Random Tales

High Tide

2010-08-01T23:15:00.002-04:00

"How many times have I told you now? I don't do surf and turf."

Gerald McKenna was peeved. He'd been a contributing author to Get Out! for going on six years now, and still his editor - as pleasant a fellow as he was in real-life, the rare boss you wouldn't mind having a beer with after quitting time - could not get this one simple fact into his managerial skull.

"Come on, Ger." Chris Yannil, editor-in-chief of America's premier adventure magazine, suspected this initial reaction out of his star writer, but pressed the idea nonetheless. That was his job, after all. Persistence.

"No, you come on! No professional sports, no beach stories. No surf, no turf. I've made this clear from the very beginning."

"I know, I know." Chris ran both hands through his longish brown hair and kicked his chair back into a tilt, putting his muddied sneakers up on the desk. He'd been trail-running earlier that morning, in the hills just outside of town, as he always did when there wasn't thunder and lightning, or a blizzard. Twenty miles horizontal, with about two miles vertical. Chris commanded the loyalty of his troops by example most of the time, but all the 'extreme' camaraderie in the world wasn't going to crack Gerald on this one. He changed his tack:

"You have to look at this from a business perspective. Ad revenues are down. Why? Because times are tough. There's no big secret there. But the other thing that happens when cash is tight is that people like to stick around their backyards. Staycations, I believe is the term.”

Gerald gave Chris a disgusted look, but the editor soldiered on.

"I know you're a bang-up bush writer, Ger. I mean, look at all of the awards on these walls!" He gesticulated with a sweep of his right arm, and Gerald's eye followed to the row of glossy mounted covers of the magazine's past issues.

Hunting with the natives of Papua New Guinea, rock-climbing in the tepuis of Northern Brazil and Paraguay, trekking the Arabian Desert on camelback - all of them Gerald's stories, all of them winners, with prestigious awards here and hard-to-win prizes there, and on its own special section of the wall the article that won the Pulitzer, an almost unheard-of feat for a outdoor sports journalist.

Gerald had gone with a team of Chinese geologists and American kayakers to one of the Hidden Valleys of the Himalayas, and after surviving eight and a half weeks of mountaineering, Class Five rapids, and heavily-armed Maoist Nepalese rebels, he told a tale that took the world by storm before he could even leave Beijing, where he had filed the dateline.

Editor and writer looked at the smiling bedraggled faces of the expedition, a picture taken before one of the myriad hidden waterfalls that the team had discovered en route; one American face, broad and freckled and toothy, looked particularly ecstatic.

"I remember you didn't want to go on that trip, either," Chris reminisced, picking a mud clot from his left shoe. "Seemed to work out just fine."

"That was different."

"How so?"

"There was a woman involved."

"You don't say!" Chris was notorious for his bachelor lifestyle, as was Gerald.

"Well, it was complicated." That was putting it mildly. Gerald had found himself forced to choose between the assignment of a lifetime and a girl who would not wait. Despite the adventure and the Pulitzer, he didn't wonder at least once every single whether he had made the right choice.

"Whereas this time..."

Chris finished his thought. "'...it's a matter of principle.' All right, already. I get it."

"I've logged too many miles to start writing hack work, and you know it. My readers come with expectations - if they see me rating pina coladas in Cabo San Lucas all of a sudden, how the hell am I supposed to keep their trust?"

"Who said anything about Cabo!"

"Maui, then. Wherever. The point is, if I do sports at all, it had better be extreme sports, and if I do beaches, they'd better be an old Viet Cong minefields or something like that."

"How about the Jersey Shore, then?"

"Funny, Yan." Gerald was a Jersey boy who wore his home state either like a badge of honor or a chip on his shoulder, depending on context. He didn't mind the occasional jab from his boss, but he couldn't help but notice that Chris wasn't laughing.

"You're serious?"

"A bunch of punk kid surfers down in Deauville are chumming the waters and hanging ten with the sharks. Extreme enough for you now?"

"Extreme or extremely stupid. Any of them make the obits yet?"

"No. That's why we're interested. We need to get someone down there to cover the inevitable first fatality."

"Cute." Gerald was trying to sound sarcastic, but his curiosity was getting the better of him. "Deauville? That's not too far from where I grew up."

"Is that a fact?" Chris' grin was positively shit-eating.

"Bastard. I want a weekend in A.C., if I take the job."

"Anything, Ger. Shall I book you at the Taj?"

"I'm thinking Caesar's. I'm thinking Emperor's Club. I'm thinking about a cool grand in chips."

"I'm thinking you've already spent half your advance."

"Anything less than seven-fifty and I walk. Let one of your Margaritaville crew do the damned piece, then."

"Relax. I was going to give you the full g. Are your bags packed?"

"Always."

"Good. You'll leave tonight. As far as I know, no one else is down there - not even X-Plore". Chris pronounced the name of his chief rival magazine as if the word were composed of cigarette butts.

"That'll change." Both knew this to be a certainty. If X-Plore wasn't already planning a trip to Jersey, they would be as soon as any whiff of these surfers hit the wires or the net; once there they'd do everything in their power to steal their thunder and scoop the story.

This wasn't just a successful marketing scheme - since its launch two years ago, X-Plore had steadily consumed more and more of the extreme adventure mag market, until now it was running neck and neck in the industry reports with Get Out! and now threatened to take its place as number one- it was a personal crusade on the part of its editor. Tess Kyriakou had worked for Get Out! on the editorial board until Chris Yannil made one too many of his trademark passes at anyone working for him who didn't use the men's washroom.

Unfortunately, before reaching the point of no return, Tess had learned a little too much about her former employer's methods and tactics, which she exploited ingeniously to jump-start her own title at Chris' expense. The fact that X-Plore was a quality magazine with first-rate writing, photography, and editing made it all the more galling.

"Well I know for a fact that they've got their best reporter in the Canadian Rockies right now, and you can write circles around any of their second-stringers."

Gerald wasn't sure if he was being paid a compliment or not, so he chose to acknowledge it with a grunt.

"Surfing with the sharks, huh?"

"I tell you, Ger, this story might pay off big-time. It'll be another 'Summer of the Shark', and we'll be right in the middle of it."

"If it bleeds, it leads?"

"Come on, you know I've got your interest piqued!"

Gerald rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "I could stand to catch up with the old neighborhood..."

"And catch some waves!"

"Jesus, Yan - I haven't surfed in years."

"Better start remembering how. It ain't a story unless you're shooting the curl along with those crazy bastards."

"It's Jersey, Chris, not Big Sur. There aren't any curls to shoot, unless you're going out surfing during a hurricane."

"That's not a bad idea, come to think of it!"

"Don't you dare."

---

It's about thirty miles or so from Atlantic City to the tip of Cape May, New Jersey's southernmost point. Although you can cover this distance in a heartbeat roaring down the empty final stretch of the Garden State Parkway, two other arteries will get you there via the scenic route - Highway Nine, celebrated in the songs of Bruce Springsteen, connects the towns on the mainland, while the shore towns are linked by the Ocean Drive, which threads Jersey's barrier islands like a skewer and leaps across the inlets between them by a series of ever more rickety-looking bridges.

After arriving at Atlantic City International and picking up his rental car - a compact with windows you crank by hand and no A.C. - Gerald drove parallel to the monumental wall of hotels and casinos and steered, trying not to make eye contact with the prostitutes working in the urban intertidal zone where the multi-billion dollar gaming industry that hugged the Boardwalk for dear life yielded to a shell of a city without hope.

Just across the street from the audio-animatronic wonders and the slot machines was a densely clustered succession of pawn shops, strip clubs, fortune tellers with dingy curtains, massage parlors of questionable clientele, and hole-in-the-wall Chinese food joints featuring bulletproof glass and menus without words. Beyond this dirty froth loomed block after block of tenements where locking your door was an act of faith that was rarely rewarded, where the tourists dare not stray, lest he or she end up another ghastly story in the local news. This is where the sharks swam, waiting for the wounded or stupid to blunder into the deep.

Gerald had of course seen this sort of stark contrast in many of the countries he'd been to, but there was something about Atlantic City that was disturbing in a way that the shantytowns of Jakarta or Lagos were not. It was not so much the disparity between rich and poor here as the absolute obliviousness with which the former carried along right within a stone's throw of the latter. In more dangerous countries, those that had were constantly aware of the fact that their neighbors did not. Whereas here the haves played like seal pups in the surf as sharks criss-crossed the hidden depths just offshore.

This vision of glitz and ghetto receded as Gerald threaded his way south into the stately town of Ventnor, where the old elite of Atlantic City had come to roost in seaside villas that reminded one of Tuscany than Trump's Taj Mahal; then through Margate, a quiet community known best as the final resting place of Lucy, a giant wooden elephant built as a tourist attraction in the 19th Century.

On a clear day you can see most of the Jersey Shore from atop Lucy's back - most of South Jersey, that is. Small as the state was, locals still managed to find a way to subdivide it into three parts. As far as Gerald was concerned, the Shore he knew and loved began with the marshes of Brigantine, just to the north of Atlantic City, and ended with Cape May Point. He remembered clambering up the rickety stairs in the belly of the elephant as a kid, his father eager to point out the telltale signs of the shore towns that curved off towards the horizon.

Somer's Point was next, then up and over a narrow two-lane bridge in Ocean City, a religious retreat from the days of Prohibition that now found itself a bustling family resort. Ocean City had a five-mile beach, a pleasantly quaint boardwalk where families still bought salt water taffy and played Skee-Ball, and the best plain cheese pizza in the known world.

Gerald wasn't hungry, but he stopped at the 9th Street Mack and Manco's nonetheless. Despite the predictable tourist crush in the summer - in another month there would be a line out the door of diners who couldn't think of passing up a pie or two - the pizzeria was one of the few truly local hangouts off-season, as it was open year round. Where better to start researching his story?

"A slice of cheese and a large birch beer."

"Comin' right up." The South Jersey twang was always a shock the first time Gerald heard it after being away for a while - not quite the drawl found down in Dixie, but nothing like the coarse accent of New York and parts north. It was something a Jersey exile lost almost immediately; he didn't even try to fake it.

"So what's goin' on down in Deauville?"

The kid who took his order smirked. "Those guys are fuckin' nuts, that's what! You hear what the sheriff said yesterday?"

"No."

"He said he's gonna throw 'em in jail if he catches them. Don't blame him. No one's gonna go in the water after Memorial Day if those guys are chumming along the beach."

The kid had a point. Beach towns like Ocean City depended on a robust summer economy to get them through the other three seasons. Even a few too many jellyfish in the surf could kill an otherwise sunny and hot July or August. Just whisper the word 'shark' and people stayed away. And places like this went under.

"Here's your pizza."

Gerald attempted to take a bite, but the still-molten cheese burned the roof of his mouth. Cursing under his breath, he took a swig of the reddish-brown birch beer and cooled his angry tongue.

"Gerald McKenna - is that you?"

There was a stocky man in bermuda shorts approaching him. Gerald did a double-take and then broke out into a broad smile of recognition.

"Paolo! How the Hell are you?"

The last time Gerald had seen Paolo was high school graduation, more than ten years ago. He may have lost some hair and gained an inch or two of girth, but he was still unmistakably the same man, as if Gerald had never left. Paolo signaled the kid behind the counter and ordered his own pie and a large birch beer as he sat down next to his old friend.

"Can't complain."

“Last time I checked, you were surfing your way around the world.” Back in the day, Paolo had been a minor god of the longboard, surfing with the legends of Hawaii and the California coast after graduation. Of all the kids he’d grown up with, Gerald considered Paolo the last guy he’d imagine settling down back home, let alone coaching the high school surf squad. “What happened?”

“My mom got sick a few years back,” Paolo answered. “The big C.”

“I’m sorry, man.”

Paolo took a swig from the drink that had just appeared in front of him. “She’s putting up on heck of a fight, actually, knock on formica, but it takes its toll. While I’ve been here taking care of her the high school offered me a chance to take over the surf squad when Coach Piepergardes retired. How could I resist an opportunity like that?”

“Coach Peeps finally called it quits and I didn’t even hear about it,” Gerald ruminated on this. “I really have been out of touch. So how’s the team shaping up?”

"Not too shabby, I'm surprised to say. Still a far cry from the dynamic duo you and I headed up, but that kind of magic only comes together once in a lifetime.” Paolo swung his stubby legs idly from the pizzeria stool. “So what brings you here? I read your column, by the way, so I know you're still writing. Missing the Mack?"

Gerald looked down at his still-steaming slice and laughed. "No. I'm here on assignment, if you can believe it."

Paolo slapped a meaty fist on the counter. "Of course! You're here about the sharks, aren't you?"

Gerald winced. The kid behind the counter could hear the whole conversation. Whereas before he could have just been a random face shooting the bull, now the kid would peg him as a glorified 'Shoobie'.

Though at one time referring to daytrippers that came to the beach carrying their lunch in a shoebox, the term applied to anyone who didn't live 'down the Shore year-round. Like losing the accent, slipping from native to Shoobie status was an irreversible thing; now Gerald could feel the kid's smirk directed at him and the balding fat goon wearing shorts in fifty-degree weather.

"Well, it was supposed to be a secret."

"Oh. Sorry about that."

"It's all right," Gerald said. His pizza had finally cooled somewhat, so he took a tentative bite. "What have you heard?"

Paolo fussed with the crushed red pepper shaker in front of him. He checked to see if the kid was still listening, then lowered his voice just to be sure.

"Forget hearing, I've actually seen these guys!"

"Really?"

"Yeah. They stay on the move, now that the sheriff's looking for them, but let's face it - there's a lot of beach to keep an eye on. You still surf?"

Gerald lied: "When my schedule allows."

"I've been out there, Ger. You can't imagine what it's like!"

"With the sharks?"

"The real deal."

"You weren't scared?"

"What do you think? I practically crapped my trunks when I saw the first dorsal fin. A hammerhead! Had to be ten feet long."

"Holy shit."

"Exactly!"

Gerald took the straw from his birch beer and quaffed the rest of the cup in one gulp. He looked over at the kid - Shoobies or not, the two had ceased to interest him, and he went back to listening to the Phillies maul the Pirates on a tinny little A.M. radio.

Nevertheless he whispered his next question to Paolo. "And no one gets hurt?"

"That's the thing, Ger. Not a nick. One of the kids says that it's all about keeping faith, but I suspect he's smoking too much weed."

"Maybe they're using those sonic shark-shakers?"

"I didn't see anything when I was out there."

"Yeah, you were too busy soiling those Bermuda shorts of yours!"

"Funny."

Gerald stared at his half-eaten slice; he found that he wasn't hungry anymore. "So do you think you could introduce me?"

"Sure. Where you staying?"

"Deauville."

"The Coral Reef, I presume."

Gerald smiled. "Where else?"

"I'll see what I can do and give you a call."

"Thanks, Paolo. Sorry again to hear about your mom."

"I appreciate it. Now get on down to Deauville - if you hurry, you can catch Happy Hour at Volo's!"

---

Volo's was the type of establishment that didn't ever feel the need to keep up with the times - Gerald recognized the same brown-and-yellow wallpaper, the same red vinyl barstools, the same collection of liqueurs and cordials behind the bar that no one ever drank. Even the regulars hadn't changed, a motley crew of townies and old salts that drank their beer and listened to the live entertainment, which on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays consisted of karaoke.

It was Friday night, and insofar as things could be lively at Volo's, they were - a man was singing "On the Way to Cape May" at the top of his lungs and had gotten the normally laconic crowd to join him on the chorus.

Deauville was on the way to Cape May, just over the 59th Street Bridge at the southern end of Ocean City, and Volo's was its only bar. Over the summer it became a yuppified hole where idiots on jet skis came to drink overpriced margaritas and eat microwaved Buffalo wings, much to the amusement of the locals, who held their ground and their stools at the bar.

Gerald ordered a gin and tonic and settled in at the bar. The regulars paid him no heed, which is exactly what he wanted after getting the evil eye at the pizza parlor. The bartender gave him his drink; he gave him a fiver and told him to keep the change, a generous tip considering Volo's prices. He tinkled the ice in his glass and sipped his cocktail slowly, letting a day that began three time zones away finally stop and catch its bearings.

Or so he thought.

"Ge-rry!" A too-familiar voice caused him to freeze in his seat. Of course he should have expected to run into a familiar face or two popping into the neighborhood bar on the weekend, but where else was he going to get a drink? Ocean City was a dry town, and if he'd started up in Atlantic City he would have stayed the weekend. And the thought of drinking alone this early on the job was too much to bear.

No, Gerald had every intention of wetting his whistle that night, come who or what may. So it was perhaps only appropriate that the first person he ran into back in his old stomping grounds would be his high school sweetheart.

"Hey, Maggie."

Margaret Applegate was different in almost every respect save for one - her twinkling brown eyes; Gerald was actually shocked when he caught an eyeful of her. For starters she had lost an awful lot of weight, so much so that it was as if she'd divided herself into two smaller selves. Her skin was also preternaturally tan, either the result of a salon or some recent Caribbean getaway. And then there was the jewelry. Maggie sparkled with diamonds and gold in the sepia-toned lighting of the bar, a girl who once eschewed rings - except for maybe a nosering.

"Paolo said you'd be coming," she smiled wickedly, sitting down beside Gerald at the bar.

He motioned at the bartender. "Whatever she's drinking."

"Now that's awfully generous of you. I don't remember you opening your wallet for me so eagerly back before you left."

"It's easier when it's not your money."

"Right. You're on assignment."

"Jesus. Does Paolo do a radio show?"

"Hey, you're big news. Like it or not, you are the closest thing to a celebrity that this town's come to in quite a while."

"What about Josh Franken?" Josh had been their class valedictorian; the last Gerald heard of him he'd made millions in the dot-com boom.

"Down and out."

"Really?"

Maggie wrinkled her nose. "Trust me. I'm Margaret Applegate-Franken, and much worse for the wear on account of it."

"Huh."

"I converted to Judaism and everything for that jerk, too."

The bartender brought Maggie an apple martini. She turned back to Gerald: "Should I ask for a receipt?"

"Ha-ha."

The two sat in silence for a short eternity, nursing their drinks and fiddling with their cocktail napkins. The old man had finished his song and surrendered the floor to a group of rowdy punks who looked too young to be drinking - they were singing a classic Warren Zevon number.

"Gerald," Maggie began tentatively. "I hope you aren't offended that I didn't invite you to the wedding.

"I just wasn't ready to face you again. Not after the way we left things. You know, with that day at the clinic - what you said, what I said. It was all still too raw.

"It's not that I didn't want you to succeed, Ger. On the contrary - I wanted you to be the best damned writer there ever was. But then you got the offer to go to China and I found out I was pregnant and suddenly the idea of biting my nails through every wild adventure wondering if I'd still have a husband and the baby a father didn't seem like much of a life. Can you blame me, Gerald?"

There was something about this group of crooning kids that commanded Gerald's attention, despite the seriousness of the conversation. On the one hand he had been dreading this inevitable confrontation with his ex, but at the same time he was curious as to what she'd say, how she'd act, who she'd look like - the girl he left all those years ago for fame and fortune, or someone else, someone he didn't know.

So why was it that he couldn't tune these damned kids out? Maggie was glaring at him now; she had said some deep and meaningful and from the heart, and he had just answered it and her with a blank stare.

Fine, she said, seemingly from the bottom of a well. Be an asshole. I don't know why I came here anyway. Here's the money for the drink your prick of a boss paid for. Tell him I said thanks again for ruining my life!

Gerald nodded and she left, with tears in her eyes - he paid her no heed. His eyes were riveted to the lead punk, who held the microphone like he was about to club somebody over the head with it, screeching as if he were at a rock concert, not a sleepy townie bar, Friday night or no Friday night.

And yet the odd thing was that no one at Volo's seemed to mind! These kids who shouldn't be in here in the first place were a bouncer's dream come true and by all accounts should have been 86'ed as soon as they'd started to mangle "Werewolves in London", but here they were, getting a free pass! There was only one thing for certain - Volo's was losing its edge.

As the youths finished their song - to a round of applause, no less! - Gerald left Maggie's crumpled ten dollar bill at the bar as a tip and made his way out, meeting the gaze of the lead punk as he did so. He was a lanky kid with grey eyes and sunbleached hair cut in the fashionable style, wearing cargo pants and a t-shirt plastered with the typical obscenities favored by the up and coming generation. His arms were intricately tattooed and his upper lip, which was pierced, curled into a perpetual sneer, as if he was forever disappointed.

Gerald was about to look away when he spied a shark tooth hanging around the kid's neck on a chain. Even from a distance he could tell that it was that of a large specimen, perhaps even a Great White. He thought about approaching the punk, but decided against it - the flight was finally catching up with him and he needed to find a bed; even one at the Coral Reef would do.

Besides, he had a feeling he'd be seeing that kid again sooner rather than later.

---

"Beauty of a day for some surfing, eh?"

Paolo was born for the ocean. With the build of a seal, he was always able to outswim anyone in the tri-county area, and even went to All-State one year for Deauville High School. Gerald remembered how as a kid he could catch a wave and bodysurf it all the way in to shore, beaching himself amidst the mothers dipping their toes and their toddlers making mudpies and sand castles.

He had his wet suit on this morning, which only confirmed his resemblance to a marine mammal, and was lugging his board under his left arm. Gerald was similarly attired in a loaner suit, carrying an old nine footer that Paolo had pulled out of storage for him.

"I can't believe you sold your board!"

Gerald shifted uncomfortably in the ill-fitting neoprene. "Didn't have much of a choice."

"Still! Think of all those good times."

The two of them had done a lot of surfing as teenagers, and formed the one-two punch that was the Deauville Varsity Surfing Team, the only sport Gerald deigned to participate in back then. They'd routinely whip the likes of Ocean City, Margate, and those meatheads from the Wildwoods, even though they were often outnumbered three or four to one in competition.

The key, of course, was practice. While the good kids of Cape May High School were skiing in the Poconos, Gerald and Paolo would be riding the winter surf at Corson's Inlet or Diamond Beach. With every square inch of exposed skin covered save for the face, the Atlantic Ocean was almost bearable in mid-February. The two of them would surf for hours, sun or rain, sleet or snow.

Gerald looked out over an empty beach at the breakers of a late Spring tide - the water temperature was in the mid-fifties, or so the preternaturally cheerful woman on the television told him this morning. It was just after dawn, though, so the air temperature was roughly the same as the ocean - good surfing weather, if you didn't mind getting up while it was still dark, or keeping a watchful eye out for cops.

They'd chosen a stretch of Peck's Beach at the northern end of Ocean City that curled away from the well-kept residential streets as far as possible. Unless the police were going to come after them in a motorboat, it would be difficult for them to nab them here. They were already at the water's edge, boards at attention. All of them faced the horizon but one - the lanky kid with the shark tooth from last night. He left his board standing upright in the wet sand and came over to where Paolo and Gerald stood.

He still had that sneer on his face, Gerald noted, but it looked like he was trying to twist it into something akin to a smile. He was wearing a dark blue wet suit with a yellow racing stripe along each side. "Did you guys park where I told you?"

Paolo nodded. "Ben, this is Gerald, the guy I told you about. He's a friend from way back. Gerald, this is Ben."

Gerald briefly thought about extending his right hand to the surfer punk, but wisely chose not to and nodded instead. Ben's unblinking grey eyes sized up the newcomer, and the sneer began to win out over the smile again.

"You from here?" he asked.

"Yeah. Class of '89."

"School," Ben snorted. "You surf?"

Out of the corner of his eye, Gerald could tell from the expression on Paolo's face that he shouldn't hedge on his answer like he had last night.

"Do you, or do you like asking stupid questions instead?"

Ben was unmoved. "Let's do it then," he said, waiting no more than a beat to turn around and head back to the others, who were now facing them; Gerald and Paolo followed.

"So where's the chum bucket?" Gerald asked.

The kid didn't turn around. "Can't chum in the surf, dude. All you'll do is scare up the dogfish."

Gerald nodded to no one in particular. Dogfish were sand sharks, usually running no larger than a couple of feet. Ben continued the lesson in his bored teen monotone:

"We have a dude in a boat - see him out there?"

He gestured at the horizon and, sure enough, there he was. Gerald blinked. He must have missed the boy and the skiff in the morning glare off the water - the sun had broken free of the mists and was cutting clear across from Europe, or so it seemed.

"Is that Jeffrey?" Paolo asked; it was a question that Ben seemed to find funny.

"Naw, Jeffrey's gone, dude. This is a new kid."

Gerald looked at Paolo, who just shrugged. They were approaching the other kids, who had opened up their tight knot to encircle the three of them. There were six of them, hair toussled and sun-bleached like Ben's, with wetsuits to match. Only by the colors of the racing stripes and the style of their boards could an outsider tell these kids apart.

"Yo," Ben said to them. "This is the Gerrymander. He'll be surfing with us this morning. So will the Rev."

"Rev-man!" said one of the punks - whose hair was cropped the shortest and who sported a red stripe on his suit - with the other five echoing him.

"Dudes, this-" he gestured towards the short-haired kid - "is Matt. Then there's Big Jim, Olie, Steve-o, Ev-man, and Little Jim. They're my crew."

Gerald forgot their names immediately, re-christening them Red Stripe, Green Stripe, Blue Stripe, White Stripe, Orange Stripe, and White Stripe Two. He'd found while travelling in the bush that remembering names was for him a hopeless affair, especially among tribesmen who couldn't write and whose native sounds wouldn't go easily into an alphabet anyway.

At the same time he realized that, as a rule, the further one got away from civilization, the less people addressed one another by their actual names. A true name was a thing of power, and not to be bandied about in casual conversation, lest someone capture it and use it against you. Instead he discovered many people calling each other by their defining attributes, or just something simple and generic - like "Dude".

Funny that home was more like the rest of the world than he'd ever suspected at the time; Gerald wondered if he would ever had left, had he known this.

"High tide is in three hours," Ben said to his crew in a tone of voice more befitting a drill instructor. "Let's get out there and catch some good ones!"

They whooped and ran into the surf. Ben then turned back towards Gerald and Paolo with a smile. "I hope we don't let you dudes down this morning. Did Rev-man tell you about the hammerhead?"

"Yeah." Gerald nervously scanned the horizon for dorsal fins. Ben laughed, his shark tooth bouncing on its gold chain against the dark neoprene.

Every surfer knows one of the cardinal rules of the sport is that you never wear jewelry into the water, lest the flashing gold or silver look like the scales of a fish to a predator. But for a moment Gerald forgot that this time out we were hoping to attract a shark or two, perhaps even more.

"You're not going to pussy out on us now, are you?"

"Hell, no."

Ben grinned tauntingly. "You first then."

Gerald hadn't surfed in ages and hoped it wouldn't show to the pack of local daredevils he was trying to impress. There was nothing worse, he'd found, than passing yourself off as a fellow traveler and then coming up short. Naturally as it was a journalist's job to get the story this sort of thing was a regular danger for those who did the extreme beat. Know how to hang-glide? Sure. Run with the bulls before? Of course. Ever take a kayak through Class Five rapids?

He'd considered himself a reasonable paddler when he answered in the affirmative on that last question before embarking on his Himalayan adventure, having endured some Class Four whitewater on a trip to Argentina the year before. Under pressure from Chris to land the one spot that had been reserved for the press, he fudged his credentials a bit in order to beat out the other mags.

How much worse could it be, Gerald thought at the time. He was to learn the answer to that question the hard way, when his teammates discovered ten days into the expedition that their allegedly extreme journalist would have to be hand-held through the most difficult legs of the journey, making safe passage far more difficult for everyone involved. Sure, everyone twenty thousand feet below would thrill to an epic tale of bandits and international intrigue, but all Gerald took away from his Pulitzer Prize-winning experience was a dozen pairs of accusatory stares from experts whose trust he had betrayed at the very beginning of their trip.

Fortunately one never really forgot how to surf, and Gerald had been quite good at it when he left Jersey to find his fortune. The surf felt strangely warm when he waded into a breaker, the result of girding one's testicles with foam rubber. He dipped his hands into the chilly brine and lifted his dripping fingertips to his lips, tasting home as he did so.

"A prayer to Poseidon Earthshaker?" Paolo, who had watched his friend's odd little ritual, asked with a wicked gleam in his eye.

"Why not?" Gerald said, trying not to seem sheepish. "And why do they call you Rev-man anyway - you didn't get ordained when I wasn't looking, did you?"

Now it was Paolo's turn to demure. "Not exactly. Ben came to me asking a few questions about sharks, and I guess I impressed them with some ancient Bermudan lore."

Paolo had studied marine biology at nearby Stockton University; Gerald now saw the obvious connection that he'd somehow missed before. He brushed a tangle of seaweed away from him and strode deeper into the water. "What kind of lore?"

"Weird stuff. Religious stuff. Don't tell him I told you this, but I think Ben and his crew worship sharks like gods. They wanted to know if anyone else in the world did, too?"

"Do they?"

"Come on, dudes!"

Ben's voice rang out across the surface of the water - although it sounded like he was standing right next to them, he was already fifty feet or more ahead of them, ready to catch a promising swell. Paolo shrugged at Gerald and paddled out to him, belly on his board. Gerald followed suit.

It was about halfway out to Ben that they saw their first dorsal fin. Gerald was breathless for a moment, then burst into laughter when he saw the telltale snout of a curious porpoise. The marine mammals usually followed the ebb and flow of the baitfish, sometimes coming close enough to shore to cause a shark panic among the shoobies before the lifeguards calmed everyone's nerves.

Gerald remembered one summer afternoon at the other end of Ocean City, down at the old fishing pier at 59th Street, where he once spotted a pod of porpoises working their way along the coastline. He was bodysurfing some exceptionally fine waves that day, and in between every ride he looked out to sea in anticipation of the next one, only to catch a glimpse of a row of rounded dorsal fins making silent cartwheels along the horizon. Every once in a while a porpoise would leap out of the water entirely, a sparkling pirouette against the deep blue sky.

Gerald would remember that day for the rest of his life. So, too, would he this one, for no sooner had he been calmed by the sight of the porpoise than was he chilled to the marrow by what he saw next - a Great White shark, no more than ten feet in front of him! He knew what it was immediately from a harrowing five minutes in a shark cage down in South Africa, when he and a "shark encounter facilitator" looked at the hungry maw of death for as long as Gerald could take it.

But this was a different experience entirely. The fright of the shark tank was predicated upon a theoretical- what if the steel doesn't hold? There was time to think about the precariousness of one's position; there was time to be afraid. This was different, however. Out of the deep it had emerged, and now Gerald would die, the fool that he was.

Only he didn't. Despite Gerald's resemblance to a tasty sea lion, the silver beast with the bone-white belly passed him by, so closely that he counted each foot of the shark with the beating of his heart:

One... two... three... four... five...

"Holy mother of God," Paolo called out, no doubt seeing now what his friend had just a moment before. As his he scrambled to get more of himself out of the water and onto his surfboard, Gerald found himself still counting:

Six... seven... eight...

"Looks like we got ourselves a Pointer!" Red Stripe called the Great White by its Australian name, and the rest of the surfer punks whooped in response.

Nine... ten... eleven...

"A twelve-footer - this is your lucky day, Gerrymander."

Gerald tried to take my eyes off the shark but could not. "Wh-what do I do?"

"Just ride the wave."

Only now did he notice the ocean swelling under him. Despite the fact that for him time had just stopped on a dime, the wind and tide cared not a whit for his perception and went on rising and falling to its eternal rhythm. There was a wave breaking under his belly, away from the cruising Great White, and what little remained of his survival instinct told him to paddle for his dear life.

As he stood up onto his board, Gerald noticed that the shark was not following him but circling back towards the others, whom by this point he had completely lost track of. Rather than risk dumping himself into the surf with an awkward backward glance he concentrated on the wave as it curled and began to break. From this vantage point, however, Gerald couldn't help but look down and notice the dark shapes all around him.

Just ride the wave.

Paolo's old board did not fail him. Before he knew it, Gerald was in knee-deep water, looking back at the waves, their riders, and the myriad fins cutting the surface around them.

How or why the Great White had not attacked him was no longer a concern to Gerald. All he could feel was the pounding of his heart and the pull of high tide. He smiled and strode back into the surf.

---

"Way to go, Gerry my boy!"

Chris' voice beamed over the receiver of the hotel phone - a pink plastic rotary unit that unfortunately matched the rest of the room perfectly - that evening. He was just checking out of the office for the day when his star reporter had called from New Jersey with news.

"You mean to tell me that you surfed all morning and didn't even get nicked? How the... no, wait. I don't want speculation - I want answers, damn it! It's gotta be something in the chum. Am I right? They're doping up the sharks!"

Gerald had suspected as much himself already and asked Paolo about the possibility. After all, hadn't they come to him with questions about sharks in the first place?

"A nice theory, but the chum dilutes to something like a part per million within a minute of hitting the water. Sharks can smell the blood just fine, but unless you're calming them by homeopathy that just isn't gonna work."

Chris was undaunted. "So what about shark shakers? You thought they might be the key."

"They wouldn't work like that. If a shaker operates successfully - and that's a rare thing, as they fail routinely - it should be driving away the sharks, tasty fish guts or no tasty fish guts."

"So what else have you got?"

"The power of prayer?"

"You're shitting me, Ger."

"No, I'm dead serious. Look, think of it like fire walking, or Pentacostal snake-handling. There's a kind of trance state that kicks in and renders the faithful impervious to pain or injury."

"Hmph."

"I've seen it, Yan. In the Himalayas I saw monks who stood outside in subzero temperatures for days and didn't even get a chillblain. I know it sounds crazy, but I think something like that is going on here. The sharks know not to attack for some reason - it's like they're picking up a vibe from the surfers."

"So why didn't the sharks bite you, if it was all about faith - or are you telling me you weren't shitting your wetsuit out there?"

"Let's just say I'm glad we were in the ocean! But as for why, I don't know. I've got a friend up at U. Penn, though, who’d be interested in what's going on. She might be able to give us some answers."

"Yeah?"

"She's a folklorist. Wrote a book about the Pineys of South Jersey."

The Pineys comprised a recluse community that lived in the sandy wastes of the Pine Barrens, making a living selling the region's distinctive pine cones to outsiders passing through. To his credit, Chris had heard of them; moreover, he'd heard of the book, as well as its author, which gave him pause.

"She's not going to poach our story, is he?"

"Of course not." Gerald hoped he wasn't lying.

"Then call her. But be careful! When are you going out surfing again?"

"Tonight."

"That's good. Any chance you can bring a camera along this time?"

Gerald hung up on his editor and called the University of Pennsylvania’s main switchboard.

"Department of Anthropology, please."

---

Gerald had hoped that not being able to see what was in the water with him would have made the whole experience less terrifying somehow. In retrospect, paddling out into darkness atop equally-dark swells, he found such a idea laughable. There was nothing more frightening than the unknown, and now he was enveloped by it.

It was he, Ben, and the Stripes that night - Paolo had something going on the high school, so he had to bow out. It was no matter to Gerald, as after just one morning of surfing he was fitting in just fine. I used to be one of these kids, he kept thinking to himself. It wasn't often that you had a chance to hang out with a younger version of yourself, sharks or no sharks in the water.

It was funny how quickly surfers' lingo had changed in just a little over ten years, while little else about the sport had. Gerald listened carefully and picked up the new terms and slang expressions using them like Ben or any other of the Stripes. He'd always despaired about going home, convinced that he'd never be able to fit back in, whereas in truth Deauville slipped back around him snugly like his neoprene bodysuit.

Just ride the wave.

Was that a shark, or merely a curl of whitewater catching the moonlight? Gerald wasn't sure. He tried not to fixate on the man-eating predators beneath him and worried instead about getting his bearings in a black-on-black tableau. He'd only been night surfing once, under radically different circumstances. Was that a dorsal fin?

He'd called Sadie that afternoon but she wasn't in her office. She was never there - the essential part of any good anthropologist's job was fieldwork, and the best of the field never stopped gathering their data. Sadie Swansea was regarded as the pre-eminent researcher in her discipline, which meant she couldn't make so much as a trip down to the pharmacy without a notebook and recorder.

It was that peripatetic voraciousness that had attracted Gerald to her all those years ago when they were freshmen at Deauville High; it was that same peripatetic voraciousness, however, that kept Sadie from being able to find satisfaction in the arms of the boy next door. Sadie left for college a year early, despite Gerald's myriad protestations of love and of loneliness.

Wait for me, he pleaded. But she couldn't and didn't. Sadie went off to Yale and Gerald rang out a lackluster senior year without her until he found a girl willing to love him back and left her in turn. Punishing Margaret for Sadie's rejection of him the year before made absolutely no sense, of course, but Gerald was a lovelorn teenager at the time - a breed of creature known for its imperviousness to logic.

"Hey, Sadie. It's Ger. Loved your book. Hey, can you give me a call back at the Coral Reef, Room 23? I could use some professional advice - I think I can pay you, even. Thanks."

Sadie Swansea had in fact been out in the field, which this time was the South Philly branch of the Russian-American club, where ancient Soviet soldiers bellied up to a makeshift bar and drank vodka from plastic cups and reminisced about fighting Hitler seventy years ago. She stayed longer than perhaps she should have and ignored her voice mail when she returned to her office early in the evening, her head abuzz with Russian spirits and the elements of an article she was working on about soldiers' folklore from World War Two.

Her telephone blinked insistently but Sadie ignored it, still lost in a world of beluga caviar, pickled mushrooms, and acrid cigarette smoke, going back through her notebooks, humming the songs the veterans had been singing in Russian. Had Sadie heard Gerald's message that night, and not curled up into a heap on her office couch to steal an hour or two or ten of sleep, she would have been delighted. As it was, she would smile at the sound of his voice the next morning and call the Coral Reef immediately. When she called the hotel the next morning, however, a woman in a hoarse whisper informed a still-smiling Sadie that Gerald McKenna had been attacked by a shark the night before and was currently in the intensive-care ward of the Middle Township Hospital.

---

"Can you hear me, bud?"

Gerald McKenna was a very confused man at the moment. The last thing he remembered was a dark tangle of surf, screams, and blood.

Whose blood?

Next thing he knew, Gerald was in a hospital bed, he was cold, and he had to pee. An intravenous tube snaked up from his right hand to a saline drip which was half-full. He looked down at his legs - still there, thank God! He wiggled his toes, and felt an ache of pain in his left thigh.

"Dude! You're all there. We counted the body parts."

It was Ben. He'd been sitting by Gerald's side, waiting for him to come to. Gerald blinked at him against the antiseptic white light of the room.

"Wh- what happened?"

"You had a nasty spill, dudeski. Scraped your leg against an old submerged pier. That shit gets covered and uncovered by the sand all the time. Nasty business."

A pier! That didn't sound right. What about the shark? Gerald fumbled to remember what had happened as Ben chuckled.

"There weren't any sharks, guy. We were just doing some night surfing, that's all. Man, you really must have rattled that skull of yours."

Yeah, he must have. Gerald could see that exposed wooden post now, in ghostly silhouette against the light of the rising moon. He saw the old corroded nails like a row of shark's teeth, felt them tear into his flesh.

But what about the scream? He remembered a scream that was distinctly not his. He could still hear it in the back of his mind - a high-pitched scream, like a woman or a child.

"That was the girl that found you. We'd lost track of you in the surf, but then we heard someone on the beach shrieking, and sure enough there you were. You were bleeding all over the place..."

Yes. There had been a girl, come to think of it. Why hadn't he remembered before? But the sharks! What about the sharks?

Ben chuckled. "Relax, dude. Plenty of time for that later. In the meantime, you should get yourself some sleep."

Get some sleep.

What a great idea, Gerald thought to himself, his heavy eyelids closing as Ben got up to leave. There was a nagging thought in his head, the kind of vertiginous feeling you get when you forget something important, then forget what it is you've forgotten. He struggled briefly against the surging black tide of oblivion, but its undertow proved too strong. Despite himself, Gerald slept soundly.

---

Sadie Swansea could not believe what she was hearing. After dropping everything she was doing and barreling down the Atlantic City Expressway at a hundred and twenty miles an hour to be at her friend and former lover's side, she found that not only had Gerald not been attacked by a shark, but he was barely injured at all.

"They're going to release me this afternoon," he said sheepishly in response to her furious but relieved questions. "I don't know how I lost so much blood - look, I barely scratched myself!"

It was true. Although Gerald's left leg clearly had a gash in it, in all actuality it seemed little more than a scrape, and certainly wasn't a shark bite.

"I'm sorry you came out like this, Sadie. All in a hurry."

"It's okay - I'm just glad it's not as serious as it sounded. But then why did everyone think it was a shark attack at first?"

Gerald explained what he'd been up to over the past week, while Sadie nodded and wished she'd brought her tape recorder. She found herself taking notes on a hospital food service napkin and a borrowed pen.

"Interesting. And so you were out surfing with the sharks last night?"

"No. Yes. I mean..."

"You don't remember?"

Gerald had an odd expression on his face. He was working one of his incisors with his tongue, Sadie realized.

"Shit. I think I knocked a tooth loose!"

"Ouch."

Sure enough, it popped right out of the gum with a little bit of pressure. Gerald scowled at the tooth in the palm of his hand.

"Goddamn it. I must have planted my face in the sand after I hit that piling. Yan had better pay my dentist's bill, that's all I have to say!"

"So what do you remember from last night, Gerry?"

"I remember calling you, then going out with Ben and the Stripes. It was a full moon, so we were going to try a little night surfing. After that it gets fuzzy."

"But you don't remember any sharks?"

"See, that's the thing. Ben says we didn't chum the water last night, and I believe him. But there was something there just the same - I know it, Sadie!"

"Hmm."

"What are you thinking?"

Gerald remembered that look she'd get when she was just getting the glimmer of an idea. It was a faraway stare, but focused at the same time, as if she were watching a column of ants crawl across the surface of Mars; it usually boded ill for him, as he recalled.

"How much do you know about the power of suggestion, Ger?"

"Wait - are you about to tell me that this has all been in my head? Please don't tell me that this is where you're going!"

"Think about it. If these are real sharks, why hasn't anyone gotten attacked?"

"It's a mystical thing. I don't know! Like those snake-handlers."

Sadie smiled- it still made his heart ache. "Do you know how many Pentacostals die every year from snake bites? Way more than you’d think. That's a Folklore 101 question, Ger. Ritual hypnotic suggestion is behind ninety-nine point nine percent of all the so-called 'weird shit' that's out there!"

"What about the other point one?"

Sadie sighed. "All I'm saying is that these kids probably couldn't rustle a sharkskin suit, let alone hammerheads and Great Whites. Besides, if man-eating sharks are actually prowling the Jersey Shore the week before Memorial Day, don't you think someone else would have noticed?"

It was Gerald's turn to sigh. He used to hate it when she used to dismantle his teenage flights of fancy with logic and obvious relish - hate it and love it, of course. The feeling was no less strong even after ten years, he was discovering.

"Can you look into it, at least? See if anyone else does this sort of thing - or at least claims to. Better? Paolo seemed to think that--"

"Paolo! Oh, I should have known he'd be involved."

"What exactly do you mean by that?" Gerald always hated this part, when she'd throw him so far off his balance that all he had left to contribute to the argument was anger.

"Your old surfing buddy, of course. It all makes sense now. He'd be the last person you'd suspect of trying to whip up a massive publicity stunt at your - and your magazine's - expense."

Gerald saw the pieces of the puzzle - now properly arranged with Sadie's help - begin to fall into place, but still he resisted.

"Why? Why would he do such a thing to an old friend?"

Sadie's smile went from triumphant to sympathetic. "A lot of us had the will to escape a town like Deauville, but precious few had the wherewithal. You and I, we're the lucky ones, Ger. We got out. Made something of ourselves. Whereas the others--"

Her logic seemed inescapable, but Gerald sensed the weakness: "But Paolo did get out! He's only back in town because of his mother."

"His mother?" Sadie blinked.

"That's what he said."

"Ger, Paolo's mother died three years ago. I know - I went to the funeral. Surely you heard the news?"

Gerald couldn't speak. His throat felt impossibly dry and his tongue leaden and numb. Three years ago he could have been in Borneo, or the Russian taiga, or Macchu Picchu. And even if by some miracle of forwarding he had received a letter from home, chances are he just ignored it.

He gripped the rails of his hospital bed, angry at Paolo for feeding him a bullshit story, angry at himself for being so gullible, angry at Sadie for pointing all of tnis out. But part of the fury directed at himself came from a deeper source than the present humiliation - Gerald was angry with himself for losing touch. Even Sadie Swansea, who had gotten out of Deauville so fast that she left it spinning in her wake, still took the time to keep up with the old neighborhood, and drop in every now and then for good measure, to boot.

He felt like an asshole.

"Ger," Sadie began softly; but Gerald wanted none of it.

"Leave me alone."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to--"'

"I said go away!"

She left then without a word, leaving Gerald to lie in his bed and fume. Only he didn't stay angry for long - the more he mulled things over, the more he wanted to go find Ben. He was sure to level with him about Paolo and finally explain what was really going on out in the water; Gerald was certain of it.

Besides, injury or no injury, sharks or no sharks, he really wanted to hit the surf again.

---

Sadie Swansea was concerned, far more so than she had let on at the hospital. It was suspicious enough for what had originally been reported as a shark bite to have been downgraded to a minor scrape in the space of a morning, but the involvement of Paolo Newcastle in this affair raised all manners of red flags in her book. To be fair, Sadie had never really liked Paolo, and had done her best to drive a wedge between him and Gerald while she'd been his girlfriend - alas, to no avail - but it was Mr. Newcastle's latter-day shenanigans that had her worried.

Paolo was a New Age snake-oil salesman who made a living peddling worthless books and accoutrements that exploited the average Joe or Jane's desire to live in a world that had purpose and meaning. He criss-crossed the Delaware Valley offering "seminars" that cashed in on whatever the latest mystical fad was at the time - one month Tibetan Buddhism, another the Kabbalah, still another the healing power of magnets. He wrote books about the Lost Secrets of Atlantis and the Knights Templar, all of them cobbled together or outright plagiarized from other authors, most them crackpots themselves. He also had a website.

Sadie knew all about Paolo's vocation because she had dedicated her life to debunking just the sort of garbage he propagated. She and her colleagues at Penn crossed swords with the American New Age movement on a regular basis, using the tricks of their respective trades to combat irrational belief and magical thinking with science. She and her fellow Ghostbustes weren't total skeptics, but she knew full well from training and experience when to suspect a hoax or fraud, and Paolo Newcastle was the poster boy for such chicanerie. But what was the angle, Sadie wondered as she contemplated her next move. Was he planning to market surfing with the sharks-- which were most likely accomplices in prosthetic bodysuits-- as the Twenty-First Century's answer to dolphin encounters, or was it a more complicated scam?

She backed her car out of the hospital parking lot and eased her way into the midday traffic on Route 9. Sadie had already cancelled her classes, so why not poke around and do a little bit of investigative fieldwork? She wasn't quite sure what she was looking for yet, but the local newspaper would be a good start. There had to be some chatter about the goings-on in Deauville, especially with the summer season right around the corner.

You just wait this time, Mr. Newcastle! Sadie half-thought half-said this aloud as she gripped the steering wheel, her knuckles white, surprising herself with the vehemence of her reaction. Most the time she simply delighted in the act of tearing apart whatever the latest con was, but to see Gerald in the hospital like that - Hell, to see him at all again, and right in the center of things...

This case was becoming personal, Sadie Swansea thought to herself as she drove. That could only mean trouble.

---

Friday night at Volo's. It had only been a week since he first returned to the old neighborhood dive, but already Gerald felt like a Jersey Boy again and no longer a Shoobie. He bellied up to the bar with the other locals and ordered a round of drinks for Ben and the Stripes. "Better yet, why don't you just give us the bottle? Thanks."

Gerald found himself drinking a lot over the past week but not necessarily getting drunk. Not that he'd been a total lightweight in the past, but usually a shot or two would be all he could handle in a given night. Now he drank tequila like it was water, and so did his friends - good thing he had the company credit card at his disposal.

His editor Chris had called after the accident, of course, more concerned for the story than his star reporter's health. He called again after Beth in Finance reported a hotel bill for a suite at Caesar's the next night, courtesy of Get Out! magazine.

"What the fuck, Ger? I thought we agreed the Atlantic City trip would be your reward, once the story was done."

"Dude, I had to take them for a night on the town. Trust me, you'll get your story, and it's going to be worth it."

"All right. But if it isn't spectacular, I'm docking your pay."

"Don't worry, Dude!"

Dude?

The trip to Caesar's had been a peace offering of sorts to Paolo after Gerald and he had fought. The funny thing was that he couldn't even remember why he'd been so angry at his Bermudan friend anymore, though he vaguely recalled that it had something to do with his conversation with Sadie at the hospital.

Sadie Swansea! As he brought the bottle of Cuervo back to his table, Gerald swelled with pride (and more than a little bit of lust) at the thought that she'd driven clear across the state to make sure he was all right, but then he remembered how agitated she had gotten him over Paolo, who had popped in to visit shortly after Sadie. Maybe she'd just put him in an ornery mood - after all, she was good at that! - and combined with the drugs they'd pumped into him the night before and earlier that morning he couldn't help himself but lock horns with whoever came in next.

What about, though? Damned if he could remember now. But Paolo had taken whatever he'd said fairly personally, so after feeling like a jerk Gerald thought maybe he could set things right by taking everyone out to the casinos.

Sure, Chris had been pissed off about the expenditure, but he'd come around once he got the first draft of this story. Since his accident last week Gerald had been out surfing no less than eight times, and while each time he had seen more sharks than the last, he was beginning to recognize a few that appeared time and time again. Was that part of the secret that protected them - had the sharks somehow been trained not to attack the surfers?

He downed a shot of tequila and refilled his own glass. Ben looked on with a wry smile, then took a swig from the whole bottle, while the Stripes played an impromptu game of table football with Spanish peanuts as Reverand Newcastle adjudicated.

"High tide's coming, dude."

Gerald nodded, half-sober. "So are we heading back to catch it tonight?"

Ben laughed. "Naw, dude. I mean the Spring High."

Every year the moon and the sun lined up to produce a flood tide in mid to late Spring. The waves were on average a foot or two higher during this time, making the Spring High a local surfer's bonanza.

"We'll get some big ones this weekend. Big and old."

Gerald slugged back a mouthful of tequila and passed the bottle back to Ben, his eyes locked on a woman who had just come in through the door.

Maggie.

To be honest, he'd sensed her before he had seen her. It wasn't smell or sound or touch but an altogether different sensation, one that Gerald had never noticed until now but was unmistakably there - a kind of tingling that had told him to look up and why, a voice that didn't speak words yet nevertheless had said: Maggie.

Ben looked at Gerald looking at Margaret and smiled. "She's all yours, dude!"

Gerald hadn't been looking for permission but he took it with a murmur of thanks just the same, leaving his friends to a night of tequila and bad karaoke as he cruised the ever-swelling ranks of weekend warriors towards the end of the bar, where he knew she was.

She's all yours. But weren't they all? Ever since that night in Atlantic City, Gerald had felt something awaken within him, a force that was relentless and primal. He remembered behaving as never before - not in Rio, not in Mykonos, not even in Thailand - especially where the ladies concerned. He had always taken pride in his gentlemanly ways and went so far as to credit them for allowing him to penetrate as deep as he could into other lands amd other cultures. Gerald had made a living out of travelling to places where people who thought with their cocks quite often found themselves strung up by them.

But now things were different. Now he was home.

Gerald had been with three different women the other night - one a Blackjack dealer at the Taj, who had let him take her in the men’s room on her break; another a former Miss Ocean County, a wholesome 4-H kind of girl whom he'd shared in his suite with Ben and Paolo while the Stripes watched and cheered; and the third one of those beautiful women of indeterminate European origin who like nothing better than to drink expensive martinis in oversized glasses and shoot down prospective suitors one after another. He had her under the Atlantic City boardwalk with the junkies and the stray cats, where she scratched him and screamed filthy words in Dutch when she came.

It was again under the boardwalk in Deauville this evening--beneath the kiddie rides, with the smell of sea salt and fresh popcorn in the air--only this time it was Maggie who screamed and scratched.

How Gerald had done it was simple enough - he merely followed her... what was it? It wasn't her scent, more like her vibe. He felt it resonate amidst the others, recognized it, and homed in on it. And there she was.

At first she was angry still - Douchebag! You've got a lot of nerve just walking up to me like this - but rage soon passed into curiosity - So why are you here then; why did you bother coming back at all? - then fascination - Tell me about where you've been, what you were doing all those years - to longing.

He hadn't even had to buy her a drink and they were out of there, hands all over each other, rolling in the cool sand. A passerby yelled to get a room, but the underside of the boardwalk was closer, and Gerald and Maggie were already half-naked anyway.

"I don't remember you scratching."

"Well, I sure don't remember you biting," Maggie snuggled up to her former lover and pretended to gnaw on his breastbone. "I think you drew blood!"

"You didn't seem to mind at the time."

"I still don't." She felt him wiggling his jaw back and forth. "What's wrong?"

"I can't believe it! I must have knocked another tooth loose."

"Another?"

"Yeah, I pulled one clear out of my mouth when Sadie came to visit."

Gerald felt her grow stiff.

"Sadie Swansea?"

"Yeah."

"She came to visit you in the hospital?"

He saw where this was headed; Gerald made no reply.

Maggie sat bolt upright all of a sudden, reaching for her blouse. "I don't need this shit."

"Mags - wait. It's not what you think."

"Sure it isn't. Tell me you didn't fuck me tonight because of her then. She won't let you have her anymore, but I will. Tell me that isn't why you're here?"

"Mags..."

She fumbled for the rest of her clothes and sat opposite him, drawing her bare knees close to her chest; there were tears in her eyes. "Tell me it's not because of her."

"It's not," Gerald lied, drawing closer to her. There was something about seeing her wounded and vulnerable like this that aroused a strange feeling within him. It was that vibe again - only different. "I swear it's not, Mags. Come on now, don't be like that..."

He put his arms around her and kissed her gently, overcome by this new mixed-up sensation of sympathy and something else, not love or even lust but something far more primitive that guided him now. Hunger. It surprised him at first when he recognized the feeling, because it was so out of place.

Or was it? Gerald stroked his prey and Maggie stopped her sobbing, submitting to his warm touch and his lies. She sighed; he bared his teeth.

"How's about you and I take a moonlight swim?"

---

Sadie Swansea was back in her office at the university. She had taken the better part of the week off as personal time, during which time she had been to every newspaper, police station, and surf shop in Ocean County. From her investigations she had ascertained two things: first, that the county was experiencing a boomlet in missing persons of late; and second, that law enforcement was keeping these cases quiet, almost as if in silent cooperation across municipal lines.

She knew from her previous research that regions would often collectively bury the news of weird goings-on, either knowingly or through some instinct of social self-preservation. The fact that the Jersey Shore was swinging into its high season with Memorial Day Weekend didn't help matters - even if there were an innocent explanation behind the spike in disappearances, Middle Township precincts would be feeling the pressure not to look into the matter until the first week of September, when the Shoobies were long gone and all their hard-earned money in the hands of local merchants and restaurateurs.

Unfortunately for the Sheriff and the county's respective Chambers of Commerce, however, Sadie was beginning to suspect an explanation for recent events that was far from innocent. And judging from the name of the most recent missing person case, Gerald was, as she'd feared, right in the middle of it all again.

She picked up the phone.

---

"So I guess all is forgiven, eh?" Gerald was sporting a native's tan after only a week in the sun; despite the fact that they were supposedly having a dinner date, he was clad in bermuda shorts and a tee shirt that seemed two sizes too small. He was also wearing flip-flops.

Sadie sat down without a word and studied the man sitting across from her, drinking a large tumbler of something potent straight with no mixers or even ice. Gone was any trace of the accident that had brought her racing across the Benjamin Franklin Bridge - gone also was the spark he still had behind those eyes when they'd met that morning for the first time in a decade, replaced by something else.

"Did you get an implant?" she asked, staring at Gerald's again-perfect smile.

He blinked at the question, clearly not expecting it. "Yes. No. Well, it's the weirdest thing, Sadie - I went to the dentist's so he could take a look-see and he told me not to worry, that there was another one coming in!"

"Isn't that unusual?" Sadie's eyes were cold, the tone of her voice flat and measured.

"I thought so, but the dentist said it happens from time to time in adults."

"Oh? Who did you see?"

"Dr. Newcastle - Paolo's uncle, remember? He's got a family practice in Sea Isle. Great guy. Did my x-rays for free!"

"Ah."

The server then intruded with their entrees; Gerald sniffed at his swordfish suspiciously.

"Is something wrong, sir?"

"I think you overcooked this steak. It smells burnt!"

"My apologies, sir. I will have the kitchen put another on the grill for you."

Gerald nodded at the server, who promptly disappeared, and then smiled across the table at Sadie. She nibbled at her arugula and watched her old lover carefully - his body language betrayed a man she didn't know, despite the familiar face.

"So you're still speaking to Paolo then."

"Look - he just didn't want to dump all that shit on me all at once. He was trying to be a good friend, which is more than I can say about you right now!"

Sadie refused to be baited into another argument; she had come to gather information, not to win some juvenile battle about what had happened ten years ago.

"Ger, I want you to look at some pictures, okay? Will you do that for me?"

He nodded, sullen, but before Sadie could take the pictures out of her purse the server returned with another swordfish steak, this one noticeably less well-done than the first. Still Gerald turned his nose up at it: "Why doesn't anyone know how to cook a fish around here? This one's overdone as well."

This gave the server a start. "I can assure you, sir, that I asked the kitchen not to overcook your steak this time. It looks fine to me," he even ventured.

"Well, I'm not eating it."

"Ger..."

"Fuck that, Sadie - I'm not paying for a burnt fish! Take it back and try again."

The server stood in defiant silence for a moment, but Gerald fixed him with an unblinking stare.

"Now!"

The incident had until now only caught the attention of the adjacent diners. Now all eyes were on the three of them - Gerald, Sadie, and the waiter who left with the plate of perfectly-grilled swordfish, trying desperately to hold back tears in front of the curious crowd.

Sadie hissed through her teeth: "How dare you treat him like that. He's just a kid."

Gerald laughed at her outrage. "Well he'd better bring me something I can eat this time or he's going to be looking for another summer job!"

Sadie said nothing to this, but merely passed him the pictures. "Will you please look at these now?"

"Oh, why not!" Gerald flipped through the stack quickly, only barely looking at one before moving to the next.

"Cute girl - nice legs. Tell me what I'm supposed to be looking for again?"

As there was no response from his dinner companion, he quickened his pace with playful defiance, only to stop dead halfway through the stack. There was a smiling picture of a boy staring back at him. Curly hair, chubby cheeks, monkey ears. Why did he look so familiar?

"His name is Timothy Gillis," Sadie said. "He was playing on the beach in Deauville the night you had your surfing 'accident'; he hasn't been seen since."

Gerald's eyes grew wide as the memory tried to bubble up through the back of his mind. But it was all so cloudy. "So - what does that have to do with me?" he asked, irritated.

"Keep going."

Next was a woman - he recognized the face, but a name escaped him.

Sadie helped him: "Cheryl Pine - Miss Ocean County 2000. She went missing a few days later, last seen in Atlantic City."

"Huh."

"You were in A.C. over the weekend, weren't you Ger?"

Gerald had the concerned look of someone who had forgotten what it was he had forgotten. He started to feel short of breath, and flipped ahead to the next photo, then to the next, and then-

"Jesus."

It was a picture of Margaret he was staring at now. He remembered her naked body, the tangle of flesh, sand, and clothes under the boardwalk - yes, he remembered all of that quite well. But there was something else buried beneath those memories, something he couldn't get at. What was it?

"You were the last person to see her on the night she disappeared. People saw you leaving Volo's with her."

Gerald could barely sit up straight - the room seemed to be spinning around him counterclockwise. The only still point was Maggie's picture, grinning up at him.

"Ger."

“Your steak, sir.”

The waiter had returned with tear-stained eyes and a plate of raw swordfish, which he slammed down on the table atop the pile of snapshots. His reverie broken, Gerald sniffed at his dinner, then tucked into it voraciously with his bare hands. “Now was that so hard?” he yelled at his already-retreating server’s back with his mouth full.

“Ger?” Sadie watched in disbelief as Gerald ate. His eyes seemed to roll up into the back of his head with every bloody bite.

“Look Sadie,” Gerald said in between chunks of swordfish, his teeth gleaming and pointy. “I’m touched that you dropped everything to come out here to make sure I was okay.. But I’m fine. Surely you can see that with your own two eyes.”

“But the pictures,” Sadie insisted, fumbling over the table for the photographs beneath the plate of swordfish. Gerald waved her away, however, and finished what was left of his meal in one bite. As his mouth gaped wide open, Sadie could see rows and rows of teeth behind those in the front—although a shiver of pure terror ran down her spine, she fought the urge to stand up and run that seemed almost uncontrollable at that moment.

“That’s a real shame about those people, but I’ve got to catch up with Ben and the Stripes. Time and tide waits for no man—especially the Spring High.”

Gerald reached for his drink to wash down the gore on his lips, but no sooner did he swallow the liquor than his entire body began to convulse violently. He gasped as if something had knocked the wind out of him and gripped the plastic laminate table with white knuckles.

“W-w-what’s happening to me?”

Sadie regarded him with a flat expression that could have been either pity or contempt. Perhaps it was both. “I slipped you a mickey, Ger. Silver nitrate mixed with wolfsbane. Wasn’t sure if it would work in your case, but looks like I got lucky. Try not to struggle too much—it’ll just hurt even worse.”

At this point Gerald could only gurgle, his eyes now beady and black and his toothy jaw snapping randomly. The other diners on the restaurant patio were now moving away from this bizarre scene as quickly as possible as a preternatural instinct older than humanity itself seized them. Sadie remained seated, however, and watched her former lover carefully as she spoke to him.

“I’ve just been studying the folklore of Russian soldiers who fought in the Far East during World War Two. They told stories about the oboroten—shapeshifters that haunted the front lines and fed on the wounded and dying. Most of them took the form of wolves and bears, but it was said that in Pacific Theater some could assume the guise of sharks.

“I am a skeptic by nature, but my colleagues and I have encountered things in the course of our research that defy any rational explanation. When you told me that Paolo was somehow involved with all of this I made the mistake of assuming that this was all one grand New Age hoax, when in fact he had stumbled upon the real deal this time. Forgive me, Ger-- I didn’t figure it out fast enough to save you. But at least I can keep you from hurting anyone else…”

Gerald slid out of his chair onto the deck of the patio, his flesh no longer tan but the battleship grey hue of a Great White. A dorsal fin protruded through the fabric of his tee shirt, and his legs had fused into a long tail that swept back and forth in the empty air. Sadie stood up and stared down at the half-man, half-shark as it flopped anemically, the gills which had appeared on Gerald’s neck flapping open and closed in rapid succession before stopping altogether after one last thrash.

“Goodbye, my love.”

It was only at this moment that Sadie became aware of the rest of the diners again. She had half-expected the restaurant patio to be deserted at this point, the clientele either too smart or too scared to remain on hand once Gerald’s terrible transformation had begun. Instead, she looked around in horror to realize that she was being watched by countless pairs of beady black eyes.

The Spring High had already arrived.

As Sadie opened her mouth to scream, Ben and the Stripes began to sing Warren Zevon at the bar’s open mike-- the rest of the crowd sang along and advanced on the girl with a million jagged teeth.

THE END

First

2009-11-08T10:22:00.002-05:00

Jansen stared out the window of the moving aircraft. Below him stretched nameless snowcapped mountains for as far as the eye could see. Not a trace of human habitation met his bored gaze as he soared thirty thousand feet above the world's most populous nation. In his mind's eye, he tried to imagine a time when it all looked like this, endless vistas and undiscovered realms, in an age when the Earth was young and vast.

"We'll be landing in about thirty minutes, Mr. Jansen."

Jansen nodded at the plastic automaton which rolled past him on its way to notify the other chartered passengers. There weren't many. Although he had started his journey in a humming metropolis of almost a quarter of a million souls, he knew full well that few ventured this far into the hinterland any more. The steward-bot made only two other courtesy stops before wheeling itself into the darkness between the cabin and the cockpit.

Jansen ran his hands through his wavy, silver hair, sighed, and glanced down at his notes. The region he would be arriving in shortly was displayed in a glowing map that faded into the background when his attention was fixed on another item in his electronic portfolio.

"Case history." Virtual mountains and alpine streams melted into the paper like a watermark as he reviewed the particulars of this mission. Jansen knew this routine, could perform it like the lifeless drone that had stowed his baggage, fluffed his pillow, and served him coffee for breakfast. Every report was checked and double-checked before coming to his attention - forty years in the field had at least won him the privilege of chasing down only the most plausible leads, for what that was worth.

A lot of good it had done him. Even in the cases that met all of the Institute's criteria for investigation by a senior member - thousands of them, as far as Jansen could recall - not one had produced a shred of evidence that didn't fade away like his portfolio map when held up to his scrutiny. Sure, there had been some tantalizing leads over the years, but even the promising cases inevitably gave way to disappointment and closed inquiries.

Of all the false hopes, it was those engendered by the hoaxes which were most maddening. Over time, the Institute had developed a series of infallible tests to separate the real potentials from the fake, as a series of pranksters had successfully fooled a rival entity and secured a fortune in bogus grant money, until the Government discovered the ruse and dismantled the Institute's sole remaining competitor. The Government also made it clear to Jansen and his colleagues that such a future embarrassment would not be tolerated, and would likely lead to the end of the project altogether.

If the project ended today, who would even notice, Jansen wondered to himself, rolling up his electronic portfolio and closing his eyes with a weary sigh. The Institute had been in existence for over a century now, and only once during that time had it turned up a potential lead that didn't peter out. That was sixty years ago, on someone else’s watch. Jansen's entire professional life had revolved around chasing phantoms, nothing more. He squinted hard, the phosphene patterns in front of his eyes forming hieroglyphics he'd never decipher.

Rumor was that the Government was going to abandon the project within the next budget cycle, or so Jansen had heard from an administrative colleague in the know. "Please, Stephen," he recalled his friend saying. "You must know that you’ve survived this long on charm alone. They shut down SETI – the search for extra-terrestrial life, for crying out loud – and those folks even had good hard evidence. What have you got? Ten million miles on your odometer and a few dozen cases of food poisoning.

"Admit it, Stephen. The search is over."

On one level, Stephen Jansen relished the thought of declaring the project dead and moving on to more fruitful lines of academic inquiry. But he was not convinced. Despite all of the evidence to the contrary - the decades of false leads, impersonators, and dead silences at the end of one long road after another - Jansen still believed, or at least doubted. It was that hint of a flicker of belief that kept him from giving up. Yes, he agreed, it might be the end, in a practical sense. But as long as the Government kept funding his search, the project would continue. Wasn't absolute certainty worth another ten million miles around the globe? Stephen tried not to get his hopes up as the plane taxied to the terminal and he disembarked in yet another foreign land that was not so foreign, not anymore.

Well, no intestinal parasites this time around, Jansen thought to himself several days later as he put the finishing touches on his report. The informant must have been elderly or not entirely competent, as his hearsay was about a few generations out of date. What he had described as a village was now a suburb of the city he had left five days ago. Incredible that his fact-checkers slipped up on such an easily caught error - he would be sure to give his staff an earful when he returned. The Institute's funds were becoming far too precious to waste on unnecessary field trips. Jansen clicked his tongue in irritation and transmitted his report to the main office. Oh, he'd have a word with them, alright.

No sooner had he finished his transmission than there was a tinkling sound floating through the silence of his room. Jansen's ears zeroed in on the source - it was coming from the corner. He crept to the grate of the ventilation panel and listened. Silence. But what he'd heard, just for a moment, caused him to race back to his report in his mind. He'd gone over everything twice, three times in places. All the possible leads had been long-since cold. And yet.

Jansen unbolted his door and walked cautiously down the hallway, fumbling to make sure he had his recorder in his pocket and at the ready. This is the hunt, he thought to himself as he opened the stairwell door and crept down the stairs. After forty years of coming up empty, he still hadn't lost the simple joy of running down the truth. He rounded the last flight of stairs and immersed himself into the darkness of the building's basement.

Jansen often studied the floorplan of his temporary accommodations at length. Being on the road all the time had its charms, but waking up in so many different beds in so many different towns and cities had taken a gradual but irreversible toll on his ability to get a good night's sleep. He found that knowing the secrets of an unfamiliar building seemed to help him relax, even if it didn’t completely cure his insomnia.

This time however Jansen had pored over the hidden recesses of his apartment block with an extra amount of attention. Every night that he had slept here, he had been awakened with a start in the middle of the night. Each time he was dreaming of overhearing a conversation he couldn't make any sense of, but which seemed natural to him nevertheless. Night after night he awoke with a start to a silent room. Until this final evening, Jansen had figured the repetitive dreams were just another indication that he'd been at his job for far too long, and that maybe it was finally time for him to retire. But this time he'd been wide awake, and he knew damned well that he wasn't so far gone as to be hearing things.

No. He had been overhearing a conversation, somewhere deep in the bowels of this complex. The soft, alien tinkling had been real. Jansen's defunct lead had just become red hot, and he wasn't going to let it go, no matter what. He stumbled ahead into the lightless room, his eyes straining to adapt to the sudden dark. His ears on the other hand were more than acclimated to the faint sound of his prey. They were still down here.

Jansen followed the sound, which despite growing louder and louder failed to resolve itself into words, as he kept expecting it to as he drew nearer. His excitement only grew as he approached this conversation from his dreams. It was exactly as he recalled it - like nothing he'd ever heard before, yet at the same time so familiar. He fingered his recorder.

Still adjusting to the lack of light, Jansen failed to notice a low-lying ventilation duct until his forehead connected with it, booming an echo through the basement chambers. He grunted in pain and cursed his clumsiness. The gentle tinkling had stopped.

"Who's there? Who's down here?"

Jansen closed the distance between himself and the source of the conversation, emerging into a reddish chamber full of hissing pipes and steaming cauldrons. There was a pungent smell lingering in the air – the aroma of cleansers battling with soiled bedding and unwashed linens. This must be the laundry room, he thought. He stepped into plain view.

Three pairs of eyes greeted him - it was too dark yet for Jansen to tell whether the glances he met were inviting or hostile. He wasn't sure if they were men or women, as the style of dress they'd chosen was completely unknown to him, but from his half-remembered dreams he was convinced that the words he heard were coming from female lips. But the words he was listening to now were words that he understood.

"What are you doing down here?" one of them asked, with hardly a trace of an accent. Jansen wasn't as disappointed by this as he'd thought he'd be. And yet a slender thread of hope kept him from excusing his intrusion and turning tail right there and then.

"I'm sorry. I must have lost my way."

"No doubt there," the same person replied. "What are you looking for?"

Jansen paused, considering how the truth might sit with this trio. He decided to take the chance and cleared his throat.

"Actually, I'm looking for a conversation - one that I heard through the air ducts. I was wondering if you ladies could help me find it."

A laugh escaped from the youngest of the women, who was not very young at all, from what Jansen could see of her features, and spread to the other two like a shared joke.

"You shouldn't be eavesdropping on other people's conversations, should you now?"

"I was wondering if you wouldn't mind… talking… that way again, like you were before."

A smile, this time from the oldest - flashes of tooth and gold revealed from behind ancient gums. Her companions smiled as well.

"Now why would you want to hear that which you can't understand, silly man?"

The moment of truth, Jansen thought. He swallowed hard.

"Because… I've been searching all my life for exactly that, and I… I was wondering--"

"You were wondering! You were wondering!" The first one again, the young one. Jansen couldn't tell if she was angry or playful.

The older one rebuked her with a sudden outburst of words that were not words, at least not any that Jansen knew, and he had made it his life's work to learn as many as he could. As the unfamiliar cadences fell upon his ears, he felt his heart start to race again. The younger was responding to her elder in kind and the middle was opening her mouth to get a word in edgewise when they all remembered their guest and fell silent in unison.

"No!" Jansen said. "Please. Don't stop talking on my account. He fiddled with the recorder in his pocket, but then stopped, uncertain about capturing their conversation in secret.

"Please."

There was genuine confusion in the middle woman’s voice. "Why are you so curious about the way we talk? Haven't you ever heard someone speak in a tongue you couldn't understand?"

"No," he said in an almost reverent voice. "No one has, not in a hundred years."

"A hundred years!" the older one cackled. "How do you know so much about what people speak and what they don't speak? What makes you so certain?"

Jansen was almost breathless. "I've spent my entire life looking. Listening. For another..." He paused to relish the thought before saying it out loud.

"For another language."

Laughter all around this time - the three women in disbelief, Jansen out of sheer giddiness.

"You have no idea. I thought that they were all gone. We thought they were all gone."

"Then why look?" the younger one asked.

"I didn't want to believe it. I didn't want it to be true. And now, here you are - three of you. How, may I ask, did you manage -"

The older one cut him off. "So what do you speak then? This language? All of you? The whole world?"

"Yes."

Cackles and guffaws. "How awful!" Jansen found that he didn’t disagree with the women’s assessment.

The younger one again. "Why did you pick that one?"

"You mean instead of what?”

"How about this one?”

“Or this one?”

“Or maybe this?"

Three more languages, each of them dead, or so presumed until this very moment. Jansen’s head was spinning like a top.

"How is this possible?"

"We thought you were the smart one."

"But surely you must have known."

But then again, maybe not. From the looks of it, these three didn't have too much interaction with the outside world. Although they matched the description given to him by what he had assumed to be a senile witness, no one else he'd spoken to in his five days of investigation recalled seeing anyone even remotely like the trio standing before him. It was as if they had stepped into this basement from across centuries of time. Jansen buried the urge to ask the women their age - a universal taboo, if there ever was one – and settled upon a less intrusive line of questioning.

"Do you work here?"

The younger snorted. "Of course we work here! Do you think we haunt this basement for fun?"

"Be nice, Kaloth," the middle called the younger by her name. "We wash the linens. Been doing it for ages. Longer than I can remember."

The older one said something incomprehensible, then translated for Jansen. "I remember. You were barely a woman then, Lakese, and Kaloth was still just a screaming baby. But I remember my first day in this basement like it was yesterday. This hotel was new then - brand new."

Remembering the date of the building's construction from his late night nervous ritual, Jansen did the math. That would make the older one well over a century old, perhaps even a century and a half. He opened and closed his mouth.

"I remember coming down from the village every afternoon," the older one continued. "How the birds sang, how the dirt crunched under my feet. I remember how empty this valley was once - just a path and a stream tumbling down to a meadow filled with flowers.

"This building - this hotel - was once the newest, the tallest in town. Can you imagine? We were happy to find work. Automatons were still new and expensive then, but already we were feeling their impact, even all the way out here. Hard to find a decent job, with those machines running around doing the work for free.

"Of course now the hotel could get a washing 'bot to do the work my younger sisters and I do. But the owners are kind. They know we don't have anything else to support us back in the village."

Jansen prided himself on his ability to get people talking. He may not have heard any other languages from living, breathing people until today, but he'd collected a lifetime of stories just like this. That was one of the rewards of his work, even in failure. He tried to keep the conversation going. "Your village. How many of you live there now?"

"Just us," Kaloth said quickly. "There's nothing left to do up there."

"And how long has it been just you?"

Lakese was also a little less relaxed speaking about this topic. "Long enough. Forty years now, I reckon. Wouldn't you say, Toropo?"

"I'd say fifty." The older one flashed a disarming smile at Jansen. "And they tease me about my memory!"

"I guess I won’t be meeting the rest of the village, then. Fifty years all by yourselves! You don’t get lonely up there?”

“We have each other.” Jansen felt the cold in Kaloth’s response. He was walking on a tightrope here, but he couldn’t stop, not now.

“True enough. Family is important. But don’t you have friends, or neighbors from the other villages?”

Lakese answered him with a voice as bloodless as her sister’s. “There are no others. They left the mountain years ago.”

“So it’s just the three of you left who speak both languages – the one we’re speaking right now, and the one you grew up with. There aren’t any more, tucked away in a valley somewhere?”

“We are the last.” However guardedly she spoke, there was genuine sadness in Toropo’s voice as well. For a moment, Jansen felt a twinge of guilt for pressing the conversation into uncomfortable territory, which he realized was exactly what the old crone wanted. He gave Toropo a sympathetic smile.

“In that case, would you ladies mind if I listened to you for a little while longer? I'd love to record as much as I can - with your permission, of course – for our permanent archives.”

"Of course," they said, one after another, before slipping back into their native tongue and returning to tend to the swirling cauldrons of boiling towels and sheets they’d left to stew.

Jansen sensed the tension that had been growing in the room melt as he stopped asking questions and settled into the role of passive observer. Recorder in hand, he tried to make a good show of absorbing the alien conversation, hoping the trio would be too engrossed in the work at hand to notice that Jansen's mind was already halfway up the valley.

The dirt crunched beneath Jansen's feet. Birdsong filled his ears - odd birds twittering old melodies. He felt a little dizzy from breathing the thin air of the upper slopes in such deep gasps, but it would take a lot more than that to deter him now.

"I've found it," he said over the satellite link, after the sun had risen and the trio of sisters had trudged back home for a few hours' rest. "Marie, after all these years, I've found it."

Marie was skeptical, as he well expected. She'd been through this routine many times before in the past - first as a colleague, later as his wife, then as sole remaining partner at the Institute. The breathless phone call in the middle of the night, the frantic last-minute arrangements for travel, accommodations, the begging for just one more grant to keep the search alive. Marie supported her husband, kept the day-to-day operations running smoothly, even chased down leads when Jansen had classes to teach, a conference to attend, or a high-level fundraising session with another Government secretary to finesse.

But his wife knew only too well how scarce the evidence was, and how little of it, if any, would pan out into something real. Marie prided herself on her ability to predict how a particular trip into the field would go, and even Jansen had to admit that his wife could sense a dead end long before he was willing to give up.
This time however he was convinced that his wife was wrong.

"These ladies were the real thing, Marie. You have the samples I sent. Whatever they were saying had a syntax way too complicated to fake, and you know it. I ran both the Zora Tests and the Schilling Diagnostics, and none of the sisters came up as positive."

Marie grunted, her way of conceding a point without giving up the argument altogether. She always reserved the right to be correct, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

"By the way, any progress on the translation? I assume that you and the kids have been working on it all night." Jansen and Marie always referred to the Institute's staff as their children. Since they’d never gotten around to having any of their own, the graduate students and volunteers that worked for them were the closest thing they had to a family.

Marie gave him a smile over the satellite link that turned into a half-grimace. "We have something, but I don't want to tell you what it is."

"It's early, isn't it?" Jansen already knew the answer, felt it in his bones. But he wanted to hear it from her, the most reasonable person he knew.

"Yes."

"How old, Marie?"

She paused.

"Marie? How far back are we talking?"

"Stephen, I don't know how this is even possible. It's as old as we can reconstruct for human language. Old as old itself."

"Is it Nostratic?"

"Older."

"Proto-Antediluvian?"

"Older, Stephen."

"Pangaean," he said, his voice a whisper now.

"Older. This language has features which seem to pre-date Pangaean, or what we thought was Pangaean until we took a closer look at what you sent us this morning. If this isn't a hoax, my love..."

"Yes?" Again he knew the truth, felt that it was so. But he needed to hear it.

"If it isn't a hoax, this may be the oldest language ever recorded."

The mountain path was getting steep now, so much so that every few minutes Jansen had to stop and gasp for breath. The air up here was clean and fragrant with the needles of evergreen trees, well above the layer of yellow haze that filled the bowl of the valley as a quarter of a million people and their automatons went about their daily business.

Passing a stand of thick trees, the vista ahead of him opened up suddenly, providing him with his first glimpse of the village above. Even from here, he could tell that there wasn't much to it - a collection of maybe a dozen whitewashed huts, some kind of a shrine, and a large communal oven, from which a solitary strand of black smoke lifted up into the stratosphere. A bird of prey cried a shrill warning, and Jansen almost lost his balance when three dark forms glided down the hill towards him, passing inches from his head and soaring upward, seemingly without effort, on a cliffside thermal. Jansen regained his composure with a laugh, and continued his afternoon march up the side of the mountain.

Another breath, another step. Jansen quietly marveled at the stamina of the three sisters, each of them easily twice his age - maybe even three times, he thought with a shudder! They made this trek up and back twice a day and somehow managed to put in a full day of work in between, whereas he would be groaning for weeks after this one climb. Already his feet were blistered and aching. Just a few more steps, he encouraged himself. A few more breaths.

At last he crested the imposing bluff on which the village had been built and found himself standing on the first patch of level ground he'd seen since the square in front of his hotel. Jansen caught his breath and looked for signs of life. Already the valley below was falling into shadow, but not here. The settlement had been situated to catch both the rising and setting sun, a necessity in the colder winter months, and the warm amber brilliance of late afternoon flooded the village common.

The shadows below were a stark reminder however that it would be soon be dark up here. Jansen had grossly miscalculated the time it had taken him to hike up the alpine track - the mileage was deceiving on a map, appearing as no more than a jaunt of hour or two up and that much back down again. In reality he'd spent almost six hours getting to the village; it would take at least that long to find his way downhill in failing light, and far longer in total darkness. He wondered with a sense of panic if there would even be a moon to travel by this evening.

Another growing concern in the back of his mind was the return of the three ancient ladies. If he was trapped up here by the dark and forced to spend the night, what could he possibly say by way of explanation when found? How would he justify such a betrayal of trust? The trio had been guarding something important about the village, this much was obvious, but hadn't they already shared enough of their secrets with a total stranger for one night?

Jansen knew he risked burning his bridges by coming up here unattended and uninvited while the sisters worked in the hotel’s laundry room, but he suspected that whatever truth he was going to find up here was not a truth the three were ever interested in sharing. Besides, his time and funding were running out. He couldn't bear to leave this mystery unsolved, not after coming so far. These sisters were already old beyond reason; they could very well be dead before he was able to secure another grant and return for more fieldwork. Jansen knew in his heart that he had stumbled upon this secret in its final days - he had to take the risk, whatever the consequences.

The black smoke was still drifting up from the oven, a circular building whose white walls were covered with a permanent dark splash of soot. Its entrance faced the clearing in the center of the village - he could see the glow of the fire burning within, and for a moment was warmed just by the thought of it. Then he heard the music.

Someone was singing.

Jansen froze, mere steps away from the hearth's doorway, and listened. A man's voice for sure this time, singing a tuneless melody with long-forgotten lyrics. The words being sung were similar in intonation and inflection to the language that the old sisters had spoken, but there was something different about what he was hearing now - something odd and resonant. He held his breath and kept listening.

The melody was not tuneless, nor was the man inept at singing. The more Jansen listened to the music, the more he recognized its underlying structures, the rules of its alien harmonies. Not so alien, suggested a voice so deep in the back of his mind, it was barely a conscious thought, but more like a memory.

More like a dream.

Jansen felt his stomach knot up, his arms and legs grown leaden. It was all too familiar. His mind whirled as he recalled the dreams of the past few days, half-remembered snatches of tinkling phonemes. Now the memories were fusing together in his head, becoming one long dream that seemed to stretch further back than just a week. He tried to wrap his brain around the truth of the matter, but couldn't. It wasn't possible. Yes, he may have heard the wizened sisters night after night through the ventilation ducts while he slept, but all along it was this voice that he had been listening to - a voice that was there long before the cackling trio, the waking dreams in the hotel, and this trip halfway around the globe.

It had been there since the beginning, as far back as Jansen could recall, even beyond. The very beginning…

At that moment the singing stopped. Had he been standing there for fifteen seconds or fifteen minutes? Jansen didn't know, but he swore that the sun was much lower now to the west than it had been when he'd last noticed it. He crouched along the boulders of a half-finished wall and stared at the doorway to the hearth, waiting for the music to resume. He held his breath.

Nothing.

Jansen fought the overwhelming urge not to speak, not to make his presence known, not to break the spell he had been under. "Hello?" he called out to the silence. "Is anyone there?"

A grunt - was that meant for him? He wasn't sure. Too curious to be cautious, he approached the glowing entrance of the oven shelter, pausing only briefly before he crossed the threshold.

It was warm inside, even with an open doorway. Jansen hadn't realized how much the temperature had dropped outside until he was smothered by the heat of the oven. He ducked to avoid a branch of drying herbs that hung from one of the ceiling rafters and looked around. There were other things hanging up to dry- more herbs, flowers, purplish sausages ground from unknown animals – so many that they almost entirely obscured the rafters and the ceiling itself. The hearth was a large opening into a burning oven, full of white-hot wood that crumbled into sparks and collapsed into embers as he gazed upon it. A hand axe lay atop a cord of wood stacked next to the man who was tending the fire - a hunched, cloaked figure who hadn't even turned to acknowledge Jansen when he entered.

The man grunted again, gesturing towards a small wooden table and a few rickety chairs in the corner of the room. There was an earthenware vase of fine craftsmanship on the table, filled with a dark and potent liquid. Jansen sat down in one of the chairs, which creaked so much under his weight he worried for a moment that he would break right through the woven seat, at which point the man began to sing again. He poked at the burning wood with a sharpened rod made of bone, his back still turned, but his lyrics filling the room like the pressing smoky haze of the fire.

Again Jansen listened as syllables mixed with melody into a half-spoken, half-sung composition. He closed his eyes, trying to discern the underlying patterns, sensing for the weave of syntax and the warp of vocabulary. The words were not Jansen's native tongue, and yet they made a kind of sense to him as he listened. This wasn't a song, he realized with a shock – it was the man's language!

Jansen tried to steady his racing mind and decode what he was hearing, but it was as if the meaning was enveloped by fog, allowing him to discern only the shadows of words. If only he could find a way to coax them out of the mist! He felt that he was standing on the threshold of comprehension, of making these words plain and distinct and laying bare this tongue's secrets.

At last the man turned. Although he was wrapped nearly head to toe with a cloak the color of a mountain stream, his eyes and mouth displayed a youthfulness that Jansen had not been expecting. He also appeared younger - much younger - than the three sisters down in the valley. Was he one of their children, perhaps? Even then, he seemed too young.

Using his bone staff, the man had removed from oven another earthenware vessel, this one for cooking. Setting the blackened piece of crockery down on the table, he flipped open its lid of with a hook on the end of his; the aroma of herbs and stewed organ meat assaulted Jansen's nostrils, almost causing him to gag. He collected himself, forcing himself to look away from the steaming pot of offal, and found himself meeting the gaze of his host. The man was staring at him. His eyes were dark - black pupils in black irises - but his expression was hospitable. He offered Jansen a hand-carved wooden spoon, and with an encouraging grunt bade him to eat.

Jansen hesitated for a moment before digging deep into the clay pot and shoveling a heaping portion of the stew into his mouth. It tasted nothing like it smelled, he discovered with relief. It was delicious in fact, vaguely similar to the food of the valley but with stronger flavors and a few spices he couldn't recognize. The meat was lamb, he guessed, or perhaps goat. He swallowed mouthful after mouthful as the man moved his head approvingly - side to side, Jansen noticed, ever the observer – and pushed the earthenware pitcher towards him so that his guest could wash down his supper.

Jansen wasn't sure what had been fermented to make this brew, but it went down like earthy fire, a smoke-like liquid that made him convulse as soon as the first swallow made it to his esophagus. It was a primitive drink, with unstrained mold forming wild swirls on its thick dark surface. He took another draught, eager not to offend the man, who was watching him eat and drink carefully, only to spill a brown rivulet of the liquid onto his brightly colored synthetic pullover. The man laughed, throwing back the wrappings of his cloak to expose his entire face, and took a long deep drink from the vessel as well.

He was young, younger than Jansen had even estimated from his mostly concealed features. A grandchild? Jansen's curiosity was getting the better of him, or was that the brew already insinuating itself into his oxygen-starved blood? He wiped his lips with his sleeve and reached for his recorder. He needed to start making a record of this visit, lest he lose valuable data due to the fuzziness of an alcohol-impaired memory.

The man looked at the slender metal cylinder with a critical, almost hostile gaze, and Jansen was suddenly made aware of the gulf of centuries between himself and his host.

"Don't worry!" he said, holding his hands up in what he hoped was a nonviolent gesture. The man leaped back with a start - not an encouraging sign. It was time to find a common language, Jansen thought.

"Can you understand what I am saying?" he asked the man, first in his own native tongue, then switching in rapid succession to other languages that he knew, working his way through the same question over and over again in more than forty halting attempts. That was every language still spoken when the Institute was founded, over a century ago - all of the known living languages at that time. The man, wild-eyed and suspicious, showed not even a hint of recognition at the words Jansen had spoken.

Now for the dead languages, starting with those that vanished shortly after the turn of the millennium. There were hundreds, the minority languages of the world's nation states, in the days before the world-spanning Government. The man showed a glimmer of familiarity with some of the words he now bombarded the man with, but no real comprehension. Jansen made a quick mental correlation with the analysis his wife and his interns had made, back at the Institute. So far, it was as they'd conjectured. He suspected that his host only spoke one language, but he had to be sure. In the meantime, the man had calmed somewhat, and now seemed genuinely curious at the lack of a common linguistic reference - hopefully he would be patient with the attempt to find one.

Jansen needed more. Although he could already sense where his quest would take him, he wanted to know for certain how far back this man's language went. The natural conclusion of this line of investigation was growing clearer and clearer as he inevitably hurtled towards it, gathering momentum like a boulder tumbling down the mountainside, unable to stop or be stopped. He now switched to the languages that had died before the millennium, some of which he had studied from archival tapes of native speakers, others that he knew from theoretical reconstruction alone. From the man's responses, which were now growing increasingly animated exactly when Jansen expected them to, a slender but unmistakable track was emerging from the data that was leading him through linguistic history. Jansen's heart pounded uncontrollably - was it the potent drink, or the growing confirmation of what he knew deep down in his soul to be true?

Now Jansen was in the realm of pure theory. Centuries ago a group of linguists had posited a mother language for all of humanity that they called Nostratic. Widely dismissed as wishful thinking by many in the discipline, this mostly-forgotten primordial tongue had gotten an unexpected boost from Jansen's mentor, the founder of the Institute, who had used a revolutionary form of statistical analysis to find the core fragments of a given language that combined and recombined in novel but ultimately traceable ways - its linguistic DNA. Using this theory, Jansen's old professor was able to refine Nostratic into a hypothetical ancestral language he called Antediluvian, out of which sprung Pangaean, which was perfected by Jansen himself in collaboration with his wife, Marie.

A lifetime of tinkering with hyper-mathematical algorithms and immersing himself in the data had enabled the married scholars to take Mankind's linguistic history as far back as could be theorized, to the very threshold of language.

But this wasn't a reconstruction that he was hearing now - it was Pangaean, the first language, so strikingly similar to his predictions that he was at first caught off-guard by it. No wonder it had resonated so deeply within him – it was indeed the language of his dreams, a shadow he had been chasing for as long as he could remember. It was the original tongue, the wellspring from which every successive human language had sprung.

And out of all of those evolutionary descendants, only one was spoken now - the last language. Jansen marveled at the sheer improbability of this meeting on the mountaintop, where the Last met the First. He knew his statistical theory, of course - take a room full of enough people and you can guarantee that one of them will meet even the most unlikely string of coincidences. But this wasn't a controlled experiment. Of all the people in the world to discover this man, in this village, in this remote valley...

Jansen's head was spinning. This was no coincidence - it couldn't be! He squinted, willing his gaze straight and piercing, and opened his mouth.

"Do you understand me now?" his words were hesitant, but they were familiar to the man, who grinned and took another drink from the mushroomy grog. His eyes were cloudy, too, wildly intent but wheeling in circles.

"I... I..." Jansen stammered, wrestling with his own tongue. Where to begin? There were so many things he wanted to know, so many questions to ask, he didn't know where to begin. More than four decades of field training was falling apart before his very eyes. He had to concentrate. "I... I..."

Before he could ask his first question, however, there was a sudden deafening boom, like a thunderclap echoing through the valley. Only it did not roll away. The oven chamber reverberated with the sound, its intensity shaking the sausages and herbs from their moorings on the ceiling. Was it an earthquake? An avalanche? The young manned snapped to his feet, alert, reaching for the sharp bone lance with which he tended the fire. Jansen was too disoriented to rise from his chair, but not so far gone that he could not taste the sudden change in the air- it was an aircraft! Its gravity repulsors were filling the thin mountain air with ozone.

Marie, Jansen realized immediately. If she had gone for a quick hike and didn't check in by sunset, he would have called the local law enforcement as well. This was his own damned fault, a search party looking for a lost eccentric presumably freezing to death on the mountainside. He should have figured his travel time better.

The flying machine's searchlights crisscrossed the irregular masonry of the village square outside before arcing through the doorway and catching the young man full in the face. He stood dazzled, bone rod in hand.

A loud but distinct voice: "Lower your weapon, and come out of the hut! This is the police!"

The man stood, trying to make out this sudden source of light and sound. Jansen wondered what his host made of this apparition - surely he must have seen many flying machines from afar, but how often would the locals have reason to fly up an otherwise abandoned slope? He tried again to rise from his chair, but he seemed rooted to it, his legs as heavy as stone.

"I repeat - this is the police! Drop the stick and come outside with your hands where we can see them!"

The man may not have understood the meaning of the booming words, but he certainly recognized the intonation of a threat. He stood, brandishing the rod like a spear, defiant, shouting curses first hurled when Mankind was young. Try as he might, Jansen still couldn't rouse himself - his eyes were swimming in phosphorescent colors, his ears buzzing with half-imagined sounds, his lips burning and freezing at the same time as the young man's intoxicating beverage invaded his blood. He felt himself melting away into a bright, vibrating, string of angry epithets coming from the mouth of his host.

"This is your last chance - drop the weapon or we'll drop you!"

What happened next was a blur. One moment the man was standing in the doorway, spear in hand, and in the next moment the spear, the light, and the roar were all gone. Only the man remained, with silence and the purplish evening sky behind him.

Had he downed the flying machine with a sharpened rod of bone, or did he just scare the pilot away for the time being? Jansen had no time to ponder the matter, for no sooner had the young man dispatched the intruder from the air than he now was closing in on him with a vengeful gleam in his eyes. He finally rose from his chair in order to face his attacker.

"Wait!" Jansen cried out. "You don't understand. Wait!"

The man was on top of him in a heartbeat, knocking him across the room in the direction of the oven. His calloused, sooty hands were around his neck, and his long fingernails digging into his skin like talons. Jansen barely recognized this man who now was trying to kill him.

"How dare you!" the man shrieked. "You were my guest. How dare you bring them to my home! You were welcome - you and you alone!"

Jansen tried to respond, but no air could escape from his windpipe. He flailed his limbs, to no avail.

"They told me you would come! They told me to prepare! They said you were not like them! They said you were special!"

Jansen tried again to speak, but the man's grip was too strong. Adrenaline flooded through his veins, temporarily washing away the grogginess brought on by the drink. At least I'll die with a clear head, he thought grimly.

The man began to curse again in an almost singsong fashion, and for a moment Jansen - ever the linguist, even in the face of death - couldn't help but be captivated by his words, those beautiful words that would now be his undoing. Then the moment passed and scientific curiosity gave way to the instinct for survival, buried under decades of theory and field research but in the end just as strong as his adversary's.

Reaching for anything to push off for leverage, Jansen felt the stone cold blade of the axe atop the cord of wood in his grasping fingers. His hand closed around the haft - slow, deliberate, and aware. There was no fuzziness now, no blur to his vision or buzz in his ears. Just the axe and those lovely, lovely words.

Jansen swung the axe blindly and struck the man from behind, on the nape of his neck. The angle was awkward, but the blow was enough to break his attacker's choke hold and throw him off balance. It was all the advantage he needed. He swung again, this time with both hands, and felt the blade bite deep into flesh. The man howled.

Jansen howled as well. Knocking his opponent over with the mass of his body, now it was he who hurled the curses, shouting in the First Tongue of Mankind fluently, as if he'd been born speaking it. But hadn't he, really?

He cursed the man, cursed his bitch of a mother, cursed his questionable lineage, cursed his ramshackle village, cursed his rancid lamb stew, cursed his undrinkable grog. He cursed everything about the man, cursed every twist and turn that had lead to their meeting, cursed the day that he had kissed his wife goodbye and first set out on this ill-fated quest.

The words rolled off his tongue - charging, challenging – as easily as the axe moved in his hands. The man looked up at Jansen as he raised the blade one last time to strike a killing blow. He listened to the old linguist's angry words. They were perfectly formed, perfectly accentuated.

The man smiled.

Jansen dropped the axe.

The man was already dead, he could plainly see – Jansen must have mortally wounded his host when he’d struck him in the chest and knocked him down. He fell to his knees and looked at the body before him. The man’s mouth was frozen in an upturned expression of comprehension and his eyes were full of calm and understanding.

Was he happy? Jansen smiled himself, then collapsed beside him. Together they lay - Last and First, First and Last. One living, one dead; one resting for the very first time, one dreaming at last.

Keeper

2009-10-09T14:12:00.002-04:00

"Goddamn it, if I catch another skate I'm tossing my pole in the ocean!"

My brother-in-law was losing his cool, but then again who wouldn't after an afternoon of hooking nothing but the ugly bottom-feeding skate. Our previous dreams of striped bass had given way to vague hopes for bluefish, winter flounder, even a sand shark at this point. Anything but another skate.

I adjusted my sunglasses and smirked in his general direction, keeping my eyes firmly out to sea. Gloucester Harbor was brilliant, blue, and barren; definitely one of the more scenic ways to throw twenty bucks of bait to the crabs and the other lowlifes of the deep, if nothing else.

Still, Gabe had a point. We'd been fishing this spot every weekend for a month now - in the morning, in the evening; at high tide, low tide, ebb tide, and neep tide; chucking sea clams and chunk herring and mackerel; using the dipsy rig, the fish-finder, and countless other half-remembered, half-improvised forms of tackle; with circle hooks, j-hooks, octopus hooks, even Japanese red steel hooks that drew blood when we snelled them.

And what did we have to show for it? Aside from a couple of dozen skates, nothing. Not even a schoolie or two, let alone a striper that was more than the legal size of twenty-eight inches, head to tail.

A keeper! How foolish we had been, when we first started fishing last summer, Gabe and I, with our Wal-Mart rods and reels and our plastic sea worms. Having started out with an uncanny string of beginners' luck, we thought it would be just a matter of weeks before we landed ourselves our prized keepers - or "keepahs," as they call them up here. Striped bass are only one of a variety of species of fish that you may find on the end of your line when casting into the chilly waters off the New England coast, but they're the only one that count.

"Fuck!" Gabe cried out as his pole jerked noncommitally, as it tends to do when a skate has gone and hooked itself on the end of your line. A family of curious sightseers who'd ventured out along the rocks of Stage Fort Park clucked at this unwholesome outburst.

I turned and looked up, eyeing their white tube socks and matching windbreakers from my vantage point about thirty feet below them. We'd set up at the bottom of a jumble of huge granite slabs that tumbled headlong into the harbor, and periodically forgot that despite the fact that it appeared to be just us, the gulls, and the passing boats, there were in fact tons of people crawling around the park.

Situated just south of the city of Gloucester, Stage Fort Park offers stunning views of both the harbor and the still somewhat sleepy fishing town from the natural promontory and the decrepit man-made fortifications. On the weekends it was a natural draw for locals on picnic, out-of-towners looking for a little scenery, and would-be fishermen such as Gabe and myself.

"Whoops," my brother-in-law said to me, and offered a lame apology to the matron of the red windbreaker party, who was too busy herding her blonde little ones away from the foul-mouthed anglers who reeked of bait.

"Townies," I heard the father mutter as he brought up the rear, looking down at us fishing with a mixture of loathing and longing before disappearing from view.

I laughed - at the squeaky clean tourists, at the skate that Gabe proceeded to reel in amidst even more profanity, at the idea of being confused with a native. Me, the city kid. Gabe caught me chuckling and let a few choice words sail my way:
"What the hell's so funny? I haven't seen you catch a motherfucking thing all day!"

"Hey," I shot back. "At least I'm not feeding the skates."

Gabe spat as he heaved the speckled brown creature out of the sea and onto the rocks. Flat and almost eerily beautiful in the water, skates tend to curl up and spasm unpredictably when caught, making it twice as hard to get off the hook as other fish.

"Gah! He swallowed the hook. Damn it all to hell..."

He moved to cut the fishing line and kick his unwanted quarry back into the deep when a voice called down from above.

"You're not going to throw that away, are you?"

Gabe and I looked up, but couldn't see our mystery guest. We looked at each other, shrugging. "Why not? Fucking skates aren't good for anything anyway."

"Not true!" The man had somehow clambered down the rocks in the time it took Gabe to find his Swiss Army knife, and interposed himself between my brother-in-law and the gasping ball of a fish. "Please," he said. "Allow me to take it off your hands, if you're not going to keep it."

"Keep it?" I asked. "You're not going to eat that thing, are you?"

"Of course I am! In my mother country, we eat skate wings all the time."

Gabe made a face. "Where is that?"

The man was already pulling the hook out of the hapless creature's gullet, as if by magic. "Sicily," he said.

"Sicily isn't a country." Gabe, always the troublemaker, had struck a nerve in our newfound friend. He picked up the skate by the tail and shook it at us proudly.

"Now you watch what you say! If we Sicilians aren't our own people, then who are we? Italians? Phtoo!" he spit into the waves.

I tried to steer the conversation to something a little less inflammatory. "So are there a lot of Sicilians in Gloucester?"

"Oh, yes!" the skate-wielding stranger nodded excitedly. "We've been coming here for generations, back when you could still pull big fish out of this harbor."

"What do you mean," my brother-in-law asked indignantly. "Are you saying there no keepers in there?"

The Sicilian laughed. "Oh, you might get lucky - it's a big ocean, after all - but you're not going to find fish like that here."

Gabe tossed his rod and reel down in disgust at this bit of insider information; I however read between the lines and asked the obvious follow-up question:

"So where will we find them?"

The Sicilian smiled, flashing a solid gold incisor and his diseased gums, but said nothing. Instead, with a sudden whirl he smacked the still-flapping skate against a broad, flat rock, killing it instantly.

"Got a knife?" he asked. Gabe rooted through our tackle box and handed him a rusty, blood-encrusted blade. The Sicilian took it and began carving the wings off of the dead sea creature's body.

"You can only eat the wings," he explained as he cut. "They're a little tough sometimes, but they taste like scallops. Not bad." The edible portions of the skate having been salvaged, he tossed the rest of the carcass to the crabs and the gulls.

"Grazie, signores." The Sicilian took his prize and started back up the rock wall.

"Hey, wait a minute!" Gabe called out. The old man paused. "I thought you were going to tell us where to find a keeper."

The Sicilian muttered something unintelligible, or was he singing? There was something lyrical in the words that escaped his lips, as if he was singing along to an unheard melody. Although it was well over ninety degrees outside, I felt a shiver run down my spine.

"Just up the coast there is a place. Farrell's Island. You'll find your fish there."

He had kept his back to us while he spoke this, but craned his neck around to give us his parting words, which he delivered with that sickly sweet brownish-gold smile.

"Just remember to tell them that Tantalo sent you!"

Gabe and I pored over a road map of Cape Ann, following every nook and cranny of its rocky coastline. Manchester-by-the-Sea, Magnolia, Gloucester, Rockport, Annisquam, Pigeon Cove - not a Farrell's Island to be found. We bought a USGS survey of the area - still no luck.

"What the fuck!" my brother-in-law exclaimed as we went through atlas after atlas in vain.

I was equally frustrated, but not quite ready to give up. "It's got to be here. Maybe we should ask around in the bait shops?"

May at Surfworld never heard of the place - a bad sign, to be sure, as she'd been selling bait and tackle and collecting fisherman's lore for a good half century or more. "You shoah you got the name right?" she drawled as she made change for an angler in hip waders who was going out to try his luck on the Joppa Flats. "I cahn't say I've ever heard of any Farrell's Island befoah."

Petey's Bait, at the other end of the Cape, was drawing a similar blank. "That's a weird one," Petey said while restocking his bait freezers with herring and mackerel, stacking the frozen fish likes cords of wood, three feet deep.

"But wait. 'Farrell', you said, right? Wasn't there a sea captain named Farrell from way back? Maybe not. That'll be ten dollars for the sea clams, what with the Governor's cut."

"Farrell's Island?" the foul-mouthed bait purveyor on Route 60's infamous rotary growled. "What asshole was telling you two nancy boys about Farrell's Island?"

Gabe and I looked at each other and shrugged. Old Dooley was always good for a package of clam necks when the other bait shops had long since closed for the season, so we figured that maybe he knew something; we were right. Unfortunately, there was a big difference between knowing that Dooley knew something and getting that knowledge out of him. This was especially true when it came to the inside information about fishing spots, which anglers generally guarded as if they were nuclear secrets.

"So there is such a place?" I asked.

"I didn't say that."

"Come on, Dooley." Gabe had a better rapport with the old geezer, so I let him try.

"We've bought enough bait from you to keep you in boat payments. We're not asking what rock to fish off of, just where this goddamned village is. Be a sport."

"A sport?" Dooley cackled. "Trust me when I tell you I'm being more of a sport by not telling you jokers about Farrell's Island. Go to Plum Island, boys, and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the other amateurs. Or better yet, get a boat with a fishfinder, for Chrissakes. Just don't go askin' anymore about that place. It's a waste of your time.

"And speaking of wasting my time, buy some bait or get the fuck out of my store!"

"We're onto something," Gabe said to me as we clambered back into my beat up grey pickup without air-conditioning or an FM radio even. He took a swig from his now-warm iced coffee and spat it out the window. "That old bastard knew the whole story. They must be pullin' up cows from that spot, wherever it is. Now the only question is, how do we find it?"

The library was the next logical stop. Massachusetts is blessed with some of the best small town libraries in the country, each an invaluable trove of regional lore. I knew this from my day job as a professional archivist. Although I officially worked for the Commonwealth, I spent a lot of time with local collections and archives, and thus had gotten to know how useful the neighborhood library actually was in this neck of the woods.

My town's public library was no exception. With a collection extending back to before the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690's, the library was the kind of place you could spend weekend after weekend in and not even scratch the surface. Located in a dusky brick building half-swallowed by ivy, the library smelled like the very history it preserved, the unmistakable must of books slowly, inexorably crumbling into dust.
Gabe and I had brought a competing odor into this high-ceilinged temple to the past, as in our excitement we opted to cut straight to the chase, lest the library close for the weekend. The reference librarian on duty crinkled her nose at the scent of herring blood and sun-ripened surf clam that hung around us like a Gypsy's curse.

"Are you gentlemen lost?" she asked hopefully. Now I've heard all of the stereotypes about librarians, the mousy, bespectacled matrons who wear their hair in a bun wrapped as tight as a tourniquet, with zero tolerance for noise and the hidden penchant for sado-masochism. In all my extensive travels around the state, not once have I met one of these fictitious creatures - until now.

"Err, hello." I started, extending my right hand then withdrawing it as I remembered the fish guts. The librarian had not made any motion to receive my hand, however, but stared at it and us coldly instead. "Could you point us in the direction of your maritime history stacks?"

"Naval History is E 182," she answered without even blinking. "Around to the left. Try not to get anything on the leather upholstery."

I was curious all of a sudden: "When did you switch over to Library of Congress classifications?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Last time I was here, it was all Dewey Decimal. A lot of the collection not even that!"

The librarian eyed me suspiciously over the brim of her bifocals. "And what exactly do you know about cataloging?"

"Enough to know a job well done when I see one. Your handiwork?"

Pause. "Yes."

"This should have taken years. I work at State Archive, and I'd give my right arm for someone like you in technical processing."

The middle-aged matron actually blushed at this, as my brother-in-law gaped incredulously. "Why, thank you. Come to think of it, let me show you the way. Those E's can get a little tricky. You can freshen up in the employee bathroom, too, if you'd like."

The librarian's name was Cassandra, and she'd just come down from Bangor, Maine to take the evening and weekend shift here at our library. "I miss living Downeast, no doubt," she confided to us as she ran back and forth to the stacks, fetching us materials. "But the library there was just filled with kooks."

"How's that?" Gabe asked, clearly amused now at how thoroughly I'd charmed this potential ogre.

"Stephen King kooks. Nineteen out of twenty questions at the desk were about Mr. King and his oeuvre."

I laughed at the unlikely combination of Stephen King and the word, only to draw a reproachful cluck from Cassandra.

"Now don't me wrong. Mr. King has been nothing but generous to the city of Bangor, including the library. And I must admit a fondness for the man's work, especially his short stories!

"That being said, I could do without the relentless fanaticism that's surrounded his success. You can't even go out for coffee in Bangor anymore without encountering a pilgrim or two. Not that I should complain, of course. If not for the kooks, I would have gone mad decades ago. But there are only so many times you can tell people what breed of dog Cujo is."

Gabe started to open his mouth, but Cassandra beat him to it:

"Don't you even think about it, mister!"

I chuckled and cracked open a book that looked promising. A Catalog of Ships And Their Captains - 1600-1700. Thumbing for the index, I stumbled upon the first promising lead of the day. Farrell, Jonathan T. Page 120.

"I think I may have something here!"

As Cassandra ("call me Cassie, dear!) and Gabe looked on, I flipped back through the book with a quickening pulse, only to find that the page I was looking for was missing. Not blank, but gone altogether. 117, 118, 119, 122, 123, 124...

"What the --?"

Cassie had a disgusted look on her face. "Vandals." She looked closely at the monograph's binding. "Someone razored the page out. I haven't seen that sort of thing since my days in the serials stacks at the University of Maine. This island of yours must be a real old timers' secret! I'll have to have a word with Eunice about this. It's a sorry day when you have to start thinking of installing metal detectors in your town library!

"As for the book, perhaps there's another copy nearby. Let me go to my catalogs and see what I can do. Back in a moment." Cassie gave my arm a squeeze as she brushed past me. Now I was the one who was blushing.

My brother-in-law was grinning at me as the librarian disappeared around the bookshelves, a little bit of a sashay in her step that wasn't there before.
"When are you going to break the bad news to her, chief?"

I eyed my unencumbered ring finger. Having already lost our original wedding ring trolling for tuna on a party boat, my wife had forbidden me to wear the replacement band when going out fishing. If she had known that this would in turn open me up to the advances of easily-flattered public librarians, however, she might have reconsidered her edict.

I winked back at Gabe. "As soon as we catch that keeper, that's when. And not a word of this to Wendy until then. Got it?"

Cassie had returned, looking a little crestfallen. A preliminary search had turned up no copies of the tantalizing title within the Metro Boston area.

"The Woods Hole library might have it, though, down in Falmouth. I could have someone there fax us the missing pages on Monday, if you'd like." Once more her tone was hopeful-sounding, only this time I didn't get the impression that she was trying to get rid of us. Or more to the point, me.

"That would be great, Cassie. Thank you."

I kicked Gabe in the shins under the table before he could say anything stupid and beamed at the smitten librarian.

"Hey, hey, hey!" Gabe cried out in an excited voice. At first I thought he was loudly protesting my pre-emptive boot, but then I noticed he was pointing down at a picture in the reference book he'd been perusing.

The volume in question was a collection of prints by Fitz Henry Lane, the celebrated Luminist painter from Gloucester who'd made countless paintings of the New England coast. The plate that my brother-in-law was transfixed by was just such a simple seascape - rocks, choppy waves, a sailboat with maddeningly detailed rigging, and a sun that even in the reproduction seemed to glow as if it lit from behind - but it was the title of the painting that made the heart leap:

"Untitled (Sunset on Farrell's Island?), 1864."

The three of us stared at the print for what seemed like an hour, before I broke the reverie with a caveat.

"This only proves that Lane knew the legend, and that's assuming the title of the painting isn't a fanciful reconstruction on someone else's part."

Cassie nodded in sage agreement, but Gabe was unconvinced. "But what if he knew? What if he'd been there? Look at the rocks - look at that weird promontory on the left. We could find this spot, I'm telling you."

"But where would we start, Gabe?"

"That's easy," he answered, sweeping aside the picture book to reveal the oversized folio map of Cape Anne we had begun our investigation with. "The plate was titled 'Sunset on Farrell's Island', right?"

Gabe and I had thanked our zealous local librarian and headed back onto the road, the pickup groaning as it climbed the modern concrete piling bridge to Beverly, the Salem Harbor a wine dark puddle beneath us as it caught the remains of the daylight. After the bridge, we turned sharply off of Route 1A and onto 127, the winding coastal route that hugged Cape Anne's outline like a form-fitting dress.

Gabe was clutching a photocopy of Lane's painting, a road map, and a book of nautical charts that I'd borrowed on my library card. Cassie had stamped the due date into the back of the tome with a wink and a hungry smile; I had uneasily smiled back.

"Yeah?" I answered my brother-in-law, worrying about how much daylight we had left.

"So it's gotta be within a certain spread of latitude, bro. Even figuring for seasonal variation, you're looking at about half the eastern coast of the Cape."

Gabe was good with figures, something that had always eluded me. Right now I couldn't visualize the mental mathematics that was going into solving this problem of perspective, but I knew enough to know that he was on the right track.
The early evening sunlight was filtering through the dense canopy that sheltered the road, painting everything preternatural shades of green, red, and gold. I looked for a turnoff that would take us closer to the water.

"Now these charts can help us narrow things even further. There are only so many shoals and offshore islands - it's just a process of elimination!"

"So long as we have light."

"Right."

"And weather permitting," I said ominously as tendrils of mist began to peek through the undergrowth of the unmarked partially-paved road we were now following.
New England is notorious for its fog, which can roll in without warning on summer or autumn evenings, inconveniencing many a late sunbather and putting myriad small boats and their unseasoned weekend warrior captains into mortal danger. As we worked our way closer and closer to the water, the mists thickened significantly. I turned on my headlights and downshifted the truck as Gabe spat.

"I can't believe this shit!"

"Easy there, Gabe. We can just come back this way tomorrow morning, after it all burns off."

"I guess."

I could tell he was more than a little disappointed that the hunt had been postponed, so I offered a consolation of sorts. "We still have some bait in the cooler - why don't we just find a place to cast off and see what dumb luck'll get us?"

Gabe was still sullen, but the lure of a trying out a new fishing spot was too much to resist. "Deal. But we're not giving up 'til we find this island, bro. Right?"

"I'll clear my schedule."

We parked where the road started to bow back towards 127, grabbed our poles and gear, and trudged through the trees following the smell of the sea. Not more than a quarter of a mile into the woods we found ourselves on a series of slippery basalt shelves that thrust right into the waves. The mist was now so thick that we could see about thirty feet of ocean in front of us, maybe less. We would be casting out into the soft grey nothing that had engulfed the Cape.

"Last one rigged is a rotten egg," Gabe said.

I went for a j-hook with a seaworm, as our supply of these hideous centipede-like critters was still alive and wriggling, whereas the chunked herring we'd been using earlier was taking on an even more unappetizing funk than usual. I launched the worm, hook, and lead sinker into the wall of mist - there was no sound of the rig hitting the water, but I could feel a tug almost immediately as something large and hungry sampled my bait.

"A hit?" Gabe asked, so excited he looped his World's Fair knot around his thumb instead of the swivel snap.

"Huge!" I said. The line was pulling to the right with a force that almost swept me clear off the rock. I played out some slack and ran alongside my quarry, adrenaline coursing through my veins.

"Holy shit, Gabe, I think this may be it!"

Striper, bluefish, dogfish, barn-door halibut - I didn't know what this thing was yet, but I knew it wasn't another skate, and that it wasn't getting away. Finding a nice dry leverage point among the rocks, I attempted to reel in the beast while Gabe fumbled for gloves and a knife, just in case. The resistance was so great, I thought for a moment I'd snagged on a rock, but it kept pulling to the right with the force of what felt like a whale.

Afraid I'd hooked something larger than my rig could handle, I nevertheless decided to take my chances and try to reel this thing in. "Go for it!" Gabe called out in encouragement as I gave the graphite rod a massive tug.

There was a not too distant cry in response, accompanied by a splash and a torrent of curses. My brother-in-law and I looked at each other in confusion.

"Sonofabitch baitchuckers!"

"Hello?" I called out into the mist. Now we could just make out a dark hull and a flash of fisherman's yellow, bobbing in and out of focus.

It was a dory. Every now and then you see them along the coast of Cape Ann, but these days they're more ornamental than functional, painted in bright blues or reds that have been unblemished by barnacle or salt. Not this one, however, which had long since lost its coat of paint, if ever it had one.

The doryman himself was similarly worn, although his classic foul weather gear had retained a sunny hue that seemed bright enough to read by (despite the fact that such a getup had been out of style for decades). As the boat came into closer view, we could see that its oarsman had a bushy white beard that, had he kept it neat and trimmed, would have made him look like one of those Old Salt buoys always on sale in the gift shops that hawked nautical tchochtkes.

"He looks like the Gorton's Fisherman!" Gabe put more succinctly. I couldn't help but snort in laughing approval.

"I had a boatful of fish when you hooked me," the old salt muttered in our direction as he worked the oars in order to maintain his craft's position in the choppy waters. "Don't take much to capsize her when she's loaded. I was lucky I could right her before losing myself along with the catch!"

"What the hell kind of fisherman is this guy?" Gabe asked me under his breath.

I ignored him and tried to apologize for my actions, but the doryman seemed remarkably upbeat for just having lost a whole bunch of whatever it was he'd been catching here. He hovered in closer and closer, fighting the incoming swells pushing him towards the basalt ledges.

"Hey buddy, you're gonna lose it on the rocks!" Gabe called out, but the fisherman was unfazed. As each wave caught him, he heaved the oars with a grunt and set the dory back aright in a graceful whirl of his arms. He did it without thinking, as if he'd been born fighting the tides in a weatherbeaten boat. I stared at the man in fascinated silence.

"Always more fish in the sea, boys - especially here." the doryman said with a knowing laugh. Gabe and I looked at each other.

"And where exactly are we?" Gabe asked, but the doryman answered with a question of his own:

"Do you happen to know what day it is?"

"Saturday."

"No, no - I want the date," the old salt clarified, annunciating the final t as deliberately as he could.

"It's the eighth."

"No, I meant --" the doryman started, then stopped himself in mid-sentence. "You know what, it don't really matter anyway. Catchin' anything, boys?"

Gabe scowled. "We haven't caught shit all month, unless you're counting skates."

The old salt hooted in derision, which only served to anger my brother-in-law. "So what's your secret, grandpa?"

The doryman stopped rowing just long enough to fix Gabe with a glance that made him flinch. "Son, I'm old enough to be a lot more than your grandfather. But you mind your manners nonetheless, you hear?"

Gabe said nothing; the doryman began to retreat back into the mists and out of sight. Desperate not to lose our chance to pick the old salt's brain, I called out to him:
"Wait! Don't go!"

But it was too late - man and boat had been swallowed by the ever-darkening gloom as evening gave way to a moonless summer night. The only trace that remained of the pair was the sloshing of the oars and a half-hummed melody that lingered over the dull slapping of wave against rock. That song! It was the same tune that the Sicilian had been singing, earlier this morning. Farrell's Island couldn't be far from here at all.

As much as we wanted to continue our search, however, the fog and the night were combining into an impenetrable dim that made me wonder if we'd even be able to find the truck. I reeled in my rig with a hurried hand. The seaworm I'd offered up had somehow survived the whole ordeal, alive, intact, and still doing its revolting primitive dance of twisting and jerking on the j-hook. I pulled it off, and tossed it into the waves with a shudder, and packed up the tacklebox while Gabe remained standing, pole still in hand, and staring out into the dark mists. I tugged at his shirt and he broke out of his reverie with a start.

"Let's go, before we lose the light entirely. We'll come back tomorrow, I promise."

Tomorrow didn't pan out as planned, unfortunately. Despite sunny skies and a total lack of coastal fog, not only couldn't we find where we'd been along the rocks the evening before, but even the road we had taken was now eluding us as well.

"I don't get it, bro." Gabe was disgusted with our lack of navigational prowess.
"How many back roads are there along the coast anyway? We've driven the whole Cape from Beverly to Gloucester, and still - nothing. I don't fucking get it."

I had to admit, it was a strange thing - as if last night's route had disappeared entirely without a trace. We drove all day, asked for directions in gas stations and the mom and pop stores, even knocked on a couple of doors, but no one could help us.

"Farrell's Island?" a woman asked from behind a screen door. "I've lived here all my life and never heard of it. You sure you got the name right?"

"Pretty sure."

"What's all that racket about, Miriam?" a man's voice called from deeper within the house we'd cold-called. Miriam yelled back without taking her wary eyes off us:

"Coupla boys asking about some place called Farrell's Island."

There was a choking sound from the man, whom we still could not see. Then the sound of footsteps on a creaky hardwood floor as a hulking shadow approached the threshold.
"I'll set these fellas straight, Miriam - you go fix dinner now."

"Do you think they mean--?"

We could see the man of the house clearly now as he interposed himself between his wife and the screen door - six feet tall, with a neck and shoulders of a professional football player, and the eyes of someone who knew more than he wanted to.

"I said let me handle this, woman!" he growled, sending Miriam back into the dark of the house's interior with a harumph. As soon as she was gone, however, his voice softened, almost to a whisper:

"Who told you about Farrell's Island?"

Gabe and I smiled in unison. "Some guy in Gloucester," my brother-in-law said. "A Sicilian, right? What was his name again..."

"Tantalo," I answered him, seeing the glimmer of recognition on the big man's face.

"So you guys are looking for the big one, eh?" His grin was broad, as if what he'd said was the punchline to a joke that no one had told us.

"Sure are," Gabe said. "So you've been there?"

The big man kept smiling, if only on the outside. "Yes, I have."

"So where the hell is the turnoff? We've been up and down 127 all weekend and I'll be damned if we could find it..."

"It doesn't work that way, gentlemen." His smile was frozen upon his lips, which appeared dry and bloodless.

"What do you mean?"

"You don't find the island; it finds you."

Gabe and I exchanged a glance at this. "Come again?"

The big man's smile was hanging by a thread. "That's all I can tell you. Now I think it would be best if you were on your way."

"That's what passes for help in this neck of the woods?" Gabe was agitated, but the man had lost his smile entirely now.

"Please go now." I could feel his bulk menace us even through the screen door.

I tugged at my brother-in-law's sleeve, eager to leave this house and its unhelpfully helpful owner as far behind as we could. Gabe gave me a melodramatic grunt but relented. As we turned to leave, however, the big man cleared his throat and began to speak:

"It's not worth it."

"What isn't?" I asked, surprised.

"The thing you're looking for."

"Farrell's Island?"

"Quit searching. It may not be too late for you two."

"Too late? What are you talking about!"

"Nothing is worth what he asks!"

I realized with a start that we had been misreading the big man. All this time he was exuding something much more troubling than the prospect of physical violence, inflicted upon us by him.

It was fear.

I backed slowly off the porch, hoping Gabe would follow - fortunately he did, muttering about how everyone on Cape Ann was crazy. "'It finds you'!" he scoffed as we clambered into the truck. "What the hell was that shit?"

"I'm not sure," I said as I started up the engine. Still shaken, I fumbled with the column shift before putting the pickup into gear, as tendrils of mist crept through the underbrush in the failing light. So much for the weekend.

I had a message from Cassie waiting for me when I arrived at work on Monday - sure enough, she had obtained the missing pages from the library at Woods Hole. As the book was rather old, the photocopies hadn't come out clear; and as she was loathe to fax them in such poor condition, would I mind coming back to the library to pick them up?

I sensed the trap, but decided to walk straight into it nonetheless. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. I wasn't unhappily married, not by any stretch of the imagination. And though my job had provided me ample time and opportunity to cheat, what with the necessary fieldwork and myriad archivists' convention all over the country, I'd quite frankly never felt the temptation to do so.

Until now.

Maybe it was the way she'd reorganized the old Public Library's collection - simple and elegant. Perhaps it was the frustration of the hunt working its way upon my baser instincts, urging me to make something of all this spent effort, since it seemed like we wouldn't be finding this mystical island or any stripers worth keeping this summer. Or maybe I was just bored.

Whatever the reason, I was all over Cassandra as soon as we were alone, locked in the staff lounge. She had been hoping for as much herself, although I couldn't help but notice that her ruse of a story had in fact been correct. As an elderly volunteer read childrens' books to toddlers just a room and a half away, Cassie and I rolled around on a table spread with photocopies that were in fact unsuitable for faxing - pushing and pulling, groping and sighing. She gathered up the rumpled papers with a sheepish chuckle when we had finished; I kissed her and promised I'd call.

"More research?" Gabe asked me when I told him that Cassie had hit upon another promising lead. Although she actually had, I didn't see the fruit of her research until we had both devoured each other again, this time in the microfilm room ("Where nobody's sure to find us," we both joked, laughing at it in a way that only librarians could).

The maddening thing was that Cassandra never ceased to provide more information, which she had tirelessly been tracking down in between our furtive meetings. I parlayed this steady stream of possibilities into weekend after weekend of searching with Gabe, who never tired himself in his quest. When the weather permitted, we rented a cheap motorboat and felt out the nooks and crannies of Cape Ann, while whenever I could steal away from work and the house I explored the contours of my newfound lover.

Did my wife suspect? Not in the slightest. Ever devoted to her husband, who had never given her reason to doubt in the past, she simply took my protestations about deadlines and forced overtime at face value, even when I came home after midnight with another woman's scent on me.

Gabe, on the other hand, saw what was going on immediately but chose not to say anything, even to me. Cassie was too good at stringing us along with tidbit after tidbit of useful information for him to risk what he now considered his only chance to bag a keeper.

Gabe didn't even want to fish anymore. "We gotta find the island, bro," he'd say, poring over his ever more worn charts, which were now covered with red magic marker and black magic marker in hopeful circles and furious scribbles. "I'm saving my tackle for the big one, not another fucking skate. What news from our friend the librarian?" he'd ask, knowing enough not to accompany me to the library anymore, lest he witness too much to ignore in good conscience.

Once or twice in the beginning he'd tagged along in what proved to be excruciating visits. Invariably I'd make up an excuse to leave, only to double back again when the coast was clear; he caught on soon enough, and merely started asking me to relay the new leads. Gabe was quite the pragmatist, especially where fishing was concerned.
I was obsessed with this librarian; she in turn was fixated on solving the riddle; while my brother-in-law only had eyes for his keeper - a fine trio we made.

Something had to give, and give it did at long last as September yielded to October and the stripers began their migration back to warmer waters for the winter. "The Fall Run", as anglers called it, was the the best chance to catch a striped bass of legal length. In need of enough nourishment to sustain them for the long journey south, stripers of all ages would snap at practically anything resembling food, sometimes churning the waters in a boiling frenzy of hunger for fishermen who were lucky enough.

It was also the last chance to land a striper. After the Fall Run, the coastal shallows would be barren, save for the skates and the rock crabs. Gabe and I had tried to fish the odd warm late October and early November tides in years before, only to learn why most bait shops close up after Columbus Day until the next spring.
We knew time was running short for all of us. Summer mania in the end had no choice but to surrender to the crisper, more reasoned thoughts of fall, but that knowledge only seemed to intensify what remained of our respective passions. Cassie became an expert in Captain Farrell, I became an expert in Cassie, and Gabe - he became an expert in looking the other way, always towards the fish.

Always.

"That's funny," my wife mused as she sorted through the day's mail.

"What?" I'd been sitting at the kitchen table, pretending to enjoy an hour at home before 'urgent business' would call me back to Cassandra's tight embrace. My daughter had finger-painted a flock of pterodactyls, and was attempting to elicit a positive reaction out of me. "Pretty dinosaurs, honey."

"They're angels, Daddy!" She stomped off in a huff, her masterpieces in hand; I tried to feel guilty, but could only feel Cassie's hot skin against mine.

My wife continued, oblivious. "Someone sent you a package today. I must have been upstairs with the baby. Sorry. I can pick it up for you tomorrow, if you'd like."

"Sure," I said, wondering when Cassandra would call my cell phone and set me free from the agony of waiting. "Who's it from?" I asked, not caring what the answer was. Anything to fill the time.

"That's the funny thing. It doesn't say."

Oh, shit.

It could only be one person. You damned fool, I thought to myself, did you really think she was going to play it cool forever?

Cassandra was a remarkable woman, no doubt, but in the end she was only human like the rest of us. My mind raced as I thought of what she might have sent. Flowers? Candies? Too trite. No, it was bound to be something personal and heartfelt and thus impossible to pass off as anything other than it was.

Even to my wife.

"That's okay, honey." I thought on my feet, or tried at least. "I need to swing by the post office tomorrow morning anyway. The Library of Congress needs the third part of that project I've been working on, and you know how slow the mail room at work can be."

She did, too. My wife was a librarian once herself, before the pull of motherhood proved stronger than a well-organized archive. I could see that she bought the excuse, but nevertheless my wife persisted:

"But that's out of your way, sweetie. You've been running yourself ragged - let me pick up the package, and I'll mail your stuff for you, too. It's no bother; I need to buy stamps anyway."

My wife's selflessness, however unwitting, had me checkmated. I couldn't press the issue without calling attention to it, so I abandoned any thought of preemption and headed straight for damage control. How bad could it be?

My cell phone rang. "Sorry, honey. I've got to take this."

Cassie was livid when I asked her if she'd sent anything to the house. "How dare you! Didn't I promise you? No games, no strings attached!"

"I know, I just thought--" I began, too stupid to know when to keep my mouth shut. We were naked, in the periodicals reading room, and although we were still entwined I felt her body tense and grow chill.

"Thought what? That I was lying? That I couldn't bear to be without you? That I was so consumed with jealousy I had to mail you a book of love poetry or my panties? Is that what you thought?"

"Cassie, please--" I started, only to be cut off again.

"Get out of my library."

Whatever unease had seeped into my life paradise was proving to be infectious. The last time Gabe and I went out in our rented skiff to painstakingly scour another few square miles of sea, he'd flown into a rage when I called out the wrong heading. Even though I was only off by a hair's breadth, it was as if I'd committed an unforgiveable insult.

Of course we both knew that I had, though not the one he was berating me for. "Watch where you're fucking going! We don't have time to do this shit again, if we fuck it up."

I said nothing in response. What could I say? We were committed now, the three of us. Or so I'd assumed until the mystery package. Despite Cassie's protestations, I knew it would be my undoing, and so I prepared for the worst as I headed back home from work the next day - Cassandra hadn't called, nor had my wife for that matter, which only added to my feeling of dread.

When I came home to find my wife in a merry mood, I knew I was done for. Although I couldn't read any trace of hidden anger in the smiling face that greeted me at the door, I knew that something awful was lying in wait for me. It had to be.

"How was your day?"

"Fine," I lied.

"I mailed your project this morning, you're very welcome, no need to thank me."

"Thanks?"

"See - that wasn't so hard!" she gave me an impish peck on the cheek and headed for the kitchen.

"What about the package?" I asked, unsure if I wanted an answer.

"It's on the table," my wife sung over her shoulder, already busy at work in the final preparations of the evening supper. I slung my satchel over a chair and looked at the anonymous gift - just as she said, there it was, unopened, unmolested, uninvestigated by a paranoid spouse.

I sighed audibly.

The package was oddly bound and suspiciously lettered. Had I encountered something like this at the Commonwealth Archives, I would have contacted the bomb squad; but as relieved as I was, I threw caution to the wind and tore into the waxy brown wrapping. My daughter was drawn to the spectacle, like an extra birthday or an early Christmas. "Is it a present, Daddy?"

So much for opening it in secret. I was reasonably sure, however, from the package's exterior that Cassie had in fact been telling the truth - it certainly wasn't from her, unless she had changed her perfectly flowing cursive script for misspelled block lettering. So instead of shooing my little girl away or secreting the wrapped bundle away to the master bedroom or the garage, I let her stay and enjoy satisfying her curiosity. "Go ahead, rip away!"

The outer layer of the packaging was thus stripped in short order, revealing another layer of wrapping, comprised of an old newspaper. I was taken aback at the sight of a hundred-year old Salem broadsheet being used in such a manner, but even more shocked at the condition of the paper, which was like brand new.

"Let me open it from here, sweetie," I said cautiously, prying my daughter's fingers off of the impossibly-preserved newsprint, eliciting a round of 'No Fair's and a stomping, door slamming exit on her part.

So much the better. Alone now, I eased off this layer with care - saving the paper for a later investigation of its own - only to be confronted with yet more wrapping, this time of straw that smelled of the sea. Salt marsh hay, which used to be dried in bales along the Cape Ann estuaries that were so numerous that they looked like herds of buffalo in an old time panorama of the West.

I savored the smell but was baffled, and shredded the hay fully expecting another inexplicably quaint packing material. There was none. Inside the tangle of salty straw was an ivory box no bigger than the palm of my hand. Its entire surface - the lid, the bottom, even the little feet on which it was meant to stand - had been hand-carved into myriad tiny shapes, sinuous whorls, swirling forms. I squinted at the carvings as my daughter (who'd crept back into the room when it was apparent that her tantrum had drawn no response) squealed:

"Look, daddy! It's a dolphin!"

I blinked and squinted again. She was right - a dolphin had been made to leap from the box's lid, its graceful hump rising out of intricately-chiseled waves to form a kind of knob.

Dolphins, sharks, octopi, seahorses, tuna, sting rays - or were they skates? - a veritable bestiary had been captured in miniature. I marveled at the box as I turned it over and over again in my hands. What incredible workmanship, I thought, wondering what would have motivated an artisan to carve sea creatures into a piece of elephant tusk.

Then it dawned on me: this wasn't ivory, it was whalebone! What I was holding in my hands was doubtless very old and very illegal. I imagined that representatives from Salem's own Peabody Essex Museum would be breaking down our door at any moment to reclaim what could only be the showpiece to one of their exhibits.

Who the hell sent me this thing? Certainly not Cassie, who indeed would have had more discretion than to send such a gift to my home, if it were intended as such. My face turned red and my neck burned still at the foolishness of accusing her out the blue, I wondered if there were any way to undo that damage.

Gabe wouldn't have sent such a package, either - he was too cheap to foot the postage, when he just could have walked it over. That and the lettering was completely unlike the neatly tight block script that is so favored by architects.
Who, then?

"Open it, Daddy!" my daughter cried out.

"What?" Not only had I been lost in thought, but I'd also been so thoroughly enchanted with the box's exterior that I forgot to wonder what exactly was inside.

"Daddy! Open it!"

I did as she commanded, pinching the dolphin's back by the dorsal fin and pulling the lid open. The hinges were spring-loaded, and opened with a snap, causing both me and my daughter to jump; I almost dropped the mysterious box onto the hardwood floor.
The inside was even more wondrous than the outside - a brass fish rolled slowly round and round a peg that had been set into the whalebone, its individual scales pricking a brass comb as it rotated to pick out a song note by note.

I blinked. The fish was a striped bass, knowingly reproduced down to the tiniest detail. And the melody. The melody...

I ran to the phone and dialed my brother-in-law's phone number. "It's time," I said without explanation. He didn't need one; Gabe hung up and began riffling his basement freezer for bait.

It was a clear and moonlit night, which put me somewhat on edge. I'd been expecting the fog which had perfectly foiled our previous attempts to locate this elusive village and its miraculous fishing hole, whereas tonight you could see starlight reflected in the waves as we glided through the dark but calm waters of ebb tide.

It finds you. Yes. At last I understood. Not being able to find Farrell's Island was a kind of test, and at long last we had passed. All but the most obsessed would have given up by now. But not us.

"I see something ahead," Gabe called out to me from the bow of our motorboat, his voice quivering with excitement. I saw it, too - there were lights ahead of us, and land, neither of which should have been where we were now. We had crossed this part of the sea countless times, only to find empty depths and laughing gulls; now there was an island.

This should have made our blood run cold, I'll be the first to admit it, but it didn't. Despite that we were approaching a landmass that we both knew couldn't possibly exist, we grinned like idiots and gunned the motor. The lights grew brighter but softer at the same time - oil lamps, I thought to myself, and definitely not electric lights - and Gabe and I could see the silhouettes of houses, docks, and even a steeple.

Look sharp now ye maties
Here comes Captain Farrell
With a hold full of codfish
And rum by the barrel!

That familiar melody tinkled over the waves, this time accompanied by lyrics that, inexplicably, my brother-in-law already seemed to know. We sang along and realized that we weren't alone in doing so; our voices were part of a chorus that was knitting itself together through the dark. The harbor was thick with boats - motorboats such as our own, but dories, skiffs, and even more primitive craft as well - but somehow we all knew how to make our way to port without running afoul of each other.

We've sailed for a fortnight
From merry old England
To fish for a month now
Or maybe the season.

The village was throbbing with life, despite the late hour. Gabe and I tied up our boat alongside a rickety wooden pier and joined the others. There were fishermen of all races, age, and manners of dress, but we paid them no heed. We had come here to fish - every last one of us - and that was all that mattered.

So lock up your daughters
And hide the fine china
Captain Farrell is back
And you know that he'll find 'em!

As one, we converged on the tiny village's main square, with a bounce in our step and our fishing gear in hand. There was no mistaking the direction, as all of us had been here before, even if only in our dreams. I flashed a grin at Gabe and he clapped a brotherly hand on my back as we walked.

The Captain's a good man
Let's not be mistaken
But your soul is his bounty
Once your first keeper's taken!

The square was already filled with the early-comers. Everyone stood expectant and armed for a night of battle with the creatures of the sea. Some of the anglers had brought in addition to their rods and reels fishing gaffs and hooks, ambitious equipment indeed. I tested my line and fussed over my lures, while Gabe cut bait. And all the while, we sang:

The fishes he'll find ya
If your luck is hurtin'
But don't think of leaving
This one thing is certain:

I blinked at the crowd, certain that I'd recognized a face. So I had - it was Tantalo, stepping up the stairs of this fishing village's town hall so that the assembled throng could see him clearly. Our voices diminished in volume, as if on cue, or did the Sicilian's voice grow so as to drown us out? I do not recall, only that our chorus then seemed to subside and all we could hear was Tantalo's clear countertenor as he finished the shanty we knew by heart.

The price you will pay here
Is known by us well
When you fish with the Captain
You'll end up in Hell!

Why we laughed at this is now beyond my comprehension. Just the memory of that sickly smile on the Sicilian's face when he sang that closing verse is enough to make my gut churn and my entire soul shudder. Why, oh, why did we not leave then and there, never to speak of this phantom island again, nor to think it, save in our nightmares?

But laugh we did, like the timeless band of brothers we were. I looked at my fellow fishermen - this one a sunburned Celt in a Boston Bruins jersey, another a bare-chested man tattooed in Portuguese, a third dressed like a pirate of old with the tackle to match. Here and there was a newcomer like Gabe and myself, standing next to men (we were all men, I remember now - the village seemed bereft of the female gender) who seemed to have stepped out of the nautical history books we had pored over all summer long.

And then he appeared, the oldest of them all, a severe-looking gentleman whose arrival in the square gladdened our hearts. Captain Farrell was a gaunt man with sunken eyes and cheekbones seemingly carved from granite, as was his chin. What few facial hairs dared to sprout from such a craggy exterior were wild and weedlike, like alpine vegetation.

Captain Farrell had survived no less than six mutiny attempts in his career. Apparently he had a habit of not knowing when to call it a good season of fishing. Though he routinely outperformed his peers as far as the catch was concerned, his crew would grumble that they came back to the European markets too late for the best prices. This crew, however, would make no such complaints. We were his, body and soul.

"Welcome," he growled over the hush that had fallen over the crowd at his sudden appearance; we stood and listened, electrified.

"They say there ain't no fish in the sea no more." Captain Farrell had climbed the stairs to stand beside the old Sicilian, who stepped back down in deference to his master. "They say that the hungry ocean is barren now, and she won't give us what she once did. They say that the fisherman's lot is a doomed one, and that you and I might as well pack it in and become farmers or shepherds.

"Rubbish, I say!"

We shouted out our assent at this - even Gabe and I, who by no means were making a living off our catch as the good captain had. Has. Does. All distinctions were lost here, as the madness for fish bound us in a manner that rendered the accidents of time and space which made us who we were irrelevant. The madness defined us here on Farrell's Island, nothing more.

"Make no mistake, my brothers. There are plenty of fish out there to be caught, as in days of yore. You simply must be willing to pay the price." The captain looked out over the square with an approving gaze that seemed to penetrate each and every one of us to the innermost depths of his soul. He smiled thinly.

"But enough talk now. The fall run has come, and these fish won't be catching themselves, will they? Off with you!"

We dispersed as orderly as we had assembled, towards the beaches and rocky ledges of the island, where we'd set up our gear and cast off into the starlit night, all the while singing our hymn to Captain Farrell. Gabe and I found a low hump of a rocky promontory that was unoccupied and started to fish. Our rigs hummed through the air with every cast, in perfect tempo with the music that surrounded us.

The fish were ready for us, ravenous for our bait and our lures. Gabe roared with laughter when he scored a hit that nearly jerked the rod clear out of his hands, and I was just as thrilled as the same thing happened to me seconds later. Now this was fishing! We both reeled in stripers that were a good twelve inches longer than anything we'd caught previously that summer but tossed them back without hesitation, confident that this was just the prelude to hauling in a keeper for the record books.

Another cast, another striper - both of our second catches were larger than our firsts. Again we let them go, only to hook even bigger fish on the next cast. And yet again. With each cast the hits grew stronger and the stripers at the end of the line longer and heavier, until we needed to help one another to haul the massive beasts out of the water and onto shore.

"This is amazing, bro!" Gabe called out to me, his forehead glistening with sweat by the light of the moon. We'd been fishing for hours now, but showed no signs of wanting to stop or even take a break, despite the burn in our arms and the ache in our legs.

"My last fish was fifty inches," he boasted. Mine had been forty-two. I played out my line and braced for the next hit. It came as expected without any waiting, but it wasn't as solid a strike as the ones before. It didn't feel like a striper at the end of my rig...

More like a skate. The ecstatic haze that had filled my mind lifted somewhat as I reeled in the all-too-familiar bottom feeder. I looked over at Gabe, but he was lost in his own world. I could see the skate trying to flap his way off my hook now and back into the glassy obsidian deep. I gave my rod a swift tug and hauled the ugly fish onto the rocks.

The skate was gasping and twitching as I tried to steady it to retrieve my gear. Normally I wasn't all that careful when catching skates, preferring to lose my hook and sinker rather than to have to wrestle with the accidental catch, but that night I certainly didn't want to waste any time on re-rigging - not with those hungry giant stripers out there just waiting for the next cast!

I could just barely see by the light of the rising moon, which reflected off the bone white belly of the skate with a preternatural sheen. Again the mists in my head parted here and there, especially as the skate groaned like a human being when I grasped the hook buried in its gullet with my pliers. I stepped on the skate's wing and pulled hard, but the barb refused to come unstuck.

Although skates like sharks are mostly composed of cartilage, they are surpirsingly resilient creatures, which is why many fishermen give up on trying to extricate their gear when a skate has gone and swallowed the hook. I was intent on getting my line free, however, at first because I didn't relish the thought of tying a new line by moonlight, but then out of a growing sense of panic over my catch's suffering as it gasped, coughed, and yelped in pain.

The hook wasn't just buried in the skate's throat, I realized. It had caught on something else already in there, a foreign body of some sort. Probably the rig of some other angler who couldn't be bothered. Trying not to hear the poor creature's hideous cries - how did Gabe not hear them as well and keep fishing? - I dug deeper with the pliers, twisting the rusty tool in hopes of dislodging both my hook and the unseen blockage. The skate flapped its one free wing and slapped my leg with its trifurcated tail.

"Ahhhhh! Ahhhhh!" it cried out in a voice like mine. I tugged one last time, desperate to end this creature's piteous cries, and I felt the resistance give way all of a sudden. My line came out completely - sinker, swivel snap, leader, and hook - and on my hook was...

How was this possible?

I grasped the catch inside the catch in a state of shock, with a numb fist. The fog had blown away completely now from the corners of my mind, and I realized that it was time to leave.

Gabe was still oblivious, fishing away with a demented grin on his face. Leaving my gear, I ran over to him and tried to shout over the surf and the sea-shanty chorus, which to my ears was now an awful cacophony of screams and gasps - like a chorus of skates. I shook my brother-in-law when he made no sign of having heard me; he shrugged me off, singing, readying his line for another cast.

"Gabe!" I yelled with every ounce of strength that remained within me, and for an instant I saw a flicker something behind the glaze of fishing revelry in his eyes.
Then it was gone.

"What the fuck, bro! I had a real monster on the line, and now I've lost it."

"Gabe, we have to get out of here." My throat burned as I shouted. Was the chorus growing louder?

"No goddamned way. Tonight's the night. I'm coming home with one for the record books!"

I could barely hear myself. I screamed, "Gabe, none of this is real!"

"Who cares, bro? Who cares!"

The chorus had been growing in volume, and now I knew why - there were myriad dark shapes converging upon our fishing spot, fellow fishermen, Captain Farrell's mates. As they drew nearer, however, I realized that I no longer recognized these people. The camaraderie of the square had melted away, and as I regarded them with fear I could sense that they were looking upon me with hatred and loathing in their deathless eyes.

"Gabe!" I started one last time, but he shoved me aside as his pole nearly bent in two from the force of an unseen leviathan. I stumbled as he whooped with delight and the shadow men closed around him and swallowed him up. "Gabe!"

It was no use - he had taken the bait without hesitation or reservation, and was lost to me. I had to leave him, before I joined him.

The way back was easy, as if the island were trying to get rid of me now. I raced across the barren rocks headlong - wondering later how it was that I didn't stumble - and back to the fishing village. Its town square was lifeless now, or had it always been that way? I shuddered at the perfectly whitewashed clapboards and virtually untrodden cobblestones and dashed for the pier to the tuneless chorus, which sang that final verse over and over again now:

The price you will pay here
Is known by us well
When you fish with the Captain
You'll end up in Hell!

Above the awful din I could hear my brother-in-law's voice, as clear as if he had called me on the phone. He sounded ecstatic, not damned; it was almost enough to draw me back to the surf and try my luck one more time.

Almost.

I opened my still-clenched fist and gazed upon the dull white gold band I had lost all those years ago. Now I know all about billion-to-one occurrences - the whale that jumps out of the ocean and crushes a yacht, the woman thrice widowed by lightning, the man who hits the lottery only to die in a plane crash on the same day, the long-lost wedding ring found in the gut of a fish.

This was more than a coincidence, though. It had to be.

I found the motorboat where we'd left it in the harbor. The other boats were no longer there; they had never been there to begin with, I knew now for certain. I started the engine and brought the skiff around. Although I could still hear Gabe leading the demented shanty, I dared not look back, for fear of what I'd see - my brother-in-law in the belly of the leviathan, a keeper for the keeper.

I never saw him again, nor did I ever meet my paramour librarian after that terrible night. In a weak moment I had tried to visit her at the library, but was told that a woman meeting Cassie's description didn't work there, and moreover had never worked there. I wondered if the blue-haired volunteer at the front desk who answered my inquiry knew what she was talking about. After all, this was the same clueless octogenarian who had read nursery rhymes to children while Cassie and I had made noisy love in the rooms next door. She was a feeble-minded old bat, I told myself as I left. Pure and simple.

But I will not return to that library, fearful lest I discover that my summer passion was spent with something not quite human. I am tempted at times to call the information desk and ask whether the collection is still arranged according to the Dewey Decimal System rather than the Library of Congress classification, but I'm terrified of what the answer would be.

Next to a smiling picture of Gabe, my daughter's finger-paintings still cover our refrigerator. Although I still can't make out the angels in her drawings, I no longer see dinosaurs when I look at them.

I see skates.

Tomorrow is Another Day

2009-09-12T14:30:00.000-04:00

September 10th, 2001— David was in love. He didn’t know her name, what she did for a living, or whether he’d ever see her again. Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue, just outside the Port Authority Terminal, where a jovial Greek man sold soft pretzels from a pushcart that smelled like burnt toast. That’s where he first saw her. He had just come in from one of the Jersey suburbs, shoes polished, pants pressed, shirt ironed, collar starched, laptop and cellphone charged; she was lighting a cigarette and waiting on the corner for a cab.

The pretzel he’d bought was coated in grains of kosher salt so big they looked like rice, and David wished he had remembered to pack a banana for the commute as he wolfed down bite after bite, feasting on the sight of the girl smoking on the curbside. It was a hot day, too hot for his Brooks Brothers suit, too hot for her leather miniskirt and matching bolero, too hot to enjoy a cigarette even. David had quit about nine years back, but not a day went by that he didn’t wish he hadn’t.

The Greek looked up from his newspaper and smiled. “Poli omorphi,” he said. “Very beautiful, no?”

David felt flustered as the girl turned and gazed in their direction. She was wearing a pink blouse under the leather jacket, with a metal choker that looked expensive. She took long, absent drags on her cigarette as she scanned oncoming traffic for her ride. Her hair was reddish-brown, her eyes were so blue he could tell from a block away.

“Yes. Very beautiful.”

Her taxi arrived. The girl tossed the still-burning butt into the gutter and got into the back seat. As the cab pulled away, he swore he saw her looking right back at him through the window before disappearing down Eighth Avenue.

“You should have said hello,” the Greek offered unsympathetically.

David tried to think of a response but couldn’t. He looked down at his watch. 8:46 a.m: he was going to be late for work.

He looked back at the Greek, who had returned to his paper, reading the soccer scores from Athens. “The girl—is she here every morning?”

“Physica! Of course.”

David looked at his watch again and bit his lip.

“Thanks.”

“Good luck!” the Greek laughed.

David crossed against the light and made his way up Forty-Second Street, past the West Africans selling bootleg videos and music, past the hoodlum offering “Fake I.D.’s, weapons, whaddaya need?”, past the peep shows that never called it a night, their barkers on the street bleary-eyed and hoarse. Halfway to the Times Square subway entrance and his train downtown, however, he stopped at a newspaper kiosk and bought a package of cigarettes.

Just one wouldn’t hurt, he thought to himself. As he lit up and took a furtive puff, he felt as if the whole city were watching him. But he didn’t care.

It was love, all right.

“You’re late, Sanders!”

Prescott van den Heuvel was not a supervisor to take lightly. Everything about his outward appearance, from his barrel chest and hairy arms to his suspenders, his gold cufflinks, and his smart tie bespoke business. He fixed one angry eye on David, the other monitoring a bank of computer screens that flashed the up-to-date prices of shares, bonds, and durable goods.

“Sorry, chief! The 8:05 broke down this morning.”

Prescott’s nose was twitching. “Never mind that a trader worth his salt should already be working by 8:05, Sanders—and when, pray tell, did you start smoking?”

David looked sheepish. “It was just one cigarette, boss.”

Prescott looked around, then spoke in a lowered voice. “You know the Company policy, Sanders. I just hope you weren’t smoking down on Wall Street, or they’ll be writing my ass up, too!”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Don’t ‘sorry’ me, son. Now you know I’m supposed to report you for the lateness and the smoking, but I’m going to let them both slide—this time. I like you, kid, and I don’t want to see you blow a promising career opportunity just because you’re green.”

“Sorry.”

“I said quit saying you’re sorry, Sanders! Tomorrow’s another day, so just set your alarm clock and get it right."

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” But David’s thoughts were returning to the girl on the corner.

8:46 a.m.

He felt a momentary pang of guilt that tomorrow’s late arrival would be premeditated and not accidental. But soon he could hardly contain his excitement as he went out onto the trading floor. David wondered if anyone could tell his mind was not on trading trading—not that he cared.

After all, tomorrow was another day.

8:46 a.m., the next morning. There she was, standing at the intersection of Forty-Second Street and Eighth Avenue, just outside the Port Authority Terminal. David watched her from afar, just as he had done the day before. She wore the same outfit—the same skirt, the same stockings, the same pink blouse, the same choker. Again she stood and smoked, waiting for her cab.

The Greek manning the pretzel cart smiled at him: “Poli omorphi. Very beautiful, no?”
David looked at him. “Didn’t you say that yesterday?”

The Greek looked confused. “Did I? Me singhorite! I see lots of people come and go here, and sometimes I lose track, katalaves? You understand?”

“Sure,” David said, returning his gaze to the woman. All day yesterday, all he could think about while he pretended to do his job was how he’d walk right up to her and introduce himself the next morning. Maybe bum a cigarette, all casual. He’d ask to share the cab with her; it didn’t matter where she was going. Uptown, Midtown, Downtown. Queens, even.

So why was he still half a block away, hiding behind the pretzel vendor? He stood and watched her cab arrive, watched her toss her cigarette into the gutter, watched her climb into the back seat and disappear down Eighth Avenue, all over again.

“You should have said hello.”

David whirled around to face the Greek. “You said that yesterday, too!”

“Did I?” The pretzel vendor chuckled.

“Exactly that!”

The Greek looked side to side. Then he spoke, in a slow and deliberative voice: “I
don’t know what you’re talking about.”

David looked at him, then looked back at the taxi, which had just missed the light and was still idling within a stone’s throw of the two of them and the pushcart. His heart stopped. She was staring right at him! There was no mistaking it for a passing glance this time. Their eyes met. David smiled; the girl smiled back, just as the traffic light turned green and the cab lurched away and out of sight.

David turned back to the Greek. The newspaper was back in front of his face, the same headlines, the same news, the same sports scores as yesterday, but the vendor eagerly devoured them like they were brand new—September 10th, 2001, read the masthead, in English and in Greek.

Tomorrow’s another day, David thought to himself, his spirits soaring. He lit a cigarette and crossed the street. On the way up to his subway connection he passed the same junkies, the same pimps, the same bootleggers as the day before, all of them barking identical pitches as yesterday. “Fake I.D.’s, weapons, whaddaya need?”
David paid them no heed. Ahead of him the famous news ticker of Times Square crawled in large glowing letters—the same news as always. He rounded a corner and headed for the stairs to the subway station, but he was cut off by someone who suddenly appeared in his way. David very nearly fell headlong trying to avoid him.

“Hey!” he said, brushing ash from his cigarette off of his sleeve.

“So sorry!” the man said, in a loud, pinched voice. He was a tourist, and as produced a map out of his bright blue fanny pack and began to unfold it David winced. He was already late for work.

“I was wondering if you could help me find Rockefeller Center. I’ve been walking around in circles all morning!”

David puffed on his cigarette. “I’d love to help you, buddy, but I’m kind of in a hurry. I’m sure someone else here would be happy to—“

The tourist gripped his left arm as David attempted to back away. His expression had changed as well. “Mr. Nollett. You will accompany me to Rockefeller Center and make it look like you’re helping me. Understood?”

A chill ran down David’s spine. The man knew his last name—his real last name. David nodded and the tourist relaxed his grip, although his demeanor did not change. “Put that cigarette out, Mr. Nollett. You are not authorized to smoke on the island.”
David mumbled an apology and did as he was told.

The tourist fixed him with an angry stare. “Do you know who I am, Mr. Nollett?”

“Um, from the Company?”

“Yes. From the Company. I’m the man you only see if you’re screwing up. So guess what that means, Mr. Nollett?”

David croaked, “I’m screwing up?”

“This is the second day in a row you’ve failed to arrive at your designated role on time. We at the Company appreciate that there may be days when delays getting into the City are unavoidable, but transit was running just fine this morning.

“But your unexcused latenesses—for which your pay will be docked, mind you—are not nearly so troubling as your newfound bad habit.”

David looked at his feet as they walked. The man continued: “Some of my colleagues were concerned when we saw the history of tobacco addiction in your personnel file, but I convinced them you’d be worth the risk. You have a real gift, Mr. Nollett, but it seems my faith in you may have been misplaced.”

“That being said,” the tourist said. “We’ve decided to give you one more chance. After all the effort that goes into selecting our employees, it would pain us to admit that we’d made a mistake in hiring you.”

“Thank you, sir!”

The man turned to disappear into the crowds milling about Rockefeller Center. “Oh, and Mr. Nollett?”

“Yes?”

“You don’t want to see me again.”

Prescott van den Heuvel was not a supervisor to take lightly. Everything about his outward appearance, from his wiry, hyperkinetic frame to his silk shirt, his silver cufflinks, and his obsessively clean-shaven face bespoke business. He fixed a suspicious eye on David, the other scanning a bank of computer screens that flashed the up-to-date prices of shares, bonds, and durable goods.

“You’re late, Sanders!”

David tried not to do too obvious a double-take at his boss’ transformation. It could mean only one thing.

“Sorry, chief.” The apology was directed at this new Prescott van den Heuvel, but it was in truth meant for the other one, the one he had inadvertently gotten fired.

“Well don’t just stand there! You’ve got a whole lot of trading to do, if you’re going to make up for the first hour of the market.” The new Prescott beamed, directing his voice to not just David, but to anyone who might happen to be listening.

September 10th, 2001—
David walked through the Port Authority Terminal in a daze. The kinetic sculpture in the foyer was the only sign of life in the strangely empty bus station, a series of balls careening around a contraption in a plexiglass cube. A conveyor belt grabbed ball after ball from a reservoir at the sculpture’s bottom and lifted them slowly to the top, only to drop them back again into the machine’s bowels.

The course each ball followed was meticulously preordained by the laws of physics, but designed to look as wild and haphazard as possible. Sometimes a ball took the fast and easy way down; other times it would get whirled and bumped and redirected, at times appearing to fly out of the contraption entirely before the trickery became apparent and the ball resumed its inevitable downward progress.

Often David would come to work early to watch this twin work of science and art, mesmerized by the controlled chaos and the reaction to it of casual passersby. Today, however, he walked right past it and stepped out onto Eighth Avenue, his mind focused solely on the girl who he knew would be on the corner of 42nd Street, as she was every morning.

Something was wrong. It was almost nine o’clock, but there was as of yet no sign of her. David wandered over to the pretzel vendor, who unlike yesterday and the day before was not buried in his newspaper. In fact, it was as if the Greek had been expecting him.

“You missed her! She was here early this morning. Very strange. I think she was looking for you, but she couldn’t wait. Den akous ta nea?”

“What?” David asked, still reveling in the Greek’s revelation. She was looking for him!

“The news! Didn’t you hear?”

“No.”

“They caught someone trying to blow up the Towers.”

“What?”

“I pirgi, vre! The Twin Towers. Very strange, no?”

“Who?”

“No one knows, but it’s made everyone a little crazy today, katalaves? Maybe that’s why she had to go.”

“The girl?” David was now trying to process this other piece of news.

“Nai, nai! The girl. Who do you think I’m talking about? She gave me a message for you, in case you came.”

The Greek proferred a pink piece of stationary. David grabbed it, numb. Someone tried to blow up the World Trade Center?

Again?

David was full of questions, but the Greek was busy breaking down his pushcart.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going home! The Company told us to take the rest of the day off. Didn’t you notice there’s no one on the streets?”

To be honest, David hadn’t. Eighth Avenue was still a sea of cars, but he suddenly remembered that the perpetual gridlock of Manhattan was composed of unmanned vehicles, acres upon acres of clockwork traffic that gave the appearance of hustle and bustle. Other than the empty automatons, which honked and jockeyed for imaginary position, he and the Greek were alone outside the Port Authority Terminal. David had been so focused on the girl that he hadn’t noticed the whole island empty out around him. Even the ubiquitous tour buses had disappeared.

“Holy shit.”

“I only stayed as a favor to the girl. I wait to give you the message, and now I’m going. You should go, too, en taxi? All right?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

David returned to the terminal in search of his ride back to Jersey. A string of empty buses idled in place, waiting to take straggling employees home. He kept walking until he found one embossed with his destination—“NEWARK”—and got on. The driver greeted him, switched on the interior lights, and waited for him to take a seat before backing the vehicle out of its designated parking spot and on its way back across the Hudson River.

David looked down at the note. He unfolded the scented pink paper, inhaling its perfume. The note was written in long, loopy letters that he’d long since forgotten to write himself: just a time—tonight, at midnight—and a place—an address on Astoria Boulevard, in Queens. David sat back as the bus plunged into a tunnel, emerging across the river amid the suburban morass of New Jersey.

Although the clouds had begun to roll in and threaten rain, he could see shafts of sunlight falling into the Meadowlands, and decided to take a short detour along the boardwalk on the tidal marsh’s edge before heading home. Getting out of work early today was a real treat, and he thought he’d linger amidst the reeds and the waterfowl and think about the morning’s events without the distractions of his apartment.

It was hard to believe that the Meadowlands—the last bit of open space for hundreds of miles up and down the coast—was once a toxic wasteland. For centuries, New Yorkers had used the marshes as their dump. Even at the turn of the last millennium, the area was dominated by landfills, industrial rot, and the occasional nameless victim of organized crime. It was such a mess that no one wanted to invest the money it would take to clean it all up, so the swamps lay fallow as towers were piled upon towers all around it.

When every other available adjacent square inch had been used up, contractors at last set themselves to task of reclaiming the long-forgotten region, but encountered a surprise or two when they did. Aside from having notoriously soft ground that was lousy for pilings or other buttressing foundations, the Meadowlands had undergone a remarkable transformation.

Left to its own devices, Mother Nature had effected a cleanup far more deep and long-lasting than anyone could have managed. Migratory birds appeared once more in this oasis of salt and sun, blue crabs and other shellfish recolonized the tidal creeks, and foxes, rabbits, white-tailed deer—even a bear or two—were being spotted in the wilds. Life had returned to this place of death, and in a rare and uncharacteristic moment of sensitivity the Government recognized it as the rightful miracle it was and moved to protect it.

It was during the very same year that the island of Manhattan was designated by the Government as ah “historical theme park,” under the auspices of the Company. A former Disney executive came up with the idea of turning the whole island into a not just a shrine or a museum, but a living reminder of what America had been at the turn of the last century, on the eve of its darkest day. America had experimented with historical parks before, from the Pioneer Village of Salem, Massachusetts to the extremely successful Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. But what the Company was proposing to do in Manhattan went leaps and bounds beyond its predecessors. The island would be open and transparent to tourists—both the casual spectators who observed from their buses that were wired for live audio and video feeds from the City below and the “free-rangers” who plunged into the thick of things and explored the world of September 10th, 2001 by foot.

Such a simulation required hundreds of thousands of actors. The Company’s payroll
ballooned as unemployed aspiring thespians filled out the bit parts of the city that never slept. David, however, had come to his role in a rather odd way. Having passed the Government exams for the civil service, which he had taken at his parents’ behest, he ended up working for the agency responsible for the Company’s finances. Millions of people applied to Central Casting in hopes of being offered so much as a bit part, but David soon learned that the easiest way into the Company was internally. David worked as a bureaucrat for a year and a day before he had ingratiated himself with his superiors enough to ask for a transfer, and just like that, he was in.

The boardwalk snaked towards a large rock outcrop in the middle of the swamp. It was the largest piece of solid ground for acres, and had a commanding view of the tidal marshes in every direction. David stepped off the boardwalk at the rock, where a set of stairs and iron handrails had been hammered into the cliff-face for an easy ascent. He huffed and puffed his way up.

The Meadowlands surrounded him in every direction now. David stared at the Empire State Building to the east, then let his gaze drift down towards the gleaming towers of the World Trade Center, which the Company had rebuilt girder for girder, following the original blueprints. He thought about lighting up a cigarette, but considering the fact that he was already out of breath from the climb, decided against it.
David liked working for the Company. His role offered him the chance to live like a real Wall Street wheeler and dealer, and for five years he buried himself in the part, coming in early and staying late. He loved pacing around and bellowing like a madman as the indices went down and then back up again throughout the day, knowing that the crowds of tourists watching every moment. He liked going to the fake Brooks Brothers store on his lunch break and getting himself a sharp new suit, or Bruno Magli for a pair of shoes, or Hermes for a nice silk tie. He liked his three-martini lunches at the Tavern on the Green, dinner with the boss at TriBeCa, and making an evening of it with his fellow traders Thursday nights, hitting the piano bars, drinking scotch, and smoking cigars, which were reluctantly permitted by the Company.

So what the hell was his problem now?

He thought about the girl, and his still-thumping heart ached. Ever since he caught his first glimpse of the girl on the corner he’d been flirting with his livelihood, and that just wasn’t like him at all. In fact, David was lucky that those crazies had tried to bomb the Towers, or else Central Casting almost certainly would have fired him today, as they had the original Mr. Van den Heuvel the day before.

David looked back at the Towers, which were crisp and bright in the midmorning light. How bizarre was it that someone would try to blow them up. And why? He doubted he’d ever hear the truth of the matter, since the Company liked to keep business of park operations as secret as possible, so as not to spoil the ambience of the simulation. Still, he couldn’t imagine that people wouldn’t be talking about it on the job tomorrow, even if it did mean breaking character.

Aware of the fact that the park’s sudden closure would have made the news, even if the reason why had not, David switched on his phone and almost immediately it began to buzz. He sighed and answered the call, letting his mother excoriate him as he clambered back down to the boardwalk. Most of the time he’d bristle at his parents telling him what and what not to do, especially where his job at the Company was concerned—a job they expressly forbade him to take, but now one they expressly forbade him to lose with equal vehemence. But not today. Already his mind was preoccupied with the evening ahead. 11 o’clock. He nodded and grunted at his as his mother continued her tirade, all the while wondering only one thing—what was he going to wear tonight?

David reached Astoria Boulevard at a quarter before midnight, out of breath as he ran down the stairs built into the rusty dusky red girders that supported the ancient subway tracks and bounded the last few stairs onto the cracked and pitted concrete pavement. He passed shop after shop that was still open for business and bustling with customers, despite the hour. Although the street itself was nowadays closed to motorized traffic, it thundered with the footfalls of a million souls, some going to the island, their costumes perfectly in place; others returning from another gruelling shift of make-pretend, ties unknotted, blouses wrinkled, hair akimbo.
David weaved his way through the jumbled pedestrian mass, following the ancient thoroughfare until it reached a three-way intersection. Standing in the middle of the chaos was a building of chrome and neon that looked like a turn of the century diner. David looked down at his address one last time and saw it matched that of the vintage eatery.

He stepped closer to the shining box of polished metal and tinted glass, and noticed that his mystery girl was still waiting for him, sitting alone in a booth flush against the diner’s front window. David smiled and crossed the establishment’s threshold.

“Table for two?” the host asked in a familiar voice. Two? David stopped and looked over his shoulder before he remembered who the smiling man before him was. The Greek! The host nodded as David made the connection, then laughed.

“I told you to talk to her!”

“I... I...”

“Don’t worry. Ola einai en taxi. O.K.? She’s waiting for you. Follow me.”

David did as he was told, and in a moment he was sitting opposite her on a cold vinyl cushion, with two tumblers of ice water, an ashtray, and a half-empty coffee cup between them; through the window, the crowd outside seethed. The host set a menu before him and disappeared.

David looked at the girl. She smiled. He took out a package of cigarettes he’d bought from a kiosk on Astoria Boulevard and offered her one.

She wrinkled her nose. “No, thanks. I don’t smoke when I’m not working.”

“Oh?”

“It’s required for us, you know—I mean, the Undesirables. But you go ahead. I don’t mind.”

David lit one for himself. He’d rehearsed this conversation ten thousand times in his head, yet already it had gotten away from him. He took a nervous drag from his cigarette.

“You know, they didn’t even want us on the island at first.”

“Who?”

“The dealers, the pimps, the junkies, the prostitutes. But it didn’t work. People saw right through it when they came, felt it was all wrong.

“The Company only grudgingly added the underbelly to its fake Manhattan, but it required that all the Undesirables smoke, so the tourists would know what we were right away.”

David tried to think of something meaningful to say, but couldn’t. He fiddled with his water glass uncomfortably.

“I’m sorry!” she blurted out. “Here I am, going right into shop talk when we’re both off duty.” She looked at her wristwatch. “Well, at least one of us is. I should be heading to work right about now— hookers with hearts of gold don’t exactly work nine to five now, do they?”

David found his voice amidst the sudden panic. “Wait.”

The girl sized him up with a mischievous glance in her eyes. She was just as beautiful as she appeared from afar, but under the fluorescent lights of the diner she took on an even more desirable aura. Perhaps it was simply that he was seeing her at the beginning of her work day, and not the end, as he had before.

Leather, fishnets, hairspray—somehow she had turned these three improbable ingredients into a masterpiece. Today she wore a yellow blouse, but every element was as it was the day before, and the day before that. Her auburn hair had a little more hold, her stockings showed no runs, her shoes betrayed no telltale scuffs. Her dark red lipstick was still perfect despite half a cup of coffee, and the rest of her make-up was unaffected by the humidity “I like your shirt,” she said.

David had chosen an expensive red silk shirt for the occasion, along with a pair of black gabardine wool slacks and some nice Italian leather shoes. Her compliment eased him somewhat, but he was still distressed at the prospect of their rendezvous ending so soon.

She sensed his tension. “Relax, David. I’m not going anywhere.”

David looked at her in shock. “How do you know my name?”

“I made it my business to find out,” she said. “Mine’s Amber.”

“That’s a lovely name.”

“Thank you.”

“So what’s it like?”

“What?”

“Being an Undesirable—playing one, I mean. Do you like it?”

Amber swirled her cold coffee in its cup and looked out the window. “It’s a job,” she said.

David pressed the question. “But do you enjoy it?”

“Do you like yours?” Her eyes had returned to his face, searching.

David glanced down at his untouched water glass, which was beaded with moisture that soaked the paper underneath. He sighed.

“I used to.”

Amber leaned forward in the booth, magnifying her presence. “Why?”

“It’s just the same thing, day in, day out. You know? Maybe I’ll buy a new shirt every other week or go to lunch somewhere nice, but aside from that it’s...”

“Yes?” Her blue eyes sparkled.

“It’s always the same.” David blushed and stubbed out his cigarette. “I can’t imagine it’s like that for you, though. The same thing every day.”

Amber smiled. “You’d be surprised. It’s funny. Tourists come and think they’re seeing a giant improvisational act. But that’s not how it works. Every last part is scripted and scheduled, whether you’re trading bonds on Wall Street or looking for a john on Eighth Avenue.”

David eyed the girl with growing suspicion. “You know what I do, too?”

“I told you...”

“You do your homework,” he interrupted her. “Yes, yes. I’m getting that. What’s really going on here, Amber? Are you from Central Casting? Is this some kind of test?”

“Lower your voice, David.”

“Why?”

“We’re not exactly alone here.”

David glanced around at the adjacent booths and the formica counter to his right and her left. All were full of patrons getting a midnight breakfast, but no one seemed to be paying much attention to them.

He lowered his voice anyway. “I don’t understand. We’re not on duty. Why the hush-hush?”

“We’ve been watching you for just about five years now, David Nollett,” Amber said.

“Under all those other eyes, you have to wait for just the right moment.”

“You’re not from the Company.”

“No.”

“Then who? Are you a talent scout?” David’s heart leapt at the thought of being hired away by another park – perhaps New Orleans, Chicago, or Los Angeles.

Amber smiled again. “In a matter of speaking. Have you ever heard of Greenwich Village?”

The name meant nothing to David. Amber didn’t look surprised. “It’s okay, no one has. Imagine that, Old Manhattan’s last stand, erased from history itself!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Not all of the island’s inhabitants were happy with the Company’s plans to remake the city into a historical theme park. Greenwich Village was one of those neighborhoods that resisted the bulldozers.”

“I don’t understand.”

Amber leaned even closer. “Didn’t you ever wonder what happened to all those old New Yorkers, the ones that didn’t want to leave?”

David frowned. “I guess not. I always assumed they were bought out by the Company. That or they got jobs.”

“Not all of us, David.”

“All of you?”

“Some of us took the Company’s measly compensation checks. Others held out for employment in the new park, lousy jobs for lousy pay, nothing but bit parts and Undesirable roles. But others fought.”

David felt a shiver run down his spine as she recounted these events—it was as if she’d been there herself, all those years ago.

“Some fought out in the open. Picketing, marching, lining up in front of the construction vehicles as they attempted to demolish Old Manhattan. But others saw the writing on the wall. The Company was too strong, too well-funded, too well-connected. They didn’t give up the fight, however, but merely took it underground.”

David stood up with a start. “You’re the ones who—“

“Shhh!” Amber sprang up from the booth as well and clapped a hand to his mouth. She tried to pull him back down to his seat, but it was no use.

The ones who tried to blow up the Towers!

“You... You...” David tried to get his words out, but Amber’s fingers turned them into angry confused mumbles.

“Please,” she whispered. “It’s not what you think. Hear me out, and I promise I’ll let you go and do whatever you want about this afterwards. Okay?”

Despite himself, David ceased struggling and sat back down.

“Okay.”

A little of the familiar sparkle had returned to her eyes. “First of all, we had nothing to do with the bombing. There are a lot of groups who have an axe to grind against the Company—some are violent; others, like us, are not.”

“Who’s ‘us’?”

Amber grimaced. “We call ourselves the Village Idiots. I know, not my first choice of names, but it’s the work that matters.”

“Work?”

“We bring disorder to the system. Our members infiltrate the park as actors or service personnel and sow a little confusion here and there while keeping a step ahead of the Company.”

David was astonished. He’d never heard of any malcontents on the island, either in his year working for the agency or the five he’d spent acting on Wall Street.
“The Company has zero tolerance for deviants. You saw how quickly they were on your case, after only one tardy?”

David nodded.

“And your boss. They cashiered him with no questions asked. That’s how they maintain order. But it’s a fictitious order, David- Manhattan was never this way, not the real city!”

“But why lie?”

“The rosier the past, the greater the outrage—if Paradise wasn’t perfect, why care if you’re kicked out?”

“So what, you’re saying the Government —“

“I’m not going to get political.” Amber cut him off. “This isn’t even about that.”

“What is it about, then?”

“It’s about the truth.”

“The truth? That the Company fudged a few details along the way? This city was dead!”

Amber narrowed her eyes. “But what is now? Stuck in the same day, day after day. It’s worse than before—it’s a living death. And you know it, David, you’ve felt it in your bones, or else you wouldn’t be here right now talking to me. We’re all trapped.”

“And how does blowing up the World Trade Center fix that? Isn’t that how we ended up here in the first place?”

“I told you,” Amber hissed. “That wasn’t us. No, we have a different idea. A beautiful idea.”

“Well, what is it? Isn’t that why you brought me here?”

She shook her head. “No, not tonight. I have to report for my shift. And you have to decide what’s important. If you don’t want any part of this, consider us gone and out of your life forever. We’ll just disappear the way we appeared.”

“The way you?”

Oh. They must have engineered the bus’ curious malfunction that morning. Was the mechanic one of them, too?

“You’ve thought of everything, then. So why me?” This was the one piece of the puzzle that still had David perplexed. If they could manipulate things already, what good was he to them?

Amber smiled. “Come back here tomorrow night and you’ll learn everything. It’s all or nothing, David — your decision.

“Now I really have to go. It was nice meeting you, finally. I mean that.”

Amber got up, straightened her leather miniskirt, then leaned in and gave David a peck on the cheek with her perfectly glossed lips before slipping out of the booth, out of the diner, and out of sight, just another pair of heels walking down Astoria Boulevard.

David remained at the table after she left. He stared at the perspiration on his water glass, the lipstick on the rim of the coffee cup. He looked around the diner, wondering how many of its patrons were part of this shadow city he’d never known existed.

He put a hand to his cheek where she’d kissed him and cursed. David got up to leave.
“See you tomorrow!” The Greek didn’t specify whether he meant tomorrow morning on the corner or tomorrow night here in Astoria, although they both knew it would be both.

The next day was excruciating. David went to work on time, nodding to the Greek and only casually glancing up and down Eighth Avenue to see if she was there, knowing full well she wouldn’t be. The new Prescott van den Heuvel was pleased to see him return to his previous punctuality, never mind that the actor who played his boss had only been there once before, so how could he possibly remember if David was chronically early, late, or anything in between?

David tried to throw himself into the role, but feared that he was overdoing it. He’d punched up a few history books after getting back from the diner since he was unable to sleep anyway, and learned that everything that Amber told him was in fact true. There was even an interview with the Disney executive responsible for the park’s inception that admitted as much:

“People remember what they want to, and that’s what we’re here for. If you’re looking for facts and figures, open a history book. This is not a historical park, it’s a historical theme park.

“Where are all the slaves in Colonial Williamsburg? Do we feel cheated because we don’t get to see the brandings and whippings that history tells us happened? No.

“The accuracy of certain details is far less important than the theme itself. Colonial Williamsburg reinvented itself as quaintness personified, whereas we in New York are striving for innocence.”

Innocence. David had done a lot of reading last night about the history of a country he thought he knew. He read about the Trail of Tears, Manifest Destiny, the Monroe Doctrine, and countless other less-than-innocent episodes that had never come up in the course of his education, even at the University. What was so astounding, however, wasn’t that such awful things were perpetrated, but that the information about them was still readily available to anyone who wanted to know.

Who wanted to know? That was the question, and at last David understood what Amber was trying to explain to him the night before. The island’s carefully cultivated amnesia had slowly become the whole nation’s. The past was September 10th, as re-told by the Company, with the Government’s blessing and financing. Why go back any further? And why look ahead? The history forward was war, death, destruction, misery; so, too, was the history behind. Living in the today and thinking only of the tomorrow was hardly a new idea in the world—especially for America—but only a former Disney executive could turn it into a theme park.

So David stumbled through his day on Wall Street, his brain buzzing with too much knowledge and a lack of sleep. He stared at the electronic tickers on the wall and laughed out loud.

“What’s so funny, Sanders?” His new and improved boss barked at him, casting a nervous glance at the mirrored observation gallery and the carefully hidden cameras.

“That stock tanked today, in real life.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Astoria Boulevard was as dazzling and full as it was the day before, a roaring, thundering river of humanity. The Greek was there to seat him when he arrived, a knowing smile on his face. And she was there, in the same booth, the same leather skirt and jacket, the same styled hair, stockings, and jewelry.

She seemed happy to see him.

“Five years ago, you transferred from the agency to the Company payroll,” she explained as the Greek poured them each a cup of coffee. “Your access privileges to the agency mainframe should have been deleted. They weren’t. At first we thought the agency had recruited you as a spy, so my superiors assigned me to keep an eye on you, from a distance.”

“You’ve been watching me for five years?”

“We had to be sure. Sometimes it takes a long time for a sleeper agent to activate. We’ve gotten burned before.”

David shook his head in disbelief. “Five years—and I only noticed you four days ago!”
Amber gave a sly smile. “Let’s just say I’m good at what I do. And technically speaking, you didn’t even notice me the day you were late. I simply chose to become visible, at long last.”

“So what made you decide I was trustworthy?”

“The Meadowlands.”

“What?”

“No one goes there anymore, David. Even if they do, they’re just passing through.” Her eyes widened. “But I’ve seen you linger there for hours. That’s how I knew.

“My superiors were skeptical, but in the end the call was mine. I knew you, down to every last quirk of your waking hours. Did you know that you have a slight bounce in your step when you walk? It’s only noticeable when you’re in a crowd, though. I know every last thing that makes you stand out, that makes you... you.”

David was silent for a long time. He was trying to remember her, a glance here or a shadow there, from the five years that he’d been working for the Company. Although he couldn’t recall anything definite, the indefinites, the maybes, the near misses were stitching themselves together in his head.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Say you’ll help us. That I didn’t make the wrong call.”

“You didn’t.”

Amber smiled; David smiled back.

September 10th, 2001— David was in love. He knew her name now, what she did for a living, and whether he’d ever even see her again on the streets of Manhattan. If all went well, he wouldn’t. He didn’t understand the technical details of the plan, but it involved a very sophisticated computer program, which using his access codes he had uploaded to Central Casting earlier that morning, via the agency’s mainframe.
The program had been ingeniously tailored to make miniscule changes in the schedules and scripts of all the actors on the Company’s payroll—a different word or two here, a minute earlier or later there. Taken individually, the changes meant nothing. Over a cast of millions, however, the bits and pieces would slowly but inexorably building to one thing, and one thing alone:

Total system failure.

It would take years to repair the damage—the Village Idiot programmer saw to that. The Company depended on millions of machines to maintain its carefully-crafted illusion. Replacing just one defective system could take a fortnight; replacing them all would put this false city out of business indefinitely, perhaps even forever.
What happened after that was anyone’s guess, but one thing was certain. For the first time in years, Manhattan would live again, or at the very least be allowed to die.
Amber stood on the corner of Forty-Second Street and Eighth Avenue, as she always did at this time of the day. Only today she did not smoke, and had traded her high heels for a pair of comfortable walking shoes. She spotted David at the entrance to the Port Authority Terminal, chatting with Stavros, her adoptive uncle.

He handed David a pretzel—slightly overcooked and caked with salt, as always. “So. Ola einai en taxi? Everything O.K.?”

David nodded.

“Well, then.” The Greek laughed at the anticlimactic nature of this important moment. Then Stavros’ face became earnest. “You did a good thing, you know.”

“I know.”

“We’ll take care of everything. Papers, money, anything you need to get out of town and lay low. Out of the country, if you want. Given the circumstances, that might be best, katalaves?”

“I appreciate that. But there’s something else I need to ask of you,” David started.

“My blessing?” Stavros beat him to it. “You don’t need that! But I give it to you anyway, thank you very much for asking. Just treat her decent. En taxi?”

“En taxi.”

The Greek smiled. “You learn quick! Maybe next time we meet I teach you some of the bad words, eh?”

Now it was David’s turn to be serious. “You’re sure you want to stay?”

“I’ve been dreaming of this moment for years! Of course I’m staying. Don’t you worry about me, I’ve been playing this game since before you were born. Now look sharp, here comes your girl...”

Amber smiled at the two of them. “Are we just about finished here? The man bought a pretzel, not your life story!”

Stavros nodded and returned to his newspaper, a tender look in his eyes.

“And as for you,” she turned her attention to David, hooking her right arm around his left. “My rates are pricey, but I can assure you I’m well worth it. So whaddaya say—my place or yours?”

“Either is fine. You’re the professional!” David replied, playing his assigned part for the very last time. “But if you’re interested, I know the most romantic little spot for just this sort of thing. It’s just outside the city.”

“Do tell,” Amber said, as they wandered down into the bus terminal and into the future. Tomorrow would finally be another day.

Bambino

2009-08-09T21:18:00.000-04:00

Seventh son of a seventh son, Flynn had been a hot dog vendor at Fenway Park since he first could lift the big metal steamer and strap it over his shoulders. His father had sold franks at the beloved Boston ballpark until he was an old man and permanently stooped; so, too, did his father's father, when they were still called frankfurters and the Red Sox were still winning the World Series. Grandpa Flynnie may have been a seventh son himself, if he'd known how many brothers he actually had, but Mother never mentioned the ones that died early, either here in the States or back in Ireland. Selling hot dogs wasn't just something Flynn did for some summer cash - it was his birthright, and he accepted the family vocation with the same seriousness that a scion of a prominent Brahmin on Beacon Hill would reserve for his decision to go to Harvard, like all of his other distinguished ancestors.

Flynn was scrubbing the interior of his hot dog steamer with a brush and a pail of gray, soapy water. The game had ended hours ago, and most of the other vendors had long since fled for a nice cold beer at the Cask and Flagon, but he took pride in the appearance and cleanliness of his equipment, and had made a habit of lingering until he was the last person in the park. The groundskeeper, also a Fenway legacy, didn't mind Flynn hanging around, so long as he locked the service gate on his way out. Sometimes when he was in a generous mood he'd clean the other vendors' steamers, since he knew most of the kids only game them a quick rinse and were on their way, but most of the time he just scoured his own with loving care and reflected on the fortunes of the home team.

Today's game had been another disappointment in what was shaping up to be a thoroughly dismal season, and after such a promising start. Of course it almost always went this way in this town since 1918, when the owner of the then-champion Red Sox dealt away one of the greatest ballplayers ever in order to finance a theatrical production on Broadway. The play came and went, but the player - one George Herman Ruth, affectionately known as "The Babe" - became a living legend in New York and the stuff of undying nightmares here in Boston.

And so the Curse of the Bambino was born. Grandpa Flynnie used to tell him about how it started as a joke, the idea of a curse, some manner of hex hanging over the Green Monster at Fenway Park; but as the years went by and the Sox came up empty handed for a World Series championship time and time again, the “joke” started to be repeated by native Bostonians first with a scowl, then eventually with a whisper. "The Curse..."

At times it seemed like the bony hand of Fate itself, pushing up through the infield dirt to tug at Bill Buckner's pant leg and make him miss that routine ground ball in 1986. Flynn remembered that moment as if it was yesterday, the sickening instant when all of New England's hopes of disbelieving in something so silly as a curse were shattered forever. The monster was proved real there and then, once and for all; from that day onward, Flynn was a believer, an acolyte who served the most terrible mystery in all of sport.

This season was a perfect case in point of the cosmic deck being stacked against the Olde Towne Team, Flynn thought to himself as he finished toweling his steamer dry and reached for the metal polish. Going into the All-Star Break, the Red Sox had the best record in decades and a comfortable twelve-game lead over their American League East rivals and arch nemeses, the Yankees. It was the kind of year that even the Globe and the Herald's most jaded columnists were granting at least the pennant, if not the whole thing. Curse be damned, they said, this is the "Summer of the Sox".

Flynn knew better, though he held his tongue when hawking hot dogs in the grandstands until he was hoarse. The pattern was eternal, like the migration of a certain rare species of bird whose name he couldn't recall, although he'd just seen a documentary about it on cable the other week during the team's last road trip. He smeared some polish on a soft clean cloth and started buffing in a slow, deliberate manner.

The faithful would begin every year with Fear. Fear that the team would not heed the lessons of last year's shortcomings - bad starters, anemic hitting, an unreliable bullpen - and correct them in the off-season with the right acquisitions. Next would be Euphoria, when the Red Sox wintered in Florida and the press junkets cozied up to management (no matter how incompetent), and slobbered over the hired guns signed for millions of dollars from other teams.

Euphoria gave way to Opening Day jitters and the harsh realities of a new year. Sure, the big hitters delivered their promised firepower, measured in runs batted in and distance from home plate, and the aces on the mound never failed to demonstrate their artistry with a small stitched sphere marked Spaulding. But by the end of April, the seeds of the team's ultimate undoing were already sown, waiting patiently for their time to germinate into sorrow and loss. But these things were quickly forgotten in the exuberance of May, when the Sox would find their collective stride and inspire fans anew. Warts and all, Red Sox Nation would renew its vows of love for the team, and for a brief spell all would seem right with the universe.

Then would come the Slump. Flynn paused to look at his reflection in the metal, the rueful grin that had spread over his face from just thinking about it. The slump was sometimes big, sometimes small, but it was as predictable as Indian Summer most of the time, when the team would go into a sudden terrifying tailspin and squander whatever advantages they had accumulated in the spring, sending devotees from Bridgeport, Connecticut to Bar Harbor, Maine into a dark depression. Those in the know called it the “June Swoon,” and awaited it with the same dread reserved for a root canal or a sigmoid colonoscopy.

This year however the Sox had managed to forestall their slump until July, during which time the fans had allowed themselves to entertain unreasonable fantasies of how the season would unfold. The ultimate act of hubris was when one Globe sportswriter actually dared to compute Boston's "magic number" - that golden sum of Sox wins and other teams' losses that, when attained, clinched a trip to the postseason - in the first week of July.

Flynn couldn't help but chuckle. He still had a clipping of that column on his bedroom wall at home. The writer was roundly chided for counting the home team's chickens so soon, but the act of impiety, once committed, could not be undone. This year's slump began less than two weeks later, and even now showed little promise of ending, as the magic number seemed to slide ever farther away from attainment. The Red Sox would need a miracle to salvage the season at this point.

A sudden unnatural silence made Flynn look up from his hot dog steamer - there was a man was standing in front of him. It was a little late for this person to be a locked-in straggler from the game, and at first glance he didn't look like the breaking-and-entering type.

Well into his fifties, maybe even sixty, the stranger nevertheless had an impish quality about him that made him seem younger. Perhaps it was his shock of hair, still full, with only a touch of gray, and the telltale sign of hat-head. His faded Sox cap was in his hands before him, an anachronistic display of respect that set Flynn at ease. Nevertheless the intrusion upon his sanctuary annoyed him - who was this joker, and more importantly, how had he gotten past the groundskeeper?

"You know what the fine for trespassing is, don't ya?"

Hat-head was unfazed by the implied threat. "Mr. Flynn, I presume?"

"Depends on who's askin'."

The stranger tucked his cap under his arm and offered his right hand - Flynn regarded it with suspicion before shaking it. "My name is Davis. Art Davis. I'm a professor of mathematics over at MIT."

Great, he thought. One of those Poindexters from the People's Republic of Cambridge. "The game's over. We lost. Do you need help finding the exit?"

Davis laughed. "Actually, I was looking for you. The groundskeeper was kind enough to let me. He told me you’d be back here, cleaning the steamers."

"Well that's my job," Flynn said, now on the defensive. Davis didn't seem to mocking his vocation, but years of taking ribbing from his friends for being a hot dog vendor made Flynn a little thin-skinned when the subject came up.

"I meant no disrespect," Davis said quickly. "It takes a whole lot of stamina to do what you do. I think I've seen you selling dogs for the past twelve years."

"Thirteen."

"Excuse me then, thirteen. And long before that, you used to help your father as a kid."

Flynn squinted at the professor. "Now how the hell do you know that?"

"I didn't think you'd remember me. It was a long time ago. Your father and I used to be friends. We went to school together. South Quincy High, class of '57. We'd talk baseball. He would tell me all the old stories his father - your grandfather - told him and I'd entertain him with all the stats I'd memorized. He'd sneak me into games and I'd give him the insider information on that night's line." Davis smiled. "We had a wicked bad gambling problem back then, he and I. Your father would feel so guilty putting money on a Sox game - even to win - but that didn't stop either of us."

A light switch flipped on in Flynn's sweaty head. "Holy Christ, I remember you! You're 'Lucky', aren't ya?"

"You used to call me 'Uncle Lucky', way back when."

"Infield Grandstand, along the third base line," Flynn could see Davis now, sitting where he sat twenty-odd years ago. "You had season tickets."

"That was back when they were still a bargain."

"You'd always get five hot dogs. I couldn't believe it. You were a beanpole then. Still are."

Davis grinned.

"Where ya been? I don't remember seeing you here at the park for years, since... since." Flynn trailed off as his memories finally aligned. Since his father died.
Davis acknowledged what Flynn hadn't said with a nod. He stared down at his feet.

"Well, I've been away. I've been teaching at Cal Tech for the last ten years, until the 'Tute made me an offer I couldn't refuse. Besides, I couldn't take another season of California baseball! There should be laws for what they do to sports out there."

Flynn couldn't help but laugh at this; Davis chuckled, too, before his face became somber and his voice grave.

"I also left because of your father. He and I had some... bad habits... that were twice as bad when we palled around together, so we kept our distance when he met your mother and started behaving like a respectable family man. I saw him at games, and maybe we'd meet for the occasional beer, but that was it. Nothing like the good old days."

This conversation was starting to make Flynn uncomfortable. Hoping to change the subject, he asked "So what brings you here?"

Davis perked up. "I have a proposition that might interest you."

"A job?"

"Not exactly. More like research. But you'll get paid. We have a generous budget for this sort of thing."

"Who's 'we'? A bunch of mathematicians?" Flynn couldn't imagine a whole lot of money in knowing your multiplication tables.

Davis laughed. "No. Let's just say I freelance with some... interesting... people. This probably isn't the best time and place to discuss the particulars, but if you come to our office we'll show you what we're up to and how you can help."

Flynn asked the obvious question. "So why me? Why now? I haven't seen you in twenty years, Uncle Lucky."

Davis said nothing at first, but merely gestured towards a newspaper on the ground. The back page of the Boston Herald, normally reserved for the highlights of last night's game, was featuring a full color photograph of a handful of scuba divers standing proudly around a baby grand piano on the shores of a pond just outside of Quincy. The headline read, in a font normally reserved for acts of war or the Second Coming of Christ: "BAMBINO'S PIANO FOUND – IS THE END OF THE CURSE NIGH?"

Flynn almost choked. He'd bought the paper that morning but neglected to read it, already depressed as he was about the Sox's current slump. Why compound what he knew damned well on his own with a gaggle of sports columnists' doom and gloom? Now he stared at the broadsheet's main story and the piano in disbelief, his jaw opening and closing in an attempt to speak.

"W-w-w-w-when? H-h-how?"

Davis smiled gently, an expression of sadness and understanding on his face. "Here's my card, Flynnie. Give us a call and we'll set up a time for you to come in, so we can explain everything. Good to see you again, son - call us soon, okay?"

Uncle Lucky left as suddenly as he'd arrived. Flynn wanted to ask him more questions, many more questions, but the professor had already made himself scarce. So the hot dog vendor, seventh son of a seventh son, sat back down beside his half-polished steamer and stared at that unbelievable picture, that dark pond, the scuba tanks stenciled with the letters “M.I.T.”.

Flynn didn't go home that night.

"Jess?"

"That you, Jimmy?"

Flynn grunted a drunken mmm-hmm to his big sister, the only female of a moderately sized Irish-American brood of eight.

"Jimmy, where've'ya been? We were worried sick."

"Out. I needed to clear my head. You seen the papers?"

"Oh, god. The piano. I knew it had to be that. You okay, Jimbo?"

"I'm fine, sis."

"You've been drinking," Jess clucked.

"Given the circumstances, I think a pint to two wouldn't hurt."

"Or ten, from the sounds of it."

"Does Mom know yet?"

"Jesus Christ, no. We're keeping the television off in her room, just in case. Told her the cable was out. This'd kill her, Jimmy."

"It damned near killed me. Guess who broke the news, of all people?"

"Uncle Lucky." It wasn't a guess, just a simple statement of fact.

"He called you first. You bitch! Why didn't you tell me?"

"Settle down, runt. You were already at Fenway. What, was I going to leave you a message on the Jumbotron?"

Flynn sobered up at his big sister's scolding. "Sorry, Jess. Didn't mean to call you a bitch. It's been a rough night."

"I know, Jimmy. I know. So what did he want?"

"Said he had a job for me. Some kind of contract work over at M.I.T.. Said they'd pay good money."

"M.I.T.? Weren’t they the ones that found it?"

"Yeah."

Jess paused. "Did he talk about Dad any?"

"A little."

"Don't go over there, Jimbo. Whatever they're scheming, it can't be good. And it won't end well."

Flynn felt fairly sober now. "But what if I can get some answers, Jess? Wouldn't it be worth it, after all this time, a little piece of mind? Besides, these guys look like they've got deep pockets. Sure would be nice if we could catch up with the bills for a change."

"Just don't agree to anything until we've talked it over, you and me, okay?"

"Okay."

"Promise, Jimmy."

"Alright, alright. I promise. Simmer down."

"I don't trust him, that's all."

"Me neither, sis. But that fucking piano. It can't be a coincidence."

"I'm sure it's not. Just be careful."

"Relax, Jess, I'm just going for a visit. What's the worst that could happen?" he said, and immediately wished he hadn't.

"Don't say that, little brother." Her voice was a whisper, rasping and pleading. "Don't ever say that."

The next morning, Flynn called in sick for the very first time in his working life as a Red Sox employee and dialed the number on the card that Uncle Lucky had given him. The man who answered had an almost impenetrable accent, but he seemed to know who Flynn was and why a Fenway Park food service associate would be calling an office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Could he come in today, at ten o'clock? Sure. He wasn't going to be selling any dogs today anyhow.

"Iz good then. Vee vill see you at ten hundred hour."

Flynn hung up the payphone receiver and wondered exactly what he was getting himself into. Overhead the Green Line trolley screeched into North Station on tracks better suited for a Coney Island rollercoaster. A pretty girl hawked newspapers down below, bellowing out in a voice ten times her size.

"Get your Globe heah, hot off the presses!"

Flynn bought one, to see if there was any additional information about the piano salvaged from a South Shore pond. There was. Flynn felt his stomach churn, a reminder of the dozen pints or so he'd drunk at The Harp (he'd crashed there last night, the bar owned by a friend of his cousin's, and slept on a folding cot in the men's bathroom) and the greasy fast food egg sandwich he'd forced down his gullet an hour ago.

Someone had finally done his homework and combed the local newspapers for any backstory on this hunt, which appeared in the Metro section of the morning edition. Flynn swallowed hard and read what he already knew.

Twenty years ago, a man went into an area pond before the ice was even out and never emerged from it, for what were at the time unknown reasons. His name was Francis Doyle Flynn, father of eight, who had graduated from North Quincy High School in 1957 and who until his disappearance had been a long-time employee for the Red Sox organization. No one had thought to connect the stories until yesterday.

That was all the article had to say. Flynn breathed a sigh of relief, if only for his poor mother, but knew damned well that the story didn't end there.

The article failed to mention that this hadn't been the first time Mr. Francis Doyle Flynn had gone jumping into icy bodies of water in that region. Nor did it mention that these eccentric dives always tended to coincide with Opening Day at Fenway Park. And fortunately, mercifully, the Metro story left out the most important of the details that only Flynn and a few others knew, that Mr. Francis Doyle Flynn had not in fact disappeared.

His body had been recovered, all right - or at least was left of it. His father's body had been mangled, almost beyond recognition, by an unknown force that even the county coroner was at a loss to identify. A snapping turtle must have found the corpse and mutilated it, the exasperated local official had concluded in the end. A rather large snapper. Case closed.

Never mind that the flesh wounds had in fact been the cause of death, not drowning, and that they did not match the bite or claw marks of any animal known to man. Flynn's mother had spent the family's entire life savings to hire a private investigator, who grimly informed her of these facts before drinking himself to death in a hotel room in Hyannis less than two weeks later. She never dared pry any further into the mystery of her husband's death, and settled into a long slow slide towards dementia.

Flynn had considered resuming the inquiry every now and then, but was wary of the publicity that it might inadvertently generate. Besides, with the family's bank accounts depleted and its chief breadwinner dead and buried - closed casket, mind you, as the funeral home flat-out refused even to try to put the Flynn patriarch back together again, despite his mother's frantic pleadings - there was nothing but work to do.

Grandpa Flynnie had built their Quincy home with his own two hands, but it would take the tireless labor of his eight grandchildren just to keep it off the auctioneer's block, especially with a matriarch who'd been bedridden for the better part of a decade.

So Flynn worked, throwing himself into the only job he knew, the one that had paid for the tuxedo he wore to his senior prom, his first car, his one bedroom apartment in Southie before his brother Ryan broke his back on a construction job and got screwed on his disability settlement; before his other brother Stevie was laid off by General Electric up in Lynn, where he'd worked for over fifteen years; before Francis Junior and Sean joined the Navy and the Marines, respectively, one of them becoming a full-time officer, another dying in the sands of Kuwait, killed by an American bullet; before Thomas got hitched to a girl and moved to California; before Jeffrey came out of the closet and got thrown out of the house by his mother; before circumstances had conspired to bring him back home to stay.

He and Jess kept the family together and under one roof, and Flynn never gave his bad luck much thought. The work at Fenway was good when the Sox were in town, and it gave him some measure of pride to carry on a family tradition.

Flynn trudged up the metal stairs leading to the elevated track of the Green Line. He felt his head pound with every step he took, and wished he had some Tylenol on him. No matter. He had an appointment to keep, headache or no headache. He got onto an inbound "E" trolley and rummaged the rest of the newspaper he'd bought. There was a story that wouldn't have caught his eye if not for the fact that it mentioned M.I.T. - he read the first paragraph:

"Cambridge, MA (Globe Staff Reporter). The provost of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology yesterday vehemently denied allegations of funding a 'shadow department' dedicated to paranormal research, despite the recent hiring of internationally renowned ghost-chasing psychologist Gregor Illeyevich Ycpia, who before defecting from the Soviet Union in 1987 was the head of Moscow's ultra-secret research in the field of parapsychology."

Jesus Christ, Flynn thought. It was a fucking Russkie who'd answered the phone this morning, he was pretty sure. The Fenway area was crawling with them, ever since the Seventies or so, and some would work off and on as part of the groundskeeping staff at the park. He wondered if that was the guy he'd talked to. Ycpia. How the hell did you even pronounce a name like that?

"Pahk Street, change for the Red Line."

Flynn wadded up the Science section in his jacket pocket, disembarked from the trolley, and descended into the cavernous cool of Park Street station's Red Line platform, watching mice scurry along the hollow of the subway rails until an Alewife train rumbled on in. He got on, feeling uncomfortable with all of the tweed and the black overcoats, the politically active pins and the personal digital assistants. Flynn rode the Red Line all the time, but outbound to Cambridge it was a whole different ride. "Freaks and geeks," he and his pals used to call the people on the Alewife train. He grimaced through his headache. The freaks and geeks were now his best chance for solving a twenty-year-old mystery.

The Charles/MGH station whisked past as the subway broke above ground and crossed the salt-and-pepper shaker towers of the Longfellow Bridge. The Charles River, thick with sailboats, glittered like a promise. The train plunged back underground, its sleek automated voice intoning: "Kendall Square. M.I.T." Flynn got off, flagged down a passing student in a trenchcoat and a cowboy hat, and asked the way to Building Two.

Everything here at the Institute was numbered - not just the rooms, but the buildings, the class names, even the majors and the minors. Flynn had a classmate from high school he used to work with at the park who got into M.I.T.. He always liked to joke about all the numbers: "I'm takin' Three-Eleven in room Ten Two-Fifty as part of my prereqs for Course Sixteen." He wondered how his friend was doing now, whether he was an astronaut yet like he had always planned.

He navigated the labyrinth of M.I.T.'s high-ceilinged corridors until he found the office he was looking for. A black wooden door with frosted glass and stenciled letters read "Department of Alchemy." Flynn had no idea what alchemy was, but assumed that was probably a good sign that he'd found the right place.

He opened the door and walked in. There was a big, shifty-looking man sitting on the solitary desk in the room who was cleaning an automatic rifle, the shiny black metal gun lying in pieces on a big white cloth that covered the rest of the desktop, save for an office phone. The man was smoking.

This was not what Flynn had expected. He cleared his throat. "I'm not sure I'm in the right place, but I was--"

"You hot dog person," the smoking man said. It was the voice on the phone. "Iz good. I am Yuri." He extended a greasy paw that could crush a coconut. Flynn shook it.

Yuri took a long drag on his cigarette and pushed a button on the phone. "What is it, Yuri?" the rasping voice over the speaker asked.

"Iz here. Shall I send him back?"

"Spasebo, Yuri."

The smoking Russian laid the stock of his Kalashnikov on the desk and opened the door opposite the one Flynn had come through, next to a dry-erase marker board which read, cryptically: "Where is Alex?!?"

Yuri motioned towards the open door. "You come now. Iz okay."

Flynn took a deep breath and stepped through into a larger room, this one with windows and long wall-length marker boards; there were charts and photographs tacked up as well. Uncle Lucky was in this room, seated behind a desk with two other men - one old as sin and breathing supplemental oxygen through a plastic nostril tube, the other silver-haired and impassive. There was a fourth chair in the room, which faced the desk and the three men behind it.

Professor Davis smiled at Flynn, who was surprised to catch himself smiling back. After the chain-smoking goon wiping down an AK-47 in the front office, he was happy to see a familiar face. Even Uncle Lucky.

"James. So glad you could make it. I'd like you to meet two of my colleagues."

Davis gestured to the fossil with the oxygen tank. Flynn eyed him cautiously - the old man looked frail as far as his body was concerned, but his eyes blazed with decades of wisdom. If anything, his feeble exterior only magnified his presence in the room.

"This is Harvey Johnston, Professor Emeritus of Literature here at the 'Tute. He taught here for thirty years, before taking up the co-chairmanship of this department."

Professor Johnson nodded; Flynn grunted back.

"The professor's specialty was evil, the occult, and the supernatural in literature. The other English faculty members hated him to high heaven, but his classes had the highest enrollment rates for any humanities course offered at the university."

Flynn didn't even try to act impressed, but cut to the chase. "And this other guy must be the Russkie. Why-kip-eye-a."

"Ycpia," the third man corrected his pronunciation.

Flynn repeated what he thought he'd heard, mangling the name yet again.

Gregor Ycpia shook his head. "It does not matter."

"Okay then."

"But I am from Ukraine, not Russia. That does matter."

Davis was a little sheepish. "I guess you caught our little P.R. flap in the papers this morning."

"Why am I here, Uncle Lucky?" Flynn demanded of him.

"History, my boy," Professor Johnston wheezed. "History. How are you for dates? Let's take 1918 for starters."

"Jesus Christ."

"He has nothing to do with this, I can assure you,” the old man responded, without missing a beat. “Although we do have in our employ a Catholic priest whose services have proven invaluable over the years. Being a long-time employee of Fenway Park, I'm assuming you're aware of the Interfaith Coalition for the Exorcism of the Curse of the Bambino?"

"ICECOB." Flynn knew them well, as well as their all-night vigil on Yawkey Way every March, during Spring Training. What had started as a joke had mushroomed into an annual event where priests, witch doctors, and all manners of New Age weirdos camped out in front of the stadium and tried to rid the Red Sox of Babe Ruth's ghost. Flynn hated ICECOB. In the spring he always helped the groundskeeper's crew with the preparations for Opening Day, and those jokers always left Yawkey Way looking like a bomb had gone off. And since Red Sox Management had convinced the City of Boston to seize the road by eminent domain for baseball related functions, they always dispatched the Groundskeeping crew to clean up the mess.

If this had meant to impress Flynn, it had clearly failed. "A bunch of slobs."

"Quite right," Johnston threw him off by agreeing with him so readily. "And a bunch of quacks, as well, I might add. Father Mendoza was one of the original members who thought of exorcising the Curse, but he broke ranks with ICECOB when he realized they were nothing but amateurs. They had absolutely no conception whatsoever of what they were up against."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Flynn blurted out.

"The Curse, Mr. Flynn." Gregor Ycpia spoke now, his Ukranian accent thick like molasses. "It is real. That is why you are here, because you know what it is capable of."

Flynn felt his gut clench. "My father..."

"He did too much, too soon, my boy," Professor Davis - Uncle Lucky - said, his bright eyes crinkling. "Give your old man credit, when he got something by the tail he didn't let go of it. Only this time the thing he grabbed a hold of was stronger than any mortal man."

He lowered his voice, as if afraid of being overheard. "You saw what it was capable of, when they found your poor daddy's body floating in the pond."

"Oh, Sweet Jesus. No."

"I saw the coroner's report. Snapping turtle my ass. You saw those marks, those tears, made by neither man nor beast."

"Jesus," Flynn repeated over and over again, tears streaming down his cheeks. At last the missing pieces were falling into place.

"Your father and I didn't know what the hell we were doing back then. A couple of dilettantes, is what we were. All we had was a harebrained idea and an old Navy surplus diving suit. Your father always insisted on making the dives himself, while I monitored the machinery topside.

"We had gotten as far as figuring out that whatever it was that we were after, the piano had some kind of power over it. Made it vulnerable. I didn't understand why at the time, but now, with the help of my esteemed colleagues here, I do.

"Your father and I also knew that there was something special about you Flynns. Do you know how many seventh sons of seventh sons this family has had? I've been to Ireland, run down the records for as far back as I could. You've got magic in your blood, son - the kind of power that makes demons shit their pants."

"A demon, then?" Flynn pulled himself together long enough to make sure he was hearing correctly. "Are you trying to tell me that his here Curse is some kind of Satanic creature of the night?"

Professor Johnston almost snorted the oxygen hose out of his nostrils. "Let's leave the Prince of Darkness out of this, shall we? This sort of thing isn't his style. No, no, Mister Flynn, we're talking something much older than the Devil - or even God, for that matter."

"I don't follow you."

The retired professor of literature was clearly relishing this rare opportunity to lecture again. He cleared his throat. "In the beginning, before the Big Bang, they existed, those things we now call demons. In the formless chaos of Nonbeing, they reigned supreme for ages upon ages.

"Then the universe as we knew it began. Matter and energy, time and space - you know, 'Fiat lux' and all that. The demons loathed this new order of being, so definite, so full of light, and they fled to the nooks and crannies of space-time itself, where darkness continued to fester and anything was still possible. Black holes, quantum singularities, cosmic strings. These were their havens.

"Some, of course - the strong ones, the proud ones, the rulers of the old cosmos - didn't take this change of regime lying down. Not satisfied to haunt the interstices of reality for the rest of eternity, they lurked instead just beneath the surface of things, in the foam of indeterminacy, waiting for an opportunity to take their revenge on the creatures of definite shape and consistency who had cuckolded them out of their rightful home."

Flynn was never a patient student in high school before he’d dropped out, and his pulsing hangover certainly wasn't making him any more receptive to the learning process right now. "What the Christ does this have to do with Babe Fucking Ruth?"

"He's one of them!" Davis jumped in, announcing this as a kind of triumph, despite the look of total disbelief on Flynn's face. "One of the worst of their kind, to boot. This one has taken many names, assumed many guises, but for a human lifetime it was known as George Herman Ruth, and it played baseball in a way that had never been seen before and would never be seen again."

"This is total bullshit, Uncle Lucky."

"Is it? When's the last time you saw a pitcher who could hit like the Babe? He went from the top pitcher in the league to top hitter without even a transition period. Check your stats, son - this just doesn't happen in baseball. The odds against a ballplayer being perfectly built for both pitching and hitting are astronomical."

"It can still happen though, can't it? I thought you were a mathematician, not a two-bit psychic."

"There's more, Flynnie. There's more. Remember the 'called shot', when the Bambino pointed at a spot in the stands and hit it on the very next swing for a home run? We have the ball from that dinger."

Davis produced a tattered old regulation baseball from a drawer in his desk and tossed it to Flynn. He fumbled, but caught it. It just looked like an ordinary ball, well past its days of Official Major League game play, although he did feel a strange tingling in his left arm as he held it. Or was that just his imagination?

"Don't ask me how we obtained it - this crew has its ways, not all of them legal - but we got a hold of it. One of our little club here is a materials scientist, so we asked her to analyze it. It looks and acts just like a normal ball until you get down to the molecular level. All of the molecules in this ball - trillions of them - are mirror images of what they should be."

"So? Explain why a hot dog vendor should care about upside-down molecules."

"There are only two possibilities," Ycpia broke the impromptu science lesson with his abrupt Slavic manner of speaking out of turn. "The ball - composed from myriad component pieces - happened to be composed from pieces that were all naturally mirrored themselves--"

"Which I suppose is possible, but don't hold your breath waiting for it to happen again!"

Ycpia glared at the mathematician, and Davis fell silent. The Ukranian continued:
"Or, much more probably - though singularly improbable in and of itself - the base ball (Gregor Ycpia pronounced this American compound as two wholly distinct words) transited out of this dimension and back in again at a right angle."

Uncle Lucky spoke again, eyeing the Ukrainian warily to make sure he wasn't just pausing for dramatic effect before opening his mouth again. "That bastard knocked it clean out of our world, then back again, in order to make the shot. When a demon 'fixes' the odds like that, it leaves its fingerprints all over the place."

"Indeed." Professor Johnston had caught his breath, and was prepared to continue the tale. "And this isn't the only time we've caught the Bambino with his hand in the cookie jar."

He pressed a button on the desk - the lights in the room dimmed, and the blinds on the windows automatically pulled themselves closed as a projector built into the ceiling displayed a very familiar photo. Bill Buckner, Game Six, the 1986 World Series. A snapshot of timeless agony, with the second baseman's glove just ever so slightly not touching the ball, a ball that was destined to roll between his legs and doom the Sox to yet another heartbreaking failure.

“For a lifelong devotee to the Boston Red Sox and their fortunes - or shall we call them 'misfortunes'? - this photograph needs no explanation, does it, Mr. Flynn? Only this picture is slightly different than the average fan is accustomed to seeing.

"Our program was still in its infancy back then - the esteemed Dr. Ycpia hadn't even left the Soviet Union yet, although we were in correspondence and had spoken with one another frequently at academic conferences in Europe - but on a tip from Professor Davis, who was in California finishing his doctorate, we hired one of the best spectral photographers in the country to document the game."

Davis explained. "They're the guys who capture auras on film. They also try and take pictures of supernatural entities."

"Yes, yes. Quite correct."

"They were so pissed at me, Flynnie. I convinced them to drop thousands if dollars on a ghost photographer, and after burning through miles of special - not to mention expensive - film, they had absolutely nothing to show for it through five games.

"Then came Game Six."

Flynn gulped. He wasn't so sure of himself anymore, as these three perfectly sensible men of reason (or so they seemed at first) battered down his wall of skepticism so methodically, so expertly. He prepared himself for what he knew was coming next.

"It was a routine ground ball," Uncle Lucky continued. "Buckner should have fielded it, no question about that. I wondered immediately though as I watched the game from Cal Tech graduate housing, with a bunch of fellow Boston exiles, as I watched that awful moment replay over and over in my head - didn't it look like something was keeping Billy's glove from touching the ground? I mean physically, actually holding his hand back?"

Flynn shivered. The bony hand of Fate he’d always imagined suddenly didn't seem so far-fetched.

"My gut feeling was confirmed when I got a call from M.I.T. the very next morning. The spectral photographer had captured something, all right - Dr. Johnston?"

The wheezing old don pressed another button, and the projector advanced a frame. Flynn cried out in horror.

It was the same photo, capturing the same instant, only this time Bill Buckner was enveloped by a mass of greenish-yellow tentacles, each of them writhing with tiny tentacles of their own, each in turn topped with miniscule but unmistakable gibbering mouths. One of the arms of this apparition had twisted itself a dozen times around Buckner's glove arm, and in the eerie resolution of the parapsychologist's camera Flynn could see the upward force rippling through the feathery demonic tufts, the howl of triumph on ten thousand faces.

It was too much. Flynn screamed, "Turn it off! Turn it off!"

Dr. Ycpia nodded to Johnston, who pressed a button and made the evil tableau disappear. Davis continued softly:

"After this moment was captured on film, we knew we had it. Every home game and most of the away games since 1986 have been carefully documented, and this... abomination appears over and over again in the photographic record. A dropped ball here, a wild pitch there, sometimes an inexplicably broken bone, torn wrist ligament, or frayed rotator cuff. The Curse has been so busy thwarting the Sox that the players themselves reek of its presence.

"You see, Flynnie, everything this thing touches becomes invested with some of its essence. It's the bargain a demon makes in order to manifest itself in the world of matter. The bigger the object, the greater amount of power it sloughs off into it."

Flynn mumbled through half-dried tears. "The piano."

Professor Johnston was exultant. "At last, the scales have fallen away from his eyes! Most things an earthbound demon touches are small, like a fork, a pair of pants, or a baseball bat. Not much demonic essence in these items, because it all works exponentially. Half the size, a quarter the power - actually less, Dr. Ycpia was the one to calibrate that curve, but that's another story, and a long one at that.

"Other items, such as an automobile or a park bench, are large but too casually associated with the demon. The essence stored in such items is diffuse and as a result a lot less potent. Again, Gregor's done the math on this, and I'm sure he could take you through the equations sometime if you'd like.

"But this creature sunk a lot of energy into that grand piano eighty years ago. We've run some tests on the salvaged piano, and the readings go off the chart across the board. The demon definitely wanted to sink it to the bottom of the pond, that's for sure, although why is still a question we haven't answered to my satisfaction. It's like a textbook case of what a demon shouldn't do - invest your essence into an object easily weighing more than a metric ton, then preserve it underneath a body of dark, cold fresh water for decades.

"Every entity we've studied except for this one has been careful to cover its tracks, especially with the big items. This one, however - this Curse of the Bambino - has made a critical blunder that renders it vulnerable, more vulnerable than any other demon we've ever encountered. Up until now, we have had the wherewithal only to defend ourselves against these entities, to drive them off, exorcise them, but not destroy them. This piano changes the balance of power. The piano... and you."

"Me?" Flynn was beyond disbelief now, and merely accepted the fact that he had passed through the Looking Glass, and might never return to his own conception of reality again.

"You, Flynnie," Davis said, his eyes twinkling. "Yes, you. And your father, your grandfather, and his father before that. Seventh sons of seventh sons, all of you. I told you I've been to Ireland, seen the records. Professor Johnston has also shown me other stories about your family, a chain of folktales, legends, and myths that stretch back to the dawn of Irish history.

"Your father, he had the power, the blood of demon killers running through his veins, but he didn't have the knowledge he needed to do battle and protect himself. Neither of us did, son, and I can't tell you how much it turns me inside out that he paid the ultimate price for our ignorance, and not me. You deserved a father, growing up as a young man, and I helped take that away from you."

Flynn said nothing. What could he say? Davis fell silent as well. Gregor Ycpia fiddled with a five thousand-dollar Cross pen, as Professor Johnston broke the uneasy pause:

"It was Father Mendoza who enabled us to retrieve the piano. Say what you will about those Catholics - presently company excluded, of course Mr. Flynn - but they're useful when the chips are down, especially where the supernatural is concerned. Before leaving the Holy See, the good Father was one of the best investigators for the Council on the Doctrine of the Faithful, a.k.a. The Inquisition, so he knows all the guards and wards in the book. His help will be crucial in the battle yet to come."

"Battle?" Flynn had managed to muster a little bit of his old incredulity at such a prospect. "What battle?"

Ycpia spoke up again, his eyes fierce, his right hand making emphatic stabbing gestures with his pen. "Mr. Flynn, by affecting the material world on a continuous basis over the past one hundred years, this entity has made itself vulnerable. We intend to seize the initiative at last and rid the world of this Curse, once and for all."

"All this so the Sox can finally go all the way, huh?"

Ycpia sniffed. "I do not care one iota for your base ball, or your precious World Series. I have tracked this demon across the ages, Mr. Flynn, and I have seen the horrors it is capable of. I will send it back to the pit of Hell before I die!"

"Hell of course being a figurative term, since demons technically pre-date the Judaeo-Christian conception of the cosmos--"

"Enough!" Ycpia cut off Johnston angrily, and fixed Flynn with a stare that had seen far too much in a lifetime. "Now you know, Mr. Flynn. So now you must make a decision. Walk away from this, and we will not call you a coward. We will merely find another way to join battle. I will not lie to you, however, Mr. Flynn - you are our best hope!"

It was Uncle Lucky's turn to speak. "Well, son, what do you say?"

Flynn didn't hesitate: "Let me sleep on it."

Jessica Marie Flynn, solitary sister of a seventh son, was neither impressed nor amused by any of this. "Are you fucking high, Jimbo? These guys belong in MacLean Hospital with tinfoil on their goddamn heads!"

Flynn had tried to explain, but somehow everything that had seemed so logical - however implausible - back in that room in Building Two sounded as fantastic to his sister as it had to him at first. He wished he'd brought Uncle Lucky along to connect the dots a little better, because this wasn't going well at all.

"No way, James. No fucking way are you gonna go play 'Ghostbusters' with this retarded little group of nerds and leave me here turning tricks to make the money you won't be bringing home when you get arrested, committed, or blown up by some piece of shit contraption that's supposed to vaporize the Devil!"

Flynn winced. "They said it was a demon, Jess--"

"I don't care if it was the ghost of fucking Tom Gordon, because no means no. We've already lost Dad to this stupid shit - do you really want to be next? Do you. What's so funny, douchebag?"

Flynn couldn't help it. He was laughing like a third-grader. "Tom Gordon isn't dead, you dope."

Jess hadn't yet unclenched her fists, but her brow furrowed in confusion, not rage. "He isn't?"

"No. I think he's playing for the Expos. Either that or the farm leagues."

"Wait. What's that Stephen King book then?"

"That's 'The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon', retard. I don't think he dies there either."

"No, no. What about the song they wrote about him? The Boss sings it!"

"That's Tom Joad. How much did you drink that night at Boston Garden - we snuck out of the house went to the Springsteen concert together, don't you remember?"

"That's right. I got wicked hammered, didn't I, Jimbo?" Jess had finally unclenched her fists.

Flynn smiled. "You sure did, sis."

"That was the summer before Dad died."

"Yeah."

"James?"

"Yeah, Jess?"

"Do you really think this thing killed him?"

Flynn paused. "You saw the body in the morgue. Did that look natural at all to you?"

Jess shuddered. "No."

"These guys are the first to give us an answer that's an answer, Jess, and not ten more questions."

"Yeah, but you gotta admit the answer they've offered us is a little fucked up, Jimbo."

"I don't argue with you there, sis."

"But you're going anyway."

"Yeah."

"They're still paying you, right?"

Flynn grinned. "They'd better, or else I'll go all seventh son of a seventh son on their asses!"

Jess laughed at this, then hugged her brother tightly, tears welling in her eyes. "Be careful, Jimbo."

Flynn kissed his sister on the forehead. "Don't worry. Tell Mom I had to run, okay? I wouldn't know what to say to her anyway."

"Go. I'll take of her. Just hurry back."

"I will. Don't worry."

"The more you say that, the more I do worry."

"Goodbye, Jess." Flynn headed for the back door of their Quincy home.

"Wait. Jimbo?"

"Yeah, sis?"

"So if you guys kill this thing, does that mean the Sox will finally win the World Series?"

"Not if their pitching still sucks."

Jess couldn't help but laugh. "Good luck, James."

Flynn left, and Jess stood in the kitchen and stared at the closed back door for what seemed like hours while she cried silently, until her reverie was broken by the doorbell. She dabbed at her wet, red eyes and went to answer the front door. It was a delivery man, holding a bouquet of flowers - expensive flowers.

"Flowers for Mrs. Francis Doyle Flynn. Are you her?"

"She's my mother."

"Ah. You looked a little young to be a missus, yourself."

Normally Jess knew how to take a compliment, but today she wasn't in the mood for flirting. "Do you know who sent these?"

"Sorry, miss. There's a card, though."

"Thanks."

"You all right, miss?" The delivery man couldn't help but notice Jess's puffy eyes and still moist cheeks.

"Yeah." She sniffled. "I'm okay. Thank you for asking. This arrangement, it's beautiful."

"I just deliver them. But I'll pass on the compliment. Have a good day."

Jess closed the front door and set the bouquet on the small table in the foyer as she reached for the card and opened it. It read:

"From an old friend."

So much for that. Well, Mom would appreciate them, Jess thought, picking up the flowers and walking them upstairs to her mother's bedroom. I wonder how many of her friends she remembers now, anyway.

Marie Anne Flynn, nee Shaughnessy, knew at once who had brought her the lovely cream and lipstick pink roses, interlaced with baby's breath, which her daughter brought into her room and set into a Lenox vase with a little water by the window. In all her years, only one person ever gave her flowers - her high school sweetheart, Artie Davis. The smell of fresh-cut roses cleared away Marie's dementia like a crisp breeze off Boston Harbor sweeps away the miasma of sweltering summer, if only for a brief spell, and she walked painlessly down the avenues of memory while the favorable winds held.

Marie smiled. Although she ended up marrying his best friend Frankie instead - the responsible one, who had a savings account and his own Ford Thunderbird by the time he turned sixteen - Marie remained close to her first boyfriend. Artie was such a romantic. He liked to call himself her Lancelot, and her his Guinevere; if Frankie had been any more of a reader, he probably would have been a little more jealous. But he and Artie were buddies. It never occurred to him that his best friend would have the audacity to pursue his wife right under his nose.

"You like those, Mum?" Jess asked with a bright voice. Marie burbled happily, and Jess smiled, opening the bedroom window curtain to let the sunlight stream in.
Although Marie and Artie shared their first kiss together, she gave herself completely only to her husband, until a day like this, almost thirty years ago. After seven children - her daughter Jessica and six handsome, strong sons - Marie let herself be seduced at last by her dashing Lancelot, making love to him in this very bed, the windows open, the sunlight on their naked bodies, a beautiful bouquet of roses on the sill. Miracle of miracles, all the children were out of the house, getting sunburn in the cheap seats at Fenway Park for a doubleheader against the Orioles while their father sold hot dogs.

Marie never regretted that stolen afternoon, nor did she ever feel the need to tell her husband about her infidelity. As always, Artie was a perfect gentleman about the whole matter, remaining tender towards her afterwards but never presuming that their one moment together could or should be anything more than just that. Marie smiled at the memory of him, lying beside her. Sweet Lancelot.

In fact, he was so nice that when Marie realized that she was pregnant, she didn't feel the need to burden the aspiring mathematician with the responsibility of a baby. Little James would be her secret, one that she'd carry to the grave.

---

Fenway Park. There had been a game that evening, and the floodlights were still blazing away, attracting countless mosquitoes and massive seagulls wheeling in and out of the darkness. A solitary hot dog wrapper rode a friendly thermal and danced a spiral three hundred feet over home plate. Flynn paid it no attention and scowled instead at the scoreboard, which told the sorry tale of the Sox's performance earlier.

He'd missed the game, calling in sick again so that he could prepare for this showdown. He wondered if the boys in the front office knew about what was going to transpire here tonight, when the hour of midnight came. They must know. Why else would they have allowed this motley crew of professional ghost chasers take over the ballpark after the last fan had filed out? Groundskeeping had been given an early night off, with pay, so Flynn was certain that money had changed hands between Yawkey Way and M.I.T.'s mysterious Department of Alchemy.

The real question was who had paid whom. Flynn knew only too well how desperate the owners had become to shake off an eighty-five year slump. After a long winless stewardship by the Yawkey Trust, the team passed into the hands of a committee of businessmen who immediately declared war on the Bambino's Curse, only to find that their quarry was far more elusive and insidious than they'd ever imagined. And then some. All the money and marquee players couldn't reverse the Red Sox's predicament, the new owners learned quickly. No wonder they were letting groups like ICECOB camp out and chant all night - they were willing to try anything to reverse the Curse.
Even this.

The grand piano sat atop the pitcher's mound, slumping a little to the right. Although preserved for the better part of a century under water, just three days of exposure to the air had set into motion the process of disintegration. There would be nothing resembling a piano in a couple of days, Flynn reckoned, just some ivory keys and a skeleton of wires.

Tending the piano was Father Joao Mendoza, a Catholic priest from the predominantly Portuguese Fall River diocese on Massachusetts' southern coast. "Former Catholic Priest! As in no longer!" he hissed when Davis introduced him to Flynn. The good father's inborn talents at combating the minions of Satan - including an exorcism of a seven year old immigrant girl from the Azores that made the headlines in the tabloids and was made into a very successful miniseries on television - at the parochial level attracted the attention of the Vatican.

In no time at all, Joao was snapped up by the Congregation on the Doctrine of the Faithful and trained to be a latter-day Inquisitor, where he combined natural aptitude with the accumulated occult knowledge of the past twenty centuries. Father Mendoza was the Inquisition's most fearsome holy warrior, traveling the globe at the Supreme Pontiff's command, joining battle with demons, ghosts, witches, faerie folk, and every once in a while the Devil himself.

Then came the child molestation scandals. At first, Father Mendoza like many Catholics assumed that these reports were isolated incidents of priests who badly needed help. But when the cases began to multiply, and evidence of wrongdoing by the Holy See began to mount, he used what authority he had garnered over the past thirty years as Inquisitor to see the official Church records for himself. For one night he set aside the task of fighting the Vatican's enemies abroad and learned to his horror that her greatest and most twisted adversary was his brethren within.

He left the Church the next morning, formally renouncing his priestly vows, and started an autocephalous parish of equally-disgusted Catholics in his old neighborhood in Fall River. The Church of course decried this action, but fearing Father Mendoza's power, chose to leave him and his flock of dissidents alone.
Nor did the Vatican try to stop the former Inquisitor from operating as a freelance exorcist. Father Mendoza had sensed early on that there was something evil lingering over the beleaguered Red Sox, which lead to those annual blessings at Fenway Park and later, the formation of ICECOB. However, he always considered the matter to be a trivial one, a kind of supernatural hobby to toy around with when he wasn't fighting evil with a capital 'E', until the year that a group of Wiccans from Salem got a hold of - using the Internet, naturally, a Satanic invention if there ever was one - an ancient Etruscan exorcism spell inscribed on a metal tablet uncovered in the Italian necropolis of Cerveteri which actually worked and attempted to use it to reverse the Curse.

The results were disastrous. One witch had died of cardiac arrest, and the remainder of the coven was driven permanently insane, all of them kept in solitary confinement at MacLean Hospital to this day. Father Mendoza had been able to interview the most lucid of the survivors, and when he learned that Etruscan magic - the most powerful form of mortal sorcery, even though pagan in nature - had failed to dislodge the entity, he realized that this was no mere haunting.

Frantic, the good father attempted to disband ICECOB, lest another similar incident occur, but as the group had been becoming more and more of an event and less a ritual, no one on the current Steering Committee took him seriously. Fine. If he couldn't persuade people to leave this demon well enough alone, he'd just have to find allies who knew what was as stake, and end this Curse once for all.

Father Mendoza sprinkled holy water on the grand piano's already-swollen wood. The water had been collected from a spring in his native Azores which lay nestled in the bosom of a dormant volcano, and was said to have miraculous curative powers even before being blessed by a priest - properties that he had verified to be true as an agent of the Inquisition. Joao had kegs of the water shipped regularly to his home in Fall River, the gunpowder of his spiritual arsenal.

Already he had traced a seven-fold counterclockwise circle around the infield. This demon was strong, perhaps the most powerful entity Father Mendoza had faced, but at midnight the unbroken line would become an uncrossable barrier even it would not be able to cross, at least for the hour. Amateurs made their binding circles with sand, salt, or some other easily disturbed powder - all a trapped supernatural creature had to do was stand at the perimeter and blow, and the would-be exorcist suddenly became helpless prey.

He glanced towards home plate at his allies. A couple of them - amicable Professor Davis and that infuriating Johnston, who had persisted in teaching those classes on evil and the occult to countless M.I.T. undergraduates despite his official protests to the Administration and secret warnings to the doctor about imparting forbidden knowledge to the uninitiated - he knew from his work as a freelance exorcist. The learned Gregor Ycpia, however, he only had known by reputation until recently. A godless atheist of the Soviet mold, Dr. Ycpia's work nevertheless was studied religiously by the Inquisition, as his thoughts about the intersection of nature with what he called 'supernature' proved invaluable in solving some of the most ancient mysteries which had defied the Church's scholars and theologians for two thousand years.

Father Mendoza nodded at the battery of spectral photographers who would document this historic exorcism. They too were mercenaries in this business, and he and they had worked together many times before. One of the photographers looked up from his eyepiece and waved.

Owing to the special danger of this operation, the cameramen would record the particulars by remote control, safely ensconced behind the binding circle in a mobile home on Yawkey Way that had been modified to serve as the Department of Alchemy's field headquarters. Professors Davis, Johnston, and Ycpia would remain there as well, while Joao performed the ritual with the help of the heavily-armed Yuri - who had been an officer in the Russian Army's Special Forces before Ycpia hired him as a bodyguard to protect him from deranged doomsday cultists in Moscow - and the Scion, who was standing on home plate with what appeared to be a violin case strapped over his shoulder.

Father Mendoza looked Flynn over. Despite Art Davis' assurances about the boy's giant-killing lineage, the former Inquisitor had his doubts. There was something not quite right about this Scion.

Flynn noticed that the priest was staring at him. Already nervous, he strode up towards Father Mendoza and the waterlogged piano, forcing as broad a grin as his facial muscles could bear. "How's everything, padre? Are we finally gonna have a winning season when we're done here tonight?"

"That depends."

"On what?"

"A lot of things, Señor Flynn. Exorcisms aren't like having your tonsils taken out. There are always surprises, and any one of them could throw the ritual off and put us in jeopardy, if we're not careful."

Flynn had come to the mound looking for reassurance, and wouldn't be that easily deterred. "But Uncle Lucky said that you were the best, right?"

"Sim," Joao agreed, not out of pride but knowledge of the fact.

"And we've got the piano."

"Sim."

"And this crew is top-notch. They certainly seem to know what they're doing."

"Sim, Señor Flynn. All of this is true."

"So I'm the weak link, then." Flynn was no fool, he could read the uncertainty in the priest's eyes when he met his case. "You don't think I'm up to the job, do you?"

Father Mendoza hastened to explain himself. "That is not what I said."

"But it's what you believe."

Joao sighed. "Forgive me if I have given you that impression, Señor Flynn. This is no typical exorcism. The demon we are about to rouse is the most powerful any of us have ever encountered, so even under perfect circumstances we would find ourselves in for a fierce battle."

"Well you don't have to worry about me, padre. I'll stand my ground - just tell me what to do and it will get done."

"I have no doubt of that, my child." Father Mendoza clasped Flynn by the shoulder. "Prepare yourself now. It is time."

Doctors Ycpia, Davis, and Johnston had retired to the mobile headquarters, along with the spectral photographers and a few graduate students who worked as the department's technicians. On a hundred monitors, some tuned to visible light, others the far ends of the electromagnetic spectrum, still others specially rigged to detect unearthly emanations not found in any normal physics textbook, even at M.I.T., they watched the infield of Fenway Park. The technicians verified the operation of the equipment and patched an audio connection between the R.V. and the trio who would face the Bambino when the hour of midnight struck.

Yuri was checking that his beloved Kalashnikov had a fresh clip of the correct ammunition. The Department of Materials Science had cast for him a special alloy of wolfram and silver that had been sanctified in one of the Russian Orthodox monasteries on the peninsular retreat of Mount Athos in Greece. The resultant bullets were able to harm any supernatural entity, yet still could kill a mortal man if need be. Yuri grinned as the magazine snapped into the base of the rifle. He had a few other tricks up his sleeve for this "base ball" demon, should the priest and the hot dog man fail.

Flynn and Father Mendoza remained at the pitcher's mound with the piano. It was ten minutes until midnight. The priest issued his final instructions, which were carried back to the mobile headquarters over the audio link.

"I will start by casting the spell of binding, which will cage the fiend when we summon it. Then I will begin the exorcism ritual proper. With your help, Señor Flynn, we will summon this Curse and force it to assume a corporeal form. This should weaken it significantly and make it more vulnerable, but it also exposes us to risk as well. The demon will attempt to confuse us during this period, and may assume the guise of people we know to elicit our sympathy. Do not be fooled!

"It is also of the utmost importance that you maintain physical contact with me and the piano once the exorcism begins. I will need the essence of the demon in order to complete the ritual that will destroy it, and you are the best conduit for that. Again, the beast will attempt to break this link, either by guile or, failing that, by force.

"You have seen with your own eyes what this creature is capable of. If it attacks, the urge to break the link and run will be overwhelming. You must resist. Yuri is here to defend us. Remember that. He is a cold-blooded killer, but he is good at it, and that is all that matters right now.

"Now. Are you ready, Señor Flynn? Midnight approaches."

Flynn gulped, then nodded.

"Good. Are you hearing us clearly, Gregor?"

The Ukrainian's voice crackled over Fenway Park's loudspeaker, rattling through the empty bleachers and echoing along the imposing left-field wall known as the Green Monster.

"Yes."

"With your permission, I will now begin the binding ritual."

"Proceed."

Father Mendoza produced a large wooden crucifix onto which the Stations of the Cross had been carved in miniature. Flynn marveled at the craftsmanship, even as he tried desperately to keep breathing and not soil his pants. As the former Inquisitor began to chant in Latin, Flynn, who had served as an altar boy for his parish before devoting his Sundays to the Olde Towne Team, recognized a word here and there - power, glory, Satan, God, mercy, righteousness, and power once more for good measure. Then the priest gesticulated with his cross and fell silent, just as the stadium's digital clock flashed 12 o'clock.

"It is done."

Flynn had expected something a little more flashy - a humming, shimmering something, like what he always saw in the movies or on television - but everything was the same as before. The padre looked satisfied, however.

Then Flynn noticed the cameras. When the ritual had been completed, those devices set to record emanations beyond the normal pale of light, X-rays, and radio waves began to beep, whirr, and snap away. The thought that something had in fact changed made the hairs on the back of Flynn’s neck stand on end, or was that the something itself?

"Proceed with the summoning spell," Dr. Ycpia's disembodied voice commanded. Father Mendoza nodded to this invisible presence and turned to face Flynn.

"Give me your left hand, child, and place your right on the top of the piano. Remember, once I begin the spell, you must not break your contact with either me or the piano. Do you understand?"

Flynn croaked an affirmative response and gave the priest his hand, while he extended his other arm and planted his right palm onto the cover of the grand piano. He could actually feel the moist, rotten wood yield beneath his fingertips. The sensation made him even queasier than he already was.

He took a deep breath as Father Mendoza began to call forth the Curse from wherever it was hiding. Keeping one eye on the cameras, Flynn waited for it to appear, the murderer of the dreams of millions of New Englanders over a century.

The murderer of his father.

But something was wrong, Flynn could see it on the priest's face. As he neared the end of another round of chanting and waving the cross, Father Mendoza's Latin grew louder and angrier - as if trying to taunt the demon into revealing itself - until he finished the spell with a spittle-flecked shout that reverberated into the grandstands.

Nothing.

"Something is wrong, Gregor," Joao said, his dark Portuguese brow furrowed. "Are you registering any activity on your instruments?"

"No."

"I will attempt the spell again. Perhaps I mispronounced a syllable, though I doubt it."

"Proceed."

Father Mendoza inhaled and exhaled deeply, then attempted a smile for Flynn's benefit before beginning the summoning a second time. His Latin was flawless again, as were his accompanying gestures; nevertheless, the outcome was the same as last time.

Nothing.

"Still reading nothing, Gregor?"

"Nichevo."

"I do not understand what's going on here. If the demon is out there - anywhere out there - it has no choice but to obey this summons. The only way it could be avoiding the enchantment is if..."

Father Mendoza fell silent. Flynn glanced over at him, saw that the priest's gaze was riveted on a figure approaching the binding circle separating the infield from the outfield. It was Art Davis.

Flynn laughed. "Uncle Lucky, what are you doing out here? Thought you'd lend a hand?"

Father Mendoza cursed in Portuguese - or was it Latin? - then said, in a bloodless voice that sank Flynn's heart sunk into the deepest reaches of his innards:
"That is not Señor Davis."

Art Davis smiled. "Sure about that, Inquisitor?"

A panicked shadow crossed Joao's face as he looked at the apparition, then Flynn, then Yuri, who was cocked and loaded and in position ready in the home team dugout.
"Gregor."

"Da."

"Is Professor Davis in the mobile unit with you?"

A pause, then a whisper.

"Nyet."

Art Davis laughed, and stepped across the binding circle. Father Mendoza gasped.

"Oh, yes. Forgot to tell you, Joe, we were all out of your special holy water, so I substituted some Poland Spring. That's not going to affect the ritual, is it?"

"Jesu Christo."

"I don't think he's coming tonight, Joe."

This was too much for Flynn to process. "What the hell is going on?"

Father Mendoza eyed Professor Davis warily as he circled the pitcher's mound deliberately in a long, slow spiral.

"It's your uncle. Art Davis. He's the demon. That's why the summoning spell failed - he was already corporeal. He's been in human form for decades.

"I can't believe it, all of those years, and he was right here, right under our noses. Watching. Plotting. Guarding."

Flynn laughed nervously. "You're shittin' me, right? Uncle Lucky..."

Art Davis shrugged. "Sorry, son. The padre's hit the nail on the head, not that it'll do him any good at this point. It took a lot of finesse to set this trap, and I don't think I've left anything to chance tonight--"

"Enough!" Gregor Ycpia's voice boomed over the public address system. "Take him, Yuri!"

A spray of gunfire erupted from the Red Sox dugout, and a nicely-clustered salvo hit Professor Davis square in the chest. He registered the impact with a gleeful cackle.
"When in doubt, wear Kevlar." He fixed the duo on the mound with a deranged grin. "And now Yuri will take the head shot..."

They could see the muzzle flash, hear the bullets whiz, then stop in midair.

"...poor, predictable Yuri. Had he taken the sure thing first, he might have given me a nasty flesh wound..."

The hail of bullets suddenly reversed direction, spraying the dugout with friendly fire. There was a groan of pain from the dark recess, then a sickening thud followed by silence.

"...and if he'd worn a bulletproof vest himself, he might still be standing right now. He's a good worker, Gregor, but dumb as a post. I told you that you could do better, but you Russians were always a stubborn bunch."

"Go to Hell!" the Ukrainian spat.

"Oh, I'm going - and I'm taking all of you along with me for the ride. Gotta tie up those loose ends, you know!"

Father Mendoza grimaced. "You've been planning this showdown all along, haven't you? Gather the opposition and deal with them once and for all."

"You have to admit it's a lot easier than killing you one by one." Davis stared at Flynn. "Although that approach has its charms, as well, eh, Flynnie?"

"You fuckin' murderer!" Flynn yelled, and stirred to charge this thing that had masqueraded as his father's friend.

"Stand still, Señor Flynn! Do not break the link!"

The demon smiled a toothy grin slightly wider than physically possible, contorting Uncle Lucky's face to accommodate the unearthly rictus. "That's right, boyo. Don't want to lose contact." He paced within arm's reach of Flynn, taunting him. "After all, you're the Scion. Seventh son of a seventh son, born to the greatest family of demon killers to walk the earth.

"Oh, I've tussled with the Flynns before. Hang around a few billion years and see who you don't run into! I remember a Seamus Flynn who gave me a good drubbing back in the Dark Ages. This guy didn't need spectral photography and a goddamned pinko commie head shrinker with a hundred degrees up his keister to come after me. He just came after me. That's what Flynns do, you see.

"Your grandpappy came after me, oh yes he did. He was fresh off the boat, and he knew exactly what I was when he first laid eyes on me, taking batting practice at the Huntington Avenue Fairgrounds. He couldn't kill me, but he managed to drive me out of Boston. Son of a bitch had a whole battalion of altar boys on his side. They believed a little more back then, the Catholics, back before getting a little underaged tail became their reason for getting out of bed in the morning, eh, padre? Needless to say, I wasn't welcome in ol' Beantown anymore, so I pulled a few strings and got myself traded for a song. The rest, they say, was history."

"Bullshit," Flynn stammered, in a failing attempt to convince himself that what he now heard was not the truth. "Bull-fucking-shit."

"Oh, don't look so surprised! Or didn't grandpa fill you in on that crucial tidbit of family history - that the Curse was his doing? I was more than happy to make Boston my home, and Fenway Park the throne of a dynasty that would have put the Bronx Bombers to shame. But you didn't want it! Even back then, the Red Sox Nation's love for suffering eclipsed everything. I gave you happiness in the form of a baseball messiah, and all you could do was cast me out so you could bitch about it for the next thousand years."

Art Davis continued to circle the piano and the two would-be exorcists, his corporeal form now rippling with demonic potential. Father Mendoza attempted to shut out the beast's tirade with a desperate muttering prayer, but Flynn listened and tried to resist:

"I... I don't believe you."

The demon cocked an eyebrow clear off his human face. "A little spirit in the face of certain death - I like that. Your old man had that kind of dumb moxie, brimming with the blood of warriors but raised without a clue as to how to channel it. All I had to do is keep close - staying away from Grandpa, of course, until he was so far gone I could have appeared to him in all my incomprehensible splendor and he wouldn't have batted an eye - and fill your dad’s head with all the wrong ideas until he didn’t know which way was up."

Something resembling remorse swept over the demon's face. "Poor guy. Can you believe I actually liked him? He was nothing but good to me, which is actually rarer than you think in this world."

"Sure," Flynn shouted, livid. "You must have loved my father an awful lot to tear him to pieces!"

Art Davis snapped. "If Frankie could have left that goddamned piano alone, none of this would have happened! The one idea I didn't put into his walnut-sized brain, and he had to go and run with it. Of course I knew he didn't have a clue as to what he was doing, but someone who did would inevitably get wind of the search. Believe it or not, sonny boy, killing your father wasn't part of my plan..."

At that the monster's smile grew even wider and more impossible, and Flynn swore he could see Davis lick his lips before saying what came out of his unnatural mouth next:

"...although fucking your mother was!"

The bottom fell out of Flynn's world when the import of those five words registered. The revelation jarred Father Mendoza out of his shell-shocked mantra as well. "My God," he whispered, his olive complexion suddenly gone white as a hospital bedsheet.

"Fuck you!" Flynn cried out. He wrested against the priest's viselike grip to haul off and pound his tormentor, demon or no demon, but controlled himself at the last second, as the thing continued its incitement.

"That's exactly what she did, Flynnie - fuck me. Your mother wanted it so bad, she practically begged me for it. So I obliged. Give Frankie credit where credit's due, but after a daughter and six sons he wasn't much of a Casanova anymore, you know what I'm saying?"

"Stop it," Flynn whimpered. "Shut the fuck up..."

"Oh, your mother was so delicious that afternoon. I'd made sure that the time of the moon was right, and her egg was right there in the Fallopian tube for the intercepting, but it wasn't all about business, son. Can I call you 'son'? Because you sure as hell aren't a Flynn, seventh son of a seventh son. No, I saw to that. But can I tell you something now that we're all out in the open here, my boy, just between father and son? Your mom was one sweet piece of ass."

Flynn lost it. Wrenching his left hand from Joao's grasp and his right from the piano, he lunged at Davis, both fists flying.

"Noooooooooo!" Father Mendoza screamed. But it was too late.

The demon laughed at his offspring's attack, taking a sock to the jaw like a father tussling with a newborn baby. Davis brushed the boy aside and moving effortlessly towards the priest, who was frantically reaching for his mammoth wooden cross, and snapped his neck. Joao slumped lifelessly onto the dirt of the pitcher's mound, front side up. His face was a frozen mask of horror, upturned to the floodlights, the circling gulls, and the washed-out stars.

"So long, Joe." Davis turned back towards his son. "Don't feel too bad, Flynnie. He wouldn't have had a chance anyway, even if you'd stood your ground. You just put the padre out of his misery a little sooner than I would have.

"Speaking of which, you might want to close your eyes for this next part. I promise to make it quick and painless - it's the least I can do for my own flesh and blood."
Davis chortled and moved in for the kill; Flynn, eyes wide open could do nothing but watch the demon approach.

Suddenly there was a cry from the home team's dugout, followed by the flash of a muzzle and the sound of gunfire. Whap! Whap! Whap! Yuri didn't take any chances this time around, as three hollow-pointed bullets of wolfram and silver slammed into Davis' head, blowing it apart in a shower of brain and putrescent ichor.
The beast crumpled down onto its knees in the infield, howling half through what was left of its human mouth, half through those myriad microscopic mouths that comprised its true nature.

Flynn just stood there.

"Run!" Yuri cried out. "Iz only stunned."

Flynn tried to move, but his legs felt like lead. He looked back over at what was once his Uncle Lucky, now a hideous tangle of human flesh and feathery tentacles.
Yuri sprayed the demon again with his Kalashnikov, leaving the machinegun on automatic until he'd emptied the mystical clip of ammunition. The beast writhed and screamed as it shed itself of its human husk entirely and began to surge outward with its long spiral arms. The mercenary charged the pitcher's mound and grabbed Flynn by his shoulders.

"Stupid hot dog man! You must run now."

Flynn blinked at the Russian. Yuri smacked him across the face, hard. That got his attention. He stared at the swirling demonic form just to their right and at last the urge to flee returned to his lower body, filling his entire frame with adrenaline and fear.

He ran, not even looking back to see if Yuri was still with him. Out of the infield, into the Red Sox dugout, down the stairs, into the clubhouse, through a side door leading to the main concourse that ringed the park and opened onto Yawkey Way and Landsdown Street. He ran past the shuttered concession booths for beer, pretzels, steak tip sandwiches, hot dogs, Chinese food; past the kiosks that hawked baseball caps, t-shirts, souvenir pennants; past the foul-smelling entrances to the lavatories, which stank even when scoured with bleach; past the ramps that lead back into the bright lights of the playing field, where Flynn could hear what he imagined were Yuri's death screams over the howling of the beast.

He tried the Gate A exit, where the R.V. headquarters had parked. The metal gates were locked, and Flynn's heart sank when he saw that Ycpia and Johnston had turned tail and fled. Fuckers. He rattled the chains and the metal bars impotently before running to the next gate with a yell. Gate B, Gate C, Gate D, all held just as fast as the last. He was locked in Fenway Park with this thing that claimed to be his father, who once he was done with the crazy Russian would surely chase him down to finish the job. What a way to go.

Flynn leaned against the nearest support column to catch his breath and remembered suddenly what he'd strapped to his back before leaving home that morning as it now poked into his spine uncomfortably. He unslung the case from over his shoulder, opening it with trembling fingers to reveal the swaddled treasure within.
He unwrapped the protective shroud; a baseball bat gleamed in the darkness. No, not a baseball bat, Flynn thought to himself, feeling its heft. A weapon. If he was going to die tonight, and Fenway Park was to be his tomb, by God he was going to go down swinging.

Grandpa Flynnie had been no fool. Well aware that he'd only won the battle, and not the war, he had kept a watchful eye over Fenway Park and the family line, preparing for the inevitable final showdown between man and demon. He suspected that the Bambino was working his dark magics on the Red Sox from afar, and did his utmost to combat them when he could, although as his health and then his mind began to falter, he had to pick and choose his battles.

So when his son Francis fell in with bad company - in the guise of Art Davis, who thought he was being so clever by playing hide and seek with his old nemesis - although Grandpa could smell the demon's influence, he did not provoke an open conflict. Too much was on the line. An old coot like himself wouldn't last a minute against the beast, nor would his son, who despite his lineage lacked a warrior’s spirit.

No, the culmination of this fight lay in the future - this much Grandpa Flynn could divine. What he didn't see coming was the end of the family line, a maneuver that the Flynn patriarch had to concede to the demon’s cunning. After centuries of stalemate in the arena of physical combat, getting close and wiping out the Flynns with a single misguided act of love was a bit of brilliance, one that called for an equally clever response.

Fortunately Grandpa Flynn was up to the challenge.

Even though he knew the child was an incubus, even though he could feel the demonic energy like a wicked case of static electricity when he tousled the boy's hair, even though when he looked into those baby blue eyes he knew he was looking into the eyes of the Adversary and the end of his clan, Grandpa Flynn chose to love little James as if he were in fact that seventh grandson. Join hate with love, he thought, and let’s see who's left standing in the end.

Grandpa's greatest act of bravery would be the faith he entrusted to this demon child the family raised as its own, completely unaware of what James was. It pained him to abandon his own son Francis to his fate, but it was the only way to fool the demon into thinking it had triumphed in this chess match of Fate. Only long after his own death would the beast learn of Grandpa Flynn's final gambit; but it was in the end up to the boy, and the boy alone.

Well, not entirely the boy. Grandpa had one last trick left up his sleeve, a parting gift he left for his grandson in name and spirit - if not in blood - to aid him in his hour of need. In the old country they called it a Shillelagh, and it was the traditional weapon of Celtic warriors for millennia. The Flynns had mastered not only the art of crafting such war clubs, but also the considerably more difficult skill of enchanting them as well, for the purpose of fighting far more potent foes than rival clansmen.

This particular Shillelagh wasn't made from the traditional oak or ash, however, but crafted from a baseball bat - a very special bat. Flynn took a practice swing with the enchanted club and felt the wood sing to him. His muscles rippled strangely, crackling with latent demonic energies. Despite the fact he still thought he faced certain death, an inexplicable sense of exuberance coursed through his blood.

James had discovered it on his twenty-first birthday, a year to the day after his father had turned up dead in that half-frozen pond. While moving a bunch of old boxes around in the basement that hadn't been touched since Grandpa had originally put them there, decades ago, he had found the strange instrument case covered with mildew and must. Inside the case was this bat, with a letter written in Grandpa's hand that was addressed to him!

The note told him where this bat had come from, and why Grandpa had seen not to pass it as an heirloom to his son Francis, Flynn's father. Francis had a gambling problem, his grandfather's dead hand revealed to Flynn, and who knows what he'd do with such a priceless artifact, should he start betting over his head again.

"Keep this bat safe, Jimmy - you will know when it's time to use it." Until this very day, Flynn did not understand what his Grandpa had been talking about. “Use it?” What would he use a baseball bat for anyway, except a little home run derby? Although he had felt compelled to bring it along with him for this final showdown, until this very moment, he didn't realize what he was supposed to do with this...

Shillelagh. He hadn't heard that word since he was a little kid on St. Patrick's Day, but now it rolled off the tongue. That's what he held in his own two hands, his own two not-entirely-human hands. A Shillelagh.

At last Flynn realized and understood. With a laugh, he strode up the nearest ramp back towards the infield of Fenway Park, gaining strength with every step he took.

It was time to do battle.

---

In a voice that was not entirely his own, James Michael Flynn called the Curse of the Bambino by its name - its true name, which Grandpa Flynn had burned into the wood of the baseball bat many years ago. The demon heard and coalesced back into human form with an angry roar, this time into the likeness of the Babe himself.

Flynn trembled at the sight of George Herman Ruth appearing before him seemingly out of nowhere - in Yankee pinstripes, he couldn't help but notice - in between him and the piano still atop the pitcher's mound. Yuri was nowhere to be found - Flynn didn't have time to speculate as to whether this was a good or bad thing, but instead gripped the bat tightly and stood his ground.

"You should have run when you had the chance, son. You may know my name, but that won't keep me from tearing you limb from limb!" The Babe spoke with the voice of Art Davis, but neither guise fooled Flynn now. He knew what this thing was, could smell its fear as if it were his own. Its threats were empty now.

Flynn took a step forward.

"The piano won't help you now, boyo. You and the padre drained it dry, exorcism or no exorcism. Might as well throw in the towel now, and maybe I'll even spare you."

Flynn took another step and raised his Shillelagh. The Babe's eyes widened in horror.

"What... Where... How?"

Flynn smiled. "You remember your old bat, don't you, Dad? The first bat you used playing for the Red Sox? Well, Grandpa Flynn thought you might like it back someday."

Now the Babe could sense the Shillelagh's presence, hear the cursed wood sing a song of betrayal and vengeance. He could feel his son's strength waxing and his own waning as Flynn closed the distance between them, bristling with demonic essence.

Damn that old coot - Grandpa Flynn had checkmated him after all, snatching victory out of the jaws of defeat. So this is how eternity would end.

"Jimbo," he pleaded, his voice - the voice of Uncle Lucky - cracked and waivering.

"Don't. I'll lift the Curse, get out of town for good, anything. I swear. Just don't kill me. Please, son."

Flynn said nothing, only pointed his weapon at the newly-installed bleachers atop the fabled Green Monster, which yawned over left field. He was calling his shot, the demon realized with an unearthly shudder. Just like he had, all those years ago.

Flynn swung the bat; the Babe screamed.

---

A month later, Flynn hefted his steamer trunk up and down the infield grandstand seats, selling hot dogs as he had for years before, and would for years to come. It was a good day for baseball, sunny but not too hot for a late summer's afternoon. It was a good time to be a Sox fan, as well - having snapped their seven-game losing streak, the Olde Towne Team had gone on to win twenty-one in a row, a new Major League record, and were three outs short of winning number twenty two.

Sports pundits couldn't quite put their fingers on it, but things just seemed to be breaking the Sox way these days, as if a breath of fresh air had blown through Fenway Park and cleaned out the cobwebs of gloom and doom. As the postseason approached, and spirits were at an all-time for both players and fans, no one however was so foolhardy as to declare the Curse to be dead and buried.

Nobody but one, that was. Flynn smiled as he looked out over the infield towards the Green Monster, which was bright as an unbroken promise in the early afternoon sunshine.

It was going to be a season for the record books, he thought. Red Sox Nation was owed as much, after close to a hundred years of pain and suffering. And Flynn would see to it, at least for this season.

After that, they were just going to have to break down and do something about their pitching.