The Blue Moose Press—Glenhaven, CA

pen. produce. publish.

thebluemoosepress.com

This is a work of fiction. The characters and events in this story are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidence unintended by the author.

© 2014 by Robert Stikmanz

Cover illustration & design by Robert Stikmanz

Edited by Amanda Kimmerly

A early version of part I appeared in The Scroll volume 1, Zarathustra Publishing, Tijeras, New Mexico, 2011.

Rose Moon, a novella, by Robert Stikmanz

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-9827426-5-5

I. Stikmanz, Robert II. Title.

For information on other work by Robert Stikmanz, please visit robertstikmanz.com

For information on other titles from The Blue Moose Press, please visit thebluemoosepress.com

Acknowledgements

Rose Moon began as a treatment written at the suggestion of Duane Allen Humeyestewa, with an eye toward developing a screenplay. Instead, when Jeremiah Griffin of Zarathustra Publishing approached me about writing serial fiction for a new magazine, The Scroll, I revised and expanded the treatment into a four-part novella. An early version of part one appeared in The Scroll #1, the only issue produced. Set adrift by circumstances, Rose Moon suffered what fiction always suffers at my hands—multiple, extensive rewrites with sometimes unexpected results. Along the way the work benefited from comment by Gary Warner Kent and M. S. Lewis. Their gifts of time and insight have been invaluable. Special thanks go to Amanda Kimmerly for close reading and editorial assistance with the project, and to Christine Rose and Ethan Rose of The Blue Moose Press for providing a channel.

This one is for my dad.

Rose Moon

a novella

by Robert Stikmanz

The Blue Moose Press

I

A hair-thin spiral of gleaming metal shaved the end of a universal joint to its required tolerance. Bigger MacGregor found it satisfying in a physical way to watch precision emerge behind a continuous, razor-edged curl. As the twist of scrap fell away, Bigger switched off the lathe, stepped away from the generator treadle, releasing the shaft head and raising it to contemplate his work. Unconsciously, he hummed a descending scale, harmonizing with the slowing tones of damping rotors.

When the harmonics wobbled unexpectedly, he thought first that something had gone wrong with the generator. Stripping off his face shield, he cocked an ear. The odd rumble came not from slowing machinery, but outside. He placed the shaft head carefully beside its companion pieces on the workbench and headed to the yard for a view of the skies. The face shield landed on a tool cabinet along the way.

The morning had been still, with high-flying puffs of cloud that changed shape faster than they crawled toward the horizon. Variable winds drove through the afternoon, gusting from a weather system in the region. Bigger halted under the eave of the fabrication bay to take in the hills separating the rural world of MacGregor Pedal Cars from town. Scattered storm cells had moved close while he had worked through the heat-charged afternoon. Atop trailing purple curtains of rain, the cells strode the land, twenty, thirty, sometimes forty miles apart. The fat, blue-and-white cauliflower shapes of their waists billowed upward into huge, flat-topped masses of cloud. Lightning, bright enough to smite the eyes, flickered up and down blue-black squall lines in the distance.

A new rumble, twin to the one that called him out, erupted from the southwest, still miles away, beyond the shop building. His dogs lifted their heads to watch him stride into the yard to investigate, but they made no move to follow.

Angry purple boiled in the sky over Standing Rock, the hill rising from Bigger’s few acres. Rapid flashes lit the gloom, but no bolts were visible above the ridge. These would not be long in coming, he was sure. A new wave of thunder cracked before it rolled.

The hair on his nape and the smell of the wind told him everything critical about changing conditions, but he checked his weather station anyway. Atop the mast bolted to an awning post on the shop, the vane whipped, now bold, now hesitant, from point to point. Perched below it, the anemometer spun and lagged without pattern. When he tapped the barometer, the needle sank. Bigger turned to his inventory.

MacGregor Pedal Cars, of which Bigger was owner, operator, designer, chief fabricator and sales force, had twelve vehicles in the yard. Post-petroleum economic contraction had created a market for comfortable, efficient, people-powered transport. A few corporations dominated the industry, as one would expect, but movement of goods became increasingly complex after collapse of the old United States. This fact, combined with the low-tech foundation of pedal cars as objects of production, had inspired a thriving niche of local manufactories. Quite apart from an aura of cool—Shapely Frakt, legendary jam band from the Los Angeles Free State, had featured their customized, nine-person MacGregor tour bus in a recent video—Bigger’s machines were regarded as brilliant, innovative and meticulously built. It was a reputation that allowed him to justify a location far enough out of town and off the highway that he dealt only with people who intended to see him. His compromise with standard business practice was to offer in-town pick-up service as a courtesy for first time buyers.

Using a hoist to stand them on end for storage, he could get four cars into the fabrication bay, but only three in the repair bay. The spaces were about the same, but as sure as he completely filled both, some contingency would raise its head and he would be sorry. Fortunately, the mix of models on his lot included five utilitarian models that would fare well staked under tarps.

It took only minutes to wheel each of seven vehicles under cover and crank it into position. As befit a land with changeable weather, stakes to tie down the remaining cars were set permanently in the ground. Covering the vehicles left in the yard, he noted that the cells in the heavens clustered more densely. Brilliant daylight still reached fat fingers through the vanguard of a broader front, but the sun itself was obscured. To the west, no gaps remained in the furious sky.

Details—a tree, the ruin of a cowshed, the wind-whipped grass of MacGregor’s field—shone eerily, saturated with color stark against the lightning-struck purple of the coming storm. As he moved from one car to the next, first anchoring the vehicle, then fitting it beneath a tarp, he watched the light change, shifting through a riot of hues and intensities.

He was attending the last of the vehicles, a rally version of a farm trike, when a faint shadow fell across the knot he tied. Bigger snugged the rope, noting the arrival of a visitor without looking up. He cinched a tarp over the three-wheeler, as the light turned rose and golden.

The silence of his dogs surprised him. Belle’s head was up, her pose inflected by coyote trace mingled somewhere in her predominantly hound ancestry. Her soft “woof” in response to his unspoken query was both assurance of no danger and a prod to step out of his thoughts. It was a sound she made for non-threatening strangers. Usually, it meant “customer.” Bigger could not imagine who would come from town to look at pedal cars with dark so close and heavy weather on the way.

Toro, an oversized male version of Belle, exhaled noisily. The signal was unambiguous. Fully aware of the newcomer, Toro knew beyond doubt that the moment required nothing from him. Bigger straightened to face whomever negotiated his quarter mile of winding drive.

She was farther away than he expected. The long cast of her shadow reached the yard though she was still some distance from the gate. For an instant, he could take in only black curls framing her face, and the onrushing colors of evening reflected in her eyes. She seemed, at first, to have no scale, and—for an instant, as though his vision faltered—she seemed only abstractly human, more tendency than shape, like a walking elemental. A trick of the light, he decided.

She looked around as she approached, ignoring Bigger. The old frame farmhouse with its afterthought additions drew her scrutiny, as did the long, low structure of bays and workshop that it faced across the yard. Her critical eye paused on the lean-to bump of his chickenhouse, then danced over tarp-covered forms of the hand-built pedal cars.

From where he watched, she seemed to walk out of the moon. Huge and red behind her, its nearly full face kissed an arc of horizon free of the turbulent clouds that claimed the setting sun. Rising defiantly, the moon cast gold and purple onto the advancing belly of the storm. Colors thrown back by the clouds spilled into the woman’s moonshadow, shifting across him with the sway of her hips.

The strange light dazzled Bigger, making her hard to behold. She registered, first, as a series of impressions: a small woman, no taller than his chest. Hair so black it gleamed blue in the highlights. Skin like coffee with cream. She wore an unadorned shift, white, sleeveless, plain to the point of stark, but woven seamlessly, impossibly, of gossamer. Catching her as he watched, rain molded the garment to her body, making it clear that she wore nothing else.

When the first drops pelted down, the dogs rose from their sprawl near the repair bay and crossed the yard, mounting the steps to the porch. This in itself told Bigger something about the woman. Normally, they would have been at his side, and stayed close until he sent them to cover. Not now. Far from challenging the stranger, they had, in fact, walked away. While he waited in the rain, the dogs sheltered on the porch, pressed against the shiplap siding of the house where only the strongest gusts managed to wet them.

His visitor was indifferent to the effect of the downpour on her clothing and equally indifferent to the effect she had on him. Were it not for his chickens, he might have stayed frozen, eyes fixed on her every step. The noisy distress of his birds, however, broke her spell, and he swung around to see why they were still in the weather.

His alpha hen, Jefita, sat in the opening of the coop, looking on as the rest of the flock dithered wet and distressed. Unwilling to challenge her, the other hens huddled miserably, cackling their upset.

“Hey!” Bigger snapped at Jefita. “Move it!”

The hen settled herself more resolutely, but otherwise did not react. Bigger scooped a stone from the yard and fired it side-armed into the wind-gong bonging softly above the door of the coop. The missile struck with a clang! that drove Jefita backward, flapping into the chickenhouse. He tallied the other birds as they filed in. The ruddy hen, his little wanderer, was absent. She would have to wait. Bigger turned back to the drive.

The woman was through the gate, much closer than he expected, as though she had leapt forward while he faced away.

Drenched, her shift clung, all but transparent, a quality of her skin more than a dress. She ignored this, making no move to hide her breasts visible through the sheer fabric. Even dry the insubstantial material would have hidden little of what lay beneath, though it was obviously tougher than it looked, and she wore it with unconcern. The single item that she carried, she carried low, perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, where it lent a sop to modesty.

Glancing to see what she held, Bigger’s sight was arrested by a finely carved wooden chest. Though hardly larger than a shoebox, the weight of it pulled down her shoulders and caused her to lean forward slightly as she walked. The textured relief of its wooden surfaces seemed to rush across the distance between them, filling his vision. Unimposing in size, it was still an insistent presence. Around it, he imagined condensing vapors of power and gravitas. He stood transfixed as step by step she carried the object into the yard.

The woman scrutinized him, assessing from the ground up. Bigger was aware of this peripherally, but could not look away from the box she held. Its detail grew increasingly clear as she brought it closer. Lightning flashed directly overhead with a resounding crack that returned him to the world in which he stood gawking. Rain tunneled cold down the back of his neck into his sopping shirt. His eyes flicked to her breasts and then to her face. Failing to decode her expression, he dropped his gaze again to the box.

Shaped like a miniature treasure chest, iron bands bound its body and arched lid. The bands were unadorned, contrasting with the elaborately chiseled wood. Even from a distance, the materials looked ancient. The oiled grain of the box shone as if from generations of touch. When the woman drew near, he saw chest to chest across the front two standing bulls with human heads. The heads faced out, as though watching him.

Bigger was no anthropologist, but he was a wide-ranging lay reader of science. On that basis and no more, he thought the design Mesopotamian. If not a scientist, though, he was both an artisan and a careful observer, and he could say with certainty that the box was an epitome of craft. Like the woman’s shift, the balanced lines and invisible seams were tokens of perfection. By reflex, he assumed it was a reproduction, a re-creation of some lost or degraded original. A late copy, it had to be. That a wooden artifact in such perfect state might have survived from Sumer or Akkad was inconceivable. Still, his eyes told him, that even if a copy, it was very old, and surpassing fine. The rain beading on its polished surface could not be good for it, yet the woman approached him without haste, stepping with sure feet even as the downpour ran in sheets over the cinder drive. She paid no more heed to the rain on the box than upon her shift.

These thoughts formed and passed in less than a breath, more than a blink. His eyes flickered back and forth from the box to all points of her, assembling a sense of her appearance from details. Backlit by the huge rose moon, she fixed him with eyes that he could tell were on him only from the glint of their highlights. She came purposefully, carefully, gracefully through the storm. From her sopping tangle of hair, he knew that, when dry, a nimbus of black curls framed her face. Skirting those eyes lost beneath her brows, he followed the high curve of her cheeks to the bow of her lips, then shot decorum and stared at the shift molded to her small, erect breasts. Desire flooded him with a shock. Bigger let his gaze bolt, looking to her side, observing her in his peripheral vision. This made him very aware of her hips swinging side-to-side from a slender waist. She walked with a motion that made his mouth go dry. He licked his rain-soaked lips.

She still watched him closely. Her head tilted as she closed, emphasizing the difference in their heights. A hair under two meters, he measured himself, a little more if one allowed the waves of his carrot top, with its sprangs of premature gray. Bigger imagined himself as she saw him, a round-shouldered figure in overalls, no longer young, not yet middle-aged, still lean, a dusting of freckles beneath the hard-won tan of his face. He straightened. A grin plucked her mouth and faded.

At last, their eyes met. He saw her brow lift when she registered the pale, liquid green of his irises. All his life he had heard how unusual their color, how beautiful and frightening. Her surprise made him self-conscious. He dropped his gaze, and found himself pulled again by her body, so he looked back to her face. The woman continued peering up, seeking confirmation of some unknown in his expression. The doubled, two-against-two rush of his heartbeat swelled in his ears.

“Mr. MacGregor?”

She stopped before him, waiting for acknowledgement. Bigger stared at her moving lips, but said nothing. Doubting suddenly, she looked around, apparently hopeful someone else might appear.

“Bigger MacGregor?” she tried again. Tossing her chin, she indicated a legend painted on the outside of the fabrication bay. “MacGregor Pedal Cars. Mr. MacGregor, he is here, yes?”

“Yes,” Bigger echoed vacantly, then roused as though coming awake. He closed his eyes and opened them, shuddering off the distraction of her presence. She shifted the box to one hand, using the other to swipe a wayward curl behind an ear. Again he said softly, “Yes,” then he squared his shoulders and spoke too loudly, “Yes! I’m Bigger MacGregor.”

The sudden boom of his voice embarrassed him, and he ducked his head to hide his blush.

“I’m sorry. You’re the first woman wearing an invisible dress to walk out of the moon this week. My manners were overthrown.” He wiped his hand on the leg of his overalls and extended it. “Please, come inside and get dry.”

She ignored his hand with a tic of distaste. Inclining her head to point where, she advised him, “My car, Mr. MacGregor. It is out in the lane. It has ceased to function.”

Metrical and sibilant, hers was a definite but unplaceable accent. Though she spoke precisely, shifting consonants told him she was not speaking her mother tongue. The depths from which she stared made him wonder if the present was her native time.

“Your car?” he mouthed, groping for his thoughts.

Bigger went up on his toes and craned his neck to scan near where his drive met the dirt road across his property. At first he saw no sign of a vehicle, neither at the turn-in, nor along the graded cut that led toward town. When he spotted the canopy, it peeked over tall grass from the unlikely direction, near where the roadway ended, unofficially, among washouts and loose cobbles on the slope of a hill called Standing Rock.

“I see it,” he told her. “You missed the turn-in? I’m surprised there was room to turn around.”

“No.” The shake of her head was a single twitch. “I drove straight here.”

“You came over the rock?” he asked, incredulous. “Maps say there’s road, but I can’t remember the last time anyone tried it. You made it in a pedal car?”

“Mr. MacGregor!” For an instant, she looked like she would hit him with the box. “May we discuss my route somewhere out of the rain? Preferably after my car is under shelter?”

Her words stung, not least because he deserved it. From first sight of her, he had been, in a very real way, almost thoughtless. He struggled to recover.

“Oh, right. Right! You’re drenched,” he stated the obvious. “Listen. Go left on the porch to the hot tub. The robe hanging there is clean. I put it there last night, fresh from the wash. Make yourself comfortable in the house while I see about your car. Tea things are in the kitchen. Kettle’s on the stove.”

Passing him without another word or look, she balanced the box on her hip with one hand. The other swung free in time with her steps. Bigger shielded his eyes and watched her saunter, unhurried, through the curtain of rain. He made himself turn away before she climbed the steps to his house.

Once she had left his field of vision, Bigger became acutely aware of the downpour. Arriving at the same time she had, the rain had been a background detail, a condition of environment to note in memory of the moment: “When first I laid eyes on her, the sky was falling.” His guest out of sight, the weather exploded upon his attention. It had been many months since a storm like this had raged. Sodden as he was, it seemed pointless to worry about rain gear for himself; there was, however, a need to protect the interior of the woman’s car.

“Customer!” he corrected the frame of his thought. Transparent dress or not, she was a customer.

He detoured through the repair bay for his road kit and a weighted tarp.

“And I’m a professional,” he mumbled.

Water ran inches deep over the cinders of his drive as the rain came down faster than the landscape could direct it. Bigger splashed gamely along the driveway curves, but slowed at the road where mud made the footing less secure.

Reaching the vehicle, he found that its driver had made no effort to pull off the road, for which he silently praised her. Had she pulled off, or even pulled too far to the right, the car would have mired beyond hope of one man moving it alone. Tracks told him she was hewing to the grassy crown at the center of the lane when she stopped. Four fat, all-terrain bike tires resting on the vegetated center promised that mud would not be his primary challenge.

The machine was fully enclosed, a custom-built coupe two-seater with a sculpted body and hatches mounted to swing up and forward. Bigger threw the folded tarp onto the roof and opened the driver’s side. A hand on the steering grips, he put his shoulder to the hatch frame, bracing his feet on the muddy grass in the middle of the road. The car rocked forward when he shoved, but did not roll. A check of the levers showed that neither parking brake nor wind anchors were set.

“I was afraid of that,” he muttered, reaching for the tarp. With a flip of his wrists, the fabric snapped and spread, dropping onto the cab. Even though weighted around its perimeter, getting the tarp settled evenly over the car in the gusting storm took both effort and comment. At last, he worried it into a position that allowed him to open the hatch fully without exposing the interior to wet.

Leaning in to release the driver’s seat and flip it out of the way, he popped the latch and froze. The seat’s retraction mechanism was almost identical to the one in his cars. The efficient, economical fold of the parts had been one of his cleverer designs. Clever enough that he held a patent, granted three years before on a provisional basis and wending its way through treaty conventions of the North American successor states. Wear marks on the latches and pedals suggested the vehicle was about that old.

A closer look at the apparatus of curves and pivots revealed proportions differing slightly from his. The hardware was more gracile, more elegant. He shifted the seat back and forth, watching the interplay of parts. It was his design, but improved. The look suggested copy from his very first production model, stolen almost day one. He knew every manufacturer with a license, and none of them had modified the shape and movement in this way. A quick inspection of the cabin showed no obvious maker’s mark. Thunder reminded him of his immediate purpose. He set aside the mystery to puzzle out later, in a sheltered location and a drier time.

Raising the cowling over the drive-train, however, revealed new surprises. A variety of kinds of linkage between pedals and shaft were current in human-powered transport, but instead of one of those he found a row of flywheels. It was clearly a yoked sequence, but constructed in such a way that he could not tell how momentum transferred from one to the next. Testing the nearest wheel with a finger, he found that it turned silently, without detectable resistance. Its neighbor began to counter-rotate at half the speed. When the next crept into motion, spinning the same direction as the first, he laid his hand over the array so the moving wheels brushed to a halt.

Bigger would have probed further, but a gust found its way under the tarp to remind him, again, that he was cold and wet. Curiosity buttoned, he released the latch his fingers found under the flywheels, and swung them out of the way on an assembly like that of the seat. Beneath were three jointed shafts in parallel and a fourth askew, separated at a broken coupling.

The intact joints of the unbroken shafts were as incomprehensible to him as the mechanics of the flywheels. That such shapes could do anything did not seem possible. If the functionability of the parts was a mystery, however, the effect of the break was not. An arm of the damaged coupling had snapped loose and wedged among the other shafts, preventing them from turning. He added “parse the linkage” to an accumulating list of oddities this car would require him to figure out. For the moment, he pried loose the jam, pulled a cable-tie from his kit and secured the broken piece away from the other shafts. The wheels, happily, would now roll. Quickly rearranging the tarp so that he could see through the windshield, he put a shoulder back to the hatch frame and pushed the car up the drive to his yard.

The full fury of the storm burst as he left the repair bay. Rain, heavy before, now drove down with painful force, its angle changing unpredictably with the wind. In passing, he scooped the little wandering hen from where its miserable huddle beneath the scant protection of a sumac, tucked her into the crook of an elbow, and dashed to the house.

The dogs rose when he stomped up the steps, and crowded close to enter with him as he pulled open the screen. This was unusual. In most weather, even the foulest, Toro and Belle chose to shelter on the porch or inside the open bays. A feral pack ranged the area, and not infrequently had to be discouraged from breaching the fence. If his dogs pressed to get out of the weather, this blow, bad as it was, would probably get worse.

Lightning strikes came rapidly one after another, marching closer. Thunderclaps rattled the house. His hair prickled from the ionized air as he pushed through the door, the dogs brushing past into dry warmth. Bigger released the hen into a nest box kept in the entry for such moments, slid the overalls straps from his shoulders and pulled off his shirt. With a nod of thanks, he accepted a towel the woman held waiting. She retreated, turning her back as he dried his face. He paused, eyeing the shape her figure gave his terry-cloth robe.

“What’s your name?”

She went stiff at the sound of his voice, apparently surprised that he addressed her.

“What do I call you?”

“Eanna,” she said without turning. “You may call me Eanna.”

He waited to see if there was more. Still without facing him, she added, “You should get out of those wet things, Mr. MacGregor. You are courting a chill.”

Quickly, he stripped off the rest of his clothing. Towel knotted at waist, he hurried for the shower.

*

Fifteen minutes later, Bigger emerged in drawstring pants and a T-shirt to find he still confronted the back of his guest. Belle crouched at the front door, staring fixedly, as though expecting someone or something to come through. He spotted Toro lying on the rug near the kitchen, head between forelegs but eyes open, positioned where he could watch the other doors into the room, and all the windows. The big dog spared him a look, flicked a glance to the woman, then sank back into his own alert counsel. Belle never stirred.

Eanna stood close to a wall, hugging herself, flinching at the immediacy of simultaneous thunder and lightning. Hanging where she faced was a circular plaque, a small hand cast in plaster, bright pink except for a name, Rebecca, below the palm in a child’s scratch and colored turquoise. Corners where the wallpaper had not faded stuck out behind the plaque, marking the place of an absent rectangle, perhaps something framed, like a photo. Bigger came no closer, watching her reach out as though to cover the cast with her own hand, but she jerked back at a flash to the west that threw stark shadows from momentarily brilliant details of the room. Another strike to the northeast lit her terry-clad form, sparking rainbows and highlights in the black tangle of her hair.

She was shaking. At first he thought she wept, but she did not. Trembling, not weeping, gripped her, although the violence of the shivers wrung her out in shallow panting much like sobs. Bigger stopped before reaching her.

“Eanna?”

She spun at his voice. Eyes wide and body taut, she vibrated with intensity that matched the storm.

“The old one is angry!” She cried. “He cannot see, but he knows I am near.”

The dark outside was ripped away, only to collapse back upon the house beneath a blast of thunder. She half crouched, finally looking at him directly.

“Shutters!” she demanded. “Are there shutters?”

“Yes!” Bigger jumped to show her. “They just crank shut. I made them myself. Come on.”

Eanna made no move from beneath the plaque. Bigger went to the windows in turn, cranking closed accordion-fold the shutters in the room where she stood, and then throughout the house. Returning, he found she still half crouched, still hugged herself, still trembled. Lightning came, a chaotic volley, so close one after another that the ground beneath them shuddered from the strikes. Between crashes of thunder, the wind carried snatches of baying and howls from the feral pack. Bigger thought it strange they had not gone to ground with the storm. They were faint through the din, but drawing closer. Eanna’s head shifted. She heard them also.

“Not to worry,” Bigger joked. “The house may creak, but most of the construction is solid. We’re all set for tempest, flood and savage beast.”

She ignored him as though he had not spoken, her head turned rigidly away. She stared, apparently through wall and distance, at the running pack.

“Eanna?”

When she did not respond, Bigger moved into her line of sight. Terror and fascination warred across her face. She peered at him as from a great distance. Sinking to her knees, she spoke, her voice husky.

“He knows that I have what he has lost.” Beads of sweat stood out on her forehead. “I am veiling us as best I can, but he knows I am close. He eats away at me!”

Bigger knelt beside her. He took one of her hands to clasp, but she snatched it away and clung more tightly to herself.

“It’s a storm,” he assured her. “It’s just energy churning in the atmosphere.”

Looking away, she muttered through gritted teeth. The language was not English.

“It’s a storm,” he soothed. “A bad one, but it will pass.”

She inhaled prodigiously. Shaking her head, Eanna opened her mouth to answer, but before words emerged, lightning struck in a cascade. Like hammer blows, behind the house, in front and to the side, the flashes blasted through the slits of the shutters like an eruption of blue-white into the world. Bigger froze, all the hair of his body standing on end from the charge in the air, but the triple blasts drove Eanna onto him. Clamping him with her thighs, the borrowed robe falling open, she grabbed Bigger’s head in both her hands.

“He eats away at me!” she shouted.

“Who eats at you?” Bigger’s hands came up to cover hers. “Who is here besides us?”

“The old one.” The words seemed to tear out of her throat. “He pulls at the veil. We must throw him off. Kiss me!”

“What?”

Bigger gulped, perplexed.

Eanna’s features softened. She released him and stepped away, looking anywhere but at his face. The fleeting shyness departed an instant later. Seeing him without the formless cloak of his overalls, she registered the plunging vee of his shoulders to his hips. Almost smiling, she brushed at the furrow in his brow with her thumb.

“Through my thoughts of him, he sees.” Her voice was low, and coarse, as from fever. “He is lost if my mind turns away.” Slowly, Eanna lifted her chin to confront his still bewildered look. She added, unblinking, “Please. Kiss me.”

Though the request was startling, her earnestness drew him forward. Bigger parted his lips to respond, but her mouth covered his, her tongue a grace note, flicking to touch spit to his spit and retreat. Like a switch was thrown, Bigger fell into the kiss as into another world. The external environment rushed away, leaving her contact, her scent growing musky and hot like primordial vapor. Her mouth on his mouth.

He plunged into silence. Sound retreated as though swept away. Her mouth on his mouth, that was the whole of being. Her tongue touched his tongue, had always touched his tongue. Never had his mouth not sealed to her mouth.

Slowly, into the muffled absence came a pulse, two-against-two, familiar, far off but surging rapidly closer. All at once the beat defied the storm and rushed into the world, pounding like cycles of a titanic engine. Another sound, too, overrode the rattle and blast, a low, shifting fundamental, a deep soughing baroque with overtones.

In staggering stop-motion, he lifted his head to gasp for air.

At first he did not recognize the enormous pulse as his beating heart, nor the soughing as his breath. When he realized that the great noise blanketing his senses was the song of his own life, his hearing pierced it. He heard the heaving breath of other lungs and felt on his ribs the pounding of a heart through another’s chest. Two-against-two, the rhythm was not his but reacted to his, faster, insistent, putting spurs to his imagination. The throb beneath her breasts paced his in counterpoint.

Eanna swung her face expectantly toward him. Half wary that she might turn away, he swam forward, but her mouth opened readily to the exploration of his tongue. She pulled blindly at his clothing as his arms encircled her, one within her robe, one without. Feeling muscles twitch beneath his fingertips, he traced down the small of her back with his inside hand, following the belling curve to her thigh. She molded to him. Bigger rose, swept her up and bore her forward to the couch. He tore loose from her arms to strip off his shirt.

She watched, unflinching, the parted robe a frame to her body. Her chest rose and fell as he stared into her, eye for eye, and rose and fell still as he drank in her form. Unconsciously, he licked his own lips at the swelling sight of hers. Bigger licked again at the sight of her breasts, small, round, nipples erect. His mouth went completely dry when his gaze descended the curves of her belly to the manicured hair at the join of her legs.

Lowering to the floor in front of her, he placed a hand inside each of her knees and parted them. His eyes again sought hers as he moved into the wedge of space. Eanna grew still, giving him no sign. He leaned to kiss her, and she pressed upward, responding, but this time he did not allow her to lock into it. The play of his mouth on hers was glancing, a provocative nibble, a feint as his hand slowly traveled the inside of her thigh. With a gentle, circular motion, he massaged ever higher on her leg until the saddle of his palm found the cleft at her center. He felt her grow moist, and pressed there as he descended, kissing beneath her chin, then the hollow of her throat. Opening his mouth wide to caress her breast, tongue at her nipple, he began to shift his hand, gently palpating the slick, hot swell of her reaction.

She gripped him with her thighs when the tip of his finger entered her. He nibbled her other breast, then kissed down her torso until halted by the strength of her hold. Bigger flexed his arms and dropped, forcing her legs enough apart that he could dive puckishly for the tender flesh high on her groin. He plucked the soft skin lightly with his teeth.

Again he slid the tip of his finger inside her, but now, little by little, he worked it deeper. Up and down, a feather’s touch, his thumb traced the folds where his fingers pressed. Pushing lower, he slowly forced his elbows apart, spreading her legs wide. Eanna drew them up, raising her pelvis insistently to his touch. Bigger probed and stroked with finger and thumb until she began to push back. She growled when he withdrew his hand, but made an altogether different noise when he pressed his face between her legs to the fork. He drew the pale, vulnerable skin between his lips and released it with a pop. Once, twice, to the left first, then to the right. His nose took her scent. He paused, the stubble of his cheek against the satin flesh of her upper thigh.

Eanna shuddered at the prickling of his chin, pulling her leg away. Bracing a foot on Bigger’s hip, she wriggled more solidly onto the couch. Her right hand blindly seized and released handfuls of his hair, laboring in time with her breathing. She moaned, a grudging, nearly silent guttural.

A twitch of his neck plunged him afresh into her scent. Bigger opened his mouth wide to cover the moist seep of her vulva. Following his finger, he reached his tongue inside her, though as his finger slipped farther in, his tongue slid upward to lap higher more than deep. Tiny thrusts, he pushed a second finger to join the first. Eanna bucked and squirmed. He shoved the fingers inside her to the knuckles. Tongue and lips sealed to her warm, moist flesh, he began to suck.

His heart pounded like walking mountains, an entire range in lock-step to the ferocious in-and-out of his breath. Eanna snatched gasping at air, now slower, now fast. Bigger sucked and kissed and nibbled and licked, learning her pleasure, reflecting it. Time dilated. She drew her legs even wider. When he reached the exquisite lesson of her aroused clit, he studied diligently until she pushed him off. He pressed back, lower, licking into her, stretching his tongue as far as it would reach. Eanna snatched his hair in both hands, and bellowed. His finger probed deep inside her, straining, until he curled it back to massage her vaginal wall. He sucked as he probed, and tongued up and down.

Her tension shifted. Eanna went limp, not in surrender but to better envelop, curling her back with her legs high, Bigger began to rotate his fingers inside her, slowly at first. He twisted one way as he pushed deep, the other as he pulled back. Surprised, Eanna gasped, but caught on, and countered each twist with a flex of her hips. He pushed faster, bobbing, and began to suck in earnest. Her hands slapped onto his head, one to push him away; the other, more powerful, pulling him tight.

Peaking, she snapped her legs up, locking his head. With both hands, she grasped his skull and pulled, forcing his face into her crotch. She kicked as she spasmed with pleasure. Bigger continued to suck, his fingers still stroking and probing, although with his nose forced against the bottom swell of her belly, he found it hard to breathe. His distress became acute when a second climax followed her first and she pulled his face tighter, squeezing her legs around his head like a vise. The sound of his heart in his ears rose again as his breathing choked to a wheeze.

Pulling both hands free, he tried first to pry her legs from his head, but she had gone rigid. His position gave him no leverage. He slapped her legs and arms, but she was oblivious. The strain in his chest became agony as he fought to pull more air into the strangled pipe of his respiration. It was not enough. Slipping from consciousness, he heard, coming through her body, a scream of outraged joy as Eanna swept to a third peak. Bigger fell into black, unaware too swiftly to have caught from outside the house the final, pattering staccato of departing rain.

II

Eanna blew on his eyelids to wake him. Bigger flinched, and blinked, puzzled by the solemnity of her expression.

Their location shifted. Light fell upon them from the open door to the bedroom, a blood cast rather than the soft white of the house LEDs. They knelt facing each other, between them the unexplained wooden chest she had carried when she arrived.

Eanna spoke to him, but the words were incomprehensible. Bigger was unsure whether she spoke an unknown language or if her speech was broken up. The quality of her voice was fractured, as though colliding with another, distinct existence. She waited expectantly for a response. When he did not react, she spoke again. He watched her lips, hoping for a clue to what she said. When he still did not respond, she rocked forward and deftly flipped open the chest.

The lid blocked his view of the insides, but not of the blue-white pulse shining onto her from the recess. She rummaged the contents and took out a small, luminous object sandwiched between her finger and thumb. As she turned it, inspecting it exhaustively, he saw she held a cube glowing dimly from within. Nothing about the appearance of the object made sense to him, not its texture, not its color. It changed as she turned it, seeming, from some angles, incompletely material. The phrase, “compressed light,” came to him unbidden. “Yes,” he murmured. That about caught it. A leaky little cube of compressed light.

Eanna spoke again, her tone soothing. She rocked forward, off her heels, rising upright on her knees to push the object against his forehead. He had a fleeting sense of pressure at the hollow above his brow, and then a jolt as the object passed into his skull.

His eyes opened wide, and he fell away from her into unbounded space. Darkness swarmed toward him, closing first to enwrap and then to draw him down. Bigger tumbled backward, head over heels. He felt the object inside his head decompress, expanding while he fell, and felt, too, an itch spreading as precise tendrils snaked from it to trace his axons. An aura he could not observe, visible in afterthought, visible only in the signature of its travel, diffused along his synapses. A million impossible colors flickered into his awareness. There was something he knew as the aura spread, coded in the sensing of it. A knowledge was becoming his, innately, although knowledge of what he could not say.

His tumbling became a slow roll, himself a mote adrift in vast convections. The boundlessness knit around him, mirrored in his breast by a flush of contentment. At a moment he did not observe, Bigger’s fall transformed into a rocking motion. His descent ceased, or became imperceptible. He rocked, clasped to the bosom of being, thinking nothing. His respiration slowed. Soothed by the hum of his own atoms, he folded into stillness.

*

Either the sound of the door woke him, or he imagined the sound of the door when he woke. Bigger lay atop the covers. Though he strained to hear, he knew at once that no one else was in the house. It took only a minute to rise and confirm that he was alone. The robe Eanna had worn hung from a hook on the bathroom door. The chest, an enigma his hands twitched to open, sat on his dining table, evidence that his absent guest had not been a phantom.

Tangible but uninformative, the box drew him. Its man-headed bulls watched when he stopped in the doorway, and watched when, curious but also wary, he started forward. A step into the room, he caught a fleet whiff of her musk. Sniffing right, then left, he chased it, until realizing it came off his own skin. The ancient casket was almost forgotten when he placed a hand atop it. This object and the smell of her juices upon him, these were the tracks that underscored her absence.

Even as he skirted melancholy, however, he was pricked by guilt. He had a friend. They had never talked about what they were to each other, or defined boundaries, but things between them were easy. Warm and easy. And close. Not frequently, but often enough. Bigger pulled his phone from a pocket of his overalls, and tapped “Q-U.” The directory autofilled “Quella,” and sang numbers as it dialed, but as soon as it finished, the screen announced, “Signal Lost,” and went dark. He tried twice more with the same result. The storm, he decided, must have damaged a tower. Maybe that was good. Maybe there were no grounds for an awkward conversation. An afterthought, he realized that his free hand still rested on the box.

Bigger imagined information flowing from the carved wood under his palm, an explanation for her presence and her absence that he could not decipher. Suddenly angry, he flushed hot. To wake and find her gone! She was not there to face him, or for him to face. There had been no morning after, unless, but, no. That had been a dream. The things that happened, the falling, the cube of light, those could exist only in dream. A substantial dream, but a dream nonetheless.

Probing with a finger told him the depression in his forehead just above his brow actually was tender to the touch. Likely she had bopped his head when it was gripped between her thighs. He was ready to believe it. He was ready to believe almost anything. Her absence was a canvas onto which he could project his ignorance of who she was and from where she had come. His budding resentment gave way, however, if grudgingly before a growing suspicion that during the night he had learned something unique and powerful. A context, or a perspective. An axiom onto which he could not put a finger.

Drawing away from the box, his mood and thoughts were far from when he approached. Physical memory of her legs gripping his skull suggested lines of motion and pivots. His head filled with visions of an idealized machine as he returned to the bedroom for clean overalls. Shirtless and in flipflops, he left the house.

His eyes went first to the three-wheeler he had been securing when Eanna arrived. Blasted scrap from a lightning strike was all that remained. His fingers twitched, as if remembering a wrench he had used when he built it. Toeing a lump of charred carbon among the wreckage, he glanced around to see what other losses he might have suffered. A bicycle was gone from the rack under the shop awning. An augmented off-road bike, it was a better choice for pounding up gullies than for a leisure ride to town. Whether or not there was significance in Eanna’s choice of ride, he could only wonder.

The three-wheeler was nearly a complete loss, which was not a conclusion Bigger reached casually. Within his circle, the man behind MacGregor Pedal Cars was famous for discovering raw material in the most thoroughly picked over tailings of the waste stream. Once, on a bet, he had created a two-seat four-wheeler entirely from cast-offs of a bicycle chop shop. He had done a lot of that as a kid, cutting corners on the fly. But that had been necessity.

In this case, what had not burned to ash was nonetheless charred. He managed to dig out small pieces of slag, all that remained of the gears and derailleur. When he went to slip the pieces into his overalls pocket, they clung to the button.

“Magnetized,” he thought. “That’s interesting.”

Bigger made a mental note to save the pieces apart from other scrap. “Lightning charged,” he named them.

The three-wheeler was the only loss to his inventory. A two-year-old elm sapling near the repair bay had splintered to its roots, and on the house’s far side, a roughly circular spot had been blasted bare. The exposed soil had partially melted. A morning breeze, still cool, picked up as he prodded the glassy crust with the toe of a flipflop. Unconsciously, he lifted his chin to dry sweat from the line of his throat and neck.

Turning to go on around the house, he stopped and stared, arrested by the sight of the lightning rods on his roof. Not one appeared to have taken a hit. No blackened or melted points, no kinks off vertical, nothing to suggest the bolts struck those attractors first and leapt to the ground. Another old tale disproved, he decided. Lightning did what it would do. In his pocket was evidence for that.

Also untouched was Eanna’s car. Crossed guy lines secured it from winds that may have swept the partly open bay. Its covering tarp remained dry and taut, and came off to expose the material presence of the coupe in mute contrast to absence of the driver. Through the flexiplex side window, he imagined a glimpse of her outline, the way she distributed herself in the driver’s sling. His mind’s eye, for a flash, saw the angle of her feet on the pedals, her hands on the grips of the steering crescent and the shift. Bigger tapped fingertips against his temples to clear his thinking. She was not there and the car was. So be it.

Popping the left-side hatch, he pulled a stool alongside the opening and perched. Rather than going first to the obvious repair, he began an inspection of the vehicle at the driver seat. Like most of the rest of the car, its frame was molded fiber composite. The sling, however, was leather, a material he never used. Imperfections in the surface told him it was skin from an actual animal, nothing vat grown. He fingered a scar high on the seat back. Here was evidence tanned forever into this hide that a pain had healed crudely. Leaning close, he scented her trace embedded in the tanned animal smell. His hand grew warm when he rested it in the cup of the sling shaped by her laboring butt.

Bigger stood, and closed the hatch. Dogs and chickens were ready for breakfast, and he wanted coffee. Prudence called for shoes and a t-shirt. His calendar was open. The rest of the day lay before him once the animals were fed.

*

By mid-afternoon, he had decided the seat mechanism was likely an independent discovery of the same arrangement as his own. An elegant independent discovery. No maker’s mark or patent stamp appeared on any part of the seat, nor anywhere else in the vehicle as far as he could tell. He had looked in the likely places, curious, but with his mind elsewhere. Professional interest in the identity of the car’s designer was of decidedly secondary importance. Even as he looked over the vehicle, his imagination combined and recombined features of this gracile assembly with the more robust lines of his own. Rapidly, methodically, he plotted steps to a hybrid.

The first spark of synthesis had come as he monkeyed with the carriage in which the flywheels sat. Bigger liked flywheels. A piece of his reputation resulted from the extraordinary efficiency of the “MacGregor Sandwich,” a large flywheel flanked by smaller wheels counterspinning on either side. The improvement in performance of his sandwich over that of previous technical standards resulted from his invention of a circular, double-helix worm gear that transferred and reversed motion between wheels in a single step. The patent had been his third, but the first to generate significant licensing revenues. It had also made his a name to conjure with among designers around the world. Major manufacturers reverse engineered his new models within days of release. He was, word had it, a man inspired.

The array in Eanna’s car had double the flywheels of the MacGregor Sandwich, and all were of a uniform size. Try as he might, he could not discover how the wheels interconnected within their nested sleeves and yokes—but in a flash he saw how to improve power transfer into and out of the array by modifying the retraction mechanism to change the angle of interface. An impression of Eanna’s leg—hip, knee, ankle, the complexity of her feet—superimposed over the shifting parts of the retractor as he watched it work. At once he saw which curves of the existing arrangement matched to which curves of his hybrid to reproduce the proportions of her leg. That the improvement could be applied to the seat design also was a side benefit.

A plan for a prototype took shape in his mind almost without direction. Bigger stood away from the car to let the idea sink in. Faint but startling, Eanna’s scent surprised him. It dissipated instantly—if he had not just imagined it. Yearning, completely unexpected, flushed through him, clouding his mechanical visions. The world seemed to twist a degree, and he jerked back to catch his balance. The moment passed. Bigger looked at the pedal car and saw only a car.

“Break time,” he decided.

Outside the bay, he paused to stretch, letting his eyes adjust to the light. Motion behind the steps to the house forced him to squint against the glare. The little red hen, his wanderer, paced the deep shade beneath the deck of the porch, hesitating every few steps with one leg lifted. She cocked her head with each pause to scrutinize particulars only she could see. It occurred to him that either he would crawl on his belly to collect her next clutch of eggs, or he would wait until she hatched the chicks and led them into the open herself.

Minutes later, iced tea in hand, Bigger lowered himself onto one of the Adirondack chairs on his porch. A panting dog plopped on either side. Ankles crossed atop the railing, Bigger fidgeted to find a comfortable position for his back against the curve of the chair. He lolled his head along the chair’s topmost slats. Without really seeing, he watched barn swallows come and go from a trio of nests at the end of the porch, hard against the angle where ceiling met wall. Breezes across the front of the house cooled the shade where man and dogs relaxed. Bigger returned to planning a new retraction assembly, neatly ordering pieces he envisioned into a series of steps for lathe and tool bench. The swallows occupied his eyes while his visual imagination adjusted proportions and reconfigured parts.

Silently, the picture in his head morphed as he worked through the mechanics of his concept. It was mental play that came naturally to Bigger, unbidden, although, without notice, minute by minute, he drifted toward drowse in the hot afternoon. A voice at the back of his head sang wordlessly, joyfully, of evolving shapes and slippages; gradually, it lost any trace of sense and merged, one more voice, with the droning cicadas.

The heads of both dogs came up at once. Rage, almost inaudible, gargled deep in Toro’s throat. Bigger shot to his feet, eyes sweeping the yard before he had shaken off his daydream. The dogs, ridges of hair standing from the crowns of their heads down their necks, rose beside him. He started for the steps, but the dogs bumped him from either side, heading him off. Astonished, he looked down at Belle, not quite touching him. She gazed up, as though to make sure he understood he should not go forward. Toro leaned a shoulder into Bigger’s leg, but stared toward the field beyond the gate. In a gesture strange and rare from the self-sufficient animal, Belle licked his hand, then turned her head slowly, deliberately, perhaps, even, signally, to face the same place as her brother. Bigger followed their stare. The head of a man out on the road bobbed into view from behind the shop building. The head popped in and out of sight beyond the field of tall grass and scrub between the road and the yard. Both dogs growled continuously.

When the man attached to the head reached the turnoff for the drive, he dropped from sight. Dogs shouldering him to stop, Bigger pushed to the top step, bracing against a post as he leaned out to see. The man was on all fours, taut on knuckles and toes to keep his clothes from being soiled, nose against the ground, sniffing. Bald and brown, he wore a belted tunic over baggy trousers—out of sync with prevailing fashion, Bigger could not help noting. Sniffing exploratorily, the man crept forward, shifting from side to side as he lifted and placed each limb separately and carefully, his flared nostrils testing the cinders over which they passed. Abruptly, he stopped, pushing up with his legs and shoving his face almost into the cinders. He snuffled ferociously at whatever scent he had struck. Satisfied at last, the man stood and continued up the drive.

Toro’s howl rose from deep in his chest. The sound that emerged was primeval, the declaration of an elemental. Her eyes showing wide, Belle joined her voice to his.

The man stopped short of the open gate. Bigger descended to the foot of the steps, the dogs crowding protectively in front of him. They pushed back hard when he tried to go forward, so he stopped and eyed the stranger from across the yard. The man was not so much bald as completely hairless. Not even eyelashes broke his skin. His complexion was the same coffee with cream as Eanna’s. In fact, as Bigger watched the man, he saw flitting resemblance to his absent guest. A not quite identifiable expression. A stance vaguely familial. Like half-siblings? Uncle and niece? Shouldering hard against his legs, the dogs moaned when Bigger pushed a few yards closer.

The man’s eyes were fixed on Toro. In no way did he acknowledge the person trying to confront him, but he watched the dog closely. After a moment, he made a tutting sound to the unresponsive animal, and smiled. Bigger recoiled. The man’s mouth held too many teeth. Dozens too many.

Gravity seized hold of Bigger and grew titanically, until he was swallowed in a well of his own mass. With every particle of will, he fought to keep from sinking immobilized to earth. Torpor descended over his thoughts, which thickened like agar, and his vision contracted to a small, bright focus on those teeth. It was as though that bizarre mouth was a hypnotist’s watch, draining vigor from his mind. Sensation, like webworms spinning in his brain, pricked his attention. He resisted. There was a protocol to follow, and protocol was focus. Shaking his head with a snap, ripping the mental lint, he demanded curtly, “May I help you?”

The man ignored this overture, too, sighting along a line the gate had dragged across the cinders when it slid opened and closed. He looked at Toro, leaned forward, and, smiling again, said something incomprehensible. The utterance may or may not have been words; it was impossible to tell. His voice sounded like he spoke bubbles underwater.

A phrase, “speaking into oceans of air,” popped from Bigger’s fancy. Immediately, the notion projected backward onto the…dream?…of falling that had taken him the night before. He had tumbled in an ocean of air. Some part of the association held a clue to this interloper, Bigger was certain. It was an association he needed to hold until his head cleared, until he could think.

Whatever the man had said, Toro’s ear twitched. This did not go unnoticed by Belle, whose sharp “woof” was a controlled explosion. Toro stomped his forefeet and lowered his head, leaving no doubt about his response to the man’s vocalization. A snarl rippled the big dog’s muzzle. Chuckling, the hairless man straightened. He said something more to Toro, and waved a placative hand, but the dog was not mollified. The man chuckled again, turned and began to make his way along the drive, back toward the drive.

The dogs threw themselves against Bigger, driving him back toward the house. “Hey, wai—!” he cried as he fought to keep his footing. The dogs were insistent, and he had to dance several steps away from the gate before they allowed him to recover. Both animals calmed as Bigger regained his balance. With a steadying grip on Toro’s collar, he checked the drive, then walked out its length to look right and left along the road. There was no sign of the man.

Coming back to the yard, he found the little wandering hen investigating the open gate. Bigger scooped her up, as much from the habit of carrying her as anything, and deposited her near the chicken house on his way back to the repair bay.

*

The linkage of the broken shaft came free when he was not paying attention. His mind had wandered back to the peculiar man when a half-unconscious flex slipped the assembly from its barrel. For a moment he could only stare at the interslotted pieces of metal and ceramic. His hands replayed their movements in pantomime before the release action became clear to him: a double release, like a Chinese finger trap. Retract first, then slide out. He recognized the other end of the shaft as an elongated version of the same design. It was a clever approach that should have allowed all the parts to slip freely any way except loose. That the assembly had, in fact, slipped loose suggested a problem with the…there. A ceramic slot was rough ground to double width, allowing the jointed steel finger that rode it to escape. He found the cause of the wear in a burr on one steel edge, a tempered flaw that scraped at the slot every time the finger ran through its prescribed motion.

Once he understood the parts, he began to trace how they functioned together. Working out the fit of elements in combination, he guided the shaft through its action, using pressure from his palm to keep the burred piece from jumping the damaged slot. Motion traveled the length of the assembly in a multi-jointed wave, the steel rocking at a sequence of pivots to transfer energy in a regular, toroidal pulse along its length. Bigger found the movement eerily biological, and racked his brain for an elusive memory. A memory from a lesson. A teasing, fleet memory of something specific in which once he had been instructed. It came back to him like a burst. “Peristalsis.”

Any thought of the man with too many teeth evaporated as Bigger, the visionary designer, was snared by new-glimpsed worlds of mechanical possibility. Inner and outer mechanisms nested with no fixed connection. Energy moved from one assembly to the other by peristaltic transfer. One segment spun the other not by turning it directly, but by the rippling swell and contraction of its elongated cap. On close examination, inner and outer components of the shaft proved to twist slightly, almost imperceptibly, in complementary directions.

“Brilliant!” he thought. An open, gradual spiral thus imparted to the motion would be sufficient to start and maintain spin; the undulations proper conveyed the force that drove the wheels.

A sigh from Toro, supine in the narrow shade at the front of the bay, drew the visionary from his clouds. It was a “heads up” sigh, a signal to pay attention to the world, which Bigger obligingly did. Backing from the hatch, he rested a hand on the canopy as he arched his back to stretch out the kinks. He stood away from the car and twisted to limber his spine after too long hunched over. Belle stuck her head around the corner and woofed.

“Coming!” he answered.

Bigger came out from the bay wiping his hands on a shop rag. A thunderhead massed in the west, its purple-black, the inky bottom perched on the horizon. Hidden lightning threw its rapidly shifting shapes into high relief. Its billowing upper reaches glowed, orange and yellow bulging from scarlet seams, in the still defiant palette of a half-visible sun.

He watched as rising cloud fed on the solar disk. It was an impressive sight, but not, he was sure, why the dogs had rousted him. Looking from the gathering storm, he saw Eanna standing at the now closed gate, back to him, her hands resting on the top rail. She wore cut-off jeans and a t-shirt. Bigger could just see that her parti-color socks had toes to accommodate straps on her sandals. The bike she had ridden lay on its side nearby, inside the gate. Coming up behind her, he heard that she muttered, though in a guttering voice hard to credit as language.

He could tell she was aware of him, but she did not interrupt herself to acknowledge that he hovered nearby. Instead, finishing her utterance, she laid her cheek on the top rail and sighted along the painted metal. Satisfied, she turned her head to sight along the opposite way. Only after seeing whatever she saw did Eanna stand and turn, though she did so to shove wordlessly past him.

From the set of her shoulders, he knew she was angry—and wound tight. He imagined tension radiating from her in palpable waves. Bigger said nothing when she disappeared into the bay, and he chose to linger in the yard rather than trail after her. It did not seem an auspicious time to discuss progress on her car. From where he listened, he heard her yank open the vehicle’s rear hatch, wrest something awkward and heavy from behind the seat, and slam shut the hatch. The suitcase she hefted as she labored back into view was large enough to make him curious about the compartment where it had ridden. Large enough also to make him wonder how long she intended to stay.

Part of him wanted to avoid confrontation and return to work on the vehicle, but his wiser mind prevailed. Instinct whispered that the longer he waited to touch off the explosion, the larger it would be. He could not help wondering which storm would spend more violence, the one boiling to existence in the sky or the other gaining strength inside his house.

As soon as he passed through the door he was ready to put money on the interior tempest. Wrapped in the terry robe, Eanna faced him across the open cavity of her wooden chest. Her eyes flashed fire as she slammed the lid and palmed something into her pocket. Bigger raised two fingers in a tentative peace sign.

“Truce?” he asked. “Talk?”

In answer, she spun on her heel and stomped into the bathroom. He watched through the open door while she rummaged in a toiletries case. Having found what she sought, she rushed out, and would have gone past him, except he touched her shoulder.

“Eanna,” he began, only to have her round on him, hissing in rage. This was more than he could accept.

“Eanna!” he snapped. “What is wrong? Why in hell are you so mad?”

“Hell is right!” she spat. “Hell is where I should send you!”

Her anger struck like a blow to his chest. The fight he had steeled for was suddenly pointless. When he repeated his question, he sounded weary.

“What…,” he began. His hand moved in an unconscious stirring motion. “What’s wrong?”

She shoved at him, pushing herself away.

“No one!” she shouted. “No one has ever done that to me. Ever!”

Confusion made him hesitate before answering. She glared, her lips pressed tight.

“I’m sorry,” he said at last, trying to feel his way slowly. “I should have asked first. I mean, I guess there was a whole discussion we should have had—”

“Don’t be an idiot!” she cut him off. “I’m not talking about the sex. No one has ever shown me such disrespect. No one!”

Bigger’s confusion deepened.

“Are you upset that I passed out?” He shook his head in disbelief. “You squeezed so tight. I tried to make you let go. I couldn’t breathe.”

Eanna’s expression softened reluctantly. She answered in a voice somewhat lower than a shout.

“You got what you deserved. On and on you went. No one has ever cost me so much control.”

“Wait!” Light went on in the MacGregor pate. “You’re pissed about having an orgasm?”

“Not one!” she snapped, smacking the bib of his overalls with force that may or may not have been playful. Softer, thoughtfully, she echoed herself, “Not just one. And then you slept.”

Bigger scratched his head, aggravating cowlicks he had never combed out that morning. Rapidly, arrhythmically, he blinked while she spoke, as though the words she said made little sense. Finally, he lifted his palms in surrender.

“This day is just too weird. First the guy with all the teeth, and now you want to gut me because you had….”

He trailed off at the expression on her face, which had changed in seconds from anger to mischief, and then as quickly to distress. Bigger wet his lips and waited. Eanna tightened her arms across her chest. When she was not forthcoming, he pressed.

“What is it?”

“What guy?” Her voice was sharp, precise, but not loud. She glanced around, as though suddenly wary of unseen listeners. “What guy with all the teeth?”

Bigger pinched the bridge of his nose, knitting his brow as he thought back to the visitor. The tender spot on his forehead prickled, so he let go of his nose to rub at the sensation with the pad of his thumb. Trying to recall that mouth ghastly with teeth, he sighed, long and heavily, like an echo of Toro.

“I don’t know what guy.”

Recalling the encounter took more effort than it seemed it should. Bigger’s thoughts grew sluggish, as though memory had turned thick, like mud and cold syrup. He had to fight to recall, as he had had to fight to think when the man was present.

“I was on the porch, taking a break from your car. The dogs woke me from a doze because this weird character turned off from the road. I was watching him come up the drive when he dropped out of sight. The dogs tried to keep me from going to see where he’d gone. Turned out, he was on all fours, sniffing the ground. Then up he hopped and came to the gate, but he stopped. He wouldn’t come through. It was open, but he stopped right at the line in the dirt. The dogs crowded me all the way out to see what he wanted. They were unhappy when I tried to get close, but the guy acted like I wasn’t there. Only Toro. He only paid attention to Toro, but Toro didn’t like him. Belle just plain hated his guts.”

Eanna placed a hand on Bigger’s chest as he talked, resting it there without force. When he finished, she stared, eyes wide, at her nails against the denim of the overalls. The instant before he broke into her silence, her expression changed, becoming distant, bemused. She drummed fingers on the hem of his bib, nodding as though she still weighed his words. Finally, she gazed at him speculatively.

“What,” she asked at last, “did you mean about his teeth?”

“That was the most…well…that was the gruesome thing.” Bigger struggled, as though pulling the memory through haze. “Here was a totally hairless guy, dressed like Sinbad the sailor, talking to my dog. As he talked, it looked like he had too many teeth.”

“Tell me,” she insisted. “How do you mean?”

Suddenly self-conscious, Bigger lowered his voice.

“I mean, it looked like he had twice as many teeth as could possibly fit in his mouth. There was no way that many could be in there, but they were.” Too loudly, he added, “And they weren’t little, either.”

He stopped, waiting for her to scoff or offer an explanation. Eanna fiddled with the button on his bib pocket, as she chewed absently at her lip. A rumble of thunder startled her from her thoughts. In the wake of the roll-off, they heard barking of the feral pack, distant but heading toward them. Toro stood, his growl seeming to come from everywhere. Belle paced before the door, hackles up.

“I cannot think of this,” Eanna stated. Shoving his shoulder playfully, she told him, “You need a shower. Clean yourself, then we must act.”

Bigger started to respond, but she pushed him again.

“After,” was all she said. She turned and walked away, going to her box. Bigger watched her place her hands on its lid, and saw her attention fall inward. When it was clear she would say nothing else, he headed for the shower.

*

Hair dripping on his bare shoulders, he emerged from the bathroom to find neither Eanna nor the dogs. His call, “Hello!” was drowned by thunder noticeably closer than before. He started to check all the rooms, but stopped. The structure creaked with the gusting wind, but the stillness of the inside air made clear he was alone.

Belle’s terse “woof” greeted him when he stepped through the front door onto the porch. The dogs lay before the screened enclosure of the hot tub. Heads up and ears erect, they looked out, appearing to study the oncoming storm. Bigger advanced, and bent to scratch between the ears of first Belle, then Toro. Each dog stretched its neck to receive the favor. Eanna spoke from the tub.

“There is not much time. The old one approaches.”

Bigger straightened, and rested his hand on the ceramic knob of the screen door.

“The guy with the teeth, you mean?”

Before she could answer, Toro started to growl so low that it came up through the earth. Belle woofed again. It was her sharp, “pay attention” woof. Turning, Bigger saw the man with too many teeth stood beyond the gate, lips mouthing inaudible words. The intruder waved a stick as he spoke.

“No, not a stick,” Bigger mentally corrected. A wand.

“Come here!” Eanna commanded. “There is no time!”

Still looking over his shoulder, Bigger entered the screened room. Water sloshed from the tub as Eanna stood, leaned across the side and grabbed his hand. Yanking him forward, she brought his attention squarely back to her. The robe hung from a hook on one of the four-by-four posts that framed the room. She stood naked, droplets clinging to her skin, staring at him expectantly, her grip tight on his wrist. Bigger stared back, his pulse increasingly loud in his ears.

“Yes?” she inquired, and he answered, “Yes,” but it was mindless, an echo.

“He finds me by my thoughts of him!” she said impatiently.

“Yes,” Bigger thought. She had said something like that the night before.

“MacGregor!” she barked. “You must distract me. Your life depends on it!”

Bigger’s gaze dropped from the fire in her eyes to her nipples, invitingly erect. Droplets hung from each, flashing when sudden lightning struck near the road.

“What?” Bigger began, shaking himself alert “Distract…?”

Eanna did not wait. Yanking the waist of his sweat pants to his knees, she pulled, meaning to topple him into the tub. He resisted, hopping from one leg to the other to free himself from the garment. Answering her insistent grip, he splashed naked into the water. She molded to him. Her hand behind his neck drew him to a kiss. Before he lost himself on her lips, a glow at the back of the enclosure caught Bigger’s eye.

“What’s that light?” he asked, trying to pull free to investigate. “There shouldn’t be anything—”

“Leave that alone!” she ordered. “Pay attention.”

“But,” he objected, “If there’s a short, or if the conduit—”

“There is nothing wrong with the conduit.” She turned him around with surprising force, and pressed him to the back rim of the tub. “As a matter of fact,” her eyebrow flicked, “Everything is exactly right with the conduit. Sit.”

Bigger sat. She had positioned him on a bench molded along the rear of the tub, just below the water’s surface. Vertical behind him was a two-inch diameter pipe enclosing the power lines for the tub’s machinery. Like so much else about the house, its installation was a legacy of previous owners, one of a list of modifications he intended to redo when time and other priorities allowed. A layer of polymer waterproofing had been an interim fix that eased his concern about electrocution and, happily, gave the conduit a decorative appearance. Eanna guided his hands behind his back one at a time and placed them on the pipe.

“Keep your hands on this,” she instructed. “Do not let go.”

Fortunately the tub was shaped so that its rim formed a back to the bench. He was able to lean against it comfortably, at least for a time. Whether or not this remained so depended on how long she wanted him to hold the conduit. He started to ask, but she placed a finger across his mouth.

“Do not talk.”

Lightning struck again, this time near the fence. Bigger jumped at the flash and boom, throwing his hands wide. In one motion, Eanna thrust herself between his legs and seized his wrists. Wrestling his hands back to the conduit, she brought her face close to his. An inch, less, separated their noses. In a voice as unyielding as her stare, she ordered, “Do…not…move.”

Bigger started to object, but her finger went again to his lips.

“If you let go of that pipe, or if you say a word, I shall leave you to the consequences. Do…not…move.”

The storm hit. A flood dropped from heaven. Wind lashed chilling mist through the wire screen that was their shield. Eanna ignored the onslaught. She sank to her knees, her mouth slowly forming a theatrical pout. His eyes flicked away when the wind brought sounds of the feral pack, but her hands grasped the soft form of his penis and drove out thought. She rolled his quickening erection between her palms.

“Now.” She conceded the ghost of a smile to his gasp. “This time you will respect the queen of heaven.”

Bigger opened his mouth like he might say something, but Eanna opened hers and enfolded the crown of his cock between her lips. The world went silent. The whole of Bigger’s existence collapsed to the feel of her tongue on his flesh. Her hands played its tightening length, seeming to hold him suspended. Only his grip on the conduit tied him to the familiar world.

She closed her lips lightly, and, for a heartbeat, held motionless. Imperceptibly at first, she began to work her jaw, drawing him cell by cell deeper into warm and wet. Her caressing tongue and the heat of her mouth kept him in taut pleasure skirting pain. Bigger floated engulfed in a well of silence, his awareness reduced to the actions of her hands and lips, her deft tongue, and suction from the slow, fluffing bellows of her cheeks. The rest of his being felt nothing, experienced nothing. There was only the burgeoning charge of her touch.

Eanna allowed her teeth to scrape the fleshy cap between them, firing a spasm of panic through Bigger that churned the tub. When he jumped, she tightened her lips to his cock and began to suck, gently, without moving her head. Her thumbs slid back and forth along the bottom of his shaft, her fingers resting laced along the top. Working her cheeks, she slowly drew and relaxed, repeating the action without hurry, repeating it again. A quiver ran through his body. His breathing grew labored and deep. In small cycles, she moved her head, sliding an inch of him in and out of her mouth. One of her hands drifted to rest on his belly. The edge of her palm registered his accelerating heart and the heaving of his chest. She allowed herself a twitch of smile, which caused her teeth to close infinitesimally. Bigger registered the tiny movement with a gasp.

Adrift in a parallel state, he was unaware of the raggedness of his breathing, but its shushing regularity turned a key in his perception. Muffled, but moment by moment gaining volume, gaining clarity, a pounding boom engulfed him. Like a kettledrum racing from a distance, the beat rode a tearing wheeze in the soundtrack to his trance. The sound dismayed him only a moment, as he knew it from the previous night. The throb of his heart was familiar; so was the gale of his breath.

Eanna bobbed faster, locking to his pulse. With each successive stroke she pushed more of him into her mouth. She willed not to gag, her entire upper body straining with a force that splashed over the far side of the tub. Abruptly, she slapped both hands to the cheeks of his ass and hauled him forward, struggling to open for his entire length. Drawn like a bow, Bigger churned the water with his shivering. Eanna pressed steadily, but her throat would not accept him.

She relaxed, holding him gently with her front teeth, panting for breath before starting again. Pulling a hand forward, Eanna circled his penis with her thumb and forefinger. Alternately, she squeezed and rolled, then she plunged her mouth again, making straining, thrusting attempts to take his flesh into her throat. Bigger planted his heels at the small of her back. Ragged gasps tore in and out of his lungs.

The intense stimulation of her mouth erased the rest of his world. He kicked involuntarily, unaware, and struck only water, but the force of the spasm threw Eanna off and under the surface. She stood flailing, coughing and choking as Bigger looked on wide-eyed, his hands still locked, as by a spell, to the conduit.

Without warning, teeth rushed from every side. Gigantic teeth crashed upon them like Bigger and Eanna had been sucked into a chewing mouth. Tiny teeth champed close, minutely voracious, ravening. Thousands of teeth, all sizes but somehow all the same, converged on the tub. Bigger bucked with pain as the choppers tore at them, but Eanna spat to clear her airway and placed a palm flat above his heart to keep him in place. Dropping upon him, she drew new life into his briefly flagging erection with her mouth and tongue. The teeth pressed ever tighter upon them.

Eanna became two. This was the way it looked to him. Only thus could he constitute what was happening. Her mouth and hand remained upon him, her head moving rhythmically up and down. She continued to kneel before him, continued to hold him thrall with her mouth, even as she, another she, a greater she, towering, rose up, first thrusting wide her hands, shoving away the harrowing teeth, and then twisting, contracting, winding up.

The teeth swarmed her, chomping, gnashing, a biting hunger that tore hunks of her flesh and oozed blood from countless wounds. With a furious shout, Eanna the titan burst into motion, her arms windmilling to claw space free from the invasion. Her bites healed in an instant; the ichor that had dripped from them absorbed back through her skin. Her frenzied counter sped up, but took on nuance, wild flailing became a dance, a kinetic flow of arms and legs pushing out, creating a sphere impervious to attack, in the center of which her human-sized self still rhythmically sucked a human-sized member.

Gradually, a glow emerged from the woman crouched between his legs, at first dimly limning Bigger’s features, but throwing them, at last, into sharp relief. Panting under her assiduous touch, he hardly registered her growing brilliance, even when it sparkled through the lashes of his heavy-lidded eyes. He had sensed the glow behind the conduit. He sensed her luminosity too bright to look upon. He did not care.

Lightning blasted from the air around their heads, coming from nowhere. Eanna collapsed into a single woman thrown across his leg, glow extinguished. Stunned by the concussion, Bigger was able to look on but unable to resist as the teeth came at them. He swung his head side to side to avoid incisors tearing his face. Dentition of a thousand mouths swarmed Eanna, ripping away her flesh in strips. She writhed as her skin was torn from the muscle beneath, and convulsed when the teeth began to tear the raw meat from her bones. Some part of Bigger knew this while it happened, although shock and pain swamped any chance he would interfere. The first of the teeth had swarmed the woman, but there was torment enough for both of them. Bigger had only an instant to register Eanna shredded to gobbets before he, too, was attacked.

The pain was beyond anything he could have imagined. Blood ran, swelling from some bites, jetting from others. He seemed frozen in hurt, his arms no less locked behind him than if bound. As the teeth ripped flesh from his body, he thrashed, trying to protect his face, trying to protect his eyes, though even under assault he clearly saw—saw the crescents of meat bitten from his torso, the morsels chewed from below his eyes and, through a haze of their mingled blood, Eanna’s failing quiver as she was stripped to naked bone.

His agony grew tenfold when Eanna ceased to move. The attack redoubled and doubled again. His throat was torn away when he lifted his head to scream. Bite by rending bite, muscle was flensed from bone until it was not possible for more to be taken. Yet, the torment went on. Beyond every mouthful of flesh remained another, the last shreds of tissue renewed, the last welling ooze of blood endlessly replenished. A new agony, like drowning, enveloped Bigger when the teeth found his organs and devoured his lungs. Time snapped to a halt. Nothing remained of him but excruciation.

Then a jagged band of gore reappeared on his bone in a slash of relief, heightening the torment to the rest of him. Another slash brought back more blood, more tissue, and with it a flash of vision.

A flicker of sight, impossible in his collapse, lit the dogs in the yard, battling the man with too many teeth. The villain danced nimbly. Jerking, leaping, he spun to escape them, but the snapping jaws of Belle and Toro tore as ruthlessly as the disembodied teeth overrunning the hot tub. Belle attached herself to the man’s side; Toro lunged repeatedly for his throat, tearing at hands and arms as the intruder parried. Lightning struck beyond the fence, again and again, hundreds of times, with deafening blasts of thunder.

Bigger was whole again in an instant. The thousands of teeth turned to sparkling powder, and the sparkles winked out. Eanna spasmed, her restored limbs striking stiff in four directions to burst the walls of the tub. Strength flowed into woman and man as the water drained away. With open mouth, Eanna fell like an engine upon Bigger’s renewed erection. She paused once to try forcing the head into her throat, but could not receive it, and went again to bobbing violently up and down. She slid a hand beneath his balls, her middle finger finding and pressing into his anus. As she worked the stiff length of him with her mouth, she paced the stroke of her thumb against the skin taut over the gland at the join of his legs.

Pulling back until his cock spanned the gap between them, only the cap held in the loose purse of her lips, Eanna shrugged his legs from her shoulders and started again to rise and fall with her whole body. Her mouth worked the head and upper stretch of his erection as her hand kneaded below. Her other hand slid between his legs to cup his balls. She kept her finger shoved in his ass. Her thumb tapped lightly against the tender flesh behind his scrotum.

A jolt went through him. Eanna plunged again as he lurched, trying anew to open her throat. Panting, Bigger went completely rigid when she tried without success to jam his meat through the balk of her reflexes. Letting go of his balls, she grabbed one of his nipples and rolled it, not too soft, not too hard, between fingertip and thumb. Their motion reflected her other hand, rocking below, manipulating within and without. She pulled back on his shaft to suck hard, working her cheeks until the first convulsion of his orgasm. Curling the finger in his butt, and pushing from outside with her thumb, she jumped up, releasing his nipple to seize his chin. Eanna pulled herself forward and exhaled into his raling mouth. He came in a ropy spew onto her breasts.

The climax telegraphed through him, making him buck and kick. Hollow thuds from his blows rebounded off the breached walls of the hot tub. Bigger collapsed into himself as the last, spent drops of semen squirted in a weak arc from his already shrinking cock. For an instant, he saw her face swim toward him, the strange glow of the secret object behind the tub reflected in her eyes. His own silhouette overlay her pupils. For that one instant only, he thought. Then she ceased blowing into his mouth and moved almost to a kiss. Before their lips touched, she began to inhale. Awareness of the cramping ache in his shoulders and arms came home like a blow. He lost his grip on the conduit. She suctioned away his escaping breath as he fell back against the pipe and away from consciousness. Down and down and down he seemed to tumble into dark.

III

Again, Bigger awoke alone, on his bed, atop the covers. Fleeting irritation that Eanna was not there gave way before gurgling from his belly. He had had nothing to eat since she had walked up his driveway. The instant he moved, he knew he was famished, but discovered also that his whole body felt battered. Slowly, diagnostically, he stretched before he dressed. Every muscle and joint resisted.

Bigger exited the house pulling overalls straps onto his shoulders, and crossed the yard to release his chickens from their coop. Birds pecking at a scattered handful of scratch, he went through nest boxes collecting eggs. He was on his way back to the kitchen with both hands full when a pedal van drove through the gate.

Though he had come of age just as the old United States had fragmented, Bigger still remembered the crippled postal service and private delivery companies of that dead formation. He had doubts about follow-on solutions in some of the successor states, but the quasi-public entity fostered in the realm of which he now found himself citizen seemed competent. As they conveyed the majority of his raw materials, he had reason to know. Changing course to intercept the vehicle, he expected not the usual driver of his route, but a fill-in who had made the previous few deliveries. Instead, when the van came to a stop, a woman stepped from the driver’s cockpit, her face impishly alight.

“Quella!” Bigger exclaimed, hurrying with arms wide to sweep her into a hug. He squeezed her hard, framing her face with eggs and fingers. “Willie delivered the last two times, and he doesn’t talk. I was getting worried.” He reddened. “I tried to call, but the signal kept fading.”

Quella showed him the dead screen of her phone, and slid it back into a pocket.

“Every time I turn it on, it shuts off. Charge is good, so I don’t know.” She tickled his rib. “You can always write me a letter, lover boy. Willie doesn’t say much, but he never misses a delivery.” She sobered, but only a little. “I’ve been under the weather, BUT…,” grinning, she gave his rib another poke, “Not enough to burden the odd casual friend!” Though slight, her stress on the word “casual” was pregnant. Laughing, she missed him jerk as if pushed, and also his second reaction, when the sense of what she said struck home. Quella went on, carried by her obvious pleasure at seeing him. “I paid a visit to that funny little aunt of yours, by the way. Ekaterina? Yeah. The stuff she concocts won’t win any taste awards, but it works better than what they compound at the pharmacy.” Her lower lip thrust forward in a theatrical pout. “Sorry, Mac. She says no whoopee for at least another week.” This hung between them a fraction of an instant. She held up a plastic basket. “I brought a quart of strawberries to tide you over.”

“Quella!” Worry made his voice break. “Are you all right?” Eyes narrow, he searched her face. “I mean really all right.” Bigger started to reach, intending to touch her cheek, but stopped at sight of the eggs filling his hand. “Are you okay?” He brushed her shoulder with the back of his wrist.

“Hey!” Cautiously, to avoid dislodging eggs, she slipped her hand over his. “After the federal collapse, we got a real union down here in the hidden lands. The contract guarantees I won’t ever pedal this thing if I’m not certifiably sound.” Again, she lifted the basket. “Strawberries? They’re heirloom. Symbiont free. Grew ‘em myself.”

“Strawberries!” Bigger shook his head, as if disbelieving his luck. “Wonderful!” He made a mental inventory of the state of the house, and displayed his egg-filled hands before her. “I was on the way to breakfast. Have time for scrambled eggs and fruit?”

“Nope.” She turned toward the van. “I rolled out here to the far point first. It’s going to take all day to work back to the depot. Let me unload this ton of stuff you’re getting, and then it’s besos, abrazos y hasta luego, querido. I gotta scram.”

He ran his eggs inside while she pulled bundles and cartons from the van. Planting a peck on his cheek, she hopped into the driver’s seat, whipped through a tight U, shifted gear and rolled out the gate. The vehicle rocked to the churn of her legs. Bigger watched her down the drive, but turned away before she was out of sight, and began shifting his deliveries into the work bays. He sorted the materials as he carried them in, scanning UPCs with his tablet and stowing goods to shelves or cabinets as appropriate. Spools of plant-derived polymer fiber, spools of glass fiber, polymer binder in powder form, meter-long rods of various kinds of steel, similar rods of aluminum and brass, and three huge spools of all-purpose carbon nanotube received ticks on his order checklist. Various resins and paints had not arrived, but were still in the expected delivery window. He lacked for nothing this day’s work would require. Bigger headed inside to eggs and strawberries.

Sitting to eat, he was surprised by a physical memory of holding Quella, strong and sturdy, in his arms. He flushed with ramifying guilt tagged with the shorthand of a single name, Eanna. He had said nothing about the latter to the former. There had not been time. Much of what he might have confessed had been beyond his control. Excuses popped into his mind without the beck of thinking about them. It did not matter. His attention strayed to the breakfast on his plate. Though his thoughts shifted to practical steps of the day he faced, he knew a conversation waited that could only grow more difficult with delay.

In truth, mundane organizing did not occupy him long. Half-aware of an imperative pressing as he chewed his eggs, Bigger recalled the feel of another body, the heat and solidity of the cause of his consternation, his lover of the previous two nights. The memories were an electrical tingle, not all of it pleasant. The wonderful parts washed through him in a physical nostalgia. The unpleasant parts brought him out of his body and somewhere near a critical mind. How was he to question a woman whose current whereabouts were unknown?

What concerned him was not Eanna’s absence or presence, but questions he had not asked and subjects they had not broached. With great force, as though to make up for not having wondered before, he mentally framed, “Who is this woman from nowhere demanding sex?” The question roiled his curiosity as he tried to fix it in mind for later, but almost without notice, it morphed into, “What does she have to do with those teeth?”

Absently biting a strawberry, he wondered what this exotic stranger had brought upon his home. From where he sat at the table he could see across the main room and through the screen door to Belle and Toro relaxed but alert on the porch. “Why,” he asked himself, “Do the dogs like her?” Struck by a single detail remembered from two different places, he stopped chewing and swallowed to ask, “What was that strange blue light?”

Questions cluttered his mind as he walked back to the bay. Standing before Eanna’s car, he did not really see it at first, though he stared at the driver’s hatch and pondered the absent driver. Finally, the car came into focus at the core of another question: what was the origin of this vehicle? What builder would have created this machine but left no obvious maker’s mark? With no more way to answer that question than any of his others, he turned to the work at hand.

Morning passed as Bigger fabricated a section of ceramic barrel to replace the failed original. While the part cured, he ground the spur from the steel finger that would ride within the newly minted slot. They snugged well in a test fit, and he broke for lunch satisfied with his progress. There was chicken soup to reheat. And there were strawberries.

Coming to the table with his lunch, he noticed that the lid of Eanna’s wooden chest was not tightly closed. It flipped open with the flick of a finger, its hinges silent and smooth. A dim blue glow from the contents contrasted starkly with the box’s obvious age. Neat ranks and files of plastic-capped vials, dozens of them, almost filled the interior. Two spots were conspicuously empty. Inspection showed the vials bore minimal labeling, no more than a UPC and the designation, “Entheoclone 36.” The term nagged at him, almost but not quite meaningful. “Inner god copy,” he thought. “Or something like that. But why 36?” Retrieving his notebook, he tapped in a search that returned a welter of hits from the far fringe.

Most discussion was on the proliferating forums of neo-Learyites or one of the reformed wings of the Castañedians. A hundred or so links down the list, he finally found a paper on an academic pharmacognosy site that was somewhat more than tripper fantasy. The paper identified Entheoclone 36 as an experimental compound being tested in extreme psychiatric interventions. According to the report, the drug absorbed readily through the skin, with delivery usually by means of transdermal patch, although some researchers preferred administration as a microcomponent of an injected cocktail.

A property researchers heard described in interviews with trial subjects was that people taking the drug in groups appeared to share hallucinations. Participants maintained that they entered a common alternate reality. The paper stated, “When multiple users dose in close proximity, part of the expressive effect is an illusion that all users experience congruent distortions of consensus reality.” The authors noted that debate was heated between those who argued that hallucinations actually were shared and those of the authors’ own camp who maintained that this was unsubstantiated and anecdotal.

A lengthy footnote related to this property implicated the drug in increasing numbers of recreational suicides. In a typical scenario compiled from police reports and grand jury proceedings, those choosing to die— the “death-marked”—surround themselves with a cohort of from one to many. The death-marked each take a deliberate overdose, a quantity sufficient to kill by complete ecstatic dissolution of the self. Those in the cohort take single doses in order to participate in the “mortgasm” of the dissolving self—usually without sharing the actual death. Both the game and the drug involved were known popularly as “Trip Out.”

Global police cartels were convinced Entheoclone 36 and Trip Out were one and the same. Again, there were dissenters. A well-argued paper based on cloud sampling maintained that Trip Out was actually the chemically distinct Entheoclone 23b. Unfortunately, all its citations were dead links, and Bigger found no further mention of any Entheoclone other than 36. Most of that was unhelpful. One link, however, from the flying encyclopedia of the Black Arts Collective, sourced vials filled with blue-glowing dermal patches to classified labs in the Lubbock Free State. By pedal car, the Lubbock Free State was a single day’s hard drive from where Bigger sat.

Unsure whether he had been enlightened or not, Bigger closed the box, leaving the lid ajar as he had found it.

*

Walking back from the house to the shop, he stumbled and nearly fell on the little red hen, scurrying underfoot to stay inside his stride. He stopped to demand of her, “What are you doing?” The hen clucked softly, and cocked her head. She stretched her neck to peer into vague distance. When Bigger started again for the shop by stepping deliberately over the bird, she hurried to travel with him. As he moved around the bay preparing to work, she settled atop a toolbox, turning her head in nervous jerks to follow his activity. After a few moments, however, she hopped down and trotted purposefully out. Bigger smiled and shook his head without consciously noticing the bird. His thoughts, instead, churned around Eanna. There were huge gaps in what he could explain about events since her arrival. When she returned, he resolved, they would sit and talk.

Afternoon wore away as Bigger reassembled the drive train of his visitor’s car. Imagined fragments of the conversation he anticipated having with her played through his thoughts while his hands explored, evaluated and memorized the specifics of her vehicle. Most of its lines were quite elegant, but here and there the designer in him would note a curve that could be refined for greater efficiency, or a form that could be tweaked to be more robust. His hands worked knowing these exceptions were quibbles, really, almost mute acknowledgements of skills he shared with an unknown artisan.

*

In golden light of approaching evening, Bigger rolled out the reassembled pedal car for a test drive. More than half the moon already showed pink above the eastern hills. When he reached the end of the driveway, he saw Eanna on his bicycle coasting down the road from the hill, and stopped to wait. She put her feet down as she skidded up beside him. Bigger stepped from the vehicle and took hold of the bike, indicating the open driver’s sling with a nod.

“Better if you do this and tell me it’s right than for me to try guessing what will make you happy.”

Her eyes narrowed with suspicion of a double meaning, but she slid into the car and started up the lane. Bigger held the bicycle and watched. Distant thunder drew his attention west. Another storm was billowing up to swallow the sun standing huge and red on the horizon. He turned to find Eanna paused, also watching the sky. She glanced at him. Leaning into the pedals, she popped the transmission, and the car lurched forward. When she neared, Bigger directed her down the drive toward his yard. Eanna rolled through the gate to a stop.

“Finally!” She exclaimed as Bigger coasted in behind her on the bike.

He gave her a curious look. She ignored him while she beamed at the sign on his shop, his foraging chickens, and the few tarp-covered vehicles still tied down in the yard.

“Finally?”

His voice rose with the question.

“Finally I have arrived at your compound as I set out for it. By car.”

Bigger’s mouth twitched at this, but he commented only, “You’ll get a smoother start if you pump the pedals a few times before engaging the transmission. That’ll charge the flywheels enough to power out of the stop.”

Eanna arched a brow, the corner of her mouth curled in challenge.

“And if I pump you, Mr. MacGregor?”

He had not thought about how to open their necessary talk, but here it was. Bigger scowled.

“How about I pump you?” Before she could react, he added, “For answers. Sitting at a table.” He looked her up and down and added, “Across from each other.”

She glanced at the sky and began, “The old one—”

He threw his hands in the air and strode past her toward the house. In the middle of the yard, he spun and took a step back. Eanna faced him, her head framed by the rising moon. The Rose Moon. Its face shone with a namesake blush, a glow refracted off the storm by the setting sun.

“The old one,” Bigger repeated. “How about tonight we keep the bogey man away with a conversation?”

“To speak of him—” she began, but he slashed the air with his hand.

“Not him!” Bigger shook his head and started again for the house. “I don’t want to talk about him.” Mounting the steps, he tossed over his shoulder, “It’s you that I want to discuss.”

The little red wandering hen waited on the porch beside the door. When Bigger rattled the screen, the dogs rose from the shade under the eaves of the repair bay and loped toward the house. The hen darted inside as soon as the door opened, but the dogs, arriving before Eanna, waited beside Bigger. She walked without hurry, climbed the steps, and strode across the porch. Bigger held the door with one hand, inviting the dogs inside with a sweep of the other. Toro acknowledged him with a look, but then flopped down on the porch. Belle moved to a point on the other side of the door, circled it three times, and lowered herself to the decking. Bigger shrugged and passed in.

Sounds of Eanna already in the shower reached him as he closed the door. He went to the kitchen. By the time she emerged from the bathroom combing out wet hair, he had dinner underway. Eanna glided to a stop beside a bowl of lettuce Bigger had plucked from his window boxes. Mixing hard-boiled egg with onions and mustard, he smiled, and jutted his chin at the fresh greens.

“Why don’t you add some imagination to that salad?” he suggested.

“Do I look like a serving girl?” she snapped.

Bigger froze, staring at her.

“My mistake,” he said at last, and shifted the bowl away from where she stood. “I meant no offense.”

She sat on a kitchen stool, sniffing in the direction of the lettuce.

“What kind of food is a bowl of leaves?” she demanded. “What is wrong with bread and mutton?”

Bigger made a face and sighed. There were explanations he had tired of making long ago.

“Red meat and grains are not a regular part of my diet.” He resumed mashing eggs. “Had I known you were coming, I would have laid in vast stores of mutton and bread. As it stands, I can only offer what I have.”

She opened her mouth to reply, but was interrupted by a clap of thunder that engulfed the house. Eanna’s eyes grew large. She reached for Bigger, exclaiming, “Hurry! You must distract me….” but Bigger held up a hand and said, “Not yet.” She looked shocked. Bigger repeated, “Not yet.” She stared. “First, we eat,” he told her. “And talk.”

“Talk?” she asked.

“Yes,” he insisted. “No offense, but there are things I need to know, and there doesn’t seem much chance you’ll stick around in the morning.”

“Only while the moon is in the sky.”

“Only while…,” he began to parrot, but stopped himself. “I guess that means talk fast.”

She stared at him, fidgeting. Lightning struck close, but neither of them jumped or looked away. Bigger nodded.

“Right,” he said at last, but then scratched his head, unsure now that he had her attention. Casting for a way in, he asked, “Who built your car?”

She hesitated before answering.

“No one you have heard of. What does it matter?”

His whole body tensed with dissatisfaction at this answer. Bigger willed the strain from his muscles.

“There’s a question of possible patent violations,” he informed her. Levelly, he added, “My patents.”

Eanna chewed her lip, seeming defensive for the first time since her arrival. Finally, she essayed, “The builder is not subject to such constraints.”

“Okay.” He took her hand and drew her resisting to the couch. “You’re going to have to explain that one. And dinner will have to wait until you convince me.”

They sat, Bigger with a leg up on the cushion so that he faced her. Eanna folded forward, giving him her profile, refused to meet his eye. She shifted nervously. He waited, but she showed no sign of opening up. When the silence stretched on, he punctured it abruptly.

“Well?”

Her chest heaved, as though with a sigh, but her expression was grim. Bigger was on the verge of another prompt when she began to speak.

“If you assume your designs influenced the construction of my car, you are correct. The. . . community . . . to which I belong has an interest in your innovations. We have followed your work for some time. I was impressed by the way you improved your father’s designs without calling his attention to the fact, but it was that collapsible aircraft that drew notice by our full council—”

“The pedal plane?” he broke in, astonished. “I made that when I was twelve years old!”

She gave him a searching look.

“Do you really not know me?” she asked.

Bigger stared at her, eyes wide, willing himself to see through the mystery of her without knowing what he was supposed to see.

“No…, I…,” he looked harder, but then shook his head. “For a moment you reminded me of someone. Your expression, but…,” he trailed off.

“But you do not think I am that person.”

She stated it as fact. Bigger laughed.

“No, not unless you used to be blonde, blue-eyed and six inches taller.”

Eanna smiled.

“And, perhaps, too, wider hips and larger breasts?”

Underscoring her words, she adjusted her entire body and struck an expression of rapt listening he found eerily familiar. Puzzled by a memory that did not fit this face, not this body, he gazed at Eanna, his thoughts a scatter. She listened intently to his almost silent breath punctuated by the sound of random drops hitting windowpanes. Finally, he ventured, “You knew Rebecca?”

The pause before she answered grew long.

“Knew is…an interesting word. It suggests the knowing has closed and is past.”

Falling back against the couch, she crossed her arms over her chest and set her mouth as though she would say no more. Bigger sat taut, a spring in check.

“Are you from the hospital?” he blurted. “No, let me rephrase that. Do you work for the hospital, or did you escape from it? Is that where you got the drugs?”

Fire in her eyes, Eanna leapt up.

“You understand nothing!” she shouted.

“That’s right!” he countered without rising. “That’s exactly right! I understand nothing. That’s why you’re going to explain it to me, because I do not understand.” His voice rose as he went on. “Not about why you’re here, not about that box of drugs, or the guy with the teeth, or the theft of my designs. And, now, especially, I do not understand what you have to do with Rebecca!”

As if to underscore his frustration, lightning struck close, near the road. They both jumped. Eanna clenched, opened and reclenched her fists.

“You MUST act!” she commanded. “We have no time!”

“Sit!” Bigger snapped, but visibly stopped and brought himself under control. More gently, he said, “Please sit down.”

When she did not, his voice tightened.

“I mean it. I’m not moving from this couch until I know what’s going on.”

Eanna glowered. Unyielding, he stared back.

“Let’s start with something easy,” he said at last. “Like the drugs you slipped me the past two nights. What about that?”

Eanna made no attempt to deny the act, bristling instead, “You have no business—” but he cut her off with an upraised hand.

“I looked. You left the box half-opened on the table and I looked. Let’s take that as fact and move on, okay? My question is, why have you brought a lifetime’s supply of a powerful, probably illegal entheogen into my home? And while you’re at it, why have you given it to me without my knowledge or consent?”

She looked set for another outburst, her mouth fidgeting and her eyes flashing. When she continued, however, she was almost subdued.

“You really understand nothing.” He started to react, but she slashed the air with her hand and ordered, “Do not interrupt!” Her eyes closed and she seemed to struggle. “I am trying to tell you.”

Lightning struck again, closer. The thunderclap rattled the structure. Before the walls stopped trembling, rain began to pelt down. Eanna closed her eyes and muttered, her voice barely loud enough for Bigger to tell she again spoke in the guttural tongue he had heard before. The sound of the rain became muted, and the thunder, which continued, seemed to draw away from them. Bigger made as if to say something, but Eanna lifted a palm to still him. When she started speaking, it was so softly that he had to lean forward to hear.

“You must look into your heart to know what I say is truth. You must look into your heart to believe you have known me before this.” She gazed at him intensely. Bigger felt recognition, like a memory, stir. He started to name the inkling, but stopped, overcome by confusion. Eanna nodded, and reached to smooth the furrow on his brow. Her tone was confessional.

“I was not prepared for the violence of your priests when I entered your Rebecca.”

The statement struck him like a blow.

“Entered Rebecca?” he asked, parroting. “What…?”

“I should not have been surprised,” she continued. “Their injections had almost driven me from the girl, Emilia, before Rebecca’s arrival. You remember Emilia? By the time I entered Rebecca, poor Emilia was so damaged by the injections that she was no more than an empty vessel. When I was no longer there to move her, there was no longer an Emilia to fill the shell. The priests were relentless.”

“The girl.” Bigger snapped his fingers. “The girl with dementia. Rebecca’s first roommate. That’s who you mean?”

“Dementia!” Eanna spat. “The priests murdered her with injections. They sought to drive me out with no other suitable host near, but all they did was kill the girl. They killed the girl while I still sat within the vessel. When I left, there remained only shell, even if it breathed.”

She shook her head, as though disbelieving her own words. Bigger waited for her to go on, but she sat unresponsive, musing. The house creaked and moaned, moved by silent winds. At last, she continued.

“These priests and their chemicals. Acolytes of chemicals, and they do not even know what they have. Poisons and dust and shadows of power. When something genuine, something true, comes into their hands, they tremble in fear and lock it away. The keys are in their hands, but still they turn to poisons, or worse, the bolts of the old one!”

As though to punctuate her words, lightning struck outside. The flashes of light and the sound of thunder were still muted. Even so, the strikes were close enough that blue light threw the room into relief, and a ghost of the thunderclap reached them. Anger passed over Eanna’s face.

“It is not a simple thing, holding him at bay!” she boasted. “Your life is in play. If he comes through the barrier, you will not be spared.”

“He who?” Bigger’s temper matched hers. “If ‘he who’ comes through the barrier? Quit trying to scare me with a bogeyman! You are going to talk to me!”

“Do you not remember last night?” she coaxed.

“Last night!” he exploded. “I’m onto your game, Eanna! I know about the drugs, and I know you’re up to something. What I don’t know is what that may be or why you’re here. Why me?”

“Why you?” she shouted in answer. “I do not know why you! You opened the chest and saw what you expected to see. You know nothing! Drugs! Your priests talk of drugs even as they deny the worlds to which they gain access! Once, you were different from them. Once you were a man apart, a man I respected. Who are you now? I do not know! Why you? I guess because I am sentimental for a time when you were extraordinary!”

She flopped against the back of the couch, sprawling in a way that suggested she had washed her hands of the topic. The house creaked loudly into the silence between them. From outside came thunder, still muted by whatever strange filter made their conversation possible.

Bigger leapt to his feet and began to pace, his head bobbing as he parsed her words.

“Once I was different, you said.” He stopped, letting the fixity of his stare draw her eyes. “When was that? Yesterday? Some other time, before we met?” He took another few steps, but turned back to her. “Why, exactly, are you here? Why did you come…,” with both hands, he indicated the place where he stood, “here?”

Eanna’s expression softened. She seemed, for an instant, on the verge of growing misty. Her voice, when she answered, slipped into the space between them, quiet with regret.

“Bigger MacGregor, you really do not know me? This is what tells me that you understand nothing.”

Bigger groaned in frustration.

“So you tell me.” He looked away from her, watching muted rain sheet down the outside of the window. Absently, he crossed the room and cranked the shutters closed. Without turning back toward her, he went on, “Enlighten me. Explain what I don’t understand. If you don’t want to start with why you are here—or why me—start with your lifetime supply of a drug so new there aren’t even any obvious laws against it yet.” He moved to crank the shutters on the next window. “The drug you have shown such willingness to give me without so much as a by-your-leave.”

Eanna rose and went to the window beyond the dining table to crank the shutter.

“You are wise to close the house,” she announced, raising her voice more than necessary.

“Any excuse will do,” he observed, possibly to himself.

Eanna’s face clouded, but she stifled an impulse to lash out.

“Your priests think the same.” She turned halfway toward him, her hand still on the shutter crank. “They think it a drug. All the time they discuss its pharmacology, and think they discuss something. Always, they try to find out who makes this, but it is not made like they hope to find. It is not a drug; it is a key. It is a key, and it comes from beyond the gate that it opens.”

Bigger laughed out loud. Eanna’s explanation angered him, and, because it made him angry, he found it amusing.

“Oh, the gate,” he repeated. “It’s obvious you spent time around Rebecca when her world was collapsing. The only thing she would talk about the last time she recognized me at all was trying to find a key to the inner gate.”

“MacGregor, that was me!” Eanna cried, but added quickly, “Wait! Wait while I do this! We must be ready!”

Leaving Bigger to stew or follow, she raced from room to room, closing shutters on windows. After a moment, he moved to secure those on his end of the house. They returned to the living room at the same time, Bigger half-angry and Eanna breathless. He turned on a lamp to drive back the gloom that had deepened with their exertions. She stood waiting beside the couch until he joined her. She gestured for them to sit.

“I tell you again, that was me.”

She pulled her legs onto the cushion, tucking them beneath her, pressing her spine into the angle where the couch’s back met its arm. Bigger said nothing, and Eanna did not wait to see if he would. “I first transferred to Rebecca as soon as she was admitted. Remaining with Emilia when the priests blasted her head with thunderbolts, I could protect her somewhat, but it was such a drain on me, and I could do less against their injections. In the beginning, I waited with Rebecca while the priests destroyed Emilia, trying to erase me. Once your Rebecca overcame her fear of me, she was a more suitable vehicle than the girl, and I began to habituate to her as Emilia’s spirit died. Unfortunately, I grew careless, and the priests realized that I was sometimes active through your lover. They escalated their assaults on her, and began to strike her with thunderbolts. The crime repeated. They blasted the soul from your woman and poisoned her body. You witnessed her collapse. Those times when she seemed to know you….” Eanna hesitated. “That was me.” She actually swallowed hard before telling him. “Rebecca was lost through the gate a long time before she died.”

“Oh, really?” Bigger snarled. “All those months of the skipping slide into dementia, it was you that showed up for the lucid visits? I don’t know whether to laugh or puke! And just who, exactly, are you, Ms. High-and-Mighty of the key to the gate?”

Eanna stirred.

“This being that you see, that you touch, is an avatar! Through this mouth speaks the great queen of heaven and earth. I am here trying to share knowledge freed from the trove of the old one. That is why I have come to this plane. That is why I have come to this house. That is why I have come to you!”

“I see.”

Seething, Bigger fought to calm himself.

“That’s rich. ‘Knowledge freed from the trove of the old one.’ You stole some guy’s drugs, right? You stole a boutique dealer’s stash, and you led him straight to this isolated spot. Thank you. Thank you very much.”

A huge crash, unmuffled, startled them both. Bigger rushed from the house. A cottonwood outside the fence had fallen onto the shop building, crushing one end of the structure and smashing open the chicken coop. As Bigger bounded from the porch, dogs of the feral pack raced up the fallen tree trunk and into the yard. Eanna paused at the head of the steps and shouted, “He has pierced the circle!” The first dogs through began killing chickens in a frenzy. Toro exploded from the house, hitting the screen door so hard that it slammed against the wall. Belle came sailing behind in a leap that carried her over Toro and over the steps to land in full forward charge. His dogs hit the intruders in a murderous dance. Bigger ran barehanded to defend his chickens, but Eanna screamed, “MacGregor!” He turned just in time to catch a walking stick she had thrown. Whirling the staff, Bigger laid into the wild dogs. Three of the pack’s leaders attacked him.

Toro and Belle fought mainly on their hind legs, spinning and twisting with savagery that tore through their foes. Within seconds, both bled from wounds. Some dogs kept killing chickens as the battle raged around them, shaking the hens and chomping panicked chicks.

Bigger felt Eanna’s fingertips slap the bare skin of his neck, and knew she had applied a transdermal patch. He swept a dog off its feet with his staff, then the world transformed. The sky brightened into a subtle swirl of shifting colors. The feral dogs deformed in an indeterminate way, a shift indescribable but unquestionably ugly.

Eanna strode past him, not the woman he had faced moments before, but the giant warrior he had seen in the hot tub. She flung wide her arms, and the feral pack was scattered. They recovered quickly as the man with too many teeth appeared in the gap where the tree had collapsed the workshop. Eanna faced off against him, but Bigger was suddenly too busy with the redoubled assault of the pack to follow her duel. He swept a slobbering beast from its feet and slammed down the stick to break the back of another. The jaws of a third closed on his leg.

The pain was excruciating, like flaming venom injected into his torn flesh. Slashing behind with the stick, he heard and felt bone shatter. The bite released, but Bigger was staggered. His leg threatened to collapse. Barely in time, he parried a charging mongrel, but remained upright only by jabbing the staff against the earth. Chickens forgotten, Belle smashed through the attacking dogs to fight anew by his wounded side. Toro battled through the invaders, dispatching two on the way. Both of his dogs bled from multiple wounds. So, in a glance, did most of the attackers.

The number of them astonished him. No trace he had ever found suggested the pack totaled more than a dozen. Dead and dying, blood from several times that number mixed with the rain washing his grounds. The corpses were all sizes, ogreous, malformed, those still in the battle likewise. What Bigger could not fathom was that there were so many. Given the number killed, there should have been none left. He whirled to face movement in his peripheral vision. Like a blur unfolding, an unblooded hound came into being, new to the fight. It crouched, snarling at silent, enraged Belle.

Violence mounting, lightning struck again and again, erupting from the air to converge on giant Eanna. Dancelike, the warrior fought the lightning as an adversary, deflecting strikes with kicks and sweeping arms. Broken bolts drained into the sodden ground. Bigger turned away in time to see Toro menaced by a dog lunging from nowhere, and then found himself facing another. It rushed him.

Huge discharges exploded on all sides, drenching the battle in chaotically strobing light. Thunder concussed the air away from the figures struggling at its center. Gasping to breathe in the tenuous atmosphere, Bigger still managed to jam his staff between the forelegs of the beast that charged him. The creature’s momentum broke when it smashed chest-first against the butt of the stick, but the impact threw Bigger to the ground. Exultation rang in the voices of the pack as he struggled to get up, shielded by the whirling fury of his defenders, Toro and Belle.

Trying to rise, he found a gigantic hound upon him. It pounced. Bigger thrust the stick between closing jaws and held on, foul, steaming breath blasting his face. Sharp nails drew blood when the monster stamped his belly as it grappled with the stick. Bigger’s arms grew weak. His consciousness wavered. He saw swarming points of light.

Hot, sudden weight knocked the wind from his chest as the hound collapsed onto him. The creature pushed off from Bigger’s sternum with a jerk, still gripping the stick. Bigger was yanked staggering to his feet. The world spun, and his wounded leg threatened to buckle. He focused on Toro pushing up from the side, teeth locked onto the windpipe of the adversary. Wrenching the stick from Bigger’s grasp, the hound swung its head, flailing, raining punishing blows on Toro. Bigger half-fell, half-leapt forward, getting clipped on the chin when he tried to seize the staff. On the rebound, he grabbed it and threw himself forward, forcing the hound onto its back. Toro held fast and landed on top of the other dog, tightening his grip on its throat. Bigger landed face down inches from the battling dogs. Despite a reeling head, he had presence of mind to roll away.

“Eanna,” he thought, articulating no further.

Peering through a cascade of lightning, he saw she had grown to titanic height. The man with too many teeth had grown comparably, but was on the defensive. Eanna smote him with rays of light from her hands and eyes. The rays pulsed and pelletized, striking the old one like beams of hail. He retaliated with lightning bolts, called down without control. Strikes blasted the air, the ground and the crushed end of the structure where the tree had fallen. None found Eanna.

Somehow, Bigger realized, she had grown again while he looked on, failing to notice. She now towered above the man with too many teeth. Her dress clung to her, drenched from the rain, and her hair bounced in tightly hanging coils as she battle-danced. The expression on her face was merciless.

Bigger watched, awed and fascinated, until he heard a roar from behind, answered in kind by his dogs. Turning, he faced a mongrel, twice gigantic, that slashed both Belle and Toro in a single sweep, bowling them aside in its charge.

Bigger braced his stick and pointed it like a spear, but it snapped on impact. Stabbing blindly with the splintered end, he thrust into sudden resistance, and was lifted off the ground. His hands, abruptly slick with wet, slipped from the butt of the staff. The world went silent. Time slowed. The giant dog stood on its hind legs, thrashing its head side to side in slow motion, a grip’s length of the broken staff protruding from its throat. Fixed on the throes of the dog, Bigger did not notice the rain had stopped until the clouds broke up, backlighting the creature’s furious end.

Across an age, as Bigger raised a hand to wipe his brow, he saw that it and his arm were covered in blood. Looking down, he saw his clothing was tattered. Blood—some his own—covered much of it. A lot of the blood, in fact, was his. Time re-engaged.

Struggling not to faint, he took in the yard. No more attackers threatened. Dead and dying, they lay around him, far too many for a single pack, each in some indeterminate way grotesque. Their carcasses mingled with feathers and hunks of chicken flesh, spread in a broad ring with Bigger at its center. All but a paltry few had fallen to Belle and Toro. His dogs. He looked for them.

Belle stood up stiffly from where she had been thrown by the giant dog, but sat back on her haunches, eyes on Bigger. Toro stood poised, looking past Bigger to a battle still raging. Vertigo almost pulled him down when Bigger dipped his head and turned to look. Eanna blasted her enemy with slugging rays from left and right. The man crouched, hunched in upon himself. Each blow pounded him smaller, more folded in. Eanna struck furiously, repeatedly. Each strike coursed through her entire body, beginning with a push in the nimble step of her feet. She smote, her beams a hammer, a ram, driving piles of solid light that battered her adversary.

Suddenly, the man burst upright and shot skyward, a lightning bolt disappearing into the breaking clouds.

Bigger, unbelieving, started to shake his head, but the motion was too much. He fell back onto the ground, slamming hard. Impact did not stop the falling.

The sky above sped away. His head throbbed. He was dizzy and nauseous. The falling went on for hours. Clouds diminished to tiny points that then vanished into the blue.

Hands rocketed from on high to seize him, snapping him to a halt. Another snap, and Eanna loomed above, her lips moving in the shape of his name. Her voice was indistinct, an echo from the limit of earshot. Slowly, his hearing and vision pulled into sync. Eanna repeated his name, demanding he answer. “MacGregor!” she shouted, “Talk to me! MacGregor!”

Bigger struggled visibly. Cords stood out in his neck. “Leg,” he managed, finally.

“Your leg, yes!” She fumbled for a purchase to lift him. “A demon bit you. Stay with me!”

He fought not to drift.

“I must get you inside,” she told him.

His reply was a confused mumble, but he managed a weak nod. He could not, however, help raise himself from the ground. It took all the will he could muster to drift near consciousness as Eanna, no longer a giant, strained to raise him. Heaving, she draped him onto her back, and held him by pulling his arms around her neck. Crouching under the dead weight of him, she plodded toward the house. Before each jerking step, she paused to check his stability. In the pauses, she talked to him, goading him to stay awake.

“MacGregor! You must not sleep! Answer me!”

Jarred by her lurching, he moaned.

“You fought well,” she told him, adjusting her grip on his arms. Even through pain and confusion, he heard the praise.

“Few survive a battle with demons.”

“Demons,” the word echoed in his thoughts. Not demons. He fought dogs. Tens of dogs. It was a drug that made them seem ugly. Dogs. The correction would not form in his throat.

“I shall compose a song to make your deed ring in heaven.”

Her voice died, and she stalled, jarring him as she staggered to keep her balance.

“Blast!” she cursed.

The foot of the steps to the porch seemed impossibly high. Eanna puffed hard as she gathered the strength to climb. Bigger, his head hanging over her shoulder, saw feathers attached to bloody flesh. He labored to ask, “Chi-? Chi-ck?” Eanna stamped a foot onto the lowest step.

“Dead!” she barked, shrugging him more firmly onto her back. She grunted, hauled up another step, and managed, “Demons, too.” She raised him, boosting his weight with her leading leg. “All of them.” Eanna concentrated on getting him onto the porch, trying to say nothing more. At the top, she stood for a moment finding her balance. Bigger croaked, “Dogs? Belle?”

“They have wounds to lick,” she answered. “You are worse. They will care for themselves.”

Without warning, Eanna shifted from under him, letting him flip to land on his back, controlling the fall so his head did not slam on the deck. She grabbed under his armpits and dragged him toward the door.

Passive as she pulled him, Bigger watched his dogs limp up the steps. Their eyes, clouded with worry, never left him. Belle had a long, shallow wound on the top of her muzzle. She also favored a leg. Bite wounds on Toro’s chest and shoulder still oozed. Blue sky showed through a pinhole in his left ear. Trying to cluck reassurance, Bigger choked on his tongue.

From the spasm, darkness flooded. His eyes rolled up. Belle surged forward, stumbling on her injured limb but grabbing the knee of his overalls, which she began to shake. Bounding, Toro flew up the steps, barking furiously in Bigger’s face. Jerked from the faint by Eanna bouncing him on the deck, Bigger heard her shout, “MacGregor! Do not sleep!”

She heaved him through the door. He strained to stay awake, but the room spun, and he lost touch with what was happening. His sense returned as Eanna half-rolled him onto the couch when she swung his legs onto the cushions. The room spun again, then cleared. He started at the sound of Eanna ripping the leg of his overalls.

An impulse to protest died without reaching his lips. His eyes worked, but his head was no more responsive than the rest of his body. Peering down as far over the contours of his face as he was able, he could watch her work. The wound on his bare calf lay at the far edge of his vision. Luminous green and purple streaks spread up and down from the bite. Eanna spun and left his view, returning a moment later with her wooden chest. From the box she took a tube and shook out two dermal patches. One she stuck on Bigger’s neck, the other on her own. In the rush of the drug, he saw her draw a knife, apparently from thin air, and wipe it with a cotton pad. The smell of rubbing alcohol burned his nose. Toro licked Bigger’s dangling hand, distracting him the instant Eanna cut.

The knife was sharp enough that he did not feel it slice, but instantly he felt pressure ease. Pain expanded in its wake. Eanna leaned forward, covered the wound with her mouth, sucked, then turned and spat. Venom hit the floor hissing. Five times she did this, then rocked back on her heels and stroked with her hands, one up from his ankle and one down from his thigh. Her motions swept back the luminous discoloration spreading from the wound. Each stroke forced a pulse of glowing purple-green liquid to bubble from the gash across the punctures.

Behind the venom Eanna forced from his leg, Bigger felt the blue drug expand ever more potently through his being. It advanced through his body, seeming to drive the poison to concentrate under Eanna’s sweeping hands. Little by little, he felt the venom’s influence give way to persistent rekeying by Entheoclone 36.

Slowly, as he watched her work, his system reanimated. Eyes alert in his unresponsive form, he tracked her actions. Feeling returned in the center of his torso, spreading first as pain that ebbed, grudgingly, from his flesh. Sensation leaked out from his core, slowly up his neck and slowly down into his fingers. Last, and most reluctantly, life moved again in his bitten leg.

He was unaware that he had begun to stir until Eanna clasped the hand he flexed unconsciously, and shushed him. Her tenderness was so astonishing that he could only gape. She patted his hand, and said, “Not too much too fast, Mr. MacGregor. I have cleared the venom, but, still, you have been bitten by a demon.”

Placing his hand on his chest, she stood, and walked away. Sounds of her rummaging came from the bedroom. When she returned, she carried a painted tin the size of an old coffee can, and what looked like a cruet for chrism or salad oil. Eanna set these on the floor by the couch, and then, shifting his limbs carefully, undressed him. He shivered as his skin was exposed to air, and the shivers became violent trembling as he continued to reinvigorate.

Eanna drew down his ruined overalls in short side-to-side jerks, tugging hard until she could slide them off. When he was naked, she opened the tin, which released fragrance like heat and morning sun. He smelled clean linen, rare unguents. Dipping with her fingers, she dabbed creamy paste onto his body. Dabbing, she told him, “It is always nice to have hope rewarded. I did not doubt that you are brave.” She dabbed his face. “But, also, you fought well.” She rubbed the paste into his cheeks with the heels of her palms. “A hero, Mr. MacGregor.” She patted again. “A hero reborn.”

Eanna straightened, and regarded him. He stirred, raising a hand as though he might reach for her, but she seized his wrist, gripped and released it, then moved to his feet.

Vigorously, she chafed his flesh, fast and firm, rubbing up his legs. His skin flushed red behind her touch. When she approached his groin, Bigger was disconcerted to realize he was bobbing slowly erect, but Eanna chuckled. Leaning close to his shaft, she whispered, “Patience,” and shifted it out of the way so she could work across his hips. From there, she jumped to his near arm, and then across his chest to the other.

The effect of her effort was a surge in the sharp tingle awakening his body. With the surge came impulse to move in the parts she had warmed. His legs jerked involuntarily as Eanna worked on an arm. When she switched to the other, the one she had finished flexed on its own, bending and straightening the elbow while opening and closing a fist.

“Do that again, with your arm,” she instructed, and he did. “Again,” she said. “Continue, but slowly.”

The deliberate, voluntary movements of his arm suppressed the involuntary twitching in his legs.

When she started on his trunk, he reached to brush a strand of hair fallen across her face, but faltered. She smiled at him, and brushed back the hair herself, then redoubled her effort. Bigger watched. Except for an occasional glance, suddenly coy, she focused intently on her task. Reaching his neck, her hands slowed, and stopped. She pulled one hand to rest over his heart, allowing the fingertips of her other to drift across his lips.

“Such a soft mouth,” she said. “A wise mouth….”

Her voice trailed away. He started to speak, but she laid a finger across his lips and told him, “Not yet.”

Raising the cruet, Eanna held it high in the diffuse light, tipping and turning it to mix faint glow into its oil. She began this time at Bigger’s head, pouring a few drops into her palm, rubbing her hands together, raising them palm up and muttering as she did so. She anointed him, massaging the oil into his head and neck. Nine times she repeated the ritual before reaching his feet.

Life force flooded back into him. All the poisons, he knew as he felt it, not only of the demon but everything collected over a lifetime, blew out the pores of his skin like thin black smoke and faded into nothing. He rose onto an elbow, but Eanna objected, “Not yet.” He resisted, reaching for her. Her face softened.

“Please lay back.”

Bigger stared at her until his heartbeat rose in his ears, and then he did as she asked. Eanna responded in a fluid arc of motion, pulling off her shift and straddling his thighs. She grabbed his half-awake phallus, and began to knead it with one hand. Leaning forward, she balanced the other on his chest, absorbing and reflecting his living rhythms. She peered into his eyes, intoning long, complex gutturals in a voice so harsh that, even though he watched, Bigger found it hard to credit as human. She spoke the sounds like language, and modulated her face and her tone as though making sense, but the utterances resembled nothing he had ever heard. Its cadences rang with impossible age.

The warmth of her palm above his heart and her hand around his enthusiastic cock erased the need for translation. She rocked forward onto her knees and sat to receive his erection.

Bigger waited for silence to descend and reality to shift, but it did not. Instead, he felt increasingly alert and increasingly aroused. Strength continued to flow into him. Slowly, he arched his back, pressing deeper into Eanna, lifting her bodily. His eyes fixed to the unbroken brown skin of her belly rising and falling as she rode him. Her belly looked so perfect that he stared, entranced. Minutes passed before it struck him that she had no navel. Not even a hint. As he formed the thought, she grabbed his chin, forcing him to look at her.

Naked lust. Desire on her face struck him like an impact, wild and startling. Behind the appetite mixed other emotions, poorly veiled, roiling, among them something like worry and something like solicitude. Then her heart was transparent, and he realized her emotion cutting through all others was fear. She was afraid for him. Her fear was growing. This made no sense, as he felt stronger, healthier by the instant. They drove into the hunger, he like granite and she atop, her knees bracketing his waist, a foot tucked for leverage over each of his thighs.

Without warning, his strength drained away and he began to convulse. Eanna shouted, “MacGregor!” and smote him across the face. Silence descended as he fell. Falling and falling.

He dropped from great height, falling such distance that time lost traction. It seemed he had just begun to fall, trapped in the panic of the first descent. It seemed he had been falling for hours. He fell through black, resisted only by whistling air. At one point, he feared he had begun to tumble, but he had no referent by which to judge, and no way to know if his squirming helped, or if it actually started him end-over-end. Another moment, he felt that he was not falling; rather, that he was buoyed by wind jetting from below.

Reappearance of scale was sudden and brief. Only after he shot through a thin cloud of ivory flecks did he realize that thousands of teeth converged on a point through which he had sped. He saw them come together in pursuit and dive, but his meteoric fall left them dwindling from sight. Judged against that blip of detail, he realized the measure of his drop was astronomical. He need not fear the teeth because, by this point, having thought these few thoughts, he had fallen out of their world.

And then Eanna stood beside him in the black, a hand on his chest and the other covering his wound. Gradually, the rushing from below abated. Even as the wind changed from gale to whisper to nothing against Bigger’s naked skin, Eanna inhabited a world becalmed. Her hands upon him, she stood firmly, feet planted, unmoving as he slowly ceased to fall.

He floated in the void. Eanna stood at his side, although on what, he could not imagine. Her hands lay motionless upon him as she matched her breath to his. When she did, they enchained, and he was powerless to breathe except with her. Inhale. Exhale. Once she ruled his lungs, her hands began to move, stroking his body in broad sweeps.

After moments—or hours—of this, he realized the sweeps were directed toward the bite on his leg. Bigger struggled up to see what she did, and discovered that he was covered by bruises. The discoloration under his skin flowed liquidly before the slight pressure of Eanna’s strokes.

Only when she stopped to push him back down did it register that he floated in space, but rose from and was pushed back onto…what?

Eanna began again, now pressing a little harder. With a glance to his face, she spoke.

“The demon continues to poison you. I feared this. I fear a tooth broke off in the bite. When this happens, the fragment tunnels deep.” She paused, pursing her lips, and stood unmoving while she weighed what she said. Her hands resumed when she went on. “Not into the meat, which I cleaned. Into the…,” she pronounced a rasping growl. Her brow furrowed as she cast for translation. Finally, reluctantly, she ventured, “The…template.”

She worked.

“It becomes like an abscess. Untreated, it will kill you. Or blacken your path.”

Bigger lifted his head to see his leg swollen to double its normal thickness. The ghastly color Eanna swept toward the wound was sooty green. This time, as it collected, he felt a growing, throbbing burn, like the blood around the injury had begun to smolder. The throb became a pulse riding his pulse. His heartbeat pumped at the fire like a bellows. His jaw locked shut. Though he squirmed and grunted with pain, he could not cry out.

The flesh of his legs felt like liquid beginning to boil. Agony forced him rigid, a thin, protracted “squeeee” all that escaped of his scream. Eanna attempted to press on, but Belle erupted into the void, challenging her. Tight threat high in the dog’s throat mixed rage and uncertainty.

“I did not do this to him!” Eanna snapped. “I am trying to save him!”

Belle reacted by snarling and barking. She feinted toward Eanna, but the woman deflected her with a wave. The dog dropped low, frustration sounding deep in her chest, her eyes wide. Eanna rested a hand on Bigger, but did nothing more. She watched Belle impatiently.

Toro emerged deliberately into their interspace from Bigger’s far side, and approached. The big dog sniffed at the stricken human, and nuzzled his hand. Bigger, breathing rapidly and shallowly, almost immobilized by pain, still had presence to stroke Toro’s head. The dog woofed softly. When no one reacted, he walked around the couch and woofed again, more forcefully, eyes on his sister. Slowly, Belle grew less taut. She sidled cautiously around Bigger’s recumbent form, her eyes on Eanna as long as possible before pressing her head into her wounded human’s hand. He stroked weakly. Belle whimpered. Toro trotted to his sister’s side, nuzzling her in comfort. Bigger tried to reassure them, but managed only, “Good…good….” A sharp pang choked him off. Eanna gave Belle a pointed look and went back to work. Belle whimpered and sank to a crouch beside Bigger. Then the dogs were no longer with them, and Bigger, alone with his visitor, reclined in space.

He felt the work of her hands concentrating the pain—and presumably the poison—at the bite. Pressed into an ever smaller area, the molten burn grew more intense. When the pain concentrated to nut-size immediately under the bite, the burning drilled, auger-like, into his leg. He tried to lose consciousness to escape, but could not. Eanna kneaded his wounded flesh. Bigger screamed. The dogs matched his voice with howls from outside the bubble of void. Eanna ignored the noise and continued to force the toxin into a smaller and smaller nugget.

The pain compressed finally into an unyielding object embedded in the meat of his calf, a starburst kernel of needle-sharp spines that pierced tissue with each stroke of Eanna’s hands. Bigger was aware only of misery, but Eanna’s method slowly worked the object through the muscle toward the surface. The torment grew so quickly, he could not even howl.

Breathing in spastic gasps, he convulsed. His fingers strained to dig into the non-existent surface on which he writhed. Mewling from both dogs reached into the void. Then they were with him. First Belle on one side, an instant later Toro on the other, materialized from nowhere to rub against the backs of his fiercely contracted hands.

A spine broke through his skin, green-brown liquid hemorrhaging around its tiny shaft. Eanna barked percussively, an expostulation that could only be a curse, or an oath. She worked frantically, squeezing in upon the fragment with the pads of her thumbs. By sleight of hand, she produced glowing blue patches, which she slapped in a circle around the wound, adding one over his heart and one in the hollow between his brows. Reality split. Eanna twinned. The new Eanna pulled a second Bigger from inside the first.

The original Eanna continued to minister to the first Bigger, still prostrate before her. Second Bigger pulled free both vigorous and aroused. Second Eanna held the tips of his fingers as she drew him through open air to an embrace. Their mouths came together as their abdomens kissed. Physical, voltaic, an appetite circulated between them. Lips upon Eanna’s lips, Bigger slid his hand down her spine, past her buttocks to the backs of her thighs. Gently, firmly, he pulled forward, lifting her as he did. She spread her legs as he penetrated her, huffing impatiently at his restraint. Like a command, Eanna barked his name, “MacGregor!” and clenched to him tightly, staring into his eyes as she sank down his shaft to its root. Drawing up her heels and crossing her legs, Eanna locked her ankles at the small of his back. Slowly, deliberately, she pumped him, torso to torso, up and down.

Near them, first Eanna worked desperately on first Bigger, ignoring her twin on the leaping creature that was his. First Bigger appeared comatose, all awareness shifted to his second self. First Eanna used her fingernail to split his flesh along a row of spines protruding from his leg. With the long nails of her index fingers, she pulled open the wound to expose the invasive fragment awash in green-brown liquid. Roughly spherical and covered in spines, the object throbbed as it rode the pulse in his leg. She made no effort to extract it. Instead, she opened another dermal patch, pinched a tear in its envelope, and squeezed out the contents. The glowing blue liquid boiled as it dripped onto the bur, which began to smoke and char. A smell like scorching hair clouded around them.

The second Bigger, seeming engrossed in sex, went wide-eyed, frenzied, banging the second Eanna hard and fast. She shouted exultantly, and matched him. First Eanna, by contrast, wore a grim face as she ministered to his prostrated twin. Sweat stood on her brow. With thumb and forefinger, she held open the wound while prying the demon burr one-handed from the flesh in which it was sunk. Careful to make sure no spine broke off, she lifted the object just enough to let her release the wound and squeeze the last drops of blue drug from the patch. These blue dregs smoldered away the remaining spines, leaving a tiny stone, like a fossilized pea. Flicking her fingernail, first Eanna flipped this in the air and blew on it. The nugget atomized. Its dust disappeared. At last, she relaxed, and wrapped her arms around first Bigger. The moment she did, they were sucked into the heat of their seconds, and reabsorbed at full fury.

Bigger felt whole, and wholly present, for the first time since the battle. A part of him was shocked by the flip from agony to intercourse, but Eanna allowed no time for wonder. Clasping the back of his head in her hands, she forced open his mouth with her kiss, his eyes popping wide at her insistence. The world changed.

From a solid place in trackless void, they burst into vast space filled with stars. Bigger knew at once they were not his stars. There were too many, too densely packed, too large and radiant in a spectrum of colors impossible to describe. He gawked, certain he should not be able to perceive them.

His distraction annoyed Eanna. She gripped his cock impossibly with her cleft, breaking their kiss and binding him in a lace of arms and legs. His attention unified. He was with Eanna, penetrating her, probing, arched like a bow. His heart thundered, a dance of titans. Deaf to that earthquake, his loins drove with the shove and pull of her hips. They fucked with perfect reciprocity, together a piston, or an engine, a pumping well.

Rushing toward climax, Bigger opened his eyes to glimpse the curve of Quella’s cheek fading against the background of stars, and he bucked in surprise. But then a deeper assertion, an undertone, throbbed exuberantly that he and Eanna coupled in open space, stars above, below and on every side, and he wondered how much—if any—of this was in some way verifiably real. Every singing nerve demanded that he act as though it were. Cresting to orgasm, he started to pull out, but Eanna locked her heels behind him and ground harder. They came together in a shudder, Bigger moaning pleasure through clenched teeth, Eanna shouting in triumph.

Again, Bigger expected to lose consciousness, but again it did not happen. Then he realized that he was already there, the realm into which he had fallen before, and he wondered once more how much of this experience was hallucinated. Unaccountably, the ambiguity struck him as funny, and he grinned at the woman straddling his hips. She used both hands to tilt back his head, and poured herself into a kiss. The world went silent, and fell away, or Bigger fell. He could not determine which, could tell nothing except that something or someone was falling, and that his pulse sang with joy.

*

The kiss lingered on his lips like a Cheshire grin. The sense of Eanna near him faded gradually, but the feeling of her mouth on his, pressing, teasing, insistent, inviting, remained. Her kiss rode with his descent, a descent that slowed, imperceptibly at first, as it continued. He grew lighter as the fall went on. More and more featherlike, he swooped in drifting arcs, moving at behest of air currents he could not otherwise detect. Finally, he settled onto a surface, yielding but able to bear his weight. Darkness grew less absolute, revealing that he lay on his bed. The hour was much closer to dawn than not. From the angle of its light, he knew the moon would soon disappear behind the western hills. Eanna sat beside him watching. When she saw that he was fully present, she smiled, tapped his chest once, lay down beside him and fell asleep. A cricket began to chirp somewhere in the house. Lulled by the sound, Bigger drifted off.

IV

The sun was high and the heat well advanced when Bigger woke. Eanna was not beside him. For a time he lay sweating onto the sheets as he took inventory of his parts. A tapping finger proved the bite on his leg was tender to the touch, but he found no break in the skin, and no scab. He sat up to look, and could find no actual wound, only suggestive bruising. The spot pulled when he flexed the leg, and ached when it pulled, though no differently than other pangs ached and pulled on other mornings. With no more sign of injury than stiff joints, he wrote off what he remembered of the prior night to hallucination. There was probably no way to know how many blue patches Eanna had slapped onto him.

Reaching for his overalls, he froze. The left leg was bloody shreds.

In the next room the dogs stirred, aware he was up. He threw the damaged overalls into his laundry hamper and grabbed another pair from the chest of drawers.

Still fastening a shoulder strap, Bigger crossed the living room to let the dogs out. He watched through the screen door as they descended from the porch, moving a bit stiffer than usual, he thought. The impression was brief, disappearing when the dogs had relieved themselves and begun their morning circuits of the yard.

No carcasses, demon or dog, marked the scene of the battle; however, where dead dogs might have been if the day before had not ended in weird dream or psychotic episode, patches of ground lay bare. He was struck by how similar they looked to the lightning-blasted earth from two nights earlier. Toro sniffed the largest of the new patches before urinating on it. Facing away, he used his hind feet to scratch grass and dirt onto the spot.

If there were no dead dogs, there were unequivocally dead chickens. Dismembered parts and bloody feathers clung to the base rail of the far fence, as though blown there by extraordinary force. Bigger could account for only eight of his hens by looking over the remains, but the wrecked coop was empty. He was disinclined to clean up the carnage. It was a task he decided would be no worse for delay. Fire ants would clear away the meat in any case.

Bigger returned to the house to start his morning routine. On his way from the bathroom to the kitchen, he spied Eanna’s wooden chest on the table, and detoured without thinking. His hand stretched toward the lid as he approached, but stopped short, fingers twitching once in mid-air, at sight of a sheet of paper tucked beneath a corner of the box. Tri-folded like a map or a brochure, the paper showed what appeared to be writing on its upper face, but the marks could as easily have been writerly doodles on the edge of disorder. When he took up the sheet and studied it carefully, the jots reminded him of cuneiform—if cuneiform were scrawled in ballpoint by a casual hand.

Opened, the sheet revealed a diagram in so unusual a style that Bigger had to stare before realizing it was a schematic of the flywheels in Eanna’s car. Once he recognized what he held, his eyes went to the dynamic linkages that carried motion into and out of the assembly. Their basis was the same system of peristaltic transfer as in the drive shaft, which did not surprise him. What did surprise him was that he saw instantly how to do it better. Quite actually saw. Visual superimpositions on the diagram, bli-bli-blip, improvements bloomed. An additional set of pivot points here, and another rocker arm here. He could see the changes step up power transfer and cut inefficiency. The vision was detailed down to crosshatched shading on the new parts to indicate depth.

Grabbing tablet and stylus, he settled at the table to sketch, roughing in the main features of his inspiration before Toro woofed through the screen door. Time had slipped away. The dogs were hungry.

*

Scant moments after he placed his breakfast dishes to dry on the rack by the sink, Bigger was in the shop cutting pieces for his design. He could have printed the parts, but he liked how his imagination played as he worked lathe and laser and other tools at his bench. Just so, only as his hands clamped a piece for the cutting beam of the laser did he remember Eanna’s wooden box. Discovering the diagram had driven it from his thoughts. He stood away from the bench, on the verge of taking a break to inspect the box’s contents, but the notion was derailed by an image of Eanna struggling to save him from the demon’s bite. Her actions had earned….

Demon’s bite? Had the day before actually happened?

Turning from his labor, he stretched, and shuffled to the bay door. The dead spots in the yard confirmed something had happened, but no matter how long he stared, he could not see any remnant of the preternatural. Blown feathers and pieces of chicken convicted the feral pack, beyond question. Did they also indict a demon world and the bizarre man with too many teeth?

And where, now that he was asking questions, was Eanna?

A quick check showed the bike she had used before was gone. Where? Opportunity to ask had never presented itself. Where had she spent the previous day? Where was she now? For that matter, who was she? Somewhere in her past was a woman who had entered the hospital as a patient. How much of that person remained in the warrior-lover who had invaded his nights? Bigger turned back to the car, stopping just inside the bay to study the machine as though it might give insight about its absent driver. What was he to make of her claim to have inhabited his lost Rebecca? If the hospital staff was dosing patients with a rogue drug that induced shared hallucinations, was there risk of a contagious personality disorder? His next thought stalled his musing. Had he been infected?

Well, he finally decided, what if? He had had massive doses of the drug, the previous night especially. What effects could he detect? When he took stock, he felt trashed. His body ached with a totality he had never known. Pain, unnoticed as he worked, emerged now from every joint, every muscle of his body as he explored it. In a slice of somebody’s reality, he had taken a beating.

Strangely, he had not really felt the pain until he had thought about it, and his awareness of each shooting ache faded to inconsequence as soon as he ceased to pay it mind. On the other hand, his mental faculties were heightened. He was in such an excited state of imagination that mere physical hurt was easy to dismiss. Two new, patentable ideas in three days did not seem like fruit of a personality disorder.

The parcel delivery horn sounded from the drive. Among happy barks from Belle and Toro he heard Quella doggie-talking to them as she slid open the gate. Bigger came out of the bay wiping his hands on a shop rag as she maneuvered the pedi-van to a stop beside him.

“What a surprise!” Bigger greeted her as she stepped from the driver’s sling. “I didn’t realize I had anything coming today.”

“You don’t, jefe,” she informed him. “I have a package for one Eanna, last name unfortunately obscured, care of MacGregor Pedal Cars. You hiding anyone like that around here?”

Bigger ran a hand through his hair and jutted his chin at the package as though it stood for his absent guest.

“Hiding is right. Only don’t look at me. I have no idea where she spends her days.”

Quella stared at him long before saying anything. Bigger paled, realizing what he had said. She blurted out, “But the nights, at least tell me you’re using condoms!”

The words slapped him. Before he could recover, she said, “No, don’t answer that! I’m sorry!” She forced herself to unclench the fists she had made without thinking. “Damn it! I promised myself I’d never get jealous. We’ve never made any commitment.”

Bigger considered only a moment.

“Quella, got time for a coffee? I can really use some perspective right now.”

Again she stared at him, considering. Finally, she reached into the cab of her van and punched a button on the monitor to show she was on break. Handing over her delivery, she collected his signature. With a wave toward the house, she said, “Lay on, MacDuff.”

*

Over coffee, Bigger gave a narrative of events since Eanna first appeared. Much of it was vague, not because he wished to hide anything, but because he had no idea how to describe what he was not even sure had happened. Quella let him talk until he ran down, interrupting only once to make sure she had heard the name of the drug correctly. He finished, “…and right beside the box was a diagram that gave me the idea I was working on when you got here. Which, by the way, is going to be a game changer. All by itself. With everything I’ve figured out in the past three days, the next MacGregor roll-out will have forty-to-sixty percent more efficient drive and better seats. I may retrofit existing inventory. This is that big.”

She said nothing for a long time, spinning her mug in halting circles that she watched closely. Finally, she looked at him and asked, “How confident are you that you haven’t hallucinated everything, start to finish?”

In answer, he hiked his overalls and hoisted his exposed leg onto the table. Quella inspected the bruising minutely. Her finger barely grazed him as she traced the discoloration.

He added, “There are also the car in the repair bay and a carved wooden box filled with glowing blue transdermal patches sitting there on the table by your arm.”

She jerked away.

“This box? This box!” Quella stared. “How did I not notice this before?” She reached toward the lid, but pulled away before touching it. “Okay, I’ll go this far with you. Something real is happening here, but there’s some kind of spell, un hechizo, that’s also working.” She inhaled deeply, expelled the air, and went on, quickly, “MacGregor, I, Mac, we’ve never talked about who we are to each other, or how that might go forward. I’m sorry to make a point of this now, but I can’t let go of it. Whatever it is between us, it isn’t going forward for a while. Blood donors have to wait eighteen months after questionable exposure, and then they’re tested before they make another donation. I expect the same before we talk about the benefits of our friendship.” She swallowed hard, her eyes never leaving his. “But then I want to talk about it. If you’re up for it, I want to have that conversation. In the meantime,” she covered his hand with hers, “Things between us have always been muy comodo, and I’m going to hang on to that. Now,” her features hardened, “As for this interlude with Little Miss Creature of the Night, I would say step one is don’t let her give you any more of that drug.”

Bigger started to respond, but closed his mouth instead. He looked long at the wooden box before nodding slowly. When he still said nothing, Quella went on, “And it also seems to me that before you jump back in the sack…or fight any more demons…you may want to ask some pertinent questions, like her history of STIs. And, now that I think of it, what the undead use for currency when they put their cars in the shop.”

“Undead?” Bigger objected. “She’s not a vampire!”

“The hell she’s not!” Quella insisted. “Just looking at you, I can see she’s sucking your life away. Don’t go all galante when you’re talking to me, ‘chacho. I know you too well to believe she didn’t have keys to your buttons before she ever walked up the driveway.”

She stood, straightened her shirt, and contemplated the man huddled before her at the table. Almost, she thought, she could follow the race of his thoughts by the fleet expressions of his face. Bigger struggled with her words, Eanna’s actions and his own confusion. Quella was sure her comments had been heard. When she spoke next, her tone was softer.

“Mac?”

He looked up.

“I’ve got a route to pedal, and the day isn’t getting any longer.”

Bigger nodded as he rose. She came around the table and put a hand on his chest.

“I won’t be back here before Tuesday unless you or…,” she coughed, and added with pointed stress, “your customer…,” the twitch of her mouth was more grimace than smile, but she finished levelly, “…require another unscheduled run.”

Smiling sheepishly, he drew close and embraced her. Muscular and solid, she filled his arms in a way that had felt familiar the first time they had hugged. She was right. Things between them had always been muy comodo. He leaned forward to brush her lips with his, but she turned to accept the kiss on her cheek.

“Come back to me on that another time,” she told him. She started to say something else, but closed her mouth. Then she blurted, “Look, Mac, if you need me for anything—anything! No matter what!—damn it! my phone doesn’t work!—you reach me. You reach me. Promise!”

“Quella, I—”

“Promise!”

He nodded.

“Qué, I promise if you’ll promise to reach me for nothing at all.”

She pushed him playfully.

“No negotiation, señor. Stand or fall with it.”

“Okay,” he agreed. “I’m standing.”

*

Bigger watched his friend and sometime lover pedal through the gate before returning to his shop. It was a longstanding bit of magic between them that neither watched the other out of sight when parting. He re-entered the repair bay with more on his mind than before Quella’s visit. Fortunately, the work still to be done was spelled out in design already produced. Another few pieces would complete the new assembly, after which there remained only installation in Eanna’s car. With a plan for his hands, his thoughts could roam.

He was on the ground beneath the vehicle when she returned. Her footsteps entering the bay were unmistakeable. Even so, she surprised him when she leaned into the car and peered down through the exposed transmission and flywheels in the well between the seats.

“You left this open,” she announced.

“The light,” was all he replied. He gave the last bolt a final twist, slid out and stood to face her.

“You’re back early.”

“No,” she shook her head, “The moon is up.”

Bigger shrugged and waved toward the car as he started to turn back to it.

“Let me show you what I—”

“You have had a visitor,” she interrupted.

“Pardon me?”

He stood motionless, a gesture cut off, his entire being demanding to know what business it was of hers.

“The smell of her is thick in the yard. And inside, at the table. And on the package.”

“Eanna,” he began, but she held up a hand.

“I accuse you of nothing. It is the odor of talk, though beneath is affection and…hurt.”

He shivered at the word, remembering Quella refusing by effort of will to be possessive.

“You are a better person because of her, MacGregor. I approve.”

“Eanna,” he started again. This time she waited to hear what he had to say, but he found himself at a loss for words. “Eanna, I don’t want to talk about this.”

She nodded, without surprise. He sniffed, and added, “There are a lot of things we ought to talk about, but this is not among them.”

Eanna crossed her arms over her chest.

“What is it you wish to discuss, Mr. MacGregor?”

Bigger squelched his first response. Standing in the bay was not where he wanted to put hard questions to a testy guest. He jabbed an index finger toward his day’s work.

“First things first,” he told her. “Right now, let’s start with your car.”

“Is it repaired?”

He could not or did not choose to suppress a smile.

“Better than that.”

“Oh?” Eanna straightened, her gaze growing sharp with curiosity. “Show me.”

She listened intently as he explained what had failed and why. Leaning into the cab beside him, she followed his description while peering at the works in the transmission well. When he began to discuss the relative efficiencies of the modifications he had made and those still planned, she stood out from the car, causing him to follow to continue talking. She interrupted once.

“In my car you have put these things?”

“Yes,” he confirmed. “First versions of prototypes. If you don’t like the results, I can still switch back to the original equipment. I haven’t cannibalized or recycled anything.”

She answered by pushing him aside with the back of a hand. In one motion, she snapped the cowl over the transmission well as she slid into the driver’s seat. Bigger’s eyes went to her left leg as she drew it into the cab.

“You have changed the seat,” she observed, shifting to test the new fit.

“Better,” she pronounced. “I like this.”

As she eased backward from the slip at his tool bench, he held his breath, waiting for reaction. When she nodded, though to herself, he exhaled.

Churning dust from the floor and startling Bigger, she accelerated backward out of the bay with no warning. Eanna slewed the car ninety degrees as she flashed into the sun, skidded to a stop, and shifted gears. The car leapt forward. Bigger ran from the bay to see her cross the yard and exit the gate. He had a moment of panic that she was fleeing, but then he remembered she had neither the wooden chest nor her massive suitcase. He followed through the gate and ambled down the drive to watch as she put the car through paces.

He was unsurprised that she was a demanding driver. For purely selfish reasons, it suited him that her idea of checking his handiwork pushed the car to the edge of its tolerances. Speeding past for the third time, she gave him a “thumbs up.” The next pass, she blew a kiss through the vee of her fingers. The next time, she skidded to a stop before him, popped open her window and said, “Get in. I want to know how it handles with two of us.”

Bigger folded into the passenger seat as Eanna flipped a lever to engage the pedals on his side. He was still situating himself when she let out the clutch and jumped them forward, flashing him a vulpine grin. Immediately, she was pedaling hard, pumping energy into the flywheels to power their acceleration. Wearing a grin to rival hers, Bigger leaned into the task, matching Eanna pump for pump. In minutes, they left the dirt road that crossed Bigger’s land and shot onto the county asphalt leading to town.

Landscape tore past. Cresting a steep rise, they found the man with too many teeth blocking their way. Eanna did not break or swerve, instead plowing straight ahead. The man dove out of the way. Bigger laughed, stroked the air to mark a point, then looked back. There was no sign of the man. Tall grass beside the road waved in the wind, revealing nothing of what it may or may not have hidden.

Settling back in his seat, he saw Eanna watched him sidelong, bemusement on her face.

“What?” he demanded.

She smiled as though something had been confirmed, but ignored his question when she spoke.

“Everything sounds different. And never have I managed such speed. Obviously, your repair is successful. Your modifications are good. I commend you, Mr. MacGregor.”

The praise was welcome, but he chose not to acknowledge it.

“After the past couple of days, I would think that you could call me Bigger.”

“No,” she answered flatly. “That is not a dignified name.”

He started to reply, but the road opened at an intersection. Eanna threw the car out of gear as they approached the crossroads, gripped the handbrakes, and wrested the juddering car through a doughnut to return the way they had come. Bigger threw up a hand to brace against the frame of the cowling, but they still knocked shoulders as they compensated at different rhythms for the slew.

“Well,” he commented. “That didn’t snap the drivetrain. I’m glad you’re giving her a workout.”

“What do you mean?” she snapped, then amended, “Who do you mean? Her? You said ‘her.’ Is this working out that woman?”

Bigger stared at her, pushing his back against the passenger-side hatch. She glanced at him.

“Do not gape,” she said peevishly. “Her trace is like a fog around your table.”

He faced forward, watching the road roll beneath them. Neither said anything else until they re-entered the yard, when Bigger spoke.

“Pull into the bay, if you will. I’d like to check that everything is trim and tight.”

Eanna smirked wickedly as she slowed to maneuver.

“The car, you mean.”

He blushed, but managed to answer without a break in his voice.

“The car, yes.” A moment later he added, “Absolutely.”

Bigger himself pulled the vehicle onto the raised tracks of the slip beside his workbench. Curious that his heart pounded only now, he sat watching in the rearview mirror until Eanna disappeared out the door of the bay. It was a quick matter to check the bolts and pins he had placed, but he lingered to go over the entire car. Once done, he reversed it off the tracks, pulled out from the bay and turned around, backing it under cover for the night.

The dogs sprawled on either side of the doormat when he climbed the steps onto the porch. He was momentarily pleased that they were not inside with Eanna, but this turned to concern when he realized both were so deeply asleep that his approach did not rouse them. Concern became fear when he patted first Belle, then Toro, and neither responded to his touch. Yanking open the door, he leapt across the threshold, and stopped cold. The man with too many teeth was at the dining table, Eanna directly across from him. Bigger’s entrance went completely unremarked.

The pair sat, eyes locked, silent, but with tension between them that swarmed the room like hornets. Eanna’s box of drugs sat on the table directly in front of the man, who looked unmistakably smug. Eanna’s glare was poison. She sat motionless with rage.

Bigger felt lethargy overtake him. It grew, coming like a tide, from which the scene at the table seemed to retreat. Normal sounds of the house grew muffled and distant.

“No!” he mutely refused.

Shuddering physically, he threw off the torpor and strained toward ordinary space. Ponderously, as though through wet cement, he dragged his senses closer to normal perception. For the first time the intruder acknowledged Bigger, astonished eyes snapping to the latecomer. In a blink, Eanna threw herself onto the table, snatched the box, and rolled back to her chair, her prize clutched to her chest.

Shrieking, the man snapped back to face her. Throwing wide his arms, he gaped his mouth, and from the maw erupted a vortex of teeth. The swarm burgeoned into a cloud that obscured the ceiling. Eanna swung an arm to ward off teeth, as some grew to enormous size and thousands split into finer and finer gnashing slivers. With her other hand, she struggled to open the chest, but the clasp was unyielding. Her movements became desperate when the teeth struck her.

Bigger recoiled when teeth flew from the intruder’s mouth, but his outrage went instantly critical. This monster was in his house. Ignoring the storm of teeth, he charged, leaping to hit the adversary with a flying tackle that carried both of them into one of the dining chairs, shattering it.

The teeth evaporated when Bigger struck, but the man himself remained unmistakably solid. Bigger landed heavily, his breath knocked away. He saw the man rise, pick up a chair leg and start toward him, but through the man’s legs he saw Eanna, no longer menaced by the teeth, throw open the box, snatch out a patch, peel it and slap it on. Her giant warrior self burst forth. The intruder rose onto his toes, raising the chair leg to club Bigger, but before he could strike, Eanna was on him. It was all Bigger could do to roll away from their stomping feet.

He strained to recover as they fought, forcing his diaphragm to still against his body’s desperate need for air, and then forcing himself to inhale slowly and deeply. He rose carefully, pausing half-bent, hands on knees, before pulling himself erect to rejoin the battle.

The man had grown as large as warrior Eanna, and fought with mad glee on his face. Warrior Eanna’s face was cold determination, but Bigger saw her human-sized self against the wall, forearms sporting twin rows of dermal patches. She hunched low with desperation. The battle went badly.

He was at a loss for a way to help her, but the smaller Eanna waved him close. He went to her, skirting the giant fighters by hugging the wall. She rummaged in the chest as he came up by her side, and when he was in reach, slapped a patch onto his arm. He felt the drug begin to enter his system, and felt the world begin to shift, but he tore away the patch and discarded it.

“No!” he barked. “No more of that!”

She gave him an imploring look, but he shook his head emphatically. Her shoulders sagged. Bruises marked half her face and one eye was swollen almost shut. Beneath the patches on her arms were more bruises that looked like she had wrested free from an iron grip. Blows her enemy aimed at the giant warrior were striking the mortal woman. Obviously, the projection, or whatever it was, was failing.

As he watched, her head snapped hard against the wall, followed instantly by the intruder’s roar of triumph. Bigger spun to see warrior Eanna broken backward across the table, her form beginning to disintegrate, her particles vanish.

The intruder stood over her, preternatural triumph completely splitting his face. He watched until only an atomizing shell remained of the Amazon, and then, slowly, his gaze rose to Bigger shivering at the edge of panic. Huge, monstrous, the man with too many teeth moved without hurry to circle the table. Casting about for a weapon, Bigger snatched the chest from stunned Eanna’s hands and brandished it. His enemy charged. Bigger spun, rising onto his toes, and smashed the box against the giant’s head. The ancient wood splintered, blue-glowing patches and fragments of wood raining across the room. The intruder buckled, falling backward to the floor, knocked out cold.

As Bigger watched, his monstrous adversary shrank to ordinary size, the unnatural maw reforming to a shape approximately normal. Or slightly wider than normal; the mortal taking shape still had a big mouth. Eyebrows sprouted over his eyes. A fine stubble appeared on his scalp and jaw. A jagged gash where Bigger had struck him began to bleed copiously.

Fascinated by the transformation happening on his floor, Bigger suddenly recognized the man as an orderly from the hospital. He flushed with new anger. At the same time, he started to worry the bastard was bleeding to death, and lost minutes undecided whether to stanch the man’s wound or tie him up.

A moan from Eanna drove the man from his thoughts.

Kneeling at her side, he took Eanna’s wrist in hand and checked her pulse. For an instant, it seemed weak and erratic, but it steadied, strengthening so quickly that he doubted his first impression.

“Eanna,” he said softly.

Her eyelids fluttered.

He spoke her name again, and this time she opened her eyes, although it took a moment for them to focus. When they did, she smiled weakly. Gingerly, she turned her head to look around, taking in the bloody figure sprawled beyond Bigger, the burst wood of the chest, and the scattered dermal patches. Her eyes opened wide at the sight. Bigger turned to survey the mess. A name floated up from memory.

“Kenny,” he pronounced.

“Do not name him!” Eanna pleaded in a frayed tone, but added less forcefully, “You know the man he uses?”

“Yes and no,” Bigger told her. “I remember the name on his scrubs,” adding with a sniff, “And I’ll name him all right. Just as soon as I can get a posse out here.”

“You understand nothing,” Eanna told him. Closing her eyes, she inhaled deeply, catching at a pang in her heaving chest. She lifted a hand. “Help me up.”

Maneuvering an arm around her, he raised the injured woman from the floor. It was apparent that her legs would not yet hold her weight, and she gasped when he embraced her bruised ribs to lift her.

Uncertain, he stopped, asking, “Eanna?…Eanna?” but she shook her head and managed through gritted teeth, “The couch.”

She staggered as he mostly carried her there, avoiding the figure on the bloodied floor. His gentleness when lowering her earned a smile, which he also took as a sign of her recovering strength. Bigger hovered while she situated herself. At a sound from behind, he spun. Eanna’s eyes riveted to the intruder.

The man was sitting up, a hand pressed to his head wound. He spared Bigger a sneering glance, and a longer glare for Eanna, but gave a long, searching look at the splintered wood, broken vials and dermal patches around him on the floor.

“Don’t move!” Bigger commanded, but other than an expression of contempt, the man hardly bothered to react. His eyes fixed on the largest remnant of the box, sitting amidst glass shards and blue patches.

Eanna snarled, “I did not steal them, pig! You lost them.”

“To your bottle!”

The man’s voice was sandpaper on brass.

“And you drained it!” she rejoined. “Drunkard!”

A wave of sadness washed over his face, his head bobbing in admission of her truth. The moment evaporated. He lunged onto his feet. Snatching a patch, he tore away its backing and slapped it to his neck. Surprised, Bigger was still crouching to respond when the man snorted with the jolt of the drug. Bigger started forward, but the man bowled him aside, charging past. The screen door burst as he exited through it.

By the time Bigger made it to the porch, the man was nowhere in sight. An empty yard confronted him, inscrutable in its ordinariness. From the top of the steps, Bigger listened, hoping to hear what he could not see. What he heard was Toro groan behind him.

The big dog lay as before, but his eyes were open. Only when Bigger knelt did he notice the fletching of a tiny dart in the dog’s flank. He snatched it out and cast it against the wall, the point wedging into the siding with a “snick!” He pulled a dart from Belle’s side and flung it to stick in the porch rail. She blinked, and one of her forelegs twitched as though she began to wake from a dream.

Bigger stroked her neck, his hand coming to rest on her shoulder. Settling onto his knees, he placed his other hand on Toro. From the shattered door, Eanna watched Bigger trying to will strength back into his dogs.

“MacGregor,” the woman called softly.

He did not answer right away, concentrating on deep, measured breaths. At last, he said, “Yeah?”

“MacGregor,” she repeated, but paused, then pronounced, almost in a whisper, “Bigger.”

He lifted his head, not looking directly at her, but listening. She continued in a voice that surprised him, almost hesitant, almost tender. “Since they are not dead, they will recover.”

He made no move away from the dogs, gazing at nothing. In full, slow rhythm, he breathed in and out.

“You must believe me,” Eanna pressed. “My time with you grows short. Already, the moon is high and the sun goes down.”

The light told him evening approached, but he looked over his shoulder for confirmation anyway.

Eanna spoke more urgently, “Bigger MacGregor, your friends are no ordinary animals—”

“Don’t you think I know that?” he cut her off.

She let the challenge pass, speaking husky and low into the silence that followed.

“Bigger, please. I need you.”

He stood, answering, “Of course,” but his eyes remained on his dogs. Only when a tiny mew escaped her did he glance up. “Eanna!” he cried, and jumped to catch her as she sagged down the doorframe.

Pulling her arm around his neck, Bigger shouldered her weight and started toward the couch. She redirected.

“The bed. Please.”

Steering her was awkward. Her limbs—and all the rest of her—responded unpredictably when she tried to walk. She would manage a controlled step, then lurch to the side, then catch herself, then sag against him, skewing their path. Finally, Bigger swept her up and carried her into the bedroom, letting her concentrate on clinging to his neck. Eanna held on until he lowered her atop the comforter, kneeling against the bed to place her without jarring. She curled onto her side. As he stood away, she said without turning to look, “Don’t go. Please. Lie down and hold me.”

Fleeting thoughts of a glass of water, aspirin, elastic bandages or other aid came and went. Instead, he kicked off his shoes and slid onto the bed. Eanna drew up her legs slightly, inviting him to spoon. Bigger slipped an arm beneath her neck and draped the other along her side. Pulling it forward, she cupped his hand lightly around her breast. The touch calmed her, and she dozed off.

Her face turned from him, the sound of her breathing drifted across a pillow before coming back to him like the rote of faraway surf. Its muted regularity lulled him, and he drifted at ease on the faint double-bump of her heart. When the afternoon glare softened to gold, they had hardly moved. Bigger closed his eyes for only a second, or so it seemed, and the light turned lazuli. A moment later, he blinked, and lay in the silvered gloom of night.

A wary particle of his brain remained awake to hear toenails click on decking, then floor, as Toro and Belle moved inside the still open front door. Toro groaned as he was wont to do when settling. Belle, as always, was flat against the floor when she sighed. Bigger registered these things even as the warmth of the woman he held conspired with the trancing lull of crickets in the yard.

One moment, he thought, “Frogs,” and smiled. There had been rain, and there were frogs. One did not hear them much anymore. Bigger did not think about that. He thought, “Frogs,” and was pleased. Adjusting his arms around Eanna, he muttered something sentence-like, but meaningless, falling silent as his breathing drifted again into synchrony with hers. Her answer was a tiny panting sound, but she did not wake. The wary particle of his brain relaxed.

He had drowsed deeply when Eanna pushed back with her bottom against an unconscious twitch of an emerging hard-on. Her hand crept back, sliding between the curves of her butt and the denim of his overalls. She molded her palm and fingers to his stiffening response.

“You recover quickly,” he whispered, fully awake.

“You understand nothing,” she replied, stroking the bulge at his crotch.

Bigger slid his hand from her breast to her belly, pressing gently to pull her tighter against him. Luck made his fingers deft as he slipped the button and slowly lowered the zipper of her pants. She inhaled sharply when his fingers stroked down her body into the swell between her thighs. Little by little, he eased his middle finger inside her.

Eanna withdrew her hand and leaned her upper body away, forcing her butt against his crotch. Her breathing huffed rapidly, impatiently, as she fidgeted to push her pants to her knees. At first, she clutched his side to stop him when he moved to get up, but relented when she saw no graceful, sensual way to get him out of his overalls. He took the opportunity to visit the bathroom, returning with the straps off his shoulders, his t-shirt gone, the overalls falling low as he unrolled a condom onto his penis. Eanna spied the rubber and laughed.

“Now you have regrets?” she asked.

He did not meet her eye. With a wiggle, he shed overalls and stepped from the garment as it piled around his feet. Eanna kept her back resolutely to him, lying on her side in an S-curve that cried out for embrace.

As he slid onto the bed, she shifted, backing her rump tight against him. His arm beneath her cradled her head; the other he folded around to stroke her belly, but she seized his hand and pulled it to her chest.

Circling her bottom in a slow, teasing press, she reached through her legs to draw his erection between her thighs, gripping him hard against her crotch. Bigger’s breathing quickened, but Eanna’s motions remained unhurried. The way she held him allowed no leverage to push a faster pace.

Each time Eanna shoved back with his cock between her legs, her fingertip traced along the shaft to the scar of its lost foreskin. His erection hardened. Bigger grabbed her hip and strained to push through the clench of her thighs. He could not press forward. He had no wish to draw back.

Fingers and thumb, she played a downy touch over the latex sheath on his bucking phallus. Lightly, she pinched the tip, then pushed her hand between his erection and her crotch to penetrate herself with a finger. She withdrew it, uxorious and moist, and began to paint the straining rubber with her juices. Bigger moaned, released her hip, and pulled his belly away from the cheeks of her ass. Eanna rolled slightly forward, and cupped the head of his cock against the lips of her vagina. She rocked back. Like that, he was inside her.

He expected the world to fall away, or stand still, or open into undreamed washes of light and color. It did not. His heartbeat and breathing resounded in his ears, but in a familiar way. An ordinary ecstasy. Eanna remained singular, a tangible woman. The bed remained a bed. His hard-on was gripped by musculature that tightened and relaxed in unquestionably physical waves. Rigid, transfixed, he panted.

Eanna’s chest heaved, her nostrils flaring as he enlarged inside her. She felt him push harder, deeper, when she squeezed, and she felt the tension shift in his thighs when he began to draw back. With a cry, she ground hard, forcing him flat as she rolled on top. She straddled his hips facing his feet, and was off, rhythmically at first, then bouncing wildly. Released by this new position, Bigger pressed steadily upward, rocking to-and-fro beneath the slap of her flesh. Eanna sped, pounding ruthlessly. She bellowed ferocious joy.

Arching from the bed as much as her intensity allowed, Bigger tightened his buttocks as he tried to force himself higher, deeper, farther inside. He raised hands to her hips, but she knocked them away, and knocked them away again when his palms drifted onto her thighs. Eanna grinned, and pushed his arms down, pinning him as she sped fucking to a gallop.

Bracing harder, Bigger watched without flinching, biding until pleasure caused her guard to drop. With the sweep of an arm and buck of a leg, he rolled her onto her back and pushed into her. For an instant, locked crotch to crotch, he spasmed, straining deeper, but then he drew back and plunged forward, and then again, and then faster, and faster. Eanna shouted new challenge as she drew up her legs and spread to absorb his reciprocating jabs. He fucked her with deep, unhesitating strokes, his breathing metrical, a distance runner hitting stride. Eanna gasped and shouted as she threw herself roughly against him, a flood checked but not pacified.

Then they found it, the angle, the pressure, the delirious pace, the synchronization that opened a path to climax. Once on it, they effortlessly matched, two halves of an engine driving to purpose. Her arms went around his neck and she melded against his body. Sparring mouths bruised when lips sought imperative lips. Bigger raised and shoved her onto the bed with every push. She enwound him, arms and legs, formed to his body, gripping him tight within and without. Her voice to his ear, she spurred him faster, harsh, explosive syllables forming words, or apparent words, in a language he did not speak. Her heels drove against his ass. Together their realities shrank to the single dimension of skin on skin. A roar swept over them. The sounds of the world washed away.

They came together, locked rigid by the spasms jolting through two bodies incapable of separate response.

Bigger felt the condom burst when he ejaculated, but was powerless to react. In the aftermath, he sagged heavily, momentarily pinning Eanna with his weight. She shifted her pelvis interrogatively, but Bigger rolled off and gazed down at his flesh peeking through torn latex. She raised his face to hers and gave him a peck on the nose. To his rueful smile, she answered simply, “You understand nothing.” There was an implicit question when she touched a finger to the moist head of his cock, but he was spent and she did not press. With tender arms, she held him as he sank near dozing, but instead of tipping into sleep, he roused. Pushing up onto an elbow, he tossed off the heaviness with a shake of his head, and pushed her onto her back so that he could look at her.

“MacGregor,” she uttered.

Instead of letting him answer when he arched an eyebrow at his name, she pulled herself into a sitting position and placed a finger across his lips. Her head tucked over his, she drew him close. He listened at the base of her neck to her whooshing pulse, the murmur of her heart steady beneath. Beat by beat, he traveled with her into peace, then stillness, then sleep.

*

It seemed only an instant had passed when he opened his eyes, but utter darkness told him the sky was lit by the last stars of night. He was alone.

Climbing back into his overalls where he found them, he strode from the bedroom and stopped. Both the drugs and wreckage from the box were gone. Pieces of smashed chair remained where they had fallen. His dogs sat alert beside the table, watching him closely. Belle woofed when Bigger started toward the door, but he waved her off and went out to the porch. She followed, moving to trot ahead as they crossed the yard. Toro stayed where he sat.

Her car was gone, the emptiness in the bay where it had been already ambiguous. He could have missed her by an hour or by five minutes. Turning on lights in the shop revealed how few traces of her remained, and those were actually his own traces. A crude sketch hung pinned next to where he propped his notebook as it milled a part. A few curls of silver metal glinted beside the lathe.

He turned on all the lights, including the exterior floods, and stood in the entrance gazing into the yard, from which she was equally absent. The light provoked motion under the porch, and he squinted trying to make out the cause.

Tilting her head first right, then left, the little red hen peeked tentatively from beneath the steps. With a shout, Bigger rushed to sweep her up, Belle loping beside him, but as he approached, the hen retreated. She settled onto a clutch of eggs Bigger dropped to hands and knees to see. Belle crept into the low space and plopped alongside the expectant mother, nuzzling her gently. The hen did not protest, but began a quiet clucking commentary to which the dog seemed to give full attention. A lump in his throat, Bigger stood, dusted his knees and started into the house.

Toro still waited beside the table, if not patiently, then at least without fuss. He sat alert on his haunches, as though marking time while Bigger went through the motions of assuring himself of what he already knew. Eanna was gone. The dog and man locked eyes briefly, then the dog licked his lips and stretched. Groaning his familiar groan, Toro lay down heavily, exuding a sense that—obviously—the fact that this was where he waited could only mean it was a place with answers.

Bigger studied the animal for clues to the reality of previous days. Toro was as self-contained as ever, sprawled with head flat on the floor for the cooler air. Without lifting his muzzle, the dog looked pointedly from Bigger to the table. Bigger looked, too. At the place the box had occupied across three days was a pouch. Beneath the pouch, double-folded, was a sheet of his own stationery.

Stepping over his dog, Bigger prodded the clicking heft of the pouch. It was heavy, and sounded, when poked, like it held ball bearings or buckshot. Before investigating the contents, however, he took up the paper. Two blue-glowing, transdermal patches were tucked into the first fold. The opened sheet held a couple rows of wedge-shaped scrawls, dashed off in careless cuneiform. He could picture her beside the table, jotting the note without ever thinking that he knew nothing of the language.

The pouch was leather. Scarring on the hide revealed that, like the seats in her car, it was skin from an actual life and not out of a vat. The source of the clicking proved to be what looked at first like beads. He lifted one out and swatted a light switch. In a crease of his hand rested an egg-shaped pellet of gold. Four of them would cover his thumbnail. There was no perforation, so he did not think it was cast as a bead. Pouring a handful into his palm, he saw all were gold, all were the same in every detail, identical even to close inspection. It was gold of exceptional purity, too, if he was a judge. Some of these, he already knew, would go to other uses besides commerce.

Guessing at the volume of pouch and contents, Bigger decided she had left him nearly a liter of gold pellets. Around the waist of each was embossed a ring of tiny, eight-pointed stars, which sent him back to the note. Scrawled at the bottom was the same eight-pointed star. It was almost eclipsed by a final symbol, which he did not recognize at first was a scribbled smiley-face.

Bigger was stuck, looking from gold pellets in one hand to unreadable note in the other. It was clear the episode with Eanna, whomever she may have been, was over. What came next, what action he needed to take right that minute, was not apparent in the competing floods of regret and relief. He was stuck, and could not see the steps from where he stood to breakfast. Even so, vibrating deep inside, he felt a current of excitement. Beauty, passion, war had come and gone. His discoveries remained. Technical consequences of her visit would reach every corner of his work in years to come.

Lost in thought, he was staring vacantly at the tiny forms in his hand when the lights of an approaching vehicle swept across the windows. Bigger returned the beads to the pouch, and dropped the pouch in a drawer of his sideboard before heading to the yard. When he saw the headlights at the gate, he knew it was Quella. Toro brushed by to greet her. Belle rose to join him, passing Bigger on the steps.

“Early start?” Bigger called as she stepped from her pedi-van.

“No start yet,” Quella answered. “Somehow my phone turned itself on and started working again, just in time to receive a text from an unidentified source.”

She stood waiting as he neared.

“Unidentified source?” he fished. “I didn’t know that was even possible any more.”

“Don’t kid, Mac.” She searched his face, but for what he did not know. “It was five words. ‘I return him to you.’ That’s it.”

He rocked back.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. I figured I needed to make sure you hadn’t bled to death after that bitch tore out your throat with her canines.”

He smiled wistfully, looking over Quella’s shoulder at nothing. She reached for his chin and turned his face until she looked in his eyes. Searching there, she said at last, “I think your throat was the least of my worries.”

“Actually,” he pulled her hand from his face and held it, “Actually,” he repeated, “There was a risk. I’m glad you worried.”

“Her bill?” Quella asked.

“Paid. Generously.”

“Generously?”

“Gold was only the start.”

“Ah, you learned. You have new ideas?”

Bigger turned, drawing Quella by the hand.

“Let me make some coffee,” he said. “If you don’t mind an earful, I’d like to ramble about how I plan to change the world.” He stopped, swiped the air to erase the thought, and reframed. “How I plan to change the world…of pedal cars.”

Quella slipped an arm around his waist and tugged.

“The day doesn’t wait, Mac. Neither do deliveries. I’ll give you an hour.”

The End

Author Note

The figurative pen behind an enlarging body of fiction known collectively as The Hidden Lands of Nod, Robert Stikmanz is also an illustrator, graphic designer, video artist and sometime musician. Inventor of the Dvarsh language and creator of Nod’s Way, a fantasy oracle, he outfits expeditions into imaginary realms from a base in far south Austin, Texas. Photo by Elizabeth Renee Smythe.

Table of Contents

Cover

indicia

Acknowledgements

title

part_1

part_2

part_3

part_4

Author