Michael carried the paper into the kitchen. There, he ate a bowl of hot oatmeal and leafed through the front section. Most of the news - however important and ominous it might seem to his fellows - barely attracted his attention.

Then he came to a small third-page story headlined CORPSES FOUND IN ABANDONED BUILDING.

and his eyes grew wide as he read: The unidentified bodies of two females were found by a transient male in the abandoned Tippett Residential Hotel on Sunset Boulevard near La Cienega Sunday afternoon. Cause of death has not been established by the coroner's office. Reporters' questions went largely unanswered during a short press briefing. Early reports indicate that one of the women weighed at least eight hundred pounds and was found nude. The second body was in a mummified condition and was clothed in a party dress of a style long since out of fashion. The Tippett hotel, abandoned since 1968, once offered a posh Hollywood address for retired and elderly actors, actresses and other film workers.

He read the piece through several times before folding the paper and putting it aside. His oatmeal cooled in its bowl, half-finished.

The bodies might be a coincidence, he thought. As rare as eight-hundred-pound women were...

But in conjunction with a mummy, clothed in a party dress?

He called up the paper's city desk and asked to speak to the reporter who had written the piece, which had run without a byline. The reporter was out on assignment, he was told, and the operator referred him to a police phone number. Michael paced the kitchen and adjacent hall for several minutes before deciding against phoning the police. How would he explain?

He had to have a look at that building. Something nagged him about the address. Sunset and La Cienega... Barely five miles from Waltiri's house.

He went to the Packard and retrieved the concert program, then checked the glove box in the Saab to find a city map. He took both to Waltiri's first-floor office, dark and musty and lined with shelves of records * and tapes, and tried to locate Sunset Boulevard, the site of the Pandall Theater according to the concert program.

The address was less than half a block from the corner of Sunset and La Cienega.

Chapter Two.

Michael walked briskly up La Cienega's slope as it approached Sunset, breathing steadily and deeply, taking pleasure in the cool night air and the darkness. He could be anonymous, alone without all the handicaps of loneliness; he could be almost anything - a dangerous prowler or a good Samaritan. The night covered all, even motives. To his left, the white wall of a hotel was painted with Mondrian stripes and squares. At the corner, he stood for a moment, looking across the street at the blocky, ugly Hyatt on Sunset, then turned right. His running shoes made almost no sound on the concrete sidewalk.

He passed the entrance of a restaurant built on the site where Errol Flynn's guest house had once stood and then spotted the Tippett building.

It rose more than twelve stories above Sunset, an aging Art Deco concrete edifice with rounded corners.

Many of the windows had been knocked out, and black soot marks rose from several of the gaping frames. At ground level, it was surrounded by a chain-link fence. The lobby entrance had been blocked off by a chain-link and steel-pipe gate. A trash tube descended from the roof to a dumpster behind the fence.

The building made Michael uneasy. It had once been lovely. It stood out in this section of the Sunset Strip even now, in its present dilapidated condition. Yet it had been abandoned for over twenty years and, judging by the state of renovations, might continue that way for another twenty.

He stood before the gate and squinted to see the obscured address, limned in aluminum figures above the plywood-boarded doors: 8538. The 8 had been knocked askew and hung on its side.

The Tippet building stood on the site of the Randall Theater. Having confirmed that much, Michael looked around guiltily and glanced over his shoulder at the lighted windows of the Hyatt.

There was a patched hole in the fencing to the left of the gate; with very little effort, he could undo the wiring on the chain-link patch and crawl under.

"Odd place, isn't it?"

Michael turned his head quickly and saw a bearded, sunburned man with thick greasy hair and dirt-green, street-varnished clothes standing on the sidewalk a dozen yards away. "Yes," he answered softly.

"It's older than it looks. Seems kind of modern, don't it?"

""I guess," Michael said.

"Used to live there," the man said. "Don't live there now. Want to go in?" The man walked slowly toward him, face conveying intense interest and almost equal caution.

"No," Michael said.

"You know the place?"

"No. I'm just out hiking."

"Care to know about it?"

Michael didn't answer.

"Care to know about the two women found dead in there?"

"Women?"

"One big, a real whale, one a mummy. In the newspapers. You read about that?"

Michael paused to reflect, then nodded.

"Thought you might have."

"Did you find them?'

"Heavens," the man said, coughing into his fist. "Not me. Someone who didn't know much. An acquaintance. Dumb to stay in that building for a night." He wrinkled his face up, expecting skepticism, and said, "It's full of things."

"Why do you hang around, then?" Michael asked.

"Because," the man said. He stood about two yards from Michael, and even at that distance his smell was rank - urine and sedimented sweat. "You know what their names were?"

"Whose names?" Michael asked.

"The women. The whale and the mummy."

"No," Michael said.

"I do. My acquaintance found it on a piece of rock next to them. Gave it to the police, but they didn't care. Didn't mean anything to them. Do you know French?"

"A little."

"Then you'd know what one of the names means. Sadness. In French. And the other..."

Michael decided to try for an effect. "Lamia," he said.

The man's face became a mask between surprise and laughter. "Gawd," he said. "Gawd, gawd. You're a reporter. I knew it. Odd time of night to be out looking for facts."

Michael shook his head, never taking his eyes off the man. He had not yet tried to read someone's aura on Earth. Now was as good a time as any. He found a festival of murmurs, a bright little coal of intelligence, a marketplace full of rotted vegetables. He backed away from the search, having come out with only one fact: Tristesse. The second name. It suited the guardian of Clarkham's gate. Bringer of sadness.

Lamia and Tristesse. Sisters...

Victims of the Sidhe, sacrificed by Clarkham to guard and wait... But how could they have found their way to Earth? And who had killed them - or inactivated them, since what life they had was dubious at best?

Abruptly and unexpectedly, Michael began to cry. Wiping his eyes, he glanced up at the Tippett building.

"Something wrong? I'm the one should be crying," the man said. "You're not a reporter. Relative, maybe?

Jesus, no. None of them would have had relatives. Not the type."

"What do you care?" Michael asked sharply. "Go away."

"Care?" the man shrilled, backing away a step. "I used to own the place. OWN IT, God dammit! I used to be worth something! I'm not that God damn old, and I'm not so far gone I don't remember what it was like, having money and being a"- he lifted a hand with pinky extended, raised his eyebrows and waggled his head-"a big God damn citizen!"

Michael probed the man again and felt the sorrow and anger directly.

"Now everybody comes around here. God damn bank never does anything with it, never tears it down, never sells it. Can't sell it. Now there's people died here. Not surprising.

I'm going, all right. You figure it out. I've had my fill."

"Wait," Michael said. "When was it built?"

"Nineteen and forty-seven," the man answered with his back to Michael, walking away with exaggerated * dignity. "Used to be a theater here, a concert hall. Tore it down and put this up."

"Thank you," Michael said.

The man shrugged his shoulders and waved away the thanks.

Michael put his hands in his coat pockets and leaned his head back to look up at the building again. High up near the top, one floor beneath a terrace, a faint red light played over a dusty pane of glass. It burned only for a moment.

Then, on the fourth floor, the red light gleamed briefly again in a broken and soot-stained window. All WLS still after that and quiet.

Michael shuddered and began the trek back down Sunset to La Cienega.

Chapter Three.

Magic like that worked by the Sidhe was more difficult on Earth; humans could not work Sidhe magic.

This much Michael had gleaned from his training in the Realm, Sidhedark. But were these facts or merely suppositions? Breeds - part human and part Sidhe - could work magic; the Crane Women and Eleuth had demonstrated that much. Clarkham, a Breed born on Earth, had nearly bested the Sidhe at their own game.

Michael himself had done things in the Realm that had no other name in his vocabulary but magic. He had even channeled the energies of a Song of Power to destroy Clarkham. And in the year since he had returned to Earth, he had learned that he could still apply Sidhe discipline and invoke hyloka, the calling-of-heat from the center of his body, and in-seeing, the probing of another's aura to gain information.

For the time being, he was content not to test the other skills he had learned in the Realm. He had not used evisa, or out-seeing, to throw a shadow; there had been no need.

Each morning, he went through his exercises in the spacious back yard. He jogged around the neighborhood holding his kima, the running-stick, before him, as the Crane Women had taught him.

Several times he jogged with Dopso, who kept up a panting stream of questions and observations. Despite the man's obvious curiosity about Michael, and nonstop talk, Michael liked him. He seemed decent.

Each day, Michael investigated another cache of Waltiri's papers and began to make a catalog of what he found. Within a week, he had worked his way through the garage and knew basically what was in each file box - manuscripts, contracts and other legal documents, and correspondence, including a wooden box filled with love letters from Waltiri to Golda, written in German. Even though he had studied German after returning from the Realm, he was hardly fluent, and that handicapped him. He thought about hiring a German-speaking student and acquiring the language more rapidly tlirough in-seeing but decided to put that off for now.

He concentrated on the manuscripts. What little musical training he had acquired before he was thirteen - when he had put his foot down and refused to continue piano lessons - was of little aid in sorting out the Waltiri papers.

Michael recorded the names (if any), opus numbers and known associations of each musical manuscript.

Most were scores for motion pictures; scattered throughout the four and a half decades' worth of work, however, were more personal pieces, even a draft of a ballet based on The Faerie Queene.

He spent hours in the garage and then began moving the sorted boxes of manuscripts into the dining * room, where he stacked them along a bare wall.

There was no sign of a manuscript for Opus 45, The Infinity Concerto.

At night, he fixed himself supper and ate alone. One night a week he joined his parents for dinner, and the visits were enjoyable; occasionally, John would drop by the Waltiri house on one pretext or another, and they would share a beer in the back yard and talk about inconsequential things. Ruth never visited.

Michael did not tell his story to John, even with Ruth away. John seemed to sense that the time was not yet right for Ruth and that they should hear together when the time was right.

All in all, with the exception of the discoveries in the Tippett Hotel, it was still a peaceful time. Michael felt himself growing stronger in more ways than one: stronger inside, less agonized by his mistakes, and stronger in dealing with the ways of the Earth, which were not much like the ways of the Realm.

What impressed him most of all, now that he had gone outside and had a basis for comparison, was the Earth's sense of solidity and thoroughness. Always in the Realm there had been the sensation of things left not quite finished; Adonna's creation was no doubt masterful, and in places extremely beautiful, but it could not compare with the Earth.

While the Realm had been built to accommodate Sidhe - and keep them in line - and while it contained some monstrous travesties, it had seemed in many ways a gentler place than Earth. What cruelty existed in the Realm was the fault of its occupants. Given Sidhe discipline, Michael had found survival in the Realm proper rather easy. He doubted if survival would be quite so easy in similar situations on Earth.

The Earth seemed not to have been built for anybody's convenience; those who had come to it, or developed on it, made their own way and found and fought for specific niches. The Earth never stopped its pressures... Nor gave up its treasures easily.

Michael acquired a videocassette recorder out of the stipend paid by the estate and began renting tapes of the movies Waltiri had scored. Watching the old films and listening to the background music, he came to appreciate the old composer's true skill.

Waltiri's music was never obtrusive in a film. Rather than sweeping richly forth with some outstanding melodic line, it played a subservient role, underscoring or heightening the action on the screen.

Again and again one day Michael played John Huston's 1958 film, The Man Who Would Be King, reveling the first time in Bogart's Peachey Carnehan and Jack Hawkins's Daniel Dravot, the next in the fine black and white photography and the beautifully integrated matte paintings, and finally in Waltiri's subtle score, not in the least period or archaic but somehow just right for the men and their adventure.

Michael enjoyed himself hugely; that one day seemed to put everything in perspective and set his mind aright. Suddenly he was ready to take on whatever might come, with the same impractical bravado of Carnehan and Dravot. He spent the next day gardening, whistling Carnehan's theme over and over again, pulling weeds and trimming back the rose bushes i ~ Cording to the instructions in an old gardening book in Golda's library.

As he trimmed, he thought of Clarkham's Sidhe woman, Mora, and of the way she had trimmed her roses, and of the rose turned to glass that she had given him, that still lay wrapped in cotton in a cardboard box in the guest bedroom.

His mood darkened the next morning, when again the newspaper proved to be a bearer of disturbing news. There was an in-depth article beginning on the left side of the front page and running on through section A for some two thousand words, describing waves of so-called hauntings in England, Israel and the eastern United States.

The phrase "intrusions into reality" occurred several times in the piece, but overall the tone was light. The conclusion was that the incidents had more to do with sociology and psychology than metaphysics. He read it through twice, then folded the paper over and stared out the kitchen window at the pink roses outside.