"Maybe you're not trying hard enough."

I agreed.

"Will you only listen? It won't take long, and I don't expect you to solve any of my problems. I need to tell someone."

Another long pause, only the sound of smoking to interrupt the silence through the receiver.

"Fine. But be quick. I'm busy."

I'm not, I think. I may never be busy again. Isn't that a choice one makes, whether to be busy or not? I have, in coming to The Village, left busyness behind me.

I told my story, which sounded even more ridiculous than I'd expected it to sound. I left out most of my talks with the thing that lives atop the hill, as no one can recall a conversation, not truly, and I didn't want to omit a word of it.

Whether or not each word is of consequence.

"You need to see someone."

"Maybe," I said.

"No. Not maybe. You need to see someone."

We said goodbye, and I was instructed to never call again.

I hung up first, then sat by the phone (I'd used the motel phone, not my cell).

A few seconds later, it rang again, and I quickly, hopefully, lifted the receiver. But it was the voice from the hill. Someone else might have screamed.

"You should leave," she says. "It's still not too late to leave. Do as I have said. It's all still waiting for you. The city, your work, your home."

"Nothing's waiting for me back there. Haven't you figured that out?"

"There's nothing for you here. Haven't you figured that out?"

"I'm asleep and dreaming this. I'm lying in my apartment above Newbury Street, and I'm dreaming all of this. Probably, The Village does not even exist."

"Then wake up. Go home. Wake up, and you will be home."

"I don't know how," I said, and that was the truth. "I don't know how, and it doesn't matter any longer."

"That's a shame, I think," she said. "I wish it were otherwise." And then there was only a dial tone.

You can almost see the hill from the window of my motel room. You can see the highway and a line of evergreens. If the trees were not so tall, you could see the hill. On a night eleven years ago, you could have seen the lightning from this window, and you could have seen the glow of the fire that must have burned afterwards. Last night, I was glad that I couldn't see the hill silhouetted against the stars.

The three times I have visited the library in The Village, the librarian has done her best to pretend I wasn't there. She does her best to seem otherwise occupied. Intensely so. She makes me wait at the circulation desk as long as she can. Today is no different. But finally she relents and frowns and asks me what I need.

"Do you have back issues of the paper?"

"Newspaper?" she asks.

"Yes. There's only the one, am I correct?"

"You are."

"Do you have back issues?"

"We have it on microfiche," and I tell her that microfiche is perfectly fine. So, she leads me through the stacks to a tiny room in the back. There's a metal cabinet with drawers filled with yellow Kodak boxes. She begins to explain how the old-style reader works, how to fit the spools onto the spindles, and I politely a.s.sure her I've spent a lot of time squinting at microfiche, but thanks, anyway. I am always polite with her. I do ask for the reel that would include October 26th, 2001.

"You aren't going to let this go, are you?" asks the librarian.

"Eventually, I might. But not yet."

"Ought never have come here. Can't nothing good come of it. Anyone in town can tell you that. Can't nothing good come of prying into the past."

I thank her, and she scowls and leaves me alone.

I press an off-white plastic b.u.t.ton, and the days whir noisily past my eyes. I have always detested the sound of a microfiche reader. It reminds me of a dental drill, though I've never found anyone who's made the a.s.sociation. Then again, I don't think I've ever asked anyone how they feel about the click-click-click whir of a microfiche reader. One day soon, with so much digital conversation going on, I imagine there will be very few microfiche archives. People pretend that hard drives, computer disks, and the internet is a safer place to keep our history. At any rate, the machine whirs, and in only a minute or so I've reached October 26th, the day after the lightning strike. On page four of the paper, I find a very brief write up of the event at the crest of the hill. One Tree, as it seems to be named, though the paper doesn't give that name. It merely speaks of a house at the end of an "unimproved" drive off Middle Road, east of The Village. A house had recently been constructed there by a family hailing from, as it happened, The City. The world is, of course, filled with coincidence, so I make nothing of this. I doubt I ever shall. The house was to be a summer home. Curiously, the family is not named, the paper reporting only that there had been three members father, mother, daughter and that all died in the fire caused by the lightning. Firefighters from The Village had responded, but were (also curiously) said to have been unable to extinguish what must have been a modest blaze. I will only quote this portion, which I am scribbling down in my notebook: Meteorologists have attributed the tragic event to "positive" lightning, a relatively rare phenomenon. Unlike far more commonly occurring "negative" lightning, positive lightning takes place when a positive charge is carried by the uppermost regions of clouds most often anvil clouds rather than by the ground. This causes the leader arc to form within the anvil of the c.u.mulonimbus cloud and travel horizontally for several miles before suddenly veering down to meet the negatively charged streamer rising up from the ground. The bolt can strike anywhere within several miles of the anvil of the thunderstorm, often in areas experiencing clear or only slightly cloudy skies, hence they may also be referred to as "bolts from the blue." Positive lightning is estimated to account for less than 5% of all lightning strikes.

The meteorologist in question is not named, nor is his or her affiliation given. I do find it odd that far more s.p.a.ce is given to an attempt to explain the event than to any other aspect of it. Also, it appears to have been cribbed from a textbook or other reference source, and deviates significantly from the voice of the rest of the article. There is, reading over it again and again, the sense that explaining the lightning was far more important to whoever wrote the piece than was reporting the deaths of the family or even the general facts of the case. A single anonymous source is quoted, a resident of High Street (in The Village) as a witness to the lightning strike. There is also mentioned a "terrific booming from the sky" that occurred an hour after the strike, and I can't help but wonder why the paper went to so much trouble to make plain that there was nothing especially peculiar about the lightning, but records another strange incident in pa.s.sing which it makes no attempt to explain.

"Did you find what you were looking for?" the librarian asks, peering into the small room. I notice for the first time, the room smells musty. Or maybe it's the librarian who smells musty.

"I did," I reply. "Thank you. You've been very helpful."

"I do my job. I do what the town council pays me to do."

"Then you do it well," I say, determined to inflict upon her a compliment.

She grumbles, and I leave while she's busy removing the spool and returning it to its yellow Kodak box. I step out onto the tiny courtyard in front of the library, and it's just begun raining. Cold drops pepper my face. I stand, staring up into the rain, and consider calling the editor, apologizing, and asking for a second chance. Telling him there really is no mystery here, so it could be a great little piece debunking a rural myth, a triumph of science over the supposedly miraculous. I could return to The City, to my apartment, and wait for other jobs. I would find a way to forget about whatever lives at the top of the hill. I would tell myself I'd imagined the whole affair, mark it up to weariness, depression, something of the sort. The rain almost feels like needles.

I awake from a nightmare. I awake breathless to sweaty sheets. I think I may have cried out in my sleep, but I don't know for sure. Almost at once, I forget most of the particulars of the dream. But it centered on the charred tree. There was something coiled in the branches of the tree, or perched there. It was gazing down at me. A shapeless thing, or very nearly so, clinging somehow to those charcoal branches. I wanted to turn away, to look away, but was unable. I felt the purest spite spilling from it, flowing down the gnarled trunk and washing over me. I have never believed in evil, but the thing in the tree was, I knew, evil. It was evil, and it was ancient beyond any human comprehension. Some of the eldest stars were younger, and the earth an infant by comparison. Mercifully, it didn't speak or make any other sound whatsoever.

I awake to a voice, and I recognize it straightaway. It's the voice from the hill. Near the door, there's the faintest of silhouettes, an outline that is only almost human. It's tall and begins moving gracefully across the room towards me. I reach to turn on the lamp, but, thankfully, my hand never touches the cord.

"Have you seen enough now?" she asks. "What you found at the library, was that enough?"

She's very near the foot of the bed now. I would never have guessed she was so tall and so extraordinarily slender. My eyes struggle with the darkness to make sense of something I cannot actually see.

"Not you," I whisper. "It hasn't explained you."

"Do I require an explanation?"

"Most people would say so."

If this is being read, I would say most readers would certainly say so. There, I have said it.

"But not you?"

"I don't know what I need," I say, and I'm being completely honest.

Here there is a long silence, and I realize it's still raining. That it's raining much harder than when I went to bed. I can hear thunder far away.

"This is the problem with explanations," she says. "You ask one, and it triggers an infinite regression. There is never a final question. Unless inquiry is halted by an arbitrary act. And it's true, many inquiries are, if only by necessity."

"If I knew what you are, why you are, how you are, if there is any connection between you and the death of those three people..." I trail off, knowing she'll finish my thought.

She says, "...you'd only have another question, and another after that. Ad infinitum."

"I think I want to go home," I whisper.

"Then you should go home, don't you think?"

"What was that I dreamt of, the thing in the tree?"

Now she is leaning over me, on the bed with me, and it only frightens me that I am not afraid. "Only a bad dream," she sighs, and her breath smells like the summer forest, and autumn leaves, and snow, and swollen mountain rivers in the spring. It doesn't smell even remotely of fire.

"Before The Village, you were here," I say. "You've almost always been here." I say. It isn't a question, and she doesn't mistake it for one. She doesn't say anything else, and I understand I will never again hear her speak.

She wraps her arms and legs about me and, as I guessed, they were delicate and nothing like the legs of women, and she takes me into her. We do not make love. We f.u.c.k. No, she f.u.c.ks me. She f.u.c.ks me, and it seems to go on forever. Repeatedly, I almost reach climax, and, repeatedly, it slips away. She mutters in a language I know, instinctively, has never been studied by any linguist, and one I'll not recall a syllable of later on, no matter how hard I struggle to do so. It seems filled with clicks and glottal stops. Outside, there is rain and thunder and lightning. The storm is pounding at the windows, wanting in. The storm, I think, is jealous. I wonder how long it will hold a grudge. Is that what happened on top of the hill? Did she take the man or the woman (or both) as a lover? Did the sky get even?

I do finally come, and the smells of her melt away. She is gone, and I lay on those sweaty sheets, trying to catch my breath.

So, I do not say aloud, the dream didn't end with the tree. I dreamt her here, in the room with me. I dreamt her questions, and I dreamt her f.u.c.king me.

I do my best to fool myself this is the truth.

It doesn't matter anymore.

By dawn, the rain has stopped.

I have breakfast, pack, fill up the Nissan's tank, and pay my motel bill.

By the time I pull out of the parking lot, it's almost nine o'clock.

I drive away from The Village, and the steep slopes pressing in on all sides as if to smother it, and I drive away from the old cemetery beside Lake Witalema. I drive south, taking the long way back to the interstate, rather than pa.s.sing the turnoff leading up the hill and the house and the lightning-struck tree. I know that I will spend the rest of my life avoiding the White Mountains. Maybe I'll even go so far as to never step foot in New Hampshire again. That wouldn't be so hard to do.

I keep my eyes on the road in front of me, and am relieved as the forests and lakes give way to farmland and then the outskirts of The City. I am leaving behind a mystery that was never mine to answer. I leave behind shadows for light. Wondrous and terrifying glimpses of the extraordinary for the mundane.

I will do my d.a.m.nedest to convince the editor to whom I owe a story he took my call this morning, and was only mildly annoyed I'd missed the deadline that there is nothing the least bit bizarre about that hill or the woods surrounding it. Nothing to it but tall tales told by ignorant and gullible Swamp Yankees, people who likely haven't heard the Revolutionary War has ended. I'll lie and make them sound that absurd, and we'll all have a good laugh.

I will bury, deep as I can, all my memories of her.

It doesn't matter anymore.

The Colliers' Venus (1898) It is not an ostentatious museum. Rather, it is only the sort of museum that best suits this modern, industrious city at the edge of the high Colorado plains. This city, with its sooty days and dusty, crowded streets and night skies that glow an angry orange from the dragon's breath of half a hundred Bessemer converters. The museum is a dignified, yet humble, a.s.semblage of geological wonders, intended as much for the delight and edification of miners and mill workers, blacksmiths and butchers, as it is for the parvenu and Old Money families of Capitol Hill. Professor Jeremiah Ogilvy, both founder and curator of this Colectanea rerum memorabilium, has always considered himself a progressive sort, and he has gone so far as to set aside one day each and every month when the city's negroes, coolies, and red indians are permitted access to his cabinet, free of charge. Professor Ogilvy would and frequently has referred to his museum as a most modest endeavor, one whose princ.i.p.al mission is to reveal, to all the populace of Cherry Creek, the long-buried mysteries of those fantastic, vanished cycles of the globe. Too few suspect the marvels that lie just beneath their feet or entombed in the ridges and peaks of the snowcapped Chippewan Mountains bordering the city to the west. Cherry Creek looks always to the problems of its present day, and to the riches and prosperity that may await those who reach its future, but with hardly a thought to spare for the past, and this is the sad oversight addressed by the Ogilvy Gallery of Natural Antiquities.

Before Professor Ogilvy leased the enormous redbrick building on Kipling Street (erected during the waning days of the silver boom of '78), it served as a warehouse for a firm specializing in the import of exotic dry goods, mainly spices from Africa and the East Indies. And, to this day, it retains a distinctive, piquant redolence. Indeed, at times the odor is so strong that a sobriquet has been bestowed upon the museum Ogilvy's Pepper Pot. It is not unusual to see visitors of either gender covering their noses with handkerchiefs and sleeves, and oftentimes the solemnity of the halls is shattered by hacking coughs and sudden fits of sneezing. Regardless, the Professor has insisted, time and again, that the structure is perfectly matched to his particular needs, and how the curiosity of man is not to be deterred by so small an inconvenience as the stubborn ghosts of turmeric and curry powder, coriander and mustard seed. Besides, the apparently indelible odor helps to insure that his rents will stay reasonable.

On this June afternoon, the air in the building seems a bit fresher than usual, despite the oppressive heat that comes with the season. In the main hall, Jeremiah Ogilvy has been occupied for almost a full hour now, lecturing the ladies of the Cherry Creek chapter of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Mrs. Belford and her companions sit on folding chairs, fanning themselves and diligently listening while this slight, earnest, and bespectacled man describes for them the reconstructed fossil skeleton displayed behind him.

"The great anatomist, Baron Cuvier, wrote of the Plesiosaurus, 'it presents the most monstrous a.s.semblage of characteristics that has been met with among the races of the ancient world.' Now, I would have you know it isn't necessary to take this expression literally. There are no monsters in nature, as the Laws of Organization are never so positively infringed."

"Well, it looks like a monster to me," mutters Mrs. Larimer, seated near the front. "I would certainly hate to come upon such a thing slithering towards me along a river bank. I should think I'd likely perish of fright, if nothing else."

There's a subdued t.i.tter of laughter from the group, and Mrs. Belford frowns. The Professor forces a smile and repositions his spectacles on the bridge of his nose.

"Indeed," he sighs and glances away from his audience, looking over his shoulder at the skillful marriage of plaster and stone and welded steel armature.

"However," he continues, "be that as it may, it is more accordant with the general perfection of Creation to see in an organization so special as this " and, with his ashplant, he points once more to the plesiosaur, " to recognize in a structure which differs so notably from that of animals of our days the simple augmentation of type, and sometimes also the beginning and successive perfecting of these beings. Therefore, let us dismiss this idea of monstrosity, my good Mrs. Larimer, a concept which can only mislead us, and only cause us to consider these antediluvian beasts as digressions. Instead, let us look upon them, not with disgust. Let us learn, on the contrary, to perceive in the plan traced for their organization, the handiwork of the Creator of all things, as well as the general plan of Creation."

"How very inspirational," Mrs. Belford beams, and when she softly claps her gloved hands, the others follow her example. Professor Ogilvy takes this as his cue that the ladies of the Women's Christian Temperance Union have heard all they wish to hear this afternoon on the subject of the giant plesiosaur, recently excavated in Kansas from the chalky banks of the Smoky Hill River. As one of the newer additions to his menagerie, it now frequently forms the centerpiece of the Professor's daily presentations.

When the women have stopped clapping, Mrs. Larimer dabs at her nose with a swatch of perfumed silk and loudly clears her throat.

"Yes, Mrs. Larimer? A question?" Professor Ogilvy asks, turning back to the women. Mr. Larimer an executive with the Front Range offices of the German airship company, Gesellschaft zur Forderung der Luftschiffahrt has donated a sizable sum to the museum's coffers, and it's no secret that his wife believes her husband's charity would be best placed elsewhere.

"I mean no disrespect, Professor, but it strikes me that perhaps you have gone and mistaken the provenance of that beast's design. For my part, it's far easier to imagine such a fiend being more at home in the sulfurous tributaries of h.e.l.l than the waters of any earthly ocean. Perhaps, my good doctor, it may be that you are merely mistaken about the demon's having ever been buried. Possibly, to the contrary, it is something which clawed its way up from the Pit."

Jeremiah Ogilvy stares at her a moment, aware that it's surely wisest to humor this disagreeable woman. To nod and smile and make no direct reply to such absurd remarks. But he has always been loathe to suffer fools, and has never been renowned as the most politic of men, often to his detriment. He makes a steeple of his hands and rests his chin upon his fingertips as he replies.

"And yet," he says, "oddly, you'll note that on both its fore- and hind limbs, each fashioned into paddles, this underworld fiend of yours entirely lacks claws. Don't you think, Mrs. Larimer, that we might fairly expect such modifications, something not unlike the prominent ungula of a mole, perhaps? Or the robust nails of a Cape anteater? I mean, that's a terrible lot of digging to do, all the way from Perdition to the prairies of Gove County."

There's more laughter, an uneasy smattering that echoes beneath the high ceiling beams, and it elicits another scowl from an embarra.s.sed Mrs. Belford. But the Professor has cast his lot, as it were, for better or worse, and he keeps his eyes fixed upon Mrs. Charles W. Larimer. She looks more chagrined than angry, and any trace of her former bl.u.s.ter has faded away.

"As you say, Professor," and she manages to make the last three syllables sound like a badge of wickedness.

"Very well, then," Professor Ogilvy says, turning to Mrs. Belford. "Perhaps I could interest you gentle women in the celebrated automatic mastodon, a bona-fide masterpiece of clockwork engineering and steam power. So realistic in movement and appearance you might well mistake it for the living thing, newly resurrected from some boggy Pleistocene quagmire."

"Oh, yes. I think that would be fascinating," Mrs. Belford replies, and soon the women are being led from the main gallery up a steep flight of stairs to the mezzanine where the automatic mastodon and the many engines and hydraulic hoses that control it have been installed. It stands alongside a finely preserved skeleton of Mammut americanum unearthed by prospectors in the Yukon and shipped to the Gallery at some considerable expense.

"Why, it's nothing but a great hairy elephant," Mrs. Larimer protests, but this time none of the others appear to pay her much mind. Professor Ogilvy's fingers move over the switches and dials on the bra.s.s control panel, and soon the automaton is stomping its ma.s.sive feet and flapping its ears and filling the hot, pepper-scented air with the trumpeting of extinct Pachydermata.

When the ladies of the Temperance Union have gone, and after Jeremiah Ogilvy has seen to the arrival of five heavy crates of saurian bones from one of his collectors working out of Monterey, and, then, after he has spoken with his chief preparator about an overdue shipment of blond Kushmi sh.e.l.lac, ammonia, and sodium borate, he checks his pocket watch and locks the doors of the museum. Though there has been nothing excessively trying about the day not even the disputatious Mrs. Larimer caused him more than a pa.s.sing annoyance Professor Ogilvy finds he's somewhat more weary than usual, and is looking forward to his bed with an especial zeal. All the others have gone, his small staff of technicians, sculptors, and naturalists, and he retires to his office and puts the kettle on to boil. He has a fresh tin of Formosa Oolong, and decides that this evening he'll take his tea up on the roof.

Most nights, there's a fine view from the gallery roof, and he can watch the majestic airships docking at the Arapahoe Station dirigible terminal, or just shut his eyes and take in the commingled din of human voices and buckboards, the heavy clop of horses' hooves and the comforting pandemonium made by the locomotives pa.s.sing through the city along the Colorado and Northern Kansas Railway.

He hangs the tea egg over the rim of his favorite mug and is preparing to pour the hot water, when the office doork.n.o.b rattles and neglected hinges creak like inconvenienced rodents. Jeremiah looks up, not so much alarmed as taken by surprise, and is greeted by the familiar but certainly unexpected face and pale blue eyes of Dora Bolshaw. She holds up her key, tied securely on a frayed length of calico ribbon, to remind him that he never took it back and to remove any question as to how she gained entry to the locked museum after hours. Dora Bolshaw is an engine mechanic for the Rocky Mountain Reconsolidated Fuel Company, and, because of this, and her habit of dressing always in men's clothes, and the fact that her hands and face are only rarely anything approaching clean, she is widely, and mistakenly, believed to be an inveterate Sapphist. Dora is, of course, shunned by more proper women such as, for instance, Mrs. Charles W. Larimer who blanche at the thought of dames et lesbiennes walking free and unfettered in their midst. Dora has often mused that, despite her obvious preference for men, she is surely the most renowned bulld.y.k.e west of the Mississippi.

"Slipping in like a common sneak thief," Jeremiah sighs, reaching for a second cup. "I trust you recollect the combination to the strongbox, along with the whereabouts of that one loose floorboard."

"I most a.s.suredly do," she replies. "Like they were the finest details of the back of my hand. Like it was only yesterday you went and divulged those confidences."

"Very good, Miss Bolshaw. Then, I trust this means we can forgo the messy gunplay and knives and whatnot?"

She steps into the office and pulls the door shut behind her, returning the key to a pocket of her waistcoat. "If that's your fancy, Professor. If it's only a peaceable sort of evening you're after."

Filling his mug from the steaming kettle, submerging the mesh ball of the tea egg and the finely ground leaves, Jeremiah shrugs and nods at a chair near his desk.

"Do you still take two lumps?" he asks her.