Constance smiled down on him. She had pulled back her hair, and her face dripped with water. Some of the water had dropped onto the stain across her chest, liquefying the dried blood. But her face was clean.

With a start, Bill came fully awake. He nearly dropped the beer as he stood up, throwing off the blanket wrapped around his legs.

"I got us a single king room," she said.

Earth-toned paint covered covered the walls. A bottle of champagne and a small white china plate of fruit and cheese sat on the desk. The curtains, a translucent beige, glowed with early Connecticut morning light. A potted palm rattled under a blowing air conditioning duct.

"We can be together here better," said Constance. "Not much time, though."

Bill set down his beer on the table behind him, next to a vase of yellow flowers. He looked back to his wife.

"Hotel," he said incredulously.

"Yes. Like it? Quiet, right?"

Bill rubbed his face. "How did you get us here?"

"Drove."

"But you don't know how to drive stick."

"I do now."

"So you drove?" he asked. "This must be two hours away from the campsite..."

"Three. The warding symbols don't affect me anymore, Bill," she said. "Like I told you, I can do whatever I want.

Bill became dizzy.

"Oh, sweetheart, please sit down," said Constance.

He felt her light touch on his elbow, and it guided him to sit in the black and white houndstooth chair by the window.

Bill rubbed his eyes. Underneath his eyelids, he saw dim stars, moving gently as if they were floating in water.

"Would you like your beer?" asked his wife.

"No," he said. "No. Are we really here?"

"Yes."

"Okay." Bill felt agreeable to any notion. A drugged kind of torpor came on him, a feeling of thickness through his blood. Anything she said, he would do.

"I'm going to talk, I mean," she said. "Is that all right?"

"Sure."

"I've never had feelings like this," she said. "Remember, Bill? Dreams?"

"Yes," said Bill, remembering parts of his dream: marble walls and men pinned to themselves with glass; a black book, and a white door, and constellations flowing on the ceiling.

"That place is real," said Constance. "Do you know that we were people?"

"What?"

"That...they were people."

"Yes," said Bill.

"They went there, and they learned."

"Mmm." Bill reached over to the table, picked up his beer, took a giant swig. He squinted at his wife, and tried to form some kind of emotional response to what she was doing.

But he was numb. He watched Constance as if she were only an image on a screen.

"Did you drug me?" he asked.

"No. But I made you calm. Easy."

For some reason, Bill thought of the black book. He remembered flipping through the pages of the book, staring at the silver ink, watching the letters flow into one another.

"We don't have much time," said Constance. "But know this, darling. Septimus and I are in a contest."

Bill again thought of the silver ink, flowing off of the page and entering him. Some kind of knowledge had tattooed itself onto his brain.

"I know," he said. "In the dream. The man. White-headed. He told me. Made me read it."

"That's called the Book of the Spine," said Constance.

"They're demons," said Bill. He touched a finger to his wife's shoulder. She was so delicate; he could have pushed her over from the pressure of that one digit alone. "Devils. All they need are the horns."

Constance patted his hand. "Maybe, darling," she said.

And Bill saw that the color of her eyes had changed. Where there had been blue there was now a deep violet. Royal purple, she would have called it; equal parts red and blue.

"And me, darling," she said. "I'm going to become one of them." Constance put her hand on Bill's shoulder. "You might want to drink the rest of that beer when you hear the rest."

She placed the can back into his hand.

"I don't understand," he said.

"It's a ritual," she said. "The victor gets privileges. Things you could not imagine."

Despite himself, Bill took a swig of the beer. "Then why do they come here?" he croaked.

"You should know this."

"If I do I can't remember."

Bill imagined his wife as she was only a day before: small and frail as a child in her pink sweatshirt, demure in the seat next to "Constance," he said. "You're not okay. Sick, honey."

"Nope," she said. "Never better."

She turned to him, and indicated the room with her hand. The T with the exclamation point still marked her palm.

"I have to admit," she said. "I had an ulterior motive for coming here."

"You did."

"Yes. There are a lot of people here, Bill. Large congregations."

The hair on Bill's arms and neck rose.

"What do you mean?" he said.

"Reinforcements. Took it out of the army. And all those people I got at that wedding, damn. They fought well, but now they need to be replaced."

"Wait. Those people you...got?" An involuntary shudder passed through Bill, making him squeeze the beer can.

"Yes, darling. I got them all."

"You mean," he murmured. "You killed them."

A smile was her only response.

Bill felt dizzy. "No. God, no. No," he said.

"Those lovely girls in the green dresses. I hated those green dresses. I gave them heart attacks. And the bridea*you should have seen her husband's face when she started coughing up blood. Ha ha ha. But they're all better now, in better places."

Bill had stopped looking at his wife, and was now staring behind her, at the fish-eye lens of the television set.

He swallowed, forced himself into calm.

Of all the shocks of the last twenty-four hours, this cracked his mind the most. His wife had changed from herselfa*a smiling beautiful delicate ghosta*into what she was now.

A murderer.

"It was worth their lives," said Constance, her violet eyes wistful at the memory.

Bill heard this only vaguely. He felt himself standing up.

"No," he said, and this time it came as less of a denial than a command. "No."

"Yes, William! Yes!"

"Your eyes were blue," he said. "You wouldn't hurt a fly. You were so quiet..."

"She's changed now, Bill."

He put his hand on her shoulder.

"I got married to you two days ago. You're my wife."

"She's your wife, darling." She held up her ring.

"I'm still your husband," said Bill. "And I say no."

He grabbed her other shoulder.

"This is so entertaining," she said.

Before she could say more, he spun her around.

Her hair brushed against his face like a light slap.

Bill prayed that she wouldn't have time to react. God only knew her capabilities; he hoped that she was sufficiently off-guard to forget them for the time being.

When she faced away from him, he wrapped his arms around her, pinning her arms to her sides.

Bending his knees, he lifted her off the floor.

"What are you doing?" she cried.

"No," said Bill again.

He brought her to the bed, and threw her down. She bounced off of the mattress and stared at him, her eyes wide, hands out at her sides.

"You're not going anywhere," he said. "Not killing anyone."

His heart beat wildly in his chest, the adrenaline carving a bright gouge through his veins.

And he remembered something.

The black pages of the black book. The silver ink flowing in trails.

"I can stop you," he said.

"No," she said, smiling and rising from the bed. Her hair had come loose, and hung around her face like a wild animal's pelt. "This is outrageously fun."

Something he remembered. On one of the black pages. The silver ink, in a language he didn't understand and had no hope of understanding.

Something to do with touch.

Trusting only in the memory, and that he subconscious would guide the way, Bill reached out with two fingers and jabbed his wife viciously in the shoulder. He said words that were like broken glass in his throat, shredding through his larynx and puncturing his tonsils and scouring his tongue. He cringed to hear himself say them, and despaired at having to hurt his wife.

Constance's grin remained frozen to her face.

He had jabbed her left shoulder, and he looked with some surprise and satisfaction as her left arm went limp at her side, as if her nerves had been switched off, and the muscles deflated like empty balloons. Her white hand sprawled at her side.