Alabaster

"Who's she," the thing on the porch growls in a voice that is thunder and wildfire and the buzzing wings of poisonous red wasps. Movement in the darkness, and Dancy can see that there's more to it than the eyes, after all, that it's pointing towards her.

"She ain't no one," Mr. Jube says. "Least ways, no one you got to be concerned about."

"You know the rules," it growls, eyes swelling wide again, eyes big around as oranges, and the dark around them flutters for a moment and is still again.

"Yeah, I know she ain't supposed to be here. I know ain't nobody supposed to be here but me. But it just kinda happened, and there ain't no use worryin' over it now."

"Dancy," the thing purrs. "Dancy Flammarion," and the sudden, hot trickle down her thighs as she wets herself. She bites at her lower lip, bites hard until there's blood and it hurts too much to bite anymore, but she doesn't scream.

"She ain't go

"Does she?" it asks, blue eyes swirling, restless, disbelieving. "Does she know the rules?" But it stops pointing at her, and the jointed thing that isn't an arm melts back into the blackness.

"The day you were born," it says, and some of it flows across the threshold, sticky, tar-baby shreds of itself to lap about Mr. Jube's ankles. He takes a deep, hitching breath and stands absolutely still. "There were tears the day you were born, Dancy Flammarion. There are tears in your mother's heart every time she looks at you."

"I have the riddle," Mr. Jube says.

A black tendril wriggles noiselessly across the pine boards towards Dancy, its ragged tip end rising like the head of a coachwhip snake, serpent head pausing a few inches from her boots, and she smells dying fish and mud, peppermint and curdled milk.

"But who's going to cry the day you leave?" the thing at the door mutters in its thunderstorm, insect voice.

"You listenin'?" Mr. Jube says. "You know the rules. I only have to ask my riddle once."

The tendril hovers a moment longer near Dancy's left foot, indecisive, reluctant, and then it slips back across the floor, flows away and leaves behind a glistening slug trail on the rough wood.

"Then ask me, old man. Ask me quick, before I forget the rules and take what I please."

The black puddle around Mr. Jube's feet shivers like jelly, and "You ain't never go

"Ask me the riddle. Why does the crow fly in the woods? What kind of bushes do rabbits sit under when the rain comes?"

Mr. Jube raises his head and stares directly into those huge and bottomless blue eyes, and when he speaks, his voice is calm and sure.

"The man who made me, never used me. The man who bought me, never used me. The man who used me, never saw me."

A gust of cold and stinking air through the open doorway and the lantern on the table glows brighter for a moment, its small flame swelling, flickering against the chill, as the blackness uncoils from about Mr. Jube's ankles. Pouring itself backwards, slow as syrup, and the eyes narrow once more down to angry, hating slits.

"Maybe next time," Mr. Jube says, and he looks down at the cabin floor again. "I can tell you're gettin' smarter. I'm go

"You got blood on your face, child," he says. "Looks like you done bit a hole clean through your bottom lip. Just let me get my breath, and I'll see about it."

"I'm all right," Dancy says. "It don't hurt," not the truth but the pain seems small and far away. She stares at the checkerboard, the candy strewn at her feet, the kerosene lantern flame no larger or brighter than any lantern flame ought to be.

"You got your questions, too. I know that."

"What if it had known that riddle? What if it had guessed-"

"No," Mr. Jube says, interrupting her, and he shakes his head slowly and rubs at his beard. "I said I know you got questions. I didn't say I got answers. Hell, there ain't no answers for things like this, Dancy. That's just somethin' you gotta learn. Ain't everything in the world got a what and a why for the askin'."

"But it knew my name. It looked at me and knew my name."

"Well, you try not to think about that too much. It don't mean nothin'. It probably don't mean nothin' at all."

And outside the cabin by the lake at the end of Wampee Creek, the summer night mumbles uneasily to itself in the dark tongue of pines needles and cypress leaves, cricket whispers and the mournful call of owls. The waxing sliver of moon rises higher and casts a thin, pale glow across the water, and in a little while the surface of the pool has grown still and flat again, and the world rolls on towards morning.

Waycross

"Rise and shine, Snow White," the Gynander growls, and so the albino girl slowly opens her pink eyes, the dream of her dead mother and sunlight and the sheltering sky dissolving to the bare earth and meat-rot stink of the cellar.

Go back to sleep, and I'll be home again, she thinks. Close my eyes, and none of this has ever happened. Not the truth, nothing like the truth, but cold comfort better than no comfort at all in this hole behind the place where the monster sleeps during the day. Dancy blinks at the darkness, licks her dry, chapped lips, and tries hard to remember the story her mother was telling her in the dream. Lion's den, whale belly, fiery-furnace Bible story, but all the words and names ru

The red thing crouched somewhere at the other side of the cellar makes a soft, wet sound and strikes a match to light the hurricane lamp gripped in the long, raw fingers of its left hand. Dancy closes her eyes, because the angel has warned her never to look at its face until after it puts on one of the skins hanging from the rusted steel hooks set into the ceiling of the cellar. All those blind and shriveled hides like deflated people, deflated animals, and it has promised Dancy that some day very soon she'll hang there, too, one more hollow face, one more mask for it to wear.

"What day…what day is it?" Dancy whispers, hard to talk because her throat's so dry, hard to even swallow, and her tongue feels swollen. "How long have I been down here?"

"Why?" the Gynander asks her. "What difference does it make?"

"No difference," Dancy croaks. "I just wanted to know."

"You got some place to be? You got someone else to kill?"

"I just wanted to know what day it is."

"It isn't any day. It's night."

Yellow-orange lantern light getting in through Dancy's eyelids, warm light and cold shadows, and she squeezes them shut tighter, turns her head to one side so her face is pressed against the hard dirt floor. Not taking any chances because she promised she wouldn't ever look, and if she starts lying to the angel he might stop coming to her.

"Sooner or later, you're go