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Welcome to my web page. My name is Michael Scott Bricker. Just call me Mike, since we're pals now. I'm a fiction writer. Above you will find some links, including a list of my published short fiction.

Below you will find a short excerpt from my novel SYMPHONY FOR THE QUIET ONES, based upon my short story by the same title. The story was published in Esther Friesner's BLOOD MUSE anthology.

I 'm currently seeking representation and a publisher for the novel. Feel free to email me if you like what you read. If you don't, feel free NOT to email me. I'm fragile, see?

If you think that the story is depressing, you're right. It takes place, in part, during the Black Death, which wasn't the most jolly period in human history. Some of my characters also end up in post-apocalyptic Las Vegas just to lighten things up. If you are wondering where the unicorns are, there are none. I hate unicorns.

I'm just throwing this out there, for now. Please don't reproduce this elsewhere, okay? The entire contents are copyrighted, for those wonder about such things.

Peace, be well, and for those of you who write, Excelsior!

Symphony for the Quiet Ones

by Michael Scott Bricker

(c) 2008 Michael Scott Bricker

"He who desires but acts not,
breeds pestilence."
-- William Blake

CHAPTER 1
OCTOBER 30, 1999
7:30 P.M.

Beyond the field of unmarked white crosses of the Garlock Cemetery, beyond the rusting gates and peeling signs, beyond the paupers graves adorned with bicycle chains and littered shards of glass in cobalt and amber, the spires of the Bone Cathedral could be seen by those who dared to cross the boundaries imposed by sanity. If Gabriel had been gifted with a quiet mind, he might not have noted the shimmer of skulls against the blood red sky, but the spires of the Cathedral were as plain as the murder stains upon his coat, and to him, equally enigmatic. The sun dipped below the Funeral Range, and the mineral colors of Death Valley faded to black as the voices that had drawn him from Las Vegas to Garlock, Nevada, grew louder. Slowly, His memories had been returning, (disjointed images, the severing of tendon and muscle, a scream, then silence), and he realized, at last, that her body would still be in the Las Vegas motel room, tangled in the bed sheets just as he had left it.

Garlock, Nevada, had been dying since 1913. A flash flood had washed away most of the town, including the wooden markers of the Garlock Cemetery. The water tore up buildings, erased roads, killed hundreds then conveyed their bodies towards the cemetery, where the water lay for weeks. As the desert warmed, the water evaporated, leaving a litter of corpses, scattered here and there like the wooden beams and fence posts which poked from the peeling mud until the desert reclaimed the land. The cemetery, it seemed, coveted the dead, and the corpses of flood victims formed a fleshy tapestry with freshly uncovered burials. The black mud smelled ripe with decay, and the cemetery was shunned by most for years after the flood.

That was when the plague broke out. Most called it Pneumonia or Consumption or simply a curse, but few of the flood survivors knew of bubonic plague, or of the deadly pneumonic strain that, within a week, would decimate the town. No more than a dozen escaped Garlock by horseback or motorcar, and even those who did perished in the desert within the week. The plague was quick and efficient, but oddly it remained localized, striking down only those individuals who had called Garlock home. Fatality was total for the residents, save for one individual who would return to Garlock eighty-six years after the flood.

Although Gabriel was that lone survivor, and despite his deep feelings of déjà vu upon entering the Garlock Cemetery, his memories had not fully returned. He was a servant of the Quiet Ones, a hollow man who knew nothing of resistance. There were, however, brief moments of clarity during which the Quiet Ones did not inflict their tortures upon him, periods when he was free to beg and steal and sleep in the streets, the dirt, the mud...

The mud...

It was here that he had first seen them, and although eighty-six years had passed since those initial torments, Gabriel possessed little understanding of the passage of time. Day and night were blurred concepts to him. There were perceivable periods of blindness and of light, perhaps, periods of suffering with brief interims of peace, most certainly. This was not a time of peace, and their torments, of late, had been extreme. The Quiet Ones had asked odd, grotesque duties of him in the past, (the murder of lesser animals, the scattering of entrails in arcane patterns, the consumption of blood), but his returning memories suggested that they had never asked him to kill another human being until that morning. He had found her living in a motel room in Las Vegas, and it was there that she had been undone.

The mud, the flood...

The Quiet Ones had furnished him with the weapons of her destruction, (the anti-runes, the Black Prayers written with their own elements upon sheets of vellum, the Living Dagger), and he found a disturbing zeal in her undoing, a feeling of fear and power that, to his knowledge, he had never experienced before. She had been immortal, and their magic, his magic, had expunged the arts that made her so. Gabriel watched and chanted as the soft dagger wormed into her flesh, as the Preserving Music leaked from her body, and as she unraveled, he felt the presence of the Humors. They had only revealed themselves to him once before.

The cemetery...

Yellow Bile. Black Bile. Phlegm. Blood. These were the four bodily humors of medieval physiology; blood from the heart, phlegm from the brain, yellow bile from the liver, black bile from the spleen. The yellow bile, dry and hot like fire, manifested itself as a woman, (fair skin, smooth, hair of flame), but the apparition was merely that, an illusion, and Gabriel knew that her gentle coaxing masked a dark agenda. The Black Bile was cool and dry, a counterpart of earth, and it came to Gabriel in the guise of a horse; huge, black like the night. Phlegm, cool and wet, the Water Humor, was seen as a mercuric snake, a deadly, glowing river of scales. Blood, with the warmth and moisture of air, was perhaps the most loathsome, as it entered the throat of its victims in a killing mist and seeded the plague deep within the lungs. It was this Humor that had taken Garlock decades before, and it was this Humor that took shape before Gabriel as he walked through the cemetery.

Yellow Bile. Black Bile. Phlegm. Blood.
Fire. Earth. Water. Air.

The Quiet Ones and their Humors had arranged the woman's undoing, but it was Gabriel who had performed the deed.

The woman. The elements. Air. Water. The deluge...

Gabriel remembered then, and with the memories came pain. He had walked the muddied roads of Garlock after the flood, years ago, the spring of 1913. He was thirty years old then, tall, thin, his long black hair sharply contrasting the pallor of his skin. That was when he saw the creature, not the Water Humor, but another snake-like creature, a basilisk. It had been there as the four of them entered the Garlock Cemetery, (Liberty Merrick, a good man who had lost his wife to consumption and his sons to the mines, Sam Harte, whose wife had been killed when the roof of his dry goods store collapsed, Reuben Ambrose, the undertaker, who had been there only because his presence had been demanded at gunpoint, and Gabriel Comfort himself, who had been pointing the gun at Ambrose), and it was Merrick who had been the first to see the creature, Merrick who had been the first to change.

The basilisk wrapped itself around the largest marker in the Garlock Cemetery, a twenty foot tall stone obelisk adorned with garlands and cherubim, and as it slithered down, hugging the marker as a python strangles its victim, it stopped for a long while and watched with a mischievous intelligence as Merrick turned to stone, then ash. At the time, Gabriel had known nothing of magic and Humors and the Quiet Ones, (that knowledge would come at the expense of his sanity), but he had known superstition, and fear most of all. He felt the mud seeping into his boots, felt his stomach clench with the ripening smell of fire and magic, and then he aimed his Peacemaker, pulled back the hammer, shot. The bullet took out a piece of the monument, missed the basilisk altogether, or perhaps it had ricocheted against the creature's scales.

Harte and Ambrose ran, but they made it no further than the cemetery gates, where their statues, like ornate markers, adorned the mud before their ashes were taken by the rising wind. Gabriel felt his body stiffen, feet, legs, groin, a tightening in his chest, then elasticity drained from his hands and face. He stared into the milky eyes of the basilisk, watched its oddly human expression as it hugged the obelisk, and then all went dark.

He died, but lived again.

The Air Humor embraced him, remade his flesh as it granted him immortality, filled his lungs with yersinia pestis, the stuff of bubonic plague. Gabriel had not realized that he had been a carrier until the flood survivors around him began to die. Only moments before, as he had passed the cemetery gates after so many years, he had believed murder to be a new agony for him. His returning memories brought the truth.

He had killed thousands with plague, and he would carry yersinia pestis for as long as the Quiet Ones would prolong his death.

Perhaps it was the Air Humor that had returned his memories, or perhaps the cemetery had triggered the wash of buried images, but as he raised his head, felt spectral hands about him, he remembered everything. Every sorrow. Every cry of pain. Every death.

Failed again...

He heard their voices then, and as night took hold of him, the spires of the Cathedral glowed with blood and dark music, and the markers threw long shadows across the cracked soil. The landscape had changed over the decades, and although the mountains surrounding Death Valley were as timeless as the Cathedral itself, little remained of the Garlock Cemetery or of Gabriel's memories. He saw the marker not far away, imagined the basilisk twisted around it, but unlike that day in 1913, the obelisk, cracked and weathered, stood barren of living mythologies, and suffered from insignificance wrought by neglect. When the threat of plague had passed, a new generation peopled the cemetery, and hundreds of white crosses had been placed in honor of the flood victims, amidst more recent graves bordered by cages of old pipe and adorned with the roughly cut stone that reflected poverty in death, as well as life. A few societal cemeteries had been established nearby as well, (Masons, Elks, Knights of Pythias), and although the massive rusting gates and cast iron signs might have suggested more costly burials, it seemed that the members had been interred without fuss or ceremony. Death had been the equalizer, and nowhere was this more evident than in the Garlock Cemetery.

Bring her body to us.

Garlock remained deserted for more than twenty years after the flood, but a fresh silver strike in 1934 brought life back to the town, and the miners returned with their families. Most of them knew of the flood and of the pestilence that followed, but they stayed until superstition drove them away. Talk of restless spirits in the cemetery and of spectral lights in the mines was common, and when a tunnel caved in and took eighty lives, many of the miners left. A severe fire in 1939 destroyed most of the rebuilt town, and few stayed through the war years. By 1950, Garlock was a ghost town once again. The desert advanced, burying structures, grinding others to dust, and the soil of the Garlock Cemetery turned to hardpan. Joshua trees dotted the landscape, grew in vanishing hearse paths and through old graves, and Gabriel imagined that those trees, with broken, gnarled limbs, looked like tormented humans, like his own body.

Bring her body to the Hotel. Not finished...

The mist crept up Gabriel's back, caressed his face, passed his lips, and more memories came with it. Back in time again. His life before the flood. His father. His sister. The murder. He was sixteen years old when he killed his sister, more than old enough to hang back then. It had been an accident, a discharge while cleaning a loaded gun, and Louise died at the moment the bullet struck her heart. Gabriel's father protected his son, and after he buried her in the desert, he insisted that secrecy would be best. Louise disappeared, he would say. It's that sort of town. Things happen. His father's false confidence lasted less than a month, until he took his own life with the same gun that had killed his daughter. Gabriel carried that secret with him to the grave, and beyond.

The Hotel. Bring her body to the Garlock Hotel.

Gabriel had worked at the Garlock Hotel. It was finished in 1909, built by Albert Bancroft on money won at the faro tables at the Tonopah Club, then invested in wildcat mining shares. For years, the Garlock was the most luxurious, as well as the most unusual hotel in the desert. Built of stone and adorned with gargoyles and grotesques, the architecture reflected both Gothic and Art Nouveau elements, with massive stained glass windows and ornate wall tapestries as well as lamps, prints and statuary from Tiffany and Maxfield Parish. The ceiling of the lobby was gilt with twenty-two karat gold, and with nearly three hundred rooms, it became known as Bancroft's Cathedral. The superb masonry of the Hotel saved it from the flood, but Bancroft took his own life, and the empty building towered over the deserted, flattened town until 1934, when the miners returned. The Hotel was purchased at that time but the new owner went bankrupt before repairs could be completed. As for Bancroft, his cryptic suicide note, pinned to his jacket, was written in Latin. "Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens." A monster - horrible, misshapen, huge. The Garlock Hotel closed for good in 1936.

We need her body.

Gabriel's failure was made clear to him as he felt the Air Humor settle more deeply into his lungs. He had watched the woman's undoing, then fear overcame the voices in his head and he ran from the motel room, climbed into his car, fled. Once he was beyond the city limits, he pulled over and recited the Cleansing Prayers. He had deceived himself into believing that he was free, but his imprisoned will brought him back to Garlock, and his brief taste of freedom had been illusory. His fear had been a product of his own actions as well as a response to the woman's aura, as he sensed great powers within her, powers of illusion, creation, and destruction. He suspected that her undoing had been accomplished too easily, and he knew, then, that something had gone wrong.

Bring her to the Garlock Hotel at dawn. You will be healed.

Gabriel knew what the Humor had done to him, and as he felt the growing lumps under his arms, his horror was confirmed. Buboes, a symptom of bubonic plague. In the odd light cast by the Cathedral, he saw fleas crawling over his hands, felt them moving up his arms. It was not his own death he feared, (he longed for it), nor the suffering, (decades of torture had gifted him with a substantial resistance to pain), but it was something far more horrendous. Once again, he would spread the plague to all who came near, and like the aftermath of the flood, hundreds, perhaps thousands would die, unless he did as the Quiet Ones instructed.

He would retrieve her body. He had no choice.

Go now.

The Air Humor flowed from his nose and mouth, made swirls of fetid mist in the air. Gabriel stood, wiped sweat and fleas from his pale skin, and walked towards his car.

The Cathedral of Skulls glowed more brightly, then faded from one existence, and moved into another.

CHAPTER 2
OCTOBER 30, 1999
7:45 P.M.

In his dream, music raised the dead. It issued from dark cathedrals, from shards of leaded glass in one thousand shades of gray, from breathing walls of rats. They lay propped against walls or in fleshy piles between stone houses, their faces purple-black with plague, and buboes swelled within their groins, their thighs, shining with infection as rain washed sewage into the muddied roads. The music swelled, fat raindrops of Gregorian Chant, and while peasant hearths echoed with the sounds of misery, the chant renewed corpses, sealing wounds, eliminating infection, making the victims of the Black Death whole once again. The chant infused Preston Kingsbury as well, and as he watched from the road, through the eyes of an aging Twentieth Century composer transported to medieval France, the music restored his youth:

"Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine..."

Kingsbury knew the Requiem Aeternam well, the Mass for the Dead, yet never before had he heard it performed so beautifully, and as the chant invigorated him, he translated the words and repeated them lovingly in his native tongue:

"Rest eternal be granted to them, O Lord..."

And then:

"...et lux perpetua luceat eis..."
"...and let eternal light shine upon them..."

The air, electric with chant, bristled his hair, his beard, and the scattered corpses glowed with holy light. Kingsbury dropped, closed his eyes, thrust his hands into the ground and kneaded the dark mud.

"In memoria aeterna erit iustus..."
"The just man shall be remembered eternally..."

Mud flowed between his arms, his legs, making his skin supple. He opened his eyes and through his healing tears his vision cleared. Kingsbury watched the age spots on his hands fade, then the wrinkles, and he stood easily upon strong, youthful legs.

"...ab auditione mala..."
"...ill tidings..."

The plagued ones glowed brighter still, and then the mud boiled, twisted into pillars of unclean matter, and from those pillars, wraithlike monks took shape.

"...non timebit..."
"...he shall not fear..."

They moved towards him, black hoods, pale, wretched faces, their fingers clutching his arms, his throat, puncturing, probing deeply into body and soul, and through his blood-bathed eyes, he watched as the dead began to stir.

*

It was an odd sensation, this feeling of renewed youth, yet vague dream images of monks and music could not dull the pain that he felt in his joints as he awoke. He dressed, slipped on his eyeglasses, stood before his bathroom mirror for a long while. Kingsbury's appearance betrayed him. He wondered where dreams ended and reality began, and then mundane reality took hold, and Kingsbury was left with a feeling of overwhelming loneliness. He was an old man, and he hadn't completed a new musical composition in years.

Life had been very different once. He remembered his Great Works; the Suite for the Orphan, The Feast of the Pharaohs, Four Postcards, and Galway - 1936, still considered to be his masterwork. Galway had been a musical reflection upon a walking tour of Ireland, composed when Kingsbury was only twenty-three years of age. It had sold in the millions, had been recorded upon media ranging from shellac 78 rpm records to compact discs, and was still selling well despite the fact that Kingsbury had become a recluse, rumored by some to be dead. His work had been called grand, or immortal, yet he considered himself to be a failure, a shadow of a man.

He lived in a trailer park outside of Baker, California, a small community in the heart of the Mojave Desert. Kingsbury's trailer was the color of sand; rusty, lonely, unexceptional. The park contained thirteen such trailers, and he refused to speak to all but one of his neighbors. Kingsbury openly referred to them trash or yokels, and so within this insular community, he had earned the reputation of being a lunatic. He embraced this reputation, took delight in his artful rudeness, but at times, he would admit to himself that his behavior masked feelings of rejection and self-hatred. Sleep used to provide an escape from his loathing, but there was no longer an escape for him, as dreams waited on the other side.

Kingsbury had grown accustomed to his seclusion. He limited his affections to the desert, and more notably, to a woman who appeared young enough to be his granddaughter. Preparing for her arrival had become a ritual. He would dress in his finest wool suit, buckle his belt and slip on his wingtips, and wait for his friend to arrive. Early that morning, Sparrow had told him that she would bring him a meal from The Oasis, a diner in the heart of Barstow, sixty miles away. Sparrow possessed a sharp wit and an impressive knowledge of music. In many ways, she reminded him of his late wife, lost many years before to a disease that remained undiagnosed to that day. She had introduced herself to Kingsbury shortly after moving into the trailer park, and had told him that she knew of his work and considered him to be one of the finest living composers. They would discuss music a great deal, and Kingsbury was delighted to find that, in many areas, her knowledge of music exceeded his own. When she told him that she was forty-two years old, Kingsbury responded by saying that she appeared to be no more than twenty, a fact that made him feel oddly uncomfortable.

Time had grown illusive. It had been morning when Sparrow had awoken him with a knock at his door. She had brought him breakfast and a late lunch before leaving for work. Kingsbury told her that his mind had dulled and that he could no longer compose, but she encouraged him and dismissed his concerns as nothing more than a crippling perfectionism. She left him to his notes, and he worked in frustration for perhaps twenty minutes before sleep overtook him once again. He awoke at dusk, and as Kingsbury looked through his dirty trailer window, at the dim umber sky, he wondered if he might complete another Great Work before his death, or if he would be remembered only for Galway, or for his waning years spent in self-imposed obscurity.

They lay upon the floor or pinned to the walls or in unmarked envelopes and boxes. There were hundreds of notes written on everything from parchment to cocktail napkins, a forty-year collection of score and verse, of inspiration and madness, and as Kingsbury explored the chaos that represented his work as well as his life, he found himself cursing Sparrow. As much as he cared for her, at times like this he hated her as well. He had come to the trailer park seeking anonymity, imagined that he could remain well hidden within this intellectual wasteland, that he might live and die within a numbing gloom, never to complete another score. When Sparrow told him that she felt great creativity within him still, she cursed him, compelled him to compose in artistic torment once again. Even worse was the fact that he knew that she had been right. His greatest work was still to be written, and perhaps, he thought, his own artistic sensibilities were what he hated most of all.

With the fading daylight came wind, bone-dry, kicking up dust ghosts and bits of desiccated scrub. Kingsbury imagined his notes as that scrub, his creativity skittering away, and he fancied himself as a lone Joshua Tree, ancient, unmoving, with gnarled, outstretched limbs embracing the quiet dead of the Mojave. Light flickered near the horizon, towards Las Vegas. Even in Baker, eighty miles from the city, one could see the neon glow. Dusk surrendered to night and still Kingsbury stared. The cool darkness crept in as that light grew brighter, closer. It might have been a thunderstorm. In the desert, fields of stars could vanish behind cloud cover in moments. The clouds moved quickly, dumping heavy rain at times, dry lightning at others, and then they would pass, leaving trails of hollow thunder.

This was not lightning. The glow fed upon itself, grew pregnant with red and blue light, and Kingsbury watched a great vortex slipping along the desert plain, towards the trailer park. His windows rattled, not with thunder, nor with the sound of uprooted Joshua trees, but with music. Kingsbury pressed his palms against the windowpanes, felt the music rumbling throughout his body. He had never heard such sounds, whistles and chimes and chant, yet the music was beautiful, nearly perfect. He closed his eyes, swayed with the music, drew inspiration from it, and the sleepy haze in his mind began to lift. The sounds of fleeing neighbors shattered his peace, their shouts, the slapping of aluminum screen doors, the puttering of aging trucks and cars, and when he opened his eyes, he saw the perimeter wall around the trailer park breaking down.

Not even the vortex music could mask the sounds of destruction as the wall, brick by brick, was eliminated, and then the homes began to go. Paint liquefied, ran up the skin of the trailers, over windows, snaking in shimmering rivulets into the turbulent sky. Screws, bolts and rivets popped next, and then sheets of metal flew alongside shattered glass windowpanes. Electric flashes augmented vortex light as generators and wires tore away, and tendrils of water flowed from the jagged mouths of pipes. The smell of sulfur hung in the air, thick and oppressive, despite the wind. When Kingsbury saw the dwarf, he wondered if he might be dreaming again. Nothing made sense, his inaction, perhaps, most of all. His trailer had remained steady except for the gentle rumbling of that odd music, though others that were less than fifty yards away had already been reduced to skeletons. This was a world without logic, the world of dreams, yet something deep inside Kingsbury suggested that this time he was not dreaming.

The dwarf held a long black pipe, and as he pointed it towards an outside wall of Kingsbury's trailer, lightning danced along the tip, then shot forward with little electric bursts. Kingsbury turned, went for the door. He should have escaped already, he thought, left with the others. One of them would have given him a ride if he had asked. They were primitive, these trailer yokels, yet they might have possessed the humanity to save an old man's life. He realized then that this was not true, as not one of them had attempted to save him. As he opened his door, Kingsbury expected to be whisked away by the howling wind, or maimed by the shards of trailer flesh whipping about, but instead he was enveloped with protective music, calm and soothing, and by the faint, electric hum of the dwarf's pipe. Outside of that envelope, there was chaos. Furniture flew through the open roof of a ruined trailer, chairs, a table, bedding, pots and pans and a twisted stainless steel sink. A sheet of aluminum soared through the air, towards Kingsbury's trailer, then bounced off. Light from the pipe played upon the dwarf's features, highlighting warts and scars, casting shadows over his sunken eye sockets. He lowered his pipe, approached Kingsbury, pulled back his hood, and a voice emerged, not from the dwarf's lips, but from the music around them.

Fool. Go back inside.

Kingsbury heeded the warning. It felt as if the music forced him back into the trailer. The dwarf raised his hood and went back to work. He burned strange runes into the side of Kingsbury's trailer, circles and stars, hieroglyphs and petroglyphs, leaving tears of molten metal. Kingsbury watched from the window as the dwarf sparked the side of the trailer again, and with a quick, powerful jolt, another group of symbols took shape. The odd, beautiful music grew louder, and Kingsbury felt young again, just as he had in his dreams. In an instant, his desire to compose returned. As lightning flashed outside, the windows and ruined trailers fed the glaring red-blue light of the vortex, Kingsbury began to create. There were so many fresh ideas about him, tapestries of timbres and rhythms, that pencil and paper proved inadequate to convey them. He composed frantically, his pages damp with sweat, and he collapsed as the trailer rocked then spun.

His last thoughts before he lost consciousness were of his music, of the rapture that he had found within this reborn creativity, and of how grateful he was that he had not committed suicide that evening as he had considered.

CHAPTER 12 (Excerpt)
PAX

They found peace here. The world of rain and death, of dark magic and designs, seemed so far away, and with the beauty they shared in this land of color and light, they found renewed youth as well. Kingsbury had felt his wrinkles fade as strength flowed into his chest, and Sparrow, his dear Sparrow, danced and sang, and more than once they had tumbled like children down the green rolling hills of Pax.

"You're young, you know," she would say as they played together, and although he would deny it, Kingsbury had accepted, finally, that the elemental magic of this land had gifted him with the body of a thirty-year-old, although his mind, he feared, was still haunted by the ghosts of dementia.

Occasionally, Kingsbury would mention the other place, (the rain, the rats, that horrific, impossibly harrowing night in Garlock), but Sparrow would change the subject or say that for them, Pax was the only world, the only reality.

They sat on the shore of the Lake Serenity, as Sparrow had named it, (just as she had named Pax in honor of the peace they found here), and watched as their dreams came alive.

"What do you wish to see?" Sparrow laid her head on his chest, felt smooth silk of the shirt that her memory worms had woven for him.

Kingsbury smiled, pointed towards the horizon, past the gentle cobalt waves slapping along the shore. Not far away, just beyond Sparrow's fire buoys, the monster broke the surface.

Nessie was violet today, with patches of thick yellow fur that continued down its back and crowned its stegosaurus-like plates. The creature turned its head, smiled, then waved its tongue at them before splashing under the surface like a lumpish sea cow.

"A noble creature." Sparrow held him, brought her face close to his, hesitated, kissed his cheek. Their play had been like this for some time, (so much like children, like good friends), but their games stopped just short of anything of a sexual nature, although Kingsbury, at times, had made trivial advances. There was an age difference to be considered, (him, a man in his eighties, and Sparrow, nearly six centuries older), but just as her immortality had preserved her body, the healing magic of Pax had restored youth to his. This was a place of illusions, Kingsbury had pointed out, and he felt that underneath the trappings of youth and color, he was still a man of eighty-six, and Sparrow, worse, a woman who should have died, should have stayed dead, centuries before. Still, despite the odd logistics imposed by immortality and rebirth, Kingsbury loved Sparrow deeply, (and that love, he suspected, was terribly mutual), but he also felt as though there were something wrong about their love as well, boiling just below the surface; something forbidden.

Later, the water would turn to blood, but as of yet, there were no signs of the plagues to come, and their lives, for the moment, were still wonderfully childlike and innocent. It was a typical day in most ways; the penguins brought them breakfast, (Sparrow had thought them into existence one morning, and the turquoise birds had served them meals on silver platters ever since), and they spent a long while strolling through Kingsbury's melon orchards until the suns, one by one, dipped below the horizon. He had fancied himself a farmer in this land, and whether Kingsbury's youth was real or illusory, he had grown strong with the labors he enjoyed in his multicolored fields, his face tanned, and, most importantly, his art had begun to return.

He composed in the evenings, (Sparrow would bring him enough moonlight to illuminate his notes), but his music consisted mostly of childlike songs, so befitting the land they inhabited, and one evening he admitted that despite the gifts that Pax had provided, Kingsbury felt empty where his art was concerned. He would reflect upon his masterpieces, and it seemed as though they had been composed by another person, a tormented artist, an extraordinary victim rejected by a flat and flavorless world, but here, things had gone topsy-turvy, and it was he who lacked color. Something was missing, he admitted, there was a hole in his heart, and the piece that was missing was pain. He needed pain to create, as well as sorrow and longing, but most of all, he needed the threat of mortality, the smell of death and the thought that with every composition, every note, he would grow closer to the kind of immortality that only death could bring. Preston Kingsbury was misunderstood, they would say, a true genius who was not appreciated until after he was gone. They would leave flowers and candles at his grave, they would complete unfinished works in his name, they would build the future of music from the timbres of his sorrow.

Perhaps.

Like imagination, the boundaries of Pax seemed limitless, yet, at its source, there was a mystery to be solved, and not even Sparrow, with her centuries of uneasy mastery of the magical arts, knew how or why they had come into this land. Bubo's vortex had proven to be a portal, though she suspected some unknown intervention had taken place in order to bring them here. After leaving Garlock behind, they had awoken, together, upon a grassy hill not far away, and their lives had been transformed. There were no rats here, no misery, and Bubo's vortex had taken him elsewhere, she imagined, to a place that would embrace a man of his foul talents.

"Are we still human? Is all this an illusion?" It was Kingsbury who posed the questions first, and it was his adventurous nature, lost to him for so long, that urged them to travel beyond the comfort of the paradise they had created for themselves. He speculated about boundaries - Pax, he reasoned, must have limits, like the walls of the magical bubble Bubo had created in Garlock, and although Sparrow poked fun at his "flat earth" theories, ("Pax ends," she said, "where sailing ships fall off the map, where stars cease to shine"), she, too, was curious, but more frightened, she admitted, of what they might find beyond the edges of their world. So, with rucksacks filled with pineapple pears, (and Kingsbury with his music, Sparrow with her magic), they set out on a voyage of discovery.

CHAPTER 16 (Excerpt)
DANCE OF DEATH

For them, it was the end of the world. The icons of biblical vengeance were everywhere, (the fires, the pain, the ghostly, inexplicable touch of the Great Mortality), and even Bubo, who had spent centuries within the slow embrace of death, found a hopelessness here which he had not endured since the Quiet Ones had transformed him from man to monster. Stone houses with thatched roofs rustled with the sound of rats, and yet these people looked elsewhere for the seeds of plague; comets and stars, bad air, the hand of a loveless creator. Alleyways had become dumping grounds for the corpses of loved ones, only to be cleared when the occasional carter came by, (highly paid yet scarce, as the occupation of carting away corpses and human waste had become deadly), and sentiment and ceremony were lost to the realities of sanitation. Bodies ceased to represent lovers, mothers, and offspring, and became depositories of disease; fleshy piles blooming with the seeds of death, dumped into unconsecrated ditches layered with those who had fallen before. There were no prayers here, no tears, no dreams; only the blank, hollow stares of a people who had been abandoned not only by emotion, but by God as well.

Church bells had been silenced, and painted red crosses, the symbol of the Pestilence, marked the doors of those households or hearths where the disease had struck. Religion had been turned upside down; crosses were symbols of disease rather than salvation, and churches, once asylums of faith, had been emptied by plague. Even the sick were turned away, as the holy would play no part in saving the lives of a Godless people, even though the disease destroyed priest and pauper alike. There were no miracles here, no cures other than herbs and bloodletting and the touch of fire, and not even the barber-surgeons, or the Quacks with their white robes and bejeweled eyes, could do more than speed the process of disease and death. Fire, they believed, could purify the bad air, and so they burned not only sweet smelling herbs and woods, but, on more than one occasion, the living bodies of those who had chosen death by cleansing flame rather the consuming attack of buboes and necrosis. They welcomed death, and had no fear of the tormented afterlife that suicide might provide, as not even hell could hold the terrors they found within their own world.

Truelove had not been prepared for the sights and sounds of the living death, and while Bubo's administrations had protected her from odors and infections, he had not shielded her mind. She was a woman of the Twentieth Century, pampered and powdered by the luxuries afforded by the new technology, and what she knew of the Black Death had been garnered from books. Books were safe; pages of sterile facts six centuries removed from the horrors that they reflected. More than once she collapsed as they passed through La Couvertoirade, and at her feet were not only human corpses, but animals as well; stiff and muddy, with patches of hair dangling from flesh that had not yet decomposed, or been gnawed by wild dogs. Houses with windows of oiled parchment stood empty, shops were closed for good, and privies overflowed with raw sewage. Lead-gray clouds drenched the land with rain, so that roads became muddy rivers of waste, or stagnant pools of insects. The air carried not only the thick, overwhelming smell of decomposition, but pneumonic plague as well; a more deadly airborne variant of the disease which did not require the intervention of fleas, and which could kill within a few days. The Pestilence spared no living creature, and Bubo, who found himself humbled by old memories revisited, also found terror and admiration in the efficiency of yersinia pestis, the killing heart of the plague, as not even the darkest magic could obliterate one-third of Europe as nature had.

Though their disguises were adequate, Bubo expected that they would be discovered after entering the town gates, which stood open and unguarded, as if the town welcomed death, or released it freely into the surrounding countryside. He had not foreseen the despondency of these people, and most had moved beyond blame and persecution in favor of self-interest. Money had lost its usefulness, as had law. Looting had changed from a criminal activity to a means of survival. Crops failed as a result of the unusually cold and wet weather preceding the plague years, and farming nearly ceased when people began to die. Starvation was common, but as more people lost their lives, there were fewer mouths to feed, and the decrease in population would pave the way, in time, for better living conditions and the birth of the Renaissance. These people knew nothing of the glories to come, nor did they speak of the future, as the future, for them, held only death.

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