-1-

There are places in New York City where realities overlap, and in any neighborhood you might find a latticework of intersecting nations: a Korean village woven through a town from central Poland, and both seamlessly interlaced with an Irish thorp. A building that would tower over the skyline of most other cities is dwarfed on the distant horizon by the skyscrapers of Manhattan, but, locally, surrounded on all sides by open sky.

On one such building in one of these neighborhoods, a fair-skinned woman in a green and silver dress climbs the iron ladder of the fire escape to the roof, her dark hair clasped back to cover the tips of her ears. Her skirts do not impede her, but she winces each time her hand grips another rung. Even through velvet gloves it causes her pain.

The time has come to know, and she is here to call him out. She climbs the iron ladder to the roof.

* * * *

On the roof of the building a young man stands, in jeans and a loose denim shirt, facing away from the access ladder, and sculpts pink polymer clay. A tiny breeze loops playfully above him. Behind him, facing the ladder, stands a peculiar mannequin that is crude and lifelike both at once, as if the stubble on its chin had somehow grown from disregard. The mannequin looks like him but smells of stale musk.

She reaches the top of the ladder, and he frowns but does not turn to face her. His shoulders tense, and he curses himself for being afraid of her still. He tries to clear his mind, lest some look or gesture give his plans away.

She steps onto the ledge and the force of her irritation holds back the tiny breeze. The mannequin that wears his face takes a step toward her. “Mother,” it says. She glares at the simulacrum, and it stops.

She speaks in an ancient language like the rustle of wind and leaves. “What are you making here, child of mine?” she asks.

“Nothing you need to worry about,” he answers in English, his back to her as he looks across the city, his broad hands cradling the polymer clay.

“There is fear in your voice,” she tells him.

“Does that surprise you?”

“Are you frightened of the things you might awaken?”

He mouths the last part along with her, familiar from repetition, and has his response already prepared. His voice cracks a bit: “What might I awaken, Mother, that is more terrible than you?” He turns to face her, his hands cupped in front of him like a beggar; he does not want her to see what he has there.

If his words hurt her, it does not show. “You should not need to fear me, Tamneth,” she answers coolly.

“No, I really shouldn’t, should I?” He wants it to be cutting, self-controlled, but his voice sounds petulant, and he’s certain she hears.

“And you certainly should not let your fear make you reckless. I taught you better.”

“You want me to weave in a year’s worth of wards and protections whenever I make a set of plates. You know I don’t have a thousand years to learn.”

That remark stings. He sees something seethe within her, though her face is a mask of stone. “I look around me,” she says, “and wards and protections are all that I see.” A fluid gesture of her arm sweeps past the frozen zephyr above and the paralyzed simulacrum on the roof.

He looks away.

“Are you dabbling in the sorceries of mortal man?”

He shakes his head.

“Are you dallying with their women?”

“Mother,” Tamneth protests.

“It is no shame,” she says. “You would not be the first to—”

“Obviously,” he snaps back.

Tamneth’s mother glares at him, and her hair moves as if in the wind, though there is none. A faint breeze follows, as if an afterthought. The simulacrum suddenly gasps and bucks, then is still again.

Her rage still terrifies him, but there is pleasure in knowing he got under her defenses. He feels a smile begin but forces it down. He thinks about turning the mannequin’s face into his last memory of his father—skin hanging slack from the bones of his skull under sparse, depleted hair—he could do that from this distance, but it would require the attention he’s using to keep his stray thoughts tucked away. Looking her in the eye, he asks, “Why have you come here, Mother?”

“Is it wrong for me to wonder what my child is doing?”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“Making, shaping—these touch at the center of things and should not be done lightly.”

“I’m making an ashtray,” he answers sullenly. “You don’t need to hound me.”

“No,” his mother answers him in English. “I should not.”

And he is on the defensive again. “Your point is?”

“Wards and protections, just as you said. It is good advice.”

“And they are there. You said so yourself.” He feels the tears at the back of his throat; he tries to hide them but knows he cannot.

“These protections,” she says, “are not against sorcerers or monsters. Not against fire or loss of soul. The only thing you guard against is me.”

He tries to hide the tremble in his voice. “Does it matter? There is nothing on this rooftop that can harm you. You know that.”

“No, my child,” she answers, in that ancient arboreal language, “there is nothing that can hurt me anyplace else.” Her face is stone again, and her eyes are as distant as stars. She steps backward onto the ladder and down off the roof.

The simulacrum shudders and lets loose a loud and fetid exhalation, like compost being turned, then crumbles in an instant, leaving rags and white sludge on the rooftop and above it an odor like unwashed sheets, which hangs in the air for a moment then slithers away. Tamneth stands where he is, holding a crude pink Fimo horse, with a touch of blue marbled in, cradled in his hands. Tears struggle against the insides of his eyes, but he holds them back, though his shoulders tremble. The zephyr that his mother’s glance had frozen goes back to its dance, a broad, elliptical Spirograph sort of pattern, oblivious to what just happened here.

-2-

She walks the city underground. She does not ride the trains, where the iron rails surround the lines of force that cross the city, but even bound round with steel the ley lines carry energy, and power gathers in the vertices. At the strongest hubs, the force has drawn merchants, musicians, and indigents to set up shop underground, where people mill about as at the grand subterranean galas of her childhood, but with tubes of bright fluorescence overhead instead of the hearths and braziers she remembers from when she was young. She is in a foul mood, and the synthetic lights flicker and buzz as she walks underneath, and a few die out. People part to let her pass, feeling vaguely unpleasant. A few will have bad dreams later and not know why.

She is dimly aware of a presence that hovers just above her shoulder. It has followed her since she spoke to her son on the rooftop, but her thoughts have been elsewhere, and she does not notice that the waves of her anger have fed this being, and twisted its growth. She worries about her son; she fears for his safety, and her own. She worries that this strange drive of his will take him away where she cannot protect him from the forces he might awaken.

He should not be so driven. It is not good to be so driven. It distracts him and opens him to attack from terrible things.

She is distracted by a humming tube of light. She walks on as the tube explodes, raining sparks and shattered glass on the tile behind her as she passes. A voice whispers in her ear in the old speech, the making speech, the language of wind and leaves. It says, Lady.

“What,” she snaps back in that language. People around her step back, afraid of her regal indignation.

It repeats, Lady. The voice is cloying, haunting, teasing. It is the voice you expect from a serpent, all treachery and sinew.

“Speak your piece and be done,” she says. People stare at her. They wonder what language she is speaking, if it is Gaelic, or Sanskrit, or Aramaic. Some look for the hands-free device she is not wearing. Others avert their eyes. She is too dignified to be talking to herself without a phone.

What shall I do with you, lady? the presence whispers.

“You shall leave me to myself if you know what is best,” she answers, with a haughty irritation in her voice.

You are a sumptuous morsel, milady, the presence says.

“And what are you?” she responds. “The ghost of a gadfly?”

Perhaps I should get you with child, milady, it says.

“And how long would that inconvenience me?” she asks. “A month, maybe two, and you shall come out a blob of indeterminate pulp. That whelp on the rooftop took three quarters of a year, and I doubt you have the will to last as long.”

She turns down a dim, less-used corridor. A limping black man in a greasy Army coat sees her and stares open-mouthed at the presence behind her right ear as she walks past.

You seem not to think much of him, the voice taunts. Would you not, then, be glad for another child, if that one is your heir?

“What I want is not your concern,” she answers with stoic authority.

You are a tasty morsel, it repeats. Mother.

“Begone!” she says, and with a gesture of her hand she scatters this formless nuisance. The greasy man ducks as if from shrapnel, and the fragmented light streaks past him, scratching his cheek. Somewhere far away, in that direction, a steam pipe hisses, and a subway train creaks grindingly to a halt. A dim, injured presence sulks away, returning to the place it was first given form.

-3-

Tam sits in the center of a circle traced in black permanent marker on the floor of his dimly-lit basement apartment. A battery-powered plastic fan, a can of Sterno, a bottle of Gatorade, and a shaker of SyntheSalt are arranged around the edges of a folding circular footstool. In the center of this stool are a length of green ribbon, a pair of scissors, and an aluminum ashtray. He does not sense the presence that lurks near the ceiling, watching. The horse he had crafted from polymer clay is now reshaped into a boat, with its sails all full. He is applying the finishing details with a toothpick, when he realizes this is not the right thing either, that it is something she will expect, and he pulps it again and hastily shapes it into one of those modern, mound-shaped Volkswagen Beetles.

He sets the sculpture in the center of the stool. He turns on the small fan at the footstool’s eastern rim, lights the Sterno in the south, and sprinkles the Gatorade in the west, then the salt substitute on the northern edge. He cuts the ribbon in half, lights it on fire from the Sterno, and leaves it in the ashtray to burn down. Then, without hesitation, he turns his sweatshirt inside out, picks up his keys and heads out the door, leaving it open behind him, taking nothing along but what he has in his pockets.

The twisted presence waits in the apartment.

-4-

Dimly, vacantly, she feels his footsteps across her shadow and rises from tangled satin sheets. He is walking someplace she has been, someplace she has recently been. She closes her eyes, tries to fix on a location, lets her mind weave its way backwards through the days, but before she can find him the trail is gone.

-5-

He senses her trail the moment he walks into Penn Station. He feels her anger in the burned-out lights above. After all these years, he still wants to fold up and cower, to disappear inside himself and let his body go on without him.

He walks to a newsstand and buys a pack of cigarettes and a plastic charm shaped like a pair of sunglasses. He takes a free box of matches, lights a cigarette, and inhales deeply.

“You cannot smoke those here!” the news vendor shouts with a Punjabi accent.

Tam blows smoke over the plastic sunglasses charm. “Then why do you sell them here?” He stubs out the cigarette, smiling, and tosses the butt and the rest of the pack in a trash bin, as the news vendor stares at him blankly. As he affixes the plastic charm to his keychain, a black man in greasy fatigues, with a black smudge on his face and a recent wound on his cheek, limps over to the trash can to fish out the cigarettes, but stops to stare at him. Tam looks at the cut on the indigent’s face, which is familiar somehow, and wonders if he could have caused it himself and not remembered. “A score buys your silence,” he says to the beggar, in a voice that is soft and stern, and hands him a twenty dollar bill. He slips the keychain with the sunglasses charm back in his pocket and walks away onto the escalator up to the cross-country trains, with the news vendor staring slack-jawed at his back.

-6-

She runs across the city in her nightgown, hair streaming behind her. A breeze in the wrong direction might show a passing stranger her ears, but she does not care. The street thugs who should be cowed by her passing are not. They notice her running, barefoot, on the city streets, and they leave her alone, not out of fear but because they cannot keep up. One whistles as she runs past, calls, “Hey, hot mama.” Her face flushes red, but she makes no response. Her passing indignation becomes a rasping irritation in his larynx. He turns to comment to the man beside him, but his voice is gone.

The apartment door is open, and she runs down the stairs and in, steps through the circle on the floor, and looks over the folding footstool with the polymer car in the center, where the Sterno is dying out, and the ribbon has gone to ashes. As the blue petrochemical flame fades into nothing, she wails and crumples to her knees, wrapping her body around this altar like a shell around a snail as her sweet tears mix with the ashes that fall to the floor. The edge of the hot can burns a crescent scar just under her collarbone, on the left.

As she lies crumpled over the folding altar, a murky light descends cautiously from a corner of the ceiling, slides down the open back of her nightgown, enters her body behind the shoulder blade, works its way down her spine, and settles in her womb.