“Thank you,” he said. “What do you think of the recording? It’s them, isn’t it?”

  She shrugged. “You shouldn’t go out alone.”

  When the last bright fleck of sun had vanished behind the trees, she went to the rocks and got his clothes as she had said she would. His shirt was still a little damp at the collar, but she folded it as she had promised and carried everything back to the tent.

  As she lifted the tent flap, she took a last look at the mountain slopes, stony and dotted here and there with needle-trees and patches of brush. Near her, night had come already; but higher up, the black mountain rocks still captured light. For an instant she glimpsed the eyes of one of the Small Folk near the shadow’s edge. Then they were gone, and she could not be sure she had not imagined them.

  Once in the tent, she removed only her boots; and she took her dragonette with her into her bag. Hours later when Michael had left the tent, she rose too, put on her boots, and followed him.

  The moon was rising, a moon no longer quite so circular as it had been. This is when he leaves, she thought, when the moon rises above the mountains.

  She saw him three hundred meters down the valley, walking fast, not looking back. She hurried after him, but he passed into the shadow of a tall needle-tree and was gone.

  For most of the rest of the night, she was certain she was following him still. Twice she heard him cough, and once she glimpsed him as he crossed a moonlit clearing. Day came, and she held back, afraid that he might see her. That was when she lost him, or so she decided later.

  For most of that day she pressed forward, stopping only to drink at a freshet that could not have been their stream. She was very tired by then, and she knew that she was no longer so strong as she had been.

  That hour came when the sun was half down the western sky—the hour at which Michael had returned before. She decided that she would return to camp as well. It was pointless to hunt him among the rocks and trees when he was asleep in camp.

  Her director pointed the way, but she found herself blocked again and again by fallen trees, gorges, or cliffs or banks too steep to climb.

  Night came. She knew it would be wiser to stop and sleep if she could; but she was hungry and felt that camp could be no more than a kilometer off at most. She blamed herself for not taking rations, not taking a light, though she had feared that he might look behind him and see a light. She imagined herself back at the school, an instructor at the school now, dressing down some cadet who was also herself for not bringing a light, not taking rations.

  Then she fell. For a moment it seemed that she would never land before the ground struck her like a blow.

  She felt she had been unconscious, perhaps not for long. It was night still, though her head ached and her bruised limbs were stiff with cold. For a long time she groped among stones for the director; but her fingers could not find it, and its green glow was nowhere to be seen.

  She decided to make herself as comfortable as she could and wait for sunrise—in daylight she could surely find the director and make her way back to camp. She took three steps, hoping to come upon a place sheltered from the wind, and fell again.

  When she recovered consciousness for the second time she was warmer, but it was very dark. She sat up and found that she had lain on a bed of fern, and that though she still wore her jacket, a jacket had been spread over her legs.

  Michael’s voice asked, “Are you all right?”

  “Where are we?”

  For a second or two, no answer came. “Lukora’s house.”

  “Lukora?”

  “This woman,” Michael said.

  By then she had noticed the tall white figure. She asked, “Did you find me, or was it Michael? In either case, thank you for taking care of me.”

  The white figure approached, fractioned into three. Like a hand, Meirax thought, with three fingers held up. It bent across the crouching bulk that was Michael. Hair brushed her cheek, and she realized that the divisions of the white figure were no more than dark hair, hair that hung before its owner’s shoulders and nearly to her waist.

  Aloud she said thank you again. A chill hand caressed her forehead, and gentle fingers explored the aching lump above her left temple; with them came a deep inhalation like the soughing of needle-trees.

  Michael said, “She is sorry that you’re hurt.”

  “Can’t she talk? How do you know her name?”

  “She can,” Michael told her. “She doesn’t speak often. Do you think you can stand?”

  “I’ll try.” She got her legs beneath her, but they were without strength.

  A fourth person entered silently, so that for a moment the darkness grew darker still. She heard something soft and heavy laid upon a table, or perhaps upon the floor.

  Michael muttered something unintelligible.

  “Who is that?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Would you like to lie down and rest for a while?”

  Lukora said, “They are abroad.” It was not really a deep voice, Meirax thought, yet it possessed the husky quality some women thought passionate…

  She was again supine. “Why is it so dark here, Michael?”

  “So that you can sleep.” There was an odor of musk, heavy and ensorceling, as warm as breath.

  When she woke again Michael gave her something oily to eat, and she asked what it was.

  “Flesh softened by fire. We used to do it too. It’s very strengthening.”

  “I think I could walk back to camp now,” she said, knowing it was what he wished to hear.

  “Then we’ll go.”

  Her heart leaped for joy. “You’re coming with me?”

  “I must. There’s danger from the Small Folk.”

  He helped her stand and held her arm so that she would not trip on the uneven stone floor. “I feel as if the ceiling were right over my head,” she told him.

  “It’s low in some places, high in others.”

  He led her through a chamber where a small, bright light shone far above without illuminating the walls, then along a twisting corridor. “There’s the door,” he said; it was a vague circle of pale light.

  “It’s day outside, isn’t it?”

  “It’s almost evening,” Michael told her. “Lukora would not like us leaving so late.” He hesitated. “It might be better if I go first.”

  “Go ahead, then.”

  “You’ll follow me? At once?”

  “Certainly,” Meirax told him.

  Metal rang against rock. The doorway darkened as Michael’s body filled it, then opened again.

  “Hurry,” he said, and extended an arm to her.

  She climbed through the doorway, blinking watering eyes at the brightness of daylight. It was like a new scene in a show, she thought: Lukora’s house was suddenly gone, and Michael was pushing through thick brush instead. Brush scratched her hands and cheeks, and sent up clouds of insects like missiles.

  At last they burst into the clearing under a big needle-tree. “What’s that?” she asked.

  “A sword.” He showed it to her. It was old and rusted, its bronze hilt grass-green with verdigris; but its edges were newly ground and looked sharp.

  “Couldn’t you have used it to cut through the brush?” she asked him.

  He shook his head. “That would have been foolish.”

  Though her director was gone, the setting sun soon restored her sense of direction—she knew that Michael led her southeast. Together they mounted slope after slope, swinging due south and even due north at times as Michael traced a path that he alone could see.

  And some third thing came with them, noiseless but always present.

  They saw the Small Folk, she thought, before the Small Folk saw them. They were waiting on the ridge line, a ragged cluster of a score or more, thin limbed and wild haired, mean statues of gold in the last light.

  “We’d better turn aside,” she told Michael.

  “Then they would know we’re afraid of them. They’d hunt us down.”

  She took out her dragonette and loosed its safety catch. “I don’t think they know we’re here.”

  “Of course they do.”

  It was dark by the time they had mounted the ridge, and the strange moon was not yet above the mountains; the suns of half a billion worlds gleamed like so many holes pricked in black film. “Stand out of our path,” Michael ordered the Small Folk.

  A champion rose before him, lean but nearly as tall as he. The champion held some weapon—a toothed club, as well as Meirax could judge it by starlight. “Shoot him,” she breathed. “Kill him now, Michael—or I will.”

  He handed her his dragonette. “What chance would we have against them at night? We’d kill half a dozen, perhaps; then they would kill us both.”

  The ancient steel gleamed under the stars, as though night had washed away all rust. She heard the thud as blade met hard wood, the whistle and whisper of the champion’s club swung in a blow too high, the champion’s wild shriek.

  Hands like claws tore Michael’s dragonette from her. She fired her own, and two of the Small Folk burst into flame.

  Then she was down, fingers at her throat, the dragonette gone. Her own hands tore away those that held her. For an instant, she glimpsed a dark bludgeon against the stars. She twisted frantically out of the way.

  The Small Folk cried out in terror, all together like the chorus at a play. White things leaped above her with flashing fangs. Her whole world was a cacophony of snarls and screams, her hair wet with blood that was not her own.

  · · · ·

  As you hear, I have returned to camp. Lukora’s brother has come with me; I do not know his name. He waits me now, sniffing the wind, pacing to and fro before our door. The sun will rise at 05:33.8 today, and already the horned lords bugle from their hilltops. We hunt now; but I will speak to you again very soon.

  Suzanne Delage

  As I was reading last night—reading a book, I should explain, which was otherwise merely commonplace; one of those somewhat political, somewhat philosophical, somewhat historical books which can now be bought by the pound each month—I was struck by a certain remark of the author’s. It seemed to me at the time an interesting, if almost self-evident, idea; and afterward, when I had turned the page, and many other pages, and was half through a new chapter bearing very little relation to what had gone before, this idea found its way back into my consciousness and there acted as a sort of filter between my mind and the book until I put it down and, still thinking, went up to bed.

  The idea which had so forcibly struck me was simply this: that every man has had in the course of his life some extraordinary experience, some dislocation of all we expect from nature and probability, of such magnitude that he might in his own person serve as a living proof of Hamlet’s hackneyed precept—but that he has, nearly always, been so conditioned to consider himself the most mundane of creatures, that, finding no relationship to the remainder of his life in this extraordinary experience, he has forgotten it.

  It seemed to me (considering the immense extent of the universe of the senses and the minute size of that area of it we think of as “everyday”) that this must certainly be correct. Yet if it were true of every man it ought also to be true of me—and try as I might I could remember no such extraordinary circumstance.

  When I had switched off the light I lay recalling, very pleasantly on the whole, my life. It has been a pleasant life, though I fear a dull, and perhaps a lonely, one. I live now not five miles from the hospital in which I was born, and have lived nowhere else. Here I grew up, learned a profession, practiced, and, much sooner than most men, retired. I have twice been married, but both marriages were brief, and both ended in friendly separations; the truth is that my wives (both of them) bored me—and I am very much afraid I bored them as well.

  As I lay in bed, then, thinking of times when my grandfather had taken me fishing and of skating parties with friends, and about our high school team (on which I was a substitute quarterback, but one so much inferior to the first-string occupant of that position that I almost never got into a game unless we were several touchdowns ahead, which was not often), it at last occurred to me that there has, in fact, been one thread of the strange—I might almost say the incredible, though not the supernatural—in my own history.

  It is simply this: living all my life, as I have, in a town of less than a hundred thousand population, I have been dimly aware of the existence of a certain woman without ever meeting her or gaining any sure idea of her appearance.

  But even this is not, perhaps, as extraordinary as it may sound. I have never made an effort to meet this woman, and I doubt that she has ever attempted to meet me, if, indeed, she is aware that I exist. On the other hand we are neither of us invalids, nor are we blind. This woman—her name is Suzanne (though I fear most of us here have always pronounced it “Susan”) Delage—lives, or at least so I have always vaguely supposed, on the eastern edge of our little city; I live on the western. I doubt that we, as children, attended the same elementary school, but I know that we were, for four years, at the same high school. I was able to ascertain this as a matter of certainty through my yearbooks, which my mother, with that more or less formalized sentimentality characteristic of her, saved for me in the attic of this tall, silent frame house (itself saved for me as well).

  Actually, of the four volumes which must originally have existed, only two remain—those for my sophomore and senior years. There are a number of pages missing from the class picture section of the earlier book, and I seem to recall that these were torn out and cut up to obtain the individual photographs many decades ago. My own face is among those missing, as well as Suzanne Delage’s; but in another section, one devoted to social activities, a girl’s club (it was called, I think, the Pie Club) is shown, and one of the names given in the caption is Suzanne’s. Unfortunately the girls in the picture are so loosely grouped—around a stove and work table—that it is not possible to be certain in every case which name should be attached to which young lady; besides, a number of them have their backs to the camera.

  The senior book should have told me more—at least so I thought when I, at last, came across it at the end of an hour or so of rummaging. It is whole and undamaged, and I, thanks largely to football, have no less than four pictures in various parts of it. Suzanne Delage has none. On one of the closing pages a woebegone roll of names reminds me of something I had forgotten for many years—that there was an epidemic of some kind (I think Spanish influenza) just at the time the pictures for the annual were to be taken. Suzanne is listed as one of those “unable to be photographed.”

  I should explain that ours was one of those overgrown schools found in the vicinity of small towns, a school repeatedly expanded because the growth of the town itself had been slow (though always faster, so it seemed in retrospect, than anyone had anticipated) and the taxpayers had not wanted to authorize a new one. It was large enough, in short, that only a few leading students—the star athletes, the class officers, the few really promiscuous girls and the dazzlingly beautiful ones whom we, in those naive times, called “queens”—were known to everyone.

  The rest of us, if we moved socially at all, went by classes and cliques. A student might know the others in his English and algebra rooms; the cliques—at least the ones I remember—were the football players and their girls, the children of the rich, the boys and girls whose families attended a certain fundamentalist church on the outskirts of town; and certain racial minorities, the chess and debating society types, and the toughs. It sounds, I suppose, as though there were a group for everyone, and at the time (since I was fairly well entrenched among the athletes) I believe I thought myself (if I thought about the matter at all) that there was. I now realize that all these little coteries embraced no more than a third of the school, but whether Suzanne Delage had entry to one or more of them I do not know.

  I should, however, have made her acquaintance long before I entered high school, since Mrs. Delage, Suzanne’s mother, was one of my own mother’s close friends. They had met, I think at about the time I was eight, through a shared passion (much more widespread in our area, I think, than in the country as a whole, and more ardently pursued in the past than it is now) for collecting antique fabrics; in other words, for embroidered tablecloths, for quilts, crocheting of all kinds, afghans, crewel work, hand-hooked rugs, and the like. If my mother or her friends could discover a sampler, or a bedspread or “comfortable” made in the earlier part of the nineteenth century (it was their enduring hope, I think never well satisfied, to find a piece from what they called “American Revolution times”—by which they meant the eighteenth, even such dates as 1790 or 1799), a piece well made and decorated—the more the better—in the unschooled, traditional ways of the old farm families, then their joy and their pride knew no bounds. If, in addition, the work was that of some notable woman—or to be more precise, of some woman relation of some notable man; the sister, say, of a lieutenant governor—and could be authenticated, the home of the finder became a sort of shrine to which visitors were brought, and to which solitary pilgrims from other towns came (ringing our bell—for we possessed, as a result of Mother’s efforts, a vast appliquéd quilt which had been the civil-wartime employment of the wife of a major in a fencible Zouave regiment—usually at about ten-thirty in the morning and offering, in introduction, a complicated recitation of friendships and cousincies linking themselves to our own family) bearing homage like cookies on a plate and eager to hear, for the better direction of their own future strategies, a circumstantial description of the inquiries and overheard clues, the offers made and rejected and made again, which had led to the acquisition of that precious object which would, as terminator of the interview, at last be brought forth in a glory of moth crystals, and spread sparkling clean (for of course these collected pieces were never used) over the living room sofa to be admired.

  Mrs. Delage, who became my mother’s friend, possessed pieces of her own as valuable as the major’s wife’s quilt (which was, as my mother never tired of pointing out, entirely handsewn) and a collection, too, of lesser treasures ranking, as my mother herself admitted, with our own hoard. Together they scoured the countryside for more, and made trips (trips so exhausting that I was, as a boy, always surprised to see how very willing, in a few weeks, my mother was to go again) to view the riches of neighboring counties—and even, once or twice, by rail, of neighboring states. It would therefore have been entirely logical for Mrs. Delage to have been our frequent guest, at least for tea; and for her to have brought, occasionally, her little daughter Suzanne, whom I would no doubt have soon come to both love and hate.