Session 19A Notes

1. Hank

Beer. A dark bar that smells like shit. A woman in sloppy clothes drools on the other side of the booth. After enough years, the sculpture underlying a life breaks free of the possibilities it might have had, and only the true form remains. Makes you wonder what kind of artist would consistently turn out such sloppy work. Same damn thing happens all the time; nothing else left to happen. Beer. And drooling women. And booths in dark bars that smell like shit. This is the shape of my life.

I should find June. She has this way of making the chisel marks look less like scars.

2. Escape to Alcatraz

I hate looking into the fairy-lands. I used to get migranes from time to time. It just reminds me of that moment before the migrane comes on, too squint and see critters running around where things should be. You know it’s coming, you know there’s nothing you can do, and out of the corner of your eye are things nobody’s meant to see. I keep waiting for the pain to take over.

I followed the spirit blood out of the corner of my eye to a place off the bay. Alcatraz, Jonathan said. My goodness, if that isn't a place out of the picture shows. I don’t know why it struck me this way (not the kind of thing I’d go remembering, if I’d seen it), but looking at that island made me think of something dead that had been crawled into by something else, eating it from inside out.

We took a boat out there, the waves knocking us around, and beat that Iaziz out there by a couple of minutes. I waved to them, and headed in.

Session 17A Notes

1. If you say so, dear.

So I talked to Conspiracy and found out what she knew about Iaziz. As usual, that woman had lots to talk about but not much to say.

Mainly she wanted to insinuate that Iaziz was just like Amaciel. He can shift perceptions, raise the dead, and act as a corrupting influence. Maybe they were twins separated at birth. Iaziz doesn’t like direct conflict, but he can fight. Didn’t we know this already? He doesn’t do anything but it’s for some goal. Good to know it’s not all a whimsy.

2. Life is like a cake baked by an idiot, full of castor oil and curry.

A limousine picked me up from the antique shop. I left Jonathan behind. The woman I’d followed to the penthouse sat in front with the glass raised, like I was some dark and powerful monster from the outer dimensions. Heh. They’d called the restaurant L’Idiot. Iaziz had a table in back. He was dressed in a suit, hold the eyeballs. I was dressed in my best floppy hat, with a fake sunflower, and a big pink dress. Never wear something too fitted when there’s good food involved, I say.

Session 16A Notes

(Found on a napkin in an antiques store)

So you agreed to meet the Excrucian. If there’s anything that’s the opposite of you, it’s them. So why?

Because Jonathan’s more useful than Hank

Because people die, and it’s a number

Because Death bleeds

Because you’re supposed to be “subtle”

Because when you look in the mirror, the mirror is all that looks back

Because the opposite of bad isn’t good

The opposite of a devil isn’t a saint

The opposite of nothing isn’t something

I don’t know

I just feel spiteful and belligerent so why not?

Session 15A Notes

Aftermath.

Two hundred thousand people died. You can say the number over and over until it doesn't mean anything. I helped heal a woman of her grief, stopped her pain from flooding a city, and tracked down the no-man with the cloak of eyes to San Francisco. When I heard we healed Amaciel with the power we took from the invaders, I horrified myself, because it didn't mean anything to me.

Two hundred thousand people still died.

Session 14A Notes

1. Networking.

They call it “networking” now, but we used to call it the prayer line. Come a funeral,
come a fire or flooded basement, you put out a call on the prayer line, and all the other
church ladies would arrive at your house, one after the other, usually with a casserole to
put in the deep freeze. Some things humans do better than angels, I guess.

I put out the call.

Mariska had her own troubles--well, she should have asked for help but she’s too proud
by half--others wouldn’t answer, and Eternity had to be bribed before he said he’d show
up, not that he made it on time. Honestly! At least the family all answered when it came
time; I’m proud of them.

2. Standing and falling.

We all met up in Miami, and Macy drove us down to the fighting. As she drove, some
kind of earthquake struck--Macy grabbed Jonathan and kind of flung him up in the air, the
others disappeared one way or another. I didn’t have anywhere to go, so I just stood.

Macy caught Jonathan and pitched him over to a warehouse rooftop where he could see.
I looked through his eyes, too (always gives me a headache; the horse’s patoot always
¹ Capitalizes his Thoughts and ² Declaimeth in Verse), and
saw an un-man on a horse. Made me dizzy to look at him, or else the building was
a-shakin’ still. I knew he was the one to deal with, even though there were other un-men
fighting, becuase Fungus laid on the ground in front of him and twitched. It’s time to
worry when an ageless mushroom collapses.

I needed some inspiration to be doing something, so when Jonathan decided that the Lord
his God would use him as a Vessel to Bring Forth the Waters of the Red Sea through the
Water Mains to Drown the Pharoah, I let him have his head. He Brought them Waters
Forth and knocked that un-man right off his horse. Well, it must have done some good;
the horse went down, anway, buried under flesh-eating mold and leaking innards from its
belly.

Next thing I know, there’s a big hole in the air leading somewhere else right behind the
un-man, with Death making melodramatic gestures that seem to be saying, “Push him
through it, you old fool.”

Hoping for the best and putting my faith in Amaciel, I let Jonathan Bring Forth the Flood
Waters again; happens Sian was standing right in front of the un-man, disarming him just
as I gave it a good push, and she flew through, too.

Long story short, everybody mostly went through Death’s gate to Lord Entropy’s realm
(not me, though, not me) and beat the stuffing out of the un-man. Macy cleaned up
everything else, and I helped save what people I could and come up with explanations for
all this. I made Jonathan help; he ended up just as caked with blood and dirt and tearstains
as me.

One time, he started feeling sorry for himself. “This is hell. This is my hell,” he
said.

I slapped him a good one. “This is somebody else’s hell,” I told him. “You’re not
man enough to rate going to hell.”

Then I made him lift half a wall off a couple of old men in washed-out undershirts
and pants, but it was too late.

Session Thirteen A Notes

1. The Bouffant Line

You know you're in the South when women old enough to be grandmothers stop wearing matching sweatpants and embroidered sweatshirts and start wearing their hair wider than their bodies and drinking on Sundays.

We stopped in Memphis to take pictures of Graceland and get a drink on Beale St. The singer at the nightclub was half as old as I am, which is saying something for a woman with dyed platinum blonde hair. I wonder if she does it to cover up the gray. Whenever the old black sax player had a solo, she'd dance two steps, kick up her right foot, then step back again. Vera did us the favor of catching beads to wear around our necks. Hank's disappeared right after the second drink.

Back in the car, Hank and Vera argued about all kinds of things without opening their mouths. Played with the radio. Pointed elbows at each other. Kept their eyes on the road, or didn't. Kids must have though I hadn't heard it before.

I looked through the bags for--items of coincedence, but I didn't find anything. Good. Not proof of anything one way or the other, but good.

We crossed into the chancel on a ferry-boat. I have got to get me one of those things; I could do it up right. Put a Memphis blues band on the deck.

2. Shush and give me a minute to think!

Griv met us on the other side with a horse and some kind of new-fangled two-seater carriage. I guess they must be all the rage with the tourists. It was both shiny and black, which fits well enough, I suppose. I should see if we can get a couple of fire-breathing pygmy rhinoceroses to pull a giant swan on rollers or something.

Vera excited herself to the point where I made her fall asleep. What I can take a from a toddler, I won’t tolerate a thirty-year old. Hank asked questions. That may have been worse.

For some reason the word “bucolic” kept running through my mind as the horses led us through the pouring rain. It doesn’t mean stomach trouble, but you’ll never be able to truly convince me it doesn’t.

Next thing you know, I ran into something in the middle of the street. The horse bucked the carriage over and dumped us out, fine as you please.

3. Even Death.

It was Death.

His body gaped open and he bled. The rain washed it onto the street.

I tried to push him back together, but it soaked through the bandages just as fast as if I’d not done a thing.

He’d done the same to the other guy, only that one’d got better.

As soon as he explained what was going on, I could feel it--the thing. It was like a hole in my memory that I could remember. Like pain, only worse.

I’m going to have to see it dead.

Session Twelve A Notes

1. Want, do be?

What do you want? Sometimes you know, sometimes you don't. Sometimes you know even if you don't--the times when you're pulled in a direction you didn't decide to go. Wise or foolish, at least it's what you want. I'm old enough that the question's not "what do you want" anymore, but "what in the Lord's name made you want that?" A few things, I still don't know.

I like helping people out, maybe not just to find out what they want, but that's part of the reason. Except Death, but that's another story. Now, I could just as soon be wrong, but I think I know what Macy wants. She's wants excitement, the times when the heart races and every nerve in your body has an exclamation point. The spice of life, mostly the cayenne pepper kind.

But Donner? Who knows?

2. It just encourages him.

Hank's in trouble again. I don't know much about the powers that be (honestly I don't), but I'd like to let them know here and now that it just encourages him. I told him when I bound him--before that, I told him before that--that it would be the end of all peace and quiet to know someone like me for too long. I hadn't heard his story yet, so I bothered to try to tell him that. If I'd known, I wouldn't have bothered. He's younger than I am, you just think, that's all.

I'd say it was the regular kind of trouble that he tends to get into, but it seems a little too deep and ugly--and what you don't want to see with deep and ugly trouble is coincidences, which we got. Unrelated, unlikely, un--what's the opposite of ironic?--out-of-place coincidences. Not like a day when nothing goes right, but a day when everything goes funny.

I picked up Hank and Vera (she'd been touched by Jealousy before, as I recall) and had them start hauling me back down to Storyville. Get them safe before I start digging into it, that's the important thing.

I should check the kids, too, while I'm at it.

Session 11 A Notes.

1. Straw hat collection.

Hee hee hee!

I was so ecstatic when I got back to the house that I opened up the jewelry box and pulled out that naughty brooch I'd had in there--a pretty, pink cameo locket with a Greek hetaera on it. I pulled out those pictures of Death, snipped one up then and there, and tucked it right inside. Then I found the floppiest straw hat in the house (and I have quite the collection of floppy straw hats) and pinned the brooch on the ribbon. The other pictures--he'll never find them!

I sent Lust a thank-you gift of a chocolate cake over that one, layers of liqueur-soaked cake with chocolate truffle filling, all wrapped up in an enormous chocolate band, with piles of white-chocolate leaves on top. --I had Michel make it for me. The idea of importing good cooks, etc., was brilliant, if I do say so myself.

Never let it be said that running after Lust will get you nowhere!

2. Merlinus.

Not much else to note; we got the prostitutes back. I had the doctors take care of them, and I've put a little health back into them myself. So many children! Clothes and homes and food and shoes and combs and toothbrushes and blankets and so on...LeFleur did help, I have to admit.

On the way home, we met an old man named Merlinus, who helped us get ourselves lost enough for Lost Things to find us. He looked at me like we'd met before.

Wonder who he was.

Session Ten A Notes

1. "Shrooms."

I don't remember nineteen sixty-nine as the Summer of Love; I remember it as the year Jim, my husband, died. I laughed and cried. The kids were listening to wild music, taking off their clothes and sleeping in fields (forgetting about the fertilizer), smoking marijuana, eating psychedelic mushrooms and whatnot.

I understood. I grew up in the jazz age--believe it or not, my granddaughter still has one skinny black dress with fringes on it, the smell now carefully laundered out, but cigarette burns still on it, here and there.

Look how I turned out, though. And look how those flower children turned out. Maybe that's all a mortal gets, just one chance to run free before you end up paying too much for it. Quick! Your heart will break if you don't settle down soon enough, and it'll break anyway if you do.

Poor Macy. Either she never had the chance that I did, or else she dragged it out too long. I decided to help her today; she wanted to find some prostitutes to help us repopulate the home place. I advertised in the papers; she had to travel through time to Victorian England.

Locus Sanguinas is never a happy place.

Eternity will take us. He gave us a handful of mushrooms. To my mind, I'd rather have Scotch if I'm going to fall off the wagon. Tastes better.

2. Close your eyes and think of England.

So I found out that time isn't what I thought it was, but I knew that already.

I spent some time on the way reliving my past as a girl, before Jim; a young man named Gabriel took me dancing and brought me home at disgraceful hours, giggling. He left me. I heard he died in the Second Great War.

During the first Great War, I knitted blankets, did chores, and worried about my brothers and father. My father died in France; my brothers died the first winter in training camp of influenza. My mother never cried for my father. She loved him, but I think by then she'd lost her mind, although we didn't find out about it until years later.

I remembered seeing my first Model T. I remembered the first electric lights. I remember--and so on.

Macy, when I looked at her, had her own body but the face of Sisera instead of her own. I never liked him.

We set out a bargain once we were in London: Come with us, and we'd save you from poverty and disease. You'd only have to cut yourself off from everything you'd ever known--I laid out the rumor that we were recruiting for the men and officers in India. Little ones welcome to come along, if they'd nowhere else or better to go.

Within a few hours, the St. James church had filled, and more poured in to fit around the corners. They filled the choir, they filled the rectory, they sat under the altar.

We prayed to Jesus, and to anyone else who would listen and have mercy.

Session Nine A Notes

1. To Russia, with knitting needles.

Bunch of gossips. That's what is means, "Chancel of the Secret Whisper." At least I never was the kind of little old lady that gleefully lisped private business past my filthy dentures across the backyard fence.

The entrance to Locus Nephys I used was an old woodcutter's hut. Dreary old thing, I spruced it up a bit. I kept expecting a fat old witch flying a mortar and pestle, or a house with chicken legs. Oh, well.

Nephys starts out quiet. You step onto the quicksand of loose evergreen needles and toddle along: the only sound is you, panting as you drag yourself up the path over those ridiculous hills. It just goes on and on. And when I say "path," I don't mean a hiking trail, lovingly maintained by the U.S. Forest Service. I mean the kind of path where you have to follow your heart, because it's too dim to see the fallen branches waiting to impale your (or at least catch on your skirt). Find me some kind of deciduous place where the leaves flutter in the wind instead of sieving the air for birds. You'd swear them things were carnivorous, because I didn't hear a bird the whole time I was there.

2. Three challenges.

Whatever idiot decided to come up with three challenges has read too much Brothers Grim. First the red rider came, chasing a red fox. I suppose he symbolized Sexual Congress, which would explain why he didn't stop to chat. Next the white rider came. He stopped. He must have been Truth. I asked him where to find his master. He started to say that he didn't have any, but he stopped himself. The black rider didn't bother to ride; he just waited for me by the stream to try to stop me. He must have been a Fruitcake. I left him fighting his own reflection and hiked it up to the castle.

3. Midwest meets Middle East.

A Jester met me at the door, which made me think they thought I was a Joke. He escorted me to the abode of the Power of Conspiracy. (You can call it an abode when the room is over sixty feet to a side with unnecessary pillars and more than seventy-six tasseled throw pillows.) She served me oatmeal cookies and lemonade, which makes me wonder who she's been talking to. She smiled and nodded at me, refused me her help and offered me anything I needed, and introduced me to her seven-year old paramour.

I'm not built for this. She checked her Pen Lo parts, and I left.

Biddy.

4. Hank.

Hank called just before a radio interview for a new book. He was worried about how he'd look! --Poor man, he deserved better than me at that moment. I sent him to Penny's with instructions to buy himself a new suit, one that fit this time. I bolstered up his ego and left him to jitter on his own.

Session Eight A Notes

1. Wasting time.

I'm reminded of something an old friend of mine used to say, way 'back when: "Today is all you have for the rest of your life." I didn't listen to her then--I sent off my husband to the Great War and waited for him to come back, even though I was pretty sure I wasn't going to be happy about it when he did.

Here I am again, running back and forth on errands passed down for no particular reason whatsoever, when I could be out in the world, doing some good. I haven't seen Hank for ages--I haven't helped a real, human being for a long time now. They never stop needing to be helped.

I know what I should be doing, though, so I suppose I'd better be doing it.

We summoned Dhambala, who turned out to be some Aaron's Serpent that some of the others had met before, the one that had helped us find Amaciel. Of course he had a little job for us to do. We returned to the chancel, and Pen Lo's fool head was whining about part of him being missing and how that could hurt Amaciel. Of course we have to find out where it went. Some d--- fool from the Caamora wanted to sell me something, like his undying loyalty. Oh, please. I haven't been that naive since the twenties.

No time to save children from burning apartment buildings, let alone for a glass of wine under the stars with an old woman who'll tell me the soap operas her children are going through for an hour or two.

I'm a cantankerous old thing, never satisfied.

2. Freak Show

The only thing I've done lately to any pleasure or profit lately has been setting up the freak show in town. It feels like a little spot of home out back, with the trailers and the dogs running around. Dapper Dan the barker man talks big, but underneath it all, he's too used to worrying about money to truly relax and enjoy putting the show together.

I sit and listen to him talk about his dreams. He wants to run a big corporation and dress in a suit every day, with ladies to fetch and carry for him and take messages so he can snub the people he doesn't like. I had to laugh. "If you just want to ignore people, well, honey, you can do that anywhere. Anybody at all can feel justified. You don't need to waste your time to find that kind of satisfaction." Then I told him about my husband and how he treated me for free, but he just rolled his eyes at me.

"It's not just the money, June," he said. "It's the piles and piles and piles and piles of money. And the suits. I could buy me so many Eye-talian suits that I couldn't wear them all if I wore a different one every day of the week. And I could buy me some of that fancy coffee, the kind that you have to brew through the machine with all them brass tubes."

Someday I believe I'll explain to him that I can give him something like that, if that's what he really wants. Right now, though, I watch his face while he's directing people to paint the wooden signboards--"World's Strongest Man!" "Elephant Lady!" "Lovely Lila Bites the Heads off Chickens!!!"--and I see that he's happy right where he is.

He should have it all painted up and ready to begin in a couple of days. I just need to find a whatchamacallit, the steam organ with the mechanical cymbals.

Cally-something.

Session Seven A Notes

1. The henhouse all a-flutter.

I haven't felt this way since I was a living woman. Where are my glasses? Are you my grandson, my great-grandson, or the janitor? What year is it? Why am I here?

There's something I can't remember. I know I can't remember something, because I would have remembered this LeFleur woman if I'd ever met her before. I would have remembered it so deeply in my head that you could screw off the top of it and see her name carved right in. She acts like I'm supposed to know her, but I don't. I don't like that woman. I would have remembered her. I know it.

She orders me--all of us--around like we were the hired hands on a farm. What is she? Who is she? Some old voodou priestess, heathen thing, and...arrogant! Acts like all I am is some old white woman.

But she doesn't bother me, really. These memories, that's what bothers me. It seems I should even know a ritual to restore memories, but I don't. I'll have to check the library. --Why didn't I think of that yesterday?

2. Ritual

The first time I went to collect the essence from him, Pen Lo's head talked to me.

Mind you, I don't like cemeteries in the first place. Not at night, anyway. During the daylight it's all right, you can bring the flowers, say the prayers, and do the mourning properly. At night it feels like the dead are gone, not wandering like ghosts or any fool thing like that, but gone. Meaningless, pointless, soulless, gone.

"So. You come to give that traitor my blood," it said.

You can imagine how I jumped! And there was a tiny squeak that may have been a mouse but was probably myself as well. At least I didn't spill anything.

Of course I wouldn't say a word, not to reply to an accusation like that from a creature of that moral degredation, so I just collected the stuff in a spangly bottle that LeFleur woman insisted on using (everything else would "let the soul out," she insisted) and left.

After that woman had escorted me to see Amaciel, I mixed up the blood with the roots and fish heads that she gave me (and won't tell me what are, although I'd guess it's just what she mixes up to make those zombies of hers) and put it in the silver dish for Amaciel to drink. If that's the word, drink.

The next time I went, the head just muttered at me. I made sure not to listen. As of late, all it does is roll its eyes.

3. The Summons

That d--- woman called us together today. Talk, talk, talk and boss. That's all she does. I don't know what it is about her that gets under my skin, but under my skin she is. She's just like a chigger. Poison ivy. Skeeters.

We built her that court of judgment she claimed we had to have. What we need a fancy place for, I don't know. I think she just wants someplace to show off. Well, the making of the thing goes on well enough. Everyone else magicked their section up, except Death who is locked up in that bug-wrapper. And that's fine with me.

I found myself a man who'd wandered into Storyville from the real world some time ago, and had been hanging around, doing odd jobs here and there. His name is Dapper Dan, and he used to be a circus barker. I found him in a hospital pushing a broom and hired him right there to come work for me. He's putting together the finest carnival you'll ever see, with games and sweets and prizes. There's a house of mirrors (into which I may put a prank or two, soon as I think of some especially good ones), a test of strength, a dunking booth, one medium that tells your future (no real talent except for saying what you want to hear), another one that tells you your past (and guess whether you want to hear that), pickpockets, pony-rides, a bottle-toss, and a freakshow. I had to think twice about putting that last in, but I did. I may just keep adding little things until it takes up the whole town.

Tomorrow we get to go out into the real, live swamps and summon this Bosou Koblamin, some kind of voodou spirit that's supposed to help protect Storyville. Well, bet you a dollar that doesn't go off as planned. That woman. Always insisting on something.

I'm starting to feel like I've been in town too long. May be time to get out and do some real work soon.

Session Six Notes

1. When all of a sudden, who should appear?

I never would have cared about libraries if it hadn't been for Amaciel. The library was just a place to leave kids so they'd stay out of your hair for a couple hours or so. The librarians picked out the books for them when they were younger, and I'd read to them, but that was about it. I must have read Huck Finn our loud from cover to cover six times. I didn't enjoy reading, myself. I had too much to do. Any spare time I had went into quilting, or embroidering--flowers, cottages, dogs with their tongues lolling about, little girls in pinafores, crucifixes. Gifts.

It's a pleasure to read. Books are just as strange and unusual as ghost towns out in the middle of the desert. It's a pleasure to search for books in that near-infinity of space, too, when all the titles leap out at you. It's even a pleasure to clamber up and down that ladder, my skirts a-flyin', now that my knees don't hurt anymore.

I found a ritual for mandrake root, little defenders that would screech their heads off and follow around any intruders like kids after the beaters when you make cookies. I also found the Word of Amaranth, an old ritual by someone I've never heard of, the Lord of Grain. I wonder if Fungus's met him. It's a good one, with unleavened semolina flat bread baked with amaranth and sprinkled with rosemary. You lay down what pieces of the spirit and body you can get ahold of, speak the ritual, break the bread, leaving a spare piece for the guest of honor, and eat it together as you speak his name.

I had the bread just pulled out of the oven when Macy came to fetch me to help negotiate with one of the Inquisitor chancels (trying to get them to at least hold back a bit when the First Castle attacked us), when all of a sudden someone said the magic words, "This had better be here when I get back..."

2. E T E R N I T Y :: T I N Y T R E E

I don't remember what it was I ate. An apple? A pear? Some kind of fruit without a pit; I ate it, seeds and peel and all. I was with the others on the Tree before I realized. What it was I might have eaten, I shudder to think.

Sian flew with me (trying to make it as dignified, I suppose, as flight with an old lady in a calico dress with a handbag large enough to hold a small baby could be) to follow the newborn body of Amaciel. He was mad, and oh, it hurt to see him out of his mind, or his mind out of him. I tried to show him visions of the chancel, of places there he loved, of the funny things people would do when they thought nobody watched them, but mostly of the trees, of the greenness of it. He slowed and spoke with me, but he wasn't himself, more like a naughty child that needs to be convinced to come home than a lord over the Earth itself. He said he'd go back, though. He'd see.

We stopped at the Graveyard; I wrapped the roots of the Bay tree up in a towel and brought it back with us to the heart of Storyville. I haven't been there too often; this time it looked like a park in the heart of a city, with old trees dripping with moss, easy walkways for the old folks to wander, a little pond with ducks, and a painted, raised gazebo big enough to hold a quintet to play Sousa marches on Independence Day.

3. Body and blood.

The ritual was easy. We chanted the words, broke the bread, spoke the name, and ate. The tree, the corn, the fungus, and I forget what else (or maybe that was it) faded, not like paint in the sun, but like--images in an old photograph. You forgot about them. Amaciel grew.

And then everything went wrong.

The First Castle attacked, the sword slicing left and right, and the rows and rows of terracotta soldiers marching into the city. But we finished it, the ritual, that is. Amaciel drank the pieces of his spirit, and the corn and fungus and tree collapsed into themselves and were dust. He lifted his head and said, "I remember...you have to..."

And then everything went wrong, only more so, and he coughed up blood like silver or mercury and collapsed.

4. Waiting, hoping, breaking.

The others left to defend the chancel. I sat with Amaciel. He didn't stop bleeding. I didn't know how to stop it or even how to slow it. I've never done that before. Sitting. Charles was taken quickly, with a heart attack. He was alive and I hated him, and then he was dead and there was nothing. The children, none of them went slowly when they died.

I've known slow death, but it was at the nursing home. Everything hurt, and it seemed like everything that I did, everything that everyone else did for that matter, was a preparation for death. The aides would give you a bath, and it was washing the corpse. They'd do your hair, and it was just saving time for the mortician. I didn't mind; I was ready.

I knew it was wrong, but I just didn't care what happened to the chancel. I just didn't care. I sat, and I rotted out my heart. Not to mention my stomach.

Friendship was destroyed, Jealousy (that poor girl) was destroyed, the rest of them were killed. And I just didn't care.

Amaciel touched us all and told us in our hearts, "My children, I remember the moments that led up to this. I cannot say that every choice made, every plan laid was perfect or just. But my path in this has been true...I am sorry for causing you pain."

And that's all. He isn't moving. He isn't breathing. I know he's there, and at least he's stopped bleeding.

But he's starting to mold.

Session Five Notes

July 19th

1. Special K: or, A Type of Cornflake

Sometimes you look for something just to have looked or at least said you looked. I can't count the number of times I looked in the cellar off the basement for monsters my children just knew were there. I could, but it wouldn't be as many times as I remember, so I won't.

I looked through the cornfield I'd described to Amaciel before the explosion, expecting to find nothing.

I found something, but I'm not sure what it was. The corn felt funny. I can't describe it any better than that. The corn spirits themselves were acting silly. Silly even for corn spirits, that is. "Look at the sky!" "Look at the birds!" "Look at the clouds!" Some of them lay on the ground in a pattern I almost recognized. I asked them just what they thought they were doing, and they giggled at me. Well. I walked around and around the pattern until I had it: it was the letter K. In angelic script.

I didn't come up with any brilliant ideas, more's the pity, so I went to the next place I'd talked to him about, Wisconsin, to see if there were any more messages there.

2. The comforts of memory

The House on the Rock was hot. The spirits of the place panted with heat.

"Australia gets hotter than this," said a painted boomerang.

"I was made by Spanish missionaries in Florida. This is nothing compared to the summer of 1887," said a row of tiles.

A terra-cotta armless Venus fountain nearby muttered that its neighbor must be confusing Florida with Taiwan again, mutter mutter damned replica.

"I miss Alaska. It's cold in Alaska. Let me tell you about Alaska--" a carved ivory dagger said.

"Shut up!" hissed the others.

The dragons on the front drive snapped at cars. Some of the drivers noticed, but since it looked as if the things were jumping out at you anyway, nobody commented.

How hot was it? The mosquitoes slept. They just slept.

I stopped to talk to the woman at the front desk; she hadn't seen anything unusual. She was the kind of person who loved to hear stories, so I stopped to tell her a few. Strange woman. She'd listen to you all the way through, nod once to herself, and tell you what time it was in another time zone.

I wandered through the Streets of Yesteryear and played tokens in the mechanical bands. Some of them were getting a little rusty, strings broken and cymbals awry, so I stopped to fix them up a bit. Not too much, though. Part of the charm is all the dust.

At the merry-go-round, I saw something rustle and ripple among the manikin angels on the ceiling. “Hello up there,” I called.

Penelope, the Power of Memory, stepped down out of them. She introduced herself and said she found the place comforting. Well, so did I. I gave her my name and told her I was looking for something.

“Ah,” she said, and left. I suppose I'd of preferred she either turn me in or help, but I suppose I'm an idiot sometimes.

3. It was aliens! I seen ‘em!

I traveled the entirety of the House, but I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, otherwise. I bought a couple of bumper stickers on the way out and vowed to find a way to affix them to Death’s sword without him noticing me.

On the way out I glimpsed a news program at the ticket-taker’s desk (she had a small television she watched between customers, a thermos of scalding-hot coffee, a heavy quilt, a bag of pretzels, six different kinds of mustard and cheese spread, and a Mickey Mouse wristwatch that she had under a glass bell) about a plague of crop circles, so I stopped to watch it. Fourteen different locations (including the one I'd been to). They flashed the pictures: all letters of angelic script. Not the sort of thing you teach to farm boys out cow tippin'.

KOLCRHOONHHHAAA

I stopped at a Norwegian coffee shop, drank coffee and ate lefse, and copied out combinations of letter on a stack of paper napkins. I used to be pretty good at puzzles, but I couldn’t make sense out of this one for anything. Finally I gave it a good squint and stuck my tongue out, which always makes things work better.

LOOK CORN HAHAHA

Good lord. That was Amaciel, all right.

4. Honor

I went back home to report to the big guns and wait for the Graf to come back with some advice. The place was in an uproar. The cops ran one way, and everyone else ran the other.

Someone shouted a shout that covered the entire town: “Ifay!” I heard shots. I’d been running toward Guilt’s office, expecting something to have happened there, but I changed direction toward the gunshots.

The Bronze Man stood in the middle of the street with Donner and Macy glaring at him. The flower I held in my hand bloomed with a sick, unnatural blossom that stank like an old woman that hadn't bathed in six weeks. And it wasn't me, either.

I was so mad I tried to freeze him like a statue where he stood, which of course didn’t work. I don’t get angry very often; when I do I sometimes lose my head.

Macy and Donner turned over the Power of Friendship, who’d also triggered the bloom of Crime I found out later. They turned her over--and if I didn’t know better, I’d say that there was something between that woman and the statue. I hollered at him about the sword and showed him the flower; he promised he'd look into it. Well, that’ll be the day. He might keep the word of his promise, but I can't see him sticking to the spirit of it. No heart. He won't find anything.

The Graf and the others got word back that Amaciel's body wasn't in the graveyard. He'd shed his skin and left it behind. Well, I knew where his spirit was, but you have to have somewhere to put these things. The others had another lead to follow, further out on the tree.

Sure. All we had to do was defend the home place from any and all, no matter what kind of idiots they were. Wouldn't have traded them for the world.

Session Four Journal

Session Four Notes -- June

1. Paradise Lost

After we performed the ritual to recover memories lost, we stood as immobile as statues. Some of us seemed puzzled--Macy clenched her fists and ground her teeth--and I wept. I lack the rest of the family's inner strength. I'm an old woman who's found something I left behind without knowing it. Just like the nursing home. Put a TV guide down on the dresser and find it days later in the closet. Talk to a visitor for hours about your kids' grandkids and remember a month later--if you remember at all--that he was your nephew and that your brother had just died but you couldn't make it to the funeral because the pains were too bad.

I remember my last conversation with Amaciel now. He knew. He warned me to take care of the others, to hold them together and try to understand--something. He never got to tell me what it was he wanted to understand, because the sky shattered into blue glass and he told me to run. I ran; I've always been a coward.

The conversation began differently, though. He asked me about some of the places I've been and the people I've talked to. I'd just been to the House on the Rock for the first time, so I told him about it. And the cornfields I went through on the way there. I even gave him some cheese curds I'd bought elsewhere in Wisconsin. He was fascinated and amazed that humans actually took the time to form small balls of spoiled milk into such random shapes, and then pack them together so perfectly. "An art," he called it.

I think he was pulling my leg.

2. Finger pointing and hair pulling.

Rituals and more rituals. Mariska, Sian, and I held a ritual to determine guilt and received back only the image of a sword. Death knew the sword--one of the inquisitors' swords, used to kill imperators and draw their energy off to another. I cast another ritual to help us know when we'd reached the particular sword we were looking for, bound it up in a sprig of Tamarisk, or salt-cedar shrub, for the crime that had been committed with the thing.

In putting together the memories that we had all recovered, I'd decided that Amaciel had been innocent. I have no proof, no logic but a few deductive clues (and even the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes would say that a theorem must be tested), but I finally have the assurance of faith. Amaciel is alive--or existent--and he's trying to flush the criminal into the open.

But who?

My heart, inept but influential at this kind of thing, says that it goes back, directly or inadvertently, to Lord Entropy. He's a corruptor; the inquisitors follow him. The sword is an inquisitor's sword, and it's an inquisitor's sword that's done the work.

3. The tree.

Death, Sian, and Fungus departed for the world-tree Yggdrasil to search the graveyard of the gods for Amaciel's body. I couldn't bear to go.

When I was much younger (barely newborn to this new life), Amaciel took me out of the Earth and brought me along the paths of the world-tree. I wasn't ready. The world-tree is the opposite of everything I hold dear: I love small, petty, insignificant, changeable things. Amaciel claims that it's the tree itself that should be impressive rather than the size of it.

I like trees. I don't like trees more important than the Earth itself.

I stayed behind to search some of the places I'd mentioned to Amaciel during our last visit. Maybe he'd find a way to hide in one of them, scattering his spirit into the growing ears of corn, waiting to be planted next spring. Maybe he was hiding behind one of the pictures of the magicians in the cafe at the House, or inside the cymbals of the Mikado mechanical band.

Session Three

Session 3 -- June.

1. Bitter Taste.

My further thoughts on justice: there's justice, and there's the laws. Justice happens when you get what's coming to you, one way or another. The laws are what come to get you when there's no justice. My father taught me that a long time ago.

My mother taught me to turn the other cheek. Sometime I'll have to try that, but not today.

D--- laws.

I let the woman go. When Amaciel gave me a part of his spirit, it lay over things I never missed: bitterness, hatred, resentment--and a little bit of freedom. The part of this woman's spirit that had been laid over must have been the joyful part. Or the part with the sense of humor.

I faded into the aisles of the filling station and let them twist and wind with trinkets and gewgaws the way they'd always wanted to, if only the owner would let them. The laws got lost in a thousand packages of pork rinds. I called Hank to bring me home, and I was gone.

He knows I can't stand the bitterness of cheap whiskey. Whiskey only makes you cry. Turns out that Sisera was dead. Well, I had to drink it anyway, didn't I?

He was a good friend when I needed one, back when I was learning how to let go of the old life. Don't get me wrong; I could have strangled him at times. I hadn't seen him for years, though.

His replacement, a hooker named Macy, shoved a hatful of money at me, because she thought I looked trustworthy. Oh, she makes me laugh. She's just the kind of little bird that Hank used to write stories about, when he was still writing.

2. Leap of Death

Next thing I knew, as I was contemplating killing a couple of pigeons and wondering if I had time to roast them up right when I'm done using them to summon Death, who should have made a grandiose leap onto the roof but Death himself. It was all guns and shouting before I realized who it was. I let the pigeons go.

Death. Like most of the family, he'd lost his memories. Not that he'd been one to talk about them--I heard once that he used to be a sword. I don't know if he's ever been a proper man, properly speaking. Well, he wasn't any more pleasant than he was when he knew who he was, so that's all right.

The family sat down and talked business for a while. We traded gossip and happenings back and forth, and under my breath (I knew he could hear me), I told Death that if I ever found out that he'd been doing something dishonorable regarding the situation, I'd betray him. "Oh, really?" he said, reserved as anything.

Well, it's like this. I'm a rabbit, and he's a snake that's got me fascinated. The funny thing is that I like him. No character, no enjoyment of life, no sense of humor. And I'll probably never know his name, if he has one.

3. New Orleans, only more so.

We drove to New Orleans with the intention of to kill off all the foreign chancel-folks that work for the Inquisitors, but there was nobody home. I didn't mind.

If I had to describe the chancel, the Home, I'd say it was like New Orleans, only more so. Ladies of questionable character, murders, all the private dramas that go on behind the wrought-iron fences and cause everyone to wear spectacles with smoked lenses to cover the bruises as they sip mint juleps in silver cups. More gargoyles, the kind that crawl from cornice to cornice when they think you're not looking. More Mardi Gras. More shiny beads, made from precious stones the color of blood instead of bright plastic. More fat cooks of all colors and sexes. More litter in the streets, if that's possible to imagine. More dark things that come when they're called, and more things, light and dark, that walk in clothes of human flesh. The difference that makes the difference most tangible to me is the bronze statue: in New Orleans, it's Louis Armstrong. At Home, it's Billy Holiday. Other than the statue (and the music), everything has an air of the turn of the century. When I'm Home, I can't bear to leave. When I'm out, I don't think of it twice in a month. Sometimes New Orleans itself is enough. If I'd been to either place as a mortal, I think I would have been in a snit for years that such places could be allowed to exist, let alone celebrated.

Postscript.

I don't know how to write this without breaking my heart with hope: the thing in the heart of the Home that should be ruined with Amaciel's death isn't ruined at all.

Session Two Journal

1. Three bands.

Vera still wore three gold rings on her hands: a wedding band, an engagement ring, and a "promise" ring. Which is a lot of rings to hold together a marriage that isn't working.

As she drove, I worked. Some call it meddling, but I call it--well, I call it meddling, too. Some other power had touched her heart, twiddled with it, and left it unable to love without trying to possess. I untwiddled most of it: it was like loosening an iron band around her heart, only less metallic. There was some other damage (her husband had cheated on her with an old girlfriend, I think) but I left it on its own.

Hearts are funny. The things you use to hold them together sometimes defeat the purpose of having a heart in the first place.

2. Tourists.

Breaking things is harder for me than fixing them. I wasn't feeling quite myself as we stopped at a convenience store for gas on east side of the Indiana state line. Thinking back, I suppose it isn't necessary to stop every couple of hundred miles for gas when you can make a tank of gas last a couple of thousand miles. Then again, I could walk into the bathroom in Indiana and have Hank bring me directly to Chicago.

The bathrooms were clean. They sold silver spoons with state symbols on them. Imagine selling spoons for Pennsylvania in Indiana. Imagine buying them. Tourists.

I like tourists. Oh, sometimes you'll see escapists, the ones who are traveling from instead of just traveling, and it's a shame when parents try to educate their children by forcing them to do something against their nature. But what good is the world without the world's largest rubber-band ball?

3. Guard Dogs for Clouds

I had narrowed my choices to a package of orange slices and a tin of old-fashioned drugstore peppermints (and leaning slightly toward the peppermints) when I noticed that I hadn't been noticing.

A woman on the other side of the candy rack stared at me. Everyone in the store was staring--not at me, but at something in particular. The man at the counter growled at a young lady who'd been trying to buy cigarettes a moment before. A mother snatched a bottle of lemonade away from her child.

"Mine!" she said.

The woman accused me of ruining things, and included Vera by name.

Aha.

The Someone.

4. Justice.

When you're young, justice is more about possession than it is about healing.

The Someone accused Amaciel of terrible things. I don't know how much of what she said was true. I love Amaciel, but the ways and plans of his kind are beyond what I can bear to know sometimes. He may have done the things she told me. I only know the Someone before me was in pain, and like to hurt the mortals.

I can't help thinking of them as my mortals, sometimes. At least Vera had gone back out to the car before the woman had appeared.

Well. Time to meddle.

I'd almost convinced the woman to stop shouting accusations and get down to the details when other Someones appeared. Inquisitors?

Just here for the orange slices, I guess.

June, Dame Reality, Session 1

1. Running away from home and everything I know.

Amaciel is gone; his soul has been folded and folded until it's nothing more than a memory. I should be dead. Death would be a relief, but I'd always thought it would be a gift granted as a reward for service, my soul returned to the paradise of Amaciel's embrace. Almost like I imagined it as a child--a different savior, but the same salvation.

Instead, I've run away from home and almost everything my heart knows is true, with no hope of ever going back. I have a purpose in living, although I do not know it yet.

2. Minnesota.

When I left the chancel, I arrived in the Minnesota cornfield I like so much. Not the wisest way to set out to accomplish a mysterious purpose, but I needed to see something of comfort. The corn-spirits were healthy, still childlike, and chattering incessantly. Gossiping about the neighbors.

The greatest joke one corn-spirit can tell to another--and this joke inevitably crops up with each new year's planting--is this:

"Look! Corn!"

They collapse in giggles for miles around, sunny blond children with button noses and blue eyes.

3. Needing each other.

Luckily the highway runs near the field. It's a good one, respectful and considerate of the land for much of its distance. You could almost say it's a philosophical highway, contemplating the parallels of earth and sky, uninterrupted but for power lines, but it has its willfully treacherous potholes here and there. It likes a good laugh now and then.

I called for someone helpful and found them. Her name is Vera; she's a travelling cracker distributor. Her husband had just left her. They didn't have any kids, which is sad but just as well.

The best way to cheer yourself up it to help someone else in trouble. She'll drive me to Chicago, and I'll see what I can do, too.

4. Hank.

Like the rest of the things that hold me to this life, I can feel Hank always. It isn't until I narrow my attention to him particularly (or when he prays for me at the track--heaven help that man) that I can hear his thoughts or see through his eyes.

The chances that I'll see something I don't really wish to see are high, Hank being who he is. It isn't the women or the drink that bother me so much as the despair. I wonder sometimes whether I didn't let him know more than he wanted to know, or if I didn't give him too much of my soul.

Well, he was a moody son-of-a-b, even before I changed him. But underneath it all, he's a decent man, and that's what I love about him. --Well, to tell the truth, if he were simply a decent man, I wouldn't love him nearly so much.

Ah. Here I am, romanticizing a man who cheats at pool and sucker-punches kids in bars, who stares at women's breasts when he's talking to them and whose means of making a living is the dogtrack. Hank would cackle to hear me go on like a big fool, and I'd never hear the end of it, would I?

5. Truckstops, diners, and vinyl tablecloths.

Vera and I stopped for lunch (the blue sky stared down at us as if we were the entirety of existence, and the horizon of road and cornstalks were the end of eternity) at Big Daddy's Cafe. It's decorated with photographs of WWII pilots, cartoon pinups of women with Valkyric breasts, and a few items of Nazi paraphrenalia. I've never understood the fascination with those. When you hate something, you give it more permission to exist than it would have if you ignored it. Eh, mortals. The owner's name is Big Daddy, and that's what he is. His wife--her voice like a radio recording of herself that hasn't been tuned in properly--takes the orders with a nice and exact loathing of everything about you. That is, she hates your hairstyle, she hates his cologne, she hates her sly
and sleazy shoes; each individual existence permitted by creation is a personal and individual insult. I laughed at her and she hated me all the more.

Big Daddy serves barbecue. I've never had its better. Or spicier! Great googly moogly! He claims to have sent strong men to the hospital with the full-strength recipe, and I believe him. I asked him for the recipe--I'd have liked to have tried it out on Hank--but he wouldn't give it to me. I decided not to press for it after he sent me half a key lime pie and a box full of barbecue sandwhiches (without bread).

Vera paid for the meal, which left me doubly in her debt. Talking to her on the road, I'm learning it isn't her absences but her jealousy that caused the problem. I'll have to consider what I'll do; lessening jealousy is the kind of complicated affair that really takes it out of me. I should be saving my strength for the tasks set before me.

6. Summoning.

Hank's working on the rites of summoning for my family. I asked that he save Death for last; I don't trust the fellow not to gut everyone in sight if I surprise him. I persuaded him to buy some decent whiskey to serve my family, as I won't be present to greet them.

Although Hank worked the summoning for Lust with enthusiasm, he didn't appear.

I supposed I could have asked him to summon me first, but I need time to think. God knows I'm not the smartest woman in the world; I could use the time.

Why am I living, when my Amaciel is dead?