***

Ashley Famous is coming to town and we’re all excited and a little apprehensive. This is the last unspoiled village on the Hudson, one of those quiet places where nobody important ever comes, and the last thing we want is gawking disciples trampling our flower beds, to say nothing of gift shops and roadside shrines popping up all along Route 9. Still we get the shivers, thinking, Ashley Famous. Here.

Bill Anthony says although she’s world renowned it’s in a good way, no YouTube antics to embarrass us, no scandal, no paparazzi implied, she can only bring honor to Schuylerton. “Think people like us, but with the sheen of greatness”– Bill actually said that!– “when all she wants is to blend in and disappear.” Well, she’s picked the right place. We all mind our own business here.

She writes those sexy little books about God, so crowds collect like flies on a road kill because, who wouldn’t want to touch the hand that’s been in touch with God? People do it, but not people you know. She can walk down our streets undisturbed, although when Gloria saw her out in front of Tazewell’s Realty that first day, she could swear the woman had look at me written all over her.

Of course Gloria is not our most reliable witness. Even though she’s a published writer, she is not all that popular, while Ashley Famous has all those fans driving her into seclusion. They follow her everywhere with misty eyes and wide, wet smiles. Bill says everybody has a cross and this is hers.

Our Reverend Anthony wrote a book about her, which is how they got friends. Bill fought his way to the platform when she got that medal, waving the book with her picture on the front. “Oh,” she shouted, “how lovely,” but by that time fans were stampeding like a herd of leeches and Bill had to rescue her. She thanked him with the saddest smile and said, “Sometimes you just get tired.”

The thing is, if you’ve touched the hand and God just happens to drop in on you, the last thing He wants is to fight off gangs of rapt admirers, Bill says, so she’s going into seclusion– here!

Bill is dean over at the college so he stepped up and invited her, to do what, we aren’t certain, but there you are.

She’s bought the Eversons’ boathouse which is odd, since we will do anything to keep our houses in the family; we owe it to our children to say nothing of the generations that came before, but you’d have to be one of us to understand. We’re not pointing any fingers, but this is the first piece of riverfront property to pass out of family hands in two centuries and Grant didn’t consult Bunk Schuyler at Historical Preservation before he sold.

Never mind. Schuylerton could use a little pizzaz, and it is well known that celebrities like Ashley Famous have creative, fascinating friends who would probably love a weekend in the country, especially with summer coming on. She’ll want to invite gangs of poets and artists, who are bound to be more exciting than certain people around here, which will definitely perk up our social lives. We can’t wait to be invited– that is, if she takes to us.

The question is, where to start with her? We won’t intrude and we never, ever overstep– no screen captures in the IGA parking lot, we promise, no cellphone shots at Luther’s Drug Store even though we’re dying for our friends to know. Uninvited drop-ins and cold calls are out; when a person’s keeping the line open for God, who are we to interrupt? We don’t go where we’re not invited and our kind doesn’t gawk, it’s just not done.

When we do meet her we’ll be discreet, we will! Guess what. We have a secret. Guess what. It’s you.

Oh, but she said something odd to Jack Tazewell when he was showing the boathouse. “I think the most interesting things in the world are sex and religion, don’t you?”

So, should we lock up our husbands or what?

We don’t mean to fret, but if we happen to run into her, is it all right to say hello?

It’s hard to know. But we are looking forward to meeting her, however it comes about, Ms. Famous and whichever husband she has this time around. We hear that there have been several, but never mind. We’re very forgiving here. We’d let you into our hearts quicker than we’d let you into our homes.

We just haven’t figured out how to let her know she has friends here in Schuylerton.

Beth and Gloria and Jeannie Chandler and I have been going home by the river road after lunch at the club, checking for signs of life. So far all we’ve seen is Grant Everson glowering over his rose bushes as we come through his gate; when he pops up with the hedge clippers we wave our fingers and laugh: la-la, Grant, you’re the one who sold the boathouse, now look. Evanoaks is not your private property now.

Rich as she is, you’d think Ashley Famous would have the boathouse crawling with painters and decorators, God knows those books make millions, but the new mailbox and fresh geraniums in the cut-out truck tire planter are pretty much it. Well, that will all change once we’re friends; we can tell her where to shop for all the best things. If only we’d come upon her planting something in the front yard; if only she’d hear our car in the turnaround and stick her head out the front door to see who’s coming, then we could all smile and wave, hel-looo. Of course she’d wave back and if we caught her smiling we’d pile out of the car and make friends, but we’ve cruised the boathouse four times this week and we haven’t seen a trace.

With anybody else, we’d start with the chess pie or the hot cross buns, but you don’t take food to a star, not even the apple basket from Creech’s Orchards with Elva Creech’s jams and homemade maple sugar leaves; usually casseroles and deep dish pies are great conversation pieces, but even the mocha cheesecake from Tempest’s Teapot is just wrong.

With a best-selling author who can’t stop winning prizes, where do you start? It’s not like Gloria would know.

We hear she’s very reclusive. Maybe she’s like us, stand-offish, but only with people she doesn’t want to know.

We hear she’s a lot of fun at parties, if you can only get her to come.

We hear that sometimes she can get a little wild.

Then why is she so damn difficult, when all we’re trying to do is welcome her to Schuylerton?

Bill warned us that she doesn’t warm up to just anybody, but Bill is infuriatingly smug just because he happened to write a book. We’re not just anybody, which he knows, and if he won’t tell Ashley Famous who we are in this town, then how do we let her know?

Should we sidle up to her in the supermarket and start the discussion about cheeses or tell her which produce to avoid? A few words and she’ll understand who we are. So, can we get friends by showing her the farmers’ market or should we offer her our cleaning lady or should we just come right out in the open and give a party for her?

What if she hates parties and doesn’t want to come?

What if she loves parties and doesn’t want to come?

What if she wants to come, just not to our house?

Would she come if we gave it at the club? Does she really hate parties, and does she know what an honor that would be? Outsiders can live here for generations without seeing the inside of the Schuylerton River Club. Bill says the last thing she wants is to feel crowded and we don’t want to make her self-conscious so it should sound casual, “If you happen to be around,” even though we’re putting on the dog. When she gets to the club and sees how much fun we’re all having she’ll know how lucky she is: we know you’re big and important but in our own way we’re important too. Of course she’ll invite us back, if we can only get her to come.

We could probably start by reading her books, but who has the time? Should we fake it and send her admiring notes? Naturally we’ll have them laid out on our end tables when she comes over and after she notices, of course we’ll ask her to sign– unless that’s gauche. We bought them all, what more does she expect?

Unlike my friends, who dropped theirs in the tub or left them out on the clubhouse porch in the rain, at least I tried. My Richard thought it was foolish, sitting up in bed improving my mind when he thought we should be doing something else, and was it my fault I got bored and fell asleep between the pages, or hers? To tell the truth, her stuff is all too airy-fairy for me– beautiful, but neither here nor there. So it just won’t do to barge up to her on Broad Street with that gooshy Ashley-fan smile, babbling, “I just loved your book.” I hate being false even when it’s working, and if there was a quiz, I’d die.

Mirabile, Stephanie Parrish makes the big breakthrough. Yesterday our Ms. Famous tripped on the old boot scraper outside Fanueil Flowers and all her shopping bags went whoosh, so Stephanie got down and helped her pick up her stuff.

Of course she was grateful, and all the while Stephanie was taking note of the items: which face creams, what shade of lipstick, whose bread; hand-knit sweater from Erdrich’s with those lambs on the front plus, from Ezekiel’s of all things, canned smelts. She thanked Stephanie three times, but that was it. It wasn’t like Ashley Famous invited her back to the boathouse for coffee, or to have lunch at Tempest’s before she headed home.

In fact Beth was the first to speak to her, and it wasn’t exactly a conversation. She saw her in Ezekiel’s, lined up for bagels on Sunday morning just like everybody else but with dark glasses and a kerchief pulled down, so we wouldn’t know. Beth just went right up to her. She smiled as nicely as she could without being smarmy and spoke. “Excuse me, but aren’t you…”

And in the name of Edith Wharton, who used to live around here and I’m sure was a lot more gracious, Ashley Famous said, “No.”

That set us back.

But we have discovered that she is a very sweet person and tremendously vulnerable, which Mariel Edmunds learned when she braved the Hudson in Jake’s little boat after Beth told us about it at brunch. She cut the motor and glided in tactfully, so to look at her, you’d think she was quietly fishing in the marsh and accidentally drifted in without noticing how close she was, which is how she caught our world-class new neighbor weeping out on the end of Grant Everson’s dock.

Well, one thing led to another– empathic grimaces, little waves– and Mariel scooted up the ladder and, respecting her privacy, sat on the end of the dock next to Ms. Famous, but not too close. She stayed quiet as the tomb while they both stared out at the channel until finally the sight of this star sitting there with tears streaming was more than Mariel could bear and she had to ask, “Are you all right?”

Imagine all that and then guess what this person with a brilliant career and gobs of honors and every man she ever wanted revealed in that thrilling, smoky voice she uses on TV. Not a damn thing. She said, “It’s just so beautiful.”

Although she’s not one of our nearest and dearest Mariel is a masterpiece of self-control; without turning a hair she dropped her own voice six feet to wherever Ashley Famous keeps hers and said, “Yes.”

We all know you don’t cry along, it’s hypocritical. Mariel just sat there and Ashley Famous just sat until she got over it and sprang up like a cat after a shower. She went skipping back to the house in her pink sneakers, calling back so carelessly that Mariel couldn’t believe her ears. “Come again.”

Mariel did not gush, “Oh, thank you.” We’re better than that. She put on our best Schuylerton River Club drawl, “But never without calling first.”

So we were in. Well, not all of us and not that minute, but this was the start. Mariel waited a good long time and then she dropped by the boathouse and asked Ashley Famous to the River Club for brunch this Sunday after church, don’t dress up, we’re just country people here.

We’ll all drift into church the way we do every week but we’re a little twitchy: what to wear, what to wear? In addition to his duties at the Episcopal college, where nobody knows what Ashley Famous will be doing for all that money, Bill Anthony is the rector here. When we told him she was coming he said of course, she’d already promised because it was his loaves-and-fishes sermon this week. So we could have seen her up close anyway, and without being beholden to Mariel, but who knew?

Besides if it hadn’t been for Mariel, we wouldn’t know that Ashley Famous and religion are… how did she put it? “Boy, is that a contradiction in terms.”

When she dropped by to invite (“I would have called, but I went off without your number…”) she scoped the boathouse interior, and she’s not part of our foursome but Mariel is very good at detail. Tacky was only the beginning, she moved on to “neo-Goodwill.” Patchwork quilts covering a multitude of sins, she said, inspirational motto painted on velvet, nicely framed and hanging over the fireplace and, oh my God, a pillow needlepointed with the praying hands. Plus, she told us, for an icon, she doesn’t dress very well. She wore more or less what we wear except in all the wrong colors, Mariel said, borderline shabby, who would have guessed? Nothing went with anything else, and that was the least of it.

She positively exuded pheromones, how did Mariel put it? “She may be all about God but she talked like a sailor rolling into a bordello after years at sea, all that with her nice husband sitting right there!”

Indeed, we have to wonder. That tight T‑shirt and flowered jeans she wore to church and to the club after, never mind the straw cartwheel hat and pink lizard clutch. She’s the kind who can’t tell when she’s pitifully underdressed, and the husband was cute. Younger, in that obvious way, with a sensitive mouth and cultivated hair. There were so many people on the lawn around Ashley Famous that day, half my friends and all our men fetching this, offering her that, that I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the husband, so I sat down next to him on the porch.

It didn’t take much to draw him out.

A poet, he told me, smoldering nicely, he’s one of those sandy boys who tan so fast that the body hairs shimmer, no question what she saw in him. He’s adorable. I probably shouldn’t have asked where to buy his books but when I saw his face I made up for it by reading the one poem he had tucked in his shirt pocket. Something to occupy him while Ashley holed up in the loft because, he said, and he wasn’t complaining, she needs to get with God before she can face church. It’s clear he adores her but I could see how hard it is for him to write with that big old shadow of greatness looming over him. At the end he invited me to come over and he’d read to me and I promised I would. His name is Archbold, from some fine old family, which is interesting because now that we see her up close it’s clear that Ashley Famous comes from somewhere south of quality. Arch, he said, just call me Arch. Sweet boy, but who knows how soon she will tire of him, or what he will do then.

We think certain thoughts about handsome young men but we always go home to bed with our husbands, most of us, even so. But among our tennis foursome, I alone had been invited, even though it was by Arch and not his first-ever and only wife, at least so far. Whatever happens, he’s entitled, the woman has been married four times.

In fact, Gloria was next to visit, and she wasn’t even invited. Or course Gloria thinks of herself as a fellow professional, which gives her the right. She just bellied up to the door and introduced herself to Ashley Famous, writer to writer as it were, as though they were equals and Ms. Famous had to ask her in. In Schuylerton, maybe they are equals; in local matters Gloria has the edge, but otherwise, no. The prizes alone, money, passionate fans in droves, but it wasn’t very kind of Ms. Famous to point it out.

Which– we finally got it out of Gloria, who is livid– she did. She told it like a sad story, but Gloria knew. Oh, Ashley Famous was dripping with self-pity, but Gloria knew.

She’d have to be drunk out of her mind or beaten senseless not to know. She says a little of both. Too much wine in strong sunlight bouncing off the river, it put her off her guard. She let herself imagine they were friends. Gloria is a giving person so she said kindly, “My contact at Valley TV would love to come talk to you, he’s doing a show on writers living on the Hudson and I thought…”

Then wasn’t she surprised. Gloria was knocking herself out to be helpful, and Ashley Famous rose right up and bit her in the ass.

“I don’t like being famous,” she said, sudden as a slap in the face.

“It’s only local TV.”

It was too late. This Ashley’s voice went back to that deep place. Her face got all pink and she went on like an angry kindergarten teacher explaining to a stupid child. About that time Arch, who had been hovering, faded away like a painter’s wet wash of a failing sky. “I don’t like it at all,” Ashley Famous said to his back, and there were tears standing in her eyes.

Gloria tried for a snappy comeback but all she managed was, “I just thought.” Then she read that face and gave up.

“People keep writing books on me, they’re making a whole movie about my life, they want me to narrate the Bible on PBS; they won’t leave me alone! Everybody wants to send me presents and force me to take their prizes; they all want me to bless them or something, when all I want is to be left alone!”

Gloria was about to go there-there when Ashley Famous got all holy and condescending. “But you wouldn’t understand.”

Gloria blinked the way you do when a strobe light flashes and you have no idea where it’s coming from.

“You wouldn’t know,” she said to Gloria. Unfortunately, that’s true, but she didn’t have to rub it in. “You would have no way of knowing how very, very hard it is to be as famous as me. The things people tell you, the things they ask you to do.”

By the time she was finished laying out the tribulations of a literary icon, she had Gloria backing away on her hands and knees, anything to get out of there. She clamped the insides of her mouth until they bled so she didn’t accidentally apologize for something she hadn’t done, and when she could manage, she stood up. “Oh,” she told Ashley Famous when she could bring herself to speak without screaming, “I would never give him your number without permission.” Then she more or less tugged her forelock and left without ever once losing her temper and telling the truth, which was that she only said it to be nice.

Gloria says that behind all that sacred, holy stuff Ashley Famous is not a nice person, but of course Gloria is biased. People say mean things about Mother Teresa too.

Beth and I are here to tell you that Gloria is wrong. Ms. Famous is an inspiration, as we discover as soon as we and Ashley start spending quality time. I personally have been invited, and I take Beth along to ride post so Arch won’t get in trouble for inviting me.

I just don’t want Ashley to think there’s anything funny going on between her husband and me and there isn’t, attractive as he is. Even though she isn’t expecting us she’s glad to see us because naturally any friend of her Archie’s is a friend of hers but as it turns out, her Arch just left for a reading in New York.

She waves us inside with an industrial-strength smile. It’s bright enough to be seen from the back of any hall and Beth and I can’t help thinking, No wonder everybody loves her because this time, it’s shining for us.

Then we get inside and it’s: Hasn’t she ever heard of Ikea? I mean, Mariel barely scratched the surface here. It’s all about vintage shag rugs in bad colors and milk crates stuffed with magazines and board-and-brick bookcases like kids make in graduate school, which makes me wonder whether all her taste is in her mouth or if she downplays the decor to make Archie feel at home. Jacket photos notwithstanding, Ashley Famous is no kid either, now that we see her up close. But she ushers us in glowing as though she is completely unaware. Then dear God she says, “Things of this world are only things of this world so why bother,” so we know she knows.

She sits us down and brings us steaming cups of Cambric tea which our grandmothers remember vaguely and used to offer when we were small.

You don’t exactly talk to Ashley Famous, you listen, which is how we find out why people fall down and worship her and follow her anywhere. It’s a foregone conclusion, voila, tout suite, when she starts going on in that thrilling voice. Actually, although it’s a little embarrassing, we follow her upstairs into the loft. It’s her meditation room, she says, and somehow the three of us end up sitting on that hard, hard floor in lotus position– or something like it for Beth and me– it’s a little harder for Beth as certain parts of her have begun to spread. We sit facing the new sheetrock wall Arch put up for her and we meditate, or Ashley Famous does, while Beth and I stare at the wall as instructed and try to empty our minds and see into the beyond, which is what she seems to expect. It’s not easy to do when you’re wondering if she’s gone out of her mind and into the Presence while you’re still sitting there worried about how long you can be on this floor in a fixed position without screaming and offending her and whether if you got up and tried to leave, she’d know.

Can you really meditate with us watching?

Still, it is an honor to be hunched in a row like this, contemplating eternity. Imagine, contemplating. Us!

Just being here makes Beth and me feel special, and definitely close to the source– although of what– well, it’s pretty ineffable. We’re only beginners, after all. I guess we’re expected to stare at that wall until we’re cross-eyed, which if you do for long enough actually does move you to a higher plane unless that’s all the blood leaving your head and pooling in your butt. Whatever it is, I could swear that something happened, so when Ashley Famous says, in hushed tones, “Can you feel it?” Beth and I both manage a breathy, “Yes” and for the moment and after we go limp and it stops hurting, we believe.

Then she kind of flows up while Beth and I creak and groan miserably and struggle to our feet, humiliated because we’ve failed. But, how glorious. Whatever we are suffering, Ashley Famous must be mysteriously transcending, because she says, “Wasn’t that wonderful!” and rakes us with that white-light smile.

Ergo, voila, mirabile, we are friends. We’re invited back tomorrow, Ashley says she sees great promise in us, which is borderline divine. I’m sitting right down and reading every one of her books as soon as I get home.

When we come back on Wednesday Arch is there; I can’t help hoping he’ll come up into the loft with us because once I get the hang of this, maybe we can meet on some astral plane. Failing that, I’ll have something good to look at while our minds are traveling out and beyond. But when she asks him, “Are you?” his face shuts up shop, so I know I’m right about them, although Beth doesn’t pick up on it.

Then Arch goes off wherever he goes to write and we’re back on that wretched floor maintaining fixed positions until I think I see paisley lights, unless I’m on the first step to the next level as Ashley promised and my life is about to change. I can’t help it, I have to peek.

Surprise, Beth is peeking too and if you believe in that kind of thing, Ashley Famous looks pretty much transfixed, unless we’re both giddy with hunger because she didn’t give lunch before she sat us down to meditate. It’s like seeing one of those intricate Chinese ivories with the light bulb inside, my God! She looks lit from within, but only for a second. In the next she yips and hits the floor like a felled log. Beth and I are gnawing our knuckles and reaching for our phones when she sits up with her eyes blazing and asks, “Did you see it? Were you there?”

We don’t know what to say, exactly, so we don’t.

“Well,” she says in that breathy tone that enchants thousands, “there you are.”

Who are we to say otherwise?

On the way home Beth says, “Did she just…”

“I don’t know.”

“Did we?”

It’s amazing, I am thinking not really but I have to say, “I don’t know!”

“I don’t either,” Beth says, “but wasn’t it grand.” Her voice drops so it’s more a statement than a question, and we leave it there.

We get out of the car feeling somewhat exalted, and go back to our lives. I’d love to tell Richard, but there’s no way to explain it so he’d understand. Instead Beth and I go around feeling special, special, whether because of the experience or because of all Schuylerton society we alone are designated friends of Ashley Famous, it’s hard to say. We don’t talk about it because this is precious and we owe it to Ashley not to tell. Also, it pisses certain people off. Mariel and Stephanie of course, but they were never part of the inner circle. Jeannie because she wasn’t invited, and Gloria for sure.

To make it up to them we decide to give a party at my house, nothing fancy: champagne with Gloria’s crudites and the satays and teriyakes the chef from Kang’s restaurant does on his row of hibachis, Jeannie’s chocolate cheesecake, Japanese lanterns in the woods, and to double-atone for being best friends with her and leaving Jeannie and Gloria and the others outside the loop, I get Arch to make sure Ashley Famous comes.

We do these things so well that naturally she’ll understand this is nothing special, we give beautiful parties all the time. Beth and I are looking out at the terrace just before the first guests come and everything is perfect: glowing hibachis, LED lights winking in the trees and Japanese lanterns glowing in the woods beyond; the peonies are out and I tell her, “Look hard, Beth, so you’ll never forget what this party looks like. We’re going to remember this night for the rest of our lives.”

Ashley and Arch come in late, and look at her! My, isn’t that the transformation? And don’t our men, who had zero interest in the matter until the party, collect like mosquitoes around the bug zapper on a summer night? Where she came to church in a T‑shirt and those tawdry flowered jeans, tonight she walks in barefoot in a beautiful diaphanous thing that I swear is by Issy Miyake, and a wreath of gold on her head with bachelors’ buttons woven in. Her hair is flying and she looks like what she is: an ornament to the community, our star.

Instead of pleasing one and all with our own personal famous writer, we’ve alienated quite a few, because the only men who aren’t glued to her are Bill Anthony, who foolishly wore the clerical collar, a turnoff for both of them, apparently, and the fourth Mr. Famous, who stalks the fringes looking every inch the poet, like Lord Byron under a cloud, but without the club foot.

Still it’s a beautiful party, everyone has to agree. Beth and I knock ourselves out running around mingling, pulling outsiders from Hyde Park and Rhinebeck and Red Hook into the circle, mixing up couples with people they already knew; we are a storm, a flame of congeniality that seems to go out as soon as we turn our backs because Ashley Famous is sitting on the steps to the fountain barefoot, holding forth, and that’s where everyone is.

This seems like the time to let Richard know that the gauzy Ms. Famous and I are kindred so I make my way through the throng and say “Ashley, dear!” Then she gives me the strangest look and does a one-two take. Who are you is quickly replaced by a manufactured smile and oddly, since Beth and I are, after all, giving the party– I mean does she not recognize us or what?—-oddly she says, “How lovely, running into you here.” And practically in the same breath Richard– my Richard!– shushes me: “Please, honey. Ashley is in the middle of a joke.”

Not that anybody notices when I storm away. At my back I hear her trilling, “I think the two most interesting things in the world are sex and religion, don’t you?”

Then, what is it the woman said to Bill Anthony, that hooked him and brought all this down on us? Right.

Sometimes you. Just. Get. Tired.

What I hate most is that I’m trying not to feel wounded, but I’m hurt. Feeling perhaps a tad bit guilty, Richard puts an arm around me and tries to pull me back into the social mainstream, but I do what any woman would do. I float out of the mainstream and drift along in the backwaters, among dropped napkins and abandoned plates. One of the Japanese lanterns in the woods has caught fire– nothing serious, it’s May, and too wet to burn long; Kang’s chef is gone and the hibachis have burned out. As I bob along I hear Gloria grumble, “You’d think being famous would be enough,” but I let it pass and drift on in the shallows until I fetch up against Arch, the lonely fourth husband, beached on the bank. I don’t do much. When we collide I plant my fingers on that broad, strong wrist, warm in spite of the fact that the night just turned cool.

I want to draw his attention to the clump of men and ask him, who’s next but in our circle we don’t say the unspeakable and for all I know the poor boy has no idea that his time with Ms. Famous is growing short. I try, “Is she always like this?”

He turns, blinded by misconception and glowing with God knows what. “You mean, radiant?”

“Radiant, yes.” I am too well bred to say, Radiant, no. Voracious.

“Ashley is… Well, Ashley.”

He may be dazzled but he has not moved and my fingers are still on his warm, warm wrist, and I am thinking: well, I’ll show her! I make them curl to make a bracelet for him, like a gift. “Would you like to take a walk?”

Look at our men, all gathering like cultists about to paint themselves blue and perform extreme acts. Look at my women friends, stewing in their own bitter juices. Look at me, bent on subversion, and look at Arch, grinning at me like a dirty boy. “Of course.”

We push off from the ship of fools and head out along the driveway to Mill Road and I have to wonder if she even saw us go; well, when her man comes home smirched and guilty, she will damn well know it. He recites yards of free verse as we walk, and I make appreciative noises and we both feel good enough about ourselves, going along in the moonlight. Then I think: Now, and nudge him until we’re facing so I can take his hands. I tell him, “They aren’t all like her.”

Then, oh! Heedless boy; when he says, “There’s nobody like her,” he is glistening all over again. I’m about to despair when he says, as if to redeem it, “You know, there is one thing.”

This could still go the other way so I leave my answer wide open. “Yes?”

“Ashley isn’t happy here.” He frees one hand and we turn back.

“Oooooh. She isn’t?” When he doesn’t pick up on it I say, “That’s too bad.”

“When she’s unhappy, it makes it hard for me.”

“Unhappy. Hmmm…” I do this carefully, leaving a hole big enough for him to drive a fork lift into, but he doesn’t follow up, he just trudges along even after I prompt him with, “And?” One unkind word and we can start on her.

It’s maddening, walking hand in hand with an attractive kid who is too stupid to know what’s happened to him let alone what’s possible here, and too obtuse to explain why.

The silence drags on until I am forced to say in tones controlled as tightly as I can squeeze them, “What. Ah. What’s gone wrong?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

I hate this. “Is it something we did?”

“In a way. Sort of. Oh, this is embarrassing.”

Right. He has been deputized. I try to make it easy for him. “What is?”

It appears that when you’re the fourth Mr. Ashley Famous, nothing is easy for you. After a struggle he gets it out– well, part of it. “It’s something you haven’t done!”

Try playing twenty questions on a country road in the middle of the night. Make that forty questions. It takes too long, but I manage to ask them all.

As it turns out, Arch isn’t embarrassed; where you or I would be humiliated, fishing on behalf of somebody who doesn’t love you enough to stay by your side at parties, Arch says as though pointing out the obvious, “Your little party is nice and all, but Ashley… She’s very upset.” By this time he is strongly aware that I am done asking polite questions so he explains. “Usually when she comes to a new town people do something special, a concert, a dinner or a dance, something big, in her honor.”

“Something big.”

“Right. When Ashley Famous comes to town people get together and throw a great big party for her.”

“Even though she hates parties.”

“Oh, you know Ashley. She only says she does.”

“At the club.”

“Could it be black tie?” Even by moonlight there’s no missing the grateful smile and I still can’t say whether it’s triumph he’s exuding, or relief. “She loves to dress up.”

Oh, we’ll give her a party all right, if that’s what she expects, and it will be the biggest and most beautiful party ever to go down in the annals of the Schulyerton River Club. Before we’re done it will rival the best efforts of the Vanderbilts and the first Roosevelts back in the day, a masterpiece of planning and execution, all in honor of our brand new local celebrity, Welcome, Ashley, now you are one of us, and naturally it will be black tie so the bitch can come in high drag without putting the rest of us in the shade, for we clean up nicely and put on our diamonds for events like this. Then the lovely Ashley Famous can float into the room in her most expensive designer-Whatever, and I hope she has the good grace to blush at Bill Anthony’s welcoming speech, after which she will truly be in our midst, surrounded by admirers, secure in the knowledge that where apparently we’ve been remiss without knowing it, we’re pulling out all the stops, including picking out her name in dwarf roses on top of one of Tempest’s most beautiful cakes. We will show Ashley Famous every way we know how that this whole beautiful, expensive evening is all about her. Before we’re done, she will have drunk from champagne fountains and danced to the Tippy Little orchestra and cracked lobsters in the driveway with the heel of her most elegant shoe; on her big night she will wine and dine and whirl around the dance floor at the center of attention in spite of her reclusive qualities, the cynosure of all eyes, and when that soft pink glow in the sky above the Hudson warns us that sunrise comes next we will by God do what you do for the GOH at any bacchanal; we’ll chase our maiden up into the woods overlooking the River Club and push her backward over a slab of granite and cut out her heart.

The post Special appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

“The black dog is not like any other,” the forensics officer says. It is a little incantation.

In the journalists’ skybox high above the civic auditorium, Bill Siefert strains to see the distant stage, the speaker and at her back, the beast he is here to deconstruct. That’s the way he thinks of it. Siefert hates anything he doesn’t understand. If it doesn’t make sense, disassemble it. He’s always been uncomfortable with the idea of supernatural powers, but this is not his stated reason for sneaking into the press box. He thinks he’s here to crack the black dog program and show the people its inner workings. If the wonder dog is just a dog, then the police department are money-grubbing charlatans and the expose will move him from unemployed to famous.

He’ll be all over CNN. Networks will come calling. Silence the black dog, he thinks, and wonders where that came from. Stop mizzling and get the story. He needs a job. He needs the attention. He needs the power. He needs to be more than who he is, and before any of this and all of this Bill Siefert needs to figure out why this morning, on a perfectly ordinary day, he woke up screaming.

Get the story, he tells himself and does not know what about this makes him so uneasy. Cell phone for instant screen shots. Notebook, digicorder, nice smile. Seat in the booth. Fake press pass to get him backstage. Piece of cake.

With the black dog, nothing spins out the way you expect.

“The black dog can cut through the welter of visual and olfactory stimuli in a disaster situation and find those most in need of rescue,” the forensics officer says matter-of-factly, as though this is a given. She is sleek in the black uniform. Persuasive. It is disturbing. “He is only the first,” she says and then she says portentously, “His descendants will save thousands.”

Cut to the chase. Startled, Bill shakes himself. Did I speak? Who?

The speaker glitters in a cone of light but the wonder dog—if there is one—is nowhere present. Peering into the shadows behind her, Bill looks for the darker shadow signifying a living creature, reflected light pinpointed in the eyes. The darkness gives back only darkness. Nothing to see, he tells himself, and wonders why this comes as a relief. No dog. Another wasted day like so many days in what is shaping up to be a wasted life.

With the black dog, the future is open to question.   

In the next second he shivers, transfixed. He can’t even guess what just happened, but all the furniture in his head has shifted.

It sees me.

Given that the stage is far, far below this is unlikely, but the sense that he is being watched is so acute that all of Bill Siefert’s bones begin to itch. No, he tells himself. No way. He swallows hard but his throat closes. It’s just a dog. 

Far below, she continues, “Of course the prototype is a genetic fluke, but one that can be exploited for the good of all.”

Yeah, he thinks bitterly. Yeah, right.

There are a thousand people in the auditorium, city officials and guests, all in some variation on black tie, velvet, opera length pearls. The gentry have come out for this press conference—the unveiling of the superdog. A thought flies across Bill’s mind: If there is a dog, Shifting on his haunches, sweating for no apparent reason, he thinks: what if I kidnap the thing? Down, boy. Focus. First in his class in Communications Studies, but a tad bit A.D.D. No wonder he can’t keep a job.

The woman who discovered and trained the black dog continues thoughtfully. “We’re not certain exactly which combination of pheromones alerts the black dog, but we do recognize his singular power. He can rush into a burning building or dig his way into earthquake debris and go like an arrow to the victim most in need.”

Fine, Bill thinks, your basic St. Bernard. It helps to picture him bounding over the snow with that keg of rum and the pink tongue flapping. Pant pant pant. Hello, I am here to save you. He tries to laugh but his belly is jittering and when he tries to swallow, the spit won’t go down. There is something terribly the matter here, and nobody sees it but him.

“The black dog is unique,” she says. “He has no interest in the quick or the dead.”

Unaccountably, Siefert feels twin points of light like paired lasers, fixed on him. The eyes—why can he not see the eyes? It leaves him jittery and unsettled.

What the forensics officer says next will overturn him.

“His peculiar skill is like no other.” Severe in black, with her own offbeat elegance, the tall, bony woman creates a silence so profound that even the mayor gets nervous.

Then she says into the hush: “He can identify the dying.”

The journalists mutter among themselves. From the orchestra seats far below comes a muffled cry.

“He has the uncanny ability to smell impending death.” In case they still don’t get it, she finishes: “The black dog knows who’s next to die.”

Everything inside Siefert’s head skids to a stop. He wants to silence the other journalists, stop them breathing if he has to, so he can hear what comes next. He has to know! He leans forward with his mouth open and his tongue out like a dog hanging out a car window, gulping the words like rushing air. If he could, he would find a way to stop his heart to create the silence he needs to grasp her meaning. Stop the pounding of his blood so he can hear.

“Understand,” she says, “he can predict the exact moment.”

The audience gasps.

The speaker smooths her varnished hair with a proud, confident smile. She is in the home stretch now. Explain. Make the pitch. Walk away with an extra million in public funding. “This makes him particularly useful in triage situations, like earthquake and building collapses, when the living and the dead are trapped under tons of rubble and for us, there is no telling which is which. Of course we have instruments to detect body mass as well as warmth and motion and the sound of breathing, but we have no time to waste excavating cadavers and no way of knowing who to rescue first. Only the black dog knows which of the victims is poised at the door to death, and only he can guide us in to pull that victim back from the brink.”

Reporters on either side exchange skeptical looks but Bill is beyond questions. He does not so much ignore his colleagues as rise above them like a soul cut loose and floating outside himself, observing from the top left-hand corner of the press both. Did he see the dog’s eyes back then or did he only imagine it?

Does it see him?

Do I?

He whirls. Dear God!

“Don’t you see?” the officer trills, rolling into the finale. “Now we know who to rescue first!”

All over the auditorium, hands fly up: questions.

“Of course you want to know how we discovered his power. Science is an exact discipline but to tell the truth, it was an accident.”

Bill leans forward as she describes a routine training exercise, the black dog going through its paces like all the others until, without prompting, it stops cold. Sits down in front of the trainer. Refuses to budge. In spite of threats it sits like a rock until its original trainer—young man, too young to have a heart condition—clutches his throat and drops like a felled redwood. Infarction, the coroner says. It’s nothing, the chief says. It’s just coincidence.

“But I,” the speaker says, “as an expert, I knew we were onto something big.” She whispers into the microphone, “I took him home.”

There the ambitious forensics officer devised a series of tests for the black dog…

Matter-of-factly, she details visits to hospitals and hospices, in which the dog paces the complex of halls like a moving shadow and then. Sits. Is present at the exact moment when the soul leaves the body. He is unfailing in his accuracy. The black dog is right every single time. Trainer and dog move on to wards where patients are more viable. Some will make it. Some may not. The dog sits down. Doctors send in the crash cart and save the patient, see how valuable this is?

Bill tunes out of her recital. What it took to get the commissioners’ approval. Startup money. Training and experiments. The first disaster—factory explosion—in which medics follow the black dog into the ruins and maker sensational, last-minute rescues. The building collapse in which at least a dozen are yanked back from the brink of death. Certain fires. The list goes on, but by this time Bill Siefert is thinking of one thing and one thing only.

He has to see the dog.

“In emergency situations like these,” she says, “prioritization is imperative.  Why rush to help people strong enough to make it until we get around to them when there are cases in which immediate rescue means the difference between life and death? Why lose hours excavating victims who are already corpses?”

Buzzing with pride, she moves on into the pitch. “Therefore, the response time of our disaster relief units and our success rates depend heavily on the services of the black dog. You can see it is essential to breed thousands like him.” Now she romances the crowd in that deep, sexy whisper, “And that’s where you come in.”

As one, they nod. Yes yes. Oh, yes yes.

“At the moment, the black dog is unique, but I am happy to report that our veterinary unit has used genetic material from our black dog to impregnate thirty black bitches. We hope to replicate his genetic set. He is, after all, this year’s gold star winner for valor under extreme circumstances in the Vidalia implosion and the West Virginia mine disaster. My triumph.” She raises her voice like a ringmaster preparing to bring on the lions: ta-da. “The miraculous black dog.”

Everybody cranes.

Speakers vibrate with the communal shout, “Bring on the dog.”

She raises a hand like a traffic cop. “And with your support…”

But the crowd is waiting for the grand entrance. They squirm in their seats, straining to see the animal, but nothing happens.

Smiling, the glossy, imposing speaker dangles the bait. How much will they pay to see? “And once we receive your support…”

On the floor of the auditorium, city officials and invited guests shift in their seats, chanting, “bring on the dog.” The cry starts as a ripple but gathers force, “The dog.” It rolls in like a long comber, growing until it breaks on the shore. “The dog!”

“Now, we are prepared to take your pledges.”

Somewhere outside himself, fixed on something he can not see, Bill Siefert scours the shadows behind her, searching. He thinks he sees… He sees… No, he doesn’t see… Where is it, he wonders, changed. What is it?

You don’t want to know.

With a start, he returns to himself, shuddering.

Why is this so important to him?

It isn’t just the sensational story: Interview with the Black Dog. Skeptical Bill Siefert, who came here to debunk, has been sucked in. He is changed and threatened by the possibility of something that he will never understand. Like a thousand others, he wants to see the animal, but the dog is nowhere present. And yet…

Yet

Bill’s head jerks so abruptly that his neck snaps. He doesn’t know it yet but in the realm of colliding fates he has chosen the black dog, or the black dog has chosen him. For whatever reasons they are in communication. In a universe of particles, in an arena of conflating sights and sounds and stimuli, he and the black dog are yoked in a way that both draws and terrifies him. All at once and through no cause Bill Siefert can divine, he comprehends its size and shape, the yellow eyes burning. Without seeing, he knows.

A question boils inside him. Name. What is your name.

Words come in from somewhere new and strange. What makes you think I have a name?

“My God!”

The video teams on either side of Bill turn to stare. He shoves his knuckles into his mouth, sealing it shut.

The forensics officer is saying, “Now, I know many of you are wondering why we haven’t brought our marvelous black dog onstage tonight, and under ordinary circumstances we would, but these are not ordinary circumstances and this is not an ordinary dog.”

The audience grumbles.

She raises a stern hand. “You will have to content yourself with the video of his last rescue. As you will see, we fitted him with a collar cam and a pin spot to bring you this remarkable footage. You will not see the black dog today. In a minute my associates will pass among you with hand mikes because of course I am anxious to answer your questions,” she says in a way that makes clear that she has no patience with questions. “Especially yours, Mr. Mayor, since I am here to seek your support for this ambitious project. Of course you deserve an explanation. You won’t see the amazing black dog today, but if you will direct your attention to the monitors in the arms of the chairs where you are sitting, you can see one of the miracles he performs daily in the line of duty.”

Murky videos blink to life on a thousand monitors. Because the camera is mounted on the collar the people who sat here so patiently won’t see the dog tonight, not even on video. Still, the audience shivers as the camera rushes into tight spaces and through dark corridors on the back of something huge and powerful. Everybody but Bill Siefert will see, and everybody but Bill will hear the forensics officer’s warning.

By that time he’s bolted out of the press box (“pardon me, excuse me, excuse me, pardon me”) and through the exit at the end of the corridor, down flight after flight of stairs into the belly of the place. He is running hard. Hunting the beast. He wants to lock his hands in its thick, leonine ruff so he can look it in the face while he asks certain questions.

Therefore he will not hear the forensics officer say, in conclusion, “We can not show you the black dog on stage here in the auditorium. This is for his protection. And for yours.”

She says, “Believe me, this is for your own safety.”

The crowd protests until she raises her hand for silence.

She says, “In a crowd this size, there are bound to be some… well, you can imagine. I mean, actuarial tables suggest that several of you are already…” Discreetly, she breaks off. “Think what that would do to him! Sensory overload, and before we can perpetuate the breed. And as for you. Well. Think what would happen if he sat down in front of one of you!”

There is a long silence.

“The presence of the black dog has terrible implications.”

For the black dog, the responsibility is tremendous. In a ruined building or an arena full of strangers he must go to the feet of the dying like a bullet to the heart. No, to the first to die. He must sit quietly, when more than anything he wants to lift his head and howl to the heavens. Even here, deep in the belly of the building, he is painfully aware of the hundreds of hearts of hundreds of strangers rustling and thrumming in the vast auditorium above, the cumulative pressure of their failing bodies. There are too many to save!

This is the prodigious engine that drives him. Before they know, he knows.

Can the black dog predict the future?

No. The future predicts him.

Now every hair on his huge body shimmers and ripples over powerful muscles as he pads along the corridors toward the space under the stage where his mistress stands. He is heading for the sunken orchestra pit. Above, his mistress is speaking to all the sad, vulnerable humans. He can hear their ruined bellies crying out. Lungs failing. Hearts stuttering. He knows which will falter and stop.

In spite of his size the black dog goes silently with his great head lifted, scanning the corridor with yellow eyes. His jaws are clenched on the necessary.

He is carrying it in his teeth. For her.

Bill Siefert is already compromised, and, like Bill, you must proceed with caution. Stay back if you are anywhere in the vicinity. Be still. The black dog is approaching. No matter who you are or how strong or how arrogantly healthy, this is the time when you must be very, very careful. Do not run if you see him coming because no matter what you try, whatever is going to happen next will happen.

Do not be afraid of the black dog. Feel sorry for him.

Imagine the burden of foreknowledge. The pressure. The choices he has to make. In this world there are billions of humans marching toward death, thousands are at the gate at this very moment and he cannot reach them all.

He does what he can.

His mistress does not know that he is racing to save her. Nor can the forensics officer, strutting and preening to massive applause in her best Armani suit, guess that tonight her pet—no, her creation—is coming for her, trotting purposefully through the maze of corridors with the necessary tightly clamped in his soft mouth.

Stand back. Hold still. Stay out of his way. Be grateful he isn’t coming for you.

There are so many! Earlier, a voice cried out to him. Nothing, he thinks, just something he heard. Voice. Yes. That will come, but in due time, because more important to the black dog than this new element in his troublesome cosmos is doing what the black dog does. The voice cries out. It is the other: searching. The dog’s head comes up, but there isn’t time. Asking, but the black dog does not brook questions. There are too many. There isn’t time. There isn’t time! For the black dog tonight, there is only one. Upstairs, she is still talking. Because she is his mistress, because in spite of her commanding, clinical approach, the black dog has grown fond of her in the way of all dogs.

She does, after all, forget sometimes and scratch his ears. Therefore instead of vaulting the ladder and bounding onstage to sit down at her feet, the black dog will wait down here. He will give her a chance to do what she does as he must do what he does. He may want to spare her public humiliation, if that’s a concept the noble creature grasps. For the black dog, pride is irrelevant. All that matters is responsibility.

What he must do.

Of all the failing hearts and bodies in departure mode tonight, exuding death smells in the great, echoing coffin above, even in the realm of a hundred simultaneous deaths he would choose her. When his mistress comes down the ladder he will drop the cell phone at her feet so she has a minute to call 911. Then he will sit down. He’ll sit with his flag tail thumping the floor and beg her to save herself.

The others, he will not necessarily save.

The black dog is heavy with foreknowledge. He does not exactly see the blood clot floating into his trainer’s brain but he knows it. When it strikes its mark and that part of the brain explodes the black dog will sense it in the way he knows what exactly is failing inside of you, which part of the mechanism you wear so proudly will break and cut you loose from whatever you think you are.

Until the black dog’s handler began emanating death smells in the house today, the whole last-minute rescue thing was something she asked him to do, and being a good dog, he did as told. Ordinarily he does what he does in his own time and as he has always done it, but it seemed to please her when he did as she said. She and the big, clumsy men she yoked to him on rescue missions rushed in with their medicine and electric paddles, jerking people back from death, and that is their business. The hero thing was her idea. 

The black dog does what he does.

Overhead the applause crescendos and the auditorium floor thrums with the footsteps of a thousand people leaving. His mistress has started down, into the cavity. She descends in a funnel of light at the far end of the corridor. Long stretch: not much time. Must reach her. Drop the phone into her hand. Give her a minute. Sit. She’ll know.

Running with his head lifted and every muscle taut with urgency, the black dog is fixed on the orderly progression, the necessary timing. First this. Then this.

Then all at once a human blunders out of a side passage and skids to a stop in front of him, flailing like a flagman on train tracks. It is barking and barking. “Is that you?”

The one he knows, and does not know why he knows it. The thing has a bad smell. It has an ugly bark.

The black dog growls. Not now.

It goes, bark bark. “Doggie, stop. I have to see you!” Blarg blarg.

The black dog growls again. No time. Move.

It just keeps barking. “Doggie, I have to ask you a question.”

Shut up so I can hear her breathe!

She’s on the ladder! She’s halfway down! He growls again but the human in his path is like a balloon, getting bigger and bigger until it fills the corridor. In times like this even a rescue dog must drop whatever he is carrying to bare his teeth.

“Come on, dog.” The human’s bark falters. “Please.” Then it does the unthinkable. It lunges for the black dog’s collar.

The black dog does what he has to. He rakes the human’s arm with his fangs and grunts in recognition. He tastes blood, but only a little, and it is vile. At least he has distracted it so he can move on. Whining, the creature frets over its wound. The black dog puts his huge paws on its back to push it down, vaults over it and runs on, bent on rescue.            

Too late. In the lost time his mistress dropped like a felled redwood; she is unconscious. Worse: while he was grappling with the human, the window of opportunity slammed shut. This isn’t the black dog’s fault, even though grief and frustration make him throw back his great head and howl his grief. It is the human’s.

The creature with his mark on it made him drop the phone.

What was that? What is it?Trembling, Bill tries to sit up. Ahead, the black dog looks up from the body it has been nosing—Bill wonders What happened? Did it kill somebody?—whirls, and charges. He cowers as the great beast covers the distance between them in enormous, terrifying leaps. With its red jaws wide and its yellow eyes suffused with blood and turning a murderous orange, it comes.

“Don’t! Don’t kill me.” Bill cries. Still the great beast rushes down on him, and as Bill Siefert collapses and waits for death, the black dog plants one huge paw on his chest, squeezing the breath out of him, and with an efficiency signifying complete indifference, stalks over him and moves on.

The form passing over Bill is huge, warm and heavily muscled, bigger than a Newfoundland with its thick, shimmering black fur soft and rich and every muscle and tendon humming with power. Its passage is swift but the sensation lingers. It is like being overshadowed by a lover.

Aren’t you going to kill me? Bill gasps, struggling for breath as the black dog passes over him and goes on running.

Did it answer? Does he imagine it? In the instant when the enormous paw compressed his chest and its full weight landed on his heart, Bill thinks he heard or comprehended what the creature may have told him. It isn’t time.

Right now no one in the auditorium knows what has happened down here in the pit, but the implications are prodigious. The forensics officer, its mistress, is dead. Nobody else can control the animal.

The black dog is on the loose.

“Wait!” the human barks as the black dog passes over it, but when he plants his paw in the creature’s chest there is a shift in the air. He recognizes it at once. It is the human, pleading: Wait. He lifts his head, considering. Did it speak? Oh please, please wait.Fragile as the human is inside its thin pink skin, the creature is communicating.

A talking human? How? In time he will have to deal with the matter. The human asks, what are you? but the black dog has his own imperatives.

There is a brief flurry after Bill’s story breaks. Since he was there when it happened, since he found the body, since he saw the thing, it is a big story. Blood clot to the brain, but that doesn’t stop false charges against the animal. “I was there,” Bill says breathlessly. “He tried to get me too. I alone am left,” he says. “I alone am left to tell the tale,” he says and by the time he has told his story on every known talk show, he is temporarily famous and eminently employable.

There will be a statewide search and bogus reports of countless sightings. The spawn of the black dog—litters artificially inseminated and carefully reared—turns out to be depressingly devoid of powers and are destroyed. For a short time Bill makes news with his Encounter With the Black Dog, but only for a little while. He quits his job to write an existential book under the same title, but by the time he has it finished the black dog is a dead issue. After a brief memorial service for the city’s top forensics officer, felled by a cerebral embolism on the night of her triumph, the mayor and the police commissioner will forget. After corruption hearings and a series of firings, the city will forget. In time Bill Siefert will forget. Almost.

Meanwhile the black dog runs on. He will not forgive the human he left squirming in the corridor that night, nor can he know why he and it are somehow yoked, but they are. Never mind. In the realm of the black dog there are imperatives that supersede all else.

If their fates are intertwined, then everything will come down when it comes down. When is a matter of no particular importance to him. The time will come and when it does, the black dog will know it. Until then, unencumbered by police handlers, harnesses and leashes and the mistress he almost loved, the black dog runs loose in the world. Not free, exactly, because he is still driven by imperatives. Even so he is free, with nobody to answer to.

Loose in the world, he does what the black dog does.

Bill is not a superficial person, but you can’t go on dwelling on a mysterious moment in your past.

He used to think the black dog would make him rich, and if it didn’t make him rich it would make him famous. All he had to do was figure out how. If he could find it again, if he could catch the thing, then he could follow his big story, Encounter With the Black Dog, with Capture of the Black Dog, to be followed by Interview With the Black Dog and finally, Secrets of the Black Dog, but he had no idea how to go about it. Or collect the reward. Then the police department gave up on the case and withdrew the reward, so that was the end of that.

Siefert never caught the black dog and he never got that book contract. His lecture, Encounter With the Black Dog, never made him rich and it didn’t make him famous, but it did help his career. He is a local television anchor now. He married a nice girl from the valley, ten years younger. They just bought a house just on the other side of the hills.

Still, Bill knows he must have tangled with the black dog for a reason. Like most people in the world, he has to proceed on faith, which in his own way, he is doing. He used to think that if the encounter wasn’t about fame or money, it must be about power. Years pass. That hope has come and gone, so Bill has to wonder whether whatever happened back there had left him marked in some other way. If only he could figure it out!

A family man now, Siefert tells himself he’s finally let it go, but whether or not he knows it, he and the black dog are by no means done.

Even now there are nights when he sits up in bed and wonders. Sitting next to his sleeping wife with his knees drawn up and his arms locked around them, he gnaws on his bare kneecaps and wonders. What happened back then? Was the black dog trying to tell him something that night in the darkened corridor? What? Why were its yellow eyes turning orange, and if they turn red, what happens then? If he and the black dog were thrown together for a reason, it’s no reason he can divine.

And the dog. Every year since his collision with the human, everything the black dog does takes a little longer to do. The slowing tempo is gradual but apparent. Whether it is the byproduct of that night, the black dog could not tell you. Is it that unwanted encounter with an unlike animal that is mysteriously linked to him? The unbidden memory of his lost mistress? The other human’s bark-bark-bark, its smell, his own resentment? Insofar as it is the function of the black dog to wonder, he wonders.

Alone in his slowing body he lifts his head and howls without making a sound.

Bill Siefert is middle aged now, father of two, secure in his career and still happily married. There were years when he would have been thrilled to see the black dog because he was ambitious and reckless and too young to be afraid of the creature. Even though he has more to lose now he has become—not careless, exactly, but less vigilant.

Then he goes to the E.R. with a bellyache and wakes up in a hospital room—a double—groggy and minus his appendix. No big. He’ll be fine. A lump in the next bed, supported by ticking monitors and a welter of tubes and drains, tells him it’s a double.

It is night in the room, and in the shadows, there is a deeper shadow. Twin lights wink and glow yellow.

Bill shudders. Is that you?

He gropes for the buzzer to get help but it isn’t anywhere he can find. Nice wife, kids, they have a bigger house. He cries, “You can’t be here for me, it’s just an appendix!”

The black dog blinks but does not move. At least it’s still standing.

He doesn’t mean to whimper, but he does. “You don’t get it, I’m up for the network anchor job!”

Bark bark bark, why won’t the human stop barking and communicate? The black dog creates the silence into which thoughts can fall. In time the creature in the bed quits flailing and lets the words out. Don’t take me. The smell it gives off is feral, frantic. Not me, I’m young! I have so much to lose.

Exactly.

The human points to the next bed. Take him.

Still standing, the black dog considers. Nothing will happen until he sits down, and he is not ready.

Although his mission is preordained, he does not know what he will do now, now that they have come to the convergence, only that he and the barking human have been brought together for a reason.

Please.

It seems right to wait until he knows. All right.

He moves on to the other bed in the room and sits down. He sits until the old soul parts from the old body. For reasons the black dog is not built to contemplate, his bones rattle with foreknowledge.

Bill Siefert emerges from the hospital changed. He can’t say what drives him now but he has lost his ambition. His children find him indifferent. His wife says he is drifting.

This is not precisely the case. He is troubled, distracted. He has become cruelly aware of the multitude of scents, miseries and toxic humors of the people around him: the lump in his wife’s breast, the rales in the lungs of his producer.

It makes him frantic. Can he make her get a checkup so soon after the last one, and for no reason he can give her? Can he get his producer to the doctor in time to forestall his death, at least for now? He does not know. The pressure is terrible, the responsibility tremendous.

His narrow escape from the black dog troubles him. He is not so much changed as sensitized. Where he used to be self-contained and live his life however, he hears a chorus of outcries and farewell wails crowding in. It is like coming into a room where a million people are calling out to him.

Still, a man has to live his life and support his family, so painful as it is—the voices multiply, a million fingers clawing at his heart—Bill goes to New York with a DVD of his best newscasts for the last round of interviews with the Manhattan network affiliates. Only a strategic cocktail party stands between him and that spot as weekend anchor. Not what he wanted as a kid, but better than he expected.

The black dog is dying. He knows it now. This explains everything, but in his life in service, the black dog has never stopped for explanations. For now, he will do what the black dog does.

The top of New York. Siefert has retreated to the penthouse balcony at the top of the glittering network tower. He told them he needed time to consider the offer, but it was the pain that drove him out here, the pressure of the unexpected.  Alone for the first time since he arrived, he inhales air so cold that it’s like breathing distilled brandy. Maybe he is a little drunk. That must account for it. When he sees the black dog sitting on the wide cement rail with the wind lifting its shimmering hair he is not surprised. He isn’t even frightened.

The black dog blinks its yellow eyes. You know why I’m here.

He does. He doesn’t. Time to die? In a way, it would be a relief. He waits for the eyes to turn orange. Red. For it to finish him.

In your dreams.

He does not say, Why are you here? He doesn’t have to.

You’re not the agent I would have chosen.

“If it’s about that time I ran into you in the hall…”

The black dog turns its magnificent head to taste the wind and lets out a wild, exuberant cry. It’s your turn, the black dog either says, or doesn’t say. Then it is gone.

It won’t matter whether this last is spoken, dreamed or imagined. Siefert understands. Grimacing with unspeakable pain, he turns. Goes inside. Sits down in front of a network vice president.

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