Trull! he thought fiercely. To subject me to such affront, so disgusting a-He could not bear to think of what he had suffered at her hands. He was afraid the memories would turn him mad with rage. His hands pressed hard against the earthen floor. He could see his castoff clothes lying in a spurned heap within arm's reach. Carefully, so as not to make the smallest sound, he stretched out his hand for the thick black leather belt and the dagger in its sheath.

It was in his hand. A twist of his hips and he was on one knee, the spring of sole to earth and he was on her. The dagger breached her chest above a breast still bared.

Haldis sank to the floor, breath whistling in her throat, while Idonna shrieked and threw herself over her granddaughter's body. He barked for the crone to move away and gave her a kick in the ribs when she would not. Bones snapped and blood flowed from Idonna's mouth. Teeth bared, he snatched up the fireside stool and brought it down on the old woman's head once, and again, and again.

"She was dead . . . with the first blow." Haldis's voice snapped his gaze away from old Idonna's shattered skull. "A true . . . victor . . . conquers no more than . . . enough."

His arm snaked down to parody a lover's embrace as it wound itself around Haldis's waist and hauled her upright. She sagged against him, bleeding, but she still lived.

"That for your victory!" He spat in her face.

"Lord . . . " The word rasped from her chest. "Is this . . . thanks?"

"For what? For killing my men? For humiliating me? God's curse take you, and the devil, too, will you play games even now?"

"No game." Breath shuddered as the blood bubbled down. "I gave you . . . what you willed. Your daughter. Grown. Soon . . . soon grown." Another breath, shallow, wet. "Of a woman's size."

He had been to battle. He had heard the last breath leave many a man. Hers fled the flesh otherwise, as laughter. He growled a final curse and let the corpse drop.

He was just pulling on his tunic when he felt the first tentative movement in his belly. Wind, he thought, jerking on his trews. Damn me if I don't have that and the griping gut from the bitch's demon-brew.

He tried to pull the drawstring tight at the waist and found the ends would not meet over the swiftly swelling roundness. Smaller bulges poked out against the taut skin, subsided, moved to protrude in different places. He dropped to the bench, staring as his navel turned itself lazily inside out, then became a knot of flesh riding the humpback wave of his body.

When he read the purpose of the dead witch's spell in the small feet that kicked, the small hands that pummelled him mercilessly from within, he began to pray.

When he recalled her dying words, he began to scream.

JOYCE CAROL OATES.

In addition to being a respected novelist and story writer, playwright, and essayist, Joyce Carol Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. She has won the National Book Award and the Bram Stoker Award for Life Achievement in Horror Fiction. Her novel Zombie won The Boston Book Review Award for Fiction and the Bram Stoker Award. Her most recent books are We Were the Mulvaneys and First Love: A Gothic Tale. Her short stories have appeared in numerous genre and mainstream magazines and anthologies. She has three collections of dark fiction: Night-Side, Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, and Demon and Other Tales. She recently edited the anthology, American Gothic Tales.

Oates was inspired by the ballad version of "The Elfin-Knight," a story existing in different forms all over the world (including "Rumpelstiltskin"). Marina Warner, in From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, relates some of these variations. Generally, the pivotal character is a false suitor who kills the women he seduces. The heroine, often tested with impossible riddles, sometimes succeeds in tricking him, sometimes fails and dies (or loses her child). In the Netherlands, a medieval Dutch version has a bride disrobe to enter the sea, which is invoked as a bridal bed in which she will be drowned.

IN THE INSOMNIAC NIGHT.

by Joyce Carol Oates.

In the night, in the insomniac night, she lies in her bed whispering Sleep, sleep! But she isn't listening, listening instead to the sweet-mournful beat of the frothy briny greeny-bitter waves at the ocean's edge a half mile away in the night in the wind-buffeted liquidy moonlight spilling through partly closed venetian blinds onto the faded-wallpaper wall and a wedge of plaster ceiling shaped like an isosceles triangle floating. Moonlight calling to her, teasing. A man's face winking out of the moon. Where are your children? the voice asks pleasantly, and her reply is immediate and easy. Both are here beneath this roof, asleep in their beds, safe in the night, miles from all harm. For children are not inhabitants of the insomniac night. Children know nothing of the insomniac night. Sleeping deeply and innocently in ignorance. Holly who is eight, Mark who is five. Fatherless children. Yet happy children. Happy children because fatherless. Both beneath this roof in their rooms close by my own and tomorrow Sunday: church. In the old life of the city amid traffic, poison-exhaust, sirens rending the air like razor wire, there had been no church, not a thought of church, faith, God, community, Jesus meek and Jesus mild. And she herself nonbelieving, a skeptic. Yes and embarrassed. In the city in the old life. In the old life in the marriage. But the old life is past, is fled. Escaped. The old life is gone. Now the new life in the seaside town in the neat attractive stone-and-stucco slightly shabby bungalow on a street of similar bungalows inland from the ocean. Rented, leased in her name. In her name exclusively. Legally. Now the divorce is final, the custody suit settled. Mostly in her favor though of course the father, the ex-husband, has certain visitation rights. But now the children are in her care beneath a roof provided for them by her, by the mother. By this woman who is astonished with her unexpectedly fierce, possessive love for her children, like a lioness's for her cubs. She who had not seemed to herself as to others an inordinately maternal woman. But now this new life, this new adventure Once upon a time, a very special time, there was a mommy and a little girl and a little boy who came to live in a town near the Atlantic Ocean where it was said nothing had happened in a hundred years that was not something happy, a happy surprise. Except these nights, these autumn nights awake hearing the wind in the pines and the ragged clouds blown overhead scratching the pearly sky, hearing the beat beat beat of the waves against the pebbly shore that stir an old ache in her loins, an old weakness she would have wished to believe she'd overcome. Softly begging Sleep! oh please, for consciousness exhausts her, her weeks are strenuous bouts of commuting seventy miles to work, seventy miles back home, on weekends sleep is precious to her Try to sleep! for God's sake! what is wrong with you, Judith! even as her heart beats with a sullen stubbornness and her feet kick the bedclothes I don't want to sleep, God damn I want to run to fly through the night. Where the night will take me. Her long slenderly muscled runner's legs like the legs of a young horse primed to run, to run, to run. But she can't give in! Lying arms crossed still as the figure on the prow of a ship. Lying still, willing herself Sleep! for she is a single mother now, she must behave like an adult woman of thirty-two and not the irresponsible restless girl, the girl she is. Insomnia is a weakness to be overcome as she has overcome other weaknesses. Insomnia is not in her nature. In the old life in the city, in the failing miserable marriage to a man now a stranger to her were shameful sedative nights, sweaty oblivion nights of no dreams and by morning a mouth parched as if blistered and dazed headachy hours when for no reason her eyes leaked tears so Holly bit at her thumbnail Mommy why are you crying? and Mark pushed against her with his scared pouty whine Mommy! Stop that! But drugged sleep was not in her nature either. Nothing of weakness in her character is in fact her character. Except I want to be outside, to run, to fly through the night where the night will take me.

Finally, then, she gives in. Kicks off the bedcovers, rises and dresses swiftly, fastens her hair into a ponytail, puts on her running shoes. Her breath quickening like a child's on the verge of an adventure. Only for a half hour checking her watch which she wears night and day, rarely removes back by 1:40 A.M. This is the second time this week unless it's the third time she will slip away from the house too restless, too alert and yearning to sleep. How many times since moving to this quiet seaside town out of the old exhausting life of the city several months before. She ties the slightly frayed laces of the running shoes with mounting excitement, an anticipation of pleasure. Shoes that fit her long narrow feet so perfectly: like a caress. She smiles to think how ironic, how funny: these water-stained not-new shoes feel to her more loving than any man cupping her feet in his hands had ever been.

She'd several times glimpsed him following her with his eyes. Tracking her with his eyes. In town, once at the mini-mart. This place new to her at the edge of the ocean: Edgewater, New Jersey. A local handyman probably. Manual laborer judging by his walnut-dark skin. Carved-looking face. Black hair that looked smudged as tar. He was of less than average height for an adult man but compactly, solidly built. Thick neck. Upper body development like a boxer. Legs rather short, though by no means stunted. A muggy September day he'd been wearing a T-shirt that fitted his chest tightly and khaki shorts, unusually short shorts for a man. Hard sinewy-muscled thighs. Legs and arms covered in dark hairs that appeared imbricated, like an animal's pelt. His eyes easing upon her as she kept in motion, not slowing to look around. Never make eye contact with a stranger especially a strange man she'd gently cautioned both her children. Oh she couldn't be certain the walnut-dark man had actually been watching her, each of the several times was the sort of situation where you can't be certain. So simply ignore. Forget. In the corner of an eye. Watching? Can't know, so wisest not to imagine. Not to alarm. She was not an excitable woman, not any longer. Here in Edgewater, New Jersey, population 1,470. The seaside town with the pebbly beaches unlike most of the Jersey shore, not very popular with summer tourists. A place where nothing has happened in a long time, the real estate woman remarked, shaking her head. Median age fifty-nine and rising. Great place to bring up children, of course. The last time she'd seen the walnut-dark man, the man with the carved face and swath of tar for hair, she'd been hurrying to her car parked at the curb in front of the post office. Holly and Mark were in the car, a Saturday morning of errands in this new town at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, where there was always a wind, always the briny smell of the estuary. And each errand pleasurable in itself. This is our life now, our life, the three of us in Edgewater, New Jersey. Where the children's father, when he came every third weekend to take them away, Friday morning to Sunday evening, was an outsider, a temporary visitor not at ease as in the city in the old life. After the post office was the dry cleaner's, then the video shop another time to rent Pocahontas, then Oleander Farm at the outskirts of town, where there was apple slush, cinnamon doughnuts, a mule and goats and a Shetland pony and many cats for the children to pet. So she hadn't given a second thought to the walnut-dark man on the sidewalk tracking her with his eyes.

Nor thinking at that time, of course, that there might be any connection between him and the lead-colored Chrysler van. That looked as if it might have been a workingman's van once, sides now crudely painted over. There was a crescent moon in silver on the driver's door, not very skillfully rendered. She'd seen this vehicle once or twice in town without taking any special notice of it except casually Why is it parked there, motor running? for so many minutes? while she'd been in the drugstore patiently waiting for the elderly pharmacist to fill a prescription. In the whitish glare of hot autumn the lead-colored van's windshield was blinding, she couldn't see who sat behind the wheel or whether in fact there was anyone behind the wheel, at all.

Quietly she checks the children in their bedrooms. The bungalow is a single story with an unfinished attic, her bedroom and theirs at the rear of the house. Next to her bedroom is Mark's, not much larger than a walk-in closet. But a cozy comfortable room whose walls she'd painted herself, cornflower blue. And the luminous Mother Goose plastic night-light on the floor, reassuring should the child wake with a start not knowing where he is. In the town house in the city We don't want to coddle Mark, spoil him the children's father had warned. He will only see that darkness holds no terrors if he can experience darkness for himself. But she is the mother; it is she who makes decisions now. So the luminous Mother Goose burns nightly in a corner of the five-year-old's room. Where is the harm? no harm certainly. And how hard Mark is sleeping! as he'd done as an infant in the crib. Sunk in sleep so he seems scarcely to be breathing, and his skin clammy-pale as if his body's heat has been sucked inside by the tension of his pumping heart and organs. In that region of dreams to which his mother, leaning above his bed, has no entrance, knows herself excluded. Love I love you Mark-y, baby Mark-y. She dares to bend closer, brushing her lips against his warm forehead, and dares to tug up the blanket beneath his chin. Mark doesn't wake, of course, he sleeps so soundly. Next is Holly in her bed in her room across the hail from Mommy's bedroom, asleep too, silky pale gold hair like her mother's at that age but resembling her father in the set of the eyes, set of the chin. Her daughter, her miraculous firstborn. Out of what starry dust, what maze of unnameable uncountable atoms. Out of what unknowable void. What do babies dream? the mother had asked as Holly, as an infant, fell asleep nursing, and twitched and flailed her tiny fattish arms, clearly enthralled by some sort of dream. And Holly's father had said Obviously, babies don't dream, can't dream, lacking memory and language. No more than an animal can dream. And the mother who was a new, young mother bold and giddy and flirtatious and in love at that time with the baby and with the baby's father and with herself such a success had laughed How do you know, do you remember? and he'd said with a smile but in finality No of course I don't remember, haven't I said babies have no memory. Our daughter's brain is an emptiness ready to be filled.

Holly is now eight years old, a third grader. Beautiful child if at times touch-me-not. High-strung. Quick to tears, quick to rages. But she loves her mother, hugs her mother tight a dozen times a day. Mommy I love you Mommy when can I have a kitten? At Oleander Farm there are kittens to be adopted, but not just now. Holly's room is a little-girl's room the two of them had decorated together, sunflower curtains, pumpkin-colored shag rug, white plastic glow-in-the-dark Kitty Clock on the bureau. Her mother doesn't dare lean over to kiss Holly, Holly is a notoriously light sleeper. A frown flickering over her face in profile on the pillow like ripples on the surface of water. Again thinking as she backs out of the room, shuts the door silently What do children dream? feeling a stab of jealousy for never will she know.

Of course the windows to the children's rooms are locked, and the blinds drawn neatly to the windowsills. Every night without fail. Double locks on both the front and rear doors of the house though there is virtually no crime here in Edgewater, New Jersey.

Where's the harm? no one will know. In sweater, slacks, running shoes slipping outside through the kitchen door and locking it, the key wrapped in a tissue in her pocket for safekeeping. She will not run far, or long. In the night in the wind-buffeted insomniac night her route has been a rectangle of which the approximate center is the stone-and-stucco bungalow on Spruce Street, the children sleeping in their beds.

Her heart quickens in rapture: running!

What freedom, what bliss: running!

Out through the carport, out the narrow asphalt driveway and to the street and along the street of darkened houses in softened leaves lining the gutters and the fresh fragrance of the leaves stirred by her running feet, her heart beginning to beat strong and hard as a fist, confident in its rhythm, this speed matches her metabolism, this is the true rhythm of her being, this is where she belongs, not lying in bed beneath smothering covers trying to sleep, not helpless, not a passive cringing frightened woman: no longer. Running in the night in chill autumnal moonlight smelling of the estuary, of the ocean. This is my life, no one can deny me my life, I am not a mother only, I am a woman before I am a mother, and I was a girl before I was a woman. High overhead are wind-driven rags of clouds passing rapidly across the moon's winking face.

Why are you taking them so far away, it's a four-hour drive for me he'd complained bitterly. Her former husband yet not the children's former father. For he would always be their father, so long as he, and they, lived.

Only after the labor of birth, only after you've come home to your own private quarters bearing the precious gift of your baby, only then in the abrupt quiet and solitude of ceiling, walls, floor does the realization pierce you like a knife blade I am responsible for keeping it alive.

Alone she runs along darkened Spruce Street, past dim shapes of houses so similar to her own glimpsed in the corner of her eye they might be interchangeable, identical. It's October, it's night and gusty in chill liquidy moonlight, and her ponytail lifts and falls between her shoulder blades as she runs, swinging her slender-muscled arms, she runs, her fists lightly clenched, her feet flying lightly, touching the pavement and springing away, and on. And on. No one observing in the insomniac night she has claimed at last as her own. How happy I am, how free I am, no one knows where I am, who I am no one knows. Holly and Mark are safe in their beds in their snug rooms she, the mother, has provided for them. The other nights she'd slipped away to run they'd slept undisturbed, not knowing she was gone, suspecting nothing. Where's the harm?-all the doors and windows of the house are locked, her car is parked as usual beneath the carport so it would appear she's home; no intruder would dare try to enter.

Here in Edgewater, New Jersey. Where nothing has happened for a hundred years. Where nothing will happen, to alarm. The town that time forgot: Edgewater, New Jersey. As the real estate agent said with a wink.

Why can't I speak with my children without you monitoring our conversations on the phone he'd asked in a voice of aggrieved dignity, his scientist-voice by which as a young wife she'd been intimidated. But now empowered by distance she'd said quietly, just slightly provocatively, Of course when you're with them, when they're in your custody no one is monitoring you, but when they're in my custody, beneath my roof, the telephone, too, is beneath my roof, it's my responsibility isn't it? Unspoken between them were the bitter accusations she'd made and he'd denied, reiterated through their lawyers like echoes that reverberated without end. He said, making an effort to disguise his deep rage at her, Judith please, it isn't necessary for its to hate each other just because we no longer love each other and she'd laughed, stung, as if the man's words possessed still the capacity for hurt, she laughed Why not? and he said Judith? What? I didn't hear and she said You heard me clearly enough, Gabriel then rethought her position for of course she feared him, she feared him revenging himself upon her through the children, quickly relenting Of course we don't hate each other, we're civilized adults aren't we?

Still she continues to listen on the telephone extension when her ex-husband speaks with the children. Never can she imagine a time, her mind at ease, she will not be compelled to listen.

It isn't just their love, their allegiance he wants, but their souls. In all broken marriages it is the children's souls that are contested.

For though the man is her ex-husband and no longer shares her bed, he remains the children's father. DNA testing would confirm what she understands to be fact, fate. Out of what unfathomable void, what far-flung careening galaxies. Male seed, female egg. Brainless, eyeless. So simple! And the two children innocently linking them, so long as they both live.

Running in the night in the insomniac night she thinks of none of this. Truly.

In the night, in the wind-buffeted insomniac night, she runs. At the corner of Spruce and Highgate, passing the First Presbyterian Church of Edgewater; next morning at 10 A.M. she will take Holly and Mark to the Sunday school class in the basement, she'll eagerly attend services upstairs with the mostly retired, predominantly middle-aged and elderly congregation, only a scattering of women and fewer men her own age, she will make an effort to concentrate, to listen to the Reverend Heideman's drowsy sermon, she will hope to feel her heart expand with Christian compassion and elation as she sings from the hymnal glancing covertly right and left, hopefully You see?-I am one of you, no different from any of you. By night, however, the church that is a historic Edgewater landmark, built in 1841 of fieldstone and granite, appears scarcely recognizable. By wind-buffeted moonlight an awkwardly shaped mound of rubble, an untidy ruin beyond straggly trees, slovenly shrubs. What has happened to the church? Has she turned onto the wrong Street, confused in the darkness? But no: she recognizes the minister's house adjoining the church, she has visited that house, but it too appears changed, squat and misshapen as if its foundation has partly collapsed. Running in the street in the dark she can't slow to look more closely; fear touches her heart and she keeps her gaze resolutely ahead, telling herself it's imagination merely, her fevered imagination, what had her smug pathologist husband predicted for her-nervous collapse, dissolution of personality-if she'd persisted in filing for divorce, demanding primary custody of Holly and Mark. But she'd defied him, proved him wrong. How wrong, he has fully to learn.

From Highgate she turns abruptly onto South Main Street, altering her route. She's shaken, confused. Running now past streetlamps that burn with a faint yellow-tinctured light. Past the Edgewater library, past the fire station, past the township office-all darkened. The pharmacy, the dry cleaner's, the barber shop-darkened. Yet there is Gino's Pizzeria, which usually closes by 9 P.M. weekdays, 11 P.M. weekends, still open; a few doors away, Edgewater Video is open, too, in fact glaring with light. Patrons in both places are mostly teenagers, she sees. High-school kids, here and there a familiar face-a girl named Sandy who'd baby-sat for her, a tall curly-haired boy named Todd, who's mowed her lawn. But most of the kids are strangers, hanging about on the sidewalk, idly smoking, drinking from cans, laughing raucously. She's surprised, disapproving-isn't Edgewater supposed to be a quiet village, not a gathering place for rowdy adolescents? She crosses the street, not wanting to pass too close to them, but sees nonetheless, to her discomfort, that several of the loutish long-haired boys are staring at her, grinning-as if they know her?-do they know her?-and on the steps of the video rental is a bevy of girls, startlingly young girls, in tank tops and jeans as if it's a summer night not a chill October night. The girls slyly cut their eyes at her, too, ducking and giggling, for they're passing what appears to be a joint among them, one of them a slender pale blond child so resembling Holly that Holly's mother blinks in astonishment, immediate denial No: impossible without hesitating for an instant in her running, head turned resolutely away and eyes fixed ahead, a sick trembling inside her But no: impossible and she does not glance back, she's eager to be gone from Main Street, which has been a mistake on a Saturday night and one she won't repeat.

Except: she'd jogged through downtown Edgewater last weekend, hadn't she, at midnight, it was deserted as a ghost town.

Except: the child wasn't Holly, at least eleven, twelve years old hardly an eight-year-old, calm down you're imagining things, just calm down the pathologist-husband's voice admonishes not unkindly. In fact Judith had scarcely glimpsed the girl's face, only the silky pale gold hair, so lovely, so like Holly's. Of the very hue her own had been, at that age.

The pathologist, the dissector. Amateur photographer. Fussy with his cameras, Please don't touch my cameras. Posing the children, developing his own prints, a perfectionist. How many portraits of her, the attractive smiling young wife so long as she was young. Why did you ever love me if you can't love me now? In such awe of him when first they'd met, she an undergraduate, nineteen years old, dismayed by organic chemistry, and he her section instructor, Gabriel, the very name Gabriel, great-winged angel bearer of celestial wisdom, Gabriel. Six years older than Judith but of another generation, in his presence she'd felt her personality so undefined, anxious, simply dissolve like vapor, felt her heart beat calmly as if with his magician's fingers he'd reached into her rib cage to cup it. But this isn't love, this is a place you've walled me up inside, and the children, please don't claim this is love. The past several years he'd taken up videotaping as a hobby, mostly of the children of course, something fanatic in his zeal to record, record, record. By then she'd ceased loving him but not fearing him. Yet daring to object to the videotaping, Holly's seventh birthday and the child was overexcited, feverish with Daddy's attention, exactitude, Don't you believe anything is real unless you've measured it and recorded it? and he'd retorted as if she'd asked an idiotic question at the end of a lecture Every attribute of a thing increases its reality, every truth we can discover about a thing defines it more precisely and she smiled angrily Are our children things? Are we things? and he said We share "thingness" with all matter, animate or inanimate. Of what do you imagine we're composed, Judith, except matter? The difference between us is that you seem to be ashamed of such facts while I, a scientist, consider them profound. She laughed, stung. Profound!-the fury in the man's face shut like a fist, steely eyes behind the lenses of his glasses narrowed in contempt of her, a mere woman: female body: unexpectedly resistant to his instruments of dissection. She said stammering It's dead matter you love! Not living people, it's dead matter you love! Lashing out at him where he stood watching her the children hushed, in the next room surely listening. How she hated losing control, a woman losing control to a man as if surrendering her very body's heat to his as in his authority he sucked it from her like that species of giant water spider sucking life from frogs anesthetized by spider venom. It's deadness you love! Where nothing changes, everything is fixed!-she stammered, not knowing what she said as with a show of patience Gabriel blew his nose, left nostril first, then the right, fastidiously then refolding the handkerchief to return to his pocket. He said There's where you're mistaken, Judith calmly, with professorial logic "Dead matter" is not permanent, it changes as much as, or more than, "life matter." Its chemicals break down, it decomposes, as fascinating a process as "composing," I assure you-if you aren't blinded by convention, or your own narrow womanly perspective.

Yet she'd won. In the end, the woman won. Taking the children from the man who'd been her husband for nearly ten years. Going into debt for thousands of dollars, borrowing to pay her lawyer, convinced she was right, would be vindicated. Gabriel had fought her, yet principled as he was, adamant in egoism, he had been forced to admit in court that his work schedule and his work addiction made it unlikely he'd be able to spend as many hours weekly with the children as she spent with them even with her commuting and her work. The judge, a black woman, had openly sympathized with the mother in this instance; there'd been a revolution in certain quarters regarding single mothers who worked. Judith had won, or nearly-she had not complete custody of the children, of course, the father had visitation rights, and had expressed satisfaction with the judgment. Not to the judge nor to the lawyers but in an undertone to Judith, smiling, shrugging Well!-the children will be for my older years, then. I have plenty of time in which to win them.

Beyond the estuary of the shallow Millstone River, smelling faintly of garbage rumored to be dumped by night, a harsher undercurrent of chemicals from factories many miles upstream, Judith is running now on the Shore Road, the third side of the rectangle. On previous nights this mile-long stretch beside the ocean has been the high point, the most pleasurable part of her run, despite the perpetual wind; tonight, already she's beginning to tire, her breath has lost its rhythm, there's a twinge of pain in her left knee. The Shore Road is gravel and sand and mud, she can't seem to find solid ground running in patches of darkness as, with a faint sound of jeering laughter, shreds of clouds race across the moon. Nonresidents of Edgewater, city people, own most of the property on this road, summer "cottages" large as houses, or mansions; all are shut for the season. Yet Judith sees, or thinks she sees, lights burning here and there, hears voices, outbursts of laughter. Drunken parties, at this time of year? She ignores such distractions, concentrates on her running, her breathing, her control.

In the night, in the insomniac night where sudden shadows loom gigantic and in the next instant vanish, much is exaggerated, Judith knows.

Thinking Not Holly, don't be ridiculous. Not my daughter not now not ever.

In the corner of her eye seeing, not seeing. What is it?-a vehicle parked in the dunes. Headlights off. On a beach trail amid tall rushes, whipped by the wind. She refuses to acknowledge it, will not be alarmed. The vehicle might be abandoned; if anyone is in it, probably they're teenagers, lovers aroused by moonlight; caught up in passion, sexual need, like water swirling deliriously down a drain; unaware of their surroundings, certainly of a lone woman jogging along the Shore Road. If the vehicle is a rusty lead-colored van, its sides painted over so the original words, like cuneiform, are indecipherable, she does not see. Don't be ridiculous. Look straight ahead, mind your own business. Yet forced to recall how early that morning the telephone had rung and she'd lifted the receiver to silence-a human, palpable silence. Whispering Gabriel? Is that you? Seeing her former husband's face: glinting eyeglasses, stubborn set of the jaw. Gabriel? Please don't do this. I'm going to hang up now. He wasn't to pick up the children until a week from Friday, he wouldn't violate that agreement-would he? A man of his professional stature and reputation would not risk any sort of embarrassing domestic scandal-would he? But that afternoon, a disturbing incident she'd since forgotten, odd she'd forgotten it for it had infuriated her at the time: she'd brought Mark to the Edgewater library for a children's reading hour, and afterward, crossing the street to her car, Mark's moist fingers securely in hers, she'd glanced up to see him-him: the walnut-dark man: and in that instant the realization came to her Of course!-he's an emissary of Gabriel's. A spy, a threat. A reminder. A warning. She wanted to shout Leave us alone! You have no right, I'll call police! I know who you are. But of course she said nothing, dared say nothing. Casting the gnomish creature a scathing look as he seemed almost to be preening himself, displaying himself, only a few yards from the rear of her car, one foot up on a sidewalk bench as he drank from a can-slowly, sensuously, even as his shiny eyes raked over her with a look of blatant sexual assessment. He wore teenage apparel as if in mockery of his age, which was not young, Judith's own age at least-bleached cutoff jeans ragged to his muscular thighs, one of those ugly mustard-yellow sweatshirts with WETLANDS SUCK in black script. Judith flinched at his scrutiny, tugging at Mark, who stared at the man, unpredictable Mark lifting a hand to wave at him, at a malevolent stranger, in that way her younger child had of abrupt indiscriminate friendliness: Hi!

Judith plunged away with him, breathless into the car, fumbling to jam the key into the ignition, slapping at her protesting son, scolding Bad! Bad! Haven't I told you never to-never to so much as look at strangers!

The memory returns to her now, vivid and jarring. It isn't an exaggeration to worry that the walnut-dark man has driven the van out here to await her, knowing her itinerary-is it? Don't think, don't think such things. He will have triumphed if you do. She runs by, runs past. Bold, indifferent. Seeing how by moonlight the beach appears coarse and riddled as a lunar landscape, crevices and debris and sunken patches like quicksand and a lacy reeking mantel of long-tendriled glistening things that must be jellyfish, a terrible invasion of jellyfish along the Jersey coast, appalling, mysterious. Such mass deaths, desolation: the purposelessness of nature: a frenzy of reproduction, crazed life brought into being but fleetingly, much of it turned immediately back to pulp, protoplasm. What is the point of it? Judith had more than once inquired of her husband, bemused, yet disturbed, at similar anomalies in nature in the early days of her marriage to a man she'd believed to be a man of wisdom as well as merely of facts. And Gabriel had said, not unkindly, Judith, questions about the "point" of things in nature suggest wishful thinking on the part of the questioner. And Judith said, with a despairing little laugh, But can't there be a point, a purpose, in nature, as well as just a "wish" in the questioner? And Gabriel laughed, kissed her as he might have kissed a charmingly impertinent child.

Yes, those shapes are jellyfish, or their remains. Luminous by moonlight as if somehow still alive. And here and there amid tangled debris a glisten of dead fish, animal carcasses, bleached detached bones. Though Judith knows these things aren't human in any way human, merely creaturely remains cast up by the waves, she has to look quickly away. When first she'd brought her excited children to hike along the Edgewater shore the previous spring, at the time she'd signed the lease for the house, the state had just completed a massive cleanup after a devastating winter, and the shoreline had been beautiful in its modest way, hospitable for wading if not for swimming; by late summer, pollution and hurricane damage had altered it considerably. Erosion, inches each year, how many inches the entire Atlantic seacoast. Inexorable, inevitable. As life sucks at life, building up in one place even as another is depleted, exhausted. I have plenty of time in which to win.

The van's motor has started, the headlights have been switched on. Judith tries not to panic hearing the vehicle bounce over the dunes and down onto the road; headed in her direction; approaching her but not passing; keeping a distance of perhaps thirty feet; teasing? taunting? or out of courtesy not wanting to pass too close to her? She's running at the very edge of the road, refuses to run in the ditch. Refuses to break suddenly and run onto someone's property, into a marshy field, hide in underbrush like a hunted animal, try to escape her pursuer. Suddenly she's covered in sticky sweat, she can smell herself; her hair loose, slipped from the ponytail and whipping in the wind. Why! why had she come out to this lonely place, at such a time of night? Leaving her sleeping children behind, what could she have been thinking of? Any punishment, you know you'll deserve. The van's brash bright glaring headlights sweep onto her exposing her straining body as in an X-ray.

But Judith manages to run as before, or nearly. Trying not to limp so the driver of the van won't know there is anything wrong. As if she isn't frightened either. As if this-the loneliness, the late hour, the teasing pursuit-is nothing remarkable, nothing she can't handle. And finally at the intersection of the road with a narrower road leading inland the driver of the van speeds up to pass her and she swallows hard feeling a thrill of terror she'll be struck, killed instantly as the motor's roaring grows louder and louder and she can't stop herself stumbling into a ditch screaming as with a blare of its horn and derisive male laughter the van rushes past.

Leaving her sobbing in relief, cringing in pain at the side of the road, her ankle twisted.

Please don't make me hate you, hatred is exhausting.

A woman does not exult in hating: not like a man.

Wish only that he. Not death exactly, but.

Yes if he'd disappear! Simply-cease to exist.

Several times since moving to Edgewater she has had the dream and it leaves her faint with shame, excitement. In a foreign country, India perhaps, somewhere she has never visited, he has died-attending one of his science conferences, all expenses paid. But he has died, is dead. Is vanished. It seems that the funeral (funeral pyre? cremation?) has already been held, and the burial. No need for her and the children to attend. The body has been cleanly disposed of, the man himself erased. Ashes, dust. Bones rising from the earth as plumes of powdery smoke.

Of course the children would grieve for their father, for a while; and then forget. As children do. Healthy children.

Except. That incident of several weeks ago, alone and possibly she'd been drinking (only wine, only a few glasses) and she'd fallen asleep on the sofa anxious, headachy in sleep awaiting the children's safe return, Sunday promptly by 8 P.M. he must return her children to the door of the rented house like clockwork and he and she exchange civil words like the civil, civilized adults they are but afterward, at bedtime, she smelled-what?-ether?-sweet sickish odor in their hair and on their clothes, no mistaking it. Suddenly frantic questioning the little girl Holly what did he do to you? Oh God, Holly-your father-what did he do to you and Mark? tearing at their clothes to examine them, their small quivering naked bodies, until Holly began to cry pushing at her mother's hands and Mark ran from her crying and she was left dull-eyed squatting on her heels her hair in her face realizing it must have been a dream. Not the dream of his death but that other so ugly she could only barely recall it by day. Confusing a dream with-whatever this is surrounding us.

Once upon a time, a very special time, there was a mommy and a little girl and a little boy who. Nothing not happy, a happy surprise. In the night in the insomniac night breathless and limping returning at last to the stone-and-stucco bungalow on a street whose name she has forgotten in a state of dread and guilt for it's very late-by her watch 2:20 A.M.-much later than she'd intended to stay out. And seeing with a shock of horror a light burning in a window at the rear of the house. One of the children's rooms: Mark's. She hurries panting to the window to peer inside, pushing away brambles, unable to see anything at first because the venetian blind is shut but she hears sounds, children's squeals, a man's deep teasing-cajoling voice, it's Gabriel? Gabriel with the children? taking advantage of her absence, her carelessness? Judith leans against the window managing to catch a glimpse through the blind's slats of pale naked squirming flesh, child-flesh, a man's straining back, video camera in his hands, she screams No! Stop! bringing her fist against the window pounding through the screen until the glass cracks, then she's at the back door but the door is locked! fumbling with her key the key in her fingers slippery with sweat but she manages to unlock the door, he'd forgotten to double-bolt it from inside, she's rushing through the darkened house as the floor tilts drunkenly beneath her as in an earthquake, she slams open the door to Mark's room crying No! Stop! I'll kill you! but to her amazement Mark is alone curled beneath the covers of his bed, only the Mother Goose lamp on the floor emits its gentle light and she switches on the overhead light furious and baffled seeing that the man is gone, the father has escaped, with a start the child wakes and opens his eyes blinking in a pretense of surprise and alarm as his mother shakes him Where is he? what have you been doing together? I saw you! I saw you! shaking the child's thin shoulders, hugging him tight against her, she's weeping angrily, sees his pajamas are back on, hurriedly Gabriel must have dressed their son and of course the child will protect the father as always, they are in league against her. She drags Mark into Holly's room again slams open the door, fumbles to switch on the overhead light seeing her daughter in a pretense of white-faced wide-eyed terror sitting up in bed, clutching the quilt to her chin Mommy? Mommy what's wrong? as Judith tears the quilt from her believing the little girl naked but in fact Holly, too, is wearing her pajamas, exactly as Judith had left her hours before, which upsets and infuriates Judith to know that the father and the children have plotted together so shrewdly! so capably! as if not for the first time. She has pushed Mark onto Holly's bed, she has seized both struggling children in her arms, she will protect them, she has driven their father away, always it will be within her power, the mother's power, to drive the father away, weeping hot bitter tears Thank God! Thank God! You're safe!-knowing one day the hysterical children would realize what it was, their mother had saved them from.

STEVE RASNIC TEM.

Steve Rasnic Tem lives in Colorado. His novel Excavations was published in 1987, but he is better known for his fantasy and horror short stories and poetry. He won the British Fantasy Award in 1988 for his story "Leaks." He has recently edited an anthology of writing by Colorado writers, called High Fantastic. His poetry has been published in Blood is Not Enough, Psychos, and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror.

Tem's poem "The Little Match Girl" is based on the tragic Hans Christian Andersen story of the same title.

THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL.

by Steve Rasnic Tem.

"Fire-fill your eyes with fire," the dead lady guides and the granddaughter follows with fingers seared by Father's hard kiss.

"Fire!" the dying girl sings to snowflakes bursting with heart-felt flame. She's waltzing through curtains of burning, each match alive with good fathers, warm meals, homes where she might sleep, and now a mother unlike the cold one whose sorrow melts with secrets held so long her arms had no more room for children. "Fire!"

she cries to rich houses blazing from bitter firewood the poor sold them for pennies and the girl frozen in the pale light promised by a dead match.

GARRY KILWORTH.