Silhouette

The wild storm of the night before had passed by the time I woke. It was still early, around 5:30. The world outside remained shrouded in gloom. Rising, I made my way to the kitchen, keeping quiet, thinking about the work I wanted to finish that day. Thinking also about Dan, who slept in a tousle of blankets on the sofa.

He'd arrived late the night before, having taken the Daylight Limited from Los Angeles.

"Such a late arrival," I exclaimed when he told me this. "Was the train delayed?" The Daylight was, after all, scheduled to run during... well, daylight.

"The train arrived hours ago," he said. "I wandered around the city, not sure I should actually come to you... but... well, here I am."

At first I couldn't get him to explain why he was in town, or even how he'd gotten to San Francisco from clear across the country. He'd seemed jittery and frightened, smudges under his eyes speaking to a string of sleepless nights.

Well, he was sleeping now. I busied myself with breakfast preparations. Farina would be a good choice on a dark, chilly morning like this one. Toasted Vita Weat with oleo would make for a nice side. Tea? I recalled Anglophile Dan preferring Darjeeling to ordinary Lipton's, but I had none. What I did have was a small supply of Earl Grey. I bet myself he'd like its exotic citrus flavor. I put the kettle on the stove, then rooted in a cupboard for the tin of Twining's, the teapot, and the strainer.

Dan and I were old college friends who had stuck with each other in spite of everything -- the Great Depression, the Second Great War, and all the thousands of miles that separated us once I settled in San Francisco while he stayed in New York. Dan was now a poet with a berth at a city college. I made a living illustrating children's books under my own name, with some supplemental income derived under a nom de plume from providing horror stories and sex novels with much darker, more graphic, and more artistically fulfilling artwork.

Lately, I had developed an even more unsavory taste; at least, that was the attitude of many of the artists I knew. I'd begun to contract for artwork on comic books. The form appealed to me; cinematic and literary in equal measure, I considered comic books to be a medium with serious potential just waiting to be tapped. For the moment, I would have to tolerate the juvenile, boy-centered sensibilities of the form, but somehow I felt that I might some day make a name for myself in this visually rich form of story telling.

Folding a pair of napkins and tucking spoons into their soft folds, I reviewed the projects awaiting me on the drawing table, which was looking cluttered. For each finished drawing I sell, I'll have made two or three dozen sketches and studies; each attempt gives me insight and details that I like. From one drawing I'll take a pair of eyes; from another, an arm in just such a position, with a coat-sleeve or sheer gown draped exactly so. Mine was a slow and steady process.

Dan, by contrast, tended to court and coax his poems, taking his time in getting to know the ideas and themes. Then he would strike, dashing out lines feverishly. This tended to make of him the proverbial ink-stained wretch. Dan eschewed many modern things, including fountain pens; he preferred to use old-fashioned pens, the sort that have to be dipped into inkbottles. His fingertips were perpetually blackened, and tiny spots were always on his shirts, sometimes even on his neck and face.

But not when he showed up the previous night, February 23, 1947. He appeared at my door as spectral and clean as a ghost, as a huge storm raged above the city and the electric lights flickered uncertainly. Dan was soaked when he stepped into my tiny house. Apart from his drowned appearance, the first thing I noticed was the wild look in his eyes, matched by his strained and watchful expression and his agitated demeanor.

Dan had fled New York City a few days before and made his way across the continent by way of an erratic chain of hitchhiked rides and train journeys. When I asked him why he hadn't taken TWA, he grew very still, and then dropped onto the settee between my drawing table and the sofa. I realized the answer for myself: Air travel was far too technologically advanced and frightening for him.

But that was only part of the reason. Taking my hands in his own very white ones (unnatural looking on him), he gazed into my eyes, as if trying to see whether he could... or should... confide in me his troubles.

Of course he could. Closer to me than either of my two brothers, almost a husband -- though a gay husband, what we called "homophile" or a "temperamental" in those years -- he could tell me anything, and, over the last two decades, he had.

"Jane," he said at length, "I'm being pursued. Or maybe a better word is haunted."

"By... a ghost?" I asked him, unsure if he might be speaking metaphorically.

"By darkness," he said. "Darkness that has taken shape and agency."

***

Gradually, I got him settled down. I hung his coat in the hall near the front door. I made consomm� while he smoked one cigarette, then lit up another. I served him when the broth was ready. He sipped at a few spoonfuls, and some color crept into his face. Slowly, he started talking. I listened and prompted, and eventually he poured it all out to me -- the whole strange tale.

It started off as a trifling anecdote about his writer's block. He suffered from it from time to time; all writers do, I suppose. Really, it shouldn't be called writer's block, because anyone whose trade involves artistic creation is subject to it: A sense that there's nothing left in the psyche, no passion, no vision, no urgency of voice. I've had my struggles with it. Sometimes a drawing will flow from me, complete and perfect in geometry and gesture; sometimes, the work of discovering and then assembling all those tiny details becomes monstrous, too overwhelming to face.

Similarly, Dan would sometimes find that no matter how still he became, no matter how closely he listened, there was no quarry in the forest of his imagination. He'd force himself to write anyway -- find a theme, even a familiar one, and determine by rote what imagery to use, how to structure lines and verses, what rhyme scheme to use (if any), which meter would best serve. He confided to me that his poem "Palimpsest" had been written in this way -- the poem that won the Kinglsey Tufts and the Strind Award.

"Don't tell the committees," he'd joked.

Dan had been working through his block in this way for two weeks, and, one quiet evening, snow outside his window blanking out the city and creating a private world of snug warmth and mental insularity, he'd rifled through the pages scattered on his desk and worked up two pages that seemed decent enough. Dan always took great pride in his penmanship; he'd spent over an hour getting the lines down, trying, by dint of his slow work, to tempt inspiration to return.

Dan always said that his was an impatient muse, but she seemed to be paying him no mind right then. His painstaking copy-work done, Dan had gone to the kitchen and prepared some tea. When he returned, he reached for his favorite cup, always perched on a corner of the desk, and as he did so his sleeve brushed an open bottle of ink.

The ink, of course, spilled all over the pages Dan had just completed. With a cry of panic, Dan leapt up, fumbled the bottle, and managed to slosh ink all over everything in range: The desk, the teacup, himself.

A poet doesn't need to resort to common cursing, and Dan has always had a talent for venting his spleen in creative ways. I smiled despite myself to think of the peals of invective he must have thundered as he stormed to the kitchen for cloth rags and a cup of warm water. His muse, wherever she was, must have been shocked... or, perhaps, she inspired him to new heights.

He set about blotting, scrubbing, and attempting to salvage; he managed to save the desk and chair from too much staining (not that it mattered, the years having marked them with plenty of errant pigment), but the fresh new pages... the hard-won, scant pages... they were lost.

Dan considered starting over again, sifting through fragments and scribbles to identify and refine promising snippets, but the process wasn't going to repeat itself and he knew it. Suddenly overcome with futility, Dan simply sat on the floor and drew his knees to his chest.

"This mood had been building for some time," he told me, sipping his broth on my settee, a blanket covering his shoulders. While other poets might have welcomed the cloud of hopelessness and failure that descended over him, making it a point to glean lessons on mortality and the human condition, not so Dan; he needed clear skies and sunshine for his work. "It was probably those very feelings, incipient and sinister, that undermined me from the start," Dan said. "They darkened everything: My words, my thoughts, my spark."

There were a number of underlying reasons for his frame of mind. Dan was forty-two years old, about to turn forty-three in April. He was still single, and he worried that he always would be. Not that he was lonely -- he always had his thoughts and visions to keep him company. But he worried that those old Biblical words about a man needing companionship were true, and that he was somehow incomplete for being all on his own.

Back then, of course, men like him were seen as perverted and criminal by nature. Dan had a hard time with that prejudice. There were already men and women who pushed back and lived defiantly, more or less openly homophile; but Dan wasn't the sort of to live boldly. His courage and his strength lay on the page, all his inner resources directed to his art. Nor was Dan the sort who could countenance a sham marriage for the sake of appearances. We had explored that option years ago.

Forty-three isn't a bad age for a man to have to stop and examine his life in the light of time's passage, youth's sunlight fading and shadows slanting noticeably toward oncoming dark. At least, that was how I tried to reassure him that stormy midnight. I was thinking that he was going through some typical male neurosis about a loss of youth and virility and he might benefit from an ego-fluffing, something women do for each other on a regular basis. My old friend needed some love. Even better, he needed a stiff shot or two. But when I offered him some whiskey, he declined... to my surprise. Dan liked a drink, and I stocked good Scotch.

"Jane, you don't understand," he said, his eyes intense. "I haven't told you yet..."

"Told me what?" I asked him.

"The shape," he whispered, "The silhouette."

***

The silhouette?

I thought back to our college years. Dan and I had gone on a lark around New England during the Easter Holiday of 1926, posing as young marrieds so as not to turn heads. We shopped for knick-knacks, scarves thrown around our necks. We cuddled close under goose-feather comforters in the freezing old rooms of bed and breakfasts, fondling and making love in the darkness when sorrow and grief paid call. Though we might not ordinarily have been each others' first choice for sexual partnership, there was love and tenderness between us that translated easily into the comfort of the flesh.

We were mourning the death of a beautiful man we both loved. Jack was Dan's closest friend, and when Dan and I met it was natural that I, too, would befriend Jack. Natural, also, that he might take an interest in me, the blonde and pretty young girl I was.

Jack was magic, magnetic, brilliant in body and soul. His green eyes danced with life; his conversation was droll and witty; his glossy black hair framed a strong, handsome face. An "All American boy," that's what they called young men like Jack. You'd see his like smiling from Army recruitment posters during the Great War. That he took a shine to me was so surprising and flattering that I fell into his arms without protest, thinking myself the luckiest of all girls. A year and a half later, older and more mature, I had come to know myself better. I loved Jack, but not the way a woman should love her husband. I didn't want to lose his friendship, but I couldn't lead him on.

How much I did lose. Not just Jack's friendship, but... Jack. We both lost him, and in his absence Dan and I drew closer together, closer than ever.

While we were in New England, Dan took an interest in the local tradition of the silhouette -- a meticulously cut likeness of a person's profile, done with black paper and then mounted on a white backdrop. Easter fell on Dan's birthday that year, April 4; the following day, he splurged and had silhouettes made of each of us. He presented me with mine as a memento of the trip. I still had it, framed and hanging on my bedroom wall. Had he kept the one of himself? Did its unchanging lines remind him that time was taking its toll, his hairline inching back along his scalp, his neck losing its corded boyishness as a second chin gradually gathered?

"That night, I fell asleep sitting on the floor, slumped up against the book cabinet," Dan told me. "When I woke up, it was around two or three in the morning. And that's... that's when I saw it. The shape -- the silhouette."

I understood then that he wasn't talking about the paper cutout.

***

After waking on the floor, stiff and out of sorts, Dan dragged himself up and sat at his desk. He was tempted to go to bed and deal with the aftermath of the ink catastrophe in the morning. But his worrying, fretful nature caused him to put off retiring for just a little longer, just long enough to survey the damage one last time. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad after all.

Seated at his desk, Dan sighed and looked at his ruined papers. Then he startled awake, cold and confused.

The pages before him were pristine and blank. There was no sign of spilled ink, nor any sign of lines set out in his careful Copperplate handwriting. There was nothing on those pages, nothing at all.

Dan shuffled the papers and then turned them over. He opened desk drawers; he tipped over his waste paper basket. Nothing: No sign of the pages he'd marred with spilled ink. No sign of the written words, the strikeouts and scribbled revisions, none of the marginal diagrams he'd idly doodled.

Pure, untouched pages. As if new from the package, except that they bore tiny crumples, bent corners, even a minor tear here and there. He knew the way the left-hand edge of one particular sheet wavered; he'd held it tightly for three-quarters of an hour, his sweat spoiling the page's flat, neat line.

Dan noticed something else, too: The stains on his desk had vanished. Not just the spatters and blotches from the night's earlier mishap, but all of them. The varnish was rubbed off in patches and scratched here and there; it was still his familiar old desk. But years of accumulated ink that had dripped and dribbled from his pens or soaked through his pages had simply disappeared.

Dan studied his fingers -- too clean, he saw; no dark stain there either, not even under his nails. His shirt was rumpled from having been worn for two days and slept in, but the tiny specks of ink that forever marred his cuffs were absent.

Dan checked the tiny bottle, thinking that perhaps all the ink had, through some strange, improbable occurrence, gathered itself back into the glass. But the bottle was empty. More than empty; it was perfectly clean -- not a dried fleck around the rim, not a glazing of pigment. His pens, too, the nibs always stained dark: They were virginally unblemished.

At a loss, Dan let his eyes stray around his desk, looking for answers. Then he caught a wisp of movement and glanced up from the desk, focusing on the middle of the room where... where it stood, black and featureless, like a hole punched in the air.

Dan simply sat there and looked at it, not comprehending. Then he swiveled his desk lamp, shining light at the form. It was not mere shadow to be dispelled by the light; it stood there, a full human shape in outline but with no depth, featureless and flat, a black shadow standing in empty space with no body to cast it.

That was when Dan understood: It was the ink! The ink had drawn itself into this form, and now it stood there expectantly, as though waiting for him...

"I jumped up," Dan told me, "and scuttled against the wall to get around the thing, to get to the door. It didn't move, except to rotate as I circled around, as if watching me. And so black! Not a gleam, not a dull reflection, nothing. It was a void."

"A void... made of ink," I said.

"Yes," Dan said, insistently. "It was my exact size, my exact shape, as if tailored to me. It was like my personal hole in existence, just waiting to fit itself over me and blot me out. When I circled around the thing, I could catch in glimpses how flat it was, see for a moment the razor-thin edges of its boundaries. It barely moved, and yet it seemed to be fixated on me."

"Dan..."

"I ran," he said. "I grabbed my coat from the hook and slammed the door behind me. I never even locked it. Thieves could have looted the place by now. Not that it matters... I don't know if I can ever go back. If I survive, I mean."

"Why wouldn't you survive?" I asked him. "Dan, sweetie... don't you think it was probably just a dream?"

"Right," he said, with a weak laugh. "What else would it have been? I walked around until dawn, thinking it must have been all in my imagination. But I kept seeing it in my memory... hovering there in the middle of the room, swiveling to keep a bead on me as I moved around it against the wall. Swiveling, its edges fluttering a little bit. Flat and black. So black. What kind of dream could that be? Have you ever had a dream like that?"

"No," I said. "But I once dreamed I was being chased by a man made of fire. Like your ink-man, your void-man." That dream of the man-shaped fire had been during our New England lark. Dan's young male body had given off positively enormous heat, and tangled together naked as we were under the down comforter, I had sometimes felt as though I were ensconced in an inferno.

"But a dream," Dan objected, "a dream stops. Once you wake up, it stops. I didn't even have this dream until I was wide awake."

"Or maybe not. Dan, the white pages? That's impossible, too. It was all part of the same dream."

"And I woke up running down the hall," he said. "Running down the stairs, into the street, coat in hand."

"Why not?" I asked him. "Couldn't you have been walking in your sleep?"

He smiled at me, a weary smile, as though he'd had all these thoughts himself, many times. "I did a little coffee crawl around the neighborhood," he said. "Well, if you count halfway to Uptown as still being in my neighborhood. You know how they say you can get anything in New York at 2:00 a.m.? It's true, but they don't tell you how hard to you have to look for it.

"I ended up at this nice little place," he continued. "A little too modern for my tastes: Black and white linoleum, a jukebox, gleaming chrome fixtures, everything that should have been in an establishment like that. I was drinking coffee, cup after cup, just to be sure I really was awake. And then I saw it."

"The shape?" I asked him. "The silhouette?"

"It was behind the door," he said. "No one else seemed to see it. I didn't want to act crazy. I thought, I'm nervous and deprived of sleep and starting to get the jitters. But then I noticed the notice board."

"You noticed the -- the notice board?" It wasn't like him to use words repetitively. And what was a notice board?

"A, you know, a cork board. For notices."

I sometimes forgot he'd lived in England until he was fifteen. He didn't sound like a limey, but he still retained certain British words and turns of phrase.

"A bulletin board," I supplied. It was so like Dan, so like a poet, to have eighteen words at the ready for the concept of the "celestial," but not know what a "notice board" was called in America.

I reached for the bottle and glass Dan had declined. If he wasn't going to have a slug, I was.

"The cork board, the... the bulletin board... it was full of notices people had pinned up," Dan was saying. "Flyers, posters, all that sort of thing. They were starting to disappear. Not the pages, I mean, just..."

"The ink?" I interrupted, startled, jamming the cork back into the whisky bottle with the heel of my hand.

"Yes, and -- and so, I ran out the back door."

I could only imagine his flight through the caf�, the chaos he probably left in his wake as he shot through the kitchen.

"So there I was in the alley and it was getting to be dawn. I headed for the subway. I was riding the subway and after a while I started to see it again... down the car a ways... It looked wispy at first, but it got darker and more evident, drawing ink from the poster ads in the car. But only the black ink, mind you... the colored inks remained intact."

I tried to imagine it: Posters losing their text, illustrations losing the black outlines that penned in shapes of red and yellow, green and blue.

Dan met my eyes with his bloodshot own. "I could hardly take my eyes off it," he said. "I glanced around the train, to see if anyone else noticed it, but there was only one other man on board, and he was drowsing. I started to feel cornered. I jumped off to switch trains. I made my way to Grand Central, and I took a train from there. It was supposed to deliver me to Duluth, but I didn't make it that far."

"Duluth?" I asked, on the verge of blurting an unladylike Why the hell Duluth?

"The train to Duluth was about to leave; I was in a panic," Dan said. "But it didn't matter. The shape followed me everywhere. If I stopped for more than just a few minutes, there it was again. Like all the fear and doubt you try to stifle every day. The thing that rattles you awake at night. You can't stand still, or it will gather shape and suffocate you."

"Are you saying you think the shape is made of fear?" I asked him.

"No... the shape is made of ink. But ink is my tool, it's my voice... it's me, the way my soul takes shape in the world."

"So the ink, it's your soul? The void you're fleeing is your own soul? That's why it's your shape and size?" I was doing my best to follow his thoughts, but they were strange and frazzled and not making any sense.

"No," Dan whispered. "I think it's worse than that. I think the shape is my emptiness."

I looked a question at him.

"My extinction," he said. "My death."

We both fell silent for a moment.

"You made your way across the country with that shape chasing you the whole way?" I asked him.

"Trains and cars," he said. "Hitching rides turned out be the best. But after a while... even they weren't safe. One fellow had newspapers on the back seat. Another fellow was an encyclopedia salesman -- an encyclopedia salesman! I saw his stock and didn't even accept the ride he offered me. I walked another twelve miles instead. But no matter where I went or by what means, the ink would soon appear nearby. The ink always taking the shape of... the shape. My shape."

Oh, my poor friend!

"Dan, emptiness dwells in all of us," I said, trying to speak his language, trying for some poetry of my own. "But emptiness is what makes it possible to move and breathe. If there's no space in which to live, there's no life; if emptiness is vanquished, suffocation results. Maybe emptiness is opportunity... something to keep in mind and try to fill."

"Something to fill so it fulfills us?" He drew the blanket tighter around his shoulders. "But the shape is so... so empty. So frightful. Like nothing you'd ever have seen."

I took his hand. He was still warm, his body older now but still vital. I felt his pulse, strong with anxiety, strong with life. He squeezed my hand gently in response. The clock chimed half past midnight.

"You need sleep," I told him.

"It will come here," he said, morosely. "Ink, gathering in the darkness. It will find me here."

"Not in my home," I told him, firmly. "In my home, you are safe."

He offered me a smile, wan and exhausted, but grateful.

I bundled blankets out of the closet. "You'll be fine out here?"

"You're too sweet to me," he said. "But we're no longer those young people we once were."

***

And now here we were, in the wan light of an overcast morning. I set the breakfast tray on the table and then, picking up a cup of tea laced with milk -- the way he liked it -- crossed into the living room. It was more like a studio, given that it housed my drawing table, a file cabinet, and a side table, all cluttered with a riot of loosely organized pencils, pens, documents, and sketches. But the room also contained a sofa and a settee, several chairs, and a low table. It was crowded and cozy, a perfect space to work or relax.

A lamp stood next to the sofa. I clicked it to light. Dan's eyes opened as I stood there, looking down at him.

"Good morning," I said.

He shifted, then sat up with a sigh. "Jane. My lovely, lovely Jane... thank you for taking me in," he said, accepting the cup.

"Of course," I laughed. "When my closest friend comes calling, of course I'm going to take him in."

"You're so much stronger than me," he said. He took a swallow of the tea. "Oh, thank you. This is heavenly."

"There's breakfast waiting," I said. "Hungry?"

"Empty, I think, is more the word," Dan said. He raised the cup once more. "Though this is awfully nice tea." Then his eyes shifted and he went pale.

I turned to look, suddenly filled with dread at what I knew I would see.

It stood in the middle of the room like a gingerbread man... a flat, densely black, burnt-to-the-pan gingerbread man. My eye trained for such things, I saw it at once: The manlike blot was precisely Dan's shape and size. I found myself looking at its head, and how the silhouette echoed the cowlicks of Dan's sleep-tousled hair. It really was Dan's own shadow. Ice tingled along my spine.

Reflexively, I rose and took a step toward the apparition. It was terrifying to behold, and yet so unreal that I found myself moving quite naturally.

"Jane!" Dan cried.

I didn't answer. The shape paid me no heed as I circled around; I took careful note of how it thinned as my perspective shifted. Seen from the side -- from edge on, as it were -- the silhouette vanished momentarily; then it waxed into being once more as I continued around the room toward my drawing table.

Strange as it seems, looking back on the moment now, it had occurred to me to check on the pages I'd left on the table's slanted surface. I'd been drawing picture after picture of a tall, elegant woman in garb that borrowed elements from the flappers of the 1920s, the latest fashions of the day, and a future dystopia. It was for a science-fiction story that a gentlemen of some means was having printed privately as a hardcover book, a saucy tale that I had enjoyed creating illustrations for. The text, and my artwork, featured voluptuous women and Sapphic themes. These were Women of Venus, and I had made them suitably Aphrodisiac. This final drawing was meant to serve as the illustration for the book's dust jacket.

My sketches in pencil and charcoal were all intact, I saw, but the painstaking, highly detailed study I'd prepared using India ink was fading away even as my eye fixed upon it. I'd struggled to capture crisp details of the pattern on the elegant woman's short coat, and the delicately crocheted blouse she wore beneath. I'd taken some pride in the result, but now I felt horror at how rapidly my work was evaporating. I gasped aloud. A moment later nothing remained, save for some ghostly penciling I'd done before applying the ink.

With a cry, I dove into the stack of papers that sat in tenuous order on the side table. Here was where I'd stashed the opening pages of a new project, a picture novelette about a professional career woman I'd playfully half-modeled after Rosie the Riveter. I had a notion that like Rosie, my as-yet unnamed heroine was a woman who'd built bombers during the Second Great War and who now refused to be trussed with an apron and stuffed back into the kitchen with the return of American's war heroes. Probably no one would ever buy it from me, but I didn't need to make money from this story. It was a labor of love.

But love's labor was lost, as they say. The pictures and still-empty word balloons were gone, the ink entirely lifted away from the heavy white stock. Was it there, ink and labor and passion, in that still, silent form? Had Dan's emptiness swallowed so much of my work? I felt a flare of something angry and ugly, a feeling of violation and blame. Dan's troubles had spilled onto me and robbed me of something precious.

I blotted out those thoughts, reminding myself that what was happening transcended those concerns. I could start the project over again, and though it wouldn't be the same, maybe it would turn out even better. In any case, blaming Dan wasn't going to restore the lost work.

I looked back at him. He raised his head and met my eyes. He set the teacup down with almost tender care and stood up. He took a step toward the blackness that hung there looking very much like he had described it earlier: A shadow that fell across the air itself.

I thought again of the silhouette, his profile captured in black paper. A negative, a shape cut into the world, like the moments (less often now, but still they came) when I missed him, missed our past together, even missed what might have been had God made us both a little differently. That suffering was part of my own emptiness, part of my own shadow.

Dan stared into the man-shaped blackness before him. "You're right about what you said last night," Dan said at length. "Others can impose limitations and secrets. Others can contribute to the emptiness. Only I can fill it."

He stepped forward -- into the void. I gasped with terror. The silhouette didn't attack, didn't do anything but seem to sink into Dan. It fit him exactly -- or, I should say, he occupied it exactly, each limb and curve, every wrinkle of his shirt. As he slotted his body into its outline, the shadow simply disappeared. Dan stood there for a long moment, seemingly intact but unmoving. Was he...?

Then he turned to me, his features no longer strained. He looked peaceful. He stepped over and settling onto the settee, where I suddenly realized I myself had retreated. My hand found his arm, held tight. He was solid and warm, the same old Dan. I watched him closely, half expecting to see him suddenly vanish, or drop into a puddle of ink and gore at my feet, or scream and sprout tentacles... I didn't know what might happen.

Nothing did. He was fine. We both were.

He drew me into his arms and we remained still for minutes on end, just breathing. At last, he kissed me and the moment ended.

"I know you have work to do. Were your drawings ruined?" He seemed concerned, apologetic... no longer terrified for his own sake, but focused on how this supernatural visitation had affected me.

Suddenly, absurdly, I was laughing. I would be spending hours, if not days, completing the cover for that book. The picture novella would take months to reproduce. As for the dust jacket... aside from the detailed study, I'd nothing in ink for that as yet. I planned to proceed as I normally would: Start with the details I'd particularly liked and build around them, finding my way to the complete image. I crossed back to the drawing table and picked up my bottle of India ink. It was empty and pristine. Evidence, I thought. Evidence that we weren't both dreaming, that it really had happened.

Or perhaps the bottle was a trophy. Victory over darkness, literally.

"I have some work to do over," I answered him. "But I'll need to get a fresh supply."

Dan looked at me sidelong, offered me a smile, paused. Then: "Did I tell you about how Jack came to me after you broke it off with him?"

I hesitated. Why was he talking about this now?

"He was already drunk when he came banging at my door, getting me out of bed," Dan continued. "He gave me quite a fright... He asked for whiskey, which of course I had, Prohibition be damned. He told me how you had assured him of your love, and then in the same breath told him you couldn't love him any more."

"I - " Was this really what Dan thought had happened between Jack and me? Was it what had happened? Suddenly, I flashed again on that old nightmare: Flames wreathing charred skin, furious black eyes accusing. Was this what I, in turn, had blotted out all these years?

Dan wasn't finished with his narration. "As drunk as he was when he arrived, he drank a lot more. We both did. You know how I felt about him, Jane... my best friend. My other best friend, I mean. Who I had to love as a friend only, because... because he wouldn't have wanted me the way I wanted him. But the night wore on, and we kept drinking, and he told me how lonely he'd always been... until he met you... and now that loneliness would claim him. So I... I told him how I felt. I thought he'd accept it, maybe welcome it. Why not? Why not take love where you find it? But he flew into a rage. Called me horrible names. 'Sodomite.' 'Faggot.' Can you imagine? Called me a false friend who had waited for a moment of weakness to pounce. I tried to calm him, but he got into his car and went speeding off..." Dan swallowed, tears rising in his eyes. "And you know the rest."

Yes, I knew. Grisly images had swum through my mind for years after the night Jack drove off in his roadster - reckless, angry, staggering drunk... an impetuous journey that ended abruptly in violence and flame.

"I'm sorry I never told you," Dan said, huge tears rolling down his gaunt face.

"Sweet Daniel," I said, wiping gently at his cheek. "You did. Don't you remember? In New England. When we were 'married.' "

"I did? I told you about that last night with Jack?"

"We talked about it until dawn. I told you then to forgive yourself. I told you Jack would have forgiven you. I told you there was nothing to forgive."

He clasped my hand in return. "I'd forgotten that."

"All those years..." I wanted to apologize to him, but I didn't know for what. For his misery and loneliness? For me finding my way to a life I loved? And a love who shared that life?

That reminded me. "Lily is coming over at two," I told him, deliberately brisk. "She's bringing a picnic. It's still cloudy out, by the look of it... if the sun isn't out by then, we can picnic here in the studio. Chase off that shadow once and for all."

"Lucky Lily," Dan said. "I'm looking forward to meeting her."

"But I have some work to finish before then, so you'll have to entertain yourself for a few hours," I added.

"Of course. And, Jane, would you happen to have a notebook and a pen I could use? I'm popping with ideas all of a sudden, and I'd like to jot some of these thoughts down."

We ate ravenously. Afterwards, I rummaged around and found him a blank diary. Aside from my illustrator's pens, all I could find was an old Parker filled, for some reason, with green ink.

"Sorry," I said as I handed it over to him. "I think I got it by mistake."

"It'll do," he said. "I've had enough of black ink for the moment."

Dan volunteered to do the washing up. He gathered the breakfast dishes. As I drew a scarf over my hair and tied the ends under my chin, stepping out the door into the brightening morning, I thought of Jack. I hoped he was someplace better, someplace without shadows or regrets.

Stepping outside, I nearly gasped as my eye was caught by a dark flutter. Stepping to the curb, I glanced down to see a comic monthly, splayed open, pages waterlogged.

My eyes traced the panels, taking in how they were laid out, a visual sequence that prompted the eye and supported the story. Half a dozen ideas swam into view. I could do that, I thought. I could do it even better. So why shouldn't I? Suddenly, the picture novella I'd been hesitantly working on unfolded in a stream of words and images that raced across my mind's eye. I knew just how it should look -- just how it should feel.

I walked on, errands to be run, stories to be told, and life to be lived.

My mind, like Dan's, was alight with inspiration.

For Kalia.

Story editor: Kristen Caven