.:ELECTRIC VELOCIPEDE:.

It shouldn’t be taking this long--two years in October--Barney thought. Two years since Yvonne hadn’t come home. Two years since the phone woke him in the middle of the night with disaster in its ring. Two years of going to sleep with a hole in his heart, and two years of waking up to emptiness.

Barney did all the right things. He consulted with a priestess, sacrificed to the gods, and wore nothing but animal skins for his season of mourning. But when he doffed his pelts for the last time, the dull numbness that was supposed to come away with them stayed.

For a long time he went through the motions: he tended his shop, observed the correct occasions at the appropriate temples--even the inconvenient and drafty Winter Mount, which he never liked, Pelagie Barents forgive him.

He went through the motions of dining with friends, until even the most devoted of them tired of the taste of ash and stopped calling. His business, once thriving, had slowed to a trickle. Though he had a reputation for quality curios and an unmatched range of items, his patrons took their custom elsewhere, convinced by his dour face that he was not just a man who’d suffered a loss, but a man under a curse. Now he spent his days at a silent counter, too much with Yvonne to care.

At sundown he closed the shop and trudged upstairs to his apartments. As he did every evening, he was still surprised to be surprised that Yvonne was not there, sitting at the table reading a book, or making some little treat for dinner, or doing some chore that he could help her finish, and so enjoy her disproportionate gratitude.

The bleakness of his life without Yvonne hung in the apartment’s still air like the odor of solitude: thin, cold, and faintly ammoniac. A heavy numbness that muffled him like a gray curtain. How the years stretched ahead, measured only by more white in his beard and a growing heaviness in his limbs.

Without putting down his newspaper, Barney turned on his heel and walked out of the apartment, neglecting to even close the door behind him, he went out into the gloaming, a small gray man lost in the dinnertime throng.

The Avenue of The Temple Mount was uncrowded. Barney resolutely pushed what he was going to do out of his mind as he trudged north toward Columbus Circle. He reached the bank just before closing and withdrew five crisp notes from a teller who was obviously unused to handing out such large denominations, especially to nondescript little men in worn coats. Barney went through the rituals of signature and thumbprint patiently, and finally walked out of the bank with the notes tucked unfolded into an inner vest pocket.

It was neither an obligation day nor a feast day, and Barney found himself blessedly alone at the Sacrificeur’s stall. The little wooden structure was a reassuringly human-scale concern, dwarfed by the giant marble edifices that ringed the crown of the hill. Behind the scarred oak counter, Alcala stirred a stewpot, huddling over his little charcoal-fired Hibachi against the evening chill.

“Barney?” Alcala straightened from his task.

“Sorry to interrupt your dinner,” he said, “but I need to make a sacrifice tonight.”

The old man looked confused. “It’s not Yvonne’s deathday…?”

“No,” Barney said. “This is special. I need two kilos of prime short loin, frost it with fifteen grams of gold.”

Alcala’s grizzled eyebrows went up. “That’s some sacrifice.”

“I know.” Now that he’d made his decision, Barney was in no mood to talk. “Do you have it?”

Alcala gave him a long look. “Sure, I have it,” he finally said.

Barney reached inside his vest and laid the fresh notes on the Sacrificeur’s counter. Alcala held Barney’s eye for another moment, then scooped the notes away.

After ritually cleansing his hands with sour wine and drying them on lambskin, the old man tore off a square of pristine white paper and set it on the counter. From the refrigerated case at the back of the stall he selected a slab of beef, deep red and perfectly trimmed, and marbled with creamy white fat.

Alcala measured out the gold dust and deftly shook it across the surface of the short loin so that the meat took on a reddish yellow glow. He then wrapped the slab into a tight, neat package, taking care to get none of the juices on the outside of the crisp white paper, and tied the bundle with gold thread. “This is no extra charge,” he told Barney, gesturing with the glittering spool.

The Sacrificeur took up his calligraphy pen and drew up a few drops of ink from a well behind the counter. He tested the nib on a scrap of paper, laying down an even line of shiny gold ink.

“So?” he said to Barney.

Barney hesitated, not because he wasn’t sure of what he was about to do, but because he was nervous to speak his intention aloud, even obliquely, to Alcala.

“The Shantamelle,” he finally managed to choke out.

The old man’s face hardened slightly and he nodded, as if the name was one he half-feared and half-expected. He took a deep breath, then inscribed the goddess’s name on the white paper. If he had reservations his flawless calligraphy didn’t betray them.

“Gods be with you,” the Sacrificeur said, offering Barney the packet.

Barney made a short bow and took the sacrifice from the old man’s hands. “And with you,” he said, avoiding Alcala’s eyes. He turned and strode away.

The entrance to Temple Larsemonius Shantamelle was set into the north face of the hill, where direct sunlight could never shine into it. Unlike the other temples on the Mount, this one was cut not from white marble, but from gray, unpolished granite. The priestess stood just outside the arch, young and barefoot, dressed only in a sheer white drape. The chill of the evening made her skin look pale and lifeless. It rarely took more than one season for priestesses of Larsemonius to sicken and die, standing watch as they did almost nude in front of the temple through the winter. Yet there was no shortage of novices for the position, for outer-borough girls a rare entrée into Mannahatta and the middle class.

“Who comes to The Shantamelle?” the priestess said when Barney stopped before her. Her accent was pure Breukelen.

“Barnard son of Agatha,” Barney said.

“What do you bring?” the priestess asked. Her face was an expressionless mask that hardly seemed animate even when she spoke.

“I bring what is required,” Barney said.

“And what do you wish?”

“Nothing that is denied,” he answered.

The priestess stood aside. “You may enter the presence of Larsemonius,” she said. “Watch the bottom step, there’s a loose stone.”

The latter, not part of the ritual call and response, was delivered in a normal conversational tone, and for a moment the priestess was just a teenage girl. Barney went down past her, hoping she survived the winter.

The chill deepened when he reached the temple floor. Forced air flowed from ducts to drive the heat of the sacrificial furnace up the flue and out of the temple. The sanctum was lit by cold green chemical lights, and it smelled of stone. Bays cut into the walls held statues of the avatars of Larsemonius, all faceless, all carved from the same rough granite as the temple walls.

Only a foot from the furnace could Barney feel the slightest heat, even though beyond the ceramic double doors the temperature of the gas-fed fire was hot enough to vaporize gold.

Barney knelt on one knee and took a rosewood platter from a shelf cut into the wall adjacent to the furnace. He centered the packet on the densely-grained wood and held the platter in both hands while he intoned the sacrificial prayer.

“Larsemonius Shantamelle, grant the wish I send aloft in the smoke,” he said.

He repeated the incantation three times, placing his forehead on the sacrifice between each repetition. Then, taking a deep breath he stood and pulled open the outer furnace door. The heat was an eye-watering blow in the face, and he had to squint to make sure he centered the platter on the receiving tray.

A second after he closed the door he could feel another pulse of heat as the inner door opened and the tray ratcheted his sacrifice into the flames.

He stood for a long minute looking dumbly at the furnace door. There was the briefest scent of seared flesh, and that was all. He’d expected to feel something, some acknowledgement--internal or external--of his sacrifice, but he merely felt empty. There was no sign that his prayer was heard, just the dim, unvarying roar of the furnace reducing his sacrifice to its component atoms. The gods answer all prayers, he thought bitterly, but sometimes the answer is no.

Barney awoke in the wee hours atop the bedclothes, wearing his overcoat and shoes. The night was perfectly still, and without turning his head he could see a cold patch of moonlight on the bedroom wall.

He wasn’t hungry, but he’d had no dinner nor much of a lunch the day before, and he thought he should eat something. There was liverwurst in the fridge, and a quarter loaf of seeded pumpernickel. He sliced an onion and made a thick sandwich, coating both slices of bread with hot mustard. Since Yvonne had left it seemed only the strongest tastes appealed to his palate.

He sat at the table in his shirtsleeves, eating slowly. The raw onion and hot mustard made his eyes tear, and he had to pause often to wipe his nose. He’d eaten almost all the sandwich when he realized someone was sitting across from him in the small kitchen.

“Aah!” Barney flew up from his chair in surprise.

The Shantamelle looked very much like her graven images in the temple, except that in this incarnation she had a face--a broad brow and prominent cheekbones framed by heavy braids of white hair. Tiny animal skulls decorated the ends of each braid.

“You’re surprised?” she said. “You summoned me.” The bony decorations clicked together softly when she moved her head.

“Forgive me goddess, I didn’t expect you,” Barney said, making a half bow.

“You want your wife back,” Larsemonius said. It wasn’t a question.

“No, goddess, I wouldn’t ask…” Barney faltered slightly under her icy gaze. “I want--I beg instead that you take me to her, across the Hudson, across the river of grief and into the country of the dead.”

For a moment the goddess seemed surprised. “Why?”

“I, I miss her so terribly,” Barney said.

“Really?” Larsemonius said, her tone skeptical. “Do you know what you’re asking? In that cold country there are no appetites and no satisfactions. You would have more warmth from the nod of a stranger here, than from the closest embrace on the far shore,” she said.

“To see Yvonne and hear her voice again would outweigh any joy I have in this life,” he said. Just the possibility of seeing his wife made Barney’s heart race.

“Your sacrifice--” Larsemonius started to say.

“I’ll make ten more!”

The goddess laughed coldly. “Ten more? Why not a hundred more, a thousand more?”

Barney started to answer, but she held up a hand to silence him. “No,” Larsemonius said. “Your sacrifice was adequate, but only to carry you to that gray shore. You will not easily return.”

He might actually see his wife again! “I don’t care, goddess.” His voice was shaking. “Please.”

She looked at him appraisingly. “All right,” she finally said, standing up and extending her hand. “Come.”

Barney gasped slightly when he took the proffered hand--it was soft and very warm.

Larsemonius smiled thinly. “Yes, my blood is hot. I bring death; it does not bring me.”

Barney stammered with embarrassment, but before he could get a word of apology out, they were standing on the Hudson’s far shore. Larsemonius released his hand.

“Thank you, goddess,” he said.

She gave him a cold smirk. “I haven’t granted you a favor,” she said. “Walk straight up the hill ahead and you’ll come to your wife.”

Then Barney was alone in the country of the dead.

The hill was a pebbled gray slope in a gray landscape. As far as he could see no color attracted the eye, just a ghostly repetition of hues that faded into the distance. Deathly quiet was not just an expression--even the sound of his feet on the stones reached Barney’s ears as if from a distance.

Here now, he let himself experience a qualm of uncertainty. What if Yvonne didn’t remember him? What if she didn’t want him? Trudging up the gray slope he realized that he was afraid.

The hill flattened off at its summit, opening onto a wide plain, and the dead were everywhere. The shades paid him no heed, murmuring among themselves in indistinct voices as he wove between them. She was standing among a knot of ghosts near the middle of the hilltop. Her back was to him, but he recognized her at once: her small frame, the way she held herself in conversation, and the sweater she always wore in cool weather--that she’d worn that terrible night.

“Yvonne?” he said, coming up on her side. His voice sounded too quiet in his ears, and she gave no sign that she’d heard him.

Louder, “Yvonne… Yvonne!”

She turned, and her expression of astonished joy stopped his heart.

“Barney!” she said, his name coming out as an excited whisper, and threw herself into his arms.

He hugged her fiercely, and for the first time in two years, everything was right with his world. She was saying something against his neck that he couldn’t quite make out, but for the moment he was quite content just to hold his wife in his arms again. If she felt somewhat...insubstantial, he didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything except that he was here with her.

Finally they drew slightly apart and he looked at her. Her face was the same palette of grays as the other dead, of course, but otherwise unchanged. That made sense: there was no time on the far shore.

“You’re alive!” she said. Now that he was looking into her face he could make out that was what she’d been saying to him. He could barely hear her and had to pay close attention to get what she was saying.

“How is it that you’re here?” she asked.

He started to explain about his sacrifice to the goddess, but the look of confusion on Yvonne’s face stopped him. He realized she couldn’t hear him, and started again from the beginning, a little self-conscious at having to shout his innermost feelings among a crowd of shades. But if any of the dead noticed him they gave no sign of it.

“You did that for me?” Yvonne said when he’d finished. The pressure of her fingers twined in his and the sight of her happy face made his breath catch.

“I missed you so much,” he said.

“Yes, but, Barney--the goddess said you can’t go back.”

“It doesn’t matter, now that I’m here with you,” he said, disappointed that she hadn’t said she missed him, too.

“You look so thin,” she said, her cool, liminal hand against his cheek. “You haven’t been eating.”

“I didn’t care about food, Yvonne--oh gods! It’s so good to see you.” He covered her hand and pressed his face against it more firmly.

“My Barney,” she said, slipping her arms around his neck again. “You came back to me.”

Her tight embrace, the familiar way she felt under his hands, and her indistinct voice murmuring into his neck, swamped him with heady feelings. His chest felt full of quicksilver, and his hands trembled as he stroked Yvonne’s small back. Against his overwhelming joy, Barney’s disquiet at the slight oddness of her reactions faded into the background.

They talked and talked, though it was exhausting to nearly shout to be intelligible--like trying to hold an intimate conversation in a crowded tavern. Yvonne introduced him to other shades (“This is my husband; he came from the other side to be with me”), though conversation with the dead strangers was even more halting for Barney.

She taught him the ways of the gray country. Appetites dwindled in the long now, until they disappeared altogether. Longtime shades--whose tenure was measured not in days and weeks, but only by whose arrival had preceded another’s--were almost inert: gray souls in a gray landscape who neither asked nor offered contact with their neighbors.

Relative newcomers like Yvonne still sought the company of her fellow shades, though after a while Barney realized that they were telling the same stories, passing the same jokes, and singing the same songs over and over.

By dint of her living husband’s presence, Yvonne was something of a celebrity among the ghosts still engaged enough to notice, but in time Barney saw his novelty attract less and less attention.

Because he was alive, and only half in the shades’ world, every conversation with the dead was effortful, like trying to drink pudding through a straw. Soon even Yvonne’s attention would begin to wander if a conversation went on at length.

Barney tried to be understanding, but beneath his pleasure at her company, his wife’s inattention was beginning to irritate him. He had come to be with her from the other side of the Hudson, after all. Being there with Yvonne, sometimes even holding her, he began to feel occasional pangs of aloneness that would make him redouble his efforts to engage her.

“...remember when we went to Mount Ursus for the solstice?” Barney was saying, but his wife’s attention had wandered again, and she didn’t respond.

“Yvonne,” he said, giving her hand a tug--he’d taken to holding her hand when they conversed, to better keep her attention. “Are you listening?”

“Don’t pull at me, Barney,” she said distractedly.

“Damn it, Yvonne! I feel more lonely now than I did--than I did after you left,” he said. “Aren’t you happy I’m here with you?”

“Oh, Barney, I’m sorry,” she said, and she looked contrite. “It’s just that it’s so hard to pay attention for very long here--you don’t understand. But I really do try.”

She took his hands in both of hers and met his eyes. “Of course I’m happy that you’re here. It means so much to me that you came across the river to be with me.”

Barney felt a tightness in his chest from what his wife hadn’t said. “Yvonne, do you still love me?”

“Love?” she looked surprised for an instant. “Yes, yes I do--how could I not? I’ve always loved you.”

Less than the words, it was the tone of confused fearfulness in Yvonne’s voice that wrung his heart, as if she were desperately groping to say the right thing, but not sure what that might be.

In that moment he felt close to her again. “It’s okay, Yvonne--it’s all okay,” he said, putting his arms around her shoulders. “I’m here with you, that’s all that matters.”

Yvonne did make an effort to be attentive, though he could often tell it was an effort, increasing his sense of loneliness. Sometimes they had animated conversations, but they seemed too few and far between to him.

“Oh Barney, we didn’t talk this much when I was on the other side!” Yvonne said once when he voiced his dissatisfaction. “Most of the time it was just ‘Did you see this article in the paper,’ or ‘What’s the price of that jewelry box,’ or what we were having for dinner. Really!”

He took to wandering the hilltop plain for what seemed long stretches at a time. Solitude--he went like a shade among shades--made his loneliness and yearning for Yvonne’s attention more tolerable. There was no horizon, of course, and no landmarks, just an endless gray distance in every direction. Somehow he always knew where he’d come from, however, and which way led back to Yvonne.

It was on one of his wanderings that Barney saw the goddess. His eye was drawn to a patch of color in the gray plain, and long before he could see her face Barney knew it was Larsemonius Shantamelle.

She was obviously awaiting him. The few shades nearby were ancient, to judge from their dress, and so turned inward as to be almost vegetal. Larsemonius had red hair in this incarnation--the spot of color he’d seen from afar. Her hair was long, wild and unbraided, and covered her whole body. She seemed to be wearing no other garment.

“Have you tired yet of your season among the stuporous?” the goddess asked without preamble.

“I don’t notice them, goddess,” Barney said, making a half bow. “I only care for the sight of my wife, thanks to you.”

“And yet here you are, son of Agatha, away from her side. Tell me, her company hasn’t begun to pall? Quick! Don’t take time to think up a soothing lie.”

“No!” Barney said, too loudly. “The greatest happiness of my life is seeing her again.”

Larsemonius said nothing, fixing him with her deathless stare. Even if he weren’t nursing a leaden heart it would have been impossible to keep still under such scrutiny.

“It is hard,” he finally said, his voice small in his own ears. “I am not ungrateful to you, goddess, but it pains me to grasp so much and touch so little. I had so many things to say to her and was so hungry for her words, but our conversation is broth--thin and unsatisfying.”

“Did I not warn you as much?” Larsemonius said. “Appetites grow cold on grief’s far shore, your simple wife is no exception.”

“I know,” Barney said, his eyes downcast. “I fault myself, not you, goddess. Still I have the pleasure of looking at her, and if it pains me that her words are fewer and meaner than in life, they are better than the silence. I only wish my company gave her more joy.”

“More joy?” The goddess raised her voice. “Are your ears growing shut like a shade’s? She has no want of that currency--you may as well give a bird a bar of gold.”

Barney said nothing. It would be impudent to further contradict Larsemonius, and he had no argument but his heart.

“So then, are you ready to return to the country of the living?” The goddess held out her hand, “Come, leave the shades to their long, barren now.”

The sudden memory of her warm hand made Barney blush. For an instant he teetered, then he thought of Yvonne, waiting eternally for him to return.

“I can’t,” he shook his head. “I can’t just leave her.”

“No, you can’t,” Larsemonius said. The coldness of the goddess’s smile scared Barney more than her raised voice. “I knew it without asking. Stay, then, stay with your dead wife and your dead heart. I will not take you from this shore, from your dim folly.”

Before Barney could answer he realized he was alone in the long gray light. The goddess was gone. A bitter, disloyal part of him wished he had gone with her.

If Yvonne registered his absence she made no outward sign of it. She let him take her hand (he tried not to compare it to the hot limb of the goddess), and was sometimes still attentive while he talked. He stretched to find memories of their time together that they hadn’t already worn through, and periodically Yvonne seemed to relish his presence.

In time, however, his wife’s attention began to flag more and more. When he saw that distracted expression on her face, the familiar feeling of terrible aloneness rose up in him and choked off his words. He stood for some time in silent misery, her hand in his as cool and unresponsive as a statue’s. She barely seemed to notice when he let her hand go and slipped away.

The fault, he realized, was in him. As long as he expected so much from his wife, he would feel bitter and ill-used when she turned inward from him. She hadn’t asked him to join her on the far shore, and it was childish of him to resent her for his sacrifice.

Instead, he resolved, he would try to find other ways to appreciate Yvonne. If her company was only a shade of what it had been in life, that would have to do. His memories of their life together were rich, and he could relive them in her presence.

It was better that she rarely showed any interest in the other shades now, since their conversations distracted him from his memories. Though he felt small and slightly ridiculous about it, he was also jealous of the shades his wife spoke to, and her increasing solitude removed that thorn from his side.

When his fond memories started to grow stale from repetition, Barney hit on the idea of reliving their occasional spats and rare all-out fights. He found a strange solace in getting furious all over again because Yvonne had given her brother a sizeable wad of bank notes for a business without consulting Barney about the loan. What was she thinking?! Didn’t she know how thin the margin of profit was on their little shop?

In time, though, even the jagged memories of hard feelings and angry words were worn smooth in his memory. Watching his wife’s placid face no longer evoked memories of any kind very easily, and Barney’s thoughts began to drift occasionally to the far side of the river. He thought of his shop with its bright display cases full of gifts and curiosities. The brass monkey from heathen India that everyone wanted to see but none wanted to buy, and the printer’s box of little ceramic flags from all the world’s nations. How odd it was that he couldn’t keep enough Japanese flags in stock, but he still had the first Union Jack he’d ever ordered!

He was gazing at Yvonne at one point and realized he must have been in some kind of trance. His mind had been utterly blank for--how long? He could not remember his last thought. It was as if he were starting to turn inward like the dead.

“Yvonne?” he said, taking her hand. “Yvonne!” he fairly bellowed when she didn’t respond.

“Yes, Barney?” she said placidly, turning toward him. Her look was mildly curious, which was about as much expression as she ever showed lately.

“I’m going for a walk,” he said. “I may be gone for a while.” Force of habit--he felt foolish as soon as he said it. His wife had no sense of time passing even if she registered his absence. But she surprised him.

Except for the time immediately after his arrival they’d kissed infrequently. He didn’t know exactly what Yvonne felt, but Barney had a deep squeamishness about intimate physical contact with his wife, a reluctance she appeared to share. The other shades never touched one another.

Yvonne looked directly into his eyes. “Okay Barney,” she said, “I’ll stay here,” and she pressed her insubstantial lips against his. He hugged her close for a moment and felt her light grip on his back in response.

Instead of walking the hilltop plain, Barney was drawn down to the riverbank. He hadn’t been there since his arrival, and the downward slope seemed so much longer this time that he wondered if he’d gotten turned around. Eventually, though, he started to hear the slow wash of the Hudson, and its silver skin appeared gradually through the mist.

The bank ran off to his left and right in an undistinguished gray haze. Neither direction called to him, so he squatted at the shore and looked out as far as he could see over the water.

He didn’t know much of the native gods--they had their own temples and whites weren’t welcome--but grief’s river was called the Mahicanituck by those peoples. It was said to run with the tears of the nearly exterminated tribes of the valley, the Nipmunks and Lenni-Lenapes, the Nawaas, the Horicans, the Pennacooks, the Mohawk, and the Abenaquis and Soquatuck.

He dipped a hand in the water and found it was icy cold, numbing his fingers almost immediately. He realized with a start that it was the first sharp sensation he’d felt in… how long? He splashed some of the frigid water on his face and the shock of it made him gasp.

The water drew him irresistibly. He lowered his face to the surface and took a deep draught. It was bitter, so bitter, and the cold made his teeth ache, yet he swallowed once, twice, several times.

The water left a taste in his mouth of gall and burned out longhouses; of starvation and pox and the bloody reek of the shitting sickness that turned the people’s insides to liquid.

But the long grief of the people, so bitter, was just the fuse for his own--their sadness was not his sadness. As the water burned down his throat and into the pit of his stomach he felt something inside himself tear loose in the torrent. The pain was deep and uncontrollable. His chest heaved and he felt weak and shaky to his core.

He struggled to hold them back, but tears ran down his face anyway. He didn’t know for whom he was weeping. He thought of Yvonne, of the long-gone natives, and even the stoic young priestess who would surely sicken and die sooner or later from her frigid watches outside the temple. The world seemed full of unbearable sadness. Their lives ran together in a torrent of grief and loss. Yvonne was gone forever, on the far side of death’s gray curtain. Even if he went back up the hill he could never reach her again.

Without thinking about it he flung himself headfirst into the river. Despite the cold that gripped his chest like an iron band, Barney stroked as hard as he could with his arms and legs. He drove himself out toward the river’s center, the icy water washing away his tears as he went.

He was not a strong swimmer, and even in warm water would not have made it very far across a wide river with such powerful currents. Moreover this was the Hudson, and no person living or dead crossed it without the connivance of the gods.

Though he willed his arms and legs to keep stroking, they soon grew still except for small, tetanic jerks of his cooling muscles. Oddly enough he felt no fear--probably because his head was mostly submerged in the icy water, freezing even his thoughts to a crawl.

It was too bad that he’d never see his little shop again, nor walk up the Avenue of the Temple Mount in the sunshine on a feast day. He would miss the spring equinox with its pageant of newborn animals. Barney could feel himself slowly sinking as the air trapped in his clothes seeped away. He wondered if the current would carry him out to sea--it seemed silly to travel all that distance just to end up back on the same gray shore from which he’d left.

A pair of warm hands on his body reminded him of the goddess. She was right about the country of the dead, of course. His final thought was regret for putting her through all that trouble for nothing.

Barney sat at the table and reached for the last bite of his sandwich. He was a little surprised to still be hungry. Well, there was some liverwurst left in the fridge.

More puzzling was why he was soaking wet, with water pooled around the legs of his chair. Despite the wet he was unnaturally warm--could he be coming out of some awful fever? He stared at the puddles in consternation--his thoughts seemed to be moving slowly, like a train struggling up a long grade. The train reached the top of the grade just as he noticed the goddess sitting across from him, white-haired and wearing the skin of a seal.

“The river!” Barney said, jumping to his feet.

“The river indeed,” Larsemonius said. “It sings a dark tune, does it not?”

“Bitter music, goddess,” Barney said, remembering his manners and bowing. “Bitter, but true.”

“You know that much--it makes me almost glad I pulled you from the flood,” she said.

Barney felt light in his limbs, as though he’d woken from a nightmarish sleep and found the daylit world waiting untroubled for him. His kitchen, the scene of so many miserable hours in the past two years, suddenly seemed cheerful and cozy again. Barney was sad that Yvonne was not here with him, but not sad to be released from his gray prison.

“I’m in your debt, goddess. Tomorrow I will make a sacrifice in your honor,” he said.

“Just one?” She asked. “What happened to the ten you offered for taking you to the far shore? Surely plucking you from the cold bosom of the stream is worth more than that?”

“Worth incalculably more, goddess,” Barney said, suddenly anxious. “But that was when I was willing to deal my life away as a bargain. I can’t make ten sacrifices to you and still have the life you saved me for, both. If you insist I’ll sacrifice myself into penury and bondage, but it might have been better in that case had you just left me to float out to sea.”

“Better?” The goddess smiled her cold smile. “Perhaps, but not nearly as entertaining.” She stood and fixed him with a stare. “The Shantamelle is no one’s friend, Barnard, son of Agatha. Do not tempt that cold current a second time.”

“Once was instructive enough, goddess,” Barney said, but he was speaking to an empty room.

He sat again in his familiar chair, in his snug kitchen, and held in slightly trembling hands the gift of fear left behind by the goddess Larsemonius Shantamelle.