"The Ocean of All Her Children" by Edward J. Santella

She ran hard because, as she'd passed the three willows at the road's turn and caught a glimpse of the house, the thirteen-year-old had had a premonition. A premonition, Mrs. Tee had explained to her, was not knowing the future but knowing the present so well you could see the direction it was taking. Amy's mind had taken her knowledge--the terrible things Mrs. Tee had told her, the bareness of the sky, the simmering heat of the sun, the confused panting of the wind, the slithering dust of the dirt road--and seen the direction the present had taken.

It was worse than she feared. Amy found Mrs. Tee's dismembered and beheaded body lying on the kitchen table. The poor woman's blood dripped from the ceiling, ran in rivulets down the walls, and pooled on the floor. Scattered trays of cookies, cupcakes and muffins lay in the slowly cooling blood and the smell of blood mixed with the scents of the fresh baked goodies. The oven was still on. The cake inside had burned to a crisp.

I didn't see but I was told. It was the worst thing that ever happened in Evyland.

There was nothing at all unusual about children going to visit Mrs. Tee during summer vacation. At the end of each school year, Mrs Tee sent out her schedule to Glen's Eat & Pump and Glen taped it in his front window. Each class received four invitations. The kids organized themselves to meet, walk two blocks down State Route 17A, turn left at Dr. Odden's office down Grove, walk two more blocks, then turn right on to Paved Road #9 which, after a hundred yards or so, became Dirt Road #4. Mrs. Tee lived a bit more than a mile down. As kids, we never thought of this as a long walk. It seemed that Mrs. Tee lived just beyond the first curve. Mrs. Tee loved to bake cakes, Krumkakes, cup cakes, muffins, cookies, girl's kisses, brownies and new things with French and Italian names. She studded them with berries and nuts and made them look like jewels.

Every year, three or four times depending on when my family went on vacation, I, too, had walked the road to Mrs. Tee's house from kindergarten through ninth grade. I think everyone in Evyland did.

Afraid of fainting or vomiting, Amy turned away from the scene, but the screaming and crying of the other children brought her to her senses. She realized what must be done. She took off back toward the town. She ran, without once stopping, the near two miles to the police station that was located on the second floor over Glen's Eat and Pump.

Amy raced up the stairs, stumbled through the door, red-faced, out of breath, crying madly, and threw herself into the arms of Officer Bill Halldorson.

Once Amy got her story out, Officer Halldorson, our only police officer, drove the child home and headed out to Mrs. Tee's house.

State Route 17A runs arrow-like the thirty-three miles from Jefferson and stops dead at Center Street in front of Glen's Eat & Pump. Though nothing but flat land runs from Evyland in every direction to and beyond the horizon, with the exception of one small hill, there is no other way in or out of Evyland by road. Almost everyone in town descended from the original Norwegian settlers. We have three doctors, four nurses, a single EMT, a pharmacist, twenty-two teachers, one librarian, a volunteer fire department of five, one minister, a five-person historical society, one ATM and Glen's Eat & Pump. Everything else the people of Evyland get in Jefferson or by UPS. The closest Fourth-of-July fireworks are in Jefferson. You practically had to drive to Jefferson to catch a cold.

That one small hill I mentioned: it's barely fifty feet high. That's where sits Mrs. Tee's house.

Jefferson is our county seat. Outside of agriculture, New Olso College functions as the city's major economic engine. NOC was primarily an agricultural school. Before my life fell apart, before my parents died, before my marriage collapsed, before my affair, before my husband's affair, before I miscarried again, before I miscarried the first time, before I got married, before I decided that no one would ever love me, I graduated from NOC, not in agriculture, but in administration. Actually, agricultural administration. I'd driven every day for four years to classes and now for nearly ten I'd driven to Jefferson every day to my job. I'd been fortunate to be hired as the First Clerk for the First Judge of the Probate Court. People around here respect titles like "First Something" even though everyone knows I'm the only clerk and he's the only probate judge.

Officer Halldorson, Bill, never overestimated his own abilities. He was fine with speeders and drunks, but a one-person police department can't mount much of a murder investigation. When Mrs. Tee turned up dead and dismembered, he knew to call in the Jefferson professionals.

Bill arrived at Mrs. Tee's and found a mass of pale, jelly-limbed, grief stricken and horrified children. He gathered them together on Mrs. Tee's front lawn near the road, helped clean up the kids who'd up-chucked on themselves, assigned kids to help the kids who were having the roughest times and generally calmed everyone down. It's no criticism to say someone is better with kids than with corpses.

In fact, it came out at the inquest that Officer Halldorson never saw Mrs. Tee's remains. He stayed with the children until the Jefferson professionals arrived, until the last child was safely with a parent.

Bill told me I arrived not much after the Jefferson police. I'd heard the police report on the radio and Judge Rasmussen, who grew up in Evyland though he now lives in Jefferson, let me go for the day, making me promise to keep him informed if I should hear anything. I helped Bill comfort the last four children till their parents came.

Some people cried, spoke angrily, wiped tears away in amazement, but most looked stunned and did little more than hug their kids and stare at the house. After awhile, people began telling stories. I didn't tell any myself--I can be shy that way--but I listened. Once or twice I heard people say that their parents had gone to visit Mrs. Tee as children. This elicited nervous laughs. I did the math in my head. Just possible. Strange stories get told in courts and, as it turns out, some of them are true. How old was Mrs. Tee? Eighty? Ninety? Guesses.

When the Jefferson police carried her remains out, we all stood silent, save for the crying we couldn't control. I suppose some prayed quietly. Not me. I couldn't believe in a god who answered prayers. He hadn't ever answered any of mine. Or else, like a human father, he'd always answered, "No."

The chief detectives told us to go home, that they'd be working through the night to solve "this most horrible and inexcusable of crimes." Those were his words. I saw him on TV one time, years later, and he used those same words. That time it was about a five-year-old girl. But that's not this story.

Slowly, we dispersed to our homes. I was surprised to catch a glimpse of Amy with her young brother and their parents leaving. Her parents steadied her as she walked with her hands covering her face, as if to block the sight of what she'd already seen. I pointed her out to Bill. He looked and nodded his head. "Poor kid," he said. "She loved Mrs. Tee."

The following morning the Jefferson Post & Telegram summarized the statement released overnight by the police. Mrs. Tee had been murdered between 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m., which was only a half-hour before the children arrived. The murderer had dismembered Mrs. Tee, which probably caused her death, meaning she wasn't already dead when the murderer began cutting and tearing. No weapon was found. The police intended to interview each child who went to the house that afternoon to ascertain whether anyone had noticed any person or event as they walked toward the house. The murderer's bloody footprints that led out the back door of the kitchen and eventually disappeared in the grasses behind the house measured size 17.

That report was enough to start talk of the Evyland Monster that ripped its victims limb from limb. The Jefferson security firms spent a lot of time in Evyland in the following two weeks adding security cams and strong locks to stronger doors.

The Evyland Monster. I didn't believe it for a minute. Still, when I was out at night I took to turning and looking over my shoulder, just in case.

Everyone in the town physically able to turned out for the funeral. After the church service we all drove out to her house for the burial. The school children led us in Amazing Grace. We laid Mrs. Tee to rest about a hundred feet behind her house. We thought that's where she'd like to be.

One afternoon in late August, Attorney Nancy Ingebritson approached me to file some papers. Two weeks earlier, because Mrs. Tee had no known relatives, Judge Rassmussen had appointed her as Administrator of Mrs. Tee's estate. She'd also been my friend since High School. She'd been maid of honor at my wedding.

I knew something was wrong because strands of her hair were seriously wandering and one collar of her blouse had flipped up, like it was trying to escape from under her jacket. That wasn't Nancy. After I stamped in her motions, affidavits and proposed orders and handed them to the Judge, she centered herself before the Judge, took a breath, and said, "May the Court please."

The first was that Mrs. Tee's full name, assuming she had one, proved impossible to determine. She possessed no Social Security Number, no checkbook, no bank accounts, no safety deposit boxes and no credit cards. No county birth records showed anyone born with Tee as a family name. No family had named a daughter Tee. No marriage records could be found. She'd never owned a car or held a driver's license. Neither the Jefferson hospital nor any of the local doctors had ever treated her. Businesses that billed her billed 'Mrs. Tee'. According to records of those businesses she dealt with, she always paid in cash. Everyone trusted her because everyone had had cake, cookies and homemade ice cream at her house.

Second, the Registry of Land and Deeds had no record that Mrs. Tee, or anyone else for that matter, held title to what was generally assumed to be her land. The land didn't appear on the survey, though it accounted for just over ten percent of Evyland. Mrs. Tee may have owned the land simply because she'd lived there so long. It's called adverse possession.

Third, although Mrs. Tee had no bank accounts and paid her bills in cash, no cash had been located in the house.

Finally, Mrs. Tee's house, if it was her house, consisted of two floors, eight rooms, and thousands of curious pieces of furniture, paintings, sculptures, other artifacts and books. Nancy couldn't do it by herself.

Attorney Ingebritson prayed the Court appoint an outside firm to conduct the cataloguing of the personal property.

Judge Rasmussen nodded, sighed, tapped his pen three times on the case file and pronounced a judicial, "Well!" He put the pen down, crossed his arms and remained silent for long seconds. Then slowly he turned to me. "I believe that I should appoint you to this matter."

Could have been two seconds or two minutes passed before I answered. Whatever it took, the time was long enough for a good portion of my life to pass through my mind. I've always had trouble stepping up, if you know what I mean. My family hadn't been the encouraging kind. They feared that encouraging me would only encourage me. "Don't get to thinking you're in charge." That's my mother talking to me. I loved her dearly, but she could have been mistaken for a mouse. "Accept what the Lord gives you," she said quietly. Good Lutheran, she was. "Accept." Of course, learning you're not in control comes as a surprise only to young people. There are things you have to accept. But she also taught me to hide from the world. I didn't need that.

I must have been twelve when I committed my first and only crime. I cut a picture out of a library book. This constituted the beginning, middle and end of my rebellious stage. I never got caught. People in Evyland weren't much into saints, and the picture I cut out was Joan of Arc. She looked less a saint than a goddess, decked out in her armor, holding her sword straight-up as if she'd called it to attention, and sitting on a white horse. I couldn't have explained why the picture spoke to me the way it did, but I knew I couldn't let it go when the book became due. I have the picture still.

Judge Rasmussen had appointed me administrator before, but only because the estates were too small for an attorney's attention. If Nancy were right, and I had no reason to believe she was exaggerating, this could be a major undertaking.

I remembered that picture then, of Joan of Arc. I thought of being able to return to the house that I'd been in so many times as a child, the house that had been the place of so many happy summer days. Besides, it was a way of repaying the poor old woman's kindness. Evyland wasn't itself without her. I accepted.

"Not in cases like this. I know Judge Rasmussen. He gets to pay you at your salary level rather than one of the accounting firms that would charge a fortune."

She offered to take me out for supper and I accepted, so long as dinner cost less than $25.00. Any amount over that paid for a public employee would be unethical. She seemed genuinely pleased that Judge Rasmussen had appointed me, but beyond that she used words very carefully. I thought she was warning me about the sheer number of items in the house and about the weirdness of some of them. At that point, perhaps that was all Nancy meant.

When I got home, I pulled into my usual parking place. Bill Halldorson pulled up alongside.

You will get the impression--if you haven't already--that our one-person police department took more interest in me than he took in most other citizens of Evyland. Unfortunately for him, my marriage had cured me of looking for Mr. Right. In fact, I'd pretty much given up on relationships altogether. Bill wasn't put off by my display of indifference and, maybe because I liked him as a friend, I never had the heart to tell him how hopeless his quest was.

I said, "Guilty. Do I pay a fine or do I have to do time?" Then I told him about my new assignment at Mrs. Tee's.

Bill is a pleasant, I'd say even an up beat, guy. One reason why I like him. But when he heard I was to be the administrator of Mrs. Tee's estate, Bill's smile faded into sobriety. "Don't do it. You don't know what you're getting into."

When I got inside, I found the picture tucked in a bureau drawer. "Jeanne d'Arc," it said. Her eyes looked not to heaven but straight at me. I felt glad I was to be Mrs. Tee's administrator. I'd staked out new territory for myself, even if Bill's warning worried me.

The next morning, the phone woke me. I rolled over in bed and checked the clock. 4:53 a.m. I swore and picked up the phone. Bill was on the other end of the line. He told me something important had happened and that he'd pick me up in ten minutes.

"I wanted you to see this before the Jefferson police arrive." Bill drove fast down Dirt Road #4 in the dark.

"This better be good. I'm not a morning person. It's unnatural to be up before the sun."

"I don't need to wake up. I need to be asleep. What were you doing up here anyway?"

"I'm the police, you know? Law and order 'R' me. Besides, I have as much a proprietary sense for old Mrs. Tee as anyone else in Evyland."

I mumbled, "Mmm." I crossed my arms for warmth and rode the rest of the way in silence.

Instead of parking at the side of the road in front of the house, Bill turned up the hill and drove over the grass around the house to the back. He stopped, put the cruiser in reverse, backed, moved forward a few feet so the nose of the car was pointed down, and parked. Leaving the motor running, he put on the high beams.

Police car lights have a lot of power. The back area lit up for two hundred yards. The hill dropped away till the slope met the former prairie that was lost to the darkness.

Mrs. Tee's grave had been dug up and her coffin looked like it had been smashed open by a giant using a boulder. The casket bottom had been dragged, or tossed, or kicked a hundred feet away. Poor Mrs. Tee. Even in death.

Then there were the burrows. That's how I thought of them: low piles of brown earth circling a dark hole, five of them around the base of the hill, as if a colony of prehistoric-sized groundhogs had decided to settle in.

I said, "Let's go." I was thinking money: that someone figured Mrs. Tee's fortune had been buried with or near her.

An unusual firmness in his voice, he repeated, "Wait." His fingers held my arm. "There may be something beyond the reach of the lights."

I turned over what he'd said in my mind for a good minute before I said, "What do you mean 'something'?"

Ten minutes later, the sun had peeked up enough to eliminate the possibility that 'something' had hidden itself in the dark. I scanned the landscape, the fields that rolled gently on forever to the horizon, sparsely scattered trees standing like sentries at outposts. No 'somethings' that I could see.

The imprint of the casket showed clearly in the bottom of the hole. Thankfully, or so I thought, no body parts were visible, though the casket had been reduced to three larger pieces and thousands of splinters. The gravestone, smashed in half, lay hidden in the grass. Where had the body gone? None of the answers I came up with settled my stomach.

I proceeded to the nearest burrow. The hole was large enough for two men easily and dirt around was piled two and a half or three feet high all around. The hole went straight down about four feet before leveling and turning toward the house. I couldn't see how far it might go beyond that, but based on the piles of soil around, it couldn't have been far.

Bill had his own flash. He stood beside me but he wasn't looking down. His eyes were on the horizon, as if he half-expected to see something there.

I walked off to the next burrow that, like the first, ended in the same twist toward the house.

Bill scratched his ear. "Possible, but I hope not. Cause I hope there's only one of them."

His flash illuminated a footprint. "This isn't the only print. I counted three pretty complete and four or five partial."

The print was complete, I could see that. The shoe tread was clear in the dirt. Big. Very big. "For some reason," I said, "I want to guess a size 17."

"You could be right. Probably didn't take all night for him to dig all five holes."

I'd crossed my arms by then and not just against the morning chill. "What …?" I was afraid of the answer to the question I needed to ask. "What could have a foot that big?"

Bill shrugged. "They look about the size of the bloody prints we found in the house."

"Could he be faking the show size? I mean, wearing a big size like you wear a snow shoe?"

"The prints are pretty deep. The Jackson folks will figure out his weight. See if the weight, the stride and shoe size match up."

Bill came by with his light. He saw it too, another print, lighter and smaller, on the newly exposed earth.

"Yep," he said. "Saw them, too. That's a sneaker or a running shoe. Look at the tread. Small, too."

I turned toward the house. The sun lit the eastern side. The west was still dark. "The house looks so damned pretty."

Bill put a hand on my shoulder. "I can't allow you to come up here alone and I don't have five deputies to send to protect you."

I was convinced that whoever was doing the digging wanted something and that something wasn't me. Mrs. Tee may not have expected a visitor, but I would keep a sharp lookout. One sight and I'd be driving away, calling for reinforcements on my cell. Maybe I just couldn't imagine my own death.

Bill dropped me back at my apartment. Mrs. Haagensen across the street was out watering her flowers. She stared at me getting out of the cruiser at 6:00 a.m. and didn't stop staring until Bill drove away and I closed door. I called Nancy and woke her up. While I was telling her what happened, I pulled a curtain aside and looked out. Mrs. Haagensen pointed at my apartment while talking to Mrs. Thorkelson and Mr. Magnussen. The discussion appeared animated.

Two days later, Bill reconciled himself to the reality that I was not going to quit my assignment counting furniture and that Judge Rasmussen would not remove me "because of some grave robber." Bill got me out on the Jefferson police firing range learning to use a Smith & Wesson M&P .40. The gun and training were gifts from the whole Evyland Police Department to me. I felt I had to accept.

The following Monday, the third full week of August, I met Nancy at Mrs. Tee's house to begin cataloguing the estate. Because of the number of items to be catalogued, I brought my laptop. I'd found an estate-cataloguing program on the internet, downloaded it at my own expense and spent the weekend trying to learn it.

I stopped on the porch. It wrapped around the east-south-west frontage of the house. Nancy was inside, I knew, having recognized her car parked out front. But I'd come to meet this house and I decided to meet it here, where the particular angle of sun turned the windows into mirrors reflecting the endless sky and the grassy plains. The air was warm, and the breeze didn't cool me so much as remind me that the warmth was comforting. I had one of those rare moments in my life when I understood in the depths of whatever I have left of a soul that I was where I was supposed to be and the world was right. Then, like a ghost, the understanding vanished.

Nancy stood at a kitchen counter drinking coffee from a thermos. She was a sharp dresser and I could tell from her outfit she had legal work to do somewhere. She was always trying to get me to dress better. "Our clocks are ticking," she'd tell me. "Good luck," I'd say.

"Not so much. Look." She pointed at some breakage and paint chips in the woodwork of the doors and hallway that led out back. "That's what Mr. Size 17 did the afternoon of the murder." Then she pointed in the other direction, toward the cellar door. "That door was fine last time I was here. Seems he's returned to the scene of the crime."

The door was open and I saw dents and gouges in the wood and places paint had chipped off. Reminded me of the time I'd hired movers who showed up under the influence and banged every piece of my furniture into the woodwork I'd painted.

"Yeah. I should read you your rights. The gun makes me feel like I'm pretending to be somebody."

I tugged it out of its holster. No fast draw expert here. I made sure the safety was on.

"Wow. Police issue. You've got some power there." She unzipped a pocket of her pocketbook and showed me her gun.

"I do divorces. It's smaller than yours and won't likely kill anyone, but it does back people off." She rezipped it back in her pocketbook. "I don't like guns much myself. Too many things can go wrong."

The wood plank stairs followed the west wall of the house down below the kitchen. I was wondering how something with size 17 feet got itself through the doorway and down the stairs when we noticed several things. The stair rail had been pushed out of its moorings and hung off the stairs. The cement of the wall had suffered the same treatment as the woodwork upstairs, being gauged and broken. I envisioned Mr. Size 17 crawling down the steps.

The biggest surprise was that the cellar was too small for the house. The rear cellar wall, the northern one, ran almost beneath the middle of the house. It had been cratered and dug through.

Nancy approached the suspect wall slowly, careful not to stumble on the pieces of concrete and clumps of dirt that littered the floor. She touched the undamaged wall at the edge of a hole where the concrete had been smashed through, then felt the inside of the hole itself.

"What do you use to destroy a wall like this?" She bent and touched one of the clods of earth. "Happened recently. The dirt is still damp; hasn't had time to dry out yet. The last day, maybe two, I bet. Look, the hole here goes through the wall and into the dirt beyond. It makes no sense, but this is really a half-cellar."

Nancy slowly shook her head 'yes' as she looked around "This place gives me the creeps. Let's go upstairs."

As soon as I got up to the kitchen I looked out the window to where the holes had been dug. The sun didn't seem as reassuringly bright as it had been. "Look where the holes are. It looks like he was trying to dig into the missing half of the cellar from the outside.

Nancy started laying down rules: always have your gun; keep your eyes open; leave well before sunset; make sure your phone is charged. "I've got a deposition at two so I have to go. Please, please be careful. And start on this floor. We'll go upstairs together next time." She wished me luck, handed me the keys to the house, climbed into her car, and, with a wave, drove back to Jefferson. I could tell she was a bit embarrassed to have got me in this predicament.

I wandered through the rooms of the first-floor: the kitchen, a half-bath, dining room, the parlor -- I thought I remembered Mrs. Tee calling it that, not 'the living room' -- and the sitting room the size of two parlors. If you think of the movies you've seen that take place in mansions in Europe or even on one of the coasts, you'll remember the wonderful rooms where parties and grand dances are held. That was where Mrs. Tee had served her baked goods to us children.

But the rooms weren't how I remembered. That didn't surprise me. Things have a way of remaining in place while your memory moves them around. Sitting through trials in court I quickly came to realize that when witnesses told wildly different stories regarding the same event, it wasn't necessarily that one was lying. In truth, people's memories suck and you might as well get your palm read as trust eyewitness testimony. So I didn't trust mine.

The day had started out sunny and the light flowed into the parlor and sitting room. A breeze came through the open windows and made the white sheer curtains dance. I pictured the rooms filled with kids, friends, all of us excited, talking, joking and stuffing our mouths while Mrs. Tee happily dished out the goodies, laughing and helping clean up when one of us spilled a plate on her rug. That picture, no matter how distorted by memory, felt real.

I stood in the parlor for the longest time with a smile on my face. I could almost hear Mrs. Tee's voice.

I pulled myself together and opened the cataloguing program. I began in the parlor because the room was a manageable size and most of the items were large and familiar.

I entered "couch". The program asked, "Style?" A drop-down menu. I clicked on that. A listing of more styles appeared, more than I'd ever imagined existed. I'd had no idea.

I was ready for this. I took a picture of the couch with my cell, emailed it to myself and tried to open my email on my laptop.

Damn. Mrs. Tee might not even have internet access. She didn't even have a TV, at least downstairs. Or would she? I checked for wireless networks.

Unsecured. Of course, Mrs. Tee would leave it unsecured. No one else lived in range to use it.

Bill arrived not ten minutes later. I thought Bill would have called the Jefferson police but he hadn't. I'd sat at the kitchen table, more or less afraid to move. I liked Bill but his presence didn't necessarily make me feel safer.

"MYCHILDRENMURDEREDME? A prank?" He'd begun to go through cabinets. "What are you looking for?"

"Well, someone could have gotten in the house. Not a lot of people would have seen him. Lousy sense of humor though. I'm looking for coffee or tea."

"I brought some tea. Look in my lunch bag. But what if it wasn't a prank? What if Mrs. Tee left it as a clue for us to find?"

Bill rummaged in my cold bag, took out my tuna sandwich, an apple and the tea bags. "After she was murdered?"

"OK, let's go with that. Mrs. Tee knows that her children are stalking her. They're trying to kill her. So she changes the name of her wireless network. How does that sound?"

He turned away from the stove where the water was heating. "I'm highly insulted. Me. The police."

Bill laughed. "I know. Evyland is probably the only place that would have me as a cop, but I try to do my job. And that includes trying to be logical."

I paused, trying to sort the possible meanings of that statement. "Want to split the sandwich?"

"Not nothing. I'll make a report and send it to the Jefferson guys. You did right. Can't be too careful."

I shrugged. "Mr. Size 17. Did some damage." I pointed. "Go down for a look see."

He stopped to check the damage to the woodwork, then disappeared into the cellar for about five minutes. When he came up he said, "Something about that cellar spooks me."

"Why would anyone name a wifi network MYCHILDRENMURDEREDME? Maybe it's a well-disguised full cellar and Mrs. Tee's fortune is in the walled-in side."

"Good. The Jefferson police think the footprints we saw were actually impressions left by the braces digging equipment puts down." He paused. "They haven't been able to match it with any known manufacturer yet."

"And the size 5 shoe is there because it was excavation equipment's go-to-work-with-daddy day?

Nancy called me at home the next evening. "Did some research today. I found something interesting."

"About what?" I'd just gotten in from work and was in the middle of boiling myself some rigatoni.

"The geology department at State twice asked for permission to do a dig-and-drill on Mrs. Tee's property."

My hand stirred the pasta while my brain looked into the implications of this news. I couldn't think of any.

Nancy said, "I've an appointment to talk to a professor there tomorrow evening. Want to come?"

"Well, if there's oil or gas or a gold mine on the property, shouldn't it be listed among the assets of the estate?"

"I'll ask Judge Rasmussen to let you leave early. It's Court business, after all."

She had a nice car, one that didn't punish you for every bump and one you could hear the radio over the road noise, and I had to remind myself that she worked hard for it. When I asked her what model it was, turned out it was already five years old.

"No. I even googled the phrase. All I got was a list of murders of children by parents and vice versa. Endless. I think we're just fooling ourselves when we say we're civilized. We act like a bunch or gorillas. Or maybe that's insulting gorillas." She paused. "I can't verify that she ever lived by any record anywhere. How can I find out who her children were? I'm surprised that Bill took it so lightly, though."

Nancy stuck to the speed limit. Took us two hours and eight minutes to get to the Price Geological Research Center on State's north campus. The newer science buildings stood like glass beacons among the trees and the walkways teemed with students.

He laughed. "Yes, I know. Not quite the paperless society. Any day now, though." He offered us seats. "Thanks, by the way, for coming out. After you called," he nodded in Nancy's direction, "I checked the internet. Awfully gruesome. I'm sorry this happened. She seems to have been quite a character. All I know is she was very welcoming to us. She even seemed disappointed when she told us, 'No.'"

"Most of this state, almost all of it, sits on layers of metamorphic or sedimentary rock. During the cretaceous -- about a hundred million years ago--this area and much of the surrounding states lay beneath an ocean we call the Western Interior Seaway." He must have been relieved when we didn't jump up and tell him the earth was 5000 years old. He continued, "Sediment brought in by rivers and streams settled on the ocean bottom and, under the weight of sediment piling on above, became sedimentary rock. Sandstone, that red, grainy rock you often see along highways, is a sedimentary rock. Sometimes the sedimentary rock gets compressed into metamorphic rock like shale or limestone. You passed through a road cut through shale just as you entered the north campus. There's a lot of limestone in your area.

"The rock beneath Mrs. Tee's house is a bit different. We think it sits on a volcanic plug. If we're correct, that means that sometime after the ocean laid down the sedimentary rock, some molten lava pushed its way up and through and formed a hill or small mountain that's since worn away to the slight hill her house sits on. We wanted to test our theory.

"Price inquired twice about her land. The first time was before I came here, twenty-two years ago. I don't know a thing about that request except that nothing came from it.

"We made an appointment, went to her house, explained what we wanted to do. We asked her if we could survey her land, drill a few holes, take a few samples and study the damn thing. We told her we were fully insured, would not create a dangerous situation, and would leave her land pretty much as we found it. She told us no. She seemed disappointed that she couldn't give us a more favorable answer. She was firm. We didn't argue. We thanked her and left.

"It was something we wanted to do, not needed. It wasn't as if we suspected oil or natural gas lay under her house."

Dr. Kazankis scrunched his mouth and glanced at the ceiling. When his eyes came down, he said, "None that I can think of."

Nancy handed him a court paper. "This is my appointment as Administrator of Mrs. Tee's estate. The house and the land are part of her estate. What this means is, though I'd have to get the court's permission, I can accept your offer to do your survey."

"Oh." The Professor handed the document back to her. "That would be wonderful. Thank you. I, I mean, we really appreciate that. We could do it as part of our summer program."

He frowned, "If someone's already doing a survey …." He must have figured from our expressions that it wasn't a geologic survey. "Who? What are they looking for?"

"We don't know who's doing the digging and it happens at night." I didn't say anything about the size of the digger's shoes.

"Must be some amateurs," said Dr. Kazankis. "I need to get some permissions and some volunteers. It would help if I saw the site again."

He thought for a second. "Yes. I can do that. Oh, one more thing. The most amazing thing, actually. A couple of months, I mean, I think it was maybe two months after we met with her, we, the Price Center, received a package from Mrs. Tee."

"A small package. With no warning. She didn't call to say she'd sent anything. It arrived with a 'Best Wishes' card asking us to accept her donation. The package contained two hundred one hundred dollar bills. Twenty thousand dollars."

I was elated by the time we left, but Nancy was furious. We stood on the walk in front of the Price Research Center. "I don't know what's wrong with these people. Mrs. Tee's got that kind of money to give away to someone she won't even cooperate with, why doesn't she have a will? If she's giving that kind of money away, she should have set up trusts! And where was she keeping all the hundred dollar bills? In her bra?"

"Look, Nancy, calm down. A lot of old people are strange. She thought her children were trying to kill her and she didn't call the police."

At dinner, Nancy unfolded a sheet of copy paper she'd carried in her pocket book. "My student intern found this." She placed it in front of me.

I saw what appeared to be a photocopy of an old newspaper photograph. At first I thought it was a primary school class with their teacher, but as I looked closer and found better light, I realized it wasn't a teacher. The caption read, "Mrs. Tee and the new fifth grade class after enjoying cake and ice cream." The date on the top of the page read, "August 1, 1914."

That night I hardly slept. The next day I drank every bit of coffee I could find. We had three divorces, one a bit of a spitting match custody dispute, and two estates, each case more irritating than the preceding. One couples' little boy had two plastic giant robot things that he periodically crashed together. Just before he did it, he made a choking noise in his throat, something like "urgle" and then "blam". Since the attorneys and the parties had to stay, the judge ordered the clerk to take the kid out to the hall. I tried to talk to him. I asked him his name, what school he went to, all that. His response was "urgle" and "blam". The next couple had two kids, both present in the courtroom, a girl of ten and a boy of eight. The husband and wife got into an argument, shouting at each other, "You take the kids," followed by "No, you take the kids." The day seemed a week long. When it ended I wanted to go home to sleep but that was not to be.

My sleep-deprived, over-caffeinated mind began grinding out some questions. When the citizens of Evyland spoke of Mrs. Tee, we talked always about the summer parties for the children. What did Mrs. Tee do during the rest of the year? Did she live all alone in that big house with no one to talk to? Did she go to Arizona or Florida for the winter? Did family come visit her? Did someone from Evyland call her to see how she was doing? I could not discard the feeling that she lived alone the rest of the year and that we forgot her until summer when the pastries and ice cream rolled around. Perhaps she fought the loneliness of those who have no one. We'd forgotten her. We'd failed. I felt I'd failed.

"But we don't know that's true. She could have called a taxi, or taken a train or plane somewhere. Or relatives could have come and taken her with them. Who would have noticed? Remember, she never asked for help, as far as we know."

"Well," I said, "I would have liked to see her take a plane somewhere without identification these days. They'd have locked her up or deported her."

Nancy said, "Look, wait. Wait until you see the upstairs, the second floor, before you jump to conclusions about her being lonely."

"Wait till you see. And I'm saying that because I can't begin to describe what's up there. We'll go up while Paul does his geology thing."

I arrived first Monday morning. I parked in front of Mrs. Tee's house and listened to the radio while I watched the sun come up. Bill arrived, then Nancy with Paul. I got out of the car, coffee in hand, and stretched. After introductions, Paul, with Nancy hanging over his shoulder, started taking pictures.

We circled to the left, not talking much, as if Paul needed quiet to take pictures. Perhaps out of impatience, or feeling left out, I walked ahead, eyes studying the house, trying to imagine where the cellar sat beneath, where its back wall divided known from unknown.

I stopped to wait for the others to catch up. The sunlight made long shadows of the piles of dirt. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Seven?!

We took a few seconds to think. Nancy was the first to figure it out. She pointed there and there. She and I rushed to one, Paul and Bill to the other. Paul called us, excitement driving his voice, "Come here, look at this!"

They'd found what I thought to be a slab of rock apparently pulled out from the earth. I guessed it was three by four feet by eight inches thick. One surface looked to have been cut flat and smoothed but not polished. Markings, odd three-cornered lines, dots, circles, angles and half-parentheses, had been carefully inscribed. The markings looked as if they'd been pushed into the solid rock.

Paul brushed away the dirt. He said, "It's clay, not stone. Cuneiform, I think. Let me get some pictures while the light is good."

He was right. The angle of the sun set the markings in beautiful half-dark, half-light relief.

Bill asked, "Was this what he was looking for? Or did it mark an entrance to the blocked half of the cellar?"

I looked into the hole. It appeared much like the others: down four feet and a turn toward the house we couldn't see beyond. I tugged on Bill's sleeve and pointed. He squatted and examined the footprints I'd pointed out. When he stood, he said, "The small one is on top of Mr. Size 17's."

"I'm going to have a look," said Nancy. She took off her jacket and handed it to me.

She dropped feet first into the hole. She squatted, then fell to all fours facing the turn toward the house. She turned her face up and said, "It goes a way but I can't see. Anyone have a flash?"

She backed out of the hole and looked up. "It goes on about six feet or so. I think I see where he got that rock. The tunnel is wider there. It goes on farther than I can see."

"Come up," he said to Nancy. "Here." Paul reached a hand down to her. "Sometimes these things aren't safe. They may even be booby-trapped."

Bill said, "He might be right. Let's let someone who knows what they're doing do it."

Paul had a quick reply. "Caves, I bet. This area is limestone and water's carved a number of caves. I didn't think to bring a map."

Paul said, "Both, apparently. This place is a geological anomaly and that clay tablet there seems to be an archeological anomaly. It sure doesn't look like it comes from around here. Does anyone have any idea who is digging these holes?"

"Size 17? Big boy." Paul continued, "I've some equipment I brought with me. I'd like to take a few measurements to get some more information about this place." He paused. "Maybe by that time Ari will answer my email."

"A geologist friend of mind at Harvard. I'm hoping he knows someone in archeology."

Nancy said, "While Paul's out here, let's go inside. Make sure nothing's changed in there."

"Anyone use some coffee?" I'd carried that and a few other necessities in from my car. I'd decided the house needed provisions.

I set the coffee maker dripping and put on water for tea. I put cups on the table along with sugar and instant creamer. As I was putting out napkins, I caught Nancy staring at me.

I looked at her over my shoulder and said, "When Paul comes in, perhaps you can show us around upstairs."

"Listen. I sent that picture to a friend of mine who teaches at Harvard thinking he'd know someone in the archeology department. He did. Dr. Sarah Wheeler just got back to me."

He took out his phone and navigated to his email. We all stopped what we had been doing to listen.

"'Paul,'" he read, "'What a surprise to see those pictures: I can hardly believe when Ari told me where you are. I don't have time to explain now. I'm on my way to the airport to catch a flight out of Logan at 11:00. Two layovers. Can someone pick me up at the airport at 5:30?"

Nancy said, "Maybe we should wait to go upstairs till this Sarah person arrives. An archeologist might be helpful up there."

Dr. Sarah Wheeler stood tall and bone thin, like a single stalk of wheat, and with her gray hair cut right below her ears, we all knew immediately this woman had to be from New England. She oozed poise but she had an authentic friendly smile. She excitedly shook hands with each of us, repeating our names to help her remember them.

We found a restaurant just outside the airport. Dinner went well enough when I wasn't comparing my life to Nancy's and Sarah's or complaining to myself that all these experts were trying to move in on 'my' project. Don't worry: I wasn't rude. Instead I seethed internally with envy. And then Sarah performed the coup de gras by showing pictures of all her grandchildren. Wonderful: Nancy had a career, Paul had a career, and Sarah had a career, grandchildren, and a decent salad. I wasn't envious in that I didn't want to be an archeologist or an attorney. I was envious because they'd known somewhere in their lives what they wanted and they worked for it and got it. I still didn't know what I wanted but I was pretty certain at that moment that it wasn't included in the definition of First Clerk.

She explained. "I did recognized the inscription. Almost immediately. The cuneiform is from the Babylonian Empire which we generally think of as lasting from 4000 to 1000 BCE, but that includes various conquerors coming in and taking over.

"The inscription you sent me is from the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian and Sumerian creation story. The tablet may have been stolen from Baghdad during the second Iraq war. There was a fair amount of theft then." She fished in her shoulder bag for her tablet, I mean the electronic kind. "Let me read you the translation:

"In the Enuma Elish, Tiamat, the ocean waters, and Apsu, the fresh waters, begat the earth. Note that Tiamat is not only the ocean waters but chaos, something unformed.

"As is their way, these gods begat gods who begat gods and so on. Apsu became angry with the young gods and decided to kill them. Tiamat warned her children, grandchildren and all. One of the children, Ea, killed Apsu and became the chief god. But Ea and his wife gave birth to another god, Marduk. Marduk was very powerful and disruptive. Tiamat, urged by the unborn gods still inside her, created monsters to destroy Marduk. The generations of gods split. Some remained loyal to Tiamat; the others supported Marduk. Marduk killed Tiamat, as I read. Marduk organizeed the stars, planets, the moon and sun and the weather. He killed Tiamat's new husband and from his blood created the human race to work for, or, essentially, to be slaves to the gods."

Paul said, "I don't think we need to jump to the conclusion that someone killed Mrs. Tee as some sort of reenactment of Babylonian myth. There must be a better explanation than that."

"Look," said Paul. "This is religion. Not only religion but ancient myth that no one believes. It doesn't have anything to do with what's going on here."

Bill said, "Wait. Wait a minute! We don't …." Then he stopped, like a child who'd spoken out of turn.

"Yes," said Sarah. "Her ass. 'And with his merciless club he smashed her skull. He cut through the channels of her blood, and he made the North wind bear it away to secret places.'"

"He dismembered her and carried her body away. That's what happened here; that's what happened to Mrs. Tee."

There was a moment of silence for my ideas. I could almost hear taps being played in the background.

Paul finally said, "Someone killed Mrs. Tee and left a bunch of crazy clues to confuse us."

Nancy said, "I don't know. I think Paul must be right. I mean, a Babylonian creation story? Here? Now? If Mrs. Tee had been named Mrs. Gee, there'd be no connection. Your mind is connecting dots that aren't connected."

In the calmest voice I'd heard in a long time, Sarah said, "Whatever we suspect at this point, we certainly need much more information. A woman has been killed. We must find out who killed her and why."

Sarah asked a lot of questions we couldn't answer. She even asked my question; not my question as if I owned it, but the question I'd been worrying, the one about Mrs. Tee's life during the rest of the year. No one had an answer. I did notice that Bill, who had been participating in the conversation with the rest of us, suddenly became quiet, cast his eyes about his plate, and didn't look up again until we'd moved on to another topic. I made note to corner him first chance I got. He was holding out on us.

Nancy had taken her car. She and Paul returned to her apartment in Jefferson. I'd ridden with Bill, so Dr. Wheeler and I shared the back seat of the cruiser. I reminded Bill that my car was back at Mrs. Tee's.

Bill put his lights on and cut a half hour off the regular driving time by keeping to the police speed limit.

Meanwhile, Dr. Wheeler got to know me. She had a way of continuing to ask seemingly non-probing questions until I'd told her my whole life story, except for tearing out the page in the library book. In self-defense, I began asking her questions. Turns out she was actually from Boston and had studied at Harvard and in France and Germany. She'd been on 'digs' in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and China and had two children and three grandchildren who were scattered around the world.

I asked her the question she'd probably been asked a million times: why had she become an archeologist.

"Because it's so interesting!" She smiled. "It's fun. And I'm terribly curious about the different ways people have found to live over the centuries.

"Every civilization has had a creation story. The Assyrians had an earlier version of the Enuma Elish and the Chaldeans and Akkadians all had similar stories, some of which resembled those of the other civilizations.

"' When the skies above were not yet named
Nor earth below pronounced by name,
Apsu, the first one, their begetter,
And maker Tiamat, who bore them all,
Had mixed their waters together,
But had not formed pastures, nor discovered reed beds;
When yet no gods were manifest,
Nor names pronounced, nor destinies decreed,
Then gods were born within them.'

"Now let me read you this. 'In the beginning, God created heaven and earth. Now the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, with a divine wind sweeping over the waters.'

"That's Genesis. But there is an alternate, equally supportable translation, the medieval Jewish understanding.

"'When God began creating heaven and earth, the earth then being a formless void, with darkness over the deep, and a divine wind sweeping over the waters, God said ….'

"Tiamat, the personification of the deep, the watery chaos, is in all three versions. The Hebrew word is Tehom, which may be a version of Tiamat. Scholars have found parallels in all the Mesopotamian creation stories, including Genesis, though they are all different stories. Many other peoples, including the Chinese, Japanese and Hindus, had creation myths involving the oceans, seas and waters all representing a kind of pregnant chaos."

"Oh, yes, I do." Then, soberly, she said, "Studying myths you understand how little we've changed over five thousand years. People now think they don't believe in myths, but they do."

Finally I was able to point ahead. "Dr. Wheeler, those lights there, that's Evyland. She leaned forward, anxious to see. As we drove through the town, she looked to both sides. When we hit the center of town, Bill pointed out the police station above Glen's Eat & Pump.

We drove out Dirt Road #4. I pointed out Mrs. Tee's house, as if Dr. Wheeeler couldn't see it herself.

Bill slowed but didn't stop the cruiser. He flashed his search lights around and then stopped. My heart sank to my ankles. My car was lying on its top not ten feet from Mrs. Tee's front steps. "That's my car! My car!" It looked like it had met a sixteen-wheeler head on at a high rate of speed. Sarah put her hand on my arm. Bill circled the car around and we headed the hell out of there.

"I don't know. I'll know more in the morning when it's light but I didn't want to hang around because Mr. Size 17 seems to be having a bad evening."

"It's him or the State University football team and they probably weren't around Mrs. Tee's tonight."

When Bill dropped us in front of my apartment, I noticed a light in Mrs. Haagensen's second floor window across the street, complete with the silhouette of her head. Damn. I imagined her dialing and whispering into her phone, "This time it's a woman!" That's me, the neighborhood bisexual harlot. Who no longer had a car.

Upstairs, Dr. Wheeler and I disagreed about who would sleep in the bed. I won. I got the couch. After she got to sleep, I broke open the whiskey that I keep for special occasions.

The smell of eggs cooking and bread toasting woke me. Thank God I didn't have a hangover.

"Morning. Oh, as well as might be expected under the circumstances. The bed was very comfortable."

She placed a cup of coffee, a glass of juice and the not-really-butter in front of me. "Dr. Wheeler, you're making me feel I'm in a restaurant."

"I've been very lucky. You know? I was born with resources. Not just up here," she pointed to her head with the spatula, "but my parents and the community I was born into were well off, not wealthy by American standards, but wealthy by world standards. Even better, I was encouraged to learn, to do, to have a good time. I found something I wanted to do, something that I almost felt I was supposed to do, and I love it and I am very good at it. And now I have titles, but what I am is a very fortunate human being."

"I'm sorry to hear that. You're like most people. You deserved the encouragement I had as much as I did. Perhaps it's not too late. Perhaps there's something you feel called to do or be. If there is, let me encourage you."

I almost cried, sitting there with toast and fake butter in my mouth and a cup of coffee in my hand.

Joan of Arc. I didn't say it. I couldn't. I didn't know what it meant. "There might be."

Sarah smiled and for a second or two I loved her like I wished I could have loved my parents.

I said, "I think I'd better call Judge Rasmussen to let him know I won't be in court today.

When Bill pulled up in his cruiser to pick us up, Mr. and Mrs. Haagensen, Mrs. Thorkelson, Mr. and Mrs. Magnussen, Mr. Lambertsen, Mr. and Mrs. Bjelland and Mayor and Mr. Thorkelson stood on the far sidewalk watching.

Whatever hopes I'd had that my car was in better condition than it had seemed the night before were as dashed as my car. I stared at it in all its smashed and crumpled glory. How to explain this to the insurance company? Nancy put her arm around me.

Bill examined the ground between where I'd parked and where the car rested. "No tire tracks. No sign that the car was dragged here. It must have been carried or thrown. Given the condition of the car, I'd guess thrown. It's about ten yards."

Nancy said she thought the hole had been widened. Paul agreed. I was too distraught about the car to have an opinion.

Sarah examined the tablet and consulted her own electronic tablet for further information. She said she'd need to do some tests, but she thought the tablet was authentic. Five or so thousand years old. Or so.

Nancy insisted that we all go up to the second floor. She wanted Sarah's opinion. We agreed. No one seemed anxious to explore the tunnel where the tablet had been, not with the threat of Mr. Size 17 being down there.

So we traipsed in and once again I slipped into to my hostess role. Nancy watched me but she had no joking comments this time. I ignored her. I was doing what came naturally. "Coffee? Tea?"

The second floor nearly stole the air from my lungs. It stood two floors high and had been paneled in glistening dark wood. Ornate chandeliers, each one unique, subtly lit the wide hallway. Every few feet a pedestal of wood or stone displayed a piece of sculpture, most of them seemed worn by ages and some were missing pieces. Tapestries hung from high above us. Except for one wall hanging that might have been Native American, they originated far away. A densely patterned Middle-Eastern-looking red runner laid the length of the hallway. High double doors stood at each end of the hallway. Two pair of more modest doors opened off the hallway not quite half-way down.

The nearest doors stood just to our left. Nancy could have stood on my head and she wouldn't have had to duck beneath the header. Paul seized one of the handles, but before opening it, he turned to us as if to seek our permission. Apparently satisfied, he opened the door.

Light entered through windows larger than the double doors we entered. The room was cool and Sarah was right: there were books upon books.

I'd been in libraries, of course, and my parents had taken me to a couple of museums in the capital when I was a kid. This room that occupied a third of the second floor was a bit of both. Dark wood bookcases heavy with old and ancient volumes lined the four walls. Rolling ladders allowed access to the books at higher elevations and an iron stairway led to a landing for the highest books. A librarian's desk that looked almost medieval despite the computers set on it greeted those who entered. Six large and heavy wood tables, each with four laptops and with matching chairs, stood evenly spaced on the floor. Pedestals with odd sculptures and upholstered chairs were scattered among the tables.

I followed Sarah, thinking libraries were more her territory. She walked almost cautiously, moving her hand over the sculptures without touching them. She knew I was behind her because she spoke.

"Raven. He comes in second I think to watery chaos as having something to do with creation, especially creating people. Many North American tribes told stories about Raven, but other societies on other continents also. Perhaps because the raven is so quick and smart. And tricky. Spiders, too.

She stopped beside a statue of a woman surrounded by waters and a dragon. "This is Eurynome, the Greek goddess of the chaotic sea and the serpent Ophion." I thought Ophion a dragon from the sculpture. "They made love and Eurynome gave birth to the universal egg. Ophion curled around it and cracked it open, spilling all creatures over the earth. Over there, is Kuan Yin with her dragon. She calms the waters.

She smiled. "And the turtle. A strange creature to give birth to the earth and heavens.

"Oh! The Venus of Millendorf. This is what at least some of our ancestors thought to be a representation of a woman. She won't make the cover of Vogue, that's for sure."

She stopped. She turned to make sure I was paying attention. "This is him. Marduk."

I walked around the image. His face was tall, broad and severe, a scowl on his lips, his eyes looked down his nose. He had encased himself in leather armor and wore a tall, circular, decorated headdress. He stood ready to attack. And he had double wings.

"So why is it him, Marduk? Why aren't we dealing with the return of the Raven, or Eurynome, or the Venus of Millendorf?"

Sarah said, "I don't understand any of the why of this. I don't understand how a mythical god can materialize, if he has. It should be impossible. But if any of the gods are to return, it would be Marduk or some god like him. Marduk is the god we worship. He created the stars, the sun and moon, the earth, the human race. He set the calendar, all of history, moving. He controls the weather. He does what we try to do: stand apart from the universe and control it. He said, 'Whatever I create will remain unchanged.' He destroyed chaos. He stands for order and security based upon unrelenting terror. So maybe he's here because so many of us believe in him."

That was a lot for me to take in at one gulp, but I thought I understood what she was talking about. It's about getting up every morning and hoping today is just like yesterday, hoping there are no surprises because change can only mean things are getting worse. And you go through day after day doing the same things at the same time in the same way with the same results, relying on those whose job it is to prevent change to defend your luxury of never having to face life, and you feel you've accomplished something, or gotten away with something, but secretly, somewhere deep, you know your heart has died.

I walked along the walls of books, sealed behind a glass-like material, each panel with its own thermostat providing temperature and humidity readings. I tried to read the titles, perhaps hoping to find one about Joan of Arc, but I found only a few in English. I tested the doors to the cabinets. They opened. I was afraid to touch the books, they seemed so old and fragile. I closed the door.

A voice behind me. "You should see the sculptures. Some of them are x-rated." Nancy's eyes slid past me to the books, then upward. "What a place," she said.

The floor came up and threw me onto a table. The lights went out and so, it seemed, did the sun. Someone screamed. It could have been me. I grabbed the edges of the trembling table I was on as if it were a life-saving raft. Someone shouted; someone swore; someone called for help. The chandeliers swung like trapeze artists and chairs tumbled. Lightening flashed just beyond the windows and thunder seemed to roar from beneath the house. Something just missed my head. Then more things fell, like heavy, black hail.

I rolled off the table onto the floor, then scurried underneath. Books. Books were falling. I hoped the bookcases didn't come crashing down. We'd never get out from beneath them.

Silence, as abrupt and uncalled for as the storm. Sunlight broke through the windows.

The sun shone through shreds of dark clouds, casting lines of shadow across the field behind the house. He -- or it -- stood, the image of a man constructed from dark metal, legs apart, shaking what appeared to be metal fists at us. He shrieked and bellowed what I could only guess to be curses. He seemed to be rousing himself into a regular fit because his arms and body moved faster and faster and he began jumping. I realized I'd seen this behavior before: when I had baby-sat two year olds.

But the thing reclaimed our attention by crying out in a voice that itself sounded like thunder, "I am Marduk! Give me the children!"

Marduk waved his fists at the sky and the shredded clouds began circling over him, knitting themselves back into a thunderhead. The sun disappeared.

Pushing furniture in our paths away, we'd made it back to the stairs when a lightening bolt flashed and thunder rolled through the building. Gusts of wind and rain pounded the house like artillery. We had to move the kitchen table away from the cellar door before we could go down.

Again I let the others go first. They ran past me down into the darkness. Bill turned his flash on.

Bill said, "You can't go up there now. He's probably someplace safe and you'd be in danger wandering around looking for him."

I'd leaned my back against the wall at the foot of the stairs to steady myself against the shaking of the building. A sense of warmth interrupted my thoughts. Not the warmth you'd feel from a stove or heater, but the warmth you feel from a friend or lover. It came from the wall behind me. A crazy sensation, I knew. I turned and placed my palms against it. I felt the desire to hug a concrete wall.

I pressed my back against the wall. "What we're looking for is behind this wall."

Bill looked shocked. I must have looked shocked, too. I had no idea why I'd said those words, except, for a moment, I felt they were true.

Our anxiety about Paul dragged time out like an elastic. The thunder seemed to go on forever. No one spoke.

When two minutes passed without a sound, we hurried up the stairs. The rain hadn't fully stopped. Nancy ran up to the second floor calling Paul's name. Sarah and I dashed window to window, looking for a sign of Paul or Marduk. The first floor windows looked out over a ground fog that had turned the hill and house into an island.

Bill was back, dripping wet, a minute later, just as Nancy came down the stairs.

Nancy crumpled on the bottom step. I ran and sat and hugged her. We cried together.

Bill sat on the floor across the hall from us, leaving Sarah the only one standing. She had her arms crossed and her face had gone pale.

Bill said, "I'm awfully sorry, Nancy. I almost think it's my fault. I have a confession to make.

"Mrs. Tee told me this would happen, that Marduk would kill her again and try to take back the house."

"You see, when summer ended, I'd come out here to check on her, usually once a week, especially after the first snow because, you know, we didn't plow this far out."

"Walked. Snow shoes. So she'd ask me in for coffee or tea and something that she'd baked. One day she said that there was something I should know as the police for Evyland. She told me she was old, older than the world. She said if it wasn't for her there never would have been a universe. Like she was a … a…."

"Yeah. I'm sorry but I don't remember the details, except she said Marduk is her great-great something grandson and he led the rebellion against her. They fought a war and Marduk killed her. Except you can't kill Tiamat, that's what she said her real name was, like in the inscription. You can't kill what the universe is made from. She told me that every five hundred years Marduk returns to try to kill her again. Marduk wants to control the world. She was a sweet lady but crazy. I thought she was crazy. I thought she didn't know what she was talking about. Till now."

"I should have known." Sarah's hands formed fists but hung helplessly at her sides. "How? How could anyone have known? Myths are powerful. People set their lives by them, kill and die for them, for them, but …."

She looked at me. "Yes. Beyond that. But we're not. The more we laugh at them, the more we're trapped by them. There's something in our souls that wants to obey.

"We scientists had our chance. We blew it. We blew it at the same time the religions blew their chance. We blew it in the First World War and the colonial wars that followed, the Second World War and the colonial wars that followed that. The ministers and priests sent boys off to kill and die and science gave them bigger and better weapons, tanks, planes and bombs. Religion and science sold themselves out to power and money. The Divine Right of Power. And Marduk is about power."

Bill said, "So we know Marduk is real because it killed Paul. He's ready to kill for what? Is there something in this house that he needs? Is that why he hasn't just blown the house up?"

Bill brought Nancy to her sister's in Evyland, then dropped me and Sarah off at Glen's Eat & Pump Car Rental, where I obtained the services of mid-sized vehicle courtesy of my insurance company, despite being unable to explain how my car had ended up sitting on its roof in front of Mrs. Tee's house. Sarah was patient during the process. I was so jittery from seeing them take Paul's body away in the ambulance that I hardly heard the terms of the lease. On the way home, while trying to figure out where the turn signals were, I asked Sarah if she had a copy of the book that Tiamet and Marduk appeared in. She did and she offered to lend it to me.

"It isn't exactly anything. It's a story that attempts an understanding the most basic things: where did the earth come from?; where did people come from?; why are there people?; what is the meaning of life?"

"Haven't we all? Myths are attempts at answering these questions based on very limited knowledge and a lot of intuition. There are psychiatrists and psychologists who believe that myths are so fundamental to our nature that they analyze patients with psychological problems using myths as guides."

"They claim it does, at least some of the time. I suppose you think I don't knock scientists because I am one. That's partly true. Science has helped a great deal. But asking questions that science can answer means that only the questions science can answer get asked. The only scientific answer I've heard to the question 'what's the meaning of life' is it has no meaning. For those who want a different answer, there is myth."

"Great, thanks. Just what I wanted to hear: life has no meaning. Of course, that's what I figured, based on my own limited experience, but I was hoping for something better."

"We all were. And just because science can't come up with another answer doesn't mean that life has no meaning. It means we can't prove it scientifically. Maybe I should add, 'Yet'. But science stands above and apart from the universe, looks down on it and asks for a meaning. We live inside it. What do the moon or stars mean to us living here? What about the plains that surround us? What do other people mean to us? Then we have lots of answers."

I did a chicken casserole and Sarah made a salad. Sarah entertained me with stories of her travels and I talked about being a court clerk in Jefferson. Despite the imbalance in romanticism, I think she laughed as hard at my stories as I did at hers.

Later, she went into my bedroom and I sat at the table reading the Enuma Elish. I read it twice and had gotten well into a third reading before Sarah's light went out. I was tired but I had things to do. I waited until I was sure she was asleep. Then I got the keys to my rental and went out. I waved to Mrs. Haagensen.

No. It was more than that. I needed to test my illusions. Paul was dead. I hadn't thought that much of him, probably because of his and Nancy's relationship. So what if I was jealous. I owed him now. I owed Mrs. Tee. And myself. Owing myself, I had to test these sense impressions, these illusions, at least until I'd proved them wrong.

And I had to do it by myself because no one, not even Nancy, would understand. I couldn't be sure about what I was getting into, and I was plenty frightened. I couldn't fight Marduk; he was huge and powerful. I couldn't fight a single lightening bolt. But this was something I needed to do. I hoped Mr. Metalhead wouldn't notice.

I'd brought a flashlight so I didn't even turn the house lights on. If I'd seen a mouse I'd have died of fright.

I opened the cellar door and started down the stairs. The cellar air was as stale as before. I felt the wall still beckoning to me. Keeping the flash on the step in front of me, I walked down. This wasn't Bill's police flash; just one I'd plucked from a kitchen drawer. The light on the stair was about the diameter of the mirror in my compact. I kept my right hand against the wall. My fingers found cracks I didn't remember, perhaps the result of Marduk's afternoon performance.

Warmth came from the wall and when I took a second to stand on a step and look up, I swore I could see the wall, just barely, glowing. I turned off the flash and blinked to clear my eyes. The wall glowed. I thought. Or was it imagination?

When I reached the bottom I shined the light over the wall. No writing or designs, no secret inscriptions saying "enter here", no hints of any kind.

I stepped back and ran the light from the flash over the whole cellar. Marduk would have had to go down on his hands and knees to fit down here. He'd practically have to crawl down the stairs. But he had been here before. He'd smashed the walls. Something to remember: he'd crawl if he was desperate enough. Just broken concrete, dirt and some rocks now.

Had I heard something? The slide of something on concrete? Was it a breath? Had something moved and created a movement of air? Some sixth or seventh sense told me I was not alone.

I turned and quickly shined the light around the cellar. Nothing. Empty. Maybe it had been a mouse or one of those cellar bugs with a hundred feet. Or just me being jittery. I was plenty scared and I had no plan what to do now.

I swung the light back toward the wall and, on the way, caught a reflection in the dark beneath the stairs. Two small reflections. I sucked in a breath. I swung my flash back. Eyes.

A girl's voice said, "Don't shoot me." Mostly, that was a command but the tail somehow curled into a plea.

I hadn't even taken my gun out of the holster. I'd forgotten I'd had it. "Not if you move slowly, come out and let me see who you are." As an afterthought, I added, "Hands up."

The shadow with eyes made scratching noises as she gathered her feet beneath her. She came into the light and stood.

Quite in possession of herself, though her hands were still raised, she said, "Mrs. Tee asked me to come. I've seen Marduk."

I glanced at her feet. That explained the smaller prints near the digging outside. "Damn, you're lucky you haven't been killed. Put your hands down. You saw … of course, you were the first … but what do you mean she asked you to come here?"

Amy was a thin girl -- I couldn't justify calling her a young woman -- with a sober attitude, a reputation as a very good student and all of thirteen years of age. Could her imagination have gotten the best of her after she saw the murder scene? Or was she like me?

"It's too dangerous." For the first time, she looked frightened. "Marduk is coming. Besides, I know how to get through the wall and you don't."

I tried to recall the minimum sentence for child endangerment. It wasn't possible to allow a child to get involved. My only option was to take her home myself. I had to do it. "Amy," I began.

But she ran to the wall. With the forefinger of her left hand she traced a pattern as if writing.

Light leaked through the narrowest of vertical lines splitting the wall where she had written. She bounced anxiously on her toes waiting for the wall to open further, looking nervously over her shoulder at me. When the split had widened just enough, she squeezed herself through and disappeared.

I ran to the wall. For all I knew, Marduk could have been on the other side. "Amy! Where are you? Come back here!" I couldn't fit through the hole yet. I hammered fists on the wall, one on each segment, trying to speed the process. The light beyond reminded me of a fish tank but I was worried about the child. "Amy!"

Her face appeared on the other side just long enough to say, "She's here! She's waiting for us." And then she disappeared again.

The wall segments moved slowly apart, quarter inch by quarter inch. I slid through as soon as I could.

Amy stood holding Mrs. Tee's right arm, the way any Girl Scout would assist a grandmother. Mrs. Tee needed the assistance. She was pale, struggling against weakness, propped on a walker. Scars remained on her wrists where Marduk had severed her hands. Her clothes covered the rest of her wounds but she struggled to stand and her breaths came hard.

Being careful not to knock her over, I hugged her. "I'm so glad you're alive." That she'd called me one of her children hadn't sunk in, probably because my eyes had locked on other things, things more amazing even than a resurrected woman.

I'd seen video on the net of the aquariums they have now where you get to walk through the middle of the tank and the fish swim above, around and below you. That's what this reminded me of, except the stairway went down as far as I could see and there appeared to be no end or particular shape to the tank. No wonder she didn't want geologists poking around. The liquid in the tank could have been water; the color was pure blue ocean.

I couldn't name what sorts of beings floated and drifted inside. Things curled in upon themselves like flower buds waiting to unfold. I don't know how I knew they were alive, but I did. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of them, each a swirl of phosphorescence, each unique, glowing faintly yellow in the forever depths, like Van Gogh stars in a watery sky.

"My children to be. They're the patterns and basic information for new variations, new species, new ways of seeing, new ways of communicating, new intelligences, new emotions, new understandings. Some births bring whole new beings; other births join a human child and become part of him or her, a new variety of human."

Mrs. Tee said, "Though he is a child of mine, he will destroy, if he can, all my other children. He has murdered me over and over. Once killed, I return. I am from before time. These, if slaughtered before their birth, cannot. They die forever. The future is lost.

"He will come tonight again. If he finds his way here and destroys my unformed children, he will rule forever. We will have his wars, his dominations, his damnations and genocides until the end of time. There will be no hope for change. That is what he wants."

"But, … but, …." Which of my ten dozen questions to ask first? "But Marduk thinks these, your children, are on the other side of the house. He doesn't know they're here."

"He thinks that he's close to finding them. He's right. Once he destroys the hill in back of the house and finds nothing, he'll tear the rest of the hill apart with his earthquakes and lightening bolts. He'll find them and destroy them."

"He doesn't know if some of these children have already been born or could be born early because of his attack. He fears he might have to fight something he can't imagine. He must kill them before they can be born.

"Marduk, even when he was a toddler, was a selfish boy. He demanded. He argued, fought, for what he thought he wanted. If his parents gave him what he wanted, he'd throw it aside and demand something else.

"He wants to be king forever. He wants to be god of the gods. He kills me because I am the mother, chaos. Chaos is that from which being was originally summoned. We call things chaos because we do not understand them. The air is in chaos and it brings us rain. The soil is in chaos, but from it grow plants. The soul is in chaos and it creates. He craves order and he hates chaos. He hates me.

"Marduk wants the kind of order where men march in lockstep against each other, day after day, year after year, in which men burn books and offer their lives for lies, in which men bend metals to their wills to make weapons, in which minds become prisons locking out thought and love. He calls it Order.

Mrs. Tee sighed. "You can't kill a god any more than he can kill me. We live in myths. As long as people remember the myths, the gods live."

"It's a myth. You have to change the story, the story people believe and live by. The myth must grow, change, mutate, become something new, deeper, more alive, more free. The myth must point to something new, something more alive.

"Oh, you two. You are my children. I'm sorry I can't be of much help. It will take nearly a century for me to recover. You, Amy and Bill, you are my children, are my hope. Marduk will come. You must stop him from destroying these children of our future."

Amy and I ran up the stairs as the wall closed behind us. Children, I thought. I stopped three steps from the top. "Amy," I said, "Was she telling us that we are her children somehow, like those beings in the, in the …?

"And Bill?" I think she nodded as she disappeared around the corner. Determination to save Mrs. Tee's children rose from my gut. Her other children. My brothers and sisters. What does it mean to be one of her children? It meant Marduk wanted to kill me personally.

We took two steps at a time to the second floor landing. I was out of breath but Amy pulled me along. The library doors were open. The lights were on. The tables and chairs had been righted, the books returned to their shelves, sculptures returned to their pedestals and, for all I knew, dusted and polished. By who? Mrs. Tee on her walker? Magic? Regardless, the library was open for business.

She looked up at me and said, "Don't worry. It's not him. He's too big to hide here."

Amy led the way. We found Sarah reading, lost in a large leather armchair in a corner by some windows. She looked up from her book. Perhaps it was the light, but I thought she looked older than she had yesterday.

"I'm old," Sarah said. "I need to pee frequently. When I got up, your bedroom door was open, your bed empty, and your car gone. I didn't think you'd gone to a movie."

I introduced Amy. "She found Mrs. Tee's body. We just met her, we met Mrs. Tee, downstairs."

Sarah looked, then smiled at me. "I'd only be surprised if it didn't surprise me."

"Sarah, Mrs. Tee told us something. She said we can't kill Marduk, that you can't kill gods because they live in myths. She said we have to change the story."

Sarah looked away for several seconds. A smile that was more sorrow than happiness turned her lips. "I suppose that makes as much sense as anything else."

Amy still holding my hand pulled me in the other direction. We stopped just long enough to duck into the bedroom on the left and the bathroom on the right -- "It works," Sarah told us. "I've used it."--before stopping before the double doors at the end of the hallway.

So that was the room at the end of the hall, opposite the library. Amy pulled the doors open, walked in and announced, "Hi, everyone. We're all here."

And I wondered, Who is this child? I know, I know: one of Mrs. Tee's children. But so am I. Whatever that meant. Did I miss the secret family handshake somewhere?

Like any other chapel, this one had pews, stained glass windows, an altar and a polished marble floor. That much, at least, looked familiar. Everything else struck me as alien, as alien as the human imagination could be. There wasn't enough light coming through the windows at night to be able to see the stained glass designs. The details of the rest of the chapel, though, were startling. Fossils of all kinds and sizes had been sketched on the walls with phosphorescent paint. The large doors opened behind two rows of six pews. Between the pews and the altar a half-globe depression had been sunk into the floor and filled with blue water. The bottom showed a map of the Asia, Africa and Europe. I didn't realize it then, but the map always displayed the half of the earth where it was day. The altar was simple and reminded me of traditional Japanese styles I'd seen in books and movies.

My eyes skimmed past all those things and rested on the wall behind the altar. I knew immediately what the painted wall sculpture represented. Like the painting of the Virgin stepping from the shell, or painted or sculpted against an oval background, or Georgia O'Keefe's flowers, the thickly lined oval was the vulva. In front of the oval hung a shining steel sword. The sword hung point up. St. Joan's sword. My sword.

A smallish hand found its way into mine. "Mrs. Tee wants you to have the sword. It's for you."

Amy pulled me behind the altar. I found I could reach the sword's handle if I stood on tip toes. With both hands I lifted it free of the wall. Even using two hands I had difficulty balancing it so to keep the point up. Once I almost slipped as I tried to steady the weight of the thing. The muscles I exercised every day carrying files, stamping dates and circling "Allowed" or "Denied" came up wanting when faced with lifting a four-foot long steel- bladed sword.

I turned and carried it to the front of the altar. Slowly, arm muscles straining, I lowered the sword until it lay over the earth bowl, dividing it as it had once divided the design on the wall. I let go of the handle. The point lay in line with the entrance. I was certain that was what I was intended to do. I was certain I had done well.

I didn't know what to do after that. I certainly wasn't going to sword fight Marduck with that, since I couldn't possibly wield it in any effective way. Even could I wield it, the blade would likely do little damage to his iron or steel shell. And swords were ineffective against hurricane winds and lightning.

She moved her hands over her body as if marking sections off. "Big things of flat metal, I guess. I really don't know."

"I couldn't see but there's a kind of material with lots of holes connecting them to each other. Like it's woven or something. It folds and covers the openings between the sections."

"Maybe this much." She held her thumb and forefinger perhaps a quarter inch apart.

Sarah walked into the center of the group. She knelt beside the sword. "There's an inscription engraved on the blade." We waited quietly while she used her tablet to work out a translation. "The blade was forged in Anatolia around 1100 B.C.E. Wait, there's more." She went from screen to screen. "Ok. I recognize this now. The inscription reads:

The Sword of Enheduanna
your hands seize the seven great powers
rightly you are High Priestess

"Those words are from a poem by a Sumerian High Priestess, Enheduanna, daughter of King Sargon. This was made long after she lived. She is the earliest known poet and a devotee of Inanna, the daughter of the moon god and goddess. She fought to reestablish Inanna as more powerful than the male war gods."

"Inanna. Later she was known as the Assyrian Ishtar, Egyptian Isis and the Hebrew Shekhinah."

"No, it was made too late, a thousand years too late. Enheduanna's father ruled in the 23rd and 22nd centuries B.C.E."

Sarah smiled. "I believe that's a question for Mrs. Tee." The she reminded us, "We need to figure out what to do when Marduk arrives."

Bill asked, "So how do we rewrite a myth that's four or five thousand years old?"

"Wouldn't it have to be something to do with what he's afraid of? The thing he despises as weak? Wouldn't it have to be water?"

I moved my foot back and forth on the floor. Good girl, I thought. I looked at Bill.

Marduk sounded like a drunken bulldozer stumbling up the stairs, making wood and plaster groan, snap and crash. Nothing subtle about him. Might over agility. I tried to picture what he was doing from the sounds of his steps and the bangings and breakings. He took his time.

I stood with the hilt of the sword at my feet. The other adults stood at the far ends of the pews.

Marduk, the beast who wanted Order, burst through the double doors. They were just high enough to let him enter. But then he grew, his plates sliding over each other, becoming the larger Murduk we'd seen on the plain. Steel on steroids. Size 17 shoes didn't do him justice. His voice came as deep and curdled as I imagined the voice of an ancient dinosaur.

The south wind, when it blows,
dizzies people with dust.
The north wind when mightily blowing
splits open the broad land.
The east wind, which has caused the rain above
to rain down its lightning,
makes a man's body waste away.
The west wind is evil, tirelessly brings
devastation to the plains.

I closed my eyes and remembered St. Joan. I responded, after clearing my throat:

The winds are not yours for you did not make them
nor do you control them.
You did not create the sun, the moon, the planets.
You did not create the hundred-billion stars in our
galaxy
nor did you create the hundred-billion galaxies.
You do not control them.
You do not control us.
You did not create and you barely control yourself.

Not poetic, but it conveyed our meaning. Perhaps a later reviser will give me better words to speak. But I knew what to look for: like Amy said, his armor was composed of plates, pretty certainly steel, which slid over or under each other as he moved. A mesh of some type, again probably steel, connected the plates together, providing flexibility and protection.

Marduk called out, "I come to save my brothers and sisters! I long for their company. Bring me to them." He made a motion with his right hand which might have been described as courtly if made by flesh and blood.

"Marduk stinks of death and rot. He is the ten year old son of degenerate gods."

Two lightning bolts. Windows shattered and walls crumbled. "You have seen the least of what I can do. I brought clouds and winds against you. I killed! I made this house shudder. I shall destroy you if you do not tell me where Tiamat's children are. Save yourself. Otherwise I will kill you and find them myself."

"You lie. You are not my sister." He sputtered. "You? My sister? My brothers and sisters have not been born."

"You will beg me for your life and acknowledge me as your god. Get down on your knees and beg my mercy."

"You are a spoiled brat. I am the Priestess Enheduanna. I am here with the Goddess Inanna."

Marduk laughed. "Your time has long, long passed. The time for war never passes. When the drums call, men march!"

I bent down and reached for the sword. It seemed he saw it then for the first time. He recoiled as if he recognized it from some half-forgotten prophecy. The sword meant something to him. I lifted it, straining every muscle.

That's when Sarah, Bill, Amy and Nancy pulled the bailing cord that we'd tied to every barrel, pail, pan, pot, glass, vase, pitcher and bowl in the house, each filled to the brim with water. There was a sudden lot of banging and crashing that seemed totally inadequate under the circumstances.

Marduk completed his first step on dry marble, but the noise distracted him. His legs and feet did what he wanted them to do, but his upper body twisted and turned this way and that, trying to find the cause of the noise and what these other people were up to. Twisting his body undid his balance just a bit, though not enough to make him fall. Then I moved to my left, as if to come at him from a different direction. He twisted his body again to face my sword, but now his steely mass was moving in three directions at once. Both his feet were in water.

"St. Joan, help me!" I lifted the sword, point up and toward his chest. I aimed it at the fabric between his breast plate and stomach armor.

We climbed over Marduk, trying to pull his armor off, but the only tool we had was my sword. We loosened a couple of plates and Nancy, being the smallest and, I guess, the bravest, climbed inside the giant and disappeared.

"I'm trying to get you out of here. You're bleeding." Then, "Stop that. Oh, you think you're smart."

Sarah held one leg, I the other. Nancy held one arm, Bill the other. The boy wore only basketball shorts and was perhaps ten years old. His legs, chest and arms resembled a boxer's. I had pierced him with my sword in the middle of his forehead. He looked as if he'd grown another eye, a bloody red eye. Thank God you can't kill a god, or I would have.

His face reddened as he tried to fight us, but without his Marduk suit he wasn't much against the four of us. Then he stopped. He stared at Amy.

He tried to wrench himself free, but the real struggle had ended. We had him good.

Winter has brought snows to Evyland and the plains around Mrs. Tee's house. Snow white, cloud grey and the few trees skeleton black: a somber and spare beauty. Once in a while there's a bit of blue sky or a peek of sun to brighten the scene and turn the snow to heaven white.

I have a room in the attic with a window that looks down into the library. I help Mrs. Tee with the house chores and with her recovery. Twice each day we check on the Children. As hard as it is because of her injuries, Mrs. Tee still loves to bake.

Bill comes to visit nearly every day the weather permits. Sometimes he brings Amy and sometimes Amy brings one of her boyfriends. Then we build snowmen and Marduks and Sarahs, Nancys, Pauls and Mrs. Tees. And castles. We all love castles. We love castles, snowball fights and hot cider in the kitchen with Mrs. Tee.

I am very happy when Bill stays for breakfast, which is, as I allow, fairly often.

Bio: Mr. Santella recently self-published an sf novel, The Gravity of Light, which is available on Amazon. His webpage is http://www.edwardjsantella.com/

In his own words, "I am semi-retired human who formerly worked as a lawyer, now using most of my 'free' time writing. Camus said that anyone wanting to be a philosopher should write fiction. I'd add that sf & fantasy are the most appropriate types of fiction. "