caught the color, too.'
She leans back and turns her head aside in fearful anticipation of the kiss. Then she thinks it might come not on her lips but on the nape of her neck.
'Shimmering with red and blue and gold fire, the flakes slowly glimmered to the ground, as if something magical were aflame high in the night, some glorious palace burning on the other side of Heaven, shedding jewel- bright embers.'
He pauses, clearly expecting a response.
As long as he is kept talking, he will not kiss.
Holly says, 'It sounds so magnificent, so beautiful. I wish I'd been there.'
'/wish you'd been there,' he agrees.
Realizing that what she's said might be taken as an invitation, she hurries to entreat him: 'There must be more. What else happened in El Valle that night? Tell me more.'
'The woman who dreamed of dead horses had a friend who claimed to be a countess from some eastern European country. Have you ever known a countess?'
'No.'
'The countess had a problem with depression. She balanced it by taking ecstasy. She took too much ecstasy and walked into that field of snow transfigured by fireworks. Happier than she had ever been in her life, she killed herself.'
Another pause requires a response, and Holly can think of nothing she dares to say except, 'How sad.'
'I knew you would see. Yes, sad. Sad and stupid. El Valle is a portal that makes possible a journey to great change. On that night, and in that special moment, transcendence was offered to everyone present. Yet there are always some who cannot see.'
'The countess.'
'Yes. The countess.'
The pressurized darkness seems to brew itself into an ever blacker reduction.
She feels his warm breath upon her brow, upon her eyes. It has no scent. And then it is gone.
Maybe she didn't feel his breath, after all, only a draft.
She wishes to believe it was a draft, and she thinks of clean things like her husband and the baby, and the bright sun.
He says, 'Do you believe in signs, Holly Rafferty?'
'Yes.'
'Omens. Portents. Harbingers, oracle owls, storm petrels, black cats and broken mirrors, mysterious lights in the sky. Have you ever seen a sign, Holly Rafferty?'
'I don't think so.'
'Do you hope to see a sign?'
She knows what he wants her to say, and she is quick to say it. 'Yes. I hope to see one.'
Upon her left cheek, she feels warm breath, and then upon her lips.
If this is him — and in her heart she knows there is no if — he remains undifferentiated from the gloom although only inches separate them.
The darkness of the room calls forth a darkness in her mind. She imagines him kneeling naked before her, his pale body decorated by arcane symbols painted with the blood of those he killed.
Struggling to keep her quickening fear from her voice, she says, 'You've seen many signs, haven't you?'
The breath, the breath, the breath upon her lips, but not the kiss, and then not the breath, either, as he withdraws and says, 'I've seen scores. I have the eye for them.'
'Please tell me about one.'
He is silent. His silence is a sharp and looming weight, a sword above her head.
Perhaps he has begun to wonder if she is talking to forestall the kiss.
If at all possible, she must avoid offending him. As important as it is to leave this place without being violated, it is likewise important to leave this place without disabusing him of the strange dark romantic fantasy that appears to have him in its grip-He seems to believe that she will eventually decide that she must go to Guadalupita, New Mexico, with him and that in Guadalupita she will 'be amazed.' As long as he continues in this belief, which she has so subtly tried to reinforce without raising suspicion, she might be able to find some advantage over him when it matters most, in the moment of her greatest crisis.
When his silence begins to seem ominously long, he says, 'This was just as summer became autumn that year, and everyone said the birds had left early for the south, and wolves were seen where they had not been in a decade.'
Wary in the dark, Holly sits very erect, with her arms crossed over her breasts.
'The sky had a hollow look. You felt like you could shatter it with a stone. Have you ever been to Eagle Nest, New Mexico?'
'No.'
'I was driving south from Eagle Nest, on a two-lane blacktop, at least twenty miles east of Taos. These two girls were across the highway, hitchhiking north.'
Along the roof, the wind finds a new niche or protrusion from which to strike another voice for itself, and now it imitates the ululant cry of hunting coyotes.
'They were college age but not college girls. They were serious seekers, you could see, and confident in their good hiking boots and backpacks, with their walking sticks, and all their experience.'
He pauses, perhaps for drama, perhaps savoring the memory.
'I saw the sign and knew at once that it was a sign. Hovering above their heads, a blackbird, its wings spread wide, not flapping, the bird riding so effortlessly on a thermal, but moving precisely no faster or slower than the girls were walking.'
She regrets having elicited this story. She closes her eyes against the images that she fears he might describe.
'Only six feet above their heads and a foot or two behind them, the bird hovered, but the girls were unaware of it. They were unaware of it, and I knew what that meant.'
Holly fears the darkness around her too much to close her eyes to it. She opens them even though she can see nothing.
'Do you know what the sign of the bird meant, Holly Rafferty?'
'Death,' she says.
'Yes, exactly right. You are arising into full spirit. I saw the bird and believed that death was settling on the girls, that they were not long for this world.'
'And…were they?'
'Winter came early that year. Many snows followed one another, and the cold was very hard. The spring thaw extended into summer, and when the snow melted, their bodies were found in late June, dumped in a field near Arroyo Hondo, all the way around Wheeler Peak from where I'd seen them on the road. I recognized their pictures in the paper.'
Holly says a silent prayer for the families of the unknown girls.
'Who knows what happened to them?' he continues. 'They were found naked, so we can imagine some of what they endured. But though it seems to us a horrible death, and tragic because of their youth, there is always a possibility of enlightenment even in the worst of situations. If we're seekers, we learn from everything, and grow. Perhaps any death involves moments of illuminating beauty and the potential for transcendence.'
He switches on his flashlight and is sitting immediately before her, cross-legged on the floor.
Had the light surprised her earlier in their conversation, she might have flinched. Now she is not as easily surprised, nor is she likely to flinch from any light, so welcome is it.
He wears the ski mask in which are visible only his chewed-sore lips and his beryl-blue eyes. He is neither naked nor painted with the blood of those he killed.
'It's time to go,' he says. 'You will be ransomed for a million four hundred thousand, and when I have the money, then the time will have come for decision.'
The dollar figure stuns her. It might be a lie.
Holly has lost all track of time, but she is confused and amazed by what his words imply. 'Is it already…
