He turned and started to walk away. "Some people don't know how to be grateful. I should let them tear the house down. What do I care?"

Ignoring him, I went to the door and did the necessary twists and turns to deactivate the alarm. I was curious about who or what was inside, not afraid. Too much had happened to cause any more fear. An explanation of some kind was near, and I was hungry to know it.

Opening the door, I heard a too-familiar tune.

"Whistle and hop

and blow your top,

it's the Finky Linky Show!

Your feet are long

and your math is wrong

but your head is sure to growwwwww –"

I walked into the living room just as the child came hopping in from the kitchen, singing along with the theme song.

At first I thought it was about a seven-year-old boy, the dark hair was cut so short, but the singing voice was the high and delicate bell of a little girl.

Barefoot, she skipped around the room in a pair of blue jean overalls and a black T-shirt. The longer I looked at her, the more I realized she was a real beauty, not just a cute little kid. This one had all the makings.

The beauty part slid away when I saw how misshapen her stomach was. Under the overalls it looked as if she were hiding a basketball. She kept looking at me until she knew I was staring at her stomach. Then she stopped in the middle of the floor and took off the jeans and shirt. She was pregnant.

It was obscene and comical. She stood with her hands at her sides and smiled at me. I couldn't take my eyes off her form. There was nothing sexual or prurient about the stares, either. It was too outrageous to be sexy, something Eric Fischl or Paul Cadmus might have included in one of their paintings. Or Bosch.

Bosch! The Garden of Earthly Delights. After Midnight first appeared, Phil said in interviews he'd gotten most of his visual inspiration from that painting. At Harvard he'd kept a large print of it over his desk. I could remember only certain details, but looking at this little pregnant girl I was somehow sure she was in the painting too. That chilled me more than anything else.

Chill two came when she spoke. It came out a deep, hoarse, chocolate mousse of a voice: Lauren Bacall's in To Have and Have Not, sexy and available. A voice that had smoked thousands of cigarettes and would stay out all night with you.

"This is what you want." She went to a side table, picked up a book, brought it to me. "It was the one he was reading before he shot himself." I wanted to look at her and at the book at the same time.

She offered it open to a specific page. I reached out hesitantly and took it: The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. There were red stains over the white page. "The Second Elegy." The girl walked to the television set and switched it off. Turning to me, she spoke slowly and clearly.

"Every angel is terrifying. And yet, alas,

I invoke you, almost deadly birds of the soul,

knowing about you. . . .

But if the archangel now, perilous, from behind the stars

took even one step down toward us: our own heart, beating

higher and higher, would beat us to death. Who are you?"

"You're Pinsleepe, aren't you?"

"Yes."

I didn't know what more to say. She was Pinsleepe the angel. The angel that had come to Phil before he died and told him to stop making the Midnight films because they were evil.

"Was he really reading about angels before he did it?"

Her nakedness was smooth and angular. Women have curves, little girls angles. Even pregnant little girls. She stood there smiling.

"I think so. I'd come over to make him a sandwich for lunch. When I got here, he was sitting on the patio with that book turned to that page."

"Sasha told me she came over to make him lunch!"

"She did. We did."

"I don't understand."

The girl took my hand and led me to the couch. "Do you remember a night in Vienna when you and Sasha went out to the –"

"Look, get to the point! I don't understand any of this, see? My best friend killed himself. Called me up to talk about thumbs, then killed himself. That doesn't make sense, does it? I've heard stories about him for two days. Tattoos coming alive. Videotapes! One of them had my mother dying on it. Now you . . . Christ! Just tell me what the fuck is going on!"

She picked up a pink pillow and put it over her hairless lap. "My name is Pinsleepe. I came because he was in trouble."

"What kind of trouble?"

"With God."

"Look, I believe in angels. Truth! But you're not what I believed. Understand? They don't have to come out of the sky, or – I've dreamt of them all my life. I looked everywhere for them: in friends, and on the street like lost coins. I even knew a woman once. . . .

"You're an angel, Pinsleepe? Then show me. Fly. Or do a miracle. Angels can –"

She held up a hand for quiet, then lowered it to her distended belly. Beneath those small fingers it began to grow transparent. Healthy skin color faded in a moment to skin of glass. Inside, and easy to see, curled in on itself but showing enough face to make out, was a fetus with long brown hair: a tiny unborn Sasha Makrianes.

"Sasha and I are pregnant with each other, Weber. Whoever gives birth first, lives. Only the baby dies."

"Why? What does Sasha have to do with Phil? She doesn't even know where the baby came from! Is it his?"

"No. It came with her cancer. Both are wrong and unnatural things, but so was Phil's death. Both are a result of his suicide.

"I came to tell him that. To tell him the films and his whole life had gone too far. There is a human balance, and there are extremes. It's different for everyone, but then you reach your limit.

"If you go beyond that, the greed explodes like a bomb in all directions. Look what happened to those children in Florida. Then what happened to Matthew Portland. The same thing is happening to Sasha. It's all Phil's fault. If he'd stopped after the first warning, I think it would have been all right. But he didn't. He did those other things and then he killed himself. Maybe he thought that was the only way he could stop his greed. But I kept telling him he was responsible for what he did. Always. Now that he's dead, someone else has to be."

I remember exactly where I began writing "Mr. Fiddlehead." Only it had a different title then: "Pinsleepe."

That's right. That's something Weber will probably never know, and she'll certainly never tell him: The film was to be a slice of my childhood, like a slice of pizza when you're a kid and can't afford a whole pie. I had been using little bits all along in the Midnight films, but "Pinsleepe" was going to be the biggest. I got the idea when I was working on the video for Vitamin D.

One night at dinner with Victor Dixon, lead guitarist of the group, we ended up talking about our childhoods. Victor told me he knew a woman who'd spent her adult life illustrating her childhood because it had been so traumatic.

I asked if he thought much about his own. His answer put "Pinsleepe " in my hand.

"Yeah, kind of, man. I was one of those lonely little kids, you know? So I made up this secret friend, the Bimbergooner, who kept me company? Sort of a combination of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, Tom Terrific, and Finky Linky. I've spent my whole damned life looking for someone like Bimbergooner to be my friend."

"It was a girl?"