"I don't understand."

"Why are you here?"

"I am merely walking. Running, in fact. You?"

"I guard this place, so none may pass who should not. You should not, I think, unless you are to replace me."

He looked past her, through the high wrought-iron fence, and understood. "No, I still live. You must wait for the next to die to take your place."

"How then can you see me?"

"Because I am who I am."

"Who are you?"

"I'm not certain. Who are you, and how did you come to die, so young?"

"Leukemia," she said dreamily, as if it made no difference to her at all, and perhaps it didn't. "My name is Karen."

"How long have you stood vigil here?"

"I'm not certain. Only a few days, I think. I relieved a tired old man who had been here four days."

The squirrel jumped closer to him, then back again.

"You will not have to wait long, I think. Then you may rest."

"Yes," she said. "Will you see to my man? We lived together for three years, and he was very kind when I was dying, but it was hard for him. Harder than for me, I think."

"What is his name?"

"Brian MacWurthier. We lived at three twenty-seven Roosevelt, upstairs."

He repeated the name and address to himself, so he wouldn't forget it. "Very well," he said. "I will-"

"A light fell upon him. He turned and his heart jumped as he saw the police car. He began to run, knowing already that it was too late."

"I'm sorry," he heard her say. The squirrel bolted between the bars of the cemetery as if escaping from a cage.

"It is nothing," said Charles softly as the two policemen took his arms and threw him against the chain-link fence. Their hands were rough and thorough as they searched him. What are their feelings at such times, he wondered. Boredom? Professional pride?

"My head hurts," he said softly. They didn't seem to hear him.

The older one found his knife and let it fall with a gesture half careless and half deliberate. Charles winced as he heard it strike the sidewalk. The younger one held his upper arms in a grip like steel. It was painful- He thought about resisting then and there,but he couldn't decide, and soon it was too late, for they wrenched his arms behind him and put handcuffs on him.

This felt familiar. Why? A piece of the Sight, or the shards of real memory? The policemen pushed him into the back of the car. He had to sit sideways because of the cuffs. He tested them, and found that they were connected by a rigid bar, rather than a mere chain. They knew him then. He frowned, his shoulder pressed uncomfortably against the seat back.There was a time when it would have pleased him that they showed such fear. There was a time,…

He walks aimlessly upon the Old Manor Way, his feet twisting in the coach tracks. He sees her before him-the one whom he had loved, and who betrayed him to marry a rich man.

"You have destroyed me," he cries. "You have broken my heart." He reaches into his chest, then, and pulls his heart from his body to show her, but she, filled with shame or pride, won't look, so he flings it down onto the road.

Soon, an old dry-nurse comes along and sees it. "Well, "she says. "We can't have this." And she calls three times like a raven and screams three times like an owl, and a shape appears beside her. The apparition, a woman who is younger than the nurse and older than the lover, takes the heart from the roadside, and brushes the dirt from it and holds it to her bosom. He looks closely, and sees that it is the ghost of his mother, still watching out for him from beyond the grave.

Lover, dry-nurse, and mother all vanish into the mist,into the dust. He takes back his heart and replaces it in his chest and continues on his way.

The holding tank was seven paces by nine. The walls were of tile, to chest height. The floor was of cement, with a large drain in the middle so the place could be hosed down. A tiled bench, perhaps eight inches off the floor and eighteen deep, was built into two of the walls. Across from it was an aluminum toilet, all of one piece. Charles, realized, after a moment's thought, that this was to ensure no one could use the toilet seat as a weapon. The sink was also aluminum. There were neither soap nor towels. The cold water worked, the hot didn't. A chest-high wall next to the toilet provided a token measure of privacy from the thick, wired-glass window next to the door.

Two pair of fluorescent light fixtures, two bulbs in each, made the tank very bright. The fixtures we recovered in heavy plastic shielding. To protect them when the place was hosed down, perhaps, since the ceiling was far too high for anyone to reach.

There were two others in the tank with him. For just a moment, Charles thought of his brothers, but,though he no longer remembered what they looked like, he knew these were not they. One prisoner was in his later thirties, perhaps. He had already been there when Charles was brought in. He was tall,stringy, with dark hair that was graying just a bit at the temples. He was sitting on the bench and he wore a black tee shirt. The other looked to be in his middle fifties. He'd been let in just a few minutes before, and Charles had the impression that this wasn't his first time in this place. His grey hair was slicked back, he had a bit of a potbelly. He wore a faded red shirt with fake pearl buttons, very old jeans, and cowboy boots. He paced in a lazy oval near the door. He was shorthand he stank very badly when Charles got too close.Charles wondered if he'd been fished out of a sewer. All three of them avoided proximity with each other, so staying away wasn't difficult-

He tried to reconstruct the events since he'd been picked up, but they blurred and faded and slipped through his fingers. He had been thoroughly searched by two bored guards with a camera watching, and there had been an old, sour-faced woman who took his picture and fingerprints while a fresh-scrubbed clerk with a weak attempt at a blond mustache had asked him questions he mostly couldn't answer, and then his possessions and even his boots had been taken and he'd been put into the tank by a guard who looked like a Nazi and carried the largest key Charles had seen since-

–Since-

He'd been a child, and his mother carried a huge ornate key on a chain around her neck. "What is that for, Anya?" he had asked.

"It is the key to our palace," she said.

"Palace?"

"We are royalty, you know. And someday we will take our place, and you will be a great king." She smiled and winked as she said it.

"Will I like being a king?" he had asked, all somber and earnest.

She had smiled, like the rippling laugh the fiddle made when Sandi led the csardas. She said, "Ah, my little man, sometimes I think you will never like anything you do, because you must suffer to be happy."She hugged him, and his face pressed against the ornate iron key she wore, and he wondered.

–Since-

He sat down on what could perhaps be called a bench, and looked at his companions. He wondered what their crimes were. It came to him then that not everyone put in this place was innocent. A shiver began somewhere low down on his spine and shot up it like a rocket. To be innocent of a crime and to be in this place, stripped of identification, dignity, and shoes, with people who smelled like pigs, behind wired glass, yes, that would truly be damnation. A man could panic in here-think that he'd been forgotten, that no one would ever come for him. There was no way to see the sky, nor was there a clock.

Suddenly desperate to take his mind from these thoughts, he addressed his companions. He said carefully, "Do either of you know how long they're likely to keep us here before something else happens?"

Echoes echoes echoes, banging around inside his head, which now hurt so badly he wanted to scream. If the police, for some reason, wanted to listen in to conversations in this place, they would be unable to hear anything but echoes, Charles wasn't sure if his companions had understood his question, but he had no wish to repeat it. The one who stank glowered at him, and Charles was startled by the deep blue of his eyes. The younger, taller one shook his head and went back to contemplating the floor between his arms.