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By Root 2282 0

had promptly escaped from. Salt-and-pepper hair fell lankly to her slight shoulders and in one hand she held a cluster of paintbrushes, so I assumed she was the artist. She was dressed in an orange shirt and rust-colored trousers over which she wore a long red apron, stiff with dried paint. Even so, I could see a white pentagram stitched to its front. You might think this a curious getup, and you’d be right. But by far the most curious thing about her was her eyes. I swear they were the color of unpolished bronze, and they had no pupils.

“Lady, I don’t know who you are but I’d be much obliged if you’d tell me where the hell I am. Also, do you have a drink—preferably something high in alcohol content.”

“I was speaking of the paintings. Even though they are unfinished I’d be interested to know whether you find them effective.” She spoke with the intensity possible only when one is consumed by a passion. Had she even heard what I’d said? No matter; her passion impelled me to give the paintings a more focused look. So far as I could tell they were all of the same subject: a series of landscapes deliberately interconnected by composition and style, caught at different times of the day and season. I was certain I didn’t know what I was looking at and yet, curiously, that very certainty filled me with an inexpressible sadness, just as if I had been pierced through the heart.

“Sure, sure. They’re beautiful,” I told her. But I was still distracted, and in desperate need of a stiff drink. “Listen, I don’t think you get it. One minute I was in a New York bar running from a madman with a machine pistol and the next I’m here. I’m asking you again, where is here?”

“Regard the paintings,” she said in the slightly stilted locution of the European. Her arm rose and fell like the swell of the ocean. “They will tell you.”

“Lady, for the love of—”

“Please,” she said. “My name is Vav. And yours is William, yes?”

“Did you say Viv, like Vivian?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right.

“No. Vav.” She enunciated it clearly. “It is a very old name—ancient, one might say. It is the Hebrew word for ‘nail.’ “ She smiled, and her face broke open like a ripe melon spilling out its fragrant and delicious juice. “I am the nail that joins the beams overhead. I am the one who provides shelter to lost travelers.”

Looking at that face I had to laugh; I had no other choice. I imagined she could make even a condemned criminal feel good about his final moments of life. “Well, that seems to be me, all right,” I admitted. I took a quick glance out the window. “That wouldn’t—Whoa! I mean, it couldn’t possibly be Sacré-Coeur. Hell, that’s in Paris.”

“Yes, it is,” she said.

“But that’s impossible!” I closed my eyes, shook my head and opened them again. There was Sacré-Coeur. It hadn’t dissolved in a sudden puff of smoke. “I must have lost my mind.”

“Or most likely gained it.” She chuckled. “Come now, do not be alarmed.” She led me away from the window. “Have another look at the paintings, yes? I am creating them just for you.”

“You mean you knew I was coming?” Why did that make me feel so good?

“That hardly seems possible, does it?” She laughed until I joined her, and we shared a joke the origin of which was beyond my ken. She took my arm as if we were old friends. “But come, tell me if anything here seems familiar,” she urged as we moved slowly around the high-ceilinged room.

My brow furrowed in concentration. “Funny, I’d been thinking just that, but …” I shook my head. “Maybe when you’ve completed them.”

“Obviously you need more time,” she interrupted. She did this a lot, as if she was oddly pressed for time.

“All things considered, I think I’d prefer to get back home,” I said.

“Didn’t I hear mention of a madman with a machine pistol?” She stripped off her apron. “Why in the world would you want to go back there?”

I considered a moment, thinking of poor dead Mike and the Tazzman, Ray on my back about Lilly, and that sonuvabitch brother of mine, not to mention a writer’s block as frightening as the death zone atop Mount Everest. Then I considered the