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We got them all out, Langi and I did. But Mark has lost his leg, and jaws three feet across had closed on Mary. That was Hanga himself, I feel sure.

Here is what I think. I think he could only make one of us see him at a time, and that was why he flashed in and out. He is real. (God knows he is real!) Not really physical the way a stone is, but physical in other ways that I do not understand. Physical like and unlike light and radiation. He showed himself to each of us, each time for less than a second.

Mary wanted children, so she stopped the pill and did not tell me. That was what she told me when I drove Rob’s jeep out to North Point. I was afraid. Not so much afraid of Hanga (though there was that, too) but afraid she would not be there. Then somebody said “Banzai!” It was exactly as if he were sitting next to me in the jeep, except that there was nobody there. I said “Banzai” back, and I never heard him again; but after that I knew I would find her, and I waited for her at the edge of the cliff.

She came back to me when the sun touched the pacific, and the darker the night and the brighter the stars, the more real she was. Most of the time it was as if she were really in my arms. When the stars got dim and the first light showed in the east, she whispered, “I have to go,” and walked over the edge, walking north with the sun to her right and getting dimmer and dimmer.

I got dressed again and drove back and it was finished. That was the last thing Mary ever said to me, spoken a couple of days after she died.

She was not going to get back together with me at all; then she heard how sick I was in Uganda, and she thought the disease might have changed me. (It has. What does it matter about people at the “end of the earth” if you cannot be good to your own people, most of all to your own family?)

Taking off.

We are airborne at last. Oh, Mary! Mary starlight!

* * *

Langi and I will take Adam to his grandfather’s, then come back and stay with Mark (Brisbane or Melbourne) until he is well enough to come home.

The stewardess is serving lunch, and for the first time since it happened, I think I may be able to eat more than a mouthful. One stewardess, twenty or thirty people, which is all this plane will hold. News of the shark attack is driving tourists off the island.

As you see, I can print better with my left hand. I should be able to write eventually. The back of my right hand itches, even though it is gone. I wish I could scratch it.

Here comes the food.

An engine has quit. Pilot says no danger.

He is out there, swimming beside the plane. I watched him for a minute or more until he disappeared into a thunderhead. “The tree is my hat.” Oh, God.

Oh my God!

My blood brother.

What can I do?

Edward Bryant

STYX AND BONES

Edward Bryant is another writer who wears many hats (though, as Jar as I know, no cowboy hat—though he does live in Denver and was raised in Wyoming). For a long time he has been a respected reviewer for Locus magazine, where his specialty is this field, and he has occasionally—but not often enough—turned out short stories with a technical facility that is to be envied. He is another in the long list of writers who migrated from science fiction to horror, but has never left his roots behind and has managed to make both fields his comfortable home. His early, highly regarded science fiction work such as Cinnabar, a series of linked stories about a future California on a dying Earth, eventually gave way to equally well regarded work in the horror genre, the latest example of which is the following a bone-chilling (yes, that’s a pun, but also a literal description) example of the classic love-revenge tale.

He dreamed he woke up dead.

Dead. Crushed. Every nerve pulled excruciatingly away from each muscle and each shattered bone. Awake and dead.

That was the confusion. The contradiction didn’t occur to him until later. Much later. Now was only the pain.

Christ, he thought. What’s wrong? It hurt so very much, and the least of the agony