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Did I ask her why that had needed to be done while they were in human form? Was that the only sorcerously potent method to be sure of them—or had it been easier to kill a woman than a beast? I think I never asked. I have no answer.

All I have is the story, which she then concluded. “After which, he took off their heads with his sword, he did.” So crooned my Speir-Bhan. She was uncivilized and cruel, too, of course—what could you expect of a muse? Yet not so bad as young girls who rip lambs and children apart with their fangs. The heroes had only done as they’d had to.

“Then it’s a job for two strong men,” I said.

“It’s a job for one that’s cunning,” said the Speir-Bhan. “But first there must be the song, or they will never stay.”

“They’re out there on the street,” I snapped. “They’ve stayed.”

“Sing to them, and you live. Without a song, they’ll tear you up the first.”

“Or, I could stay in. Bolt the door.Wait till Monday—the waning moon.What then?”

“They’ll always be there, patient. Till next full moon,” the old horror murmured, in that honey brogue I can’t speak at all. “And next after that next, and next for ever.” Not whisky on her breath—uisege beatha and flowering heather.

“Why?”

“You found Colum’s book.”

“Hasn’t anyone ever read his bloody book before?”

“You have,” said she, “eyes in your eyes.You see what others don’t. The curse of your kind it is. And your blessing.”

We remained as we were, and the fat moon came up. It glided over the window. That was Saturday. Tomorrow the fat moon would be full.

THAT SATURDAY NIGHT I SLEPT, but had no dreams. I had other experiences. The Speir-Bhan did me the great kindness of sleeping on the couch. Twice I got up. The first time it was about 4 A.M. Outside, down on the pavement, I couldn’t tell if they were there or not, among the tree shadows and the orange bluster of the streetlamp.

Then, near sunrise, a noise—something—in the garden-yard behind the flats—and I got up again. I went to the back windows now to see, and saw. S hapes . . . shapes in long sombre gowns, circling the single tree that grows there among the rough grass. A glimmer of bangles, spangle of eyes—oh as if their bracelets and their eyes together sprang right at me so I started back. The eyes were red, redder than the lamps over the wall. For a moment as I stood there on the floor, the memory of their red gaze locked with mine—it seemed to me my eyes were just the same, bloodred, like theirs.

Minutes passed. I made myself creep back and look again. The dancing figures by the tree were merely someone’s washing, hanging on the makeshift line that now and then appears there, and the gleam of gold and red—some trick of my vision in the fugitive dark.

It was like the dentist’s. You can only put up with it, put it off so long. Something has to be done once the thing’s gone wrong.

WHEN I WAS A KID, I used to travel on the tube with my mother. She would hold my hand as I climbed laboriously on. I recollect journeys, and her wearing the French perfume she wore then, called Emeraude—Emerald. She told me stories on trains. They’re gone; she told me so many, just wisps and drifts of fantasy and idea left behind, which mold quite often the things that I create. In her teenage years, before there were teenagers, she’d written songs and sung them. She had a wonderful singing voice, I’ve heard, but I never heard it, for by the time I was born, somehow it had left her.

To my embarrassment, I don’t even know if they have an underground system in Ireland. Surely they must? Lord help them if they do. Because it will pass, won’t it, through all the hollow hills, through all the supernatural caves—in and out of the Many-Colored Land, which is the Hereafter, or Faerie—or both.

This time, the Speir-Bhan did not hang heavy on my arm. She walked unaided with a steadier and more sprightly middle-aged tread. She had become, too, more assimilated.Her hair was less knotted, and shiny. Like me, she had on jeans and a T-shirt, though she’d kept to her old boots and her long coat. There were earrings