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destroyed. Nor was it right to pry and uncover what, if any, silken bonds might have fettered the black-haired young woman to the dying man, Edward Saxton. Consumption has long worn a cloak of romance and horror, and I would not venture to raise its hood and look upon the face within. Some truths should remain secluded in chambers of privacy far beyond the touch of art. Yet the chiaroscuro of a black cloak against the snow would haunt my imaginings forever, I feared, along with that spellbinding rose blossom of a face, and last of all the hands held together but open like a book I was not permitted to read, the curled fingers cupping the locket with its mirror seizing and possessing the blue-eyed face of death.

Afterword to “The Grave Reflection”

The dark, jeweled stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne have long appealed to me. My life is not so very different from his—three children, a house in a village, days spent twisting words into a shape, a childhood lived in the guilt and shadow of the past (in my case, “the giant’s dead body” was not Puritan but Southern history).

“The Grave Reflection” borrows my dim image of him, a figure caught in a distant mirror. Hawthorne governs many of the threads in the story as well. Like some magpie of Romanticism, I have plucked and used some of his favorite ideas. The ghostly reflection enforces solitude. It creates a Hawthornean risk that its presence will isolate and transform a human being, barring him from ordinary life and “the magnetic chain of humanity.” Opposed to this danger is the character Hawthorne, the family man and friend who knows the necessity of human affections.

As in much of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work, the past dyes the present with shadows from events both recent and faraway in time. If they grow too black, the present and future will be trapped and dark. The setting of Saxton’s Folly serves as one of Hawthorne’s dream houses that are vessels for both past time and present psychological difficulty.

—MARLY YOUMANS

Theodora Goss

Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. Her publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting; Interfictions, a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; and Voices from Fairyland, a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Mythopoeic, and Crawford Awards and has been on the Tiptree Award Honor List. She has won the World Fantasy and Rhysling Awards. Visit her website at www.theodoragoss.com.

THEODORA GOSS

Christopher Raven

WHY HAD I come back to Collingswood? That was what I asked myself, standing on the path that led to the main school building, a structure built of gray stone and shadowed by oaks that had stood for a hundred years. I had ridden the cart from the train station, just as I had so many years ago at the beginning of each term. Then, I had been accompanied by a trunk almost as large as I was, filled with clothes and books. Now I carried only a small suitcase. It contained another walking suit, a dress suitable for dinner, and toiletries. I would be here for only one night. Why had I come back? Because I had been invited to give a speech. Surely that was all.

“Lucy!” It was Millicent Tolliver, walking down the path toward me.

“Hello, Tollie!” I called, then wondered if she would mind the schoolgirl nickname. She looked very much like the schoolgirl she had been, with an untidy blouse and, I could see when she gave me an enthusiastic hug, an ink stain on one cheek. Only the length of her skirt and the bun of hair at the back of her head, which threatened to come down at any moment, marked her as not a schoolgirl any longer, but one of the teachers. I had wondered how many of the girls I knew would be coming