“What did I hit..?”

Pepper released the throttle, and the lawnmower cut off with a ka-thunk. She’d run over something, something big enough to nick the blade. There weren’t any rocks in this part of the yard, and she hoped that she hadn’t struck a rabbit. At the thought, her stomach lurched.

As the roar of the lawnmower engine faded to a ringing in her ears, a high-pitched squeal rattled the blades under the mower deck. Pepper squeezed her eyes shut, and shoved sweaty hair from her eyes. Jesus, it was a rabbit.

The dizzying heat, the mosquitoes trying to nibble at his neck and the rum must have triggered some hidden mechanism inside John Leight, because all of a sudden he chuckled and said the most ridiculous thing.

“Last night I dreamt Agatha tore my fingers off.”

Richard, who had been babbling animatedly now grew quiet.

“There was a man who had nightmares such as yours. He dreamt of Agatha Regant and fell gravely ill. He is dead. His cousin, Madeline Locke, swears Agatha is a witch.”

After twenty-odd years of doing collector's fairs, I considered myself happily jaded. Rare albums going for the price of your average luxury car, wild gossip about more than one long-retired artist making ready for a pie-in-the-sky comeback -- I'd seen and heard it all. Hell, I knew of one fan who'd quit his job and sold everything he owned to follow his favorite band around on their latest world tour. If there was a story out there that still had the power to shock me, I hadn't come across it yet.

She had only vague memories of her mother--rhyming songs, tickles, a loving face. Her father and the townsfolk said her mother had died trying to bring her a baby brother. Fate had its ways.

Her father, an innkeeper, never remarried. A good man, he was proud of his daughter, and of his work. Over the years he’d painted scenes on the walls of the inn--travelers, idylls and animals--and she learned to make brushes and to mix pigments. She loved her father.

The first reason cabs in Bangkok are dangerous is that cab-drivers in Bangkok have no fear, and after you've been in a cab doing 120 kmh approximately three inches from the tires of a semi doing 80, well, then you appreciate a nervous driver.

The second reason is that cab-drivers take amphetamines to stay awake. This allows them to make more money, but unfortunately, it also drives them slowly insane. Every so often one of them snaps. The results are not pretty. Machetes, guns, that kind of thing.

Masculine. A dangerous word because it could mean so many things, and isn't really allowed to mean any of them anymore. Sandra, who is a middle-of-the-road feminist, feels guilty for thinking of her boyfriend Ted as masculine because he likes to watch the fights and is good at fixing appliances. Greta, who has renounced feminism as a self-centered ideology of victimization that undermines the dignity of women, thinks of her husband as masculine because he looks like a Byzantine icon and thunders like an old-testament prophet. Kristine, who has changed her name to Illya in the belief that Troy was secretly a matriarchal paradise to which Helen had fled to escape Menelaus' crypto-homosexual misogynistic energies, is trying to redefine masculinity by dying her male cats pink and naming them “Dawnbeam” and “Young Hag.”

It was a fine day to spend in the park and it seemed most of the town agreed. It was one of those days where everything merged into perfection; the breeze, the sun, the sky. Only the occasional piece of litter gave any hint that it was not completely manufactured, or that we weren’t living in some talented, terminally benign artist’s rendering of a park at midday. If there is such an artist, I suppose his market would be hotel rooms with the occasional greeting card on the side. I doubt that I’ll every see my work displayed either place; I suspect that most of my stuff ends up at the bottom of drawers or discarded in the trash. Probably that would be the case with the little girl.

“But a cheetah can outrun a man.” Braddock said. The video – he still could not believe what he had seen.

“Of course. Everyone recognizes that fact. That is the whole point.”

“The whole point is to be killed?” Braddock could not fathom the reasoning of men such as these.

“Not to be killed. That’s only a small part of the process. To be challenged by death. That is the object. To be confronted by its absolute certainty. To know, inescapably and undeniably, that it is bearing down on you. That is the catalyst. Everything follows from that.”

Lode Harkwick hadn't more than half believed that there really was a Hanging Witch. Folks who returned from seeking the Witch didn't talk about it, and no-returners never spoke again. Then how did anyone know that the Witch was even there? Such notions came natural to Lode; born on Old Christmas before the Evening Star rose, she saw what others didn't.

Death came for Melanie James when she was seventy-six pounds. Her mother was in the middle of berating her when he walked into her hospital room, dressed like a doctor.

"You're selfish," her mother accused, her voice an angry hiss. She said more, and Melanie tried to listen, but the sound kept slipping in her ears--her mother shouted, her mother whispered, her mother's voice became white noise.