The hostess of the boarding house in the little seaside Maine town had just told us with a vicious enthusiasm about the Sketcher being arrested for breaking town laws. Nobody went to the extreme of Harbor Point at night, and yet, Sketcher’s girlfriend had, and now lay near death.



I scraped the thin and lumpy bowl of porridge dry, and washed it out in a line of other men alone with lye soap and bone-chillingly cold water that we hand-pumped out of the ground.



The hostess gave me a mean eye because I did not share her joy, and the others kept their eyes downcast in weariness.



“You going to see that no-account murdering rat?” She asked me blocking my path from the kitchen even though the answer must have been obvious in the sadness of my face. Her pushy manner got on my nerves, and the way she stared at me annoyed.



“Excuse me.” I said and stared into her eyes for nearly a minute until she ungraciously stepped aside. I walked past.



“Don’t think he’s not going to fry, the woman of this town won’t put up with that type of scum. Why we might engage in some justice ourselves.” Her taunt and threat grated, and I turned back to look at her with a cold fury.



“And the coyotes said to the wolf better be wary, or we’ll eat you.” Then I stared at her until she turned away.



What with my slow start, and the single bath in the house, and the way our hostess dawdled making breakfast, it was near ten before I walked away from the dank, hateful boarding house.



It was strange, I’d seen people who could have cooperated and gotten things done quicker, but instead they persisted in trying to grab everything for themselves first, and spilling the porridge onto the table so that a good third of our breakfast was wasted. There was something disturbing about this world, and I seemed to be having an unusually hard time figuring it out. And my spirits flagged so that in walking across town in the clear, gray light, I found myself staggering a bit toward the end not from true exhaustion, but from a malaise that made sleep seem more attractive than not.



With a lurch upright, I remembered some of my dreams of last night. Chants and drowning in salty seas while others with human faces but no hearts in their chests looked on impassively. I shook the dreams off, and began to focus a bit. Something was bothering me. I needed to figure it out. I sat down on a wet bench by the roadside which caused some laughter by some idlers, but a glare stifled their humor.



I welcomed my ill-tempered mood. It gave me energy, and a defense against whatever was wrong. I spotted a church steeple, and walked toward it.



Inside, I began to pray and think. It could not be magic because magic did not work here. A psi influence was possible, but unlikely that anyone would have the skill to affect me so subtly and everyone else as well. Nevertheless, I put up a mental barrier, and immediately I felt some relief.



Startled, I sent out my clairvoyance despite the extreme difficulty. And a pastor came up to me as I sat on the splintered pew.



“Son, why do you come here?”



I pulled back my clairvoyance with some effort, and saw a weary man with black bags under his eyes. The pastor of the local church slowly set down on the pew in front of me.



“For relief against the depression that seeps from every doorway, and pollutes the air.” I said with a touch of theactricality which surprised me.



He grinned for a second.



“A fellow thespian, well met. I played Hamlet at Harvard.”



I decided mentioning that I had shared a beer with Will was probably not the thing, and so I grinned back. We chatted for a bit about plays and he showed me a copy of his favorite play. “Hamlet” of course. The writing seemed dull, the sharp edges worn off, and the keenly cynical knowledge of humanity had fled. This was not the Shakespeare I knew. This was a poor copy without insight or wit.



“Son, in answer to your question. The only relief is what I have shown you. Find a hobby that in your darkest moments you can immerse yourself in. God is still in his heaven; I do not doubt this, but Satan is Prince of the Earth. Our duty is to persevere until sweet death takes us to glory.”



Full of pity, I saw his kind face, and I wanted to weep for him. He knew nothing of joy or happiness, just duty. And I saw that he truly wished for death to “end his vale of sorrows.”



He left me alone, and I turned back to the clairvoyance, sparing a moment to pray for blessings on the poor pastor of this benighted town. I sought the source of the force that shadowed my life, and my watching eye turned toward the sky.



Soon, a blackness of space caused me to change my vision to draw in more light because it seemed oddly dim out here. I nearly lost it as I altered my sensitivity. The effect nearly spiralled completely out of control which would have left me so sensitive to light that moonlight could have stunned me.



In that wavering moment, I saw mirages in the Outer Planets. Crawling things, and collections of bubbles infested the moons of Jupiter. I put it down to a defect of vision, and sure enough when I had corrected my senses, the mirages were gone.



I looked about, and saw a pattern in the stars. Curious, I tried to decipher it. With a sense of forboding, it snapped into place, and I looked into the face of Madness and Evil. It leered at me, and I fled focusing my awareness back to my body.



A rising scream in my throat competed for my attention with a lilting voice that kept saying “Tadeusz.” It would pause, and repeat itself. Shuddering, I came back to full awareness.



I must have looked across a dimensional boundary, or maybe Things of Horror swam in the Outer Dark, but could not reach Earth. This explained things to a degree though. The God of this world might not be Satan, but It was definitely one of his buddies.



Still shaking, I walked out into the week sunlight, and headed to the courthouse. Nearly one, and still nothing done, I groused aware that it might not be a just criticism. But my thinking patterns seemed to be damaged in this world.



I had to wait three hours to meet the prisoner. Some of the local woman had come by to sing him doleful hymms that fluctuated between “woe, is me” and “God is going to stomp on you real hard.” The vultures came out of his room chatting gaily and well-pleased with their afternoons work at “soothing a tortured soul, and winning him back for the Kingdom, which is no doubt where he is going soon.”



I went in, and saw him with an apple. My stomach growled, and he laughed, and offered to repay me for the meal of last night. Accepting, I sat down on the foot of his metal-framed bed and waited for him to explain what happened while crunching down the large and good apple.



Even if an evil god ran this world, he seemed to have missed one detail.



“Great news. I saw the Nixie last night.” He seemed wired.

“So you were breaking the law.”

“Err, not exactly. Look, the point is, I saw it. It seemed to have broken bits which is probably why it was slow enough for me to catch sight of it.”

Something nibbled at my mind, a faint memory, and I let it continue to rise to the surface.

“And your girlfriend?”

His face fell.

“I ah, brought her to Harbor Point later that night. But it was not my fault.” He hurriedly added the last bit.

“I was possessed.”



I looked at him with my mouth hanging open, and then I noticed the ways his eyes were not completely tracking.

“You’re higher than a kite, aren’t you.”

“Just a little cocaine. Nothing serious.” He scooted back, and crossed his arms over his folded legs. I got up, and walked over to the door, and gave it a good kick.



The sherrif came.

“Make sure he doesn’t get anymore cocaine.”

The sherrif examined Sketcher, and growled like an awakening bear. Then he stomped off to yell at his assistant. The deputy did not seem to see anything wrong with it, but he soon shut up as the sherrif kept yelling at him.



My theory was that Sketcher got drugged out of his mind; thought he saw the Nixie, and dragged his girlfriend up to see it even as his better sense told him to stop.



I went to see the waitress at her home to check up on her. A large crowd hung around in her front yard, and I realized with a sickening feeling that I needed an excuse to see her. The unfriendly looks from the waiters who hung out by the doctor’s horseless carriage emphasized how stupid I had been to think I could waltz right in.



I asked the crowd where the doctor was, and then walked away with their objections hitting deaf ears. Inside the house, I went up to the doctor who had his black bag open, and was I’d say reading a book inside it. Probably trying to research the problem for what looked like an influential family that he would not want to fail.



“Hello, Doctor. I have some experience dealing with exposure, basic medical practises, emergency surgery, and physical rehabilitation.” The training in exposure I had first come by the hard way. Versers often land in desolate spots. Later, I had systematized my training because of the usefulness of these skills.



He looked relieved, and despite objections that I was a friend of the “murdering scum”, he brought me into the room with the sick girl. The mother sat by the bedside and gave way begrudgingly.



She lay in a mildly delirious trance, and a sweat kept coming off her despite the maid continually sopping it up.



“Dehyrdration, doctor. The patient needs fluids.”



“She just spits it up when I try to pour it down her throat.”



The doctor went to stand by the mother, and tell her to please do as she is told, and not drown her daughter. I needed a plastic bag, and a hose and a needle. I had the needle, a penicillin mix held with stabilizer so it would last for years ready to use.



Slipping it out, and injecting the patient in the calf through a blanket was not hard with the ultra-sharp needle. But it came back with a bit of green on its tip which I cleaned off. I’d get to that later.



“Do you have some muslin fabric, very clean, and a small glass bottle?”



They boiled the muslin per my instructions. And they boiled the water adding a bit of salt and a bit more of sugar to the second pot I had them make.



The boiled bottle, I took aside, and somewhat surreptitiouslyu extruded my titanium fingernail claws. A slight shave, and then two soft pushes into the shave a fraction of an inch apart, three millimeters were followed by a tap from the inside. The tiny hole in the bottom of the glass was smooth, and just what the doctor would have ordered if he really knew what he was doing.



I stuffed the muslin into the hole, and then poured the cooled liquid which had been stored in the icehouse into the bottle. The end of the needle came off with a flick of my index finger’s claw. The doctor saw this, and stared in shock, but he kept his mouth shut.



We gently led the mother aside who chose that moment to have a fit protesting that we were not going to hurt her daughter. One of the hanger-ons came in, a big brute who came up to my size, and he started to try to slam me against the wall, and slap the bottle out of my hand.



A parry to the inside of his wrist, and a pinch on the nerve just above his elbow made for an arm lock that should stop him, I thought. Instead, he acted like he felt no pain for several seconds until the doctor threatened to brain him with a lamp if he did not get out of the sick room at once. Then he winced, and backed off. I barely saved my primitive intravenous kit.



We inserted it into her left elbow, and again a spot of bright green welled up. I scraped this off, and examined it frightened for the girl, and for the townfolk. The only thing I could think of was some sort of mad variant of Ebola virus which ended with the body structure collapsing, and blood spewing across the floor. Granted we were too far out of the tropical zones for most diseases, but that was the rule in most worlds. Maybe viruses liked the cold here, or something.



The doctor stationed a sensible aunt by the girl with instructions, and we watched the IV work. Drops ran down the muslin, and into the open top of the needle, and into her body. She seemed easier in minutes which surprised me.



I rigged a screen around the muslin so that people wouldn’t cough on it. It was not the best, but seeing as I thought the girl was terminal, I’d try anything.



The doctor and I walked out, and to his car. He had to shoo a bunch of aggressive grown-up brats away from it before he could leave with me.



“I need to see the Nixie.” I said not really meaning it literally since the Nixie was just wind and water scouring a cliff.



“You’re one of them, the Powers of Light.” The doctor burst out as he turned off his car by the side of the road.

I gaped at him.

“I saw the claws, and the medical knowledge you had is astounding.”

He had a point about the claws, and my medical knowledge was not all that great. Its just he knew next to nothing. I temporized.

“I have been so hoping that one of you would come and help. So many people have suffered these comas.”



My head jerked up, and I studied him with growing fear. What was going on here?



“Drive, doctor.” And he did heading toward the Nixie.

“There’s no magic.” I muttered to myself.

“Hah. I thought as much when I got out of college. All superstitions. Why God does not seem to hear me when I pray, so I became an atheist. A proper cliche’ I was, the educated and suave country doctor ministering to the bumpkins. Thing is, I started seeing things I could not explain.”



I kept my mouth shut. With the state of medical science in the the 1920’s most things were such that he could not explain them.



“And in all the darkness, I got to see that we were still alive, and if the darkness had not ate us already, and it surely craved to do so, then the Powers of light must exist.”



“So you think I’m an angel?” This made two worlds in a row.

“Something Mysterious and Wonderful.” He said, his courtly and practical voice transformed by reverence.

“Stop that. I don’t think you are totally wrong, except for that part about me being an angel.”



We drove toward the Nixie as the sun went down.



Tadeusz