=============================== Spring/Summer 1992. FUGUE #5 chairs or picture books. He could only offer drinks--some of the best, he added--well aged and preserved by the caring employees of Shady Lake .
A
marching band's instruments glittered in the daylight, the guard demonstrated his morning exercises to his guest, and something creaked on badly-oiled hinges, like a car door. The guard awoke with a start. The arm he had been leaning on had fallen asleep and felt awful as he let it drop to the countertop . "Serves me right for droppin' off like a damned first-week trainee ." He put a transparent plastic clipboard over his paperback book to keep it open and sat on his cold hands. The public library, his other job, had over one thousand mysteries to choose from, most under 250 pages. After finishing six or seven of them he grew fond of their regularity, and welcomed the security they brought. He knew better than to bring any harrowing tales into the booth early in the morning, when his reading light cast unpleasant shadows on the cramped walls. He shifted is his seat, tur ned another page and looked up . A white blur suddenly flew headon into the plexiglass window before him , bouncing off it with a sharp crack. The guard bounced a full foot in his chair, poking himself in the eye and falling down on the floor . He sat up and stared at the doorknob for a moment, listening, his congestion clear. There was a kind of fr enzied flit-flit of something against the front wall of the booth. Suddenly his expression tur ned from surprise to anger, and he bounded up to his feet and out the side door. "Sons a bitches they think they can scare an old man half out of his wits and break into a private cemetery, welll'lljust show 'em
a thing or two--" He stood in the small space where the gates were ajar, in the gravel driveway facing the street. His lit flashlight played on the bushes. "All right who's there!" There were no stifled breaths, no feet sprinting on the pavement into the blackness. The flit-flitting made him turn to look in front of the booth. A dove was thrashing around in the leaves below the window, frantically beating one wing, suddenly expiring with a thud against the wooden panel of the booth. The guard went to the creature, picked it up, knelt, cradled it in his hands before the light-giving window . "Isn't that the darndest thing." "Have you an offering, my child?" The growl came from inside the gate, in the darkness of the driveway. He breathed erratically as if from lack of practice. With slow steps he limped forward into the fluorescent light of the lamp, and then his grisly countenance confirmed the ashen quality of his voice: he was of medium height, combed black hair stuck in place, wrinkle-free clothing tarnished with dirt and cobwebs, a marble-colored face . Slouching, with one a rm bouncing erratically at the shoulder, he walked through t he gate; upon reaching his victim, frozen in its crouch, he suddenly stopped, straightened up, put both arms over his head and did a pirouette. Then he bent his knees slightly, looked up, clapped his hands above his head, looked down and thrust them both in the guard's face, palms outstretched. "Vouchsafe it to me, and the rite will be perfor med!" The guard, goggle-eyed, whose years at his post had not prepared him for such a situation, slumped over unconscious onto the wall of the booth. The corpse stood over its victim , not rushing the process of devour-
------------------------------------------------43