This was in a town called Cuba, where the dry wind still carried dust through crevices into every room. It was the most trouble that we ever had, for it was the only stage we ever used that did not have a trap door; and so Jones insisted that Lon make one.

The curtain had only just closed on our third night at the Cuba Grange when Jones announced that she was retiring "The Twilight of the Gods," and had decided that a collection of my one-acts was ready for a trial run. One of these was "Excavation," a comedy in which the characters gradually unearth a horde of unusual props -- hat stands, clothes dummies, musical instruments, paintings, burning candlesticks, vacuum cleaners, car parts1 radios and the like -- from an impossible space between the floors of a converted apartment building. In rehearsal the company had perfected an increasing hysteria that lent some effectiveness to the piece, but it needed a better ending than what I had yet been able to supply. Jones said that it did not go far enough; she said that I had dug around the idea without ever hitting it. Perhaps, by putting it on the schedule, she meant to nudge me along, or perhaps she had no other choice. She had played the Norn for the last time; "Excavation" was needed, ready or not.

When Jones liked an audience she would have the company stand in a receiving line on the front steps of the theater, to greet the people one by one as they passed back into their normal lives. It was more than just good business; Jones liked to see their faces and to hear their names, to watch the way they carried themselves and the way they changed when she offered her hand. She liked to hear their stories. Now that the nights were getting cooler it didn't happen as often, but this had been an especially good performance, and an appreciative crowd; everyone expected that Jones would give the sign to go out. Mary and Mrs. Templeton were so sure of it that they went on ahead. They were halfway out the door before they realized Jones wasn't behind them.

Jones was still working. Without waiting for the house to clear, she paced across the length and width of the stage, pausing every other step to pound on the floor with her heel, the black Norn gown whispering over the boards in her wake. She was not trying to find the trapdoor; she already knew that it didn't exist, had already made up her mind. "Here," she said at last, sighting her position with the back wall. "Put it here." On the far side of the curtain people rose from their seats, passed whispering up the aisle. Jones gave one final stamp. "Don't make it too big. I'll set the program tonight. We'll run through everything out of costume tomorrow afternoon."

"Why now?" Templeton said. "We've played it this long; we can play it two more nights. For gosh sakes, there must be a better way to leave your mark on this tank town."

But Lon had already started to work with a drill and a keyhole saw. "Don't think of it as vandalism," Jones said. "Think of it as making an improvement."

"Christ," Templeton said as she went off into the darkness. "Christ, I hate this."

But he did not leave. He stood off to one side and watched Lon and I crouching like ice fishermen around the growing hole. "You know this play isn't ready," he said to our backs. "We don't need this thing." Lon said nothing. He had cut three sides in the place Jones wanted; as he started on the fourth the stage floor gave out a loud crack and began to fall against the blade. It didn't slow Lon at all. He cut until there was a final snap, and then the wood disappeared from beneath my hands. It landed somewhere in the darkness below, kicking a cloud of dust into our faces, on up over our heads.

"Get a flashlight," Lon said. Before I could move, Templeton slapped one into Lon's outstretched hand, as if he had read Lon's mind. He draped his suitcoat over the footlights and came rolling up his sleeves to join us at the edge of the hole. "Not much room down there," he said as Lon pointed the beam down into the shadows.

Like opening a tomb, I thought. I remember wondering if we might find a corpse buried in the rubble down there, or propped in some abysmal corner, its dead fingers still clutching a few glittering gems from the pile of treasures strewn around its trunk. I suppose I babbled some of that nonsense out loud. But the stage was built just a yard and a half above a smooth floor of dirt. Lon swept the light far along under the floor; there were no eruptions, no scattered bones, only the footprints of mice swirling in a pattern back and around as if they had been caught in the middle of a waltz.

"Sorry, son," Templeton said. "If they have any skeletons they've buried 'em somewhere else."

"This will work," Lon said. He climbed to his feet and shuffled away into the wings, returning a moment later with a hatstand and his favorite box full of butterfly hinges. "Hop down," he said to me.

I lowered myself until the stage came up to my chest, then bobbed my head under. Fine sawdust still floated in a rectangle of light. The ground was cool as the bottom of a lake; it had a musty smell that I didn't mind. I found the square of flooring where it had dropped and passed it up so that Lon could start on the hinges. "Don't bend over like that," Templeton said from above. "Ruin your back. Sit down. Or get on your hands and knees." We tried the hatstand through the trap, angling it in so it came down just right. We tried it three different ways, just to be sure. It worked fine.

When I poked my head back into the fresh air, Jones was resting against the proscenium edge, her arms crossed, her booted feet crossed at the ankles, the tweed jacket draped loose across her shoulders. The Norn make-up was gone forever, that character absorbed at last or else set free, I didn't know which. "Back from the Underworld," she said. "Find anything good?"

"Some nails," I said. "A piece of kindling. Some rocks"

"Our scribe here was hoping we would find a body," Templeton said. The way he said it made me want to slink back under the boards and pull the lid on over me.

Jones only cocked an eyebrow. She gave us that sideways twist of her mouth that had become a familiar thing to me. "Sleep on that one," she said. "I like it."

Lon and I didn't finish with the trap until well after one. By then, I expected that Cuba would be still and cool as the other little towns had always been, a place of empty windows, of cars sitting motionless in silent yards, a place of cats and the occasional rush of far-distant trains. But on the landing out in back of the grange, under a yellow lamp that burned all night, I was surprised to hear music close on the street below. It wasn't coming from the boarding house; it wasn't coming from anywhere that I could tell. It was all over the air.

Lon looked at me and I looked at him. We went around between the buildings, through a V-shaped slash of shadow. It wasn't just music anymore; as we came through the grass I thought I heard soft, distant voices, the low murmur of an engine at idle. "What is it?" I said, and Lon said, "You never went out much on Saturday nights, did you?"

All the way down, as far as we could see, the main street was lined with cars and trucks caked in road dust. They were parked with their noses to the curb, windows half open, the music splashing out across their parallel hoods so at first I thought they all had radios, tuned to the same channel. Then Lon pointed down the length of the sidewalk. Among the two or three buildings with lights still burning was a modern-looking dance hall standing open to the street. People were going in and coming out, but the cars never moved. In dark seats behind the dashboards, or perched out along the row of fenders, handsome men and women sat whispering to each other in a language that I didn't know, didn't even recognize. Lon and I had the better part of the sidewalk to ourselves. A few townsfolk waved as we passed, or offered their hands as if they knew us. Lon seemed completely at ease. We strolled along the busy, peaceful lane until we came into the light of the hall.

Inside, there was fiddle music, dancing couples, and smoke. I spotted Jones right away. She was sitting at a corner of the bar, looking as if she had just come back from exploring India. She had a glass of whiskey resting in her lap, cupped in both hands. She was surrounded by men.

Lon stepped inside, paused and looked back. "Aren't you coming?" he said.

In all the racket and bustle of that place, Jones seemed contained, poised inside a bubble of her own making. She listened with care and apparent interest to something that a man on her left was trying to say. As I watched, I began to sense that invisible bubble slowly expanding, to encompass first the bar, then the men standing near, and finally the entire hall.

"No," I said at last. "It's late. I've got to think about the play."

Lon shrugged, went on ahead, and I stepped back into the street. Men passed me going in. Drawn by her scent, by the prospect of her swelling to embrace them all. I went back up the whispering block, turned, and started alone to the boarding house beyond.

My room looked out on a parking space made all of compressed dirt, then over the backs of facades lining the main street, out to the distant grasslands. I could just see the roof of the grange, facing south from the center of town. Every morning a boy in coveralls swept the walk in front of a dry goods store, and slowly, after that, blue and green and black automobiles would begin to drift by, covering over his work.

I sat counting cadavers with the morning sun coming too hot through the glass. I had five of them, false endings to the piece that would have its premiere within a few hours. I had been digging them up since just before dawn, a new one every time, each more ridiculous than the one before. It isn't easy to end a play with a corpse, it raises too many questions, tempts the story along in directions it was never intended to go. I had the characters dreaming up strange, conflicting histories for the dead man; I had the body (dressed in decrepit but very modern clothes) put on display as an example of a species long vanished, hunted to extinction. I had professors attempting to revive the thing, to question it eagerly about the past. I had them cut open its chest. They were trying to find a rationale, and I saw then that I was making the same mistake. Like them, I came up with effects that were colorful but empty: clouds of gas and dust, fluttering moths, a far-distant moan. In itself, the corpse was just another object; what mattered was the chance of discovery.

I went down to the end of the hall and doused myself in cold water, then came back still dripping. It took me about a minute to write the ending. It went like this:

It was eleven thirty before I dragged myself down to the grange. By then Lon had loaded the thunder machine onto one of the trucks and was greasing it for the last time. His hands were black to the wrists. Through the stage door, far out into the yard, I could hear the company rehearsing a scene that I didn't remember having written. "You're late," Lon said, scooping glop out of a tin can and then vanishing his fingers into the machinery. "Getting kind of showy aren't you?"

Jones looked as if she hadn't slept. Still wearing the same canvas pants from the evening before, the same blue cotton shirt with the tail hanging out, the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, gypsy-bedraggled, she circled with the others inside a boundary of chalk that marked the edges of an invisible set. They were referring to a mess of dogeared pages spread out at the foot of the stage. Jones was the only one who saw me come in.

I waited and watched off stage left until she broke away, leaving them to play out the scene with just an empty space. "Hey there, stay-at-home," she said in the grey windowlight by the packing cases. "Got anything for me?"

The new ending was scrawled out on a half page of yellow paper in the worst handwriting I could manage. It had many crossings-out and some inky fingerprints; I'd crumpled it into a ball, flattened it again, smudged the dialogue and sprinkled it with tap water to represent sweat. Jones ignored everything but the words. She read the piece three times, once with her lips moving. "Nothing fancy," I said. "Hardly seems worth the trouble. But it's --"

"Good," she said distractedly, her face a dead blank. "I'll bring it out to them."

It took a while for that to sink in. Good, I thought. It was her highest compliment but also sometimes an admonition to do better. Did she mean Good, this will work or Good, it's a start?

I was still wondering about it when Jones turned back suddenly on her way to the stage. She rested in mock thoughtfulness against a canvas tree; the yellow paper turned in her fingers. "Just a moment," she said. "There's this new part. The face at the screen."

And I wilted, because I hadn't seen it, not until just then. "Aw, no. Everybody's onstage"

Jones nodded. "Except Lon," she said. "And you."

"Maybe if..."

Jones clapped her free hand down on my shoulder. She looked as if everything had come together beautifully. "Buck up. Tonight's your debut. It may not be a speaking part, but everyone has to start somewhere"

If I wouldn't accept that I had brought it on myself, Lon would not believe that I hadn't planned it this way all along. That night, with Mary out upon the apron playing "Aura Lea" and Lon stuck with redressing the stage all by himself, Moscow sat me down in a freezing metal-backed chair and bent over me in the glare of an unshaded lamp. "Don't move," he said softly, "except when and how I tell you. And keep your mouth shut. We have only ten minutes."

His make-up case rested open on a stand that came up to the level of my chest. Moscow twisted the lamp around until it shone into my eyes, then began to mark my face with a stick of black greasepaint. "First time you've worn this shit," he said. "Does wonders for your skin."

A block of shadow decapitated him above the bridge of his painted nose. I could hear Mary in the distance and I could hear his breath sounding just like a forge nearby, just the way Lon had described it when he told me of seeing Moscow alone in the night, looking for his own name on the marquee. "Close your eyes,,, Moscow said. He dumped corn starch into my hair; when I didn't rub it in fast enough to please him he pushed my hands away and finished the job himself. Then a glass jar jumped into his fingertips. He prodded at the greyish-white stuff inside and began pushing it hard into my pores, cold and moist over my brow, down along my cheeks, chin and neck. "Why haven't you tried her," he said at last.

When I opened my eyes Moscow was lighting the stub of a candle, holding the narrow end of a cork into its tall flame. The base coat of make-up had already started to dry; it felt as if my whole face was hardening into a paper mask. "Tried her?" I said. "Jones? For what?"

Moscow gave out a sharp hiss of air from between his lips. "Tyro," he said. "Close them." The burnt cork was still warm as he pressed it to my eyelids, working in a circular motion that rose high up under my brow. He heated it again and painted my mouth, cheekbones and nostrils chalky black. "Next spring she'll find herself a new writer," he said. "Or she'll find herself something else to do, and you'll have missed your chance."

Moscow lifted a handmirror so that I could see reflected a withered skull-face, caked in dust with just my eyes, brown and surprised, floating there far back in the sockets. Then he picked out a crumpled cardboard box not much larger than a ring case. Inside was a set of jagged wooden teeth, brown with age, bound in curving metal braces. "This is going to hurt," he said. "Don't say I didn't warn you."

"How did you find your first taste of acting," Mrs. Templeton said later that week as we rode together in the back seat with rain splashing black against black windows.

"Taste?" I said. "Not at all. It tasted like sour beer. It tasted like dust. It was almost tropical under that stage, and with all the garbage Moscow piled on my face--"

"Yes," Mrs. T said. "Yes, I did think he had overdone it a bit."

"With that on it was all I could do to breathe. Act? 'Hold your body stiff and try not to sneeze.' I didn't think I'd manage it."

"Still, the play came off all right," Mrs. T said. "I knew it when that woman fainted in the third row

A man named John Huss was waiting for us when we came through after the show. He was standing by the stage door with his hands in the pockets of a cream-colored suit, building up what was already a sizable head of steam. "Ma'am," he said when he had succeeded at picking Jones out of the group. "Ma'am, could I have a word with you?"

Every one of us followed in her wake, a costumed retinue spreading out in a fantail shape at her back. She offered her hand and an uncommitted expression that fit over her features like thin gauze. "Of course. What can I do for you?"

It had some effect: Huss looked like he couldn't decide on the best approach. "Well ma'am, I think this is something more in the way of what's already been done. If you needed firewood I would have sold it to you. Hell's fire, you didn't have to chop up my damn stage."

Jones said nothing. Her face did not change. It was Templeton who barged in, hooking his thumb at his own chest, his eyes clear blue in a puddle of make-up. "I am her legal advisor," he said, overdoing it a bit as if he thought he was playing to the back row. "If there's any problem here then I'm your man."

"Problem?" Huss said. "Well, what do you think? How about I just go out there and have a peek at the floor?"

"You can't come in here at all without our say so," Templeton said. "And you know it." He was starting to enjoy himself; Jones was giving him her Be Quiet look but he wasn't paying attention.

"I don't need to come in," Huss said. "Maybe you think that I don't go to plays. Or maybe you just think that I don't know how things are done. You had to have some kind of a hole out there and this place wasn't built with one."

Templeton said, "Hole? Listen, there's no shame in it but you don't know how things are done. Those props are all specially made. They fold up just like that. Why, half of them are paper. We don't use holes."

"I see," Huss said. He lifted a well-calloused hand and pointed it at me. "How does that one fold up?"

Much later, Templeton said that I stepped on his best line. He meant to tell Huss that I had travelled with the Adam Forpaugh and Sells Brothers Combined Shows as a contortionist, that in fact I folded up quite well. But he never had the chance. In Huss I saw someone who lived in the world I had come from: a regular bootstraps businessman, small and solid, clean-shaven, neat, built to stand the weather. Men like him had been the everyday players in my life until the summer overtook me; I felt as if I knew him. It was naive of me to assume that of all the company, only I could see that he was no fool. Jones knew it, surely; why didn't she cut Templeton off?

Before Huss could take his hand down out of the air I stepped forward and clasped it. "Mishter Hush," I said, and then stopped. Moscow's teeth were still in my mouth. I hadn't forgotten them but I hadn't had any chance to take them out either, and now wasn't the time.

Huss looked me up and down, then freed himself and peered into his upturned palm. A dusty grey handprint had appeared there; too late, I remembered that I'd spent the last forty minutes crawling around in the grime below the stage. "Who are you really?" Huss said.

"Winshdon Howe. A couble monsh agho I wash a bishnesh clergh. Now look had me." For the part of the corpse Mary had fitted me out with a rotten old vest, string tie and an oversized tailcoat. They were as dirty as my hands; I tried to wipe myself clean and couldn't tell the difference.

"You know that almost sounds like the truth," Huss said. "Who was your employer?"

I told him about Mr. DeLodges and the Happiness Home Baking Company as well as I could manage. The name was not familiar to him. I offered to show the letter of recommendation that I still carried from Mr. DeLodges himself. Huss refused it. He said it sounded like a good job. What in the name of Sam Hill made me give it up?

I said, "Well shir I'm nod sure I know the anshwer do thad. Bud I can dell you thad I don' fold ub. Nod yed."

Now Huss gave the faintest of nods. "Thank you son, I'm glad to hear that." He shot a look at Templeton, who only looped his thumbs through his suspenders and stuck his jaw in the air. "Now maybe we can accomplish something."

In the alley of canvas and paint that ran across the stage Huss's voice echoed up and down and climbed into the rafters. "Oh, my. Doesn't seem Huh. It isn't the same out here at all. So flat." We took him straight to the spot where the trap door joined almost invisibly with the parallel sweep of the boards. Lon worked the mechanism a few times; with Huss so occupied Mary passed me a handkerchief, and I spit the false teeth into it, folding the whole mess away into a side pocket. "Mr. DeLodges never expected me to be an expert on everything," I said. "But he expected me to know who the experts were, and to listen to them and act on what they said. And if Jones says this place needs a trap door than it needs one. I guess you can see for yourself that it's an expert job."

Huss watched the door work, worked it a few times himself and then shook his head sadly. "All I can see is that you understand business men all right. If that's the case, then you'll understand why I can't be seen to have been hoodwinked by an ex-off ice boy and a pack of mummers." He stood back frowning, sniffed through one side of his nose, and cut off my reply with a wave of his hand. "Plug it up," he said. "Plug it up, and we'll let this one go."

Jones turned her eyes from where Huss was standing and fixed them on me. She might have been smiling or frowning; her face had become a painted mask. "Thank you," I said, and again Huss brushed the air as if this too was of no consequence. He turned to Lon. "Make it good and solid, if you can."

"Don't worry," Lon said without meeting his eyes. He had his toolbox already in hand; now it hit the floor with a sound that filled the house from front to back.

Jones still had not broken her silence. "Good show, Ma'am," Huss said to her. "I liked it a lot." She offered her bandaged hand and he took it. Then with a kind of embarrassment that I had not noticed in him before, he touched his forehead and passed through us into the dark beyond the wings. A moment later the stage door opened and closed, followed by a gust of warm air washing in from the yard.

At last Mrs. Templeton stirred. "Winston, I can't believe my ears!" She came up and rapped me gently on the forehead, on the hard crust of corpse make-up. "Is it really you? Are you there?"

When Mary and I had everything in place for the next day, I went to Lon at the corner of the stage and asked if he needed any help. "That depends," he said, looking up from a quite unnecessary mess of rulers, protractors, pencils, sawblades and nails that he'd strewn about the gaping mouth of the trapdoor. His fingers were dusted with a fine yellow powder; around his knees he had dotted the stage floor with drawings of angles, arrows, squares. "You all through playing leading man?"

I asked what he meant by that. None of us were in jail; our equipment hadn't been seized; as far as I was concerned I'd gotten us out of a tight spot with only the mildest of damage done. Lon shrugged it off. He knelt there shaking his head, poking at the marks on the boards. "You've been playing yourself for her just like a character in a play," he said. "All I know is it's made a lot of work for me. Help or go away."

I went out, got my coat and stopped there cursing him, then turned around and went back. Lon didn't say anything more. We closed the trapdoor, screwed it down tight, and together sealed the edges with a thick coating of homemade glue that smelled like turpentine and looked a lot like maple sugar. When it was finished Lon sat back on his heels. He began to peel dried glue from the ends of his fingers. "You go on," he said. "We've got to let this dry, and then it'll need another coat. I'll lock up. Go ahead, it's late."

I didn't argue with him, I had had enough of that to last me a while. I said goodnight, picked myself up and this time just draped the overcoat loose over my shoulders. It wasn't a costume; it had come with me all the way from Saint Paul. Back then it always helped me to look smart. Now, in my dirty slacks and a frayed shirt smeared with make-up, I was just a shabby young man in an overcoat, and too tired to care.

I hadn't believed Mary when she told me I was going to need it, but as soon as I stepped out under that half-moon night I knew that the summer was nearly gone. I shivered, caught a glimpse of my own breath in the air, and paused under the light to push my arms through the sleeves. I was just doing up the buttons when the gravel crunched at my side and a ragged shadow came up out of the dark and caught me by the elbow. "Please," it said to me. "Please, will you sign?"

I remember jumping back, and I remember the sight of a hand gripping the air, a longfingered thing with red nails, vanishing at the wrist into a grey sleeve that extended into darkness. "Please, if you would," it said, sexless, insistent, and the next thing I knew a wad of dirty paper and the stub of a pencil were being pushed hard up against my chest. "I have all of the greats the Barrymores, William Gillette, Julia Marlowe, Mrs. Fiske"

Beyond the light I saw only a mass of white hair and a heavy coat piled up with layer upon layer of mismatched scarves. "I'm sorry, you've made a mistake," I said. "I'm no one whose autograph you could want." I turned away and started across the yard, but was halted midway when the hand gathered up a fistful of cloth at the small of my back. "No," it said, close at my shoulder, breathing hard. "No, I know who you are. You're Winston Howe, the writer. You were the body. You're famous. Sign. Oh, sign"

I tried to get away and then it held me and would not let me go, crying "Sign, please sign sign, oh sign" but by then I had turned some and could see in the light that the face was painted and the eyes were dark brown. I took hold of his nose and twisted until it came off in my hand, and Moscow stepped back, a rough square of his own face now showing in the middle of powder and rouge. "Big playwright-man," he said and laughed out loud so that clouds poured out through his mouth and nose. "Big talker. You think we need your help? You aren't anything. You aren't piss. But you wanted to sign. You would have signed"

I called him a son of a bitch, turned and crunched off across the cold gravel, half expecting him to follow, half expecting to hear him still shouting and laughing in the yard for the whole town to hear. Neither of those things happened, but I am not sure that I knew the difference; his voice followed me anyway, or a voice much like it, telling me that I had been warned, that I was an idiot, that Jones of course could take care of herself. If I had shut up long enough to let her speak I would have known that; if I had thought at all I would have seen why Huss had bothered talking to me. And that lady who screamed. It was not the play after all. It was only the make-up.

At the boarding house I was admitted by a pleasant man in his forties who asked if I thought my friends would be out much longer. I said that I didn't think so but couldn't be sure, and went past him into a twisty stairwell that carried the sound of my footsteps all up and down through the building. The walls were brown and white, the paint peeling in spots above a row of oak wainscotting. My room was second on the left at the top of the stairs; I walked past it, down to the middle of the hall. Jones's light was still on.

I made the knock as small and soft as I possibly could, hoping that it would pass unnoticed. Instead it was answered by the sound of papers being pushed around, a whisper, a sigh, and her bare feet coming across the floor. She opened the door and stood blinking as if I had wakened her, her hands resting on the frame. "Hey, Doc," she said, and when I did not reply, added "What's on your mind?"

I told her about the floor, guessed that Lon must be about finished by now, that he ought to be on his way any minute. We stood in the doorway looking at each other. Far away, down in the walls, someone was clumping up in the stairwell.

"You look sick," she said.

I said I was sorry about barging in on the dealings with Huss. I said it was her company and I should know better than to try and run it. I said I would go home if she wanted me to.

Jones stifled a yawn, then stood to one side, and motioned me in. Her room was no warmer than the hall had been, no brighter, no less dusty. There were white curtains hanging against the glass. I looked for signs of her, found only the grey suitcase pushed into a corner, and a mess of paper spread out across the bed. Jones pulled a chair from beside the wardrobe and settled into it. She crossed her arms on the seat back. "You don't seriously want to go," she said.

I thought: Yes, damn it. Of course not.

When I would not answer, Jones said, "What is the matter with you? You had three premieres tonight, all of which went well. You should be crowing. You should be jumping around."

There was no other chair; I cleared a space at the foot of the bed and sat there on the covers. "I've never crowed in my life."

"Then it's time to start. I was glad watching you tonight. It was the most talk I've heard out of you since you joined the company. I've wondered what you were like, back in your old job; now I know. You tried to keep everyone happy, and it worked as far as it could. If that isn't a successful debut, what is?"

"Moscow is right. I don't fit in."

Jones smiled. "Moscow wears his evil spirits all on the surface. It doesn't have anything to do with you, unless you happen to be in his path when he's taking them out for a walk."

I thought, he had 'em on a short leash tonight.

Jones looked away. She sighed, stood up again and walked over to the door. "I want only one thing from you," she said with her hand on the knob. "I want you to stop being frightened all the time."

The door opened, and then closed again before I could even get up. "There," Jones said. "You've been heard leaving. Now tell me." She pulled the light chain, came and stood over me in the dark. Her hands found my face. There was only the faintest rustle of cloth as she lowered herself around me.

"Margaret Darwin," I said.