* * * *

When the shadows deepened and the patterns lost their logic, when the moon-drawn lines bent and the squares of light folded in and swallowed themselves, he knew he wasn't crazy. Setting Maggie's head carefully on the pillow, he went to the railing and looked down on the stairs, braving the encroaching darkness this time without his revolver.

Am I dreaming or am I awake? he wondered. Or is this some place in between?

The turmoil of darkness was again advancing up the stairway.

"You can skip the melodramatics," David told the dark cloud. "I know who and what you are."

The demarcation of true night and false paused on the stairs, looking almost puzzled in its momentary hesitation.

"Show yourself for what you are," David commanded. "I'm not afraid--" (This, a lie that he hoped did not seem obvious.) "--and I don't intend to step aside." (Truth.) "Dispense with this facade and show your face."

He wasn't sure what he expected. A robed figure with protracted, skeletal fingers wrapped about the handle of a scythe--No, that was too garish, too cliché, too--Hollywood. He expected something simpler. Death revealed would be bourgeois. Death without his masks would be as inconspicuous as the mailman. Death would be the lovely actress Maria Casarès in Jean Cocteau's Orpheus. Death in black would not be skeletal, but rather like the character in Bergman's The Seventh Seal: dark of robe and white of face, but with nothing frightening or terrifying in his serene, regular features.

What he least expected was a crowded stairway.

There was a slim, dark young man in a black tux, an inexplicable pair of silver scissors protruding from his breast pocket. Behind him was a line of women, their feminine curves more accentuated than hidden by long, heavy robes, their faces concealed within the folds of dark hoods. Flanking the line of hooded women, was a line of surgeons, their hospital scrubs glistening with blood and gore as if they'd just come from some horrific triage, their rubber-gloved hands full of surgical instruments that appeared to have never been washed, let alone sterilized.

The man in the tux arched one Napoleonic eyebrow. "You've a reason for stopping me?" He withdrew a notebook from an inside pocket, flipped a few pages, and made a production out of consulting the data contained therein. "Hunter. David Allen." The dark eyes rose from the page to gaze up the stairs at David. "You haven't a great deal of time, Mr. Hunter, but your appointment was not tonight."

"You've come to take my wife," David stammered.

The dark man pursed his lips and snapped the notebook closed. "I see."

"I?" David forced his hands to release the wrought iron rail and rubbed absently at the painful indentations in his palms. "I can't let you have her."

"Can't?"

David swallowed. "Can't."

The dark young man indicated the remaining stairs. "May I?"

David shook his head. "I'd prefer you not come any closer." The absurdity of the situation suddenly set in. He fought an insane urge to bust out laughing. He hadn't expected Death to be so--polite.

"Then we have ourselves a dilemma here, Mr. David Allen Hunter." He glanced at his entourage, then at the moon shining through the window on the landing, then back up at David. "You've obviously realized that I can't proceed without your permission."

David blinked. Death needed his permission?

"I suppose we'll have to leave."

David shrugged and tried to smile, but it came out a grimace. "Don't forget to lock up on your way out."

No one laughed.

The tuxedoed man scratched his chin and leaned against the hand rail with one foot a step higher than the other. For a moment, he held this pose, as if he were deep in thought. Finally, he looked up. "You love this woman?"

"More than anything."

"And you think she loves you?"

"I know she does."

"Hmmm--Interesting. What if I told you there were things about her you don't know. What if I told you she had lied to you for--let's see?" He consulted his notebook. "Ah, yes, here it is--thirty-seven years."

"It won't work."

"What won't work?"

"Your lies."

"Lies?" The dark man looked genuinely wounded. "My dear friend, there is nothing so honest as Death. Do you really know who I am?" He withdrew the scissors from his pocket and took a few practice snips at the air. "I am the Scissor Man, the Remover, the Collector of Spirits. I come for the soul. With these scissors?" He held the nondescript silver instruments up for David's inspection. "--I separate the spirit from the flesh. If you dissuade me, you condemn her soul to perish with her physical remains. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, of her will live on.

"You don't want that, do you?"

David found himself at a loss for words. What did he want? He wanted Maggie to be with him forever. He didn't think he knew how to go on without her.

While David hesitated, the Scissor Man advanced to the landing and several steps beyond, his entourage following close behind. David dashed from the railing to the head of the stairs to cut him off.

"You said you couldn't come any further without my permission!"

The Remover of Souls smiled sadly. "You gave it, Hunter. You don't know it, but you did." By this time, he had reached the top of the stairs. Despite his convictions, David fell back before him, terrified of the dark eyes, the dispassionate set of his thin mouth, the gleaming scissors.

"Please," David begged. "Don't take my wife."

One of the surgeons stepped forward and whispered something in the Scissor Man's ear. As he did, David got a close look at the surgeon's face. The skin was transparently thin and drawn, as if pulled by some inner vacuum until it was stretched like a worn rubber glove, leaving the bone visible beneath it. The surgeon's teeth were yellow and grey, held by more bone than gum. His ears were pale languets pinned to the side of his head by the band of a surgical cap. His eyes were protuberant, red-rimmed and pus-colored. He stank like road-rottened flesh. He moved as if his bones were linked with baling wire.

There was no way on Earth David was going to allow one of them near his wife.

The Scissor Man frowned. "You're probably right," he said to the surgeon. "Brutal, but right."

He glanced at Maggie. "She must have once been a very beautiful woman, Hunter."

"Stay away from her," David hissed.

"Would you like to see her when she was--say, in her early twenties?" The Scissor Man indicated the hooded women who had by this time climbed the stairs and spread out along the bedroom walls. "These are Maggie's Memories. Each of them has captured some fragment of your wife's mind, some element of who and what she was, some piece of the events that made her Maggie."

"Vampires," David spat. He could easily imagine such monsters, the source for every case of Alzheimer's and senile dementia. "They're sucking away everything she was so that in the end there'll be nothing but a shell!"

"Oh, no, David. No. This is preservation, not theft. This has been going on since the day she was born. Let me show you." The Remover motioned and one of the hooded women stepped forward and dropped the dark hood down about her shoulders.