The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

ALSO EDITED BY ANN AND JEFF VANDERMEER

The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases (with Mark Roberts)

Best American Fantasy 1 (with Matthew Cheney)

Best American Fantasy 2 (with Matthew Cheney)

The New Weird

Steampunk

Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded

Fast Ships, Black Sails

The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

Last Drink Bird Head

ODD?

The Weird

The Time Traveler’s Almanac

Sisters of the Revolution

The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals

The Big Book of Science Fiction

The Big Book of Classic Fantasy

ALSO BY JEFF VANDERMEER

FICTION

The Southern Reach Trilogy

Annihilation

Authority

Acceptance

Dradin in Love

The Book of Lost Places (stories)

Veniss Underground

City of Saints and Madmen

Secret Life (stories)

Shriek: An Afterword

The Situation

Finch

The Third Bear (stories)

Borne

The Strange Bird

Dead Astronauts

NONFICTION

Why Should I Cut Your Throat?

Booklife

Monstrous Creatures

The Steampunk Bible (with S. J. Chambers)

The Steampunk User’s Manual (with Desirina Boskovich)

Wonderbook

ALSO BY ANN VANDERMEER

Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution

The Bestiary

A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, JULY 2020

Introduction and compilation copyright © 2020 by VanderMeer Creative, Inc.

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Owing to limitations of space, permissions to reprint previously published material appear on this page.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: VanderMeer, Ann, editor, writer of introduction. | VanderMeer, Jeff, editor, writer of introduction.

Title: The big book of modern fantasy : the ultimate collection / edited and with an introduction by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

Description: New York : Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2020. | A Vintage Books original.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019047608 (print) | LCCN 2019047609 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525563860 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780525563877 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Fantasy fiction.

Classification: LCC PN6071.F25 B537 2020 (print) | LCC PN6071.F25 (ebook) | DDC 808.83/8766—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019047608

Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780525563860

Ebook ISBN 9780525563877

Cover design by Joe Montgomery

Cover painting: Myth of 1,000 Eyes by Leonora Carrington © 2020 Estate of Leonora Carrington/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images

www.vintagebooks.com

ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

For Sally Harding

CONTENTS

Cover

Also Edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

INTRODUCTION BY ANN AND JEFF VANDERMEER

TEN ROUNDS WITH GRANDFATHER CLOCK

Maurice Richardson

THE CIRCULAR VALLEY

Paul Bowles

SIGNS AND SYMBOLS

Vladimir Nabokov

THE ZAHIR

Jorge Luis Borges

LIANE THE WAYFARER

Jack Vance

POOLWANA’S ORCHID

Edgar Mittelholzer

THE MAN WHO SOLD ROPE TO THE GNOLES

Margaret St. Clair

O UGLY BIRD!

Manly Wade Wellman

THE GOPHERWOOD BOX

Abraham Sutzkever

MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS (EXCERPT)

Amos Tutuola

A VERY OLD MAN WITH ENORMOUS WINGS

Gabriel García Márquez

THE ANYTHING BOX

Zenna Henderson

LEAN TIMES IN LANKHMAR

Fritz Leiber

THE DREAMING CITY

Michael Moorcock

CRONOPIOS AND FAMAS

Julio Cortázar

KAYA-KALP (METAMORPHOSIS)

Intizar Husain

THE LAST DRAGON IN THE WORLD

Tove Jansson

THE DROWNED GIANT

J. G. Ballard

THE MONSTER

Satu Waltari

NARROW VALLEY

R. A. Lafferty

THE SINISTER APARTMENT

Mikhail Bulgakov

THE ORIGIN OF THE BIRDS

Italo Calvino

THE PREY

Bilge Karasu

THE TOPLESS TOWER

Silvina Ocampo

THE BARBARIAN

Joanna Russ

THE YOUNGEST DOLL

Rosario Ferré

THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS

Ursula K. Le Guin

ARK OF BONES

Henry Dumas

WINGED CREATURES

Sylvia Townsend Warner

LINNAEUS FORGETS

Fred Chappell

THE ERL-KING

Angela Carter

THE GREAT NIGHT OF THE TRAINS

Sara Gallardo

THE TALE OF DRAGONS AND DREAMERS

Samuel R. Delany

THE WHITE HORSE CHILD

Greg Bear

THE DREAMSTONE

C. J. Cherryh

FIVE LETTERS FROM AN EASTERN EMPIRE

Alasdair Gray

THE ICE DRAGON

George R. R. Martin

ONE TIME

Leslie Marmon Silko

SISTER LIGHT, SISTER DARK

Jane Yolen

THE LUCK IN THE HEAD

M. John Harrison

WARLOCK AT THE WHEEL

Diana Wynne Jones

MRS. TODD’S SHORTCUT

Stephen King

ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE STATION WHERE THE TRAIN NEVER STOPS

Pat Murphy

AFTER THE HURRICANE

Edgardo Sanabria Santaliz

THE GIRL WHO WENT TO THE RICH NEIGHBORHOOD

Rachel Pollack

THE BYSTANDER

Leena Krohn

WILD BOYS: VARIATIONS ON A THEME

Karen Joy Fowler

THE MOLE KING

Marie Hermanson

WHAT THE TAPSTER SAW

Ben Okri

THE FOOL

David Drake

THE FLYING CREATURES OF FRA ANGELICO

Antonio Tabucchi

A MEXICAN FAIRY TALE

Leonora Carrington

THE BOY IN THE TREE

Elizabeth Hand

TV PEOPLE

Haruki Murakami

ALICE IN PRAGUE OR THE CURIOUS ROOM

Angela Carter

MOON SONGS

Carol Emshwiller

THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF SHED NUMBER XII

Victor Pelevin

THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE DRAGON

Patricia McKillip

TROLL BRIDGE

Terry Pratchett

LONGING FOR BLOOD

Vilma Kadlečková

A BRIEF VISIT TO BONNYVILLE

D. F. Lewis

TRAVELS WITH THE SNOW QUEEN

Kelly Link

THE NEUROSIS OF CONTAINMENT

Rikki Ducornet

THE DARKTREE WHEEL

Rhys Hughes

FŒTUS

Shelley Jackson

TAN-TAN AND DRY BONE

Nalo Hopkinson

WHERE DOES THE TOWN GO AT NIGHT?

Tanith Lee

POP ART

Joe Hill

STATE SECRETS OF APHASIA

Stepan Chapman

THE WINDOW

Tatyana Tolstaya

THE WEIGHT OF WORDS

Jeffrey Ford

ALL THE WATER IN THE WORLD

Han Song

THE KITE OF STARS

Dean Francis Alfar

MOGO

Alberto Chimal

THE MALADY OF GHOSTLY CITIES

Nathan Ballingrud

END OF THE LINE

Aimee Bender

I LEFT MY HEART IN SKAFTAFELL

Victor LaValle

THE GRASSDREAMING TREE

Sheree Renée Thomas

LA PEAU VERTE

Caitlín R. Kiernan

A HARD TRUTH ABOUT WASTE MANAGEMENT

Sumanth Prabhaker

BUFO REX

Erik Amundsen

THE ARREST OF THE GREAT MIMILLE

Manuela Draeger

AUNTS

Karin Tidbeck

FOR LIFE

Marta Kisiel

THE SPRING OF DONGKE TEMPLE

Qitongren

THE WORDEATERS

Rochita Loenen-Ruiz

CREATURE

Ramsey Shehadeh

BEYOND THE SEA GATE OF THE SCHOLAR-PIRATES OF SARSKÖE

Garth Nix

THE BEAR DRESSER’S SECRET

Richard Bowes

TABLE WITH OCEAN

Alberto Chimal

THE JINN DARAZGOSH

Musharraf Ali Farooqi

Acknowledgments

Permissions

About the Translators

About the Editors

INTRODUCTION

FANTASY IS A BROAD and various category that on the one hand can feature fire-breathing dragons and on the other can be as quiet as a man encountering a strange plant. As with The Big Book of Classic Fantasy, we have worked from a simple concept of what makes a story fantasy: any story in which an element of the unreal permeates the real world or any story that takes place in a secondary world that is identifiably not a version of ours, whether anything overtly fantastical occurs in the story. We distinguish fantasy from horror or the weird by considering the story’s apparent purpose: fantasy isn’t primarily concerned with the creation of terror or the exploration of an altered state of being frightened, alienated, or fascinated by an eruption of the uncanny.

Argument over the details of this broad definition could go on for hours, days, lifetimes. Only the most narrow and specific genres can be defined with precision, and fantasy is one of the broadest genres imaginable, if it even qualifies as a genre and not a mode, tendency, tradition…But every anthology needs criteria for selection, for inclusion and exclusion. For us, the defining moment of fantasy is the encounter with the not-real, no matter how slight, and what that moment signifies. Sometimes it is the entire world and sometimes it is the slight distance from reality that allows a writer to bring our reality into focus in a meaningful way.

We defined classic fantasy as stories from the early nineteenth century up to the end of World War II in 1945. Modern fantasy, then, begins with the end of the war. There are practical reasons for this separation: we knew it would require two books to offer an acceptable selection of the body of work we wanted to draw from, and we wanted those books to be balanced in size and scope. However, the separation also makes sense in the context of what was happening culturally in the middle of the twentieth century.

Soon after 1945, fantasy solidified into a publishing category. In 1939, two pulp magazines were established that helped readers see fantasy as its own category, separate from both weird/horror and science fiction: Unknown, edited by John W. Campbell, and Fantastic Adventures, edited by Raymond A. Palmer. Campbell and Palmer were quite different as editors, but they created markets for stories that were lighter or less horrifying than those in Weird Tales and its imitators, and not beholden to pseudo-scientific rationalizations that grounded the science fiction in Astounding and Amazing magazines. Nineteen forty-seven saw publication of the first Avon Fantasy Reader, edited by Donald A. Wollheim, and then in 1949 The Magazine of Fantasy, retitled The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, reappeared with its second issue and continues to be published up to this very day. F&SF (as it is known) lived in the liminal space between the pulps and the commercial slick magazines, publishing writers who had established themselves in the pages of Weird Tales and Unknown alongside writers like Shirley Jackson and James Thurber, familiar to readers of The New Yorker. While the popularity of these publications varied, they had a strong effect on English-language writers in particular, creating a sense of a type of fiction called fantasy that was different from other types of writing. F&SF in particular is heavily represented in this volume.

Just as fantasy was beginning to become a recognized, separate type of writing in U.S. magazines, the postwar boom in paperback publishing opened up new opportunities for writers and readers both, creating a space for the phenomenal success of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings novels in paperback in the mid-1960s, and leading to countless imitators, some of them also bestsellers. The next decade saw the rise of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, the conception of which was influenced not only by Tolkien but also the writing of well-known genre fantasy writers such as Fritz Leiber and Jack Vance (plus unjustly lesser-known ones, such as Margaret St. Clair). D&D would go on to influence not only the structure and content of other games (including computer games) but also many works of fiction, including television shows and movies. By the 1980s at the latest, fantasy, as a marketing category, was a significant part of most media. Today, it is arguably the dominant category of pop culture.

To some writers, fantasy is an element in a wider set of tools that can be taken out and used for a particular story or novel. Other writers are born with a worldview that skews toward fantasy or become steeped in the non-real and it becomes part of their core identity. Neither approach is inherently better than the other, but for the purposes of post–World War II fantasy it often signified a continuing widening of the breach between the real and the non-real in terms of what most general readers think of as fantasy and what kinds of fantasy have been most accepted by genre communities. At times, fantasy has become that which is produced by a fantasy writer or that which I recognize as fantasy because of pop culture.

The power of pop culture to familiarize readers with the fantastical cannot be overstated. Inherent to popularity is a tendency to render key elements familiar and conventional, even safe. Marketing categories let you know what to expect. (While this can create cliché and generic qualities, they also allow subversive and genre-defying material to reach a wider audience, by allowing mimics of a kind to infiltrate the mainstream. The cuckoo’s egg that cracks open to reveal a fairy.)

In a purely technical sense, until recently, sophistication in movie and television versions of fantasy has lagged behind the sophistication of even the most generic Tolkien-derivative fantasy. Thanks to Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, the year 2001 has a mythical science fiction meaning, but the actual year itself proved to be one of the most important in the history of pop culture fantasy, because it was at the end of that year that the first Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movies were released, having an effect on the popular imagination of fantasy comparable to the effect of Star Wars on the popular idea of science fiction in 1977. Before 2001, the influence of written fantasy and Dungeons & Dragons made it a major source for much pop culture; after 2001, pop culture and fantasy were nearly synonymous.

Yet to this day, despite any amount of commercialization of fantasy, the short story remains a wild and unpredictable delivery system for unusual and bizarre fantastical ideas, images, and characters. Sadly, the depth and breadth of this wildness often remains half-unseen. The post–World War II split between fantasy and literature, while hardly as deep as that between science fiction and literature, effectively rendered certain types of writing invisible to large groups of readers. For instance, The New Yorker’s long history of publishing fantasy stories has often been obscured by the magazine’s reputation for publishing slice-of-life stories. Even in the 1980s, when the craze for dirty realism was at its height among the English-language literati, all but the most puritanical literary magazines and journals still published stories with fantastical elements (often calling them surrealism, fabulism, or magical realism to distinguish them from genre fantasy). These days, we’re used to seeing fantasists such as Steven Millhauser and George Saunders appear in both The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and The New Yorker.

Because of the opposing poles of ubiquitous pop culture and literary movements like Magic Realism in Latin America, fantasy as a concept found favor in the mainstream, encouraging many writers who didn’t identify with the fantasy genre, or had been scared away from the fantastical by its genrefication, to employ fantasy as a device or idea in their fiction—including and up to a point where it is fascinating to discover that some stories that are clearly fantasy, coming from the mainstream side, have been ignored or dismissed as not really fantasy by the genre side. Conversely, on the mainstream side fantasy is often seen as referring solely to some bastard child of Harry Potter and Tolkien, with Borges or Calvino, for example, not fantastical at all—ironic, since Borges appeared more than once in F&SF and had little patience for the division between popular and literary fiction.

As ever in our anthologies, we seek to repatriate these sides because they are, in fact, closely related on the page, as opposed to their position on the map out in the world. That a kind of not-seeing occurs in both directions might best be exemplified by our experience of a major SF/F editor calling Jorge Luis Borges, derisively, small press, while the editor of a major mainstream literary market for fiction once in front of us fiercely denied that Borges and Calvino contain any trace of fantasy. Fantasy was wizards and, oddly, zombies.

In The Big Book of Classic Fantasy, we introduced the concept of the rate of fey as a barometer for fantasy, providing for fantasy what sense of wonder provides for science fiction and the uncanny provides for the weird—the fey is an otherworldliness, a strangeness emanating from the kinds of associations generated by elements like fairies, elves, and talking animals rather than from ghosts or monsters. With popular culture making many elements of fantasy so familiar as to be clichés, rates of fey diminish, just as in science fiction the sense of wonder diminishes with the umpteenth invocation of a conventional faster-than-light drive. The ubiquity of fantasy throughout post-1945 culture provides different challenges to writers who seek originality and otherworldliness. That struggle can be productive. For the period we cover in this volume, 1945 to 2010, readers will find a wonderful chaos of different approaches from writers with vastly different points of view and heritage, and often they will find those writers extending and wrestling with traditions and creating unpredictable new styles from old.

ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES AND PROCESS

Modern-era fantasy fiction poses a challenge related to organization, in that the wealth and variety of material can make a mockery of process. Indeed, most such collections trend toward the realm of treasury rather than anthology. The material, in a sense, demands it, because too narrow or too tight a focus risks leaving out many treasures. Whereas with our anthologies The Weird and The Big Book of Science Fiction there were definitional exclusions that made the task easier, in fantasy the wild, broad nature of the fiction makes that impossible. However, we have come to accept over a career of editing anthologies that no anthology can be perfect and that the best way to come close is to let your reach exceed your grasp (as Angela Carter liked to say).

Perhaps the most important idea in compiling this anthology was simply to make sure that no matter how surreal the fantastical elements, they are present throughout the story. These elements might be quite normalized or presented as normal, but whether it’s a person transformed into an animal or the effects of magical systems, the story is permeated by the fantastic.

We also found it worthwhile to think about organization in terms of how writers draw ideas from each other. The networks of influence linking many of the writers through this volume are not always predictable or well-known. For example, Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges stand out as having helped stimulate creative energy in many different writers, including writers on both sides of the post-war literary/genre divide. Borges, for instance, reoccurs as a clear and stated influence in the work of Angela Carter, Michael Moorcock, and Antonio Tabucci, to name just three. Often, also, fairy tales and folktales provide the foundation from which these writers launched their stories, but not in any simple way—the various crises, technological developments, and social changes of the twentieth century ended any possibility of serious writers just reiterating the tales of the past. Instead, for example, we get Abraham Sutzkever using a kind of folktale idiom to express what realism feels wrong for: his experience of the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto. Fantasy becomes something of use to a writer to make a political or social statement. It’s not just a mode, it’s a tool allowing conversation with predecessors and conversation with an often bewildering and sometimes horrifying world; it’s no surprise that absurdism and surrealism arose when they did. While in The Big Book of Classic Fantasy, we found few out-and-out surrealist stories that fit the book’s goals, with this volume we find numerous and diverse writers claiming surrealism as an inspiration as a movement and a valuable technique for writing about life when the real world feels far from real.

To select the stories in this book, we sought out previous anthologies to analyze existing canons—canons seen as literary and canons seen as genre, canons national and international. We evaluated individual stories in those canons to see how they held up for us as readers today. We looked for stories that seemed to use fantasy in ways that transcended pastiche. We looked for productive connections. We did not worry overmuch about including any particular individual writer, but sought more to show the diversity of approaches possible.

We chose a rough end date of 2010 to maintain the decade-long exclusion zone we feel is important for objectivity, and which we have used in our other anthologies. Several anthologies, including various annual best-of-the-year collections, already cover the past ten years in fantasy fiction. But this exclusion did mean that some emerging writers of note from the past decade had only published a few stories by our cutoff date and could not be included herein.

On a higher level of hierarchy, our process and thought process was informed by, as previously noted, ignoring where a story came from or how an author self-identified (genre or mainstream); repatriating the fringe with the core (turning a spotlight on forgotten writers); articulating the full expanse (including non-Anglo stories).

INTERNATIONAL FICTION

English-language modern fantasy could itself fill a five-hundred-thousand-word volume. For this reason, we have included fewer translations than in some of our prior anthologies. However, we have still provided a robust selection of international fiction, much of it little known or in English for the first time.

First-time translations include bestselling Swedish author Marie Hermanson’s The Mole King, Polish writer Marta Kisiel’s For Life (a writer never before published in English), Mexican writer Alberto Chimal’s Mogo and Table with Ocean, and the amazing The Arrest of the Great Mimille by French author Manuela Draeger. Other highlights of translation include Silvina Ocampo’s major long story The Topless Tower, Abraham Sutzkever’s The Gopherwood Box in a new translation, Czech writer Vilma Kadlečková’s Longing for Blood (her only story in English), and Intizar Husain’s Kaya-Kalp, rescued for this volume from obscurity in a long-forgotten journal from the 1960s.

It is worth noting that if an English-language modern fantasy volume could fill five hundred thousand words, then so, too, could, for example, Latin American women writers of fantasy, if only more was available in translation. We, in English, still cannot see the entirety of world fantasy, which is both depressing and a challenge for future editors to rectify more fully.

EMPHASIZED IN THIS ANTHOLOGY

Whereas our prior classic fantasy volume featured many fairy tales with actual fairies and general uses of magic, this volume focuses more specifically on dragon stories. Something about the ferocity and versatility of the idea of dragon appears to have allowed these beasts, once at risk of extinction, to flourish into the modern age of fiction. Or, perhaps, we as editors were just much taken with them. (Certainly, here in Florida the proliferation of iguanas and other giant lizards due to climate change can have serious and important effects on one’s subconscious mind.)

As in classic fantasy, there are also many stories involving quests and swordplay. How could there not be? The people involved are not the typical heroes, however, and their atypicality seems more emphasized in these stories than in the classic tales. We also see more heroines, as in Joanna Russ’s story The Barbarian and in Jane Yolen’s Sister Light, Sister Dark. And unlikely heroes, such as in Fritz Leiber’s Lean Times in Lankhmar and Jack Vance’s Liane the Wayfarer. Leiber is featured in the classic volume with his first Grey Mouser tale from the 1940s, and it is striking to see how the earnest innocence of that yarn had given way to an altogether more realistic and jaded view of humanity and of our two heroes in Lean Times.

In 1939, Unknown and Fantastic Adventures magazines sought to bring more lightness and humor to fantastic fiction, and that effort had a lasting effect. Humor plays a large role in many of these stories, from David Drake’s The Fool to Terry Pratchett’s Troll Bridge, showing the versatility of fantasy as a genre. Sometimes, this humor has a satirical edge, as in our excerpt from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (which we chose to place by its date of translation into English, given the novel was still very relevant to the Soviet condition at that time).

Fantasy has long been associated with kingdoms, and in this volume you’ll see that royalty, and attitudes to it, has changed in fantasy stories after 1945. For example, in The Mole King by Marie Hermanson, the reluctant King would prefer to live underground, like a mole, rather than face up to any royal responsibilities. In Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Winged Creatures, a sad little kingdom is undone by plague, and love is thwarted by time and chance. The prince in Intizar Husain’s story Kaya-Kalp decides he likes being a fly, after the princess changes him nightly in order to escape detection by the evil giant who has imprisoned her.

Metamorphosis is a subject of fantasy going back at least as far as Ovid, and perhaps best represented in the twentieth century by Kafka’s famous story. Modern fantasy features many highly unusual transformation stories. Qitongren’s The Spring of Dongke Temple includes a protagonist who wishes to become a bird, like the monks that preceded him. Stephen King’s Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut is a transformation story of sorts, in that Mrs. Todd becomes younger and younger each time she takes that shortcut. Gabriel García Márquez celebrates an old man’s transformation in A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.

As urbanization has progressed, fantasy has also accommodated it, leading to inanimate objects as sentient beings, such as trains, sheds, and even cities (Sara Gallardo’s The Great Night of the Trains, Victor Pelevin’s The Life and Adventures of Shed Number XII, and Tanith Lee’s Where Does the Town Go at Night?). Even in urbanized modernity, talking animals abound, not to mention the talking plants and insects in Edgar Mittelholzer’s wonderful and newly discovered Poolwana’s Orchid.

Also, in a definitely modern and relevant vein, fantasy with a social message has flourished, allowing the distance from reality to be effective and sometimes biting. Examples include Alasdair Gray’s Five Letters from an Eastern Empire, Rachel Pollack’s The Girl Who Went to the Rich Neighborhood, Haruki Murakami’s TV People, Shelley Jackson’s Fœtus, and Sumanth Prabhaker’s A Hard Truth About Waste Management. When reality itself often feels unbelievable, fantasy may allow the most perceptive portrayals of the real.

THE GRAY LANDS

We would like to end this introduction on a rare personal note. For more than thirty years, we have each of us edited fiction magazines and anthologies. We have had successes and discoveries beyond our wildest dreams. Our joy has existed in championing new and unjustly obscure voices, and, somehow, this quixotic quest has been rewarded beyond hope. It is unbelievably satisfying, but it also takes a toll. As importantly, we believe it’s vital to make space for the next generation and to encourage the upcoming, diverse future of anthology editors.

For these reasons, The Big Book of Modern Fantasy is our last anthology together. We hope you enjoy it, and we hope you understand how much we love fiction and how much we love storytelling, and what satisfaction it gives us to present some new gems to readers that were once lost to the world.

Thanks to Matthew Cheney for his contribution to this introduction and our invaluable conversations about the history of modern fantasy.

Thank you for reading.

Maurice Richardson (1907–1978) was an English journalist and writer best known for his comic stories of the dwarf Surrealist boxer Engelbrecht, collected in The Exploits of Engelbrecht (1950). Though the Engelbrecht stories have never achieved great popularity, afficionados speak of Richardson alongside Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. His work has been particularly championed by Michael Moorcock and Rhys Hughes, whose own Engelbrecht Again! picks up where Richardson left off. Hughes has called Richardson the great lost master of comic fantasy and stated that though Richardson wrote little fiction, he nonetheless invented the slyest and driest Gothic world yet seen.

TEN ROUNDS WITH GRANDFATHER CLOCK

Maurice Richardson

THIS IS THE STORY of the greatest fight in the career of Engelbrecht, the surrealist boxer, champion of all Time.

Engelbrecht hasn’t been in the game very long and his rise has been sensationally quick. He’s licked to within an inch of its life the Town Hall Clock at Wolverhampton, a deuced ugly customer whom surrealist sportsmen in the Midlands have backed heavily, and on his South Coast Tour he’s fought all the weighing machines to a standstill, knocked out Try Your Grips and Test Your Strengths by the score, and left the piers from Southend to Bournemouth a shambles of springs and cog-wheels, battered brasswork and twisted remains of What the Butler Saw.

His is quite an impressive record but, as some of the surrealist fancy remark, it’s a short one for a champion, and—as the sagacious Tommy Prenderghast points out—it doesn’t include nearly enough first-class clocks. After all, most of these automatic machines are terribly raw. They stand wide open and sling over haymakers. They’ve no science at all. True the Wolverhampton scrap is something to go by, but there are ugly rumours that Engelbrecht’s manager, Lizard Bayliss, slipped that Clock a couple of hundred hours to lie down.

However, there’s a shortage of chopping blocks this season, and when Engelbrecht applies for a championship fight against a recognized opponent the committee of the Surrealist Sporting Club decide to let him have his fling.

You hear gossip of some fast work behind the scenes. Tommy Prenderghast and some of the boys have got something up their sleeves and plan to rake in a packet laying odds against Engelbrecht. It looks as if they’re on to a good thing, too, because the Grandfather Clock, which the Committee nominates as official Champion and Engelbrecht’s opponent, is something really special. He comes originally, I believe, from a big country house in East Anglia. His case is made of thick black bog-oak and he stands every inch of ten feet high. Everything about him is of the strongest and stoutest. In addition to all the usual organs, hands, weights, pendulum, he’s got various accessories on top of his dial such as a Dance of the Hours and Death with a Scythe—a damned sharp one, too. And when he strikes, well, my God, you think it’s the voice of Doom itself.

You only need to take half a look at him to see he’s as cunning as they come. On top of which he’s been trained to a hair-spring by Tommy Prenderghast and Chippy de Zoete, a former champion, and what those two don’t know about the game wouldn’t fill a watch wheel’s tooth.

Engelbrecht sends Lizard Bayliss down to Grandfather Clock’s training quarters and he comes back very depressed. Don’t think me defeatist, kiddo, he says, but you don’t stand a dog’s dance. They only let me see the old boy do a bit of shadow boxing but that was enough. It’ll be murder.

What’d he take to lie down? Engelbrecht asks.

Nothing less than a century and we couldn’t raise that between us, not if we was to live in training the rest of our lives. If I was you, kiddo, I’d turn it in. Lay everything you got against yourself and lie down snug before he clocks you to death.

I’ll not do that, says Engelbrecht. If I can’t frame, I fight. Never let it be said that I quit.

You’ll quit all right, kiddo. In a hearse.

—

Comes the fight which, like all surrealist championships, is held at the Dreamland Arena round behind the gasworks, a vast desert of cinders and coal dust with an occasional oasis of nettles and burdock between two parallel canals that don’t even meet at infinity.

Engelbrecht as challenger has to be first in the ring and as he and the faithful Lizard Bayliss make their way through the crowd there is a dread chorus of alarm clocks, and a derisive yell of: You couldn’t even box the compass! This last is a little piece of psychological warfare on the part of Chippy de Zoete who doesn’t believe in leaving anything to chance and has hired a claque to undermine Engelbrecht’s morale. Lizard Bayliss blows a mournful raspberry back and helps his man up the ladder into the ring, which is the top of an old gasometer. Then they settle down in their corner to wait.

And how they wait. At last Lizard Bayliss complains to the committee of the Surrealist Sporting Club that if they have to wait much longer, Engelbrecht will be too old to fight. But soon after the New Year there’s a stir in the crowd along the canal side and Grandfather Clock and his gang are seen gliding along towards the ring in a barge. There is a roar of cheering from the crowd and the band strikes up The Black Waltz followed by The Clockfighter’s Lament for His Lost Youth.

Grandfather Clock is hoisted into his corner and he stands there during the preliminaries while they pull the gloves on his hands, wearing his dressing gown of cobwebs, looking a regular champion every minute of him. And when they hand him good-luck telegrams from Big Ben, the Greenwich Observatory chronometer and the BBC Time Pips, he strikes thirteen and breaks into the Whittington Chimes.

But over in Engelbrecht’s corner Lizard Bayliss is in despair. The whole set up is against us, kiddo, he says. Every protest is overruled. They won’t even let me look inside his works. And who do you think you’ve got for ref? Dreamy Dan!

What! That schizophrenic tramp! says Engelbrecht. Why, he’d sell his grandmother for five minutes! Never mind, Lizard. I’ll go down fighting. Fix me my spring heel shoes and I’ll try and land one on his dial as soon as the bell goes.

Dreamy Dan says Seconds Out. Chippy de Zoete whips off the cobweb dressing gown and just as the bell goes Tommy Prenderghast gives Grandfather Clock a shove that sends him gliding out of his corner sideways along the ropes. He’s got a nice classic stance, hour hand well forward, minute hand guarding his face. They’ve mounted him on castors with ball bearings, and his footwork is as neat as a flea’s.

Time, says Dreamy Dan, late as usual, and all that huge arena is one vast hush except for the quick breathing of little Engelbrecht, three foot eleven in his spring heel shoes, and the steady tick tock, tick tock, tick tock—with a nasty emphasis on the tock—of his giant opponent, ten feet of black bog-oak and brass, coffin-lead and hangman’s rope.

Engelbrecht gathers himself together, leaps up high in the air, comes down heavily on his spring heels, then bounds like a rubber ball straight for Grandfather Clock’s dial. But Grandfather Clock sidesteps light as a kitten and Engelbrecht sails harmlessly past his dial and falls flat on his face in the middle of the ring.

There’s a roar from Tommy Prenderghast of First blood to Grandfather Clock, and an answering yell from Lizard Bayliss, who claims it’s a slip, not a knock-down. They wake up Dreamy Dan and he awards the point to Grandfather Clock who, meanwhile, is standing over the prostrate Engelbrecht trying to drop his weights on him. But Engelbrecht comes to just in time, rolls over to one side and scuttles away to safety.

So ends the first round. Grandfather Clock sidles back to his corner with a self-satisfied smirk on his dial. But Lizard Bayliss is more pessimistic than ever and as he flaps the towel, he says: I suppose you know you’ve started going grey, kiddo?

—

Soon after the start of the second round Engelbrecht tries another spring but Grandfather Clock smacks him down in midair with his minute hand. Then the door in his front opens and he lets drive with his pendulum. Wham! It catches Engelbrecht at six o’clock precisely and sends him spinning out of the ring into the canal. He swims ashore and climbs back in time to take the most fearful dose of punishment ever handed out in the annals of the surrealist ring. Grandfather Clock gives him everything he’s got: Hour Hand, Minute Hand, Second Hand, Pendulum, both Weights, the Dance of the Hours and Death’s Scythe. When at last Dreamy Dan falls asleep on the bell, Engelbrecht is in a very poor way indeed. And all over the town clocks start striking and alarms jangling in celebration of their champion’s prowess.

He ain’t half clockin’ you, kiddo, says Lizard Bayliss. Do you know your hair’s gone quite white?

But in round three Engelbrecht makes a surprise comeback. Putting everything he’s got left into one mighty spring, he lands right on top of Grandfather Clock’s works, bores in close to his dial and tries to put his hands back. Before he knows what time it is Grandfather Clock’s hands are forced back to midnight last Tuesday and he starts to strike. Dreamy Dan, prompted by Chippy de Zoete, invents a new rule and says: Engelbrecht! You must come down off there and stand back while your opponent strikes the hour.

By now the gameness of this dwarf on springs has caught the fancy of the fickle surrealist crowd and they are yelling to him to stay up there and never mind the referee, but Engelbrecht loses his hold and drops from the dial.

After that, for the next six rounds, it’s just plain murder all the way. Engelbrecht has shot his bolt and has to fight on the defensive. When he’s not being whammed into the middle of next week by the pendulum he’s back-pedalling to try and escape straight lefts from the minute hand and right hooks from the hour hand. Grandfather Clock goes after him round and round the ring, slap, bang, wham, clang, striking and chiming time out of mind. How Engelbrecht avoids the k.o. nobody will ever know. Perhaps it’s the vivifying effect of all those dips in the canal. Anyway, he just manages to keep on his feet.

At the end of the ninth round the gang are just a tiny bit worried. It’s in the bag, of course. Their Clock is way ahead on points and fresh as the dawn, but they’ve counted on a knockout long before this. Still, the last round in a surrealist championship can last as long as the winning side likes, so they look fairly cheerful as they go into a huddle over some grand strategy.

Not so Lizard Bayliss, who is begging Engelbrecht to turn it in while he’s still got a few days left. If you could see yourself, kiddo, he says. You’re all shrivelled up. You look a hundred.

Just then one of the oldest of all the old-timers of the Surrealist Sporting Club hobbles over and plucks Lizard by the sleeve. I’ve got a tip for you, he says. It’s a chance in a million but it might come off. Tell your man… And he whispers into Lizard’s ear. Lizard nods and whispers it to Engelbrecht. And, whatever it is, it seems to filter through the state of dotage that Engelbrecht is now in, for he nods his trembling head.

They come out for the last round and pretty soon Grandfather Clock gets Engelbrecht tied up against the ropes and starts measuring him for the k.o. The door in his front opens and the weights and pendulum come out for the coup de grace when suddenly, Engelbrecht darts forward, dodges between the weights, jumps inside the clock case and slams the door to after him. The next moment a convulsive tremor passes over Grandfather Clock’s giant frame, an expression of anguish crosses his dial, and he starts striking and chiming like fury, but the tone doesn’t sound like his ordinary tone. It sounds much more like hiccoughs.

Engelbrecht isn’t in there long but when he pops out he looks fifty years younger, and damme if he isn’t brandishing Grandfather Clock’s pendulum and weights above his head. This, of course, means that Grandfather Clock’s works are running wild, lost control. His hands chase each other round his dial and he ticks and strikes so fast it’s like a stick being drawn along railings.

Chippy de Zoete and Tommy Prenderghast are afraid he’ll run down and they chase after him, trying to wind him up and fit him with a new pendulum and weights, but Engelbrecht and Lizard Bayliss intercept and they’re all four milling round Grandfather Clock, when suddenly there is a terrible death-rattle, followed by a howl from Lizard Bayliss: You’ve got him, kiddo! He’s stopped, I tell you! He’s stopped! The fight’s yours! And Grandfather Clock, shoved this way and that as they mill round him, starts to totter and heel over. Then down he comes with a frightful jangling crash and Engelbrecht squats on his face and wrenches off his hands. The crowd goes wild and the sun turns black and all over the place clocks stop and time stands still.

Paul Bowles (1910–1999) was born in New York and from his late thirties to his death lived in Tangier, Morocco. Bowles first came to attention as a composer, writing music for various instruments, music for theatrical productions by Orson Welles and Tennessee Williams, and music for film and ballet, as well as an opera choreographed by Merce Cunningham and directed by Leonard Bernstein. When he was young, Bowles thought of becoming a writer but found more success with music. Inspired by his wife, Jane, an extraordinary writer herself, he returned in the 1940s to writing prose with the short stories that would become his most influential collection, The Delicate Prey (1950). After moving to North Africa, Bowles continued writing stories as well as his first novel, The Sheltering Sky (1949), which became a bestseller in the United States and the United Kingdom, and has remained in print ever since. His early fiction is richly informed by his travels to Mexico and Morocco, and it is mixed with a deep existentialism that sometimes borders on nihilism. (So much so that the British edition of The Delicate Prey, titled A Little Stone, did not include two of Bowles’s most famous stories, The Delicate Prey and Pages from Cold Point, because publisher John Lehmann was advised that if the stories somehow got past censors, readers would find them so repulsive that there could be a backlash.) Though his later work is masterful, he never repeated the popular success of his first books. The Circular Valley appeared in The Delicate Prey and various later selections and collections of his stories, including the two-volume Library of America edition of Bowles’s works. It draws from time he spent in Mexico before moving to Morocco and is a particularly fine example of a writer using fantasy to lend new power to a basic element of fiction: point of view.

THE CIRCULAR VALLEY

Paul Bowles

THE ABANDONED MONASTERY stood on a slight eminence of land in the middle of a vast clearing. On all sides the ground sloped gently downward toward the tangled, hairy jungle that filled the circular valley, ringed about by sheer, black cliffs. There were a few trees in some of the courtyards, and the birds used them as meeting-places when they flew out of the rooms and corridors where they had their nests. Long ago bandits had taken whatever was removable out of the building. Soldiers had used it once as headquarters, had, like the bandits, built fires in the great windy rooms so that afterward they looked like ancient kitchens. And now that everything was gone from within, it seemed that never again would anyone come near the monastery. The vegetation had thrown up a protecting wall; the first storey was soon quite hidden from view by small trees which dripped vines to lasso the cornices of the windows. The meadows roundabout grew dank and lush; there was no path through them.

At the higher end of the circular valley a river fell off the cliffs into a great cauldron of vapor and thunder below; after this it slid along the base of the cliffs until it found a gap at the other end of the valley, where it hurried discreetly through with no rapids, no cascades—a great thick black rope of water moving swiftly downhill between the polished flanks of the canyon. Beyond the gap the land opened out and became smiling; a village nestled on the side hill just outside. In the days of the monastery it was there that the friars had got their provisions, since the Indians would not enter the circular valley. Centuries ago when the building had been constructed the Church had imported the workmen from another part of the country. These were traditional enemies of the tribes thereabouts, and had another language; there was no danger that the inhabitants would communicate with them as they worked at setting up the mighty walls. Indeed, the construction had taken so long that before the east wing was completed the workmen had all died, one by one. Thus it was the friars themselves who had closed off the end of the wing with blank walls, leaving it that way, unfinished and blind-looking, facing the black cliffs.

Generation after generation, the friars came, fresh-cheeked boys who grew thin and gray, and finally died, to be buried in the garden beyond the courtyard with the fountain. One day not long ago they had all left the monastery; no one knew where they had gone, and no one thought to ask. It was shortly after this that the bandits and then the soldiers had come. And now, since the Indians do not change, still no one from the village went up through the gap to visit the monastery. The Atlájala lived there; the friars had not been able to kill it, had given up at last and gone away. No one was surprised, but the Atlájala gained in prestige by their departure. During the centuries the friars had been there in the monastery, the Indians had wondered why it allowed them to stay. Now, at last, it had driven them out. It always had lived there, they said, and would go on living there because the valley was its home, and it could never leave.

—

In the early morning the restless Atlájala would move through the halls of the monastery. The dark rooms sped past, one after the other. In a small patio, where eager young trees had pushed up the paving stones to reach the sun, it paused. The air was full of small sounds: the movements of butterflies, the falling to the ground of bits of leaves and flowers, the air following its myriad courses around the edges of things, the ants pursuing their endless labors in the hot dust. In the sun it waited, conscious of each gradation in sound and light and smell, living in the awareness of the slow, constant disintegration that attacked the morning and transformed it into afternoon. When evening came, it often slipped above the monastery roof and surveyed the darkening sky: the waterfall would roar distantly. Night after night, along the procession of years, it had hovered here above the valley, darting down to become a bat, a leopard, a moth for a few minutes or hours, returning to rest immobile in the center of the space enclosed by the cliffs. When the monastery had been built, it had taken to frequenting the rooms, where it had observed for the first time the meaningless gestures of human life.

And then one evening it had aimlessly become one of the young friars. This was a new sensation, strangely rich and complex, and at the same time unbearably stifling, as though every other possibility besides that of being enclosed in a tiny, isolated world of cause and effect had been removed forever. As the friar, it had gone and stood in the window, looking out at the sky, seeing for the first time, not the stars, but the space between and beyond them. Even at that moment it had felt the urge to leave, to step outside the little shell of anguish where it lodged for the moment, but a faint curiosity had impelled it to remain a little longer and partake a little further of the unaccustomed sensation. It held on; the friar raised his arms to the sky in an imploring gesture. For the first time the Atlájala sensed opposition, the thrill of a struggle. It was delicious to feel the young man striving to free himself of its presence, and it was immeasurably sweet to remain there. Then with a cry the friar had rushed to the other side of the room and seized a heavy leather whip hanging on the wall. Tearing off his clothing he had begun to carry out a ferocious self-beating. At the first blow of the lash the Atlájala had been on the point of letting go, but then it realized that the immediacy of that intriguing inner pain was only made more manifest by the impact of the blows from without, and so it stayed and felt the young man grow weak under his own lashing. When he had finished and said a prayer, he crawled to his pallet and fell asleep weeping, while the Atlájala slipped out obliquely and entered into a bird which passed the night sitting in a great tree on the edge of the jungle, listening intently to the night sounds, and uttering a scream from time to time.

Thereafter the Atlájala found it impossible to resist sliding inside the bodies of the friars; it visited one after the other, finding an astonishing variety of sensation in the process. Each was a separate world, a separate experience, because each had different reactions when he became conscious of the other being within him. One would sit and read or pray, one would go for a long troubled walk in the meadows, around and around the building, one would find a comrade and engage in an absurd but bitter quarrel, a few wept, some flagellated themselves or sought a friend to wield the lash for them. Always there was a rich profusion of perceptions for the Atlájala to enjoy, so that it no longer occurred to it to frequent the bodies of insects, birds and furred animals, nor even to leave the monastery and move in the air above. Once it almost got into difficulties when an old friar it was occupying suddenly fell back dead. That was a hazard it ran in the frequenting of men: they seemed not to know when they were doomed, or if they did know, they pretended with such strength not to know, that it amounted to the same thing. The other beings knew beforehand, save when it was a question of being seized unawares and devoured. And that the Atlájala was able to prevent: a bird in which it was staying was always avoided by the hawks and eagles.

When the friars left the monastery, and, following the government’s orders, doffed their robes, dispersed and became workmen, the Atlájala was at a loss to know how to pass its days and nights. Now everything was as it had been before their arrival: there was no one but the creatures that always had lived in the circular valley. It tried a giant serpent, a deer, a bee: nothing had the savor it had grown to love. Everything was the same as before, but not for the Atlájala; it had known the existence of man, and now there were no men in the valley—only the abandoned building with its empty rooms to make man’s absence more poignant.

Then one year bandits came, several hundred of them in one stormy afternoon. In delight it tried many of them as they sprawled about cleaning their guns and cursing, and it discovered still other facets of sensation: the hatred they felt for the world, the fear they had of the soldiers who were pursuing them, the strange gusts of desire that swept through them as they sprawled together drunk by the fire that smoldered in the center of the floor, and the insufferable pain of jealousy which the nightly orgies seem to awaken in some of them. But the bandits did not stay long. When they had left, the soldiers came in their wake. It felt very much the same way to be a soldier as to be a bandit. Missing were the strong fear and the hatred, but the rest was almost identical. Neither the bandits nor the soldiers appeared to be at all conscious of its presence in them; it could slip from one man to another without causing any change in their behavior. This surprised it, since its effect on the friars had been so definite, and it felt a certain disappointment at the impossibility of making its existence known to them.

Nevertheless, the Atlájala enjoyed both bandits and soldiers immensely, and was even more desolate when it was left alone once again. It would become one of the swallows that made their nests in the rocks beside the top of the waterfall. In the burning sunlight it would plunge again and again into the curtain of mist that rose from far below, sometimes uttering exultant cries. It would spend a day as a plant louse, crawling slowly along the underside of the leaves, living quietly in the huge green world down there which is forever hidden from the sky. Or at night, in the velvet body of a panther, it would know the pleasure of the kill. Once for a year it lived in an eel at the bottom of the pool below the waterfall, feeling the mud give slowly before it as it pushed ahead with its flat nose; that was a restful period, but afterward the desire to know again the mysterious life of man had returned—an obsession of which it was useless to try to rid itself. And now it moved restlessly through the ruined rooms, a mute presence, alone, and thirsting to be incarnate once again, but in man’s flesh only. And with the building of highways through the country it was inevitable that people should come once again to the circular valley.

A man and a woman drove their automobile as far as a village down in a lower valley; hearing about the ruined monastery and the waterfall that dropped over the cliffs into the great amphitheatre, they determined to see these things. They came on burros as far as the village outside the gap, but there the Indians they had hired to accompany them refused to go any farther, and so they continued alone, upward through the canyon and into the precinct of the Atlájala.

It was noon when they rode into the valley; the black ribs of the cliffs glistened like glass in the sun’s blistering downward rays. They stopped the burros by a cluster of boulders at the edge of the sloping meadows. The man got down first, and reached up to help the woman off. She leaned forward, putting her hands on his face, and for a long moment they kissed. Then he lifted her to the ground and they climbed hand in hand up over the rocks. The Atlájala hovered near them, watching the woman closely: she was the first ever to have come into the valley. The two sat beneath a small tree on the grass, looking at one another, smiling. Out of habit, the Atlájala entered into the man. Immediately, instead of existing in the midst of the sunlit air, the bird calls and the plant odors, it was conscious only of the woman’s beauty and her terrible imminence. The waterfall, the earth, and the sky itself receded, rushed into nothingness, and there were only the woman’s smile and her arms and her odor. It was a world more suffocating and painful than the Atlájala had thought possible. Still, while the man spoke and the woman answered, it remained within.

Leave him. He doesn’t love you.

He would kill me.

But I love you. I need you with me.

I can’t. I’m afraid of him.

The man reached out to pull her to him; she drew back slightly, but her eyes grew large.

We have today, she murmured, turning her face toward the yellow walls of the monastery.

The man embraced her fiercely, crushing her against him as though the act would save his life. No, no, no. It can’t go on like this, he said. No.

The pain of his suffering was too intense; gently the Atlájala left the man and slipped into the woman. And now it would have believed itself to be housed in nothing, to be in its own spaceless self, so completely was it aware of the wandering wind, the small flutterings of the leaves, and the bright air that surrounded it. Yet there was a difference: each element was magnified in intensity, the whole sphere of being was immense, limitless. Now it understood what the man sought in the woman, and it knew that he suffered because he never would attain that sense of completion he sought. But the Atlájala, being one with the woman, had attained it, and being aware of possessing it, trembled with delight. The woman shuddered as her lips met those of the man. There on the grass in the shade of the tree their joy reached new heights; the Atlájala, knowing them both, formed a single channel between the secret springs of their desires. Throughout, it remained within the woman, and began vaguely to devise ways of keeping her, if not inside the valley, at least nearby, so that she might return.

In the afternoon, with dreamlike motions, they walked to the burros and mounted them, driving them through the deep meadow grass to the monastery. Inside the great courtyard they halted, looking hesitantly at the ancient arches in the sunlight, and at the darkness inside the doorways.

Shall we go in? said the woman.

We must get back.

I want to go in, she said. (The Atlájala exulted.) A thin gray snake slid along the ground into the bushes. They did not see it.

The man looked at her perplexedly. It’s late, he said.

But she jumped down from her burro by herself and walked beneath the arches into the long corridor within. (Never had the rooms seemed so real as now when the Atlájala was seeing them through her eyes.)

They explored all the rooms. Then the woman wanted to climb up into the tower, but the man took a determined stand.

We must go back now, he said firmly, putting his hand on her shoulder.

This is our only day together, and you think of nothing but getting back.

But the time…

There is a moon. We won’t lose the way.

He would not change his mind. No.

As you like, she said. I’m going up. You can go back alone if you like.

The man laughed uneasily. You’re mad. He tried to kiss her.

She turned away and did not answer for a moment. Then she said: You want me to leave my husband for you. You ask everything from me, but what do you do for me in return? You refuse even to climb up into a little tower with me to see the view. Go back alone. Go!

She sobbed and rushed toward the dark stairwell. Calling after her, he followed, but stumbled somewhere behind her. She was as sure of foot as if she had climbed the many stone steps a thousand times before, hurrying up through the darkness, around and around.

In the end she came out at the top and peered through the small apertures in the cracking walls. The beams which had supported the bell had rotted and fallen; the heavy bell lay on its side in the rubble, like a dead animal. The waterfall’s sound was louder up here; the valley was nearly full of shadow. Below, the man called her name repeatedly. She did not answer. As she stood watching the shadow of the cliffs slowly overtake the farthest recesses of the valley and begin to climb the naked rocks to the east, an idea formed in her mind. It was not the kind of idea which she would have expected of herself, but it was there, growing and inescapable. When she felt it complete there inside her, she turned and went lightly back down. The man was sitting in the dark near the bottom of the stairs, groaning a little.

What is it? she said.

"I hurt my leg.