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  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF NANCY SPRINGER

  “Wonderful.” —Fantasy & Science Fiction

  “The finest fantasy writer of this or any decade.” —Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Ms. Springer’s work is outstanding in the field.” —Andre Norton

  “Nancy Springer writes like a dream.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Nancy Springer’s kind of writing is the kind that makes you want to run out, grab people on the street, and tell them to go find her books immediately and read them, all of them.” —Arkansas News

  “[Nancy Springer is] someone special in the fantasy field.” —Anne McCaffrey

  Larque on the Wing

  Winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award

  “Satisfying and illuminating … uproariously funny … an off-the-wall contemporary fantasy that refuses to fit any of the normal boxes.” —Asimov’s Science Fiction

  “Irresistible … charming, eccentric … a winning, precisely rendered foray into magic realism.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “Best known for her traditional fantasy novels, Springer here offers an offbeat contemporary tale that owes much to magical realism.… An engrossing novel about gender and self-formation that should appeal to readers both in and outside the SF/fantasy audience.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Springer’s best book yet … A beautiful/rough/raunchy dose of magic.” —Locus

  Fair Peril

  “Rollicking, outrageous … eccentric, charming … Springer has created a hilarious blend of feminism and fantasy in this heartfelt story of the power of a mother’s love.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Witty, whimsical, and enormously appealing.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “A delightful romp of a book … an exuberant and funny feminist fairy tale.” —Lambda Book Report

  “Moving, eloquent … often hilarious, but … beneath the laughter, Springer has utterly serious insights into life, and her own art … Fair Peril is modern/timeless storytelling at its best, both enchanting and very down-to-earth. Once again, brava!” —Locus

  Chains of Gold

  “Fantasy as its finest.” —Romantic Times

  “[Springer’s] fantastic images are telling, sharp and impressive; her poetic imagination unparalleled.” —Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Nancy Springer is a writer possessed of a uniquely individual vision. The story in Chains of Gold is borrowed from no one. It has a small, neat scope rare in a book of this genre, and it is a little jewel.” —Mansfield News Journal

  “Springer writes with depth and subtlety; her characters have failings as well as strengths, and the topography is as vivid as the lands of dreams and nightmares. Cerilla is a worthy heroine, her story richly mythic.” —Publishers Weekly

  The Hex Witch of Seldom

  “Springer has turned her considerable talents to contemporary fantasy with a large degree of success.” —Booklist

  “Nimble and quite charming … with lots of appeal.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “I’m not usually a witchcraft and fantasy fan, but I met the author at a convention and started her book to see how she writes. Next thing I knew, it was morning.” —Jerry Pournelle, coauthor of Footfall

  Apocalypse

  “This offbeat fantasy’s mixture of liberating eccentricity and small-town prejudice makes for some lively passages.” —Publishers Weekly

  Plumage

  “With a touch of Alice Hoffmanesque magic, a colorfully painted avian world and a winning heroine, this is pure fun.” —Publishers Weekly

  “A writer’s writer, an extraordinarily gifted craftsman.” —Jennifer Roberson

  Godbond

  “A cast of well-drawn characters, a solidly realized imaginary world, and graceful writing.” —Booklist

  Apocalypse

  Nancy Springer

  For all the women who showed me trails.

  PROLOGUE

  The one-room apartment over the Tropical Beauty Tanning Salon: the heat came up through the old floorboards, in winter, when it was wanted, for winters in the Pennsylvania mountains are gelid; but also in summer, when thunderstorms raised steam from the potholed pavements and flat tar roofs of Hoadley, turning the days more sweltering than before; when any increase of heat was a perversion.

  In the darkness of a May night and in ungodly heat, in the rented room, a black candle burns. She, the denizen, studies perversion by that shadowy light. She reads the works of Albertus Magnus, Aleister Crowley, the prophecies of Nostradamus, the erotica of Anaïs Nin. She likes the darkness.

  If she could read with less light, she would. The dim candlelight softens but cannot straighten the skewed contours of her face. Her nose and cheekbones, squashed and awry. Her head, her skull, bent to one side, as if her maker had gotten temperamental in the molding and had thrown it against the wall. Her mouth, a harelipped rictus. No chin. Her eyes—the candlelight catches on the whites, which show all around an iris the color of mud and algae. Huge eyes. Enormous. Like a frog’s.

  This night she reads that infamous work of Pennsylvania German pietistic witchcraft, John George Homan’s Der Lang Verbogne Freund, “The Long Lost Friend.”

  She lifts her frog-eyed stare from the printed page and smiles at the wall—she sits with her back to the one window, and keeps no mirrors in her darkened refuge. She does not close her mouth to smile, for she breathes through it. Her nose is an excrescence on her face, of no use.

  The candlelight flickers on the hollow moons that are her eyes, on the young skin lying pallid over the pathos of her face, on her aspiring mouth. The mouth moves and speaks.

  For some years she has practiced reading aloud the poetry of Donne and Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath. Her voice is low, silky, thrilling in spite of the slight distortion due to the harelip, the nasal blockage. Her enunciation is precise from long practice. Her tone, intense.

  “Swelling fever,” she says to the darkness or the wall, “and the wasting away, and sties in their eyes, and the wildfire. And gravel in their urine, and the palsy. That’s what they’re afraid of.” Her hand, lying atop the pages of the black-bound volume, curls and clenches, digging ridged white nails into a yellow palm.

  She scrapes back her chair and stands up. Even in the candlelight the stains on her thrift-shop clothing show. Her body deserves no better. Though young, it moves lumpishly, not fat but unhealthy looking, mushroom-colored from living too long in the dark. She takes a step or two, reaches across the small confines of the rented room and from a hiding place on a high shelf lifts down a shoebox. At her touch, the occupant rears its head out of its bed of shredded newspaper: a tiny snake with a human head, conceived from a spell and springwater and a hair plucked from near the vulva of a mare in heat.

  She places the shoebox on the table, in the candlelight, and the snake, no larger than an earthworm, turns its androgynous face toward her and awaits her word.

  “The idiots. Afraid of sickness,” she says to her tiny ally or to the darkness, “instead of the pit they’ve dug themselves. Black as their souls. We’ll show them, won’t we, Snakey?” Her bulging eyes swivel and focus, fervid, on this friend of sorts. “They’ll get theirs. All of them. Every one of them in this reeking town.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Hungry. Even on horseback, even out in the wild birdsinging carnival-sweet springtime, still hungry. Since marriage and childrearing and the other accidents of life, Cally Wilmore had a theory that horseback riding released druglike substances in the brain, suppressing all discomfort whether physical or psychic, but this time it wasn’t happening for her. She
still felt the hunger, not just the pinch in her gut but the hunger hanging in her whole body like the haze in the yellow Hoadley sky.

  She pulled her horse to an abrupt halt, staring up. The black brim of her headgear got in the way of a view of the high sky, where a true-blue remnant might yet survive. No matter. Blue sky would not feed her. She saw canned-pea green shading into banana yellow—more of a chicken-gravy hue toward the horizon. Those colors did not feed her either.

  Sunlight filtered down as if through cheap kitchen curtains. Even on a cloudless day Hoadley lay under a shadow.

  Cally heard a roaring in her ears and felt vertigo, though her eyes remained wide open. She slowly lowered them to the abandoned strip-mine site and the woods, the scraggle of stunted trees rising beyond her horse’s ears. Outside her nothing ever seemed to change, yet within her mind she felt a whirling, a turning, relentless, like the wheeling of time. And a pressing sense of doom.… The sensation was a familiar one lately. “What the hell,” she muttered. “Who cares.” In thin hands she gathered the reins. With her booted heels she nudged her horse into a walk.

  The roaring sound had not stopped.

  Far away yet all around, as if it had had no beginning and no end, though Cally had just become aware of it: a humming, a mighty, muted phenomenon of sound, glassy, constant, lonesome, like the hollow roar on the empty telephone wire long distance, a sound hollow as the coal mines under Hoadley, hollow as Cally’s belly, hollow as a defeated heart. Cally’s eyes widened, for she had heard that hungry sound before, she knew it in deep memories, almost palpable, she could almost smell it, almost taste it in the scent of white warm-weather flowers, bindweed, honeysuckle, blackberry, heavy in the air all around her, but she could not recall.

  It was not the yammering, flatulent roar of the mine down in the woods. That sound she knew well. It was far louder, and far less eerie. In this sound, somehow, were intimations of mortality.

  Even the horse seemed to feel unease, and balked, reluctant. Cally kicked the animal to keep it moving across the clay and shale toward the woods. I know how the deer feels, she thought, when the hunters hang out the fluttering strips of plastic. I just have to go closer. Have to look. Have to see.

  Then she saw, and understood.

  Weeds stood at the edge of the strip site, thriving on the ravaged ground where nothing else would grow, tall and bright green except for—on every stalk, bending the crabgrass, clustered thick on the woody stems of chicory, a brown blight clung. Cally thought at first that she saw many small dead leaves hanging from the broad, fleshy milkweed leaves like leeches. Then she signaled her horse to halt and looked more closely: the things were hollow shells, tan husks out of which had crawled—

  “Cicadas,” she said aloud.

  In a single May night they had come bubbling up out of the ground by the thousand, by the hundreds of thousands, and now they hid in the scrub trees somewhere and shrilled. Closer now, Cally could hear within the humming roar the individual voices. Amid the buzz and chatter, something that sounded like a sigh. Or a scream.

  “What in God’s name …”

  And again, and again, many times, from many voices, the cries: wailing, dying, chilly smooth cries cold as flute music, yet heartbreaking.

  “It sounds like babies!”

  Demon infants, descending to the pit …

  “Lost souls,” Cally murmured. She knew the things were cicadas, yet she had never heard cicadas pine so. Their song cast a shadow on the day like the shadow of yellow smog.

  “Huh,” she muttered. Her bony shoulders moved, shrugging off the mood. She rode on, taking the trail that ducked dark as a low mine tunnel into the green scarp of the woods.

  A grown woman who rode horseback was considered peculiar in this part of Pennsylvania. Riding alone in the state game lands, even more so. Cally knew the women back in Hoadley, the ones she thought of as the “cows,” talked about her. God forbid what they would think if they knew what she was hearing: the cicadas, in the lettuce-green leaf shadow all around and above her, sighing “Doom … Doom …”

  She looked around at the trash woods that stretched for mountainous miles, state land and logging land and mining land and rocky farmland gone back to half-dead scrub dense with grapevine. Rotting logs, bare groping snags, rocks hulking and desperate saplings reaching for light. No sound but the cicadas and the sharp protests of chipmunks. Nothing to justify the taut, portentous feeling in her back and buttocks.

  Her horse broke into a trot.

  Momentarily Cally was so delighted by surprise that she let the mare go. A ponylike dun named Dove, the horse was customarily placid. Dead safe, to Cally’s pique. Boring. Trust Mark to buy her a horse that was safe and boring.… The mare’s unexpected rebellion heartened her as if it were her own. She let Dove veer off the trail; meekly she braced herself in the saddle and ducked branches as Dove slalomed down a steep slope between trees, then plunged over a weedy embankment, almost on her haunches, to a logging road. On the dirt road the little horse speeded to a bobbing canter. “Okay, enough,” Cally said, and she tightened the reins.

  Dove laid back her mouse-colored ears, tossed her head and fought the bit, cantering faster, though Cally’s efforts to stop her turned her almost sideways. “Dove!” Cally exclaimed, more astonished than afraid. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  As if in answer the horse’s ears came up and pricked forward. Cally stared and slackened rein. On her own Dove slowed, walking with dignity toward the presence that drew her. A red-tailed hawk swooped overhead, bound in the same direction. Cally grew aware of rustlings in the underbrush to both sides: animals of some sort—but she did not turn her head to look. She stared at the person sitting on the road’s edge in front of her.

  Cally prided herself on her intellect, her sophistication relative to the bovine women among whom she lived. The fact that this man was thoroughly naked in and of itself would not have made her gawk. There was more, much more.… The hawk sat on a crooked finger of deadwood near his shoulder. A black snake lay in cryptic loops at his side. Deer stood near enough for him to touch. A red fox sat flame-bright under his stroking hand. Birds chittered along with the cicadas in the trees all around, and squirrels flounced, and tick-ridden rabbits crowded around his bare strong feet. At night, Cally knew with unreasoning certainty, there would be black bear and wildcat and maybe even larger beasts out of the depths of the woods.

  She came toward him until Dove stood with the deer, and then the horse stopped of her own accord and Cally sat on her back, looking down into caramel-brown eyes and shaking.

  He was young, or ageless, and ridiculously beautiful, so much so that Cally knew he was unnatural, a fetch, what her Folklore in Literature professor used to call, erroneously, a doppelganger. Face and body, both were too beautiful for a human as Cally knew humans in Hoadley. His eyes were too bright, glass-clear, unveined, like hard honey candy. His body was that of a carved Greek hero, all the color of alabaster, no, butter-cream icing, too sweetly flesh for her to think long of stone. This is my body, take and eat.… She noticed his lips—there was no restraint, no morality about the way he held his full-lipped mouth, and though he did not move, suddenly Cally understood the meaning of the word “pagan” as the old farts in her Sunday School used it. There were Christians, and then there were the unbelievers.…

  He sat at ease, leaning on one forearm, his knees bent and lazily spread. Despite herself, Cally shifted her gaze down his broad shoulders and chest to his genitals, so casually displayed. They bulked large even at rest. She had never seen the penis of an uncircumcised man before, and her lips moved; at once she wanted to swallow it into her mouth, tasting it, the new thing, the exotic fruit.… Her reaction moved hot and tight through her groin, ruining the depth and relaxation of her riding seat, and for a moment she thought, hit-and-run, of Mark. She loved him. She loved him. But it had been so long since he had moved her the same way, and another word for pagan was infidel.… She hoped she did not blush,
but on the weird stranger’s sculpted-sugar face she thought she saw the flicker of a smile.

  He wet his lips with a slow, probing tongue, then spoke. “Prepare,” he said.

  Cally’s hand left Dove’s reins and faltered to the buttons of her cotton shirt between her flat breasts. “What?” she whispered. “What do you mean?”

  “Prepare,” he said again, the single word.

  Though he had not moved, even his hand had not paused in its stroking of the red fox, though the snake had not uncoiled from its place at his side, though no part of him had roused, as Cally could plainly see, she could envision only one immediate event for which she might prepare, and think only one thought, half-frightened, half-thrilled: He Is Not Nice.

  “Go away,” she said to him, since even on horseback she herself did not seem able to do so. “Let me alone.”

  He grinned wickedly at her, then wavered like heat haze in the air, thinned and disappeared. On the ground where he had been lay a massive stub of log, three feet thick and oddly hacked and gouged as if someone had gone mad with a chain saw.

  The deer, the fox, the hawk and snake remained, momentarily. Then the deer leaped away, the hawk wheeled into sky, the others darted into underbrush. The snake sluggishly coiled, regarding woman and horse with an impersonal stare. Dove seemed to see it for the first time, shied and snorted at it.

  Cally turned the mare, kicked hard and sent her galloping back toward the stable. But Dove had reverted to her deadhead self and would not gallop long on the steep trails. Cally let her slow to her customary walk. What, in fact, was there to run from? She could not be hearing what she thought she was hearing in the cicada chorus; she could not have seen what she thought she had seen. She had to be going insane.

  The thought did not trouble her. Insanity seemed reasonable under her personal circumstances.