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said that certain nights in deep winter, below the howl of the wind, you can hear him weeping for want of work. If you wake on a cold morning and find your garage door open when it wasn’t the night before, it means The Mower has taken refuge from the cold in there.”
    Beverly got up and took her papers and old diaries and daguerreotypes to the filing cabinet and put them away. I carried the false face and the sickle. She took the mask from me and stored it, but when I handed her the tool, she said, “No, you keep that.”
    After all she’d told me, I wasn’t sure I wanted it, but eventually my sense of politeness kicked in and I thanked her. She walked with me to my car, and before I got in, we shook hands. “You’re the last one,” she said before I drove off. When I got home, I immediately looked around for a place to stow the sickle. Crazy as it was, I shoved it down into the big freezer in the garage underneath the layers of frozen vegetables from the garden. I figured I’d freeze the creep out of it.
    The Word Doll Museum and old Doctor Geary stuck with me for a week or so, and I’d sit out under the apple trees and stare off into the corn to see if I could spot a shadowy figure passing amid the rows. Nothing. Just as it started to get too cold to sit out there, and Farmer Frank had the combine out harvesting corn, I got an idea for a story about a religious painter who’s sent out by a prelate on a journey to find and paint a true portrait of the devil. It was a relatively long piece and it consumed my imagination. By the time I finished a first draft the fields were barren, and I was forced to move inside. The revisions on that story turned out to be extensive, and I didn’t finish it until the middle of winter.
    The very night I was finally satisfied that the piece was ready to send out, the coldest night of the year, I had a dream of Mower Manc. In it I got out of bed and went to the window. It was night and the light in the room was off. There was a full moon, though, and I saw, out in the barren field past the orchard and the garden, a figure moving through the snow, curved blade glinting as it swung like the pendulum of an old clock. Across that distance, I heard the weeping clear as a bell, and its anguish woke me.
    When I went out to get my cigarettes the next morning, I came around that bend and saw that the gray barn and home of the Word Doll Museum had at some point since the day before collapsed into a smoldering pile of rubble. Orange flames still darted from the charred wreckage and smoke rolled across the yard and fields like a storm cloud come down to earth. I thought instantly of Beverly’s habit of flicking her cigarette ash on the floor of the place and just as quickly of Evron’s penchant for lighting fires. Then I saw her, on the snow-covered lawn in front of the house, cane nowhere in sight, in a long blue nightgown and dirty pink slippers, white hair lurid in the wind. There was a cop car in the driveway, and the officer stood next to her with a pen and pad as if waiting to take down her statement. She was just staring into the distance, though, her grief-stricken expression pale and distorted like the False Face mask, and as I passed I realized that what I was seeing was the end of it—a doll maker, all out of words.

The Angel Seems

    In late autumn, after the harvest had been brought in and the first real snow had fallen, he came from the forest on a stag-bone sled drawn by enormous twin mastiffs. He was slight and trim, with white hair and beard, and he wore a snug black suit with slits in the back of the jacket for his wings to fit through. They were small, violet, and made of scales instead of feathers. It was a wonder how they could lift him, but a number of folk had spotted the angel Seems across the field, flying above the tree tops, wings fluttering like a moth’s.
    On his first journey to the village, he glided in on his sled, requested that the people gather, and then