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pressure of his gaze as an urgent interest, impossible to ignore.
    It was suddenly important that he know how she f e l t . . . and why. Particularly why.
    She reached down and tugged the Box from beneath the table, pushing it toward him so that it rested against his well polished shoes. "Look in that. Everything in there is something Harvey has given me over the last several years. Presents.
    Together with suggestions as to where to display them. I couldn't... couldn't bring myself to put them out, not here, so I've kept them in this box."
    He put down his glass. She had not sealed the Box, but had merely closed the cardboard carton by folding the top together.
    He opened it and drew out the two framed prints which lay on top, setting them side by side against the table and regarding them with the same intent gaze he had focused on her.
    To the right was a cheaply framed print of an Escher lith-ograph, an endless ribbon of black fishes and white birds swimming in space, at one end the black figures emerging, at the other the white, coming forward from two dimensions into three, from shadow shapes into breathing reality, one white bird flying free of the pattern only to be cruelly killed by the devilish fangs of the metallic black fish.
    "It bothered me when he gave it to me. So, one day at the library, I looked it up," she said, trying to be unemotional.
    Everything in her screamed anger at the black fish, but she was so long experienced in swallowing her anger that she believed it did not show. "The artist wrote that the bird was all innocence, doomed to destruction. Not exactly cheerful, but by itself it shouldn't have made me feel as unpleasant as I did.
    Then I got the other one..."
    He turned his attention to the other print, this one of a painting. "Paul Delvaux," murmured Makr Avehl. "Titled Chrysis. Well."
    A naked girl stood on a lonely platform at the edge of an abandoned town, a blonde, her scanty pubic hair scarcely shadowing her crotch, eyes downcast, lacy robe draped behind her as though just fallen from her shoulders, right hand holding a lighted candle. To the left of the picture a floodlight threw hard shadows against a dark building. On a distant siding, a freight car crouched, red lights on it gleaming like hungry, feral eyes in the dark.
    "She's like the white bird in the other picture," Marianne said. "All alone. Totally vulnerable. She has no protection at all. Nothing. Someone horrible is coming. You can tell she knows it. She is trying to pretend that she is dreaming, but she isn't."
    "Ah," he said. "Is there more?"
    She reached into the bottom of the Box to pull out the little carvings of ivory, basalt, soaps tone. Eskimo and Bantu and old, old oriental. Strange, hulked shapes, little demons. Another black fish. A white skull-faced ghost. An ebony devil.
    A small ornamented bag made of stained and tattered skin with some dry, whispery material inside. "I don't know what's in it," she said, apologetically. "I didn't want to open it. Harvey said it was a witch bag. Something from Siberia? I think his card said it belonged to a shaman."

    "Yes," said Makr Avehl soberly. "I should think it probably did. And should never have left Siberia. It is black shamans from there who have come to Lubovosk."
    "All these things are interesting, in a way. Even the little bag, colored and patterned the way it is. I feel a little guilty to be so ungrateful for them. It's just—Harvey had never given me gifts before. Not even cards on my birthday. And then, suddenly, to give me such strange things, which make me feel so odd...."
    "What did he suggest you do with them?" Makr Avehl's voice had a curious flatness, almost a repressed distaste, as though he smelled something rotten but was too polite to say anything about it.
    "When he gave me the picture of the fish and the birds, he told me to hang it on the wall in my bedroom—he hadn't been here, but I told him I had a one bedroom apartment. Then, later, when he gave me