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the glowing coals, running her fingers over the tool marks left in the pit when it had been hacked out of the rock.  The reality of those scars had a calming effect on her, as much in its way as seeing the soap in the bathroom.  Animals may use blankets—the gorillas at the zoo dragged some around, and a dog might fluff up his favorite pillow before he lay down—but they didn’t build beds, not like this.  She put it back together with the tents on the bottom, the furs on ‘his’ side and the sleeping bags on ‘hers’.
    She felt better, looking at that, just as though she thought he would see those boundaries and respect them.
    Olivia stepped out of the pit and walked around the sleeping room slowly, really looking at it this time.  It was amazing how much it looked like a real bedroom.  Maybe it shouldn’t have been, but it was.  He kept the stack of his spare loincloths and buckles just where she would have expected to find them—in a cardboard box under a bench close to the pit—and he’d incorporated pieces of human life into his primitive and alien one with surprising ease.  A weathered flashlight had been tucked away in a box of unburned candles and lighters on the carved rock shelf above the fireplace.  An ancient-looking leather boot, a tennis racket, and a rusted old hubcap had all been very deliberately arranged on separate shelves, apparently for decorative purposes alone.  A handful of magazines and catalogues— Mountain Living , Fish and Field , L.L. Bean , that sort of thing—going back more than twenty years, occupied a corner of the sleeping room, many of them earmarked at pictures of humans to indicate a closer than casual study, and he’d made sure they were all in easy reach of her alcove.  Her ‘place to be’.
    Maybe he thought seeing them would comfort her.
    The weird thing was…seeing them did.
    Olivia picked up her candle and went hesitantly out to see the other rooms, reasoning that they were hers now, whether she liked it or not, and she’d ought to know her way around.  It took longer than she ever would have imagined to memorize the layout of the creature’s lair; she’d never realized how completely she depended on windows and other landmarks to find her way around.  None of the rooms opened directly on each other, and in the sickly light of the smoky candle, all the narrow passageways that connected them looked the same.  She couldn’t exactly get lost in only four rooms and half a dozen tunnels, but she did manage to turn herself around once or twice.
    Four rooms, the smallest of them the entry chamber with the chimney where Olivia had been forbidden to go.  It seemed excessive for a monster’s lair.  Perhaps it seemed so to him too, because he didn’t seem to know what to do with them all.  One of them seemed to be nothing but storage—empty camping coolers pushed under stone benches, cardboard boxes and backpacks stacked on top, shelves and shelves and shelves cut into the walls holding only a few tins and jars stuffed with dried roots or leaves.  His hunting tools were there as well: an Okuma rod and reel mounted on a wall between two wooden spears with very sharp metal points and an assortment of chipped-stone and modern steel knives.
    But what she found herself returning to again and again were not his sparse furnishings, but the symbols which marked each room, either painted onto flattened patches of the wall, or pressed into rough mortar to make more of those abstract mosaics.  They had no kind of symmetry or identifiable ethnicity; they were neither Aztec nor African nor Chinese nor any other kind of art.  If the little human touches she encountered brought her towards calm, these symbols were the force that pushed her violently away.  She could touch them and feel the paints flake up under her fingernails, she could even smell some of them (the blue paint was particularly pungent and unpleasant), but looking at them filled her with a sense of