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better."
     
    Lily looked at her watch. "Hey, I've got to be going," she said. She kissed Philip on the cheek, then turned and hugged Amelia. Still holding Amelia's shoulders, the old woman looked steadily into the girl's eyes. "Well, well," she said. She let go of the girl's shoulders but continued to study her face. "Not what I would have guessed at all."
     
    "I beg your pardon," Amelia said, flustered by this close scrutiny.
     
    "You saw something too," the old woman said, and then she turned and walked out the door.
     
    Amelia frowned at the empty doorway. Then she turned and regarded Philip. "What was that about?"
     
    "My therapist is very intuitive," Philip said.
     
    "Great. Sounds like your kind of therapist. Does she read entrails?"
     
    "Huh?"
     
    Amelia rolled her eyes. "Forget it. Are you in pain?"
     
    "I would never call anything pain that brought you to my side," Philip said, surprising himself with the nobility and poetry that flew, with such felicity, from his lips.
     
    It was that sort of genuine, heightened and faintly stupid moment that only lovers, long parted, know and appreciate.
     
    "Oh Philip," Amelia said. Twin tears bloomed in her eyes. Her eyeliner, a new, unproven product, bled instantly, giving her a haunted, tragic look.
     
    She went to Philip's bedside, knelt down and kissed him on the lips. He kissed her back, in the hallucinatory ecstasy of an invalid on strong painkillers.
     
    Amelia had to leave—she did indeed have an interview—but she promised to return the nextday .
     
    Philip felt joyous beyond belief. And what a curious, convoluted path toward joy. He wished
     
    Bingham, that natural philosopher, were here to share the feverish thoughts that filled his head. He fell asleep, fully expecting dreams of unalloyed happiness. Instead, he dreamed of his father.
     

     
    #
     

     
    "You'll scare the child senseless," his mother said. His father looked up from the tattered copy of Weird Tales and said, "You don't know a thing about it, Marge. It's in a boy's blood to like this kind of story."
     
    "An older boy," Marge said. "Not a child."
     
    "Oh, just leave us be," Walter Kenan said, and he turned back to the child propped up by pillows and read, "Then came a noxious rush of noisome, frigid air from that same dreaded direction, followed by a piercing shriek just beside me on that shocking rifted tomb of man and monster. In another instant I was knocked from my gruesome bench by the devilish threshing of some unseen entity of titanic size but undetermined nature..."
     
    Philip listened to his father read. His father was a great fan of the reclusive New England writer, H. P. Lovecraft , whose horrific tales of loathsome, monstrous entities from beyond the stars had thrilled the teenage Walter Kenan . The stories first appeared in pulp magazines with lurid covers, and the originals were Walter Kenan's most prized possessions. He never lost his love for the tales, and chose them as bedtime reading for his son. Perhaps his wife was right—no doubt, she was—that they were not proper fare for a child of six or seven, but what harm could there be in stories?
     
    And that was true enough.
     
    And there was no telling how it happened, how Philip's father descended into the same madness that was the lot of most Lovecraft narrators, and opened the black abyss and let them in, a grotesque, unholy crew, the monstrous Old Ones that waited in eternity at the gates of Sleep and Time— Cthulhu , Nyarlathotep , Yog-Sothoth , Dagon, and the ones whose names were lost to time and to their own forgotten languages.
     
    They were creatures the mind could not quite encompass. Their shapes possessed an unholy geometry that shattered human reason. Often, it was not the monster itself that was perceived, but that truncated section that writhed in the visible world, the rest remaining in shadowy dimensions.
     
    Perhaps the drinking did it, or perhaps the drinking came after. In any event, a