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inhuman, Dante. Something took me out of the sunlight to be your god damn shadow.
    "For years I didn't care, that's just the way it was, I grew up the outsider, who ever thought different? But that's not enough anymore. Now I want to know, Dante. I want to know what happened."
    Dante said, "I can't tell you that."
    Jet jumped off the bureau with a tight laugh, tense with fury. "You're an angel, damn it! You can find out."
    "I can't. I don't know how."
    "Well
learn
!" And with a savage jerk, Jet yanked the bedspread off Dante's bureau to leave the white marble top bare.
    Dante's body lay under the mirror's cold unblinking eye. He was dead.
    Dante couldn't scream. He couldn't move.
    Helpless, he stared into the mirror. Helpless, he saw himself bending over the corpse. Only he was wearing his father's face, and he held a scalpel in his hand.
    *   *   *
    "The autopsy is like the third movement of a sonata," his father once said. "The Body; the Life; the Body Reconsidered."
    *   *   *
    Dante reconsidered himself, lying dead and mutilated in the boathouse. An autopsy is all about time, he thought. Alive we stand against the stream and hold our shape; dead, we drift with the current, carried from the land of the living and lost at last even to memory.
    Holding the tissue apart with the thumb and index finger of his left hand, he peered down into his own dead abdomen at a white, fibrous sac, of the sort spiders fill with their eggs. It was half the size of a football, engulfing most of his liver and half a kidney.
    "Dear God," Sarah whispered. She grabbed for a bait pail and retched.
    Standing beside Dante, Jet reached down with one finger to touch the sac, ever so gently. "Still warm," he said.
    *   *   *
    Hands shaking, Dante stripped off his rubber gloves and looked away from the white sac growing in his body cavity. He conld feel the growth inside him now, a sticky alien mass webbed around his vital organs. Threads of it like cobweb tangling his heart.
    He didn't want to die. Not yet. Please, God.
    The sudden blank uselessness of his life yawned under him like a pit. Thirty-one years old and what had he done? Nothing. Never finished his degree, never fell in love.
    Oh, he had felt affection for women—lots of women. But love? Love was something else again. What he felt for Jet and Sarah, Mom and Dad and Aunt Sophie, was not an emotion, but a fact: something as real as a stone.
    He had never let a woman get that close to him. He had never made a family of his own. Never would.
    He glanced at Sarah, twenty-eight and smart and grown, and saw buried in her his baby sister: a chubby toddler gone missing, he and Jet the frantic babysitters running like madmen up and down the river trails for half an hour before Dante saw her at last, pelting down a path and laughing and waving her diaper overhead like the banner of a victorious legion.
    Sarah had stopped retching. She took a long moment to steady her nerves, and then forced herself to consider the body in the boat. A humorless smile flickered across her mouth. "Was it not Socrates who said, 'The unexamined death is not worth dying'?"
    Dante's heart hammered endlessly inside his chest. Up the hill, Grandfather Clock would still be ticking in the parlor, long after the last ember in the fireplace had smoked and died. Mother and Father would be lying in their twin beds; Aunt Sophie would be dreaming her unquiet dreams of crows and cigarettes.
    Sarah studied the white growth in the dead Dante's abdomen. "Maybe Dad can cut it out. If there's one of these in you, I mean."
    A nightmare image raced through Dante: his father, bending over him, slitting him open. The slide of the knife through his organs. His heart, beating in his father's hands.
    Dante shook his head. "It's got its hooks into too many vital systems. Liver. Kidneys. Spleen maybe. Heart maybe. It's too late for surgery." Dante shuddered, feeling the barbed world biting into him with thin, evil little