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slipped from her hand and crashed to the floor, the beam dying.
    Oh dear God, what is going on?
    “Kevin? Stop screwing around.”
    She felt a scream about to break out of her throat.
    She pulled the bedroom door open, leaned across the threshold and peered inside.
    Kevin’s flashlight lay on the bed. Its beam backlit the hunched figure coming toward her. He was no one Sally had ever seen before—big and lumbering, impossibly bent, as though he’d suffered some terrible trauma. The tattered shirt that he wore was dripping with blood. In his hands he held a machete.
    This isn’t real, Sally thought distantly. Kevin must be playing the world's worst joke on me.
    But Kevin’s head was perched on top of one of the bed-posts. It looked like a Halloween mask mounted on a broomstick. His eyes were open and staring. Blood ran down the post pooling on the floor. The lumbering figure moved toward her. This had to be a joke.
    Screaming, Sally lurched backward and slammed the door shut, whirled and tried to run. Her foot came down on something that had to be the disabled flashlight. It rolled away and she went airborne. Her back slammed onto the floor. The breath pushed from her lungs.
    As she tried to get up the door flew open and dim light poured into the corridor.
    Quasimodo charged out. Seeing Sally lying on the floor he stopped abruptly.
    “Who are you?” she screamed, scrabbling to get up.
    He was raising the machete above his head. “Kevin didn’t tell you? I’m his uncle. His demented uncle. That’s what the family likes to call me anyway. They get a big laugh out of it. I’ll bet they won’t be laughing after this.”
    “No!” she cried. “I didn't do anything. Leave me alone.”
    She rolled as the machete came down.
    She heard him grunt.
    Something struck her shoulder but there was no pain. She got to her feet and ran for the stairs.
    She felt the pain now and the warm blood against her skin. Her left arm dangled, immobile.
    Something heavy struck her in the back and she tumbled down the stairs.
    At the bottom she opened her eyes. He was standing over her. She tried to push herself up but it was no use.
    She knew this wasn’t happening. It had to be a joke. She and Kevin were supposed to make love, sleep-in tomorrow morning, have a languid and lazy New Years Day.
    He raised the machete. She tried to move.
    It was no use.
    All she could do was scream.
     

The Nest
     
    The day: cold. November, gray. Vagrant spears of melancholy light piercing heavy overcast, pressing down, stifling.
    The house: bright white, an impressionist’s painting; skeletal swamp willows. The river: wide, smooth, reflective, below island’s eternal evergreens.
     
    Obsidian eyes, watching.
     
    The man: hunched, lurking, glasses trained, patient, waiting, moving forward a careful step at time; watching.
    “Do you see them, Alden?”
    A contemptuous flap of a hand. “Shush! You’ll scare them.”
    “It’s not as if they can hear us from this distance, you know.”
    He lowers the binoculars, shakes his head, sighs. “I’m not taking any chances.” His whisper is shrill, impatient. “Do you understand? Not before I have a chance to photograph them.”
    “Why did you drag me out here then?”
    “To observe, not to flap your gums.”
    “I can observe perfectly well from the house, thank you very much, and at least in there I can talk if I so desire.”
    He ignores her insolence, sorry he had dragged her along. “I just don’t understand it,” he says. “I’ve gone through that book a hundred times and I’m completely baffled. There isn’t a species that even closely resembles them. And I don’t know of one single example in the northern part of the United States that mate this time of year. Most birds migrate in the fall and the ones that don’t have all they can do to survive. They don’t mate in November. It’s insanity.”
    “What makes you think they’re mating?”
    “You have to see for