a ways away his words resonate through the clearing. “What happens here does not concern you. You’re interfering in another’s business.”
“I’m not… not interfering with her business,” he says, though he sounds as terrified as he feels.
Mr. Macey does not respond: he simply stares at him. He is completely different from how he is in the day; it is as if something distant and unknowable is wearing his body.
“You’re not supposed to be here, either,” says Gracie, much more authoritatively than Joseph. “You’re interfering just as much as Joseph.”
Mr. Macey slowly turns his head to look at her. His expression does not change. Then he walks across the clearing and stands beside them to stare into the mouth of the little canyon below. “Is he awake?” he asks.
“That’s none of your business,” says Gracie.
“He should be soon, correct? Tonight is your night, after all.”
“How would you know?”
“Weringer told me of your arrangement.”
“Our arrangement has nothing to do with you. Or Weringer.”
He turns to look at her. He studies her for a long while. “You know what has happened.”
“I know Weringer died, but so does everyone.”
“You know more than that.”
Gracie does not respond, but she looks slightly nervous.
“You know he was killed,” says Macey.
“I never said so.”
“But you do. I can see it in you. How did you know? This was deduced just recently. Unless he told you. But we have not told him yet.” His eyes swivel in his head to stare out at the canyon. It is an unnervingly reptilian motion, and Joseph feels a bit sick to see it. He does not want to be here at all, does not want to hear any private discussions of the powerful elite in Wink. “So he knew before we did.”
“He had nothing to do with it,” says Gracie, nervous.
Mr. Macey does not answer.
“You know he sees things his own ways,” she says.
“Yes,” says Macey. “And this is why I wish to speak to him. Does he know about the new arrival in Wink? That woman in the red car?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is she connected to what has happened?”
“I said I don’t know.”
He looks back out at the canyon. “Is he awake?” he asks again.
Gracie bites her lip, but gives in. “He will be. Soon.”
“How soon?”
From somewhere down in the canyon there is the sound of soft, atonal pipes, almost like flutes. They make no melody; it is as if the piping is done at random, or perhaps by someone mad.
“Ah,” says Macey. “Then I will go and see him.”
“You aren’t invited,” says Gracie.
“These are extenuating circumstances.”
“But you aren’t invited. These are the rules. And this is my arrangement. There’s never an exception. Isn’t that what Mr. Weringer said?”
Macey pauses, frowning. Joseph can see he’s trying very hard to think of a way around the rules that have governed life in Wink for so long.
Then Macey appears to have an idea. He looks up at Joseph, and something flutters in the back of Mr. Macey’s eyes, and he begins speaking low and quickly in a monotone voice: “Joseph Gradling. Born March fourteenth, 1997. Parents Eileen and Mark. Episcopalian. Good math student. Bad English student. Sometimes at night you sit up in your bed and stare out the window when you know you shouldn’t. Sometimes when you go back to sleep you dream of a green field with a black tower, and at the top of the tower is a blue fire. Someone is standing beside that fire. But you do not know who it is, and you cannot see.”
“Enough,” says Gracie.
“You do not like it here in Wink. You are brazen, condescending. You like to talk and ask questions. You do not like minding your own affairs. You like crossing boundaries, doing what you shouldn’t, knowing what you shouldn’t.”
“Stop,” says Gracie.
“I know you, Joseph Gradling. When you slipped out of your bedroom window tonight you had to lift your hips up, up just a little, for as you slid over the window ledge you felt your penis twitch as it filled with blood, hugely and wonderfully stiff, and you feared it would be pinched between your belt buckle and your belly—”
“Stop!”
“—And you wanted it to be in rare form tonight, didn’t you, Joseph, isn’t that what you thought as you walked across the forest to this place, this place where you should not be, and though you came here for her and her slender hands and heady musk you also came here because you love knowing something you shouldn’t and breaking every