A quiet evening

But the crickets sing

While I comb my hair.

---Lady Suzume Murasaki, 1766-1790.


At that moment, however, I heard someone walking overhead. I froze for a split second, as the document I had read earlier flashed through my mind, but I recovered immediately. "Is someone there?" I called loudly. "Because I have a bottle of nitric acid here, and I'm prepared to use it. Trust me when I say you don't want to find out firsthand what it does to human epidermis."

I picked up the bottle, starting up the stairs slowly and carefully. Thanks to the old and squeaky floorboards, I knew the intruder was in the dining room by the windows. I reached the kitchen, eased myself around the corner, and—.

No one was there.

I searched the house, starting with the chest. Nothing. The living room was unoccupied. I checked the storage space under the built-in seat by the fireplace—someone small could have fit in there. No one. I had just come through the dining room, so I checked the kitchen, the pantry, all the cabinets. I went back to the living room, went through the coat closet under the stairs. Empty of everything save my coat and the vacuum cleaner. I went up the stairs, checked the bathroom, the linen closet, my room, my closet, under the bed. Passing through the tiny sewing alcove, I went through the spare bedroom just as thoroughly. Nothing but dust.

I went back downstairs, wondering at the human imagination. I had heard sounds, of that I was certain, but this was an old house, and it did sometimes creak and make noises. In the fall, when the furnace first went on for the season, one would think the whole house would come crashing down. I had filled my brain with disturbing images, and this was the result.

At any rate, I was going to go upstairs for Friday's financial section, to check the gold prices, and the recycling bin was by the back door. I found the page I wanted, turned to go back down into the basement—and stopped.

I'd bought plums the last time I was at the supermarket. After washing them, I'd put them in a bowl on the counter by the microwave. There were four plump, blue-black fruits in that bowl now, practically bursting with juice. How many had there been when I came home? Four? Or five? I knew I hadn't eaten one, because a good plum is a memorable enjoyment and a bad plum had me flossing my teeth for fifteen minutes, trying to get the stringy bits out of my teeth.

I couldn't remember.

No. I could not, I would not start obsessing like this. I stomped back down to the basement and got out the scales. The unwrapped ingot weighed one hundred and sixty-five grams. The wrapped ingots weighed one hundred and sixty-seven each; allowing two grams for the wrapping, they all weighted the same. Obviously a standard measure.

Looking over the page, I discovered that gold was currently thirty dollars a gram. I could do this sort of math in my head: one hundred sixty-five grams times thirty equaled—four thousand nine hundred seventy-seven. Multiply that by five, and the total was twenty-four thousand eight hundred eighty-five.

Dollars.

Twenty-four thousand eight hundred eighty-five dollars. Possibly more, if these had any collectible value, but that was pure speculation.

I had to sit down. Unfortunately, there were no chairs in the basement, so I hoisted myself up on the washing machine instead, narrowly avoiding a knock on the head from a ceiling beam.

Twenty-four thousand eight hundred eighty-five dollars. That was over ten times what I had paid for the chest, approximately a quarter of my student loan debt, and, after taxes and withholding, more than I was paid this school year. How much easier would that much money make my life? Not having to worry so intensely? Immeasurably.

No. No, no, no, no. This wasn't happening. I was hallucinating. I'd breathed in too much of the fumes from one of my experiments and I was now lying on the basement floor having an extremely vivid wish-fulfillment fantasy. I would wake up in the morning with a splitting headache and lower back pain from lying on cold concrete all night.

Good things, nice surprises, did not happen to me. I took my glasses off and leaned against the concrete wall, turning so my forehead touched the cool, rough surface of the concrete. How hideous it would feel when I realized this was just a dream.

Of course, if this was real, it would be no fairytale. I would have to find an appraiser for not just the gold, but for everything else, then decide how I was going to sell it. The numismatist or the auction house would want a cut, as would the government, no doubt. What with one thing or another, I would be lucky to realize half what the gold was worth. That thought made me feel a bit less light-headed. I sat up again and put on my glasses.

Then I froze. On the stairs, on the first visible step, I saw a bare foot. A small, white, human foot. I sprang off the washing machine, intending to give chase—only to hit my head on that ceiling beam I mentioned earlier. After I recovered from that excruciating pain and found my glasses, which had gone flying, I looked again, and realized that what I saw as a human foot had only been light coming in through the basement window, and a smudge on the riser. It was my imagination again. I thought of burning that document—but I didn't.

I put the loose ingot back in its wrappings as best I could, put it back in the box with the others, and went back upstairs. I had a fireproof lockbox I used for important papers, and I put the box of ingots in with those.

There were still a few things left in the chest, and I went back to exploring. I couldn't remember the last time I'd enjoyed myself so much—oh, I'd had my moments of triumph here and there, like graduating Magna Cum Laude from medical school at twenty-one, but when was the last time I had fun like this?

Or ever?

Now that it was so close to empty, I could remove the pair of two-panel folding screens, which turned out to be pictures of flowers and a stream, with a silver-leaf moon on one and a gold-leaf sun on the other, and get a grip on a long, narrow box that ran nearly the length of the chest.

Weapons. A small dagger, a larger dagger, and a long pole with a short, curving blade at the end. I knew nothing whatever about armaments of any kind, so I had no idea what to call it. Presents for the groom, perhaps? I could see the bottom of the box in places now; the adventure was almost over.

Some wall scroll paintings, landscapes, birds, and flowers—I liked the one with the crow against the snowy landscape the best. Perhaps I would keep it... One with monkeys that reminded me of the senior psych faculty members—all they needed were button-downs and bow-ties, and the resemblance would be complete.

A silk drawstring bag, the next to last item in the box. I unknotted it, looked in, and saw only blackness. Reaching in, I felt some soft fibers.

Which proved to be human hair.

"Ugh!" I dropped both hair and bag the same way one shakes off an unexpected cockroach in a restaurant, with a shudder of revulsion, and wiped my hand on my sweater. Why did I react that way? The hair had felt perfectly clean, and any vermin in it would have been centuries dead by this time. Yet I did not want to touch that black, spidery clot again. It seemed inexpressibly sinister and repulsive.

However, I couldn't leave it lying where it was. Picking up a piece of junk mail, I scooped the loose strands back into the bag, making a mental note to have it analyzed. It hadn't been cut off, because many of the hairs still had roots, and it hadn't been gathered from a brush, because it wasn't matted. It had fallen out in thick hanks. What would make hair fall out by the handfuls?

Chemotherapy, which was out of the question. Exposure to radiation, likewise impossible.

Illness, yes.

And poison.

All sorts of ingested substances make their way into the hair. It would be interesting to see what, if anything, showed up in the test results.

Last box, what a pity—but it was really very late now. After midnight, in fact. This one was about two feet by four feet, not heavy, and sealed with strips of paper. The labels, if that was what they were, had red and black writing on them. I got a pen knife from my desk and slit them.

The lid was reluctant, but it finally came free, and I saw—.

Human bones.

They'd belonged to a small woman, judging from the pelvis and the leg bones.

And the skull grinning up at me had shiny black teeth.