Title: Spiderland
Author: moon-pix
Email: chinks@start.com.au
Ratings: 15
Spoilers: general night world. Later, some specific characters.
Disclaimers: the wonderful concept sof the Night World and the
wild powers are all LJS' and i am borrowing it for my own
pleasure/fun, no harm intended.
Summary: A lost witch finds herself by apparent freak accident
in a Night World fortress in the sticks, where the fourth wild
power is being hidden.
1.
'I wish we could go to hell.' - Cat Power
Grier Hunt turned up forty minutes late to her first day at Oxely
College, Tribune. The clock radio had been punctual enough,
lighting up at 7am with the sound of some hick rockband she'd had
no compunction about slamming off a few seconds later. After that,
Grier had rolled to the other side of the new, still unfamiliar
bed and gone back to sleep; a perfectly reasonable thing to do,
she'd reasoned, since she'd stayed up late painting and only
caught about four hours of z's. Her mother though, hammering on
her door ten minutes later, hadn't seen the finer points of the
necessity of sleep in the same way, and unfortunately she could be
so damn insistent about things sometimes.
She'd still strolled through the morning routine of showering and
dressing and breakfasting though, and she yawned now as her mum
pulled their old station wagon up beside the school's main
entrance. Grier took a look at it while she threw her sheer dark
hair up in what she knew, without even checking in the rear-view-
mirror, was a flawless looking pony-tail.
'Not bad, for operation Education Nowheresville', she muttered,
not quite under her breath. It was a sprawling brick veneer 50's-
blocky structure, set on a whole lot of pretty green grass ('ten
acres of parkland', according to the school's handbook, which
Grier didn't know as she had not yet bothered to read it). Nothing
that special about that of course, the state of Kansas was
certainly the place to come if you wanted to see endless miles of
green featureless landscape, tampered with in only the most rustic
of ways. There was a line of pretty thick, fir-tree wood running
down from the back entrance of the school, which Grier hoped was
accessible to students. Most painters liked to work with plenty of
air and light, and a panoramic view. Grier was different, she
worked best in claustrophobic woods, or under sandbanks, that
screened out the world and the sun and left you only with a sense
of complicated crystalline textures, your relation to which you
could only start to fathom, or murky shapes and configurations
better suggested with shading than with stencils.
'I think it's lovely. It has it all over the Newtown High dejore
of asphalt hand-ball courts and sky scrapers. And I know how
important aesthetics are to you, my dear.' Her mother grinned at
her from the other side of the car with good spirited mocking,
brushing back the straying greying bang from her eyes. She was a
60's child who'd never been calculating enough to surrender her
hippie vales; she was a single parent; she was not merely self
employed, but as a self-proclaimed fortune teller - and she was
proud of it all. Her daughter had inherited her free-spiritedness,
and her stubborn independence, which meant they clashed wills
quite a lot.
Grier smiled, but retorted 'Yeah well at least that was a top 500
school inside the walls. Inner city melting pot of knowledge and
all. Half the teachers filling in their time there before they
took up chairs in the Ivy League, y'know.' She smirked as her
mother rolled her eyes; professorships in elite universities were
not Ms Hunt's idea of an ideal spiritual and personal goal. Grier
continued, 'I have my doubts about whether they've heard of Darwin all the
way out here..'
'Yeah, yeah, alright missy. You better scoot. You've already
nearly skipped out on first period bread-sawing.' She looked
sardonically at the clock on the dashboard and tutted.
'Hehe..Ok mom. Seeya later.' Grier jumped out and shut the door.
Her mom tapped on the window with a long, elaborately sculptured
purple nail. Grier leaned back in and opened the door to kiss her
on the cheek; the slender, tiny woman reached up and brushed her
forehead with a kiss before she could pull back out. 'Be well,
child. Hecate's blessings on your five senses; be pure, audacious,
wise, sincere and.. unbracketed.'
'Oh mom.' Grier pulled back, readjusting the strap on the hessian
bag she'd sewed together herself a few days before, and glancing
around the empty parking lot self consciously. 'You know I don't
believe in that sh- 'Unbracketed'?? What does that mean? that
sounds kinda bondage-related and kinky...'
'Oh, shush. You're too cynical by half, my darling, there are
moorrre things in heaven and earth horatio, than you can
schematise for your sketchbook! Now begood. Playnice. Ta ta.'
Her mom pulled the door to and abruptly drove off. Grier chuckled
to herself, smoothed out her full-length, grey-knit skirt, and
headed for the front doors.
'Heather Angel You Are Somewhere Off The Show' - Sonic Youth
Grier glanced down at the class schedule in her hand. First
period was chemistry, (ugh) Room 2G. She'd missed most of it
already, of course, but she had few qualms about only turning up
for the last few minutes. If there was one thing she'd learnt in
her movement through the stream of school's shed been to, moving
around a lot ever since she was a kid, it was that if you were
smart, sassy and unafraid - it wasn't hard to adjust to new
places. Being conspicuously beautiful in a slender lily-cut way
helped too, Grier knew well, but didn't bother with too much.
She loped up a set of stairs, automatically calculating that the
room must be on the second floor, to the left, from where she'd
been standing, rounded the corner into a long empty coridoor with
a cemented floor and grey lockers on either side. And paused.
The hallway wasn't empty after all; there was someone slouched
against a lockered wall about ten metres from where she stood. It
was a tall guy, and he was a striking thing because he was utterly
still, his eyes were closed, his head was kind of kicked back
against a grey metal door. In another moment Grier saw he had
headphones dangling from his ears. He cut quite a beautiful figure
in the ascetic carceral space, not just 'cause of his long, thin,
hard-muscled body or his pretty-unruly mop of blonde curly hair
falling over his eyes, but because of a certain aura he held about
him; a sense of meditative focus, a kind of distilled and
channelled something.
Grier had to actively resist the urge to just drop her backpack
and pull out a sketchbook right there.
She didn't of course. Instead, she padded forward, her sneakers
making almost no noise on the concrete, heading for the classroom
door that was just ahead of headphone-boy. She glanced at him
again as she got adjacent to him; wow he really was
preternaturally still. She wondered if he was awake, if he was
alive, hell, whether or not he was a wax-doll (his skin does look
too flawless and too creamy to be anything but rubber padding, she
chuckled silently).
At another time she might have walked right up and tapped him on
the shoulder and asked flat out what a spunk like him was doin'
sleeping in a dingy little hallway like this? But just then it was
more important to get to the dying minutes of chemistry, and her
fingertips had just brushed the doorhandle when she heard his
voice behind her say; 'hey.'
Grier paused and looked around. The boy hadn't moved himself an
inch from his prized position against what must be a lot more
comfy wall of lockers than appearances suggested; he had opened
his eyes though. A surprising glacier-green pair met hers straight
on, under the tangled fringe.
'Hey yourself,' Grier returned, but grinning.
But the kid didn't smile back. In the same flat tone as 'hey' he
said - 'Where are you going?'
Grier blinked. 'To a beach volley ball game?' No change in the
cold blank stare. 'Where does it look like i'm going? To class.'
'First period is nearly over. Who are you? I haven't seen you
around here before.'
Grier gave the guy a calculating once-over, that took in his
slouched, unmoving pose on the lockers, his fashionably tatty
cargo pants and sonic youth tee. He looked like a slacker, arty
indie-kid, but his dull sardonic voice had a weird air of bored
authority she thought. He was too young to be a teacher, right?
'Who are you? The hall monitor?'
The guy returned her hostile glare. 'If you don't even know that,
you're a seal-pup splashing in sharkinfested waters, kid. That
kinda brashness is out of place here, I'll let you in on that
right from the start.' There wasn't much humour in his tone, it
was more a kinda weary sardonicness. 'What circle are you from?'
'Oh, so you'd probly describe yourself more as the weird-morose-
hintingly psychotic hall monitor type..' Grier summoned her best
unimpressed voice, but actually she was just a little bit creeped
out.
'Twilight, right?', looking peeved but dogged.
Grier crossed her arms over her annoying, queasy stomach. She was
extra-irritated because somehow he was getting to her with his
intimidate-the-newgirl schtick. 'That's when the giant bunny comes
to take you back to the pumpkin patch, perhaps?'
His face lost its look of bored procedure then and took on a much
more attractive expression of surprised quizicalness. He didn't
say anything for a few seconds, just stared hard at her face, and
at that moment she had the oddest tingling sensation in her head,
as if someone was in there with a feather duster.
A clattering noise made her look down, and there was her book bag
spilled out over the floor. Half furious, half embarrassed she
knelt down on jellied knees to retrieve her stuff. The weirdo
didn't lift a finger to help, and when she made it back to her
feet his look was bemused and his eyes were two shuttered slits of
green beneath heavy eyelashes. 'I'm sorry, kid. I didn't realise
you were as new as all that.' There was a kind of genuine sympathy
in his voice too, that bugged Grier more than anything else could
have.
'Aw, well I guess weird-creepiness and omnipotence don't always
go hand-in-hand eh?' she said acidly.
He laughed, and actually chucked her chin. 'You're funny. Cute,
too. I bet you've even heard of sonic youth?'
'Yeah, i've heard they have some blonde girly as their bassist,
how lame that must be.' She felt unsettled, and unready for combat
and it was the best she could do.
He grinned. 'Let's kill our parents and hit the road.'
'Goo's my least favourite album of theirs.'
'Shucks. It could have been sucha beautiful thing.' Right then a
deafening noise rattled down the concrete corridor, one of those
oldfashioned school bells that make the whole building shake.
'Gee, it looks like you missed out on chem afterall, Grier. What a
poor first-day impression to make. You'll hafta get up when the
alarm rings tomorrow morning, huh. Or I will set the hall monitor
on your ass. And no, it's not me.. but I got him in my pocket.' He
winked, but his smile oddly faded and he said in a different
tone, 'You take care'.
The chemlab door opened then, and Grier didn't have time to
inquire of him how he knew her name and all about what she'd been
doing that morning (of course, she reasoned later that he'd been
toying with her all along and had known her as the new girl Grier-
Hunt on sight), because kids were spilling into the hallway, and,
more noteworthily, stopping dead in their tracks. An exceptionally
goodlooking Asian kid, with spiky gelled hair and sexy, smudged-
with-eyeliner eyes was the first one to actually speak to the
object of their attention though. 'ALEX!!!' he yelped, rushing
past Grier. 'You're back! Are you back? Is this for real, are you
spending the year?' He was excited, gleeful even, and it was all
the more infectious because, with his perfectly worn black jeans,
black tee that looked like it was hand printed with an esoteric
black and white photograph of a tractor in a field, and strings-
for-bracelets he looked like the kind of kid that usually hung
back inside his own coup of aristocratic cool.
'Naiad, heyyy.' The guy called Alex responded, slapping the kids
hands, but oddly the warmth he'd shown Grier just before had
drained from him again, and his voice had that same cipher-
sternness with which he'd first addressed her. 'Yeah, I'm here all
year I guess.'
The boy with the weird-ass-name looked a bit confused about the
coolness in the other's voice, and the way he now shrugged him off
and leant back towards the wall, but he tried again anyway,
immediately in a way that reminded Grier of a puppy hopefully
wagging it's tail. 'Well y'know, glad days then! this place has
been dead as a pile of poo while you've been away..'
'Yeah well even a pile of poo attracts flies and other kinds of
interesting life forms..' at this point, he paused and looked
pointedly at the gawking kids surrounding him. 'Righto, move on
people, let's get this flea circus on the road, eh?'
Most of the students hurried off like they'd just got the cap'n's
orders but Grier lingered and she heard what he said as he turned
back, with that reprised sullen-tired-bored look again. 'And you
shouldn't be so damn sure you want to shovel the refuse and see
what's underneath, Naiad.' He cut off the other's chuckle 'No,
look kid I mean it. I'm here for a quiet year. 'Cuz things are
different now: and I'm different. Some weird-shit happened to me
this summer..' and then he cut himself short, and looked at Grier,
now the only person left standing by the chemlab. He rolled his
eyes ceilingwood, and this time Grier felt like she was the stray
kitten, that he'd thought he'd shaken off. He turned Naiad around
like a toy soldier so he faced the other direction. 'C'mon, lets
go find Russ and Jewel anyway, I have some family business to take
care of...'
As the two uncannily pretty boys walked away, Grier, who
incidentally wasn't used to watching retreating backs, couldn't
resist whispering spitefully to herself, 'well if you're not
monitoring the hall.. who the hell do you think you are..',
whereupon, almost as if he'd heard her, he turned and gave her a
brief, disturbing smile. Then he mouthed something, which Grier
didn't quite catch; later she replayed it in her mind again and
realised with a shudder (except that he *can't* have heard) it
might have been: 'just call me 'jaws', baby'.
Author: moon-pix
Email: chinks@start.com.au
Ratings: 15
Spoilers: general night world. Later, some specific characters.
Disclaimers: the wonderful concept sof the Night World and the
wild powers are all LJS' and i am borrowing it for my own
pleasure/fun, no harm intended.
Summary: A lost witch finds herself by apparent freak accident
in a Night World fortress in the sticks, where the fourth wild
power is being hidden.
1.
'I wish we could go to hell.' - Cat Power
Grier Hunt turned up forty minutes late to her first day at Oxely
College, Tribune. The clock radio had been punctual enough,
lighting up at 7am with the sound of some hick rockband she'd had
no compunction about slamming off a few seconds later. After that,
Grier had rolled to the other side of the new, still unfamiliar
bed and gone back to sleep; a perfectly reasonable thing to do,
she'd reasoned, since she'd stayed up late painting and only
caught about four hours of z's. Her mother though, hammering on
her door ten minutes later, hadn't seen the finer points of the
necessity of sleep in the same way, and unfortunately she could be
so damn insistent about things sometimes.
She'd still strolled through the morning routine of showering and
dressing and breakfasting though, and she yawned now as her mum
pulled their old station wagon up beside the school's main
entrance. Grier took a look at it while she threw her sheer dark
hair up in what she knew, without even checking in the rear-view-
mirror, was a flawless looking pony-tail.
'Not bad, for operation Education Nowheresville', she muttered,
not quite under her breath. It was a sprawling brick veneer 50's-
blocky structure, set on a whole lot of pretty green grass ('ten
acres of parkland', according to the school's handbook, which
Grier didn't know as she had not yet bothered to read it). Nothing
that special about that of course, the state of Kansas was
certainly the place to come if you wanted to see endless miles of
green featureless landscape, tampered with in only the most rustic
of ways. There was a line of pretty thick, fir-tree wood running
down from the back entrance of the school, which Grier hoped was
accessible to students. Most painters liked to work with plenty of
air and light, and a panoramic view. Grier was different, she
worked best in claustrophobic woods, or under sandbanks, that
screened out the world and the sun and left you only with a sense
of complicated crystalline textures, your relation to which you
could only start to fathom, or murky shapes and configurations
better suggested with shading than with stencils.
'I think it's lovely. It has it all over the Newtown High dejore
of asphalt hand-ball courts and sky scrapers. And I know how
important aesthetics are to you, my dear.' Her mother grinned at
her from the other side of the car with good spirited mocking,
brushing back the straying greying bang from her eyes. She was a
60's child who'd never been calculating enough to surrender her
hippie vales; she was a single parent; she was not merely self
employed, but as a self-proclaimed fortune teller - and she was
proud of it all. Her daughter had inherited her free-spiritedness,
and her stubborn independence, which meant they clashed wills
quite a lot.
Grier smiled, but retorted 'Yeah well at least that was a top 500
school inside the walls. Inner city melting pot of knowledge and
all. Half the teachers filling in their time there before they
took up chairs in the Ivy League, y'know.' She smirked as her
mother rolled her eyes; professorships in elite universities were
not Ms Hunt's idea of an ideal spiritual and personal goal. Grier
continued, 'I have my doubts about whether they've heard of Darwin all the
way out here..'
'Yeah, yeah, alright missy. You better scoot. You've already
nearly skipped out on first period bread-sawing.' She looked
sardonically at the clock on the dashboard and tutted.
'Hehe..Ok mom. Seeya later.' Grier jumped out and shut the door.
Her mom tapped on the window with a long, elaborately sculptured
purple nail. Grier leaned back in and opened the door to kiss her
on the cheek; the slender, tiny woman reached up and brushed her
forehead with a kiss before she could pull back out. 'Be well,
child. Hecate's blessings on your five senses; be pure, audacious,
wise, sincere and.. unbracketed.'
'Oh mom.' Grier pulled back, readjusting the strap on the hessian
bag she'd sewed together herself a few days before, and glancing
around the empty parking lot self consciously. 'You know I don't
believe in that sh- 'Unbracketed'?? What does that mean? that
sounds kinda bondage-related and kinky...'
'Oh, shush. You're too cynical by half, my darling, there are
moorrre things in heaven and earth horatio, than you can
schematise for your sketchbook! Now begood. Playnice. Ta ta.'
Her mom pulled the door to and abruptly drove off. Grier chuckled
to herself, smoothed out her full-length, grey-knit skirt, and
headed for the front doors.
'Heather Angel You Are Somewhere Off The Show' - Sonic Youth
Grier glanced down at the class schedule in her hand. First
period was chemistry, (ugh) Room 2G. She'd missed most of it
already, of course, but she had few qualms about only turning up
for the last few minutes. If there was one thing she'd learnt in
her movement through the stream of school's shed been to, moving
around a lot ever since she was a kid, it was that if you were
smart, sassy and unafraid - it wasn't hard to adjust to new
places. Being conspicuously beautiful in a slender lily-cut way
helped too, Grier knew well, but didn't bother with too much.
She loped up a set of stairs, automatically calculating that the
room must be on the second floor, to the left, from where she'd
been standing, rounded the corner into a long empty coridoor with
a cemented floor and grey lockers on either side. And paused.
The hallway wasn't empty after all; there was someone slouched
against a lockered wall about ten metres from where she stood. It
was a tall guy, and he was a striking thing because he was utterly
still, his eyes were closed, his head was kind of kicked back
against a grey metal door. In another moment Grier saw he had
headphones dangling from his ears. He cut quite a beautiful figure
in the ascetic carceral space, not just 'cause of his long, thin,
hard-muscled body or his pretty-unruly mop of blonde curly hair
falling over his eyes, but because of a certain aura he held about
him; a sense of meditative focus, a kind of distilled and
channelled something.
Grier had to actively resist the urge to just drop her backpack
and pull out a sketchbook right there.
She didn't of course. Instead, she padded forward, her sneakers
making almost no noise on the concrete, heading for the classroom
door that was just ahead of headphone-boy. She glanced at him
again as she got adjacent to him; wow he really was
preternaturally still. She wondered if he was awake, if he was
alive, hell, whether or not he was a wax-doll (his skin does look
too flawless and too creamy to be anything but rubber padding, she
chuckled silently).
At another time she might have walked right up and tapped him on
the shoulder and asked flat out what a spunk like him was doin'
sleeping in a dingy little hallway like this? But just then it was
more important to get to the dying minutes of chemistry, and her
fingertips had just brushed the doorhandle when she heard his
voice behind her say; 'hey.'
Grier paused and looked around. The boy hadn't moved himself an
inch from his prized position against what must be a lot more
comfy wall of lockers than appearances suggested; he had opened
his eyes though. A surprising glacier-green pair met hers straight
on, under the tangled fringe.
'Hey yourself,' Grier returned, but grinning.
But the kid didn't smile back. In the same flat tone as 'hey' he
said - 'Where are you going?'
Grier blinked. 'To a beach volley ball game?' No change in the
cold blank stare. 'Where does it look like i'm going? To class.'
'First period is nearly over. Who are you? I haven't seen you
around here before.'
Grier gave the guy a calculating once-over, that took in his
slouched, unmoving pose on the lockers, his fashionably tatty
cargo pants and sonic youth tee. He looked like a slacker, arty
indie-kid, but his dull sardonic voice had a weird air of bored
authority she thought. He was too young to be a teacher, right?
'Who are you? The hall monitor?'
The guy returned her hostile glare. 'If you don't even know that,
you're a seal-pup splashing in sharkinfested waters, kid. That
kinda brashness is out of place here, I'll let you in on that
right from the start.' There wasn't much humour in his tone, it
was more a kinda weary sardonicness. 'What circle are you from?'
'Oh, so you'd probly describe yourself more as the weird-morose-
hintingly psychotic hall monitor type..' Grier summoned her best
unimpressed voice, but actually she was just a little bit creeped
out.
'Twilight, right?', looking peeved but dogged.
Grier crossed her arms over her annoying, queasy stomach. She was
extra-irritated because somehow he was getting to her with his
intimidate-the-newgirl schtick. 'That's when the giant bunny comes
to take you back to the pumpkin patch, perhaps?'
His face lost its look of bored procedure then and took on a much
more attractive expression of surprised quizicalness. He didn't
say anything for a few seconds, just stared hard at her face, and
at that moment she had the oddest tingling sensation in her head,
as if someone was in there with a feather duster.
A clattering noise made her look down, and there was her book bag
spilled out over the floor. Half furious, half embarrassed she
knelt down on jellied knees to retrieve her stuff. The weirdo
didn't lift a finger to help, and when she made it back to her
feet his look was bemused and his eyes were two shuttered slits of
green beneath heavy eyelashes. 'I'm sorry, kid. I didn't realise
you were as new as all that.' There was a kind of genuine sympathy
in his voice too, that bugged Grier more than anything else could
have.
'Aw, well I guess weird-creepiness and omnipotence don't always
go hand-in-hand eh?' she said acidly.
He laughed, and actually chucked her chin. 'You're funny. Cute,
too. I bet you've even heard of sonic youth?'
'Yeah, i've heard they have some blonde girly as their bassist,
how lame that must be.' She felt unsettled, and unready for combat
and it was the best she could do.
He grinned. 'Let's kill our parents and hit the road.'
'Goo's my least favourite album of theirs.'
'Shucks. It could have been sucha beautiful thing.' Right then a
deafening noise rattled down the concrete corridor, one of those
oldfashioned school bells that make the whole building shake.
'Gee, it looks like you missed out on chem afterall, Grier. What a
poor first-day impression to make. You'll hafta get up when the
alarm rings tomorrow morning, huh. Or I will set the hall monitor
on your ass. And no, it's not me.. but I got him in my pocket.' He
winked, but his smile oddly faded and he said in a different
tone, 'You take care'.
The chemlab door opened then, and Grier didn't have time to
inquire of him how he knew her name and all about what she'd been
doing that morning (of course, she reasoned later that he'd been
toying with her all along and had known her as the new girl Grier-
Hunt on sight), because kids were spilling into the hallway, and,
more noteworthily, stopping dead in their tracks. An exceptionally
goodlooking Asian kid, with spiky gelled hair and sexy, smudged-
with-eyeliner eyes was the first one to actually speak to the
object of their attention though. 'ALEX!!!' he yelped, rushing
past Grier. 'You're back! Are you back? Is this for real, are you
spending the year?' He was excited, gleeful even, and it was all
the more infectious because, with his perfectly worn black jeans,
black tee that looked like it was hand printed with an esoteric
black and white photograph of a tractor in a field, and strings-
for-bracelets he looked like the kind of kid that usually hung
back inside his own coup of aristocratic cool.
'Naiad, heyyy.' The guy called Alex responded, slapping the kids
hands, but oddly the warmth he'd shown Grier just before had
drained from him again, and his voice had that same cipher-
sternness with which he'd first addressed her. 'Yeah, I'm here all
year I guess.'
The boy with the weird-ass-name looked a bit confused about the
coolness in the other's voice, and the way he now shrugged him off
and leant back towards the wall, but he tried again anyway,
immediately in a way that reminded Grier of a puppy hopefully
wagging it's tail. 'Well y'know, glad days then! this place has
been dead as a pile of poo while you've been away..'
'Yeah well even a pile of poo attracts flies and other kinds of
interesting life forms..' at this point, he paused and looked
pointedly at the gawking kids surrounding him. 'Righto, move on
people, let's get this flea circus on the road, eh?'
Most of the students hurried off like they'd just got the cap'n's
orders but Grier lingered and she heard what he said as he turned
back, with that reprised sullen-tired-bored look again. 'And you
shouldn't be so damn sure you want to shovel the refuse and see
what's underneath, Naiad.' He cut off the other's chuckle 'No,
look kid I mean it. I'm here for a quiet year. 'Cuz things are
different now: and I'm different. Some weird-shit happened to me
this summer..' and then he cut himself short, and looked at Grier,
now the only person left standing by the chemlab. He rolled his
eyes ceilingwood, and this time Grier felt like she was the stray
kitten, that he'd thought he'd shaken off. He turned Naiad around
like a toy soldier so he faced the other direction. 'C'mon, lets
go find Russ and Jewel anyway, I have some family business to take
care of...'
As the two uncannily pretty boys walked away, Grier, who
incidentally wasn't used to watching retreating backs, couldn't
resist whispering spitefully to herself, 'well if you're not
monitoring the hall.. who the hell do you think you are..',
whereupon, almost as if he'd heard her, he turned and gave her a
brief, disturbing smile. Then he mouthed something, which Grier
didn't quite catch; later she replayed it in her mind again and
realised with a shudder (except that he *can't* have heard) it
might have been: 'just call me 'jaws', baby'.