This one was written for the Peterborough Science Fiction Club web-site - they needed some fiction to fill a page and I obliged.

     "Don't you just hate locked-room murder mysteries?"

     We're standing outside an average house in an average street, the neat semidetached kingdom of your average citizen. According to our records his name is Gene Merlane and he hasn't set foot outside his front door in five years. The front door in question is painted purple, a bad sign. I read a study on that once, the links between personality and choice of colour used on the forward reality portal/interface; black for born leaders of men, red for extroverts, blue for conformists, yellow for the sunny and carefree, grey for habitual bores, green for sensitive souls who love nature, are kind to small, furry animals and enjoy romantic, candle-lit dinners, and purple for psychopaths. Okay, so it was the April 1st issue of the journal, but even a spoof theory can have some merit. My own front door, by the way, like that of the author's, is green.

     "They don't exist outside of fiction." Afton replies. "And we don't know for certain that Mr Merlane is dead."

     She's like that, Afton - Detective-Inspector A. Afton Lamont - prosaic and down-to earth. I'm the one given to flights of fancy, the mystic, the stranger in a strange land. I'm called Jerome.

     Officer Janine Benoit is waiting for us, accompanied by one of the department's constructs. They can build you constructs in any shape you like, hardware brains in flesh-and- blood bodies; ours are humanoid, huge, muscular giants taller than I am, with gentle, child-like faces, vacant eyes and hands that can crumple armour-plate. They scare the hell out of me. We've been called here by Merlane's friends - not the people who live on this street, who are accustomed to never seeing their reclusive neighbour, but the folk he communicates with on the Net. Over the past two days the station's link-site has received more than three hundred items of e-mail from forty different worlds, all expressing concern over the safety of five people who live at this address. It seemed we might have a massacre or at very least, a mass kidnapping on our hands, until we discovered that all five names belong to Gene Merlane, all facets of his on-line personality.

     "Inspector Lamont." Benoit dips her head in greeting. She looks anxious - she's only been on the force for eight months. "This house is like a fortress, ma'am, all the windows sealed, all the blinds down and the doors locked and bolted. I've leaned on the bell and thumped on both doors, but nobody answers."

     "Is there an alarm system?"

     "Yes, and quite a sophisticted one." she frowns. "It told me, quite politely, to go away."

     "Jerome, can you handle it?"

     "Once we're inside and find the controls, I can run an override and turn it off." I extract my magic box from my pocket, keying it for code search/shutdown mode. I call the tricksy little device Pandora - its no bigger than a standard holo-screen remote and probably smarter than I am. "Good enough?"

     Afton nods. "Break down the door."

     Benoit touches the construct on the arm and looks up into its innocent, smiling face. "Sean, please open this door."

     It stands still for a moment, scanning the problem, then slams the purple portal dead- centre with the heel of one enormous hand. There's a volley of sharp, tearing sounds as loud as gunshots as locks, hinges and bolts fracture, then the door falls slowly inwards, crashing to the floor of the hallway. As the noise dies away there's a forlorn silence, as if the alarm system can't quite believe what's happened, then the siren goes off and a measured, calm voice warns 'Security breach - burglary in progress', the words repeating over and over. I find the control box in the hall and Pandora disables it within ten seconds - told you she was smart.

     "Sean, please wait here and let nobody in." Benoit says, from behind me. "Use minimal force."

     Afton steps over the fallen dor and enters the first room. A parlour, empty and dusty, it looks to have seen little use. We ignore the stairs for the moment and enter the room at the back of the house. This is obviously where Merlane spends most of his time - there's a couch and one armchair, a holo-screen, an audio- player and discs in a neat, alphabetical stack, and set in the window, a desk with a computer system sprawling over its entire surface and hanging over its edges. The brain is up and running, its screen filled with iridescent fractals in a constantly- shifting pattern. In front of it is a high-backed chair complete with an occupant - I can see the crown of a head covered with wavy red hair.

     "Mr Merlane?" Afton asks. "It's the police, Mr Merlane."

     No reply. She walks up to the desk and horror dawns in her face, so I join her quickly and see why. The person in the chair is a woman, young, slim and rating between six and seven on a ten- point scale of prettiness. She has long, unruly red hair, a turned-up nose and cute freckles. Her hands are resting on the keyboard, pale and frozen. She's dead, killed by whatever made the neat, round hole in the centre of her forehead. There's no sign of any weapon.

     "Dear God!" Afton swallows hard. "Is this Gene Merlane?"

     "The e-mail referred to Merlane by five different names, but it isn't uncommon to run multiple personae on the Net - some people get a kick out of pretending to be something they're not. It also isn't uncommon to lie about yourself, subtracting age or switching sex."

     "Officer Benoit, we need a forensic team - call it in, please." Afton glances at me. "I'm going to need every last scrap of data we can wring out of that bloody computer. Can you make it talk to us, Jerome?"

     "Not me. I may be a tek-wiz, but I'm best with small, dumb machines. That's not orthodox kit - I'd say that Genie here altered and modified it herself." I shrug. "It'll take an expert to handle the data-search on that beastie."

     Afton sighs. "Okay, we'll get us an expert. Now, make yourself useful and take a holo of the crime scene."

     I'm just about finished when Forensics arrive, but then I have a actress who never fluffs her lines or argues with her director. You can tell it's a quiet day down at the station - we get a team of six, headed by Ivory, the Chief Pathologist himself. His habitual irritation fades when he sees our corpse.

     "This is a pretty one." he gains a rapt expression, the look of a man appreciating an exquisite porcelain tea-cup and saucer, or a pearlescent Art Deco glass bowl. "I'd have to say though, that in my professional opinion, this isn't a man."

     "See, Jerome, you shouldn't believe the rumours." Afton says, perfectly straight-faced. "He can tell the difference."

     We reconvene the next day in Afton's basement office, affectionately known as the Pit. Ivory is still nursing a grudge and sends one of his minions to the meeting, Beka McGee. I appreciate the substitution - Beka's my best friend and she has a sense of humour.

     "According to our birth-data, your victim's real name was Genevieve-Gabrielle Merlane." Beka says. "She was thirty-two years old and female."

     "There's no doubt about that, is there?" Afton asks.

     "Not a whisker. Genetically female - she'd even had a child. We estimate time of death at between midnight and three a.m. on the fifth." With a flourish, Beka produces a sealed evidence bag. "And this is what killed her."

     It's a dark yellow-brown object as long as my little finger, smooth, hollow and shaped like a bullet. Even in its plastic wrapping it feels cold, as if it's made of stone.

     Afton poses the obvious question. "What is it?"

     "A belemnite." Beka smiles at our blank faces. "An Earth fossil, formed out of the shell of a cephalopod. Once mistaken for neolithic arrowheads, they're also called thunderbolts or thunder-shot, or elf-arrows, elf- bolts or elf- shot. We took this one out of Gene Merlane's skull - it had done almost as much damage as a bullet."

     "How did it get in there?" I wonder.

     "The usual excuse for misplaced foreign objects is that the victim fell on them." Afton's voice is devoid of humour, yet I see it in her eyes.

     "In this case, I think we can rule that out." Beka admits. "It wasn't hammered in - there was no blunt trauma to the forehead and, anyhow, the woman died suddenly, without a struggle. To penetrate that deeply into her brain it had to be moving at quite a velocity. Since there's no scoring on its surface to suggest that it was fired from a gun barrel, our best guess is that it was propelled from a non-metallic tube by gas pressure. There's also some evidence that it had a protective coat of ice to ease its passage along the tube."

     "What sort of range would we be talking about for an eccentric pseudo-weapon like that?" Afton muses.

     "Pretty short, I'd imagine." Beka purses her lips, deep in thought. "Hard to say without a few experiments. We'd have to mock it up... "

     "Short is an accurate enough estimate. That puts the killer either just outside the window or inside the room."

     I'm still holding the stone dart, ancient and cold. "You said this was an Earth fossil - is it found anywhere else?"

     Beka shakes her head. "There's nothing like it in this world's fossil record nor any of our close neighbours. We're running a search through the data- libraries of all the friendly worlds, but I'll have to get back to you in two or three days with the results of that baby. Did you dredge up anything talking to her neighbours?"

     Benoit and I had done the canvass, a weary succession of genuine, helpful people who knew nothing. "No-one had even seen Merlane. Groceries were delivered once a week and left in the storage cupboard, the windows were cleaned, the garden was tended and minor household repairs were carried out, all without anyone having face-to-face contact with our Genie. It's unbelievable that she could exist alone for that long."

     "She was never alone - the world came to her through her computer screen." Beka rests her chin on her hands. "How did she earn enough to keep her lifestyle up and running?"

     "Trust fund." Afton wears a sour expression; the bank gave her the runaround until she pulled a warrant out of the hat. "Her parents died ten years ago and left her well provided for."

     "The number one motive for murder - money." I sigh. "People are so predictable. Who gets the cash?"

     Beka's face lit up with understanding. "The child!"

     "How old is it?" Afton asks. "Can we pull the records?"

     I swing around and wake up my terminal. "Front door or back? Back's faster."

     "And illegal. Knock at the front door and wait to be invited in, Jerome." Afton scolds. "We don't need to cut any corners - saving time won't bring Merlane back to life."

     It takes me twenty minutes to catch the data, a life sketched out in electrons, a fairy tale with a sad beginning and no happy ending. "Genie got pregnant when she was fourteen and had a little girl, Gayle-Galadriel. The name of the father is unlisted - Genie withheld it for legal reasons."

     "So the child is an adult. Is she on-planet?"

     "In a manner of speaking. She died in the same crash as her grandparents. Their ashes were scattered in the hills."

     "Nice try." Beka acknowledges. "Any other greedy relatives in the frame?"

     "Maybe a crazy old uncle who just happens to be a palaentologist?" I shake my head. "The records state no living relatives."

     "So where do we go from here?" Beka asks.

     Afton's frowning again. "If there is an answer, we'll find it on Merlane's computer."

     Our pet tek-head meets us at Merlane's house, Afton's old friend, Spiro. What can I tell you about Spiro? Six-foot two, eyes of blue, waist- length blonde hair and more dangerous curves than a mountain road. She has everything on the thinking man's wants-list, and she has it in spades. If she were ice-cream, she'd be sex on a stick. Me, I'm double-choc chip with hot mocha sauce. Afton? Vinegar sorbet.

     "Hullo, sweetcakes!" Spiro stands on tip-toe to plant a kiss on each of my cheeks. This close I'm caught in the hot cloud of her perfume, vanilla, raspberry and musk. "It's been way too long, Jerome-honey. Dinner, tonight, with all the trimmings - and I don't want to hear any argument!"

     She always does this to me, Spiro. Considers me a challenge, I suppose. I hold her off at arm's length, grinning. "If you can wrap up this case before midnight, you have a date - and I'll pay."

     "I'll hold you to that promise." she slithers out of my grasp and sashays after Afton into the house.

     Genie's pet-brain is still patiently running its array of glittering fractals. Spiro sits down in the now-vacant leather chair and cracks her fingers. "What do you need to know?"

     "Who hated Genevieve Merlane enough to kill her."

     "We know she had five separate identities on the Net." I add, counting off on my fingers. "Diabolo, Mumpsimus, Woodwose, Jack-in-the-Green and Merlin... "

     Spiro's mouth drops open, a pretty cherry- pink O. "But I know all of those people...! I sent mail to all of them, had lengthy dialogues with several of them - even some heated arguments. Are you telling me they were all the same man?"

     "Woman."

     Spiro shakes her head. "None of them came over as female, not even remotely so. Diabolo now, he's a prankster, on the nasty side, so quick-tempered he'd flame you for not saying 'please' and 'thank-you', while Mumpsimus is a tek-head, pompous and pedantic to the core. Jack-in-the-Green's a gamer, a cute little guy with a quirky sense of humour. Woodwose is one weird fruitcake - still believes in UFO's, evil green EBE's and the magickal power of ley lines. Merlin, though, he's something else - all- knowing and all-seeing, a legend on the Net, a shadowy figure held in awe by all users. They couldn't all be the same person!"

     "The records say that they are." Afton insists.

     Spiro whistles through her teeth and cracks her knuckles again. "This sure is going to be one fascinating data-search!"

     It takes us all day to read a fortnight's worth of post - I'd no idea that anyone could be so prolific. Genie had a real talent for holding dozens of meaningful and interesting conversations at the same time, on subjects as diverse as the art of tea-blending, the wisdom of keeping venomous serpents as pets, judging character by studying sock-colour preferences, the efficacy of rituals using tequila, chilli powder and limericks to subdue lesser household demons, and the occult religious subtexts concealed in the plot-lines of 'Port Cinquecento', one of the most popular holo- soaps. It may be fascinating, but it's no help at all - there's nothing here to account for a murder.

     There are two unscheduled pauses in our search. Around midday Afton takes a call on her mobile and her habitual frown takes a dive into the realm of scowl.

     "Two people claiming to be next- of-kin have requested the release of Merlane's body." she explains. "Both give their surnames as Merlane - Gayle- Galadriel and Georgia-Grace."

     "The dead daughter and the dead mother?"

     "Both are alive and solid enough to be at the station's front desk." Afton picks up her raincoat. "You stay with Spiro - I'll go back and commune with the dead."

     She doesn't come back until evening, bringing pint-pots of coffee, cherry doughnuts and Beka McGee. I'm not sure which I'm happiest to see.

     "Take a break - I need to check some measurements." the med-tek instructs. "Have you moved anything?"

     "Only the chair." Spiro swings around and climbs out of it, accepting the bribe of coffee.

     "What did our ghosts have to say for themselves?" I ask.

     "Georgia-Grace confessed to an insurance fraud - only her husband died in the crash." Afton's mood hasn't improved. "She says that she made a pact with her daughter to share the trust fund and Genevieve-Gabrielle fixed the computer records. Gayle-Galadriel, of course, denies all knowledge of the deception."

     "Three scheming woman indeed!" Spiro laughs. "It's a plausible story - any one of Merlane's personae had the skills to doctor official data- banks. Hell, they could reprogram the damn sun to come up in the west!"

     I watch Beka reposition the chair and use a laser-line to calculate a series of distances and angles. She sticks the tip of her tongue out of the corner of her mouth when she's concentrating - cute. When she's done, she comes up to us, looking bemused.

     "I don't understand this at all, detectives, but the missile that killed Gene Merlane had a really weird trajectory. We ran some simulations using the holo that Jerome took when the body was discovered and I've just re-checked the actual positions, but it keeps coming up with the same answer. From the angle of entry into her skull, the projectile must have gone right through her monitor, slap- bang in the centre of its display screen."

     "That's impossible." Afton frowns. "Unless the killer replaced the wrecked unit with a new one... "

     "No." Spiro insists. "That's unorthodox hardware shipped in from Dhantechni, two or three years old, set up with all manner of quirky defaults and preferences - it has to be Merlane's original kit. I'll bet you she never turned it off."

     "Could the shot have been fired in front of the screen?" I wonder.

     "Unlikely." Beka shakes her head - ebony corkscrew curls dance. "That close and we would have found some evidence of the means of propulsion on her body - there was nothing."

     Afton lets out a wordless grunt of disgust. "What are we missing here? It's a swivel chair!"

     "So Genie turns around to face someone, who kills her, then puts her back, facing her computer?" Beka seems unimpressed. "Why bother? Anyhow, it was a very natural pose. It didn't look faked at all."

     "If she let her killer into this house, she must have known them." I say. "Which puts Georgia- Grace and Gayle-Galadriel back at the top of the list."

     "I'll go back and ask them some more pertinent questions." Afton decides, with a sigh. "If you're finished up here, Ms McGee, do you want to hitch a ride back to the station?"

     Beka ignores the pleading in my eyes - she even smiles as she leaves me in the clutches of the man-eater. "I'm done. Bye, Jerome, and behave yourself!"

     Spiro and I get to the end of the mail around midnight.

     "Nothing." I shake my head. "A few disagreements, a handful of frayed tempers and a pinch or two of resentment - that's no recipe for murder."

     Spiro massages her temples, combing her incredible hair back with her fingers. "Want to call it a night?"

     "Not yet. Is there any way to find out what Genie was working on when she died?"

     "Sure." she types faster than I can follow, segues between mouse and keyboard seamlessly - a true artist. "Looks like she was walking the Web in the guise of Woodwose. Want to play chase the missing link?"

     We start out at a site called 'Fundamental StarChild'. You never heard of them? Which rock have you been under? Even a musical philistine like me can hum the odd line of a StarChild song - not so much mega as giga- stars. This is a temple to their greatness, a glitzy chunk of graphics, bios and song-lyrics obviously put together by devoted fans.

     "Didn't StarChild break up a couple of years ago?"

     "Yep - their pet diva threw a tantrum and ditched the group." Spiro says, most of her mind fixed on finding Genie's trail. "Pity that - I saw them once and they did a great show. High theatre."

     From there we slide to a home- page called 'Witchery, Wisdom and Wu-wei', a cynical mish- mash of new-age magic and dross posted by an ex- member of the group. According to his arcane auguries, on the fifth the significant colour was heliotrope, the flower was love-in- idleness and the Tarot trump was the Devil. I'm taken by his thought for the day - 'You may buy your way into a woman's heart with jewellery, but only chocolate cheesecake clinches the deal.' A true sage indeed.

     "Jeb Lucas." Spiro says, and there's a nasty glint in her eye. "The only person to get better grades than I did at college on Dhantechni - and he didn't even have to sweat in the sheets with any of our lecturers. Bastard!"

     Third stop is the Moon-Phase Almanac. You need a full moon? This page will find you one, on any world you care to name. There were seventeen on the night Genie died.

     Leap number four takes us to 'The Absolute Truth - Concealed by a Malign Conspiracy for Centuries', a shoddy, amateurish site with page upon page of half-insane rambling that insists that an ancient, alien monolith really had been uncovered n Earth'd moon in 2001, that the truth had been suppressed by a nameless, faceless Them and that the work of fiction had been commissioned as a smokescreen to hide the fact. Even the colour-scheme is offensive - purple text on buttercream fake parchment.

     "Some people should have their fingers broken." Spiro observes, wrinkling her nose.

     "Don't you hold with free expression?"

     "For me - yes, for you - perhaps, but for every mad fool in the galaxy? No way!"

     The fifth site is much better, a semi-pro web-magazine about earthlights, anomalous energy discharges and ley lines. I'm deeply impressed by some lovely photographs of the acidic green aurorae that preceded the earthquakes on Soupcisson.

     "I knew Woodwose would lead us on one wild trip!" Spiro grins, her flying fingers tracing the next link. It pitches us into the middle of a stuffy academic debate on the nature of pre- human technology. Never was any, of course, but that plain and simple truth had never troubled these poor guys.

     "The Pyramids were built by giant, invisible dung-beetles from the fifth dimension?" I whistle. "They used to burn people for holding less unorthodox beliefs!"

     The seventh step on the path is a gaming site, 'Darker Diversions', a place of wondrous transformations, where bored housewives, short- order cooks and cargo handlers become proud queens, kings and warriors, haughty and dangerous, able to cast fearsome spells and fight with legendary weapons, yet cursed with the need to drink human blood.

     "Hey, look at this!" Spiro peers into the screen. "A recipe for a 'true and trusty potion to abate the vampyric urge' - just what every modern woman needs! You'd have to be a sick puppy to waste your time with this nonsense."

     "Some puppies have a lot of time to waste."

     Eight is a site I recognise, run by a veritable saint as a vital service to mankind - 'The Worst B-Holos of All Time'.

     "Ah, Genie had taste." Spiro navigates us through the list, pausing on three entries. "We have 'Full Moon', a tacky werewolf flick, with abysmal dialogue and gratuitous nudity, 'When Midnight Comes Around', an espionage caper, with an absurd plot and gratuitous nudity, and some weird confection about elves and hobgoblins called 'The Thirteenth Crystal'. Oh, did I mention that the nudity in that last offering is described as 'artistic'? Do you think we can glean any clues from this weed-patch?"

     "I doubt it. Do they have anything at all in common?"

     "I don't have a cast list for that rubbish about elves, but the other two share one name in common, right down there in the bit-parts. It's that actress who died recently - Amaranth Dusk. Is that a significant clue?"

     "Didn't she spend the last five years of her life in coma?" I dredge that little gem up from memory. "I'm not sure that would fit in with our profile of the murderer somehow."

     I make us some more coffee while she find the next site. When I come back she's in the thick of the 'We still believe in UFO's' support group. "With so much space traffic, how do they separate the sheep from the goats these days?"

     "Maybe the guys in the flying saucers wear black hats?" she takes a cup from me and sips through the steam. "We never did find those short, grey wrinkly guys with the big eyes anywhere out here, did we?"

     "Perhaps they only existed in here." I tap my forehead.

     Spiro skips to the tenth stop, a collection of Pre-Dark poetry. Genie chose only two, on an eeriely-similar theme - William Allingham's 'The Fairies' and 'The Stolen Child' by Yeats.

     "They took here lightly back, between the night and morrow. They thought that she was fast asleep, but she was dead with sorrow." Spiro quotes from the first poem. "Was that a premonition, do you think?"

     "Where I come from, they believe that every man can foresee his own death.

     Her blue eyes are suddenly bright with curiosity. "You never talk about your past, Jerome. Where do you come from?"

     "Nowhere good." I touch the screen and read a line from the second poem. "For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.' It seems that our Genie was in a maudlin mood on the night she died."

     "This isn't much help, is it?" Spiro sends us to the next site.

     The eleventh stepping stone in this wild- goose chase is a gallery of fantasy art, a series of paintings by a new artist on the scene, Lindy Tormentil; beautiful, complex everyday scenes of country kitchens, lush, flower-stuffed gardens and shady woodland glades with shy, delicate fairies and wide-eyed mythical beasts peering out from the velvet shadows.

     "Very pretty." I lean closer, looking over her shoulder. "Such vivid colours and intricate brushwork - I could live with one of those on my wall."

     "There speaks a man who knows little about art, but knows what he likes." Spiro laughs. "You old romantic, you!"

     We zip to the twelfth stop, a database of folklore. My pet expert freezes, her hands suddenly still on the keyboard. "I don't recognise this site. Given its size and complexity, it ought to be running on an university main-brain, but that location code means nothing to me. There's only one more link in the chain after this - we're nearly at the terminus."

     "What did Genie come this far to find?"

     "A random, whimsical journey like this has no purpose." Spiro shrugs and pulls up a fresh page. "This is the only thing she looked at, an entry on the Erlking."

     I read it out. "In German legend, a malevolent goblin who haunts forests and lures travellers, especially children, to destruction. It was used as the basis for a poem by Goethe."

     "He had something to say about Gene Merlane too - 'a useless life is an early death'. Shall we take a look at the last site?"

     I nod and Spiro works her magic. I glimpse a pattern of green-speckled darkness taking shape, a swirl of midnight that spins into a vortex, like a whirlpool or a wormhole in space. It seems far too real for an image on a flat screen.

     "What in hell...!"

     I knock Spiro out of the way so hard that the swivel chair overturns. She squeals as I grab her, pinning her close to my chest. We hit the floor in a tangle, with me mostly underneath. The elf-bolt buzzes over our heads, burying itself in the far wall.

     "It came out of the screen!" Spiro wails, her baby-blue eyes full of horror. Stripped of all poise and artifice, she's just a scared little girl. "It came right out of the goddamn screen!"

     I gently untangle her hands from around my neck, set the chair upright again and deposit her in it. She flows out of my grasp as if all her bones have turned to water. I'm still able to walk, even though my knees are shaky, and I use my trusty antique Swiss-army knife to dig the vicious little missile out of the plaster, folding it into an evidence bag. A stone arrowhead, sepia brown - another belemnite. It feels colder than the void of space.

     When I turn back to Spiro, she's tapping at the keyboard again, her hands trembling. "Where did that final link take us?"

     "Didn't look." she says vaguely.

     Things are flashing across the screen so fast that I can't read them, which smacks of panic. "What are you doing?"

     "Wiping the cache and deleting every goddamn step of that path we followed through the Web."

     "If you destroy all the evidence, how will we trace Genie's murderer?"

     She glances at the elf-shot in my hand and laughs tightly. "Do you really think something human sent that? Get real, Jerome!"

     When she's done, she turns the computer off. The abrupt silence is unsettling, almost malignant. I take her home, neither of us speaking as we drive through the dead, pre-dawn streets. We can't talk about it. The unreality of our experience evades words.

     Sleep avoids me. I'm too strung out on coffee and fear. I trusted to this backwater haven of technology to protect me, yet my past is reaching out to haunt me again, barbarism and black sorcery, the terrible destiny that I fled. This isn't my own nightmare, I know, just as it wasn't Genie's, until she strayed from the path and stumbled into terror.

     Long ago, humankind lived in little nuclei of safety, hill-forts and walled villages linked by fragile threads of roads through the perilous forest; now whole worlds are our fortresses and we fly between them in magical ships through the unknown wastes of un-space. I always visualise the Web as part of that magic, as bright, shining threads across the void, linking the islands of human life. I never dreamt that anything lurked in that virtual darkness, until now.

     The next morning we gather in the Pit to tell our story. My head is packed full of the fuzzy vagueness that a night's insomnia brings. Spiro looks pale and hides the shadows under her eyes beneath a pair of mirrored Jackie-O's. Afton hears us out but doesn't believe us, of course, not even when I show her the second belemnite. That hurts - she's known me long enough to realise I wouldn't lie. A lie would be easier to cope with; I don't want to dwell on the truth.

     "I swear it came right out of the goddamn screen!" Spiro repeats, as if the words are a mantra of protection. "And as for that spooky folklore database, I couldn't find it again. Hit it with every search engine there is, even called in a whole bundle of favours at every university in the human sphere to buy some expert help - we turned up nothing, nada, natch, the big, fat zero! I swear to God the bloody thing doesn't exist!"

     "So what do I put in the report?" Afton asks, with an expression that could sour UHT. "That Gene Merlane was killed by some malevolent gnome out of Teutonic fairy-tale? Unless I miss my guess, Captain Vincenzo's sure gonna love that one!"

     "The man himself said it, Goethe, the one who wrote the poen about the Erlking - 'What is hardest of all? That which seems most simple: to see with your eyes what is before your eyes.' I saw it, Afton... " Spiro shivers. "Now I want to believe that I saw something else, something natural... "

     As she trails into silence, I finish it for her. "Something that didn't feel so evil."

     "There are some mysteries that humankind shouldn't meddle in?" Afton grimaces. "Shit, Jerome, give me a break!"

     We never did catch Genie Merlane's killer - that case is still open. Georgia-Grace hired herself the best lawyer on planet and was cleared of fraud, on the implausible grounds that criminal charges can't be filed against the dead. We helped her wriggle off the hook - every computer file we pulled up insisted that she was no longer alive, even Censcomp, Earth's impregnable and supposedly-tamperproof genetic database. Gayle-Galadriel continued the family tradition and got herself pregnant without passing through wedlock first. We're running a sweepstake at the station on what she'll name the baby - and hot rumour from our mole at the City's hospital says that it will be a girl. I don't think I'll win - true to my habitual bad luck, I've drawn Gillian-Gretchen.