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them that a pigeon had saved me from a strange man who thought I was a princess and tried to kill me, even Grandma wasn’t buying it. ‘If you didn’t want to go to your Brownie meeting,’ she said, ‘all you had to do was say so.’

    Sydney added, ‘You’re too big a girl to be making up stories.’ After a while, I began thinking that Sydney and Grandma were right; I really had imagined the whole incident. What if I had?

    No. I was saved from a murderer by a damn pigeon, and I am not hearing things. It was probably a homeless guy. A homeless guy dragging something around. And now I am going to leave him alone . I got up and walked back toward the fence.

    But why didn’t I see the homeless guy earlier? I looked through the trailer’s windows. It was empty.

    I turned around again, made myself stare at the big space between the bin and the trailer.

    Two people stood there, a man and a woman. He was facing the water with his back to me, his dark hair cropped so close it looked like a shadow. He was a tall man in a long black trench coat; she was smaller with blond hair, wearing a red dress. She wasn’t wearing a coat, even though it was freezing. Her dress had short sleeves.

    She must be cold in those sleeves, I thought. They were bending over, pushing against something that I couldn’t see.

    I could hear it scraping the concrete, though. And when they straightened up, I saw it: a pale blue ice chest. Small, to be making such a scrape. Prettier color than the water . . . a clean, shiny blue.

    Both of them bent over again, and pushed it hard. I heard a dull splash, and as they stepped back, I saw the white lid sinking into the Hudson. Not so clean now. Not so shiny . . . Why am I watching this?

    For a long time, they both stood there, staring at what they’d just done. The woman’s bare arms and back seemed to shake violently, though the rest of her body remained perfectly still.

    ‘Crying,’ I said. The woman didn’t move, but the man spun around fast and stared at me.

    The bottom half of his face was covered by a thick black scarf, but I wouldn’t have noticed it had it been visible. He had a smooth forehead, black eyebrows. But the eyes . . . Where did you come from where did you?

    The irises were, literally, mirrors. The fading sunlight refracted off them, made points of light on my black coat. For a second, they seemed to transform into two laser beams.

    ‘Oh, Jesus,’ I whispered. ‘I am insane.’

    Heart pumping, fingernails digging into my palms, I held my breath and ducked under the fence. On the other side, I walked fast, but I refused to run. I crossed Tenth Avenue, headed east on Fourteenth. It’s okay. Too much emotion in one day. Weird things happening. Dead Man’s Fingers. Cops in the classroom. Safety lectures, bad memories. Hermyn told a joke. You’re worked up. You’re not crazy. Not insane . Just worked up. But where did they, where did he . . .

    Maybe Shell had slipped something into the box office coffeepot. Maybe the egg salad had been bad.

    I passed a group of laughing teenage girls. One of them, the one with the pierced lip, looked like a vampirette from a cheap seventies movie; another had a snake tattooed on her forehead, but they all looked real. None of them had mirror eyes.

    Whatever it is, it’s wearing off .

    I had noticed something else, though, something harder to dismiss. I took a deep breath and tried to forget about it. Breathe in, breathe out . I opened the box office door. Think of anything, think of nothing.

    Still, it stuck in my mind. More than once during the walk, I’d heard footsteps - and breath - moving closer and closer to my back. But each time I turned around and looked, no one was there.

     
    En Henry was brushing his teeth one morning after twenty-four hours on ecstasy when he saw Christopher Marlowe’s ghost levitating behind him in the mirror. ‘Write movies,’ the ghost intoned. So En, who was then called Stephen, lopped off the