Tempter by Nancy A. Collins Page B

would awaken, and all his planning would be for naught. Still, it required tremendous effort on his part to keep from hurrying things along.
    Rossiter felt himself sliding into the not-place. It was a pleasant sensation, not unlike falling asleep in a tub of warm water. He felt something inside himself slip free, and he suddenly found himself hovering above the fold-out couch, looking down at his own body. He stared in dismay at the lines and creases etched into face. He looked way too old for a business that routinely ate teenagers for breakfast.
    There was a sound of wind rushing down a tunnel, and his uninhabited shell began to dwindle, like the picture used to fade on the tube of his family’s old television, until it collapsed into a point of pulsating blue light.
    He was back in the place between places, vévés stretching across the expanse where the sky should have been. He moved towards them, trying to discern where one began and the other left off, but it was impossible to separate one from the other. He somehow had the impression that the vévés were alive, but not the same way humans or animals are. He was reminded of sea anemones waving in the ocean current. He reached out to touch one of them, but the vévé was suddenly somewhere else, just beyond his reach.
    “Of course I can’t touch them,” he gently chided himself. “I don’t have any hands! I’m just a bundle of thought.”
    “You’re much more than that, my friend.”
    It took Rossiter a moment to realize that the voice inside his head wasn’t his own. With a start, he saw the shadowy figure of a man standing on the other side of the pulsing vévés . As he focused his attention, the other man’s features suddenly leapt into sharp detail, and Rossiter was surprised to discover he was looking at his own face. Except the duplicate that stood before him was not the embittered thirty-something whose body he had left sprawled across a foldout sofa like an empty suit.
    The Rossiter who confronted him was considerably younger, with spiky hair and the barest hint of whiskers on his jaw. He was the very image of The Artist As Boy Genius, youthful and unbowed, captured at his professional and physical peak.
    “You read my mind,” he said.
    His younger self shrugged. “There is no difference between thought and word on this plane. The thought and the deed are one and the same: both irrevocable and inconsequential.”
    “What are you? Are you really me? Or are you a spirit?”
    “Call me Alex, if you wish.” His younger self smiled, and for the first time Rossiter noticed the doppelganger’s eyes shone like of polished carnelian. “There is much you must learn. More than you can possibly imagine.” The doppelganger beckoned Rossiter to step forward. “Come closer, so I might show you.”
    Although the vévés seemed as delicate as hothouse orchids, moving forward was like trying to push his way through a privet hedge. They did not so much stop him as slow his progress.
    The doppelganger scowled, his eyes shining like twin cups of fresh blood. “Try harder! You’ve got to want to enter.”
    Rossiter tried to do as his younger self instructed, but the more he pushed, the harder it was to move forward. It was as if he was trapped in sucking mud. He tried to extricate himself from the vévés by backing up, but that only made things worse. A tiny flicker of panic sparked inside his mind, and suddenly the vévés surged into life, crackling like an electric fence.
    The last thing he saw was his younger self, wrapped in multicolored lightning, shouting furiously at the patterns towering overhead.
    So close! He’d come so close to ensnaring a horse, only to have the damned vévés get in the way! Tempter’s frustration created tornadoes that danced across the emptiness, raining bloated, worm-eaten corpses in their wake.
    At least it wasn’t a total loss. The bait had produced the desired response in his prey. The horse would return, of that he was