Giles waited with dry mouth to tell the next part of the story. He sipped cautiously at his water bottle, not wanting to fill his bladder too much.

On the evening stage where he’d be standing in ten minutes a large man named Tim Tiddwell strummed a guitar and sang a painfully bad song. (The Planners didn’t mind if you sang, as long as you told a story too.)

As Tim in his tie-die Grateful Dead shirt rhymed “my heart is on the floor” with “open up the door,” Giles remembered the old storytelling festival.

The telling of oral stories was an ancient art undergoing a blossoming renaissance and for two days the town square had been roped off, open only to happy audiences listening to all kinds of verbal wizardry. Some told hilarious stories of their own childhood, some told fairy tales from Switzerland or Ethiopia or the American Southwest.

Audience members had listened on uncomfortable folding chairs or cross-legged on the lawn or even stretched out with their eyes closed, drifting. Giles, a young teller with lots of raw talent, had thought the ones laying down were just sleeping until he tried it himself and found that folk tales and fairy tales sounded better when you were half dreaming.

There was none of that here. The new “storytelling festivals” were like military service: anyone who had ever publicly identified as a storyteller got a summons to appear. You could be arrested if you didn’t show up. It was not only oral tellers: authors were required to give public readings of their latest books and singer-songwriters had to sing any story songs. Hiyako would certainly be called if anybody realized shakuhachi music told stories in any way.

Giles, eyeing the audience, guessed that of the thirty listeners, maybe five worked for the Planners, taking down every word, analyzing expressions and gestures. Perhaps another five sensed how little joy there was.

The rest of the audience were there because it was free. The heavy, sloppy woman and three kids eating square slices of pizza dotted with transparently thin pepperoni were certainly just audience members. The guy with the old farmer’s hat and scraggly black beard? Hard to say.

There was no sign of Tiffany in the crowd – and no reason she should be there, Giles reminded himself.

Watching poor Tiddwell’s sweat-coated face and glistening bushy moustache as he rhymed “It was meant to be” with “I’m in love with you, you see,” Giles remembered how he’d burned like green ice when Tim had made it to the main stage at the old festival. How hard it had been for an unknown teller to “break in” back then and how Giles now wished he had been content to be passed over!

The old festival had had a critique session: the theory was you brought a rough work-in-progress for feedback and his first year Giles duly brought a piece which was far from his best and got good feedback from Jerry, the main organizer of the old festival. But the next year he saw Jerry introduce Tim on the main stage with “Here’s some talent that we found last year in the critique session.” Giles seethed as Tiddwell, standing behind Jerry, nodded with quiet self-importance.

The year after, Giles brought his absolute best story to the critique and right before he told it, Jerry ambled off to the porta-potties and never saw it. But the year after that all the cards had fallen right and Giles had been the one “discovered.”

That was the year the sky ripped open and the festival became the nightmare it was now.

Tim finished his song (rhyming “please be mine” with “I love you till the end of time”), accepted the scattering of applause, and hurried from the stage. Giles swallowed another hasty sip.

“Would you please welcome our next performer,” said the MC, speaking too close to the microphone so that “welcome” sounded like “whoosh-um.” “From San Francisco, no, I’m sorry, from across the bay in Alameda, would you please make very welcome Mr. Giles Hammond!”

Even the most seasoned performer has an instant of fear when they walk alone onto a stage: maybe this will be the time I forget the words, the time that everyone just stares at me. Giles barely heard the routine applause as he crossed the empty stage with needles in his cold feet and hands. “Gosh, thanks everybody,” he said to the people he could no longer see because of the klieg lights.

After two years, it was habit not to look at the sky. But Giles glanced up without thinking now.

That mess of clashing light and senseless form made his head ache as always. His dazzled eyes strained to see how it could be night down here with all that light up there. But of course nobody really understood the Chaos

He looked back down, disoriented and dizzy and said without further thought. “Earlier today, I told how a reporter found an old woman who knew some evil secret about a place and a picture of her as a young woman. Here, as I promised, is the next part of that story.”

That was probably best: don’t mention Arizona again, just pick up the story. With a start he remembered that Tiffany had made the memory of his trial fall out of reality. Did anybody remember the first part of his story?

Oh well, the Planners encouraged long, rambling, multi-part sagas, analyzing every word for hints about the Demon world. If audience members got lost, let them fall asleep or get up and wander on.

Tiffany still wasn’t there as he spoke and slipped into a cold day in the Arizona desert…

It was a high-desert winter day but the rock under my hand was warm and red as trapped desert sun.

The old woman, bundled in shapeless clothes and felt hat, was behind me. We reached an unreadable signpost and she nudged me, pointing up a boulder-strewn gouge in the cliff face.

Up the scree slope we climbed. I had the strangest impression that the rocks were made of half-baked clay, almost soft enough to shape. We found a faint trail and then lost it again.

She nudged me from behind again and pointed to a short, steep cliff. As I hauled myself up, I wished she’d just walk in front of me and lead.

When we topped it I had to lean over and put my hands on my knees but she was tough as mesquite; I swear she walked up that cliff face.

When I could think again, I saw her on the bluff, wrapped in her blanket, looking out at the harsh, clear day. I straightened and took several deep breaths. She jerked her head to her left. More climbing, but we were almost at the top and the slope was gentle.

Century plants and a couple of cacti decorated the red face. You could see for a hundred miles. Her little house (Giles wasn’t going to call it a “hogan” again) was down there somewhere. I looked to see the smoke curling from her chimney, but that was silly: she’d have put the fire out for the day. I kept walking, hearing her behind me.

The sky, clean and blue and peaceful, vaulted impossibly high and pure.

Her hand pressed against my back. I turned.

“This is where I sat.”

She was like a statue. I looked at the little nook where we stood: it was floored with pebbles and red powder which would cake my clothes if I sat. She’d been naked in that long-ago picture. I pictured her brown buttocks coated with red like a valentine heart and I know I blushed. But she didn’t seem to notice, thank God.

She pointed down a gradual slope, not in the direction we had come. “That’s where he was, last I saw him. That’s where he was, right there. Couldn’t take a picture with a naked woman in it, ‘less he had something else in it to make it art. That father his.” She still wasn’t crying.

I looked around in the windswept silence. Yes, he could have backed in that direction for quite a distance. Eventually he would have come to cliffs and he surely hadn’t been fool enough to back over the cliff like the coyote in a Chuck Jones cartoon.

No, something had taken him. Or somebody.

I shivered. I suddenly wondered why I’d thought we’d be any safer up here in the daylight. The silence was too intense. The pure cold sky was hard and breakable.

Something happened between one breath and the next…