Title: Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)

Author: E.A. Week

E-mail: [email protected]

Summary: When an old friend is brutally murdered, Charlie and Stella Croker find themselves caught in a mysterious web of supernatural intrigue.

Category: Based on the movie The Italian Job; crossover galore!

Feedback: Letters of comment are always welcome! Loved it? Hated it? Let me know why!

Disclaimer: Copyrights to all characters in this story belong to their respective creators, production companies, and studios. I'm just borrowing them, honest!

: )  The story title is shamelessly stolen from David Bowie.

Datclaimer: This story is rated PG-13 for fight scenes and some profanity.

Prologue

Music poured through the hall, now a crashing wave, then light and shimmering, pulsating, singing, soaring up majestically overhead.  Beneath its spell, hundreds of souls were transported, each to its own secret paradise.

Finally, inevitably, the music reached its crescendo and came to a precise, magnificent conclusion.  Applause swept through the rows, the crowd standing on its feet, thundering its delight.  On the podium, Bernard Haitink stood, bowing graciously, accepting the ovation.  The orchestra stood also, glistening with sweat, glowing with pleasure.

The applause died a lingering death, and the crowds began to shift out of the vast hall, murmuring and laughing.  Two people seated near the center front didn't move, savoring the afterglow of the concert.

"I wish it didn't have to end," Stella Croker groaned.

"It doesn't."  Her husband, Charlie, grinned.  "Any music store'll be more than happy to sell you the CD."

"Fff!"  Stella tossed her little beaded handbag in the air, catching it on its descent.  "It's not the same, and you know it."

Charlie shifted comfortably.  "This was a great idea," he said, playing with a strand of her golden-blonde hair.

"Hey, I'm just full of great ideas," she said, leaning over to kiss him.  "And the next one starts with a nightcap back at the hotel."

"Can't argue with that one."  Charlie stood, helping Stella to her feet.  They slid along the row of seats and out to the aisle.  In Charlie's head, he still heard the surging chords of Rimsky-Korsakoff's "Russian Easter Overture," the final selection on the program.  In Tanglewood, the soft caress of night air was nothing short of magical.

"Stella?  Stella Bridger?"

The pair turned.  Coming up the aisle behind them, leaning heavily on a polished wooden cane, was an old man moving at a remarkable clip for his age.  Charlie stared.  The man looked close to a hundred: hunched and completely bald, painfully thin, skin hanging loose on his gaunt frame.  But behind thick glasses, his eyes burned with intelligence.

"Professor Rosenstein!  Oh, my goodness!"

Rosenstein reached the Crokers and held out his arms to embrace Stella.  She hugged him gently. "This is so wonderful!"

"Indeed it is!  Little Stella Bridger!  The last time I saw you, you were ten years old.  You've grown up some since then."

She laughed.  "It's Stella Croker now.  This is my husband, Charlie.  Charlie, this is Professor David Rosenstein, an old friend of my father's."

Rosenstein's eyes went wide.  "Charlie Croker?" he repeated.  "You worked with Stella's father?"

"Uh, yeah," Charlie said uneasily, glancing at his wife.

"Wonderful!"  Rosenstein shook Charlie's hand.  "He was a good man—I owed him a debt I could never repay."  Mysteriously, he didn't elaborate, and if he had any qualms about how John Bridger had made a living, he didn't show it.  "So, how did you enjoy the concert?"

"It was wonderful," said Charlie.

"Beautiful," Stella nodded.  "We're on vacation in the Berkshires, and it seemed a pity not to catch the BSO at Tanglewood."

"Indeed."  Rosenstein leaned closer to the Crokers, and in a hushed voice, he said, "There's another concert that I think might intrigue you."  His eyes gleamed.  "It's smaller than this one—intimate—beautiful—but completely silent.  Nobody's heard it for thirteen years."  He straightened up, fished into his jacket pocket, and extracted a business card and a pen.  "This is where I'm staying," he said as he wrote.  "If you care to drop by later tonight, I'll be more than happy to tell you about it.  Say 11:30?"

"I must admit you've piqued my curiosity," laughed Stella.

"Will 11:30 be too late?" asked Charlie.

"Not at all!  I'll put some coffee on."  Rosenstein pressed the card into Charlie's hand, giving his fingers a surprisingly strong squeeze as he did.  The look on his face was intense, full of hidden meaning.

Then he was an old man again, waving benignly to some companions.

"When I shake them loose, come join me," he whispered to the Crokers.  "We have many interesting things to discuss."  And he limped back up the aisle.

*****

"Could he possibly have gotten any more cryptic?" asked Charlie.

Stella laughed, tossing him an amused glance as she deftly steered her Cooper Mini across the night roads.  Traffic had thinned out at last, and they were heading toward the villas where Professor Rosenstein was staying.

"So what was that favor he can never repay?"

"My father recovered a vase stolen from a museum in Baltimore," Stella said.  "It was Greek, solid gold from Thrace, and dated back to about 800 BC.  The craftsmanship was exquisite.  Dad used some of his contacts and recovered it.  He and Professor Rosenstein were great friends all their lives, but that sealed it in stone."  Stella's voice grew melancholy.  "He wrote me a three-page letter when my father died.  It was beautiful.  I still have it."

Charlie reached over and squeezed her hand.

She shifted, slowing the car.  "Here we are."

The entrance to the Lebanon Villas was well-marked and well-lit.  The Mini cruised along the twisting, hilly road, and Charlie admired the beautifully appointed little bungalows, set in among the fragrant pines.  Stella took care with the speed bumps.

"Over there… up that hill on the right."

"Not too shabby," Charlie remarked.

"About a thousand dollars a night worth of shabby," Stella said.  They coasted up to the top of the hill.

"Hey, who's that?" Charlie asked idly.  A tall man in a neat suit stood outside Rosenstein's bungalow.  Charlie watched him knock, then open the door.  "Is he expecting someone besides us?"

"I don't know," said Stella, bewildered.

Charlie felt like a gong had rung in his head.  He bolted from the Mini even before it stopped moving and vaulted up the walkway to the open door.  "Professor Rosenstein!" he shouted.  Behind him, Stella parked the car and sprinted up the walk, her heels clicking on the flagstones.

Charlie heard a brief cry of terror, then a horrible, bright snapping noise as he burst through the door.  The intruder stood over the body of Professor Rosenstein, which lay on the floor, the head flopped over at an unnatural angle.

"You piece of shit!" Charlie screamed.  He grabbed the nearest weapon at hand, Rosenstein's walking stick, and advanced upon the assailant, a russet-haired man in his late thirties.

The killer shook his head slightly, and in an instant, his features shifted hideously.  Charlie stared at the most grotesque visage he had ever seen, but rather than shocking him into immobility, it only fueled his rage.  Brandishing the stick, he lunged forward.

The thing's yellow eyes went wide, and in evident panic, it spun about and ran for a rear window.  Charlie gave chase, but the creature moved with phenomenal speed, throwing itself through a window.  The glass shattered, exploding outward.  When Charlie reached the windowsill, he watched as the thing—which had dropped unharmed two stories to the ground below—took off at a run for the woods and vanished.

Part I.

"Charlie… oh, my God!"

He spun about, finding Stella on her knees beside Rosenstein's body.

"He's dead," she choked.

"That fucker broke his neck," Charlie swore savagely, dropping down at her side.  His mind still reeled, unable to comprehend exactly what he'd seen.

"What was that thing?" she asked.

"You saw?"

"Just for second.  Oh, God!"

The corner of something brightly colored beneath Rosenstein's shoulder caught Charlie's eye.  Gently, he shifted the old man's torso and slid the item out from under him.  It seemed to be a thick magazine, with a picture of a stained-glass window on the front.  A post-it had been stuck on the cover, with "Charlie and Stella" written on it in a thin, spidery script.

"He was gonna give this to us," Charlie realized, staring down at it.

Stella pressed his arm.  "We should go," she said.  "If we're found here, it could look bad."

Charlie knew she was right.  If the police found him, they would only need to run the most basic background check, and he would face decades in the slammer.  He stood up, found a box of Kleenex, and used a couple of tissues to wipe his fingerprints off the cane.  Stella gazed down at Rosenstein's body, weeping silently.

"Come on," he whispered, and gently guided her back out to the car.  Charlie hadn't touched anything else, so there was nothing more to wipe.  He took the keys from Stella and drove them back to their hotel.  Stella clutched the magazine, saying nothing the entire ride.  Charlie wondered if she, like him, was thinking of John Bridger's untimely demise.

*****

In their suite, Charlie ordered hot tea with lemon from room service, and when it arrived, he doctored each cup generously with whiskey from the mini-bar.  They curled together silently on the sofa, drinking.  Over and over, Charlie replayed the scene at the bungalow in his mind, wondering if there was anything he could have done differently and despairing in the knowledge that there wasn't.

He couldn't stop thinking about the thing that had murdered Rosenstein.  What the hell was it, with its monstrous face and ability to drop two stories to the ground uninjured?

After nearly an hour of simply sitting, Stella got up and went into the bathroom.  When she emerged, she had about her that look of resolve Charlie remembered so well.  She picked up the magazine that neither of them had had the heart to examine and pulled up closer to one of the bright lamps.

Charlie slid over beside her.  Carefully, Stella removed the post-it.  The last thing he ever wrote, Charlie thought.  Our names.  Silently, they studied the cover photo.

"That's beautiful," Stella said.  "It's amazing."

Charlie nodded, entranced by the image of a large, circular stained-glass window.  It had been photographed with light streaming in behind it, setting each tiny pane of colored glass afire.  He felt for a moment that he had never truly perceived color until now, that he was seeing the reds and blues and greens and golds and purples all for the first time.

Lettering at the bottom of the photo read, "Schuyler family estate auction, October 10-13, 2003."

"I'll be damned," Charlie said.  "It's an auction catalog."

Stella opened the cover.  Inside, a brief note from a representative of an upstate New York auction house stated that they were pleased to be overseeing such an extensive auction of so many beautiful items.  On the first page was a photo of the house itself, an elaborate Italianate mansion, modeled on the Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island.

Stella turned pages, and for two hours, she and Charlie were lost, marveling at the exquisite photographs.  The number and variety of items to be auctioned staggered the imagination: furniture, china, silver, carpets, stunning crystal chandeliers, electronic equipment, appliances, a Steinway concert grand piano, a Stradivarius violin, and three cars, including a 1960 Corvette.

"Jesus," Charlie whispered.  Many items had been photographed from two or three angles, in astonishing detail, and each piece was accompanied by a thorough description of its origins and history.

"So why did Professor Rosenstein want to talk to us about this auction?" asked Stella.  "Was he planning to bid on something?"

"The way he squeezed my hand and looked at me, I swore he was thinking more in terms of engaging my professional services."

"Steal something?" she asked skeptically.  "He had piles of money, and he could've afforded to bid on almost anything in this catalog."

"I don't know," Charlie sighed.  "It was just something in his expression.  And what was that he said about a silent concert?"

"A silent concert that nobody's heard for thirteen years?"  Stella shook her head.  "Unless he was talking about the Steinway or the Stradivarius, I can't see the connection."  She pondered the situation.  "Do you think that thing—whatever it was—killed him to keep him from telling us about the auction?"

"When I came in on him—it—he was next to the body, reaching for the catalog.  I'd swear it."

"Could he have been at Tanglewood, and overheard our conversation?"

"He was dressed like he might have been there," Charlie agreed.  "It makes sense.  He might have been following Rosenstein around, planning to kill him anyway.  I can't believe it was pure coincidence that he got to Rosenstein five seconds before we did."

"I wonder what Professor Rosenstein knew about this auction."

"We could start by learning about the Schuyler family," Charlie said.  "Maybe Rosenstein knew them."  He flipped out his cellular and speed-dialed one of the numbers in the memory.  "And when you need information in a hurry, there's only one guy to call."

*****

"Hey, Napster."

"Charlie?"

Charlie could barely hear Lyle's voice over the blaring music.  A moment later, the noise dropped to a bearable volume.  "Hey, Charlie, what's up?"

"You got a few minutes?  I need a favor from you."

"Sure!"  The note of glee in Lyle's voice could not be mistaken.  He was itching for some fun.

"I'm in upstate New York.  We ran into an old friend of Stella's, Professor David Rosenstein, who apparently wanted to talk to us about a big estate auction over Columbus Day weekend.  He was pretty cryptic about it, and before we could get more details, he was murdered.  Practically right in front of us."

After a moment of silence, Lyle whispered, "Oh, man!  Charlie!"  He sounded genuinely stricken; as with the Crokers, John's death was never too far from his mind.  "Is Stella okay?"

"Yeah, she's shaky, but she's okay.  We've been looking over the estate catalog.  I want some information on the Schuyler family.  The house is in Haines Falls, New York, in the Catskills."

"I'll get right on it," Lyle promised.

Charlie set down his phone and turned to Stella, who sat flicking absently through the pages of the catalog.

"He'll call us back," he said.  She nodded.  He went into the bathroom to wash up.  In the mirror, his face looked old and drawn, closer to forty-five than to Charlie's actual thirty-five.  He averted his gaze and finished washing, then went back out to Stella.

Twenty minutes passed, then thirty.  At last the cellular bleeped.

"Man, you sure know how to pick 'em, don't you?" said Lyle.

"What'd you find?"

"A hornet's nest, my friend.  I need to do some more digging, but I'd bet money that Professor Rosenstein was killed to keep him quiet.  But never fear, if there's dirty family secrets to expose, the Napster's your man."

"When do you think you'll have something?"

"Tomorrow morning, your time."

"Okay.  I appreciate it."

"My pleasure."

*****

They went to bed right away.  Stella dropped immediately into exhausted slumber.  Charlie lay by her side, listening to her breathe, unable to drop off, his mind awhirl with guilt and confusion.

Sometime in the small hours of the morning, he slipped, not down into sleep, but seemingly sideways.  He blinked, startled to find himself once again beside that frigid Alpine lake.  Only now the waters were blue and tranquil rather than cold and black; around him, the meadows bloomed with tiny blue and white flowers.  The sun shone, and a soft wind rippled the surface of the water.

"Beautiful, isn't it?"

Charlie turned his head.  "John?" he said, laughing out loud in amazement.  "Is it you?"

"Who the hell do you think it is, Charlie?"  John sat beside his protégé, lanky, tall, gray-haired, exactly as Charlie remembered him.

"But… you're dead."

"You haven't seen me in two years, and that's the best you can do?"

Charlie laughed again, shaking his head at the unreality of it all.  John opened his coat and shirt.  The skin of his chest was unblemished.

"It's just scar tissue, Charlie.  It fades.  It all fades."

"I miss you," said Charlie softly.

"Yeah, I guess you probably do.  I miss you guys."

Charlie looked about the meadow.  "Is this heaven?" he asked cautiously.

John rumbled with laughter.  "Now, you're being banal," he teased.

"So why are you here in my head like this?  I know I must be dreaming, because this can't possibly be real."

"Why do you think?"

Charlie watched the diamond-like glitter of sunlight on the lake.  "Is it because of Professor Rosenstein?"

"I'm guessing you're not feeling too great right now," said John.  "You've had your eyes opened to something most people never see, never have to deal with, something they can easily pretend doesn't exist.  But you've seen it, and you're trying to process the experience, trying to make it fit with the world you already know."

"That sums it up pretty neatly," Charlie agreed.

"Accept it, Charlie.  The faster you can accept it, the longer you'll stay alive."

"So, what do I do about the auction Rosenstein wanted to talk to me about?"

John stood up, hands deep in his coat pockets.  "You know what to do, Charlie."

*****

The ceiling overhead was smooth, bland, vanilla-colored.  Charlie stared at it for a full minute before he realized he was awake.  Beside him, Stella slept on.  The clock told him it was almost nine.

On the nightstand beside him, his cellular bleeped.  Quickly Charlie answered the summons, swinging out of bed and padding into the sitting room.  He closed the door to the bedroom and said, "Yeah?"

"Hey, it's me.  Not too early, is it?"

"No, it's perfect.  I just woke up."

"You sitting down?" Lyle asked.  "This is gonna take some time."

Charlie sat on the sofa.  "Talk to me."

"Okay, the Schuyler family.  Old money—really old.  There's been Schuylers in New York since the Dutch settled it, literally.  The branch we're interested in made a small fortune in the railroads.  They built the place in the Catskills, copying the Vanderbilts' 'summer cottage' in Newport.  They were a kind of artsy, intellectual bunch."

"Gotcha."

"This line of the family ended with an only daughter, who died young, about eighteen years ago.  She left the estate to her husband.  You ever hear of Norman Osborn?"

The name seemed vaguely familiar.  "I think so… didn't he die recently?"

"Yeah, he did.  He was a scientist and a businessman, a really brilliant guy.  A lot of us geeky types kinda looked up to him.  He used some of his late wife's money to found OsCorp—"

"I remember this now," said Charlie.  "From the business pages—the company was dissolved after he died."

"It was on shaky ground even before then.  Osborn had a big contract with the military, but he wasn't producing the results they wanted fast enough, and they were threatening to pull his funding.  The day after they lowered the boom, Osborn's lab was found vandalized, and one of his assistants was murdered."

"What was he researching?" asked Charlie.

"He was trying to artificially enhance human strength."

"You mean create a biologically pumped-up Superman?"

"Super soldier," Lyle corrected.  "That's what the military wanted.  But the results Osborn was getting were so erratic they were unusable.  The more he enhanced strength in the lab animals, the more violent and uncontrollable they got.  One rhesus ripped open its cage and tore some of the other monkeys to shreds.  It had to be put down."

"Jesus," Charlie muttered.

"His other big project was trying to repress neural impulses to the frontal lobes."

"Napster, I cut most of my science classes.  Can you translate that?"

"It's the part of your brain that controls your conscience—you know: guilt, regret, altruism?  All that good stuff?"

A cold chill went through Charlie.  "So, Osborn was trying to create the perfect killing machine?" he asked.  "Something with super strength and no conscience?"

"He tried, but it didn't work.  The animals he enhanced were uncontrollable, and since an army of soldiers that won't obey orders is pretty useless, the military wrote off the whole thing as a failure."

"I won't ask how you found out all this."

"I called in some favors," Lyle said modestly.

"So, Osborn died?"

"About a year after that whole debacle."

"Wasn't he murdered?"  Charlie vaguely recalled the story; it was around the time of John's death, and he hadn't paid the news much attention.

"The perp is still at large."

Charlie pondered all this.  "So, who's auctioning the house?"

"His son, Harold, aka Harry.  He's never lived there, and maintaining the place costs a small fortune, even by the standards of his bottomless bank account.  So he's getting rid of it."

"What's he do for a living?  Is he in research, like his father?"

Lyle barked with laughter.  "You must be joking," he said.  "He flunked out of like six private schools before graduating with no particular distinction from a middling high school in New York.  He didn't even try to get into college.  He's settled into a career as a young philanthropist—big donations to colleges, libraries, hospitals.  All in his father's name."

"You think he's trying to make up for something, protect his dad's memory, something like that?"

"It seems like it.  From what I gather, he's very defensive of his father's image, won't hear a word against him.  Even the auction is for charity.  Harry's lawyers told him that an auction'll bring in more money than an outright sale, because the bidding'll drive the prices up.  The proceeds are going to fund a state-of-the-art research hospital.  In guess-whose name."

"Sounds like he's trying to prove something."

"Osborn was involved in work that was of pretty dicey ethics," Lyle said.  "It's possible that Junior either knows this or suspects it, and he's trying to kind of clean up his dad's name posthumously."

"These lab experiments," Charlie asked suddenly.  "Could someone have replicated them?"

"I dunno, man.  Officially, the military sealed all of Osborn's research notes and files."

"The reason I ask is that whatever killed David Rosenstein didn't look human to me."  Charlie described to Lyle how the thing's face had changed so horribly.  "It went flying though a glass window, dropped two stories to the ground, and took off running for the woods."

"Oh, man!  Charlie—listen, whatever you do, be careful."  Lyle was deadly serious.  "When they found Osborn's body, he was sliced almost in half.  It wasn't pretty."

Charlie was silent.  He stared down at the catalog cover.  "Yeah," he said finally.

"So, what are you gonna do?"

You know what to do, Charlie.  "I'm gonna go to this auction and see if I can figure out what the hell Rosenstein was talking about."

"Hey, you need help?"

Charlie hesitated.  His group was disbanded, and this wasn't officially a job.  He couldn't plan for it, because he didn't know what he was looking for.  But he couldn't ignore the situation and do nothing, no matter how dangerous it might be.  Did he have the right to drag his friends into it, too?

"Only if you want," Charlie decided.

"I'm on the next plane."

"The auction's not for a few weeks.  But you know what you could do?  Come to New York and tap Osborn's line for a couple of weeks."

"Consider it done.  What about Handsome Rob and Left Ear?"

"I'll think about it," said Charlie.

"Okay, cool.  I'll keep digging, see what I can find."

"Sounds good.  Keep me posted."

"Sure thing."

They disconnected.  Charlie looked up to find Stella standing in the doorway, arms folded, hugging herself.

"We're going to the auction?" she asked.

"Yeah, do you mind?"

She shook her head.  "If you didn't suggest it, I was going to."

Charlie went and held her.  "We'll find out what he wanted our help with," he said.  "I promise."

Part II.

They returned to Philadelphia after that.  Stella kept working, but Charlie was at loose ends.  He'd been like this since his "retirement."  For one thing, he was too young simply to do nothing; for another, he harbored a deep craving for risk, and for the first time since childhood, his day-to-day life didn't involve some kind of gamble.  He was bored.

He had tried to keep himself occupied with legitimate activities.  The sale of the gold had given him and Stella plenty of money, so he amused himself by finding ways to invest their millions.  The stock market was weak, so the Crokers had become real estate moguls, buying lucrative properties all over the country.  At Stella's suggestion, they were backing a handful of Broadway shows, and now Charlie wanted to buy a racehorse.  But still, he felt stifled.  He looked forward to October, counting the days.

At the beginning of the month, Lyle arrived in New York, took up residence in a modest hotel, and began tapping Harry Osborn's phone line.  The results were nothing short of depressing.

"He spends all freakin' day on the phone with lawyers," Lyle groaned when he reported in to Charlie.  "God, the kid's a young Donald Trump, and he's so boring I can't stand listening to him, the pathetic schmuck!"

A couple of days later, Lyle called again.  "He's having his friends over for pizza.  They rented all three Jurassic Park movies.  I don't think I can stand the excitement."

He did some digging into Osborn's finances.  For someone with so much money, Harry lived relatively frugally.  He resided in the luxurious high-rise condominium that had once been his father's, maintaining a small staff, but otherwise he spent very little on himself.  On the occasion of his twentieth birthday, he had hired a $5000 call girl, but he hadn't indulged himself since then.  He held the lease on another Manhattan apartment, which he rented to a friend for $400 a month.  When Lyle mentioned the figure, Charlie was sure he must have left off a zero.

"You mean $4000?"

"No, $400.  The poor bastard only makes about twenty grand a year, so it looks like Harry's cutting him a break."

Other than that generosity, Lyle could find nothing of interest about the young heir.  He struck both Lyle and Charlie as a painfully lonely kid, one with too much money and no real purpose in life.  Charlie understood how that felt.  Thank God he had Stella.

*****

On the morning of Thursday, October 10, the Crokers piled their bags into the back of Stella's Mini and headed north.  They used Route 287 to skirt around New York City, then picked up Route 87, staying on it for two hours.  By the time they picked up Route 32, outside Saugerties, they were both tired and stopped for an early supper.  Stella had driven as far as New York, and Charlie as far as Saugerties, so Stella took the wheel again for the final leg.

The secondary road provided a welcome respite after the speed of the highway—even for Stella, who always enjoyed fast driving.  Around them, autumn cloaked the Catskills in brilliant hues of red, yellow, and orange.

About halfway between Palenville and Haines Falls, Stella pulled over at an elaborate stone church.  "Our Lady of the Mountains," the sign read.  Charlie shot his wife a quizzical expression.

"The grotto is famous," she explained.  "It's like a local natural wonder.  C'mon."

Outside the car, the air held a tangy, crisp sent.  Charlie inhaled, drinking in the melancholy beauty of the season.  Over to one side of the church lay a well-tended garden, stunning even in October, the colors of the late flowers contrasting wonderfully with the autumn foliage.

A small, clear stream bubbled through the garden.  Over a wooden footbridge, the Crokers came to the centerpiece of the grotto: a sculpture of the Virgin Mary, sheltered by a stone hat-shell.  Unlike most western depictions of Mary—fair, modest, gentle—this one radiated a raw, primal power that Charlie found vaguely unsettling.  Her complexion was dark, her expression intense, her eyes boring into the viewer, and her gaze seemed to follow one about.  One arm was slightly extended forward, as if beckoning.  She stood on a half-moon sickle.

They read a small plaque mounted beside the shrine.  In 1927, a local farmer had seen a vision of Mary beside a stream that flowed through his property.  He'd been so inspired that he had bequeathed his lands to the Church, with the express request that the stream be preserved as a special shrine.  The water flowing through the grotto was said to be blessed, and was reportedly responsible for any number of miracles.

Stella took a taper and lit one of the candles at the Virgin's feet.  Her expression was brooding.  "For Professor Rosenstein," she said softly.

"He was Jewish."

Stella nodded her chin at the statue.  "So was she."

They didn't tarry much longer.  The place had a feeling of elemental power that Charlie disliked.  As he and Stella returned over the footbridge, he felt the statue's eyes boring into the back of his head.

*****

They had taken a room in a lovely country inn, booked solid with foliage tourists and people in town for the auction.  Lyle had reserved a room in the best local hotel, unable to do without modern technological amenities for more than a few minutes.  When Stella telephoned the hotel, he hadn't yet arrived, so she left him a message to meet her and Charlie at the Schuyler mansion.

Charlie checked in with Left Ear and Handsome Rob, both staying at the Crokers' expense in an Albany hotel.  If needed, they could be in Haines Falls within two hours, especially given the way Handsome Rob drove.

They ate at a small German restaurant recommended by the woman who ran the inn.  Stella was especially pleased, pronouncing every wunderbar, much to the gratification of the restaurant's owner.   Burping up the memories of sauerkraut and wiener schnitzel, they returned to the inn to wash and change.

Charlie donned a new suit, even wearing a necktie, which as a rule he disliked.  A few minutes later, Stella slipped out of the bathroom, wearing slim black trousers and a cashmere sleeveless turtleneck in soft faun.  Sparkling against the fabric was the diamond necklace that John had sent her from Venice.

"Hey!"  At times like this, Stella's beauty took Charlie's breath away, and he again marveled at the good fortune of having her in his life.  He touched the necklace.  "It looks good," he said.  Stella wore it only on special occasions.

"Thanks," she smiled.  Charlie helped her into her stylish leather jacket, and they went down to her Mini.  Darkness had fallen completely, and its inky weight pressed in against the car windows as they whipped along the road.  Charlie shrank down slightly into the collar of his jacket.  He had a lifelong city dweller's innate distrust of nature: it was too big, too wild, too uncontrollable, and too full of things he didn't understand.

Stella drove along Route 23A, apparently unconcerned, following the directions in the back of the auction catalog.  Two miles outside Tannersville, a sign directed them onto a private road.  Half a mile up sat a small guardhouse, where a hired security guard waved them through a pair of tall, ornate metal gates.

"Welcome to Manderly," said Stella.

Charlie made a noncommittal voice, his eyes darting from side to side.  Too many damn trees clung too closely to the sides of the winding road, creating a dark tunnel.  Overhead, stars sparkled in the indigo sky.

The house loomed up suddenly ahead of them like a crouching beast.  Lights blazed from the windows.  As they swept up the curving drive, a black-jacketed valet with a flashlight directed them to a wide gravel parking lot over to the right side of the house.

"Jesus," Charlie muttered.  The mansion, which looked so dramatic on its seaside cliff in Rhode Island, seemed weirdly out of place in the Catskills, a hulking granite monstrosity.  The Crokers walked up the drive to the main terrace, where a two-leveled loggia created an airy, open façade for the front of the house.

"Feels like a mausoleum," Stella complained in a low voice.  Charlie nodded.  Their footsteps clattered loudly on the flagstones.

A smiling young woman in black and white greeted them at the door, offering them another catalog.  Charlie and Stella slipped inside.

They gaped.  Even Charlie, who had helped himself to the possessions of many a wealthy homeowner, was dazzled.  The ceiling in the great hall soared overhead, a gorgeous trompe l'oeil painting of a blue sky, framed in gilt-trimmed, gorgeously molded plaster.  The floors were marble, the light fixtures glittered with crystal, and elegant paintings and tapestries hung from the walls.  High in the west wall was the rose window, which the afternoon sun would doubtless set afire in a blaze of color.  In one corner, a string trio quietly played a tune that Charlie recognized as Pachelbel's Canon in D.

More black-and-white clad employees circulated about, some offering hors d'oeuvres and champagne, while others led groups of guests up the broad staircase for tours.  The auction-goers seemed a mostly affluent crowd, quietly oohing over the treasures, poring over the catalog, or talking into cellular phones in hushed voices.

Charlie and Stella made a casual circuit of the first floor, pretending to look things over.  Off the main foyer on the left was a formal dining room, and behind it, the vast, beautiful library.  From the catalog, Charlie knew the collection included many valuable first editions; he hoped to pick up a few for Left Ear.  On the right side of the great hall lay a drawing room, and behind it, a music room.  Here sat the Steinway, with a number of other lovely instruments also displayed, some of them antiques.  The Stradivarius occupied a place of honor in a glass case.

This room interested Charlie and Stella the most because of Professor Rosenstein's cryptic remarks about a concert.  But nothing in the collection gave them even a clue: the instruments, for all their monetary value, were fundamentally unremarkable.  According to the catalog notes, nothing in the collection had any kind of mysterious or disreputable origin.

Back out in the main hall, Charlie nudged Stella's arm.  "The heir apparent," he said under his breath.  Stella followed the line of his gaze and looked.

Harry Osborn stood near the foot of the stairs, greeting people.  He wore a tuxedo that, with his youth and good looks, should have been splendid on him.  But it looked like a fool's motley on an Amish farmer because he wore the clothes without confidence or pleasure.  His face was fixed in a tight, social mask, more like a rictus of pain than a smile.

He only seemed to relax in the presence of two kids his own age; these must be his friends.  One was a strikingly pretty girl with unnaturally brilliant red hair.  Her simple blue dress could have come off the rack at any department store, but so great was her charm and self-possession that the garment seemed like some dazzling new creation of Madison Avenue.

The second friend was a dark-haired young man who appeared, if anything, even more gloomy than Osborn.  He had a slouched, caved-in posture, his head hunched so far down into the collar of his suit that he almost appeared to have no neck.  He seemed awkward and embarrassed, but also vaguely irritated; Charlie watched him shoot a long, baleful expression at the string trio.

Another tour group was forming, so Charlie and Stella joined it.  Their guide was an enthusiastic historian, sketching the tale of the house for the auction-goers.  Charlie had heard most of this information from Lyle, so he only half-listened, instead concentrating on the layout of the rooms, the furnishings, and the decorations.  His professional thief's eyes made a quick inventory.  On the whole, there was nothing in this house he would ever trouble himself to steal.  Literally everything in it was either a reproduction or mass-produced.  He saw nothing original or unique.

A hallway leading to the northeast corner of the house had been roped off.  "Where does that go?" a woman asked.

"Mr. Osborn and his friends are staying in that wing," the guide explained, smoothly steering them away.  They trooped down to the basement, where they peered into the kitchen ("all restaurant quality equipment") and concluded the tour in the recreation room, the only really modern part of the house.  The guests admired the home theater, the gorgeous wooden bar with a ceiling-to-floor mirror on the wall behind it, a collection of casual, leather-upholstered furniture, and all manner of games and toys.

"Now, this is a room I could get comfy in," Charlie said.

"It's the only room that doesn't feel like a museum," agreed Stella as they were shepherded back up the stairs.  "Did you notice that painting in the gentleman's study?"

"The shipwreck at sea?" Charlie asked, brushing her arm lightly.  "Wanna bid on it?"

"No, I just thought it was interesting."

"Yeah."  He knew perfectly well, of course, that Stella would have realized there was a safe behind the painting.  It was the oldest trick in the world to cover a safe.  Absently, he wondered if there was any way he and Stella could double back and try to open it.  Not now, with so many people milling about.

He spotted Lyle almost immediately, the bright red head bobbing along at the level of other people's shoulders, one hand clutching an auction catalog.  Charlie moved toward him, but before he could reach Lyle's side, someone else beat him to the mark.

Stella tugged on his arm.  "Mingle," she murmured in his ear.  They circled the main foyer, accepting hors d'oeuvres and champagne from a waiter.  Charlie kept flicking glances in Lyle's direction.  He couldn't hear the conversation, but he heard Lyle's high-pitched, giggling laugh.

"Shit," Charlie said under his breath.  "That's Osborn's friend."

"Does Lyle know him?"

"We'll find out," said Charlie grimly.  "So much for our cover as anonymous auction-goers."

"So, we improvise," said Stella.  "C'mon."  She made brief eye contact with Lyle, then she and Charlie left through the front door and went out onto the broad patio.  Here and there, couples sat, and solitary people stood talking quietly into cellular phones, all of them poring over the catalog.

Charlie and Stella found an unoccupied stretch of balustrade and pretended to do the same, until Lyle joined them.

"Hey, Napster," said Charlie in a low voice.

"Hey, Charlie, Stella."  Lyle hopped up and sat on the balustrade.

"So, did you know that guy?"  Charlie asked conversationally.

"Yeah, he went to a science camp where I was a counselor," Lyle said.  "Jesus, I wouldn't have recognized him in a million years.  It was the summer after my first year at Northeastern, a camp that MIT ran for junior high kids from low-income families.  He was one of them.  His name's Peter Parker."

"He's friends with His Nibs," said Stella.

"Yeah, I know," said Lyle.  "He's the $400 a month tenant."

"Which means our anonymity is blown," Charlie sighed.  "Unless we avoid each other all weekend."

"I wouldn't worry about him," Lyle shrugged.  "He's harmless."

"He knows who you are, he's not harmless," Charlie said in a low voice.

Lyle was shaking his head. "I still wouldn't worry.  He's pathetic.  He was the dork the dorks made fun of.  You know it's bad when a bunch of kids with slide rules and graphing calculators gang up on one of their own.  And you know what upset Pete more than anything?  They broke his glasses, and he cried because he didn't want his aunt and uncle to have to pay for a new pair.  Finally, I took him out and got him a new pair myself, and know what he made me do?  He made me get the exact same stupid-ass frames because if we got something different, his aunt and uncle would find out that the first pair was broken."

"He doesn't have glasses now," Charlie observed.

"He must've got contacts," Lyle responded.

"Guys," said Stella.  "Look at this."  She had turned to the back of the catalog.  "I knew the name sounded familiar."  A small note at the foot of the page read, All photographs copyright 2003 by Peter Parker.

"He did the photography," said Charlie, flipping the pages, looking at the pictures with new eyes.

"Yeah, he and his camera were inseparable," Lyle recalled.  "I used to swear the thing grew right out of his hand."

"He's talented," observed Stella.

"He's in pretty tight with Osborn," said Charlie.  "Maybe we can use that to our advantage.  If Parker photographed everything in the house, he might've noticed something, even if he wasn't consciously aware of it."  Charlie changed his tactic.  "Sweet-talk him, Napster.  Cameras, computers, music, whatever his weakness is."  He waved the catalog.  "Flatter him a little about this.  Don't lay it on too thick, but let him know he's got real stuff."  Charlie had always employed geeks, and he knew how well they responded to flattery and attention, Lyle included.

Lyle nodded.  "Okay, I'm on it."

"Well, well," a voice drawled from across the patio.  "Aren't we a guilty-looking trio of conspirators?"

Charlie hopped up off the balustrade.  "Jack!" he laughed.  "I didn't see you coming."  He pretended to scan the yard with one hand held above his eyes in an exaggerated searching gesture.  "What, you didn't land your private jet on the lawn?"

"Oh, I'm over the jets, Charlie," said Jack.  "I'm more into helicopters these days."  He held out a hand to Stella.  "Mrs. Croker, it's so delightful to see you again."

"Hey, Jack," she laughed, standing up to hug him.  "You're all fuzzy."  She briefly touched his beard.

"Aah, well, it's getting cold; I need to keep me face warm," Jack said, slipping into an outlandish Scots dialect.  He could change accents at will.

"Jack, I don't think you've ever met the Napster," said Charlie.  "Napster, this is Jack O'Connell."

"That's Jonathan Richard Alexander O'Connell II," Jack corrected archly.

"Oooh, should I bow?" Lyle grinned, wiggling his fingers in the air.

"Nah, don't bother.  Are you the real Napster?"

Lyle smiled modestly.  "Yes, I'm the real Napster.  Didn't you see my picture on the cover of Wired?"

"I must've missed that issue," Jack breezed.  "You know how the bloody post is."

Charlie laughed.  He told Lyle, "Jack is a great collector of antiques and rare treasures.  He recently acquired a couple of gold Balinese dancers."

"Cool," grinned Lyle.  "Good taste."

"Aye, they're beauties.  It's not the value of the things," said Jack.  "I just like the way they shimmer."

"So, what brings you here?" Charlie asked.  "I can't imagine there's anything in the collection you don't already own ten of."

"I've collected a personal invitation from my cousin," Jack said.

"Your cousin?" Stella repeated.

"Aye, Harold Osborn.  We're first cousins, through our maternal grandparents.  Our mums were sisters."

"No way," said Lyle.  "Harry Osborn is your cousin?  In what universe?"

"This one.  I'm going to go say hello to the lad and be social.  Care to join me?"  With a quick exchange of glances, Charlie, Stella, and Lyle followed him inside.

Charlie could understand Lyle's incredulity; even after two minutes of conversation, the Napster had seen that Jack O'Connell and Harry Osborn were cut from completely different bolts of cloth.

Jack was about thirty, a lean five-ten, his slender build deceptive; he was a master of several martial arts forms and any number of weapons.  The descendant of a long line of Anglo-American adventurers, he had fully inherited the family's proclivities for risk and daring.  He flew around the world in his own Cessna, frequenting exotic and dangerous locales, owned residences in nearly a dozen countries, spoke about twenty languages, and owned a vast collection of museum quality artifacts.  Yet, for all that, he was down-to-earth, funny, and a great talker.  He had bought two of Charlie's gold bricks.

Not content to merely walk into a room, Jack swept into it and immediately took possession of people's attention.  "Harry!" he called out.  "Harry, lad, how are you?"

For the first time that night, Osborn exhibited genuine animation.  "Jack?" he laughed.  "You made it!"

"Wouldn't have missed it!"  Ignoring Osborn's hand, Jack pulled his cousin into a warm embrace. "You look splendid, Harry!  All grown up, auctioning off the old heap for a good cause, eh?"

"Uh, yeah," said Harry nervously.  "Well, starting Sunday.  I'm so glad you're here."

"My pleasure.  Harry, let me introduce a dear old friend of mine and his lovely wife, Charles and Stella Croker."

"It's Charlie, please."  Charlie shook the young man's hand.  "Nice to meet you.  This is a beautiful house."

"I wonder you can stand to part with it," added Stella.           

"I never really used it," said Harry, his cool gray gaze flicking nervously over the newcomers.  "I can't see myself ever needing someplace this big.  What am I gonna do with it?  There's like two dozen bedrooms, and the dining room table seats like thirty people.  It's an ark."

Magnanimously, Jack said, "Well, one sad part of growing up is having to make decisions like this.  You're doing the right thing, Harry."

"Thanks," the boy flushed.

"So, just how are you guys related?" asked Stella.

"Our mothers were sisters," Harry provided.  "I think they were on vacation in London when my aunt and uncle met—right?"

"Right," confirmed Jack.  "The older sister, Catherine, was swept off her feet by my dad, John O'Connell.  A few years later, her younger sister, Emily, married Harry's dad, Norman.  I was sorry to hear about your father, lad.  That was a tragic loss."

Harry nodded, his expression tightening once again into that hard, unpleasant mask. "Thank you for the flowers," he said politely.  "And the letter."

Jack gave his shoulder a little rub.  Looking back and forth between them, Charlie found it hard to believe they shared even a drop of blood in common.  He could see a superficial similarity in height, build, and coloring—the dark blond hair, the nice features—but where Harry's expression was closed, hard, almost petulant, Jack's was warm and kind, full of humor and light.  Jack's skin tended to be spotty, his teeth were slightly crooked, his mouth rather narrow, but those imperfections only added to his appeal.  Harry's looks were too perfect, too glacial, lacking in charm or character.

Harry was giving Lyle a curious look, so Charlie quickly made introductions. "This is Lyle, a friend of mine."

"Didn't I see you talking to my friend Pete?" Harry asked.

"Oh, sure," said Lyle easily.  "I was a counselor at a science camp he went to once.  Where's he gone off to?"

"Floating around somewhere," Harry said vaguely.  "Oh, here's MJ—she probably knows."  He waved a hand, smiling, and Charlie turned to see the red-haired girl strolling toward them.  "MJ, this is my cousin, Jack O'Connell.  Jack, this is Mary Jane Watson, a friend of mine from high school."

"Hullo!" said Jack, taking her in with a quick, appreciative look up and down.  "My pleasure."

"Hi," she laughed, shaking his hand.  "Nice to meet you.  Harry, you never said you have English relatives."

Harry, painfully lacking the gift of casual social banter, made a noncommittal noise.  Swiftly, Jack said, "Oh, I'm the Schuyler black sheep—all the Stateside family are embarrassed to admit we're related."

She laughed again, clearly delighted.  "I can't imagine why," she teased.

"And to allow me to introduce some friends," Jack said.  "Charlie and Stella Croker and their mate, Lyle."

"Hi," she said, shaking hands all around.

"And there's Pete," said Lyle, waving to the young man, who slouched awkwardly over to the group.

"Pete, this is my cousin, Jack O'Connell, and some friends of his, Charlie and Stella Croker," said Harry.  "Jack, Charlie, Stella, this is Peter Parker."

"Hi."  Parker shook hands unenthusiastically.

"Why didn't you tell me you did the catalog?" Lyle ribbed him.  "That's great work."

Parker managed a tepid smile that suggested he might have a splitting headache.  Charlie observed that his cheap black suit hung slackly off his thin frame; at around five-six, Parker couldn't have weighed more than 130 pounds.  A short haircut with a severe side part emphasized his large ears, long nose, and big, prominent chin.  Charlie founded it interesting that the young millionaire Harry's two best friends looked like they didn't have $5 to spare between them.

"That must've taken a lot of time," Stella remarked.  "The photos are wonderful."

"A whole week, last summer," Harry provided.

"Good job," Charlie said.

"Thanks."  Parker asked, "Have you been around the house?  Pictures can't do it justice."

"We have," Stella responded.  "It's beautiful."

"I haven't been upstairs," Lyle remarked.

Parker immediately brightened.  "There's a group going up now—c'mon."  Lyle caught Charlie's eye, lifted his red brows, and followed his former student up the stairs.

"He's usually not so morose," Mary Jane said.  "I don't know what's gotten into him."

"I think he has a headache," Harry shrugged.  He said to his cousin, "C'mon, I'll show you around."

"That would be lovely," Jack smiled.  "Miss Watson, won't you come with us?"

"Sure," she laughed, heading off with the two men.  "And please, it's MJ."

Left alone in the throng of auction-goers, Charlie said, "What do you make of all this?"

"I think Harry's one unhappy kid," Stella pronounced.  "He looks like he's had too much money and too little of everything else, probably his whole life."

"Yeah, that's my take."  Charlie stuck his hands in his pockets.  "You know, something tells me Jack's not here out of familial obligation.  He certainly wouldn't bid on anything; there's nothing in the catalog he doesn't already own."

"You think he knows something about this mysterious concert?"

"Maybe."  They circled the floor a few times.

"Hey, at least we're on the inside track," said Stella.  "It might be easier to learn something now."

"Yeah, we should probably—"  Charlie stopped short, staring around the vast foyer, trying to peer through the knots of people.

"What is it?"

"I thought I saw—"  The crowds thinned for a moment, and Charlie glimpsed a tall, slender man in a gray suit.  He started moving toward the entrance.  The crowds parted, and Charlie clearly saw the man: tall, thin, pale, wavy russet hair sweeping back off a high forehead.  He stood gazing about with a rapt expression, nostrils flared, as if smelling for something.

Then he saw Charlie, spun about on his heel, and made a beeline for the front door.

Immediately, Charlie set off after him, walking as quickly as possible without actually running.  His quarry made it through the door just before a gaggle of senior citizens came in.  In the few seconds Charlie had to wait, the man slipped away from him.  When Charlie reached the terrace, he saw his quarry sprinting toward the parked cars.  A dark sedan roared out of the lot, and the gray suit leaped into it.  A door slammed, tires sprayed gravel, and the car shot down the drive.

"Was it him?" Stella gasped, running up behind him.  "The thing that killed Professor Rosenstein?"

"I'm positive," Charlie snarled.  "Dammit!"  Giving chase would be useless: by the time they got into the Mini, the sedan would be long-gone.

Stella looked at her watch.  "The viewing's over at ten," she said.  "We have about twenty minutes."

Charlie studied the exterior of the house.  "I'm gonna take a look around."

"I'll go with you," she offered.

"No, I'll be fine.  Go back inside, see if you can get anything out of Jack."

"Be careful, Charlie," she admonished.

"I will," he promised.

She went back in through the main door.  Swiftly, Charlie went around the side of the house, looking up and down as he went.  Off to the right sat a modern garage, where those gorgeous cars were doubtless kept.  Light spilling out of the windows guided him.  Around back, the lawns sloped down to acres of gardens and then woods.  In the distance to the left sat a low, dark building.  Curiously, Charlie loped across the grass toward it.

As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he saw the outline of a fence, stretching into the darkness, a vast, empty space behind it.  A paddock he realized.  The building was an old stable.

Once inside, Charlie drew a small penlight from his pocket, casting the powerful beam around.  He saw nothing.  The stalls had been empty for some time, the floor clean of hay, manure, everything.  Propped against one wall stood some gardening tools.  Charlie made a quick tour up and down the row, checking each stall, but he found nothing.  Whatever Professor Rosenstein had been talking about, there were no clue here.

A cobweb drifted across his cheek, and Charlie slapped it away, shuddering.  He hastened back to the entrance, not relishing the thought of any eight-legged encounters.  He stood outside, letting his vision adjust again.  At one time, he thought, this must have been a thriving stable, but no horse had set a hoof inside for years, maybe decades.  The realization saddened him.  He stared back at the house.  The whole place was so lifeless.  It needed people, it needed animals, it needed laughter and voices.  It needed a purpose.

"You can come up here, if you want," a light voice called politely down, causing Charlie to jump almost out of his skin.  "The ladder's over on the left side.  Mars is really bright."  Charlie hesitated, then went around the left side of the stable, where he saw a ladder propped against one wall.  He tested it to make sure it would bear his weight, and climbed up to the roof.

A few feet away, Peter Parker lay on his back, his right ankle crossed over the opposite bent knee.  He had removed his jacket and folded it beneath his head, his hands folded along with it.  He was gazing up at the star-strewn sky.

"Where's Lyle?" asked Charlie, hunkering down to sit beside Parker.

"Oh, back in the house," Peter said vaguely.

"Aren't you cold?" asked Charlie.  The October night was chilly, and Parker wore only a long-sleeved gray shirt that couldn't have provided much in the way of warmth.

"No," he answered serenely.  The uncomfortable look had melted away, and out here, Parker seemed far more at ease, as if he were in his natural element, somehow.

"Crowds getting to you?"

"No, just the strings."

Strings? Charlie wondered.  Then he realized Parker meant the string trio.  "Didn't you like the music?"

"They played the same numbers over and over.  I must've heard 'Air on a G-string' like forty times tonight."

Charlie chuckled.  "In that case, I don't blame you for wanting some peace and quiet."

Parker pointed up at the sky.  "That's Mars, right there, that really bright one."

Charlie gazed up.  The stars all looked the same to him.  "Oh, yeah."

"There's no moon, so you can really see it well," Parker went on.  "And there's the Big Dipper."  He pointed out constellations one by one, but Charlie couldn't tell one cluster of stars from another.

"You like it up here?" he asked.  "Upstate, I mean."

"No," Parker answered, surprisingly.  "I hate being away from the city, but Harry asked me to come.  For moral support."

"It can't be easy for him, selling off all this stuff," Charlie offered.

"I think it would be harder, hanging onto it."  Before Charlie could ask what he meant, Parker rolled up into a sitting position.  "I should get back."  He shook out his jacket.  Charlie stood up, and when he did, his foot crunched on something.

"What's that?" he grunted.

"A bone, probably."  Parker shrugged his arms into the jacket sleeves.

"Bone?"

"Yeah, there's a lot of hawks around here, and they eat their prey on the roof—"

"Okay, I believe you," Charlie shuddered.  Parker gave him a peculiar expression, his eyes grey-rimmed violet pools in the starlight.  Then he shimmied down the ladder with surprising grace.  Charlie followed behind him.

At the house, guests were leaving.  Jack was still talking with Harry and Mary Jane; Lyle had found Stella.  After saying goodbye, the three headed out to Stella's Mini.

"Learn anything?" Charlie asked.

"Nothing," Stella grimaced.  "I think Jack's found himself a new girlfriend, but not much else.  Oh, there's a violinist coming in tomorrow to play the Stradivarius.  One o'clock.  We really should plan to be here for that.

"Okay, good."  They got into the Mini.  "Napster?"

"I learned more about Pete's damn camera than I really wanted to, but nothing about the house," Lyle said.

Briefly, Charlie recounted his trek around the mansion and his conversation with Parker on the stable roof.

"I'd really like to crack that safe," Stella said.

"We could come back tonight," said Lyle.

"They must have security," Charlie said.

"Sure they do.  It's a pretty basic system, though," Lyle grinned.  "Hasn't been updated in twenty years."

"You can switch it off remotely?" Charlie asked rhetorically.

"Piece of cake."

"How do we get in?" objected Stella, "without breaking anything?"

"Well gosh, it's a good thing someone unlocked a bathroom window down in the basement," Lyle said.

"Good job," Charlie laughed.  "Any brainstorms for how to get past the security booth?"  That sort of thing had always been Left Ear's detail.  Knocking the guard unconscious would only raise the alarm.

"We'll go through the woods," Lyle suggested.  "There's a dirt road that runs around the back of the property."  At Charlie's expression, he said, "Well gosh, it's a good thing someone cased the joint in advance, huh?"

Charlie laughed.  "You rock, Napster.  Okay, two o'clock?"

"Meet me in the hotel parking lot," Lyle agreed, and he slipped out of the Mini, running across the lot to his rented SUV.

*****

The house looked even bigger in the darkness.  With Lyle taking the lead, the trio crept from woods to paddock to stable, keeping low, their black and gray attire blending into the night.

Positioned between Lyle and Stella, Charlie felt humiliated by a sick-making, irrational fear.  He was out of his depth here in the eerily silent outdoors.  No sound broke the still darkness: not a human voice, not an automobile or bus or airplane, not a radio or TV.  The normal drone of white noise that made up so much of the backdrop of Charlie's life was completely absent here, and he felt cut adrift without it.

He could have lived with any of that however, had it not been for one thing: Charlie was terrified of spiders.  He simply hated them, regarding them as one of nature's more abominable creations: hairy, blood-sucking carnivorous little beasts that spun clinging webs and dangled into the faces of the unwary.  He couldn't pinpoint the exact origin of this phobia; he only knew that by the age of eight or nine, spiders frightened him so badly that he would go to any lengths to avoid them.  He knew rationally that they had their place in the ecosystem, but he felt better if that place was as far away from him as possible.  Once, he had been flipping absently through an issue of National Geographic, and the pages had fallen open to a photo of a gigantic Australian species.  Charlie hadn't touched an issue of National Geographic ever since then.

They watched the house, and after observing no sign of movement, Charlie said, "Okay, let's roll."  Lyle flipped open his laptop, and in five seconds he had deactivated the mansion's electronic security system.

They scurried quickly across the lawn to a back corner of the house, where Charlie wiggled open the window Lyle had left unlocked.  The casement was so small that only Lyle could slip through; he went around to the side and let the Crokers in through the kitchen.

With silent caution, they proceeded up the stairs to the main floor, pausing every few feet to listen.  The house was empty, except for the three kids sleeping upstairs.  Osborn had not bothered to hire a night watchman.  Trusting soul, Charlie thought, probably relying on the electronic security, the gate, and the guardhouse to protect the family treasures.

They reached the gentleman's study on the second floor without difficulty, closing the door and locking it behind them.  Charlie and Lyle gently removed the painting from the wall, exposing the safe behind it.  Stella went to work at once.  Charlie had learned much about safes from his wife, and he recognized this one as an old model.  Stella cracked it in two minutes, completely by touch.

The safe was empty.  Stella flashed her small light around the interior, but anything of value that might once have been stored there had been removed.

"Damn," Lyle muttered.

Stella closed the safe, spun the combination dial, and she and Charlie returned the painting to the wall.  They stood in a huddle, conferring in low voices.

"I didn't think there'd be anything in there," admitted Stella.

"No, any papers or valuables are probably with Osborn's lawyers in New York," Lyle confirmed.

"I can't imagine what Rosenstein was hinting around at," Charlie said.  "An intimate, beautiful concert that nobody's heard in thirteen years?"

"A silent concert," Stella reminded him.

"Maybe we should get a better look at the Steinway and the Strad," Lyle suggested.

"We can, but it doesn't fit," argued Stella.  "Both instruments apparently play perfectly well, so why would Professor Rosenstein talk about a silent concert?"

"Maybe something in the record collection?" Charlie suggested.  "Something rare or valuable?"

Lyle shook his head.  "I went through the catalog, and there's nothing in there even remotely unusual.  Harry's mom's family had pretty pedestrian tastes in music.  The whole collection is being sold off in lots."

"That still leaves the question of why Rosenstein was so interested in telling me about this," Charlie said.  "He might've believed something in the collection had been stolen."

"Even if so, he wouldn't have asked you to steal it for him," argued Stella.  "He'd have come here, bid on it, and returned it to its rightful owner.  He'd never ask anyone to steal something for him."

Lyle tugged urgently on Charlie's sleeve.  "Hey, was that transom open when we came in?"

Charlie's head snapped, and he stared up at the glass window over the tall door.  He hadn't even realized that the transom was there: the door was tall, the window so high up that it was obscured in darkness.  For a moment he froze, unable to believe his own carelessness, then he padded over to the door.  The transom opened by a long, slender rod hanging down the left side of the doorframe.  Cautiously, Charlie opened the door and stepped into the hallway.  He found no way to open the window from the outside, and the corridor was empty.

"It's okay," he whispered.  "It must've been open."  Suddenly aware of how long they had loitered in the study, the three crept silently back down to the first floor and into the music room.  Charlie and Lyle lifted the lid of the grand piano so that Stella could examine the insides.  She found nothing out of the ordinary.  Charlie used a lock pick to pop the glass case that held the Stradivarius.  Stella gently removed the violin from its case and looked it over minutely, peering into the f-holes with her penlight.  The instrument appeared completely normal.

They returned to the kitchen, where Lyle fetched his laptop.  "Dammit," Charlie swore softly.  "What did he want us to do, Stella?  What was he talking about?"

She shook her head.  "It's pretty inconvenient when someone's last conversation with you is a riddle."

"C'mon," said Lyle.  "I wanna do some research on-line tonight, maybe check out some of those pieces."  They left through the kitchen door, and once back at the stables, he re-set the alarm.  They made their way out through the woods, Charlie's flesh crawling by the time they reached Stella's Mini.

Interlude

"It was the same guy," said Joshua.  "The one at the old man's hotel."  All eight vampires had gathered in the central room of the hunting camp they'd commandeered.

"He recognized you?" asked Gemini.

Joshua nodded.

"You'll have to lay low until we make our move," said Leopold.  Gemini gave him an irritated why-must-you-state-the-obvious? expression.

"Which is when?" asked Scorpio, bored.  He sat near the fireplace, pretty and petulant, toying with a knife.  Scorpio suffered from a kind of attention deficit, and he grew sulky when they weren't killing, looting, or otherwise causing mayhem.

"I'll approach him tomorrow night, after the viewing is over," Gemini decided.  "I may be able to persuade him to call off the auction.  We might be able to avoid bloodshed."

"What's the fun of that?" Scorpio whined.

"Because I don't want undue attention," she shot back at him.  "We can feed all you like when I have my hands on that painting, but not a moment before.  I don't want to be driven off by a mob."

"Are you sure it's even in the house?" asked Samuel skeptically.  "Not in some vault in New York?"

"It's here," Gemini said.  "I'm positive.  Old Man Osborn bought it and hid it away in the country, every one of my contacts has said so."

Around the room, heads nodded.  Gemini had many, many contacts in the underworld, and her sources were reliable.  The few who had proven otherwise rarely survived for long.

"There was something else tonight, something unusual."  Joshua looked pensive.  "Something in the house."

"Care to elaborate?" Gemini asked.

"It was a smell.  It wasn't human, but it wasn't demon, either.  Something I've never smelled before."

"Describe it," she ordered.

Joshua focused, his hunting face briefly emerging.  His tongue flicked out across his lips, as if remembering the scent.  Then his features returned to normal.

"It was part human," he said, "but part something else.  The closest thing I can compare it to is a werewolf."

"Describe the non-human part," Gemini urged.

Joshua focused again.  "It smelled of secrecy," he said at last.  "Dark, hidden places."

"Did it have a soul?" she pressed.

Joshua's face wrinkled.  "Its soul reeked."

"So, something human, but other," Gemini deduced.  "A mutant with a human soul."  They all knew that in nature, mutations occurred more often than many humans realized.  Mutants usually died prematurely as a result of their conditions or were killed by superstitious humans.  The survivors lived lives of bitter solitude, shunned from humanity because of their appearance.  A few of the stronger ones had become allies of the undead.

"Did you happen to see the owner of this peculiar aroma?" Scorpio inquired.

"I barely got inside before that muscle-bound bloodbag spotted me," Joshua scowled.  "No, I didn't see it.  But its scent was pretty thick, like it'd been in the house for a while."

Gemini thought.  "It must appear normal enough to pass as human," she said.  "Otherwise, it couldn't move freely among them.  This complicates things, but it should hardly stop us.  Most mutants are weak, terrified of having their secrets exposed, so I doubt if this one will give us any trouble."

"I'm hungry," Scorpio moaned.

Gemini sighed.  "Samuel, Charles—see if you can find us something to eat."  She glared at them with an unmistakable warning in her eyes.  "Discreetly."

Part III

On Saturday, the viewing started at nine.  Because of their late night, Charlie and Stella didn't return to the mansion until 10:30.  The parking lot was full, and latecomers were being steered to a nearby field.  When they got closer, they realized Osborn's friend Parker was directing traffic.  He waved them over to the end of one row.

"Wow, that's a really nice car," he said, eyes shining.  "Can I get a picture?"

"Sure," laughed Stella, stepping away when Parker aimed his camera.  But he waved her back toward the Mini.

"Do you mind…?"

"You're a better model than me," Charlie joked, stepping well out of the camera's range; he had an instinctive dislike of being photographed.  Stella, however, had no compunctions about posing with her beloved car, and Parker blushed endearingly when she smiled at him.

"So, Harry's keeping you busy?" Charlie asked.

"I volunteered," Parker said.  "I'd rather be outside."  He returned to a nearby folding chair, a threadbare backpack beside it, and crossed one heel over the opposite knee, a well-defined ridge of thigh muscle pulling the fabric of his jeans taut.  Scattered around lay sections of the New York Times; Parker was tackling the crossword puzzle.  In pen.  Red pen.

Show-off, Charlie thought.

Inside, the house was so mobbed with people that the Crokers could barely move.  By daylight, the place was even more spectacular, especially with light streaming in through the windows, but no more inviting.  A palpable sense of avarice lingered in the air as people roved around the collection, making notes in their catalogs.

At one, guests gathered in the foyer to hear the Stradivarius.  The violinist was young and gifted, and she made the instrument sing sweetly.  Charlie marveled at the Strad's exquisite quality.  He and Stella glanced at each other as she played: the violin was far from silent.

They went for lunch after that, and when they returned, Lyle had arrived.  He pulled them outside to talk.  His face was pale and puffy from lack of sleep, and dark circles ringed his green eyes.

"I've been double-checking the collection," he said, "and all the major pieces here are completely legit, bought and paid for."  He lowered his voice.  "I hacked into Harry's lawyer's files and spent half the night going over the family business records. Nada.  Harry's dad seems to have spent a lot of time finding ways to avoid paying taxes, but there was almost nothing about the house, apart from maintenance and staff salaries."

"No questionable purchases?" asked Stella.

"Nothing."

"That makes sense," Charlie said.  "If he picked up something hot, something off the black market, he probably paid for it with cash."

"I double-checked the provenance of the piano and the violin," said Lyle.  "They're both completely legit.  The Strad's been in the Schuyler family for generations, and the Steinway was purchased brand-new when the house was built."

Abruptly, Stella said, "Maybe we're looking at this the wrong way—maybe we should be thinking about people instead of things.  Maybe a 'concert that's been silent for thirteen years' is referring to someone who died thirteen years ago, maybe a musician killed on the property."

Lyle's eyebrows went up.  "I'll check out some local records tonight.  You might be on to something."

While they were out looking over the property, Jack schmoozed up to them.  "Damn fine place, isn't it?"

"Hasn't seen a horse in decades," Charlie observed.

"No, not since Granddad was a boy," Jack confided.  "They all got sold in the fifties.  Norman Osborn certainly had no use for them, and I gather his wife was too frail to ride."

"Did you know her?"

"No, she died when Harry was two; I'd have been twelve, and we were living in France then.  I visited here when I was twenty—Norman invited my parents.  Before then, Mum hadn't had much contact with him after poor Emily died—I think in some ways she blamed him for her death.  So we came here for a weekend; that's how I got to know Harry."

"What was his father like?" asked Stella.

"A right bastard," said Jack frankly.  "He was one cold son of a bitch, and I used to wonder if ice water ran in his veins instead of blood.  Harry was ten, and his father belittled him constantly—you could tell he'd already made up his mind the kid was never going to amount to anything.  And Harry, naturally, was an abysmal student.  It was a classic self-fulfilling prophecy.  But for all that, he loved his dad, and never stopped trying to please him."

"He still hasn't," Lyle observed.

"More's the pity," said Jack.

"What do you make of his friends?" asked Charlie.

"I think with the girl, what you see is pretty much what you get—a nice, pretty, outgoing kid.  She'll never have trouble getting by in the world, that one.  The boy is another matter entirely.  All sorts of things going on under the surface there, a real still water that runs deep."

"I know him," said Lyle.  "He's smart as hell."

"Normally, I'd say they're both pretty shrewd, latching onto a kid like Harry, who's fabulously rich and desperately lonely," said Jack.  "The weird thing is, they're both too transparently honest—they like Harry, they care about him, and I doubt if either one gives a fig about his bank account."  He put arms around Charlie and Stella.  "Stick around," he advised.  "The viewing ends at four, and I'm going to see if I can wrangle a dinner invitation.  Hopefully, I can include you three in there as well."

Jack's plan turned out to be easier than expected.  When the foursome went back inside, Harry found them and said, "Hey, Jack, you wanna stay for dinner tonight?  We have a caterer."

"Uh…"  Jack glanced at the Crokers.  "We were thinking of that little restaurant…"

"You can stay, too," said Harry, "all of you."  His gaze encompassed the Crokers and Lyle.

"Why, thank you," said Stella graciously.  "That's very kind.  An extra four people won't be a problem?"

"No, there's plenty of food."  He looked around at the crowds, which had finally begun to thin out.  "Dinner's at six."

"Thanks, lad," said Jack.  "We'd love to join you."

At 3:45, the hired staff began discreetly steering people toward the entrance.  Outside, the sky had grown overcast—rain was predicted for Sunday—and even the foliage looked suddenly drab.  At five to four, a tall woman swept inside, ignoring the protests of the ushers.

"I'm here to see Harold Osborn," she announced; her voice low, beautiful, and commanding, held a trace of a British accent.

Harry had been in the library, talking to Jack and the Crokers, and he emerged into the foyer.  "Who's looking for me?"

"I am," the woman smiled.                   

Harry stood gaping at her, and Charlie couldn't blame him.  The woman stood nearly six feet tall, broad-shouldered, curving splendidly in exactly the right places.  Her face was exotic, with high cheekbones, a full mouth, and eyes that appeared blue, green, and gray all at the same time.  A mane of chestnut brown hair fell halfway down her back.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"I'm Gemini."  Her smile held the bewitchment of a thousand twilights.  "I'd like to buy this house, and everything in it."

"It's being auctioned tomorrow and Monday.  You're welcome to come back and bid."

"I'll give you $5 million."

"Look, I…"

"Ten million."

Jack slipped out into the foyer.  From inside the library, Charlie watched.  The woman seemed to exert some powerful, hypnotic influence on Harry; he stood mesmerized, a deer caught in headlights.

"He said it's being auctioned tomorrow," Jack said softly.

"O'Connell," she greeted him, her voice like ice.

"Gemini.  How's life been treating you?"

"Wonderfully," she said, more than a little irony in her tone.

"You guys know each other?"  Harry sounded half-asleep, or drunk.

"We go back a ways," Jack said.  The grandfather clock chimed four, its elegant, precise tones echoing through the foyer.  "Well, the viewing is officially over.  You'd best be leaving now."

Gemini stared at Harry, her gaze boring into him.  "Fifteen million," she said charmingly.

Jack put a protective hand on Harry's shoulder.  "The auction starts tomorrow," he responded.

With a flare of her nostrils, Gemini whipped around and strode out, a long, cream-colored coat whirling around her long legs as she walked.  They heard the sound of a car engine, the squeal of tires, and then silence.

Harry blinked, looking as though he had just woken up from a drugged sleep.

"Who was that?"  Watson skipped lightly down the stairs into the foyer.

"Nobody," said Jack.  "Just a latecomer."  He steered Harry back into the library, MJ on his heels.  Absently, Charlie wondered where Parker had gone.

*****

"O'Connell's here," Gemini reported.

"Shit," muttered Scorpio.

"Plan B?" said Joshua.  "Since persuasion didn't work?"

"Kill them, and hunt for the painting at leisure," suggested Leopold.

"We'd have to wait until after the auction," said Joshua.  "The place is gonna be swarming with people starting early tomorrow.  If we kill everyone in the house and we can't find the painting before morning, we're screwed."

"Leave Osborn alive," said Scorpio.  "Torture it out of him."

"He doesn't know," said Gemini.  "Or we would have done that months ago."

"You think he doesn't know," Scorpio countered.

"No, he doesn't know," Gemini repeated. "His old man thought he was an imbecile and shared very few secrets with him.  If Junior knew the painting was there, he would have had it removed well before this auction."

"You think O'Connell knows it's there?" Leopold asked.

"I can't think of anything else that would bring him here," said Gemini. "His whole family has been collecting priceless artifacts since the first World War.  The painting is the sort of thing he wouldn't be able to resist."

"I don't like this," said Joshua.  "He was palling around with the bloodbag that saw me waste the old man.  I don't like what might happen if the two of them put their heads together."

"Double back," Gemini decided.  "We'll snare O'Connell on his way out tonight.  With a bit of gentle persuasion, maybe he can share with us the painting's location."

"You think he knows?" asked Joshua, turning the sedan.

"I'd be willing to bet he has a better idea than Osborn."

*****

"They're not going anywhere," Scorpio moaned.

"He'll have to leave, eventually," said Samuel, sniffing around the rented Lexus.  A few feet away, Joshua waited in the sedan.  Silently, the rest of the vampires melted into the woods.

"Patience," Gemini chided softly.  "Maybe he'll stay for a few drinks."  Alcohol would make their work that much easier.

Dusk deepened into darkness.  Gemini sniffed the air; in an hour or so, rain would start.  The big house sat mostly in darkness.  As they watched, most of the hired staff departed, leaving the parking lot nearly empty.  In addition to the Lexus, a Cooper Mini and an SUV remained in the lot.  Osborn's Porsche was parked out back, and the catering staff had parked near the kitchen.  On the first floor, light glowed from the dining room windows.

"They're eating," Samuel guessed softly.  "Looks like O'Connell charmed his way into a dinner invitation."

"He's Osborn's first cousin, through their mothers," Gemini murmured.

"It's almost six," said Leopold.  "There's no telling how long they'll be in there."

"We'll wait," said Gemini.  Impatience in immortal vampires always amused her.  "It's not like we're getting any older."

"Why can't we—" Scorpio began.

"Sh!"  Her head snapped up, listening.  They all fell silent, hunting faces emerging as they assessed the night air.  A thick mist had risen with the humidity, making the darkness almost impenetrable, but their vampiric eyes saw through it easily.

"That smell," Gemini said, all senses on alert, straining with her ears.  She knew she had heard something, a twig snapping, leaves rustling faintly, perhaps.

Less than a second later, she caught the stick that whipped toward her at phenomenal speed.  It wasn't even a stake, just an ordinary piece of deadfall, but it would have reduced her to ashes just as easily.  The vampires all moved immediately, putting O'Connell's car between them and the assailant in the woods, dodging pieces of wood that whipped at them with intimidating precision.  One impaled Samuel through the ankle, and he snarled in pain.

The sedan roared toward them, Joshua behind the wheel.  A dark blur of motion swung from the trees and dropped lightly, noiselessly to the roof of the Lexus.  Samuel and Leopold immediately sprang up to attack it.  Gemini made her decision without thinking: she shoved Scorpio into the back of the sedan, and screamed at Joshua, "Go!"

He gunned the motor.  Gemini twisted around in time to see Samuel explode into ashes; Leopold seemed trapped in some kind of net.  Then the sedan rounded the corner and roared down the road; thanks to some modifications, the car could achieve speeds of nearly 100 miles per hour within seconds.

"What the fuck was that thing?" Scorpio gasped.

"That was our mutant," said Gemini grimly.

"It moved fast.  As fast as us."

"Did you get a look at it?" asked Joshua as they tore out onto the main road.

"Barely," said Gemini.  She had only caught a frightening glimpse of scaly red skin and large, alien eyes.  "But it knows what we are, and it knows how to kill us."

"It was hunting us," said Scorpio indignantly.  "It's not even a Slayer!"

"This is worse than a Slayer," said Gemini.  She had known immediately that the thing possessed superhuman speed and strength.  "It would have dusted us in seconds."

"What do we do now?" asked Joshua.

"Go back to the camp and pick up Charles," said Gemini.  She burned with anger at the loss of Samuel and Leopold, who had served her faithfully for three centuries.  "We're going back there, and when we do, we're bringing an army with us."

*****

"Where's Pete?" said Lyle.

"Somewhere," Osborn shrugged, leaning slightly to one side as a waitress set a plate of salad in front of him.

The woman went around the table, and when she reached the empty chair, she asked, "Should I put this one out, or bring it back later?"

"Sure," Osborne answered. "He'll be here in a few minutes… probably upstairs doing homework."  The waitress nodded and set the plate down at the empty chair.

The six of them tackled salads, bread, and wine.  Sitting at the head of the grand dining table, Harry looked small and terribly out of place, a child in a king's throne.  At his right, Jack seemed far more at ease, and he complimented Harry lavishly on the meal.

"Splendid old room, eh?" he said, gazing about.  Down to the right, the rest of the table stretched, empty and rather glacial, despite a cheerful flower arrangement and strategically placed candles.

"The dishes are so pretty," Watson commented, examining the china pattern.  "I'm almost afraid to eat off them."

"Enjoy," Harry urged.  "Tomorrow they get packed up and sent home with a new owner."

Charlie and Stella ate, but didn't say much: the table and chairs were so big that Charlie felt he'd have to yell for anyone to hear him.  The food, however, was delicious; he had to admit Harry had hired a terrific cater.

As the salad course ended, Watson asked, "Should I go find Peter?  Maybe he fell asleep."

Before Harry could answer, Parker whirled into the dining room.  "Sorry," he apologized.  "I was out walking, and lost track of time—"  He broke off, stared around, and asked, "Company?"

"Yeah, I invited Jack and his friends," Harry responded.

"Cool."  Parker dropped into the chair opposite Lyle.  Charlie observed that his hair had been recently combed, and his eyes seemed very bright, almost hectic.  Immediately, Charlie wondered what the kid had been up to.

Conversation resumed.  "So, what are you majoring in?" Lyle asked Parker.

"Haven't really decided yet," said Parker, tearing into his bread.  "Biochem or molecular bio, maybe."

"You ever do any programming?"  Lyle asked.

"A couple of courses."  Then they were off on some highly technical discussion, Lyle trying to persuade Parker to abandon research science in favor of information technology.  To Charlie's right, Mary Jane and Jack were asking Harry about the house, Stella chiming in eagerly.

"Who collected all those instruments?" she asked.  "They're wonderful."

"Oh, my mom's mother, and her parents, I think," Harry provided.  "I don't really know that much about them."  He knew more about the vintage cars.  "My grandfather collected them, and he left them to my father.  Whenever he came up here, he'd take them out for a spin."

"Did he come up here much?" asked Stella.

"Less often over time," said Harry shortly.  "He was usually too busy working."

An awkward silence descended over the table with a tangible weight.  Thankfully, the hired waitress arrived at that moment with the main course and began to clear away salad plates.

"Could I try out the piano after dinner?" asked Stella charmingly.  "It's so beautiful."

"Sure," said Harry.  Charlie caught Stella's eye and smiled.

Conversation flowed more easily after that, and Charlie kept an ear open on each side of him, listening to Lyle geek-talking Parker on his left and Stella schmoozing with Harry on his right.  He observed Jack flirting shamelessly with Mary Jane, which generated a few envious glances from Parker, and more than one from Osborn.

The food was delicious, and they gorged themselves into a stupor, finishing the meal with crème broulee.  At Harry's suggestion, they took their coffee into the music room to hear Stella play.

She found books of music inside the bench and ran through a few numbers: Bach, Brahms, Liszt, demonstrating the piano's quality; if the instrument had ever been silent, it gave no sign of it now.  While she played, the others drank their coffee and admired the books.  Harry was almost embarrassingly generous with his offers of gifts.

"Take what you want," he told Jack and Charlie.  "The first editions are being held separately, but everything else will be sold in lots."

Charlie felt awkward just taking things—the books may not have been collector's items, but they were still expensive leather-bound volumes.  After more persuasion from Harry, Charlie finally selected a beautiful tome on thoroughbred racing.  The next day, he would bid on some of the first editions for Left Ear.

Stella had begun playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, filling the room with a kind of gentle melancholy.  Charlie found himself transported:  unwittingly, he thought of his mother, of his two brothers, one now dead, one in prison.  His rough-and-tumble youth flashed before his eyes in quick vignettes, ending, not surprisingly, beside that cold, black mountain lake.

He realized he was weeping, tears streaming down his face, and as he looked around the room, he saw everyone else motionless, their faces wet: Jack, Mary Jane, Parker, even poor Lyle.  At the piano, Stella sat with her eyes half-closed, tears dripping off her chin, seemingly lost in her own inner world of grief.  Only Osborn wasn't crying: he stood with a horribly cynical expression twisting up his face.  This shocked Charlie and angered him: of all the people in the room, Harry had as much reason or more to grieve.  His parents were both dead, his extended family were mostly gone, and he was standing in the house of his dead mother, preparing to auction off her belongings to complete strangers.  And yet, he couldn't find it in himself to shed even a single tear for all his losses.

Stella came back to herself and broke off abruptly.  "Oh, God, I'm sorry!" she apologized, wiping her face on her sleeve.  "I didn't mean to start a flood here."

Lyle made a strangled laughing sound.  "Stella, you evil woman, you," he said.

"Nonsense," Jack cut in briskly, wiping his face.  "Nothing like a little group catharsis to remind you you're still alive."  Charlie didn't miss his irony, or the quick glance he shot at Harry.

The waitress appeared in the doorway.  "Would anyone like more coffee?" she asked.

The seven of them gratefully returned to the dining room for refills, then, with Harry's prompting, they retreated to the informal comfort of the recreation room.

*****

In the basement, everyone paired off.  Lyle challenged Parker to a game of Scrabble; Jack sat with Harry at the bar, sketching out their family tree; Mary Jane and Stella curled up in leather armchairs, making feminine small talk.  Charlie pretended to immerse himself in some newspapers, and when it seemed that the pairs had become engrossed in their activities, he casually slipped out of the room.  From the kitchen came the sounds of dishes being washed.  Noiselessly, Charlie sprinted up to the first floor.

In the dining room, the dishes had been cleared away and the lights turned out; the entire floor lay empty and quiet.  Charlie double-checked, then sprinted for the staircase and hopped over the rope barriers that kept visitors out of the northeast wing.  Down the dim hallway, he found doors to four bedrooms.  One room was empty and unused.  The second room he knew immediately was Osborn's by the tuxedo hanging in the wardrobe.

A quick look around revealed nothing extraordinary.  Osborn was fairly neat.  On a handsome desk lay piles of legal papers, documents mostly pertaining to the auction.  Charlie checked in the bathroom, and in the wardrobe, dresser, and desk, and beneath the bed.  Nothing.

Across the hall, he found Mary Jane's room.  Her belongings were neat and well cared for, but painfully cheap: inexpensive clothes that had seen too much wear, generic brand toiletries.  Back issues of dog-eared beauty magazines suggested they had been pinched from waiting rooms.  A nice portable stereo sat atop the desk, and Charlie wondered if it had been a gift from Osborn or Parker.  He made the same sweeping search, but found nothing out of the ordinary.

The final room was Parker's, and here, Charlie had the greatest surprise.  On the bed lay a thick biochemistry textbook, a spiral-bound notebook, and a folder.  The first third of the notebook was filled with incomprehensible notes taken in a neat, precise hand.  In the folder, Charlie found laboratory reports dating back to September, flawlessly typed, each one graded with full marks for the assignment.  Charlie flipped through pages of a unit quiz given October 1: definitions, short-answer questions, and a long essay.  Parker had answered every question perfectly, receiving the full 100 points for the quiz and the praise "excellent work" from the instructor.

Charlie returned the papers to the folder and quickly checked the rest of the room.  The bathroom was bare to the point of being Spartan, suggesting that Parker put no particular effort into his physical appearance.  His clothes were even cheaper and more worn then Watson's.  On the floor, his threadbare backpack bulged with yet more books—three of them clearly from Osborn's library, including histories of the Civil War, the Depression, and the Nixon administration—plus articles from scientific journals.  Charlie spotted a set of good quality artist's pens and a sketchbook, which he tugged out curiously.  Parker's work was fantastic, including a gorgeous sketch of Stella's Mini.  Near the back, he found a beautiful, stylized portrait of Mary Jane, made to look like a red-haired anime princess.  Embarrassed, Charlie returned the sketchbook to the pack.

A gleam of silver caught his eye, and he fished his hand deeper inside, closing over something cool and smooth.  He tugged out a high energy protein bar, the kind used by body builders.  Charlie shook the pack and saw easily two dozen of the things at the bottom.  He remembered Parker's prominent leg muscles; maybe the kid was pumping iron, trying to put some meat on his thin frame.  Charlie nodded in approval, dropping the sports bar back inside the bag.

On the desk lay Parker's camera bag, containing easily the most expensive things he possessed.  Otherwise, Charlie detected nothing unusual in the room; yet he was struck by the intensity of Parker's inner life—the kid all but brimmed with intelligence and talent, but nobody looking at him would ever have guessed it.  He just needs a few years for the rest of him to catch up to his brain, Charlie thought.  He hastened back down the stairs, checked the foyer, then darted down to the basement.  He found a bathroom and flushed the toilet, then returned to his newspapers.  Pretending to read, he sat quietly, mulling over what he had found.  Again and again, his thoughts turned to Parker's room.  Something about it bothered him, but he couldn't, at the moment, pinpoint exactly what.

*****

"Whaddayou say, guys?" asked Lyle.  "Do we consider 'escargot' an English word?"

After a moment's consideration, heads nodded.  "Sure," said Stella.  "You can order them in English-speaking restaurants, right?"

Grinning broadly, Lyle placed seven titles on the Scrabble board, using an 'r' in another word.  Then he sat back and waited for Parker to top him.

With a complete lack of expression, Parker began assembling a series of small squares, building off the 't' in 'escargot.'  Lyle sat watching, his lower jaw slack.

"Quixotic?" he shrieked.

"That's a word, right?"  Parker allowed himself a tiny smile, eyes gleaming.  He held up his hands.  "Cleans me out," he said.  "Game over."

"You little bastard!"

Parker tilted back in his chair, the tiny smile broadening into a shit-eating grin.  "Sticks and stones, Lyle."

"Yeah, the 'q', the 'u', and the 'x' oughta be good for what, about a hundred points?" Charlie smirked.

"I suppose this is a bad time to mention Peter was the sixth-grade spelling champion of the entire city of New York," Mary Jane said.

"You remember that?" Parker squeaked, staring at her, visibly astonished.  The front legs of his chair landed on the floor with a thump.

"Sure I do!" she laughed, giving him a bemused, affectionate expression.  He looked back down at the Scrabble board, a blush staining his cheeks.  Charlie thought of the portrait hidden at the back of Parker's sketchbook, and he felt vaguely like a Peeping Tom.

"I hope you had money riding on that game," Jack teased.

"Uh, no," said Parker, recovering his composure.  "I never gamble with my money, only my life."

That generated some laughs, and when Lyle finished adding up the final score—in his head, naturally—Parker had thumped him by nearly 200 points.  They packed away the game amidst much good-natured ribbing, Lyle trying to goad Parker into a game of chess as a rematch.

Charlie half-listened to them, turning his attention to Jack and Harry.

"…and there's Jonathan Carnahan, who had a rep as a drunk and a gambler, but he was just as daring in his own way—he was shot to death smuggling Jewish kids out of Nazi-occupied France into England.  He got about a thousand kids across the channel before the Gerries caught up with him, poor bastard."

"So that's who you're named after?" Harry asked.

"Aye, his nephew, Alex, who flew Spitfires in the RAF, named his son after Jonathan.  That was my dad; they called him Johnny when he was little.  They call me Jack to tell us apart."

"Wow."  Harry stared dreamily at the pieces of paper, as if lost in those long-ago exploits of daring and valor.  He seemed younger now, less hard-bitten, his face appealing and soft.  "That's so amazing."  His voice was wistful, yearning.

Jack rubbed his shoulder gently.  "A taste for adventure runs in the family."

Harry shook his head ruefully.  "It seems to have passed me by entirely."

"Nonsense," Jack chided.  "Why don't you take a holiday when this is all over?  Come spend Christmas with us.  Mum and Dad'll be pleased as punch to have you stay."

"You should do it," Parker encouraged.  "You'd probably have a lot of fun."  He seemed inordinately pleased to see Harry bonding with his cousin.

"Yeah," Harry said at last.  "Yeah, I guess I will."

"Splendid!" Jack laughed, and the ice in Harry's eyes continued to melt.

"No rematch?" Charlie asked Lyle.

"He didn't want to," Lyle groused.  "Chicken."

"He's being nice," Stella cut in.  "He'd probably kick your ass."

"Gee, thanks for that vote of confidence," Lyle huffed.

Charlie laughed.  He stood up, pretending to yawn and stretch.  "We should get going," he told Lyle and Stella.  "Tomorrow's gonna be a long day."

Stella located her handbag and slipped out to the bathroom.  Mary Jane joined Harry and Jack at the bar, looking over the Schulyer-O'Connell family tree, asking Jack about his far-flung ancestors.  Parker began absently re-assembling the newspapers, piling them in a stack.  Lyle stood as if mesmerized, staring at his small, pale, red-haired reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirror.

"Hey," said Charlie quietly.

"Hey," Lyle responded, sounding dazed.

"Ready to roll?"

"Yeah."

Stella returned, and they spent nearly half an hour saying their goodbyes.  At last the foursome wandered out to the field, burrowing into their jackets.  The night air had grown low and heavy, punctuated by occasional cold drops of rain.

Charlie didn't like where Jack had left his Lexus, practically in the woods, and he waited until the Englishman had gotten into the car before he and Stella took off.  Lyle was already safely ensconced in his SUV.

"What's wrong?" asked Stella, glancing at him.

"I dunno," said Charlie, gazing about into the thick, black night.  "I just have a kind of weird vibe."

"Yeah," said Stella, turning up the heat in the Mini.  "Me too."

*****

The next morning, the Crokers woke up early, reluctantly.  Rain fell in steady sheets from a sullen, lead-colored sky.  They ate breakfast in the dining room, yawning, wishing they didn't have to be up so early—it would have been a perfect morning to sleep late and enjoy a lazy brunch.  But bidding started at 9:30.

They pulled up the sweeping drive at nine, the lot and field already filling with cars, despite the weather.  A sleek, silver Porsche was heading toward them, a most unlikely driver behind the wheel.

"Hey."  Parker rolled down the window, Stella did likewise, and he treated the Crokers to his dorky smile.  He wore the same cheap black suit he'd worn Friday night.

"Nice wheels," Stella remarked.

"It's Harry's," Parker explained.  "He's letting me borrow it."

"Where are you going?" asked Charlie.

"Church," said Parker, his face, voice, and eyes completely without guile.

"Have fun," Stella smiled.

"Yeah, say hi to God for me, would you?" Charlie jibed.

"Sure," Parker responded, rolling up the window and continuing down the drive.

"Charlie," Stella murmured.  "Was that really necessary?"

"Church, my ass," her husband groused.  "I'll bet he gets away with a lot, with a face like that.  The big, innocent eyes, the butter-wouldn't-melt-in-his-mouth expression, the twelve-year-old's voice."

She started laughing.  "Oh, come on," she said.  "Him?  You must be kidding."

"He could be up to all sorts of things," Charlie insisted as they parked.  "He's got serious gray matter, Stella.  You should've seen his room."  He broke off abruptly, staring straight ahead.

"What about it?"

"I didn't see any contact lens solution, anything like that in his bathroom," Charlie said, realizing at last what had struck him as odd about Parker's belongings.  "Lyle said he had terrible eyesight, but he doesn't wear glasses, and I didn't see any signs of contact lenses."

"Maybe he had surgery," Stella suggested.

"How'd he pay for it?  Laser surgery costs five or six grand, and he's only making twenty grand a year."

She exhaled, parked the car, and cut the engine.  "So, what are you suggesting?"

"I dunno," Charlie admitted.  "I just don't trust him, Stella.  I don't trust the devil inside him."

"Just what kind of devil do think he has in him?" she asked, incredulous.

"I dunno," Charlie repeated, feeling foolish, but unable to shake the notion that something shifty lurked beneath Parker's nerd-next-door exterior.  "Can you imagine what those three kids could do if they put their minds to it?  Parker as the brains behind the outfit, Watson as the front woman, and Osborn bankrolling the whole operation?"

"Okay, now you're way off the meter," she teased.  "I don't think any one of them has a criminal bone in their bodies.  Maybe Osborn if you pushed him, but I doubt he'd have the guts.  Watson doesn't need to; she's so pretty, sooner or later someone like Jack is going to come along and be her sugar daddy.  Parker has too many other options open to him, and besides, he's just too honest."

"I don't know, Stella," he sighed.  "He knows how to keep a secret.  I watched him play Scrabble, and he was inscrutable.  Lyle wore everything on his face, but even I had a hard time reading Parker.  He may look transparent, but I think Jack's right—there's a lot going on under the surface that he's keeping to himself."

Stella shook her head.  "I don't know, Charlie.  I think your line of work has left you a little too suspicious."  She opened the driver's side door, snapping up her umbrella.  "Come on, before the bidding starts and all the best things are gone."

*****

Most of the bidding was done in the foyer, which was so packed with auction-goers that there almost wasn't room to breathe.  Competition for certain items was fierce, and Charlie watched the prices soar.  After two hours, people were sweating, and the Norman Osborn Memorial Hospital was well on its way to becoming a reality.

By noon, the property had been sold to a pair of siblings from Texas who planned to turn it into an inn, a vacation retreat where people could come and ride horses.  Charlie and Stella agreed that this was a wonderful idea, and it would keep the pristine site from being bulldozed into a subdivision.  An elated shriek went up when Lyle won the bidding on the Corvette; he would have danced around the foyer if there had been room.

In the afternoon, Charlie won six rare first editions for Left Ear, and just for the hell of it, he bid on, and won, a wonderful antique silver ashtray for Handsome Rob.  Near the end of the day, some weapons came up on the block: old guns, a gorgeous collection of hunting knives, and the pride of the collection, a sword engraved with the letters 'CS'—Confederate States.  That baby fetched three-quarters of a million.  To Charlie's surprise, Jack bid on a trio of handsome Japanese katanas—surely he already owned such swords by the dozen—but he seemed utterly thrilled, almost dazed, when nobody topped his bid and the gavel crashed down.

The bidding stopped from 12:30-1:30 so people could eat lunch, and Charlie made his way through the crowd to Lyle, who was being congratulated by Parker on his acquisition of the Corvette.

"How was church?" Charlie asked without preamble.

"Great," said Parker, his eyes as clear and gray as rainwater.

"Where'd you go?"

"Our Lady of the Mountains—you know that big stone place outside Palenville?"

"Yeah, we passed it," Charlie said casually.  "Are you Catholic?"

"No," Parker told him serenely.  "There was a guest speaker, the Catholic dean at Cornell, who wrote a terrific book on Galileo.  He talked about the balance of faith and reason.  It was interesting."

"Uh-huh."  Charlie knew full well that if he checked with the church, they would verify everything Parker had said, which aggravated him deeply.  Lyle tossed puzzled looks at Charlie.

"Harry's waving," Parker said.  "See you later, Lyle."

"Later," Lyle repeated.  After Parker had slipped out of earshot, Lyle turned to Charlie.

"What's that about?" he muttered.

"I don't trust him."

Lyle raised his eyebrows.  "Hey, listen, c'mon outside—I need some air."

They went and stood beneath the loggia, watching sheets of rain fall.

"The inner dimensions of the recreation room downstairs don't match the dimensions of the outer walls," Lyle whispered.

"You sure?"

"Positive."

"There's not a boiler room or something you haven't accounted for?" Charlie asked.

"No, I measured the outside of the house and compared it against the floor layout they printed in the catalog," said Lyle.  "Then I did some mental calculating last night, after the Scrabble game.  The whole rec room is like six, maybe eight feet shorter than it should be, given the outer dimensions of the house."

"You sure?  The room looks pretty big to me."

"The mirror makes it look longer," Lyle said.  "It's a very clever optical illusion.  In fact, I'd lay money there's a room behind there, decent sized, maybe eight by fourteen."

Charlie whistled.  "You think that's where Harry's old man might have stashed something?"

"I did more work last night," Lyle said.  "I checked local crime stats and didn't turn up any mysterious deaths on the property.  Then I got thinking about Professor Rosenstein and did a little background check on him.  Did you know he was an international expert in recovering stolen artwork?"

"No, but it's not surprising."

"I got thinking about what he'd said—silent concerts, thirteen years—then I did a quick search to see if there were any famous art robberies thirteen years ago, especially anything involving musical instruments.  This is what I found."  He dug into the pocket of his jeans and produced a computer printout.  Charlie read the text, aware that his eyes must be bugging out of his head.

"Yeah, my reaction, basically."

"Son of a bitch," Charlie whispered.

Lyle took the sheet and stuck it back in his pocket.  "It's here," said Charlie, dazed.  "They're all here.  Jesus."

"Yeah, Stormin' Norman's private blue-chip stocks," Lyle muttered.  "He could have sold them and financed another whole research lab."

"That woman," Charlie said abruptly.  "That Gemini woman.  She wanted to buy the house.  How much do you wanna bet she wasn't interested in the Steinway?"

"What about Jack?" said Lyle.  "What's his game?"

"He's not interested in the house; he didn't even bid on it," said Charlie.  "He only seemed to want those swords."

"We gotta tell Harry," Lyle said.  "He can't let the house pass to the new owners without getting that stuff out first."

"How the hell are we going to approach him?" Charlie asked.  "Without mortally insulting his father's memory?"

"Shit," Lyle said.  "I didn't think about that."

Stella came out onto the porch.  "Hey, I was wondering where you guys went.  D'you feel like lunch?  I'm starving."  She stared at both men.  "Why the long faces?"

"Come on," said Charlie.  "Let's get some lunch, and we'll tell you about it."

*****

"Harry, lad!"

"Hey, Jack… thanks for the high bid on those swords.  You probably could've won them for less."

Jack shrugged.  "Ah, it's for a good cause, right?"  He fished into one pocket of his jeans. "Here.  Please accept this as a token of my appreciation."

"One cent?" Harry laughed.  "You paid almost three grand for those things."  He tried to give the penny back to his cousin.

"Ah, but that money's going to a bank account, and I won't feel like they're properly mine unless some money has changed hands."

"Is this some weird Scottish thing?" Harry inquired.

"Nah, it's just a weird me-thing.  Keep the penny, please."

"Okay," Harry shrugged.  He tucked the penny into a pocket.  "But they're all yours, man.  You don't owe me anything else."

Charlie watched this exchange from the music room, bemused but worried.  He simply didn't know how to approach Osborn, and he didn't want to shatter the boy's newfound sense of human connection, which sullying his father's memory almost surely would do.  He had debated having Lyle tell Parker, but Charlie didn't trust the young photographer.  That left only one real avenue:  Jack.

"Hey, Charlie, mate," Jack called.  "You about ready to get dinner?  I'm famished."

"Sure," said Charlie.

"I'm surprised you didn't bid on the Steinway," Jack said to Stella.

"No, I have my mother's piano," she told him. "I bid on the mandolin, though—that's beautiful, and I'd love to learn a different instrument."

"Where's Lyle, out admiring his new baby?" Jack laughed.

"Probably," Charlie grinned.  "C'mon, let's go collect him and see what we can do for dinner."

"You'll be back tomorrow, right?" asked Harry, sounding appealingly anxious.

"Sure we will, lad," Jack encouraged him.  "Sure we will."

*****

Charlie opened up to Jack over dinner at the German restaurant.  His friend listened attentively while Lyle sketched out the reasons for their suspicions.  Jack nodded, sad but not surprised.

"You guessed all this?" asked Stella.

"I had a suspicion," Jack allowed.  "When we came here ten years ago, Dad visited with Norman for an hour, and when they came back, he was utterly revolted.  Wouldn't say why, but he and Mum severed all contacts with the Osborns after that.  I did some digging on my own, and it seems Norman had a taste for masterpieces, and he didn't care how he came by them.  My guess is that your Professor Rosenstein knew this as well, and that's why he planned to attend the auction.  And that's why he wanted to run it all past you, Charlie, to see if you knew anything, or maybe just to get your professional opinion."

"Harry wouldn't know about the artwork," Lyle guessed.  "His father wouldn't have told him."

"Not in this life," Jack confirmed.

"We don't have a lot of time," Charlie said.  "If we're gonna confront him about this, we need to do it before the end of the day tomorrow.  Once the house is turned over to its new owners, we won't be able to get in there."

"So you think it's all behind the mirror?" asked Jack.

"Positive," said Lyle, keeping his voice low.  "There's a whole room in there."

"Chances are, a portion of the glass opens," put in Stella.  "There's probably a trigger hidden in the bar somewhere."

"How do we approach Harry?" Charlie asked Jack.

The Englishman shook his head.  "Very carefully.  It would be best if one of us, probably me, said casually, 'Hey, this room looks awfully small,' or if someone, say the Napster here, 'accidentally' found the switch in the bar."

"And if we do, what then?" Stella pressed.  "Do we just tell him, 'Oh, this is a lot of priceless artwork your dad bought illegally?'"

"Best to let him draw that conclusion on his own," Jack said soberly.

They paused while a waitress brought over their drinks.  Charlie mulled over the situation, then said, "I think the thing to do is get ourselves invited to dinner again.  Offer to pay for it, Jack—maybe Chinese or pizza, so we can suggest eating in the basement.  Then maybe Lyle can get curious about the bar and start poking around, something like that.  We may have to improvise."

"All right," said Jack.  "I'll toss out the bait and tomorrow, see if he bites."

"What about that Englishwoman, Gemini?" asked Stella.  "Where does she fit into all this?"

Jack shook his head.  "That's the oddest thing.  She's known to collect masterpieces too, just as Osborn did, so it didn't surprise me one jot when she turned up.  What's odd is she didn't come back to bid on the house."  Jack took a long pull off his martini.  "It's not like her to give up without a fight, not at all."

*****

A different atmosphere prevailed the following day.  Many of the high-end bidders had cleared out, and a somewhat more proletarian crowd jockeyed for the less expensive items: kitchen wares, art reproductions, small appliances, job lots of books and records.

Charlie and Stella waited for the bidding to end, on pins and needles all day.  Charlie felt like he was walking on delicate egg shells now that he knew about the priceless treasure hidden within the walls of the house.  He watched Osborn closely, hoping Jack's plan of "casual discovery" would work.  He didn't want to see Jack ruin his relationship with his cousin, but more, he didn't want Osborn to become estranged from his two friends.  He couldn't say why—maybe it was Lyle and Jack's stories about Norman Osborn's arrogance and ruthlessness—but he feared the consequences of Harry losing the warmth of human contact.  He disliked the thought of what might happen if such a lonely young man with so much money and so much time to brood became completely isolated.

At last the bidding ended for good, and the auction-goers began to depart.  Outside the house, a fleet of cars, vans, and trucks waited, and people began loading up their booty, looking weirdly like kids departing a college dormitory for the summer.  Moving vans would come for the larger items the following day; only the largest pieces of furniture—and those purchased by the new owners—remained.

Darkness had almost fallen when the last van rumbled out of the driveway, leaving the mansion uncomfortably quiet, bigger and more stark than ever, now that so many of the things that had given it warmth and personality were gone.

"So, do you have a final tally, lad?" Jack asked his cousin.  Mary Jane hovered by his side; the two had been exchanging frequent smiles all day, and Charlie suspected that Harry might not be the only one getting an invitation to spend the holidays in Jolly Auld England.

"Better than $20 million," said Harry, his face flushed.  He glanced around the nearly-vacant foyer, for the first time showing something like sadness.  "Most of that's from the house and the property."

"Good work," Stella praised warmly.  "When will work on the hospital begin?"

"Next year," Harry answered.  "We're going to invest the money and see how much else we can get in donations—you know, matching funds, stuff like that.  So there'll be even more once construction begins."

"Great," said Charlie.

"God, I'm hungry," Harry sighed.  "Jack said he'd treat us to pizza, and it's coming in like half an hour… you guys wanna stay?"

"Sure," Stella laughed.  "Are we going to eat on the floor?"

"No, the dining room table is still here," said Harry.  "The new owner is coming for it tomorrow.  What a beast—I can't imagine what anyone'd do with a table that big, but hey.  It's ours for tonight.  Just don't spill anything on it, okay?"

Jack said casually, "Why don't we just eat downstairs?"

*****

The delivery came at seven.  Harry took receipt of the substantial order, and Jack helped him cart the food into the dining room.  Mary Jane went to the top of the stairs and yelled, "Peter, the pizza's here!"

"Jesus, she should've been a cheerleader," Lyle muttered.

"He's been doing homework all day," said Mary Jane, skipping lightly down the stairs.  "He's like, so unbelievably smart."

"Putting himself through college," Harry added, gesturing toward the staircase with a six-pack of soda.  "Can you guys help me get this stuff downstairs?"  Everyone moved to pick up bags and boxes.  Absently, Charlie wondered why Osborn's philanthropy didn't extend to underwriting his friend's education.  Perhaps he had offered and Parker had refused.

"Hey, Jack, are those your swords?" asked Lyle, puzzled, staring at the three katanas, sheathed in their ornate rack.  The collection sat incongruously on the dining room table.

"Sure they are," said Jack cheerfully.  "I'm not letting those babies out of my sight."

Charlie heard footsteps on the stairs, and he turned to see Parker heading down.

"And there's Mr. Smartypants himself," Lyle snarked.  "What were you doing up there, working out pi to a few more digits?"  He still hadn't gotten over the loss at Scrabble, apparently.

Parker looked at down Lyle, perhaps to call out some kind of retort, but when he reached the landing, his feet went out from under him—Charlie didn't see quite how it happened—and for a moment, he hung suspended in the air, arms windmilling wildly, then gravity won, and Parker's head struck the banister with an audible crack before he went tumbling down the stairs, coming to rest at the bottom like a broken toy.

Part IV

"Oh, my God!" Mary Jane shrieked.  "Peter!"

Jack was the first to move, leaping over to Parker's side.  "Call for an ambulance!" he barked, but Charlie already had his cellular in hand.

"How is he?" asked Stella, coming to crouch at Parker's other side.

"He's alive," said Jack grimly.  "He's out stone cold, though.  Don't move him."

Harry stood motionless, like a dumb thing, staring at his friend's prone form.

Lyle went to Charlie side.  "Is he gonna be okay?" he whispered.

"I don't know," Charlie answered.  He couldn't see any blood, but it didn't look good: Parker was utterly motionless and white as a sheet.  Nearby, Mary Jane wept in great, wracking sobs.  Stella got up and wrapped long arms around her.

"It's okay," she whispered.

The ambulance came with alacrity, and Harry opened the doors for the EMTs.  The sight of Parker—young, healthy, intelligent—being strapped onto the gurney was almost too distressing for the others to bear.  Mary Jane was beside herself, and Charlie wondered abruptly if her feelings for Parker went deeper than they appeared on the surface.

"Come on," said Lyle, taking her arm.  "Let's go to the hospital—they're gonna need his information, insurance, stuff like that.  Okay?"

She nodded, trembling violently, but she allowed Lyle to steer her out of the house behind the EMTs.  The silence that followed their departure was deafening.

Harry was stricken, as close to tears as Charlie had seen him all weekend.  "Oh, God," he kept muttering.  "Oh, God."

"C'mon, let's go sit down," Jack urged everyone.  "I think we could all stand to get off our feet."  Silently, they took seats at the big table, their plans to eat downstairs forgotten, and Jack poured them sodas.  The pizzas sat fragrant in their boxes, but nobody had any appetite for them.

*****

"Where the hell are they going?" muttered Scorpio.

Gemini's nose assessed the air.  "That's the mutant they're taking out," she pronounced, watching the rear end of the ambulance vanish down the drive, an SUV behind it.

"It's a trick," said Josh.

"Of course it is," said Gemini.  "It's trying to draw us away from the house."

"Maybe it plans to double back," Joshua suggested.  "O'Connell might have a trap set for us inside."

Gemini debated, then said, "Charles, William.  Follow the mutant and keep an eye on it—from a distance.  It will be taken to the nearest hospital.  Find out what's supposedly wrong with it and report back to me."

The two vampires nodded and slipped away.  After fifteen minutes, Gemini detected no movement from the house, so she signaled the front group of vampires to start moving.  Amy, one of the smaller females, slipped up to a window where light shone.  "They're eating dinner," she reported.

Entering the house proved ridiculously easy: the front door had not been re-locked when the ambulance left.  Because of the auction, the threshold barrier that normally prevented the undead from entering a home had been rendered inactive.  Silently, they began filling the foyer.

*****

"Charlie?"

"Yeah, Lyle."  Around the table, heads turned, eyes staring at Charlie as he spoke into the cellular.  "How is he?"

"Not good," Lyle reported.  In the background, Charlie could hear the dim sound of automobile engines.

"Where are you?"

"The parking lot.  They don't let you use cell phones inside the hospital.  MJ's in there with him.  God, the poor kid's a wreck—she really likes him, Charlie—she kept going on and on about how much she loves him, how wonderful he is—it's a little pathetic."

"So, how's Peter?"

"He's got some kind of head trauma they can't figure out," Lyle said.  "They ran an EEG, and he's hardly showing any brain activity.  He has a bump on his head where he fell, but I guess the CT scan didn't show any damage.  His vitals are way, way slow, and it's like he's almost in a coma.  So it's this weird combination of symptoms.  They wanna run an MRI, but they have to bring in the equipment from somewhere else, and they don't think they'll have it until tomorrow."

"Poor kid!" Charlie said, feeling acutely guilty for his earlier suspicions of Parker.

"Yeah, they have no idea when he'll come out of it—if he ever does."

"What about his family?" asked Charlie.  "Have they been called?"

"There's just his aunt, but MJ can't remember the phone number."

"Shit."  Charlie rubbed his forehead.  "You want us to come there?"

"Not right now, but see if Harry can dig up the aunt's phone number.  If he comes by later, could he maybe bring MJ's portable stereo?  She's babbling about music, how that sometimes brings people out of comas."

"Yeah, we'll do that," Charlie promised.  "Call me again in half an hour."  He rang off and told Harry, "Lyle needs Peter's aunt's phone number, and MJ wants her radio."  Briefly, he explained Parker's condition.  The others nodded, visibly distressed at the news.

"Why don't we all just go over there?" suggested Stella.  "We're not doing any good here, and it'll give MJ some support."

"Good idea," said Harry, showing an unexpected flash of maturity.  "I have his aunt's number programmed into my cellular—it's upstairs.  I can get MJ's radio while I'm up there."  They all stood up, pushing away the remains of the pizza, and went out into the foyer.

Charlie blinked in surprise.  In the center of the vast space stood Gemini, looking around with a proprietary eye.

"You're a little late," said Jack dryly.  "The house's been sold."

"Oh, it's not the house I'm interested in," she smiled.  An instant later, a small army poured out of the other rooms: the music room, the drawing room, the library, from upstairs and downstairs.  The others gasped, and Charlie's heart slammed against his ribs: every single one of these creatures—they looked like people from the neck down, but their faces were hideous—resembled the thing that had killed Professor Rosenstein.  And sure enough, there he was, the tall russet-haired man in the gray suit.

The four humans pressed against each other.  Charlie could hear Stella's heart pounding, and Harry's.  Jack's breath whistled over his teeth, and he swore furiously.

"What are those things?" whispered Stella.

Grimly, Jack told her, "They're vampires."

*****

"That's right," Gemini smiled, pleased to see them so afraid.  "I can't believe you didn't figure it out before now, O'Connell."

"You and me both," he said dryly.  "I'm getting a little slow on the uptake in my old age."

"What the hell do you want?" asked Osborn.

"Harry, Harry," she purred, strolling over to the young heir.  She reached out and put a hand on his chest.  "So much anger inside, so much hatred and confusion."  He stared at her, mesmerized, his dark eyes dilated.  Gemini took him in: tall, strong, beautiful.  A pity to use this one for food.  She felt the stirring of another, deeper appetite, something she hadn't felt in almost a century.  She hadn't sired a mate in so long—her last consort had perished on a Slayer's stake, and Gemini had resisted siring another until she found exactly the right personality type.  And this boy had it, a streak of ruthlessness that lay deep within, awaiting the right trigger to bring it to turbulent life.

"What do you want?" he repeated sluggishly.

"You," she smiled, then struck him once, hard across the temple.  The other humans lunged to his defense, but even more quickly, her minions sprang over and grabbed them.  Gemini caught Osborn as he fell, then carried him over and lay him near the wall.  "Leave him," she ordered.

"Why do you get to have him?" Scorpio whined, gazing covetously at the unconscious human.

"Because I'm the leader," Gemini scowled.  "Sire one of the others if you want… O'Connell's not so bad."

"He's Scottish."

"Oh, spare me your confounded snobbery."  Gemini returned to the other three humans. "The speed and mercy of your death will hinge on how fully you cooperate," she stated.  "Where is the painting?"

Jack raised an eyebrow. "Will someone please explain to me why a powerful, immortal vampire is concerned with an ephemeral piece of human artwork?"

She glared at him.  "Because I want it, O'Connell.  Greed is as common among the undead as it is among the living.  Now, where is it?"  When she received only silence in reply, she gestured to Joshua.  "Torture them, starting with the woman."

"You piece of shit!" the big male hollered, struggling vainly against his captors.

"Tell me where it is," Gemini repeated sweetly.  "I can be quite reasonable, you know."

*****

"She told us to watch it," William said.  "Not to kill it."

"It's not doing anything," responded Charles.  "I say we should just kill it and be done with it."

"Shhh… the bloodbags are leaving."

The vampires pretended to busy themselves with magazines, watching as the two red-haired humans approached the waiting area.

"Charlie said he'd bring the radio," the male was saying.

"I can't wait," said the female, agitated.  "I need to do something, Lyle.  C'mon.  We can go and be back in the time it'll take everyone else to get over here."   They whirled through the fire doors and were gone.

The vampires waited.  "C'mon, now, before they return," Charles whispered.

"But—"

"Oh, come on."  Charles was impatient.  William had only been sired a decade ago; he remained in complete awe of Gemini, and he wouldn't dream of countermanding one of her orders.  Charles had been in her service two centuries, and he had grown more sanguine.  He thought that in this case, Gemini's caution was unwarranted—the mutant was injured and catatonic, and given that it had murdered Leopold and Samuel, they'd be best to kill it while they could.

As they waited, a nurse went into the mutant's room, then re-emerged.  She went into another patient's room, and Charles gestured to William.  "C'mon."  Reluctantly, William followed.

They slipped into the room and shut the door.  Charles watched the creature in the bed avidly.  It looked thoroughly human, though its scent betrayed its true nature more than its appearance ever could.  They approached the bed with silent stealth.  Charles observed that its vital signs were almost nil.  The mutant lay utterly still, near death's door.  Well, let's push him through it.  Charles spotted an extra pillow on a chair and picked it up.

He and William crept closer to the bed.  The mutant didn't stir, its face as pale as those of the undead themselves.  Charles raised the pillow, preparing to strike.

Faster than lightning, arms whipped up, catching each vampire by the back of the neck, with a grip like an iron vise.  In the bed, the mutant was wide awake and smiling.

"Gotcha."  And it slammed their heads together.

*****

An unexpected commotion startled the group before the vampire could lay a hand on Stella.  Charlie's heart, which had already dropped to the pit of his stomach, sank through his feet and into the floor when he saw two vampires prodding Lyle and MJ into the foyer.

"Look what we found outside," one of the vampires gloated.  "Creeping around the walls."

"We tried to be sneaky," Lyle said sheepishly to Charlie.  "Sorry, man."

"All right, now that your little friends are here—where's the painting?"

After a moment, Gemini gestured to Lyle.  "Cut his ears off, Joshua."

"No!" an unexpected voice shouted.  Charlie watched as Gemini's henchman (Scorpio, she called him), an arrogantly handsome blond male, strolled over for a closer look at Lyle.  "Leave this one alone."  He reached out a finger and touched Lyle's hair.  "I've always liked redheads."

"All right, now that you've picked out your boy toy, can we get on with it?"  Gemini shifted her ugly gaze to Mary Jane.  "Her," she said.  "Cut off her ears."

"Oh, for God's sake, it's in the bloody basement!" Jack burst out.  "Behind the mirror!"

"Wonderful," Gemini pronounced.  "Cut off her ears."

"You promised!" Stella cried.

"Since when did I promise anything?" Gemini said contemptuously.  Charlie watched in horror as Scorpio grabbed Mary Jane and withdrew a long, wicked-looking knife.

He never had a chance to use it.  As Charlie watched, Scorpio flew backward through the air, rising off the floor, moving so fast that he seemed to be pulled up by a giant vacuum cleaner.  His arms and legs thrashed in the air, mouth moving comically then, when he reached the window—one of the small ones up near the ceiling—his whole frame jolted.  "You fuck," Charlie heard him say clearly.  Then, incredibly, his body dissolved into a skeleton, then crumbled into dust and vanished.

*****

So many things happened immediately afterwards that Charlie could barely make sense of them all.  Jack, taking advantage of the vampires' shock, executed some complicated martial arts maneuver that sent his captor flying.  He shouted something that sounded like Japanese, and to Charlie's vast amazement, one of the katanas came flying out of the dining room and into his hand.  A vampire rushed him, but he sprang up smartly, swung the sword, and sliced off its head in one clean movement.  Like Scorpio, it crumbled into dust.

Charlie didn't hesitate: he stomped down with all his strength on the foot of the vampire that held him.  Its grip loosened fractionally, and he rammed an elbow into its gut.  Suddenly, he was free.

"Charlie!"  He looked up and saw a katana spinning through the air toward him.  Without thinking, he reached up a hand; instead of dismembering him, the hilt landed smartly in his palm.  His captor lunged to grab him again; Charlie spun about and lopped its head from its shoulders.  The feeling of the sword in his hand was incredible; the weapon seemed to have a life of its own.  He immediately turned, looking for Stella.  A second figure rushed over: Mary Jane, brandishing an enormous machine gun, looking crazily like a 1920s gangster's moll.  She aimed at Stella's captor and fired: not bullets, but a stream of water.  The vampire howled, its flesh sizzling, as if corroded by acid.  It loosened its grip on Stella, and she tore herself free from its grasp.

"Stella!"  The third katana flew toward her, and she caught it, just as Charlie had done, and she reduced the vampire to ashes with one clean swipe.

The foyer was a pandemonium of vampires fighting.  Some of them seemed caught in some bizarre-looking net; every couple of seconds, there would be an explosion of ashes.  Others moved about the perimeter, looking for hostages or an escape.  Charlie saw Lyle, also brandishing an enormous water gun, using the weapon to blind any vampire within range.

"What's in those?" Charlie yelled at MJ.

"Holy water!" she shouted back, turning around to soak another vampire.  It screamed, and Jack smartly decapitated it.

"Kill as many as you can!" he shouted.  "Don't let any of them escape!"

They went to work.  At first, they had been staggeringly outnumbered, but as more and more of the undead disintegrated, the odds began to improve, and Charlie's hopes began to rise.  He trailed MJ, and Stella trailed Lyle, forming two efficient teams of blind-and-decapitate.  Jack worked on his own, employing his formidable combat skills.  Charlie marveled at the katana, which practically sang in his hand.

He couldn't tell exactly what was happening at the center of the melee, only that there seemed to be a lot of vicious fighting and a lot of dead vampires.  Periodically, he would glimpse a blur of motion, a kind of reddish-blue streak, but he didn't dare stand still long enough to figure out what the hell was going on.  He kept following MJ: soak, swing, soak, swing.

Near one wall, a vampire grabbed Harry's curly hair and yanked his head upward, a knife in one hand, aiming to slit the boy's throat.  "No!" MJ screamed, and she bolted across the floor, firing a powerful stream of water.  Charlie moved to follow her, but something smashed into him, toppling him to the hard floor, where he lay, winded.  The katana went flying, and before Charlie could grab it back, another hand snatched the weapon.  It was Joshua, the russet-haired vampire who had killed Professor Rosenstein.  Leering down at Charlie, it prepared to drive the katana into his heart.

The sword flashed, but Charlie felt nothing.  Then Joshua's head fell from his shoulders.  For one instant, it lay on the floor, blinking in astonishment.  Then the head and body crumbled to ash.  Behind him, Stella stood with the katana in one hand, a dangerous expression on her face.

"Thanks," Charlie wheezed.  She helped him to his feet and kicked his weapon back up into his hands.

"What's going on?" he asked, gazing about.  On one side of the foyer, Jack battled four vampires, swinging his sword with lethal precision.  Lyle rushed to his assistance, spraying water.  On the other side of the foyer, MJ stood guarding Harry's body with her super-soaker.  At the center of the room, vampires were exploding spectacularly, and Charlie could see at last that they were fighting a single, fast-moving opponent.  Then he got a better look at the foyer itself, and his heart lurched with a horror even greater than when the army of vampires had revealed itself.  Spun from one end of the room to the other were great, glistening spider webs.

*****

All of Jack's vampires were dead.  He and Lyle joined Charlie and Stella, and they watched the rest of the battle.  Three vampires remained, Gemini and two huge brutes.  One of the brutes exploded.  The second one's feet went out from under him, and he was dragged across the floor.  Something landed on his back, and a long wooden spear drove down into the vampire's heart.

Charlie's mouth was glued shut with fear.  He didn't know which of the two combatants he feared more.

Gemini's demonic face was terrifying, all the more so because it was completely at odds with her beautiful human features.  Her forehead bulged out, thick and lumpy; her eyes were sunken back into yellow-green slits; her fangs were so long they curved down almost to her chin.  On the end of each hand, long black claws extended like talons from her fingers.  Her nose was flat, the nostrils two snake-like slits.

The creature that fought her was even more bizarre.  It had a human form, two arms and two legs, but its skin was scaly, red and blue.  Its face was a flat, featureless red, lacking a nose, mouth, and ears.  Its large silver eyes slanted upward like an alien's.  It circled around Gemini, a long spear of wood in one hand, both ends of the weapon sharpened into points.

Jack took a step toward them, but MJ waved him back.  "Give him some space," she called.

Gemini lunged.  The alien sprang away from her, leaping spectacularly high into the air, and on its descent, tried to skewer her with the spear.  Lightly, she somersaulted away.  The two circled each other like jungle cats, both phenomenally swift and strong.

The alien flicked a hand, spewing out a stream of white.  Gemini neatly avoided this, and an extravagant spider web blossomed in the doorway to the library.  Charlie shuddered.  Gemini flew at the alien with a lunging kick.  It leaped away, spewing out more webs, which she mostly avoided.  A few strands caught her sleeve; she used her talons to sever them.

The alien crawled along one wall with a scuttling sideways movement, then sprang down, finally catching her in a tackle.  They writhed about on the floor, talons flashing, webs spitting out everywhere (Charlie ducked, not wanting to become entangled in one), fists and feet pummeling.  Gemini caught the alien's head in her arms, no doubt intending to break its neck, but one of its legs shot up with amazing agility, slamming her arm and forcing her to release her grip.  But the alien had lost hold of the wooden spear, which clattered across the marble floor.  The alien whipped around and punched hard.  The force of the blow caused Gemini to stagger back a few steps.  Behind her, MJ leveled her super-soaker and coolly doused the vampire with holy water.

Gemini screamed, a horrible sound.  Some instinct for self-preservation took over, and she sprang up toward the open window.  The alien moved with such speed that it became a streaking blur of crimson and blue.  With its left hand, it shot a web at the ceiling, rising up alongside Gemini; with its right, it shot another web down at the wooden spear, snagging the weapon and pulling it upward.  Just as the vampire reached the window, the alien caught the spear and drove it into her chest.

A fearsome noise followed, like a thousand screeching banshees, a din so abhorrent to the human ear that everyone in the foyer clamped hands to the sides of their heads.  Gemini's flesh seemed to be sucked off her frame and out the window, leaving only clean white bones behind.  When nothing remained but her skeleton, impaled on the wooden spear, the bones abruptly dropped to the marble floor with a loud clatter, breaking into smaller pieces.

The alien hung from the ceiling by a single, glistening strand of web.  Then it folded up its legs and began to descend, upside down, looking for all the world like a gigantic spider.  Charlie felt that he would pass out from fear.  When it got within a few feet of the floor, it straightened its legs, and in one fluid movement, flipped over and landed noiselessly on its feet.

As if some spell had broken, MJ went over to its side.  Charlie wondered how she could stand to be so near the thing.  Briefly, without words, they seemed to confer.  Mary Jane surveyed Gemini's skeletal remains.  "I don't like this," Charlie heard her say.

The alien evidently agreed with her.  It picked up the skull, regarding it like some bizarre extraterrestrial Hamlet: Alas poor Yorick; I knew him well.  Then it brought its two hands together and crushed the skull to powder.

*****

Mary Jane noticed the others staring, and she lightly touched the creature on its elbow.

"Come on, guys," she laughed.  "It's okay."

"Oh, my God," Lyle was saying, his voice high and excited.  "Oh, my God!"

Mary Jane approached her friends, still smiling, the creature on her heels.

"Guys," she said, gesturing to the alien.  "This is Spider-Man.  Um, Spider-Man, these are my friends: Jack O'Connell, Charlie and Stella Croker, and Lyle, whose last name I don't know."

Lyle was beside himself.  He hopped over and began poking Spider-Man's bicep.  "Oh, my God!  I'm so psyched!  You're really him!"  Spider-Man tilted his head down toward Lyle, his posture like that of an adult lion humoring a cub.

"Oh, come on," laughed Stella.  "I thought Spider-Man was a tabloid hoax!"

"No, he's for real," MJ smiled.

"You know him?" Jack squeaked, incredulous.

"Sure, he saves my life on a pretty regular basis… I was actually getting overdue for rescue."  Her face held a deep flush, her blue eyes all a-sparkle, and Charlie thought with horror, she likes him!

At the center of all this attention, Spider-Man stood, utterly unfazed.  Its long, lithe body rippled with muscle, and its subtle, powerful grace reminded Charlie of a big cat.

"Well," Jack said briskly, "we should properly dispose of our friend Gemini, wouldn't you say?  I for one favor a nice, Christian burial."

"You're joking, right?" said Lyle.

"Not at all," Jack responded.  "She needs to be ground into little bits and buried with as much holy power as we can muster.  If Gemini's bones are recovered intact by someone with the proper knowledge, they could be used to resurrect her—it's a fairly grotesque ritual, involving the blood of everyone who was present when she died… which pretty much means all of us."

"So, what do we need?" asked Stella.  "Crosses, holy water…?"

"All of the above," said Jack. "If we can swing it, the best—"  He broke off suddenly.  "Harry, no!" he shouted.

Charlie whipped around.  One of the vampires had left a semiautomatic behind when it was dusted; Harry had regained consciousness, crawled quietly across the marble floor, and was now taking aim at the dead center of Spider-Man's chest.

He never had a chance to fire.  A long web shot out, catching the gun and pulling it from Osborn's hand.  Charlie at last saw how Spider-Man did it, curling his two middle fingers inward, the web spinning directly from his wrist, the most repulsive thing Charlie had ever seen in his life.  The gun flew through the air, landing straight in Jack's hands, as if that were precisely where Spider-Man had aimed it.  With a web shot from his right hand, he snagged the front of Osborn's shirt and reeled him in like a hooked marlin.  Harry flew across the room exactly as Scorpio had, his trip terminating abruptly when Spider-Man caught the front of his shirt and held him up off the floor with one hand.

"Go on, kill me!" Harry shrieked, his voice high-pitched and shrill.  "Kill me, just like you killed my father, you murdering fiend!"

To Charlie's surprise, Spider-Man gave Harry a shake and lowered him to the floor.  Releasing the young man, he said in a gruff, muffled voice, "There's a lot about your father you don't understand."

Part V

Harry stood sputtering indignantly.  He made a half-hearted lunge at Spider-Man, only to be caught again by the shirt, held out at arm's length, and set on the floor.

"Don't be foolish, lad," Jack warned.  "He could break you in half."

Harry's gaze darted about wildly.  "This place is a mess," he sputtered.  "Him—I don't want him in my house!"

"It's not yours anymore," Lyle reminded him evenly.

Ignoring Harry, Spider-Man said to Jack, "Why don't we go find that painting?"

"What painting?" Harry snarled.

"The one your dad bought illegally," Jack said.  "It's hidden behind the mirror downstairs.  We were going to tell you about it before Gemini and her minions arrived."

"Where is she now?" asked Harry, as if the absence of the vampires had just occurred to him at that moment.

"Right there."  Jack pointed to the skeleton. "All this dust is what's left of her army."

For the first time, Harry noticed the three swords and the water guns, and he asked uncertainly, "Did you guys kill them?"

"Well, we had some help," MJ said dryly, and Harry turned to glare at Spider-Man.

"Getting in good with my friends?" he snarled.  "Turning them all against me?"

Spider-Man's posture conveyed impatience.  "Don't be tiresome," it growled.

"Come on, let's go find the thing before we play the blame game," Jack chided.  Charlie and Stella headed for the stairs, Lyle behind them.  But Harry wouldn't budge.

"I don't trust him."

"For the love of Christ!" Jack swore.  "You go ahead, then MJ, and I'll keep an eye on our impromptu houseguest, all right?"  Finally, grudgingly, Harry began to move, casting dirty looks back over his shoulder.

At last they all assembled in the basement.  Charlie maintained a safe distance from Spider-Man, although Lyle watched him with excited eyes.  Charlie had realized, after hearing the thing speak, that what he had mistaken for skin was some kind of mesh spandex unitard—not unlike what an acrobat might wear—and that underneath it was a human being—a spectacularly fast and strong human, one that could crawl walls and spin webs from its wrists.  The discovery that the thing was a person creeped him out on some deep, psychological level.  He realized the red and blue suit acted as a clever kind of camouflage, completely hiding the identity of the man beneath it.  On closer inspection, he saw the silver webbing that covered the entire suit (which contributed to his initial impression of scales) and the black spider emblazoned on both its chest and back.

It stood quietly watching—Charlie couldn't bring himself to think of the thing as "him"—as Stella carefully examined every inch of the bar for a hidden trigger.  Harry stood there, glowering alternately at her and at Spider-Man.

"Charlie, give me a hand," she called.

Gladly, he went and helped her.  Lyle checked the countertop.  Jack and MJ began checking the rest of the rec room, looking along the floors and walls.  Charlie glanced up from the bar and gagged back revulsion when he saw Spider-Man crawling along the ceiling, inspecting the soundproofing panels.  He forced his attention back to the bar, checking the wooden surfaces for any unusual depressions or bumps, while Harry grew increasingly indignant.

"You're all nuts," he pronounced.  "My father didn't steal anything."

"Gotcha," said Jack.  "It's right here, inside the radiator baseboard—a lovely little switch.  Now, watch."

Charlie stepped back from the bar.  With a soft mechanical hum, the central third of the mirror began to rise up into the ceiling.  "Hot damn," said Lyle.

They all crowded around.  Behind the mirror stood a heavy steel door, like that on a bank vault, with an elaborate combination lock.

"Can you crack it?" Charlie asked Stella.

"Sure," she said.  "Just give me some space, okay?"  She began turning the dial experimentally.

Everyone moved back.  Harry was staring at the door, looking angry and chagrined and almost ludicrously betrayed.  He glared at Jack.

"Did you come here for this?" he demanded.

"Not exactly," Jack responded.  "My first and foremost interest was the Dragon Swords."

"What are they?" asked MJ curiously.

He showed her one katana.  "There's three," he explained.  "The Green Dragon, the Red Dragon, and the Blue Dragon."  For the first time Charlie noticed the fire-breathing lizards etched into the metal of the narrow blades, a different color on each sword.  "They obey the will of their owner."

"So that's why they flew right into our hands," Charlie said.

"Exactly," said Jack.  "It's why I gave Harry a penny, to assure my ownership.  The swords will come when their master calls for them."

Harry looked at the weapons with distaste, as though they were foul, unclean.

"What about the water guns?" Charlie asked Lyle.  "Where'd you guys get those?"

MJ nodded at Spider-Man, who stood silently, watching Stella work.  "He threw one to me, one to Lyle."

"Smart," said Jack.  Harry looked so angry that Jack said sharply, "MJ saved your life with that holy water, laddie.  You might show a bit more gratitude."

"Guys," said Stella.  She turned the handle of the vault and gave it a tug.  It swung forward two inches.

"You rock!" said Lyle, hopping over.  "Well, c'mon, let's check it out!"

"No, Harry should," she said, stepping away from the door.  "It was his house; he's going to have to decide what to do with whatever we find inside."

Harry shot dirty looks at all of them, one by one, his gaze finally settling on Spider-Man with a murderous expression.  Maybe Gemini had been right about the rage bottled up inside him.  At last he moved stiffly forward and grabbed the handle.

"Are you a safecracker?" he asked Stella, regarding her with disdain.

"I'm a vault and safe technician," she snapped.  "I usually charge a thousand dollars to open a safe like this."  She gestured to the door of the vault.  "Go on, see what's in there."

Reluctantly, Harry pulled the door toward him; as he did, a light inside flicked on automatically.  Charlie could hear a quiet humming; no doubt the interior was kept carefully climate-controlled.  Harry stepped inside.

"Oh, my God."

Jack went in after him, then Stella, Charlie, Lyle, and MJ.  Charlie gaped.  They all did.  They stood in a room that measured about eight by fourteen, just as Lyle had predicted, a tiny, private museum, filled with paintings that Charlie knew must be worth billions of dollars.

Hanging prominently, clearly in a place of pride, was a work Charlie recognized immediately.  It showed a room with a black and white tile floor, in which three people dressed in seventeenth century clothing played music: a young woman seated at an instrument that resembled a small piano, an older woman holding a piece of paper and singing, and a man sitting in a chair, back to the viewer, his left hand on the neck of a stringed instrument.  Visible in the foreground of the painting were a violin and a cello.  An astonishing feeling of peace and light suffused the scene, capturing the intimacy of the moment with a timeless, poignant beauty.  Although the music couldn't be heard, viewers could easily imagine it in their minds.

"What is it?" asked Harry, dazed.

Nobody could speak for a moment, and when Jack did, Charlie heard an emotional catch in his voice.

"It's a Vermeer," he said softly.  "The painting is called The Concert.  It was stolen from a museum in Boston thirteen years ago."

*****

"Stolen—my father stole this?"

"He bought it," Jack said.  "He knew it was stolen, and he bought it—this must be what he showed my father that made him so angry the last time we visited."

Harry swallowed hard, looking like his world was collapsing around him.

"Everything in this room is stolen," Jack went on.  "But that—" he pointed to the painting—"is beyond price.  There's only thirty-five Vermeers in existence, and this is one of them."

"What—what should I do with all this?"

"Give them back," said Stella.

"They don't belong to you, lad," Jack said gently.  "They belong to the world."

Faintly, from somewhere in the house, a phone rang.

As if a spell had been broken, they all clambered out of the vault one by one.  The rec room was empty.  "Where is he?" Harry roared.  "Where'd that fiend vanish to now?"

"Let's get the damn phone," Jack said, irritated.  "We'll worry about him later."

The nearest extension was in the kitchen; Lyle reached it first.

"Hello," he said.  "Yeah, this is—what?"  His eyes went wide.  "What?  When?  Oh, my God.  We'll be right there!"  He hung up.

"Pete's missing," he said.  "The nurse found his room empty—they've been trying to call us, but I guess we didn't hear it—with all the fighting—"

They scrambled for the stairs.  "Spider-Man!" Harry snarled.  "If he touches Pete—"

"Vampires," said everyone else in unison.

Upstairs, they received a shock: all the webbing Spider-Man had shot out was gone.  He must have cleaned up after himself before taking off.  Charlie didn't have time to reflect on this peculiarity at the moment, but he was glad to see those vile spider webs gone.

"Lyle, come with me and Stella.  Jack—you take MJ and Harry.  Come on!"  They tore out to the cars, climbed inside, and sprayed gravel as they raced down the long drive.

*****

A nurse was waiting for them at the main desk, smiling broadly with relief.

"The police found him," she said, "wandering around a VFW hall parking lot.  He has some bruises and scratches, like he maybe took a tumble through some brambles, but he's okay—he must've been delirious when he wandered out of here—he was mumbling about his physics lab when they picked him up."

"Oh, thank God!" said Stella. 

MJ burst into tears.  "Is he all right?  Is his—is his brain okay?"

"He's fine," the nurse smiled.  "He came around just when we brought him back to the unit," she went on, leading them to the elevator bank.  "He was confused, but he knew his name and address and who the president is, so he's okay.  We gave him a little valium to settle him down."  They reached the third floor and went down the hallway to the ICU.  "He's asleep.  We're keeping him overnight for observation."

She opened the door to Parker's room.  Inside, the young man lay on the bed, deeply asleep but plainly all right.  MJ slipped over, fussed with the covers, and leaned down to kiss his forehead.

"You don't stand a chance with that one," Charlie said under his breath to Jack.

"Aye," the Englishman agreed, sounding melancholy.

"Come on, let's go," ordered Stella.  "We still have some decisions to make."  She looked pointedly at Harry.  Exhausted but relieved, they all trooped back to their cars.  The nurse told them that visiting hours began at nine the next morning.

*****

"Well, this is your bad luck, mate," Jack ribbed Peter.  "When most blokes're found wandering deliriously around a parking lot at midnight, there's usually a few pints of Guinness and a naked woman involved."

Beneath tousled hair, Parker turned maroon.

"Did I do anything—you know, anything embarrassing?"

"Apart from wandering around in a hospital johnny muttering about a physics lab?" Lyle grinned.  "No, nothing at all."

"Don't pick on him," MJ chided.  "C'mon, eat that Jello, Peter."

"It looks evil," he said, scowling at the wiggling emerald-green cubes.

"It's no worse than the stuff in the high school cafeteria," MJ reminded him.

With a resigned expression, Parker tucked into the Jello.  "Where's Harry?" he asked around the spoon.

"Dealing with the police and the FBI," Stella remarked.

"Is he gonna get in trouble?"

"No," said Jack.  "But his dad's name is gonna get dragged though the mud, and he's not happy about that."

Peter looked depressed and concerned.  "Oh, man."

"They have an art expert in, checking over the stuff," said Stella.  "The Vermeer is in really good condition, considering what it's been through."

"That's great," said Peter, but he looked crestfallen.  "I can't believe I missed all the excitement."

Charlie shook his head.  "Be glad you weren't there.  It was pretty damn scary at the time."

"Yeah, I almost became some gay vampire's love-slave," Lyle muttered.

Peter stared at him.  "What?"

There was a knock on the door, and a nurse poked her head in.  "Mr. Parker, when you've finished your breakfast, we'd like to run that MRI on you."

He dropped the spoon with a clatter.  "MRI?" he squeaked.

"Yes, we'd like to make sure you weren't seriously hurt when you fell—"

"But I'm fine."

"Still, we'd like to—"

"Look, I don't have health insurance," he said self-consciously.  "I can barely cover the hospital stay."

"We're taking care of the bill," Charlie assured him.  "Get the tests, just in case."

"I'm claustrophobic," Peter said in a small, frightened voice.

"Hey."  Jack put a gentle hand on his shoulder.  "It's all right, lad.  If you don't want an MRI, you don't have to have one."

The nurse scowled.  "I'm going to note in your chart that you refused the MRI against the doctor's recommendation," she said.  "But if you have any pain or dizzy spells or double vision, I'd strongly advise you to seek treatment immediately."

"All right," said Parker meekly.

After she left, Jack squeezed the boy's shoulder.  "You have a legal right to refuse any procedure you don't want."

"Yeah."  Peter began poking again at his Jello.  "When're they gonna spring me?"

"Later today," said Stella.  "Provided you're all right."

"I'm fine," he said peevishly.

Jack gave him a peculiar expression, and for an instant, some unspoken communication passed between them.  "Sure you are," he said, smiling and stroking his beard.

"Hey, you know what 'fine' stands for, right?" asked Charlie.

Peter gave him a puzzled look.

"Freaked-out…" said Charlie.

"Insecure," Lyle chimed in.

"Neurotic," Stella smiled.

"And emotional," Charlie finished.

"Oh, yeah," said Parker glumly.  "That's me."

*****

"So, what I want to know is, how'd Spider-Man know about the vamps?" asked Lyle.  They were strolling through the hospital parking lot.  "Doesn't he usually, you know, do his superhero stuff in New York?"

"Um, I think I might have something to do with that," said MJ, blushing slightly.

"What, he likes you?" laughed Lyle.

"Sort of," said MJ, sweeping hair out of her face.  "It's not like anything serious—he shows up, saves my life, flirts like crazy, then takes off and I don't see him again for months.  You can't exactly have a relationship with a guy like that."

"Yeah, not to mention what the kids'd be like," said Lyle with gruesome relish.  "You know, spiders can have like thousands of babies at once?"

"Oh, gross!" she shouted.

"So, he followed you up here?" asked Stella.

"Maybe," she shrugged.

"He must've had that stuff ready," said Lyle.  "The super-soakers, the spear he used."

"Maybe he was tracking the vampires," Jack suggested.  "And Mary Jane's presence gave him a personal interest in the matter."

"We'll never know," the girl shrugged.  "He doesn't usually explain himself.  At least we're all okay and the artwork is recovered."

"Yeah, and Lyle's not an undead butt-monkey," Charlie joked.  Lyle gave him a dirty look.

"I should get back to Harry," MJ said.  "I'm kinda worried about him."

"We can give you a lift," offered Stella.

"Actually, if you wouldn't mind taking MJ and Lyle, I'd like a few words with Charlie here," Jack said.

"Sure," she responded.  "I'll meet you back at the inn."

"Ooh, a Cooper Mini—cool!" MJ exclaimed.

After they drove off, Jack and Charlie got into the rented Lexus.  They drove around the countryside until they reached Our Lady of the Mountains.  Jack parked and they got out, admiring the gardens and grotto.

"This is where our arachnid friend got his holy water, almost certainly," Jack remarked.

"I never would've thought of that," Charlie admitted, laughing.  "But it makes sense."  He followed Jack to the Virgin's shrine and watched his friend light a few candles.  They strolled around the garden together; Jack seemed very troubled.

"Harry's taken against me," he finally admitted.

"Why?" asked Charlie, astonished.

"Because I supported Spider-Man."

"Oh, Jesus."

"That's the crux of it.  He's furious at me.  I, ah, said some things to him I really should never have said, but I was tired and frustrated—"

"What'd you say?"

"Harry's got this insane notion that Spider-Man killed Norman, and he's obsessed with avenging his death.  I told him that even if he does, he's never going to win his father's approval."

"Besides, he's just gonna get himself killed," Charlie said.

"I told him that, but he wouldn't listen.  He thinks Spider-Man came up here deliberately to uncover the Vermeer and sully the old man's name.  He'd worked himself into a lather, and I told him flat-out that even if Spider-Man did murder his dad—and I have my doubts about that—Harry could never take him on.  Spider-Man dusted an army of vampires in about five minutes flat, including one of the Old Ones.  What's Harry going to do, drop an atomic bomb on him?"

Charlie shook his head.  "What're Old Ones?" he asked.

"Our friend Gemini was an Old One—most vampires are sired by other vampires—it happens when a human gets bitten in the neck.  The soul goes out of the body and a demon enters in.  Well, Gemini was sired directly by an actual demon—a pure demon, not a hybrid."

Charlie shuddered.

"Yes, it's not a pretty thing.  And that's why she left a skeleton behind."

"You got rid of that?"

"Buried it in the woods with all holy ritual first thing this morning.  Harry told me after I was done that he never wants to see me again.  He's disowned me.  I feel terrible about it, Charlie.  I was really getting underneath that shell of his, and boom.  He's closed himself off to me."

"Nothing good's gonna come of that," Charlie remarked soberly.

"My fears exactly."  They wandered back to the Lexus and drove off; the October air held the chill of approaching winter.  Charlie wondered if the candles Jack had lit had been a petition to protect Harry's soul.

Epilogue

The art world rejoiced at the return of the Vermeer and the other stolen paintings.  The city of Boston was already planning a day-long gala to celebrate the re-installation of The Concert in the Gardener Museum.  Charlie ruffled through pages of the New York Times, reading about the story, glancing up from time to time, watching Stella pack.  They'd planned to return to Philadelphia that afternoon.  He looked back down at the paper.  The stories only mentioned Harry briefly, in passing, saying that his father had apparently acquired the works illegally when Harry was a child.  Charlie was relieved the young man wasn't being held accountable.

None of the stories made any mention of Spider-Man or vampires.

"What's wrong?" asked Stella.  "You look like you need to hiccup and can't get it out."

Charlie heaved a sigh.  Tossing the paper aside, he said, "Can I tell you something stupid?"

"You never say anything stupid."

"I'm arachnophobic."

"What?"

"It means you're afraid of spiders."

"I know what it means."  She stared at him.  "I just never knew you were."

Charlie looked down at the floor.  "It's not exactly something I advertise."

She smiled kindly.  "Is that why you've taken about twenty showers since Monday night?"

He shuddered.  "Let's put it this way: we can scratch New York City off the list of places we might ever consider moving to."

She burst out laughing and hugged him.  "It's okay."

Charlie rubbed his arms.  "Jesus, that thing creeped me out, Stella.  How the hell did he get like that?  Did his mom have a fling with a giant tarantula, or something?"

"Who knows," she shrugged.  "But put it this way—think of all the things he could be doing with those abilities.  And what's he doing?  Saving people's lives, recovering stolen property.  And he's doing it all anonymously, not taking money or credit or even thanks.  There's something to be said for that."

"Yeah.  So long as he does his heroic stuff away from me.  Far, far away from me."

Smiling and shaking her head, Stella returned to packing.  "I'm all set," she said.  "We should check out."

"Great."  Charlie hopped up off the bed.  "Hey, wanna make a detour to Saratoga Springs?"

"Sure, why not?"

"Great."  He gave her a kiss and picked up her suitcase.  "I wanna talk to a man about a horse."

~The End~

Author's note:  On the night of March 18, 1990, a pair of thieves disguised as Boston police officers entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and stole thirteen works of art, including: Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee, A Lady and Gentleman in Black, and Self-Portrait; Vermeer's The Concert; Govaert Flinck's Landscape with an Obelisk; five drawings by Edgar Degas; and Edouard Manet's Chez Tortoni. [From http://www.gardenermuseum.org/]  The story above is fiction; in reality, the works have never been recovered.

The Cast

Charlie Croker                                                 Mark Wahlberg

Stella (Bridger) Croker                         Charlize Theron

Lyle                                                                  Seth Green

John Bridger                                                     Donald Sutherland

Peter Parker/ Spider-Man                                Tobey Maguire

Mary Jane Watson                                           Kirsten Dunst

Harry Osborn                                                   James Franco

Jack O'Connell                                                Ewan McGregor

Gemini                                                              Angelina Jolie

Scorpio                                                            Leonardo DiCaprio

The West Wing Vampires

Joshua                                                              Bradley Whitford

Samuel                                                             Rob Lowe

Leopold                                                           John Spencer

Charles                                                 Dule Hill

William                                                 Joshua Malina

Amy                                                                 Mary-Louise Parker