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in the Mondream Wood where as a child she’d thought that the trees dreamed they were people?
    Smiling, she pocketed the nut, then slowly made her way back into the House.

ASCIAN IN ROSE

    ASCIAN —one who casts no shadow
    I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like silence,
listening
To silence.
    —Thomas Hood, from “Autumn”
    One
    She was running along a downhill stretch of the Gatineau Parkway, an asphalt ribbon that cut through the wooded Gatineau Hills. The grass on the verge swallowed the sound of her footsteps, but not the ragged rasp of her breathing. Panic shrieked through every nerve end. The moon was fat and swollen above her, but she cast no shadow.
    Her mind was empty, except for her fear. She couldn’t remember her name. She didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know who was chasing her. All she knew was that they were closing in.
    Terror drummed in her chest—a monster that consumed her with a will of its own. It wailed through her nervous system, a banshee howl that gained intensity with every pace that closed the gap between herself and what she fled.
    And then she stumbled.
    She fell with bruising force against the ground. Flailing her arms, she landed in a sprawl. One hand clawed at the grass, trying to stop the force of her momentum. The other was closed in a fist so tight that her knuckles were white.
    Sobbing for breath, she began to haul herself to her feet, but then they were there, a circle of them standing all around her.
    Not one of them appeared out of breath.
    They were squat ugly creatures, body hair covering their lower torso and legs like wiry trousers, their upper bodies hairless and pale. Wide noses split their flat faces. The heads were triangular, reptilian almost. Thick dirty-white hair like a Rastaman’s dread-locks hung to their broad shoulders. Their eyes were a deep green and, in the moonlight, gleamed like the reflective retinas of a cat.
    She turned slowly, panting for air, taking in their watching stance, the grins that split thick lips, the utter silence with which they encircled her. They cast shadows, thick and crouching on the grass. Something in their eyes, in the alien set of their features, told her that the chase, by and of itself, held a certain pleasure for them.
    “P-please...” she tried, but knew before she spoke that whatever she said would mean nothing to them. “I don’t... I never... don’t...”
    Had they been willing to listen, she wouldn’t have known what to say. Her mind was empty, filled only with emotion. Fear. Raw, paralyzing fear.
    The circle opened then and another of the creatures walked slowly toward her. There were bones woven into his hair—small bones like those of a bird, or a rodent, or a man’s fingers. His phallus stood erect between his legs, its tip shiny. The lust in his eyes was not a carnal lust for her body, but a lust for the hunt. She was the game, those eyes told her, and she had quit the chase too soon.
    “Run!” he told her, the word issuing like a grunt.
    “P-please...” she tried again.
    He carried a short staff, bedecked with bones and shells and feathers tied to it by leather thongs. He raised it and she cringed, waiting for the blow, but then there was a new sound in the night. A distant throbbing like thunder. He hesitated, staff still lifted. His nostrils flared as he turned his head toward the source of the sound.
    Light blossomed at the top of the hill, the thunder resolving into the roar of an engine. When the machine topped the rise, it appeared to be bathed in a halo of light. The leader of the creatures grunted—they were words, but they were unintelligible to her. Like ghosts, for all their bulk, the creatures melted into the night.
    The leader was last to go. He touched her knee with the tip of his staff and pain fired there, lancing up her thigh. Then he, too, was gone.
    She collapsed forward, crouching on her hands and knees in the damp grass, rough sobs heaving up her throat. That