It happened that the undertaker was a darkly glamorous twenty-nine-year-old man born in Paris. The funeral home was the family business, generations-old, elaborate and sumptuous, and the city’s oldest, a society funeral home. They were a society family. Claude had beckoned the undertaker into the kitchen, saying he wanted to “talk shop.” Then he asked the undertaker what kind of funeral he would like to have himself, after seeing so many other people’s funerals, and what kind of burial he would like to have. The glamorous undertaker said, “I would like to be exploded.”

“You mean, exploded, like with dynamite, at the funeral?” said Claude.

“Yes.”

This was Claude’s kind of person.

[Nancy Lemann]

“Which floor?” asked Zhark.

“First, please.”

He pressed the button with a long and finely manicured finger and continued his conversation with Mrs. Tiggy-winkle.

“… and that was when the rebels destroyed a third of my battle stations,” said the emperor sorrowfully. “Have you any idea how much these things cost?”

“Tch,” said Mrs. Tiggy-winkle, bristling her spines, “they always find some way of defeating you, don’t they?”

Zhark sighed. “It’s like one huge conspiracy,” he muttered. “Just when I think I have the galaxy at my mercy, some hopelessly outnumbered young hothead destroys my most insidious death machine using some hitherto-undiscovered weakness. I’m suing the manufacturer after that last debacle.”

He sighed again, sensed he was dominating the conversation and asked, “So how’s the washing business?”

“Well, the price of starch is something terrible these days.”

“Oh, I know,” said Zhark, thumbing his high collar, “look at this. My name alone strikes terror into billions, but can I get my collars done exactly how I want them?”

The elevator doors opened and I stepped out.

[Jasper Fforde]

[Jane Austen]

[Edmund Crispin]

Kate hesitated. The only answer she could think of seemed wild to the point of blasphemy, but there was no help for it: she would have to put the thing into the only sort of language the Lady might possibly understand.

“What need is there for another teind, then?” she asked, trying desperately to keep her voice steady. “The time for that has passed by. It was finished and done with when Our Lord paid it freely, to add His strength to our own; and His power is enough for us all.”

“I have heard that tale,” said the Lady, “and it is not as you say. I will not deny that your Lord paid the teind, nor that it would be good to have had some part in it, for he was a strong man, born of a race of kings, and His teind must have been a very great one. But that was long ago, long ago in his own time and place. Its strength is spent now. The power has gone out of it.”

“It has never gone out of it,” Kate answered, her voice beginning to shake as she searched for the right words, because everything might hang on them. “All power comes from life, as you said yourself, but the life that was in Him came from the God who is above all the gods; and that is a life that knows nothing of places and times.” She paused, and the Lady said almost sharply: “What more?” She was leaning a little forward, her head bent as if she was trying to hear some unfamiliar sound in the distance.

“I—I mean,” Kate stumbled on, “that with us there is a time past and a time present, and a time future, and with your gods perhaps there is time forever; but God in Himself has the whole of it, all times at once. It would be true to say that He came into our world and died here, in a time and a place; but it would also be true to say that in His eternity it is always That Place and That Time—here—and at this moment—and the power He had then, He can give to us now, as much as He did to those who saw and touched Him when He was alive on the earth.”

“Do you mean,” asked the Lady slowly, “that His power is in you?”

Kate stiffened, the color pouring over her face.

“Oh, no, no, no!” she cried in a sort of panic. “That was not what I meant. You must not judge it by me. Christopher is the one who has it.”

“There is no thought of that in the Young Lord’s mind,” said the Lady, “or the Guardian of the Well would have learned it by this time, and so I would know it.”

“He does not know it himself.”

“That is fool’s talk,” said the Lady. “How could anyone have a power like that without knowing it?”

“I cannot tell,” said Kate. “But he was named for a man who bore the whole weight of Our Lord once, on his own shoulders, and His power was with him, even though he—” her voice suddenly wavered and broke, “he did not know it, either, and thought he was caring for a child.”

The Lady drew a long breath. Then she lifted her head at last, and her eyes were shining.

“This is a great thing you have shown me,” she said. “For it means that when we take his life tonight, we can take the Other Life also, to add its strength to our own; and that is even more than I thought we would get from him.”

[Elizabeth Marie Pope]

[Mary Roberts Rinehardt]

OLIVIA
Why, what would you?

VIOLA
Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out ‘Olivia!’ O, You should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth,
But you should pity me!

[Paulette Jiles]