“And what did I do with you?” the healer woman asked the kneeling Tiffany. “After I ate the demon with the golden power in its hands?”

Giles as he listened remembered (for no reason) his old love Melanie Greyfire waking with a sleepy little yawn as they drove across the desert so many years ago.

“Well, you will not be surprised that your silver hands with palms of gold were my gift to you from that demon. What need had I for golden power from my hands, which are only for healing? And then, my love, I sent you back into your story. Back to Cloud Rock from whence you came, but with golden power.

“Perhaps you can see dimly that the first time you lived that story, you had no golden power, only ordinary human hands. But the story continually retells itself. Do you know this, storyteller??” Her piercing, dreamy eyes fixed upon Giles.

He remembered the image of Euclid’s stretching the line that was the whole history of the universe into a sheet of paper containing an infinite number of alternate lines. Yes, he understood. By the time he had told Doree’s story, she had the golden power but it had not come from anything on Cloud Rock. He had never been able to explain where it came from, it was an inconsistency. This healer had sent Doree back to relive the story with magic hands from nowhere … but that was inconsistent too. How…

But Carmen laughed and turned back to Tiffany. “So, a part of you went back to live your story better. But I never told you that there were two parts of you. The rest of you followed the demon into my belly.”

Giles had stopped being surprised. Of course half of her went back and lived her story again while the other half went into the belly of a magic woman to be reborn.

“Long I carried you in my womb as you grew into the demon you are. And all that time there was the changing story that your Mary told of you as she grew. When you stepped from my womb fully grown and no, mi hija, I shall not tell you how that was possible, you were tightly woven into Mary Hammond’s story. You were her dream lover, her Theophania, her Tiffany.”

When Tiffany finally spoke her voice bitter. “But I could never reach her, only long for her. Only look at her through holes in the walls from time to time. When she was a young woman in Ireland I peeped into her bedroom and longed to kneel on the stone hearth near her bed. She grew more older and more beautiful. Shortly before the world changed, I looked through her wall at my silver haired beauty and loved her all the more. But I never could touch her.”

“No,” said Carmen gently, her hands upon Tiffany’s head. “Not until the world changed and the demons were loosed. But I think that in her dreams you touched her many times, no?”

There was a silence and when Tiffany answered, it was clear she repressed a smile. “None of your bloody business.”

Even more gently than she had said anything else, the healer asked, “And why did you not go to her when you were freed of these tunnels? On that day when last barrier whispered away and the demons were loosed, you did not go to her.”

“I meant to!” she answered too quickly. “But I was hellishly busy, stopping the harm the monstrous demons tried to do. Twas me who turned them into gorgeous people, you know.”

Giles was startled into looking at memories of the day the sky opened into Chaos and the demons had burst loose. He’d been in Golden Gate Park looking at a weeping statue near a wall covered with climbing ivy. When demons started popping out of the wall it was so crazy out of synch with anything he was thinking that he just stared. Then he ran, thinking only of getting out of the park and catching a bus, as if the inside of a bus would be safety. But the bus driver had pulled over and stood scratching his head and staring, so he ran and ran out of the park and up 7th street, seeing demons leap from spaces between buildings, not stopping even with his lungs burning, along the shores of Laguna Honda where swimming was forbidden but people leapt in, laughing and crying while even the air filled with flying shapes, and finally along Dewey and a left turn into winding streets to the cul de sac with the grand dame where his mother lived and up the stairs and into the safety, the unquestioned, unshakeable safety of her home. He stayed in that safe haven with Silver Mary for a week while the world erupted in riots and fires and wild frenzy and finally calmed down and the demons turned into good looking people but everyone remembered they were demons though nobody talked about it and went on with life under a sky nobody would look at.

“I made things better,” Tiffany continued. “I did.” She paused, clearly not satisfied with her reasons. “But I never went to her. Didn’t let myself think of what kissing her had been like. And then she was gone.

“Came the day I had to step in and save….” Her eyes, gleaming and moist, looked up at Giles. “I kissed him and it all came back and I knew I had to reach her, knew how to in fact. Except that I could not possibly have done it.”

And Giles, who had already accepted that Tiffany loved not him but his mother, knew the rest. She could have reached Mary through him. She had been deeply tempted. When she lay beside him, kissing him and feeling Mary’s kiss through his, she had started to pull off her gloves to lay her hand on his heart and reach through him to rip Mary into the present. But she had stopped. It would have killed him, like the Alien bursting from John Hurt’s chest in the movie.

She had been even more sorely tempted in the room where Giles’s body lay just before they got lost in these corridors. There had been two of him in that room, the one lying in drugged sleep and himself, the one who had lived all these adventures. Tiffany had known she could reach her golden-palmed hand into the chest of the sleeping Giles and pull her Mary to her without harming the waking Giles who stood beside her. She could have her beloved and still be a good person.

Then he, Giles, had touched her hand. Her hand had then touched his chest, killed him dead and still not gotten her Mary to her.

But at last he saw what needed to happen. “There’s still the me who was lying there dreaming,” he said slowly, and the eyes of both the women turned to him. “Help me wake up. I was dreaming all this. I’ll wake up remembering everything, won’t I?” His eyes begged Tiffany’s forgiveness that he could not return her beloved to her.

“I think, yes, I think that must do,” Carmen said slowly. “Back out into the world with you. After all, you have a demon to kill and a wounded sky to restore.” She reached for him.

“Come with us, Teacher,” Tiffany begged, almost a child again. “Leave these endless tunnels and come out into the world again.”

Carmen laughed a weary laugh. “Your time is splendid, querida, but I wish to return to mine. I sense that my men are trying to pull me back. Men have always tried to pull me back to them and now for once I wish to go back to a man and I cannot. But let your heart not beat for me! I have spent much less time in these tunnels than you would think.” She made a shooing gesture. “Go on, back with you, now.” She touched Giles and Tiffany with one hand each.

And slam. Giles lay alone in the dark with his eyes closed. All he had to do was open his eyes.