The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

Beating wings shooting rainbows off their fringes and a presence: huge calm eyes rimmed with blue and black, a fan of dark hair, breasts, a spangled body arching . . .

Laurel wakes, and a woman wearing a dress like the night sky bends over her. She always has been terrified of intruders, especially since she has become so physically helpless, and she should be terrified now, but she isn’t, though she realizes that the woman is not bending over her, she is floating. The floating woman looks at her, eye to eye, before she disappears into the ceiling.

It is four in the morning. This hour has got to be the loneliest and most profound of the twenty-four. No one in their right mind is up at four in the morning, not even the birds.

Disturbed, disoriented, she rises. She isn’t bleeding, but pain socks her in the gut the moment she stands up. A sudden wallop like nothing she’s felt before. Now she is terrified. Laurel, this is It.

But this isn’t It. She doesn’t even pass out or fall back on the bed. She stands there in the night, clutching her stomach. Morphine? She finds the kit Jerry left her. She is shaky and clumsy and rips the hell out of her arm, but she finally manages to do it. Then, repulsed but not beaten by her own cowardice, she grips the walls like a blind woman, goes into the moonlit living room, and sits down with her death books.

Laurel never thought much about death before. She never knew her grandparents; death hadn’t touched her. Oh, she philosophized about it with her freaky friends when they were twenty and smoking doo in Golden Gate Park. Initiation, man; wow, the Trip of All. She read an interview with Rod Serling that took place two months before the man died. The interviewer had asked the fantasist what he thought happened, and he said: nothing. You just go off into nothing. No Willoughby, no Owl Creek, no next reality in a dark alley with jazz in the air. Then his heart gave out at age fifty. Mr. Serling smoked twenty, twenty-five years, Laurel recalls.

Twilight Zonish speculations always appealed to her; Mr. Serling’s bleakness did not. And then her father and her mother and the children she could never have; death caught up with her.

It was sometime after her mother’s death that she began to collect Madame Blavatsky and the works of the Golden Dawn, the Theosophists, the Rosicrucians. Carl Jung, Edinger, and their various disciples of metapsychology. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross for clinical details. Out-of-the-body experiences, near-death experiences; many modern works of varying quality on these topics. And an ancient text: The Egyptian Book of the Dead.

The modern philosophers and psychologists and therapists are as enlightened and humane and cool as they can be. But they are too clinical for Laurel, too willing to concede the finiteness of human existence. She likes Fate magazine, the column, “My Proof of Survival.” The column is comprised of anecdotes from humble readers: “Dad Knocked On The Wall”; “Mama’s Last Kiss”; “Boodles Said Goodbye.” Boodles was a poodle. Laurel is amazed at how many people’s pets visit them from the grave and reassure them the soul survives. Even Boodles’s soul.

She wants to see the long tunnel, the white light. Maybe her mother will greet her there, ready with a scolding for her latest mistake. She wants details. She wants instructions, damn it.

Maybe that’s why that strange ancient text, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, is so perversely thrilling to her.

She plays the book oracle with it more than any other death book. Book oracle: you close your eyes, turn the book over and under, around and around, then flip the pages, plunge your index finger down.

This is how she finds elegant hieroglyphs and sloe-eyed god-animals, ceremonies and strictures, prescriptions and proscriptions. There is a weird ring of truth to these. As though death is just another reality. So when you emerge from the other side, you’ve got to roll up your sleeves and master it. She likes the idea; that it’s possible to master the inevitable.