Thomas Walton was tall and quick; pale as a ghost and emaciated as a grasshopper. He could glide down the street sideways and never be noticed. Thomas considered himself a collector. He specialized in macabre things. His basement had colored bugs impaled on needles, snakes of the deadly variety and tall jars of pickled spiders. He also had stuffed birds and feral cats mounted together in poses intended to replicate the exact moment of death.

The scrapbooks were his true treasures. They held copies of tintypes from the old west, which showed bloody outlaws grimacing in their fresh pine coffins. They held photographs of black men hanging from the green Southern trees, with "Uppity" signs dangling from their oddly elongated necks. He had Nazi medical experiments, recorded in utter horror by the Allies as they first arrived at the death camps of Europe. The Khmer Rouge and the Viet Cong, the bombing in Oklahoma City and the African work of Osama Bin Laden were documented. Thomas had selected and purchased and cherished these items since boyhood.

So it was strange he'd never noticed her before.

He was sitting in his executive chair, going through the scrapbook from the Viet Nam war when he spotted the woman. She was turned to one side, half away from the camera, wearing shorts and a no-nonsense white blouse. She had a camera of her own on a strap around her shoulder and a large notebook in her hand. A neophyte in the press corps, perhaps, who just happened to get caught in the midst of some true combat. Her breasts were dappled with gore. There was a boy at her feet; a mine had blown away his legs at the knees, and his face was frozen forever in a grotesque scream of pain. Thomas turned the page.

The Tet Offensive, a few months later. Coincidentally, there she was again. Oddly enough, her hair was brown in this photograph. She was dressed as a nurse. Some mortars had wiped out a hospital battalion, and she was valiantly trying to save lives. Bandages and entrails were scattered everywhere. One boy's arm was clenched in a fist; he was holding a piece of her uniform as if begging for morphine. Thomas felt a chill pass over him, and resolved to pay his heating bill. The brick basement got cold after dark.

When he turned to his collection of Civil War photographs his breath caught in his throat. A sound came out, very much like a mixture of a whistle and a moan. For there she was again. Now she was a grieving widow, black vale blown up and away by the smoking wind. The emaciated Confederate dead lay everywhere, some stacked like cordwood; others scattered like so many rags. The woman was wailing, her huge eyes bulging with emotion, horrific expression captured forever by the photographer's antiquated flash bar.

Thomas froze. He got out his magnifying glass and looked closer. He flipped back to the Viet Nam photographs. He double and triple checked himself. Jesus Christ!

More than hundred years apart in time, and yet they seemed to be pictures of the same woman.

Thomas made himself a scotch and soda. He paced with excitement. He knew he had found something marvelous, but what to do about it? Who would believe him? And what did this coincidence mean, if anything? Perhaps the explanation was a simple one; a woman and her grandmother, each victimized by a terrible war, caught grieving the loss of a brave young man. Facial features are determined by genetics. Anything was possible. And yet something in Thomas suspect more, far more, was at stake here.

The next work day, the last of the week, seemed to crawl by. Thomas stared at the clock from lunch hour on, his mind barely able to do the math his bookkeeping position required.

"You in a hurry, or something?"

"Huh? What?"

"Get your mind back on the job, Walton." It was Robert Riggins, also known as Fat Bob. Thomas hated his immediate superior; hated even that the word superior could be applied to Fat Bob in any context. Riggins wore pricey shoes and six hundred dollar suits, but had a roll of blubber hanging over his expensive belt that ruined the effect. He was a difficult man to like.

But Thomas said: "Yes, sir. Sorry, sir." And did not say: I hope your dick rots off while you're sleeping tonight, you pot-bellied, arrogant piece of camel shit.

Riggins cocked his head to one side. The pose made him look like a caricature of W.C. Fields. "You're a weird bastard," he said. "Weird and morbid. Anyone ever tell you that before, Walton?"

"I..I guess so. Yes. People say nasty things to me all the time."

"You say hello to people once in a while," Riggins said. "Maybe they'll say hello back. Now get to work."

"Yes, sir."

Finally five o'clock arrived and Thomas rushed out the door to the kiosk. He bought tabloids and dailies and weeklies and magazines by the score, stuffed them into his backpack and hurried along 82^nd Street. The panhandlers took no notice of him, he might have been a ghost, or perhaps he seemed merely a starving student rushing off to night school. The fellow pedestrians seemed to part for him, like leaves scattering from the path of a gentle autumn breeze.

Thomas Walton let himself into his tiny brownstone, an abode inherited from a bitter alcoholic father long dead, and locked the door behind him. He stumbled as he approached the cellar door, badly slicing his knee; scattering papers across the floor and down the dusty wooden stairs. He swore in a reedy, thin tenor. In the light of the bathroom, he examined his wound. The cut was a long gash, thin as a razor blade but widening, and it sliced from left to right and halfway around. It was bleeding profusely. Bright blood spurted everywhere, and Thomas felt himself growing faint. Thomas was not courageous when it came to personal injury.

He put some ice in a wash cloth and applied pressure to the cut, swearing softly under his breath. Unable to wait upon his wound, he limped towards the cellar door, only marginally aware of the Jackson Pollock splatter he was leaving in his wake. He clumsily gathered up the newspapers and magazines as he fumbled down the stairs into the blackness. He groped for the light switch, flipped it on.

Spreading the pages out upon the floor, clutching his reddened pants leg and pressing ice against his ravaged knee, Thomas Walton began looking for carnage. Auto accidents, tenement fires, shooting deaths at public schools; anywhere there might be a photograph. And he found her, again and again: There she was, a stricken white-haired old teacher, knuckles in her mouth as she stared down at the dying student at her high school. And here as a shocked bystander, with raven black tresses, who wept at the site of the DUI that claimed the lives of five children and their mother on the icy Interstate.

In his excitement, Thomas dropped the ice pack. Crimson raindrops danced everywhere as he spun excitedly and turned the pages. She had many looks and expressions, myriad costumes to disguise her, but she was everywhere and all at once. She was a veritable goddess of death, a Kali. But how could such a thing be? He grabbed scissors and bean cutting her likeness out and collecting the umpteen versions into a bundle. After perhaps twenty more minutes, Thomas fell over to one side. He felt dizzy and weak. All of a sudden it occurred to him that he had lost a great deal of blood. He pressed the ice firmly against his knee, but much of it had melted. He tasted something sour.

Crawling on his side, Thomas worked his way over to the telephone and punched in 911. He knew he was now too weak to give his name and address, but that the operator would trace the call and send help. As he waited, he realized the rust-stained papers spread everywhere would mean nothing, but the growing stack of images containing the woman might allow someone else to notice her and capitalize on his discovery. He crawled across the floor and stuffed the pile under the magazine rack. He noticed his pale hands were trembling. He tried to remain calm.

And someone was pounding on the door.

His voice failed him. Thomas summoned up his remaining strength and stumbled down the hallway, trailing the bloody leg behind him like an Igor on the platform of some train station in Transylvania. His reddened, slick fingers slipped on the doorknob repeatedly as he desperately tried to open the door and he heard someone saying let us in please, is everything okay in there? Sir, please open the door! And Thomas Walton fell backwards in the hallway and looked up. The door swung open and the Paramedics entered, just as he had hoped they would. The handsome young black man went past him and put an oxygen mask over his face. Thomas began to laugh, but all that emerged was a wheeze.

She was a little chubby here, her hair gone stringy and brown. She wore large glasses that reflected Thomas Walton and his own shocked facial expression behind the clear plastic mask. But it was she, as he had somehow known it would be. It was Kali, the Goddess of death. He tried to scream. She leaned down and pried his gaping wound even wider with those long, gloved fingers. Smiling gently all the while, she let him bleed out into the blackness he'd always found so fascinating.

Perhaps a year later, Fat Bob Riggins watched a long drool of secret sauce and ketchup drip from a double cheeseburger to splat down on his copy of Newsweek. He was reading about the latest act of terrorism in the Middle East. Riggins was sitting on a motel bed with a stripper he'd been screwing.

"That's fucking weird," he said.

"What, sweetie?" she said, as if she gave a damn.

Fat Bob looked closer, squinted at the page and then chuckled.

"Damned if some Israeli soldier, standing there with his female partner, don't look a lot like poor old Tom Walton."

"Who?"

"Schmuck used to work for me," Riggins said. "Guy's dead, now."

"Oh," she said. She went back to clipping her nails.