Franny had gone straight to Nightingale’s Pawn and old Nightingale had hemmed and hawed to himself and flopped off into the shadowed depths of his cluttered, jumbled store. Franny had amused himself by counting the number of guitars hanging in the store—thirty-two. Studied the watches and jewelry in the locked case. The abandoned wedding rings were especially poignant to him. Wondered why on earth Nightingale would have taken in turntables and speakers. Finally the old man returned with an ancient cassette player. Its white plastic case had faded to an ugly yellow like a fungus-infected toenail.

Still it played and it was doing so now. The speaker was tinny and crackled a bit, but the voice of the man came through clearly enough. It was a rich baritone, warm and almost buttery. Franny tried to reconcile it with the thing he’d seen in the hospital bed.

Baba Yaga was expressionless, just staring at the plastic box resting at her side on the bed as the story spooled out. Which Franny understood courtesy of Babel’s power. He wished she hadn’t been so courteous. The man had been trying to give a dry, factual report, but Franny could hear the fear and sorrow beneath the words. He’d heard it in the voices of cops who had been through a harrowing situation, in the voice of a high school friend diagnosed with a brain tumor and facing death.

“… Help me. For the sake of whatever God you believe in, help me…”

“… I don’t know what entered me, Mariamna. I don’t want to know what it is. Horrorshow, I call it, or Dark God, or … The name doesn’t matter. All that matters is that it intends to move across all the realities, across all the boundaries between our world and the rest of the universes out there. It wants to own them, wants to devour them, wants to rule them. It wants all the pain and the blood and the agony to feed itself and grow stronger. It will create minor gods to worship it, but that won’t be us. [Tolenka laughs, a bitter cough.] We’re nothing to it, creatures hardly worth noticing …

“… But I’ve found a way to keep it back, keep it inside and not be free to pursue its ends in our world. It feeds on death and fear, and that’s what I have to give it. Not too much or it would become too powerful; not too little or it would destroy me in frustration and emerge anyway …

“… I’m so sorry, Mariamna. I didn’t want this …

“… I don’t know how long I can continue this, Mariamna. I’ve become loathsome to myself, a creature nearly as bad as the Master inside. I hear its voice and it’s my own that I hear. I think of how pleasant it would be to just die and let it go, because I wouldn’t be there to know what happens afterward. If I die, it will be free to enter our world …