She was down, a few people gathered about her. He looked away again, pretending not to see, trying not to show his sudden elation. It was over! He raised his face to the sky, squinted into the sunlight, and masked his grin with a grimace. Such a big thing, and now it was over!

Something firm and padded hit him in the shins; something broad and padded broke his fall. He flailed in bewilderment and snagged his empty hands in large quantities of cloth.

“Not over,” said the Trickster, standing at the foot of the bed and staring down at the man strangling the bed linens. “Not yet. You can call that a dry run, if you like.”

Julian tried to comfort himself. This was only one of those anxiety dreams where you sit down to do the exam you’ve been dreading and just when the teacher says, “Pens down!” you wake up and find you’ve got to do it all over again for real. So he did. He went out to meet Miranda again, superstitiously looking for her not at her office but at the intersection he had seen in his dream. And there she was! The poison pen had been replaced with a poisoned scalpel, but it worked as brilliantly as before, and his escape was as elegant.

And yet it all came back once more to waking up aggravated and dissatisfied, facing the malicious grin and verbal barbs of the spider-man who summarized and assessed each unconsummated killing with inappropriate delight.

On the fifth try, he openly stabbed at her in utter frustration, desperate to change the dream into something of his own shaping. Instead he woke to find himself pounding ineffectually at his pillow. The time after that, instead of pulling Miranda to safety, he gave her a little shove, just enough to make her stumble from the sidewalk and fall in front of an omnibus. He changed the timing of the encounter, yet he always found her. Once he even stabbed himself, but the poison only took his consciousness for a few brief moments before he woke up alive and furious in bed.

He decided that his only option was to refuse to get up. Three days of moping behind closed drapes passed, but eventually, having eaten the few snacks he kept in his lodgings and drunk two bottles of wine, he dragged himself up and went out to a restaurant on the other side of town, far from Miranda’s offices. He ate, he drank, he relaxed at last. A party of three businessmen got up from a table nearby, leaving behind a newspaper in plain view on one of the seats. He craned his neck to scan the headlines. Thus Julian discovered, with a feeling like petulance, that Miranda had managed to get killed in a traffic accident without his assistance hardly a day after he had been scheduled to murder her.