By way of a gift to Five Rivers supporters, readers, fans, we’re offering you this excerpt from Lorina Stephens’ collection of short stories, And the Angels Sang. The work is held under copyright by Lorina Stephens, and may not be reproduced in any form without direct permission of the author.

Without Laura’s environmental data the geological report meant little. Again Brian glanced at the calendar on the computer. A dark square outlined today. To the right of that dark square was another day, this one outlined in red, red for urgency, and red because tomorrow was Christmas.

He shifted his attention back to the notes in front of him on the battered desk. All the words blurred. He felt the silence crush him. Laura should have been standing behind him, fresh from another analysis of Ela that garnered nothing. His wife would have praised his findings as if he had placed this wealth of minerals here in the MacKenzie Basin himself Her hands would have been on his shoulders, her warmth palpable on his back. She would have said something like: “Brenley, come see how clever your father is,” and Brenley would have careened over, excitement vibrating through her small body. Such a harsh place to raise such a delicate child.

He turned to where Laura should have been, reaching out for her, her dark hair, her slender body, ready to hold her and let her ease the rawness.

Brian found only Ela.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, his voice rough from non-use. It seemed bizarre to him that he spoke to a figment of Laura’s insanity.

Ela frowned, that pale, elongated face expressing confusion. Everything about this woman wounded him: the way she watched, the way she spoke. She opened her mouth, but he pre-empted her.

“I know, I know. You don’t understand what I’m talking about.”

“I do not understand,” she said. That voice so fluid, so aloof, as if he were a specimen she studied. He wondered if the Aleuts weren’t right, that there were forces here in the MacKenzie Basin with which no one should tamper. Certainly Laura had said as much.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

“You were thinking of me.”

“Bullshit.” Her statement unnerved him. Around the image of Laura had been this mystery phantom she’d discovered and could never prove. When he asked Laura for data she’d shrug in a helpless gesture and mumble something about being unable to remember her data when with Ela. It had been like watching her drift away, marooned on a floe in the pack-ice. When she’d found Ela, the woman was just there, kneeling where Laura knelt examining purple saxifrage. Laura said Ela hadn’t been dressed for the weather, but when queried as to how Ela had been dressed Laura had been vague; when pressed, answered, “I don’t know.”

How could she not have known? Laura was an environmental scientist! It was part of her training to observe.

And yet all the details about Ela were the same – vague. No data where the woman came from. No data as to her background. Ela always just seemed to show up.

Now he shared Laura’s insanity. He could find no psychological, chemical or biological reason why he did. Anyway, it mattered little he was going insane. There was no one to stay together for.

Don’t go there. Don’t think about that. To think about that was to let that howling thing in him climb up his throat, out his mouth and shatter everything he clung to.

“Why is it so frightening to you that you’ve accepted my existence?”

He wanted to shout: Because you’re not real! Instead, he turned to his notes and the reality of one of the world’s largest oil deposits. This was his chance to retire. No more scrabbling under adverse conditions. There would be a warm clime for him, a warm house. There would be people to grow old with. People to die with.

The thing in him gibbered up his throat, filled his mouth. He clenched his teeth, blinking the blur from his eyes. No. You can’t do this. You can’t let go.

“I am part of your reality,” Ela said.

You are part of my insanity. How could he tell his insanity to go away?

“You are very special, Brian. Like Laura and Brenley.”

“Don’t talk about them!” He cradled his head in his hands, leaning against the desk. “Go away.” I have to finish this report. I have to get out of here. Even if the supply plane wasn’t due until a month after Christmas. “I have work to do.” Please, let me work. Let me forget for one moment that Laura and Brenley aren’t going to walk through the cabin door.

“What is this work?”

What was the point? He couldn’t evade her. This was probably his way of linking to Laura and Brenley. “I have to find oil.”

“Why?”

“Because we need to have it.”

“How can you accept the existence of something you can’t see when you can’t accept me?”

“You’re my madness. You won’t be a problem for others.”

“I could be.”

He whirled on her, gripping the violence in his hands until his knuckles ached. “All I know is that my reality’s twisted. You’re not real, Ela. Nothing about you is real.”

She smiled, all softness and compassion, so at odds with the aloofness she usually exhibited. As he watched her she seemed to glow. An aberration of Arctic light, he assumed, part of his growing madness or part of his grief. They were one and the same.

She spoke, softly, weaving the beginnings of a story, pulling at everything he locked into a safe place. The grief in him threatened freedom. Ela spoke of a woman, her hair dark, her body slender, a woman he had known, and loved, and been loved by, and as she spoke out of her aura stepped that woman, smiling, reaching out to him. Laura. So like Laura. Even her fragrance was there, clean, soapy, filling his senses when she wrapped her arms around him. Her lips parted as she leaned into him. He stood abruptly and threw himself onto the bed on the other side of the cabin, burying his head under the pillows.

How could she do that? How could she make the characters she spoke real? But then Ela wasn’t real, was she? Why shouldn’t a thing from his insanity create people who weren’t supposed to be alive?

He unburied himself and glared at her.

“I don’t understand why you are angry,” she said. He ignored her comment, refusing to accept anything his mind created. She knelt before him, almost catlike. “I want to understand. If I can understand you then maybe I can help you understand me.”

“Why should I even speak to you?”

“Because it would help both of us.”

“You’re not even real.”

“What is real?” She reached up and touched the photo of Laura and Brenley that hung on the wall over the desk, cautiously, her long fingers testing the surface as if measuring just how far she could go.

“I miss them,” he said, giving up, giving in, giving her the key to undo him.

She only stared at him.

But, then, he was only admitting his loss to himself, wasn’t he?

To sleep would have been wise. To sleep would have let him sink into a place where memory and reality merged, where he was happy and Christmas wouldn’t be a bleak promise. He’d been chasing sleep for hours now. To no avail. It was one of those nights Laura stood behind his eyes, Brenley in her arms, both of them lying like broken dolls dressed in clownish parkas, smashed in the rubble of a shale slide. He could still hear her telling him about her last encounter with Ela, of her frustration. His last thought before that roar had been one of despair, of Laura lost in a world of insanity. Then the earth had taken everything. His despair. Laura. Brenley.

He should have known. The shale scree was unstable. It was no place for his wife and daughter to be hiking. A geologist. fine. But not Laura and Brenley. He should have known.

He turned in the darkness and clutched Laura’s pillow. The bed stretched around him, vast, empty, too much for one man to fill. He spread himself across its surface, trying to find Laura there, Laura’s warmth, Laura’s smell.

A movement on the bed stopped him. Alarm chattered down his limbs. Had someone sat down? He tried to hold his breath, to silence the rush of his blood in his ears.

Light filled the cabin, radiant like candlelight. All he could think to do was clutch the pillow, his heart thudding painfully. It was a woman on his bed, slender, her hair dark, that small mouth that could utter such brilliance in her field and such tenderness when it came to him. Her skin glowed softly. Lamplight, he told himself, knowing in that other part of him skin didn’t emanate light like that. What was more, Laura was dead.

She smiled. “What would you like for Christmas?”

He tried to speak, failed, cleared his throat and managed, “You,” convinced he had completely fallen over the edge. When the supply plane arrived the crew would find a drooling lunatic.

But it was Christmas Eve. Miracles could happen. That cold part of him laughed. Miracles didn’t happen in the real world. Get a grip. You’re a scientist. You’re suffering from grief and isolation.

Laura laughed, like a caress. He shuddered. It was pleasant, insane though it was, to hear her laugh.

Oh god she seemed so real! And he wanted to hold her. Just for a little while. If this was insanity he would accept it. The bed was too large. His life was too empty. This place he called home was too sterile. He closed his arms around Laura, his mouth on hers. It didn’t matter that he made love to a memory. It didn’t matter that the woman he touched was no more substantial than the creature who visited him day after day since Laura and Brenley died. None of it mattered. Laura felt real.

This was Christmas Eve and he was making love to his wife, tasting her skin, touching her curves, whispering desperately indecent things as they moved in a way that was both selfish and selfless.

She shuddered against him, a cry in the room. He sank into euphoria that seemed timeless and then ended too quickly. Sweaty, satiated, he rolled over and held her in his arms, stroking her hair, an emotion in his chest he couldn’t name and was afraid to confront. It took two to fill this bed. That was as far as he would allow his thoughts to go. It didn’t do to question miracles. Or the gifts of insanity. He didn’t want to remember her broken under the weight of the slide.

“I love you, Brian,” she whispered. And then his arms were empty, the light snuffed. That raw thing in him escaped. He sobbed into the pillow still damp from Laura’s head.

In the end he must have slept, he realized, because he woke to that dim light called day in the Arctic winter. It was something he sensed rather than visualized because his eyes were sealed shut with crust. He rubbed at them painfully. Finally he looked around the cabin, to the dresser and small mirror on the wall at the foot of the bed, to the bedstand to his right. It didn’t feel safe to look any farther.

He swung his legs over the bed. There was a chill to the floor. He wiggled his toes against that, careful not to let his thoughts begin, not to question, not to do anything to stir the dream and the nightmare of last night.

Somewhere in the back of his mind memory of the smell of roasting turkey came to the fore, filling the cabin. His pulse lurched. He closed his eyes, willing this not to be. He could smell that turkey. It was stuffed with a sage dressing. His mouth watered. And now he could smell cider rich with cinnamon, cloves and orange peel simmering over a burner.

His hands trembled between his knees. He clasped them over his face. It was then he was aware of the rise of humidity and the thick, sweet smell of plum pudding on the steam.

“Please,” he whispered, unsure from whom he begged mercy, unsure even if he wanted to be delivered of his insanity.

There was laughter then, high and clear, that unmistakable giggle of a little girl. As if in a dream he hauled on his trousers, stood and paced into the centre of the cabin, sure of what he was about to confront, unsure of what to do about it. Against all odds there was a luxuriant balsam against the sitting area wall, its primitive, pristine scent impossible and marvelous. Trees like that didn’t grow here. Brenley stood beneath its six feet, wrapped in a pink robe, her dark hair gleaming. She was so much like a miniature of her mother. She tossed silver icicles onto the branches, giggling when they caught, giggling when they fell. At her fuzzy slippered feet was an array of packages.

“Well hello, sleepy,” Laura said.

Bewildered, he turned to the kitchen area where Laura stood fussing with crepes and applesauce and sausages – a traditional Christmas morning breakfast she dubbed French Piggies. That the ingredients for this dish were impossible to have at the moment didn’t occur to him. It was the impossibility of Laura and Brenley that baffled him.

“Your dad’s awake, Brenley.”

Brenley turned from the tree, her dark eyes wide, her mouth an O of astonishment. She dumped the icicles and rushed into his arms. He opened them, mechanically, lifted her up and up, etching every line of this child he’d made onto his memory, relishing the feel of her small body against his skin. It occurred to him that it was these small things that made memories. A touch. A smell. A taste.

Had he remade her last night? Was that what he’d done when he’d made love to a ghost?

Laura was no ghost this morning. She set breakfast on the table and walked over to him, pecked him on the cheek, wrapped her arms around both him and Brenley.

“Merry Christmas, sweetheart,” she whispered in his ear.

He could only nod, warmth rippling down his neck.

“Ela’s going to have Christmas with us. Do you mind?”

He shook his head and let her lead him to the table where Ela now sat, another aberration of his mind suddenly there and real. They ate. He handled utensils without notice, lifting food that tasted wonderful to his mouth. He chewed. He watched these three females. They laughed. Brenley twitched with the prospect of presents. Ela said little. She just sat there glowing in that way she had.

Laura leaned toward him and wrapped her hand around his. “I think we better leave breakfast for now. Brenley’s bursting.”

His gaze shifted to his daughter, over to Ela and then back to Laura. “You’re not real.”

Laura smiled, squeezed his hand, looking at him the way she did when he needed her, when he was unsure. “Life isn’t about happy endings, Brian. Happiness is what you experience along the way to death.”

He yanked his hand away from her. “But you are death!”

She looked over to Ela. He stood abruptly. He was distantly aware of the chair overturning and clattering behind him. “I have to finish my report.”

“It’s done,” Ela said. “There is no oil. Your resignation is tendered. You never have to leave.”

He backed away, tripped over the chair, swearing when pain shot up his leg.

“Reality is what you want it to be,” Ela said in that infuriatingly cool way she had. “You want your wife and daughter to be real.” She shrugged. “They are.”

“I don’t want you to be real!”

“That’s a reality I can’t alter because I know myself to be real.” Her look softened. “Brian, I need you to accept my reality.”

“What are you really?”

“I’m what you want me to be.”

What did he want her to be? A ghost? An alien? One of the spirits from Inuit legend? Or do I want her to be my insanity? “And them?” he asked, nodding to Laura and Brenley.

“As I said before, reality depends on perspective.”

A life for a life.

He crossed to a chair and sank into it, watching his wife and daughter, the way they laughed, inhaling the smell of them, luxuriating in the reality of them. It was Christmas. Who was he to question the existence of miracles? Or to shatter them.

With a sob he slid off the chair and sat cross-legged beside his wife and daughter, ripping a bow off the present in Brenley’s small hands.