Apocalypse

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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF NANCY SPRINGER

“Wonderful.” —
Fantasy & Science Fiction

“The finest fantasy writer of this or any decade.” —Marion Zimmer Bradley

“Ms. Springer's work is outstanding in the field.” —Andre Norton

“Nancy Springer writes like a dream.” —
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Nancy Springer's kind of writing is the kind that makes you want to run out, grab people on the street, and tell them to go find her books immediately and read them, all of them.” —
Arkansas News

“[Nancy Springer is] someone special in the fantasy field.” —Anne McCaffrey

Larque on the Wing

Winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award

“Satisfying and illuminating … uproariously funny … an off-the-wall contemporary fantasy that refuses to fit any of the normal boxes.” —
Asimov's Science Fiction

“Irresistible … charming, eccentric … a winning, precisely rendered foray into magic realism.” —
Kirkus Reviews

“Best known for her traditional fantasy novels, Springer here offers an offbeat contemporary tale that owes much to magical realism.… An engrossing novel about gender and self-formation that should appeal to readers both in and outside the SF/fantasy audience.” —
Publishers Weekly

“Springer's best book yet … A beautiful/rough/raunchy dose of magic.” —
Locus

Fair Peril

“Rollicking, outrageous … eccentric, charming … Springer has created a hilarious blend of feminism and fantasy in this heartfelt story of the power of a mother's love.” —
Publishers Weekly

“Witty, whimsical, and enormously appealing.” —
Kirkus Reviews

“A delightful romp of a book … an exuberant and funny feminist fairy tale.” —
Lambda Book Report

“Moving, eloquent … often hilarious, but … beneath the laughter, Springer has utterly serious insights into life, and her own art …
Fair Peril
is modern/timeless storytelling at its best, both enchanting and very down-to-earth. Once again, brava!” —
Locus

Chains of Gold

“Fantasy as its finest.” —
Romantic Times

“[Springer's] fantastic images are telling, sharp and impressive; her poetic imagination unparalleled.” —Marion Zimmer Bradley

“Nancy Springer is a writer possessed of a uniquely individual vision. The story in
Chains of Gold
is borrowed from no one. It has a small, neat scope rare in a book of this genre, and it is a little jewel.” —
Mansfield News Journal

“Springer writes with depth and subtlety; her characters have failings as well as strengths, and the topography is as vivid as the lands of dreams and nightmares. Cerilla is a worthy heroine, her story richly mythic.” —
Publishers Weekly

The Hex Witch of Seldom

“Springer has turned her considerable talents to contemporary fantasy with a large degree of success.” —
Booklist

“Nimble and quite charming … with lots of appeal.” —
Kirkus Reviews

“I'm not usually a witchcraft and fantasy fan, but I met the author at a convention and started her book to see how she writes. Next thing I knew, it was morning.” —Jerry Pournelle, coauthor of
Footfall

Apocalypse

“This offbeat fantasy's mixture of liberating eccentricity and small-town prejudice makes for some lively passages.” —
Publishers Weekly

Plumage

“With a touch of Alice Hoffmanesque magic, a colorfully painted avian world and a winning heroine, this is pure fun.” —
Publishers Weekly

“A writer's writer, an extraordinarily gifted craftsman.” —Jennifer Roberson

Godbond

“A cast of well-drawn characters, a solidly realized imaginary world, and graceful writing.” —
Booklist

Apocalypse

Nancy Springer

For all the women who showed me trails
.

PROLOGUE

The one-room apartment over the Tropical Beauty Tanning Salon: the heat came up through the old floorboards, in winter, when it was wanted, for winters in the Pennsylvania mountains are gelid; but also in summer, when thunderstorms raised steam from the potholed pavements and flat tar roofs of Hoadley, turning the days more sweltering than before; when any increase of heat was a perversion.

In the darkness of a May night and in ungodly heat, in the rented room, a black candle burns. She, the denizen, studies perversion by that shadowy light. She reads the works of Albertus Magnus, Aleister Crowley, the prophecies of Nostradamus, the erotica of Anaïs Nin. She likes the darkness.

If she could read with less light, she would. The dim candlelight softens but cannot straighten the skewed contours of her face. Her nose and cheekbones, squashed and awry. Her head, her skull, bent to one side, as if her maker had gotten temperamental in the molding and had thrown it against the wall. Her mouth, a harelipped rictus. No chin. Her eyes—the candlelight catches on the whites, which show all around an iris the color of mud and algae. Huge eyes. Enormous. Like a frog's.

This night she reads that infamous work of Pennsylvania German pietistic witchcraft, John George Homan's
Der Lang Verbogne Freund
, “The Long Lost Friend.”

She lifts her frog-eyed stare from the printed page and smiles at the wall—she sits with her back to the one window, and keeps no mirrors in her darkened refuge. She does not close her mouth to smile, for she breathes through it. Her nose is an excrescence on her face, of no use.

The candlelight flickers on the hollow moons that are her eyes, on the young skin lying pallid over the pathos of her face, on her aspiring mouth. The mouth moves and speaks.

For some years she has practiced reading aloud the poetry of Donne and Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath. Her voice is low, silky, thrilling in spite of the slight distortion due to the harelip, the nasal blockage. Her enunciation is precise from long practice. Her tone, intense.

“Swelling fever,” she says to the darkness or the wall, “and the wasting away, and sties in their eyes, and the wildfire. And gravel in their urine, and the palsy. That's what they're afraid of.” Her hand, lying atop the pages of the black-bound volume, curls and clenches, digging ridged white nails into a yellow palm.

She scrapes back her chair and stands up. Even in the candlelight the stains on her thrift-shop clothing show. Her body deserves no better. Though young, it moves lumpishly, not fat but unhealthy looking, mushroom-colored from living too long in the dark. She takes a step or two, reaches across the small confines of the rented room and from a hiding place on a high shelf lifts down a shoebox. At her touch, the occupant rears its head out of its bed of shredded newspaper: a tiny snake with a human head, conceived from a spell and springwater and a hair plucked from near the vulva of a mare in heat.

She places the shoebox on the table, in the candlelight, and the snake, no larger than an earthworm, turns its androgynous face toward her and awaits her word.

“The idiots. Afraid of sickness,” she says to her tiny ally or to the darkness, “instead of the pit they've dug themselves. Black as their souls. We'll show them, won't we, Snakey?” Her bulging eyes swivel and focus, fervid, on this friend of sorts. “They'll get theirs. All of them. Every one of them in this reeking town.”

CHAPTER ONE

Hungry. Even on horseback, even out in the wild birdsinging carnival-sweet springtime, still hungry. Since marriage and childrearing and the other accidents of life, Cally Wilmore had a theory that horseback riding released druglike substances in the brain, suppressing all discomfort whether physical or psychic, but this time it wasn't happening for her. She still felt the hunger, not just the pinch in her gut but the hunger hanging in her whole body like the haze in the yellow Hoadley sky.

She pulled her horse to an abrupt halt, staring up. The black brim of her headgear got in the way of a view of the high sky, where a true-blue remnant might yet survive. No matter. Blue sky would not feed her. She saw canned-pea green shading into banana yellow—more of a chicken-gravy hue toward the horizon. Those colors did not feed her either.

Sunlight filtered down as if through cheap kitchen curtains. Even on a cloudless day Hoadley lay under a shadow.

Cally heard a roaring in her ears and felt vertigo, though her eyes remained wide open. She slowly lowered them to the abandoned strip-mine site and the woods, the scraggle of stunted trees rising beyond her horse's ears. Outside her nothing ever seemed to change, yet within her mind she felt a whirling, a turning, relentless, like the wheeling of time. And a pressing sense of doom.… The sensation was a familiar one lately. “What the hell,” she muttered. “Who cares.” In thin hands she gathered the reins. With her booted heels she nudged her horse into a walk.

The roaring sound had not stopped.

Far away yet all around, as if it had had no beginning and no end, though Cally had just become aware of it: a humming, a mighty, muted phenomenon of sound, glassy, constant, lonesome, like the hollow roar on the empty telephone wire long distance, a sound hollow as the coal mines under Hoadley, hollow as Cally's belly, hollow as a defeated heart. Cally's eyes widened, for she had heard that hungry sound before, she knew it in deep memories, almost palpable, she could almost smell it, almost taste it in the scent of white warm-weather flowers, bindweed, honeysuckle, blackberry, heavy in the air all around her, but she could not recall.