Free Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods by Sheri S. Tepper

cars in front of her collided.
    In her apartment, the chewed chunk of wood had found its way back to her mantel. She laid wood in the fireplace and set it ablaze, waiting until a crackling fire was going before tossing the featureless chunk of wood on top. It hissed agonizingly, finally exploding in a shower of glowing coals. The firescreen caught them, harmlessly. There was an odor of sulphur. She shivered, something she could not quite remember teasing at the edges of her mind.
    In the morning, she went to her office in a fatalistic mood, prepared to spend all of the next few weeks restoring the ruined files. She was greeted with smiles from the software support woman. ‘Good news. You’ve got your files back. I got into the system last night and got around the glitch, whatever it was.’
    The morning went by in a flurry of productive, interesting work. Just after lunch, the phone rang and Pat Apple said, ’A package came for you, Marianne. I signed for it and put it up in your apartment. Hope that’s OK?’
    She assured Pat it was okay, then turned to the restored files. They had disappeared again. Only gibberish came up on her screen.
    She sat very still for five minutes, then left the office and walked home. She did not really believe there was any connection, and yet – the two events had followed very closely. A hex, perhaps? If there were any such thing. She laughed at herself unconvincingly.
    In her living room she found the remnants of a cardboard box, scraps of grayish tissue paper, a faintly musty smell. On the carpet lay fragments of grainless wood, obviously chewed.
    She built a fire and put all the remnants on the flames. When they started to burn, she heard her own voice saying, ’All right. Which one of you is it?’
    From behind the curtains came the Dingo Dog, yellow eyes gleaming at her. She sat, head turned a little, regarding Marianne out of the corner of her eyes. Marianne caught her breath, a deep, choking gasp, as though she could not get enough air in her lungs to speak. She had thought all the old hallucinations and visions were behind her. She was grown-up now. Real was what real was. She wanted no more of this fantasy, and yet here were her childhood visions, come to life again. Her voice asked, ‘Did you chew it up because it was dangerous? Is that why?’ It was her voice, and yet she had not asked the question.
    The Dingo whined. She remembered then that the Dingo had never spoken, not like the others.
    ‘Are the rest of you around, too?’
    ‘From time to time,’ said a breathy voice in a peculiar accent. ‘From time to time.’ The Red Foo Dog came from the bathroom, jauntily. Just behind it the Dragon Dog came slithering, crawling on its belly, as though begging to be petted. Her bedroom door creaked open. She could see the Wolf Bitch lying on her bed, her huge head pillowed on her crossed paws. Beside her lay the Black Dog, asleep, eyes shut and red mouth agape.
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Bad thing, that was,’ the Dragon Dog said. ‘That thing you got in the boxes. Very bad creature, that one, as us creatures go. Had to chew it up, get it to go away.’
    ‘You have to burn them,’ the foreign, not-herself voice said, ‘or you’ll not get rid of them.’ In the fireplace the thing she had tried to burn had turned into something quite horrible that screamed as it incinerated. So, she was dreaming. There was no need for rejection of what was going on around her. She would merely play along, waiting until she woke up.
    ‘Fire isn’t one of our things,’ the Foo Dog said. ‘We have others, but not fire.’
    ‘Someone’s after you,’ the Wolf said from the bedroom. ’Someone very nasty.’
    ‘Have you been here all along?’ she asked, ignoring what the Wolf had said. She didn’t want to hear it.
    ‘Off and on,’ said the Black Dog. ‘When we had time.’
    ‘I thought maybe … maybe’d you’d gone back to—to wherever
Marianne
got you from.’
    ‘She got us from our own