clutched the rock at his side with all the zeal of an impassioned suitor back home after a three-year absence on a desert island. His attitude clearly intimated that he loved that rock dearly and nothing would ever part him from it. Something that was not a rock landed thuddingly at his side, but he was too distracted to notice.

"Earthquake!" he gasped.

The sudden, nerve-shattering blast turned the world upside down, and the woman along with it.

"Earthquake, my left eye!" a voice grunted thickly. And Marc's head snapped about to find the ghostly woman looking up at him with startled eyes. She had exchanged locations with amazing rapidity. Lying on her stomach, arms, legs, and hair in a distressing state of disarray, she looked like nothing so much as a bloodless witch who had suffered a rather devastating crash landing. Certainly, she had descended as from the heavens, and yet, one glance told you that her association was certainly not with things astral. With stunning directness, she parted bluish lips and spat an impossible quantity of sand onto the beach where it looked much more natural.

Marc shrank back suspiciously. Perhaps it wasn't the gallant thing to do, but it seemed prudent. "What ... what happened?" he asked timidly.

"How should I know?" the woman asked bitterly, beginning an unconcerned inventory of her various parts. "I was too busy getting away from it to notice." Then, pummeling an embarrassingly intimate region with vigorous enthusiasm, she seemed to come to the comforting conclusion that she had passed through her ordeal still in possession of all she had started out with. Just why this should mean anything to her, Marc could not fathom. It seemed to him that any change, willy-nilly, could hardly miss being an improvement. No matter what ever happened to the woman, it could never be any worse than the awful trouncing that nature had already given her. She got stiffly to her feet and peered cautiously over the rock.

"Holy mother!" she breathed. "They're gone like a maiden's illusions!"

"What?" Marc asked. "What's gone?"

"The rock," the woman replied with dismaying heartiness, "and Mr. Epperson. He's gone too." Obviously, these missing items had been listed in the order of their importance.

"You ... you mean the little fellow? He's dead?" Marc asked shakily.

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