In the hot summer night, Tam awoke on the peeling, rusted, lumpy swing-bed which stood at a strange tilt on the ramshackle porch on the weatherbeaten house, on the flat patch on the back side of Tea Creek Mountain, looking down into Sadie Moon Holler.

The moon was high, and larger than her head, up over the treetops on the ridge above, thrilling the whole hill with silver. The skeeters had gone to bed, and she could sense the gathering of mist readying itself for sunrise to cloud up in the low spots. It was dead silent and she didn't know for a moment what it was that had interrupted her dreams. Then the picture that had crossed her dream and stiired her nerves into alrm resurfaced in her mind's eye -- a shiny black surface with a ghostly image of a lady and a knight, roses made of death's heads, and a black wind-song echoing behind it, a calling song that said "Come...I am yours..come...".

She sat up, startled and frightened by the mix in her mind of the silver light around her, and the ghastly thin silver lines etched into the black surface. Gramp's guitar, she realized. She wondered why she had thought of him again. She stood up and slipped out the screen door and down the steps into the yard, staring into the moonlight toward the piney woods that climbed the ridge, walking slowly, listening to the moonlight, and the faint susurrus of an echo from her dream -- the silvered strings and the lute-like voice whispering "Come...come...".

She stood there, long and quiet, breathing softly and staring at the silver light.