ONLY I AM LEFT TO TELL THE TALE_SHOW VERSUS TELL BLOGFEST entry

This is my TELL entry for Misty Waters' SHOW VERSUS TELL BLOGFEST :

http://mistydawnwaters.blogspot.com/2010/12/um-so-yeah-im-doing-blogfest.html#comment-form

{Scroll down for the SHOW entry} :

TELL :

I am Elu, Apache diyi. And I only am left to tell the tale of Man, for I exist only in mirrors. If the White man had just been content to destroy himself, I would be glad.

But it is the White Man's way to destroy all he touches -- even his entire world.

Where to begin?

Do I begin with the madman who tainted ice cream he gave for free to the children on the streets of Detroit? The poisoned dessert that turned those children into the walking dead?

No. Instead I will begin with the seven year old Victor Standish. Abandoned by his mother, the Angel of Death, he sat in a swing in a Detroit playground, misunderstanding completely why she had left him.

As Death, she was Allwheres, Alltimes at once. She could no longer take him with her lest she destroy his sanity.

Being Death's son, Victor unknowingly drew the undead children to him. Showing the largeness of heart that would one day be his undoing, he saved the white girl beside him.

His mother's touch was already removing most of the memories of his wanderings. But though he could not place the face or form of his centaur teacher, Chiron, Victor remembered his teachings.

When surrounded by enemies, seize your sword, thrust up your shield, and find the high ground.

And this Victor did, taking the white girl, Becky, with him, though taunting and herding her. He found his sword, a fallen baseball bat. He picked up his shield, a discarded garbage can lid.

In the towering child's slide and swing bars, Victor found his high ground. He found his first teacher in free running, the black boy, LeRoy. He found his rage against his deserting mother. He channeled it to fend off the undead horde.

But they were too many.

His rage exploded. Tapping into the power of his mother's blood, Victor screamed for the undead to die. And since he was his mother's son, they did just that.

Above Victor, safe from his death-scream, Becky lowered her slingshot, looking at Victor in wonder. LeRoy pushed the three unmoving, undead children from the top of the slide. The small white girl in glasses began to shiver from shock.

The enemy was defeated ... for the moment.

Standing a layer of life from Victor, his mother, Death, cried black tears. Her son had proven he could survive without her.

She decided to cast him only on the deadliest streets. Then, though he would never again be by her side, he would always be in her heart and in her sight.

Still, there were other undead children than the ones killed in the playground.

The end of Man had begun.
***

THE FUN NEVER STOPS WITH ZOMBIES_SHOW VERSUS TELL BLOGFEST entry {staring Victor Standish}

For Misty Waters' SHOW VERSUS TELL BLOGFEST

http://mistydawnwaters.blogspot.com/2010/12/um-so-yeah-im-doing-blogfest.html#comment-form

SHOW :

When you're seven, you're too old for a swing. But I wasn't sitting in it for fun. No. My legs were too weak to hold me up.

Mother had left me. Me. For days, maybe weeks she said. "Survive as best you can, Victor. I must be alone with my latest conquest."

And then, she was gone with her muscled bad boy. What was I going to do?

"I don't like you," sniveled the little girl in the swing next to me.

"Pick a number. It's a long line."

The black-haired girl pointed her finger past me. "I don't like them neither."

"Must be my kind of people," I grunted, turning to look.

"Or not," I gulped.

Zombies. Fricking kid-zombies. "Oh, why the hell not?"

"Oooh, you just said a no-no."

"On my best day, I'm PG-13. And Sunshine, this ain't my best day."

"My name is Becky not Sunshine!"

I got up, looking all around. Damn, we were surrounded.

"It's gonna be 'Kibbles-N-Brains' if you don't put some muscle to the hustle."

What had Chiron told me? When surrounded by enemies, get a sword, a shield, and the high ground.

Becky pulled out a wooden slingshot. "I'll stop them."

"Lots of luck with that, Nibbles."

I ran to a fallen baseball bat. Two zombies were making sure that the boy who dropped it wouldn't miss it. I darted in between them. I tumbled in a roll, snatching up the bat. One lunged at me.

I beaned him with all my might, and his rotten head burst. I laughed, "I hope your name was Homer. Cuz I always wanted to hit a homer."


To my far left, Becky screamed, "Fall down! WHY WON'T YOU FALL DOWN?"

I ran over to her, grabbed her by her pony-tail and snapped, "Cuz the fun never stops with zombies!"

"Stop!," cried Becky. "You're messing up my pigtail."

I spotted the slide/jungle-gym. High ground.

I snapped, "Those zombies will mess up more than your ...."

A kid-zombie with a half-eaten face lurched through the garbage cans lining the playground, knocking them over. A garbage can lid rolled to my feet. My shield!

I snatched it up and smacked him in the face with it. "Watch out! Low bridge."

I thumped Becky on the butt to get her moving faster to the slide/jungle-gym.

"Hey, that's my butt!," she yelled.

I jerked my head to the shambling but all-too-fast kid zombies. "It'll be theirs if you don't get a move on!"

We made it to the slide as a black kid took a mop handle and used it as a pole vault to get to the top of the metal tree-house at the top of the slide.

"Whoa," I gasped. "Way to go, LeRoy."

He laughed down at me. "Ya gotta learn free runnin' if you gonna make it on these streets, bro. And how did you know my name?"

I got uneasy. "Lucky guess." But it hadn't been. I had just known it.

I smacked Becky up the slide. The ladder was too slow as a couple of screaming kids found out the hard way. We ducked aside a girl with glasses. I shield-blocked the brick she aimed at me.

"Save it for the dead heads," I snapped, scooting by her.

The slide/jungle-gym was a big son of a gun. I skipped down the steps from the tree house to the walkway where six kid-zombies scrambled towards us, moaning, "Brains. Brains. Brains."

I winked at Becky, who was taking aim at them with her ball-bearing loaded slingshot. "They can't mean you. It's gotta be me they're after."

Becky let go with her slingshot, sending a ball bearing into the only eye of a grasping girl zombie. "Ha. Ha. Very not funny."

LeRoy pushed a boy zombie off the top of the treehouse with his mop handle. "Damn! They just too many of 'em!"

It hit me. Mother had left me to die. Die. She didn't want me anymore. She didn't love me. Had she ever loved me? Hot tears filled my eyes.

"Wrong!," I yelled. "There aren't enough of them!"

I leapt onto the walkway, swinging with my bat and shield, knocking the grabbing kid-zombies every whichway.

Zombies scuttled like cockroaches out of Hell along the top of the rungs of the jungle-gym. They dropped down on the walkway. I swung at them.

Brains, bits of skull, and rotted flesh flew as I jumped about, smacking away with all the anger I felt at Mother for just dumping me ... for not loving me any more.

"Die. Die! DIE!"

Glasses sobbed, "I-I'm outta bricks. They're going to eat us."

They kept coming. I kept blocking and smashing. Becky went for more ball bearings but came up empty. A giggling girl-zombie knocked LeRoy down. He screamed.

I raised my shield and bat to the uncaring skies and roared, "WOULD YOU JUST DIE!"

Whoa.

I could've sworn a pale green circle pulsed out from around me. The kid-zombies keeled over as if their electric plugs had been pulled from the wall socket. They just lay there, all limp and finally as dead as they looked.

Becky gasped, "H-How did you do that?"

"I just yelled like Mother."

LeRoy muttered, "Bro, she must be one bad mutha."

I looked down at the swing where she had dumped me. "You have no idea."

{And neither does Victor. What really happened? Tune in tomorrow for the TELL version.}
***

FALLEN in TO KNOW THE POWER OF DARKNESS

I paused before following the disordered orderly through the open doorway.

"Now I shall enjoy myself full measure."

"Wh-What are you going to do?," whispered Clover.

I arched an eyebrow. "I shall tutor him and his ilk as I did Guy de Maupassant."

"You knew him?"

I smiled, and Clover shuddered as her eyes met mine.

"Indeed. And he knew me. Though the encounter was not to his liking."

I smiled at the memory. "What he saw drove him quite mad. He tried to slit his throat to keep from seeing those visions endlessly repeated in his fevered brain. But I was merciful."

"H-How?"

"I let him die a year and a half later."

Clover started to edge back from me, but I snared her arm. "Come. Let us hear what lies locust tell."

"I don't understand."

"Nature does not require that her victims understand their fate."

"Don't make me. Please!"

I easily dragged her after me. After all, she was but flesh. I turned back and showed her all my needle teeth.

"Only she who walks the country road by night knows the power of darkness."

"Fallen!"

"Too true."

She squirmed helplessly in my arms as I followed the shivering orderly through the open doorway. I clamped a tight hand over her mouth. Alerted these tormentors of the helpless would force me to end my fun much too quickly.

Clover went death still as the metal door hissed closed behind us. I smiled when I spied the interior. The angular starting gate of a sprawling maze of corridors. Rats. They thought of humans as rats. How insulting to rats.

The metal dull. The stench fetid. Decaying flesh. Stagnant sewers. Stale air of the tomb.

The group of humans were intelligently scared witless.

But not as addled as the orderly who approached the tall, angular man in the lab coat, twitching his eyebrows furiously. The orderly jerked his arms about as if regressing to another stage of life. His clicks and clucks were unnerving the already unsettled humans. The doctor in the lab coat was past unsettled all the way to furious.

"Smitz. Smitz! Remember your station. English. English!"

The three other orderlys looked at one another, their own eyebrows convulsing as if about to tear themselves from their moorings. I smiled. One so likes to see one's efforts appreciated.

Smitz was beside him. Literally. He twitched in place as if cursed to dance to the music of the damned eternally. The clicks were mere husks now.

The doctor gave up and wetly gurgled his own series of rasping clicks. The humans stepped back as one unit. But the alien words seemed to help the orderly gather a wit or two.

"A-Abberations, Doctor. Abberations!"

"Talk sense, Smitz!"

Smitz shuddered in a grotesque fashion, his knees rubbing together as if for comfort, not unlike some giant preying mantis. "Man-Manifistations of psychic presence. Insane psychic presenses!"

The doctor's eyebrows did the impossible and moved sideways. "Psychic phenomena are the delusions of hu ...."

He bent his neck so sharply mine hurt just seeing him do it. " ... delusions of inmates like those here we study."

"Study?," grunted the tallest female among the patients.

Hair cut like a boy, body held in what she felt a mannish pose. Yet her genes betrayed her, and the effect was one of childish exaggeration.

"You're supposed to be helping us, Usher."

Unblinking eyes studied her remotely. "Are we? And that is Doctor Usher, Sydney."

A feral cherub of a young man to her right whispered, "What are you doing, trying to get him mad? Are you nuts?"

Sydney smirked, "Depends who you ask."

Smitz jerked in spasms. "No! I felt it. It is out there."

Usher moved his jaws sideways as if they were mandibles. "Felt what?"

"C-Contagion."

The doctor finally lost patience with Smitz and motioned with his eyebrows to a short, bulky orderly. "Chizsene, take this ... this reject to the larvae."

"No! Not that. Not that!"

Chizsene was not to be denied. And Smitz in his current state was no match for him. Though I will give him this, he tried. Chizsene dragged his throttled charge right past me. I could see the distaste and fear in the short orderly. I smiled. It would seem he feared contagion. So be it. His fear had pronounced his own judgement.

I leaned forward, drawing in his fear and breathed it back upon him fourfold. I smiled wide. Best to layer this cake.

I drew forth the words etched on the tomb of Edward the Black Prince. Cursed wretch that he had been. Though, truth to tell, since 1376, he had done nary a crime in all of Albion. Not surprising since when you are dead, you are quiet a long time.

As Chizsene looked his fear of contagion at Smitz, I murmured in his ear,

"Behold and see as you pass by

As you are now, so once was I.

As I am now, so soon you will be.

Prepare for that and follow me."

His eyes went wild wide as he passed. His chirp to the door barely audible. It hissed open. Chizsene and his charge stumbled through. The door slammed closed.

I whispered to the unseen mechanisms, "Rust of ages."

No longer would that door open. The contagion of fear and madness would now spread throughout the rest of the staff outside this chamber --

and to the larvae, whatever manner of creatures they might be.

And these few that remained? I smiled cold. They were mine.
***
the new trailer :

FALLEN in IT IS A FEARSOME THING TO BE FRIEND TO A SIDHE

I took Clover's quivering hand.

"The midnight hour has just begun. Time enough to teach terror to those who think themselves expert in it."

As we followed the unhinged orderly, Clover could not stop her shaking. I frowned. This would never do.

She must have some semblance of composure else she would be consumed by the next terrors I would inflict. I sighed deep.

If verse dipped in magic black unbalanced her, perhaps words of light from a long lost friend might restore some small measure of peace to her?

But which one? There were so few. So few. And none remained who still lived. I smiled though I ached inside.

Georgie Gordon. His poetry. His spirit would I use to restore hers. I would speak to her the words of another who, alone out of all his generation, could see me as I was.

I leaned my head next to hers, and though she flinched, I whispered still the words I hoped would heal,

"I would I were a careless child,
Still dwelling in my highland cave,
Or roaming through the dusky wild,
Or bouding o'er the dark blue wave.

The stiff pomp of Saxon pride
Accords not with the freeborn soul.
Which loves the mountain's craggy side,
And seeks the rocks where the billows roll."

Clover hushed in a breath, and with a sudden lunge, kissed me light on the cheek, pulling back as if the deed were done before thought could check it.

"How did you know that was my favorite verse? How?"

I touched gingerly my cheek. "Mayhap we are kindred souls."

"I - I would like that."

I turned my back to her and husked, "It is a fearsome thing to be friend to a Sidhe."

"Does it suck as much as being alone?"

Slowly I turned around and hesitantly took back up her hand. "Let us find out, shall we?"

She smiled wide, and I tried, and failed, not to hear the rest of Georgie's verse :

"I loved -- but those I loved are gone;
Had friends -- those friends are fled:
How cheerless feels the heart alone
When all its former hopes are dead;

Though gay companions o'er the bowl
dispel awhile the sense of ill,
Though pleasure stirs the maddening soul,
The heart -- the heart -- is lonely still."

And suddenly I was on fire with the need to be rid of this place, this foul deed ahead of me. Earlier I had not hated these tormentors. They had been merely acting out their nature.

But now hate was there hot within me. And they would rue the day they had decided to step conquering feet upon strange shores.

The unhuman orderly clicked out a series of churps as he hung onto the doorframe in front of him as if under assault by a gale. The black door hissed open. So that was how they secured their wards.

I smiled sharp. Time to tip the balance.
***

FALLEN in TERROR FOR TERROR

I placed a long forefinger to my lips in a silent order to hush and with the flat of my other hand pushed back reality a heartbeat.

The world became misty after-images.

Clover, showing all the memory span of a lightning bolt, started to speak. I pressed my forefinger against her open lips.

I kept forgetting the girl was daft. Poetry seemed to work best with her so I dredged up dreary Longfellow. Perhaps she would learn wisdom from his verse.

"Tell me not in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream;

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

And things are not what they seem."

Longfellow seemed to work. Or mayhap it was the door being unlocked and thrust open. The massive human walked oddly into our room. Clover appeared shocked that he seemed to look right through us. I winked at her.

She almost giggled, but my fingers closed about her mouth like a vise. She hushed. As shocked as Clover was, our guest was even more so.

He looked this way and that, his eyes widening more and more. He twisted his neck in a way that hurt me to watch and spoke into a wire mesh on his shoulder. If you could call what he uttered speech.

It was a wet series of clicking, clucks, and rasping of vocal chords as if he were trying to imitate chalk grating against a slate board. All in all, it sounded nothing so much as a human trying to chatter like an angry grasshopper.

And it unnerved me to no end. Clover had gone from giggles to aghast in a heartbeat. Nor could I much blame her.

A hollow version of his strange speech sputtered from the wire mesh on his shoulder. His eyebrows appeared to be trying to wrench themselves from his forehead. He twisted about sharply and walked back down the hall.

I had to literally drag Clover after me as I followed something I no longer thought of as human. It had even stopped trying to walk human. The being scuttled quickly down the dark hallway. I half-expected it to drop to all fours and give up the pretense of humanity altogether.

Clover hissed low into my ear, "Things are not what they seem! You think?"

"I take it you have never heard him speak thus before."

"I knew everyone on the staff here was weird. But not this weird."

Something was trying to claw its way back into my bruised mind. "I do not think weird goes far enough."

"You think?"

"I know."

"That makes two of us."

She seized me by the shoulders. "Oh, Fallen! Please do not make me go. You don't know what that thing has done to me."

The brute turned suddenly, hearing as he did Clover's plea, though muted by time's reprieve. I clamped a hand back over her mouth. The orderly studied the shadowy hallway, his glowing eyes blankly passing over us as the unseen wraiths we were.

Clover stood, rooted to the spot by her terror. So this obscenity had done unspeakable things to my field mouse, had he? Then it was past time that this unwanted intruder and his ilk discovered Gaia's shores held terrors of their own.

I turned to Clover, and she shivered at what she saw in my eyes, and I smiled wide. "Bridges it is that you love so, then Bridges it is that this brute shall receive. Though I doubt he shall be thankful for the gift."

Midnight held her shadows close. I glided through them, gathering up their magic as I went, until I walked beside the striding tormentor of helpless girls. With ghostly fingers I stroked his throat. He stopped full still, fright bright in his unhuman eyes.

He glared unseeing right at me, and I whispered in his ear,


"On such a night, when air has loosed

Its guardian grasp on blood and brain,

Old terrors then of god or ghost

Creep from their caves to live again.



Some have seen corpses long interred

Escape from death's control.

Pale decayed forms -- nay, have even heard

The shrilling of an insane soul."



And with that, I licked his naked throat and raked the points of my nails across the back of his soft neck. Only their echoes did he feel. But they were enough. He shrieked wet, shrill, and long. With maddened eyes, he splayed with slipping feet down the darkened hallway.

I turned to Clover, her trembling hand held up to her open mouth, and smiled. "Terror for terror."
***

FALLEN in THE WORST HELL?

Clover hugged her knees, still shivering.

"Midnight. Just great. There's no clocks in these bloody rooms. They do that on purpose, you know. To make us sweat and jump at every footstep outside the door."

I shook my head. "Not this time. When you dared to be my champion uninvited, your terror became my province."

She went pale. "Wh-What I did was a bad thing?"

"The very worst, human."

She nodded wearily. "Figures. The times I caught the worst hell were always when I tried to do the right thing."

I felt my heart harden. "The worst hell? Human, you simply have no idea."

I breathed upon her, murmuring, "Sleep."

The room filled with the perfume of jasmine and lilac. Clover stiffened like a deer caught under the bow of a hunter. Eyes rolling up, she slumped backwards across the mattress in a most ungainly position. I arose and walked to her bed.

Sighing, I picked her up. She was light as if filled with straw. I laid her gently upon her hard mattress, nestling her head upon the pillow. I brushed the hair from her eyes, haunted even in sleep.

A whimsey of Tennyson came to me as I stood watching her in troubled slumber, and I whispered,

"She breathed in sleep a low moan,

And murmuring , as at each night and morn,

She thought, 'My spirit is here alone,

Walks forgotten and forlorn."

"Never forgotten, little field mouse. Never forgotten. Not for all eternity. My nature may well be the death of thee, but forgotten thou wilt never be."

Holding her right hand, I stood watch over her as the heartbeats drummed into minutes and the minutes flowed into hours. No clock did I need. My race knew well the chiming of the midnight hour when Hell's gate swung open the easier.

A chime of brass vibrated in the hollow that was my soul. The hour had come. I bent and lightly kissed her troubled forehead, quoting from the Bard this time, "The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve. It is almost fairy time."

Clover's eyelids fluttered as her mind struggled to surface above the heavy waves of sleep. I turned slightly. The odd doorstop of a human was just turning the far end of the long hallway outside.

For me there was no silence, only the sigh of spiders breathing, the shudder of the dying leaves as their tree held back its sap, the wet clicking of stretching scales as the snake slithered upon a rock.

And speaking of snakes, our very own two-legged one was walking its odd gait to us. I smiled wide. Death was on the air like the taste of ashes on the wind.

Clover shot straight up, clutching her breast. "Oh, god, it's midnight already?"

I took back her right hand. "No harm comes to you unless it comes from me."

"Gee, I feel ever so much better."

I smiled coldly. "I thought you would."

She looked pleadingly at me. "Oh, please, Fallen, I don't think I can go through another session of group therapy. Could you --"

"No. I am here for a reason."

"What reason?"

"At the moment it still eludes me. But it will come to me."

She pouted. "Before or after I am driven mad or killed?"

I showed her all my needle teeth. "Why I think that depends upon how firm a grip you have on life and sanity."

She reclaimed her hand from mine. "I think I understand why you want me to call you Fallen."

I have known driftwood to burst into flames under the gaze I gave her. "You have no idea. But you will. You will."
***
For those of you who liked PARANORMAL ACTIVITY :

CALL ME ... FALLEN

I ran my tongue over my needle teeth and decided to give this addled human fair warning.

"Call me Fallen."

Suddenly she looked as if she were about to cry. "Oh, I know you think me slow. And I am. But I still know that faeries are dangerous."

I stiffened, and she waved a weary hand. "Don't worry, Fallen. No one else sees you like I do."

I closed my eyes. How truly unique. The only one in this generation who could see me as I was. And she was a lunatic. How utterly fitting. It was a situation that screamed to be rectified. I shook my head. No. To yield to my nature towards a mind-bruised waif was beneath me.

And unimaginative. Clover mistook my frown for worry. I wagered she made many such mistakes.

"Actually, Fallen, I don't think any of the doctors paid much attention to you. I mean, the way you looked when you came in. I didn't think you were going to make it. That hit-and-run driver must've been going ninety."

She shook her head in wonderment. "How does a faerie get nailed by a car anyway?"

"On purpose I would wager. My memory of the incident is denied me."

"On purpose?"

"Do you think me an ungainly cow that I could not elude a bulky vechicle of steel?"

She pouted. "I am not an ungainly cow."

I sighed. "Do not make the mistake most mortals make. It is not all about you."

"I thought you were my friend."

I drew in a breath and my temper. I kept forgetting the girl was addled. "Clover, you are thinking of me in human terms. That is a fatal mistake. Nor I am fae or elf or sprite. I am Tuatha de Danann."

She squinted as if trying to see my words in the air. "Which is?"

The door flung open before I could speak. A mass of muscles masquerading as a man strode in. Clover looked terrified. I could taste her fear. It was thick in the stale air. What was going on?

I sniffed. The human smelled wrong. His eyes blinked too often. Clover started to edge away on her bed whimpering.

My eyes became slits. Was he the one who had fondled me? I felt the fury rise cold within me. I looked to his fingertips. They were not smoldering. He was not shrieking in agony. No, he was not the one. Then why was the field mouse so terrified of him? And why did he move as if his body were some ill-fitting garment?

He even moved his eyebrows oddly. As if something else should have been sprouting there instead. I watched fascinated as they quivered as if alive.

"So patient Jane Doe is awake?" The words came out frail and wet as if from a throat unaccustomed to forcing out air to make sounds.

I smiled, running my tongue along the edge of my sharp teeth. "Doe, a female deer."

Clover giggled despite her fear, "Ray, a drop of golden sun."

I nodded to the blank-faced doorstop of a human. "That is your cue to say ‘Me, a name I call myself.’ By the way --"

I smiled like a wolf. "You can call me ... Fallen."

The human not only looked a bull but obviously was as smart as one. He seemed bored to distraction. I thought about making that bored to death. Then he noticed the small hole in the thick window.

"Th-That's impossible! That glass is unbreakable."

I smirked. "Obviously."

"Oh, a smart-ass, huh?"

"Unlike you, my brains do not reside where I sit."

He turned to the window again and muttered, "That glass simply cannot be broken. How did a hu --"

He stopped and glared at me as if I had somehow tricked him. I ignored him. I studied the glass with all my senses. I went cold deep inside. He was right. On a level which cannot be put into human terms, it was a solid mass. I should not have been able to pierce it as I had.

Unaided that was.

I murmured, "Gaia as well as Abbadon?"

His eyes dismissed me as if I were bad meat. And for all I knew that was exactly what I was to him. He turned and walked in his odd way back out of the door.

He muttered under his breath, "What do they expect us to learn from the insane?"

He spun about. His eyes reflected the dim light in the room like a snake's ... but without as much warmth.

"Group therapy is at midnight."

Clover whimpered, "Not group therapy."

I smiled. "Midnight. My favorite time of day."

He closed the door behind him. At the sound of the bolt slaming home Clover shivered. Words penned by Kyoski came to me.

The snake slid away,

But the eyes that glared at me,

Remained in the grass.

Clover turned her own hollow eyes to me. "W-Who is Abbadon?"

This time it was I who shivered. "When Question warred against Answer, he was Question."

"Who won the war?"

I grew cold and looked inward into my own darkness. "The jury, as you humans say, is still out on that."
***