They catch her in the long corridor of Subbasement 3. She turns, a gun glints, then sprouts a bright white flower. But the shot, in that dark, cramped corridor, goes wild. It ricochets, knitting a wild web of velocity trails across the corridor before settling, finally, into the meat of a conduit in the ceiling. The pipe snaps in half, and out of it tumbles a live power line, like a snake falling from a tree onto a piglet. It lands in the very puddle that earlier ruined Miss Dark's shoes. Now many watts of power course through her slender frame, and through the circuitry of gems and gold wire on the leather case of the Book of Lo. A flash turns everything white but the black roentgen skeleton of Miss Judy Dark, and she utters a somewhat unladylike cry of "YE-OOOW!"

"Nice shot," says one of the thieves. They lift the book from her slack grip and make off with it to the surface world, leaving Miss Judy Dark for dead.

Which she very well may be. She flies, hair streaming, upward through a spiral column of smoke and light. The first thing we notice about her may not be, surprisingly, that she appears to be flying in the nude, the zones of her modesty artfully veiled by the coils of the astral helix. No, what we notice first is that she appears to have grown an immense pair of swallowtailed moth's wings. They are a pale greenish-white and have a translucent quality; they might even, like Wonder Woman's airplane, be visibly invisible, at once ghostly and solid. All around her, outside the column spiraling infinitely upward, reality dissolves into dream-landscapes and wild geometric prodigies. Chessboards dissolve, parabolas bend themselves into asterisks, whorls, and pinwheels. Mysterious hieroglyphs stream past like sparks from a roman candle. Miss Dark, her great phantom wings steadily flapping, takes it all strangely in stride-for, dead or alive, there is no question that Judy Dark, that human umbrella, has, at long last, opened to the sky.

Finally, in the immeasurable and timeless distance, she makes out something that has the appearance of solidity, a smudge of stony gray, wavering. As she draws nearer, she glimpses a flash of silver, a ghostly stand of cypress, the plinth and columns of a temple, rough-hewn, pyramidal, at once Druidic and Babylonian, and withal vaguely reminiscent of the great institution in whose bowels she has for so long dreamed away her days. It looms ever larger, and then the spiral finally unravels around her and gives out, depositing her, clothed now only in the clasp of her wings, on the temple's threshold. The great doors, cast from solid silver and ornamented with crescent moons, creak as they slowly open inward to admit her. With a final glance back toward the shattered chrysalis of her old life, she steps through the portal and into a high chamber. Here, in a weird radiance cast by the tails of a thousand writhing glowworms, sits on a barbarous throne a raven-haired giantess with immense green wings, sensuously furred antennae, and a sharp expression. She is, quite obviously, the Cimmerian moth goddess, Lo. We know it before she even opens her rowanberry mouth.

"You?" the goddess says, her feelers wilting in evident dismay. " You are the one the book has chosen? You are to be the next Mistress of the Night?"

Miss Dark-wreathed discreetly now in curling tufts of dry-ice smoke-concedes that it seems unlikely. Only now we notice, perhaps for the first time, that our Judy is no longer wearing her glasses. Her unpinned hair strays around her face with Linda Darnell abandon. And all at once the idea of her being a Mistress of the Night-whatever that may mean-is somehow less difficult to swallow.

"Know that before my homeland, great Cimmeria, was plunged into eternal darkness," the goddess explains, "it was ruled by women." Ah, she reminisces, her face wistful, her eyes brimming, and that was a paradise! All were happy in the Queendom of Cimmeria, peaceful, contented-the men in particular. Then one shrivel-hearted malcontent, Nanok, schooled himself in the ways of bloodshed and black magic, and set himself upon an obsidian throne. He sent his armies of demons into battle against the peace-loving Cimmerians; the outcome was foreordained. Men took over the world, Lo was banished to the nether kingdoms, and the Queendom of Cimmeria was plunged into its legendary perpetual night. "And since Cimmeria fell into eternal darkness," Lo says, "men have been making a hash of things. War, famine, slavery. Things got so bad after a while that I felt obliged to send help. A champion, out of the land of darkness, to fly in darkness but always to seek the light. A woman warrior with power enough to help right the world's many wrongs."

Unfortunately, the goddess continues, her power is not what it once was. She is able to underwrite, as it were, only one Mistress of the Night at a time. The previous incarnation having at last, after a thousand years, grown too old, the moth goddess has sent forth her sacred book to find a new girl worthy of donning the witchy green wings of the great luna moth.

"I confess I did have someone a little more… sturdy… in mind," Lo says. "But I suppose that you will have to do. Go now." She waves her ancient slender hand and draws the outline of a moon in the air between herself and Judy. "Return to the mortal realm, and haunt the night in which evil so often goes prowling. You now possess all the mystic power of ancient Cimmeria."

"If you say so," Judy says. "But, well…"

"Yes? What is it?"

"I really think I'll need some clothes."

The goddess, a serious old girl, cannot suppress the faint pale crescent of a smile. "You will find, Judy Dark, that you have only to imagine something to make it so."

"Gee whiz!"

"Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination."

"Yes. I mean, yes, mistress."

"Usually the girls come up with something involving boots. I don't know why." She shrugs, then outspreads the mighty span of her wings. "Now go, and remember, if ever you should need me, you have only to come to me in your dreams."

Worlds and aeons hence, in a dilapidated old tenement along the river, two of the thieves set to work with chisel and tongs on the gems in the ancient book's case. In a chair, in a corner, bound and gagged, Officer O'Hara sits slumped. It is still raining, there is a chill in the air, and the third thief is trying to start a fire in an old black potbellied stove.

"Here," says the first thief as he reaches to tear a sheaf of pages from the Book of Lo. "I'll bet this old thing'llburn real nice."

There is a silken rustle, like a billowing ball gown or an immense, soft pair of wings. They look up and see a giant shadow flit in through the window.

"It's a bat!" says a thief.

"It's a bird!" says another.

"It's a lady!" says the third, no fool, starting to run for the door.

The lady turns, eyes flashing. The garment she has imagined for herself is iridescent green, part Merry Widow, part Norman Bel Geddes, tricked out with fins and vanes and laced, with evident complexity, up the front. Her lower parts, in their tight green underpants, are barely covered by the merest suggestion of a skirt, her nine miles of leg are enmeshed in black fishnet, and the heels on her ankle boots are stingingly high. She wears a purple cowl, topped with a pair of lushly furred antennae, that covers her eyes and nose but leaves her black curls free to tumble around her bare shoulders. And from her back bloom, no longer ghostly but green as leaves, a pair of great swallowtailed moth's wings, each jeweled with a staring blind eye.

"That's right, little mouse," she cries to the man headed for the door. "Run!"

She extends her arm. Bright green light ripples from her outspread fingers and enmeshes the thief before he can reach the door. There is an unpleasant crackling sound, a snapping of twigs and pinecones, as an entire skeleton of human bones is compressed rapidly into a very small skin; then silence; then a tiny thin squeak.