Zane Fadee/Petshop of Horrors

And there he was, the wild-eyed boy-child, his lips the color of a blackberry bruise, and blackberry juice running down his chin like sweet and sticky blood.  He lay out in a field of brambles and thorns, his coat tattered and torn perhaps beyond repair, pale purple thistle-flowers woven in his long white hair like a princess' crown.  His feet were wrapped thickly and hidden away in strips and pads and yards of rags, but he was no son of a rich lord, and that was not uncommon.  What <i>was</i> uncommon was that beneath those rags the feet were cloven hooves. But nevermind; his parents loved him.

He was a shepherd's boy--oh, nothing so sinister as the nasty rumors that spread about the shepherd and his wife and, of course, their sheep.  He wasn't <i>really</i> the shepherd's boy at all; he was found abandoned one night and the shepherd took him in.  The lawmen were too few and far between in those days to deal with that sort of thing, and no one came asking after a little lost babe, so the shepherd and his wife (who were, of course, as all these stories must go, incapable of having their own children) took him in gladly.  And kept him.

And if he had cloven feet, well, they would wrap them and keep his secret.  And if he grew hair on his arms and legs like long, soft wool, they would give him a coat and long britches and keep his secret.  And so what if these signs were the signs of the devil's animal?  He had a face like an angel, their baby, their bold baby, their wild-eyed boy-child, and even the devil could not possess an angel, try as he might.

They found him there in the bramble patch, complaining of a headache.  Soon enough he began to produce horns from his head, small and goatish at first, and, as the days and weeks and months passed, large and spiraled like the sheep in the mountains too wild to join the shepherd's flock.

And the shepherd for the first time was afraid.  But he loved the boy, and he kept his secret.  As long as he could.

And then the rich lords came, and brought with them money and servants and huge, huge manors.  And people wanted more to eat than cheese and better cloth to wear than wool, and so cheese and wool no longer sold, and the shepherd feared for his family.  And then the richer lords came, as months passed into years and years passed into eternity, and brought with them cities and cars and wars.  And the shepherd no longer had goods to sell, and no longer had a place to live.

And he could no longer keep the secret, with so many bodies crowding in, pressing in, where once there had been only three, and the silent, dull-eyed sheep.

(Incidentally it was at this time that a young lordling found the man-beast on one of his wanderings, and took him home night after night, though neither the lordling's parents nor the shepherd and his wife ever knew, and it was in this man's bedroom that the sheep-boy learned much of the ways of the world, and gained his taste for fine things, and discovered what happened when he came in possession of diamonds.)


And a man appeared with impeccable timing, from across the world, and said he would protect and care for the wild-eyed boy-child with the soul of an angel and the mark of the devil.  And the boy-child, who was by now very much a young man, did not want to leave the family who loved him (or the memory of the lordling his parents could never know of, for the lordling himself was now gone), did not understand the concept of 'pet', as he had been raised by loving, foolish parents as a normal boy.  But the man moved in mysterious ways--diagonally, like the bishops on chess boards--and the boy's parents were old, and there was no more room in the world for him.

And the shepherd and his wife knew all this, and they loved the boy, and so they let the boy go, across the oceans and across the world, to a new world-within-a-world, somewhere to belong, to be safe, to stay alive.  And all their hopes rested with the stranger, the mysterious stranger who always left with what he came for, and the shepherd despaired, even as he trusted, for all he knew of the man was a name, which wasn't even his own (or, not to begin with): Sphinx.