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a White Man would be skeptical of such magic, Anatole ceased his rhythm on the drum.
    The claws returned to Danny’s heart, and the vise in his chest clamped back down. His heart had stopped beating. Heart beats, drumbeats—
    The boy stopped only long enough to convince Danny, then started the beat again. He looked with pleading eyes in the shadowy hut. “ Je vais avec toi !” I go with you. Let me be your heartbeat. From now on.
    Leaving his sleeping bag behind, Danny staggered out of the guest hut to his bicycle resting against an acacia tree. The rest of the village was dark and silent, and the next morning they would expect to find him dead and cold on his blankets; and the new drum would have the same resonant quality, the same throbbing of a captured spirit, to add to their collection. The sound of White Man’s music for Kabas.
    “ Allez !” Anatole whispered as Danny climbed aboard his bike. Go! What was he supposed to do now? The boy ran in front of him along the narrow track. Danny did not fear navigating the rugged trail by moonlight, with snakes and who-knows-what abroad in the grass, as much as he feared staying in Kabas and being there when the chief and the sorcier came to look at his body in the morning, and no doubt to appraise their pale new drum skin.
    But how long could Anatole continue his drumming? If the beat stopped for only a moment, Danny would seize up. They would have to take turns sleeping. Would this nightmare continue after he had left the vicinity of the village? Distance had not helped the shambling man in the marketplace in Garoua.
    Would this be the rest of his life?
    Stricken with panic, Danny nodded to the boy, just wanting to be out of there and not knowing what else to do. Yes, I’ll take you with me. What other choice do I have? He pedaled his bike away from Kabas, crunching on the rough dirt path. Anatole jogged in front of him, tapping on the drum.
    And tapping.
    And tapping.

    The End

AFTERWORD
    Neil Peart
    In the late ’80s, a novel called Resurrection Inc. arrived in my mailbox, accompanied by a letter from the author, Kevin J. Anderson. He wrote that the book had been partly inspired by an album called Grace Under Pressure, which my Rush bandmates and I had released in 1984.
    It took me a year or so to get around to reading Resurrection Inc. , but when I did, I was powerfully impressed, and wrote back to Kevin to tell him so. Any inspiration from Rush’s work seemed indirect, at best, but nonetheless, Kevin and I had much in common, not least a shared love since childhood for science fiction and fantasy stories.
    We began to write to each other occasionally, and during Rush’s Roll the Bones tour in 1991, on a day off between concerts in California, I rode my bicycle from Sacramento to Kevin’s home in Dublin, California. That was the beginning of a good friendship, many stimulating conversations (mostly by letter and e-mail, as we lived far apart), and regular packages in the mail, as we shared our latest work with each other—the ultimate stimulating conversation. In subsequent years I would send Kevin a few books of my own, numerous CDs and DVDs from my work with Rush, and there seemed to be a fat volume from Kevin arriving about every other month.
    Back in 1991, though, Kevin was still working full-time as a technical writer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He spent every spare minute working on his fiction, and though he would famously collect over 750 rejection letters, there was no doubt in Kevin’s mind about his destiny. Even as a child, Kevin didn’t “want to be” a writer when he grew up; he was going to be a writer.
    And so he was. To date, Kevin has published over 80 novels, story collections, graphic novels, and comic books, and he still spends every minute being a writer. Kevin doesn’t write to live, he lives to write.
    He has even found ways to weave his recreation, relaxation, and desire for adventure and physical challenge into