question: Who gathered under the bridge? answer: Him and his girlfriend paragraph: Strange things have always happened to my family. It came in through my mother's blood; my Russian grandmother would always tell me stories, bylichkas, of ancestors with the "second sight", stupid mill owners who discovered bags of gold after letting a special fish off their hooks, and dark strangers who used to appear to help or interfere at crucial times. When I asked her if she'd ever seen them – before I was old enough to stop believing, I mean – she would always look sad and tell me, "No, not since the family came to America has anything happened to us. But if you ever should see a faerie, tell him that you are of the blood of Ivan Bogatyrivitch and he will not pass you by so quickly." As I got older, I shook the tales off with a nod and a "Yes, Nana." I got older and went to school, then to college, and I replaced the dreams my Nana gave me with the music DJs mixed for crowds in clubs, webs of pulse that shook us until we could believe anything. My girlfriend Rachel and I would go to the clubs near our school. Sometimes we'd get word that people were gathering under one of the bridges, and we'd rush down to hit it before the cops broke it up. Boston is a strange place at night. You wouldn't believe half of the shit I've seen, even when I was straight. It was a Friday night. Rachel and I went out to dinner, and when we finished, she saw that there was a message on her cell phone. She checked it there in the restaurant. Her head tilted into the phone as she listened, her pleather purse on her lap, shining jet against the worn black of her snug Dead Can Dance T-shirt. "It's from Mitch," she said, folding up the phone. "He says we should meet him tonight, there's a good one going on in that church that closed down last month." 