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This Book Reader was distributed solely for the reading of classic books which are out of copyright. Program extends to address offset 0x10000. No responsibilty can be accepted for any breach of copyright nor for any other matter involved with material above this address. This material will have been added by a user of this program and not the author of this program. Please address any enquiries concerning breach of copyright or any other concerns, to that third party.Additionally this program is supplied without any Logo data which may be copyright by Nintendo. 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B0 2 4 6 8 : = 5? 5A {C E G I :L N Q S 'U HW VY ][ R] m_ ya c e g j 2l m o /r Ut v x z | ? 8 \ ه ʉ ۋ  ; J ј  4 <  8 B ԭ = O k w  " 5 l  B n i X V     I y       ) 9 d d! u# K% c' P) i+ - / 1 3 5 7 9 ; > (@ CB [D fF H J &M hO aQ S V X Z \\ b^ s` b d g !i Qk sm o q s u w y { }  [ k Ō  , Y q   ? ` W j P k M F R J ~ N W . ; K r  + P _ { 4   \guz^!"$)&')*,./ 1{2X4679:<>?,ABD?F8H,J LN,PQySU8WX+Z[:]^'`ajc6ef,hikmoqsuwySzv|@~yg&Ɖ^:UO ?զ0oԱõ&)@X @f:t+=T, B[E   BOlr!"#6%?')+-/#2A4h68:<>@ CAEuG\I;KMOQSV'X"Z[\]^`bdfhklo4qLs!u|wy{}+] %kfeۛҟI8ymͮӶ۸^/T$4.,UjUos8z  mG!$&?(K*,.0246+9?;I=w?sACEG+JULuNPRPTXV{XZ\^`4cPeRgSi}kmoqsvFxzf|H~[u݈=]ezp&VzxҪ¬ݮ-yٿ1l: Gfe")=holu   /H]m "%B')+.10^2b4o6l8:<>@BEFIJLN!QSUW2ZZ\%^Z`begi=kMmkoqsuwy|L~,,ŏ͑,Mkpn֦)@E˵#`z+,^Xpjcj  TR  ;:!!#$5&C(z*,.1@3l579<6>B@SBpDFHJLNPSTV Y9[b]n_iactegikmfodqdsuwy|~HQr͊(AAO GPq,BbOH$65R  5. "$&-)P+-/13628T:v<>@(C-E@GnIKMP4RT?VdXpZh\^`LcVeTgAifkmors!vVxz|~&9uً+np~Ŝ#-Mlzܭ%K}'<Hg-^s?^AWZ\  *L0!]#]%n')+-/24@6\8:<>@CEGI=KlMOQSUWZ.\^`/cIeNghikm(pirStvx4{P}(V 7j -0=UEiq$c Fax:#?!4HvEh4A  0;dQ^^!#%'E*4,h.0=2d4e6q8:<>@B7E6G,IQKrMrOQSHV]XZ\^`c'eg4iKkXmkoxqsu>xz|~ڀwu]qW;>xdz߻Al:Yn"'iE]T+-nm ; Y  6<Y "$&(*,!/$1O3G579;=?ACE:HdJhLNPRURWDY[]`6bVdjfzhsjlnEq7s_uwy{}݃$Oʒ 25K]Ŵ-w:9@BGg?gu@BDCssk L *Ery!##&;(Y*,.0225a79;=?ACEH#J)LNPRTVY[G]@_gacuegiknMprrtvxz|~рւtvƊU_֙!5Wb}vߪ 4O{Ȼ׽ 0ngV!*c1F| -  5WZ!O#a$"&-+8!a$(;1Z<[EKVD^cj_o|>ØZ̲    Introduction: # Myth, Belief, Faith and Ripley's  Believe It or Not!  . When I was a kid I believed everything I was,told, everything I read, and every dispatch sent out by + my own overheated imagination. This made -for more than a few sleepless nights, but it also filled the . world I lived in with colors and textures I /would not have traded for a lifetime of restful nights. I + knew even then, you see, that there were )people in the world too many of them, actually whose ) imaginative senses were either numb or (completely deadened, and who lived in a mental state akin to 0 colorblindness. I always felt sorry for them, ,never dreaming (at least then) that many of these unimaginative ' types either pitied me or held me in +contempt, not just because I suffered from any . number of irrational fears but because I was,deeply and unreservedly credulous on almost every . subject. 'There's a boy,' some of them must .have thought (I know my mother did), 'who willbuy the - Brooklyn Bridge not just once but over and over again, all his life.' ' There was some truth to that then, I -suppose, and if I am to be honest, I suppose there's some - truth to it now. My wife still delights in /telling people that her husband cast his first Presidential + ballot, at the tender age of twenty-one, /for Richard Nixon. 'Nixon said he had a plan toget us out of - Vietnam,' she says, usually with a gleeful ,gleam in her eye, 'and Steve believed him!' 0 That's right; Steve believed him. Nor is that "all Steve has believed during the often-eccentric course / of his forty-five years. I was, for example, .the last kid in my neighborhood to decide that all those * street-corner Santas meant there was no 1real Santa (I still find no logical merit in the idea; it's like saying - that a million disciples prove there is no ,master). I never questioned my Uncle Oren's assertion that - you could tear off a person's shadow with a/steel tent-peg (if you struck precisely at high noon, that / was) or his wife's claim that every time you -shivered, a goose was walking over the place where your + grave would someday be. Given the course -of my life, that must mean I'm slated to end up buried ( behind Aunt Rhody's barn out in Goose Wallow, Wyoming. / I also believed everything I was told in the +schoolyard; little minnows and whale-sized whoppers + went down my throat with equal ease. One ,kid told me with complete certainty that if you put a dime / down on a railroad track, the first train to ,come along would be derailed by it. Another kid told me - that a dime left on a railroad track would ,be perfectly smooshed (that was exactly how he put it - perfectly smooshed) by the next train, and .what you took off the rail after the train had passed would , be a flexible and nearly transparent coin /the size of a silver dollar. My own belief was that both / things were true: that dimes left on railroad+tracks were perfectly smooshed before they derailed the " trains which did the smooshing. - Other fascinating schoolyard facts which I -absorbed during my years at Center School in Stratford, , Connecticut, and Durham Elementary School )in Durham, Maine, concerned such diverse subjects as - golf-balls (poisonous and corrosive at the /center), miscarriages (sometimes born alive, as malformed % monsters which had to be killed by .health-care individuals ominously referred to as 'the special nurses'), , black cats (if one crossed your path, you +had to fork the sign of the evil eye at it quickly or risk - almost certain death before the end of the ,day), and sidewalk cracks. I probably don't have to explain , the potentially dangerous relationship of &these latter to the spinal columns of completely innocent  mothers. & My primary sources of wonderful and %amazing facts in those days were the paperback compilations . from Ripley's Believe It or Not! which were 0issued by Pocket Books. It was in Ripley's that I ' discovered you could make a powerful ,explosive by scraping the celluloid off the backs of playing * cards and then tamping the stuff into a /length of pipe, that you could drill a hole in your own skull * and then plug it with a candle, thereby &turning yourself into a kind of human night-light (why anyone & would want to do such a thing was a *question which never occurred to me until years later), that there . were actual giants (one man well over eight +feel tall), actual elves (one woman barely eleven inches tall), & and actual MONSTERS TOO HORRIBLE TO .DESCRIBE . . . except Ripley's described them all, in loving 2 detail, and usually with a picture (if I live to/be a hundred, I'll never forget the one of the guy with ( the candle stuck in the center of his shaved skull). - That series of paperbacks was to me, at .least the world's most wonderful sideshow, one I could - carry around in my back pocket and curl up 'with on rainy weekend afternoons, when there were no + baseball games and everyone was tired of (Monopoly. Were all of Ripley's fabulous curiosities and , human monsters real? In this context that -hardly seems relevant. They were real to me, and that . probably is during the years from six to )eleven, crucial years in which the human imagination is / largely formed, they were very real to me. I +believed them just as I believed you could derail a . freight-train with a dime or that the drippy,goop in the center of a golf-ball would eat the hand right , off your arm if you were careless and got 1some of it on you. It was in Ripley's Believe It or Not! . that I first began to see how fine the line +between the fabulous and the humdrum could sometimes ! be, and to understand that the (juxtaposition of the two did as much to illuminate the ordinary . aspects of life as it did to illuminate its *occasional weird outbreaks. Remember it's belief we're / talking about here, and belief is the cradle .of myth. What about reality, you ask? Well, asfar as . I'm concerned, reality can go take a flying ,fuck at a rolling doughnut. I've never held much of a , brief for reality, at least in my written -work. All too often it is to the imagination what ash stakes  are to vampires. , I think that myth and imagination are, in +fact, nearly interchangeable concepts, and that belief / is the wellspring of both. Belief in what? I .don't think it matters very much, to tell you the truth. - One god or many. Or that a dime can derail a freight-train. * These beliefs of mine had nothing to do 1with faith; let's be very clear on that subject. I was + raised Methodist and hold onto enough of -the fundamentalist teachings of my childhood to believe , that such a claim would be presumptuous at+best and downright blasphemous at worst. I believed . all that weird stuff because I was built to /believe in weird stuff. Other people run races because ' they were built to run fast, or play !basketball because God made them six-foot-ten, or solve long, ' complicated equations on blackboards *because they were built to see the places where the numbers  all lock together. + Yet faith comes into it someplace, and I .think that place has to do with going back to do the ) same thing again and again even though .you believe in your deepest, truest heart that you will - never be able to do it any better than you /already have, and that if you press on, there's really no + place to go but downhill. You don't have *anything to lose when you take your first whack at the + piata, but to take a second one (and a 4third . . . and a fourth . . . and a thirty-fourth) is to risk / failure, depression, and, in the case of the .short-story writer who works in a pretty well defined , genre, self-parody. But we do go on, most /of us, and that gets to be hard. I never would have * believed that twenty years ago, or even 0ten, but it does. It gets hard. And I have days when I , think this old Wang word-processor stopped-running on electricity about five years ago; that from & The Dark Half on, it's been running .completely on faith. But that's okay; whatevergets the words  across the screen, right? . The idea of each of the stories in this book-came in a moment of belief and was written ina + burst of faith, happiness, and optimism. (Those positive feelings have their dark analogues, - however, and the fear of failure is a long -way from the worst of them. The worst for me, at - least is the gnawing speculation that I +may have already said everything I have to say, and am , now only listening to the steady quacking ,of my own voice because the silence when it stops is just  too spooky. * The leap of faith necessary to make the -short stories happen has gotten particularly tough in * the last few years; these days it seems )that everything wants to be a novel, and every novel wants * to be approximately four thousand pages .long. A fair number of critics have mentioned this, and - usually not favorably. In reviews of every -long novel I have written, from The Stand to Needful . Things, I have been accused of overwriting. ,In some cases the criticisms have merit; in others they , are just the ill-tempered yappings of men )and women who have accepted the literary anorexia of / the last thirty years with a puzzling (to me,0at least) lack of discussion and dissent. These selfappointed & deacons in the Church of Latter-Day -American Literature seem to regard generosity, with suspicion, texture with dislike, and .any broad literary stroke with outright hate. The result / is a strange and arid literary climate where ,a meaningless little fingernail-paring like Nicholson # Baker's Vox becomes an object of .fascinated debate and dissection, and a truly ambitious , American novel like Greg Matthews's Heart #of the Country is all but ignored. . But all that is by the by, not only off the -subject but just a tiny bit whimpery, too after all, . was there ever a writer who didn't feel that(he or she had been badly treated by the critics? All I / started to say before I so rudely interrupted-myself was that the act of faith which turns a moment 0 of belief into a real object i.e., a short 0story that people will actually want to read has been / a little harder for me to come by in the last few years. . 'Well then, don't write them,' someone might0say (only it's usually a voice I hear inside my own . head, like the ones Jessie Burlingame hears 1in Gerald's Game}. 'After all, you don't need themoney ' they bring in the way you once did.' , That's true enough. The days when a check )for some four-thousand-word wonder would buy 1 penicillin for one of the kids' ear infections -or help meet the rent are long gone. But the logic is . more than spurious; it's dangerous. I don't ,exactly need the money the novels bring in, either, you . see. If it was just the money, I could hang .up my jock and hit the showers . . . or spend the rest ' of my life on some Caribbean island, .catching the rays and seeing how long I could grow my  fingernails. * But it isn't about the money, no matter /what the glossy tabloids may say, and it's not about , selling out, as the more arrogant critics /really seem to believe. The fundamental things still ( apply as time goes by, and for me the *object hasn't changed the job is still getting to you, , Constant Reader, getting you by the short /hairs and, hopefully, scaring you so badly you won't be * able to go to sleep without leaving the 1bathroom light on. It's still about first seeing the 2 impossible . . . and then saying it. It's still ,about making you believe what I believe, at least for a  little while. + I don't talk about this much, because it ,embarrasses me and it sounds pompous, but I still see , stories as a great thing, something which +not only enhances lives but actually saves them. Nor am I + speaking metaphorically. Good writing 1good stories are the imagination's firing pin,and the / purpose of the imagination, I believe, is to ,offer us solace and shelter from situations and life-passages - which would otherwise prove unendurable. I *can only speak from my own experience, of course, but for , me, the imagination which so often kept me+awake and in terror as a child has seen me through . some terrible bouts of stark raving reality 0as an adult. If the stories which have resulted from that * imagination have done the same for some *of the people who've read them, then I am perfectly happy , and perfectly satisfied feelings which ,cannot, so far as I know, be purchased with rich movie 0 deals or multi-million-dollar book contracts. , Still, the short story is a difficult and 0challenging literary form, and that's why I was so delighted . and so surprised to find I had enough 0of them to issue a third collection. It has comeat a + propitious time, as well, because one of /those facts of which I was so sure as a kid (I probably picked 1 it up in Ripley's Believe It or Not!, too) was (that people completely renew themselves every seven * years: every tissue, every organ, every ,muscle replaced by entirely new cells. I am drawing Nightmares + and Dreamscapes together in the summer of+1992, seven years after the publication of Skeleton Crew, + my last collection of short stories, and -Skeleton Crew was published seven years afterNight Shift, my * first collection. The greatest thing is )knowing that, although the leap of faith necessary to translate an + idea into reality has become harder (the .jumping muscles get a little older every day, you know), it's still . perfectly possible. The next greatest thing ,is knowing that someone still wants to read them * that's you, Constant Reader, should you wonder. . The oldest of these stories (my versions of &the killer golf-ball goop and monster miscarriages, if - you will) is 'It Grows on You', originally ,published in a University of Maine literary magazine called ( Marshroots . . . although it has been 0considerably revised for this book, so it could better be what it . apparently wanted to be a final look back.at the doomed little town of Castle Rock. The most ( recent, 'The Ten O'Clock People', was )written in three fevered days during the summer of 1992. - There are some genuine curiosities here 1the first version of my only original teleplay; a Sherlock ( Holmes story in which Dr Watson steps ,forward to solve the case; a Cthulhu Mythos story set in the , suburb of London where Peter Straub lived 0when I first met him; a hardboiled 'caper' storyof the ) Richard Bachman stripe; and a slightly /different version of a story called 'My Pretty Pony', which / was originally done as a limited edition from+the Whitney Museum, with artwork by BarbaraKruger. + After a great deal of thought, I've also )decided to include a lengthy non-fiction piece, 'Head . Down', which concerns kids and baseball. It ,was originally published in The New Yorker, and I - probably worked harder on it than anything /else I've written over the last fifteen years. That doesn't + make it good, of course, but I know that +writing and publishing it gave me enormous satisfaction, / and I'm passing it along for that reason. It .doesn't really fit in a collection of stories which concern * themselves mostly with suspense and the /supernatural . . . except somehow it does. The texture is ' the same. See if you don't think so. , What I've tried hardest to do is to steer /clear of the old chestnuts, the trunk stories, and the , bottom-of-the-drawer stuff. Since 1980 or *so, some critics have been saying I could publish my 0 laundry list and sell a million copies or so, ,but these are for the most part critics who think that's - what I've been doing all along. The people -who read my work for pleasure obviously feel differently, ' and I have made this book with those .readers, not the critics, in the forefront of my mind. The result, I * think, is an uneven Aladdin's cave of a -book, one which completes a trilogy of which Night Shift and / Skeleton Crew are the first two volumes. All %the good short stories have now been collected; all the bad , ones have been swept as far under the rug /as I could get them, and there they will stay. If there is to 1 be another collection, it will consist entirely-of stories which have not as yet been writtenor even - considered (stories which have not yet been3believed, if you will), and I'd guess it will show up in a  year which begins with a 2. + Meantime, there are these twenty-odd (and-some, I should warn you, are very odd). Each contains . something I believed for awhile, and I know .that some of these things the finger pokingout of ' the drain, the man-eating toads, the 0hungry teeth are a little frightening, but I think we'll be all - right if we go together. First, repeat the catechism after me: / I believe a dime can derail a freight-train. , I believe there are alligators in the New ,York City sewer system, not to mention rats as big as  Shetland ponies. , I believe that you can tear off someone's shadow with a steel tent-peg. 0 I believe that there really is a Santa Claus, .and that all those red-suited guys you see at ( Christmastime really are his helpers. 0 I believe there is an unseen world all around us. 1 I believe that tennis balls are full of poison +gas, and if you cut one in two and breathe what comes  out, it'll kill you. , Most of all, I do believe in spooks, I do +believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks. + Okay? Ready? Fine. Here's my hand. We're .going now. I know the way. All you have to do is hold  on tight . . . and believe.  Bangor, Maine  November 6, 1992  Waking? Sleeping? ! Which side of the line are the  dreams really on?    -Dolan's Cadillac-  % Revenge is a dish best eaten cold.  -Spanish proverb  - I waited and watched for seven years. I saw/him come and go Dolan. I watched him stroll into ) fancy restaurants dressed in a tuxedo, *always with a different woman on his arm, always with his ' pair of bodyguards bookending him. I (watched his hair go from iron-gray to a fashionable silver / while my own simply receded until I was bald.-I watched him leave Las Vegas on his regular + pilgrimages to the West Coast; I watched (him return. On two or three occasions I watched from a + side road as his Sedan DeVille, the same .color as his hair, swept by on Route 71 towardLos , Angeles. And on a few occasions I watched .him leave his place in the Hollywood Hills in the . same gray Cadillac to return to Las Vegas )not often, though. I am a schoolteacher. , Schoolteachers and high-priced hoodlums do,not have the same freedom of movement; it's just  an economic fact of life. * He did not know I was watching him I (never came close enough for him to know that. I  was careful. 0 He killed my wife or had her killed; it comes .to the same, either way. Do you want details? * You won't get them from me. If you want -them, look them up in the back issues of the papers. , Her name was Elizabeth. She taught in the -same school where I taught and where I teach still. , She taught first-graders. They loved her, +and I think that some of them may not have forgotten + their love still, although they would be /teenagers now. I loved her and love her still, certainly. , She was not beautiful but she was pretty. /She was quiet, but she could laugh. I dream of her. Of ' her hazel eyes. There has never been (another woman for me. Nor ever will be. . He slipped Dolan. That's all you have to ,know. And Elizabeth was there, at the wrong place + and the wrong time, to see the slip. She .went to the police, and the police sent her to the FBI, and , she was questioned, and she said yes, she -would testify. They promised to protect her, but they . either slipped or they underestimated Dolan.,Maybe it was both. Whatever it was, she got into + her car one night and the dynamite wired +to the ignition made me a widower. He made me a  widower Dolan. . With no witness to testify, he was let free.- He went back to his world , I to mine. The *penthouse apartment in Vegas for him, the empty ' tract home for me. The succession of -beautiful women in furs and sequined evening dresses for / him, the silence for me. The gray Cadillacs, .four of them over the years, for him, and the aging - Buick Riviera for me. His hair went silver while mine just went.  But I watched. 0 I was careful oh, yes! Very careful. I knew)what he was, what he could do. I knew he + would step on me like a bug if he saw or /sensed what I meant for him. So I was careful. , During my summer vacation three years ago .I followed him (at a prudent distance) to Los ( Angeles, where he went frequently. He .stayed in his fine house and threw parties (I watched the + comings and goings from a safe shadow at +the end of the block, fading back when the police cars / made their frequent patrols), and I stayed in.a cheap hotel where people played their radiostoo + loud and neon light from the topless bar /across the street shone in the windows. I fell asleep on * those nights and dreamed of Elizabeth's -hazel eyes, dreamed that none of it had ever happened, * and woke up sometimes with tears drying on my face.  I came close to losing hope. ( He was well guarded, you see; so well +guarded. He went nowhere without those two heavily , armed gorillas with him, and the Cadillac 1itself was armor plated. The big radial tires it rolled on + were of the self-sealing type favored by &dictators in small, uneasy countries. . Then, that last time, I saw how it could be 2done but I did not see it until after I'd had avery  bad scare. + I followed him back to Las Vegas, always -keeping at least a mile between us, sometimestwo, , sometimes three. As we crossed the desert *heading east his car was at times no more than a - sunflash on the horizon and I thought about+Elizabeth, how the sun looked on her hair. / I was far behind on this occasion. It was the-middle of the week, and traffic on US 71 was very 0 light. When traffic is light, tailing becomes +dangerous even a grammar-school teacher knows + that. I passed an orange sign which read %DETOUR 5 MILES and dropped back even farther. / Desert detours slow traffic to a crawl, and I+didn't want to chance coming up behind the gray - Cadillac as the driver babied it over some rutted secondary road. * DETOUR 3 MILES, the next sign read, and %below that: BLASTING AREA AHEAD TURN  OFF 2-WAY RADIO. + I began to muse on some movie I had seen +years before. In this film a band of armed robbers - had tricked an armored car into the desert +by putting up false detour signs. Once the driver fell & for the trick and turned off onto a +deserted dirt road (there are thousands of them in the desert, & sheep roads and ranch roads and old 'government roads that go nowhere), the thieves had - removed the signs, assuring isolation, and .then had simply laid siege to the armored car until the  guards came out.  They killed the guards.  I remembered that.  They killed the guards. . I reached the detour and turned onto it. The)road was as bad as I had imagined packed dirt, , two lanes wide, filled with potholes that (made my old Buick jounce and groan. The Buick ) needed new shock absorbers, but shocks ,are an expense a schoolteacher sometimes hasto put ) off, even when he is a widower with no ,children and no hobbies except his dream of revenge. + As the Buick bounced and wallowed along, -an idea occurred to me. Instead of following / Dolan's Cadillac the next time it left Vegas /for LA or LA for Vegas, I would pass it get ahead 0 of it. I would create a false detour like the /one in the movie, luring it out into the wastesthat - exist, silent and rimmed by mountains, west-of Las Vegas. Then I would remove the signs, as the # thieves had done in the movie . I snapped back to reality suddenly. Dolan's ,Cadillac was ahead of me, directly ahead of me, - pulled off to one side of the dusty track. 0One of the tires, self-sealing or not, was flat. No not 0 just flat. It was exploded, half off the rim. ,The culprit had probably been a sharp wedge of rock ( stuck in the hardpan like a miniature )tank-trap. One of the two bodyguards was working a jack - under the front end. The second an ogre *with a pig-face streaming sweat under his brush cut . stood protectively beside Dolan himself. *Even in the desert, you see, they took no chances. & Dolan stood to one side, slim in an /open-throated shirt and dark slacks, his silver hair blowing + around his head in the desert breeze. He )was smoking a cigarette and watching the men as if he ) were somewhere else, a restaurant or a $ballroom or a drawing room perhaps. - His eyes met mine through the windshield of-my car and then slid off with no recognition at + all, although he had seen me once, seven /years ago (when I had hair!), at a preliminary hearing,  sitting beside my wife. ) My terror at having caught up with the *Cadillac was replaced with an utter fury. . I thought of leaning over and unrolling the ,passenger window and shrieking: How dare you* forget me? How dare you dismiss me? Oh, .but that would have been the act of a lunatic.It was - good that he had forgotten me, it was fine )that he had dismissed me, better to be a mouse behind * the wainscoting, nibbling at the wires. )Better to be a spider, high up under the eaves, spinning its  web. , The man sweating the jack flagged me, but /Dolan wasn't the only one capable of dismissal.I - looked indifferently beyond the arm-waver, +wishing him a heart attack or a stroke or, best of all, . both at the same time. I drove on but my (head pulsed and throbbed, and for a few moments ) the mountains on the horizon seemed to double and even treble. 0 If I'd had a gun! I thought. If only Id had a .gun! I could have ended his rotten, miserable life $ right then if I'd only had a gun! - Miles later some sort of reason reasserted 0itself If I'd had a gun, the only thing I could have 1 been sure of was getting myself killed. If I'd ,had a gun I could have pulled over when the man ) using the bumper-jack beckoned me, and .gotten out, and begun spraying bullets wildly around ' the deserted landscape. I might have (wounded someone. Then I would have been killed and - buried in a shallow grave, and Dolan would +have gone on escorting the beautiful women and + making pilgrimages between Las Vegas and -Los Angeles in his silver Cadillac while the desert * animals unearthed my remains and fought 'over my bones under the cold moon. For Elizabeth + there would have been no revenge none at all. & The men who travelled with him were (trained to kill. I was trained to teach third-graders. . This was not a movie, I reminded myself as I,returned to the highway and passed an orange' END CONSTRUCTION THE STATE OF NEVADA THANKS YOU! sign. And if I ever - made the mistake of confusing reality with $a movie, of thinking that a balding third-grade teacher ( with myopia could ever be Dirty Harry ,anywhere outside of his own daydreams, therewould  never be any revenge, ever. * But could there be revenge, ever? Could there be? + My idea of creating a fake detour was as (romantic and unrealistic as the idea of jumping out of ) my old Buick and spraying the three of -them with bullets me, who had not fired a gun since , the age of sixteen and who had never fired a handgun. - Such a thing would not be possible without .a band of conspirators even the movie I had* seen, romantic as it had been, had made ,that clear. There had been eight or nine of them in two - separate groups, staying in touch with each.other by walkie-talkie. There had even been a man in . a small plane cruising above the highway to )make sure the armored car was relatively isolated as & it approached the right spot on the highway. % A plot no doubt dreamed up by some 'overweight screenwriter sitting by his swimming pool - with a pina colada by one hand and a fresh +supply of Pentel pens and an Edgar Wallace plot- + wheel by the other. And even that fellow /had needed a small army to fulfill his idea. I was only  one man. , It wouldn't work. It was just a momentary .false gleam, like the others I'd had over the years , the idea that maybe I could put some sort *of poison gas in Dolan's air-conditioning system, or , plant a bomb in his Los Angeles house, or .perhaps obtain some really deadly weapon a - bazooka, let us say and turn his damned 1silver Cadillac into a fireball as it raced east toward $ Vegas or west toward LA along 71.  Best to dismiss it.  But it wouldn't go. + Cut him out, the voice inside that spoke .for Elizabeth kept whispering. Cut him out theway an * experienced sheep-dog cuts a ewe out of -the flock when his master points. Detour him out into - the emptiness and kill him. Kill them all. 0 Wouldn't work. If I allowed no other truth, I ,would at least have to allow that a man who had , stayed alive as long as Dolan must have a .carefully honed sense of survival honed to the point - of paranoia, perhaps. He and his men would *see through the detour trick in a minute. , They turned down this one today, the voice)that spoke for Elizabeth responded. They never - even hesitated. They went just like Mary's little lamb. , But I knew yes, somehow I did! that -men like Dolan, men who are really more like + wolves than men, develop a sort of sixth -sense when it comes to danger. I could steal genuine ) detour signs from some road department 0shed and set them up in all the right places; I could even * add fluorescent orange road cones and a .few of those smudge-pots. I could do all that and Dolan , would still smell the nervous sweat of my .hands on the stage dressing. Right through his bulletproof , windows he would smell it. He would close .his eyes and hear Elizabeth's name far back in* the snake-pit that passed for his mind. * The voice that spoke for Elizabeth fell 1silent, and I thought it had finally given up for the day. , And then, with Vegas actually in sight .blue and misty and wavering on the far rim of the  desert it spoke up again. ) Then don't try to fool him with a fake 0detour, it whispered. Fool him with a real one. + I swerved the Buick over to the shoulder *and shuddered to a stop with both feet on the brakepedal. . I stared into my own wide, startled eyes in the rear-view mirror. - Inside, the voice that spoke for Elizabeth /began to laugh. It was wild, mad laughter, but after a . few moments I began to laugh along with it. * The other teachers laughed at me when I ,joined the Ninth Street Health Club. One of them ' wanted to know if someone had kicked ,sand in my face. I laughed along with them. People don't - get suspicious of a man like me as long as +he keeps laughing along with them. And why + shouldn't 1 laugh? My wife had been dead )seven years, hadn't she? Why, she was no more than . dust and hair and a few bones in her coffin!/So why shouldn't I laugh? It's only when a man like * me stops laughing that people wonder if something is wrong. + I laughed along with them even though my *muscles ached all that fall and winter. I laughed , even though I was constantly hungry no )more second helpings, no more late-night snacks, no + more beer, no more before-dinner gin and (tonic. But lots of red meat and greens, greens, greens. ) I bought myself a Nautilus machine for Christmas. * No that's not quite right. Elizabeth ,bought me a Nautilus machine for Christmas. . I saw Dolan less frequently; I was too busy .working out, losing my pot belly, building up my * arms and chest and legs. But there were ,times when it seemed I could not go on with it, that * recapturing anything like real physical +fitness was going to be impossible, that I could not five ( without second helpings and pieces of )coffee cake and the occasional dollop of sweet cream in + my coffee. When those times came I would %park across from one of his favorite restaurants or - perhaps go into one of the clubs he favored+and wait for him to show up, stepping from the foggray - Cadillac with an arrogant, icy blonde or a .laughing redhead on his arm or one on each., There he would be, the man who had killed -my Elizabeth, there he would be, resplendent in a , formal shirt from Bijan's, his gold Rolex ,winking in the nightclub lights. When I was tired and - discouraged I went to Dolan as a man with a-raging thirst might seek out an oasis in the desert. I - drank his poisoned water and was refreshed., In February I began to run every day, and +then the other teachers laughed at my bald head, * which peeled and pinked and then peeled %and pinked again, no matter how much sun-block I , smeared on it. I laughed right along with /them, as if I had not twice nearly fainted and spent ' long, shuddering minutes with cramps -stabbing the muscles of my legs at the end of my runs. , When summer came, I applied for a job with#the Nevada Highway Department. The municipal ( employment office stamped a tentative +approval on my form and sent me along to a district , foreman named Harvey Blocker. Blocker was -a tall man, burned almost black by the Nevada, sun. He wore jeans, dusty workboots, and a)blue tee-shirt with cut-off sleeves. BAD . ATTITUDE, the shirt proclaimed. His muscles 1were big rolling slabs under his skin. He looked - at my application. Then he looked at me and*laughed. The application looked very puny rolled  up in one of his huge fists. - 'You got to be kidding, my friend. I mean, -you have got to be. We talkin desert sun and desert # heat here none of that yuppie /tanning-salon shit. What are you in real life, bubba? An  accountant?' & 'A teacher,' I said. 'Third grade.' / 'Oh, honey,' he said, and laughed again. 'Getout my face, okay?' + I had a pocket watch handed down from ,my great-grandfather, who worked on the last( stretch of the great transcontinental ,railroad. He was there, according to family legend, when ) they hammered home the golden spike. I .took the watch out and dangled it in Blocker'sface on  its chain. . 'See this?' I said. 'Worth six, maybe seven hundred dollars.' 0 'This a bribe?' Blocker laughed again. A great/old laugher was he. 'Man, I've heard of people . making deals with the devil, but you're the )first one I ever met who wanted to bribe himself into , hell.' Now he looked at me with something $like compassion. 'You may think you understand . what you're tryin to get yourself into, but (I'm here to tell you you don't have the slightest idea. In . July I've seen it go a hundred and seventeen-degrees out there west of Indian Springs. It makes . strong men cry. And you ain't strong, bubba./I don't have to see you with your shirt off to know - you ain't got nothin on your rack but a few+yuppie health-club muscles, and they won't cut it out  in the Big Empty.' 3 I said, 'The day you decide I can't cut it, I'll )walk off the job. You keep the watch. No  argument.'  'You're a fucking liar.' + I looked at him. He looked back for some time. / 'You're not a fucking liar.' He said this in tones of amazement.  'No.' . 'You'd give the watch to Tinker to hold?' He*cocked his thumb at a humongous black man in a + tie-dyed shirt who was sitting nearby in /the cab of a bulldozer, eating a fruit-pie from McDonald's and listening.  'Is he trustworthy?'  'You're damned tooting.' , 'Then he can hold it until you tell me to *take a hike or until I have to go back to school in  September.'  'And what do I put up?' - I pointed to the employment application in 3his fist. 'Sign that,' I said. 'That's what you putup.'  'You're crazy.' . I thought of Dolan and of Elizabeth and said nothing. . 'You'd start on shit-work,' Blocker warned. *'Shovelling hotpatch out of the back of a truck and ) into potholes. Not because I want your +damned watch although I'll be more than happy to take * it but because that's where everyone starts.'  'All right.' & 'As long as you understand, bubba.'  'I do.' 1 'No,' Blocker said, 'you don't. But you will.'  And he was right. - I remember next to nothing about the first .couple of weeks just shovelling hot-top and+ tamping it down and walking along behind ,the truck with my head down until the truck stopped + at the next pothole. Sometimes we worked /on the Strip and I'd hear the sound of jackpot bells / ringing in the casinos. Sometimes I think the0bells were just ringing in my head. I'd look up and , I'd see Harvey Blocker looking at me with &that odd look of compassion, his face shimmering ' in the heat baking off the road. And +sometimes I'd look over at Tinker, sitting under the canvas . parasol which covered the cab of his 'dozer,-and Tinker would hold up my great-granddad's ( watch and swing it on the chain so it kicked off sunflashes. - The big struggle was not to faint, to hold 'onto consciousness no matter what. All through June - I held on, and the first week of July, and +then Blocker sat down next to me one lunch hour while + I was eating a sandwich with one shaking /hand. I shook sometimes until ten at night. It was the . heat. It was either shake or faint, and when,I thought of Dolan I somehow managed to keep  shaking. , 'You still ain't strong, bubba,' he said. , 'No,' I said. 'But like the man said, you .should have seen the materials I had to start with.' + 'I keep expecting to look around and see ,you passed out in the middle of the roadbed and you % keep not doing it. But you gonna.'  'No, I'm not.' . 'Yes, you are. If you stay behind the truck with a shovel, you gonna.'  'No.' . 'Hottest part of the summer still coming on,+bubba. Tink calls it cookiesheet weather.'  'I'll be fine.' , He pulled something out of his pocket. It ,was my great-granddad's watch. He tossed it in my + lap. 'Take this fucking thing,' he said, disgusted. 'I don't want it.'  'You made a deal with me.'  'I'm calling it off.' 4 'If you fire me, I'll take you to arbitration,' I $said. 'You signed my form. You ' 1 'I ain't firing you,' he said, and looked away..'I'm going to have Tink teach you how to run a front-end loader.' . I looked at him for a long time, not knowing.what to say. My third-grade classroom, so cool( and pleasant, had never seemed so far 1away . . . and still I didn't have the slightest idea of how a , man like Blocker thought, or what he meant-when he said the things he said. I knew that he , admired me and held me in contempt at the )same time, but I had no idea why he felt either way. ' And you don't need to care, darling, ,Elizabeth spoke up suddenly inside my mind. Dolan is your  business. Remember Dolan. + 'Why do you want to do that?' I asked at last. * He looked back at me then, and I saw he *was both furious and amused. But the fury was the , emotion on top, I think. 'What is it with %you, bubba? What do you think I am?'  'I don't ' ) 'You think I want to kill you for your %fucking watch? That what you think?'  'I'm sorry.' 0 'Yeah, you are. Sorriest little motherfucker I ever saw.' ( I put my great-granddad's watch away. + 'You ain't never gonna be strong, bubba. -Some people and plants take hold in the sun. Some , wither up and die. You dyin. You know you .are, and still you won't move into the shade. Why? - Why you pulling this crap on your system?'  'I've got my reasons.' + 'Yeah, I bet you do. And God help anyone who gets in your way.  He got up and walked off.  Tinker came over, grinning. - 'You think you can learn to run a front-end loader?'  'I think so,' I said. - 'I think so, too,' he said. 'Ole Blockhead -there likes you he just don't know how to say so.'  'I noticed.' , Tink laughed. 'Tough little motherfucker, ain't you?'  'I hope so,' I said. + I spent the rest of the summer driving a *front-end loader, and when I went back to school that - fall, almost as black as Tink himself, the 'other teachers stopped laughing at me. Sometimes they + looked at me out of the corners of their *eyes after I passed, but they had stopped laughing. / I've got my reasons. That's what I told him. /And I did. I did not spend that season in hell just - on a whim. I had to get in shape, you see. -Preparing to dig a grave for a man or a womanmay not , require such drastic measures, but it was 'not just a man or woman I had in mind. . It was that damned Cadillac I meant to bury.. By April of the following year I was on the /State Highway Commission's mailing list. Every , month I received a bulletin called Nevada ,Road Signs. I skimmed most of the material, which ( concerned itself with pending highway +improvement bills, road equipment that had been bought - and sold, State Legislature action on such &subjects as sand-dune control and new anti-erosion + techniques. What I was interested in was /always on the last page or two of the bulletin.This . section, simply titled The Calendar, listed (the dates and sites of roadwork in each coming month. + I was especially interested in sites and 'dates followed by a simple four-letter abbreviation: ( RPAV. This stood for repaving, and my (experience on Harvey Blocker's crew had showed me , that these were the operations which most 0frequently called for detours. But not always no . indeed. Closing a section of road is a step *the Highway Commission never takes unless there is ( no other choice. But sooner or later, 0 I thought, those four letters might spell the ,end for Dolan. Just four letters, but there were , times when I saw them in my dreams: RPAV. - Not that it would be easy, or perhaps even /soon I knew I might have to wait for years, and + that someone else might get Dolan in the +meantime. He was an evil man, and evil men live / dangerous lives. Four loosely related vectors)would have to come together, like a rare / conjunction of the planets: travel for Dolan,.vacation time for me, a national holiday, and a threeday  weekend. - Years, maybe. Or maybe never. But I felt a +kind of serenity a surety that it would happen, , and that when it did I would be prepared. 'And eventually it did happen. Not that summer, not / that fall, and not the following spring. But +in June of last year, I opened Nevada Road Signs and  saw this in The Calendar: ) Hands shaking, I paged through my desk /calendar to July and saw that July 4th fell on a  Monday. . So here were three of the four vectors, for ,surely there would be a detour somewhere in the , middle of such an extensive repaving job. . But Dolan . . . what about Dolan? What aboutthe fourth vector? * Three times before I could remember him -going to LA during the week of the Fourth of July - a week which is one of the few slow ones+in Las Vegas. I could remember three other times * when he had gone somewhere else once -to New York, once to Miami, once all the way to * London and a fourth time when he had simply stayed put in Vegas.  If he went . . . $ Was there a way I could find out? + I thought on this long and hard, but two 2visions kept intruding. In the first I saw Dolan's, Cadillac speeding west toward LA along US /71 at dusk, casting a long shadow behind it. I saw it * passing DETOUR AHEAD signs, the last of )them warning CB owners to turn off their sets. I * saw the Cadillac passing abandoned road ,equipment bulldozers, graders, front-end loaders. * Abandoned not just because it was after 'knocking-off time but because it was a weekend, a  three-day weekend. * In the second vision everything was the (same except the detour signs were gone. * They were gone because I had taken them down. * It was on the last day of school when I .suddenly realized how I might be able to find out. I had * been nearly drowsing, my mind a million -miles away from both school and Dolan, when I- suddenly sat bolt-upright, knocking a vase *on the side of my desk (it contained some pretty , desert flowers my students had brought me +as an end-of-school present) to the floor, where it - shattered. Several of my students, who had /also been drowsing, also sat bolt-upright, and perhaps ) something on my face frightened one of )them, because a little boy named Timothy Urich burst & into tears and I had to soothe him. - Sheets, I thought, comforting Timmy. Sheets,and pillowcases and bedding and silverware; the , rugs; the grounds. Everything has to look (just so. He'll want everything just so. * Of course. Having things just so was as &much a part of Dolan as his Cadillac. + I began to smile, and Timmy Urich smiled ,back, but it wasn't Timmy I was smiling at.  I was smiling at Elizabeth. * School finished on June 10th that year. +Twelve days later I flew to Los Angeles. I rented a car * and checked into the same cheap hotel I ,had used on other occasions. On each of the next three , days I drove into the Hollywood Hills and .mounted a watch on Dolan's house. It could notbe a ' constant watch; that would have been (noticed. The rich hire people to notice interlopers, because . all too often they turn out to be dangerous.  Like me. , At first there was nothing. The house was +not boarded up, the lawn was not overgrown  . heaven forbid! the water in the pool was .doubtless clean and chlorinated. But there wasa look * of emptiness and disuse all the same -shades pulled against the summer sun, no carsin the - central turnaround, no one to use the pool )that a young man with a ponytail cleaned every other  morning. * I became convinced it was a bust. Yet I )stayed, wishing and hoping for the final vector. ) On the 29th of June, when I had almost ,consigned myself to another year of watchingand ' waiting and exercising and driving a *front-end loader in the summer for Harvey Blocker (if he , would have me again, that was) a blue car %marked LOS ANGELES SECURITY SERVICES , pulled up at the gate of Dolan's house. A +man in a uniform got out and used a key to open the + gate. He drove his car in and around the ,corner. A few moments later he came back on foot , $ closed the gate, and relocked it. . This was at least a break in the routine. I felt a dim flicker of hope. + I drove off, managed to make myself stay *away for nearly two hours, and then drove back, - parking at the head of the block instead of,the foot this time. Fifteen minutes later a blue van / pulled up in front of Dolan's house. Written %on the side were the words BIG JOE'S CLEANING - SERVICE. My heart leaped up in my chest. I ,was watching in the rear-view mirror, and I ( remember how my hands clamped down on &the steering wheel of the rental car. + Four women got out of the van, two white,-one black, one Chicana. They were dressed in , white, like waitresses, but they were not *waitresses, of course; they were cleaning women. * The security guard answered when one of -them buzzed at the gate, and unlocked it. Thefive + of them talked and laughed together. The ,security guard attempted to goose one of thewomen ( and she slapped his hand aside, still laughing. ( One of the women went back to the van -and drove it into the turnaround. The others walked , up, talking among themselves as the guard %closed the gate and locked it again. * Sweat was pouring down my face; it felt )like grease. My heart was triphammering. - They were out of my field of vision in the -rear-view mirror. 1 took a chance and looked  around. - I saw the back doors of the van swing open.& One of them carried a neat stack of .sheets; another had towels; another had a pair of vacuum  cleaners. , They trooped up to the door and the guard let them inside. / I drove away, shaking so badly I could hardlysteer the car. & They were opening the house. He was coming. , Dolan did not trade in his Cadillac every *year, or even every two the gray Sedan DeVille he - was driving as that June neared its end was1three years old. I knew its dimensions exactly. Ihad # written the GM company for them, -pretending to be a research writer. They had sent me an , operator's manual and spec sheet for that -year's model. They even returned the stamped,- selfaddressed envelope I had enclosed. Big -companies apparently maintain their courtesy even # when they're running in the red. ( I had then taken three figures the 0Cadillac's width at its widest point, height at its tallest, . and length at its longest to a friend of *mine who teaches mathematics at Las Vegas High / School. I have told you, I think, that I had .prepared for this, and not all my preparation was  physical. Most assuredly not. % I presented my problem as a purely *hypothetical one. I was trying to write a science fiction ) story, I said, and I wanted to have my ,figures exactly right. I even made up a few plausible plot - fragments my own inventiveness rather I astonished me. ) My friend wanted to know how fast this /alien scout vehicle of mine would be going. It was a + question I had not expected, and I asked him if it mattered. 1 'Of course it matters,' he said. 'It matters a 0lot. If you want the scout vehicle in your storyto 0 fall directly into your trap, the trap has to +be exactly the right size. Now this figure you've given & me is seventeen feet by five feet.' ' I opened my mouth to say that wasn't -exactly right, but he was already holding up his hand. . 'Just an approximation,' he said. 'Makes it easier to figure the arc.'  'The what?' + 'The arc of descent,' he repeated, and I +cooled off. That was a phrase with which a man bent on - revenge could fall in love. It had a dark, &smoothly portentous sound. The arc of descent. - I'd taken it for granted that if I dug the /grave so that the Cadillac could fit, it would fit. It took * this friend of mine to make me see that .before it could serve its purpose as a grave, it had to work  as a trap. . The shape itself was important, he said. The+sort of slit-trench I had been envisioning might + not work in fact, the odds of its not +working were greater than the odds that it would. 'If the . vehicle doesn't hit the start of the trench .dead-on,' he said, 'it may not go all the way in at all. It / would just slide along on an angle for awhile/and when it stopped all the aliens would climb out + the passenger door and zap your heroes.' &The answer, he said, was to widen the entrance end, - giving the whole excavation a funnel-shape.( Then there was this problem of speed. - If Dolan's Cadillac was going too fast and -the hole was too short, it would fly across, sinking a . bit as it went, and either the frame or the .tires would strike the lip of the hole on the far side. It - would flip over on its roof but without 2falling in the hole at all. On the other hand, if the - Cadillac was going too slowly and the hole -was too long, it might land at the bottom on its nose . instead of its wheels, and that would never /do. You couldn't bury a Cadillac with the last two feet , of its trunk and its rear bumper sticking *out of the ground any more than you could bury a man  with his legs sticking up. * 'So how fast will your scout vehicle be going?' - I calculated quickly. On the open highway, ,Dolan's driver kept it pegged between sixty and - sixty-five. He would probably be driving a /little slower than that where I planned to makemy / try. I could take away the detour signs, but 0I couldn't hide the road machinery or erase all the  signs of construction.  'About twenty rull,' I said. $ He smiled. 'Translation, please?' # 'Say fifty earth-miles an hour.' , 'Ah-hah.' He set to work at once with his /slip-stick while I sat beside him, bright-eyed and ) smiling, thinking about that wonderful phrase: arc of descent. - He looked up almost at once. 'You know,' he-said, 'you might want to think about changingthe % dimensions of the vehicle, buddy.'  'Oh? Why do you say that?' / 'Seventeen by five is pretty big for a scout 0vehicle.' He laughed. 'That's damn near the sizeof a  Lincoln Mark IV.' ' I laughed, too. We laughed together. , After I saw the women going into the house.with the sheets and towels, I flew back to Las  Vegas. , I unlocked my house, went into the living +room, and picked up the telephone. My hand 0 trembled a little. For nine years I had waited,and watched like a spider in the eaves or a mouse + behind a baseboard. I had tried never to /give Dolan the slightest clue that Elizabeth's husband - was still interested in him the totally )empty look he had given me that day as I passed his - disabled Cadillac on the way back to Vegas,+furious as it had made me at the time, was my just  reward. / But now I would have to take a risk. I would .have to take it because I could not be in two % places at the same time and it was ,imperative that I know if Dolan was coming, and when to ) make the detour temporarily disappear. - I had figured out a plan coming home on the0plane. I thought it would work. I would make it  work. / I dialed Los Angeles directory assistance and+asked for the number of Big Joe's Cleaning # Service. I got it and dialed it. 3 'This is Bill at Rennie's Catering,' I said. 'We .got a party Saturday night at 1121 Aster Drivein . Hollywood Hills. I wanted to know if one of *your girls would check for Mr Dolan's big punchbowl . in the cabinet over the stove. Could you do that for me?' * I was asked to hold on. I did, somehow, *although with the passing of each endless second I ( became more and more sure that he had (smelled a rat and was calling the phone company on one " line while I held on the other. 0 At last at long, long last he came back .on. He sounded upset, but that was all right. That & was just how I wanted him to sound.  'Saturday night?' ) 'Yes, that's right. But I don't have a +punch-bowl as big as they're going to want unless I call , across town, and my impression was that he,already has one. I'd just like to be sure.' - 'Look, mister, my call-sheet says Mr Dolan *ain't expected in until three P.M. Sunday afternoon. 0 I'll be glad to have one of my girls check out.your punch-bowl, but I want to straighten thisother / business out first. Mr Dolan is not a man to /fuck around with, if you'll pardon my French ' , 'I couldn't agree with you more,' I said. 0 ' and if he's going to show up a day early,.I got to send some more girls out there right  away.' % 'Let me double-check,' I said. The -third-grade reading textbook I use, Roads to Everywhere, - was on the table beside me. I picked it up +and riffled some of the pages close to the phone. 2 'Oh, boy,' I said. 'It's my mistake. He's having.people in Sunday night. I'm really sorry. You  going to hit me?' 2 'Nah. Listen, let me put you on hold I'll get/one of the girls and have her check on the '- 'No need, if it's Sunday,' I said. 'My big (punch-bowl's coming back from a wedding reception  in Glendale Sunday morning.' % 'Okay. Take it easy.' Comfortable. ,Unsuspicious. The voice of a man who wasn't going to  think twice.  I hoped. 0 I hung up and sat still, working it out in my .head as carefully as I could. To get to LA by three, - he would be leaving Vegas about ten o'clock+Sunday morning. And he would arrive in the ! vicinity of the detour between 'eleven-fifteen and eleven-thirty, when traffic was apt to be almost  non-existent anyway. - I decided it was time to stop dreaming and start acting. ) I looked through the want ads, made +some telephone calls, and then went out to look at five . used vehicles that were within my financial .reach. I settled for a battered Ford van that had rolled & off the assembly line the same year 2Elizabeth was killed. I paid cash. I was left with only two ( hundred and fifty-seven dollars in my -savings account, but this did not disturb me in the + slightest. On my way home I stopped at a .rental place the size of a discount department store and - rented a portable air compressor, using my MasterCard as collateral. * Late Friday afternoon I loaded the van: ,picks, shovels, compressor, a hand-dolly, a toolbox, % binoculars, and a borrowed Highway )Department Jackhammer with an assortment of arrowheadshaped ' attachments made for slicing through .asphalt. A large square piece of sand-colored - canvas, plus a long roll of canvas this /latter had been a special project of mine last summer * and twenty-one thin wooden struts, each *five feet long. Last but not least, a big industrial stapler. + On the edge of the desert I stopped at a ,shopping center and stole a pair of license plates and  put them on my van. - Seventy-six miles west of Vegas, I saw the &first orange sign: CONSTRUCTION AHEAD , PASS AT YOUR OWN RISK. Then, a mile or so .beyond that, I saw the sign I had been waiting2 for since . . . well, ever since Elizabeth died,.I suppose, although I hadn't always known it.  DETOUR AHEAD 6 MILES. - Dusk was deepening toward dark as I arrived.and surveyed the situation. It could have been* better if I'd planned it, but not much. * The detour was a right turn between two -rises. It looked like an old fence-line road which the & Highway Department had smoothed and 'widened to temporarily accommodate the heavier traffic * flow. It was marked by a flashing arrow ,powered by a buzzing battery in a padlocked steel box. ) Just beyond the detour, as the highway .rose toward the crest of that second rise, the road was . blocked off by a double line of road cones. +Beyond them (if one was so extraordinarily stupid as , to have, first, missed the flashing arrow -and, second, run over the road cones without realizing it ) I suppose some drivers were) was an *orange sign almost as big as a billboard, reading ROAD  CLOSED USE DETOUR. ( Yet the reason for the detour was not /visible from here, and that was good. I didn't want Dolan . to have the slightest chance of smelling thetrap before he fell into it. / Moving quickly I didn't want to be seen at)this I got out of the van and quickly stacked , up some dozen of the road cones, creating .a lane wide enough for the van. I dragged the ROAD - CLOSED Sign to the right, then ran back to ,the van, got in, and drove through the gap. ) Now I could hear an approaching motor. , I grabbed the cones again, replacing them /as fast as I could. Two of them spilled out of my * hands and rolled down into the gully. I -chased after them, panting. I tripped over a rock in the / dark, fell sprawling, and got up quickly with,dust on my face and blood dripping from one palm. ( The car was closer now; soon it would %appear over the last rise before the detour-junction and in ( the glow thrown by his high beams the &driver would see a man in jeans and a tee-shirt trying to / replace road cones while his van stood idling+where no vehicle that didn't belong to the Nevada * State Highway Department was supposed to.be. I got the last cone in place and ran back to the / sign. I tugged too hard. It swayed and almost fell over. , As the approaching car's headlights began /to brighten on the rise to the east, I suddenly) became convinced it was a Nevada State Trooper. , The sign was back where it had been and1if it wasn't, it was close enough. I sprinted forthe - van, got in, and drove over the next rise. .just as I cleared it, I saw headlights splash over the rise  behind me. * Had he seen me in the dark, with my own lights out?  I didn't think so. , I sat back against the seat, eyes closed, /waiting for my heart to slow down. At last, as the * sound of the car bouncing and bucketing +its way down the detour faded out, it did. ( I was here safe behind the detour.  It was time to get to work. + Beyond the rise, the road descended to a +long, straight flat. Two-thirds of the way along this - straight stretch the road simply ceased to 0exist it was replaced by piles of dirt and a long, wide  stretch of crushed gravel. , Would they see that and stop? Turn around?,Or would they keep on going, confident that there ( must be an approved way through since $they had not seen any detour signs? " Too late to worry about it now. - I picked a spot about twenty yards into the1flat, but still a quarter of a mile short of the place - where the road dissolved. I pulled over to -the side of the road, worked my way into the back of - the van, and opened the back doors. I slid 'out a couple of boards and muscled the equipment. * Then I rested and looked up at the cold desert stars. / 'Here we go, Elizabeth,' I whispered to them.. It seemed I felt a cold hand stroke the back of my neck. ' The compressor made a racket and the )jackhammer was even worse, but there was no help for it . the best I could hope for was to be done (with the first stage of the work before midnight. If it , went on much longer than that I was going .to be in trouble anyway, because I had only a limited + quantity of gasoline for the compressor. * Never mind. Don't think of who might be +listening and wondering what fool would be running + a jackhammer in the middle of the night; -think about Dolan. Think about the gray Sedan DeVille. " Think about the arc of descent. + I marked off the dimensions of the grave +first, using white chalk, the tape measure from my , toolbox, and the figures my mathematician *friend had worked out. When I was done, a rough ( rectangle not quite five feet wide by .forty-two feet long glimmered in the dark. At the nearer end . it flared wide. In the gloom that flare did /not look so much like a funnel as it had on thegraph , paper where my mathematician friend first +sketched it. In the gloom it looked like a gaping ) mouth at the end of the long, straight -windpipe. All the better to eat you with, my dear, I thought,  and smiled in the dark. + I drew twenty more lines across the box, -making stripes two feet wide. Last, I drew a single , vertical line down the middle, creating a ,grid of forty-two near-squares, two feet by two and a ( half. The forty-third segment was the shovel-shaped flare at the end. 0 Then I rolled up my sleeves, pull-started the )compressor, and went back to square one. , The work went faster than I had any right +to hope, but not as fast as I had dared to dream / does it ever? It would have been better if I )could have used the heavy equipment, but that would . come later. The first thing was to carve up )the squares of paving. I was not done by midnight and ( not by three in the morning, when the -compressor ran out of gas. I had anticipated this might , happen, and was equipped with a siphon for/the van's gas tank. I got as far as unscrewing the - gas-cap, but when the smell of the gasoline-hit me, I simply screwed the cap back on and lay $ down flat in the back of the van. 0 No more, not tonight. I couldn't. In spite of *the work-gloves I had worn, my hands were * covered with big blisters, many of them %now weeping. My whole body seemed to vibrate from $ the steady, punishing beat of the )jackhammer, and my arms felt like tuning forks gone mad. My & head ached. My teeth ached. My back .tormented me; my spine felt as if it had been filled with  ground glass. ( I had cut my way through twenty-eight squares.  Twenty-eight.  Fourteen to go.  And that was only the start. . Never, I thought. It's impossible. Can't be done.  That cold hand again.  Yes, my darling. Yes. 0 The ringing in my ears was subsiding a little *now; every once in awhile I could hear an - approaching engine . . . and then it would -subside to a drone on the right as it turned onto the ) detour and started around the loop the )Highway Department had created to bypass the  construction. , Tomorrow was Saturday . . . sorry, today. (Today was Saturday. Dolan was coming on Sunday.  No time.  Yes, my darling. $ The blast had torn her to pieces. ) My darling had been torn to pieces for /telling the truth to the police about what she had seen, , for refusing to be intimidated, for being 0brave, and Dolan was still driving around in his Cadillac , and drinking twenty-year-old Scotch while "his Rolex glimmered on his wrist. . I'll try, I thought, and then I fell into a %dreamless sleep that was like death. . I woke up with the sun, already hot at eight*o'clock, shining in my face. I sat up and screamed, , my throbbing hands flying to the small of 'my back. Work? Cut up another fourteen chunks of ! asphalt? I couldn't even walk.  But I could walk, and I did. - Moving like a very old man on his way to a *shuffleboard game, I worked my way to the glove ) compartment and opened it. I had put a *bottle of Empirin there in case of such a morning after. . Had I thought I was in shape? Had I really? ) Well! That was quite funny, wasn't it? ) I took four of the Empirin with water, .waited fifteen minutes for them to dissolve inmy * stomach, and then wolfed a breakfast of dried fruit and cold Pop-Tarts. , I looked over to where the compressor and -the jackhammer waited. The yellow skin of the- compressor already seemed to sizzle in the -morning sunshine. Leading up to it on either side of - my incision were the neatly cut squares of asphalt. - I didn't want to go over there and pick up -that jackhammer. I thought of Harvey Blocker + saying, You ain't never gonna be strong, .bubba. Some people and plants take hold in thesun. / Some wither up and die . . . Why you pulling this crap on your system? / 'She was in pieces,' I croaked. 'I loved her and she was in pieces.' + As a cheer it was never going to replace 0'Go, Bears!' or 'Hook em, horns!' but it got me . moving. I siphoned gas from the van's tank, ,gagging at the taste and the stink, holding onto my * breakfast only by a grim act of will. I .wondered briefly what I was going to do if the road-crew - had drained the diesel from their machines ,before going home for the long weekend, and quickly , shoved the thought out of my mind. It made)no sense to worry over things I couldn't control. + More and more I felt like a man who has. 'jumped out of the bay of a B-52 with a parasol in his + hand instead of a parachute on his back. ) I carried the gasoline can over to the .compressor and poured it into the tank. I had to use my , left hand to curl the fingers of my right &around the handle of the compressor's starter-cord. When , I pulled, more blisters broke, and as the 'compressor started up, I saw thick pus dripping out of  my fist.  Never make it.  Please darling. & I walked over to the jackhammer and started it again. - The first hour was the worst, and then the +steady pounding of the jackhammer combined with + the Empirin seemed to numb everything 'my back, my hands, my head. I finished cutting out . the last block of asphalt by eleven. It was *time to see how much I remembered of what Tinker ' had told me about jump-starting road equipment. , I went staggering and flapping back to my -van and drove a mile and a half down the roadto - where the road construction was going on. I%saw my machine almost at once: a big Case-Jordan + bucket-loader with a grapple-and-pincers *attachment on the back. $135,000 worth of rolling 1 stock. I had driven a Caterpillar for Blocker, ,but this one would be pretty much the same.  I hoped. . I climbed up into the cab and looked at the #diagram printed on the head of the stick-shift. It - looked just the same as the one on my Cat. +I ran the pattern once or twice. There was some , resistance at first because some grit had -found its way into the gearbox the guy who drove this - baby hadn't put down his sand-flaps and his*foreman hadn't checked him. Blocker would have - checked. And docked the driver five bucks, long weekend or not.  His eyes. His half-admiring, ,half-contemptuous eyes. What would he think of an errand like  this? - Never mind. This was no time to be thinking)of Harvey Blocker; this was a time to be thinking  of Elizabeth. And Dolan. + There was a piece of burlap on the steel /floor of the cab. I lifted it, looking for the key. There  was no key there, of course. - Tink's voice in my mind: Shit, a kid could ,jump-start one of these babies, whitebread. Ain't 0 nothin to it. At least a car's got a ignition .lock on it new ones do, anyway. Look here. No, not , where the key goes, you ain't got no key, )why you want to look where the key goes? Look under % here. See these wires hangin down? ) I looked now and saw the wires hanging +down, looking just as they had when Tinker pointed ) them out to me: red, blue, yellow, and .green. I pared the insulation from an inch of each and then + took a twist of copper wire from my back pocket. ( Okay, whitebread, lissen up 'cause we +maybe goan give Q and A later, you dig me? You gonna ( wire the red and the green. You won't .forget that, 'cause it's like Christmas. That takes care of  your ignition. , I used my wire to hold the bare places on -the red and green wires of the Case-Jordan's ignition . together. The desert wind hooted, thin, like,the sound of someone blowing over the top ofa soda , bottle. Sweat ran down my neck and into my$shirt, where it caught and tickled. , Now you just got the blue and the yellow. (You ain't gonna wire em; you just gonna touch em , together and you gonna make sho you ain't *touchin no bare wire wither own self when you do it ) neither, 'less you wanna make some hot .electrified water in your jockeys, m'man. The blue and , the yellow the ones turn the starter. Off -you go. When you feel like you had enough of a joyride, / you just pull the red and green wires apart. (Like turnin off the key you don't have. & I touched the blue and yellow wires -together. A big yellow spark jumped up and I recoiled, - striking the back of my head on one of the ,metal posts at, the rear of the cab. Then I leaned , forward and touched them together again., (The motor turned over, coughed, and the bucketloader + took a sudden spasmodic lurch forward. I +was thrown into the rudimentary dashboard, the - left side of my face striking the steering 'bar. I had forgotten to put the damned transmission in * neutral and had almost lost an eye as a +result. I could almost hear Tink laughing. / I fixed that and then tried the wires again. *The motor turned over and turned over. It coughed + once, puffing a dirty brown smoke signal .into the air to be torn away by the ceaseless wind, and * then the motor just went on cranking. I +kept trying to tell myself the machine was just in rough & shape a man who'd go off without ,putting the sand-flaps down, after all, was apt to forget ) anything but I became more and more .sure that they had drained A the diesel, just as I had  feared. + And then, just as I was about to give up /and look for something I could use to dipstick the 0 loader's fuel tank (all the better to read the,bad news with, my dear), the motor bellowed into  life. . I let the wires go the bare patch on the 'blue one was smoking and goosed the throttle. , When it was running smoothly, I geared it .into first, swung it around, and started back toward the + long brown rectangle cut neatly into the westbound lane of the highway. / The rest of the day was a long bright hell of.roaring engine and blazing sun. The driver of the ) Case-Jordan had forgotten to mount his *sand-flaps, but he had remembered to take his sun / umbrella. Well, the old gods laugh sometimes,,I guess. No reason why. They just do. And I - guess the old gods have a twisted sense of humor. 0 It was almost two o'clock before I got all of (the asphalt chunks down into the ditch, because I ( had never achieved any real degree of (delicacy with the pincers. And with the spade-shaped . piece at the end, I had to cut it in two and+then drag each of the chunks down into the ditch by 0 hand. I was afraid that if I used the pincers I would break them. + When all the asphalt pieces were down in -the ditch, I drove the bucketloader back downto the / road equipment. I was getting low on fuel; it.was time to siphon. I stopped at the van, got the ' hose . . . and found myself staring, ,hypnotized, at the big jerrican of water. I tossed the siphon + away for the time being and crawled into ,the back of the van. I poured water over my face and , neck and chest and screamed with pleasure.0I knew that if I drank I would vomit, but I had to 0 drink. So I did and I vomited, not getting up .to do it but only turning my head to one side and * then crab-crawling as far away from the mess as I could. + Then I slept again and when I woke up it )was nearly dusk and somewhere a wolf was howling * at a new moon rising in the purple sky. / In the dying light the cut I had made really +did look like a grave the grave of some mythical  ogre. Goliath, maybe. . Never, I told the long hole in the asphalt. 1 Please, Elizabeth whispered back. Please . . . for me. + I got four more Empirin out of the glove %compartment and swallowed them down.  'For you,' I said. . I parked the Case-Jordan with its fuel tank -close to the tank of a bulldozer, and used a crowbar to , pry off the caps on both. A 'dozer-jockey $on a state crew might get away with forgetting to drop * the sand-flaps on his vehicle, but with .forgetting to lock the fuel-cap, in these days of $1.05  diesel? Never. . I got the fuel running from the 'dozer into +my loader and waited, trying not to think, watching . the moon rise higher and higher in the sky. ,After awhile I drove back to the cut in the asphalt and  started to dig. , Running a bucket-loader by moonlight was a+lot easier than running a jackhammer under the - broiling desert sun, but it was still slow -work because I was determined that the floor of my + excavation should have exactly the right /slant. As a consequence, I frequently consultedthe . carpenter's level I'd brought with me. That )meant stopping the loader, getting down, measuring, , and climbing up into the peak-seat again. *No problem ordinarily, but by midnight my body had ) stiffened up and every movement sent a -shriek of pain through my bones and muscles. My back , was the worst; I began to fear I had done #something fairly unpleasant to it. * But that like everything else was -something I would have to worry about later. / If a hole five feet deep as well as forty-two&feet long and five feet wide had been required, it ( really would have been impossible, of /course, bucket-loader or not I might just as well have + planned to send him into outer space, or .drop the Taj Mahal on him. The total yield on such - dimensions is over a thousand cubic feet ofearth. , 'You've got to create a funnel shape that /will suck your bad aliens in,' my mathematician+ friend had said, 'and then you've got to *create an inclined plane that pretty much mimes the arc of  descent.' ( He drew one on another sheet of graph paper. - 'That means that your intergalactic rebels -or whatever they are only need to remove halfas 0 much earth as the figures initially show. In, -this case ' He scribbled on a work sheet, and ( beamed. 'Five hundred and twenty-five +cubic feet. Chicken-feed. One man could do it.' , I had believed so, too, once upon a time, -but I had not reckoned on the heat . . . the blisters . . . - the exhaustion . . . the steady pain in my back. ' Stop for a minute, but not too long. !Measure the slant of the trench. ) It's not as bad as you thought, is it, .darling? At least it's roadbed and not desert hardpan . I moved more slowly along the length of the ,grave as the hole got deeper. My hands were - bleeding now as I worked the controls. Ram -the drop-lever all the way forward until the bucket & lay on the ground. Pull back on the +drop-lever and shove the one that extended the armature with . a high hydraulic whine. Watch as the bright 0oiled metal slid out of the dirty orange casing,- pushing the bucket into the dirt. Every now+and then a spark would flash as the bucket slid over a - piece of flint. Now raise the bucket . . . +swivel it, a dark oblong shape against the stars (and try to + ignore the steady throbbing pain in your -neck the way you're trying to ignore the evendeeper 0 throb of pain in your back) . . . and dump it *down in the ditch, covering the chunks of asphalt  already there. - Never mind, darling you can bandage your&hands when it's done. When he's done. . 'She was in pieces,' I croaked, and jockeyed+the bucket back into place so I could take another , two hundred pounds of dirt and gravel out of Dolan's grave. + How the time flies when you are having a good time. . Moments after I had noticed the first faint /streaks of light in the east I got down to takeanother . measurement of the floor's incline with the 1carpenter's level I was actually getting near the 0 end. I thought I might just make it. I knelt, 0and as I did I felt something in my back let go.It went  with a dull little snap. . I uttered a guttural cry and collapsed on my)side on the narrow, slanted floor of the . excavation, lips pulled back from my teeth, *hands pressing into the small of my back. . Little by little the very worst of the pain )passed and I was able to get to my feet. 5 All right, I thought. That's it. It's over. It was a good try, but it's over. / Please, darling, Elizabeth whispered back ,impossible as it would have been to believe once ) upon a time, that whispering voice had ,begun to take on unpleasant undertones in my mind; there ) was a sense of monstrous implacability .about it. Please don't give up. Please go on. , Go on digging? I don't even know if I can walk! . But there's so little left to do! the voice /wailed it was no longer just the voice that spoke for ) Elizabeth, if it had ever been; it was $Elizabeth. So little left, darling! + I looked at my excavation in the growing ,light and nodded slowly. She was right. The bucketloader , was only five feet from the end; seven at .most. But it was the deepest five or seven, of. course; the five or seven with the most dirtin it. , You can do it, darling I know you can. Softly cajoling. ' But it was not really her voice that -persuaded me to go on. What really turned the trick was an . image of Dolan lying asleep in his penthouse)while I stood here in this hole beside a stinking, - rumbling bucket-loader, covered with dirt, /my hands in flaps and ruins. Dolan sleeping in silk ) pajama bottoms with one of his blondes )asleep beside him, wearing only the top. * Downstairs, in the glassed-in executive -section of the parking garage, the Cadillac, already + loaded with luggage, would be gassed and ready to go. 3 'All right, then,' I said. I climbed slowly back -into the bucket-loader's seat and revved the  engine. 1 I kept on until nine o'clock and then I quit )there were other things to do, and I was running out / of time. My angled hole was forty feet long. It would have to be enough. ( I drove the bucket-loader back to its -original spot and parked it. I would need it again, and that + would mean siphoning more gas, but there (was no time for that now. I wanted more Empirin, but . there weren't many left in the bottle and I *would need them all later today . . . and tomorrow. Oh, ( yes, tomorrow Monday, the glorious Fourth. - Instead of Empirin I took a fifteen-minute 0rest. I could ill-afford the time, but I forced myself / to take it just the same. I lay on my back in+the van, my muscles jumping and twitching,  imagining Dolan. ( He would be packing a few last-minute ,items in a Travel-All now  some papers to look over, , a toilet kit, maybe a paperback book or a deck of cards. / Suppose he flies this time? a malicious voice.deep inside me whispered, and I couldn't help it + a moan escaped me. He had never flown 'to LA before always it had been the Cadillac. I / had an idea he didn't like to fly. Sometimes .he did, though he had flown all the way to + London once and the thought lingered, ,itching and throbbing like a scaly patch of skin. . It was nine-thirty when I took out the roll -of canvas and the big industrial stapler and the wooden , struts. The day was overcast and a little +cooler God sometimes grants a favor. Up until then . I'd forgotten my bald head in consideration .of larger agonies, but now, when I touched it with my / fingers, I drew them away with a little hiss 0of pain. I looked at it in the outside passengermirror + and saw that it was a deep, angry red almost a plum color. & Back in Vegas Dolan would be making -last-minute phone calls. His driver would be bringing - the Cadillac around front. There were only ,about seventy-five miles between me and it, and soon ) the Cadillac would start to close that /distance at sixty miles an hour. I had no time to stand & around bemoaning my sunburned pate. . I love your sunburned pate, dear, Elizabeth said beside me. . 'Thank you, Beth,' I said, and began taking the struts over to the hole. ) The work was now light compared to the )digging I'd done earlier, and the almost unbearable - agony in my back subsided to a steady dull throb. ) But what about later? that insinuating %voice asked. What about that, hmmmm? + Later would have to take care of itself, 1that was all. It was beginning to look as if the trap was & going to be ready, and that was the important thing. ( The struts spanned the hole with just -enough extra length to allow me to seat them tightly in , the sides of the asphalt which formed the +top layer of my excavation. This was a job that would ' have been tougher at night, when the +asphalt was hard, but now, at mid-morning, the stuff was . sludgy pliable, and it was like sticking "pencils in wads of cooling taffy. - When I had all the struts in, the hole had 'taken on the look of my original chalk diagram, / minus the line down the middle. I positioned -the heavy roll of canvas next to the shallow end of ) the hole and removed the hanks of rope that had tied it shut. - Then I unrolled forty-two feet of Route 71 / Close up, the illusion was not perfect as -stage make up and set-decoration is never . perfect from the first three rows. But from (even a few yards away, it was virtually undetectable. - It was a dark-gray strip which matched the .actual surface of Route 71 exactly. On the farleft of - the canvas strip (as you faced west) was a broken yellow passing line. . I settled the long strip of canvas over the )wooden under-structure, then went slowly along the + length of it, stapling the canvas to the ,struts. MY hands didn't want to do the work but I coaxed  them. - With the canvas secured, I returned to the )van, slid behind the wheel (sitting down caused - another brief but agonizing muscle spasm), -and drove back to the top of the rise. I sat there for a ( fun minute, looking down at my lumpy, ,wounded hands as they lay in my lap. Then I got out and - looked back down Route 71, almost casually.-I didn't want to focus on any one thing, you see; I , wanted the whole picture a gestalt, if 0you will. I wanted, as much as possible, to see the scene , as Dolan and his men were going to see it -when they came over the rise. I wanted to getan idea . of how right or how wrong it was goingto feel to them. - What I saw looked better than I could have hoped. + The road machinery at the far end of the 1straight stretch justified the piles of dirt that had come , from my excavation. The asphalt chunks in )the ditch were mostly buried. Some still showed , the wind was picking up, and it had blown ,the dirt around but that looked like the remnants of ( an old paving job. The compressor I'd +brought in the back of the van looked like Highway  Department equipment. + And from here the illusion of the canvas -strip was perfect Route 71 appeared to be utterly  untouched down there. + Traffic had been heavy Friday and fairly )heavy on Saturday the drone of motors heading ' into the detour loop had been almost +constant. This morning, however, there was hardly any , traffic at all; most people had gotten to ,wherever they intended to spend the Fourth, or were - taking the Interstate forty miles south to "get there. That was fine with me. . I parked the van just out of sight over the +brow of the rise and lay on my belly until ten-fortyfive. ( Then, after a big milk-truck had gone -lumbering slowly up the detour, I backed the van - down, opened the rear doors, and threw all the road cones inside. # The flashing arrow was a tougher 1proposition at first I couldn't see how I was going to ( unhook it from the locked battery box -without electrocuting myself. Then I saw the plug. It had - been mostly hidden by a hard rubber O-ring ,on the side of the sign-case . . . a little insurance . policy against vandals and practical jokers *who might find pulling the plug on such a highway % sign an amusing prank, I supposed. - I found a hammer and chisel in my toolbox, -and four hard blows were sufficient to split the Oring. , I yanked it off with a pair of pliers and )pulled the cable free. The arrow stopped flashing * and went dark. I pushed the battery box 0into the ditch and buried it. It was strange to stand there ( and hear it humming down there in the .sand. But it made me think of Dolan, and that made me  laugh. + I didn't think Dolan would hum. He might )scream, but I didn't think he would hum. + Four bolts held the arrow in a low steel 1cradle. I loosened them as fast as I could, ears cocked , for another motor. It was time for one $but not time for Dolan yet, surely. / That got the interior pessimist going again.  What if he flew?  He doesn't like to fly. - What if he's driving but going another way?-Going by the Interstate, for instance? Today  everyone else is . . .  He always goes by 71.  Yes, but what if 0 'Shut up,' I hissed. 'Shut up, damn you, just shut the fuck up!' 0 Easy, darling easy! Everything will be all right. / I got the arrow into the back of the van. It -crashed against the sidewall and some of the bulbs * broke. More of them broke when I tossed the cradle in after it. , With that done, I drove back up the rise, ,pausing at the top to look behind me. I had taken ) away the arrow and the cones; all that *remained now was that big orange warning: ROAD  CLOSED USE DETOUR. , There was a car coming. It occurred to me -that if Dolan was early, it had all been for nothing - the goon driving would simply turn down -the detour, leaving me to go mad out here in the  desert.  It was a Chevrolet. - My heart slowed down and I let out a long, -shuddering breath. But there was no more timefor  nerves. - I drove back to where I had parked to look -at my camouflage job and parked there again. I + reached under the jumble of stuff in the )back of the van and got the jack. Grimly ignoring my - screaming back, I jacked up the rear end of+the van, loosened the lug-nuts on the back tire they  would see when  (if) , they came, and tossed it into the back of ,the van. More glass broke, and I would just have to ( hope there had been no damage done to !the tire. I didn't have a spare. - I went back to the front of the van, got my,old binoculars, and then headed back toward the , detour. I passed it and got to the top of 0the next rise as fast as I could a shambling trot was * really all I could manage by this time. + Once at the top, I trained my binoculars east. 0 I had a three-mile field of vision, and could ,see snatches of the road for two miles east of that. * Six vehicles were currently on the way, /strung out like random beads on a long string. The first ) was a foreign car, Datsun or Subaru, I ,thought, less than a mile away. Beyond that was a pick-up, ) and beyond the pick-up was what looked /like a Mustang. The others were just desert light  flashing on chrome and glass. ( When the first car neared it was a .Subaru I stood up and stuck my thumb out. Ididn't - expect a ride looking the way I did, and I -wasn't disappointed. The expensively coiffed woman - behind the wheel took one horrified glance ,and her face snapped shut like a fist. Then she was + gone, down the hill and onto the detour. ) 'Get a bath, buddy!' the driver of the *pick-up yelled at me half a minute later. + The Mustang actually turned out to be an +Escort. It was followed by a Plymouth, the Plymouth , by a Winnebago that sounded as if it were $full of kids having a pillow-fight.  No sign of Dolan. - I looked at my watch. 11:25 A.M. If he was ,going to show up, it ought to be very soon. This  was prime time. % The hands on my watch moved slowly /around to 11:40 and there was still no sign of him. ) Only a late-model Ford and a hearse as black as a raincloud. . He's not coming. He went by the Interstate. Or he flew.  No. He'll come. . He won't, though. You were afraid he'd smell+you, and he did. That's why he changed his  pattern. ( There was another twinkle of light on +chrome in the distance. This car was a big one. Big  enough to be a Cadillac. 0 I lay on my belly, elbows propped in the grit ,of the shoulder, binoculars to my eyes. The car 1 disappeared behind a rise . . . re-emerged . . 0. slipped around a curve . . . and then came outagain. . It was a Cadillac, all right, but it wasn't "gray it was a deep mint green. ' What followed was the most agonizing /thirty seconds of my life; thirty seconds that seemed to / last for thirty years. Part of me decided on +the spot, completely and irrevocably, that Dolan had , traded in his old Cadillac for a new one. 'Certainly he had done this before, and although he had - never traded for a green one before, there !was certainly no law against it. ( The other half argued vehemently that ,Cadillacs were almost a dime a dozen on the highways * and byways between Vegas and LA, and the-odds against the green Caddy's being Dolan's " Cadillac were a hundred to one. . Sweat ran into my eyes, blurring them, and I,put the binoculars down. They weren't going to - help me solve this one, anyhow. By the time.I was able to see the passengers, it would be too  late. . It's almost too late now! Go down there and +dump the detour sign! You're going to miss him! - Let me tell you what you're going to catch ,in your trap if you hide that sign now: two rich old / people going to LA to see their children and $take their grandkids to Disneyland. / Do it! It's him! It's the only chance you're going to have! / That's right. The only chance. So don't blow !it by catching the wrong people.  It's Dolan!  It's not! 1 'Stop it,' I moaned, holding my head. 'Stop it, stop it.'  I could hear the motor now.  Dolan.  The old people.  The lady.  The tiger.  Dolan.  The old # 'Elizabeth, help me!' I groaned. , Darling, that man has never owned a green 0Cadillac in his life. He never would. Of course it's  not him. * The pain in my head cleared away. I was -able to get to my feet and get my thumb out. 0 It wasn't the old people, and it wasn't Dolan,-either. It was what looked like twelve Vegas + chorines crowded in with one old boy who +was wearing the biggest cowboy hat and the darkest * Foster Grants I'd ever seen. One of the )chorines mooned me as the green Cadillac went  fishtailing onto the detour. 0 Slowly, feeling entirely washed out, I raised the binoculars again.  And saw him coming. - There was no mistaking that Cadillac as it +came around the curve at the far end of my . uninterrupted view of the road it was as +gray as the sky overhead, but it stood out with 1 startling clarity against the dull brown rises of land to the east. * It was him Dolan. My long moments of ,doubt and indecision seemed both remote and - foolish in an instant. It was Dolan, and I .didn't have to see that gray Cadillac to know it. , I didn't know if he could smell me, but I could smell him. + Knowing he was on the way made it easier #to pick up my aching legs and run. ( I got back to the big DETOUR sign and .shoved it face down into the ditch. I shook a sandcoloured , piece of canvas over it, then pawed loose /sand over its support posts. The overall effect, wasn't as good as the fake strip of road, but I thought it would serve. . Now I ran up the second rise to where I had -left the van, which was just another part of the ' picture now a vehicle temporarily )abandoned by the owner, who had gone off somewhere to + either get a new tire or have an old one fixed. . I got into the cab and stretched out across )the seat, my heart thumping. Again, time seemed to - stretch out. I lay there listening for the ,engine and the sound didn't come and didn't come and  didn't come. , They turned off. He caught wind of you at *the last moment anyway . . . or something looked 0 hinky, either to him or to one of his men . . . and they turned off. / I lay on the seat, my back throbbing in long,-slow waves, my eyes squinched tightly shut asif * that would somehow help me hear better.  Was that an engine? ( No just the wind, now blowing hard ,enough to drive an occasional sheet of sand against the  side of the van. ) Not coming. Turned off or turned back.  Just the wind.  Turned off or turned b ) No, it was not just the wind. It was a .motor, the sound of it was swelling, and a fewseconds 1 later a vehicle one single vehicle rushed past me. - I sat up and grabbed the wheel I had to -grab something and stared out through the ) windshield, my eyes bulging, my tongue caught between my teeth. * The gray Cadillac floated down the hill .toward the flat stretch, doing fifty or maybe a little , more. The brake lights never went on. Not -even at the end. They never saw it; never hadso much  as the slightest idea. * What happened was this: all at once the .Cadillac seemed to be driving through the road) instead of on it. This illusion was so ,persuasive that I felt a moment of confused vertigo even , though I had created the illusion myself. .Dolan's Cadillac was hubcap-deep in Route 71, and then * it was up to the door-panels. A bizarre *thought occurred to me: if the GM company made luxury + submarines, this is what they would look like going down. + I could hear thin snapping sounds as the -struts supporting the canvas broke under the car. I . could hear the sound of canvas rippling and ripping. / All of it happened in only three seconds, but*they are three seconds I will remember my whole  life. * I had an impression of the Cadillac now .running with only its roof and the top two or three . inches of the polarized windows visible, and+then there was a big toneless thud and the sound of - breaking glass and crimping metal. A large *puff of dust rose in the air and the wind pulled it  apart. , I wanted to go down there wanted to go .down right away but first I had to put the detour 1 to rights. I didn't want us to be interrupted. + I got out of the van, went around to the 0back, and pulled the tire back out. I put it on the wheel . and tightened the six lug-nuts as fast as I 0could, using only my fingers. I could do a more - thorough job later; in the meantime I only )needed to back the van down to the place where the # detour diverged from Highway 71. , I jacked the bumper down and hurried back *to the cab of the van at a limping run. I paused - there for a moment, listening, head cocked. I could hear the wind. - And from the long, rectangular hole in the -road, the sound of someone shouting . . . or maybe  screaming. # Grinning, I got back in the van. * I backed rapidly down the road, the van .swinging drunkenly back and forth. I got out, opened the , back doors, and put out the traffic cones ,again. I kept my ear cocked for approaching traffic, but ) the wind had gotten too strong to make -that very worthwhile. By the time I heard an approaching - vehicle, it would be practically on top of me. * I started down into the ditch, tripped, -landed on my prat, and slid to the bottom. I pushed away ' the sand-colored piece of canvas and -dragged the big detour sign up to the top. I set it up again, + then went back to the van and slammed the0rear doors closed. I had no intention of trying to set  the arrow sign up again. . I drove back over the next rise, stopped in .my old place just out of sight of the detour, got out, * and tightened the lug-nuts on the van's /back wheel, using the tire-iron this time. The shouting + had stopped, but there was no longer any *question about the screaming; it was much louder. / I took my time tightening the nuts. I wasn't ,worried that they were going to get out and either ) attack me or run away into the desert, ,because they couldn't get out. The trap had worked * perfectly. The Cadillac was now sitting -squarely on its wheels at the far end of the excavation, - with less than four inches of clearance on /either side. The three men inside couldn't opentheir * doors wide enough to do more than stick .out a foot, if that. They couldn't open their windows ( because they were power-drive and the *battery would be so much squashed plastic and metal and , acid somewhere in the wreck of the engine.- The driver and the man in the shotgun seat ,might also be squashed in the wreckage, but this * did not concern me; I knew that someone .was still alive in there, just as I knew that Dolan always - rode in back and wore his seatbelt as good citizens are supposed to do. . The lug-nuts tightened to my satisfaction, I,drove the van down to the wide, shallow end of the  trap and got out. + Most of the struts were completely gone, .but I could see the splintered butt ends of a few, still - sticking out of the tar. The canvas 'road' +lay at the bottom of the cut, crumpled and ripped and , twisted. It looked like a shed snakeskin. + I walked up to the deep end and here was Dolan's Cadillac. - The front end was utterly trashed. The hood'had accordioned upward in a jagged fan shave. ) The engine compartment was a jumble of .metal and rubber and hoses, all of it covered with sand + and dirt that had avalanched down in the -wake of the impact. There was a hissing soundand I . could hear fluids running and dripping down -there someplace. The chilly alcohol aroma of % antifreeze was pungent in the air. + I had been worried about the windshield. -There was always a chance that it could have broken ) inward, allowing Dolan space enough to *wriggle up and out. But I hadn't been too worried; I told / you that Dolan's cars were built to the sorts/of specifications required by tinpot dictators and / despotic military leaders. The glass was not #supposed to break, and it had not. + The Caddy's rear window was even tougher -because its area was smaller. Dolan couldn't break 0 it not in the time I was going to give him,*certainly and he would not dare try to shoot it + out. Shooting at bullet-proof glass from .close up is another form of Russian roulette. The slug . would leave only a small white fleck on the +glass and then ricochet back into the car. - I'm sure he could have found an out, given +world enough and time, but I was here now, and I  would give him neither. ' I kicked a shower of dirt across the Cadillac's roof.  The response was immediate. - 'We need some help, please. We're stuck in here.' . Dolan's voice. He sounded unhurt and eerily -calm. But I sensed the fear underneath, held + rigidly in check, and I came as close to +feeling sorry for him right then as it was possible for me . to come. I could imagine him sitting in the -back seat of his telescoped Cadillac, one of his men - injured and moaning, probably pinned by the'engine block, the other either dead or unconscious. - I imagined it and felt a jittery moment of !what I can only term sympathetic claustrophobia. * Push the window-buttons nothing. Try +the doors, even though You can see they're going to - clunk to a full stop long before you could squeeze through. , Then I stopped trying to imagine, because +he was the one who had bought this, wasn't he? , Yes. He had bought his own ticket and paid a full fare.  'Who's there?' - 'Me,' I said, 'but I'm not the help you're looking for, Dolan.' + I kicked another fan of grit and pebbles .across the gray Cadillac's roof. The screamer started , doing his thing again as the second bunch $of pebbles rattled across the roof.  'My legs! Jim, my legs!' + Dolan's voice was suddenly wary. The man (outside, the man on top, knew his name. Which ( meant this was an extremely dangerous situation. + 'Jimmy, I can see the bones in my legs!' 0 'Shut up,' Dolan said coldly. It was eerie to +hear their voices drifting up like that. I suppose I . could have climbed down onto the Cadillac's -back deck and looked in the rear window, but I ) would not have seen much, even with my -face pressed right against it. The glass was polarized, " as I may already have told you. + I didn't want to see him, anyway. I knew .what he looked like. What would I want to see him . for? To find out if he was wearing his Rolexand his designer jeans? " 'Who are you, buddy?' he asked. 0 'I'm nobody,' I said. 'Just a nobody who had a+good reason to put you where you are right  now.' - And with an eerie, frightening suddenness, %Dolan said: 'Is your name Robinson?' - I felt as if someone had punched me in the )stomach. He had made the connection that fast, , winnowing through all the half-remembered +names and faces and coming up with exactly the . right one. Had I thought him an animal, with/the instincts of an animal? I hadn't known the half . of it, and it was really just as well I had .not, or I never would have had the guts to do what I had  done. + I said, 'My name doesn't matter. But you #know what happens now, don't you?' - The screamer began again great bubbling,liquid bellows. * 'Get me outta here, Jimmy! Get me outta /here! For the luvva Jaysus! My legs're broke!' - 'Shut up,' Dolan said. And then, to me: 'I .can't hear you, man, the way he's screaming.' ' I got down on my hands and knees and *leaned over. 'I said you know what h ' - I suddenly had an image of the wolf dressed.up as Gramma telling Red Riding Hood, All the . better to hear you with, my dear . . . come 3a little closer. I recoiled, and just in time. The revolver + went off four times. The shots were loud +where I was; they must have been deafening in the car. ( Four black eyes opened in the roof of 1Dolan's Cadillac, and I felt something split the air an inch  from my forehead. , 'Did I get you, cocksucker?' Dolan asked.  'No,' I said. ) The screamer had become the weeper. He 0was in the front seat. I saw his hands, as pale as the , hands of a drowned man, slapping weakly at-the windshield, and the slumped body next to him. - Jimmy had to get him out, he was bleeding, -the pain was bad, the pain was turrible, the pain was ) more than he could take, for the luvva ,Jaysus he was sorry, heartily sorry for his sins, but this  was more than . There was another pair of loud reports. The -man in the front seat stopped screaming. The * hands dropped away from the windshield. * 'There,' Dolan said in a voice that was .almost reflective. 'He ain't hurting any more and we can # hear what we say to each other.' , I said nothing. I felt suddenly dazed and 1unreal. He had killed a man just now. Killed him.The + feeling that I had underestimated him in -spite of all my precautions and was lucky to be alive  recurred. / 'I want to make you a proposal,' Dolan said. " I continued to hold my peace  'My friend?'  and to hold it some more. / 'Hey! You!' His voice trembled minutely. 'If ,you're still up there, talk to me! What can that  hurt?' / 'I'm here,' I said. 'I was just thinking you -fired six times. I was thinking you may wish you'd * saved one for yourself before long. But -maybe there's eight in the clip, or you have reloads.' , Now it was his turn to fall silent. Then:  'What are you planning?' / 'I think you've already guessed,' I said. 'I -have spent the last thirty-six hours digging the . world's longest grave, and now I'm going to $bury you in your fucking Cadillac.' / The fear in his voice was still reined in. I wanted that rein to snap. + 'You want to hear my proposition first?' 2 'I'll listen. In a few seconds. First I have to get something.' - I walked back to the van and got my shovel.+ When I got back he was saying 'Robinson? .Robinson? Robinson?' like a man speaking into a  dead phone. 6 'I'm here,' I said. 'You talk. I'll listen. And when/you're finished I may make a counterproposal.' + When he spoke, he sounded more cheerful. 1If I was talking counterproposals, I was talking * deal. And if I was talking deal, he was already halfway to being out. 0 'I'm offering you a million dollars to let me )out of here. But, just as important ' . I tossed a shovelful of gritty till down on .the rear deck of the Cadillac. Pebbles bouncedand 0 rattled off the small rear window. Dirt sifted into the line of the trunk-lid. , 'What are you doing?' His voice was sharp with alarm. / 'Idle hands do the devil's work,' I said. 'I .thought I'd keep mine busy while I listened.' ) I dug into the dirt again and threw in another shovelful. ) Now Dolan spoke faster, his voice more urgent. / 'A million dollars and my personal guarantee .that no one will ever touch you . . . not me, not " my men, not anyone else's men.' ( My hands didn't hurt any more. It was -amazing. I shoveled steadily, and in no more than five ( minutes, the Cadillac's rear deck was -drifted deep in dirt. Putting it in, even by hand, was ' certainly easier than taking it out. ( I paused, leaning on the shovel for a moment.  'Keep talking.' , 'Look, this is crazy,' he said, and now I ,could hear bright splinters of panic in his voice. 'I  mean it's just crazy.' 0 'You got that right,' I said, and shoveled in more dirt. + He held on longer than I thought any man +could, talking, reasoning, cajoling yet becoming + more and more disjointed as the sand and .dirt piled up over the rear window, repeating himself, - backtracking, beginning to stutter. At one -point the passenger door opened as far as it could and . banged into the sidewall of the excavation. -I saw a hand with black hair on the knuckles and a - big ruby ring on the second finger. I sent ,down a quick four shovelfuls of loose earth into the ) opening. He screamed curses and yanked the door shut again. . He broke not long after. It was the sound of/the dirt coming down that finally got to him, I+ think. Sure it was. The sound would have 0been very loud inside the Cadillac. The dirt andstones . rattling onto the roof and falling past the -window. He must have finally realized he was sitting in . an upholstered eight-cylinder fuel-injected coffin. . 'Get me out!' he shrieked. 'Please! I can't stand it! Get me out!' + 'You ready for that counter-proposal?' I asked. % 'Yes! Yes! Christ! Yes! Yes! Yes!' / 'Scream. That's the counter-proposal. That's .what I want. Scream for me. If you scream loud enough, I'll let you out.'  He screamed piercingly. 2 'That was good!' I said, and I meant it. 'But itwas nowhere near good enough.' . I began to dig again, throwing fan after fan'of dirt over the roof of the Cadillac. Disintegrating / clods ran down the windshield and filled the windshield-wiper slot. ( He screamed again, even louder, and I )wondered if it was possible for a man to scream loud $ enough to rupture his own larynx. 1 'Not bad!' I said, redoubling my efforts. I was,smiling in spite of my throbbing back. 'You / might get there, Dolan you really might.' 1 'Five million.' It was the last coherent thing he said. 2 'I think not,' I replied, leaning on the shovel *and wiping sweat off my forehead with the heel of , one grimy hand. The dirt covered the roof ,of the car almost from side to side now. It looked like * a starburst . . . or a large brown hand 0clasping Dolan's Cadillac. 'But if you can make a sound + come out of your mouth which is as loud, .let me say, as eight sticks of dynamite taped to the . ignition switch of a 1968 Chevrolet, then I ,will get you out, and you may count on it.' - So he screamed, and I shoveled dirt down on*the Cadillac. For some time he did indeed + scream very loudly, although I judged he )never screamed louder than two sticks of dynamite ) taped to the ignition switch of a 1968 .Chevrolet. Three, at most. And by the time the last of the * Cadillac's brightwork was covered and I )rested to look down at the dirt-shrouded hump in the ( hole, he was producing no more than a $series of hoarse and broken grunts. - I looked at my watch. It was just past one .o'clock. My hands were bleeding again, and the- handle of the shovel was slippery. A sheaf /of gritty sand flew into my face and I recoiled from it. . A high wind in the desert makes a peculiarly.unpleasant sound a long, steady drone that 0 simply goes on and on. It is like the voice ofan idiot ghost. # I leaned over the hole. 'Dolan?'  No answer.  'Scream, Dolan.' / No answer at first then a series of harsh barks.  Satisfactory! - I went back to the van, started it up, and +drove the mile and a half back down to the road , construction. On the way I turned to WKXR,,Las Vegas, the only station the van's radio would . pull in. Barry Manilow told me he wrote the (songs that make the whole world sing, a statement I , greeted with some skepticism, and then the(weather report came on. High winds were forecast; a . travellers' advisory had been posted on the ,main roads between Vegas and the California line. + There were apt to be visibility problems *because of sheeting sand, the disc jockey said, but the $ thing to really watch out for was -wind-shear. I knew what he was talking about,because I could  feel it whipsawing the van. ) Here was my Case-Jordan bucket-loader; +already I thought of it as mine. I got in, humming the + Barry Manilow tune, and touched the blue ,and yellow wires together again. The loader started up - smoothly. This time I'd remembered to take ,it out of gear. Not bad, white boy, I could hear Tink " saying in my head. You learnin. $ Yes I was. Learning all the time. , I sat for a minute, watching membranes of /sand skirl across the desert, listening to the bucketloader's ) engine rumble and wondering what Dolan 0was up to. This was, after all, his Big Chance. - Try to break the rear window, or crawl over)into the front seat and try to break the windshield. I , had put a couple of feet of sand and dirt )over each, but it was still possible. It depended on how ) crazy he was by now, and that wasn't a -thing I could know, so it really didn't bear thinking about.  Other things did. , I geared the bucket-loader and drove back )up the highway to the trench. When I got there I * trotted anxiously over and looked down, )half-expecting to see a man-sized gopher hole at the , front or rear of the Cadillac-mound where -Dolan had broken some glass and crawled out. ' My spadework had not been disturbed. 1 'Dolan,' I said, cheerfully enough, I thought.  There was no answer.  'Dolan.'  No answer. - He's killed himself, I thought, and felt a +sick-bitter disappointment. Killed himself somehow or  died of fright.  'Dolan?' - Laughter drifted up from the mound; bright,2irrepressible, totally genuine laughter. I felt my2 flesh lift itself into large hard lumps. It was -the laughter of a man whose mind has broken. * He laughed and he laughed in his hoarse )voice. Then he screamed; then he laughed again.  Finally he did both together. . For awhile I laughed with him, or screamed, &or whatever, and the wind laughed and screamed  at both of us. ' Then I went back to the Case-Jordan, -lowered the blade, and began to cover him up for real. ( In four minutes even the shape of the 0Cadillac was gone. There was just a hole filled with dirt. - I thought I could hear something, but with ,the sound of the wind and the steady grumbleof the . loader's engine, it was hard to tell. I got .down on my knees; then I lay down full-length with my ) head hanging into what remained of the hole. , Far down, underneath all that dirt, Dolan *was still laughing. They were sounds like something " you might read in a comic book: *Hee-hee-hee, aaah-hah-hah-hah. There mighthave been some 0 words, too. It was hard to tell. I smiled and nodded, though. 0 'Scream,' I whispered. 'Scream, if you want.' .But that faint sound of laughter just went on,, seeping up from the dirt like a poisonous vapor. - A sudden dark terror seized me Dolan was)behind me! Yes, somehow Dolan had gotten , behind me! And before I could turn around (he would tumble me into the hole and , I jumped up and whirled around, my mangled,hands making rough approximations of fists.  Wind-driven sand smacked me.  There was nothing else. , I wiped my face with my dirty bandanna and+got back into the cab of the bucket-loader and  went back to work. / The cut was filled in again long before dark.There was even dirt left over, ( in spite of what the wind had whipped +away, because of the area displaced by the Cadillac. It ! went quickly . . . so quickly. % The tone of my thoughts was weary, .confused, and half-delirious as I piloted the loader back . down the road, driving it directly over the spot where Dolan was buried. 0 I parked it in its original place, removed my .shirt, and rubbed all of the metal in the cab with it / in an effort to remove fingerprints. I don't .know exactly why I did that, even to this day,since I ) must have left them in a hundred other *places around the site. Then, in the deep brownish-gray , gloom of that stormy dusk, I went back to the van. + I opened one of the rear doors, observed +Dolan crouched inside, and staggered back, , screaming, one hand thrown up to shield my)face. It seemed to me that my heart must explode in  my chest. , Nothing no one came out of the van. +The door swung and banged in the wind like the - last shutter on a haunted house. At last I .crept back, heart pounding, and peered inside.There , was nothing but the jumble of stuff I had )left in there the road-arrow with the broken bulbs,  the jack, my toolbox. 0 'You have got to get hold of yourself,' I saidsoftly. 'Get hold of yourself' / I waited for Elizabeth to say, You'll be all 3tight, darling . . . something like that . . . but there  was only the wind. + I got back into the van, started it, and +drove halfway back to the excavation. That was as far as - I could make myself go. Although I knew it ,was utterly foolish, I became more and more . convinced that Dolan was lurking in the van.,My eyes kept going to the rear-view mirror, trying ( to pick his shadow out of the others. + The wind was stronger than ever, rocking .the van on its springs. The dust it pulled up from the ) desert and drove before it looked like smoke in the headlights. 0 At last I pulled over to the side of the road,.got out, and locked an the doors. I knew I was. crazy to even try sleeping outside in this, 4but I couldn't sleep in there. I just couldn't. So I- crawled under the van with my sleeping bag.+ I was asleep five seconds after I zipped myself into it. * When I woke up from a nightmare I could ,not remember except there had been hands in it, / clutching at my throat I found that I had -been buried alive. There was sand up my nose,sand - in my ears. It was down my throat, choking me. , I screamed and struggled upward, at first -convinced that the confining sleeping bag wasearth. % Then I banged my head on the van's -undercarriage and saw flakes of rust silting down. / I rolled out from under into a dawn the color,of smutty pewter. My sleeping bag blew away ) like a tumbleweed the moment my weight /was off it. I gave a surprised yell and chased twenty - feet after it before realizing it would be /the world's worst mistake. Visibility was down to no * more than twenty yards, and maybe less. .The road was totally gone in places. I looked back at + the van and it looked washed-out, barely *there, a sepia photograph of a ghost-town relic. - I staggered back to it, found my keys, and *got inside. I was still spitting sand and coughing / dryly. I got the motor going and drove slowly+back the way I had come. There was no need to , wait for a weather report; the weather was0all the jock could talk about this morning. The worst * desert windstorm in Nevada history. All .roads closed. Stay home unless you absolutely have to % go out, and then stay home anyway.  The glorious Fourth. - Stay in. You're crazy if you go out there. You'll go sandblind. ) That I would chance. This was a golden /opportunity to cover it up forever never in my - wildest imaginings had I suspected I might -get such a chance, but it was here, and I was taking it. 0 I had brought three or four extra blankets. I -tore a long, wide strip from one of them and tied it , around my head. Looking like some sort of crazed Bedouin, I stepped out. ) I spent all morning carrying chunks of +asphalt up from the ditch and placing them back into the * trench, trying to be as neat as a mason 0laying a wall . . . or bricking up a niche. The actual ) fetching and carrying was not terribly -difficult, although I had to unearth most of the asphalt + blocks like an archaeologist hunting for ,artifacts, and every twenty minutes or so I had to repair , to the van to get out of the blowing sand and rest my stinging eyes. * I worked slowly west from what had been *the shallow end of the excavation, and by quarter - past noon I had started at six I had +reached the final seventeen feet or so. By then the wind . had begun to die and I could see occasional !ragged patches of blue above me. , I fetched and placed, fetched and placed. +Now I was over the spot where I calculated Dolan * must be. Was he dead yet? How many cubic,feet of air could a Cadillac hold? How soon would + that space become unable to support human+life, assuming that neither of Dolan's two " companions was still breathing? * I knelt by the bare earth. The wind had ,eroded the impressions of the Case-Jordan's treads but + not quite erased them; somewhere beneath -those faint indentations was a man wearing a Rolex. - 'Dolan,' I said chummily, 'I've changed my "mind and decided to let you out.' / Nothing. No sound at all. Dead for sure this time. ( I went back and got another square of 3asphalt. I placed. it, and as I started to rise, I heard faint, + cackling laughter seeping up through the earth. ) I sank back into a crouch with my head 0forward if I'd still had hair, it would have been - hanging in my face and remained in that (position for some time, listening as he laughed. The & sound was faint and without timbre. ' When it stopped, I went back and got -another asphalt square. There was a piece of the broken , yellow line on this one. It looked like a hyphen. I knelt with it. / 'For the love of God!' he shrieked. 'For the love of God, Robinson!' 1 'Yes,' I said, smiling. 'For the love of God.' . I put the chunk of asphalt in neatly next to/its neighbor, and although I listened, I heard him no  more. - I got back to my place in Vegas that night 1at eleven o'clock. I slept for sixteen hours, gotup, + walked toward the kitchen to make coffee,0and then collapsed, writhing, on the hall floor as a $ monstrous back spasm racked me. I +scrabbled at the small of my back with one hand while I - chewed on the other to stifle the screams. / After awhile I crawled into the bathroom I*tried standing once, but this resulted in another + thunderbolt and used the washstand to )pull myself up enough so I could get the second bottle & of Empirin in the medicine cabinet. . I chewed three and drew a bath. I lay on the2floor while I waited for the tub to fill. When it ( was, I wriggled out of my pajamas and -managed to get into the tub. I lay there for five hours, - dozing most of the time. When I got out, I could walk.  A little. - I went to a chiropractor. He told me I had /three slipped discs and had suffered a serious lower - spinal dislocation. He wanted to know if I -had decided to sub for the circus strongman. , I told him I did it digging in my garden. ) He told me I was going to Kansas City.  I went.  They operated. + When the anesthesiologist put the rubber .cup over my face, I heard Dolan laughing from the * hissing blackness inside and knew I was going to die. - The recovery room was a watery tiled green. 'Am I alive?' I croaked. / A nurse laughed. 'Oh, yes.' His hand touched )my brow my brow that went all the way , around my head. 'What a sunburn you have! ,My God! Did that hurt, or are you still too doped  up?' 4 'Still too doped up,' I said. 'Did I talk while I was under?'  'Yes,' he said. 0 I was cold all over. Cold to the bones of me.  'What did I say?' 2 'You said, 'It's dark in here. Let me out!'' Andhe laughed again.  'Oh,' I said. ! They never found him Dolan. + It was the storm. That flukey storm. I'm -pretty sure I know what happened, although I think , you'll understand when I tell you I never checked too closely. , RPAV remember that? They were repaving.*The storm almost buried the section of 71 ) which the detour had closed. When they )went back to work, they didn't bother to remove the new * dunes all at once but only as they went (along why do otherwise? There was no traffic to ' worry about. So they plowed sand and .routed up old paving at the same time. And if the 'dozer ' operator happened to notice that the )sand-crusted asphalt in one section a section about forty , feet long was breaking in front of his +blade in neat, almost geometric pieces, he never said * anything. Maybe he was stoned. Or maybe -he was just dreaming of stepping out with hisbaby  that evening. + Then came the dumpsters with their fresh /loads of gravel, followed by the spreaders and , rollers. After them the big tankers would 'arrive, the ones with the wide sprayer attachments on 0 the backs and their smell of hot tar, so like )melting shoe-leather. And when the fresh asphalt had . dried, along would come the lining machine, /the driver under his big canvas parasol looking* back frequently to make sure the broken ,yellow line was perfectly straight, unaware that he was . passing over a fog-gray Cadillac with three (people inside, unaware that down in the darkness . there was a ruby ring and a gold Rolex that &might still be marking off the hours. + One of those heavy vehicles would almost ,surely have collapsed an ordinary Cadillac; there ) would have been a lurch, a crunch, and -then a bunch of men digging to see what orwho . they had found. But it really was more tank .than car, and Dolan's very carefulness has so far kept  anyone from finding him. 0 Sooner or later the Cadillac will collapse of 'course, probably under the weight of a passing . semi, and the next vehicle along will see a +big broken dent in the westbound lane, and the + Highway Department will be notified, and 0there will be another RPAV. But if there aren't , Highway Department workers right there to ,see what happens, to observe that the heavy weight , of a passing truck has caused some hollow /object under the road to collapse, I think theywill - assume the 'marsh-hole' (that is what they /call them) has been caused by either frost, or a , collapsed salt-dome, or possibly a desert 2temblor. They will repair it and life will go on. $ He was reported missing Dolan.  A few tears were shed. - A columnist in the Las Vegas Sun suggested -that he might be playing dominos or shooting # pool somewhere with Jimmy Hoffa. - Perhaps that is not so far from the truth.  I'm fine. ) My back is pretty much okay again. I'm /under strict orders not to lift anything which weighs , over thirty pounds without help, but I've -got a good bunch of third-graders this year, and all the  help I could want. . I've driven back and forth over that stretch&of road several times in my new Acura automobile. + Once I even stopped, got out, and (after -checking in both directions to make sure the road was - deserted) took a piss on what I was pretty .sure was the spot. But I couldn't produce muchof a . flow, even though my kidneys felt full, and -when I drove on I kept checking the rearview mirror: . I had this funny idea, you see, that he was .going to rise up from the back seat, his skin charred to * a cinnamon color and stretched over his 1skull like the skin of a mummy, his hair full of sand, his ' eyes and his Rolex watch glittering. / That was the last time I was on 71, actually.-Now I take the Interstate when I need to head west. , And Elizabeth? Like Dolan, she has fallen !silent. I find that is a relief.   -The End of the Whole Mess-  . I want to tell you about the end of war, the*degeneration of mankind, and the death of the & Messiah an epic story, deserving (thousands of pages and a whole shelf of volumes, but you (if 1 there are any 'you' later on to read this) will-have to settle for the freeze-dried version. The direct / injection works very fast. I figure I've got )somewhere between forty-five minutes and two hours, . depending on my blood-type. I think it's A, 1which should give me a little more time, but I'llbe . goddamned if I can remember for sure. If it /turns out to be O, you could be in for a lot ofblank ! pages, my hypothetical friend. ) In any event, I think maybe I'd better *assume the worst and go as fast as I can. / I'm using the electric typewriter Bobby's -word processor is faster, but the genny's cycle / is too irregular to be trusted, even with the2line suppressor. I've only got one shot at this; Ican't , risk getting most of the way home and then)seeing the whole thing go to data heaven because of , an oHm drop, or a surge too great for the suppressor to cope with. $ My name is Howard Fornoy. I was a -freelance writer. My brother, Robert Fornoy, was the / Messiah. I killed him by shooting him up with/his own discovery four hours ago. He called it - The Calmative. A Very Serious Mistake might,have been a better name, but what's done is done - and can't be undone, as the Irish have been-saying for centuries . . . which proves what assholes  they are. * Shit, I can't afford these digressions. . After Bobby died I covered him with a quilt +and sat at the cabin's single living-room. window + for some three hours, looking out at the +woods. Used to be you could see the orange glow of the & hi-intensity arc-sodiums from North *Conway, but no more. Now there's just the White , Mountains, looking like dark triangles of (crepe paper cut out by a child, and the pointless stars. - I turned on the radio, dialed through four /bands, found one crazy guy, and shut it off. I sat / there thinking of ways to tell this story +My mind kept sliding away toward all those miles of - dark pinewoods, all that nothing Finally I -realized I needed to get myself off the dime and shoot / myself up: Shit. I never could work without a deadline. $ And I've sure-to-God got one now. & Our parents had no reason to expect *anything other than what they got: bright children. Dad was ' a history major who had become a fun -professor at Hofstra when he was thirty. Ten years later + he was one of six vice-administrators of -the National Archives in Washington, DC, and in line * for the top spot. He was a helluva good -guy, too had every record Chuck Berry evercut and , played a pretty mean blues guitar himself )My dad filed by day and rocked by night. * Mom graduated magna cum laude from Drew.+Got a Phi Beta Kappa key she sometimes wore, on this funky fedora she had. She became a*successful CPA in DC, met my dad, married him, * and took in her shingle when she became +pregnant with yours truly. I came along in 1980. By '84 + she was doing taxes for some of my dad's 2associates she called this her 'little hobby.' By the ' time Bobby was born in 1987, she was +handling taxes, investment portfolios, and estate-planning ) for a dozen powerful men. I could name *them, but who gives a wad? They're either dead or  driveling idiots by now. - I think she probably made more out of 'her ,little hobby' each year than my dad made at his job, , but that never mattered they were happy)with what they were to themselves and to each other. + I saw them squabble lots of times, but I ,never saw them fight. When I was growing up, the only ) difference I saw between my mom and my ,playmates' moms was that their moms used to read or - iron or sew or talk on the phone while the *soaps played on the tube, and my mom used to run a + pocket calculator and write down numbers -on big green sheets of paper while the soaps played  on the tube. ) I was no disappointment to a couple of 0people with Mensa Gold Cards in their wallets. I+ maintained A's and B's through my school -career (the idea that either I or my brother might go to , a private school was never even discussed 1so far as I know). I also wrote well early, with no 0 effort at all. I sold my first magazine piece 'when I was twenty it was on how the Continental . Army wintered at Valley Forge. I sold it to +an airline magazine for four hundred fifty dollars. My + dad, whom I loved deeply, asked me if he ,could buy that check from me. He gave me hisown , personal check and had the check from the -airline magazine framed and hung it over his desk. A + romantic genius, if you will. A romantic 0blues-playing genius, if you will. Take it from me, a kid , could do a lot worse. Of course he and my -mother both died raving and pissing in their pants late / last year, like almost everyone else on this -big round world of ours, but I never stopped loving  either of them. ) I was the sort of child they had every -reason to expect a good boy with a bright mind, a * talented boy whose talent grew to early &maturity in an atmosphere of love and confidence, a + faithful boy who loved and respected his mom and dad. ( Bobby was different. Nobody, not even .Mensa types like our folks, ever expects a kidlike  Bobby. Not ever. . I potty-trained two full years earlier than ,Bob, and that was the only thing in which I ever beat - him. But I never felt jealous of him; that ,would have been like a fairly good American Legion . League pitcher feeling jealous of Nolan Ryan,or Roger Clemens. After a certain point the - comparisons that cause feelings of jealousy.simply cease to exist. I've been there, and I can tell , you: after a certain point you just stand .back and shield your eyes from the flashburns., Bobby read at two and began writing short *essays ('Our Dog', 'A Trip to Boston with Mother') - at three. His printing was the straggling, 'struggling galvanic constructions of a six-year-old, and + that was startling enough in itself, but +there was more: if transcribed so that his still-developing $ motor control no longer became an *evaluative factor, you would have thought you were reading , the work of a bright, if extremely naive, (fifth-grader, He progressed from simple sentences to * compound sentences to complex ones with %dizzying rapidity, grasping clauses, sub-clauses, and . modifying clauses with an intuitiveness that,was eerie. Sometimes his syntax was garbled and his - modifiers misplaced, but he had such flaws 0 which plague most writers all their lives pretty ) well under control by the age of five. * He developed headaches. My parents were /afraid he had some sort of physical problem a , brain-tumor, perhaps and took him to a .doctor who examined him carefully, listened tohim ( even more carefully, and then told my +parents there was nothing wrong with Bobby except ' stress: he was in a state of extreme +frustration because his writing-hand would not work as well  as his brain. ) 'You got a kid trying to pass a mental )kidney stone,' the doctor said. 'I could prescribe + something for his headaches, but I think .the drug he really needs is a typewriter.' So Mom and + Dad gave Bobby an IBM. A year later they *gave him a Commodore 64 with WordStar for + Christmas and Bobby's headaches stopped. .Before going on to other matters, I only want to add . that he believed for the next three years or-so that it was Santa Claus who had left that wordcruncher / under our tree. Now that I think of it, that (was another place where I beat Bobby: I  Santa-trained earlier, too. / There's so much I could tell you about those 2early days, and I suppose I'll have to tell you a little, . but I'll have to go fast and make it brief. .The deadline. Ah, the deadline. I once read a very funny , piece called 'The Essential Gone with the %Wind' that went something like this: # ' "A war?" laughed Scarlett."Oh, fiddle-de-dee!" , Boom! Ashley went to war! Atlanta burned! %Rhett walked in and then walked out! 0 ' ''Fiddle-de-dee," said Scarlett through her ,tears, "I will think about it tomorrow, for  tomorrow is another day." / I laughed heartily over that when I read it; (now that I'm faced with doing something similar, it . doesn't seem quite so funny. But here goes: * 'A child with an IQ immeasurable by any +existing test?' smiled India Fornoy to her devoted * husband, Richard. 'Fiddle-de-dee! We'll -provide an atmosphere where his intellect not to ) mention that of his not-exactly-stupid 0older brother can grow. And we'll raise them as the . normal all-American boys they by gosh are!' ( Boom! The Fornoy boys grew up! Howard .went to the University of Virginia, graduated cum ) laude, and settled down to a freelance +writing career! Made a comfortable living! Stepped out + with a lot of women and went to bed with -quite a few of them! Managed to avoid social diseases , both sexual and pharmacological! Bought a -Mitsubishi stereo system! Wrote home at leastonce ( a week! Published two novels that did 1pretty well! 'Fiddle-de-dee,' said Howard, 'this is the life  for me!' . And so it was, at least until the day Bobby $showed up unexpectedly (in the best mad-scientist / tradition) with his two glass boxes, a bees' ,nest in one and a wasps' nest in the other, Bobby & wearing a Mumford Phys Ed tee-shirt -inside-out, on the verge of destroying human intellect and ( just as happy as a clam at high tide. - Guys like my brother Bobby come along only -once every two or three generations, I think  ' guys like Leonardo da Vinci, Newton, .Einstein, maybe Edison. They all seem to have one thing * in common: they are like huge compasses 'which swing aimlessly for a long time, searching for , some true north and then homing on it with-fearful force. Before that happens such guys are apt * to get up to some weird shit, and Bobby was no exception. * When he was eight and I was fifteen, he 'came to me and said he had invented an airplane. By ) then I knew Bobby too well to just say /'Bullshit' and kick him out of my room. I went out to the , garage where there was this weird plywood .contraption sitting on his American Flyer red wagon. 2 It looked a little like a fighter plane, but the-wings were raked forward instead of back. He had , mounted the saddle from his rocking horse ,on the middle of it with bolts. There was a lever on . the side. There was no motor. He said it was(a glider. He wanted me to push him down * Carrigan's Hill, which was the steepest (grade in DC's Grant Park there was a cement path - down the middle of it for old folks. That, !Bobby said, would be his runway. / 'Bobby,' I said, 'you got this puppy's wings on backward.' * 'No,' he said. 'This is the way they're (supposed to be. I saw something on Wild Kingdom about * hawks. They dive down on their prey and ,then reverse their wings coming up. They're doublejointed, & see? You get better lift this way.' . 'Then why isn't the Air Force building them 0this way?' I asked, blissfully unaware that boththe * American and the Russian air forces had .plans for such forward-wing fighter planes on their  drawing boards. * Bobby just shrugged. He didn't know and didn't care. ) We went over to Carrigan's Hill and he *climbed into the rocking-horse saddle and gripped the 0 lever. 'Push me hard,' he said. His eyes were .dancing with that crazed light I knew so well  / Christ, his eyes used to light up that way in+his cradle sometimes. But I swear to God I never ( would have pushed him down the cement -path as hard as I did if I thought the thing would  actually work. / But I didn't know, and I gave him one hell of-a shove. He went freewheeling down the hill, . whooping like a cowboy just off a traildrive-and headed into town for a few cold beers. Anold * lady had to jump out of his way, and he )just missed an old geezer leaning over a walker. Halfway + down he pulled the handle and I watched, %wide-eyed and bullshit with fear and amazement, as - his splintery plywood plane separated from +the wagon. At first it only hovered inches above it, / and for a second it looked like it was going .to settle back. Then there was a gust of wind and - Bobby's plane took off like someone had it *on an invisible cable. The American Flyer wagon ran & off the concrete path and into some .bushes. All of a sudden Bobby was ten feet in the air, then + twenty, then fifty. He went gliding over )Grant Park on a steepening upward plane, whooping  cheerily. . I went running after him, screaming for him +to come down, visions of his body tumbling off ' that stupid rocking-horse saddle and 0impaling itself on a tree, or one of the park's many statues, * standing out with hideous clarity in my *head. I did not just imagine my brother's funeral; I tell  you I attended it. $ 'BOBBY!' I shrieked. 'COME DOWN!' ) 'WHEEEEEEEe!' Bobby screamed back, his +voice faint but clearly ecstatic. Startled chessplayers, - Frisbee-throwers, book-readers, lovers, and,joggers stopped whatever they were doing to  watch. % 'BOBBY THERE'S NO SEATBELT ON THAT -FUCKING THING!' I screamed. It was the first / time I ever used that particular word, so faras I can remember. . 'Iyyyy'll beeee all riyyyyht . . . ' He was -screaming at the top of his lungs, but I was appalled to * realize I could barely hear him. I went 0running down Carrigan's Hill, shrieking all the way. I * don't have the slightest memory of just -what I was yelling, but the next day I could not speak + above a whisper. I do remember passing a (young fellow in a neat three-piece suit standing by the - statue of Eleanor Roosevelt at the foot of #the hill. He looked at me and said conversationally, 0 'Tell you what, my friend, I'm having one hellof an' acid flashback.' ' I remember that odd misshapen shadow ,gliding across the green floor of the park, rising and . rippling as it crossed park benches, litter 'baskets, and the upturned faces of the watching people. + I remember chasing it. I remember how my +mother's face crumpled and how she started to cry , when I told her that Bobby's plane, which +had no business flying in the first place, turned upside * down in a sudden eddy of wind and Bobby (finished his short but brilliant career splattered all  over D Street. + The way things turned out, it might have 'been better for everyone if things had actually turned ! out that way, but they didn't. $ Instead, Bobby banked back toward /Carrigan's Hill, holding nonchalantly onto the tail of his ) own plane to keep from falling off the )damned thing, and brought it down toward the little pond ' at the center of Grant Park. He went 3air-sliding five feet over it, then four . . . and then he was . skiing his sneakers along the surface of the&water, sending back twin white wakes, scaring the , usually complacent (and overfed) ducks up *in honking indignant flurries before him, laughing his * cheerful laugh. He came down on the far ,side, exactly between two park benches that snapped - off the wings of his plane. He flew out of -the saddle, thumped his head, and started to bawl.  That was life with Bobby. , Not everything was that spectacular in 0fact, I don't think anything was . . . at least until The / Calmative. But I told you the story because I,think, this time at least, the extreme case best . illustrates the norm: fife with Bobby was a *constant mind-fuck. By the age of nine he was ) attending quantum physics and advanced *algebra classes at Georgetown University. There was , the day he blanked out every radio and TV *on our street and the surrounding four blocks * with his own voice; he had found an old .portable TV in the attic and turned it into a wide-band & radio broadcasting station. One old -black-and-white Zenith, twelve feet of hi-fi flex, a coathanger + mounted on the roofpeak of our house, and+presto! For about two hours four blocks of + Georgetown could receive only WBOB . . . )which happened to be my brother, reading some of - my short stories, telling moron jokes, and +explaining that the high sulfur content in baked beans + was the reason our dad farted so much in *church every Sunday morning. 'But he gets most of em . off pretty quiet,' Bobby told his listening (audience of roughly three thousand, 'or sometimes he 1 holds the real bangers until it's time for the hymns.' , My dad, who was less than happy about all ,this, ended up paying a seventy-five-dollar FCC . fine and taking it out of Bobby's allowance for the next year. 0 Life with Bobby, oh yeah . . . and look here, 1I'm crying. Is it honest sentiment, I wonder, or the - onset? The former, I think Christ knows 0how much I loved him but I think I better tryto # hurry up a little just the same. + Bobby had graduated high school, for all .practical purposes, by the age of ten, but he never got a . BA or BS, let alone any advanced degree. It +was that big powerful compass in his head, swinging + around and around, looking for some true north to point at. * He went through a physics period, and a %shorter period when he was nutty for chemistry . . . * but in the end, Bobby was too impatient .with mathematics for either of those fields to hold him. / He could do it, but it and ultimately all %so-called hard science bored him. % By the time he was fifteen, it was +archaeology he combed the White Mountain foothills + around our summer place in North Conway, 0building a history of the Indians who had lived there - from arrowheads, flints, even the charcoal 'patterns of long-dead campfires in the mesolithic * caves in the mid-New Hampshire regions. , But that passed, too, and he began to read&history and anthropology. When he was sixteen my , father and my mother gave their reluctant )approval when Bobby requested that he be allowed to # accompany a party of New England *anthropologists on an expedition to South America. * He came back five months later with the 0first real tan of his life; he was also an inch taller, . fifteen pounds lighter, and much quieter. He0was still cheerful enough, or could be, but his littleboy $ exuberance, sometimes infectious, +sometimes wearisome, but always there, was gone. He ) had grown up. And for the first time I .remember him talking about the news . . . how bad it was, ( I mean. That was 2003, the year a PLO /splinter group called the Sons of the Jihad (a name that ( always sounded to me hideously like a +Catholic community service group somewhere in western ) Pennsylvania) set off a Squirt Bomb in +London, polluting sixty per cent of it and making the rest + of it extremely unhealthy for people who /ever planned to have children (or to live past the age of / fifty, for that matter). The year we tried to+blockade the Philippines after the Cedeo - administration accepted a 'small group' of .Red Chinese advisors (fifteen thousand or so, - according to our spy satellites), and only *backed down when it became clear that (a) the Chinese . weren't kidding about emptying the holes if *we didn't pull back, and (b) the American people * weren't all that crazy about committing /mass suicide over the Philippine Islands. That was also % the year some other group of crazy 0motherfuckers Albanians, I think tried to air-spray the  AIDS virus over Berlin. - This sort of stuff depressed everybody, but$it depressed the shit out of Bobby. + 'Why are people so goddam mean?' he asked+me one day. We were at the summer place in ) New Hampshire, it was late August, and +most of our stuff was already in boxes and suitcases. + The cabin had that sad, deserted look it 'always got just before we all went our separate ways. For ( me it meant back to New York, and for 0Bobby it meant Waco, Texas, of all places . . . he had ) spent the summer reading sociology and /geology texts how's that for a crazy salad?  and $ said he wanted to run a couple of (experiments down there. He said it in a casual, offhand way, * but I had seen my mother looking at him 0with a peculiar thoughtful scrutiny in the last couple of - weeks we were all together. Neither Dad nor*I suspected, but I think my mom knew that Bobby's - compass needle had finally stopped swingingand had started pointing. ( 'Why are they so mean?' I asked. 'I'm supposed to answer that?' / 'Someone better,' he said. 'Pretty soon, too,the way things are going.' . 'They're going the way they always went,' I ,said, 'and I guess they're doing it because people , were built to be mean. If you want to lay blame, blame God.' 2 'That's bullshit. I don't believe it. Even that +double-X-chromosome stuff turned out to be 2 bullshit in the end. And don't tell me it's just-economic pressures, the conflict between the haves & and have-nots, because that doesn't explain all of it, either.' 3 'Original sin,' I said. 'It works for me it's *got a good beat and you can dance to it.' 1 'Well,' Bobby said, 'maybe it is original sin. -But what's the instrument, big brother? Have you  ever asked yourself that?' ( 'Instrument? What instrument? I'm not following you.' 0 'I think it's the water,' Bobby said moodily.  'Say what?' & 'The water. Something in the water.  He looked at me.  'Or something that isn't.' ) The next day Bobby went off to Waco. I .didn't see him again until he showed up at my + apartment wearing the inside-out Mumford -shirt and carrying the two glass boxes. That was  three years later. + 'Howdy, Howie,' he said, stepping in and -giving me a nonchalant swat on the back as ifit had  been only three days. / 'Bobby!' I yelled, and threw both arms around+him in a bear-hug. Hard angles bit into my ( chest, and I heard an angry hive-hum. . 'I'm glad to see you too,' Bobby said, 'but )you better go easy. You're upsetting the natives.' , I stepped back in a hurry. Bobby set down -the big paper bag he was carrying and unslunghis . shoulder-bag. Then he carefully brought the (glass boxes out of the bag. There was a beehive in , one, a wasps' nest in the other. The bees -were already settling down and going back to whatever ) business bees have, but the wasps were 'clearly unhappy about the whole thing. - 'Okay, Bobby,' I said. I looked at him and 0grinned. I couldn't seem to stop grinning. 'Whatare  you up to this time)' + He unzipped the tote-bag and brought out .a mayonnaise jar which was half-filled with a clear  liquid.  'See this?' he said. * 'Yeah. Looks like either water or white lightning.' 2 'It's actually both, if you can believe that. It1came from an artesian well in La Plata, a little - town forty miles east of Waco, and before I-turned it into this concentrated form, there were five 5 gallons of it. I've got a regular little distillery-running down there, Howie, but I don't think the . government will ever bust me for it.' He was.grinning, and now the grin broadened. 'Water'sall it 1 is, but it's still the goddamndist popskull thehuman race has ever seen.' / 'I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about.' , 'I know you don't. But you will. You know what, Howie?'  'What?' + 'If the idiotic human race can manage to 0hold itself together for another six months, I'mbetting , it'll hold itself together for all time.' ( He lifted the mayonnaise jar, and one ,magnified Bobby-eye stared at me through it with huge 2 solemnity. 'This is the big one,' he said. 'The )cure for the worst disease to which Homo sapiens  falls prey.'  'Cancer?' , 'Nope,' Bobby said. 'War. Barroom brawls. ,Drive-by shootings. The whole mess. Where's your % bathroom, Howie? My back teeth are floating.' + When he came back he had not only turned ,the Mumford tee-shirt rightside out, he had + combed his hair nor had his method of /doing this changed, I saw. Bobby just held his head ) under the faucet for awhile then raked "everything back with his fingers. ' He looked at the two glass boxes and &pronounced the bees and wasps back to normal. 'Not that ) a wasps' nest ever approaches anything /even closely resembling 'normal', Howie. Wasps are 0 social insects, like bees and ants, but unlike-bees, which are almost always sane, and ants,which - have occasional schizoid lapses, wasps are 4total full-bore lunatics.' He smiled. 'Just like us good * old Homo saps.' He took the top off the "glass box containing the beehive. 1 'Tell you what, Bobby,' I said. I was smiling, /but the smile felt much too wide. 'Put the top - back on and just tell me about it, what do -you say? Save the demonstration for later. I mean, my . landlord's a real pussycat, but the super's *this big bull dyke who smokes Odie Perode cigars and $ has thirty pounds on me. She ' 1 'You'll like this,' Bobby said, as if I hadn't 1spoken at all a habit as familiar to me as hisTen * Fingers Method of Hair Grooming. He was /never impolite but often totally absorbed. And could . I stop him? Aw shit, no. It was too good to .have him back. I mean I think I knew even thenthat + something was going to go totally wrong, -but when I was with Bobby for more than five ) minutes, he just hypnotized me. He was +Lucy holding the football and promising me this time for . sure, and I was Charlie Brown, rushing down 0the field to kick it. 'In fact, you've probably seen it - done before they show pictures of it in /magazines from time to time, or in TV wildlife / documentaries. It's nothing very special, but-it looks like a big deal because people have got , these totally irrational prejudices about bees.' - And the weird thing was, he was right I had seen it before. , He stuck his hand into the box between the)hive and the glass. In less than fifteen seconds his - hand had acquired a living black-and-yellow+glove. It brought back an instant of total recall: - sitting in front of the TV, wearing footie *pajamas and clutching my Paddington Bear, maybe half + an hour before bedtime (and surely years &before Bobby was born), watching with mingled + horror, disgust, and fascination as some +beekeeper allowed bees to cover his entire face. They - had formed a sort of executioner's hood at +first, and then he had brushed them into a grotesque  living beard. ' Bobby winced suddenly, sharply, then grinned. 1 'One of em stung me,' he said. 'They're still a1little upset from the trip. I hooked a ride with the - local insurance lady from La Plata to Waco / she's got an old Piper Cub and flew some little 0 commuter airline, Air Asshole, I think it was,)up to New Orleans from there. Made about forty - connections, but I swear to God it was the +cab ride from LaGarbage that got em crazy. Second , Avenue's still got more potholes than the .Bergenstrasse after the Germans surrendered.' - 'You know, I think you really ought to get .your hand out of there, Bobs,' I said. I kept waiting ) for some of them to fly out I could -imagine chasing them around with a rolled-up magazine , for hours, bringing them down one by one, ,as if they were escapees in some old prison movie. . But none of them had escaped . . . at least so far. , 'Relax, Howie. You ever see a bee sting a .flower? Or even hear of it, for that matter?' " 'You don't look like a flower.' - He laughed. 'Shit, you think bees know what.a flower looks like? Uh-uh! No way, man! They * don't know what a flower looks like any ,more than you or I know what a cloud sounds like. They + know I'm sweet because I excrete sucrose 0dioxin in my sweat . . . along with thirty-sevenother - dioxins, and those're just the ones we knowabout.'  He paused thoughtfully. - 'Although I must confess I was careful to, .uh, sweeten myself up a little tonight. Ate a box of . chocolate-covered cherries on the plane ' 'Oh Bobby, Jesus!' . ' and had a couple of MallowCremes in thetaxi coming here.' ( He reached in with his other hand and .carefully began to brush the bees away. I saw him - wince once more just before he got the last'of them off, and then he eased my mind considerably 0 by replacing the lid on the glass box. I saw a.red swelling on each of his hands: one in the cup of / the left palm, another high up on the right, -near what the palmists call the Bracelets of Fortune. - He'd been stung, but I saw well enough what-he'd set out to show me: what looked like at least * four hundred bees had investigated him. Only two had stung. - He took a pair of tweezers out of his jeans+watch-pocket, and went over to my desk. He moved ) the pile of manuscript beside the Wang .Micro I was using in those days and trained myTensor ( lamp on the place where the pages had 0been fiddling with it until it formed a tiny hard  spotlight on the cherrywood. + 'Writin anything good, Bow-Wow?' he asked-casually, and I felt the hair stiffen on the back of - my neck. When was the last time he'd called)me Bow-Wow? When he was four? Six? Shit, man, , I don't know. He was working carefully on +his left hand with the tweezers. I saw him extract a 0 tiny something that looked like a nostril hairand place it in my ashtray. 1 'Piece on art forgery for Vanity Fair,' I said./'Bobby, what in hell are you up to this time?' . 'You want to pull the other one for me?' he +asked, offering me the tweezers, his right hand, and 2 an apologetic smile. 'I keep thinking if I'm so ,goddam smart I ought to be ambidextrous, butmy / left hand has still got an IQ of about six.'  Same old Bobby. , I sat down beside him, took the tweezers, *and pulled the bee stinger out of the red swelling - near what in his case should have been the .Bracelets of Doom, and while I did it he told me ) about the differences between bees and +wasps, the difference between the water in La Plata and * the water in New York, and how, goddam! -everything was going to be an right with his water  and a little help from me. ) And oh shit, I ended up running at the /football while my laughing, wildly intelligent brother  held it, one last time. ) 'Bees don't sting unless they have to, #because it kills them,' Bobby said matter-of-factly. 'You + remember that time in North Conway, when .you said we kept killing each other because of original sin?'  'Yes. Hold still.' 0 'Well, if there is such a thing, if there's a ,God who could simultaneously love us enough to - serve us His own Son on a cross and send us.all on a rocket-sled to hell just because one stupid , bitch bit a bad apple, then the curse was ,just this: He made us like wasps instead of bees. Shit,  Howie, what are you doing?' 5 'Hold still,' I said, 'and I'll get it out. If you 0want to make a lot of big gestures, I'll wait.' * 'Okay,' he said, and after that he held 0relatively still while I extracted the stinger. 'Bees are - nature's kamikaze pilots, Bow-Wow. Look in -that glass box, you'll see the two who stung me / lying dead at the bottom. Their stingers are ,barbed, like fishhooks. They slide in easy. When they ) Pull out, they disembowel themselves.' / 'Gross,' I said, dropping the second stinger 0in the ashtray. I couldn't see the barbs, but I didn't  have a microscope. / 'It makes them particular, though,' he said.  'I bet.' ) 'Wasps, on the other hand, have smooth -stingers. They can shoot you up as many timesas they / like. They use up the poison by the third or -fourth shot, but they can go right on making holes if 2 they like . . . and usually they do. Especially .wall-wasps. The kind I've got over there. You gotta . sedate em. Stuff called Noxon. It must give +em a hell of a hangover, because they wake up  madder than ever.' . He looked at me somberly, and for the first -time I saw the dark brown wheels of weariness- under his eyes and realized my kid brother )was more tired than I had ever seen him. % 'That's why people go on fighting, )Bow-Wow. On and on and on. We got smooth stingers.  Now watch this.' ( He got up, went over to his tote-bag, $rummaged in it, and came up with an eye-dropper. He , opened the mayonnaise jar, put the dropper/in, and drew up a tiny bubble of his distilled Texas  water. - When he took it over to the glass box with .the wasps' nest inside, I saw the top on this one was ( different there was a tiny plastic .slide-piece set into it. I didn't need him to draw me a picture: - with the bees, he was perfectly willing to ,remove the whole top. With the wasps, he wastaking  no chances. + He squeezed the black bulb. Two drops of -water fell onto the nest, making a momentary dark . spot that disappeared almost at once. 'Give "it about three minutes,' he said.  'What ' . 'No questions,' he said. 'You'll see. Three minutes.' * In that period, he read my piece on art -forgery . . . although it was already twenty pages long. + 'Okay,' he said, putting the pages down. ,'That's pretty good, man. You ought to read up a little , on how Jay Gould furnished the parlor-car .of his private train with fake Manets, though that's , a hoot.' He was removing the cover of the +glass box containing the wasps' nest as he spoke. , 'Jesus, Bobby, cut the comedy!' I yelled. - 'Same old wimp,' Bobby laughed, and pulled ,the nest, which was dull gray and about the size 0 of a bowling ball, out of the box. He held it ,in his hands. Wasps flew out and lit on his arms, his - cheeks, his forehead. One flew across to me.and landed on my forearm. I slapped it and it fell - dead to the carpet. I was scared I mean &really scared. My body was wired with adrenaline and , I could feel my eyes trying to push their way out of their sockets. 1 'Don't kill em,' Bobby said. 'You might as well0be killing babies, for all the harm they can do . you. That's the whole point.' He tossed the (nest from hand to hand as if it were an overgrown 0 softball. He lobbed it in the air. I watched, /horrified, as wasps cruised the living room of my + apartment like fighter planes on patrol. - Bobby lowered the nest carefully back into +the box and sat down on my couch. He pattedthe , place next to him and I went over, nearly )hypnotized. They were everywhere: on the rug, the , ceiling, the drapes. Half a dozen of them %were crawling across the front of my big-screen TV. - Before I could sit down, he brushed away a +couple that were on the sofa cushion where my ass * was aimed. They flew away quickly. They 0were all flying easily, crawling easily, moving fast. ( There was nothing drugged about their *behavior. As Bobby talked, they gradually found their , way back to their spit-paper home, crawled+over it, and eventually disappeared inside again  through the hole in the top. / 'I wasn't the first one to get interested in +Waco,' he said. 'It just happens to be the biggest town - in the funny little non-violent section of /what is, per capita, the most violent state in the union. . Texans love to shoot each other, Howie I -mean, it's like a state hobby. Half the male ) population goes around armed. Saturday /night in the Fort Worth bars is like a shootinggallery ( where you get to plonk away at drunks *instead of clay ducks. There are more NRA card-carriers , than there are Methodists. Not that Texas *is the only place where people shoot each other, or , carve each other up with straight-razors, 0or stick their kids in the oven if they cry too long, you * understand, but they sure do like their firearms.'  'Except in Waco,' I said. 0 'Oh, they like em there, too,' he said. 'It's .just that they use em on each other a hell of a lot less  often.' / Jesus. I just looked up at the clock and saw .the time. It feels like I've been writing for fifteen / minutes or so, but it's actually been over an,hour. That happens to me sometimes when I'm * running at white-hot speed, but I can't &allow myself to be seduced into these specifics. I feel as . well as ever no noticeable drying of the (membranes in the throat, no groping for words, and as / I glance back over what I've done I see only .the normal typos and strikeovers. But I can't kid 1 myself. I've got to hurry up. 'Fiddle-de-dee,' said Scarlett, and all of that. ) The non-violent atmosphere of the Waco 'area had been noticed and investigated before, . mostly by sociologists. Bobby said that when,you fed enough statistical data on Waco and . similar areas into a computer population ,density, mean age, mean economic level, mean) educational level, and dozens of other +factors what you got back was a whopper of an 0 anomaly. Scholarly papers are rarely jocular, .but even so, several of the better than fifty Bobby . had read on the subject suggested ironically,that maybe it was 'something in the water'. + 'I decided maybe it was time to take the 1joke seriously,' Bobby said. 'After all, there's , something in the water of a lot of places 2that prevents tooth decay. It's called fluoride.' + He went to Waco accompanied by a trio of #research assistants: two sociology grad-students & and a full professor of geology who +happened to be on sabbatical and ready for adventure. - Within six months, Bobby and the sociology (guys had constructed a computer program which ) illustrated what my brother called the *world's only calmquake. He had a slightly rumpled 0 printout in his tote. He gave it to me. I was /looking at a series of forty concentric rings. Waco - was in the eighth, ninth, and tenth as you moved in toward the center. ) 'Now look at this,' he said, and put a *transparent overlay on the printout. More rings; but in . each one there was a number. Fortieth ring: 0471. Thirty-ninth: 420. Thirty-eighth: 418. And so - on. In a couple of places the numbers went .up instead of down, but only in a couple (and only by  a little).  'What are they?' + 'Each number represents the incidence of 0violent crime in that particular circle,' Bobby said. + 'Murder, rape, assault and battery, even *acts of vandalism. The computer assigns a number by a - formula that takes population density into 'account.' He tapped the twenty-seventh circle, which ( held the number 204, with his finger. /'There's less than nine hundred people in this whole area, , for instance. The number represents three +or four cases of spouse abuse, a couple of barroom + brawls, an act of animal cruelty some -senile farmer got pissed at a pig and shot a load of rocksalt . into it, as I recall and one involuntary manslaughter.' / I saw that the numbers in the central circles/dropped off radically: 85, 81, 70, 63, 40, 21, 5. At , the epicenter of Bobby's calmquake was the1town of La Plata. To call it a sleepy little town seems more than fair. - The numeric value assigned to La Plata was zero. ( 'So here it is, Bow-Wow,' Bobby said, +leaning forward and rubbing his long hands together + nervously, 'my nominee for the Garden of -Eden. Here's a community of fifteen thousand, twentyfour ( per cent of which are people of mixed )blood, commonly called Indios. There's a moccasin . factory, a couple of little motor courts, a /couple of scrub farms. That's it for work. For play - there's four bars, a couple of dance-halls )where you can hear any kind of music you want as long & as it sounds like George Jones, two /drive-ins, and a bowling alley.' He paused and added, / 'There's also a still. I didn't know anybody "made whiskey that good outside of Tennessee.' ) In short (and it is now too late to be ,anything else), La Plata should have been a fertile ) breeding-ground for the sort of casual *violence you can read about in the Police Blotter section + of the local newspaper every day. Should *have been but wasn't. There had been only one murder / in La Plata during the five years previous to/my brother's arrival, two cases of assault, no rapes, . no reported incidents of child abuse. There ,had been four armed robberies, but all four turned out - to have been committed by transients . . . *as the murder and one of the assaults had been. The - local Sheriff was a fat old Republican who 0did a pretty fair Rodney Dangerfield imitation. He * had been known, in fact, to spend whole +days in the local coffee shop, tugging the knot in his tie / and telling people to take his wife, please. +My brother said he thought it was a little more than * lame humor; he was pretty sure the poor *guy was suffering first-stage Alzheimer's Disease. His , only deputy was his nephew. Bobby told me *the nephew looked quite a lot like Junior Samples  on the old Hee-Haw show. - 'Put those two guys in a Pennsylvania town )similar to La Plata in every way but the - geographical,' Bobby said, 'and they would +have been out on their asses fifteen years ago. But in / La Plata, they're gonna go on until they die 1. . . which they'll probably do in their sleep.' + 'What did you do?' I asked. 'How did you proceed?' / 'Well, for the first week or so after we got /our statistical shit together, we just sort of sat * around and stared at each other,' Bobby .said. 'I mean, we were prepared for something,but - nothing quite like this. Even Waco doesn't )prepare you for La Plata.' Bobby shifted restlessly and  cracked his knuckles. / 'Jesus, I hate it when you do that,' I said. ) He smiled. 'Sorry, Bow-Wow. Anyway, we +started geological tests, then microscopic analysis 1 of the water. I didn't expect a hell of a lot; /everyone in the area has got a well, usually a deep ' one, and they get their water tested ,regularly to make sure they're not drinking borax, or ) something. If there had been something -obvious, it would have turned up a long time ago. So we ) went on to submicroscopy, and that was ,when we started to turn up some pretty weirdstuff.'  'What kind of weird stuff?' ) 'Breaks in chains of atoms, subdynamic *electrical fluctuations, and some sort of unidentified / protein. Water ain't really H2O, you know -not when you add in the sulfides, irons, God knows - what else happens to be in the aquifer of a/given region. And La Plata water you'd have to , give it a string of letters like the ones -after a professor emeritus's name.' His eyes gleamed. 'But . the protein was the most interesting thing, ,Bow-Wow. So far as we know, it's only found in one ! other place: the human brain.'  Uh-oh. + It just arrived, between one swallow and *the next: the throat-dryness. Not much at yet, but ( enough for me to break away and get a )glass of ice-water. I've got maybe forty minutes left. And , oh Jesus, there's so much I want to tell! ,About the wasps' nests they found with waspsthat * wouldn't sting, about the fender-bender *Bobby and one of his assistants saw where the two + drivers, both male, both drunk, and both /about twenty-four (sociological bull moose, in other $ words), got out, shook hands, and )exchanged insurance information amicably before going into % the nearest bar for another drink. . Bobby talked for hours more hours than I .have. But the upshot was simple: the stuff in the  mayonnaise jar. 0 'We've got our own still in La Plata now,' he /said. 'This is the stuff we're brewing, Howie; . pacifist white lightning. The aquifer under )that area of Texas is deep but amazingly large; it's like / this incredible Lake Victoria driven into the,porous sediment which overlays the Moho. The* water is potent, but we've been able to ,make the stuff I squirted on the wasps even more potent. + We've got damn near six thousand gallons -now, in these big steel tanks. By the end of the year, - we'll have fourteen thousand. By next June 0we'll have thirty thousand. But it's not enough.We . need more, we need it faster . . . and then we need to transport it.' % 'Transport it where?' I asked him.  'Borneo, to start with.' / I thought I'd either lost my mind or misheardhim. I really did. . 'Look , Bow-Wow . . . sorry. Howie.' He was )scrumming through his tote-bag again. He - brought out a number of aerial photographs *and handed them over to me. 'You see?' he asked as I , looked through them. 'You see how fucking /perfect it is? It's as if God Himself suddenly busted - through our business-as-usual transmissions,with something like "And now we bring you a . special bulletin! This is your last chance, +assholes! And now we return you to Days of Our  Lives." ' 1 'I don't get you,' I said. 'And I have no idea /what I'm looking at.' Of course I knew; it was an , island not Borneo itself but an island +lying, to the west of Borneo identified as Gulandio, - with a mountain in the middle and a lot of 3muddy little villages lying on its lower slopes. Itwas * hard to see the mountain because of the ,cloud cover. What I meant was that I didn't know what I  was looking for. ) 'The mountain has the same name as the 4island,' he said. 'Gulandio. In the local patois it means + grace, or fate, or destiny, or take your +pick. But Duke Rogers says it's really the biggest timebomb - on earth . . . and it's wired to go off by )October of next year. Probably earlier.' 0 The crazy thing's this: the story's only crazy/if you try to tell it in a speed-rap, which is what I'm , trying to do now. Bobby wanted me to help (him raise somewhere between six hundred thousand - and a million and a half dollars to do the 0following: first, to synthesize fifty to seventy thousand - gallons of what he called 'the high-test'; 0second, to airlift all of this water to Borneo, which had ' landing facilities (you could land a ,hang-glider on Gulandio, but that was about all); third, to ship ( it over to this island named Fate, or .Destiny, or Grace; fourth, to truck it up the slope of the , volcano, which had been dormant (save for -a few puffs in 1938) since 1804, and then to drop it ' down the muddy tube of the volcano's ,caldera. Duke Rogers was actually John Paul Rogers, the . geology professor. He claimed that Gulandio )was going to do more than just erupt; he claimed , that it was going to explode, as Krakatoa -had done in the nineteenth century, creating a bang that + would make the Squirt Bomb that poisoned !London like a kid's firecracker. ( The debris from the Krakatoa blow-up, +Bobby told me, had literally encircled the globe; the + observed results had formed an important )part of the Sagan Group's nuclear winter theory. For % three months afterward sunsets and $sunrises half a world away had been grotesquely colorful as a / result of the ash whirling around in both the-jet stream and the Van Allen Currents, which he . forty miles below the Van Allen Belt. There )had been global changes in climate which lasted . five years, and nipa palms, which previously%had grown only in eastern Africa and Micronesia, , suddenly showed up in both South and North America. , 'The North American nipas all died before /1900,' Bobby said, 'but they're alive and well below + the equator. Krakatoa seeded them there, ,Howie . . . the way I want to seed La Plata water all - over the earth. I want people to go out in /La Plata water when it rains and it's going to rain a . lot after Gulandio goes bang. I want them to-drink the La Plata water that falls in their reservoirs, . I want them to wash their hair in it, bathe /in it, soak their contact lenses in it. I want whores to  douche in it.' / 'Bobby,' I said, knowing he was not, 'you're crazy.' - He gave me a crooked, tired grin. 'I ain't .crazy,' he said. 'You want to see crazy? Turn on , CNN, Bow . . . Howie. You'll see crazy in living color.' * But I didn't need to turn on Cable News ,(what a friend of mine had taken to calling The Organ- * Grinder of Doom) to know what Bobby was .talking about. The Indians and the Pakistanis were + poised on the brink. The Chinese and the -Afghans, ditto. Half of Africa was starving, the other / half on fire with AIDS. There had been border.skirmishes along the entire Tex-Mex border in the % last five years, since Mexico went -Communist, and people had started calling theTijuana - crossing point in California Little Berlin ,because of the wall. The saber-rattling had become a + din. On the last day of the old year the .Scientists for Nuclear Responsibility had set their black , clock to fifteen seconds before midnight. - 'Bobby, let's suppose it could be done and /everything went according to schedule,' I said.'It , probably couldn't and wouldn't, but let's +suppose. You don't have the slightest idea what the  long-term effects might be.' - He started to say something and I waved it away. + 'Don't even suggest that you do, because (you don't! You've had time to find this calmquake of - yours and isolate the cause, I'll give you .that. But did you ever hear about thalidomide?About . that nifty little acne-stopper and sleeping -pill that caused cancer and heart attacks in thirty-yearolds? ) Don't you remember the AIDS vaccine in 1997?'  'Howie?' + 'That one stopped the disease, except it (turned the test subjects into incurable epileptics who $ all died within eighteen months.'  'Howie?'  'Then there was '  'Howie?'  I stopped and looked at him. - 'The world,' Bobby said, and then stopped. +His throat worked. I saw he was struggling with + tears. 'The world needs heroic measures, +man. I don't know about long-term effects, and there's , no time to study them, because there's no *long-term prospect. Maybe we can cure the whole  mess. Or maybe ' - He shrugged, tried to smile, and looked at +me with shining eyes from which two single tears  slowly tracked. - 'Or maybe we're giving heroin to a patient -with terminal cancer. Either way, it'll stop what's 1 happening now. It'll end the world's pain.' He /spread out his hands, palms up, so I could see the , stings on them. 'Help me, Bow-Wow. Please help me.'  So I helped him. . And we fucked up. In fact I think you could +say we fucked up big-time. And do you want the 0 truth? I don't give a shit. We killed all the .plants, but at least we saved the greenhouse. - Something will grow here again, someday. I hope.  Are you reading this? 0 My gears are starting to get a little sticky. 0For the first time in years I'm having to think about ) what I'm doing. The motor-movements of 0writing. Should have hurried more at the start. - Never mind. Too late to change things now. - We did it, of course: distilled the water, 0flew it in, transported it to Gulandio, built a primitive . lifting system half motor-winch and half /cog railway up the side of the volcano, and + dropped over twelve thousand five-gallon $containers of La Plata water the brain-buster , version into the murky misty depths of 0the volcano's caldera. We did an of this in justeight . months. It didn't cost six hundred thousand /dollars, or a million and a half; it cost over four 1 million, still less than a sixteenth of one per+cent of what America spent on defense that year. - You want to know how we razed it? I'd tell /you if I had more thyme, but my head's falling apart / so never mend. I raised most of it myself if ,it matters to you. Some by hoof and some by croof. 1 Tell you the truth, I din't know I could do it .muself until I did. But we did it and somehow the * world held together and that volcano 'whatever its name wuz, I can't exactly remember now , and there izzunt time to go back over the +manuscript it blue just when it was spo  Wait. 2 Okay. A little better. Digitalin. Bobby had it. +Heart's beating like crazy but I can think again. . The volcano Mount Grace, we called it *blue just when Dook Rogers said it would. ' Everything when skihi and for awhile &everyone's attention turned away from whatever and , toward the skys. And bimmel-dee-dee, said Strapless! - It happened pretty fast like sex and checks,and special effex and everybody got healthy again.  I mean.  Wait # Jesus please let me finish this. $ I mean that everybody stood down. .Everybody started to get a little purstective on the / situation. The wurld started to get like the *wasps in Bobbys nest the one he showed me where - they didn't stink too much. There was three+yerz like an Indian summer. People getting together - like in that old Youngbloods song that went+cmon everybody get together rite now, like what all , the hippeez wanted, you no, peets and luv and  wt . Big blast. Feel like my heart is coming out /thru my ears. But if I concentrate every bit ofmy  force, my concentration . It was like an Indian summer, that's what I )meant to say, like three years of Indian summer. , Bobby went on with his resurch. La Plata. *Sociological background etc. You remember the local + Sheriff ? Fat old Republican with a good +Rodney Youngblood imitashun? How Bobby saidhe + had the preliminary simptoms of Rodney's Disease?  concentrate asshole . Wasn't just him; turned out like there was a/lot of that going around in that part of Texas.All's , Hallows Disease is what I meen. For three +yerz me and Bobby were down there. Created a new - program. New graff of circkles. I saw what )was happen and came back here. Bobby and his to - asistants stayed on. One shot hisself Boby said when he showed up here.  Wait one more blas 0 All right. Last time. Heart beating so fast I +can hardly breeve. The new graph, the last graph, + really only whammed you when it was laid (over the calmquake graft. The calmquake graff ) showed ax of vilence going down as you 'approached La Plata in the muddle; the Alzheimer's & graff showed incidence of premature )seenullity going up as you approached La Plata. People + there were getting very silly very yung. * Me and Bobo were careful as we could be *for next three years, drinke only Parrier Water and . wor big long sleekers in the ran. so no war ,and when everybobby started to get seely we din and + I came back here because he my brother I cant remember what his name  Bobby ) Bobby when he came here tonight cryeen .and I sed Bobby I luv you Bobby sed Ime sorry - Bowwow Ime sorry I made the hole world ful -of foals and dumbbels and I sed better fouls and / bells than a big black sinder in spaz and he -cryed and I cryed Bobby I luv you and he sed will + you give me a shot of the spacial wadder /and I sed yez and he said wil you ride it down and I sed ( yez an I think I did but I cant reely +remember I see wurds but dont no what they mean , I have a Bobby his nayme is bruther and I ,theen I an dun riding and I have a bocks to put this 0 into thats Bobby sd full of quiyet air to last,a milyun yrz so gudboy gudboy everybrother, Im - goin to stob gudboy bobby i love you it wuznot yor falt i love you  forgivyu  love yu  sinned (for the wurld),  BoWwOw FoRn.....   -Suffer the Little Children- , Miss Sidley was her name, and teaching was her game. + She was a small woman who had to stretch %to write on the highest level of the blackboard, , which she was doing now. Behind her, none (of the children giggled or whispered or munched on + secret sweets held in cupped hands. They .knew Miss Sidley's deadly instincts too well. Miss + Sidley could always tell who was chewing 'gum at the back of the room, who had a beanshooter ) in his pocket, who wanted to go to the -bathroom to trade baseball cards rather than use the + facilities. Like God, she seemed to know everything an at once. , She was graying, and the brace she wore to,support her failing back was limned clearly against 0 her print dress. Small, constantly suffering, ,gimlet-eyed woman. But they feared her. Her tongue * was a schoolyard legend. The eyes, when /focused on a giggler or a whisperer, could turnthe  stoutest knees to water. 0 Now, writing the day's list of spelling words -on the board, she reflected that the success of her + long teaching career could be summed and (checked and proven by this one everyday action: she ) could turn her back on her pupils with confidence. - 'Vacation,' she said, pronouncing the word )as she wrote it in her firm, no-nonsense script. - 'Edward, please use the word vacation in a sentence.' + 'I went on a vacation to New York City,' .Edward piped. Then, as Miss Sidley had taught,he . repeated the word carefully. 'Vay-cay-shun.'- 'Very good, Edward.' She began on the next word. 0 She had her little tricks, of course; success,-she firmly believed, depended as much on the little - things as on the big ones. She applied the .principle constantly in the classroom, and it never  failed.  'Jane,' she said quietly. , Jane, who had been furtively perusing her Reader, looked up guiltily. + 'Close that book right now, please.' The .book shut; Jane looked with pale, hating eyes at Miss . Sidley's back. 'And you will remain at your 0desk for fifteen minutes after the final bell.' , Jane's lips trembled. 'Yes, Miss Sidley.' / One of her little tricks was the careful use .of her glasses. The whole class was reflected in - their thick lenses and she had always been /thinly amused by their guilty, frightened faceswhen . she caught them at their nasty little games.+Now she saw a phantomish, distorted Robert in the 0 first row wrinkle his nose. She did not speak.,Not yet. Robert would hang himself if given just a  little more rope. / 'Tomorrow,' she pronounced clearly. 'Robert, +you will please use the word tomorrow in a  sentence.' ' Robert frowned over the problem. The 'classroom was hushed and sleepy in the late-September . sun. The electric clock over the door buzzed*a rumor of three o'clock dismissal just a half-hour + away, and the only thing that kept young ,heads from drowsing over their spellers was the silent, ( ominous threat of Miss Sidley's back.  'I am waiting, Robert.' - 'Tomorrow a bad thing will happen,' Robert .said. The words were perfectly innocuous, but / Miss Sidley, with the seventh sense that all 0strict disciplinarians have, didn't like them a bit. , 'Too-mor-row,' Robert finished. His hands 'were folded neatly on the desk, and he wrinkled his $ nose again. He also smiled a tiny )side-of-the-mouth smile. Miss Sidley was suddenly, + unaccountably sure Robert knew about her little trick with the glasses.  All right; very well. + She began to write the next word with no -word of commendation for Robert, letting her + straight body speak its own message. She ,watched carefully with one eye. Soon Robert would $ stick out his tongue or make that .disgusting finger-gesture they all knew (even the girls seemed - to know it these days), just to see if she -really knew what he was doing. Then he would be  punished. ) The reflection was small, ghostly, and *distorted. And she had all but the barest comer of her # eye on the word she was writing.  Robert changed. * She caught just a flicker of it, just a .frightening glimpse of Robert's face changing into  something . . . different. ) She whirled around, face white, barely ,noticing the protesting stab of pain in her back. / Robert looked at her blandly, questioningly. .His hands were neatly folded. The first signs of * an afternoon cowlick showed at the back )of his head. He did not look frightened. 0 I imagined it, she thought. I was looking for *something, and when there was nothing, my mind + just made something up. Very cooperative of it. However + 'Robert?' She meant to be authoritative; )meant for her voice to make the unspoken demand for , confession. It did not come out that way. / 'Yes, Miss Sidley?' His eyes were a very dark'brown, like the mud at the bottom of a slowrunning  stream.  'Nothing.' ) She turned back to the board. A little whisper ran through the class. . 'Be quiet!' she snapped, and turned again to+face them. 'One more sound and we will all stay - after school with Jane!' She addressed the )whole class, but looked most directly at Robert. He - looked back with childlike innocence: Who, me? Not me, Miss Sidley. ' She turned to the board and began to -write, not looking out of the corners of her glasses. The - last half-hour dragged, and it seemed that *Robert gave her a strange look on the way out. A look ) that said, We have a secret, don't we? + The look wouldn't leave her mind. It was .stuck there, like a tiny string of roast beef between - two molars a small thing, actually, but !feeling as big as a cinderblock. . She sat down to her solitary dinner at five 0(poached eggs on toast) still thinking about it.She * knew she was getting older and accepted -the knowledge calmly. She was not going to beone of , those old-maid schoolmarms dragged kicking,and screaming from their classes at the age of , retirement. They reminded her of gamblers +unable to leave the tables while they were losing. But , she was not losing. She had always been a winner. ' She looked down at her poached eggs.  Hadn't she? , She thought of the well-scrubbed faces in .her third-grade classroom, and found Robert's face  most prominent among them. , She got up and switched on another light. . Later, just before she dropped off to sleep,/Robert's face floated in front of her, smiling / unpleasantly in the darkness behind her lids.The face began to change ) But before she saw exactly what it was &changing into, darkness overtook her. + Miss Sidley spent an unrestful night and )consequently the next day her temper was short. She + waited, almost hoping for a whisperer, a .giggler, perhaps a note-passer. But the class was quiet ( very quiet. They all stared at her -unresponsively, and it seemed that she could feel the weight , of their eyes on her like blind, crawling ants. . Stop that! she told herself sternly. You're 2acting like a skittish girl just out of teachers' college! ( Again the day seemed to drag, and she (believed she was more relieved than the children when / the last bell rang. The children lined up in ,orderly rows at the door, boys and girls by height,  hands dutifully linked. 0 'Dismissed,' she said, and listened sourly as .they shrieked their way down the hall and intothe  bright sunlight. % What was it I saw when he changed? -Something bulbous. Something that shimmered. + Something that stared at me, yes, stared 1and grinned and wasn't a child at all. It was oldand it  was evil and  'Miss Sidley?' & Her head jerked up and a little Oh! )hiccupped involuntarily from her throat. / It was Mr Hanning. He smiled apologetically. 'Didn't mean to disturb you.' 0 'Quite all right,' she said, more curtly than $she had intended. What had she been thinking?  What was wrong with her? , 'Would you mind checking the paper towels in the girls' lav?' * 'Surely.' She got up, placing her hands *against the small of her back. Mr Hanning looked at her - sympathetically. Save it, she thought. The ,old maid is not amused. Or even interested. ( She brushed by Mr Hanning and started 0down the hall to the girls' lavatory. A snigger of boys ) carrying scratched and pitted baseball .equipment grew silent at the sight of her and leaked + guiltily out the door, where their cries began again. - Miss Sidley frowned after them, reflecting -that children had been different in her day. Not . more polite children have never had time .for that and not exactly more respectful oftheir . elders; it was a kind of hypocrisy that had -never been there before. A smiling quietness around - adults that had never been there before. A *kind of quiet contempt that was upsetting and # unnerving. As if they were . . . # Hiding behind masks? Is that it? + She pushed the thought away and went into-the lavatory. It was a small, L-shaped room. The , toilets were ranged along one side of the .longer bar, the sinks along both sides of the shorter one. , As she checked the paper-towel containers,+she caught a glimpse of her face in one of the . mirrors and was startled into looking at it -closely. She didn't care for what she saw not a bit. * There was a look that hadn't been there .two days before, a frightened, watching look. With - sudden shock she realized that the blurred ,reflection in her glasses of Robert's pale, respectful % face had gotten inside her and was festering. * The door opened and she heard two girls ,come in, giggling secretly about something. She was , about to turn the comer and walk out past &them when she heard her own name. She turned back * to the washbowls and began checking the towel holders again.  'And then he '  Soft giggles.  'She knows, but ' + More giggles, soft and sticky as melting soap.  'Miss Sidley is '  Stop it! Stop that noise! ) By moving slightly she could see their +shadows, made fuzzy and ill-defined by the diffuse / light filtering through the frosted windows, +holding onto each other with girlish glee. - Another thought crawled up out of her mind. They knew she was there. . Yes. Yes they did. The little bitches knew. ) She would shake them. Shake them until 0their teeth rattled and their giggles turned to wails, * she would thump their heads against the -tile walls and she would make them admit thatthey  knew. * That was when the shadows changed. They *seemed to elongate, to flow like dripping tallow, ( taking on strange hunched shapes that )made Miss Sidley cringe back against the porcelain / washstands, her heart swelling in her chest.  But they went on giggling. - The voices changed, no longer girlish, now /sexless and soulless, and quite, quite evil. A slow, - turgid sound of mindless humor that flowed &around the corner to her like sewage. ( She stared at the hunched shadows and +suddenly screamed at them. The scream went on and / on, swelling in her head until it attained a +pitch of lunacy. And then she fainted. The giggling, , like the laughter of demons, followed her down into darkness. * She could not, of course, tell them the truth. + Miss Sidley knew this even as she opened ,her eyes and looked up at the anxious faces of Mr + Hanning and Mrs Crossen. Mrs Crossen was .holding the bottle of smelling salts from the - gymnasium first-aid kit under her nose. Mr .Hanning turned around and told the two little girls / who were looking curiously at Miss Sidley to go home now, please. # They both smiled at her slow, )we-have-a-secret smiles and went out. . Very well, she would keep their secret. For .awhile. She would not have people thinking her0 insane, or that the first feelers of senility ,had touched her early. She would play their game. Until . she could expose their nastiness and rip it out by the roots. 3 'I'm afraid I slipped,' she said calmly, sitting -up and ignoring the excruciating pain in her back.  'A patch of wetness.' 3 'This is awful,' Mr Hanning said. 'Terrible. Are you ' , 'Did the fall hurt your back, Emily?' Mrs .Crossen interrupted. Mr Hanning looked at her  gratefully. - Miss Sidley got up, her spine screaming in her body. . 'No,' she said. 'In fact, the fall seems to -have worked some minor chiropractic miracle. My ( back hasn't felt this well in years.' , 'We can send for a doctor ' Mr Hanning began. - 'Not necessary.' Miss Sidley smiled at him coolly. * 'I'll call you a taxi from the office.' / 'You'll do no such thing,' Miss Sidley said, *walking to the door of the girls' lav and opening it.  'I always take the bus.' & Mr Hanning sighed and looked at Mrs .Crossen. Mrs Crossen rolled her eyes and said nothing. - The next day Miss Sidley kept Robert after &school. He did nothing to warrant the punishment, so . she simply accused him falsely. She felt no /qualms; he was a monster, not a little boy. Shemust  make him admit it. - Her back was in agony. She realized Robert .knew; he expected that would help him. But it + wouldn't. That was another of her little )advantages. Her back had been a constant pain to her for , the last twelve years, and there had been .many times when it had been this bad well, almost  this bad. + She closed the door, shutting the two of them in. - For a moment she stood stiff, training her .gaze on Robert. She waited for him to drop hiseyes. ( He didn't. He looked back at her, and .presently a little smile began to play around the comers of  his mouth. + 'Why are you smiling, Robert?' she asked softly. + 'I don't know,' Robert said, and went on smiling.  'Tell me, please.'  Robert said nothing.  And went on smiling. . The outside sounds of children at play were +distant, dreamy. Only the hypnotic buzz of the  wall clock was real. + 'There's quite a few of us,' Robert said *suddenly, as if he were commenting on the weather. * It was Miss Sidley's turn to be silent. & 'Eleven right here in this school.' ) Quite evil, she thought, amazed. Very, incredibly evil. 1 'Little boys who tell stories go to hell,' she -said clearly. 'I know many parents no longer make . their . . . their spawn . . . aware of that /fact, but I assure you that it is a true fact, Robert. Little 1 boys who tell stories go to hell. Little girls too, for that matter.' / Robert's smile grew wider; it became vulpine.,'Do you want to see me change, Miss Sidley? # Do you want a really good look?' 0 Miss Sidley felt her back prickle. 'Go away,' 0she said curtly. 'And bring your mother or your , father to school with you tomorrow. We'll /get this business straightened out.' There. On solid + ground again. She waited for his face to crumple, waited for the tears. - Instead, Robert's smile grew wider wide 0enough to show his teeth. 'It will be just like Show 1 and Tell, won't it, Miss Sidley? Robert the 2other Robert he liked Show and Tell. He's still- hiding way, way down in my head.' The smile(curled at the corners of his mouth like charring , paper. 'Sometimes he runs around . . . it $itches. He wants me to let him out. * 'Go away,' Miss Sidley said numbly. The 'buzzing of the clock seemed very loud.  Robert changed. . His face suddenly ran together like melting ,wax, the eyes flattening and spreading like knifestruck ( egg yolks, nose widening and yawning, ,mouth disappearing. The head elongated, and the - hair was suddenly not hair but straggling, twitching growths.  Robert began to chuckle. + The slow, cavernous sound came from what +had been his nose, but the nose was eating into / the lower half of his face, nostrils meeting ,and merging into a central blackness like a huge,  shouting mouth. 0 Robert got up, still chuckling, and behind it /all she could see the last shattered remains ofthe / other Robert, the real little boy this alien -thing had usurped, howling in maniac terror, screeching  to be let out.  She ran. , She fled screaming down the corridor, and .the few late-leaving pupils turned to look at her * with large and uncomprehending eyes. Mr ,Hanning jerked open his door and looked out just as + she plunged through the wide glass front ,doors, a wild, waving scarecrow silhouetted against the  bright September sky. / He ran after her, Adam's apple bobbing. 'MissSidley! Miss Sidley!' ' Robert came out of the classroom and watched curiously. ) Miss Sidley neither heard nor saw. She (clattered down the steps and across the sidewalk and , into the street with her screams trailing ,behind her. There was a huge, blatting horn and then the - bus was looming over her, the bus driver's .face a plaster mask of fear. Air brakes whinedand  hissed like angry dragons. ( Miss Sidley fell, and the huge wheels -shuddered to a smoking stop just eight inches from her % frail, brace-armored body. She lay (shuddering on the pavement, hearing the crowd gather around  her. ( She turned over and the children were +staring down at her. They were ringed in a tight little . circle, like mourners around an open grave. +And at the head of the grave was Robert, a small ) sober sexton ready to shovel the first spade of dirt into her face. ) From far away, the bus driver's shaken 0babble: ' . . . crazy or somethin . . . my God, another  half a foot . . . ' , Miss Sidley stared at the children. Their &shadows covered her. Their faces were impassive. * Some of them were smiling little secret +smiles, and Miss Sidley knew that soon she would begin  to scream again. + Then Mr Hanning broke their tight noose, +shooed them away, and Miss Sidley began to sob  weakly. . She didn't go back to her third grade for a +month. She told Mr Hanning calmly that she had not ' been feeling herself, and Mr Hanning *suggested that she see a reputable doctor and discuss the + matter with him. Miss Sidley agreed that 0this was the only sensible and rational course. She also . said that if the school board wished for her-resignation she would tender it immediately, although ( doing so would hurt her very much. Mr (Hanning, looking uncomfortable, said he doubted if that * would be necessary. The upshot was that ,Miss Sidley came back in late October, once again ) ready to play the game and now knowing how to play it. - For the first week she let things go on as -ever. It seemed the whole class now regarded her - with hostile, shielded eyes. Robert smiled .distantly at her from his front-row seat, and she did not ( have the courage to take him to task. * Once, while she was on playground duty, -Robert walked over to her, holding a dodgem. ball, * smiling. 'There's so many of us now you 1wouldn't believe it,' he said. 'And neither wouldanyone . else.' He stunned her by dropping a wink of 2infinite slyness. 'If you, you know, tried to tellem.' ) A girl on the swings looked across the /playground into Miss Sidley's eyes and laughed at her. . Miss Sidley smiled serenely down at Robert. %'Why, Robert, whatever do you mean?' * But Robert only continued smiling as he went back to his game. / Miss Sidley brought the gun to school in her +handbag. It had been her brother's. He had taken it - from a dead German shortly after the Battle*of the Bulge. Jim had been gone ten years now. She - hadn't opened the box that held the gun in -at least five, but when she did it was still there, . gleaming dully. The clips of ammunition were)still there, too, and she loaded the gun carefully,  just as Jim had shown her. / She smiled pleasantly at her class; at Robert/in particular. Robert smiled back and she could( see the murky alienness swimming just &below his skin, muddy, full of filth. - She had no idea what was now living inside -Robert's skin, and she didn't care; she only hoped / that the real little boy was entirely gone by-now. She did not wish to be a murderess. She decided ) the real Robert must have died or gone 0insane, living inside the dirty, crawling thing that had , chuckled at her in the classroom and sent -her screaming into the street. So even if he was still - alive, putting him out of his misery would be a mercy. + 'Today we're going to have a Test,' Miss Sidley said. # The class did not groan or shift /apprehensively; they merely looked at her. She could feel their ) eyes, like weights. Heavy, smothering. 2 'It's a very special Test. I will call you down +to the mimeograph room one by one and give it to ( you. Then you may have a candy and go 'home for the day. Won't that be nice?' - They smiled empty smiles and said nothing. ! 'Robert, will you come first?' . Robert got up, smiling his little smile. He -wrinkled his nose quite openly at her. 'Yes, Miss  Sidley.' ) Miss Sidley took her bag and they went +down the empty, echoing corridor together, past the * sleepy drone of classes reciting behind ,closed doors. The mimeograph room was at the far end of - the hall, past the lavatories. It had been ,soundproofed two years ago; the big machine was very  old and very noisy. - Miss Sidley closed the door behind them and locked it. . 'No one can hear you,' she said calmly. She *took the gun from her bag. 'You or this.' / Robert smiled innocently. 'There are lots of -us, though. Lots more than here.' He put one small ) scrubbed hand on the paper-tray of the +mimeograph machine. 'Would you like to see me change  again?' - Before she could speak, Robert's face began*to shimmer into the grotesqueness beneath and . Miss Sidley shot him. Once. In the head. He .fell back against the paper-lined shelves and slid . down to the floor, a little dead boy with a &round black hole above his right eye.  He looked very pathetic. + Miss Sidley stood over him, panting. Her cheeks were pale. " The huddled figure didn't move.  It was human.  It was Robert.  No! . It was all in your mind, Emily. All in your mind.  No! No, no, no! + She went back up to the room and began to.lead them down, one by one. She killed twelve of - them and would have killed them all if Mrs )Crossen hadn't comedown for a package of  composition paper. , Mrs Crossen's eyes got very big; one hand +crept up and clutched her mouth. She began to * scream and she was still screaming when .Miss Sidley reached her and put a hand on her / shoulder. 'It had to be done, Margaret,' she 0told the screaming Mrs Crossen. 'It's terrible, but it " had to. They are all monsters.' * Mrs Crossen stared at the gaily-clothed .little bodies scattered around the mimeograph and - continued to scream. The little girl whose *hand Miss Sidley was holding began to cry steadily 0 and monotonously: 'Waahhh . . . waahhhh . . . waahhhh.' . 'Change,' Miss Sidley said. 'Change for Mrs &Crossen. Show her it had to be done.'  The girl continued to weep uncomprehendingly. , 'Damn you, change!' Miss Sidley screamed. /'Dirty bitch, dirty crawling, filthy unnatural bitch! , Change! God damn you, change!' She raised /the gun. The little girl cringed, and then Mrs * Crossen was on her like a cat, and Miss Sidley's back gave way.  No trial. ( The papers screamed for one, bereaved ,parents Swore hysterical oaths against Miss Sidley, + and the city sat back on its haunches in )numb shock, but in the end, cooler heads prevailed and , there was no trial. The State Legislature )called for more stringent teacher exams, Summer Street , School closed for a week of mourning, and ,Miss Sidley went quietly to juniper Hill in Augusta. * She was put in deep analysis, given the (most modem drugs, introduced into daily work-therapy ) sessions. A year later, under strictly .controlled conditions, Miss Sidley was put in an , experimental encounter-therapy situation. , Buddy Jenkins was his name, psychiatry was his game. ' He sat behind a one-way glass with a .clipboard, looking into a room which had been outfitted - as a nursery. On the far wall, the cow was +jumping over the moon and the mouse ran up the 0 clock. Miss Sidley sat in her wheelchair with 'a story book, surrounded by a group of trusting, . drooling, smiling, cataclysmically retarded -children. They smiled at her and drooled and touched . her with small wet fingers while attendants -at the next window watched for the first signof an  aggressive move. ) For a time Buddy thought she responded -well. She read aloud, stroked a girl's head, consoled a + small boy when he fell over a toy block. 'Then she seemed to see something which disturbed her; * a frown creased her brow and she looked away from the children. , 'Take me away, please,' Miss Sidley said, 0softly and tonelessly, to no one in particular. + And so they took her away. Buddy Jenkins -watched the children watch her go, their eyeswide + and empty, but somehow deep. One smiled, 0and another put his fingers in his mouth slyly. Two 0 little girls clutched each other and giggled. . That night Miss Sidley cut her throat with a+bit of broken mirror-glass, and after that Buddy + Jenkins began to watch the children more ,and more. In the end, he was hardly able to take his  eyes off them.   -The Night Flier-  1 / In spite of his pilot's license, Dees didn't /really get interested until the murders at the airport in . Maryland the third and fourth murders in )the series. Then he smelled that special combination , of blood and guts which readers of Inside (View had come to expect. Coupled with a good , dimestore mystery like this one, you were *looking at the likelihood of an explosive circulation & boost, and in the tabloid business, -increased circulation was more than the name of the game; it  was the Holy Grail. + For Dees, however, there was bad news as ,well as good. The good news was that he had + gotten to the story ahead of the rest of )the pack; he was still undefeated, still champeen, still top , hog in the sty. The bad news was that the 2roses really belonged to Morrison . . . so far, atleast. - Morrison, the freshman editor, had gone on ,picking away at the damned thing even after Dees, - the veteran reporter, had assured him there,was nothing there but smoke and echoes. Deesdidn't / like the idea that Morrison had smelled blood.first - hated it, in fact - and this left him with a - completely understandable urge to piss the (man off. And he knew just how to do it.  'Duffrey, Maryland, huh?'  Morrison nodded. . 'Anyone in the straight press pick up on it +yet?' Dees asked, and was gratified to see Morrison  bristle at once. - 'If you mean has anyone suggested there's aserial killer out there, the " answer is no,' he said stiffly. & But it won't be long, Dees thought. - 'But it won't be long,' Morrison said. 'If there's another one ' / 'Gimme the file,' Dees said, pointing to the /buff-colored folder lying on Morrison's eerily neat  desk. . The balding editor put a hand on it instead,-and Dees understood two things: Morrison was / going to give it to him, but not until he had*been made to pay a little for his initial unbelief . . . , and his lofty I'm-the-veteran-around-here /attitude. Well, maybe that was all right. Maybeeven , the top hog in the sty needed to have his .curly little tail twisted every now and then, just to ) refresh his memory on his place in the scheme of things. - 'I thought you were supposed to be over at .the Museum of Natural History, talking to the . penguin guy,' Morrison said. The corners of .his mouth curved up in a small but undeniably evil - smile. 'The one who thinks they're smarter than people and dolphins.' * Dees pointed to the only other thing on +Morrison's desk besides the folder and the pictures of # his nerdy-looking wife and three 0nerdy-looking kids: a large wire basket labelled DAILY BREAD. / It currently contained a single thin sheaf of-manuscript, six or eight pages held together with one - of Dees's distinctive magenta paper-clips, )and an envelope marked CONTACT SHEETS DO NOT  BEND. ( Morrison took his hand off the folder -(looking ready to slap it back on if Dees so much as , twitched), opened the envelope, and shook +out two sheets covered with black-and-whitephotos , not much bigger than postage stamps. Each ,photo showed long files of penguins staring silently ) out at the viewer. There was something *undeniably creepy about them to Merton Morrison , they looked like George Romero zombies in )tuxedos. He nodded and slipped them back into the ) envelope. Dees disliked all editors on /principle, but he had to admit that this one at least gave - credit where credit was due. It was a rare *attribute, one Dees suspected would cause the man all . sorts of medical problems in later life. Or -maybe the problems had already started. Therehe sat, , surely not thirty-five yet, with at least 'seventy per cent of his skull exposed. - 'Not bad,' Morrison said. 'Who took them?' 2 'I did,' Dees said. 'I always take the pix that /go with my stories. Don't you ever look at the  photo credits?' 0 'Not usually, no,' Morrison said, and glanced -at the temp headline Dees had slugged at the top . of his penguin story. Libby Grannit in Comp -would come up with a punchier, more colorful one, / of course that was, after all, her job .but Dees's instincts were good all the way up to , headlines, and he usually found the right ,street, if not often the actual address and apartment + number. ALIEN INTELLIGENCE AT NORTH POLE,+this one read. Penguins weren't aliens, of course, - and Morrison had an idea that they actually*lived at the South Pole, but those things hardly + mattered. Inside View readers were crazy ,about both Aliens and Intelligence (perhaps because a , majority of them felt like the former and -sensed in themselves a deep deficiency of the latter),  and that was what mattered. . 'The headline's a little lacking,' Morrison began, 'but ' / ' that's what Libby's for,' Dees finished for him. 'So . . . ' . 'So?' Morrison asked. His eyes were wide and*blue and guileless behind his gold-rimmed , glasses. He put his hand back down on top +of the folder, smiled at Dees, and waited. , 'So what do you want me to say? That I waswrong?' 0 Morrison's smile widened a millimeter or two. -'Just that you might have been wrong. That'd , do, I guess you know what a pussycat I am.' . 'Yeah, tell me about it,' Dees said, but he /was relieved. He could take a little abasement;it was / the actual crawling around on his belly that he didn't like. * Morrison sat looking at him, right hand splayed over the file. # 'Okay; I might have been wrong.' * 'How large-hearted of you to admit it,' )Morrison said, and handed the file over. - Dees snatched it greedily, took it over to ,the chair by the window, and opened it. Whathe read + this time it was no more than a loose 'assemblage of wire-service stories and clippings from a , few small-town weeklies blew his mind. / I didn't see this before, he thought, and on )the heels of that: Why didn't I see this before? * He didn't know . . . but he did know he -might have to rethink that idea of being top hog in the , tabloid sty if he missed any more stories /like this. He knew something else, as well: if his and . Morrison's positions had been reversed (and +Dees had turned down the editor's chair at Inside ( View not once but twice over the last *seven years), he would have made Morrison crawl on his 2 belly like a reptile before giving him the file.- Fuck that, he told himself. You would have "fired his ass right out the door. ( The idea that he might be burning out -fluttered through his mind. The burnout rate was pretty - high in this business, he knew. Apparently +you could spend only so many years writing about . flying saucers carrying off whole Brazilian .villages (usually illustrated by out-of-focus * photographs of light-bulbs hanging from 'strands of thread), dogs that could do calculus, and outof- + work daddies chopping their kids up like )kindling wood. Then one day you suddenly snapped. + Like Dottie Walsh, who had gone home one +night and taken a bath with a dry-cleaning bag  wrapped around her head. / Don't be a fool, he told himself, but he was ,uneasy just the same. The story was sitting there, . right there, big as life and twice as ugly. )How in the hell could he have missed it? + He looked up at Morrison, who was rocked ,back in his desk chair with his hands laced + together over his stomach, watching him. 'Well?' Morrison asked. 1 'Yeah,' he said. 'This could be big. And that's'not all. I think it's the real goods.' 0 'I don't care if it's the real goods or not,' 0Morrison said, 'as long as it sells papers. And it's * going to sell lots of papers, isn't it, Richard?' + 'Yes.' He got to his feet and tucked the 0folder under his arm. 'I want to run this guy's backtrail, - starting with the first one we know about, up in Maine.'  'Richard?' % He turned back at the door and saw +Morrison was looking at the contact sheets again. He was  smiling. + 'What do you think if we run the best of )these next to a photo of Danny DeVito in that Batman  movie?' . 'It works for me,' Dees said, and went out. )Questions and self-doubts were suddenly, blessedly / set aside; the old smell of blood was back in.his nose, strong and bitterly compelling, and for the - time being he only wanted to follow it all (the way to the end. The end came a week later, not in + Maine, not in Maryland, but much farther south, in North Carolina.  2 , It was summertime, which meant the living +should have been easy and the cotton high, but + nothing was coming easy for Richard Dees +as that long day wound its way down toward dark. , The major problem was his inability at 0least so far to get into the small Wilmington' airport, which served only one major /carrier, a few commuter airlines, and a lot of private planes. - There were heavy thunderstorm cells in the -area and Dees was circling ninety miles from the ' airfield, pogoing up and down in the -unsteady air and cursing as the last hour of daylight began 0 to slip away. It was 7:45 P.M. by the time he +was given landing clearance. That was less than , forty minutes before official sundown. He ,didn't know if the Night Flier stuck to the traditional / rules or not, but if he did, it was going to be a close thing. + And the Flier was here; of that Dees was .sure. He had found the right place, the right Cessna * Skymaster. His quarry could have picked /Virginia Beach, or Charlotte, or Birmingham, orsome + point even farther south, but he hadn't. %Dees didn't know where he had hidden between leaving , Duffrey, Maryland, and arriving here, and ,didn't care. It was enough to know that his intuition + had been correct - his boy had continued -to work the windsock circuit. Dees had spent a good 1 part of the last week calling all the airports +south of Duffrey that seemed right for the Flier's MO, + making the rounds again and again, using -his finger on the Touch-Tone in his Days Inn motel - room until it was sore and his contacts on )the other end had begun to express their irritation with . his persistence. Yet in the end persistence "had paid off, as it so often did. - Private planes had landed the night before 0at all of the most likely airfields, and Cessna % Skymaster 3375 at all of them. Not +surprising, since they were the Toyotas of private aviation. * But the Cessna 337 that had landed last 'night in Wilmington was the one he was looking for; no ( question about it. He was on the guy.  Dead on the guy. + 'N471B, vector ILS runway 34,' the radio .voice drawled laconically into his earphones. 'Fly , heading 160. Descend and maintain 3,000.' - 'Heading 160. Leaving 6 for 3,000, roger.' ( 'And be aware we still got some nasty weather down here.' / 'Roger,' Dees said, thinking that ole Farmer )John, down there in whatever beer-barrel passed - for Air Traffic Control in Wilmington, was .sure one hell of a sport to tell him that. He knew there / was still nasty weather in the area; he could/see the thunderheads, some with lightning stillgoing / off inside them like giant fireworks, and he /had spent the last forty minutes or so circlingand , feeling more like a man in a blender than !one in a twin-engine Beechcraft. * He flicked off the autopilot, which had +been taking him around and around the same stupid ) patch of now-you-see-it, now-you-don't .North Carolina farmland for far too long, and grabbed a * handful of wheel. No cotton down there, -high or otherwise, that he could see. Just a bunch of ( used-up tobacco patches now overgrown (with kudzu. Dees was happy to point his plane's nose ' toward Wilmington and start down the .ramp, monitored by pilot, ATC, and tower, for the ILS  approach. ' He picked up the microphone, thought +about giving ole Farmer John there a yell, asking him if , there happened to be anything weird going +on downstairs the dark-and-stormy-night kind of . stuff Inside View readers loved, perhaps 0then racked the mike again. It was still awhile until ' sunset; he had verified the official %Wilmington time on his way down from Washington , National. No, he thought, maybe he'd just 1keep his questions to himself for a little while longer. + Dees believed the Night Flier was a real ,vampire about as much as he believed it was the - Tooth Fairy who had put all those quarters /under his pillow when he was a kid, but if the guy , thought he was a vampire and this guy, -Dees was convinced, really did that would + probably be enough to make him conform to the rules. ! Life, after all, imitates art. 0 Count Dracula with a private pilot's license. + You had to admit, Dees thought, it was a -lot better than killer penguins plotting the overthrow  of the human race. + The Beech jounced as he passed through a (thick membrane of cumulus on his steady + downward course. Dees cursed and trimmed -the plane, which seemed increasingly unhappy with  the weather. ( You and me both, babes, Dees thought. ( When he came into the clear again, he 'could see the lights of Wilmington and Wrightsville  Beach clearly. - Yes, sir, the fatties who shop at 7-Eleven 'are gonna love this one, he thought as lightning . flashed on the port side. They're gonna pick-up about seventy zillion copies of this baby when * they go out for their nightly ration of Twinkies and beer. & But there was more, and he knew it. - This one could be . . . well . . . just so goddam good.  This one could be legitimate. ) There was a time when a word like that (never would have crossed your mind, ole buddy, he & thought. Maybe you are burning out. - Still, big stacked headlines danced in his +head like sugarplums. INSIDE VIEW REPORTER * APPREHENDS CRAZED NIGHT FLIER. EXCLUSIVE(STORY ON HOW BLOOD-DRINKING NIGHT FLIER WAS ' FINALLY CAUGHT. 'NEEDED TO HAVE IT,' DEADLY DRACULA DECLARES. . It wasn't exactly grand opera Dees had to.admit that but he thought it sang just the same. " He thought it sang like a boid. & He picked up the mike after all and "depressed the button. He knew his blood-buddy was still ) down there, but he also knew he wasn't *going to be comfortable until he had made absolutely  sure. . 'Wilmington, this is N471B. You still got a *Skymaster 337 from Maryland down there on the  ramp?' 1 Through static: 'Looks like it, old hoss. Can't#talk just now. I got air traffic.' + 'Has it got red piping?' Dees persisted. * For a moment he thought he would get no /answer, then: 'Red piping, roger. Kick it off, . N471B, if you don't want me to see if I can /slap an FCC fine on y'all. I got too many fish to fry $ tonight and not enough skillets.' . 'Thanks, Wilmington,' Dees said in his most )courteous voice. He hung up the mike and then + gave it the finger, but he was grinning, /barely noticing the jolts as he passed through another , membrane of cloud. Skymaster, red piping, -and he was willing to bet next year's salary that if the - doofus in the tower hadn't been so busy, he$would have been able to confirm the tail-number as  well: N101BL. - One week, by Christ, one little week. That -was all it had taken. He had found the Night Flier, . it wasn't dark yet, and as impossible as it .seemed, there were no police on the scene. If there had ( been cops, and if they had been there *concerning the Cessna, Farmer John almost certainly & would have said so, sky-jam and bad *weather or not. Some things were just too good not to  gossip about. ) I want your picture, you bastard, Dees 'thought. Now he could see the approach lights, flashing 1 white in the dusk. I'll get your story in time,.but first, the picture. Just one, but I gotta have it. , Yes, because it was the picture that made .it real. No fuzzy out-of-focus lightbulbs; no 'artist's - conception'; a real by-God photo in living %black-and-white. He headed down more steeply, * ignoring the descent beep. His face was 2pale and set. His lips were pulled back slightly, revealing  small, gleaming white teeth. ( In the combined light of dusk and the .instrument panel, Richard Dees looked quite a little bit  like a vampire himself.  3 , There were many things Inside View was not. literate, for one, over-concerned with such, minor matters as accuracy and ethics, for ,another but one thing was undeniable: it was ) exquisitely attuned to horrors. Merton .Morrison was a bit of an asshole (although not as much of * one as Dees had thought when he'd first +seen the man smoking that dumb fucking pipe of his), * but Dees had to give him one thing - he (had remembered the things that had made Inside View a / success in the first place: buckets of blood and guts by the handful. / Oh, there were still pictures of cute babies,*plenty of psychic predictions, and Wonder Diets / featuring such unlikely ingestibles as beer, -chocolate, and potato chips, but Morrison hadsensed + a sea-change in the temper of the times, &and had never once questioned his own judgement about , the direction the paper should take. Dees &supposed that confidence was the main reason , Morrison had lasted as long as he had, in -spite of his pipe and his tweed jackets from Asshole ) Brothers of London. What Morrison knew ,was that the flower children of the sixties had grown , into the cannibals of the nineties. Huggy )therapy, political correctness, and 'the language of ) feelings' might be big deals among the /intellectual upper class, but the ever-popular common . man was still a lot more interested in mass -murders, buried scandals in the lives of the stars, and * just how Magic Johnson had gotten AIDS. ' Dees had no doubt there was still an .audience for All Things Bright and Beautiful, but the one * for All Shit Grim and Gory had become a $growth stock again as the Woodstock Generation / began to discover gray in its hair and lines .curving down from the corners of its petulant,selfindulgent ( mouth. Merton Morrison, whom Dees now *recognized as a kind of intuitive genius, * had made his own inside view clear in a .famous memo issued to all staff and stringers less than a * week after he and his pipe had taken up .residence in the corner office. By all means, stop and , smell the roses on your way to work, this +memo suggested, but once you get to there, spread , those nostrils spread them wide and #start sniffing for blood and guts. , Dees, who had been made for sniffing blood+and guts, had been delighted. His nose was the . reason he was here, flying into Wilmington. (There was a human monster down there, a man who + thought he was a vampire. Dees had a name1all picked out for him; it burned in his mind as a . valuable coin might burn in a man's pocket. .Soon he would take the coin out and spend it. When - he did, the name would be plastered across .the tabloid display racks of every supermarket, checkout counter in America, screaming at -the patrons in unignorable sixty-point type. * Look out, ladies and sensation seekers, ,Dees thought. You don't know it, but a very bad man is - coming your way. You'll read his real name ,and forget it, but that's okay. What you'll remember , is my name for him, the name that's going .to put him right up there with Jack the Ripperand the ) Cleveland Torso Murderer and the Black 0Dahlia. You'll remember the Night Flier, coming soon & to a checkout counter near you. The /exclusive story, the exclusive interview . . . but what I want ( most of all is the exclusive picture. ) He checked his watch again and allowed 0himself to relax the tiniest bit (which was all he 1 could relax). He still had almost half an hour /till dark, and he would be parking next to the white + Skymaster with red piping (and N101BL on 0the tail in a similar red) in less than fifteen minutes. , Was the Flier sleeping in town or in some -motel on the way into town? Dees didn't thinkso. - One of the reasons for the Skymaster 337's 1popularity, besides its relatively low price, wasthat it 0 was the only plane its size with a belly-hold..It wasn't much bigger than the trunk of an oldVW , Beetle, true, but it was roomy enough for 1three big suitcases or five small ones . . . and it could . certainly hold a man, provided he wasn't the1size of a pro basketball player. The Night Flier / could be in the Cessna's belly-hold, provided/he was (a) sleeping in the fetal position with his + knees drawn up to his chin; or (b) crazy .enough to think he was a real vampire; or (c) both of the  above.  Dees had his money on (c). , Now, with his altimeter winding down from +four to three thousand feet, Dees thought: Nope, - no hotel or motel for you, my friend, am I *right? When you play vampire, you're like Frank - Sinatra you do it your way. Know what I +think? I think when the belly-hold of that plane , opens, the first thing I'm gonna see is a -shower of graveyard earth (even if it isn't, you can bet / your upper incisors it will be when the story-comes out), and then I'm gonna see first one leg in a , pair of tuxedo pants, and then the other, )because you are gonna be dressed, aren't you? Oh, dear + man, I think you are gonna be dressed to /the nines, dressed to kill, and the auto-winder is already * on my camera, and when I see that cloak flap in the breeze + But that was where his thoughts stopped, )because that was when the flashing white lights on # both runways below him went out.  4 - I want to run this guy's backtrail, he had .told Merton Morrison, starting with the first one we  know about, up in Maine. , Less than four hours later he had been at (Cumberland County Airport, talking to a mechanic , named Ezra Hannon. Mr Hannon looked as if -he had recently crawled out of a gin-bottle, and - Dees wouldn't have let him within shouting +distance of his own plane, but he gave the fellow his . full and courteous attention just the same. ,Of course he did; Ezra Hannon was the first link in ) what Dees was beginning to think might $prove to be a very important chain. " Cumberland County Airport was a &dignified-sounding name for a country landing-field which ( consisted of two Quonset huts and two ,crisscrossing runways. One of these runways was actually - tarred. Because Dees had never landed on a .dirt runway, he requested the tarred one. The - bouncing his Beech 55 (for which he was in )hock up to his eyebrows and beyond) took when he , landed convinced him to try the dirt when *he took off again, and when he did he had been . delighted to find it as smooth and firm as a.coed's breast. The field also had a windsock, of . course, and of course it was patched like a 0pair of Dad's old underdrawers. Places like CCA . always had a windsock. It was part of their /dubious charm, like the old biplane that always- seemed to be parked in front of the single hangar. * Cumberland County was the most populous ,in Maine, but you never would have known it . from its cow-patty airport, Dees thought . .$. or from Ezra the Amazing Gin-Head Mechanic, for / that matter. When he grinned, displaying all .six of his remaining teeth, he looked like an extra * from the film version of James Dickey's Deliverance. * The airport sat on the outskirts of the (much plusher town of Falmouth, existing mostly on . landing fees paid by rich summer residents. 1Claire Bowie, the Night Flier's first victim, hadbeen - CCA's night traffic controller and owned a ,quarter interest in the airfield. The other employees ' had consisted of two mechanics and a %second ground controller (the ground controllers also sold . chips, cigarettes, and sodas; further, Dees )had learned, the murdered man had made a pretty  mean cheeseburger). + Mechanics and controllers also served as 'pump jockeys and custodians. It wasn't unusual for + the controller to have to rush back from )the bathroom, where he had been swabbing out the John * with Janitor-in-a-Drum, to give landing 'clearance and assign a runway from the challenging - maze of two at his disposal. The operation /was so high-pressure that during the airport's peak % summer season the night controller ,sometimes got only six hours' worth of good sleep between  midnight and 7:00 A.M. . Claire Bowie had been killed almost a month +prior to Dees's visit, and the picture the reporter + put together was a composite created from-the news stories in Morrison's thin file and Ezra the ( Amazing Gin-Head Mechanic's much more -colorful embellishments. And even when he had( made the necessary allowances for his (primary source, Dees remained sure that something very . strange had happened at this dipshit little airport in early June. * The Cessna 337, tail-number N101BL, had 0radioed the field for landing clearance shortly * before dawn on the morning of July 9th. -Claire Bowie, who had been working the night shift at ' the airfield since 1954, when pilots +sometimes had to abort their approaches (a maneuver in + those days known simply as 'pulling up') #because of the cows that sometimes wandered onto * what was then the single runway, logged /the request at 4:32 A.M. The time of landing he noted as - 4:49 A.M.; he recorded the pilot's name as +Dwight Renfield, and the point of N101BL's * origination as Bangor, Maine. The times 'were undoubtedly correct. The rest was bullshit (Dees + had checked Bangor, and wasn't surprised -to find they had never heard of N101BL), but even if . Bowie had known it was bullshit, it probably,wouldn't have made much difference; at CCA, the * atmosphere was loose, and a landing fee was a landing fee. - The name the pilot had given was a bizarre +joke. Dwight just happened to be the first name of ) an actor named Dwight Frye, and Dwight (Frye had just happened to play, among a plethora of 0 other parts, the role of Renfield, a slavering,lunatic whose idol had been the most famous . vampire of all time. But radioing UNICOM and,asking for landing clearance in the name of , Count Dracula might have raised suspicion .even in a sleepy little place like this, Dees supposed. - Might have; Dees wasn't really sure. After *all, a landing fee was a landing fee, and 'Dwight / Renfield' had paid his promptly, in cash, as -he had also paid to top off his tanks the money ) had been in the register the next day, -along with a carbon of the receipt Bowie had written out. * Dees knew about the casual, hipshot way /private air-traffic had been controlled at the smaller 0 fields in the fifties and sixties, but he was /still astonished by the informal treatment the Night / Flier's plane had received at CCA. It wasn't 1the fifties or sixties any more, after all; this was the - era of drug paranoia, and most of the shit *to which you were supposed to just say no came into . small harbors in small boats, or into small 3airports in small planes . . . planes like 'Dwight . Renfield's' Cessna Skymaster. A landing fee -was a landing fee, sure, but Dees would have ( expected Bowie to give Bangor a shout /about the missing flight-plan just the same, ifonly to - cover his own ass. But he hadn't. The idea /of a bribe had occurred to Dees at this point, but his + gin-soaked informant claimed that Claire ,Bowie was as honest as the day was long, andthe two , Falmouth cops Dees talked to later on had confirmed Hannon's judgement. . Negligence seemed a likelier answer, but in -the end it didn't really matter; Inside View readers & weren't interested in such esoteric )questions as how or why things happened. Inside View readers * were content to know what had happened, +and how long it took, and if the person it happened to + had had time to scream. And pictures, of (course. They wanted pictures. Great big hi-intensity , black-and-whites, if possible the kind ,that seemed to leap right off the page in a swarm of & dots and nail you in the forebrain. ) Ezra the Amazing Gin-Head Mechanic had +looked surprised and considering when Dees asked - where he thought 'Renfield' might have goneafter landing. , 'Dunno,' he said. 'Motel, I s'pose. Musta tooken a cab.' / 'You came in at . . . what time did you say? )Seven o'clock that morning? July ninth?' 0 'Uh-huh. Just before Claire left to go home.' + 'And the Cessna Skymaster was parked and tied down and empty?' / 'Yep. Parked right where yours is now.' Ezra ,pointed, and Dees pulled back a little. The - mechanic smelled quite a little bit like a )very old Roquefort cheese which had been pickled in  Gilbey's Gin. / 'Did Claire happen to say if he called a cab .for the pilot? To take him to a motel? Because- there don't seem to be any in easy walking distance.' 1 'There ain't,' Ezra agreed. 'Closest one's the ,Sea Breeze, and that's two mile away. Maybe / more.' He scratched his stubbly chin. 'But I ,don't remember Claire saying ary word about callin  the fella a cab.' * Dees made a mental note to call the cab -companies in the area just the same. At that time he , was going on what seemed like a reasonable,assumption: that the guy he was looking for slept in $ a bed, like almost everyone else. ! 'What about a limo?' he asked. - 'Nope,' Ezra said more positively, 'Claire *didn't say nothing about no limbo, and he woulda  mentioned that.' - Dees nodded and decided to call the nearby ,limo companies, too. He would also question the . rest of the staff, but he expected no light ,to dawn there; this old boozehound was about all there , was. He'd had a cup of coffee with Claire ,before Claire left for the day, and another with him , when Claire came back on duty that night, +and it looked like that was all she wrote. Except for . the Night Flier himself, Ezra seemed to have0been the last person to see Claire Bowie alive. * The subject of these ruminations looked +slyly off into the distance, scratched the wattles below , his chin, then shifted his bloodshot gaze /back to Dees. 'Claire didn't say nothing about no cab or ) limbo, but he did say something else.'  'That so?' , 'Yep,' Ezra said. He unzipped a pocket of ,his grease-stained coverall, removed a pack of + Chesterfields, lit one up, and coughed a *dismal old man's cough. He looked at Dees through the ' drifting smoke with an expression of 'half-baked craftiness. 'Might not mean nothing, but then ) again, it might. It sure struck Claire +perculyer, though. Must have, because most of the time old ' Claire wouldn't say shit if he had a mouthful.'  'What was it he said?' % 'Don't quite remember,' Ezra said. -'Sometimes, you know, when I forget things, a picture of ( Alexander Hamilton sorta refreshes my memory.' - 'How about one of Abe Lincoln?' Dees asked dryly. , After a moment's consideration a short ,one Hannon agreed that sometimes Lincoln also ( did the trick, and a portrait of this *gentleman consequently passed from Dees's wallet to Ezra's - slightly palsied hand. Dees thought that a )portrait of George Washington might have turned the , trick, but he wanted to make sure the man 3was entirely on his side . . . and besides, it all came out  of the expense account.  'So give.' . 'Claire said the guy looked like he must be /goin to one hell of a fancy party,' Ezra said. + 'Oh? Why was that?' Dees was thinking he -should have stuck with Washington after all. , 'Said the guy looked like he just stepped -out of a bandbox. Tuxedo, silk tie, all that stuff.' Ezra . paused. 'Claire said the guy was even wearin0a big cloak. Red as a fire engine inside, black as a , woodchuck's asshole outside. Said when it .spread out behind him, it looked like a goddambat's  wing.' / A large word lit in red neon suddenly flashed+on in Dees's mind, and the word was BINGO. + You don't know it, my gin-soaked friend, ,Dees thought, but you may have just said thewords % that are going to make you famous. 1 'All these questions about Claire,' Ezra said, /'and you ain't never once ast if I saw anything  funny.'  'Did you?'  'As a matter of fact, I did.'  'What was that, my friend?' - Ezra scratched his stubbly chin with long, -yellow nails, looked wisely at Dees from the * corners of his bloodshot eyes, and then $took another puff on his cigarette. ( 'Here we go again,' Dees said, but he ,produced another picture of Abe Lincoln and was careful * to keep his voice and face amiable. His (instincts were wide awake now, and they were telling , him that Mr Ginhead wasn't quite squeezed dry. Not yet, anyway. 2 'That don't seem like enough for all I'm tellin 0you,' Ezra said reproachfully. 'Rich city fella like * you ought to be able to do better'n ten bucks.' , Dees looked at his watch a heavy Rolex .with diamonds gleaming on the face. 'Gosh!' he+ said. 'Look how late it's getting! And I (haven't even been over to talk with the Falmouth police  yet!' , Before he could do more than start to get *up, the five had disappeared from between his ) fingers and had joined its mate in the pocket of Hannon's coverall. . 'All right, if you've got something else to 3tell, tell it,' Dees said. The amiability was gone now. - 'I've got places to go and people to see.' + The mechanic thought it over, scratching ,his wattles and sending out little puffs of ancient, % cheesy smell. Then he said, almost 1reluctantly: 'Seen a big pile of dirt under that Skymaster. ( Right under the luggage bay, it was.'  'That so?' " 'Ayuh. Kicked it with my boot.' ! Dees waited. He could do that.  'Nasty stuff. Full of worms.' , Dees waited. This was good, useful stuff, *but he didn't think the old man was wrung  completely dry even yet. ' 'And maggots,' Ezra said. 'There was *maggots, too. Like where something died.' + Dees stayed that night at the Sea Breeze +Motel, and was winging his way to the town of ( Alderton in upstate New York by eight o'clock the next morning.  5 + Of all the things Dees didn't understand -about his quarry's movements, the thing whichpuzzled . him the most was how leisurely the Flier had'been. In Maine and in Maryland, he had actually . lingered before killing. His only one-night (stand had been in Alderton which he had visited two " weeks after doing Claire Bowie. ( Lakeview Airport in Alderton was even ,smaller than CCA a single unpaved runway and a ' combined Ops/UNICOM that was no more .than a shed with a fresh coat of paint. There was no , instrument approach; there was, however, a+large satellite dish so none of the flying farmers who + used the place would have to miss Murphy -Brown or Wheel of Fortune or anything really  important like that. * One thing Dees liked a lot: the unpaved ,Lakeview runway was just as silky-smooth as the one / in Maine had been. I could get used to this, ,Dees thought as he dropped the Beech neatly onto , the surface and began to slow it down. No ,big thuds over asphalt patches, no potholes that want - to ground-loop you after you come in . . . *yeah, I could get used to this real easy. - In Alderton, nobody had asked for pictures +of Presidents or friends of Presidents. In Alderton, ( the whole town a community of just +under a thousand souls - was in shock, not merely the + few part-timers who, along with the late .Buck Kendall, had run Lakeview Airport almost as a / charity (and certainly in the red). There was-really no one to talk to, anyway, not even a witness ) of the Ezra Hannon caliber. Hannon had -been bleary, Dees reflected, but at least he had been  quotable. , 'Must have been a mighty man,' one of the -part-timers told Dees. 'Ole Buck, he dressed out + right around two-twenty, and he was easy /most of the time, but if you did get him riled,he made , you sorry. Seen him box down a fella in a +carny show that came through P'keepsie two years ) ago. That kind of fightin ain't legal, *accourse, but Buck was short a payment on that little Piper ) of his, so he boxed that carny fighter .down. Collected two hundred dollars and got it to the loan ) comp'ny about two days before they was +gonna send out someone to repo his ride, I guess.' ) The part-timer shook his head, looking +genuinely distressed, and Dees wished he'd thought to ) uncase his camera. Inside View readers 'would have lapped up that long, lined, mournful face. - Dees made a mental note to find out if the -late Buck Kendall had had a dog. Inside View readers , also lapped up pictures of the dead man's &dog. You posed it on the porch of the deceased's house % and captioned it BUFFY'S LONG WAIT BEGINS, or something similar. ! 'It's a damn shame,' Dees said sympathetically. ) The part-timer sighed and nodded. 'Guy +musta got him from behind. That's the only way I can  figger it.' ( Dees didn't know from which direction .Gerard 'Buck' Kendall had been gotten, but he knew - that this time the victim's throat had not -been ripped out. This time there were holes, holes from ) which 'Dwight Renfield' had presumably /sucked his victim's blood. Except, according tothe . coroner's report, the holes were on opposite/sides of the neck, one in the jugular vein and the , other in the carotid artery. They weren't +the discreet little bite marks of the Bela Lugosi era or the . slightly gorier ones of the Christopher Lee .flicks, either. The coroner's report spoke in - centimeters, but Dees could translate well +enough, and Morrison had the indefatigable Libby , Grannit to explain what the coroner's dry -language only partially revealed: the killer either had * teeth the size of one of View's beloved /Bigfeet, or he had made the holes in Kendall's neck in a + much more prosaic fashion - with a hammer and a nail. + DEADLY NIGHT FLIER SPIKED VICTIMS, DRANK +THEIR BLOOD, both men thought at different places  on the same day. Not bad. . The Night Flier had requested permission to -land at Lakeview Airport shortly after 10:30 P.M. ) on the night of July 23rd. Kendall had #granted permission and had noted a tail-number with ' which Dees had become very familiar: -N101BL. Kendall had noted 'name of pilot' as 'Dwite ' Renfield' and the 'make and model of (aircraft' as 'Cessna Skymaster 337'. No mention of the red * piping, and of course no mention of the ,sweeping bat-wing cloak that was as red as a fire engine - on the inside and as black as a woodchuck's.asshole on the outside, but Dees was positive of  both, just the same. , The Night Flier had flown into Alderton's +Lakeview Airport shortly after ten-thirty, killed that + strapping fellow Buck Kendall, drunk his )blood, and flown out again in his Cessna sometime ' before Jenna Kendall came by at five ,o'clock on the morning of the twenty-fourth to give her " husband a fresh-made waffle and -discovered his exsanguinated corpse instead. ' As Dees stood outside the ramshackle +Lakeview hangar/tower mulling these things over, it - occurred to him that if you gave blood, the*most you could expect was a cup of orange juice and . a word of thanks. If you took it, however 0sucked it, to be specific you got headlines. As he - turned the rest of a bad cup of coffee out +on the ground and headed toward his plane, ready to fly , south to Maryland, it occurred to Richard ,Dees that God's hand might have shaken just a tiny bit ) when He was finishing off the supposed $master-work of His creative empire.  6 # Now, two bad hours after leaving )Washington National, things had suddenly gotten a lot worse, + and with shocking suddenness. The runway +lights had gone out, but Dees now saw that wasn't all - that had gone out half of Wilmington and.all of Wrightsville Beach were also dark. ILS was * still there, but when Dees snatched the +mike and screamed, 'What happened? Talk to me, ) Wilmington!' he got nothing back but a (screech of static in which a few voices babbled like  distant ghosts. ' He jammed the mike back, missing the .prong. It thudded to the cockpit floor at the end of its , curled wire, and Dees forgot it. The grab 0and the yell had been pure pilot's instinct and no more. + He knew what had happened as surely as he,knew the sun set in the west . . . which it would do , very soon now. A stroke of lightning must $have scored a direct hit on a power substation near the - airport. The question was whether or not togo in anyway. . 'You had clearance,' one voice said. Another.immediately (and correctly) replied that that was / so much bullshit rationalization. You learned,what you were supposed to do in a situation like / this when you were still the equivalent of a /student driver. Logic and the book tell you to head - for your alternate and try to contact ATC. -Landing under snafu conditions such as these could ) cost him a violation and a hefty fine. . On the other hand, not landing now right 0now could lose him the Night Flier. It might / also cost a life (or lives), but Dees barely /factored this into the equation . . . until an idea went off / like a flashbulb in his mind, an inspiration /that occurred, as most of his inspirations did,in huge  tabloid type: - HEROIC REPORTER SAVES (fill in a number, as+large as possible, which was pretty large, given + the amazingly generous borders that mark *the range of human credulity) FROM CRAZED NIGHT  FLIER. + Eat that, Farmer John, Dees thought, and (continued his descent toward Runway 34. ( The runway lights down there suddenly /flashed on, as if approving his decision, then went out ) again, leaving blue afterimages on his .retinas that turned the sick green of spoiled avocados a - moment later. Then the weird static coming .from the radio cleared and Farmer John's voice. screamed: 'Haul port, N471B: Piedmont, haul /starboard: Jesus, oh Jesus, midair, I think we got  a midair ' * Dees's self-preservation instincts were .every bit as well honed as those which smelled blood in + the bush. He never even saw the Piedmont .Airlines 727's strobe lights. He was too busy banking - as tightly to port as the Beech could bank / which was as tight as a virgin's cooze, and Dees , would be happy to testify to that fact if .he got out of this shitstorm alive as soon as the second * word was out of Farmer John's mouth. He )had a momentary sight/sense of something huge only * inches above him, and then the Beech 55 ,was taking a beating that made the previous rough air . seem like glass. His cigarettes flew out of +his breast pocket and streamed everywhere. The halfdark ) Wilmington skyline tilted crazily. His +stomach seemed to be trying to squeeze his heart all , the way up his throat and into his mouth. *Spit ran up one cheek like a kid whizzing along a / greased slide. Maps flew like birds. The air .outside now raved with jet thunder as well as the * kind nature made. One of the windows in $the four-seat passenger compartment imploded, and an & asthmatic wind whooped in, skirling +everything not tied down back there into a tornado. - 'Resume your previous altitude assignment, ,N471B!' Farmer John was screaming. Dees was  aware that he'd just ruined a -two-hundred-dollar pair of pants by spraying about a pint of hot piss - into them, but he was partially soothed by .a strong feeling that old Farmer John had justloaded . his Jockey shorts with a truckload or so of +fresh Mars Bars. Sounded that way, anyhow. . Dees carried a Swiss Army knife. He took it -from his right pants pocket and, holding the , wheel with his left hand, cut through his 0shirt just above the left elbow, bringing blood.Then & with no pause, he made another cut, 0shallow, just below his left eye. He folded the knife shut and - stuffed it into the elasticized map pocket .in the pilot's door. Gotta clean it later, he thought. And 2 if I forget it, I could be in deep shit. But he -knew he wouldn't forget, and considering the things + the Night Flier had gotten away with, he thought he'd be okay. - The runway lights came on again, this time +for good, he hoped, although their pulsing quality ( told him they were being powered by a *generator. He homed the Beech in again on Runway 34. . Blood ran down his left cheek to the corner )of his mouth. He sucked some in and then spat a pink 0 mixture of blood and spit into his IVSI. Never(miss a trick; just keep following those instincts # and they'd always take you home. * He looked at his watch. Sunset was only ,fourteen minutes away now. This was cutting it much  too close to the bone. 1 'Pull up, Beech!' Farmer John yelled. 'Are you deaf?' ) Dees groped for the mike's kinked wire -without ever taking his eyes from the runway lights. / He pulled the wire through his fingers until )he got the mike itself. He palmed it and depressed  the send button. , 'Listen to me, you chicken-fried son of a 2bitch,' he said, and now his lips were pulled all the . way back to the gum line. 'I missed getting 'turned into strawberry jam by that 727 because your ( shit genny didn't kick in when it was .supposed to; as a result I had no ATC comm. I don't know . how many people on the airliner just missed .getting turned into strawberry jam, but I bet you do, - and I know the cockpit crew does. The only 0reason those guys are still alive is because the, captain of that boat was bright enough to ,allemande right, and I was bright enough to do-si-do, + but I have sustained both structural and /physical damage. If you don't give me a landing) clearance right now, I'm going to land .anyway. The only difference is that if I have to land - without clearance, I'm going to have you up-in front of an FAA hearing. But first I will . personally see to it that your head and your*asshole change places. Have you got that, hoss?' - A long, static-filled silence. Then a very *small voice, utterly unlike Farmer John's previous , hearty 'Hey bo'!' delivery, said, 'You're #cleared to land Runway 34, N471B.' * Dees smiled and homed in on the runway. , He depressed the mike button and said, 'I 1got mean and yelling. I'm sorry. It only happens  when I almost die.'  No response from the ground. - 'Well, fuck you very much,' Dees said, and -then headed on down, resisting the impulse totake , a quick glance at his watch as he did so.  7 * Dees was case-hardened and proud of it, -but there was no use kidding himself; what he found in ) Duffrey gave him the creeps. The Night /Flier's Cessna had spent another entire day July 31st + on the ramp, but that was really only -where the creeps began. It was the blood his loyal Inside , View readers would care about, of course, )and that was just as it should be, world without end, ( amen, amen, but Dees was increasingly .aware that blood (or, in the case of good old Ray and + Ellen Sarch, the lack of blood) was only .where this story started. Below the blood werecaverns  dark and strange. , Dees arrived in Duffrey on August 8th, by .then barely a week behind the Night Flier. He + wondered again where his batty buddy went-between strikes. Disney World? Busch Gardens?+ Atlanta, maybe, to check out the Braves? +Such things were relatively small potatoes right now, - with the chase still on, but they would be /valuable later on. They would become, in fact, the . journalistic equivalent of Hamburger Helper,,stretching the leftovers of the Night Flier story . through a few more issues, allowing readers -to resavor the flavor even after the biggest chunks of  raw meat had been digested. - Still, there were caverns in this story ,dark places into which a man might drop and be lost ' forever. That sounded both crazy and +corny, but by the time Dees began to get a picture of what * had gone on in Duffrey, he had actually 0begun to believe it . . . which meant that part of the story - would never see print, and not just because+it was personal. It violated Dees's single iron-clad , rule: Never believe what you publish, and -never publish what you believe. It had, over the years, - allowed him to keep his sanity while those &all about him had been losing theirs. , He had landed at Washington National a .real airport for a change and rented a car to ' take him the sixty miles to Duffrey, .because without Ray Sarch and his wife, Ellen, there was no / Duffrey Airfield. Aside from Ellen's sister, ,Raylene, who was a pretty fair Socket WrenchSusie, % the two of them had been the whole .shebang. There was a single oiled-dirt runway (oiled both to , lay the dust and to discourage the growth 'of weeds) and a control booth not much bigger than a * closet attached to the Jet-Aire trailer -where the Sarch couple lived. They were both retired, both 0 fliers, both reputedly as tough as nails, and /still crazy in love with each other even after almost  five decades of marriage. - Further, Dees learned, the Sarches watched ,the private air-traffic in and out of their field with , a close eye; they had a personal stake in -the war on drugs. Their only son had died in the Florida , Everglades, trying to land in what looked /like a clear stretch of water with better than a ton of + Acapulco Gold packed into a stolen Beech 018. The water had been clear . . . except for a single ( stump, that was. The Beech 18 hit it, +water-looped, and exploded. Doug Sarch had been thrown ) clear, his body smoking and singed but 0probably still alive, as little as his grieving parents would , want to believe such a thing. He had been .eaten by gators, and all that remained of him when the - DBA guys finally found him a week later was&a dismembered skeleton, a few maggoty scraps of / flesh, a charred pair of Calvin Klein jeans, -and a sport coat from Paul Stuart, New York. One of ' the sport-coat pockets had contained -better than twenty thousand dollars in cash; another had , yielded nearly an ounce of Peruvian flake cocaine. * 'It was drugs and the motherfuckers who -run em killed my boy,' Ray Sarch had said on several , occasions, and Ellen Sarch was willing to ,double and redouble on that one. Her hatred of drugs , and drug dealers, Dees was told again and ,again (he was amused by the nearly unanimous, feeling in Duffrey that the murder of the 0elderly Sarches had been a 'gangland hit'), was exceeded - only by her grief and bewilderment over the+seduction of her son by those very people. ( Following the death of their son, the 'Sarches had kept their eyes peeled for anything or anyone ' who looked even remotely like a drug +transporter. They had brought the Maryland State Police / out to the field four times on false alarms, *but the State Bears hadn't minded because the Sarches , had also blown the whistle on three small -transporters and two very big ones. The last had been * carrying thirty pounds of pure Bolivian -cocaine. That was the kind of bust that made you forget a * few false alarms, the sort of bust that made promotions. + So very late in the evening of July 30th *comes this Cessna Skymaster with a number and ) description that had gone out to every /airfield and airport in America, including the one in . Duffrey; a Cessna whose pilot had identified%himself as Dwight Renfield, point of origination, , Bayshore Airport, Delaware, a field which -had never heard of 'Renfield' or a Skymaster with tailnumber , N101BL; the plane of a man who was almost surely a murderer. . 'If he'd flown in here, he'd be in the stir /now,' one of the Bayshore controllers had told Dees , over the phone, but Dees wondered. Yes. Hewondered very much. + The Night Flier had landed in Duffrey at /11:27 P.M., and 'Dwight Renfield' had not only + signed the Sarches' logbook but also had -accepted Ray Sarch's invitation to come into the trailer, $ have a beer, and watch a rerun of -Gunsmoke on TNT. Ellen Sarch had told all of this to the + proprietor of the Duffrey Beauty Bar the ,following day. This woman, Selida McCam-mon,had / identified herself to Dees as one of the lateEllen Sarch's closest friends. ( When Dees asked how Ellen had seemed, *Selida had paused and then said, 'Dreamy, * somehow. Like a high-school girl with a ,crush, almost seventy years old or not. Her color was so ) high I thought it was make-up, until I ,started in on her perm. Then I saw that she was just . . . you - know . . . ' Selida McCammon shrugged. She +knew what she meant but not how to say it. * 'Het up,' Dees suggested, and that made *Selida McCammon laugh and clap her hands. 3 'Het up! That's it! You're a writer, all right!' , 'Oh, I write like a boid,' Dees said, and ,offered a smile he hoped looked good-humoredand + warm. This was an expression he had once -practiced almost constantly and continued to practice / with fair regularity in the bedroom mirror of+the New York apartment he called his home, and in , the mirrors of the hotels and motels that +were really his home. It seemed to work Selida ) McCammon answered it readily enough +but the truth was that Dees had never felt goodhumored ( and warm in his life. As a kid he had /believed these emotions didn't really exist at all; ( they were just a masquerade, a social ,convention. Later on he decided he had been wrong about & that; most of what he thought of as /'Reader's Digest emotions' were real, at least for most people. . Perhaps even love, the fabled Big Enchilada,/was real. That he himself could not feel these ( emotions was undoubtedly a shame, but .hardly the end of the world. There were, after all, people + out there with cancer, and AIDS, and the )memory-spans of brain-damaged parakeets. When you . looked at it that way, you quickly realized )that being deprived of a few huggy-kissy emotions . was fairly small beans. The important thing ,was that if you could manage to stretch the muscles - of your face in the right directions every ,now and then, you were fine. It didn't hurt and it was - easy; if you could remember to zip up your .fly after you took a leak, you could remember to + smile and look warm when it was expected +of you. And an understanding smile, he had - discovered over the years, was the world's ,best interview tool. Once in awhile a voice inside * asked him what his own inside view was, -but Dees didn't want an inside view. He only wanted to ( write and to take photographs. He was +better at the writing, always had been and always would ' be, and he knew it, but he liked the .photographs better just the same. He liked to touch them. To - see how they froze people either with their.real faces hung out for the whole world to seeor with , their masks so clearly apparent that they .were beyond denial. He liked how, in the best of them, / people always looked surprised and horrified.How they looked caught. % If pressed, he would have said the ,photographs provided all the inside view he needed, and the ) subject had no relevance here, anyway. /What did was the Night Flier, his little batty buddy, and + how he had waltzed into the lives of Ray &and Ellen Sarch a week or so earlier. - The Flier had stepped out of his plane and -walked into an office with a red-bordered FAA% notice on the wall, a notice which (suggested there was a dangerous guy out there driving a , Cessna Skymaster 337, tail-number N101BL, +who might have murdered two men. This guy, the ( notice went on, might or might not be /calling himself Dwight Renfield. The Skymaster had , landed, Dwight Renfield had signed in and -had almost surely spent the following day in the . belly-hold of his plane. And what about the )Sarches, those two sharp-eyed old folks? , The Sarches had said nothing; the Sarches had done nothing. . Except that latter wasn't quite right, Dees -had discovered. Ray Sarch had certainly done / something; he had invited the Night Flier in ,to watch an old Gunsmoke episode and drink abeer . with his wife. They had treated him like an 0old friend. And then, the next day, Ellen Sarch had ) made an appointment at the Beauty Bar, ,which Selida McCammon had found surprising; Ellen's / visits were usually as regular as clockwork, +and this one was at least two weeks before Selida $ would next have expected her. Her .instructions had been unusually explicit; she had wanted not , just the usual cut but a perm . . . and a little color, too. ' 'She wanted to look younger,' Selida *McCammon told Dees, and then wiped a tear from one # cheek with the side of her hand. & But Ellen Sarch's behavior had been ,pedestrian compared to that of her husband. He had , called the FAA at Washington National and ,told them to issue a NOTAM, removing Duffrey. from the active-airfield grid, at least for /the time being. He had, in other words, pulled down the ! shades and closed up the shop. + On his way home, he'd stopped for gas at -the Duffrey Texaco and told Norm Wilson, the , proprietor, that he thought he was coming *down with the flu. Norm told Dees that he thought * Ray was probably right about that -he'd -looked pale and wan, suddenly even older than his years. , That night, the two vigilant fire wardens +had, in effect, burned to death. Ray Sarch was found 0 in the little control room, his head torn off .and cast into the far corner, where it sat on a ragged ) stump of neck, staring toward the open ,doorway with wide, glazed eyes, as if there were actually  something there to see. , His wife had been found in the bedroom of +the Sarch trailer. She was in bed. She was dressed + in a peignoir so new it might never have ,been worn before that night. She was old, a deputy had - told Dees (at twenty-five dollars he was a *more expensive fuck than Ezra the Amazing Gin-Head . Mechanic, but worth it), but you still only ,had to take one look to know that there was a woman + who'd dressed for bed with loving on her ,mind. Dees had liked the c & w twang so muchthat he - wrote it down in his notebook. Those huge, -spike-sized holes were driven into her neck, one in - the carotid, the other in the jugular. Her (face was composed, her eyes closed, her hands on her  bosom. - Although she had lost almost every drop of ,blood in her body, there were only spots on the , pillows beneath her, and a few more spots +on the book which lay open on her stomach: The  Vampire Lestat, by Anne Rice.  And the Night Flier? - Sometime just before midnight on July 31st,/or just after it on the morning of August 1st, he & had simply flown away. Like a boid.  Or a bat.  8 ( Dees touched down in Wilmington seven -minutes before official sunset. While he was throttling . back, still spitting blood out of his mouth -from the cut below his eye, he saw lightning strike . down with blue-white fire so intense that it.nearly blinded him. On the heels of the light came the ) most deafening thunderclap he had ever .heard. His subjective opinion of the sound was' confirmed when another window in the -passenger compartment, stellated by the near miss with + the Piedmont 727, now coughed inward in aspray of junk-shop diamonds. ) In the brilliant glare he saw a squat, -cubelike building on the port side of Runway 34 impaled / by the bolt. It exploded, shooting fire into .the sky in a column that, although brilliant, did not + even come close to the power of the bolt that had ignited it. + Like lighting a stick of dynamite with a (baby nuke, Dees thought confusedly, and then: The  genny. That was the genny. . The lights all of them, the white lights +that marked the edges of the runway and thebright ( red bulbs that marked its end were +suddenly gone, as if they had been no more than candles . puffed out by a strong gust of wind. All at ,once Dees was rushing at better than eighty miles an  hour from dark into dark. ( The concussive force of the explosion 'which had destroyed the airport's main generator struck / the Beech like a fist - did more than strike -it, hammered it like a looping haymaker. The Beech, ' still hardly knowing it had become a 'ground-bound creature again, skittered affrightedly to starboard, + rose, and came down with the right wheel &pogoing up and down over something + somethings that Dees vaguely realized were landing lights. + Go port! his mind screamed. Go port, you asshole! ' He almost did before his colder mind 0asserted itself. If he hauled the wheel to port at this ( speed, he would ground-loop. Probably .wouldn't explode, considering how little fuel was left in . the tanks, but it was possible. Or the Beech/might simply twist apart, leaving Richard Dees from . the gut on down twitching in his seat, while*Richard Dees from the gut on up went in a different . direction, trailing severed intestines like -party-favors and dropping his kidneys on the concrete ' like a couple of oversized chunks of birdshit. / Ride it out! he screamed at himself. Ride it &out, you son of a bitch, ride it out! ( Something the genny's secondary LP 'tanks, he guessed when he had time for guessing - * exploded then, buffeting the Beech even ,farther to starboard, but that was okay, it got him off the . dead landing lights, and all at once he was -running with relative smoothness again, port wheel on , the edge of Runway 34, starboard wheel on ,the spooky verge between the lights and the ditch he + had observed on the right of the runway. /The Beech was still shuddering, but not badly, and he - understood that he was running on one flat,+the starboard tire shredded by the landing lights it  had crushed. % He was slowing down, that was what )mattered, the Beech finally beginning to understand that + it had become a different thing, a thing *that belonged to the land again. Dees was starting to relax ) when he saw the wide-body Learjet, the /one the pilots called Fat Albert, looming aheadof him, * parked insanely across the runway where )the pilot had stopped on his taxi out to Runway 5. - Dees bore down on it, saw lighted windows, -saw faces staring out at him with the gape of. idiots in an asylum watching a magic trick, +and then, without thinking, he pushed full right , rudder, bouncing the Beech off the runway (and into the ditch, missing the Lear by approximately - an inch and a half. He heard faint screams ,but was really aware of nothing but the now exploding 0 in front of him like a string of firecrackers ,as the Beech tried to become a thing of the air again, , helpless to do so with the flaps down and -the engines dropping revs but trying anyway; there was 0 a leap like a convulsion in the dying light of)the secondary explosion, and then he was skidding ( across a taxi way, seeing the General (Aviation Terminal for a moment with its corners lit by ' emergency lights that ran on storage .batteries, seeing the parked planes one of them almost 0 surely the Night Flier's Skymaster as dark *crepe-paper silhouettes against a baleful orange - light that was the sunset, now revealed by the parting thunderheads. . I'm going over! he screamed to himself, and 0the Beech did try to roll; the port wing struck a & fountain of sparks from the taxiway /nearest the terminal and its tip actually brokefree, wheeling ) off into the scrub where friction-heat #awoke a dim fire in the wet weeds. ) Then the Beech was still, and the only *sounds were the snowy roar of static from the radio, the ( sound of broken bottles fizzing their *contents onto the carpet of the passenger compartment, and - the frenzied hammering of Dees's own heart.-He slammed the pop release on his harness and( headed for the pressurized hatch even )before he was totally sure he was alive. ) What happened later he remembered with )eidetic clarity, but from the moment the Beech , skidded to a stop on the taxiway, ass-end +to the Lear and tilted to one side, to the moment he - heard the first screams from the terminal, -all he remembered for sure was swinging back to get * his camera. He couldn't leave the plane -without his camera; the Nikon was the closest thing Dees , had to a wife. He'd bought it in a Toledo +hockshop when he was seventeen and kept it with him + ever since. He had added lenses, but the +basic box was about the same now as it had been then; & the only modifications had been the -occasional scratch or dent that came with thejob. The Nikon + was in the elasticized pocket behind his -seat. He pulled it out, looked at it to make sure it was . intact, saw that it was. He slung it around "his neck and bent over the hatch. + He threw the lever, jumped out and down, .staggered, almost fell, and caught his camera before . it could strike the concrete of the taxiway.-There was another growl of thunder, but only a growl * this time, distant and unthreatening. A ,breeze touched him like the caressing touch of a kind . hand on his face . . . but more icily below .the belt. Dees grimaced. How he had pissed hispants * when his Beech and the Piedmont jet had ,barely scraped by each other would also not be in the  story. - Then a thin, drilling shriek came from the )General Aviation Terminal a scream of mingled - agony and horror. It was as if someone had +slapped Dees across the face. He came back to - himself. He centered on his goal again. He /looked at his watch. It wasn't working. Either the . concussion had broken it or it had stopped. -It was one of those amusing antiques you had to wind + up, and he couldn't remember when he had last done it. * Was it sunset? It was fucking dark out, *yes, but with all the thunderheads massed around the - airport, it was hard to tell how much that meant. Was it? , Another scream came no, not a scream, a,screech and the sound of breaking glass. * Dees decided sunset no longer mattered. ) He ran, vaguely aware that the genny's /auxiliary tanks were still burning and that he could 1 smell gas in the air. He tried to increase his &speed but it seemed he was running in cement. The , terminal was getting closer, but not very fast. Not fast enough. ) 'Please, no! Please, no! PLEASE NO! OH PLEASE, PLEASE NO!' ( This scream, spiraling up and up, was .suddenly cut off by a terrible, inhuman howl. Yet there * was something human in it, and that was /perhaps the most terrible thing of all. In the chancy * light of the emergency lamps mounted on &the corners of the terminal, Dees saw something dark 0 and flailing shatter more glass in the wall of,the terminal that faced the parking area that wall / was almost entirely glass and come flying .out. It landed on the ramp with a soggy thud, % rolled, and Dees saw it was a man. * The storm was moving away but lightning 2still flickered fitfully, and as Dees ran into the, parking area, panting now, he finally saw /the Night Flier's plane, N101BL painted boldly on the / tail. The letters and numbers looked black in-this light, but he knew they were red and it didn't ( matter, anyway. The camera was loaded )with fast black-and-white film and armed with a smart - flash which would fire only when the light "was too low for the film's speed. , The Skymaster's belly-hold hung open like ,the mouth of a corpse. Below it was a large pile of , earth in which things squirmed and moved. -Dees saw this, did a double-take, and skiddedto a / stop. Now his heart was filled not just with ,fright but with a wild, capering happiness. How good + it was that everything had come together like this! . Yes, he thought, but don't you call it luck / don't you dare call it luck. Don't you even call it  hunch. , Correct. It wasn't luck that had kept him /holed up in that shitty little motel room with the + clanky air-conditioner, not hunch not -precisely hunch, anyway that had tied him to the * phone hour after hour, calling flyspeck &airports and giving the Night Flier's tail-number over and ' over again. That was pure reporter's ,instinct, and here was where it all started paying off. Except , this was no ordinary payoff; this was the /jackpot, El Dorado, that fabled Big Enchilada. ' He skidded to a stop in front of the *yawning belly-hold and tried to bring the camera up. ) Almost strangled himself on the strap. "Cursed. Unwound the strap. Aimed. + From the terminal came another scream (that of a woman or a child. Dees barely noticed. ) The thought that there was a slaughter -going on in there was followed by the thoughtthat - slaughter would only fatten the story, and +then both thoughts were gone as he snapped three , quick shots of the Cessna, making sure to ,get the gaping belly-hold and the number on the tail.  The auto-winder hummed. - Dees ran on. More glass smashed. There was )another thud as another body was ejected onto + the cement like a rag doll that had been ,stuffed full of some thick dark liquid like cough-syrup. * Dees looked, saw confused movement, the -billowing of something that might have been a cape . . . . but he was still too far away to tell. He )turned. Snapped two more pictures of the plane, these + shots dead-on. The gaping belly-hold and %the pile of earth would be stark and undeniable in the  print. , Then he whirled and ran for the terminal. ,The fact that he was armed with only an old Nikon  never crossed his mind. * He stopped ten yards away. Three bodies +out here, two adults, one of each sex, and one that , might have been either a small woman or a 1girl of thirteen or so. It was hard to tell with the head  gone. * Dees aimed the camera and fired off six /quick shots, the flash flickering its own white( lightning, the auto-winder making its !contented little whizzing sound. + His mind never lost count. He was loaded ,with thirty-six shots. He had taken eleven. That left + twenty-five. There was more film stuffed .into the deep pockets of his slacks, and that was great . . . . if he got a chance to reload. You could "never count on that, though; with photographs like , these, you had to grab while the grabbing /was good. It was strictly a fast-food banquet. , Dees reached the terminal and yanked open the door.  9 * He thought he had seen everything there +was to see, but he had never seen anything like this.  Never. ( How many? his mind yammered. How many $you got? Six? Eight? Maybe a dozen? / He couldn't tell. The Night Flier had turned -the little private terminal into a knacker's shop. - Bodies and parts of bodies lay everywhere. )Dees saw a foot clad in a black Converse sneaker; / shot it. A ragged torso; shot it. Here was a ,man in a greasy mechanic's coverall who was still - alive, and for a weird moment he thought it'was Ezra the Amazing Gin-Head Mechanic from * Cumberland County Airport, but this guy .wasn't just going bald; this guy had entirely made the ( grade. His face had been chopped wide ,open from forehead to chin. His nose lay in halves, * reminding Dees for some mad reason of a 1grilled frankfurter, split and ready for the bun. Dees shot it. * And suddenly, just like that, something -inside him rebelled and screamed No more! in an ( imperative voice it was impossible to ignore, let alone deny.  No more, stop, it's over! , He saw an arrow painted on the wall, with 'the words THIS WAY TO COMFORT STATIONS below * it. Dees ran in the direction the arrow pointed, his camera flapping. * The men's room happened to be the first ,one he came to, but Dees wouldn't have caredif it * was the aliens' room. He was weeping in +great, harsh, hoarse sobs. He could barely credit the fact - that these sounds were coming from him. It ,had been years since he had wept. He'd been a kid  the last time. - He slammed through the door, skidded like a-skier almost out of control, and grabbed the edge  of the second basin in line. - He leaned over it, and everything came out )in a rich and stinking flood, some of it splattering & back onto his face, some landing in -brownish clots on the mirror. He smelled the take-out , chicken Creole he'd eaten hunched over the-phone in the motel room - this had been just before + he'd hit paydirt and gone racing for his *plane - and threw up again, making a huge grating sound - like overstressed machinery about to strip its gears. , Jesus, he thought, dear Jesus, it's not a man, it can't be a man $ That was when he heard the sound. ) It was a sound he had heard at least a (thousand times before, a sound that was commonplace in 2 any American man's life . . . but now it filled -him with a dread and a creeping terror beyondall  his experience or belief. + It was the sound of a man voiding into a urinal. - But although he could see all three of the +bathroom's urinals in the vomit-splattered mirror, he # could see no one at any of them. . Dees thought: Vampires don't cast reflec * Then he saw reddish liquid striking the /porcelain of the center urinal, saw it running down that / porcelain, saw it swirling into the geometric$arrangement of holes at the bottom. , There was no stream in the air; he saw it (only when it struck the dead porcelain. # That was when it became visible. , He was frozen. He stood, hands on the edge,of the basin, his mouth and throat and nose and , sinuses thick with the taste and smell of +chicken Creole, and watched the incredible yet prosaic , thing that was happening just behind him. - I am, he thought dimly, watching a vampire take a piss. + It seemed to go on forever the bloody 0urine striking the porcelain, becoming visible, and / swirling down the drain. Dees stood with his -hands planted on the sides of the basin into which - he had thrown up, gazing at the reflection -in the mirror, feeling like a frozen gear in some vast  jammed machine. . I'm almost certainly dead meat, he thought. - In the mirror he saw the chromed handle go down by itself. Water roared. + Dees heard a rustle and flap and knew it -was a cape, just as he knew that if he turnedaround, . he could strike the 'almost certainly' from *his last thought. He stayed where he was, palms biting  the edge of the basin. + A low, ageless voice spoke from directly *behind him. The owner of the voice was so close / Dees could feel its cold breath on his neck. , 'You have been following me,' the ageless voice said.  Dees moaned. / 'Yes,' the ageless voice said, as if Dees had,disagreed with him. 'I know you, you see. I know ( all about you. Now listen closely, my ,inquisitive friend, because I say this only once: don't  follow me any more.' * Dees moaned again, a doglike sound, and more water ran into his pants. . 'Open your camera,' the ageless voice said. 1 My film! part of Dees cried. My film! All I've got! All I've got! My pictures! ) Another dry, batlike flap of the cape. +Although Dees could see nothing, he sensed the Night  Flier had moved even closer.  'Now.'  His film wasn't all he had.  There was his life.  Such as it was. - He saw himself whirling and seeing what the+mirror would not, could not, show him; saw , himself seeing the Night Flier, his batty )buddy, a grotesque thing splattered with blood and bits , of flesh and clumps of torn-out hair; saw +himself snapping shot after shot while the auto-winder + hummed . . . but there would be nothing.  Nothing at all. , Because you couldn't take their pictures, either. / 'You're real,' he croaked, never moving, his *hands seemingly welded to the edge of the basin. . 'So are you,' the ageless voice rasped, and (now Dees could smell ancient crypts and sealed 0 tombs on its breath. 'For now, at least. This -is your last chance, my inquisitive would-be 0 biographer. Open your camera . . . or I'll do it.' , With hands that seemed totally numb, Dees opened his Nikon. 0 Air hummed past his chilly face; it felt like +moving razor blades. For a moment he saw a long ' white hand, streaked with blood; saw ragged nails silted with filth. / Then his film parted and spooled spinelessly out of his camera. . There was another dry flap. Another stinking*breath. For a moment he thought the Night Flier / would kill him anyway. Then in the mirror he .saw the door of the men's room open by itself., He doesn't need me, Dees thought. He must -have eaten very well tonight. He immediately . threw up again, this time directly onto the $reflection of his own staring face. ) The door wheezed shut on its pneumatic elbow. ) Dees stayed right where he was for the -next three minutes or so; stayed there until the + approaching sirens were almost on top of .the terminal; stayed there until he heard the cough and  roar of an airplane engine. ( The engine of a Cessna Skymaster 337, almost undoubtedly. , Then he walked out of the bathroom on legs1like stilts, struck the far wall of the corridor + outside, rebounded, and walked back into .the terminal. He slid in a pool of blood, and almost  fell. 0 'Hold it, mister!' a cop screamed behind him. 0'Hold it right there! One move and you're dead!'  Dees didn't even turn around. - 'Press, dickface,' he said, holding up his *camera in one hand and his ID card in the other. He + went to one of the shattered windows with.exposed film still straggling from his camera like long , strips of brown confetti, and stood there *watching the Cessna accelerate down Runway 5. For a * moment it was a black shape against the .billowing fire of the genny and the auxiliary tanks, a / shape that looked quite a lot like a bat, and-then it was up, it was gone, and the cop was ) slamming Dees up against the wall hard ,enough to make his nose bleed and he didn't care, he + didn't care about anything, and when the .sobs began to tear their way out of his chest again he . closed his eyes, and still he saw the Night -Flier's bloody urine striking the porcelain, becoming ( visible, and swirling down the drain. & He thought he would see it forever.   -Popsy-  - Sheridan was cruising slowly down the long -blank length of the shopping mall when he sawthe - little kid push out through the main doors "under the lighted sign which read COUSINTOWN. It was . a boy-child, perhaps a big three and surely &no more than five. On his face was an expression to ( which Sheridan had become exquisitely +attuned. He was trying not to cry but soon would. , Sheridan paused for a moment, feeling the 0familiar soft wave of self-disgust . . . though every , time he took a child, that feeling grew a 2little less urgent. The first time he hadn't sleptfor a ( week. He kept thinking about that big +greasy Turk who called himself Mr. Wizard, kept + wondering what he did with the children. . 'They go on a boat-ride, Mr. Sheridan,' the -Turk told him, only it came out Dey goo on a botrahd, - Messtair Shurdunn. The Turk smiled. And if ,you know what's good for you, you won't ask - any more about it, that smile said, and it +said it loud and clear, without an accent. + Sheridan hadn't asked any more, but that &didn't mean he hadn't kept wondering. Especially - afterward. Tossing and turning, wishing he +had the whole thing to do over again so he could turn ( it around, so he could walk away from ,temptation. The second time had been almost as bad . . . 0 the third time a little less . . . and by the ,fourth time he had almost stopped wondering about the + botrahd, and what might be at the end of it for the little kids. * Sheridan pulled his van into one of the .handicap parking spaces right in front of the mall. He , had one of the special license plates the ,state gave to crips on the back of his van. That plate was , worth its weight in gold, because it kept /any mall security cop from getting suspicious, and those ' spaces were so convenient and almost always empty. + You always pretend you 're not going out 0looking, but you always lift a crip plate a day or two  before. 0 Never mind all that bullshit; he was in a jam .and that kid over there could solve some very big  problems. , He got out and walked toward the kid, who .was looking around with increasing panic. Yes,+ Sheridan thought, he was five all right, 0maybe even six just very frail. In the harsh fluorescent + glare thrown through the glass doors the ,boy looked parchment-white, not just scared but / perhaps physically ill. Sheridan reckoned it -was just big fear, however. Sheridan usually ' recognized that look when he saw it, /because he'd seen a lot of big fear in his own mirror over " the last year and a half or so. , The kid looked up hopefully at the people /passing around him, people going into the mall & eager to buy, coming out laden with -packages, their faces dazed, almost drugged, with something * they probably thought was satisfaction. + The kid, dressed in Tuffskin jeans and a /Pittsburgh Penguins tee-shirt, looked for help,looked & for somebody to look at him and see +something was wrong, looked for someone to ask the right * question You get separated from your ,dad, son? would do looking for a friend. , Here I am, Sheridan thought, approaching. )Here I am, sonny I'll be your friend. + He had almost reached the kid when he saw(a mall rent-a-cop ambling slowly up the % concourse toward the doors. He was .reaching in his pocket, probably for a pack ofcigarettes. He ) would come out, see the boy, and there would go Sheridan's sure thing. - Shit, he thought, but at least he wouldn't ,be seen talking to the kid when the cop cameout.  That would have been worse. ) Sheridan drew back a little and made a .business of feeling in his own pockets, as if to make 1 sure he still had his keys. His glance flicked -from the boy to the security cop and back to the boy. * The boy had started to cry. Not all-out +bawling, not yet, but great big tears that looked pinkish in + the reflected glow of the red COUSINTOWN -sign as they tracked down his smooth cheeks. , The girl in the information booth flagged ,down the cop and said something to him. She was - pretty, dark-haired, about twenty-five; he *was sandy-blonde with a moustache. As the cop leaned * on his elbows, smiling at her, Sheridan +thought they looked like the cigarette ads you saw on the - backs of magazines. Salem Spirit. Light My +Lucky. He was dying out here and they were in ) there making chit-chat whatcha doin +after work, ya wanna go and get a drink at that new . place, and blah-blah-blah. Now she was also #batting her eyes at him. How cute. ( Sheridan abruptly decided to take the -chance. The kid's chest was hitching, and as soon as he * started to bawl out loud, someone would 0notice him. Sheridan didn't like moving in with a cop . less than sixty feet away, but if he didn't -cover his markers at Mr. Reggie's within the next , twenty-four hours, he thought a couple of )very large men would pay him a visit and perform ( impromptu surgery on his arms, adding several elbow-bends to each. - He walked up to the kid, a big man dressed *in an ordinary Van Heusen shirt and khaki pants, a - man with a broad, ordinary face that looked.kind at first glance. He bent over the little boy, - hands on his legs just above the knees, and+the boy turned his pale, scared face up to Sheridan's. , His eyes were as green as emeralds, their *color accentuated by the light-reflecting tears that  washed) them. * 'You get separated from your dad, son?' Sheridan asked. 3 'My Popsy,' the kid said, wiping his eyes. 'I . .. I can't find my P-P-Popsy!' , Now the kid did begin to sob, and a woman )headed in glanced around with some vague  concern. 2 'It's all right,' Sheridan said to her, and she 'went on. Sheridan put a comforting arm around the / boy's shoulders and drew him a little to the 1right . . . in the direction of the van. Then he looked  back inside. ) The rent-a-cop had his face right down 0next to the information girl's now. Looked like maybe / more than that little girl's Lucky was going .to get lit tonight. Sheridan relaxed. At this point there + could be a stick-up going on at the bank +just up the concourse and the cop wouldn't notice a 1 thing. This was starting to look like a cinch. # 'I want my Popsy!' the boy wept. , 'Sure you do, of course you do,' Sheridan .said. 'And we're going to find him. Don't you worry.' * He drew him a little more to the right. . The boy looked up at him, suddenly hopeful.  'Can you? Can you, mister?' / 'Sure!' Sheridan said, and grinned heartily. 3'Finding lost Popsys . . . well, you might say it's  kind of a specialty of mine.' - 'It is?' The kid actually smiled a little, &although his eyes were still leaking. / 'It sure is,' Sheridan said, glancing inside *again to make sure the cop, whom he could now . barely see (and who would barely be able to -see Sheridan and the boy, should he happen tolook 0 up), was still enthralled. He was. ' What was your Popsy wearing, son?' / 'He was wearing his suit,' the boy said. 'He -almost always wears his suit. I only saw him once , in jeans.' He spoke as if Sheridan should 'know all these things about his Popsy. . 'I bet it was a black suit,' Sheridan said. / The boy's eyes lit up. 'You saw him! Where?' , He started eagerly back toward the doors, .tears forgotten, and Sheridan had to restrain himself + from grabbing the pale-faced little brat -right then and there. That type of thing was no good. . Couldn't cause a scene. Couldn't do anything.people would remember later. Had to get him inthe $ van. The van had sun-filter glass ,everywhere except in the windshield; it was almost impossible ) to see inside unless you had your face smashed right up against it. # Had to get him in the van first. . He touched the boy on the arm. 'I didn't see.him inside, son. I saw him right over there.' - He pointed across the huge parking lot with+its endless platoons of cars. There was an access - road at the far end of it, and beyond that -were the double yellow arches of McDonald's. + 'Why would Popsy go over there?' the boy ,asked, as if either Sheridan or Popsy or maybe ( both of them had gone utterly mad. . 'I don't know,' Sheridan said. His mind was -working fast, clicking along like an express train - as it always did when it got right down to -the point where you had to stop shitting and either do it - up right or fuck it up righteously. Popsy. (Not Dad or Daddy but Popsy. The kid had corrected ) him on it. Maybe Popsy meant Granddad, /Sheridan decided. 'But I'm pretty sure that washim. . Older guy in a black suit. White hair . . . green tie . . . ' 0 'Popsy had his blue tie on,' the boy said. 'Heknows I like it the best.' , 'Yeah, it could have been blue,' Sheridan .said. 'Under these lights, who can tell? Come on, hop / in the van, I'll run you over there to him.' . 'Are you sure it was Popsy? Because I don't ,know why he'd go to a place where they ' 0 Sheridan shrugged. 'Look, kid, if you're sure +that wasn't him, maybe you better look for him . on your own. You might even find him.'' And (he started brusquely away, heading back toward  the van. * The kid wasn't biting. He thought about -going back, trying again, but it had already gone on ) too long you either kept observable ,contact to a minimum or you were asking for twenty , years in Hammerton Bay. He'd better go on +to another mall. Scoterville, maybe. Or 0 'Wait, mister!' It was the kid, with panic in /his voice. There was the light thud of running 0 sneakers. 'Wait up! I told him I was thirsty, +he must have thought he had to go way over there to  get me a drink. Wait!' - Sheridan turned around, smiling. 'I wasn't (really going to leave you anyway, son.' , He led the boy to the van, which was four -years old and painted a nondescript blue. He opened - the door and smiled at the kid, who looked .up at him doubtfully, his green eyes swimming in that / pallid little face, as huge as the eyes of a )waif in a velvet painting, the kind they advertised in the * cheap weekly tabloids like The National Enquirer and Inside View. 0 'Step into my parlor, little buddy,' Sheridan .said, and produced a grin which looked almost 1 entirely natural. It was really sort of creepy,how good he'd gotten at this. . The kid did, and although he didn't know it,.his ass belonged to Briggs Sheridan the minute! the passenger door swung shut. - There was only one problem in his life. It -wasn't broads, although he liked to hear the swish of a + skirt or feel the smooth smoke of silken .hose as well as any man, and it wasn't booze, although , he had been known to take a drink or three/of an evening. Sheridan's problem his fatal flaw, , you might even say was cards. Any kind -of cards, as long as it was the kind of game where ) wagers were allowed. He had lost jobs, +credit cards, the home his mother had left him. He had 0 never, at least so far, been in jail, but the .first time he got in trouble with Mr. Reggie, he'd ' thought jail would be a rest-cure by comparison. / He had gone a little crazy that night. It was*better, he had found, when you lost right away. # When you lost right away you got *discouraged, went home, watched Letterman on the tube, and , then went to sleep. When you won a little .bit at first, you chased. Sheridan had chased that night # and had ended up owing seventeen 1thousand dollars. He could hardly believe it; he went home . dazed, almost elated, by the enormity of it..He kept telling himself in the car on the way home , that he owed Mr. Reggie not seven hundred,+not seven thousand, but seventeen thousand iron - men. Every time he tried to think about it +he giggled and turned up the volume on the radio. - But he wasn't giggling the next night when ,the two gorillas the ones who would make sure ( his arms bent in all sorts of new and /interesting ways if he didn't pay up brought him into Mr.  Reggie's office. 5 'I'll pay,' Sheridan began babbling at once. 'I'll 0pay, listen, it's no problem, couple of days, a % week at the most, two weeks at the outside ' , 'You bore me, Sheridan,' Mr. Reggie said.  'I ' , 'Shut up. If I give you a week, don't you 0think I know what you'll do? You'll tap a friendfor a / couple of hundred if you've got a friend left1to tap. If you can't find a friend, you'll hit a liquor 1 store . . . if you've got the guts. I doubt if .you do, but anything is possible.' Mr. Reggie leaned - forward, propped his chin on his hands, and0smiled. He smelled of Ted Lapidus cologne. ' Andif + you do come up with two hundred dollars, what will you do with it?'' - 'Give it to you,' Sheridan had babbled. By 2then he was very close to tears. 'I'll give it to you,  right away!' 2 'No you won't,' Mr. Reggie said. 'You'll take it+to the track and try to make it grow. What / you'll give me is a bunch of shitty excuses. /You're in over your head this time, my friend. Way  over your head.' ( Sheridan could hold back the tears no longer; he began to blubber. , 'These guys could put you in the hospital 0for a long time,' Mr. Reggie said reflectively. 'You , would have a tube in each arm and another one coming out of your nose.' $ Sheridan began to blubber louder. 2 'I'll give you this much,' Mr. Reggie said, and *pushed a folded sheet of paper across his desk to / Sheridan. 'You might get along with this guy.0He calls himself Mr. Wizard, but he's a shitbag just + like you. Now get out of here. I'm gonna ,have you back in here in a week, though, and I'll have , your markers on this desk. You either buy )them back or Pm going to have my friends tool up on * you. And like Booker T. says, once they ,start, they do it until they're satisfied.' * The Turk's real name was written on the ,folded sheet of paper. Sheridan went to see him, and - heard about the kids and the botrahds. Mr. (Wizard also named a figure, which was a fairish bit ) larger than the markers Mr. Reggie was (holding. That was when Sheridan started cruising the  malls. . He pulled out of the Cousintown Mall's main ,parking lot, looked for traffic, then drove across the . access road and into the McDonald's in-lane..The kid was sitting all the way forward on the, passenger seat, hands on the knees of his ,Tuffskins, eyes agonizingly alert. Sheridan drove + toward the building, swung wide to avoid (the drive-thru lane, and kept on going. + 'Why are you going around the back?' the kid asked. - 'You have to go around to the other doors,'3Sheridan said. 'Keep your shirt on, kid. I think I  saw him in there.'  'You did? You really did?'  'I'm pretty sure, yeah.' - Sublime relief washed over the kid's face, -and for a moment Sheridan felt sorry for him  - hell, he wasn't a monster or a maniac, for ,Christ's sake. But his markers had gotten a little deeper - each time, and that bastard Mr. Reggie had .no compunctions at all about letting him hang - himself. It wasn't seventeen thousand this "time, or twenty thousand, or even twenty-five ) thousand. This time it was thirty-five *grand, a whole damn marching battalion of iron men, if he * didn't want a few new sets of elbows by next Saturday.  He stopped in the back by the (trash-compactor. Nobody was parked back here. Good. There - was an elasticized pouch on the side of the+door for maps and things. Sheridan reached into it . with his left hand and brought out a pair of+blued-steel Kreig handcuffs. The loop-jaws were  open. . 'Why are we stopping here, mister?' the kid .asked. The fear was back in his voice, but the- quality of it had changed; he had suddenly +realized that maybe getting separated from good old * Popsy in the busy mall wasn't the worst +thing that could happen to him, after all. 1 'We're not, not really,' Sheridan said easily. -He had learned the second time he'd done thisthat * you didn't want to underestimate even a *six-year-old once he had his wind up. The second kid + had kicked him in the balls and had damn .near gotten away. 'I just remembered I forgot to put 0 my glasses on when I started driving. I could .lose my license. They're in that glasses-case on the 0 floor there. They slid over to your side. Handem to me, would you?' - The kid bent over to get the glasses-case, *which was empty. Sheridan leaned over and snapped - one of the cuffs on the kid's reaching hand,as neat as you please. And then the trouble started. , Hadn't he just been thinking it was a bad mistake to underestimate even a six-year-old? The brat . fought like a timberwolf pup, twisting with *a powerful muscularity Sheridan would not have , credited had he not been experiencing it. (He bucked and fought and lunged for the door, panting / and uttering weird birdlike cries. He got the-handle. The door swung open, but no domelight* came on Sheridan had broken it after that second outing. . Sheridan got the kid by the round collar of /his Penguins tee-shirt and hauled him back in. He . tried to clamp the other cuff on the special,strut beside the passenger seat and missed. The kid bit + his hand twice, bringing blood. God, his +teeth were like razors. The pain went deep and sent a ) steely ache all the way up his arm. He +punched the kid in the mouth. The kid fell back into the / seat, dazed, Sheridan's blood on his lips and.chin and dripping onto the ribbed neck of the teeshirt. * Sheridan locked the other cuff onto the ,strut and then fell back into his own seat, sucking  the back of his right hand. . The pain was really bad. He pulled his hand ,away from his mouth and looked at it in the weak . glow of the dashlights. Two shallow, ragged *tears, each maybe two inches long, ran up toward * his wrist from just above the knuckles. 5Blood pulsed in weak little rills. Still, he felt no urge to - pop the kid again, and that had nothing to ,do with damaging the Turk's merchandise, in spite of + the almost fussy way the Turk had warned *him against that demmege the goots end you - demmege the velue, the Turk had said in hisgreasy accent. . No, he didn't blame the kid for fighting +he would have done the same. He would have to + disinfect the wound as soon as he could, +though, might even have to have a shot; he had read & somewhere that human bites were the /worst kind. Still, he couldn't help but admire the kid's guts. - He dropped the transmission into drive and ,pulled around the hamburger stand, past the drivethru , window, and back onto the access road. He ,turned left. The Turk had a big ranch-style house . in Taluda Heights, on the edge of the city. ,Sheridan would go there by secondary roads, just to * be safe. Thirty miles. Maybe forty-five minutes, maybe an hour. ( He passed a sign which read THANK YOU &FOR SHOPPING THE BEAUTIFUL COUSINTOWN MALL, - turned left, and let the van creep up to a 0perfectly legal forty miles an hour. He fished a- handkerchief out of his back pocket, folded(it over the back of his right hand, and concentrated + on following his headlights to the forty -grand the Turk had promised for a boy-child. # 'You'll be sorry,' the kid said. - Sheridan looked impatiently around at him, -pulled from a dream in which he had just won + twenty straight hands and had Mr. Reggie -groveling at his feet for a change, sweating bullets and + begging him to stop, what did he want to do, break him? 0 The kid was crying again, and his tears still ,had that odd pinkish cast, even though they were . now well away from the bright lights of the .mall. Sheridan wondered for the first time if the kid ' might have some sort of communicable -disease. He supposed it was a little late to start worrying - about such things, so he put it out of his mind. - 'When my Popsy finds you you'll be sorry,' the kid elaborated. 0 'Yeah,' Sheridan said, and lit a cigarette. He%turned off State Road 28 and onto an unmarked , stretch of two-lane blacktop. There was a -long marshy area on the left, unbroken woods on the  right. - The kid pulled at the handcuffs and made a sobbing noise. $ 'Quit it. Won't do you any good.' / Nevertheless, the kid pulled again. And this ,time there was a groaning, protesting sound 0 Sheridan didn't like at all. He looked around +and was amazed to see that the metal strut on the / side of the seat a strut he had welded in 0place himself was twisted out of shape. Shit!he . thought. He's got teeth like razors and now 0I find out he's also strong as a fucking ox. If this is . what he's like when he's sick, God forbid I *should have grabbed him on a day 'when he was  feeling well. , He pulled over onto the soft shoulder and said, 'Stop it!'  'I won't!' + The kid yanked at the handcuff again and +Sheridan saw the metal strut bend a little more. % Christ, how could any kid do that? . It's panic, he answered himself. That's how he can do it. - But none of the others had been able to do )it, and many of them had been a lot more terrified + than this kid by this stage of the game. ) He opened the glove compartment in the %center of the dash. He brought out a hypodermic , needle. The Turk had given it to him, and &cautioned him not to use it unless he absolutely had to. / Drugs, the Turk said (pronouncing it drocks) could demmege the merchandise.  'See this?' % The kid gave the hypo a glimmering sideways glance and nodded.  'You want me to use it?' , The kid shook his head at once. Strong or ,not, he had any kid's instant terror of the needle,  Sheridan was happy to see. , 'That's very smart. It would put out your 0lights.' He paused. He didn't want to say it hell, he . was a nice guy, really, when he didn't have 1his ass in a sling but he had to. 'Might even kill  you.' / The kid stared at him, lips trembling, cheekspapery with fear. - 'You stop yanking the cuff, I put away the needle. Deal?'  'Deal,' the kid whispered.  'You promise?' / 'Yes.' The kid lifted his lip, showing white $teeth. One of them was spotted with Sheridan's  blood. ' 'You promise on your mother's name?'  'I never had a mother.' 0 'Shit,' Sheridan said, disgusted, and got the 0van rolling again. He moved a little faster now,and * not only because he was finally off the )main road. The kid was a spook. Sheridan wanted to turn + him over to the Turk, get his money, and split. & 'My Popsy's really strong, mister.' - 'Yeah?' Sheridan asked, and thought: I bet 0he is, kid. Only guy in the old folks' home who can $ bench-press his own truss, right?  'He'll find me.'  'Uh-huh.'  'He can smell me.' 0 Sheridan believed it. He could smell the kid. +That fear had an odor was something he had / learned on his previous expeditions, but this0was unreal the kid smelled like a mixture of ) sweat, mud, and slowly cooking battery *acid. Sheridan was becoming more and more sure that - something was seriously wrong with the kid *. . . but soon that would be Mr. Wizard's problem, + not his, and caveat emptor, as those old )fellows in the togas used to say; caveat fucking emptor. , Sheridan cracked his window. On the left, ,the marsh went on and on. Broken slivers of - moonlight glimmered in the stagnant water.  'Popsy can fly.' , 'Yeah,' Sheridan said, 'after a couple of .bottles of Night Train, I bet he flies like a  sonofabitchin eagle.'  'Popsy ' + 'Enough of the Popsy shit, kid okay?'  The kid shut up. . Four miles farther on, the marsh on the left+broadened into a wide empty pond. Sheridan made a + turn onto a stretch of hardpan dirt that /skirted the pond's north side. Five miles west of here he , would turn right onto Highway 41, and from.there it would be a straight shot into Taluda  Heights. , He glanced toward the pond, a flat silver *sheet in the moonlight . . . and then the moonlight  was gone. Blotted out. + Overhead there was a flapping sound like big sheets on a clothesline.  'Popsy!' the kid cried. ! 'Shut up. It was only a bird.' , But suddenly he was spooked, very spooked..He looked at the kid. The kid's lip was drawn , back from his teeth again. His teeth were very white, very big. / No . . . not big. Big wasn't the right word. .Long was the right word. Especially the two atthe 0 top at each side. The . . . what did you call them? The canines. * His mind suddenly started to fly again, 'clicking along as if he were on speed.  I told him I was thirsty. + Why would Popsy go to a place where they  " (?eat was he going to say eat?)  He'll find me.  He can smell me.  Popsy can fly. * Something landed on the roof of the van with a heavy clumsy thump. * 'Popsy!' the kid screamed again, almost .delirious with delight, and suddenly Sheridan could % not see the road anymore a huge -membranous wing, pulsing with veins, covered the  windshield from side to side.  Popsy can fly. & Sheridan screamed and jumped on the .brake, hoping to tumble the thing on the roof off the - front. There was that groaning, protesting +sound of metal under stress from his right again, this * time followed by a short bitter snap. A ,moment later the kid's fingers were clawing into his face,  pulling open his cheek. . 'He stole me, Popsy!' the kid was screeching/at the roof of the van in that birdlike voice. 'He + stole me, he stole me, the bad man stole me!' & You don't understand, kid, Sheridan .thought. He groped for the hypo and found it. I'm not a  bad guy, I just got in a jam. - Then a hand, more like a talon than a real *hand, smashed through the side window and ripped . the hypo from Sheridan's grasp along with)two of his fingers. A moment later Popsy peeled + the entire driver's-side door out of its 'frame, the hinges now bright twists of meaningless metal. . Sheridan saw a billowing cape, black on the 0outside, lined with red silk on the inside, and the + creature's tie . . . and although it was 1actually a cravat, it was blue all right just as the boy had  said. ( Popsy yanked Sheridan out of the car, /talons sinking through his jacket and shirt and deep into + the meat of his shoulders; Popsy's green ,eyes suddenly turned as red as blood-roses. + 'We came to the mall because my grandson )wanted some Ninja Turtle figures,' Popsy . whispered, and his breath was like flyblown )meat. 'The ones they show on TV. All the children - want them. You should have left him alone. You should have left us alone.' * Sheridan was shaken like a rag doll. He (shrieked and was shaken again. He heard Popsy + asking solicitously if the kid was still -thirsty; heard the kid saying yes, very, the bad man had + scared him and his throat was so dry. He (saw Popsy's thumbnail for just a second before it . disappeared under the shelf of his chin, the/nail ragged and thick. His throat was cut with that - nail before he realized what was happening,,and the last things he saw before his sight dimmed . to black were the kid, cupping his hands to ,catch the flow the way Sheridan himself had cupped , his hands under the backyard faucet for a ,drink on a hot summer day when he was a kid,and . Popsy, stroking the boy's hair gently, with grandfatherly love.   -It Grows on You-  + New England autumn and the thin soil now )shows in patches through the ragweed and / goldenrod, waiting for snow still four weeks /distant. The culverts are clogged with leaves, the % sky has gone a perpetual gray, and /cornstalks stand in leaning rows like soldiers who have found + some fantastic way to die on their feet. ,Pumpkins, sagging inward now with soft-rot, are piled / against crepuscular sheds, smelling like the -breath of old women. There is no heat and no cold at / this time of year, only pallid air, which is -never still, beating through the bare fields under white ) skies where birds fly south in chevron -shapes. That wind blows dust up from the soft shoulders , of back roads in dancing dervishes, parts ,the played-out fields as a comb parts hair, and sniffs its , way into junked cars up on blocks in back yards. ' The Newall house out on Town Road #3 ,overlooks that part of Castle Rock known as the * Bend. It is somehow impossible to sense )anything good about this house. It has a deathly look, / which can be only partially explained by its +lack of paint. The front lawn is a mass of dried - hummocks, which the frost will soon heave, (into even more grotesque postures. Thin smoke rises 0 from Brownie's Store at the foot of the hill. -Once the Bend was a fairly important part of Castle , Rock, but that time passed around the time,Korea got over. On the old bandstand across the road / from Brownie's two small children roll a red .firetruck between them. Their faces are tired and , washed out, the faces of old men, almost. ,Their hands actually seem to cut the air as they roll the , truck between them, pausing only to swipe .at their endlessly running noses every now andagain. . In the store Harley McKissick is presiding, (corpulent and red-faced, while old John - Clutterbuck and Lenny Partridge sit by the 1stove with their feet up. Paul Corliss is leaning- against the counter. The store has a smell )that is ancient a smell of salami and flypaper and ( coffee and tobacco; of sweat and dark *brown Coca-Cola; of pepper and cloves and O'Dell Hair . Tonic, which looks like semen and turns hair/into sculpture. A flyspecked poster advertisinga / beanhole bean supper held in 1986 still leans)in the window next to one advertising an + appearance of 'Country' Ken Corriveau at +the 1984 Castle County Fair. The light and heat of / almost ten summers has fallen on this latter ,poster, and now Ken Corriveau (who has been out of . the country-music business for at least half.of those ten years and now sells Fords over in- Chamberlain) looks simultaneously faded and,toasted. At the back of the store is a huge glass ' freezer that came out of New York in )1933, and everywhere hangs the vague but tremendous  smell of coffee-beans. + The old men watch the children and speak +in low, desultory tones. John Clutterbuck, whose . grandson, Andy, is busy drinking himself to ,death this fall, has been talking about the town 1 landfill. The landfill stinks like a bugger in -the summertime, he says. No one disputes this it's / true but no one is very interested in the /subject, either, because it's not summer, it's autumn, + and the huge range-oil stove is throwing *off a stuporous glow of heat. The Winston thermometer , behind the counter says 82. Clutterbuck's (forehead has a huge dent above his left eyebrow where * he struck his head in a car accident in /1963. Small children sometimes ask to touch it. Old Clut + has won a great deal of money from summer.people who don't believe the dent in his head will , hold the contents of a medium-sized water tumbler. , 'Paulson,' Harley McKissick says quietly. . An old Chevrolet has pulled in behind Lenny )Partridge's oil-burner. On the side is a cardboard * sign held with heavy masking tape. GARY (PAULSON CHAIR'S CANED ANTIQUES BOUGHT & SOLD, , the sign reads, with the telephone number -to call beneath the words. Gary Paulson gets out of his . car slowly, an old man in faded green pants -with a huge satchel seat. He drags a knurled cane out . after him, holding to the doorframe tightly .until he has the cane planted just the way he likes it. * The cane has the white plastic handgrip .from a child's bike affixed over its dark tip like a 1 condom. It makes small circles in the lifeless 0dust as Paulson begins his careful trip from hiscar  to the door of Brownie's. + The children on the bandstand look up at 1him then follow his glance (fearfully, it seems) to the * leaning, crepitating bulk of the Newall ,house on the ridge above them. Then they go back to their  firetruck. + Joe Newall bought in Castle Rock in 1904 -and owned in Castle Rock until 1929, but his fortune , was made in the nearby mill town of Gates +Falls. He was a scrawny man with an angry, hectic ( face and eyes with yellow corneas. He .bought a great parcel of open land out in the Bend this , was when it was quite a thriving village, +complete with a profitable little combined wood-milling . operation and furniture factory from The .First National Bank of Oxford. The bank got itfrom , Phil Budreau in a foreclosure assisted by (County Sheriff Nickerson Campbell. Phil Budreau, + well-liked but considered something of a -fool by his neighbors, slunk away to Kittery and spent - the next twelve years or so tinkering with *cars and motorcycles. Then he went off to France to - fight the Heinies, fell out of an airplane -while on a reconnaissance mission (or so the story has  it), and was killed. . The Budreau patch lay silent and fallow for /most of those years, while Joe Newall lived in a - rented house in Gates Falls and saw to the ,making of his fortune. He was known more forhis + employee-severance policies than for the -way he'd turned around a mill, which had been tottering . on the brink of ruination when hed bought -it for a song, back in '02. The mill-workers called * him Firing Joe, because if you missed a -single shift you were sent down the road, no excuses  accepted or even listened to. ) He married Cora Leonard, niece of Carl -Stowe, in 1914. The marriage had great merit  in / Joe Newall's eyes, certainly because Cora /was Carl's only living relative, and she would no , doubt come into a nice little bundle when +Carl passed on (as long as Joe remained on good terms $ with him, that was, and he had no .intentions of being on anything less with the old fellow, who + had been Damned Shrewd in his day but was-considered to have become Rather Soft in his . declining years). There were other mills in -the area that could be bought for a song and then / turned around . . . if, that was, a man had a/little capital to use as a lever. Joe soon had his lever; . his wife's rich uncle died within a year of the wedding. * So the marriage had merit oh yes, no *doubt about it. Cora herself did not have merit, * however. She was a grainbag of a woman, 1incredibly wide across the hips, incredibly full in the + butt, yet almost as flatchested as a boy +and possessed of an absurd little pipestem neck upon ) which her oversized head nodded like a -strange pale sunflower. Her cheeks hung like dough, her - lips like strips of liver; her face was as -silent as a full moon on a winter night. She sweated huge * dark patches around the armholes of her ,dresses even in February, and she carried a dank smell # of perspiration with her always. ( Joe began a house for his wife on the +Budreau patch in 1915, and a year later it seemed . finished. It was painted white and enclosed %twelve rooms that sprouted from many strange / angles. Joe Newall was not popular in Castle +Rock, partly because he made his money out of $ town, partly because Budreau, his -predecessor, had been such an all-around nicefellow (though - a fool, they always reminded each other, as-if foolishness and niceness went together andit + would be death to forget it), but mostly (because his damned house was built with out-of-town ( labor. Shortly before the gutters and )downspouts were hung, an obscene drawing accompanied ) by a one-syllable Anglo-Saxon word was -scrawled on the fanhghted front door in soft yellow  chalk. ) By 1920 Joe Newall was a rich man. His 0three Gates Falls mills were going like a house afire, . stuffed with the profits of a world war and )comfortable with the orders of the newly arisen or . (arising) middle class. He began to build a )new wing on his house. Most folks in the village * pronounced it unnecessary after all, ,there were just the two of them up there and almost all - opined it added nothing but ugly to a house,most of them already considered ugly beyond almost ) all measure. This new wing towered one .story above the main house and looked blindly down * the ridge, which had in those days been covered with straggling pines. * The news that just the two of them were &soon to become just the three of them trickled in from , Gates Falls, the source most likely being +Doris Gingercroft, who was Dr. Robertson's nurse in + those days. So the added wing was in the .nature of a celebration, it seemed. After six years of / wedded bliss and four years of living in the -Bend, during which she had been seen only at a + distance as she crossed her dooryard, or /occasionally picking flowers crocuses, wild roses, / Queen Anne's lace, ladyslipper, paintbrush 1in the field beyond the buildings, after all that) time, Cora Leonard Newall had Kindled. + She never shopped at Brownie's. Cora did -her marketing at the Kitty Korner Store over in ) Gates Center every Thursday afternoon. + In January of 1921, Cora gave birth to a .monster with no arms and, it was said, a tiny clutch of & perfect fingers sticking out of one -eyesocket. It died less than six hours after mindless & contractions had pushed its red and /senseless face into the light. Joe Newall addeda cupola to the + wing seventeen months later, in the late -spring of 1922 (in western Maine there is no early 1 spring; only late spring and winter before it).*He continued to buy out of town and would have 0 nothing to do with Bill 'Brownie' McKissick's .store. He also never crossed the threshold of the & Bend Methodist Church. The deformed +infant which had slid from his wife's womb was buried - in the Newall plot in Gates rather than in &Homeland. The inscription on the tiny headstone read: ' SARAH TAMSON TABITHA FRANCINE NEWALL  JANUARY 14, 1921  GOD GRANT SHE LIE STILL. , In the store they talked about Joe Newall ,and Joe's wife and Joe's house as Brownie's kid - Harley, still not old enough to shave (but +with his senescence buried inside just the same, . hibernating, waiting, perhaps dreaming) but -old enough to stack vegetables and haul pecksof % potatoes out to the roadside stand ,whenever called upon to do so, stood by and listened. Mostly it , was the house of which they spoke; it was #considered to be an affront to the sensibilities and an - offense to the eye. 'But it grows on you,' %Clayton Clutterbuck (father of John) sometimes * remarked. There was never any answer to ,this. It was a statement with absolutely no meaning . . . - yet at the same time it was a patent fact. /If you were standing in the yard at Brownie's, maybe / just looking at the berries for the best box (when berry-season was on, you sooner or later found + your eyes turning up to the house on the )ridge the way a weathervane turns to the nor'east before / a March blizzard. Sooner or later you had to .look, and as time went by, it got to be soonerfor - most people. Because, as Clayt Clutterbuck $said, the Newall place grew on you. - In 1924, Cora fell down the stairs between *the cupola and the new wing, breaking her neck - and her back. A rumor went through town (it/probably originated at a Ladies Aid Bake Sale) that , she had been stark naked at the time. She %was interred next to her ill-formed, short-lived  daughter. , Joe Newall who, most folks now agreed, -undoubtedly contained a touch of the kike , continued to make money hand over fist. He/built two sheds and a barn up on the ridge, allof * them connected to the main house by way +of the new wing. The barn was completed in 1927, ) and its purpose became clear almost at ,once Joe had apparently decided to becomea + gentleman farmer. He bought sixteen cows -from a fellow in Mechanic Falls. He bought a shiny . new milking machine from the same fellow. It)looked like a metal octopus to those who glanced - into the back of the delivery truck and saw.it when the driver stopped at Brownie's for a cold - bottle of ale before going on up the hill. ( With the cows and the milking machine .installed, Joe hired a halfwit from Motion to take care ) of his investment. How this supposedly -hard-fisled and tough-minded mill-owner couldhave + done such a thing perplexed everyone who /turned his mind to the question that Newall was . slipping seemed to be the only answer but)he did, and of course the cows all died. ) The county health officer showed up to 'look at the cows, and Joe showed him a signed . statement from a veterinarian (a Gates Falls-veterinarian, folks said ever after, raising their ' brows significantly as they said it) ,certifying that the cows had died of bovine meningitis. . 'That means bad luck in English,' Joe said. $ 'Is that supposed to be a joke?'' . 'Take it the way you want to take it,' said Joe. 'That's all right.' , 'Make that idiot shut up, why don't you?' .the county health officer said. He was lookingdown ' the driveway at the halfwit, who was *leaning against the Newall R.F.D. box and howling. Tears * ran down his pudgy, dirty cheeks. Every )now and then he would draw back and slap himself a , good one, like he knew the whole thing was his fault.  'He's all right, too.' 0 'Nothing up here seems all right to me,' said -the county health man, 'least of all sixteen cows , layin dead on their backs with their legs /stickin up like fence-posts. I can see 'em fromhere.' , 'Good,' said Joe Newall, 'because it's as close as you'll get.' , The county health officer threw the Gates .Falls vet's paper down and stamped one of his boots + on it. He looked at Joe Newall, his face .flushed so bright that the burst squiggles of veins on the 0 sides of his nose stood out purple. 'I want to-see those cows. Haul one away, if it comes tothat.'  'No.' 1 'You don't own the world, Newall I'll get a court order.'  'Let's see if you can.' , The health officer drove away. Joe watched)him. Down at the end of the driveway the halfwit, / clad in dung-splattered bib overalls from the,Sears and Roebuck mail-order catalogue, wenton , leaning against the Newall R.F.D. box and -howling. He stayed there all that hot August day, 0 howling at the top of his lungs with his flat ,mongoloid face turned up to the yellow sky. 'Bellerin . like a calf in the moonlight' was how young Gary Paulson put it. % The county health officer was Clem (Upshaw, from Sirois Hill. He might have dropped the ) matter once his thermostat went down a 'little, but Brownie McKissick, who had supported him * for the office he held (and who let him -charge a fair amount of beer), urged him not to. Harley * McKissick's dad was not the kind of man /who usually resorted to cat's paws or had to but ) he'd wanted to make a point concerning ,private property with Joe Newall. He wanted Joe to . understand that private property is a great +thing, yes, an American thing, but private property is , still stitched to the town, and in Castle -Rock people still believed the community came first, even 1 with rich folks that could build a little more +house on their house whenever the whim tookthem. * So Clem Upshaw went on down to Lackery, ,which was the county seat in those days, andgot the  order. - While he was getting it, a large van drove +up past the howling moron and to the barn. When , Clem Upshaw returned with his order, only +one cow remained, gazing at him with black eyes + which had grown dull and distant beneath -their covering of hay chaff. Clem determined that this . cow at least had died of bovine meningitis, )and then he went away. When he was gone, the + remover's van returned for the last cow. + In 1928 Joe began another wing. That was 'when the men who gathered at Brownie's decided , the man was crazy. Smart, yes, but crazy. ,Benny Ellis claimed that Joe had gouged out his - daughter's one eye and kept it in a jar of )what Benny called 'fubbledehyde'' on the kitchen table, , along with the amputated fingers which had,been poking out of the other socket when thebaby  was born. ) Benny was a great reader of the horror *pulps, magazines that showed naked ladies being , carried off by giant ants and similar bad ,dreams on their covers, and his story about Joe Newall's * jar was clearly inspired by his reading 0matter. As a result, there were soon people all over Castle + Rock not just the Bend who claimed ,every word of it was true. Some claimed Joe kept + even less mentionable things in the jar. , The second wing was finished in August of (1929 and two nights later a fast-moving jalopy - with great sodium circles for eyes screamed-juddering into Joe Newall's driveway and the - stinking, flyblown corpse of a large skunk 'was thrown at the new wing. The animal splattered + above one of the windows, throwing a fan .of blood across the panes in a pattern almost like a  Chinese ideogram. - In September of that year a fire swept the 0carding room of Newall's flagship mill in Gates / Falls, causing fifty thousand dollars' worth 'of damage. In October the stock market crashed. In , November Joe Newall hanged himself from a )rafter in one of the unfinished rooms probably a ( bedroom, it was meant to be of the +newest wing. The smell of sap in the fresh wood was still - strong. He was found by Cleveland Torbutt, .the assistant manager of Gates Mills and Joe's- partner (or so it was rumored) in a number *of Wall Street ventures that were now not worth the + puke of a tubercular cocker spaniel. The (county coroner, who happened to be Clem Upshaws $ brother Noble, cut down the body. . Joe was buried next to his wife and child on)the last day of November. It was a hard, brilliant + day and the only person from Castle Rock )to attend the service was Alvin Coy, who drove the - Hay & Peabody funeral hack. Alvin reported (that one of the spectators was a young, shapely , woman in a raccoon coat and a black cloche.hat. Sitting in Brownie's and eating a pickle straight ' out of the barrel, Alvin would smile .mordantly and tell his cronies that she was a jazz baby if he - had ever seen one. She bore not one whit of-resemblance to Cora Leonard Newall's side of the ) family, and she hadn't closed her eyes during the prayer. % Gary Paulson enters the store with /exquisite slowness, closing the door carefully behind him. 0 'Afternoon,' Harley McKissick says neutrally. & 'Heard you won a turkey down to the (Grange last night,' says Old Clut as he prepares to light  his pipe. / 'Yuh,' Gary says. He's eighty-four and, like +the others, can remember when the Bend was a 0 damned sight livelier than it is now. He lost ,two sons in two wars the two before that mess in - Viet Nam and that was a hard thing. His .third, a good boy, died in a collision with a + pulpwood truck up around Presque Isle )back in 1973, that was. Somehow that one was easier ) to take, God knows why. Gary sometimes 0drools from the corners of his lips these days, and , makes frequent smacking sounds as he tries-to suck the drool back into his mouth before it can , get away and start running down his chin. .He doesn't know a whole hell of a lot lately, but he , knows getting old is a lousy way to spend the last years of your life.  'Coffee?' Harley asks.  'Guess not.' + Lenny Partridge, who will probably never .recover from the broken ribs he suffered in a ) strange road-accident two autumns ago, .pulls his feet back so the older man can pass by him and 0 lower himself carefully into the chair in the *corner (Gary caned the seat of this chair himself, / back in '82). Paulson smacks his lips, sucks .back spit, and folds his lumpy hands over the head of ( his cane. He looks tired and haggard. 0 'It is going to rain a pretty bitch,' he says finally. 'I'm aching that bad.' ( 'It's a bad fall,' Paul Corliss says. , There is silence. The heat from the stove -fills the store that will go out of business when . Harley dies or maybe even before he dies if /his youngest daughter has her way, it fills thestore , and coats the bones of the old men, tries ,to, anyway, and sniffs up against the dirty glass with its * ancient posters looking out at the yard ,where there were gas-pumps until Mobil took them out in + 1977. They are old men who have, for the *most part, seen their children go away to more ' profitable places. The store does no +business to speak of now, except for a few locals and the + occasional through-going summer tourists .who think old men like these, old men who sit by the - stove in their thermal undershirts even in .July, are quaint. Old Clut has always claimed that new + people are going to come to this part of .the Rock, but the last couple of years things have been ( worse than ever it seems the whole goddam town is dying. ( 'Who is building the new wing on that +Christly Newall house?' Gary asks finally. , They look around at him. For a moment the *kitchen match Old Clut has just scratched hangs - mystically over his pipe, burning down the /wood, turning it black. The sulfur node at the end - turns gray and curls up. At last, Old Clut (dips the match into the bowl and puffs.  'New wing?' Harley asks.  'Yuh.' + A blue membrane of smoke from Old Clut's *pipe drifts up over the stove and spreads there like . a delicate fisherman's net. Lenny Partridge 0tilts his chin up to stretch the wattles of his neck taut ) and then runs his hand slowly down his throat, producing a dry rasp. ( 'No one that I know of,' Harley says, -somehow indicating by his tone of voice that this ) includes anyone of any consequence, at !least in this part of the world. . 'They ain't had a buyer on that place since ,nineteen n eighty-one,' Old Clut says. When Old ) Clut says they, he means both Southern 'Maine Weaving and The Bank of Southern Maine, but he ) means more: he means The Massachusetts 'Wops. Southern Maine Weaving came into ownership 0 of Joe's three mills and Joe's house on the-ridge about a year after Joe took his own life, , but as far as the men gathered around the .stove in Brownie's are concerned, that name's just a , smoke-screen . . . or what they sometimes &call The Legal, as in She swore out a perfection order ) on him n now he can't even see his own *kids because of The Legal. These men hate The Legal as 0 it impinges upon their lives and the lives of 0their friends, but it fascinates them endlessly when * they consider how some people put it to -work in order to further their own nefarious moneymaking  schemes. * Southern Maine Weaving, aka The Bank of +Southern Maine, aka The Massachusetts Wops,- enjoyed a long and profitable run with the 0mills Joe Newall saved from extinction, but it'sthe * way they have been unable to get rid of *the house that fascinates the old men who spend their - days in Brownie's. 'It's like a booger you /can't flick off the end of your finger,' Lenny Partridge , said once, and they all nodded. 'Not even ,those spaghetti-suckers from Maiden n Reverecan get  rid of that millstone.' ' Old Clut and his grandson, Andy, are -currently estranged, and it is the ownership of Joe 1 Newall's ugly house, which has caused it . . . .although there are other, more personal issues- swirling around just below the surface, no .doubt there almost always are. The subject came up - one night after grandfather and grandson *both widowers now had enjoyed a pretty decent ( dinner at Young Clut's house in town. + Young Andy, who had not yet lost his job *on the town's police-force, tried (rather selfindulgently) . to explain to his grandfather that Southern $Maine Weaving had had nothing to do , with any of the erstwhile Newall holdings -for years, that the actual owner of the housein the + Bend was The Bank of Southern Maine, and +that the two companies had nothing whateverto do - with each other. Old John told Andy he was .a fool if he believed that; everyone knew, he said, , that both the bank and the textile company+were fronts for The Massachusetts Wops, and that the , only difference between them was a couple )of words. They just hid the more obvious $ connections with great bunches of /paperwork, Old Clut explained The Legal, in other words. + Young Clut had the bad taste to laugh at ,that. Old Clut turned red, threw his napkin onto his . plate, and got to his feet. Laugh, he said. *You just go on. Why not? The only thing a drunk does - better'n laugh at what he don't understand *is cry over he don't know what. That made Andy mad, , and he said something about Melissa being ,the reason why he drank, and John asked his , grandson how long he was going to blame a -dead wife for his boozing. Andy turned white when - the old man said that, and told him to get .out of his house, and John did, and he hasn't been back * since. Nor does he want to. Harsh words /aside, he can't bear to see Andy going to hell on a  handcart like he is. * Speculation or not, this much cannot be (denied: the house on the ridge has been empty for * eleven years now, no one has ever lived )there for long, and The Bank of Southern Maine is . usually the organization that ends up trying0to sell it through one of the local real estate firms. , 'The last people to buy it come from uppa +state New York, didn't they?' Paul Corliss asks, and / he speaks so rarely they all turn toward him.Even Gary does. 0 'Yessir,' Lenny says. 'They was a nice couple.)The man was gonna paint the barn red and turn - it into some sort of antique store, wasn't he?' 0 'Ayuh,' Old Clut says. 'Then their boy got thegun they kep ' - 'People are so goddam careless ' Harley puts in. ' 'Did he die?' Lenny asks. 'The boy?' . Silence greets the question. It seems no one.knows. Then, at last almost reluctantly Gary 1 speaks up. 'No,' he said. 'But it blinded him. )They moved up to Auburn. Or maybe it was Leeds.' 2 'They was likely people,' Lenny said. 'I really -thought they might make a go of it. But they was , set on that house. Believed everybody was /pullin their leg about how it was bad luck, on account $ of they was from Away.' He pauses 0meditatively. 'Maybe they think better now . . . wherever  they are.' . There's silence as the old men think of the *people from uppa state New York, or maybe of ' their own failing organs and sensory ,equipment. In the dimness behind the stove, oil gurgles. ' Somewhere beyond it, a shutter claps .heavily back and forth in the restless autumn air. 1 'There's a new wing going up on it, all right,'.Gary says. He speaks quietly but emphatically,as - if one of the others has contradicted this *statement. 'I saw it comin down the River Road. Most of . the framing's already done. Damn thing looks,like it wants to be a hundred feet long and thirty + feet wide. Never noticed it before. Nice *maple, looks like. Where does anybody get nice maple  like that in this day n age?'  No one answers. No one knows. 0 At last, very tentatively, Paul Corliss says, ,'Sure you're not thinking of another house, Gary?  Could be you ' . 'Could be shit,' Gary says, just as quietly 1but even more forcefully. 'It's the Newall place,a new + wing on the Newall place, already framed +up, and if you still got doubts, just step outside and  have a look for yourself.' / With that said, there is nothing left to say - they believe him. Neither Paul nor anyone else , rushes outside to crane up at the new wing*being added to the Newall house, however. They + consider it a matter of some importance, *and thus nothing to hurry over. More time passes + Harley McKissick has reflected more than .once that if time was pulpwood, they'd all be rich. $ Paul goes to the old water-cooled +soft-drink chest and gets an Orange Crush. He gives Harley & sixty cents and Harley rings up the (purchase. When he slams the cash-drawer shut again, he + realizes the atmosphere in the store has ,changed somehow. There are other matters to discuss. - Lenny Partridge coughs, winces, presses his*hands lightly against his chest where the broken . ribs have never really healed, and asks Gary)when they are going to have services for Dana Roy. . 'Tomorrow,' Gary says, 'down Gorham. That's !where his wife is laid to rest.' - Lucy Roy died in 1968; Dana, who was until ,1979 an electrician for U.S. Gypsum over in . Gates Falls (these men routinely and with no+prejudice refer to the company as U.S. Gyp Em), - died of intestinal cancer two days before. 2He lived in Castle Rock all his life, and liked totell * people that he'd only been out of Maine /three times in his eighty years, once to visit an aunt in * Connecticut, once to see the Boston Red .Sox play at Fenway Park ('And they lost, thosebums,' - he always added at this point), and once to&attend an electricians' convention in Portsmouth, New - Hampshire. 'Damn waste of time,' he always /said of the convention. 'Nothin but drinkin and& wimmin, and none of the wimmin even 0worth lookin at, let alone that other thing.' Hewas a - crony of these men, and in his passing they,feel a queer mixture of sorrow and triumph. / 'They took out four feet of his underpinnin,'1Gary tells the other men. 'Didn't do no good. It  was all through him.' - 'He knew Joe Newall,' Lenny says suddenly. +'He was up there with his dad when his dad was . puttin in Joe's lectricity couldn't have 0been more'n six or eight, I'd judge. I remember he said ) Joe give him a sucker one time, but he /pitched it out'n his daddy's truck on the ride home. Said it , tasted sour and funny. Then, later, after 0they got all the mills runnin again the late thirties, that + would've been he was in charge of the #rewirin. You member that, Harley?'  'Yup.' + Now that the subject has come back to Joe'Newall by way of Dana Roy, the men sit quietly, % conning their brains for anecdotes )Concerning either man. But when Old Clut finally speaks, he / says a startling thing. ' 'It was Dana Roy's -big brother, Will, who throwed that skunk at the side * of the house that time. I'm almost sure 'twas.' / 'Will?' Lenny raises his eyebrows. 'Will Roy /was too steady to do a thing like that, I would have said.' - Gary Paulson says, very quietly: 'Ayuh, it was Will.'  They turn to look at him. - 'And 'twas the wife that give Dana a sucker+that day he came with his dad,' Gary says. 'Cora, , not Joe. And Dana wa'ant no six or eight; )the skunk was throwed around the time of the Crash, + and Cora was dead by then. No, Dana maybe,remembered some of it, but he couldn't have been , no more than two. It was around 1916 that +he got that sucker, because it was in ' 16 that Eddie , Roy wired the house. He was never up there/again. Frank the middle boy, he's been dead ten + or twelve year now he would have been *six or eight then, maybe. Frank seen what Cora done . to the little one, that much I know, but not1when he told Will. It don't matter. Finally Will + decided to do somethin about it. By then ,the woman was dead, so he took it out on the house Joe  built for her.' ' 'Never mind that part,' Harley says, +fascinated. 'What'd she do to Dana? That's what I want to  know.' * Gary speaks calmly, almost judiciously. ,'What Frank told me one night when he'd had a few ) was that the woman give him the sucker *with one hand and reached into his didies with the other. $ Right in front of the older boy.' / 'She never!' Old Clut says, shocked in spite of himself. , Gary only looks at him with his yellowed, fading eyes and says nothing. - Silence again, except for the wind and the &clapping shutter. The children on the bandstand & have taken their firetruck and gone /somewhere else with it and still the depthless afternoon , continues on and on, the light that of an /Andrew Wyeth painting, white and still and full of idiot ' meaning. The ground has given up its +meager yield and waits uselessly for snow. . Gary would like to tell them of the sickroom+at Cumberland Memorial Hospital where Dana - Roy lay dying with black snot caked around 2his nostrils and smelling like a fish left out in the . sun. He would like to tell them of the cool /blue tiles and of nurses with their hair drawn back in , nets, young things for the most part with *pretty legs and firm young breasts and no idea that 1923 . was a real year, as real as the pains which -haunt the bones of old men. He feels he wouldlike to , sermonize on the evil of time and perhaps -even the evil of certain places, and explain why Castle ) Rock is now like a dark tooth which is 0finally ready to fall out. Most of all he would like to * inform them that Dana Roy sounded as if -someone had stuffed his chest full of hay andhe was , trying to breathe through it, and that he /looked as if he had already started to rot. Yet he can say * none of these things because he doesn't ,know how, and so he only sucks back spit andsays  nothing. 1 'No one liked old Joe much,' Old Clut says . . /. and then his face brightens suddenly. 'But by God, he grew on you!'  The others do not reply. ) Nineteen days later, a week before the -first snow comes to cover the useless earth, Gary Paulson 1 has a surprisingly sexual dream . . . except itis mostly a memory. + On August 14, 1923, while driving by the )Newall house in his father's farm truck, thirteenyear- & old Gary Martin Paulson happened to )observe Cora Leonard Newall turning away from her - mailbox at the end of the driveway. She had,the newspaper in one hand. She saw Gary and + reached down with her free hand to grasp .the hem of her housedress. She did not smile. That + tremendous moon of a face was pallid and -empty as she raised the dress, revealing her sex to him , it was the first time he had ever seen -that mystery so avidly discussed by the boys he knew. 1 And, still not smiling but only looking at him .gravely, she pistoned her hips at his gaping, , amazed face as he passed her by. And as he*passed, his hand dropped into his lap and moments . later he ejaculated into his flannel pants. / It was his first orgasm. In the years since, 'he has made love to a good many women, beginning ) with Sally Ouelette underneath the Tin *Bridge back in '26, and every time he has neared the - moment of orgasm every single one he +has seen Cora Leonard Newall: has seen her * standing beside her mailbox under a hot /gunmetal sky, has seen her lifting her dress to reveal an - almost non-existent thatch of gingery hair .beneath the creamy ground-swell of her belly, has . seen the exclamatory slit with its red lips *tinting toward what he knows would be the most  deliriously delicate coral  (Cora) - pink. Yet it is not the sight of her vulva ,below that somehow promiscuous swell of gut that has - haunted him through all the years, so that )every woman became Cora at the moment of release; , or it is not just that. What always drove *him mad with lust when he remembered (and when he , made love he was helpless not to) was the .way she had pumped her hips at him . . . once,twice, % three times. That, and the lack of /expression on her face, a neutrality so deep itseemed more like * idiocy, as if she were the sum of every .very young man's limited sexual understanding and desire , a tight and yearning darkness, no more -than that, a limited Eden glowing Cora-pink. , His sex-life has been both delineated and *delimited by that experience a seminal experience , if ever there was one but he has never +mentioned it, although he has been tempted more than , once when in his cups. He has hoarded it. 0And it is of this incident that he is dreaming, penis / perfectly erect for the first time in almost -nine years, when a small blood vessel in his cerebellum + ruptures, forming a clot which kills him .quietly, considerately sparing him four weeks or four - months of paralysis, the flexible tubes in -the arms, the catheter, the noiseless nurses with their / hair in nets and their fine high breasts. He ,dies in his sleep, penis wilting, the dream fading like . the afterimage of a television picture tube .switched off in a dark room. His cronies wouldbe ( puzzled, however, if any of them were .there to hear the last two words he speaks gasped out  but still clear enough:  'The moon!' / The day after he is laid to rest in Homeland,,a new cupola starts to go up on the new wingon  the Newall house.   -Chattery Teeth-  ) Looking into the display case was like /looking through a dirty pane of glass into the middle third , of his boyhood, those years from seven to (fourteen when he had been fascinated by stuff like , this. Hogan leaned closer, forgetting the )rising whine of the wind outside and the gritty spickspack ) sound of sand hitting the windows. The +case was full of fabulous junk, most of it , undoubtedly made in Taiwan and Korea, but ,there was no doubt at all about the pick of the litter. , They were the largest Chattery Teeth he'd -ever seen. They were also the only ones he'd ever seen - with feet big orange cartoon shoes with white spats. A real scream. * Hogan looked up at the fat woman behind -the counter. She was wearing a tee-shirt thatsaid & NEVADA IS GOD'S COUNTRY on top (the 'words swelling and receding across her enormous breasts) , and about an acre of jeans on the bottom. 0She was selling a pack of cigarettes to a pallidyoung + man whose long blonde hair had been tied ,back in a ponytail with a sneaker shoelace. The young * man, who had the face of an intelligent .lab-rat, was paying in small change, counting it # laboriously out of a grimy hand. # 'Pardon me, ma'am?' Hogan asked. * She looked at him briefly, and then the ,back door banged open. A skinny man wearing a , bandanna over his mouth and nose came in. -The wind swirled desert grit around him in a cyclone & and rattled the pin-up cutie on the -Valvoline calendar thumb-tacked to the wall. The newcomer * was pulling a handcart. Three wire-mesh &cages were stacked on it. There was a tarantula in the  one on top. ' In the cages below it were a pair of -rattlesnakes. They were coiling rapidly back and forth and & shaking their rattles in agitation. - 'Shut the damn door, Scooter, was you born )in a barn?' the woman behind the counter bawled. * He glanced at her briefly, eyes red and *irritated from the blowing sand. 'Gimme a chance, + woman! Can't you see I got my hands full .here? Ain't you got eyes? Christ!' He reached over the * dolly and slammed the door. The dancing .sand fell dead to the floor and he pulled the dolly * toward the storeroom at the back, still muttering. * 'That the last of em?' the woman asked. . 'All but Wolf.' He pronounced it Woof. 'I'm +gonna stick him in the lean-to back of the gaspumps.' + 'You ain't not!' the big woman retorted. 0'Wolfs our star attraction, in case you forgot. You get , him in here. Radio says this is gonna get +worse before it gets better. A lot worse.' - 'Just who do you think you're foolin?' The )skinny man (her husband, Hogan supposed) stood & looking at her with a kind of weary /truculence, his hands on his hips. 'Damn thing ain't nothin ( but a Minnesota coydog, as anyone who ,took more'n half a look could plainly see.' + The wind gusted, moaning along the eaves -of Scooter's Grocery & Roadside Zoo, throwing- sheaves of dry sand against the windows. It,was getting worse, and Hogan could only hopehe + would be able to drive out of it. He had 'promised Lita and Jack he'd be home by seven, eight at , the latest, and he was a man who liked to keep his promises. . 'Just take care of him,' the big woman said,+and turned irritably back to the rat-faced boy.  'Ma'am?' Hogan said again. ) 'Just a minute, hold your water,' Mrs. ,Scooter said. She spoke with the air of one who is all but , drowning in impatient customers, although ,Hogan and the rat-faced boy were in fact theonly  ones present. - 'You're a dime short, Sunny Jim,' she told +the blonde kid after a quick glance at the coins on  the counter-top. + The boy regarded her with wide, innocent /eyes. 'I don't suppose you'd trust me for it?' , 'I doubt if the Pope of Rome smokes Merit 3100's, but if he did, I wouldn't trust him for it.'" The look of wide-eyed innocence -disappeared. The rat-faced boy looked at her with an , expression of sullen dislike for a moment -(this expression looked much more at home on the . kid's face, Hogan thought), and then slowly (began to investigate his pockets again. , Just forget it and get out of here, Hogan 0thought. You'll never make it to LA by eight if you $ don't get moving, windstorm or no ,windstorm. This is one of those places that have only two , speeds slow and stop. You got your gas .and paid for it, so just count yourself ahead of the + game and get back on the road before the storm gets any worse. + He almost followed his left-brain's good /advice . . . and then he looked at the Chattery Teeth in - the display case again, the Chattery Teeth +standing there on those big orange cartoon shoes. And / white spats! They were the real killer. Jack /would love them, his right brain told him. And tell the / truth, Bill, old buddy; if it turns out Jack 'doesn't want them, you do. You may see another set of , Jumbo Chattery Teeth at some point in your/life, any thing's possible, but ones that also walk on . big orange feet? Huh-uh. I really doubt it. - It was the right brain he listened to that )time . . . and everything else followed. , The kid with the ponytail was still going .through his pockets; the sullen expression on his face + deepened each time he came up dry. Hogan 'was no fan of smoking his father, a two-pack-aday - man, had died of lung cancer but he had 0visions of still waiting to be waited on an hour from now. 'Hey! Kid!' * The kid looked around and Hogan flipped him a quarter.  'Hey! Thanks, m'man!'  'Think nothing of it.' - The kid concluded his transaction with the .beefy Mrs. Scooter, put the cigarettes in one , pocket, and dropped the remaining fifteen *cents in another. He made no offer of the change to - Hogan, who hadn't really expected it. Boys .and girls like this were legion these days they ' cluttered the highways from coast to .coast, blowing along like tumbleweeds. Perhaps they had & always been there, but to Hogan the +current breed seemed both unpleasant and a little scary, like . the rattlers Scooter was now storing in the back room. ) The snakes in piss-ant little roadside 1menageries like this one couldn't kill you; theirvenom . was milked twice a week and sold to clinics ,that made drugs with it. You could count on that just , as you could count on the winos to show up+at the local plasma bank every Tuesday and / Thursday. But the snakes could still give you0one hell of a painful bite if you got too close and + then made them mad. That. Hogan thought, ,was what the current breed of road-kids had in  common with them. & Mrs. Scooter came drifting down the -counter, the words on her tee-shirt drifting up and down . and side to side as she did. 'Whatcha need?'-she asked.-Her tone was still truculent. The West had / a reputation for friendliness, and during the-twenty years he had spent selling there Hoganhad , come to feel the reputation was more often-than not deserved, but this woman had all thecharm ( of a Brooklyn shopkeeper who has been ,stuck up three times in the last two weeks. Hogan ) supposed that her kind was becoming as ,much a part of the scene in the New West as the roadkids.  Sad but true. % 'How much are these?' Hogan asked, -pointing through the dirty glass at what the sign ( identified as JUMBO CHATTERY TEETH ,THEY WALK! The case was filled with novelty items * Chinese finger-pullers, Pepper Gum, Dr. ,Wacky's Sneezing Powder, cigarette loads (A Laff * Riot! according to the package Hogan -guessed they were more likely a great way to get your - teeth knocked out), X-ray glasses, plastic $vomit (So Realistic!), joy-buzzers. - 'I dunno,' Mrs. Scooter said. 'Where's the box, I wonder?' + The teeth were the only item in the case -that wasn't packaged, but they certainly werejumbo, - Hogan thought super-jumbo, in fact, five,times the size of the sets of wind-up teeth which had - so amused him as a kid growing up in Maine.,Take away the joke feet and they would look like 0 the teeth of some fallen Biblical giant the-cuspids were big white blocks and the canine teeth . looked like tentpegs sunk in the improbably -red plastic gums. A key jutted from one gum. The , teeth were held together in a clench by a thick rubber band. & Mrs. Scooter blew the dust from the 'Chattery Teeth, then turned them over, looking on the ( soles of the orange shoes for a price 2sticker. She didn't find one. 'I don't know,' she said crossly, , eyeing Hogan as if he might have taken the0sticker off himself. 'Only Scooter'd buy a pieceof . trash like this here. Been around since Noah)got off the boat. I'll have to ask him.' + Hogan was suddenly tired of the woman and*of Scooter's Grocery & Roadside Zoo. They were ' great Chattery Teeth, and Jack would -undoubtedly love them, but he had promised eight at the  latest. . 'Never mind,' he said. 'It was just an ' - 'Them teeth was supposed to go for $15.95, 0if you c'n believe it,' Scooter said from behind- them. 'They ain't just plastic those're +metal teeth painted white. They could give you a helluva / bite if they worked . . . but she dropped 'em*on the floor two-three years ago when she was dustm . the inside of the case and they're busted.' . 'Oh,' Hogan said, disappointed. 'That's too /bad. I never saw a pair with, you know, feet.' 0 'There are lots of 'em like that now,' Scooter.said. 'They sell 'em at the novelty stores in Vegas / and Dry Springs. But I never saw a set as big-as those. It was funnier'n hell to watch 'em walk . across the floor, snappin like a crocodile. !Shame the old lady dropped 'em.' + Scooter glanced at her, but his wife was .looking out at the blowing sand. There was an % expression on her face which Hogan .couldn't quite decipher was it sadness, or disgust, or  both? - Scooter looked back at Hogan. 'I could let +'em go for three-fifty, if you wanted 'em. We're - gettin rid of the novelties, anyway. Gonna +put rental videotapes in that counter.' He closed the ' storeroom door. The bandanna was now -pulled down, lying on the dusty front of his shirt. His + face was haggard and too thin. Hogan saw +what might have been the shadow of serious illness ' lurking just beneath his desert tan. / 'You could do no such a thing, Scooter!' the -big woman snapped, and turned toward him . . .  almost turned on him. . 'Shutcha head,'' Scooter replied. 'You make my fillins ache.'  'I told you to get Wolf ' + 'Myra, if you want him back there in the -storeroom, go get him yourself.' He began to advance , on her, and Hogan was surprised almost (wonder-struck, in fact when she gave ground. ' 'Ain't nothin but a Minnesota coydog .anyway. Three dollars even, friend, and those Chattery - Teeth are yours. Throw in another buck and *you can take Myra's Woof, too. If you got five, I'll - deed the whole place to you. Ain't worth a )dogfart since the turnpike went through, anyway.' * The long-haired kid was standing by the 'door, tearing the top from the pack of cigarettes ) Hogan had helped buy and watching this -small comic opera with an expression of mean ' amusement. His small gray-green eyes )gleamed, flicking back and forth between Scooter and his  wife. / 'Hell with you,' Myra said gruffly, and Hogan/realized she was close to tears. 'If you won't get 0 my sweet baby, I will.' She stalked past him, +almost striking him with one boulder-sized breast. * Hogan thought it would have knocked the %little man flat if it had connected. / 'Look,' Hogan said, 'I think I'll just shove along.' 0 'Aw, hell,' Scooter said. 'Don't mind Myra. I ,got cancer and she's got the change, and it ain't * my problem she's havin the most trouble /livin with. Take the darn teeth. Bet you got a boy might . like 'em. Besides, it's probably just a cog ,knocked a little off-track. I bet a man who was handy + could get 'em walkin and chompin again.' , He looked around, his expression helpless .and musing. Outside, the wind rose to a brief,thin ( shriek as the kid opened the door and )slipped out. He had decided the show was over, apparently. / A cloud of fine grit swirled down the middle ,aisle, between the canned goods and the dog food. , 'I was pretty handy myself, at one time,' Scooter confided. , Hogan did not reply for a long moment. He /could not think of anything quite literally not - one single thing to say. He looked down ,at the Jumbo Chattery Teeth standing on the , scratched and cloudy display case, nearly )desperate to break the silence (now that Scooter was / standing right in front of him, he could see (that the man's eyes were huge and dark, glittering . with pain and some heavy dope . . . Darvon, -or perhaps morphine), and he spoke the first words . that popped into his head: 'Gee, they don't look broken.' . He picked the teeth up. They were metal, all.right too heavy to be anything else and - when he looked through the slightly parted *jaws, he was surprised at the size of the mainspring + that ran the thing. He supposed it would -take one that size to make the teeth not only chatter but - walk, as well. What had Scooter said? They .could give you a helluva bite if they worked. Hogan , gave the thick rubber band an experimental*tweak, then stripped it off. He was still looking at the ) teeth so he wouldn't have to look into -Scooter's dark, pain-haunted eyes. He grasped the key and / at last he risked a look up. He was relieved +to see that now the thin man was smiling a little.  'Do you mind?' Hogan asked. # 'Not me, pilgrim let er rip.' - Hogan grinned and turned the key. At first /it was all right; there was a series of small, * ratcheting clicks, and he could see the *mainspring winding up. Then, on the third turn, there was + a spronk! noise from inside, and the key +simply slid bonelessly around in its hole.  'See?' - 'Yes,' Hogan said. He set the teeth down on/the counter. They stood there on their unlikely orange feet and did nothing. + Scooter poked the clenched molars on the /lefthand side with the tip of one horny finger.The , jaws of the teeth opened. One orange foot *rose and took a dreamy half-step forward. Then the . teeth stopped moving and the whole rig fell ,sideways. The Chattery Teeth came to rest onthe + wind-up key, a slanted, disembodied grin /out here in the middle of no-man's-land. After a $ moment or two, the big teeth came 0together again with a slow click. That was all. , Hogan, who had never had a premonition in +his life, was suddenly filled with a clear certainty , that was both eerie and sickening. A year (from now, this man will have been eight months in his + grave, and if someone exhumed his coffin -and pried off the lid, they'd see teeth just like these - poking out of his dried-out dead face like an enamel trap. / He glanced up into Scooter's eyes, glittering*like dark gems in tarnished settings, and suddenly , it was no longer a question of wanting to ,get out of here; he had to get out of here. + 'Well,' he said (hoping frantically that +Scooter would not stick out his hand to be shaken), ( 'gotta go. Best of luck to you, sir.' . Scooter did put his hand out, but not to be ,shaken. Instead, he snapped the rubber band back * around the Chattery Teeth (Hogan had no .idea why, since they didn't work), set them ontheir & funny cartoon feet, and pushed them -across the scratched surface of the counter. 'Thank you . kindly,' he said. 'And take these teeth. No charge.' 1 'Oh . . . well, thanks, but I couldn't . . . ' . 'Sure you can,' Scooter said. 'Take 'em and .give 'em to your boy. He'll get a kick out of 'em + standin on the shelf in his room even if -they don't work. I know a little about boys. Raised up  three of 'em.' ( 'How did you know I had a son?' Hogan asked. - Scooter winked. The gesture was terrifying /and pathetic at the same time. 'Seen it in your% face,' he said. 'Go on, take 'em.' ( The wind gusted again, this time hard *enough to make the boards of the building moan. The - sand hitting the windows sounded like fine 'snow. Hogan picked the teeth up by the plastic feet, - surprised all over again by how heavy they were. . 'Here.' Scooter produced a paper bag, almost,as wrinkled and crumpled about the edges as his - own face, from beneath the counter. 'Stick .'em in here. That's a real nice sportcoat you got there. , If you carry them choppers in the pocket, it'll get pulled out of shape.' ) He put the bag on the counter as if he ,understood how little Hogan wanted to touch him. , 'Thanks,' Hogan said. He put the Chattery *Teeth in the bag and rolled down the top. 'Jack # thanks you, too he's my son.' / Scooter smiled, revealing a set of teeth just,as false (but nowhere near as large) as the ones in + the paper bag. 'My pleasure, mister. You -drive careful until you get out of the blow. You'll be ' fine once you get in the foothills.' . 'I know.' Hogan cleared his throat. 'Thanks 0again. I hope you . . . uh . . . recover soon.' 0 'That'd be nice,' Scooter said evenly, 'but I (don't think it's in the cards, do you?' . 'Uh. Well.' Hogan realized with dismay that )he didn't have the slightest idea how to conclude + this encounter. 'Take care of yourself.'  Scooter nodded. 'You too.' * Hogan retreated toward the door, opened /it, and had to hold on tight as the wind tried to rip it . out of his hand and bang the wall. Fine sand)scoured his face and he slitted his eyes against it. - He stepped out, closed the door behind him,0and pulled the lapel of his real nice sportcoat over ' his mouth and nose as he crossed the 'porch, descended the steps, and headed toward the * customized Dodge camper-van parked just *beyond the gas-pumps. The wind pulled his hair and * the sand stung his cheeks. He was going &around to the driver's-side door when someone tugged  his arm.  'Mister! Hey, mister!' * He turned. It was the blonde-haired boy .with the pale, ratty face. He hunched against the wind * and blowing sand, wearing nothing but a )tee-shirt and a pair of faded 501 jeans. Behind him, , Mrs. Scooter was dragging a mangy beast on*a choke-chain toward the back door of the store. * Wolf the Minnesota coydog looked like a ,half-starved German shepherd pup and the runt of  the litter, at that + 'What?' Hogan shouted, knowing very well what. , 'Can I have a ride?' the kid shouted back over the wind. / Hogan did not ordinarily pick up hitchhikers . not since one afternoon five years ago. He had . stopped for a young girl on the outskirts of+Tonopah. Standing by the side of the road, the girl , had resembled one of those sad-eyed waifs -in the UNICEF posters, a kid who looked like her . mother and her last friend had both died in *the same housefire about a week ago. Once she was * in the car, however, Hogan had seen the 'bad skin and mad eyes of the long-time junkie. By then / it was too late. She'd stuck a pistol in his -face and demanded his wallet. The pistol was old and * rusty. Its grip was wrapped in tattered .electrician's tape. Hogan had doubted that it was loaded, or 2 that it would fire if it was . . . but he had a .wife and a kid back in LA, and even if he had been ( single, was a hundred and forty bucks (worth risking your life over? He hadn't thought so even * then, when he had just been getting his -feet under him in his new line of work and a hundred and $ forty bucks had seemed a lot more .important than it did these days. He gave the girl his wallet. ( By then her boyfriend had been parked ,beside the van (in those days it had been a Ford ) Econoline, nowhere near as nice as the -custom Dodge XRT) in a dirty blue Chevy Nova.Hogan , asked the girl if she would leave him his /driver's license, and the pictures of Lita and Jack. 'Fuck ) you, sugar,' she said, and slapped him +across the face, hard, with his own wallet before getting # out and running to the blue car.  Hitchhikers were trouble. + But the storm was getting worse, and the +kid didn't even have a jacket. What was he supposed . to tell him? Fuck you, sugar, crawl under a ,rock with the rest of the lizards until the wind drops?  'Okay,' Hogan said.  'Thanks, man! Thanks a lot!' ) The kid ran toward the passenger door, 0tried it, found it locked, and just stood there, waiting to . be let in, hunching his shoulders up around /his ears. The wind billowed out the back of hisshirt / like a sail, revealing glimpses of his thin, pimple-studded back. , Hogan glanced back at Scooter's Grocery & &Roadside Zoo as he went around to the driver's , door. Scooter was standing at the window, (looking out at him. He raised his hand, solemnly, , palm out. Hogan raised his own in return, .then slipped his key into the lock and turned it. He , opened the door, pushed the unlock button %next to the power window switch, and motioned for  the kid to get in. - He did, then had to use both hands to pull ,the door shut again. The wind howled around the - van, actually making it rock a little from side to side. ( 'Wow!' the kid gasped, and rubbed his 0fingers briskly through his hair (he'd lost the sneaker / lace and the hair now lay on his shoulders in*lank clots). 'Some storm, huh? Big-time!' * 'Yeah,' Hogan said. There was a console +between the two front seats the kind of seats the 0 brochures liked to call 'captain's chairs' ,and Hogan placed the paper bag in one of the cupholders. - Then he turned the ignition key. The engine%started at once with a good-tempered  rumble. ) The kid twisted around in his seat and +looked appreciatively into the back of the van. There - was a bed (now folded back into a couch), a(small LP gas stove, and several storage + compartments where Hogan kept his various0sample cases, and a toilet cubicle at the rear. 1 'Not too tacky, m'man!' the kid said. 'All the ,comforts.' He glanced back at Hogan. 'Where you  headed?'  'Los Angeles.' 1 The kid grinned. 'Hey, great! So'm I!' He took *out his just-purchased pack of Merits and  tapped one loose. & Hogan had put on his headlights and ,dropped the transmission into drive. Now he shoved the - gearshift back into park and turned to the 1kid. 'Let's get a couple of things straight,' he said. + The kid gave Hogan his wide-eyed innocentlook. 'Sure, dude no prob.' 3 'First, I don't pick up hitchhikers as a rule. I *had a bad experience with one a few years back. It . vaccinated me, you might say. I'll take you .through the Santa Clara foothills, but that's all. + There's a truckstop on the other side ,Sammy's. It's close to the turnpike. That's where we part  company. Okay?' ( 'Okay. Sure. You bet.' Still with the wide-eyed look. + 'Second, if you really have to smoke, we $part company right now. That okay?' ( For just a moment Hogan saw the kid's ,other look (and even on short acquaintance, Hogan . was almost willing to bet he only had two): )the mean, watchful look. Then he was all wide-eyed + innocence again, just a harmless refugee ,from Wayne's World. He tucked the cigarette behind his + ear and showed Hogan his empty hands. As "he raised them, Hogan noticed the hand-lettered . tattoo on the kid's left bicep: DEF LEPPARD 4-EVER. ' 'No cigs,' the kid said. 'I got it.' , 'Fine. Bill Hogan.' He held out his hand. ) 'Bryan Adams,' the kid said, and shook Hogan's hand briefly. , Hogan dropped the transmission into drive ,again and began to roll slowly toward Route 46. As ( he did, his eyes dropped briefly to a ,cassette box lying on the dashboard. It was Reckless, by  Bryan Adams. + Sure, he thought. You're Bryan Adams and *I'm really Don Henley. We just stopped by , Scooter's Grocery & Roadside Zoo to get a ,little material for our next albums, right, dude? - As he pulled out onto the highway, already .straining to see through the blowing dust, he found . himself thinking of the girl again, the one 'outside of Tonopah who had slapped him across the . face with his own wallet before fleeing. He -was starting to get a very bad feeling about this. - Then a hard gust of wind tried to push him ,into the eastbound lane, and he concentratedon his  driving. ) They rode in silence for a while. When +Hogan glanced once to his right he saw the kid was lying - back with his eyes closed maybe asleep, +maybe dozing, maybe just pretending becausehe , didn't want to talk. That was okay; Hogan /didn't want to talk, either. For one thing, he didn't ( know what he might have to say to Mr. (Bryan Adams from Nowhere, USA. It was a cinch young / Mr. Adams wasn't in the market for labels or *Universal Product Code readers, which was what , Hogan sold. For another, just keeping the *van on the road had become something of a challenge. , As Mrs. Scooter had warned, the storm was )intensifying. The road was a dim phantom crossed . at irregular intervals by tan ribs of sand. -These drifts were like speed-bumps, and they forced ( Hogan to creep along at no' more than .twenty-five. He could live with that. At some points, + however, the sand had spread more evenly ,across the road's surface, camouflaging it, and then , Hogan had to drop down to fifteen miles an-hour, navigating by the dim bounceback of his, headlights from the reflector-posts which $marched along the side of the road. + Every now and then an approaching car or .truck would loom out of the blowing sand like a ) prehistoric phantom with round blazing .eyes. One of these, an old Lincoln Mark IV as big as a . cabin cruiser, was driving straight down the%center of 46. Hogan hit the horn and squeezed right, + feeling the suck of the sand against his 1tires, feeling his lips peel away from his teeth in a - helpless snarl. Just as he became sure the (oncomer was going to force him into the ditch, the - Lincoln swerved back onto its own side just+enough for Hogan to make it by. He thought he ) heard the metallic click of his bumper +kissing off the Mark TV's rear bumper, but given the - steady shriek of the wind, that was almost ,certainly his own imagination. He did catch just a . glimpse of the driver an old bald-headed +man sitting bolt-upright behind the wheel, peering , into the blowing sand with a concentrated ,glare that was almost maniacal. Hogan shook his fist - at him, but the old codger did not so much 1as glance at him. Probably didn't even realize I was , there, Hogan thought, let alone how close he came to hitting me. ) For a few seconds he was very close to -going off the road anyway. He could feel the sand / sucking harder at the rightside wheels, felt 0the van trying to tip. His instinct was to twistthe . wheel hard to the left. Instead, he fed the -van gas and only urged it in that direction, feeling * sweat dampen his last good shirt at the 'armpits. At last the suck on the tires diminished and he - began to feel in control of the van again. *Hogan blew his breath out in a long sigh.  'Good piece of driving, man.' + His attention had been so focused he had /forgotten his passenger, and in his surprise healmost - twisted the wheel all the way to theIleft, ,which would have put them in trouble again. He looked ) around and saw the blonde kid watching +him. His gray-green eyes were unsettlingly bright; there % was no sign of sleepiness in them. 3 'It was really just luck,' Hogan said. 'If there 2was a place to pull over, I would . . . but I know, this piece of road. It's Sammy's or bust. 0Once we're in the foothills, it'll get better.' ) He did not add that it might take them 'three hours to cover the seventy miles between here and  there.  'You're a salesman, right?'  'As rain.' - He wished the kid wouldn't talk. He wanted )to concentrate on his driving. Up ahead, fog-lights - loomed out of the murk like yellow ghosts. 0An Iroc Z with California plates followed them. The . van and the Z crept past each other like old0ladies in a nursing-home corridor. In the cornerof his , eye, Hogan saw the kid take the cigarette /from behind his ear and begin to play with it. Bryan , Adams indeed. Why had the kid given him a ,false name? It was like something out of an old . Republic movie, the kind of thing you could #still see on the late-late show, a black-and-white + crime movie where the traveling salesman .(probably played by Ray Milland) picks up the tough , young con (played by Nick Adams, say) who .has just broken out of jail in Gabbs or Deeth or  some place like that  'What do you sell, dude?''  'Labels.'  'Labels?' - 'That's right. The ones with the Universal 0Product Code on them. It's a little block with apreset  number of black bars in it.' / The kid surprised Hogan by nodding. 'Sure -they whip 'em over an electric-eye gadget in the , supermarket and the price shows up on the "cash register like magic, right?' / 'Yes. Except it's not magic, and it's not an 1electric eye. It's a laser reader. I sell those, too. Both # the big ones and the portables.' . 'Far out, dude-mar.' The tinge of sarcasm in2the kid's voice was faint . . . but it was there.  'Bryan?'  'Yeah?' - 'The name's Bill, not m'man, not dude, and most certainly not dude-mar.' ) He found himself wishing more and more ,strongly that he could roll back in time to Scooter's, - and just say no when the kid asked him for -a ride. The Scooters weren't bad sorts; they would - have let the kid stay until the storm blew ,itself out this evening. Maybe Mrs. Scooter would even + have given him five bucks to babysit the 'tarantula, the rattlers, and Woof, the Amazing ( Minnesota Coydog. Hogan found himself /liking those gray-green eyes less and less. He could , feel their weight on his face, like small stones. ' 'Yeah Bill. Bill the Label Dude.' / Bill didn't reply. The kid laced his fingers &together and bent his hands backward, cracking the  knuckles. / 'Well, it's like my old mamma used to say .it may not be much, but it's a living. Right, Label  Dude?' + Hogan grunted something noncommittal and .concentrated on his driving. The feeling that he $ had made a mistake had grown to a -certainty. When he'd picked up the girl that time, God had let + him get away with it. Please, he prayed. -One more time, okay, God? Better yet, let me be wrong , about this kid let it just be paranoia -brought on by low barometer, high winds, and the / coincidence of a name that can't, after all, be that uncommon. ' Here came a huge Mack truck from the -other direction, the silver bulldog atop the grille . seeming to peer into the flying grit. Hogan /squeezed right until he felt the sand piled up along the , edge of the road grabbing greedily at his .tires again. The long silver box the Mack was pulling / blotted out everything on Hogan's left side. -It was six inches away maybe even less and it  seemed to pass forever. + When it was finally gone, the blonde kid /asked: 'You look like you're doin pretty well, Bill / rig like this must have set you back at leastthirty big ones. So why ' . 'It was a lot less than that.' Hogan didn't *know if 'Bryan Adams' could hear the edgy note in his 0 voice, but he sure could. 'I did a lot of the work myself.' * 'All the same, you sure ain't staggerin .around hungry. So why aren't you up above all this shit,  flyin' the friendly skies?' * It was a question Hogan sometimes asked (himself in the long empty miles between Tempe and + Tucson or Las Vegas and Los Angeles, the -kind of question you had to ask yourself whenyou * couldn't find anything on the radio but *crappy synthopop or threadbare oldies and you'd listened & to the last cassette of the current ,best-seller from Recorded Books, when there was nothing to ' look at but miles of gullywashes and )scrubland, all of it owned by Uncle Sam. - He could say that he got a better feel for +his customers and their needs by traveling through the * country where they lived and sold their *goods, and it was true, but it wasn't the reason. He could , say that checking his sample cases, which ,were much too bulky to fit under an airline seat, was a * pain in the ass and waiting for them to *show up on the conveyor belt at the other end was always , an adventure (he'd once had a packing case,filled with five thousand soft-drink labels show up in / Hilo, Hawaii, instead of Hillside, Arizona). +That was also true, but it also wasn't the reason. * The reason was that in 1982 he had been )on board a Western Pride commuter flight which had - crashed in the high country seventeen miles.north of Reno. Six of the nineteen passengers on ' board and both crew-members had been -killed. Hogan had suffered a broken back. He had spent * four months in bed and another ten in a *heavy brace his wife Lita called the Iron Maiden. They + (whoever they were) said that if you got *thrown from a horse, you should get right back on. / William I. Hogan said that was bullshit, and 'with the exception of a white-knuckle, two-Valium / flight to attend his father's funeral in New *York, he had never been on a plane since. - He came out of these thoughts all at once, -realizing two things: he had had the road to himself , since the passage of the Mack, and the kid/was still looking at him with those unsettling eyes, * waiting for him to answer the question. ( 'I had a bad experience on a commuter 0flight once,' he said. 'Since then, I've pretty much stuck , to transport where you can coast into the &breakdown lane if your engine quits.' " 'You sure have had a lot of bad 0experiences, Bill-dude,' the kid said. A tone of bogus regret , crept into his voice. 'And now, so sorry, -you're about to have another one.' There was a sharp , metallic click. Hogan looked over and was .not very surprised to see the kid was holding a + switchknife with a glittering eight-inch blade. * Oh shit, Hogan thought. Now that it was /here, now that it was right in front of him, hedidn't - feel very scared. Only tired. Oh shit, and +only four hundred miles from home. Goddam. ) 'Pull over, Bill-dude. Nice and slow.'  'What do you want?' / 'If you really don't know the answer to that 0one, you're even dumber than you look.' A little/ smile played around the corners of the kid's ,mouth. The homemade tattoo on the kid's arm 0 rippled as the muscle beneath it twitched. 'I )want your dough, and I guess I want your rolling , whorehouse too, at least for a while. But 1don't worry there's this little truck stop nottoo far - from here. Sammy's. Close to the turnpike. +Someone'll give you a ride. The people who don't - stop will look at you like you're dog-shit -they found on their shoes, of course, and youmight 1 have to beg a little, but I'm sure you'll get a!ride in the end. Now pull over.' / Hogan was a little surprised to find that he /felt angry as well, as tired. Had he been angrythat - other time, when the road-girl, had stolen +his wallet? He couldn't honestly remember. 1 'Don't pull that shit on me,' he said, turning *to the kid. 'I jjjave you a ride when you needed / one, and I didn't make you beg for it. If it 0werent for me, you'd still be eating sand withyour , thumb out. So why don't you just put that thing away. We'll ' + The kid suddenly lashed forward with the .knife, and Hogan felt a thread of burning pain* across his right hand. The van swerved, ,then shuddered as it passed over another of those sandy  speed-bumps. 2 'Pull over, I said. You're either walking, Label0Dude, or you're lying in the nearest gully with & your throat cut and one of your own *price-reading gadgets jammed up your ass. And you wanna , know something? I'm gonna chain-smoke all )the way to Los Angeles, and every time I finish a * cigarette I'm gonna butt it out on your fuckin dashboard.' + Hogan glanced down at his hand and saw a -diagonal line of blood, which stretched from the / last knuckle of his pinky to the base of his /thumb. And here was the anger again . . . only now it , was really rage, and if the tiredness was ,still there, it was buried somewhere in the middle of that + irrational red eye. He tried to summon a -mental picture of Lita and Jack to damp that feeling + down before it got the better of him and ,made him do something crazy, but the images were , fuzzy and out of focus. There was a clear .image in his mind, but it was the wrong one it was . the face of the girl outside of Tonopah, the+girl with the snarling mouth below the sad posterchild . eyes, the girl who had said Fuck you, sugar -before slapping him across the face with his  own wallet. + He stepped down on the gas-pedal and the )van began to move faster. The red needle moved  past thirty. . The kid looked surprised, then puzzled, then/angry. 'What are you doing? I told you to pull . over! Do you want your guts in your lap, or what?' / 'I don't know,' Hogan said. He kept his foot -on the gas. Now the needle was trembling just. above forty. The van ran across a series of /dunelets and shivered like a dog with a fever. 'What ' do you want, kid? How about a broken 0neck? All it takes is one twist of the wheel. I fastened my ( seatbelt. I notice you forgot yours.' + The kid's gray-green eyes were huge now, ,glittering with a mixture of fear and fury. You're * supposed to pull over, those eyes said. .That's the way it's supposed to work when I'm holding a ' knife on you don't you know that? * 'You won't wreck us,' the kid said, but (Hogan thought he was trying to convince himself. ) 'Why not?' Hogan turned toward the kid 3again. 'After all, I'm pretty sure I'll walk away, and 0 the van's insured. You call the play, asshole.What about that?' - 'You ' the kid began, and then his eyes 0widened and he lost all interest in Hogan. 'Lookout!'  he screamed. ) Hogan snapped his eyes forward and saw *four huge white headlamps bearing down on him - through the flying wrack outside. It was a ,tanker truck, probably carrying gasoline or propane. - An air-horn beat the air like the cry of a 'gigantic, enraged goose: WHONK! WHONK! WHONNNK! - The van had drifted while Hogan was trying )to deal with the kid; now he was the one halfway , across the road. He yanked the wheel hard +to the right, knowing it would do no good, knowing it , was already too late. But the approaching -truck was also moving, squeezing over just asHogan ( had tried to squeeze over in order to *accommodate the Mark IV. The two vehicles danced past * each other though the blowing sand with -less than a gasp between them. Hogan felt his rightside + wheels bite into the sand again and knew /that this time he didn't have a chance in hell of holding + the van on the road not at forty-plus +miles an hour. As the dim shape of the big steel tank $ (CARTER'S FARM SUPPLIES & ORGANIC ,FERTILIZER was painted along the side) slid from view, he * felt the steering wheel go mushy in his .hands, dragging farther to the right. And from the corner - of his eye, he saw the kid leaning forward with his knife. , What's the matter with you, are you crazy?-He wanted to scream at the kid, but it would have * been a stupid question even if he'd had /time enough to articulate it. Sure the kid was crazy - you only had to take a good look into those+gray-green eyes to see it. Hogan must have been . crazy himself to give the kid a ride in the ,first place, but none of that mattered now; he had a ) situation to cope with here, and if he -allowed himself the luxury of believing this couldn't be / happening to him if he allowed himself to *think that for even a single second he would , probably be found tomorrow or the next day-with his throat cut and his eyes nibbled out of their + sockets by the buzzards. This was really happening; it was a true thing. , The kid tried his level best to plant the -blade in Hogan's neck, but the van had begun to tilt by + then, running deeper and deeper into the ,sand-choked gully. Hogan recoiled back from the blade, ( letting go of the wheel entirely, and .thought he had gotten clear until he felt the wet warmth of . blood drench the side of his neck. The knife)had unzipped his right cheek from jaw to temple. He 0 flailed with his right hand, trying to get the0kid's wrist, and then the van's left front wheel struck a + rock the size of a pay telephone and the 0van flipped high and hard, like a stunt vehicle in one of - those movies this rootless kid undoubtedly ,loved. It rolled in midair, all four wheels turning, still . doing thirty miles an hour according to the .speedometer, and Hogan felt his seatbelt lock / painfully across his chest and belly. It was /like reliving the plane-crash now, as then, he could , not get it through his head that this was really happening. ) The kid was thrown upward and forward, /still holding onto the knife. His head bounced off the + roof as the van's top and bottom swapped /places. Hogan saw his left hand waving wildly, and + realized with amazement that the kid was 0still trying to stab him. He was a rattler, all right, * Hogan had been right about that, but no one had milked his poison sacs. * Then the van struck the desert hardpan, -peeling off the luggage racks, and the kid's head , connected with the roof again, much harder/this time. The knife was jolted from his hand. The ) cabinets at the rear of the van sprang &open, spraying sample-books and laser label-readers * everywhere. Hogan was dimly aware of an %inhuman screaming sound the long, drawn-out . squall of the XRT's roof sliding across the /gravelly desert surface on the far side of the gully / and thought: So this is what it would be like(to be inside a tin can when someone was using the  opener. . The windshield shattered, blowing inward in &a sagging shield clouded by a million zigzagging , cracks. Hogan shut his eyes and threw his 'hands up to shield his face as the van - continued to roll, thumping down on Hogan's.side long enough to shatter the driver's-side ) window and admit a rattle of rocks and /dusty earth before staggering upright again. It rocked as 0 if meaning to go over on the kid's side . . . and then came to rest. + Hogan sat where he was without moving for'perhaps five seconds, eyes wide, hands gripping 2 the armrests of his chair, feeling a little like+Captain Kirk in the aftermath of a Klingon attack. + He was aware there was a lot of dirt and .crumbled glass in his lap, and something else as well, * but not what the something else was. He .was also aware of the wind, blowing more dirt through  the van's broken windows. . Then his vision was temporarily blocked by a(swiftly moving object. The object was a mottle . of white skin, brown dirt, raw knuckles, and.red blood. It was a fist, and it struck Hogan squarely + in the nose. The agony was immediate and -intense, as if someone had fired a flare-gun directly . into his brain. For a moment his vision was .gone, swallowed in a vast white flash. It had just * begun to come back when the kid's hands (suddenly clamped around his neck and he could no  longer breathe. ) The kid, Mr. Bryan Adams from Nowhere, *USA, was leaning over the console between the . front seats. Blood from perhaps half a dozen+different scalp-wounds had flowed over his cheeks , and forehead and nose like war paint. His ,gray-green eyes stared at Hogan with fixed, lunatic  fury. ) 'Look what you did, you fuck!' the kid $shouted. 'Look what you did to me!' + Hogan tried to pull back, and got half a #breath when the kid's hold slipped momentarily, but / with his seatbelt still buckled and still ,locked down as well, from the feel there was really , nowhere he could go. The kid's hands were -back almost at once, and this time his thumbswere 0 pressing into his windpipe, pinching it shut. - Hogan tried to bring his own hands up, but 0the kid's arms, as rigid as prison bars, blockedhim. - He tried to knock the kid's arms away, but 'they wouldn't budge. Now he could hear another wind / a high, roaring wind inside his own head. + 'Look what you did, you stupid shit! I'm bleedin!' , The kid's voice, but farther away than it had been. . He's killing me, Hogan thought, and a voice #replied: Right fuck you, sugar. , That brought the anger back. He groped in ,his lap for whatever was there besides dirt and , glass. It was a paper bag with some bulky *object Hogan couldn't remember exactly what - inside it. Hogan closed his hand around it .and pistoned his fist upward toward the shelf of the - kid's jaw. It connected with a heavy thud. ,The kid screamed in surprised pain, and his grip on . Hogan's throat was suddenly gone as he fell over backward. , Hogan pulled in a deep, convulsive breath .and heard a sound like a teakettle howling to be + taken off the burner. Is that me, making that sound? My God, is that me? / He dragged in another breath. It was full of -flying dust, it hurt his throat and made him cough, , but it was heaven all the same. He looked *down at his fist and saw the shape of the Chattery + Teeth clearly outlined against the brown bag.  And suddenly felt them move. , There was something so shockingly human in&this movement that Hogan shrieked and + dropped the bag at once; it was as if he )had picked up a human jawbone, which had tried to  speak to his hand. - The bag hit the kid's back and then tumbled-to the van's carpeted floor as 'Bryan Adams' . pushed himself groggily to his knees. Hogan .heard the rubber band snap . . . and then the ( unmistakable click-and-chutter of the 'teeth themselves, opening and closing. , It's probably just a cog knocked a little -off-track, Scooter had said. I bet a man who was handy * could get 'em walkin and chompin again. * Or maybe just a good knock would do it, /Hogan thought. If I live through this and ever get 0 back that way, I'll have to tell Scooter that $all you have to do to fix a pair of malfunctioning + Chattery Teeth is roll your van over and ,then use them to hit a psychotic hitchhiker who's trying / to strangle you: so simple even a child coulddo it. , The teeth clattered and smacked inside the/torn brown bag; the sides fluttered, making it look + like an amputated lung, which refused to 'die. The kid crawled away from the bag without even . looking at it crawled toward the back of -the van, shaking his head from side to side, trying to 1 clear it. Blood flew from the clots of his hairin a fine spray. , Hogan found the clasp of his seatbelt and *pushed the pop-release. Nothing happened. The - square in the center of the buckle did not 1give even a little and the belt itself was still locked as % tight as a cramp, cutting into the ,middle-aged roll of fat above the waistband of his trousers and . pushing a hard diagonal across his chest. He*tried rocking back and forth in the seat, hoping that + would unlock the belt. The flow of blood /from his face increased, and he could feel his cheek 0 flapping back and forth like a strip of dried +wallpaper, but that was all. He felt panic struggling to * break through amazed shock, and twisted -his head over his right shoulder to see what the kid was  up to. - It turned out to be no good. He had spotted/his knife at the far end of the van, lying atop a litter - of instructional manuals and brochures. He +grabbed it, flicked his hair away from his face, and ' peered back over his own shoulder at &Hogan. He was grinning, and there was something in that . grin that made Hogan's balls simultaneously 0tighten and shrivel until it felt as if someone had ) tucked a couple of peach-pits into his Jockey shorts. - Ah, here it is! The kid's grin said. For a +minute or two there I was worried quite seriously - worried but everything is going to come -out all right after all. Things got a little - improvisational there for a while, but now we're back to the script. . 'You stuck, Label Dude?' the kid asked over /the steady shriek of the wind. 'You are, ain't you? + Good thing you buckled your belt, right? Good thing for me.' . The kid tried to get up, almost made it, and*then his knees gave way. An expression of surprise ( so magnified it would have been comic ,under other circumstances crossed his face. Then he / flicked his blood-greasy hair out of his face+again and began to crawl toward Hogan, his left ) hand wrapped around the imitation-bone ,handle of the knife. The Def Leppard tattoo ebbed and , flowed with each flex of his impoverished )bleep, making Hogan think of the way the words on & Myra's tee-shirt NEVADA IS GOD'S 'COUNTRY had rippled when she moved. ) Hogan grasped the seatbelt buckle with ,both hands and drove his thumbs against the poprelease / as enthusiastically as the kid had driven his-into Hogan's' windpipe. There was absolutely - no response. The belt was frozen. He craned#his neck to look at the kid again. , The kid had made it as far as the fold-up )bed and then stopped. That expression of large, - comic surprise had resurfaced on his face. +He was staring straight ahead, which meant he was ) looking at something on the floor, and *Hogan suddenly remembered the teeth. They were still  chattering away. * He looked down in time to see the Jumbo *Chattery Teeth march from the open end of the torn - paper bag on their funny orange shoes. The (molars and the canines and the incisors chopped . rapidly up and down, producing a sound like -ice in a cocktail-shaker. The shoes, dressed up in + their tiny white spats, almost seemed to *bounce along the gray carpet. Hogan found himself + thinking of Fred Astaire tap-dancing his (way across a stage and back again; Fred Astaire with a ( cane tucked under his arm and a straw ,boater tipped saucily forward over one eye. 3 'Oh shit!' the kid said, half-laughing. 'Is that +what you were dickerin for back there? Oh, man! 0 I kill you, Label Dude, I'm gonna be doin the world a favor.' ) The key, Hogan thought. The key on the +side of the teeth, the one you use to wind them up . . .  it isn 't turning. ' And he suddenly had another of those ,precognitive flashes; he understood exactly what was - going to happen. The kid was going to reach for them. ) The teeth abruptly stopped walking and +chattering. They simply stood there on the slightly 0 tilted floor of the van, jaws slightly agape. /Eyeless, they still seemed to peer quizzically up at the  kid. * 'Chattery Teeth,' Mr. Bryan Adams, from +Nowhere, USA, marveled. He reached out and - curled his right hand around them, just as Hogan had known he would. 0 'Bite him!' Hogan shrieked. 'Bite his fucking fingers right off!' , The kid's head snapped up, the gray-green (eyes wide with startlement. He gaped at Hogan for - a moment that big expression of totally -dumb surprise and then he began to laugh. His + laughter was high and shrieky, a perfect +complement to the wind howling through the van and 0 billowing the curtains like long ghost-hands. * 'Bite me! Bite me! Biiiite me!' the kid ,chanted, as if it were the punchline to the funniest joke 0 he'd ever heard. 'Hey, Label Dude! I thought I!was the one who bumped my head!' $ The kid clamped the handle of the +switchblade in his own teeth and stuck the forefinger of his ' left hand between the Jumbo Chattery .Teeth. 'Ite ee!' he said around the knife. He giggled and + wiggled his finger between the oversized jaws. 'Ite ee! Oh on, ite ee!' ) The teeth didn't move. Neither did the +orange feet. Hogan's premonition collapsed around him ) the way dreams do upon waking. The kid (wiggled his finger between the Chattery Teeth one - more time, began to pull it out . . . then -began screaming at the top of his lungs. 'Oh shit! SHIT!  Mother FUCKER.'' + For a moment Hogan's heart leaped in his .chest, and then he realized that, although thekid * was still screaming, what he was really .doing was laughing. Laughing at him. The teethhad + remained perfectly still the whole time. / The kid lifted the teeth up for a closer look,as he grasped his knife again. He shook the long - blade at the Chattery Teeth like a teacher .shaking his pointer at a naughty student. 'You shouldn't . bite,' he said. 'That's very bad behav ' , One of the orange feet took a sudden step -forward on the grimy palm of the kid's hand. The + jaws opened at the same time, and before "Hogan was fully aware of what was happening, the ) Chattery Teeth had closed on the kid's nose. . This time Bryan Adams's scream was real a0thing of agony and ultimate surprise. He flailed. at the teeth with his right hand, trying to +bat them away, but they were locked on his nose as ) tightly as Hogan's seatbelt was locked /around his middle. Blood and filaments of torn gristle ' burst out between the canines in red .strings. The kid jackknifed backward and for amoment * Hogan could see only his flailing body, .lashing elbows, and kicking feet. Then he saw the glitter  of the knife. + The kid screamed again and bolted into a 0sitting position. His long hair had fallen over his face , in a curtain; the clamped teeth stuck out .like the rudder of some strange boat. The kid had , somehow managed to insert the blade of his*knife between the teeth and what remained of his  nose. - 'Kill him!' Hogan shouted hoarsely. He had +lost his mind; on some level he understood that he , must have lost his mind, but for the time .being, that didn't matter. 'Go on, kill him!' ' The kid shrieked a long, piercing -fire-whistle sound and twisted the knife. The blade , snapped, but not before it had managed to *pry the disembodied jaws at least partway open. The 0 teeth fell off his face and into his lap. Most&of the kid's nose fell off with them. . The kid shook his hair back. His gray-green -eyes were crossed, trying to look down at the. mangled stump in the middle of his face. His-mouth was drawn down in a rictus of pain; the% tendons in his neck stood out like pulley-wires. + The kid reached for the teeth. The teeth (stepped nimbly backward on their orange cartoon feet. * They were nodding up and down, marching +in place, grinning at the kid, who was now sitting - with his ass on his calves. Blood drenched the front of his tee-shirt. , The kid said something then that confirmed,Hogan's belief that he, Hogan, had lost his mind; + only in a fantasy born of delirium would such words be spoken.  'Give bme bag by dose, you sud-of-a-bidtch!' * The kid reached for the teeth again and &this time they ran forward, under his snatching hand, + between his spread legs, and there was a )meaty chump! sound as they closed on the bulge of ( faded blue denim just below the place +where the zipper of the kid's jeans ended. , Bryan Adams's eyes flew wide open. So did .his mouth. His hands rose to the level of his , shoulders, springing wide open, and for a -moment he looked like some strange Al Jolson imitator - preparing to sing 'Mammy.' The switchknife /flew over his shoulder to the back of the van.  'Jesus! Jesus! Jeeeeeee ' - The orange feet were pumping rapidly, as if-doing a Highland Fling. The pink jaws of the ) Jumbo Chattery Teeth nodded rapidly up /and down, as if saying yes! yes! yes! and then shook / back and forth, just as rapidly, as if saying no! no! no!  ' eeeeeeEEEEEEEE '' / As the cloth of the kid's jeans began to rip - and that was not all that was ripping, by the " sound Bill Hogan passed out. - He came to twice. The first time must have +been only a short while later, because the storm was , still howling through and around the van, -and the light was about the same. He started to turn , around, but a monstrous bolt of pain shot .up his neck. Whiplash, of course, and probablynot as . bad as it could have been . . . or would be tomorrow, for that matter. , Always supposing he lived until tomorrow. - The kid. I have to look and make sure he's dead. , No, you don't. Of course he's dead. If he wasn't, you would be. ( Now he began to hear a new sound from behind him the steady chutter-click-chutter of the  teeth. . They're coming for me. They've finished with.the kid, but they're still hungry, so they're  coming for me. - He placed his hands on the seatbelt buckle 0again, but the pop-release was still hopelessly * jammed, and his hands seemed to have no strength, anyway. . The teeth grew steadily closer they were .right in back of his seat, now, from the sound ) and Hogan's confused mind read a rhyme into their ceaseless chomping: Clickety-dicketyclickety- , clack! We are the teeth, and we're coming +back! Watch us walk, watch us chew, we ate  him, now we 'II eat you!  Hogan closed his eyes.  The clittering sound stopped. , Now there was only the ceaseless whine of -the wind and the spick-spack of sand strikingthe  dented side of the XRT van. , Hogan waited. After a long, long time, he -heard a single click, followed by the minute sound - of tearing fibers. There was a pause, then .the click and the tearing sound was repeated.  What's it doing? ) The third time the click and the small ,tearing sound came, he felt the back of his seat moving a / little and understood. The teeth were pulling+themselves up to where he was. Somehow they% were pulling themselves up to him. , Hogan thought of the teeth closing on the .bulge below the zipper of the kid's jeans and willed * himself to pass out again. Sand flew in +through the broken windshield, tickled his cheeks and  forehead. 5 Click . . . rip. Click . . . rip. Click . . . rip. , The last one was very close. Hogan didn't -want to look down, but he was unable to help . himself. And beyond his right hip, where the+seat-cushion met the seat's back, he saw a wide - white grin. It moved upward with agonizing )slowness, pushing with the as-yet-unseen orange ) feet as it nipped a small fold of gray /seat-cover between its incisors . . . then the jaws let go and it  lurched convulsively upward. + This time what the teeth fastened on was ,the pocket of Hogan's slacks, and he passed out  again. ' When he came to the second time, the -wind had dropped and it was almost dark; the air had , taken on a queer purple shade Hogan could ,not remember ever having seen in the desert before. . The skirls of sand running across the desert%floor beyond the sagging ruin of the windshield & looked like fleeing ghost-children. + For a moment he could remember nothing at.all of what had happened to land him here; the* last clear memory he could touch was of -looking at his gas-gauge, seeing it was down to an . eighth, then looking up and seeing a sign at+the side of the road which said: SCOOTER'S GROCERY ( & ROADSIDE ZOO GAS SANX COLD BEER SEE LIVE RATTLESNAKE'S! - He understood that he could hold onto this .amnesia for a while, if he wanted to; given a little , time, his subconscious might even be able 'to wall off certain dangerous memories permanently. ( But it could also be dangerous not to %remember. Very dangerous. Because , The wind gusted. Sand rattled against the *badly dented driver's side of the van. It sounded  almost like  (teeth! teeth! teeth!) % The fragile surface of his amnesia ,shattered, letting everything pour through, and all the heat , fell from the surface of Hogan's skin. He +uttered a rusty squawk as he remembered thesound  (chump!) & the Chattery Teeth had made as they -closed on the kid's balls, and he closed his hands over his . own crotch, eyes rolling fearfully in their ,sockets as he looked for the runaway teeth. ( He didn't see them, but the ease with -which his shoulders followed the movement of his hands ) was new. He looked down at his lap and .slowly removed his hands from his crotch. His seatbelt 0 was no longer holding him prisoner. It lay on )the gray carpet in two pieces. The metal tongue of . the pull-up section was still buried inside )the buckle, but beyond it there was only ragged red , fabric. The belt had not been cut; it had been gnawed through. - He looked up into the rear-view mirror and -saw something else: the back doors of the van+ were standing open, and there was only a *vague, man-shaped red outline on the gray carpet + where the kid had been. Mr. Bryan Adams, from Nowhere, USA, was gone.  So were the Chattery Teeth. . Hogan got out of the van slowly, like an old1man afflicted with a terrible case of arthritis. He + found that if he held his head perfectly 0level, it wasn't too bad . . . but if he forgot and moved it in - any direction, a series of exploding bolts +went off in his neck, shoulders, and upper back. Even + the thought of allowing his head to roll backward was unbearable. + He walked slowly to the rear of the van, *running his hand lightly over the dented, paint-peeled / surface, hearing and feeling the glass as it -crunched under his feet. He stood at the far end of the / driver's side for a long time. He was afraid -to turn the corner. He was afraid that, when he did, he . would see the kid squatting on his hunkers, 0holding the knife in his left hand and grinning that / empty grin. But he couldn't just stand here, -holding his head on top of his strained neck like a big . bottle of nitroglycerine, while it got dark *around him, so at last Hogan went around. , Nobody. The kid was really gone. Or so it seemed at first. ( The wind gusted, blowing Hogan's hair +around his bruised face, then dropped away , completely. When it did, he heard a harsh (scraping noise coming from about twenty yards . beyond the van. He looked in that direction -and saw the soles of the kid's sneakers just + disappearing over the top of a dry-wash. +The sneakers were spread in a limp V. They stopped * moving for a moment, as if whatever was -hauling the kid's body needed a few moments' rest to + recoup its strength, and then they began to move again in little jerks. - A picture of terrible, unendurable clarity *suddenly rose in Hogan's mind. He saw the Jumbo ) Chattery Teeth standing on their funny -orange feet just over the edge of that wash, standing there , in spats so cool they made the coolest of ,the California Raisins look like hicks from Fargo, North ) Dakota, standing there in the electric )purple light, which had overspread these empty lands west , of Las Vegas. They were clamped shut on a )thick wad of the kid's long blonde hair. & The Chattery Teeth were backing up. , The Chattery Teeth were dragging Mr. BryanAdams away to Nowhere, U.S.A. * Hogan turned in the other direction and +walked slowly toward the road, holding his nitro head - straight and steady on top of his neck. It -took him five minutes to negotiate the ditch and another , fifteen to flag a ride, but he eventually -managed both things. And during that time, henever  looked back once. + Nine months later, on a clear hot summer .day in June, Bill Hogan happened by Scooter's , Grocery & Roadside Zoo again . . . except *the place had been renamed. MYRA'S PLACE, the sign - now said. GAS COLD BEER VIDEO'S. Below the .words was a picture of a wolf or maybe just' a Woof snarling at the moon. Wolf +himself, the Amazing Minnesota Coydog, was lying in a + cage in the shade of the porch overhang. +His back legs were sprawled extravagantly, and his , muzzle was on his paws. He did not get up /when Hogan got out of his car to fill the tank.Of the - rattlesnakes and the tarantula there was nosign. . 'Hi, Woof,' he said as he went up the steps.,The cage's inmate rolled over onto his back and ( allowed his long red tongue to dangle ,enticingly from the side of his mouth as he stared up at  Hogan. . The store looked bigger and cleaner inside. *Hogan guessed this was partly because the day + outside was not so threatening, but that -wasn't all; the windows had been washed, for one thing, , and that made a big difference. The board ,walls had been replaced with pine-panelling that still + smelled fresh and sappy. A snackbar with ,five stools had been added at the back. The novelty * case was still there, but the cigarette (loads, the joy-buzzers, and Dr. Wacky's Sneezing Powder & were gone. The case was filled with +videotape boxes. A hand-lettered sign read X-RATED IN BACK  'B 18 OR B GONE.' % The woman at the cash register was .standing in profile to Hogan, looking down at a calculator * and running numbers on it. For d moment .Hogan was sure this was Mr. and Mrs. Scooter's, daughter the female complement to those-three boys Scooter had talked about raising. Then + she lifted her head and Hogan saw it was 1Mrs. Scooter herself. It was hard to believe thiscould ' be the woman whose mammoth bosom had (almost burst the seams of her NEVADA is GOD'S - COUNTRY tee-shirt, but it was. Mrs. Scooter,had lost at least fifty pounds and dyed her hair a ) sleek and shiny walnut-brown. Only the ,sun-wrinkles around the eyes and mouth were the same.  'Getcha gas?' she asked. 0 'Yep. Fifteen dollars' worth.' He handed her a.twenty and she rang it up. 'Place looks a lot * different from the last time I was in.' - 'Been a lot of changes since Scooter died, 1all right,' she agreed, and pulled a five out of the 0 register. She started to hand it over, really &looked at him for the first time, and hesitated. 'Say . . . . ain't you the guy who almost got killed the "day we had that storm last year?' * He nodded and stuck out his hand. 'Bill Hogan.' . She didn't hesitate; simply reached over the*counter and gave his hand a single strong pump. * The death of her husband seemed to have /improved her disposition . . . or maybe it was just that ' her change of life was finally over. + 'I'm sorry about your husband. He seemed like a good sort.' . 'Scoot? Yeah, he was a fine fella before he /took ill,' she agreed. 'And what about you? Youall  recovered?' ) Hogan nodded. 'I wore a neck-brace for +about six weeks not for the first time, either but  I'm okay.' - She was looking at the scar, which twisted .down his right cheek. 'He do that? That kid?'  'Yeah.'  'Stuck you pretty bad.'  'Yeah.' . 'I heard he got busted up in the crash, then)crawled into the desert to die.' She was looking at & Hogan shrewdly. 'That about right?' 1 Hogan smiled a little. 'Near enough, I guess.' , 'J.T. he's the State Bear around these *parts said the animals worked him over pretty , good. Desert rats are awful impolite that way.' + 'I don't know anything about that part.' / 'J.T. said the kid's own mother wouldn't have'reckanized him.' She put a hand on her reduced - bosom and looked at him earnestly. 'If I'm lyin, I'm dyin.' + Hogan laughed out loud. In the weeks and ,months since the day of the storm, this was ( something he found himself doing more +often. He had come, it sometimes seemed to him, to a + slightly different arrangement with life since that day. 1 'Lucky he didn't kill you,' Mrs. Scooter said. ,'You had a helluva narrow excape. God musta  been with you.' . 'That's right,' Hogan agreed. He looked down+at the video case. 'I see you took out the  novelties.' , 'Them nasty old things? You bet! That was *the first thing I did after ' Her eyes suddenly + widened. 'Oh, say! Jeepers! I got sumpin -belongs to you! If I was to forget, I reckon Scooter'd  come back and haunt me!' ( Hogan frowned, puzzled, but the woman *was already going behind the counter. She stood on + tiptoe and brought something down from a ,high shelf above the rack of cigarettes. It was, Hogan . saw with absolutely no surprise at all, the )Jumbo Chattery Teeth. The woman set them down  beside the cash register. * Hogan stared at that frozen, insouciant .grin with a deep sense of deja vu. There they were, the ) world's biggest set of Chattery Teeth, ,standing on their funny orange shoes beside the Slim Jim . display, cool as a mountain breeze, grinning.up at him as if to say, Hello, there! Did you forget - me? I didn't forget YOU, my friend. Not at all. * 'I found 'em on the porch the next day, /after the storm blew itself out,' Mrs. Scooter said. She , laughed. 'Just like old Scoot to give you /somethin for free, then stick it in a bag with a hole in the , bottom. I was gonna throw 'em out, but he 0said he give 'em to you, and I should stick 'em on a + shelf someplace. He said a traveling man .who came in once'd most likely come in again .. . and  here you are.' $ 'Yes,' Hogan agreed. 'Here I am.' ) He picked up the teeth and slipped his ,finger between the slightly gaping jaws. He ran the pad . of the finger along the molars at the back, ,and in his mind he heard the kid, Mr. Bryan Adams / from Nowhere, U.S.A., chanting Bite me! Bite me! Biiiiite me! - Were the back teeth still streaked with the.dull rust of the boy's blood? Hogan thought he, could see something way back in there, butperhaps it was only a shadow. - 'I saved it because Scooter said you had a boy.' - Hogan nodded. 'I do.' And, he thought, the /boy still has a father. I'm holding the reason why. - The question is, did they walk all the way .back here on their little orange feet because this was * home . . . or because they somehow knew +what Scooter knew? That sooner or later, a traveling + man always comes back to where he's been,.the way a murderer is supposed to revisit the scene  of his crime? . 'Well, if you still want 'em, they're still *yours,' she said. For a moment she looked solemn . . . / and then she laughed. 'Shit, I probably would,have throwed 'em out anyway, except I forgot, about 'em. Course, they're still broken.' * Hogan turned the key jutting out of the )gum. It went around twice, making little wind-up . clicks, then simply turned uselessly in its )socket. Broken. Of course they were. And would be , until they decided they didn't want to be ,broken for a while. And the question wasn't how they ) had gotten back here, and the question wasn't even why. , The question was this: What did they want?+ He poked his finger into the white steel -grin again and whispered, 'Bite me do you want to?' & The teeth only stood there on their $super-cool orange feet and grinned. 1 'They ain't talking, seems like,' Mrs. Scooter said. * 'No,' Hogan said, and suddenly he found .himself thinking of the kid. Mr. Bryan Adams, from 0 Nowhere, U.S.A. A lot of kids like him now. A (lot of grownups, too, blowing along the , highways like tumbleweed, always ready to +take your wallet, say Fuck you, sugar, and run. You . could stop picking up hitchhikers (he had), ,and you could put a burglar-alarm system in your 0 home (he'd done that, too), but it was still a.hard world where planes sometimes fell out of the * sky and the crazies were apt to turn up )anyplace and there was always room for a little more ' insurance. He had a wife, after all.  And a son. . It might be nice if Jack had a set of Jumbo ,Chattery Teeth sitting on his desk. Just in case  something happened.  Just in case. ( 'Thank you for saving them,' he said, +picking the Chattery Teeth up carefully by the feet. 'I + think my kid will get a kick out of them even if they are broken.' - 'Thank Scoot, not me. You want a bag?' She +grinned. 'I got a plastic one no holes,  guaranteed.' ' Hogan shook his head and slipped the 0Chattery Teeth into his sportcoat pocket. 'I'll carry them - this way,' he said, and grinned right back at her. 'Keep them handy.' / 'Suit yourself.' As he started for the door, 0she called after him: 'Stop back again! I make a% damn good chicken salad sandwich!' 0 'I'll bet you do, and I will,' Hogan said. He *went out, down the steps, and stood for a moment / in the hot desert sunshine, smiling. He felt .good he felt good a lot these days. He had come lo % think that was just the way to be. * To his left, Woof the Amazing Minnesota (Coydog got to his feet, poked his snout through the . crisscross of wire on the side of his cage, ,and barked. In Hogan's pocket, the Chattery Teeth - clicked together once. The sound was soft, /but Hogan heard it . . . and felt them move. Hepatted 1 his pocket. 'Easy, big fella,' he said softly. - He walked briskly across the yard, climbed +behind the wheel of his new Chevrolet van, and ( drove away toward Los Angeles. He had +promised Lita and Jack he would be home by seven, , eight at the latest, and he was a man who liked to keep his promises.   -Dedication-  * Around the corner from the doormen, the -limos, the taxis, and the revolving doors at the entrance - to Le Palais, one of New York's oldest and -grandest hotels, there is another door, this one small, ( unmarked, and for the most part unremarked. , Martha Rosewall approached it one morning -at a quarter of seven, her plain blue canvas totebag + in one hand and a smile on her face. The +tote was usual, the smile much more rarely seen. + She was not unhappy in her work being ,the Chief Housekeeper of floors ten through twelve - of Le Palais might not seem an important or*rewarding job to some, but to a woman who had % worn dresses made out of rice- and -flour-sacks as a girl growing up in Babylon, Alabama, it ) seemed very important indeed, and very *rewarding as well. Yet no matter what the job, mechanic ( or movie-star, on ordinary mornings a (person arrives at work with an ordinary expression on his . or her face; a look that says Most of me is +still in bed and not much more. For Martha Rosewall, ) however, this was no ordinary morning. - Things had begun being not ordinary for her,when she arrived home from work the previous* afternoon and found the package her son *had sent from Ohio. The long-expected and longawaited * had finally come. She had slept only in .snatches last night she had to keep gettingup , and checking to make sure the thing he had,sent was real, and that it was still there. Finally she - had slept with it under her pillow, like a )bridesmaid with a piece of wedding cake. ) Now she used her key to open the small -door around the corner from the hotel's main entrance & and went down three steps to a long *hallway painted flat green and lined with Dandux laundry + carts. They were piled high with freshly -washed and ironed bed-linen. The hallway was filled , with its clean smell, a smell that Martha +always associated, in some vague way, with the smell of * freshly baked bread. The faint sound of ,Muzak drifted down from the lobby, but thesedays , Martha heard it no more than she heard the.hum of the service elevators or the rattle of china in  the kitchen. * Halfway down the hall was a door marked *CHIEFS OF HOUSEKEEPING. She went in, hung up her ( coat, and passed through the big room 0where the Chiefs there were eleven in all took their ( coffee-breaks, worked out problems of -supply and demand, and tried to keep up with the endless , paperwork. Beyond this room with its huge &desk, wall-length bulletin board, and perpetually , overflowing ashtrays was a dressing room. .Its walls were plain green cinderblock. There were , benches, lockers, and two long steel rods +festooned with the kind of coathangers you can't steal. - At the far end of the dressing room was the*door leading into the shower and bathroom area. * This door now opened and Darcy Sagamore (appeared, wrapped in a fluffy Le Palais bathrobe * and a plume of warm steam. She took one -look at Martha's bright face and came to her with her 0 arms out, laughing. 'It came, didn't it?' she /cried. 'You got it! It's written all over your face! Yes  sir and yes ma'am!' + Martha didn't know she was going to weep +until the tears came. She hugged Darcy and put her ( face against Darcy's damp black hair. 1 'That's all right, honey,' Darcy said. 'You go on and let it all out.' 0 'It's just that I'm so proud of him, Darcy so damn proud.' ( 'Of course you are. That's why you're 2crying, and that's fine . . . but I want to see it as soon as - you stop.' She grinned then. 'You can hold /it, though. If I dripped on that baby, I gotta believe  you might poke my eye out.' ) So, with the reverence reserved for an +object of great holiness (which, to Martha Rosewall, it . was), she removed her son's first novel from)the blue canvas tote. She had wrapped it carefully in * tissue paper and put it under her brown -nylon uniform. She now carefully removed the tissue so & that Darcy could view the treasure. - Darcy looked carefully at the cover, which )showed three Marines, one with a bandage . wrapped around his head, charging up a hill 0with their guns firing. Blaze of Glory, printed in / fiery red-orange letters, was the title. And -below the picture was this: A Novel by Peter Rosewall. . 'All right, that's good, wonderful, but now -show me the other!' Darcy spoke in the tones of a ' woman who wants to dispense with the /merely interesting and go directly to the heartof the  matter. , Martha nodded and turned unhesitatingly to-the dedication page, where Darcy read: 'This book $ is dedicated to my mother, MARTHA 'ROSEWALL. Mom, I couldn't have done it without you.' Below - the printed dedication this was added in a )thin, sloping, and somehow old-fashioned script: 'And ' that's no lie. Love you, Mom! Pete.' - 'Why, isn't that just the sweetest thing?' )Darcy asked, and swiped at her dark eyes with the heel  of her hand. + 'It's more than sweet,' Martha said. She /re-wrapped the book in the tissue paper. 'It's true.' She + smiled, and in that smile her old friend ,Darcy Sagamore saw something more than love.She saw  triumph. - After punching out at three o'clock, Martha&and Darcy frequently stopped in at La Ptisserie, the . hotel's coffee shop. On rare occasions they .went into Le Cinq, the little pocket bar just off the . lobby, for something a little stronger, and -this day was a Le Cinq occasion if there had ever been ( one. Darcy got her friend comfortably ,situated in one of the booths, and left her there with a , bowl of Goldfish crackers while she spoke )briefly to Ray, who was tending bar that afternoon. ) Martha saw him grin at Darcy, nod, and ,make a circle with the thumb and forefinger of his right , hand. Darcy came back to the booth with a )look of satisfaction on her face. Martha regarded her  with some suspicion.  'What was that about?'  'You'll see.' * Five minutes later Ray came over with a +silver ice-bucket on a stand and placed it beside , them. In it was a bottle of Perrier-Jouet #champagne and two chilled glasses. . 'Here, now!' Martha said in a voice that was+half-alarmed, half-laughing. She looked at Darcy,  startled. / 'Hush,' Darcy said, and to her credit, Marthadid. + Ray uncorked the bottle, placed the cork +beside Darcy, and poured a little into her glass. Darcy ! waved at it and winked at Ray. - 'Enjoy, ladies,' Ray said, and then blew a .little kiss at Martha. 'And congratulate your boy for & me, sweetie.' He walked away before )Martha, who was still stunned, could say anything. , Darcy poured both glasses full and raised -hers. After a moment Martha did the same. The/ glasses clinked gently. 'Here's to the start ,of your son's career,' Darcy said, and they drank. Darcy / tipped the rim of her glass against Martha's -a second time. 'And to the boy himself,' she said. , They drank again, and Darcy touched their )glasses together yet a third time before Martha could + set hers down. 'And to a mother's love.' + 'Amen, honey,' Martha said, and although ,her mouth smiled, her eyes did not. On each of the , first two toasts she had taken a discreet ,sip of champagne. This time she drained the glass. + Darcy had gotten the bottle of champagne &so that she and her best friend could celebrate Peter * Rosewall's breakthrough in the style it ,seemed to deserve, but that was not the only reason. She , was curious about what Martha had said ,It's more than sweet, ifs true. And she was curious $ about that expression of triumph. , She waited until Martha had gotten through*her third glass of champagne and then she said, + 'What did you mean about the dedication, Martha?'  'What?' 0 'You said it wasn't just sweet, it was true.' ' Martha looked at her so long without (speaking that Darcy thought she was not going to answer 0 at all. Then she uttered a laugh so bitter it /was shocking at least to Darcy it was. She'dhad no , idea that cheerful little Martha Rosewall .could be so bitter, in spite of the hard life she had led. , But that note of triumph was still there, !too, an unsettling counterpoint. - 'His book is going to be a best-seller and ,the critics are going to eat it up like ice cream,' / Martha said. 'I believe that, but not because1Pete says so . . . although he does, of course. I* believe it because that's what happened with him.'  'Who?' / 'Pete's father,' Martha said. She folded her .hands on the table and looked at Darcy calmly.. 'But ' Darcy began, then stopped. Johnny /Rosewall had never written a book in his life, of . course. IOUs and the occasional I fucked yo )momma in spray-paint on brick walls were more - Johnny's style. It seemed as if Martha was saying . . . - Never mind the fancy stuff, Darcy thought. +You know perfectly well what she's saying; She ) might have been married to Johnny when *she got pregnant with Pete, but someone a little more , intellectual was responsible for the kid. , Except it didn't fit. Darcy had never met ,Johnny, but she had seen half a dozen photosof him * in Martha's albums, and she'd gotten to 0know Pete well so well, in fact, that during his last ) two years of high school and first two .years of college she'd come to think of him as partly her , own. And the physical resemblance between (the boy who'd spent so much time in her kitchen ( and the man in the photo albums . . . / 'Well, Johnny was Pete's biological father,' /Martha said, as if reading her mind. 'Only haveto . look at his nose and eyes to see that. Just .wasn't his natural one . . . any more of that bubbly? It ) goes down so smooth.' Now that she was ,tiddly, the South had begun to resurface in Martha's 0 voice like a child creeping out of its hiding place. % Darcy poured most of the remaining .champagne into Martha's glass. Martha held it up by the - stem, looking through the liquid, enjoying -the way it turned the subdued afternoon lightin Le 0 Cinq to gold. Then she drank a little, set the,glass down, and laughed that bitter, jagged laugh  again. . 'You don't have the slightes' idea what I'm talking about, do you?'  'No, honey, I don't.' . 'Well, I'm going to tell you,' Martha said. 1'After all these years I have to tell someone now + more'n ever, now that he's published his .book and broken through after all those years of gettin , ready for it to happen. God knows I can't 2tell him him least of all. But then, lucky sonsnever + know how much their mothers love them, or$the sacrifices they make, do they?' + 'I guess not,' Darcy said. 'Martha, hon, -maybe you ought to think about if you really want to " tell me whatever it is you ' - 'No, they don't have a clue,' Martha said, -and Darcy realized her friend hadn't heard a single . word she'd said. Martha Rosewall was off in *some world of her own. When her eyes came back 1 to Darcy, a peculiar little smile one Darcy /didn't like much touched the corners of her - mouth. 'Not a clue,' she repeated. 'If you 'want to know what that word dedication really means, I * think you have to ask a mother. What do you think, Darcy?' - But Darcy could only shake her head, unsure+what to say. Martha nodded, however, as if , Darcy had agreed completely, and then she began to speak. + There was no need for her to go over the &basic facts. The two women had worked together at Le - Palais for eleven years and had been close friends for most of that time. - The most basic of those basic facts, Darcy /would have said (at least until that day in Le Cinq - she would have said it), was that Marty had(married a man who wasn't much good, one who was - a lot more interested in his booze and his ,dope not to mention just about any woman who happened 0 to flip a hip in his direction than he was in the woman he had married. ) Martha had been in New York only a few ,months when she met him, just a babe in the woods, ' and she had been two months pregnant -when she said I do. Pregnant or not, she had told Darcy , more than once, she had thought carefully )before agreeing to marry Johnny. She was grateful he ' wanted to stick by her (she was wise )enough, even then, to know that many men would have + been down the road and gone five minutes /after the words 'I'm pregnant' were out of the little / lady's mouth), but she was not entirely blind-to his shortcomings. She had a good idea whather / mother and father especially her father -would make of Johnny Rosewall with his black TBird ' and his tu-tone airtip shoes, bought %because Johnny had seen Memphis Slim wearing a pair ) exactly like them when Slim played the Apollo. 0 That first child Martha had lost in the third ,month. After another five months or so, she had - decided to chalk the marriage up to profit ,and loss mostly loss. There had been too many late * nights, too many weak excuses, too many 0black eyes. Johnny, she said, fell in love with his fists  when he was drunk. * 'He always looked good,' she told Darcy -once, 'but a good-lookin shitheel is still a shitheel.' ) Before she could pack her bags, Martha ,discovered she was pregnant again. Johnny's reaction * this time was immediate and hostile: he -socked her in the belly with the handle of a broom in an * effort to make her miscarry. Two nights ,later he and a couple of his friends men who shared , Johnny's affection for bright clothes and ,tu-tone shoes tried to stick up a liquor store on East , n6th Street. The proprietor had a shotgun -under the counter. He brought it out. Johnny Rosewall . was packing a nickel-plated .32 he'd gotten %God knew where. He pointed it at the proprietor, . pulled the trigger, and the pistol blew up. +One of the fragments of the barrel entered his brain by / way of his right eye, killing him instantly. . Martha had worked on at Le Palais until her *seventh month (this was long before Darcy , Sagamore's time, of course), and then Mrs -Proulx told her to go home before she droppedthe kid + in the tenth-floor corridor or maybe the .laundry elevator. You're a good little worker and you can . have your job back later on if you want it, /Roberta Proulx told her, but for right now you get  yourself gone, girl. + Martha did, and two months later she had %borne a seven-pound boy whom she had named + Peter, and Peter had, in the fullness of -time, written a novel called Blaze of Glory, which  everyone including the %Book-of-the-Month Club and Universal Pictures thought destined  for fame and fortune. / All this Darcy had heard before. The rest of /it the unbelievable rest of it she heard about - that afternoon and evening, beginning in Le)Cinq, with champagne glasses before them and the - advance copy of Pete's novel in the canvas tote by Martha Rosewall's feet. - 'We were living uptown, of course,' Martha -said, looking down at her champagne glass and/ twirling it between her fingers. 'On Stanton +Street, up by Station Park. I've been back since. It's - worse than it was a lot worse but it #was no beauty spot even back then. , 'There was a spooky old woman who lived at,the Station Park end of Stanton Street back then / folks called her Mama Delorme and lots of +them swore she was a bruja woman. I didn't , believe in anything like that myself, and .once I asked Octavia Kinsolving, who lived in the same - building as me and Johnny, how people could)go on believing such trash in a day when space , satellites went whizzing around the earth *and there was a cure for just about every disease under + the sun. 'Tavia was an educated woman 0had been to Juilliard and was only living on the , fatback side of 110th because she had her -mother and three younger brothers to support.I * thought she would agree with me but she !only laughed and shook her head. 1 ' "Are you telling me you believe in bruja?" I asked her. 2 ' "No," she said, "but I believe in her. She is .different. Maybe for every thousand or ten . thousand or million women who claim to-be witchy, there's one who really is. If so, Mama  Delorme's the one." / 'I just laughed. People who don't need bruja -can afford to laugh at it, the same way that people , who don't need prayer can afford to laugh +at that. I'm talkin 'bout when I was first married, you , know, and in those days I still thought I .could straighten Johnny out. Can you dig it?'  Darcy nodded. - Then I had the miscarriage. Johnny was the 1main reason I had it, I guess, although I didn't like - to admit that even to myself back then. He %was beating on me most the time, and drinking all the + time. He'd take the money I gave him and ,then he'd take more out of my purse. When I told him I ) wanted him to quit hooking from my bag .he'd get all woundy-faced and claim he hadn't done any . such thing. That was if he was sober. If he was drunk he'd just laugh. , 'I wrote my momma down home it hurt me .to write that letter, and it shamed me, and I - cried while I was writing it, but I had to *know what she thought. She wrote back and told me to , get out of it, to go right away before he .put me in the hospital or even worse. My oldersister, . Cassandra (we always called her Kissy), went,that one better. She sent me a Greyhound bus' ticket with two words written on the /envelope in pink lipstick GO NOW, it said.' ' Martha took another small sip of her 3champagne. 'Well, I didn't. I liked to think I had too - much dignity. I suppose it was nothing but ,stupid pride. Either way, it turned out the same. I . stayed. Then, after I lost the baby, I went /and got pregnant again only I didn't know at first. I / didn't have any morning sickness, you see . .,. but then, I never did with the first one, either.' & 'You didn't go to this Mama Delorme ,because you were pregnant?' Darcy asked. Her+ immediate assumption had been that Martha(had thought maybe the witch-woman would give , her something that would make her miscarry.. . . or that she'd decided on an out-and-out  abortion. / 'No,' Martha said. 'I went because Tavia said-Mama Delorme could tell me for sure what the - stuff was I found in Johnny's coat pocket. (White powder in a little glass bottle.'  'Oh-oh,' Darcy said. , Martha smiled without humor. 'You want to )know how bad things can get?' she asked. 0 'Probably you don't but I'll tell you anyway. +Bad is when your man drinks and don't have no , steady job. Really bad is when he drinks, *don't have no job, and beats on you. Even worse is ' when you reach into his coat pocket, 0hoping to find a dollar to buy toilet paper with down at the 0 Sunland Market, and find a little glass bottle,with a spoon on it instead. And do you know what's . worst of all? Looking at that little bottle /and just hoping the stuff inside it is cocaine and not  horse.' ( 'You took it to Mama Delorme?' Martha laughed pityingly. ) 'The whole bottle'? No ma'am. I wasn't /getting much fun out of life, but I didn't want to die. If ) he'd come home from wherever he was at (and found that two-gram bottle gone, he would have - plowed me like a pea-field. What I did was 0take a little and put it in the cellophane from off a + cigarette pack. Then I went to Tavia and +'Tavia told me to go to Mama Delorme and I went.'  'What was she like?' , Martha shook her head, unable to tell her *friend exactly what Mama Delorme had been like, or , how strange that half-hour in the woman's -third-floor apartment had been, or how she'd nearly - run down the crazily leaning stairs to the ,street, afraid that the woman was following her. The . apartment had been dark and smelly, full of +the smell of candles and old wallpaper and cinnamon & and soured sachet. There had been a -picture of Jesus on one wall, Nostradamus on another. , 'She was a weird sister if there ever was 1one,' Martha said finally. 'I don't have any ideaeven ( today how old she was; she might have ,been seventy, ninety, or a hundred and ten. There was a + pink-white scar that went up one side of -her nose and her forehead and into her hair. Looked like 0 a burn. It had pulled her right eye down in a /kind of droop that looked like a wink. She was . sitting in a rocker and she had knitting in /her lap. I came in and she said, "I have three things to / tell you, little lady. The first is that you .don't believe in me. The second is the bottle you found in - your husband's coat is full of White Angel -heroin. The third is you're three weeks gone with a * boy-child you'll name after his natural father.'' ' + Martha looked around to make sure no one -had taken a seat at one of the nearby tables, satisfied / herself that they were still alone, and then ,leaned toward Darcy, who was looking at her with  silent fascination. / 'Later, when I could think straight again, I +told myself that as far as those first two things went, , she hadn't done anything that a good stage(magician couldn't do or one of those mentalist ) fellows in the white turbans. If Tavia 0Kinsolving had called the old lady to say I was coming, she - might have told her why I was coming, too. +You see how simple it could have been? And to a ( woman like Mama Delorme, those little +touches would be important, because if you want to be * known as a bruja woman, you have to act like a bruja woman.' ( 'I suppose that's right,' Darcy said. . 'As for her telling me that I was pregnant, /that might have been just a lucky guess. Or . .. well  . . . some ladies just know.' ' Darcy nodded. 'I had an aunt who was (damned good at knowing when a woman had caught , pregnant. She'd know sometimes before the %woman knew, and sometimes before the woman had * any business being pregnant, if you see what I mean.'  Martha laughed and nodded. - 'She said their smell changed,' Darcy went *on, 'and sometimes you could pick up that new , smell as soon as a day after the woman in -question had caught, if your nose was keen.' . 'Uh-huh,' Martha said. 'I've heard the same ,thing, but in my case none of that applied. She just + knew, and down deep, underneath the part -of me that was trying to make believe it was all just a , lot of hokum, I knew she knew. To be with *her was to believe in bruja her bruja, anyway. And - it didn't go away, that feeling, the way a (dream does when you wake up, or the way your belief in , a good faker goes away when you're out of his spell.'  'What did you do?' , 'Well, there was a chair with a saggy old -cane seat near the door and I guess that was lucky for * me, because when she said what she did, +the world kind of grayed over and my knees came . unbolted. I was going to sit down no matter +what, but if the chair hadn't been there I would have  sat on the floor. - 'She just waited for me to get myself back /together and went on knitting. It was like she had / seen it all a hundred times before. I suppose she had. - 'When my heart finally began to slow down I+opened my mouth and what came out was "I'm  going to leave my husband." - ' "No," she came back right away, "he gonna0leave you. You gonna see him out, is all. Stick - around, woman. There be a little money. You,gonna think he hoit the baby but he dint be doin it.' 1 ' "How," I said, but that was all I could say, -it seemed like, and so I kept saying it over and * over. "How-how-how," just like John Lee +Hooker on some old blues record. Even now, twentysix , years later, I can smell those old burned *candles and kerosene from the kitchen and the sour / smell of dried wallpaper, like old cheese. I .can see her, small and frail in this old blue dress with . little polka-dots that used to be white but -had gone the yellowy color of old newspapers by the / time I met her. She was so little, but there +was such a feeling of power that came from her, like a  bright, bright light ' , Martha got up, went to the bar, spoke with)Ray, and came back with a large glass of water. ' She drained most of it at a draught.  'Better?' Darcy asked. 1 'A little, yeah.' Martha shrugged, then smiled..'It doesn't do to go on about it, I guess. If you'd . been there, you'd've felt it. You'd've felt her. . ' "How I do anythin or why you married that /country piece of shit in the first place ain't neither + of them important now," Mama Delorme said+to me. "What's important now is you got to find  the child's natural father." + 'Anyone listening would have thought she (was as much as saying I'd been screwing around on + my man, but it never even occurred to me +to be mad at her; I was too confused to be mad. "What / do you mean?" I asked. "Johnny's the child's natural father." , 'She kind of snorted and flapped her hand /at me, like she was saying Pshaw. "Ain't nothin natural about that man." ( Then she leaned in closer to me and I .started to feel a little scared. There was so much , knowing in her, and it felt like not very much of it was nice. . ' ''Any child a woman get, the man shoot it -out'n his pecker, girl," she said. "You know that,  don't you?" / 'I didn't think that was the way they put it /in the medical books, but I felt my head going up n * down just the same, as if she'd reached .across the room with hands I couldn't see and nodded it  for me. * ' "That's right," she said, nodding her /ownself. "That's the way God planned it to be . . . like a ) seesaw. A man shoots cheerun out'n his /pecker, so them cheerun mostly his. But it's a woman * who carries em and bears em and has the +raisin of em, so them cheerun mostly hers. That's the . way of the world, but there's a 'ception to /every rule, one that proves the rule, and this is one of + em. The man who put you with child ain't /gonna be no natural father to that child he wouldn't , be no natural father to it even if he was *gonna be around. He'd hate it, beat it to death before its - foist birthday, rnos' likely, because he'd -know it wasn't his. A man can't always smell that out, or 0 see it, but he will if the child is different 0enough . . . and this child goan be as differentfrom pissignorant 0 Johnny Rosewall as day is from night. So tell .me, girl: who is the child's natural father?" $ And she kind of leaned toward me. - 'All I could do was shake my head and tell .her I didn't know what she was talking about. But I * think that something in me something -way back in that part of your mind that only gets a real . chance to think in your dreams did know. /Maybe I'm only making that up because of all I / know now, but I don't think so. I think that ,for just a moment or two his name fluttered there in  my head. / 'I said, "I don't know what it is you want me.to say I don't know anything about natural . fathers or unnatural ones. I don't even know0for sure if I'm pregnant, but if I am it has to be + Johnny's, because he's the only man I've ever slept with!" - 'Well, she sat back for a minute, and then 0she smiled. Her smile was like sunshine, and it eased , me a little. "I didn't mean to scare you, .honey," she said. "That wasn't none of what I had in my 2 mind at all. It's just that I got the sight, and1sometime it's strong. I'll just brew us a cup of tea, and . that'll calm you down. You'll like it. It's special to me." / 'I wanted to tell her I didn't want any tea, /but it seemed like I couldn't. Seemed like too much - of an effort to open my mouth, and all the "strength had gone out of my legs. , 'She had a greasy little kitchenette that +was almost as dark as a cave. I sat in the chair by the , door and watched her spoon loose tea into -an old chipped china pot and put a kettle on the gas + ring. I sat there thinking I didn't want .anything that was special to her, nor anything that came 0 out of that greasy little kitchenette either. 0I was thinking I'd take just a little sip to be mannerly - and then get my ass out of there as fast asI could and never come back. . 'But then she brought over two little china +cups just as clean as snow and a tray with sugar and ) cream and fresh-baked bread-rolls. She +poured the tea and it smelled good and hot and strong. It + kind of waked me up and before I knew it (I'd drunk two cups and eaten one of the bread-rolls,  too. - 'She drank a cup and ate a roll and we got .talking along on more natural subjects who we % knew on the street, whereabouts in ,Alabama I came from, where I liked to shop, and all that. , Then I looked at my watch and seen over an.hour and a half had gone by. I started to get up and a - dizzy feeling ran through me and I plopped right back in my chair again.' ( Darcy was looking at her, eyes round. . ' "You doped me," I said, and I was scared, 'but the scared part of me was way down inside. / ' "Girl, I want to help you," she said, "but )you don't want to give up what I need to know and I ) know damn well you ain't gonna do what -you need to do even once you do give it up not , without a push. So I fixed her. You gonna -take a little nap, is all, but before you do you're gonna * tell me the name of your babe's natural father." - 'And, sitting there in that chair with its ,saggy cane bottom and hearing all of uptown roaring - and racketing just outside her living-room -window, I saw him as clear as I'm seeing you now, - Darcy. His name was Peter Jefferies, and he0was just as white as I am black, just as tall asI am , short, just as educated as I am ignorant. ,We were as different as two people could be except for * one thing we both come from Alabama, +me from Babylon down in the toolies by the Florida - state line, him from Birmingham. He didn't /even know I was alive I was just the nigger ' woman who cleaned the suite where he ,always stayed on the eleventh floor of this hotel. And as . for me, I only thought of him to stay out of,his way because I'd heard him talk and seen him + operate and I knew well enough what sort /of man he was. It wasn't just that he wouldn't use a + glass a black person had used before him *without it had been washed; I've seen too much of that . in my time to get worked up about it. It was.that once you got past a certain point in thatman's ) character, white and black didn't have ,anything to do with what he was. He belongedto the sonof- + a-bitch tribe, and that particular bunch comes in all skin-colors. - 'You know what? He was like Johnny in a lot+of ways, or the way Johnny would have been if + he'd been smart and had an education and -if God had thought to give Johnny a great bigslug of . talent inside of him instead of just a head #for dope and a nose for wet pussy. / 'I thought nothing of him but to steer clear .of him, nothing at all. But when Mama Delorme 1 leaned over me, so close I felt like the smell 'of cinnamon comin out of her pores was gonna * suffocate me, it was his name that came -out with never a pause. "Peter Jefferies," I said. "Peter , Jefferies, the man who stays in 1163 when )he ain't writing his books down there in Alabama. , He's the natural father. But he's white!" - 'She leaned closer and said, "No he ain't, /honey. No man's white. Inside where they live, they's . all black. You don't believe it, but that's /true. It's midnight inside em all, any hour of God's day. - But a man can make light out of night, and +that's why what comes out of a man to make a baby . in a woman is white. Natural got nothing to (do with color. Now you close your eyes, honey, / because you tired you so tired. Now! Say! .Now! Don't you fight! Mama Delorme ain't goan * put nothin over on you, child! Just got ,somethin I goan to put in your hand. Now no, don't - look, just close your hand over it." I did .what she said and felt something square. Felt like glass  or plastic. , ' "You gonna remember everythin when it's -time for you to remember. For now, just go onto 3 sleep. Shhh . . . go to sleep . . . shhh . . . " - 'And that's just what I did,' Martha said. +'Next thing I remember, I was running down those / stairs like the devil was after me. I didn't +remember what I was running from, but that didn't , make any difference; I ran anyway. I only ,went back there one more time, and I didn't see her  when I did.' + Martha paused and they both looked around*like women freshly awakened from a shared / dream. Le Cinq had begun to fill up it was(almost five o'clock and executives were drifting in / for their after-work drinks. Although neither)wanted to say so out loud, both suddenly wanted to ) be somewhere else. They were no longer ,wearing their uniforms but neither felt she belonged , among these men with their briefcases and -their talk of stocks, bonds, and debentures. - 'I've got a casserole and a six-pack at my .place,' Martha said, suddenly timid. 'I could warm up / the one and cool down the other . . . if you want to hear the rest.' 0 'Honey, I think I got to hear the rest,' Darcy&said, and laughed a little nervously. , 'And I think I've got to tell it,' Martha /replied, but she did not laugh. Or even smile. 1 'Just let me call my husband. Tell him I'll be late.' . 'You do that,' Martha said, and while Darcy *used the telephone, Martha checked in her bag one + more time just to make sure the precious book was still there. . The casserole as much of it as the two of)them could use, anyway was eaten, and they had , each had a beer. Martha asked Darcy again -if she was sure she wanted to hear the rest. Darcy  said she did. 0 'Because some of it ain't very nice. I got to .be up front with you about that. Some of it's + worse'n the sort of magazines the single *men leave behind em when they check out.' ' Darcy knew the sort of magazines she -meant, but could not imagine her trim, clean little friend ' in connection with any of the things ,pictured in them. She got them each a fresh beer, and  Martha began to speak again.  ' + I was back home before I woke up all the ,way, and because I couldn't remember hardly any of ( what had gone on at Mama Delorme's, I .decided the best thing the safest thing was to + believe it had all been a dream. But the .powder I'd taken from Johnny's bottle wasn't a dream; it . was still in my dress pocket, wrapped up in .the cellophane from the cigarette pack. All I wanted * to do right then was get rid of it, and /never mind all the bruja in the world. Maybe I didn't make ' a business of going through Johnny's *pockets, but he surely made a business of going through - mine, 'case I was holding back a dollar or two he might want. / 'But that wasn't all I found in my pocket -there was something else, too. I took it out and , looked at it and then I knew for sure I'd -seen her, although I still couldn't remember much of  what had passed between us. 1 'It was a little square plastic box with a top -you could see through and open. There wasn't - nothing in it but an old dried-up mushroom - except after hearing what 'Tavia had said about , that woman, I thought maybe it might be a -toadstool instead of a mushroom, and probablyone - that would give you the night-gripes so bad0you'd wish it had just killed you outright like some  of em do. * 'I decided to flush it down the commode -along with that powder he'd been sniffing up his nose, ' but when it came right down to it, I /couldn't. Felt like she was right there in the room with me, / telling me not to. I was even scairt to look 0into the livin-room mirror, case I might see her standin behind me. 0 'In the end, I dumped the little bit of powder/I'd taken down the kitchen sink, and I put the - little plastic box in the cabinet over the 0sink. I stood on tiptoe and pushed it in as far as I could , all the way to the back, I guess. Where I forgot all about it.' ) She stopped for a moment, drumming her /fingers nervously on the table, and then said, 'I guess I . ought to tell you a little more about Peter -Jefferies. My Pete's novel is about Viet Nam and what * he knew of the Army from his own hitch; +Peter Jefferies's books were about what he always ( called Big Two, when he was drunk and .partying with his friends. He wrote the first one while * he was still in the service, and it was *published in 1946. It was called Blaze of Heaven.' . Darcy looked at her for a long time without &speaking and then said, 'Is that so?' + 'Yes. Maybe you see where I'm going now. -Maybe you get a little more what I mean about- natural fathers. Blaze of Heaven, Blaze of Glory.' % 'But if your Pete had read this Mr .Jefferies's book, isn't it possible that ' . 'Course it's possible,' Martha said, making +that pshaw gesture herself this time, 'but that ain't * what happened. I ain't going to try and /convince you of that, though. You'll either be convinced . when I get done or you won't. I just wanted &to tell you about the man, a little.'  'Go to it,' Darcy said. + 'I saw him pretty often from 1957 when I +started working at Le Palais right through until 1968 . or so, when he got in trouble with his heart-and liver. The way the man drank and carried on, I . was only surprised he didn't get in trouble /with himself earlier on. He was only in half a dozen + times in 1969, and I remember how bad he *looked he was never fat, but he'd lost enough , weight by then so he wasn't no more than a(stuffed string. Went right on drinking, though, / yellow face or not. I'd hear him coughing and,puking in the bathroom and sometimes crying with 2 the pain and I'd think, Well, that's it; that's 1all; he's got to see what he's doing to himself; he'll . quit now. But he never. In 1970 he was only (in twice. He had a man with him that he leaned on ) and who took care of him. He was still )drinking, too, although anybody who took even half a ( glance at him knew he had no business doing it. + The last time he came was in February of .1971. It was a different man he had with him, * though; I guess the first one must have -played out. Jefferies was in a wheelchair by then. When I % come in to clean and looked in the ,bathroom, I seen what was hung up to dry on the showercurtain & rail -continence pants. He'd been a 'handsome man, but those days were long gone. The + last few times I saw him, he just looked .raddled. Do you know what I'm talking about?' ' Darcy nodded. You saw such creatures )creeping down the street sometimes, with their brown - bags under their arms or tucked into their shabby old coats. * 'He always stayed in 1163, one of those .corner suites with the view that looks toward the - Chrysler Building, and I always used to do 0for him. After awhile, it got so's he would evencall 0 me by name, but it didn't really signify I ,wore a name-tag and he could read, that was all. I , don't believe he ever once really saw me. /Until 1960 he always left two dollars on top ofthe . television when he checked out. Then, until 0'64, it was three. At the very end it was five. Those - were very good tips for those days, but he -wasn't really tipping me; he was following a custom. - Custom's important for people like him. He .tipped for the same reason he'd hold the door for a - lady; for the same reason he no doubt used /to put his milk-teeth under his pillow when he was a 0 little fellow. Only difference was, I was the *Cleanin Fairy instead of the Tooth Fairy. - 'He'd come in to talk to his publishers or -sometimes movie and TV people, and he'd call up his . friends some of them were in publishing, /too, others were agents or writers like him and - there'd be a party. Always a party. Most I -just knew about by the messes I had to clean up the - next day dozens of empty bottles (mostly1Jack Daniel's), millions of cigarette butts, wet , towels in the sinks and the tub, leftover (room service everywhere. Once I found a whole platter / of jumbo shrimp turned into the toilet bowl. *There were glass-rings on everything, and people / snoring on the sofa and floors, like as not. , 'That was mostly, but sometimes there were/parties still going on when I started to clean at / ten-thirty in the morning. He'd let me in and)I'd just kinda clean up around em. There weren't any * women at those parties; those ones were /strictly stag, and all they ever did was drink and talk * about the war. How they got to the war. *Who they knew in the war. Where they went in the war. - Who got killed in the war. What they saw in*the war they could never tell their wives about - (although it was all right if a black maid -happened to pick up on some of it). Sometimes not - too often they'd play high-stakes poker ,as well, but they talked about the war even while they , were betting and raising and bluffing and 1folding. Five or six men, their faces all flushedthe way ( white men's faces get when they start )really socking it down, sitting around a glass-topped table / with their shirts open and their ties pulled +way down, the table heaped with more money than a - woman like me will make in a lifetime. And .how they did talk about their war! They talked* about it the way young women talk about $their lovers and their boyfriends.' # Darcy said she was surprised the (management hadn't kicked Jefferies out, famous writer or not ' they were fairly stiff about such )goings-on now and had been even worse in years gone by, or  so she had heard. / 'No, no, no,' Martha said, smiling a little. .'You got the wrong impression. You're thinkingthe - man and his friends carried on like one of -those rock-groups that like to tear up their suites and - throw the sofas out the windows. Jefferies -wasn't no ordinary grunt, like my Pete; he'd been to , West Point, went in a Lieutenant and came )out a Major. He was quality, from one of those old . Southern families who have a big house full /of old paintings where everyone's ridin hosses and + looking noble. He could tie his tie four +different ways and he knew how to bend over a lady's 0 hand when he kissed it. He was quality, I tellyou.' / Martha's smile took on a little twist as she *spoke the word; the twist had a look both bitter and  derisive. - 'He and his friends sometimes got a little ,loud, I guess, but they rarely got rowdy there's a / difference, although it's hard to explain ,and they never got out of control. If there was a ) complaint from the neighboring room ,because it was a corner suite he stayed in, there was - only the one and someone from the front -desk had to call Mr Jefferies's room and ask him and , his guests to tone it down a little, why, "they always did. You understand?'  'Yes.' 0 'And that's not all. A quality hotel can work -for people like Mr Jefferies. It can protect them. - They can go right on partying and having a .good time with their booze and their cards or maybe  their drugs.'  'Did he take drugs?' / 'Hell, I don't know. He had plenty of them at*the end, God knows, but they were all the kind - with prescription labels on them. I'm just 0saying that quality it's that white Southern / gentleman's idea of quality I'm talking about-now, you know calls to quality. He'd been + coming to Le Palais a long time, and you "may think it was important to the management that he + was a big famous author, but that's only .because you haven't been at Le Palais as long as I have. * Him being famous was important to them, .but it was really just the icing on the cake. What was + more important was that he'd been coming -there a long time, and his father, who was a big - landowner down around Porterville, had been.a regular guest before him. The people who ranthe - hotel back then were people who believed in.tradition. I know the ones who run it now say they + believe in it, and maybe they do when it *suits them, but in those days they really believed in it. ) When they knew Mr Jefferies was coming *up to New York on the Southern Flyer from Birmingham, ( you'd see the room right next to that +corner suite sort of empty out, unless the hotel was full ' right up to the scuppers. They never *charged him for the empty room next door; they were just + trying to spare him the embarrassment of /having to tell his cronies to keep it down to a dull roar.' ' Darcy shook her head slowly. 'That's amazing.' ! 'You don't believe it, honey?' 4 'Oh yes I believe it, but it's still amazing.' , That bitter, derisive smile resurfaced on /Martha Rosewall's face. 'Ain't nothing too muchfor 1 quality . . . for that Robert E. Lee Stars and 2Bars charm . . . or didn't used to be. Hell, even / - recognized that he was quality, no sort of &a man to go hollering Yee-haw out the window or / telling Rastus P. Coon jokes to his friends. * 'He hated blacks just the same, though, /don't be thinking different . . . but remember what I " said about him belonging to the ,son-of-a-bitch tribe? Fact was, when it cameto hate, Peter % Jefferies was an equal-opportunity ,employer. When John Kennedy died, Jefferies happened to be / in the city and he threw a party. All of his ,friends were there, and it went on into the next day. I ) could barely stand to be in there, the *things they were saying -about how things would be perfect , if only someone would get that brother of -his who wouldn't be happy until every decent white + kid in the country was fucking while the -Beatles played on the stereo and the colored (that's what ( they called black folks, mostly, "the /colored", I used to hate that sissy, pantywaistway of saying ) so much) were running wild through the "streets with a TV under each arm. , 'It got so bad that I knew I was going to 0scream at him. I just kept telling myself to be quiet ) and do my job and get out as fast as I -could; I kept telling myself to remember the man was my / Pete's natural father if I couldn't remember /anything else; I kept telling myself that Pete was only , three years old and I needed my job and I 0would lose it if I couldn't keep my mouth shut. * 'Then one of em said, "And after we get /Bobby, let's go get his candy-ass kid brother!"and . one of the others said, "Then we'll get all ,the male children and really have a party!" 1 ' "That's right!" Mr Jefferies said. "And when .we've got the last head up on the last castle wall / we're going to have a party so big I'm going to hire Madison Square Garden!" - 'I had to leave then. I had a headache and ,belly-cramps from trying so hard to keep my mouth / shut. I left the room half-cleaned, which is -something I never did before nor have since, but , sometimes being black has its advantages; /he didn't know I was there, and he sure didn't know - when I was gone. Wasn't none of them did.' - That bitter derisive smile was on her lips again. / 'I don't see how you can call a man like that/quality, even as a joke,' Darcy said, 'or call him the ' natural father of your unborn child, ,whatever the circumstances might have been. To me he  sounds like a beast.' 1 'No!' Martha said sharply. 'He wasn't a beast. -He was a man. In some ways in most ways ) he was a bad man, but a man is what he (was. And he did have that something you could call * 'quality' without a smirk on your face, ,although it only came out completely in the things he  wrote.' - 'Huh!' Darcy looked disdainfully at Martha +from below drawn-together brows. 'You read one  of his books, did you?' - 'Honey, I read them all. He'd only written +three by the time I went to Mama Delorme's with . that white powder in late 1959, but I'd read.two of them. In time I got all the way caught up, - because he wrote even slower than I read.' 'She grinned. 'And that's pretty slow!' * Darcy looked doubtfully toward Martha's *bookcase. There were books there by Alice Walker - and Rita Mae Brown, Linden Hills by Gloria +Naylor and Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down by + Ishmael Reed, but the three shelves were #pretty much dominated by paperback romances and # Agatha Christie mystery stories. , 'Stories about war don't hardly seem like .your pick an glory, Martha, if you know what I  mean.' . 'Of course I know,' Martha said. She got up /and brought them each a fresh beer. 'I'll tell you a / funny thing, Dee: if he'd been a nice man, I +probably never would have read even one of them. 1 And I'll tell you an even funnier one: if he'd *been a nice man, I don't think they would have been  as good as they were.' ' 'What are you talking about, woman?' 3 'I don't know, exactly. Just listen, all right?'  'All right.' - 'Well, it didn't take me until the Kennedy -assassination to figure out what kind of man he was. , I knew that by the summer of '58. By then *I'd seen what a low opinion he had of the human race - in general not his friends, he would've +died for them, but everyone else. Everyone was out . looking for a buck to stroke, he used to say) stroking the buck, stroking the buck, everyone , was stroking the buck. It seemed like him -and his friends thought stroking the buck wasa real , bad thing, unless they were playing poker ,and had a whole mess of em spread out on thetable. , Seemed to me like they stroked them then, /all right. Seemed to me like then they stroked them  plenty, him included. ) 'There was a lot of big ugly under his +Southern-gentleman top layer he thought people who - were trying to do good or improve the world)were about the funniest things going, he hated the ) blacks and the Jews, and he thought we $ought to H-bomb the Russians out of existence before - they could do it to us. Why not? he'd say. &They were part of what he called 'the subhuman strain + of the race'. To him that seemed to mean ,Jews, blacks, Italians, Indians, and anyone whose + family didn't summer on the Outer Banks. . 'I listened to him spout all that ignorance 0and high-toned filth, and naturally I started to, wonder about why he was a famous writer . .. . how he could be a famous writer. I wanted to + know what it was the critics saw in him, (but I was a lot more interested in what ordinary folks * like me saw in him -the people who made ,his books best-sellers as soon as they came out. . Finally I decided to find out for myself. I -went down to the Public Library and borrowed his first  book, Blaze of Heaven. ' 'I was expecting it'd turn out to be -something like in the story of the Emperor's new clothes, . but it didn't. The book was about these five*men and what happened to them in the war, and what * happened to their wives and girlfriends *back home at the same time. When I saw on the jacket it . was about the war, I kind of rolled my eyes,+thinking it would be like all those boring stories they  told each other.'  'It wasn't?' , 'I read the first ten or twenty pages and 2thought, This ain't so good. It ain't as bad as I thought / it'd be, but nothing's happening. Then I read0another forty pages and I kind of . . . well, I kind of , lost myself. Next time I looked up it was ,almost midnight and I was two hundred pages into that . book. I thought to myself, You got to go to &bed, Martha. You got to go right now, because fivethirty . comes early. But I read another thirty pages,in spite of how heavy my eyes were getting, - and it was quarter to one before I finally got up to brush my teeth.' ) Martha stopped, looking off toward the ,darkened window and all the smiles of night outside it, , her eyes hazed with remembering, her lips -pressed together in a light frown. She shook her head  a little. - 'I didn't know how a man who was so boring -when you had to listen to him could write so you + didn't never want to close the book, nor &ever see it end, either. How a nasty, cold-hearted man - like him could still make up characters so )real you wanted to cry over em when they died. When - Noah got hit and killed by a taxi-cab near )the end of Blaze of Heaven, just a month after his part 0 of the war was over, I did cry. I didn't know -how a sour, cynical man like Jefferies could make a & body care so much about things that 0weren't real at all about things he'd made up out of his , own head. And there was something else in 2that book . . . a kind of sunshine. It was full ofpain , and bad things, but there was sweetness init, too . . . and love . . . ' + She startled Darcy by laughing out loud. . 'There was a fella worked at the hotel back ,then named Billy Beck, a nice young man who was ) majoring in English at Fordham when he *wasn't on the door. He and I used to talk sometimes '  'Was he a brother?' . 'God, no!' Martha laughed again. 'Wasn't no -black doormen at Le Palais until 1965. Black , porters and bellboys and car-park valets, .but no black doormen. Wasn't considered right.Quality / people like Mr Jefferies wouldn't have liked it. - 'Anyway, I asked Billy how the man's books )could be so wonderful when he was such a - booger in person. Billy asked me if I knew +the one about the fat disc jockey with the thin voice, / and I said I didn't know what he was talking -about. Then he said he didn't know the answerto my , question, but he told me something a prof .of his had said about Thomas Wolfe. This prof said , that some writers and Wolfe was one of -them were no shakes at all until they sat down to a + desk and took up pens in their hands. He 0said that a pen to fellows like that was like a telephone . booth is to Clark Kent. He said that Thomas -Wolfe was like a . . . ' She hesitated, then smiled.' . . - . that he was like a divine wind-chime. He ,said a wind-chime isn't nothing on its own, but when . the wind blows through it, it makes a lovelynoise. 0 'I think Peter Jefferies was like that. He was+quality, he had been raised quality and he was, but - the quality in him wasn't nothing he could /take credit for. It was like God banked it for him and 0 he just spent it. I'll tell you something you 0probably won't believe: after I'd read a couple of his + books, I started to feel sorry for him.'  'Sorry?' - 'Yes. Because the books were beautiful and (the man who made em was ugly as sin. He really * was like my Johnny, but in a way Johnny +was luckier, because he never dreamed of a better life, + and Mr Jefferies did. His books were his ,dreams, where he let himself believe in the world he ( laughed at and sneered at when he was awake.' ( She asked Darcy if she wanted another !beer. Darcy said she would pass. . 'Well if you change your mind, just holler. -And you might change it, because right about here " is where the water gets murky.' * 'One other thing about the man,' Martha .said. 'He wasn't a sexy man. At least not the way you . usually think about a man being sexy.' 'You mean he was a ' , 'No, he wasn't a homosexual, or a gay, or ,whatever it is you're supposed to call them these - days. He wasn't sexy for men, but he wasn't,what you could call sexy for women, either. There ) were two, maybe three times in all the /years I did for him when I seen cigarette buttswith + lipstick on them in the bedroom ashtrays -when I cleaned up, and smelled perfume on the pillows. . One of those times I also found an eyeliner .pencil in the bathroom it had rolled under the door * and into the corner. I reckon they were /call-girls (the pillows never smelled like the kind of ) perfume decent women wear), but two or 2three times in all those years isn't much, is it?'3 'It sure isn't,' Darcy said, thinking of all the /panties she had pulled out from under beds, allthe - condoms she had seen floating in unflushed /toilets, all the false eyelashes she had found on and  under pillows. ( Martha sat without speaking for a few -moments, lost in thought, then looked up. 'I tell you * what!' she said. 'That man was sexy for .himself! It sounds crazy but it's true. There sure wasn't - any shortage of jizz in him I know that from all the sheets I changed.'  Darcy nodded. . 'And there'd always be a little jar of cold +cream in the bathroom, or sometimes on the table by - his bed. I think he used it when he pulled )off. To keep from getting chapped skin.' ) The two women looked at each other and &suddenly began giggling hysterically. - 'You sure he wasn't the other way, honey?' Darcy asked finally. , 'I said cold cream, not Vaseline,' Martha )said, and that did it; for the next five minutes the two " women laughed until they cried. - But it wasn't really funny, and Darcy knew (it. And when Martha went on, she simply listened, ) hardly believing what she was hearing. * 'It was maybe a week after that time at -Mama Delorme's, or maybe it was two,' Martha said. 'I . don't remember. It's been a long time since 0it all happened. By then I was pretty sure I was. pregnant I wasn't throwing up or nothing,0but there's a feeling to it. It don't come from places , you'd think. It's like your gums and your ,toenails and the bridge of your nose figure out what's * going on before the rest of you. Or you -want something like chop suey at three in the afternoon - and you say, "Whoa, now! What's this?" But ,you know what it is. I didn't say a word to Johnny, / though I knew I'd have to, eventually, butI was scared to.' # 'I don't blame you,' Darcy said. - 'I was in the bedroom of Jefferies's suite &one late morning, and while I did the neatening up I , was thinking about Johnny and how I might &break the news about the baby to him. Jefferies had & gone out someplace to one of his 0publishers' meetings, likely as not. The bed was a double, + messed up on both sides, but that didn't .mean nothing; he was just a restless sleeper. Sometimes * when I came in the groundsheet would be .pulled right out from underneath the mattress.- 'Well, I stripped off the coverlet and the "two blankets underneath he was thin-blooded and 0 always slept under all he could and then I -started to strip the top sheet off backward, and I / seen it right away. It was his spend, mostly dried on there. 4 'I stood there looking at it for . . . oh, I don't/know how long. It was like I was hypnotized. I 0 saw him, lying there all by himself after his ,friends had gone home, lying there smelling nothing + but the smoke they'd left behind and his -own sweat. I saw him lying there on his back and then , starting to make love to Mother Thumb and 0her four daughters. I saw that as clear as I seeyou - now, Darcy; the only thing I didn't see is )what he was thinking about, what sort of pictures he / was making in his head . . . and considering )the way he talked and how he was when he wasn't ) writing his books, I'm glad I didn't.' + Darcy was looking at her, frozen, saying nothing. . 'Next thing I knew, this . . . this feeling *came over me.' She paused, thinking, then shook her & head slowly and deliberately. 'This -compulsion came over me. It was like wanting chop suey at + three in the afternoon, or ice cream and 1pickles at two in the morning, or . . . what did you want,  Darcy?' . 'Rind of bacon,' Darcy said through lips so -numb she could hardly feel them. 'My husband , went out and couldn't find me any, but he -brought back a bag of those pork rinds and I just  gobbled them.' * Martha nodded and began to speak again. *Thirty seconds later Darcy bolted for the bathroom, - where she struggled briefly with her gorge .and then vomited up all the beer she'd drunk. ( Look on the bright side, she thought, .fumbling weakly for the flush. No hangover to worry - about. And then, on the heels of that: How -am I going to look her in the eyes? Just how am I  supposed to do that? - It turned out not to be a problem. When she*turned around, Martha was standing in the + bathroom doorway and looking at her with warm concern.  'You all right?' ) 'Yes.' Darcy tried a smile, and to her 5immense relief it felt genuine on her lips. 'I . . . I just . . . ' , 'I know,' Martha said. 'Believe me, I do. ,Should I finish, or have you heard enough?' 0 'Finish,' Darcy said decisively, and took her .friend by the arm. 'But in the living room. I don't - even want to look at the refrigerator, let alone open the door.'  'Amen to that.' & A minute later they were settled on ,opposite ends of the shabby but comfortable living-room  couch.  'You sure, honey?'  Darcy nodded. - 'All right.' But Martha sat quiet a moment .longer, looking down at the slim hands claspedin + her lap, conning the past as a submarine +commander might con hostile waters through his * periscope. At last she raised her head, (turned to Darcy, and resumed her story. . 'I worked the rest of that day in kind of a +daze. It was like I was hypnotized. People talked to me, * and I answered them, but I seemed to be &hearing them through a glass wall and speaking back to ) them the same way. I'm hypnotized, all /right, I remember thinking. She hypnotized me. That old  woman. Gave me one of those -post-hypnotic suggestions, like when a stage hypnotist says, * 'Someone says the word Chiclets to you, ,you're gonna get down on all fours and bark like a dog,' ) and the guy who was hypnotized does it ,even if no one says Chiclets to him for the next ten years. $ She put something in that tea and +hypnotized me and then told me to do that. That nasty thing. - 'I knew why she would, too an old woman #superstitious enough to believe in stump-water , cures, and how you could witch a man into 0love by putting a little drop of blood from your, period onto the heel of his foot while he -was sleeping, and cross-tie walkers, and God alone - knows what else . . . if a woman like that 'with a bee in her bonnet about natural fathers could do ) hypnotism, hypnotizing a woman like me -into doing what I did might be just what she would do. * Because she would believe it. And I had (named him to her, hadn't I? Yes indeed. . 'It never occurred to me then that I hadn't -remembered hardly anything at all about goingto 0 Mama Delorme's until after I did what I did in+Mr Jefferies's bedroom. It did that night, though. . 'I got through the day all right. I mean, I -didn't cry or scream or carry on or anything like that. + My sister Kissy acted worse the time she *was drawing water from the old well round dusk and a , bat flew up from it and got caught in her -hair. There was just that feeling that I was behind a wall 2 of glass, and I figured if that was all, I couldget along with it. , 'Then, when I got home, I all at once got 3thirsty. I was thirstier than ever in my life itfelt . like a sandstorm was going on in my throat. 0I started to drink water. It seemed like I just couldn't . drink enough. And I started to spit. I just /spit and spit and spit. Then I started to feel sick to my * stomach. I ran down to the bathroom and -looked at myself in the mirror and stuck out my tongue , to see if I could see anything there, any 0sign of what I'd done, and of course I couldn't. I thought, ! There! Do you feel better now? / 'But I didn't. I felt worse. I knelt down in ,front of the toilet and I did what you did, Darcy, only , I did a lot more of it. I vomited until I .thought I was going to pass out. I was crying and begging + God to please forgive me, to let me stop /puking before I lost the baby, if I really was quick with - one. And then I remembered myself standing +there in his bedroom with my fingers in my mouth, - not even thinking about what I was doing 0I tell you I could see myself doing it, as if I was + looking at myself in a movie. And then I vomited again. , 'Mrs Parker heard me and came to the door 0and asked if I was all right. That helped me get+ hold of myself a little, and by the time *Johnny came in that night, I was over the worst of it. He * was drunk, spoiling for a fight. When I +wouldn't give him one he hit me in the eye anyway and + walked out. I was almost glad he hit me, +because it gave me something else to think about. # The next day when I went into Mr 0Jefferies's suite he was sitting in the parlor, still in his ) pajamas, scribbling away on one of his .yellow legal pads. He always travelled with a bunch of , them, held together with a big red rubber -band, right up until the end. When he came to Le Palais / that last time and I didn't see them, I knew -he'd made up his mind to die. I wasn't a bit sorry,  neither.' ' Martha looked toward the living-room ,window with an expression which held nothingof , mercy or forgiveness; it was a cold look, +one which reported an utter absence of the heart. ' 'When I saw he hadn't gone out I was /relieved, because it meant I could put off the cleaning. - He didn't like the maids around when he was,working, you see, and so I figured he might not ) want housekeeping service until Yvonne came on at three. 1 'I said, "I'll come back later, Mr Jefferies." 1 ' ''Do it now," he said. "Just keep quiet while-you do. I've got a bitch of a headache and a hell . of an idea. The combination is killing me." + 'Any other time he would have told me to .come back, I swear it. It seemed like I could almost % hear that old black mama laughing. ( 'I went into the bathroom and started +tidying around, taking out the used towels and putting up , fresh ones, replacing the soap with a new ,bar, putting fresh matches out, and all the time I'm + thinking, You can't hypnotize someone who*doesn't want to be hypnotized, old woman. Whatever & it was you put in the tea that day, )whatever it was you told me to do or how many times you told . me to do it, I'm wise to you wise to you and shut of you. . 'I went into the bedroom and I looked at the+bed. I expected it would look to me like a closet $ does to a kid who's scared of the *boogeyman, but I saw it was just a bed. I knew I wasn't going to ) do anything, and it was a relief. So I +stripped it and there was another of those sticky patches, , still drying, as if he'd woke up horny an (hour or so before and just took care of himself. 0 'I seen it and waited to see if I was going to2feel anything about it. I didn't. It was just the * leftovers of a man with a letter and no 0mailbox to put it in, like you and I have seen ahundred , times before. That old woman was no more a,bruja woman than I was. I might be pregnant or I . might not be, but if I was, it was Johnny's /child. He was the only man I'd ever lain with, and . nothin I found on that white man's sheets )or anywhere else, for that matter was gonna  change that. , 'It was a cloudy day, but at the second I ,thought that, the sun came out like God had put His 0 final amen on the subject. I don't recall ever0feeling so relieved. I stood there thanking God / everything was all right, and all the time I )was sayin that prayer of gratitude I was scoopin that . stuff up off the sheet all of it I could -get, anyway and stickin it in my mouth and swallowin  it down. - 'It was like I was standing outside myself )and watching again. And a part of me was saying, + You're crazy to be doing that, girl, but ,you're even crazier to be doing it with him right there in , the next room; he could get up any second ,and come in here to use the bathroom and seeyou. + Rugs as thick as they are in this place, ,you'd never hear him coming. And that would be the end / of your job at Le Palais or any other big .hotel in New York, most likely. A girl caught doing a + thing like what you're doing would never -work in this city again as a chambermaid, at least not  in any half-decent hotel. / 'But it didn't make any difference. I went on-until I was done or until some part of me was - satisfied and then I just stood there a .minute, looking down at the sheet. I couldn't hear - nothing at all from the other room, and it (came to me that he was right behind me, standing in the + doorway. I knew just what the expression /on his face'd be. Used to be a travelling show that , came to Babylon every August when I was a /girl, and they had a man with it I guess he was a $ man that geeked out behind the -tent-show. He'd be down a hole and some fella would give a . spiel about how he was the missing link and +then throw a live chicken down. The geek'd bite the ) head off it. Once my oldest brother /Bradford, who died in a car accident in Biloxi -said he , wanted to go and see the geek. My dad said/he was sorry to hear it, but he didn't outrightforbid , Brad, because Brad was nineteen and almost*a man. He went, and me and Kissy meant to ask * him what it was like when he came back, +but when we saw the expression on his face we never / did. That's the expression I thought I'd see -on Jefferies's face when I turned around and saw him . in the doorway. Do you see what I'm sayin?'  Darcy nodded. / 'I knew he was there, too I just knew it. -Finally I mustered up enough courage to turn / around, thinking I'd beg him not to tell the -Chief Housekeeper beg him on my knees, if I had . to and he wasn't there. It had just been 0my guilty heart all along. I walked to the door and * looked out and seen he was still in the .parlor, writing on his yellow pad faster than ever. So I % went ahead and changed the bed and .freshened the room just like always, but that feeling that I - was behind a glass wall was back, stronger than ever. ( 'I took care of the soiled towels and .bed-linen like you're supposed to -out to the hall through . the bedroom door. First thing I learned when.I came to work at the hotel is you don't ever take , dirty linen through the sitting room of a .suite. Then I came back in to where he was. I meant to , tell him I'd do the parlor later, when he *wasn't working. But when I saw the way he was acting, I . was so surprised that I stopped right there in the doorway, looking at him. * 'He was walking around the room so fast +that his yellow silk pajamas were whipping around 0 his legs. He had his hands in his hair and he /was twirling it every which way. He looked likeone , of those brainy mathematicians in the old -Saturday Evening Post cartoons. His eyes wereall 1 wild, like he'd had a bad shock. First thing I /thought was that he'd seen what I did after alland it , had, you know, made him feel so sick it'd driven him half-crazy. + 'Turned out it didn't have nothing to do 2with me at all . . . at least he didn't think so. That was , the only time he talked to me, other than -to ask me if I'd get some more stationery or another & pillow or change the setting on the ,air-conditioner. He talked to me because he had to. # Something had happened to him ,something very big and he had to talk to somebody or go  crazy, I guess. % ' "My head is splitting," he said. . ' "I'm sorry to hear that, Mr Jefferies," I 'said. "I can get you some aspirin " 3 ' "No," he said. "That's not it. It's this idea. 0It's like I went fishing for trout and hooked a marlin 0 instead. I write books for a living, you see. Fiction." 2 ' "Yes, sir, Mr Jefferies," I said, "I have read)two of them and thought they were fine." , ' "Did you," he said, looking at me as if .maybe I'd gone crazy. "Well, that's very kind of you to , say, anyway. I woke up this morning and I had an idea." / 'Yes, sir, I was thinking to myself, you had /an idea, all right, one so hot and so fresh it just / kinda spilled out all over the sheet. But it *ain't there no more, so you don't have to worry. And I 0 almost laughed out loud. Only, Darcy, I don't &think he would have noticed if I had. / ' "I ordered up some breakfast," he said, and+pointed at the room-service trolley by the door, / "and as I ate it I thought about this little -idea. I thought it might make a short story. There's this / magazine, you know . . . The New Yorker . . ..well, never mind." He wasn't going to explain The + New Yorker magazine to a pickaninny like me, you know.'  Darcy grinned. 0 ' "But by the time I'd finished breakfast," he'went on, "it began to seem more like a novelette. 0 And then . . . as I started to rough out some 6ideas . . . " He gave out this shrill little laugh. "Idon't * think I've had an idea this good in ten -years. Maybe never. Do you think it would be possible for / twin brothers fraternal, not identical ,to end up fighting on opposite sides during World  War II?" . ' "Well, maybe not in the Pacific," I said. ,Another time I don't think I would have had nerve , enough to speak to him at all, Darcy I -would have just stood there and gawped. But I still felt 1 like I was under glass, or like I'd had a shot ,of novocaine at the dentist's and it hadn't quite worn  off yet. - 'He laughed like it was the funniest thing *he'd ever heard and said, "Ha-ha! No, not there, it ) couldn't happen there, but it might be )possible in the ETO. And they could come face-to-face # during the Battle of the Bulge." 0 ' "Well, maybe " I started, but by then he *was walking fast around the parlor again, running + his hands through his hair and making it look wilder and wilder. + ' "I know it sounds like Orpheum Circuit *melodrama," he said, "some silly piece of claptrap , like Under Two Flags or Armadale, but the 0concept of twins . . . and it could be explained5 rationally . . . I see just how . . . " He whirled (on me. "Would it have dramatic impact?" 0 ' "Yes, sir," I said. "Everyone likes stories 'about brothers that don't know they're brothers." 0 ' "Sure they do," he said. "And I'll tell you .something else " Then he stopped and I saw the - queerest expression come over his face. It /was queer, but I could read it letter-perfect. It was like & he was waking up to doing something ,foolish, like a man suddenly realizing he's spread his face ( with shaving cream and then taken his 0electric razor to it. He was talking to a nigger hotel maid * about what was maybe the best idea he'd .ever had a nigger hotel maid whose idea of a really - good story was probably The Edge of Night. *He'd forgot me saying I'd read two of his books ' , 'Or thought it was just flattery to get a bigger tip,' Darcy murmured. ) 'Yeah, that'd fit his concept of human -nature like a glove, all right. Anyway, that expression - said he'd just realized who he was talking to, that was all. . ' "I think I'm going to extend my stay," he -said. "Tell them at the desk, would you?" He spun , around to start walking again and his leg ,whanged against the room-service cart. "And get this ) fucking thing out of here, all right?" , ''Would you want me to come back later and " I started. / ' "Yes, yes, yes," he says, "come back later -and do whatever you like, but for now just bemy - good little sweetheart and make everything $all gone . . . including yourself." 0 'I did just that, and I was never so relieved /in my life as when the parlor door shut behind me. I + wheeled the room-service trolley over to -the side of the corridor. He'd had juice and scrambled - eggs and bacon. I started to walk away and (then I seen there was a mushroom on his plate, too, - pushed aside with the last of the eggs and 1a little bit of bacon. I looked at it and it was like a light ' went on in my head. I remembered the ,mushroom she'd given me old Mama Delorme  in / the little plastic box. Remembered it for the/first time since that day. I remembered findingit in - my dress pocket, and where I'd put it. The )one on his plate looked just the same wrinkled and 0 sort of dried up, like it might be a toadstool*instead of a mushroom, and one that would make  you powerful sick.'  She looked at Darcy steadily. / 'He'd eaten part of it, too. More than half, I'd say.' - 'Mr Buckley was on the desk that day and I &told him Mr Jefferies was thinking of extending his - stay. Mr Buckley said he didn't think that 'would present a problem even though Mr Jefferies had ' been planning to check out that very afternoon. ( 'Then I went down to the room-service ,kitchen and talked with Bedelia Aaronson you must - remember Bedelia and asked her if she'd ,seen anyone out of the ordinary around that + morning. Bedelia asked who I meant and I -said I didn't really know. She said 'Why you asking, 1 Marty?' and I told her I'd rather not say. She ,said there hadn't been nobody, not even the man ' from the food service who was always (trying to date up the short-order girl. , 'I started away and she said, "Unless you mean the old Negro lady." * 'I turned back and asked what old Negro lady that was. 1 ' "Well," Bedelia said, "I imagine she came in .off the street, looking for the John. Happens ) once or twice a day. Negroes sometimes -won't ask the way because they're afraid the hotel , people will kick them out even if they're 0well-dressed . . . which, as I'm sure you know, they ' often do. Anyway, this poor old soul .wandered down here . . . " She stopped and got a look at 0 me. "Are you all right, Martha? You look like you're going to faint!" 0 ' "I'm not going to faint," I said. "What was she doing?" + ' "Just wandering around, looking at the .breakfast trolleys like she didn't know where she + was," she said. "Poor old thing! She was .eighty if she was a day. Looked like a strong gust of , wind would blow her right up into the sky 0like a kite . . . Martha, you come over here andsit , down. You look like the picture of Dorian Gray in that movie." ' ' "What did she look like? Tell me!" 2 ' "I did tell you an old woman. They all look%about the same to me. The only thing different . about this one was the scar on her face. It *ran all the way up into her hair. It " + 'But I didn't hear any more because that was when I did faint. - 'They let me go home early and I'd no more -than got there than I started feeling like I wanted / to spit again, and drink a lot of water, and )probably end up in the John like before, sicking my . guts out. But for the time being I just sat *there by the window, looking out into the street, and  gave myself a talking-to. % 'What she'd done to me wasn't just +hypnosis; by then I knew that. It was more powerful than 1 hypnosis. I still wasn't sure if I believed in -any such thing as witchcraft, but she'd done something / to me, all right, and whatever it was, I was /just going to have to ride with it. I couldn't quit my - job, not with a husband that wasn't turning.out to be worth salt and a baby most likely onthe . way. I couldn't even request to be switched -to a different floor. A year or two before I could ( have, but I knew there was talk about *making me Assistant Chief Housekeeper for Ten to ) Twelve, and that meant a raise in pay. .More'n that, it meant they'd most likely take me back at % the same job after I had the baby. ) 'My mother had a saying: What can't be -cured must be endured. I thought about going back to , see that old black mama and asking her to -take it off, but I knew somehow she wouldn't she'd , made up her mind it was best for me, what -she was doing, and one thing I've learned as I've , made my way through this world, Darcy, is )that the only time you can never hope to change + someone's mind is when they've got it in *their head that they're doing you a help. 1 'I sat there thinking all that and looking out /at the street, all the people coming and going,and I , kind of dozed off. Couldn't have been for +much more than fifteen minutes, but when I woke up - again I knew something else. That old woman,wanted me to keep on doing what I'd already done ) twice, and I couldn't do that if Peter -Jefferies went back to Birmingham. So she got into the $ room-service kitchen and put that +mushroom on his tray and he ate part of it and it gave him that - idea. Turned out to be a whale of a story, /too Boys in the Mist, it was called. It was about just + what he told me that day, twin brothers, -one of them an American soldier and the other a German / one, that meet at the Battle of the Bulge. It,turned out to be the biggest seller he ever had.' , She paused and added, 'I read that in his obituary.' , 'He stayed another week. Every day when I *went in he'd be bent over the desk in the parlor, 0 writing away on one of his yellow pads, still .wearing his pajamas. Every day I'd ask him if he - wanted me to come back later and he'd tell *me to go ahead and make up the bedroom but be quiet . about it. Never looking up from his writing -while he talked. Every day I went in telling myself . that this time I wasn't going to do it, and -every day that stuff was there on the sheet, still fresh, ' and every day every prayer and every ,promise I'd made myself went flying out the window and I 0 found myself doing it again. It really wasn't /like fighting a compulsion, where you argue it back - and forth and sweat and shiver; it was more.like blinking for a minute and finding out it had , already happened. Oh, and every day when I-came in he'd be holding his head like it was just . killing him. What a pair we were! He had my .morning-sickness and I had his night-sweats!' # 'What do you mean?' Darcy asked. 1 'It was at night I'd really brood about what I (was doing, and spit and drink water and maybe - have to throw up a time or two. Mrs Parker +got so concerned that I finally told her I thought I , was pregnant but I didn't want my husband to know until I was sure. - 'Johnny Rosewall was one self-centered son +of a bitch, but I think even he would have known + something was wrong with me if he hadn't .had fish of his own to fry, the biggest trout in the / skillet being the liquor store holdup he and *his friends were plannin. Not that I knew about that, . of course; I was just glad he was keepin out2of my way. It made life at least a little easier. . 'Then I let myself into 1163 one morning and,Mr Jefferies was gone. He'd packed his bags and ( headed back to Alabama to work on his +book and think about his war. Oh, Darcy, I can't tell you , how happy I was! I felt like Lazarus must +have when he found out he was going to have a second / go at life. It seemed to me that morning like0everything might come right after all, like in astory . I would tell Johnny about the baby and he-would straighten up, throw out his dope, and get a . regular job. He'd be a proper husband to me .and a good father to his son I was already sure it  was going to be a boy. - 'I went into the bedroom of Mr Jefferies's -suite and seen the bedclothes messed up like always, * the blankets kicked off the end and the .sheet all tangled up in a ball. I walked over there feeling - like I was in a dream again and pulled the 2sheet back. I was thinking, Well, all right, if I have to . " . . but it's for the last time. ( 'Turned out the last time had already -happened. There wasn't a trace of him on thatsheet. * Whatever spell that old bruja woman had .put on us, it had run its course. That's good enough, I ) thought. I'm gonna have the baby, he's ,gonna have the book, and we're both shut of her magic. I * don't care a fig about natural fathers, /either, as long as Johnny will be a good dad to the one I've  got coming.' / 'I told Johnny that same night,' Martha said,-then added dryly: 'He didn't cotton onto the idea, as I  think you already know.'  Darcy nodded. # 'Whopped me with the end of that +broomstick about five times and then stood over me where I - lay crying in the corner and yelled, 'What /are you, crazy? We ain't having no kid\ I thinkyou , stone crazy, woman!' Then he turned aroundand walked out. 2 'I laid there for awhile, thinking of the first *miscarriage and scared to death the pains would , start any minute, and I'd be on my way to *having another one. I thought of my momma writing + that I ought to get away from him before (he put me in the hospital, and of Kissy sending me that * Greyhound ticket with GO NOW written on .the folder. And when I was sure that I wasn't going to , miscarry the baby, I got up to pack a bag -and get the hell out of there right away, before he * could come back. But I was no more than *opening the closet door when I thought of Mama / Delorme again. I remembered telling her I was,going to leave Johnny, and what she said to me: + "No he gonna leave you. You gonna see /him out, is all. Stick around, woman. There be a little * money. You gonna think he hoit the baby but he dint be doin it." / 'It was like she was right there, telling me -what to look for and what to do. I went into the * closet, all right, but it wasn't my own +clothes I wanted any more. I started going through his, and * I found a couple of things in that same ,damned sportcoat where I'd found the bottle of White + Angel. That coat was his favorite, and I .guess it really said everything anyone needed to know 0 about Johnny Rosewall. It was bright satin . .0. cheap-looking. I hated it. Wasn't no bottle ofdope - I found this time. Was a straight-razor in ,one pocket and a cheap little pistol in the other. I took - the gun out and looked at it, and that same'feeling came over me that came over me those times 0 in the bedroom of Mr Jefferies's suite like+I was doing something just after I woke up from a  heavy sleep. - 'I walked into the kitchen with the gun in -my hand and set it down on the little bit of counter I * had beside the stove. Then I opened the -overhead cupboard and felt around in back of the spices - and the tea. At first I couldn't find what ,she'd given me and this awful stiflin panic came over me , I was scared the way you get scared in &dreams. Then my hand happened on that plastic box  and I drew it down. - 'I opened it and took out the mushroom. It /was a repulsive thing, too heavy for its size, and , warm. It was like holding a lump of flesh /that hasn't quite died. That thing I did in Mr Jefferies's . bedroom? I tell you right now I'd do it two +hundred more times before I'd pick up that mushroom  again. . 'I held it in my right hand and I picked up -that cheap little .32 in my left. And then I squeezed / my right hand as hard as I could, and I felt (the mushroom squelch in my fist, and it sounded . . . 1 well, I know it's almost impossible to believe .. . . but it sounded like it screamed. Do you believe  that could be?' / Slowly, Darcy shook her head. She did not, in.fact, know if she believed it or iot, but she was , absolutely sure of one thing: she did not want to believe it. 0 'Well, I don't believe it, either. But that's .what it sounded like. And one other thing you won't 0 believe, but I do, because I saw it: it bled. -That mushroom bled. I saw a little stream of blood * come out of my fist and splash onto the -gun. But the blood disappeared as soon as it hit the  barrel. . 'After awhile it stopped. I opened my hand, /expecting it would be full of blood, but there was . only the mushroom, all wrinkled up, with the,shapes of my fingers mashed into it. Wasn't no , blood on the mushroom, in my hand, on his ,gun, nor anywhere. And just as I started to think I'd * done nothing but somehow have a dream on)my feet, the damned thing twitched in my hand. I , looked down at it and for a second or two 2it didn't look like a mushroom at all it lookedlike a 3 little tiny penis that was still alive. I thought*of the blood coming out of my fist when I squeezed . it and I thought of her saying "Any child a -woman get, the man shoot it out'n his pecker, girl." It / twitched again I tell you it did and I +screamed and threw it in the trash. Then I heard ) Johnny coming back up the stairs and I &grabbed his gun and ran back into the bedroom with it . and put it back into his coat pocket. Then I.climbed into bed with all my clothes on, even my . shoes, and pulled the blanket up to my chin.+He come in and I seen he was bound to make . trouble. He had a rug-beater in one hand. I ,don't know where he got it from, but I knew what he  meant to do with it. / ' "Ain't gonna be no baby," he said. "You geton over here." 1 ' "No," I told him, "there ain't going to be a ,baby. You don't need that thing, either, so put it + away. You already took care of the baby, you worthless piece of shit." 1 'I knew it was a risk, calling him that, but I ,thought maybe it would make him believe me, and - it did. Instead of beating me up, this big /goony stoned grin spread over his face. I tell you, I ) never hated him so much as I did then.  ' "Gone?" he asked.  ' "Gone," I said. " ' "Where's the mess?" he asked. . ' "Where do you think?" I said. "Halfway to %the East River by now, most likely." + 'He came over then and tried to kiss me, /for Jesus' sake. Kiss me! I turned my face awayand ( he went upside my head, but not hard. - ' "You're gonna see I know best," he says. -"There'll be time enough for kids later on." , 'Then he went out again. Two nights later .him and his friends tried to pull that liquor store job - and his gun blew up in his face and killed him.' ) 'You think you witched that gun, don't you?' Darcy said. 2 'No,' Martha said calmly. 'She did . . . by way .of me, you could say. She saw I wouldn't help + myself, and so she made me help myself.' * 'But you do think the gun was witched.' / 'I don't just think so,' Martha said calmly. - Darcy went into the kitchen for a glass of (water. Her mouth was suddenly very dry. / 'That's really the end,' Martha said when she(came back. 'Johnny died and I had Pete. Wasn't * until I got too pregnant to work that I .found out just how many friends I had. If I'd known + sooner, I think I would have left Johnny -sooner . . . or maybe not. None of us really knows the ) way the world works, no matter what we think or say.' , 'But that's not everything, is it?' Darcy asked. , 'Well, there are two more things,' Martha 1said. 'Little things.' But she didn't look as if they  were little, Darcy thought. , 'I went back to Mama Delorme's about four -months after Pete was born. I didn't want to but I . did. I had twenty dollars in an envelope. I -couldn't afford it but I knew, somehow, that it . belonged to her. It was dark. Stairs seemed ,even narrower than before, and the higher I climbed / the more I could smell her and the smells of .her place: burned candles and dried wallpaper and " the cinnamony smell of her tea. . 'That feeling of doing something in a dream / of being behind a glass wall came over me. for the last time. I got up to her door and +knocked. There was no answer, so I knocked again. / There was still no answer, so I knelt down to*slip the envelope under the door. And her voice . came from right on the other side, as if she.was knelt down, too. I was never so scared in my life + as I was when that papery old voice came /drifting out of the crack under that door it was like ) hearing a voice coming out of a grave. - ' "He goan be a fine boy," she said. "Goan 1be just like he father. Like he natural father." / ' "I brought you something," I said. I could barely hear my own voice. 0 ' "Slip it through, dearie," she whispered. I +slipped the envelope halfway under and she pulled . it the rest of the way. I heard her tear it "open and I waited. I just waited. . ' "It's enough," she whispered. "You get on -out of here, dearie, and don't you ever come back & to Mama Delorme's again, you hear?" . 'I got up and ran out of there just as fast as I could.' ( Martha went over to the bookcase, and 'came back a moment or two later with a hardcover. & Darcy was immediately struck by the .similarity between the artwork on this jacket and that on , the jacket of Peter Rosewall's book. This ,one was Blaze of Heaven by Peter Jefferies, and the ) cover showed a pair of GIs charging an -enemy pillbox. One of them had a grenade; the other was  firing an M-1. % Martha rummaged in her blue canvas &tote-bag, brought out her son's book, removed the tissue - paper in which it was wrapped, and laid it .tenderly next to the Jefferies book. Blaze of Heaven; . Blaze of Glory. Side by side, the points of comparison were inescapable. + 'This was the other thing,' Martha said. - 'Yes,' Darcy said doubtfully. They do look 0similar. What about the stories? Are they . . . well .  . . ' + She stopped in some confusion and looked -up at Martha from beneath her lashes. She was& relieved to see Martha was smiling. ) 'You askin if my boy copied that nasty (honky's book?' Martha asked without the slightest bit  of rancor. ) 'No!' Darcy said, perhaps a little too vehemently. + 'Other than that they're both about war, 1they're nothing alike,' Martha said. 'They're as different 2 as . . . well, as different as black and white.'.She paused and then added: 'But there's a feelabout - them every now and then that's the same . .+. somethin you seem to almost catch around corners. . It's that sunshine I told you about that .feeling that the world is mostly a lot better than it looks, + especially better than it looks to those &people who are too smart to be kind.' + Then isn't it possible that your son was /inspired by Peter Jefferies . . . that he read him in  college and . . . ' / 'Sure,' Martha said. 'I suppose my Peter did .read Jefferies's books -that'd be more likely than 0 not even if it was just a case of like calling0to like. But there's something else somethingthat's  a little harder to explain.' . She picked up the Jefferies novel, looked at-it reflectively for a moment, then looked at Darcy. , 'I went and bought this copy about a year 2after my son was born,' she said. 'It was still inprint, - although the bookstore had to special-order-it from the publisher. When Mr Jefferies was in on - one of his visits, I got up my courage and /asked if he would sign it for me. I thought he might be , put out by rne asking, but I think he was )actually a little flattered. Look here.' - She turned to the dedication page of Blaze of Heaven. - Darcy read what was printed there and felt ,an eerie doubling in her mind. This book is ) dedicated to my mother, ALTHEA DIXMONT (JEFFERIES, the finest woman I have ever known. And - below that, Jefferies had written in black +fountain-pen ink that was now fading, 'For Martha ) Rosewall, who cleans up my clutter and /never complains.' Below this he had signed his name  and jotted August '61. ' The wording of the penned dedication /struck her first as contemptuous . . . then as eerie. But - before she had a chance to think about it, +Martha had opened her son's book, Blaze of Glory, to + the dedication page and placed it beside -the Jefferies book. Once again Darcy read theprinted ' matter: This book is dedicated to my )mother, MARTHA ROSEWALL. Mom, I couldn't have done it - without you. Below that he had written in a.pen which looked like a fine-line Flair: 'And that's no  lie. Love you, Mom! Pete.' , But she didn't really read this; she only ,looked at it. Her eyes went back and forth, back and + forth, between the dedication page which -had been inscribed in August of 1961 and the one - which had been inscribed in April of 1985. " 'You see?' Martha asked softly.  Darcy nodded. She saw. + The thin, sloping, somehow old-fashioned -backhand script was the same in both books . . . and , so, given the variations afforded by love %and familiarity, were the signatures themselves. Only + the tone of the written messages varied, ,Darcy thought, and there the difference was as clear as * the difference between black and white.   -The Moving Finger-  , When the scratching started, Howard Mitla *was sitting alone in the Queens apartment where he - lived with his wife. Howard was one of New %York's lesser-known certified public accountants. " Violet Mitla, one of New York's +lesser-known dental assistants, had waited until the news was , over before going down to the store on the,corner to get a pint of ice cream. Jeopardy was on . after the news, and she didn't care for that*show. She said it was because Alex Trebek looked like , a crooked evangelist, but Howard knew the $truth: Jeopardy made her feel dumb. + The scratching sound was coming from the /bathroom just off the short squib of hall that led to + the bedroom. Howard tightened up as soon 0as he heard it. It wasn't a junkie or a burglar in there, + not with the heavy-gauge mesh he had put -over all the windows two years ago at his own+ expense. It sounded more like a mouse in (the basin or the tub. Maybe even a rat. - He waited through the first few questions, ,hoping the scratching sound would go away onits * own, but it didn't. When the commercial .came on, he got reluctantly up from his chair and & walked to the bathroom door. It was (standing ajar, allowing him to hear the scratching sound  even better. , Almost certainly a mouse or a rat. Little %paws clicking against the porcelain. ) 'Damn,' Howard said, and went into the kitchen. . Standing in the little space between the gas&stove and the refrigerator were a few cleaning / implements a mop, a bucket filled with old*rags, a broom with a dustpan snugged down over + the handle. Howard took the broom in one /hand, holding it well down toward the bristles,and the - dustpan in the other. Thus armed, he walked/reluctantly back through the small living room to ( the bathroom door. He cocked his head forward. Listened. & Scratch, scratch, scritchy-scratch. . A very small sound. Probably not a rat. Yet -that was what his mind insisted on conjuring up. . Not just a rat but a New York rat, an ugly, *bushy thing with tiny black eyes and long whiskers . like wire and snaggle teeth protruding from )below its V-shaped upper lip. A rat with attitude. + The sound was tiny, almost delicate, but nevertheless . Behind him, Alex Trebek said, 'This Russian .madman was shot, stabbed, and strangled . . . all  in the same night.' + 'Who was Lenin?'' one of the contestants responded. - 'Who was Rasputin, peabrain,' Howard Mitla ,murmured. He transferred the dustpan to the * hand holding the broom, then snaked his *free hand into the bathroom and turned on the light. He * stepped in and moved quickly to the tub )crammed into the corner below the dirty, mesh-covered , window. He hated rats and mice, hated all &little furry things that squeaked and scuttered (and - sometimes bit), but he had discovered as a -boy growing up in Hell's Kitchen that if you had to - dispatch one of them, it was best to do it /quickly. It would do him no good to sit in his chair and . ignore the sound; Vi had helped herself to a)couple of beers during the news, and the bathroom , would be her first stop when she returned -from the market. If there was a mouse in the tub, she . would raise the roof . . . and demand he do 'his manly duty and dispatch it anyway. Posthaste. + The tub was empty save for the hand-held -shower attachment. Its hose lay on the enamellike a  dead snake. ) The scratching had stopped either when &Howard turned on the light or when he entered the . room, but now it started again. Behind him. *He turned and took three steps toward the bathroom - basin, raising the broomhandle as he moved., The fist wrapped around the handle got to )the level of his chin and then froze. He stopped + moving. His jaw came unhinged. If he had ,looked at himself in the toothpaste-spotted mirror + over the basin, he would have seen shiny .strings of spittle, as gossamer as strands of spiderweb, + gleaming between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. ( A finger had poked its way out of the drain-hole in the basin.  A human finger. , For a moment it froze, as if aware it had -been discovered. Then it began to move again,feeling . its wormlike way around the pink porcelain. /It reached the white rubber plug, felt its way over it, - then descended to the porcelain again. The -scratching noise hadn't been made by the tinyclaws / of a mouse after all. It was the nail on the /end of that finger, tapping the porcelain as itcircled  and circled. + Howard gave voice to a rusty, bewildered +scream, dropped the broom, and ran for the / bathroom door. He hit the tile wall with his .shoulder instead, rebounded, and tried again. This ' time he got out, swept the door shut *behind him, and only stood there with his back pressed , against it, breathing hard. His heartbeat -was hard, toneless Morse code high up in one side of his  throat. + He couldn't have stood there for long .when he regained control of his thoughts, Alex/ Trebek was still guiding that evening's three+contestants through Single Jeopardy but while he - did, he had no sense of time passing, wherehe was, or even who he was. % What brought him out of it was the /electronic whizzing sound that signaled a DailyDouble / square. 'The category is Space and Aviation,'+Alex was saying. 'You currently have seven . hundred dollars, Mildred how much do you *wish to wager?' Mildred, who did not have gameshow- & host projection, muttered something inaudible in response. & Howard moved away from the door and .back into the living room on legs, which felt like / pogo-sticks. He still had the dustpan in one ,hand. He looked at it for a moment and then let it fall , to the carpet. It hit with a dusty little thump. . 'I didn't see that,' Howard Mitla said in a /trembling little voice, and collapsed into his chair. 3 'All right, Mildred for five hundred dollars: .This Air Force test site was originally known as  Miroc Proving Ground.' , Howard peered at the TV. Mildred, a mousy ,little woman with a hearing aid as big as a clockradio - screwed into one ear, was thinking deeply. 2 'I didn't see that,' he said with a little more conviction. / 'What is . . . Vandenberg Air Base?' Mildred asked. ) 'What is Edwards Air Base, birdbrain,' +Howard said. And, as Alex Trebek confirmed what $ Howard Mitla already knew, Howard &repeated: 'I didn't see that at all.' , But Violet would be back soon, and he had left the broom in the bathroom. . Alex Trebek told the contestants and the 0viewing audience that it was still anybody's game, ( and they would be back to play Double (Jeopardy, where the scores could really change, in two 0 shakes of a lamb's tail. A politician came on &and began explaining why he should be re-elected. / Howard got reluctantly to his feet. His legs 4felt a little more like legs and a little less like pogosticks . with metal fatigue now, but he still didn't #want to go back into the bathroom. + Look, he told himself, this is perfectly /simple. Things like this always are. You had a , momentary hallucination, the son of thing .that probably happens to people all the time. The only ( reason you don't hear about them more +often is because people don't like to talk about them . . . ) having hallucinations is embarrassing. ,Talking about them makes people feel the wayyou 're . going to feel if that broom is still on the +floor in there when Vi comes back and asks what you  were up to. - 'Look,' the politician on TV was saying in .rich, confidential tones. 'When you get right down / to cases, it's perfectly simple: do you want +an honest, competent man running the NassauCounty * Bureau of Records, or do you want a man .from upstate, a hired gun who's never even ' 1 'It was air in the pipes, I bet,' Howard said, +and although the sound which had taken him into * the bathroom in the first place had not 1sounded the slightest bit like air in the pipes, just hearing - his own voice reasonable, under control +again got him moving with a little more authority. , And besides Vi would be home soon. Any minute, really. ( He stood outside the door, listening. - Scratch, scratch, scratch. It sounded like /the world's smallest blind man tapping his caneon * the porcelain in there, feeling his way +around, checking out the old surroundings. / 'Air in the pipes!' Howard said in a strong, (declamatory voice, and boldly threw the bathroom & door open. He bent low, grabbed the *broomhandle, and snatched it back out the door. He did not , have to take more than two steps into the /little room with its faded, lumpy linoleum and its ' dingy, mesh-crisscrossed view on the -airshaft, and he most certainly did not look into the  bathroom sink.  He stood outside, listening. % Scratch, scratch. Scritch-scratch. + He returned the broom and dustpan to the -little nook in the kitchen between the stove and the / refrigerator and then returned to the living -room. He stood there for a moment, looking atthe / bathroom door. It stood ajar, spilling a fan /of yellow light into the little squib of hall. - You better go turn off the light. You know .how VI raises the roof about stuff like that. You ' don't even have to go in. Just reach #through the door and flick it off. ) But what if something touched his hand ,while he was reaching for the light switch? - What if another finger touched his finger? % How about that, fellows and girls? , He could still hear that sound. There was /something terribly relentless about it. It was  maddening.  Scratch. Scritch. Scratch. ) On the TV, Alex Trebek was reading the ,Double Jeopardy categories. Howard went overand , turned up the sound a little. Then be sat ,down in his chair again and told himself he didn't hear + anything from the bathroom, not a single thing. * Except maybe a little air in the pipes. * Vi Mitla was one of those women who move*with such dainty precision that they seem almost / fragile . . . but Howard had been married to ,her for twenty-one years, and he knew there was - nothing fragile about her at all. She ate, (drank, worked, danced, and made love in exactly the ( same way: con brio. She came into the -apartment like a pocket hurricane. One large arm curled a - brown paper sack against the right side of +her bosom. She carried it through into the kitchen ( without pausing. Howard heard the bag .crackle, heard the refrigerator door open and then close ( again. When she came back, she tossed ,Howard her coat. 'Hang this up for me, will you?' she - asked. 'I've got to pee. Do I ever! Whew!' ! Whew! was one of Vi's favorite ,exclamations. Her version rhymed with P.U., the child's $ exclamation for something smelly. . 'Sure, Vi,' Howard said, and rose slowly to /his feet with Vi's dark-blue coat in his arms. His + eyes never left her as she went down the $hall and through the bathroom door. - 'Con Ed loves it when you leave the lights /on, Howie,' she called back over her shoulder. 1 'I did it on purpose,' he said. 'I knew that'd be your first stop.' * She laughed. He heard the rustle of her .clothes. 'You know me too well people will say  we're in love.' , You ought to tell her warn her, Howard ,thought, and knew he could do nothing of thekind. * What was he supposed to say? Watch out, -Vi, there's a finger coming out of the basin drainhole, . don't let the guy it belongs to poke you in +the eye if you bend over to get a glass of water? - Besides, it had just been a hallucination, 0one brought on by a little air in the pipes and his fear * of rats and mice. Now that some minutes -had gone by, this seemed almost plausible to him. . Just the same, he only stood there with Vi's.coat in his arms, waiting to see if she would , scream. And, after ten or fifteen endless seconds, she did.  'My God, Howard!' ' Howard jumped, hugging the coat more +tightly to his chest. His heart, which had begun to ( slow down, began to do its Morse-code ,number again. He struggled to speak, but at first his  throat was locked shut. - 'What?' he managed finally. 'What, Vi? Whatis it?' , 'The towels! Half of em are on the floor! Sheesh! What happened?' ' 0 'I don't know,' he called back. His heart was &thumping harder than ever, and it was impossible - to tell if the sickish, pukey feeling deep +down in his belly was relief or terror. He supposed he , must have knocked the towels off the shelf.during his first attempt to exit the bathroom,when he  had hit the wall. 2 'It must be spookies,' she said. 'Also, I don't ,mean to nag, but you forgot to put the ring down  again.'  'Oh sorry,' he said. * 'Yeah, that's what you always say,' her +voice floated back. 'Sometimes I think you want me to / fall in and drown. I really do!' There was a )clunk as she put it down herself. Howard waited, - heart thumping away, her coat still hugged against his chest. . 'He holds the record for the most strikeouts%in a single game,' Alex Trebek read. ( 'Who was Tom Seaver?' Mildred snapped right back. , 'Roger Clemens, you nitwit,' Howard said. ) Pwooosh! There went the flush. And the +moment he was waiting for (Howard had just realized ) this consciously) was now at hand. The +pause seemed almost endless. Then he heard the squeak ' of the washer in the bathroom faucet *marked H (he kept meaning to replace that washer and kept . forgetting), followed by water flowing into /the basin, followed by the sound of Vi briskly  washing her hands.  No screams. - Of course not, because there was no finger., 'Air in the pipes,' Howard said with more *assurance, and went to hang up his wife's coat. 0 She came out, adjusting her skirt. 'I got the 1ice cream,' she said, 'cherry-vanilla, just like you - wanted. But before we try it, why don't you*have a beer with me, Howie? It's this new stuff. 0 American Grain, it's called. I never heard of /it, but it was on sale so I bought a six-pack. Nothing * ventured, nothing grained, am I right?' 1 'Hardy-har,' he said, wrinkling his nose. Vi's )penchant for puns had struck him as cute when he , first met her, but it had staled somewhat 0over the years. Still, now that he was over his fright, a - beer sounded like just the thing. Then, as *Vi went out into the kitchen to get him a glass of her + new find, he realized he wasn't over his )fright at all. He supposed that having a hallucination was . better than seeing a real finger poking out -of the drain of the bathroom basin, a finger that was ) alive and moving around, but it wasn't "exactly an evening-maker, either. . Howard sat down in his chair again. As Alex ,Trebek announced the Final Jeopardy category, it was The Sixties he found himself -thinking of various TV shows he'd seen where it & turned out that a character who was 0having hallucinations either had (a) epilepsy or (b) a brain - tumor. He found he could remember a lot of them. , 'You know,' Vi said, coming back into the 0room with two glasses of beer, 'I don't like the+ Vietnamese people who run that market. I 1don't think I'll ever like them. I think they're sneaky.' , 'Have you ever caught them doing anything *sneaky?' Howard asked. He himself thought the ) Lahs were exceptional people . . . but +tonight he didn't care much one way or the other. . 'No,' Vi said, 'not a thing. And that makes 1me all the more suspicious. Also, they smile all the . time. My father used to say, "Never trust a 1smiling man." He also said . . . Howard, are you  feeling all right?' ) 'He said that?' Howard asked, making a !rather feeble attempt at levity. - 'Trs amusant, cheri. You look as pale as +milk. Are you coming down with something?' + No, he thought of saying, I'm not coming .down with something that's too mild a term for it. + I think I might have epilepsy or maybe a .brain tumor, Vi how's that for coming down with  something? 2 'It's just work, I guess,' he said. 'I told you &about the new tax account. St. Anne's Hospital.'  'What about it?' ) 'It's a rat's nest,' he said, and that +immediately made him think of the bathroom again the ) sink and the drain. 'Nuns shouldn't be ,allowed to do bookkeeping. Someone ought to have put it # in the Bible just to make sure.' + 'You let Mr. Lathrop push you around too 0much,' Vi told him firmly. 'It's going to go on and . on unless you stand up for yourself. Do you want a heart attack?' - 'No.' And I don't want epilepsy or a brain .tumor, either. Please, God, make it a one-timething. ) Okay? Just some weird mental burp that ,happens once and never again. Okay? Please? Pretty ! please? With some sugar on it? 0 'You bet you don't,' she said grimly. 'Arlene ,Katz was saying just the other day that whenmen - under fifty have heart attacks, they almost*never come out of the hospital again. And you're only & forty-one. You have to stand up for /yourself, Howard. Stop being such a pushover.'  'I guess so,' he said glumly. ( Alex Trebek came back on and gave the .Final Jeopardy answer: 'This group of hippies crossed - the United States in a bus with writer Ken +Kesey.'' The Final Jeopardy music began to play. The + two men contestants were writing busily. +Mildred, the woman with the microwave oven in her ) ear, looked lost. At last she began to ,scratch something. She did it with a marked lack of  enthusiasm. / Vi took a deep swallow from her glass. 'Hey!'.she said. 'Not bad! And only two-sixty-seven a  six-pack!' , Howard drank some himself. It was nothing -special, but it was wet, at least, and cool.  Soothing. + Neither of the male contestants was even +close. Mildred was also wrong, but she, at least, was . in the ball-park. 'Who were the Merry Men?' she had written. - 'Merry Pranksters, you dope,' Howard said. - Vi looked at him admiringly. 'You know all !the answers, Howard, don't you?' 0 'I only wish I did,' Howard said, and sighed. - Howard didn't care much for beer, but that .night he helped himself to three cans of Vi's new find - nevertheless. Vi commented on it, said that.if she had known he was going to like it that much, * she would have stopped by the drugstore %and gotten him an IV hookup. Another time-honored - Vi-ism. He forced a smile. He was actually ,hoping the beer would send him off to sleep quickly. / He was afraid that, without a little help, he*might be awake for quite awhile, thinking about what , he had imagined he'd seen in the bathroom .sink. But, as Vi had often informed him, beer was full . of vitamin P, and around eight-thirty, after-she had retired to the bedroom to put on her * nightgown, Howard went reluctantly into !the bathroom to relieve himself. , First he walked over to the bathroom sink and forced himself to look in.  Nothing. 0 This was a relief (in the end, a hallucination/was still better than an actual finger, he had + discovered, despite the possibility of a /brain tumor), but he still didn't like looking down the . drain. The brass cross-hatch inside that was/supposed to catch things like clots of hair or dropped , bobby-pins had disappeared years ago, and *so there was only a dark hole rimmed by a circle of , tarnished steel. It looked like a staring eyesocket. + Howard took the rubber plug and stuck it into the drain.  That was better. , He stepped away from the sink, put up the 1toilet ring (Vi complained bitterly if he forgot to ' put it down when he was through, but -never seemed to feel any pressing need to put it back up , when she was), and addressed the John. He 'was one of those men who only began to urinate ( immediately when the need was extreme -(and who could not urinate at all in crowded public - lavatories the thought of all those men /standing in line behind him just shut down his + circuits), and he did now what he almost *always did in the few seconds between the aiming of ) the instrument and the commencement of -target practice: he recited prime numbers in his mind. ) He had reached thirteen and was on the )verge of flowing when there was a sudden sharp sound ' from behind him: pwuck! His bladder, )recognizing the sound of the rubber plug being forced + sharply out of the drain even before his )brain did, clamped shut immediately (and rather  painfully). , A moment later that sound the sound of 0the nail clipping lightly against the porcelain as the - questing finger twisted and turned began-again. Howard's skin went cold and seemed to - shrink until it was too small to cover the .flesh beneath. A single drop of urine spilled from him + and plinked in the bowl before his penis 'actually seemed to shrink in his hand, retreating like a * turtle seeking the safety of its shell. - Howard walked slowly and not quite steadily%over to the washbasin. He looked in. * The finger was back. It was a very long ,finger, but seemed otherwise normal. Howard could - see the nail, which was neither bitten nor /abnormally long, and the first two knuckles. Ashe , watched, it continued to tap and feel its way around the basin. ( Howard bent down and looked under the -sink. The pipe, which came out of the floor, was no - more than three inches in diameter. It was .not big enough for an arm. Besides, it made a severe - bend at the place where the sink trap was. *So just what was that finger attached to? What could it  be attached to? , Howard straightened up again, and for one ,alarming moment he felt that his head might / simply detach itself from his neck and float ,away. Small black specks flocked across his field of  vision. - I'm going to faint! he thought. He grabbed ,his right earlobe and yanked it once, hard, the way & a frightened passenger who has seen -trouble up the line might yank the Emergency Stop cord of 1 a railroad car. The dizziness passed . . . but the finger was still there. / It was not a hallucination. How could it be? .He could see a tiny bead of water on the nail,and + a tiny thread of whiteness beneath it ,soap, almost surely soap. Vi had washed her hands after  using the John. 0 It could be a hallucination, though. It still (could be. Just because you see soap and water on it, , does that mean you can't be imagining it? .And listen, Howard if you're not imagining it, + what's it doing in there? How did it get *there in the first place? And how come Vi didn't see it? * Call her, then call her in! his mind (instructed, and in the next microsecond countermanded / its own order. No! Don't do that! Because if 'you go on seeing it and she doesn't ' Howard shut his eyes tight and for a -moment lived in a world where there were onlyred % flashes of light and his own crazy heartbeat. + When he opened them again, the finger was still there. ' 'What are you?' he whispered through /tightly stretched lips. 'What are you, and whatare you  doing here?' / The finger stopped its blind explorations at 0once. It swivelled and then pointed directly at + Howard. Howard blundered a step backward,*his hands rising to his mouth to stifle a scream. He ( wanted to tear his eyes away from the *wretched, awful thing, wanted to flee the bathroom in a - rush (and never mind what Vi might think or,say or see) . . . but for the moment he was - paralyzed and unable to tear his gaze away %from the pink-white digit, which now resembled + nothing so much as an organic periscope. , Then it curled at the second knuckle. The &end of the finger dipped, touched the porcelain, and , resumed its tapping circular explorations once more. ) 'Howie?' Vi called. 'Did you fall in?' 0 'Be right out!' he called back in an insanely cheery voice. ) He flushed away the single drop of pee -which had fallen into the toilet, then moved toward the - door, giving the sink a wide berth. He did /catch sight of himself in the bathroom mirror, ( however; his eyes were huge, his skin -wretchedly pale. He gave each of his cheeks a brisk pinch ) before leaving the bathroom, which had ,become, in the space of one short hour, the most horrible / and inexplicable place he had ever visited in his life. + When Vi came out into the kitchen to see 'what was taking him so long, she found Howard ! looking into the refrigerator. ! 'What do you want?' she asked. 2 'A Pepsi. I think I'll go down to Lah's and get one.' ' 'On top of three beers and a bowl of 0cherry-vanilla ice cream? You'll bust, Howard!' 0 'No, I won't,' he said. But if he wasn't able -to offload what his kidneys were holding, he might. , 'Are you sure you feel all right?' Vi was ,looking at him critically, but her tone was gentler now , tinged with real concern. 'Because you look terrible. Really.' - 'Well,' he said reluctantly, 'there's been 0some flu going around the office. I suppose '+ 'I'll go get you the damned soda, if you really need it,' she said. - 'No you won't,' Howard interposed hastily. 1'You're in your nightgown. Look I'll put on my  coat.' $ 'When was the last time you had a ,soup-to-nuts physical, Howard? It's been so long I've  forgotten.' / 'I'll look it up tomorrow,' he said vaguely, .going into the little foyer where their coats were , hung. 'It must be in one of the insurance folders.' / 'Well you better! And if you insist on being %crazy and going out, wear my scarf!' . 'Okay. Good idea.' He pulled on his topcoat -and buttoned it facing away from her, so she + wouldn't see how his hands were shaking. #When he turned around, Vi was just disappearing back ' into the bathroom. He stood there in (fascinated silence for several moments, waiting to hear if + she would scream this time, and then the *water began to run in the basin. This was followed by , the sound of Vi brushing her teeth in her usual manner: con brio. * He stood there a moment longer, and his 0mind suddenly offered its verdict in four flat, nonnonsense  words: I'm losing my grip. / It might be . . . but that didn't change the .fact that if he didn't take a whiz very soon, he was * going to have an embarrassing accident. .That, at least, was a problem he couls solve, and - Howard took a certain comfort in the fact. ,He opened the door, began to step out, then paused to  pull Vi's scarf off the hook. , When are you going to tell her about this .latest fascinating development in the life of Howard % Mitla? his mind inquired suddenly. " Howard shut the thought out and (concentrated on tucking the ends of the scarf into the lapels  of his overcoat. - The Mitla apartment was on the fourth floor.of a nine-story building on Hawking Street. Tothe - right and half a block down, on the corner +of Hawking and Queens Boulevard, was Lah's $ Twenty-Four-Hour Delicatessen and +Convenience Market. Howard turned left and walked to the ) end of the building. Here was a narrow ,alleyway, which gave on the airshaft at the rear of the / building. Trash-bins lined both sides of the -alley. Between them were littery spaces where, homeless people some but by no means of+them winos often made their comfortless ( newspaper beds. No one seemed to have .taken up residence in the alley this evening, for which " Howard was profoundly grateful. * He stepped between the first and second 0bins, unzipped, and urinated copiously. At firstthe * relief was so great that he felt almost 1blessed in spite of the evening's trials, but as the flow ) slackened and he began to consider his .position 'again, anxiety started creeping backin. * His position was, in a word, untenable. . Here he was, pissing against the wall of the&building in which he had a warm, safe apartment, 0 looking over his shoulder all the while to see+if he was being observed. The arrival of a junkie or - a mugger while he was in such a defenseless.position would be bad, but he wasn't sure thatthe - arrival of someone he knew the Fensters *from 2C, for instance, or the Dattlebaums from 3F + wouldn't be even worse. What could he +say? And what might that motormouth Alicia Fenster  say to Vi? , He finished, zipped his pants, and walked (back to the mouth of the alley. After a prudent look + in both directions, he proceeded down to -Lah's and bought a can of Pepsi-Cola from the smiling,  olive-skinned Mrs. Lah. 0 'You look pale tonight, Mr. Mit-ra,' she said 1through her constant smile. 'Peering all right?' - Oh yes, he thought. I'm fearing just fine, *thank you, Mrs. Lah. Never better on that score. / 'I think I might have caught a little bug at +the sink,' he told her. She began to frown through . her smile and he realized what he had said. 'At the office, I mean.' . 'Better bunder up walm,' she said. The frown-line had smoothed out of her almost ethereal / forehead. 'Radio say cold weather is coming.'- 'Thank you,' he said, and left. On his way +back to the apartment, he opened the Pepsi and - poured it out on the sidewalk. Considering *the fact that his bathroom had apparently become . hostile territory, the last thing he needed tonight was any more to drink. . When he let himself in again, he could hear ,Vi snoring softly in the bedroom. The three beers / had sent her off quickly and efficiently. He ,put the empty soda can on the counter in the kitchen, , and then paused outside the bathroom door.*After a moment or two, he tilted his head against the  wood. , Scratch-scratch. Scritch-scritch-scratch. ( 'Dirty son of a bitch,' he whispered. , He went to bed without brushing his teeth /for the first time since his two-week stint at Camp * High Pines, when he had been twelve and %his mother had forgotten to pack his toothbrush. % And lay in bed beside Vi, wakeful. ( He could hear the sound of the finger .making its ceaseless exploratory rounds in the bathroom . sink, the nail clicking and tap-dancing. He -couldn't really hear it, not with both doors closed, and - he knew this, but he imagined he heard it, and that was just as bad. . No, it isn't, he told himself. At least you 0know you're imagining it. With the finger itselfyou're  not sure. / This was but little comfort. He still wasn't .able to get to sleep, and he was no closer to solving - his problem. He did know he couldn't spend *the rest of his life making excuses to go outside and , pee in the alley next to the building. He )doubted if he could manage that for even forty-eight * hours. And what was going to happen the -next time he had to take a dump, friends and - neighbors? There was a question he'd never -seen asked in a round of Final Jeopardy, and he + didn't have a clue what the answer might ,be. Not the alley, though he was sure of that much,  at least. ) Maybe, the voice in his head suggested *cautiously, you'll get used to the damned thing. ' No. The idea was insane. He had been +married to Vi for twenty-one years, and he still found it , impossible to go to the bathroom when she +was in there with him. Those circuits just overloaded . and shut down. She could sit there cheerily -on the John, peeing and talking to him about her day / at Dr. Stone's while he shaved, but he could +not do the same. He just wasn't built that way. . If that finger doesn 't go away on its own, +you better be prepared to make some changesin the . way you're built, then, the voice told him, -because I think you're going to have to make some ( modifications in the basic structure. - He turned his head and glanced at the clock.on the bed-table. It was quarter to two in the/ morning . . . and, he realized dolefully, he had to pee again. & He got up carefully, stole from the )bedroom, passed the closed bathroom door with the - ceaseless scratching, tapping sounds still )coming from behind it, and went into the kitchen. He ' moved the step-stool in front of the .kitchen sink, mounted it, and aimed carefully into the drain, - ears cocked all the while for the sound of Vi getting out of bed. 0 He finally managed . . . but not until he had -reached three hundred and forty-seven in his ( catalogue of prime numbers. It was an /all-time record. He replaced the step-stool and shuffled 1 back to bed, thinking: I can't go on like this.Not for long. I just can't. , He bared his teeth at the bathroom door ashe passed it. , When the alarm went off at six-thirty the &next morning, he stumbled out of bed, shuffled down to ! the bathroom, and went inside.  The drain was empty. + 'Thank God,' he said in a low, trembling 2voice. A sublime gust of relief relief so greatit felt . like some sort of sacred revelation blew through him. 'Oh, thank G ' + The finger popped up like a Jack popping -out of a Jack-in-the-box, as if the sound of his voice - had called it. It spun around three times, +fast, and then bent as stiffly as an Irish setter on point. ' And it was pointing straight at him. - Howard retreated, his upper lip rising and )falling rapidly in an unconscious snarl. * Now the tip of the finger curled up and /down, up and down . . . as if it were waving athim. , Good morning, Howard, so nice to be here. ) 'Fuck you,' he muttered. He turned and .faced the toilet. He tried resolutely to pass water . . . . and nothing. He felt a sudden lurid rush of 0rage . . . an urge to simply whirl and pounce onthe / nasty intruder in the sink, to rip it out of .its cave, throw it on the floor, and stamp on it in his bare  feet. . 'Howard?' Vi asked blearily. She knocked on the door. 'Almost done?' . 'Yes,' he said, trying his best to make his %voice normal. He flushed the toilet. , It was clear that Vi would not have known +or much cared if he sounded normal or not, and she . took very little interest in how he looked. $She was suffering from an unplanned hangover. + 'Not the worst one I ever had, but still -pretty bad,' she mumbled as she brushed past him, hiked . her nightdress, and plopped onto the Jakes. *She propped her forehead in one hand. 'No more of - that stuff, please and thank you. American ,Grain, my rosy red ass. Someone should have told - those babies you put the fertilizer on the &hops before you grow em, not after. A headache on + three lousy beers! Gosh! Well you buy +cheap, you get cheap. Especially when it's those / creepy Lahs doing the selling. Be a dollface +and get me some aspirin, will you, Howie?' + 'Sure,' he said, and approached the sink -carefully. The finger was gone again. Vi, it seemed, - had once more frightened it off. He got the(aspirin out of the medicine cabinet and removed two. * When he reached to put the bottle back, &he saw the tip of the finger protrude momentarily from ( the drain. It came out no more than a 'quarter of an inch. Again it seemed to execute that + miniature wave before diving back out of sight. - I'm going to get rid of you, my friend, he #thought suddenly. The feeling that accompanied the - thought was anger pure, simple anger /and it delighted him. The emotion cruised into his . battered, bewildered mind like one of those -huge Soviet icebreakers that crush and slice their & way through masses of pack-ice with -almost casual ease. I am going to get you. I don't know how  yet, but I will. - He handed Vi the aspirin and said, 'Just a *minute I'll get you a glass of water.' 0 'Don't bother,' Vi said drearily, and crunched-both tablets between her teeth. 'Works fasterthis  way.' 4 'I'll bet it plays hell on your insides, though,' .Howard said. He found he didn't mind being in . the bathroom very much at all, as long as Viwas in here with him. 3 'Don't care,' she said, more drearily still. She 0flushed the toilet. 'How are you this morning?' # 'Not great,' he said truthfully.  'You got one, too?' / 'A hangover? No. I think it's that flu-bug I .told you about. My throat's sore, and I think I'm  running a finger.'  'What?' - 'Fever,' he said. 'Fever's what I meant to say.' , 'Well, you better stay home.' She went to +the sink, selected her toothbrush from the holder, and  began to brush vigorously. / 'Maybe you better, too,' he said. He did not )want Vi to stay home, however; he wanted her 2 right by Dr. Stone's side while Dr. Stone filled/cavities and did root canals, but it would have- been unfeeling not to have said something. / She glanced up at him in the mirror. Already .a little color was returning to her cheeks, a little , sparkle to her eye. Vi also recovered con 2brio. 'The day I call in sick at work because I'vegot a + hangover will be the day I quit drinking 0altogether,' she said. 'Besides, the doc's gonna need me. / We're pulling a complete set of uppers. Dirty"job, but somebody's gotta do it.' . She spat directly into the drain and Howard .thought, fascinated: The next time it pops up,it'll  have toothpaste on it. Jesus! ) 'You stay home and keep warm and drink 0plenty of fluids,' Vi said. She had adopted her Head ) Nurse Tone now, the tone which said If /you're not taking all this down, be it on your own head. . 'Catch up on your reading. And, by the bye, )show that Mr. Hot Shit Lathrop what he's missing ) when you don't come in. Make him think twice.' / 'That's not a bad idea at all,' Howard said. + She kissed him on the way by and dropped .him a wink. 'Your Shrinking Violet knows a fewof . the answers, too,' she said. By the time she.left to catch her bus half an hour later, she was + singing lustily, her hangover forgotten. , The first thing Howard did following Vi's -departure was to haul the step-stool over to the kitchen - sink and whiz into the drain again. It was .easier with Vi out of the house; he had barelyreached ( twenty-three, the ninth prime number, !before getting down to business. - With that problem squared away at least -for the next few hours he walked back intothe & hall and poked his head through the *bathroom door. He saw the finger at once, and that was + wrong. It was impossible, because he was -way over here, and the basin should have cut off his ( view. But it didn't and that meant , 'What are you doing, you bastard?' Howard (croaked, and the finger, which had been twisting ) back and forth as if to test the wind, +turned toward him. There was toothpaste on it, just as he had ' known there would be. It bent in his 2direction . . . only now it bent in three places, and that was - impossible, too, quite impossible, because )when you got to the third knuckle of any given finger, ' you were up to the back of the hand. 2 It's getting longer, his mind gibbered. I don't ,know how that can happen, but it is if I can . see it over the top of the basin from here, ,it must be at least three inches long . . . maybe more! ) He closed the bathroom door gently and .staggered back into the living room. His legs had ( once again turned into malfunctioning -pogo-sticks. His mental ice-breaker was gone, flattened * under a great white weight of panic and .bewilderment. No iceberg this; it was a whole glacier. ) Howard Mitla sat down in his chair and /closed his eyes. He had never felt more alone, more / disoriented, or more utterly powerless in his,entire life. He sat that way for quite some time, and , at last his fingers began to relax on the ,arms of his chair. He had spent most of the previous night + wide-awake. Now he simply drifted off to *sleep while the lengthening finger in his bathroom ( drain tapped and circled, circled and tapped. $ He dreamed he was a contestant on +Jeopardy not the new, big-money version but the original , daytime show. Instead of computer screens,)a stagehand behind the game-board simply pulled up ( a card when a contestant called for a ,particular answer. Art Fleming had replaced Alex Trebek, ) with his slicked-back hair and somehow (prissy poor-boy-at-the-party smile. The woman in the 0 middle was still Mildred, and she still had a 0satellite downlink in her ear, but her hair was teased , up into a Jacqueline Kennedy bouffant and -a pair of cats-eye frames had replaced her wirerimmed  glasses. + And everyone was in black and white, him included. + 'Okay, Howard,' Art said, and pointed at -him. His index finger was a grotesque thing, easily a 0 foot long; it stuck out of his loosely curled +fist like a pedagogue's pointer. There was dried - toothpaste on the nail. 'It's your turn to select.' , Howard looked at the board and said, 'I'd -like Pests and Vipers for one hundred, Art.' * The square with $100 on it was removed, -revealing an answer which Art now read: 'The best - way to get rid of those troublesome fingersin your bathroom drain.' . 'What is . . . ' Howard said, and then came ,up blank. A black-and-white studio audience stared , silently at him. A black-and-white camera %man dollied in for a close-up of his sweat-streaked 2 black-and-white face. 'What is . . . um . . . ' * 'Hurry up, Howard, you're almost out of 'time,' Art Fleming cajoled, waving his grotesquely ) elongated finger at Howard, but Howard ,was a total blank. He was going to miss the question, + the hundred bucks would be deducted from -his score, he was going to go into the minus column, , he was going to be a complete loser, they .probably wouldn't even given him the lousy setof  encyclopedias . . . ' A delivery truck on the street below -backfired loudly. Howard sat up with a jerk, which almost  pitched him out of his chair. / 'What is liquid drain-cleaner?' he screamed. !'What is liquid drain-cleaner?'' - It was, of course, the answer. The correct answer. / He began to laugh. He was still laughing five.minutes later, as he shrugged into his topcoat and stepped out the door. * Howard picked up the plastic bottle the &toothpick-chewing clerk in the Queens Boulevard Happy ' Handyman Hardware Store had just set )down on the counter. There was a cartoon woman in an - apron on the front. She stood with one hand,on her hip while she used the other hand to pour a , gush of drain-cleaner into something that 0was either an industrial sink or Orson Welles's bidet. - DRAIN-EZE, the label proclaimed. TWICE the 'strength of most leading brands! Opens bathroom ) sinks, showers, and drains IN MINUTES! #Dissolves hair and organic matter! , 'Organic matter,' Howard said. 'Just what does that mean?' . The clerk, a bald man with a lot of warts on-his forehead, shrugged. The toothpick poking out / between his lips rolled from one side of his *mouth to the other. 'Food, I guess. But I wouldn't / stand the bottle next to the liquid soap, if you know what I mean.' - 'Would it eat holes in your hands?' Howard -asked, hoping he sounded properly horrified. 1 The clerk shrugged again. 'I guess it ain't as -powerful as the stuff we used to sell the stuff / with lye in it but that stuff ain't legal /anymore. At least I don't think it is. But you see that,  don'tcha?' He tapped the *skull-and-crossbones POISON logo with one short, stubby finger. , Howard got a good look at that finger. He /had found himself noticing a lot of fingers on his walk  down to the Happy Handyman. " 'Yes,' Howard said. 'I see it.' / 'Well, they don't put that on just because it/looks, you know, sporty. If you got kids, keep it out 0 of their reach. And don't gargle with it.' He ,burst out laughing, the toothpick riding up and down  on his lower lip. / 'I won't,' Howard said. He turned the bottle )and read the fine print. Contains sodium hydroxide ) and potassium hydroxide. Causes severe .burns on contact. Well, that was pretty good. He didn't , know if it was good enough, but there was !a way to find out, wasn't there? , The voice in his head spoke up dubiously. +What if you only make it mad, Howard? What then? 1 Well . . . so what? It was in the drain, wasn'tit? * Yes . . . but it appears to be growing. , Still what choice did he have? On this %subject the little voice was silent. . 'I hate to hurry you over such an important .purchase,' the clerk said, 'but I'm by myself this ) morning and I have some invoices to go over, so ' 0 'I'll take it,' Howard said, reaching for his /wallet. As he did so, his eye caught something else - a display below a sign, which read FALL ,CLEARANCE SALE. 'What are those?' he asked. 'Over  there?' & 'Those?' the clerk asked. 'Electric ,hedge-clippers. We got two dozen of em last June, but they  didn't move worth a damn.' 2 'I'll take a pair,' said Howard Mitla. He began -to smile, and the clerk later told police he didn't ' like that smile. Not one little bit. & Howard put his new purchases on the *kitchen counter when he got home, pushing the box . containing the electric hedge-clippers over )to one side, hoping it would not come to those. Surely * it wouldn't. Then he carefully read the )instructions on the bottle of Drain-Eze. . Slowly pour 1/4 bottle into drain . . . let -stand fifteen minutes. Repeat application if necessary. 0 But surely it wouldn't come to that, either . . . would it? + To make sure it wouldn't, Howard decided 0he would pour half the bottle into the drain. / Maybe a little bit more. I He struggled with -the safety cap and finally managed to get it f>ff. He * then walked through the living room and 0into the hall with the white plastic bottle heldout in , front of him and a grim Expression the -expression of a soldier who knows he will be ordered + over the top of the trench at any moment  on his usually mild face. - Wait a minute! the voice in his head cried ,out as he reached for the doorknob, and his hand / faltered. This is crazy! You KNOW it's crazy!)You don't need drain-cleaner, you need a * psychiatrist! You need to lie down on a %couch somewhere and tell someone you imagine that's / right, that's the word, IMAGINE there's a ,finger stuck in the bathroom sink, a finger that's  growing! ) 'Oh no,' Howard said, shaking his head !firmly back and forth. 'No way.' * He could not absolutely could not *visualize himself telling this story to a psychiatrist . . . . to anyone, in fact. Suppose Mr. Lathrop got /wind of it? He might, too, through Vi's father.Bill ( DeHorne had been a CPA in the firm of .Dean, Green, and Lathrop for thirty years. He had gotten ( Howard his initial interview with Mr. #Lathrop, had written him a glowing recommendation . . . - had, in fact, done everything but give him .the job himself. Mr. DeHorne was retired now, but he + and John Lathrop still saw a lot of each .other. If Vi found out her Howie was going to see a . shrink (and how could he keep it from her, a0thing like that?), she would tell her mother Vi + told her mother everything. Mrs. DeHorne +would tell her husband, of course. And Mr. DeHorne  ) Howard found himself imagining the two /men, his father-in-law and his boss, sitting inleather ) wingback chairs in some mythic club or -other, the kind of wingback chairs that were studded * with little gold nailheads. He saw them -sipping sherry in this vision; the cut-glass decanter stood - on the little table by Mr. Lathrop's right (hand. (Howard had never seen either man actually drink , sherry, but this morbid fantasy seemed to *demand it.) He saw Mr. DeHorne who was now / doddering into his late seventies and had all%the discretion of a housefly lean confidentially - forward and say, You'll never believe what )my son-in-law Howard's up to, John. He's going to * see a psychiatrist! He thinks there's a -finger in his bathroom sink, you see. Do you suppose he % might be taking drugs of some son? + And maybe Howard didn't really think all *that would happen. He thought there was a 1 possibility it might if not in just that way-then in some other but suppose it didn't? He still 0 couldn't see himself going to a psychiatrist. -Something in him a close neighbor of that ( something that would not allow him to ,urinate in a public bathroom if there was a line of men - behind him, no doubt simply refused the 'idea. He would not get on one of those couches and ( supply the answer There's a finger -sticking out of the bathroom sink so that some goateewearing . head-shrinker could pelt him with questions.#It would be like Jeopardy in hell. ! He reached for the knob again. ) Call a plumber, then! the voice yelled .desperately. At least do that much! You don't have to + tell him what you see! Just tell him the /pipe's clogged! Or tell him your wife lost her wedding * ring down the drain! Tell him ANYTHING! ) But that idea was, in a way, even more 0useless than the idea of calling a shrink. This was New + York, not Des Moines. You could lose the )Hope Diamond down your bathroom sink and still & wait a week for a plumber to make a .housecall. He did not intend to spend the next seven days * slinking around Queens, looking for gas )stations where an attendant would accept five dollars for , the privilege of allowing Howard Mitla to &move his bowels in a dirty men's room underneath this  year's Bardahl calendar. . Then do it fast, the voice said, giving up. At least do it fast. , On this Howard's two minds were united. He0was, in truth, afraid that if he didn't act fast , and keep on acting he would not act at all. - And surprise it, if you can. Take off your shoes. ' Howard thought this was an extremely .useful idea. He acted upon it at once, easing off first * one loafer and then the other. He found )himself wishing he had thought to put on some rubber & gloves in case of backsplatter, and +wondered if Vi still kept a pair under the kitchen sink. Never ) mind, though. He was screwed up to the /sticking point. If he paused to go back for therubber . gloves now, he might lose his courage . . . #maybe temporarily, maybe for good. & He eased open the bathroom door and slipped inside. ( The Mitla bathroom was never what one /would call a cheery place, but at this time of day, . almost noon, it was at least fairly bright. 1Visibility wouldn't be a problem . . . and there was no / sign of the finger. At least, not yet. Howard+tiptoed across the room with the bottle of draincleaner . clutched tightly in his right hand. He bent .over the sink and looked into the round black ' hole in the center of the faded pink porcelain. ' Except it wasn't dark. Something was .rushing up through that blackness, hurrying upthat . small-bore, oozy pipe to greet him, to greetits good friend Howard Mitla. . 'Take this!' Howard screamed, and tilted the#bottle of Drain-Eze over the sink. Greenish-blue / sludge spilled out and struck the drain just as the finger emerged. . The result was immediate and terrifying. The0glop coated the nail and the tip of the finger. It . went into a frenzy, whirling like a dervish ,around and around the limited circumference of the / drain, spraying off small blue-green fans of 'Drain-Eze. Several droplets struck the light-blue & cotton shirt Howard was wearing and 0immediately ate holes in it. These holes fizzed brown lace - at the edges, but the shirt was rather too )large for him, and none of the stuff got through to his 0 chest or belly. Other drops stippled the skin 0of his right wrist and palm, but he did not feelthese + until later. His adrenaline was not just flowing; it was at flood tide. / The finger blurted up from the drain joint)after impossible joint of it. It was now smoking, 0 and it smelled like a rubber boot sizzling on a hot barbecue grill. - 'Take this! Lunch is served, you bastard!' +Howard screamed, continuing to pour as the finger / rose to a height of just over a foot, rising %out of the drain like a cobra from a snake-charmer's - basket. It had almost reached the mouth of -the plastic bottle when it wavered, seemed to shudder, + and suddenly reversed its field, zipping (back down into the drain. Howard leaned farther over the & basin to watch it go and saw just a /retreating flash of white far down in the dark.Lazy tendrils of  smoke drifted up. ( He drew a deep breath, and this was a .mistake. He inhaled a great double lungful of Drain-Eze - fumes. He was suddenly, violently sick. He +vomited forcefully into the basin and then staggered + away, still gagging and trying to retch. / 'I did it!' he shouted deliriously. His head +swam with the combined stench of corrosive - chemicals and burned flesh. Still, he felt ,almost exalted. He had met the enemy and theenemy, + by God and all the saints, was his. His! 0 'Hidey-ho! Hidey-fucking-ho! I did it! I ' ' His gorge rose again. He half-knelt, /half-swooned in front of the toilet, the bottle of Drain-Eze 0 still held stiffly out in his right hand, and /realized too late that Vi had put both the ringand the , lid down this morning when she vacated the+throne. He vomited all over the fuzzy pink toiletseat + cover and then fell forward into his own gloop in a dead faint. ) He could not have been unconscious for (long, because the bathroom enjoyed full daylight for / less than half an hour even in the middle of .summer then the other buildings cut off thedirect + sunlight and plunged the room into gloom again. - Howard raised his head slowly; aware he was/coated from hairline to chin-line with sticky, - foul-smelling stuff. He was even more aware.of something else. A clittering sound. It was - coming from behind him, and it was getting closer. ) He turned his head, which felt like an 1overfilled sandbag, slowly to his left. His eyes slowly - widened. He hitched in breath and tried to scream, but his throat locked. ! The finger was coming for him. ) It was easily seven feet long now, and .getting longer all the time. It curved out of the sink in a $ stiff arc made by perhaps a dozen -knuckles, descended to the floor, then curvedagain (Doublejointed! " some distant commentator in his -disintegrating mind reported with interest). Now it was . tapping and feeling its way across the tile .floor toward him. The last nine or ten inches were . discolored and smoking. The nail had turned *a greenish-black color. Howard thought he could + see the whitish shine of bone just below .the first of its knuckles. It was quite badly burned, but it , was not by any stretch of the imagination dissolved. + ''Get away,' Howard whispered, and for a %moment the entire grotesque, jointed contraption - came to a halt. It looked like a lunatic's ,conception of a New Year's Eve party-favor. Then it 0 slithered straight toward him. The last half a)dozen knuckles flexed and the tip of the finger . wrapped itself around Howard Mitla's ankle. - 'No!' he screamed as the smoking Hydroxide -Twins Sodium and Potassium ate through / his nylon sock and sizzled his skin. He gave ,his foot a tremendous yank. For a moment thefinger , held it was very strong and then he .pulled free. He crawled toward the door with ahuge , clump of vomit-loaded hair hanging in his .eyes. As he crawled he tried to look back overhis - shoulder, but he could see nothing through 'his coagulated hair. Now his chest had unlocked and ( he gave voice to a series of barking, frightful screams. ( He could not see the finger, at least /temporarily, but he could hear the finger, and now it was 0 coming fast, tictictictictic right behind him.0Still trying to look back over his shoulder, he ran , into the wall to the left of the bathroom 0door with his shoulder. The towels fell off the shelf + again. He went sprawling and at once the +finger was around his other ankle, flexing tight with its  charred and burning tip. 0 It began to pull him back toward the sink. It !actually began to pull him back. - Howard uttered a deep and primitive howl ,a sound such as had never before escaped his/ polite set of CPA vocal cords and flailed .at the edge of the door. He caught it with hisright * hand and gave a huge, panicky yank. His 0shirttail pulled free all the way around and theseam , under his right arm tore loose with a low +purring sound, but he managed to get free, losing only % the ragged lower half of one sock. + He stumbled to his feet, turned, and saw -the finger feeling its way toward him again. The nail & at the end was now deeply split and bleeding. + Need a manicure, bud, Howard thought, and,uttered an anguished laugh. Then he ran for the  kitchen. * Someone was pounding on the door. Hard. 1 'Mitla! Hey, Mitla! What's going on in there?' -Feeney, from down the hall. A big loud Irish + drunk. Correction: a big loud nosy Irish drunk. + 'Nothing I can't handle, my bog-trotting ,friend!' Howard shouted as he went into the kitchen. . He laughed again and tossed his hair off his0forehead. It went, but fell back in exactly the same 2 jellied clump a second later. ' 'Nothing I can't.handle, you better believe that! You can take that + right to the bank and put it in your NOW account!' , 'What did you call me?' Feeney responded. )His voice, which had been truculent, now became 2 ominous as well. 'Shut up!' Howard yelled. 'I'm 2busy!' 'I want the yelling to stop or I'm calling  the cops!' . 'Fuck off!'' Howard screamed at him. Another0first. He tossed his hair off his forehead, and  clump! Back down it fell. 2 'I don't have to listen to your shit, you littlefour-eyes creep!' % Howard raked his hands through his -vomit-loaded hair and then flung them out in front of him 0 in a curiously Gallic gesture Et voila! it (seemed to say. Warm juice and shapeless gobbets ' splattered across Vi's white kitchen )cabinets. Howard didn't even notice. The hideous finger had + seized each of his ankles once, and they +burned as if they were wearing circlets of fire. Howard , didn't care about that, either. He seized the box containing the electric hedge-clippers. On the - front, a smiling dad with a pipe parked in -his gob was trimming the hedge in front of an estatesized  home. - 'You having a little drug-party in there?' Feeney inquired from the hall. / 'You better get out of here, Feeney, or I'll +introduce you to a friend of mine!' Howard yelled / back. This struck him as incredibly witty. He'threw his head back and yodeled at the kitchen 0 ceiling, his hair standing up in strange jags /and quills and glistening with stomach juices. He , looked like a man who has embarked upon a .violent love affair with a tube of Brylcreem. 2 'Okay, that's it,' Feeney said. 'That's it. I'm callin the cops.' ) Howard barely heard him. Dennis Feeney /would have to wait; he had bigger fish to fry. He . had ripped the electric hedge-clippers from +the box, examined them feverishly, saw the battery " compartment, and pried it open. 1 'C-cells,' he muttered, laughing. 'Good! That'sgood! No problem there!' + He yanked open one of the drawers to the /left of the sink, pulling with such force that the stop , broke off and the drawer flew all the way +across the kitchen, striking the stove and landing + upside down on the linoleum floor with a .bang and a clatter. Amid the general rick-rack . tongs, peelers, graters, paring knives, and .garbage-bag ties was a small treasure-troveof ' batteries, mostly C-cells and square 1nine-volts. Still laughing it seemed he could no longer , stop laughing Howard fell on his knees -and grubbed through the litter. He succeeded in * cutting the pad of his right palm quite ,badly on the blade of a paring knife before seizing two of - the C-cells, but he felt this no more than +he felt the burns he had sustained when he had been , backsplashed. Now that Feeney had at last .shut his braying Irish donkey's mouth, Howard could * hear the tapping again. Not coming from ,the sink now, though huh-uh, no way. The ragged . nail was tapping on the bathroom door . . . -or maybe the hall floor. He had neglected to close the  door, he now remembered. , 'Who gives a fuck?' Howard asked, and then,he screamed: 'WHO GIVES A FUCK, I SAID! I'M READY ) FOR YOU, MY FRIEND! I'M COMING TO KICK (ASS AND CHEW BUBBLEGUM, AND I'M ALL OUT OF & BUBBLEGUM! YOU'LL WISH YOU'D STAYED DOWN THE DRAIN!' $ He slammed the batteries into the 'compartment set into the handle of the hedge-clippers and # tried the power switch. Nothing. . 'Bite my crank!' Howard muttered. He pulled .one of the batteries out, reversed it, and putit / back in. This time the blades buzzed to life ,when he pushed the switch, snicking back andforth $ so rapidly they were only a blur. , He started for the kitchen door, then made-himself switch the gadget off and go back to the ( counter. He didn't want to waste time .putting the battery cover back in place not when he was + primed for battle but the last bit of 0sanity still flickering in his mind assured him that he had . no choice. If his hand slipped while he was ,dealing with the thing, the batteries might pop out of ' the open compartment, and then where (would he be? Why, facing the James Gang with an  unloaded gun, of course. + So he fiddled the battery cover back on, /cursing when it wouldn't fit and turning it in the other  direction. . 'You wait for me, now!' he called back over 0his shoulder. 'I'm coming! We're not done yet!' * At last the battery cover snapped down. .Howard strode briskly back through the living room - with the hedge-clippers held at port arms. 0His hair still stood up in punk-rock quills and spikes. . His shirt now torn out under one arm and 0burned in several places flapped against his - round, tidy stomach. His bare feet slapped -on the linoleum. The tattered remains of his nylon , socks swung and dangled about his ankles. , Feeney yelled through the door, 'I called ,them, birdbrain! You got that? I called the cops, and I $ hope the ones who show up are all &bog-trotting Irishmen, just like me!' . 'Blow it out your old tan tailpipe,' Howard /said, but he was really paying no attention to ' Feeney. Dennis Feeney was in another &universe; this was just his quacking, unimportant voice " coming in over the sub-etheric. + Howard stood to one side of the bathroom 1door, looking like a cop in a TV show . . . only ( someone had handed him the wrong prop +and he was packing a hedge-clipper instead of a.38. He ( pressed his thumb firmly on the power %button set high on the handle of the hedge-clippers. He , took a deep breath . . . and the voice of ,sanity, now down to a mere gleam, offered a final thought  before packing up for good. . Are you sure you want to trust your life to -a pair of electric hedge-clippers you bought on  sale? . 'I have no choice,' Howard muttered, smilingtightly, and lunged inside. 1 The finger was still there, still arced out of +the sink in that stiff curve that reminded Howard of a , New Year's Eve party-favor, the kind that (makes a farting, honking sound and then unrolls ) toward the unsuspecting bystander when /you blow on it. It had filched one of Howard's loafers. - It was picking the shoe up and slamming it .petulantly down on the tiles again and again. From * the look of the towels scattered about, ,Howard guessed the finger had tried to kill several of ! those before finding the shoe. - A weird joy suddenly suffused Howard it /felt as if the inside of his aching, woozy headhad  been filled with green light. 0 'Here I am, you nitwit!' he yelled. 'Come and get me!' - The finger popped out of the shoe, rose in +a monstrous ripple of joints (Howard could actually , hear some of its many knuckles cracking), /and floated rapidly through the air toward him.* Howard turned on the hedge-clippers and /they buzzed into hungry life. So far, so good. * The burned, blistered tip of the finger -wavered in front of his face, the split nail weaving + mystically back and forth. Howard lunged +for it. The finger feinted to the left and slipped around - his left ear. The pain was amazing. Howard /simultaneously felt and heard a grisly ripping sound / as the finger tried to tear his ear from the ,side of his head. He sprang forward, seized the finger in - his left fist, and sheared through it. The +clippers lugged down as the blades hit the bone, the high ( buzzing of the motor becoming a rough -growl, but it had been built to clip through small, tough , branches and there was really no problem. ,No problem at all. This was Round Two, this was * Double Jeopardy, where the scores could ,really change, and Howard Mitla was racking up a - bundle. Blood flew in a fine haze and then -the stump pulled back. Howard blundered afterit, the - last ten inches of the finger hanging from (his ear like a coat hanger for a moment before  dropping off. * The finger lunged at him. Howard ducked ,and it went over his head. It was blind, of course. + That was his advantage. Grabbing his ear /like that had just been a lucky shot. He lunged with the / clippers, a gesture which looked almost like -a fencing thrust, and sheared off another twofeet of . the finger. It thumped to the tiles and lay there, twitching. . Now the rest of it was trying to pull back. ) 'No you don't,' Howard panted. 'No you don't, not at all!' . He ran for the sink, slipped in a puddle of (blood, almost fell, and then caught his balance. The + finger was blurring back down the drain, ,knuckle after knuckle, like a freight-train going into a . tunnel. Howard seized it, tried to hold it, 0and couldn't it went sliding through his handlike a - greased and burning length of clothesline. *He sliced forward again nevertheless, and managed to + cut off the last three feet of the thing +just above the point where it was whizzing through his fist. . He leaned over the sink (holding his breath .this time) and stared down into the blackness of . the drain. Again he caught just a glimpse ofretreating white. ' 'Come on back anytime!' Howard Mitla 2shouted. 'Come back anytime at all! I'll be right here,  waiting for you!' . He turned around, releasing his breath in a /gasp. The room still smelled of drain-cleaner. / Couldn't have that, not while there was still-work to do. There was a wrapped cake of Dial soap , behind the hot-water tap. Howard picked it+up and threw it at the bathroom window. It broke the * glass and bounced off the crisscross of +mesh behind it. He remembered putting that mesh in * remembered how proud of it he had been. ,He, Howard Mitla, mild-mannered accountant, had ) been TAKING CARE OF THE OLD HOMESTEAD. (Now he knew what TAKING CARE OF THE OLD , HOMESTEAD was really all about. Had there *been a time when he had been afraid to go into the * bathroom because he thought there might ,be a mouse in the tub, and he would have to beat it to , death with a broomhandle? He believed so, ,but that time and that version of Howard Mitla  seemed long ago now. + He looked slowly around the bathroom. It -was a mess. Pools of blood and two chunks of * finger lay on the floor. Another leaned )askew in the basin. Fine sprays of blood fanned across the . walls and stippled the bathroom mirror. The basin was streaked with it. . 'All right,' Howard sighed. 'Clean-up time, .boys and girls.' He turned the hedge-clippers on - again and began to saw the various lengths +of finger he had cut off into pieces small enough to  flush down the toilet. - The policeman was young and he was Irish .O'Bannion was his name. By the time he finally* arrived at the closed door of the Mitla )apartment, several tenants were standing behind him in a , little knot. With the exception of Dennis 'Feeney, who wore an expression of high outrage, they  all looked worried. & O'Bannion knocked on the door, then rapped, and finally hammered. 0 'You better break it down,' Mrs. Javier said. +'I heard him all the way up on the seventh floor.' - 'The man's insane,' Feeney said. 'Probably killed his wife.' / 'No,' said Mrs. Dattlebaum. 'I saw her leave !this morning, just like always.' , 'Doesn't mean she didn't come back again, ,does it?' Mr. Feeney asked truculently, and Mrs.  Dattlebaum subsided. " 'Mr. Mitter?' O'Bannion called. 2 'It's Mitla' Mrs. Dattlebaum said. 'With an l.' / 'Oh, crap,' O'Bannion said, and hit the door -with his shoulder. It burst open and he went inside, , closely followed by Mr. Feeney. 'You stay "here, sir,' O'Bannion instructed. 1 'The hell I will,' Feeney said. He was looking .into the Kitchen, with its strew of implementson . the floor and the splatters of vomit on the *kitchen cabinets. His eyes were small and bright and / interested. 'The guy's my neighbor. And after'all, I was the one who made the call.' - 'I don't care if you made the call on your %own private hotline to the Commish,' O'Bannion said. , 'Get the hell out of here or you're going +down to the station with this guy Mittle.' . 'Mitla,' Feeney said, and slunk unwillingly (toward the door to the hallway, casting glances " back at the kitchen as he went. ( O'Bannion had sent Feeney back mostly )because he didn't want Feeney to see how nervous he - was. The mess in the kitchen was one thing.)The way the place smelled was another some sort , of chemistry-lab stink on top, some other 'smell underneath it. He was afraid the underneath  smell might be blood. * He glanced behind him to make sure that ,Feeney had gone back all the way that he was not . lingering in the foyer where the coats were +hung and then he advanced slowly across the + living room. When he was beyond the view )of the onlookers, he unsnapped the strap across the - butt of his pistol and drew it. He went to /the kitchen and looked all the way in. Empty. Amess, % but empty. And . . . what was that *splattered across the cabinets? He wasn't sure, but judging by  the smell . A noise from behind him, a little shuffling +sound, broke the thought off and he turned quickly,  bringing his gun up.  'Mr. Mitla?' & There was no answer, but the little *shuffling sound came again. From down the hall. That % meant the bathroom or the bedroom. .Officer O'Bannion advanced in that direction, raising his . gun and pointing its muzzle at the ceiling. ,He was now carrying it in much the same way ) Howard had carried the hedge-clippers. , The bathroom door was ajar. O'Bannion was ,quite sure this was where the sound had come+ from, and he knew it was where the worst +of the smell was coming from. He crouched, and then * pushed the door open with the muzzle of his gun.  'Oh my God,' he said softly. , The bathroom looked like a slaughterhouse .after a busy day. Blood sprayed the walls and / ceiling in scarlet bouquets of spatter. There-were puddles of blood on the floor, and more blood - had run down the inside and outside curves /of the bathroom basin in thick trails; that waswhere + the worst of it appeared to be. He could +see a broken window, a discarded bottle of what , appeared to be drain-cleaner (which would 0explain the awful smell in here), and a pair of men's , loafers lying quite a distance apart from (each other. One of them was quite badly scuffed. + And, as the door swung wider, he saw the man. * Howard Mitla had crammed himself as far +into the space between the bathtub and the wall as ( he could get when he had finished his )disposal operation. He held the electric hedge-clippers on - his lap, but the batteries were flat; bone 0was a little tougher than branches after all, it seemed. His . hair still stood up in its wild spikes. His )cheeks and brow were smeared with bright streaks of / blood. His eyes were wide but almost totally &empty it was an expression Officer O'Bannion # associated with speed-freaks and crackheads. . Holy Jesus, he thought. The guy was right -he DID kill his wife. He killed somebody, at least.  So where's the body? - He glanced toward the tub but couldn't see .in. It was the most likely place, but it also seemed ) to be the one object in the room which *wasn't streaked and splattered with gore. 0 'Mr. Mitla?' he asked. He wasn't pointing his +gun directly at Howard, but the muzzle was most ! certainly in the neighborhood. * 'Yes, that's my name,' Howard said in a /hollow, courteous voice. 'Howard Mitla, CPA, atyour . service. Did you come to use the toilet? Go ,right ahead. There's nothing to disturb you now. I . think that problem's been taken care of. At least for the time being.' ) 'Uh, would you mind getting rid of the weapon, sir?' * 'Weapon?' Howard looked at him vacantly !for a moment, and then seemed to understand. - 'These?' He raised the hedge-clippers, and .the muzzle of Officer O'Bannion's gun for the first ' time came to rest on Howard himself.  'Yes, sir.' . 'Sure,' Howard said. He tossed the clippers ,indifferently into the bathtub. There was a clatter # as the battery-hatch popped out. + 'Doesn't matter. The batteries are flat, .anyway. But . . . what I said about using the toilet? On ) more mature consideration, I guess I'd advise against it.' $ 'You would?' Now that the man was ,disarmed, O'Bannion wasn't sure exactly how to proceed. / It would have been a lot easier if the victim+were on view. He supposed he'd better cuff the guy , and then call for backup. All he knew for +sure was that he wanted to get out of this smelly,  creepy bathroom. 1 'Yes,' Howard said. 'After all, consider this, 0Officer: there are five fingers on a hand . . . just . one hand, mind you . . . and . . . have you )ever thought about how many holes to the underworld - there are in an ordinary bathroom? Counting-the holes in the faucets, that is? I make it seven.' , Howard paused and then added, 'Seven is a -prime which is to say, a number divisible only by  one and itself.' - 'Would you want to hold out your hands for -me, sir?' Officer O'Bannion said, taking his  handcuffs from his belt. + 'Vi says I know all the answers,' Howard /said, 'but Vi's wrong.' He slowly held out his hands. ) O'Bannion knelt before him and quickly .snapped a cuff on Howard's right wrist. 'Who'sVi?' - 'My wife,' Howard said. His blank, shining /eyes looked directly into Officer O'Bannion's. , 'She's never had any problem going to the ,bathroom while someone else is in the room, you - know. She could probably go while you were in the room.' - Officer O'Bannion began to have a terrible .yet weirdly plausible idea: that this strange little ) man had killed his wife with a pair of *hedge-clippers and then somehow dissolved her body with / drain-cleaner and all because she wouldn't.get the hell out of the bathroom while he was  trying to drain the dragon.  He snapped the other cuff on. ' 'Did you kill your wife, Mr. Mitla?' $ For a moment Howard looked almost )surprised. Then he lapsed back into that queer, plastic 1 state of apathy again. 'No,' he said. 'Vi's at /Dr. Stone's. They're pulling a complete set of uppers. - Vi says it's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. Why would I kill Vi?' ( Now that he had the cuffs on the guy, 1O'Bannion felt a little better, a little more in control of 0 the situation. 'Well, it looks like you offed someone.' . 'It was just a finger,' Howard said. He was 2still holding his hands out in front of him. Light+ twinkled and ran along the chain between 1the handcuffs like liquid silver. 'But there are more , fingers than one on a hand. And what about)the hand's owner?' Howard's eyes shifted around the + bathroom, which had now gone well beyond 0gloom; it was filling up with shadows again. 'I told # it to come back anytime,' Howard 0whispered, 'but I was hysterical. I have decidedI . . . I am not - capable. It grew, you see. It grew when it hit the air.' ) Something suddenly splashed inside the -closed toilet. Howard's eyes shifted in that direction. . So did Officer O'Bannion's. The splash came .again. It sounded as if a trout had jumped in there. * 'No, I most definitely wouldn't use the 3toilet,' Howard said. 'I'd hold it, if I were you, Officer. 0 I'd hold it just as long as I possibly could, -and then use the alley beside the building.'  O'Bannion shivered. . Get hold of yourself, boyo, he told himself 1sternly. You get hold of yourself, or you'll windup  as nutty as this guy. ! He got up to check the toilet. 0 'Bad idea,' Howard said. 'A really bad idea.' . 'What exactly happened in here, Mr. Mitla?' -O'Bannion asked. 'And what have you stored in the toilet?' 1 'What happened? It was like . . . like . . . ' /Howard trailed off, and then began to smile. Itwas a 1 relieved smile . . . but his eyes kept creeping2back to the closed lid of the toilet. 'It was like2 Jeopardy,' he said. 'In fact, it was like Final /Jeopardy. The category is The Inexplicable. The* Final Jeopardy answer is, "Because they *can." Do you know what the Final Jeopardy question is,  Officer?' + Fascinated, unable to take his eyes from ,Howard's, Officer O'Bannion shook his head. - 'The Final Jeopardy question,' Howard said *in a voice that was cracked and roughened from * screaming, 'is: "Why do terrible things (sometimes happen to the nicest people?" That's the Final 1 Jeopardy question. It's all going to take a lot/of thought. But I have plenty of time. As long as I ' stay away from the . . . the holes.' - The splash came again. It was heavier this .time. The vomitous toilet seat bumped sharply up , and down. Officer O'Bannion got up, walked*over, and bent down. Howard looked at him with  some interest. 0 'Final Jeopardy, Officer,' said Howard Mitla. !'How much do you wish to wager?' . O'Bannion thought about it for a moment . . .. then grasped the toilet seat and wagered it all.   -Sneakers-  . John Tell had been working at Tabori Studios,just over a month when he first noticed the . sneakers. Tabori was in a building which had-once been called Music City and had been, in the , early days of rock and roll and top-forty -rhythm and blues, a very big deal. Back then you never - would have seen a pair of sneakers (unless )they were on the feet of a delivery boy) above lobbylevel. + Those days were gone, though, and so were(the big-money producers with their reet pleats , and pointy-toed snakeskin shoes. Sneakers -were now just another part of the Music City uniform, . and when Tell first glimpsed these, he made +no negative assumptions about their owner. Well, - maybe one: the guy really could have used a)new pair. These had been white when they were ) new, but from the look of them new had been a long time ago. , That was all he noticed when he first saw -the sneakers in the little room where you so often ( ended up judging your neighbor by his +footwear because that was all you ever saw of him. Tell . spied this pair under the door of the first /toilet-stall in the third-floor men's room. He passed / them on his way to the third and last stall. ,He came out a few minutes later, washed and dried his , hands, combed his hair, and then went back,to Studio F, where he was helping to mix an album ) by a heavy-metal group called The Dead -Beats. To say Tell had already forgotten the sneakers * would be an overstatement, because they *had hardly registered on his mental radar screen to  begin with. ' Paul Jannings was producing The Dead -Beats' sessions. He wasn't famous in the way the old & be-bop kings of Music City had been .famous Tell thought rock-and-roll music was no longer , strong enough to breed such mythic royalty* but he was fairly well-known, and Tell himself & thought he was the best producer of .rock-and-roll records currently active in the field; only ! Jimmy Iovine could come close. / Tell had first seen him at a party following .the premiere of a concert film; had, in fact, + recognized him from across the room. The -hair was graying now, and the sharp features of & Jannings's handsome face had become -almost gaunt, but there was no mistaking the man who , had recorded the legendary Tokyo Sessions +with Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, John Lennon, and Al + Kooper some fifteen years earlier. Other )than Phil Spector, Jannings was the only record . producer Tell could have recognized by sight+as well as by the distinctive sound of his recordings + crystal-clear top ends underscored by /percussion so heavy it shook your clavicle. It was that , Don McLean clarity you heard first on the ,Tokyo Sessions recordings, but if you wiped the ' treble, what you heard pulsing along &through the underbrush was pure Sandy Nelson. + Tell's natural reticence was overcome by *admiration and he had crossed the room to where % Jannings was standing, temporarily -unengaged. He introduced himself, expecting aquick + handshake and a few perfunctory words at .most. Instead, the two of them had fallen intoa long , and interesting conversation. They worked ,in the same field and knew some of the same people, ) but even then Tell had known there was .more to the magic of that initial meeting thanthose . things; Paul Jannings was just one of those ,rare men to whom he found he could talk, andfor / John Tell, talking really was akin to magic. & Toward the end of the conversation, -Jannings had asked him if he was looking for work. - 'Did you ever know anyone in this business who wasn't?' Tell asked. + Jannings laughed and asked for his phone /number. Tell had given it to him, not attaching+ much importance to the request it was +most likely a gesture of politeness on the other man's . part, he'd thought. But Jannings had called 1him three days later to ask if Tell would like tobe ( part of the three-man team mixing The /Dead Beats' first album. 'I don't know if it's really / possible to make a silk purse out of a sow's -ear,' Jannings had said, 'but since Atlantic Records is . footing the bills, why not have a good time 0trying?' John Tell saw no reason at all why not,and ( signed on for the cruise immediately. & A week or so after he first saw the 'sneakers, Tell saw them again. He only registered the fact that + it was the same guy because the sneakers ,were in the same place under the door of stall - number one in the third-floor men's. There (was no question that they were the same ones; white , (once, anyway) high tops with dirt in the ,deep creases. He noticed an empty eyelet and thought, * Must not have had your own eyes all the -way open when you laced that one up, friend. Then he , went on down to the third stall (which he /thought of, in some vague way, as 'his'). This time he - glanced at the sneakers on his way out, as )well, and saw something odd when he did: there was a ) dead fly on one of them. It lay on the -rounded toe of the left sneaker, the one with the empty , eyelet, with its little legs sticking up. ) When he got back to Studio F, Jannings 'was sitting at the board with his head clutched in his  hands.  'You okay, Paul?'  'What's wrong?' - 'Me. I was wrong. I am wrong. My career is 'finished. I'm washed up. Eighty-sixed. Overdone-  with-gone.' , 'What are you talking about?' Tell looked .around for Georgie Ronkler and didn't see him - anywhere. It didn't surprise him. Jannings ,had periodic fugues and Georgie always left when he * saw one coming on. He claimed his karma 1didn't allow him to deal with strong emotion. 'I cry at ' supermarket openings,' Georgie said. . 'You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's 0ear,' Jannings said. He pointed with his fist atthe ( glass between the mixing room and the )performance studio. He looked like a man giving the old 0 Nazi Heil Hitler salute. 'At least not out of pigs like those.' , 'Lighten up,' Tell said, although he knew .Jannings was perfectly right. The Dead Beats, . composed of four dull bastards and one dull %bitch, were personally repulsive and professionally  incompetent. 0 'Lighten this up,' Jannings said, and flipped him the bird. ( 'God, I hate temperament,' Tell said. + Jannings looked up at him and giggled. A +second later they were both laughing. Five minutes % after that they were back to work. , The mix such as it was ended a week !later. Tell asked Jannings for a recommendation  and a tape. , 'Okay, but you know you're not supposed to)play the tape for anyone until the album comes  out,' Jannings said.  'I know.' - 'And why you'd ever want to, for anyone, is(beyond me. These guys make The Butthole # Surfers sound like The Beatles.' . 'Come on, Paul, it wasn't that bad. And evenif it was, it's over.' 0 He smiled. 'Yeah. There's that. And if I ever 4work in this business again, I'll give you a call.'  'That would be great.' + They shook hands. Tell left the building )which had once been known as Music City, and the , thought of the sneakers under the door of /stall number one in the third-floor men's John never  crossed his mind. ) Jannings, who had been in the business *twenty-five years, had once told him that when it came to 0 mixing bop (he never called it rock and roll, -only bop), you were either shit or Superman. For the ) two months following the Beats' mixing 0session, John Tell was shit. He didn't work. He began to - get nervous about the rent. Twice he almost.called Jannings, but something in him thought that  would be a mistake. . Then the music mixer on a film called Karate&Masters of Massacre died of a massive coronary , and Tell got six weeks' work at the Brill *Building (which had been known as Tin Pan Alley back ( in the heyday of Broadway and the Big /Band sound), finishing the mix. It was library stuff in the 0 public domain and a few plinking sitars -for the most part, but it paid the rent. And / following his last day on the show, Tell had 'no more than walked into his apartment before the . phone rang. It was Paul Jannings, asking him*if he had checked the Billboard pop chart lately.  Tell said he hadn't. ' 'It came on at number seventy-nine.' )Jannings managed to sound simultaneously disgusted, ' amused, and amazed. 'With a bullet.' ) 'What did?' But he knew as soon as the question was out of his mouth.  ' ''Diving in the Dirt.'' ' ' It was the name of a cut on The Dead 1Beats' forthcoming Beat It 'Til It's Dead album, the only , cut which had seemed to Tell and Jannings remotely like single material.  'Shit!' . 'Indeed it is, but I have a crazy idea it's ,gonna go top ten. Have you seen the video?'  'No.' / 'What a scream. It's mostly Ginger, the chick(in the group, playing mud-honey in some generic ) bayou with a guy who looks like Donald 0Trump in overalls. It sends what my intellectualfriends / like to call 'mixed cultural messages'.' And .Jannings laughed so hard Tell had to hold the phone  away from his ear. * When Jannings had himself under control .again, he said, 'Anyway, it probably means the. album'll go top ten, too. A platinum-plated -dog-turd is still a dog-turd, but a platinum reference is & platinum all the way through you understand dis t'ing, Bwana?' 2 'Indeed I do,' Tell said, pulling open his desk -drawer to make sure his Dead Beats cassette, . unplayed since Jannings had given it to him -on the last day of the mix, was still there. . 'So what are you doing?' Jannings asked him. 'Looking for a job.' - 'You want to work with me again? I'm doing )Roger Daltrey's new album. Starts in two weeks.'  'Christ, yes!' + The money would be good, but it was more ,than that; following The Dead Beats and six ' weeks of Karate Masters of Massacre, +working with the ex-lead singer of The Who would be * like coming into a warm place on a cold -night. Whatever he might turn out to be like personally, ' the man could sing. And working with ,Jannings again would be good, too. 'Where?' * 'Same old stand. Tabori at Music City.'  'I'm there.' . Roger Daltrey not only could sing, he turned/out to be a tolerably nice guy in the bargain. Tell , thought the next three or four weeks would%be good ones. He had a job, he had a production * credit on an album that had popped onto .the Billboard charts at number forty-one (and the single ' was up to number seventeen and still /climbing), and he felt safe about the rent for the first time % since he had come to New York from Pennsylvania four years ago. . It was June, trees were in full leaf, girls .were wearing short skirts again, and the worldseemed 0 a fine place to be. Tell felt this way on his /first day back at work for Paul Jannings until * approximately 11.45 P.M. Then he walked ,into the third-floor bathroom, saw the same oncewhite / sneakers under the door of stall one, and all&his good feelings suddenly collapsed. , They are not the same. Can't be the same. - They were, though. That single empty eyelet.was the clearest point of identification, but * everything else about them was also the *same. Exactly the same, and that included their % positions. There was only one real +difference that Tell could see: there were more dead flies  around them now. 3 He went slowly into the third stall, 'his' stall,+lowered his pants, and sat down. He wasn't , surprised to find that the urge which had .brought him here had entirely departed. He sat still for a 0 little while just the same, however, listening+for sounds. The rattle of a newspaper. The clearing " of a throat. Hell, even a fart.  No sounds came. ) That's because I'm in here alone, Tell .thought. Except, that is, for the dead guy in the first  stall. + The bathroom's outer door banged briskly +open. Tell almost screamed. Someone hummed his - way over to the urinals, and as water began-to splash out there, an explanation occurred to Tell * and he relaxed. It was so simple it was )absurd . . . and undoubtedly correct. He glanced at his  watch and saw it was 1:47. + A regular man is a happy man, his father ,used to say. Tell's dad had been a taciturn fellow, ) and that saying (along with Clean your ,hands before you clean your plate} had been one of his / few aphorisms. If regularity really did mean -happiness, then Tell supposed he was a happy man. , His need to visit the bathroom came on at &about the same time every day, and he supposed the - same must be true of his pal Sneakers, who .favored Stall #i just as Tell himself favored Stall #3. - If you needed to pass the stalls to get to ,the urinals, you would have seen that stall empty lots . of times, or with different shoes under it. -After all, what are the chances a body could stay / undiscovered in a men's-room toilet-stall for. . . . He worked out in his mind the time he'd last been there. # . . . four months, give or take? * No chance at all was the answer to that /one. He could believe the janitors weren't too fussy . about cleaning the stalls all those dead -flies but they would have to check on the toiletpaper . supply every day or two, right? And even if .you left those things out, dead people started. to smell after awhile, right? God knew this .wasn't the sweetest-smelling place on earth and ) following a visit from the fat guy who +worked down the hall at Janus Music it was almost - uninhabitable but surely the stink of a 0dead body would be a lot louder. A lot gaudier. + Gaudy? Gaudy? Jesus, what a word. And how$would you know? You never smelted a ! decomposing body in your life. ) True, but he was pretty sure he'd know /what he was smelling if he did. Logic was logicand - regularity was regularity and that was the "end of it. The guy was probably a pencil-pusher from - Janus or a writer for Snappy Kards, on the 1other side of the floor. For all John Tell knew, the guy , was in there composing greeting-card verse right now: & Roses are red and violets are blue, ) You thought I was dead but that wasn't true; - I just deliver my mail at the same time as you! . That sucks, Tell thought, and uttered a wild,little laugh. The fellow who had banged the door , open, almost startling him into a scream, +had progressed to the wash-basins. Now the splashinglathering ) sound of him washing his hands stopped )briefly. Tell could imagine the newcomer ( listening, wondering who was laughing &behind one of the closed stall doors, wondering if it was - a joke, a dirty picture, or if the man was 0just crazy. There were, after all, lots of crazy people in ' New York. You saw them all the time, *talking to themselves and laughing for no appreciable * reason . . . the way Tell had just now. 0 Tell tried to imagine Sneakers also listening and couldn't. , Suddenly he didn't feel like laughing any more. , Suddenly he just felt like getting out of there. - He didn't want the man at the basin to see -him, though. The man would look at him. Just for a * moment, but that would be enough to know)what he was thinking. People who laughed behind + closed toilet-stall doors were not to be trusted. ( Click-clack of shoes on the old white -hexagonal bathroom tiles, whooze of the door being , opened, hisshh of it settling slowly back +into place. You could bang it open but the pneumatic . elbow-joint kept it from banging shut. That /might upset the third-floor receptionist as he sat - smoking Camels and reading the latest issue of Krrang! / God, it's so silent in here! Why doesn't the guy move? At least a little? , But there was just the silence, thick and .smooth and total, the sort of silence the deadwould 1 hear in their coffins if they could still hear,%and Tell again became convinced that Sneakers was , dead, fuck logic, he was dead and had been-dead for who knew how long, he was sitting inthere + and if you opened the door you would see (some slumped mossy thing with its hands dangling ' between its thighs, you would see & For a moment he was on the verge of %calling, Hey, Sneaks! You all right? * But what if Sneakers answered, not in a /questioning or irritated voice but in a froggy grinding & croak? Wasn't there something about waking the dead? About . Suddenly Tell was up, up fast, flushing the +toilet and buttoning his pants, out of the stall, - zipping his fly as he headed for the door, ,aware that in a few seconds he was going to feel silly + but not caring. Yet he could not forbear /one glance under the first stall as he passed. Dirty white - mislaced sneakers. And dead flies. Quite a few of them. / Weren't any dead flies in my stall. And just /how is it that all this time has gone by and hestill + hasn't noticed that he missed one of the -eyelets? Or does he wear em that way all the time, as # some kind of artistic statement? , Tell hit the door pretty hard coming out. -The receptionist just up the hall glanced at him with ) the cool curiosity he saved for beings -merely mortal (as opposed to such deities in human form  as Roger Daltrey). 0 Tell hurried down the hall to Tabori Studios.  'Paul?' , 'What?' Jannings answered without looking 'up from the board. Georgie Ronkler was standing - off to one side, watching Jannings closely /and nibbling a cuticle cuticles were all he had left 1 to nibble; his fingernails simply did not exist*above the point where they parted company with + live flesh and hot nerve-endings. He was .close to the door. If Jannings began to rant, Georgie  would slip through it. - 'I think there might be something wrong in  ' & Jannings groaned. 'Something else?'  'What do you mean?' . 'This drum track is what I mean. It's badly )botched, and I don't know what we can do about it.' . He flicked a toggle, and drums crashed into the studio. 'You hear it?'  The snare, you mean?' / 'Of course I mean the snare! It stands out a /mile from the rest of the percussion, but it's  married to it!'  'Yes, but ' / 'Yes but Jesus bloody fuck. I hate shit like ,this! Forty tracks I got here, forty goddam tracks to * record a simple bop tune and some IDIOT technician ' , From the tail of his eye Tell saw Georgie disappear like a cool breeze. 0 'But look, Paul, if you lower the equalization ' ( 'The eq's got nothing to do with ' + 'Shut up and listen a minute,' Tell said .soothingly something he could have said to no one . else on the face of the earth and slid a -switch. Jannings stopped ranting and started listening. . He asked a question. Tell answered it. Then 'he asked one Tell couldn't answer, but Jannings was * able to answer it himself, and all of a (sudden they were looking at a whole new spectrum of - possibilities for a song called 'Answer to You, Answer to Me'. + After awhile, sensing that the storm had 'passed, Georgie Ronkler crept back in. * And Tell forgot all about the sneakers. * They returned to his mind the following .evening. He was at home, sitting on the toilet in his own - bathroom, reading Wise Blood while Vivaldi (played mildly from the bedroom speakers (although 0 Tell now mixed rock and roll for a living, he +owned only four rock records, two by Bruce ( Springsteen and two by John Fogerty). ' He looked up from his book, somewhat -startled. A question of cosmic ludicrousness had , suddenly occurred to him: How long has it +been since you took a crap in the evening, John? , He didn't know, but he thought he might be-taking them then quite a bit more frequently in the + future. At least one of his habits might change, it seemed. - Sitting in the living room fifteen minutes 0later, his book forgotten in his lap, something else & occurred to him: he hadn't used the .third-floor rest room once that day. They had gone across the - street for coffee at ten, and he had taken -a whiz in the men's room of Donut Buddy whilePaul + and Georgie sat at the counter, drinking ,coffee and talking about overdubs. Then, on his lunch , hour, he had made a quick pit-stop at the .Brew 'n Burger . . . and another on the first floor late * that afternoon when he had gone down to ,drop off a bunch of mail that he could have just as + easily stuffed into the mail-slot by the elevators. + Avoiding the third-floor men's? Was that (what he'd been doing today without even realizing . it? You bet your Reeboks it was. Avoiding it.like a scared kid who goes a block out of his way + coming home from school so he won't have /to go past the local haunted house. Avoiding itlike  the plague. % 'Well, so what?' he said out loud. . He couldn't exactly articulate the so-what, %but he knew there was one; there was something . just a little too existential, even for New ,York, about getting spooked out of a public bathroom  by a pair of dirty sneakers. 2 Aloud, very clearly, Tell said: 'This has got tostop.' , But that was Thursday night and something &happened on Friday night that changed everything. + That was when the door closed between himand Paul Jannings. - Tell was a shy man and didn't make friends /easily. In the rural Pennsylvania town where he+ had gone to high school, a quirk of fate .had put Tell up on stage with a guitar in his hands the + last place he'd ever expected to be. The 0bassist of a group called The Satin Saturns fell ill with / salmonella the day before a well-paying gig. /The lead guitarist, who was also in the school band, * knew John Tell could play both bass and (rhythm. This lead guitarist was big and potentially , violent. John Tell was small, humble, and .breakable. The guitarist offered him a choice between + playing the ill bassist's instrument and /having it rammed up his ass to the fifth fret. This choice , had gone a long way toward clarifying his +feelings about playing in front of a large audience. - But by the end of the third song, he was no/longer frightened. By the end of the first set he + knew he was home. Years after that first *gig, Tell heard a story about Bill Wyman, bassist of The * Rolling Stones. According to the story, #Wyman actually nodded off during a performance not - in some tiny club, mind you, but in a huge .hall and fell from the stage, breaking his + collarbone. Tell supposed lots of people )thought the story was apocryphal, but he himself had an 2 idea it was true . . . and he was, after all, in$a unique position to understand how something like ' that could happen. Bassists were the ,invisible men of the rock world. There were exceptions + Paul McCartney, for one but they only proved the rule. , Perhaps because of the job's very lack of -glamor, there was a chronic shortage of bass players. * When The Satin Saturns broke up a month .later (the lead guitarist and the drummer got into a . fist-fight over a girl), Tell joined a band +formed by the Saturns' rhythm man, and his life's course - was chosen, as simply and quietly as that. . Tell liked playing in the band. You were up .front, looking down on everyone else, not justat , the party but making the party happen; you)were simultaneously almost invisible and absolutely + essential. Every now and then you had to +sing a little back-up, but nobody expected you to make  a speech or anything. . He had lived that life part-time student .and full-time band gypsy for ten years. He was . good, but not ambitious there was no fire1in his belly. Eventually he drifted into session work - in New York, began fooling with the boards,,and discovered he liked life even better on the far , side of the glass window. During all that 'time he had made one good friend: Paul Jannings. That + had happened fast, and Tell supposed the ,unique pressures that went with the job had had ( something to do with it . . . but not .everything. Mostly, he suspected, it had been a combination / of two factors: his own essential loneliness )and Jannings's personality, which was so powerful it , was almost overwhelming. And it wasn't so ,different for Georgie, Tell came to realize following & what happened on that Friday night. , He and Paul were having a drink at one of *the back tables in McManus's Pub, talking about the - mix, the biz, the Mets, whatever, when all ,of a sudden Jannings's right hand was under the table & and gently squeezing Tell's crotch. . Tell moved away so violently that the candle)in the center of the table fell over and Jannings's / glass of wine spilled. A waiter came over and.righted the candle before it could scorch the ( tablecloth, then left. Tell stared at %Jannings, his eyes wide and shocked. . 'I'm sorry,' Jannings said, and he did look ,sorry . . . but he also looked unperturbed. 2 'Jesus Christ, Paul!' It was all he could think %of to say, and it sounded hopelessly inadequate. * 'I thought you were ready, that's all,' /Jannings said. 'I suppose I should have been a little more  subtle.' - 'Ready?' Tell repeated. 'What do you mean? Ready for what?' . 'To come out. To give yourself permission to come out.' / 'I'm not that way,' Tell said, but his heart ,was pounding very hard and fast. Part of it was + outrage, part was fear of the implacable -certainty he saw in Jannings's eyes, most of it was * dismay. What Jannings had done had shut him out. 2 'Let's let it go, shall we? We'll just order and+make up our minds that it never happened.' Until ( you want it to, those implacable eyes added. - Oh, it happened, all right, Tell wanted to )say, but didn't. The voice of reason and practicality 1 would not allow it . . . would not allow him to0risk lighting Paul Jannings's notoriously short 2 fuse. This was, after all, a good job . . . and .the job per se wasn't all. He could use Roger , Daltrey's tape in his portfolio even more -than he could use two more weeks' salary. He would do % well to be diplomatic and save the )outraged-young-man act for another time. Besides, did he ( really have anything to feel outraged /about? It wasn't as if Jannings had raped him, after all. * And that was really just the tip of the -iceberg. The rest was this: his mouth closed because that - was what his mouth had always done. It did *more than close it snapped shut like a bear-trap, - with all his heart below those interlocked teeth and all his head above. * 'All right,' was all he said, 'it never happened.' . Tell slept badly that night, and what sleep ,he did get was haunted by bad dreams: one of( Jannings groping him in McManus's was *followed by one of the sneakers under the stall door, , only in this one Tell opened the door and -saw Paul Jannings sitting there. He had died naked, and ' in a state of sexual excitement that +somehow continued even in death, even afterall this time. , Paul's mouth dropped open with an audible .creak. 'That's right; I knew you were ready,' the / corpse said on a puff of greenly rotten air, .and Tell woke himself up by tumbling onto the floor . in a tangle of coverlet. It was four in the .morning. The first touches of light were just creeping + through the chinks between the buildings 'outside his window. He dressed and sat smoking one / cigarette after another until it was time to go to work. , Around eleven o'clock on that Saturday (they were working six-day weeks to make Daltrey's - deadline Tell went into the third-floor ,men's room to urinate. He stood just inside the door, - rubbing his temples, and then looked aroundat the stalls. ( He couldn't see. The angle was wrong. . Then never mind! Fuck it! Take your piss andget out of here! . He walked slowly over to one of the urinals /and unzipped. It took a long time to get going.' On his way out he paused again, head ,cocked like Nipper the Dog's on the old RCA Victor , record labels, and then turned around. He &walked slowly back around the corner, stopping as - soon as he could see under the door of the 1first stall. The dirty white sneakers were still there. ) The building which used to be known as (Music City was almost completely empty, Saturdaymorning- , empty, but the sneakers were still there. 0 Tell's eyes fixed upon a fly just outside the (stall. He watched with an empty sort of avidity as - it crawled beneath the stall door and onto /the dirty toe of one of the sneakers. There it stopped , and simply fell dead. It tumbled into the *growing pile of insect corpses around the sneakers. Tell - saw with no surprise at all (none he felt, ,anyway) that among the flies were two small spiders - and one large cockroach, lying on its back like an upended turtle. - Tell left the men's room in large painless .strides, and his progress back to the studios seemed . most peculiar; it was as if, instead of him ,walking, the building was flowing past him, around ( him, like river-rapids around a rock. 3 When I get back I'll tell Paul I don't feel well -and take the rest of the day off, he thought,but , he wouldn't. Paul had been in an erratic, .unpleasant mood all morning, and Tell knew he was / part (or maybe all) of the reason why. Might *Paul fire him out of spite? A week ago he would + have laughed at such an idea. But a week .ago he had still believed what he had come to believe + in his growing-up: friends were real and %ghosts were make-believe. Now he was starting to ) wonder if maybe he hadn't gotten those &two postulates turned around somehow. / The prodigal returns,' Jannings said without ,looking around as Tell opened the second of the ) studio's two doors the one that was 2called the 'dead air' door. 'I thought you died inthere,  Johnny.'  'No,' Tell said. 'Not me.' - It was a ghost, and Tell found out whose a &day before the Daltrey mix and his association * with Paul Jannings ended, but before -that happened a great many other things did. Except , they were all the same thing, just little #mile-markers, like the ones on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, ) announcing John Tell's steady progress )toward a nervous breakdown. He knew this was happening + but could not keep it from happening. It .seemed he was not driving this particular road but being chauffcured. + At first his course of action had seemed ,clear-cut and simple: avoid that particular men's room, - and avoid all thoughts and questions about ,the sneakers. Simply turn that subject off. Make it  dark. ' Except he couldn't. The image of the +sneakers crept up on him at odd moments andpounced / like an old grief. He would be sitting home, )watching CNN or some stupid chat-show on the * tube, and all at once he'd find himself ,thinking about the flies, or about what the janitor who . replaced the toilet paper was obviously not ,seeing, and then he would look at the clock and see & an hour had passed. Sometimes more. , For awhile he was almost convinced it was -some sort of malevolent joke. Paul was in on it, of ( course, and probably the fat guy from *Janus Music Tell had seen them talking together quite , frequently, and hadn't they looked at him -once and laughed? The receptionist was also agood ) bet, him with his Camels and his dead, .skeptical eyes. Not Georgie, Georgie couldn't have kept + the secret even if Paul had hectored him /into going along, but anyone else was possible.For a ) day or two Tell even speculated on the -possibility that Roger Daltrey himself might have taken a , turn wearing the mislaced white sneakers. + Although he recognized these thoughts as /paranoid fantasies, recognition did not lead to- dispersion. He would tell them to go away, -would insist there was no Jannings-led cabal out to ( get him, and his mind would say Yeah, -okay, makes sense to me, and five hours later or ( maybe only twenty minutes he would 'imagine a bunch of them sitting around Desmond's , Steak House two blocks downtown: Paul, the-chain-smoking receptionist with the taste for+ heavy-metal, heavy-leather groups, maybe .even the skinny guy from Snappy Kards, all of them , eating shrimp cocktails and drinking. And /laughing, of course. Laughing at him, while thedirty , white sneakers they took turns wearing sat)under the table in a crumpled brown bag. - Tell could see that brown bag. That was howbad it had gotten. * But that short-lived fantasy wasn't the &worst. The worst was simply this: the third-floor men's / room had acquired a pull. It was as if there (were a powerful magnet in there and his pockets were 0 full of iron filings. If someone had told him *something like that he would have laughed (maybe ( just inside, if the person making the +metaphor seemed very much in earnest), but it was really . there, a feeling like a swerve every time he.passed the men's on his way to the studios or to the 2 elevators. It was a terrible feeling, like being/pulled toward an open window in a tall buildingor * watching helplessly, as if from outside /yourself, as you raised a pistol to your mouth and sucked  the barrel. , He wanted to look again. He realized that -one more look was about all it would take to finish ) him off, but it made no difference. He wanted to look again. + Each time he passed, that mental swerve. * In his dreams he opened that stall door %again and again. Just to get a look.  A really good look. * And he couldn't seem to tell anyone. He .knew it would be better if he did, understood that if * he poured it into someone else's ear it ,would change its shape, perhaps even grow a handle with - which he could hold it. Twice he went into ,bars and managed to strike up conversations with the , men next to him. Because bars, he thought,.were the places where talk was at its absolute$ cheapest. Bargain-basement rates. * He had no more than opened his mouth on 'the first occasion when the man he had picked + began to sermonize on the subject of the !Yankees and George Steinbrenner. Steinbrenner had - gotten under this man's skin in a big way, 'and it was impossible to get a word in edgeways with - the fellow on any other subject. Tell soon gave up trying. , The second time, he managed to strike up a*fairly casual conversation with a man who looked * like a construction worker. They talked ,about the weather, then about baseball (but this man, , thankfully, was not nuts on the subject), -and progressed to how tough it was to find a good job in - New York. Tell was sweating. He felt as if )he were doing some heavy piece of manual labor - pushing a wheelbarrow filled with cement up/a slight grade, maybe but he also felt that he  wasn't doing too badly. ) The guy who looked like a construction /worker was drinking Black Russians. Tell stuck to 0 beer. It felt as if he was sweating it out as .fast as he put it in, but after he had bought the guy a * couple of drinks and the guy had bought .Tell a couple of schooners, he nerved himself to begin. . 'You want to hear something really strange?' he said. ) 'You queer?' the guy who looked like a *construction worker asked him before Tell could get * any farther. He turned on his stool and 0looked at Tell with amiable curiosity. 'I mean, it's nothin - to me whether y'are or not, but I'm gettin .those vibes and I just thought I'd tell you I don't go for + that stuff. Have it up front, you know?'  'I'm not queer,' Tell said.  'Oh. What's really strange?'  'Huh?' + 'You said something was really strange.' 2 'Oh, it really wasn't that strange,' Tell said. -Then he glanced down at his watch and said itwas  getting late. + Three days before the end of the Daltrey 0mix, Tell left Studio F to urinate. He now used the ' bathroom on the sixth floor for this ,purpose. He had first used the one on four, then the one on - five, but these were stacked directly above+the one on three, and he had begun to feel the owner ( of the sneakers radiating silently up ,through the floors, seeming to suck at him. The men's room ) on six was on the opposite side of the 'building, and that seemed to solve the problem. , He breezed past the reception desk on his -way to the elevators, blinked, and suddenly, instead . of being in the elevator car, he was in the -third-floor bathroom with the door hisshhing softly ( shut behind him. He had never been so .afraid. Part of it was the sneakers, but most of it was + knowing he had just dropped three to six /seconds of consciousness. For the first time in his life # his mind had simply shorted out. ( He had no idea how long he might have (stood there if the door hadn't suddenly opened behind . him, cracking him painfully in the back. It +was Paul Jannings. 'Excuse me, Johnny,' he said. 'I - had no idea you came in here to meditate.' ' He passed Tell without waiting for a *response (he wouldn't have got one in any case, Tell , thought later; his tongue had been frozen .to the roof of his mouth), and headed for the stalls. Tell / was able to walk over to the first urinal and/unzip his fly, doing these things only because he - thought Paul might enjoy it too much if he *turned and scurried out. There had been a time not so ) long ago when he had considered Paul a -friend maybe his only friend, at least in New York.  Times had certainly changed. . Tell stood at the urinal for ten seconds or -so, then flushed it. He headed for the door, then , stopped. He turned around, took two quiet ,on-tiptoe steps, bent, and looked under the door of the 1 first stall. The sneakers were still there, now$surrounded by mounds of dead flies, ) So were Paul Jannings's Gucci loafers. , What Tell was seeing looked like a double ,exposure, or one of the hokey ghost effects from , the old Topper TV program. First he would /be seeing Paul's loafers through the sneakers; then - the sneakers would seem to solidify and he -would be seeing them through the loafers, as if Paul + were the ghost. Except, even when he was 0seeing through them, Paul's loafers made little shifts $ and movements, while the sneakers remained as immobile as always. 0 Tell left. For the first time in two weeks he felt calm. ' The next day he did what he probably *should have done at once: he took Georgie Ronkler out to + lunch and asked him if he had ever heard .any strange tales or rumors about the buildingwhich . used to be called Music City. Why he hadn't .thought of doing this earlier was a puzzle to him. He # only knew that what had happened *yesterday seemed to have cleared his mind somehow, like a ) brisk slap or a faceful of cold water. (Georgie might not know anything, but he might; he had , been working with Paul for at least seven ,years, and a lot of that work had been done at Music  City. , 'Oh, the ghost, you mean?' Georgie asked, &and laughed. They were in Cartin's, a delirestaurant % on Sixth Avenue, and the place was -noon-noisy. Georgie bit into his corned-beef * sandwich, chewed, swallowed, and sipped 'some of his cream soda through the two straws poked - into the bottle. 'Who told you 'bout that, Johnny?' 1 'Oh, one of the janitors, I guess,' Tell said. His voice was perfectly even. ) 'You sure you didn't see him?' Georgie /asked, and winked. This was as close as Paul's longtime " assistant could get to teasing. ) 'Nope.' Nor had he, actually. Just the sneakers. And some dead bugs. . 'Yeah, well, it's pretty much died down now,.but for awhile it was all anybody ever talked ( about how the guy was haunting the -place. He got it right up there on the third floor, you / know. In the John.' Georgie raised his hands,,trembled them beside his peach-fuzzy cheeks,) hummed a few bars of The Twilight Zone .theme, and tried to look ominous. This was an , expression he was incapable of achieving. 2 'Yes,' Tell said. 'That's what I heard. But the .janitor wouldn't tell me any more, or maybe he, didn't know any more. He just laughed and walked away.' - 'It happened before I started to work with .Paul. Paul was the one who told me about it.' / 'He never saw the ghost himself?' Tell asked,,knowing the answer. Yesterday Paul had been 1 sitting in it. Shitting in it, to be perfectly vulgarly truthful. / 'No, he used to laugh about it.' Georgie put +his sandwich down. 'You know how he can be . sometimes. Just a little m-mean.' If forced -to say something even slightly negative about- someone, Georgie developed a mild stutter. - 'I know. But never mind Paul; who was this ghost? What happened to him?' - 'Oh, he was just some dope pusher,' Georgie.said. 'This was back in 1972 or '73, I guess, when . Paul was just starting out he was only an)assistant mixer himself, back then. Just before the  slump.' / Tell nodded. From 1975 until 1980 or so, the -rock industry had lain becalmed in the horse - latitudes. Kids spent their money on video *games instead of records. For perhaps the fiftieth time ( since 1955, the pundits announced the )death of rock and roll. And, as on other occasions, it , proved to be a lively corpse. Video games ,topped out; MTV checked in; a fresh wave of stars * arrived from England; Bruce Springsteen *released Born in the USA; rap and hip-hop began to & turn some numbers as well as heads. * 'Before the slump, record-company execs (used to deliver coke backstage in their attache cases * before big shows,' Georgie said. 'I was 'concert-mixing back then, and I saw it happen. There was , one guy he's been dead since 1978, but /you'd know his name if I said it who used toget a 1 jar of olives from his label before every gig. (The jar would come wrapped up in pretty paper with ' bows and ribbon and everything. Only ,instead of water, the olives came packed in cocaine. He . used to put them in his drinks. Called them b-b-blast-off martinis.' % 'I bet they were, too,' Tell said. * 'Well, back then lots of people thought ,cocaine was almost like a vitamin,' Georgie said. 'They 0 said it didn't hook you like heroin or f-fuck +you over the next day like booze. And this building, . man, this building was a regular snowstorm. ,Pills and pot and hash too, but cocaine was the hot  item. And this guy '  'What was his name?' . Georgie shrugged. 'I don't know. Paul never -said and I never heard it from anyone in the . building not that I remember, anyway. But-he was s-supposed to be like one of the deli - delivery boys you see going up and down in ,the elevators with coffee and doughnuts and bbagels. . Only instead of delivering coffee-and, this )guy delivered dope. You'd see him two or , three times a week, riding all the way up +and then working his way down. He'd have a topcoat + slung over his arm and an alligator-skin -briefcase in that hand. He kept the overcoat over his arm + even when it was hot. That was so people -wouldn't see the cuff. But I guess sometimes they did  a-a-anyway.'  'The what?' . 'C-C-Cuff,' Georgie said, spraying out bits )of bread and corned beef and immediately going % crimson. 'Gee, Johnny, I'm sorry.' , 'No problem. You want another cream soda?'* 'Yes, thanks,' Georgie said gratefully.  Tell signalled the waitress. . 'So he was a delivery boy,' he said, mostly ,to put Georgie at his ease again Georgie was still $ patting his lips with his napkin. / 'That's right.' The fresh cream soda arrived ,and Georgie drank some. 'When he got off the. elevator on the eighth floor, the briefcase ,chained to his wrist would be full of dope. When he got / off it on the ground floor again, it would befull of money.' 0 'Best trick since lead into gold,' Tell said. + 'Yeah, but in the end the magic ran out. *One day he only made it down to the third floor. ( Someone offed him in the men's room.'  'Knifed him?' + 'What I heard was that someone opened the-door of the stall where he was s-sitting and stuck a  pencil in his eye.' . For just a moment Tell saw it as vividly as 'he had seen the crumpled bag under the imagined 0 conspirators' restaurant table: a Berol Black *Warrior, sharpened to an exquisite point, sliding , forward through the air and then shearing .into the startled circle of pupil. The pop of the eyeball.  He winced. , Georgie nodded. 'G-G-Gross, huh? But it's *probably not true. I mean, not that part. Probably & someone just, you know, stuck him.'  'Yes.' $ 'But whoever it was must have had .something sharp with him, all right,' Georgie said.  'He did?' ) 'Yes. Because the briefcase was gone.' - Tell looked at Georgie. He could see this, .too. Even before Georgie told him the rest he could  see it. + 'When the cops came and took the guy off the toilet, they found his left  hand in the b-bowl.'  'Oh,' Tell said. - Georgie looked down at his plate. There was0still half a sandwich on it. 'I guess maybe I'm f-ffull,'  he said, and smiled uneasily. . On their way back to the studio, Tell asked,/'So the guy's ghost is supposed to haunt . . . what, + that bathroom?' And suddenly he laughed, )because, gruesome as the story had been, there was ) something comic in the idea of a ghost haunting a shithouse. - Georgie smiled. 'You know people. At first +that was what they said. When I started in working , with Paul, guys would tell me they'd seen 0him in there. Not all of him, just his sneakers under the  stall door.' ) 'Just his sneakers, huh? What a hoot.' ) 'Yeah. That's how you'd know they were +making it up, or imagining it, because you only heard ( it from guys who knew him when he was -alive. From guys who knew he wore sneakers.' . Tell, who had been a know-nothing kid still -living in rural Pennsylvania when the murder ( happened, nodded. They had arrived at ,Music City. As they walked across the lobby toward the - elevators, Georgie said, 'But you know how ,fast the turnover is in this business. Here today and , gone tomorrow. I doubt if there's anybody *left in the building who was working here then, except - maybe for Paul and a few of the j-janitors,+and none of them would have bought from theguy.'  'Guess not.' - 'No. So you hardly ever hear the story any +more, and no one s-sees the guy any more.'  They were at the elevators. ) 'Georgie, why do you stick with Paul?' , Although Georgie lowered his head and the 0tips of his ears turned a bright red, he did not0 sound really surprised at this abrupt shift in+direction. 'Why not? He takes care of me.' & Do you sleep with him, Georgie? The %question occurred at once, a natural outgrowth, Tell , supposed, of the previous question, be he 0wouldn't ask. Didn't really dare to ask. Becausehe + thought Georgie would give him an honest answer. / Tell, who could barely bring himself to talk +to strangers and hardly ever made friends, + suddenly hugged Georgie Ronkler. Georgie +hugged him back without looking up at him. Then ) they stepped away from each other, and *the elevator came, and the mix continued, and the ( following evening, at six-fifteen, as (Jannings was picking up his papers (and pointedly not 2 looking in Tell's direction), Tell stepped into ,the third-floor men's room to get a look at the  owner of the white sneakers. * Talking with Georgie, he'd had a sudden 1revelation . . . or perhaps you called something this - strong an epiphany. It was this: sometimes *you could get rid of the ghosts that were haunting - your life if you could only work up enough courage to face them. + There was no lapse in consciousness this 0time, nor any sensation of fear . . . only that slow - steady deep drumming in his chest. All his 'senses had been heightened. He smelled chlorine, the . pink disinfectant cakes in the urinals, old /farts. He could see minute cracks in the paint on the . wall, and chips on the pipes. He could hear +the hollow click of his heels as he walked toward the  first stall. , The sneakers were now almost buried in the#corpses of dead spiders and flies. ' There were only one or two at first. *Because there was no need for them to die until the ( sneakers were there, and they weren't there until I saw them there. / 'Why me?' he asked clearly in the stillness. ( The sneakers didn't move and no voice answered. / 'I didn't know you, I never met you, I don't /take the kind of stuff you sold and never did. So  why me?' , One of the sneakers twitched. There was a .papery rustle of dead flies. Then the sneaker  it ( was the mislaced one settled back. - Tell pushed the stall door open. One hinge /shrieked in properly gothic fashion. And there it , was. Mystery guest, sign in, please, Tell thought. , The mystery guest sat on the John with one/hand lying limply on his thigh. He was much as - Tell had seen him in his dreams, with this /difference: there was only the single hand. Theother ' arm ended in a dusty maroon stump to -which several more flies had adhered. It was only now * that Tell realized he had never noticed .Sneaker's pants (and didn't you always notice the way , lowered pants bunched up over the shoes if(you happened to glance under a bathroom stall? & something helplessly comic, or just .defenseless, or one on account of the other?). He hadn't * because they were up, belt buckled, fly .zipped. They were bell-bottoms. Tell tried to remember ) when bells had gone out of fashion and couldn't. ' Above the bells Sneakers wore a blue -chambray work-shirt with an appliqud peace symbol . on each flap pocket. He had parted his hair /on the right. Tell could see dead flies in the part. ( From the hook on the back of the door +hung the topcoat of which Georgie had told him. There , were dead flies on its slumped shoulders. ) There was a grating sound not entirely .unlike the one the hinge had made. It was the tendons ) in the dead man's neck, Tell realized. -Sneakers was raising his head. Now he looked at him, and . Tell saw with no sense of surprise whatever *that, except for the two inches of pencil protruding . from the socket of his right eye, it was the)same face that looked out of the shaving mirror at him ) every day. Sneakers was him and he was Sneakers. . 'I knew you were ready,' he told himself in +the hoarse toneless voice of a man who has not ' used his vocal cords in a long time. # 'I'm not,' Tell said. 'Go away.' . To know the truth of it, I mean,' Tell told 1Tell, and the Tell standing in the stall doorway saw . circles of white powder around the nostrils -of the Tell sitting on the John. He had been using as - well as pushing, it seemed. He had come in +here for a short snort; someone had opened the stall . door and stuck a pencil in his eye. But who 'committed murder by pencil? Maybe only someone # who committed the crime on . . . . 'Oh, call it impulse,' Sneakers said in his -hoarse and toneless voice. 'The world-famous  impulse crime.' - And Tell the Tell standing in the stall ,doorway understood that was exactly what it had , been, no matter what Georgie might think. /The killer hadn't looked under the door of the stall / and Sneakers had forgotten to flip the little(hinged latch. Two converging vectors of coincidence ) that, under other circumstances, would 'have called for no more than a mumbled 'Excuse me' and ' a hasty retreat. This time, however, ,something different had happened. This time it had led to a  spur-of-the-moment murder. 1 'I didn't forget the latch,' Sneakers told him 1in his toneless husk of a voice. 'It was broken.'0 Yes, all right, the latch had been broken. It ,didn't make any difference. And the pencil? Tell 0 was positive the killer had been holding it in-his hand when he pushed open the stall door, but & not as a murder weapon. He had been ,holding it only because sometimes you wanted something - to hold a cigarette, a bunch of keys, a +pen or pencil to fiddle with. Tell thought maybe the + pencil had been in Sneakers's eye before ,either of them had any idea that the killer was going to + put it there. Then, probably because the )killer had also been a customer who knew what was in ( the briefcase, he had closed the door .again, leaving his victim seated on the John, had exited the 0 building, got . . . well, got something . . . + 'He went to a hardware store five blocks -over and bought a hacksaw,' Sneakers said in his 0 toneless voice, and Tell suddenly realized it .wasn't his face any more; it was the face of aman - who looked about thirty, and vaguely native.American. Tell's hair was gingery-blonde, and so . had this man's been at first, but now it wasa coarse, dull black. ) He suddenly realized something else *realized it the way you realize things in dreams: when % people see ghosts, they always see +themselves first. Why? For the same reason deep divers pause , on their way to the surface, knowing that -if they rise too fast they will get nitrogen bubbles in * their blood and suffer, perhaps die, in *agony. There were reality bends, as well. ( 'Perception changes once you get past 2what's natural, doesn't it?' Tell asked hoarsely. 'And + that's why life has been so weird for me .lately. Something inside me's been gearing up to deal & with . . . well, to deal with you.' - The dead man shrugged. Flies tumbled dryly -from his shoulders. 'You tell me, Cabbage you  got the head on you.' / 'All right,' Tell said. 'I will. He bought a .hacksaw and the clerk put it in a bag for him and he , came back. He wasn't a bit worried. After ,all, if someone had already found you, he'd know; * there'd be a big crowd around the door. 'That's the way he'd figure. Maybe cops already, too. If . things looked normal, he'd go on in and get the briefcase.' . 'He tried the chain first,' the harsh voice .said. 'When that didn't work, he used the saw to cut  off my hand.' + They looked at each other. Tell suddenly .realized he could see the toilet seat and the dirty * white tiles of the back wall behind the +corpse . . . the corpse that was, finally, becoming a real  ghost. - 'You know now?' it asked Tell. 'Why it was you?' " 'Yes. You had to tell someone.' / 'No history is shit,' the ghost said, and #then smiled a smile of such sunken malevolence that * Tell was struck by horror. 'But knowing /sometimes does some good . . . if you're still alive, that 1 is.' It paused. 'You forgot to ask your friend -Georgie something important, Tell. Something he ( might not have been so honest about.' - 'What?' he asked, but was no longer sure hereally wanted to know. - 'Who my biggest third-floor customer was in-those days. Who was into me for almost eight * thousand dollars. Who had been cut off. ,Who went to a rehab in Rhode Island and got clean two - months after I died. Who won't even go near,the white powder these days? Georgie wasn't here , back then, but I think he knows the answer.to all those questions just the same. Because he hears - people talk. Have you ever noticed the way *people talk around George, as if he isn't there?'  Tell nodded. 0 'And there's no stutter in his brain. I think 2he knows, all right. He'd never tell, Tell, but I think  he knows.' * The face began to change again, and now -the features swimming out of that primordial fog + were saturnine and finely chiseled. Paul Jannings's features.  'No,' Tell whispered. . 'He got better than thirty grand,' the dead 1man with Paul's face said. 'It's how he paid for rehab 2 . . . with plenty left over for all the vices hedidn't give up.' - And suddenly the figure on the toilet seat .was fading out entirely. A moment later it wasgone. , Tell looked down at the floor and saw the flies were gone, too. , He no longer needed to go to the bathroom..He went back into the control room, told Paul ' Jannings he was a worthless bastard, &paused just long enough to relish the expression of utter , stunned surprise on Paul's face, and then *walked out the door. There would be other jobs; he was + good enough at what he did to be able to (count on that. Knowing it, however, was something of a ' revelation. Not the day's first, but definitely the day's best. ( When he got back to his apartment, he -went straight through the living room and to the John. . His need to relieve himself had returned +had become rather pressing, in fact but that was + all right; that was just another part of 0being alive. 'A regular man is a happy man,' he said to the 0 white tile walls. He turned a little, grabbed .the current issue of Rolling Stone from where he'd left * it on the toilet tank, opened it to the (Random Notes column, and began to read.   %-You Know They Got a Hell of a Band-  ) When Mary woke up, they were lost. She -knew it, and Clark knew it, too, although he didn't , want to admit it at first; he was wearing +his I'm Pissed So Don't Fuck with Me look, where his / mouth kept getting smaller and smaller until .you thought it might disappear altogether. And'lost' - wasn't how Clark would put it; Clark would ,say they had 'taken a wrong turn somewhere,'and it , would just about kill him to go even that far. . They'd set off from Portland the day before.+Clark worked for a computer company one of . the giants and it had been his idea that )they should see something of the Oregon, which lay $ outside the pleasant, but humdrum ,upper-middle-class suburb of Portland where they lived an , area that was known to its inhabitants as ,Software City. 'They say it's beautiful out there in the - boonies,' he had told her. 'You want to go .take a look? I've got a week, and the transferrumors - have already started. If we don't see some -of the real Oregon, I think the last sixteen months are - going to be nothing but a black hole in my memory.' . She had agreed willingly enough (school had 'let out ten days before and she had no summer - classes to teach), enjoying the pleasantly *haphazard, catch-as-catch-can feel of the trip, forgetting * that spur-of-the-moment vacations often .ended up just like this, with the vacationers lost along , some back road which blundered its way up ,the overgrown butt-crack of nowhere. It was an * adventure, she supposed at least you .could look at it that way if you wanted butshe had ( turned thirty-two in January, and she +thought thirty-two was maybe just a little too old for . adventures. These days her idea of a really -nice vacation was a motel with a clean pool, * bathrobes on the beds, and a hair-dryer that worked in the bathroom. ' Yesterday had been fine, though, the ,countryside so gorgeous that even Clark had several % times been awed to an unaccustomed ,silence. They had spent the night at a nice country inn just ) west of Eugene, had made love not once -but twice (something she was most definitely not too - old to enjoy), and this morning had headed -south, meaning to spend the night in Klamath Falls. ) They had begun the day on Oregon State .Highway 58, and that was all right, but then, over lunch % in the town of Oakridge, Clark had )suggested they get off the main highway, which was pretty , well clogged with RVs and logging trucks. 1 'Well, I don't know . . . ' Mary spoke with the*dubiousness of a woman who has heard many + such proposals from her man, and endured ,the consequences of a few. 'I'd hate to get lost out 0 there, Clark. It looks pretty empty.' She had +tapped one neatly shaped nail on a spot of green - marked Boulder Creek Wilderness Area. 'That.word is wilderness, as in no gas stations, no rest  rooms, and no motels.' , 'Aw, come on,' he said, pushing aside the +remains of his chicken-fried steak. On the juke, . Steve Earle and the Dukes were singing 'Six #Days on the Road,' and outside the dirt-streaked ) windows, a bunch of bored-looking kids 'were doing turns and pop-outs on their skateboards. + They looked as if they were just marking ,time out there, waiting to be old enough to blow this + town for good, and Mary knew exactly how .they felt. 'Nothing to it, babe. We take 58 a few + more miles east . . . then turn south on State Road 42 . . . see it?' - 'Uh huh.' She also saw that, while Highway .58 was a fat red line, State Road 42 was only a 0 squiggle of black thread. But she'd been full ,of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, and hadn't wanted , to argue with Clark's pioneering instinct /while she felt like a boa constrictor that has just * swallowed a goat. What she'd wanted, in -fact, was to tilt back the passenger seat of their lovely # old Mercedes 'and take a snooze. 0 'Then,' he pushed on, 'there's this road here.+It's not numbered, so it's probably only a county * road, but it goes right down to Toketee 0Falls. And from there it's only a hop and a jumpover to % U.S. 97. So what do you think?' 1 'That you'll probably get us lost,' she'd said 1 a wisecrack she rather regretted later. 'But I. guess we'll be all right as long as you can .find a place wide enough to turn the Princess around  in.' 0 'Sold American!' he said, beaming, and pulled .his chicken-fried steak back in front of him. He . began to eat again, congealed gravy and all.- 'Uck-a-doo,' she said, holding one hand up +in front of her face and wincing. 'How can you?' . 'It's good,' Clark said in tones so muffled 'only a wife could have understood him. 'Besides, , when one is traveling, one should eat the native dishes.' . 'It looks like someone sneezed a mouthful of/snuff onto a very old hamburger,' she said. 'I  repeat: uck-a-doo.' - They left Oakridge in good spirits, and at .first all had gone swimmingly. Trouble hadn't set in + until they turned off SR 42 and onto the )unmarked road, the one Clark had been so sure was * going to breeze them right into Toketee /Falls. It hadn't seemed like trouble at first; county road , or not, the new way had been a lot better )than Highway 42, which had been potholed and frostheaved, & even in summer. They had gone along /famously, in fact, taking turns plugging tapes into . the dashboard player. Clark was into people 0like Wilson Pickett, Al Green, and Pop Staples. ) Mary's taste lay in entirely different directions. - 'What do you see in all these white boys?' 'he asked as she plugged in her current favorite  Lou Reed's New York. / 'Married one, didn't I?' she asked, and that made him laugh. ) The first sign of trouble came fifteen +minutes later, when they came to a fork in the road. Both " forks looked equally promising. * 'Holy crap,' Clark said, pulling up and )popping the glove compartment open so he could get at , the map. He looked at it for a long time. 'That isn't on the map.' + 'Oh boy, here we go,' Mary said. She had -been on the edge of a doze when Clark pulled up at , the unexpected fork, and she was feeling a-little irritated with him. 'Want my advice?' - 'No,' he said, sounding a little irritated 3himself, 'but I suppose I'll get it. And I hate it when you - roll your eyes at me that way, in case you didn't know.'  'What way is that, Clark?' / 'Like I was an old dog that just farted under*the dinner table. Go on, tell me what you think. # Lay it on me. It's your nickel.' / 'Go back while there's still time. That's my advice.' + 'Uh-huh. Now if you only had a sign that said REPENT.' " 'Is that supposed to be funny?' / 'I don't know, Mare,' he said in a glum tone /of voice, and then just sat there, alternating looks - through the bug-splattered windshield with )a close examination of the map. They had been - married for almost fifteen years, and Mary )knew him well enough to believe he would almost . certainly insist on pushing on . . . not in .spite of the unexpected fork in the road, but because of  it. , When Clark Willingham 's balls are on the -line, he doesn't back down, she thought, and then - put a hand over her mouth to hide the grin that had surfaced there. ( She was not quite quick enough. Clark ,glanced at her, one eyebrow raised, and she had a , sudden discomfiting thought: if she could 0read him as easily as a child's storybook after all this ( time, then maybe he could do the same /with her. 'Something?' he asked, and his voice was just a , little too thin. It was at that moment +even before she had fallen asleep, she now realized - that his mouth had started to get smaller. 'Want to share, sweetheart?'' ( She shook her head. 'Just clearing my throat.' * He nodded, pushed his glasses up on his )ever-expanding forehead, and brought the map up . until it was almost touching the tip of his +nose. 'Well,' he said, 'it's got to be the left-hand fork, * because that's the one that goes south, *toward Toketee Falls. The other one heads east. It's ( probably a ranch road, or something.' + 'A ranch road with a yellow line running down the middle of it?' 1 Clark's mouth grew a little smaller. 'You'd be -surprised how well-off some of these ranchers are,' he said. - She thought of pointing out to him that the*days of the scouts and pioneers were long gone, . that his testicles were not actually on the +line, and then decided she wanted a little doze-off in the + afternoon sun a lot more than she wanted .to squabble with her husband, especially afterthe / lovely double feature last night. And, after ,all, they were bound to come out somewhere, weren't  they? + With that comforting thought in her mind ,and Lou Reed in her ears, singing about the last ( great American whale, Mary Willingham *dozed off. By the time the road Clark had picked began - to deteriorate, she was sleeping shallowly (and dreaming that they were back in the Oakridge cafe - where they had eaten lunch. She was trying )to put a quarter in the jukebox, but the coin-slot was * plugged with something that looked like .flesh. One of the kids who had been outside inthe ' parking lot walked past her with his .skateboard under his arm and his Trailblazers hat turned  around on his head. * What's the matter with this thing? Mary asked him. , The kid came over, took a quick look, and +shrugged. Aw, that ain't nothing, he said. That's just * some guy's body, broken for you and for -many. This is no rinky-dink operation we got here; , we're talking mass culture, sugar-muffin. * Then he reached up, gave the tip of her ,right breast a tweak not a very friendly one, either + and walked away. When she looked back .at the jukebox, she saw it had filled up with blood * and shadowy floating things that looked suspiciously like human organs. , Maybe you better give that Lou Reed album ,a rest, she thought, and within the pool of blood * behind the glass, a record floated down .onto the turntable as if at her thought and Lou $ began to sing 'Busload of Faith.' + While Mary was having this steadily more (unpleasant dream, the road continued to worsen, the , patches spreading until it was really all +patch. The Lou Reed album a long one came to an * end, and began to recycle. Clark didn't -notice. The pleasant look he had started the day with was - entirely gone. His mouth had shrunk to the +size of a rosebud. If Mary had been awake, she would , have coaxed him into turning around miles ,back. He knew this, just as he knew how she would ) look at him if she woke up now and saw -this narrow swatch of crumbling hot-top a road only + if one thought in the most charitable of ,terms with piney woods pressing in close enough on ( both sides to keep the patched tar in +constant shadow. They had not passed a car headed in the ' other direction since leaving SR 42. ( He knew he should turn around Mary *hated it when he got into shit like this, always , forgetting the many times he had found his,way unerringly along strange roads to their planned , destinations (Clark Willingham was one of .those millions of American men who are firmly ) convinced they have a compass in their /heads) but he continued to push on, at first stubbornly ' convinced that they must come out in /Toketee Falls, then just hoping. Besides, there really was 0 no place to turn around. If he tried to do it,-he would mire the Princess to her hubcaps in one of ) the marshy ditches which bordered this /miserable excuse for a road . . . and God knew how long . it would take to get a tow-truck in here, or,how far he'd have to walk just to call one. - Then, at last, he did come to a place where.he could have turned around another fork inthe . road and elected not to do so. The reason.was simple: although the right fork was rutted. gravel with grass growing up the middle, the,leftward-tending branch was once again wide, wellpaved, , and divided by a bright stroke of yellow. .According to the compass in Clark's head, this/ fork headed due south. He could all but smell)Toketee Falls. Ten miles, maybe fifteen, twenty at  the outside. ) He did at least consider turning back, ,however. When he told Mary so later, he saw doubt in . her eyes, but it was true. He decided to go -on because Mary was beginning to stir, and hewas - quite sure that the bumpy, potholed stretch.of road he'd just driven would wake her up if he / turned back . . . and then she would look at ,him with those wide, beautiful blue eyes of hers. Just  look. That would be enough. , Besides, why should he spend an hour and a-half going back when Toketee Falls was just a( spin and a promise away? Look at that /road, he thought. You think a road like that is going to  just peter out? , He put the Princess back in gear, started -down the left fork, and sure enough, the roadpetered , out. Over the first hill, the yellow line (disappeared again. Over the second, the paving gave out , and they were on a rutted dirt track with .the dark woods pressing even closer on either side and - the sun Clark was aware of this for the .first time now sliding down the wrong side of the  sky. , The pavement ended too suddenly for Clark ,to brake and baby the Princess onto the new ! surface, and there was a hard, ,spring-jarring thud that woke Mary. She sat up with a jerk and , looked around with wide eyes. 'Where ' +she began, and then, to make the afternoon utterly + perfect and complete, the smoky voice of +Lou Reed sped up until he was gabbling out the lyrics ) to 'Good Evening, Mr. Waldheim' at the "speed of Alvin and the Chipmunks. ( 'Oh!' she said, and punched the eject -button. The tape belched out, followed by an ugly brown % afterbirth coils of shiny tape. ' The Princess hit a nearly bottomless ,pothole, lurched hard to the left, and then threw herself up + and out like a clipper ship corkscrewing through a stormwave.  'Clark?' ( 'Don't say anything,' he said through 0clenched teeth. 'We're not lost. This will turn back to tar . in just a minute or two probably over thenext hill. We are not lost.' , Still upset by her dream (even though she ,could not quite remember what it had been), Mary 0 held the ruined tape in her lap, mourning it. -She supposed she could buy another one . . . but not . out here. She looked at the brooding trees, /which seemed to belly right up to the road like- starving guests at a banquet and guessed it-was a long way to the nearest Tower Records. ) She looked at Clark, noted his flushed )cheeks and nearly nonexistent mouth, and decided it ) would be politic to keep her own mouth .shut, at least for the time being. If she was quiet and - non-accusatory, he would be more likely to )come to his senses before this miserable excuse for a & road petered out in a gravel pit or quicksand bog. / 'Besides, I can't very well turn around,' he /said, as if she had suggested that very thing. + 'I can see that,' she replied neutrally. ( He glanced at her, perhaps wanting to ,fight, perhaps just feeling embarrassed and hoping to / see she wasn't too pissed at him at least ,not yet and then looked back through the , windshield. Now there were weeds and grass-growing up the center of this road, too, and the way + was so narrow that if they did happen to ,meet another car, one of them would have to back up. ' Nor was that the end of the fun. The $ground beyond the wheel-ruts looked increasingly , untrustworthy; the scrubby trees seemed to/be jostling each other for position in the wet ground. - There were no power-poles on either side of/the road. She almost pointed this out to Clark,* and then decided it might be smarter to -hold her tongue about that, too. He drove on in silence ) until they came around a down-slanting ,curve. He was hoping against hope that they would see a - change for the better on the far side, but +the overgrown track only went on as it had before. It 2 was, if anything, a little fainter and a little +narrower, and had begun to remind Clark of roads in / the fantasy epics he liked to read stories%by people like Terry Brooks, Stephen Donaldson, 2 and, of course, J. R. R. Tolkien, the spiritual (father of them all. In these tales, the characters (who + usually had hairy feet and pointed ears) -took these neglected roads in spite of their own gloomy , intuitions, and usually ended up battling /trolls or boggarts or mace-wielding skeletons.  'Clark ' , 'I know,' he said, and hammered the wheel (suddenly with his left hand a short, frustrated , stroke that succeeded only in honking the .horn. 'I know.' He stopped the Mercedes, whichnow . straddled the entire road (road? hell, lane -was now too grand a word for it), slammed the, transmission into park, and got out. Mary (got out on the other side, more slowly. - The balsam smell of the trees was heavenly,$and she thought there was something beautiful + about the silence, unbroken as it was by )the sound of any motor (even the far-off drone of an / airplane) or human voice . . . but there was -something spooky about it, as well. Even the sounds . she could hear the tu-whit! of a bird in -the shadowy firs, the sough of the wind, the rough , rumble of the Princess's diesel engine &served to emphasize the wall of quiet encircling them. - She looked across the Princess's gray roof .at Clark, and it was not reproach or anger in her + gaze but appeal: Get us out of this, all right? Please? / 'Sorry, hon,' he said, and the worry she saw 1in his face did nothing to soothe her. 'Really.' , She tried to speak, but at first no sound .came out of her dry throat. She cleared it andtried - again. 'What do you think about backing up,Clark?' . He considered it for several moments the ,tu-whit! bird had time to call again and be ( answered from somewhere deeper in the .forest before shaking his head. 'Only as a last resort. 0 It's at least two miles back to the last fork in the road ' $ 'You mean there was another one?' , He winced a little, dropped his eyes, and ,nodded. 'Backing up . . . well, you see how narrow - the road is, and how mucky the ditches are.-If we went off . . . ' He shook his head and sighed.  'So we go on.' 2 'I think so. If the road goes entirely to hell, !of course, I'll have to try it.' . 'But by then we'll be in even deeper, won't .we?' So far she was managing, and quite well, she , thought, to keep a tone of accusation from,creeping into her voice, but it was getting harder and - harder to do. She was pissed at him, quite 0severely pissed, and pissed at herself, as well  for . letting him get them into this in the first -place, and then for coddling him the way she was now. . 'Yes, but I like the odds on finding a wide .place up ahead better than I like the odds on - reversing for a couple of miles along this -piece of crap. If it turns out we do have to back out, I'll ( take it in stages back up for five /minutes, rest for ten, back up for five more.' He smiled # lamely. 'It'll be an adventure.' 1 'Oh yes, it'll be that, all right,' Mary said, 0thinking again that her definition for this sort of thing . was not adventure but pain in the ass. 'Are ,you sure you aren't pressing on because you believe ) in your heart that we're going to find )Toketee Falls right over the next hill?' # For a moment his mouth seemed to )disappear entirely and she braced for an explosion of + righteous male wrath. Then his shoulders +sagged and he only shook his head. In that moment she , saw what he was going to look like thirty .years from now, and that frightened her a lot more than - getting caught on a back road in the middle of nowhere. + 'No,' he said. '1 guess I've given up on 0Toketee Falls. One of the great rules of travel in + America is that roads without electrical .lines running along at least one side of them don't go  anywhere.'  So he had noticed, too. , 'Come on,' he said, getting back in. 'I'm 1going to try like hell to get us out of this. Andnext  time I'll listen to you.' * Yeah, yeah, Mary thought with a mixture -of amusement and tired resentment. I've heardthat + one before. But before he could pull the ,transmission stick on the console down from park to / drive, she put her hand over his. 'I know you/will,' she said, turning what he'd said into a promise. ! 'Now get us out of this mess.'  'Count on it,' Clark said.  'And be careful.' - 'You can count on that, too.' He gave her a0small smile that made her feel a little better, then . engaged the Princess's transmission. The big,gray Mercedes, looking very out of place in these & deep woods, began to creep down the shadowy track again. * They drove another mile by the odometer )and nothing changed but the width of the cart-track - they were on: it grew narrower still. Mary -thought the scruffy firs now looked not like hungry + guests at a banquet but morbidly curious /spectators at the site of a nasty accident. If the track got - any narrower, they would begin to hear the /squall of branches along the sides of the car. The ) ground under the trees, meanwhile, had *gone from mucky to swampy; Mary could see patches of . standing water, dusty with pollen and fallen-pine needles, in some of the dips. Her heart was + beating much too fast, and twice she had -caught herself gnawing at her nails, a habit she thought , she had given up for good the year before ,she married Clark. She had begun to realize that if they - got stuck now, they would almost certainly ,spend the night camped out in the Princess. And + there were animals in these woods she *had heard them crashing around out there. Some of + them sounded big enough to be bears. The +thought of meeting a bear while they stood looking at + their hopelessly mired Mercedes made her .swallow something that felt and tasted like a large lint  ball. 0 'Clark, I think we'd better give it up and try2backing. It's already past three o'clock and ' 3 'Look,' he said, pointing ahead. 'Is it a sign?' , She squinted. Ahead, the lane rose toward /the crest of a deeply wooded hill. There was a , bright blue oblong standing near the top. +'Yes,' she said. 'It's a sign, all right.'  'Great! Can you read it?' + 'Uh-huh it says IF YOU CAME THIS FAR, YOU REALLY FUCKED up.' * He shot her a complex look of amusement $and irritation. 'Very funny, Mare.'  'Thank you, Clark. I try.' - 'We'll go to the top of the hill, read the +sign, and see what's over the crest. If we don't see 0 anything hopeful, we'll try backing. Agreed?''  'Agreed.' . He patted her leg, then drove cautiously on.+The Mercedes was moving so slowly now that ( they could hear the soft sound of the *weeds on the crown of the road whickering against the , undercarriage. Mary really could make out ,the words on the sign now, but at first she rejected . them, thinking she had to be mistaken it 0was just too crazy. But they drew closer still, and the  words didn't change. , 'Does it say what I think it does?' Clark asked her. 0 Mary gave a short, bewildered laugh. 'Sure . .+. but it must be someone's idea of a joke. Don't  you think?' 0 'I've given up thinking it keeps getting me/into trouble. But I see something that isn't a joke.  Look, Mary!' + Twenty or thirty feet beyond the sign .just before the crest of the hill the road widened , dramatically and was once more both paved .and lined. Mary felt worry roll off her heart like a + boulder. Clark was grinning. 'Isn't that )beautiful?' She nodded happily, grinning herself. They + reached the sign and Clark stopped. They read it again:  Welcome to  Rock and Roll Heaven, Ore. ! WE COOK WITH GAS! SO WILL YOU! ) Jaycees Chamber of Commerce Lions Elks ) 'It's got to be a joke,' she repeated.  'Maybe not.' ' 'A town called Rock and Roll Heaven? Puh-leeze, Clark.' + 'Why not? There's Truth or Consequences, ,New Mexico, Dry Shark, Nevada, and a town in. Pennsylvania called Intercourse. So why not #a Rock and Roll Heaven in Oregon?' / She laughed giddily. The sense of relief was 'really incredible. 'You made that up.'  'What?'  'Intercourse, Pennsylvania.' 0 'I didn't. Ralph Ginzberg once tried to send a)magazine called Eros from there. For the . postmark. The Feds wouldn't let him. Swear. )And who knows? Maybe the town was foundedby ' a bunch of communal back-to-the-land /hippies in the sixties. They went establishment Lions, ) Elks, Jaycees but the original name .stayed.' He was quite taken with the idea; he found it both + funny and oddly sweet. 'Besides, I don't +think it matters. What matters is we found some honestto- + God pavement again, honey. The stuff you drive on.' + She nodded. 'So drive on it . . . but be careful.' , 'You bet.' The Princess nosed up onto the &pavement, which was not asphalt but a smooth ) composition surface without a patch or *expansion-joint to be seen. 'Careful's my middle n ' . Then they reached the crest of the hill and ,the last word died in his mouth. He stamped on the + brake-pedal so hard that their seatbelts +locked, then jammed the transmission lever back into  park.  'Holy wow!' Clark said. # They sat in the idling Mercedes, 'open-mouthed, looking down at the town below. . It was a perfect jewel of a town nestled in +a small, shallow valley like a dimple. Its resemblance * to the paintings of Norman Rockwell and /the small-town illustrations of Currier & Ives was, to 1 Mary, at least, inescapable. She tried to tell +herself it was just the geography; the way the road * wound down into the valley, the way the (town was surrounded by deep green-black forest ( leagues of old, thick firs growing in .unbroken profusion beyond the outlying fields  but it was + more than the geography, and she supposed,Clark knew it as well as she did. There was + something too sweetly balanced about the ,church steeples, for instance one on the north end * of the town common and the other on the ,south end. The barn-red building off to the east had to , be the school-house, and the big white one-off to the west, the one with the bell-tower on top and / the satellite dish to one side, had to be the/town hall. The homes all looked impossibly neatand . cozy, the sorts of domiciles you saw in the (house-beautiful ads of pre-World War II magazines % like The Saturday Evening Post and American Mercury. ' There should be smoke curling from a *chimney or two, Mary thought, and after a little + examination, she saw that there was. She +suddenly found herself remembering a story from Ray . Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. 'Mars Is +Heaven,' it had been called, and in it the Martians . had cleverly disguised the slaughterhouse so'it had looked like everybody's fondest hometown  dream. / 'Turn around,' she said abruptly. 'It's wide !enough here, if you're careful.' + He turned slowly to look at her, and she +didn't care much for the expression on his face. He * was eyeing her as if he thought she had &gone crazy. 'Honey, what are you ' 4 'I don't like it, that's all.' She could feel her (face growing warm, but she pushed on in spite of * the heat. 'It makes me think of a scary )story I read when I was a teenager.' She paused. 'It also ' makes me think of the candy-house in "Hansel and Gretel." & He went on giving her that patented .I-just-don't-believe-it stare of his, and she realized he ( meant to go down there it was just "another part of the same wretched testosterone blast that - gotten them off the main road in the first .place. He wanted to explore, by Christ. And hewanted / a souvenir, of course. A tee-shirt bought in ,the local drugstore would do, one that said something & cute like I'VE BEEN TOROCK AND ROLL &HEAVEN AND YOU KNOW THEY GOT A HELL OFA BAND. / 'Honey ' It was the soft, tender voice he (used when he intended to jolly her into something  or die trying. . 'Oh, stop. If you want to do something nice ,for me, turn us around and drive us back to + Highway 58. If you do that, you can have (some more sugar tonight. Another double helping,  even, if you're up to it.' ' He fetched a deep sigh, hands on the .steering wheel, eyes straight ahead. At last, not looking , at her, he said: 'Look across the valley, /Mary. Do you see the road going up the hill on the far  side?'  'Yes, I do.' * 'Do you see how wide it is? How smooth? How nicely paved?'  'Clark, that is hardly ' . 'Look! I believe I even see an honest-to-God0bus on it.' He pointed at a yellow bug trundling- along the road toward town, its metal hide ,glittering hotly in the afternoon sunlight. 'That's one , more vehicle than we've seen on this side of the world.'  'I still ' * He grabbed the map which had been lying *on the console, and when he turned to her with it, , Mary realized with dismay that the jolly, ,coaxing voice had temporarily concealed the fact that 0 he was seriously pissed at her. 'Listen, Mare,(and pay attention, because there may be questions * later. Maybe I can turn around here and 1maybe I can't it's wider, but I'm not as sure as you are . that it's wide enough. And the ground still looks pretty squelchy to me.' 1 'Clark, please don't yell at me. I'm getting a headache.' , He made an effort and moderated his voice./'If we do get turned around, it's twelve miles back + to Highway 58, over the same shitty road we just traveled ' - 'Twelve miles isn't so much.' She tried to .sound firm, if only to herself, but she could feel / herself weakening. She hated herself for it, ,but that didn't change it. She had a horrid suspicion * that this was how men almost always got +their way: not by being right but by being relentless. / They argued like they played football, and if.you hung in there, you almost always finished the , discussion with cleat-marks all over your psyche. + 'No, twelve miles isn't so much,' he was &saying in his most sweetly reasonable I-am-tryingnot- ( to-strangle-you-Mary voice, 'but what ,about the fifty or so we'll have to tack on going around * this patch of woods once we get back on 58?' - 'You make it sound as if we had a train to catch, Clark!' / 'It just pisses me off, that's all. You take +one look down at a nice little town with a cute little , name and say it reminds you of Friday the )13th, Part XX or some damn thing and you want to go ( back. And that road over there' he /pointed across the valley 'heads due south. It's probably - less than half an hour from here to ToketeeFalls by that road.' & 'That's about what you said back in )Oakridge before we started off on the Magical Mystery  Tour segment of our trip.' ( He looked at her a moment longer, his -mouth tucked in on itself like a cramp, then grabbed the 3 transmission lever. 'Fuck it,' he snarled. 'We'll,go back. But if we meet one car on the way, Mary, . just one, we'll end up backing into Rock andRoll Heaven. So ' , She put her hand over his before he could *disengage the transmission for the second time that  day. 0 'Go on,' she said. 'You're probably right and 2I'm probably being silly.' Rolling over like this has ) got to be bred in the goddam bone, she /thought. Either that, or I'm just too tired to fight. * She took her hand away, but he paused a /moment longer, looking at her. 'Only if you're sure,'  he said. . And that was really the most ludicrous thing/of all, wasn't it? Winning wasn't enough for a * man like Clark; the vote also had to be )unanimous. She had voiced that unanimity many times - when she didn't feel very unanimous in her .heart, but she discovered that she just wasn'tcapable  of it this time. / 'But I'm not sure,' she said. 'If you'd been /listening to me instead of just putting up withme, - you'd know that. Probably you're right and 1probably I'm just being silly your take on it makes * more sense than mine does, I admit that 1much, at least, and I'm willing to soldier along  but 0 that doesn't change the way I feel. So you'll .just have to excuse me if I decline to put on my little / cheerleader's skirt and lead the Go Clark Go cheer this time.' , 'Jesus!' he said. His face was wearing an (uncertain expression that made him look + uncharacteristically and somehow hate .fully boyish. 'You're in some mood, aren't you,  honey-bunch?' / 'I guess I am,' she said, hoping he couldn't %see how much that particular term of endearment / grated on her. She was thirty-two, after all,/and he was almost forty-one. She felt a little too old ( to be anyone's honeybunch and thought (Clark was a little too old to need one. - Then the troubled look on his face cleared .and the Clark she liked the one she really - believed she could spend the second half of0her life with was back. 'You'd look cute in a- cheerleader's skirt, though,' he said, and -appeared to measure the length of her thigh. 'You  would.' - 'You're a fool, Clark,' she said, and then 0found herself smiling at him almost in spite of herself. / 'That's correct, ma'am,' he said, and put thePrincess in gear. , The town had no outskirts, unless the few -fields, which surrounded it, counted. At one moment # they were driving down a gloomy, )tree-shaded lane; at the next there were broad tan fields on + either side of the car; at the next they !were passing neat little houses. , The town was quiet but far from deserted. -A few cars moved lazily back and forth on thefour , or five intersecting streets that made up 'downtown, and a handful of pedestrians strolled the 0 sidewalks. Clark lifted a hand in salute to a %bare-chested, potbellied man who was ' simultaneously watering his lawn and /drinking a can of Olympia. The potbellied man, whose ) dirty hair straggled to his shoulders, ,watched them go by but did not raise his ownhand in return. , Main Street had that same Norman Rockwell ,ambience, and here it was so strong that it was 0 almost a feeling of dj vu. Robust, mature +oaks shaded the walks, and that was somehowjust + right. You didn't have to see the town's ,only watering hole to know that it would be called The ) Dew Drop Inn and that there would be a 'lighted clock displaying the Budweiser Clydesdales , over the bar. The parking spaces were the -slanting type; there was a red-white-and-bluebarber + pole turning outside The Cutting Edge; a ,mortar and pestle hung over the door of the local ) pharmacy, which was called The Tuneful +Druggist. The pet shop (with a sign in the window ( saying WE HAVE SIAMESE IF YOU PLEASE) +was called White Rabbit. Everything was so right you - could just shit. Most right of all was the #town common at the center of town. , There was a sign hung on a guy-wire above .the bandshell, and Mary could read it easily, + although they were a hundred yards away. CONCERT TONIGHT, it said. + She suddenly realized that she knew this -town had seen it many times on late-night TV. . Never mind Ray Bradbury's hellish vision of 'Mars or the candy-house in 'Hansel and Gretel'; - what this place resembled more than either )was The Peculiar Little Town people kept stumbling + into in various episodes of The Twilight Zone. - She leaned toward her husband and said in a)low, ominous voice: 'We're traveling not through - a dimension of sight and sound, Clark, but *of mind. Look!' She pointed at nothing in particular, * but a woman standing outside the town's +Western Auto saw the gesture and gave her anarrow,  mistrustful glance. ' 'Look at what?' he asked. He sounded +irritated again, and she guessed that this time it was ' because he knew exactly what she was talking about. . 'There's a signpost up ahead! We're entering ' / 'Oh, cut it out, Mare,' he said, and abruptly)swung into an empty parking slot halfway down  Main Street. . 'Clark!' she nearly screamed. 'What are you doing?' * He pointed through the windshield at an (establishment with the somehow not-cute name of  The Rock-a-Boogie Restaurant. 1 'I'm thirsty. I'm going in there and getting a .great big Pepsi to go. You don't have to come.You 1 can sit right here. Lock all the doors, if you *want.' So saying, he opened his own door. Before he , could swing his legs out, she grabbed his shoulder.  'Clark, please don't.' , He looked back at her, and she saw at once,that she should have canned the crack about The , Twilight Zone not because it was wrong ,but because it was right. It was that macho thing + again. He wasn't stopping because he was -thirsty, not really; he was stopping because this freaky + little burg had scared him, too. Maybe a /little, maybe a lot, she didn't know that, but she did , know that he had no intention of going on )until he had convinced himself he wasn't afraid, not  one little bit. - 'I won't be a minute. Do you want a ginger ale, or something?' * She pushed the button that unlocked her 1seatbelt. 'What I want is not to be left alone.'  He gave her an indulgent, *I-knew-you'd-come look that made her feel like tearing out a couple  of swatches of his hair. / 'And what I also want is to kick your ass for,getting us into this situation in the first place,' she ' finished, and was pleased to see the ,indulgent expression turn to one of wounded surprise. She + opened her own door. 'Come on. Piddle on /the nearest hydrant, Clark, and then we'll get out of  here.' 1 'Piddle . . . ? Mary, what in the hell are you talking about?' . 'Sodas!' she nearly screamed, all the while .thinking that it was really amazing how fast agood + trip with a good man could turn bad. She -glanced across the street and saw a couple of- longhaired young guys standing there. They -were also drinking Oily and checking out the ' strangers in town. One was wearing a -battered top-hat. The plastic daisy stuck in the band + nodded back and forth in the breeze. His )companion's arms crawled with faded blue tattoos. To , Mary they looked like the sort of fellows +who dropped out of high school their third time through - the tenth grade in order to spend more time/meditating on the joys of drive-train linkages and  date rape. ) Oddly enough, they also looked somehow familiar to her. ) They saw her looking. Top-Hat solemnly 0raised his hand and twiddled his fingers at her.Mary - looked away hurriedly and turned to Clark. 0'Let's get our cold drinks and get the hell out of here.' 0 'Sure,' he said. 'And you didn't need to shout-at me, Mary. I mean, I was right beside you, and  ' + 'Clark, do you see those two guys across the street?'  'What two guys?' , She looked back in time to see Top-Hat and)Tattoos slipping through the barber-shop ) doorway. Tattoos glanced back over his -shoulder, and although Mary wasn't sure, she thought he  tipped her a wink. / 'They're just going into the barber shop. Seethem?' , Clark looked, but only saw a closing door ,with the sun reflecting eye-watering shards of light % from the glass. 'What about them?'  'They looked familiar to me.'  'Yeah?' / 'Yeah. But I find it somehow hard to believe ,that any of the people I know moved to Rock and - Roll Heaven, Oregon, to take up rewarding, -high-paying jobs as street-corner hoodlums.' . Clark laughed and took her elbow. 'Come on,',he said, and led her into The Rock-a-Boogie  Restaurant. ) The Rock-a-Boogie went a fair distance .toward allaying Mary's fears. She had expected a greasy ) spoon, not much different from the dim .(and rather dirty) pit-stop in Oakridge where they'd eaten . lunch. They entered a sun-filled, agreeable 0little diner with a funky fifties feel instead: blue-tiled & walls; chrome-chased pie case; tidy -yellow-oak floor; wooden paddle fans turning lazily + overhead. The face of the wall-clock was .circled with thin tubes of red and blue neon. Two , waitresses in aqua-colored rayon uniforms ,that looked to Mary like costumes left over from ) American Graffiti were standing by the )stainless-steel pass-through between the restaurant and , the kitchen. One was young no more than.twenty and probably not that and pretty in a + washed-out way. The other, a short woman 0with a lot of frizzy red hair, had a brassy lookthat . struck Mary as both harsh and desperate . . -. and there was something else about her, as well: for + the second time in as many minutes, Mary 'had the strong sensation that she knew someone in this  town. / A bell over the door tinkled as she and Clark+entered. The waitresses glanced over. 'Hi, there,' - the younger one said. 'Be right with you.' ( 'Naw; might take awhile,' the redhead .disagreed. 'We're awful busy. See?' She swept an arm at * the room, deserted as only a small-town ,restaurant can be as the afternoon balances perfectly ( between lunch and dinner, and laughed /cheerily at her own witticism. Like her voice, the laugh , had a husky, splintered quality that Mary /associated with Scotch and cigarettes. But it's a voice I & know, she thought. I'd swear it is. - She turned to Clark and saw he was staring )at the waitresses, who had resumed their - conversation, as if hypnotized. She had to .tug his sleeve to get his attention, then tug it again + when he headed for the tables grouped on -the left side of the room. She wanted them to sit at the * counter. She wanted to get their damned *sodas in take-out cups and then blow this joint.  'What is it?' she whispered. ! 'Nothing,' he said. 'I guess.' - 'You looked like you swallowed your tongue,or something.' / 'For a second or two it felt like I had,' he /said, and before she could ask him to explain, he had # diverted to look at the jukebox.  Mary sat down at the counter. * 'Be right with you, ma'am,' the younger +waitress repeated, and then bent closer to hear $ something else her whiskey-voiced +colleague was saying. Looking at her face, Mary guessed the - younger woman wasn't really very interested"in what the older one had to say. , 'Mary, this is a great juke!' Clark said, 1sounding delighted. 'It's all fifties stuff! The 1 Moonglows . . . The Five Satins . . . Shep and 1the Limelites . . . La Vern Baker! Jeez, La Vern / Baker singing 'Tweedlee Dee'! I haven't heardthat one since I was a kid!' - 'Well, save your money. We're just getting take-out drinks, remember?'  'Yeah, yeah.' + He gave the Rock-Ola one last look, blew -out an irritated breath, and then joined her at the ) counter. Mary pulled a menu out of the (bracket by the salt and pepper shakers, mostly so she * wouldn't have to look at the frown-line +between his eyes and the way his lower lip stuck out. , Look, he was saying without saying a word *(this, she had discovered, was one of the more * questionable long-term effects of being .married). I won our way through the wildernesswhile , you slept, killed the buffalo, fought the +Injuns, brought you safe and sound to this nifty little oasis . in the wilderness, and what thanks do I get?-You won't even let me play 'Tweedlee Dee' on the - jukebox! Never mind, she thought. We'll be gone soon, so never mind. . Good advice. She followed it by turning her /full attention to the menu. It harmonized with the , rayon uniforms, the neon clock, the juke, .and the general decor (which, while admirably , subdued, could still only be described as -Mid-Century Rebop). The hot dog wasn't a hot dog; it * was a Hound Dog. The cheeseburger was a +Chubby Checker and the double cheeseburger was a - Big Bopper. The specialty of the house was -a loaded pizza; the menu promised 'Everythingon It  But the (Sam) Cooke!' , 'Cute,' she said. 'Poppa-ooo-mow-mow, and all that.' ) 'What?' Clark asked, and she shook her head. + The young waitress came over, taking her ,order pad out of her apron pocket. She gave them a - smile, but Mary thought it was perfunctory;-the woman looked both tired and unwell. Therewas . a coldsore perched above her upper lip, and -her slightly bloodshot eyes moved restlessly about + the room. They touched on everything, it seemed, but her customers.  'Help you folks?' + Clark moved to take the menu from Mary's -hand. She held it away from him and said, 'A large 0 Pepsi and a large ginger ale. To go, please.' * 'Y'all oughtta try the cherry pie!' the -redhead called over in her hoarse voice. The younger + woman flinched at the sound of it. 'Rick +just made it! You gonna think you died and went to - heaven!' She grinned at them and placed her/hands on her hips. 'Well, y'all are in Heaven, but  you know what I mean.' 1 'Thank you,' Mary said, 'but we're really in a hurry, and ' + 'Sure, why not?' Clark said in a musing, +distant voice. 'Two pieces of cherry pie.' - Mary kicked his ankle hard but Clark -didn't seem to notice. He was staring at the + redhead again, and now his mouth was hung.on a spring. The redhead was clearly aware of his ) gaze, but she didn't seem to mind. She ,reached up with one hand and lazily fluffed her  improbable hair. * 'Two sodas to go, two pieces of pie for .here,' the young waitress said. She gave them another ( nervous smile while her restless eyes (examined Mary's wedding ring, the sugar shaker, one of the * overhead fans. 'You want that pie  la ,mode?' She bent and put two napkins and two forks on the  counter. - 'Y ' Clark began, and Mary overrode him firmly and quickly. 'No.' , The chrome pie case was behind the far end(of the counter. As soon as the waitress walked + away in that direction, Mary leaned over +and hissed: 'Why are you doing this to me, Clark? You # know I want to get out of here!' + 'That waitress. The redhead. Is she ' , 'And stop staring at her!' Mary whispered 1fiercely. 'You look like a kid trying to peek up some  girl's skirt in study hall!' , He pulled his eyes away . . . but with an 0effort. 'Is she the spit-image of Janis Joplin, or am I  crazy?' , Startled, Mary cast another glance at the )redhead. She had turned away slightly to speak to the , short-order cook through the pass-through,0but Mary could still see at least two-thirds of her ) face, and that was enough. She felt an (almost audible click in her head as she superimposed the ' face of the redhead over the face on .record albums she still owned vinyl albums pressed in a ) year when nobody owned Sony Walkmen and+the concept of the compact disc would have - seemed like science fiction, record albums +now packed away in cardboard boxes from the) neighborhood liquor mart and stowed in ,some dusty attic alcove; record albums with names like ' Big Brother and the Holding Company, 0Cheap Thrills, and Pearl. And the face of Janis Joplin + that sweet, homely face, which had grown -old and harsh and wounded far too soon. Clarkwas , right; this woman's face was the spitting 'image of the face on those old albums. ( Except it was more than the face, and ,Mary felt fear swarm into her chest, making her heart ' feel suddenly light and stuttery and dangerous.  It was the voice. - In the ear of her memory she heard Janis's -chilling, spiraling howl at the beginning of 'Piece of . My Heart.' She laid that bluesy, boozy shout(over the redhead's Scotch-and-Marlboros voice, just + as she had laid one face over the other, ,and knew that if the waitress began to sing that song, her . voice would be identical to the voice of thedead girl from Texas. + Because she is the dead girl from Texas. /Congratulations, Mary you had to wait until you + were thirty-two, but you've finally made 0the grade; you've finally seen your first ghost.* She tried to dispute the idea, tried to )suggest to herself that a combination of factors, not the , least of them being the stress of getting +lost, had caused her to make too much of a chance + resemblance, but these rational thoughts ,had no chance against the dead certainty in her guts: she  was seeing a ghost. + Life within her body underwent a strange )and sudden sea-change. Her heart sped up from a - beat to a sprint; it felt like a pumped-up (runner bursting out of the blocks in an Olympic heat. $ Adrenaline dumped, simultaneously 'tightening her stomach and heating her diaphragm like a - swallow of brandy. She could feel sweat in .her armpits and moisture at her temples. Most - amazing of all was the way color seemed to .pour into the world, making everything the neon - around the clock-face, the stainless-steel +pass-through to the kitchen, the sprays of revolving ) color behind the juke's facade seem .simultaneously unreal and too real. She could hear the ) fans paddling the air overhead, a low, .rhythmic sound like a hand stroking silk, and smell the * aroma of old fried meat rising from the /unseen grill in the next room. And at the same time, she . suddenly felt herself on the edge of losing -her balance on the stool and swooning to the floor in a  dead faint. ( Get hold of yourself, woman! she told +herself frantically. You're having a panic attack, that's 0 all no ghosts, no goblins, no demons, just &a good old-fashioned whole-body panic attack, - you've had them before, at the start of big/exams in college, the first day of teaching at school, + and that time before you had to speak to -the PTA. You know what it is and you can deal with it. + No one's going to do any fainting around /here, so just get hold of yourself, do you hearme? - She crossed her toes inside her low-topped *sneakers and squeezed them as hard as she could, . concentrating on the sensation, using it in .an effort to draw herself back to reality and away from ) that too-bright place she knew was the threshold of a faint. . 'Honey?' Clark's voice, from far away. 'You all right?' . 'Yes, fine.' Her voice was also coming from /far away . . . but she knew it was closer than it * would have been if she'd tried to speak -even fifteen seconds ago. Still pressing her crossed toes - tightly together, she picked up the napkin +the waitress had left, wanting to feel its texture it * was another connection to the world and -another way to break the panicky, irrational (it was 0 irrational, wasn't it? surely it was) feeling .which had gripped her so strongly. She raised it toward - her face, meaning to wipe her brow with it,+and saw there was something written on the . underside in ghostly pencil strokes that had/torn the fragile paper into little puffs. Mary read this . message, printed in jagged capital letters: GET OUT WHILE YOU STILL CAN.  'Mare? What is it?' ) The waitress with the coldsore and the +restless, scared eyes was coming back with their pie. ( Mary dropped the napkin into her lap. 0'Nothing,' she said calmly. As the waitress set the plates in - front of them, Mary forced herself to catch/the girl's eyes with her own. 'Thank you,' she said. 0 'Don't mention it,' the girl mumbled, looking .directly at Mary for only a moment before her + eyes began to skate aimlessly around the room again. , 'Changed your mind about the pie, I see,' #her husband was saying in his most infuriatingly + indulgent Clark-knows-best voice. Women! -this tone said. Gosh, aren't they something? % Sometimes just leading them to the /waterhole isn't enough you gotta hold their heads down to 0 get em started. All part of the job. It isn't ,easy being a man, but I do my goldurn best. + 'Well, it looks awfully good,' she said, -marveling at the even tone of her voice. She smiled at + him brightly, aware that the redhead who /looked like Janis Joplin was keeping an eye on them. 0 'I can't get over how much she looks like '+Clark began, and this time Mary kicked his ankle . as hard as she could, no fooling around. He -drew in a hurt, hissing breath, eyes popping wide, ( but before he could say anything, she ,shoved the napkin with its penciled message into his hand. + He bent his head. Looked at it. And Mary 2found herself praying really, really praying . for the first time in perhaps twenty years. +Please, God, make him see it's not a joke. Make him ( see it's not a joke became that woman 0doesn't just look like Janis Joplin, that woman is Janis 0 Joplin, and I've got a horrible feeling about &this town, a really horrible feeling. ) He raised his head and her heart sank. %There was confusion on his face, and exasperation, but - nothing else. He opened his mouth to speak 2. . . and it went right on opening until it lookedas if ( someone had removed the pins from the place where his jaws connected. , Mary turned in the direction of his gaze. ,The short-order cook, dressed in immaculate whites - and wearing a little paper cap cocked over )one eye, had come out of the kitchen and was leaning . against the tiled wall with his arms folded (across his chest. He was talking to the redhead while * the younger waitress stood by, watching &them with a combination of terror and weariness. 1 If she doesn't get out of here soon, it'll just,be weariness, Mary thought. Or maybe apathy., The cook was almost impossibly handsome +so handsome that Mary found herself unable to % accurately assess his age. Between /thirty-five and forty-five, probably, but that was the best she ( could do. Like the redhead, he looked .familiar. He glanced up at them, disclosing a pair of wideset ( blue eyes fringed with gorgeous thick *lashes, and smiled briefly at them before returning his - attention to the redhead. He said something$that made her caw raucous laughter. & 'My God, that's Rick Nelson,' Clark 2whispered. 'It can't be, it's impossible, he died in a plane , crash six or seven years ago, but it is.' * Mary opened her mouth to say he must be &mistaken, ready to brand such an idea ludicrous ' even though she herself now found it )impossible to believe that the redheaded waitress was * anyone but the years-dead blues shouter -Janis Joplin. Before she could say anything, that click , the one which turned vague resemblance ,into positive identification came again. Clark had - been able to put the name to the face first.because Clark was nine years older, Clark had been & listening to the radio and watching )American Bandstand back when Rick Nelson had been Ricky * Nelson and songs like 'Be-Bop Baby' and -'Lonesome Town' were happening hits, not justdusty + artifacts restricted to the golden oldie *stations which catered to the now-graying baby boomers. * Clark saw it first, but now that he had /pointed it out to her, she could not unsee it. - What had the redheaded waitress said? Y'all/oughtta try the cherry pie! Rick just made it! ) There, not twenty feet away, the fatal )plane crash victim was telling a joke probably a dirty . one, from the looks on their faces to thefatal drug OD. & The redhead threw back her head and /bellowed her rusty laugh at the ceiling again. The cook 0 smiled, the dimples at the corners of his full)lips deepening prettily. And the younger waitress, , the one with the coldsore and the haunted .eyes, glanced over at Clark and Mary, as if toask Are * you watching this? Are you seeing this? . Clark was still staring at the cook and the *waitress with that alarming expression of dazed - knowledge, his face so long and drawn that 'it looked like something glimpsed in a funhouse  mirror. - They'll see that, if they haven't already, +Mary thought, and we'll lose any chance we still have / of getting out of this nightmare. I think you-better take charge of this situation, kiddo, and quick. - The question is, what are you going to do? , She reached for his hand, meaning to grab .it and squeeze it, then decided that wouldn't do . enough to alter his slack-jawed expression. +She reached further and squeezed his balls instead . . - . as hard as she dared. Clark jerked as if (someone had zapped him with a laser and swung toward , her so fast he almost fell off his stool. 1 . 'I left my wallet in the car,' she said. Her .voice sounded -Brittle and too loud in her ownears. $ 'Would you get it for me? Clark?' / She looked at him, lips smiling, eyes locked ,on his with complete concentration. She had read, * probably in some shit-intensive woman's -magazine while waiting to get her hair done, that when ) you lived with the same man for ten or %twenty years, you forged a low-grade telepathic link with / your partner. This link, the article went on +to suggest, came in mighty handy when your hubby ' was bringing the boss home to dinner )without phoning ahead or when you wanted him to bring a . bottle of Amaretto from the liquor store and$a carton of whipping cream from the supermarket. / Now she tried tried with all her might &to send a far more important message. * Go, Clark. Please go. I'll give you ten *seconds, and then come on the run. And if you're not in ( the driver's seat with the key in the 0ignition, I have a feeling we could be seriously fucked here. * And at the same time, a deeper Mary was 1saying timidly: This is all a dream, isn't it? I mean .  . . it is, isn't it? / Clark was looking at her carefully, his eyes .watering from the tweak she had given him . . . but / at least he wasn't complaining about it. His $eyes shifted to the redhead and the short-order cook , for a moment, saw they were still deep in ,their own conversation (now she appeared to be the ( one who was telling a joke), and then shifted back to her. 0 'It might have slid under the seat,' she said -in her too-loud, too-brittle voice before he could  reply. 'It's the red one.' - After another moment of silence one that0seemed to last forever Clark nodded slightly.. 'Okay,' he said, and she could have blessed -him for his nicely normal tone, 'but no fair stealing  my pie while I'm gone.' 0 'Just get back before I finish mine and you'll,be okay,' she said, and tucked a forkful of cherry + pie into her mouth. It had absolutely no /taste at all to her, but she smiled. God, yes. Smiled like ( the Miss New York Apple Queen she had once been. / Clark started to get off his stool, and then,)from somewhere outside, came a series of amplified + guitar chops not chords but only open ,strums. Clark jerked, and Mary shot out one hand to , clutch his arm. Her heart, which had been +slowing down, broke into that nasty, scary sprint  again. ' The redhead and the cook even the /younger waitress, who, thankfully, didn't look like + anyone famous glanced casually toward the plate-glass windows of the Rock-a-Boogie. 1 'Don't let it get you, hon,' the redhead said. )'They're just startin to tune up for the concert  tonight.' 0 'That's right,' the short-order cook said. He ,regarded Mary with his drop-dead blue eyes. 'We ) have a concert here in town most every night.' * Yes, Mary thought. Of course. Of course you do. + A voice both toneless and godlike rolled ,across from the town common, a voice almost loud * enough to rattle the windows. Mary, who -had been to her share of rock shows, was able to place 0 it in a clear context at once it called up /images of bored, long-haired roadies strolling around ) the stage before the lights went down, *picking their way with easy grace between the forests of ) amps and mikes, kneeling every now and (then to patch two power-cords together. 1 'Test!' this voice cried. 'Test-one, test-one, test-one!' - Another guitar chop, still not a chord but .close this time. Then a drum-run. Then a fast trumpet * riff lifted from the chorus of 'Instant )Karma,' accompanied by a light rumble of bongos. CONCERT , TONIGHT, the Norman Rockwell sign over the*Norman Rockwell town common had said, and ( Mary, who had grown up in Elmira, New #York, had been to quite a few free concerts-on-thegreen + as a child. Those really had been Norman -Rockwell concerts, with the band (made up of $ guys wearing their Volunteer Fire ,Department kit in lieu of the band uniforms they couldn't . afford) tootling their way through slightly +off-key Sousa marches and the local Barber Shop + Quartet (Plus Two) harmonizing on things +like 'Shenandoah' and 'I've Got a Gal from Kalamazoo.' , She had an idea that the concerts in Rock .and Roll Heaven might be quite different from those ( childhood musicales where she and her +friends had run around waving sparklers as twilight drew  on for night.  She had an idea that these )concerts-on-the-green might be closer to Goya than to Rockwell. 2 'I'll go get your wallet,' he said. 'Enjoy your pie.' / 'Thank you, Clark.' She put another tasteless,forkful of pie in her mouth and watched him head , for the door. He walked in an exaggerated -slow-motion saunter that struck her feverish eye as - absurd and somehow horrid: I don't have the0slightest idea that I'm sharing this room with a- couple of famous corpses, Clark's ambling, -sauntering stride was saying. What, me worry?) Hurry up! she wanted to scream. Forget .about the gunslinger strut and move your ass! * The bell jingled and the door opened as )Clark reached for the knob, and two more dead + Texans came in. The one wearing the dark -glasses was Roy Orbison. The one wearing the  hornrims was Buddy Holly. , All my exes come from Texas, Mary thought /wildly, and waited for them to lay their hands on ! her husband and drag him away. 0 ' 'Scuse me, sir,' the man in the dark glasses0said politely, and instead of grabbing Clark, he- stepped aside for him. Clark nodded without,speaking Mary was suddenly quite sure he - couldn't speak and stepped out into the sunshine. . Leaving her alone in here with the dead. And)that thought seemed to lead naturally to another . one, even more horrible: Clark was going to -drive off without her. She was suddenly sure of it. * Not because he wanted to, and certainly -not because he was a coward this situationwent " beyond questions of courage and *cowardice, and she supposed that the only reason they both . weren't gibbering and drooling on the floor ,was because it had developed so fast but because / he just wouldn't be able to do anything else.1The reptile that lived on the floor of his brain,the , one in charge of self-preservation, would .simply slither out of its hole in the mud and take charge  of things. + You've got to get out of here, Mary, the .voice in her mind the one that belonged to her own . reptile said, and the tone of that voice /frightened her. It was more reasonable than it had any , right to be, given the situation, and she ,had an idea that sweet reason might give way to shrieks  of madness at any moment. , Mary took one foot off the rail under the +counter and put it on the floor, trying to ready herself / mentally for flight as she did so, but before/she could gather herself, a narrow hand fell onher / shoulder and she looked up into the smiling, knowing face of Buddy Holly. - He had died in 1959, a piece of trivia she &remembered from that movie where Gary Busey had ) played him. 1959 was over thirty years (gone, but Buddy Holly was still a gawky twenty-threeyear- % old who looked seventeen, his eyes +swimming behind his glasses and his adam's apple ) bobbing up and down like a monkey on a .stick. He was wearing an ugly plaid jacket and a string * tie. The tie's clasp was a large chrome (steer-head. The face and the taste of a country bumpkin, % you would have said, but there was +something in the set of the mouth that was too wise, * somehow, too dark, and for a moment the /hand gripped her shoulder so tightly she could feel the * tough pads of callus on the ends of the fingers guitar calluses. - 'Hey there, sweet thang,' he said, and she .could smell clove gum on his breath. There wasa . silvery crack, hair-thin, zigzagging across .the left lens of his glasses. 'Ain't seen you roun' these  parts before.' 0 Incredibly, she was lifting another forkful of-pie toward her mouth, her hand not hesitating- even when a clot of cherry filling plopped .back onto her plate. More incredibly, she was slipping * the fork through a small, polite smile. + 'No,' she said. She was somehow positive +that she couldn't let this man see she had recognized + him; if he did, any small chance she and ,Clark might still have would evaporate. 'My husband ) and I are just . . . you know, passing through.' * And was Clark passing through even now, .desperately keeping to the posted speed limit while + the sweat trickled down his face and his .eyes rolled back and forth from the mirror to the + windshield and back to the mirror again? Was he? * The man in the plaid sportcoat grinned, +revealing teeth that were too big and much too sharp. / 'Yep, I know how that is, all right y'all .seen hoot, n now you're on your way to holler.That  about the size of it?'' / 'I thought this was hoot,' Mary said primly, +and that made the newcomers first looks at each ) other, eyebrows raised, and then shout .with laughter. The young waitress looked from one to the - other with her frightened, bloodshot eyes. 0 'That ain't half-bad,' Buddy Holly said. 'You +and y'man ought to think about hangin on a little . while, though. Stay for the concert tonight,.at least. We put on one heckuva show, if I do say so . myself.' Mary suddenly realized that the eye+behind the cracked lens had filled up with blood. As / Holly's grin widened, pushing the corners of .his eyes into a squint, a single scarlet drop spilled * over his lower lid and tracked down his ,cheek like a tear. 'Isn't that right, Roy?' - 'Yes, ma'am, it is,' the man in the shades *said. 'You have to see it to believe it.' 2 'I'm sure that's true,' Mary said faintly. Yes, ,Clark was gone. She was sure of it now. The . Testosterone Kid had run like a rabbit, and ,she supposed that soon enough the frightenedyoung - girl with the coldsore would lead her into +the back room, where her own rayon uniform and order  pad would be waiting. - 'It's somethin to write home about,' Holly /told her proudly. 'I mean to say.' The drop of blood . fell from his face and pinked onto the seat ,of the stool Clark had so recently vacated. 'Stick 1 around. You'll be glad y'did.' He looked to hisfriend for support. - The man in the dark glasses had joined the -cook and the waitresses; he dropped his hand onto * the hip of the redhead, who put her own ,hand over it and smiled up at him. Mary saw that the - nails on the woman's short, stubby fingers (had been gnawed to the quick. A Maltese cross hung + in the open V of Roy Orbison's shirt. He -nodded and flashed a smile of his own. 'Love to have * you, ma'am, and not just for the night, .either draw up and set a spell, we used to say down  home.' + 'I'll ask my husband,' she heard herself )saying, and completed the thought in her mind: If I ever  see him again, that is. 1 'You do that, sugar pie!' Holly told her. 'You /just do that very thing!' Then, incredibly, he was , giving her shoulder one final squeeze and .walking away, leaving her a clear path to the door. * Even more incredibly, she could see the -Mercedes's distinctive grille and peace-sign hood  ornament still outside. - Buddy joined his friend Roy, winked at him .(producing another bloody tear), then reached , behind Janis and goosed her. She screamed (indignantly, and as she did, a flood of maggots flew ( from her mouth. Most struck the floor -between her feet, but some clung to her lowerlip,  squirming obscenely. , The young waitress turned away with a sad,/sick grimace, raising one blocking hand to her - face. And for Mary Willingham, who suddenly-understood they had very likely been playing + with her all along, running ceased to be (something she had planned and became an instinctive / reaction. She was up and off the stool like a!shot and sprinting for the door. / 'Hey!' the redhead screamed. 'Hey, you didn't1pay for the pie! Or the sodas, either! This ain't- no Dine and Dash, you crotch! Rick! Buddy! Get her!' , Mary grabbed for the doorknob and felt it 0slip through her fingers. Behind her, she heard the , thump of approaching feet. She grabbed the/knob again, succeeded in turning it this time, and , yanked the door open so hard she tore off +the overhead bell. A narrow hand with hard calluses on + the tips of the fingers grabbed her just ,above the elbow. This time the fingers were not just + squeezing but pinching; she felt a nerve 0suddenly go critical, first sending a thin wire of pain , from her elbow all the way up to the left *side of her jaw and then numbing her arm. ' She swung her right fist back like a -short-handled croquet mallet, connecting with what felt . like the thin shield of pelvic bone above a .man's groin. There was a pained snort they could , feel pain, apparently, dead or not and -the hand holding her arm loosened. Mary tore free and ' bolted through the doorway, her hair (standing out around her head in a bushy corona of fright. + Her frantic eyes locked on the Mercedes, 1still parked on the street. She blessed Clark for( staying. And he had caught all of her ,brainwave, it seemed; he was sitting behind the wheel + instead of groveling under the passenger &seat for her wallet, and he keyed the Princess's engine ( the moment she came flying out of the Rock-a-Boogie. * The man in the flower-decorated top-hat )and his tattooed companion were standing outside the  barber shop again, watching )expressionlessly as Mary yanked open the passenger door. She + thought she now recognized Top-Hat she,had three Lynyrd Skynyrd albums, and she was) pretty sure he was Ronnie Van Zant. No +sooner had she realized that than she knew who his + illustrated companion was: Duane Allman, -killed when his motorcycle skidded beneath a tractortrailer * rig twenty years ago. He took something ,from the pocket of his denim jacket and bit into / it. Mary saw with no surprise at all that it was a peach. - Rick Nelson burst out of the Rock-a-Boogie.-Buddy Holly was right behind him, the entire left * side of his face now drenched in blood. / 'Get in!' Clark screamed at her. 'Get in the fucking car, Mary!'' - She threw herself into the passenger bucket,head-first and he was backing out before shecould , even make a try at slamming the door. The /Princess's rear tires howled and sent up cloudsof blue & smoke. Mary was thrown forward with +neck-snapping force when Clark stamped the brake, and % her head connected with the padded -dashboard. She groped behind her for the opendoor as Clark * cursed and yanked the transmission down into drive. % Rick Nelson threw himself onto the 0Princess's gray hood. His eyes blazed. His lips were parted + over impossibly white teeth in a hideous -grin. His cook's hat had fallen off, and his dark-brown - hair hung around his temples in oily snags and corkscrews. * 'You're coming to the show!' he yelled. 0 'Fuck you!' Clark yelled back. He found drive ,and floored the accelerator. The Princess's + normally sedate diesel engine gave a low (scream and shot forward. The apparition continued to . cling to the hood, snarling and grinning in at them. - 'Buckle your seatbelt!'' Clark bellowed at Mary as she sat up. ( She snatched the buckle and jammed it -home, watching with horrified fascination as the thing , on the hood reached forward with its left )hand and grabbed the windshield wiper in front of her. - It began to haul itself forward. The wiper -snapped off. The thing on the hood glanced at it, tossed - it overboard, and reached for the wiper on Clark's side. + Before he could get it, Clark tramped on -the brake again this time with both feet. Mary's - seatbelt locked, biting painfully into the +underside of her left breast. For a moment there was a 1 terrible feeling of pressure inside her, as if -her guts were being shoved up into the funnelof her . throat by a ruthless hand. The thing on the ,hood was thrown clear of the car and landed in the ) street. Mary heard a brittle crunching -sound, and blood splattered the pavement in a starburst  pattern around its head. & She glanced back and saw the others *running toward the car. Janis was leading them, her face - twisted into a hag-like grimace of hate and excitement. - In front of them, the short-order cook sat +up with the boneless ease of a puppet. The big grin  was still on his face. * 'Clark, they're coming!' Mary screamed. . He glanced briefly into the rear-view, then ,floored the accelerator again. The Princess leaped - ahead. Mary had time to see the man sitting0in the street raise one arm to shield his face, and - wished that was all she'd had time to see, 'but there was something else, as well, something * worse: beneath the shadow of his raised $arm, she saw he was still grinning. * Then two tons of German engineering hit -him and bore him under. There were crackling * sounds that reminded her of a couple of -kids rolling in a pile of autumn leaves. She clapped her / hands over her ears too late, too late and screamed. - 'Don't bother,' Clark said. He was looking /grimly into the rear-view mirror. 'We couldn't have 0 hurt him too badly he's getting up again.'  'What?' / 'Except for the tire-track across his shirt, 1he's ' He broke off abruptly, looking at her. 'Who  hit you, Mary?'  'What?' ) 'Your mouth is bleeding. Who hit you?' ( She put a finger to the corner of her +mouth, looked at the red smear on it, then tasted it. 'Not ) blood pie,' she said, and uttered a .desperate, cracked laugh. 'Get us out of here,Clark, please  get us out.' / 'You bet,' he said, and turned his attention +back to Main Street, which was wide and for the . time being, at least empty. Mary noticed *that, guitars and amps on the town common or not, , there were no power-lines on Main Street, ,either. She had no idea where Rock and Roll Heaven / was getting its power (well . . . maybe some ,idea), but it certainly wasn't from Central Oregon  Power and Light. / The Princess was gaining speed as all diesels(seem to not fast, but with a kind of relentless ( strength and chumming a dark brown +cloud of exhaust behind her. Mary caught a blurred - glimpse of a department store, a bookstore,*and a maternity shop called Rock and Roll Lullabye. + She saw a young man with shoulder-length +brown curls standing outside The Rock Em & Sock / Em Billiards Emporium, his arms folded across)his chest and one snakeskin boot propped against & the whitewashed brick. His face was +handsome in a heavy, pouting way, and Mary recognized  him at once. * So did Clark. 'That was the Lizard King /himself,' he said in a dry, emotionless voice.  'I know. I saw.' + Yes she saw, but the images were like &dry paper bursting into flame under a relentless, / focused light which seemed to fill her mind; -it was as if the intensity of her horror had turned her ) into a human magnifying glass, and she ,understood that if they got out of here, no memories of . this Peculiar Little Town would remain; the ,memories would be just ashes blowing in the wind. + That was the way these things worked, of /course. A person could not retain such hellish images, ' such hellish experiences, and remain $rational, so the mind turned into a blast-furnace, crisping & each one as soon as it was created. * That must be -why most people can still /afford the luxury of disbelieving in ghosts andhaunted ( houses, she thought. Because when the -mind is turned toward the terrifying and the irrational, ) like someone who is turned and made to -look upon the face of Medusa, it forgets. It has to forget. / And God! Except for getting out of this hell,,forgetting is the only thing in the world I want. . She saw a little cluster of people standing -on the tarmac of a Cities Service station at an - intersection near the far end of town. They,wore frightened, ordinary faces above faded ordinary . clothes. A man in an oil-stained mechanic's /coverall. A woman in a nurse's uniform white* once, maybe, now a dingy gray. An older .couple, she in orthopedic shoes and he with a hearing . aid in one ear, clinging to each other like ,children who fear they are lost in the deep dark woods. , Mary understood without needing to be told*that these people, along with the younger waitress, + were the real residents of Rock and Roll )Heaven, Oregon. They had been caught the way a  pitcher-plant catches bugs. 0 'Please get us out of here, Clark,' she said. /'Please.' Something tried to come up her throatand - she clapped her hands over her mouth, sure %she was going to upchuck. Instead of vomiting, she . uttered a loud belch that burned her throat .like fire and tasted of the pie she had eaten in the  Rock-a-Boogie. ' 'We'll be okay. Take it easy, Mary.' . The road she could no longer think of it -as Main Street now that she could see the endof + town just ahead ran past the Rock and -Roll Heaven Municipal Fire Department on the left and ' the school on the right (even in her )heightened state of terror, there seemed something existential . about a citadel of learning called the Rock /and Roll Grammar School). Three children stood in ) the playground adjacent to the school, -watching with apathetic eyes as the Princess tore past. Up + ahead, the road curved around an outcrop -with a guitar-shaped sign planted on it: YOU ARE NOW  LEAVING ROCK AND ROLL HEAVEN GOODNIGHT SWEETHEART GOODNIGHT. * Clark swung the Princess into the curve ,without slowing, and on the far side, there was a bus  blocking the road. / It was no ordinary yellow school bus like the*one they had seen in the distance as they entered ) town; this one raved and rioted with a *hundred colors and a thousand psychedelic swoops, an , oversized souvenir of the Summer of Love. -The windows flocked with butterfly decals andpeace ( signs, and even as Clark screamed and -brought his feet down on the brake, she read,with a ) fatalistic lack of surprise, the words -floating up the painted side like overfilled dirigibles: THE  MAGIC BUS. / Clark gave it his best, but wasn't quite able.to stop. The Princess slid into The Magic Bus at + ten or fifteen miles an hour, her wheels -locked and her tires smoking fiercely. There was a & hollow bang as the Mercedes hit the (tie-dyed bus amidships. Mary was thrown forward against - her safety harness again. The bus rocked on(its springs a little, but that was all. + 'Back up and go around!' she screamed at +Clark, but she was nearly overwhelmed by a . suffocating intuition that it was all over. *The Princess's engine sounded choppy, and Mary could + see steam escaping from around the front /of her crumpled hood; it looked like the breathof a ) wounded dragon. When Clark dropped the .transmission lever down into reverse, the car - backfired twice, shuddered like an old wet dog, and stalled. " Behind them, they could hear an ,approaching siren. She wondered who the town constable ) would turn out to be. Not John Lennon, %whose life's motto had been Question Authority, and not . the Lizard King, who was clearly one of the ,town's pool-shooting bad boys. Who? And did it 0 really matter? Maybe, she thought, it'll turn ,out to be Jimi Hendrix. That sounded crazy, but she . knew her rock and roll, probably better than+Clark, and she remembered reading somewherethat ( Hendrix had been a jump-jockey in the )101st Airborne. And didn't they say that ex-service  people often made the best law-enforcement officials? - You're going crazy, she told herself, then 0nodded. Sure she was. In a way it was a relief. 'What  now?' she asked Clark dully. ( He opened his door, having to put his 0shoulder into it because it had crimped a littlein the  frame. 'We run,' he said.  'What's the point?' * 'You saw them; do you want to be them?' ' That rekindled some of her fear. She .released the clasp of her seatbelt and opened her own + door. Clark came around the Princess and *took her hand. As they turned back toward The Magic . Bus, his grip tightened painfully as he saw )who was stepping off a tall man in an openthroated # white shirt, dark dungarees, and ,wrap-around sunglasses. His blue-black hair was - combed back from his temples in a lush and (impeccable duck's ass 'do. There was no mistaking . those impossible, almost hallucinatory good ,looks; not even sunglasses could hide them. The full % lips parted in a small, sly smile. , A blue-and-white police cruiser with ROCK (AND ROLL HEAVEN PD written on the doors came + around the curve and screeched to a stop ,inches from the Princess's back bumper. The man , behind the wheel was black, but he wasn't /Jimi Hendrix after all. Mary couldn't be sure, but she * thought the local law was Otis Redding. , The man in the shades and black jeans was ,now standing directly in front of them, his thumbs - hooked into his belt-loops, his pale hands /dangling like dead spiders. 'How y'all t'day?' There ' was no mistaking that slow, slightly )sardonic Memphis drawl, either. 'Want to welcome you both ) to town. Hope you can stay with us for .awhile. Town ain't much to look at, but we're neighborly, - and we take care of our own.' He stuck out +a hand on which three absurdly large rings glittered. + 'I'm the mayor round these parts. Name's Elvis Presley.'  Dusk, of a summer night. ' As they walked onto the town common, ,Mary was again reminded of the concerts she had / attended in Elmira as a child, and she felt a+pang of nostalgia and sorrow penetrate the cocoon of ( shock which her mind and emotions had ,wrapped around her. So similar . . . but so different, too. . There were no children waving sparklers; the-only kids present were a dozen or so huddled - together as far from the bandshell as they )could get, their pale faces strained and watchful. The % kids she and Clark had seen in the (grammar-school play-yard when they made their abortive run ! for the hills were among them. + And it was no quaint brass band that was ,going to play in fifteen minutes or half an hour, ) either spread across the band-shell -(which looked almost as big as the Hollywood Bowl to ' Mary's eyes) were the implements and *accessories of what had to be the world's biggest and $ loudest, judging from the amps )rock-and-roll band, an apocalyptic bebop combination that , would, at full throttle, probably be loud *enough to shatter window-glass five miles away. She ( counted a dozen guitars on stands and 'stopped counting. There were four full drum-sets . . . 3 bongos . . . congas . . . a rhythm section . . . (circular stage pop-ups where the backup singers , would stand . . . a steel grove of mikes. , The common itself was filled with folding +chairs Mary estimated somewhere between * seven hundred and a thousand but she &thought there were no more than fifty spectators / actually present, and probably less. She saw -the mechanic, now dressed in clean jeans and a - Perma-Pressed shirt; the pale, once-pretty +woman sitting next to him was probably his wife. The 0 nurse was sitting all by herself in the middle)of a long empty row. Her face was turned upward % and she was watching the first few ,glimmering stars come out. Mary looked away from this one; . she felt if she looked at that sad, longing (face too deeply, her heart would break. , Of the town's more famous residents there ,was currently no sign. Of course not; their day-jobs , were behind them now and they would all be-backstage, duding up and checking their cues.. Getting ready for tonight's rilly big shew. * Clark paused about a quarter of the way )down the grassy central aisle. A puff of evening . breeze tousled his hair, and Mary thought it)looked as dry as straw. There were lines carved into - Clark's forehead and around his mouth that .she had never seen before. He looked as if he had lost - thirty pounds since lunch in Oakridge. The *Testosterone Kid was nowhere in evidence, and Mary - had an idea he might be gone for good. She +found she didn't care much, one way or the other. * And by the way, sugarpie-honeybunch, howdo you think you look? . 'Where do you want to sit?' Clark asked. His-voice was thin and uninterested the voice of a . man who still believes he might be dreaming.% Mary spotted the waitress with the .coldsore. She was on the aisle about four rows down, now , dressed in a light-gray blouse and cotton )skirt. She had thrown a sweater over her shoulders. 2 'There,' Mary said, 'beside her.' Clark led her &in that direction without question or objection. ) The waitress looked around at Mary and )Clark, and Mary saw that her eyes had at least settled ) down tonight, which was something of a 1relief. A moment later she realized why: the girlwas , cataclysmically stoned. Mary looked down, )not wanting to meet that dusty stare any longer, and , when she did, she saw that the waitress's 'left hand was wrapped in a bulky white bandage. Mary / realized with horror that at least one finger*and perhaps two were gone from the girl's hand. + 'Hi,' the girl said. 'I'm Sissy Thomas.' 0 'Hello, Sissy. I'm Mary Willmgham. This is my husband, Clark.' , 'Pleased to meet you,' the waitress said. 0 'Your hand . . . ' Mary trailed off, not sure how to go on. . 'Frankie did it.' Sissy spoke with the deep +indifference of one who is riding the pink horse % down Dream Street. 'Frankie Lymon. ,Everyone says he was the sweetest guy you'd ever want to , meet when he was alive and he only turned *mean when he came here. He was one of the first 0 ones . . . the pioneers, I guess you'd say. I 'don't know about that. If he was sweet before, I mean. . I only know he's meaner than cat-dirt now. I/don't care. I only wish you'd gotten away, and I'd do 0 it again. Besides, Crystal takes care of me.' ) Sissy nodded toward the nurse, who had )stopped looking at the stars and was now looking at  them. 0 'Crystal takes real good care. She'll fix you -up, if you want you don't need to lose no fingers ' to want to get stoned in this town.' / 'My wife and I don't use drugs,' Clark said, sounding , pompous. , Sissy regarded him without speaking for a )few moments. Then 'she said, 'You will.' - 'When does the show start?' Mary could feel.the cocoon of shock starting to dissolve, and she $ didn't much care for the feeling.  'Soon.'  'How long do they go on?' / Sissy didn't answer for nearly a minute, and &Mary was getting ready to restate the question, + thinking the girl either hadn't heard or /hadn't understood, when she said: 'A long time.I mean, * the show will be over by midnight, they 3always are, it's a town ordinance, but still . . . they go on / a long time. Because time is different here. 4It might be . . . oh, I dunno . . . I think when theguys + really get cooking, they sometimes go on for a year or more.' - A cold gray frost began creeping up Mary's .arms and back. She tried to imagine having to sit - through a year-long rock show and couldn't /do it. This is a dream and you'll wake up, she told ( herself, but that thought, persuasive /enough as they stood listening to Elvis Presleyin the - sunlight by The Magic Bus, was now losing a$lot of its force and believability. / 'Drivin out this road here wouldn't do you no0good no how,' Elvis had told them. 'It don't go no , place but Umpqua Swamp. No roads in there,0just a lot of polk salad. And quicksand.' He had( paused then, the lenses of his shades %glittering like dark furnaces in the late-afternoon sun. 'And  other things.' + 'Bears,' the policeman who might be Otis *Redding had volunteered from behind them. 0 'Bears, yep,' Elvis agreed, and then his lips ,had curled up in the too-knowing smile Mary , remembered so well from TV and the movies.'And other things.' 0 Mary had begun: 'If we stay for the show . . .' + Elvis nodded emphatically. 'The show! Oh -yeah, you gotta stay for the show! We really rock.  You just see if we don't.' ) 'Ain't nothin but a stone fact,' the policeman had added. / 'If we stay for the show . . . can we go when it's over?' + Elvis and the cop had exchanged a glance /that had looked serious but felt like a smile. 'Well, * you know, ma'am,' the erstwhile King of 2Rock and Roll said at last, 'we're real far out inthe / boonies here, and attractin an audience is .kinda slow work . . . although once they hear us, . everybody stays around for more . . . and we/was kinda hopin you'd stick around yourselvesfor , awhile. See a few shows and kind of enjoy /our hospitality.' He had pushed his sunglasses up on , his forehead then, for a moment revealing +wrinkled, empty eyesockets. Then they were Elvis's , dark-blue eyes again, regarding them with somber interest. * 'I think,' he had said, 'you might even !decide you want to settle down.' + There were more stars in the sky now; it -was almost full dark. Over the stage, orange spots were - coming on, soft as night-blooming flowers, )illuminating the mike-stands one by one. - 'They gave us jobs,' Clark said dully. 'He +gave us jobs. The mayor. The one who looks like  Elvis Presley.' . 'He is Elvis,' Sissy Thomas said, but Clark -just went on staring at the stage. He was not- prepared to even think this yet, let alone hear it. ) 'Mary is supposed to go to work in the -Be-Bop Beauty Bar tomorrow,' he went on. 'Shehas an . English degree and a teacher's certificate, %but she's supposed to spend the next God-knows-howlong - as a shampoo girl. Then he looked at me and)he says, "Whuh bou-chew, sir? Whuh-cuore * speciality?" ' Clark spoke in a vicious ,imitation of the mayor's Memphis drawl, and at last a * genuine expression began to show in the ,waitress's stoned eyes. Mary thought it was fear. , 'You hadn't ought to make fun,' she said. .'Makin fun can get you in trouble around here . . . - and you don't want to get in trouble.' She -slowly raised her bandage-wrapped hand. Clarkstared 1 at it, wet lips quivering, until she lowered it-into her lap again, and when he spoke again, it was  in a lower voice. ( 'I told him I was a computer software &expert, and he said there weren't any computers in town . / . . although they 'sho would admiah to git a -Ticketron outlet or two.' Then the other guy laughed + and said there was a stockboy's job open down at the superette, and ' ' A bright white spotlight speared the .forestage. A short man in a sportcoat so wild it made * Buddy Holly's look tame strode into its .beam, his hands raised as if to stifle a huge comber of  applause. " 'Who's that?' Mary asked Sissy. - 'Some oldtime disc jockey who used to run a.lot of these shows. His name is Alan Tweed or . Alan Breed or something like that. We hardly/ever see him except here. I think he drinks. He% sleeps all day that I do know.' ) And as soon as the name was out of the -girl's mouth, the cocoon which had sheltered Mary , disappeared and the last of her disbelief -melted away. She and Clark had stumbled into Rock and , Roll Heaven, but it was actually Rock and .Roll Hell. This had not happened because they were + evil people; it had not happened because )the old gods were punishing them; it had happened , because they had gotten lost in the woods,,that was all, and getting lost in the woods was a thing  that could happen to anybody. ) 'Got a great show for ya tonight!' the -emcee was shouting enthusiastically into his mike. 'We 0 got the Big Bopper . . . Freddie Mercury, just-in from London-Town . . . Jim Croce . . . my main  man Johnny Ace . . . ' . Mary leaned toward the girl. 'How long have you been here, Sissy?' 2 'I don't know. It's easy to lose track of time. 2Six years at least. Or maybe it's eight. Or nine.'2 ' . . . Keith Moon of The Who . . . Brian Jones 3of the Stones . . . that cute li'l Florence Bollard+ of the Supremes . . . Mary Wells . . . ' + Articulating her worst fear, Mary asked: "'How old were you when you came?' * 'Cass Elliot . . . Janis Joplin . . . '  'Twenty-three.' , 'King Curtis . . . Johnny Bumette . . . '  'And how old are you now?' 4 'Slim Harpo . . . Bob 'Bear' Hite . . . Stevie RayVaughan . . . ' . 'Twenty-three,' Sissy told her, and on stage*Alan Freed went on screaming names at the almost * empty town common as the stars came out,-first a hundred stars, then a thousand, then too many + to count, stars that had come out of the )blue and now glittered everywhere in the black; he tolled * the names of the drug OD's, the alcohol .OD's, the plane crash victims and the shooting victims, , the ones who had been found in alleys and (the ones who had been found in swimming pools and * the ones who had been found in roadside ,ditches with steering columns poking out of their chests ) and most of their heads torn off their ,shoulders; he chanted the names of the young ones and the + old ones, but mostly they were the young *ones, and as he spoke the names of Ronnie Van Zant + and Steve Gaines, she heard the words of 0one of their songs tolling in her mind, the one that went 0 Oooh, that smell, can't you smell that smell, ,and yes, you bet, she certainly could smell that , smell; even out here, in the clear Oregon +air, she could smell it, and when she took Clark's hand + it was like taking the hand of a corpse. , 'Awwwwwwlllll RIIIIIYYYYYGHT!' Alan Freed ,was screaming. Behind him, in the darkness, + scores of shadows were trooping onto the *stage, lit upon their way by roadies with Penlites. 'Are  you ready to PAAAARTY?' * No answer from the scattered spectators (on the common, but Freed was waving his hands and ) laughing as if some vast audience were (going crazy with assent. There was just enough light left ) in the sky for Mary to see the old man 'reach up and turn off his hearing aid.  'Are you ready to BOOOOOGIE?' , This time he was answered by a demonic ,shriek of saxophones from the shadows behind him. - 'Then let's go . . . BECAUSE ROCK AND ROLL WILL NEVER DIE!' * As the show-lights came up and the band /swung into the first song of that night's long,long 0 concert 'I'll Be Doggone,' with Marvin Gaye-doing the vocal Mary thought: That's what 0 I'm afraid of. That's exactly what I'm afraid of.   -Home Delivery-  - Considering that it was probably the end of,the world, Maddie Pace thought she was doinga / good job. Hell of a good job. She thought, in-fact, that she just might be coping with the End of ( Everything better than anyone else on +earth. And she was positive she was coping better than any ! other pregnant woman on earth.  Coping.  Maddie Pace, of all people. , Maddie Pace, who sometimes couldn't sleep -if, after a visit from Reverend Johnson, she spied # a single speck of dust under the (dining-room table. Maddie Pace, who, as Maddie Sullivan, used , to drive her fiance, Jack, crazy when she $froze over a menu, debating entrees sometimes for as  long as half an hour. 0 'Maddie, why don't you just flip a coin?' he'd(asked her once after she had managed to narrow * it down to a choice between the braised ,veal and the lamb chops, and then could get no further. . 'I've had five bottles of this goddam German.beer already, and if you don't make up y'mind pretty ' damn quick, there's gonna be a drunk -lobsterman under the table before we ever get any food on  it!' + So she had smiled nervously, ordered the -braised veal, and spent most of the ride home, wondering if the chops might not have been(tastier, and therefore a better bargain despite their  slightly higher price. * She'd had no trouble coping with Jack's -proposal of marriage, however; she'd acceptedit * and him quickly, and with tremendous +relief. Following the death of her father, Maddie and . her mother had lived an aimless, cloudy sort0of life on Little Tall Island, off the coast of Maine. . 'If I wasn't around to tell them women where-to squat and lean against the wheel,' George / Sullivan had been fond of saying while in his-cups and among his friends at Fudgy's Tavern or in + the back room of Prout's Barber Shop, 'I #don't know what'n hell they'd do.' $ When her father died of a massive *coronary, Maddie was nineteen and minding the town * library weekday evenings at a salary of -$41.50 a week. Her mother minded the house or did, % that was, when George reminded her -(sometimes with a good hard shot to the ear) that she had a  house which needed minding. + When the news of his death came, the two ,women had looked at each other with silent, + panicky dismay, two pairs of eyes asking &the same question: What do we do now? - Neither of them knew, but they both felt 0felt strongly that he had been right ir, his , assessment of them: they needed him. They -were just women, and they needed him to tell them , not just what to do, but how to do it, as )well. They didn't speak of it because it embarrassed , them, but there it was they hadn't the -slightest clue as to what came next, and the idea that + they were prisoners of George Sullivan's )narrow ideas and expectations did not so much as cross + their minds. They were not stupid women, ,either of them, but they were island women. ' Money wasn't the problem; George had -believed passionately in insurance, and when he * dropped down dead during the tiebreaker ,frame of the League Bowl-Offs at Big Duke's Big Ten , in Machias, his wife had come into better 0than a hundred thousand dollars. And island lifewas * cheap, if you owned your place and kept *your garden tended and knew how to put by your own ( vegetables come fall. The problem was ,having nothing to focus on. The problem was how the , center seemed to have dropped out of their-lives when George went facedown in his Island. Amoco bowling shirt just over the foul line *of lane nineteen (and goddam if he hadn't picked up - the spare his team had needed to win, too).+With George gone their lives had become an eerie  sort of blur. . It's like being lost in a heavy fog, Maddie .thought sometimes. Only instead of looking forthe , road, or a house, or the village, or just .some landmark like that lightning-struck pine out on the . point, I am looking for the wheel. If I can /ever find it, maybe I can tell myself to squat and lean  my shoulder to it. / At last she found her wheel: it turned out tobe Jack Pace. * Women marry their fathers and men their *mothers, some say, and while such a broad * statement can hardly be true all of the )time, it was close enough for government work in , Maddie's case. Her father had been looked .upon by his peers with fear and admiration 'Don't 0 fool with George Sullivan, dear,' they'd say. .'He'll knock the nose off your face if you so much as  look at him wrong.' & It was true at home, too. He'd been -domineering and sometimes physically abusive, but he'd * also known things to want and work for, .like the Ford pick-up, the chainsaw, or those two acres - that bounded their place to the south. Pop .Cook's land. George Sullivan had been known torefer ' to Pop Cook as one armpit-stinky old .bastid, but the old man's aroma didn't change the fact that - there was quite a lot of good hardwood left'on those two acres. Pop didn't know it because he . had gone to living across the reach in 1987,/when his arthritis really went to town on him, and - George let it be known on Little Tall that &what that bastid Pop Cook didn't know wouldn't hurt & him none, and furthermore, he would .disjoint the man or woman that let light into the darkness & of Pop's ignorance. No one did, and /eventually the Sullivans got the land, and the hardwood on - it. Of course the good wood was all logged +off inside of three years, but George said that didn't . matter a tinker's damn; land always paid for-itself in the end. That was what George said and . they believed him, believed in him, and they/worked, all three of them. He said: You got to put + your shoulder to this wheel and push the )bitch, you got to push ha'ad because she don't move # easy. So that was what they did. + In those days Maddie's mother had kept a *produce stand on the road from East Head, and there , were always plenty of tourists who bought ,the vegetables she grew (which were the onesGeorge ) told her to grow, of course), and even (though they were never exactly what her mother called 'the + Gotrocks family,' they made out. Even in +years when lobstering was bad and they had to stretch . their finances even further in order to keep*paying off what they owed the bank on Pop Cook's  two acres, they made out. ' Jack Pace was a sweeter-tempered man )than George Sullivan had ever thought of being, but * his sweet temper only stretched so far, ,even so. Maddie suspected that he might get around to , what was sometimes called home correction - the twisted arm when supper was cold, the . occasional slap or downright paddling in -time; when the bloom was off the rose, so as to + speak. There was even a part of her that +seemed to expect and look forward to that. ' The women's magazines said marriages -where the man ruled the roost were a thing of the past, * and that a man who put a hard hand on a .woman should be arrested for assault, even if the man * in question was the woman in question's (lawful wedded husband. Maddie sometimes read + articles of this sort down at the beauty )shop, but doubted if the women who wrote them had the , slightest idea that places like the outer /islands even existed. Little Tall had produced one writer, . as a matter of fact Selena St. George .but she wrote mostly about politics and hadn'tbeen * back to the island, except for a single Thanksgiving dinner, in years. 1 'I'm not going to be a lobsterman all my life, ,Maddie,' Jack told her the week before they were ( married, and she believed him. A year *before, when he had asked her out for the first time (she'd - said yes almost before all the words could -get out of his mouth, and she had blushed to the roots , of her hair at the sound of her own naked /eagerness), he would have said, 'I ain't going to be a 3 lobsterman all my life.' A small change . . . but-all the difference in the world. He had been going ) to night school three evenings a week, .taking the old Island Princess over and back. He would be - dog-tired after a day of pulling pots, but -off he'd go just the same, pausing only long enough to , shower off the powerful smells of lobster *and brine and to gulp two No Doz with hot coffee. - After a while, when she saw he really meant,to stick to it, Maddie began putting up hot soup for ' him to drink on the ferry-ride over. ,Otherwise he would have had nothing but one of those nasty + red hot-dogs they sold in the Princess's snack-bar. + She remembered agonizing over the canned *soups in the store there were so many! Would * he want tomato? Some people didn't like (tomato soup. In fact, some people hated tomato soup, + even if you made it with milk instead of (water. Vegetable soup? Turkey? Cream of chicken? Her , helpless eyes roved the shelf display for *nearly ten minutes before Charlene Nedeau asked if she ( could help her with something only )Charlene said it in a sarcastic way, and Maddie guessed 0 she would tell all her friends at high school ,tomorrow, and they would giggle about it in the girls' + room, knowing exactly what was wrong with0her poor mousy little Maddie Sullivan, unable- to make up her mind over so simple a thing -as a can of soup. How she had ever been able to , decide to accept Jack Pace's proposal was /a wonder and a marvel to all of them . . . but of course + they didn't know about the wheel you had +to find, and about how, once you found it, you had to , have someone to tell you when to stoop and(where exactly to push the damned thing. - Maddie had left the store with no soup and a throbbing headache. ) When she worked up nerve enough to ask .Jack what his favorite soup was, he had said: / 'Chicken noodle. Kind that comes in the can.', Were there any others he specially liked? , The answer was no, just chicken noodle ,the kind that came in the can. That was all the soup , Jack Pace needed in his life, and all the .answer (on that particular subject, at least) that Maddie - needed in hers. Light of step and cheerful +of heart, Maddie climbed the warped wooden steps of , the store the next day and bought the four,cans of chicken noodle soup that were on theshelf. * When she asked Bob Nedeau if he had any *more, he said he had a whole damn case of the stuff  out back. - She bought the entire case and left him so +flabbergasted that he actually carried the carton out , to the truck for her and forgot all about -asking why she wanted so much a lapse for which his ( long-nosed wife and daughter took him sharply to task that evening. ( 'You just better believe it and never *forget,' Jack had said that time not long before they tied ) the knot (she had believed it, and had .never forgotten). 'More than a lobsterman. My dad says 0 I'm full of shit. He says if draggin pots was .good enough for his old man, and his old man'sold * man and all the way back to the friggin /Garden of Eden to hear him tell it, it ought tobe good 1 enough for me. But it ain't isn't, I mean 1and I'm going to do better.' His eye fell on her,and . it was a stern eye, full of resolve, but it .was a loving eye, full of hope and confidence,too. ' , 'More than a lobsterman is what I mean to *be, and more than a lobster-man's wife is what I . intend for you to be. You're going to have ahouse on the mainland.'  'Yes, Jack.' ) 'And I'm not going to have any friggin .Chevrolet.' He drew in a deep breath and took her & hands in his. 'I'm going to have an Oldsmobile.' . He looked her dead in the eye, as if daring .her to scoff at this wildly upscale ambition. She did * no such thing, of course; she said yes, (Jack, for the third or fourth time that evening. She had said - it to him thousands of times over the year -they had spent courting, and she confidently expected . to say it a million times before death ended,their marriage by taking one of them or, better, ( both of them together. Yes, Jack; had ,there ever in the history of the world been two words, , which made such beautiful music when laid side by side? - 'More than a friggin lobsterman, no matter &what my old man thinks or how much he laughs.' - He pronounced this last word in the deeply 0downeast way: loffs. 'I'm going to do it, and doyou  know who's going to help me?' . 'Yes,' Maddie had responded calmly. 'I am.' - He had laughed and swept her into his arms./'You're damned tooting, my little sweetheart,'  he'd told her. * And so they were wed, as the fairytales /usually put it, and for Maddie those first few months * months when they were greeted almost ,everywhere with jovial cries of 'Here's the newlyweds!' / were a fairytale. She had Jack to lean on,-Jack to help her make decisions, and that was/ the best of it. The most difficult household +choice thrust upon her that first year was which . curtains would look best in the living room * there were so many in the catalogue to choose . from, and her mother was certainly no help. )Maddie's mother had a hard time deciding between $ different brands of toilet paper. + Otherwise, that year consisted mostly of .joy and security the joy of loving Jack in their ) deep bed while the winter wind scraped 0over the island like the blade of a knife acrossa - breadboard, the security of having Jack to *tell her what it was they wanted, and how they were - going to get it. The loving was good so +good that sometimes when she thought of himduring , the days her knees would feel weak and her+stomach fluttery but his way of knowing things . and her growing trust in his instincts were 0even better. So for a while it was a fairytale, yes. , Then Jack died and things started getting $weird. Not just for Maddie, either.  For everybody. & Just before the world slid into its #incomprehensible nightmare, Maddie discovered she was what . her mother had always called 'preg,' a curt +word that was like the sound you made when you had + to rasp up a throatful of snot (that, at (least, was how it had always sounded to Maddie). By then % she and Jack had moved next to the *Pulsifers on Gennesault Island, which was known simply as - Jenny by its residents and those of nearby Little Tall. * She'd had one of her agonizing interior +debates when she missed her second period, and after $ four sleepless nights she made an %appointment with Dr. McElwain on the mainland. Looking / back, she was glad. If she'd waited to see if+she was going to miss a third period, Jack would not ) have had even one month of joy and she *would have missed the concerns and little kindnesses he  had showered upon her. - Looking back now that she was coping )her indecision seemed ludicrous, but her deeper , heart knew that going to have the test had+taken tremendous courage. She had wanted tobe more + convincingly sick in the mornings so she -could be surer; she had longed for nausea to drag her + from her dreams. She made the appointment(when Jack was out at work, and she went while he * was out, but there was no such thing as ,sneaking over to the mainland on the ferry; too many , people from both islands saw you. Someone .would mention casually to Jack that he or she had - seen his wife on the Princess t'other day, )and then Jack would want to know what it was all ) about, and if she'd made a mistake, he (would look at her like she was a goose. - But it hadn't been a mistake; she was with -child (and never mind that word that sounded like . someone with a bad cold trying to clear his 'throat), and Jack Pace had had exactly twenty-seven * days to look forward to his first child &before a bad swell had caught him and knocked him over - the side of My Lady-Love, the lobster boat +he had inherited from his Uncle Mike. Jack could ) swim, and he had popped to the surface &like a cork, Dave Eamons had told her miserably, but , just as he did, another heavy swell came, (slewing the boat directly into him, and although Dave * would say no more, Maddie had been born -and brought up an island girl, and she knew: could, in - fact, hear the hollow thud as the boat with-its treacherous name smashed its way into her- husband's head, letting out blood and hair +and bone and perhaps the part of his brain that had + made him say her name over and over again-in the dark of night, when he came into her. & Dressed in a heavy hooded parka and +down-filled pants and boots, Jack Pace had sunk like a , stone. They had buried an empty casket in .the little cemetery at the north end of Jenny Island, ) and the Reverend Johnson (on Jenny and -Little Tall you had your choice when it came to 0 religion: you could be a Methodist, or if that'didn't suit you, you could be a lapsed Methodist) , had presided over this empty coffin as he -had so many others. The service ended, and atthe age + of twenty-two Maddie had found herself a +widow with a bun in the oven and no one to tell her , where the wheel was, let alone when to put*her shoulder to it or how far to push it. / She thought at first she'd go back to Little /Tall, back to her mother, to wait her time, buta year / with Jack had given her a little perspective ,and she knew her mother was as lost maybeeven . more lost than she was herself, and that +made her wonder if going back would be the right  thing to do. . 'Maddie,' Jack told her again and again (he *was dead in the world but not, it seemed, inside her , head; inside her head he was as lively as 0any dead man could possibly get . . . or so she had . thought then), 'the only thing you can ever decide on is not to decide.' - Nor was her mother any better. They talked )on the phone and Maddie waited and hoped for + her mother to just tell her to come back /home, but Mrs. Sullivan could tell no one over the age of , ten anything. 'Maybe you ought to come on (back over here,' she had said once in a tentative way, ) and Maddie couldn't tell if that meant ,please come home or please don't take me up on an offer . which was really just made for form's sake. +She spent long, sleepless nights trying to decide * which it had been and succeeded only in confusing herself more. & Then the weirdness started, and the +greatest mercy was that there was only the one small ) graveyard on Jenny (and so many of the ,graves filled with those empty coffins a thing which , had once seemed pitiful to her now seemed .another blessing, a grace). There were two on Little . Tall, both fairly large, and so it began to (seem so much safer to stay on Jenny and wait. / She would wait and see if the world lived or died. , If it lived, she would wait for the baby. + And now she was, after a life of passive *obedience and vague resolves that usually passed like - dreams an hour or two after she got out of /bed, finally coping. She knew that part of thiswas ( nothing more than the effect of being %slammed with one massive shock after another, beginning + with the death of her husband and ending /with one of the last broadcasts the Pulsifers' high-tech , satellite dish had picked up: a horrified ,young boy who had been pressed into service as a CNN . reporter saying that it seemed certain that .the President of the United States, the first lady, the + Secretary of State, the honorable senior ,senator from Oregon, and the emir of Kuwait had been + eaten alive in the White House East Room by zombies. * 'I want to repeat this,' the accidental -reporter had said, the firespots of his acne standing out on + his forehead and chin like stigmata. His *mouth and cheeks had begun to twitch; his hands shook . spastically. 'I want to repeat that a bunch 'of corpses have just lunched up on the President and his * wife and a whole lot of other political +hotshots who were at the White House to eatpoached - salmon and cherries jubilee.' Then the kid ,had begun to laugh maniacally am} to scream Go, 0 Yale! Boola-boola! at the top of his voice. At.last he bolted out of the frame, leaving a CNN- news-desk untenanted for the first time in .Maddie's memory. She and the Pulsifers sat in $ dismayed silence as the news-desk (disappeared and an ad for Boxcar Willie records not - available in any store, you could get this +amazing collection only by dialing the 800 number , currently appearing on the bottom of your (screen came on. One of little Cheyne Pulsifer's * crayons was on the end table beside the *chair Maddie was sitting in, and for some crazy reason ( she picked it up and wrote the number *down on a sheet of scrap paper before Mr. Pulsifer got up ) and turned off the TV without a single word. * Maddie told them good night and thanked /them for sharing their TV and their Jiffy Pop. 0 'Are you sure you're all right, Maddie dear?' ,Candi Pulsifer asked her for the fifth time that - night, and Maddie said she was fine for the,fifth time that night, that she was coping, and Candi % said she knew she was, but she was ,welcome to the upstairs bedroom that used to be Brian's + anytime she wanted. Maddie hugged Candi, )kissed her cheek, declined with the most graceful ) thanks she could find, and was at last ,allowed to escape. She had walked the windy half mile + back to her own house and was in her own /kitchen before she realized that she still had the scrap + of paper on which she had jotted the 800 )number. She had dialed it, and there was nothing. No / recorded voice telling her all circuits were -currently busy or that the number was out of service; / no wailing siren sound that indicated a line -interruption; no boops or beeps or clicks or clacks. , Just smooth silence. That was when Maddie +knew for sure that the end had either come or was , coming. When you could no longer call the '800 number and order the Boxcar Willie records that . were not available in any store, when there /were for the first time in her living memory no- Operators Standing By, the end of the worldwas a foregone conclusion. - She felt her rounding stomach as she stood .there by the phone on the wall in the kitchen and / said it out loud for the first time, unaware /that she had spoken: 'It will have to be a home1 delivery. But that's all right, as long as you -get ready and stay ready, kiddo. You have to + remember that there just isn't any other $way. It has to be a home delivery.' % She waited for fear and none came. . 'I can cope with this just fine,' she said, (and this time she heard herself and was comforted by ! the sureness of her own words.  A baby. + When the baby came, the end of the world would itself end. . 'Eden,' she said, and smiled. Her smile was )sweet, the smile of a madonna. It didn't matter how ) many rotting dead people (maybe Boxcar *Willie among them, for all she knew) were shambling  around the face of the earth. # She would have a baby, she would &accomplish her home delivery, and the possibility of Eden  would remain. , The first reports came from an Australian +hamlet on the edge of the outback, a place with the , memorable name of Fiddle Dee. The name of *the first American town where the walking dead & were reported was perhaps even more -memorable: Thumper, Florida. The first story appeared in * America's favorite supermarket tabloid, Inside View. * DEAD COME TO LIFE IN SMALL FLORIDA TOWN!-the headline screamed. The story began with a- recap of a film called Night of the Living +Dead, which Maddie had never seen, and wenton to + mention another Macumba Love which )she had also never seen. The article was ) accompanied by three photos. One was a -still from Night of the Living Dead, showing what + appeared to be a bunch of escapees from a&loonybin standing outside an isolated farmhouse at $ night. One was from Macumba Love, -showing a blonde whose bikini top appeared to be holding , breasts the size of prize-winning gourds. (The blonde was holding up her hands and screaming in , horror at what could have been a black man/in a mask. The third purported to be a picture taken 0 in Thumper, Florida. It was a blurred, grainy &shot of a person of indeterminate sex standing in ' front of a video arcade. The article .described the figure as being 'wrapped in the cerements of the - grave,' but it could have been someone in a dirty sheet. , No big deal. BIGFOOT RAPES CHOIR BOY last +week, dead people coming back to life this week, % the dwarf mass murderer next week. / No big deal, at least, until they started to /come out in other places, as well. No big deal until , the first news film ('You may want to ask -your children to leave the room,' Tom Brokaw + introduced gravely) showed up on network %TV, decayed monsters with naked bone showing - through their dried skin, traffic accident ,victims, the morticians' concealing make-up sloughed $ away so that the ripped faces and *bashed-in skulls showed, women with their hair teased into ( dirt-clogged beehives where worms and 0beetles still squirmed and crawled, their faces alternately & vacuous and informed with a kind of /calculating, idiotic intelligence. No big deal until the first 0 horrible stills in an issue of People magazine-that had been sealed in shrink-wrap and sold with + an orange sticker that read NOT FOR SALE TO MINORS!  Then it was a big deal. , When you saw a decaying man still dressed +in the mud-streaked remnants of the Brooks , Brothers suit in which he had been buried -tearing at the throat of a screaming woman in a teeshirt $ that read PROPERTY OF THE HOUSTON ,OILERS, you suddenly realized it might be a very big  deal indeed. * That was when the accusations and saber .rattling had started, and for three weeks the entire - world had been diverted from the creatures +escaping their graves like grotesque moths escaping + diseased cocoons by the spectacle of the *two great nuclear powers on what appeared to be an ! indivertible collision course. & There were no zombies in the United %States, Communist Chinese television commentators + declared; this was a self-serving lie to +camouflage an unforgivable act of chemical warfare , against the People's Republic of China, a /more horrible (and deliberate) version of what had - happened in Bhopal, India. Reprisals would *follow if the dead comrades coming out of their ) graves did not fall down decently dead /within ten days. All US diplomatic people were expelled ) from the mother country and there were -several incidents of American tourists being beaten to  death. * The President (who would not long after ,become a Zombie Blue Plate Special himself) + responded by becoming a pot (which he had.come to resemble, having put on at least fifty) pounds since his second-term election) .calling a kettle black. The US government, he told the ( American people, had incontrovertible -evidence that the only walking-dead people in China had - been set loose deliberately, and while the &Head Panda might stand there with his slanty-eyed face - hanging out, claiming there were over eight+thousand lively corpses striding around in search of - the ultimate collectivism, we had definite .proof that there were less than forty. It was the Chinese , who had committed an act a heinous act ' of chemical warfare, bringing loyal Americans ' back to life with no urge to consume +anything but other loyal Americans, and if these Americans * some of whom had been good Democrats - did not lie down decently dead within the next + five days, Red China was going to be one large slag pit. ' NORAD was at DEFCON-2 when a British *astronomer named Humphrey Dagbolt spotted the 0 satellite. Or the spaceship. Or the creature. /Or whatever in hell's name it was. Dagbolt was not - even a professional astronomer but only an ,amateur star-gazer from the west of England  no , one in particular, you would have said ,and yet he almost certainly saved the world from some ) sort of thermonuclear exchange, if not 1flat-out atomic war. All in all not a bad week's work for a + man with a deviated septum and a bad caseof psoriasis. " At first it seemed that the two ,nose-to-nose political systems did not want to believe in what * Dagbolt had found, even after the Royal )Observatory in London had pronounced his photographs , and data authentic. Finally, however, the 1missile silos closed and telescopes all over the world ' homed in, almost grudgingly, on Star Wormwood. + The joint American/Chinese space mission ,to investigate the unwelcome newcomer liftedoff + from the Lanzhou Heights less than three &weeks after the first photographs had appeared in the , Guardian, and everyone's favorite amateur +astronomer was aboard, deviated septum and all. In - truth, it would have been hard to have kept+Dagbolt off the mission he had become a + worldwide hero, the most renowned Briton )since Winston Churchill. When asked by a reporter ' on the day before lift-off if he was )frightened, Dagbolt had brayed his oddly endearing Robert - Morley laugh, rubbed the side of his truly .enormous nose, and exclaimed, 'Petrified, dearboy!  Utterly pet-trifled!' - As it turned out, he had every reason to be petrified.  They all did. * The final sixty-one seconds of received +transmission from the Xiaoping/Truman were considered ( too horrible for release by all three 'governments involved, and so no formal communique was , ever issued. It didn't matter, of course; )nearly twenty thousand ham operators had been - monitoring the craft, and it seemed that at)least nineteen thousand of them had been rolling tape - when the craft had been well, was there *really any other word for it? invaded. + Chinese voice: Worms! It appears to be a massive ball of 0 American voice: Christ! Look out! It's coming for us! / Dagbolt: Some sort of extrusion is occurring.The portside window is / Chinese voice: Breach! Breach! To your suits, my friends!  (Indecipherable gabble.) . American voice: and appears to be eating its way in - Female Chinese voice (Ching-Ling Soong): Ohstop it stop the eyes  (Sound of an explosion.) ' Dagbolt: Explosive decompression has /occurred. I see three er, four dead, and there are , worms . . . everywhere there are worms ( American voice: Faceplate! Faceplate! Faceplate!  (Screaming.) ' Chinese voice: Where is my mamma? Oh dear, where is my mamma? , (Screams. Sounds like a toothless old man sucking up mashed potatoes.) . Dagbolt: The cabin is full of worms what .appear to be worms, at any rate which is to. say that they really are worms, one realizes, that have apparently extruded themselves from . the main satellite what we took to be /which is to say one means the cabin is full of ) floating body parts. These space-worms (apparently excrete some sort of acid ( (Booster rockets fired at this point; .duration of the burn is 7.2 seconds. This may have been an + attempt to escape or possibly to ram the -central object. In either case, the maneuver did not work. * It seems likely that the blast-chambers 'themselves were clogged with worms and Captain Lin + Yang or whichever officer was then in ,charge believed an explosion of the fuel tanks + themselves to be imminent as a result of the clog. Hence the shutdown.) - American voice: Oh my Christ they're in my %head, they're eating my fuckin br  (Static.) . Dagbolt: I believe that prudence dictates a %strategic retreat to the aft storage compartment; the - rest of the crew is dead. No question about'that. Pity. Brave bunch. Even that fat American . who kept rooting around in his nose. But in another sense I don't think  (Static.) / Dagbolt: dead after all because Ching-Ling'Soong or rather, Ching-Ling Soong's ) severed head, one means to say just ,floated past me, and her eyes were open and blinking. * She appeared to recognize me, and to  (Static.)  Dagbolt: keep you  (Explosion. Static.) . Dagbolt: around me. I repeat, all around *me. Squirming things. They I say, does anyone  know if - (Dagbolt, screaming and cursing, then just /screaming. Sounds of toothless old man again.)  (Transmission ends.) % The Xiaoping/Truman exploded three ,seconds later. The extrusion from the rough ball # nicknamed Star Wormwood had been (observed from better than three hundred telescopes / earthside during the short and rather pitiful,conflict. As the final sixty-one seconds of , transmission began, the craft began to be ,obscured by something that certainly looked like . worms. By the end of the final transmission,1the craft itself could not be seen at all onlythe , squirming mass of things that had attached*themselves to it. Moments after the final explosion, a - weather satellite snapped a single picture -of floating debris, some of which was almost certainly ' chunks of the worm-things. A severed 'human leg clad in a Chinese space suit floating among + them was a good deal easier to identify. - And in a way, none of it even mattered. The)scientists and political leaders of both countries ' knew exactly where Star Wormwood was -located: above the expanding hole in earth's ozone , layer. It was sending something down from 'there, and it was not Flowers by Wire. + Missiles came next. Star Wormwood jigged -easily out of their way and then returned to its  place over the hole. / On the Pulsifers' satellite-assisted TV, more,dead people got up and walked, but now there- was a crucial change. In the beginning the .zombies had only bitten living people who got too / close, but in the weeks before the Pulsifers'*high-tech Sony started showing only broad bands of - snow, the dead folks started trying to get close to the living folks. * They had, it seemed, decided they liked what they were biting. , The final effort to destroy the thing was )made by the United States. The President approved an * attempt to destroy Star Wormwood with a .number of orbiting nukes, stalwartly ignoring his , previous statements that America had never*put atomic SDI weapons in orbit and never would. . Everyone else ignored them, as well. Perhaps(they were too busy praying for success. . It was a good idea, but not, unfortunately, ,a workable one. Not a single missile from a single ) SDI orbiter fired. This was a total of twenty-four flat-out failures. ! So much for modern technology. , And then, after all these shocks on earth -and in heaven, there was the business of the one little * graveyard right here on Jenny. But even *that didn't seem to count much for Maddie because, . after all, she had not been there. With the /end of civilization now clearly at hand and theisland 0 cut off thankfully cut off, in the opinion /of the residents from the rest of the world,old & ways had reasserted themselves with ,unspoken but inarguable force. By then they all knew what - was going to happen; it was only a question,of when. That, and being ready when it did.  Women were excluded. , It was Bob Daggett, of course, who drew up-the watch roster. That was only right, since Bob had + been head selectman on Jenny for about a +thousand years. The day after the death of the . President (the thought of him and the first -lady wandering witlessly through the streets of ( Washington, DC, gnawing on human arms .and legs like people eating chicken legs at a picnic - was not mentioned; it was a little much to -bear, even if the bastid and his blonde wife were + Democrats), Bob Daggett called the first %men-only Town Meeting on Jenny since sometime - before the Civil War. Maddie wasn't there, ,but she heard. Dave Eamons told her all she needed  to know. . 'You men all know the situation,' Bob said. ,He looked as yellow as a man with jaundice, and * people remembered his daughter, the one 1still living at home on the island, was only one of four. / The other three were other places . . . whichwas to say, on the mainland. . But hell, if it came down to that, they all had folks on the mainland. + 'We got one boneyard here on Jenny,' Bob ,continued, 'and nothin ain't happened there yet, but , that don't mean nothin will. Nothin ain't /happened yet lots of places . . . but it seems like once it * starts, nothin turns to somethin pretty goddam quick.' , There was a rumble of assent from the men *gathered in the grammar-school gymnasium, - which was the only place big enough to hold*them. There were about seventy of them in all, , ranging in age from Johnny Crane, who had +just turned eighteen, to Bob's great-uncle Frank, ' who was eighty, had a glass eye, and ,chewed tobacco. There was no spittoon in thegym, of * course, so Frank Daggett had brought an -empty mayonnaise jar to spit his juice into. He did so  now. ' 'Git down to where the cheese binds, 0Bobby,' he said. 'You ain't got no office to run for, and  time's a-wastin.' ) There was another rumble of agreement, %and Bob Daggett flushed. Somehow his great-uncle * always managed to make him look like an /ineffectual fool, and if there was anything in the world & he hated worse than looking like an 0ineffectual fool, it was being called Bobby. He owned , property, for Chrissake! And he supported ,the old fart bought him his goddam chew! . But these were not things he could say; old (Frank's eyes were like pieces of flint. 0 'Okay,' Bob said curtly. 'Here it is. We want .twelve men to a watch. I'm gonna set a roster in , just a couple minutes. Four-hour shifts.' 0 'I can stand watch a helluva lot longer'n four+hours!' Matt Arsenault spoke up, and Davey told ) Maddie that Bob said after the meeting ,that no welfare-slacker like Matt Arsenault would have + had the nerve to speak up like that in a .meeting of his betters if that old man hadn't called him , Bobby, like he was a kid instead of a man .three months shy of his fiftieth birthday, in front of all  the island men. ) 'Maybe you can n maybe you can't,' Bob -said, 'but we got plenty of warm bodies, and nobody's % gonna fall asleep on sentry duty.'  'I ain't gonna ' 0 'I didn't say you,' Bob said, but the way his -eyes rested on Matt Arsenault suggested that he / might have meant him. 'This is no kid's game.Sit down and shut up.' ) Matt Arsenault opened his mouth to say *something more, then looked around at the other men / including old Frank Daggett and wisely held his peace. / 'If you got a rifle, bring it when it's your /trick,' Bob continued. He felt a little better with , Arsenault more or less back in his place. 1'Unless it's a twenty-two, that is. If you ain't got ) somethin bigger'n that, come n get one here.' / 'I didn't know the school kep a supply of em ,handy,' Cal Partridge said, and there was a ripple  of laughter. 2 'It don't now, but it will,' Bob said, 'because )every man jack of you with more than one rifle - bigger than a twenty-two is gonna bring it ,here.' He looked at John Wirley, the school principal. ' . 'Okay if we keep em in your office, John?'' & Wirley nodded. Beside him, Reverend &Johnson was drywashing his hands in a distraught way. 0 'Shit on that,' Orrin Campbell said. 'I got a +wife and two kids at home. Am I s'posed to leave + em with nothin to defend themselves with (if a bunch of cawpses come for an early Thanksgiving  dinner while I'm on watch?' 0 'If we do our job at the boneyard, none will,'/Bob replied stonily. 'Some of you got handguns.* We don't want none of those. Figure out *which women can shoot and which can't and give em ( the pistols. We'll put em together in bunches.' , 'They can play Beano,' old Frank cackled, /and Bob smiled, too. That was more like it, by the  Christ. * 'Nights, we're gonna want trucks posted -around so we got plenty of light.' He looked over at * Sonny Dotson, who ran Island Amoco, the (only gas station on Jenny. Sonny's main business / wasn't gassing cars and trucks shit, there.was no place much on the island to drive, and you , could get your go ten cents cheaper on the0mainland but filling up lobster boats and the- motorboats he ran out of his jackleg marina*in the summer. 'You gonna supply the gas, Sonny?'  'Am I gonna get cash slips?' / 'You're gonna get your ass saved,' Bob said. +'When things get back to normal if they ever 0 do I guess you'll get what you got coming.'+ Sonny looked around, saw only hard eyes, -and shrugged. He looked a bit sullen, but in truth he + looked more confused than anything, Daveytold Maddie the next day. . 'Ain't got n'more'n four hunnert gallons of gas,' he said. 'Mostly diesel.' 0 'There's five generators on the island,' Burt 'Dorfman said (when Burt spoke everyone listened; ( as the only Jew on the island, he was )regarded as a creature both quixotic and fearsome, like an * oracle that works about half the time). 4'They all run on diesel. I can rig lights if I have to.' / Low murmurs. If Burt said he could do it, he .could. He was a Jewish electrician, and there was / a feeling on the outer islands, unarticulated+but powerful, that that was the best kind. . 'We're gonna light that graveyard up like a friggin stage,' Bob said. + Andy Kingsbury stood up. 'I heard on the )news that sometimes you can shoot one of them . things in the head and it'll stay down, and sometimes it won't.' / 'We've got chainsaws,' Bob said stonily, 'and,what won't stay dead . . . why, we can make sure  it won't move too far alive.' - And, except for making out the duty roster,that was pretty much that. - Six days and nights passed and the sentries,posted around the little graveyard on Jenny were 3 starting to feel a wee bit silly ('I dunno if I'm0standin guard or pullin my pud,' Orrin Campbell * said one afternoon as a dozen men stood )around the cemetery gate, playing Liars' Poker) when it * happened . . . and when it happened, it happened fast. - Dave told Maddie that he heard a sound like+the wind wailing in the chimney on a gusty night, , and then the gravestone marking the final -resting place of Mr. and Mrs. Fournier's boy Michael, , who had died of leukemia at seventeen (bad.go, that had been, him being their only child and - them being such nice people and all), fell ,over. A moment later a shredded hand with a mosscaked , Yarmouth Academy class ring on one finger ,rose out of the ground, shoving through the . tough grass. The third finger had been torn off in the process. . The ground heaved like (like the belly of a )pregnant woman getting ready to drop her load, . Dave almost said, and hastily reconsidered) /a big wave rolling into a close cove, and then the . boy himself sat up, only he wasn't anything -you could really recognize, not after almost two ) years in the ground. There were little +splinters of wood sticking out of what was left of his face, - Davey said, and pieces of shiny blue cloth 'in the draggles of his hair. 'That was coffin-linin,' & Davey told her, looking down at his 2restlessly twining hands. 'I know that as well's Iknow , m'own name.' He paused, then added: 'Thank)Christ Mike's dad dint have that trick.'  Maddie had nodded. . The men on guard, bullshit-scared as well as(revolted, opened fire on the reanimated corpse of , the former high-school chess champion and (All-Star second baseman, tearing him to shreds. / Other shots, fired in wild panic, blew chips +off his marble gravestone, and it was just luck that ) the armed men had been loosely grouped ,together when the festivities commenced; if they had ) been divided up into two wings, as Bob ,Daggett had originally intended, they would very likely . have slaughtered each other. As it was, not )a single islander was hurt, although Bud Meechum . found a rather suspicious-looking hole torn )in the sleeve of his shirt the next day. * 'Prob'ly wa'ant nothin but a blackberry ,thorn, just the same,' he said. 'There's an almighty lot of . em out at that end of the island, you know.')No one would dispute that, but the black smudges + around the hole made his frightened wife .think that his shirt had been torn by a thorn with a  pretty large caliber. / The Fournier kid fell back, most of him lying4still, other parts of him still twitching . . . but by ( then the whole graveyard seemed to be ,rippling, as if an earthquake were going on there but  only there, noplace else. + Just about an hour before dusk, this had happened. * Burt Dorfman had rigged up a siren to a -tractor battery, and Bob Daggett flipped the switch. , Within twenty minutes, most of the men in "town were at the island cemetery. + Goddam good thing, too, Dave Eamons said,(because a few of the deaders almost got away. . Old Frank Daggett, still two hours from the .heart attack that would carry him off just as the + excitement was dying down, organized the +new men so they wouldn't shoot each other, either, * and for the final ten minutes the Jenny .boneyard sounded like Bull Run. By the end of the - festivities, the powder smoke was so thick .that some men choked on it. The sour smell of vomit ' was almost heavier than the smell of 0gunsmoke . . . it was sharper, too, and lingeredlonger. & And still some of them wriggled and .squirmed like snakes with broken backs the fresher ones,  for the most part. , 'Burt,' Frank Daggett said. 'You got them chainsaws?' * 'I got em,' Burt said, and then a long, ,buzzing sound came out of his mouth, a soundlike a . cicada burrowing its way into tree bark, as *he dry-heaved. He could not take his eyes from the $ squirming corpses, the overturned ,gravestones, the yawning pits from which thedead had come.  'In the truck.' / 'Gassed up?' Blue veins stood out on Frank's ancient, hairless skull. / 'Yeah.' Burl's hand was over his mouth. 'I'm sorry.' / 'Work y'fuckin gut all you want,' Frank said /briskly, 'but toddle off n get them saws while you 4 do. And you . . . you . . . you . . . you . . . ' * The last 'you' was his grandnephew Bob. . 'I can't, Uncle Frank,' Bob said sickly. He )looked around and saw five or six of his friends and . neighbors lying crumpled in the tall grass. ,They had not died; they had swooned. Most ofthem . had seen their own relatives rise out of the-ground. Buck Harkness over there lying by an aspen + tree had been part of the crossfire that )had cut his late wife to ribbons; he had fainted after - observing her decayed, worm-riddled brains )exploding from the back of her head in a grisly gray  splash. 'I can't. I c ' . Frank's hand, twisted with arthritis but as (hard as stone, cracked across his face. + 'You can and you will, chummy,' he said. % Bob went with the rest of the men. ( Frank Daggett watched them grimly and *rubbed his chest, which had begun to send cramped . throbs of pain all the way down his left arm.to the elbow. He was old but he wasn't stupid,and he * had a pretty good idea what those pains were, and what they meant. + 'He told me he thought he was gonna have ,a blow-out, and he tapped his chest when he said it,' + Dave went on, and placed his hand on the ,swell of muscle over his own left nipple to  demonstrate. ( Maddie nodded to show she understood. . 'He said, "If anything happens to me before -this mess is cleaned up, Davey, you and Burt and - Orrin take over. Bobby's a good boy, but I /think he may have lost his guts for at least a little - while . . . and you know, sometimes when a -man loses his guts, they don't come back." ' , Maddie nodded again, thinking how grateful.she was how very, very grateful that she was not a man. . 'So then we did it,' Dave said. 'We cleaned up the mess.' , Maddie nodded a third time, but this time 'she must have made some sound, because Dave told / her he would stop if she couldn't bear it; hewould gladly stop. 0 'I can bear it,' she said quietly. 'You might -be surprised how much I can bear, Davey.' He - looked at her quickly, curiously, when she +said that, but Maddie had averted her eyes before he  could see the secret in them. , Dave didn't know the secret because no one'on Jenny knew. That was the way Maddie wanted it, - and the way she intended to keep it. There *had been a time when she had, perhaps, in the blue ) darkness of her shock, pretended to be )coping. And then something happened that made her - cope. Four days before the island cemetery (vomited up its corpses, Maddie Pace was faced with  a simple choice: cope or die. + She had been sitting in the living room, /drinking a glass of the blueberry wine she and Jack + had put up during August of the previous *year a time that now seemed impossibly distant & and doing something so trite it was +laughable. She was Knitting Little Things. Booties, in fact. + But what else was there to do? It seemed ,that no one would be going across the reach to the Wee . Folks store at the Ellsworth Mall for quite some time. + Something had thumped against the window.. A bat, she thought, looking up. Her needles ,paused in her hands, though. It seemed that ) something bigger had moved jerkily out *there in the windy dark. The oil lamp was turned up + high and kicking too much reflection off -the panes for her to be sure. She reached to turn it down & and the thump came again. The panes 0shivered. She heard a little pattering of dried putty falling ) on the sash. Jack had been planning to 'reglaze all the windows this fall, she remembered, and * then thought, Maybe that's what he came (back for. That was crazy, he was on the bottom of the  ocean, but . . . , She sat with her head cocked to one side, ,her knitting now motionless in her hands. A little + pink bootie. She had already made a blue .set. All of a sudden it seemed she could hear so much. ) The wind. The faint thunder of surf on 'Cricket Ledge. The house making little groaning sounds, ' like an elderly woman making herself -comfortable in bed. The tick of the clock in the hallway. . 'Jack?' she asked the silent night that was 1now no longer silent. 'Is it you, dear?' Then the+ living-room window burst inward and what 'came through was not really Jack but a skeleton with , a few mouldering strings of flesh hanging from it. / His compass was still around his neck. It hadgrown a beard of moss. + The wind flapped the curtains in a cloud -above him as he sprawled, then got up on his hands and - knees and looked at her from black sockets in which barnacles had grown. ) He made grunting sounds. His fleshless )mouth opened and the teeth chomped down. He was , hungry . . . but this time chicken noodle -soup would not serve. Not even the kind that came in the  can. ) Gray stuff hung and swung beyond those 'dark barnacle-encrusted holes, and she realized she - was looking at whatever remained of Jack's ,brain. She sat where she was, frozen, as he got up + and came toward her, leaving black kelpy +tracks on the carpet, fingers reaching. He stank of salt - and fathoms. His hands stretched. His teeth)chomped mechanically up and down. Maddie saw he ! was wearing the remains of the +black-and-red-checked shirt she had bought him at L. L. Bean's / last Christmas. It had cost the earth, but he*had said again and again how warm it was, and look - how well it had lasted, how much of it was 0left even after being under water all this time.* The cold cobwebs of bone which were all )that remained of his fingers touched her throat + before the baby kicked in her stomach .for the first time and her shocked horror, which she - had believed to be calmness, fled, and she +drove one of the knitting needles into the thing's eye. * Making horrid thick choking noises that *sounded like the suck of a swill pump, he staggered - backward, clawing at the needle, while the ,half-made pink bootie swung in front of the cavity , where his nose had been. She watched as a -sea slug squirmed from that nasal cavity and onto the . bootie, leaving a trail of slime behind it. / Jack fell over the end table she'd gotten at -a yard sale just after they had been married  she , hadn't been able to make her mind up about-it, had been in agonies about it, until Jack finally / said either she was going to buy it for their.living room or he was going to give the biddy - running the sale twice what she was asking -for the goddam thing and then bust it up into firewood with  with the / He struck the floor and there was a brittle, ,cracking sound as his febrile, fragile form broke in ( two. The right hand tore the knitting +needle, slimed with decaying brain tissue, from his eyesocket , and tossed it aside. His top half crawled 'toward her. His teeth gnashed steadily together. - She thought he was trying to grin, and then)the baby kicked again and she remembered how . uncharacteristically tired and out of sorts +he'd sounded at Mabel Hanratty's yard-sale that day: , Buy it, Maddie, for Chrissake! I'm tired! )Want to go home and get m'dinner! If you don't get a / move on, I'll give the old bat twice what she-wants and bust it up for firewood with my ' Cold, dank hand clutching her ankle; /polluted teeth poised to bite. To kill her and kill the . baby. She tore loose, leaving him with only -her slipper, which he chewed on and then spatout. ( When she came back from the entry, he /was crawling mindlessly into the kitchen at least - the top half of him was with the compass+dragging on the tiles. He looked up at the sound of ) her, and there seemed to be some idiot +question in those black eye-sockets before she brought the . ax whistling down, cleaving his skull as he (had threatened to cleave the end table. 0 His head fell in two pieces, brains dribbling -across the tile like spoiled oatmeal, brains that ) squirmed with slugs and gelatinous sea ,worms, brains that smelled like a woodchuck exploded + with gassy decay in a high-summer meadow./ Still his hands clashed and clittered on the ,kitchen tiles, making a sound like beetles. + She chopped . . . chopped . . . chopped. & At last there was no more movement. - A sharp pain rippled across her midsection -and for a moment she was gripped by terrible 0 panic: Is it a miscarriage? Am I going to have.a miscarriage? But the pain left and the baby + kicked again, more strongly than before. . She went back into the living room, carrying#an ax that now smelled like tripe. ) His legs had somehow managed to stand. . 'Jack, I loved you so much,' she said, 'but .this isn't you.' She brought the ax down in a . whistling arc that split him at the pelvis, +sliced the carpet, and drove deep into the solid oak floor  beneath. * The legs separated, trembled wildly for ,almost five minutes, and then began to grow quiet. At ( last even the toes stopped twitching. . She carried him down to the cellar piece by ,piece, wearing her oven gloves and wrapping each . piece with the insulating blankets Jack had )kept in the shed and which she had never thrown * away he and the crew threw them over /the pots on cold days so the lobsters wouldn't freeze. - Once a severed hand closed upon her wrist. .She stood still and waited, her heart drumming0 heavily in her chest, and at last it loosened .again. And that was the end of it. The end of him. ) There was an unused cistern, polluted, ,below the house Jack had been meaning to fill it in. - Maddie slid the heavy concrete cover aside ,so that its shadow lay on the earthen floor like a . partial eclipse and then threw the pieces of*him down, listening to the splashes. When everything ' was gone, she worked the heavy cover back into place. ) 'Rest in peace,' she whispered, and an 'interior voice whispered back that her husband was + resting in pieces, and then she began to 0cry, and her cries turned to hysterical shrieks,and she - pulled at her hair and tore at her breasts .until they were bloody, and she thought, I am insane, ' this is what it's like to be insa , But before the thought could be completed,.she had fallen down in a faint, and the faint , became a deep sleep, and the next morning she felt all right.  She would never tell, though.  Never. / 'I can bear it,' she told Dave Eamons again, *thrusting aside the image of the knitting needle with ) the bootie swinging from the end of it ,jutting out of the kelp-slimed eyesocket of the thing, ' which had once been her husband, and /co-creator of the child in her womb. 'Really.' , So he told her, perhaps because he had to ,tell someone or go mad, but he glossed over the ) worst parts. He told her that they had 'chainsawed the corpses that absolutely refused to return to / the land of the dead, but he did not tell her+that some parts had continued to squirm hands * with no arms attached to them clutching *mindlessly, feet divorced from their legs digging at the - bullet-chewed earth of the graveyard as if +trying to run away and that these parts had been ) doused with diesel fuel and set afire. .Maddie did not have to be told this part. She had seen the  pyre from the house. / Later, Gennesault Island's one firetruck had -turned its hose on the dying blaze, although there , wasn't much chance of the fire spreading, -with a brisk easterly blowing the sparks off Jenny's , seaward edge. When there was nothing left .but a stinking, tallowy lump (and still there were / occasional bulges in this mass, like twitches0in a tired muscle), Matt Arsenault fired up his old , D-9 Caterpillar above the nicked steel /blade and under his faded pillowtick engineer'scap, + Matt's face had been as white as cottage *cheese and plowed the whole hellacious mess under. ) The moon was coming up when Frank took ,Bob Daggett, Dave Eamons, and Cal Partridge aside.  It was Dave he spoke to. - 'I knew it was coming, and here it is,' he said. ) 'What are you talking about, Unc?' Bob asked. , 'My heart,' Frank said. 'Goddam thing has thrown a rod.'  'Now, Uncle Frank ' - 'Never mind Uncle Frank this n Uncle Frank .that,' the old man said. 'I ain't got time to listen to * you play fiddlyfuck on the mouth-organ. /Seen half my friends go the same way. It ain't no day at / the races, but it could be worse; beats hell out of getting whacked with the cancer-stick. / 'But now there's this other sorry business to/mind, and all I got to say on that subject is, when I , go down I intend to stay down. Cal, stick 0that rifle of yours in my left ear. Dave, when I raise my . left arm, you sock yours into my armpit. And.Bobby, you put yours right over my heart. I'm . gonna say the Lord's Prayer, and when I hit ,amen, you three fellows are gonna pull your triggers  at the same time.' ( 'Uncle Frank ' Bob managed. He was reeling on his heels. . 'I told you not to start in on that,' Frank +said. 'And don't you dare faint on me, you friggin , pantywaist. Now get your country butt overhere.'  Bob did. - Frank looked around at the three men, their,faces as white as Matt Arsenault's had been when + he drove the 'dozer over men and women he,had known since he was a kid in short pants and  Buster Browns. 0 'Don't you boys frig this up,' Frank said. He .was speaking to all of them, but his eye might( have been particularly trained on his ,grandnephew. 'If you feel like maybe you're gonna . backslide, just remember I'd'a done the samefor any of you.' 0 'Quit with the speech,' Bob said hoarsely. 'I love you, Uncle Frank.' , 'You ain't the man your father was, Bobby *Daggett, but I love you, too,' Frank said calmly, and . then, with a cry of pain, he threw his left -hand up over his head like a guy in New York who has ) to have a cab in a rip of a hurry, and -started in with his last prayer. 'Our Father who art in heaven 0 Christ, that hurts! hallow'd be Thy name. oh, son of a gun! Thy kingdom come, Thy 3 will be done, on earth as it . . . as it . . . ' ) Frank's upraised left arm was wavering /wildly now. Dave Eamons, with his rifle socked into ) the old geezer's armpit, watched it as -carefully as a logger would watch a big tree that looked like . it meant to do evil and fall the wrong way. *Every man on the island was watching now. Big , beads of sweat had formed on the old man's/pallid face. His lips had pulled back from the even, , yellowy-white of his Roebuckers, and Dave +had been able to smell the Polident on his breath. 2 ' . . . as it is in heaven!' the old man jerked "out. 'Lead us not into temptation  .butdeliverusfromevilohshitonitforeverand-eve- rAMEN!' ( All three of them fired, and both Cal -Partridge and Bob Daggett fainted, but Frank never did  try to get up and walk. + Frank Daggett had meant to stay dead, andthat was just what he did. , Once Dave started that story he had to go .on with it, and so he cursed himself for ever starting. , He'd been right the first time; it was no story for a pregnant woman. - But Maddie had kissed him and told him she *thought he had done wonderfully, and that Frank * Daggett had done wonderfully, too. Dave .went out feeling a little dazed, as if he had just been ( kissed on the cheek by a woman he had never met before. ' In a very real sense, that was true. * She watched him go down the path to the -dirt track that was one of Jenny's two roads and turn ' left. He was weaving a little in the 'moonlight, weaving with tiredness, she thought, but reeling - with shock, as well. Her heart went out to 1him . . . to all of them. She had wanted to tell Dave she ) loved him and kiss him squarely on the -mouth instead of just skimming his cheek with her lips, + but he might have taken the wrong meaning,from something like that, even though he was boneweary + and she was almost five months pregnant. + But she did love him, loved all of them, ,because they had gone through hell in order to make 2 this little lick of land forty miles out in the Atlantic safe for her.  And safe for her baby. 2 'It will be a home delivery,' she said softly as,Dave went out of sight behind the dark hulk of 1 the Pulsifers' satellite dish. Her eyes rose to3the moon. 'It will be a home delivery . . . and it will  be fine.'   -Rainy Season-  , It was half past five in the afternoon by -the time John and Elise Graham finally found their way 1 into the little village that lay at the center .of Willow, Maine, like a fleck of grit at the center of / some dubious pearl. The village was less than-five miles from the Hempstead Place, but they( took two wrong turns on the way. When -they finally arrived on Main Street, both of them were # hot and out of sorts. The Ford's -air-conditioner had dropped dead on the trip from St. Louis, and . it felt about a hundred and ten outside. Of 0course it wasn't anything at all like that, JohnGraham - thought. As the old-timers said, it wasn't ,the heat, it was the humidity. He felt that today it would , be almost possible to reach out and wring /warm dribbles of water from the air itself. Thesky * overhead was a clear and open blue, but .that high humidity made it feel as if it were going to rain 0 any minute. Fuck that it felt as if it wereraining already. , 'There's the market Milly Cousins told us !about,' Elise said, and pointed. / John grunted. 'Doesn't exactly look like the supermarket of the future.' / 'No,' Elise agreed carefully. They were both ,being careful. They had been married almost two - years and they still loved each other very )much, but it had been a long trip across country from / St. Louis, especially in a car with a broken .radio and air-conditioner. John had every hopethey - would enjoy the summer here in Willow (they*ought to, with the University of Missouri picking , up the tab), but he thought it might take ,as long as a week for them to settle in and settle down. ) And when the weather turned yellow-dog 0hot like this, an argument could spin itself outof thin + air. Neither of them wanted that kind of start to their summer. , John drove slowly down Main Street toward ,the Willow General Mercantile and Hardware. . There was a rusty sign with a blue eagle on -it hanging from one corner of the porch, and he & understood this was also the postal *substation. The General Mercantile looked sleepy in the * afternoon light, with one single car, a +beat-to-shit Volvo, parked beside the sign advertising ) ITALIAN SANDWICHES PIZZA GROCS FISHING ,LICENCES, but compared with the rest of the . town, it seemed to be all but bursting with .life. There was a neon beer sign fizzing away in the , window, although it would not be dark for -almost three hours yet. Pretty radical, John thought. - Sure hope the owner cleared that sign with ,the Board of Selectmen before he put it in. . 'I thought Maine turned into Vacationland inthe summer,' Elise murmured. * 'Judging from what we've seen so far, I .think Willow must be a little off the tourist track,' he  replied. * They got out of the car and mounted the /porch steps. An elderly man in a straw hat sat in a + rocker with a cane seat, looking at them 0from shrewd little blue eyes. He was fiddling a homemade / cigarette together and dribbling little bits ,of tobacco on the dog which lay crashed out at * his feet. It was a big yellow dog of no 0particular make or model. Its paws lay directly beneath . one of the rocker's curved runners. The old *man took no notice of the dog, seemed not even to . realize it was there, but the runner stopped.a quarter of an inch from the vulnerable paws each ) time the old man rocked forward. Elise &found this unaccountably fascinating. ( 'Good day to ye, lady n man,' the old gentleman said. - 'Hello,' Elise answered, and offered him a small, tentative smile.  'Hi,' John said. 'I'm ' / 'Mr. Graham,' the old man finished placidly. +'Mr. and Missus Graham. Ones that took the + Hempstead Place for the summer. Heard youwas writin some kind of book.' , 'On the in-migration of the French during -the seventeenth century,' John agreed. 'Word sure  gets around, doesn't it?' / 'It do travel,' the old party agreed. 'Small -town, don'tcha know.' He stuck the cigarette in his ' mouth, where it promptly fell apart, -sprinkling tobacco all over his legs and the dog's limp hide. 1 The dog didn't stir. 'Aw, flapdoodle,' the old .man said, and peeled the uncoiling paper from his , lower lip. 'Wife doesn't want me to smoke -nummore anyway. She says she read it's givin her  cancer as well as m'ownself.' - 'We came into town to get a few supplies,' 1Elise said. 'It's a wonderful old house, but the  cupboard is bare.' . 'Ayuh,' the old man said. 'Good to meet you ,folks. I'm Henry Eden.' He hung one bunched . hand out in their direction. John shook with/him, and Elise followed suit. They both did so with , care, and the old man nodded as if to say /he appreciated it. 'I expected you half an hourago. ) Must have taken a wrong turn or two, I +guess. Got a lot of roads for such a small town, you 0 know.' He laughed. It was a hollow, bronchial *sound that turned into a phlegmy smoker's cough. . 'Got a power of roads in Willow, oh, ayuh!' And laughed some more. - John was frowning a little. 'Why would you be expecting us?' - 'Lucy Doucette called, said she saw the new/folks go by,' Eden said. He took out his pouch of - Top tobacco, opened it, reached inside, and,fished out a packet of rolling papers. 'You don't ' know Lucy, but she says you know her grandniece, Missus.' , 'This is Milly Cousins's great-aunt we're talking about?' Elise asked. . 'Yessum,' Eden agreed. He began to sprinkle ,tobacco. Some of it landed on the cigarette paper, , but most went onto the dog below. Just as 'John Graham was beginning to wonder if maybe the / dog was dead, it lifted its tail and farted. /So much for that idea, he thought. 'In Willow, just about . everybody's related to everybody else. Lucy 0lives down at the foot of the hill. I was gonna call ) you m'self, but since she said you was comin in anyway . . . ' * 'How did you know we'd be coming here?' John asked. * Henry Eden shrugged, as if to say Where else is there to go? - 'Did you want to talk to us?' Elise asked. 0 'Well, I kinda have to,' Eden said. He sealed .his cigarette and stuck it in his mouth. John / waited to see if it would fall apart, as the 1other one had. He felt mildly disoriented by all this, as ) if he had walked unknowingly into some bucolic version of the CIA. , The cigarette somehow held together. There+was a charred scrap of sandpaper tacked to one of * the arms of the rocker. Eden struck the )match on it and applied the flame to his cigarette, half of  which incinerated on contact. - 'I think you and Missus might want to spend'tonight out of town,' he finally said. ) John blinked at him. 'Out of town? Why -would we want to do that? We just got here.' , 'Good idea, though, mister,' a voice said from behind Eden. + The Grahams looked around and saw a tall -woman with slumped shoulders standing inside the + Mercantile's rusty screen door. Her face .looked out at them from just above an old tin sign ) advertising Chesterfield cigarettes TWENTY-ONE GREAT TOBACCOS MAKE TWENTY WONDERFUL + SMOKES. She opened the door and came out /on the porch. Her face looked sallow and tired but - not stupid. She had a loaf of bread in one +hand and a six-pack of Dawson's Ale in the other. 1 'I'm Laura Stanton,' she said. 'It's very nice .to meet you. We don't like to seem unsociable in ) Willow, but it's the rainy season here tonight.' & John and Elise exchanged bewildered /glances. Elise looked at the sky. Except for a few small ' fair-weather clouds, it was a lucid, unblemished blue. + 'I know how it looks,' the Stanton woman /said, 'but that doesn't mean anything, does it,  Henry?' . 'No'm,' Eden said. He took one giant drag on.his eroded cigarette and then pitched it over the  porch rail. . 'You can feel the humidity in the air,' the /Stanton woman said. 'That's the key, isn't it, Henry?' / 'Well,' Eden allowed, 'ayuh. But it is seven years. To the day.' ( 'The very day,' Laura Stanton agreed. & They both looked expectantly at the Grahams. , 'Pardon me,' Elise said at last. 'I don't 0understand any of this. Is it some sort of localjoke?' ) This time Henry Eden and Laura Stanton &exchanged the glances, then sighed at exactly the  same moment, as if on cue. . 'I hate this,' Laura Stanton-said, although *whether to the old man or to herself John Graham  had no idea. " 'Got to be done,' Eden replied. * She nodded, and then sighed. It was the )sigh of a woman who has set down a heavy burden + and knows she must now pick it up again. / 'This doesn't come up very often,' she said, .'because the rainy season only comes in Willow every seven years ' * 'June seventeenth,' Eden put in. 'Rainy !season every seven years on June seventeenth. Never / changes, not even in leap-year. It's only one/night, but rainy season's what it's always been, called. Damned if I know why. Do you know why, Laura?' ) 'No,' she said, 'and I wish you'd stop ,interrupting, Henry. I think you're getting senile.' 2 'Well, pardon me for livin, I just fell off the ,hearse,' the old man said, clearly nettled. . Elise threw John a glance that was a little .frightened. Are these people having us on? it asked.  Or are they both crazy? + John didn't know, but he wished heartily (that they had gone to Augusta for their supplies; they - could have gotten a quick supper at one of the clam-stands along Route 17. / 'Now listen,' the Stanton woman said kindly. #'We reserved a room for you at the Wonderview ) Motel out on the Woolwich Road, if you /want it. The place was full, but the manager's my , cousin, and he was able to clear one room )out for me. You could come back tomorrow and spend * the rest of the summer with us. We'd be glad to have you.' 2 'If this is a joke, I'm not getting the point,' John said. 1 'No, it's not a joke,' she said. She glanced at0Eden, who gave her a brisk little nod, as if to say * Go on, don't quit now. The woman looked *back at John and Elise, appeared to steel herself, and 0 said, 'You see, folks, it rains toads here in )Willow every seven years. There. Now you know.' , 'Toads,' Elise said in a distant, musing, %Tell-me-I'm-dreaming-all-this voice. % 'Toads, ayuh!' Henry Eden affirmed cheerfully. . John was looking cautiously around for help,.if help should be needed. But Main Street was . utterly deserted. Not only that, he saw, but-shuttered. Not a car moved on the road. Not asingle - pedestrian was visible on either sidewalk. . We could be in trouble here, he thought. If ,these people are as nutty as they sound, we could / be in real trouble. He suddenly found himself/thinking of Shirley Jackson's short story 'The 0 Lottery' for the first time since he'd read itin junior high school. / 'Don't you get the idea that I'm standin here0and soundin like a fool 'cause I want to,' Laura1 Stanton said. 'Fact is, I'm just doin my duty. .Henry, too. You see, it doesn't just sprinkle toads. It  pours.' / 'Come on,' John said to Elise, taking her arm+above the elbow. He gave them a smile that felt 1 as genuine as a six-dollar bill. 'Nice to meet +you folks.' He guided Elise down the porch steps, , looking back over his shoulder at the old +man and the slump-shouldered, pallid woman two or / three times as he did. It didn't seem like a #good idea to turn his back on them completely. ) The woman took a step toward them, and +John almost stumbled and fell off the last step. 0 'It is a little hard to believe,' she agreed. ,'You probably think I am just as nutty as a fruitcake.' 1 'Not at all,' John said. The large, phony smile.on his face now felt as if it were approachingthe , lobes of his ears. Dear Jesus, why had he *ever left St. Louis? He had driven nearly fifteen ( hundred miles with a busted radio and *air-conditioner to meet Farmer Jekyll and Missus Hyde. 1 'That's all right, though,' Laura Stanton said,-and the weird serenity in her face and voice made + him stop by the ITALIAN SANDWICHES sign, /still six feet from the Ford. 'Even people who have . heard of rains of frogs and toads and birds -and such don't have a very clear idea of whathappens - in Willow every seven years. Take a little /advice, though: if you are going to stay, you'dbe well / off to stay in the house. You'll most likely be all right in the house.' , 'Might want to close y'shutters, though,' (Eden added. The dog lifted his tail and articulated . another long and groaning dog-fart, as if toemphasize the point. 3 'We'll . . . we'll do that,' Elise said faintly, ,and then John had the Ford's passenger door open ( and was nearly shovelling her inside. . 'You bet,' he said through his large frozen grin. , 'And come back and see us tomorrow,' Eden /called as John hurried around the front of the . Ford to his side. 'You'll feel a mite safer .around us tomorrow, I think.' He paused, then added: 'If ) you're still around at all, accourse.' ( John waved, got behind the wheel, and pulled out. ' There was silence on the porch for a )moment as the old man and the woman with the pale, + unhealthy skin watched the Ford head back0up Main Street. It left at a considerably higherspeed " than that at which it had come. ' 'Well, we done it,' the old man said contentedly. 0 'Yes,' she agreed, 'and I feel like a horse's 1ass. I always feel like a horse's ass when I see the  way they look at us. At me.' / 'Well,' he said, 'it's only once every seven ,years. And it has to be done just that way. Because  ' . 'Because it's part of the ritual,' she said glumly.  'Ayuh. It's the ritual.' / As if agreeing it was so, the dog flipped up his tail and farted once more. ) The woman booted it and then turned to *the old man with her hands clamped on her hips. 'That - is the stinkiest mutt in four towns, Henry Eden!' + The dog arose with a grunt and staggered )down the porch stairs, pausing only long enough to ) favor Laura Stanton with a reproachful gaze. ! 'He can't help it,' Eden said. , She sighed, looking up the road after the 0Ford. 'It's too bad,' she said. 'They seem like such  nice people.' . 'Nor can we help that,' Henry Eden said, andbegan to roll another smoke. , So the Grahams ended up eating dinner at a,clam-stand after all. They found one in the , neighboring town of Woolwich ('Home of the+scenic Wonderview Motel,' John pointed out to / Elise in a vain effort to raise a smile) and $sat at a picnic table under an old, overspreading blue - spruce. The clam-stand was in sharp, almost.jarring contrast to the buildings on Willow's Main 0 Street. The parking lot was nearly full (most +of the cars, like theirs, had out-of-state licence . plates), and yelling kids with ice cream on +their faces chased after one another while their . parents strolled about, slapped blackflies, ,and waited for their numbers to be announced over the + loudspeaker. The stand had a fairly wide ,menu. In fact, John thought, you could have just about , anything you wanted, as long as it wasn't $too big to fit in a deep-fat fryer. / 'I don't know if I can spend two days in that.town, let alone two months,' Elise said. 'The * bloom is off the rose for this mother's daughter, Johnny.' + 'It was a joke, that's all. The kind the 0natives like to play on the tourists. They just went too far / with it. They're probably kicking themselves for that right now.' - 'They looked serious,' she said. 'How am I ,supposed to go back there and face that old man  after that?'' 0 'I wouldn't worry about it judging from his+cigarettes, he's reached the stage of life where , he's meeting everyone for the first time. Even his oldest friends.' / Elise tried to control the twitching corners )of her mouth, then gave up and burst out laughing.  'You're evil!' / 'Honest, maybe, but not evil. I won't say he /had Alzheimer's, but he did look as if he might( need a roadmap to find his way to the bathroom.' + 'Where do you suppose everyone else was? #The town looked totally deserted.' - 'Bean supper at the Grange or a card-party +at the Eastern Star, probably,' John said, stretching. . He peeked into her clam basket. 'You didn't eat much, love.'  'Love wasn't very hungry.' 2 'I tell you it was just a joke' he said, taking her hands. 'Lighten up.' 2 'You're really, really sure that's all it was?' - 'Really-really. I mean, hey every seven 0years it rains toads in Willow, Maine? It soundslike " an outtake from a Steven Wright monologue.' 1 She smiled wanly. 'It doesn't rain,' she said, 'it pours.' ) 'They subscribe to the old fisherman's 3credo, I guess if you're going to tell one, tella * whopper. When I was a kid at sleep-away -camp, it used to be snipe hunts. This really isn't much - different. And when you stop to think about&it, it really isn't that surprising.'  'What isn't?' - 'That people who make most of their yearly )income dealing with summer people should $ develop a summer-camp mentality.' 2 'That woman didn't act like it was a joke. I'll *tell you the truth, Johnny she sort of scared  me.' , John Graham's normally pleasant face grew /stern and hard. The expression did not look at , home on his face, but neither did it look faked or insincere. 0 'I know,' he said, picking up their wrappings .and napkins and plastic baskets. 'And there's . going to be an apology made for that. I find(foolishness for the sake of foolishness agreeable * enough, but when someone scares my wife 0 hell, they scared me a little, too I draw the line.  Ready to go back?'  'Can you find it again?' * He grinned, and immediately looked more /like himself. 'I left a trail of breadcrumbs.' , 'How wise you are, my darling,' she said, ,and got up. She was smiling again, and John was / glad to see it. She drew a deep breath it &did wonders for the front of the blue chambray workshirt * she was wearing and let it out. 'The !humidity seems to have dropped.' , 'Yeah.' John deposited their waste into a *trash basket with a left-handed hook shot and then - winked at her. 'So much for rainy season.' ' But by the time they turned onto the +Hempstead Road, the humidity had returned, and with a . vengeance. John felt as if his own tee-shirt(had turned into a clammy mass of cobweb clinging to - his chest and back. The sky, now turning a .delicate shade of evening primrose, was still clear, , but he felt that, if he'd had a straw, he (could have drunk directly from the air. ( There was only one other house on the ,road, at the foot of the long hill with the Hempstead + Place at the top. As they drove past it, ,John saw the silhouette of a woman standing motionless at ( one of the windows and looking out at them. 2 'Well, there's your friend Milly's great-aunt,' -John said. 'She sure was a sport to call the local - crazies down at the general store and tell ,them we were coming. I wonder if they would have ' dragged out the whoopee cushions and 'joy-buzzers and chattery teeth if we'd stayed a little  longer.' . 'That dog had his own built-in joy-buzzer.'  John laughed and nodded. , Five minutes later they were turning into +their own driveway. It was badly overgrown with + weeds and dwarf bushes, and John intended-to take care of that little situation before the summer - got much older. The Hempstead Place itself +was a rambling country farmhouse, added to by + succeeding generations whenever the need ( or maybe just the urge to do some building . happened to strike. A barn stood behind it, *connected to the house by three rambling, zig-zag / sheds. In this flush of early summer, two of .the three sheds were almost buried in fragrantdrifts  of honeysuckle. + It commanded a gorgeous view of the town,0especially on a clear night like this one. John + wondered briefly just how it could be so +clear when the humidity was so high. Elise joined him . in front of the car and they stood there for+a moment, arms around each other's waists, looking at , the hills, which rolled gently off in the /direction of Augusta, losing themselves in the shadows of  evening. " 'It's beautiful,' she murmured.  'And listen,' he said. , There was a marshy area of reeds and high /grass fifty yards or so behind the barn, and init a ' chorus of frogs sang and thumped and -snapped the elastics God had for some reason stretched in  their throats. / 'Well,' she said, 'the frogs are all present and accounted for, anyway.' * 'No toads, though.' He looked up at the ,clear sky, in which Venus had now opened hercoldly 0 burning eye. 'There they are, Elise! Up there!Clouds of toads!'  She giggled. 0 ' "Tonight in the small town of Willow," ' he -intoned, ' "a cold front of toads met a warm front & of newts, and the result was " ' 2 She elbowed him. 'You,' she said. 'Let's go in.'- They went in. And did not pass Go. And did !not collect two hundred dollars.  They went directly to bed. ) Elise was startled out of a satisfying -drowse an hour or so later by a thump on the roof. She got - up on her elbows. 'What was that, Johnny?' , 'Huzz,' John said, and turned over on his side. / Toads, she thought, and giggled . . . but it -was a nervous giggle. She got up and went to the $ window, and before she looked for )anything, which might have fallen on the ground, she found ! herself looking up at the sky. . It was still cloudless, and now shot with a 1trillion spangled stars. She looked at them, for a + moment hypnotized by their simple silent beauty.  Thud. & She jerked back from the window and .looked up at the ceiling. Whatever it was, it had hit the  roof just overhead.  'John! Johnny! Wake up!' / 'Huh? What?' He sat up, his hair all tangled tufts and clock-springs. 1 'It's started,' she said, and giggled shrilly. 'The rain of frogs.' . 'Toads,' he corrected. 'Ellie, what are you talking ab '  Thud-thud. , He looked around, then swung his feet out of bed. 3 'This is ridiculous,' he said softly and angrily. 'What do you m ' * Thud-CRASH! There was a tinkle of glass downstairs. ( 'Oh, goddam,' he said, getting up and 0yanking on his blue-jeans. 'Enough. This is just. . .  fucking . . . enough.' . Several soft thuds hit the side of the house'and the roof. She cringed against him, frightened  now. ' 'What do you mean?'' - ' 'I mean that crazy woman and probably the*old man and some of their friends are out there / throwing things at the house,' he said, 'and *I am going to put a stop to it right now. Maybe - they've held onto the custom of shivareeing,the new folks in this little town, but ' ! THUD! SMASH! From the kitchen. , 'God-DAMN!' John yelled, and ran out into the hall. / 'Don't leave me!' Elise cried, and ran after him. ) He flicked up the hallway light-switch ,before plunging downstairs. Soft thumps and thuds , struck the house in an increasing rhythm, -and Elise had time to think, How many people from + town are out there? How many does it take(to do that? And what are they throwing? Rocks  wrapped in pillowcases? * John reached the foot of the stairs and -went into the living room. There was a large window in , there, which gave on the same view, which )they had admired earlier. The window was broken. . Shards and splinters of glass lay scattered -across the rug. He started toward the window,meaning , to yell something at them about how he was,going to get his shotgun. Then he looked at the * broken glass again, remembered that his ,feet were bare, and stopped. For a moment hedidn't + know what to do. Then he saw a dark shape-lying in the broken glass the rock one of the , imbecilic, interbred bastards had used to ,break the window, he assumed and saw red.He * might have charged to the window anyway,-bare feet or no bare feet, but just then the rock  twitched. * That's no rock, he thought. That's a + 'John?' Elise asked. The house rang with -those soft thuds now. It was as if they were being $ bombarded with large, rotten-soft hailstones. 'John, what is it?' 2 'A toad,' he said stupidly. He was still looking/at the twitching shape in the litter of broken . glass, and spoke more to himself than to hiswife. ( He raised his eyes and looked out the )window. What he saw out there struck him mute with - horror and incredulity. He could no longer /see the hills or the horizon hell, he could barely see - the barn, and that was less than forty feetaway. + The air was stuffed with falling shapes. ) Three more of them came in through the ,broken window. One landed on the floor, not far - from its twitching mate. It came down on a -sharp sliver of window-glass and black fluid burst  from its body in thick ropes.  Elise screamed. ( The other two caught in the curtains, 0which began to twist and jerk as if in a fitful breeze. One , of them managed to disentangle itself. It -struck the floor and then hopped toward John.+ He groped at the wall with a hand, which .felt as if it were no part of him at all. His fingers . stumbled across the light-switch and flippedit up. . The thing hopping across the glass-littered -floor toward him was a toad, but it was also not a , toad. Its green-black body was too large, /too lumpy. Its black-and-gold eyes bulged like freakish % eggs. And bursting from its mouth, +unhinging the jaw, was a bouquet of large, needle-sharp  teeth. - It made a thick croaking noise and bounded /at John as if on springs. Behind it, more toads* were falling in through the window. The ,ones which struck the floor had either died outright or - been crippled, but many others too many ,others used the curtains as a safety-net and ! tumbled to the floor unharmed. . 'Get out of here!' John yelled to his wife, .and kicked at the toad which it was insane,but it , was true was attacking him. It did not (flinch back from his foot but sank that mouthful of . crooked needles first over and then into his)toes. The pain was immediate, fiery, and immense. , Without thinking, he made a half-turn and 0kicked the wall as hard as he could. He felt histoes % break, but the toad broke as well, %splattering its black blood onto the wainscoting in a half-circle, * like a fan. His toes had become a crazy /road-sign, pointing in all directions at once. ( Elise was standing frozen in the hall )doorway. She could now hear window-glass shattering all ( over the house. She had put on one of *John's tee-shirts after they had finished making love, and , now she was clutching the neck of it with .both hands. The air was full of ugly croaking sounds. . 'Get out, Elise!' John screamed. He turned, ,shaking his bloody foot. The toad which had bitten , him was dead, but its huge and improbable ,teeth were still caught in his flesh like a tangle of - fishhooks. This time he kicked at the air, ,like a man punting a football, and the toad finally flew  free. ' The faded living-room carpet was now *covered with bloated, hopping bodies. And they were  all hopping at them. ) John ran to the doorway. His foot came ,down on one of the toads and burst it open. His heel . skidded in the cold jelly, which popped out 'of its body, and he almost fell. Elise relinquished her - death-grip on the neck of her tee-shirt and)grabbed him. They stumbled into the hall together and , John slammed the door, catching one of the.toads in the act of hopping through. The door cut it . in half. The top half twitched and juddered -on the floor, its toothy, black-lipped mouth opening - and closing, its black-and-golden pop-eyes goggling at them. . Elise clapped her hands to the sides of her *face and began to wail hysterically. John reached - out to her. She shook her head and cringed /away from him, her hair falling over her face. - The sound of the toads hitting the roof was,bad, but the croakings and chirrupings were worse, * because these latter sounds were coming -from inside the house . . . and all over the house. He - thought of the old man sitting on the porch0of the General Mercantile in his rocker, callingafter ) them: Might want to close y 'shutters. % Christ, why didnt I believe him? ' And, on the heels of that: How was I -supposed to believe him? Nothing in my whole life  prepared me to believe him! ) And, below the sound of toads thudding ,onto the ground outside and toads squashing - themselves to guts and goo on the roof, he )heard a more ominous sound: the chewing, splintering ( sound of the toads in the living room -starting to bite their way through the door. He could / actually see it settling more firmly against *its lunges as more and more toads crowded their - weight against it. He turned around and saw,toads hopping down the main staircase by the  dozens. 0 'Elise!' He grabbed at her. She kept shrieking+and pulling away from him. A sleeve of the . tee-shirt tore free. He looked at the ragged(chunk of cloth in his hand with perfect stupidity for a - moment and then let it flutter down to the floor.  'Elise, goddammit!' $ She shrieked and drew back again. + Now the first toads had reached the hall ,floor and were hopping eagerly toward them. There 0 was a brittle tinkle as the fanlight over the +door shattered. A toad whizzed through it, struck the , carpet, and lay on its back, mottled pink ,belly exposed, webbed feet twitching in the air. - He grabbed his wife, shook her. 'We have to.go down cellar! We'll be safe in the cellar!' - 'No!' Elise screamed at him. Her eyes were ,giant floating zeros, and he understood she was not 0 refusing his idea of retreating to the cellar but refusing everything. + There was no time for gentle measures or ,soothing words. He bunched the front of the shirt - she was wearing in his fist and yanked her $down the hall like a cop dragging a recalcitrant , prisoner to a squad car. One of the toads (which had been in the vanguard of those hurrying down - the stairs leaped gigantically and snicked .its mouthful of darning-needles shut around a chunk of . space occupied by Elise's bare heel a secondbefore. - Halfway down the hall, she got the idea and*began to come with him of her own accord. They , reached the door. John turned the knob and'yanked it, but the door wouldn't move. . 'Goddam!' he cried, and yanked it again. No good. Nothing.  'John, hurry!' , She looked back over her shoulder and saw *toads flooding down the hall toward them, taking - huge crazy sproings over each other's back,*falling on each other, striking the faded rambler-rose . wallpaper, landing on their backs and being ,overrun by their mates. They were all teeth and goldblack % eyes and heaving, leathery bodies.  'JOHN, PLEASE! PL ' * Then one of them leaped and battened on *her left thigh just above the knee. Elise screamed . and seized it, her fingers punching through 0its skin and into its dark liquid workings. She tore it  free , and for a moment, as she raised her arms, +the horrid thing was right in front of her eyes, its teeth * gnashing like a piece of some small but +homicidal factory machine. She threw it as hard as she - could. It cart-wheeled in the air and then .splattered against the wall just opposite the kitchen . door. It did not fall but stuck fast in the glue of its own guts.  'JOHN! OH JESUS. JOHN!' , John Graham suddenly realized what he was .doing wrong. He reversed the direction of his . effort, pushing the door instead of pulling 1it. It flew open, almost spilling him forward anddown - the stairs, and he wondered briefly if his /mother had had any kids that lived. He flailed at the ' railing, caught hold of it, and then ' Elise almost knocked him down again, &bolting past him and down the stairs, screaming like a  firebell in the night. - Oh she's going to fall, she can't help but 0fall, she's going to fall and break her neck + But somehow she did not. She reached the 0cellar's earth floor and collapsed in a sobbing heap,  clutching at her torn thigh. , Toads were leaping and hopping in through the open cellar doorway. ' John caught his balance, turned, and ,slapped the door shut. Several of the toads caught on their ( side of the door leaped right off the 0landing, struck the stairs, and fell through thespaces between . the risers. Another took an almost vertical (leap straight up, and John was suddenly shaken by / wild laughter a sudden bright image of Mr.-Toad of Toad Hall on a pogo-stick instead of in a - motor-car had come to him. Still laughing, )he balled his right hand into a fist and punched the * toad dead center in its pulsing, flabby /chest at the top of its leap, while it hung in perfect * equilibrium between gravity and its own (expended energy. It zoomed off into the shadows, and + John heard a soft bonk! as it struck the furnace. / He scrabbled at the wall in the dark, and his-fingers found the raised cylinder, which was the / old-fashioned toggle light-switch. He flipped,it, and that was when Elise began to scream again. , A toad had gotten tangled in her hair. It -croaked and twisted and turned and bit at herneck, ' rolling itself into something, which %resembled a large, misshapen curler. / Elise lurched to her feet and ran in a large /circle, miraculously avoiding a tumble over the+ boxes, which had been stacked and stored *down here. She struck one of the cellar's support posts, ( rebounded, then turned and banged the -back pf her head twice, briskly, against it. There was a / thick gushing sound, a squirt of black fluid,(and then the toad fell out of her hair, tumbling down . the back of her tee-shirt, leaving dribbles of ichor. , She screamed, and the lunacy in that sound0chilled John's blood. He half-ran, half-stumbled- down the cellar stairs and enfolded her in +his arms. She fought him at first and then surrendered. . Her screams gradually dissolved into steady weeping. + Then, over the soft thunder of the toads )striking the house and the grounds, they heard the * croaking of the toads, which had fallen ,down here. She drew away from him, her eyes shifting 0 wildly from side to side in their shiny-white sockets. - 'Where are they?' she panted. Her voice was.hoarse, almost a bark, from all the screaming she $ had done. 'Where are they, John?' . But they didn't have to look; the toads had ,already seen them, and came hopping eagerly  toward them. ( The Grahams retreated, and John saw a *rusty shovel leaning against the wall. He grabbed it - and beat the toads to death with it as they,came. Only one got past him. It leaped from the floor ) to a box and from the box it jumped at .Elise, catching the cloth of her shirt in its teeth and + dangling there between her breasts, legs kicking. 0 'Stand still!' John barked at her. He dropped ,the shovel, took two steps forward, grabbed the / toad, and hauled it off her shirt, It took a .chunk of cloth with it. The cotton strip hung from one , of its fangs as it twisted and pulsed and .wriggled in John's hands. Its hide was warty, dry but % horridly warm and somehow busy. He *snapped his hands into fists, popping the toad. Blood and . slime squirted out from between his fingers.. Less than a dozen of the little monsters had.actually made it through the cellar door, and soon . they were all dead. John and Elise clung to ,each other, listening to the steady rain of toads  outside. . John looked over at the low cellar windows. +They were packed and dark, and he suddenly saw . the house as it must look from the outside, 1buried in a drift of squirming, lunging, leaping toads. , 'We've got to block the windows,' he said /hoarsely. 'Their weight is going to break them,and if " that happens, they'll pour in.' . 'With what?' Elise asked in her hoarse bark of a voice. 'What can we use?' , He looked around and saw several sheets of/plywood, elderly and dark, leaning against one * wall. Not much, perhaps, but something. 0 'That,' he said. 'Help me to break it up into smaller pieces.' - They worked quickly and frantically. There /were only four windows in the cellar, and theirvery * narrowness had caused the panes to hold ,longer than the larger windows upstairs had done. They ) were just finishing the last when they /heard the glass of the first shatter behind theplywood . . .  but the plywood held. . They staggered into the middle of the cellar(again, John limping on his broken foot. ( From the top of the stairway came the ,sound of the toads eating their way through the cellar  door. ) 'What do we do if they eat all the way through it?' Elise whispered. - 'I don't know,' he said . . . and that was ,when the door of the coal-chute, unused for years but . still intact, suddenly swung open under the ,weight of all the toads which had fallen or hopped - onto it, and hundreds of them poured out ina high-pressure jet. , This time Elise could not scream. She had -damaged her vocal chords too badly for that. . It did not last long for the Grahams in the +cellar after the coal-chute door gave way, but until it ' was over, John Graham screamed quite adequately for both of them. ( By midnight, the downpour of toads in -Willow had slackened off to a mild, croaking drizzle. . At one-thirty in the morning, the last toad .fell out of the dark, starry sky, landed in a pine tree + near the lake, hopped to the ground, and ,disappeared into the night. It was over for another seven  years. , Around quarter past five, the first light .began to creep into the sky and over the land.Willow * was buried beneath a writhing, hopping, .complaining carpet of toads. The buildings on Main , Street had lost their angles and corners; 'everything was rounded and hunched and twitching. The + sign on the highway, which read: SWELCOME&TO WILLOW, MAINE, THE FRIENDLY PLACE! , Looked as if someone had put about thirty ,shotgun shells through it. Flying toads, of course, . had made the holes. The sign in front of the.General Mercantile, which advertised: ITALIAN * SANDWICHES PIZZA GROCS FISHING LICENCES -had been knocked over. Toads played leapfrog + on and around it. There was a small toad %convention going on atop each of the gas-pumps at ) Donny's Sunoco. Two toads sat upon the ,slowly swinging iron arm of the weathervane atop the ) Willow Stove Shop like small misshapen children on a merry-go-round. - At the lake, the few floats which had been /put out this early (only the hardiest swimmers dared - the waters of Lake Willow before July 4th, ,however, toads or no toads) were piled high with , toads, and the fish were going crazy with ,so much food almost within reach. Every now and then . there was a plip! plip! sound as one or two .of the toads jostling for place on the floats were ' knocked off and some hungry trout or ,salmon's breakfast was served. The roads in and out of - town there were a lot of them for such a+small town, as Henry Eden had said were paved - with toads. The power was out for the time )being; free-falling toads had broken the power-lines ' in any number of places. Most of the ,gardens were ruined, but Willow wasn't much of a farming ) community, anyway. Several people kept 0fairly large dairy herds, but they had all been safely . tucked away for the night. Dairy farmers in -Willow knew all about rainy season and had nowish ) to lose their milkers to the hordes of -leaping, carnivorous toads. What in the hell would you tell  the insurance company? - As the light brightened over the Hempstead /Place, it revealed drifts of dead toads on the roof, . rain-gutters that had been splintered loose +by dive-bombing toads, a dooryard that was alive with - toads. They hopped in and out of the barn, +they stuffed the chimneys, and they hopped ( nonchalantly around the tires of John -Graham's Ford and sat in croaking rows on the front seat - like a church congregation waiting for the *services to start. Heaps of toads, mostly dead, lay in - drifts against the building. Some of these drifts were six feet deep. . At 6:05, the sun cleared the horizon, and as.its rays struck them, the toads began to melt.+ Their skins bleached, turned white, then ,appeared to become transparent. Soon a vaporthat + gave off a vaguely swampy smell began to +trail up from the bodies and little bubbly rivulets of , moisture began to course down them. Their -eyes fell in or fell out, depending on their positions , when the sun hit them. Their skins popped +with an audible sound, and for perhaps ten minutes it + sounded as if champagne corks were being drawn all over Willow. - They decomposed rapidly after that, melting(into puddles of cloudy white shmeg that looked - like human semen. This liquid ran down the 0pitches of the Hempstead Place's roof in little creeks ' and dripped from the eaves like pus. . The living toads died; the dead ones simply /rotted to that white fluid. It bubbled briefly and . then sank slowly into the ground. The earth 0sent up tiny ribands of steam, and for a little while 0 every field in Willow looked like the site of a dying volcano. - By quarter of seven it was over, except for,the repairs, and the residents were used to them. - It seemed a small price to pay for another /seven years of quiet prosperity in this mostly  forgotten Maine backwater. & At five past eight, Laura Stanton's ,beat-to-shit Volvo turned into the dooryard of the General - Mercantile. When Laura got out, she looked -paler and sicker than ever. She was sick, in fact; she / still had the six-pack of Dawson's Ale in one.hand, but now all the bottles were empty. She had a  vicious hangover. , Henry Eden came out on the porch. His dog walked behind him. + 'Get that mutt inside, or I'm gonna turn +right around and go home,' Laura said from the foot of  the stairs. & 'He can't help passing gas, Laura.' ) 'That doesn't mean I have to be around 0when he lets rip,' Laura said. 'I mean it, now, Henry. - My head hurts like a bastard, and the last /thing I need this morning is listening to that dog play % Hail Columbia out of its asshole.' - 'Go inside, Toby,' Henry said, holding the door open. - Toby looked up at him with wet eyes, as if .to say Do I have to? Things were just getting  interesting out here.  'Go on, now,' Henry said. * Toby walked back inside, and Henry shut +the door. Laura waited until she heard the latch ' snick shut, and then she mounted the steps. / 'Your sign fell over,' she said, handing him the carton of empties. . 'I got eyes, woman,' Henry said. He was not .in the best temper this morning, himself. Few . people in Willow would be. Sleeping through +a rain of toads was a goddam hard piece of work. * Thank God it only came once every seven .years, or a man would be apt to go shit out ofhis  mind. + 'You should have taken it in,' she said. , Henry muttered something she didn't quite catch.  'What was that?' . 'I said we should have tried harder,' Henry /said defiantly. 'They was a nice young couple. We  should have tried harder.' - She felt a touch of compassion for the old .man in spite of her thudding head, and laid a hand + on his arm. 'It's the ritual,' she said. 0 'Well, sometimes I just feel like saying frig the ritual!' . 'Henry!' She drew her hand back, shocked in spite of herself. ) But he wasn't getting any younger, she ,reminded herself. The wheels were getting a little rusty  upstairs, no doubt. , 'I don't care,' he said stubbornly. 'They .seemed like a real nice young couple. You said so, too, $ and don't try to say you didn't.' / 'I did think they were nice,' she said. 'But ,we can't help that, Henry. Why, you said so yourself  just last night.'  'I know,' he sighed. - 'We don't make them stay,' she said. 'Just ,the opposite. We warn them out of town. They) decide to stay themselves. They always .decide to stay. They make their own decision. That's part  of the ritual, too.' ( 'I know,' he repeated. He drew a deep 'breath and grimaced. 'I hate the smell afterward. Whole + goddam town smells like clabbered milk.' * 'It'll be gone by noon. You know that.' / 'Ayuh. But I just about hope I'm underground ,when it comes around again, Laura. And if I . ain't, I hope somebody else gets the job of 'meetin whoever comes just before rainy season. I like - bein able to pay m'bills when they come due0just as well as anybody else, but I tell you, a man / gets tired of toads. Even if it is only once (every seven years, a man can get damned tired of  toads.' # 'A woman, too,' she said softly. 2 'Well,' he said, looking around with a sigh, 'I ,guess we might try puttin some of this damn  mess right, don't you?' . 'Sure,' she said. 'And, you know, Henry, we 'don't make ritual, we only follow it.'  'I know, but ' / 'And things could change. There's no telling +when or why, but they could. This might be the * last time we have rainy season. Or next -time no one from out of town might come ' 2 'Don't say that,' he said fearfully. 'If no one ,comes, the toads might not go away like theydo  when the sun hits em.' - 'There, you see?' she asked. 'You have come%around to my side of it, after all.' 0 'Well,' he said, 'it's a long time. Ain't it. Seven years is a long time.'  'Yes.' ) 'They was a nice young couple, weren't they?'  'Yes,' she said again. , 'Awful way to go,' Henry Eden said with a -slight hitch in his voice, and this time she said - nothing. After a moment, Henry asked her if-she would help him set his sign up again. In spite of - her nasty headache, Laura said she would 0she didn't like to see Henry so low, especially when - he was feeling low over something he could *control no more than he could control the tides or  the phases of the moon. , By the time they'd finished, he seemed to feel a little better. / 'Ayuh,' he said. 'Seven years is a hell of a long time.' / It is, she thought, but it always passes, and,rainy season always comes around again, and the - outsiders come with it, always two of them,,always a man and a woman, and we always tellthem , exactly what is going to happen, and they )don't believe it, and what happens . . . happens. / 'Come on, you old crock,' she said, 'offer me+a cup of coffee before my head splits wide open.' , He offered her a cup, and before they had ,finished, the sounds of hammers and saws had) begun in town. Outside the window they +could look down Main Street and see people folding - back their shutters, talking and laughing. , The air was warm and dry, the sky overhead/was a pale and hazy blue, and in Willow, rainy  season was over.   -My Pretty Pony-  - The old man sat in the barn doorway in the .smell of apples, rocking, wanting not to want to & smoke not because of the doctor but .because now his heart fluttered all the time. He watched that ) stupid son of a bitch Osgood do a fast )count with his head against the tree and watched him turn , and catch Clivey out and laugh, his mouth &open wide enough so the old man could observe how - his teeth were already rotting in his head .and imagine how the kid's breath would smell: like the * back part of a wet cellar. Although the $whelp couldn't be more than eleven. ' The old man watched Osgood laugh his +gaspy hee-hawing laugh. The boy laughed so hard he - finally had to lean over and put his hands -on his knees, so hard the others came out of their - hiding places to see what it was, and when ,they saw, they laughed, too. They all stood around in % the morning sun and laughed at his +grandson and the old man forgot how much he wanted a * smoke. What he wanted now was to see if 'Clivey would cry. He found he was more curious on + this subject than on any other which had ,engaged his attention over the last several months, # including the subject of his own fast-approaching death. ' 'Caught im out!' the others chanted, +laughing. 'Caught im, caught im, caught im out!' / Clivey only stood there, stolid as a chunk of*rock in a farmer's field, waiting for the razzing to + be over so the game could go on with him ,as It and the embarrassment beginning to be behind . him. After a while the game did. Then it was+noontime and the other boys went home. The old + man watched to see how much lunch Clivey /would eat. It turned out to be not much. Cliveyjust + poked at his potatoes, made his corn and .his peas change places, and fed little scraps of meat to ' the dog under the table. The old man .watched it all, interested, answering when theothers talked * to him, but not much listening to their ,mouths or his own. His mind was on the boy. * When the pie was done he wanted what he -couldn't have and so excused himself to take a nap + and paused halfway up the stairs because -now his heart felt like a fan with a playing card caught * in it, and he stood there with his head /down, waiting to see if this was the final one (there had * been two before), and when it wasn't he $went on up and took off all but his underdrawers and lay & down on the crisp white coverlet. A /rectangular label of sun lay across his scrawnychest; it was - cut into three sections by dark strokes of *shadow that were the window laths. He put his hands + behind his head, drowsing and listening. )After awhile he thought he heard the boy crying in his + own room down the hall and he thought, I ought to take care of that. + He slept an hour, and when he got up the -woman was asleep beside him in her slip, and so he + took his clothes out into the hallway to dress before going down. . Clivey was outside, sitting on the steps and*throwing a stick for the dog, who fetched with - more will than the boy tossed. The dog (he )had no name, he was just the dog) seemed puzzled. - The old man hailed the boy and told him to -take a walk up to the orchard with him and sothe  boy did. , The old man's name was George Banning. He +was the boy's grandfather, and it was from him , that Clive Banning learned the importance .of having a pretty pony in your life. You had to have , one of those even if you were allergic to *horses, because without a pretty pony you could have ' six clocks in every room and so many .watches on each wrist you couldn't raise your arms and + still you'd never know what time it was. . The instruction (George Banning didn't give -advice, only instruction) had taken place on the . day Clive got caught out by that idiot Alden,Osgood while playing hide and seek. By that time ) Clive's Grandpa seemed older than God, +which probably meant about seventy-two. TheBanning ) homestead was in the town of Troy, New .York, which in 1961 was just starting to learnhow not  to be the country. ) The instruction took place in the West Orchard. - His grandfather was standing coatless in a *blizzard that was not late snow but early apple , blossoms in a high warm wind; Grandpa was *wearing his biballs with a collared shirt beneath, a + shirt that looked as if it had once been (green but was now faded to a no-account olive by dozens + or hundreds of washings, and beneath the -collared shirt was the round top of a cotton undershirt + (the kind with the straps, of course; in +those days they made the other kind, but a man like , Grandpa would be a strap-undershirt man to+the end), and this shirt was clean but the color of old . ivory instead of its original white because *Gramma's motto, often spoken and stitched into a . living-room sampler as well (presumably for ,those rare times when the woman herself was not ' there to dispense what wisdom needed 1dispensing), was this: Use it, use it, never lose it! Break it / in! Wear it out! Keep it safe or do without! -There were apple blossoms caught in Grandpa'slong + hair, still only half white, and the boy )thought the old man was beautiful in the trees. ' He had seen Grandpa watching them as -they went about their game earlier that day. Watching . him. Grandpa had been sitting in his rocker (at the entrance to the barn. One of the boards * squeaked every time Grandpa rocked, and /there he sat, a book face down in his lap, his hands , folded atop it, there he sat rocking amid +the dim sweet smells of hay and apples and cider. It was - this game that caused his Grandpa to offer ,Clive Banning instruction on the subject of time, and , how it was slippery, and how a man had to -fight to hold it in his hands almost all the while; the - pony was pretty but it had a wicked heart. .If you didn't keep a close eye on that pretty pony, it + would jump the fence and be out of sight ,and you'd have to take your rope bridle and go after it, . a trip that was apt to tire you all the way $to your bones even if it was short. * Grandpa began his instruction by saying &that Alden Osgood had cheated. He was supposed to , hide his eyes against the dead elm by the +chopping block for a full minute, which he would time / by counting to sixty. This would give Clivey *(so Grandpa had always called him, and he hadn't , minded, although he was thinking he would ,have to fight any boy or man who called him that * once he was past the age of twelve) and -the others a fair chance to hide. Clivey had still been , looking for a place when Alden Osgood got .to sixty, turned around, and 'caught him out' as he . was trying to squirm as a last resort &behind a pile of apple crates stacked haphazardly + beside the press-shed, where the machine -that squeezed the blems into cider bulked in the % dimness like an engine of torture. 1 'It wasn't fair,' Grandpa said. 'You didn't do )no bitching about it and that was right, because a - natural man never does no bitching they -call it bitching because it ain't for men or even boys ( smart enough to know better and brave .enough to do better. Just the same, it wasn't fair. I can say , that now because you didn't say it then.' / Apple blossom blowing in the old man's hair. (One caught in the dent below his Adam's apple, , caught there like a jewel that was pretty -simply because some things were and couldn't help it, % but was gorgeous because it lacked .duration: in a few seconds it would be brushed impatiently , away and left on the ground where it would%become perfectly anonymous among its fellows. , He told Grandpa that Alden had counted to +sixty, just as the rules said he must, not knowing ) why he wanted to argue the side of the *boy who had, after all, shamed him by not even having to , find him but had simply 'caught him out'. +Alden who sometimes slapped like a girl when he , was mad -had needed only to turn, see him,,then casually put his hand on the dead tree and chant ) the mystic and unquestioned formula of elimination: 'I-see-Clive, my gool-one-two-three!' * Maybe he only argued Alden's case so he ,and Grandpa wouldn't have to go back yet, sohe - could watch Grandpa's steel hair blow back /in the blizzard of blossoms, so he could admirethat . transient jewel caught in the hollow at the base of the old man's throat. / 'Sure he did,' Grandpa said. 'Sure he counted-to sixty. Now looka this, Clivey! And let it mark  your mind!' ' There were real pockets in Grandpa's 'overalls five of them, counting the kangaroo-like ) pouch in the bib but beside the hip +pockets there were things that only looked like pockets. , They were really slits, made so you could ,reach through to the pants you were wearing , underneath (in those days the idea of not (wearing pants underneath would not have seemed - scandalous, only laughable the behavior /of someone who was A Little Soft in the Attic).- Grandpa was wearing the inevitable pair of .blue-jeans beneath his overalls. 'Jew-pants', he called - them matter-of-factly, a term that all the ,farmers Clive knew used. Levi's were either 'Jew-pants'  or simply 'Joozers'. . He reached through the righthand slit in his(overalls, fumbled at some length in the righthand , pocket of the denim trousers beneath, and .at last brought out a tarnished silver pocket watch - which he put in the boy's unprepared hand. +The weight of the watch was so sudden, the ticking , beneath its metal skin so lively, that he #came within an ace of dropping it. - He looked at Grandpa, his brown eyes wide. / 'You ain't gonna drop it,' said Grandpa, 'and1if you did you probably wouldn't stop it it's + been dropped before, even stepped on once*in some damned beerjoint in Utica, and it never 0 stopped yet. And if it did stop, it'd be your )loss, not mine, because it's yours now.' % 'What?' He wanted to say he didn't *understand but couldn't finish because he thought he did. 0 'I'm giving it to you,' Grandpa said. 'Always 0meant to, but I'll be damned if I'm gonna put itin ' my will. It'd cost more for the damn %law-rights than that thing's worth.' ! 'Grandpa . . . I . . . Jesus!' - Grandpa laughed until he started to cough. ,He doubled over, coughing and laughing, his face - going a plum-purple color. Some of Clive's (joy and wonder were lost in concern. He - remembered his mother telling him again and-again on their way up here that he was not totire , Grandpa out because Grandpa was ill. When 'Clive had asked him two days before cautiously * -what had made him sick, George Banning .had replied with a single mysterious word. It was , only on the night after their talk in the .orchard, as he was drifting off to sleep with the pocket . watch curled warmly in his hand, that Clive .realized the word Grandpa had spoken, 'ticka',, referred not to some dangerous poison-bug ,but to Grandpa's heart. The doctor had made him stop , smoking and said if he tried anything too -strenuous, like shovelling snow or trying to hoe the - garden, he would end up playing a harp. The&boy knew well enough what that meant. / 'You ain't gonna drop it, and if you did you .probably wouldn't stop it,' Grandpa had said, but ) the boy was old enough to know that it +would stop someday, that people and watchesboth  stopped someday. * He stood, waiting to see if Grandpa was ,going to stop, but at last his coughing and laughter , eased off and he stood up straight again, .wiping a runner of snot from his nose with his left hand & and then flicking it casually away. / 'You're a goddam funny kid, Clivey,' he said./'I got sixteen grandchildren, and there's only two ( of em that I think is gonna amount to .duckshit, and you ain't one of em although you're on the , runner-up list but you're the only one -that can make me laugh until my balls ache.' 0 'I didn't mean to make your balls ache,' Clive'said, and that sent Grandpa off again, although , this time he was able to get his laughter +under control before the coughing started. . 'Loop the chain over your knuckles a time or-two, if it'll make you feel easier,' Grandpa said. 1 'If you feel easier in your mind, maybe you'll pay attention a little better.' + He did as Grandpa suggested and did feel ,better. He looked at the watch in his palm, ' mesmerized by the lively feel of its -mechanism, by the sunstar on its crystal, by the second hand / which turned in its own small circle. But it /was still Grandpa's watch: of this he was quitesure. ) Then, as he had this thought, an apple ,blossom went skating across the crystal and was gone. . This happened in less than a second, but it .changed everything. After the blossom, it was true. It 1 was his watch, forever . . . or at least until ,one of them stopped running and couldn't be fixed and  had to be thrown away. 0 'All right,' Grandpa said. 'You see the second(hand going around all by its ownself ?'  'Yes.' . 'Good. Keep your eye on it. When it gets up 1to the top, you holler 'Go!' at me. Understand.'  He nodded. . 'Okay. When it gets there, you just let her go, Gallagher.' + Clive frowned down at the watch with the $deep seriousness of a mathematician approaching + the conclusion of a crucial equation. He *already understood what Grandpa wanted to show him, ) and he was bright enough to understand .that proof was only a formality . . . but one that must be / shown just the same. It was a rite, like not .being able to leave church until the minister said the , benediction, even though all the songs on +the board had been sung and the sermon was finally,  mercifully, over. + When the second hand stood straight up at0twelve on its own separate little dial (Mine, he) marvelled. That's my second hand on my ,watch), he hollered 'Go!' at the top of his lungs, and ) Grandpa began to count with the greasy .speed of an auctioneer selling dubious goods, trying to + get rid of them at top prices before his ,hypnotized audience can wake up and realize it has not ! just been bilked but outraged. - 'One-two-thre', fo'-fi'-six, sev'-ay-nine, )ten-'leven,' Grandpa chanted, the gnarly blotches on his . cheeks and the big purple veins on his nose $beginning to stand out again in his excitement. He ) finished in a triumphant hoarse shout: -'Fifjynine-sizzy!' As he said this last, the second hand of ) the pocket watch was just crossing the 'seventh dark line, marking thirty-five seconds. ) 'How long?' Grandpa asked, panting and $rubbing at his chest with his hand. * Clive told him, looking at Grandpa with &undisguised admiration. That was fast counting,  Grandpa!' ) Grandpa flapped the hand with which he )had been rubbing his chest in a get out! gesture, but 0 he smiled. 'Didn't count half as fast as that ,Osgood brat,' he said. 'I heard that little sucker count * twenty-seven, and the next thing I knew 'he was up somewhere around forty-one.' Grandpa fixed * him with his eyes, a dark autumnal blue +utterly unlike Clive's Mediterranean brown ones. He put 0 one of his gnarled hands on Clive's shoulder. /It was knotted with arthritis, but the boy feltthe . live strength that still slumbered in there 0like wires in a machine that's turned off. 'You remember / one thing, Clivey. Time ain't got nothing to !do with how fast you can count.' , Clive nodded slowly. He didn't understand -completely, but he thought he felt the shadowof , understanding, like the shadow of a cloud passing slowly across a meadow. + Grandpa reached into the pouch pocket in /the bib of his overalls and brought out a pack of . unfiltered Kools. Apparently Grandpa hadn't /stopped smoking after all, dicky heart or not. Still, + it seemed to the boy as if maybe Grandpa ,had cut down drastically, because that pack of Kools / looked as if it had done hard travelling; it )had escaped the fate of most packs, torn open after , breakfast and tossed empty into the gutter,at three, a crushed ball. Grandpa rummaged, brought - out a cigarette almost as bent as the pack +from which it had come. He stuck it in the corner of his + mouth, replaced the pack in the bib, and $brought out a wooden match which he snapped alight , with one practiced flick of his old man's .thick yellow thumbnail. Clive watched with the' fascination of a child who watches a (magician produce a fan of cards from an empty hand. The - flick of the thumb was always interesting, ,but the amazing thing was that the match didnot go / out. In spite of the high wind which steadily.combed this hilltop, Grandpa cupped the small , flame with an assurance that could afford /to be leisurely. He lit his smoke and then was actually * shaking the match, as if he had negated 1the wind by simple will. Clive looked closely at the * cigarette and saw no black scorch-marks -trailing up the white paper from the glowing tip. His + eyes had not deceived him, then; Grandpa 0had taken his light from a straight flame, like a man . who takes a light from a candle in a closed 'room. It was sorcery, pure and simple. ) Grandpa removed the cigarette from his +mouth and put his thumb and forefinger in, looking ' for a moment like a man who means to +whistle for his dog, or a taxi. Instead he brought them out ) again wet and pressed them against the +match-head. The boy needed no explanation; the only - thing Grandpa and his friends out there in ,the country feared more than sudden freezes was fire. * Grandpa dropped the match and ground it *under his boot. When he looked up and saw the boy ( staring at him, he misinterpreted the subject of his fascination. 0 'I know I ain't supposed to,' he said, 'and I 0ain't gonna tell you to lie or even ask you to. If - Gramma asks you right out 'Was that old ,man smokin up there?' you go on and tell her I - was. I don't need a kid to lie for me.' He /didn't smile, but his shrewd, side-slanted eyesmade . Clive feel part of a conspiracy that seemed /amiable and sinless. 'But then, if Gramma asks me - right out if you took the Savior's name in .vain when I gave you that watch, I'd look her right in , the eye and say, 'No'm. He said thanks as /pretty as could be and that was all he done.'' % Now Clive was the one to burst out -laughing, and the old man grinned, revealing his few  remaining teeth. * 'Course, if she don't ask neither of us ,nothing, I guess we don't have to volunteer nothing . . . ' do we, Clivey? Does that seem fair?' . 'Yes,' Clive said. He wasn't a good-looking *boy and never became the sort of man women- exactly consider handsome, but as he smiled+in complete understanding of the old man's % rhetorical sleight-of-hand, he was -beautiful, at least for a moment, and Grandparuffled his hair.  'You're a good boy, Clivey.'  'Thank you, sir.' - His grandfather stood ruminating, his Kool -burning with unnatural rapidity (the tobacco was * dry, and although he puffed seldom, the )greedy hilltop wind smoked the cigarette ceaselessly), ) and Clive thought the old man had said +everything he had to say. He was sorry. He loved to hear ( Grandpa talk. The things Grandpa said +continually amazed him because they almost always & made sense. His mother, his father, -Gramma, Uncle Don they all said things he was supposed ) to take to heart, but they rarely made )sense. Handsome is as handsome does, for instance  what did that mean? , He had a sister, Patty, who was six years )older. He understood her but didn't care because - most of what she said out loud was stupid. ,The rest was communicated in vicious little pinches.  The worst of these she called /'Peter-Pinches'. She told him that, if he ever told about the Peter- * Pinches, she'd murdalize him. Patty was -always talking about people she was going to murdalize; & she had a hit-list to rival Murder, .Incorporated. It made you want to laugh . . . until you took a . good look at her thin, grim face, that was. -When you saw what was really there, you lost your . desire to laugh. Clive did, anyway. And you .had to be careful of her she sounded stupidbut  was far from it. - 'I don't want dates,' she had announced at ,supper one night not long ago around the time 1 that boys traditionally invited girls to either.the Spring Dance at the country club or to theprom 2 at the high school, in fact. 'I don't care if I *never have a date.' And she had looked at them with , wide-eyed defiance from above her plate ofsteaming meat and vegetables. , Clive had looked at the still and somehow .spooky face of his sister peering through the steam $ and remembered something that had *happened two months before, when there had still been * snow on the ground. He'd come along the 0upstairs hallway in his bare feet so she hadn't heard + him, and he had looked into the bathroom +because the door was open he hadn't had the / slightest idea old Pukey Patty was in there. 'What he saw had frozen him dead in his tracks. If she + had turned her head even a h'ttle to the left, she would have seen him. ' She didn't, though. She had been too ,preoccupied with her inspection of herself. She had been ( standing there as naked as one of the .slinky babes in Foxy Brannigan's well-thumbed Model ) Delights, her bath towel lying puddled )around her feet. She was no slinky babe, though Clive - knew it, and she knew it too, from the look+of her. Tears were rolling down her pimply cheeks. - They were big tears and there were a lot of*them, but she never made a sound. At last Clive had " regained enough of his sense of -self-preservation to tiptoe away, and he had never said a word to - anyone about the incident, least of all to +Patty herself. He didn't know if she would have been ' mad about her kid brother seeing her *bareass, but he had a good idea about how she'd react to the * idea that he had seen her bawling (even *that weird boohoo-less bawling she'd been doing); for ) that she would have murdalized him for sure. * 'I think boys are dumb and most of them .smell like gone-over cottage cheese,' she had said on , that spring night. She stuck a forkful of /roast beef into her mouth. 'If a boy ever asked me for a  date, I'd laugh.' ' 'You'll change your mind about that, .Punkin,' Dad said, chewing his roast beef and not looking - up from the book beside his plate. Mom had .given up trying to get him to stop reading at the  table. / 'No I won't,' Patty said, and Clive knew she *wouldn't. When Patty said things she most always ' meant them. That was something Clive .understood about her that his parents didn't. He wasn't + sure she meant it you know, really +about murdalizing him if he tattled on her about the - Peter-Pinches, but he wasn't going to take /chances. Even if she didn't actually kill him, she would , find some spectacular yet untraceable way )to hurt him, that was for sure. Besides, sometimes the / Peter-Pinches weren't really pinches at all; ,they were more like the way Patty sometimes stroked / her little half-breed poodle, Brandy, and he *knew she was doing it because he was bad, but he . had a secret he certainly did not intend to )tell her: these other Peter-Pinches, the stroking ones,  actually felt sort of good. & When Grandpa opened his mouth, Give +thought he would say Time to go back t'the house, , Clivey, but instead he told the boy: 'I'm ,going to tell you something, if you want to hear it. Won't + take long. You want to hear it, Clivey?'  'Yes, sir!' 0 'You really do, don't you?' Grandpa said in a bemused voice.  'Yes, sir.' / 'Sometimes I think I ought to steal you from (your folks and keep you around forever. . Sometimes I think if I had you on hand most /the time, I'd live forever, goddam bad heart ornot.' & He removed the Kool from his mouth, ,dropped it to the ground, and stamped it to death under , one workboot, revolving the heel back and .forth and then covering the butt with the dirt his heel ( had loosened just to be sure. When he +looked up at Clive again, it was with eyes that gleamed. / 'I stopped giving advice a long time ago,' he0said. 'Thirty years or more, I guess. I stopped - when I noticed only fools gave it and only 3fools took it. Instruction, now . . . instruction'sa 1 different thing. A smart man will give a little-from time to time, and a smart man or boy  ) will take a little from time to time.' ) Clive said nothing, only looked at his &grandfather with close concentration. + 'There are three kinds of time,' Grandpa 0said, 'and while all of them are real, only one is really + real. You want to make sure you know them+all and can always tell them apart. Do you  understand that?'  'No, sir.' / Grandpa nodded. 'If you'd said "Yes, sir", I *would have swatted the seat of your pants and  taken you back to the farm.' - Clive looked down at the smeared results of*Grandpa's cigarette, face hot with blush, proud. 0 'When a fellow is only a sprat, like you, time-is long. Take a for-instance. When May comes,. you think school's never gonna let out, that+mid-month June will just never come. Ain't that  pretty much how it is?' ' Clive thought of that last weight of -drowsy, chalk-smelling schooldays and nodded., 'And when mid-month June finally does come+and Teacher gives you your report card and lets , you go free, it seems like school's never *gonna let back in. Ain't that pretty much right, too?' , Clive thought of that highway of days and .nodded so hard his neck actually popped. 'Boy,it / sure is! I mean, sir.' Those days. All those +days, stretching away across the plains of June and , July and over the unimaginable horizon of (August. So many days, so many dawns, so many noon , lunches of bologna sandwiches with mustard+and raw chopped onion and giant glasses of milk 0 while his mom sat silently in the living room ,with her bottomless glass of wine, watching the + soap operas on the TV; so many depthless (afternoons when sweat grew in the short hedge of & your crewcut and then ran down your 'cheeks, afternoons when the moment you noticed that your * blob of a shadow had grown a boy always .came as a surprise, so many endless twilights with the , sweat cooling away to nothing but a smell ,like aftershave on your cheeks and forearms while you / played tag or red rover or capture the flag; -sounds of bike chains, slots clicking neatly into oiled * cogs, smells of honeysuckle and cooling (asphalt and green leaves and cut grass, sounds of the / slap of baseball cards being laid out on some.kid's front walk, solemn and portentous trades+ which changed the faces of both leagues, .councils that went on in the slow shady axial tilt of a - July evening until the call of 'Cliiiiive! +Sup-per!' put an end to that business; and that call was , always as expected and yet as shocking as (the noon blob that had, by three or so, become a black - boy-shape running in the street beside him ) and that boy stapled to his heels had actually ( become a man by five or so, albeit an /extraordinarily skinny one; velvet evenings of television, / the occasional rattle of pages as his father ,read one book after another (he never tired of them; . words, words, words, his dad never tired of *them, and Clive had meant once to ask him how that + could be but lost his nerve), his mother .getting up once in a while and going into the kitchen, / followed only by his sister's worried, angry .eyes and his own simply curious ones; the softclink ) as Mom replenished the glass which was -never empty after eleven in the morning or so (and their ) father never looking up from his book, /although Clive had an idea he heard it all and knew it all, . although Patty had called him a stupid liar .and had given him a Peter-Pinch that hurt all day long / the one time he had dared to tell her that); ,the sound of mosquitoes whining against the screens, - always so much louder, it seemed, after the,sun had gone down; the decree of bedtime, sounfair - and unavoidable, all arguments lost before ,they were begun; his father's brusque kiss, smelling of , tobacco, his mother's softer, both sugary .and sour with the smell of wine; the sound of his sister + telling Mom she ought to go to bed after *Dad had gone down to the corner tavern to drink a * couple of beers and watch the wrestling ,matches on the television over the bar; his mom telling ' Patty to mind her own p's and q's, a -conversational pattern that was upsetting in its content but * somehow soothing in its predictability; -fireflies gleaming in the gloom; a car horn, distant, as he / drifted into sleep's long dark channel; then (the next day, which seemed the same but wasn't, not - quite. Summer. That was summer. And it did !not just seem long; it was long. + Grandpa, watching him closely, seemed to /read all this in the boy's brown eyes, to know all - the words for all the things the boy never ,could have found a way to tell, things that could not + escape him because his mouth could never /articulate the language of his heart. And then Grandpa * nodded, as if he wanted to confirm this ,very idea, and suddenly Clive was terrified that Grandpa - would spoil everything by saying something ,soft and soothing and meaningless. Sure, he would 1 say. I know all about it, Clivey I was a boyonce myself, you know. - But he didn't, and Clive understood he had /been stupid to fear the possibility even for a - moment. Worse, faithless. Because this was "Grandpa, and Grandpa never talked meaningless ) shit like other grownups so often did. .Instead of speaking softly and soothingly, he spoke with , the dry finality of a judge pronouncing a $harsh sentence for a capital crime.  'All that changes,' he said. / Clive looked up at him, a little apprehensive.at the idea but very much liking the wild way the * old man's hair blew around his head. He #thought Grandpa looked the way the church-preacher - would if he really knew the truth about God.instead of just guessing. 'Time does? Are you sure?' . 'Yes. When you get to a certain age right-around fourteen, I think, mostly when the two* halves of the human race go on and make .the mistake of discovering each other time starts to 2 be real time. The real real time. It ain't long 2like it was or short like it gets to be. It does, you . know. But for most of your life it's mostly +the real real time. You know what that is, Clivey?'  'No, sir.' 1 'Then take instruction: real real time is your (pretty pony. Say it: "My pretty pony'." ) Feeling dumb, wondering if Grandpa was .having him on for some reason ('trying to get your . goat', as Uncle Don would have said), Clive *said what he wanted him to say. He waited for the / old man to laugh, to say, 'Boy, I really got /your goat that time, Clivey!' But Grandpa only nodded . matter-of-factly, in a way that took all thedumb out of it. ) 'My pretty pony. Those are three words 1you'll never forget if you're as smart's I think y'might * be. My pretty pony. That's the truth of time.' ' Grandpa took the battered package of *cigarettes from his pocket, considered it briefly, then put  it back. 0 'From the time you're fourteen until, oh, I'm .gonna say until you're sixty or so, most time is - my-pretty-pony time. There's times when it -goes back to being long like it was when you were a , kid, but those ain't good times any more. ,You'd give your soul for some my-pretty-ponytime 1 then, let alone short time. If you was to tell ,Gramma what I'm gonna tell you now, Clivey, she'd - call me a blasphemer and wouldn't bring me ,no hot-water bottle for a week. Maybe two.' . Nevertheless, Grandpa's lips twisted into a bitter and unregenerate jag. ( 'If I was to tell it to that Reverend -Chadband the wife sets such a store by, he'd trot out the one - about how we see through a glass darkly or )that old chestnut about how God works in mysterious 0 ways His wonders to perform, but I'll tell you.what I think, Clivey. I think God must be one + mean old son of a bitch to make the only -long times a grownup has the times when he ishurt / bad, like with crushed ribs or stove-in guts .or something like that. A God like that, why, He 0 makes a kid who sticks pins in flies look like,that saint who was so good the birds'd come and - roost all over him. I think about how long *them weeks were after the hay-rick turned turtle on * me, and I wonder why God wanted to make 2living, thinking creatures in the first place. If He , needed something to piss on, why couldn't (He have just made Him some sumac bushes and left it ) at that? Or what about poor old Johnny +Brinkmayer, who went so slow with the bone cancer last  year.' , Clive hardly heard that last, although he ,remembered later, on their ride back to the city, that ( Johnny Brinkmayer, who had owned what .his mother and father called the grocery storeand , what Grandpa and Gramma still both called +'the mercantile', was the only man Grandpa went to . see of an evening . . . and the only man who*came to see Grandpa of an evening. On the long * ride back to town it came to Clive that +Johnny Brinkmayer, whom he remembered only vaguely ) as a man with a very large wart on his -forehead and a way of hitching at his crotch as he walked, - must have been Grandpa's only real friend. +The fact that Gramma tended to turn up her nose * when Brinkmayer's name was mentioned +and often complained about the way the man had ' smelled only reinforced the idea. , Such reflections could not have come now, "anyway, because Clive was waiting breathlessly , for God to strike Grandpa dead. Surely He -would for such a blasphemy. No one could get away - with calling God the Father Almighty a mean.old son of a bitch, or suggest that the Being who ) made the universe was no better than a -mean third-grader who got his kicks sticking pins into  flies. * Clive took a nervous step away from the +figure in the bib overalls, who had ceased being his , Grandpa and had become instead a lightning,rod. Any moment now a bolt would come out ofthe ) blue sky, sizzling his Grandpa dead as +doggy-doo and turning the apple trees into torches that . would signal the old man's damnation to all 'and sundry. The apple blossoms blowing through the . air would be turned into something like the ,bits of char that went floating up from the incinerator + in their backyard when his father burned 'the week's worth of newspapers on late Sunday  afternoons.  Nothing happened. - Clive waited, his dreadful surety eroding, $and when a robin twittered cheerily somewhere - nearby (as if Grandpa had said nothing more%awful than kiss-my-foot), he knew no lightning was + going to come. And at the moment of that ,realization, a small but fundamental change took place ) in Clive Banning's life. His Grandpa's *unpunished blasphemy would not make him a criminal or - a bad boy, or even such a small thing as a 0'problem child' (a phrase that had only recentlycome , into vogue). Yet the true north of belief /shifted just a little in Clive's mind, and the way he + listened to his Grandpa changed at once. ,Before, he had listened to the old man. Now he attended  him. ( Times when you're hurt go on forever, .seems like,' Grandpa was saying. 'Believe me, Clivey ) a week of being hurt makes the best *summer vacation you ever had when you was a kid seem - like a weekend. Hell, makes it seem like a )Sat'dy mornin! When I think of the seven months . Johnny lay there with that . . . that thing .that was inside him, inside him and eating on his guts . . / . Jesus, I ain't got no business talkin this -way to a kid. Your Gramma's right. I got the sense of a  chicken.' * Grandpa brooded down at his shoes for a +moment. At last he looked up and shook his head, . not darkly, but with brisk, almost humorous dismissiveness. - 'Ain't a bit of that matters. I said I was *gonna give you instruction, and instead I stand here ) howlin like a woe-dog. You know what a woe-dog is, Clivey?'  The boy shook his head. + 'Never mind; that's for another day.' Of ,course there had never been another, because the next ( time he saw Grandpa, Grandpa was in a $box, and Clive supposed that was an important part of + the instruction Grandpa had to give that -day. The fact that the old man didn't know he was giving - it made it no less important. 'Old men are 2like old trains in a switchin yard, Clivey too many ) damned tracks. So they loop the damned +roundhouse five times before they ever get in.'  'That's all right, Grandpa.' . 'What I mean is that every time I drive for !the point, I go someplace else.' ) 'I know, but those someplace elses are pretty interesting.' 0 Grandpa smiled. 'If you're a bullshit artist, $Clivey, you are a damned good one.' ) Clive smiled back, and the darkness of *Johnny Brinkmayer's memory seemed to lift from his * Grandpa. When he spoke again, his voice was more businesslike. . 'Anyway! Never mind that swill. Having long -time in pain is just a little extra the Lord throws - in. You know how a man will save up Raleigh-coupons and trade em in for something like a - brass barometer to hang in his den or a newset of steak knives, Clivey?'  Clive nodded. 2 'Well, that's what pain-time is like . . . only .it's more of a booby prize than a real one, I guess - you'd have to say. Main thing is, when you /get old, regular time my pretty pony time , changes to short time. It's like when you !were a kid, only turned around.'  'Backwards.'  'Yep.' , The idea that time went fast when you got (old was beyond the ability of the boy's emotions to + grasp, but he was bright enough to admit *the concept. He knew that if one end of a seesaw went % up, the other had to go down. What ,Grandpa was talking about, he reasoned, must be the same / idea: balance and counterbalance. All right; /it's a point of view, Clive's own father might have  said. , Grandpa took the packet of Kools from the 'kangaroo pouch again, and this time he carefully - extracted a cigarette not just the last +one in the packet but the last one the boy would ever see & him smoke. The old man crumpled the ,package and stowed it back in the place from which it had - come. He lit this last cigarette as he had -the other, with the same effortless ease. He did not - ignore the hilltop wind; he seemed somehow to negate it. " 'When does it happen, Grandpa?' - 'I can't exactly tell you that, n it don't .happen all at once,' Grandpa said, wetting the match as / he had its predecessor. 'It kinda creeps up, 3like a cat stalking a squirrel. Finally you notice.And , when you do notice, it ain't no more fair (than the way the Osgood boy counted his numbers was  fair.' ' 'Well then, what happens? How do you notice?' ( Grandpa tapped a roll of ash from his .cigarette without taking it from his mouth. He did it with + his thumb, knocking on the cigarette the *way a man may rap a low knock on a table. The boy ! never forgot that small sound. ) 'I think what you notice first must be /different for everyone,' the old man said, 'but for me it . started when I was forty-something. I don't ,remember exactly how old I was, but you wantto bet . I remember where I was . . . in Davis Drug. You know it?' . Clive nodded. His father almost always took *him and his sister in there for ice-cream sodas & when they were visiting Grandpa and 'Gramma. His father called them the Van Chockstraw . Triplets because their orders never varied: 'their father always had vanilla, Patty chocolate, Clive ' strawberry. And his father would sit (between them and read while they slowly ingested the cold - sweet treats. Patty was right when she said,you could get away with anything when their father + was reading, which was most of the time, )but when he put his book away and looked around, you - wanted to sit up and put on your prettiest )manners, or you were apt to get clouted. / 'Well, I was in there,' Grandpa resumed, his /eyes far off, studying a cloud that looked likea , soldier blowing on a bugle moving swiftly -across the spring sky, 'to get some medicine for your . Gramma's arthritis. We'd had rain for a week1and it was hurting her like all get-out. And all at - once I seen a new store display. Would have-been hard to miss. Took up most of one whole aisle, & it did. There were masks and cutout )decorations of black cats and witches on brooms and things , like that, and there were those cardboard .punkins they used to sell. They came in a bag with an , elastic inside. The idea was, a kid would *punch the punkin out of the cardboard and then give his + mom an afternoon of peace coloring it in )and maybe playing the games on the back. When it was & done you hung it on your door for a ,decoration, or, if the kid's family was too poor to buy him a , store mask or too dumb to help him make a *costume out of what was around the house, why, you . could staple that elastic onto the thing and/the kid would wear it. Used to be a lot of kidswalking - around town with paper bags in their hands *and those punkin masks from Davis Drug on their . faces come Halloween night, Clivey! And, of -course, he had his candy out. Was always that+ penny-candy counter up there by the soda 'fountain, you know the one I mean ' $ Clive smiled. He knew, all right. . ' but this was different. This was penny .candy by the job lot. All that truck like wax bottles + and candy corn and root-beer barrels and licorice whips. - 'And I thought that old man Davis there +really was a fella named Davis who ran the place + back then, it was his father that opened .her up right around 1910 had slipped a cog or two. 0 Holy hell, I'm thinkin to myself, Frank Davis *has got his trick-or-treat out before the goddam , summer's even over. It crossed my mind to +go up to the prescription counter where he was n tell - him just that, and then a part of me says, +Whoa up a second, George you're the one who's . slipped a cog or two. And that wasn't so far/wrong, Clivey, because it wasn't still summer, and I / knew it just as well as I know we're standin %here. See, that's what I want you to understand  that I knew better. - 'Wasn't I already on the lookout for apple .pickers from around town, and hadn't I alreadyput / in an order for five hundred handbills to get.put up over the border in Canada? And didn't I- already have my eye on this fella named TimWarburton who'd come down from Schenectady + lookin for work? He had a way about him, -looked honest, and I thought he'd make a good- foreman during picking time. Hadn't I been *meaning to ask him the very next day, and didn't he + know I was gonna ask because he'd let on .he'd be getting his hair cut at such-and-such a place at - such-and-such a time? I thought to myself, .Suds n body, George, ain't you a little young to be * going senile? Yeah, old Frank's got his /Halloween candy out a little early, but summer)That's  gone by, me fine bucko. , 'I knew that just fine, but for a second, )Clivey or maybe it was a whole row of seconds it + seemed like summer, or like it had to be *summer, because it was just being summer. Get what I & mean? It didn't take me long to get (September set down straight again hi my head, but until I did 4 I felt . . . you know, I felt . . . ' He frowned, ,then reluctantly brought out a word he knew but + would not have used in conversation with /another farmer, lest he be accused (if only in the other . fellow's mind) of being high-flown. 'I felt ,dismayed. That's the only goddam way I know how to . put it. Dismayed. And that's how it was the first time.' , He looked at the boy, who only looked back%at him, not even nodding, so deep in + concentration was he. Grandpa nodded for -both of them and knocked another roll of ash off his , cigarette with the side of his thumb. The ,boy believed Grandpa was so lost in thought that the / wind was smoking practically all of this one for him. * 'It was like steppin up to the bathroom -mirror meanin to do no more'n shave and seein that first ( gray hair in your head. You get that, Clivey?'  'Yes.' / 'Okay. And after that first time, it started -to happen with all the holidays. You'd think they was & puttin the stuff out too early, and (sometimes you'd even say so to someone, although you always + stayed careful to make it sound like you *thought the shopkeepers were greedy. That something ( was wrong with them, not you. You get that?'  'Yes.' % 'Because,' Grandpa said, 'a greedy %shopkeeper was something a man could understand and + something some men even admired, although*I was never one of them. 'So-and-so keeps himself - a sharp practice,' they'd say, as if sharp /practice, like that butcher fella Radwick that used to , always stick his thumb on the scales when .he could get away with it, like that was just a honey of , a way to be. I never felt that way, but I +could understand it. Saying something that made you , sound like you had gone over funny in the /head, though . . . that was a different kettle of beans. , So you'd just say something like 'By God, 1they'll have the tinsel and the angel's hair out before ( the hay's in the barn next year,' and *whoever you said it to would say that was nothing but the / Gospel truth, but it wasn't the Gospel truth,,and when I hunker right down and study her, Clivey, / I know they are putting all those things out &pretty near the same time every year. + 'Then somethin else happened to me. This -might have been five years later, might have been , seven. I think I must've been right round ,fifty, one side or the other. Anyhow, I got called on jury . duty. Damn pain in the ass, but I went. The -bailiff sweared me up, asked me if I'd do my duty so / help me God, and I said I will, just as if I ,hadn't spent all my life doin my duty about one thing n - another so help me God. Then he got out his.pen and asked for my address, and I give it tohim . neat as you'd like. Then he asked how old I -was, and I opened my mouth all primed to say thirtyseven.' * Grandpa threw back his head and laughed .at the cloud that looked like a soldier. That cloud, ( the bugle part now grown as long as a -trombone, had gotten itself halfway from one horizon to  the other. + 'Why did you want to say that, Grandpa?' ,Clive thought he had followed everything up to this ' pretty well, but here was a thicket. / 'I wanted to say it because it was the first ,thing to come into my mind! Hell! Anyhow, I knew . it was wrong and so I stopped for a second. 1I don't think that bailiff or anyone else in the + courtroom noticed seemed like most of ,em was either asleep or on the doze and, even if - they'd been as wide awake as the fella who +just got Widow Brown's broomstick rammed uphis , buttsky, I don't know as anyone would have)made anything of it. Wasn't no more than how, * sometimes, a man trying to hit a tricky .pitch will kinda take a double pump before he swings. , But, shit! Askin a man how damn old he is 5ain't like throwin no spitball. I felt like an ijit. Seemed - like for that one second I didn't know how 0old I was if I wasn't thirty-seven. Seemed for asecond ) there like it could have been seven or -seventeen or seventy-seven. Then I got it andI said fortyeight , or fifty-one or whatever-the-frig. But to 0lose track of your age, even for a second . . . shoo!' - Grandpa dropped his cigarette, brought his +heel down upon it, and began the ritual of first # murdalizing and then burying it. , 'But that's just the beginning, Clivey me .son,' he went on, and, although he spoke only in the . Irish vernacular he sometimes affected, the *boy thought, I wish I was your son. Yours instead of / his. 'After a bit, it lets go of first, hits -second, and before you know it, time has got itself into . high gear and you're cruising, the way folks,do on the turnpike these days, goin so fast their cars / blow the leaves right off'n the trees in the fall.'  'What do you mean?' - 'Way the seasons change is the worst,' the /old man said moodily, as if he hadn't heard theboy. ) 'Different seasons stop bein different -seasons. Seems like Mother has no more'n got the boots n ( mittens n scarves down from the attic *before it's mud season, and you'd think a man'd be glad to . see mud season gone shit, I always was /but you ain't s'glad t'see it go when it seems like + the mud's gone before you done pushed the/tractor out of the first jellypot it got stuck in. Then it ) seems like you no more 'n clapped your -summer straw on for the first band concert of the year ' when the poplars start showing their chemises.' ) Grandpa looked at him then, an eyebrow .raised ironically, as if expecting the boy to ask for an . explanation, but Clive smiled, delighted by /this he knew what a chemise was, all right, ( because it was sometimes all that his /mother wore until five in the afternoon or so, at least when * his father was out on the road, selling )appliances and kitchen ware and a little insurance when he ) could. When his father went out on the (road his mother got down to the serious drinking, and that . was drinking sometimes too serious to allow -her to get dressed until the sun was getting ready to ( go down. Then sometimes she went out, .leaving him in Patty's care while she went to visit a sick / friend. Once he said to Patty, 'Ma's friends +get sick more when Dad's on the road, d'ja notice?' - And Patty laughed until tears ran down her +face and she said Oh yes, she had noticed, she most  certainly had. ) What Grandpa said reminded him of how, *once the days finally began to slope down toward , school again, the poplars changed somehow.,When the wind blew, their undersides turned up . exactly the color of his mother's prettiest %chemise, a silver color which was as surprisingly sad as 0 it was lovely: a color that signified the end *of what you had believed must be forever. / 'Then,' Grandpa continued, 'you start to lose*track of things in your own mind. Not too much 0 it ain't being senile, like old man Hayden -down the road, thank God but it's still a . suckardly thing, the way you lose track. It ,ain't like forgetting things; that'd be one thing. No, , you remember em but you get em in all the -wrong places. Like how I was so sure I broke my arm . just after our boy Billy got killed in that +road accident in '58. That was a suckardly thing, too. ( That's one I could task that Reverend /Chadband with. Billy, he was followin a gravel truck, doin + no more than twenty mile an hour, when a ,chunk of stone no bigger'n the dial of that pocket , watch I gave you fell off the back of the -truck, hit the road, bounced up, and smashed the 0 windshield of our Ford. Glass went in Billy's )eyes and the doc said he would have been blinded - in one of em or maybe even in both if he'd -lived, but he didn't live he went off the road and hit 1 a 'lectric pole. It fell down atop the car and *he got fried just the same as any mad dog killer that - ever rode Old Sparky at Sing Sing. And him .the worst thing he ever did in his life maybe playing ) sick to keep from hoeing beans when we still kep the garden. . 'But I was saying how sure I was I broke my .goddam arm after I swore up n down I could - remember goin to his funeral with that arm -still in the sling! Sarah had to show me the family - Bible first and the insurance papers on my -arm second before I could believe she had it the right + way around; it had been two whole months .before, and by the time we buried Billy away, the 0 sling was off. She called me an old fool and I,felt like putting one up on the side of her head I ) was s'mad, but I was mad because I was -embarrassed, and at least I had the sense to know that n , leave her alone. She was only mad because /she don't like to think about Bill. He was the apple of  her eye, he was.'  'Boy!' Clive said. 1 'It ain't goin soft; it's more like when you go*down to New York City and there are these fellas - on the street corners with nutshells and a )beebee under one of em, and they bet you can't tell ) which nutshell the beebee's under, and ,you're sure you can, but they shuffle em so goddarn fast * they fool you every time. You just lose #track. You can't seem to help it.' & He sighed, looking around, as if to (remember where exactly it was that they were. His face had - a momentary look of utter helplessness that+disgusted the boy as much as it frightened him. He - didn't want to feel that way, but couldn't 0help it. It was as if Grandpa had pulled open a bandage % to show the boy a sore which was a +symptom of something awful. Something like leprosy. ) 'Seems like spring started last week,' +Grandpa said, 'but the blossoms'll be gone tomorrow if - the wind keeps up its head, and damn if it 1don't look like it's gonna. A man can't keep his train of , thought when things go as fast as that. A ,man can't say, Whoa up a minute or two, old boss, / while I get my bearins! There's no one to say.it to. It's like bein in a cart that's got no driver, if , you take my drift. So what do you make of it, Clivey?' 0 'Well,' the boy said, 'you're right about one 0thing, Grandpa it sounds like an ijit of some) kind must've made up the whole thing.' - He didn't mean it to be funny, but Grandpa *laughed until his face went that alarming shade of . purple again, and this time he not only had ,to lean over and put his hands on the knees of his . overalls but then had to sling an arm around.the boy's neck to keep from falling down. Theyboth ( would have gone tumbling if Grandpa's +coughing and wheezing hadn't eased just at the moment , when the boy felt sure the blood must come-bursting out of that face, which was swollen purple  with hilarity. . 'Ain't you a jeezer!' Grandpa said, pulling !back at last. 'Ain't you a one!' - 'Grandpa? Are you all right? Maybe we oughtto ' 0 'Shit, no, I ain't all right. I've had me two .heart attacks in the last two years, and if I live * another two years no one'll be any more /surprised than me. But it ain't no news to the human 0 race, boy. All I ever set out to say was that .old or young, fast time or slow time, you can walk a + straight line if you remember that pony. *Because when you count and say 'my pretty pony' % between each number, time can't be /nothing but time. You do that, I'm telling you you got the / sucker stabled. You can't count all the time 1-that ain't God's plan. I'll go down the primroselane . with that little oily-faced pissant Chadband*that far, anyway. But you got to remember that you . don't own time; it's time that owns you. It )goes along outside you at the same speed every second 0 of every day. It don't care a pisshole in the +snow for you, but that don't matter if you got a pretty . pony. If you got a pretty pony, Clivey, you /got the bastard right where its dingle dangles and * never mind all the Alden Osgoods in the world.'  He bent toward Clive Banning.  'Do you understand that?'  'No, sir.' , 'I know you don't. Will you remember it?'  'Yes, sir.' - Grandpa Banning's eyes studied him so long ,the boy became uncomfortable and fidgety. At+ last he nodded. 'Yeah, I think you will. Goddam if I don't.' + The boy said nothing. In truth, he could think of nothing to say. . 'You have taken instruction,' Grandpa said. - 'I didn't take any instruction if I didn't /understand!' Clive cried in a frustrated anger so real and + so complete it startled him. 'I didn't!' ) 'Fuck understanding,' the old man said /calmly. He slung his arm around the boy's neck again . and drew him close drew him close for the,last time before Gramma would find him dead as a , stone in bed a month later. She just woke +up and there was Grandpa and Grandpa's ponyhad ( kicked down Grandpa's fences and gone !over all the hills of the world. * Wicked heart, wicked heart. Pretty, but with a wicked heart. - 'Understanding and instruction are cousins .that don't kiss,' Grandpa said that day among the  apple trees.  Then what is instruction?' , 'Remembrance,' the old man said serenely. 'Can you remember that pony?'  'Yes, sir.'  'What name does it keep?'  The boy paused.  'Time . . . I guess.'  'Good. And what color is it?' - The boy thought longer this time. He opened3his mind like an iris in the dark. 'I don't know,' he  said at last. - 'Me, neither,' the old man said, releasing 2him. 'I don't think it has one, and I don't think it / matters. What matters is, will you know it?' $ 'Yes, sir,' the boy said at once. / A glittering, feverish eye fastened the boy'smind and heart like a staple.  'How?' - 'It'll be pretty,' Clive Banning said with absolute certainty. - Grandpa smiled. 'So!' he said. 'Clivey has +taken a bit of instruction, and that makes him wiser - and me more blessed . . . or the other way /around. D'you want a slice of peach pie, boy?'  'Yes, sir!' + 'Then what are we doin up here? Let's go get her!'  They did. + And Clive Banning never forgot the name, )which was time, and the color, which was none, & and the look, which was not ugly or 1beautiful . . . but only pretty. Nor did he ever forget her ( nature, which was wicked, or what his +Grandpa said on the way down, words almost thrown + away, lost in the wind: having a pony to .ride was better than having no pony at all, nomatter * how the weather of its heart might lie.   -Sorry, Right Number-  * AUTHOR'S NOTE: Screenplay abbreviations are simple and exist, in this - author's opinion, mostly to make those who write screenplays feel like - lodge brothers. In any case, you should be aware that cu means close-up; ) ECU means extreme close-up; INT. means "interior, EXT. means exterior, BG ' means background; POV means point of view. Probably most of you knew ' all that stuff to begin with, right?  ACT I  FADE IN ON:  KATIE WEIDERMAN'S MOUTH, ECU , She's speaking into the telephone. Pretty +mouth; in a few seconds we'll see that the rest of her is  just as pretty.  KATIE / Bill? Oh, he says he doesn't feel very well, but he's always like that / between books . . . can't sleep, thinks everyheadache is the first . symptom of a brain tumor . . . once he gets going on something  new, he'll be fine.  SOUND, BG: THE TELEVISION. - THE CAMERA DRAWS BACK. KATIE is sitting in *the kitchen phone nook, having a good gab / with her sister while she idles through some !catalogues. We should notice one not-quite-ordinary / thing about the phone she's on: it's the sort-with two lines. There are LIGHTED BUTTONS to ) show which ones are engaged. Right now .only one KATIE'S is. As KATIE CONTINUES & HER CONVERSATION, THE CAMERA SWINGS AWAY FROM HER, TRACKS ACROSS & THE KITCHEN, and through the arched )doorway that leads into the family room.  KATIE (voice, fading) 0 Oh, I saw Janie Charlton today . . . yes! Big as a house! . . . + She fades. The TV gets louder. There are *three kids: JEFF, eight, CONNIE, ten, and DENNIS, ( thirteen. Wheel of Fortune is on, but .they're not watching. Instead they're engaged in that great ( pastime, Fighting About What Comes On Later.  JEFF $ Come onnn! It was his first book!  CONNIE  His first gross book.  DENNIS + We're gonna watch Cheers and Wings, just like we do every week,  Jeff. / DENNIS speaks with the utter finality only a -big brother can manage. 'Wanna talk about it some - more and see how much pain I can inflict on*your scrawny body, Jeff?'' his face says.  JEFF  Could we at least tape it?  CONNIE ) We're taping CNN for Mom. She said she might be on the phone # with Aunt Lois for quite awhile.  JEFF + How can you tape CNN, for God's sake? It never stops!  DENNIS " That's what she likes about it.  CONNIE - And don't say God's sake, Jeffie you're not old enough to talk  about God except in church.  JEFF  Then don't call me Jeffie.  CONNIE  Jeffie, Jeffie, Jeffie. ) JEFF gets up, walks to the window, and ,looks out into the dark. He's really upset. DENNIS and * CONNIE, in the grand tradition of older /brothers and sisters, are delighted to see it.  DENNIS  Poor Jeffie.  CONNIE % I think he's gonna commit suicide.  JEFF (turns to them) - It was his first book! Don't you guys even care?  CONNIE + Rent it down at the Video Stop tomorrow, if you want to see it so  bad.  JEFF - They don't rent R-rated pictures to little kids and you know it!  CONNIE (DREAMILY) % Shut up, it's Vanna! I love Vanna!  JEFF  Dennis  DENNIS * Go ask Dad to tape it on the VCR in his office and quit being such $ a totally annoying little booger. + JEFF crosses the room, poking his tongue *out at Vanna White as he goes. THE CAMERA ' FOLLOWS as he goes into the kitchen.  KATIE / . . . so when he asked me if Polly had testedstrep positive, I had to - remind him she's away at prep school . . . and God, Lois, I miss  her . . . . JEFF is just passing through, on his way to the stairs.  KATIE ! Will you kids please be quiet?  JEFF (glum)  They'll be quiet. Now. , He goes up the stairs, a little dejected. .KATIE looks after him for a moment, loving and worried.  KATIE / They're squabbling again. Polly used to keep them in line, but now 2 that she's away at school . . . I don't know . .. maybe sending her - to Bolton wasn't such a hot idea. Sometimeswhen she calls home  she sounds so unhappy . . . " INT. BELA LUGOSI AS DRACULA, CU % Drac's standing at the door of his +Transylvanian castle. Someone has pasted a comic-balloon ' coming out of his mouth which reads: .'Listen! My children of the night! What music they make!' . The poster is on a door but we only see this,as JEFF opens it and goes into his father's study. ! INT. A PHOTOGRAPH OF KATIE, CU % THE CAMERA HOLDS, THEN PANS SLOWLY *RIGHT. We pass another photo, this one of - POLLY, the daughter away at school. She's a,lovely girl of sixteen or so. Past POLLY is * DENNIS.. . then CONNIE . . . then JEFF. ' THE CAMERA CONTINUES TO PAN AND ALSO WIDENS OUT SO WE can see BILL + WEIDERMAN, a man of about forty-four. He #looks tired. He's peering into the word-processor / on his desk, but his mental crystal ball must.be taking the night off, because the screen isblank. - On the walls we see framed book-covers. All.of them are spooky. One of the titles is GhostKiss. , JEFF comes up quietly behind his dad. The .carpet muffles his feet. BILL sighs and shuts off the + word-cruncher. A moment later JEFF claps %his hands on his father's shoulders.  JEFF  BOOGA-BOOGA!  BILL / Hi, Jeffie. He turns in his chair to look at his son, who is  disappointed.  JEFF " How come you didn't get scared?  BILL - Scaring is my business. I'm case-hardened. Something wrong?  JEFF - Daddy, can I watch the first hour of Ghost Kiss and you tape the & rest? Dennis and Connie are hogging everything. + BILL swivels to look at the book-jacket, bemused.  BILL * You sure you want to watch that, champ? It's pretty  JEFF  Yes!  INT. KATIE, IN THE PHONE NOOK * In this shot, we clearly see the stairs +leading to her husband's study behind her.  KATIE , I really think Jeff needs the orthodontic work but you know Bill 1 The other line rings. The other light stutters. KATIE + That's just the other line, Bill will & But now we see BILL and JEFF coming downstairs behind her.  BILL * Honey, where're the blank videotapes? I can't find any in the study  and  KATIE (to BILL)  Wait!  (to LOIS) # Gonna put you on hold a sec, Lo. - She does. Now both lines are blinking. She +pushes the top one, where the new call has just come  in.  KATIE  Hello, Weiderman residence.  SOUND: DESPERATE SOBBING.  SOBBING VOICE (filter) ) Take . . . please take . . . t-t . . .  KATIE $ Polly? Is that you? What's wrong? - SOUND: SOBBING. It's awful, heartbreaking.  SOBBING VOICE (filter)  Please quick - SOUND: SOBBING . . . Then, CLICK! A broken connection.  KATIE , Polly, calm down! Whatever it is can't be that b  HUM OF AN OPEN LINE ( JEFF has wandered toward the TV room, hoping to find a blank tape.  BILL  Who was that? $ Without looking at her husband or .answering him, KATIE slams the lower button inagain.  KATIE 3 Lois? Listen, I'll call you back. That was Polly,and she sounded 1 very upset. No . . . she hung up. Yes. I will. Thanks.  She hangs up.  BILL (concerned)  It was Polly?  KATIE . Crying her head off. It sounded like she wastrying to say 'Please . take me home' . . . I knew that damn school was bumming her out . / . . Why I ever let you talk me into it . . . , She's rummaging frantically on her little ,phone desk. Catalogues go slithering to the floor around  her stool.  KATIE ' Connie did you take my address book?  CONNIE (voice)  No, Mom. - BILL pulls a battered book out of his back pocket and pages through it.  BILL  I got it. Except  KATIE * I know, damn dorm phone is always busy. Give it to me.  BILL  Honey, calm down.  KATIE - I'll calm down after I talk to her. She is sixteen, Bill. Sixteen-yearold , girls are prone to depressive interludes. Sometimes they even k & . . . just give me the damn number!  BILL  617-555-8641 ) As she punches the numbers, THE CAMERA SLIDES IN TO CU.  KATIE 1 Come on, come on . . . don't be busy . . . justthis once . . . / SOUND: CLICKS. A pause. Then . . . the phone starts ringing.  KATIE (eyes closed)  Thank You, God.  VOICE (filter) . Hartshorn Hall, this is Frieda. If you want Christine the Sex Queen, $ she's still in the shower, Arnie.  KATIE + Could you call Polly to the phone? Polly 'Weiderman? This is Kate Weiderman. Her mother.  VOICE (filter) 0 Oh, jeez! Sorry. I thought hang on, please,Mrs. Weiderman.  SOUND: THE PHONE CLUNKS DOWN. ! VOICE (filter, and very faint) 0 Polly? Pol? . . . Phone call! . . . It's your mother! ( INT. A WIDER ANGLE ON THE PHONE NOOK, WITH BILL  BILL  Well?  KATIE " Somebody's getting her. I hope. " JEFF comes back in with a tape.  JEFF - I found one, Dad. Dennis hid em. As usual.  BILL ( In a minute, Jeff. Go watch the tube.  JEFF  But  BILL  I won't forget. Now go on.  JEFF goes.  KATIE " Come on, come on, come on . . .  BILL  Calm down, Katie.  KATIE (snaps) . If you'd heard her, you wouldn't tell me to calm down! She  sounded  POLLY (filter, cheery voice)  Hi, mom!  KATIE ! Pol? Honey? Are you all right?  POLLY (happy, bubbling voice) . Am I all right? I aced my bio exam, got a B on my French * Conversational Essay, and Ronnie Hansen asked me to the Harvest / Ball. I'm so all right that if one more good thing happens to me ( today, I'll probably blow up like the Hindenburg.  KATIE . You didn't just call me up, crying your headoff? ) We see by KATE'S face that she already #knows the answer to this question.  POLLY (filter)  Heck no!  KATIE * I'm glad about your test and your date, honey. I guess it was * someone else. I'll call you back, okay?  POLLY (filter)  'Kay. Say hi to Dad!  KATIE  I will.  INT. THE PHONE NOOK, WIDER  BILL  She okay?  KATIE 2 Fine. I could have sworn it was Polly, but . . .she's walking on air.  BILL ( So it was a prank. Or someone who was crying so hard she dialed a / wrong number . . . 'through a shimmering filmof tears,' as we  veteran hacks like to say.  KATIE , It was not a prank and it was not a wrong number! It was someone  in my family!  BILL  Honey, you can't know that.  KATIE . No? If Jeffie called up, just crying, would you know it was him?  BILL (struck by this)  Yeah, maybe. I guess I might. / She's not listening. She's punching numbers, fast.  BILL  Who you calling? ' She doesn't answer him. SOUND: PHONE RINGS TWICE. Then:  OLDER FEMALE VOICE (filter)  Hello?  KATIE / Mom? Are you . . . (She pauses) Did you call just a few seconds  ago?  VOICE (filter)  No, dear . . . why?  KATIE / Oh . . . you know these phones. I was talkingto Lois and I lost the  other call.  VOICE (filter) 0 Well, it wasn't me. Kate, I saw the prettiest dress in La Boutique  today, and  KATIE ( We'll talk about it later, Mom, okay?  VOICE (filter)  Kate, are you all right?  KATIE + I have . . . Mom, I think maybe I've got diarrhea. I have to go. 'Bye. . She hangs up. BILL hangs on until she does, )then he bursts into wild donkey-brays of  LAUGHTER.  BILL / Oh boy . . . diarrhea . . . I gotta remember that the next time my 2 agent calls . . . oh Katie, that was so cool  KATIE (almost screaming)  This is not funny!  BILL stops laughing.  INT. THE TV ROOM + JEFF and DENNIS have been tussling. They .stop. All three kids look toward the kitchen. + INT. THE PHONE NOOK, WITH BILL AND KATIE  KATIE - I tell you it was someone in my family and she sounded oh, you ' don't understand. I knew that voice.  BILL 0 But if Polly's okay and your mom's okay . . .  KATIE (positive)  It's Dawn.  BILL + Come on, hon, a minute ago you were sure it was Polly.  KATIE - It had to be Dawn. I was on the phone with Lois and Mom's okay - so Dawn's the only other one it could have been. She's the / youngest . . . I could have mistaken her for Polly . . . and she's out ) there in that farmhouse alone with the baby!  BILL (STARTLED)  What do you mean, alone?  KATIE 0 Jerry's in Burlington! It's Dawn! Something's happened to Dawn! * CONNIE comes into the kitchen, worried.  CONNIE  Mom? Is Aunt Dawn okay?  BILL / So far as we know, she's fine. Take it easy, doll. Bad to buy trouble  before you know it's on sale. , KATIE punches numbers and listens. SOUND: (The DAH-DAH-DAH of a busy signal. KATIE . hangs up. BILL looks a question at her with raised eyebrows.  KATIE  Busy.  BILL  Katie, are you sure  KATIE / She's the only one left it had to be her. Bill, I'm scared. Will you  drive me out there? ! BILL takes the phone from her.  BILL  What's her number?  KATIE  555-6169. ( BILL dials. Gets a busy. Hangs up and punches 0.  OPERATOR (filter)  Operator.  BILL ( I'm trying to reach my sister-in-law, operator. The line is busy. I * suspect there may be a problem. Can you break into the call,  please?  INT. THE DOOR TO THE TV ROOM 0 All three kids are standing there, silent and worried. + INT. THE PHONE NOOK, WITH BILL AND KATIE  OPERATOR (filter)  What is your name, sir?  BILL % William Weiderman. My number is  OPERATOR (filter) ' Not the William Weiderman that wrote Spider Doom?!  BILL  Yes, that was mine. If  OPERATOR (filter) 0 Oh my God, I just loved that book! I love all your books! I  BILL . I'm delighted you do. But right now my wife is very worried about - her sister. If it's possible for you to  OPERATOR (filter) * Yes, I can do that. Please give me your number, Mr. Weiderman, 0 for the records. (She GIGGLES.) I promise not to give it out.  BILL  It's 555-4408.  OPERATOR (filter)  And the call number?  BILL (looks at KATIE)  Uh . . .  KATIE  555-6169.  BILL  555-6169.  OPERATOR (filter) . Just a moment, Mr. Weiderman . . . Night of the Beast was also  great, by the way. Hold on. ' SOUND: TELEPHONIC CLICKS AND CLACKS.  KATIE  Is she  BILL  Yes. Just . . .  There's one final CLICK.  OPERATOR (filter) - I'm sorry, Mr. Weiderman, but that line is not busy. It's off the * hook. I wonder if I sent you my copy of Spider Doom  BILL hangs up the phone.  KATIE  Why did you hang up?  BILL 1 She can't break in. Phone's not busy. It's off the hook. $ They stare at each other bleakly. ) EXT. A LOW-SLUNG SPORTS CAR PASSES THE CAMERA NIGHT $ INT. THE CAR, WITH KATIE AND BILL . KATIE'S scared. BILL, at the wheel, doesn't look exactly calm.  KATIE ( Hey, Bill tell me she's all right.  BILL  She's all right.  KATIE % Now tell me what you really think.  BILL * Jeff snuck up behind me tonight and put the old booga-booga on ) me. He was disappointed as hell when I didn't jump. I told him I % was case-hardened. (Pause) I lied.  KATIE + Why did Jerry have to move out there whenhe's gone half the , time? Just her and that little tiny baby? Why?  BILL ! Shh, Kate. We're almost there.  KATIE  Go faster.  EXT. THE CAR  He does. That car is smokin.  INT. THE WEIDERMAN TV ROOM - The tube's still on and the kids are still +there, but the horsing around has stopped.  CONNIE ) Dennis, do you think Aunt Dawn's okay? . DENNIS (thinks she's dead, decapitated by a maniac)  Yeah. Sure she is. ' INT. THE PHONE, POV FROM THE TV ROOM . Just sitting there on the wall in the phone .nook, lights dark, looking like a snake ready to strike.  FADE OUT  ACT II  EXT. AN ISOLATED FARMHOUSE . A long driveway leads up to it. There's one 0light on in the living room. Car lights sweep upthe - driveway. The WEIDERMAN car pulls up close to the garage and stops. $ INT. THE CAR, WITH BILL AND KATIE  KATIE  I'm scared. + BILL bends down, reaches under his seat, and brings out a pistol.  BILL (solemnly)  Booga-booga.  KATIE (total surprise)  How long have you had that?  BILL 0 Since last year. I didn't want to scare you orthe kids. I've got a  licence to carry. Come on.  BILL AND KATIE - They get out. KATIE stands by the front of the car while BILL # goes to the garage and peers in.  BILL  Her car's here. % THE CAMERA TRACKS WITH THEM to the ,front door. Now we can hear the TV, PLAYING - LOUD. BILL pushes the doorbell. We hear it -inside. They wait. KATIE pushes it. Still no * answer. She pushes it again and doesn't )take her finger off. BILL looks down at:  EXT. THE LOCK, BILL'S POV  Big scratches on it.  EXT. BILL AND KATIE  BILL (low) ! The lock's been tampered with. , KATIE looks, and whimpers. BILL tries the "door. It opens. The TV is louder.  BILL % Stay behind me. Be ready to run if something happens. God, I wish  I'd left you home, Kate. ' He starts in. KATIE comes after him, terrified, near tears. $ INT. DAWN AND JERRY'S LIVING ROOM . From this angle we see only a small section /of the room. The TV is much louder. BILL entersthe 0 room, gun up. He looks to the right . . . and -suddenly all the tension goes out of him. He lowers  the gun.  KATIE (draws up beside him)  Bill . . . what . . .  He points. * THE LIVING ROOM, WIDE, BILL AND KATIE'S POV 2 The place looks like a cyclone hit it . . . but .it wasn't robbery and murder that caused this mess; * only a healthy eighteen-month-old baby. -After a strenuous day of trashing the living room, Baby - got tired and Mommy got tired and they fell-asleep on the couch together. The baby is in ) DAWN'S lap. There is a pair of Walkman )earphones on her head. There are toys tough plastic - Sesame Street and PlaySkool stuff, for the .most part scattered hell to breakfast. The baby has + also pulled most of the books out of the +bookcase. Had a good munch on one of them, too, by the . look. BILL goes over and picks it up. It is Ghost Kiss.  BILL - I've had people say they just eat my books up, but this is  ridiculous. . He's amused. KATIE isn't. She walks over to /her sister, ready to be mad . . . but she sees how + really exhausted DAWN looks and softens. & INT. DAWN AND THE BABY, KATIE'S POV + Fast asleep and breathing easily, like a +Raphael painting of Madonna and Child. THE CAMERA ) PANS DOWN TO: the Walkman. We can hear .the faint strains of Huey Lewis and the News. % THE CAMERA PANS A BIT FURTHER TO a .Princess telephone on the table by the chair. It's + off the cradle. Not much; just enough to )break the connection and scare people to death.  INT. KATIE * She sighs, bends down, and replaces the *phone. Then she pushes the STOP button on the  Walkman.  INT. DAWN, BILL, AND KATIE & DAWN wakes up when the music stops. "Looks at BILL and KATIE, puzzled.  DAWN (fuzzed out)  Well . . . hi. , She realizes she's got the Walkman phones on and removes them.  BILL  Hi, Dawn.  DAWN (still half asleep) ) Shoulda called, guys. Place is a mess. - She smiles. She's radiant when she smiles.  KATIE - We tried. The operator told Bill the phone was off the hook. I * thought something was wrong. How can yousleep with that music  blasting?  DAWN  It's restful. - (Sees the gnawed book BILL'S holding) Oh myGod, Bill, I'm " sorry! Justin's teething and  BILL - There are critics who'd say he picked just the right thing to teethe / on. I don't want to scare you, beautiful, butsomebody's been at - your front door lock with a screwdriver or something. Whoever it  was forced it.  DAWN / Gosh, no! That was Jerry, last week. I lockedus out by mistake + and he didn't have his key and the spare wasn't over the door like , it's supposed to be. He was mad because hehad to take a whiz real / bad and so he took the screwdriver to it. It didn't work, either / that's one tough lock. (Pause) By the time I found my key he'd  already gone in the bushes.  BILL - If it wasn't forced, how come I could just open the door and walk  in?  DAWN (guiltily) , Well . . . sometimes I forget to lock it.  KATIE $ You didn't call me tonight, Dawn?  DAWN 0 Gee, no! I didn't call anyone! I was too busy chasing Justin around! - He kept wanting to eat the fabric softener!Then he got sleepy and , I sat down here and thought I'd listen to some tunes while I waited . for your movie to come on, Bill, and I fell asleep * At the mention of the movie BILL starts /visibly and looks at the book. Then he glances at his  watch.  BILL + I promised to tape it for Jeff. Come on, Katie, we've got time to get  back.  KATIE  Just a second. $ She picks up the phone and dials.  DAWN 0 Gee, Bill, do you think Jeffie's old enough towatch something like  that?  BILL . It's network. They take out the blood-bags,  DAWN (confused but amiable)  Oh. That's good.  INT. KATIE, CU  DENNIS (filter)  Hello?  KATIE , Just thought you'd like to know your Aunt Dawn's fine.  DENNIS (filter)  Oh! Cool. Thanks, Mom. ' INT. THE PHONE NOOK, WITH DENNIS AND THE OTHERS  He looks very relieved.  DENNIS  Aunt Dawn's okay. $ INT. THE CAR, WITH BILL AND KATIE $ They drive in silence for awhile.  KATIE / You think I'm a hysterical idiot, don't you?  BILL (genuinely surprised)  No! I was scared, too.  KATIE  You sure you're not mad?  BILL - I'm too relieved. (Laughs) She's sort of a scatterbrain, old Dawn,  but I love her. $ KATIE (leans over and kisses him) " I love you. You're a sweet man.  BILL  I'm the boogeyman!  KATIE  I am not fooled, sweetheart. ( EXT. THE CAR PASSES THE CAMERA and WE DISSOLVE TO:  INT. JEFF, IN BED / His room is dark. The covers are pulled up to his chin.  JEFF  You promise to tape the rest? ( CAMERA WIDENS OUT so we can see BILL, sitting on the bed.  BILL  I promise.  JEFF - I especially liked the part where the dead guy ripped off the punk  rocker's head.  BILL + Well . . . they used to take out all the blood-bags.  JEFF  What, Dad?  BILL  Nothing. I love you, Jeffie.  JEFF " I love you, too. So does Rambo. - JEFF holds up a stuffed dragon of decidedly/unmilitant aspect. BILL kisses the dragon, then JEFF.  BILL  'Night.  JEFF / 'Night. (As BILL reaches his door) Glad Aunt Dawn was okay.  BILL  Me too.  He goes out.  INT. TV, CU . A guy who looks like he died in a car crash *about two weeks prior to filming (and has since been ( subjected to a lot of hot weather) is ,staggering out of a crypt. THE CAMERA WIDENSto show ( BILL, releasing the VCR PAUSE button.  KATIE (voice)  Booga-booga. ' BILL looks around companionably. THE &CAMERA WIDENS OUT MORE to show KATIE,  wearing a sexy nightgown.  BILL ( Same to you. I missed the first forty !seconds or so after the break. I  had to kiss Rambo.  KATIE ' You sure you're not mad at me, Bill? ! He goes to her and kisses her.  BILL  Not even a smidge.  KATIE / It's just that I could have sworn it was one of mine. You know  what I mean? One of mine?  KATIE 0 I can still hear those sobs. So lost . . . so heartbroken.  BILL " Kate, have you ever thought you "recognized someone on the street, . and called her, and when she finally turned around it was a total  stranger?  KATIE / Yes, once. In Seattle. I was in a mall and I thought I saw my old 2 roommate. I . . . oh. I see what you're saying.  BILL * Sure. There are sound-alikes as well as look-alikes.  KATIE * But . . . you know your own. At least I thought so until tonight. . She puts her cheek on his shoulder, looking troubled.  KATIE ' I was so positive it was Polly . . .  BILL ( Because you've been worried about her getting her feet under her / at the new school . . . but judging from the stuff she told you 1 tonight, I'd say she's doing just fine in that department. Wouldn't  you?  KATIE  Yes . . . I guess I would.  BILL  Let it go, hon.  KATIE (looks at him closely) / I hate to see you looking so tired. Hurry up and have an idea, you.  BILL  Well, I'm trying.  KATIE  You coming to bed?  BILL ) Soon as I finish taping this for Jeff.  KATIE (amused) * Bill, that machine was made by Japanese technicians who think of 0 damned near everything. It'll run on its own.  BILL - Yeah, but it's been a long time since I've seen this one, and . . .  KATIE 2 Okay. Enjoy. I think I'll be awake for a little while. (Pause) I've got  a few ideas of my own.  BILL (smiles)  Yeah?  KATIE  Yeah. - She starts out, showing a lot of leg, then .turns in the doorway as something else strikesher.  KATIE * If they show that part where the punk's head gets  BILL (guiltily)  I'll edit it.  KATIE , 'Night. And thanks again. For everything. & She leaves. BILL sits in his chair.  INT. TV, CU - A couple is necking in a car. Suddenly the -passenger door is ripped open by the dead guyand we  DISSOLVE TO:  INT. KATIE, IN BED 3 It's dark. She's asleep. She wakes up . . . sort of.  KATIE (sleepy)  Hey, big guy 0 She feels for him, but his side of the bed is 2empty, the coverlet still pulled up. She sits up. Looks  at: + INT. A CLOCK ON THE NIGHT-TABLE, KATIE'S POV - It says 2:03 A.M. Then it flashes to 2:04.  INT. KATIE + Fully awake now. And concerned. She gets .up, puts on her robe, and leaves the bedroom.  INT. THE TV SCREEN, CU  Snow  KATIE (voice, approaching) % Bill? Honey? You okay? Bill? Bi  INT. KATIE, IN BILL'S STUDY ' She's frozen, wide-eyed with horror.  INT. BILL, IN HIS CHAIR . He's slumped to one side, eyes closed, hand 1inside his shirt. DAWN was sleeping. BILL is not.& EXT. A COFFIN, BEING LOWERED INTO A GRAVE  MINISTER (voice) * And so we commit the earthly remains of William Weiderman to 0 the ground, confident of his spirit and soul. 'Be ye not cast down,  brethren . . . '  EXT. GRAVESIDE , All the WEIDERMANS are ranged here. KATIE +and POLLY wear identical black dresses and . veils. CONNIE wears a black skirt and white /blouse. DENNIS and JEFF wear black suits. JEFF + is crying. He has Rambo the Dragon under $his arm for a little extra comfort. ) CAMERA MOVES IN ON KATIE. Tears course -slowly down her cheeks. She bends and gets a . handful of earth. Tosses it into the grave.  KATIE  Love you, big guy.  EXT. JEFF  Weeping. # EXT. LOOKING DOWN INTO THE GRAVE ( Scattered earth on top of the coffin.  DISSOLVE TO:  EXT. THE GRAVE ) A GROUNDSKEEPER pats the last sod into place.  GROUNDSKEEPER * My wife says she wishes you'd written a couple more before you 0 had your heart attack, mister. (Pause) I like Westerns, m'self. + THE GROUNDSKEEPER walks away, whistling.  DISSOLVE TO:  EXT. A CHURCH DAY  TITLE CARD: FIVE YEARS LATER , THE WEDDING MARCH is playing. POLLY, older-and radiant with joy, emerges into a pelting . shower of rice. She's in a wedding gown, hernew husband by her side. / Celebrants throwing rice line either side of *the path. From behind the bride and groom come ( others. Among them are KATIE, DENNIS, 1CONNIE, and JEFF . . . all five years older. With- KATIE is another man. This is HANK. In the )interim, KATIE has also taken a husband. ' POLLY turns and her mother is there.  POLLY  Thank you, Mom.  KATIE (crying)  Oh doll, you're so welcome. * They embrace. After a moment POLLY draws)away and looks at HANK. There is a brief $ moment of tension, and then POLLY embraces HANK, too.  POLLY . Thank you too, Hank. I'm sorry I was such a creep for so long . . .  HANK (easily) / You were never a creep, Pol. A girl only has one father.  CONNIE  Throw it! Throw it! + After a moment, POLLY throws her bouquet.$ EXT. THE BOUQUET, CU, SLOW MOTION ' Turning and turning through the air.  DISSOLVES TO:  INT. THE STUDY, WITH KATIE , The word-processor has been replaced by a .wide lamp looming over a stack of blueprints. The , book jackets have been replaced by photos 0of buildings. Ones that have first been built in HANK'S mind, presumably. . KATIE is looking at the desk, thoughtful anda little sad.  HANK (voice)  Coming to bed, Kate? ) She turns and THE CAMERA WIDENS OUT to 'give us HANK. He's wearing a robe over , pajamas. She comes to him and gives him a +little hug, smiling. Maybe we notice a few streaks of - gray in her hair; her pretty pony has done +its fair share of running since BILL died.  KATIE - In a little while. A woman doesn't see her first one get married  every day, you know.  HANK  I know. ' THE CAMERA FOLLOWS as they walk from 'the work area of the study to the more informal . area. This is much the same as it was in the+old days, with a coffee table, stereo, TV, couch, and , BILL'S old easy-chair. She looks at this.  HANK ! You still miss him, don't you?  KATIE ) Some days more than others. You didn't know, and Polly didn't  remember.  HANK (gently)  Remember what, doll?  KATIE % Polly got married on the five-year anniversary of Bill's death.  HANK (hugs her) ! Come on to bed, why don't you?  KATIE  In a little while.  HANK # Okay. Maybe I'll still be awake.  KATIE  Got a few ideas, do you?  HANK  I might.  KATIE  That's nice. / He kisses her, then leaves, closing the door 2behind him. KATIE sits in BILL'S old chair. Close . by, on the coffee table, is a remote control)for the TV and an extension phone. KATIE looks at * the blank TV, and THE CAMERA MOVES IN on/her face. One tear rims one eye, sparkling like a sapphire.  KATIE / I do still miss you, big guy. Lots and lots. Every day. And you  know what? It hurts. - The tear falls. She picks up the TV remote and pushes the ON button.  INT. TV, KATIE'S POV , An ad for Ginsu Knives comes to an end andis replaced by a STAR LOGO.  ANNOUNCER (voice) * Now back to Channel 63's Thursday night Star Time Movie . . .  Ghost Kiss. * The logo DISSOLVES INTO a guy who looks ,like he died in a car crash about two weeks ago + and has since been subjected to a lot of ,hot weather. He comes staggering out of the same old  crypt.  INT. KATIE 2 Terribly startled almost horrified. She hits ,the OFF button on the remote control. The TV blinks off. - KATIE'S face begins to work. She struggles +against the impending emotional storm, but the - coincidence of the movie is just one thing +too many on what must have already been oneof the / most emotionally trying days of her life. The0dam breaks and she begins to sob . . . terrible , heartbroken sobs. She reaches out for the .little table by the chair, meaning to put the remote + control on it, and knocks the phone onto the floor. " SOUND: THE HUM OF AN OPEN LINE. - Her tear-stained face grows suddenly still )as she looks at the telephone. Something begins to fill 3 it . . . an idea? an intuition? Hard to tell. Andmaybe it doesn't matter. " INT. THE TELEPHONE, KATIE'S POV + THE CAMERA MOVES IN TO ECU . . . MOVES IN,until the dots in the off-the-hook receiver  look like chasms. & SOUND OF OPEN-LINE BUZZ UP TO LOUD. & WE GO INTO THE BLACK . . . and hear  BILL (voice) * Who are you calling? Who do you want to call? Who would you  call, if it wasn't too late?  INT. KATIE , There is now a strange hypnotized look on 'her face. She reaches down, scoops the telephone up, ' and punches in numbers, seemingly at random.  SOUND: RINGING PHONE. . KATIE continues to look hypnotized. The look0holds until the phone is answered . . . and she . hears herself on the other end of the line.  KATIE (voice; filter)  Hello, Weiderman residence. * KATIE our present-day KATIE with the /streaks of gray in her hair goes on sobbing,yet an , expression of desperate hope is trying to 'be born on her face. On some level she understands that . the depth of her grief has allowed a kind of1telephonic time-travel. She's trying to talk, to force  the words out.  KATIE (sobbing) $ Take . . . please take . . . t-t- $ KATIE, IN THE PHONE NOOK, REPRISE / It's five years ago. BILL is standing beside .her, looking concerned. JEFF is wandering off to look & for a blank tape in the other room.  KATIE  Polly? What's wrong?  INT. KATIE, IN THE STUDY  KATIE (sobbing)  Please quick ' SOUND: CLICK OF A BROKEN CONNECTION.  KATIE (screaming) . Take him to the hospital! If you want him tolive, take him to the / hospital! He's going to have a heart attack! He  SOUND: HUM OF AN OPEN LINE. * Slowly, very slowly, KATIE hangs up the .telephone. Then, after a moment, she picks it up again. - She speaks aloud with no self-consciousness+whatever. Probably doesn't even know she's doing  it.  KATIE ' I dialed the old number. I dialed  SLAM CUT TO: * INT. BILL, IN THE PHONE NOOK WITH KATIE BESIDE HIM - He's just taken the phone from KATIE and isspeaking to the operator.  OPERATOR (filter, GIGGLES)  I promise not to give it out.  BILL  It's 555-  SLAM CUT TO: & INT. KATIE, IN BILL'S OLD CHAIR, CU  KATIE (finishes)  -4408.  INT. THE PHONE, CU 0 INT. KATIE'S trembling finger carefully picks out the number, and we hear the corresponding  tones: 555-4408. & INT. KATIE, IN BILL'S OLD CHAIR, CU * She closes her eyes as the PHONE BEGINS .TO RING. Her face is filled with an agonizing , mixture of hope and fear. If only she can 'have one more chance to pass the vital message on, it # says . . . just one more chance.  KATIE (low)  Please . . . please . . .  RECORDED VOICE (filter) ) You have reached a non-working number. Please hang up and dial # again. If you need assistance * KATIE hangs up again. Tears stream down %her cheeks. THE CAMERA PANS AWAY AND  DOWN to the telephone. + INT. THE PHONE NOOK, WITH KATIE AND BILL,REPRISE  BILL ( So it was a prank. Or someone who was crying so hard she dialed a / wrong number . . . 'through a shimmering filmof tears,' as we  veteran hacks like to say.  KATIE , It was not a prank and it was not a wrong number! It was someone  in my family! + INT. KATIE (PRESENT DAY) IN BILL'S STUDY  KATIE * Yes. Someone in my family. Someone very close. (Pause) Me. + She suddenly throws the phone across the ,room. Then she begins to SOB AGAIN and puts her + hands over her face. THE CAMERA HOLDS on &her for a moment, then DOLLIES ACROSS  TO  INT. THE PHONE. / It lies on the carpet, looking both bland and(somehow ominous. CAMERA MOVES IN TO ECU . the holes in the receiver once more look %like huge dark chasms. We HOLD, then  FADE TO BLACK.   -The Ten O' Clock People-   1 + Pearson tried to scream but shock robbed ,his voice and he was able to produce only a low, ) choked whuffling the sound of a man /moaning in his sleep. He drew in breath to try it again, * but before he could get started, a hand .seized his left arm just above the elbow in a strong pincers  grip and squeezed. / 'It'd be a mistake,' the voice that went with/the hand said. It was pitched only half a step above ( a whisper, and it spoke directly into /Pearson's left ear. 'A bad one. Believe me, it would.' - Pearson looked around. The thing which had ,occasioned his desire no, his need to ) scream had disappeared inside the bank )now, amazingly unchallenged, and Pearson found he * could look around. A good-looking young -black man in a cream-colored suit had grabbedhim. - Pearson didn't know him, but he recognized )him; he sight-recognized most of the odd little subtribe + he'd come to think of as the Ten O'clock .People . . . as, he supposed, they recognized him. ' The good-looking young black man was watching him warily. - 'Did you see it?' Pearson asked. The words *came out in a high-pitched, nagging whine that was . totally unlike his usual confident speaking voice. + The good-looking young black man had let #go of Pearson's arm when he became reasonably ) convinced that Pearson wasn't going to &shock the plaza in front of The First Mercantile Bank of ( Boston with a volley of wild screams; ,Pearson immediately reached out and gripped the young . black man's wrist. It was as if he were not -yet capable of living without the comfort of the other , man's touch. The good-looking young black -man made no effort to pull away, only glanced& down at Pearson's hand for a moment ,before looking back up into Pearson's face. 0 'I mean, did you see it? Horrible! Even if it -was makeup . . . or some kind of mask someone put on for a joke . . . ' + But it hadn't been make-up and it hadn't -been a mask. The thing in the dark-gray AndreCyr ) suit and five-hundred-dollar shoes had +passed very close to Pearson, almost close enough to . touch (God forbid, his mind interjected with0a helpless cringe of revulsion), and he knew it ) hadn't been make-up or a mask. Because +the flesh on the huge protuberance Pearson supposed - was its head had been in motion, different /parts moving in different directions, like the bands of * exotic gases surrounding some planetary giant. - 'Friend,' the good-looking young black man /in the cream-colored suit began, 'you need '/ 'What was it?' Pearson broke in. 'I never saw+anything like that in my life! It was like , something you'd see in a, I don't know, a #sideshow . . . or . . . or . . . ' * His voice was no longer coming from its -usual place inside his head. It seemed to be drifting , down from someplace above him, instead 1as if he'd fallen into a snare or a crack in the earth ' and that high-pitched, nagging voice (belonged to somebody else, somebody who was speaking  down to him.  'Listen, my friend ' & There was something else, too. When $Pearson had stepped out through the revolving doors ' just a few minutes ago with an unlit *Marlboro between his fingers, the day had been overcast , threatening rain, in fact. Now everything ,was not just bright but overbright. The red skirt on the - pretty blonde standing beside the building 'fifty feet or so farther down (she was smoking a % cigarette and reading a paperback) +screamed into the day like a firebell; the yellow of a passing 0 delivery boy's shirt stung like the barb of a .wasp. People's faces stood out like the faces in his ) daughter Jenny's beloved Pop-Up books. 4 And his lips . . . he couldn't feel his lips. They*had gone numb, the way they sometimes did ! after a big shot of novocaine. + Pearson turned to the good-looking young .man in the cream-colored suit and said, 'This is / ridiculous, but I think I'm going to faint.' . 'No, you're not,' the young man said, and he'spoke with such assurance that Pearson believed . him, at least temporarily. The hand gripped ,his arm above the elbow again, but much more. gently this time. 'Come on over here you need to sit down.' + There were circular marble islands about +three feet high scattered around the broad plaza in - front of the bank, each containing its own 0variety of late summer/early fall flowers. Therewere , Ten O'clock People sitting on the rims of (most of these upscale flower tubs, some reading, some , chatting, some looking out at the passing +rivers of foot-traffic on the sidewalks of Commercial / Street, but all of them also doing the thing ,that made them Ten O'Clock People, the thing* Pearson had come downstairs and outside ,to do himself. The marble island closest to Pearson , and his new acquaintance contained asters,2their purple miraculously brilliant to Pearson in his . heightened state of awareness. Its circular -rim was vacant, probably because it was goingon for ( ten past the hour now, and people had begun to drift back inside. ) 'Sit down,' the young black man in the )cream-colored suit invited, and although Pearson tried - his best, what he ended up doing felt more /like falling than sitting. At one moment he was+ standing beside the reddish-brown marble -island, and then somebody pulled the pins in his knees " and he landed on his ass. Hard. . 'Bend over now,' the young man said, sitting'down beside him. His face had remained pleasant - throughout the entire encounter, but there *was nothing pleasant about his eyes; they combed + rapidly back and forth across the plaza.  'Why?' . 'To get the blood back into your head,' the .young black man said. 'But don't make it look like / that. Make it look like you're just smelling the flowers.'  'Look like to who?' , 'Just do it, okay?' The smallest tinge of *impatience had crept into the young man's voice. * Pearson leaned his head over and took a .deep breath. The flowers didn't smell as good as they - looked, he discovered they had a weedy, /faintly dog-pissy smell. Still, he thought his head % might be clearing just a tiny bit. + 'Start saying the states,' the black man ,ordered. He crossed his legs, shook out the fabric of his , pants to preserve the crease, and brought &a package of Winstons out of an inner pocket. Pearson * realized his own cigarette was gone; he +must have dropped it-in that first shocked moment, when ) he had seen the monstrous thing in the -expensive suit crossing the west side of the plaza. ! 'The states,' he said blankly. ) The young black man nodded, produced a +lighter that was probably quite a bit less expensive . than it looked at first glance, and lit his .cigarette. 'Start with this one and work your way west,'  he invited. 1 'Massachusetts . . . New York, I suppose . . . /or Vermont if you start from upstate . . . New 1 Jersey . . . ' Now he straightened up a little ,and began to speak with greater confidence. 1 'Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Illinois ' + The black man raised his eyebrows. 'West Virginia, huh? You sure?' 1 Pearson smiled a little. 'Pretty sure, yeah. I !might have got Ohio and Illinois bass-ackwards,  though.' + The black man shrugged to show it didn't 0matter, and smiled. 'You don't feel like you're going , to faint anymore, though I can see you /don't and that's the important part. Want a butt?' / 'Thank you,' Pearson said gratefully. He did -not just want a butt; he felt that he needed one. 'I - had one, but I lost it. What's your name?' & The black man poked a fresh Winston .between Pearson's lips and snapped a light to it. 'Dudley $ Rhinemann. You can call me Duke.' * Pearson dragged deeply on the cigarette ,and looked toward the revolving doors which gave ) ingress upon all the gloomy depths and .cloudy heights of The First Mercantile. 'That wasn't just a 0 hallucination, was it?' he asked. 'What I saw . . . you saw it, too, right?'  Rhinemann nodded. + 'You didn't want him to know I saw him,' 0Pearson said. He spoke slowly, trying to put it - together on his own. His voice was back in /its usual spot again, and that alone was a big relief.  Rhinemann nodded again. - 'But how could I not see him? And how couldhe not know it?' , 'Did you see anyone else getting ready to 0holler themselves into a stroke like you were?' * Rhinemann asked. 'See anybody else even -looking the way you were? Me, for instance?' - Pearson shook his head slowly. He now felt 1more than just frightened; he felt totally lost. . 'I got between you and him the best I could,.and I don't think he saw you, but for a secondor , two there it was close. You looked like a *man who just saw a mouse crawl out of his meatloaf. + You're in Collateral Loans, aren't you?' & 'Oh yes Brandon Pearson. Sorry.' . 'I'm in Computer Services, myself. And it's .okay. Seeing your first batman can do that to you.' ( Duke Rhinemann stuck out his hand and +Pearson shook it, but most of his mind was one turn - back. Seeing your first batman can do that )to you, the young man had said, and once Pearson had , jettisoned his initial image of the Caped &Crusader swinging his way between the art-deco spires , of Gotham City, he discovered that wasn't +a bad term at all. He discovered something else, as / well, or perhaps rediscovered it: it was good&to have a name for something that had frightened . you. It didn't make the fright go away, but (it went a long way toward rendering the fright  manageable. + Now he deliberately replayed what he had 'seen, thinking Batman, it was my first batman, as  he did. ( He had come out through the revolving +doors thinking of only one thing, the same thing he was * always thinking about when he came down /at ten how good that first rush of nicotine was . going to feel when it hit his brain. It was .what made him a part of the tribe; it was his version of # phylacteries or tattooed cheeks. , He had first registered the fact that the +day had gotten even darker since he'd come in at eightforty- . five, and had thought: We'll be puffing our 'cancer-sticks in the pouring rain this afternoon, + the whole damned bunch of us. Not that a /little rain would stop them, of course; the TenO'clock ) People were nothing if not persistent. ) He remembered sweeping his eyes across -the plaza, doing a quick attendance check so - quick it was really almost unconscious. He (had seen the girl in the red skirt (and wondered again, - as he always did, if anyone who looked that)good would be any good in the sack), the young bebop , janitor from the third floor who wore his +cap turned around while he was mopping the floors - in the John and the snack-bar, the elderly ,man with the fine white hair and the purple blotches on ' his cheeks, the young woman with the .thick glasses, narrow face, and long straight black hair. He ) had seen a number of others he vaguely -recognized, as well. One of them, of course, had been * the good-looking young black man in the cream-colored suit. - If Timmy Flanders had been around, Pearson 'probably would have joined him, but he wasn't, & and so Pearson had moved toward the .center of the plaza instead, meaning to sit on one of the . marble islands (the very one he was sitting +on now, in fact). Once there he would have been in an - excellent position to calculate the length 0and curves of Little Miss Red Skirt's legs a cheap , thrill, granted, but one made do with the -materials at hand. He was a well-married man with a * wife he loved and a daughter he adored, ,he'd never come even close to cheating, but as he & approached forty, he had discovered 0certain imperatives surfacing in his blood like sea-monsters. , And he didn't know how any man could help 0staring at a red skirt like that, wondering just a little $ if the woman was wearing matching underwear beneath. ' He had barely gotten moving when the &newcomer had turned the corner of the building and * begun mounting the plaza steps. Pearson )had caught movement in the corner of his eye, and , under ordinary circumstances he would have,dismissed it it was the red skirt he had been , concentrating on just then, short, tight, 0and as bright as the side of a fire engine. But he had , looked, because, even seen from the corner.of his eye and with other things on his mind, he had + registered something wrong with the face ,and the head that went with the approaching figure. So , he had turned and looked, canceling sleep &for God knew how many nights to come. * The shoes were all right; the dark-gray (Andre Cyr suit, looking as solid and as dependable as - the door of the bank vault in the basement,-was even better; the red tie was predictable but not + offensive. All of this was fine, typical )top-echelon banker's attire for a Monday morning (and * who but a top-echelon banker could come 2in at ten o'clock in the first place?). It wasn't until you - got to the head that you realized that you )had either gone crazy or were looking at something for , which there was no entry in the World BookEncyclopedia. , But why didn't they run? Pearson wondered +now, as a raindrop fell on the back of his hand and / another fell on the clean white paper of his ,half-smoked cigarette. They should have run , screaming, the way the people run from the,giant bugs in those fifties monster movies. Then he 0 thought, But then . . . I didn't run, either. * True enough, but it wasn't the same. He .hadn't run because he'd been frozen in place. He had - tried to scream, however; it was just that )his new friend had stopped him before he could throw " his vocal cords back into gear.  Batman. Your first batman. + Above the broad shoulders of this year's ,most Eminently Acceptable Business Suit and the - knot in the red Sulka power-tie had loomed ,a huge grayish-brown head, not round but as + misshapen as a baseball that has taken a /whole summer's worth of bashing. Black lines veins, . perhaps pulsed just below the surface of ,the skull in meaningless roadmap squiggles, and the * area that should have been its face but ,wasn't (not in any human sense, anyway) had been % covered with lumps that bulged and ,quivered like tumors possessed of their own terrible semisentient * life. Its features were rudimentary and .pushed together flat black eyes, perfectly . round, that stared avidly from the middle of*its face like the eyes of a shark or some bloated * insect; malformed ears with no lobes or ,pinnae. It hadn't had a nose, at least none that Pearson * could recognize, although two tusk-like (protuberances had jutted from the spiny tangle of hair - that grew just below the eyes. Most of the ,thing's face had been mouth a huge black crescent . ringed with triangular teeth. To a creature ,with a mouth like that, Pearson had thought later, + bolting one's food would be a sacrament. . His very first thought as he stared at this 0horrible apparition an apparition carrying a slim / Bally briefcase in one beautifully manicured .hand was It's the Elephant Man. But, he now- realized, the creature had been nothing at -all like the misshapen but essentially human creature in , that old movie. Duke Rhinemann was closer 'to the mark; those black eyes and that drawn-up ) mouth were features he associated with )furry, squeaking things that spent their nights eating flies + and their days hanging head-down in dark places. + But none of that was what had caused him -to try that first scream; that need had come when , the creature in the Andre Cyr suit walked ,past him, its bright, bug-like eyes already fixed on the 1 revolving doors. It was at its closest in that ,second or two, and it was then that Pearson had seen ) its tumorous face somehow moving below .the mottles of coarse hair which grew from it.He . didn't know how such a thing could possibly -be, but it was he was watching it happen, , observing the man's flesh crawling around 0the lumpy curves of its skull and rippling alongthe & thick cane-head shape of its jaw in +alternating bands. Between these he caught glimpses of some , gruesome raw pink substance that he didn't.even want to think about . . . yet now that he* remembered, it seemed that he could not stop thinking about it. - More raindrops splattered on his hands and /face. Next to him on the curved lip of marble, % Rhinemann took a final drag on his *cigarette, pitched it away, and stood up. 'Come on,' he said.  'Starting to rain.' - Pearson looked at him with wide eyes, then .looked toward the bank. The blonde in the red ( skirt was just going in, her book now ,tucked under her arm. She was being closely followed (and . closely observed) by the old party with the #tycoon's shock of fine white hair. - Pearson flicked his eyes back to Rhinemann .and said, 'Go in there? Are you serious? That  thing went in there!'  'I know.' - 'You want to hear something totally nuts?' )Pearson asked, tossing his own cigarette away. He + didn't know where he was going now, home,*he supposed, but he knew one place he was most ) assuredly not going, and that was back ,inside The First Mercantile Bank of Boston. ' 'Sure,' Rhinemann agreed. 'Why not?' * 'That thing looked quite a lot like our )revered Chief Executive Officer, Douglas Keefer . . . + until you got to the head, that is. Same taste in suits and briefcases.' * 'What a surprise,' Duke Rhinemann said. + Pearson measured him with an uneasy eye. 'What do you mean?'' . 'I think you already know, but you've had a 1tough morning and so I'll spell it out. That was  Keefer.' . Pearson smiled uncertainly. Rhinemann didn't(smile back. He got to his feet, gripped Pearson's . arms, and pulled the older man forward until$their faces were only inches apart. . 'I saved your life just now. Do you believe that, Mr. Pearson?' * Pearson thought about it and discovered 0that he did. That alien, bat-like face with its black + eyes and clustered bunches of teeth hung 4in his mind like a dark flare. 'Yes. I guess I do.' , 'Okay. Then do me the credit of listening 1carefully as I tell you three things will you do  that?'  'I . . . yes, sure.' - 'First thing: that was Douglas Keefer, CEO .of The First Mercantile Bank of Boston, close * friend of the Mayor, and, incidentally, (honorary chairman of the current Boston Children's / Hospital fund-drive. Second thing: there are .at least three more bats working in the bank, one of + them on your floor. Third thing: you are *going back in there. If you want to go on living, that is.' $ Pearson gaped at him, momentarily .incapable of reply if he'd tried, he would have $ produced only more of those fuzzy whuffling sounds. , Rhinemann took him by the elbow and pulled*him toward the revolving doors. 'Come on, + buddy,' he said, and his voice was oddly -gentle. 'The rain is really starting to come down. If we * stay out here much longer we'll attract ,attention, and people in our position can't afford to do  that.' - Pearson went along with Rhinemann at first,+then thought of the way the black nests of lines % on the thing's head had pulsed and +squiggled. The image brought him to a cold stop just outside - the revolving doors. The smooth surface of 'the plaza was now wet enough to reveal another ( Brandon Pearson below him, a shimmery /reflection that hung from his own heels like a bat of a 5 different color. 'I . . . I don't think I can,' he !said in a halting, humble voice. ( 'You can,' Rhinemann said. He glanced )momentarily down at Pearson's left hand. 'Married, I  see with kids?' . 'One. A daughter.' Pearson was looking into *the bank's lobby. The glass panels in the , revolving door were polarized, making the ,big room beyond them look very dark. Like a cave, he , thought. A batcave filled with half-blind disease-carriers. - 'You want your wife and kid to read in the +paper tomorrow that the cops dragged Da-Da out of & Boston Harbor with his throat cut?' ( Pearson looked at Rhinemann with wide /eyes. Raindrops splattered against his cheeks, his  forehead. + 'They make it look like junkies did it,' /Rhinemann said, 'and it works. It always works., Because they're smart, and because they've1got friends in high places. Hell, high places is what  they're all about.' - 'I don't understand you,' Pearson said. 'I don't understand any of this.' / 'I know you don't,' Rhinemann returned. 'This/is a dangerous time for you, so just do what I 0 tell you. What I'm telling you is to get back ,to your desk before you're missed, and roll through + the rest of the day with a smile on your /face. Hold onto that smile, my friend don't let go of it . no matter how greasy it gets.' He hesitated,,then added: 'If you screw up, it's probably gonna get  you killed.' , The rainwater made bright tracks down the *young man's smooth dark face, and Pearson - suddenly saw what had been there all along,+what he had missed only because of his own shock: . this man was terrified, and he had risked a *great deal to keep Pearson from stumbling into some  awful trap. - 'I really can't stay out here any longer,' "Rhinemann said. 'It's dangerous.' . 'Okay,' Pearson said, a little astounded to -hear his own voice coming out in normal, even* measures. 'Then let's go back to work.' , Rhinemann looked relieved. 'Good man. And ,whatever you see the rest of the day, don't show  surprise. You understand?' , 'Yes,' Pearson said. He didn't understand anything. + 'Can you clear your desk early and leave around three?' / Pearson considered it, then nodded. 'Yeah. I guess I could do that.' + 'Good. Meet me around the corner on Milk Street.'  'All right.' , 'You're doin great, man,' Rhinemann said. 0'You're going to be fine. See you at three.' He + entered the revolving door and gave it a 'push. Pearson stepped into the segment behind him, , feeling as though he had somehow left his 2mind out there in the plaza . . . all of it, that was, * except for the part that already wanted another cigarette. * The day crawled, but everything was all -right until he came back from lunch (and two cigarettes) - with Tim Flanders. They stepped out of the 0elevator on the third floor and the first thing Pearson + saw was another batman . . . except this *one was actually a batwoman wearing black patentleather , heels, black nylon hose, and a formidable -silk tweed suit Samuel Blue was Pearson's . guess. The perfect power outfit . . . until +you got to the head nodding over it like a mutated  sunflower, that was. / 'Hullo, gents.' A sweet contralto voice spoke*from somewhere behind the harelipped hole that  was its mouth. , It's Suzanne Holding, Pearson thought. It can't be, but it is. . 'Hello, Suzy darlin,' he heard himself say, 0and thought: If she comes near me . . . tries totouch 4 me . . . I'll scream. I won't be able to help it, no matter what the kid told me. - 'Are you all right, Brand? You look pale.' 0 'A little touch of whatever's going around, I -guess,' he said, astounded all over again at the 1 natural ease of his voice. 'I think I'm gettingon top of it, though.' , 'Good,' Suzanne Holding's voice said from .behind the bat's face and the strangely motileflesh. . 'No French kissing until you're all better, /though in fact, don't even breathe on me. I can't , afford to be sick with the Japanese comingin on Wednesday.' , No problem, sweetheart no problem, you better believe it. ! 'I'll try to restrain myself.' ) 'Thanks. Tim, will you come down to my ,office and look at a couple of spread-sheet  summaries?' + Timmy Flanders slipped an arm around the /waist of the sexily prim Samuel Blue suit, and * before Pearson's wide eyes, he bent and 1planted a little kiss on the side of the thing's tumorraddled, * hairy face. That's where Timmy sees her .cheek, Pearson thought, and he felt his sanity. suddenly slip like greasy cable wound around*the dram of a winch. Her smooth, perfumed cheek - that's what he's seeing, all right, and -what he thinks he's kissing. Oh my God. Oh myGod. ) 'There!' Timmy exclaimed, and gave the 1creature a small cavalier's bow. 'One kiss and I am  your servant, dear lady!' , He tipped Pearson a wink and began walking/the monster in the direction of her office. As ( they passed the drinking fountain, he ,dropped the arm he had hung about her waist. The short ( and meaningless little peacock/peahen ,courting dance a ritual that had somehow developed , over the last ten years or so in business ,relationships where the boss was female and the aide was + male had now been performed, and they )drew away from Pearson as sexual equals, talking  nothing but dry numbers. - Marvelous analysis, Brand, Pearson thought *distractedly as he turned away from them. You - should have been a sociologist. And almost +had been it had been his college minor, after all. + As he entered his office he became aware ,that his whole body was running with a slow slime ) of sweat. Pearson forgot sociology and 'began rooting for three o'clock again. + At two-forty-five he steeled himself and .poked his head into Suzanne Holding's office. The alien - asteroid of her head was tilted toward the *blue-gray screen of her computer, but she looked ) around when he said 'Knock-knock,' the 1flesh on her strange face sliding restlessly, herblack . eyes regarding him with she cold avidity of "a shark studying a swimmer's leg. / 'I gave Buzz Carstairs the Corporate Fours,' 0Pearson said. 'I'm going to take the Individual + Form Nines home with me, if that's okay. !I've got my backup discs there.' / 'Is this your coy way of saying you're going )AWOL, my dear?' Suzanne asked. The black - veins bulged unspeakably on top of her bald.skull; the lumps which surrounded her features- quivered, and Pearson realized one of them +was leaking a thick pinkish substance that looked # like bloodstained shaving cream. * He made himself smile. 'You caught me.' 1 'Well,' Suzanne said, 'we'll just have to have +the four o'clock orgy without you today, I guess.' " 'Thanks, Suze.' He turned away.  'Brand?' ) He turned back, his fear and revulsion .threatening to turn into a bright white freeze of panic, + suddenly very sure that those avid black ,eyes had seen through him and that the thing, masquerading as Suzanne Holding was going ,to say, Let's stop playing games, shall we? Come 0 in and close the door. Let's see if you taste as good as you look. , Rhinemann would wait awhile, then go on to,wherever he was going by himself. Probably, - Pearson thought, he'll know what happened. Probably he's seen it before. $ 'Yes?' he asked, trying to smile. , She looked at him appraisingly for a long ,moment without speaking, the grotesque slab of * head looming above the sexy lady exec's ,body, and then she said, 'You look a little better this / afternoon.' The mouth still gaped, the black /eyes still stared with all the expression of a Raggedy . Ann doll abandoned under a child's bed, but )Pearson knew that anyone else would have seen / only Suzanne Holding, smiling prettily at one-of her junior executives and exhibiting just the - right degree of Type A concern. Not exactly%Mother Courage, but still caring and interested. ( 'Good,' he said, and decided that was probably too limp. 'Great!' ( 'Now if we could only get you to quit smoking.' + 'Well, I'm trying,' he said, and laughed ,weakly. The greasy cable around that mental winch . slipped again. Let me go, he thought. Let me/go, you horrible bitch, let me get out of here before * I do something too nutso to be ignored. - 'You'd qualify for an automatic upgrade on -your insurance, you know,' the monster said. Now ) the surface of another of those tumors ,broke open with a rotten little chup! sound and more of % that pink stuff began to ooze out. - 'Yeah, I know,' he said. 'And I'll give it )serious consideration, Suzanne. Really.' * 'You do that,' she said, and swung back *toward the glowing computer screen. For a moment he ( was stunned, unable to grasp his good !fortune. The interview was over. / By the time Pearson left the building it was +pouring, but the Ten O'Clock People now they , were the Three O'clock People, of course, .but there was no essential difference were out just ) the same, huddled together like sheep, 1doing their thing. Little Miss Red Skirt and the janitor * who liked to wear his cap turned around *backward were sheltering beneath the same sodden + section of the Boston Globe. They looked )uncomfortable and damp around the edges, but , Pearson envied the janitor just the same. +Little Miss Red Skirt wore Giorgio; he had smelled it in - the elevator on several occasions. And she +made little silky rustling noises when she moved, of  course. + What the hell are you thinking about? he /asked himself sternly, and replied in the same mental , breath: Keeping my sanity, thank you very much. Okay by you? ( Duke Rhinemann was standing under the *awning of the flower shop just around the corner, his ( shoulders hunched, a cigarette in the -corner of his own mouth. Pearson joined him, glanced at his , watch, and decided he could wait a little /longer. He poked his head forward a little bit just the ) same, to catch the tang of Rhinemann's .cigarette. He did this without being aware of it. * 'My boss is one of them,' he told Duke. /'Unless, of course, Douglas Keefer is the sort of % monster who likes to cross-dress.' ) Rhinemann grinned ferociously and said nothing. - 'You said there were three others. Who are the other two?' . 'Donald Fine. You probably don't know him (he's in Securities. And Carl Grosbeck.' 1 'Carl . . . the Chairman of the Board? Jesus!' 1 'I told you,' Rhinemann said. 'High places are ,what these guys're all about Hey, taxi!' ) He dashed out from beneath the awning, )flagging the maroon-and-white cab he had spotted * cruising miraculously empty through the )rainy afternoon. It swerved toward them, spraying fans & of standing water. Rhinemann dodged ,agilely, but Pearson's shoes and pantscuffs were soaked. 0 In his current state, it didn't seem terribly ,important. He opened the door for Rhinemann,who . slid in and scooted across the seat. Pearsonfollowed and slammed the door. + 'Gallagher's Pub,' Rhinemann said. 'It's directly across from ' 1 'I know where Gallagher's is,' the driver said,.'but we don't go anywhere until you dispose of- the cancer-stick, my friend.' He tapped the.sign clipped to the taximeter. SMOKING IS NOT % PERMITTED IN THIS LIVERY, it read. " The two men exchanged a glance. &Rhinemann lifted his shoulders in the half-embarrassed, / half-surly shrug that has been the principal /tribal greeting of the Ten O'Clock People since1990 , or so. Then, without a murmur of protest, *he pitched his quarter-smoked Winston out into the  driving rain. & Pearson began to tell Rhinemann how ,shocked he had been when the elevator doors had opened - and he'd gotten his first good look at the )essential Suzanne Holding, but Rhinemann frowned, - gave his head a minute shake, and swivelled2his thumb toward their driver. 'We'll talk later,'he  said. , Pearson subsided into silence, contenting (himself with watching the rain-streaked highrises of + midtown Boston slip by. He found himself )almost exquisitely attuned to the little street-life ( scenes going on outside the taxicab's ,smeary window. He was especially interested in the little - clusters of Ten O'Clock People he observed -standing in front of every business building they - passed. Where there was shelter, they took /it; where there wasn't, they took that, too simply . turned up their collars, hooded their hands .protectively over their cigarettes, and smoked- anyway. It occurred to Pearson that easily $ninety per cent of the posh midtown high-rises they * were passing were now no-smoking zones, .just like the one he and Rhinemann worked in. It , occurred to him further (and this thought .came with the force of a revelation) that the Ten - O'Clock People were not really a new tribe .at all but the raggedy-ass remnants of an old one, + renegades running before a new broom that,intended to sweep their bad old habit clean out the ( door of American life. Their unifying *characteristic was their unwillingness or inability to quit - killing themselves; they were junkies in a $steadily shrinking twilight zone of acceptability. An , exotic social group, he supposed, but not .one that was apt to last very long. He guessedthat by - the year 2020, 2050 at the latest, the Ten *O'Clock People would have gone the way of the dodo. - Oh shit, -wait a minute, he thought. We 're0just the last of the world's diehard optimists, that's * all most of us don't bother with our /seatbelts, either, and we'd love to sit behind home plate at - the ballpark if they'd just take down that silly fucking screen. , 'What's so funny, Mr. Pearson?' Rhinemann +asked him, and Pearson became aware he was  wearing a broad grin. / 'Nothing,' Pearson said. 'Nothing important, at least.' & 'Okay; just don't freak out on me.' * 'Would you consider it a freak-out if I asked you to call me Brandon?' . 'I guess not,' Rhinemann said, and appeared /to think it over. 'As long as you call me Duke and + we don't get down to BeeBee or Buster or "anything embarrassing like that.' . 'I think you're safe on that score. Want to know something?'  'Sure.' , 'This has been the most amazing day of my life.' * Duke Rhinemann nodded without returning 2Pearson's smile. 'And it's not over yet,' he said. 2 , Pearson thought that Gallagher's had been -an inspired choice on Duke's part a clear Boston - anomaly, more Gilley's than Cheers, it was ,the perfect place for two bank employees to discuss - matters which would have left their nearest.and dearest with serious questions about theirsanity. ( The longest bar Pearson had ever seen )outside of a movie curved around a large square of shiny * dance-floor on which three couples were (currently dry-humping dreamily as Marty Stuart and . Travis Tritt harmonized on 'This'One's Gonna Hurt You.' / In a smaller place the bar proper would have *been packed, but the patrons were so well spaced  along this amazing length of )mahogany-paved racetrack that brass-rail privacy was actually , achievable; there was no need for them to -search out a booth in the dim nether reaches of the . room. Pearson was glad. It would be too easy,to imagine one of the batpeople, maybe even a batcouple, . sitting (or roosting) in the next booth and *listening intently to their conversation. / Isn't that what they call a bunker mentality,-old buddy? he thought. Certainly didn't take you  long to get there, did it? - No, he supposed not, but for the time being.he didn't care. He was just grateful he would be + able to see in all directions while they 1talked . . . or, he supposed, while Duke talked. ( 'Bar's okay?' Duke asked, and Pearson nodded. / It looked like one bar, Pearson reflected as -he followed Duke beneath the sign which read * SMOKING PERMITTED IN THIS SECTION ONLY, /but it was really two . . . the way that, back in the ) fifties, every lunch-counter below the -Mason-Dixon had really been two: one for the white folks - and one for the black. And now as then, you,could see the difference. A Sony almost the size of a ' cineplex movie screen overlooked the )center of the no-smoking section; in the nicotine ghetto - there was only an elderly Zenith bolted to .the wall (a sign beside it read: FEEL FREE TO ASK FOR ( CREDIT, WE WILL FEEL FREE TO TELL YOU /TO F!!K OFF). The surface of the bar itself wasdirtier - down here Pearson thought at first that )this must be just his imagination, but a second glance + confirmed the dingy look of the wood and *the faint overlapping rings that were the Ghosts of , Schooners Past. And, of course, there was -the sallow, yellowish odor of tobacco smoke. He - swore it came puffing up from the barstool ,when he sat down, like popcorn farts out of an elderly ( movie-theater seat. The newscaster on ,their battered, smoke-bleared TV appeared to be dying of . zinc poisoning; the same guy playing to the *healthy folks farther down the bar looked ready to * run the four-forty and then bench-press his weight in blondes. * Welcome to the back of the bus, Pearson +thought, looking at his fellow Ten O'Clock People + with a species of exasperated amusement. *Oh well, mustn't complain; in another ten years * smokers won't even be allowed on board. . 'Cigarette?' Duke asked, perhaps displaying )certain rudimentary mind-reading skills. % Pearson glanced at his watch, then ,accepted the butt, along with another light from Duke's / faux-classy lighter. He drew deep, relishing ,the way the smoke slid into his pipes, even relishing - the slight swimming in his head. Of course -the habit was dangerous, potentially lethal; how , could anything that got you off like this -not be? It was the way of the world, that wasall. - 'What about you?' he asked as Duke slipped %his cigarettes back into his pocket. 3 'I can wait a little longer,' Duke said, smiling..'I got a couple of puffs before we got in the cab. . Also, I have to pay off the extra one I had at lunch.'  'You ration yourself, huh?' , 'Yeah. I usually only allow myself one at +lunch, but today I had two. You scared the shit out of  me, you know.'  'I was pretty scared myself.' ' The bartender came over, and Pearson ,found himself fascinated at the way the man avoided + the thin ribbon of smoke rising from his /cigarette. I doubt if he even knows he's doing it . . . but if / I blew some in his face, I bet he'd come over#the top and clean my clock for me.  'Help you gentlemen?' # Duke ordered Sam Adamses without ,consulting Pearson. When the bartender left to get them, . Duke turned back and said, 'Stretch it out. .This'd be a bad time to get drunk. Bad time to even get  tight.' + Pearson nodded and dropped a five-dollar ,bill on the counter when the bartender came back * with the beers. He took a deep swallow, *then dragged on his cigarette. There were people who * thought a cigarette never tasted better &than it did after a meal, but Pearson disagreed; he believed / in his heart that it wasn't an apple that had'gotten Eve in trouble but a beer and a cigarette. , 'So what'd you use?' Duke asked him. 'The -patch? Hypnosis? Good old American willpower?/ Looking at you, I'd guess it was the patch.' - If it had been Duke's humorous effort at a -curve-ball, it didn't work. Pearson had been thinking - about smoking a lot this afternoon. 'Yeah, /the patch,' he said. 'I wore it for two years, starting just - after my daughter was born. I took one look+at her through the nursery window and made up my - mind to quit the habit. It seemed crazy to 0go on setting fire to forty or fifty cigarettes a day when % I'd just taken on an eighteen-year (commitment to a brand-new human being.' With whom I had * fallen instantly in love, he could have ,added, but he had an idea Duke already knew that. , 'Not to mention your life-long commitment to your wife.' , 'Not to mention my wife,' Pearson agreed. + 'Plus assorted brothers, sisters-in-law, ,debt-collectors, ratepayers, and friends of the court.' ) Pearson burst out laughing and nodded. 'Yeah, you got it.' * 'Not as easy as it sounds, though, huh? ,When it's four in the morning and you can't sleep, all  that nobility erodes fast.' , Pearson grimaced. 'Or when you have to go 'upstairs and turn a few cartwheels for Grosbeck * and Keefer and Fine and the rest of the /boys in the boardroom. The first time I had to do that ( without grabbing a cigarette before I &walked in . . . man, that was tough.' , 'But you did stop completely for at least awhile.' ( Pearson looked at Duke, only a trifle /surprised at this prescience, and nodded. 'For about six . months. But I never quit in my mind, do you know what I mean?'  'Of course I know.' . 'Finally I started chipping again. That was -1992, right around the time the news stories started ' coming out about how some people who )smoked while they were still wearing the patch had ) heart attacks. Do you remember those?' & 'Uh-huh,' Duke said, and tapped his ,forehead. 'I got a complete file of smoking stories up here, + my man, alphabetically arranged. Smoking -and Alzheimer's, smoking and blood-pressure, ) smoking and cataracts . . . you know.' - 'So I had my choice,' Pearson said. He was 1smiling a small, puzzled smile the smile of a & man who knows he has behaved like a 3horse's ass, is still behaving like a horse's ass, but doesn't - really know why. 'I could quit chipping or "quit wearing the patch. So I ' * 'Quit wearing the patch!' they finished (together, and then burst into a gust of laughter that ' caused a smooth-browed patron in the -no-smoking area to glance over at them for a moment, . frowning, before returning his attention to the newscast on the tube. 0 'Life's one fucked-up proposition, isn't it?' +Duke asked, still laughing, and started to reach - inside his cream-colored jacket. He stopped,when he saw Pearson holding out his pack of * Marlboros with one cigarette popped up. &They exchanged another glance, Duke's suiprised and ) Pearson's knowing, and then burst into 'another mingled shout of laughter. The smooth-browed - guy glanced over again, his frown a little ,deeper this time. Neither man noticed. Duke took the / offered cigarette and lit it. The whole thing,took less than ten seconds, but it was long enough for ! the two men to become friends. . 'I smoked like a chimney from the time I was-fifteen right up until I got married back in '91,' 0 Duke said. 'My mother didn't like it, but she +appreciated the fact that I wasn't smoking rock or - selling it, like half the other kids on my /street I'm talking Roxbury, you know and so she  didn't say too much. , 'Wendy and I went to Hawaii for a week on +our honeymoon, and the day we got back, she, gave me a present.' Duke dragged deep and ,then feathered twin jets of blue-gray smoke from his + nose. 'She found it in the Sharper Image .catalogue, I think, or maybe it was one of the other ones. + Had some fancy name, but I don't remember.what it was; I just called the goddamned thing0 Pavlov's Thumbscrews. Still, I loved her like 4fire still do, too, you better believe it so I* rared back and gave it my best shot. It 0wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, either. You know ! the gadget I'm talking about?' + 'You bet,' Pearson said. 'The beeper. It (makes you wait a little longer for each cigarette. , Lisabeth my wife kept pointing them -out to me while she was pregnant with Jenny. About . as subtle as a wheelbarrow of cement fallingoff a scaffold, you know.' % Duke nodded, smiling, and when the *bartender drifted by, he pointed at their glasses and told - him to do it again. Then he turned back to $Pearson. 'Except for using Pavlov's Thumbscrews . instead of the patch, the rest of my story's,the same as yours. I got all the way to the place where / the machine plays a shitty little version of *the Freedom Chorus, or something, but the habit crept . back. It's harder to kill than a snake with -two hearts.' The bartender brought the fresh beers. Duke 1 paid this time, took a sip of his, and said, 'I*have to make a telephone call. Take about five  minutes.' + 'Okay,' Pearson said. He glanced around, ,saw the bartender had once more retreated tothe , relative safety of the no-smoking section .(The unions'll have two bartenders in here by 2005, he + thought, one for the smokers and one for *the non-smokers), and turned back to Duke again. * When he spoke this time, he pitched his .voice lower. 'I thought we were going to talk about the  batmen.' ) Duke appraised him with his dark-brown *eyes for a moment and then said, 'We have been, my  man. We have been.' - And before Pearson could say anything else,-Duke had disappeared into the dim (but almost- entirely smokeless) depths of Gallagher's, 'bound for wherever the pay phones were hidden away. , He was gone closer to ten minutes than to ,five, and Pearson was wondering if maybe he should + go back and check on him when his eye was(drawn to the television, where the news anchor was & talking about a furor that had been )touched off by the Vice President of the United States. The ( Veep had suggested in a speech to the $National Education Association that governmentsubsidized , daycare centers should be re-evaluated andclosed wherever possible. ) The picture switched to videotape shot +earlier that day at some Washington, D.C., convention , center, and as the newsclip went from the /wide establishing shot and lead-in narration tothe , close-up of the VP at his podium, Pearson -gripped the edge of the bar with both hands, squeezing . tightly enough to sink his fingers a little -way into the padding. One of the things Duke had said ) that morning on the plaza came back to /him: They've got friends in high places. Hell, high places  is what they're all about. ' 'We have no grudge against America's *working mothers,' the misshapen bat-faced monster + standing in front of the podium with the .blue Vice Presidential seal on it was saying, 'and no + grudge against the deserving poor. We do feel, however ' , A hand dropped on Pearson's shoulder, and -he had to bite his lips together to keep the scream - inside them. He looked around and saw Duke.,A change had come over the young man his . eyes were sparkling brightly, and there were)fine beads of sweat on his brow. Pearson thought he , looked as if he'd just won the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes. / 'Don't ever do that again,' Pearson said, and,Duke froze in the act of climbing back onto his ( stool. 'I think I just ate my heart.' , Duke looked surprised, then glanced up at *the TV. Understanding dawned on his face. 'Oh,' he 3 said. 'Jesus, I'm sorry, Brandon. Really. I keep -forgetting that you came in on this movie in the  middle.' - 'What about the President?' Pearson asked. /He strained to keep his voice level and almost 2 made it. 'I guess I can live with this asshole, )but what about the President? Is he ' - 'No,' Duke said. He hesitated, then added: 'At least, not yet.' , Pearson leaned toward him, aware that the ,strange numbness was stealing back into his lips , again. 'What do you mean, not yet? What's )happening, Duke? What are they? Where do they ) come from? What do they do and what do they want?' / 'I'll tell you what I know,' Duke said, 'but -first I want to ask you if you can come to a little , meeting with me this evening. Around six? You up for that?'  'Is it about this?'  'Of course it is.' 3 Pearson ruminated. 'All right. I'll have to call Lisabeth, though.' + Duke looked alarmed. 'Don't say anything about ' 2 'Of course not. I'll tell her La Belle Dame sans$Merci wants to go over her precious spreadsheets % again before she shows them to the /Japanese. She'll buy that; she knows Holding's all but + fudging her frillies about the impending -arrival of our friends from the Pacific Rim. Sound okay  to you?'  'Yes.' - 'It sounds okay to me, too, but it feels a little sleazy.' + 'There's nothing sleazy about wanting to ,keep as much space as possible between your wife # and the bats. I mean, it's not a ,massage-parlor I want to take you to, bro.'  'I suppose not. So talk.' 3 'All right. I guess I better start by telling youabout your smoking habits.' . The juke, which had been silent for the last!few minutes, now began to emit a tired-sounding / version of Billy Ray Cyrus's golden clunker, ,'Achy Breaky Heart.' Pearson stared at Duke * Rhinemann with confused eyes and opened -his mouth to ask what his smoking habits had to do . with the price of coffee in San Diego. Only "nothing came out. Nothing at all. 2 'You quit . . . then you started chipping . . . *but you were smart enough to know that if you - weren't careful, you'd be right back where +you started in a month or two,' Duke said. 'Right?'  'Yes, but I don't see ' - 'You will.' Duke took his handkerchief out %and mopped his brow. Pearson's first impression ( when the man had come back from using )the phone had been that Duke was all but blowing his + stack with excitement. He stood by that, +but now he realized something else: he was also scared ! to death. 'Just bear with me.'  'Okay.'  'Anyway, you've worked out an !accommodation with your habit. A whatdoyoucallit, modus - vivendi. You can't bring yourself to quit, ,but you've discovered that's not the end of the world . it's not like being a coke-addict who can't -let go of the rock or a boozehound who can't stop - chugging down the Night Train. Smoking's a 0bastard of a habit, but there really is a middle* ground between two or three packs a day and total abstinence.' , Pearson was looking at him, wide-eyed, and Duke smiled. - 'I'm not reading your mind, if that's what -you think. I mean, we know each other, don't we?' 0 'I suppose we do,' Pearson said thoughtfully. /'I just forgot for a minute that we're both Ten O'clock People.'  'We're what?' . So Pearson explained a little about the Ten 0O'Clock People and their tribal gestures (surly ( glances when confronted by no smoking )signs, surly shrugs of acquiescence when asked by * some accredited authority to Please Put 'Your Cigarette Out, Sir), their tribal sacraments (gum, , hard candies, toothpicks, and, of course, +little Binaca push-button spray cans), and their tribal , litanies (I'm quitting for good next year being the most common). & Duke listened, fascinated, and when -Pearson had finished he said, 'Jesus Christ, Brandon! / You've found the Lost Tribe of Israel! Crazy -fucks all wandered off following Joe Camel!' - Pearson burst out laughing, earning another+annoyed, puzzled look from the smooth-faced fellow over in NoSmo. 2 'Anyway, it all fits in,' Duke told him. 'Let me)ask you something do you smoke around  your kid?' # 'Christ, no!' Pearson exclaimed.  'Your wife?'  'Nope, not anymore.' - 'When was the last time you had a butt in a restaurant?' ) Pearson considered it and discovered a .peculiar thing: he couldn't remember. Nowadayshe ' asked to be seated in the no-smoking -section even when he was alone, deferring his cigarette 0 until after he'd finished, paid up, and left. )And the days when he had actually smoked between , courses were long in the past, of course. ' 'Ten O'Clock People,' Duke said in a 0marveling voice. 'Man, I love that I love it that we 0 have a name. And it really is like being part of a tribe. It ' , He broke off suddenly, looking out one of +the windows. A Boston city cop was walking by, + talking to a pretty young woman. She was )looking up at him with a sweetly mingled expression ( of admiration and sex-appeal, totally *unaware of the black, appraising eyes and glaring triangular  teeth just above her. / 'Jesus, would you look at that,' Pearson saidin a low voice. ) 'Yeah,' Duke said. 'It's becoming more +common, too. More common every day.' He wasquiet , for a moment, looking into his half-empty (beer schooner. Then he seemed to almost physically - shake himself out of his revery. 'Whatever /else we are,' he told Pearson, 'we're the only people in ( the whole goddam world who see them.' & 'What, just smokers?' Pearson asked -incredulously. Of course he should have seen that Duke ( was leading him here, but still . . . 0 'No,' Duke said patiently. 'Smokers don't see .them. Non-smokers don't see them, either.' He ( measured Pearson with his eyes. 'Only .people like us see them, Brandon people whoare  neither fish nor fowl. % 'Only Ten O'Clock People like us.' - When they left Gallagher's fifteen minutes /later (Pearson had first called his wife, told her his , manufactured tale of woe, and promised to -be home by ten), the rain had slackened to a fine . drizzle and Duke proposed they walk awhile. (Not all the way to Cambridge, which was where , they would end up, but far enough for Duke+to fill in the rest of the background. The streets were / nearly deserted, and they could finish their -conversation without looking back over their  shoulders. 2 'In a bizarre way, it's sort of like your first (orgasm,' Duke was saying as they walked through a + gauzy groundmist in the direction of the +Charles River. 'Once that kicks into gear, becomes a . part of your life, it's just there for you. .Same with this. One day the chemicals in your head + balance just right and you see one. I've )wondered, you know, how many people have just + dropped dead of fright at that moment. A lot, I bet.' * Pearson looked at the bloody smear of a ,traffic-light reflection on the shiny black pavement of + Boylston Street and remembered the shock .of his first encounter. 'They're so awful. So hideous. + The way their flesh seems to move around 1on their heads . . . there's really no way to sayit, is  there?' " Duke was nodding. 'They're ugly 0motherfuckers, all right. I was on the Red Line, headed back - home to Milton, when I saw my first one. He)was standing on the downtown platform at Park - Street Station. We went right by him. Good .thing for me I was in the train and goin away, because I screamed.'  'What happened then?' $ Duke's smile had become, at least )temporarily, a grimace of embarrassment. 'People looked at , me, then looked away real quick. You know .how it is in the city; there's a nut preachin about , how Jesus loves Tupperware on every street corner.' , Pearson nodded. He knew how it was in the 1city, all right. Or thought he had, until today. ) 'This tall redheaded geek with about a .trillion freckles on his face sat down in the seat beside ) me and grabbed my elbow just about the +same way I grabbed yours this morning. His name is - Robbie Delray. He's a housepainter. You'll meet him tonight at Kate's.'  'What's Kate's?' / 'Specialty bookstore in Cambridge. Mysteries.+We meet there once or twice a week. It's a good / place. Good people, too, mostly. You'll see. *Anyway, Robbie grabbed my elbow and said, 4 'You're not crazy, I saw it too. It's real it's+a batman.' That was all, and he could have been # spoutin from the top end of some /amphetamine high for all I knew . . . except I had seen it, and  the relief . . . ' - 'Yes,' Pearson said, thinking back to that -morning. They paused at Storrow Drive, waitedfor a * tanker truck to go by, and then hurried &across the puddly street. Pearson was momentarily ' transfixed by a fading spray-painted ,graffito on the back of a park bench, which faced the river. , THE ALIENS HAVE LANDED, it said. WE ATE 2 AT LEGAL SEAFOOD. ) 'Good thing for me you were there this 'morning,' Pearson said. 'I was lucky.' * Duke nodded. 'Yeah, man, you were. When *the bats fuck with a dude, they fuck with him + the cops usually pick up the pieces in a .basket after one of their little parties. You hear that?''  Pearson nodded. , 'And nobody knows the victims all had one )thing in common they'd cut down their , smoking to between five and ten cigarettes1a day. I have an idea that sort of similarity's alittle ! too obscure even for the FBI.' - 'But why kill us?' Pearson asked. 'I mean, -some guy goes running around saying his boss is a , Martian, they don't send out the National ,Guard; they put the guy in the boobyhatch!' / 'Come on, man, get real,' Duke said. 'You've seen these cuties.'  'They . . . like to?' . 'Yeah, they like to. But that's getting the ,cart before the horse. They're like wolves, Brandon, . invisible wolves that keep working their way,back and forth through a herd of sheep. Now tell ( me what do wolves want with sheep, 0aside from getting their jollies off every time they kill  one?' . 'They . . . what are you saying?' Pearson's ,voice dropped to a whisper. 'Are you saying that  they eat us?' ) 'They eat some part of us,' Duke said. .'That's what Robbie Delray believed on the dayI met ( him, and that's what most of us still believe.'  'Who's us, Duke?' . 'The people I'm taking you to see. We won't 0all be there, but this time most of us will be. ' Something's come up. Something big.'  'What?' , To that Duke would only shake his head and+ask, 'You ready for a cab yet? Getting too  mildewy?' + Pearson was mildewy, but not ready for a 0cab. The walk had invigorated him . . . but not just / the walk. He didn't think he could tell Duke ,this at least not yet but there was a definite 1 upside to this . . . a romantic upside. It was (as if he had fallen into some weird but exciting boy's + adventure story; he could almost imagine 0the N. C. Wyeth illustrations. He looked at the + nimbuses of white light revolving slowly .around the streetlamps, which soldiered their way up / Storrow Drive and smiled a little. Something +big has come up, he thought. Agent X-9 has slipped ) in with good news from our underground .base . . . we 've located the batpoison we've been  looking for! * 'The excitement wears off, believe me,' Duke said dryly. % Pearson turned his head, startled. ) 'Around the time they fish your second .friend out of Boston Harbor with half his headgone, . you realize Tom Swift isn't going to show up*and help you whitewash the goddam fence.' , 'Tom Sawyer,' Pearson muttered, and wiped )rainwater out of his eyes. He could feel himself  flushing. , 'They eat something that our brains make, ,that's what Robbie thinks. Maybe an enzyme, he . says, maybe some kind of special electrical -wave. He says it might be the same thing thatlets us ) some of us, anyway see them, and .that to them we're like tomatoes in a farmer'sgarden, , theirs to take whenever they decide we're ripe. / 'Me, I was raised Baptist and I'm willing to .cut right to the chase none of that Farmer John ' crap. I think they're soul-suckers.' , 'Really? Are you putting me on, or do you really believe that?' - Duke laughed, shrugged, and looked defiant,0all at the same time. 'Shit, I don't know, man. + These things came into my life about the +same time I decided heaven was a fairytale and hell was - other people. Now I'm all fucked up again. .But that doesn't really matter. The important thing, - the only thing you have to get straight and+keep straight, is that they have plenty of reasons to kill / us. First because they're afraid of us doing )just what we're doing, getting together, organizing, ' trying to put a hurt on them . . . ' - He paused, thought it over, shook his head.-Now he looked and sounded like a man holding - dialogue with himself, trying yet again to )answer some question, which has held him sleepless  over too many nights. 0 'Afraid? I don't know if that's exactly true. +But they're not taking many chances, about that . there's no doubt. And something else there's-no doubt about, either they hate the fact that , some of us can see them. They fucking hate'it. We caught one once and it was like catching a ! hurricane in a bottle. We '  'Caught one!' - 'Yes indeed,' Duke said, and offered him a .hard, mirthless grin. 'We bagged it at a rest area on - I-95, up by Newburyport. There were half a -dozen of us my friend Robbie was in chargeWe ' took it to a farmhouse, and when the /boatload of dope we'd shot into it wore off which it did . much too fast we tried to question it, to,get better answers to some of the questions you've + already asked me. We had it in handcuffs )and leg-irons; we had so much nylon rope wrapped - around it that it looked like a mummy. You know what I remember best?' . Pearson shook his head. His sense of living ,between the pages of a boy's adventure storyhad  quite departed. - 'How it woke up,' Duke said. 'There was no in-between. One second it was knocked-outloaded , and the next it was wide-awake, staring at-us with those horrible eyes they have. Bat's ' eyes. They do have eyes, you know -people don't always realize that. That stuff about them + being blind must have been the work of a good press-agent. 0 'It wouldn't talk to us. Not a single word. I ,think it knew it wasn't going to ever leave that barn, * but there was no fear in it. Only hate. Jesus, the hate in its eyes!'  'What happened?' - 'It snapped the handcuff-chain like it was ,tissue-paper. The leg-irons were tougher and we . had it in those special Long John boots you -can nail right to the floor but the nylon boat-rope . - . . it started to bite through it where it +crossed its shoulders. With those teeth you've seen them - it was like watching a rat gnaw through /twine. We all stood there like bumps on a log. Even + Robbie. We couldn't believe what we were 1seeing . . . or maybe it had us hypnotized. I've * wondered about that a lot, you know, if -that might not have been possible. Thank God for Lester - Olson. We'd used a Ford Econoline van that ,Robbie and Moira stole, and Lester'd gotten - paranoid that it might be visible from the ,turnpike. He went out to check, and when he came ) back in and saw that thing almost free /except for its feet, he shot it three times in the head. Just  pop-pop-pop.' # Duke shook his head wonderingly. 1 'Killed him,' Pearson said. 'Just pop-pop-pop.', His voice seemed to have risen out of his /head again, as it had on the plaza in front of the bank , that morning, and a horrid yet persuasive -idea suddenly came to him: that there were no batpeople. , They were a group hallucination, that was -all, not much different from the ones peyote # users sometimes had during their 0drug-assisted circle jerks. This one, unique to the Ten O'clock + People, was brought on by just the wrong ,amount of tobacco. The folks Duke was takinghim to . meet had killed at least one innocent person,while under the influence of this mad idea, and 1 might kill more. Certainly would kill more, if /given time. And if he didn't get away from this+ crazed young banker soon, he might end up.being a part of it. He had already seen two ofthe / batpeople . . . no, three, counting the cop, *and four counting the Vice President. And that just ( about tore it, the idea that the Vice "President of the United States ) The look on Duke's face led Pearson to -believe that his mind was being read for the third , record-breaking time. 'You're starting to -wonder if maybe we've all gone Looney Tunes, you ) included,' Duke said. 'Is that right?' 1 'Of course it is,' Pearson said, a little more sharply than he had intended. 0 'They disappear,' Duke said simply. 'I saw theone in the barn disappear.'  'What?' / 'Get transparent, turn to smoke, disappear. I-know how crazy it sounds, but nothing I could) ever say would make you understand how .crazy it was to actually be there and watch ithappen. 0 'At first you think it's not real even though .it's going on right in front of you; you must be + dreaming it, or maybe you stepped into a *movie somehow, one full of killer special effects like in - those old Star Wars movies. Then you smell ,something that's like dust and piss and hot chilipeppers + all mixed together. It stings your eyes, ,makes you want to puke. Lester did puke, and+ Janet sneezed for an hour afterward. She +said ordinarily only ragweed or cat-dander does that to , her. Anyway, I went up to the chair where /he'd been. The ropes were still there, and the . handcuffs, and the clothes. The guy's shirt ,was still buttoned. The guy's tie was still knotted. I ( reached out and unzipped his pants -careful, like his pecker was gonna fly outta there and rip ' my nose off but all I saw was his +underwear inside his pants. Ordinary white Jockey shorts. , That was all, but that was enough, because-they were empty, too. Tell you something, my brother . you ain't seen weird until you've seen a .guy's clothes all put together in layers like that with  no guy left inside em.' . 'Turn to smoke and disappear,' Pearson said.'Jesus Christ.' 0 'Yeah. At the very end, he looked like that.' /He pointed to one of the streetlights with its bright  revolving nimbus of moisture. / 'And what happens to . . . ' Pearson stopped,+unsure for a moment how to express what he - wanted to ask. 'Are they reported missing? -Are they . . . ' Then he knew what it was he really * wanted to know. 'Duke, where's the real .Douglas Keefer? And the real Suzanne Holding?'- Duke shook his head. 'I don't know. Except -that, in a way, it's the real Keefer you saw this ) morning, Brandon, and the real Suzanne ,Holding, too. We think that maybe the heads we see + aren't really there, that our brains are .translating what the bats really are their hearts and their  souls into visual images.'  'Spiritual telepathy?' + Duke grinned. 'You got a way with words, /bro that'll do. You need to talk to Lester. When - it comes to the batpeople, he's damn near apoet.' * The name rang a clear bell, and after a *moment's thought, Pearson thought he knew why. / 'Is he an older guy with lots of white hair? -Looks sort of like an aging tycoon on a soap opera?' / Duke burst out laughing. 'Yeah, that's Les.' , They walked on in silence for awhile. The 1river rippled mystically past on their right, andnow , they could see the lights of Cambridge on -the other side. Pearson thought he had never seen  Boston looking so beautiful. ( 'The batpeople come in, maybe no more -than a germ you inhale . . . ' Pearson began again,  feeling his way. * 'Yeah, well, some folks go for the germ /idea, but I'm not one of em. Because, dig: you never & see a batman janitor or a bat-woman .waitress. They like power, and they're moving into the - power neighborhoods. Did you ever hear of a&germ that just picked on rich people, Brandon?'  'No.'  'Me either.' . 'These people we're going to meet . . . are 1they . . . ' Pearson was a little amused to find he had * to work to bring the next thing out. It -wasn't exactly a return to the land of boys' books, but it was ) close. 'Are they resistance fighters?' , Duke considered this, then both nodded and-shrugged a fascinating gesture, as if his body + were saying yes and no at the same time. /'Not yet,' he said, 'but maybe, after tonight, we will be.' ' Before Pearson could ask him what he +meant by that, Duke had spotted another cab cruising - empty, this one on the far side of Storrow .Drive, and had stepped into the gutter to flagit. It + made an illegal U-turn and swung over to the curb to pick them up. + In the cab they talked Hub sports the ,maddening Red Sox, the depressing Patriots, the sagging / Celtics and left the batpeople alone, but *when they got out in front of an isolated frame house - on the Cambridge side of the river (KATE'S 'MYSTERY BOOKSHOP was written on a sign that , showed a hissing black cat with an arched ,back), Pearson took Duke Rhinemann's arm andsaid, ! 'I have a few more questions.' ' Duke glanced at his watch. 'No time, 1Brandon we walked a little too long, I guess.' 'Just two, then.' . 'Jesus, you're like that guy on TV, the one ,in the old dirty raincoat. I doubt if I can answer . them, anyway I know a hell of a lot less (about all this than you seem to think.'  'When did it start?' . 'See? That's what I mean. I don't know, and .the thing we caught sure wasn't going to tell us . that little sweetheart wouldn't even give us*its name, rank, and serial number. Robbie Delray, the . guy I told you about, says he saw his first -one over five years ago, walking a Lhasa Apsoon ) Boston Common. He says there have been /more every year since. There still aren't many of them * compared to us, but the number has been 2increasing . . . exponentially? . . . is that the word I  want?' 3 'I hope not,' Pearson said. 'It's a scary word.' - 'What's your other question, Brandon? Hurryup.' + 'What about other cities? Are there more *bats? And other people who see them? What do you  hear?' - 'We don't know. They could be all over the ,world, but we're pretty sure that America's the only ) country in the world where more than a !handful of people can see them.'  'Why?' + 'Because this is the only country that's -gone bonkers about cigarettes . . . probably because it's + the only one where people believe and .down deep they really do that if they just eat the - right foods, take the right combination of .vitamins, think enough of the right thoughts, and wipe % their asses with the right kind of *toilet-paper, they'll live forever and be sexually active the whole & time. When it comes to smoking, the +battle-lines are drawn, and the result has been this weird  hybrid. Us, in other words.' / 'Ten O'Clock People,' Pearson said, smiling. . 'Yep Ten O'Clock People.' He looked past !Pearson's shoulder. 'Moira! Hi!' - Pearson was not exactly surprised to smell .Giorgio. He looked around and saw Little Miss Red  Skirt. ' 'Moira Richardson, Brandon Pearson.' & 'Hello,' Pearson said, and took her 1outstretched hand. 'Credit Assistance, isn't it?'- 'That's like calling a garbage collector a (sanitation technician,' she said with a cheerful grin. It * was a grin, Pearson thought, that a man /could fall in love with, if he wasn't careful. 0 'Credit checks are what I actually do. If you 'want to buy a new Porsche, I check the records to , make sure you're really a Porsche kind of ,guy . . . in a financial sense, of course.' . 'Of course,' Pearson said, and grinned back at her. * 'Cam!' she called. 'Come on over here!' * It was the janitor who liked to mop the -John with his cap turned around backward. In his ) streetclothes he seemed to have gained +about fifty IQ points and a rather amazing resemblance to , Armand Assante. Pearson felt a small pang (but no real surprise when he put an arm around - Moira Richardson's delectable little waist 'and a casual kiss on the corner of her delectable little + mouth. Then he offered Brandon his hand.  'Cameron Stevens.'  'Brandon Pearson.' / 'I'm glad to see you here,' Stevens said. 'I )thought you were gonna high-side it this morning for  sure.' & 'How many of you were watching me?' .Pearson asked. He tried to replay ten o'clock in the - plaza and discovered he couldn't it was ,lost in a white haze of shock, for the most part. + 'Most of us from the bank who see them,' 2Moira said quietly. 'But it's okay, Mr. Pearson '  'Brandon. Please.' - She nodded. 'We weren't doing anything but )rooting for you, Brandon. Come on, Cam.' , They hurried up the steps to the porch of -the small frame building and slipped inside. Pearson . caught just a glimpse of muted light before ,the door shut. Then he turned back to Duke. * 'This is all real, isn't it?' he asked. & Duke looked at him sympathetically. *'Unfortunately, yes.' He paused, and then added, 'But $ there's one good thing about it.'  'Oh? What's that?' , Duke's white teeth flashed in the drizzly )dark. 'You're about to attend your first smokingallowed / meeting in five years or so,' he said. 'Come on let's go in.'  3 , The foyer and the bookstore beyond it were*dark; the light along with a murmur of voices / was filtering up the steep staircase to theirleft. 1 'Well,' Duke said, 'this is the place. To quote.the Dead, what a long strange trip it's been,  right?'  Pearson agreed. " 'Is Kate a Ten O'Clock Person?'  'You better believe it,' / 'The owner? Nope. I only met her twice, but I,have an idea she's a total non-smoker. This * place was Robbie's idea. As far as Kate -knows, we're The Boston Society of HardboiledYeggs.' , Pearson raised his eyebrows. 'Say again?' / 'A small group of loyal fans that meets every+week or so to discuss the works of Raymond - Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald,-people like that. If you haven't read any of those . guys, you probably ought to. It never hurts -to be safe. It's not that hard; some of them are  actually pretty good.' - They descended with Duke in the lead the*staircase was too narrow for them to walk ( abreast and passed through an open 'doorway into a well-lit, low-ceilinged basement room that + probably ran the length of the converted .frame house above. About thirty folding chairs had been + set up, and an easel covered with a blue *cloth had been placed before them. Beyond the easel - were stacked shipping cartons from various (publishers. Pearson was amused to see a framed - picture on the left-hand wall, with a sign 'reading DASHIELL HAMMETT: ALL HAIL OUR FEARLESS  LEADER beneath it. - 'Duke?' a woman asked from Pearson's left. &'Thank God I thought something had happened  to you.' + She was someone else Pearson recognized: )the serious-looking young woman with the thick 0 glasses and long, straight black hair. Tonight1she looked a lot less serious in a pair of tight faded $ jeans and a Georgetown University (tee-shirt beneath which she was clearly braless. And Pearson + had an idea that if Duke's wife ever saw ,the way this young woman was looking at her husband, * she would probably drag Duke out of the )basement of Kate's by the ear, and never mind all the  batpeople in the world. 4 'I'm fine, darlin,' he said. 'I was bringing along%another convert to the Church of the Fucked- ( Up Bat, that's all. Janet Brightwood, Brandon Pearson.' + Brandon shook her hand, thinking: You're the one who kept sneezing. - 'It's very nice to meet you, Brandon,' she -said, and then went back to smiling at Duke, who / looked a little embarrassed at the intensity ,of her gaze. 'Want to go for coffee after?' she asked  him. ( 'Well . . . we'll see, darlin. Okay?' - 'Okay,' she said, and her smile said she'd +wait three years to go out for coffee with Duke, if # that was the way Duke wanted it. ) What am I doing here? Pearson suddenly 4asked himself. This is totally insane . . . like an AA  meeting in a psycho ward. # The members of the Church of the *Fucked-Up Bat were taking ashtrays from a stack on one of ( the book cartons and lighting up with )obvious relish as they took their seats. Pearson estimated ) that there were going to be few if any +folding chairs left over when everyone had gotten settled. ( 'Got just about everyone,' Duke said, -leading him to a pair of seats at the end of the back row, & far from where Janet Brightwood was ,presiding over the coffeemaker. Pearson had no idea if this . was coincidental or not. 'That's good . . . mind the window-pole, Brandon.' + The pole, with a hook on the end to open -the high cellar windows, was leaning against one & whitewashed brick wall. Pearson had -inadvertently kicked it as he sat down. Duke grabbed it ) before it could fall and possibly gash (someone, moved it to a marginally safer location, then + slipped up the side aisle and snagged an ashtray. ( 'You are a mind-reader,' Pearson said 3gratefully, and lit up. It felt incredibly strange (but * rather wonderful) to be doing this as a member of such a large group. . Duke lit his own cigarette, then pointed it *at the skinny, freckle-splattered man now standing % by the easel. Freckles was deep in -conversation with Lester Olson, who had shot the batman, & pop-pop-pop, in a Newburyport barn. - 'The redhead is Robbie Delray,' Duke said, -almost reverently. 'You'd hardly pick him as The + Savior of His Race if you were casting a -miniseries, would you? But he might turn out to be just  that.' - Delray nodded at Olson, clapped him on the 'back, and said something that made the whitehaired - man laugh. Then Olson returned to his seat ( front row center and Delray moved  toward the covered easel. - By this time all the seats had been taken, ,and there were even a few people standing atthe * back of the room near the coffee-maker. +Conversation, animated and jittery, zinged and caromed / around Pearson's head like pool-balls after a)hard break. A mat of blue-gray cigarette smoke had + already gathered just below the ceiling. - Jesus, they're cranked, he thought. Really +cranked. I bet the bomb-shelters in London felt this & way back in 1940, during the Blitz. - He turned to Duke. 'Who'd you talk to? Who (told you something big was up tonight?' - 'Janet,' Duke said without looking at him. (His expressive brown eyes were fixed on Robbie - Delray, who had once saved his sanity on a 'Red Line train. Pearson thought he saw adoration as % well as admiration in Duke's eyes. 2 'Duke? This is a really big meeting, isn't it?' * 'For us, yeah. Biggest I've ever seen.' , 'Does it make you nervous? Having so many #of your people in the same place?' 1 'No,' Duke said simply. 'Robbie can smell bats.He . . . shhhh, here we go.' / Robbie Delray, smiling, raised his hands, and+the babble quieted almost at once. Pearson saw ) Duke's look of adoration on many other -faces. Nowhere did he see less than respect. / 'Thanks for coming,' Delray said quietly. 'I -think we've finally got what some of us have been # waiting four or five years for.' , This sparked spontaneous applause. Delray .let it go on for a few moments, looking aroundthe . room, beaming. Finally he held his hands up .for quiet. Pearson discovered a disconcerting thing ' as the applause (in which he had not 1participated) tapered off: he didn't like Duke's friend and " mentor. He supposed he might be -experiencing a touch of jealousy now that Delray was doing + his thing at the front of the room, Duke (Rhinemann had clearly forgotten Pearson existed but 0 he didn't think that was all of it. There was *something smug and self-congratulatory in that , hands-up, be-quiet gesture; something that&expressed a slick politician's almost unconscious  contempt for his audience. , Oh, get off it, Pearson told himself. You can't know anything like that. ) True, quite true, and Pearson tried to -sweep the intuition out of his mind, to give Delray a # chance, if only for Duke's sake. 1 'Before we begin,' Delray went on, 'I'd like to+introduce you to a brand-new member of the ( group: Brandon Pearson, from deepest, *darkest Medford. Stand up for a second or two, Brandon, - and let your new friends see what you look like.' * Pearson gave Duke a startled look. Duke )grinned, shrugged, then pushed Pearson's shoulder * with the heel of his hand. 'Go on, they won't bite.' # Pearson was not so sure of that. *Nevertheless he got up, face hot, all too aware of the people * craning around to check him out. He was /most particularly aware of the smile on Lester Olson's , face like his hair, it was somehow too dazzling not to be suspect. ) His fellow Ten O'Clock People began to .applaud again, only this time it was him they were - applauding: Brandon Pearson, middle-echelon-banker and stubborn smoker. He found himself ' wondering again if he hadn't somehow *found his way into an AA meeting that was strictly for + (not to mention run by) psychos. When he ,dropped back into his seat, his cheeks were bright red. - 'I could have done without that very well, thanks,' he muttered to Duke. 0 'Relax,' Duke said, still grinning. 'It's the +same for everybody. And you gotta love it, man, . don't you? I mean, shit, it's so nineties.' 4 'It's nineties, all right, but I don't gotta love .it,' Pearson said. His heart was pounding too hard + and the flush in his cheeks wasn't going 0away. It felt, in fact, as if it was deepening. What is this? , he wondered. A hot-flash? Male menopause? What? , Robbie Delray bent over, spoke briefly to ,the bespectacled brunette woman sitting nextto , Olson, glanced at his watch, then stepped (back to the covered easel and faced the group again. . His freckled, open face made him look like a.Sunday choirboy apt to get up to all sorts of - harmless dickens frogs down the backs of.girls' blouses, short-sheeting baby brother's bed, - that sort of thing during the other six days of the week. , 'Thanks, folks, and welcome to our place, Brandon,' he said. * Pearson muttered that he was glad to be /here, but it wasn't true what if his fellow Ten - O'Clock People turned out to be a bunch of ,raving New Age assholes? Suppose he ended up- feeling about them as he did about most of #the guests he saw on Oprah, or the well-dressed + religious nuts who used to pop up on The +PTL Club at the drop of a hymn? What then? / Oh, quit it, he told himself. You like Duke, don't you? + Yes, he did like Duke, and he thought he -was probably going to like Moira Richardson, too . . . . once he got past the sexy outer layer and .was able to appreciate the person inside, thatwas. , There would undoubtedly be others he'd end1up liking as well; he wasn't that hard to please.And . he had forgotten, at least temporarily, the -underlying reason they were all here in this basement: , the batpeople. Given the threat, he could 'put up with a few nerds and New Agers, couldn't he?  He supposed he could. - Good! Great! Now just sit back, relax, and watch the parade. . He sat back, but found he couldn't relax, at/least not completely. Part of it was being the new 1 boy. Part of it was his strong dislike for this0sort of forced social interaction as a rule, he + viewed people who used his first name on 'short notice and without invitation as hijackers of a  sort. And part of it . . . - Oh, stop! Don't you get it yet? You have nochoice in the matter! - An unpleasant thought, but one it was hard .to dispute. He had crossed a line that morning+ when he had casually turned his head and +seen what was really living inside Douglas Keefer's ) clothes these days. He supposed he had .known at least that much, but it wasn't until tonight that . he had realized how final that line was, how.small was the chance of his ever being able tocross - back to the other side of it again. To the safe side. + No, he couldn't relax. At least not yet. - 'Before we get down to business, I want to /thank you all for coming on such short notice,'Robbie / Delray said. 'I know it's not always easy to )break away without raising eyebrows, and sometimes / it's downright dangerous. I don't think it'd 'be exaggerating to say that we've been through a lot of 4 hell together . . . a lot of high water, too . . .' & A polite, murmured chuckle from the ,audience. Most of them seemed to be hanging on  Delray's every word. 0 ' . . . and no one knows any better than I do /how difficult it is to be one of the few peoplewho / actually know the truth. Since I saw my firstbat, five years ago . . . ' - Pearson was already fidgeting, experiencing$the one sensation he would not have expected * tonight: boredom. For the day's strange -passage to have ended as it was ending, with a bunch of - people sitting in a bookstore basement and .listening to a freckled housepainter give what. sounded like a bad Rotary Club speech . . . ( Yet the others seemed utterly enrapt; -Pearson glanced around again to confirm this to himself. , Duke's eyes shone with that look of total *fascination a look similar to the look Pearson's & childhood dog, Buddy, had worn when -Pearson got its food-dish out of the cupboard under the , sink. Cameron Stevens and Moira Richardson*sat with their arms around each other and gazed at . Robbie Delray with starry absorption. Ditto /Janet Brightwood. Ditto the rest of the little group  around the Bunn-O-Matic. + Ditto everyone, he thought, except Brand -Pearson. Come on, sweetheart; try to get withthe  program. , Except he couldn't, and in a weird way it 0was almost as if Robbie Delray couldn't, either.+ Pearson looked back from his scan of the +audience just in time to see Delray snatch another . quick glance at his watch. It was a gesture +Pearson had grown very familiar with since he'd , joined the Ten O'Clock People. He guessed +that the man was counting down the time to his next  cigarette. * As Delray rambled on, some of his other -listeners also began to fall out a little Pearson + heard muffled coughs and a few shuffling -feet. Delray sailed on regardless, seemingly unaware . that, loved resistance leader or no, he was *now in danger of overstaying his welcome. / ' . . . so we've managed the best we can,' he+was saying, 'and we've taken our losses as best we - can, too, hiding our tears the way I guess (those who fight in the secret wars have always had to, . all the time holding onto our belief that a /day will come when the secret is out, and we'll ' * Boink, another quick peek at the old Casio / ' be able to share our knowledge with all +the men and women out there who look but donot  see.' - Savior of His Race? Pearson thought. Jesus +please us. This guy sounds more like Jesse Helms  during a filibuster. + He glanced at Duke and was encouraged to 0see that, while Duke was still listening, he was, shifting in his seat and showing signs of coming out of his trance. + Pearson touched his face again and found -it was still hot. He lowered the tips of his fingers to 1 his carotid artery and felt his pulse still .racing. It wasn't the embarrassment at having to stand , up and be looked over like a Miss America +finalist now; the others had forgotten his existence, at 0 least temporarily. No, it was something else. 1Not a good something else, either. ' . . . we've stuck * with it and stuck to it, we've done the +footwork even when the music wasn't to our taste . . . '  Delray was droning. / It's what you felt before, Brand Pearson told0himself. It's the fear that you've stumbled intoa * group of people sharing the same lethal hallucination. + 'No, it's not,' he muttered. Duke turned )toward him, eyebrows raised, and Pearson shook his - head. Duke turned his attention back to thefront of the room. . He was scared, all right, but not of having 2fallen in with some weird thrill-kill cult. Maybe the * people in this room some of them, at 0least had killed, maybe that interlude in the) Newburyport barn had happened, but the $energy necessary for such desperate endeavors was not + evident here tonight, in this roomful of 'yuppies being watched over by Dashiell Hammett. All he , felt here was sleepy half-headedness, the .sort of partial attention that enabled people to get * through dull speeches like this without falling asleep or walking out. + 'Robbie, get to the point!' some kindred -spirit shouted from the back of the room, andthere  was nervous laughter. / Robbie Delray shot an irritated glance in the(direction the voice had come from, then smiled - and checked his watch again. 'Yeah, okay,' 3he said. 'I got rambling, I admit it. Lester, will you  help me a sec?' + Lester got up. The two men went behind a ,stack of book cartons and came back carryinga . large leather trunk by the straps. They set #it down to the right of the easel.  'Thanks, Les,' Robbie said. # Lester nodded and sat back down. - 'What's in the case?' Pearson murmured into Duke's ear. - Duke shook his head. He looked puzzled and 0suddenly a little uncomfortable . . . but maybe ( not as uncomfortable as Pearson felt. - 'Okay, Mac's got a point,' Delray said. 'I .guess I got carried away, but it feels like a historic % occasion to me. On with the show.' ) He paused for effect, and then whipped /aside the blue cloth on the easel. His audiencesat / forward on their folding chairs, prepared to &be amazed, then sat back with a small collective % whoosh of disappointment. It was a *black-and-white photograph of what looked to be an , abandoned warehouse. It had been enlarged )enough so that the eye could easily sort through the ' litter of papers, condoms, and empty .wine-bottles in the loading bays, and read the tangle of , spray-painted wit and wisdom on the wall. ,The biggest of these said RIOT GRRRLS RULE. % A whispered babble of murmurs went through the room. . 'Five weeks ago,' Delray said impressively, -'Lester, Kendra, and I trailed two batmen to this ' abandoned warehouse in the Clark Bay section of Revere.' - The dark-haired woman in the round rimless ,glasses sitting next to Lester Olson looked ) around self-importantly . . . and then ,Pearson was damned if she didn't glance downat her watch. * 'They were met at this point' Delray .tapped one of the trash-littered loading bays  'by * three more batmen and two batwomen. They,went inside. Since then, six or seven of us have set - up a rotating watch on this place. We have established ' ) Pearson glanced around at Duke's hurt, ,incredulous face. He might as well have had WHY - WASN'T I PICKED? tattooed on his forehead. / ' that this is some sort of meeting ground+for the bats in the Boston metro area ' * The Boston Bats, Pearson thought, great +name for a baseball team. And then it came back - again, the doubt: Is this me, sitting here /and listening to this craziness? Is it really? ) In the wake of this thought, as if the )memory had somehow been triggered by his momentary + doubt, he again heard Delray telling the *assembled Fearless Bat Hunters that their newest recruit % was Brandon Pearson, from deepest, darkest Medford. + He turned back to Duke and spoke quietly into his ear. + 'When you spoke to Janet on the phone -back in Gallagher's you told her you were  bringing me, right?'  Duke gave him an impatient -I'm-trying-to-listen look in which there was still a trace of hurt.  'Sure,' he said. ) 'Did you tell her I was from Medford?' + 'No,' Duke said. 'How would I know where +you're from? Let me listen, Brand!' And he turned  back. . 'We have logged over thirty-five vehicles ,luxury cars and limos, for the most part + visiting this abandoned warehouse in the .middle of nowhere,' Delray said. He paused to let this . sink in, snatched another quick peek at his +watch, and hurried on. 'Many of these have visited the + site ten or a dozen times. The bats have (undoubtedly congratulated themselves on having picked ( such an out-of-the-way spot for their /meeting-hall or social club or whatever it is, but I think ( they're going to find they've painted 0themselves into a corner instead. Because . . . pardon me just  a sec, guys . . . ' + He turned and began a quiet conversation *with Lester Olson. The woman named Kendra , joined them, her head going back and forth,like someone watching a Ping-Pong match. The( seated audience watched the whispered ,conference with expressions of bewilderment and  perplexity. - Pearson knew how they felt. Something big, ,Duke had promised, and from the feel of the place ) when they'd come in, everyone else had ,been promised the same. 'Something big' had turned out ' to be a single black-and-white photo +showing nothing but an abandoned warehouse wallowing in + a sea of trash, discarded underwear, and *used rubbers. What the fuck is wrong with this picture? ) The big deal's got to be in the trunk, +Pearson thought. And by the way, Freckles, how did you + know I came from Medford? That's one I'm )saving for the Q-and-A after the speech, believe me. ) That feeling flushed face, pounding -heart, above all else the desire for another cigarette + was stronger than ever. Like the anxiety ,attacks he'd sometimes had back in college. What was & it? If it wasn't fear, what was it? 3 Oh, it's fear, all right it's just not fear of-being the only sane man in the snake-pit. Youknow + the bats are real; you 're not crazy and ,neither is Duke and neither is Moira or Cam Stevens or + Janet Brightwood. But something is wrong -with this picture just the same . . . really wrong. And I . think it's him. Robbie Delray, housepainter ,and Savior of His Race. He knew where I was from. - Brightwood called him and told him Duke was-bringing someone from the First Merc, Brandon, Pearson's his name, and Robbie checked on ,me. Why would he do that? And how did he do it? % In his mind he suddenly heard Duke .Rhinemann saying, They're smart . . . they've got friends , in high places. Hell, high places is what they're all about. / If you had friends in high places, you could ,check on a fellow in a hurry, couldn't you? Yes. . People in high places had access to all the (right computer passwords, all the right records, all the + numbers that made up all the right vital statistics . . . . Pearson jerked in his seat like a man waking.from a terrible dream. He kicked his foot out . involuntarily and it struck the base of the -window-pole. It started to slide. Meanwhile, the , whispering at the front of the room broke up with nods all around. - 'Les?' Delray asked. 'Would you and Kendra &give me another little helping hand?' * Pearson reached to grab the window-pole *before it could fall and brain someone maybe + even slice someone's scalp open with the )wicked little hook on top. He caught it, started to place ( it back against the wall, and saw the ,goblin-face peering in the basement window. The black , eyes, like the eyes of a Raggedy Ann doll -abandoned under a bed, stared into Pearson's wide blue . ones. Strips of flesh rotated like bands of %atmosphere around one of the planets astronomers . called gas giants. The black snakes of vein .under the lumpy, naked skull pulsed. The teeth! glimmered in its gaping mouth. . 'Just help me with the snaps on this darned -thing,' Delray was saying from the other end of the - galaxy. He gave a friendly little chuckle. $'They're a little sticky, I guess.' - For Brandon Pearson, it was as if time had -doubled back on itself to that morning: once again * he tried to scream and once again shock ,robbed his voice and he was able to produce only a low, ) choked whuffling the sound of a man moaning in his sleep.  The rambling speech.  The meaningless photograph. . The constant little peeks at the wristwatch.+ Does it make you nervous? Having so many )of your people in the same place? he had asked, / and Duke had replied, smiling: No. Robbie can smell bats. - This time there was no one to stop him, and.this time Pearson's second effort was a total  success. / 'IT'S A SET-UP!' he screamed, leaping to his )feet. 'IT'S A SET-UP, WE HAVE TO GET OUT  OF HERE!' . Startled faces craned around to look at him /. . . but there were three that didn't have to crane. + These belonged to Delray, Olson, and the )dark-haired woman named Kendra. They had just + solved the latches and opened the trunk. /Their faces were full of shock and guilt . . . but no ( surprise. That particular emotion was absent. / 'Siddown, Iman!' Duke hissed. 'Have you gone era ' - Upstairs, the door crashed open. Bootheels /clumped across the floor toward the stairwell. - 'What's happening?' Janet Brightwood asked.*She spoke directly to Duke. Her eyes were wide - and frightened. 'What's he talking about?' + 'GET OUT!' Pearson roared. 'GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE! HE TOLD IT TO YOU ) BACKWARD! WE'RE THE ONES IN THE TRAP!' % The door at the head of the narrow *staircase leading to the basement crashed open, and from % the shadows up there came the most .appalling sounds Pearson had ever heard it was like / listening to a pack of pit-bulls baying over %a live baby thrown into their midst. . 'Who's that?' Janet screamed. 'Who's that up)there?' Yet there was no question on her face; her - face knew perfectly well who was up there. What was up there. , 'Calm down!' Robbie Delray shouted to the +confused group of people, most of whom werestill , sitting on their folding chairs. 'They've )promised amnesty! Do you hear me? Do you understand * what I'm saying? They've given me their solemn ' * At that moment the cellar window to the *left of the one through which Pearson had seen the + first batface shattered inward, spraying *glass across the stunned men and women in the first row , along the wall. An Armani-clad arm snaked ,through the jagged opening and seized Moira + Richardson by the hair. She screamed and -beat at the hand holding her . . . which was not really a - hand at all, but a bundle of talons tipped with long, chitinous nails. ' Without thinking, Pearson seized the *window-pole, darted forward, and launched the hook at . the pulsing batlike face peering in through +the broken window. The hook drove into one of the 0 thing's eyes. A thick, faintly astringent ink +pattered down on Pearson's upthrust hands. The - batman uttered a baying, savage sound it/didn't sound like a scream of pain to Pearson, but he ) supposed he was allowed to hope and /then it fell backward, pulling the window-pole out of . Pearson's hands and into the drizzly night. *Before the creature disappeared from view entirely, , Pearson saw white mist begin to drift off *its tumorous skin, and smelled a whiff of ! (dust urine hot chili-peppers)  something unpleasant. - Cam Stevens pulled Moira into his arms and -looked at Pearson with shocked, disbelieving + eyes. All around them were men and women +wearing that same blank look, men and women/ frozen like a herd of deer in the headlights of an oncoming truck. ' They don't look much like resistance +fighters to me, Pearson thought. They look like sheep ) caught in a shearing-pen . . . and the +bastard of a judas goat who led them in is standing up * there at the front of the room with his co-conspirators. ) The savage baying upstairs was getting .closer, but not as fast as Pearson might have expected. $ Then he remembered how narrow the +staircase was too narrow for two men to walk abreast . and said a little prayer of thanks as he -shoved forward. He I grabbed Duke by the tie and . hauled him to his feet. 'Come on,' he said. 1'We're blowing this joint. Is there a back door?'- 'I . . . don't know.' Duke was rubbing one -temple slowly and forcefully, like a man who has a * bad headache. 'Robbie did this? Robbie? *Can't be, man . . . can it?' He looked at Pearson with  pitiful, stunned intensity. " 'I'm afraid so, Duke. Come on.' + He got two steps toward the aisle, still /holding onto Duke's tie, then stopped. Delray, Olson, , and Kendra had been rooting in the trunk, ,and now they flashed pistol-sized automatic weapons - equipped with ridiculous-looking long wire -stocks. Pearson had never seen an Uzi outsideof the * movies and TV, but he supposed that was .what these were. Uzis or close relatives, and what the ( fuck did it matter, anyway? They were guns. , 'Hold it,' Delray said. He appeared to be ,speaking to Duke and Pearson. He was trying to smile + and producing something that looked like ,the grimace of a death row prisoner who has just been 0 notified it's still on. 'Stay right where you are.' - Duke kept moving. He was in the aisle now, -and Pearson was right beside him. Others were- getting up, following their lead, pressing .forward but looking nervously back over their ) shoulders at the doorway giving on the -stairs. Their eyes said they didn't like the guns, but they - liked the snarling, baying sounds drifting %down from the first floor even less. * 'Why, man?' Duke asked, and Pearson saw .he was on the verge of tears. He held out his hands, ) palms up. 'Why would you sell us out?' . 'Stop, Duke, I'm warning you,' Lester Olson !said in a Scotch-mellowed voice. + 'The rest of you stay back, too!' Kendra .snapped. She did not sound mellow at all. Her eyes * rolled back and forth in their sockets, (trying to cover the whole room at once. - 'We never had a chance,' Delray told Duke. .He sounded as if he were pleading. 'They were , onto us, they could have taken us anytime,#but they offered me a deal. Do you understand? I / didn't sell out; I never sold out. They came (to me.' He spoke vehemently, as if this distinction + actually meant something to him, but the (shuttling blinks of his eyes signaled a different - message. It was as if there were some other.Robbie Delray inside, a better Robbie Delray, one + who was trying frantically to dissociate ,himself from this shameful act of betrayal. * 'YOU'RE A FUCKING LIAR!' Duke Rhinemann 'shrieked in a voice breaking with hurt ) betrayal and furious understanding. He +leaped at the man who had saved his sanity and perhaps . his life on a Red Line train . . . and then !everything swooped down at once. - Pearson could not have seen it all, yet it *seemed that somehow he did. He saw Robbie Delray - hesitate, then turn his weapon sideways, as,if he intended to club Duke with the barrel instead of - shooting him. He saw Lester Olson, who had (shot the batman in the Newburyport barn pop-poppop - before losing his guts and deciding to try ,and cut a deal, lodge the wire stock of his own gun . against the buckle of his belt and pull the -trigger. He saw momentary blue licks of fire appear in + the ventilation holes in the barrel, and )heard a hoarse hack!hack!hack!hack! that Pearson ) supposed was the way automatic weapons .sounded in the real world. He heard something 2 invisible slice the air an inch in front of his /face; it was like hearing a ghost gasp. And he saw , Duke flung backward with blood spraying up,from his white shirt and splattering on his creamcolored $ suit. He saw the man who had been -standing directly behind Duke stumble to his knees, , hands clapped over his eyes, bright blood &oozing out from between the knuckles. + Someone maybe Janet Brightwood had -shut the door between the staircase and this % downstairs room before the meeting +started; now it banged open and two batmen wearing the - uniforms of the Boston Police squeezed in. *Their small, pushed-together faces stared savagely - out of their oversized, strangely restless heads. . 'Amnesty!' Robbie Delray was screaming. The (freckles on his face now stood out like brands; , the skin upon which they had been printed -was ashy-white. 'Amnesty! I've been promised - amnesty if you'll just stand where you are and put up your hands!' ' Several people those who had been *clustered around the coffeemaker, for the most part ' did raise their hands, although they *continued to back away from the uniformed batmen as they * did it. One of the bats reached forward ,with a low grunt, seized a man by the front of his shirt, * and yanked him toward it. Almost before ,Pearson realized it had happened, the thing had torn out * the man's eyes. The thing looked at the (jellied remains resting on its strange, misshapen palm for & a moment, then popped them into its mouth. ) As two more bats lunged in through the (door, looking around with their blackly gleaming little . eyes, the other police-bat drew its service -revolver and fired three times, seemingly at random,  into the crowd. . 'No!' Pearson heard Delray scream. 'No, you promised!'' , Janet Brightwood grabbed the Bunn, lifted -it over her head, and threw it at one of the - newcomers. It struck with a muted metallic +bonging and spewed hot coffee all over the thing. , This time there was no mistaking the pain .in that shriek. One of the police-bats reached for her. ' Brightwood ducked, tried to run, was 1tripped . . . and suddenly she was gone, lost in a stampede  toward the front of the room. ) Now all the windows were breaking, and &somewhere close by Pearson could hear approaching , sirens. He saw the bats breaking into two )groups and running down the sides of the room, clearly ) bent on driving the panic-stricken Ten ,O'CIock People into the storage area behind the easel, # which had now been knocked over. ' Olson threw down his weapon, grabbed /Kendra's hand, and bolted in that direction. A bat-arm ( snaked down through one of the cellar -windows, grabbed a handful of his theatrical white hair, % and hauled him upward, choking and ,gargling. Another hand appeared through the window, and + a thumbnail three inches long opened his $throat and let out a scarlet flood. + Your days of popping off batmen in barns .on the coast are all over, my friend, Pearson thought , sickly. He turned toward the front of the *room again. Delray stood between the open trunk and . the fallen easel, his gun now dangling from -one hand, his eyes shocked nearly to vacancy.When ) Pearson pulled the wire stock from his ,fingers, the man made no attempt to resist. . 'They promised us amnesty,' he told Pearson.'They promised.' / 'Did you really think you could trust things +that looked like that?' Pearson asked, and then * drove the wire stock into the center of *Delray's face with all the force he could muster. He heard / something break probably Delray's nose (and the thoughtless barbarian which had , awakened within his banker's soul cheered with rude savagery. * He started toward a passage zig-zagging ,between the stacked cartons one that had been ( widened by the people who had already +bolted their way through then paused as gunfire - erupted behind the building. Gunfire . . . screams . . . roars of triumph. * Pearson whirled and saw Cam Stevens and -Moira Richardson standing at the head of the aisle ( between the folding chairs. They wore 'identical shocked expressions and were holding hands. ( Pearson had time to think, That's how -Hansel and Gretel must have looked after they finally got ' out of the candy-house. Then he bent %down, picked up Kendra's and Olson's weapons, and  handed one to each. ( Two more bats had come in through the /rear door. They moved casually, as if all were going ) according to plan . . . which, Pearson *supposed, it was. The action had moved to the rear of the - house now that was where the pen really ,was, not in here, and the bats were doing a lot more  than just shearing. . 'Come on,' he said to Cam and Moira. 'Let's get these fucks.' * The batmen at the rear of the room were -late in realizing that a few of the refugees had ) decided to turn and fight. One of them +spun around, possibly to run, struck a new arrival, and / slipped in the spilled coffee. They both went%down. Pearson opened fire on the one remaining on ( its feet. The machine-pistol made its +somehow unsatisfying hack!hack!hack! sound and the bat & was driven backward, its alien face )breaking open and letting out a cloud of stinking fog . . . it . was as if, Pearson thought, they really werejust illusions. , Cam and Moira got the idea and opened fire*on the remaining bats, catching them in a , withering field of fire that knocked them ,back against the wall and then sent them to the floor, , already oozing out of their clothes in an +insubstantial mist that to Pearson smelled quite a lot like * the asters in the marble flower-islands outside The First Mercantile. - 'Come on,' Pearson said. 'If we go now, we might have a chance.' - 'But ' Cameron began. He looked around, +starting to come out of his daze. That was good; , Pearson had an idea they'd all have to be (wide-awake if they were going to have a chance of  getting out of this. . 'Never mind, Cam,' Moira said. She had also ,looked around, and noted the fact that they were - the only ones, human or bat, left in here. ,Everyone else had gone out the back. 'Let's just go. I * think maybe the door we came in through would be our best bet.' + 'Yes,' Pearson said, 'but not for long.' - He spared one last look at Duke, who lay on/the floor with his face frozen in an expressionof . pained disbelief. He wished there were time (to close Duke's eyes, but there wasn't. & 'Let's go,' he said, and they went. * By the time they reached the door which *gave on the porch and Cambridge Avenue beyond it - the gunfire coming from the rear of the 'house had begun to taper off. How many dead? ) Pearson wondered, and the answer which 1first occurred all of them was horrible buttoo , plausible to deny. He supposed one or two .others might have slipped through, but surely no - more. It had been a good trap, set quietly +and neatly around them while Robbie Delray ran his + gums, stalling for time and checking his 0watch . . . probably waiting to give some signalwhich  Pearson had preempted. / If I'd woken up a little earlier, Duke might -still be alive, he thought bitterly. Perhaps true, but - if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. )This wasn't the time for recriminations. ( One police-bat had been left to stand .sentry on the porch, but it was turned in the direction of - the street, possibly watching for unwanted -interference. Pearson leaned through the opendoor . toward it and said, 'Hey, you ugly ringmeat asshole got a cigarette?'  The bat turned.  Pearson blew its face off. , Shortly after one the next morning, three ,people two men and a woman, wearing torn nylons ( and a dirty red skirt ran beside a /freight-train pulling out of the South Station shipping yards. + The younger of the two men leaped easily *into the square mouth of an empty boxcar, turned, and # held out his hands to the woman. + She stumbled and cried out as one of her +low heels broke. Pearson put an arm around her waist + (he got a heartbreakingly faint whiff of ,Giorgio below the much fresher smell of her sweat and ) her fear), ran with her that way, then /yelled for her to jump. As she did, he grabbed her hips and ' boosted her toward Cameron Stevens's ,reaching hands. She caught them and Pearson gave her a - final rough shove to help Stevens haul her aboard. - Pearson had fallen behind in his effort to )help her, and now he could see the fence which - marked the edge of the train yards not far .ahead. The freight was gliding through a hole in the , chainlink, but there would be no room for .both it and Pearson; if he didn't get aboard, and / quickly, he would be left behind in the yard.+ Cam glanced around the open boxcar door, (saw the approaching fence, and held his hands out 0 again. 'Come on!' he shouted. 'You can do it!'. Pearson couldn't have not back in the old+two-pack-a-day life, anyway. Now, however, he / was able to find a little extra, both in his -legs and in his lungs. He sprinted along the treacherous + bed of trash-littered cinders beside the -tracks, temporarily outrunning the lumbering train again, . holding his hands out and up, stretching his,fingers to touch the hands above him as the fence % loomed. Now he could see the cruel +interfacings of barbed wire weaving in and out of the  chainlink diamonds. * The eye of his mind opened wide in that *moment and he saw his wife sitting in her chair in the . living room, her face puffy with crying and .her eyes red. He saw her telling two uniformed& policemen that her husband had gone *missing. He even saw the stack of Jenny's Pop-Up books + on the little table beside her. Was that .really going on? Yes; in one form or another, he supposed , it was. And Lisabeth, who had never smoked0a single cigarette in her whole life, would not be + aware of the black eyes and fanged mouths)beneath the young faces of the policemen sitting * across from her on the couch; she would (not see the oozing tumors or the black, pulsing lines ) which crisscrossed their naked skulls. ! Would not know. Would not see. , God bless her blindness, Pearson thought. Let it last forever. + He stumbled toward the dark behemoth that,was a westbound Conrail freight, toward the + orange fluff of sparks which spiraled up -from beneath one slowly turning steel wheel. / 'Run!' Moira shrieked, and leaned out of the *boxcar door farther, her hands imploring. 'Please, # Brandon just a little more!'' * 'Hurry up, you gluefoot!' Cam screamed. $'Watch out for the fucking fence!'' * Can't, Pearson thought. Can't hurry up, ,can't watch out for the fence, can't do any more. Just ( want to lie down. Just want to sleep. ) Then he thought of Duke and managed to +put on a little more speed after all. Duke hadn't been + old enough to know that sometimes people -lose their guts and sell out, that sometimes even the , ones you idolize do that, but he had been +old enough to grab Brand Pearson's arm and keep him + from killing himself with a scream. Duke .wouldn't have wanted him to be left behind in this  stupid trainyard. * He managed one last sprint toward their +outstretched hands, watching the fence now seeming . to leap toward him out of the corner of his .eye, and seized Cam's fingers. He jumped, felt. Moira's hand clamp firmly under his armpit, .and then he was squirming aboard, pulling his right - foot into the boxcar a split second before -the fence would have torn it off, loafer and all. / 'All aboard for Boy's Adventure,' he gasped, 'illustrations by N. C. Wyeth!' + 'What?' Moira asked. 'What did you say?' ' He turned over and looked up at them ,through a matted tangle of hair, resting on his elbows ( and panting. 'Never mind. Who's got a cigarette? I'm dying for One.' * They gawped at him silently for several *seconds, looked at each other, then burst into wild ) shouts of laughter at exactly the same (moment. Pearson guessed that meant they were in love. / As they rolled over and over on the floor of -the boxcar, clutching each other and howling,% Pearson sat up and slowly began to .investigate the inside pockets of his filthy, torn suitcoat. * 'Ahhh,' he said as his hand entered the +second one and felt the familiar shape. He hauled out . the battered pack and displayed it. 'Here's to victory!' " The boxcar trundled west across *Massachusetts with three small red embers glowing in the dark ) of the open doorway. A week later they (were in Omaha, spending the mid-morning hours of each ) day idling along the downtown streets, #watching the people who take their coffee-breaks outside , even in the pouring rain, looking for Ten +O'Clock People, hunting for members of the Lost Tribe, * the one that wandered off following Joe Camel. ( By November there were twenty of them 'having meetings in the back room of an abandoned  hardware store in La Vista. * They mounted their first raid early the ,following year, across the river in Council Bluffs, and + killed thirty very surprised mid-western *bat-bankers and bat-executives. It wasn't much, but . Brand Pearson had learned that killing bats -had at least one thing in common with cuttingdown - on your cigarette intake: you had to start somewhere.   -Crouch End-  - By the time the woman had finally gone, it .was nearly two-thirty in the morning. Outside the , Crouch End police station, Tottenham Lane 0was a small dead river. London was asleep . . . but - London never sleeps deeply, and its dreams are uneasy. , PC Vetter closed his notebook, which he'd .almost filled as the American woman's strange,. frenzied story poured out. He looked at the +typewriter and the stack of blank forms on the shelf 0 beside it. 'This one'll look odd come morning light,' he said. , PC Farnham was drinking a Coke. He didn't *speak for a long time. 'She was American, wasn't 1 she?' he said finally, as if that might explain'most or all of the story she had told. 2 'It'll go in the back file,' Vetter agreed, and 2looked round for a cigarette. 'But I wonder . . . ' ' Farnham laughed. 'You don't mean you -believe any part of it? Go on, sir! Pull the other one!' . 'Didn't say that, did I? No. But you're new here.' * Farnham sat a little straighter. He was .twenty-seven, and it was hardly his fault thathe had , been posted here from Muswell Hill to the ,north, or that Vetter, who was nearly twice his age, , had spent his entire uneventful career in *the quiet London backwater of Crouch End. , 'Perhaps so, sir,' lie said, 'but with /respect, mind I still think I know a swatch of the old 1 whole cloth when I see one . . . or hear one.' . 'Give us a fag, mate,' Vetter said, looking amused. 'There! - What a good boy you are.' He lit it with a ,wooden match from a bright red railway box, shook ) it out, and tossed the match stub into (Farnham's ashtray. He peered at the lad through a haze of . drifting smoke. His own days of laddie good (looks were long gone; Vetter's face was deeply ) lined and his nose was a map of broken 0veins. He liked his six of Harp a night, did PC Vetter. . 'You think Crouch End's a very quiet place, then, do you?' ( Farnham shrugged. In truth he thought +Crouch End was a big suburban yawn what his , younger brother would have been pleased to call 'a fucking Bore-a-Torium.' 0 'Yes,' Vetter said, 'I see you do. And you're /right. Goes to sleep by eleven most nights, it does. + But I've seen a lot of strange things in 0Crouch End. If you're here half as long as I've been, you'll - see your share, too. There are more strange.things happen right here in this quiet six or eight ) blocks than anywhere else in London 2that's saying a lot, I know, but I believe it. It scares me. * So I have my lager, and then I'm not so $scared. You look at Sergeant Gordon sometime, , Farnham, and ask yourself why his hair is /dead white at forty. Or I'd say take a look at Petty, but & you can't very well, can you? Petty -committed suicide in the summer of 1976. Our hot summer. / It was . . . ' Vetter seemed to consider his ,words. 'It was quite bad that summer. Quite bad. There - were a lot of us who were afraid they mightbreak through.' * 'Who might break through what?' Farnham ,asked. He felt a contemptuous smile turning up the - corners of his mouth, knew it was far from 0politic, but was unable to stop it. In his way, Vetter , was raving as badly as the American woman )had. He had always been a bit queer. The booze, + probably. Then he saw Vetter was smiling right back at him. / 'You think I'm a dotty old prat, I suppose,' he said. / 'Not at all, not at all,' Farnham protested, groaning inwardly. . 'You're a good boy,' Vetter said. 'Won't be .riding a desk here in the station when you're my / age. Not if you stick on the force. Will you %stick, d'you think? D'you fancy it?' + 'Yes,' Farnham said. It was true; he did .fancy it. He meant to stick even though Sheilawanted , him off the police force and somewhere she,could count on him. The Ford assembly line, - perhaps. The thought of joining the wankersat Ford curdled his stomach. , 'I thought so,' Vetter said, crushing his ,smoke. 'Gets in your blood, doesn't it? You could go * far, too, and it wouldn't be boring old 1Crouch End you'd finish up in, either. Still, you don't know ) everything. Crouch End is strange. You &ought to have a peek in the back file sometime, 3 Farnham. Oh, a lot of it's the usual . . . girls ,and boys run away from home to be hippies orpunks / or whatever it is they call themselves now . -. . husbands gone missing (and when you clap an eye $ to their wives you can most times ,understand why) . . . unsolved arsons . . . purse-snatchings . . . . all of that. But in between, there's enough .stories to curdle your blood. And some to makeyou  sick to your stomach.'  'True word?' + Vetter nodded. 'Some of em very like the 1one that poor American girl just told us. She'll not , see her husband again take my word for (it.' He looked at Farnham and shrugged. 'Believe me, 4 believe me not. It's all one, isn't it? The file's-there. We call it the open file because it's more # polite than the back file or the /kiss-my-arse file. Study it up, Farnham. Study it up.' , Farnham said nothing, but he actually did -intend to 'study it up.' The idea that there might be a . whole series of stories such as the one the 'American woman had told . . . that was disturbing. - 'Sometimes,' Vetter said, stealing another (of Farnham's Silk Cuts, 'I wonder about  Dimensions.'  'Dimensions?' . 'Yes, my good old son dimensions. Science$fiction writers are always on about Dimensions, * aren't they? Ever read science fiction, Farnham?' . 'No,' Farnham said. He had decided this was !some sort of elaborate leg-pull. , 'What about Lovecraft? Ever read anything by him?' / 'Never heard of him,'' Farnham said. The last-fiction he'd read for pleasure, in fact, had been a * small Victorian Era pastiche called Two Gentlemen in Silk Knickers. * 'Well, this fellow Lovecraft was always (writing about Dimensions,' Vetter said, producing his . box of railway matches. 'Dimensions close to+ours. Full of these immortal monsters that would ) drive a man mad at one look. Frightful ,rubbish, of course. Except, whenever one of these people 2 straggles in, I wonder if all of it was rubbish..I think to myself then when it's quiet and late at + night, like now that our whole world, -everything we think of as nice and normal andsane, 3 might be like a big leather ball filled with air.+Only in some places, the leather's scuffed almost - down to nothing. Places where the barriers are thinner. Do you get me?' * 'Yes,' Farnham said, and thought: Maybe )you ought to give me a kiss, Vetter I always fancy , a kiss when I'm getting my doodle pulled. / 'And then I think, 'Crouch End's one of those1thin places. Silly, but I do have those thoughts.- Too imaginative, I expect; my mother alwayssaid so, anyway.'  'Did she indeed?' ( 'Yes. Do you know what else I think?'  'No, sir not a clue.' . 'Highgate's mostly all right, that's what I *think it's just as thick as you'd want between us ) and the Dimensions in Muswell Hill and 'Highgate. But now you take Archway and Finsbury - Park. They border on Crouch End, too. I've -got friends in both places, and they know of my - interest in certain things that don't seem .to be any way rational. Certain crazy stories which have / been told, we'll say, by people with nothing $to gain by making up crazy stories. + 'Did it occur to you to wonder, Farnham, ,why the woman would have told us the things she  did if they weren't true?'  'Well . . . ' & Vetter struck a match and looked at &Farnham over it. 'Pretty young woman, twenty-six, two ) kiddies back at her hotel, husband's a (young lawyer doing well in Milwaukee or someplace. & What's she to gain by coming in and +spouting about the sort of things you only used to see in  Hammer films?' - 'I don't know,' Farnham said stiffly. 'But there may be an ex ' 0 'So I say to myself' Vetter overrode him 0'that if there are such things as 'thin spots,' this * one would begin at Archway and Finsbury 1Park . . . but the very thinnest part is here at Crouch - End. And I say to myself, wouldn't it be a .day if the last of the leather between us and what's on / the inside that ball just . . . rubbed away? .Wouldn't it be a day if even half of what thatwoman  told us was true?' , Farnham was silent. He had decided that PC/Vetter probably also believed in palmistry and # phrenology and the Rosicrucians. 0 'Read the back file,' Vetter said, getting up.*There was a crackling sound as he put his hands in , the small of his back and stretched. 'I'm "going out to get some fresh air.' , He strolled out. Farnham looked after him ,with a mixture of amusement and resentment. - Vetter was dotty, all right. He was also a ,bloody fag-mooch. Fags didn't come cheap in this brave , new world of the welfare state. He picked 'up Vetter's notebook and began leafing through the  girl's story again. . And, yes, he would go through the back file. He would do it for laughs. , The girl or young woman, if you wanted 1to be politically correct (and all Americans did these ) days, it seemed) had burst into the )station at quarter past ten the previous evening, her hair in ) damp strings around her face, her eyes +bulging. She was dragging her purse by the strap. 1 'Lonnie,' she said. 'Please, you've got to find Lonnie.' . 'Well, we'll do our best, won't we?' Vetter 1said. 'But you've got to tell us who Lonnie is.' - 'He's dead,' the young woman said. 'I know ,he is.' She began to cry. Then she began to laugh 0 to cackle, really. She dropped her purse in"front of her. She was hysterical. . The station was fairly deserted at that hour%on a weeknight. Sergeant Raymond was listening ) to a Pakistani woman tell, with almost 'unearthly calm, how her purse had been nicked on * Hillfield Avenue by a yob with a lot of -football tattoos and a great coxcomb of blue hair. Vetter ) saw Farnham come in from the anteroom, *where he had been taking down old posters (HAVE YOU % ROOM IN YOUR HEART FOR AN UNWANTED +CHILD?) and putting up new ones (SIX RULES FOR SAFE  NIGHT-CYCLING). # Vetter waved Farnham forward and *Sergeant Raymond, who had looked round at once when  he heard the American woman's *semi-hysterical voice, back. Raymond, who liked breaking . pickpockets' fingers like breadsticks ('Aw, 0c'mon, mate,' he'd say if asked to justify this extralegal + proceeding, 'fifty million wogs can't be *wrong'), was not the man for a hysterical woman. / 'Lonnie!' she shrieked. 'Oh, please, they've got Lonnie!' ( The Pakistani woman turned toward the ,young American woman, studied her calmly fora ' moment, then turned back to Sergeant *Raymond and continued to tell him how her purse had  been snatched.  'Miss ' PC Farnham began. . 'What's going on out there?' she whispered. &Her breath was coming in quick pants. Farnham , noticed there was a slight scratch on her -left cheek. She was a pretty little hen with nice bubs ) small but pert and a great cloud of )auburn hair. Her clothes were moderately expensive. The & heel had come off one of her shoes. - 'What's going on out there?' she repeated. 'Monsters ' . The Pakistani woman looked over again . . . -and smiled. Her teeth were rotten. The smile was - gone like a conjurer's trick, and she took *the Lost and Stolen Property form Raymond was  holding out to her. - 'Get the lady a cup of coffee and bring it -down to Room Three,' Vetter said. 'Could you do  with a cup of coffee, love?' / 'Lonnie,' she whispered. 'I know he's dead.' ) 'Now, you just come along with old Ted .Vetter and we'll sort this out in a jiff,' he said, and 0 helped her to her feet. She was still talking ,in a low moaning voice when he led her away with , one arm snugged around her waist. She was )rocking unsteadily because of the broken shoe. , Farnham got the coffee and brought it into,Room Three, a plain white cubicle furnished with a * scarred table, four chairs, and a water +cooler in the corner. He put the coffee in front of her. 4 'Here, love,' he said, 'this'll do you good. I've got some sugar if ' 5 'I can't drink it,' she said. 'I couldn't ' And %then she clutched the porcelain cup, someone's . long-forgotten souvenir of Blackpool, in her'hands as if for warmth. Her hands were shaking - quite badly, and Farnham wanted to tell her-to put it down before she slopped the coffee and  scalded herself. 0 'I couldn't,' she said again. Then she drank, ,still holding the cup two-handed, the way a child + will hold his cup of broth. And when she 1looked at them, it was a child's look simple, exhausted, . appealing . . . and at bay, somehow. It was (as if whatever had happened had somehow . shocked her young; as if some invisible hand*had swooped down from the sky and slapped the / last twenty years out of her, leaving a child*in grownup American clothes in this small white $ interrogation room in Crouch End. 0 'Lonnie,' she said. 'The monsters,' she said. ,'Will you help me? Will you please help me?  Maybe he isn't dead. Maybe 1 'I'm an American citizen.!' she cried suddenly,.and then, as if she had said something deeply  shameful, she began to sob. . Vetter patted her shoulder. 'There, love. I )think we can help find your Lonnie. Your husband,  is he?'' . Still sobbing, she nodded. 'Danny and Norma 2are back at the hotel . . . with the sitter . . . they'll / be sleeping . . . expecting him to kiss them when we come in . . . ' / 'Now if you could just relax and tell us whathappened ' * 'And where it happened,' Farnham added. +Vetter looked up at him swiftly, frowning. 1 'But that's just it!' she cried. 'I don't know *where it happened! I'm not even sure what happened, & except that it was h-huh-horrible.' - Vetter had taken out his notebook. 'What's your name, love?'' ( 'Doris Freeman. My husband is Leonard +Freeman. We're staying at the Hotel Inter- . Continental. We're American citizens.' This +time the statement of nationality actually seemed to - steady her a little. She sipped her coffee +and put the mug down. Farnham saw that the palms of - her hands were quite red. You'll feel that later, dearie, he thought. ) Vetter was drudging it all down in his *notebook. Now he looked momentarily at PC Farnham, ) just an unobtrusive flick of the eyes. " 'Are you on holiday?' he asked. . 'Yes . . . two weeks here and one in Spain. #We were supposed to have a week in Barcelona . . . . but this isn't helping find Lonnie! Why are 'you asking me these stupid questions?' + 'Just trying to get the background, Mrs. 'Freeman,' Farnham said. Without really thinking about - it, both of them had adopted low, soothing +voices. 'Now you go ahead and tell us what happened.  Tell it in your own words.' / 'Why is it so hard to get a taxi in London?' she asked abruptly. ' Farnham hardly knew what to say, but )Vetter responded as if the question were utterly  germane to the discussion. / 'Hard to say. Tourists, partly. Why? Did you ,have trouble getting someone who'd take you out  here to Crouch End?' / 'Yes,' she said. 'We left the hotel at three )and came down to Hatchard's Bookshop. Is that  Haymarket?' ( 'Near to,' Vetter agreed. 'Lovely big bookshop, love, isn't it?' , 'We had no trouble getting a cab from the +Inter-Continental . . . they were lined up outside. + But when we came out of Hatchard's, there-was nothing. Finally, when one did stop, the driver ' just laughed and shook his head when ,Lonnie said we wanted to go to Crouch End.' . 'Aye, they can be right barstards about the ,suburbs, beggin your pardon, love,' Farnham said. ' 'He even refused a pound tip,' Doris -Freeman said, and a very American perplexity had crept . into her tone. 'We waited for almost half an*hour before we got a driver who said he'd take us. It , was five-thirty by then, maybe quarter of -six. And that was when Lonnie discovered he'd lost the  address . . . '  She clutched the mug again. - 'Who were you going to see?' Vetter asked. ) 'A colleague of my husband's. A lawyer *named John Squales. My husband hadn't met him, but ) their two firms were ' She gestured vaguely.  'Affiliated?' . 'Yes, I suppose. When Mr. Squales found out +we were going to be in London on vacation, he , invited us to his home for dinner. Lonnie )had always written him at his office, of course, but he . had Mr. Squales's home address on a slip of .paper. After we got in the cab, he discovered he'd . lost it. And all he could remember was that it was in Crouch End.'  She looked at them solemnly. / 'Crouch End I think that's an ugly name.' * Vetter said, 'So what did you do then?' ' She began to talk. By the time she'd .finished, her first cup of coffee and most of another were , gone, and PC Vetter had filled up several 'pages of his notebook with his blocky, sprawling  script. + Lonnie Freeman was a big man, and hunched,forward in the roomy back seat of the black cab so / he could talk to the driver, he looked to her-amazingly as he had when she'd first seen himat a / college basketball game in their senior year - sitting on the bench, his knees somewhere up * around his ears, his hands on their big /wrists dangling between his legs. Only then he had been . wearing basketball shorts and a towel slung -around his neck, and now he was in a suit andtie. He & had never gotten in many games, she *remembered fondly, because he just wasn't that good. And  he lost addresses. - The cabby listened indulgently to the tale +of the lost address. He was an elderly man " impeccably turned out in a gray *summer-weight suit, the antithesis of the slouching New York * cabdriver. Only the checked wool cap on )the driver's head clashed, but it was an agreeable clash; ' it lent him a touch of rakish charm. .Outside, the traffic flowed endlessly past on Haymarket; the $ theater nearby announced that The (Phantom of the Opera was continuing its apparently endless  run. 0 'Well, I tell you what, guv,' the cabby said. .'I'll take yer there to Crouch End, and we'll stop at , a call box, and you check your governor's ,address, and off we go, right to the door.' 1 'That's wonderful,' Doris said, really meaning -it. They had been in London six days now, and- she could not recall ever having been in a +place where the people were kinder or more civilized. . 'Thanks,' Lonnie said, and sat back. He put *his arm around Doris and smiled. 'See? No  problem.' , 'No thanks to you,' she mock-growled, and 'threw a light punch at his midsection. / 'Right,' the cabby said. 'Heigh-ho for CrouchEnd.' , It was late August, and a steady hot wind 'rattled the trash across the roads and whipped at the * jackets and skirts of the men and women ,going home from work. The sun was settling, but when , it shone between the buildings, Doris saw -that it was beginning to take on the reddish cast of ) evening. The cabby hummed. She relaxed -with Lonnie's arm around her she had seen more of , him in the last six days than she had all -year, it seemed, and she was very pleased to discover that * she liked it. She had never been out of ,America before, either, and she had to keep reminding + herself that she was in England, she was +going to Barcelona, thousands should be so lucky. , Then the sun disappeared behind a wall of /buildings, and she lost her sense of direction almost . immediately. Cab rides in London did that to-you, she had discovered. The city was a great) sprawling warren of Roads and Mews and /Hills and Closes (even Inns), and she couldn't * understand how anyone could get around. ,When she had mentioned it to Lonnie the day before, + he had replied that they got around very 0carefully . . . hadn't she noticed that all the cabbies kept , the London Streetfinder tucked cozily awaybeneath the dash? ) This was the longest cab ride they had 'taken. The fashionable section of town dropped behind " them (in spite of that perverse .going-around-in-circles feeling). They passed through an area of - monolithic housing developments that could /have been utterly deserted for all the signs oflife , they showed (no, she corrected herself to ,Vetter and Farnham in the small white room; she had * seen one small boy sitting on the curb, *striking matches), then an area of small, rather tattylooking ) shops and fruit stalls, and then no -wonder driving in London was so disorienting to ( out-of-towners they seemed to have *driven smack into the fashionable section again. * 'There was even a McDonald's,' she told -Vetter and Farnham in a tone of voice usually, reserved for references to the Sphinx and the Hanging Gardens. . 'Was there?' Vetter replied, properly amazed-and respectful she had achieved a kind of total - recall, and he wanted nothing to break the 'mood, at least until she had told them everything she  could. - The fashionable section with the McDonald's+as its centerpiece dropped away. They came . briefly into the clear and now the sun was a-solid orange ball sitting above the horizon, washing - the streets with a strange light that made /all the pedestrians look as if they were about to burst  into flame. - 'It was then that things began to change,' .she said. Her voice had dropped a little. Her hands  were trembling again. * Vetter leaned forward, intent. 'Change? +How? How did things change, Mrs. Freeman?' + They had passed a newsagent's window, she)said, and the signboard outside had read SIXTY  LOST IN UNDERGROUND HORROR.  'Lonnie, look at that!' $ 'What?' He craned around, but the %newsagent's was already behind them. 0 'It said, "Sixty Lost in Underground Horror." *Isn't that what they call the subway? The  Underground?' - 'Yes that or the tube. Was it a crash?' 1 'I don't know.' She leaned forward. 'Driver, do*you know what that was about? Was there a  subway crash?' , 'A collision, madam? Not that I know of.'  'Do you have a radio?'  'Not in the cab, madam.'  'Lonnie?'  'Hmmm?' ) But she could see that Lonnie had lost +interest. He was going through his pockets again (and ) because he was wearing his three-piece /suit, there were a lot of them to go through), having + another hunt for the scrap of paper with &John Squales's address written on it. * The message chalked on the board played +over and over in her mind, SIXTY KILLED IN TUBE . CRASH, it should have read. But . . . SIXTY (LOST IN UNDERGROUND HORROR. It made her uneasy. It 3 didn't say 'killed,' it said 'lost,' the way news/reports in the old days had always referred to sailors  who had been drowned at sea.  UNDERGROUND HORROR. + She didn't like it. It made her think of -graveyards, sewers, and flabby-pale, noisome things % swarming suddenly out of the tubes ,themselves, wrapping their arms (tentacles, maybe) around * the hapless commuters on the platforms, %dragging them away to darkness . . . , They turned right. Standing on the corner +beside their parked motorcycles were three boys in . leathers. They looked up at the cab and for /a moment the setting sun was almost full in her - face from this angle it seemed that the ,bikers did not have human heads at all. For that one - moment she was nastily sure that the sleek +heads of rats sat atop those black leather jackets, rats + with black eyes staring at the cab. Then .the light shifted just a tiny bit and she saw of course she + had been mistaken; there were only three -young men smoking cigarettes in front of the British ' version of the American candy store. + 'Here we go,' Lonnie said, giving up the )search and pointing out the window. They were 0 passing a sign, which read 'Crouch Hill Road.'.Elderly brick houses like sleepy dowagers had - closed in, seeming to look down at the cab ,from their blank windows. A few kids passed back / and forth, riding bikes or trikes. Two others)were trying to ride a skateboard with no notable & success. Fathers home from work sat +together, smoking and talking and watching the children. It " all looked reassuringly normal.  The cab drew up in front of a /dismal-looking restaurant with a small spotted sign in the * window reading FULLY LICENSED and a much.larger one in the center, which informed that - within one, could purchase curries to take 'away. On the inner ledge there slept a gigantic gray - cat. Beside the restaurant was a call box. / 'Here you are, guv,' the cabdriver said. 'You.find your friend's address and I'll track him down.' + 'Fair enough,' Lonnie said, and got out. - Doris sat in the cab for a moment and then /also emerged, deciding she felt like stretchingher + legs. The hot wind was still blowing. It ,whipped her skirt around her knees and then plastered an ) old ice-cream wrapper to her shin. She +removed it with a grimace of disgust. When she looked + up, she was staring directly through the ,plate-glass window at the big gray torn. It stared back at - her, one-eyed and inscrutable. Half of its *face had been all but clawed away in some long-ago - battle. What remained was a twisted pinkish.mass of scar tissue, one milky cataract, and afew  tufts of fur. 0 It miaowed at her silently through the glass. . Feeling a surge of disgust, she went to the *call box and peered in through one of the dirty . panes. Lonnie made a circle at her with his )thumb and forefinger and winked. Then he pushed * ten-pence into the slot and talked with +someone. He laughed soundlessly through the glass. , Like the cat. She looked over for it, but )now the window was empty. In the dimness beyond she + could see chairs up on tables and an old +man pushing a broom. When she looked back, she saw , that Lonnie was jotting something down. He-put his pen away, held the paper in his hand  she + could see an address was jotted on it +said one or two other things, then hung up and came out. , He waggled the address at her in triumph. -'Okay, that's th ' His eyes went past her shoulder * and he frowned. 'Where's the stupid cab gone?' , She turned around. The taxi had vanished. *Where it had stood there was only curbing and a + few papers blowing lazily up the gutter. .Across the street, two kids were clutching at each other . and giggling. Doris noticed that one of them-had a deformed hand it looked more like a claw. ( She'd thought the National Health was .supposed to take care of things like that. The children - looked across the street, saw her observing0them, and fell into each other's arms, giggling again. 2 'I don't know,' Doris said. She felt disoriented,and a little stupid. The heat, the constant wind - that seemed to blow with no gusts or drops,.the almost painted quality of the light . . . ) 'What time was it then?' Farnham asked suddenly. / 'I don't know,' Doris Freeman said, startled +out of her recital. 'Six, I suppose. Maybe twenty  past.' ( 'I see, go on,' Farnham said, knowing .perfectly well that in August sunset would nothave , begun even by the loosest standards until well past seven. . 'Well, what did he do?' Lonnie asked, still 'looking around. It was almost as if he expected his . irritation to cause the cab to pop back into view. 'Just pick up and leave?' + 'Maybe when you put your hand up,' Doris *said, raising her own hand and making the thumband- / forefinger circle Lonnie had made in the call)box, 'maybe when you did that he thought you  were waving him on.' . 'I'd have to wave a long time to send him on.with two-fifty on the meter,' Lonnie grunted, and - walked over to the curb. On the other side ,of Crouch Hill Road, the two small children were still . giggling. 'Hey!' Lonnie called. 'You kids!' + 'You an American, sir?' the boy with the claw-hand called back. 0 'Yes,' Lonnie said, smiling. 'Did you see the ,cab over here? Did you see where it went?'' * The two children seemed to consider the ,question. The boy's companion was a girl of about - five with untidy brown braids sticking off .in opposite directions. She stepped forward tothe ) opposite curb, formed her hands into a /megaphone, and still smiling she screamed itthrough , her megaphoned hands and her smile she "cried at them: 'Bugger off, Joe!'  Lonnie's mouth dropped open. / 'Sir! Sir! Sir!' the boy screeched, saluting ,wildly with his deformed hand. Then the two of + them took to their heels and fled around /the corner and out of sight, leaving only their laughter to  echo back. & Lonnie looked at Doris, dumbstruck. * 'I guess some of the kids in Crouch End +aren't too crazy about Americans,' he said lamely. - She looked around nervously. The street nowappeared deserted. . He slipped an arm around her. 'Well, honey, looks like we hike.' * 'I'm not sure I want to. Those two kids .might've gone to get their big brothers.' She laughed to - show it was a joke, but there was a shrill ,quality to the sound. The evening had taken on a surreal / quality she didn't much like. She wished theyhad stayed at the hotel. + 'Not much else we can do,' he said. 'The 0street's not exactly overflowing with taxis, is it?' , 'Lonnie, why would the cabdriver leave us $here like that? He seemed so nice.' / 'Don't have the slightest idea. But John gave0me good directions. He lives in a street called , Brass End, which is a very minor dead-end %street, and he said it wasn't in the Streetfinder.' As he ) talked he was moving her away from the 0call box, from the restaurant that sold curries to take * away, from the now-empty curb. They were.walking up Crouch Hill Road again. 'We take a right , onto Hillfield Avenue, left halfway down, 2then our first right . . . or was it left? Anyway,onto , Petrie Street. Second left is Brass End.'  'And you remember all that?' 0 'I'm a star witness,' he said bravely, and she-just had to laugh. Lonnie had a way of making things seem better. + There was a map of the Crouch End area on*the wall of the police station lobby, one - considerably more detailed than the one in ,the London Streetfinder. Farnham approached it and - studied it with his hands stuffed into his ,pockets. The station seemed very quiet now. Vetter was ( still outside clearing some of the ,witchmoss from his brains, one hoped and Raymond had + long since finished with the woman who'd had her purse nicked. + Farnham put his finger on the spot where +the cabby had most likely let them off (if anything $ about the woman's story was to be 0believed, that was). The route to their friend's house looked . pretty straightforward. Crouch Hill Road to /Hillfield Avenue, and then a left onto Vickers Lane / followed by a left onto Petrie Street. Brass -End, which stuck off from Petrie Street like + somebody's afterthought, was no more than2six or eight houses long. About a mile, all told. Even * Americans should have been able to walk that far without getting lost. * 'Raymond!' he called. 'You still here?' + Sergeant Raymond came in. He had changed /into streets and was putting on a light poplin ( windcheater. 'Only just, my beardless darling.' 0 'Cut it,' Farnham said, smiling all the same. -Raymond frightened him a little. One look at the + spooky sod was enough to tell you he was .standing a little too close to the fence that ran between , the yard of the good guys and that of the 0villains. There was a twisted white line of scarrunning 0 like a fat string from the left corner of his .mouth almost all the way to his Adam's apple. He + claimed a pickpocket had once nearly cut /his throat with a jagged bit of bottle. Claimedthat's & why he broke their fingers. Farnham &thought that was the shit. He thought Raymond broke their * fingers because he liked the sound they )made, especially when they popped at the knuckles.  'Got a fag?' Raymond asked. - Farnham sighed and gave him one. As he lit .it he asked, 'Is there a curry shop on Crouch Hill  Road?' - 'Not to my knowledge, my dearest darling,' Raymond said.  'That's what I thought.'  'Got a problem, dear?' , 'No,' Farnham said, a little too sharply, -remembering Doris Freeman's clotted hair and staring  eyes. . Near the top of Crouch Hill Road, Doris and -Lonnie Freeman turned onto Hillfield Avenue, $ which was lined with imposing and .gracious-looking homes nothing but shells, she thought, / probably cut up with surgical precision into #apartments and bed-sitters inside. ! 'So far so good,' Lonnie said. / 'Yes, it's ' she began, and that was when the low moaning arose. + They both stopped. The moaning was coming/almost directly from their right, where a high ( hedge ran around a small yard. Lonnie -started toward the sound, and she grasped hisarm.  'Lonnie, no!' $ 'What do you mean, no?' he asked. 'Someone's hurt.' - She stepped after him nervously. The hedge +was high but thin. He was able to brush it aside - and reveal a small square of lawn outlined .with flowers. The lawn was very green. In the center , of it was a black, smoking patch or at .least that was her first impression. When she peered ( around Lonnie's shoulder again his .shoulder was too high for her to peer over it  she saw it & was a hole, vaguely man-shaped. The *tendrils of smoke were emanating from it. ( SIXTY LOST IN UNDERGROUND HORROR, she thought abruptly. + The moaning was coming from the hole, and*Lonnie began to force himself through the hedge  toward it. ' 'Lonnie,' she said, 'please, don't.' , 'Someone's hurt,' he repeated, and pushed +himself the rest of the way through with a bristly * tearing sound. She saw him going toward +the hole, and then the hedge snapped back, leaving her - nothing but a vague impression of his shape'as he moved forward. She tried to push through after , him and was scratched by the short, stiff +branches of the hedge for her trouble. She was wearing  a sleeveless blouse. . 'Lonnie!' she called, suddenly very afraid. 'Lonnie, come back!'  'Just a minute, hon!' + The house looked at her impassively over the top of the hedge. ( The moaning sounds continued, but now (they sounded lower guttural, somehow gleeful.  Couldn't Lonnie hear that? + 'Hey, is somebody down there?' she heard .Lonnie ask. 'Is there oh! Hey! Jesus!' And * suddenly Lonnie screamed. She had never ,heard him scream before, and her legs seemedto turn . to waterbags at the sound. She looked wildly.for a break in the hedge, a path, and couldn'tsee * one anywhere. Images swirled before her /eyes the bikers who had looked like rats fora ' moment, the cat with the pink chewed "face, the boy with the claw-hand. , Lonnie! she tried to scream, but no words came out. + Now there were sounds of a struggle. The )moaning had stopped. But there were wet, sloshing + sounds from the other side of the hedge. (Then, suddenly, Lonnie came flying back through the / stiff dusty-green bristles as if he had been -given a tremendous push. The left arm of his suit-coat . was torn, and it was splattered with runnels-of black stuff that seemed to be smoking, as the pit in  the lawn had been smoking.  'Doris, run!'  'Lonnie, what ' " 'Run!' His face pale as cheese. , Doris looked around wildly for a cop. For .anyone. But Hillfield Avenue might have been a/ part of some great deserted city for all the +life or movement she saw. Then she glanced back at ' the hedge and saw something else was (moving behind there, something that was more than , black; it seemed ebony, the antithesis of light.  And it was sloshing. . A moment later, the short, stiff branches of'the hedge began to rustle. She stared, hypnotized. - She might have stood there forever (so she *told Vetter and Farnham) if Lonnie hadn't grabbed . her arm roughly and shrieked at her yes, +Lonnie, who never even raised his voice at the kids, ' had shrieked she might- have been -standing there yet. Standing there, or . . .  But they ran. + Where? Farnham had asked, but she didn't .know. Lonnie was totally undone, in a hysteriaof 0 panic and revulsion that was all she really,knew. He clamped his fingers over her wrist like a ' handcuff and they ran from the house ,looming over the hedge, and from the smoking hole in the / lawn. She knew those things for sure; all the,rest was only a chain of vague impressions. / At first it had been hard to run, and then it-got easier because they were going downhill. They - turned, and then turned again. Gray houses (with high stoops and drawn green shades seemed to + stare at them like blind pensioners. She *remembered Lonnie pulling off his jacket, which had + been splattered with that black goo, and .throwing it away. At last they came to a widerstreet. / 'Stop,' she panted. 'Stop, I can't keep up!' -Her free hand was pressed to her side, where a redhot % spike seemed to have been planted. , And he did stop. They had come out of the *residential area and were standing at the corner of - Crouch Lane and Morris Road. A sign on the -far side of Morris Road proclaimed that they were % but one mile from Slaughter Towen.  Town? Vetter suggested. + No, Doris Freeman said. Slaughter Towen, with an 'e.' + Raymond crushed out the cigarette he had .cadged from Farnham. 'I'm off,' he announced, and + then looked more closely at Farnham. 'My +poppet should take better care of himself. He's got big / dark circles under his eyes. Any hair on your)palms to go with it, my pet?' He laughed  uproariously. ( 'Ever hear of a Crouch Lane?' Farnham asked.  'Crouch Hill Road, you mean.'  'No, I mean Crouch Lane.'  'Never heard of it.'  'What about Norris Road?' * 'There's the one cuts off from the high street in Basing-stoke '  'No, here.'  'No not here, poppet.' , For some reason he couldn't understand *the woman was obviously buzzed Farnham + persisted. 'What about Slaughter Towen?'  'Towen, you said? Not Town?'  'Yes, that's right.' 2 'Never heard of it, but if I do, I believe I'll steer clear.'  'Why's that?' . 'Because in the old Druid lingo, a touen or /towen was a place of ritual sacrifice where they - abstracted your liver and lights, in other (words.' And zipping up his windcheater, Raymond  glided out. - Farnham looked after him uneasily. He made +that last up, he told himself. What a hard copper * like Sid Raymond knows about the Druids /you could carve on the head of a pin and still have  room for the Lord's Prayer. . Right. And even if he had picked up a piece /of information like that, it didn't change the fact  that the woman was . . . * 'Must be going crazy,' Lonnie said, and laughed shakily. , Doris had looked at her watch earlier and ,saw that somehow it had gotten to be quarterof - eight. The light had changed; from a clear -orange it had gone to a thick, murky red that glared off * the windows of the shops in Norris Road +and seemed to face a church steeple across the way in . clotted blood. The sun was an oblate sphere on the horizon. + 'What happened back there?' Doris asked. 'What was it, Lonnie?' ) 'Lost my jacket, too. Hell of a note.' / 'You didn't lose it, you took it off. It was covered with ' 0 'Don't be a fool!' he snapped at her. But his (eyes were not snappish; they were soft, shocked, & wandering. 'I lost it, that's all.' ' 'Lonnie, what happened when you went through the hedge?' / 'Nothing. Let's not talk about it. Where are we?'  'Lonnie ' 1 'I can't remember,' he said more softly. 'It's ,all a blank. We were there . . . we heard a sound . . ) . then I was running. That's all I can "remember.' And then he added in a frighteningly childish - voice: 'Why would I throw my jacket away? I/liked that one. It matched the pants.' He threw- back his head, gave voice to a frightening 0loonlike laugh, and Doris suddenly realized that( whatever he had seen beyond the hedge -had at least partially unhinged him. She was not sure the . same wouldn't have happened to her . . . if /she had seen. It didn't matter. They had to getout of - here. Get back to the hotel where the kids were. ( 'Let's get a cab. I want to go home.'  'But John ' he began. - 'Never mind John!' she cried. 'It's wrong, .everything here is wrong, and I want to get a cab  and go home!' * 'Yes, all right. Okay.' Lonnie passed a ,shaking hand across his forehead. 'I'm with you. The & only problem is, there aren't any.' + There was, in fact, no traffic at all on )Norris Road, which was wide and cobbled. Directly . down the center of it ran a set of old tram /tracks. On the other side, in front of a flower shop, an * ancient three-wheeled D-car was parked. )Farther down on their own side, a Yamaha motorbike / stood aslant on its kickstand. That was all. (They could hear cars, but the sound was faraway,  diffuse. + 'Maybe the street's closed for repairs,' ,Lonnie muttered, and then had done a strange thing . . . & strange, at least, for him, who was /ordinarily so easy and self-assured. He looked back over his / shoulder as if afraid they had been followed. 'We'll walk,' she said.  'Where?' * 'Anywhere. Away from Crouch End. We can .get a taxi if we get away from here.' She was 0 suddenly positive of that, if of nothing else.1 'All right.' Now he seemed perfectly willing to.entrust the leadership of the whole matter to  her. ' They began walking along Norris Road +toward the setting sun. The faraway hum of the traffic - remained constant, not seeming to diminish,-not seeming to grow any, either. It was like the + constant push of the wind. The desertion /was beginning to nibble at her nerves. She feltthey + were being watched, tried to dismiss the *feeling, and found that she couldn't. The sound of their  footfalls % (SIXTY LOST IN UNDERGROUND HORROR) + echoed back to them. The business at the ,hedge played on her mind more and more, and  finally she had to ask again.  'Lonnie, what was it?' / He answered simply: 'I don't remember. And I don't want to.' , They passed a market that was closed a *pile of coconuts like shrunken heads seen back-to - were piled against the window. They passed ,a launderette where white machines had been pulled - from the washed-out pink plasterboard walls(like square teeth from dying gums. They passed a ( soap-streaked show window with an old +SHOP TO LEASE sign in the front. Something moved * behind the soap streaks, and Doris saw, (peering out at her, the pink and tufted battle-scarred face  of a cat. The same gray torn. * She consulted her interior workings and *tickings and discovered that she was in a state of - slowly building terror. She felt as if her )intestines had begun to crawl sluggishly around and + around within her belly. Her mouth had a -sharp unpleasant taste, almost as if she had dosed with , a strong mouthwash. The cobbles of Norris %Road bled fresh blood in the sunset. , They were approaching an underpass. And it(was dark under there. I can't, her mind informed ) her matter-of-factly. I can't go under ,there, anything might be under there, don't ask me because  I can't. . Another part of her mind asked if she could .bear for them to retrace their steps, past theempty . shop with the travelling cat in it (how had ,it gotten from the restaurant to here? best not to ask, or - even wonder about it too deeply), past the /weirdly oral shambles of the launderette, past The + Market of the Shrunken Heads. She didn't think she could. ) They had drawn closer to the underpass -now. A strangely painted six-car train it was bonewhite / lunged over it with startling suddenness, .a crazy steel bride rushing to meet her groom.* The wheels kicked up bright spinners of -sparks. They both leaped back involuntarily, but it was - Lonnie who cried out. She looked at him and-saw that in the last hour he had turned into ) someone she had never seen before, had (never even suspected. His hair appeared somehow / grayer, and while she told herself firmly -as firmly as she could that it was just a trick of the * light, it was the look of his hair that *decided her. Lonnie was in no shape to go back. Therefore,  the underpass. . 'Come on,' she said, and took his hand. She .took it brusquely so he would not feel her own, trembling. 'Soonest begun, soonest done.' -She walked forward and he followed docilely. . They were almost out it was a very short 0underpass, she thought with ridiculous relief ' when the hand grasped her upper arm. - She didn't scream. Her lungs seemed to have/collapsed like small crumpled paper sacks. Her + mind wanted to leave her body behind and 2just . . . fly. Lonnie's hand parted from her own.He ' seemed unaware. He walked out on the -other side she saw him for just one moment+ silhouetted, tall and lanky, against the /bloody, furious colors of the sunset, and then he was gone. - The hand grasping her upper arm was hairy, like an ape's hand. - It turned her remorselessly toward a heavy (slumped shape leaning against the sooty concrete . wall. It hung there in the double shadow of .two concrete supporting pillars, and the shapewas . she could make out . . . the shape, and two luminous green eyes . 'Give us a fag, love,' a husky cockney voice#said, and she smelled raw meat and deep-fat-fried + chips and something swee and awful, like +the residue at the bottom of garbage cans. ( Those green eyes were cat's eyes. And .suddenly she became horribly sure that if the slumped ( shape stepped out of the shadows, she .would see the milky cataract of eye, the pink ridges off ' scar tissue, the tufts of gray hair. % She tore free, backed up, and felt +something skid through the air near her. A hand? Claws? A  spitting, hissing sound + Another train charged overhead. The roar 0was huge, brain rattling. Soot sifted down like black + snow. She fled in a blind panic, for the -second time that evening not knowing where.. or for how  long. + What brought her back to herself was the /realization that Lonnie was gone. She had half ( collapsed against a dirty brick wall, 0breathing in great tearing gasps. She was still in Morris Road 0 (atleast she believed herself to be, she told +the two constables; the wide way was still cobbled, . and the tram tracks still ran directly down -the center), but the deserted, decaying shops had given ( way to deserted, decaying warehouses. (DAWGLISH & SONS, read the soot-begrimed signboard on & one. A second had the name ALHAZRED ,emblazoned in ancient green across the faded brickwork. ( Below the name was a series of Arabic pothooks and dashes. . 'Lonnie!' she called. There was no echo, no *carrying in spite of the silence (no, not complete . silence, she told them; there was still the )sound of traffic, and it might have been closer, but not , much). The word that stood for her husband.seemed to drop from her mouth and fall like a stone , at her feet. The blood of sunset had been -replaced by the cool gray ashes of twilight. For the first / time it occurred to her that night might fall0upon her here in Crouch End if she was still + indeed in Crouch End and that thought brought fresh terror. , She told Vetter and Farnham that there had(been no reflection, no logical train of thought, on - her part during the unknown length of time .between their arrival at the call box and the final ) horror. She had simply reacted, like a .frightened animal. And now she was alone. She wanted ) Lonnie, she was aware of that much but 2little else. Certainly it did not occur to her to wonder . why this area, which must surely lie within *five miles of Cambridge Circus, should be utterly  deserted. - Doris Freeman set off walking, calling for -her husband. Her voice did not echo, but her , footfalls seemed to. The shadows began to ,fill Norris Road. Overhead, the sky was now purple. , It might have been some distorting effect ,of the twilight, or her own exhaustion, but the * warehouses seemed to lean hungrily over -the toad. The windows, caked with the dirt ofdecades + of centuries, perhaps seemed to be %staring at her. And the names on the signboards became / progressively stranger, even lunatic, at the -very least, unpronounceable. The vowels were in the ( wrong places, and consonants had been ,strung together in a way that would make it impossible + for any human tongue to get around them. *CTHULHU KRYON read one, with more of thoseArabic ' pothooks beneath it. YOGSOGGOTH read -another. R'YELEH said yet another. There was one that & she remembered particularly: NRTESN NYARLAHOTEP. + 'How could you remember such gibberish?' +Farnham asked her. Doris Freeman shook her head, 4 slowly and tiredly. 'I don't know. I really don't.,It's like a nightmare you want to forget as soon as + you wake up, but it won't fade away like ,most dreams do; it just stays and stays and stays.' ( Norris Road seemed to stretch on into -infinity, cobbled, split by tram tracks. And although she ) continued to walk she wouldn't have ,believed she could run, although later, she said, she did 0 she no longer called for Lonnie. She was in.the grip of a terrible, bone-rattling fear, a fear so , great she would not have believed a human +being could endure it without going mad or dropping 0 dead. It was impossible for her to articulate +her fear except in one way, and even this, she said, * only began to bridge the gulf which had .opened within her mind and heart. She said it was as if ' she were no longer on earth but on a ,different planet, a place so alien that the human mind could - not even begin to comprehend it. The angles.seemed different, she said. The colors seemed , different. The . . . but it was hopeless. + She could only walk under a gnarled-plum ,sky between the eldritch bulking buildings, and  hope that it would end.  As it did. + She became aware of two figures standing -on the sidewall ahead of her the children she and - Lonnie had seen earlier. The boy was using 0his claw-hand to stroke the little girl's ratty braids. + 'It's the American woman,' the boy said.  'She's lost,' said the girl.  'Lost her husband.'  'Lost her way.'  'Found the darker way.' ) 'The road that leads into the funnel.'  'Lost her hope.' * 'Found the Whistler from the Stars '  ' Eater of Dimensions '  ' the Blind Piper ' ( Faster and faster their words came, a -breathless litany, a flashing loom. Her head spun with - them. The buildings leaned. The stars were +out, but they were not her stars, the ones she had , wished on as a girl or courted under as a (young woman, these were crazed stars in lunatic , constellations, and her hands went to her (ears and her hands did not shut out the sounds and  finally she screamed at them: + 'Where's my husband? Where's Lonnie? Whathave you done to him?' - There was silence. And then the girl said: 'He's gone beneath.' , The boy: 'Gone to the Goat with a ThousandYoung.' 3 The girl smiled a malicious smile full of evil/innocence. 'He couldn't well not go, could he? ( The mark was on him. You'll go, too.' ( 'Lonnie! What have you done with ' + The boy raised his hand and chanted in a )high fluting language that she could not understand , but the sound of the words drove Doris Freeman nearly mad with fear. , 'The street began to move then,' she told *Vetter and Farnham. 'The cobbles began to undulate . like a carpet. They rose and fell, rose and /fell. The tram tracks came loose and flew into the air / I remember that, I remember the starlight (shining on them and then the cobbles themselves , began to come loose, one by one at first, -and then in bunches. They just flew off into the + darkness. There was a tearing sound when 1they came loose. A grinding, tearing sound . . . the ' way an earthquake must sound. And 'something started to come through ' ' 'What?' Vetter asked. He was hunched -forward, his eyes boring into her. 'What did you see?  What was it?' 2 'Tentacles,' she said, slowly and haltingly. 'I .think it was tentacles. But they were as thickas + old banyan trees, as if each of them was -made up of a thousand smaller ones . . . and there were ( pink things like suckers . . . except .sometimes they looked like faces . . . one of them looked like . Lonnie's face . . . and all of them were in -agony. Below them, in the darkness under the street ' in the darkness beneath there was ,something else. Something like eyes . . . ' , At that point she had broken down, unable .to go on for some time, and as it turned out, there - was really no more to tell. The next thing ,she remembered with any clarity was coweringin the , doorway of a closed newsagent's shop. She -might be there yet, she had told them, except that she , had seen cars passing back and forth just %up ahead, and the reassuring glow of arc-sodium . streetlights. Two people had passed in front+of her, and Doris had cringed farther back into the / shadows, afraid of the two evil children. But-these were not children, she saw; they were a- teenage boy and girl walking hand in hand. +The boy was saying something about the new Martin  Scorsese film. + She'd come out onto the sidewalk warily, 'ready to dart back into the convenient bolthole of the , newsagent's doorway at a moment's notice, ,but there was no need. Fifty yards up was a - moderately busy intersection, with cars and0lorries standing at a stop-and-go light. Across the ( way was a jeweler's shop with a large *lighted clock in the show window. A steel accordion grille - had been drawn across, but she could still .make out the time. It was five minutes of ten.- She had walked up to the intersection then,%and despite the streetlights and the comforting + rumble of traffic, she had kept shooting .terrified glances back over her shoulder. She ached all , over. She was limping on one broken heel. -She had pulled muscles in her belly and both legs 0 her right leg was particularly bad, as if she had strained something in it. + At the intersection she saw that somehow ,she had come around to Hillfield Avenue and ' Tottenham Road. Under a streetlamp a +woman of about sixty with her graying hair escaping - from the rag it was done up in was talking *to a man of about the same age. They both looked at - Doris as if she were some sort of dreadful apparition. / 'Police,' Doris Freeman croaked. 'Where's the3police station? I'm an American citizen . . . I've , lost my husband . . . I need the police.' , 'What's happened, then, lovey?' the woman /asked, not unkindly. 'You look like you've been  through the wringer, you do.' ' 'Car accident?' her companion asked. 5 'No. Not . . . not . . . Please, is there a police station near here?' - 'Right up Tottenham Road,' the man said. He+took a package of Players from his pocket. 'Like ) a cig? You look like you c'd use one.' & 'Thank you,' she said, and took the .cigarette although she I had quit nearly four years ago. The 0 elderly man had to follow the jittering tip of.it with his lighted match to get it going for her. ( He glanced at the woman with her hair 5bound up in the rag. 'I'll just take a little stroll up with + her, Evvie. Make sure she gets there all right.' 2 'I'll come along as well, then, won't I?' Evvie /said, and put an arm around Doris's shoulders. - 'Now what is it, lovey? Did someone try to mug you?' = 'No,' Doris said. 'It . . . I . . . I . . . the street . . .. there was a cat with only one eye . . . the street / opened up . . . I saw it . . . and they said 0something about a Blind Piper . . . I've got to find  Lonnie!' & She was aware that she was speaking -incoherencies, but she seemed helpless to be any clearer. ' And at any rate, she told Vetter and .Farnham, she hadn't been all that incoherent, because the ) man and woman had drawn away from her, ,as if, when Evvie asked what the matter was,Doris & had told her it was bubonic plague. + The man said something then 'Happened again,' Doris thought it was. / The woman pointed. 'Station's right up there.0Globes hanging in front. You'll see it.' Moving ) very quickly, the two of them began to +walk away. The woman glanced back over her shoulder - once; Doris Freeman saw her wide, gleaming +eyes. Doris took two steps after them, for what * reason she did not know. 'Don't ye come 1near!' Evvie called shrilly, and forked the sign of the . evil eye at her. She simultaneously cringed +against the man, who put an arm about her. 'Don't * you come near, if you've been to Crouch End Towen!' % And with that, the two of them had disappeared into the night. & Now PC Farnham stood leaning in the (doorway between the common room and the main filing - room although the back files Vetter had (spoken of were certainly not kept here. Farnham had * made himself a fresh cup of tea and was .smoking the last cigarette in his pack the woman had " also helped herself to several. ' She'd gone back to her hotel, in the -company of the nurse Vetter had called the nurse would ) be staying with her tonight, and would &make a judgement in the morning as to whether the * woman would need to go in hospital. The ,children would make that difficult, Farnham supposed, + and the woman's being an American almost %guaranteed a first-class cock-up. He wondered what . she was going to tell the kiddies when they +woke up tomorrow, assuming she was capable of * telling them anything. Would she gather *them round and tell them that the big bad monster of  Crouch End Town  (Towen) ' had eaten up Daddy like an ogre in a fairy-story? + Farnham grimaced and put down his teacup.1It wasn't his problem. For good or for ill, Mrs. ( Freeman had become sandwiched between *the British constabulary and the American Embassy , in the great waltz of governments. It was )none of his affair; he was only a PC who wanted to - forget the whole thing. And he intended to *let Vetter write the report. Vetter could afford to put + his name to such a bouquet of lunacy; he -was an old man, used up. He would still be a PC on the . night shift when he got his gold watch, his /pension, and his council flat. Farnham, on the other ) hand, had ambitions of making sergeant +soon, and that meant he had to watch every little posey. , And speaking of Vetter, where was he? He'd/been taking the night air for quite awhile now.& Farnham crossed the common room and #went out. He stood between the two lighted-globes + and stared across Tottenham Road. Vetter -was nowhere in sight. It was past 3:00 a.m., and - silence lay thick and even, like a shroud. -What was that line from Wordsworth? 'All thatgreat ) heart lying still,' or something like. * He went down the steps and stood on the .sidewalk, feeling a trickle of unease now. It was * silly, of course, and he was angry with .himself for allowing the woman's mad story to gain even . this much of a foothold in his head. Perhaps.he deserved to be afraid of a hard copper likeSid  Raymond. * Farnham walked slowly up to the corner, *thinking he would meet Vetter coming back from his / night stroll. But he would go no farther; if *the station was left empty even for a few moments, ' there would be hell to pay if it was -discovered. He reached the corner and looked around. It was + funny, but all the arc-sodiums seemed to )have gone out up here. The entire street looked different - without them. Would it have to be reported,#he wondered? And where was Vetter? * He would walk just a little farther, he .decided, and see what I was what. But not far. It simply - wouldn't do to leave the station unattended for long.  Just a little way. - Vetter came in less than five minutes after*Farnham had left. Farnham had gone in the opposite , direction, and if Vetter had come along a -minute earlier, he would have seen the young constable , standing indecisively at the corner for a *moment before turning it and disappearing forever.  'Farnham?' , No answer but the buzz of the clock on thewall. - 'Farnham?' he called again, and then wiped %his mouth with the palm of his hand. , Lonnie Freeman was never found. Eventually+his wife (who had begun to gray around the ) temples) flew back to America with her )children. They went on Concorde. A month later she - attempted suicide. She spent ninety days in(a rest home and came out much improved. * Sometimes when she cannot sleep this *occurs most frequently on nights when the sun goes * down in a ball of red and orange she -creeps into her closet, knee-walks under the hanging - dresses all the way to the back, and there +she writes Beware the Goat with a Thousand Young / over and over with a soft pencil. It seems toease her somehow to do this. $ PC Robert Farnham left a wife and .two-year-old twin girls. Sheila Farnham wrote a series of * angry letters to her MP, insisting that ,something was going on, something was being covered up, , that her Bob had been enticed into taking "some dangerous sort of undercover assignment. He # would have done anything to make .sergeant, Mrs. Farnham repeatedly told the MP. Eventually - that worthy stopped answering her letters, )and at about the same time Doris Freeman was coming ( out of the rest home, her hair almost ,entirely white now, Mrs. Farnham moved back to Essex, * where her parents lived. Eventually she /married a man in a safer line of work Frank Hobbs is * a bumper inspector on the Ford assembly -line. It had been necessary to get a divorce from her , Bob on grounds of desertion, but that was easily managed. * Vetter took early retirement about four -months after Doris Freeman had stumbled into the + station in Tottenham Lane. He did indeed move into council housing, a two-above-the-shops in . Frimley. Six months later he was found dead .of a heart attack, a can of Harp Lager in his hand. - And in Crouch End, which is really a quiet .suburb of London, strange things still happen from + time to time, and people have been known (to lose their way. Some of them lose it forever.   -The House on Maple Street-  & Although she was only five, and the .youngest of the Bradbury children, Melissa had very sharp 0 eyes and it wasn't really surprising that she ,was the first to discover something strange had ( happened to the house on Maple Street +while the Bradbury family was summering in England. . She ran and found her older brother, Brian, -and told him something was wrong upstairs, onthe / third floor. She said she would show him, but.not until he swore not to tell anyone what shehad + found. Brian swore, knowing it was their *stepfather Lissa was afraid of; Daddy Lew didn't like it , when any of the Bradbury children 'got up ,to foolishness' (that was how he always put it), and he ) had decided that Melissa was the prime -offender in that area. Lissa, who was stupid no more than $ she was blind, was aware of Lew's ,prejudices, and had become wary of them. In fact, all of the + Bradbury children had become rather wary "of their mother's second husband. , It would probably turn out to be nothing, +anyway, but Brian was delighted to be back home . and willing enough to humor his baby sister 0(Brian was two full years her senior), at least for . awhile; he followed her down the third-floor'hallway without so much as a murmur of argument, - and he only pulled her braids he called -these braid-pulls 'emergency stops' once. - They had to tiptoe past Lew's study, which (was the only finished-off room up here, because * Lew was inside, unpacking his notebooks ,and papers and muttering in an ill-tempered way. * Brian's thoughts had actually turned to -what might be on TV tonight he was looking, forward to a pig-out on good old American +cable after three months of BBC and ITV when $ they reached the end of the hall. + What he saw beyond the tip of his little /sister's pointing finger drove all thoughts of television  from Brian Bradbury's mind. - 'Now swear again!' Lissa whispered. 'Never -tell anyone, Daddy Lew or anyone, or hope to  die!' 1 'Hope to die,' Brian agreed, still staring, and*it was a half-hour before he told his big sister, ) Laurie, who was unpacking in her room. -Laurie was possessive of her room as only an elevenyear- / old girl can be, and she gave Brian the very -dickens for coming in without knocking, even % though she was completely dressed. - 'Sorry,' Brian said, 'but I gotta show you something. It's very weird.' . 'Where?' She went on putting clothes in her /drawers as if she didn't care, as if there was * nothing any dopey little seven-year-old /could tell her which would be of the slightest interest to ) her, but when it came to eyes, Brian's 0weren't exactly dull. He could tell when Laurie was * interested, and she was interested now. / 'Upstairs. Third floor. End of the hall past Daddy Lew's study.' / Laurie's nose wrinkled as it always did when .Brian or Lissa called him that. She and Trent ) remembered their real father, and they 1didn't like his replacement at all. They made it their , business to call him Just Plain Lew. That 1Lewis Evans clearly did not like this found it. vaguely impertinent, in fact simply added,to Laurie and Trent's unspoken but powerful * conviction that it was the right way to /address the man their mother (uck!) slept with these days. . 'I don't want to go up there,' Laurie said. -'He's been in a pissy mood ever since we got back. . Trent says he'll stay that way until school +starts and he can settle back into his rut again.' / 'His door's shut. We can be quiet. Lissa n me(went up and he didn't even know we were there.'  'Lissa and I.' 0 'Yeah. Us. Anyway, it's safe. The door's shut .and he's talking to himself like he does when he's  really into something.' - 'I hate it when he does that,' Laurie said )darkly. 'Our real father never talked to himself, and he * didn't use to lock himself in a room by himself, either.' 3 'Well, I don't think he's locked in,' Brian said,/'but if you're really worried about him coming - out, take an empty suitcase. We'll pretend -like we're putting it in the closet where we keep them,  if he comes out.' ' 'What is this amazing thing?' Laurie )demanded, putting her fists on her hips. 2 'I'll show you,' Brian said earnestly, 'but you +have to swear on Mom's name and hope to dieif / you tell anyone.' He paused, thinking, for a -moment, and then added: 'You specially can't tell " Lissa, because I swore to her.' 0 Laurie's ears were finally all the way up. It .was probably a big nothing, but she was tired of . putting clothes away. It was really amazing +how much junk a person could accumulate in just ! three months. 'Okay, I swear.' + They took along two empty suitcases, one (for each of them, but their precautions proved + unnecessary; their stepfather never came 0out of his study. It was probably just as well; he had + worked up a grand head of steam, from the'sound. The two children could hear him stamping % about, muttering, opening drawers, *slamming them shut again. A familiar odor seeped out from . under the door to Laurie it smelled like ,smouldering athletic socks. Lew was smoking his  pipe. - She stuck her tongue out, crossed her eyes,-and twiddled her fingers in her ears as they tiptoed  by. , But a moment later, when she looked at the.place Lissa had pointed out to Brian and which+ Brian now pointed out to her, she forgot .Lew just as completely as Brian had forgotten about all , the wonderful things he could watch on TV that night. , 'What is it?' she whispered to Brian. 'My gosh, what does it mean?' 0 'I dunno,' Brian said, 'but just remember, youswore on Mom's name, Laurie.'  'Yeah, yeah, but ' 3 'Say it again!' Brian didn't like the look in her-eyes. It was a telling look, and he felt she really ! needed a little reinforcement. ( 'Yeah, yeah, on Mom's name,' she said -perfunctorily, 'but, Brian, jeezly crow ' - 'And hope to die, don't forget that part.' ' 'Oh, Brian, you are such a cheeser!' * 'Never mind, just say you hope to die!' 0 'Hope to die, hope to die, okay?' Laurie said.-'Why do you have to be such a cheeser, Bri?' - 'Dunno,' he said, smirking in that way she )absolutely hated, 'just lucky, I guess.' + She could have strangled him . . . but a .promise was a promise, especially one given onthe ' name of your one and only mother, so -Laurie held on for over one full hour before getting Trent , and showing him. She made him swear, too, -and her confidence that Trent would keep his / promise not to tell was perfectly justified. -He was almost fourteen, and as the oldest, hehad no 1 one to tell . . . except a grownup. Since their-mother had taken to her bed with a migraine, that - left only Lew, and that was the same as no one at all. * The two oldest Bradbury children hadn't &needed to bring up empty suitcases as camouflage . this time; their stepfather was downstairs, ,watching some British fellow lecture on the Normans * and Saxons (the Normans and Saxons were ,Lew's specialty at the college) on the VCR, and - enjoying his favorite afternoon snack a &glass of milk and a ketchup sandwich. . Trent stood at the end of the hall, looking )at what the other children had looked at before him. " He stood there for a long time. 1 'What is it, Trent?'' Laurie finally asked. It +never crossed her mind that Trent wouldn't know. ) Trent knew everything. So she watched, -almost incredulously, as he slowly shook his head. , 'I don't know,' he said, peering into the .crack. 'Some kind of metal, I think. Wish I'd brought a - flashlight.' He reached into the crack and .tapped. Laurie felt a vague sense of disquiet at this, and , was relieved when Trent pulled his finger back. 'Yeah, it's metal.' 1 'Should it be in there?' Laurie asked. 'I mean,was it? Before?' * 'No,' Trent said. 'I remember when they -replastered. That was just after Mom married him. * There wasn't anything in there then but laths.'  'What are they?' - 'Narrow boards,' he said. 'They go between 0the plaster and the outside wall of the house.' Trent - reached into the crack in the wall and once*again touched the metal which showed dull white in - there. The crack was about four inches long-and half an inch across at its widest point. 'They put ) in insulation, too,' he said, frowning -thoughtfully and then shoving his hands into the back & pockets of his wash-faded jeans. 'I /remember. Pink, billowy stuff that looked like cotton candy.' + 'Where is it, then? I don't see any pink stuff.' 0 'Me either,' Trent said. 'But they did put it /in. I remember.' His eyes traced the four-inch length + of the crack. 'That metal in the wall is ,something new. I wonder how much of it there is, and how / far it goes. Is it just up here on the third floor, or . . . ' + 'Or what?' Laurie looked at him with big )round eyes. She had begun to be a little frightened. 0 'Or is it all over the house,' Trent finished thoughtfully. ) After school the next afternoon, Trent 0called a meeting of all four Bradbury children. It got off to % a somewhat bumpy start, with Lissa +accusing Brian of breaking what she called 'your solemn $ swear'' and Brian, who was deeply .embarrassed, accusing Laurie of putting their mother's soul in . dire jeopardy by telling Trent. Although he -wasn't very clear on exactly what a soul was (the - Bradburys were Unitarians), he seemed quite+sure that Laurie had condemned Mother's to hell. 1 'Well,' Laurie said, 'you'll have to take some .of the blame, Brian. I mean, you were the one ) who brought Mother into it. You should ,have had me swear on Lew's name. He could go to hell.' " Lissa, who was young enough and *kind-hearted enough not to wish anyone in hell, was so / distressed by this line of discourse that shebegan to cry. - 'Hush, all of you,' Trent said, and hugged )Lissa until she had regained most of her composure. . 'What's done is done, and I happen to think !it all worked out for the best.' / 'You do?' Brian asked. If Trent said a thing -was good, Brian would have died defending it,that , went without saying, but Laurie had sworn on Mom's name. $ 'Something this weird needs to be ,investigated, and if we waste a lot of time arguing over who - was right or wrong to break their promise, we'll never get it done.' - Trent glanced pointedly up at the clock on .the wall of his room, where they had gathered.It + was twenty after three. He really didn't ,have to say any more. Their mother had been up this * morning to get Lew his breakfast two )three-minute eggs with whole-wheat toast and & marmalade was one of his many daily +requirements but afterward she had gone back to bed, + and there she had remained. She suffered (from dreadful headaches, migraines that sometimes , spent two or even three days snarling and &clawing at her defenseless (and often bewildered) brain & before decamping for a month or so. * She would not be apt to see them on the -third floor and wonder what they were up to, but - 'Daddy Lew' was a different kettle of fish .altogether. With his study just down the hall from the - strange crack, they could count on avoiding0his notice and his curiosity only if they - conducted their investigations while he was(away, and that was what Trent's pointed glance at  the clock had meant. / The family had returned to the States a full +ten days before Lew was scheduled to begin * teaching classes again, but he could no +more stay away from the University once he was back 0 within ten miles of it than a fish could live .out of water. He had left shortly after noon, with a * briefcase crammed full of papers he had )collected at various spots of historical interest in + England. He said he was going up to file ,these papers away. Trent thought that meant he'd cram * them into one of his desk drawers, then +lock his office and go down to the History Department's - Faculty Lounge. There he would drink coffee0and gossip with his buddies . . . except, Trent had & discovered, when you were a college ,teacher, people thought you were dumb if you had buddies. * You were supposed to say they were your )colleagues. So he was away, and that was good, but he ( might be back at any time between now ,and five, and that was bad. Still, they had some time, and , Trent was determined they weren't going to,spend it squabbling about who swore what to who. - 'Listen to me, you guys,' he said, and was )gratified to see that they actually were listening, ' their differences and recriminations "forgotten in the excitement of an investigation. They had + also been caught by Trent's inability to /explain what Lissa had found. All three of them shared, at 0 least to some extent, Brian's simple faith in /Trent if Trent was puzzled by something, if Trent ) thought that something was strange and ,just possibly amazing, they all thought so. . Laurie spoke for all of them when she said: 1'Just tell us what to do, Trent we'll do it.' 0 'Okay,' Trent said. 'We'll need some things.' +He took a deep breath and began explaining what  they were. * Once they were convened around the crack-at the end of the third-floor hallway, Trent held Lissa , up so she could shine the beam of a small /flashlight it was the one their mother used to + inspect their ears, eyes, and noses when -they weren't feeling well  into the crack. They could all + see the metal; it wasn't shiny enough to +throw back a clear reflection of the beam, but it shone , silkily just the same. Steel, was Trent's *opinion steel, or some sort of. alloy. ) 'What's an alloy, Trent?' Brian asked. ' Trent shook his head. He didn't know .exactly. He turned to Laurie and asked her to give him  the drill. , Brian and Lissa exchanged an uneasy glance/as Laurie passed it over. It had come from the * basement workshop, and the basement was ,the one remaining place in the house, which was their , real father's. Daddy Lew hadn't been down )there a dozen times since he had married Catherine . Bradbury. The smaller children knew that as .well as Trent and Laurie. They weren't afraid * Daddy Lew would notice someone had been .using the drill; it was the holes in the wall outside - his study they were worried about. Neither .one of them said this out loud, but Trent readit on  their troubled faces. / 'Look,' Trent said, holding the drill out so /they could get a good look. 'This is what they call a 1 needle-point drill bit. See how tiny it is? And+since we're only going to drill behind the pictures, I ! don't think we have to worry.' ) There were about a dozen framed prints ,along the third-floor hallway, half of them beyond the - study door, on the way to the closet at the-end where the suitcases were stored. Most of these + were very old (and mostly uninteresting) 0views of Titusville, where the Bradburys lived. + 'He doesn't even look at them, let alone behind them,' Laurie agreed. . Brian touched the tip of the drill with one -finger, and then nodded. Lissa watched, then copied - both the touch and the nod. If Laurie said .something was okay, it probably was; if Trent said so, - it almost certainly was; if they both said so, there could be no question. + Laurie took down the picture, which hung .closest to the small crack in the plaster and gave it / to Brian. Trent drilled. They stood watching ,him in a tight little circle of three, like infielders . encouraging their pitcher at a particularly tense moment of the game. / The drill bit went easily into the wall, and *the hole it made was every bit as tiny as promised. , The darker square of wallpaper, which had -been revealed when Laurie took the print off its hook, - was also encouraging. It suggested that no &one had bothered taking the dark line engraving of the / Titusville Public Library off its hook for a very long time. - After a dozen turns of the drill's handle, ,Trent stopped and reversed, pulling the bit free. ! 'Why'd you quit?' Brian asked.  'Hit something hard.'  'More metal?'' Lissa asked. 0 'I think so. Sure wasn't wood. Let's see.' He ,shone the light in and cocked his head this way - and that before shaking it decisively. 'My $head's too big. Let's boost Lissa.' + Laurie and Trent lifted her up and Brian .handed her the Pen Lite. Lissa squinted for a time, / then said, 'Just like in the crack I found.' & 'Okay,' Trent said. 'Next picture.' - The drill hit metal behind the second, and 1the third, as well. Behind the fourth by this time - they were quite close to the door of Lew's -study it went all the way in before Trent pulled it * out. This time when she was boosted up, *Lissa told them she saw 'the pink stuff.' 0 'Yeah, the insulation I told you about,' Trent1said to Laurie. 'Let's try the other side of the hall.' / They had to drill behind four pictures on the-east side of the corridor before they struck first + wood-lath and then insulation behind the .plaster . . . and as they were re-hanging the last picture, , they heard the out-of-tune snarl of Lew's +elderly Porsche turning into the driveway. + Brian, who had been in charge of hanging /this picture he could just reach the hook ontiptoe ( dropped it. Laurie reached out and +grabbed it by the frame on the way down. A moment . later she found herself shaking so badly she)had to hand the picture to Trent, or she would have  dropped it herself. . 'You hang it,' she said, turning a stricken )face to her older brother. 'I would have dropped it if . I'd been thinking about what I was doing. I really would.' ' Trent hung the picture, which showed ,horse-drawn carriages clopping through City Park, and ( saw it was hanging slightly askew. He +reached out to adjust it, then pulled back just before his - fingers touched the frame. His sisters and ,his brother thought he was something like a god; Trent * himself was smart enough to know he was .only a kid. But even a kid assuming he was a kid - with half a brain knew that when things /like this started to go bad, you ought to leavethem , alone. If he messed with it anymore, this 0picture would fall for sure, spraying the floor with + broken glass, and somehow Trent knew it. - 'Go!' he whispered. 'Downstairs! TV room!' * The back door slammed downstairs as Lew came in. , 'But it's not straight!' Lissa protested. 'Trent, it's not ' , 'Never mind!' Laurie said. 'Do what Trent says!' ) Trent and Laurie looked at each other, .wide-eyed. If Lew went into the kitchen to fix himself a 3 bite to tide himself over until supper, all still0might be well. If he didn't, he would meet Lissaand , Brian on the stairs. One look at them and *he'd know something was going on. The two younger - Bradbury children were old enough to close #their mouths, but not their faces.  Brian and Lissa went fast. - Trent and Laurie came behind, more slowly, (listening. There was a moment of almost + unbearable suspense when the only sounds /were the little kids' footsteps on the stairs, and then * Lew bawled up at them from the kitchen: ('KEEP IT DOWN, CAN'T YOU? YOUR MOTHER'S  TAKING A NAP!' * And if that doesn't wake her up, Laurie thought, nothing will. - Late that night, as Trent was drowsing off .to sleep, Laurie opened the door of his room, came in, & and sat down beside him on the bed. 0 'You don't like him, but that's not all,' she said. - 'Who-wha?' Trent asked, peeling a cautious eyelid. + 'Lew,' she said quietly. 'You know who I mean, Trent.' 2 'Yeah,' he said, giving up. 'And you're right. Idon't like him.' + 'You're scared of him, too, aren't you?' / After a long, long moment, Trent said: 'Yeah. A little.'  'Just a little?' 2 'Maybe a little more than a little,' Trent said.*He winked at her, hoping for a smile, but Laurie - only looked at him, and Trent gave up. She *wasn't going to be diverted, at least not tonight. ( 'Why? Do you think he might hurt us?' ( Lew shouted at them a lot, but he had (never put his hands on them. No, Laurie suddenly * remembered, that wasn't quite true. One *time when Brian had walked into his study without , knocking, Lew had given him a spanking. A -hard one. Brian had tried not to cry, but in the end + he had. And Mom had cried, too, although /she hadn't tried to stop the spanking. But she must ' have said something to him later on, -because Laurie had heard Lew shouting at her.+ Still, it had been a spanking, not child *abuse, and Brian could be an insufferable cheese-dog  when he put his mind to it. * Had he been putting his mind to it that 'night? Laurie wondered now. Or had Lew spanked her + brother and made him cry over something, ,which had only been an honest, little kid's mistake? ( She didn't know, and had a sudden and ,unwelcome insight, the sort of thought that made her ) think Peter Pan had had the right idea +about never wanting to grow up: she wasn't sure she * wanted to know. One thing she did know: )who the real cheese-dog around here was. ) She realized Trent hadn't answered her -question, and gave him a poke. 'Cat got your tongue?' 1 'Just thinking,' he said. 'It's a toughie, you know?' % 'Yes,' she said soberly. 'I know.'  This time she let him think. . 'Nah,' he said at last, and laced his hands -together behind his head. 'I don't think so, Sprat.' She + hated to be called that, but tonight she ,decided to let it go. She couldn't remember Trent ever 0 speaking to her this carefully and seriously. 4'I don't think he would . . . but I think he could.'He , got up on one elbow and looked at her even/more seriously. 'But I think he's hurting Mom, and I - think it gets a little worse for her every day.' * 'She's sorry, isn't she?' Laurie asked. /Suddenly she felt like crying. Why were adults so stupid - sometimes about stuff kids could see right *away? It made you want to kick them. 'She never / wanted to go to England in the first place . ). . and there's the way he shouts at her sometimes . . . ' + 'Don't forget the headaches,' Trent said 2flatly. 'The ones he says she talks herself into. Yeah,  she's sorry, all right.' ) 'Would she ever . . . you know . . . '  'Divorce him?' 0 'Yes,' Laurie said, relieved. She wasn't sure -she could have brought the word out herself, and ( had she realized how much she was her ,mother's daughter in that regard, she could have  answered her own question.  'No,' Trent said. 'Not Mom.' + 'Then there's nothing we can do,' Laurie sighed. + Trent said in a voice so soft she almost couldn't hear it: 'Oh yeah?' ( During the next week and a half, they /drilled other small holes around the house when there was * no one around to see them: holes behind +posters in their various rooms, behind the refrigerator in + the pantry (Brian was able to squeeze in ,and just had room to use the drill), in the downstairs ' closets. Trent even drilled one in a .dining-room wall, high up in one corner where the shadows + never quite left. He stood on top of the (stepladder while Laurie held it steady. * There was no metal anywhere. Just lath. * The children forgot for a little while. , One day about a month later, after Lew had,gone back to teaching full-time, Brian came to Trent - and told him there was another crack in the.plaster on the third floor, and that he could see more + metal behind it. Trent and Lissa came at *once. Laurie was still in school, at band practice. / As on the occasion of the first crack, their ,mother was lying down with a headache. Lew's* temper had improved once he was back at -school (as Trent and Laurie had been sure it would), + but he'd had a crackerjack argument with -their mother the night before, about a party he wanted , to have for fellow faculty members in the .History Department. If there was anything the former ) Mrs. Bradbury hated and feared, it was ,playing hostess at faculty parties. Lew had insisted on . this one, however, and she had finally given-in. Now she was lying in the shadowy bedroom with - a damp towel over her eyes and a bottle of *Fiorinal on the night-table while Lew was presumably , passing around invitations in the Faculty *Lounge and clapping his colleagues on the back. , The new crack was on the west side of the (hallway, between the study door and the stairwell. + 'You sure you saw metal in there?' Trent $asked. 'We checked this side, Bri.' 1 'Look for yourself,' Brian said, and Trent did..There was no need of a flashlight; this crack was , wider, and there was no question about themetal at the bottom of it. . After a long look, Trent told them he had to&go to the hardware store, right away.  'Why?' Lissa asked. / 'I want to get some plaster. I don't want him.to see that crack.' He hesitated, then added: 'And I - especially don't want him to see the metal inside it.' + Lissa frowned at him. 'Why not, Trent?'' / But Trent didn't exactly know. At least, not yet. - They started drilling again, and this time -they found metal behind all the walls on the third floor, . including Lew's study. Trent snuck in there .one afternoon with the drill while Lew was at the , college and their mother was out shopping for the upcoming faculty party. , The former Mrs. Bradbury looked very pale 'and drawn these days even Lissa had noticed . but when any of the children asked her if.she was okay, she always flashed a troubling, overbright + smile and told them never better, in the .pink, rolling in clover. Laurie, who could be blunt, + told her she looked too thin. Oh no, her -mother responded, Lew says I was turning intoa blob . over in England all those rich teas. She /was just trying to get back into fighting trim, that was  all. * Laurie knew better, but not even Laurie .was blunt enough to call her mother a liar to her face. . If all four of them had come to her at once . ganged up on her, so to speak they mighthave ) gotten a different story. But not even Trent thought of doing that. + One of Lew's advanced degrees was hanging/on the wall over his desk in a frame. While the- other children clustered outside the door, .nearly vomiting with terror, Trent removed theframed - degree from its hook, laid it on the desk, +and drilled a pinhole in the center of the square where it 0 had been. Two inches in, the drill hit metal. . Trent carefully rehung the degree making -very sure it wasn't crooked and came back  out. . Lissa burst into tears of relief, and Brian ,quickly joined her; he looked disgusted but seemed ( unable to help himself. Laurie had to *struggle very hard against her own tears. , They drilled holes at intervals along the +stairs to the second floor and found metal behind these + walls, too. It continued roughly halfway -down the second-floor hallway as it proceededtoward * the front of the house. There was metal -behind the walls of Brian's room, but behind only one  wall of Laurie's. / 'It hasn't finished growing in here,' Laurie said darkly. ) Trent looked at her, surprised. 'Huh?' & Before she could reply, Brian had a brainstorm. 0 'Try the floor, Trent!' he said. 'See if it's there, too.' / Trent thought it over, shrugged, and drilled 0into the floor of Laurie's room. The drill went in - all the way with no resistance, but when he+peeled back the rug at the foot of his own bed and . tried there, he soon encountered solid steel . . . or solid whatever-it-was. - Then, at Lissa's insistence, he stood on a ,stool and drilled up into the ceiling, eyes slitted , against the plaster-dust that sifted down into his face. . 'Boink,' he said after a few moments. 'More metal. Let's quit for the day.' & Laurie was the only one who saw how deeply troubled Trent looked. , That night after lights-out, it was Trent -who came to Laurie's room, and Laurie didn't even . pretend to be sleepy. The truth was, neither,of them had been sleeping very well for the last  couple of weeks. ( 'What did you mean?' Trent whispered, sitting down beside her. , 'About what?' Laurie asked, getting up on one elbow. / 'You said it hadn't finished growing in your room. What did you mean?' ' 'Come on, Trent you're not dumb.' , 'No, I'm not,' he agreed without conceit. /'Maybe I just want to hear you say it, Sprat.' ) 'If you call me that, you never will.' 1 'Okay. Laurie, Laurie, Laurie. You satisfied?' * 'Yes. That stuff's growing all over the 0house.' She paused. 'No, that's not right. It's growing  under the house.'  'That's not right, either.' / Laurie thought about it, then sighed. 'Okay,'3she said. 'It's growing in the house. It's stealing. the house. Is that good enough, Mr. Smarty?'0 'Stealing the house . . . ' Trent sat quietly -beside her on the bed, looking at her poster of * Chrissie Hynde and seeming to taste the +phrase she had used. At last he nodded and flashed the 0 smile she loved. 'Yes that's good enough.' 3 'Whatever you call it, it acts like it's alive.' * Trent nodded. He had already thought of /this. He had no idea how metal could be alive, but he * was damned if he saw any way around her &conclusion, at least for the present.  'But that isn't the worst.'  'What is?' / 'It's sneaking.' Her eyes, fixed solemnly on 1his, were big and frightened. 'That's the part I 1 really don't like. I don't know what started it/or what it means, and I don't really care. But it's  sneaking.' , She ran her fingers into her heavy blonde -hair and pushed it back from her temples. It was a - fretful, unconscious gesture that reminded *Trent achingly of his dad, whose hair had been that  exact same shade. , 'I feel like something's going to happen, -Trent, only I don't know what, and it's like being in a . nightmare you can't get all the way out of. *Does it feel like that to you sometimes?' 0 'A little, yeah. But I know something's going $to happen. I might even know what.' . She bolted to a sitting position and grabbed)his hands. 'You know? What? What is it?' 0 'I can't be sure,' Trent said, getting up. 'I .think I know, but I'm not ready to say what I think ( yet. I have to do some more looking.' 0 'If we drill many more holes, the house is aptto fall down!' + 'I didn't say drilling, I said looking.'  'Looking for what?' - 'For something that isn't here yet that ,hasn't grown yet. But when it does, I don't think it  will be able to hide.'  'Tell me, Trent!' 0 'Not yet,' he said, and planted a small, quick0kiss on her cheek. 'Besides curiosity killed the  Sprat.' . 'I hate you!' she cried in a low voice, and *flopped back down with the sheet over her head. But ) she felt better for having talked with +Trent, and slept better than she had for a week. * Trent found what he was looking for two -days before the big party. As the oldest, he perhaps * should have noticed that his mother had -begun to look alarmingly unhealthy, her skin drawn , shiny over her cheekbones, her complexion 'so pale it had taken on an ugly yellow underlight. He ( should have noticed how often she was .rubbing at her temples, although she denied almost in - a panic that she had a migraine, or had had one for over a week. - He did not notice these things, however. Hewas too busy looking. ' In the four or five days between his -after-bedtime talk with Laurie and the day he found what , he was looking for, he went through every +closet in the big old house at least three times; + through the crawlspace above Lew's study .five or six times; through the big old cellar half a  dozen times. 1 It was in the cellar that he finally found it. & This was not to say he hadn't found )peculiar things in other places; he most certainly had. - There was a knob of stainless steel poking /out of the ceiling of a second-floor closet. A curved ( metal armature of some kind had burst -through the side of the luggage-closet on thethird floor. It * was a dim, polished gray . . . until he +touched it. When he did that, it flushed a dusky rose color, , and he heard a faint but powerful humming -sound deep in the wall. He snatched his hand back as . if the armature had been hot (and at first, .when it turned a color he associated with the burners on - the electric stove, he could have sworn it )was). When he did that, the curved metal thing went + gray again. The humming stopped at once. ' The day before, in the attic, he had -observed a cobweb of thin, interlaced cables growing in a , low dark corner under the eave. Trent had -been crawling around on his hands and knees, not , doing anything but getting hot and dirty, (when he had suddenly spied this amazing phenomenon. . He froze in place, staring through a tangle -of hair as the cables spun themselves out of nothing at . all (or so it looked, anyway), met, wrapped ,around each other so tightly they seemed to merge, * and then continued spreading until they -reached the floor, where they drilled in and anchored ' themselves in dreamy little puffs of )sawdust. They seemed to be creating some sort of limber - bracework, and it looked as if it would be -very strong, able to hold the house together through a $ lot of buffeting and hard knocks.  What buffeting, though?  What hard knocks? , Again, Trent thought he knew. It was hard $to believe, but he thought he knew. / There was a little closet at the north end of-the cellar, far beyond the workshop area and the - furnace. Their real father had called this 0'the wine-cellar,' and although he'd put up onlyabout , two dozen bottles of plonk (this word had ,always made their mother giggle), they were all - carefully stored in crisscrossing racks he had made himself. - Lew came in here even less frequently than +he went into the workshop; he didn't drink wine. , And although their mother had often taken -a glass or two with their dad, she no longer drank , wine either. Trent remembered how sad her +face had looked the one time Bri had asked her why - she never had a glass of plonk in front of the fire anymore. - 'Lew doesn't approve of drinking,' she had %told Brian. 'He says it's a crutch.' ) There was a padlock on the wine-cellar -door, but it was only there to make sure the door didn't * swing open and let in the heat from the ,furnace. The key hung right next to it, but Trent didn't . need it. He'd left the padlock undone after -his first investigation, and no one had come along to / press it shut since then. So far as he knew, -no one came to this end of the cellar at all anymore. ( He was not much surprised by the sour -whiff of spilled wine that greeted him as he + approached the door; it was just another ,proof of what he and Laurie already knew the . changes were winding themselves quietly all +through the house. He opened the door, and * although what he saw frightened him, it didn't really surprise him. , Metal constructions had burst through two .of the wine-cellar's walls, tearing apart the racks ) with their diamond-shaped compartments )and pushing the bottles of Bollinger and Mondavi and + Battiglia onto the floor, where they had broken. + Like the cables in the attic crawlspace, -whatever was forming here growing, to use Laurie's . word hadn't finished yet. It spun itself 0into being in sheens of light that hurt Trent's eyes and . made him feel a little sick to his stomach. ) No cables here, however, and no curved .struts. What was growing in his real father's forgotten ' wine-cellar looked like cabinets and +consoles and instrument panels. And, as he looked, vague + shapes humped themselves up in the metal )like the heads of excited snakes, gained focus, ) became dials and levers and read-outs. *There were a few blinking lights. Some of these actually ' began to blink as he looked at them. - A low sighing sound accompanied this act of creation. , Trent took one cautious step farther into 1the little room; an especially bright red light, or series , of them, had caught his eye. He sneezed as'he stepped forward the machines and consoles . pushing across the old concrete had stirred up a great deal of dust. - The lights which had snagged his attention ,were numbers. They were under a glass strip on a - metal construct which was spinning its way -out of a console. This new thing looked like some / sort of chair, although no one sitting in it ,would have been very comfortable. At least, no one + with a human shape, Trent thought with a little shiver. , The glass strip was in one of the arms of 1this twisted chair if it was a chair. And the % numbers had perhaps caught his eye because they were moving.  72:34:18  became  72:34:17  and then  72:34:16 ) Trent looked at his watch, which had a *sweep second hand, and used it to confirm what his - eyes had already told him. The chair might (or might not really be a chair, but the numbers under / the glass strip were a digital clock. It was 'running backward. Counting down, to be perfectly + accurate. And what would happen when thatread-out finally went from  00:00:01  to  00:00:00 , some three days from this very afternoon? , He was pretty sure he knew. Every American*boy knows one of two things happen when a - backward-running clock finally reads zeros .across the board: an explosion or a lift-off. # Trent thought there was too much -equipment, too many gadgets, for it to be an explosion. + He thought something had gotten into the .house while they were in England. Some sort of+ spore, perhaps, that had drifted through .space for a billion years before being caught in the - gravitational pull of the earth, spiraling *down through the atmosphere like a bit of milkweed fluff / caught in a mild breeze, and finally falling +into the chimney of a house in Titusville, Indiana. + Into the Bradburys' house in Titusville, Indiana. . It might have been something else entirely, ,of course, but the spore idea felt right to Trent, and - although he was the oldest of the Bradbury .kids, he was still young enough to sleep well after - eating a pepperoni pizza at 9:00 P.M., and -to believe completely in his own perceptions and / intuitions. And in the end, it didn't really +matter, did it? What mattered was what had happened. , And, of course, what was going to happen. .When Trent left the wine-cellar this time, he not , only snapped the padlock's arm closed, he took the key as well. ' Something terrible happened at Lew's /faculty party. It happened at quarter of nine, only fortyfive / minutes or so after the first guests arrived,.and Trent and Laurie later heard Lew shouting at $ their mother that the only goddam ,consideration she had shown him was getting up to her 1 foolishness early if she'd waited until ten .o'clock or so, there would have been fifty or more . people circulating through the living room, 'dining room, kitchen, and back parlor. / 'What the hell's the matter with you?' Trent .and Laurie heard him yelling at her, and when 0 Trent felt Laurie's hand creep into his like a1small cold mouse, he held it tightly. 'Don't you know + what people are going to say about this? ,Don't you know how people in the department talk? I ) mean, really, Catherine it was like %something out of the Three Stooges!' / Their mother's only reply was soft, helpless -sobbing, and for just one moment Trent felt a0 horrible, unwilling burst of hate for her. Why/had she married him in the first place? Didn't she & deserve this for being such a fool? , Ashamed of himself, he pushed the thought -away, made it gone, and turned to Laurie. He was ) appalled to see tears pouring down her ,cheeks, and the mute sorrow in her eyes went to his heart  like a knife-blade. . 'Great party, huh?' she whispered, scrubbing+at her cheeks with the heels of her palms. - 'Right, Sprat,' he said, and hugged her so +she could cry against his shoulder without being 0 heard. 'It'll make my top-ten list at the end of the year, no sweat.' * It seemed that Catherine Evans (who had +never wished more bitterly to be Catherine Bradbury - again) had been lying to everyone. She had .been in the grip of a screaming-blue migraine for not . just a day or two days this time but for the)last two weeks. During that time she had eaten next to + nothing and lost fifteen pounds. She had +been serving canapes to Stephen Krutchmer, the head of , the History Department, and his wife when *the colors went out of everything and the world - suddenly swam away from her. She had rolled-bonelessly forward, spilling a whole tray of , Chinese pork rolls onto the front of Mrs. *Krutchmer's expensive Norma Kamali dress, which had ) been purchased for just this occasion. * Brian and Lissa had heard the commotion )and had come creeping down the stairs in their $ pajamas to see what was going on, 0although both of them all four children, for that matter - had been strictly forbidden by Daddy Lew to-leave the upper floors of the house once the party . began. 'University people don't like to see /children at faculty parties,' Lew had explained0 brusquely that afternoon. 'It sends all sorts of mixed signals.' - When they saw their mother on the floor in (a circle of kneeling, concerned faculty members - (Mrs. Krutchmer was not there; she had run *for the kitchen, wanting to get some cold water on $ the front of her dress before the +sauce-stains could set) they had forgotten their stepfather's firm , order and had run in, Lissa crying, Brian .bellowing in excited dismay. Lissa managed to kick the , head of Asian Studies in the left kidney. *Brian, who was two years older and thirty pounds + heavier, did even better: he knocked the 0fall semester's guest lecturer, a plump babe in a pink ) dress and curly-toed evening slippers, )smack into the fireplace. She sat there, dazed, in a large  puff of gray-black ashes. ) 'Mom! Mommy!' Brian cried, shaking the -former Catherine Bradbury. 'Mommy! Wake up!' ! Mrs. Evans stirred and moaned. 2 'Get upstairs,' Lew said coldly. 'Both of you.' + When they showed no signs of obeying, Lew/put his hand on Lissa's shoulder and tightened it ) until she squeaked with pain. His eyes ,blazed at her out of a face, which had gone dead pale . except for red spots as bright as dimestore #rouge in the center of each cheek. 2 'I'll take care of this,' he said through teeth ,so tightly clamped they refused to entirely unlock * even to speak. 'You and your brother go upstairs right n ' ( 'Take your hand off her, you son of a bitch,' Trent said clearly. ) Lew and all the party-goers who had %arrived early enough to witness this entertaining ( sideshow turned toward the archway .between the living room and the hallway. Trentand . Laurie stood there, side by side. Trent was ,as pale as his stepfather, but his face was calm and - set. There were people at the party not *many but a few who had known Catherine Evans's , first husband, and they agreed later that +the resemblance between father and son was . extraordinary. That it was, in fact, almost +as though Bill Bradbury had come back from the dead , to confront his ill-tempered replacement. 2 'I want you to go upstairs,' Lew said. 'All four-of you. There's nothing here to concern you. " Nothing to concern you at all.' ( Mrs. Krutchmer had come back into the )room, the bosom of her Norma Kamali damp but  reasonably free of stains. ) 'Get your hand off Lissa,' Trent said. . 'And get away from our mother,' Laurie said.- Now Mrs. Evans was sitting up, her hands to&her head, looking around dazedly. The headache ) had popped like a balloon, leaving her ,disoriented and weak but at last out of the agony she had * endured for the last fourteen days. She &knew she had done something terrible, embarrassed Lew, * perhaps even disgraced him, but for the *moment she was too grateful that the pain had stopped to , care. The shame would come later. Now she -only wanted to go upstairs very slowly and lie  down. + 'You'll be punished for this,' Lew said, /looking at his four stepchildren in the nearly perfect / shocked silence of the living room. He didn't/look at them all at once but one at a time, as if ( marking the nature and extent of each .crime. When his gaze fell on Lissa, she began to cry. 'I'm / sorry for their misbehavior,' he said to the 0room at large. 'My wife is a bit lax with them, I'm + afraid. What they need is a good English nanny ' , 'Don't be a jackass, Lew,' Mrs. Krutchmer +said. Her voice was very loud but not very tuneful; 0 she sounded a bit like a jackass in full bray 0herself. Brian jumped, clutched his sister, and also . gave way to tears. 'Your wife fainted. They were concerned, that's all.' / 'Quite right, too,' the guest lecturer said, ,struggling to extract her considerable bulk from the . fireplace. Her pink dress was now a splotchy*gray and her face was streaked with soot. Only her - shoes with their absurd but engaging curly ,tips seemed to have escaped, but she looked quite , unperturbed by the whole thing. 'Children -should care about their mothers. And husbandsabout  their wives.' + She looked pointedly at Lew Evans as she ,said this last, but Lew missed her gaze; he was . marking Trent and Laurie's progress as they /assisted their mother up the stairs. Lissa and Brian - trailed along behind, like an honor guard. + The party went on. The incident was more .or less papered over, as unpleasant incidents at / faculty parties usually are. Mrs. Evans (who ,had slept three hours a night at most since her ) husband had announced his intention of ,throwing a party) was asleep almost as soon as her head - touched the pillow, and the children heard %Lew downstairs, booming out bonhomie without her. , Trent suspected that he was even a little )relieved not to have to contend with his scurrying, & frightened mouse of a wife anymore. * He never once broke away to come up and check on her. * Not once. Not until the party was over. + After the last guest had been shown out, +he walked heavily upstairs and told her to wake up . . / . which she did, obedient in this as she had +been in everything else since the day when she had . made the mistake of telling the minister shedid and Lew that she would. , Lew poked his head into Trent's room next )and measured the children with his gaze. 0 'I knew you'd all be in here,' he said with a 2satisfied little nod. 'Conspiring. You're going tobe , punished, you know. Yes indeed. Tomorrow. *Tonight I want you to go right to bed and think ) about it. Now go to your rooms. And no creeping around, either.' , Neither Lissa nor Brian did any 'creeping ,around,' certainly; they were too exhausted and + emotionally wrung out to do anything but +go to bed and fall immediately asleep. But Laurie - came back down to Trent's room in spite of -'Daddy Lew,' and the two of them listened in silent - dismay as their stepfather upbraided their 1mother for daring to faint at his party . . . and as their ( mother wept and offered not a word of argument or even demurral. . 'Oh, Trent, what are we going to do?' Laurie/asked, her voice muffled against his shoulder. , Trent's face was extraordinarily pale and 2still. 'Do?' he said. 'Why, we're not going to do  anything, Sprat.' , 'We have to! Trent, we have to! We have to help her!' * 'No, we don't,' Trent said. A small and /somehow terrible smile played around his lips. 'The 0 house is going to do it for us.' He looked at %his watch and calculated. 'At around three-thirty-four , tomorrow afternoon, the house is going to do it all.' , There were no punishments in the morning; ,Lew Evans was too preoccupied with his eight) o'clock seminar on Consequences of the *Norman Conquest. Neither Trent nor Laurie was very - surprised at this, but both were extremely ,grateful. He told them he would see them in his study * that night, one by one, and 'mete a few /fair strokes to each.' Once this threat in the form of an ' obscure quotation had been given, he %marched out with his head up and his briefcase clasped - firmly in his right hand. Their mother was .still asleep when his Porsche snarled its way down the  street. , The two younger kids were standing by the +kitchen with their arms around each other, looking 0 to Laurie like an illustration from a Grimm's 0fairytale. Lissa was crying. Brian was keeping a/ stiff upper lip, at least so far, but he was -pale and there were purple pouches under his eyes. 'He'll * spank us,' Brian said to Trent. 'And he spanks hard, too.' ) 'Nope,' Trent said. They looked at him -hopefully but dubiously. Lew had, after all, promised , spankings; even Trent was not to be sparedthis painful indignity.  'But, Trent ' Lissa began. 1 'Listen to me,' Trent said, pulling a chair out-from the table and sitting on it backward in front 1 of the two little ones. 'Listen carefully, and .don't you miss a single word. It's important, and none  of us can screw up.' - They stared at him silently with their big green-blue eyes. / 'As soon as school is out, I want you two to -come right home . . . but only as far as the corner. + The corner of Maple and Walnut. Have you got that?' - 'Ye-ess,' Lissa said hesitantly. 'But why, Trent?' 0 'Never mind,' Trent said. His own eyes also)green-blue were sparkling, but Laurie , thought it wasn't a good-humored sparkle; %she thought, in fact, that there was something / dangerous about it. 'Just be there. Stand by +the mailbox. You have to be there by three o'clock, & three-fifteen at the latest. Do you understand?' / 'Yes,' Brian said, speaking for both of them. 'We got it.' 2 'Laurie and I will already be there, or we'll be"there right after you get there.' . 'How are we going to do that, Trent?' Laurie.asked. 'We don't even get out of school until three - o'clock, and I have band practice, and the bus takes ' + 'We're not going to school today,' Trent said.  'No?' Laurie was nonplussed. / Lissa was horrified. 'Trent!' she said. 'You 2can't do that! That's . . . that's . . . hookey!' , 'And about time, too,' Trent said grimly. ('Now you two get ready for school. Just remember: * the corner of Maple and Walnut at three /o'clock, three-fifteen at the absolute latest. And * whatever you do, don't come all the way 0home.' He stared at Brian and Lissa so fiercely that they & looked back with frightened dismay, )drawing together for mutual comfort once again. Even + Laurie was frightened. 'Wait for us, but .don't you dare come back into this house,' he said. 'Not  for anything.' ) When the little kids were gone, Laurie +seized his shirt and demanded to know what was going  on. . 'It has something to do with what's growing .in the house, I know it does, and if you want me to , play hookey and help you, you better tell me what it is, Trent Bradbury!' . 'Mellow out, I'll tell you,' Trent said. He 0carefully removed his shirt from Laurie's tight grip. , 'And quiet down. I don't want you to wake /up Mom. She'll make us go to school, and that'sno  good.'  'Well, what is it? Tell me!' / 'Come on downstairs,' Trent said. 'I want to show you something.' , He led her downstairs to the wine-cellar. , Trent wasn't completely sure Laurie would *ride along with what he had in mind it seemed 5 awfully . . . well, final . . . even to him but )she did. If it had just been a matter of enduring a - spanking from 'Daddy Lew,' he didn't think -she would have, but Laurie had been as deeply, affected by the sight of her mother lying /senseless on the living-room floor as Trent hadbeen by - his stepfather's unfeeling reaction to it. 0 'Yeah,' Laurie said bleakly. 'I think we have /to.' She was looking at the blinking numbers on& the arm of the chair. They now read  07:49:21 . The wine-cellar was no longer a wine-cellar 0at all. It stank of wine, true enough, and there- were the piles of shattered green glass on *the floor amid the twisted ruins of their father's wineracks, . but it now looked like a madman's version of#the control-bridge on the Starship / Enterprise. Dials whirled. Digital read-outs ,flickered, changed, flickered again. Lights blinked  and flashed. 1 'Yeah,' Trent said. 'I think so, too. That son (of a bitch, shouting at her like that!'  'Trent, don't.' ( 'He's a jerk! A bastard! A dickhead!' - But this was just a foul-mouthed version of*whistling past the graveyard, and both of them " knew it. Looking at the strange *agglomeration of instruments and controls made Trent feel , almost sick with doubt and unease. He was ,reminded of a book his dad had read him whenhe , was a child, a Mercer Mayer story where a ,creature called a Stamp-Eating Trollusk had popped a 0 little girl into an envelope and mailed her To(Whom It May Concern. Wasn't that pretty much ' what he was proposing they do to Lew Evans? . 'If we don't do something, he'll kill her,' Laurie said in a low voice. * 'Huh?' Trent whipped his head around so 0fast it hurt his neck, but Laurie wasn't lookingat - him. She was looking at the red numbers of +the countdown. They reflected backward off the ' lenses of the spectacles she wore on *schooldays. She seemed almost hypnotized, unaware Trent + was looking at her, perhaps even unaware that he was there. - 'Not on purpose,' she said. 'He might even -be sad. For a while, anyway. Because I think he - does love her, sort of, and she loves him. .You know sort of. But he'll make her worse and 1 worse. She'll get sick all the time, and then .. . one day . . . ' ' She broke off and looked at him, and )something in her face scared Trent worse than anything - in their strange, changing, sneaking house had been able to do. / 'Tell me, Trent,' she said. Her hand grasped .his arm. It was very cold. 'Tell me how we're  going to do it.' ( They went up to Lew's study together. +Trent was prepared to ransack the place if that was what it * took, but they found the key in the top ,drawer, tucked neatly into an envelope with the word , study printed on it in Lew's small, neat, %somehow hemorrhoidal printing. Trent pocketed it. They - left the house together just as the shower +on the second floor went on, meaning their mom was  up. + They spent the day in the park. Although (neither of them spoke of it, it was the longest day ) either of them had ever lived through. +Twice they saw the beat-cop and hid in the public toilets , until he was gone. This was no time to be )caught playing truant and bundled off to school. - At two-thirty, Trent gave Laurie a quarter )and walked her to the phone booth on the east side  of the park. . 'Do I have to?' she asked. 'I hate to scare #her, especially after last night.' % 'Do you want her in the house when )whatever happens, happens?' Trent asked. Laurie dropped ) the quarter into the telephone with no further protest. , It rang so many times that she became sure)their mother had gone out. That might be good, but ) it might also be bad. It was certainly +worrisome. If she was out, it was entirely possible that she  might come back before % 'Trent, I don't think she's h ' . 'Hello?' Mrs. Evans said in a sleepy voice. 2 'Oh, hi, Mom,' Laurie said. 'I didn't think you were there.' ) 'I went back to bed,' she said with an /embarrassed little laugh. 'I can't seem to get enough 2 sleep, all of a sudden. I suppose if I'm asleep ,I can't think about how horrible I was last night ' ) 'Oh, Mom, you weren't horrible. When a /person faints, it isn't because she wants to ' . 'Laurie, why are you calling? Is everything okay?'  'Sure, Mom . . . well . . . ' % Trent poked her in the ribs. Hard. ) Laurie, who had been slumping (growing /smaller, it almost seemed), straightened up in a / hurry. 'I hurt myself in gym. Just . . . you know, a little. It's not bad.' . 'What did you do? Jesus, you're not calling from the hospital, are you?' 0 'Gosh, no,' Laurie said hastily. 'It's just a ,sprained knee. Mrs. Kitt asked if you could come and - bring me home early. I don't know if I can walk on it. It really hurts.' / 'I'll come right away. Try not to move it at /all, honey. You could have torn a ligament. Is the  nurse there?' , 'Not right now. Don't worry, Mom, I'll be careful.' ' 'Will you be in the nurse's office?' - 'Yes,' Laurie said. Her face was as red as 'the side of Brian's Radio Flyer wagon.  'I'll be right there.'  'Thanks, Mom. Bye.' , She hung up and looked at Trent. She drew 0in a deep breath and then let it out in a long,  trembly sigh. , 'That was fun,' she said in a voice which was close to tears. + He hugged her tight. 'You did great,' he -said. 'Lots better than I could have, Spr Laurie. I'm ( not sure she would have believed me.' . 'I wonder if she'll ever believe me again?' Laurie asked bitterly. % 'She will,' Trent said. 'Come on.' ) They went over to the west side of the ,park, where they could watch Walnut Street. The day , had turned cold and dim. Thunderheads were(forming overhead, and a chilly wind was blowing. + They waited for five endless minutes and (then their mother's Subaru passed them, heading + rapidly toward Greendowne Middle School, .where Trent and Laurie went . . . where we go when , we're not playing hookey, that is, Laurie thought. 1 'She's really humming,' Trent said. 'I hope she-doesn't get into an accident, or something.' . 'Too late to worry about that now. Come on.',Laurie had Trent's hand and was pulling him - back to the telephone kiosk again. 'You getto call Lew, you lucky devil.' , He put in another quarter and punched the )number of the History Department office, referring - to a card he had taken from his wallet. He .had barely slept a wink the night before, but now that . things were set in motion, he found himself 1cool and calm . . . so cool, in fact, that he wasalmost ) refrigerated. He glanced at his watch. +Quarter to three. Less than an hour to go. Thunder rumbled  faintly in the west. . 'History Department,' a woman's voice said. / 'Hi. This is Trent Bradbury. I need to speak *with my stepfather, Lewis Evans, please.' / 'Professor Evans is in class,' the secretary said, 'but he'll be out at ' 0 'I know, he's got Modern British History until/three-thirty. But you better get him, just the + same. It's an emergency. It concerns his -wife.' A pointed, calculated pause, and then he added:  'My mom.' + There was a long pause, and Trent felt a -moment of faint alarm. It was as if she were thinking . of refusing or dismissing him, emergency or +no emergency, and that was most definitely not in  the plan. - 'He's in Oglethorpe, right next door,' she 7said finally. 'I'll get him myself. I'll have him call  home as soon as ' ' 'No, I have to hold on,' Trent said.  'But ' . 'Please, will you just stop goofing with me .and go get him?' he asked, allowing a ragged, / harried note into his voice. It wasn't hard. * 'All right,' the secretary said. It was /impossible to tell if she was more disgruntled or worried. / 'If you could tell me the nature of the '  'No,' Trent said. + There was an offended sniff, and then he was on hold. - 'Well?' Laurie asked. She was dancing from -foot to foot like someone who needs to go to the  bathroom. & 'I'm on hold. They're getting him.'  'What if he doesn't come?' . Trent shrugged. 'Then we're sunk. But he'll ,come. You wait and see.' He wished he could be as , confident as he sounded, but he did still )believe this would work. It had to work. ! 'We left it until awful late.' - Trent nodded. They had left it until awful -late, and Laurie knew why. The study door was+ solid oak, plenty strong, but neither of )them knew anything about the lock. Trent wanted to make . sure Lew had only the shortest time possible to test it. + 'What if he sees Brian and Lissie on the corner when he comes home?' 1 'If he gets as hot under the collar as I think .he will, he wouldn't notice them if they were on ) stilts and wearing Day-Glo duncecaps,' Trent said. * 'Why doesn't he answer the darn phone?' $Laurie asked, looking at her watch. ( 'He will,' Trent said, and then their stepfather did.  'Hello?' - 'It's Trent, Lew. Mom's in your study. Her *headache must have come back, because she + fainted. I can't wake her up. You better come home right away.' . Trent was not surprised at his stepfather's -first stated object of concern it was, in fact, an 1 integral part of his plan but it still made -him so angry his fingers turned white on the  telephone. , 'My study? My study? What the hell was shedoing in there?' / In spite of his anger, Trent's voice came out1calmly. 'Cleaning, I think.' And then tossed the + ultimate bait to a man who cared a great )deal more for work than wife: 'There are papers all over  the floor.' . 'I'll be right there,' Lew rapped, and then )added: 'If there are any windows open in there, shut ( them, for God's sake. There's a storm ,coming.' He hung up without saying goodbye. ) 'Well?' Laurie asked as Trent hung up. - 'He's on his way,' Trent said, and laughed 0grimly. 'The son of a bitch was so stirred up he, didn't even ask what I was doing home fromschool. Come on.' - They ran back to the intersection of Maple ,and Walnut. The sky had grown very dark now,& and the sound of thunder had become /almost constant. As they reached the blue U.S. mailbox on + the corner, the streetlights along Maple $Street began to come on two by two, marching away  from them up the hill. & Lissa and Brian hadn't arrived yet. + 'I want to come with you, Trent,' Laurie 1said, but her face proclaimed her a liar. It was very - pale, and her eyes were too large, swimmingwith unshed tears. - 'No way,' Trent said. 'Wait here for Brian and Lissa.' + At their names, Laurie turned and looked ,down Walnut Street. She saw two kids coming,- hurrying along with lunchboxes bouncing in -their hands. Although they were too far away to , make out faces, she was pretty sure it wasthem, and she told Trent. ) 'Good. The three of you go behind Mrs. *Redland's hedge there and wait for Lew to pass. Then - you can come up the street, but don't go in/the house and don't let them, either. Wait for me  outside.' . 'I'm afraid, Trent.' The tears had begun to spill down her cheeks now. + 'Me too, Sprat,' he said, and kissed her 0swiftly on the forehead. 'But it'll all be over soon.' , Before she could say anything else, Trent &went running up the street toward the Bradburys' + house on Maple Street. He glanced at his +watch as he ran. It was twelve past three. - The house had a still, hot air that scared /him. It was as if gunpowder had been spilled inevery + corner, and people he could not see were .standing by to light unseen fuses. He imaginedthe 0 clock in the wine-cellar ticking relentlessly away, now reading  00:19:06  What if Lew was late? # No time to worry about that now. , Trent raced up to the third floor through 0the still, combustible air. He imagined he couldfeel . the house stirring now, coming alive as the -countdown neared its conclusion. He tried to tell / himself that imagination was all it was, but part of him knew better. * He went into Lew's study, opened two or (three file-cabinets and desk drawers at random, and / threw the papers he found all over the floor.)This took only a few moments, but he was just , finishing when he heard the Porsche coming0up the street. Its engine wasn't snarling today;Lew  had wound it up to a scream. + Trent stepped out of the office and into .the shadows of the third-floor hallway, where they had - drilled the first holes what seemed like a )century ago. He rammed his hand into his pocket for the + key, and his pocket was empty except for an old, crumpled lunch-ticket. 0 I must have lost it running up the street. It *must have bounced right out of my pocket. * He stood there, sweating and frozen, as ,the Porsche squealed into the driveway. Its engine cut , out. The driver's door opened and slammed -shut. Lew's footsteps ran for the back door. Thunder 0 crumped like an artillery shell in the sky, a .stroke of bright lightning forked through the gloom, & and, somewhere deep in the house, a +powerful motor turned over, uttered a low, muffled bark,  and then began to hum. + Jesus, oh dear Jesus, what do I do? What /CAN I do? He's bigger than me! If I try to hit him  over the head, he'll . He had slipped his left hand into his other )pocket, and his thoughts broke off as it touched the + old-fashioned metal teeth of the key. At ,some point during the long afternoon in the park, he + must have transferred it from one pocket -to the other without even being aware of it. . Gasping, heart galloping in his stomach and ,throat as well as in his chest, Trent faded back ' down the hall to the luggage-closet, .stepped inside, and pulled the accordion-styledoors most of  the way shut in front of him. , Lew was galumphing up the stairs, bawling ,his wife's name over and over at the top of his - voice. Trent saw him appear, hair standing *up in spikes (he must have been running a hand . through it as he drove), his tie askew, big *drops of sweat standing out on his broad, intelligent * forehead, eyes squinted down to furious little slits. / 'Catherine!' he bawled, and ran down the hallinto the office. + Before he could even get all the way in, (Trent was out of the luggage-closet and running + soundlessly back down the hall. He would 'have just one chance. If he missed the keyhole . . . if + the tumblers failed to turn at the first twist of the key . . . 0 If either of those things happens, I'll fight -with him, he had time to think. I can't send him . alone, I'll make damn sure to take him with me. , He grabbed the door and banged it shut so 0hard that a little film of dust shot out of the cracks , between the hinges. He caught one glimpse ,of Lew's startled face. Then the key was in the lock. - He twisted it, and the bolt shot across an $instant before Lew struck the door. 0 'Hey!' Lew shouted. 'Hey, you little bastard, +what are you doing? Where's Catherine? Let me  out of here!' . The knob twisted fruitlessly back and forth./Then it stopped, and Lew rained a fusillade of  blows on the door. & 'Let me out of here right now Trent -Bradbury before you get the worst beating of your  goddamned life!' - Trent backed slowly across, the hall. When .his shoulders struck the far wall, he gasped. The ) key to the study, which he had removed ,from the keyhole without even thinking aboutit, * dropped from his fingers and thumped to ,the faded hall-runner between his feet. Now that it was , done, reaction set in. The world began to ,look wavery, as if he were under water, and he had to , fight to keep from fainting himself. Only -now, with Lew locked in, his mother sent off on a wildgoose * chase, and the other kids safely tucked )away behind Mrs. Redland's overgrown yew hedge, * did he realize that he had never really .expected it would work at all. If 'Daddy Lew' was - surprised to find himself locked in, Trent Bradbury was absolutely amazed. ) The doorknob of the study twisted back 'and forth in short sharp half-circles.  'LET ME OUT, GODDAMMIT!' . 'I'll let you out at quarter of four, Lew,' .Trent said in an uneven, trembling voice, and then a 3 little giggle escaped him. 'If you're still here at quarter of four, that is.' , Then, from downstairs: 'Trent? Trent, are you all right?'  Dear God, that was Laurie.  'Are you, Trent?'  And Lissa!  'Hey, Trent! Y'okay?'  And Brian. - Trent looked at his watch and was horrified,to see it was 3:31 . . . going on 3:32. And suppose  his watch was slow? + 'Get out!' he screamed at them, plunging -down the hallway toward the stairs. 'Get out of this  house!' , The third-floor hallway seemed to stretch .out before him like taffy; the faster he ran, the - farther it seemed to stretch ahead of him. +Lew rained blows on the door and curses on the air; , thunder boomed; and, from deep within the )house came the ever-more-urgent sound of machines  waking to life. / He reached the stairwell at last and hurried ,down, his upper body so far out in front of his legs , that he almost fell. Then he was whirling ,around the newel post and hurtling down the flight of * stairs between the second floor and the (first, toward where his brother and two sisters waited,  looking up at him. - 'Out!' he screamed, grabbing them, shoving )them toward the open door and the stormy  blackness outside. 'Quick!' * 'Trent, what's happening?' Brian asked. /'What's happening to the house? It's shaking!' / It was, too a deep vibration that rose up /through the floor and rattled Trent's eyeballs in , their sockets. Plaster-dust began to sift down into his hair. ) 'No time! Out! Fast! Laurie, help me!' * Trent swept Brian into his arms. Laurie -grabbed Lissa under the arms of her dress and" stumbled out the door with her. + Thunder bammed. Lightning twisted across (the sky. The wind that had been gasping earlier # now began to roar like a dragon. + Trent heard an earthquake building under *the house. As he ran out through the door with / Brian, he saw electric-blue light, so bright .it left afterimages on his eyes for almost an hour (he + reflected later he was lucky not to have ,been blinded), shoot out through the narrow cellar . windows. It cut across the lawn in rays that/looked almost solid. He heard the glass break. And, . just as he passed through the door, he felt !the house rising under his feet. % He jumped down the front steps and -grabbed Laurie's arm. They stumble-staggered down the - walk to the street, which was now as black 'as night with the coming of the storm. ( There they turned back and watched it happen. & The house on Maple Street seemed to 0gather itself. It no longer looked straight and solid; it / seemed to jitter, like a comic-strip picture *of a man on a pogo-stick. Huge cracks ran out from it, ) not only in the cement walk but in the /earth surrounding it. The lawn pulled apart in huge pieshaped * turves of grass. Roots strained blackly ,upward below the green, and the whole front yard + seemed to become bubble-shaped, as if it -were straining to hold the house before whichit had  spread so long. - Trent cast his eyes up to the third floor, ,where the light in Lew's study still shone. Trent * thought the sound of breaking glass had /come was still coming from up there, then+ dismissed the idea as imagination how .could he hear anything in all that racket? It was only a * year later that Laurie told him she was *quite sure she had heard their stepfather screaming from  up there. - The foundation of the house first crumbled,,then cracked, and then sundered with a croakof - exploding mortar. Brilliant cold blue fire ,lanced out. The children covered their eyes and , staggered back. The engines screamed. The *earth pulled up and up in a last agonized holding - action . . . and then let go. Suddenly the +house was a foot above the ground, resting on a pad of  bright blue fire.  It was a perfect lift-off. ! Atop the center roof peak, the weathervane spun madly. - The house rose slowly at first, then began ,to gather speed. It thundered upward on its flaring , pad of blue fire, the front door clapping !madly back and forth as it went. / 'My toys!' Brian bleated, and Trent began to laugh wildly. - The house reached a height of thirty yards,*seemed to poise itself for its great leap upward, ) then blasted into the rushing spate of night-black clouds.  It was gone. - Two shingles came floating down like large black leaves. / 'Look out, Trent!' Laurie cried out a second ,or two later, and shoved him hard enough to knock * him over. The rubber-backed welcome mat +thwacked into the street where he had been standing. . Trent looked at Laurie. Laurie looked back. / 'That would've smarted like big blue heck if 0it'd hit you on the head,' she told him, 'so youjust , better not call me Sprat anymore, Trent.' ( He looked at her solemnly for several *seconds, and then began to giggle. Laurie joined in. So 0 did the little ones. Brian took one of Trent's.hands; Lissa took the other. They helped pull him to , his feet, and then the four of them stood /together, looking at the smoking cellar-hole inthe , middle of the shattered lawn. People were (coming out of their houses now, but the Bradbury - children ignored them. Or perhaps it would -be truer to say the Bradbury children didn't know  they were there at all. / 'Wow,' Brian said reverently. 'Our house took off, Trent.'  'Yeah,' Trent said. * 'Maybe wherever it's going, there'll be *people who want to know about the Normans and the  Sexies,' Lissa said. - Trent and Laurie put their arms around each'other and began to shriek with mingled laughter . and horror . . . and that was when the rain began to pelt down. - Mr. Slattery from across the street joined ,them. He didn't have much hair, but what he did . have was plastered to his gleaming skull in tight little bunches. ( 'What happened?' he screamed over the (thunder, which was almost constant now. 'What  happened here?' / Trent let go of his sister and looked at Mr. +Slattery. 'True Space Adventures,' he said solemnly, # and that set them all off again. / Mr. Slattery cast a doubtful, frightened look-at the empty cellar-hole, decided discretion was - the better part of valor, and retreated to .his side of the street. Although it was still pouring  buckets, In / did not invite the Bradbury children to join -him. Nor did they care. They sat down on the curb, , Trent and Laurie in the middle, Brian and Lissa on the sides. - Laurie leaned toward Trent and whispered inhis ear: 'We're free.' 1 'It's better than that,' Trent said. 'She is.' - Then he put his arms around all of them +by stretching, he could just manage and they sat - on the curb in the pouring rain and waited for their mother to come home.   -The Fifth Quarter-  + I parked the heap around the corner from -Keenan's house, sat in the dark for a moment,then ) turned off the key and got out. When I /slammed the door, I could hear rust flaking off the rocker * panels and dropping onto the street. It *wasn't going to be like that much longer. - The gun was in a bandolier holster and lay 'against my ribcage like a fist. It was Barney's.45, , and I was glad of that. It lent the whole -crazy business a touch of irony. Maybe even a sense of  justice. & Keenan's house was an architectural *monstrosity spread over a quarter-acre of land, all ) slanting angles and steep-sloped roofs )behind an iron fence. He'd left the gate unlocked, as I'd . hoped. Earlier I'd seen him calling someone -from the living room, and a hunch too strong to deny + told me it had been either Jagger or the +Sarge. Probably the Sarge. The waiting was over; this  was my night. - I walked to the driveway, staying close to ,the shrubbery and listening for any strange sound - over the cutting whine of the January wind.+There wasn't any. It was Friday night, and Keenan's , sleep-in maid would be out having a jolly ,time at somebody's Tupperware party. Nobody home + but that bastard Keenan. Waiting for the -Sarge. Waiting although he didn't know it yet for  me. - The carport was open and I slipped inside. -The ebony shadow of Keenan's Impala loomed. I. tried the back door. The car was also open. )Keenan wasn't cut out to be a villain, I reflected; he / was much too trusting. I got in the car, sat down, and waited. - Now I could hear the faint sound of jazz on.the wind, very quiet, very good. Miles Davis, - maybe. Keenan listening to Miles Davis and /holding a gin fizz in one manicured hand. Nice for  him. , It was a long wait. The hands on my watch .crawled from eight-thirty to nine to ten. Timefor a * lot of thinking. I mostly thought about -Barney, and that wasn't strictly a matter of choice. I , thought about how he looked in that small ,boat when I found him, staring up at me and making . meaningless cawing noises. He'd been adrift /for two days and looked like a boiled lobster. There ' was black blood encrusted across his !midsection where he'd been shot. , He'd steered toward the cottage as best he0could, but still it had been mostly luck. Lucky he'd 0 gotten there, lucky he could still talk for a 2little while. I'd had a fistful of sleeping pills ready if 1 he couldn't talk. I didn't want him to suffer. .Not unless there was a reason for it, anyway. As it + turned out, there was. He had a story to 0tell, a real whopper, and he told me almost all of it. + When he was dead, I went back to the boat-and got his.45. It was hidden aft in a small ' compartment, wrapped in a waterproof +pouch. Then I towed his boat out into deep water and / sank it. If I could have put an epitaph over +his head, it would have been the one about how . there's a sucker born every minute. Most of .them are pretty nice guys, too, I bet just like 0 Barney. Instead, I started trying to find the ,men who capped him. It had taken six months to find , Keenan and to ascertain that Sarge was, at/least, somewhere close by, but I'm a persistentlittle  pup, and here I was. , At ten-twenty, headlights splashed up the /curving driveway and I lay on the floor of the & Impala. The newcomer drove into the 0carport, snuggling up close to Keenan's car. It sounded like ) one of the old Volkswagens. The little ,engine died and I could hear Sarge grunting softly as he , fought his way out of the little car. The *porch light went on, and the sound of the door clicking  open came to me. . Keenan: 'Sarge! You're late! Come on in and have a drink.'  Sarge: 'Scotch.' . I'd unrolled the window before. Now I stuck /Barney's .45 through it, holding the stock with% both hands. 'Stand still,' I said. , The Sarge was halfway up the porch steps. +Keenan, the perfect host, had come out and was * looking down at him, waiting for him to +come up so he could after-you him into the house. They - were both perfect silhouettes in the light 0spilling through from inside. I doubted if they could see - much of me in the dark, but they could see the gun. It was a big gun. ( 'Who the hell are you?' Keenan asked. 2 'Jerry Tarkanian,' I said. 'Move and I'll put a +hole in you big enough to watch television  through.' 0 'You sound like a punk,' Sarge said. He didn'tmove, though. - 'Just don't move. That's all you've got to .worry about.' I opened the Impala's back door and got - out carefully. The Sarge was staring at me 0over his shoulder and I could see the glitter of his little - eyes. One hand was creeping up the lapel of%his 1943-model double-breasted suit. 0 'Oh, please,' I said. 'Get your fucking hands up, asshole.' . The Sarge put his hands up. Keenan's alreadywere. , 'Come down to the foot of the steps. Both of you.' ( They came down, and out of the direct ,glare of the light I could see their faces. Keenan looked ( scared, but the Sarge might have been -listening to a lecture on Zen and the art of motorcycle + maintenance. He was probably the one who had jobbed Barney. / 'Face the wall and lean on it. Both of you.' ) Keenan: 'If you're after money . . . ' 0 I laughed. 'Well, I was going to start off by ,offering you a cut-rate deal on Tupperware, work , my way up to the big stuff gradually, but +you saw through me. Yeah, I'm after money. Four ' hundred and eighty thousand dollars, 2actually. Buried on a little island off Bar Harborcalled  Carmen's Folly.' - Keenan jerked as if he'd been shot, but the&Sarge's dipped-in-concrete face never twitched. He ) turned around and put his hands on the )wall, leaning his weight on them. Keenan reluctantly / followed suit. I frisked him first and got a 1stupid little.32 with a three-inch barrel. A gun like + that, you could put the muzzle against a .guy's head and still miss when you pulled the trigger. I ) threw it over my shoulder and heard it .bounce off one of the cars. Sarge was clean and it was " a relief to step away from him. * 'We're going into the house. You first, %Keenan, then Sarge, then me. Without incident, okay?' + We all trooped up the steps and into the &kitchen. It was one of those germless chrome-and-tile / jobs that looks like it was spit whole out of)some mass-production womb in the Midwest * somewhere, the work of hearty Methodist .assholes who all look like Mr. Goodwrench and smell 0 like Cherry Blend tobacco. I doubt if it ever -needed anything so vulgar as cleaning; Keenan, probably just closed the doors and turned &on the hidden sprinklers once a week. . I paraded them through into the living room,.another treat for the eyes. A pansy decorator who % never got over his crush on Ernest ,Hemingway had apparently done it. There was a flagstone / fireplace almost as big as an elevator car, a+teak buffet table with a moosehead mounted above it, , and a drinks cart stashed below a gunrack .loaded with premium artillery. The stereo had turned  itself off. , I waved the gun at the couch. 'One on eachend.' - They sat, Keenan on the right, Sarge on the+left. The Sarge looked even bigger sitting down. ' An ugly, dented scar twisted its way .through his slightly overgrown crewcut. I put his weight at * about two-thirty, and wondered why a man,with the size and physical presence of Mike Tyson  owned a Volkswagen. . I grabbed an easy chair and dragged it over /Keenan's quicksand-colored rug until it was in - front and between them. I sat down and let -the.45 rest on my thigh. Keenan stared at it like a bird - stares at a snake. The Sarge, on the other -hand, was staring at me like he was the snake and I was " the bird. 'Now what?' he asked. - 'Let's talk about maps and money,' I said. , 'I don't know what you're talking about,' ,Sarge said. 'All I know is that little boys shouldn't  play with guns.' ) 'How's Cappy MacFarland these days?' I asked casually. . It didn't get jack shit from the Sarge, but .Keenan popped his cork. 'He knows. He knows!' The & words shot out of him like bullets. / 'Shut up!' the Sarge told him. 'Shut up your goddam trap!' . Keenan moaned a little. This was one part of.the scenario he had never imagined. I smiled. 5 'He's right, Sarge.' I said. 'I know. Almost all ofit.'  'Who are you?' + 'No one you know. A friend of Barney's.' + 'Barney who?' Sarge asked indifferently. ('Barney Google, with the goo-goo-googly eyes?'' + 'He wasn't dead, Sarge. Not quite dead.' , Sarge turned a slow and murderous look on (Keenan. Keenan shuddered and opened his mouth. , 'Don't talk,' Sarge said to him. 'Not one 0fucking word. I'll snap your neck like a chickenif you  do.' # Keenan's mouth shut with a snap. - Sarge looked at me again. 'What does almostall of it mean?' + 'Everything but the fine details. I know )about the armored car. The island. Cappy MacFarland. & How you and Keenan and some bastard +named Jagger killed Barney. And the map. I know about  that.' / 'It wasn't the way he told you,' Sarge said. 'He was going to cross us.' 1 'He couldn't cross the street,' I said. 'He wasjust a patsy who could drive.' , He shrugged; it was like watching a minor ,earthquake. 'Okay. Be as dumb as you look.' - 'I knew Barney had something on as early as.last March. I just didn't know what. And then one , night he had a gun. This gun. How did you connect with him, Sarge?' + 'A mutual friend someone who did time &with him. We needed a driver who knew eastern - Maine and the Bar Harbor area. Keenan and I,went to see him and laid it out for him. He liked it.' 1 'I did time with him in the Shank,' I said. 'I .liked him. You couldn't help but like him. He was + dumb, but he was a good kid. He needed a keeper more than a partner.' & 'George and Lennie,' Sarge sneered. - 'Good to know you spent your own jail time %improving what passes for your mind, . sweetheart,' I said. 'We were thinking about.a bank in Lewiston. He couldn't wait for me tofinish + doping it out. So now he's underground.' 2 'Jeepers, this is really sad,' Sarge said. 'I'm *gettin, like, all soft and mushy inside.' ) I picked up the gun and showed him the +muzzle, and for a second or two he was the bird and it . was the snake. 'One more wisecrack and I'll 1put a bullet in your belly. Do you believe that?'' His tongue flickered in and out with 1startling quickness, lapped across his lower lip,and + disappeared again. He nodded. Keenan was .frozen. He looked like he wanted to retch but didn't  quite dare. / 'He told me it was big time, a big score,' I 0resumed. 'That's all I could get out of him. He took / off on April third. Two days later four guys )knock over the Portland-Bangor Federated truck just / outside of Carmel. All three guards dead. The$newspapers said the robbers ran two roadblocks in - a souped-up '78 Plymouth. Barney had a '78 /up on blocks, thinking about turning it into a . stacker. I'm betting Keenan put up the front*money for him to turn it into something a little better  and a lot faster.' / I looked at him. Keenan's face was the color of cheese. , 'On May sixth I get a card postmarked Bar *Harbor, but that doesn't mean anything there are . dozens of little islands that channel their (mail through there. A mailboat does the circuit, picks it + up. The card says: 'Mom and family fine, +store doing good. See you in July.' It was signed with . Barney's middle name. I leased a cottage on *the coast, because Barney knew that would be the ) deal. July comes and goes, no Barney.' . 'Musta had a terminal hard-on by then, kid, /right?' Sarge said. I guess he wanted me to be sure  I hadn't buffaloed him. - I looked at him remotely. 'He showed up in -early August. Courtesy of your buddy Keenan, - Sarge. He forgot about the automatic bilge ,pump in the boat. You thought the chop wouldsink it ' quick enough, right, Keenan? But you )thought he was dead, too. I had a yellow blanket spread . out on Frenchman's Point every day. Visible /for miles. Easy to spot. Still, he was lucky.' " 'Too lucky,' Sarge almost spat. . 'One thing I'm curious about did he know +before the job that the money was new, all the - serial numbers recorded? That you couldn't )even sell it to a currency-junker in the Bahamas for  three or four years?' * 'He knew,' the Sarge rumbled, and I was -surprised to find myself believing him. 'And nobody * was planning to junk the dough. He knew /that, too, kid. I think he was counting on that Lewiston ( job you mentioned for ready cash, but *whatever he was or wasn't counting on, he knew the score . and said he could live with it. Christ, why ,not? Say we had to wait ten years to go back for that / dough and split it up. What's ten years to a .kid like Barney? Shit, he would have been all of " thirty-five. I'd be sixty-one.' + 'What about Gappy MacFarland? Did Barney know about him, too?' - 'Yes. Cappy came with the deal. A good man.0A pro. He got cancer last year. Inoperable. And  he owed me a favor.' * 'So the four of you went out to Cappy's .island,' I said. 'A little nobody-on-it named Carmen's + Folly. Cappy buried the money and made a map.' - 'That part was Jagger's idea,' Sarge said. *'We didn't want to split hot money too tempting. . But we didn't want to leave all the swag in ,one pair of hands, either. Cappy MacFarland was the  perfect solution.'  'Tell me about the map.' / 'I thought we'd get to that,' Sarge said witha wintry smile. / 'Don't tell him!' Keenan cried out hoarsely. * Sarge turned to him and gave him a look .that would have melted bar steel. 'Shut up. I can't lie , and 1 can't stonewall, thanks to you. You ,know what I hope, Keenan? I hope you weren'treally ' looking forward to seeing in the new century.' 1 'Your name's in a letter,' Keenan said wildly. -'If anything happens to me, your name's in a  letter!' - 'Cappy made a good map,' the Sarge said, as.if Keenan were not there at all. 'He had some / draftsman training in Joliet. He cut it into ,quarters. One for each of us. We were going to have a 0 reunion on July fourth, five years later. Talk+it over. Maybe decide to wait another five years, * maybe decide to put the pieces together $right then. But there was trouble.' , 'Yes,' I said. 'I guess that's one way of putting it.' / 'If it makes you feel any better, it was all .Keenan's play. I don't know if Barney knew it or not, + but that's how it was. When Jagger and I ,took off in Cappy's boat, Barney was fine.' + 'You're a goddam liar!' Keenan squealed. . 'Who's got two pieces of the map in his wall*safe?' Sarge inquired. 'Is it you, dear?'  He looked at me again. 4 'It was still all right. Half the map still wasn't*enough. And am I gonna sit here and say I would ' have preferred a four-way split to a /three-way? I don't think you'd believe it even if it was true. . Then, guess what? Keenan calls. Tells me we /ought to have a talk. I was expecting it. Lookslike  you were, too.' + I nodded. Keenan had been easier to find .than the Sarge he kept a higher profile. I could & have tracked Sarge all the way down 0eventually, I suppose, but I'd been pretty sure that wouldn't + be necessary. Thieves of a feather flock 'together . . . and the feathers have a tendency to fly, too, * when one of the birds is a vulture like Keenan. / 'Of course,' Sarge went on, 'he tells me not /to get any lethal ideas. Says he's taken out an" insurance policy, my name in an +open-in-event-of-my-death letter he'd sent his lawyer. His idea , was that the two of us could probably dope,out where Cappy'd buried the money if we putthree + of the four pieces of the map together.' , 'And split the swag fifty-fifty,' I said. ) Sarge nodded. Keenan's face was like a "moon drifting somewhere in a high stratosphere of  terror. # 'Where's the safe?' I asked him.  Keenan didn't say anything. . I had done some practicing with the .45. It .was a good gun. I liked it. I held it in both hands - and shot Keenan in the forearm, just below .the elbow. The Sarge didn't even jump. Keenan fell ) off the couch and curled up in a ball, holding his arm and howling.  'The safe,' I said.  Keenan continued to howl. 1 'I'll shoot you in the knee,' I said. 'I don't .know from personal experience, but I've heard that  hurts like a mad bastard.' / 'The print,' he gasped. 'The Van Gogh. Don't *shoot me anymore, huh?'' He looked at me,  grinning fearfully. + I motioned to Sarge with the gun. 'Stand facing the wall.' + The Sarge got up and looked at the wall, arms dangling limply. , 'Now you,' I said to Keenan. 'Go open the safe.' * 'I'm bleeding to death,' Keenan moaned. . I went over and stroked the butt of the .45 ,up the side of his cheek, laying back skin. 'Now - you're bleeding,' I told him. 'Go open the safe or you'll bleed more.' % Keenan got up, holding his arm and ,blubbering. He took the print off its hooks with his good . hand, revealing an office-gray wall safe. He,threw a terrified glance at me and began to twiddle - the dial. He made two false starts and had +to go back. The third time he got it open. There were ' some documents and two wads of bills +inside. He reached in, fumbled around, and came up with + two squares of paper, about three inches on a side. 2 I swear I didn't mean to kill him. I planned to *tie him up and leave him. He was harmless + enough; the maid would find him when she -got back from her lingerie party or wherever it was + she'd gone in her little Dodge Colt, and .Keenan wouldn't dare poke his nose out of his house for - a week. But it was like Sarge had said. He .did have two. And one of them had blood on it.. I shot him again, this time not in the arm. (He went down like an empty laundry bag. / Sarge didn't flinch. 'I wasn't crapping you. *Keenan jobbed your friend. They were both " amateurs. Amateurs are stupid.' / I didn't answer. I looked down at the squares,and shoved them into my pocket. Neither one ! had an X-marks-the-spot on it.  'What now?' Sarge asked.  'We go to your place.' + 'What makes you think my piece of the map is there?' / 'I don't know. Telepathy, maybe. Besides, if 2it isn't, we'll go where it is. I'm in no hurry.' % 'You've got all the answers, huh?'  'Let's go.' , We went back out to the carport. I sat in *the back of the VW, on the side away from him. His . bulk and the size of the car made a surprise0play on his part a joke; it would take him five ) minutes just to get turned around. Two #minutes later we were on the road. . It was starting to snow, big, sloppy flakes +that clung to the windshield and turned to instant * slush when they struck the pavement. It *was slippery going, but there wasn't much traffic. + After a half hour on Route 10, he turned +off onto a secondary road. Fifteen minutes later we # were on a rutted dirt track with -snow-freighted pines staring at us on either side. Two miles along ) we turned into a short, trash-littered driveway. . In the limited sweep of the VW's headlights +1 could make out a rickety backwoods shack with * a patched roof and a twisted TV aerial. -There was a snow-covered old Ford in a gully to the left. , Out in back was an outhouse and a pile of old tires. Hernando's Hideaway. - 'Welcome to Bally's East,' Sarge said, and killed the engine. % 'If this is a con, I'll kill you.' . He seemed to fill three-quarters of the tiny.vehicle's front seat. 'I know that,' he said.  'Get out.' * Sarge led the way up to the front door. ''Open it,' I said. 'Then stand still.' . He opened the door and stood still. I stood /still. We stood still for about three minutes, and * nothing happened. The only moving thing .was a fat gray squirrel that had ventured intothe + middle of the yard to curse us in lingua rodenta. ! 'Okay,' I said. 'Let's go in.' - Surprise, it was a dump. The one sixty-watt-bulb cast a grungy glow over the whole room, + leaving shadows like starved bats in the #corners. Newspapers were scattered helter-skelter. - Drying clothes were hung on a sagging rope..In one corner there was an ancient Zenith TV. In - the opposite corner was a rickety sink and .a stark, rust-stained bathtub on claw feet. A hunting / rifle stood beside it. The predominant odors were feet, farts, and chili. % 'It beats living raw,' Sarge said. - I could have argued the point, but didn't. !'Where's your piece of the map?'  'In the bedroom.'  'Let's go get it.' * 'Not yet.' He turned around slowly, his +dipped-in-concrete face hard. 'I want your word you + ain't going to kill me when you get it.' & 'How you going to make me keep it?' . 'Fuck, I don't know. I guess I'm just gonna )hope it was more than the money that got you . cranked up. If it was Barney, too wanting3to clean Barney's slate you did it, it's clean. + Keenan capped him and now Keenan's dead. )If you want the bundle, too, okay. Maybe threequarters + will be enough, and you were right my +piece has got a great big X on it. But you ( don't get it unless you promise I get something, too: my life.' + 'How do I know you won't come after me?' . 'But I will, sonny,' the Sarge said softly. 2 I laughed. 'All right. Throw in Jagger's address1and you've got your promise. I'll keep it, too.' . The Sarge shook his head slowly. 'You don't 0want to play with Jagger, fella, Jagger will eat  you up.' 2 I had dropped the .45 a little. Now I lifted it again. 0 'All right. He's in Coleman, Massachusetts. A "ski lodge. Is that good enough?'' & 'Yes. Let's get your piece, Sarge.' & The Sarge looked me over once more, *closely. Then he nodded. We went into the bedroom. , More Colonial charm. The stained mattress ,on the floor was littered with stroke-books and the ) walls were papered with photographs of )women who appeared to be wearing nothing but a thin * coating of Wesson Oil. One look at this .place and Dr. Ruth's head would have exploded.. The Sarge didn't hesitate. He picked up the +lamp on the night-table and pried the base off it. . His quarter of the map was neatly rolled up #inside; he held it out wordlessly.  'Throw it,' I invited. , The Sarge smiled thinly. 'Cautious little pencil-neck, aren't you?' ' 'I find it pays. Give it up, Sarge.' , He tossed it over to me. 'Easy come, easy go,' he said. * 'I'm going to keep my promise,' I said. +'Consider yourself lucky. Out in the other room.' . Cold light flickered in his eyes. 'What are you going to do?' . 'See that you stay in one place for awhile. Move.' * We went out into the main room, a nifty &little parade of two. The Sarge stood underneath the - naked lightbulb, back to me, his shoulders -hunched, anticipating the gunbarrel that was going to + groove his head very shortly. I was just ,lifting the gun to clout him when the light blinked out. & The shack was suddenly pitch black. ) I threw myself to the right; Sarge was .already gone like a cool breeze. I could hear the thump ) and tumble of newspapers as he hit the .floor in a flat dive. Then silence. Utter and complete. , I waited for my night vision, but when it %came it was no help. The place was a mausoleum in * which a thousand dim tombstones loomed. &And the Sarge knew every one of them. - I knew about Sarge; material on him hadn't )been hard to spade up. He'd been a Green Beret in ) Vietnam, and no one even bothered with .his real name anymore; he was just the Sarge, big and  murderous and tough. , Somewhere in the dark he was moving in on *me. He must have known the place like the back - of his hand, because there wasn't a sound, .not a squeaking board, not a foot scrape. But I could / feel him getting closer and closer, flanking .from the left or the right or maybe pulling a tricky $ one and coming in straight ahead. * The stock of the gun was very sweaty in /my hand, and I had to control the urge to fire it / wildly, randomly. I was very aware that I had*three-quarters of the pie in my pocket. I didn't + bother wondering why the lights had gone /out. Not until the powerful flashlight stabbed in - through the window, sweeping the floor in a+wild, random pattern that just happened to catch the , Sarge, frozen in a half-crouch seven feet +to my left. His eyes glowed greenly in the bright cone  of light, like cat's eyes. - He had a glinting razor blade in his right ,hand, and I suddenly remembered the way his hand * had been spidering up his coat lapel in Keenan's carport. ) The Sarge said one word into the flash beam. 'Jagger?' $ I don't know who got him first. A +large-caliber pistol fired once behind the flashlight beam, 0 and I pulled the trigger of Barney's .45 twice* pure reflex. The Sarge was thrown back against * the wall with force enough to knock him out of one of his boots.  The flashlight snapped off. / I fired one shot at the window, but hit only ,glass. I lay on my side in the darkness and realized * that I hadn't been the only one waiting .around for Keenan's greed to resurface. Jagger had been ) waiting, too. And, although there were ,twelve rounds of ammunition back in my car, there was  only one left in my gun. - You don't want to play with Jagger, fella, ,the Sarge had said, Jagger will eat you up. - I had a pretty good picture of the room in +my head now. I got up in a crouch and ran, stepping * over Sarge's sprawled legs and into the ,corner. I got into the bathtub and poked my eyes up over - the edge. There was no sound, none at all. &The bottom of the tub was gritty with flaked-off  bathtub ring. I waited. - About five minutes went by. It seemed like five hours. / Then the light nicked on again, this time in *the bedroom window. I ducked my head when it ( glared through the doorway. It probed briefly and clicked off. . Silence again. A long, loud silence. On the -dirty surface of Sarge's porcelain bathtub I saw , everything. Keenan, grinning desperately. .Barney, with the clotted hole in his gut, due east of his ' navel. Sarge, standing frozen in the )flashlight beam, holding the razor blade professionally - between thumb and first finger. Jagger, the,dark shadow with no face. And me. The fifth quarter. + Suddenly there was a voice, just outside +the door. It was soft and cultured, almost womanish, ( but not effete. It sounded deadly and competent as hell.  'Hey, beautiful.' , I kept quiet. He wasn't getting my number without dialing a little. + When the voice came again, it was by the 2window. 'I'm going to kill you, beautiful. I came to " kill them, but you'll do fine.' . A pause while he shifted position once more.+When the voice came again, it came from the, window just over my head the one above -the bathtub. My guts crawled into my throat. If he  flashed that light now . . . - 'No fifth wheels need apply,' Jagger said. 'Sorry.' - I could barely hear him moving to his next *position. It turned out to be back to the doorway. , 'I've got my quarter with me. You want to come and take it?' , I felt an urge to cough and repressed it. . 'Come and get it, beautiful.' His voice was *mocking. 'The whole pie. Come and take it away.' . But I didn't have to, and I suppose he knew .it. I was holding the chips. I could find the money . now. With his single quarter, Jagger had no chance. + This time the silence really spun out. A /half-hour, an hour, forever. Eternity squared. My body , started to stiffen. Outside, the wind was (tuning up, making it impossible to hear anything but / rattling snow against the walls. It was very .cold. The tips of my fingers were going numb. . Then, around one-thirty, a ghostly stirring ,sound like crawling rats in the darkness. I stopped + breathing. Somehow Jagger had got in. He *was right in the middle of the room . . . . Then I got it. Rigor mortis, hurried by the /cold, was rearranging Sarge for the last time, which  was all. I relaxed a little. ) That was when the door rammed open and /Jagger charged through, ghostly and visible in a + mantle of white snow, tall and loose and +gangling. I let him have it and the bullet punched a hole + through the side of his head. And in the ,brief gunflash, I saw that what I had holed was a * scarecrow with no face, dressed in some )farmer's thrown-out pants and shirt. The burlap head fell / off the broomstick neck as it hit the floor. Then Jagger was shooting at me. - He was holding a semi-automatic pistol, and-the innards of the bathtub were like a great / percussive hollow cymbal. Porcelain flew up, +bounced off the wall, struck my face. Wood / splinters and a single hot spent slug rained down on me. - Then he was charging, never letting up. He /was going to shoot me in the tub like a fish ina * barrel. I couldn't even put my head up. , It was Sarge who saved me. Jagger stumbled'over one big dead foot, staggered, and pumped , bullets into the floor instead of over my ,head. Then I was on my knees. I pretended I was Roger , Clemens. I pegged Barney's big .45 at his head. ) The gun hit him but didn't stop him. I -stumbled over the rim of the tub getting out to tackle , him, and Jagger put two groggy shots to myleft. . The faint silhouette stepped back, trying to+get a bead, one hand holding his ear where the gun - had hit him. He shot me through the wrist, *and his second shot ripped a groove in my neck. - Then, incredibly, he stumbled over Sarge's -feet again and fell backward. He brought the gun up - again and put one through the roof. It was -his last chance. I kicked the gun out of his hand, ) hearing the wet-wood sound of breaking /bones. I kicked him in the groin, doubling him up. I - kicked him again, this time in the back of 'the head, and his feet rattled a fast, unconscious tattoo - on the floor. He was as good as dead then, -but I kicked him again and again, kicked him until , there was nothing but pulp and strawberry -jam, nothing anyone could ever identify, not by teeth, 1 not by anything. I kicked him until I couldn't +swing my leg anymore, and my toes wouldn't  move. * I suddenly realized I was screaming and *there was no one to hear me but dead men. + I wiped my mouth and knelt over Jagger's body. - He had been lying about his quarter of the -map, as it turned out. It didn't surprise me much. 0 No, I take that back. It didn't surprise me atall. ( My heap was just where I had left it, *around the block from Keenan's house, but now it was just - a ghostly hump of snow. I had left Sarge's ,VW a mile back. I hoped my heater was still working. / I was numb all over. I got the door open and 0winced a little as I sat down inside. The creasein + my neck had already clotted over, but my wrist hurt like hell. + The starter cranked for a long time, and )the motor finally caught. The heater was working, and ) the one wiper cleared away most of the +snow on the driver's side. Jagger had been lying about his % quarter, and it hadn't been in the .unobtrusive (and probably stolen) Honda Civic he'd come in. . But his address had been in his wallet, and ,if I actually needed his quarter, I thought there was a / pretty good chance I could find it. I didn't .think I would; three pieces should be enough, . especially since Sarge's quarter was the one with the X. , I pulled out carefully. I was going to be ,careful for a long time. The Sarge had been right + about one thing: Barney had been a dope. .The fact that he'd also been my friend didn't matter # anymore. The debt had been paid. - In the meantime, I had a lot to be careful for.   -The Doctor's Case-  - I believe there was only one occasion upon *which I actually solved a crime before my slightly . fabulous friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. I say (believe because my memory began to grow hazy ( about the edges as I entered my ninth -decade; now, as I approach my centennial, the whole has ) become downright misty. There may have *been another occasion, but if so I do not remember it. ( I doubt that I shall ever forget this 'particular case no matter how murky my thoughts and , memories may become, and I thought I might+as well set it down before God caps my pen + forever. It cannot humiliate Holmes now, +God knows; he is forty years in his grave. That, I think, / is long enough to leave the tale untold. Even,Lestrade, who used Holmes upon occasion but , never had any great liking for him, never 0broke his silence in the matter of Lord Hull he - hardly could have done so, considering the -circumstances. Even if the circumstances had been , different, I somehow doubt he would have. 'He and Holmes baited each other, and I believe that * Holmes may have harbored actual hate in .his heart for the policeman (although he neverwould , have admitted to such a low emotion), but ,Lestrade had a queer respect for my friend. ) It was a wet, dreary afternoon and the .clock had just rang half past one. Holmes sat by the 0 window, holding his violin but not playing it,/looking silently out into the rain. There were times, ( especially once his cocaine days were +behind him, when Holmes would grow moody to the point ' of surliness when the skies remained +stubbornly gray for a week or more, and he had been + doubly disappointed on this day, for the +glass had been rising since late the night before and he . had confidently predicted clearing skies by -ten this morning at the latest. Instead, the mist, which , had been hanging in the air when I arose, .had thickened into a steady rain, and if therewas , anything that rendered Holmes moodier than*long periods of rain, it was being wrong. * Suddenly he straightened up, tweaking a ,violin string with a fingernail, and smiled - sardonically. 'Watson! Here's a sight! The "wettest bloodhound you ever saw!' , It was Lestrade, of course, seated in the )back of an open wagon with water running into his , close-set, fiercely inquisitive eyes. The )wagon had no more than stopped before he was out, + flinging the driver a coin, and striding -toward 22IB Baker Street. He moved so quicklythat I - thought he should run into our door like a battering ram. - I heard Mrs. Hudson remonstrating with him +about his decidedly damp condition and the ( effect it might have on the rugs both (downstairs and up, and then Holmes, who could make . Lestrade look like a tortoise when the urge *struck him, leaped across to the door and called + down, 'Let him up, Mrs. H. I'll put a ,newspaper under his boots if he stays long, but I / somehow think, yes, I really do think that ' , Then Lestrade was bounding up the stairs, .leaving Mrs. Hudson to expostulate below. His + color was high, his eyes burned, and his .teeth decidedly yellowed by tobacco werebared  in a wolfish grin. / 'Inspector Lestrade!' Holmes cried jovially. $'What brings you out on such a ' 0 No further did he get. Still panting from his .climb, Lestrade said, 'I've heard gypsies say the . devil grants wishes. Now I believe it. Come )at once if you'd have a try, Holmes; the corpse is . still fresh and the suspects all in a row.' / 'You frighten me with your ardor, Lestrade!' /Holmes cried, but with a sardonic little waggleof  his eyebrows. / 'Don't play the shrinking violet with me, man. I've come at the run to offer you the very ) thing for which you in your pride have )wished a hundred times or more in my own hearing: the  perfect locked-room mystery!' - Holmes had started into the corner, perhaps,to get the awful gold-tipped cane, which he was , for some reason affecting that season. Now+he whirled upon our damp visitor, his eyes wide.  'Lestrade! Are you serious?' - 'Would I have risked wet-lung croup riding /here in an open wagon if I were not?'' Lestrade  countered. ( Then, for the only time in my hearing ,(despite the countless times the phrase has been - attributed to him), Holmes turned to me and*cried: 'Quick, Watson! The game's afoot!' ( On our way, Lestrade commented sourly ,that Holmes also had the luck of the devil; although * Lestrade had commanded the wagon-driver *to wait, we had no more than emerged from our & lodgings when that exquisite rarity 'clip-clopped down the street: an empty hackney in what had + become a driving rain. We climbed in and .were off in a trice. As always, Holmes sat on the - lefthand side, his eyes darting restlessly -about, cataloguing everything, although therewas 1 precious little to see on that day . . . or so 1it seemed, at least, to the likes of me. I've no doubt , every empty street corner and rain-washed %shop window spoke volumes to Holmes. - Lestrade directed the driver to an address +in Savile Row, and then asked Holmes if he knew  Lord Hull. / 'I know of him,' Holmes said, 'but have never+had the good fortune of meeting him. Now I / suppose I never shall. Shipping, wasn't it?' - 'Shipping,' Lestrade agreed, 'but the good )fortune was yours. Lord Hull was, by all accounts / (including those of his nearest and ahem! / dearest), a thoroughly nasty fellow, and as dotty + as a puzzle-picture in a child's novelty .book. He's finished practicing both nastiness and dottiness + for good, however; around eleven o'clock 0this morning, just' he pulled out his turnip of a - pocket-watch and looked at it 'two hours-and forty minutes ago, someone put a knife inhis / back as he sat in his study with his will on the blotter before him.' / 'So,' Holmes said thoughtfully, lighting his /pipe, 'you believe the study of this unpleasantLord ( Hull is the perfect locked room of my .dreams, do you?' His eyes gleamed skeptically through a  rising rafter of blue smoke. 4 'I believe,' Lestrade said quietly, 'that it is.' + 'Watson and I have dug such holes before *and never struck water,' Holmes remarked, and he ( glanced at me before returning to his +ceaseless catalogue of the streets through which we passed. . 'Do you recall the "Speckled Band," Watson?'+ I hardly needed to answer him. There had *been a locked room in that business, true enough, * but there had also been a ventilator, a .poisonous snake, and a killer fiendish enough to introduce . the latter into the former. It had been the 0work of a cruelly brilliant mind, but Holmes hadseen to - the bottom of the matter in almost no time at all. * 'What are the facts, Inspector?' Holmes asked. - Lestrade began to lay them before us in the+clipped tones of a trained policeman. Lord Albert + Hull had been a tyrant in business and a -despot at home. His wife had gone in fear of him, and - had apparently been justified in doing so. +The fact that she had borne him three sons seemed in & no way to have moderated his savage *approach toward their domestic affairs in general and / toward her in particular. Lady Hull had been -reluctant to speak of these matters, but her sons had . no such reservations; their papa, they said,,had missed no opportunity to dig at her, to criticize 2 her, or to jest at her expense . . . all of this*when they were in company. When they were alone, - he virtually ignored her. Except, Lestrade ,added, when he felt moved to beat her, whichwas by # no means an uncommon occurrence. / 'William, the eldest, told me she always gave(out the same story when she came to the * breakfast table with a swollen eye or a -mark on her cheek: that she had forgotten to put on her . spectacles and had run into a door. "She ran+into doors once and twice a week," William said. "I , didn't know we had that many doors in the house." ' - 'Hmmm,' Holmes said. 'A cheery fellow! The sons never put a stop to it?' * 'She wouldn't allow it,' Lestrade said. / 'Insanity,' I returned. A man who would beat (his wife is an abomination; a woman who would , allow it an abomination and a perplexity. & 'There was a method in her madness, -though,' Lestrade said. 'Method and what you might call . 'an informed patience.' She was, after all, 'twenty years younger than her lord and master. Also, * Hull was a heavy drinker and a champion *diner. At age seventy, five years ago, he developed  gout and angina.' , 'Wait for the storm to end and then enjoy the sunshine,' Holmes remarked. 0 'Yes,' Lestrade said, 'but it's an idea which (has led many a man and woman though the devil's 1 door, I'll be bound. Hull made sure his family .knew both his worth and the provisions of his wijl. ( They were little better than slaves.' & 'With the will as their document of indenture,' Holmes murmured. + 'Exactly so, old boy. At the time of his &death, Hull's worth was three hundred thousand * pounds. He never asked them to take his .word for this; he had his chief accountant to the house , quarterly to detail the balance sheets of $Hull Shipping, although he kept the purse-strings firmly ( in his own hands and tightly closed.' 1 'Devilish!' I exclaimed, thinking of the cruel (boys one sometimes sees in Eastcheap or / Piccadilly, boys who will hold out a sweet to.a starving dog to see it dance . . . and then gobble it - themselves while the hungry animal watches.+I was shortly to find this comparison even more apt & than I would have thought possible. - 'On his death. Lady Rebecca was to receive .one hundred and fifty thousand pund'. William,- the eldest, was to receive fifty thousand; +Jory, the middler, forty; and Stephen, the youngest,  thirty.'' , 'And the other thirty thousand?' I asked. * 'Small bequests, Watson: to a cousin in +Wales, an aunt in Brittany (not a cent for Lady Hull's ' relatives, though), five thousand in .assorted bequests to the servants. Oh, and you'll like this, ( Holmes ten thousand pounds to Mrs. 'HemphilFs Home for Abandoned Pussies.' 1 'You're joking!' I cried, although if Lestrade ,expected a similar reaction from Holmes, he was - disappointed. Holmes merely re-lighted his /pipe and nodded as if he had expected this . . . this or + something like it. 'With babies dying of starvation in the East End and twelve-year-old children / working fifty hours a week in the mills, this-fellow left ten thousand pounds to a . . . a boardinghotel  for cats?' * 'Exactly so,' Lestrade said pleasantly. "'Furthermore, he should have left twenty-seven times that - amount to Mrs. Hemphill's Abandoned Pussies-if not for whatever happened this morning and  whoever did the business.' 0 I could only gape at this, and try to multiply&in my head. While I was coming to the conclusion , that Lord Hull had intended to disinherit %both wife and children in favor of a rest-home for ( felines, Holmes was looking sourly at ,Lestrade and saying something which sounded to me like a / total non sequitur. 'I am going to sneeze, amI not?' % Lestrade smiled. It was a smile of -transcendent sweetness. 'Yes, my dear Holmes! Often and  profoundly, I fear.' - Holmes removed his pipe, which he had just 1gotten drawing to his satisfaction (I could tell by * the way he settled back slightly in his +seat), looked at it for a moment, and then held it out into * the rain. More dumbfounded than ever, I #watched him knock out the damp and smouldering  tobacco.  'How many?' Holmes asked. - 'Ten,' Lestrade said with a fiendish grin. , 'I suspected it was more than this famous -locked room of yours that brought you out in the + back of an open wagon on such a wet day,'Holmes said sourly. 2 'Suspect as you like,' Lestrade said gaily. 'I'm.afraid I must go on to the scene of the crime  / duty calls, you know but if you'd like, I -could let you and the good doctor out here.' , 'You are the only man I ever met,' Holmes *said, 'whose wit seems to be sharpened by foul + weather. Does that perhaps say something *about your character, I wonder? But never mind . that is, perhaps, a subject for another day.+Tell me this, Lestrade: when did Lord Hull become " sure that he was going to die?' 0 'Die?' I said. 'My dear Holmes, whatever gives(you the idea that the man believed ' 2 'It's obvious, Watson,' Holmes said. 'CIB, as I +have told you at least a thousand times , character indexes behavior. It amused him .to keep them in bondage by means of his will . . . ' He ) looked an aside at Lestrade. 'No trust .arrangements, I take it? No entailments of anysort?'' , Lestrade shook his head. 'None whatever.'  'Extraordinary!' I said. ) 'Not at all, Watson; character indexes &behavior, remember. He wanted them to soldier along in . the belief that all would be theirs when he -did them the courtesy of dying, but he never actually ) intended any such thing. Such behavior .would, in fact, have run completely across the grain of ) his character. D'you agree, Lestrade?' 1 'As a matter of fact, I do,' Lestrade replied. ( 'Then we are very well to this point, ,Watson, are we not? All is clear? Lord Hull realizes he is . dying. He waits . . . makes absolutely sure 1that this time it's no mistake, no false alarm . . . and - then he calls his beloved family together. When? This morning, Lestrade?' # Lestrade grunted an affirmative. * Holmes steepled his fingers beneath his -chin. 'He calls them together and tells them he's made 0 a new will, one which disinherits all of them 3. . . all, that is, save for the servants, his few distant + relatives, and, of course, the pussies.' & I opened my mouth to speak, only to -discover I was too outraged to say anything. The image, , which kept returning to my mind, was that .of those cruel boys, making the starving East End - curs jump with a bit of pork or a crumb of +crust from a meat pie. I must add it never occurred to ) me to ask whether such a will could be +disputed before the bar. Today a man would have a deuce / of a time slighting his closest relatives in 0favor of a cat-hotel, but in 1899, a man's will was a * man's will, and unless many examples of *insanity not eccentricity but outright Insanity 0 could be proved, a man's will, like God's, wasdone. * 'This new will was properly witnessed?' Holmes asked. 0 'Indeed it was,' Lestrade replied. 'Yesterday 0Lord Hull's solicitor and one of his assistants + appeared at the house and were shown into,Hull's study. There they remained for about fifteen / minutes. Stephen Hull says the solicitor once/raised his voice in protest about something he - could not tell what and was silenced by *Hull. Jory, the middle son, was upstairs, painting, and . Lady Hull was calling on a friend. But both )Stephen and William Hull saw these legal fellows / enter, and leave a short time later. William .said that they left with their heads down, and/ although William spoke, asking Mr. Barnes ,the solicitor if he was well, and making some - social remark about the persistence of the -rain, Barnes did not reply and the assistant seemed - actually to cringe. It was as if they were ashamed, William said.' . Well, so much for that possible loophole, I thought. . 'Since we are on the subject, tell me about the boys,' Holmes invited. , 'As you like. It goes pretty much without +saying that their hatred for the pater was exceeded - only by the pater's boundless contempt for .them . . . although how he could hold Stephen in 0 contempt is . . . well, never mind, I'll keep things in their proper order.' * 'Yes, please be so kind as to do that,' Holmes said dryly. 2 'William is thirty-six. If his father had given .him any sort of allowance, I suppose he would be . a bounder. As he had little or none, he has .spent his days in various gymnasiums, involvedin 1 what I believe is called 'physical culture' -he appears to be an extremely muscular fellow " and his nights in various cheap ,coffee-houses, for the most part. If he did happen to have a bit of + money in his pockets, he was apt to take -himself off to a card-parlor, where he would lose it - quickly enough. Not a pleasant man, Holmes..A man who has no purpose, no skill, no hobby, / and no ambition (save to outlive his father) *could hardly be a pleasant man. I had the queerest ' idea while talking to him that I was *interrogating not a man but an empty vase upon which the / face of Lord Hull had been lightly stamped.' . 'A vase waiting to be filled up with pounds sterling,' Holmes commented. . 'Jory is another matter,' Lestrade went on. /'Lord Hull saved most of his contempt for him, - calling him from his earliest childhood by ,such endearing pet-names as "Fish-Face" and "Keg- , Legs" and "Stoat-Belly." It's not hard to +understand such names, unfortunately; Jory Hull stands + no more than five feet tall, if that, is %bow-legged, and of a remarkably ugly countenance. He 0 looks a bit like that poet fellow. The pouf.'  'Oscar Wilde?' asked I. , Holmes turned a brief, amused glance upon %me. 'I think Lestrade means Algernon Swinburne,' . he said. 'Who, I believe, is no more a pouf than you are, Watson.' , 'Jory Hull was born dead,' Lestrade said. 0'After he remained blue and still for an entire minute, ) the doctor pronounced him so and put a .napkin over his misshapen body. Lady Hull, in her one ) moment of heroism, sat up, removed the ,napkin, and dipped the baby's legs into the hot water, + which had been brought to be used at the -birth. The baby began to squirm and squall.' . Lestrade grinned and lit a cigarillo with a flourish. . 'Hull claimed this immersion had caused the )boy's bowed legs, and when he was in his cups, * he taxed his wife with it. Told her she /should have left well enough alone. Better Jory had been , born dead than lived to be what he was, he,sometimes said a scuttling creature with the legs of ! a crab and the face of a cod.' / Holmes's only reaction to this extraordinary ,(and to my physician's mind rather suspect) story + was to comment that Lestrade had gotten a*remarkably large body of information in a # remarkably short period of time. , 'That points up one of the aspects of the -case which I thought would appeal to you, my dear * Holmes,' Lestrade said as we swept into ,Rotten Row with a splash and a swirl. 'They need no . coercion to speak; coercion's what it would *take to shut em up. Ihey've had to remain silent all . too long. And then there's the fact that the/new will is gone. Relief loosens tongues beyond measure, I find.' * 'Gone!' I exclaimed, but Holmes took no *notice; his mind still ran upon Jory, the misshapen  middle child. ) 'Is he ugly, then?' he asked Leptrade. + 'Hardly handsome, but not as bad as some -I've seen,' Lestrade replied comfortably. 'I believe - his father continually heaped vituperation on his head because ' + ' because he was the only one who had *no need of his father's money to make his way in the # world,' Holmes finished for him. , Lestrade started. 'The devil! How did you know that?' , 'Because Lord Hull was reduced to carping ,at Jory's physical faults. How it must have chafed - the old devil to be faced with a potential *target so well armored in other respects! Baiting a man / for his looks or his posture may be fine for 0schoolboys or drunken louts, but a villain like Lord * Hull had no doubt become used to higher .sport. I would venture the opinion that he mayhave - been rather afraid of his bow-legged middle-son. What was Jory's key to the cell door?'' , 'Haven't I told you? He paints,' Lestrade said.  'Ah!' . Jory Hull was, as the canvases in the lower .halls of Hull House later proved, a very good + painter indeed. Not great; I do not mean .that at all. But his renderings of his mother and brothers - were faithful enough so that, years later, +when I saw color photographs for the first time, my + mind flashed back to that rainy November -afternoon in 1899. And the one of his father perhaps ( was a work of greatness. Certainly it 'startled (almost intimidated) with the malevolence that * seemed to waft out of the canvas like a -breath of dank graveyard air. Perhaps it was Algernon ) Swinburne that Jory resembled, but his .father's likeness at least as seen through the middle * son's hand and eye reminded me of an ,Oscar Wilde character: that nearly immortal rou,  Dorian Gray. - His canvases were long, slow processes, but-he was able to quick-sketch with such nimble ( rapidity that he might come home from *Hyde Park on a Saturday afternoon with as much as  twenty pounds in his pockets. / 'I'll wager his father enjoyed that,' Holmes -said. He reached automatically for his pipe, then ( put it back again. 'The son of a Peer *quick-sketching wealthy American tourists and their ' sweethearts like a French Bohemian.' 0 Lestrade laughed heartily. 'He raged over it, .as you may imagine. But Jory good for him! 2 wouldn't give over his selling stall in Hyde 2Park . . . not, at least, until his father agreed to an - allowance of thirty-five pounds a week. He called it low black mail.'  'My heart bleeds,' I said. , 'As does mine, Watson,' Holmes said. 'The -third son, Lestrade, quickly we've almost ! reached the house, I believe.' , As Lestrade had intimated, surely Stephen /Hull had the greatest cause to hate his father.As his $ gout grew worse and his head more -muddled, Lord Hull surrendered more and more of the + company affairs to Stephen, who was only )twenty-eight at the time of his father's death. The . responsibilities devolved upon Stephen, and .the blame also devolved upon him if his least . decision proved amiss. Yet no financial gain-accrued to him should he decide well and his  father's affairs prosper. . Lord Hull should have looked with favor upon.Stephen, as the only one of his children with an . interest in and an aptitude for the business&he had founded; Stephen was a perfect example of + what the Bible calls 'the good son.' Yet /instead of displaying love and gratitude, Lord Hull repaid - the young man's largely successful efforts -with scorn, suspicion, and jealousy. On many - occasions during the last two years of his +life, the old man had offered the charming opinion that * Stephen 'would steal the pennies from a dead man's eyes.' , 'The b-----d!' I cried, unable to contain myself. - 'Ignore the new will for a moment,' Holmes /said, steepling his fingers again, 'and return to the - old one. Even under the conditions of that +marginally more generous document, Stephen Hull * would have had cause for resentment. In ,spite of all his labors, which had not only saved the . family fortune but increased it, his reward *was still to have been the youngest son's share of the , spoils. What, by the way, was to have been-the disposition of the shipping company underthe - provisions of what we might call the Pussy Will?' / I looked carefully at Holmes, but, as always,/it was difficult to tell if he had attempted a small , bon mot. Even after all the years I spent +with him and all the adventures we shared, Sherlock , Holmes's sense of humor remains a largely "undiscovered country, even to me. , 'It was to be handed over to the Board of +Directors, with no provision for Stephen,' Lestrade * said, and pitched his cigarillo out the +window as the hackney swept up the curving drive of a - house which looked extraordinarily ugly to .me just then, as it stood amid its brown lawnsin the . driving rain. 'Yet with the father dead and *the new will nowhere to be found, Stephen Hull has * what the Americans call "leverage." The ,company will have him as managing director. They - should have done anyway, but now it will beon Stephen Hull's terms.' / 'Yes,' Holmes said. 'Leverage. A good word.' *He leaned out into the rain. 'Stop short, driver!' $ he cried. 'We've not quite done!' . 'As you say, guv'nor,' the driver returned, "'but it's devilish wet out here.' . 'And you'll go with enough in your pocket to.make your innards as wet and devilish as your ) out'ards,' Holmes said. This seemed to -satisfy the man, and he stopped thirty yards from the front - door of the great house. I listened to the +rain tip-tapping on the sides of the coach while Holmes 0 cogitated and then said: 'The old will the )one he teased them with that document isn't  missing, is it?' 0 'Absolutely not. It was on his desk, near his body.' . 'Four excellent suspects! Servants need not 0apply . . . or so it seems now. Finish quickly, . Lestrade the final circumstances, and thelocked room.' . Lestrade complied, consulting his notes from.time to time. A month previous, Lord Hull had 0 observed a small black spot on his right leg, ,directly behind the knee. The family doctor was ) called. His diagnosis was gangrene, an -unusual but far from rare result of gout and poor + circulation. The doctor told him the leg +would have to come off, and well above the site of the  infection. . Lord Hull laughed until tears streamed down ,his cheeks. The doctor, who had expected any, reaction but this, was struck speechless. -'When they stick me in my coffin, sawbones,' Hull said, - 'it will be with both legs still attached, thank you very much.' * The doctor told him that he sympathized 0with Lord Hull's wish to keep his leg, but that , without amputation he would be dead in six+months, and he would spend the last two in exquisite , pain. Lord Hull asked the doctor what his ,chances of survival should be if he were to undergo the - operation. He was still laughing, Lestrade -said, as though it were the best joke he had ever heard. + After some hemming and hawing, the doctorsaid the odds were even.  'Bunk,' said I. * 'Exactly what Lord Hull said,' Lestrade +replied, 'except he used a term more often used in ! dosses than in drawing-rooms.' ' Hull told the doctor that he himself -reckoned his chances at no better than one in five. 'As to 1 the pain, I don't think it will come to that,' .he went on, 'as long as there's laudanum and aspoon ) to stir it with in stumping distance.' . The next day, Hull finally sprang his nasty -surprise that he was thinking of changing his - will. Just how he did not immediately say. . 'Oh?' Holmes said, looking at Lestrade from ,those cool gray eyes that saw so much. 'And who,  pray, was surprised?' . 'None of them, I should think. But you know &human nature, Holmes; how people hope against  hope.' . 'And how some plan against disaster,' Holmessaid dreamily. - This very morning Lord Hull had called his *family into the parlor, and when all were settled, ( he performed an act few testators are +granted, one which is usually performed by the wagging . tongues of their solicitors after their own .have been forever silenced. In short, he read them his . new will, leaving the balance of his estate +to Mrs. Hemphill's wayward pussies. In the silence % that followed he rose, not without (difficulty, and favored them all with a death's-head grin. And . leaning over his cane, he made the following/declaration, which I find as astoundingly vile now . as I did when Lestrade recounted it to us in/that hackney cab: 'So! All is fine, is it not? Yes, very - fine! You have served me quite faithfully, ,woman and boys, for some forty years. Now I intend, $ with the clearest and most serene -conscience imaginable, to cast you hence. But take heart! , Things could be worse! If there was time, .the pharaohs had their favorite pets cats, for the / most part killed before they died, so the ,pets might be there to welcome them into the afterlife, ) to be kicked or petted there, at their 0masters' whims, forever . . . and forever . . . and forever.' - Then he laughed at them. He leaned over his(cane and laughed from his doughy, dying face, the + new will properly signed and properly .witnessed, as all of them had seen clutchedin one  claw of a hand. - William rose and said, 'Sir, you may be my +father and the author of my existence, but you are - also the lowest creature to crawl upon the ,face of the earth since the serpent tempted Eve in the  Garden.' 0 'Not at all!' the old monster returned, still /laughing. 'I know four lower. Now, if you will , pardon me, I have some important papers to-put away in my safe . . . and some worthless ones to  burn in the stove.' 0 'He still had the old will when he confronted $them?' Holmes asked. He seemed more interested  than startled.  'Yes.' - 'He could have burned it as soon as the new-one was signed and witnessed,' Holmes mused. ) 'He had all the previous afternoon and -evening to do so. But he didn't, did he? Why not? How ' say you on that question, Lestrade?' , 'He hadn't had enough of teasing them even(then, I suppose. He was offering them a chance 0 a temptation he believed all would refuse.'- 'Perhaps he believed one of them would not 1refuse,' Holmes said. 'Hasn't that idea at least - crossed your mind?' He turned his head and )searched my face with the momentary beam of his / brilliant and somehow chilling regard. .'Either of your minds? Isn't it possible that such a ' black creature might hold out such a .temptation, knowing that if one of his family were to - succumb to it and put him out of his misery+ Stephen seems most likely from what you say / that one might be caught . . . and swing for the crime of patricide?'' ' I stared at Holmes in silent horror. / 'Never mind,' Holmes said. 'Go on, Inspector - it's time for the locked room to make its  appearance, I believe.' ( The four of them had sat in paralyzed .silence as the old man made his long, slow wayup the . corridor to his study. There were no sounds /but the thud of his cane, the labored rattle ofhis - breathing, the plaintive miaow of a cat in (the kitchen, and the steady beat of the pendulum in the . parlor clock. Then they heard the squeal of )hinges as Hull opened his study door and stepped  inside. 0 'Wait!' Holmes said sharply, sitting forward. +'No one actually saw him go in, did they?' 1 'I'm afraid that's not so, old chap,' Lestrade 2returned. 'Mr. Oliver Stanley, Lord Hull's valet, 0 had heard Lord Hull's progress down the hall. -He came from Hull's dressing chamber, went to1 the gallery railing, and callec1 iown to ask if0all was well. Hull looked up Stanley saw him as 0 plainly as I see you right now, old fellow -and said all was absolutely tip-top. Then he rubbed , the back of his head, went in, and locked the study door behind him. * 'By the time his father had reached the ,door (the corridor is quite long and it may have taken ) him as much as two minutes to make his -way up it unaided) Stephen had shaken off hisstupor - and had gone to the parlor door. He saw the-exchange between his father and his father's man. Of , course Lord Hull was back-to, but Stephen +heard his father's voice and described the same / characteristic gesture: Hull rubbing the backof his head.' . 'Could Stephen Hull and this Stanley fellow *have spoken before the police arrived?' I asked  shrewdly, I thought. ( 'Of course they could,' Lestrade said .wearily. 'They probably did. But there was no collusion.' - 'You feel sure of that?' Holmes asked, but he sounded uninterested. , 'Yes. Stephen Hull would lie very well, I +think, but Stanley would do it very badly. Accept my 0 professional opinion or not, just as you like, Holmes.'  'I accept it.' * So Lord Hull passed into his study, the .famous locked room, and all heard the click of the lock - as he turned the key the only key there (was to that sanctum sanctorum. This was followed by - a more unusual sound: the bolt being drawn across.  Then, silence. . The four of them Lady Hull and her sons, )so shortly to be blue-blooded paupers looked - at one another in similar silence. The cat -miaowed again from the kitchen and Lady Hull said in - a distracted voice that if the housekeeper +wouldn't give that cat a bowl of milk, she supposed she - must. She said the sound of it would drive 0her mad if she had to listen to it much longer. She left , the parlor. Moments later, without a word .among them, the three sons also left. William went to + his room upstairs, Stephen wandered into ,the music room, and Jory went to sit upon a bench ( beneath the stairs where, he had told .Lestrade, he had gone since earliest childhood when he was + sad or had matters of deep difficulty to think over. . Less than five minutes later a shriek arose -from the study. Stephen ran out of the music room, * where he had been plinking out isolated -notes on the piano. Jory met him at the studydoor. - William was already halfway downstairs and -saw them breaking in when Stanley, the valet,, came out of Lord Hull's dressing room and 0went to the gallery railing for the second time./ Stanley has testified to seeing Stephen Hull .burst into the study; to seeing William reach the foot / of the stairs and almost fall on the marble; -to seeing Lady Hull come from the dining-room. doorway with a pitcher of milk still in one -hand. Moments later the rest of the servants had  gathered. / 'Lord Hull was slumped over his writing-desk .with the three brothers standing by. His eyes * were open, and the look in them . . . I 0believe it was surprise. Again, you are free to accept or 1 reject my opinion just as you like, but I tell -you it looked very much like surprise to me. 2 Clutched in his hands was his will . . . the old+one. Of the new one there was no sign. And there  was a dagger in his back.' . With this, Lestrade rapped for the driver togo on. # We entered the house between two (constables as stone-faced as Buckingham Palace sentinels. + Here to begin with was a very long hall, /floored in black and white marble tiles like a - chessboard. They led to an open door at the,end, where two more constables were posted: the - entrance to the infamous study. To the left-were the stairs, to the right two doors: the parlor and  the music room, I guessed. * 'The family is gathered in the parlor,' Lestrade said. / 'Good,' Holmes said pleasantly. 'But perhaps ,Watson and I might first have a look at the scene  of the crime?''  'Shall I accompany you?' , 'Perhaps not,' Holmes said. 'Has the body been removed?' * 'It was still here when I left for your 0lodgings, but by now it almost certainly will begone.'  'Very good.' , Holmes started away. I followed. Lestrade called, 'Holmes!' " Holmes turned, eyebrows raised. . 'No secret panels, no secret doors. For the /third time, take my word or not, as you like.' 5 'I believe I'll wait until . . . ' Holmes began and-then his breath began to hitch. He scrambled in . his pocket, found a napkin probably carried *absently away from the eating-house where we had * dined the previous evening, and sneezed 0mightily into it. I looked down and saw a large,scarred - tomcat, as out of place here in this grand -hall as would have been one of those urchins of whom I + had been thinking earlier, twining about -Holmes's legs. One of its ears was laid back against its - scarred skull. The other was gone, lost in (some long-ago alley battle, I supposed. + Holmes sneezed repeatedly and kicked out 'at the cat. It went with a reproachful backward look , rather than with the angry hiss one might +have expected from such an old campaigner. Holmes * looked at Lestrade over the napkin with .reproachful, watery eyes. Lestrade, not in the least put & out of countenance, thrust his head )forward and grinned like a monkey. 'Ten, Holmes,' he said. 2 'Ten. House is full of felines. Hull loved em.' And with that he walked off. / 'How long have you suffered this affliction, +old fellow?' I asked. I was a bit alarmed. , 'Always,' he said, and sneezed again. The .word allergy was hardly known all those years ago, ( but that, of course, was his problem. . 'Do you want to leave?' I asked. I had once .seen a case of near asphyxiation as the resultof * such an aversion, this one to sheep but #otherwise similar in all respects. 0 'He'd like that,' Holmes said. I did not need ,him to tell me whom he meant. Holmes sneezed, once more (a large red welt was appearing +on his normally pale forehead) and then we passed , between the constables at the study door. Holmes closed it behind him. . The room was long and relatively narrow. It -was at the end of something like a wing, the main - house spreading to either side from an area+roughly three-quarters of the way down the hall. ) There were windows on two sides of the .study and it was bright enough in spite of thegray, ( rainy day. The walls were dotted with *colorful shipping charts in handsome teak frames, and $ among them was mounted an equally )handsome set of weather instruments in a brass-bound, & glass-fronted case. It contained an .anemometer (Hull had the little whirling cups mounted on one % of the roofpeaks, I supposed), two *thermometers (one registering the outdoor temperature and the , other that of the study), and a barometer +much like the one, which had fooled Holmes into * believing the bad weather, was about to 1break. I noticed the glass was still rising, and then . looked outside. The rain was falling harder /than ever, rising glass or no rising glass. We believe , we know a great lot, with our instruments )and things, but I was old enough then to believe we , don't know half as much as we think we do,-and old enough now to believe we never will. * Holmes and I both turned to look at the *door. The bolt was torn free, but leaning inward, as it - should have been. The key was still in the #study-side lock, and still turned. - Holmes's eyes, watering as they were, were )everywhere at once, noting, cataloguing, storing. % 'You are a little better,' I said. * 'Yes,' he said, lowering the napkin and -stuffing it indifferently back into his coat pocket. 'He - may have loved em, but he apparently didn't*allow em in here. Not on a regular basis, anyway. # What do you make of it, Watson?' + Although my eyes were slower than his, I ,was also looking around. The double windows were . all locked with thumb-turns and small brass 'side-bolts. None of the panes had been broken. Most & of the framed charts and the box of 'weather instruments were between these windows. The other . two walls were filled with books. There was )a small coal-stove but no fireplace; the murderer + hadn't come down the chimney like Father +Christmas, not unless he was narrow enough to fit - through a stovepipe and clad in an asbestos)suit, for the stove was still very warm. * The desk stood at one end of this long, .narrow, well-lit room; the opposite end was a 0 pleasantly bookish area, not quite a library, ,with two high-backed upholstered chairs and a + coffee-table between them. On this table -was a random stack of volumes. The floor was covered . with a Turkish rug. If the murderer had come,through a trap-door, I hadn't the slightest idea how * he'd gotten back under that rug without 1disarranging it . . . and it was not disarranged, not in the - slightest: the shadows of the coffee-table ,legs lay across it without even a hint of a ripple. . 'Did you believe it, Watson?' Holmes asked, %snapping me out of what was almost a hypnotic / trance. Something . . . something about that coffee-table . . .  'Believe what, Holmes?' . 'That all four of them simply walked out of /the parlor, in four different directions, four  minutes before the murder?' " 'I don't know,' I said faintly. 2 'I don't believe it; not for a mo ' He broke "off. 'Watson! Are you all right?' . 'No,' I said in a voice I could hardly hear ,myself. I collapsed into one of the library chairs. My . heart was beating too fast. I couldn't seem *to catch my breath. My head was pounding; my eyes * seemed to have suddenly grown too large .for their sockets. I could not take them from the , shadows of the coffee-table legs upon the 7rug. 'I am most . . . definitely not . . . all right.' * At that moment Lestrade appeared in the 2study doorway. 'If you've looked your fill, H 'He . broke off. 'What the devil's the matter with Watson?' / 'I believe,' said Holmes in a calm, measured -voice, 'that Watson has solved the case. Haveyou,  Watson?' ) I nodded my head. Not the entire case, ,perhaps, but most of it. I knew who; I knew how. . 'Is it this way with you, Holmes?' I asked. 'When you . . . see?' . 'Yes,' he said, 'though I usually manage to keep my feet.' , 'Watson's solved the case?' Lestrade said .impatiently. 'Bah! Watson's offered a thousand, solutions to a hundred cases before this, .Holmes, as you very well know, and all of themwrong. 1 It's his b te noire. Why, I remember just thislast summer ' * 'I know more about Watson than you ever /shall,' Holmes said, 'and this time he has hit upon it. . I know the look.' He began to sneeze again; *the cat with the missing ear had wandered into the , room through the door, which Lestrade had +left open. It moved directly toward Holmes with an , expression of what seemed to be affection on its ugly face. 6 'If this is how it is for you,' I said, 'I'll never (envy you again, Holmes. My heart should burst.' ( 'One becomes inured even to insight,' -Holmes said, with not the slightest trace of conceit in his . voice. 'Out with it, then . . . or shall we .bring in the suspects, as in the last chapter of a detective  novel?' . 'No!' I cried in horror. I had seen none of -them; I had no urge to. 'Only I think I must show you ( how it was done. If you and Inspector 0Lestrade will only step out into the hall for a moment . . . ' , The cat reached Holmes and jumped into his0lap, purring like the most satisfied creature on  earth. . Holmes exploded into a perfect fusillade of ,sneezes. The red patches on his face, which had - begun to fade, burst out afresh. He pushed the cat away and stood up. * 'Be quick, Watson, so we can leave this .damned place,' he said in a muffled voice, and left the  room with his shoulders in an +uncharacteristic hunch, his head down, and with not a single look / back. Believe me when I say that a little of my heart went with him. . Lestrade stood leaning against the door, his0wet coat steaming slightly, his lips parted in a. detestable grin. 'Shall I take Holmes's new admirer, Watson?' / 'Leave it,' I said, 'and close the door when you go out.' 0 'I'd lay a fiver you're wasting our time, old )man,' Lestrade said, but I saw something different 0 in his eyes: if I'd offered to take him up on (the wager, he would have found a way to squirm out  of it. 3 'Close the door,' I repeated. 'I shan't be long.', He closed the door. I was alone in Hull's +study . . . except for the cat, of course, which was - now sitting in the middle of the rug, tail )curled neatly about its paws, green eyes watching me. ( I felt in my pockets and found my own ,souvenir from last night's dinner men on their own . are rather untidy people, I fear, but there -was a reason for the bread other than general0 slovenliness. I almost always kept a crust in -one pocket or the other, for it amused me to feed the ' pigeons that landed outside the very *window where Holmes had been sitting when Lestrade  drove up. - 'Pussy,' said I, and put the bread beneath -the coffee-table the coffee-table to whichLord , Hull would have presented his back when he.sat down with his two wills, the wretched old one & and the even more wretched new one. 'Puss-puss-puss.' , The cat rose and walked languidly beneath $the table to investigate the crust. - I went to the door and opened it. 'Holmes! Lestrade! Quickly!'  They came in. . 'Step over here,' I said, and walked to the coffee-table. , Lestrade looked about and began to frown, ,seeing nothing; Holmes, of course, began to sneeze , again. 'Can't we have that wretched thing *out of here?'' he managed from behind the tablenapkin,  which was now quite soggy. ) 'Of course,' said I. 'But where is the wretched thing, Holmes?' - A startled expression filled his wet eyes. 'Lestrade whirled, walked toward Hull's writing-desk, ( and peered behind it. Holmes knew his ,reaction should not have been so violent if the cat had , been on the far side of the room. He bent )and looked beneath the coffee-table, saw nothing but ( the rug and the bottom row of the two (bookcases opposite, and straightened up again. If his eyes + had not been spouting like fountains, he .should have seen all then; he was, after all, right on top - of it. But one must also give credit where /credit is due, and the illusion was devilishly good. The # empty space beneath his father's .coffee-table had been Jory Hull's masterpiece.0 'I don't ' Holmes began, and then the cat, ,who found my friend much more to its liking than . any stale crust of bread, strolled out from )beneath the table and began once more to twine . ecstatically about his ankles. Lestrade had .returned, and his eyes grew so wide I thought they ' might actually fall out. Even having +understood the trick, I myself was amazed. The scarred + tomcat seemed to be materializing out of .thin air; head, body, white-tipped tail last. - It rubbed against Holmes's leg, purring as Holmes sneezed. 0 'That's enough,' I said. 'You've done your joband may leave.' 0 I picked it up, took it to the door (getting a*good scratch for my pains), and tossed it , unceremoniously into the hall. I shut the door behind it. - Holmes was sitting down. 'My God,' he said (in a nasal, clogged voice. Lestrade was incapable / of any speech at all. His eyes never left the,table and the faded Turkish rug beneath its legs: an + empty space that had somehow given birth to a cat. . 'I should have seen,' Holmes was muttering. 0'Yes . . . but you . . . how did you understand so - quickly?' I detected the faintest hurt and -pique in that voice, and forgave it at once. 1 'It was those,' I said, and pointed at the rug.) 'Of course!' Holmes nearly groaned. He +slapped his welted forehead. 'Idiot! I'm a perfect  idiot!' 1 'Nonsense,' I said tartly. 'With a houseful of *cats and one who has apparently picked you , out for a special friend I suspect you were seeing ten of everything.' ' 'What about the rug?' Lestrade asked .impatiently. 'It's very nice, I'll grant, and probably  expensive, but ' ( 'Not the rug,' I said. 'The shadows.' + 'Show him, Watson,' Holmes said wearily, "lowering the napkin into his lap. + So I bent and picked one of them off the floor. . Lestrade sat down in the other chair, hard, %like a man who has been unexpectedly punched. - 'I kept looking at them, you see,' I said, .speaking in a tone which could not help being apologetic. / This seemed all wrong. It was Holmes's job to,explain the whos and hows at the end of the - investigation. Yet while I saw that he now -understood everything, I knew he would refuseto . speak in this case. And I suppose a part of *me the part that knew I would probably never have . another chance to do something like this -wanted to be the one to explain. And the cat was . rather a nice touch, I must say. A magician -could have done no better with a rabbit and a top-hat. - 'I knew something was wrong, but it took a 'moment for it to sink in. This room is extremely , bright, but today it's pouring down rain. -Look around and you'll see that not a single object in , this room casts a shadow . . . except for these table-legs.'  Lestrade uttered an oath. 0 'It's rained for nearly a week,' I said, 'but *both Holmes's barometer and the late Lord Hull's' 0 I pointed to it 'said that we could expect /sun today. In fact, it seemed a sure thing. So he ' added the shadows as a final touch.'  'Who did?' . 'Jory Hull,' Holmes said in that same weary tone. 'Who else?' * I bent down and reached my hand beneath &the right end of the coffee-table. It disappeared into * thin air, just as the cat had appeared. *Lestrade uttered another startled oath. I tapped the back of + the canvas stretched tightly between the ,forward legs of the coffee-table. The books and the rug / bulged and rippled, and the illusion, nearly 0perfect as it had been, was instantly dispelled.. Jory Hull had painted the nothing under his +father's coffee-table, had crouched behind the * nothing as his father entered the room, .locked the door, and sat at his desk with his two wills, and ) at last had rushed out from behind the nothing, dagger in hand. ) 'He was the only one who could execute 1such an extraordinary piece of realism,'' I said,this + time running my hand down the face of the*canvas. We could all hear the low rasping sound it . made, like the purr of a very old cat. 'The ,only one who could execute it, and the only one who . could hide behind it: Jory Hull, who was no &more than five feet tall, bow-legged, slumpshouldered. 0 'As Holmes said, the surprise of the new will .was no surprise. Even if the old man had been - secretive about the possibility of cutting 0the relatives out of the will, which he wasn't, only , simpletons could have mistaken the import *of the visit from the solicitor and, more important, + the assistant. It takes two witnesses to *make a will a valid document at Chancery. What Holmes ' said about some people preparing for .disaster was very true. A canvas as perfect as this was not ) made overnight, or in a month. You may +find he had it ready, should it need to be used, for as  long as a year ' " 'Or five,' Holmes interpolated. . 'I suppose. At any rate, when Hull announced/that he wanted to see his family in the parlor this , morning, I imagine Jory knew the time had ,come. After his father had gone to bed last night, he ( would have come down here and mounted +his canvas. I suppose he may have put down the faux - shadows at the same time, but if I had been/Jory I should have tip-toed in here for anotherpeek ( at the glass this morning, before the .previously announced parlor gathering, just to make sure it . was still rising. If the door was locked, I -suppose he filched the key from his father's pocket and  returned it later.' 1 'Wasn't locked,' Lestrade said laconically. 'As.a rule he kept the door shut to keep the cats out,  but rarely locked it.' / 'As for the shadows, they are just strips of -felt, as you now see. His eye was good, they are & about where they would have been at 0eleven this morning . . . if the glass had been right.' - 'If he expected the sun to be shining, why *did he put down shadows at all?' Lestrade grumped. + 'Sun puts em down as a matter of course, ,just in case you've never noticed your own, Watson.' / Here I was at a loss. I looked at Holmes, who(seemed grateful to have any part in the answer. / 'Don't you see? That is the greatest irony of'all! If the sun had shone as the glass suggested it + would, the canvas would have blocked the (shadows. Painted shadow-legs don't cast them, you * know. He was caught by shadows on a day +when there were none because he was afraid he + would be caught by none on a day when his*father's barometer said they would almost certainly # be everywhere else in the room.' 0 'I still don't understand how Jory got in here)without Hull seeing him,' Lestrade said. , 'That puzzles me as well,' Holmes said /dear old Holmes! I doubt that it puzzled him a bit, ' but that was what he said. 'Watson?' / 'The parlor where Lord Hull met with his wife+and sons has a door which communicates with  the music room, does it not?' , 'Yes,' Lestrade said, 'and the music room (has a door which communicates with Lady Hull's - morning room, which is next in line as one ,goes toward the back of the house. But from the , morning room one can only go back into the+hall, Doctor Watson. If there had been two doors / into Hull's study, I should hardly have come #after Holmes on the run as I did.' & He said this last in tones of faint -self-justification. 'Oh, Jory went back into the hall, all right,' + I said, 'but his father didn't see him.'  'Rot!' . 'I'll demonstrate,' I said, and went to the .writing-desk, where the dead man's cane still leaned. I , picked it up and turned toward them. 'The 0very instant Lord Hull left the parlor, Jory wasup and  on the run.' - Lestrade shot a startled glance at Holmes; .Holmes gave the inspector a cool, ironic look in + return. I did not understand those looks ,then, nor give them much thought at all, if the whole 0 truth be told. I did not fully understand the /wider implications of the picture I was drawingfor - yet awhile. I was too wrapped up in my own re-creation, I suppose. * 'He nipped through the first connecting -door, ran across the music room, and entered Lady / Hull's morning room. He went to the hall door-then and peeked out. If Lord Hull's gout had & gotten so bad as to have brought on +gangrene, he would have progressed no more than a quarter ( of the way down the hall, and that is -optimistic. Now mark me, Inspector Lestrade, and I will & show you the price a man pays for a /lifetime of rich food and strong drink. If you harbor any * doubts when I've done, I shall parade a *dozen gout sufferers before you, and each one will show + the same ambulatory symptoms I now intend,to demonstrate. Please notice above all how fixed $ my attention is . . . and where.' + With that I began to stump slowly across )the room toward them, both hands clamped tightly - on the ball of the cane. I would raise one +foot quite high, bring it down, pause, and then draw the . other leg along. Never did my eyes look up. *Instead, they alternated between the cane and that  forward foot. / 'Yes,' Holmes said quietly. 'The good doctor /is exactly right, Inspector Lestrade. The gout . comes first; then the loss of balance; then )(if the sufferer lives long enough), the characteristic , stoop brought on by always looking down.' * 'Jory would have been very aware of how .his father fixed his attention when he walked from . place to place,' I said. 'As a result, what /happened this morning was diabolically simple. When + Jory reached the morning room, he peeped .out the door, saw his father studying his feetand the + tip of his cane just as always and +knew he was safe. He stepped out, right in front of his . unseeing father, and simply nipped into the *study. The door, Lestrade informs us, was unlocked, , and really, how great would the risk have ,been? They were in the hall together for no more than 0 three seconds, and probably a little less.' I 1paused. 'That hall floor is marble, isn't it? He must  have kicked off his shoes.' 0 'He was wearing slippers,' Lestrade said in a *strangely calm tone of voice, and for the second  time, his eyes met Holmes's. 3 'Ah,' I said. 'I see. Jory gained the study well .ahead of his father and hid behind his cunning* stage-flat. Then he withdrew the dagger -and waited. His father reached the end of the hall. Jory , heard Stanley call down to him, and heard ,his father call back that he was fine. Then Lord Hull , entered his study for the last time . . . &closed the door . . . and locked it.' . They were both looking at me intently, and I,understood some of the godlike power Holmes ( must have felt at moments like these, ,telling others what only he could know. And yet, I must 0 repeat that it is a feeling I should not have -wanted to have too often. I believe the urge to repeat + such a feeling would have corrupted most .men men with less iron in their souls than was * possessed by my friend Sherlock Holmes. + 'Old Keg-Legs would have made himself as (small as possible before the locking-up happened, , perhaps knowing (or only suspecting) that *his father would have one good look round before , turning the key and shooting the bolt. He )may have been gouty and going a bit soft about the , edges, but that doesn't mean he was going blind.' ) 'Stanley says his eyes were top-hole,' 1Lestrade said. 'One of the first things I asked.'/ 'So he looked round,' I said, and suddenly I .could see it, and I suppose this was also the way it - was with Holmes; this reconstruction which,+while based only upon facts and deduction, seemed / to be half a vision. 'He saw nothing to alarm-him; nothing but the study as it always was, empty , save for himself. It is a remarkably open +room I see no closet door, and with the windows on * both sides, there are no dark nooks and %crannies even on such a day as this. . 'Satisfied that he was alone, he closed the .door, turned his key, and shot the bolt. Jory would , have heard him stump his way across to the*desk. He would have heard the heavy thump and , wheeze of the chair cushion as his father &landed on it a man in whom gout is well-advanced + does not sit so much as position himself (over a soft spot and then drop onto it, seat-first and - then Jory would at last have risked a look out.'  I glanced at Holmes. - 'Go on, old man,' he said warmly. 'You are 2doing splendidly. Absolutely first rate.' I saw he, meant it. Thousands would have called him *cold, and they would not have been wrong, , precisely, but he also had a large heart. ,Holmes simply protected it better than most men do. . 'Thank you. Jory would have seen his father ,put his cane aside, and place the papers the . two packets of papers on the blotter. He 0did not kill his father immediately, although hecould ) have done; that's what's so gruesomely /pathetic about this business, and that's why I wouldn't go ( into that parlor where they are for a -thousand pounds. I wouldn't go in unless you and your men  dragged me.' # 'How do you know he didn't do it immediately?' Lestrade asked. - 'The scream came several minutes after the ,key was turned and the bolt drawn; you said so ) yourself, and I assume you have enough -testimony on that point not to doubt it. Yet it can only + be a dozen long paces from door to desk. .Even for a gouty man like Lord Hull, it would have , taken half a minute, forty seconds at the -outside, to cross to the chair and sit down. Add fifteen , seconds for him to prop his cane where you,found it, and put his wills on the blotter. % 'What happened then? What happened .during that last minute or two, a short time, which must + have seemed to Jory Hull, at least /almost endless? I believe Lord Hull simply sat there, + looking from one will to the other. Jory ,would have been able to tell the difference between the - two easily enough; the differing colors of +the parchment would have been all the clew he needed. , 'He knew his father intended to throw one /of them into the stove; I believe he waited to see / which one it would be. There was, after all, .a chance that the old devil was only having a cruel * practical joke at his family's expense. ,Perhaps he would burn the new will, and put the old one , back in the safe. Then he could have left .the room and told his family the new will was safely put + away. Do you know where it is, Lestrade? The safe?' . 'Five of the books in that case swing out,' .Lestrade said briefly, pointing to a shelf in the  library area. + 'Both family and old man would have been ,satisfied then; the family would have known their - earned inheritances were safe, and the old -man would have gone to his grave believing hehad , perpetrated one of the cruelest practical /jokes of all time . . . but he would have gone as God's + victim or his own, and not Jory Hull's.' $ Yet a third time that queer look, &half-amused and half-revolted, passed between Holmes and  Lestrade. / 'Myself, I rather think the old man was only +savoring the moment, as a man may savor the+ prospect of an after-dinner drink in the +middle of the afternoon or a sweet after a long period of - abstinence. At any rate, the minute passed,/and Lord Hull began to rise . . . but with the darker ( parchment in his hand, and facing the )stove rather than the safe. Whatever his hopes may have . been, there was no hesitation on Jory's part,when the moment came. He burst from hiding, # crossed the distance between the -coffee-table and the desk in an instant, and plunged the knife - into his father's back before he was fully up. + 'I suspect the post-mortem will show the )thrust clipped through the heart's right ventricle and * into the lung that would explain the .quantity of blood expelled onto the desk-top. It also , explains why Lord Hull was able to scream ,before he died, and that's what did for Mr. Jory Hull.'  'How so?' Lestrade asked. . 'A locked room is a bad business unless you /intend to pass murder off as suicide,' I said, - looking at Holmes. He smiled and nodded at .this maxim of his. 'The last thing Jory would have / wanted was for things to look as they did . .+. the locked room, the locked windows, the man with - a knife in him where the man himself never (could have put it. I think he had never foreseen his , father dying with such a squawl. His plan .was to stab him, burn the new will, rifle the desk, ( unlock one of the windows, and escape ,that way. He would have entered the house byanother . door, resumed his seat under the stairs, and.then, when the body was finally discovered, itwould  have looked like robbery.' , 'Not to Hull's solicitor,' Lestrade said. ( 'He might well have kept his silence, 'however,' Holmes mused, and then added brightly, 'I'll , bet our artistic friend intended to add a .few tracks, too. I have found that the better class of - murderer almost always likes to throw in a ,few mysterious tracks leading away from the scene of , the crime.' He uttered a brief, humorless )sound that was more bark than laugh, and then looked + back from the window nearest the desk to 0Lestrade and me. 'I think we all agree it would have + seemed a suspiciously convenient murder, )under the circumstances, but even if the solicitor - spoke up, nothing could have been proved.' 1 'By screaming, Lord Hull spoiled everything,' I3said, 'as he had been spoiling things all his life., The house was roused. Jory must have been .in a total panic, frozen to the spot the way adeer is - by a bright light. It was Stephen Hull who 3saved the day . . . or Jory's alibi, at least, the one, + which had him sitting on the bench under )the stairs when his father was murdered. Stephen , rushed down the hall from the music room, ,smashed the door open, and must have hissed at Jory - to get over to the desk with him, at once, *so it would look as if they had broken in togeth ' ( I broke off, thunderstruck. At last I 'understood the glances, which had been flashing between ) Holmes and Lestrade. I understood what &they must have seen from the moment I showed them , the trick-hiding place: it could not have 0been done alone. The killing, yes, but the rest . . . - 'Stephen said he and Jory met at the study 2door,' I said slowly. 'That he, Stephen, burst it in , and they entered together, discovered the .body together. He lied. He might have done it to / protect his brother, but to lie so well when ,one doesn't know what has happened seems . .. seems  . . . ' . 'Impossible,' Holmes said, 'is the word for "which you are searching, Watson.' ' 'Then Jory and Stephen went in on it 3together,' I said. 'They planned it together . . . and in the , eyes of the law, both are guilty of their father's murder! My God!' , 'Not both of them, my dear Watson,' Holmes.said in a tone of curious gentleness. 'All of them.'  I could only gape. ( He nodded. 'You have shown remarkable +insight this morning, Watson; you have, in fact, 0 burned with a deductive heat I'll wager you'll,never generate again. My cap is off to you, dear - fellow, as it is to any man who is able to +transcend his normal nature, no matter how briefly. But ( in one way you have remained the same (dear chap you've always been: while you understand & how good people can be, you have no )understanding of how black they may be.' + I looked at him silently, almost humbly. - 'Not that there was much blackness here, if*half of what we've heard of Lord Hull was true,' ) Holmes said. He rose and began to pace /irritably about the study. 'Who testifies that Jory was ) with Stephen when the door was smashed in? Jory, naturally. . Stephen, naturally. But there are two other .faces in this family portrait. One belongs to - William, the third brother. Do you concur, Lestrade?' 1 'Yes,' Lestrade said. 'If this is the straight 0of the matter, William also had to be in on it. He said ) he was halfway down the stairs when he +saw the two of them go in together, Jory a little ahead.' ' 'How interesting!' Holmes said, eyes /gleaming. 'Stephen breaks in the door as theyounger + and stronger of course he must and so )one would expect simple forward momentum would , have carried him into the room first. Yet +William, halfway down the stairs, saw Jory enter first.  Why was that, Watson?' % I could only shake my head numbly. + 'Ask yourself whose testimony, and whose (testimony alone, we can trust here. The answer is * the only witness who is not part of the ,family: Lord Hull's man, Oliver Stanley. He approached - the gallery railing in time to see Stephen .enter the room, and that is just as it should have been, + since Stephen was alone when he broke it 1in. It was William, with a better angle from his place - on the stairs, who said he saw Jory precede(Stephen into the study. William said so because he ) had seen Stanley and knew what he must ,say. It boils down to this, Watson: we know Jory was / inside this room. Since both of his brothers *testify he was outside, there was, at the very least, , collusion. But as you say, the smooth way ,they all pulled together suggests something far more  serious.'  'Conspiracy,' I said. - 'Yes. Do you recall my asking you, Watson, /if you believed all four of them simply walked ( wordlessly out of that parlor in four *different directions after they heard the study door locked?'  'Yes. Now I do.' + 'The four of them.' He looked briefly at +Lestrade, who nodded, and then back at me. 'We know ' Jory had to have been up and off and *about his business the moment the old man left the parlor in - order to reach the study ahead of him, yet .all four of the surviving family including Lady Hull / say they were in the parlor when Lord Hull/locked his study door. The murder of Lord Hull * was very much a family affair, Watson.' ) I was too staggered to say anything. I ,looked at Lestrade and saw an expression on his face I + had never seen there before nor ever did )again; a kind of tired sickened gravity. ' 'What may they expect?' Holmes said, almost genially. . 'Jory will certainly swing,' Lestrade said. 3'Stephen will go to jail for life. William Hull mayget 1 life, but will more likely get twenty years in *Wormwood Scrubs, a kind of living death.' % Holmes bent and stroked the canvas "stretched between the legs of the coffee-table. It made / that odd hoarse purring noise. 'Lady Hull,'' +Lestrade went on, 'may expect to spend the next five - years of her life in Beechwood Manor, more &commonly known to the inmates as Poxy Palace . . . * although, having met the lady, I rather +suspect she will find another way out. Her husband's  laudanum would be my guess.' 1 'All because Jory Hull missed a clean strike,' -Holmes remarked, and sighed. 'If the old man $ had had the common decency to die 0silently, all would have been well. Jory would, as Watson , says, have left by the window, taking his /canvas with him, of course . . . not to mentionhis + trumpery shadows. Instead, he raised the ,house. All the servants were in, exclaiming over the , dead master. The family was in confusion. )How shabby their luck was, Lestrade! How close was , the constable when Stanley summoned him?' , 'Closer than you would believe,' Lestrade /said. 'Hurrying up the drive to the door, as a matter ) of fact. He was passing on his regular +rounds, and heard a scream from the house. Their luck was  shabby.' & 'Holmes,' I said, feeling much more .comfortable in my old role, 'how did you know a  constable was so nearby?' 1 'Simplicity itself, Watson. If not, the family (would have shooed the servants out long enough & to hide the canvas and 'shadows.' ' * 'Also to unlatch at least one window, I )should think,' Lestrade added in a voice uncustomarily  quiet. , 'They could have taken the canvas and the shadows,' I said suddenly. " Holmes turned toward me. 'Yes.'  Lestrade raised his eyebrows. - 'It came down to a choice,' I said to him. .'There was time enough to burn the new will orget , rid of the hugger-mugger . . . this would ,have been just Stephen and Jory, of course, in the + moments after Stephen burst in the door. -They or, if you've got the temperature of the * characters right, and I suppose you do, -Stephen decided to burn the will and hope for the best. * I suppose there was just enough time to chuck it into the stove.' - Lestrade turned, looked at it, then looked .back. 'Only a man as black as Hull would have ) found strength enough to scream at the end,' he said. * 'Only a man as black as Hull would have .required a son to kill him,' Holmes rejoined. , He and Lestrade looked at each other, and *again something passed between them, some . perfectly silent communication from which I myself was excluded. . 'Have you ever done it?' Holmes asked, as if#picking up on an old conversation. & Lestrade shook his head. 'Once came *damned close,' he said. 'There was a girl involved, not 1 her fault, not really. I came close. Yet . . . that was only one.' . 'And here there are four,' Holmes returned, *understanding him perfectly. 'Four people ill-used / by a villain who should have died within six months anyway.' & At last I understood what they were discussing. + Holmes turned his gray eyes on me. 'What *say you, Lestrade? Watson has solved this one, " although he did not see all the ,ramifications. Shall we let Watson decide?' / 'All right,' Lestrade said gruffly. 'Just be /quick. I want to get out of this damned room.' , Instead of answering, I bent down, picked .up the felt shadows, rolled them into a ball, and put + them in my coat pocket. I felt quite odd 0doing it: much as I had felt when in the grip of the fever & which almost took my life in India. * 'Capital fellow, Watson!' Holmes cried. *'You've solved your first case, become an accessory to * murder, and it's not even tea-time! And 1here's a souvenir for myself an original Jory Hull. I . doubt it's signed, but one must be grateful .for whatever the gods send us on rainy days.' He used , his pen-knife to loosen the artist's glue &holding the canvas to the legs of the coffee-table. He , made quick work of it; less than a minute +later he was slipping a narrow canvas tube into the , inner pocket of his voluminous greatcoat. , 'This is a dirty piece of work,' Lestrade +said, but he crossed to one of the windows and, after a * moment's hesitation, released the locks 0which held it and opened it half an inch or so. 0 'Say it's dirty work undone,' Holmes said in a,tone of almost hectic gaiety. 'Shall we go,  gentlemen?' - We crossed to the door. Lestrade opened it.-One of the constables asked him if there was any  progress. * On another occasion Lestrade might have ,shown the man the rough side of his tongue. This . time he said shortly, 'Looks like attempted -robbery gone to something worse. I saw it at once, of " course; Holmes a moment later.' + 'Too bad!' the other constable ventured. . 'Yes,' Lestrade said, 'but at least the old -man's scream sent the thief packing before hecould  steal anything. Carry on.' + We left. The parlor door was open, but I *kept my head down as we passed it. Holmes looked, + of course; there was no way he could not ,have done. It was just the way he was made. As for me, ) I never saw any of the family. I never wanted to. , Holmes was sneezing again. His friend was 0twining around his legs and miaowing blissfully.- 'Let me out of here,' he said, and bolted. + An hour later we were back at 221B Baker *Street, in much the same positions we had occupied + when Lestrade came driving up: Holmes in %the window-seat, myself on the sofa. . 'Well, Watson,' Holmes said presently, 'how $do you think you'll sleep tonight?' # 'Like a top,' I said. 'And you?' 1 'Likewise, I'm sure,' he said. 'T'm glad to be ,away from those damned cats, I can tell you that.' * 'How will Lestrade sleep, d'you think?' * Holmes looked at me and smiled. 'Poorly .tonight. Poorly for a week, perhaps. But then he'll be / all right. Among his other talents, Lestrade *has a great one for creative forgetting.'  That made me laugh. 2 'Look, Watson!' Holmes said. 'Here's a sight!' I'got up and went to the window, somehow sure . I would see Lestrade riding up in the wagon *once more. Instead I saw the sun breaking through + the clouds, bathing London in a glorious late-afternoon light. ( 'It came out after all,' Holmes said. *'Marvelous, Watson! Makes one happy to be alive!' He . picked up his violin and began to play, the sun strong on his face. + I looked at his barometer and saw it was 0falling. That made me laugh so hard I had to sit- down. When Holmes asked in tones of mild0irritation what the matter was, I could only - shake my head. I am not, in truth, sure he *would have understood, anyway. It was not the way his  mind worked.   -Umney's Last Case-  0 The rains are over. The hills are still green and in the valley across the * Hollywood hills you can see snow on the #high mountains. The fur stores are + advertising their annual sales. The call 'houses that specialize in sixteenyear- 0 old virgins are doing a land-office business. And in Beverly Hills the * jacaranda trees are beginning to bloom.  Raymond Chandler  The Little Sister  I. The News from Peoria ) It was one of those spring mornings so *LA-perfect you keep expecting to see that little trademark , symbol (R) stamped on it somewhere. -The exhaust of the vehicles passing on Sunset, smelled faintly of oleander, the oleander +was lightly perfumed with exhaust, and the sky ' overhead was as clear as a hardshell .Baptist's conscience. Peoria Smith, the blind paperboy, was * standing in his accustomed place on the /corner of Sunset and Laurel, and if that didn't mean God - was in His heaven and all was jake with theworld, I didn't know what did. - Yet since I'd swung my feet out of bed that)morning at the unaccustomed hour of 7:30 A.M., 0 things had felt a little off-kilter, somehow; .a tad woozy around the edges. It was only as Iwas - shaving or at least showing those pesky .bristles the razor in an effort to scare them into , submission that I realized part of the /reason why. Although I'd been up reading until at least , two, I hadn't heard the Demmicks roll in, +squiffed to the earlobes and trading those snappy oneliners * that apparently form the basis of their marriage. , Nor had I heard Buster, and that was maybe(even odder. Buster, the Demmicks' Welsh Corgi, , has a high-pitched bark that goes through 0your head like slivers of glass, and he uses it as much - as he can. Also, he's the jealous type. He 2lets loose with one of his shrill barking squalls every * time George and Gloria clinch, and when /they aren't zinging each other like a couple of* vaudeville comedians, George and Gloria -usually are clinching. I've gone to sleep on more than . one occasion listening to them giggle while *that mutt prances around their feet going - yarkyarkyark and wondering how difficult it-would be to strangle a muscular, medium-sizeddog + with a length of piano-wire. Last night, *however, the Demmicks' apartment had been as quiet as + the grave. It was passing strange, but a ,long way from earth-shattering; the Demmicksweren't + exactly your perfect life-on-a-timetable couple at the best of times. / Peoria Smith was all right, though chipper(as a chipmunk, just as always, and he'd * recognized me by my walk even though it .was at least an hour before my usual time. He was * wearing a baggy CalTech sweatshirt that &came down to his thighs and a pair of corduroy - knickers that showed off his scabby knees. -His hated white cane leaned casually against the side ( of the card-table he did business on.  'Say, Mr. Umney! Howza kid?' / Peoria's dark glasses glinted in the morning ,sunlight, and as he turned toward the sound of my , step with my copy of the LA Times held up .in front of him, I had a momentary unsettling , thought: it was as if someone had drilled .two big black holes into his face. I shivered the thought , off my back, thinking that maybe the time +had come to cut out the before-bedtime shotof rye. " Either that or double the dose. . Hitler was on the front of the Times, as he *so often was these days. This time it was something , about Austria. I thought, and not for the +first time, how at home that pale face and limp forelock . would have looked on a post-office bulletin board. 0 'The kid is just about okay, Peoria,' I said. 1'In fact, the kid is as fine as fresh paint on an outhouse wall.' ' I dropped a dime into the Corona box .resting atop Peoria's stack of newspapers. The Times is a - three-center, and over-priced at that, but /I've been dropping that same chip into Peoria's changebox . since time out of mind. He's a good kid, and-making good grades in school I took it on - myself to check that last year, after he'd *helped me out on the Weld case. If Peoria hadn't shown + up on Harris Brunner's houseboat when he .did, I'd still be trying to swim with my feet cemented & into a kerosene drum, somewhere off %Malibu. To say I owe him a lot is an understatement. # In the course of that particular /investigation (Peoria Smith, not Harris Brunner and Mavis / Weld), I even found out the kid's real name, .although wild horses wouldn't have dragged it out of ' me. Peoria's father took a permanent -coffee-break out a ninth-floor office window on Black , Friday, his mother's the only white frail +working in that goofy Chinese laundry down on La - Punta, and the kid's blind. With all that, &does the world need to know they hung Francis on him + when he was too young to fight back? The defense rests. . If anything really juicy happened the night .before, you almost always find it on the frontpage 1 of the Times, left side, just below the fold. I)turned the newspaper over and saw that a bandleader ) of the Cuban persuasion had suffered a +heart attack while dancing with his female vocalist at The - Carousel in Burbank. He died an hour later +at LA General. I had some sympathy for the ( maestro's widow, but none for the man *himself. My opinion is that people who go dancing in ! Burbank deserve what they get. , I opened to the sports section to see how -Brooklyn had done in their doubleheader with the ( Cards the day before. 'How about you, +Peoria? Everyone holding their own in your castle? Moats ' and battlements all in good repair?' " 'I'll say, Mr. Umney! Oh, boy!' - Something in his voice caught my attention,.and I lowered the paper to take a closer look at + him. When I did, I saw what a gilt-edged ,shamus like me should have seen right away: the kid & was all but busting with happiness. , 'You look like somebody just gave you six /tickets to the first game of the World Series,'I said.  'What's the buzz, Peoria?' . 'My mom hit the lottery down in Tijuana!' he)said. 'Forty thousand bucks! We're rich, brother!  Rich!' / I gave him a grin he couldn't see and ruffled-his hair. It popped his cowlick up, but what the / hell. 'Whoa, hold the phone. How old are you, Peoria?' , 'Twelve in May. You know that, Mr. Umney, .you gave me a polo-shirt. But I don't see what that has to do with ' $ 'Twelve's old enough to know that 'sometimes people get what they want to happen mixed up / with what actually does happen. That's all I meant.' , 'If you're talkin about daydreams, you're /right I do know all about em,' Peoria said, - running his hands over the back of his head*in an effort to make his cowlick lie down again, 'but 0 this ain't no daydream, Mr. Umney. It's real! *My Uncle Fred went down and picked up the cash . yest'y afternoon. He brought it back in the /saddlebag of his Vinnie! I smelled it! Hell, I rolled in + it! It was spread all over my mom's bed! /Richest feeling I ever had, let me tell you fortyfroggin-  thousand smackers!' ( 'Twelve may be old enough to know the (difference between daydreams and what's real, but it's 1 not old enough for that kind of talk,' I said. *It sounded good I'm sure the Legion of Decency + would have approved two thousand per cent) but my mouth was running on automatic pilot, , and I barely heard what was coming out of *it. I was too busy trying to get my brain wrapped - around what he'd just told me. Of one thing0I was absolutely positive: he'd made a mistake. He * must have made a mistake, because if it +was true, then Peoria wouldn't be standing here anymore + when I came by on my way to my office in .the Fulwider Building. And that just couldn't be. - I found my mind returning to the Demmicks, +who for the first time in recorded history hadn't / played any of their big-band records at full .volume before retiring, and to Buster, who forthe / first time in recorded history hadn't greeted.the sound of George's latchkey turning in the lock . with a fusillade of barks. The thought that .something was off-kilter returned, and it was stronger  this time. + Meanwhile, Peoria was looking at me with .an expression I'd never expected to see on his, honest, open face: sulky irritation mixed -with exasperated humor. It was the way a kid looks at a , windbag uncle who's told all his stories, +even the boring ones, three or four times. / 'Ain't you picking up on this newsflash, Mr. )Umney? We're rich! My mom ain't going to have - to press shirts for that damned old Lee Ho +anymore, and I ain't going to have to sell papers on the , corner anymore, shiverin when it rains in )the winter and havin to suck up to those nutty old bags . who work down at Bilder's. I can quit actin *like I died and went to heaven every time some $ blowhard leaves me a nickel tip.' 0 I started a little at that, but what the hell . I wasn't a nickel man. I left Peoria seven cents, day , in and day out. Unless I was too broke to ,afford it, of course, but in my business an occasional * stony stretch comes with the territory. , 'Maybe we ought to go up to Blondie's and .have a cup of java,' I said. 'Talk this thing over.'  'Can't. It's closed.' ! 'Blondie's? The hell you say!' , But Peoria couldn't be bothered with such (mundane stuff as the coffee shop up the street. 'You , ain't heard the best, Mr. Umney! My Uncle &Fred knows a doctor up in Frisco a specialist * who thinks he can do something about my ,eyes.' He turned his face up to mine. Below the + cheaters and his too-thin nose, his lips -were trembling. 'He says it might not be the optic nerves ) after all, and if it's not, there's an +operation . . . I don't understand all the technical stuff, but I - could see again, Mr. Umney!' He reached out1for me blindly . . . well, of course he did. How else + could he reach out? 'I could see again!' - He clutched at me, and I gripped his hands )and squeezed them briefly before pushing them - gently away. There was ink on his fingers, +and I'd been feeling so good when I got up that I'd put + on my new chalk worsted. Hot for summer, !of course, but the whole city is air-conditioned these - days, and besides, I was feeling naturally ,cool. I didn't feel so cool now. Peoria was looking up at # me, his thin and somehow perfect ,newsboy's face troubled. A little breeze scented with / oleander and exhaust ruffled his cowlick, .and I realized that I could see it because he wasn't + wearing his tweed cap. He looked somehow %naked without it, and why not? Every newsboy + should wear a tweed cap, just like every *shoeshine boy should wear a beanie cocked way back on  his head. + 'What's the matter, Mr. Umney? I thought .you'd be happy. Jeepers, I didn't have to comeout - here to this lousy corner today, you know, .but I did I even got here early, because I kinda had / an idea you'd get here early. I thought you'd+be happy, my mom hittin the lottery and me gettin a . chance at an operation, but you ain't.' Now 0his voice trembled with resentment. 'You ain't!'/ 'Yes I am,' I said, and I wanted to be happy . part of me did, anyway but the bitch of it + was that he was mostly right. Because it (meant things would change, you see, and things weren't ' supposed to change. Peoria Smith was ,supposed to be right here, year in and year out, with that - perfect cap of his tilted back on hot days .and pulled down low on rainy ones, so that the/ raindrops dripped off the bill. He was always-supposed to be smiling, was never supposed tosay 0 'hell' or 'frogging,' and most of all, he was supposed to be blind. 0 'You ain't!' he said, and then, shockingly, he-pushed his card-table over. It fell into the street, - papers flapping everywhere. His white cane /rolled into the gutter. Peoria heard it go and bent . down to get it. I could see tears coming out-from beneath his dark glasses and go rolling down / his pale, thin cheeks. He started groping for+the cane, but it had fallen near me and he was going - the wrong way. I felt a sudden strong urge /to haul off and kick him in his blind newsboy'sass. + Instead, I bent over, got his stick, and 'tapped him lightly on the hip with it. ' Peoria turned, quick as a snake, and +snatched it. Out of the corner of my eye I could see . pictures of Hitler and the recently deceased*Cuban bandleader flapping all over Sunset ( Boulevard a bus bound for Van Ness 0snored through a little drift of them, leaving a bitter tang * of diesel fumes behind. I hated the way -those newspapers looked, fluttering here and there. They * looked messy. Worse, they looked wrong. .Utterly and completely wrong. I fought anotherurge, - as strong as the first one, to grab Peoria +and shake him. To tell him he was going to spend the - morning picking up those newspapers, and I +wasn't going to let him go home until he'd gotten  every last one. ' It occurred to me that less than ten -minutes ago, I'd been thinking that this was the perfect LA & morning so perfect it deserved a -trademark symbol. And it had been, dammit. So where had $ things gone wrong? And how had it happened so fast? * No answers came, only an irrational but /powerful voice from inside, telling me that thekid's - mother couldn't have won the lottery, that .the kid couldn't stop selling newspapers, and that, , most of all, the kid couldn't see. Peoria .Smith was supposed to be blind for the rest of his life. / Well, it's got to be something experimental, 1I thought. Even if the doctor up in Frisco isn't a - quack, and he probably is, the operation's bound to fail. ) And, bizarre as it sounds, the thought calmed me down. - 'Listen,' I said, 'we got off on the wrong 0foot this morning, that's all. Let me make it upto you. . We'll go down to Blondie's and I'll buy you ,breakfast. What do you say, Peoria? You can dig into / a plate of bacon and eggs and tell me all ab  ' . 'Fuck you!' he shouted, shocking me all the (way down to my shoes. 'Fuck you and the horse ) you rode in on, you cheap gumshoe! You /think blind people can't tell when people like you are + lying through their teeth? Fuck you! And ,keep your hands off me from now on! I think you're a  faggot!' . That did it no one calls me a faggot and .gets away with it, not even a blind newsboy. I+ forgot all about how Peoria had saved my /life during that Mavis Weld business; I reachedfor his ) cane, meaning to take it away from him +and whack him across the keister with it a few times.  Teach him some manners. / Before I could get it, though, he hauled off .and slammed the cane's tip into my lower belly . and I do mean lower. I doubled up in agony, )but even while I was trying to keep from howling . with pain, I was counting my blessings; two 0inches lower still and I could have quit peepingfor a - living and gotten a job singing soprano in the Palace of the Doges. ) I made a quick, reflexive grab for him (anyway, and he brought the cane down on the back of 0 my neck. Hard. It didn't break, but I heard it/crack. I figured I could finish the job when I caught . him and ran it into his right ear. I'd show him who was a faggot. + He backed away from me as if he'd caught *my brainwave, and threw the cane into the street. 1 'Peoria,' I managed. Maybe it still wasn't too 0late to catch sanity by the shirttail. 'Peoria, what  the hell's wrong with ' - 'And don't call me that!' he screamed. 'My *name's Francis! Frank! You're the one who started , calling me Peoria! You started it and now 'everyone calls me that and I hate it!' , My watering eyes doubled him as he turned /and fled across the street, heedless of traffic(of . which there was currently none, luckily for 0him), hands held out in front of him. I thought he . would trip over the far curb was looking ,forward to it, in fact but I guess blind people must * keep a pretty good set of topographical +survey maps in their heads. He jumped onto the sidewalk , as nimbly as a goat, then turned his dark +glasses back in my direction. There was an expression ) of crazed triumph on his tear-streaked +face, and the dark lenses looked more like holes than ever. + Big ones, as if someone had hit him with "two large-caliber shotgun rounds. 2 'Blondie's is gone, I toldja!' he screamed. 'My )mom says he upped and ran away with that * redhead floozy he hired last month! You %should be so lucky, you ugly prick!' * He turned and went running up Sunset in *that strange way of his, with his splayed fingers held . out in front of him. People stood in little .clusters on both sides of the street, looking at him, * looking at the papers fluttering in the street, looking at me. # Mostly looking at me, it seemed. - This time Peoria well, okay, Francis )made it as far as Derringer's Bar before turning to  deliver one final salvo. - 'Fuck you, Mr. Umney!' he screamed, and ranon.  II. Vernon's Cough - I managed to pull myself erect and make my +way across the street. Peoria, aka Francis Smith, + was long gone, but I wanted to put those -blowing newspapers behind me, too. Looking atthem $ was giving me a headache that was )somehow worse than the ache in my groin. . On the far side of the street I stared into 'Felt's Stationery as if the new Parker ball-point pen in , the window was the most fascinating thing 0I'd ever seen in my life (or maybe it was those sexy . imitation-leather appointment books). After ,five minutes or so time enough to commit every * item in the dusty show-window to memory - I felt capable of resuming my interrupted voyage . up Sunset without listing too noticeably to port. ' Questions circled in my mind the way /mosquitoes circle your head at the drive-in in San Pedro + when you forget to bring along an insect +stick or two. I was able to ignore most of them, but a / couple got through. First, what the hell had .gotten into Peoria? Second, what the hell had gotten $ into me? I kept slapping at these /uncomfortable queries until I got to Blondie's City Eats, Open . 24 Hrs, Bagels Our Specialty, on the corner -of Sunset and Travernia, and when I got that far, + they were driven out in a single wallop. .Blondie's had been on that corner for as long as I could , remember the sharpies and the hustlers ,and the hipsters and the hypes going in and going out, * not to mention the debs, the dykes, and *the dopes. A famous silent-movie star was once arrested % for murder as he was coming out of .Blondie's, and I myself had concluded a nasty piece of - business there not so long ago, shooting a +coked-up fashion-plate named Dunninger who had . killed three hopheads in the aftermath of a ,Hollywood dope party. It was also the place where I'd % said goodbye to the silver-haired, 0violet-eyed Ardis McGill. I'd spent the rest of that lost night * walking in a rare Los Angeles fog which .might have only been behind my eyes . . . and trickling + down my cheeks, by the time the sun came up. 0 Blondie's closed? Blondie's gone? Impossible, ,you would have said more likely that the , Statue of Liberty should have disappeared )from her barren lick of rock in New York Harbor. , Impossible but true. The window which had -once held a mouth-watering selection of pies and ) cakes was soaped over, but the job had +been done indifferently, and I could see a nearly empty , room through the stripes. The lino looked .filthy and barren. The grease-darkened blades of the - overhead fans hung down like the propellers.of crashed airplanes. There were a few tables left, # and six or eight of the familiar .red-upholstered chairs piled on them with the legs sticking up, but , that was all . . . except for a couple of +empty sugar-shakers tumbled in one corner. / I stood there trying to get it into my head, .and it was like trying to get a big sofa up a narrow 1 flight of stairs. All that life and excitement,/all that late-night hustle and surprise how could it . be ended? It didn't seem like a mistake; it .seemed like a blasphemy. For me Blondie's had . summed up all the glittering contradictions 0that surround LA's essentially dark and loveless+ heart; I had sometimes thought Blondie's /was LA as I had known it over the last fifteen or twenty , years, only drawn small. Where else could +you see a mobster eating breakfast at 9:00 p.m. with a ) priest, or a diamond-decked glamorpuss %sitting on a counter-stool next to a grease-monkey . celebrating the end of his shift with a hot .cup of java? I suddenly found myself thinking of the ( Cuban bandleader and his heart attack (again, this time with considerably more sympathy. / All that fabulous starry City of Lost Angels /life do you get it, chum? Are you picking up this newsflash? , The sign hung in the door read CLOSED FOR *RENOVATIONS, REOPENING SOON, but I didn't / believe it. Empty sugar-shakers lying in the *corner do not, in my experience, indicate renovations 0 in progress. Peoria had been right: Blondie's -was history. I turned away and went on up the- street, but now I walked slowly and had to +consciously order my head to stay up. As I . approached the Fulwider Building, where I've-kept an office for more years than I like to think * about, an odd certainty gripped me. The )handles of the big double doors would be wrapped up in - a thick tow-chain and held with a padlock. .The glass would be soaped over in indifferent stripes. + And there would be a sign reading CLOSED !FOR RENOVATIONS, REOPENING SOON. + By the time I reached the building, this +nutty idea had taken over my mind with the force of a - compulsion, and not even the sight of Bill ,Tuggle, the rummy CPA from the third floor, going . inside could quite dispel it. But seeing is /believing, they say, and when I got to 2221, I saw no / chain, no sign, and no soap on the glass. It +was just the Fulwider, the same as ever. I went into - the lobby, smelled the familiar odor it -reminds me of the pink cakes they put in the urinals of ' public men's rooms these days and ,glanced around at the same ratty palm trees overhanging ! the same faded red tile floor. * Bill was standing next to Vernon Klein, /world's oldest elevator operator, in Car 2. In his + frayed red suit and ancient pillbox hat, -Vernon looks like a cross between the Philip Morris ( bellboy and a rhesus monkey which has )fallen into an industrial steam-cleaning machine. He $ looked up at me with his mournful +basset-hound eyes, which were watering from the Camel ) pasted in the middle of his mouth. His ,peepers should have gotten used to the smoke years ago; I ) couldn't remember ever having seen him .without a Camel parked in that same position. 0 Bill moved over a little, but not far enough. ,There wasn't room enough in the car for him to , move far enough. I'm not sure there would *have been room in Rhode Island for him to move far + enough. Delaware, maybe. He smelled like %bologna which has spent a year or so marinating in , cheap bourbon. And just when I thought it $couldn't get any worse, he belched.  'Sorry, Clyde.' - 'Well, you certainly ought to be,' I said, +waving the air in front of my face as Vern slid the gate - across the front of the car and prepared to,fly us to the moon . . . or at least to the seventh floor. . 'What drainpipe did you spend the night in, Bill?' + Yet there was something comforting about 3that smell I'd be lying if I said there wasn't. / Because it was a familiar smell. It was just )Bill Tuggle, odoriferous, hung over, and standing . with his knees slightly bent, as if someone -had filled the crotch of his underpants with chicken 0 salad and he'd just realized it. Not pleasant,.nothing about that morning's elevator ride was' pleasant, but it was at least known. , Bill gave me a sick smile as the elevator )began to rattle upward but said nothing. ) I swung my head in Vernon's direction, %mostly to get away from the smell of overbaked . accountant, but whatever small talk I'd been+meaning to make died in my throat. The two , pictures which had hung over Vern's stool ,since the beginning of time one of Jesus walking , on the Sea of Galilee while his boatbound )disciples gawped at him and the other of Vern's wife * in a buckskin-fringed Sweetheart of the 'Rodeo outfit and a turn-of-the-century hairdo were $ both gone. What had replaced them ,shouldn't have been shocking, especially in light of Vernon's * age, but it hit me like a barge-load of bricks just the same. - It was a card, that's all a simple card -showing the silhouette of a man fishing on a lake at - sunset. It was the sentiment printed below ,the canoe that floored me: HAPPY RETIREMENT!, You could have doubled the way I felt when,Peoria told me he might see again and still have , come up short. Memories flickered through &my mind with the speed of cards being shuffled by a - riverboat gambler. There was the time Vern .broke into the office next to mine to call an ( ambulance when that nutty dame, Agnes .Sternwood, first tore my phone out of the wall and then  swallowed what she swore was .drain-cleaner. The 'drain-cleaner' turned out to be nothing but - crystals of raw sugar, and the office Vern .broke into turned out to be a high-class horseparlor. + So far as I know, the guy who leased the +place and slapped MacKenzie Imports on the door is + still receiving his annual Sears Roebuck -catalogue in San Quentin. Then there was the guy Vern , cold-conked with his stool just before he ,could ventilate my guts; that was the Mavis Weld , business again, of course. Not to mention *the time he brought his daughter to me what a babe - she was! when she got involved with thatdirty-picture racket.  Vern retiring? & It wasn't possible. It just wasn't. 1 'Vernon,' I asked, 'what kind of joke is this?'+ 'No joke, Mr. Umney,' he said, and as he -brought the elevator car to a stop on Three, he began . to hack a deep cough I'd never heard in all 1the years I'd known him. It was like listening to, marble bowling balls rolling down a stone .alley. He took the Camel out of his mouth, andI was . horrified to see the end of it was pink, and)not with lipstick. He looked at it for a moment, , grimaced, then replaced it and yanked back.the accordion grille. 'Thuh-ree, Mr. Tuggle.'  'Thanks, Vern,' Bill said. ) 'Remember the party on Friday,' Vernon +said. His words were muffled; he'd taken a , handkerchief spotted with brown stains out+of his back pocket and was wiping his lips with it. 'I ) sure would admire for you to come.' He ,glanced at me with his rheumy eyes, and whatwas in ' them scared the bejabbers out of me. ,Something was waiting for Vernon Klein just around the , next bend in the road, and that look said .Vernon knew all about it. 'You too, Mr. Umney  we * been through a lot together, and I'd be $tickled to raise a glass with you.' 0 'Wait a minute!'' I shouted, grabbing Bill as /he tried to step out of the elevator. 'You waitjust a ' God damned minute, both of you! What party? What's going on here?' 2 'Retirement,' Bill said. 'It usually happens at +some point after your hair turns white, in case + you've been too busy to notice. Vernon's .party is going to be in the basement on Friday/ afternoon. Everybody in the building's going &to be there, and I'm going to make my worldfamous ) Dynamite Punch. What's the matter with *you, Clyde? You've known for a month that + Vern was finishing up on May thirtieth.' , That made me angry all over again, the way+I'd been when Peoria called me a faggot. I . grabbed Bill by the padded shoulders of his +double-breasted suit and gave him a shake. 'The hell  you say!' 0 He gave me a small, pained smile. 'The hell I -don't, Clyde. But if you don't want to come, fine. * Stay away. You've been acting poco loco "for the last six months, anyhow.' - I shook him again. 'What do you mean, poco loco?' . 'Crazy as a loon, nutty as a fruitcake, two +wheels off the road, out to lunch, playing without a - full deck any of those ring a bell? And *before you answer, just let me inform you that if you ( shake me one more time, even a little -shake, my guts are going to explode straight out through + my chest, and not even dry-cleaning will get that mess off your suit.' , He pulled away before I could do it again +even if I'd wanted to and started down the hall with * the seat of his pants hanging somewhere +down around the level of his knees, as per usual. He + glanced back just once, while Vernon was ,sliding the brass gate across. 'You need to take some ( time off, Clyde. Starting last week.' . 'What's gotten into you?' I shouted at him. -'What's gotten into all of you?' But by then the inner ( door was closed and we were headed up 0again this time to Seven. My little slice of heaven. + Vern dropped his cigarette butt into the -bucket of sand that squats in the corner, and immediately . stuck a fresh one in his kisser. He popped a,wooden match alight with his thumbnail, set the fag , on fire, and immediately started coughing +again. Now I could see fine drops of blood misting out * from between his cracked lips. It was a +gruesome sight. His eyes had dropped; they stared ' vacantly into the far corner, seeing .nothing, hoping for nothing. Bill Tuggle's BO hung between $ us like the Ghost of Binges Past. . 'Okay, Vern,' I said. 'What is it and where are you going?' + Vernon had never been one to wear out the+English language, and that at least hadn't changed. 2 'It's Big C,' he said. 'On Saturday I catch the -Desert Blossom to Arizona. I'm going to live with + my sister. I don't expect to wear out my *welcome, though. She might have to change the bed , twice.' He brought the elevator to a stop .and rattled the gate back. 'Seven, Mr. Umney. Your little . slice of heaven.' He smiled at that just as 0he always did, but this time it looked like the kind of , smile you see on the candy skulls down in !Tijuana, on the Day of the Dead. ) Now that the elevator door was open, I 0smelled something up here in my little slice of heaven , that was so out of place it took a moment -for me to recognize it: fresh paint. Once it was noted, I % filed it. I had other fish to fry. 2 'This isn't right,' I said. 'You know it isn't, Vern.' + He turned his frightening vacant eyes on .me. Death in them, a black shape flapping and ( beckoning just beyond the faded blue. 'What isn't right, Mr. Umney?' . 'You're supposed to be here, damn it! Right /here! Sitting on your stool with Jesus and your/ wife over your head. Not this!' I reached up,-grabbed the card with the picture of the man fishing . on the lake, tore it in two, put the pieces .together, tore it in four, and then gave them the toss. - They fluttered to the faded red rug on the )floor of the elevator car like confetti. + 'S'posed to be right here,' he repeated, /those terrible eyes of his never leaving mine. Beyond , us, two men in paint-splattered coveralls %had turned to look in our direction.  'That's right.' + 'For how long, Mr. Umney? Since you know /everything else, you can probably tell me that,+ can'tcha? How long am I supposed to keep drivin this damned car?' 2 'Well . . . forever,' I said, and the word hung !between us, another ghost in the cigarette-smokey , elevator car. Given a choice of ghosts, I 1guess I would have picked Bill Tuggle's BO . . . but I , wasn't given a choice. Instead, I said it again. 'Forever, Vern.' ' He dragged on his Camel, coughed out -smoke and a fine spray of blood, and went on looking 0 at me. 'It ain't my place to give the tenants -advice, Mr. Umney, but I guess I'll give you some, . anyway it being my last week and all. You.might consider seeing a doctor. The kind that * shows you ink-pitchers and you say what they look like.' ) 'You can't retire, Vern.' My heart was +beating harder than ever, but I managed to keep my ! voice level. 'You just can't.' . 'No?' He took his cigarette out of his mouth/ fresh blood was already soaking into the tip , and then looked back at me. His smile was 1ghastly. 'The way it looks to me, I ain't exactlygot a  choice, Mr. Umney.'  III. Of Painters and Pesos + The smell of fresh paint seared my nose, (overpowering both the smell of Vernon's smoke and 1 Bill Tuggle's armpits. The men in the coveralls,were currently taking up space not far from my - office door. They had put down a dropcloth,-and the tools of their trade were spread out all along . it tins and brushes and turp. There were /two step-ladders as well, flanking the painterslike + scrawny bookends. What I wanted to do was.to run down the hall, kicking the whole works + every whichway as I went. What right had 0they to paint these old dark walls that glaring, sacrilegious white? - Instead, I walked up to the one who looked *as if it might take a two-digit number to express , his IQ and politely asked what he and his 'fellow mug thought they were doing. He glanced 2 around at me. 'Hellzit look like? I'm givin Miss/America a finger-frig and Chick there's puttin ' rouge on Betty Grable's nippy-nips.' , I'd had enough. Enough of them, enough of 'everything. I reached out, grabbed the quiz-kid - under the armpit, and used my fingertips to-engage a particularly nasty nerve that hides up there. + He screamed and dropped his brush. White -paint splattered his shoes. His partner gave me a & timid doe-eyed look and took a step backward. . 'If you try taking off before I'm done with 1you,' I snarled, 'you're going to find the handleof - your paint-brush so far up your ass you'll *need a boathook to find the bristles. You want to try  me and see if I'm lying?' , He stopped moving and just stood there on -the edge of the dropcloth, eyes darting from side to / side, looking for help. There was none to be +had. I half-expected Candy to open my door and + look out to see what the fracas was, but +the door stayed firmly closed. I turned my attention back & to the quiz-kid I was holding onto. * 'The question was simple enough, bud *what the hell are you doing here? Can you answer it, # or do I give you another blast?' . I twiddled my fingers in his armpit just to *refresh his memory and he screamed again. 'Paintin $ the hall! Jeezis, can't you see?' / I could see, all right, and even if I'd been 1blind, I could smell. I hated what both of those - senses were telling me. The hallway wasn't ,supposed to be painted, especially not this glaring, / light-reflecting white. It was supposed to be.dim and shadowy; it was supposed to smell likedust ) and old memories. Whatever had started ,with the Demmicks' unaccustomed silence was getting 1 worse all the time. I was mad as hell, as this /unfortunate fellow was discovering. I was also - scared, but that was a feeling you get good/at hiding when carrying a heater in a clamshell+ holster is part of the way you make your living. % 'Who sent you two dubs down here?' - 'Our boss,' he said, looking at me as if I (were crazy. 'We work for Challis Custom Painters, on - Van Nuys. The boss is Hap Corrigan. If you +want to know who hired the cump'ny, you'll have to  ask h ' - 'It was the owner,' the other painter said ,quietly. 'The owner of this building. A guy named  Samuel Landry.' * I searched my memory, trying to put the +name of Samuel Landry together with what I knew of / the Fulwider Building and couldn't do it. In .fact, I couldn't put the name of Samuel Landry0 together with anything . . . yet for all that -it seemed almost to chime in my head, like a churchbell * you can hear from miles away on a foggy morning. 3 'You're lying,' I said, but with no real force. I+said it simply because it was something to say. + 'Call the boss,' the other painter said. 'Appearances could be deceiving; he was apparently the - brighter of the two, after all. He reached -inside his grimy, paint-smeared coverall and brought out  a little card. . I waved it away, suddenly tired. 'Who in the.name of Christ would want to paint this place,  anyway?' . It wasn't them I was asking, but the painter,who'd offered me the business card answered just / the same. 'Well, it brightens the place up,' ,he said cautiously. 'You gotta admit that.' 0 'Son,' I asked, taking a step toward him, 'did.your mother ever have any kids that lived, or did - she just produce the occasional afterbirth like you?' - 'Hey, whatever, whatever,' he said, taking -a step backward. I followed his worried gaze down , to my own balled-up fists and forced them 0open again. He didn't look very relieved, and I , actually didn't blame him very much. 'You 0don't like it you're coming through loud and clear . on that score. But I gotta do what the boss ,tells me, don't I? I mean, hell, that's the American  way.' - He glanced at his partner, then back to me.-It was a quick glance, really no more than a flick, / but in my line of work I'd seen it more than /once, and it's the kind of look you file away. Don't , bother this guy, it said. Don't bump him, don't rattle him. He's nitro. / 'I mean, I've got a wife and a little kid to &take care of,' he went on. 'There's a Depression going  on out there, you know.' + Confusion came over me then, drowning my ,anger the way a downpour drowns a brushfire., Was there a Depression going on out there? Was there? 1 'I know,' I said, not knowing anything. 'Let's "just forget it, what do you say?' - 'Sure,' the painters agreed, so eager they .sounded like half of a barbershop quartet. Theone I'd + mistakenly tabbed as half-bright had his +left hand buried deep in his right armpit, trying to get . that nerve to go back to sleep. I could have-told him he had an hour's work ahead of him, maybe * more, but I didn't want to talk to them ,anymore. I didn't want to talk to anyone or see anyone + not even the delectable Candy Kane, whose-humid glances and smooth, subtropical curves have  been known to send seasoned ,street-brawlers reeling to their knees. The only thing I wanted to , do was to get across the outer office and -into my inner sanctum. There was a bottle of Robb's ) Rye in the bottom lefthand drawer, and ,right now I needed a shot in the worst way. ) I walked down toward the frosted-glass door marked CLYDE UMNEY PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR, / restraining a renewed urge to see if I could *drop-kick a can of Dutch Boy Oyster White through , the window at the end of the hall and out .onto the fire-escape. I was actually reaching for my * doorknob when a thought struck me and I 1turned back to the painters . . . but slowly, so they . wouldn't believe I was being gripped by some+new seizure. Also, I had an idea that if I turned too , fast, I'd see them grinning at each other 0and twirling their fingers around their ears the looneygesture $ we all learned in the schoolyard. / They weren't twirling their fingers, but they,hadn't taken their eyes off me, either. The halfsmart + one seemed to be gauging the distance to -the door marked STAIRWELL. Suddenly I wanted , to tell them that I wasn't such a bad guy ,when you got to know me; that there were, in fact, a few ' clients and at least one ex-wife who )thought me something of a hero. But that wasn't a thing you / could say about yourself, especially not to acouple of bozos like these. 1 'Take it easy,' I said. 'I'm not going to jump -you. I just wanted to ask another question.' 2 They relaxed a little. A very little, actually. % 'Ask it,' Painter Number Two said. ) 'Either of you ever played the numbers down in Tijuana?' # 'La loter a?' Number One asked. - 'Your knowledge of Spanish stuns me. Yeah. La loter a.' * Number One shook his head. 'Mex numbers /and Mex call houses are strictly for suckers.' * Why do you think I asked you? I thought but didn't say. ) 'Besides,' he went on, 'you win ten or -twenty thousand pesos, big deal. What's that in real  money? Fifty bucks? Eighty?' * My mom hit the lottery down in Tijuana, +Peoria had said, and I had known something about it ) wasn't right even then. Forty thousand (bucks . . . My Uncle Fred went down and picked up the . cash yest'y afternoon. He brought it back inthe saddlebag of his Vinnie! 1 'Yeah,' I said, 'something like that, I guess. (And they always pay off that way, don't they? In  pesos?' * He gave me that look again, as if I was (crazy, then remembered I really was and readjusted his 0 face. 'Well, yeah. It is the Mexican lottery, -you know. They couldn't very well pay off in dollars.' + 'How true,' I said, and in my mind I saw 0Peoria's thin, eager face, heard him saying, It was  spread all over my mom's bed! !Forty-froggin-thousand smackers! . Except how could a blind kid be sure of the .exact amount . . . or even that it really was money + he was rolling around in? The answer was .simple: he couldn't. But even a blind newsboy would 0 know that la loter a paid off in pesos rather.than in dollars, and even a blind newsboy had to ) know you couldn't carry forty thousand )dollars' worth of Mexican lettuce in the saddlebag of a + Vincent motorcycle. His uncle would have +needed a City of Los Angeles dump truck to transport  that much dough. + Confusion, confusion nothing but dark clouds of confusion. . 'Thanks,' I said, and headed for my office. 2 I'm sure that was a relief for all three of us.  IV. Umney's Last Client - 'Candy, honey, I don't want to see anybody or take any ca ' + I broke off. The outer office was empty. +Candy's desk in the corner was unnaturally bare, and , after a moment I saw why: the IN/OUT tray *had been dumped into the trash basket and her - pictures of Errol Flynn and William Powell .were both gone. So was her Philco. The little blue - stenographer's stool, from which Candy had *been wont to flash her gorgeous gams, was  unoccupied. & My eyes returned to the IN/OUT tray /sticking out of the trash can like the prow of a sinking * ship, and for a moment my heart leaped. ,Perhaps someone had been in here, tossed theplace, - kidnapped Candy. Perhaps it was a case, in )other words. At that moment I would have welcomed ( a case, even if it meant some mug was -tying Candy up at this very moment . . . and adjusting the / rope over the firm swell of her breasts with ,particular care. Any way out of the cobwebs that ) seemed to be falling around me sounded just peachy to me. , The trouble with the idea was simple: the +room hadn't been tossed. The IN/OUT was in the . trash, true enough, but that didn't indicate-a struggle; in fact, it was more as if . . . - There was just one thing left on the desk, 0placed squarely in the center of the blotter. A white - envelope. Just looking at it gave me a bad ,feeling. My feet carried me across the room just the , same, however, and I picked it up. Seeing (my name written across the front of the envelope in ' Candy's wide loops and swirls was no .surprise; it was just another unpleasant part of this long,  unpleasant morning. ( I ripped it open and a single slip of "note-paper fell out into my hand.  Dear Clyde, - I have had all of the groping and sneering .I'm going to take from you, and I am tired of your . ridiculous and childish jokes about my name.#Life is too short to be pawed by a middle-aged - divorce detective with bad breath. You did )have your good points Clyde but they are getting + drownded out by the bad ones, especially )since you started drinking all the time. # Do yourself a favor and grow up.  Yours truely,  Arlene Cain 0 P.S.: I'm going back to my mother's in Idaho. $Do not try to get in touch with me. * I held the note a moment or two longer, .looking at it unbelievingly, then dropped it. One * phrase from it recurred as I watched it &seesaw lazily down toward the already occupied trash , basket: I am tired of your ridiculous and -childish jokes about my name. But had I ever known her * name was anything other than Candy Kane?-I searched my mind as the note continued its lazy + and seemingly endless swoops back and (forth, and the answer was an honest and resounding + no. Her name had always been Candy Kane, -we'd joked about it many a time, and if we'd had a - few rounds of office slap-and-tickle, what .of that? She'd always enjoyed it. We both had.* Did she enjoy it? a voice spoke up from /somewhere deep inside me. Did she really, or isthat , just another little fairytale you've been "telling yourself all these years? . I tried to shut that voice out, and after a ,moment or two I succeeded, but the one that replaced , it was even worse. That voice belonged to /none other than Peoria Smith. I can quit actin like I * died and went to heaven every time some 0blowhard leaves me a nickel tip, he said. Ain't you + picking up on this newsflash, Mr. Umney? , 'Shut up, kid,' I said to the empty room. 0'Gabriel Heatter you ain't.' I turned away from Candy's / desk, and as I did, faces passed in front of -my mind's eye like the faces of some lunatic marching - band from hell: George and Gloria Demmick, +Peoria Smith, Bill Tuggle, Vernon Klein, a + million-dollar blonde who went under the /two-bit name of Arlene Cain . . . even the two painters  were there. $ Confusion, confusion, nothing but confusion. - Head down, I trudged into my office, closed)the door behind me, and sat at the desk. Dimly, - through the closed window, I could hear the/traffic out on Sunset. I had an idea that, for the right + person, it was still a spring morning so +LA-perfect you expected to see that little trademark * symbol stamped on it somewhere, but for -me all the light had gone from the day . . . inside as - well as out. I thought about the bottle of )hooch in the bottom drawer, but all of a sudden even ) bending down to get it seemed like too -much work. It seemed, in fact, a job akin to climbing ! Mount Everest in tennis shoes. . The smell of fresh paint had penetrated all /the way into my inner sanctum. It was a smell I* ordinarily liked, but not then. At that +moment it was the smell of everything that had gone wrong , since the Demmicks hadn't come into their +Hollywood bungalow bouncing wisecracks off each , other like rubber balls and playing their )records at top volume and throwing their Corgi into - conniptions with their endless billing and /cooing. It occurred to me with perfect clarity and , simplicity the way I'd always imagined +great truths must occur to the people they occur to ( that if some doctor could cut out the 0cancer that was killing the Fulwider Building's elevator - operator, it would be white. Oyster white. -And it would smell just like fresh Dutch Boy paint. . This thought was so tiring that I had to put(my head down with the heels of my palms pressed 0 against my temples, holding it in place . . . +or maybe just keeping what was inside from ) exploding out and making a mess on the +walls. And when the door opened softly and footsteps / entered the room, I didn't look up. It seemed.like more of an effort than I was able to makeat that  particular moment. ) Besides, I had the strange idea that I .already knew who it was. I couldn't put a nameto my & knowledge, but the step was somehow 0familiar. So was the cologne, although I knew I wouldn't , be able to name it even if someone had put(a gun to my head, and for a very simple reason: I'd / never smelled it before in my life. How could.I recognize a scent I'd never smelled before, you 0 ask? I can't answer that one, bud, but I did. - Nor was that the worst of it. The worst of +it was this: I was scared nearly out of my mind. I've + faced blazing guns in the hands of angry ,men, which is bad, and daggers in the hands of angry , women, which is a thousand times worse; I (was once tied to the wheel of a Packard automobile * that had been parked on the tracks of a /busy freight line; I have even been tossed out a third-story 1 window. It's been an eventful life, all right, -but nothing in it had ever scared me the way the & smell of that cologne and that soft footstep scared me. ' My head seemed to weigh at least six hundred pounds. 1 'Clyde,' a voice said. A voice I'd never heard /before, a voice I nevertheless knew as well as my , own. Just that one word and the weight of my head went up to an even ton. , 'Get outta here, whoever you are,' I said *without looking up. 'Joint's closed.' And something " made me add, 'For renovations.'  'Bad day, Clyde?' & Was there sympathy in that voice? I *thought maybe there was, and somehow that made things - worse. Whoever this mug was, I didn't want )his sympathy. Something told me that his sympathy ) would be more dangerous than his hate. - 'Not so bad,' I said, supporting my heavy, +aching head with the palms of my hands and looking . down at my desk-blotter for all I was worth.)Written in the upper lefthand corner was Mavis - Weld's number. I sent my eyes tracing over .it again and again BEverley 6-4214. Keepingmy . eyes on the blotter seemed like a good idea./I didn't know who my visitor was, but I knew I didn't . want to see him. Right then it was the only thing I did know. - 'I think maybe you're being a little . . . .disingenuous, shall we say?' the voice asked, and it was . sympathy, all right; the sound of it made my/stomach curl up into something that felt like a. quivering fist soaked with acid. There was a-creak as he dropped into the client's chair. - 'I don't exactly know what that word means,0but by all means, let's say it,' I agreed. 'And now & that we have, why don't you rise up .righteous, Moggins, and shift on out of here. I'm thinking of + taking a sick day. I can do that without -much argument, you see, because I'm the boss. Neat, the , way things work out sometimes, isn't it?' % 'I suppose so. Look at me, Clyde.' ( My heart stuttered but my head stayed ,down and my eyes kept tracing over BEverley 6-4214. - Part of me wondered if hell was hot enough ,for Mavis Weld. When I spoke, my voice came out 1 steady. I was surprised but grateful. 'In fact,+I might take a whole year of sick days. In Carmel, & maybe. Sit out on the deck with the ,American Mercury in my lap and watch the big ones come in  from Hawaii.'  'Look at me.' - I didn't want to, but my head came up just /the same. He was sitting in the client's chair where , Mavis had once sat, and Ardis McGill, and ,Big Tom Hatfield. Even Vernon Klein had sat there * once, when he got those pictures of his +daughter wearing nothing but an opium grin and her - birthday suit. Sitting there with the same ,patch of California sun slanting across his features - features I most certainly had seen before. .The last time had been less than an hour ago, in my 0 bathroom mirror. I'd been scraping a Gillette Blue Blade over them. . The expression of sympathy in his eyes in.my eyes was the most hideous thing I'd ever. seen, and when he held out his hand held -out my hand I felt a sudden urge to wheel around - in my swivel chair, get to my feet, and go -running straight out my seventh-floor office window. I / think I might even have done it, if I hadn't 0been so confused, so totally lost. I've read theword . unmanned plenty of times it's a favorite /of the pulp-smiths and sob-sisters but this was the . first time I'd ever actually felt that way. , Suddenly the office darkened. The day had ,been perfectly clear, I would have sworn to that, + but a cloud had crossed the sun just the ,same. The man on the other side of the desk was at least - ten years older than I was, maybe fifteen, ,his hair almost completely white while mine was still / almost all black, but that didn't change the -simple fact no matter what he was calling himself ) or how old he looked, he was me. Had I .thought his voice sounded familiar? Sure. The way your , own voice sounds familiar although not -quite the way it sounds inside your own head  # when you hear it on a recording. * He picked my limp hand up off the desk, -shook it with the briskness of a real-estate agent on . the make, then dropped it again. It hit the +desk-blotter with a plop, landing on Mavis Weld's - telephone number. When I raised my fingers,-I saw that Mavis's number was gone. In fact, all the , numbers I'd scratched on the blotter over .the years were gone. It was as clear as . . . well, as clear ' as a hardshell Baptist's conscience. & 'Jesus,' I croaked. 'Jesus Christ.' 0 'Not at all,' the older version of me sitting /in the client's chair on the other side of the desk + said. 'Landry. Samuel D. Landry. At your service.'  V. An Interview with God , Even as rattled as I was, it only took me (two or three seconds to place the name, probably . because I'd heard it such a short time ago. (According to Painter Number Two, Samuel Landry ( was the reason why the long dark hall *leading to my office was soon going to be oyster white. ' Landry was the owner of the Fulwider Building. , A crazy idea suddenly occurred to me, but ,its patent craziness did nothing to dim the sudden - blaze of hope which accompanied it. They ,whoever they are say that everyone on theface * of the earth has a double. Maybe Landry )was mine. Maybe we were identical twins, unrelated ' doubles who had somehow been born to .different parents and ten or fifteen years out of step in - time with each other. The idea did nothing &to explain the rest of the day's high weirdness, but it ' was something to hang onto, damn it. 0 'What can I do for you, Mr. Landry?' I asked. ,I was trying like hell, but my voice was no 1 longer quite steady. 'If it's about the lease, +you'll have to give me a day or two to get squared % around. It seems my secretary just *discovered she had pressing business back home in Armpit,  Idaho.' . Landry paid absolutely no attention to this .feeble effort on my part to shift the focus ofthe / conversation. 'Yes,' he said in a musing tone.of voice, 'I imagine it's been the granddaddy of bad 4 days . . . and it's my fault. I'm sorry, Clyde 2really. Meeting you in person has been . . . well,+ not what I expected. Not at all. For one ,thing, I like you quite a bit better than I expected to. But - there's no going back now.' And he fetched 0a deep sigh. I didn't like the sound of it very much. + 'What do you mean by that?' My voice was -trembling worse than ever now, and the blaze of , hope was dying. Lack of oxygen inside the *cave-in site which had once been my brain seemed to  be the cause. - He didn't answer right away. He leaned over,instead, and grasped the handle of the slim / leather case leaning against the front leg of/the client's chair. The initials stamped on it were . S.D.L., and I deduced that my weird visitor -had brought it in with him. I didn't win the Shamus ( of the Year Award in 1934 and '35 for nothing, you know. . I had never seen a case quite like it in my .life it was too small and too slim to be a * briefcase, and it was fastened not with 0buckles and straps but with a zipper. I'd never seen a 0 zipper quite like this one, either, now that I+thought about it. The teeth were extremely tiny, and ( they hardly looked like metal at all. , But the oddities only began with Landry's (luggage. Even setting aside his uncanny olderbrother + resemblance to me, Landry looked like no *businessman I'd ever seen in my life, and , certainly not one prosperous enough to own*the Fulwider Building. It's not the Ritz, granted, but / it is in downtown LA, and my client (if that *was what he was) looked like an Okie on a good + day, one which had included a bath and a shave. + He was wearing blue jeans pants, for one 0thing, and a pair of sneakers on his feet . . . except . they didn't look like any sneakers I'd ever (seen before. They were great big clumpy things. What / they really looked like were the shoes Boris *Karloff wears as part of his Frankenstein get-up, and * if they were made of canvas, I'd eat my .favorite Fedora. The word written up the sidesin red - script looked like the name of a dish on a Chinese carry-out menu: REBOK. - I looked down at the blotter which had once(been covered with a tangle of telephone numbers, / and suddenly realized that I could no longer ,remember Mavis Weld's, although I must have 2 called it a billion times only this past winter.#That feeling of dread intensified. - 'Mister,' I said, 'I wish you'd state your ,business and get out of here. Come to think of it, why / don't you skip the talking and just go right to the getting-out part?' / He smiled . . . tiredly, I thought. That was *the other thing. The face above the plain opencollared . white shirt looked terribly tired. Terribly /sad, as well. It said the man who owned it had , been through things I couldn't even dream -of. I felt some sympathy for my visitor, but what I . mostly felt was fear. And anger. Because it &was my face, too, and the bastard had apparently ) gone a long way toward wearing it out. ( 'Sorry, Clyde,' he said. 'No can do.' ( He put his hand on that tiny, cunning ,zipper, and all at once Landry opening that case was the / last thing in the world I wanted. To stop him0I said, 'Do you always go visiting your tenants * dressed like a guy who makes his living *following the cabbage crop? What are you, one of those  eccentric millionaires?' / 'I'm eccentric, all right,' he said. 'And it ,won't do you any good to draw this business out,  Clyde.'  'What gave you that ide ' , Then he said the thing I'd been dreading, -and put out the last tiny flicker of hope at the same 2 time. 'I know all your ideas, Clyde. After all, I'm you.' / I licked my lips and forced myself to speak; 'anything to keep him from yanking that zipper. , Anything at all. My voice came out husky, but at least it did come out. , 'Yeah, I noticed the resemblance. I'm not .familiar with the cologne, though. I'm an Old Spice  man, myself.' + His thumb and finger remained pinched on 0the zipper, but he didn't pull it. At least not yet. , 'But you like this,' he said with perfect 0assurance, 'and you'd use it if you could get itdown at * the Rexall on the corner, wouldn't you? .Unfortunately, you can't. It's Aramis, and it won't be . invented for another forty years or so.' He +glanced down at his weird, ugly basketball shoes.  'Like my sneakers.'  'The devil you say.' - 'Well, yes, I suppose the devil might come /into it somewhere,' Landry said, and he didn't  smile.  'Where are you from?' * 'I thought you knew.' Landry pulled the ,zipper, revealing a rectangular gadget made of some , smooth plastic. It was the same color the .seventh-floor hall was going to be by the timethe sun . went down. I'd never seen anything like it. $There was no brand name on it, just something that * must have been a serial number: T-1000. +Landry lifted it out of its carrying case, thumbed the . catches on the sides, and lifted the hinged -top to reveal something that looked like the telescreen + in a Buck Rogers movie. 'I come from the +future,' Landry said. 'Just like in a pulp magazine  story.' , 'You come from Sunnyland Sanitarium, more like it,' I croaked. / 'But not exactly like a pulp science-fiction 1story,' he went on, ignoring what I'd said. 'No, not . exactly.' He pushed a button on the side of -the plastic case. There was a faint whirring sound . from inside the gadget, followed by a brief,-whistling beep. The thing sitting on his lap looked / like some strange stenographer's machine . . .. and I had an idea that that wasn't far from the truth. ) He looked up at me and said, 'What was your father's name, Clyde?' - I looked at him for a moment, resisting an /urge to lick my lips again. The room was still dark, . the sun still behind some cloud that hadn't *even been in sight when I came in off the street. - Landry's face seemed to float in the gloom !like an old, shrivelled balloon. + 'What's that got to do with the price of !cucumbers in Monrovia?' I asked.  'You don't know, do you?' . 'Of course I do,' I said, and I did. I just 0couldn't come up with it, that was all it wasstuck , there on the tip of my tongue, like Mavis $Weld's phone number, which had been BAyshore  something-or-other.  'How about your mother's?'  'Quit playing games with me!' . 'Here's an easy one what high school did *you go to? Every red-blooded American man + remembers what school he went to, right? 0Or the first girl he ever went all the way with.Or the ) town he grew up in. Was yours San Luis Obispo?' + I opened my mouth, but this time nothing came out.  'Carmel?' - That sounded right . . . and then felt all wrong. My head was whirling. % 'Or maybe it was Dusty Bottom, New Mexico.'  'Cut the crap!' I shouted.  'Do you know? Do you?'  'Yes! It was ' ( He bent over. Rattled the keys of his strange steno machine.  'San Diego! Born and raised!' + He put the machine on my desk and turned 0it around so I could read the words floating in the  window above the keyboard.  'San Diego! Born and raised!' ) My eyes dropped from the window to the $word stamped into the plastic frame surrounding it. / 'What's a Toshiba?' I asked. 'Something that *comes on the side when you order a Reebok  dinner?' ) 'It's a Japanese electronics company.' 0 I laughed dryly. 'Who're you kidding, mister? &The Japs can't even make wind-up toys without ' getting the springs in upside down.' - 'Not now,' he agreed, 'and speaking of now,&Clyde, when is now? What year is it?' / '1938,' I said, then raised a half-numb hand to my face and rubbed my lips.  'Wait a minute 1939.' ' 'It might even be 1940. Am I right?' 0 I said nothing, but I felt my face heating up.) 'Don't feel bad, Clyde; you don't know .because I don't know. I always left it vague. The timeframe 0 I was trying for was actually more of a feel .+. . call it Chandler American Time, if you / like. It worked like gangbusters for most of .my readers, and it made things simpler from a copyediting , standpoint as well, because you can never .exactly pinpoint the passage of time. Haven't , you ever noticed how often you say things -like "for more years than I can remember" or "longer , ago than I like to think about" or "since Hector was a pup"?' / 'Nope can't say that I have.' But now that-he mentioned it, I did notice. And that made me . think of the LA Times. I read it every day, &but exactly which days were they? You couldn't tell + from the paper itself, because there was (never a date on the masthead, only that slogan which ( reads 'America's Fairest Newspaper in America's Fairest City.' - 'You say those things because time doesn't 4really pass in this world. It is . . . ' He paused, then . smiled. It was a terrible thing to look at, 0that smile, full of yearning and strange greed. 'It is one $ of its many charms,' he finished. - I was scared, but I've always been able to -bite the bullet when I felt it really needed biting, and - this was one of those times. 'Tell me what the hell's going on here.' 3 'All right . . . but you're already beginning to know, Clyde. Aren't you?' + 'Maybe. I don't know my dad's name or my /mom's name or the name of the first girl I ever* went to bed with because you don't know them. Is that it?' , He nodded, smiling the way a teacher would/smile at a pupil who's made a leap of logic and, come up with the right answer against all +odds. But his eyes were still full of that terrible  sympathy. ( 'And when you wrote San Diego on your ,gadget there and it came into my head at thesame  time . . . '  He nodded, encouraging me. 0 'It isn't just the Fulwider Building you own, 2is it?' I swallowed, trying to get rid of a large - blockage in my throat that had no intention)of going anywhere. 'You own everything.' ( But Landry was shaking his head. 'Not 'everything. Just Los Angeles and a few surrounding / areas. This version of Los Angeles, that is, .complete with the occasional continuity glitchor  made-up addition.' , 'Bull,' I said, but I whispered the word. . 'See the picture on the wall to the left of the door, Clyde?' - I glanced at it, but hardly had to; it was -Washington crossing the Delaware, and it had been 1 there since . . . well, since Hector was a pup.+ Landry had taken his plastic Buck Rogers )steno machine back onto his lap, and was bending  over it. 0 'Don't do that!' I shouted, and tried to reach*for him. I couldn't do it. My arms had no strength, . it seemed, and I could summon no resolve. I 0felt lethargic, drained, as if I had lost about three - pints of blood and was losing more all the time. ( He rattled the keys again. Turned the ,machine toward me so I could read the words in the - window. They read: On the wall to the left +of the door leading out to Candy-Land, Our Revered 0 Leader hangs . . . but always slightly askew. -That's my way of keeping him in perspective. ' I looked back at the picture. George ,Washington was gone, replaced by a photo of Franklin / Roosevelt. F.D.R. had a grin on his face and ,his cigarette holder jutting upward at that angle his ( supporters think of as jaunty and his (detractors as arrogant. The picture was hanging slightly  askew. 1 'I don't need the laptop to do it,' he said. He0sounded a little embarrassed, as if I'd accused him % of something. 'I can do it just by %concentrating as you saw when the numbers disappeared - from your blotter but the laptop helps. +Because I'm used to writing things down, I suppose. . And then editing them. In a way, editing and,rewriting are the most fascinating parts of the job, , because that's where the final changes .usually small but often crucial take place and the $ picture really comes into focus.' - I looked back at Landry, and when I spoke, +my voice was dead. 'You made me up, didn't you?' - He nodded, looking strangely ashamed, as if&what he had done was something dirty. - 'When?' I uttered a strange, croaky little (laugh. 'Or is that the right question?' 4 'I don't know if it is or isn't,' he said, 'and I ,imagine any writer would tell you about the same. 0 It didn't happen all at once that much I'm 0sure of. It's been an ongoing process. You first- showed up in Scarlet Town, but I wrote that,back in 1977 and you've changed a lot since then.' * 1977, I thought. A Buck Rogers year for (sure. I didn't want to believe this was happening, . wanted to believe it was all a dream. Oddly -enough, it was the smell of his cologne that kept me . from being able to do that that familiar 0smell I'd never smelled in my life. How could I have? - It was Aramis, a brand as unfamiliar to me as Toshiba.  But he was going on. ' 'You've grown a lot more complex and -interesting. You were pretty one-dimensional to start . with.' He cleared his throat and smiled down.at his hands for a moment. 'What a pisser for me.' . He winced a little at the anger in my voice,.but made himself look up again, just the same./ 'Your last book was How Like a Fallen Angel. .I started that one in 1990, but it took until 1993 to 0 finish. I've had some problems in the interim.1My life has been . . . interesting.' He gave the word 1 an ugly, bitter twist. 'Writers don't do their +best work during interesting times, Clyde. Take my  word for it.' - I glanced at the baggy way his hobo clothes(hung on him and decided he might have a point - there. 'Maybe that's why you screwed up in 1such a big way on this one,' I said. 'That stuff about - the lottery and the forty thousand dollars -was pure guff they pay off in pesos south of the  border.' 3 'I knew that,' he said mildly. 'I'm not saying I .don't goof up from time to time I may be a / kind of God in this world, or to this world, -but in my own I'm perfectly human but whenI do * goof up, you and your fellow characters *never know it, Clyde, because my mistakes and / continuity lapses are part of your truth. No,.Peoria was lying. I knew it, and I wanted you to  know it.'  'Why?' * He shrugged, again looking uneasy and a .little ashamed. 'To prepare you for my coming a / little, I suppose. That's what all of it was /for, starting with the Demmicks. I didn't want to scare  you any more than I had to.' . Any private eye worth his salt has a pretty *good idea when the person in the client's chair is ) lying and when he's telling the truth; -knowing when the client is telling the truth but purposely 0 leaving gaps is a rarer talent, and I doubt if.even the geniuses among us can tap it all the time. , Maybe I was only tapping it now because my)brainwaves and Landry's were marching in lockstep, + but I was tapping it. There was stuff he .wasn't telling me. The question was whether ornot I  should call him on it. ) What stopped me was a sudden, horrible -intuition that came waltzing out of nowhere, like a , ghost oozing out of the wall of a haunted +house. It had to do with the Demmicks. The reason - they'd been so quiet last night was because-dead people don't engage in marital spats it's one . of those rules, like the one that says crap .rolls downhill, that you can pretty much counton + through thick and thin. >From almost the /first moment I'd met him, I'd sensed there was a violent - temper under George's urbane top layer, and)that there might be a sharp-clawed bitch lurking in - the shadows behind Gloria Demmick's pretty *face and daffy demeanor. They were just a little too , Cole Porter to be true, if you see what I &mean. And now I was somehow sure that George had , finally snapped and killed his wife . . . +probably their yappy Welsh Corgi, as well. Gloria might ( be sitting propped up in the bathroom )corner between the shower and the toilet right now, her - face black, her eyes bulging like old dull +marbles, her tongue protruding between her blue lips. - The dog was lying with its head in her lap )and a wire coathanger twisted around its neck, its 0 shrill bark stilled forever. And George? Dead /on the bed with Gloria's bottle of Veronals now & empty standing beside him on the &night-table. No more parties, no more jitterbugging at Al * Arif, no more frothy upper-class murder +cases in Palm Desert or Beverly Glen. They were / cooling off now, drawing flies, growing pale 'under their fashionable poolside tans. * George and Gloria Demmick, who had died .inside this man's machine. Who had died inside this man's head. / 'You did one lousy job of not scaring me,' I +said, and immediately wondered if it would have . been possible for him to do a good one. Ask -yourself this: how do you get a person ready to meet , God? I'll bet even Moses got a little hot +under the robe when he saw that bush start to glow, and ) I'm nothing but a shamus who works for forty a day plus expenses. - 'How Like a Fallen Angel was the Mavis Weld-story. The name, Mavis Weld, is from a novel & called The Little Sister By Raymond *Chandler.' He looked at me with a kind of troubled + uncertainty that had some small whiff of 2guilt in it. 'It's an hommage.' He said the first syllable so  it rhymed with Rome. / 'Bully for you,' I said, 'but the guy's name rings no bells.' / 'Of course not. In your world which is my -version of L.A., of course Chandler never 0 existed. Nevertheless, I've used all sorts of +names from his books in mine. The Fulwider 0 Building is where Chandler's detective, Philip,Marlowe, had his office. Vernon Klein . . . Peoria / Smith . . . and Clyde Umney, of course. That )was the name of the lawyer in Playback.' ( 'And you call those things hommages?'  'That's right.' - 'If you say so, but it sounds like a fancy /word for plain old copying to me.' But it made me feel ' funny, knowing that my name had been .made up by a man I'd never heard of in a world I'd never  dreamed of. . Landry had the good grace to flush, but his eyes didn't drop. 3 'All right; perhaps I did do a little pilfering. ,Certainly I adopted Chandler's style for my own, / but I'm hardly the first; Ross Macdonald did +the same thing in the fifties and sixties, Robert / Parker did it in the seventies and eighties, .and the critics decked them with laurel leavesfor it. , Besides, Chandler learned from Hammett and.Hemingway, not to mention pulp-writers like ' / I held up my hand. 'Let's skip the lit class )and get down to the bottom line. This is crazy, but ) ' My eyes drifted to the picture of .Roosevelt, from there they went to the eerily blank blotter, ' and from there they went back to the .haggard face on the other side of the desk. '  but let's say . I believe it. What are you doing here? What did you come for?' 0 Except I already knew. I detect for a living, (but the answer to that one came from my heart,  not my head.  'I came for you.'  'For me.' / 'Sorry, yes. I'm afraid you'll have to start 1thinking of your life in a new way, Clyde. As . .. 0 well . . . a pair of shoes, let's say. You're 0stepping out and I'm stepping in. And once I've got the ' laces tied, I'm going to walk away.' . Of course. Of course he was. And I suddenly -knew what I had to do . . . the only thing I could  do.  Get rid of him. - I let a big smile spread across my face. A .tell-me-more smile. At the same time I coiled my - legs under me, getting them ready to launch*me across the desk at him. Only one of us could , leave this office, that much was clear. I intended to be the one. . 'Oh, really?' I said. 'How fascinating. And (what happens to me, Sammy? What happens to the ( shoeless private eye? What happens to Clyde ' * Umney, the last word was supposed to be .my last name, the last word this interloping, . invading thief would ever hear in his life. -The minute it was out of my mouth I intended to leap. + The trouble was, that telepathy business #seemed to work both ways. I saw an expression of alarm * dawn in his eyes, and then they slipped "shut and his mouth tightened with concentration. He - didn't bother with the Buck Rogers machine;,I suppose he knew there was no time for it. . ' "His revelations hit me like some kind of /debilitating drug," ' he said, speaking in the low but * carrying tone of one who recites rather /than simply speaking. ' "All the strength went out of my ) muscles, my legs felt like a couple of /strands of al dente spaghetti, and all I could do was flop ' back in my chair and look at him." ' / I flopped back in my chair, my legs uncoiling-beneath me, unable to do anything but look at him. 0 'Not very good,' he said apologetically, 'but *rapid composition has never been a strong point of  mine.' / 'You bastard,' I rasped weakly. 'You son of abitch.' & 'Yes,' he agreed. 'I suppose I am.' ' 'Why are you doing this? Why are you stealing my life?' / His eyes flickered with anger at that. 'Your -life? You know better than that, Clyde, even if you 0 don't want to admit it. It isn't your life at 0all. I made you up, starting on one rainy day inJanuary ) of 1977 and continuing right up to the -present time. I gave you your life, and it's mine to take  away.' , 'Very noble,' I sneered, 'but if God came ,down here right now and started yanking yourlife / apart like bad stitches in a scarf, you might/find it a little easier to appreciate my point of view.' 0 'All right,' he said, 'I suppose you've got a ,point. But why argue it? Arguing with one's self is . like playing solitaire chess a fair game .results in a stalemate every time. Let's just say I'm  doing it because I can.' 1 I felt a little calmer, all of a sudden. I had ,been down this street before. When they got the + drop on you, you had to get them talking *and keep them talking. It had worked with Mavis Weld / and it would work here. They said stuff like .Well, I suppose it won't hurt you to know now or  What harm can it do? . Mavis's version had been downright elegant: +I want you to know, Umney I want you to take . the truth to hell with you. You can pass it 0on to the devil over cake and coffee. It really didn't * matter what they said, but if they were talking, they weren't shooting. - Always keep em talking, that was the thing.*Keep em talking and just hope the cavalry would  show up from somewhere. + 'The question is, why do you want to?' I 3asked. 'It's hardly the usual thing, is it? I mean,aren't + you writer types usually content to cash (the checks when they come, and go about your  business?' , 'You're trying to keep me talking, Clyde. Aren't you?' - That hit me like a sucker-punch to the gut,-but playing it down to the last card was the only / choice I had. I grinned and shrugged. 'Maybe.+Maybe not. Either way, I really do want to know.'  And there was no lie in that. , He looked unsure for a moment longer, bent-over and touched the keys inside that strange- plastic case (I felt cramps in my legs and (gut and chest as he stroked them), then straightened up  again. - 'I suppose it won't hurt you to know now,' 2he said finally. 'After all, what harm can it do?' 'Not a bit.' . 'You're a clever boy, Clyde,' he said, 'and .you're perfectly right writers very rarely plunge . all the way into the worlds they've created,-and when they do I think they end up doing it strictly . in their heads, while their bodies vegetate -in some mental asylum. Most of us are contentsimply ' to be tourists in the country of our .imaginations. Certainly that was the case withme. I'm not a - fast writer composition has always been 1torture for me, I think I told you that but I ( managed five Clyde Umney books in ten .years, each more successful than the last. In 1983 I left ' my job as regional manager for a big 'insurance company and started to write full-time. I had a 0 wife I loved, a little boy that kicked the sun+out of bed every morning and put it to bed every ' night that's how it seemed to me, 0anyway and I didn't think life could get any better.' / He shifted in the overstuffed client's chair,-moved his hand, and I saw the cigarette burn Ardis - McGill had put in the over-stuffed arm was ,also gone. He voiced a bitterly cold laugh. 2 'And I was right,' he said. 'It couldn't get any/better, but it could get a whole hell of a lot worse. . And did. About three months after I started 0How Like a Fallen Angel, Danny our little boy - fell out of a swing in the park and bashed 'his head. Cold-conked himself, in your parlance.' 0 A brief smile, every bit as cold and bitter as.the laugh had been, crossed his face. It came and  went at the speed of grief. ' 'He bled a lot you've seen enough *head-wounds in your time to know how they are and + it scared the crap out of Linda, but the ,doctors were good and it did turn out to be only a * concussion; they got him stabilized and -gave him a pint of blood to make up for what he'd lost. ( Maybe they didn't have to and that ,haunts me but they did. The real problem wasn't with . his head, you see; it was with that pint of #blood. It was infected with AIDS.'  'Come again?' - 'It's something you can thank your God you ,don't know about,' Landry said. 'It doesn't exist in / your time, Clyde. It won't show up until the %mid-seventies. Like Aramis cologne.'  'What does it do?' - 'Eats away at your immune system until the )whole thing collapses like the wonderful one-hoss + shay. Then every bug circling around out -there, from cancer to chicken pox, rushes in and has a  party.'  'Good Christ!' / His smile came and went like a cramp. 'If you1say so. AIDS is primarily a sexually transmitted - disease, but every now and then it pops up /in the blood supply. I suppose you could say mykid * won big in a very unlucky version of la loter a.' 1 'I'm sorry,' I said, and although I was scared .to death of this thin man with the tired face,I / meant it. Losing a kid to something like that/. . . what could be worse? Probably something, yeah + there's always something but you'd .have to sit down and think about it, wouldn't you? - 'Thanks,' he said. 'Thanks, Clyde. It went 0fast for him, at least. He fell out of the swingin May. / The first purple blotches Kaposi's sarcoma) showed up in time for his birthday in , September. He died on March 18, 1991. And *maybe he didn't suffer as much as some of them - do, but he suffered. Oh yes, he suffered.' ( I didn't have the slightest idea what ,Kaposi's sarcoma was, either, and decided I didn't want to - ask. I knew more than I wanted to already. * 'You can maybe understand why it slowed 0me down a little on your book,' he said. 'Can't you,  Clyde?'  I nodded. / 'I pushed on, though. Mostly because I think -make-believe is a great healer. Maybe I have to 0 believe that. I tried to get on with my life, /too, but things kept going wrong with it it was as if + How Like a Fallen Angel was some kind of ,weird bad-luck charm that had turned me intoJob. & My wife went into a deep depression &following Danny's death, and I was so concerned with her - that I hardly noticed the red patches that (had started breaking out on my legs and stomach and 0 chest. And the itching. I knew it wasn't AIDS,/and at first that was all I was concerned with.But - as time went on and things got worse . . . $have you ever had shingles, Clyde?' - Then he laughed and clapped the heel of his,hand to his forehead in a what-a-dunce-I-am ( gesture before I could shake my head. - 'Of course you haven't you've never had *more than a hangover. Shingles, my shamus * friend, is a funny name for a terrible, *chronic ailment. There's some pretty good medicine . available to help alleviate the symptoms in )my version of Los Angeles, but it wasn't helping me + much; by the end of 1991 I was in agony. ,Part of it was general depression over what had , happened to Danny, of course, but most of -it was the agony and the itching. That would make an * interesting book title about a tortured +writer, don't you think? The Agony and the Itching, or, + Thomas Hardy Faces Puberty.' He voiced a harsh, distracted little laugh.  'Whatever you say, Sam.' 1 'I say it was a season in hell. Of course it's %easy to make light of it now, but by Thanksgiving / of that year it was no joke I was getting .three hours of sleep a night, tops, and I had days / when it felt like my skin was trying to crawl(right off my body and run away like The . Gingerbread Man. And I suppose that's why I /didn't see how bad it was getting with Linda.' 0 I didn't know, couldn't know . . . but I did. 'She killed herself.' ' He nodded. 'In March of 1992, on the .anniversary of Daniel's death. Over two years ago now.' + A single tear tracked down his wrinkled, *prematurely aged cheek, and I had an idea that he 0 had gotten old in one hell of a hurry. It was ,sort of awful, realizing I had been made by such a * bush-league version of God, but it also *explained a lot. My shortcomings, mainly. , 'That's enough,' he said in a voice which 0was blurred with anger as well as tears. 'Get tothe - point, you'd say. In my time we say cut to 'the chase, but it comes to the same. I finished the . book. On the day I discovered Linda dead in ,bed the way the police are going to find Gloria / Demmick later today, Clyde I had finished -one hundred and ninety pages of manuscript. Iwas ( up to the part where you fish Mavis's ,brother out of Lake Tahoe. I came home from the funeral ! three days later, fired up the ,word-processor, and got started right in on page one-ninety-one.  Does that shock you?' 0 'No,' I said. I thought about asking him what *a word-processor might be, then decided I didn't & have to. The thing in his lap was a &word-processor, of course. Had to be. / 'You're in a decided minority,' Landry said. )'It shocked what few friends I had left, shocked / them plenty. Linda's relatives thought I had 0all the emotion of a warthog. I didn't have the energy / to explain that I was trying to save myself. -Frog them, as Peoria would say. I grabbed my book & the way a drowning man would grab a 0life-ring. I grabbed you, Clyde. My case of the shingles . was still bad, and that slowed me down to,some extent it kept me out, or I might have gotten * here sooner but it didn't stop me. I 2started getting a little better physically, at least right + around the time I finished the book. But 0when I had finished, I fell into what I suppose must * have been my own state of depression. I ,went through the edited script in a kind of daze. I felt 4 such a feeling of regret . . . of loss . . . ' He -looked directly at me and said, 'Does any of this make  any sense to you?' 2 'It makes sense,' I said. And it did. In a crazy sort of way. 0 'There were lots of pills left in the house,' 0he said. 'Linda and I were like the Demmicks in a lot - of ways, Clyde we really did believe in /living better chemically, and a couple of timesI came * very close to taking a couple of double ,handfuls. The way the thought always came to me wasn't . in terms of suicide, but in terms of wanting,to catch up to Linda and Danny. To catch up while  there was still time.' / I nodded. It was what I'd thought about Ardis(McGill when, three days after we'd said toodleoo / to each other in Blondie's, I'd found her in .that stuffy attic room with a small blue hole in the - center of her forehead. Except it had been .Sam Landry who had really killed her, and who had ' accomplished the deed with a kind of /flexible bullet to the brain. Of course it had been. In my . world Sam Landry, this tired-looking man in &the hobo's pants, was responsible for everything. , The idea should have seemed crazy, and it 1did . . . but it was getting saner all the time. - I found I had just energy enough to swivel ,my chair and look out my window. What I saw , somehow did not surprise me in the least: ,Sunset Boulevard and all that surrounded it had frozen / solid. Cars, buses, pedestrians, all stopped .dead in their tracks. It was a Kodak snapshot world , out there, and why not? Its creator could -not be bothered with animating much of it, at least for - the time being; he was still caught in the 1whirlpool of his own pain and grief. Hell, I was lucky to  still be breathing myself. , 'So what happened?' I asked. 'How did you +get here, Sam? Can I call you that? Do you mind?' - 'No, I don't mind. I can't give you a very -good answer, though, because I don't exactly know. + All I know for sure is that every time I /thought of the pills, I thought of you. What I thought - specifically was, "Clyde Umney would never +do this, and he'd sneer at anyone who did. He'd call  it the coward's way out." ' . I considered that, found it fair enough, and*nodded. For someone staring some horrible ailment ) in the face Vernon's cancer, or the +misbegotten nightmare that had killed this man's son I , might make an exception, but take the pipe*just because you were depressed? That was for  pansies. , 'Then I thought, "But that's Clyde Umney, /and Clyde is make-believe . . . just a figment of . your imagination." That idea wouldn't live, +though. It's the dumbbells of the world politicians - and lawyers, for the most part who sneer-at imagination, and think a thing isn't real unless / they can smoke it or stroke it or feel it or *fuck it. They think that way because they have no + imagination themselves, and they have no 0idea of its power. I knew better. Hell, I ought to my * imagination has been buying my food and .paying the mortgage for the last ten years or so. - 'At the same time, I knew I couldn't go on /living in what I used to think of as `the real world,' + by which I suppose we all mean `the only /world.' That's when I started to realize there was only + one place left where I could go and feel -welcome, and only one person I could be when I got / there. The place was here Los Angeles, in )1930-something. And the person was you.' + I heard that faint whirring sound coming 0from inside his gadget again, but I didn't turn around. " Partly because I was afraid to. + And partly because I no longer knew if I could.  VI. Umney's Last Case + On the street seven stories below, a man -was frozen with his head half-turned to look at the + woman on the corner, who was climbing up 'the step of the eight-fifty bus headed downtown. She $ had exposed a momentary length of -beautiful leg, and this was what the man was looking at. A + little farther down the street a boy was /holding out his battered old baseball glove to catch the . ball frozen in mid-air just above his head. /And, floating six feet above the street like a ghost ' called up by a third-rate swami at a +carnival seance, was one of the newspapers from Peoria 0 Smith's overturned table. Incredibly, I could ,see the two photographs on it from up here: Hitler ( above the fold, the recently deceased Cuban bandleader below it. , Landry's voice seemed to come from a long way off. ( 'At first I thought that meant I'd be %spending the rest of my life in some nut-ward, thinking I . was you, but that was all right, because it /would only be my physical self locked up in the funnyfarm, . do you see? And then, gradually, I began to 1realize that it could be a lot more than that . .. * that maybe there might be a way I could 6actually . . . well . . . slip all the way in. And do you  know what the key was?' / 'Yes,' I said, not looking around. That whir &came again as something in his gadget revolved, ' and suddenly the newspaper frozen in $mid-air flapped off down the frozen Boulevard. A moment , or two later an old DeSoto rolled jerkily 'through the intersection of Sunset and Fernando. It - struck the boy wearing the baseball glove, !and both he and the DeSoto sedan disappeared. Not 3 the ball, though. It fell into the street, rolled/halfway to the gutter, then froze solid again. " 'You do?' He sounded surprised.  'Yeah. Peoria was the key.' / 'That's right.' He laughed, then cleared his /throat nervous sounds, both of them. 'I keep forgetting that you're me.' ! It was a luxury I didn't have. - 'I was fooling around with a new book, and ,not getting anywhere. I'd tried Chapter One six . different ways to Sunday before realizing a 2really interesting thing: Peoria Smith didn't likeyou.' - That made me swing around in a hurry. 'The hell you say!' 1 'I didn't think you'd believe it, but it's the -truth, and I'd somehow known it all along. I don't . want to convene the lit class again, Clyde, .but I'll tell you one thing about my trade writing 0 stories in the first person is a funny, tricky0business. It's as if everything the writer knowscomes , from his main character, like a series of .letters or dispatches from some far-off battle zone. It's - very rare for the writer to have a secret, 1but in this case I did. It was as if your little part of Sunset ) Boulevard were the Garden of Eden ' + 'I never heard it called that before,' I remarked. . ' and there was a snake in it, one I saw -and you didn't. A snake named Peoria Smith.' - Outside, the frozen world that he'd called 'my Garden of Eden continued to darken, although ) the sky was cloudless. The Red Door, a ,nightclub reputedly owned by Lucky Luciano, , disappeared. For a moment there was just a'hole where it had been, and then a new building 2 filled it a restaurant called Petit Djeuner.with a window full of ferns. I glanced up the street + and saw that other changes were going on . new buildings were replacing old ones with silent, , spooky speed. They meant I was running out,of time; I knew this. Unfortunately, I knew ' something else, as well there was *probably not going to be any nick in this bundle of time. , When God walks into your office and tells /you He's decided he likes your life better thanHis ' own, what the hell are your options? 0 'I junked all the various drafts of the novel /I'd started two months after my wife's death,' - Landry said. 'It was easy poor crippled ,things that they were. And then I started a new one. I ) called it . . . can you guess, Clyde?' 0 'Sure,' I said, and swung around. It took all *my strength, but what I suppose this geek would . call my 'motivation' was good. Sunset Strip /isn't exactly the Champs Elyses or Hyde Park,but , it's my world. I didn't want to watch him .tear it apart and rebuild it the way he wantedit. 'I , suppose you called it Umney's Last Case.' , He looked faintly surprised. 'You suppose right.' + I waved my hand. It was an effort, but I .managed. 'I didn't win the Shamus of the Year Award * in 1934 and '35 for nothing, you know.' 1 He smiled at that. 'Yes. I always did like thatline.' ) Suddenly I hated him hated him like .poison. If I could have summoned the strength to + lunge across the desk and choke the life -out of him, I would have done it. He saw it, too. The  smile faded. + 'Forget it, Clyde you wouldn't have a chance.' . 'Why don't you get out of here?' I grated at+him. 'Just get out and let a working stiff alone?' 0 'Because I can't. I couldn't even if I wanted /to . . . and I don't.' He looked at me with an odd . mixture of anger and pleading. 'Try to look (at it from my point of view, Clyde ' ' 'Do I have any choice? Have I ever?' . He ignored that. 'Here's a world where I'll *never get any older, a year where all the clocks are ( stopped at just about eighteen months *before World War II, where the newspapers always cost , three cents, where I can eat all the eggs ,and red meat I want and never have to worry about my  cholesterol level.' / 'I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about.' / He leaned forward earnestly. 'No, you don't! /And that's exactly the point, Clyde! This is a ( world where I can really do the job I .dreamed about doing when I was a little boy I can be a . private eye. I can go racketing around in a -fast car at two in the morning, shoot it out with ) hoodlums knowing they may die but I .won't and wake up eight hours later next toa % beautiful chanteuse with the birds /twittering in the trees and the sun shining in my bedroom 0 window. That clear, beautiful California sun.'* 'My bedroom window faces west,' I said. / 'Not anymore,' he replied calmly, and I felt -my hands curl into strengthless fists on the arms of - my chair. 'Do you see how wonderful it is? ,How perfect? In this world, people don't go half-mad . with itching caused by a stupid, undignified/disease called shingles. In this world, people don't  go gray, let alone bald.' - He looked at me levelly, and in his gaze I $saw no hope for me. No hope at all. 0 'In this world, beloved sons never die of AIDS*and beloved wives never take overdoses of / sleeping pills. Besides, you were always the -outsider here, not me, no matter how it mighthave , felt to you. This is my world, born in my ,imagination and maintained by my effort and ambition. 2 I loaned it to you for awhile, that's all . . . and now I'm taking it back.' 0 'Finish telling me how you got in, will you do#that much? I really want to hear.' / 'It was easy. I tore it apart, starting with 'the Demmicks, who were never much more than a , lousy imitation of Nick and Nora Charles, 0and rebuilt it in my own image. I took away all the - beloved supporting characters, and now I'm 0removing all the old landmarks. I'm pulling the rug , out from under you a strand at a time, in /other words, and I'm not proud of it, but I am proud of 1 the sustained effort of will it's taken to pull it off.' + `What's happened to you back in your own 1world?' I was still keeping him talking, but now it % was nothing but habit, like an old ,milk-horse finding his way back to the barn on a snowy  morning. . He shrugged. 'Dead, maybe. Or maybe I really/have left a physical self a husk sitting 0 catatonic in some mental institution. I don't 0think either of those things is really the case,though 3 all of this feels too real. No, I think I made.it all the way, Clyde. I think that back home 2 they're looking for a missing writer . . . with .no idea that he's disappeared into the storagebanks . of his own word-processor. And the truth is I really don't care.'  'And me? What happens to me?' . 'Clyde,' he said, 'I don't care about that, either.' ! He bent over his gadget again.  'Don't!' I said sharply.  He looked up. 3 'I . . . ' I heard the quiver in my voice, tried 2to control it, and found I couldn't. 'Mister, I'm 0 afraid. Please leave me alone. I know it's not.really my world out there anymore hell, in here, 2 either but it's the only world I'll ever come-close to knowing. Let me have what's left of it.  Please.' 1 'Too late, Clyde.' Again I heard that merciless3regret in his voice. 'Close your eyes. I'll make it as fast as I can.' . I tried to jump him I tried as hard as I /could. I didn't move so much as an iota. And asfar as . closing my eyes went, I discovered I didn't /need to. All the light had gone out of the day,and the & office was as dark as midnight in a coalsack. - I sensed rather than saw him lean over the )desk toward me. I tried to draw back and & discovered I couldn't even do that. ,Something dry and rustly touched my hand and I screamed. / 'Take it easy, Clyde.' His voice, coming out .of the darkness. Coming not just from in frontof ' me but from everywhere. Of course, I )thought. After all, I'm a figment of his imagination. 'It's  only a check.'  'A . . . check?' / 'Yes. For five thousand dollars. You've sold /me the business. The painters will scratch your, name off the door and paint mine on before(they leave tonight.' He sounded dreamy. 'Samuel D. . Landry, Private Detective. It's got a great ring, doesn't it?' / I tried to beg and found I couldn't. Now evenmy voice had failed me. . 'Get ready,' he said. 'I don't know exactly -what's coming, Clyde, but it's coming now. I don't 3 think it'll hurt.' But I don't really care if it )does that was the part he didn't say. , That faint whirring sound came out of the -blackness. I felt my chair melt away beneath me, 1 and suddenly I was falling. Landry's voice fell,with me, reciting along with the clicks and taps of ) his fabulous futuristic steno machine, +reciting the last two sentences of a novel called Umney's  Last Case. 0 ' "So I left town, and as to where I finished 3up . . . well, mister, I think that's my business.  Don't you?" ' 0 There was a brilliant green light below me. I -was falling toward it. Soon it would consume me, 0 and the only feeling I had was one of relief. , ' "THE END," ' Landry's voice boomed, and 1then I fell into the green light, it was shining + through me, in me, and Clyde Umney was nomore.  So long, shamus. # VII. The Other Side of the Light  All that was six months ago. * I came to on the floor of a gloomy room ,with a humming in my ears, pushed myself to my ( knees, shook my head to clear it, and 1looked up into the bright green glare I'd fallen through, like / Alice through the looking glass. I saw a Buck+Rogers machine that was the big brother of the one + Landry had brought into my office. Green .letters shone on it and I pushed myself to my feet so I ' could read them, absently running my -fingernails up and down over my lower arms as I did so: / So I left town, and as to where I finished up0. . . well, mister, I think that's my business. Don't  you? , And below that, capitalized and centered, two more words:  THE END. . I read it again, now running my fingers over-my stomach. I was doing it because there was * something wrong with my skin, something .that wasn't exactly painful but was certainly - bothersome. As soon as it rose to the fore ,in my mind, I realized that weird sensation was going , on everywhere the nape of my neck, the "backs of my thighs, in my crotch. ) Shingles, I thought suddenly. I've got 0Landry's shingles. What I'm feeling is itching, and the - reason I didn't recognize it right away is because - 'Because I've never had an itch before,' I +said, and then the rest of it clicked into place. The ) click was so sudden and so hard that I ,actually swayed on my feet. I walked slowly across to a / mirror on the wall, trying not to scratch my .weirdly crawling skin, knowing I was going to see an + aged version of my face, a face cut with ,lines like old dry washes and topped with a shock of  lackluster white hair. ( Now I knew what happened when writers #somehow took over the lives of the characters they - had created. It wasn't exactly theft after all.  More of a swap. + I stood staring into Landry's face my /face, only aged fifteen hard years and felt my skin + tingling and buzzing. Hadn't he said his .shingles had been getting better? If this was better, how % had he endured worse without going completely insane? + I was in Landry's house, of course my *house, now and in the bathroom off the study, I ' found the medication he took for his 0shingles. I took my first dose less than an hour after I came ) to on the floor below his desk and the .humming machine on it, and it was as if I had swallowed  his life instead of medicine. & As if I'd swallowed his whole life. - These days the shingles are a thing of the 0past, I'm happy to report. Maybe it just ran its0 course, but I like to think that the old Clyde,Umney spirit had something to do with it Clyde . was never sick a day in his life, you know, 'and although I seem to always have the sniffles in this . run-down Sam Landry body, I'll be damned if 1I'll give in to them . . . and since when did it hurt 0 to turn on a little of that positive thinking?*I think the correct answer to that one is 'since never.' ( There have been some pretty bad days, 'though, the first one coming less than twenty-four . hours after I showed up in the unbelievable -year of 1994. I was looking through Landry's fridge . for something to eat (I'd pigged out on his -Black Horse Ale the night before and felt it couldn't + hurt my hangover to eat something) when a-sudden pain knifed into my guts. I thought I was 0 dying. It got worse, and I knew I was dying. I0fell to the kitchen floor, trying not to scream.A + moment or two later, something happened, and the pain eased. 0 Most of my life I've been using the phrase 'I *don't give a shit.' All that has changed, starting * that morning. I cleaned myself up, then -climbed the stairs, knowing what I'd find in the bedroom:  wet sheets in Landry's bed. , My first week in Landry's world was spent 1mostly in toilet-training myself. In my world, of, course, nobody ever went to the bathroom. +Or to the dentist, for that matter, and my first trip to ( the one listed in Landry's Rolodex is ,something I don't even want to think about, let alone  discuss. . But there's been an occasional rose in this .nest of brambles. For one thing, there's been no % need to go job-hunting in Landry's *confusing, jet-propelled world; his books apparently continue + to sell very well, and I have no problem -cashing the checks that come in the mail. My signature 0 and his are, of course, identical. As for any ,moral compunctions I might have about doing that, , don't make me laugh. Those checks are for ,stories about me. Landry only wrote them; I lived * them. Hell, I deserved fifty thou and a /rabies shot just for getting within scratching distance of  Mavis Weld's claws. , I expected to have problems with Landry's .so-called friends, but I suppose a heavy-duty - shamus like me should have known better *would a guy with any real friends want to - disappear into a world he'd created on the /soundstage of his own imagination? Not likely. . Landry's friends were his son and his wife, ,and they were dead. There are acquaintances and + neighbors, but they seem to accept me as +him. The woman across the street throws me puzzled 0 glances from time to time, and her little girl-cries when I come near even though I used to babysit ) for them every now and then (the woman -says I did, anyway, and why would she lie?), but  that's no big deal. - I have even spoken to Landry's agent, a guy)from New York named Verrill. He wants to know & when I'm going to start a new book.  Soon, I tell him. Soon. . Mostly I stay in. I have no urge to explore (the world Landry pushed me into when he pushed + me out of my own; I see more than I want *to on my once-weekly trip to the bank and the grocery + store, and I threw a bookend through his -awful television machine less than two hours after I 0 figured out how to use it. It doesn't surprise-me that Landry wanted to leave this groaning world , with its freight of disease and senseless ,violence a world where naked women dance in + nightclub windows, and sex with them can kill you. - No, I spend my time inside, mostly. I have ,re-read each of his novels, and each one is like , leafing through the pages of a well-loved -scrapbook. And I've taught myself to use his wordprocessing ( machine, of course. It's not like the /television machine; the screen is similar, but on # the word-processor, you can make +whatever pictures you want to see, because they all come  from inside your own head.  I like that. - I've been getting ready, you see trying *sentences and discarding them the way you try / pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. And this morning I,wrote a few that seem right . . . or almost right. ! Want to hear? Okay, here goes: - When I looked toward the door, I saw a very&chastened, very downcast Peoria Smith standing / there. 'I guess I treated you pretty bad the -last time I saw you, Mr. Umney,' he said. 'I came to / say I'm sorry.' It had been over six months, -but he looked the same as ever. And I do meanthe  same. 0 'You're still wearing your cheaters,' I said. / 'Yeah. We tried the operation, but it didn't /work.' He sighed, then grinned and shrugged. In, that moment he looked like the Peoria I'd *always known. 'What the hey, Mr. Umney bein blind  ain't so bad.' 1 It isn't perfect; sure, I know that. I started 0out as a detective, not a writer. But I believe you can - do just about anything, if you want to bad 'enough, and when you get right down to where the " cheese binds, this is a kind of ,keyhole-peeping, too. The size and shape of the word-processor 1 keyhole are a little different, but it's still +looking into other people's lives and then reporting back ! to the client on what you saw. * I'm teaching myself for one very simple 0reason: I don't want to be here. You can call itLA in 2 1994 if you want to; I call it hell. It's awful *frozen dinners you cook in a box called a , 'microwave,' it's sneakers that look like .Frankenstein shoes, it's music that comes out of the radio . sounding like crows being steamed alive in apressure-cooker, it's  Well, it's everything. - I want my life back, I want things the way *they were, and I think I know how to make that  happen. + You're one sad, thieving bastard, Sam 3may I still call you that? and I feel sorry for you . / . . but sorry only stretches so far, because /the operant word here is thieving. My original opinion , on the subject hasn't changed at all, you 1see I still don't believe that the ability to create  conveys the right to steal. , What are you doing right this minute, you -thief? Eating dinner at that Petit Djeuner restaurant $ you made up? Sleeping beside some +gorgeous honey with perfect no-sag breasts and murder up . the sleeve of her negligee? Driving down to -Malibu with carefree abandon? Or just kickingback ) in the old office chair, enjoying your 0painless, odorless, shitless life? What are you doing? - I've been teaching myself to write, that's .what I've been doing, and now that I've found my . way in, I think I'll get better in a hurry. Already I can almost see you. ) Tomorrow morning, Clyde and Peoria are )going to go down to Blondie's, which has re-opened , for business. This time Peoria's going to ,take Clyde up on that breakfast offer. That will be step  two. - Yes, I can almost see you, Sam, and pretty 2soon I will. But I don't think you'll see me. Not . until I step out from behind my office door &and wrap my hands around your throat.  This time nobody goes home.   -Head Down-  ( AUTHOR'S NOTE: I am breaking in here, #Constant Reader, to make you aware + that this is not a story but an essay 'almost a diary. It originally appeared + in The New Yorker in the spring of 1990.  S.K. # Head down! Keep your head down!' , It is far from the most difficult feat in .sports, but anyone who has ever tried to do it will tell , you that it's tough enough: using a round 0bat to hit a round ball squarely on the button. Tough + enough so that the handful of men who do /it well become rich, famous, and idolized: the Jose + Cansecos, the Mike Greenwells, the Kevin ,Mitchells. For thousands of boys (and not a few 0 girls), their faces, not the face of Axl Rose *or Bobby Brown, are the ones that matter; their ) posters hold the positions of honor on .bedroom walls and locker doors. Today Ron St. Pierre is * teaching some of these boys boys who .will represent Bangor West Side in District 3 Little + League tournament play how to put the ,round bat on the round ball. Right now he's working , with a kid named Fred Moore while my son, ,Owen, stands nearby, watching closely. He's due in & St. Pierre's hot seat next. Owen is 0broad-shouldered and heavily built, like his old man; Fred 1 looks almost painfully slim in his bright green+jersey. And he is not making good contact. . 'Head down, Fred!' St. Pierre shouts. He is )halfway between the mound and home plate at one - of the two Little League fields behind the -Coke plant in Bangor; Fred is almost all the way to the - backstop. The day is a hot one, but if the /heat bothers either Fred or St. Pierre it does not show. * They are intent on what they are doing. / 'Keep it down!' St. Pierre shouts again, and unloads a fat pitch. , Fred chips under it. There is that chinky *aluminum-on-cowhide sound the sound of - someone hitting a tin cup with a spoon. The.ball hits the backstop, rebounds, almost bonkshim - on the helmet. Both of them laugh, and then*St. Pierre gets another ball from the red plastic  bucket beside him. . 'Get ready, Freddy!' he yells. 'Head down!' 2 Maine's District 3 is so large that it is split +in two. The Penobscot County teams make up half the ) division; the teams from Aroostook and ,Washington counties make up the other half. Ail-Star , kids are selected by merit and drawn from /all existing district Little League teams. The dozen + teams in District 3 play in simultaneous +tournaments. Near the end of July, the two teams left + will play off, best two out of three, to %decide the district champ. That team represents District 3 - in State Championship play, and it has been/a long time eighteen years since a Bangor' team made it into the state tourney. * This year, the State Championship games ,will be played in Old Town, where they make the + canoes. Four of the five teams that play 0there will go back home. The fifth will go on to represent , Maine in the Eastern Regional Tournament, .this year to be held in Bristol, Connecticut. Beyond $ that, of course, is Williamsport, ,Pennsylvania, where the Little League World Series happens. ) The Bangor West players rarely seem to *think of such dizzy heights; they will be happy just to . beat Millinocket, their first-round opponent'in the Penobscot County race. Coaches, however, are + allowed to dream are, in fact, almost obligated to dream. - This time Fred, who is the team joker, does+get his head down. He hits a weak grounder on the - wrong side of the first-base line, foul by about six feet. 0 'Look,' St. Pierre says, taking another ball. ,He holds it up. It J is scuffed, dirty, and grassstained. / It is nevertheless a baseball, and Fred eyes 1it respectfully. 'I'm going to show you a-trick.  Where's the ball?'  'In your hand,' Fred says. , Saint, as Dave Mansfield, the team's head 1coach, calls him, drops it into his glove. 'Now?' 'In your glove.' * Saint turns sideways; his pitching hand creeps into his glove. 'Now?'  'In your hand. I think.' , 'You're right. So watch my hand. Watch my +hand, Fred Moore, and wait for the ball to come 1 out in it. You're looking for the ball. Nothing0else. Just the ball. I should just be a blur to you. * Why would you want to see me, anyway? Do/you care if I'm smiling? No. You're waiting to see / how I'll come sidearm or three-quarters or!over the top. Are you waiting?''  Fred nods.  'Are you watching?'  Fred nods again. - 'O.K.,' St. Pierre says, and goes into his )short-arm batting-practice motion again. + This time Fred drives the ball with real 0authority: a hard sinking liner to right field. 4 'All right!' Saint cries. 'That's all right, Fred .Moore!' He wipes sweat off his forehead. 'Next  batter!' + Dave Mansfield, a heavy, bearded man who -comes to the park wearing aviator sunglasses and an / open-neck College World Series shirt (it's a -good-luck charm), brings a paper sack to the Bangor - West-Millinocket game. It contains sixteen .pennants, in various colors. bangor, each one says, , the word flanked by a lobster on one side -and a pine tree on the other. As each Bangor West + player is announced on loudspeakers that ,have been wired to the chain-link backstop, he takes a , pennant from the bag Dave holds out, runs (across the infield, and hands it to his opposite  number. - Dave is a loud, restless man who happens to/love baseball and the kids who play it at this / level. He believes there are two purposes to 0All-Star Little League: to have fun and to win. Both ' are important, he says, but the most -important thing is to keep them in the right order. The + pennants are not a sly gambit to unnerve ,the opposition but just for fun. Dave knows that the ( boys on both teams will remember this +game, and he wants each of the Millinocket kids to have & a souvenir. It's as simple as that. , The Millinocket players seem surprised by )the gesture, and they don't know exactly what to do , with the pennants as someone's tape player.begins to warble out the Anita Bryant version of 'The ) Star-Spangled Banner.' The Millinocket )catcher, almost buried beneath his gear, solves the * problem in unique fashion: he holds his Bangor pennant over his heart. + With the amenities taken care of, Bangor &West administers a brisk and thorough trouncing; the 0 final score is Bangor West 18, Millinocket 7. )The loss does not devalue the souvenirs, however; , when Millinocket departs on the team bus, -the visitors' dugout is empty save for a few Dixie , cups and Popsicle sticks. The pennants &every single one of them are gone. * 'Cut two!' Neil Waterman, Bangor West's )field coach, shouts. 'Cut two, cut two!' + It's the day after the Millinocket game. -Everyone on the team is still showing up for practice, 2 but it's early yet. Attrition will set in. That .is a given: parents are not always willing to give up - summer plans so their kids can play Little -League after the regular, May-June season is over, and , sometimes the kids themselves tire of the .constant grind of practice. Some would rather be riding + their bikes, trying to hang ten on their (skateboards, or just hanging around the community pool  and checking out the girls. , 'Cut two!' Waterman yells. He is a small, ,compact man in khaki shorts and a Joe Coach . crewcut. In real life he is a teacher and a -college basketball coach, but this summer he is trying to - teach these boys that baseball has more in 'common with chess than many would ever have / believed. Know your play, he tells them over .and over again. Know who it is you're backing up. + Most important of all, know who your cut .man is in every situation, and be able to hit him. He , works patiently at showing them the truth .that hides at the center of the game: that it is played ' more in the mind than with the body. ' Ryan Larrobino, Bangor West's center +fielder, fires a bullet to Casey Kinney at second base. . Casey tags an invisible runner, pivots, and +throws another bullet to home, where J. J. Fiddler - takes the throw and tosses the ball back to Waterman. / 'Double-play ball!' Waterman shouts, and hits+one to Matt Kinney (not related to Casey). Matt . is playing shortstop at practice today. The ,ball takes a funny hop and appears to be on its way to - left center. Matt knocks it down, picks it (up, and feeds to Casey at second; Casey pivots and / throws to Mike Arnold, who is on first. Mike feeds it home to J.J. 0 'All right!' Waterman shouts. 'Good job, Matt &Kinney! Good job! One-two-one! You're ) covering, Mike Pelkey!' The two names. *Always the two names, to avoid confusion. The team is * lousy with Matts, Mikes, and guys named Kinney. + The throws are executed flawlessly. Mike -Pelkey, Bangor West's number two pitcher, is right - where he's supposed to be, covering first. *It's a move he doesn't always remember to make, but - this time he does. He grins and trots back ,to the mound as Neil Waterman gets ready to hit the  next combination. 0 'This is the best Little League All-Star team .I've seen in years,' Dave Mansfield says some days # after Bangor West's trouncing of *Millinocket. He dumps a load of sunflower seeds into his * mouth and begins to chew them. He spits 0hulls casually as he talks. 'I don't think they can be , beaten at least not in this division.' ' He pauses and watches as Mike Arnold ,breaks toward the plate from first, grabs a practice , bunt, and whirls toward the bag. He cocks 0his arm back then holds the ball. Mike Pelkeyis ' still on the mound; this time he has /forgotten that it is his job to cover, and the bag is - undefended. He flashes Dave a quick guilty -glance. Then he breaks into a sunny grin and gets . ready to do it again. Next time he'll do it +right, but will he remember to do it right during a  game? + 'Of course, we can beat ourselves,' Dave ,says. 'That's how it usually happens.' And, raising his + voice, he bellows, 'Where were you, Mike .Pelkey? You're s'posed to be covering first!' . Mike nods and trots over better late thannever. , 'Brewer,' Dave says, and shakes his head. 2'Brewer at their field. That'll be tough. Brewer's always tough.' + Bangor West does not trounce Brewer, but -they win their first 'road game' without any real - strain. Matt Kinney, the team's number one )pitcher, is in good form. He is far from . overpowering, but his fastball has a sneaky,.snaky little hop, and he also has a modest but. effective breaking pitch. Ron St. Pierre is (fond of saying that every Little League pitcher in . America thinks he's got a killer curveball. 0'What they think is a curve is usually this big lollipop , change,' he says. 'A batter with a little *self-discipline can kill the poor thing.' + Matt Kinney's curveball actually curves, *however, and tonight he goes the distance and strikes ) out eight. Probably more important, he /walks only four. Walks are the bane of a LittleLeague + coach's existence. 'They kill you,' Neil /Waterman says. 'The walks kill you every time. . Absolutely no exceptions. Sixty per cent of .batters walked score in Little League games.' Not in - this game: two of the batters Kinney walks (are forced at second; the other two are stranded. Only - one Brewer batter gets a hit: Denise Hewes,0the center fielder, singles with one out in the fifth,  but she is forced at second. , After the game is safely in the bag, Matt #Kinney, a solemn and almost eerily self-possessed . boy, flashes Dave a rare smile, revealing a .set of neat braces. 'She could hit!' he says, almost  reverently. * 'Wait until you see Hampden,' Dave says dryly. 'They all hit.' % When the Hampden squad shows up at .Bangor West's field, behind the Coke plant, on July 17th, - they quickly prove Dave right. Mike Pelkey -has pretty good stuff and better control thanhe had . against Millinocket, but he isn't much of a ,mystery to the Hampden boys. Mike Tardif, a * compact kid with an amazingly fast bat, .rips Pelkey's third pitch over the left-field fence, two + hundred feet away, for a home run in the ,first inning. Hampden adds two more runs in the % second, and leads Bangor West 3-0. , In the third, however, Bangor West breaks -loose. Hampden's pitching is good, Hampden's . hitting is awesome, but Hampden's fielding, 0particularly infielding, leaves something to be ' desired. Bangor West puts three hits +together with five errors and two walks to score seven runs. * This is how Little League is most often -played, and seven runs should be enough, but they aren't; ( the opposition chips stubbornly away, -getting two in its half of the third and two more in the & fifth. When Hampden comes up in the ,bottom of the sixth, it is trailing by only three, 10-7. + Kyle King, a twelve-year-old who started *for Hampden this evening and then went to catcher , in the fifth, leads off the bottom of the .sixth with a double. Then Mike Pelkey strikes out Mike * Tardif. Mike Wentworth, the new Hampden )pitcher, singles to deep short. King and Wentworth - advance on a passed ball, but are forced to*hold when Jeff Carson grounds back to the pitcher. , This brings up Josh Jamieson, one of five *Hampden home-run threats, with two on and two out.  He represents the tying run. / Mike, although clearly tired, finds a little .extra and strikes him out on a one-two pitch. The  game is over. + The kids line up and give each other the /custom-ordained high fives, but it's clear thatMike - isn't the only kid who is simply exhausted .after the match; with their slumped shoulders and , lowered heads, they all look like losers. /Bangor West is now 3-0 in divisional play, but the win is . a fluke, the kind of game that makes Little +League such a nerve-racking experience for ' spectators, coaches, and the players .themselves. Usually sure-handed in the field, Bangor West , has tonight committed something like nine errors. . 'I didn't sleep all night,' Dave mutters at &practice the next day. 'Damn, we were outplayed. We  should have lost that game.' - Two nights later, he has something else to .feel gloomy about. He and Ron St. Pierre make the - six-mile trip to Hampden to watch Kyle King/and his mates play Brewer. This is no scouting , expedition; Bangor has played both clubs, +and both men have copious notes. What they are / really hoping to see, Dave admits, is Brewer ,getting lucky and putting Hampden out of theway. + It doesn't happen; what they see isn't a $baseball game but gunnery practice. - Josh Jamieson, who struck out in the clutch,against Mike Pelkey, clouts a home run over + everything and into the Hampden practice /field. Nor is Jamieson alone. Carson hits one, . Wentworth hits one, and Tardif hits a pair. )The final score is Hampden 21, Brewer 9. - On the ride back to Bangor, Dave Mansfield 0chews a lot of sunflower seeds and says little. He - rouses himself only once, as he wheels his -old green Chevy into the rutted dirt parking lot beside ( the Coke plant. 'We got lucky Tuesday ,night, and they know it,' he says. 'When we go down . there Thursday, they'll be waiting for us.' & The diamonds, on which the teams of 0District 3 play out their six-inning dramas all have the , same dimensions, give or take a foot here +or an outfield gate there. The coaches all carry the + rulebook in their back pockets, and they /put it to frequent use. Dave likes to say that it never 0 hurts to make sure. The infield is sixty feet -on each side, a square standing on the point that is - home plate. The backstop, according to the ,rulebook, must be at least twenty feet from home . plate, giving both the catcher and a runner -at third a fair chance on a passed ball. The fences are - supposed to be 200 feet from the plate. At 0Bangor West's field, it's actually about 210 to dead ( center. And at Hampden, home of power 1hitters like Tardif and Jamieson, it's more like 180. . The most inflexible measurement is also the )most important: the distance between the pitcher's & rubber and the center of the plate. ,Forty-six feet no more, no less. When it comes to this one, * nobody ever says, 'Aw, close enough for +government work let it go.' Most Little League , teams live and die by what happens in the )forty-six feet between those two points. 0 The fields of District 3 vary considerably in .other ways, and a quick look is usually enoughto . tell you something about the feel any given +community has for the game. The Bangor Westfield . is in bad shape a poor relation that the 0town regularly ignores in its recreation budget.The / undersurface is a sterile clay that turns to $soup when the weather is wet and to concrete when the . weather is dry, as it has been this summer. 'Watering has kept most of the outfield reasonably . green, but the infield is hopeless. Scruffy 'grass grows up the lines, but the area between the , pitcher's rubber and home plate is almost /completely bald. The backstop is rusty; passed balls . and wild pitches frequently squirt through a*wide gap between the ground and the chain link. % Two large, hilly dunes run through +short-right and center fields. These dunes have actually ' become a home-team advantage. Bangor *West players learn to play the caroms off them, just as - Red Sox left fielders learn to play caroms -off the Green Monster. Visiting fielders, on the other , hand, often find themselves chasing their #mistakes all the way to the fence. . Brewer's field, tucked behind the local IGA .grocery and a Marden's Discount Store, has to ) compete for space with what may be the -oldest, rustiest playground equipment in New England; - little brothers and sisters watch the game )upside down from the swings, their heads down and  their feet in the sky. & Bob Beal Field in Machias, with its ,pebble-pocked-skin infield, is probably the worst of the + fields Bangor West will visit this year; )Hampden, with its manicured outfield and neat - composition infield, is probably the best. -With its picnic area beyond the center-field fence and a * rest-room-equipped snack bar, Hampden's /diamond, behind the local VFW hall, looks like a rich 0 kids' field. But looks can be deceiving. This ,team is a combination of kids from Newburgh and , Hampden, and Newburgh is still small farm .and dairy country. Many of these kids ride to the - games in old cars with primer paint around -the headlights and mufflers held in place by chicken * wire; they wear sunburns they got doing +chores, not while they were hanging out at the countryclub - swimming pool. Town kids and country kids. )Once they're in uniform, it doesn't much  matter which is which. + Dave is right: the Hampden-Newburgh fans .are waiting. Bangor West last won the District3 + Little League title in 1971; Hampden has 'never won a title, and many local fans continue to hope * that this will be the year, despite the 0earlier loss to Bangor West. For the first time, the Bangor - team really feels it is on the road; it is -faced with a large hometown rooting section. & Matt Kinney gets the start. Hampden -counters with Kyle King, and the game quicklyshapes * up as that rarest and richest of Little .League commodities, a genuine pitchers' duel. At the end of , the third inning, the score is Hampden 0, Bangor West 0. - In the bottom of the fourth, Bangor scores )two unearned runs when Hampden's infield comes ' unglued once more. Owen King, Bangor ,West's first baseman, comes to bat with two on and one * out. The two Kings, Kyle on the Hampden *team and Owen on the Bangor West team, arenot / related. You don't need to be told; a single /glance is enough. Kyle King is about five foot three. - At six foot two, Owen King towers over him.*Size differences are so extreme in Little League 0 that it's easy to feel disoriented, the victimof hallucination. 1 Bangor's King raps a ground ball to short. It's+a tailor-made double play, but the Hampden + shortstop does not field it cleanly, and ,King, shucking his two hundred or so pounds down to , first at top speed, beats the throw. Mike %Pelkey and Mike Arnold scamper home. . Then, in the top of the fifth, Matt Kinney, +who has been cruising, hits Chris Witcomb, number . eight in Hampden's order. Brett Johnson, the*number nine hitter, scorches one at Casey Kinney, - Bangor West's second baseman. Again, it's a.tailor-made double-play ball, but Casey gives up on . it. His hands, which have been automatically+dipping down, freeze about four inches off the + ground, and Casey turns his face away to 0protect it from a possible bad hop. This is the most / common of all Little League fielding errors, /and the most easily understood; it is an act ofnaked , self-preservation. The stricken look that -Casey throws toward Dave and Neil as the ballsquirts + through into center field completes this part of the ballet. 2 'It's O.K., Casey! Next time!' Dave bawls in his%gravelly, self-assured Yankee voice. . 'New batter!' Neil shouts, ignoring Casey's .look completely. 'New batter! Know your play! & We're still ahead! Get an out! Just concentrate on getting an out!' , Casey begins to relax, begins to get back -into the game, and then, beyond the outfield fences, + the Hampden Horns begin to blow. Some of -them belong to late-model cars Toyotas and, Hondas and snappy little Dodge Colts with )US OUT OF CENTRAL AMERICA and SPLIT WOOD NOT , ATOMS stickers on the bumpers. But most of+the Hampden Horns reside within older cars and , pick-up trucks. Many of the pick-ups have ,rusty doors, FM converters wired up beneath the - dashboards, and Leer camper caps built over.the truck beds. Who is inside these vehicles, , blowing the horns? No one seems to know /not for sure. They are not parents or relativesof ' the Hampden players; the parents and )relatives (plus a generous complement of ice-creamsmeared / little brothers and sisters) are filling the &bleachers and lining the fence on the third-base ) side of the diamond, where the Hampden +dugout is. They may be local guys just off work ) guys who have stopped to watch some of ,the game before having a few brewskis at theVFW . hall next door or they may be the ghosts ,of Hampden Little Leaguers Past, hungry for that * long-denied State Championship flag. It ,seems at least possible; there is something both eerie * and inevitable about the Hampden Horns. .They toot in harmony high horns, low horns,a few ' foghorns powered by dying batteries. .Several Bangor West players look uneasily backtoward  the sound. * Behind the backstop, a local TV crew is .preparing to videotape a story for the sports final on . the eleven o'clock news. This causes a stir ,among some of the spectators, but only a fewof the ' players on the Hampden bench seem to 0notice it. Matt Kinney certainly doesn't. He is totally * intent on the next Hampden batter, Matt (Knaide, who taps one turf shoe with his aluminum - Worth bat and then steps into the batter's box. - The Hampden Horns fall silent. Matt Kinney -goes into his windup. Casey Kinney drops back+ into position just east of second, glove ,down. His face says it has no plans to turn away if the ball + is hit to him again. The Hampden runners .stand expectantly on first and second. (There is no / leading away from the bag in Little League.) -The spectators along the opposing arms of the! diamond watch anxiously. Their 0conversations die out. Baseball at its best (andthis is a very & good game indeed, one you would pay *money to see) is a game of restful pauses punctuated by - short, sharp inhalations. The fans can now ,sense one of those inhalations coming. Matt Kinney  winds and fires. / Knaide lines the first pitch over second for +a base hit, and now the score is 2-1. Kyle King, , Hampden's pitcher, steps to the plate and ,sends a low, screeching line drive straight back to the / mound. It hits Matt Kinney on the right shin.,He makes an instinctive effort to field the ball, - which has already squiggled off toward the (hole between third and short, before he realizes he is . really hurt and folds up. Now the bases are -loaded, but for the moment no one cares; the instant . the umpire raises his hands, signaling time -out, all the Bangor West players converge on Matt + Kinney. Beyond center field, the Hampden Horns are blowing triumphantly. - Kinney is white-faced, clearly in pain. An /ice pack is brought from the first-aid kit keptin the + snack bar, and after a few minutes he is -able to rise and limp off the field with his arms around . Dave and Neil. The spectators applaud loudlyand sympathetically. * Owen King, the erstwhile first baseman, +becomes Bangor West's new pitcher, and the first * batter he must face is Mike Tardif. The ,Hampden Horns send up a brief, anticipatory blat as 0 Tardif steps in. King's third pitch goes wild +to the backstop. Brett Johnson heads home; King , breaks toward the plate from the mound, as-he has been taught to do. In the Bangor West dugout, + Neil Waterman, his arm still around Matt Kinney's shoulders, chants, 'Cover-cover-COVER!' - Joe Wilcox, Bangor West's starting catcher,/is a foot shorter than King, but very quick. Atthe / beginning of this All-Star season, he did not1want to catch, and he still doesn't like it, but he has / learned to live with it and to get tough in a.position where very few small players survive for - long; even in Little League, most catchers .resemble human Toby jugs. Earlier in this gamehe + made an amazing one-handed stab of a foul)ball. Now he lunges toward the backstop, flinging + his mask aside with his bare hand at the ,same instant he catches the rebounding wild pitch. He , turns toward the plate and tosses to King *as the Hampden Horns chorus a wild and premature, & as it turns out bray of triumph. - Johnson has slowed down. On his face is an .expression strikingly similar to that worn by , Casey Kinney when Casey allowed Johnson's /hard-hit grounder to shoot through the hole. Itis a + look of extreme anxiety and trepidation, )the face of a boy who suddenly wishes he were ) someplace else. Anyplace else. The new pitcher is blocking the plate. + Johnson starts a halfhearted slide. King (takes the toss from Wilcox, pivots with surprising, & winsome grace, and tags the hapless -Johnson out easily. He walks back toward the mound, & wiping sweat from his forehead, and *prepares to face Tardif once more. Behind him, the * Hampden Horns have fallen silent again. ' Tardif loops one toward third. Kevin +Rochefort, Bangor's third baseman, takes a single step / backward in response. It's an easy play, but .there is an awful look of dismay on his face, and it is . only then, as Rochefort starts to freeze up -on what is an easy pop fly, that one can see how badly + the whole team has been shaken by Matt's .injury. The ball goes into Rochefort's glove, and then * pops out when Rochefort dubbed Roach +Clip first by Freddy Moore and then by the whole , squad fails to squeeze it. Knaide, who -advanced to third while King and Wilcox were dealing + with Johnson, has already broken for the .plate. Rochefort could have doubled Knaide up easily if . he had caught the ball, but here, as in the .majors, baseball is a game of ifs and inches. Rochefort , doesn't catch the ball. He throws wild to *first instead. Mike Arnold has taken over there, and he . is one of the best fielders on the team, but-no one issued him stilts. Tardif, meanwhile, steams - into second. The pitchers' duel has become *a typical Little League game, and now the Hampden ) Horns are a cacophony of joy. The home *team has their thumping shoes on, and the final score is - Hampden 9, Bangor West 2. Still, there are -two good things to go home on: Matt Kinney isnot , seriously hurt, and when Casey Kinney got ,another tough chance in the late innings he refused to  choke, and made the play. . After the final out is recorded, the Bangor .West players trudge into their dugout and sit on the / bench. This is their first loss, and most of -them are not coping with it very gracefully. Some toss / their gloves disgustedly between their dirty /sneakers. Some are crying, others look close totears, . and no one is talking. Even Freddy, Bangor's*quipmaster general, has nothing to say on this, % muggy Thursday evening in Hampden. ,Beyond the center-field fence, a few of the Hampden ( Horns are still tooting happily away. . Neil Waterman is the first person to speak. ,He tells the boys to get their heads up and look at - him. Three of them already are: Owen King, +Ryan Larrobino, and Matt Kinney. Now about half ) the squad manages to do as he's asked. *Several others, however including Josh Stevens, who ) made the final out continue to seem %vastly interested in their footgear. , 'Get your heads up,' Waterman says again. .He speaks louder this time, but not unkindly, and + now they all manage to look at him. 'You ,played a pretty good game,' he says softly. 'You got a / little rattled, and they ended up on top. It )happens. It doesn't mean they're better, though that's ' something we're going to find out on .Saturday. Tonight all you lost was a baseball game. The / sun will still come up tomorrow.' They begin /to stir around on the bench a little; this old homily ' has apparently not lost its power to ,comfort. 'You gave what you had tonight, andthat's all we ) want. I'm proud of you, and you can be +proud of yourselves. Nothing happened that you have to  hang your heads about.' * He stands aside for Dave Mansfield, who (surveys his team. When Dave speaks, his usually . loud voice is even quieter than Waterman's. )'We knew when we came down here that theyhad to * beat us, didn't we?' he asks. He speaks .reflectively, almost as if he were talking to himself. 'If 0 they didn't, they'd be out. They'll be coming .to our field on Saturday. That's when we have to  beat them. Do you want to?'  They are all looking up now. . 'I want you to remember what Neil told you,'.Dave says in that reflective voice, so unlike his / practice-field bellow. 'You are a team. That )means you love each other. You love each other * win or lose because you are a team.' + The first time anyone suggested to these ,boys that they must come to love each other while ' they were on the field, they laughed ,uneasily at the idea. Now they don't laugh. After enduring + the Hampden Horns together, they seem to understand, at least a little. * Dave surveys them again, and then nods. 'O.K. Pick up the gear.' ' They pick up bats, helmets, catching ,equipment, and stuff everything into canvas duffel bags. , By the time they've got it over to Dave's *old green pick-up truck, some of them are laughing  again. + Dave laughs with them, but he doesn't do +any laughing on the ride home. Tonight the ride + seems long. 'I don't know if we can beat ,them on Saturday,' he says on the way back. He is + speaking in that same reflective tone of 0voice. 'I want to, and they want to, but I just don't know. ( Hampden's got mo on their side, now.' , Mo, of course, is momentum that mythic .force which shapes. not only single games but - whole seasons. Baseball players are quirky .and superstitious at every level of play, and for some & reason the Bangor West players have /adopted a small plastic sandal a castoff of some young / fan's baby doll as their mascot. They have-named this absurd talisman Mo. They stick it in I - the chain-link fence of the dugout at every+game, and batters often touch it furtively before ) stepping into the on-deck circle. Nick .Trzaskos, who ordinarily plays left field for Bangor West, + has been entrusted with Mo between games.0Tonight, for the first time, he forgot to bring the  talisman. ) 'Nick better remember Mo on Saturday,' 0Dave says grimly. 'But even if he remembers . . . ' He ( shakes his head. 'I just don't know.' ) There is no admission charge to Little /League games; the charter expressly forbids it. Instead, a - player takes around a hat during the fourth/inning, soliciting donations for equipment and field ( maintenance. On Saturday, when Bangor *West and Hampden square off in the year's final * Penobscot County Little League game, at *Bangor, one can judge the growth of local interest in ) the team's fortunes by a simple act of +comparison. The collection taken up at the Bangor- + Millinocket contest was $15.45; when the .hat finally comes back in the fifth inning of the * Saturday-afternoon game against Hampden,*it's overflowing with change and crumpled dollar 1 bills. The total take is $94.25. The bleachers 2are full; the fences are lined; the parking lot isfull. - Little League has one thing in common with (almost all American sports and business endeavors: ! nothing succeeds like success. / Things start off well for Bangor they lead$7-3 at the end of three and then everything - falls apart. In the fourth inning, Hampden -scores six runs, most of them honest. Bangor West , doesn't fold, as it did after Matt Kinney -was hit in the game at Hampden the playersdo not + drop their heads, to use Neil Waterman's )phrase. But when they come to bat in the bottom of the + sixth inning they are down by a score of -14-12. Elimination looks very close and very real. Mo is - in its accustomed place, but Bangor West is*still three cuts away from the end of its season. - One kid who did not need to be told to get -his head up following Bangor West's 9-2 loss was + Ryan Larrobino. He went two for three in ,that game, played well, and trotted off the field 0 knowing he had played well. He is a tall kid, +quiet, with broad shoulders and a shock of dark- ' brown hair. He is one of two natural 'athletes on the Bangor West team. Matt Kinney is the other. % Although the two boys are physical 1opposites Kinney slim and still fairly short, Larrobino tall + and well muscled they share a quality .that is uncommon in boys their age: they trusttheir + bodies. Most of the others on the Bangor +West squad, no matter how talented, seem toregard % feet, arms, and hands as spies and potential traitors. * Larrobino is one of those boys who seem )somehow more there when they are dressed for - some sort of competition. He is one of the ,few kids on either team who can don batting helmets ( and not look like nerds wearing their +mothers' stewpots. When Matt Kinney stands on the mound - and throws a baseball, he seems perfect in ,his place and time. And when Ryan Larrobino steps . into the right-hand batter's box and points +the head of his bat out toward the pitcher for an instant / before raising it to the cocked position, at /his right shoulder, he also seems to be exactlywhere - he belongs. He looks dug in even before he /settles himself for the first pitch: you could draw a / perfectly straight line from the ball of his /shoulder to the ball of his hip and on down to the ball . of his ankle. Matt Kinney was built to throw0baseballs; Ryan Larrobino was built to hit them.* Last call for Bangor West. Jeff Carson, +whose fourth-inning home run is really the difference in + this game, and Mike Tardif, now replaces +who earlier replaced Mike Wentworth on the mound - for Hampden. He faces Owen King first. King,goes three and two (swinging wildly for the - fences at one pitch in the dirt), and then -lays off a pitch just inside to work a walk. Roger Fisher . follows him to the plate, pinch-hitting for +the ever-gregarious Fred Moore. Roger is a small boy / with Indian-dark eyes and hair. He looks like)an easy out, but looks can be deceptive; Roger has $ good power. Today, however, he is overmatched. He strikes out. * In the field, the Hampden players shift .around and look at each other. They are close, and they + know it. The parking lot is too far away +here for the Hampden Horns to be a factor; their fans - settle for simply screaming encouragement. *Two women wearing purple Hampden caps are + standing behind the dugout, hugging each -other joyfully. Several other fans look like track / runners waiting for the starter's gun; it is +clear they mean to rush onto the field the moment their + boys succeed in putting Bangor West away for good. & Joe Wilcox, who didn't want to be a +catcher and ended up doing the job anyway, rams a oneout , single up the middle and into left-center -field. King stops at second. Up steps Arthur Dorr, * the Bangor right fielder, who wears the -world's oldest pair of high-top sneakers and has not had a 2 hit all day. This time he rifles one, but right ,at the Hampden shortstop, who barely has to move. * The shortstop whips the ball to second, .hoping to catch King off the bag, but he's out of luck. # Nevertheless, there are two out. " The Hampden fans scream further *encouragement. The women behind the dugout are jumping * up and down. Now there are a few Hampden-Horns tootling away someplace, but they are alittle 0 early, and all one has to do to know it is to /look at Mike Tardif 's face as he wipes off his, forehead and pounds the baseball into his glove. + Ryan Larrobino steps into the right-hand .batter's box. He has a fast, almost naturally perfect 0 swing; even Ron St. Pierre will not fault him on it much. / Ryan swings through Tardif's first pitch, his,hardest of the day it makes a rifle-shot sound , as it hits Kyle King's glove. Tardif then +wastes one outside. King returns the ball; Tardif * meditates briefly and then throws a low 1fastball. Ryan looks at it, and the umpire calls strike two. - It has caught the outside corner maybe. ,The ump says it did, anyway, and that's the end of it. ) Now the fans on both sides have fallen /quiet, and so have the coaches. They're all out of it. It's - only Tardif and Larrobino now, balanced on ,the last strike of the last out of the last game one of ( these teams will play. Forty-six feet ,between these two faces. Only, Larrobino is not watching 0 Tardif's face. He is watching Tardif's glove, /and somewhere I can hear Ron St. Pierre telling/ Fred, You're waiting to see how I'll come *sidearm, three-quarters, or over the top. . Larrobino is waiting to see how Tardif will .come. As Tardif moves to the set position, youcan + faintly hear the pock-pock, pock-pock of /tennis balls on a nearby court, but here there is only - silence and the crisp black shadows of the 0players, lying on the dirt like silhouettes cut from - black construction paper, and Larrobino is %waiting to see how Tardif will come. & He comes over the top. And suddenly /Larrobino is in motion, both knees and the left shoulder / dipping slightly, the aluminum bat a blur in ,the sunlight. That aluminum-on-cowhide sound . chink, like someone hitting a tin cup with a2spoon is different this time. A lot different. Not ) chink but crunch as Ryan connects, and -then the ball is in the sky, tracking out to left field a . long shot that is clearly gone, high, wide, +and handsome into the summer afternoon. The ball will ( later be recovered from beneath a car %about 275 feet away from home plate. ) The expression on twelve-year-old Mike (Tardif's face is stunned, thunderstruck disbelief. He - takes one quick look into his glove, as if 1hoping to find the ball still there and discover that + Larrobino's dramatic two-strike, two-out ,shot was only a hideous momentary dream. Thetwo ) women behind the backstop look at each +other in total amazement. At first, no one makes a ( sound. In that moment before everyone ,begins to scream and the Bangor West players rush out ( of their dugout to await Ryan at home ,plate and mob him when he arrives, only two people are / entirely sure that it did really happen. One /is Ryan himself. As he rounds first, he raises both ( hands to his shoulders in a brief but *emphatic gesture of triumph. And, as Owen King crosses the . plate with the first of the three runs that /will end Hampden's Ail-Star season, Mike Tardif0 realizes. Standing on the pitcher's rubber for-the last time as a Little Leaguer, he bursts into tears. - 'You gotta remember, they're only twelve,' +each of the three coaches says at one time or another, ) and each time one of them says it, the /listener feels that he Mansfield, Waterman, or St. Pierre " is really reminding himself. - 'When you are on the field, we'll love you .and you will love each other,' Waterman tells the + boys again and again, and in the wake of 'Bangor's eleventh-hour, 15-14 win over Hampden, . when they all did love each other, the boys -no longer laugh at this. He continues, 'From now on, , I'm going to be hard on you very hard. ,When you're playing, you'll get nothing but - unconditional love from me. But when we're -practicing on our home field some of you are going - to find out how loud I can yell. If you're 1goofing off, you're going to sit down. If I tell you to do . something and you don't do it, you're going .to sit down. Recess is over, guys everybodyout of 0 the pool. This is where the hard work starts.'- A few nights later, Waterman hits a shot to*right during fielding practice. It almost amputates $ Arthur Dorr's nose on the way by. . Arthur has been busy making sure his fly is /zipped. Or inspecting the laces of his Keds. Or some damn thing. . 'Arthur!' Neil Waterman bellows, and Arthur -flinches more at the sound of that voice thanhe , did at the close passage of the baseball. "'Get in here! On the bench! Now!'  'But ' Arthur begins. 4 'In here!' Neil yells back. 'You're on the pine!' 1 Arthur trots sullenly in, head down, and J. J. -Fiddler takes his place. A few nights later, Nick , Trzaskos loses his chance to hit away when1he fails to bunt two pitches in five tries or so.He sits + on the bench by himself, cheeks flaming. * Machias, the Aroostook County/Washington*County winner, is next on the docket a twoout- * of-three series, and the winner will be -District 3 champion. The first game is to be played at . the Bangor field, behind the Coke plant, the.second at Bob Beal Field in Machias. The last game, . if needed, will be played on neutral ground between the two towns. % As Neil Waterman has promised, the -coaching staff is all encouragement once the national , anthem has been played and the first game starts. 0 'That's all right, no damage!' Dave Mansfield .cries as Arthur Dorr misjudges a long shot to / right and the ball lands behind him. 'Get an 1out, now! Belly play! Let's just get an out!' No one . seems to know exactly what 'belly play' is, +but since it seems to involve winning ball games, the  boys are all for it. - No third game against Machias is necessary.#Bangor West gets a strong pitching performance - from Matt Kinney in the first one and wins *17-5. Winning the second game is a little tougher $ only because the weather does not 'cooperate: a drenching summer downpour washes out the first . try, and it is necessary for Bangor West to (make the 168-mile round trip to Machias twice in 1 order to clinch the division. They finally get *the game in, on the twenty-ninth of July. Mike - Pelkey's family has spirited Bangor West's *number two pitcher off to Disney World in Orlando, , making Mike the third player to fade from -the team, but Owen King steps quietly in and pitches + a five-hitter, striking out eight before ,tiring and giving way to Mike Arnold in the sixth inning. & Bangor West wins, 12-2, and becomes District 3 Little League champ. , At moments like these, the pros retire to ,their air-conditioned locker rooms and pour champagne + over each other's heads. The Bangor West -team goes out to Helen's, the best (maybe theonly) + restaurant in Machias, to celebrate with -hot dogs, hamburgers, gallons of Pepsi-Cola, and - mountains of French fries. Looking at them -as they laugh at each other, razz each other,and . blow napkin pellets through their straws at /each other, it is impossible not to be aware ofhow + soon they will discover gaudier modes of celebration. . For now, however, this is perfectly O.K. ,great, in fact. They are not overwhelmed by what  they have done, but they seem ,tremendously pleased, tremendously content, and entirely here. If ) they have been touched with magic this ,summer, they do not know it, and no one has as yet been , unkind enough to tell them that it may be ,so. For now they are allowed the deep-fried 1 simplicities of Helen's, and those simplicities&are quite enough. They have won their division; the ' State Championship Tournament, where -bigger and better teams from the more heavily, populated regions downstate will probably %blow them out, is still a week away. + Ryan Larrobino has changed back into his *tank top. Arthur Donhas a rakish smear of ketchup * on one cheek. And Owen King, who struck .terror into the hearts of the Machias batters by ) coming at them with a powerful sidearm 0fastball on 0-2 counts, is burbling happily into his glass ( of Pepsi. Nick Trzaskos, who can look ,unhappier than any boy on earth when things don't break - his way, looks supremely happy tonight. And,why not? Tonight they're twelve and they're  winners. , Not that they don't remind you themselves ,from time to time. Halfway back from Machias2 after the first trip, the rainout, J. J. Fiddler.begins to wriggle around uneasily in the back seat of 2 the car he is riding in. 'I gotta go,' he says. +He clutches at himself and adds ominously, 'Man, I " gotta go bad. I mean big time.' 4 'J.J.'s gonna do it!' Joe Wilcox cries gleefully. *'Watch this! J.J.'s gonna flood the car!' 0 'Shut up, Joey,' J.J. says, and then begins towriggle around again. ) He has waited until the worst possible %moment to make his announcement. The eighty-fourmile - trip between Machias and Bangor is, for the+most part, an exercise in emptiness. There isn't . even a decent stand of trees into which J.J.+can disappear for a few moments along this stretch of ' road only mile after mile of open ,hayfields, with< Route 1A cutting a winding course through  them. . Just as JJ.'s bladder is going to DEFCON-1, (a providential gas station appears. The assistant - coach swings in and tops up his tank while 0J.J. splits for the men's room. 'Boy!' he says, brushing . his hair out of his eyes as he jogs back to the car. ' That was close!' - 'Got some on your pants, J.J.,' Joe Wilcox -says casually, and everyone goes into spasms of  wild laughter as J.J. checks. , On the trip back to Machias the next day, %Matt Kinney reveals one of the chief attractions + People magazine holds for boys of Little *League age. 'I'm sure there's one in here someplace,' he / says, leafing slowly through an issue he has -found on the back seat. 'There almost always is.' * 'What? What are you looking for?' third +baseman Kevin Rochefort asks, peering over Matt's ) shoulder as Matt leafs past the week's #celebs, barely giving them a look. . 'The breast-examination ad,' Matt explains. +'You can't see everything, but you can see quite a - lot. Here it is!' He holds the magazine up triumphantly. ' Four other heads, each wearing a red .Bangor West baseball cap, immediately cluster around - the magazine. For a few minutes, at least, /baseball is the furthest thing from these boys'minds. % The 1989 Maine State Little League +Championship Tournament begins on August 3, just over . four weeks after All-Star play began for the/teams involved. The state is divided into five , districts, and all five send teams to Old /Town, where this year's tourney is to be held. The & participants are Yarmouth, Belfast, )Lewiston, York, and Bangor West. All the teams but Belfast - are bigger than the Bangor West All-Stars, )and Belfast is supposed to have a secret weapon. * Their number one pitcher is this year's tourney wunderkind. , The naming of the tourney wunderkind is a -yearly ceremony, a small tumor that seems to defy . all attempts to remove it. This boy, who is +anointed Kid Baseball whether he wants the honor or % not, finds himself in a heretofore %unsuspected spotlight, the object of discussion, speculation, + and, inevitably, wagering. He also finds /himself in the unenviable position of having to live up to , all sorts of pretournament hype. A Little .League tournament is a pressure situation for any kid; # When you get to Tourney Town and $discover you have somehow become an instant legend as  well, it's usually too much. . This year's object of myth and discussion is/Belfast's southpaw Stanley Sturgis. In his two . outings for Belfast he has chalked up thirty*strikeouts fourteen in his first game, sixteen in his ( second. Thirty K's in two games is an 0impressive statistic in any league, but to fully understand & Sturgis's accomplishment one has to -remember that Little League games consist of only six - innings. That means that 83 per cent of the/outs Belfast recorded with Sturgis on the hill came on  strikeouts. . Then there is York. All the teams that come -to the Knights of Columbus field in Old Town to ( compete in the tourney have excellent .records, but York, which is undefeated, is theclear * favorite to win a ticket to the Eastern -Regionals. None of their players are giants, but several of ) them are over five-ten, and their best .pitcher, Phil Tarbox, has a fastball that may top seventy # miles an hour on some pitches -extravagant by Little League standards. Like Yarmouth and , Belfast, the York players come dressed in ,special All-Star uniforms and matching turf shoes, " which make them look like pros. % Only Bangor West and Lewiston come ,wearing mufti which is to say, shirts of many colors , bearing the names of their regular-season ,team sponsors. Owen King wears Elks orange, Ryan * Larrobino and Nick Trzaskos wear Bangor ,Hydro red, Roger Fisher and Fred Moore wear Lions ) green, and so on. The Lewiston team is -dressed in similar fashion, but they have at least been - provided with matching shoes and stirrups. )Compared with Lewiston, the Bangor team, dressed , in a variety of baggy gray sweatpants and .nondescript street sneakers, looks eccentric. Next to + the other teams, however, they look like *out-and-out ragamuffins. No one, with the possible + exception of the Bangor West coaches and (the players themselves, takes them very seriously. In - its first article on the tourney the local -newspaper gives more coverage to Sturgis, of Belfast, ) than it does to the entire Bangor West team. % Dave, Neil, and Saint, the odd but ,surprisingly effective brain trust that has brought the team + this far, watch Belfast take infield and *batting practice without saying much. The Belfast kids are , resplendent in their new purple-and-white +uniforms uniforms that have not worn so much as a . speck of infield dirt until today. At last, /Dave says, 'Well, we finally got here again. We did that , much. Nobody can take that away from us.' ) Bangor West comes from the district in .which the tournament is being held this year, and the . team will not have to play until two of the /five teams have been eliminated. This is called a firstround . bye, and right now it's the biggest, perhaps,the only, advantage this team has. In their own . district, they looked like champions (except*for that one awful game against Hampden), but - Dave, Neil, and Saint have been around long,enough to know that they are now looking at an . entirely different level of baseball. Their ,silence as they stand by the fence watching Belfast ) work out acknowledges this eloquently. ( In contrast, York has already ordered 0District 4 pins. Trading pins is a tradition at the regional * tournaments, and the fact that York has .already laid in a supply tells an interesting tale. The pins * say York means to play with the best of .the East Coast, in Bristol. The pins say they don't think + Yarmouth can stop them; or Belfast, with ,its wunderkind southpaw; or Lewiston, which clawed ) its way to the Division 2 championship ,through the losers' bracket, after dropping their first / game 15-12; or, least of all, fourteen badly )dressed pipsqueaks from the west side of Bangor. . 'At least we'll get a chance to play,' Dave -says, 'and we'll try to make them remember wewere  here.' , But first Belfast and Lewiston have their -chance to play, and after the Boston Pops has, steamed through a recorded version of the ,national anthem, and a local writer of some repute has 1 tossed out the obligatory first pitch (it sails/all the way to the backstop), they have at it. . Area sports reporters have spilled a lot of +ink on the subject of Stanley Sturgis, but reporters - are not allowed on the field once the game /starts (a situation caused by a mistake in the rules as . they were originally laid out, some of them #seem to feel). Once the umpire has commanded the / teams to play ball, Sturgis finds himself on +his own. The writers, the pundits, and the entire . Belfast hot-stove league are now all on the other side of the fence. . Baseball is a team sport, but there is only -one player with a ball at the center of each diamond ( and only one player with a bat at the -diamond's lowest point. The man with the bat keeps . changing, but the pitcher remains unless 0he can no longer cut it, that is. Today is Stan . Sturgis's day to discover the hard truth of %tourney play: sooner or later, every wunderkind meets  his match. 0 Sturgis struck out thirty men in his last pair,of games, but that was District 2. The team Belfast % is playing today, a tough bunch of *scrappers out of Lewiston's Elliot Avenue League, is a , different plate of beans altogether. They )are not as big as the boys from York and don't field as * smoothly as the boys from Yarmouth, but )they are pesky and persistent. The first batter, Carlton + Gagnon, personifies the gnawing, clawing .spirit of the team. He singles up the middle, steals + second, is sacrificed to third, and then ,bolts home on a steal play sent in from the bench. In the + third inning, with the score 1-0, Gagnon -reaches base again, this time on a fielder's choice. . Randy Gervais, who follows this pest in the )lineup, strikes out, but before he does, Gagnon has - gone to second on a passed ball and stolen /third. He scores on a two-out base hit by Bill Paradis,  the third baseman. - Belfast comes up with a run in the fourth, .briefly making a game of it, but then Lewistonputs , them, and Stanley Sturgis, away for good, .scoring two in the fifth and four more in the sixth. The 2 final tally is 9-1. Sturgis strikes out eleven, /but he also gives up seven hits, while Carlton * Gagnon, Lewiston's pitcher, strikes out /eight and allows only three hits. When Sturgis leaves the . field at the end of the game, he looks both -depressed and relieved. For him the hype and hoopla * are over. He can quit being a newspaper .sidebar and go back to being a kid again. His face + suggests that he sees certain advantages in that. , Later, in a battle of the giants, tourney (favorite York knocks off Yarmouth. Then everybody - goes home (or, in the case of the visiting .players, back to their motels or to the homes of their / host families). Tomorrow, Friday, it will be .Bangor West's turn to play while York waits tomeet  the winner in the closer. . Friday comes in hot, foggy, and cloudy. Rain.threatens from first light, and an hour or so before , Bangor West and Lewiston are scheduled to /square off the rain comes a deluge of rain. When . this sort of weather struck in Machias, the /game was quickly cancelled. Not here. This is a. different field one with a grass infield +instead of dirt but that isn't the only factor. The , major one is TV. This year, for the first .time, two stations have pooled their resources and will - telecast the tournament final statewide on -Saturday afternoon. If the semifinal between Bangor - and Lewiston is postponed, it means trouble-with the schedule, and even in Maine, even inthis * most amateur of amateur sports, the one 0thing you don't jiggle is the media's schedule. + So the Bangor West and Lewiston teams are+not dismissed when they come to the field. 1 Instead, they sit in cars or cluster in little +groups beneath the candy-striped canvas of the central ) concession booth. Then they wait for a *break in the weather. And wait. And wait. Restlessness . sets in, of course. Many of these kids will +play in bigger games before their athletic careers end, - but this is the biggest to date for all of "them; they are pumped to the max. - Someone eventually has a brainstorm. After -a few quick phone calls, two Old Town school ' buses, gleaming bright yellow in the 0drenching rain, pull up to the nearby Elks Club,and the . players are whisked off on a tour of the Old)Town Canoe Company factory and the local James % River paper mill. (The James River -Corporation is the prime buyer of ad time on the upcoming . championship telecast.) None of the players -look particularly happy as they climb aboard the + buses; they don't look much happier when ,they arrive back. Each player is carrying a small canoe 0 paddle, about the right size for a well-built .elf. Freebies from the canoe factory. None of the boys ( seem to know just what they should do )with the paddles, but when I check later they're all gone, + just like the Bangor pennants after that /first game against Millinocket. Free souvenirs  good  deal. 0 And there will be a game after all, it seems. *At some point perhaps while the Little , Leaguers were watching the fellows at the 1James River mill turn trees into toilet paper the 0 rain stopped. The field has drained well, the ,pitcher's mound and the batters' boxes have been * dusted with Quick-Dry, and now, at just *past three in the afternoon, a watery sun takes its first  peek through the clouds. * The Bangor West team has come back from -the field trip flat and listless. No one has thrown a . ball or swung a bat or run a single base so .far today, but everybody already seems tired. The ) players walk toward the practice field -without looking at each other; gloves dangle at the ends of - arms. They walk like losers, and they talk like losers. - Instead of lecturing them, Dave lines them ,up and begins playing his version of pepper with , them. Soon the Bangor players are razzing *each other, catcalling, trying for circus catches, + groaning and bitching when Dave calls an *error and sends someone to the end of the line. Then, ( just before Dave is ready to call the +workout off and take them over to Neil and Saint for batting / practice, Roger Fisher steps out of the line 0and bends over with his glove against his belly.Dave - goes to him at once, his smile becoming an +expression of concern. He wants to know if Roger is  all right. 1 'Yes,' Roger says. 'I just wanted to get this.'*He bends down a little farther, dark eyes intent, ) plucks something out of the grass, and ,hands it to Dave. It is a four-leaf clover. ) In Little League tournament games, the ,home team is always decided by a coin toss. Dave has - been extremely lucky at winning these, but -today he loses, and Bangor West is designatedthe ) visiting team. Sometimes even bad luck .turns out to be good, though, and this is one of those % days. Nick Trzaskos is the reason. . The skills of all the players have improved *during their six-week season, but in some cases ( attitudes have improved as well. Nick -started deep on the bench, despite his proven skills as a * defensive player and his potential as a /hitter; his fear of failure made him unready to play. Little / by little, he has begun to trust himself, and-now Dave is ready to try starting him. 'Nick finally * figured out that the other guys weren't .going to give him a hard time if he dropped a ball or 0 struck out,' St. Pierre says. 'For a kid like Nick, that's a big change.' , Today, Nick cranks the third pitch of the 0game to deep center field. It is a hard, rising line , drive, over the fence and gone before the .center fielder has a chance to turn and look, let alone , cruise back and grab it. As Nick Trzaskos ,rounds second and slows down, breaking into the , home-run trot all these boys know so well *from TV, the fans behind the backstop are treated to a . rare sight: Nick is grinning. As he crosses $home plate and his surprised, happy teammates mob * him, he actually begins to laugh. As he .enters the dugout, Neil claps him on the back, and Dave ) Mansfield gives him a brief, hard hug. + Nick has also finished what Dave started +with his game of pepper: the team is fully awake + now, and ready to do some business. Matt *Kinney gives up a lead-off single to Carl Gagnon, the , pest who began the process of dismantling *Stanley Sturgis. Gagnon goes to second on Ryan / Stretton's sacrifice, advances to third on a 0wild pitch, and scores on another wild pitch. Itis an , almost uncanny repetition of his first at -bat against Belfast. Kinney's control is not great this . afternoon, but Gagnon's is the only run the +team from Lewiston can manage in the early going. ( This is unfortunate for them, because *Bangor comes up hitting in the top of the second. * Owen King leads off with a deep single; .Arthur Dorr follows with another; Mike Arnold ) reaches when Lewiston's catcher, Jason .Auger, picks up Arnold's bunt and throws wild to first * base. King scores on the error, putting *Bangor West back on top, 2-1. Joe Wilcox, Bangor's / catcher, scratches out an infield hit to load)the bases. Nick Trzaskos strikes out his second time , up, and that brings Ryan Larrobino to the 0plate. He struck out his first time up, but not now. He ( turns Matt Noyes's first pitch into a -grand-slam home run, and after an inning and a half the score  is Bangor West 6, Lewiston 1. & Up to the sixth, it is an authentic +four-leaf-clover day for Bangor West. When Lewiston comes , to bat for what the Bangor fans hope will .be the last time, they are down by a score of 9-1. The - pest, Carlton Gagnon, leads off and reaches-on an error. The next batter, Ryan Stretton, also , reaches on an error. The Bangor fans, who +have been cheering wildly, begin to look a little . uneasy. It's hard to choke when you're eight.runs ahead, but not impossible. These northernNew ) Englanders are Red Sox fans. They have seen it happen many times. * Bill Paradis makes the jitters worse by ,singling sharply up the middle. Both Gagnon and , Stretton come home. The score is now 9-3, -runner on first, nobody out. The Bangor fans shuffle , and look at each other uneasily. It can't /really get away from us this late in the game, can it? - their looks ask. The answer is, Of course, /you bet it can. In Little League, anything can and often  does happen. - But not this time. Lewiston scores one more-time, and that's it. Noyes, who fanned three times + against Sturgis, fans for the third time ,today, and there is finally one out. Auger, Lewiston's , catcher, hits the first pitch hard to the +shortstop, Roger Fisher. Roger booted Carl Gagnon's ball . earlier in the inning to open the door, but .he picks this one up easily and shovels it to Mike * Arnold, who feeds it on to Owen King at 0first. Auger is slow, and King's reach is long. The result * is a game-ending 6-4-3 double play. You -don't often see around-the-horn d.p.s in the scaleddown ) world of Little League, where the base *paths are only sixty feet long, but Roger found a / four-leaf clover today. If you have to chalk -it up to anything, it might as well be that. Whatever + you chalk it up to, the boys from Bangor have won another one, 9-4. , Tomorrow, there are the giants from York. , It is August 5, 1989, and in the state of .Maine only twenty-nine boys are still playing Little - League ball fourteen on the Bangor West -squad and fifteen on York's team. The day is an . almost exact replica of the day before: hot,-foggy, and threatening. The game is scheduledto . begin promptly at 12:30, but the skies open -once again, and by 11 it looks as though the game , will be must be cancelled. The rain comes pouring down in buckets. . Dave, Neil, and Saint are taking no chances,-however. None of them liked the flat mood the- kids were in when they returned from their +impromptu tour of the day before, and they have no . intention of allowing a repeat. No one wants,to end up counting on a game of pepper or a fourleaf / clover today. If there is a game and TV is*a powerful motivator, no matter how murky the 1 weather it will be for all the marbles. The .winners go on to Bristol; the losers go home. ' So a makeshift cavalcade of vans and ,station wagons driven by coaches and parentsis ) assembled at the field behind the Coke /plant, and the team is ferried the ten miles upto the . University of Maine field house, a barnlike 0indoor facility where Neil and Saint rally them ) through their paces until the boys are -soaked with sweat. Dave has arranged for the York team to . use the field house, too, and as the Bangor ,team exits into the overcast the York team, dressed in ( their natty blue uniforms, troops in. + The rain is down to isolated dribbles by )three o'clock, and the ground crew works frantically to + return the field to playable shape. Five !makeshift TV platforms have been constructed on steel / frames around the field. In a nearby parking ,lot is a huge truck with MAINE BROADCASTING * SYSTEM LIVE REMOTE painted on the side. +Thick bundles of cable, held together with cinches of , electrician's tape, lead from the cameras ,and the temporary announcer's booth back to this truck. $ One door stands open, and many TV monitors glimmer within. + York hasn't arrived from the field house +yet. The Bangor West squad begins throwing outside ' the left-field fence, mostly to have -something to do and keep the jitters at bay; they certainly , don't need to warm up after the humid hour'they just spent at the University. The camerapersons , stand on their towers and watch the ground"crew try to get rid of the water. . The outfield is in fair shape, and the skin )parts of the infield have been raked and coated with * Quick-Dry. The real problem is the area ,between home plate and the pitcher's mound. This % section of the diamond was freshly *resodded before the tournament began, and there has been no . time for the roots to take hold and provide .some natural drainage. The result is a swampy mess in . front of home plate a mess that slops offtoward the third-base line. / Someone has an idea an inspiration, as it /turns out that involves actually removing a . large section of the wounded infield. While -this is being done, a truck arrives from Old Town & High School and two industrial-size /Rinsenvacs are off-loaded. Five minutes later, the ground - crew is literally vacuuming the subsurface 'of the infield. It works. By 3:25, the groundskeepers / are replacing chunks of sod like pieces in a ,large green jigsaw puzzle. By 3:35, a local music & teacher, accompanying herself on an .acoustic guitar, is winging her way through a gorgeous / rendition of 'The Star-Spangled Banner.' And +at 3:37 Bangor West's Roger Fisher, Dave's darkhorse , pick to start in place of the absent Mike /Pelkey, is warming up. Did Roger's find of the day ) before have anything to do with Dave's )decision to start him instead of King or Arnold? Dave / only puts his finger on the side of his nose and smiles wisely. / At 3:40, the umpire steps in. 'Send it down, +catcher,' he says briskly. Joey does. Mike Arnold ' makes the sweep tag on the invisible -runner, then sends the baseball on its quick journey around , the infield. A TV audience that stretches ,from New Hampshire to the Maritime Provincesof + Canada watches as Roger fusses nervously -with the sleeves of his green jersey and the gray * warm-up shirt he wears beneath it. Owen 0King tosses him the ball from first base. Fisher takes it  and holds it against his hip. . 'Let's play ball,' the umpire invites an ,invitation that umpires have been extending to Little , League players for fifty years now and )Dan Bouchard, York's catcher and leadoff hitter, steps . into the box. Roger goes to the set position-and prepares to throw the first pitch of the 1989 State  Championship game.  Five days earlier: + Dave and I take the Bangor West pitching -staff up to Old Town. Dave wants them all to know ( how the mound feels when they come up .here to play for real. With Mike Pelkey gone, the staff , consists of Matt Kinney (his triumph over .Lewiston still four days in the future), Owen King, , Roger Fisher, and Mike Arnold. We get off +to a late start, and as the four boys take turns  throwing, * Dave and I sit in the visitors' dugout, -watching the boys as the light slowly leaves the summer  sky. , On the mound, Matt Kinney is throwing one 1hard curve after another to J. J. Fiddler. In the' home dugout, across the diamond, the /three other pitchers, their workouts finished, are sitting on * the bench with a few teammates who have +come along for the ride. Although the talk comes to . me only in snatches, I can tell it's mostly -about school a subject that comes up with greater ( and greater frequency during the last *month of summer vacation. They talk about teachers past & and teachers future, passing on the )anecdotes that form an important part of their preadolescent + mythology: the teacher who blew her cool )during the last month of the school year because her . oldest son was in a car accident; the crazy *grammar-school coach (they make him sound like a + lethal combination of Jason, Freddy, and &Leatherface); the science teacher who supposedly once - threw a kid against his locker so hard the +kid was knocked out; the home-room teacher who will , give you lunch money if you forget, or if +you just say you forgot. It is junior high apocrypha, . powerful stuff, and they tell it with great relish as twilight closes in. - Between the two dugouts, the baseball is a )white streak as Matt throws it again and again. His . rhythm is a kind of hypnosis: Set, wind, and0fire. Set, wind, and fire. Set, wind, and fire. J.J.'s # mitt cracks with each reception. - 'What are they going to take with them?' I /ask Dave. 'When this is all over, what are they+ going to take with them? What difference &does it make for them, do you think?' + The look on Dave's face is surprised and +considering. Then he turns back to look at Matt and . smiles. 'They're going to take each other,' he says. - It is not the answer I have been expecting 1 far from it. There was an article about Little, League in the paper today one of those 0think pieces that usually run in the ad-littered+ wasteland between the obituaries and the -horoscopes. This one summarized the findings of a , sociologist who spent a season monitoring )Little Leaguers, and then followed their progress for a + short time thereafter. He wanted to find 'out if the game did what Little League boosters claim it . does that is, pass on such old-fashioned -American values as fair play, hard work, and the , virtue of team effort. The fellow who did /the study reported that it did, sort of. But healso , reported that Little League did little to ,change the individual lives of the players. School " troublemakers were still school ,troublemakers when classes started again in September; good / scholars were still good scholars; the class *clown (read Fred Moore) who took June and July off . to play some serious Little League ball was +still the class clown after Labor Day. The sociologist % found exceptions; exceptional play +sometimes bred exceptional changes. But in the main this , fellow found that the boys were about the 'same coming out as they were going in. * I suppose my confusion at Dave's answer -grows out of my knowledge of him he is an / almost fanatic booster of Little League. I'm .sure he must have read the article, and I havebeen , expecting him to refute the sociologist's %conclusions, using the question as a springboard. ' Instead, he has delivered one of the (hoariest chestnuts of the sports world. + On the mound, Matt continues to throw to .J.J., harder than ever now. He has found that mystic - place pitchers call 'the groove,' and even )though this is only an informal practice session to - familiarize the boys with the field, he is reluctant to quit. - I ask Dave if he can explain a little more +fully, but I do so in a gingerly way, half expecting . that I am on the verge of hitting a hitherto+unsuspected jackpot of cliches: night owls never fly in & the daytime; winners never quit and 0quitters never win; use it, don't lose it. Maybe even, God ! save us, a little Hummm, baby. , 'Look at them,' Dave says, still smiling. +Something in that smile suggests he may be reading / my mind. 'Take a good look.' I do. There are +perhaps half a dozen of them on the bench, still . laughing and telling junior high school war 'stories. One of them breaks out of the discussion * long enough to ask Matt Kinney to throw 'the curve, and Matt does one with a particularly . nasty break. The boys on the bench all laugh and cheer. ' 'Look at those two guys,' Dave says, )pointing. 'One of them comes from a good home. The * other one, not so good.' He tosses some (sunflower seeds into his mouth and then indicates , another boy. 'Or that one. He was born in ,one of the worst sections of Boston. Do you think he'd ' know a kid like Matt Kinney or Kevin 0Rochefort, if it wasnt for Little League? They won't be in , the same classes at junior high, wouldn't /talk to each other in the halls, wouldn't have the / slightest idea the other one was alive.' Matt-throws another curve; this one so nasty J.J. can't ) handle it. It rolls all the way to the .backstop, and as J.J. gets up and trots after it the boys on the  bench cheer again. 0 'But this changes all that,' Dave says. 'These(boys have played together and won their district - together. Some come from families that are /well-to-do, and there's a couple from families as poor * as used dishwater, but when they put on /the uniform and cross the chalk they leave all that on the , other side. Your school grades can't help ,you between the chalk, or what your parents do, or ) what they don't do. Between the chalk, .what happens is the kids' business. They tend it, too, as 0 well as they can. All the rest ' Dave makes+a shooing gesture with one hand. 'All left behind. . And they know it, too. Just look at them if +you don't believe me, because the proof is right there.' - I look across the field and see my own kid 'and one of the boys Dave has mentioned sitting ( side-by-side, heads together, talking ,something over seriously. They look at each other in & amazement, then break out laughing. . 'They played together,' Dave repeats. 'They .practiced together, day after day, and that's ( probably even more important than the (games. Now they're going into the State Tournament. / They've even got a chance to win it. I don't *think they will, but that doesn't matter. They're going * to be there, and that's enough. Even if -Lewiston knocks them out in the first round, that's enough. + Because it's something they did together ,between those chalk lines. They're going to remember + that. They're going to remember how that felt.' 0 'Between the chalk,' I say, and all at once I *get it the penny drops. Dave Mansfield believes + this old chestnut. Not only that, he can *afford to believe it. Such cliches may be hollow in the big , leagues, where some player or other tests -positive for drugs every week or two and the free agent 0 is God, but this is not the big leagues. This )is where Anita Bryant sings the national anthem over , battered PA speakers that have been wired .to the chain-link behind the dugouts. This is where, , instead of paying admission, to watch the +game, you put something in the hat when it comes - around. If you want to, of course. None of -these kids are going to spend the off-season playing . fantasy baseball in Florida with overweight +businessmen, or signing expensive baseball cards at , memorabilia shows, or touring the chicken ,circuit at two thousand bucks a night. When it's all , free, Dave's smile suggests, they have to +give the cliches back and let you own them again, fair + and square. You are once more allowed to /believe in Red Barber, John Tunis, and the Kid from - Tomkinsville. Dave Mansfield believes what *he is saying about how the boys are equal between , the chalk, and he has a right to believe, -because he and Neil and Saint have patiently led these . kids to a point where they believe it. They .do believe it; I can see it on their faces as they sit in - the dugout on the far side of the diamond. +It could be why Dave Mansfield and all the other Dave ( Mansfields across the country keep on /doing this, year after year. It's a free pass. Not back into / childhood it doesn't work that way but back into the dream. , Dave falls silent for a moment, thinking, +bouncing a few sunflower seeds up and down in the  palm of his hand. . 'It's not about winning or losing,' he says 3finally. 'That comes later. It's about how they'll pass + each other in the corridor this year, or ,even down the road in high school, and look at each other, - and remember. In a way, they're going to be.on the team that won the district in 1989 for a long - time.' Dave glances across into the shadowy+first-base dugout, where Fred Moore is now - laughing about something with Mike Arnold. )Owen King glances from one to the other, ) grinning. 'It's about knowing who your ,teammates are. The people you had to depend on, ! whether you wanted to or not.' ( He watches the boys as they laugh and *joke four days before their tournament is scheduled to . begin, then raises his voice and tells Matt *to throw four or five more and knock off. . Not all coaches who win the coin toss as )Dave Mansfield does on August 5, for the sixth time . in nine postseason games elect to be the (home team. Some of them (the coach from Brewer, & for instance) believe the so-called +home-team advantage is a complete fiction, especially in a ) tournament game, where neither team is (actually playing on its home field. The argument for , being the visitors in a jackpot game runs 0like this: At the start of such a game, the kidson both % teams are nervous. The way to take )advantage of those nerves, the reasoning goes, is to bat first + and let the defending team commit enough +walks, balks, and errors to put you in the driver's seat. . If you bat first and score four runs, these ,theorists conclude, you own the game before it's barely . begun. QED. It's a theory Dave Mansfield has-never subscribed to. 'I want my lasties,' he says, $ and for him that's the end of it. 0 Except today is a little different. It is not -only a tournament game, it is a championship ! tournament game a televised )championship game, in fact. And as Roger Fisher winds and 1 fires his first pitch past everything for ball ,one, Dave Mansfield's face is that of a man who is - fervently hoping he hasn't made a mistake. + Roger knows that he is a spot starter *that Mike Pelkey would be out here in his place if - Pelkey weren't currently shaking hands with,Goofy down in Disney World but he manages0 his first-inning jitters as well as one could ,expect, maybe a little better. He backs off the mound - following each return from the catcher, Joe-Wilcox, studies the batter, fiddles with his * shirtsleeves, and takes all the time he -needs. Most important of all, he understands how necessary / it is to keep the ball in the lowest quarter .of the strike zone. The York lineup is packed with , power from top to bottom. If Roger makes a-mistake and gets one up in the batter's eyes  / especially a batter like Tarbox, who hits as -powerfully as he throws it's going to get lost in a  hurry. / He loses the first York batter nevertheless. ,Bouchard trots down to first, accompanied bythe ( hysterical cheers of the York rooting +section. The next batter is Philbrick, the shortstop. He / bangs the first pitch back to Fisher. In one *of those plays that sometimes decide ball games, * Roger elects to go to second and try to -force the lead runner. In most Little League games, this ) turns out to be a bad idea. Either the 0pitcher throws wild into center field, allowing the lead / runner to get to third, or he discovers that +his short-stop has not moved over to cover second and , the bag is undefended. Today, however, it 1works. St. Pierre has drilled these boys well on their , defensive positions. Matt Kinney, today's /shortstop, is right where he's supposed to be. So is . Roger's throw. Philbrick reaches first on a ,fielder's choice, but Bouchard is out. This time, it is * the Bangor West fans who roar out their approval. ) The play settles most of Bangor West's *jitters and gives Roger Fisher some badly needed ' confidence. Phil Tarbox, York's most 0consistent hitter as well as their ace pitcher, strikes out on a - pitch low and out of the strike zone. 'Get /him next time, Phil!' a York player calls from the / bench. 'You're just not used to pitching thisslow!' ( But speed is not the problem the York .batters are having with Roger; it's location. Ron St. , Pierre has preached the gospel of the low 1pitch all season long, and Roger Fisher Fish, the ( boys call him has been a quiet but +extremely attentive student during Saint's ball-yard , seminars. Dave's decisions to pitch Roger -and bat last look pretty good as Bangor comes in to bat / in the bottom of the first. I see several of 0the boys touch Mo, the little plastic sandal, asthey  enter the dugout. - Confidence of the team, of the fans, of (the coaches is a quality that can be measured in , different ways, but whatever yardstick you-choose, York comes out on the long side. The , hometown cheering section has hung a sign .on the lower posts of the scoreboard. YORK IS * BRISTOL BOUND, this exuberant Fan-O-Gram(reads. And there is the matter of those District 4 / pins, all made up and ready for trading. But .the clearest indicator of the deep confidence York's . coach has in his players is revealed in his 1starting pitcher. All the other clubs, including Bangor , West, pitched their number one starter in /their first game, bearing an old playoff axiom in mind: . if you don't get a date, you can't dance at ,the prom. If you can't win your prelim, you don't have + to worry about the final. Only the coach *from York ran counter to this wisdom, and pitched his + number two starter, Ryan Fernald, in the *first game, against Yarmouth. He got away with it ( by a whisker as his team outlasted +Yarmouth, 9-8. That was a close shave, but today should . be the payoff. He has saved Phil Tarbox for 'the final, and while Tarbox may not be technically as . good as Stanley Sturgis, he's got something 0going for him that Sturgis did not. Phil Tarbox is  scary. - Nolan Ryan, probably the greatest fastball +pitcher ever to play the game of baseball, likes to ( tell a story about a Babe Ruth League *tournament game he pitched in. He hit the opposing team's - leadoff batter in the arm, breaking it. He -hit the second batter in the head, splitting the boy's + helmet in two and knocking him out for a ,few moments. While this second boy was being( attended to, the number three batter, *ashen-faced and trembling, went up to his coach and begged - the man not to make him hit. 'And I didn't blame him,' Ryan adds. - Tarbox is no Nolan Ryan, but he throws hard)and he is aware that intimidation is the pitcher's . secret weapon. Sturgis also threw hard, but .he kept the ball low and outside. Sturgis was polite. . Tarbox likes to work high and tight. Bangor (West has got to where they are today by swinging - the bat. If Tarbox can intimidate them, he .will take the bats out of their hands, and if he does that  Bangor is finished. + Nick Trzaskos doesn't come anywhere near -a leadoff home run today. Tarbox strikes him out * with an intimate fastball that has Nick *ducking out of the box. Nick looks around unbelievingly ) at the home-plate umpire and opens his ,mouth to protest. 'Don't say a word, Nick!' Dave blares 0 from the dugout. 'Just hustle back in there!' (Nick does, but his face has resumed its former * narrow look. Once inside the dugout, he /slings his batting helmet disgustedly under thebench. , Tarbox will try to work everyone but Ryan (Larrobino high and tight today. Word on Larrobino , has got around, and not even Phil Tarbox, .confident as he appears to be, will challenge him. He . works Ryan low and outside, finally walking ,him. He also walks Matt Kinney, who follows , Ryan, but now he is high and tight again. ,Matt has superb reflexes, and he needs them to avoid - being hit, and hit hard. By the time he is ,awarded first base, Larrobino is already at second, , courtesy of a wild pitch that came within +inches of Mart's face. Then Tarbox settles down a little, ) striking out Kevin Rochefort and Roger Fisher to end the first inning. , Roger Fisher continues to work slowly and /methodically, fiddling with his sleeves between+ pitches, glancing around at his infield, -occasionally even checking the sky, possibly for UFOs. & With two on and one out, Estes, who .reached on a walk, breaks for third on a pitch that bounces - out of Joe Wilcox's glove and lands at his -feet. Joe recovers quickly and guns the ball down to 0 Kevin Rochefort at third. The ball is waiting -for Estes when he arrives, and he trots back to the ' dugout. Two out; Fernald has gone to second on the play. . Wyatt, York's number eight hitter, dribbles 1one up the right side of the infield. The ball's * progress is slowed further by the soggy -condition of the ground. Fisher goes for the ball. So does + King, the first baseman. Roger grabs it, .then slips on the wet grass and crawls for the bag, ball in - hand. Wyatt beats him easily. Fernald comes*all the way home on the play to score the first run  of the game. . If Roger is going to crack, one would expect0it to happen right here. He checks his infield, and ) examines the ball. He appears ready to *pitch, and then steps off the rubber. His sleeves, it seems, 1 are not quite to his liking after all. He takes-his time fixing them while Matt Francke, the York . batter, grows old and mouldy in the batter's/box. By the time Fisher finally gets around to - throwing, he all but owns Francke, who hits,an easy hopper to Kevin Rochefort at third. & Rochefort throws on to Matt Kinney, 0forcing Wyatt. Still, York has drawn first blood and leads, + 1-0, at the end of an inning and a half. * Bangor West doesn't put any runs on the -board in the second inning, either, but they score . against Phil Tarbox just the same. The rangy,York pitcher trotted off the mound with his head up + at the end of the first inning. Going in .after pitching the second, he trudges with his head down, * and some of his teammates glance at him uneasily. , Tarbox doesnt intimidate Owen King, who 0bats first in Bangors half of the second, but he is + a big boy, much slower than Matt Kinney. .After running the count full, Tarbox tries to jam him . inside. The fastball turns up and in too .much of both. King is hit hard in the armpit. He falls to , the ground, clutching the hurt place, too 0stunned to cry at first, but obviously in pain. Eventually, . the tears do come not a lot of them, but .real tears, for all that. At six foot two and over two , hundred pounds, he's as big as a man, but 0he's still only twelve and not used to being hitby ) seventy-mile-an-hour inside fastballs. (Tarbox immediately rushes off the mound toward him, his - face a mask of concern and contrition. The (umpire, already bending over the downed player, ) waves him off impatiently. The on-duty ,paramedic who hurries out doesn't even give Tarbox a - second look. The fans do, however. The fans*are giving him all kinds of second looks. . 'Take him out before he hits someone else!' one yells. . 'Pull him before someone really gets hurt!' /another adds, as if being hit in the ribcage bya ( fastball weren't really getting hurt. 0 'Warn im, ump!' a third voice chimes in. 'That)was a deliberate brushback! Warn im what  happens if he does it again!' , Tarbox glances toward the fans, and for a -moment this boy, who has formerly radiated a kind , of serene confidence, looks very young and+very uncertain. He looks, in fact, the way Stanley + Sturgis did as the Belfast-Lewiston game .neared its conclusion. As he goes back to the mound, & he slams the ball into his glove in frustration. * King, meanwhile, has been helped to his .feet. After making it clear to Neil Waterman, the , paramedic, and the umpire that he wants to-stay in the game and is capable of doing so, he trots - down to first base. Both sets of fans give him a solid round of applause. - Phil Tarbox, who of course had no intention,of hitting the lead-off batter in a one-run game, ( immediately shows how shaken he is by -grooving one right down the middle to Arthur Dorr. , Arthur, the second-smallest boy in Bangor %West's starting lineup, accepts this unexpected but + welcome gift by driving it deep to right center. * King is off at the crack of the bat. He )rounds third, knowing he can't score but hoping to draw . the throw that will assure Arthur of second *base, and, as he does, the wet conditions become a - factor. The third-base side of the diamond -is still damp. When King tries to put on the brakes, his - feet go out from under him and he lands on .his ass. The relay has come in to Tarbox, and Tarbox . will not risk a throw; he charges King, who 0is making feeble efforts to regain his feet. At the end, / Bangor's biggest player just raises his arms /in an eloquent, touching gesture: I surrender. Thanks - to the slippery conditions, Tarbox now has +a runner on second with one out instead of runners on . second and third with none out. It is a big ,difference, and Tarbox displays his renewed ) confidence by sinking out Mike Arnold. . Then, on his third pitch to Joe Wilcox, the -next batter, he hits him smack in the elbow. This - time, the cries of outrage from the Bangor .West fans are louder, and tinged with threat. Several - of them direct their ire at the home-plate ,umpire, demanding that Tarbox be taken out. The ump, - who understands this situation completely, )does not bother even to warn Tarbox. The stricken ( look on the boy's face as Wilcox jogs /shakily down to first undoubtedly tells him it isn't , necessary. But York's manager has to come .out and settle the pitcher down, to point out the , obvious: You have two outs and first base %was open anyway. There's no problem. , But for Tarbox there is a problem. He has +hit two boys this inning, hit both of them hard - enough to make them cry. If that weren't a -problem, he would need a mental examination. , York puts together three singles to score .two runs in the top of the third, opening up a3-0 0 lead. If these runs, both solidly earned, had +come in the top of the first, Bangor would have been + in serious trouble, but when the players +come in for their raps they look eager and excited. There , is no feeling among them that the game is lost, no whiff of failure. - Ryan Larrobino is Bangor's first batter in *the bottom of the third, and Tarbox works him . carefully too carefully. He has begun to 'aim the ball, and the result is fairly predictable. With . the count at 1-2, he plinks Larrobino on the-shoulder. Larrobino turns and pounds his bat once on . the ground whether in pain, frustration, 1or anger is impossible to tell. Most probably it is all * three. Reading the mood of the crowd is *much easier. The Bangor fans are on their feet, yelling + angrily at Tarbox and at the ump. On the /York side, the fans are silent and bewildered; it is not ( the game they were expecting. As Ryan /trots down to first, he glances over at Tarbox. It is brief, * that glance, but it seems clear enough: -That's the third time, you. Make it the last time. . Tarbox confers briefly with his coach, then (faces Matt Kinney. His confidence is in shambles, + and his first pitch to Matt, a wild one, ,suggests that he wants to continue pitching this game ( about as much as a cat wants a bubble 'bath. Larrobino beats York catcher Dan Bouchard's throw - to second easily. Tarbox walks Kinney. The *next batter is Kevin Rochefort. After two failed bunt . attempts, Roach settles back and allows Phil+Tarbox the chance to dig his hole a little deeper. He , does, walking Kevin after having him 1-1. &Tarbox has now thrown more than sixty pitches in  less than three innings. - Roger Fisher also goes 3-2 with Tarbox, who*is now relying almost exclusively on soft + breaking stuff; he seems to have decided /that if he does hit another batter he will not hit him + hard. There is no place to put Fish; the ,bases are jammed. Tarbox knows it and takes a calculated - risk, grooving another one, believing Fish 0will lay off in the hope of a walk. Roger snaps ' hungrily at it instead, bouncing one )between first and second for a base hit. Larrobino trots home  with Bangor's first run. + Owen King, the player who was at bat when-Phil Tarbox started to self-destruct, is the next - batter. The York coach, suspecting his ace .will work even less successfully to King this time, has ( seen enough. Matt Francke comes in to ,relieve, and Tarbox becomes York's catcher. As he * squats behind the plate to warm Francke )up, he looks both resigned and relieved. Francke doesn't + hit anyone, but he is unable to stop the .bleeding. At the end of three innings, Bangor West has * only two hits, but they lead York, 5-3. 1 It is now the fifth inning. The air is full of 'gray moisture, and the YORK IS BRISTOL BOUND + banner tacked to the scoreboard uprights /has begun to sag. The fans look a little saggy . themselves, and increasingly uneasy. Is York+Bristol bound? Well, we're supposed to be, their / faces say, but it's the fifth inning now, and0we're still two runs behind. My God, how did it get so  late so early? . Roger Fisher continues to cruise, and in the*bottom of the fifth Bangor West puts what appear / to be the final nails in York's coffin. Mike +Arnold leads off with a single. Joe Wilcox sacrifices ) pinch-runner Fred Moore to second, and .Larrobino doubles off Francke, scoring Moore. This + brings Matt Kinney to the plate. After a +passed ball advances Ryan to third, Kinney hits an easy , grounder to short, but it squirts off the ,infielder's glove and Larrobino trots home. * Bangor West takes the field jubilantly, )owning a 7-3 lead and only needing three more outs. + When Roger Fisher takes the mound to face,York in the top of the sixth, he has thrown ninetyseven / pitches, and he's a tired boy. He shows it at.once by walking pinch-hitter Tim Pollack on a . full count. Dave and Neil have seen enough. -Fisher goes to second base, and Mike Arnold, who ' has been warming up between innings, ,takes over on the mound. He is ordinarily a good reliever, + but it's not his day. Tension, maybe, or *maybe it's just that the damp dirt of the mound has caused ) a change in his normal motion. He gets -Francke to fly out, but then Bouchard walks, Philbrick . doubles, and Pollack, the runner charged to 0Fish, scores, and Bouchard is held up at third; by + itself, Pollack's run means nothing. The -important thing is that York now has runners on second , and third, and the potential tying run is /coming to the plate. The potential tying run issomeone - with a very personal interest in getting a +hit, because he is the main reason York is only two outs , away from extinction. The potential tying run is Phil Tarbox. ( Mike works the count to 1-1, and then .throws a fastball right down the middle of the plate. In ) the Bangor West dugout, Dave Mansfield &winces and raises one hand toward his forehead in a , warding-off gesture even as Tarbox begins -his swing. There is the hard sound of Tarbox / accomplishing that most difficult of baseball,feats: using the round bat to hit the round ball  squarely on the button. - Ryan Larrobino takes off the instant Tarbox+connects, but he runs out of room much too early. , The ball clears the fence by twenty feet, (bangs off a TV camera, and bounces back onto the field. . Ryan looks at it disconsolately as the York ,fans go mad, and the entire York team boils out of the ( dugout to greet Tarbox, who has hit a (three-run homer and redeemed himself in spectacular - fashion. He does not step on home plate but-jumps on it. His face wears an expression of nearbeatific - satisfaction. He is mobbed by his ecstatic *teammates; on his way back to the dugout, his . feet are barely allowed to touch the ground.* The Bangor fans sit in silence, utterly +stunned by this awful reversal. Yesterday, against * Lewiston, Bangor flirted with disaster; ,today they have swooned in its arms. Mo has changed / sides again, and the fans are clearly afraid -that this time it has changed for good. Mike Arnold / confers with Dave and Neil. They are telling +him to go on back and pitch hard, that the game is - only tied, not lost, but Mike is clearly a dejected, unhappy boy. * The next batter, Hutchins, hits an easy -two-hopper to Matt Kinney, but Arnold is not the only , one who is shaken; the usually dependable /Kinney boots the ball, and Hutchins is on. AndyEstes & pops out to Rochefort at third, but -Hutchins advances to second on a passed ball. King grabs , Matt Hoyt's pop-up for the third out, and Bangor West is out of trouble. * The team has a chance to put it away in -the bottom of the sixth, except that doesn't quite ( happen, either. They go one-two-three -against Matt Francke, and all at once Bangor West is in its ) first extra-innings game of postseason play, tied 7-7 with York. ( During the game against Lewiston, the (muddy weather eventually unraveled. Not today. As , Bangor West takes the field in the top of -the seventh, the skies grow steadily darker. It's now * approaching six o'clock, and even under 1these conditions the field should still be clear and fairly ) bright, but fog has begun to creep in. 'Watching a videotape of the game would make someone ) who wasn't there believe something was ,wrong with the TV cameras; everything looks listless, . dull, underexposed. Shirtsleeve fans in the $center-field bleachers are becoming disembodied . heads and hands; in the outfield, Trzaskos, +Larrobino, and Arthur Dorr are discernible chiefly by  their shirts. - Just before Mike throws the first pitch of -the seventh, Neil elbows Dave and points out to right / field. Dave immediately calls time and trots .out to see what's the matter with Arthur Dorr,who is + standing bent over, with his head almost between his knees. - Arthur looks up at Dave with some surprise 0as he approaches. 'I'm O.K.,' he says in answer to  the unspoken question. / 'Then what in hell are you doing?' Dave asks.* 'Looking for four-leaf clovers,' Arthur responds. , Dave is too flabbergasted, or too amused, .to lecture the boy. He simply tells Arthur it might be - more appropriate to look for them after thegame is over. , Arthur glances around at the creeping fog .before looking back at Dave. 'I think by then it's  gonna be too dark,' he says. * With Arthur set to rights, the game can ,continue, and Mike Arnold does a creditable job # possibly because he's facing the +substitute-riddled bottom of York's order. York does not score, + and Bangor comes up in the bottom of the 'seventh with another chance to win it. + They come close to doing just that. With +the bases loaded and two out, Roger Fisher hits one , hard up the first-base line. Matt Hoyt is -right there to pounce on it, however, and theteams  change sides again. / Philbrick flies out to Nick Trzaskos to open +the eighth, and then Phil Tarbox steps in. Tarbox + is not finished working Bangor West over .yet. He has regained his confidence; his face is utterly . serene as he takes Mike's first pitch for a ,called strike. He swings at the next one, a pretty decent ) changeup that bounces off Joe Wilcox's ,shin guard. He steps out of the box, squats with the bat , between his knees, and concentrates. This ,is a Zen technique the York coach has taughtthese . boys Francke has done it several times on/the mound while in tight spots and it works for - Tarbox this time, along with a little help from Mike Arnold. . Arnold's final pitch to Tarbox is a hanging -curve up in the batter's eyes, exactly where Dave * and Neil hoped no pitch would be today, +and Tarbox creams it. It goes deep to left center, high % over the fence. There is no camera .stanchion to stop this one; it ends up in the woods, and the - York fans are on their feet again, chanting0'Phil-Phil-Phil' as Tarbox circles third, comes down * the line, and jumps high in the air. He /doesn't just jump on home plate; he spikes it. , Nor, it seems at first, will that be all. *Hutchins bangs a single up the middle and gets second on 0 an error. Estes follows this by hitting one to-third, and Rochefort throws badly to second. . Luckily, Roger Fisher is backed up by Arthur,Dorr, saving a second run, but now York has guys ) at first and second with only one out. - Dave calls Owen King in to pitch, and Mike -Arnold moves over to first. Following a wild , pitch that moves the runners up to second ,and third, Matt Hoyt bangs one on the ground to Kevin * Rochefort. In the game that Bangor West *lost to Hampden, Casey Kinney was able to come back ( and make the play after committing an /error. Rochefort does it today, and in spades. He comes , up with the ball, and then holds it for a ,moment, making sure Hutchins isn't going to break for ' the plate. Then he throws across the *diamond to Mike, getting the slow-running Matt Hoyt by + two steps. Considering the wringer these ,boys have been through, it is an incredibly canny piece ) of baseball. Bangor West has recovered /itself, and King works Ryan Fernald who hit a three- + run homer against Yarmouth perfectly, *nipping at the corners, using his weirdly effective % sidearm delivery to supplement the .over-the-top fastball. Fernald pops weakly to first and the , inning is over. At the end of seven and a 0half, York leads Bangor, 8-7. Six of York's RBIsbelong  to Philip Tarbox. / Matt Francke, York's pitcher, is as tired as (Fisher was when Dave finally elected to replace . him with Mike Arnold. The difference is that,Dave had a Mike Arnold and, behind Mike, an + Owen King. The York coach has no one; he +used Ryan Fernald against Yarmouth, making him * ineligible to pitch today, and now it's Francke forever. ( He starts off the eighth well enough, .striking out King. Arthur Dorr comes up next, one for ) four on the day (a double off Tarbox). .Francke, obviously struggling now but just as obviously , determined to finish this game, goes full +with Arthur, then serves one up that's way outside.  Arthur trots down to first. . Mike Arnold comes up next. It wasn't his day,on the mound, but he does well this time at the ) plate, laying down a perfect bunt. The 0intent is not to sacrifice; Mike is bunting for the base hit, 1 and almost gets it. But the ball will not quite)die in that soggy patch between home and the ( pitcher's mound. Francke snatches it, -glances toward second, and then elects to go to first. Now ) there are two men out with a runner at ,second. Bangor West is an out away from the end. , Joe Wilcox, the catcher, is up next. With -the count 2-1, he hits a chalk hugger up the first-base / line. Matt Hoyt grabs it, but just an instant-too late; he takes the ball less than half a foot into foul 0 territory, and the first-base umpire is right .there to call it. Hoyt, who has been ready to charge the * mound and embrace Matt Francke, instead returns the ball. ( Now the count on Joey is 2-2. Francke .steps off the rubber, stares straight up into the sky, and * concentrates. Then he steps back on and .delivers one high and out of the strike zone. Joey goes . for it anyway, not even looking, swinging in,self-defense. The bat makes contact with theball , pure luck and it bounces foul. Francke +does the concentration bit again, and then throws  just outside. Ball three. ) Now comes what may be the pitch of the (game. It appears to be a high strike, a game-ending . strike, but the umpire calls ball four. Joe -Wilcox trots down to first base with a faint expression . of disbelief on his face. It is only later, *watching the slow-motion replay on the TV tape of the + game, that one can see how right, and how,good, the umpire's call was. Joe Wilcox, so anxious . that he is pin-wheeling the bat in his hands/like a golf club right up to the moment of the pitch, / rises on his tiptoes as the ball approaches, (and this is the reason it appears to be letter-high to him + as it crosses the plate. The umpire, who ,never moves, discounts all of Joe's nervous tics and . makes a major league call. The rules say you,cannot shrink the strike zone by crouching; by the & same token, you cannot expand it by /stretching. If Joe hadn't gone up on his toes, Francke's pitch ) would have been throat-high instead of /letter-high. So, instead of becoming the third out and + ending the game, Joe becomes another baserunner. ' One of the TV cameras was trained on *York's Matt Francke as he made the pitch, and it caught + a remarkable image. A video replay shows -Francke light up as the ball breaks downward just a * moment too late to earn the strike. His .pitching hand comes up in a victorious fisted salute. At ( this moment, he begins to move to his 'right, toward the York dugout, and the umpire blocks him ( out. When he returns to view a second (later, his expression has become one of unhappiness and / incredulity. He does not argue with the call + these kids are taught not to do that in their regular . seasons, and to never, never, never do it in.a championship situation but as he preparesto , work the next batter Francke appears to becrying. * Bangor West is still alive, and as Nick +Trzaskos approaches the plate they come to their feet . and begin to yell. Nick is obviously hoping *for a free ride, and he gets one. Francke walks him + on five pitches. It is the eleventh walk ,given up by York pitching today. Nick trots down to first, - loading the bases, and Ryan Larrobino steps/in. Again and again, it has been Ryan Larrobinoin , these situations, and now it is Ryan once -more. The Bangor West fans are on their feet,* screaming. The Bangor players crowd the )dugout, fingers hooked through the mesh, watching  anxiously. & 'I can't believe it,' one of the TV /commentators says. 'I can't believe the script of this game.' 3 His partner chips in, 'Well, I'll tell you what. )Either way, this is how both teams would want  the game to end.'. * As he speaks, the camera offers its own 'ghastly counterpoint to the comment by focusing on ) the stricken face of Matt Francke. The .image strongly suggests that this is the last thing the York , lefty wanted. Why would he? Larrobino has -doubled twice, walked twice, and been hit by a 0 pitch. York hasn't retired him a single time. +Francke throws high and outside, then low. These . are his 135th and 136th pitches. The boy is ,exhausted. Chuck Bittner, the York manager, calls - him over for a brief conference. Larrobino ,waits for the conference to end, then steps in again. + Matt Francke concentrates, head back and /eyes closed; he looks like a baby bird waiting to be , fed. Then he winds up and throws the last )pitch of the Maine Little League season. & Larrobino has not been watching the /concentration bit. His head is down; he is only watching - to see how Francke will come, and his eyes 0never leave the ball. It is a fastball, low and tailing * toward the outside corner of the plate. .Ryan Larrobino dips a little. The head of the bat whips - around. He catches all of this one, really 0cranks it, and as the ball flies out of the parkto deep - right-center field, his arms shoot up over $his head and he begins to tap-dance deliriously down  the first-base line. & On the mound, Matt Francke, who was )twice within inches of winning his game, lowers his ) head, not wanting to look. And as Ryan +rounds second and starts back toward home, he seems to - finally understand what he has done, and atthat point he begins to weep. ( The fans are in hysterics; the sports ,commentators are in hysterics; even Dave and Neil seem . close to hysterics as they block the plate, +making room for Ryan to touch it. Rounding third, he 0 passes the umpire there, who is still twirling1one magisterial finger in the gray air, signaling  home run. . Behind the plate, Phil Tarbox takes off his ,mask and walks away from the celebration. He* stamps his foot once, his face clenched +with deep frustration. He walks off-camera and out of , Little League for good. He will play Babe /Ruth ball next year, and probably he will play it well, / but there will be no more games like this for/Tarbox, or for any of these boys. This one is, as  they say, in the books. / Ryan Larrobino, laughing, crying, holding his-helmet on his head with one hand and pointing. straight up to the gray sky with the other, *leaps high, comes down on home plate, and then leaps ' again, straight into the arms of his )teammates, who bear him away in triumph. The game is over; & Bangor West has won, 11-8. They are &Maine's 1989 Little League Champions. , I look toward the fence on the first-base -side and see a remarkable sight: a forest of waving ) hands. The parents of the players have 'crowded against the chain-link and are reaching across the ' top to touch their sons. Many of the -parents are also in tears. The boys all wear identical / expressions of happy disbelief, and all these,hands hundreds of them, it seems wave + toward them, wanting to touch, wanting to.congratulate, wanting to hug, wanting to feel.- The boys ignore them. Later, there will be +touches and hugs. First, however, there is business . to take care of. They line up and slap hands*with the boys from York, crossing at home plate in - the ritual manner. Most of the boys on both,teams are crying now,- some so hard they canbarely  walk. - Then, in the instant before the Bangor boys+go to the fence, where all those hands are still * waving, they surround their coaches and -pummel them and each other in joyful triumph.They * have held on to win their tournament )Ryan and Matt, Owen and Arthur, Mike and Roger / Fisher, finder of four-leaf clovers. At this )moment they are cheering each other, and everything / else will just have to wait. Then they break *for the fence, going toward their crying, cheering, , laughing parents, and the world begins to (turn in its ordinary course once again. * 'How long are we gonna keep on playing, /Coach?' J. J. Fiddler asked Neil Waterman after' Bangor clinched the division against Machias. / 'JJ.,' Neil replied, 'we're gonna play until someone makes us stop.' ) The team that finally made Bangor West *stop was Westfield, Massachusetts. Bangor West ) played them in the second round of the -Eastern Regional Little League Championship, at Bristol, * Connecticut, on August 15th, 1989. Matt ,Kinney pitched for Bangor West and threw thegame of 1 his life, striking out nine, walking five (one -intentional), and giving up only three hits. Bangor & West, however, got only one hit off ,Westfield pitcher Tim Laurita, and that one belonged, - predictably enough, to Ryan Larrobino. The /final score was 2-1, Westfield. Credit Bangor'sone - RBI in the game to King, on a bases-loaded .walk. Credit the game-winning RBI to Laurita, also - on a bases-loaded walk. It was a hell of a -game, a purist's game, but it couldn't match the one  against York. * In the pro world, it was a bad year for ,baseball. A future Hall of Famer was banned from the 1 sport for life; a retired pitcher shot his wife-and then took his own life; the commissioner + suffered a fatal heart attack; the first -World Series game to be played at Candlestick Park in over % twenty years was postponed when an .earthquake shook northern California. But the majors are / only a small part of what baseball is about. /In other places and in other leagues Little League, ( for instance, where there are no free /agents, no salaries, and no gate admissions it was a pretty - fine year. The Eastern Regional Tournament ,winner was Trumbull, Connecticut. On August 26, . 1989, Trumbull beat Taiwan to win the Little.League World Series. It was the first time an ) American team had won the Williamsport /World Series since 1983, and the first time in fourteen * years that the winner had come from the #region in which Bangor West plays. * In September, the Maine division of the -United States Baseball Federation voted Dave ' Mansfield amateur coach of the year.   -Brooklyn August-   (For Jim Bishop) & In Ebbets Field the crabgrass grows  (where Alston managed)  row on row ( as the day's axle turns into twilight ) I still see them, with the green smell # of just-mown infield grass heavy # in the darkening end of the day: - picked out by the right-field floods, just % turned on and already assaulted by  battalions of circling moths  and bugs on the night shift; * below, old men and offduty taxi drivers 0 are drinking big cups of Schlitz in the $0.75 seats, ) this Flatbush as real as velvet Harlem streets , where jive packs the jukes in the June of '56. % In Ebbets Field the infield's slow " and seats are empty, row on row . Hodges is hulked over first, glove stretched- to touch the throw from Robinson at third, - the batters' boxes float in the ghost-glow $ of this sky-filled Friday evening - (Musial homered early, Flatbush is down by 2). & Newcombe trudged to an early shower through $ a shower of popcorn and newspaper headlines. + Carl Erskine is in now and chucking hard ( But Johnny Podres and Clem Labine are heating  in case he blows up late; ! he can, you know, they all can # In Ebbets Field they come and go ' and play their innings, blow by blow * time's called in the dimness of the 5th + someone chucked a beer at Sandy Amoros inright ) he spears the empty cup without a word ) and hands it to a groundkeeper chewing Mail Pouch ) while the faceless fans cry down juicy Brooklyn vowels, ! a plague on both their houses. + Pee Wee Reese leans on his knees west of second  Campanella gives the sign # with my eyes closed I see it all % smell steamed franks and 8 pm dirt + can see those heavenly shades of evening * they swim with angels above the stadium dish ) as Erskine winds and wheels and throws low-inside:   -Notes-  . Not long after I published Skeleton Crew, my-previous book of short stories, I spoke to a reader - who told me how much she had liked it. She -had been able to ration the stories out, she said ( one a night for about three weeks. 'I +skipped the notes at the end, though,' she said, keeping a . close eye on me as she said it (I think she .believed I might leap upon her in my anger at this . terrible affront). 'I'm one of those people (who don't want to know how the magician does his  tricks.' , I simply nodded and told her that was her /perfect right, not wanting to get into a long, , involved discussion on the subject when I /had errands to run, but I have no errands this morning, * and I want to make two things perfectly -clear, as our old pal from San Clemente used to say. , First, I don't care if you read the notes 0that follow or not. It's your book, and you can wear it on * your head in a horserace for all of me. -Second, I am not a magician and these are nottricks. / That's not to say there isn't magic involved /in writing; I happen to believe that there is, and / that it twines around fiction with particular0luxuriance. The paradox is this: magicians don'thave , anything to do with magic, as most of them0will readily admit. Their undeniable wonders ' doves from handkerchiefs, coins from -empty pitchers, silk scarves from empty hands are + achieved through exhaustive practice and /well-tested misdirections and sleights of hand.Their . talk of 'ancient secrets of the Orient' and ,'the forgotten lore of Atlantis' is so much patter. I - suspect that, by and large, stage-magicians.would deeply identify with the old joke about the outof- * towner who asks the New York beatnik how)to get to Carnegie Hall. 'Practice, man, practice,'  the beatnik replies. / All that goes for writers, too. After twenty +years of writing popular fiction and being 0 dismissed by the more intellectual critics as 0a hack (the intellectual's definition of a hack seems - to be 'an artist whose work is appreciated 1by too many people'), I will gladly testify that craft is . terribly important, that the often tiresome *process of draft, redraft, and then draft again is + necessary to produce good work, and that .hard work is the only acceptable practice for those of + us who have some talent but little or no genius. 1 Still, there is magic in this job, and it comes-most frequently at that instant when a story pops . into a writer's head, usually as a fragment 'but sometimes as a complete thing (and having that 1 happen is a little like being hit by a tactical,nuke). The writer can later relate where he was when + that happened, and what the elements were,that combined to give him his idea, but the idea itself ) is a new thing, a sum greater than its .parts, something that is created from nothing. It is, to , paraphrase Marianne Moore, a real toad in -an imaginary garden. So you need not fear to read the / notes that follow on the grounds that I will .spoil the magic by telling you how the tricks work. - There are no tricks to real magic; when it ,comes to real magic, there is only history. / It is possible to spoil a story which hasn't -been read yet, however, and so if you're one of those . people (one of those awful people) who feel .a compulsion to read the last thing in a book first, 0 like a willful child who is determined to eat -his or her chocolate pudding before touching the / meatloaf, I'm going to invite you to get the .hell out of here, lest you suffer what may be the worst . of all curses: disenchantment. For the rest -of you, here is a whirlwind tour of how some of the ( stories in Nightmares and Dreamscapes happened to happen. / 'Dolan's Cadillac' I'd guess the train of *thought which led to this story is pretty obvious. I ) was idling my way through one of those .seemingly endless road-repair sites where you breathe a / lot of dust, tar, and exhaust and sit looking,at the ass end of the same station wagon and the same ) I BRAKE FOR ANIMALS bumper sticker for 0what feels like about nine years . . . only the car in front * of me that day was a big green Cadillac ,Sedan DeVille. As we inched our way past an * excavation where huge cylinders of pipe -were being laid, I remember thinking, Even a car as big ) as that Cadillac would fit in there. A 1moment later I had the idea of 'Dolan's Cadillac' firmly in * place, fully developed, and none of the +narrative elements ever changed so much as an iota. + That is not to say the story was an easy 0birth; it most definitely was not. I have never been so , daunted s& nearly overwhelmed, in fact 0 by technical details. Now I'll give you what the + Reader's Digest likes to call A Personal 1Glimpse: although I like to think of myself as a literary * version of James Brown (the self-styled .'Hardest-Working Man in Show Business'), I am an & extremely lazy sod when it comes to ,research and technical details. I have been twigged again ) and again by readers and critics (most &accurately and humiliatingly by Avram Davidson, who - writes for the Chicago Tribune and Fantasy .and Science Fiction magazine) for my lapses in1 these areas. When writing 'Dolan's Cadillac,' I+came to realize that this time I could not simply , fudge my way through, because the story's (entire underpinning depended on various scientific * details, mathematical formulae, and the postulates of physics. - If I had discovered this unpalatable truth ,sooner before I had roughly 15,000 words already - invested in the story of Dolan, Elizabeth, /and Elizabeth's Poe-esque husband, that is I, undoubtedly would have consigned 'Dolan's *Cadillac' to The Department of Unfinished Stories. 1 But I didn't discover it sooner, I didn't want -to stop, and so I did the only thing I could think of I , called my big brother and asked for help. . Dave King is what we New Englanders call 'a /piece of work,'' a child prodigy with a tested IQ , of over 150 (you will find reflections of +Dave in Bow-Wow Fornoy's genius brother in 'The End ' of the Whole Mess') who went through 0school as if on a rocket-sled, finishing college at eighteen + and going right to work as a high-school ,math teacher at Brunswick High. Many of his remedial + algebra students were older than he was. %Dave was the youngest man ever to be elected Town - Selectman in the state of Maine, and was a *Town Manager at the age of twenty-five or so. He is a $ genuine polymath, a man who knows 'something about just about everything. - I explained my problems to my brother over /the telephone. A week later I received a manila) envelope from him and opened it with a +sinking heart. I was sure he'd sent me the information I - needed, but I was equally sure it would do (me no good; my brother's handwriting is absolutely  awful. * To my delight, I found a videocassette. .When I plugged it in, I saw Dave sitting at a table piled - high with dirt. Using several toy Matchbox *cars, he explained everything I needed to know, + including that wonderfully ominous stuff ,about the arc of descent. Dave also told me that my ( protagonist would have to use highway 0equipment in order to bury Dolan's Cadillac (in the ) original story he did it by hand), and ,explained exactly how to jump-start the big machines your + local Highway Department is apt to leave *around at various road-repair sites. This information 1 was extremely good . . . a little too good, in .fact. I changed just enough so that if anyone tries it ( according to the recipe in the story, nothing will happen. . One last point about this story: when it was0finished, I hated it. Absolutely loathed it. It was + never published in a magazine; it simply ,went into one of the cardboard boxes of Bad Old Stuff I - keep in the hallway behind my office. A few(years later, Herb Yellin, who publishes gorgeous . limited editions in his function as head of -Lord John Press, wrote and asked if he could do a . limited edition of one of my short stories, .preferably an unpublished one. Because I love his , books, which are small, beautifully made, *and often extremely eccentric, I went out into what I , think of as the Hallway of Doom and hunted%through my boxes to see if there was anything  salvageable. - I came across 'Dolan's Cadillac,' and once .again time had done its work it read a lot better + than I remembered, and when I sent it to )Herb, he agreed enthusiastically. I made further 0 revisions and it was published in a small Lord)John Press edition of about five hundred copies. I + have revised it again for its appearance (here, and have changed my opinion of it enough to have . put it in the lead-off position. If nothing .else, it's a kind of archetypal horror story, with its mad * narrator and its account of a premature 0burial in the desert. But this particular story really isn't , mine anymore; it belongs to Dave King and Herb Yellin. Thanks, guys. 0 'Suffer the Little Children' this story is .from the same period as most of the stories inNight ) Shift, and was originally published in .Cavalier, as were most of the stories in that 1978 ) collection. It was left out because my )editor, Bill Thompson, felt the book was getting 'unwieldy' , this is the way editors sometimes tell .writers that they have to cut a little before the price of . the book soars out of sight. I voted to cut /a story called 'Gray Matter' from Night Shift. Bill voted 2 to cut 'Suffer the Little Children.' I deferred )to his judgment, and read the story over carefully 0 before deciding to include it here. I like it .quite a lot it feels a little bit like the Bradbury of the , late forties and early fifties to me, the 0fiendish Bradbury who reveled in killer babies, renegade - undertakers, and tales only a Crypt-Keeper 0could love. Put another way, 'Suffer the Little + Children' is a ghastly sick-joke with no 0redeeming social merit whatever. I like that in a story. . 'The Night Flier' sometimes a supporting (character in a novel catches a writer's attention and , refuses to go away, insisting he has more -to say and do. Richard Dees, the protagonist of 'The ( Night Flier,' is such a character. He -originally appeared in The Dead Zone (1979), where he * offers Johnny Smith, the doomed hero of ,that novel, a job as a psychic on his awful paper, the * supermarket tabloid Inside View. Johnny -throws him off the porch of his dad's house, and that ) was supposed to be the end of him. Yet here he is again. - Like most of my stories, 'The Night Flier' /started off as nothing but a lark a vampire with a ) private pilot's license, how amusingly -modrun but it grew as Dees grew. I rarely understand , my characters, any more than I understand /the lives and hearts of the real people I meet every / day, but I find that it's sometimes possible -to plot them, as a cartographer plots his or her maps. / As I worked on 'The Night Flier,' I began to ,glimpse a man of profound alienation, a man who ' seemed to somehow sum up some of the -most terrible and confusing things about our supposedly * open society in the last quarter of the /century. Dees is the essential unbeliever, and his , confrontation with the Night Flier at the -end of the story recalls that George Seferis line I used in . 'Salem's Lot the one about the column of 0truth having a hole in it. In these latter days of the - twentieth century, that seems to be all too0true, and 'The Night Flier' is mostly about one man's  discovery of that hole. 2 'Popsy' is this little boy's grandfather the (same creature that demands Richard Dees open his $ camera and expose his film at the -conclusion of 'The Night Flier'? You know, I rather think he is. / 'It Grows on You' a version of this story ,was originally published in a University of Maine . literary magazine called Marshroots back in -the early seventies, but the version in this book is / almost entirely different. As I read through ,the original story, I began to realize that these old ) men were actually the survivors of the *debacle described in Needful Things. That novel is a black - comedy about greed and obsession; this is a.more serious story about secrets and sickness.It . seems a fitting epilogue to the novel . . . +and it was great to glimpse some of my old Castle Rock + friends one last time. To put it another 0way, I want you to be a little bit afraid every time you . step into my parlor. I want you unsure about(how far I'll go, or what I may do next. / 'Dedication' for years, since I first met &and was appalled by a now-dead famous writer, ) whom I will not name here, I have been %troubled by the question of why some enormously , talented people turn out to be such utter )shits in person woman-pawing sexists, racists, 0 sneering elitists, or cruel practical jokers. ,I'm not saying that most talented or famous people are - this way, but I have met enough who are .including that one undeniably great writer to + wonder why. This story was written as an )effort to answer that question to my own satisfaction. 0 The effort failed, but I was at least able to ,articulate my own unease, and in this case, that  seemed enough. 2 It's not a very politically correct story, and I.think a lot of readers the ones who want tobe * scared by the same comfy old bogies and ,funhouse demons are going to be outraged by it. I . hope so; I've been doing this job for quite .awhile now, but I like to think I'm not quite ready for , the old rocking chair yet. The stories in ,Nightmares and Dreamscapes are, for the most part, the - sort that critics categorize (and then all 0too often dismiss, alas) as horror stories, and the horror $ story is supposed to be a kind of .evil-tempered junkyard dog that will bite you if you get too 0 close. This one bites, I think. Am I going to 0apologize for that? Do you think I should? Isn'tthat , the risk of being bitten one of the -reasons you picked this book up in the first place? I think , so. And if you get thinking of me as your #kindly old Uncle Stevie, a sort of end-of-the-century . Rod Serling, I will try even harder to bite .you. To put it another way, I want you to be alittle / afraid every time you step into my parlour. I.want you unsure about how far I'll go, or whatI  may do next. / Now that I've said all that, just let me add 0that if I really thought 'Dedication' needed to be . defended, I never would have offered it for -publication in the first place. A story that can't serve , as its own defense lawyer doesn't deserve +to be published. It's Martha Rosewall, the humble ( maid, who wins this battle, not Peter /Jefferies, the big-shot writer, and that shouldtell the reader , all he or she needs to know about where mysympathies lie. * Oh, one other thing. It seems to me now /that this story, originally published in 1985, was a 1 trial cut for a novel called Dolores Claiborne (1992). - 'The Moving Finger' my favorite sort of +short story has always been the kind where things - happen just because they happen. In novels -and movies (save for movies starring fellows like  Sylvester Stallone and Arnold -Schwarzenegger), you are supposed to explain why things happen. ) Let me tell you something, friends and (neighbors: I hate explaining why things happen, and my ) efforts in that direction (such as the ,doctored LSD and resultant DNA changes whichcreate ) Charlie McGee's pyrokinetic talents in 1Firestarter) aren't very good. But real life very rarely has - what movie producers are this year calling /'a motivation through-line' have you noticedthat? I ( don't know about you, but nobody ever *issued me an instruction manual; I'm just muddling along , as best I can, knowing I'm never going to .get out of it alive but trying not to fuck up too badly in  the meantime. , In short stories, the author is sometimes 0still allowed to say, 'This happened. Don't ask me . why.' The story of poor Howard Mitla is that*sort of tale, and it seems to me that his efforts to - deal with the finger that pokes out of his )bathroom drain during a quiz-show form a perfectly * valid metaphor for how we cope with the 3nasty surprises life holds in store for all of us: the ( tumors, the accidents, the occasional *nightmarish coincidence. It is the unique province of the ) fantasy story to be able to answer the +question 'Why do bad things happen to good people?' by - replying, 'Feh don't ask.' In a tale of -fantasy, this gloomy answer actually seems to satisfy us. * In the end, it may be the genre's chief /moral asset: at its best, it can open a window (or a * confessional screen) on the existential 0aspects of our mortal lives. It ain't perpetual motion . . .  but it ain't bad, either. * 'You Know They Got a Hell of a Band' ,there are at least two stories in this book about what . the lead female character here thinks of as 0'the peculiar little town.' This is one; 'Rainy Season' is + the other. There will be readers who may 2think I've visited 'the peculiar little town' once or twice , too often, and some may note similarities -between these two pieces and an earlier story of mine, 2 'Children of the Corn.' There are similarities, +but does that mean 'Band' and 'Season' are lapses 1 into self-imitation? It's a delicate question, ,and one each reader must answer for him- or herself, - but my answer is no (of course it is, what else am I gonna say?). , There's a big difference, it seems to me, )between working in traditional forms and selfimitation. * Take the blues, for instance. There are 0really only two classic guitar chordprogressions, for the blues, and those two progressions )are essentially the same. Now, answer me - this just because John Lee Hooker plays -almost everything he ever wrote in the key ofE or , the key of A, does that mean he's running -on auto-pilot, doing the same thing over and over - again? Plenty of John Lee Hooker fans (not ,to mention fans of Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters,/ Furry Lewis, and all the other greats) would 1say it doesn't. It's not the key you play it in, these - blues aficionados would say; it's the soul you sing it with. % Same thing here. There are certain -horror-tale archetypes, which stand out with the authority , of mesas in the desert. The haunted-house ,story; the return-from-the-grave story; the peculiarlittle- . town story. It's not really about what it's ,about, if you can dig that; this is, by and large, the * literature of the nerve-endings and the +muscle-receptors, and as such, it's really about what you 0 feel. What I felt here the impetus for the ,story was how authentically creepy it is that so ) many rockers have died young, or under 0nasty circumstances; it's an actuarial expert's nightmare. , Many younger fans view the high mortality *rate as romantic, but when you've boogied your way - from The Platters to Ice T, as I have, you 'start to see a darker side, a crawling kingsnake side. * That's what I've tried to express here, 1although I don't think the story really starts to move and , groove and creep and crawl until the last six or eight pages. / 'Home Delivery' this is probably the only .story in the book which was written to order. John , Skipp and Craig Spector (The Light at the /End, The Bridge, plus several other good horror, splatterpunk-ish novels) came up with the .idea of an anthology of stories exploring whatthings + would be like if George Romero's zombies .from his Dead trilogy (Night of, Dawn of, Day of) - took over the world. The concept fired off +in my imagination like a Roman candle, and this story, . set off the coast of Maine, was the result. - 'My Pretty Pony' in the early eighties, *Richard Bachman was struggling to write a novel * called (naturally enough, I suppose) My $Pretty Pony. The novel was about an independent - hitman named Clive Banning who is hired to %put together a string of like-minded psychopaths . and kill a number of powerful crime figures .at a wedding. Banning and his string succeed, , turning the wedding into a bloodbath, and ,are then double-crossed by their employers, who begin - picking them off, one by one. The novel was-to chronicle Banning's efforts to escape the  cataclysm he had induced. , The book was a bad piece of work, born in )an unhappy time of my life when a lot of things - that had been working pretty well for me up&until then, suddenly fell over with a resounding * crash. Richard Bachman died during this )period, leaving two fragments behind: an almost , complete novel called Machine's Way under -his pseudonym, George Stark, and six chaptersof ( My Pretty Pony. As Richard's literary +executor, I worked Machine's Way up into a novel called - The Dark Half and published it under my own+name (I did acknowledge Bachman, however). My 0 Pretty Pony I junked . . . except for a brief -flashback in which Banning, while waiting to begin $ his assault on the wedding party, ,remembers how his grandfather instructed himon the plastic , nature of time. Finding that flashback /marvellously complete, almost a short story as it stood * was like finding a rose growing in a 0junkheap. I plucked it, and I did so with great gratitude. It ' turned out to be one of the few good -things I wrote during an extremely bad year. / 'My Pretty Pony' was originally published in -an overpriced (and overdesigned, in my humble+ opinion) edition produced by the Whitney /Museum. It was later issued in a slightly more ' accessible (but still overpriced and .overdesigned, in my humble opinion) edition by Alfred A. + Knopf. And here, I am pleased to see it, 0polished and slightly clarified, as it probably should / have been in the first place just another /short story, a little better than some, not so good as  others. * 'Sorry, Right Number' remember how I 0started off, about a billion pages ago, talking about 3 Ripley's Believe It or Not'? Well, 'Sorry, Right /Number' almost belongs in it. The idea occurred/ to me as a 'teleplaylet'' one night on my way.home from buying a pair of shoes. It came as a0 'visual,' I suppose, because the telecast of a,film plays such a central part. I wrote it, pretty much / as it is presented here, in two sittings. My *West Coast agent the one who does film deals + had it by the end of the week. Early the -following week, Steven Spielberg read it for Amazing , Stories, a TV series which he then had in +production (but which had not yet begun to air). - Spielberg rejected it they were looking ,for Amazing Stories that were a little more upbeat, . he said and so I took it to my long-time &collaborator and good friend, Richard Rubinstein, . who then had a series called Tales from the -Darkside running in syndication. I won't say Richard . blows his nose on happy endings he likes /a happily-ever-after as well as anyone, I think + but he's never shied away from a downer; *he was the guy who got Pet Sematary made, after all - (Pet Sematary and Thelma and Louise are, I -think, the only major Hollywood films to end with $ the death of a major character or "characters since the late 1970s). - Richard bought 'Sorry' the day he read it, .and had it in production a week or two later. A / month after that, it was telecast . . . as a 1season premiere, if my recollection serves. It is still one + of the fastest turns from in-the-head to ,on-the-screen that I've ever heard of. This version, by the , way, is my first draft, which is a little +longer and a little more textured than the final shooting & script, which for budgetary reasons 0specified just two sets. It is included here as an example of 1 another kind of story-telling . . . different, but as valid as any other. ) 'The Ten O'Clock People' during the $summer of 1992 I was walking around downtown + Boston, looking for an address that kept /eluding me. I eventually found the place I was looking 0 for, but before I did, I found this story. My *address-hunt took place around ten in the morning, . and as I walked I began to notice groups of -people clustered in front of every expensive high-rise - building, groups that made no sociological ,sense. There were carpenters hobnobbing with, businessmen, janitors shooting the breeze &with elegantly coiffed women in power clothes, * messengers passing the time of day with executive secretaries. ) After I'd puzzled over these groups -granfalloons Kurt Vonnegut never imagined for half * an hour or so, the penny dropped: for a (certain class of American city dweller, addiction has # turned the coffee-break into the -cigarette-break. The expensive buildings are now all no-smoking ) zones as the American people go calmly ,about one of the most amazing turnabouts of the - twentieth century; we are purging ourselves+of our bad old habit, we are doing it with hardly any - fanfare, and the result has been some very ,odd pockets of sociological behavior. Those who / refuse to give up their bad old habit the .Ten O'Clock People of the title constitute one of * these. The story is intended as no more ,than a simple amusement, but I hope it says something , interesting about a wave of change, which +has temporarily, at least, re-created some aspects of + the separate-but-equal facilities of the forties and fifties. * 'The House on Maple Street' remember +Richard Rubinstein, my producer friend? He was , the guy who sent me my first copy of Chris0Van Allsburg's The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. ' Richard attached a note in his spiky 4handwriting: 'You'll like this' was all it said, andall it really  needed to say. I did like it. & The book purports to be a series of &drawings, titles, and captions by the eponymous Mr. / Burdick the stories themselves are not in .evidence. Each combination of picture, title, and ( caption serves as a kind of Rorschach .inkblot, perhaps offering more of an index to the ' reader/viewer's mind than to Mr. Van +Allsburg's intentions. One of my favorites shows a man . with a chair in his hand he is obviously -prepared to use it as a bludgeon if he needs to + looking at a strange and somehow organic )bulge under the living-room carpet. 'Two weeks - passed and it happened again,' the caption reads. ) Given my feelings about motivation, my +attraction to this sort of thing should be clear. What * happened again after two weeks? I don't +think it matters. In our worst nightmares, there are only * pronouns for the things, which chase us ,back to wakefulness, sweating and shudderingwith  horror and relief. , My wife, Tabitha, was also taken with The ,Mysteries of Harris Burdick, and it was she who + suggested that each member of our family (write a short story based on one of the pictures. She + wrote one; so did our youngest son, Owen /(then twelve). Tabby chose the first picture inthe - book; Owen chose one in the middle; I chose.the last one. I have included my effort here, with - the kind permission of Chris Van Allsburg. .There's no more to add, except that I've read a . slightly bowdlerized version of the tale to ,fourth-and fifth-graders several times over the last - three or four years, and they seem to like /it a great deal. I have an idea that what they really get + off on is the idea of sending the Wicked (Stepfather off into the Great Beyond. I certainly got off , on it. The story has never been published &before, mostly because of its tangled antecedents, and I / am delighted to offer it here. I only wish I 1could offer my wife's and son's stories as well. + 'The Fifth Quarter' Bachman again. Or maybe George Stark. ' 'Umney's Last Case' a pastiche +obviously and paired with 'The Doctor's Case' for that ( reason, but this one is a little more -ambitious. I have loved Raymond Chandler and Ross , Macdonald passionately since I discovered )them in college (although I find it both instructive ) and a little scary to note that, while -Chandler continues to be read and discussed, Macdonald's + highly praised Lew Archer novels are now 0little-known artifacts outside the small circle of livre + noir fans), and I think again it was the +language of these novels which so fired my imagination; + it opened a whole new way of seeing, one -that appealed fiercely to the heart and mind of the ' lonely young man I was at that time. . It was also a style which was lethally easy *to copy, as half a hundred novelists have discovered 0 in the last twenty or thirty years. For a long/time I steered clear of that Chandlerian voice,, because I had nothing to use it for . . . .nothing to say in the tones of Philip Marlowe that was  mine. - Then one day I did. 'Write what you know,' )the Wise Old Dudes tell us poor cemetery + remnants of Sterne and Dickens and Defoe .and Melville, and for me, that means teaching,/ writing, and playing the guitar . . . though /not necessarily in that order. As far as my owncareerwithin- . a-career of writing about writing goes, I'm /reminded of a line I heard Chet Atkins toss off- on Austin City Limits one night. He looked ,up at the audience after a minute or two of fruitless , guitar-tuning and said, 'It took me about ,twenty-five years to find out I wasn't very good at this , part of it, and by then I was too rich to quit.' , Same thing happened to me. I seem destined/to keep going back to that peculiar little town , whether you call it Rock and Roll Heaven, .Oregon; Gatlin, Nebraska; or Willow, Maine and I + also seem destined to keep going back to *what I do. The question, which haunts and nags and - won't 'ever completely let go is this one: -Who am I when I write? Who are you, for that matter? + Exactly what is happening here, and why, and does it matter? / So, with these questions in mind, I pulled on$my Sam Spade fedora, lit up a Lucky , (metaphorically speaking, these days) and .started to write. 'Umney's Last Case' was the result, 1 and of all the stories in this volume, it's the4one I like the best. This is its first publication. . 'Head Down' my first writing for pay was -sports writing (for a while I was the entire sports " department of the weekly Lisbon +Enterprise), but that didn't make this any easier. My proximity + to the Bangor West All-Star team when it )mounted its unlikely charge on the State , Championship was either pure luck or pure -fate, depending on where you stand in regard to the / possible existence of a higher power. I tend .toward the higher power thesis, but in either case, I + was only there because my son was on the /team. Nevertheless, I quickly realized more / quickly than Dave Mansfield, Ron St. Pierre, ,or Neil Waterman, I think that something pretty ( extraordinary was either happening or /trying to happen. I didn't want to write about it, 0 particularly, but something kept telling me I was supposed to write about it. , My method of working when I feel out of my.depth is brutally simple: I lower my own head . and run as fast as I can, as long as I can. $That was what I did here, gathering documentation like - a mad packrat and simply trying to keep up -with the team. For a month or so it was like living . inside one of those corny sports novels with+which many of us guys have whiled away our duller * afternoon study-halls: Go Up for Glory, %Power Forward, and occasional bright standouts like - John R. Tunis's The Kid from Tomkinsville. # Hard or not, 'Head Down' was the ,opportunity of a lifetime, and before I was done, Chip * McGrath of The New Yorker had coaxed the0best nonfiction writing of my life out of me. I thank - him for that, but I owe the most thanks to +Owen and his teammates, who first made the story ( happen and then gave me permission to publish my version of it.  ' * Brooklyn August' it pairs with 'Head .Down,' of course, but there's a better reason for putting - it here, at what is almost the end of this -long book: it has escaped the wearisome cage of its . creator's questionable reputation and lived 1its own placid life quite apart from him. It has been % reprinted several times in various -anthologies of baseball curiosa, and appears to have been , selected upon each occasion by editors who.seem not to have the slightest idea of who I'm. supposed to be or what it is I'm supposed todo. And I really like that. . Okay; stick it on the shelf and take care of-yourself until we meet again. Read a few good( books, and if one of your brothers or /sisters falls down and you see it happen, pick him or her up. , After all, next time you might be the one 0who needs a hand . . . or a little help getting that pesky , finger out of the drain, for that matter.  Bangor, Maine  September 16, 1992  The Beggar and the Diamond . AUTHOR'S NOTE: This little story a Hindu parable in its original form . was first told to me by Mr. Surendra Patel, of Scarsdale, New York. I have + adapted it freely and apologize to those $who know it in its true form, where , Lord Shiva and his wife, Parvati, are the major characters. * One day the archangel Uriel came to God +with a downcast face. 'What troubles you?' God asked. * 'I have seen something very sad,' Uriel ,replied, and then pointed between his feet. 'Down  there.' . 'On earth?' God asked with a smile. 'Oh! No .shortage of sadness there! Well, let us see.' * They bent over together. Far below they ,saw a ragged figure trudging slowly along a country - road on the outskirts of Chandrapur. He was.very thin, this figure, and his legs and arms were - covered with sores. Dogs frequently chased )after him, barking, but the figure never turned to * strike at them with his staff even when ,they nipped at his heels; he simply trudged onward, . favoring his right leg as he walked. At one -point a number of handsome, well-fed childrenwith - wicked smiling faces boiled out of a large )house and threw stones at the ragged man when he + held his empty begging bowl out to them. * 'Go away, you nasty thing!' one of them *cried. 'Go away into the fields and die!' 0 At this, the archangel Uriel burst into tears., 'Now, now,' God said, clapping him on the .shoulder. 'I thought you were made of sterner  stuff.' 0 'Yes, no doubt,' Uriel said, drying his eyes. /'It's just that the fellow down there seems to sum * up everything which has ever gone wrong .for all the sons and daughters of the earth.' - 'Of course he does,' God replied. 'That is )Ramu, and that is his job. When he dies, another will $ hold it. It is an honorable job.' 0 'Perhaps,' Uriel said, covering his eyes with .a shudder, 'but I cannot bear to watch him do it. , His sorrow fills my heart with darkness.' 0 'Darkness is not allowed here,' said God, 'and+therefore I must take steps to change what has ( brought it to you. Look here, my good archangel.' - Uriel looked and saw that God was holding a#diamond as big as a peacock's egg. 0 'A diamond of this size and quality will feed ,Ramu for the rest of his life, and keep his , descendants unto the seventh generation,' 0God remarked. 'It is, in fact, the finest on theearth. 1 Now . . . let us see . . . ' He leaned forward -on His hands and knees, held the diamond out - between two gauzy clouds, and let it drop. /He and Uriel marked its fall closely, watching as it + struck the center of the road upon which Ramu walked. , The diamond was so large and so heavy that-Ramu would no doubt have heard it strike the + earth had he been a younger man, but his .hearing had failed quite severely in the last few years, , along with his lungs and his back and his .kidneys. Only his eyesight remained as keen asit had # been when he was one-and-twenty. ) As he struggled up a rise in the road, &unaware of the huge diamond which lay gleaming and ' flashing on the far side in the hazy (sunshine, Ramu sighed deeply . . . then stopped, bent over his * staff, as his sigh turned into a fit of +coughing. He held onto his staff with both hands, trying to . weather the fit, and just as it was easing, 'the staff old and dry and almost as worn-out as , Ramu himself snapped with a dry crack, pitching Ramu into the dust. * He lay there, looking up at the sky and (wondering why God was so cruel. 'I have outlived all . those I loved the most,' he thought, ' 'but /not those I hate. I have grown so old and ugly that the ) dogs bark at me and the children throw .stones at me. I have had nothing but scraps to eat these - last three months, and no decent meal with /family and friends for ten years or more. I am a , wanderer on the face of the earth with no 0home to call my own; tonight I will sleep under a tree + or a hedge with no roof to keep the rain -off. I am covered with sores, my back aches, and when * I pass water I see blood where no blood -should be. My heart is as empty as my beggingbowl.' , Ramu slowly got to his feet, unaware that -less than sixty feet and a dry bulge of land hid his - still-keen glance from the world's largest -diamond, and looked up at the hazy blue sky. 'God, I / am unlucky,' he said. 'I do not hate You, but,I fear You are not my friend, nor any man's friend.' 0 Having said this, he felt a little better and ,resumed his trudge, pausing only to pick up the * longer piece of his broken staff. As he -walked, he began to reproach himself for his self-pity and  for his ungrateful prayer. - 'For I do have a few things to be grateful /for,' he reasoned. 'The day is extraordinarily + beautiful, for one thing, and although I (have failed in many respects, my vision remains keen. + Think how terrible it would be if I were blind!' , To prove this to himself, Ramu closed his )eyes tightly and shuffled along with his broken staff , stretched out in front of him, as a blind .man uses his cane. The darkness was terrible, stifling, . and disorienting. He soon had no idea if he +was moving on as he had been, or if he was + wandering off to one side of the road or +the other, and might soon go tumbling into the ditch. * The thought of what could happen to his 1old, brittle bones in such a fall frightened him,but he - kept his eyes firmly shut and continued to forge ahead. . 'This is just the thing to cure you of your 0ingratitude, old fellow!' he told himself. 'You will , spend the rest of the day remembering that-you may be a beggar, but at least you are nota blind " beggar, and you will be happy!' - Ramu did not walk into the ditch on either 0side, but he did begin to drift off to the rightof the ) road as he topped the rise and started 'down the far side, and this was how he walked past the - huge diamond which lay glowing in the dust;0his left foot missed it by less than two inches.- Thirty yards or so farther on, Ramu opened )his eyes. Bright summer sunshine flooded them, , and seemed to flood his mind, as well. He ,looked with gladness at the dusty blue sky, the dusty / yellow fields, the beaten-silver track of the)road upon which he walked. He marked the passage + of a bird from one tree to the next with ,laughter, and although he never turned once to see the , huge diamond, which lay close behind him, .his sores and his aching back were forgotten. . 'Thank God for sight!' he cried. 'Thank God (for that, at least! Perhaps I shall see something of + value on the road an old bottle worth +money in the bazaar, or even a coin but even if I do 2 not, I shall look my fill. Thank God for sight! Thank God for God!' 0 And, well satisfied, he set off again, leaving*the diamond behind. God then reached down and * scooped it up, replacing it beneath the +mountain in Africa from which He had taken it. Almost as - an afterthought (if God can be said to have*afterthoughts), He plucked up an ironwood branch ) from the veldt and dropped it onto the 'Chandrapur Road, as He had dropped the diamond. , 'The difference is,' God told Uriel, 'our .friend Ramu will find the branch, and it will serve him ( as a staff for the rest of his days.' . Uriel looked at God (as nearly as anyone .even an archangel can look at that burning / face, at least) uncertainly. 'Have You given me a lesson, Lord?' / 'I don't know,' God responded blandly. 'Have I?'       CONTENTS:  Introduction  Dolan's Cadillac $ The End of the Whole Mess % Suffer the Little Children  The Night Flier  Popsy  It Grows on You  Chattery Teeth  Dedication   The Moving Finger   Sneakers -  You Know They Got a Hell of a Band   Home Delivery   Rainy Season  My Pretty Pony  Sorry, Right Number " The Ten O' Clock People  Crouch End $ The House on Maple Street  The Fifth Quarter  The Doctor's Case  Umney's Last Case  Head Down  Brooklyn August  Notes ((PP p@  BP*Jp|v@@@@@@@@@@ P @@@@@ pp ` p @pp(H @p @@ppppx @@@@```` @@@@ <B@< PPP8DD88DD<`DDDl8DD8 8DD8 p@  xDDD((( UUUU""HH00HHD( @@@@@ @@@@@@@@@@pxxppxxpp0@@@@@@p`pp@@@@@@ ` ppxxp@ @@@@@@0xPPP DP PPPP  @ @@@@@@@  @@@@@@@ P(P@ Ppxx@ pp pp@ pxx Ppp@@@@@@-)!()!sJss{oRF%[s[1j%Zg[rFo9_9_kss{k8[{koJFkssNJ!-ZocsJVo{oRJ%9_sw^j%1>{gksF)_{k-1YgssR)k%zgss9gZ8cs{oZj%-Vwso[R[zkZgI0>9c_rFRwFj%9_o9_Ycsws9_9_oYcj%-Zgw{oRsJcZ)k%9cwszkVRRYg{1J%QBsssR(!(0>{ksw0>j%k)VsssZV_Zgw0>(QBw{{8cVYc{oVI%{o-%sJ(_{J6k%Z{Q>5I!(ZVw5J%zg{1Rs9(Zc{g%NZg(![55RFVRsJJ(0>1osI)5I!5()9_I!1-ss1:k%V5J%YcI%RI!5s{o1-{os1[QB9cJw{rB'(oFNYg6os9sF{w1>R(RF{oqFwVzk1{k9c)(Z_R1wsFRB8c[95V>NwwRI!rJ_1BBQF{kj%ZgwV9)!Zco(_{c0B(!H!Yg1B0BQFYcQFYcI%Vi%1swRF1B1BRN{os0:)QBwzk-_I!_{{kNwJsF{V1N{o-Q>ww1:V)NoQBRzk''qFsW{gR1ow1BsJ{kRB8[::R1RF9cw{oNRJV150>s(1V{k{NZcwJ%5QFYg{{Vi!%Yg:19ZrJZc)!Rh%1ss515_F{o{Z[{Zkj%_1sF:_0B0>0>N8_(P>w{Q>Vk%-{ow:V{JRI%(!V{zgj%)o[0>QB0>QB{ks-8[:9I!6QF)kIRJF(j%%i!):ss)YcI!QBj%sw0>i!R-)Yc)!P>Ri%51s{o-9{os1Q>{_)!K%Zk1'!JwF(!>ws(1{k:g))J!_c)%1Zg/>')_{srJ-1V{9c9j%8cQB){k{k%1{ko:(Z{k1(J%o_JsJNZw1I%J8cQFrJZgw_k%ZYcRF1FRFJs0:-{kN55VwsJ1B{QB(!sZ95N{wN()!:oNQFRJRoRF(0BoVNNsJZ{1Zk[NNNZs)sJwwNsJRJNoZ-swsF)!1{{kk)(--1--%9q).!--o) -))1-k- !l)--1l-K1---K)1)!)!1:>>-*!K%l-l-- 51l)K)k)-*%l-l)k)K)l)K%l-K%l)l)l)k)l)l-L)m-K)k)-k)k)11k)K%J%k)k)l)l)k)k)K)1- K%l-=95l-)!-l)l)l)K% *%1>>>1 K%k)k)--l-L)l-l)l))! l)l)l)K)K)J)K)k)l)k)k)-k)k)k)K%K%k)k)l)*%-K)J%k)k)-k)-l-J%K%k)K)k)K)*% %K)*) !! !!})^%?!q%  !! $ =%?%!%%%! ! ! ! $  % %^)!$ $$)=-)! %=% !p q ?%_!5!5!W%}%_!! n ?!? !!p  _!)_!?!%?!?q !!]%_%?  !%p?%  !m?!!!%o!r q  ]%_!  n %!r ! >!m !n ! ?!p ?!r %?%n p ?!q ?!? p !? r !n ?!!!p  r ??r !! m ?%p q ?%o :%m %!!q ?!?!q  m ?!!p ?%o n ! $ =%$=%%o m ?!q  n    !?! m ?%n t ?% ! m ?% m !?! ??!--)x)v)! n>%[%y)Y-5y-z)]%_!-1|-z-x)4!  ! s  ?! !%p ?!!! <)qn??!>$ $np !))! % !!s o !!p ? $$!! >!?!  !s n q   !rn    ?! !!s o  !   %rn    !!s n   qm        !p !n ! s n   ss t %!! ?!_%_%_!%%!_!?!!%  $%%?_!_!_!__?_!_!_!?!?!_!!!!!_??!!  % ?!_!!!!!_!>!! ?% !?!_!!%!_!?!! !??????!?? % %$$ !>%        !   ? >%!<%]%~!!_!?!!! _!)~)%!q! o%  o n!  $ o m   o n >%?%   o m!!!$( o r   o  m>%%)1, !  n m )-(I)I)(% ! !w n  -0:Q>0:$M! o n  !%I-$ (9QNVVQ>j!  ! o  ;%%! j-995rFFsFrBrB0:5I1$ $$($   $t %o k%5RF>J1$ I)-Q>F:1 s !   p    )-j)6FJJKOJR>5j) ?!   !p   (!)rBJ0:j!I!j!%-6Q>Q>RB5+%n$ ! !  p    )9qB- !K)n  ?%! s n p m   J59-(%-*!u p n   %9j%   v ! p   .!.!o % !u  $p   -%5o-,!p  !?!o !  o ! &%G)') ! %0%1 2)  t u !?%p  q o !9q- !!  % % ! %!  %)-9 -  ^1$J%-*!j)9 $H-(!JJ/>H!*!*!K%L)h)99J)! !1-5q%O%O%! !O).% ! 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