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dead echo

C. G. BANKS

DEAD ECHO

Published by C. G. Banks at Smashwords

Copyright © 2014 by C. G. Banks

All rights reserved. This includes the right to reproduce any portion of this book in any form.

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# Prologue

The girl had been kicking from the trunk for a good while and only in the last few minutes had she appeared to run out of steam. Joe Carter and his boy, Billy, were passing around a bottle and laughing. They thought the retarded girl kicking around back there was funny. She'd been walking along the road about an hour ago, right before dark, and she'd been nothing to get into the trunk. She didn't have a lot in the brains department but those titties deserved a second look. Up close.

Carter slowed the car, looking for the turn off. It was hard enough to see in the daylight, by night it was like a needle in a haystack. "There it is," Billy said pointing. Carter slowed down the Buick Roadmaster and slowly turned left off onto the gravel. As he checked the rear view mirror he was glad theirs was the only car on the highway.

Branches scraped and clawed along the side of the car and there were potholes big enough to get lost in but that wasn't going to stop them. Carter already had a spike in his pants a cat couldn't scratch. "Wind on back behind the lake," Billy said as if Carter didn't already know. They looked at each other and grinned.

After another couple of minutes they got to a break in the foliage where the road widened out and Carter steered left again. The highway now might as well have been in another universe. He stopped the car and pulled the keys free of the ignition. Everything around them went quiet as the grave.

Billy looked at him, his eyes shining like little diamonds. Carter could tell he was really pumped up. He opened the car door and got out, fixing his pants so he could walk straight. They met at the trunk.

Looked at each other for a moment until Carter opened it up. There she was, wide-eyed, shrunk down like she was trying to hide in the otherwise empty space. The two men smiled again. Billy leaned down and started pulling her out.

She yelled a little bit but didn't seem to make much sense. Carter had seen her around town a couple of times, figured her brains weren't much more than oatmeal anyway. She looked scared but what the hell did she know?

"Get her over toward the lake," he said and left Billy to get it done. He skirted the side of the car and made his way to the lake. The moon was out like a small sun, casting shadows that writhed and stretched along the ground. He heard Billy cuss once and then the slamming of the trunk lid. He lit a cigarette. Turned back to watch Billy come on.

He had the girl pushed out in front of him and she was bent over, shuffling. Every once in a while she took her eyes from the ground and looked about as if trying to decide which direction to run. Billy had torn her shirt and one breast was visible in the moonlight, milky white like cream. He smiled, grabbed at the front of his pants.

"Over here by this tree," he called to Billy. It was a big oak that had rotted through the middle and cracked on one side. Most of it lay on the ground but there was one jagged slice left pointing up like a fang with a hole of darkness around the base. It drew his attention for a moment until Billy shoved the girl to her knees in front of him. She didn't look up this time.

"All right," Billy said, almost panting. "All right." He brought his feral eyes to Carter's.

"Bend her over that tree and hold her arms," Carter said. He pointed, spit out the cigarette butt, and started undoing his belt buckle.

"Oh yeah," Billy said, dragging the girl over to the broken tree. He draped her across it like a wet blanket and she didn't move. All she did was make a small mewling noise like a cat trapped in a bag.

Carter walked over and slapped her on the ass. Shut her up good and quick. Then he grabbed hold of her pants on either side of her hips and wrenched them down to the ground, panties and all. He stepped back. "Two moons out tonight, hey Billy?" he said and they had another good laugh. The goon moved around the tree, grabbed both of the girl's arms. She made another small sound but it didn't amount to much. Carter dropped his pants. Moved up behind her and spit in his hand.

Didn't notice the tendrils of mist seeping out of the broken hole in the ground underneath the fang.

In fact, he didn't notice anything but the jiggling white ass he was starting to work over. He went at it like a hound to the trail for a couple of minutes, only slowing down when he began to get light-headed. He leaned into her and straightened up. Looked into Billy leering face. The sonofabitch's tongue was practically hanging out of his mouth. He pulled out. Billy's eyes got wider. "You done?" he asked.

"Naw," Carter said. "Spin 'er over. I wanta look at 'er."

The henchman did as he was told. The girl mewled again and turned her face away. Carter moved in for the second show. But on his third stoke, the girl twisted violently, pulling one of her arms free, and with lightning precision lashed out and dragged her fingernails into a deep runnel along Carter's face. He immediately pulled out and went to his knees on the ground, holding his face. "Goddammit! I told you to hold her!" he shouted at Billy, fumbling around on the other side of the downed tree. The girl flipped over backward to the other side of the tree and Billy began grappling with her. Carter, blood streaming down his face, made his move around the side to let her have it.

In the confusion of trying to control the girl, Billy had no time to watch Carter coming around. He punched out a couple of quick, hard rights and the girl quit fighting so much. And when he looked up he saw Carter. And pissed his pants.

The man was standing no more than ten feet away, seemingly frozen in place. The misty tendrils from the broken tree had thickened and grown during the struggle. Now they looped out from the hole and had somehow attached themselves to the older man. But not to just anywhere. The grey, almost-tentacles had reached over to Carter's face, where the blood was flowing, and incredibly seemed to be digging inside. Carter grimaced and the skin of his face pulsed and stretched like something was entering him. He made a gagging sound and his tongue popped out. And then, equally insane, his head began to dissolve. Like acid had been injected inside it. Carter fell to his knees, clutching at his throat. His face was running like hot tallow dripping off his skull. His hair slid off the back of his head.

Billy started screaming. Backing up toward the lake. Not taking the time to look behind him. The girl was forgotten.

He tripped over a stump or some such thing and went down hard on his ass. From around the corner of the downed tree he could see steam rising up and an awful acrid stench burned his nostrils. It was also right then his hands touched water. Amid the horrible gurgling sound from the other side of the tree, Billy wrenched his head around.

The lake had come alive. There were what appeared to be floating heads dotting its surface and the water had pushed itself into thick fingers that had reached him while he wasn't looking. And he couldn't pull his hands free. It was like they were stuck in glue but infinitely worse. Glue that burned. He turned his face toward the sky and started screaming. Was immediately jerked backward as the water pooled over his body, moving over him like oil. And then he began to be dragged toward the lake, his shoes dragging ruts in the dirt. In another few seconds he was gone completely and once again the lake was confined to the bank. The floating heads dipped below the water line and the surface became glassy, still.

The abandoned Roadmaster was found several days later, but as to the three people who'd wandered into the trap of Leszno's Acres, not a scrap of evidence was ever found.

# Chapter 1: History

From the air, the area known colloquially as Leszno's Acres appeared as a rough rectangle, its southern extremity pulled down slightly to follow the contour of Mill's Stream. Highway 27, Old Perkins Way, bisected what had originally been almost a thousand acres of hardwood and swamp in its isolation, though everything on the east side of the highway had been sold in the late 1940s and for the most part remained untouched. This stasis, however, was slowly changing as the influence of Macon's Bluff, a city of almost 45,000 souls ten miles to the south, pushed outward. Already land on the west of 27, almost three hundred and fifty acres cut from the original one thousand, was being scraped clean to accommodate a hundred and fifty unit housing development due to open in the spring of 2014.

Back on the eastern side of the highway, Leszno's Acres tracked north to a long defunct spur of the Illinois Central Railway. During the dawn of rail travel it had served the growing cities of Blackburn and Angle Sides for most of a generation, but a mysterious outbreak of smallpox in the early 1900s had decimated Blackburn and business between the two quickly perished. The line limped along for another decade but eventually failed due to incompetent managers and the onset of trucking.

Gulliver's Creek dipped away from the wide, muddy Turnley River near the dilapidated bridge the Illinois Central had left in the earth and ran a zig-zag southwest, transecting all that remained of the Acres to its farthest western boundary, the state line. Here Neadles County and Pharsee Parish met in a delineated stalemate south and north, facing each other across a vast tract of pine forest, owned for the past hundred and thirty-three years by the PetaCollins Paper Mill, only recently declared insolvent. Gulliver's Creek joined Asdlundt Lake at the far southern extreme, yawning an oval five acres back into the forest. The company had stocked the pond years back for employee picnics and other such forgotten get-togethers but a spate of unusually wet seasons had spilled the lake over its bank, stranding and killing most of the fish in spread out oxygen-starved shallow pockets and creating a vast bog that mudded and made untenable most of the southwest corner of Leszno's Acres.

And there it was. With boundaries thus defined, the encompassed seven hundred acres were nothing to shock the imagination (as it would in the future) or cause sustained pause. Any magazine on farm and woodland would have contained its various elements, the cleared areas for grazing, the wooded for shade and protection, the ponds and creeks supplying water and irrigation. But it was what had happened there over time that made all the difference, the creation of the thing that refused to lie quiet beneath the earth.

*

One should remember history is not the sole provenance of man. It lays a gossamer tissue of experience upon the land and bides in seeming disinterest. And because land and time are not human constructs, they are not subject to our whims and petty laws. Therefore patterns can be very subtle, if recognizable at all, and ripple through the ages like a goosefleshed skin across the land. So it had been for the swath of land known currently as Leszno's Acres. So it has been for every other spot on, above, or under the earth for time out of mind. But the land, like us, its human counterpart, slowly acquires personality and quirks, intent, and finally will. Like the delineations of old scars on a fisherman's hands or the thin burst veins in an alcoholic's nose point to deeper, more savage, truths, so too does land acquire a history, a personality of its own. So call it Leszno's Acres now, but before it had known other more malicious titles: the Hill of Blood, the Flame Trap, Carter's Demise, Malice Stop and on and on.

The land becomes a magnet for what it has known, and like a child at Christmas, it learns, it eventually burns, to acquire its wishes. No matter how banal, how bizarre, how perverse.

It becomes both Lure and Lair.

Such was Leszno's Acres.

*

If one had the inclination to lie flat a transparency across a map of the area and mark with a red X all locations where animals and/or humans had happened upon misfortune of one sort or another, the area would appear to bleed. There were, of course, the natural deaths: wild horses trapped in unexpected brush fires, deer broken legged in deadfalls, wooly pigs snorting out their pitiful rage as muckpits dragged them to their depths. And then, the metaphysical ones: Indian tribes slowly, surely losing ground to defeat at the hands of the Wasicun, ritually disfiguring themselves amid other fruitless tortures in the vain attempt to placate and tame their stern and deadly gods. Or finally, and perhaps the most stigmatizing, the purely mysterious: hunting parties gone missing, sometimes single men, but other times complete organized parties. Leaving nothing to herald their passing except short passages in newspapers of the time, scattered bones in gullies and creek beds. And always thereafter, the forgetfulness as people, the living, got on with their lives. Leaving the dead to whatever spaces they would inhabit.

And so time went until, eventually, with European settlements and all the accoutrements of modern living creeping down from the northeast corner of the continent and up from the south, the area, which would one day become Leszno's Acres, claimed the rather blasé nom de plume of haunted. The term was implied in newspaper accounts on the occasion something strange happened within its boundaries; it was proclaimed in bold type in the popular serials of the day, huckstered by 'professional' clairvoyants and their specious castes; it was warned by parents to their children to by all means steer clear of the area whenever possible, and if not able to avoid it, then to arm themselves with accomplices, and never, never after dark.

But the plague of misfortune continued.

*

In 1848, three boys excavating along the backbone of a gradual rise near Grimball Rock Quarry, just on the verge of the present southeastern border, were smothered to death when the roof of their primitive tunnel let go. When discovered two days later (they had, of course, not mentioned to their parents their whereabouts nor their endeavors), a pair of hands and a pair of boots stuck out amid the rubble of the entrance. One going in, the other out, like adjacent currents in a vast ocean, two short lives caught in the process of entering and leaving.

Then fourteen years later, 1862, a minister's daughter suddenly missing from her bed, found miles away and days later, close within the dim rectangle, tied with rusty wire to a willow tree, her poor young body nude and ravaged from time, the wire, and depravity. For the crime a drifter took the fall, some toothless vagrant tossed out of his own home years before in the deathgrip of alcoholism, blasted out of his mind and completely clueless when the vigilantes rousted him from sleep near Gulliver's Creek. To be hung by the neck from a nearby oak, vehemently proclaiming his innocence until his ability to continue was...shall we say, choked off.

The area drew victims like a spider web draws flies.

*

The new century offered little respite. On January 1, 1901, a dog-handler in search of his prize Catahoola bitch broke through a magnolia copse and into the light of what was known for the next thirty years as the Hill of Blood. After retching up his breakfast and arming himself with a stout red oak branch, he managed to stumble to the summit of the small rise.

Around him, scattered in haphazard piles and even a few to their own spaces, lay the remains of what was eventually identified as thirty-seven bodies. Men, women, and children. Four were identified; two, a forty year old farmer and his nine year old son, having disappeared in a fishing boat four years earlier on the other side of the state, and the other two, unrelated fieldworkers, one white, one black, both middle aged, identified by their families, owing to the fact they appeared only to have died very recently.

And the other thirty-three? A mystery, thirty-three dead ends. For those not too far gone in decomposition, photos went out in the paper, black and white grainy shots to be sure, but photos nonetheless. The others were buried at parish expense, immediately, some said to make the nightmare end. That grisly circus of lost bodies.

And of the photographed few?

Not one word, not one single inquiry from the entire limit of the newspaper's influence. Some fearful townsfolk hinted the dead were the derelicts of Heaven, others the rejects of Hell.

And there it stayed.

*

On May 22, 1929, according to the microfiche remnants from the old Angler's Gazette, a man named Antonio Grasse, a recent Italian immigrant, was found dead in the woods near Asdlundt Lake. His fishing pole was found nearby, owing to the interest by the gazette, but not to the follow up stories that would continue by print and mouth for the next quarter century. The gazette laid it out in simple terms, bereft of histrionics. Grasse had spoke of fishing one afternoon, obviously had held true to his word, and even though the area in which he'd been found was far from the typical haunt of such types (angler's are known for their quirks), no eyebrow was lifted to this irregularity. Initially. The odd thing, and here the paper only suggested, was how he was found: hooked by the pantsleg to the third strand of barbwire in the PetaCollins fence line, head down, his face resting in six inches of foul lake-runoff from the previous summer's flood. Not a mark on his body, not even cuts from the barbwire, and yet his lungs full of the swampy water. Drowned somehow, hanging upside down from a barbwire fence. A damn sight strange indeed, but that's where the Angler's Gazette left it.

By the time of the first sighting the periodical had gone the way of the dinosaurs. And that was in 1939, April, just short of a decade later, when two teenagers, a boy and a girl, hysterically reported being dogged in the woods by "a ragged stranger." More attention was paid on the fact that these two were together in the woods at all, but there was an interesting little side note in the story of a rare, old fishing lure found embedded in the boy's torn shirt. And for some that brought back the memory of Grasse.

Over the course of the next fifteen years his ghost was spotted numerous times near the area, shadowing hunters and fisherman, occasionally getting close enough to become an actual menace according to those few who claimed these encounters. And then, very slowly, as the area became more notorious, the apparition slipped from the public conscience completely, or as completely as ghosts ever do.

*

The 1940s passed with little more of substance to add to the public record. People, however, continued to talk. Hunting dogs, it was said, had difficulty following trails within Leszno's Acres, and even if not, game taken was often deformed and distasteful. Camps would burn, lightning strikes from clear skies. Compasses would point errant directions. And then, the only real significant episode of the decade, the dead cows.

*

The owner of PetaCollins Paper Mill during that period had been a certain Thomas Clark, a sixty year old philanthropist from Chicago and supposed distant relative of H.G. Wells, the writer. Or at least that's what he told everyone. Known for his mysterious whims (orchids from South America for two years, ancient Irish metallurgy for five more, numerous endeavors and interests in between) he happened upon the idea of raising Hereford cattle on the huge tract of land the paper mill had owned for years.

Once inflamed with an enterprising scheme, Clark was relentless. Within four months he owned 30-head of the finest producers he could nail down. By the end of the year he'd added 50 more. Some of the older-growth tracts were cleared for grazing, other areas sectioned off by barbwire with transition gates and a gang of wranglers to handle every day operations. And consequently a lively, lucrative operation for the first year or so.

Until the cows began straying into Leszno's Acres.

Seven times in the course of three months they were found in the boggy southern extremity, having broken down the same stretch of fence every time. But when they were discovered, none save the few on the PetaCollins side of the fence were still alive. All of the others (eight the first time, to a record of fifteen on the fifth) were stone dead. Some found hunched on the ground as if at rest, the others upright. All dead and as desiccated as Egyptian mummies. According to one clandestine report, a wrangler had taken his Bowie knife and cut into one them. In the absence of blood or resistance he'd removed a square of flesh from the animal almost nine inches thick and as dry and brittle as a sponge left all day in the sun. The vet couldn't explain it, nor could any of the local cattle wizards, and with the persistence of the cattle to return to the same deadly place, Mr. Clark soon found new interests and sold off what remained of his herd. That was in September of 1948.

Nothing else of significance is known to have happened in the short span of decade left.

*

The 1950s and 60s also passed without obvious acts of malice, as if the land itself knew the modern world was closing in and its powers were not enough to keep it safe. Yet. Still, it took what it could for whatever purpose it conceived. March, 1953, a vagrant's body was found along a stretch of what would eventually become Highway 27, Old Perkins Way. He'd been trampled to death, apparently, by horses, crushed into a bloody pulp of gravel, blood, and bones. October of the same year, Halloween night, a group of three boys living within walking distance of the old Illinois Central line did not return home. To this day they are still delinquent. And then nothing till June of 1965 when a farm truck was found planted into the side of a gigantic live oak near the newly-paved Highway 27, the four passengers in its bed tossed into oblivion, the driver impaled through the throat by a branch, his passenger, the only survivor, broken-backed and babbling incessantly about "things in the road." Of course the newspapers reported it as a drunken accident (there was no doubt as to the number and contents of the wild scattering of cans) but some of the oldsters took a moment to pause and thumb their lip, recalling this or that story from years before, bringing a shiver along their spines until they turned the page and got on with lighter reading.

And it remained quite a task to keep livestock and other animals in the vicinity of the Boundary. A vague sense of unease accompanied any discussion of its worth and future, and it sat unclaimed, a prisoner to the federal government, so to speak, until a Polish extract, Karol Leszno, bought the whole plot from a room in the Angle Sides Manor, two days after arriving from the airport in New York. Sight-unseen. He was sixty-four years old.

The date was May 17, 1975.

# Chapter 2: Leszno's Acres

Karol Leszno, commonly known forever after in his new country as 'Carl', carried his last name due to a sheer act of circumstance. He'd hailed from a declining nobility in Poland, having entrenched itself somewhat securely in cattle and dairy products, in the rail town of Leszno, Poland. A farsighted ancestor had deposited huge sums in various Swiss accounts through a French agent for various favors and information after World War I, and during the scourge of the Holocaust, Leszno, at the age of 33, saw more human grotesquerie than he could stomach. His belligerence toward the Nazi regime targeted him a political subversive during the summer of 1942, and he was captured (taken really from his country estate as he sipped tea early one morning), imprisoned, boarded on a train like cattle, and shipped off to Buchenwald. Luckily, since he was not a Jew and had transcontinental influence, he was allowed 'escape' from the camp, but not until three months had passed. And it was these months that shaped him forever after. The images of death and defilement he'd lived with never retreated far into from his mind. Later he'd say that 'evil that vicious had a way of seeping in whether you wanted it to or not,' in his strange, pregnant accent. People would look at him and he'd stand there shaking his head, his eyes like steel, icy rods glowing through you, telling you, he knew, he knew goddammit. Some said that was part of what made him a good businessman: he had the carriage of a soul who'd seen into the pit of Hell and walked away. What could harm him after that?

He'd handled financial transactions from a safehouse in the Netherlands by the time 1944 rolled around. He lost an uncle, two children, and a sister to the crematoriums but managed to buy asylum for his wife and small daughter. During their escape to Hungary, Ellsie, his wife had died and left him alone with the three-year-old girl. They made a steamer on the Danube as far as Csepel Island, just south of Budapest. From there they took a train southwest to Siofok, situated on the shore of the inland sea of Lake Balaton and made their residence in a grimy dockside hotel, inundated with the reek of spotted foga from dusk till dawn, until better quarters could be secured. By that time the war was nearly at its end, and though conditions were not good for most, money always has a way of lessening a burden. He bought the land of a blasted abbey on the verge of the Bakony range and used the surroundings to cultivate grapes for wine. An extensive crypt below the abbey was converted into a cellar and they lived, both Karol and his daughter Meeta, in solitary, uneventful quiet. Nobody but hired hands was known to frequent the place, and most of these for only short stretches of time. This went on until early 1975, when the place was put up for sale, and the Leszno's abruptly left for the United States.

Arriving in New York, in anonymity, they'd hopped a train south, with no apparent destination in mind, at least as far as the remaining relatives they possessed knew. They deboarded, only briefly in Atlanta, to get their bearings and procure the proper real estate literature, and ended up at the Angle Sides Manor two days afterward. The sale was made concrete around a small wooden table with no drawers and a deep gouge straight through the middle. The now young woman, Meeta, watched her father sign the document the great, bearded stranger had brought with him, the room a swirling mass of cigar smoke and low, grumbling voices. And when the bearded man finally left, closing his presentation and disappearing down the ghostly corridor, her father had turned to her and, hands on hips said, in Polish, "Meeta, it's done."

They were on site a day later, a sixty-four year old man and his thirty-four-year-old, unmarried daughter. But it was a new day in a new land and no one knew them well enough to hold any opinion. They were simply a family, a monied-family it was whispered, from Europe, and a person's business was his and his alone. He immediately hired a crew, had a travel-trailer delivered early one morning, and set out with purpose. Meeta remained the enigma, no classic beauty, but compelling nonetheless in her mysteriousness. She was never seen in town, never far from her father's shoulder. There was seldom a day when some gigantic piece of machinery didn't arrive to scalp or push the land into different places. The building of the house became a sort of sideline to the rest of the action taking hold of the place. And it wasn't long after the endless stretch of barbwire went up along the side of Highway 27 that people began to slow down when passing its length, glancing off to the left or right and wondering just what kind of crazy hell was going on over there? By the New Year, the house was completed and the cattle ranch not far behind. All those hundreds of acres had been put to task and were responding magnificently. Vast cleared areas offered ample space for grazing, and the glades covered well over half of the entire property. The land movers had eaten three great ponds into strategic locations and now awaited the next acquisition. Within the following four months, 350 head of Hereford cattle (ironically enough) were bought by his hand. No one remembered (or at least made it known to anyone it would have made sense to tell) about the incident years earlier. It wouldn't have mattered if anyone had. This was a new day, in a new land.

Problems began to occur within the first eight months. Dead animals lying about, having been found under no apparent duress or trauma. In the fields, in the barns. Vets were summoned, tests run, to no avail. No hoof-and-mouth disease, no anthrax. And still the deaths continued. Sometimes it was up to ten a week. And then there started a different angle, cows found floating dead in the ponds, some lying flat on their backs on the shallow banks, some only surfacing days later from the ponds when their bloated, gas-filled bodies rose to the surface. The land began to reek of death. Carl, not known to frequent town often even early on, retreated entirely to the compound he'd built. Groceries and supplies were ordered by phone and delivered by truck, unloaded without a word according to the men who undertook the rides out to the farm. The grass began to grow wild and unkempt along the stretch of barbwire. The hired hands drifted off to other endeavors.

Except one.

His name was Eduardo Mendez and he was from a small, destitute village near Matamorus, Mexico. Originally he'd been hired as a carpenter's apprentice but upon completion of the house, and having proven his work ethic, the Old Man kept him on as a cattle hand. The travel trailer was removed to a corner of the compound as the cattle increased, and up until the spate of mysterious deaths, many of the hands elected to stay there. Eduardo had been one of the first. He was tall, just over six-feet, and bore his muscle within wide, swarthy bands of glistening skin. He had flowing black hair and the tongue of a priest. Early on the other men developed a dislike for the Mexican because of his grace with the lady. Because there was not a day went by that Meeta didn't bring a fresh pot of lemonade out to whichever outfit Eduardo happened to be in the interest of. And then the deaths started. There were attempts to write off all as natural occurrences, until the vets were brought aboard and continued to meet the wall. Carl became increasingly withdrawn, complaining incessantly of some debilitating "pain in his legs," one that he refused to see a doctor for and which continued to plague him until his death. More and more Meeta was seen in the company of the hired men, with her eye obviously fixed upon Eduardo. But during those days her demeanor never changed, her distant aloofness remained a constant. However, word did begin to filter around the camp. The cattle continued to die, the revenue to dwindle, and the Old Man was seen less and less, and even then usually in pillowed chairs, his legs set out before him on ottomans. Then came the carcasses in the lake, which led to more odd whispering, and with the new unease of superstition the exodus began. First, one or two of the hands over the course of a week, then a steady, rising stream until Eduardo stood alone. At his little corner of the lot. With the Old Man now confined to the porch, rumored to be dying of some consumptive illness.

And then he was dead for good.

The coroner came and went as did the undertaker and his macabre entourage and Meeta was alone, captive to a haunted place. Eduardo remained. Within three weeks he was a fixture in the main house. All correspondence and transactions with the cattle ranch on 27 and the outside world abruptly ceased. Effectively they split from the world until almost ten months later, when a public school bus driver reported repeatedly seeing two small children riding horses on the now defunct cattle ranch during school hours. A truant officer was briefed on the driver's information and took his state vehicle out to investigate several days later. He didn't get far. At the turn-in to the drive he found an old cattle gate hanging lopsided from a broken hinge. Grass had grown up through the ruts work trucks had left in the hardpan years back, and after the state employee pushed the gate back far enough to get the car through, he continued along the drive to the main house.

He reported being fired upon halfway down its length, by a shooter he never saw. And yes, the car did have a crumpled left rear fender and no bullet holes, but the employee was very adamant in the defense of his story, to the extent that a sheriff was summoned to check it out. He, too, reported gunfire, but this time from behind the wheel of his cruiser, the butt-end of it planted in a run-off ditch, as he continued to take fire. When he was dramatically cut off in mid sentence, the Sheriff's Department went into overdrive. Five units were dispatched to the farm, along with an ambulance and a fire truck. For the next six hours the latter two sat on the verge of the highway while an increasing number of law enforcement officers amassed at the scene in hopes of rescuing their downed peer. The raid was commenced an hour before sundown.

Two SWAT teams filtered off into the brush just at dusk, each with a military sniper. All members were equipped with night-vision goggles and Kevlar vests. One team came in from the southeast, the other from the northeast, both off the highway. No word had been received from the sheriff's deputy for the better part of an hour and a half. HQ was situated just down the street at a utility companies' parking lot. A professional hostage negotiator had been called in from New Orleans after the fact was clarified that at least one woman and several children were potentially involved. For the next five hours the area was as still and quiet as the eye of a hurricane, the only subdued buzz from radio traffic coordinating positions. At midnight the perimeter was tightened though no one could be seen moving within or around the house. The deputy had been found two hours earlier, dead in the driver's seat, his brains blown out against the seat behind him. The car was later counted to have twelve bullet entry holes and most of these were from the driver's side. Classic ambush. And then, at twelve-seventeen to be exact, years before the Waco fiasco, flames were reported in a downstairs window. Within minutes they had gained the outside wall on that side and were devouring the roof. The command to enter the dwelling was issued and SWAT teams fanned out from their nooks edging steadily closer, all weapons trained on the conflagration building before their eyes. The suicide mission was suddenly aborted when the front door burst open and what appeared to be a woman holding two bundles tore across the porch and into the small, manicured front yard. The woman was Meeta, the two bundles, children. Eduardo's scorched bones were found the next morning as the arson team picked through the ruins of what had so shortly before been a beautiful home.

That was on December 14, 1976, just shy of a year and a half since Karol and his daughter had bought the place from their room at the Angle Sides Manor. And in that time they were still relative unknowns. Their reclusive ways had afforded the surrounding gossip mill with no real grist, but of course, that did little to stop its engine running; if anything, it only fueled ambition it would have had a hard time achieving on its own. Serious inspiration held sway of the airwaves in most of the parish by early the next morning. Everything at least third-person, but no one providing enlightenment, on the sickening number they'd allowed among their ranks for the last good while, "right there in our midst," as even the Methodist minister's wife was sworn to admit shortly thereafter, the phone lines popping with conversation. Now, even the typically mute mental pygmy voiced his mind on those "foreigners" with their "goddamn Mexican" bunch. How they'd always "been a bomb waiting to go off." After all, the peculiar behavior between the father and daughter just went to show you. "Why wasn't that girl married?" Yes, it just went to show you, they assured one another over cups of coffee, Foreigners could not be trusted. Meanwhile Meeta was interrogated, the children taken away as soon as her butt hit the cruiser's seat, away from any sneaky photog just waiting to grab the next money-shot.

*

Among all the hearsay and innuendo that steadily made its rounds over the course of the next few weeks, predictably very little had anything to do with facts. Because there were few. One: Eduardo Mendez was dead, or at least someone of his general height and build (the fire had been started with a large amount of gasoline and had burned excessively hot). Two: Sheriff's deputy Franklin Benoit had been killed by at least two if not three shots from a Winchester .30-.30. It was thought Mendez had owned such a gun after certain acquaintances were interviewed, but none was ever found in the burned-out wreckage of the house. Three: the children, one boy and one girl, were undocumented and obviously of South American descent, judging from the dialect of Spanish they spoke to one another. And four: though this was really more speculation than fact, that Meeta was mentally unbalanced. Of course, this conclusion was based solely on her behavior the night of the raid (she'd come close to scratching an officer's eyes out when he reached for the children), and had absolutely no relation to any psychological examination of any kind. Tests were and would continue to be forthcoming but owing to the nature of the report, would never reach the eye of the Public. But this did little to stop tongues wagging. The fire was dowsed, the bodies (or what was left of them) buried, the children put under State protection, and Meeta relegated to the lost, dank rooms of a basement ward for psychotics in upstate New York. And with her departure so too went the remaining smoking tendrils of interest after the gluttony of the fat had been chewed from the story.

# Chapter 3: The Neighborhood

Three months after the debacle at Leszno's Acres, the novelty of the catastrophe was sidelined by a child kidnapping in Bank's Ridge, a little burg forty miles northeast. The child was an Honor student and daughter of a local district councilman, and by the time she was found a month later and twenty pounds lighter, the focus had shifted from the farm for good, or so people thought. The parish erected a new cattle gate to replace the old broken one in hopes of deterring late-night excursions by horny teenagers and the matter of succession was left to the courts. This was the Jimmy Carter years and with prices out of control and continuing to spiral out of sight no one was much interested in acquiring or developing over 700 acres of land largely in the middle of nowhere. The children were parceled out to foster families, Meeta Leszno wasted away in the bowels of the New York hospital, and the selectmen of the area agreed amongst themselves to let sleeping dogs lie. Or better still, die.

And die the Acres did for the next decade.

It lay unvisited but fecund; its vast pastures slowly reclaimed by wilderness. The burnt-out remnant of the farmhouse rotted slowly into the earth, leaving scarce reminder except for the odd shard of timber or crumbling foundation. The lakes spread in black washes of turbid water that carried a crown of scum on their surface. The cattle gate entrance was overrun by crabgrass and great banks of poison ivy. The barbwire rusted and dipped to the ground over vast areas, allowing whoever, or most likely whatever, to come and go as it wished. The towns and hamlets around its perimeter continued to limp along despite their sluggish economies, and it seemed at times that every ill will that washed across the land, either from a recent firing or simple bad luck, resonated simple and deadly from that dead, black plot of land which ran the gauntlet of Highway 27. Once again, inevitably, it resorted back to its former enigmatic self, a thing best talked about and scorned if the distance were great, but never on the nights, when alone, some soul would travel the length of barbwire fence lining Highway 27, and suddenly remember every word spoken about the place from their infancy; and, with the witching moon high over the land, have very little trouble believing every one.

And then, like a half-dead body left for a moment unattended on an examination table, it coughed once more to life. The date was October 29, 1988.

Meeta Leszno was found dead in her basement room. Strangled, apparently, from the proliferate bruises on her neck, the horror expressed on her face. The door to her room was locked as usual; there was no sign of a struggle. She was found at shift change and ultimately the security guard for the ward was implicated in the crime. However, he'd worked in the institution for going on fourteen years and his record had been exemplary. He swore he'd heard nothing and, indeed, no physical evidence ever did link him to the murder. The cameras marked him at his desk, accountable for every move, save when he left for his punctual attention to rounds. And these absences were nothing out of the ordinary, hardly providing enough time to systematically strangle a woman in her bed. But still he would have probably been convicted had the bruises on her neck matched his fingerprints. Because herein lie his salvation; they were not. In fact, they could be linked to no one on staff, both those working during the time of the murder and those who were not. Ultimately, the whole mess passed away; Meeta was cremated at state expense, the guard, still shrouded in the stink of mystery, was forced out and left the state entirely, thanking his lucky stars he was not to do the rest of his life behind bars. All was done, it seemed, everything could be put to rest, until a G1 clerk going through Meeta's personal file rediscovered the land in Louisiana. The economic climate had changed dramatically during the Reagan years, and that much land, anywhere, was nothing to scoff at. Especially since the file specifically mentioned the fact of the two children. Gone these many years into the foster home circuit. So, in order to satisfy the law and put the whole matter to rest (it was still unclear as to just how the children were related to the diseased), the children had to be found and notified of their right of succession. The older of the two, the boy, looked, as far as the scant information from the files provided, to be nearing legal age. His last recorded entry indicated a Vermont residence, the girl's somewhere in St. Louis.

Daniel Martin, the G1 clerk, made the appropriate calls, provided directives for the children to acquire their rightful property, or at least for an investigation to commence, and let the matter go. This caused further scrutiny of the land to which the fact that property taxes in the amount of several thousand dollars had yet to be paid since the incident with the Fire. Both families agree (in the interest of the children, they said) to sell off several tens of acres to satisfy the fees and penalties and provide a working budget for the children to receive. The rest would have to wait until both were of legal age and it could be determined just what their relationship had been to the deceased. The paper trail had long since gone cold and the lengthy gaps commanded unwelcome attention by public servants not known for their delicacy or diligence even on their best of days.

The children had come from Colombia, at least as far as the passports were concerned, but beyond that there was very little to go on. Record-keeping was far less advanced then than now, and with the added burden of years, the trail became moldier still. While the lawyers and child-services employees wrangled now over something that had been unknown and unworthy of their attention years earlier, twenty-five acres were auctioned off in the direct center of the property (some said to attempt to force the hand, later, of the sell of the rest of it) with a right-of-way extending all the way to Highway 27. Even before the ink was dry on these proceedings, another round of earth-movers arrived to push the land again to economic purpose.

*

By the winter of 1989 the work began in earnest. The acreage sold during the reevaluation of the property readied itself for occupancy. Another barbwire enclosure was erected around the site (the older fence long gone to dereliction) and Smith and Fields Construction, Incorporated, under the scrutiny of a host of lenders and other legitimate benefactors, cleared away the mass of paperwork that perpetually haunts any legal enterprise. Another trailer was installed just off the main access road to the property, along with a plethora of equipment shacks and utility poles, and a site boss was hired to oversee the work. The road, up until this time, a rutted affair suited strictly for the use of light farm trucks and their like was upgraded to asphalt to bear the heavy equipment. One of the closer ponds was filled in up to the extent of the new boundary amid No Trespassing signs posted at set intervals every five hundred feet of the fence line. During this time, while the area was cleared of accumulated waste and declinations and inclines incongruent to a straight line of sight for the surveyors, a small team of architects (both residential and landscape) was brought on board to snap an inspiring vista into shape. It was soon determined the neighborhood would be modest in scope and geared toward a lower-middle-class market since, at the time, that was all the economic strength the area warranted. Within two months yellow markers began appearing, designating streets and drives thus far only lines on rudimentary plans.

The neighborhood, Leszno's Acres (holding firm to the name on the property deed), would encompass the entire twenty-five acres, and include a modest sixty single household dwellings set down on quarter-acre lots. The housing grid provided a rectangular layout of two parallel drives with perpendicular streets bisecting them every standard block. This would serve as the First Filing and any subsequent building would be commenced at later dates, when or if legal restrictions were ever lifted. The modest homes were scaled for three bedrooms and two baths, with a limit of fifteen major layouts differing only in aesthetics. Foundation work began and a local nursery was hired for turf and congenial hardwood placement. Highway 27 now bore a perpetual film of mud tracked from the trucks entering and leaving the site. Digging began for the installation of sewer and electrical services. The memory of the fire slowly faded to soft background chatter as did the other ominous echoes from the past that had tried to resurface during the resurrection of the area.

By the fall of 1990 the streets were laid, the utilities functional. Thirty of the projected sixty units were nearing various stages of completion with the surrounding area enjoying the benefits of new enterprise in what had hitherto been a mere lonesome spot on the map. There were no complaints.

Then came the incident.

*

Early one Monday morning a backhoe excavating a short canal to the city main dug up a mass of dirt and deposited it into a waiting dump truck to be ferried over to a low spot on the far west end of the property. A human skull rolled free of the bucket and shattered on the side of the tire well. Robert Baskin, the foreman, happened to be on-site and was nervously called over to investigate the find. Though the skull lay in pieces it was very obviously human and all work at the site immediately ceased for the day. The area was subsequently cleared of all workers under the assurances proper authorities were being informed and the actual witnesses were sequestered in the site trailer until these men arrived.

By three o'clock that afternoon a forensics expert from the nearby university was on hand. He appeared in a nondescript four-wheel drive and exited the driver's side in the standard apparel of a television anthropologist: a T-shirt bearing the logo of his university, blue jeans, and boots. He first visited the men in the trailer, those who'd been on-site when the skull was discovered, and after a brief interlude headed out to the site where the dump truck waited, its bed full and the skull lying by the side of the road where one of the more astute workers had set it down. While the mass of engineers, architects, and foremen gathered in a half-circle near the dump truck, the forensics man walked over and squatted down beside the broken, mud-caked relic. He spoke a few words into a hand-held recorder he drew from his jeans back pocket and then preceded to take a multitude of snapshots with the Polaroid camera he had slung around his neck. The contingent of men paced nervously in the hot afternoon sun, kicking at stray rocks, talking quietly among themselves, until he finished, each one adding up the time and money lost and wasted due to the grisly find. Baskin was on his fourteenth cigarette and the sun was by then a hollow spot in the sky when the university man gestured toward the group and sent one of them over to fetch his truck. While the underling went about his duty the man withdrew a large, Ziplock bag from his other back pocket and slipped the skull, in its many pieces, into it. The truck arrived and he walked over to Baskin (called earlier from his trailer), motioned predatorily toward the silent dump truck as the foreman nodded his head in perplexity and flicked the butt of his cigarette into the hole that'd caused all the trouble.

As the last of the sun faded behind the gauntlet of trees, the university man climbed back into his truck, said a few more words to the foreman, and cut a wide V back to the main road. The men watched him go, endlessly smoking, all praying the find didn't hit the news. Baskin holed-up in the trailer, talking long into the night to his superiors, suggesting avenues and dropping names in the hopes someone could thwart the coming storm.

By the grace of modern economics, construction was allowed to continue the next day, but the entire area surrounding the dig and dump truck was cordoned off until some sense could be made of the mysterious find. The discovery crew was called in and briefed that everything was under control and nothing should venture outside the bounds of the construction site. This was a Tuesday. Bigwigs in the upstairs offices of Smith and Fields burned up the phone lines, offering and securing confidences of utmost participation from officials all the way up to the senatorial level. By Thursday the original crew of five (the dump truck driver and four laborers) was looking for work elsewhere, the two Mexican laborers on their way back to Matamoros, Mexico after discrepancies were suddenly discovered in their work permits. On Saturday there was not much else. Tests were being run on the skull, the whole gambit of dental and forensics, but nothing had so far turned up. From decay and calcium content the skull was determined to be in the neighborhood of fifteen to twenty years old and records were being searched for any missing persons and unsolved disappearances in the area from that period. The only thing certain was the skull belonged to a long-departed twenty-something male with bad teeth and, not surprisingly, no dental records. The bones showed no sign of violence and with that the investigation hit a snag. The lawyers for Smith and Fields kicked into overdrive in the lull, arguing against slowing down their companies' progress when tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, were on the line with every day lost during this unfortunate episode. When the university balked at this assertion, the company offered to investigate on its own, hiring private forensic investigators who would, of course, keep the original investigators updated on a daily, perhaps weekly (it was hinted at) basis. Of course, this was rejected by the powers-that-be and oaths were sworn to alert the news agencies. Even though this was a multi-million dollar project for the intangible benefits of an unknown man, long dead and forgotten, proper channels must be investigated to put the whole matter to rest, or so that side of the argument went. In the end it came to nothing. With the lawyers hedging at every conceivable corner, the investigation limped on. Regardless of the fact that the head of Smith and Fields happened to be an old fraternity brother of both the Louisiana coroner and several influential congressmen. There were, it seemed, certain things that money just couldn't cover up, and murder, even if it was years old, was one of those things.

Bright and early the next Monday morning another, more expansive rig arrived on-site to the further chagrin of Robert Baskin. Yell and curse as he did, amid a glorious chain of telephone calls and threats of other more volatile actions, the men from the university were allowed to continue. There was still a threat of publicity hanging as thick as October fog along the ground, and multi-million dollar project or not, people would not come later if an avalanche of negativity descended now. Baskin, choking back his rage, relegated himself to the trailer and was seen no more that day. The men from the university once again hovered around the site of the skull discovery like vultures on a long-dead kill. The dump truck was unloaded on the ground around the tires by a whole contingent of graduate students who fast lost their initiative under the relentless sun and shovelful after shovelful of dirt and rock. The hole was scoured for twenty feet on either side, six more feet down, and not another shard of bone proved forthcoming. Baskin was radioed in the shack of the crew's disappointment, and right at nightfall, with the site lights blazing around the area, did he finally withdraw from the trailer and make his own inspection. He couldn't help but smile at the results of the digging, and with the plague upon the leader of the expedition, the self-righteous university anthropologist who'd been first on the scene when the shit went down, the imperative fell away. As the anthropologist filed past him to his four-by-four Baskin couldn't help but ask what the "experts" had found, and as if by chance, wonder aloud how much longer their work would be side-tracked by "the bunch of dirt-hounds sniffing through their ditches." This inquiry was met with silence, which further boosted his confidence, and Baskin was quick to assure the man, as he tried to close the door on his adversary, that the site was open for them tomorrow as soon as they could get off "their university asses" and let the "real men" get back to business. He took great relish in the plume of dust that heralded the team's departure.

Phone calls were made, lawyers rousted from their beds. Time was money and as of now that one lost skull had cost more than the sonofabitch who'd ever owned it most likely made in his lifetime. As was suggested, most vulgarly by the lead shark in the Smith and Fields arsenal, it was "time to shit or get off the pot." It was here the senator's influence finally began to make an impact. Law was law, but for God's sake, you couldn't expect a company to shut down its business for the sake of one poor soul long since forgotten by the community at large, and most probably, by his own family. The university, pressured on all sides now, reluctantly withdrew its objections and the whole thing slid into the past, relegating itself to an unsavory aspect of the adventures of large-scale construction. By Wednesday, it was as if the whole thing was a figment of someone's imagination.

*

On the night before the second find Baskin woke in a cold sweat at 4 a.m. His heart pounding, he thought he was having a heart attack. Sure he was only 45 but he had been under a lot of stress. He sat bolt upright in bed, gasping for breath as he tried to bring the ghost of the nightmare back to life. It was then he remembered: the dark chamber, the parade of naked flesh, and then the spattered stains against the far wall. Bodies piled in abundance, fatter versions of the atrocities he remembered from college from the class he'd taken on the Holocaust. Men, women, children, all heaped and piled one on top of another while living, naked bodies slithered and slid among and within them. He also remembered the smell, that brutal vice around his throat, and felt sure, upon awakening, he could still feel the cold steel tight about his neck. And as he slowly regained control of himself, as he tediously felt the wickedness retreat into the far corners of the room, slipping in among the baseboards and back through the floor, he thought of, for only the tiniest, bare second of waking, his wife, bedded down beside him. Because, really, he tried to tell himself, sometimes the child was there in the dark, never that far away inside the bulk of manhood, once more in need of an understanding mother. But as his hand wilted at her bare shoulder he pulled back and wrapped his knees to his chest, trying to remember the foolishness that had awoken him while some other desperate part of his mind tried to forget.

It left enough of a residue to make him cautious. He'd gotten the go-ahead to commence work any and everywhere on the site, and even though Thursday morning eased out of the earth like a sweet breath, the phantom of the night persisted. He was not a superstitious man, God forbid, he thought all such bullshit for grandmothers and niggers, but the intimacy of the memory refused to abate.

He arrived at the site trailer an hour earlier than usual and worked out the crew schedule with no particular goal in mind, except to catch up on the last few lost days. And it was at this task that the premonition came on him again. As his skin began to crawl along his back and down his arms, he again saw the pile of bodies, the living amongst them, squeezing and rolling in their putridity. He felt another mild pain in his left arm and wiped a hand across his forehead. He cupped his mouth in his hand and stared blankly at the desk's surface, his mind running on channels he could not fathom.

And then it passed.

He took a deep breath and tried to calm down. He looked at the task sheet and unconsciously scratched out the names of the crew he'd scheduled for the city main work. In its place he wrote down two other names, and those of only a backhoe operator and his own nephew, a kid on loan for the summer. Baskin's brother, a real estate broker from Seville and one of the baker's with his thumb in the pie, had wanted his son to get "a little reality check" during his summer break. The kid was a dynamo in chemistry but hardly more than a breathing body at "man's work" as the kid's dad had told him (speaking from his own depth of experience from more than twenty years ago at a construction site), not more than a month before. It was from this supposed wealth of knowledge that he considered his son lacking in the fine art of "honest work". Baskin thought the whole thing laughable but what his brother wanted he got, and damned if Baskin hadn't obliged him on this too.

He called in his overseer at seven and distributed the schedule. Then he retired to his computer and scrolled through the miasma of emails he'd accumulated in the past several hours. Just before nine-thirty he got the summons, extremely urgent, if he read the look on Adam's face correctly. He took the walkie-talkie from the junior site manager, closed the door to his office, and spoke for a moment very quietly. During the exchange his face gradually went white and with a muttered curse and his fingers playing unsteadily against the walls of the trailer, he left for the company truck. Within two minutes he pulled up alongside the goddamned dump truck, in its now customary spot next to the city main work. Looking like it was made to fuck up his life. The nephew, Scott, met him as he opened the door. "Trouble, Unc," the boy said, his face not much more colorful than his uncles'. Baskin shook his head and withdrew from the cab, not even looking at the boy as he made his way over to the hole where the dump truck driver stood. His name was Peter Sims and he stood resolutely looking down, working the faded old Cat Diesel hat nervously in his hands. He watched the boss come on and pointed a shaking finger down, taking two steps back so the foreman could get a better view past him. Baskin walked up, wordlessly, to the edge of the pit and looked down.

There, right before him, just outside the excavation the university pricks had established, lie a vast collection of broken bones and semi-intact skulls. From his point above Baskin counted four of them...at least four. Scattered chunks of what looked like rotted leather and lengths of bone framed them like some macabre painting. He heard the dump truck driver shuffle up behind him, held out his hand in case the man had a mind to speak. He squatted down to a knee, pulled a rock from the soil and chunked it into the hole. "Goddamn," he said and squinted into the sun. At his right shoulder he felt his nephew. He stood up and spat on the ground. Many things ran roughshod through his mind, none of them pleasant. He turned to his nephew, stepped closer. "We're gonna go ahead and clean that outta there," he told the boy tonelessly. The boy said nothing, just averted his eyes. Baskin turned to the driver. He'd known the man for the better part of fifteen years; their association ran through divorces and all manner of barrooms, and right then Baskin was owed all he was going to ask. He leaned in closer than he had with his nephew, conspiratorially, as if he knew the man's mind. "Pete," he muttered. "Dammit I need you now, man. This is a righteous fuckall, but my ass is on the line here. The first time was a gimme but we ain't gonna be able to shake this shit off if it gets out."

The man continued gaping into the hole, nodding his head in barest acknowledgement as Baskin continued. His nephew edged up alongside and this time Baskin turned to include him. "Old goddamn bones, boys. You see it just like I do. Nothing came outta it last time and if we doan let it, ain't nothing gonna come outta it now. Forget it. The university fucks'll just come out here and turn the whole goddamn place into a playground and we can kiss this job goodfuckin'bye." He stared at them, each in turn, directly in the eyes, nodding his own head now as he went. "We're gonna keep going. Ain't another twenty-five feet to the fuckin' main and we're pushin' through. The dead are dead, far's I'm concerned, and it ain't none a our goddamn business anyhow."

No one met his eye. He was a big man, and formidable when roused. It had come around to Pete's turn to speak, everyone knew that. He looked at a spot just below Baskin's nose, where a muscle twitched at the corner of his mouth. "How d'ya mean?" he said.

Baskin pointed at his nephew. "Get the backhoe and finish filling that truck. Anything showin' when you're finished, cover it up. I'll make a coupla calls. Ain't nobody else gonna be workin' down here today, anyway. I 'ad a feelin' this fuckin' mornin'.... Regardless, get it cleaned up and we're gonna forget the whole damn thing. There's too much fuckin' money involved here, gentlemen. Our bottom line is to get this done, and by God that's just what we're gonna do." And with that he turned around and left.

And they did just what he said. The truck was filled, the area combed for errant traces of bone they might have missed. The boy and Pete, the dump truck driver, worked silently, neither looking at the other out of fear some understanding would emerge to clap them further into misery, telling themselves all the while that orders were orders, and after all, Baskin was right. Just a bunch of old bones lying around like dynamite waiting to go off. That was all it was.

The area was finally clear around the main two hours later; Steve worked a wide oval out from the concrete junction housing, wider than necessary so there would be no need for further digging. And as he worked he thought of the coming semester and how he'd never do this kind of work again, regardless of the lessons his old man wanted him to learn. Because he'd already learned one of the biggest, most dangerous, already. Here he was covering up a potential murder site. And oddly enough, it wasn't that hard. If you looked around at the scenery while you worked, and kept telling yourself that it was just a typical Monday morning with the rest of the work week stretching out ahead, it wasn't so hard to refocus on the task at hand. Work was work; orders were orders. Why, hadn't his old man continually lauded the Marine drill instructors he'd used as examples of duty and responsibility? This was just like that...only different. But not enough to matter, he decided, lifting the last load into the back of the dump truck. He hadn't wanted this goddamn job in the first place. Pete, on the other hand, didn't have any options. Alcoholism had neatly encased him years before and he wouldn't be working now had not Baskin known somebody at the licensing board. He was just lucky the last DUI had been four years ago (God only knows how), and his name was pretty much shit everywhere else, anyway. He didn't do it out of loyalty, and his intelligence, or lack thereof, didn't cloud him with any chimeras of moral and legal consequence. He did it because Baskin told him to, and in a world of few contacts, his options were fewer than his friends. Besides, what did it have to do with him anyway? He didn't know any of these poor fucks. And sooner or later everything ended up coming around to just this anyway. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust (something his poor old mother had warned him), just like the Bible said.

He climbed up into the bed of the dump truck and covered over a few bones that stuck free of the dirt. Then, while Steve nosed around the hole looking for anything they'd missed, he pulled the tarp across the load and sat in the cab, the walkie talkie lying on the seat beside him, waiting for instructions to come down the pipe.

It was amazing, really, how easy it was to get rid of the problem once you'd decided that's what you were going to do. Baskin had a friend at a landfill and arranged to dump the load there. It wasn't the first time and Franklin wasn't known to possess a suspicious nature (Baskin had told the man he was under time constraints and the landfill was closer than his other option) as long as the money was good. And once in the landfill, especially after a few run-throughs by the garbage trucks and bulldozers, even if the bones were discovered, nobody would know where the hell they'd come from anyway.

So that was that and work continued.

The city main connection was secured, the other lines laid down with no further discoveries. The streets paved, the stucco applied and roofs shingled. Landscapers came and went like ants on a nest, utilities connected. Baskin got a bonus for pulling the job in under deadline and went on to the next job, already distancing himself from the problems of this one. The houses went on the market; the fields around the subdivision were mowed and cleaned of building refuse and trash.

The neighborhood was ready.

# Chapter 4: Patsy

Patsy Standish closed the carport door and turned around to look at her newly-bought house. It was a bittersweet moment lost to the silence standing hard around her. All hers, completely paid for, and her only twenty years old. Nothing like any trailer she'd ever lived in before. John and little Terri had been dead almost eleven months now, her husband and daughter. And much of that time was a vast chasm of anguish, confusion, ultimate disbelief that something so horrible had actually happened to her, to them. She walked over to the dining room table. Sat down and cupped her hands in front of her, looked across the wooden surface where the others should have been sitting. A great, sustained emptiness rang through her, slammed into her brain, leaving her senseless before a thoughtless stream of pictures that never seemed to end. Their tiny apartment of the past two years, the hours the two of them had talked in bed, his promotion to sales manager, her pregnancy, the very taste of a beautiful future she'd never expected. Then the smoking car, the taste of gasoline at the back of her throat, the heat of the flames, the little hand by the side of the road.

And now this.

She stood up and went over to the kitchen island. Pulled a pack of cigarettes from her purse. She'd known of nothing else to do, but now done, the satisfaction remained distant. She'd had to get away, make a complete 360 degrees. Or she'd be dead too. She knew that now, there was no doubt. She'd thought about taking the .38 caliber John had received from his grandfather four Christmas's ago and blowing her fucking brains out so many times it was pathetic. But she hadn't. And with that, she knew there was still something to be said for miracles.

She blew out a plume of smoke and stubbed the barely-touched cigarette into the dusty sink. Then she closed her eyes, counted slowly to ten, and turned around to face the clutter of the new house. Jane Brenning ("call me Janie") the real estate lady had assured her this was "just the thing." A "nice little starter home" she'd said, grinning below her sunglasses, oblivious to the fact that her client had no starter family to go with the starter home. Oblivious that all those Patsy loved now lay in two graves at the back of Perpetual Rest Cemetery not far from here. Just over fourteen hundred square feet, three bedrooms ("plenty to grow into," she'd been assured), a nice fenced in back yard. She thought about the trailers of her youth, the later apartments, and didn't see much of a goddamn difference. During high school, lying in bed in the tiny broom closet of a bedroom with the paper-thin walls and the smell of mildew rising up from the floor vents, she'd always imagined differently. She'd wished for this...prayed for it.

And she'd gotten it.

Thoughts of the .38 surfaced again in her mind. It was right out there in the car, underneath the driver's seat, that hand-sized suicide. Of course it wasn't registered but she'd never held much truck with authority. She flexed her fingers and looked down at her almost translucent white hand. Right there at your fingertips, the voice in her head said soothingly. Just one little pull and all this shit's history. No, she thought and tried to snap her mind away from the gulf. Because that's what this place, this new house, this "nice little starter home" was supposed to alleviate. She couldn't go down that easy. It would do the memory of John and Terri ill; there'd be one less to remember them. No, she'd tough it out, keep going as long as she could. She nodded her head and bent to the boxes at her knee to begin unpacking.

*

Patsy Jane Gilbert had been born on Christmas Day, 1971. At home, on the trailer's linoleum dining room floor. Her mother, Jean, assisted only by her younger sister, Pauline, in the quick, unexpected delivery. Patsy's father, "a student of some sort" from the university (or as far as he'd claimed the night he fucked her in the Rusty Nail's parking lot) had not been seen since. Jean (though she didn't like to admit it and in fact never did, even to herself) called him Ed though his real name had been John too. It hadn't made any difference. He was just as gone.

Part of the reason Patsy had been born on the floor was because there was no car, or medical insurance. The other reason being that both women were shit drunk, ashtrays overflowing while Led Zeppelin spun on the turntable. Christmas had seemed as far away as the moon, and with both of them disowned by their equally fucked-up parents, it was just another night in the trailer park. Then Jean's water broke and things changed. Up until that point she'd tried to pretend everything was under control; afterward, she could no longer. She was nineteen, living with her sister in a run-down trailer, selling weed and acid (sometimes her ass before the pregnancy) to remain fixed in place. Things were not good. She managed to call 911 in those first terrible minutes and the ambulance eventually came and took her away. She stayed at the hospital long enough to secure a birth certificate and a hefty bill she had no intent, or means, of paying.

And then...

things went back to normal. Relatively speaking. Two weeks after having the child a guy named Douglas Spangler broke into the trailer and held the two girls (Patsy was in a crib in the next room) at gun point while a nameless buddy of his rifled their rooms in search of dope. They didn't find enough and things turned nasty. For the next forty minutes both of the girls were raped and sodomized. Afterward nothing was ever reported. Three weeks later Pauline was arrested for burglarizing a liquor store. While she was locked up the narcotics police raided the trailer and busted Jean too.

From then on Patsy went to live with her grandmother, a fifty-five year old wretch of damp clothes and cigarette breath who lived across town on a state pension as modest as a Baptist on Sunday morning.

*

Patsy ripped open the first box, regretting already that she'd not marked them more carefully. Not just Kitchen or Living Room because, now, with all of them stacked nice and neat along the walls, one on top of the other, that just wasn't enough. Looking around at just the boxes in here, it was hard to believe everything had been in the apartment. But this was it, all boxed up and filed away, her former life. Even now growing as musty as the smell that drifted out from the boxes after a month in storage. Funny how fast corruption set in. She pulled back the paper from one box and saw the dishes, pushed it back to a corner to inspect the next box. Finally, the kitchen utensils, the forks, spoons, ladles, measuring cups, knives, all the things to be neatly put away in the expansive drawers that lined the kitchen. Not because that's what she was used to, back at the apartment everything had been thrown topsy-turvy wherever it happened to land. Here she wanted to make things different, organized, a new go at whatever came next. Because deep down she hadn't a clue. Her life had always seemed a One Way, an endless streak from one disappointment to the next, and now, here she was again. A gambler trying to change her luck. And all on the money of the dead, the damned voice whispered. She tried to lock it out, tried not to think about the gun underneath the driver's seat. She lifted the box to the kitchen island, clearing her mind of everything except the spoons, the knives, anything to take away that fucking voice that kept at her continuously.

She'd wake up eventually, make this work, goddammit! With every ounce of strength, against every fragile and devastating doubt and grief, she was going to make this work. She owed it to the memory of her daughter. To John. To everything that had gone before. And for the next thirty minutes she unpacked the things slowly, carefully, tuning in to the gentle tinkling of silverware in the drawers, making everything else go away.

*

She'd lived with her grandmother until the age of sixteen. A hellion all the way, she now supposed in the dawning certainty of adulthood. God knows she'd been told enough. Her grandmother, all the while smoking away, haranguing her at every turn. Seeing her real mother infrequently until the woman had disappeared completely, gone one night into the snow, found frozen in a ditch, her blood full of amphetamines. She'd taken to pinching her grandmother's car at night (the old lady always slept soundly), drinking with an older crowd she met at the arcade, petty theft. "Just like your goddamn mother!" Nelda used to say, coughing behind the endless cigarettes. "Just like your goddamn mother!" Right up until she got caught the first time, joy-riding with a trunk load of stolen TVs. Johnny had worked at a neat little electronics repair store, the door had been an easy jimmie with a crowbar, the burglar alarm non-existent. Nelda had left her to simmer for a week that first time, a month the second. And when she did come home it proved unbearable. The acid in the woman's tone, the disgust with which she viewed her own life and all the ones who'd come to make it so put Patsy on the street again, only this time with nowhere to go. Her aunt, Pauline, had been doing a stint a state over for prostitution that spring and Patsy's prospects were grim. But at least she'd been young and pretty. It hadn't taken long to find an older guy to pin herself to. That had ended up taking her to Texas of all places, that stoking furnace of cowboys, money and oil, and by early winter, playing her cards right, she'd had a place of her own. Selling drugs just like her mother used to, yes, she realized that. Selling a little ass here and there, but it goddamn well beat the alternative. Besides, she'd always remained sure it was just another One Way. Doom in slow motion.

Two years later she got a postcard (that had sure been funny, as peculiar as shoes on a monkey) addressed to her in Pauline's ragged scrawl. Nelda was dead, hammered finally down into whatever hell she'd seen coming. Patsy had read the message through and walked over to the wastebasket and chunked it. Then she went out and got very drunk, and in the darkest deeps of the night sobbed for no reason she could readily imagine. The next morning she cleaned out her meager bank account, and left, tooling out of downtown Houston in the Civic she'd only had for a couple of months, driving aimlessly for the next three days.

She ended up in Lincoln, Nebraska, that great mid-western Mecca, with two hundred and fifty eight dollars to her name and the Civic at a half-tank. A lot of the drive was lost even then (more so since) and when she finally parked the car and rented a room at a Motel 6 she had to fight hard to remember why she'd left Texas in the first place. Monte hadn't been abusive nor even exceptionally demanding (he'd been impotent on more occasions than not) and he'd paid her a monthly allowance, almost like a kid, really. She wondered how he treated his own children on those odd days she chose to consider such things, and rarely left the vicinity of the memory when a series of violent tremors didn't course along her spine. Perhaps that's why she left, she tried to rationalize in the room that night. Perhaps it was just that because what the hell else did she have to hide behind? Christ. The death of a grandmother she'd neither loved nor cared about? Surely not that. She laid back and stared long into the ceiling as if looking for some sort of evasive answer hidden there in the swirls and nuggets of texture. But nothing had come. Except the morning. She'd walked out into the parking lot of that crappy motel, shading her hand as she scanned the bleak, flat horizon, and saw only desolation. It was at that moment she knew the truth of Stopping. Of simply discontinuing. Perhaps also, at the lowest point of despair, could one ever truly hope to overcome the worry and necessity of life.

*

Patsy pulled up sharply at the counter at the memory. The sound that had brought her around no doubt the broken glass lying in shards around her feet. Her hands shook violently and she barely made it back to the kitchen table. Where the fuck had that come from? She hadn't thought about that hell-hole of a morning in years, not in all the time since the Accident. But it was there, right there in her mind, as crystal clear as a knife viewed through spot-lighted water. The black of the asphalt, the blue line of sky leaking up into the haze of the early morning, the sun a blazing sore on the horizon. Cornfields to the left and right, a cleared field straight ahead leading to absolutely Nowhere. She fumbled again in her pocket and pulled the cigarettes free, almost broke a nail thumbing the lighter. When she closed her eyes and breathed in the acrid smoke she could see the memory closer up, every detail etched out like an artist had spent months preparing her this presentation. And oddly enough she began to feel better.

She'd believed it the end there on that desolate plain. She'd known she would never do any better than right there, right then, and as she remembered the surrender that had rolled over her, she also remembered the release. Even at the end of everything, she tried to remind herself now, there was still life. Even out there underneath the seat of her car. She sat quietly, fire-boxing the cigarette until it was just a burning filter between her fingers. She tried to convince herself, on this bright day of her first ownership, that even though she readily admitted to being a Loser, she'd never been a quitter. The memory had jogged that little bit of belief to the forefront, set it out for her to dust off and have another look at. Because she could have let it go. She recalled standing there on the parking lot asphalt, wanting nothing more than to walk out into that long stretch of field and keep going. Just walk to the sun and quit. But she hadn't.

And as the long day dwindled slowly to a close she sat and let the memory of that day wash over her.

*

She drove away from the Motel 6 like it harbored a pestilence. She'd come all this way, all the way to the End of Nowhere and once here, there, of course, was nothing. She'd driven aimlessly down the highway for a while. The cornfields ranged off in all directions and her solitude was complete. The miles washed away the confusion that'd clouded her mind since the postcard and she began to get hungry. She hadn't eaten since...she really had no idea. Ten minutes later she passed a ragged sign posted by the side of the road, just between the ditch and the first row of corn. Go Eat, it said, with an equally ragged red arrow pointing straight up, almost like an obscenity. 4 miles, it added, as if an afterthought. And right on schedule the close-packed field on her right relinquished its hold on the highway, squaring itself around a ramshackle frame structure with a matching Go Eat sign hanging sun-washed and exhausted from its tin roof. She pulled into the gravel parking lot, dragging behind her a cloud of dust that blew against the front of the building like a dry wave. The windows were shells of accumulated drive-ups and allowed no sight-line at all as to what the place was like inside.

But at the End of Nothing so what.

She killed the engine and walked over to the door, went inside, eyes on the floor as she made her way to the counter. A lone waitress stood behind it talking on the phone and smoking a cigarette. There had been three other cars in the parking lot but the place was light in numbers even from them. There was one middle-aged trucker-type pushed back in the corner off to the right thumbing his way through a thin newspaper and a skinny, younger guy with his back to her, hunched over a plate of something. Patsy picked a spot four down from him and sat down. From the kitchen drifted the faint murmur of a radio evangelist "sowing the grain for God." She happened to glance left and found the guy just down from her staring. Chewing and staring, his eyes wide. She looked away and then back. He was still doing it though this time he looked a little embarrassed. He swallowed what he was chewing and said, "Excuse me?"

Patsy just stared back, a little nervous now.

He raised his eyebrows and lowered his head. "You say something?" he asked.

"No." Now she raised her eyebrows and almost muttered something under her breath. But the look in his eyes stopped her.

"No...seriously, I..." and he stopped, looking at her like he'd seen a ghost.

"What is it?" she said louder this time, looking around to see if the trucker might be of some assistance with this clown. The young guy shook his head and held up the hand that clutched the fork.

"Do I know you?" he said, and the honesty and (let's face it, what got her right from the start) desperation in his face cooled her down a few degrees.

"No, I don't think so," she'd said, but softer, no longer laying out the daggers on his approach.

"I swear you look like..." and he stopped again, smiled. And really, looking back, that had been it. She'd left with him, followed him actually, with the Civic getting closer and closer to empty. They'd ended up at a row of apartments, each identical to all the others. He'd stopped the truck in front of a short staircase leading up to the second floor and got out. She'd killed the Civic and done the same. And with hardly a word they'd gone upstairs.

And that was how it'd gone with John. Poor, sweet John. The long, sandy-blond hair and green eyes, his infectious smile. The little boy, really, who'd only recently lost his mother, the only real friend he'd ever had, he'd told her. The woman had died of lung cancer the summer before and he hadn't been back to the community college since. In fact, he never did. He was twenty-one, an only child, fatherless since age four, motherless on the day Patsy met him. He worked for a small construction company just outside a little burg called Campbell. Patsy was almost seventeen, told him she was nineteen and he'd never batted an eye. He'd been struck dumb from the first glance.

They were married a year later, two castaways set adrift.

Three years later he ditched the construction company and they headed south. Ended up in Louisiana where he knew a friend who worked for a car dealership. And it was there his infectious smile flourished. He was the leading salesman on the lot when they'd gotten the small four-room apartment in downtown Baton Rouge. Within six months he'd been promoted to sales manager and Patsy had quit her job at the bakery, thinking her stint in hell over. But she should have known, she should have smelled it coming.

The next two and a half years were spent saving up for their "dream home." John had wanted at least twenty percent to put down and there was no reason to find any place bigger because children were not in the picture. Not that they weren't trying. But their generosity and frequency with each other did not keep them that way for long. The pregnancy had been a surprise, but not a big one.

Terri had been born in the summer of '91 at a real hospital, covered by insurance that Patsy had been so sure would never exist. They'd begun shopping around for a home then, combing through the real estate pages of the newspaper, watching the home shopping channels for that perfect place. And they'd found the moderately new subdivision within their range with a nice little fenced-in yard for the baby. It had been then, also, that Patsy had begun to have nightmares. Visions of flames and the smell of gasoline. John wrote it off as nerves, a new mother's inchoate fear, and she'd even begun to believe him. The smile was hard to deny, the confidence with which he spoke of their future and all the little ones they'd surely fill the new place with.

And then came the weekend drive. It'd been raining slightly when they left the apartment, the sky a dull, slate-gray. The car inexplicably blew a tire on the wet interstate, veered wildly left into a Covenant tractor-trailer. They'd slewed into the side of the rig at sixty miles an hour, John fighting the wheel for all he was worth, almost disengaging them from the wheel well of the semi before they got somehow hooked on the frame. Then the car had lurched back to the right, the driver of the big-rig fighting against their pull as they went into the ditch. Patsy remembered little of the actual accident besides these few scattered images: the sparks flying from the driver's side, the tortuous scream of metal as the car met with the frame of the truck. Then the silence of the grave and nothing more. When she came to, lying on the grass beside the interstate, the silence continued and for just a moment Patsy had thought it was just another bad turn of the series of nightmares, had even rolled over in the grass to get closer to John's side of the bed. Then she'd seen the flames rising from the car, the tractor-trailer flipped onto its side, its wheels still turning. She'd fought to her knees in the muddy ditch she suddenly found herself in and the next thing she'd seen was the little body lying by the side of the road, the limp hand resting on the white warning stripe. And with that she'd begun to scream, for what she thought to be years and years.

*

She snapped back to the present in the kitchen like a swimmer emerging from a deep dive. The driver of the truck had sustained broken ribs and a shattered leg. John had been burned beyond recognition, their little girl, her little Terri, hardly bruised but dead and curled at the side of the road. Patsy herself had sustained only a mild concussion. She could still see the swirl of blinking lights in her mind's eye, the noise of the flames, the rush of action as the paramedics and police descended. But there had been nothing to do, no one really to save. She'd been released from the hospital the next day, alone in a city where she knew hardly anyone at all, alone as the day she'd been born. Then the interminable calls from law firms wanting to take her case, promising the moon and stars though she knew in her heart the accident had been unavoidable.

It had been the fruition of the Thing that always waited behind the next corner, lulling her into a false sense of security to make the fall all that much harder when it actually came. She'd eventually stopped answering the phone, took to sleeping more and more in the empty bed, all curtains drawn and the lights out. The life insurance policy had paid off without her even making a call; she'd been unaware John had even taken it out. An agent had come to her door, unexpectedly one afternoon, and delivered the check with a humility that had been almost touching, though studied in some hard to pinpoint untheatrical way, before disappearing under the same stealth. And for the next two days thereafter she'd sat again in the dark room, the check lying on the bureau right next to the .38, her mind running on a different track. It had never gone unloaded since. She figured it never would again, but somehow she'd fought off its impetuousness regardless how many times she was drawn to it like a bug to a light, begging for immolation.

Then on the spur of the moment, one day soon after, she'd called Century 21 Realtors and asked to speak to someone. She told the woman they gave her exactly where she wished to look and two hours later was standing in this very same kitchen, her mind a whirl of confusion and, oddly enough considering the circumstances, relief. She'd signed the purchase agreement that day, assuring the real estate agent the house would be paid in full on the day of purchase but offering no details as to how or why. The realtor had asked no questions.

And now here she was.

For better or worse, just like the Justice of the Peace warned on the day of their wedding. Only now she was alone once more. She silently smoked through the remains of the pack of cigarettes, staring across the table at nothing this time, not even trying to imagine her lost husband and daughter seated across from her, trying to adjust to the reality of the life she'd just bought, wondering deep down if anything could actually pull her from the hole she'd unwittingly dropped into.

# Chapter 5: The Attic

By five that afternoon she'd tired of focusing on the kitchen. There were still a ton of boxes to unload but the other rooms called her attention, just to come see for a moment. She slowly walked through the house, pausing in the living room to try and imagine where the things she had would go, what else she'd have to buy to finish things out. This place actually had a fireplace, something she'd never figured even in her wildest imagination, the closest she'd ever come a hollowed-out firepit in her grandmother's backyard for bonfires on nights when the woman had been away. She guessed she'd need those tools she always saw in magazines, the little shovel and brushes, the poker to move logs around. There was just so much.

And she continued the survey, her eyes tripping over all the boxes lying singly and piled on the floor and against the walls. The movers had been as quick as they dared, placing only the furniture she'd stipulated in the appropriate rooms and just piling the rest anywhere they could. Now the front of the house was top-heavy with their haste, the hall leading back to the bedrooms a minor obstacle course. She muscled her way through to the master bedroom, poking her head inside to make sure the bastards had at least put the bed together. She figured now she'd paid them too much but what did she know about ordering men around? Or anyone for that matter. Now she knew she'd have to put a little iron in her back or the world was gonna chew her up. She'd heard John say that more than she liked to admit but now realized the truth in it. Always the knowledge after the fact. That was what Life taught you: that you really didn't know how to correctly address something until that thing was receding away from you at the speed of light. Well, she'd have to change that now. John hadn't been like that and she couldn't afford to be, paid for house or not.

Yes, there was the bed, pushed back against the far wall just like she'd told them. The bureau was also in place, along with another dozen or so small boxes. They were all dutifully marked just waiting to be put away. And now she had nothing but time. Time and patience. She backed out of the room to the hall. Chanced a look to the extent of the hall where Terri's bedroom would have been in a perfect world. Now it would serve only as a holding room, another larger closet in a house full of them. She reached over to the door and pulled it closed, not rightly knowing if or when she'd ever be able to function in there, if she'd be able to enter at all. She thought maybe she'd get a lock, maybe seal the whole room up like an airless chamber. But that would have to all come sometime in the future. Whatever that was. She leaned hard against the wall, tried to steady her breathing as she examined the multitude of boxes lining the floor.

"First things first," she whispered, running the back of her hand along her lips. Only think one step ahead, one step at a time. Let the rest come as it may. She glanced up to the ceiling. The attic door was firmly in place above her head. Its skinny pull-string hung down like an exclamation point. Yes, she had to prioritize, get a head for the house, clear some of the mess away so she could get a true picture of what would have to come next.

The attic.

The movers had high-tailed it without putting anything up there, and now, really, she could not see herself unpacking most of these boxes scattered in the hall. Many were marked with Terri's stuff. Patsy hadn't been able to part with anything before the move, doubted if she'd ever be able to part with any of it, any time. But it would have to be put away whether it was unpacked or not.

But not now.

She looked over at the wall switch. There were two, side by side. She reached over and flicked the closest, and the light in the hallway went out. She switched it back on and flicked its neighbor. Nothing happened. But when she looked up at the ceiling there was a vaguely-lit outline around the cutaway. The attic light. She reached up and backed out of the way as she pulled the door down, unfolded the ladder. No time like the present, she thought.

She grabbed the closest small box, fitted it to her chest and started up. At chin-level she pushed it across the plywood flooring and continued up. It was just like any other attic she'd ever seen, as close to the inverted bottom of a ship as she could imagine, all exposed ribs and naked rafters. Insulation stretched out to the corners, pink and fluffy. Someone had paid special attention to flooring a large area up here, providing a suitable staging area for any number of boxes she (or anyone else) should ever wish to leave.

And that's when it caught her eye.

At first she wasn't sure, as if not fully comprehending the fact of what she thought she saw. She squinted into the recesses of the attic, but no, there it was. A small little child's table, surrounded by matching chairs, something any parent could have bought for a little girl's tea party, just outside the ring of light, back there behind the duct work. "What the hell?" she whispered. She stepped off the last step to the plywood, bent over and shaded her eyes with her hands to cut the glare that poured off the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling.

There was no doubt.

Someone had definitely left it arranged so. But why? Patsy knew she wasn't the first owner of the house, but this just didn't seem to make much sense. She stepped to the side of the hole in the attic, bent over beneath the slanted rafters, straining to make out the little tea-set. Why in the world...? She looked around at all the other emptiness; nothing up here but the box she'd lugged. Curiosity definitely had the better of her by now (that with a healthy little chill down the spine), forced her footsteps closer to the duct work, even now trying to formulate possibilities in her head. She rounded a cluster of two-by-fours that held up the crown of the roof and finally got a good look.

Sure enough. A little tea set, laid out as if for a girl's tea party. But covered in dust, and meticulously drawn. The small table with pictures of dolls and laughing children, four matching chairs pulled up close. Weird enough, sure, plenty if you got right down to the heart of it, but what sent the wave of shivers and, following close on, revulsion was what was set out in geometric perfection. Four plates and matching cups, brimming over with what had now become a slimy mess of squirming activity.

"What the hell?" she said again. She reached up and grabbed a rafter, steadying herself as she carefully stepped over the air-conditioning duct in front of her. Like everything laid out for a party, she thought, her mind starting to go places she didn't want it to go. She squatted down, biting back the burgeoning edge of fear that crept up over her shoulder, the hair on the back of her neck just beginning to stand up. Four little tea sets with matching forks and spoons, each laid out as if in accordance with a weird Mrs. Manners. The saucers and cups were grimed over and black and when Patsy bent closer the faint whiff of corruption reached her nostrils. The black substance looked like congealed blood with fat white maggots writhing within. Further streaks of black on the table's dirty surface looked like they'd been made by little fingers, like children experimenting in watercolors. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she thought she caught a glimpse of movement far back in the shadows near where the roof edge descended to the attic floor. She snapped her gaze up to get a fix and the next instant the light hanging from the ceiling blinked out.

Everything went to pitch black.

She screamed in surprise, immediately regretting her loss of control as her heart stepped up a stampede. She fell back against another piece of ductwork and came close to stepping between a rafter and going through the ceiling. Luckily her hand found a beam and she caught herself. In the pitch black. She cast a frantic glance over her shoulder, searching out the attic door. A little ghost of illumination drifted up from the hallway below, but not much.

Not enough.

Then, a scrabbling somewhere farther back in the gloom, her eyes tricking her for a second that two pinpoints of red glowed from that general direction. No, fucking way...get a hold of yourself! Another scream threatened to burst from her throat but she bit back on it hard, knowing that if she did scream again she would be coming out of the attic one way or the other, and since she was too far away from the ladder, it would most likely be through the goddamn ceiling.

She closed her eyes in the dark and counted slowly to twenty, all the time her mind painting the picture of her proximity to the little table and its odd contents. All the while waiting for a hand from one of the mysterious, missing party-goers to close on her shoulder, a fetid voice to whisper in her ear. But there was nothing. The trip-hammer velocity of her heart gradually dwindled under the count and she opened her eyes. There were no further noises, no hints of motion, if, in fact, there had ever been any in the first place. "Calm down, Patsy," she murmured, the claustrophobia biting into her with all teeth now. "You're being ridiculous, dammit." But the admonition did little to still her. There, right over there was the opening. The old light bulb had simply gone out. Everything was perfectly logical, perfectly ordinary if you didn't go placing horrors down on top of it. She opened her eyes and found the light again coming up from the hallway. Her eyes had had time to adjust and the attic was not so dark now, the noise could have easily been the attic vents circling in the wind; they could definitely use some oil. There had been no red pinpoints of light in the back corner. She was a grown woman, for chrisake! She took another moment and practiced breathing steadily, purposefully. Hell, rats and birds got in attics all the time; she knew that. People left shit they didn't need with no intention of scaring the bejesus out of anybody who'd find them later.

Get a grip on yourself, she warned.

She breathed out loudly once more, her hand on her chest, and then set out fumbling across the plywood to the attic door. It was at the moment when she felt most in control that she heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps in the hallway.

This time she did scream and tore across the remaining space to the door. "Who the hell's in here!" she yelled. No answer from below. Without looking down she thumped down the ladder violently enough to test its construction. And now she squatted on the floor, her eyes casting about frantically, fully in the throes of terror. She heard nothing, only the gentle circling of the attic vents above, mindless to her fright. She didn't want to say anything else, as if in voicing her fear she would somehow make whatever she was afraid of real. She looked down the hall toward the living room. There was nothing in the hall, no sound coming from elsewhere in the house. All in your mind, the voice that always whispered about the gun consoled her now. She stood up, walked to where the hall entrance gave on to the living room. Sure enough, nothing at all. She'd been spooked, but there was nothing. She crossed over to the kitchen/dining room entrance, checked the front door to make sure it was not ajar.

Closed.

No sound of footsteps, no guttural laughter from the carport. No children playing a joke on the new tenant, no terrible presence of a killer loose in her new house. She walked back into the living room, chanced another look back down the hall. The attic ladder was right where she'd left it, mocking her terror.

She tried to laugh and found she couldn't. The paranoia was too close, too personal. For just a moment she imagined the movement she thought she'd seen up there, those two little pinpricks of red. The children's table with its terrible place settings. "I'm losing it," she said, very small now. All the boxes were where she'd left them, the house nothing more than a place waiting to be put to rights. She'd had a moment, one lost moment of irrationality, but now it was gone. The world was back to normal. Surely...

She leaned against the doorjamb, wondering if she'd have the courage to walk over and shut the attic door. For just a moment she had another vision of seeing actual movement up there, small things skittering away from the light and back into the darkness. No, she'd didn't think she'd be able to walk back over there.

She really didn't.

But after another couple of minutes she did. She braced up and marched back to the attic door. Chanced a look up the steps but didn't see anything. "Of course you don't, you idiot," she chided herself. "There's nothing up there to see." She thought about climbing the steps again, poking her head above the attic floor to just get another look around. But her heart started its trip-hammer beat again. "You're tired, Patsy," she told herself. "It's been a long day and you should really get some rest." She reached over and folded the bottom third of the ladder up into its place. Then she folded it again.

There was nothing up there, not one goddamn thing.

She set the attic door back into place and reached over and shut the light off. The vague rectangle of light blinked out and only then did her heart slow. She stood in the emptiness of the hall, alone with the multitude of boxes, waiting, listening for any odd scrabbling sounds from above. But none came. No scatchings from the attic door, no miscreant sounds. She leaned against the wall and tried to bring herself back to normal. After five minutes she felt she could breathe again.

But further work was out of the question.

"Just tired," she told herself. "Been a long day." But in the back of her mind she did see the pinpricks of light in the corner, saw the table and the things arranged on it. "Tired," she said again. "That's all it is," and in the depths of her heart she hoped so.

An overwhelming sense of exhaustion cascaded down around her then, sucking away what little energy she had left. She thought about the bedroom and the bed, considered the proximity to the attic door, and decided against sleeping there. At least for the moment...just for the time being. The couch in the living room would do just fine. The bed would have to be made if she was going to sleep in the bedroom tonight, anyway, and she was really not up to the task. It would be fine to just throw a blanket on the couch and retrieve a pillow from one of the boxes. She could do that.

She could do that just fine.

And though she thought sleep would be light years away, when she laid down on the couch in the living room, consciousness fled and she fell into a dreamless expanse where nothing had to be evaluated for sanity and nothing more need be done. At least until morning.

*

Seemingly moments later light creeping in through the curtainless window in the front room roused her awake. She sat up on the couch, scratching her head and smacking her lips. She stumbled from the hallway into the bathroom, dug through the boxes lined on the counter until she found her toothbrush and washed the nastiness away. She looked into the bathroom mirror and wasn't frightened by what she saw.

The events of yesterday resurfaced, and in the light of day her previous terror seemed an illogical phantom now, nothing more than some twisted cartoon. She thought back to the child's playset, the dead lightbulb that had sent her into such terror, and was pleased to find the memory did little to plague her. In fact it seemed childish now, no more than the vestiges of a bad horror movie. "What the hell were you thinking?" she asked her reflection. She considered the footsteps in the hallway and actually laughed the idea away. Here she was, a grown woman, terrified of her own (mostly) empty attic, scared of toys, for chrisake. It was down right laughable, sad when you got right down to it. There was really no other explanation. Except, of course, crazy.

No, her mind had been playing tricks. Obviously she should have gone to bed earlier. She'd been doing too much, burning the candle at both ends. That was surely the only plausible explanation, because let's face it, what was the alternative? Monsters in the attic? Jesus.

The boxes really had to be put away. Every journey, no matter how long, started with the first step and it past that time. She left the bathroom and chanced a look up at the attic door. No premonitions of doom drifted into her mind. It was just an attic, just a fucking attic, a place to store things you didn't really need. At least not often. That was why the previous owner had left the playset up there. He hadn't needed it and there was really no sense in taking things you didn't need. She should have thought of that herself before she began packing every godforsaken thing she could lay her hands on. It would have afforded her much less work than the barrage that lay in front of her now. She thought about going up there again and the idea did little to frighten her. It was simply something that would have to be done, and the sooner the better. Okay. She pulled the attic door down, folded out the ladder, and grabbed one of the closest boxes. She brought it to her chin and started up.

The attic vent twirled lazily in its prescribed circle, the dead light hanging from its cord. She'd have to replace that today though she'd have to get some bulbs. But there was always the hardware store; she'd noticed one right off the highway. It would be less crowded than the Wal-Mart, but before she went she'd have to make a list of other things she'd need. All in good time.

She set the box down at the top of the ladder and continued up, glad her heart was steady. It was amazing what a little morning sunshine could do. There was nothing up here to scare anybody. It was just an old attic, everything was perfectly fine, even the tight shadowed edges where the roof came down to meet the attic floor. Nothing but insulation and two-by-fours. She chanced a look over the ductwork and found the little table. It was still covered with dust but the leading edge of terror it had invoked was gone. It was almost comical now, really it was, here in the light of a new day. She could hardly believe, or even conceive, the things she'd actually considered as she'd torn across the plywood toward the attic door in those frantic moments last night.

She pushed the box back a bit farther so she wouldn't trip up here later. A corner of the box slid off the decking and clunked metallically down on something she couldn't see. Huh? Now that was weird. She squinted in the half gloom and bent down, pushing the box back to see whatever had made the noise. And right then, underneath a caul of insulation, she saw it. A box. A metal box with a padlock attached. She pulled the strip of insulation away. Looked closer. The box had been anchored with large bolts to one of the rafters running parallel to the attic door. Secured with a big Master lock. A small box with a big lock. Fucking perplexing; first the playset and now the box. Why the hell would someone leave these things? A lock denoted secrecy. Perhaps the previous owner had kept important papers in here, passports or birth certificates, insurance proof. Perfectly normal, but up here? And then just why walk away and leave it? Now, unbidden, the creepiness returned, though hardly with the yesterday's force. It was mostly curiosity, really, like finding a hidden treasure. Sure the box was screwed securely into the rafter but why the lock? Wouldn't the owner have emptied the box and taken the lock with him? Obviously not. She edged closer to examine the metal box. She reached over and tugged on the lock, hoping it wasn't locked but of course it was.

She rocked back on her haunches, panning the area while she thought about the hardware store. They sold bold cutters there, she felt sure that was what they called them. Wrench-looking things you could cut through steel grating, padlocks, whatever. It really wouldn't be anything to pick one up with whatever else she was going to get. She looked back at the vexing lock, already feeling the itch of curiosity pulling her forward, begging her to look inside.

And with that she climbed out of the attic. Country hardware stores always opened early.

# Chapter 6: The Contents

Earl's Ace Hardware was a pretty extravagant affair just short of three miles from her front door. It was not much different (she imagined) than a male Aladdin's Lamp. Tools of every configuration and size hung from the walls, huge pots and burners, insecticides and mailboxes, brooms and paintbrushes. It was as if an eccentric handyman had willed the contents of some secret cache of sheds, and these people had been the beneficiaries of the spoils.

Already there were work trucks parked outside (one loading plumbing supplies while a group of overalled men stood close by smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee out of stainless steel mugs) amid a bustle of activity around the propane tanks anchored within a fenced enclosure just outside the front door. She pulled into an empty space down from this, at the extent of the building where the strip-mall center began: a miasma of mismatched private enterprises, a karate clinic, floral arrangers, one derelict and lonely old place advertising frames in thick gold lettering. The sign over the front of the hardware store was so faded that it could barely be read from the road, but that didn't seem to deter any business.

Patsy got out of the car and made her way past the plumbers (noticing as one caught a quick peek at her ass as she moved by) and through the front door. A checkout counter stood rooted into the floor a couple of steps away, practically wilting under the weight it had heaped on top. Racks of fish bait and quarts and gallons of honey, stainless steel pots (with related burners and implements) and a whole mess of dirty rental tools. There was not a soul behind it, but there were random shapes moving about in different places of the store. She glanced to the walls and moved right, skirting the side of the counter, sounding out for anything she might need and had forgotten to put on the list. Or had never known existed in the first place, she realized now as she looked around, suddenly glad the Impala had a big empty trunk. Because now inside, though she'd always considered hardware stores a man's domain, she found herself inexpressibly captivated by all the stuff. Who would have even thought of half of it? Most of it she had no idea for what or even how someone would use it. But it was obviously not for decoration, all these pipes and joints, the plethora of casters and bins filled with nails of all sizes and practically all shapes; no, undoubtedly there was purpose. And lamps, to boot, (derelict looking enough to be mistaken junk from some grandmother's garage), and enough insecticide to kill a small town. Bird houses clustered in a corner next to paint samples and gardening equipment, and there was even one lost corner devoted to the presentation of country/rustic mirrors and chimes.

Nothing seemed to fit together and it was just great.

It reminded her a lot of herself, really, and before she could take that train of thought any further a voice beside her said:

"Hep ya m'am?"

She jumped slightly, bringing both hands up in an unconscious act of self-defense. But she was lucky to catch herself in mid-stride and paint it off as something else because the face stuffed down beneath the brim of the Cat Diesel hat would have made a baby laugh. Tiny little doe eyes beneath an overhang of bristled black brows, the thin pointy nose and too-fat cheeks, the absence of chin and ponderous Adam's apple. Like staring at Ichabod Crain in stained jeans and a baseball cap, all the incongruities endearing him like a clown with big, brightly colored shoes. She had to stifle the laugh that threatened and brought her right hand up to her mouth. She nodded her head, yes, quickly.

"Well, whad'ya need?" and the guy looked off, as if knocked askew by her rigorous examination and not all the healthier for it. Patsy coughed into her palm and carried her hand away. Finally in control.

"As a matter of fact, you could," she said. She reached into her purse and withdrew the scrap of paper she'd been filling out before leaving. She had twelve items printed in her tiny script and Cat Diesel took the document almost reverentially. He looked at it for a moment and nodded his head. "Yeah, got most'a this." Then he turned to face her again. "But I ain't got no 50-watt bulbs. They make 40, 60, and 100."

She smiled back disarmingly and touched his shoulder. "I'm sure the 60's will do, if you don't mind."

"Yeah, well let me round it up," he said and tucked his head away, already turning to the duty. "I'll stack it by the counter," he added and ducked behind a row of semi-assembled wheel barrels. Patsy stood there and watched him go, hoping she hadn't hurt his feelings. But let's face it, he was funny looking. She saw him bend down to retrieve something and, dismissing the moment, walked over toward the wind chimes. They were in both metal and bamboo and she ran her fingers through the closest. She smiled at the cascade of sound but it was as she turned toward the second one that she got the scare. Her eye happened across the surface of one of the rustic, burnished copper mirrors and caught the set of eyes on hers. It was just a quick peek but it held enough impetus to turn her around. And there he was, just now looking away, pretending to look through a stack of shovels pushed back against the wall. Coal-black hair cut at neck length, Hispanic, she thought. He looked back for a second, noticed her staring directly at him, before cutting around the corner and out of sight.

For the second time in as many days she found her heart racing, her breath coming in short little stabs. He's just looking at you like the plumbers did, she tried to tell herself but to little affect. No, this wasn't usual. She made her way down the back wall, working toward the side where the store opened up. There, right there, two rows down and facing the other way. Him again. She caught another glance he tossed over his shoulder and this time it was Patsy who looked away, hating herself even as she did so. She quickly forced her eyes back and he was moving again. Toward the door, not looking back now. Passing the counter where Cat and somebody else were rifling through something (probably her stuff), waving a hand to them as he pushed through the front door. And just like that he was gone. Patsy started forward, threading her way down the packed aisles and through all the stuff spread out along the floor, and when she got to the front door, she saw a light blue Ford full-size pickup backing up and driving quickly away. She could have sworn the driver (and it was him, definitely him) was looking her way as he went by.

Patsy turned back to Cat and his friend.

She thought about asking about the Hispanic guy but considered after her earlier faux pas she'd best leave well enough alone. She was the newcomer here, not these people. These people would all know one another, would have probably grown up around them all their lives. This was no time to be starting fires because they always had a way of growing, and she was a single woman. That thought stuck in her head like a dart into a dartboard and once again she was briefly revisited by the terror of the night before. The little table in the attic, the supposed movement in the back corner, the light suddenly flickering to black. Christ, thinking about it right now, in the light of day standing lost in the hardware store, it really was laughable. Something a kid would think up, some childhood paranoia that always caused the adults to pat them on the head while they winked at each other, telling the kids that everything was just fine. Just your imagination playing tricks on you, of course. And she knew that was right; what else could it be? She was making a pretty sad go at being a responsible adult, new homeowner or not.

"M'am, you okay?" she heard and Patsy found Cat rising from his knee, concern clouding his humorous features. It brought no laughter now. She noticed her hands were shaking and clasped them together in front of her. "You okay?" he repeated, on his feet now and moving her direction. The other guy was still down on one knee, looking, a little corner of grin sticking to his face. Fuckin' women, he must be thinking, Patsy found herself thinking as Cat got closer. She looked at Cat and swallowed hard. Claustrophobia was coming down on her hard and fast. This time it was his turn to touch her shoulder. "Yer white as a ghost," he said. She brought her hand up to her forehead, noticed how cold and clammy it was.

"Outside," she managed. "Air."

"Yep, okay," Cat Diesel said, and steered her in that direction. He pushed open one of the double glass doors and pulled her through to the outside. She knew how ridiculous this looked, how ridiculous it felt, and was supremely thankful that the group of plumbers had finished their business and gone on to fiddle with their pipes. "Sit down right here," she heard as if from a tunnel and let herself be led in the offered direction. Cat sat her down on an oversized cypress rocking chair and took three steps back. "Ya feel awlright?" he said. "Ya color's a little better."

She nodded and managed a yes. He asked again if there was anything he could do and she said, "Water...please." By this time the other guy was standing in the half-opened door, the question looming large on his face. When Cat moved past he followed the older man into the store and Patsy was left alone in the rocking chair. She was starting to feel normal again and realized what a horse's ass she'd made of herself in front of these strangers. Here it was, the first place she'd visited since moving into her house, and she was having some sort of post-traumatic freak out. She put her head in her hands and stayed very still. That seemed to be the thing to put her back together again, but of course her mind raced on ahead. Maybe she'd forced this move; maybe she really had no business whatsoever buying the house and trying to pretend that everything was fine, that everything could return to normal. Again, the image of the gun underneath the car seat flashed through her mind. A goose walked across your grave, a hideous voice whispered way back there somewhere, and she shivered involuntarily.

Then, "M'am," she heard Cat's familiar voice and looked up. She hadn't heard the door open and this time he'd left his friend inside. She could still see him, though, through the glass doors, standing by the counter but definitely looking their way. Cat had a tall glass in his hand and he held it out to her.

"Thank you," she said, taking it from him and finishing off half the contents at a single gulp. Then she ran a hand across her brow and placed the glass in her lap, taking a moment to compose herself before raising her eyes to meet his. He was standing back a bit (a safe distance, the warning voice whispered again), his little doe eyes as wide as they'd get, his hands clasped in the classic fig-leaf pose. "I think I'm okay," she told him, hoping her voice sounded better than she felt. "I just got a little dizzy," (and then the lie) "that happens sometimes. Low blood sugar," she added for legitimacy. Cat stood there and nodded his head as if, yes, he'd heard of that sort of thing, and it was really nothing out of the ordinary. But under his silence and the dull gaze she bit her lip, looked down at her lap, and finished off the rest of the water. He held his hand out to her as the ice clinked sharply to the bottom. She gave it back and he edged toward the door another couple of steps.

"Umm, m'am," he said, clearing his throat and looking just past her left shoulder. "I've got them things ya had on yer list. Everthing. I can hold 'em till later when ya feel better, or we can ring 'em up an' Ed an' me'll load it in yer car. Whateva ya want..." and he stood there in his aw shucks pose, looking in desperate need of a can to kick. His discomfort almost succeeded in bringing a smile to Patsy's face, but she knew what he wanted more than anything else right now was to be finished with this strange potential lawsuit that'd walked in off the street.

"I think I'm all right now," she said and made as if to stand. Cat held out his hands imploringly, his little doe eyes stretching impossibly wider.

"No, no! You just sit there while we handle everthing. All's I need is a credit or debit card and you can check everthing off from the receipt. Ya still look a lil pale and there's a lotta stuff you might trip over if ya get dizzy again," and this time the implication was clear. They'd be better off with her gone. She cast her eyes down to the Welcome mat and swallowed back the acrid taste of irony. Then she nodded and dug through her purse until she found the wallet. She opened it and extracted the debit card, held it out to Cat.

"It's a debit," she said so he wouldn't have to ask her any more questions and he nodded and headed back inside. He came out a few minutes later and handed both the card and the receipt back to her. She took them wordlessly and put them both in her wallet without so much as a glance. She was feeling better now, but she really, really, wanted to be the hell away from this place. She could scratch this one off the list for the future. She pointed down to the end of the hardware store where her Impala was parked, and stood up, her composure back in full it now seemed. She pulled her keys from the purse and touched the button that sprang the trunk. "Thank you for the water, and...the help," she told him as he brought the first bag to the trunk, and he smiled back. The other guy, Ed, came shouldering up with two more bags and thankfully her hardware run was over and she could head back to the house.

She opened the driver's door and started to get inside. "Ya be careful, now," she heard Cat say and she raised her hand in acknowledgement. Then they were off and away down the sidewalk, heading for the double doors, glancing over their shoulders a time or two on the way as she sat and watched them go. Patsy breathed out a great sigh of relief and started the car. In retrospect she could hardly understand what had brought on the crazy spell in there. My God, for a second she'd thought she was going to pass out. It really didn't make any sense. There were plenty of guys over the years who'd scoped her ass and tits (hell, what about the plumbers?) but it hadn't been like that. With that guy it'd been something different, almost like she'd been a target of some kind. But of course that was crazy because she was doubly sure she'd never seen him before. Anywhere. But he'd sure left the goddamn hardware store in a rush. Peeled out of there like his ass was on fire, and for what? She hadn't the slightest. She wasn't from around here, didn't know anybody around here, and couldn't imagine what a middle-aged Hispanic guy would want with her other than to fuck her.

So, yes, a mystery. But one she'd have to mull over later, hopefully not in the dark with the house settling around her, but she had no control over that. Come what may. She put the car into Reverse and backed out of the parking spot. By the time she got to the pull-out she had only one thought on her mind. And that was if Cat and his trusty helper had forgotten the bolt cutters. She was getting into that box today come hell or high water.

*

She pulled into her driveway five minutes later, back to herself, she thought. She parked in the carport and chanced a look in the rearview mirror. Yes, her color was back and she didn't look harried or harassed in any way. That was good. More than she could honestly ask for at this point. She killed the engine and opened the door, touching the button that let go the trunk. Then she got out and walked around to the back of her car. There they were, the three bags. In the bright sunshine the fear she'd felt at the hardware store was a long way gone but that didn't mean it wouldn't be back for consideration later. But again, nothing she could do about it. She grabbed the first bag and walked over to the carport door, resting the bag on her hip as she fiddled the key into the lock. It let go and she pushed the door open. She went inside and set the bag on the dining room table, went out and grabbed the other two, and then soundlessly began the search. She found the bolt cutter in the second bag, of course right there at the very bottom. She picked it up and gave it a good look. Squeezed the handle and watched the black blades come together with sinister precision. Then, without another thought, she stood up and made her way into the hall.

She paused a moment in the doorway, eyeing the door to the attic. Such a little thing, really, no more than a hole cut in the ceiling. But the implications. What implications? the persistence voice asked seductively. She chose not to cruise too far down that highway and took a tentative step forward. No time like the present. She reached up and grabbed the pull-string, heaved it down. It was dark up there, no surprise, but not so bad as it was the night before. She heard the attic vent with its incessant whirling and unfolded the ladder until it was flat on the floor. She tucked one leg of the bolt cutter into her back pocket and started up.

First things first, she thought. Take this a step at a time and it wouldn't seem so unusual...so threatening, she had to grudgingly admit. She gained the attic floor and stoop-walked over to the hanging light bulb. She unscrewed the used bulb and screwed in the one she'd carried with her from the kitchen, careful not to look directly at it when it fired to life. Suddenly the attic was suffused with the glow. There was the little table, all laid out for a child's tea party. There was the box she'd dragged up last night, all the little hidden corners of the attic now safely illuminated. For a moment she felt genuine shame at her terror, safe now in the daylight with the new bulb radiating added confidence. Then she looked over in the direction of the box and the weird feeling returned, the ominous presence, like the one she got anytime she watched the film of the Kennedy assassination. That feeling of impending doom; that feeling of knowing what the future held and being helpless to do anything whatsoever about it. Because, of course, time ran about its course without the slightest concern for human wants or fears. Like a train coming into town at full speed.

She bent down and pulled the bolt cutter out of her pocket, pushed the cardboard box farther into the insulation so that she'd have a clear go at the metal one. And there it was. Of course it would be there, the little tide-box, always there but concealed. Well, the tide was out now and there was no better time than the present. She bent down and blew the dust away from its surface, pushed a small flake of insulation away so she could get a better idea of its dimensions though the reality didn't change her expectations. Indeed, it was bolted securely to the cross beam, flat down against the sheet rock that formed the ceiling below. The Master lock with its spin dial hanging from the side eyes. She looked at the cutter and considered the strength of the lock. Just off hand she thought Cat had probably chosen one adequate enough for the job, and just for a fleeting moment she wished he hadn't. That way she could have sighed first, then cursed, and left this whole goddamn thing for later. When she felt stronger. But another part of her, a harder part, was glad she could get this damn thing finished.

This sticking point.

She took the bolt cutter and placed it against the metal loop that secured the lock to the box. Right, a perfect fit, almost as if Cat had known exactly what she was going to do with it. She grasped both handles and squeezed down. Nothing. She let go and examined the damage. A little nick on the side, probably another one on the other she couldn't see. But still, not much. She wiped her sleeve across her brow and noticed how badly she was sweating. And the heat was not even that bad. "Fuck it," she spat and reapplied herself to the task, squeezing this time until the veins and cords in her forearms stood out like blue lines on a road map. And then, just at the moment when she felt she could give no more, there was a loud, metallic snap and the lock pitched violently away from the pressure point. Patsy, half surprised, half fearful of her own strength, sat back on her haunches and surveyed what she'd done.

The Master lock was history, cut cleanly in two in sharp chisel edges. All she'd have to do was reached down and flip it away. Do it, the damned voice whispered maliciously. This is what you came for. She tried to ignore its impetus by slowly placing the cutter down on the plywood flooring. Her heart was racing again but she was far past the point of backing down now. She was fixing to find out exactly what was in that motherfucking box.

She reached down and plucked the lock out of the eye. Now the box was available for whomever, come what may. All she had to do was---

She ripped the cover off, expecting anything, and finding...scratched notes, old newspaper clippings. She reached inside and pulled them out. They were not banded together and her first dig got most but not all. She held what she had and quickly leafed through, surprised at the dates and the disparity in color of the various documents. After another few minutes of perusal she was doubly surprised by their content. Or rather...their theme.

There was murder here, death by accident, odd little clips that seemed to have nothing to do with anything else in here. But a blackness leaked from the words like oil from an old car, and God knew she'd owned (or at least driven) plenty of those in her day. A catalogue of atrocity and murder. And as she flipped through them she wondered (fearful of the answer) just what the hell they were doing here, locked away in this box in the attic of her new house?

Why they'd been left, as if for her to find?

But, of course, that was ridiculous. The realtor had told her the house hadn't been lived in for six months; something about the owner getting a new job somewhere in the northern part of the state. There was no way this person could have known who would buy the house, or for that matter, who was even looking at it. She studied the contents a little more. Very damn creepy, regardless, and why would someone collect crap like this anyway? Why not stamps or blue chip stocks or something of worth? Not this shit.

And then the voice came again: What makes you think they're worthless? and she did shiver this time in the warmth of the attic. She bit her lip and reached into the box to get the rest of the stuff. Then she went slowly and carefully down the attic ladder to study her find in more depth at the kitchen table, forgetting about the light or even the withdrawn attic ladder drawing away her air conditioning.

Once at the table she went about sorting the papers, trying to find some act of reason for collecting them. First she separated the notes from the newspaper clippings. It didn't take long and she found there were far more of the latter than the former. Then, since the notes were not dated, she pushed them off to the side and concentrated on the clippings. Some were original, others copied. All of them had dates, the ones not actually printed on the paper were scrawled in a large hand in the margins. And it didn't take long for her to see the history represented here. Some of the yellowed originals went all the way back to the 1930s. The older, photostatted copies went back much further. There was one from 1867, several others dating not much later. But the theme she'd spotted in the attic was true enough. Death, accidental and otherwise. Atrocities. And there were maps, aerial and topographical. It didn't take long to recognize the contours, the landmarks. The real estate lady had shown her a copy of the neighborhood taken from an airplane on the day she'd first seen the house. They were the same. Doubtless, they were the same if you disregarded former tree lines and such. She fought through another chill as she continued leafing through the documents. There were many; whoever had saved them had damn near needed a bigger box. But of course he was gone now and these things were hers.

She pushed the newspaper clippings off to the side. She'd have to sort them by date and some of the stories were multiple pages. That would come later. Right now she wanted to get a look at the handwritten notes. And oddly, considering the obvious dedication with which the man had collected the dates for the clippings, the notes had none whatsoever. Many were simply numbers and addresses followed by a colon. But as she read them over she found many ringing bells in her head. And of course they should. She'd not moved into the neighborhood blind. She driven its streets, trying to taste the flavor of the people who lived here, and as she'd driven she noticed street names.

These names.

She put her finger on the one labeled 1 and looked past the colon. Eighteen year old girl shot to death by her boyfriend, 2 a.m. one Saturday night. Not at home, but at the boyfriend's. Number 2 was a quick account of a 21 year old man's drug overdose. This one struck her immediately because the address was her street, probably no more than two or three houses down from her address, same side. Number 12: a 25 year old man found dead at the end of Jasper Street, his head caved in by a culvert and his hopped-up dirt bike resting right alongside. Then others not so serious: a game room fire on Pepper Ave, a multitude of missing dogs seemingly from all over the neighborhood, repeated listings of night work at some power plant in the woods. Still other oblique references to particular houses for no obvious reasons, just asterisks beside them, some circled, some not.

A gust of wind rattled the storm door in its casing and she jerked upright, pulled back to the present. She saw her hands were shaking, her breath coming short and fast. She looked out the kitchen window and saw the bright day, seemingly at odds with the findings she had here in front of her. For a moment she thought of going on, delving deeper into this treasure chest of fear, but her hands refused to oblige. Okay, she thought. Enough is enough. At least for now. She raked all the documents into a pile, careful to keep the written notes separated from the clippings, and placed them back into the box. Despite her curiosity, despite the urge to continue, she knew she must not. There was always later, even though as she thought this, her mind went back to the accident, its immediacy. The finality of any moment in time.

She picked up the papers and stood, taking them with her as she left the kitchen and walked into the hallway. The attic door was open, just as she'd left it, the light still on up there. She wished she'd turned it off before coming down but there was nothing to be done about it. She squeezed around the ladder and turned into her bedroom. For a moment she considered hiding the papers under her bed, but settled upon placing them in a bundle upon the highest shelf in the back of the closet. Somehow it felt safer there. Why, she could not say.

Then, sucking up her courage she again ascended the ladder and pulled the string to the light. She willed herself to come back down slowly, confidently. Folded the ladder back to its place and pushed the attic door closed.

# Chapter 7: The Walk

By Thursday of the following week she'd put most of her things to rights. The weather had been good with only one afternoon of scattered showers and the persistent sunshine had gone far in alleviating her initial uneasiness. The house had shed its weirdness as she finished first one room and then another, and she tried to write off these early misgivings as being in a strange place, alone. She still missed her family dearly, every day for hours at a time, but it was getting easier. For the last four days she hadn't thought about the gun underneath the seat of the Impala at all, and that was a new record. It was still there though, like a weak magnet, but its power over her had indeed diminished. It didn't call out to her during all hours of the day, nor torment her in the darkest shadows of nightmares. In fact, she'd had no nightmares at all since she'd taken to sleeping in her own bed. She'd thought that's when they'd come, lying in bed soaking in the emptiness streaming in from the other side where John used to lay. She'd half-expected to start awake in the dead time of night, alert for Terri's cries from her bedroom, but so far (and here she kept her fingers crossed) these fears had not materialized. There were only tender remembrances in dreams, simple rewinds and poignant moments. She could handle that.

She wanted that.

When she'd had time to consider her trouble at the hardware store it proved no cataclysm either. Let's face it, she told herself, she was a pretty good-looking woman with an athletic build, though she'd never really done anything up to now to have or maintain it. Seems these were the years when the stick-thin angles of her youth had come to pay off. So men were gonna look. Sometimes women too. When she tried to recapture the episode with the Hispanic guy it was not surprisingly horrific. After all, what had really happened? She'd caught some stranger looking at her a couple of times and when he knew she knew he'd left. In a nutshell that was it. She'd already been a little off her mark with moving and the ridiculous scene in the attic (because after all, what else could that have been?) and maybe even the first looks she'd gotten from the plumbers had unnerved her more than she'd realized. Okay, good, the voice said quietly, reasonably. But what about the box? What about the papers, the newspaper articles? That was a difference, she had to admit, regardless if the sun was bright and high in the sky or not, but it really didn't mean that much either. Hell, it was kind of like the Bermuda Triangle, she guessed. John had been a History Channel nut and she remembered watching a program with him late one night in their bed, right after having had great sex. Although she didn't remember much of what had been said (she'd been tired and satisfied, dozing as the lights flickered on the screen), she did remember one thing. The narrator said that if one took the area of the Triangle and placed it in just about any random same-sized place of any ocean or sea the world over, the number of disappearances would be roughly equal. Well, she didn't know about any of that but it sounded good; it sounded right. Patsy knew a lot about reputations and knew for certain (she didn't need any narrator to tell her so) that many times reputations were overblown and stuck for no good reason at all. The guy who'd lived here before, the one who'd left the goddamn locked box in the attic, had obviously been one of the many weirdos in the world who happened to fixate on a particular thing, his being proximity to deaths and accidents. She tried to convince herself that wherever he was now he was probably stuffing clippings and handwritten notes into another lock box in his new attic.

However, that particular unease persisted.

She stood up from the couch and glanced around at the walls. The pictures still had to be hung in here and the armoire for the TV suddenly didn't seem right. In the early morning light, like now, the sun streamed in through the sheer curtain she'd placed over the large living room window and made watching TV difficult from the center of the room. And the couch was not moving. She would turn it a little, one way or the other, but she wanted it to be the center, the point from which everything else radiated. And the damn armoire was heavy, even empty. She looked down at her hands and saw all the nicks and scratches and bruises. They hurt to clinch even, much less to go pushing heavy furniture around. She pursed her lips and thought for a moment, then shook her head as if negating some unspoken question before moving around the couch and through the square breezeway to the kitchen. She pulled the house key from the hook on the cabinet by the carport door and unlocked the deadbolt. Then she dropped the key in her pocket and opened it, pushing the creaking storm door back and turned left, away from the Impala. Between the wall of the house and carport storage room the concrete stretched about ten feet to a door that had obviously not been there when the house was built. It used to open out to a patio crammed into the back L of the house, facing the backyard but somebody (Lockbox Guy?) had added a room back here. The new roof meshed with the old, and the windows and doors were of sound quality but that was about as far as finishing it as he'd come. The walls were absent of sheet rock and the floor was the same dirty outside patio moved inside. But, she thought opening the door, there was potential here.

She stepped through the doorway and into the room, reaching for the light switch because the sun was on the other side of the house. A long, florescent bulb began to flicker and dance not far above her head and she considered it with a frown. That would be the first to go. She hated florescent light. Her grandmother had had it in almost every room of her house and it'd always made the place seem like a police station, or maybe a hospital. Anyway, no place you wanted to hang around. A place where questions were always waiting to barrage you. Uh, uh. Even though she knew absolutely nothing about electrical work other than screwing in light bulbs, that damn thing was coming down. If she had to hire an electrician, so be it. She wouldn't let that damn woman haunt her here. She waved her hand, brushing off the thought. It was a little warm in here which meant by noon it would be untenable. Below the window on the right was a plug where the air conditioner would go. That would have to be soon too. It was amazing, really, how much you didn't consider when buying a house. All the little things that just kept on piling up no matter how much you did

She walked across the room to the opposite door, pausing to look out the window before opening it. It was a pretty back yard with six-foot wood fences on either side, only open at the back of the property by a four-foot hurricane fence that connected the wooden fences. At the far back left corner was a little gate, no padlock. She'd noticed it on her first visit and thought nothing of it really, but of course that was before she found the box in the attic. Strange habits from a strange man. There was nothing behind the house, just an empty field that ran across a pot-holed street into another, larger field and then a tree line beyond. She grabbed the doorknob and turned it, pulling the door back into the room. Then she stepped out into the sunshine, enjoying the play of light across her face. For a moment she just stood there quietly, soaking it in. She walked to the extent of the patio. There was a lot she'd have to do back here too, though the previous owner had helped out as far as trees went. In the quarter acre lot he'd planted five hard woods: two pecans, two red maples, a pin oak and some kind of spindly vinegar tree that had blown its yellow blossoms all over the yard. She could already envision a picnic table over there, underneath the pecan and red maple; it would be nice when the real heat of summer set in.

Patsy walked across the patio, cut left around the large rectangle of four-by-fours that described a separate area in the yard, filled with loose gravel, each rock no bigger than the pebbles one found if looking through a parking lot. She skirted its edges and headed deeper into the yard, toward the gate. On her initial drive-through she'd noticed construction starting up behind her on Achin Street, but it was obvious now things wouldn't be finished for the better part of a couple of years, not that she knew anything about construction. Just a gut instinct. As of now there were no more than four houses on both sides of the street, total, and as she raised the swing-latch, and looked around, the emptiness gave the neighborhood an unsettling, unfinished look back here.

She walked through the gate and latched it solid again. She'd yet to take a walking tour through the neighborhood, and gazing up at the sun, she couldn't imagine another time proving better than now. She passed through the empty lot and reached the street, looked both right and left deciding on a direction. To the left the pot-holed street led down to a STOP sign and intersection at the extremity of the neighborhood and a solid line of old-growth woods started up directly thereafter. However, to the right, the canvass opened up in starts and spurts to Highway 27. On the way in she'd passed a lake on the right and figured that would be the most reasonable direction, especially on the first run. She turned right and began walking down Achin Street, looking off left and right as she went.

The grass had not been cut here in a while and was almost knee-high. Cat tails and dandelions grew in profusion, halted only by the several infrequent manicured yards she passed on her way down the street. After a block she again came to a STOP sign, this one at the corner of Achin and Stickler. It was obvious the developer had not taxed himself coming up with names for the neighborhood. To the right Tangerine led out to Samane (her street) but to the right it went no more than seventy feet back to a gravel intersection just past the house on the corner. The gravel ran out behind the corner house's fence on the left and right clear out of sight among the high grass and spindly border trees toward the highway.

She turned left and walked the short distance to the gravel. There were dirt bike and four-wheeler tracks everywhere, some skirting the edge of the pock-marked road and others trailing off into the woods in every direction. She squinted right into the distance and saw the long gravel trail leading out of sight and around a corner a quarter mile away. It would skirt the lake down there, the distance seemed about right, and if she walked it she'd eventually end up at the highway. To the left of the gravel road numerous trails led back into the woods, but she wasn't up to that right now. She looked deeper. The scale was smaller and because of its proximity, more inviting. Good enough. She turned away from the longer leg of the trail and started left, walking alongside the corner lot's back fence as she made her way along. A dog, a big one from the sound of it, started up a frantic volley of barks but the fence look solid enough and was at least six feet tall. Nonetheless, she moved to the other side of the road and went quick, swinging a thin stick she'd grabbed by the side of the road near the ditch moments before.

The gravel road made a sharp dog-leg right just ahead and she found herself disappointed at the amount of trash back here. Some people. Everything from household trash to kitchen appliances and it really sucked. Their own neighborhood and they thought little enough to trash it. It recalled the many trailer parks she known before John, the propensity of people to let things pile up with no intention of ever really doing anything about them. Once again, for the second time since leaving the kitchen, she found herself reminded of the life she'd thought she'd left. But it was reality; stone-cold, stark reality. Run though you tried, you could never really, truly escape your past, the things that made you who you were.

Patsy swung the switch at a bank of creeper vines to little effect. Right, right, right, she thought, but who the hell are you? That was a harder question to answer, a seemingly fateful question. A master of charades? She hated to think so but that's where it went. Let's face it, the voice spoke again, this time with the confidence of a well-versed college professor venting his angst on a slacker student. You're no more than a couple of steps from the trailer park right now. No education, no job prospects, you think about that goddamn gun underneath the seat more than you think about getting a job, and what are you gonna do when the house is done, when all the neat little boxes have been emptied and put away? What then? You've never even had a real job in your life. Most people in this neighborhood have either been working or out of school with degrees by your age, and here you are railroading in like you know what the hell's up. What happens when the money gets short? What happens when the novelty of this idea dries up?

She stopped in the road and flung the stick as far as she could into the underbrush that made a solid line back to the trees. No, goddammit, she wouldn't let this come down again, not like it did for the weeks after the accident. Those had been the nights where the gun had begged her, just to follow her loved ones and forget about the trials she was left here to face. It wasn't fair and she'd been looking to square the score. Only she'd gone the other way, into the light instead of the darkness.

Only to find the light was not so goddamn bright, that not much separated it from the black hole of oblivion she felt crouched around her like a dog itching to bite. She stuck her hands into her jeans' pockets and continued along the road toward the dog-leg. She kept her head down and kicked at the random rocks that sat dislodged from their places, skittering them into the ditches and mud holes that ran the length of the trail back here. Somewhere in the distance she heard the whine of either a dirt bike or four-wheeler, but it didn't get any closer. It gave her a weird feeling. No more than five minutes earlier she'd been walking paved roads in her new neighborhood, and now it was as if she'd stepped off some unforeseen shelf into the unknown, surrounded on all sides by vast areas of nameless and unknown space.

She came to the dog-leg and followed it around right. It looked like a tractor of some sort had been back her recently because much of the grass and undergrowth had been cut back. What remained had been beaten into submission by the dirt bikes and four-wheelers. There were tracks and trails everywhere. Piles of trash. Some asshole (or group of assholes, it seemed) had obviously pulled their trucks back here and dumped bagfuls of household trash. Shit the normal trash detail would have picked up easy enough. Just impatience, the unwillingness to wait for anything. It was a fucking shame.

She walked on, trying not to notice the garbage, bending her neck to catch the trees and pretty bushes. She paused, glancing into the underbrush and, yes, there was no denying. Blueberries. Not ready yet, but from the looks of it there'd be plenty soon. Because now that she'd spotted them, she couldn't help but notice the rest. My God, blueberry heaven. It brightened her mood and she continued along the trail, disavowing the garbage, refusing it the right to spoil her day. She came to a spot in the trail that was a boy's dream, banks of hard-packed dirt spread amid huge craters and mud holes. She threaded her away around the biggest, as close as she could get between that and the underbrush, holding off some of it with a bigger stick she'd found because poison ivy had a hold back here. She squeezed around the last little bit and a large, unfamiliar bush that appeared to be vicariously hanging from a muddy bank, and looked around.

She drew her breath in surprise.

An area as big as a football field lay before her, trampled clean of vegetation. Everywhere she saw the tell-tale signs of knobby wheels; the bikes and four-wheelers had really leveled things out back here. What looked like a miniature crater lake formed the centerpiece of the vista and shone in the high sunlight malevolently. The area surrounding this was nothing but mud and hard-pan. She thought of her little tomboy, Terri, of the other children John and she had talked about having. They would have loved it back here, but of course, those were things never meant to be. At the cost of poor tires and wet pavement; that was all it took to break things into pieces, to smash your life into a million, irretrievable, little parts. She bent to her knee and looked at the small pile of rocks close by her feet, all flat, skipping stones someone had obviously gathered and then, for some reason, not thrown. Maybe this mysterious person had been no good at it and given up. Patsy, for her part, had been taught this skill not long into junior high by some boy (she could remember his face but not his name) at the reservoir they used to swim in after school. But, here she could not lie either, many of those times had been during school, with hell usually following her later at her grandmother's desolate house. As she looked down at the pile of rocks those afternoons rolled through her mind; hadn't she let that boy, whatever his name was, "touch her monkey" as they'd used to say. She couldn't say for sure but thought the answer was probably yes. What else would "a little Jezabel" (according to her grandmother) have done? Well, she hoped she had because life was short and you needed to get your thrills where and when you could.

Like this pile of rocks.

She reached over and picked out the largest, flattest one and hefted it up and down in her right palm. Terri had gotten her tomboy nature from her mother because Patsy had never been one to sit on the sidelines when things were heating up. All the girls had told her she "threw like a boy" but even as they'd said it she could see the jealousy close behind their eyes. Because it gave her special access to the secret lives of the boys they had craved. Of course, touch football had possessed an added dimension when she'd played, but attention was attention. Or at least so she'd thought. Now she wasn't so sure. Maybe it would have been better to hermit away; it would have spared her the agony of the last year, that was a sure bet.

"Fuck it," she said, squeezing her fingers together. She curled her forefinger around the edge of stone and drew back her arm in a high arc, letting go with a sidearm throw that would have shamed many boys half her age. The stone left her hand like pure sweetness (the feel when the basketball leaves your fingertips and you don't even have to wonder if it's going in) and dropped down to the pond-sized mud hole like it had wings. It hit the surface a quarter of the way across, dimpling the water in an undulating ripple, and roared on across the pond, marking the water at nine different places as straight as any ruler could have drawn. She saw the stone tumble briefly across the mud flat on the other side before coming to an abrupt halt. "Still got it, sister," she told herself. Then she looked around, almost self-consciously, as if someone had heard her mumbling to herself. No one was there.

She kicked the rest of the rocks in a wide scatter and made her way steady right, skirting the edge of the gigantic mud hole up where the ground was dry and furrowed and curled with tracks. It made walking difficult but it beat hell out of ruining her new running shoes. But something else had her eyes now.

She held up a hand to shield them from the sun and stumbled once, almost going down. Just ahead, no more than forty or fifty yards away, hunched a large bank with an old bridge running across it. Sitting out in the middle of nowhere it seemed such an anomaly, and therefore drew her like a bug to a light. No road led up to it, if one disavowed the remnants of gravel trail she felt through the soles of her shoes, but, closer now and with the sun behind a cloud, she could tell the surface was concrete, and looked to be upwards of two feet thick. Strange. Someone had obviously paid big bucks in the past to have it put here and now it stood like a lonely, lost relic of time.

She grunted up the bank to the top for a better look. The bridge spanned a creek, now just a dribble of water wandering in and out between rocks, broken trees and branches, and muddy cut-backs. It was anchored by telephone poles and stood almost twenty feet above the wet bottom. Patsy looked both ways down the creek, trying to imagine what it must be like when things really got rolling back here. It didn't take much of a stretch to picture torrents of water licking the bottom of the concrete because as she scanned the banks she saw a clear high-water mark, at a point just below the tops of the telephone poles. "Jesus," she whispered, eyeing the broken bicycle tied up among the weeds and split branches in a little cleft beneath the bridge. If you were ever caught down there during a flood it would be curtains. Why, the many years of such violence had broken the bridge from the land. Or at least on her side, though she felt sure the other would echo the same; there was a good two feet between the edge of the bank and the beginning of the bridge, and the fall would not be kind with all the broken bottles and bridge stanchions you'd meet on the way to the water.

Patsy looked down, summoning courage, and stretched her right foot across to the concrete. She stood there, scissored, not daring to look down as she pumped weight to her foot, testing the bridge. It seemed solid enough, not that she knew a damn thing about engineering, but what the hell. For a second she pictured herself crumpled down there either in the water or close to it, deep in the gully. No one would hear her cries, no one would see her unless they happened to come to the bridge as she had. It could, theoretically, take days. Regardless...she swung her weight across with her left leg, fully on the bridge now. She stood hands out as if catching her balance or checking for ominous tremors, and scanned the surface for cracks and holes. It appeared solid enough. When she rocked back and forth on her heels she didn't notice any mirrored behavior from the structure. And now, standing here in the sunlight, she saw the bridge for what it actually was, after its separation and neglect. It was a stage, a platform. She walked carefully to the center, testing each step. On the far side of the creek ran a long length of hurricane fence completely engulfed by foliage and young trees. A deep field played out behind it, and around to the right she could just make out the rooftops of another neighborhood. Over there, somewhere, she could dimly hear the sound of children hollering, probably over a ballgame. It did little to change her view on the solitude, the sense of being far away from others, of being left to your own devices. She nodded and felt good, powerful. Defiant. From far over to her right she heard the bee-like drone of a two-stroke engine until it abruptly disappeared. This raised a moment of trepidation, but, she told herself, how could she help what she couldn't see? It was an apt metaphor for her life.

She sat down and folded her knees to her chest, wrapping them solidly with her arms. Then she stared down the creek bed into the distance.

*

She came to with a start. At first she had no idea where she was but then, gradually, the vista above her turned to sky. It was getting dark. She noticed a dancing of pins in her legs and sat up slowly, aware of the rough grind of concrete beneath her hands. She gasped, and then sat up. She was situated at the very edge of the bridge, her legs hanging off at the knee. She remembered coming here, but she had no idea what had transpired since. Immediately, she crabbed backwards, scratching her hands badly in the process, but wanting nothing more than to be away from the edge. The image of the twisted bicycle in the dead weeds down there swept across her mind's eye and her breath caught in her throat. Then she was at the center. She placed a hand to her forehead, trying to summon any explanation. Her feet were really screaming now, the sleep-needles going in long and deep. She wondered if she'd be able to walk and tried to roll over to her knees. It sent a rush of agony into her lower extremities and she went back over to her butt, bending down to massage her calves. "I went to sleep?" she asked the air in amazement. It didn't seem possible. Lately, if anything, she'd had problems getting to sleep, sometimes reading magazines late into the night. She'd never had any sleep disorder other than a short jot of insomnia, especially after the accident. Now she'd conked out here, on top of a derelict bridge, practically falling over the edge? Incredible.

As she continued massaging her legs, the needles and pins gradually faded and when her feet finally felt strong enough to hold her she looked around. God, it was getting dark. What time had she come out here? She tried to think back, remembered getting up and not wanting to do anything inside. Remembered going into her outside room and deciding on the walk. It couldn't have been much past noon, could it? She'd never taken to wearing watches and knew absolutely nothing about telling time from the sun, but when she looked at it now it was a mere smudge of orange sinking past the treetops.

She stumbled to her feet, suddenly wanting nothing else than to be away from this terrible bridge, wondering now why she'd risked walking out here in the first place. The vague recollection she had of peace now switched over entirely to unease. Her skin goose-fleshed.

She hurried over to the edge nearest the bank, careful with her legs, the last remnants of needles radiating up into her lower calves, and she didn't want to risk going over the side and down into the wreckage beneath the bridge. It would definitely be morning before anyone even had the chance of finding her if that happened. It was only two feet to the bank but with her legs as they were she leaped too far and caught the opposite side off balance. She tripped and went down on her hands, face-first down the slight incline until she came to a stop at the base in a muddy hole. All right, all right, she told herself. You got a washing machine and drier. Better to be muddy than broken and dying. Get your ass home! She rose up on hands and knees, pushed her long hair out of her eyes, and stepped away from the mud puddle.

There were almost no shadows left. The orange smudge behind the tree line had turned dull yellow and she was still a good ways from the road, her house. And her legs, from hanging God only knows how long over the side of that bridge, were still weak and jittery. She remembered the old Christmas song, the Ice Wizard or something singing "put one foot in front of the other" and it did a little to ease her. She did and her feet felt better.

Then she heard the growling. Low, guttural. A big dog or...something else. It seemed to come from just ahead right, and as if in answer, she saw faint movement in the undergrowth, fifteen or twenty feet back. It came again, lower this time and definitely menacing. She'd known enough trailer park dogs in her day to know when one meant business and this is what it was like. She tried to whistle but no sound came. She moved onto the gravel and tried to make out the dog-leg that led back to the asphalt. She remembered the big dog on the other side of the fence earlier, but something inside her told her that was not the problem.

This time the growl came from her left. Same sound. The creek was not far behind her and she'd heard and seen nothing cross in front so how the hell...? It came again and this time she was sure she saw a small pine among the undergrowth move as something brushed against it. Everything she knew about dogs rushed her mind, trivial and otherwise. But one thing stuck. Confidence, something about dogs being able to sense fear. They were pack animals, always submissive to an Alpha. And even though she was not male she was human and that, hopefully, would give her a leg up. She thought it must say something to her credit that the dog was growling from the undergrowth and not challenging her on the path.

That would have been a different situation altogether.

"Well, don't give it a chance," she whispered, squatting down to her knee. No longer were the pins and needles an issue. They disappeared entirely as the low growl started up again from the left, closer this time. For just a moment Patsy thought she saw a red, double-flash of eyes peering at her from mere yards away. Her eyes found a big stick half-in another mud puddle not five feet away and moved slowly toward it, speaking in a soothing voice to whatever was shadowing her in the undergrowth.

Her hand closed over the dry end of the stick and she drew it out of the mud, gripped it firmly with both hands like a baseball bat. It was heavy with water but didn't feel rotten. It made the knot in her stomach loosen minutely. She turned back to where the sound had last come from and spit into the bushes, cursing the dog. She thought she saw something move (it was definitely getting darker by the minute) a little farther back than a moment ago and this gave her courage. She stepped up to the undergrowth and swung the stick as hard as she could. The stuff was close-packed but the fury of the blow hacked a wide path. "Come on, you motherfucker!" she snarled. "Come out here and get some of this!" and she swung the stick again. The image of the Doberman she'd cowed once coming home from school with a rock in her hand fed her fuel. Again, she heard the growling, the same side of the road (it had not switch-backed) but farther away.

It was working.

Patsy smiled grimly and swung the stick again for good measure. Then she backed away from the line of undergrowth to the gravel. She had to get the hell out of here. It would be full dark in the next ten minutes or so and the growl had never sounded right. She knew there were raccoons and possums out here, and they carried rabies. If that dog (or whatever the fuck it was) had it, it would not be reasonable.

It would be unpredictable. And brave in the darkness.

She began walking quickly left, toward the dog-leg, her eyes over her shoulder and scanning the undergrowth constantly. She didn't hear anything else. She went a little faster, not wanting to bolt in panic, but faster; she was still a long way from the neighborhood road and didn't want to create another scene like the one at the hardware store, running and screaming to beat the band. And fuck other people; she was doing this for herself.

She was the one that needed convincing. This was her sanity on the line, nobody else's. No, she'd taught that dog a fucking lesson, and that's the way it was. She made herself walk without glancing every few seconds over her shoulder. She'd hear the sonofabitch coming through the undergrowth if it decided to attack, and if it did, she'd deal with it.

She was coming up now to where all the garbage was piled, and even though she was a little more confident, she still wasn't comfortable hugging up too close to the undergrowth where the growls had come from. She moved a little more to the left, closer to the piles of garbage and that's when she forgot about the dog.

Something was moving in those bags.

Not all of them, but...God...a lot. She stopped cold in her tracks. Things were moving; she could see that clear enough, even in this feeble light. Little lines of tension like fingers pushing out from the inside. Small scratching sounds, others she could not identify. She turned her head away and scooted past. Nope, no, no, she told herself, shaking her head as she did it. You didn't see anything. Not one fucking thing. Keep walking.

She was almost to the dog-leg now and there were no more growls shadowing her path. Visibility was cut back to twenty or thirty yards and she knew she had at least twice that, if not more, to get back to the road.

She reached the dog-leg and veered left and that's when she saw the couple.

Standing in the road, facing her. Silent.

Patsy froze in her tracks. Her fingers went white against the stick.

At first she thought it was a man and woman but in the next instant she could not say with any confidence. But it was two of them. Standing in the road (Blocking the road! a voice shouted from inside her) and facing her way.

Neither of them said anything. Not a word.

Another growl came from behind her, closer this time. She felt it pressing but dared not turn around. It was too dark now to make out any features of the couple, but they looked male. At least their hair was short, if in fact, they had any. "Hello?" she asked tentatively. There was no reply. They simply stood there and stared back. Another growl came from behind.

Patsy took a step forward and the figures joined hands. And then, in a fluid movement, they moved left, toward the undergrowth and the ditch, stepped down into it, and disappeared, though Patsy could make out no sound of their passage.

And with that her courage broke and she ran pell-mell for what she hoped would be the safety of the asphalt street.

# Chapter 8: The Neighbor

Right at twilight he sat very still, enjoying the last breath of day. A soft, dull yellow suffused the sky as he watched his cigarette trail smoke lazily into the blur of the patio ceiling fan. Tomas Lopez sat on a small white wrought-iron chair, hunched over an equally small table. Not because he was a small man, but from the fact that a guy at work had bought a new outdoor seating set and had sold it to him for cheap. Every once in a while he could hear a car or truck buzzing down the street in front of his house; besides that there was only the sound of cicadas in the oaks and crickets in the grass. Even though he was originally from Colombia he could tell the difference in local insects without much of a second thought. He grimaced above the cigarette and snubbed it out in the ashtray. Goddamn filthy habit, he knew, but not one he'd been able to kick. Probably never would either, if the truth be known. But something had to take you to the grave and at least he would see this one coming.

He coughed once, hard, spit into the grass bordering the exposed aggregate patio. Then he reached for the pack again, flipped it open and extracted another stick. He fired it up with his handy Zippo, then slipped the lighter back to his pocket. The house was dark inside, like he liked it. Nothing but darkness and tenuous shadows. Bright lights always reminded him of flames and he'd never gotten over that one. Like the cigs, he probably never would.

His lot backed up to an edge of the creek that led out to the concrete bridge where Patsy had fallen asleep but he couldn't see either from where he sat. Two years ago he'd hired a company to fence in the backyard with eight-foot pine. It gave him the security of isolation, of being sealed off. Of safety.

This way the place didn't look so much like he remembered it used to. The streets and homes had helped too, but closing off the backyard had done the most, as far as his peace of mind was concerned. Anonymity, that was the ticket. At least until he could get his mind settled. It'd been a long time coming, and like the cigarettes and the flames, he wondered if it ever really get here.

Another car passed on the street up front. He grimaced again as the smoke trailed into his eye and he stubbed the practically untouched cigarette out in the ashtray. The hedge clippers were lying right alongside it. He put his eyes on them and stood up, his skin rippling under the twilight chill. He was naked as the day he was born, not even sandals on his feet, and that was another reason he'd had the fence installed; he didn't like people spying. He reached down and lifted the clippers off the table, studied them for a moment before turning his back on the house. Then he walked off into the dark yard, heading for the cluster of roses he had planted last spring.

*

He'd been born in an unnamed barrio at the tail end of 1965. His mother, a whore who'd contracted syphilis and died alone, buried in an unknown pauper's grave, had christened him Tomas Durand Lorca, though he knew as little about the origin of his birth name as he did about his birth mother. Subsequently, he'd never thought of women as mothers anyway. More to the point, they were just something soft warm and wet to sink your dick into.

According to the legend of his life (he thought of it in this way because on the day he'd legally turned eighteen, a date set and agreed upon by some nebulous court for lack of legal documentation), he'd left Colombia in early '67 or late '66. The information had come to him in a thin manila envelope, handed across an old peeling table at St. Paul's by a chain-smoking stick of a woman who'd left after a few curt instructions in a swirl of tobacco reek. He'd opened the envelope and struggled through the meager contents, having managed little better than second grade reading competence at the time of his burgeoning manhood.

The name at the top of the file had initially thrown him off, Thomas Leszno, causing him to think the dragon-lady had given him the wrong folder, whatever this thing was supposed to be, supposed to prove. But as he pieced through the words he did begin to find himself, if however, only obliquely. Memories and images took on corporeal form as he hammered through the English words, smells and sensations as if from another's life, as if he were no more than the doppelganger of someone long forgotten and dead, somehow resurrected back to life by this slim skiff of papers.

He'd stopped with The Fire, had closed the damned file and sat breathing hard for the next ten minutes. Because before he'd closed it, the ghosts' names had been clear on the page, as if highlighted in confusion. Meeta, one had read, and Eduardo (even now the nauseating swirl starting in his gut), and last, the real mystery, the one he'd called 'Big Daddy', illumined now as one Karol Leszno. Ghosts from the past, little, growing streaks of fiery memory.

The rest of that day was lost to him now. Whether he'd eaten, what time he'd gone to bed, who if anyone he'd spoken to. All lost. As well as most of the contents of that slim folder too. Everything except those three odd names, forever scratching at the back of his mind, rattling skeletons out of their uneasy slumber. Because until that moment he'd never considered a past. He lived facing forward, comfortable finally in the reality of state possession, doggedly unfettered now when he was shuffled from home to home, sometimes state to state. He'd come to believe it was normal, a somewhat unfortunate but unquestionable fact of life. Until the folder. And even though he'd filed the three names nowhere else but his mind, there was a forth name and address he'd taken pains to copy on a dirty scrap of paper he'd fished out of his jeans that day. It'd turned out to belong to a lawyer in Killdare, South Carolina.

It was not a full two weeks later that he spoke to the man's accomplice in person.

He remembered it had been a Tuesday afternoon, just getting back to the dorm after the Algebra tutor had had enough. He'd just thrown the books on the desk and collapsed on the slat they called a bed when the sharp crack had come from the other side of the door to the hallway. That goddamned Percy, he thought, getting up. Little sawed-off pansy fucking "Hall Chief" with his pearl-handled stick. One day Tomas knew he'd put that motherfucker straight up Mr. Fancy Pants'ass, that cabron, and he set his mouth, yanking the door wide. Sure enough, there stood Percy Applewhite in what passed on his thin pasty face for smug glory. You'd have never guessed both his parents had died within a year of each other of fucking AIDS. Not to see this smug prick standing here.

"What?" Tomas sneered, hating the very smell wafting off the little pink. Percy looked him up and down once, quickly, dismissing him to the wastes of his mind. Then he cleared his throat, tapped his little stick twice on the floor.

"You have a visitor," he said, already moving away down the hall. "At the reception desk," he added glancing at his neatly trimmed fingernails as he moved into the shadows.

That had been another first, and initially Tomas had not considered the file folder as having anything to do with whoever this person was. It didn't have a chance; he was too surprised by the actuality of a visitor to consider much else. He stepped into the hall and pulled the door closed behind him after patting his pants down for the keys. And Don Brown, as he soon found out, would have liked to have been anywhere other than the shitty little chair in the shitty little confidence room, stale with the smell of smoke and mildewed furniture. This was a man who obviously thought it beneath his dignity to hobnob with orphans; everything in his demeanor said it like a megaphone.

It took Tomas about two minutes to get there and he opened the door, aware of a few glances from others as he went inside. The suit and tie looked up, smiled thinly and pulled his things closer together in his lap. Tomas walked deeper into the room and in the universal manner of older cast-off children kept his distance. The man made a decisive mark in a notebook resting on his knee and smiled again, thinly, across the space that separated the two. Tomas changed tactics, stared at his hands in practiced boredom. Up until now these guys had spoken only to the people in charge, only casting sideways glances every once in a while in his direction. After another moment of silence the stranger spoke. He did not, however, stand up or offer his hand. And Tomas liked it just fine that way.

"My name is Donald Brown," the man began, pressing back into the chair, leaving the things he held on his lap free. "And I'm here on behalf of two agencies, my employer, and the Child Protection and Support Services of the State of Louisiana." At this he produced a card and reached over, placing it on a table he must have strategically arranged before Tomas walked in. Tomas plucked it off the table, glanced quickly at the lettering, registering the names of some unknown string of lawyers among one familiar one. The one he'd copied out of the file folder.

"Okay?" he said.

The flunky smiled and nodded his head as if the time, finally, of talking had visited itself fully upon him. "First," he said, "I must congratulate you on your birthday. Eighteen is indeed a landmark." He paused and now it was Tomas's turn to smile and nod.

"Uh hmm, yeah, I knew it had to be something like this," Tomas said with a brutal edge. "Why else would you be here?" Brown obviously considered the question rhetorical because he remained nonpulsed. "Oh, come on," Tomas continued, shaking his head. "I'm legal now and it's time to get me off the State's back. That sure didn't take long." He looked at the man and felt the ticking in his head again. But then Brown's hands went up, waving him down.

"Now, now, Tomas, please, hear me out. I've been making these sorts of visits for a long time and I know the foster home system and its auxiliaries fall short of what's intended. Unfortunately we have to work with what we have, and so far, up until now at least, very few options have been available. I have two kids of my own and many nights I've laid awake in bed wondering 'what if'?" He shook his head and pursed his lips. Tomas didn't take his eyes off the man. Brown nodded his head again and slapped the notepad in his lap. "But you, son, are better off than most. Without your knowledge, you've been the subject of random scrutiny that has speeded up as of late when your official birthday was set by a court of law. You see, you're legal now, and there are certain things concerning you that have, as they say, 'slipped through the gaps.'" He turned to the notebook in his lap and stabbed something about halfway down the page.

Tomas leaned up in his chair, closing the distance on the man. He waited expectantly, but Brown seemed to be fishing for a comment, so Tomas obliged him. "I didn't do anything," he lied, searching back through his memory for any loophole he'd missed.

Again Brown held out his hands, even laughed a small burst of air to relieve the suddenly stifling tension. "Oh, no, son, this...this situation is beyond anything you might have done, at least to the best of my knowledge. To the best of anyone's, it seems," and he glanced up into the air. "Do you remember a man named Karol Leszno; he may have called himself Carl?" Tomas shook his head, refusing to give up anything, yet. Brown nodded, continued. "How about Meeta?" and at this there was a sudden flare in his eyes he had no hope of hiding. He leaned back. "Ah, I was hoping so," Brown said. "It will probably expedite matters, make things a little easier to comprehend." But Tomas was no longer listening. He clasped his hands together in his lap so Brown wouldn't see them shaking. "Do you remember a fire?" he heard as if from the depths of a deep tunnel.

And the dam broke. A wild torrent of fear raced through Tomas's head: furniture blooming flames to the ceiling, the sound of splintering glass against waves of heat, himself and another huddled tight in a corner watching the smoke build like black, choking tumbleweed around them. He gasped, his eyes darting back and forth as if half-expecting the conflagration to roll into this room as well. The panic brought Brown to his feet, the notebook and other paraphernalia slipping off his lap to the floor. And then he cautiously approached the boy. His concern broke the vision and Tomas sat bolt upright, refusing to give this guy any more fuel for the grist mill than he'd just supplied. "Are you okay?" he heard and nodded, running a cold hand across his forehead.

"Yeah," he managed. "'S just a spell I get sometimes. No big deal..." but his eyes remained wild and pained.

Brown bent to retrieve the notebook. "Spells?" he repeated but found nothing offered in the silence that followed. He decided not to write anything down until the interview was complete. He heard the boy clear his throat and looked at him. Tomas appeared a little better; not great, but better. Brown thought it best to skip ahead.

"I'll come to the point of this visit," he continued, resorting back to his this-is-the-way-things-are-going-to-be voice. "Simple, short and sweet." The boy was still discombobulated but Brown had need to get on with it; time was money as they say. The previous few minutes would prove useful after he'd put some miles and time between them, later when he could talk to the boss. "Your case is an anomaly, a breach in the system. More than once, and this fact alone makes it extremely rare and strange, you've simply dropped off the face of the earth, insofar as records are concerned anyway. But every time, oddly enough, you've surfaced. Needed paperwork suddenly becoming handy enough to identify you, at least obliquely, until you're gone again," and the man snapped his fingers.

"So I've lived in a lot of different places," Tomas replied, over the brunt of whatever had sideswiped him, but still far from the land of the rational.

"Indeed you have," Brown agreed. He flipped the notebook open to a yellow sticky-note. He put his finger to a line of penciled chart and began to read. "St. Paul, Concord, Birmingham, St. Louis, Tampa..." and he pulled his finger back. "Foster homes, orphanages and the like, as well as much, and I use that word in its broadest sense, undisclosed and undocumented whereabouts." He snapped the notebook closed with the same forefinger, this time probably for good, Tomas thought. He seemed to be coming to the end of this train, whatever it was and wherever it was going. "You are," and the man smiled humorlessly, "a mystery man, pure and simple."

This time Tomas had to laugh. He wasn't being arrested and it was obvious this prick didn't know shit. The vision of the fire had receded to a safe place and there was nothing he'd reveal accidentally or otherwise to any suit and tie, especially this joker. If they were going to take him it was going to require a lot more work than this guy was obviously up for.

He decided to push the envelope. "Listen, Mr. Brown, or whatever your name is. Why don't you tell me what this is all about. I don't understand; you act like I'm hiding something." He hunched forward and glared at Brown, stealing the advantage when the man glanced away to the door. Tomas was glad he'd closed it when he entered. "So look," he said, slapping both knees. "I'm done with this. I don't know you from Adam and can't think of any reason you'd be here in the first place. Fuck, you people have been overlooking me my whole fucking life and now I'm about to be put out on my ass. What else is it?" He worked hard to keep his voice low, away from the menace he felt lurking just beneath the surface. He took one more look at the man and stood up to leave.

With his hand on the doorknob, Brown finally spoke. "How about one more little thing before you go," he said. Tomas didn't turn around until he heard the word 'money'. And then he did. He let his hand fall away from the knob and put his attention back to the suit, still sitting in his chair. The man was not smiling now, humorlessly or otherwise. "Yes, that's what I figured," he said. "Money talks when everything else walks, right?" He gestured with his hand back to the chair. "Please, Tomas, sit."

Tomas walked over and sat back down.

This time Brown didn't open his notebook nor refer to any other cue. He seemed to have memorized this part. "Though any adoption papers, if they even ever existed, have never surfaced, a compensation has been made available to you from the will of a one Karol Leszno, father of Meeta Leszno, now deceased. Seems she died some years back in a sanitarium in New York, and due to the nature of her state and her father's somewhat clouded immigration status, his legally-held property in the state of Louisiana has lingered in limbo for almost two decades. But once again," and he smiled now, again humorlessly, "certain documents have suddenly come to light. Documents naming you as beneficiary upon your eighteenth birthday, which, lucky again for you, the laws of this land have seen fair to grant you. Legal status has been achieved." Brown reached to the side of his chair for a briefcase which until now had been hidden from Tomas's sight. He placed it on his lap, rifled through a quick combination, and popped it open. He reached inside and withdrew some official-looking documents, placed them on the table he'd used before. "Once again, an anomaly, my boy. It appears you are not a rich man, but you are plainly in a league apart from the vast majority of orphans I've had the opportunity to deal with over the years." When Tomas did not move he gestured with his hand. "Please, they are yours. My employers' firm will be more than happy to help you with any and all legal questions and papers that need to be filed, but I do not want to overstep any line of ethics here. I have been invested with the job of delivering these documents to you and then you can make any arrangements you feel necessary. I have also been instructed to do nothing further today; you are to read the file and then get in touch with my employer at your convenience." Brown gathered the things in his lap and placed them in the briefcase. "We have done our best to make the information contained there straight forward and simple to understand. And as I said before, I think you'll find you are a very lucky person, Tomas." He smiled again and extended his hand. Tomas took it but felt nothing. His eyes were glued to the folder on the table. Brown turned to leave but paused at the door. "The phone numbers you will find inside can be reached at any time of the day or night. We look forward to hearing from you. Good day son," and the man opened the door and left the room.

*

Tomas, grown now, distanced from any and all orphanages and foster homes, stood naked in his own backyard, recalling the random cluster of memories that had come into his head. It seemed like someone else's life now, that fucked up kid who was constantly getting passed around, but when he really thought back, it was him, always had been. He'd been fashioned more in those eighteen years than anything else that had happened since. He'd grown up hard and it'd served him well, and he'd taught himself how to hide away from others, and that had served him even better. And just like Brown had told him that day years back, he was not a rich man but it really didn't make much difference. When you've been born and raised with jack shit anything you get is more than you expect.

And Karol Leszno had damn sure left him more than that.

Oh, he'd read the file Brown had left that day. He'd read the goddamn thing sitting right there in the chair in the confidence room. Maybe it had been dumbed down but that had no effect on the way it made him feel. The old man had left him money, and from what he understood, it was some now and some later. He'd called one of the numbers that night at midnight, after lights out, hunched in the corner and scratching a hole in his leg from a nervous habit. Sure enough, someone had answered, it wasn't Brown, and assured him (and this was the crazy part) that at his earliest convenience a car would be sent to pick him up and bring him to the office of the string of lawyers he'd seen on the card. Barely able to keep from laughing outright or cursing the lying fuck on the other end of the line, he'd set a time for mid-afternoon that Thursday and sure enough a black BMW had arrived and whisked him away to a new life. He'd left the goddamn group home with the full expectation and even the intention of returning whenever the joke was finally revealed but he'd never seen the place again. The few possessions he'd owned he'd left without another thought. And as the old saying went, he'd never looked back.

But he goddamn sure remembered.

On nights like tonight. He'd gotten the initial compensation from the sale of the first filing of Leszno's Farm and since then had received a check every month from some kind of shelter or annuity the rest of the land generated. He guessed one day, when everything was sold off, he'd stop getting the monthly checks but, hell, by that time he'd have taken his cut from the entire sale of the land.

But the money was only a means to an end. For years he'd been looking for whatever would shut the racket in his head, and just the other day, in a hardware store, of all places (Christ, you just never knew what was gonna happen from one day to the next) it had come upon him. Or rather her. Oh yeah, she'd come upon him, right there at the back of the store by the wind chimes. He'd seen her and something had clicked in his head.

And she'd felt it too. That had been just as obvious.

Everything else went away and her face washed across his memory, the line of her cheekbones, the swell of her breasts. It was like some kind of fucking prophecy, really. He closed his eyes and sought to pull her in. He already knew where she lived and that's what truly made everything divine. He felt a sudden pressure and looked down. His dick was standing out true and hard, ticking a bit up and down with the blood piling up inside. He dropped the hose and spread his legs. Grabbed his cock and began working away on himself underneath the mild, night sky.

# Chapter 9: The Attic, Late Night

Patsy came awake to faint laughter. She rolled over in bed and reached for the alarm clock, hit the top until the faint green glow bloomed. 12:03, pitch black outside. She didn't remember going to bed, had no idea what had roused her from sleep. But there, again, the same soft tittering. She sat up, pulled the hair out of her eyes. The covers were in a ball at her feet and the fan was whirling fast above her head. She reached over in the darkness to where she knew the fan cord hung, found it dancing crazily in the turbulent air and pulled, twice, hard. Instantly the motor disengaged, the room suddenly drenched in silence, save for the dying slash of blade against air. For a moment she considered lying back down but then the sound again. Unmistakable. Laughter. A child. Gooseflesh sprang up on her arms and down the length of her back.

She had no idea where it was coming from.

She rolled over, reached past the clock to the bedside lamp. She turned the knob and the darkness lurched away from the light. She swung her feet over the side to the floor, noticing the chill obliquely. She stood up, the current creepiness recalling the pair on the gravel road two days before, even then, trying to make some sense of their odd behavior and disappearance. Again, coming up dry.

A tinny clash of silverware brought her back to the present. Brought on a fresh coat of gooseflesh all the way to the ends of her fingertips. She looked down at the phone and wondered whom she'd call, and then if she did, what she'd say. The sound seemed to be coming from somewhere out there in the hallway, maybe as far as the kitchen. The bedroom door was partially cracked and she was thankful she'd left the light on in the living room, though she had no memory of doing so. There were no moving shadows lurking against the wall, no further sound from out there. She moved to the foot of the bed already wishing she'd brought the gun in from the car, out from underneath the seat and in here, where she could get to it if she needed to. And God help her, she hoped she wouldn't now. She considered calling out but wondered (as she had with the phone) what and whom she'd call out to. And after all, wouldn't that be obliging the terror she felt building up?

She crept over to the door and pushed it carefully back to the wall. It didn't make a sound and for that she was thankful. The added light brought the furniture (what little there was) out of hiding. Everything was normal, not a thing out of place. She glanced back at the clock and saw four minutes had already been gobbled up. She stepped out into the hall and stared down its length. All clear to the curtain in the living room. No sound of approaching footsteps, no heavy breathing around the corner.

And then the sound again and she jerked her head up to the attic door. Jesus Christ, it was coming from up there!

Oh no, a frantic voice warned. This is not real, Patsy! You are, right this minute, lying in bed in the middle of a very weird dream! Remember this! Turn around and go back to bed. Pull the covers over your head and if you even think you hear anything else jam your fingers in your ears! This is not real, Patsy. This is where madness starts! And she found her hand rising to the pull cord. "A dream," she whispered into the silence. Only a dream that would soon pass. But the cord was real; she could feel that, the length of nylon ending in the cold metal ball. It seemed to be vibrant with life against her fingertips.

And now the whispering was not in her head, but somewhere up there, on the other side of the pull-down door. She could almost make it out but not quite (the voice so familiar), a short little round of laughter following. And then she said it, the name she would have followed into any fiery pit of Hell itself if the summons ever came. "Terri," she said and pulled the door down. She was not afraid; that was the strangest, the most dream-like quality of the whole affair. Perhaps the possibility of dreaming gave her the strength to continue, knowing this had no right in the logical world, the world that she seemed to have less and less true hold upon lately. She folded the ladder down to the floor, set her foot on the first rung, didn't even look up into the darkness until her head rose above the lip of ceiling. Then the gooseflesh returned in a solid cold wave. Her rational mind fought for control, attempting some plea that was lost in the crystal-shattering moment of her daughter's voice.

Terri! My God, somehow Terri was up here!

Patsy's motherly instincts kicked in and she envisioned her baby trapped, wanting her bed, her momma. She savagely attacked the darkness for the light cord. Missed it the first time, almost pulled it from the rafters the second. Suddenly the area was illumined. Quiet.

No laughter, no sound of children's whispers.

But someone had been here. Or some thing.

Her eyes went straight to the little children's table with its set of matching chairs. There was no one seated around it but all the chairs were pushed back as if a small party had just disengaged and left. The table was covered in blood. The leg closest to her was painted all the way down to the plywood deck, the blood pooling out beneath it. A strange smell of carrion filled the air. But still she remembered the laughter, the thin whispering, the realization that this was probably only a dream. The realization that she would walk through the Gate of Hell Itself if that trail led to her lost daughter.

She stood up, hunched over, studying the small bloody table. Silverware indeed, lying haphazardly in the mess that was much more, she saw now, than a gout of blood washed across the surface. There were other things there, muscled tissue, it appeared. Maybe even a couple of fingers removed at the knuckle.

Then, another sound. Not laughter this time but a shuffling, back in the darkness where she'd thought she'd heard it previously. And then another, around behind her now. Shapes began to coalesce from the shadows. Small, child-shaped things hunching forward into view. Two little girls, red-eyed and blood-streaked, pulling themselves toward her with lurching steps, coming across the insulation which could in no reality hold them. Patsy jerked back and hit her head on a rafter, went down hard, a knife of pain racing her spine as it jarred on the two-by-six beneath the plywood. It was then she began to doubt the dream, began to see the logic of Hell. The two girls were still coming, oblivious to the beams and boards in their way. Their eyes were glazed, doll-like, their hair hanging in bloodied rivulets down from their foreheads. Patsy saw they held knives in their hands, still painted from whatever deed they'd done at the table. Then they stopped and their heads turned toward the darkness where Patsy had thought she'd heard the sound when she'd first come up here.

Another shape began to move there in the darkness.

She wiped a hand across her forehead to move her hair and a trickle of blood from her eyes. There, right behind the air conditioning vent. A flash of movement! Then, in the disparity of either a dream or a nightmare her little girl waffled into view. Terri! the word ripped through her mind, the complete impossibility of circumstance. She managed to lift herself to her knees, held her arms out for her baby, unmindful now of the other children drifting closer. She had eyes only for her baby now. "Terri," and this time the word came from her lips, damned all nightmares to the corners. The little girl was now in the open beneath the angled rafters, and the sight of her brought tears to Patsy's eyes. It was as if the night of the wreck, the fire, had never ended. Terri stood before her in her blackened, burnt dress, smoke still puffing out in little billows of besooted air. Her face was a dark red rash of angry, burned flesh and crisped hair etched into her cheeks. Her body broken and disfigured from the impact of the crash. She limped badly and Patsy saw it was from the fact that one foot was almost fully twisted around backwards. One arm was charred to the stump of her elbow. Patsy crawled across the plywood floor and raised herself on her knees again, held out her arms. If this was Hell, she'd take it, make it pay, refuse to give her daughter up again to it. And suddenly Terri was right there, she could smell the smoke wafting off her pretty little dress, or what was left of it. The scent of scorched flesh reached her, enveloped her. "Terri," she said again and the little girl went to hug her with the one good arm she had left. And just then Patsy felt another hand on her shoulder. A grave hand, as cold as endless winter and time lost to sadness.

And then another one closed around her throat.

*

Sometime later she came to her senses on the floor of the attic. The overhead light was still on but everything was quiet now. She heard the songs of birds outside, very incongruent in the banality of the attic. She rolled over and groaned, aware suddenly of a pain in her throat. She began to massage it, sat up. The table. There, right where she knew it'd be, clean now except for the dust. Each chair pushed back to its place. She smacked her lips and grimaced. Never could she remember having a taste this bad. And what the hell was she doing up here in the first place? Nothing came to mind. It was a great, vast blank. She felt a horrible combination of hangover and flu. She was afraid she'd throw up.

She looked behind and saw the opening to the attic. The ladder was down. She pulled herself over to it and descended to the floor, fighting through acid curtains of dizziness as she stumbled (hands on either wall) to the bathroom. The door was open but the light was off and she went inside, fumbling for the light switch with one hand and opening the drawer that held her toothbrush with the other. But she completely forgot about it the second she looked at herself. The mirror above the sink was directly before her. Her face was smeared with blood, specks of gray matter dotting her nightshirt. The images of the girls came back now like a violent thunderclap and she began screaming at the mirror, lost now in the terror she'd finally found real.

*

Sometime later she came back to her senses again, curled up tight by the toilet. She could not keep her legs steady and she almost fell standing. A wave of dizziness almost brought her to the floor again, but she fought it, closing her eyes and straining to regain her balance. She needed a spot on which to fix, something to ground herself. Then her eyes found the toothbrush, no more than six inches from the bottom edge of the cabinet. She didn't remember dropping it, but there it was. She did remember her bloodied face and hoped against all gods it had been nothing more than a trick of the light, or even worse but somehow comforting just the same, her mind unraveling. It proved neither. The blood had dried to a dark maroon from her nose all the way down to her neck. The specks of gray matter were still there too, dashed incongruently upon her nightshirt. The taste in her mouth threatened to make her sick again. She felt her gorge rising. She had to get rid of it first; whatever would come later would have to wait. She got the drawer open that held the toothpaste, spun the cap off and watched it fall into the sink and down the drain, squeezed out a monster glop onto the toothbrush and went at the job as if her life depended on it. Because for all she knew, it did. She pushed it so far back in her throat she almost retched and she bent over the basin, spitting for all she was worth. Then she flung the toothbrush away and attacked the soap bar, raking the blood off her face like a killer with cops beating down the door. Her pulse was up to a 150 beats a minute by the time she finished and she got scared again, frightened that she would die right here in the new house, without a single neighbor knowing her name, left to rot for days or weeks on end until someone got suspicious enough to find out what had happened to her. Finding her swollen, blackened body curled like a desiccated apple with an unholy stench pressing the walls out into the hallway. She gripped the countertop and tried to steady herself, tried to find reason and calm in the simple act of standing. After an indeterminate time her head cleared a bit and she chanced another look into the mirror that now ran with the water she'd splashed around like a kindergartener in a bathtub. Her eyes were black pits, her hair spider web strands. She seemed to have aged ten years over the course of the last twelve hours. A kindergartener, her mind reminded her, thrusting Terri's pale face into the reel of her mind. And at that moment she felt sanity leaving, or if not leaving, at least bidding everyone a goodnight. The image of the Taurus .38 revolver lying underneath the driver's seat outside greeted her like a breath of hot wind and she tried to push it away.

What the hell was happening to her?

There had to be some kind of explanation. Maybe she'd bitten her tongue or something, but goddammit, why had she been in the attic? You're going crazy, the voice said evenly. Even though it's taken this long and every once in a while all is well, you're going crazy just the same. You'll be in the fucking loony bin before the week's out. She shook her head at her reflection. Now that, she knew, was a lie because the call of the gun could rectify all that right now. And she felt sure she could. She could taste the barrel in her mouth right now.

And for just a moment it really didn't seem so bad.

She shook her head and turned back to the sink, twisting the HOT knob around to clear the shit out. There were red and blue streaks of blood and toothpaste clinging to the porcelain side and she washed them away by fanning the water with her fingertips. But a minute speck of something forced a scream from her mouth and she slammed her fist down hard on the stopper knob so that nothing would go down the drain. Then she jammed her fingers into the warm, sudsy water and felt around until her right forefinger touched what she thought she'd seen. She pinched it with her thumb and freed it from the sink. She stared at the small fingernail until she thought her eyes would burst. Just a tiny little sliver, something she really had had no right seeing in the first place, but there it was all the same.

A child's fingernail.

Terri's, the ghostly voice whispered as she stared at the bit of protein poised there on the point of her finger. Terri's, you remember, the voice coaxed, threatened. The memory of the laughter caught her by the throat, tried to strangle her vision away.

It came back in a rush. The little girl, her little girl, emerging from the darkness of the attic. Her hands, her tiny little hands, reaching out for her momma.

The hysteria rose in her throat like a solid rock of grief, tried to strangle the life right out of her. She fell back to the shower door almost knocking it loose, her vision wavering sickeningly before her face. And then, with no other warning, the long-seated grief burst like a thunderclap around her and she collapsed to the floor, sobbing incoherently.

There was no hold on the passage of time that drifted away from her then. She cried, and screamed. Cried some more. Pounded her fists against the stark, white tiles. Cursed everything, every entity she could think to curse. But nothing changed. The lilting laughter from the night before refused to come, the ghostly contingent of little girls hid themselves away within the walls, underneath the floor. But sometime later, it could have been a million years for as much as she knew, her mind began to work of its own volition. And ideas began to wash to the surface of her turgid imagination like beasts swimming up through a cloud of muddy water.

There was a chance.

She could just see it, like a glimpse from the corner of her eye.

But at what price?

The thought stopped her cold. Up until that moment she'd convinced herself that the next move, her only real move really, would be to call 911. Tell the operator that she was going crazy, that someone, anyone, needed to come before she completely lost her mind. But now...

She calmed her hands and slid her tongue over surprisingly dry lips. Because was that any kind of solution? Packing herself into a nuthouse somewhere, talking through her delirium (as she knew it would be called, because after all, what else would someone else be forced to call it?) to a shrink, or even a group of shrinks, to be sorted out over coffee and cigarettes during the course of a normal work week. And all the while disregarding her daughter, disregarding the hope of Terri. That wasn't gonna happen. Her daughter was here, or at least a bit of the essence that had once composed her. Didn't the blood and fingernail make the idea at least plausible? And here she was thinking of running away. Like some fucking coward. Could she really start down that road now?

She fought to her knee, pressed up with her hand until she was standing upright. She looked into the mirror and wasn't too oppressed by what she found there. This could be the end of everything, she knew. But on the flip side of that coin, couldn't it also be some sort, some ragged tail of a beginning?

She remembered the crash, saw the flames, smelled the smoke, saw Terri's shoe lying in the middle of the road, heard the sound of sirens in the distance. Yes, it could indeed be the end. She could tuck and run; she felt sure most would. But what would she potentially be running away from? She considered the notion. Asked herself the blunt question: What would she be willing to do to have her daughter back, or for that matter, even a little piece of her? She stared straight into the mirror, spat into the sink. The answer came, as brutal as its counterpart.

"Anything," she whispered into the cold chill of the bathroom. "Anyfuckingthing." And with that her future was made.

# Chapter 10: Phoenix

Tomas awoke screaming into the darkness of his bedroom. He sat up ramrod straight, his eyes wild and staring, fighting to find the flames of his nightmare, the acrid smell of smoke drifting yet in the room. But there was nothing. The house silent as a tomb. No washing roar of flames licking to the ceiling, no choking suffocation bringing him down.

This didn't happen often, had not in fact happened for the better part of three years. But now, entire, that day with the lawyer's flunky, it descended around him. All at once in a sickening wave, the man with his Italian suit and shoes, the self-confidence of a shark wafting off in waves. And with it came the memory of the Fire, the residue of the nightmare. He worked himself off the bed and stood up. Made his way to the kitchen and the icebox. Pulled it open and rooted out a beer. The pop-tab made a sound like breaking glass in the silence. He downed half the beer with his first gulp, the rest with his second. His hair was wet and slick with the heat pulsing through the house. He walked over to the trashcan and threw the empty away. Ghosts were alive in the air around him. He left the kitchen and sat down hard in the chair before the television, the remote waiting at his right hand. But he left it alone, tried to climb away from the tension that screwed at his bones.

The Fire.

It never really left. Though each time he told himself it was surely the last, that time would beat it in the end; it was always right there in the darkness of sleep, waiting to claim him and finish the business that had been left undone so many years before.

And so close to where he now sat. He couldn't forget that. He questioned himself sometimes on the point of his attraction. A bug drawn to a light on some forbidden and unthinkable quest. Because, now, that's all his life had ever seemed: a quest. For what, he had no idea, but a quest nonetheless. The feeling only sharpened over time. The remote hit the floor and he looked down, noticed his hands were shaking. He brought them together in his lap and clasped them tightly. Saw how they were the same, unchanged mirrors to that day with the flunky. He tried to smirk in the darkness and failed miserably. No...face it, he thought. The days are a countdown.

He absently found himself fingering the depression in his right palm. Even in the pitch darkness he knew exactly what he'd find. His badge of remembrance. It had come just before Meeta, his "mother" (at least that's what he remembered calling her) had grabbed him and his "sister" in her arms and hustled them outside. But only when the flames had gotten so intense that remaining was impossible. The scar had grown as his hand matured, spreading from its quarter shape to now the size of a half dollar. If he'd been working hard with his hands under a hot sun, if the blood really set right, the faint outline of a face, and underneath it, a date. His birth year. The scar from the quarter he'd picked up off the floor right before they'd vacated the conflagration. Even now he remembered first catching site of the thing lying placidly on the floor a couple of feet away. Being drawn to it (again, like a moth), and then reaching, grabbing it up in his palm. And, of course, the scorching pain. He'd thought he dropped it, had had no doubt really, until he found it (nice and preternaturally cool) in the pocket of his smoky jeans later, as untarnished as if it'd been minted that very day. And, also, the scar. His hand had hurt damnably for the better part of a week, the skin of his palm growing red and enflamed though he'd tried to hide it from the strangers who were suddenly so proliferate.

But the brand had always remained.

He tried to find his lost childhood in these moments, adrift in the cool dark of the night. Any night. Nothing ever seemed that far away, but nothing solid ever came either. Of that lost childhood. Of anything, really, of a time before the Fire. That had been, and continued to be, the defining moment of his life, though for what reason he could secure no answer. He'd learned of Colombia through the file he'd been given. Like reading the history of a stranger, nothing was familiar. He remembered riding a bicycle with his "sister" (even now her name evaded him), sitting around a dinner table and eating with his eyes pinned to the food on his plate, the wash of conversation around him meaningless in a language he'd not understood. But the flames had been real, the heat, the roar, the smoke. As real as the scar on his palm. As real as the monster Eduardo. As real as the liquid the man had taken from below the kitchen sink and poured in small amounts into the old man's food day in and day out. That had struck him as strange: the fact that the old man's food was prepared differently from his own. With Meeta always close at hand and a willing accomplice while Eduardo whispered in her ear, toyed gently with his hand on her ass as she went about preparing lunch or dinner. And running alongside, the old man's sickness, his gagging coughs and the spattering of blood on the table before him, on his shirt and pants. He realized now the two had poisoned the old man, but again, the reason eluded him. The Old Man had been Meeta's father and she'd gone about her days as if she truly cared for him. But the knowledge was there, always in the back of his mind.

They'd killed him as purposefully as if they'd placed a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. This was gospel, unchangeable. His death had been planned. And so, it seemed, had the Fire.

Over the years he'd brought back pieces of the disaster. Eduardo's wild obscenities before he'd taken out the rifle and shot the trooper. Meeta's silent capitulation when he'd told her to gather more ammunition. Tomas remembered the cans of gasoline that had stood lined in the garage like regimented soldiers. Ten of them (he recalled counting in his new language) filled and capped in the sweltering shade against the wall near the freezer. He remembered as the man Meeta had called "honey" had torn the carport door wide and raced inside; he'd been watching from the same corner where he'd seen the quarter as Eduardo uncapped two of the ten and begun spilling their contents across the concrete floor, against the walls; the pungent smell of the gasoline as it made its way through the doorway to the living room, before the maniac tossed it around in there as well. Meeta standing before him with her hands out, daring him to come near the children, her eyes on fire even before the real flames started.

And then the breaking glass and Eduardo's screaming challenge to the force gathered against him. All of these things were etched in his brain like the grooves of a record. Even now he saw the flame kick up and away from the lighter Eduardo had held in his hand, the flesh catching immediately. The man had never stopped his rampage even when his whole arm was engulfed. The room had gone up like a Molotov cocktail; one second there was nothing but the choking smell, and the next a huge blanket of heat and sound as the gas came alive like a thing incarnate. Tomas had imagined Hell many times in his life but never with as much fear. He'd been there and survived, suffered only to carry the brand of a quarter on his hand. He recalled Meeta's screams and his "sister" bunched up around him, her tiny hands tearing at his clothes as the rush of fuel built a hurricane around them.

And then his real life began, or so he had always assumed. Now, however, he was not so sure. Fingers of remembrance were beginning to stir, little things in the lost corners of his mind that begged release. Edgy things, a bizarre momentum that threatened to break free. Because as he now saw it, he had died a sort of death in the Fire, but equally strange, he'd also been reborn to this new life. The life that had drawn him irrevocably here to the scene of his initial death, his subsequent rebirth. Never before had he felt it so keenly, his nerves filed down to razor points. It had not been there when he'd come back to Louisiana years before; it had not really suggested itself when he rode the highway and noticed the new construction; and, stranger still, it hadn't even been there when he signed the purchase agreement on the house. All that time something in the back of his mind suggested it was mere circumstance; perhaps a twinge of longing for what he'd lost years before. But now he saw things differently. Had done so ever since he'd seen the woman in the hardware store a couple of weeks before. No, it had always been a vague suggestion up until that point. But after that day it had been something else. For the past few nights it had begun to build, taking form in the slow darkness of the empty house.

Now it was a pestilence, a warning.

Now it was his destiny.

He sat still in the chair, clasping and unclasping his hands, working his finger over the old scar, breathing hoarsely in the silence of the house.

In his soul he felt his life, his purpose, had just begun.

# Chapter 11: Biscuits and Hard Sleep

Elizabeth Tanksley was eighty-two and had rarely slept over three hours without waking her whole life. Some would say it had been her misfortune having been born early in the century when child psychology (or any psychology, for that matter) had been in its infancy, if you could pardon the pun. There were no Dr. Spock's or his equivalent in those days; people either got along or they didn't. Graveyards weren't strangers and surely not the surprise they became as the 20th century bedazzled with its empty promises of everything except eternal life. She'd worn cotton sack underwear for the first two decades of her life and farmed with her parents sunup to sundown whether she'd slept well or not. To her it was a normal fact of life, like buttermilk biscuits in the morning. Nothing was to be questioned; God was in his Heaven and the devil in Hell and the patterns of the world did Their bidding as they would.

But as mentioned in the Bible, for every affliction there was its opposite. Hers happened to be the Second Sight. She'd been three when her mother saw it upon her. They'd been farmers from Oklahoma on a little spit of land forty miles southwest of Tulsa. Her pa and the boys had been working a field a mile from the house when little Lizzy had walked into the kitchen where her mother was making the biscuits; they'd been poor and meat had seemed a strange delicacy until she'd reached her teens, meant for other, more refined, people. Her mother, Mertle, told her one morning she came padding up, rubbing at her puffy eyes and pulling the woman's skirt. When Mertle had turned to her, the little girl had quite plainly stated there were circles in the sky. "Black circles," she'd said, twirling her fingers tightly to run the picture home. Her mother picked her up and set her on the countertop, hushing her with a quiet lullaby as she continued with the biscuits.

It had been less than ten minutes later she'd heard the train. That low, dark, throaty building of sound that anyone living on the plains instantly recognized. Tornados. Mertle immediately squinted out the kitchen window and sure enough, off to the east, two distinct funnel clouds pushed down from the sky. The field was in that direction but Mertle had lived long enough to realize the only alternative. She scooped up the little girl and pushed the kitchen table across the floor with her backside. She set Lizzy on the table and bent to tug the threadbare rug out of the way. The trapdoor to the basement was underneath and up until that day had never been used for safety. She'd liked to think of it as a large, dark pantry with its dusty collection of preserves, tack and baking goods, but as the noise grew louder she was reminded of its true purpose. Cover.

Without a word her mother had grabbed Lizzy off the table, chanced one more look back toward the window (already the dust beginning to dance like the devil out there), and whispered a small, mumbled prayer for her husband and sons. Then they'd gone below, huddled among the dusty, cobwebbed preserves as Hell raged above. Several times during the milieu Mertle had been sure the trapdoor would come off and they'd be sucked into the vortex, but though the door threatened to let go it never did. Amid the rending of wood and screech of wind they remained removed in the cool sanctuary of the basement. Waiting until the storm left with the same abruptness as it came. One minute there was the screeching and rending, and the next, a quick retreat of the train whistle to some far distant point. Mertle guessed the whole thing had lasted less than three minutes, but those minutes were forever engraved in her mind, never very far away after she learned of the devastation they'd visited.

With the baby in her arms her mother had slowly ascended the ladder and pushed the door open. It flapped back easily (Mertle sighing with relief, having heard the horror stories of families trapped in their cellars to die after such storms, a wagon or other heavy implement lodged on top of the trapdoor), but her moment of respite vanished with the sunlight. Because above her head was not the ragged kitchen ceiling she expected but the clear, blue sky, as placid now as a sweet Sunday morning. The house was gone, scattered over the better part of five square miles (a neighbor eight miles closer in to town found the black iron pan she'd been doing the biscuits in half-buried in the hard-pan of the wagon track outside her house several days later) and she was reminded of the prairie gophers she'd seen popping their heads above ground in just the same way.

The land was barren as a graveyard.

And that, for the most part, was what it was. Mertle, baby in arms and hysteria rising, had swept the horizon with her eyes, shading them from the sun with her free hand. What little scrub brush she remembered was gone now, leaving the land scraped bare and raw. It was indeed as if she'd emerged from a hole. The house, every remnant of it save a few floorboards still attached to the floor joists that'd led down to the basement, was gone. The sapling they'd planted in the front and watered with what little they could spare uprooted and whisked away, likewise the picket fence that had defined three sides around the house. All gone. Glancing in the direction the whistle had followed she could make out a pitiful assortment of debris: a piece of twisted tin, the remnants of a broken porch standing ladder-like and strange, alone, a quarter mile away.

The silence was absolute. Elizabeth always remembered that too, the way her mother spoke of it on the very rare occasions when she did. "Like death pushed deeper," she'd told her once, again on a rare occasion, this time, Lizzy suspected, after drinking. Mertle had pulled her apron around the little girl's head and run toward the fields, screaming the names of her men until she was hoarse and mad. The fields were empty when she arrived.

A sheriff's detachment found them near sunset. They were brought into town and sheltered in a saloon along with others left equally homeless. The whores didn't mind if their rooms were requisitioned because the disaster stirred traffic in the area and they did a brisk business in less private locations. Everyone was as helpful as country folk generally are, and everyone was eventually accounted for in a ten-mile radius except Mertle's husband and boys. The three were gone. There was talk around the barbershop over the next two weeks of the bodies popping up somewhere, even some unlikely where, but they never did.

Not a hat, not a boot, not one stitch of clothing. Ever. They simply went out one day and vanished into the sky.

And after that Mertle and Elizabeth had been on their own.

The town pooled their resources and bought them a ticket to Atlanta, Georgia, on Mertle's insistence there was family there, more out of desperation than any truth, her head spinning on the circumstances, wishing only to be away and free of the very air that came in its deadly "black circles".

They were at the point of destitution when the talent resurfaced.

*

One morning, nearly two years later, Elizabeth had been sitting at the breakfast table of a rapidly vanishing relationship between her mother and a distant third cousin when she relayed an advertisement she'd heard on the radio. A circus was coming to town. The opportunity gave Bill, the tired husband of the third cousin, time for rejoicing and he gladly paid their fare into town to have them out of the house for the evening. By the next morning they were gone for good.

Standing in the line for the ring toss Elizabeth had the strangest sensation about the man standing three up from them. She occasioned the feeling to her mother but Mertle only gripped her hand harder and told her not to look that way. But to this day Elizabeth remembered what it meant to know the man was as good as dead. The knowledge had been radiating off him like heat, and again, she had told her mother. Mertle hushed her again, this time more forcefully, warned her that people close by would hear and know what they were talking about. Elizabeth did, but kept her eye on the man. After the ring toss and a ride they made their way to the concession stand and got a bag of popcorn. On the third handful Elizabeth turned to Mertle and said, "That old man is going to have a heart attack on the way to his car. His wife, her name is Charly, has been dead for five years and his kids haven't seen him in seven. When he goes it'll be like he never was. That's the truth, Momma," and she shut her mouth, looked ahead as if she'd never uttered a word. Then, as a coda, "He's got one thousand and thirty-five dollars on him in cash," she'd said. "He's never trusted anyone, is why."

The seemingly spectral information had whetted Mertle's appetite as well as horrified her sensibilities, and for the next forty minutes she watched the man under a pretense of other inclinations. He did indeed look feeble and unsteady, and he was alone. They had followed him at a distance as he made his way through the gates a short time later. From fifty feet away they both saw his head duck out of sight as he fell. They raced over, the first ones to his body, alone and forgotten in the seclusion of the fairground parking lot. He'd been hunched there as if sleeping, drawn up with his hands in front of his chest. Elizabeth remembered his tongue had just begun to creep out the side of his mouth.

"The money's in his back pocket," she said, pointing, and Mertle, as if on a string had hurried over and went straight to it. The wallet had been as big and fat as her hand. The count exactly one thousand thirty-five dollars, each bill as crisp as the day it'd come off the press. Mertle had immediately stuffed them into her purse with the furtiveness of a fox. Her eyes two mean pencil-marks in the darkness.

"How did you know?" she hissed, hurrying the girl away to the lights of the entrance gate. Her steps had been long and jerky, carrying Elizabeth away from the death scene with her feet barely touching the ground. "How did you know, girl?" but Elizabeth had just shook her head and held her tongue.

*

They'd arrived in Waddles Bluff, a small burg in Louisiana, late the next day at a depot largely devoid of people. They had no luggage, just the dusty clothes they'd left the fair wearing, but they did have a lot of money. Waddles Bluff, though neither had ever heard of the place, had been picked because of a "feeling." The word sent a creeping twist of fear down Mertle's spine but the pull proved irresistible. Regardless of the source of the talent, it had placed well over a thousand dollars in her pocket, and with no means of support, that kind of influence could not be lightly bug-a-booed.

They took a horse-drawn carriage down the road to the closest motel, which was not even in the Bluff at all, but two miles farther down at Bailey's Show. A small tourist attraction as it turned out, a cave that had only been discovered four years before. It was an enigma of the region, the ground being too swampy and irregular for permanent crevices, but existing nonetheless, an out-of-place vein of limestone struck through with numerous tunnels. The region had suffered a drought over the previous several years and people tended to forget the suspectness of the anomaly, especially, and with reason, the owner of the attraction, Douglas Hapshaw. At a dollar a head the weather could be damned.

Mertle was not a bad-looking woman, and with a little applied purpose, Hapshaw came to notice her quickly in the motel. He'd never married and at forty-four, with his new windfall of income, had come to consider himself lacking somewhat socially. And, damn it all, it seemed the woman was always close by with just the thing he wanted or needed. She could repair hardware and tackle as good as any man he knew and she was a damn sight better to look at. Their interests ran common ground, his people, likewise, had been plains dwellers, and within two months Mertle and Elizabeth had taken to spending most of their time on the top floor of the four-story motel that Hapshaw had laid over to his convenience. Of course everything Mertle knew about the man came from her daughter. She discovered the things Mertle used to her advantage in such an off-hand manner, standing with her elbows resting on the window ledges as she stared off into the distance.

Within six months the two were engaged and business was booming. Hapshaw took her suggestion to advertise in the more established papers society sections and the train brought more and more people every day. But the weather paid these aspirations no mind, reverting back to its former, natural state of wet, stormy conditions that had characterized the area for time out of mind until the drought. Of course, the rain caused a small rumble of disquiet in Hapshaw because he was not a fool to water tables, but he religiously scouted the touring part of the cave as the weather went it fits and starts and didn't notice anything which he feared might prove dangerous to his clientele.

Elizabeth, however, knew better.

As the rain continued, she pulled her mother aside one night after dinner and told her there was a section of the cave that would go, soon, if the rain continued. She knew it she said, and Mertle remembered the "black circles," the old man huddled like an infant at the fair that night. The last month they'd done an average of seventy-five people a day, and it had all seemed so easy. Hapshaw was talking about adding on to the motel, changing the sign to read "hotel" even, maybe even sharing her name on the marquee. She asked the only question she could think to ask: "When?" and sat quietly before the child, her eyes large and wide. "Doan know, Momma," she had said, shaking her head. "Soon, though, I think." Then she'd run off to her room to play with her dolls.

Hapshaw knew nothing about Elizabeth's strange talent. Mertle had never mentioned anything about it in fear the man would turn things over in his mind and feel he'd been duped in some way or another. Salesmen were always more likely to be of the suspicious type, she felt. It was raining outside again and she looked through the window and bit her lip. "Soon," Elizabeth had said. It could mean anything, surely, but to her knowledge the girl had never been wrong. And right now when things were going so nicely! What would Douglas say if she told him? It would bring up more questions than it would answer, that much was sure.

She elected to remain quiet and prayed the weather would abide.

The limestone plug broke two weeks later and forty-eight people drowned, including Douglas Hapshaw. Waddles Bluff went into an uproar. Of course, the accident was the talk of the region, in the papers, the radios, but at first it really did nothing except add to the crowds who'd been drawn. It seemed everyone in the general vicinity had to come and have a look at the spot of the tragedy. Mertle wrote it off as some compelling figure of the human condition, this lust to roll in the dust of another's misfortune. And here, oddly enough, it seemed a misfortune her little girl had predicted. And she'd done nothing. Nothing, that is, except catch Elizabeth's directed stares over the course of the week of the funerals and newspapermen hubbub for a couple of weeks afterward. Though it was hard to disavow the creeping anger of the stares she bucked herself up internally to plow through another hard time. It was also then she became convinced a curse was upon her. Perhaps it stemmed from Elizabeth, such talents had never been deemed wholesome throughout the course of human history. After all, being that she had the talent, perhaps, (and here Mertle felt the blackness waiting behind her eyelids) Lizzy could actually cause such things to happen. The thought ripped a chill through her body and all the looks she'd been receiving lately came back to her in the dark nights with Elizabeth sleeping right next door. She wondered what else her daughter might, just might, be capable of?

The next morning she quit ignoring the girl. She even said that she'd told Douglas about Elizabeth's premonition but he'd gone about his business anyway. Elizabeth just nodded and remained quiet, though Mertle prayed she was still of an age when the words of parents were gospel. She also told Elizabeth that they'd be moving again. There was obviously nothing here to hold them, of which the little girl readily agreed, and Mertle hoped to take Elizabeth's mind away from the accident by suggesting she come up with another place they could go. And the implication was plain: use your Second Sight. As it was now, out of three times visited, it had actually proven beneficial (at least to them) twice. Because Mertle didn't know if Elizabeth knew it or not, but Douglas kept a safe in the back corner of his closet, and Mertle had been able to tease the combination out of him one night when he was taking his pleasure. She never opened it but she'd seen him do it, and it looked to contain a hell of a lot more than a thousand dollars. In reality it contained almost four thousand and Mertle used it to spirit her and the child out of town before blame for the cave-in could be laid squarely at her feet.

And when they left, they left at night.

*

Elizabeth Tanksley sat alone over the biscuits at her kitchen table, thinking. Her insomnia had been off and on over the years, but as eighty-one of them had passed her by she took to noticing patterns, something she'd not had experience enough to recognize when she was younger. The loss of sleep always signaled a revelation. Sometimes it'd only be a day's warning, other times a month or more. But they always went hand-in-hand. She recalled her years as a fortune-teller and the little sleep that allowed and then the years when she consciously tried to rein the power in. Between the two, she had to admit now, she'd always felt better, more comfortable, when she'd let the Thing loose.

And now she hadn't slept in almost two months.

She felt sure, she knew in the hollows of her bones, that whatever was coming had something to do with the young woman who'd moved in just across the street. She was single, it appeared, and didn't work. Strange. Her car seldom moved from the driveway and even when it did, it didn't stay gone long. She looked at the clock above the pantry. Of course old women got up earlier, she reckoned, than most unattached young ones, but even the young ones got hungry. And her biscuits had always been one to satisfy. She nodded her head and smiled at the clock on the wall. Now all she had to do was let the Sight tell her when the time was right.

# Chapter 12: Decisions

Patsy found herself in a conundrum. There were two fairly clear routes to pursue but neither of them gave much hope. Or courage for that matter. It had been four days since her encounter. That was all she could safely call it. Had it been ghosts or something else entirely? The bruises on her arms and neck had been real, as had the child's fingernail, or the foulness she'd spit out in the sink. She had not been imagining them. But if she hadn't, what did it mean? My God, as far as she remembered there were children in the attic. Terri, for Christ's sake. Over the previous nights since she scarcely slept, lying there instead with her eyes on the ceiling, waiting for the tiny laughter to begin. And this is what scared her too; inside, just as much as being terrified to hear it, another part of her wanted it. Wanted, at whatever cost, to have her daughter again.

But it was crazy regardless how she saw it. Whether it was an actual haunting or approaching insanity, how would it bring Terri back? And how would nursing this completely irrational need help her in any way? Terri was dead; John was dead. That was the truth, the end of the matter. It made no difference that her mind was potentially creating this false world for her on the coincidence that the previous owner had mistakenly left a child's play set in the attic. Yes, something said inside her, if that's the truth. But what if it isn't coincidence? She remembered the accident again, lying beside the road looking at the little burnt shoe smoking on the asphalt. It seemed like you'd always known...and the chill the voice brought drove ice into her brain. That was how the headache always began, with that secret insinuation at the core of her being that somehow, someway, she'd known the accident was going to happen. No, she told herself. You just always expected it because that's how things go with you. You've always felt the worst chasing you down, and you just thought that was it.

Now you're seeing your dead daughter, among others, in the attic, and you're wondering if it can't be a good thing...?

That was the darkest side, the most unforgiving. Maybe she had lost all contact with reality. The facts seemed to speak for themselves, but then again...what would she be willing to do to get Terri back? That was definitely a point to ponder. She remembered the movie, Pet Sematary, and the lengths the father had gone to have his son back. At the time it had seemed ludicrous (she'd never liked horror movies and had been drawn in by one of her friends; she couldn't even remember who, it had just been a good excuse to stay away from her grandmother's one night) but now she saw it differently. She realized now that a chance was a chance. Goddammit, there was no other way to see it. Terri was gone and she'd believed, rationally, that was it, but that had proved wrong. She'd been right there in the attic. Patsy was sure of it; of the other little girls she was not so positive, but she knew her daughter like she knew herself. Terri had been up there. What she could not understand were the circumstances. Why here? Why now? And why like this? Who were the other girls? But most importantly, perhaps, why did the feeling of menace still surround her after four days?

There were so many questions and as far as she could tell, no answers.

Here a frown crossed her face. She was not being completely honest with herself and she knew it. Every one of these questions might just so happen to have a perfectly obvious answer. She had gone crazy. That would explain everything; her suicidal urgings, the people on the path, the things she'd seen in the attic. All of it, every little bit, could easily be ascribed to a person losing her mind. Or maybe having already lost it. She knew she'd been under a great deal of strain for a long time, but had always believed she'd feel herself slipping if she ever did lose her mind. Of course she'd heard the stories professing the ill unaware of their illnesses but how could someone outside ever really know? From interviewing the ill? How would you know if they were telling the truth? She thought differently; she believed people would feel themselves losing their minds. It had always made sense to her, though she had to admit, she'd never given it much mileage except as of late. But it had always felt true, like her uncomfortable knowledge that things in her life were weighted for the bad. And even though the latter was still a fixture in her mind, she was no longer so sure about the former. Maybe people didn't feel themselves losing their senses. Maybe it just happened while you were going about your ordinary life. The thought brought an image to her mind: a young guy in a wheelchair, pulling himself jerkily through an empty mall parking lot several years before. Talking and gesturing to beat the band. It hadn't been the first such person she'd ever seen, but he had been close, close enough to smell... She shook her head and tried to refocus. She remembered him now, staring blindly ahead as his one good leg chopped at the parking lot. He could have been involved in a courtroom dispute for all the energy he put into it.

And then there was also the other time.

She didn't like to think about it because it was so disturbing and sad, but times like this always brought it back. She'd worked a couple of weeks at a hospital as a sheet-changer dash ass-wiper several years before John. One patient never escaped her. He'd been paralyzed and sick, out of his mind. But he'd been awake and active for the better part of a week, his eyes rolling like a horse's at a fire. He'd been one she had to have help with; in fact two other girls had been necessary to change the sheets. And the whole time in the room with him his life had played out like a chopped-up movie reel. Every dope deal, every clandestine meeting, every person he'd ever known, loved, or hated had been right there in that room with him, with them. It had been hard to concentrate even on the usually simple task before her, and it had been because of his ghostly, ice pick stare, interspersed between the intervals of madness, as cold as an icy hand on her thigh. She'd never seen it before, hoped she'd never see it again. He had addressed anyone and everyone who happened to fall into that room with that paradoxical stare, those eyes so unfocused but bizarrely intense. He had believed everything he'd said, traveling his whole life it seemed, in that one week. Alone, in his world, with all the ghosts of his life.

What if this thing with Terri was like that?

That long ago bedlam had had no qualms about his sanity, so now, here, why should she?

It was a perplexing question because she knew she could not give up this thing. Even if Hell itself had flung out the bait. But she didn't want to lose her mind, not if it could be prevented. If not for her, then for whatever Terri had become. Because inside, this is what made her heart beat faster: the belief that her little girl was somehow, someway, closer than she'd been since the accident. It was real, and she could feel it.

She got up and walked away from the kitchen table to the window above the sink. She looked out and saw children playing in the yard of the house where the boy had died of the overdose. It sent a ripple of unease through her and she wondered if the people who lived there now knew it. It wouldn't be a strong selling point; that was for sure. But hell, she wondered, here I am with ghosts in my own attic. Who am I to say anything? She turned her eyes from the window to the sink. Only one side had anything in it (she'd been eating a lot of fast food lately) and she quickly put the dishes and assorted silverware into the dishwasher. Then she turned and put her butt against the counter, regarded the floor. Dirty, untouched, not even swept since she'd moved in and that was a damn shame. It reminded her of her grandmother's, and how Patsy had sworn she'd never live in a mess like that again. But now the world had turned back the clock. Same dirty floor, same dirty life. For just a second a tear threatened to spill but she raked it away and gave the floor a venomous stare. She would not go back to that. John and Terri were both dead and her life had changed for the worse, but she would not go back to that. She crossed straight to the accordion doors that hid the washer and drier from the dining room and pulled the broom, mop, and bucket from the corner, and for the next half hour she mopped away at the floor, doing her savage best to dispel the thoughts in her head.

*

Having a sandwich at eleven-thirty, she had to admit the work had done her good. She felt rejuvenated, relaxed even. Her muscles needed work; her mind had been doing too much of it lately. She needed a happy medium. Nice, she thought, looking around. The floor was spotless, along with the gas range. It was the first time she'd really looked at it since buying the house, and she was surprised at its newness. Someone had spent the bucks there. She'd also wiped down all the cabinet fronts and counter space but still had be make a run to the Wal-Mart (wherever the closest one was) to get some liner paper for inside. Another thing her grandmother had never done, something that she must do. She nibbled the last bite of the sandwich and stood up, taking her plate to the dishwasher which she hadn't turned on yet. She snapped her fingers, detergent, she mustn't forget that. She quickly added it to the growing list of things she'd placed by the phone.

She nodded and smiled because she felt good. Amazing but true. Out of the depths she'd suddenly broken to the surface and it was a bright, sunny day. The sandwich and the cleaning, the most mundane activities, had cleansed her somehow. It was truly amazing. It was said idle hands did the devil's work. So yeah, maybe. Best not be idle. She thought about the list of things, but again, she'd not seen a Wal-Mart and that's where she did her shopping. Besides, she really didn't feel like doing that yet anyway. The house was calling; it needed her attention. Ever since she'd moved in, that is the one thing that'd been elsewhere. Her sorrow, the encounter on the path, the laughter from the attic; all these things had distracted her from the very thing she'd sought with the purchase of the place: peace. Until this moment she'd not realized it and now it was almost sad. As if she were unconsciously attempting to boobytrap her life at every step. A welcoming veil had been lifted, and it had come with the familiarity of a little physical work. She liked the feeling and wanted to keep it going. And of course the house was not without a multitude of things that needed addressing. The rest of the floors, for one; the kitchen now looked nice enough to throw a pale over the rest of the house and she thought she'd finish that first. One thing at a time. It didn't go jumping from task to task, completing none of them.

She refilled the bucket with fresh hot water and soap and began working from back to front. By the time she got to the hallway she was whistling. She hummed in the study, and was actually singing lightly in her bedroom when she heard it.

Children playing.

It was not coming from the attic and a half-wash of thankfulness coursed through her without a thought. She remembered the kids playing in the neighbor's yard, earlier, but she hadn't been able to hear them even from the kitchen. She placed the mop back in the bucket. Her backyard was surrounded on two sides by the six-foot wood fence and in the back by a roughly four-foot hedge in front of a neighbor's hurricane fence.

There...again.

Her hands had gone clammy and uncertain. The late night in the room when she'd been awakened was upon her suddenly and she had to admit the laughter was the same. Whether in dream or reality, it was the same.

The window that looked out to the backyard was covered with a beach towel she'd hung from a couple of nails. She'd always hated the early morning sunlight stealing away her sleep and had hung it up the first night she'd slept here. She could hear the children out there right now, just on the other side of that towel. All she had to do was...

She stopped her hand in mid-motion, a foot from the towel. She didn't even remember covering the ten feet in between. Her heart was pounding, the midnight pounding. But it was not midnight now. It was not and that made a difference. A big difference. This was not waking up out of a dead sleep to something that was still unclear the next morning. This was the next morning. Along the edge of the towel she could see the blocked sunlight scrabbling for purchase on the sheetrock. This would take it to a whole different level altogether, if she went with this thing.

The laughter seemed to recede a bit and for just a moment her hand stayed the course. Let it go, let it go! the voice screamed, but of course she couldn't. Already, in her mind's eye, she saw Terri out there in her new back yard, playing with the friends who'd just come in through the back gate. She lurched forward and grabbed the towel, pulled it violently away from the nails, freeing the window.

Across the yard, near the back hedge, stood two little girls. They were facing each other with their hands clasped but their heads were turned and their eyes were on the house. Staring at the window. They were not moving and there was no laughter now. There was also no Terri.

In a second Patsy knew these were the two from the attic. She had no doubt whatsoever. They were dirty, their dresses caked with blood, mud perhaps, their hair in strings and their faces drawn and white beneath the filth. Their eyes huge white circles staring her way.

Patsy felt her hand go to her mouth to keep the scream down.

The girls loosed their hands and turned to face her, side by side. A sinister smile broke through the dirt on their faces and they turned as one and began making for the gate in the corner of the yard at the edge of the hedge.

Patsy knew she had to stop them. She almost broken a finger trying to wrench the window up, and when it wouldn't come she saw someone had driven a large screw into the wood above the runner so her effort was in vain. The little girls stopped as she pawed at the window and were once again staring her way, side by side. Their faces had changed on some almost imperceptible level and they were no longer smiling. The one on the left raised her hand and pointed at Patsy and Patsy's blood ran cold. The window was no use unless she smashed it and there was still the screen on the outside to contend with. Besides, she'd placed a large padlock on the hurricane fence gate after the encounter with the two on the path, whatever that had been. She'd catch them if she was quick.

She spun away from the window and raced out of her room and down the hall to the kitchen, grabbing the doorjamb to slow her before angling left across the kitchen to the side door. She wrenched it open and blew through the screen door facing the carport. Then it was a short dash left to the sunroom. She went through the doors like they didn't exist and burst out onto the back patio that opened on the yard.

The girls were gone.

She ran through the gravel pit that had obviously been used for a swing set or above ground pool in the past, between the pecan and red maple that flanked it, and out to the spot where she'd seen them. Nothing. She squatted to her knees and ran her hands through the grass. She peered into the hedge that paralleled the fence but could find no one hiding there either as she made her way to the corner where they'd been heading when she left the window. Sure enough, the lock was still in place. She walked up to the gate and put both hands on top. Her heart had stopped pounding but now she felt weak, finished. With everything. The empty lot still opened up behind her house on the pot-holed street and the sprinkling of houses on the other side. Patsy knew without doubt that just past those houses on the other side was the trail where she'd seen the two figures. It had not been the girls; that was another thing she knew for certain. Those had been adults, or something adult-sized. In fact they'd done nothing except slink away into the underbrush. At dusk, she shouldn't forget that. At dusk your eyes might trick you; a shadow might become a form it had no rightful inheritance to. Or even at midnight when you thought you heard laughter in the attic. All explained through confusion of the senses.

But now...

This was a new thing altogether. Ghosts in the daylight. Because there was assuredly no one in her yard or in the empty lot now. She supposed they could have jumped the fence and ran away before she got back here, but her mind told her they hadn't. They'd disappeared, like ghosts do. And this time Terri hadn't been with them. Patsy found her mind running over crazy scenarios of kidnapping and torture and placed a hand to her forehead. "You're losing it," she said quietly. "She's dead, dead. Why can't you face it?" She looked at the empty lot again, straining her eyes for footprints, anything to convince her the little girls she'd seen were real. But all she saw was grass and pine shoots. She looked up and a couple of birds circled high up in the air. She wished she were up there with them too, another fantasy.

So, she wondered. Where you gonna file this little tidbit? You don't know anyone in this neighborhood so it pretty well cancels out someone having it in for you, trying to drive you crazy. Second, now you're to the point where you're recognizing the ghosts, for Christ's sake. What's it going to be next? You got one foot in the fucking loony bin already. She shook her head and looked down at her hands clenching the gate.

You gotta see somebody.

It really was just that simple. If she didn't it wouldn't be long before she'd be enjoying the comforts of a padded room. But no psychiatrist, they were too expensive. What were those others...? Psychologists, yes, them. She'd seen a couple of them before in treatment. They weren't too bad if you found the right one and this time she'd be paying. She resolved to go inside, get the phone book, and make some calls.

This was not working.

# Chapter 13: The Mailman

Samuel "Jester" Johnson had been a mailman for longer than he cared to remember, almost twenty-eight years now. He'd got on with an aunt's help when he finished high school way back when the dinosaurs roamed the land. He'd known then school wasn't going to take him far. The motivation and patience weren't there, and he knew it, but at least he did have enough common sense to realize as much and move on. He'd been with the United States Postal Service ever since. Rain, sleet, or snow, just like the old saying. And he had to admit, the work suited him; there were a lot of people he knew who couldn't say that. It allowed him to do his favorite two things: walk and observe. The twenty-eight years of walking had sharpened his body and the years of observation, his mind. Book sense had eluded him since birth but his common sense had flourished in the vacuum.

He'd always taken country routes because he'd always been a country boy. He didn't care much for the hustle and bustle, people running here and there, always busy and nervous. It wasn't his kind of life. He lived in his dead grandmother's house a stone's throw from Gulliver's Creek. The land had been in the family since just after the Civil War, if the stories he'd heard were true, but history was the kind of subject that occupied little of his time. What was gone was gone. There were birds to look at, places to walk; all of these things here and now. Around his grandmother's house were trails old since before he was born. He'd run most of them in his childhood when there really hadn't been anything else within seven miles except the paper mill. He never tired of walking and the trails eased him.

He thought about his life a lot. Why he'd never married, or had any kids. Couldn't pinpoint it down directly. It just was. And not like he'd ever intended to be alone late into his forties. It was just something that had happened, along with plenty of others. Still, it wasn't too bad; he had his dogs, and of course the birds. The woods around his house rang with their songs. Many of them would line his porch when he sat outside, the dogs at his feet. Two twin Labradors, as black as midnight. They didn't even blink their eyes to the noise and activity.

And now, alone, that's where he sat. Rocking into the shadows that crept across the yard. He'd heard Ole Shake, the male, barking not far off (probably at something in the creek) but there was nothing strange about that. Those dogs were relentless when they had something on the run. So he sat and thought. Trying to find a common ground for his unease. It had been coming on a little at a time lately, so slowly and stealthy that he'd been unaware until it filled him. And even full blown it was hard to strike the stone of its origin. He'd didn't know many words on the subject nor take time to read much, but his unease, he would have had to acknowledge if the explanation were forthcoming, could be summed up in one word: foreboding. A sense that something was coming, that something was going to happen. Like someone watching who didn't want you to be aware of the fact.

It was the neighborhood, the old Leszno's Acres, he felt sure, though for no reason he could fathom. Not really, anyway. He'd been delivering mail there since the neighborhood came into existence, and up until now there'd been nothing to cause him any consternation. It was a damning thought. He liked organization. Some of the other letter carriers were amazed he could consistently finish his rounds so early, and asked him as much, and that's what he always told them. Organization. Putting things in order, having a plan, that was key. So now here he was working over this problem like a sore tooth. He taken to the trails when he'd gotten home, but today, and as of late, they did little to soothe him. The dogs had refused to accompany him the last couple of days and that was doubly disconcerting. It only heaped on the unease.

He reached between his legs and grabbed the flask, snapped back the cap, and drank a nice long swallow. It would do little to clear his head but right now he didn't care. Something was coming. Or maybe it'd always been here, but asleep. Jester had the idea it was waking. His grandmother had been one for signs, on the trees, in the sky, on the trails they walked together. She'd tried to teach him to no avail because it had always seemed too much like witchcraft, knowing what others didn't. And he didn't want any part of that. Why, there were things he sometimes did that made him uncomfortable now, and that was enough as far as he was concerned. But he couldn't forget. She had foretold his uncle's and dad's deaths. And they hadn't listened either, had scoffed at her warnings even, and look where it had gotten them. That goddamn old paper mill, nearly three years apart. Jester had only been a kid then and hadn't inquired as to the circumstances because he didn't see, then, how it would make any difference anyway. Now he wished he would have asked more questions, though, again, he didn't know how that would have helped.

He was near the last of his line. His mother struck dead in her early forties, now a lifetime ago it seemed, of a vicious heart attack. Likewise his grandmother several years later. His ticker, on the other hand, continued to roar along like a freight train. He did have a living sister but hadn't heard from her in eleven years and didn't figure things were gonna change any time soon. She'd gone off to California almost twenty years ago with some Black Panther, and when their mother died so had their relationship. In fact, Jester didn't actually know if she was indeed still living, but there had been no messages to the contrary.

But these thoughts only sidetracked him. Didn't lead him any closer to an answer. Something was wrong; he could feel it in the air. Regardless what he knew about signs in the sky and all the other hocus pocus, he did have a good nose for trouble and he could smell this one coming. He glanced up from his musings and tried to spot the sun through the thick trees surrounding the house. It had receded to a ribbon slash of orange along the ragged tree top horizon and would be gone for good soon. That only increased his unease and made him shameful. He hadn't been scared of the dark since he was a kid and goddamn didn't intend on going back now. This whole business was vexing, ridiculous. Nothing was wrong, nothing had changed, and that was that!

Except it wasn't and he damn well knew it.

The neighborhood was changing and that wasn't all. A couple times lately he'd thought, only thought of course, but there it was regardless, he'd seen something too. And worse, not in the neighborhood, but right here near his own property. He shook his head and took another swallow. He wasn't a particularly good drunk and knew his head would pound tomorrow, but right now with the sun cutting loose from the sky, it was the only medicine that worked. The mere thought of what he'd seen sent a chill along his spine and here he'd been the last few days trying to convince himself it'd been nothing.

His instinct, hell, his eyes, told him different.

*

He'd never considered himself much of a fisherman, but up until the incident he still tried to track out to the old Asdlundt Pond and catch a few catfish at least once a week. He figured there must be other fish in there but only on the rarest of occasions would he catch anything different. Or would anyone else for that matter. Of course they had the old nut, Horace Timms, who swore up and down you could catch a limit of sac a lait on a full moon, but even before it happened Jester hadn't thought of fishing there at night. The memories were too close of the bones he used to find sticking out of the mud when he was a kid (he knew nothing of the failed cattle experiment), and that had been warning enough as far as he was concerned. But the cats were good, most of them around hand-size which were perfect for frying, and the afternoons had always been good too. Soothing.

Up until last week. He'd seen someone, or upon closer reflection, some thing. He glanced to the right self-consciously, toward the end of the Acadian wrap-around porch. Just past the corner of the house there, out where the big live oak swelled at the extent of what he kept mowed, was the trail that led out that way. Like the others, it'd been there as long as he could remember. He and his cousins used to spend more time on those damn trails than they did sleeping. So they'd always been firm and clearly lined. Now, not so. They were grown over and ragged, blocked in places by fallen trees or wasted away in sinkholes. But if you knew where they'd been you could still find where they ended up. Came from living here so long. He stood up and walked down to the end of the porch and had a long look at the Big Oak as Mamma had always called it. And he also remembered how good it had felt just the other day to see its blasted top from a distance. Because, goddammit, he'd been lost. Face it, looking out at Big Oak, thinking these thoughts, he had to admit he'd somehow gotten lost. Maybe it was just that old folks' shit setting in early, though that explanation didn't fit real good. Because he was pretty sure he knew what it'd been.

He'd been chased. He'd been scared. He'd lost his way.

There it was. Another chill coursed his spine because he had not let his mind so readily provide this simple explanation until this very moment. But there it was. He couldn't disavow the fact that he slept with two loaded guns in his bedroom now. He couldn't deny the locked doors and the fretful sleep. No, denying was avoiding and that was what was adding to his unease.

He had seen something.

His mind went back to that afternoon, fishing tackle in one hand and pole in the other. A fresh pack of Kools in one pocket and the flask in the other. It was about a mile walk out to where the slough started, and from there you had to skirt its perimeter another quarter mile to the cypress-ringed pond. He had an old pirogue turned over by a tree and even though it was about on its last leg the water out there didn't get much deeper than nine feet or so except at the mouth of the creek. But of course the pirogue was as much protection as flotation because there were water moccasins as long as he was tall and as big around as his calf. He usually brought a gun with him but that day he hadn't. Not that he thought it would have done any good.

It had been an uneventful walk. It had been raining a little more than usual lately and the ground was a soggy mess, but the rise that hugged the south end of the pond always stayed firm regardless. Jester had a spot on the point where he did his fishing, a couple of five-gallon buckets to sit on and a big tree with a hole in the side where he stuffed his garbage. So far he'd been stuffing it for the better part of a decade and it wasn't full yet.

He didn't carry a watch but thought now it must have been right around five-thirty or so when he saw it. He remembered he was just getting ready to gather his stuff together (he'd pulled four nice cats from the drink) and leave because he didn't want to traverse the trail in the dark, when a touch of movement far off to the left caught his eye. Off in the bog that collected the run-off from the pond. At first he thought it must have been a nutra or beaver because it was moving and close to the ground, but then he wasn't so sure because it stopped. Like a statue in the mud, about waist high. He wasn't against eating either one and it was just then he remembered he'd left his gun back at the house. All he had was a pocketknife and that was as good as useless if he wasn't cutting fishing line away from a tangle. The second time it moved he got the familiar chill. He looked down at his arms and noticed the goose bumps and shook his head. He'd been out here all his life and had never had the acquaintance of such a feeling. Not even as a boy, but there it was.

Whatever it was that caused it ceased moving again.

He squinted in the gathering twilight but could get no better idea of what the thing was, but he did notice where it was. He'd have to walk right past it on the way to the trail, and for some unknown reason that didn't bode well. But with the tackle box and pole in one hand and the stringer with the four cats in the other he started back, trying to walk with a strength and purpose he had a hard time finding.

He stopped again about thirty feet away. His eyes had not deceived him; there was something in the bog and it didn't look like an animal. The shape was odd, the thing (whatever it was) covered, absolutely covered in bog mud. It looked almost like a broken cypress stump except for the fact that it continued to move at irregular intervals. Now it rocked back and forth as if blowing lightly in the wind, a sheet perhaps, winding back and forth. Jester also at the same time thought he heard a thin mewling sound coming from it but the wind through the trees could have fooled him.

Then it moved again and it was a man, or at least something man-shaped. Two bog-covered arms lifted out from the sides, pulling free of the muck. The hands at the end of those arms clenched and unclenched and the mud fell away in gloppy chunks. That's when Jester noticed the mewling came from a mouth as two white eyes opened above it on either side. Pointing his direction. The head swiveled around to get him head-on and Jester froze solid. His eyes told him one thing but his head told him another: his eyes that a person, a man probably, was sitting embedded in the marsh, while his mind frantically whispered that such a thing was completely implausible. Dangerously so. There'd been nothing there when he'd passed earlier and even if someone had been buried in the mud down here and he'd missed it, it shouldn't be moving now! He looked away from the thing and back to his feet. They seemed a long way away and as if they'd belonged to someone else. He could give them no command. He heard a squelching and looked back.

Whatever it was was getting up. A very big man. Covered head to foot with cake-black mud except for those milky white eyeballs still drilled upon him. It began to shake itself free with great, dog-like tremors, slowly pulling itself from the bog. Great wads of mud, clinging to what must have been ragged clothes bent the figure into a slump. But it seemed determined. The milky eyes blazed and Jester dropped everything he had in his hands. And, lucky for him, the sound broke him from his paralysis. Suddenly his feet belonged to him again and the first thing he did was take two shuffling steps backward and fall over a root. He came down amid the tackle and fishing pole (not even realizing until he got home later that he'd gotten a fish hook caught in his right thigh which proved a bitch getting out) and gulped air like a landed fish.

The thing was almost out now.

And that's when the stench hit. Jester remembered as a child finding a dead cow half-submerged by the side of Mill's Creek. He'd been the youngest in the group that day and one of the older boys had dared him to hit it with a tree branch. Not wanting to lose face he'd crept up to the creek side and laid a hefty blow on the cow's bloated side. The exploding stench as the branch broke through the rotted meat was easily the worst he'd ever encountered.

Until now.

This was worse because its bearer was not dead, not in the classic sense. This thing that made dead and bloated cows smell not so bad was almost completely out of the slough, and although the eyes showed no pupils, their whites remained fixed upon him. The mewling had turned into a chest-deep grunting, like a large pig's. The rotting stench surrounded him, and he thought he might puke. But he didn't...didn't think he had the time. The white eyes shown with a faint red haze now and its hands were reaching out for him, somehow no more than twenty or so feet away. It was trying to cut him off on the left side, he noticed in horror, trying to force him back, deeper into the bog.

It was this thought that finally got him moving, his action suddenly mirrored in the larger thing's also, turning fast to cut him off, its arms outstretched and fingers splayed. Jester had not expected anything so quick and ducked at the same time he skipped over a cypress stump. Nonetheless, he felt the shirtsleeve on the thing's side tear away, wrenching his own arm back, for a second. But then he was free and running. The thing howling behind him and beginning the chase. Because even though Jester never looked back he could hear mud slapping on the trail and breaking branches over his shoulder, a heavy rancid breathing he could not break free of. Every second he waited for a muddy hand to grab his shirttail and pull him into its clutches. So he ran and ran. At some point something did touch him on his shoulder and he spun in the opposite direction, off the path, tearing through brambles and vines with his hands out in front of his face, screaming himself hoarse as he ran. He finally tripped over a log and went sprawling headfirst into a mud hole near the base of a water oak. The second he hit the ground he knew it was over and he closed his eyes and put his hands behind his head to protect it from the claws. But none came. After a moment he rolled over on his back and stared straight up at the green canopy. It was all serenity and that fact alone goosed him to action.

He sprang to his feet and looked around. Right smack dab in the middle of nowhere, nothing he recognized. He had no idea how long he'd been running once he cut from the track, but at least there was no sign of whatever had been chasing him. But his shirtsleeve was missing and that was as far along that track as he wanted to go right then. He wanted home, the comfort of his shabby little living room, his bed. That was all. He'd have to leave these horrors for another time when he could give them more consideration. Now all he wanted was home. And once again, luck was on his side. He'd run into the furthest reaches of dusk and the shadows were thickening up around him. In another fifteen, twenty minutes he'd be left in total darkness and have to stay out for the night. With the mosquitoes and that thing. He'd always been good with directions, but it still took him until the last vestige of light was on the way out and a lucky glance in the right direction to spot the top of the blasted live oak.

When dark set in full he'd been standing on his front porch, reaching for the doorknob. The fishhook just beginning to pain him but paying it no mind until he was safely inside with his weapons loaded and within easy reach. Extracting the hook had occupied his mind and a good two hours of his time thereafter.

*

Now he wasn't sure. Of course he'd heard the rumors of the old dead fisherman out there near the pond but that was for old women and children. Not grown men, surely not grown men. But the shirtsleeve had been missing and there had been an oddly hand-shaped smear of mud where he'd thought the thing had touched him before he broke from the trail. So how to explain that? He didn't know because he could still see it emerging from the mud, the white orbs of its eyes. The stink. If seeing was believing, what was seeing and smelling? He didn't want to know. He tried to find an excuse, a plausible explanation; after all, he had been drinking. He didn't want to throw away that easy excuse to have to deal with the unthinkable. Maybe he'd been drunker than he thought. After all, he had run damn near the whole way back and that was close to a mile and a half from where he started. He didn't see how that was possible but his mind supplied a ready answer: You were running for your life, you idiot. That's why you were able to do it. If not you'd be dead. That quiet, secret voice. Drunk, indeed, it continued. You ran all that way as drunk as you wanna believe? Please.

He turned away from the corner of the house and walked back to his chair. Pulled the flask out of his pocket again and drained it before sitting down. Besides, since the incident he couldn't even get drunk anymore. And believe it, he'd tried. Every night since, he tried, with the same results. It brought back the memories but it sure as hell didn't chase them away. He felt the cold hardness of the Colt strapped to his leg. That was another thing that'd changed. He always carried a piece, no matter where he was. He knew it was against Federal policy but he really didn't care at the moment. If his piece could bring him any peace, then praise God, hallelujah.

But if the truth be known, he didn't think it would.

# Chapter 14: Talking It Out

Late that same afternoon Patsy flipped through the Yellow Pages until she got to the psychologists' listings. She was surprised at how many there were and had absolutely no idea how to go about finding the right one. All she knew was that it must be a woman. Luckily, that decision seriously cut away at the list. She also wanted one not too far away but not too close either. She didn't know anybody in her new neck of the woods and didn't want to go on the board as an out-and-out loony right from the start. She had an area map in the glove compartment outside and grabbed her keys off the hook hanging by the side door and went to get it. She went around to the passenger side door and opened it, sliding into the seat as she popped the drawer, and started rummaging around in the junked compartment for the map. She found it after a moment (bent and creased like an old, yellowed newspaper) and was just getting ready to get out after shoving the rest of the stuff back in when something on the floorboard on the driver's side caught her eye.

The butt of the Taurus .38 poked out enough that she could see the black pistol-grip handle. She kept it in a leather holster and she could see part of that too. She looked at it for a moment as if weighing some larger problem. Well, if she could see it anybody peering into her car could, and she didn't want to court trouble. She felt she was doing enough of that already. She'd not touched it since placing it beneath the seat before beginning the move and didn't want to now. But it was against the law to carry an unlicensed gun in an automobile and even though she'd known that from the start, not seeing it had kind of been like it not being there. However, there it sat in plain view. She placed the map in her lap and reached across to pick it up. It was heavier than she remembered, fully loaded with hollow-points, whatever those were. John had told her a lifetime ago that with a low caliber handgun you couldn't always count on stopping power (whatever that was) so you had to stack the deck in your favor by juicing the power of the bullet. Supposedly, the hollow-points did just that though Patsy had no idea how or why. She'd shot the gun no more than five times less than a year ago at the back end of a baseball park right before dark and had hit nothing she'd aimed at. John had assured her her shooting "wasn't that bad" and all it would take "was a little practice." But that had been the end of it until this very day.

Now she picked it up and turned it over in her hand. It felt powerful, but in a bad way, disconcerting. Like knowing a terrible secret about a person you didn't care that much for, knowing you could destroy them with a word. She placed it on the map and folded up the edges so no one would be the wiser. Then she got out of the car and went back inside. The telephone book was still open where she'd left it, her notebook eagerly awaiting names on its blank page. She set the map down on the table and the gun clunked against the wood. Now, that wouldn't do. Here she was looking up shrinks' numbers in a phone book with a pistol lying within easy reach. It didn't feel right, and right now she was looking for solace. In whatever guise it might appear. She didn't want to touch the gun again so she folded the map tighter and carried it over to the kitchen island and opened one of the drawers that was still largely empty. She slid it off into the drawer and brought the map back to the table. For the next forty-five minutes she poured over both documents, occasionally jotting information down in the notebook. Finally, she had eight names and addresses, none of them closer than five miles and none farther than ten. She felt it a good start, that she was actually doing something positive for herself now rather than uselessly (and dangerously, the quiet voice in her head warned) spinning her wheels. All she had to do was pick up the phone.

She looked up from her chair to the phone hanging dumb by the carport door. Three or four steps, then seven little numbers, and this whole project would be jump-started into action. That's all it would take. She stared at the numbers on the notebook page. Eight numbers, eight names. All she had to do was...

"I know, I know, dammit, I know," she hissed. She closed her eyes and lifted her right hand. She held out her forefinger and drove it down on the page, pressing hard, the nail biting into the tablet. Then she opened her eyes and looked down. Her forefinger was not on any name but she'd resolved to take the closest one and that one was clear enough: Deborah Skate. Her lottery winner was chosen. She smiled wryly down at the page, wondering how many patients Skate received in this manner. Regardless, it felt right because life itself had become much too much like a crapshoot, everything hinging on mere cheap coincidence. So be it, she thought. Fight fire with fire.

Strangely confident, she rose from the table and carried the notebook over to the phone. She briskly tapped in the numbers (afraid if she didn't hurry she'd lose her nerve) and before another five minutes were up had set the initial appointment. In reality, she was surprised how easy it had gone, but after all, psychologists were not doctors so there was no need for referrals from family GPs. Still, it made her nervous, having stepped into this new course of action. Until this moment she'd almost believed she could explain or disavow the encounters she'd been having since moving into the new house. This new wrinkle nullified all that. Now she was actually acknowledging (and not only to herself) that things could be about to spin out of control. The phone call confirmed it.

She looked down at the information she'd written beside the woman's name. Just a simple little date and time: next Thursday, 10 a.m.. Six days to go; six days in which to go crazy or sane enough to cancel the damn thing.

She figured to play it by ear and see what happened.

*

She came awake long before her alarm clock was set to ring at 7:30. In fact as she finally slid out of bed at a little after six, she had to admit it was unclear whether she'd slept at all. The night, in her mind, had simply been an exercise in futility, tossing and turning or rampaged by weird half-awake high-energy dreams that fled before she could get a grasp on any one. But worst of all, she was beginning to doubt the necessity of making the appointment. Absolutely nothing else had happened since she thought she'd seen the girls playing in the backyard. Since the phone call everything had been as peaceful as suburban life was depicted to be in the movies. She'd cleaned the rest of the house top to bottom, called a yard service to handle the lawn, made the necessary changes of residence and voting cards. And day or night, for the past six days, nothing had happened. Almost disappointing, really. It had begun to make her reconsider. Because, let's face it, sometimes new environments brought out seemingly crazy behavior in ordinarily normal people. She was sure she'd seen that on some TV program sometime, or read it in one of those trashy tabloid magazines. But regardless of the source, the idea held validity. Maybe the things she thought she'd seen (she did notice her mind had begun to unconsciously substitute that word) had just been evidence of a stressful adjustment period? That sounded like something she'd heard on TV too...but, something about it didn't ring true. She knew subconsciously her mind was trying to construct a solid reason for not going to the appointment, but regardless how she'd felt before, these new arguments seemed to bear weight.

By the time she stepped out of the shower she was on the verge of calling the whole thing off. It seemed silly now, with the clock edging toward her acknowledgement that something was wrong with her mind. How could a person she not know help her with a problem she wasn't even sure existed? It seemed ludicrous.

She finished toweling off and stood naked at the foot of the bed. She'd pressed her clothes for the appointment last night and they were hanging in the front of the closet, right on the other side of that door. Now or never, she thought. Take control of your destiny or don't be surprised what comes. Her mouth tightened into a line and she moved to the closet. For just a scant second she'd seen herself crumpled on the bathroom floor, her mouth and neck covered in blood, the gray flecks of matter dotting her nightshirt. And, finally, that was enough. She decided to go.

*

She found the address with no difficulty, the neat red-brick building at the far end of a long row of identical, neat red-brick buildings; some adjoining, some not. Some had been painted to help break up the monotony, and landscape crews had brightened the area with azalea rows, crepe myrtle bunches, and little islands of Bradford pears among the concrete and cobbled sidewalks. As she rolled slowly past the buildings she noticed this was also the home of CPAs, contractors, insurance firms and other health organizations besides psychology. She found Dr. Skate's brilliant blue sign hedged up alongside a cluster of roses and pulled into an empty parking slip close by, but on the opposite side of the parking lot. It was beginning to get hot and the slip was within a copse of tall pines lining the perimeter, but it was not because of the shade she parked there. She did so for escape. The whole long way down the drive had been one of suffocating nervousness. It seemed a hand was pressed to her throat, squeezing her breath away. Her hands shook and a cold sheen of sweat slicked her forehead. She turned off the ignition and sat still in the car, trying to gain control. She gripped the steering wheel and closed her eyes. Within the darkness the image of the two little girls playing in the backyard hunched into view. Once again, Terri was not among them. Patsy's eyes snapped open to the light and she quickly moved her left hand and popped the latch on the door, swinging it back and disengaging her seatbelt in the same moment with her right. She knew this imperative would not last and hurried out of the seat, walking stiff-legged to the same colored door as the sign. She looked at the Welcome mat briefly, took a breath, and opened the door.

The waiting room was not much bigger than her den and decorated much as she'd expect a residence to be: warm colors and serious framed artwork, an equal mixture of the right leather and upholstery, track lighting on the ceiling that pointed in all the right directions. The reception window was directly ahead, outlined in richly-stained mahogany, and a woman in her early 20s sat behind the glass, looking her way and smiling. Patsy noticed someone else (a patient, of course, she thought rapidly) sitting to the right, leafing through a Home and Garden magazine. For the first time she heard a Phil Collins melody carrying lightly through the room. The girl was reaching for the sliding glass partition; there was no turning back now. Patsy walked briskly across the carpet, looking neither right nor left. She forced a smile and said hello to the young woman seated before her.

"May I help you?" she the young woman asked.

"Yes. I'm Patsy Standish. I have an appointment with Mrs....er, Dr. Skate. Excuse me." The woman looked down at her book and circled something before looking up again. "If you'll just have a seat, it won't be long." She remained smiling but offered nothing more. Patsy turned from the window and moved right, away from the woman she'd noticed on the way in. Luckily, there was a wide range of reading material lying about and the next twenty minutes subsequently went by quicker than Patsy had ever hoped them to. Another woman, this one in nursing scrubs, opened a door to the right of the reception window and quietly gestured her way when Patsy looked up. As she stood, Patsy noticed the other woman covertly eyeing her over the top of the Home and Garden magazine. Patsy watched her as she crossed the room, but the woman's gaze never faltered. The nurse stepped back from the doorway as Patsy came on and gestured with her arm to step inside. Doing so, Patsy found herself in a narrow hallway, this too replete with expensive-looking artwork, the walls done in a relaxing neutral shade of beige. Straight down the hall, at the very end, a door stood open on what looked to be a conference room or some sort of large office. The RN, smiling like the receptionist had earlier, backed a few steps farther into the hallway, turned and opened another door on Patsy's right. "Please," she said, and Patsy moved past her into the small, typical patient's room. An examination table sat on her left, a blood pressure wall unit above it. A medium-sized supply cabinet and desk occupied one corner, while next to it stood a cheap office chair. The tiny, pencil-shaped camera mounted in the corner by the door she'd entered was missed by her quick inspection. Patsy went to lean against the table, wondering where this would lead. She'd never been to a psych before and had no idea what to expect, but this was surely not it.

The nurse sat down at the desk and pulled a medical chart from a drawer in front of her. She motioned for Patsy to sit down in the office chair next to the desk and for the next ten minutes they discussed her medical history. Not once did the RN mention or inquire as to what had brought Patsy there. The nurse's manner put her at ease and when the last questionnaire was complete, the RN thanked her and stood up. "If you'll just step this way, please, the doctor is waiting." Patsy almost laughed at the juxtaposition. In another second they were both in the hallway again, Patsy just a step behind as they headed for the large room at the end. The RN stopped before the open door, once more gesturing for Patsy to step through, and backed away as she did.

"Hello, Mrs. Standish," Patsy heard and turned left toward the voice. From behind she heard the door close. "Feel free to sit wherever you please," the woman standing in front of the desk across the room said. She was dressed in a simple, blue business suit, her hair brown and shoulder-length. She was slim and looked to be in her early or mid 30s. Her face was full, open, with large brown eyes set widely apart. She gestured to the room in general and pushed a leather swivel chair sitting in front of a large desk to face Patsy and sat down. Patsy spied its twin and walked over to it, putting her hands on its high back. Dr. Skate placed a pair of reading glasses she held in her hand on the corner of the desk just off her left shoulder and turned her full attention to Patsy. "How may I help you?" she asked.

"I'm not completely sure," Patsy began, running her fingers over the top of the chair. "Everything seems so complicated, but then again, that could just be me."

"Yes, it could."

Patsy took the remark in silence and moved in front of the chair, pursed her lips and sat down. "I think I'm losing my mind," she admitted, surprised it came out like that.

The psychologist remained non-pulsed. She put her hands in her lap, smoothed out the skirt. "What makes you think so?"

"My daughter, Terri, my husband, John...they were both killed in a car accident not long ago. I was involved, hurt, you know, but...I lived." She cut her eyes straight to the doctor. "I've been seeing things lately. I've seen Terri."

"Where have you seen her, Mrs. Standish?"

"In the attic of my new house. I bought it because I thought it might do me some good, but....There were others too..." and Patsy looked at the floor.

"You said you were involved in the accident. Were you driving?"

"No. John was. I was in the passenger seat. An eighteen wheeler blew a tire. He, John I mean, lost control of the car. There was a fire..."

"When did it happen?"

Patsy told her but Skate didn't write it down. Instead, she nodded her head and steepled her fingers in her lap. "You said there were others. Where else have you seen your daughter? Where else have you seen Terri," and the woman leaned forward.

Patsy shook her head, looked back at the floor. "No, that's not it, exactly. I've really only seen her once. But the 'others' I mean...I've seen other...uh, hallucinations, if that's what they are."

"What kind of hallucinations?"

Patsy bit her lip. She cleared her throat. "Children," she said. She put her hand to her mouth. "Dangerous children," she whispered.

The doctor nodded. "And where did you see these children? Were they with Terri?" It was Patsy's turn to nod. "What were the circumstances?" She watched closely as Patsy closed her eyes and shook her head. She waited until the woman looked up, but said nothing. This was important, the first few minutes; everything was already here. All she had to do was interpret it correctly.

"It's not just them," she thought she heard Patsy whisper.

"Come again," Skate said, leaning farther in.

"I said, it's not just them." Patsy bit her lip again, so hard it looked on the verge of bleeding.

"Tell me."

"I...I moved into the house not long ago, like I said. I don't know," and she fluttered her hands before her, "maybe, I guess, to try and start over. Put the past somewhere safe, where it's not always right there in front of me." She looked at the woman and Skate nodded encouragingly. "But...I don't know...these things never happened before...." Skate saw her struggling and came to the rescue.

"Mrs. Standish," she said. "Obviously you are concerned enough to come and see me, and I know this must be difficult for you. Regardless of what it says in the phone book or on my door, I'm a stranger, and a lot of the time it's hard to speak such things to people you don't know. Let me help you—" but Patsy cut her off.

"You're not the first head doctor I've seen," she said abruptly. Ahh, now we're getting somewhere, Skate thought, careful not to change her expression. "I might as well tell you now. I wasn't raised in a very...productive...family situation. My grandmother, who happened to be an ignorant, mad-at-the-world bitch, had me until I couldn't take it anymore, but along the way I did a couple of stints at Rehab. Once when I got busted for selling weed, and another time when I felt like I couldn't take it anymore..."

"It...?" Skate suggested.

"Huh?"

Skate smiled and sat back, giving her the semblance of more space. "You said, you couldn't take it anymore. What couldn't you take?"

Patsy looked at her and smiled grimly. "Life, I guess. Like now."

"Okay. Did you find satisfaction in these doctors when you saw them?"

"No."

"But still you came to see me." Skate let the statement hang in the air, untouched. Patsy looked back to the floor. "Mrs. Standish, you did the right thing coming here, whether you know it or not. I have not been forced upon you and still you came. That is the first step toward getting better."

Patsy looked up. "You think so?"

Dr. Skate decided to move forward. "You said that these...sightings of the children have not been the only thing."

"That's right, there's been other stuff too."

"Like what?"

Patsy whistled through her teeth. She cleared her throat. "Umm, things when I was walking. There are these trails all around the neighborhood, and one time, I think it was a couple of days before the children, I thought I saw something else."

"What?" Skate persisted.

"Something moving in these large plastic bags. Also I thought something was following me before that, a dog or something. Then, right at the end, two people standing side by side, almost like they were going to block me from getting out of there. I don't know if they were men or women or both. It was too dark. But there was something wrong with them. Something I couldn't put my finger on. Then they turned and disappeared into the ditch..."

Skate leaned forward again. "Okay, so you're not completely sure what you saw." Patsy shrugged because it was hard to say. "But," the doctor continued, "you don't have the same lack of reservation when it comes to the two girls and your daughter. Terri." She said the name to see Patsy's reaction: a flinch as if struck.

"And?" Patsy said, the tone of her voice starting to veer left.

Skate held her hands up and shrugged. "I don't know. I'm just restating what you said. The episode involving your daughter seems much clearer in your mind than these other...occurrences." She stopped and looked across the space at Patsy. The woman was pale; it didn't appear she'd been eating right lately. There was a look in her eyes that spoke of insomnia. She waited.

Patsy looked up finally. She was gripping the arms of the chair and didn't appear to notice. Her bottom lip began to tremble. Skate leaned back in her chair again, her face fixed for decompression.

"Mrs. Standish," she said, reverting to the formal. Sometimes it seemed to add direction, a sense of responsibility. "We may already be onto something. From what you've told me I know this: You are a newly widowed woman who also had the misfortune of losing a child. You were directly involved in the accident and by some act of nature you survived while your family did not. In my business I know this strikes at the very heart of a person, to the core. These things do not pass lightly. So," and she stood up from the chair. "You have, rightly enough, took steps to put the horrible event that separated you from your family behind you, and it must have taken an enormous amount of courage for you to do this. These...hallucinations...whatever you want to call them, are an important key to getting you well. This is the way your mind seeks to create a balance." She paced over to a wall of bookshelves, wall to ceiling, hardbacks jamming every inch. She touched a shelf but did not look at the books. She looked at Patsy. "Now," she said, turning her back to the bookshelves. "You've told me some very enlightening things already, whether you know it or not." She smiled disarmingly. "You are afraid of losing your mind. Many people involved in circumstances similar to yours have voiced similar concerns. That is not unusual. It's a defense mechanism, a way to get help. You have done that; you are here. Then there is the case of these hallucinations, as you call them. From the simple fact of you using that term, hallucinations, it shows you have not made a break with reality. You can still distinguish what is real and what is illusion. But, within these hallucinations, I think we can find even more. Let's look. One: you did not start having these episodes until the move. This, in itself, is not surprising. Nervousness and tension many times manifest themselves in strange ways. Two: the substance of the very illusions. You say the ones, excuse me, the one, involving Terri is really the only one of extreme clarity. The others are somewhat foggy. Again, not surprising. You have suffered two extreme losses and your mind is trying to make sense of them." She moved back to the chair and looked at it for a moment before si:tting down. Then she looked at Patsy.

"Maybe you're right," Patsy said very quietly. She fidgeted with the chair. She nodded her head. "Maybe you're right," she repeated.

Skate smiled. Patsy looked at her hands and noticed the nails were long and polished. Her own were short and bitten to the quick and she tried to hide them. "Things have just seemed so..." and Patsy shrugged. Skate nodded.

"I'm sure things have not been going well. Trying to make sense of the tragedy you've suffered has been harder on you than you realize. But you've started in the right direction. You've turned your feelings into words. That's the only true place to start."

Patsy ran a hand across her mouth. Then drew it up into a small, sad smile. "So what do I do now?" she asked.

Skate leaned forward. "You're doing it."

Patsy looked away, out of the closest window. "It seems so easy here. So clear." She looked back at the doctor. Then she began to cry. She did so for the next twenty minutes, going steadily through a box of tissues Skate handed her. But afterward, she had to admit, she felt a little lighter, a bit more self-possessed. And in the end she thanked the doctor and made another appointment for the following week.

# Chapter 15: The Phoenix Revealed

Tomas Lorca had not been home long, had in fact, only been peering through his living room curtains with the Range Finder binoculars for ten minutes or so, when he spotted Patsy's car at the far end of Samane Street. His own street had the added benefit of running perpendicular to hers, which was the only street that ran all the way to the back of the neighborhood from the highway. His property sat on the corner, his backyard close up to an as-of-yet undeveloped tract that stretched back to a finger of Miller's Stream about two-hundred yards in. Valhalla crossed Achin Street just off the right corner of his front yard and nosed up to the Dead End not twenty feet from where his privacy fence began. He'd had the fence people install a gate so he could access the woods behind his house but that had no hold on him at all, now.

Now, all he could think about was her.

The light gray Impala got closer, sucked into his view by the Range Finders. He saw her face and the response from his cock, the steady rising pulse, was instant. He took one hand off the binoculars and adjusted his jeans. He wanted focus, mind-focus above all else. Here was Purpose; he could feel it all over. She came up to her driveway, put on her blinker he noticed obliquely, and turned slowly, coasting up the drive until she was hidden from his view by first the maple in her front yard and then her carport. Nonetheless, he kept his eyes trained hard, hoping for anything to get another glimpse. Then it came. He pumped his fist into the air, twice, hard, in satisfaction, holding the Finders to his eyes with the other, a large grin spreading the expanse of his dark, flat face. He could only see her legs until she cleared the tree, but he concentrated to remember every second. He hadn't seen her since the hardware store and he wanted to remember everything. Every last detail. Stylish blue jeans, cut tight at the ankles, black tennis shoes. Perfect. And then she broke from behind the tree. He licked his lips. The blouse was yellow, pictures of suns and birds dotting her breasts, her beautiful angular back. She'd forgotten to check the mail, he could see that now. Great! Then, now at the box, both feet in the street. She'd have to walk back down the drive to the house and it was wonderful, wonderful! The binoculars pulled in her profile and there wasn't much, he found, he'd forgotten. His memory had always been good but he'd only had those few minutes in the hardware store and he'd been sure there was something he'd overlooked or forgotten. She took out the mail and went through it in the street. He saw from the stack it would take a minute or two, and he fumbled to unbutton and unzip his pants. Cursed himself for jogging the Finders up and down, but sprang his cock free just before she closed the mailbox and started back for the house. He memorized everything about her in the few seconds he had left, and when she was gone he set the binoculars on the side table, closed his eyes, and masturbated. When he was finished he walked nonchalantly into the kitchen, grabbed a roll of paper napkins, and returned to clean up the mess he'd sprayed on the back of the leather chair. Then he spun it around so that it faced away from the window and into the room. It sat across from a 32-inch Sony Home Entertainment Center, but right now, he had no interest in it whatsoever.

Right now, he was thinking about the past.

*

It had been years since he'd left the Dead Kids Brigade, as he bitterly thought of his string of foster homes and orphanages, but no matter how long he lived the conversation with Donald Brown would loom large in his head. He still remembered how smug and self-confident the older man had seemed alone in that room with a boy mostly ignorant of the machinations of the world. It brought a violent flame to his mind, thinking of him there in that other time. But regardless of the bile there was no denying the importance of the conversation. He remembered everything: the weather, Percy Applewhite's pansy-ass, the smell of the Confidence Room, the weight of the matter on the rest of his life. He'd felt it then, and now, he knew his instincts had been right. It was the other Momentous Moment of his Life. The second, because he knew the first had been The Fire, which was like a rock lodged in a vacant space in his head. But the meeting with the fancy lawyer had proven what he'd felt all along, the idea, the by-God conviction, that he was meant for something...unique. He had not been cut from common cloth. The lawyer had proved that, unknowingly Tomas remembered and smiled, with the contents of the file folder. Most kids in his predicament were set adrift when they became "of age" as those pricks like to call it. He, on the other hand, was one of the infinitesimal percent who actually came into something when the State had had enough. But, he couldn't forget of course, those other comments Brown had tossed about so frivolously, those things about Tomas being a "mystery man" and his strange periodic disappearances from public record. That was the final piece. The final key that had set the thing straight in his head. He'd listened cautiously to every word, sniffing for any clue that the man may have been onto him. Because, in point of fact, that was the very thing he thought the man had come for when Percy announced him. And then, to sit through those interminable minutes as the lawyer went through papers Tomas had not read, naming off the many places he'd been on his journey in the Dead Kids Brigade. It had been a wonder to him, really, those places. Brown had not mentioned a one that had been the scene of a crime, almost as if he'd been somehow invisible at the most opportune times.

He thought about her again, this Patsy Standish, imagined what it would be like in her bedroom, in her shower. Since the hardware store he'd dreamed of her almost every night. His imagination having no bounds, the dreams illustrating this point consistently until he could barely think of her without getting a hard-on. So intense had these fantasies become, one night a week ago he'd awoke in a sweat, his cock so tumescent he could barely stand to be in bed with himself. He'd gotten out of bed nude, opened the drawer of his nightstand and taken out the Colt .45 he kept there. In his half-awake, half-asleep state he'd actually considered going over there, breaking in, actually making the dreams real. Because, after all, he knew it could be, right this moment; all it would take was a little convincing. But breaking into her house in the middle of the night was another story. That bit of persuasion would have to be done with the .45. He'd hefted it in his hand, appreciating the weight, the power. He'd even stood up and walked over to his chest of drawers, fully intending to pull on a pair of shorts and finish the whole business, but at the front door he'd wavered.

Something dissuading him at the cusp.

Because he possessed the Power of Darkness; he'd acquired it years before in California. Another one of those "mystery" places Brown had referred to years ago, the one in between St. Paul and Concord. In St. Paul he'd been assigned to the foster care of William and Philomena Brumfield, both attorneys, and childless. A successful couple in their mid-30s with a three bedroom, two-story house on almost two acres just outside the suburban sprawl. They mainly handled accident cases, especially Great Lakes' injuries and deaths, and their success in these matters apparently freed them up for other, professedly, more humanitarian purposes. Tops on their list was child welfare and they each did many pro bono hours every year espousing everything from labor laws to sexual predation to unfit living conditions. Hardly two years would pass when the local papers or television stations didn't choose them for an "expose" article on the good they did their community. And at about these same intervals they would take on foster children for anywhere from six months to 15 years. Race never a factor.

How Tomas had come into their radar he didn't know. The facts were he'd simply been driven out to their home one day when he was twelve and dropped off with the couples' fat, island housekeeper. She claimed Dominican Republic citizenship and quickly won him over with her cooking and attention. She, too, had no children of her own. She said she'd never been married nor intended to and that was that. He was brought there at the end of a long, hot summer spent somewhere in Tennessee (the name had long since escaped him) and it was no more than a week or two after arriving that school started. His language difficulties and sporadic attendance caused him to fall behind and the first semester passed in a roller coaster of ups and downs.

Up until New Years Eve he'd not even known the house had a cellar.

Then, late that night, well after he'd gone to sleep (the maid, Maria, had tucked him in once his movie ended; the Brumfield's had gone out for the night) he heard his bedroom door open. He'd trained himself to be a light sleeper; being bumped from pillar to post had a way of keeping you on your toes. He'd opened one eye, glanced around the dark room. The line of the door, two heads near it, together, in the darkness. He could hear them whispering though he could not tell the words. He feinted sleep, putting his ears on high-alert. It seemed to him an argument because every few minutes the voices raised, though not by much, became almost vehement. Seemingly one of them trying to convince the other of a point. And as they talked the faint, lingering smell of alcohol began to drift in the room. Right before the bedroom light was switched on Tomas distinctly heard the phrase "it's going to happen, and you know it." He had no time to consider its import because the couple were moving toward his bed.

Tomas continued with the act, came up rubbing his eyes vigorously, glancing left to the clock radio, registering 3:17. The Brumfields still had on what Tomas took for their "work clothes" but he'd never seen them so disheveled. Both bore down on him with bloodshot eyes and the smell of alcohol got steadily stronger the closer they got to the bed.

It was the first time Tomas had ever felt fear in their household.

It would not be the last.

William sat down first, his wife standing just off his left shoulder. He looked at Tomas and reached up to loosen his already loose tie. His hair was no longer parted; now it hung down in the front almost to his eyes. He coughed and Tomas got a greater whiff of alcohol. He suddenly felt defenseless and wished he'd slept in his clothes. William opened his mouth and began to speak.

"There's something you have to see," he said and glanced back to his wife who'd peeled around his shoulder and now stood a foot from the bed. She still looked indecisive; he just looked drunk. Regardless, he smiled and patted the bed. Stood up and looked down at the boy, expectantly. Philomena took a step back. Their intention obvious, Tomas pushed back the covers and slid over to the side, putting his feet to the thick, comfortable carpet that blanketed the room. It was cold and goosebumps broke across his body. William looked back at his wife and nodded again, firmly this time. Philomena looked back at the boy and moved to the door. William also moved toward it and motioned the boy to follow. He did so, too tired to question, but uncomfortable in front of the two in just his underwear.

William disappeared into the hall and Philomena followed, leaving the light on as she left the room. The house was quiet as Tomas passed through the doorway and turned right. His bedroom was upstairs, a short walk to the staircase which led down to the foyer by the dining room. He could hear William clumping down the stairs now and saw Philomena in the darkness, her hand on the banister, waiting for him to catch up. She let him pass her by, barely catching a glimpse of her husband's back, almost at the bottom of the stairs now. He kept a tight grip on the railing because he could not escape the feeling she would suddenly dart forward and shove him down the stairs if he didn't.

By the time he got to the landing William had gone on, bumping several times against the wall as he headed for the door underneath the stairs Tomas had considered a broom closet or some such since he'd been here. Of course, why they would take the pains to lock such a door had crossed his mind a time or two, but people were entitled to do what they wanted in their own homes, weren't they? Now he wasn't so sure. He could feel Philomena closing in from behind as he stopped ten feet away and watched William fumbling with a set of keys he pulled from his pants' pocket. Just for a moment Tomas wished Maria was here, but William stopped the thought cold when he found the right key and placed a steely stare on the boy shivering before him.

"It's time," he said and unlocked the door, pulled it away from the wall. He reached into the darkness underneath the stairway and flipped a switch. Tomas heard a click and the area within the doorway was suddenly infused in a deep, red glow. William started down without another word. Tomas hesitated until a hand came down on his shoulder. Philomena, her face carved from stone. She pushed him gently and Tomas stepped through the door and into the glow.

His eyes didn't have to adjust to the difference; the glow only seemed to bring things out in contrast though the darkness still held a mighty grip. A short set of steps led down. The room broke open to the right and he went down, still followed closely by Philomena. A strange smell reached his nostrils and he fought to keep down a coughing fit. Silence appeared the rule down here.

The room below the staircase was a little bigger than his bedroom, from what little he could see. There could have been doors or other passageways toward the back walls, but again, things were so deep in shadow it was impossible to tell. Several of the places he'd been forced to stay had insisted he go to church and though he'd never liked it much there was no denying an altar of sorts held center stage here. It was surrounded on two sides by couches, and directly in front was a bed, set directly into the floor like a pit. On the wall, directly behind the altar, burned a red pentangle, a five-pointed star, its points connected by a circle. He didn't know much but he knew some; that star was the sign of the devil. Other, less familiar signs glowed redly eminent around the room. He thought for a second of the Fire that'd burned the coin's image into his hand. He suddenly closed his fist and ran his fingertips along the ridges.

William walked behind the altar and turned to face them. His eyes had changed in a dark, menacing way though his voice came out mellifluous, no longer slave to the alcohol. Tomas forgot about Philomena when the man pointed a finger at him. He smiled but in the darkness it was like a shark's. "Boy, it's time," William said again. "Everything in its time and yours is now." He raised both arms from his sides and tilted his head back. His hands splayed wide. "This is the chapel of Lucifer, our master," he said matter-of-factly. "Tonight you will join us." Tomas became absolutely sure he'd find the door at the top of the stairs locked if he raced back up there now. "Come here and sit down," William said, pointing to the couch on the left. "There are certain initiations...." Tomas did as instructed and by chance caught a glimpse of Philomena standing close to where he'd left her.

She was completely naked now, her clothes in a pile beside her.

Then she walked over quietly and lay down on the bed. Tomas looked from her, wide-eyed, at her husband. No longer even remotely tired. Scared, yes, a little, but the sight of this first live naked woman went a long way in dispelling that too. William was getting undressed also. When he was finished he came around and stood at the foot of the bed, his dangling penis disturbing as Tomas watched it. His wife lay before him, her legs spread wide. "For You," the man said, though he was not looking at Tomas when he said it. Then he stepped down into the pit with the bed and began to do things to the woman Tomas had only heard of in whispered conversations.

And after awhile he joined in. It was part of the initiation, they said.

He was a month past his thirteenth birthday.

*

Tomas sat nude in his armchair, relishing that long ago, lost time. The Brumfield's had been a revelation. He'd believed himself reborn after the Fire; he'd just never known as what. After the Brumfields there had been no question. He'd stayed with them for two years, the longest of any child they'd sponsored, they told him many times. And whether or not it was true mattered little. Here was experience, purpose. The Dark Lord had saved him from the Fire; there were many discussions about that. He liked the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing bit; this couple, a pillar in the community, and no one really knew anything about them. The use of the children took on a whole new meaning. Not that Tomas minded being used. From early on he'd known that as a fact of life; people would try to get whatever they could out of you. They'd use you until you were empty, and then you'd be discarded. The trick (and this is one of the things the Brumfield's reiterated to exhaustion) was to be the one pulling the levers. Selfishness was the natural way. All you had to do was study any piece or parcel of nature and that's what you'd see. Most people were simply blind to the facts, satisfied like bleating sheep; he should not be.

He also found out the Brumfields were not the only ones.

There was a League of sorts. The Brumfield's called it a cabal. According to their information, people from all over the world were involved in this organization. From all walks of life. Even though Aleister Crowley had made the idea of devil worship somewhat faddish in the late 60s, the group, as a whole, had turned away from the limelight upon his demise. They had to, really. There were far too many aspects of their...(and they were touchy about going too far into detail with him) organization that would not withstand public scrutiny. Of course, every idea has its fanatics and theirs was no exception. However, the ones who infrequently made the news and 'weird files' slot in the Prime Time hours were merely the fluff. According to William, these very fanatics were allowed to continue because they took attention away from the 'devout.' "But," he had laughed one night as they sat, the three of them in the cellar, one to a couch, "they were lucky that they weren't rubbed out of existence just on principle." It was a mysterious statement, one Tomas never had time to inquire about; the sessions before the altar would have won him over easily enough anyway, and he could have cared less about a bunch of "dim-witted assholes," as William liked to call the whole blanket-bunch. However, there did come a time when their teaching was done, when he'd let them take him to the very extent of their perversions.

That was when the Brumfields sent him to California.

For the next two years (one of those patches of gray that Donald Brown had alluded to in the Confidence Room) he lived right outside Los Angeles in a palatial estate owned by some European artist he never even met. The home had a permanent staff and the stuff of dreams passed through the arched entrance in the drive: rock and movie stars, politicians and statesmen, even religious figures. He'd been shocked at the faces, at the casual attitudes of these very public figures who walked the marbled halls, admired the paintings and frescoes on the walls and patios, mixed drinks in the fully-stocked bar, and ate at a table that would have served the Queen of England well, though she was never in attendance. Because this house had a cellar too, more formally, probably, a basement, much bigger than the one the Brumfields possessed. Only this basement contained a torture chamber. It had everything from an Iron Maiden to breaking racks and they weren't for show either. One night Tomas had watched a woman (a vagrant some Collection Group had scraped out from underneath an interstate overpass) slowly pulled to pieces as a crowd of twenty-five hardcores had watched two others turn the wheels. What had fascinated him that night, as he watched from underneath the folds of his coal black tunic with blood red sash, was the ease with which the gears meshed as the nude woman was slowly pulled apart, her left arm first, squeezing away from the socket with a taffy-like pull of skin while she howled like some common dying animal. The amount of blood had been amazing. She, like the other sacrifices, was later spirited away in a truck sent in the back alley entrance, arranged and paid for by unnamed sponsor. A price had to be paid. Every time.

For every circumstance.

He looked down, pulled from the memory, smirked at his cock. He considered it his Rod of Destruction, had even written the phrase down in a notebook he had lying around somewhere in his bedroom. It would bring doom. He stood up and walked over to the curtains. Reached up with his right hand and pulled a wedge he could look through. It was a very dark night. Across his front yard he saw the shade of a raccoon slide from one edge to the next, off into the ditch and out of sight. He couldn't see her house but he knew where it was.

He smiled savagely into the night.

# Chapter 16: A Day in the Life

Jester Johnson turned the mailtruck off Highway 27, left onto Samane Street. This was always the last stop (it was the closest to home) and when he chanced a look at his wristwatch, he found he was almost an hour ahead of schedule. For some reason, or none at all as the case may be (he didn't choose to wrestle over such things in his mind; there was simply not enough room), if there was to be a light day on a mail route that day should be Tuesday. This was Tuesday. Okay, but an hour? He remembered when he looked at the passenger side seat. His cooler sat right where he'd put it this morning, safely strapped in with the seatbelt, as if to save the sandwiches in case of an accident.

He'd forgotten to eat.

His mind had been wandering lately, disquietingly so. He'd not been able to shake the terror of whatever he'd seen in the bog (whatever had chased you, his mind was quick to supply). No, no, he told himself. Not that. Whatever you thought you saw. Nothing really, just a trick of the light, swamp gas. He pulled over to the side of the road near the ditch and let the Jeep idle. Tried to shut out the voice by looking out the window. The temperature hung in the upper 70s without the slightest hint of humidity (there was supposed to be a front moving in from the north this evening) and the clouds were fat and lazy overhead. A black rabbit emerged from behind a shard of broken culvert no more than twenty feet away and began nibbling in fits and starts at a clump of clover which did a pretty good job of hiding it. The sight (seemingly unreasonably) reminded him again of the cooler sitting on the passenger seat. He'd already organized most of the stuff for tomorrow last night (all the circulars and fliers and bills and leaflets) and didn't see himself with a lot to do this evening. But this freedom from duty did little to right his unease. He'd not been sleeping well. No, not since the...incident. His attack of panic after seeing something that wasn't there, that simply couldn't be there in the first place. He knew that now, would be prepared to swear it the gospel, but it didn't put him any closer to explaining what the hell had happened. He wrote it off as some weird anomaly, a compromising mix of signals. Scratch that, he told himself. Tried to write it off. So far he wasn't having any great success. "Lunch," he said aloud, trying to clear his mind. He nodded and pushed the Jeep back into first gear. Nestled over to the right was one of the ponds the developers had neglected to fill. Beside it crowded a nice little copse of oak and pine at one end. A dusty four-wheeler track crossed the ditch just ahead and it was no problem to get the Jeep back there as long as it hadn't been raining. He'd done it plenty of times before.

Jester smiled, armed now with this plan. It was a good day for a picnic, sunny skies, clean sharp air. Maybe it would serve to calm the irrational swirl of thoughts. Regardless, it couldn't hurt. He drove down the slight decline and crossed through the ditch on the four-wheeler trail. It was bumpier than it looked but the pond was no more than seventy-five yards from the avenue and the shade from the copse a beacon. He parked the Jeep in the shade of the oak and pine cluster, snapped both seatbelts loose, and grabbed the cooler. Walked over to the closest oak and sat down at its base. From here he could see the pond just fine. He took out both ham sandwiches he'd made this morning and looked inside the cooler to make sure the melting ice or pickle juice (he had a pickle in a Ziplock bag) hadn't gotten to the chips. No, they were fine. He unwrapped the first sandwich and ate it in silence, getting a little show from two, angry bluejays fighting over some shiny piece of something. The pond was peaceful, every once in a while its surface breaking in an expanding circle, him watching as it slowly rode back to invisibility. Soon, he was done with everything except the pickle and he didn't much want it anyway. He flung it out in the grass and leaned back hard against the oak, stretched out both arms, yawning gigantically. Oh yes, much better! Nothing really like a little impromptu picnic to get the old blood pumping. He piled his trash into the cooler and stood up, shuffled over to the Jeep, and placed it inside. Because this was a rural route most of the mailboxes were on poles by the street and all he had to do was drive by and stuff em full. Only today he didn't feel that impersonal; his legs were restless. He wanted to walk, needed it. After all, this was the last portion of his route and he was still forty-five minutes or so ahead of schedule. Also, all he had to do when finished was head back to his house and...

No, he didn't like the focus of this last line of thought. The day was too gorgeous, and by God, it was going to stay that way. Besides, there was one sure cure for sleeplessness and that was exercise. Maybe he hadn't been getting enough of it lately; maybe that was all it was. He nodded at the thought. Sure enough. He shoved the seat forward and regarded the last few remaining stacks of mail. The neighborhood was not all that big, compared to some he had to deal with, only about a hundred or so houses pitched along a couple of back-to-back rectangles. Yeah, he'd walk it today. What the hell.

He flipped the seat upright and got inside. He didn't intend on leaving the Jeep back here (there was an old tree house spanning the distance between two of the trees and boys would be boys), and he put the key in and turned the ignition. No, he'd pull out to Samane and make a right on Willow at the corner of the open area where the tree house and pond were. Willow only ran back a little way (four lots, and these only on one side) to a rusty metal swinging gate secured with chains and a huge padlock. Past the gate was a seldom-used track that trailed back into the woods and connected up with any of the multitude of trails back there, one of which where Patsy Standish had thought she'd seen the two ghostly forms blocking the roadway days before. He'd start delivering from there and if he got tired or fell too far behind all he'd have to do was walk back to the Jeep and wheel around the rest of the neighborhood like he usually did. He had an old Walkman (he couldn't believe it still worked but was damned if he was going to throw it away) he used when he walked. Had an assortment of Sly and the Family Stone, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, George Clinton, even a little Beatles to keep things rolling, and he rooted around until he found something suitable. Ahh, yeah. Stevie Wonder, Hotter Than July. He slotted the tape home, pulled on the earphones, and grabbed the pouch he'd placed the remaining mail in.

He smiled. What a day, he thought again, and started on his way.

*

A vague disquiet began to creep upon him soon after. He couldn't put his finger on it initially, but it came on soon enough, in fact descended while he crossed the street at the corner of Achin and Valhalla. Stopped him cold, instantly, right there in the middle of the street with the asphalt seam running away out of sight. The neighborhood was deserted. Usually, when he delivered there were cars in and out of driveways, kids racing down the street on bikes, ice cream trucks idling in the road, lawn mowers throwing out their plumes of grass. But not today. He'd passed down Samane to the first right, Stickler, and down to a left on Achin and hadn't seen the first soul. Not even a dog. Curtains were drawn, windows empty, gates usually left open now uniformly barred, no shouts of children even from the hidden backyards. Damn strange. And here the public schools had let out a little over two weeks ago. Probably all the kids were inside playing video games; not like when he was a kid and you were outside from daybreak till dusk. Lazy, he thought, shaking his head. He opened the Smithfield's box and placed their mail inside. Stood there for a second, lost, because the explanation didn't fit, simply didn't feel right. There was something else afoot here. For just a moment he felt the icy chill down his spine and actually shivered in the high daylight. He reached to his side and turned Stevie off. What the hell? Less than half an hour ago he'd been on top of the fucking world and now here he was getting the nerve-crawls standing on the side of the street with the sun beaming down on a perfect summer day.

Just like the porch, something wicked inside his mind whispered and he swallowed hard. No, it wasn't. Not like that at all...not like...except it was. "Now just wait a goddamn minute," he said bitterly. This was not like him, dammit, it just wasn't. His hand went back to the Walkman and he turned Stevie back on, louder this time. So loud it almost hurt. He determined right then to make the block and get back to the Jeep. This was not turning out as planned and he really, now, just wanted to be done. You need a break, his mind told him, though he knew he did not. But he did need to be finished, and the sooner the better.

It was while passing back down Samane, about halfway back to the Jeep and feeling a little better, even starting to wonder why, exactly, he'd had a case of the nerves on Valhalla, that he got the scare. At first the name, Patsy Standish, didn't ring a bell. And then he remembered the nut (what was his name?), oh yes, Miles Placard. He'd lived here and moved a good while back. A very nervous fellow, wouldn't hardly look your way unless you were running his direction. Always fidgeting with his hands and looking like he stole something. He'd packed up all his stuff and just left, never any word at the post office at all about stopping delivery. Jester recalled now (looking at the box) that by the time the For Sale sign had gone up in the front yard he hadn't been able to stuff any more mail in there and had had to report it to the Post Master. After that there'd simply been a memo in his carrel not to deliver anything else and as far as he'd been concerned the matter was closed. He stared down at the circulars in his hand with this Patsy Standish's name on them. He hadn't seen her yet though he had seen her gray Impala in the carport a few times. He flipped through the small bundle, the circulars (junk really) and something from the electric company. Probably welcoming her on her first billing cycle. "Hmmm," he said, noticing the name. Mrs., it read. Well that would seem to designate a Mister but he'd never seen any other car in the carport. In fact, he'd noticed a couple of times that she tended to park right smack in the center. Interesting, true, but none of your business, his mind reminded as he went to pull down the mailbox door. From where he stood, looking down, he thought he saw something scrabbling out from the darkness inside and instinctively took a step back just as a large, black spider raced into view and launched itself from the mailbox in his direction. In the split second before he jumped back he saw the fat, glistening poison sack gleaming in the air. Then the thing fell short and swung back and forth from a thick strand of silk, twirling around and around. Jester drew his hand back and watched the creature dangle, its legs reaching out in his direction. Every time it turned he caught a brief glimpse of the bloodred hourglass on its abdomen and disbelief spread across his face. "A black fuckin widow?" he said incredulously; the thing was huge. He kicked out with his boot and knocked it away from the mailbox, out onto the concrete drive that led to the carport. Crushed it under his heel in the next instant. Took notice that his hands were shaking when he looked back at the mail. He could no longer find the joy of the moments at the pond during lunch. He bent down and looked carefully into the mailbox. Nothing. He placed the mail inside and quickly made his way down the street back to the Jeep.

As he rounded the corner of Willow (almost back now, the voice kept saying) he saw the old man standing by the mail truck. Big guy, old-looking, tall, a rangy beard billowing out below his face. He had on jeans, brown boots, a red-checked flannel shirt. Long sleeved. In June? Jester stopped walking. The old man was in fact leaning against the locked gate in front of the Jeep, looking down the street right at him. Jester had never seen the man before. Of that he was certain. He tentatively waved but the old man just stared, never taking his hands off the metal bar that blocked access to the dirt road beyond. As Jester got closer the old man spit into the dirt at the end of the blacktop and ran a hand through his beard. Jester was close enough to see; whatever the man had spat seemed a bruised, blood red. He tried to keep his eyes off it. The old man pushed himself away from the gate and walked into the street, five or six feet away from the mail truck. He didn't say anything, stared.

Jester eased up, looking at the man's hands, gauging whether or not he had anything to fear. "Hey," he tried. He stopped before the door of the Jeep. The old man turned his face away and spit again. Jester followed it with his eyes and suddenly knew the man was spitting blood. "Hey, you all right?" he found himself asking automatically.

"You know me, boy?" the old man said. His eyes screwed up into two tiny points of malice.

Now it was getting personal and Jester didn't like it. He'd heard too much of this shit in his time. Fuckin cracker. "Can't say I do, old timer. Who are you?" he said, glad for the impetus of anger though he hardly felt it. In fact, he didn't like being back here right now, no way. Reminded him too much of that walk to the pond that day. There was still no one else moving he could see. Not one goddamn mower going.

"Well, you will, boy," the old man said. "Names Carol and you'll get to know me real well by the time this's over." He spit again, this time on the ground at Jester's feet. Blood again, deep red, coagulated. When Jester looked back up the old man was already on the other side of the gate, walking off down the dirt trail. He wasn't looking back anymore and turned left on the gravel track ahead and disappeared moments later in the underbrush. For just a moment Jester thought about calling out, or pursuing the old man, but in the end all he did was get in the Jeep and get the hell out of there.

# Chapter 17: Subtle Changes

On June 16, 1995, Patsy Standish had been living in her new home for almost three weeks. In that period of time she'd already seen her dead daughter once, been accosted (sort of, she told herself) by two other unknown ghostly children several times, contemplated suicide, been frightened witless on one of the subdivision's trails, and for the first time in her life actually sought out the help of a psychologist. If someone had read off this tally sheet and laid money on the odds, it would have most assuredly remained in the bank, drawing interest. However, time ran in one direction and what was done was done. That much was anathema. What she didn't know was that she wasn't alone.

A pall had fallen as of late. The darkness was soon to descend.

Elizabeth Tanksley had taken to resting in her chair at night rather than waste away her restlessness in bed. She had not slept in ten nights, at least not for more than an hour at a time. And when she did, her sleep was haunted by fires and smoke; screams that could have come from the bottom of deep wells or the hollows of forbidden caves. Her ears had sharpened too, and just on the verge of her perception were growing whispers, a steady stream of gibberish that seemed to take on meaning as each day passed.

In the Simmons' home over on Brighten Street no one had been seen for a week. The one car the family owned had been sitting in the carport collecting dust, but still, no one living nearby saw any cause for alarm. They were a strange bunch, were the Simmons. Neither the husband nor wife worked, at anything. Not even in the yard. They had a man who handled that end and his check was always mailed. Always. When they'd moved in (one of the first in the new neighborhood) they'd quickly installed thick curtains at every window and these were never drawn. They had two kids (home schooled, the ones who chose to guess probably suspected) but they were never seen either. Sometimes young voices could be heard from behind the wood fence that encircled the backyard but it never went any further than that. No one had ever seen them. No one ever would now either. Alive anyway. Three nights before and with the air conditioner set at 72 degrees, the heater had suddenly kicked to life. Even though the unit was comparatively new there was a malfunction. It had poured carbon monoxide into every room before the oppressive, encroaching heat could rouse the family, and they had all slowly died, poisoned in their sleep. The heater had just as unexplainably kicked off several hours later with the temperature hovering at a stifling 97 degrees and all four of the inhabitants as dead as coffin nails in their beds. That had been a Monday. Today was Friday. They would not be discovered for another six days, and then only after the Pikrens, who lived next door, called to report a strange lingering smell in the air.

In one dark little house on Maple, a woman, Gretchen Mobley, had gone to work for the last four days in a state of shock. So far, no one had noticed anything because she handled shipping for a small steal fabricating plant just outside Angle Sides. She too, had taken to hearing voices at night, but these had soon developed into full-blown conversations between whatever it was and her. Nothing had been shipped to where it needed to be since the first of last week and from the looks of it, nothing would until her snafu was discovered later in this one. She wore long-sleeved blouses to work and her arms were criss-crossed in the tangled lines she'd carved in both forearms with her rather long, incredibly strong, fingernails. She was careful to keep them bandaged so no one would notice any seepage through her clothes.

One of the crucial beams in the treehouse near where Jester Johnson had taken his lunch twisted out of true during a short summer squall a couple of days before, and was a waiting deathtrap for any children who might happen along.

Tomas Lopez had called in the last two days running, complaining of excruciating headaches, though he never took the time to call a doctor and set an appointment. His eyes had become super-sensitive to the light (as if he'd stared straight into a welding arch without protection). He was living off Codeine and whiskey.

Four dogs and nine cats had disappeared and the Lost posters were just beginning to pop up on selected STOP signs and nearby convenience store bulletin boards.

One of the five generators used to power the neighborhood (this one located far back in the woods just west of the defunct bridge and on the site where a torture/suicide had occurred more than thirty years before), had begun to send odd readings and was scheduled for a maintenance check in the next cycle.

A whole nest of squirrels had become infected with rabies and ravenously patrolled the neighborhood and surrounding vicinity for water and relief from their agony.

Tempers were short, revenge seductive. Temperatures had begun to fall five to eight degrees lower on Leszno's Acres during the night than the area forecasters were aware of. Blood ran freely from a hole in the ground not fifty feet from where Patsy had spotted the two strange figures several weeks before. Phone calls were not getting through. Television channels were often fuzzy for hours at a stretch, though never when a service man was on hand. Figures began to move unbidden in the wooded stretches that surrounded the neighborhood.

A great unsettling prepared itself.

# Chapter 18: The Chronicler

Miles Placard was in a quandary. He hadn't been able to keep anything solid down in a week and had already lost nine pounds. The only thing he could stomach were certain protein drinks and just the thought of another one sent ironic waves of revulsion through his system. However, he (unlike Tomas Lopez) had been to see a doctor, a GP in Sylvan, a short fifteen-minute drive from his new home. Dr. Francis Malone had listened silently as he'd gone through the list of his ailments and then run a whole battery of blood and urine tests to try and pinpoint their focus. So far, nothing. Francis had even suggested on the third visit that the problem seemed more psychological than physiologic. Sometimes these things just had to run their course.

So, yeah, but in the meantime he was still sick.

He looked down at the small scrap of paper lying on the countertop in front of him. He thought acidly if he didn't know Frank Meldrum down at Bell South, the paper would not have existed. Or at least his ability to know the name and phone number of the person he had scratched down with his trusty Cross pen. Patsy Standish. Every time he looked at the name he felt a tight hand grip his heart. A shadow falling across his life. And even though he knew nothing about this woman, he did have something in common: he'd lost his wife as she'd lost her husband. They'd been married eight years and she'd died childless, leaving him the same. But that was not what had a hold of him just now; he'd long since resigned himself to the fact of Debbie's death, to the fact that he was alone now and forever. All that was not new. No, what had him now (after all the tests and appointments with Dr. Malone), was simple cowardice. He felt he'd somehow, and not quite unwittingly, tricked another to stand before a firing squad that had had their weapons pointed at him.

It wasn't what he'd intended. Surely...

Bullshit, the voice spat back, the one that'd been hammering him lately. It's exactly what you intended; just not like you thought things would unfold. He went to shake his head and stopped. The voice was not far off the mark...but what would anyone have done? That was the question that required a great deal of thought.

His mind went back to 9535 Samane Street.

He'd moved there in the spring of '92 with his new wife of seven months. He handled insurance claims for Allstate and she'd been a sales manager at a women's clothing store, Dorrie's Retreat. They could have afforded something a little bigger, but it was just the two of them, with no plans for any others; at least as of yet. Thinking back brought on the familiar nostalgia, the days when everything had seemed wine and roses. They'd been happy, secure.

And he'd bought that goddamn house.

In retrospect, that had been the end of it all. Right from the very fucking start. He'd had a brother (still had, in fact, even now rotting away in Angola from a botched burglary attempt ten years before; he sent him a card at Christmas) who'd been in trouble from day one. He'd never been able to get anything right, as if he'd been born under a bad sign, though Miles didn't ordinarily cotton to such thoughts. Or at least he hadn't before. Life had a way of proving things that were best (Miles thought) left unknown. But his brother...Miles had always thought of his brother's life in the terms of a huge cow pasture. And in this pasture waited one, exactly one, pile of cow shit. All that space and just one pile. But it hadn't mattered for Avery; anytime he chose to walk through that field he still stepped in that one measly pile. Everyfuckingtime. Like it was written down somewhere.

But now it seemed the pile of shit was not his brother's alone.

Perhaps it was a curse, a curse on his whole line, and he'd tried to pass it off on someone else. Yeah, and who wouldn't? he tried to rationalize but his conviction wouldn't hold. Because he wasn't a bad guy. He'd even left the box right there in the attic for anyone to find.

And you thought that would do what? the voice asked again for the millionth time. Again he shook his head. Impossible to know, really. It seemed to him now that he'd had some plan of warning but, really, if what he suspected about that damn place was true, his little warning would be small potatoes.

Yeah, well...but he had left something. Nobody had left anything for him.

*

Since childhood he'd always written everything down. He was the first (hell, the only) boy he ever knew who kept a diary. Every day, Sunday too. Right now he had one whole bedroom devoted to the past; heap after boxed-heap of worn and beaten journals, his name on every one. Whatever passage of time they covered scrawled underneath. And even though he'd tried to keep his passion shielded from the world there had been people over the years who'd discovered and called others' attention to it. He'd been the "writing sissy," the "scribbler," "pencil pusher," "ole cross Ts," and a handful of other colorful descriptions. If he wanted to remember them, all he had to do was thumb through the pages of his life and he'd find them there. He'd left out nothing important. No matter how much a name hurt, or a situation, or a whole school year, he'd left out nothing. Sometimes even his co-workers called him "The Scribbler" but he just let it roll off his back. What the fuck did they know?

He was "The Chronicler" and that was it. He'd always been.

But he knew, sitting there in his new house, gravely aware of the past he had entrenched himself in, that his life had not been so bad. It'd had its ups and downs, like everyone else's he supposed, but it had never gotten unbearable. Until now.

He looked down at his writing desk. He was not one to write just anywhere. It had to feel right. The room had to be conducive to his needs, not too much light, cool, accepting. The first thing he'd done with this new house was pick out a bedroom to turn into an office. The second had been to paint it blue. The blue of Destin's surf, out past the first breakwater. He had it written down, had everything written down. He guessed that was what made him a good adjustor because he never missed a trick. If something was in question, all he had to do was go back and look it up. He even suspected it made a few of his fellow adjustors a little bit jealous, this uncanny ability to remember everything about seemingly every particular case. But then again, he was "The Chronicler," wasn't he? Could he expect anything less? Could anyone?

His eyes rode over to the pile of journals he had stacked in a corner (the farthest corner to be exact) of the room. He knew the dates without looking, had pulled them for the very fact of those numbers. March 3, 1992 to April 17, 1995. Just over three years, Christ, over 1,000 days! It was hard to believe those kinds of numbers now, sitting here at this desk, miles away, a lifetime away. Indeed, hard to believe, but the evidence stared back at him from the corner like a dull eye. Seventeen standard journals, the kind you picked up at Dollar General or Hallmark stores (if you didn't mind paying a little extra). Every one of them filled with his tight, precise handwriting. He'd wanted to leave more for the next occupant of 9535 Samane but he never once considered leaving the journals. They were his lifework (his real lifework) and parting with them would have been akin to leaving an arm or leg behind as he left. But as hard as it'd been to delve back into the horrors those journals contained, he had gone back and tried to piece together a warning of sorts, something the next person (or persons) would be able to hold and say: See? I'm not crazy. Here's proof. Miles just hoped it wasn't too late because he knew how people were. He'd been the same. Even faced with that list of horrors he'd taken the pains and time to write down, he'd still held to the idea that the fault was his own. That something had gone awry with his mind, that he was not seeing things as they really were. People were like that. Quick to place the blame on their senses rather than admit what they saw didn't fit the patterns they were used to. Miles sensed this basic fault came from the act of dreaming. After all, that's what he'd suspected for the longest time, that somehow the things he saw were only manifestations of his sleeping mind, no more real than a talking monkey. Of course, he'd had no idea why (no text to consult), but that hadn't stopped him from thinking such things. In fact, it had made it easier. That way he hadn't thought he was going crazy. He'd been like Ebenezer Scrooge, rationalizing the supernatural off on a bad stomach, or more pointedly, poor sleep. But, gradually, those rationalizations had worn thin.

It had finally been the finger that did it.

And strangely, it had been after a quiet week: no sounds from the attic, no phantasmagoric blood splattered floor to ceiling in the bathroom, no creeping forms in the house at night. Only a finger, as dry and desiccated as some small stuffed animal hanging in a hunting lodge. From the smallest instance, the greatest illumination, he thought, wrote it down on the inside cover of the journal closest to him. An original? he wondered, because its irony cut to the bone.

He remembered walking into the kitchen early that morning (it had been a Saturday) and turning on the coffee pot. He'd walked down the driveway to fetch the paper (he knew every move, it was all written down) and glanced at the front page as he made his way back to the carport door. He'd spread the paper out on the island, gave it a cursory flip-through as he waited for the coffee, crossed over to the refrigerator to see if they still had anything quick to put together for breakfast and noticed they didn't (he was in no mood for a pepperoni Lean Pocket). Backtracked to the cabinet where he got a coffee mug, filled it to the rim, black. He'd still had the paper in his left hand, peering at it over his glasses, when with his right he'd opened the drawer to get a spoon. And that's when he'd seen it, a little piece of bone-white stick, he thought at first. But no, that wasn't quite right. It was ragged at one end and had a disconcerting fleshy quality now that the first glance was done. He dropped the cup then, heard very faintly (as if from a long way away) as it shattered on the tile floor, felt very faintly the splash of hot liquid against his bare calf. He'd reached in for the pair of tongs, gripped the two-inch piece of whatever-it-was from among the rack of forks where it lay and pulled it free of the drawer, placed it on the paper. Pushed his glasses high up on the bridge of his nose and squatted down to get a better look. A finger sure enough, there was no denying what he saw. He reached down and poked it with his own finger, appalled and disgusted at the rubbery, wrinkled texture of flesh on bone. Bloodless.

And that had been that, the moment when he knew it was not insanity, or stress, or simply a joke his senses visited upon him for reasons unexplained. At that moment he knew everything was real, all the questions he'd had in his head answered.

But there had also been his damnable curiosity. Without that, he thought, he knew in his bones that Debbie would still be alive.

*

He stopped writing and looked up at the clock. Almost noon. His stomach was beginning its first tenuous rumbles and he thought about getting up and putting a frozen pizza in the oven. He was usually a light eater and that would be enough for the whole day the way his nerves were acting up lately, but he wasn't quite ready. His exercise this morning (because that's what he called this daily writing process he so religiously devoted himself to) had opened up new avenues in his mind.

Lately he'd begun to fear for his soul. Strange, this, from an atheist. It would have been laughable had it not been true, but there it was. Out in plain sight and twice as ugly. He'd never been religious for a scant moment in his entire life, even when Debbie died, he'd never once prayed for peace or redemption or whatever the hell it was believers did for solace. He'd simply written it out, let his mind string out all its uncertainty and woe in letters and phrases. Making real what had until that time been merely loose strings floating aimlessly around his mind. Even the finger had not changed that. But it had not been the sudden insight of affirmation of God that he found then, but the terrible realization that His Other could prove infinitely more lethal. And as things turned out, more terrible than he could ever believe.

It had been a Thursday, a little over a year and half ago. Debbie had complained the night before of a "fierce headache" (her exact words) so when he'd awakened to get ready for work the next morning he wasn't altogether surprised that she wasn't feeling well. But she was a good employee, hadn't taken a sick day in all the six years she'd worked in the clothing store. He'd gotten her some Ibuprofen, kissed her on the forehead, whispered something sweet into her ear as he'd prepared himself for the day. She'd smiled wanly and told him she'd see him at dinner and he'd patted her face before leaving for work. And that had been the last time he ever touched her while she lived. Of course he wasn't a callous man, his job forbade such an attitude because, let's face it, in the insurance business, if you can't at least feign concern for others' troubles, your tenure would not be long. He never feigned anything and had been in the business for the better part of twenty years. He called several times from his rounds that day, with every attempt receiving nothing but the quick cut-over to the answering machine. He left messages, blew her kisses through the line. He even managed to leave the office at 4:30, even then with a small drift of papers on his desk demanding attention, waving off until tomorrow a request from a fellow adjustor (a new guy on the job, Bob Wilson, fresh out of college and as green to the world as a chick in its nest) to help him straighten out some twist he'd managed to entangled himself in.

He pulled into his driveway nineteen minutes later (that was another thing they'd liked about the house, its proximity to both of their workplaces), not at all surprised to see her car where he'd left it this morning. He let himself in with the key, holding another small drift of papers from the mailbox in his other hand, and placed them on the counter just below the hook where they hung their keys. And yes, there were Debbie's. But that bit of normalcy didn't damp his growing concern a second later. The kitchen was a mess, untouched from the previous night, which was strange. Debbie was a fastidious cleaner and even on the days she felt punk, it was seldom enough to keep her from her rituals. But no, dishes were piled in the sink, the floor still needed mopping and she'd made a comment about that yesterday with the headache. A vague sense of disquiet snugged up close to his chest.

"Debbie?" he called. No answer. He left the kitchen/dining room and passed into the living room. She hadn't been on the couch; there were no blankets or pillows. The remote control for the TV was still right where he'd left it the night before: on top of the Sony. "Debbie?" he called again and this time he thought he heard something from down the hall. Slippers, maybe, on the laminate floor. But no answer.

His breath came a little shorter.

He entered the hall from the living room and the distance to their bedroom door had never been greater. He knew now, in hindsight, that it had been the rest of his life spread out before him, receding into a nothing future. Running the gauntlet of the beast. Sometimes you had to admit you were beaten, let's face it. He hadn't called her name again, not until after he saw her, and then only in disbelief. The last couple of steps had been the hardest, that too, he had to admit. He'd known. Of course it had shocked him but he'd known right at that moment, halfway down the hall. Everything had coalesced into shape. The rest inevitable.

The door had not been shut but it was pulled-to enough so he couldn't see the bed from the hall. All he could see was the window, its shades still pulled tight against the sun outside. And that was bad too, just another little aside that everything was not all right, that pushing the bedroom door full-wide would change the rest of his life. Debbie was (had been, his mind kept chiming in) a sun-worshipper and Miles had always thought if you had to worship something, the sun was probably your best bet. Debbie had sure thought so. She'd rather vacation on any beach than enjoy the poshest indoor resort. She'd affirmed a hundred times that the sun was healing, and here the shades were drawn. Like a viewing chamber in a mortuary.

He saw his hand at the end of his arm reaching out. Touching the cool surface of the bedroom door and for just a moment freezing there. All power left him and he saw the blank surface of his remaining life, all shades of gray and black, an extending impenetrable darkness. For a moment he thought he heard the skittering footsteps behind him in the hallway, perhaps terrible things (the things in the attic! his mind screamed though he ploughed ahead) coming up from back there to sink their fetid nails into his back, to drag him through a bloody hole in the floor to everlasting darkness. But he did not turn.

He pushed and the door fell back with a tiny whine.

He was still surprised he had not gone crazy then, blanked out and ran along the streets in a wild-eyed daze, screaming, tearing his eyes out. But there were worse things. Because many days now he wished he had. Just gone tearing out of that house like some certifiable maniac to fall somewhere in the arms of control, somewhere where he'd never have to decide another thing for himself again. At night now, that was a pleasantness, a sweet idea that scorned his cowardice of the moment. Someone would have had to take him away, and in that probable padded room everything would have ended. There would be none of this.... But he hadn't.

Debbie had been right where he left her. The room was demolished, the bedside lamp splintered at the foot of the bed. The valise he hung his clothes on likewise. Wet, bloody masses dotted the walls, seeped down on the floor. And then he had Debbie, framed perfectly in the madness. The sheets had been stripped from the bed and she was nude. Her legs splayed out to the corners, her arms limp at her side and placed in synchronicity along her thighs, a broken doll. Scratches covered her chest, legs, tufts of her hair were scattered on the bare mattress. But her eyes were the worst. Even from his distance at the doorway her eyes remained aghast in their sightlessness, unable it seemed, to distance themselves from the enormity of the horror that had been visited upon her.

He tried to move forward. Couldn't. Closed his eyes and opened them slowly and found nothing had changed. Tried to speak her name and choked. Fell down to his knees. Felt his heart constricting in his chest. Pulled himself back down the hall, bright stars flashing in front of his eyes, through the living room again, finally into the kitchen. Fought the phone from its cradle. Dialed 911 in a fugue. Remembered nothing else until he was gently shaken awake by a paramedic sometime far in the future.

*

He had fled.

In the end he had taken what he dared and fled like some fucking refugee. He had met the face of his enemy and declined the invitation. But only after his wife had paid with her life. Oh, now it was easy to remember all the conversations they'd held, talking scarcely louder than second graders in the library. And always his reasoning, his fucking logic. They couldn't make their investment back; they couldn't run like children from ghost stories. Nope, they couldn't do anything like that (not in the face of how the world ran on hard facts) and they had stayed. Even as Debbie had slowly slipped into madness (he knew that now, could see it on his own face in the darkness of night or the early morning light of morning, when the truth was plain) he had held to his guns and denied that there were stranger things in the world than have been imagined. Only now he knew: everything that could be imagined was only a small token of all things that were already in existence.

The police and the paramedics had come, taken them both to the hospital and he'd been the only one to leave. A day later. He had walked out unaided and his wife had been transferred to the morgue, shut up in one of those stainless-steel drawers, and left until he came up with arrangements. He could hardly recall the funeral. It was simply when the darkness had descended so deeply around him he could no longer focus on anything but breathing, moment by sucking moment. But it had passed as all things do and since he hadn't died he moved forward also. He never spent another night in the house. For a solid month he lived in motels and only ventured inside that black place during the heat of day when the sun was at its most powerful. He spirited his journals out during these times, piecing together the scrapbook he'd left in the attic when he was finally done.

But he'd since found out. He wasn't done. Not by a long shot.

# Chapter 19: Locked In

Fourteen hours before the ambulances arrived Patsy awoke from a fugue state. That was the first word that crossed her mind because it couldn't really be called sleep. In a way, she had been aware of her surroundings: the living room with the TV armoire directly ahead, off to its right side, the fireplace, the two matching armchairs off to the left of the couch where she rested. And as she gradually came around she realized her confusion: the TV was playing some black-and-white quality reality-show of a large, consuming fire. But she could recall no details, discern no vagaries. Not to mention, of course, the fact that she felt the room was filled with others, a silent contingent of on-lookers who crowded, lumped into her space with a deep menace, as cold as she imagined the surface of the moon to be.

She rose up from the couch, only now aware she had dozed off; the familiar leaden confusion a conundrum from which she could not escape. This was not the first time she'd made the acquaintance of such an emotion. Back in the days before John there had been many, and in much worse circumstances. Alcohol had done it a couple of times but never like drugs. Never. Back then she'd had access to just about every mind-numbing, mind-frying concoction known to man and she'd done them all with the intensity distilled from a life of rebellion. In those long lost days she'd never given any mind at all to the future; there was only the here-and-now, a chance to be grown and capable of making decisions, regardless how bad they proved to be. Because she hadn't cared then, she hadn't really begun to care until John, and then only truly after Terri was born. She even now remembered late one night (early in the morning, really) behind the wheel of someone else's car, idling at a red light and cursing her luck in having to be the one, the designated one, to bring all these fuckers home. She'd suddenly caught herself cursing quietly in front of the light that was now green, the car behind her honking furiously to get the hell out of the way. She hadn't known, for a moment, what to do, where she was even; she simply slammed her foot down on the accelerator and escaped to a side street where she pulled to the curb and rested her head on the steering wheel. Cursing her luck, cursing her friends, cursing all these asshol---and she'd looked over at the passenger seat. Realized she was in the car alone, had been for God knows how long. Shuttling ghosts from one place to the other, blasted completely out of her mind.

It had been a bad one. Even the next day she'd felt the weight of confusion in her head: the very same weight she felt now.... The past rolls into today, she thought blankly, shaking her head to try and clear it. She was sooo sluggish, just like the drug nights, but now there was no excuse. The drugs a dead thing of the past. She hadn't had anything harder than scotch at a Christmas party they'd been to when John was.... She couldn't take that farther, not now, not like this.

She sat bolt upright, not resting on her elbows anymore. She glanced back at the TV. Noticed it was off and that was strange because just a second before she'd been watching it; she just knew it. Something in black-and-white. Why, yes, she had, with—and the thought caught in her mind like a rabbit in a trap. She stood up quickly and looked around. It's what had brought on the memory of the night driving. Like then, there was no one here. Both armchairs were empty. The couch. The light off in the kitchen, something she never did until she was ready for bed. But that's what it was, the only light now was the one between the two armchairs, sitting on the side table next to the picture of the family. Her family. What had been her family. She scratched her head, still wondering if this was some lingering fragment of dream.

And then the light came on in her bedroom.

Right down the hall someone had clicked her night table lamp on. She recognized its distinctive glow, filtered through the stained glass shade.

Not a sound in the house now. Just the fan of light slipping through her bedroom door. She backed up and bumped the coffee table, scooted it a few inches across the floor with a growling sound that tore the silence like the break of a stick. She made her way around the table and put her hand to the TV. Cool. It had not been on; that part must have been a dream. But she'd been so sure...

What about the light? Don't forget about that, the voice warned, another voice; one she'd never heard before. And that seemed to clear her head a little, bring her a step closer to reality. Strangely, she was not afraid. Somehow the feeling that this might not be anything more serious than confusion-upon-waking stilled her. She held up her hands and looked to make sure they weren't shaking. Because if they were (even a little bit) that would probably be enough to send her screaming out of the house and down the street. Screaming and laughing and crying until someone came and took her away to the nuthouse. But they were all right, her forehead cool.

Okay, okay, she thought. I'm back. I must have fallen asleep on the couch and had a dream or something. It had happened before, waking on the tail end of a dream or nightmare, sure the thing that was after her would grab her wrist from the darkness growing up from underneath the bed, or that the cops would begin to bash her bedroom door down any minute. But of course those things weren't real. All you really had to do was lie in bed, staring madly at the ceiling, and keep telling yourself it was all a dream...all a dream. Like now. She slipped over to the couch again and peered down the hall.

"You left it on," she said. Her voice was large in the room and she clamped her mouth shut. Nodded her head for confirmation. Yes, even though she didn't remember, she had left it on. It wasn't so hard to believe. Why, a minute ago she'd thought she was sitting in a room full of strangers watching a fire burn black-and-white on her TV. You're out of your m--, the voice, the new one, tried to start again, but she pushed the door closed on it. Looked at the cable box underneath the Sony and it read 12:01.

One minute into the witching hour.

The thought raced a wave of gooseflesh over her body and then it was gone.

Let's face it, she thought, staring down the hallway toward her bedroom. You fell asleep on the couch watching TV and a bad memory woke you. The light's been on. Don't make something out of nothing.

Except it wasn't nothing.

How can you go to sleep watching TV if it isn't even on?

She turned back to the coffee table. No remote. Somewhere in the couch, then? She pulled off the pillows at each end, ran her hands into the seams and cracks to no avail. She stood up and looked back at the Sony, but really she already knew. She didn't want to but she did. There it sat right beside the black cable box where she always left it. Her grandmother had been a beast about losing the remote control. In fact, nothing with her had ever been where it was supposed to be. All during her Trailer Days (as she called them, the acrid taste of bile always rising in her throat) she'd constantly been on the search for that goddamn remote control. Having a place for it, knowing where it was, had always been a token of how far away from that hellhole she was so lucky to have escaped.

Suddenly confusion had her. Maybe she was coming down with something. She really hadn't felt good in days, and maybe she did have the beginnings of a headache. She might even have a touch of fever. Hell, it was late. She needed sleep; she needed to go to...bed.

All she had to do was walk down that hallway, pull the covers back, and go back to sleep. Because back was the key. That's where she'd been and what owed to all this confusion. That was it: signed, sealed, delivered, just like Stevie Wonder. But her legs wouldn't work. She looked down at her feet, willed them to move. They finally did. They carried her over to the entranceway into the hall. The stained-glass fan of light lay along the floor, crept up the wall.

She thought she heard a thump in the attic but dismissed it. That would be too much. No, no, no. That was the wind, or a squirrel, or simply nothing at all because that's what it had to be. She would not allow it to be anything else. Right now she was going to walk down the hall, take a right through her bedroom door, and climb into bed. That was it: a very simple plan. Three steps, just like the ABCs. Step One wasn't so bad but her plan began to unravel at Step Two. She couldn't step through the doorway to her bedroom. She really, deep down, didn't even want to.

Someone had been in it.

The covers were stripped off to the floor even though the tail end of the sheet was still stuffed underneath one corner of the mattress. Both pillows on the queen-size bed had been piled on one another and there was the obvious impression of a head playing through them both. The under sheet was rumpled and creased. But the bed was empty. Of course it's empty! the old voice shouted, the one of seeming implacable reason. There's nobody in the house but you, so how could anyone else have been in here?! The window was closed. She knew that even though she couldn't see it through the curtain because she heard wind kicking up out there now and rain pounding down on the roof. And come to think of it, she couldn't recall when the storm had started (had it been raining like this when you woke up? she asked herself to no avail), but with all that racket the curtains would be blowing if the window was broken, or up. There would be a growing puddle of water on the floor beneath it. But there wasn't. She took a step closer, a foot inside the room now, and glanced left at the closet. Closed. But her eyes drew back to the bed. Even now she remembered getting up this morning and making it. She did so every morning, religiously. Something she'd never done until they'd gotten that first apartment in the first heady days of John.

This looked like her bed from the Trailer Days.

She didn't like it one bit. In fact, now felt her anger rising. It gave her the courage to cross over to the foot of the bed. To bend over and collect the sheets from the floor, to spread them back on the bed. But then she stopped.

A smell. Perfume. Nothing she owned. Nothing she even recognized, which wasn't so strange, seeing as to the fact she'd never been a connoisseur of women's perfume. And then an odd feeling passed over. If John were living, if she'd just come into their bedroom and found the sheets like this with a strange female scent wafting off in all directions, she would have been mad as hell. It wouldn't have taken her a second to click over to Extremely Pissed-Off.

But now the only thing she felt was fear. Pure and simple. The last vestige of anger trailed away.

John was gone. She lived here alone. Someone, some woman, had been lying in her bed! Lying right here while Patsy slept away some strangeness on the couch down the hall! The creeping unease began again, this time deep in her groin, working out like a heating pad. She dropped the covers and stepped away from the bed. She glanced back at the closet. Could be hiding back there right this minute!

She sat down hard on the edge of the bed.

No. She would not do that again. The conversation with the psychologist drifted back like a life raft. It had all seemed very pointed and matter-of-fact, sitting in that office discussing her problems with the stranger. But beyond all that, what it had mainly felt like was ridiculous. All those fears she'd expressed. The light of day and the office had given them an almost comical essence (not Terri's! the old, frantic voice whispered). But now, here, they didn't seem ridiculous at all. Right now she knew why she'd had them in the first place.

She needed water, something to clear her dry pipe of a throat. She turned her head left toward the bathroom. That door was open just like she'd left it. She could see the sink from here and all she had to do was walk over and turn on the tap. Really, such a small thing. A test you couldn't fail.

And right now, with the storm ramping up outside and her bed a mess, right now, all she wanted was a test to pass. No matter how small, how trivial. She stood up and made her way through the room to the sink, watched as her hand turned on the Cold-water tap. She peered into the mirror and saw her red eyes, her tangled mess of hair. Nothing moved in the room behind her. She bent down and drank for what seemed forever. When she was done she breathed out deeply, surprised how much the water had calmed her. She almost felt normal. She knew now: she'd fallen asleep on the couch, dreamed, hell, maybe even sleepwalked a little (back to the bedroom to mess up the bed). It had given her a hell of a fright but that wasn't out of the ordinary. A lot of people woke up confused in the middle of the night. She wouldn't worry about the bed. She'd grab one of the pillows and go back to the couch. Somehow, that seemed better. She wiped her mouth with a hand towel and caught the glimpse from the mirror.

The door to the closet was open now. Wide. Pushed all the way back to the wall.

"Wait a damn minute," she said, her heart starting to hammer. She turned back into the bedroom, stared at the door with eyes she hoped would burn the motherfucker to cinders. She didn't look at the bed, at the rumpled sheets, at the impression of a stranger's head in her pillows. She walked over to the closet (my house! my house goddammit!) and glared into the darkness. She watched her hand (as of its own accord) reach across the distance to the light switch on the wall by her bureau and flip it up. The closet came unveiled and there was no one there, no legs attached to huge feet dropping down to the floor behind the three rows of clothes, one for each wall. She shook her head and pinched the bridge of her nose right below her eyes. She let out the breath she'd been unconsciously holding and was reaching back for the switch to turn the light off when she heard it.

This time a quick, grinding screech, followed by a hard thump. She'd heard it before and what it was drove her back against the wall next to the window. And dear God, her heart was pounding now!

Someone had just pulled down the attic door in the hallway.

She thought at that moment she would simply die. Her heart would seize up in her chest, her eyes bulge out of her skull; she'd claw at her neck fighting for air, and then she'd slide down the wall and die. Maybe she'd see whatever had pulled down the door and maybe she wouldn't. Pray God she wouldn't.

But she didn't die. And she didn't slide down the wall. She just stood there staring through the bedroom door, seeing a slice of the attic door and, below it, the short run of rungs down to the floor. And then the whispers started, the sound of things shifting around in the attic. She tried to shut her mind, to just go drifting off to some safe Somewhere where she'd never have to endure this terror. This coming terror.

The whispers grew louder, as if whoever (whatever! her mind screamed) knew there was no need for stealth now. Two voices running together as if completing each others' sentences, but somewhere in the sibilant phrases of nonsense there was another one, a voice that seemed a little clearer though Patsy could no more understand it than the others. And God in Heaven! That voice was Terri's!

Patsy stood ramrod straight against the wall, her entire body a mass of gooseflesh. Out of the corner of her right eye she thought she caught movement from the closet, just a quick flash of something and it was suddenly ten degrees colder, twenty. She moved away from it, closer to the doorway and the voices stopped. She heard a brief, glass-breaking cackle of laughter that could have issued from no human throat, and then the attic door moved.

Whatever was up there was coming down!

Vaguely, in the back of her mind, she heard the rain, the thunder, the sudden cracks of lightning. All right on the other side of that thin sheet of glass. She saw herself ripping the curtain aside and tearing the window skyward. Breaking through the screen and falling out through the window into the mud outside by the foundation and wall. A very important part of her mind kept telling her that was exactly what she should do. Fuck everything and haul ass! And as if to add weight she suddenly felt the rock of her car keys pressed tightly against her thigh. Go! Go, dammit! Jump straight through the damn thing if you have to and just Go, Go, Go!! Don't stop until tomorrow! Decide what to do then, but right now just get the hell out of h---

And she saw the tiny muddy hand. Then the other. She came out of her trance and hunched near the bureau. No, no! Now two little arms were bending at the elbows, the rest of the body hidden behind the attic door, and my God, whatever was coming down the attic ladder was doing so head first!

A fall of muddy wet hair came next and the hands crab-crawled down one more rung. Patsy dumbstruck at the details she was suddenly aware of: the thin lines of water running down and pooling on the rungs, the hair all twisted and clumped together, pieces of sticks and dead leaves, the terrible, bursting smell of rot. And then a forehead, ghost white behind deep, muddy seams in the flesh. The hands clumped down one more rung, this one two from the floor and Patsy saw the upside-down face of the thing. One of the girls from the attic, one of the ones from the backyard. Only now the face was a muddy puddle of clay, the cloudy cataract eyes glaring balefully from the puffed and swollen face. The thing smiled then, really just a rearranging of the monstrosity, and the smell intensified, grew like the lid coming off a summer garbage can, and Patsy saw the black, putrid maw, a glimpse of yellow-white teeth. A black, runny trill of water spilled out, washing through those upside-down eyes, and Patsy looked on in something so extreme the word 'horror' was like putting a Sunday school dress on it. The eyes didn't blink. They just continued to stare at Patsy through their thin, cloudy sheen of filth.

Patsy somehow found the reserve to stare it down as it continued to smile, hanging there, some horror from hell. Water ran off the thing and Patsy looked at the foot of the ladder as the puddle grew out to the walls.

"Patsy," it croaked, the voice as if from a long tube sunk into the mud of a deep grave. "We're so glad you've come. Terri is our greatest little friend," and the thing laughed, also deep and long, like the voice of a massive bedridden man lost in the soup of his mind. Then the thing began to back up the ladder, pushing back effortlessly with its thin, grimy arms, the head slowly becoming lost behind the attic door.

For a moment Patsy was sure she'd died. Probably still on the couch in the living room, stone dead from a heart attack or brain embolism. And all the wrongs she'd committed were now here and forever to torment her, even now, in her first few minutes in hell. The only thing that didn't seem congruent was the fact the thing had mentioned Terri. Terri would have no right inhabiting a place like this!

So Patsy determined to set things straight. In the land of the dead she had no more fear for herself, but she was goddamned if she was going to let them have Terri too.

She stumbled over to her bedroom door, hardly aware how the awful stink grew the closer she got to the ladder. She ducked underneath the open attic access and squeezed past with the wall at her back and the ladder pressing against her breasts. She noticed numbly how the putrid water stained her shirt the minute the two came into contact. But she squeezed past and stood at the foot of the ladder, looking up into the darkness that was as thick with menace as a nest of snakes. The rain was coming harder, each booming blast of thunder seeming to shake the very foundation of the house. But incredibly the power was still on. And when her eyes found purchase in the darkness at the top of the stairs she saw both girls, hand-in-hand, ghastly and dripping, their dead and muddy eyes shining dully in the thin, impossible eldritch light.

That was also the moment when Patsy heard, just at the outside range of perceptibility, an unmistakable voice pronounce that single heartbreaking word. "Mommy?" Terri asked from the darkness up there at the top of the ladder.

Every trace of remaining fear vanished. Suddenly there was no room in Patsy's mind for anything but her daughter (your dead daughter, the old voice tried to reason, but of course this advice went unheeded) from the grip of whatever these hellish things were. And they were real all right, as real as anything she'd ever seen. Standing there at the top of the ladder, filthy hands linked as they stared down, dripping sewer water down on her below. Patsy lips twisted into a tight snarl of hatred, her eyes flashing like red signals of death itself. She stepped forward and grabbed both sides of the ladder, her necked craned up at the terrible girls above her.

"YOUFUCKINGBITCHESLEAVEMYDAUGHTERALONE!!!!!" she screamed in one monstrous burst of adrenaline, her eyes riveted to the apparitions at the top of the stairs, her right foot already on the second step with her left coming up quick from behind. Because she could feel the savageness in her body, the death-dealing hatred that threatened to blow out her brain. At that moment all she wanted was to get to the top of these goddamn steps and start tearing. Her hands itched to get around the necks of the girls, to rip the skin from their rotten faces and tear them limp-from-limb. The anticipation broke a grisly smile upon her face, and the girls slid out and away from the opening, looking at one another now and laughing at a seemingly small joke they shared. Patsy snarled and lunged into the eldritch light that still held sway in the attic. For just a second she thought she actually had her hand around something (a rotten piece of cloth, perhaps the tail edge of one of the dresses) but it squirted away with a sickly ease as her elbow came down hard on the plywood flooring. Her underarm and right breast also scraped down hard on the unyielding opening and for a moment, with stars flashing behind her eyes, Patsy was sure she would lose her footing and fall back to the hard floor beneath. But luckily, with her right hand numb and useless, her left did manage to grab hold of the top rung of the ladder and she swung away from the opening, her right leg also swinging out into space as her left foot held tight regardless of the excruciating pain she suddenly had from the scrape she'd sustained on her left shin before her foot found a rung.

But her pain was a small thing compared to the apocalypse she intended to bring.

She grit her teeth and leveraged herself up with her right elbow. Within seconds she was lying in a heap at the top of the ladder, vaguely aware of the smell and seeping rot that was climbing into her clothes. She spat into the thin darkness and swung her head around trying to find the ones she intended to rip into tiny, rotten pieces.

And it was then she saw what the attic had become.

It was no longer a place of wooden struts and rafters, blanket insulation and air ducts. Not now, even though the vague forms still held in subtle degrees. The rafters and struts were now bones, blackened and bloody; the insulation, thick mounds of rotted tissue and festering organs; the air ducts, clotted, ragged veins and arteries dripping and pulsing with the vileness they contained. Patsy was suddenly (surprisingly) reminded of an old movie she watched as a kid, The Incredible Journey, where scientists had managed to shrink themselves and be injected into a live human body. She'd really only watched it because it happened to star a very young and beautiful Rachel Welch, but the idea of the thing had always been in the back of her mind, apparently, because that was the first thing that came now. She was within the body of something huge, powerful, and ultimately evil.

She was in the Belly of the Beast.

And as point of fact, she didn't give a fuck. They were up here somewhere and if she had to stomp through twenty miles of shit to get them that's what---

"Mommy?" The word broke the stillness and the deathgrip in her mind like a karate chop to the throat. That one little word. That one precious little word from that precious throat. Everything else was sucked away in the vortex it left in the air, in the hole she could feel in her heart. Instantly the other two girls were forgotten. She had no mind she was standing in the body of some horrible, heaving beast. She didn't hear the violence of the storm ramp up like wildfire above her head. The only thing she heard, the only thing she sought, was the source of that tiny, frightened voice.

"Terri," she said. "Baby, it's Mamma. Where are you baby?" and she squinted into the half -light to try and find her child in this hell house. It took virtually no time at all. Just to the right of one glistening rafter, back toward the slant that described the angle of the roof, on top of a slat of plywood that had taken on the oily, diseased sheen of cancerous flesh, sat the small child's table. Its selection of four matching chairs. In the one closest to the roof-slant sat Terri. She was small and dirty and huddled upon the edge of the table, her elbows resting on it, the chair tilted up to its front two legs. She was looking in Patsy's direction but there was no indication that she saw her. In point of fact (notwithstanding the creeping green darkness of the attic enclosure), her eyes were as dull, cloudy and lifeless as the ones Patsy had followed up here. But her voice, Terri's voice, the one that sent a solid jolt of pain and terrible longing through Patsy's entire frame, was pitiful and true. The little girl raised her hands from the table and Patsy saw the lengths of black chains descending down from her wrists and out of sight below the table.

"Oh, baby, it's Mamma," she croaked and fell to her knees in the spongy mess of rot around her. She determined to crawl through it all, beat every demon of hell that stood in her way, but she'd get to her daughter. Nothing in heaven, hell, or earth would stop her now. She'd just begun to move when a tremendous crack of thunder lifted the very house around her and its accompanying effusion of lightning seemed to glow through the roof, blast through the ventilation ducts around her. For one terrible moment (the time it took to draw the knob of one startled breath) the entire attic was drenched in a blinding whiteness that seemed to erase everything else from existence. But in that same instant it was gone, and with it every semblance of grainy light within, save for the impression of stars that winked crazily before her eyes in the coal blackness.

*

Once again, a thousand years later maybe, she came back to her senses. She was lying crumpled by the hall bathroom, her legs splayed back toward the bedrooms, her left shoulder pushed into the angle between the wall and the living room entrance way. Her eyes opened gradually on the snowy picture buzzing from the Sony. Though she hadn't the inclination to notice, the storm had abated, leaving nothing to remind other than a mild dripping ceaselessness from the roof tips. She turned her eyes to the attic door. Shut. Of course. There was no puddle on the floor to give credence to the nightmare she'd witnessed. But she didn't need it.

She'd seen Terri (her little hands reaching out for her) and there was nothing now that would run her off or keep her away from taking back what had once been hers and John's.

She was locked in to it now.

# Chapter 20: The Pendulum Begins

At just before ten o'clock on Thursday morning, Bill Kamp pulled the SPCA truck into the driveway at 2450 Samane Street. People usually hated to see him coming; they'd be standing by their windows with every animal they owned (and he used the word 'owned' loosely) nervously standing around in their kitchens or living rooms, the animals doubly nervous about what to do inside a house they were usually forbidden entry. Bill thought it was pretty funny, for sure. All he had to do was pull into a neighborhood and it was like a silent alarm went off; people would be beating the streets, thrashing the bushes to get animals they very seldom even paid attention to safely back home. Not even, usually, in the fenced backyards where they should have been kept anyway. Like those dumbasses half-expected him to climb over the fences to string their dogs up. Shit, their owners maybe, yeah, but not the dogs. Hell, he loved the dogs, even most of the cats, though he did draw the line at ferrets and the big snakes. If one of those got loose under a house and ate half the fucking dogs in a neighborhood, the goddamn snake could have the other half and then some before Bill would even get out of the truck. And even then it'd just be to watch somebody else smoke that fucker out because snakes just weren't his bag. Hell, what he'd been called out here for today wasn't really, either. Squirrels, for Christsake. What the hell was he supposed to do about them? The motherfuckers lived in the tops of fuckin trees and that was also something he didn't concern himself with; naw, he'd leave that for the spooks. But the new guy, Chet Michell, that prick, had gotten the call and shit always rolled downhill. Usually right down to where he happened to be standing. At that moment he had no idea whatsoever that he'd be on the evening news at both six and ten tonight.

As he pulled up in the driveway and switched the ignition off he was thinking about the report he'd have to write up later. It was one of the biggest pitfalls of the job, he had to admit. Picking up dogs and cats, chasing just about everything except those goddamn pipe snakes, he didn't mind any of that. But for every capture he also had to fill out a short report, and that motherfucker Mitchell had made a new policy of having everybody write a short paragraph describing the incident. Said it was for insurance purposes, something to keep the lawyers happy. Shit like where the capture was made, who reported it, damages, whatever else. Regardless, it felt like fucking English class to him and if there was one thing in life William John Kamp hated above all others, it was writing. Hell, that was a major reason he'd quit school after eighth grade (he didn't like to remember it'd been his third time around). He was still trying to get the facts straight in his head (some squirrels acting weird, chasin some ole woman back into her house with her little toy poodle in tow), fixing to jot down his notes so he wouldn't forget anything (fuckin important, he thought sarcastically) when he heard a knock on the window of the truck. "Goddamn!" he said, startled, and looked up into the face of an equally startled (and this was the part he liked) smaller man. A smaller man with a neat little haircut and trimmed nails (Bill Kamp wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer but he did pride himself on detail, the exact kind of thing that would place him before the cameras before another three hours were out), some "pussy man" as Bill liked to call them. Some prick like Mitchell.

He could tell the sweaty little shit outside his truck would rather be anywhere than where he was and Bill feinted a little slow on the uptake, really just to make the bastard standing out in the heat a bit more frazzled. Because Bill could see that right up front. The guy looked like he was gonna piss his pants if something didn't happen real quick. Bill pasted on his most sour expression and began rolling down the window of the truck. The little guy backed away as he did so, putting his hands behind his back just like a dutiful little schoolboy, and Bill cranked the window the rest of the way down, the details of his previous engagement already getting scrambled in the smoothness of his mind.

"What is it, buddy?" he said in his most condescending manner. "I'm writin sometin up here an—"

"The smell," the little guy was saying. "'S been around for about a week, and it's getting worse every day. I was going to call the police or...somebody today; I didn't think 911 would be the thing to do, but when I saw you I figured you'd do about as good as any."

"You did did'ya?" Kamp said. "And just what made—" and he wrinkled his nose in disgust. "Gotdamn! What the hell?" he exclaimed, already reaching to pop the latch on his door.

The little guy had backed farther away now, though the teasing bit of triumph was readily visible on his mousy little face. "You see, I told you. It's bad, isn't it?"

Kamp turned on the man, trying hard to keep his cool. "Buddy, if somethin smelled like that around my house, I'd'a called somebody beside the fuckin dogcatcher a long time ago. Know what I mean?" He caught himself wagging his finger at the man and hurriedly stuffed the hand back into his uniform pocket. He didn't need any irate phone calls to that prick Mitchell. Besides, the little dude might really be onto something here. "Listen, Mr...uh," he began, looking down the drive at the house.

"Pikren, Jim Pikren," Pikren said, not moving either forward or backward a step.

"Pikren," Kamp repeated, turning his head back. "These people here...they got a big dog, somethin like a Great Dane or somethin?" The smell was starting to get to him, and he'd smelled plenty, had a gut like a cast iron barrel.

Pikren had his hand up to his nose, squeezing his nostrils shut, and squinting his eyes behind his glasses. "Not that I know of," he said nasally. "At least I've never heard anything, any kind of dog, I mean. Sometimes there's kids playin...but no dogs...no sir." He glanced back to the house again.

"Well," Kamp said and cleared his throat. It wasn't so bad if you didn't think too much about it. He squinted at the guy and asked honestly, "It's been like this and you ain't called nobody...?"

Pikren let out a small sound that could have been either a laugh or a cough. His eyes were big and questioning behind his glasses as if he were afraid of getting in trouble for his dereliction. Kamp just held up his hands and shushed him. He didn't have time for that shit.

"S okay, buddy, forget it. Jus forget it...." and he glanced at the car in the carport. A crazy idea had come to his mind, something really out of the ordinary on such a fine summer day as today. "How long since that car's been moved?"

Pikren got the suggestion immediately, as if he'd already thought the same thing himself but was afraid to give it credence. "You don't think..." he stated flatly and took another couple of steps backward, his eyes glued on the front of the house now.

"No, now I ain't sayin nothin. I was just wonderin how long it's been." He looked hard at Pikren. "Well?"

"A couple of days," the little man said and gulped down a mouthful of air. Then he shook his head again. "But that's really nothing because—" but Kamp shut him down with a quick wave of his hand.

"Yeah, okay," he said, starting down the drive. He looked over his shoulder as he veered right toward the gate. "You say they don't own no dogs, right?"

Pikren shook his head, made a step as if to follow and then seemed to think better of it. He just switched his hands to the front fig-leaf posture instead. Kamp moved over to the fence, trying to adjust this new thing in his mind. The little guy was out of it; that much was obvious. Whatever happened from here on out was up to Yours Truly. He reached the gate and tried the latch. It released with a dry snap and Kamp pulled the gate back, having to rip it the last couple of feet because it kept catching in the high grass. That was another thing he noticed: the grass hadn't been cut in a while, a week or two. He chanced a last look over his shoulder (Pikren was still standing right where he'd left him, looking toward the fence like a fuckin owl or something) and stepped into the backyard. The smell was definitely worse here. Not something in his head, the smell was definitely worse. He pulled his shirt out of his pants so he could get it up around his nose and went around the corner of the house. The grass was even higher back here. Musta been three weeks or so since he mowed, Kamp thought absently, scanning the yard for any kamikaze dogs still on the prowl. He chanced another whiff and felt his gorge rise. "Fuck," he muttered and put his shirt back in place over his nose.

There was a little screened-in porch with a barbeque pit and a couple of bicycles inside. One of the bottom sections of screen had been pulled loose like something used it for coming and going. That something, however, not in evidence. He continued his circle, his eyes trained on the house now. Beginning to feel this was definitely out of his league. He was the damn dog catcher, for Christsake, so what the hell was he doing creeping around in somebody's backyard? He'd have to get back to himself on that one, but for the moment there was something awful goddamn odd about this whole thing. The smell for one, how the hell had half the neighborhood not raised ten shades of hell about that? It was damn near bad enough to bring him to his knees and there was still the little guy standing in the front yard, not knowing whether or not to call 911.

Because, goddammit, something was dead back here.

And from the smell, something a might bit bigger than a dog.

He reached the screen door and pulled it open. Right across, not ten steps, was the back door. It was open. And not just a little bit either, but full-blown back to the wall. He could see carpet and a few shadowy images that wore the shape of furniture inside but other than that, nothing. The lights were all off. But that was definitely where the smell was coming from. He felt his balls tighten at this recognition and reached an impasse.

If he disregarded his training (what little it had been) and went inside a residence he would be risking his job. He should turn around right now, go out to the truck, and call in the whole damn thing. Right, that was exactly what he should do. However, it was nowhere near what he was gonna do. Something was dragging him forward, irrevocably drawing him inside as a witness...

Witness.

The word stuck in his mind. He hadn't thought it; it had just appeared.

He inched up to the door and stuck his head inside. Just as dark as he'd known it would be from the patio. "Hello," he called, stupidly, already knowing intuitively it would be for nada. He moved a little farther inside and put his hand on the door. It budged no further back. He put a foot inside the residence. The first thing he noticed was a TV sitting in the corner. Off. A deep cold set into his bones. "Hello," he called again and stepped fully inside.

The place was a quiet as a blast furnace after cooling.

He moved a little farther in, chanced a look toward the kitchen. The light was off there too, as were all others as far as he could tell. No one was here. Somehow he felt he'd know if there were. Intuition, the thing that had kept more than a few dogs off his ass. He walked over to the sofa, put his hands on its back, looked around. Even through the shirt he could feel the stink getting bigger, threatening to drag him down. It wouldn't be long now until he'd have to go back outside, leave this whole fucking business to someone better qualified. The word stuck in his throat like a chicken bone. Yeah, someone would just love to come along and find whatever it was he was afraid to find. All he had to do was go back out to the truck and make the call. He could stand by little Mr. Pikren while he did so and wait for the Calvary to come rushing down. "Fuck that," he said and stepped around the corner of the couch, moving now to where he knew he had to go.

It was suddenly as clear as a neon sign.

He found himself at the beginning of a dark hallway. There were shadowy pictures in rows on the wall, whatever they portrayed lost in the reflection of glass and angles. The carpet was worn and in needed of replacing. In the darkness, a couple of doors farther down seemed to beckon. One on either side of the hall, the bedrooms he figured. Both closed. Or almost, he found as he inched forward. The one on the right was ajar just a bit, and once again, the image of prim little Mr. Pikren drifted into his mind. Suddenly, outside didn't seem like a particularly bad place to be. He wiped a hand briskly across his mouth and continued down the hall. He didn't worry about the door on the left yet. It was a little farther down and closed. Definitely closed. The other one, the one right here at his hand, was not. It was open, but not by much. He thought about calling out again but found his mouth dry. He saw his hand reaching out, pushing the door back into the darkness. And, once again, he felt the very real need to get out and wait on someone else to come and figure what all this shit was anyway.

It seemed darker here than the rest of the house.

His right hand dug at his belt, at the place where he always kept the flashlight. Sometimes he had to flush a dog out from underneath a porch and many times the light helped; it let you know what you were letting yourself in for. Now he wasn't so sure. He watched the hand disconnect the flashlight from his belt, watched even more helplessly as his finger went to the switch.

A solid beam of white lit the room, seemed to leap out of his hand.

It bounced quickly across a low bureau and a wicker chair set in a corner. A bathroom opened up into further darkness just to the chair's right. Kamp flicked the beam ten degrees and happened upon the bed. And there it froze like the temperature had dropped to a hundred below. The stink was massive, like a thing straining to be released. At the top of his mind Kamp made out the hooded shape of feet tented up through a blanket. He backed the beam up a few feet, following the contour of the form.

The man looked like he'd been dead a lot longer than a week. His face was bloated like a basketball. In the white glow from the flashlight the corpse's skin was green and runny-looking. The lids had stretched open and the dull sockets of sunken eyes stared lifelessly at the ceiling, long trails of slime having oozed out and down the chin to the pillow where a nest of flies swarmed. There was a woman lying right beside the man, her mouth open, a black tongue rolled out on the sheet like a toad. He tried to get his shirt away from his mouth and nose in time but was too late. His breakfast came up in a solid chunk that tore from his mouth and spewed out of both nostrils. The force of the two smells, the putridity and vomit, broke him to his knees and he collapsed near the foot of the bed, not far from where that one lone, dead foot poked up through the bedspread. This thought brought on another shorter but equally violent puking spree, and he leaned over on his left knee, trying to make his way back to the hallway. Anything to be out of here. The death-stink had taken on an almost physical shape, all hooks and claws, and he seemed to see shadows melting together. For one blinding second he believed the woman turned ever so slightly in his direction, as if to get a better view of the invader in her bedroom. Kamp screamed and waved the flashlight, throwing crazy flashes of light careening off the walls, the ceiling. The flies buzzed angrily. He stumbled out into the hallway. Realized he must have dropped the flashlight because he could no longer feel anything in his hand. Puke was running down the inside of his shirt to his pants. Out of the corner of his eye he made out the impression of light still inside there (with the bodies) but there was no way he was going back to get it. It'd be a cold day in hell before he'd ever even touch that thing again. All he wanted now was outside, away from this charnel-house, with the smell stuffing itself down his throat, suffocating him. Little flashes of light danced before his eyes, increasing his dizziness. He stumbled forward again and one of his hands met up with a wall. The other touched the smooth finish of a door and he went down again, this time in the children's bedroom right across the hall. He landed stiffly on all-fours and shook his head, trying to clear the spots.

He raised his head and found matching twin beds. A small night table sat between them, and as he looked he was once again shocked as the small lamp suddenly clicked on.

Sitting bolt upright (as if iron rods had been driven into their spines) in each bed was a child, just as dead as the parents from the looks of it, but, impossibly, alive too. It proved a paradox he had no way to justify. It looked to be both a boy and a girl (the boy on the left, shirtless, his sister on the right in a thin night shirt), their expressions dull but murderous. And they, too, were bloated and discolored, but unlike their parents, the ones in here had eyes burning with hatred. Huge, red bloody eyeballs tracked him on the floor and held him riveted in place. The girl moved first, in jerky strokes as she fought to free herself from the tangle of wet, seeping sheets. Never taking her eyes off the man down on his knees in the doorway, she grabbed her legs and pushed them over the side of the bed, her feet making dull, wet thumps on the carpet. Her brother on the other side was just starting to stir, though he moved in more exaggerated jerkiness, as if whatever mush was left for a brain was having a hard time getting signals through. But the intention was obvious.

They were coming for him.

Kamp realized this with the suddenness of being shot through the chest with an arrow. He screamed and reeled back on his knees, clawing at the carpet to get back to the doorjamb. The spots were gone from his eyes, but now, he almost wished them back. The little girl was almost out of bed. Then she was standing on the carpet in between, right in front of the night table with the lamp. Her body trembled violently and it appeared she was having a hard time getting started. But it was pretty clear signals were getting through, and from the looks of it, it wouldn't be long before she made her legs do exactly what she wanted them to. And Kamp already knew what that was. His major problem was much the same: his legs wouldn't work right. Maybe it was the stink (it was so overpowering now it went a million years past terrible and right up to the gates of hell itself) but he thought not. It was the boy. He'd gotten wound up in the sheets somehow, and like a cow caught in a fence there seemed no reason to guide him. He just kept thrashing around, winding himself tighter, his eyes a blaze of fury as wild grunts and shrieks burped out. He suddenly freed a hand and it smacked back against the wall leaving a large, wet print and a good deal of flesh to slide down to the head board. He pitched wildly and flung himself out of bed to the floor, where he lay at his sister's feet. He rolled around on the floor like a huge worm trying to break out of a chrysalis. It was the wet, tearing of the blankets that finally got Kamp to his feet, his hands out on either doorjamb, his breath coming in great heaving sobs, the stink now a part of him, inside him where it rooted. He took one more look at the girl and she opened her mouth as if to smile and came for him.

She pounced (he really had not been expecting that) and landed on the floor not two feet away, her rotten hands scrabbling at his pants legs for purchase. He screamed, kicked out, and barged out to the hallway, his ass kicking a big hole in the sheetrock that the forensics' team would have a hard time explaining later on that day. His last look into the room was the worst, the one that never let him go for a single night during the next fifty-three years he lived at state expense. When he died he was the oldest patient in the facility. Both of them were indeed coming after him, the girl crabbing across the floor, black ooze running out of her mouth and nose, while the brother, finally torn from the folds of the blankets, was standing, lurching across the room, using the bed as a crutch.

Their blazing eyes never dimmed in the memories that spanned all those coming years.

He turned and ran down the hall, tripped over an easy chair and almost went down. Without thinking he grabbed a coffee table and managed to save himself from a head first dive. He dimly remembered coming in through the back door and jerked his head frantically in that direction, trying to spot it in the clammy darkness. Right there. Knowing he was only seconds away from the dead, rotten hands closing on his shoulders and dragging him back into the hall, he bolted over the couch, his feet barely hitting the floor as he tore the screen door on the patio from its hinges. Suddenly he found himself in the daylight, alone in the backyard, on his knees, gripping great tufts of grass in both hands, rooted to the earth. Holding himself down so he wouldn't go spiraling off into madness. He was crying, wailing like a baby, and those sounds, along with a few others finally made little Mr. Pikren run back inside his house and call 911.

*

The police arrived in nine minutes, the first of a string of ambulances several minutes later. Even a couple of fire trucks rolled up to the street in front of the house and rumbled gravely. They were taking Kamp out on a stretcher (tightly strapped to a gurney) when the news crews arrived, and even though the things he yelled were ghosted out by the networks, his image, the image of a man in a paroxysm of hysteria did make the news on most channels, though Bill Kamp neither saw nor heard any of it.

It seems there were more ways than one to be fired.

# Chapter 21: A Shot at Redemption

Miles Placard looked at the clock on the nightstand, not that surprised to see it was almost 4:30 in the morning. He wouldn't be going to work today. He was just going to lay awake and stare at the ceiling, ticking off the minutes until he could safely call Shelly, the personnel director, and let her know he was sick. Jesus Christ, was he. In fact he'd never felt worse (almost as bad as when he'd found Debbie...but still...). He rolled over to his side and flicked the switch on the lamp. He only kept a twenty-watt bulb in here but the gossy, threaded light it sent into the room helped a little. A very little.

He'd gotten home last night in time to catch the 6 O'Clock News on Channel 9. The report had been sketchy, but in its brevity had said enough. He'd listened like someone standing outside a room at first, unsure whether or not to enter, but it hadn't mattered, he hadn't been gone from the neighborhood that long. He recalled its details, staring there at the ceiling: the family of four found dead. No signs of foul play. A dogcatcher (the one who'd found them) crazy and railing from his gurney. Miles knew the street, thought he vaguely remembered seeing the man who'd lived there a time or two. Probably because Miles had gone through a phase about a year ago (right after Debbie's death) when he walked every night. Never out of the neighborhood, just circling, always circling. He walked to tire himself out, in the hope that when he went back into that dark, lonely hole of his house he'd be able to sleep. Undisturbed. But that, however, hadn't happened very often. No, my friend, it hadn't. That was indeed the truth. The shuffling footsteps, the laughter from the attic, things scratching at this or that window and rummaging through the backs of closets. All that had been a constant, only growing worse after Debbie died. Hell, several times he thought he'd caught a glimpse of her, just around a corner, in the depths of a mirror. He remembered her expression then, terrible, wide-eyed, terrified. He knew. He'd felt himself start to spiral down into that limitless hole the dogcatcher had obviously found unawares. He'd felt his feet slip just on its verge while his nails dug furrows in the vision to keep him out.

Now he could feel the pull again.

The pull he thought he'd escaped when the house was sold, but he should have known. Evil like that would not let him go, not until it'd sucked the marrow from his bones. He sat up in bed and stared at the wall. You fucking coward, he thought. You knew how dangerous that fucking house was and you sold it anyway. What if a family lives there? What if it's kids, you selfish, cowardly prick? He shook his head, tried to throw off the terrible accusation. Tried to convince himself there was nothing else he could have done. He knew he couldn't have stayed, not after Debbie.... No, that had not been an option. I had to sell it, he told himself. No, no, that was exactly inaccurate. You should have burned the motherfucker down to the foundation, taken a fucking bulldozer to that and scraped the whole place clean. He shook his head again. Uh uh, now that was ridiculous. He'd never committed a crime in his life, never anything more than an occasional speeding ticket. Nothing he would have ever had to worry about going to prison for.

So where the hell are you now? the voice asked.

"I had to sell it," he said very plainly, as if seated at an interrogation table right this minute, laying out his alibi. "Either sell it or go crazy. And I didn't want to do that." So here he was, 4: 38 in the morning, planning on skipping work because the guilt of selling a haunted house had him. Talk about crazy. He actually laughed then, a high-pitched humorless thing. The laugh of a doomed man on the way to the gallows, taking the secret of where the gold was buried to his grave. Only thing was, there was no gold.

And the news last night hadn't been the only time either. No, even here, these many miles away, he'd felt the tendrilled fingers of his past pinching at his coattails, whispering from the eaves at night. He hadn't seen anything yet (and he felt the key word here was 'yet'), but he was old enough now to know that was subject to change.

Things could just go on getting worse, and worse, and worse....

He thought of the metal box he'd left in the attic. All those nasty little secrets. Of course the new owner would have found it by now, of that there was no doubt. All the unexplained nasties of the neighborhood, all printed and put away in black and white. Not that it would make a hill-of-beans difference, he was afraid. The new people (person?) would only wonder what kind of fucking kook used to live there until it was too late and the house, hell, the whole fucking neighborhood began to work them down. Too late, too late. How many would be dead by then?

And then, unbidden: You set those people up to die and you know it.

He shook his head again, much more violently this time. No, that was absolutely incorrect. He had just sold it and left. Simple and direct, to the point. Nobody before him had left anything to warn him, and so what if they had? Would he have simply up and sold the house? Hell no. Houses weren't something you bought and sold frivolously unless you were rich beyond description, or at least that's as far as he was concerned. And no one in that neighborhood qualified. If they did they wouldn't live there in the first place.

Okay, so what? Now that you've had all this time to think things through, what are you going to do about it? Keep skipping work, claiming you've got the flu? How long is that going to hold out?

He looked down and noticed he was wringing his hands. He forced himself to stop, placed them flat on the blanket against his legs. He looked to his right and saw the remote. He'd probably still be able to catch a recap of what happened (Channel 9 ran their latest news programs back-to-back all night long), but he didn't want to do that. He wanted to go to sleep, just to lie back in his bed and sleep dreamlessly. The sleep of the dead.

The idea sent a chill up his spine. He threw back the covers and got out of bed, moved down the hall to the kitchen. He turned on the light in the doorway and made his way to the refrigerator. Opened it and took out the gallon of orange juice that had become a half-gallon. Drank it straight out of the bottle. A little spilled down his chin and he wiped it off with the back of his hand. He put it back and closed the refrigerator. No, he couldn't run from this thing. He could try to close his eyes and pretend nothing ever really happened but that would stop nothing. Some night soon he'd hear the scratching at his window screen, he'd see a shadow at the back of his closet. He glanced up at the clock above the pantry. Almost five. Still several hours before he'd be able to call work and tell them he wasn't coming in.

And in the meantime, what?

That was the thing; that was the crux of the matter. What was he going to do about it?

"Nothing," he whispered, but as soon as the word appeared he knew it a lie. He'd run from something that had taken his wife. Simply tucked his tail on his two hundred and five pound, six foot one frame, and run. Even against her protests, he'd made them stay and it had cost her her life. He could not forget that, would not forget it. Whatever there was to do, he'd have to be the one to do it. Case closed.

He left the kitchen and walked back to the bedroom, climbed back into bed and pulled the blanket up to his chest. And it came to him. If he was to seek any redemption whatsoever, regardless of the reason or motivation, it would have to come from going and talking to whoever lived there. Of course, he had no hope the intervention would come to anything, but the simple fact of doing so laid a clear path in his mind. He looked across the room, above the bureau where the picture of Debbie hung. It was his favorite, the two of them together at a fair some time in the Early Days, the Ferris wheel slightly blurred in the background. Jimmy Sams had taken it less than a year after they'd been married, back in the prehistoric times when Miles had known no fear of the future. He looked hard at those smiling lost faces, remembering with a clarity that threatened to suffocate him. Her brilliant smile, the laugh lines around her eyes, that spark of love and life she had breathed like air. All gone now. And partly, he had to figure, because he'd been unwilling to act. Once was a mistake, twice would be an unpardonable sin.

He knew that now, had felt it waiting at the core of his being since the ink was spilled on the sale documents. And with that his resolve set; all he had to do was move from passive to active. He'd go to the house. Today. Odds were no one would be there (it was a working-class neighborhood) but that didn't really matter in the grand course. He'd leave a message. He'd pin the motherfucker to the front fucking door and then he'd wait again. At least this way there was the chance no one would call, that his note would be thought nothing more than the raving of a mad man. That part didn't matter. He was prepared for questions from the police. He'd committed no crime by selling the house and was pretty sure there was nothing legally binding in his direction, especially with the hilarity of hauntings and its like. If they laughed or cursed him, that was all right; he would just relay a message and whomever would have to take it from there. Just as he had.

Just as he still did.

He nodded sadly in the quietude of his room. Even enveloped in the safety of thinking that it would perhaps rid him completely of the whole mess, there was an inner wail that refused to die away. But it was a finality he was now prepared to face. He threw the covers away and stood up, flexed his shoulders and looked at the wall. His face drew into granite, his teeth hard in his jaw. And with that he walked into the bathroom and turned on the water for a shower.

This day, he could feel in his bones, would be a doozy. He had no idea how right he was, or how horribly bad it was not to be completely aware of such things.

*

At 9:01 he stood by his front door, preparing to leave and head back to the old neighborhood. In the light of day things he'd considered earlier seemed a bit harder to grasp, the direction no longer as clear as it'd seemed alone in bed. He bit back his trepidation and closed the door, tried it twice to make sure he'd locked it. The keys felt like a hot, molten ball of doom in his hand and he squeezed tight, thinking of poor Frodo. He walked over to his dirty Volvo and considered it a moment. It had never gotten this dirty when Debbie was alive; he would have never let it. Back in those days everything had been ordered and clean. Since she died it was anything but.

But, damningly, he didn't see that it made any difference.

He opened the door and sat down, glanced to the passenger seat at his briefcase. He had a small notebook laptop in there with his working-life crunched down to little 1s and 0s. He used to guard it with his life and now here he was leaving it overnight in the car. Not even pushed under the seat or locked in the trunk. The image of the spiraling hole flushed through his mind again. He started the car, turned off the irritation of the morning DJs and backed out of his driveway. He looked at his watch: 9:27. No, odds were there'd be no one home.

But, after all, what were fucking odds anyway?

*

Twenty-eight minutes later he pulled into the subdivision and a blackness gripped him. His old street, Samane, spanned the length of the neighborhood all the way back to Valhalla where it T'd off left and right. Beyond that a Dead End and woods. He'd never had the nerve to walk there after Little Billy got run over, the damn dog. He pulled the car to the side where the pond waited, lost a hundred or so yards away in the swaying grass. Little Billy, Debbie's poodle. He hadn't thought of that dog since it got killed. He still remembered the neighbor, some little teenage girl whose name he'd forgotten, knocking on their door and telling them about Little Billy beside the mailbox out by the road. He'd been as limp as a wet rag when they got there, a splash of blood in one ear but nothing else. Just some kid hotrodding, he'd thought then, though in his heart, now, he felt that had been a warning. Or maybe (and this felt a little more right) the warning. They hadn't been in the house three months. Really the point where everything had started to go...weird. Or at least the next level of weird. And his mind came back to the poodle. Little Billy had been such an easy dog to walk. Put him on a leash and you hardly knew he was there at all, but in those woods....

Miles squinted down the length of the street through his Ray-Bans. He could just see the STOP sign down there at the end, and then, what was that? A run of fence maybe?

He pulled back onto the road and drove slowly down the street. Strangely enough, it felt like years since he'd been here, as if he'd never lived here at all. But that was just his mind trying to hide because there was something else deep down inside, something that whispered he'd never left. He could walk in that bedroom right now and find her, dead and spread out like some horrible pornographic joke. He jerked to a stop in front of the house.

Felt his blood run cold.

Same walnut vinyl siding, blending in with the brick along the sides. The roof would need replacing in a couple of years, yeah, and the Maple was the same, more like a big bush than a tree. The curtains were drawn along the front and the carport was empty.

He put his foot on the gas and moved farther down the street. Early summer morning and not a person in sight. No kids, walkers, not even a fucking yard man mowing. Like the slate had been cleaned for his homecoming. Or so it appeared, because unknown to him, in fact, a pair of binoculars tracked his every move. He reached the end of the street and stopped. It was a fence, he saw, an eight-footer. That must have been how he picked it up all the back to the pond. Back when he'd lived here you could walk right down to the end of the street and take a trail that led back to God-knows-where. He'd tried, but Little Billy had absolutely refused. Had pulled and strained at the leash like a dog three times his size, digging his painted toenails into the crumbling gravel at the end of the road, twisting and spinning and whining, and then, eventually, actually growling.

Little Billy had never growled.

He'd simply known something was wrong. His instincts told him the place was evil and he'd listened. And they had not gone into the woods that day or any other. Oh, yeah, sometimes he'd whined inside the house, whined plenty if the truth be known, but he'd never refused to go inside. Never refused anything except going into the woods. Miles unconsciously fumbled with the turn switch and made the block. The street back here which ran parallel to Samane was still mostly undeveloped, but as he made his way down he did notice several newly-poured foundations, and in no particular pattern, several brand new houses. The sweat started on his forehead. He was thinking of the children, of the new families ecstatic with new home ownership. It was a lost feeling he knew well.

He found himself at the STOP sign at Achin and Stickler and thought about high-tailing it. He shouldn't even be here! This fucking place had taken his wife and it, it had no goddamn right to continue plaguing him! He'd sold it fair and square and that was it!

Except it wasn't.

He turned back right on Samane, having made the block, and headed back down the street to his old house. Still no one home. He pulled the Volvo into the driveway and idled, his heart pounding. He gripped the steering wheel for a moment, closed his eyes, moved his lips as if in prayer, and then opened them again. "Okay," he said. "All right, goddammit," and reached over for the briefcase. He popped it open and withdrew a pad and pen. He quickly scribbled a few lines on the notebook page and tore it out, leaving a diagonal slash across the bottom quarter. Then he got out of his car, walked determinedly up the drive to the carport. He pulled back the screen door and stuffed the paper into the same groove in the jamb he'd used on several occasions with Debbie. When she was alive. Some things didn't change, and perhaps that was the worst, the feeling that tiny inconsequential things or circumstances still held you tenuously to a past you could never retrieve.

He backed away and pushed the screen door closed. He could see his message through the tiny squares and knew anyone opening the door would see it too. If he walked back to his car right now and left, he would have definitely set something new in motion. That one little piece of paper was proof of that. His hand went back to the handle as if of its own volition and started to pull the screen open again but he stopped it with an extraordinary act of will. No. Now whatever happened, happened. He nodded and walked back to the Volvo. He stood by the door for a moment looking around, but the street was still empty; the grass still grew unabated.

A crawl of gooseflesh started along his back and he flinched. Suddenly, all he wanted was to be clear of this abortion of a neighborhood, this abomination. He pulled the door open and slid inside, his hand automatically going to the ignition where he'd left the keys. Then he started the car, backed up, and drove off.

# Chapter 22: Checking Up

Cathryn Skate sat behind her desk, restlessly doodling on a sheet of notebook paper. It was 7:45, much earlier than her usual arrival time of 8:30 or thereabouts, and she didn't have an appointment until 9:45. But today time didn't seem to matter because she'd already been up since four. Tossing and turning in bed, up and down, until she'd finally gotten up for good at five-fifteen. And she was never insomniac. Not in childhood, or the long, arduous hours in college where many people claim to have troubled sleeping, eating, adjusting. Not any time. Just last night. Usually it was simply putting her head down on the pillow and lights out. Hardly any dreams either, which seemed strange to her (in a way), since her job was so intimately intertwined with the night-haunting demons of so many troubled strangers.

But at least she knew what had caused it.

The news. Funny, kind of, since she generally didn't watch the Talking Heads; she usually came to work and spent the first forty-five minutes or so drinking coffee and catching up with the paper. She usually skimmed her way through to the crosswords and (a secret vice) the horoscopes, and that was it. Last night she'd seen the news at ten and she'd not been able to sleep. And it wasn't out of fear, really, just curiosity. A strange bit on a dead family and a spooked dog catcher. The last had been almost comical, but she had noted the name of the neighborhood. That had been most of it, she guessed, because when she'd finally crawled out of bed and fetched her notes from the briefcase, she'd been right. Her newest patient (if the woman really intended on coming back, that is), Patsy Standish, lived there. Skate had no idea how close the two houses were but neighborhoods were neighborhoods.

Anyway, a strange coincidence.

But since she'd already been up and restless, Skate had taken the time to read back through the notes she'd jotted down from that interview. Single woman, alone. Family killed in a car accident. Hearing voices, seeing things...dangerous children, she'd said. Skate had underlined that bit. It seemed to say a lot, and often the clues weren't verbalized at all. There were also comments scribbled down about the woman's appearance, and that had been indicative. Her eyes spoke volumes of sleeplessness. Her fingernails had been bitten down to the quick. Skate had seen all this sort of thing before, countless times in countless situations. The unthreading of a personality, many times too far gone to repair, far too many if a clinician's history was examined, all those failures. It was something you grew to know, to accept. But it was always worse with the death of a child. From her experience nothing else touched it. People got over missing limbs and blind eyes, the death of spouses and parents, close friends. But never a child; this was gospel. And from the first moment Skate had seen her walk through the office door into her suite she'd known the woman, this Patsy Standish, was heading for a breakdown. Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, it was referred to, in hopes of giving the monster a face. People tended to associate the term with a condition common to veterans of wars or violent natural disasters, but there were plenty of other unfortunates.

Yes, there was no doubt about it, but something didn't quite ring true with that diagnosis, at least as far as the first impression of Patsy Standish went. It seemed too 'pat,' almost contrived. And Skate was usually reserved in judgment until the first few visits were done because many times, once again, the clues were not in plain sight. Many times a person wore another face, even to a person he or she was theoretically seeking professional help from. Instinct was one thing (and many times a right thing), but these were people's lives she was dealing with. You could never be too careful. There'd been once, early in her practice, when she'd been drawn into an emotional entanglement, and these scars still itched and wailed occasionally in the deep, dark well of her mind. She shook her head and tried to refocus. These things would only cloud her judgment. She knew that; it was in all the textbooks, repeated at all the conferences, engraved on her soul. She had to remind herself of that from time to time, especially when cases involved children, even though she had none herself.

Times like now.

She pushed the notebook aside and turned on the computer, sipping on her third cup of coffee as the machine ran through its mystifying wake-up exercises. She watched the meaningless numbers roll and dodge across her screen, hooking her professional life back into the Grid of the World. It made her feel small and useless if the truth be known. She didn't want to delve beneath that light-generated surface and see the breakdown of everything into simple algorithms; no, she preferred the sanctuary of human imperfection every time. Oh, and here, finally...the Menu. She grabbed the cursor and scrolled down to her phone file. She missed it the first time and caught herself racing back up the list in search of the name like a cat after a string. Or a mouse that was disappearing into a hole. The image gave her a shuddery pause and she forced her hand off the cursor when she saw it, his name: James Arnold, 10th Precinct, followed by the phone number she hadn't used in.... She raised her hand and looked at the palm, flexed it slowly a couple of times to make sure it was still real. Her skin was clammy and cold and for a blind, childhood moment she flinched as if half-expecting someone or something to be standing, hunched and slobbering, behind her. Preparing to leap. Then it was gone as fast as she'd perceived it. For a moment she stared at the name (blinking on and off in the rectangle the cursor had described around it), lost as to why she'd sought it out in the first place. She was now of an age when lessons should be learned. Then her eye happened back to the notebook lying beside the keyboard and most everything came back. "Mrs. Standish," she said and then repeated it, quieter this time, "Mrs. Standish." She cast a guilty eye toward the door like a teenager caught masturbating, and refocused the clinical part of her mind on the name again.

Because this was business. Regardless how it felt at the moment, this was business. She had a patient in trouble, and what do you know, this same woman's neighborhood becomes the scene of a tragedy several days later. Coincidence? Almost assuredly, of course. But.... James Arnold was a homicide detective who'd been involved in an accidental shooting when Skate hadn't been two years out of her residency. A woman had been killed though Arnold had eventually been cleared of any and all wrongdoing by the department. Skate had tried to help him and that had been the one time her professionalism had slipped.

That part still rankled.

"Get over it, bitch," she whispered and picked up the phone. She was glad she still had to check the number again before dialing. That was good. It didn't feel real satisfying, but it was good. The phone rang and her mind went blank.

It was picked up on the third ring by a haggard-sounding woman. "Police Department," she said, as if looking over her shoulder at something infinitely more interesting. Then she coughed like a man, seemed to turn back to the phone. "Fields here," the voice said, a little more pointedly this time.

"Uh...Detective...uh, Arnold, please," goddammit she hated how she sounded.

"What? Who's that?"

"Arnold, Detective James Arnold. I need to speak to him."

"Yeah, well, he's out on a call. I can leave a message if I can't do anything for you. It ain't an emergency is it?"

"No! No, no emergency. Just have him call," and she fumbled through her name and number. The person on the other side, the lovely Fields, told her she wrote it down and would leave it on his desk, "so he'd see it first thing," and the conversation came to an end. For the next thirty minutes Carolyn Skate sat nervously at her desk wondering if her flash of sleepless inspiration would do more harm than good.

And as it turned out, she'd have a hard time believing the truth.

# Chapter 23: Erasure

Tomas Lopez put down the binoculars and stared through the window as the car went out of sight. He'd already written down the license plate and make, the color. Everything he might need. His balls had drawn up into a tight knot in his belly and his flesh crawled.

He didn't like that car one goddamn bit. No sir.

Of course it could have been anyone, anyone at all; a relative, a salesman, a welcoming neighbor, an old boyfriend. Anyone. But he knew it wasn't. What he'd just seen was Bad News and it had the hair standing up along the back of his neck. Because the dream last night had warned him, had put him on the lookout against his wishes. But he'd done it and he'd just seen confirmation. He pounded a fist down into his naked thigh. His erection had long since dwindled; as soon as the man had gotten out of the car it had flown away and that was something Tomas Lopez didn't take kindly to either. He tried to forget it by going back to the dream. It had been no more than a set of images, really, that and an overwhelming sense of danger. In it he'd seen the car, that same fucking Volvo, the man inside. Even as he'd watched him disappear into the carport, Tomas had known what business he was on: he'd seen the note (that damned blurred note!) placed in the crack between the casement and screen door in the dream. And the rest was yet to come, the last few bits and pieces: her face when reading it, the phone call, several meetings with this strange prick, and finally, worst of all, the For Sale sign stuck in the front yard by the ditch. All of these things were on the way if the premonition had been correct, and as far as Tomas was concerned, why should he pretend they were not? He still wasn't sure about the existence of a god or devil, a heaven or hell, but he knew the cult of which he was a member of had great, unknown power. He'd seen things that didn't make sense before, that paled the imagination to think on. Things that could steal a person's soul whether you believed in one or not.

That brought his eye back to the coffee table.

On it sat a thick, banded stack of welcoming brochures from the Baptist church up Simmon's Road. He'd seen the picture on the front and thought he recognized the place, but he could, of course, be wrong. Not that it would make any difference in the long run. He'd had the dream last night and all the attendant dread it brought, and when he walked into the living room this morning all the brochures had been sitting right here in their nice little banded stack.

With every problem, a solution.

That was it, wasn't it?

He walked over and picked up the stack. It was Thursday and most people would be at work (he on the other hand had dropped his job like a hot potato less than a week ago), and he figured he'd be largely unnoticed in going about his real business. He had to get that goddamn note. That had been the key in the dream, the key from the pure fact that it'd been the only thing hidden from him. And he knew from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet whatever the man had left on that piece of paper did have the power to stop what was beginning to move. He'd felt the Great Beast heave and knew the time was nigh. And this thick stack of welcome from the Baptist church? Why that was the greatest irony. Even though the congregation might be a might swelled this coming Sunday, it would have nothing whatsoever to do with the intent of Whatever had given him these things. He placed the brochures back on the coffee table and walked down the hall to his bedroom to get some clothes.

*

Fifteen minutes later he looked a changed man, his hair neatly parted to the side, his shoes polished, his slacks and matching jacket completing the transformation. He hadn't worn a suit (this suit, in fact) since Henry Bailing died almost three years ago, but it hadn't gone too far out of style and he was fastidious about his weight. Better yet, the slight out-of-touchness of the suit lent a certain air of the zealot. After all it was edging up over 90 out there and only a die-hard would choose today for a brochure run in the name of the Lord. He'd quickly shaved and laced the tie, snatched up the paperwork and...froze by the front door.

This was it. This was where the rubber met the road, where the men get separated from the boys. Something whispered in his head that walking through the door was final; there would be no turning back. All the spying and lustful jerking off, all the imaginings and wondering. All that would fly by the wayside as soon as he put one foot on the stoop. The Machine was waiting and now he had the Key. He looked down at his clenched fist, at the brochures. He breathed out, tried to relax, didn't want the literature crumpled and mean-looking when he left it on people's doors, in the mailboxes. He figured he'd have to make at least one block to give it a semblance of legitimacy. Maybe more if people started to notice.

From his corner to her house was seven houses on her side. There were six on the opposite side owing to an empty lot one down from the corner. Far down that way (almost to the STOP sign at the corner of Stickler and Samane) he could see a man on a riding lawnmower. Other than that the street was empty. He paused suddenly at the end of his driveway, realizing that he didn't even know what was printed on the flyers. He quickly pulled one free of the rubber band and opened it, hit it briefly with his eyes. Yep, just as he'd thought. A little information, a warm word-hug, and an invitation. Odds were these brochures had been handed out for the church, but where his had come from...well, the devil was in the details.

He decided to work her side of the street exclusively. He prided himself on being perceptive and knew as he worked along whatever answer he needed would come to him. They always did. But there was the question of the mailboxes. That would seem the easiest place to leave the flyers but it didn't get him any closer to that fucking note. So...he'd go door-to-door, at least up to her house. He'd check the coast at that point and if it was clear, he'd leave the rest in mailboxes, make the corner back toward the unfinished section of the neighborhood and circle back to his house by way of Achin Street. If things went right it shouldn't take him any more than thirty, forty minutes.

Then, hopefully, he could go on with step two. Everything really hinged on the contents of whatever that guy had left. Get your ass moving, a sinister voice warned. While you're out here tugging your dick making decisions, that bitch could come driving up any minute, and this plan is straight down the shitter. He involuntarily flinched at the power of the voice, and dropped the brochures down to his side. There were times when he did feel like a puppet (times like now) and it completely threw him off. He shook his head to take away the specter. "Free will, baby," he whispered to himself. "I am not led, I am not led." The sentence had become a private mantra to him lately. Most times it soothed his nerves; today it just got his ass moving.

He crossed the street, jumped the ditch, and walked up the drive to the first house. While slipping out the brochure the front door peeled back and Tomas found himself face-to-face with an elderly woman, seemingly fresh out of bed. She was smoking and eyeing him suspiciously, squinting through the stink rifling out past her. He smiled and transformed seamlessly into the Salesman, spent the next fifteen minutes (fifteen goddamn minutes!) meeting and getting to know her, explaining the wonders of the Afterlife and its attendant church on the brochure. After a quick handshake and a lot of nodding of heads he was finally able to extract himself from the ancient's grasp. He reeled down her walkway to the street with a dizziness he hadn't expected. At this rate I'll be roasting in the fucking sun all day! he thought. But it couldn't be helped.

At the next two houses he simply left the brochures pushed into a crease between the jamb and the door. At the fourth house he was rather rudely asked to "peddle his religion" elsewhere. At number five a dog raised nine shades of hell from the other side of the door but number six was quiet and empty as a tomb. The target's house, the one right next door, had an Acadian-style front porch from one end of the house to the carport. A large maple stood in front and shadowed most of the front from the street. That was good. He simply left the door at six and moved onto the porch at the target, shielded from the street by the maple. He made a left at the carport and slid over to the screen door.

And there it was! The dream became so real he felt a bloated wave of deja-vu wash over him, making his head spin. Sending just a little tendril of doubt into his system on the actuality of free will. But he shook it off, cracked the screen door and ripped the note from its crack. He didn't even look at it, just shoved it into the pocket of his slacks. Then he started to turn away, remembered he hadn't left a brochure.

Except that word didn't seem quite right, here.

Here it was more like a calling card. He pulled one of the brochures free of the rubber band and slipped it into the space where the message had been. Then he moved quickly to the next house.

*

Just less than an hour later he opened his own front door. He wiped a sweaty hand across his sweaty forehead and dropped the diminished stack of brochures on the foyer table. It felt like an anchor letting go. He walked down the hall to the bathroom, stripped out of the suit, and toweled himself dry. Then, standing nude in front of the mirror, he glanced down at the floor under the sink where he'd thrown the clothes. He reached down and retrieved the pants, fumbled in the pocket until he found the folded piece of paper. He pulled it free and (the note gripped tightly in his hand) left the bathroom. He made a right and padded into the bedroom. Sat down heavily on the bed. Slowly he unfolded the note. Opened it.

It was very short. A terse greeting, an explanation that this Miles Placard had lived in the house. That he had something to tell her that would not do in a note. Below this a phone number, and below that, an address.

Tomas placed the note down flat on the bed, pressed down with his hand to smooth it. He stood up and walked over to the writing desk by the window. He used it for paying bills, signing checks. In the file drawer at the bottom he kept a phone book, the computer user's manual, and a Rand McNally U.S. road map. He took the latter out and turned back the front cover. Pushed tight into the staple-fold was another map, this one an area map, much more detailed than the Rand McNally. He'd inexplicably bought it a week before at a local convenience store. Now he knew why. Again, a flutter of disquiet rifled through him at the seemingly pointless urge that had now manifested itself to purpose.

But his hands didn't shake as he spread the area map alongside the note he'd stolen from his neighbor's door. He ran his finger down a triple column of incredibly small print: the list of streets, avenues, drives and boulevards for a thirty-mile radius. His finger stopped when it came to the one on the note. He refolded the map so the area he needed was all he got and left it on the bed. Then he stood up and went to the closet to get dressed again and gather his tools together.

His smiled to himself grimly as he did this.

*

At one minute after noon he pulled into Placard's neighborhood. Not quite as big as his, but more exclusive from the looks. The houses here sat on larger lots though the actual sizes of the houses weren't much different. This was also an older neighborhood; the landscaping had had plenty of time to grow and shape the yards. He liked that. He rolled sedately through the tree-shrouded streets, peering at the mailboxes as he went along. Most of them had addresses, enough anyway to get a pretty good idea how they were marked off. Also, he knew the guy's car. Definitely a plus except for the long, winding driveways and closed garages. But he wasn't much worried about that either; his senses were on high alert.

He came to the end of the street and stopped. He'd missed it somehow; there'd been no ping of warning or recognition as he'd driven by. He gripped the steering wheel with both hands and breathed out and in slowly, slowly. He decided to swing right and make the block. He knew he was on the right street and he knew the house had to be there, but he didn't want to look like he was casing the neighborhood. He hadn't seen any Neighborhood Watch signs but it looked like that kind of place.

He made the circuit and was starting to turn right again when he saw the car coming his way. The binoculars had engraved every detail on his mind and now fate seemed to be handing it to him on a silver tray. He felt the old, familiar thrill as the guy he'd been spying on this morning drove straight past as Tomas sat idling at the STOP sign. "Fucking amazing," he muttered, pulling slowly out to the cross street.

Placard was about fifty yards ahead by now, his taillights flashing as he hit the brakes. Tomas let his car go into a coast (he didn't want his own taillights flashing, oftentimes it was the little things that eventually got you clipped) and marked the other car by the foliage on the right side of the road. He'd already familiarized himself with the house numbers and knew which way the guy would turn. Then, sure enough, a turn signal (this guy was careful, no doubt about that) and the car swung into a driveway behind the drape of a large, overgrown azalea. Tomas chanced a look at his watch (as he'd done when his prey had turned) and found nine seconds had elapsed. Ten, eleven, and he was at the bush himself. He swung into the driveway, his face set now, and reached down for the brochures he'd taken with him for the second time that day. He had to have something to distract the guy's attention for just moment and these would be as good as anything. The rest of the stuff he needed he already had. The bigger stuff in the trunk.

The drive curled left toward the house and lucky for him a squat live oak was anchored at the curve, obscuring the garage from the street. Tomas came around the oak with a welcoming smile on his face. The guy was getting out of his car and looked back. As Tomas rolled to a stop he smiled as widely as he could and waved his hand out the window. He almost laughed when the guy waved back, stopped beside his closed door, and actually put his hands in his pockets.

Fucking chump, Tomas thought, thumbing his own door latch and leaving he car running. He got out all peaches and cream. "Hello there!" he said, smiling broadly and waving with his free hand. The brochures in the other hid the brass knuckles. "Mr. Placard, right?" and the guy nodded like someone had him on a chain. Tomas was within ten feet and closing fast. He couldn't chance a look over his shoulder now to see if the coast was clear or not; he'd just have to go on faith. "Great, great," he said, still smiling like he had a million teeth in his head. Five feet more. A brief wash of suspicion crossed the man's face and that's when Tomas dropped the bundle of flyers and in one fluid motion set his left foot and drove his right brass-knuckled fist into the side of Miles Placard's face. He felt the crunch of teeth as the man collapsed straight back onto the gravel driveway, one of his feet clipping Tomas's left knee. He landed on his side and remained there, blood pooling out of his mouth, his eyes rolled up in his head.

Tomas dropped to one knee and looked around quickly, right and left. It was a good seventy yards straight across to the neighbor's doorway and there was no movement on the street or lawns. He scooted over to the unconscious man and grabbed both ankles, pulled him over behind a bush a couple of feet away. Thorough landscaping, he fucking loved it! He put a hand to the man's throat and felt a pulse. Good, the punch hadn't killed him, but it had damn sure fucked his face up. And that was fine too; he wouldn't need it much longer anyway. The cheek all the way up to his hairline was starting to swell like a balloon.

Tomas looked over his shoulder at the house. The garage door was down, probably so stuffed full of shit our man here couldn't get the damn car inside. Fucking unlucky for him. Most of the windows he could see were covered but there was one, a big nice picture window in what must have been the living room, that looked in on a dark and empty-looking house. He looked back at the guy, checked his left hand. No wedding ring. And this guy didn't look the sort for a live-in girlfriend. Or boyfriend, for that matter. He walked over to the white Corolla he'd just climbed out of and used for jobs like this. He had bought it a few years back for its anonymity and kept it parked at a friend's storage unit not far from his house. The trunk contained almost twenty stolen license plates along with a suitcase of tools and several heavy blankets. Walking over, Tomas had to smile. You couldn't even see the next-door neighbor's house because of a gigantic hedge that ran almost the entire way to the street on the driveway side. The damn thing must have been twenty feet high. Again, kudos to the landscaper.

He fitted the key into the lock and popped the trunk, pulled out one of the heavy blankets. Then he nonchalantly walked back to his victim and laid it out on the grass beside him. He wasn't even worried about neighbors now. He was feeling this. The guy coughed weakly and Tomas looked down. There were several teeth lying on the ground in the blood. The guy groaned, eyes fluttering. Tomas sized him up, figured him about five-nine or ten. The blanket was six even. He bent down and rolled the guy over on his back. Pushed him over on the blanket and began to roll him up. He made it tight and when finished you could barely see the top of the guy's head about three inches down. Tomas moved to the feet-end and dragged Placard over to the gravel behind the Toyota. He bent down, cradled the man's body and hoisted it into the trunk.

He checked his watch. Just shy of three minutes since he'd clocked this fucker.

He shut the trunk.

Looked around for anything he'd missed, forgotten in the excitement. There...the brochures, lying where he'd dropped them. He went over and scooped them up. Headed back to the Corolla. Looped around and got pointed straight down the driveway. He rolled slowly around the curve to the street. Idled at the end, taking one more quick look around. Still nothing noticeable, but no guarantees.

He turned left and worked the knob on the radio. Found Bon Scott howling about cyanide and TNT. "Dirty fuckin deeds," he said, glancing in the rear view mirror. "Never any doubt about that."

# Chapter 24: The Photograph

Patsy sat like a stone at her kitchen table. She'd seen the news too, had driven by the house this morning. Except for what she knew it could have been any house on any day. But that whole family was dead. The morning paper confirmed it. She'd crumpled the whole mess up and thrown it away, not wanting to think about it. There were already too many other things to consider. She cast a disapproving eye on the cigarette smoldering in her right hand. Another nasty habit she'd reverted to, something she hadn't done even in the maelstrom of grief that had followed the accident.

It had been almost a week since the last visitation. For the first time since she'd moved in there had been absolutely nothing disturbing. No children in the attic or the yard, no weird noises, but worst of all: no Terri. The last image of her daughter was the thing that plagued her now, worse than anything she'd seen or thought she'd seen since moving in. She couldn't forget the pleading in Terri's sweet, stricken little face, the chains connected to her wrists. Like it or not, Patsy could feel her sanity slipping away. And that was the oddest thing: she'd always believed people unaware of approaching insanity, but here, now, the evidence mounted. She could feel it like a train leaving a station. But unlike that train, she had no idea where this one was headed.

"Ahhhh!" she yelled, jerking her hand violently. The filterless Camel had burned down to her fingers and now laid smoking on the kitchen table. She pincered it up with her thumb and forefinger and dropped it into the ashtray. Examined her fingers to see how bad it was. Not too. She brushed off the stray flecks of ash and wrung her hands together. Her supposed "job hunt" had gone nowhere. In fact she'd hardly left the house at all since...well, since the last time she'd seen Terri, except for the grocery store, anything to pass the time.

She'd even taken to leaving the attic door down. Just in case. Of course it was a tight squeeze getting through to the bedroom but it was a small price to pay in case Terri needed her help. Christ, the voice whispered in her head (a voice that was getting fainter and fainter with each passing day. She'd come to equate that voice with the sign of her mental health. It appeared to be leaving on the same train.). What is this you're thinking? Do you actually believe Terri just might come crawling down that ladder one day? Do you really believe you might have to rescue her from those other two? These are very simple, disturbing questions, Patsy. If you can answer yes to either of them it should tell you something. Something very important. Terri's dead. You know that, face it. Because if you go on believing this fantasy it won't be long before you're ready for the padded room. This last was like a faint stale breeze in her mind.

She knew it was right, this voice. She knew that insanity beckoned. But she was powerless to stop it. That was another irony. Because there was Terri to consider. Patsy had seen her...several times. She'd made out every detail on her little face, watched her fingers reach out, seen the pleading in her eyes. And she would not let that go. Once again, she would not. She'd rather go screaming into oblivion than let this go.

She could almost imagine the voice of reason in her head sobbing softly in a corner of her mind, but as far as she was concerned, that's where the motherfucker could stay. Bring all hell to bear and she'd spit it its motherfucking eye.

But how was she going to do this? She needed guidance, some sort of clue. She knew Terri was close, she could practically feel her sometimes, right there at her fingertips. But what to do? This new place had become her prison and still that was not enough. She sat for hours at a time either on the living room sofa or right here at the kitchen table, and so far it had been all for naught.

Not a scratch, not a whimper.

She stood up and paced over to the sink. Picked up a stained coffee mug, washed it out, then filled it again with tap water and chugged the whole thing down. She looked out the window, through the carport to the outside world. Just down the street a yardman was mowing, his partner skirting the driveway with an edger. A little boy was slowly pedaling his bicycle away from her, every once in a while trying to unsuccessfully pop a wheelie.

She felt like a fish in an aquarium. An aquarium with a leak.

She turned away from the window, leaned her butt against the cabinet. The house remained deathly quiet; she almost wished she could hear laughter, scratching in the walls...anything. She looked back at the kitchen table and saw the fresh pack of cigarettes, the burgeoning ashtray. Yeah, it had been a brand new pack this morning; now it was eleven o'clock and the damn thing was almost empty. At this rate she'd be up to three packs a day in no time flat. "What difference does it make?" she said, not even aware until it passed her lips that she'd said it aloud. So, okay, what did it matter? Nonetheless, she bit back the urge and moved away from the sink, around the kitchen island to the living room opening. From the table to the couch, the couch to the table. Like an endless, fruitless game. She cocked her head right, toward the hallway.

The attic ladder was down, just as she'd left it. The light was on up there too; she was ready, goddammit! There was no more fear left inside her now, just a slow smoldering rage that threatened to explode. But as of yet, this rage had found no outlet.

Suddenly the thought of the box ranged through her mind, the one she'd found in the attic and broken into with the bolt cutters. Odd, how it'd come now, right out of the blue. Especially after all the horrors she'd witnessed. She stood still, hands gripping the couch back, trying to find a reason why she'd not thought even for the briefest second about that strange, enigmatic box, even though, now, right this minute, it suddenly seemed imperative to get it out and examine it in more detail. She'd only made a cursory inspection the first time and had fully intended on a closer look.

And then she'd forgotten all about it.

Oh, she still remembered where she'd put it (high on the top shelf in her closet, pushed way toward the corner out of sight), but it still didn't seem reasonable that, with all the trouble and questions she'd had, to have forgotten the only real clue she'd been able to uncover.

Well, by God that was about to change!

She let go of the couch and hurried down the hall toward the ladder, squeezing by between it and the wall to the bedroom. She passed through the door, glancing briefly at her rumpled, unmade bed. She'd kicked most of the covers off sometime during the night and there they lay on the floor, collecting dust. She could care less. The closet door was closed and she wrenched it back, hitting the light switch with her free hand and stepping immediately into the enclosure. Unconcerned with any potential intruder (either of the common or supernatural variety) she stepped up to the bank of clothes along the back wall and reached up on tiptoes, patting the top shelf in search of the cold metal surface of that box. Her index finger caught on the corner of the handle and she immediately compensated her grip and pulled it into view. It was heavier than she remembered and she brought it down with two hands like a pilgrim retrieving a holy relic.

She looked down at the thing she held in her hands and ran a finger lightly over the top. A thrum of electricity seemed to pass through her and she fought to catch her breath. For just a moment the interior of the closet swam like a bad movie and she felt like she might faint. She closed her eyes, counted to ten and opened them again. Better, but not great. She still felt faint, wobbly. She backed out of the closet all the way to the bed, the box springs catching her calves. She sat down heavily with the box in her lap.

Then she very slowly opened it for the second time. Stared at the contents momentarily before upending the box and dumping everything out by her side on the bed. It made a fairly large pile and she stood up, chunked the empty box up near the headboard. Pretty much what she remembered. Old newspaper clippings, handwritten notes. She ran her hand through the pile and fanned it out across the bed. Quite a lot. Someone had definitely spent an inordinate amount of time collecting all this shit. But, let's face it, what was the fucking point?

A warning, the faint little voice managed from its cell.

A chill did not pass down her spine (she was immune to most of that now) but she did feel a prick of unease as cold and sharp as a knife just removed from a drawer. She fanned her hand back through the way it'd come and the contents of the box scattered even more. But one thing stood out. The corner of what appeared to be a Polaroid snapshot protruded from one of the drifts of paper, and she pushed her finger toward it. Kicked the end out of the pile so that it now stood alone on a half-sheet of notebook paper with dates and addresses scrawled across it with an accountant's precision. The hand she'd used to extricate the picture flew up to rest at her neck as her eyes grew and grew, her mouth opening and closing around a muteness that was slowly, suffocatingly, paralyzing.

The photo was of her. As impossible as that seemed, there she was. Whoever had taken the picture had caught the entire left side of her face and that was no doubt Patsy Standish's face. But hers was not the only one. A man faced her. He was smiling. In a split second the recognition slammed into her with the force of a fist to the jaw.

The man from the hardware store. The Mexican-looking guy who'd hurried out when she'd noticed him watching her. "Whathafu...." she said, squinting down at the picture. She picked it up and turned it over. There was no information on the other side: no date, not even where the thing had been developed. It was totally blank.

She flipped it back around. Gripped the picture in both hands. "My God, who took this...?" she whispered, mesmerized. It couldn't have been from more than ten feet away. She looked closer. There was not a lot of background, as if whoever (whatever) had taken the picture had been intent only on the subjects, because a wall butted up on Patsy's side and the strange man's back formed the edge on the other. There was not much space between the two. Patsy was standing in a doorway, holding a screen door open with her right hand. The realization came in a flash. So fast, in fact, she couldn't believe it hadn't struck her immediately. Her carport. Why right there, that wall was undeniably the one that ran back to the patio room on the back of the house. The screen door was hers; she recognized the glass partition that could be opened to let in outside air. The man had his hands out in front of him as if explaining something, his face nothing but goodwill and understanding. Just past him she could make out the contour lines of her car stretching away from the focal point of the photo. This house. There was no doubt. Now that the shock was fading to a safer distance it was as plain as the nose on her face. She could almost guess the circumstances. He had knocked on her door, she'd answered, and here he was explaining something to her in earnest; the smile on her face more recognition than happiness, she now saw. And the photographer? Why, he or she would have had to stand back near the door leading into the outside room. But both Patsy and the man showed no clue whatsoever that they were aware of anyone else's presence.

Now a chill did descend. This was somehow beyond anything she'd yet to experience. All the strange happenings in the attic, on the trail, in the yard somehow paled before this thin little photograph. She rubbed her finger across its surface and it did not go away. If anything, she merely cleaned a skim of dust that allowed her to see in more detail. She recognized the blue blouse and stone-washed jeans. She tried to think back, wondering if she'd worn that outfit the day in the hardware store. Maybe this was some photographer's trick; she knew a good computer nerd could make up practically anything and present it very convincingly. Maybe...

But that didn't shake. For Christ's sake she'd just taken the box down from its corner in the closet. It hadn't just been shoved under her front door or left in the mailbox out by the road. If it was a trick (and Patsy couldn't fathom how it could be) then she never wanted to see another magic show. This unknown person would have had to have a picture of her to begin with, then fashioned up this phony, snuck into her house without her being the wiser, found the box and hid it inside. Then, of course, it would have been only the simple job of slipping out and getting away without anyone seeing. Pretty elaborate when you got right down to it. And for what? All that trouble to plant a photograph? It didn't make sense.

She looked back at it.

She checked the shading, whatever shadows she could discern. She looked for overlaps and smudges. Came up blank. The damn thing looked real. She guessed she could find a lab of some sort that could tell her for certain, but in the end, what good would that do? Even if it was faked there had to be a reason.

But the man. She hadn't thought for a second about him sense the incident in the hardware store. In fact, she'd dismissed the whole incident entirely. Until this very moment the encounter had disappeared from her mind, but now like a recognized but lost scent, it was back. She remembered him staring at her. Turning her eyes toward him and then, him, beating a fast retreat. He'd said something to the guy at the counter and left. Hell, the plumbers had stared at her longer and harder than he had.

And now, this.

She looked down at the scatter of newsprint and handwriting on her bed. God knows what else is in there, something inside her warned. Could be anything, indeed. But Patsy was almost positive it would be nothing good. This stank of depravity, the whole bloody mess. She plunked the photo back into the thick of the pile. Stared at it a second longer and walked over to the window. The shades were drawn as they'd been ever since moving in. Every time she looked this way she thought of those two strange girls milling around back there. Stopping and walking over toward the window when she'd seen them. Somehow this was all part of the same thing: the girls, the photo, everything weird that had happened since she came here.

Even Terri.

That got her heart beating and she reached over to the pull-cord and drew the curtains. No one stood at the window. Everything appeared so normal in the daylight. It was hot, not a cloud in the sky. There were little spots of shade here and there around the bases of the young trees in the backyard and the grass had grown fat and deeply green with the afternoon showers they'd gotten every afternoon for fifteen or twenty minutes. Just enough time to leave the neighborhood in a thick knot of humidity. There were little spotlets of condensation on the window, trickling down to rust in the tracks of the windowpane. She moved a step closer, feeling the oppressiveness of the house pushing up against her back.

She didn't know what else to think about the whole situation, but at least, she thought, now she just might know what to look for.

# Chapter 25: Signs and Portents

Janie Todd was a small woman with a big heart. Always the nice girl, yes. Everybody loved her. Never married but nonetheless first to volunteer at Lower Baptist Church's every social function. Taught Sunday school. Worked out of her house as a seamstress right around the corner from the house Patsy Standish (a woman she did not know), bought and paid for by her daddy almost twenty years ago. When she'd been in her twenties...

She looked into the mirror and watched the tears falling from her eyes and leaving streaks down her cheeks. Just tonight she'd missed her weekly bridge club meeting and that was a rarity. She was too big on pleasing people for the agony of believing she'd let someone down by not honoring an obligation. She'd heard the phone ring about an hour ago on three different occasions. All within five minutes of the others. The third, a message. Wondering where you are and blah, blah, blah.

The whole time Janie had sat stock-still, staring into the mirror and fingering the trigger well of her late father's Colt .45.

She stared down at the opened box of razor blades lying on the counter. Stared down at the floor and wondered how it would look.

The phone rang again and this time when the answering machine picked up the caller broke the line immediately.

All the happiness she'd ever known was gone. She knew, for good, now. She reached over for the prescription bottle sitting amid the razor blades. She picked it up and looked at the label. Her name right there in black and white. Hydrocodone, it said and listed a quantity of one hundred capsules. Said Take For Pain. She looked back at the mirror and took off the cap. She dumped roughly half the pills into her hand and stuffed them into her mouth. A few fell out to the tile floor. She leaned over and drank from the faucet, losing more to the sink but still managing to fight back a great many. She leaned away from the counter, grabbed a double handful of razors and began to rake them along her arms and legs until she was a gaping, dripping mess gasping for breath in the close confines of the bathroom. She'd left her face alone so she could see it in the bathroom mirror. She pulled the .45 from its bloody pool alongside the sink and pulled back the hammer the way her dear father had taught her so many years before.

She put it to her head, smiled a ghastly final knowledge at the mirror, and blew her brains over the interior of the small bathroom where she'd shared her great heart with no one. From outside it sounded like a transformer blowing, which (considering the heat of the day) struck no one as being uncommonly strange or worthwhile to examine.

She would not be found for a full week.

*

Sophie Kitchens was folding clothes on her bed when she happened to look out the window. Her mind had been pretty set on the job at hand (she'd always been meticulous, careful in every aspect of her life to the plus or minus that she'd never married either), and at first, staring away from the neat pile of clothes through the spotless window, she was not sure what had warped her attention. But then it came. Right behind the house was the huge water oak, almost seventy feet high and as big around as a tractor tire, and it was pitching violently. Strange, because Sophie, whose ears were just as meticulously pitched as every other thing about her, had heard nothing. Usually when the wind kicked up outside, the roof vents whistled along like a chain gang. Now, nothing. But nonetheless the tree was twisting in the wind. The lowest branches were higher than the roof and now she realized the whipping shadows cast across the window were what had actually drawn her attention. But that was not its end-all. With a worried curl of frown dripping from her chin Sophie dropped the blouse she'd been folding and stepped over toward the window.

What she saw brought her hands to her face.

A storm had blown out of nowhere, obviously. Though she'd gone out to the end of her driveway not twenty minutes before and marveled at the tranquility of the day, there was no clue left of that reality. As she stepped forward a night-darkness drenched the very screen of the window and a deep-seated rumbling issued up through the floor beneath her feet. Something like thunder, but only like. She could still hear absolutely nothing from outside. Oh, her ancient passed-down grandfather clock still ticked ponderously from its stained perch on the wall, but there was not the faintest creak in the attic to betray the tumult above. She'd lived all her sixty-two years in south Louisiana, and she'd seen plenty of hurricanes but this was like nothing she'd experienced before. Somehow this lent the impression of being in two places at once: the railing outer edge and at the same time the quiet eye of a big storm. Rock-sized chunks of hail bounced through the grass; a solid sheet of water seemed to be cascading in a cloud-darkened slip of the backyard.

Then, from the tree itself, small brown furry lumps.

Sophie Kitchen cataloged each one as it hit the ground.

Squirrels. Squirrels pelting out of the tree like stones. It was almost comic Almost funny, actually, until she saw the Colonel.

The Colonel was a miniature poodle, almost twelve years old and her only companion. An inside dog who slept beside her on his side of the bed, and she'd fed him a succulent strip of breakfast bacon not an hour ago from his spot on the couch next to her as they enjoyed the shopping channels. When he had to go to the bathroom (and these times were rigid, indeed, between them) Sophia always escorted the old soldier (as she liked to think of him) to keep him out of harm's way. After all, he was an old gentleman.

Now he was outside in the storm.

The scream was out of her throat before she realized it. Hands pressed like claws to the window she screamed his name like a person warning another of an oncoming train. If her shrill voice carried the Colonel made no sign.

He was backed into a crouch. Snarling. His tail drawn tight between his legs and his teeth bared as she'd not seen since he was a pup. It was this terror that brought her back to the brown lumps that were now moving in the yard. Moving and circling, it seemed. Circling her poor old Colonel.

She howled his name again and tore away from the window. Ripped her dress on the corner of the bed as she made her way to the doorway, but it hardly slowed her at all. Within seconds she was through the hall and out the side door (her house not really much different in design from her unknown neighbor, Patsy Standish, no more than a block over), her hands still as claws, her voice still shrieking into the wind tearing away in the backyard.

She was fumbling with the gate clasp when she heard him yelp. "Colonel!" she screamed again, yanking up on the handle and shouldering the rusty old thing back into its rut in the grass. She came around the house at a sprint.

The wind was now ominously gone, the sun bright daylight. The wash of a dream touched her and she actually paused in her tracks, a bewildered expression on her face, when the old Colonel howled again.

The dream dispelled.

She could see him now. Seemingly covered in those strange furry lumps. That and blood. There was a great lot of it spattered about the grass, flying through the air. For a moment she couldn't fit it together and then it came like the storm that'd turned her attention. The squirrels were attacking the Colonel.

She ran into their midst kicking and screaming. Realizing in horror she'd unknowingly connected with her beloved Colonel, rolling him backward through the grass and flinging off those horrible lumps as he went. Then he lay still.

The squirrels did not.

They spun to their nervous feet in a crazy, psychotic swirl of motion and sized up the creature above them. The dog now forgotten. Right before they came on Sophie saw the foam dripping from each snout and her eyes grew wide, and then they were all over her, biting scratching. Building their fury until she fell to her knees, then down completely on her face.

By the time her neighbor got through the gate and down on the ground next to her, screaming his own entreaties, the pack of rabid squirrels had retreated to the high solitude of the monstrous water oak, chattering away like veritable demons from their hiding spots.

*

Joe and Mary Clark huddled together in the closet of their bedroom. Achin Street was calm both up and back. Almost 4:30 in the afternoon and neither of them had been to work. They had pushed back into a corner as far as they could go, their arms wrapped tightly around each other.

Their eyes shut.

The malady (if that's what it was; by this time at least Joe was beginning to entertain their affliction might be closer rooted in insanity) had come on Mary the Thursday before, on her way home from work. It had started on Joe the next morning, almost imperceptibly. Now they huddled, clutching in the dark, squeezing their eyes shut against the onslaught even a glimpse of light would give them.

With Mary it had started with a dog. A medium sized Heinz 57 alongside the road. She'd been cruising along at a good forty-five miles an hour when she happened to catch movement out of the corner of her eye. She passed it, already a couple hundred yards down, before she admitted what her mind had suggested. The dog had been upright and walking, its eyes a vast, dull empty, its side split open and trailing insides along the gravel side. She found her heart hammering and her breath coming in short brilliant stabs.

She failed to note the brake lights of an Impala rolling slowly to a stop behind the line of cars until almost too late and laid on her own, skidding to an abrupt stop inches from the other car's bumper. The lady behind the wheel looked sharply into her rearview mirror and flipped her the bird. But it was not the finger Mary saw. The woman behind the wheel, one car in front, only a few yards of metal between the two, was a rotting corpse. The sun had reeled around an escarpment of trees and flooded the inside of the Impala. The corpse took no notice. It railed and pitched within the confines of the car, screaming its silent rage into the rearview mirror while Mary stared. Bits of wet, ragged material began to dot the inside of the windows. Mary looked around but there was no one else to notice. Then the door on the corpse's driver side began to open.

The light up ahead went from red to green.

The line began to edge forward.

The Impala's door snapped shut.

Mary did not step on the gas until the car ahead was almost lost in the glare of the road and the driver behind laid on the horn. And then she drove with both hands clenched on the wheel, her eyes drilling into the distance ahead, always staying well behind the demon Impala until she came to a sidestreet that provided a route of escape. She shook all the way home.

And when she got there Joe was already home. He greeted her at the door and noticed her distress before she even set her few things down. She collapsed at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette. He sat down beside her. They'd been trying to get pregnant for the past year and just the other day Mary had brought home an EPT test. That night she'd taken it. According to the test, she was pregnant. Now this. It was as if a cold chill had blown into the kitchen with his wife's entrance. He wanted to touch her but was afraid. She told him of the two hallucinations. At one point she'd held her hands up in front of her face so he could see how badly rattled she was though she really hadn't needed to.

The night had passed and she'd seemed better the next morning. He'd felt fine too. Absolutely wonderful until he'd gotten into the car and reached for the radio. For just a split second he'd seen his hand as a bloody mass, a deep-red dripping bundle of holed tendons and black, fly-picked bones. Then it was gone and he'd not chased it down. By three o'clock that afternoon (just the previous day, now) they'd both been back in the house, all doors locked against the outside, all curtains drawn. Lights out. They'd fled a panic of blood. Everywhere, in the streets, on people's rotten faces, lying in skimmed puddles of depravity as they'd fought their way home. Mary's car had a dent along the entire back side. Joe's truck was resting on a blown tire.

And then they'd begun to see the carnage in each other.

Nothing much at first, just the barest smudge of black beneath the eyes, a deep gray blooming through the skin. They'd tried to ignore it. Talked to each other with averted eyes in case the hallucination (because that's what it was; what else could it be?) should take on more complexity. But that hadn't lasted long. The other's eyes had clouded over, going an unpleasant rheumy yellow, long rotted cracks sprouting underneath the skin and spreading outward like some fast-acting cancer. Blood dripped from their ears, their hair fell out in greasy chunks. Mary had gone to him once, in a thinly-veiled panic and touched John's face. It seemed whole, alive, not the ghastly rot her eyes told her was there. And then John had begun to cry black tears.

The smell of corruption surrounded them.

That was when they'd retreated to the closet. Within its darkness they could see nothing. Even the lingering stench of rot didn't have a foothold there, though the faintest whiff of foulness did waft back and forth through the hanging row of clothes. Large balls of toilet paper filled their noses in the effort to hold the stink at bay. To only partial success.

Like being in a grave.

And as they huddled, lost in the desolation that had swarmed down upon them the blood began to run from between Mary's legs.

*

Dan Sidworth had been a trouble-shooter for DEMCO, the local electricity monopoly, for only four months, but he'd been a licensed electrician for the better part of two decades, mostly working for himself. Right up until the lawsuit now almost a year in the past. He tried not to think about it too much but there was really nothing he could do to keep his mind from circling back. And as he sat in the company truck a half mile out in the woods which ringed the new subdivision (he still couldn't fathom why the powers-that-be had decided to stick the transformers so motherfucking far out) it all came back to him like an unwelcome nightmare. He laughed at the thought. His mother always thought he should have been more than he was. Of course she didn't say it but he could read it in her eyes. His father, on the other hand, had just never given a big shit. But his mother...he could still remember her reading him stories before he went to bed as a child, her holding his hand and praying when the story was told. Praying for him to be a doctor, a lawyer, all the standard shit uneducated women wish on their children though they knew no one themselves engaged in any such profession. She would hold his face in her hands on those nights, look him straight in the eye and tell him he would do GREAT THINGS. Her prophecy had seemed inevitable. So much so that he'd never amounted to shit.

He looked down at the sandwich in his hand and shook his head. Marlo always made the same fucking thing. When you said 'sandwich' in front of her it meant ham with bread barely grazed by mustard. That was it and it said a lot about her; a lot about him, too, if the truth be known. His mother's child prodigy amounting to no more than a hired man with a dull, stringy-haired wife who'd never even made it out of high school. Every year or so she'd talk about getting her G.E.D. but he knew it'd never happen. Couldn't figure any reason why it should. It wouldn't mean shit in the long run.

He rolled down the window and chunked the sandwich out to the long grass sprouting up inches back from the well-worn track. Fucking pathetic.

His mother had died right before the lawsuit and that was a good thing. It would have killed her just as dead to have her only child broke and hustling change like a nigger. Because that's what she'd've thought of this job.

And it was the work; he had to admit it. Maybe he had been born for greater things than tinkering around with wires and relay switches. It'd grown so old he'd lost interest years back. He'd gotten lax, so fucking lazy. Even now he wanted to kick himself in the ass but it was too late. What's done is done and fuck you very much.

Thank God the kids had managed to get out.

If they'd have burned...

"Fuck it," he said and snapped the handle on the door, stepping out into the sunlight. His life was nothing but a huge, gigantic WHAT IF. He needed to grow up, quit acting like a fucking baby. If he'd run herd on his hired men when he had a business he wouldn't be in this fucked up situation right now. Wouldn't be a hired man himself. When you got right down to it that was the only truth that mattered. He could cry into his beer all he wanted and it still wouldn't change a goddamn thing.

He put his hands in his pockets and felt the work order. He could just see the transformer from here, almost hidden behind a bank of scrub brush about twenty feet away. It'd been giving off some weird readings lately and he was supposed to run a check on it with his instruments, try to hunt down the anomaly if there, in fact, was one. He turned back to the truck and snapped open the wrap-around toolbox. DEMCO had every damn gadget in the world back here at his disposal and it almost made him feel important again, but only for a second. And then it was gone and he was just another number, busting his hump for a bi-weekly paycheck.

In the midst of this melancholy the lid of the toolbox slammed down on his fingers and he howled loud and strong. In the process he ripped his fingers free and left most of the nail from his right middle finger somewhere in the box. It hurt like ten bastards and he gripped it, tears welling in his eyes, cursing under his breath as he squinted to see the large drops of blood spattering to the dirt. Making crazy little patterns there.

"Ohyoumotherfuckingsonofabitch!" he yelled and grimaced, his face pointed up at the sun. He almost dared not look. Blood always made him woozy and the damn finger already felt like a balloon getting ready to sail away. He swallowed back the nausea and tried to focus on the cause. He remembered the sudden claustrophobic chill and looked around, his mind momentarily free from the pain. Then it washed back in a wave. He closed his eyes, counted to ten, tried to steady his breathing. When he opened them he felt better. The blood wasn't dripping anymore. The pain was choking back to a more manageable place. He squeezed his lips together and decided to take a look. Held his hand up like a claw and didn't feel his bile rise. Yeah it hurt like hell, but it didn't look too bad. Most of the nail had been clipped away but there wasn't any bone showing or anything like that. There was a First Aid kit behind the driver's seat (standard issue from a company that liked to brag about its safety record) and there were plenty of band-aids.

But that still didn't explain...

He turned slowly in a circle. Holding his hand up. Trying to forget about the terrible throbbing. Because something wasn't right. He had no idea why but something was...not...right.

Something was watching him. He did another slow turn, taking his time now that the pain had abated somewhat. Nothing stirred in the tall grass that grew alongside the road. For just a moment there he felt like a child again, afraid of some nameless something in the dark. It made him ashamed. Here he was, a grown man, jumping at shadows, and even this figure was ridiculous. The sun could not have been brighter. Even now it boiled down, running a rivulet of sweat down his back. Trying to draw his moisture up to the clouds that floated gently overhead. He heard a small laugh escape his lips. Looked again at his hand. Shook the wet droplets of blood free and held it closer. No, it wasn't really that bad. Of course, he'd lose the nail, or what was left of it; that was a given, but weirdly, now, that seemed a good thing. Funny. Not ha, ha funny but worth a laugh all the same.

He shook his head and walked over to the truck. Opened the door and rummaged around behind the seat for the First Aid kit. Using his good hand he pulled it out from underneath the seat, set it down on the running board, and popped the top. Two band-aids later and a dollop of Neosporin and he felt himself again. He'd almost forgotten the chill and cursed his clumsiness.

There was still the work order.

He was new to the job and, experience or not, it wouldn't look good to go running back to the shop with a bandaged finger claiming he was done for the day. This was a new, less understanding, world he inhabited. "Okay," he said. He reached in his pocket again and withdrew the order. Pressed it out flat on the seat and read it through one more time. "Okay," he said again. "No time like the present."

He grabbed the toolbox he kept beside him at all times and made his way back toward the transformer. Ten feet away he stopped. "Fuck a truckload of monkeys," he whispered under his breath. The transformer was new enough and sitting high and dry on a concrete slab that extended out about three inches past the metal enclosure box on all sides but its placement was terrible. The whole area was awash in mud, right up to the top of the concrete and extending out to the tips of his boots where he stood. He shook his head and moved forward, splashing over to the concrete pad. There was no room to work and stand. He'd have to keep one foot in the mud while he ran the checklist. It seemed his finger began to throb a little more as he stood there. He set the toolbox down on the pad and pulled the company key from his pocket.

He stuck it into the lock and turned...tried to turn it. Stuck. Motherfuck. He put his bad hand on the top of the box and leaned in to it. Sweat ran into his eyes and his wet foot squelched back in the mud. Cool water was edging into his work boot by the time he finally got the damn thing to let go and when it did he jerked it back violently, leaving the shop key in the lock. It'd be just his luck the goddamn thing would fall out into the mud and he'd have to spend the next half hour panning through to find the motherfucker. His shirt was drenched, his hands slick with sweat.

Before him were roughly a godzillion wires and circuits running every which way. He squatted down on his haunches and looked at the schematics embossed in shiny white letters on their black background. This was going to take awhile. Like it or not. He spat on the concrete pad and edged closer to the writing, only aware at the last moment that it was upon him again, that curious, discomfiting feeling of being watched. Only this time much worse.

He was just beginning to turn around (the hair standing up on his neck all the way up to the base of his head) when he saw the shadow and felt a monstrous shove from behind. His foot slipped out in the mud and he lurched forward, his hands unconsciously shoved out in front of him to break his fall. He fell into the High Voltage box, realizing all too late it was over for him a millisecond before making contact.

He never heard the incredible whomping boom, never noticed his hair frying on his head as his eyeballs exploded, the force carrying him completely over the mud puddle and landing him flat and smoking in a band of weeds growing close by.

And at that moment all the power in every house on Leszno's Farm went as dead as the body that was just then beginning to ignite the weeds ten feet away from the blown transformer.

# Chapter 26: Phone Call

Carolyn Skate arrived at the office earlier than usual because she'd had a hard time sleeping. Usually she slept like the dead; her dad had liked to tell her that when she was young (that careful half-lidded-eyed way he had of looking at her at times) and she'd never forgotten. He'd called her his "little zombie" when her mother had not been around and as she'd gotten older and his memory had receded to a comfortable place in her mind, she'd thought of this moniker as a well-intentioned play on her personality. She had been quiet as a child, secretive even. It was something her mother had never made note of but as the years passed her father's secret nickname had never escaped her. In fact it had dug down to a safe place, had become part of a nostalgic memory that propped up with any thought that came of the man. This morning, however, it had not been so welcome. She'd awakened in the middle of the night in a dead sweat. Panting. Her hands drawn up into claws. And the strangest thing was that she could remember nothing of the episode that had brought her around. She'd gotten out of bed at 4:30, made a huge pot of coffee and waited for the paper. By the time it came she'd already taken a shower and dressed. Even so, she paged through it like an automaton, hardly aware of the words she was reading.

By 5:45 she'd been in her car heading for the office.

She liked arriving when no one else was around. Her father had been a solid blue-collar worker (for thirty-four years he'd worked as a Safety Inspector at Exxon) but he'd always beaten into her brain the necessity of college; her mother, on the other hand, had been the dutiful helpmate, always in the house and about its business. She was sixty-eight now and sequestered in an Alzheimer's ward of a local nursing home. Carolyn still visited her every weekend, rain or shine. But she'd gone off to college, suffered through the interminable generalized courses of her Freshman year until she'd taken the Introductory to Psychology class. After that, time had passed like water through a sieve. She'd found her mark. On his deathbed, her father, the man she'd always looked up to, had squeezed her hand and smiled a deathly white smile across the equally white sheet of his hospital bed and thanked her. Thanked her for doing what he'd been unable to imagine. She passed through Georgetown University's graduate program as an honor student, funded entirely from the government's pocket, until she'd emerged one day with her doctorate. Ready to take on the world.

And she had.

The only thing she'd ever been unsuccessful at had been relationships and even now she wondered if that, too, didn't have something to do with her father. But as her courses and intuition assured her, there was no sense in questioning ghosts. The answers one could procure were tenuous at best and never satisfactory. Her child had become her work. And coming to the office was like coming home.

She walked over to the receptionist's desk and checked the mail in the In-Box. Nothing pressing, nothing her workers couldn't handle on their own. She set down her coffee mug and chanced a look down the hall. Toward her office. So much of her life took place back there, behind that closed door. So many confessions, so much regret and disappointment. College had not prepared her for that. The steady stream of disaffected people, in and out her door seeking sanctuary. How many had she supplied that equally tenuous property? That was a depressing thought also. Her door was partially open and from here she saw the foot of the couch. It'd been with her from the start even though no one really elected to spill out their troubles in its embrace. But nonetheless, it stayed. And why? It kept her grounded, reminded her constantly of her own insecurities and failings. Like the albatross around the old mariner's neck. Because, in actuality, that's what it was. She left the mug where it was and walked down the short hall to her office. Pushed open the door with her right hand. Looked down at the couch.

Her own Scarlet Letter.

She walked into the office and trailed over to her desk. Sat down, her eyes still on the couch. It'd been almost four years and the sight of it never failed to humiliate on some primal level. The detective, James Arnold, immediately washed across her mind. Her failing. He'd come to her for help and she'd destroyed his marriage, come close to destroying her career. The couch was a constant reminder. He'd been one of the youngest detectives on the force when they'd started, referred to her from a client's service she'd long since quit. Seven years her junior and startlingly child-like she'd thought. The shooting she was supposed to help him through had been the gate she'd gone gladly through. Her looks, his manner, slowly drawing her in to the point of no return.

It had been an early morning then, too.

She'd reached out and touched his face. Even now, she had no idea how or why she'd done such a thing. But she had. And the want in his face had took over; her own head in his hands as he whispered in her ear. She'd found herself on the couch below him, her mind spinning at a million miles an hour, shuffling off her skirt even then as her mind screamed warning. But by then he'd been inside her and there was no turning back. She'd watched his eyes and, even now, she had to admit, there was nothing she could have done to change a thing. It had seemed like the final chapter to a satisfying, though forbidden, book.

And that, really, was what it was.

Never again had he ventured into her office. And it was only weeks later that she learned he'd told his wife of the indisgression, and the woman was in the process of leaving him. They had two little children, both girls, ages three and five. She'd taken them and moved out of state. And still he had not called. For a year she'd never uttered another word to the man. Not a single word. She broken her professional code, even now for reasons she could no more fathom than the man in the moon. But then, late one Friday afternoon, he'd called to set the record straight. He was still working for the force, living in a small one bedroom apartment downtown and sending most of his check in child support. He said he didn't blame her, that it was just something he'd had to do, both the transgression and the subsequent telling. He assured her she'd done no wrong; that things had just suddenly fallen apart and the world had continued to move regardless.

And she, meanwhile, still had no clue as to his motivations. It made her small, apparently unprepared for the profession she'd thought she was in such tight control over. She'd let it lie dormant for a year, called him on a whim when she thought he might be able to provide some information on a client's problem she was trying to unravel. And he'd helped her. Had never mentioned that one thing that lay like a stone in her heart. And so it goes.

She considered turning on the television mounted on the wall in the back corner near the bookshelves. Immediately decided against it; the quiet was too dear. For a long, lost, lonely moment she thought herself the only one in the world, a victim of her own secrets.

Then the phone rang. Her hand, still close to the mug, jerked forward and overturned it. The coffee spilled over the edge of her desk to the carpet below. But she made no move to get up; her eyes were glued on the caller ID. That number. Her mind a fugue, she reached over and gripped the handset, brought it to her ear.

"Carolyn," she heard. Her voice caught in her throat and a long moment of silence beaded out across the centuries. Now, it came again as a question, "Carolyn?" She breathed in deeply and eyed the coffee edging over the end of the desk.

"James," she said.

"Yeah, it's me." She chanced another look at the couch. "Was wonderin if you'd be in this early."

"Just got here," she lied, her mind spinning. "Couldn't sleep," and she coughed, even then glancing around the office as if afraid someone was spying on her. She cleared her throat and tried again. "What's up?" An alarm sounded in her head, putting her on guard immediately.

He started to say something, was interrupted by a voice at the far fringe of her hearing. A woman's. She stood up and walked over to her bathroom to get a towel (the coffee would make a hell of a mess) all the while chiding herself silently for calling up such a question, considering their past. She heard him bark something over his shoulder. "Yeah, I know," he finished as a seeming afterthought before turning his attention back to her. "Carolyn," he said for the third time (the charm?), then, "busy as hell over here."

"Uh huh," she returned, fetching a towel from the rack by the sink and turning back to her office. Before she could say anything else he went on.

"Listen, got something might interest you." She waited for a moment for him to continue but he didn't. Reminiscent of how many of their earliest sessions had gone. She threw the towel onto the top of her desk, one corner catching the spill.

"Shoot," she said only because she could think of nothing else.

"I just pieced this together," he said. "Something kind of odd came up."

"Okay."

"I don't really have anything much, but something in the back of my head said give you a ring."

"I'm all ears."

"The woman you gave me to check out, that Patsy Standish..."

"Uh huh."

"Well, we got a missing person on the wire yesterday. House untouched, car in the driveway, neighbors didn't see anything. Hell, for all I know he might have skipped town for a million different reasons, or he might be right here under our noses. No big deal except for one thing."

"Yes?"

"An address. His previous residence. Seems our missing character used to live at the current address of one Patsy Standish, your Patsy Standish. I can't tell you the guy's name but it shouldn't be too hard to find out."

"Really," Carolyn said, sitting back down at her desk, the spilled coffee forgotten now.

"Really." She could almost see him grinning grimly through the phone. "Just thought you might like to know."

"Yeah, you were right. I do."

He laughed humorlessly. "Hey, what can I say? Just trying to keep the customer satisfied. You satisfied?"

"Not really. Intrigued, yes."

That short burst of laughter again. "Yeah, well...that's about it. Least for the moment. Right now this thing's as new as wet paint. Though it doesn't hurt to have someone else snooping around too, if you get me."

"I do," she said. "And James..."

"Yeah?"

"I appreciate this. I don't know why, but I do."

"Yeah, well one hand washes the other, huh?"

"That it does," she said. Within another minute Doctor Carolyn Skate sat alone, thoughtfully staring out the window into the parking lot, searching for something in her mind that she could neither identify nor even rightly explain.

# Chapter 27: Old Shake

Even as a kid he'd never liked the night. It was dumb, stupid; he knew that. If not, why the hell would he live alone in the woods, for christsake? Regardless, it was true and it was real, and right this minute, staring out through the blinds into the darkness, it was night. He looked down at the gun in his hand, shook his head, wiped his forehead with the towel he held in the other. Looked over his shoulder into the kitchen, trying to read the wall clock. Looked back at the window.

Nothing out there, dammit, nothing!

He gripped the .22 a little tighter. Tried to think back to what had stirred him from sleep.

Where were the dogs?

He remembered feeding them right before bed. Why, there were the bowls, empty, beside his TV chair. And it seemed he could remember watching them eat, but he wasn't quite sure. It could have been yesterday, the day before. Regardless, where the hell were they? He always kept them in at night. Old Shake hadn't complained about the restriction for years; he was almost eight and didn't have time for much else beside sleeping, eating, and getting rubbed. And Sally never left his side anyway. So where the hell were they?

He let the blinds snap closed and backed slowly into the kitchen doorway. The clock read 3:47. Jesus, hours till first light. What the hell was he going to do in the meantime? Creep around in here like a fucking burglar with a gun in his hand, just waiting to the blow the balls off anything that moved?

Weird, man, creepy. The kind of shit that got you thrown into Jackson. The State Home, as his granny used to call it. The State Home, yeah. Over the years he'd known a few who went that direction, and he never remembered seeing any of them again. He shook his head. At least today was Saturday, no, Sunday he reminded himself, looking back at the clock. Yeah, Sunday, right. The only day the mail didn't run and thank God for small favors.

And it wasn't like he didn't know what it was. He knew damn good and well. That fucking fisherman, the one from the ghost stories he'd heard when he was a kid. Probably almost a hundred times or so, and it had been a scary one, sure, but it had never felt real. That had been a good thing, a thing that gave it a nice little safe place in his mind. But now...

Things hadn't been...what, safe? Maybe ever since you took that walk down to the pond. And then seen that fucking mud man or whatever the hell it was. He remembered the fear and running, and that was about it. Like his mind only worked in fits and starts lately.

But there must be more, the dirty little voice whispered. Why else would you sit in the kitchen in the middle of the night with a handgun in your lap? He looked down at the kitchen table, hardly remembering that even, and saw the gun. He wanted to let it go but didn't. Couldn't.

Doom approaches.

He sat back fast, wincing. There it was in two simple words. That, in a nutshell, was the cause of his sleeplessness, the nightmares, the fear. That was it and that was all it was and it would be everything, somehow he could see that part, and sooner than later. But where it was coming from he had no i---

\---but he did and he damn well knew it.

Leszno's Farm. That goddamn place was where it came from, probably where it always came from, but something new was in the air now, for sure. Hell, the news, that poor family. God knew what else was going on over there, but you could bet it was no good. Everything about that neighborhood had soured lately, and there seemed to be no one who really let on about it other than himself. Or maybe that crazy old fucking man he'd seen by the mailtruck a couple of weeks before, but shit...what was all that anyway?

Oh man, yeah, getting ready for the State House indeed. Life and its little jokes. But he didn't laugh. He swallowed back on a hard lump in his throat and heard the tremor in his hand tap the pistol barrel against the tabletop. He coughed the lump through and tried to whistle, hoping that somehow both dogs were already in the house; maybe back there lying deeper in the house, somehow unaware of his need. The sound came out cracked, ludicrous, and Jester hunched forward, self-consciously pulling the gun in closer to his body. His eyes remained on the windows but nothing was out there. He already knew that; he'd sat out there on the porch every night for the past week, staring out into the goddamn woods for no reason.

Oh, no, motherfucker...you got reason...

He stood up suddenly and the chair kicked out from underneath him and hit the kitchen cabinet three feet away. He spun around from the sound and immediately closed his eyes and brought his free hand to his chest. Jesus Christ! I was just that far from shootin a fucking hole through the kitchen! That far! What the hell's got you, boy? You stepping over the edge, damn straight, straight over the goddamn edge, and here it is, the funny part, the part you just won't believe...all over the fucking boogyman.

No. There was something out there!

Oh, a course, sure! And if that's the case and the whateveritis is indeed after you, well then, the question has to be: what the fuck are you still doing here? Because, you see, that's the part that just doesn't shake. He dropped his head and almost laughed then. This was like something a kid needed his momma for, not a grown—

\--no. It ain't like that and you know it.

He sat down again, hard, on the chair and shook his head. He leaned forward and placed the gun on the table, sat back and looked at it a good long time. Think! Think! You don't believe this, whatever it is you've been tryin to think. You're a grown man let's face it, and now, for some unknown reason, you're suddenly scared of the dark. You can try to twist and turn it around so it looks different than it is, but what it boils down to is you is scared of the dark. Believe that shit. Four o'clock in the fuckin morning and you're staring off into space with a fucking gun in your hand, waiting to shoot anything that moves.

There it is. Put that in your goddamn pipe and smoke it.

He bit his lip and wondered if a little shot of whiskey wouldn't help. Stood up and tried not to look at the gun hanging at his wrist. Whistled again, this time a bit louder. A bit better, but still no dogs. He walked over to the sink by the window, forced himself to look through the dirty pane of glass. But he did look goddammit, at the same damn things that'd always been there, of course, but he did look. The tin sheeting extending off the eave of the house to the 4 bys sunk in the concrete where they used to keep the tractor years back. Same damn extension cord from the past ten years, too, looping out to the work-light which hung from the nail. The pile of old tires and the scrap metal from T-Boy's. What was left of a sandbox and the old dead tree where the swing used to be. He dragged his eye right to the liquor cabinet. Reached over and opened it, took out the bottle of Evan Williams. He pulled out the glass he kept beside it for one express purpose and dropped two fingers in, eyed it, and poured in one more. He readied himself and threw it back.

It was as he placed the empty glass back on the countertop that he saw it out by the dead tree. His fingers viced together and shot the glass into the sink, spinning it around loudly, but not breaking it. He ducked down toward the window ledge, trying to see back past where the edge of the tin sheeting obscured the yard past the tree. He did have a light on a pole back there, but from the house, anywhere in the house, he'd have no better view than here. The rest of the yard was mostly wild owing to untended hedges and lazy Saturday afternoons in the heat of summer, but--

There it was again, gotdammit!

He ducked even lower, trying to get a better view and only succeeding in crunching his nose against the ledge. His eyes welled and blurred and he lurched back from the sink, toward the kitchen table, the gun clutched at his chest. He shook the tears from his eyes and brought the weapon to bear.

There came the sound of something large, a garbage can most likely, getting thrown against a tree, hard. And on the tail end of that he thought he heard a dog. "Shake," he whispered and moved away from the table. Another crash of metal from the same direction. "Sonofabitch," he muttered, pushing past the few sacks of undelivered mail through to the dining room. He only paused long enough at the door to glance down at the gun again and then the knob was in his fist and he was pulling it back hard, not shaking now.

He jumped down the small step-up, ignoring the rail and jerking his head and the gun in all directions. "Da hell's goin on out here!" he yelled into the darkness. "I got a gun!"

Nothing.

He moved slowly, on point, to the edge of the drip line, pulling up behind one of the 4bys, the gun twitching at every shape in the darkness. The only thing that kept his finger still was the fear that the dogs were still out there somewhere and he'd hit one by mistake. He wished he'd thought to bring a fucking flashlight. "Motherfucker, I'll kill ya!" he yelled again, his voice no longer as loud nor as confident as he'd pretended in Full Assault Mode. Now he could see how dark and lonely and fucking menacing it really was out here.

He cut his eyes left and saw the garbage can. Somebody had sure enough chunked it all right. There was shit all over the place over there by the tires but that's not what really had him. No, not by half, because the last time he'd looked in it had been rimmed-out with old rainwater and rust. He'd pushed against it as a test and it hadn't budged an inch.

And here it'd been chunked halfway across the backyard.

He pointed his gun back toward the corner of the house where the can had been sitting. He wanted to shout but couldn't find the voice, the courage now. He'd been in a couple of fights in middle and high school and it had never been anything like this. This felt more like walking along the edge of your own grave. The gooseflesh rippled along the small of his back and the gun went off in his hand.

The explosion almost brought him to his knees.

That and the pain.

Suddenly a bright, crystallized point of flame lit in his right foot and immediately mushroomed into such an intricate scheme of blinding hurt that he had no idea where he was or what had happened. His ears were ringing and he got the sense of the moon hanging low in the sky right before his leg buckled and dumped him on the dew-stained ground. He rolled over on his back, wondering at the hard piece of metal in his hand, only then coming to some sort of semi-conscious acknowledgement of what had happened. The gun had gone off in his hand. And from the feel of it he'd shot himself in the fucking foot! He squeezed his eyes shut and pushed himself up on his elbows into a sitting position. He was suddenly no longer afraid, the pain killed all that. For just a moment he wondered if this was how men felt in battle, and then he saw his foot.

The bullet had drilled a neat little hole in the side of his boot and even as he watched, blood welled up and out. A dazed part of his mind tried to tell him that at least it wasn't spurting. He tried to wiggle his toes and winced. All right, all right. Bad idea. Get up and get back inside. And again, for another weird moment he could not even remember what had got him out here in the first place.

An agonized howl reminded him.

This time there was no doubt. Old Shake (where the hell was Sally?) and there was no other time on earth Jester had heard him like that. He knew the dog like people knew their kids. "Motherfucker," he whispered, trying to get an idea where the sound was coming from. His ears still rang from his fuck-up but the wail was almost continuous now, not showing any sign of slacking. He finally reached his knee, trying to see through the swimming waves of pain, trying to situate his foot so it didn't have to bear weight. It made the sound funny in his head, like an echo, an endless loop. His stomach pitched and he lost his dinner all out in front of him. The pistol barrel was stuck in the ground, propping him up. He thought he would puke again but didn't. Barely.

And suddenly the form was there again. Whatever (his mind was quick to remind him now) had drawn him from the kitchen. Right out there past the shadow-mark of light, something was moving again. Toward him. This time it seemed to be oozing out of the treeline and shrubs. Jester heard branches snapping and the heavy sound of something pushing through the bank of hedges over there and cried out from the pain in his foot again. There was a lot of blood in the grass, flowing out of him like a tide. He straightened his back and pulled the gun out of the ground.

Something was coming toward him. It seemed to be splashes of color combining into an elusive shape and it was only as the thing got near that Jester made it out to be two things. One behind the other. Or one holding up the other. The hairs along Jester's arm raised to hackles. The second the color coalesced he knew and just this knowing helped his head clear a little. Without a thought he stood up and pointed the pistol at whatever was coming toward him through the woods.

He didn't think about his foot, of the intruder creeping closer, or anything in the world really. Because he recognized what the thing was carrying. He'd know that rangy fur anywhere, and somehow, knowing this gave him the strength he needed to raise the gun. "Goddammit, mister," he growled. "I'm sending ya to hell for that."

And he pulled the trigger.

The six-inch barrel had been completely buried in the earth when he fell, due to the fact of several hard rains the previous week; it had gone in like a lover. The mud-packed barrel disintegrated in his hand amid a brilliant flash of white and he went over again, not knowing if he was for the world or against it, with it or somewhere on the outer edges, scrabbling and babbling as he went down.

The last thing he felt was something land hard on his chest.

# Chapter 28: Introductions

Elizabeth Tanksley gingerly lifted herself out of the recliner and thumbed the television off. Her arthritis was terrible today, even with the pills. That and the headache had her in a deathgrip. Or so it seemed. Deep inside she knew it was anything but, but still...at least this gave her something else to consider. Because she really didn't want to recognize the thing she knew had brought on both of these minor inconveniences.

Her neighbor. She would go over and meet her come hell or highwater. Today...soon. And that, in a nutshell, was what was causing everything else. Her body was in rebellion over the thing her mind refused to ignore. Besides, she honestly feared now, that if she didn't at least get this part over with, she'd never sleep again.

Not until the Big and Final One.

A shiver passed along her frame and she steadied herself against the table, gripping its edge in a claw-like grip. It'd now been twelve days since she'd slept a wink. Crazy, yes, but true. A new record. There'd been nothing like it since her teens. And she still remembered that, yes sir: her first real boyfriend. Johnson Teal had been his name. He'd come from a nice little family from right down the road. They used to walk those same roads, holding hands, and on more than one occasion she'd let him get a little randy, even though they'd never gone all the way. Oh, even then, back in the mists of time, some girls she'd known had let the boys have their way but it was really never something she'd seriously considered.

And now it brought bitterness. Partly because she'd never let him; mostly because she'd never married; ultimately because even now she was as chaste as the day she'd entered the world. A virgin. For her gift, she'd always led herself to believe. The visions, the things she'd always been able to see. She'd felt that this thing would depart if she were ever to let a man have her. She never knew where the feeling originated, only that it had always been there.

She looked across the room at one of the several pictures she'd hung on the wall. All of them black and white, most of them her over the years. She'd even been vaguely pretty once and now...well. She felt like crying. Oh so long ago, remembering those walks and Teal's entreaties to step across the ditch, to wind back into the high grass.... But he'd failed. And now she had to wonder if she'd somehow been party to his death, had somehow caused it by not relinquishing as she should have. But she shook her head. That time it had been eight straight nights without sleep, her mind a vast, empty shell of disquiet. Johnson had hooked on with a construction outfit and told her he'd be gone for three months, at least. She cried and pleaded with him not to go, but times were tight and good money was not something that could be thumbed down. Besides, there'd been no visions up to that point. The first night she'd slept, but dreamlessly. Which was strange. Up till that time she couldn't remember a night without dreams, and perhaps, in retrospect, that's what had disturbed her initially. There had been no portent of disaster. Only dreamlessness.

And then the eight straight sleepless nights.

After that she'd slept. Not good, but she'd slept.

Her mother told her of Johnson's death two days later. She called Elizabeth into the dining room and grabbed her hand in both of hers and told her. There'd been an accident with the rigging. Something had slipped. He'd been hit in the head. There was nothing anyone could have done.

Elizabeth had taken the news in silence, feeling the grip of her mother's warm hands on her own. She'd felt something slip inside her then, some telling, intricate piece of her own machinery, and she'd left the table without a word and went straight to her bedroom. Her mother had not followed, knowing enough about the gulf of broken hearts to remain apart. Elizabeth had entered the room, closed the door, turned off all lights and lay down on the bed. Cried for a few minutes and then, inexplicably, slept twenty-five hours straight through.

For just a moment the events of those long years past floated before her eyes like things seen through a frost-paned shower stall. She was lost in some deep maze of strangeness made ever more so by the nostalgic bitterness of familiarity. She shook her head and blinked her eyes. She cocked her head left and right as if getting a bearing on her surroundings. She breathed out softly and looked down at the table, at her hands. They were old now, deep lines running a gamut of directions, all of them going nowhere. She'd studied them often and long over the years. It had always seemed that whatever power she had originated there, not in her head. Why this would be so she could not say, call it intuition. But for long years she'd watched them and they'd told her many things, but all in all those lost years they'd never shown her anything she could change. And still she'd persisted. Waiting, waiting. For what she'd never known.

But now she could feel it coming.

Another shiver rammed through her and her hands twitched violently as if from electric shock. Something was on the way. She'd known it earlier; it must have been the better part of three-four weeks now, since she'd felt it creeping on, but never more so than right this minute. She thought of her neighbor again, coming to her unbidden like a memory brought on by a song on the radio. Relentless.

She thought back to the night and could find nothing much on which to hang her hat. Just a brooding unease, and mind snapshots of the woman she knew by look alone. Up until now she'd never spoken the first word to her. The smell of the biscuits brought her a step closer to reality. Time, it was time. The biscuits called. Her nose was like that, in over sixty years of baking, she'd never burned them once, her timing always impeccable. But now it was close; her nose told her so, and really, this morning, something told her she'd never make another batch of more importance. Get up before you burn the sonofabiscuits, she thought.

She hurried over to the oven, picking up the pot handlers by the sink as she went. Pure ridiculousness, she chided herself. Here you go getting all loosy-goosy over---what? That was the thing. Nothing. Only a persistent sense of dread. She didn't think meeting her neighbor would do much in the way of stopping that either, but again, intuition must be followed. And she didn't know what was worse, the dread of meeting the woman or the dread in not meeting her. Both prospects were equally grim.

She opened the door of the oven and reached inside, pulled out the tray of biscuits and set them on the burners of the stove to cool. There, now, it was okay. Her nose told her so, and she felt better, but only for a moment. Because now she knew, looking down at the things she'd made, that there was no turning back. Whatever mysterious, undefined thing that had steadily been whittling away at her lately, well that thing was ready to break into the light. God help her, she could feel it coming. She tore a few sheets of paper towels free and placed them over the cooling biscuits and stepped back, her hands on her hips. She nodded and smiled grimly.

Oh yes, and even now, in her mind's eye she could picture herself and Johnson Teal stealing away from the road into the shadows of the tall grass. And right now, this very minute, over all time and place, her old mind ticked with the knowledge that she should have let him do that thing they'd both wanted all those many years ago. She was suddenly irrevocably sure it would have saved her from whatever was flying up from the darkness of the future.

*

Twenty minutes later saw her back at the kitchen table, gently placing the biscuits, one by one, into the depths of the picnic basket. She'd come across it, oddly enough, at the back of her bedroom closet, not a week ago. There she'd been, on hands and knees (and that was indeed a trick these days, and not an altogether wise one for a hermit like her; she'd many times wondered how someone would find her one of these days, mummified into the recliner's embrace, most likely) windshield-wipering everything on the floor before her to either side, and suddenly, right back there at the corner, there it was. She'd taken it out and looked closely, the missing shoes forgotten in this new discovery. Because to the best of her knowledge she'd never owned such a thing. She had a vague memory of her mother possessing one much like it, but surely not this one lost back here in the depths of the closet. No.

And that had been part of it too.

Because right then it'd been like a bell going off. Time to meet the neighbor.

She placed the last biscuit in, recalling these last few strands of thought. She bit her lip and shook her head. Knew she was on the very edge. Almost afraid to look over, afraid she'd see nothing but miles and miles of emptiness leading straight down. Perhaps to oblivion. Most likely to oblivion. More and more, the thought tugged. But she'd never been a coward with the gift, call it bane or benefit, she'd long since ceased to classify. It was time and she was going. She'd already peered through the living room curtains. The woman's car was in the garage and it was just before eleven. She closed the picnic top and folded the handles upright. Hefted it up off the table to her side. It was not heavy; it felt right, and that at least, she hoped, was a good thing. She had on a simple blue pants suit with a white blouse. As usual Reebok running shoes on her feet. She'd never jogged a day in her life and even now couldn't remember the reason she'd bought them the first time. Ahh...she shook her head and stared across the kitchen toward the living room, toward the front door. All this was just stalling, all these petty thoughts. She walked across the tiled floor and through the entranceway between the kitchen and living room. The TV was off (she never turned it on in the morning until noon, sort of like an alcoholic with his drink, she figured) and the room was suffused with a gleaming warm embrace from outside. And just then the brief familiar hum through the vents before the air conditioner compressor kicked on. It was going to be another hot one.

It suits, she thought, and passed through the room to the front door. Opened it and stepped outside, pulling it shut behind her. She always left it unlocked unless she were sleeping and had never thought twice about it before. Now she found herself looking back at the doorknob, focusing on that tiny little keyhole. Wondering if she even knew where the keys were. "Come on, woman," she chided. "You could do this for a week."

She turned away from the door then and walked briskly down the walk that led from her front door to the street, taking an idle swoop by an incongruous hickory tree planted beside the driveway. Several of her yardmen had told her the tree would never make it in this climate but there it stood. Hadn't complained yet. The thought set to break her mood and she smiled, glancing up into its tangled branches. Then she was past it and the only thing before her remained the woman's house. Everything else inferior beside it. Now she was to the road. She shifted the picnic basket to both hands in front of her and crossed over. And it was as she passed down the length of her neighbor's driveway that the singularity of the day began to address her.

She was utterly, completely alone.

Right now, here in the very heart of a budding day, there was that. A fleeting instant's thought of standing alone once in the woods, years lost in the past, laid a cold hand on her soul from her chin to toe tips. Against her will she pulled up short. Set the picnic basket down on the concrete and looked around slowly. Nothing. No humming motors nor kids playful yelling over a block. No darting birds between the houses. Nothing.

But she could feel eyes upon her. From everywhere. Like she was naked and parading around out here for the enjoyment of every pervert in the world. She suddenly felt the unaccustomed dirtiness mix with the cold inside and her eyes drew up into slits. She turned and looked back down the driveway, toward the carport.

There was almost a smell...almost, my God.

She bent quickly and retrieved the basket, knowing if she didn't do so immediately she'd be heading straight back across the road for her house with her tail between her legs. She rubbed her free hand over her dry lips and willed herself forward, pressing her eyes for any hint of motion from anywhere. She passed to the left of the car (parked in the center of the carport) and came up short against the storm door. There was a doorbell right beside it. It even glowed a dull, sickly yellow, a color to the smell she could feel. She looked only a moment before reaching out and punching it back into the wall. When it rang the sick little light winked out as if trading energy for death.

Then she rolled back on her heels and waited.

A moment later she heard someone fumbling with a lock (strange, that, she thought offhand) and subsequently the door was pulled back. The woman standing before her looked much older than she remembered. But then again, that wasn't quite right. No, because it was really more than that...haggard. Those black circles underneath the eyes, the lank hair. The T-shirt she had on was faded, a single hole in the right shoulder. Elizabeth tried to smile, attempting to hide the unease she felt building like some bleak thundercloud. "Hello," she said and held up the basket like some pagan offering. Later on, in the stillness of her home, she would wonder if that had, in fact, been the case. The woman's eyes left hers and glanced down, her mouth a tight line of stress.

"Hello," Elizabeth said again. "I'm your neighbor from across the street," and she pointed in that direction, glad for the moment to look away and compose herself. When she looked back the woman was again staring at her. With something more than curiosity, more than question. Somewhere deep down inside seemed to lurk a sense of need, of relief even. The woman's eyes widened, seemed momentarily surprised. She looked down at the basket and her hands started out.

"Oh, okay, yes, a neighbor," and Elizabeth relinquished it to the younger woman's grasp.

"That's right, honey," she found herself saying as she was led inside.

*

The kitchen was a cozy enough affair. They'd gotten over introductions ten minutes before and Patsy had excused herself to the bathroom. Elizabeth thought she seemed nice enough. Talked a little fast, sure, but there was really nothing to pinpoint the feeling of dread she'd felt across the street, in the driveway. Thinking back over the succession of sleepless nights, right here in the light of day in this sunlight-filled kitchen, the connection was hard to make. But still there remained a sense of unease. And she'd grown accustomed to never underestimate her intuitions. The years had proved her right time after time and there was no reason to doubt them now. She turned from where she stood and looked toward the range. Everything spotless, nothing out of place. But still...

You see it, but still refuse...

The idea came like a loose feather, teased along by the wind, shuffling through on the very edge of perceptibility. And then it came clear.

A movie set. Once implanted, the thought was impossible to deny. This place was a mere set, a sham. This house no more lived in than some deserted motel out on the far edge of a desert. The familiar tickle of realization pulled though her like a faint heartbeat.

"Mrs. Elizabeth?" she heard suddenly as if from a great distance, some chasm of understanding. She started back to the present. Patsy already moving toward her as she spun around, her face a mass of pity. "Oh I'm sorry, I scared you!" Elizabeth heard her say as she came into focus. A vision was on her now that she could scarcely contain. She reached for a chair, pulled it her way and sat down heavily. She could feel her heart pounding like a hammer. Saw the younger woman down on one knee, one hand on each of her knees. Looking worriedly into Elizabeth's eyes. And at that moment Elizabeth knew this poor woman kneeling before her would be no more able to escape whatever approaching doom was coming than Christ on His cross.

# Chapter 29: Cold Realizations

The clock had just ticked into the next day and Patsy stared at the gun in her hand. It was fully loaded with hollow points and she was not blind as to what those would do. The two of them, John and her, had gone out shooting pumpkins one day and right now those images were very real in her mind, the shards of orange flesh, the strings of entrails. She cast an errant look to the walls, imagining what her brains would look like spread across them. Pictured herself in a huddle on the floor, the blood running out while her dead eyes fixed on some permanent spot on the ceiling. Cooling here in the silence of this haunted house. Her finger twitched in the triggerwell but still she could bring herself no further.

It was the night following Mrs. Tanksley's appearance and her strange affliction in the kitchen. Patsy had done her level best to soothe the woman, pretending along with the octogenarian that her episode could be written off as having nothing to eat that morning, or perhaps some other haunting trick of old age pressing its advantage even into the daylight. Patsy had gotten her a wet rag and held it to the woman's clammy forehead, all the while aware of the poor woman's eyes wide with some fiery knowledge. She'd tried to hide it but Patsy had recognized the terror, known the fear. Because she lived it every day. Only, unlike the poor Mrs. Tanksley, Patsy doggedly refused to leave because of her daughter. There was no doubt she was here...somewhere. Her smell would carry into a room on occasion, so very real that Patsy would spin around, her heart pounding, her arms aching to hold her lost child. To comfort her. Because the worst thing, the most terrible idea which railed in her brain, was the almost unbearable certainty that little Terri was here, frightened and set upon by whatever beasts hung in the air like a bitter curse. Now there was no doubt.

This was some zero set point, a borderline between opposing realities. She'd seen movies of such ideas in the past, writing them off as bullshit. But now she knew they were real. Therefore, the gun. It would be a simple thing, really. Just a little squeeze and then...

What? The darkness of eternity or the starting point of continued persecution? She believed in hell now; she lived it. But even so she still had at least one foot elsewhere. She could still look out the window and watch the sunrise, see children playing in the yards (or you used to, the malicious voice whispered). Yes, that was true too. It wasn't just this house; it was the whole fucking neighborhood. Everyone in it. This was a nexus of evil and somehow she'd become entangled in it like a bug in a web. But that was not the worst; she could live with that. It was little Terri; that was something she could not reconcile. Her sweet, innocent daughter was somehow caught up in the wickedness that had consumed this house. And that was unacceptable. She could not run; she could not hide. There was really, inevitably, only one thing she could do.

And that was wait, the gun be damned. Because something terrible was on the way. It was headed straight toward her like a runaway freight train and there was nothing she could do to avoid it.

*

Elizabeth Tanksley sat in the wooden rocking chair beside her bed, every light in her bedroom on. It had been hours now, and still she could not stop the shaking. Twice she'd spilled hot coffee on herself but she drank on anyway even though she was exhausted, her body, her mind, a solid ache for sleep. Because tonight she'd do anything to keep it at bay. Its call was a siren song of doom, and she knew all she'd have to do was surrender to it and a revelation would come. It'd damn killed her at the neighbor's house (that poor, lost woman, she now knew) and it'd gotten little better since she'd been home.

She looked up from her lap to the window, ringed by a frame of light around the curtain. Just over there, she thought and shivered. This close to the Brink, the close of a few steps and the world was no longer the same. She felt an odd nostalgia overcome her then, some protective, ancient logic she'd sensed as a kid. Close your eyes and it'll go away. Her mother had whispered those words countless times over the years, leaning in close as if the two were in conspiracy. Because she'd known, she'd recognized the absolute relentlessness of little Elizabeth's visions. But there was nothing to be done, and so...close your eyes. She tried it now and found no solace. And the red of light through her eyelids only served to remind of the pervasiveness of blood. She snapped them open and looked again at the window.

Something had been at her over there. There was no other way to describe the violation she now remembered. She still recalled the diabolical stream of icy certainty that'd rammed through her spine, rattling her teeth; she could still see the woman (her neighbor, that poor, poor doomed woman) silhouetted against the frame of the entranceway. How the very air had seemed to whirl in a mass around her. And then—

Only a deep, endless darkness, absent of any color, but possessed of the very stench of doom. Stretching out to infinity, the vacuum rushing in from all sides.

She'd come to with her neighbor (Patsy, she kept telling herself) squatted down beside the chair, one hand on her knee the other on Elizabeth's forehead. And the look. Even through the concern Elizabeth had seen the knowledge written on the young woman's face. She could sense it too, probably had for a long good while.

But somehow...someway... she'd resigned herself to its horror. Elizabeth shivered again and shook her head. What would it take for someone to do that? This was a thing to crack and grind your bones and here was this woman, bent down, attempting to offer her solace. The thought gripped her heart. And she still did not know what it was.

But she sat, rocking to and fro, muttering under her breath, repeating endlessly her mantra of consciousness. Because she knew, it was right there breathing below the surface. The vision had not completed itself over there, but it was perfectly willing to bare its truth at the faintest wan of consciousness. And with this thought Elizabeth glanced down quickly at the cup and gripped it tighter in both hands. She couldn't fight it forever, she knew, but she could fight it for a while.

*

Jester sat in the dark and polished the gun. He stared at it, pausing in the middle of his frantic rubbing to hold it to the light and just watch. When he did this his mind ran even faster. Many times since that night almost a week ago he'd thought he heard light footsteps racing about in the backyard, deep breathing from just around a doorway, feather touches of malice playing along his spine. And every time he thought of these things he polished faster. Rubbing, rubbing, trying to find some avenue of escape. But he knew it wasn't to be. He'd known it the second he came to and found Old Shake scattered out around him. Whatever it was had torn the dog to bits; even its skull had been in two pieces, the bottom jaw hanging from a low-lying branch almost twenty feet away from the rest of it. And even while he polished he knew the endeavor was most probably useless, that what he had couldn't be dealt with by bullets. He knew that as gospel like a great sinking in his heart.

He heard a noise and jerked the gun into firing position. The refrigerator continued to hum and he chided himself for the hundredth time. He was like a mouse, frightened of every creak, every shift in shadows. He knew this could not continue. He'd missed more days of work the past three weeks than he'd missed the previous five years; it wouldn't take long until people started talking. Hell, even now he was hobbling around at work. The .22 bullet had punched clean through his foot, splitting the difference between his big toe and the one next to it, and with his foot wrapped up to his calf he'd told his coworkers he'd stepped in a hole and twisted his ankle. Thank God the rural route didn't require him to get out of the truck much if he didn't feel like it. Regardless, he could already feel them looking now. A fucking mailman on crutches just wouldn't do for long and he lived in dread that asshole Thompson would send him to a doctor to have the "ankle" looked at. So bullet through the foot or not, he'd sucked it up and tried to act like it wasn't that bad. He'd been working there too long to go and fuck everything up now. And sitting at the table, polishing the fucking shine off his gun, he just wanted everything to be back like it had been.

And with this he stopped polishing.

Let's face it, he thought. Here he was, a single guy, save for a couple of dogs (as far as they knew, he reminded himself) living out in the middle of the fucking woods. The job didn't require him to spend a lot of time socializing and everyone knew by now the hazards of solitary work. Yeah, they knew it well; the postal system had practically spawned its own unique breed of psychopath in the last couple of decades. So he had to be careful.

Yeah, you'll be careful fine, when you're fucking dead, the voice stated in his inner ear. You'll be pushing up daisies just like Old Shake in no time at all. He looked at his hand. It was shiny with gun oil and the nails were grimed. He was waiting for them to shake but they wouldn't; it was deep down inside where he shook and no amount of polishing whatsoever was going to stop that. There was really nothing he could do, when you got right down to the bone of it, nothing at all, except find some way of talking face to face with the lady who lived alone at 9535 Samane.

*

Tomas Lorca stared up into the night sky that stretched out over the fence in his backyard. The moon was a high yellow far off in the vacuum above the ragged line of trees which led back to the woods, and farther still, to the winding creek which cut past the broken bridge over on the other side. He was completely nude, tumescent. He'd been stroking himself for the past thirty minutes, running over the dream as it'd come to him last night. Imagining the fruition of its promise. Because the time was now. Everything he'd felt coming together for the past forever was finally, now, curling up and around him to bring whatever it had to offer home.

He grinned frightfully in the darkness and squeezed harder, his other hand drifting down to his balls. He spread his legs and leaned back in the chair, never taking his eyes off the fathomless depths of the sky above him. There was a saying about the stars being in line. Well, now was the time; if ever there would be, it was now. He knew he'd go to her tomorrow. He wasn't quite sure what he'd say, but guessed it'd be something in the neighborhood of the church brochures. Something provided. This was not simply a thing, a decision, of his choice. He knew the undercurrents of the world, had felt them, been a part of them, many times in the past, and this was how every revelation always rode in.

Just not this hard. Not this direct.

He urgently cupped his balls in his hand, the other working hard up and down. He could feel the pressure building, that dangerous, ancient animal from the past, and his eyes rolled back to whites. His heels dug into the patio tiles, his buttocks flexed. With a final upward thrust he shot hot spray across his chest, speckling his chin. He continued pumping it out until closure, and then looked, weary-eyed, into the future he saw spiraling down toward him.

*

Skate sat in front of her computer screen and looked at what she'd written. She put down abstracts on each patient who filed through her office and right now she didn't like what she was seeing. John had called her not four hours before, and in a voice that hinted at certain possibly explosive things left unsaid, he'd told her what she knew. Looking at it now caused an angry buzz in her head. A man, Miles Placard, was missing. So far no sign of foul play, save for the fact that he was not where he could usually be found. His car, on the other hand, had been found, in his garage, nothing obviously stolen. The house, likewise, empty, nothing damaged, nothing gone. Altogether something out of her league, saved for the likes of the police force. But that wasn't why James had called her. This missing man, this Miles Placard, an accountant from some easily forgettable firm, had previously lived at the very same address as a certain, interesting, new patient of hers, a Mrs. Patsy Standish. And oddly enough, this man's wife had died under mysterious circumstances not long before he sold the thing and moved away. But not far, just away. That was the part that kept sticking. Why? She looked up both addresses and there was really nothing monetarily that separated them. Same relative square footage, close to the same price. But just far enough away.

She didn't like it.

She'd learned to trust her intuition and it was ringing like hell right now. Of course, she could see leaving a house where a loved one had died. It didn't take much to see the reasoning there, but she'd found people, generally, if they moved at all from the sight of a tragedy, tended to move...let's face it, away. Not right across town, even if town happened to be out in the suburbs. They usually uprooted, the whole shit and shebang, and just got the fuck out. But he hadn't. And now he was missing. She wasn't even clear on who'd reported it, and that was one of the things (one of many) she wanted to discuss with James at his earliest possible convenience. It had been awkward, sure, at least on her end, but she could tell right there near the end that he had been just as willing as she'd been intrigued.

She looked down at her notes on the new client, Patsy Standish. Pretty much standard grief progression, but there had been the stuff on the girls. Those dangerous ones she'd spoken of. Skate still remembered the look in her eyes when she'd said it, and she couldn't count the times she'd seen the same one before. But in most of those instances the client (patient, more times than not) had been a confirmed psychotic.

But not the Standish woman.

Granted, she did come from a postcard of an unforgiving background: bad childhood, poor upbringing, clinging to the first powerful male figure she came across, but that wasn't it. Most of the women Skate had dealt with with these same fixations often confessed to an intense love of their children too, but the emotional impact, more times than not, had not been a part of it. This seemed a key difference with Standish. The woman had conveyed her pain with the clarity of a set of nails dragged across a chalkboard. This was rare. Most times it proved purely lip-service spilled out of a small pool of intellect, intended to buffalo the listener. She'd heard it enough to write a paper, a fucking book. But it hadn't been like that with Patsy. Skate never liked to let herself get involved with a patient (after all, they were all that in the end) but something about the woman had struck a nerve. Why else would she be staring at the aftermath of an abstract at two thirty in the morning?

The thought stopped her in her tracks, took her mind off, even, the longing she'd felt pulling at her psyche from the ghost of her own past. She bit her lip and tried to concentrate, but the thread she'd been attempting to unravel eluded her. She put a forefinger to her nose, tried to hunt out the key to this perplexity, but it was no use.

However there was James, goddammit, there was that...

# Chapter 30: Formal Introduction

Tomas Lorca had been up for three hours already and the hands of the clock hadn't even reached seven. This was it. Today, right now, this very minute. Everything in his life had been leading up to now and he wasn't gonna fuck it up. He was going over there, hell or high water; he was gonna say his piece, and then he was gonna stand there and see how she took it. If his dreams were anywhere near the truth the outcome was already done. If not, he planned on pulling the .32 Beretta and shooting her once in the eye. If that didn't kill her he'd put one in the other. Then he'd drag her inside and sit down on her couch in the living room. And then, why then he'd blow his own brains out.

This was that important. This was that NOW.

He'd only slept two hours the night before. It had been the same dream for going on four straight nights. A dream, hah, he smirked; a fucking script. A training ground. This was weightier stuff than anything he'd experienced before, and that had been quite a lot out in California. Quite a lot. But all that was fluff compared to this.

He looked sadistically at his image in the mirror. He'd been watching it minutely for the past three hours, just to see if there was any physical change brought on by this new discovery, something you could actually see, but so far, nothing. Of course, he had to remind himself, the best approach would be one of calmness, to simply...surrender. He smiled again at the mirror and his face was a grimace. He looked back at the clock by his bed, steeled himself with the knowledge that only another eight minutes had creep-stepped by. He closed his eyes and tried to bring the image back; it was almost like a painting in his head now, so close he could practically feel its texture. He saw her surprise as she opened the door (a black curl of hair lying flat across her forehead), the T-shirt and faded jeans, her hand already coming up in a great big emphatic fucking question mark.

The first thing the image did was produce a high raging hard on. He'd always loved those looks: the psuedo-surprise of the inevitable, although he felt deep down most had always known something like this was coming, that their life somehow had unerringly led them to this one inescapable moment. Some would scream, others beg, and still others, surrender. That's how it'd always been. Sometimes he did think about California, the group he'd took up with there. It'd been the full, flushing hell of war without the worry of dying or repercussions. He'd seen big names, openly, at these clandestine meetings. Politicians, celebrities. They'd sat and watched right alongside him the executions, the slow tortures. It'd been a long time but these things never went away. When it got dug in so very good and low there was no way it was ever coming out again. Never. The second thing the image did was blanket his body in a gossamer mesh of pleasure. Like dropping four or five Valium without the disorienting sleepiness. Because, now, alive with the humming of electricity, he felt every fiber of his being tuning up, getting into synchronicity with the coming Moment.

He looked down at himself, hard against his belly. Then over toward the closet where the clothes hung. And with that he left the mirror and went to get dressed.

*

He shut the door behind him and turned to face the street. It was a clear bright morning, just after eight. He looked up and saw a white, crystal-cut contrail dividing the sky, the plane itself an imperceptible speck. He wore a brand new pair of Levis, ostrich skin boots, a navy pullover. His skin was clean and his hair oiled and combed. The .32 pressed to the hollow of his back. He brought his eyes back from the sky and nodded, setting off down the walkway to the street. Walking. He thought this would be the best way, nothing sitting out in the driveway for the neighbors to remember later. He smiled at the thought, thinking if this doesn't go well you're not gonna have to worry about anything like that anyway. Yeah, well, old habits were hard to break.

A change had fallen over the whole neighborhood as of late. Here it was summer, early morning, and the yards were bereft of activity. Not a single kid in the whole block. Over on the other side (toward the trails leading back to the bridge) he could hear, every once in a while, a teenager's voice, but could make out nothing it said. And as he walked he noticed. It wasn't just the kids. Curtains normally open were pulled tight, driveway gates shut and bolted. Like the people huddling inside were waiting for a siege.

And there were other things loose in the neighborhood now too. He'd heard one trailing through the scrub on the other side of his fence the other night. Its smell unthinkable. He'd been followed and watched by something else when he'd buried the body late last week. For just a moment he'd thought he was busted, but then, fast on his initial surprise, came the soothing sense that he was being protected. Those things lurking in the woods were only to make sure no one disturbed him on his black duty. He thought about the dead family and the dogcatcher. That was no coincidence either. Hell was fixing to rise right out of the heart of this place and he was going to be riding the helm. And she (he drew a dead bead on her house as he clopped along), she, would be standing right beside him. He knew this. After all, what else would a mother consider other than a duty to a child?

He didn't even pause at her driveway. Two houses down he'd noticed a drape tick ever so slightly as he looked that way and knew somebody had been huddled behind it, checking his progress. But now, he kept reminding himself, that meant nothing. Either this was going to play out as the dream entailed on there would be two dead bodies lying inside 9535 Samane Drive thirty minutes from now. There were no other alternatives. He scanned the house as he came on. The porch light was still on from the night and the curtains here were drawn too. Her Impala was parked dead center of the carport and he saw the screen door.

He moved past the car and came up to the door. He saw his hand reach out and pull back the screen door, saw his other hand moving of it own volition to the glass pane in the kitchen door and heard the sharp rasp of his knuckles. The sound reminded him, weirdly, of ice cubes dropping into a thin glass. He saw a shadow behind the sash and moved in closer to the door, shouldering the screen door aside. He heard someone fumbling with the lock on the other side as he snaked a hand to his back just in case.

Then the door opened.

Patsy Standish stepped into view and everything from the dream washed over him like a sweetly seductive déjà vu. There was the black curl, the faded jeans, her hand coming out like a question mark. Everything right except her face. It was much more haggard than the dream had suggested, marked deeply with loss of sleep. The eyes alive and heated and there was no question mark at all in them. There was (and Tomas would run over this moment in his mind many times in the coming weeks) a calculated look of acceptance, as if she'd been having dreams of her own. For just a moment it put Tomas off his step, but only for a moment.

"Mrs. Standish, Patsy," he said. "I'm—"

"The guy from the hardware store," she cut in, finishing for him.

He tried to smile and the corner of his mouth twitched at the lead in her eyes. "My name is Tomas Lorca. From down the street." And then the thing from the dream. "I can help you, Patsy." He paused in reverential silence. "I know about your little girl. I know about Terri. I can help." He looked up from her shoes to her eyes now, ready to read the future or the end of it all.

He found her eyes hard on his. She never even blinked. "I think you better come inside, Mr. Lorca. There's things we need to talk about," and even though this diverged from the dream, the essence was the same and Lorca brought his gun hand around and away from his back.

"Thank you, Patsy," he said genuinely. "Thank you."

She stepped back into the darkness of the kitchen and he followed.

# Chapter 31: The Girls

Four days later, a Thursday, Jester sat parked in his mailtruck on the lip of the ditch that curled around the pond to the highway. His hands were still shaking so badly he feared he wouldn't be able to drive home. He could just see how that would look at work, leaving Federal property unattended on the side of the road. It'd just serve to confirm the disquiet he knew to be breeding and it was really the goddamndest thing. He was throwing it all away, this job, his life. He could feel it slipping through his fingers and there was not one damn thing he could do about it. Everything had changed since Old Shake had been killed. He hadn't slept more than a couple of hours at a stretch since that night, and even though he lay for hours lost in the agony of insomnia, his mind racing like a runaway locomotive in the night-light gloom of the bedroom, sleep never got any closer. And he knew why.

There were things out there in the woods. There were things out there and they were coming to get him. He hadn't the slightest idea why, but this knowledge was concrete. They were coming to get him and if he gave whatever it was the slightest edge he was a dead man. It was that simple. Every night he could hear them edging around the house, dragging long devious nails along the walls. He'd actually taken to firing shots through his fucking bedroom walls, and then, in the daylight, he'd watch the little circle of lights meander across the floor like marbles. He heard things howling too, late in the night, things in pain, sometimes sure it was Old Shakes' bitch, but others not because he'd never heard her in pain before, and the sound sent razors along his spine. He'd barely been able to function the last week. Thompson, his boss, had called him into his office just yesterday, trying to feel him out (Jester knew this), but he hoped he'd revealed nothing. The foot was still all wrapped up and hurt like a motherfucker but at least that was starting to get better; he could now walk around on it without the crutches.

But this whole fucking thing was craziness. There was only one person in the world he felt sure would have had the slightest edge on this thing but she'd been dead for going on twenty years. Just thinking about his grandmother made him want to roll up into a tight little ball and hide his head, but he knew if he went that far there'd be no return. Someone would find him, perhaps days later, shit-fouled and piss-stained, crumpled in the corner, half dead of starvation mumbling to himself and hiding from the light. Because that, my friend, was what crazy motherfuckers did. If those goddamn things in the woods didn't get him first.

He looked out the dirty Jeep windshield and ran a hand over his dry, cracked lips. He'd been gutting it out lately, trying to plow through the impossibility of his thoughts to some safe place, but as each day passed he felt that figment of a place receding into some lost darkness. Death was close on and he didn't think it was going to take no for an answer.

He tried to pull his mind away, looked over his shoulder to the back where all the mail was. Still so much to do. He hadn't gotten through half the deliveries yesterday before the fear came on him so fast and strong that he'd been forced to turn around and go home. And Jesus, talk about crazy. What had he done? Sat hunched in his room, the gun in his hand, his finger hard on the trigger, looking at his foot propped there on the chair. His eyes ticking off the seconds of the clock until first light. And now here he was.

He hadn't even brought any lunch today (his religion in the past) but it wasn't going to make much difference. He hadn't eaten much in two weeks; he'd dropped almost twelve pounds. "Whathafuck...whathafuck," he whispered looking far down the street. Like some kind of fucking ghost town, he thought, and that didn't help much. He'd had the route for years and even though a lot of the other guys bitched about the heat, he'd never let it bother him. Sure it was hot, but in the summer there were more people out and about. Kids and he liked that. But not now. Not here. This place was becoming like an old, forgotten cemetery in the country. Not a damn soul in sight. Not a car moving along the roads. Nothing. People weren't even going out to check the mail, for Christ's sake. There were a couple of houses back here with so much back-dated shit in the box he'd have to start bringing it back to the postal hub.

Then his eye skirted sideways to the torn bucket seat beside him. It was empty save for a thin bundle of circulars and random correspondence caught up with a rubber band at both ends. Patsy Standish and the address, though he didn't need it and never would. He knew more about the woman than anyone else back here and she'd lived here the shortest time. He knew she was a widow, even at her age, knew she'd had a daughter who was dead too. And also, worse, he knew she was in trouble. But the worst thing, the very worst, was the fact that he had no idea how or even why he knew any of these things. He'd never talked to her, had only seen her once or twice in passing, had never heard anyone else talking about her or her situation. Not a single thing.

But nonetheless, he knew. Knew it like his own right hand and as if in confirmation looked down where it lay limp in his lap, and he thought about insanity a little more. He also thought about what it was he would have to do. It made his gut tie up like a leather knot in the sun and sweat break across his brow but he didn't see any other way around it. He was going to have to warn her. And that's where his ideas ran out because when he considered it from her point of view he realized he'd really gone off around the bend. He was thinking like a fucking lunatic and that's the one thing he feared the most. He could understand crazy; hell, people went batshit all the time. Killed their wives, shot their children, burned up complete strangers in their homes. This was nothing new. All you had to do was turn on the fucking TV and you could have all you could stomach. Only thing was, he wasn't considering doing any of that, as if shooting up his own house in the middle of the night wasn't enough to convince just about anybody he was ready for the fucking nuthatch already.

He was going to try and help her. He honestly believed that and that's what scared him the most. Going up to a strange, white woman he didn't know from Adam and trying to convince her that she was in grave danger and should get the fuck out as quickly as possible. He could see her face right now in his mind's eye. Oh no, there was no doubt about it; she'd think she was in jeopardy all right. She'd probably hightail it inside the minute he was out of the driveway and call the cops for sure. Because that would be the reasonable thing to do.

Hell, he reminded himself, it might even be the right thing to do.

So...

He looked back at the bundle of banded mail. No time like the present. All he had to do was start this fucking Jeep and drive a couple of blocks down the road and all that could be done in one nice little deal. He looked at the keys dangling from the ignition, mocking him. Then he looked at his hand. Just turn the key and the business would be on. He brought his left hand up and scratched at the back of his neck, grimacing. That's all it would take...

And the sudden laughter scattered his thoughts to the wind. At first he had no idea where the sound was coming from. He glanced up from his lap, left out the driver's side window and saw nothing. But still the playful laughter continued. He swiveled his head right, skirting the length of the windshield, seeing only a frontage of closed up houses and empty yards. Continued on until his eyes found the passenger side window...and stopped.

Two young girls were far out across the span of rapidly growing grass, right out there in the small grove of trees he'd had lunch at a couple of times. They were not looking his way but that's where the laughter was coming from all right. He leaned across the seat to get a better view. No doubt there were two, poking something before them with a long stick. Laughing, poking and then jumping away. Every once in a while the bigger one with the stick would strike down overhanded upon whatever they were toying with and then back again. Odd...

Then, she turned his direction and pointed. Still laughing. They both wore identical white dresses, frilled at the arms and knees. Totally out of place. They had to be sisters, their aspects almost identical across the expanse of the field. And pointing his direction. Seemed to be motioning for his attention. Well, they damn sure had that.

He worked the handle on his side and stepped carefully out into the sunlight, mindful of his foot. Limped around to the front of the Jeep and stood off from the hood. They weren't laughing anymore but they were definitely looking his way. The smaller of the two waved (he heard a faint but tinny laughter bounce off the lake and wash over and through him) and seemed to beckon again. Unconsciously he put a hand to his chest as if their roles were reversed and he was being called to task. The taller one laughed and hit down with the stick again.

He felt his feet moving in that direction without any volition of his own. Found himself wading through the ditch, moving off through the knee high grass, not even thinking much about his foot now. The girls went back to whatever it was they were messing with. Totally oblivious, it seemed, to the man coming toward them. He thought to call out, then didn't. Just kept moving. When he got to the edge of the clearing they quit what they were doing and turned their attention back toward him. Both stood motionless, the one with the stick letting it hang down at her feet.

He mincingly stepped forward. Before him circled a large expanse of dirt, scrubbed by many feet and bicycle tires. He noticed, not far away, ten feet perhaps, in the reach of a pine tree, the remnants of a treehouse long gone to neglect. Both the girls were still looking at him. He stopped. Then the bigger one said:

"Hey mister. You look tired."

He stumbled forward a few more steps into the enclosure of the dusty circle and stopped. "Sorry?" he said.

She stepped forward, away from the one who had to be her sister. "I said," she repeated, "you look very tired."

He looked down at his feet and shrugged, wondering if he was imagining the hint of sarcasm in her tone. He looked back at them. Considered a retort and all he could come up with was, "What are you two doing?"

The girls looked at one another and giggled into their hands. "Playing," came the response. Again from the older-looking of the two.

"Playing?" It seemed he was lost in some strange dream. His sight hazed before him. And then, when nothing was forthcoming, "with what?"

"This," the younger of the two said, and pointed down at her feet. His eyes followed her finger and he saw a large, overturned can in the dirt. He hadn't noticed it before and looking at it made his skin go cold. He shuffled back a step, wished he had the crutches.

"Don't," the older one said and he stopped.

He found his voice far down in his throat. "What are you doing girls?" Something urgent was pressing him now to know.

She smiled and stepped toward him. "Playing," she repeated.

And then, because he could think of nothing else, "Where are your parents?"

They looked at each other again and he thought he heard their strange laughter though he didn't see their mouths move. The older one looked him straight in the eye and this time she was not smiling. Definitely not smiling. "I told you already," she said deviously. "Playing...come see."

He felt his feet drag him forward another couple feet. "What is that?" he said, not wanting to know.

"Nothing much. Come see. Really."

At a loss he found the same question. "Where are your parents?" and he saw now their dresses were fouled and ripped, as if they'd been involved in some sort of recent accident.

The smaller of the two pointed off through the trees toward where the houses were. "Over there," she said and he turned his head. For just a moment he thought he saw the burly form of a man standing just off on the other side of the ditch by the road and his breath whistled sharp. The memory of the old man he'd come upon weeks before, smiling and spitting before he meandered off into the underbrush curled in his imagination, but their renewed laughter broke him away from these thoughts before they got a very deep purchase. He heard the stick ting off the can again. And then something else.

"You should mind your own business, mister. That's what daddy says," and he immediately forgot about the man by the road. Jerked his head back to the girls. The older of the two was looking at him and this time her eyes were cold evil. One side of her mouth was tied up in a snarl. "He says people who mess in other people's business is bound to get hurt." She smiled now, maliciously, and Jester watched as the younger one broke away to flank him.

"That what he says, huh?" he said, trying to keep them both in his field of vision, but not daring now to take his eyes off the one with the stick. He thought about his damnable foot again; he might as well be stuck in cement. She laughed and hit the top of the can with the stick again. She nodded and Jester saw what he thought to be a bloody knot of hair at the base of her neck. She seemed not to mind. He lost the other one off to the left and he stepped up another two steps though that was the last thing on earth he wanted to do right now. "What is that there?" he demanded, hating himself to the depths of his soul for asking.

"Oh it's just nothing," the girl said and there was definitely blood caked along the back of her neck, down the back of her dress. She took the stick and hit the can a little harder, tipping it slightly and he could see it was covering something. His eyes would not turn away. "Never was," she continued and this time she grabbed the stick with both hands and swung it like a baseball bat, connecting with the can right below the rim. It caught for just a bare moment on something and then came free, rolling off into the dust like a loose wheel off a child's racer.

The head beneath it had been dead for a long time. The skin was black and loose-looking, the eyes rolled out on crusted stalks. What must have been a tongue, now a black cancer of corruption stretched the mouth widely. He felt something whack him hard just below the knees and he went down in the dust, his mind spinning at the thing in the dirt. The neck was ragged as if it'd been pulled rather than cut off. He felt his stomach heave, saw the girl with the stick get closer. "Should mind your own business, mister," he heard, staring at the black mess of blood clotting the dirt below and around the severed head. He saw some hair clinging to the side of the rusty can, felt the presence of the other sneaking up from behind. Still, he could not take his eyes away.

"It's time," she said and he did look now, caught her coming toward him, tried to scream in the broad daylight of the bright summer day as the point of the stick drove straight through his right eye and directly into his brain.

# Chapter 32: Note to Self

I decided to write this down a couple of hours ago. I been thinking a long time and now I don't know what else to do. I haven't written nothing since school and I never liked it then and I don't know what good its gonna do now, but anyway here goes. I have to. He came to me just like I knew it. We sat right here where I'm writing and talked. For hours we just talked. I watched his mouth as he went on, I watched his face. Most of the time I heard what he was saying but others I just watched. And thought.

I thought a lot about Terri, a little about John. He seems farther gone now but there's no sense saying any diffrent. Not to myself. I don't guess it much matters. I see her when I'm sleeping, her little dresses, the toys she used to play with. Sometimes I think my hearts gonna bust. Sometimes I want to just take the gun and put it in my mouth and finish this hole goddam mess but I don't. It seems like now I don't know if I can finish it. Somehow I think that would be doing her memry harm. I think a lot about the old days, those shitty days with grandma an I just want to rip it all out and start over, but theres no starting over. I'm old enough to know that now. I see that road in my mind and I see the tire let go of the truck, spinning out towards us. I remember trying to reach the wheel and jerk it the other direction but it didn't do no good. Every time there's just the smell of smoke and tires shreding. The smell of the grass I was laying in by the side of the road. The sound of cars stopin and sirens. And the wurst is her shoe laying in the road with the car burning off to the side. I thought at first somehow I'd manage to shuvel it out of my life, but that ain't gonna happen. I know that now. Seems like now that I can't do nothing all this shit's hanging over my head and it won't ever go anywhere but inside me.

There's been nothing for over two weeks. I lay in bed waiting for the attic ladder to slam down in the hall but it don't come. I wait for the sound of the girls playing up there but it don't come either. Nothing does. Except the dreams. All my dreams of her. She's laughing, playing, asking questions that I never could anser. I knew from the start she was a gift because it wasn't like John had all that much in the brains department either but now it's just terrable memrys. Makes me wish Ida spent more time listening in church but I know that's no dam good either. Listening don't make things real, beleving don't much either. I see that now.

And now he's come. He says he can help. What I got to lose? I knew something was werd, strange that day in the hardware store but never did I figur it to be anything like this. This is against everything I know, everything I ever thought. Everything I ever learned. But it don't matter. Most of that turned out to be nothing but bullshit anyway. I ain't smart and never have been. I dropped out a school, got lucky when I found John and it still didnt save me. Now I think I'm past all that. But it don't change my mind. I think every nite what would you do to have her back and there ain't nothing really. There ain't nothing.

This is what he said. He could get her for me. He talked like he knew her, like everything I been going through was on the tip a his tongue. And that made me beleve him. What else is there? All the things I did beleve ain't helped. And he says he can get her. Tole me stuff about what he done. What can I do? He axed me that same question what would I do to have her back and I looked him straht in the eye and said there wasn't nothing. He just nodded his head and smiled. Reached over and took my hand. Made like we was in it together. I didnt even care.

I know Terri's here. I seen her. I damn near had my hands on her up there in the attic, I wasn't but ten feet or so away. And he says he can get her. That's all. He started off with this mumbo jumbo shit about California and some kinda cult-sounding bullshit and I wasn't even listening. I just watched his mouth and his eyes. I always been able to tell when a mans lying to me. Don't mean I ever did much a shit about it but I always been able to tell. Billy in the back seat a his dad's car that first time, sweating with his pants down around his knees, hanging over me like some kinda dog or something. Telling me he loved me, that he just wanted to put it in a little way. I could see it then but it didnt mean much cause it was better than being at that goddam trailer. Having him spunk all over me was still better than that even though I could see his eyes was lying.

It was different with Lorca. I still can't bring myself to think a him by his first name. He ain't clean enough with all his talk a killing and devils. But I let him talk talk talk, thinking he was pulling me in like everyother Dick and Harry done over the years. Until John. But now he don't matter. He ain't been back and I ain't coming. He was like a vacation away from the bullshit but vacations always end. But I can't quit Terri. I don't know now if its cause I been seeing her or what but I don't think so. I was thinking about killing myself way before that and if theres one thing I do know is now I'm not. Almost like I got something to live for. Almost like this house is part a my life now. Almost like it always has been.

But I looked him in the eye while he was talking and searched him out. Around all his bullshit he does aim to get her back I know that. Not exatly how but I do know he aims to try. And that's about all I got. There ain't nothing more except the bullets in that gun and I won't try that until I know for sure. It wouldn't do her rite if I didn't. So now it almost seems funny, me beleving all them years God was gonna make everything alright regardless and never seeing nothing happen. Hell, right now it even makes a little bit a sense that I ought to give the devil a shot.

If that's what it is then that's what it is...

# Chapter 33: Lunch

Skate walked into the restaurant, was seated quickly at a table, and checked her watch as soon as the hostess left. Almost twenty minutes early but there'd been no traffic. When Arnold had phoned last night (9:23 to the minute, it was funny the things that wouldn't let go) she'd felt her heart jump and hoped it didn't show in her voice. It was the first time he'd initiated conversation since That Day and for just a second there her racing heart had...what? She pursed her lips and looked around at the lunch crowd. He'd suggested the place and that was about right because she'd never heard of it. It sure looked like a cop hangout, seedy, like the walls had absorbed all the sordid conversations that'd taken place beneath the roof and now oozed them out like some effluvial gas from a corpse. She shook her head and tried to dispel the image because of course it wasn't that bad. She had to remind herself she was not all that far removed from places like this anyway. When she'd been a girl, they'd seldom had any money at all, much less for restaurants, and now this old truth prodded her like a finger pointing back to where she'd come from. She tried to think back about the conversation, unconsciously unzipping her purse and pulling out the compact. She flipped it open, looked at her face for flaws, the slight edgings around her eyes and mouth, not bad yet, but a warning of things to come, the tight lines across her forehead. She wondered what he would look like now, today, and worried about the pants suit she had on.

No, she shook her head, stuffing the compact back into the depths of her purse, trying to focus again on the conversation. Yes, that. Only that. His voice had been different, urgent. He'd mentioned the Standish woman again (Carolyn had told him she had not been back since her initial visit and his voice seemed to convey some understanding she had no grasp of) and told her he needed to meet her for lunch. Here. Of course she'd agreed (she wouldn't be a very good psychologist if she couldn't read her own mind) because in her subconscious she knew she'd already been waiting, hoping for a call like this for some time. Perhaps as a way to set things to rights because in her heart she knew there was no such thing as turning back the clock. And besides...

Dammit, what are you doing? a scalding voice in her head demanded. This is business and don't for a minute consider it to be anything else. You fucked up once and the first time's free but don't you ever forget this: the next time's for keeps. She swallowed hard and tried to focus. Yes, she could hear all the clutter and tumult inside her head but it hardly amounted to much of a clamor. When she'd hung up the phone last night she'd been wet. Actually wet. She knew it was ridiculous but nonetheless that was how it was. She blushed at the thought, was shocked back to the real world with a voice off her left shoulder.

She jerked around, a short little twig of a waitress asking her if she'd like something to drink, a cocktail maybe? She stammered, yes, a White Russian, no, Jack Daniels and coke. Looked away from the girl's eyes so nothing showed, or so she hoped. Her heart was going fast, trip-hammering in there like some practical joke waiting to go off. And as if sensing Skate's discomfort, the waitress backed off and left without going over anything on the menu. This was just awkward, weird. She tried to get her mind right, tried to focus on the real reason she was sitting right here, right now. The Standish woman. A patient she'd seen one time only. Skate had gone back over the notes after the phone call last night but nothing had jumped out. Definitely the woman needed help but there was nothing Skate could do to force it on her. She'd shown and made several strange statements and disappeared back to wherever it was she'd come from. There were so many like her it was near impossible to make a firm connection and in the grand scheme of things (i.e. for the court's exhibit, witness the mess she'd made with the man who was due to meet her for lunch, momentarily), but she wasn't really run-of-the-mill. Skate had felt it that first time, a different type of grief. She'd wanted to have another go but, again, the woman had not come back. Then there'd been the strange circumstance of the dog catcher in her neighborhood, the dead family, but really that was just ghost story fodder.

But now there was this.

She didn't know what it was but James Arnold was on the way to meet her here for "something important." The only thing he'd mentioned over the phone was her name, whetting Skate's appetite. She had no idea how he felt about her personally, but the lack of communication spoke volumes words could not. This thought brought her around. Arnold had not called her here as a romantic sideline; she remembered the man too distinctly to figure on anything so blatant as that; he'd called her here, in reality, because he did have some information he felt she needed. When you got right down to it; that was right down to it. Anything else was fantasyland not befitting a professional in her field. And you better remember that, the voice scolded again, unwilling to hide in the back of her mind.

The waitress reappeared, set the drink down (Skate really didn't recall what she'd ordered, and looking now was still hard-pressed to say) and Skate pulled herself away from the depths of her thoughts. "You wanna order something?" the twig of a waitress said, reaching for the notepad tucked into the waistband of her apron.

Skate shook her head and gestured toward the empty chair across from her. "I'm waiting for someone," she said. "He ought to be here any minute now," and she nodded her head for emphasis. The twig nodded too, though without much confidence. There seemed to be too many such speculations in her life to believe any different. She shuffled off back to the shadows and Skate touched the glass to her lips. Whisky! She felt a momentary shock, unwilling to remember she'd asked for this, for lunch, and for just a moment she looked around for somewhere to pour it, to just leave it hidden. There was no such place and she idly wondered what Arnold would think, this psychologist drinking whiskey just after noon. But she had no more time for consideration because the door opened and from across the room she saw him come in.

His face was set in the taut lines of determination, his thick, finely-pressed cotton pants and shirt immaculate, leaving Skate to think he looked more like a producer than a cop, though she knew not why. To her knowledge she'd never known, or for that fact, even seen one. He stopped in the doorway and scanned the room with trained eyes. She pushed the drink to the center of the table like it just might happen to belong to someone else and the instant her fingers left its cool surface his eyes found her. He came across the room in seconds, waving to a call from the corner as he went, but not slowing. He pulled back the chair across from her and sat down heavily. "Hello, Carolyn," he said and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. She tried to smile, nodded.

"I thought you quit," she said pointing.

He lit up and smiled crookedly. "I did." He took one out and lit it, blew away the smoke in a pipe stream, and pursed his lips. His eyes ran along her face, not veering lower. She noticed and swallowed. "You're looking...well," he said. "Hope I didn't throw off your plans."

"I didn't have any." There followed a moment of silence. Arnold took the cigarette out of his mouth again and placed it in the ashtray. Now he nodded.

"Well," he offered. "Think I got something you might be interested in." He put his hands together on the table and leaned forward. The cigarette smoke whirled out and away from the pair, tracing ghostly patterns in the air.

She drew toward him. "Okay," she said and tried to smile again. Arnold's face shaded a degree and he reached for the cigarette. Put it back in the corner of his mouth like it was holding something's place. "This Standish woman may be involved in something a little weirder than I can figure. I got a feeling she might even be in danger."

Skate fumbled for the drink and took a sip, her eyes never leaving Arnold's lips. "This is what I know," he continued. He had no notes but Skate already knew him to possess a phenomenal memory. "Patricia Skate, currently unemployed. Widowed and childless as you've already heard. That much checks out. The accident, everything just like she told you. So," and he fanned his hands, shrugged his shoulders. "That's that. Plenty of pain and death to go around." Skate nodded though Arnold took scant notice. He was seeing it now, she could practically see the shadows flitting about behind his eyes. "Of course you already know about the family dead of carbon monoxide poisoning and the SPCA guy who found em. He's still sequestered up at the State House, mumbling like a goddamn monkey. And when he does say something understandable, it still doesn't make any sense. At least not rationally. So, still unfortunate, but hey, the worm turns." He drew on the cigarette deeply (Skate watched a quarter inch disintegrate almost instantaneously) and turned his head to blow out another great rail of smoke, which, while he talked continued to puff and seep like a coal fire all around his face. His eyes rocked back to hers and fixed. "This is what you don't know. Coupla weeks back, this woulda been right after the Standish woman came to see ya, guy from Entergy out checking one of the switch boxes way out on the ass-end of the neighborhood gets fried. Whole fucking neighborhood's electricity goes down for six hours. Not much left a the guy but leather and bone. So..." he bit his lip and nodded. "This ain't even mentionin' the guy who used to live in Standish's house. Guy I tole you about, still missing. Hasn't been seen or heard of since," and again he sprinkled the air with his fingers as if performing magic. "Now we got something else. Mailman for the neighborhood since before there was a neighborhood...regular as a grandfather clock, he's missing too. Mailtruck pulled right off to the side of the street, fulla mail, no sign of violence, keys still in the ignition. Gone. Fuckin' gone," and as if to push the point home he snubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. Shook his head. Squinted at Skate. "You haven't checked anything out for yourself, have you?"

She cocked her head. Looked at him aslant. "Where?"

"The neighborhood," he said and thumbed over his shoulder. Laughed. Said, "the neighborhood."

She tried to laugh too but couldn't find it. "No. Why would I?" She didn't like the look in his eyes but as soon as it appeared it was gone.

"Wondering," he said. "Just wondering," and paused, his hand wanting to go to the cigarettes but something unspoken dissuading him. "Because I have."

For the second time today she found herself leaning forward, "Okay...?"

He pinched his lower lip with his top teeth, leaned in a little closer over the table. They weren't very far apart now. She could smell him, through the cigarettes, and for one flash her mind wandered back to the couch. She fought hard to bring herself back because he, on the other hand, went on like nothing. "Oh I don't really know. Just a whim, probably, some vague notion I got. See, some asshole shot his neighbor's car fulla holes in Tangletree, a little subdivision not far from there, fucking felon, so I had to spread myself around, checking up, and I remembered you bringing up the name last time." Arnold ducked his chin in her direction, acknowledging her presence. "Leszno's Farm," he said reaching for the pack as his will snapped. "Nothing exciting. Middle class place. Handful a streets and a big pond, fuckin' lake, toward the highway. I drove through, once again, checking, sniffing around. That's it." He lit the second and squinted through the smoke at her. "But something ain't right..." he finished and dug in his left ear with his forefinger, looking off toward the door.

The memory of the couch had escaped her when mention of the subdivision came up and her trained, analytical mind moved forward automatically, leaving her hormones somewhere back in the darkness of confusion. She didn't like the way he looked. "What is it?" she asked, hopefully in just the right modulation, designed to put someone at ease, another innocuous, but many times productive, trick in the baring of souls. He looked at her again and tapped the cigarette into the ashtray.

"You ever get feelings?" he said bluntly.

For a split second Skate felt sure he was firing across her prow, looking for the trigger to the wounds he must already see. Then she looked again and knew he wasn't, though she still couldn't fathom his meaning or intention.

"About what?"

He inhaled again, blew out. "Anything."

She made a sign with her eyes that meant just as much, but he was already moving forward again, seemingly changing the subject. "Never will forget this one time," he said and smiled grimly. "Could'na been on the force more than five, six months." He took another dramatic pull, coughed blackly into his fist. "Domestic call. Nothing outta the ordinary. Some woman, got the address from dispatch. Remember it was a Wednesday, not even the weekend..." and he glanced down at the table and she looked too, realizing he'd pinched a roll of the tablecloth into a hard knot with both hands. Let it go but didn't look up. "Nice neighborhood, big expensive fucking houses. Had a Benz in the driveway parked right beside a Jaguar. No broken glass or screaming drunks. No frying pans getting tossed. Just quiet, nice."

"But something didn't feel right then, either.

"I went up to the door and a woman answered. Figured it was the one called. She wasn't beat up, didn't look like she'd been crying. Clothes all right. Just looked kinda tired. I told her why I was there and she shook her head like she had no idea, you know? Smiled at me like a kid hiding something and said I must be mistaken. Well, I read off the address and she nodded, yeah, right address all right. Kinda stood there looking at me, so I held up my hands and told her someone at this address had called the police. Reported a domestic disturbance, and she just smiled that sad smile again. Shook her head. A man's voice came from somewhere back in that big, dark house and she called over her shoulder. Said, 'Honey, it's nothing, be there in a second.' If I live to be a hundred I'll never forget it. Like a kite falling out of the sky. But different somehow, and it threw me off a little. No sooner had I looked down at the pad in my hand like there may have been something written there that I'd missed, than the door slammed in my face and I heard, muffled, running feet, shoes on the stone floor I'd just noticed. My hand was on the doorknob when the shots were fired. Two, one right after the other, and then a pause. Then one more. When I got the door open she was dead and bleeding on the floor, the guy with the voice, her husband it turned out, slumped against the wall, one eye blinking real weird and blood running out his ear. Sonofabitch never made it to the hospital. And neither did she."

He stopped and looked hard at Skate. "That look, the little smile she gave me right before slamming the door. It's the same fucking feeling I got driving through that goddamn neighborhood..."

# Chapter 34: Seeing is Believing

The fight was over. Though she'd lasted ten nights and lost twelve pounds in the interim, it was lost. She lay flat on her back in the bedroom, her hollow eyes staring unseeing at the ceiling. Her arms and legs like iron bars of weight screwed into a body that could no longer contain them. Her head ached like an abscessed tooth and the left side of her mouth was pulled down from the cerebral event of the night before.

Elizabeth knew none of this.

The only thing clear in her mind was the vision. The awful burning-ice knowledge of what was to come. It played over and over in her mind, like some horrible vintage reel of disaster replete in the splendor of color and texture. A tear slid out of her right eye and, unhampered, down her cheek to her chin and then to her neck. Its track like a snail's across her skin. Oddly enough, if she'd been able to contemplate rather than just observe, she'd have noticed that, after all the years and the innumerable visitations, this last one deviated from all those before. What she was used to, the way things had always come in the long stretch of years that had been her life, was little snapshots. Still-frame pictures, almost, with a vast weight of baggage attached. But nevertheless, frozen points in time. Last night, her last night, she knew that now, had differed greatly; perhaps this very difference the pivot by which her mind had finally given way.

It had come in a weird, movie-like chronology. Playing now continuously, a first-run film of madness. First just a burst of light from complete darkness, then, a quiet dawning new day in the neighborhood, tufts of clouds just visible above the fringe of the red maple growing placidly in Patsy Standish's front yard. She could almost hear a faint lilt of music building through the air around her, and then the man. Coming into frame. Dressed sharp for the morning, intent. Turning into the drive now, walking confidently up to the carport door to the kitchen. Then, the gun tucked snug into the small of his back, and all the while, from the depths of the vision, the irretrievable knowledge there was no chance, not even a scant opportunity, to warn the poor woman inside.

Because this had already happened.

It was no ominous portent of things to come, like those dreadful ghostly visitations of Scrooge on that long lost Christmas Eve. This was writ in stone already. Why it appeared for her now, so unlike any other vision she'd ever had in her rather substantial life, had no more right of discussion than babies dead of leukemia or genocide. It simply was.

She watched him knock on the carport door in the eerie emptiness common to silent movies and unfathomable dreams, watched as her neighbor opened the door. Saw the two talking mysteriously in the carport, the man's hand resting at the small of his back where the gun waited. Watched as the woman pushed the screen door wide and he went inside.

Then a cut to the kitchen. Just as she remembered it. Clean in a picked-up but non-obsessive way. Patsy standing by the table, the man, this Tomas Lorca, seated. And then the discussion. A script of doom.

"You knew I'd come," he said, his cold, dark eyes piercing.

Patsy nodded.

"I know about your little girl, I know about Terri," and Elizabeth saw the woman flinch.

He held out his hand and motioned for Patsy to sit, to just let him talk a moment. She did so. Collected her hands on the table before her. "I knew it was you that first day in the hardware store," he went on. "Every moment of my life has been leading up to it...to this. Everything in yours too."

And the kitchen came suddenly alive with tension. It swirled around them like a malevolent horde of bats in a cave. "What do you want?" she said.

He smiled savagely. "You know."

She nodded. "You can help." It was not a question.

He smiled. "Yes...I can help you get her back," and the words hung in the air like a red flag to a bull. He fanned out his hands on the table, regarded them a moment and looked back at the woman. "Do you believe in God?" he said. He was no longer smiling.

"I used to."

"But not so much now..." he finished, nodding, leaving the rest unsaid. He pursed his lips. "Well I do," he said and nodded. "But He doesn't concern me."

"Who does?"

"The Other."

There was the tick of moment throughout the kitchen, a long drain of irrevocable challenge. "I've done many things; I know many things," he said. She looked at him dumbly. He ran a hand across his mouth as if considering some ancient, dark secret. "This Other is the key."

"I don't understand."

He smiled again, less savagely this time. "Oh, I think you do. You do. People have the mistaken want of belief that good always prevails in the natural order of things. That if you wait long enough things will turn out for the good." He frowned, arched his eyebrows. "Pure bullshit. Not the natural order of things at all. Everything moves toward chaos according to science. Do you believe me?"

She just looked at him.

"This darkness, this chaos, contains more power than the light. I've seen it; I know it. This is the truth." And still the woman said nothing. As if mindful of this he changed direction. "Nights I've laid alone with the visions, seeing you in this agony. I know about the girls; I've heard your talking in the attic."

Patsy's eyes flew up from the table. Her mouth a round O of grief, of madness. Lorca leaned forward, whispered. "I know she's here...close." Patsy tried to speak, mouthed the word how? but he fanned it away. "I know loss," he said and began fingering an odd burn in his hand. Her eyes were drawn to it but could not make out the figure. "Do you believe me?" he repeated.

This time she nodded.

"There are certain rites that must be observed but it shouldn't dissuade you. Nothing worthwhile is ever costless..." and she was staring off now, her mouth moving the thought across the wide gulf of her endless grief. Then she seemed to stick. She tried to speak and nothing came out. He leaned in closer, his chin mere inches from the table. She turned back to him.

"Anything," she said.

He smiled, softly this time, or as softly as his face allowed. "I thought so," he replied. Took the initiative to reach across the gulf and grasp her hand. It was cold to the touch and he pulled it closer. "It can be done in degrees...can you feel it?" and she nodded weakly, a dull dawning of recognition shadowing her face. "It will not be pleasant," he said. "Not at first."

Again, nothing.

"You have felt me during the nights, my presence in the rooms with you. I've stalked the spirits railing about you though you've been blind. What you've seen I've let you." He stood up from the chair, still holding her hand, and rounded the corner. She was a lost girl before him. "You want her back," he repeated, such things necessary to move events forward.

She looked up at him. "How?" she murmured.

He ran his hand through her hair, pretending she didn't shudder. "Stand up," he said. She did and he took her by the shoulders and turned her facing away. "Put your hands on the table," he directed and gently pressed her shoulders forward, bending her at the waist. She said nothing though her lips moved. When he reached around and unbuttoned her jeans she did not resist. He grabbed the waistline with both hands and slid them to the floor, along with her panties. Then he bent over her, fumbling with his own pants now, stripping them down to his knees. "Nothing comes without sacrifice. You know this don't you?" but his voice had dried to a rasp and she made no move of acknowledgement. "It has to be this way the first time," he said and spread her cheeks apart, aiming his throbbing penis at the round pinkness of her anus. Then he righted himself and began pressing it home, slow at first, then with more urgency. She gripped the table and tried not to scream. When he unloaded minutes later he was in all the way to the hilt.

And with this came the end of the film-like reel. The room spun away to a million shards of glass-like light, its principals coming to pieces along with it. There seemed an endless chill of death around her until suddenly the light began to reassert itself amid the fathomless emptiness, and Elizabeth saw the neighborhood again, from a vantage point high up in the sky. Darkness, but not that of night, only of emptiness, regret, loneliness.

The old woman on the bed cried freely from both eyes now, the dollops of moisture edging out on the pillow on both sides of her head, expanding and expanding. From high up here she saw the land burn, fledgling brushfires and conflagrations consuming trees, houses, people. Blackened forms stalking the land leaving trails of blood and gore, animals howling into the heat. And in the midst of it all, a lone figure, a man she now knew as one Tomas Lorca, early of this place, arms outstretched and head back in supplication to whatever demons had spawned him. Laughing as the flames built and fed upon themselves and the forms they consumed. She saw the ghosts of the many-murdered rising sluggishly from their forgotten graves, trailing up like leaves of acidic smoke, her neighbors in their misery becoming incorporeal. Gas and water lines bursting from internal pressures and infernal heat, spewing steam and torrents of gas heavenward; and within this maelstrom the wavering, stumbling form of her neighbor, Patsy Standish, moving through it all, the screams sucked out of her throat as she clutched her stomach and lurched forward aimlessly trying to escape the clutch of evil that had so suddenly and completely expunged everything she'd known.

And then there was nothing. The cessation of all being, all goodness. Lost.

In the thin sheet of her awareness she felt a presence. The vision was gone, sucked back to whatever foul hell it'd come from, but what was here now was infinitely worse. This was no figment, no figure from the dying works of her mind. This was real.

She opened her eyes and fought the waves of nausea to focus. The ceiling wavered in and out of existence but she fought hard and finally found the compunction to steady her sight. She considered for a mad second that her body had deserted her already, leaving the husk of her thoughts in whatever purgatory had been set aside to swallow her whole. As it was, she wasn't far wrong.

She still couldn't move. She tried to cry for her ruin but could find no more tears.

Then she heard the voice. "Lizzy, Lizzy, Lizzy," it said and the blood in her veins froze into crystal-shards of ice. A shadow cast across her face and she blinked hard trying to steady her vision. She thought herself already dead and descended not into purgatory but some unspecified hell of which there could be no hope of redemption. Her heart broke at the implication.

Then she saw his face.

Tomas Lorca was standing above her, smiling his ghastly smile, at the foot of her bed. So strange to be lost in such familiarity. "Can you see me Lizzy?" the man asked and moved his head from side to side as if to frame her acuity.

She began to cry in earnest, her tears once more found.

He left the foot of the bed and circled around to stand beside her. She felt his weight press the bed covers as he sat down next to her. Took her hand in his and a knifey edge of galactic cold slid seductively into her body. She managed to turn her head ever so slightly in his direction. He was looking at her, still smiling, patting her brittle bones through the paper-thin texture of her flesh. "Lizzy, I'm here for you," he said and laughed. "Here we've been neighbors all this time and I never knew you had the Sight." He tsk, tsked far down in his throat. "You just never know, do you?" he said. "Well, we can put all that behind us now. I know you're sick and fixing to step off and it would be such a shame, such a rude thing, to go alone on this last ride." He put his lips together and shook his head sadly. Patted her hand so that shocks coursed through her body. "No. We couldn't have that." He leaned toward her face and the smile was gone, replaced by something inhuman, nearer to its real self. "Too late to warn her now, old woman." He laughed again. "Not that it'd do any goddamn good, but I did want to be here to see you away." He stopped and looked around the room. "I guess you're wondering what I'm doing here, how I got in. I can do just about anything now." Her mouth opened and closed like a beached fish but only gurgles escaped her. "There comes a time for everything and now it's mine," he said and stood up once more. Leaned over so that his face was inches from her own. "Yes," he said. "I can see the darkness." Her body began to shake. He nodded and backed away. "Yes, I can see it."

She watched in horror as his hand came down to touch her face, and when it did she was gone as if existence had always been merely a fragile dream that ever waited on the edge of the moment to cease.

# Chapter 35: Night in the Realm

Patsy sat unblinking on the couch in her living room. The TV was a blank empty shell before her playing its endless darkness. At times she could almost see forms, shapes dancing far back in its depths and she feared to turn it on. Feared what it could do, what it would tell her. It was now three days after her second encounter with Lorca. She'd not seen him since; there'd been no voice on the telephone in explanation. She could feel her gnawed-at soul quivering far down inside, crouching against the deep chill of subjugation and pain that would not leave. Her mind had become a dervish in her head, all whispered warnings it now seemed too late to heed.

She stood up and rounded the couch to the kitchen. Walked over to the refrigerator and opened it. The starkness inside echoed her thoughts and she bent to her knee, looking deeper. She pushed back a carton of spoiled meat and grabbed the tin of ham, the remnants of a mustard jar she'd bought when first she came here. She took these and shuffled back to the kitchen island, set them down, stared, and turned back to the window. A quarter loaf of bread sat by the toaster oven and she put her hand on it, feeling its rigidity through the wrap. Regardless, she set it with the others on the island. Pulled open a drawer and extracted a knife, only too late realizing it was not for butter but rather possessed a serrated edge. She held it up to her face and studied it closely, turning it this way and that in her hand, watching her pale, fleeting image play along the blade. A seductive thought whistled through her: the flash of steel across her throat, the hot splash of blood it would call forth. The knife clanged to the floor, her hunger suddenly lost. She left it where it lay, turned her back on the things arranged on the island, and stared out through the window.

It was another sunny day in a long bright string of them. So hot now the air conditioner had to run steady for hours at a time and even then labored like a lost dog. The house remained as sultry and stifled as an abattoir. A subtle stink hung in the air, refusing to give ground. She stepped aside from the island to the sink. Placed her hands on either side of its partition. Leaned forward and continued staring.

Not a soul moved outside her confines. Even now the neighbors' yards were falling to the spell of her own dereliction. A bicycle lay neglected three yards down, the same place it'd been for the past week, long tufted weeds already sprouting up through the wheels. A car across the street and cattycornered rested on two flat tires, and she'd not seen its owner in days. Perhaps weeks. She was hard-pressed to measure time now. Everything seemed to flow with an uneasy restlessness to some pre-ordained point of despair. She'd received no mail since she couldn't remember, had no idea of her carrier's fate because she'd also quit with the TV days ago. She thought of the things she'd seen on the path and shuddered.

Something in the back of her mind, a small voice much likened to Terri's, tried from its shackles to convince her to leave. Go! it whispered as if looking over its own shoulder. Don't pack, don't wait, just go! but she knew she wouldn't. Couldn't. Such deals as hers weren't made for reconsideration. That, too, was a reason she figured Lorca had not called her since...then.

Some decisions were irrevocable.

But there was a part of her mind that hinted otherwise. Just as a trapped animal will gnaw off its own leg to free itself, so too did her mind turn. And the main reason was because she'd still not seen Terri, regardless of what he'd said. And if Lorca's word was not anathema, why then, should hers? She scanned the kitchen. Caught the edge of the table where he'd taken her. Tried to pull down the blinds on that thing. Because it was all Terri now, always had been. Everything in her life now for one sole purpose. There was no other avenue to pursue. Nothing else left to hope for.

Her eyes slid across the phone. Stopped. Stared.

A number came to her mind. Skate's, the doctor's. It had been weeks since that visit; she'd almost forgotten the woman entirely except for right now. A small voice (a different, alien one) begged her from some lost room to try. To just call. To try and escape this madness because that's what it is, Patsy. This is fucking madness. Think whatever you want but you know. In the part of you that knows, you know this is madness. Call her! Call her please!

She found her hand on the phone. Pulled it from the wall in a daze, dialed the numbers.

"Doctor Skate's office," a pleasant voice on the other end said after three rings. For a moment Patsy had no idea how to proceed; her voice was locked inside her throat. She frantically scanned the kitchen, trying to get her bearings, looking at the phone in her hand like a snake she'd suddenly grabbed up off the kitchen counter. She was on the verge of hanging up when she heard the tinny voice repeat, "Doctor Skate's office, may I help you?" Eyes wide she brought the receiver back to her ear. She still could find no words. "Is there anyone there?" the female voice asked.

"Yes. Yes, I'm here," she said, trying to bring some focus. She dragged a hand through her tangled hair pulling the knots, the personification of her downward slide. Thoughts of hanging up evaporated. "This is Patsy," she said in a small, child's voice. "Patsy Standish. I'm calling for Doctor Skate." It was all she could manage.

The voice helped her through. "Okay, Mrs. Standish. How can we help you?"

"I, uh, I need to speak to Doctor Skate."

"You are a patient?" the calm, still voice prodded.

Patsy found herself nodding, closed her eyes, and said, "Yes. I've been to see her once." Then a pause.

"Could you spell your last name?" She did and another brief pause followed.

"Yes, okay," the voice said. "You're in our records."

"Is she there?" Patsy said in a breathless hush. She still rode the fine line between continuing on the one hand and slamming the phone back into its cradle on the other and high-tailing it to the bedroom. For a moment the image of herself safe behind the locked bedroom door, the covers pulled up to her chin, was almost enough to terminate the call.

"Yes, she's here, Mrs. Standish, but she's in session. Do you want to make an appointment?"

"I,uh, yes, I think I would. I do." Her throat had constricted into a tight squeeze of air. Like breathing through a long, clogged snorkel. A wave of dizziness passed before her eyes so she shut them and leaned hard against the cabinets, her free hand to her forehead. She felt like she might pass out; just keep concentrating on the cool, rational voice on the other end of the line, she told herself.

"Okay," she heard. In the background came the faint sound of keyboard tapping. "Let's see, Doctor Skate has an opening on Thursday, 2 o'clock. Would that be all right?"

For a long, monstrous second the world twisted violently, almost throwing her off. She couldn't seem to find her voice again. Then, finally, terribly she said, grimacing, "What day is today?" The pause proved longer on the other end this time.

"Monday," the woman replied, all hesitation now too. "But that's her first available slot." Then, when nothing came. "Mrs. Standish, ma'am, is this an emergency? If it is I might be able to work something out..."

The tone of the question brought her around. The last thing she wanted was to fan suspicion. She coughed hard to clear her throat. Baked away from the counter. Found her real voice hiding far down in the ruin of this funny one she was using. "No, no, that's fine...that's...really, it's fine. Thursday's fine." She fumbled for the pencil and pad she kept by the phone. Wrote down most of Thursday before the lead broke on 'd'. Threw it off to the corner by the laundry closet and watched it. The voice on the other end remained uncomfortably silent so she asked, "And the time again?" even though she remembered. Anything to retain a semblance of normalcy.

The voice was restrained and wary now. "2 o'clock," it repeated. In the background Patsy heard that damned clattering again. She wondered what the woman was writing down. Decided the call had been a wrong move, but of course, there was nothing to be done about it now.

"Okay...2 o'clock," she said haltingly as if writing that down. She continued staring across the room at the pencil lying accusingly on the floor. From the attic above she thought she heard the whispered sound of footsteps. A cold wave of nausea uncoiled through her gut. "Okay, that's good...fine," she intoned staring above her head at the ceiling. Laughter now? Something heavy being dragged around up there?

"All right," the now-hesitant voice said from its place in the sane world. NO! NO! the warning voice railed in Patsy's mind. IT'S NOT ALL RIGHT! TELL HER NOW AND SAVE YOURSELF, PATSY! FOR GOD'S SAKE—"then I'll pencil you in for Thursday," and the voice slid once more to silence. Patsy's dizziness increased. The voice on the other end returned, quieter, more pronounced, like a mother to a child. "Mrs. Standish," this voice said. "Are you sure you're all right?"

"Yes," she breathed. "I'm fine. I've just been sick lately. A cold. It's nothing, nothing really. Thursday will be fine," and found herself completely out of breath. She knew another word would kill her.

"Okay then," the receptionist said, only then realizing she was talking to a dead line.

*

Time passed in a slow drag of minutes. How long she couldn't say. She eyed the phone like a bottle of poison, backed away from the counter and trailed over to the kitchen table. Sat down. Put her head in her hands. "Crazy," she said. "I'm fucking crazy." The statement served to root her to reality. She raised her head and looked out the kitchen door through the glass pane of the screen door which distorted the world outside, but she could still see no signs of life. She might as well be the last, living person on earth.

The telephone rang. The sudden noise in the stillness of the room drove a sickening blade panic through her mind. Then it rang again, akin now to animal's scream. She stood up from the table and moved a step closer. Her hand, rising from her side like a traitor. Another step. Another couple and she'd be close enough to grab it. Four, five rings. She wanted it to stop but knew instinctively it wouldn't.

She had to answer.

She picked it up like a hot thing from coals and drove it to her ear. "Hello?" she said to nothing but the deep, forbidding drone of space. "Hello," she said again. She heard another drag of weight above her head and jerked her eyes up, the phone still to her ear. And the soft, tittering laughter began, not from above her head but from the phone itself. Like a child's prank. "Who is this?" she whispered, afraid for the answer. Something clunked up there and the laughter ceased. Then, ever so faintly, at the very verge of her range of hearing, "Momma?"

Everything stopped. Her blood ran cold. "Terri?" she said, her voice rising to a shrillness on the last syllable she did not like. The sound in the attic was forgotten. Again, she thought she heard something on the other end but couldn't make it out. She began to scream into the phone then, but no one in the neighborhood heard, or even if they did, felt inclined to help.

*

Beverly Evans stepped quietly down the hallway and stood before Carolyn Skate's closed door. She leaned in close and listened. Even though the appointment had ended fifteen minutes before and the patient left, Beverly knew better than to go barging in unannounced. She'd been working for Skate for almost two years now and knew the routine. The doctor liked to take time after each patient, considering what had been said and taking notes. She usually did this into an old-fashioned tape recorder she said had once belonged to her father. Beverly didn't hear anything through the door. She straightened up and knocked lightly. "Yes?" she heard.

She reached down and turned the knob, opened the door and entered. Skate was seated behind her desk, a scatter of papers before her. "What is it, Beverly?" she asked, leaning back in the chair.

Beverly looked down at the notepad in her hand, cleared her throat. "Something I thought you should be aware of," she said.

Skate placed her hands on the desktop, one over the other. "Okay."

"A phone call I just received. A woman named Standish. Patsy Standish." The name caused the doctor to lean forward. She took note and continued.

"I don't know but something didn't seem right." She cleared her throat again. "I checked the computer and—"

"Yes, yes, okay," and Skate was standing now, rounding off the corner of her desk, coming toward her. "What did she want?"

"Well, she wanted to see you. I told her you were in with a patient and she asked for an appointment." She swallowed. "She didn't sound well." Then, "I asked her if it was an emergency and she said no. I think she must have hung up on me..."

By this time Skate was standing in front of her with her right hand on Beverly's sleeve. Beverly handed her the note and searched her eyes while Skate looked it over. Below the appointment date Beverly had scratched down the home phone number. The same one Skate remembered. "Didn't seem right?" Skate repeated, looking up from the note. "What didn't seem right?"

"I don't know. She just sounded...bad. Like she'd been crying or was about to. Like I said, she hung up pretty quick."

Skate pursed her lips and nodded. Scratched at an area below her right eye. "Okay," she said. "Anything else I oughta know?"

Beverly shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. "Not that I can think of."

"Okay, well I'll handle it," Skate said and turned back to her desk.

Beverly turned away and left the office, closing the door behind her. Skate stood motionless staring at the scrap of paper in her hand. A bell was going off loud and clear in her head. The conversation she'd had with James (one that was never far away at any time) now came back full force. She held no truck with superstition of any kind (religion included) but he'd felt the same thing that had been worrying her. There was no denying simple human instinct. It had developed over eons of time and experience and for that fact alone was, indeed, something any rational person should take into account. Still...she turned the scrap over as if looking for instructions on the other side. Shook her head and breathed out deeply. Tried to picture the woman in her mind's eye but the only thing that surfaced were the notes she'd written afterward. There was a slight image in her head but Skate didn't like to trust such ephemeral footprints. She walked back over to her desk, sat down, and placed the scrap of paper in front of her. Coincidence, she thought. Because it was as if the woman had known she'd been discussed; let's face it, she'd largely disappeared from Skate's consciousness up until the meeting with James. She saw too many disturbed individuals to go chasing at straws like this one, but...

There was something else. Professionalism demanded that she, at least, be true to herself. Standish had been at the back of her mind, hell, ever since their only meeting. She couldn't deny the fact that it'd been her who called James in the first place, not the other way around. And why had she done that? She felt peculiar about this woman. In a nutshell that was it, had from the start. As ironic as that sounded to her trained mind, it was the truth. She smiled grimly and looked around the office. She licked her lips and picked up the note.

Then she reached for the phone. Heard the bells get louder in her head as she dialed.

*

Patsy stood stock-still in the hallway staring up at the attic door. The bumping had ceased up there but at the far edge of perceptibility she thought she could still hear the dragging. She'd managed to pull herself together only moments before from a weeping puddle on the kitchen floor, Terri's name on her tongue. She was crazy all right, but if this was her world she'd goddamn well have to live in it. And it had been Terri's voice. She knew it like her own skin.

There was just the fear to contend with and that had her puzzled. How in God's name could she be afraid of her own daughter? Regardless of the circumstances, how could she be afraid?

But she still couldn't bring herself to open the attic door. The image of the two other girls was trapped like a spider in her mind; the forms she'd seen on the path; every creaky noise and suspicious shadow she'd seen or thought she'd seen had coalesced to freeze her into immobility. And somewhere out there (up there, a malignant voice whispered) her daughter was waiting. Probably a lot more frightened than her chickenshit mother if the truth be known.

The thought sent a bolt of courage through her and she jerked forward, her eyes fixed on the tantalizing pull-string that hung down from the attic door. She reached up and pulled. And was blinded. A swirl of material filled the air, cascading into her eyes, burning, blotting out her vision. She stumbled backward and hit the wall, crumpled down to the floor, her hands adrift in whatever it was. She dared not open her eyes and fumbled back down the hall to the bathroom door. Lurched inside and blindly flung back the shower door. Stepped in fully clothed and turned the taps on high. By the time she'd cleaned whatever it was out of her eyes she was soaking wet. But then, very tenderly, she opened them and blinked slowly. Most of the stuff, whatever it was, was out but there was still a gritty sensation on the underside of her eyelids. She let the water run another few minutes and when the gritty sensation was finally gone she chanced a look down at the swirl of water but could see no evidence of whatever it had been. She turned off the taps. Opened the door. Stepped out to drip on the tiled floor and saw it. Attic insulation.

Still soaking wet she stepped though the door to the hallway and looked around. Insulation all right, everywhere. But this was not in rolls but shredded as if by a legion of rats. Little bits of glass twinkled in the light from the hallway fixture. There was an awful lot of it scattered about, and now she realized it had all been piled on top of the door so that when she pulled down.... Ghosts couldn't do things like that, goddammit, but people could.

A new anger flared deep within her and she walked over to the half-drawn attic door. The folded ladder was still filled with the particles of insulation and she pulled it back slowly, fanning out the fluff with her free hand, shutting her eyes against the drift. The foot of the ladder clunked down on the carpet of insulation that filled the hallway. "Here I come you fuckers," she whispered and started up.

*

Later on, Patsy sat at the foot of her bed with the pistol in her hand. The curtains on the back window were drawn so she had a view of the backyard. The hall door for her bedroom was also open so she could see the distended attic ladder. She hadn't bothered cleaning up the insulation. Hadn't even bothered with changing her clothes and now, hours later, they were almost dry even though the bed where she sat was wet clean through to the box springs. She didn't care. The phone had rung for a few minutes sometime long before, but she didn't care about that either. All she cared about right now was sitting right here with the gun in her lap because ghost or not, the first motherfucker that showed was getting blown away. She'd had enough. And if Lorca picked right now to visit she'd kill him too. It was that simple.

There hadn't been a goddamn thing in the attic. Not then anyway. Oh, there had been something, somethings from the look of it, earlier but of course it, they, whatever, had gone. After the fun with the insulation whatever it was had slunk off to whatever hell had spawned it and that was all right too. Because it would be back.

Patsy knew this, felt it with every sinew in her body, and that was why she sat here now, still in her wet clothes with little bits of insulation prickling at every bit of skin she possessed. And when it did she was going to kill it. That was the only foundation she had. If she had to go running down the street blasting every fucking thing she saw all the way to the highway, well, that was how it was going to be.

Because she'd had it. Terri, or not, she'd had it.

Her mind had descended to a blank pit of despair. She would not remember having spoken with the receptionist at Skate's office, would never see the piece of paper she'd scratched the information on because it had blown off the counter when the air conditioner kicked on several hours before and miraculously made its drifting way beneath the refrigerator as if guided by malignant hands. As it probably had. And due to this fact alone, the careless drift of a scrap of paper, Carolyn Skate would be ultimately doomed and the final parts of the drama set into motion.

The air conditioner came on again and Patsy's head snapped up, the sound breaking her from the darkness. She fanned the gun out in a two-fisted grip but her breathing was still moderate and controlled. Then she recognized, realized, the sound. Brought the gun slowly back to her lap. For the first time in hours she took assessment of her surroundings and blinked in confusion.

It was dark outside and she didn't remember that. She could clearly see the new moon rising against the backyard and it was only then that she realized her situation. The wet clothes, the prickling skin. She set the gun down on the bed, never taking her eyes off it as she peeled off her clothes and stood away naked from the bed. She walked over to the window and looked out in search of any specters capering around back there. There were none. Or at least none she could see. She already knew the neighborhood was chock full of such creatures; they fairly crowded out the living if the truth be known, but they, too, obviously knew when times were dangerous and this was one of those times.

She pulled the curtains shut and walked back to the bed. Picked up the gun and trailed around the edge of the king-size to the master bathroom. She bent over the tub and turned the faucets on with her left hand. Popped the lever for the showerhead. Stepped into the tub neglecting to close the shower curtain and washed completely while maintaining the death-grip on the pistol. Then she stepped out, toweled off quickly, taking more time with the gun than she did her body, switching it from one hand to the other to finish up on herself.

Then she walked over to the bed, still nude, and threw the covers off to the floor. Lay down like a body in its coffin and stared at the ceiling, the gun a satisfying weight on her belly as the night slid slowly into the small hours.

# Chapter 36: Skate on Ice

Beverly came to the partially opened door and chanced pushing it back the rest of the way. Doctor Skate was in the same position she'd maintained since earlier that day, bent to the scatter of work splayed across her desk as if time had stopped back here while continuing running its course up front. Skate noted her presence in the room with a lifted eyebrow and looked up from her notes. Beverly thought she looked tired, distracted. "I, um, it's five o'clock," she said. "I'm heading out and wanted to know if you need anything." Then, on impulse, "It's Brad's birthday tomorrow and I haven't gotten him anything yet." She didn't know why she offered this, but some sort of cover seemed imperative even though Skate had never asked a word about her family. Beverly suspected this was because she lived alone. And as far as she was concerned, psychologists were a nutty bunch anyway. But the nervousness? She didn't know where that had come from because Skate had never been anything less than cordial. Aloof, yes. Sometimes to the very edge, but never mean. It was just lately that the woman was making her uncomfortable.

"Oh...yes," Skate said. She brushed back a strand of hair from her face and readjusted her reading glasses. Her face was drawn and pale, anyone would say the same. She looked at her wristwatch and blew out a breath. "Five already?" she said, shaking her head and rubbing her forehead. She gave her receptionist a cursory nod. "Go on," she said. "I've got a few more things to do. Just lock the door on your way out and I'll handle the rest when I leave."

"Okay," Beverly said. "Well," and she paused in the doorway. "Goodnight then."

"Yeah, uhh, goodnight. See you tomorrow," and Skate returned her attention to the notebook computer on her desk and the wild conglomeration of papers scattered about it. She, however, quit the subterfuge the second the door latched. Reached up and pulled the computer closed. Her heart pounding, short of breath. It had not been a good day and she didn't know why; there'd been no great catastrophe to deal with and she wasn't sick. But something was not right.

Something, she thought and let go a quick, sardonic laugh. Laughed because she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt what that something was. Patsy Standish. She couldn't keep the woman from her mind. Of course she'd tried to call her back but hadn't been surprised when no one answered. She hadn't been expecting anything else down inside where the truth lived. This whole thing rankled and its cause was a mystery. She saw people every day in much the same if not much worse situations and these didn't stick in her head like a bad song that wouldn't go away.

This was different, strange.

She'd looked through the notes on their meeting and come up with nothing new, but the conversation she'd had with James kept resurfacing like a drowned body. For the past hour or so she'd poured over newspaper accounts of the strange goings-on in Standish's neighborhood. She'd accessed the stories through the internet and as of yet nobody except James and her seemed to have connected any dots. But from the look of things that wouldn't take much longer. Most probably, only another incident or two, and that's what had her scared. Because something was telling her loud and clear the woman, Patsy Standish, was in danger.

And Skate knew it. She didn't know how but she knew.

She looked down at the papers and considered the folly of her newest idea. Completely ludicrous. Was she really thinking of driving out there? The comments James had made about the place kept rolling through her mind like an endless, looped reel. Intuition, instinct. Completely unquantifiable ridiculousness. But there it was anyway. "Shit," she said quietly and turned her eyes to the ceiling as if the answer to her questions might be scrawled up there. She tapped on the desk and stood up. Checked her watch again. Fifteen minutes had slid into the sink. She thought of going home and the emptiness that waited. Knew she'd be mulling over this problem for hours yet and hated the image of freefall.

Maybe just a drive through, she thought randomly. She'd already found the address on one of the many maps she kept in her desk drawer and knew it wouldn't take long to swing through. Hell, if she left right now she'd still be able to make it back to her place before dark. So...

She remembered her father on his deathbed, her hand clenched tightly in his. He'd always been an impulsive man and now she felt the pull of this latent trait. Never waste an opportunity because time doesn't forgive; that had been his mantra. It had taken her to the top of her high school class, had spurred her on through the bachelor and graduate work to bring her here, now. She looked down at the hand he'd held and thought of his face, his bright eyes in that wonderfully seamed face. He'd always had confidence in her.

She stood up and walked over to the bureau where she kept her purse. Slid the top drawer back. Grabbed the Gucci bag inside and nodded. After all, what could a little after-work ride hurt?

*

She missed it on the first pass because negligence had let a bank of azaleas reach up over the lettering of the subdivision sign. She realized her mistake and turned around at the power plant just down the highway and drove back slowly, mindful of any approaching cars in her rearview (there were none), trying to fix an impression of the place in her mind to run as a baseline. None came until she turned onto the main road. Then it descended with such arbitrary maliciousness she had to pull over to the side, narrowly avoiding dropping her passenger side tires in the ditch as the car lurched along the grassy shoulder like a coughing drunk. She felt a sudden budding nausea, the same sickening response as if from a wave of corruption. She held her hand over her mouth and nose and tried to concentrate. Told herself to breathe, slowly, in, out. Because it was not a smell; whatever it was (if anything really, now it was hard to pinpoint) it was not a smell. After a moment her stomach unclenched slightly and she took her hand away from her face. Breathed in slowly and shallowly. No, definitely not any smell. The air conditioner was blowing freely, and that was not it. She chanced a look around. A lake farther back to the right surrounded by high grass and mostly immature trees, a stark sprinkling of bigger, broken ones in their midst. Peering harder, she noticed that only deeper into the verge on the other side of the lake did any sustained tree line start, and there a long, stretched line of hardwoods that pushed all the way up to front the highway and extended out of sight on the far border of the neighborhood. From the map legends she'd familiarized herself, she knew the area had been farmland years before and much of it remained untouched still. She turned her head to look down the street where she was parked, idling on the shoulder.

On the left a string of new middle-class houses, each with a small front yard, wood fences cordoning off the back, passed down to the first cross street. It was about a hundred yards farther down and even though Skate couldn't see where the street on the left curled around to, the one on the right ran straight up to a dead end seventy yards across the neglected field that ringed the lake. She thought about what James had told her at lunch, that 'feeling' he'd described. He'd said nothing about this sensation of nausea, but she intuited what he was talking about even if she couldn't describe it in words.

Palpable, looming...deadly.

She placed her right hand back on the steering wheel and prepared to pull back onto the roadway. Then the right word clicked home. Evil. Her hand fell away from the wheel to her lap. A cold chill rippled through her body. She looked down at the goosebumps speckled across her forearms. She reached out suddenly and slapped off the air conditioner. The sensation of nausea was gone, but something deeper, much more evil, remained. She tried to shake off this illogical thought, her old theological battles were long since finished, but deep down where the childhood monsters lived she was glad it was still daylight. Just the thought of passing this way in the night sent another random chill through her body.

"Okay, enough of that," she said as forcefully as she could muster. She was a professional psychologist, for Christ's sake! What was she doing shivering in the summer heat out here with her car damned near planted in a ditch? She shook her head in disgust. Tried to lose the eerie strangeness by searching through the scatter of papers on the passenger seat to find the address for that damn woman. Found the pad of paper and focused her attention. She shut her eyes, counted to twenty, and opened them with what she hoped was a more clinical eye.

What could have caused the sensation?

Suggestion? There was no doubt the seed had been planted by James's story but Skate didn't believe that was the whole ball of wax. No. She did a slow pan of the area, trying not to let her eyes rest on any particular spot longer than any other. It only took a couple of studied seconds before it hit her. The whole place might as well have been deserted. There was nobody jogging, nobody playing, nobody walking. Nobody. Like a ghost town. She glanced down at the outside temperature display on the BMW's dash. Late afternoon and 88 degrees. Nothing out of the ordinary for a typical Louisiana summer day, but the facts spoke for themselves. Where the fuck was everybody?

Armed now with the address in her free right hand, she dropped the car into Drive and pulled back onto the roadway, trolling along at a snail's pace, glancing at each house as she passed. The first thing that struck her was how many curtains were drawn. And it wasn't just in a room or two. Even as Skate passed down the street she craned her neck into the side yards and found most of the windows fronting these likewise screened off from prying eyes.

She reached the cross road and glanced left. The road swept back past four houses on the right to a 90 degree turn before heading deeper into the neighborhood. Still, not a soul. She looked right, back about thirty yards where the road ran up against a metal gate secured by a heavy gauge of chain and an equally ponderous padlock. Nothing.

She continued on, checking the addresses against the piece of paper. And then, up ahead on the right she noticed the car, the one she'd happened to see Patsy Standish get out of on the only day they'd met. The same silver Impala alone in a double carport. She slowed even more, almost welcoming suspicion now. She wished that someone would do something innocuous like open a front door to stare after her taillights. At least it would bring a breath of normalcy to what she now felt in her very bones to be the exact opposite.

She stopped in front of Patsy's driveway. Idled nervously. Noticed the shades here were drawn too. Considered for a moment pulling in but had no idea how she could explain it off. Just by being here she'd consciously disregarded countless rules of professional etiquette and knew she could have a lot of explaining to do, not just to Mrs. Standish, but to the police also if the woman so wished it. She swiveled around to see if anyone had yet taken notice. No, the street was still empty. The houses and yards motionless. As if the entire neighborhood was holding its breath. As if there was a mighty secret she stood just on the verge of.

She took her foot off the brake pedal and slowly tooled down to the STOP sign at the end of the street, trying to find reason in what she was doing. Told herself it was all just as normal as--and her breath came suddenly in vicious little stabs, her heart pounding in her chest. Out of the clear, blue sky, seemingly, this wave of paranoia from nowhere. She jerked her head left and right, searching out a clue, and saw him. A lone man standing outside on his porch. Looking directly at her. She looked down and fumbled at the papers again, pulled out a random map and pretended to study it, all the while checking him out from the corner of her eye. Undeniable. He remained motionless, looking her way. Sizing her up. A bug under a microscope. Another cold chill rifled her bones and she put the map down and put her foot on the gas pedal. Turned right slowly as if looking for an address and rolled past him, his head swiveling to follow her the entire way down to the next STOP sign. In her rearview mirror she watched him leave the porch and begin walking down the concrete walkway that led out to the ditch in front of his house. He seemed to waver like a heat-image and her courage broke. Was the sonofabitch coming toward her?

She stepped on the gas and made another right. Glanced back and saw the man gesturing with his hands, as if signaling her to turn around and come back. But surely not, that couldn't be—and another wave of nausea hit her and she stepped down on the gas pedal harder, running the engine up to put some distance between her and whomever that happened to be.

And at the same time she became aware of other people, finally, these exiting their own homes. A tighter wave of claustrophobia began to bite at her insides. Her hands were cold and clammy on the leather steering wheel. Their faces were emotionless, slack and droll, except for the eyes, which were fixed in her direction. She could not deny that. Some of them stumbled along like those horrible zombies from the movies. This was not paranoia, no, but God how she wished it was. By now she was so disconcerted she considered running the STOP sign at the end of the street, but fought back the urge. She could feel herself on the very edge of panic and rebelled against this illogical reaction. Dammit, this is ridiculous, she told herself. Yeah, sure, ridiculous but true. She looked in the rear view mirror again; it was as if she were pulling these people from their houses in a wake behind the car. There were at least ten, maybe fifteen, people all the way out to the street now and plodding her direction. And as far as she could tell, nobody was saying anything. Their heads were straight ahead, their direction unerring. They really were like fucking zombies.

They're coming to get you, a frantic little voice whispered in her head. Then, No shit, Carolyn, get the hell out of here! Trying hard to maintain her composure she turned right again, shaken to the present, and reality, when a horn went off loud and close. She swung her head around and saw she'd almost clipped a car making the same turn from the opposite direction. The driver's head was no more than ten feet away from her own and she and this other were looking directly at one another. It was a middle-aged man, his eyes murderous, his horn continuing to blare as she dragged her car over to the side. She heard the grating slash of branches passing along her passenger side from a bush growing too close to the road, at the same time sensing the car's taillights she'd almost hit blink to life. She felt her gorge rising, feared she would throw up any second now. Everything wavered as if from the same heat-image she'd noticed around the first man she'd seen. On top of the nausea she had a strong sense of vertigo and her stomach lurched. A mouthful of bile hit the back of her throat bringing tears to her eyes and further obscuring her vision.

Other people were coming out of their houses now. Some of them carrying tools, garden rakes, shovels...long kitchen knives, for God's sake! For a moment she pictured her office, its neat little pandemonium, and a jolt of nostalgia swept her as if gazing into a deep and lost past. She whimpered far down in her throat.

And the car died.

It gave no warning, just cut off cool and dead right there in the street. Its forward momentum carried her a few more feet and then nothing. She stared down through the steering wheel at the ignition switch. Still in the ON position. All the gauges on the dashboard fading away as if the battery had gone suddenly cold. A cold that swept her also. She chanced a glance in the mirror and saw the other car's taillights change from red to white.

The sonofabitch was backing up!

"Oh fuck," she murmured, aware now of the awesome range of panic that was descending all around her. Like a net. She gripped the keys and frantically twisted the switch back and forth, mindfully and absurdly aware of how the keys jangled noisily. But nothing happened.

The carport door of the house off to her left swung open and a woman emerged in a dirty shirt and panties, her eyes vicious as a feral animal's, even from a distance. In her hand she had what appeared to be a short handled machete. Skate's stomach twisted again terribly and she jerked forward spraying vomit onto the BMW's dashboard. The woman over there moved with jerking steps past her car and into the driveway. She was coming to get her, by God.

Then the horn again, loud and braying. Breaking the trance that had held her tight. Skate wiped the vomit remnants from her mouth with a quick swipe and saw the backend of this other car. Stopped now a few feet behind her own bumper. The door swung open and a big leg appeared. From around the corner from the STOP sign the growing crowd of people had made the bend, some on the road, some cutting through the yards on that side. Not running (thank God for small favors) but they were coming.

The sudden realization that they were coming to kill her got Skate moving. Regardless of the fact that it was still daylight, that everything was coming in surreal waves, that a whole street, perhaps a whole neighborhood, of people she didn't know and had never wronged, were coming to kill her, finally pounded the last nail into her initiative. She threw her shoulder into the door, afraid for one gruesome second that the electronic lock had engaged when the motor quit, at the same time working the lever, feeling the minute catch and then the rush of outside air as the door swung wide.

She fell into the street, a sudden, ridiculous justification of her refusal to wear a safety belt. She looked in disbelief at the concrete before her face, her hands pressed onto its hot surface. For a moment she really thought she'd gone crazy, certifiably lunatic, and the irony of this almost bubbled laughter from her throat. But the maniacal moment passed when she heard the shuffling footsteps beside her. Saw the heavy work boots attached to the leg she'd seen getting out of the car. She looked up from her place in the street into the dangerous yellow eyes of the man she'd almost hit seemingly years before. Time had gotten all jumbled up somehow.

In his hand dangled a tire tool.

This last little detail broke her out of her funk and to her feet. She didn't even notice the people coming up the street now, all she could see was the hulking man standing in front of her. Crazily she noticed how white his hands were against the black metal of the iron. "Mister," she said, fighting for calm. Surely he didn't intend to brain her with that thing out here in front of all these people in the middle of the day. Right in the middle of the goddamn street. Her whole brain screamed against it. "I don't—" and she stopped as he took a shuffling step forward and swung the tire tool at her full force. Luckily her reflexes were good and she ducked, feeling the whiz of air pass directly above her head. She stumbled back a step, falling to her knee, taking in the whole scene like a still shot in a movie.

They did mean to kill her. Right here, right now.

The reek wafting off the man caused her gorge to rise again and she fought the urge, struggling with every ounce of courage she had left to regain composure, to somehow find her way out of this nightmare.

And as she backed up, her arms out in front of her, the man came on in earnest, his partners in crime, the whole multitude, moving in quickly for the kill. She screamed and broke into a stumbling run. The woman in panties and the T-shirt had by now made it into the street with the machete raised above her head. She slashed down at Skate as the woman ran past and the machete cut a long, jagged rent in her left arm from shoulder to elbow. The pain was immediate and excruciating. For a moment Skate was afraid she would lose consciousness. She stumbled across the ditch, into the woman's front yard, only dimly aware of a great, encompassing warmth of stickiness along her left side. She paused a moment to assess the damage and almost passed out when she saw the glistening wetness of exposed muscle. She could feel nothing on her left side and realized crazily that her assailant had obviously severed the major nerves in that arm, if not the arteries. The blood came prodigiously enough and she knew she didn't have much time until escape would become mute. If it wasn't already. Behind the loud buzzing in her ears she heard the rest of them gaining and looked over her shoulder. The closest, the woman in the panties and T-shirt, was now no more than ten feet away, climbing through the ditch now, the machete angled out in front of her and stained a bright red.

Even now Skate found this hard to accept.

But acceptance had little to do with reality and she struggled on across the expanding front yard to the street perpendicular to the one where she'd left the car.

A phone. She had to get to a phone.

There was no way she was going to outrun the mob coming up from behind, and the highway where she'd turned into the neighborhood seemed a continent away. The houses over here were still largely devoid of movement but there was one where the curtains were not drawn. She made toward it like a famished desert survivor to a watering hole.

She almost fell again crossing the street and did go down once more as she attempted to jump the ditch on the other side. A great splash of blood spattered the ground before her and her stomach lurched again. She looked across the smaller front yard toward the front door to the house and set all of her will to reaching it. She had no idea how far the mob was behind her. At any second she half-expected a club or knife to reach down into the small spot between her shoulder blades but she dared not look back now. Already the blood loss was sapping what little remained of her strength, soon the adrenaline would wear through also. "Just get to the fucking house," she whispered and clasped her good hand to the mangled arm in an attempt to slow the bleeding.

She reached the porch, pulled up against the railing, and reached out a bloody hand to pull the screen door back. Thinking she heard the tortured breathing of the ones following she threw herself against the door, working the knob with her slippery hand and praying whoever lived there was not in the habit of locking the damn thing.

Then, suddenly, she was sprawled in a bleeding mass on the carpeted floor of the foyer, her legs splayed out behind her. She glanced back over her shoulder and saw she still had a moment left her; the mass of people had yet to cross the front yard but were coming with a fatalism she readily understood.

"Help me," she croaked into the muggy stillness of the house. All was silence and she pulled her legs inside, kicking the door closed. Fighting off the terrible waves of darkness that threatened her dimming consciousness, she made it to her knees and reached over and threw the deadbolt with her bloody right hand. Then she looked at her destroyed, hanging arm and vomited again on the carpet. Already a great pool of blood spread around her. She knew she didn't have long; the blood was coming too fast. The maniac out there had hit an artery and without immediate medical attention she was going to bleed to death.

She was going to die.

The simple logic of this idea drove her to her feet, the room swaying disastrously before her eyes. "Hello?" she tried but even realized the request was no more than a choked grunt. She had to hurry.

She heard the screen door pulled open outside. Something heavy and hard pounded at the door. There was no time.

She slid down the wall to the living room leaving a great, red smear as she went. All the lights were off and the only illumination was what filtered in through the drawn curtains at the large porch window. And even this light danced grotesquely from the gathering forms out there trying to get in. Any second now Skate prepared to hear the sound of breaking glass as the multitude came to get her. But it didn't come. They continued to just mill around out there. Almost comically she heard the doorbell ring.

Then she remembered; it was getting so hard now. The phone. Where was the fucking phone?

She knocked over a side table and a lamp slammed to the hardwood floor. Leaned up hard against the back of a couch. And saw it. A hundred miles away on the other side of the room. An old white, rotary job. The kind that took forever. Fuck it, she thought. Beggars can't be choosers.

They were pounding on the door now, really battering the motherfucker, and Skate knew it wouldn't be long. She cut a zig-zag path across the remaining couple of feet and picked up the receiver from its cradle. She almost cried when she heard the dial tone and thought just for a second that she might, just might, still get out of this alive. But she'd only dialed the 9 when a ghostly figure slipped out of the hallway, unseen, behind her, and silently crossed the room in slippered steps to punch the long-handled screwdriver into her spine.

Skate hit the floor like a sack of meat at a slaughterhouse and saw nothing more.

# Chapter 37: The Neighborhood, Now

Forty-five minutes after Skate was killed the sun spread a bloody canvass over the neighborhood. The people who'd emerged from their houses in pursuit of Carolyn Skate found themselves, almost wonderingly, milling around in the neighbor's yard of the atrocity, many still with farming implements in their hands. They looked confused, exhausted. Nobody looked at anyone else and no one spoke. As it got darker everyone just drifted off, at their own varying paces, back down the streets to their homes.

Angie Pullman, the woman of the T-shirt and panties (both of them now ripped and blood-spattered), entered her house through the front door. She had a damnable headache and wanted nothing more than to lie down on the couch, on the floor even.

But there was the issue of the machete.

She looked at it regretfully and moved into the kitchen. Placed it on the counter and began filling the sink with hot water, squeezing in a large amount of dishwashing liquid in the process. For the next ten minutes she cleaned the long-bladed knife with a sponge she typically kept nearby for the dirty dishes. She was thorough, meticulous, as if honing the blade to a new sharpness, and when she was done she moved on to the counter and then out through the living room, following the dripped trail of blood from the kitchen to the front door. This took her another fifteen minutes to clean and by that time she was sweating badly and the headache was worse.

She brought the sponge back to the sink and cleaned the area again, including the bucket she'd fished out from underneath to counter to clean the drip line, finally watching the last of the pinkish water swirl away down the drain. She caught her reflection in the window in front of the sink and looked down at her scanty clothing. In a studied, physical dead-pan she carefully stepped out of her panties and eased the shirt over her head, trying to avoid most of the blood. She took the bloody rags into the living room and opened the glass doors of the fireplace. It was stocked with dry oak from the winter before and she threw the things inside. Went back to the kitchen and retrieved the machete. Placed it under the bed in one of the bedrooms. The house, like most others in the neighborhood, had three bedrooms, but there was one she'd not entered in the better part of two weeks. It was her son's, Phillip's, but it was locked solid from the outside. It had been a simple enough thing to turn the knob around one day while he was napping.

Phillip was three.

She then walked slowly back to the living room and after a few fumbling attempts with the matches and gas, got a good fire going. It was still damnably hot but Angie took no notice. She lie down flat on the floor, naked as the day she was born, and passed off to a dreamless sleep while the fire crackled over its evil burden.

*

Cab Able also found himself milling around in the neighbor's yard though he hadn't been one of the ones trying to break the door down. He could tell by now the show was over in there and really couldn't imagine hanging around here anymore, anyway. He didn't like the weight of the tire iron hanging from his right hand. Not that there was a hell of a lot he could do about it, but.... Things were just the way they were, and that was that. He nodded. Yeah, some things just weren't worth figuring over.

He turned back to the street and whistled hollowly. The woman's car was still right where she'd left it, and that had slipped his mind. Damn driver's side door hanging open. There even looked to be a bright splash of blood on the bottom panel, probably almost dried by now in this late afternoon sun. He noticed Murphy and Nell walk past it without looking on the way back to their house. Murphy dragging the shovel behind him like a kid pulling a wagon. Little sparks jumping out from underneath it every so often, both of their shoulders slumped like they were both being pulled by the same string as they went along. No sense calling out to them though, everyone had his or her own responsibilities and Cab knew his was resting over there on four tires. Murphy and Nell didn't have a damn thing to do with that now. Cab looked down and thumped the tire iron against his leg, once, twice. Sighed like a guy who finally realized at the end of the day no one had remembered his birthday.

Started out across the street and less than a minute later was standing beside the car. Sure enough, it was blood on the bottom panel, and a lot more of it on the street and through Whatshername's yard. He spat on the asphalt. Stepped closer and grabbed the door, throwing it open a little wider so he could see inside. Expensive number fucker and, yeah, the keys were right there. Still in the ignition. He smiled thinly and stepped over a splash of congealing blood into the driver's seat. He had to scrunch over and work the lever so his knees weren't up around his goddamn ears, but when he finally got it right it was better. Leather interior, nice color. She'd really taken care of this baby.

So it was with a slight pang of regret that he considered giving it up, but of course he would. What was the alternative? Granted, the woman they'd just killed wouldn't be using it but he sure as hell couldn't.

He reached down and twisted the key to ON. The engine turned over on the first try and he sat there a moment, slowly moving his foot up and back on the accelerator, trying to imagine it on the interstate. Then he frowned, glanced in the rearview mirror and saw his own car parked right behind. Funny, until now he'd forgotten all about that, hadn't even seen it, but there it was. A rush of fragmentary guilt surged through his mind and he quickly looked away. At least his door was shut, he reminded himself for reasons unknown. He could feel the keys through his pants on his thighs and tried to think of nothing. Nothing at all.

He knew he had to hurry and get the car down to the guy's house at the back of the neighborhood. Of course Cab had no idea what that guy's name was or what the hell any of this was all about, but he'd damn sure get this car, and then, by God, Cab's part in this whole fucking circus would be up. Then he could go back and deal with Mamma.

That was the main thing on his mind right now.

*

Samantha Toney (Kit to her friends, though they were in fact very far from her thoughts at the moment) crouched behind the sofa, staring outside through a slit she'd been courageous (or stupid, another voice suggested) enough to pull in the curtain. She would not have done so if the small stand of four spindly pine trees didn't block that direction from the street, but she wanted to see.

Because this was really something different. Much more so than what she'd been expecting. Hell, granted it had been over a month since she last ventured out at dark, but now this was happening right in broad daylight. People pouring around the corner with shovels and garden rakes in their hands. She'd tried not to look at the knives. But there was that; sure there was that. These people weren't gardeners; they were just fucking lunatics.

Up until now she'd thought she was the one going mad. After all, nothing else fit. Seeing ghosts of the dead, hearing them at night, sometimes all night? The creeping sensations under the skin, the random bounces of thought? Because this wasn't the first time. No sir indeed. She could still recall the institution from her teens like a living virus in her bloodstream. Schizophrenia, the doctor's had called it. She still took her medication for it everyday, but it had been years since...that time. She'd started hearing voices, seeing shit that wasn't there. Terrible things: screaming faces, humiliating accusations. All this she'd managed to hide from her parents until the suicide attempt. Her eyes dropped down to her wrists, to the worm-like thread of scars across them.

She wasn't married and was glad of it. Anyone else here with her would have known by now that she was seeing things again. Hearing them too, but that wasn't always as bad. Sometimes...but not always. At first she'd pretended not to. Her imagination had always been top-notch and she tried to write it off as that, but more and more often, the malaise from her early teens had reasserted itself. Or so she had believed.

She supported herself with clerical work down at the hospital a few miles south on Highway 12. The irony that it was a "mental" hospital was not lost on her, in fact, she'd pretended to appreciate its proximity over the years. Here was a direct realization of what her life could have been had the disease gotten any more severe. Lifetime confinement in the nuthatch. Yeah, she liked to think the very proximity to such illnesses helped frame her mind to avoid them.

Until today she'd been sure she was descending into madness again. After keeping her head above those turbulent waters for so long, she'd eventually sprung a leak and was sinking. She continued to stare out the window. People (somehow she couldn't bring herself to consider them as neighbors), were just walking aimlessly around in Mrs...., what the hell was it? She snapped her fingers trying to remember but nothing came. The couple's faces were as real as a picture in her mind, and even though she'd talked to them off and on for the past three years, she couldn't for the life of her remember their first or last names. She wondered now that it didn't matter anyway.

She'd thought she was going crazy. But now.... All she had to do was stare across the street at the rapidly disintegrating mob and that was no longer a foregone conclusion. What if all this shit was real? Everything, even down to the woman limping back to her house in the T-shirt and panties with the goddamn machete. Kit let go the curtain and stared around wildly, realizing this possibility. Because insanity couldn't hurt you, not unless you did something to yourself, but people with shovels and machetes? Well they could damn well do a lot worse. She'd watched the bleeding woman stumble across the street and inside her own house. Then, this mob.

She knew the woman in the car was dead.

She'd been killed.

Now the comfort of insanity seemed almost preferable to this unspeakable reality. Because if the milling mob outside was not from some depthless chasm in her mind, then maybe, just maybe, all the other things she'd seen and heard for the past few months belonged in the same reality. She shivered violently in the thin light leaking in through the curtain.

And it was at this moment the two identical little girls strolled out of her hallway and fixed their apocalyptic eyes upon her. Laughed at her, crouched there in the corner. Kit saw, horribly, the long metal kebob skewers they were holding in both hands.

Then they came on and her screams went unheard for the better part of the next hour.

*

Jacob Fields stood just within the jamb of his front door and watched the neighbor's straggle back to their houses. They had the look of exiles, every one of them, and it was almost funny. All the lost. They weren't even seeking direction any more. All of that shit was in the Past. This was a new frontier they were plying now. From where he stood he could just make out the form of Cab Able climbing into the stranger's car. Poor woman never had a chance, Jacob thought acidly. Polly McNamara was already unrolling the garden hose to spray down the street in front of her house.

He didn't know what had come over him lately. He was so tired and unmotivated. He'd missed more work the last two months than he'd missed in the previous decade but he really wasn't concerned about that either. Nothing much touched him. He'd felt a moment of regret when he watched the woman drive down the street, his neighbors already emerging from their houses like cockroaches invading a kitchen, but even that had floated away with no trace.

She had made the wrong choice and it had fixed her little red wagon.

Case closed. That's why he was sticking close to home. Things were mixed up, he wasn't thinking clearly, so why muddle in someone else's business? Nobody could fault him for that, could they? Surely not. His mother had always asserted that good fences tended to make better neighbors and that stood just fine with him too. Why just the thought of her brought a tear to his eye. Dead now for almost eight years. Where did the time go? It crept lightly away while you weren't looking, heading toward oblivion, that's where. Because that, truly, was the only fixed thing in the universe.

Molly should have known that too, but she'd refused to acknowledge the obvious. And look where it'd gotten her. He looked down at his scabbed hands, the right one still a little bloody on certain days if he used it much. Yeah, she shoulda known. It would have made things a little easier for all concerned.

He remembered their wedding day, how pretty she'd been. Just like one of those wedding magazines he still remembered her thumbing through every day so long ago, though of course, their actual wedding had been nothing of the sort. She was always one for pipe dreams. He had to laugh now just thinking about her former righteousness, her eager willingness to "change the world" as she'd been so fond of saying. Their only son, Edgar, hadn't called now in at least six months (Jacob was sure she probably had the date written down somewhere, for some unknown reason) and he didn't care. It was just one more thing now in a long line of things that really didn't matter.

He'd tried to make Molly see the reason. Up until the very end he'd tried as hard as he could to paint the sort of picture he knew she had to see. But in the end he had been merely pissing up a rope. She'd seen something with the mailman, she'd tried to tell him, something about little girls and something beastly, but he hadn't wanted to hear. Not then and not now. You couldn't stop a locomotive by standing out on the tracks. She'd just gotten more exasperated. Louder. Threatening to call the police if he didn't do something.

Well...and here he laughed again. He had done something.

And really, as far as he could tell, it had gone a long way to solving his problems. Or most of them anyway.

But there was the smell. Yeah, definitely, there was that.

He wrinkled his nose and backed away from the door, curling back into the darkness that crouched all around him. Even the thickest gauge of Visqueen pinned along the bathroom wall and covering the outside of the door wasn't enough to keep it at bay.

He moved into the living room, now only a wild menagerie of broken and knocked-over items. The scene of their Last Great Battle. He kicked through the remains of a broken lamp, scattering tiny shards of the light bulb into the general chaos of the room. Fell heavily into the recliner Molly had surprised him with for Christmas two years ago. He stared across the room at the television. Or what was left of it. It had been one of the most expensive items they'd ever purchased but it had been no match for the battle. Now it was broken and dead like everything else. A shattered hull. He thought about dragging it outside to the back yard; perhaps a family of birds or a raccoon would make a home there, but just the thought of the exertions implied was enough to set him to another course. He sat and peered into its broken, dark depths, his mind as black and dead as the thing he stared into.

And as he drifted away to the seamless emptiness of the coming night the smell continued to anchor itself to every surface, the very air itself. This putrescence that had once been Molly Fields, now growing to a vast puddle of sawn bones and corruption in the bathtub.

*

All over Leszno's Acres the scene was much the same. People locked away in their houses among the growing omnipotence of some foul deed. Grass continued to grow more ragged and high in ill-tended yards, cars to sink a little lower on deflating tires. The few windows that had been opened to the light now closed by the pull of trembling fingers crouched low against walls in the fear someone, or something, would find them and come looking.

Oscar Levant sat quietly at the card table that now served for dining, a Banquet TV dinner before him. It was only slightly heated and tasteless but still he ate on, his eyes on a fixed point somewhere out far ahead of him, never on the crumpled form of his oldest daughter (the only one who had still lived with him) sprawled in the hallway, one claw hand curled like stone on the tile entranceway to the kitchen. The baseball bat he'd used to cave in her head lay on the table by a roll of napkins. Blood and hair still stuck to its side.

The lake, especially now after dark, had developed slow rolls that washed up on the bank like a tide returning. It took no wind for these motions to continue all the night long. And along its weedy banks, if one had the inclination to look, could be found clothing: shirts, torn shorts, the sodden shoe of a late mailman. Rounded shapes appeared and disappeared like waterlogged corks bobbing to the surface and occasionally, if the night was clear and the moon in the right spot, sharp glints of light would reflect from these eyes of the dead. Forms milled out from the treeline, some two legged and upright howling like dogs at the moon.

Things moved beneath the ground.

And no one escaped and no one called out for help. Not here in the Eye.

Norma Deplessis, seventy-one years old, and for the world ten or fifteen years younger-looking than was her right, had broken every mirror in her home, of which there had been a great many. She'd lived with her husband in California until the late seventies when he'd run off with another woman, but by that time she'd had most of the procedures done to well-known Hollywood stars and their ilk. He had produced "dirty movies" and even though it was not a thing Norma could suffer quietly, the money had been plentiful enough to point her head the other direction.

But of course the sin had found her out, both then and now.

Among the new chin and forehead, the high cheek bones and sculpted nose, the raised and full breasts, tummy tucks and ear pinnings, he'd found another toy and thrown the old one away. And she'd realized her sin like an ages-old coma victim suddenly struggling to the surface of consciousness. She'd looked around, appalled, at the earthly opulence in which she was surrounded, alone now since he'd left week before, and she'd thrown it all off. Moved back to Louisiana. Bought the little house in Leszno's Acres and tried to forget the life she'd once lived.

But how she had loved her beauty. Everyone had a right to at least one vice and hers was vanity. Not that she could harm the world in any way; not now, at this age, but old habits were hard to break.

Or had been.

Now her home was a glittering jumble of broken glass. When the Undoing had begun she'd taken to breaking the smaller mirrors, but after awhile it became impossible, imperative, not to smash every last one. One hundred and seven. She knew because she'd counted, many times. Designed to catch her every move from every angle, which of course made things all the more horrible in the early stages.

Because the surgeries had begun to...undo. At first just little things, things no ordinary person, one not trained to the least disturbance in their physical form, would notice. But she had been and did. Stepping out of the shower, one breast a tad lower than the other, its nipple discolored and swollen. And later the eruptions on her nose, the bleeding when she'd done her bathroom duties.

She'd taken to breaking the mirrors shortly thereafter.

Now, a little over a month later, the mirrors were mere fragments of nasty jags lining the floor and cabinets. The powder from the violence done them reflected everywhere in the house like little diamonds of glitter in every tuck and fold. Tiny, lighter than air bits and shards of glass railed on the currents when the air conditioner switched on. She could feel these edges scratching her lungs when she breathed.

But Norma didn't care. She was Undone completely now, so nothing else mattered. Her ears hung like a hounds, her nose a malformed cucumber, her dugs now flappy, deflated sacks hanging below her waist. Great rents criss-crossed her face and her hair had fallen out in chunks, her stomach rebelling against anything she put into her mouth now so terribly bereft of teeth.

So she sat tightly rolled up in a stinking blanket from her bedroom in the last vain attempt to hide the reality of the Undoing. Sat and listened far into the night at the ululations of howls that seemed to start somewhere out there near the lake but were joined by more vicious things as the night descended in its primitive depravity.

Because humans were not the only ones subject to such mysteries. All around and within the faint demarcations of the poisoned acres, animals in their simple understanding were learning the savage imperatives of the time. A group of former house cats, now feral, stalked the nights with bloody intent. Lone dogs were victims of their savagery, their squeals and howls breaking the unnatural stillness. Rabies had spread from squirrels to mice to rats to raccoons. Everywhere was the steady beat of upheaval.

A thirty-seven year old African parrot, bought years before by a former zoo curator, had consumed its own legs a day before and now bleed slowly out on the floor of its putrid cage, its owner unmindfully in the grip of horrible manifestations and confined to her bedroom.

In numerous attics across the length and breadth of the neighborhood battles were being waged between species, their clamor bone-chilling and unforgettable to those who heard them.

The band of squirrels that'd set upon the Colonel had settled into the top of a large elm and stripped every leaf from it in some mindless fury.

Birds plummeted from the sky to lay twitching and dead within the perimeter of the acres.

Earthworms emerged from the ground in gouts as if on the run from some ominous presence seeking them in the cool, fecund levels.

Owls deserted, Opossums gained unearthly sight.

And in the backyard of the house where Carolyn Skate had sought sanctuary her grave yawned open and ready. Todd Buchanan stood shirtless and dirty under the red moon, his skin aflame from the sacks of lye he'd steadily lined the hole with for the past three hours. Milly, his wife of five years, even now finished the heavy stitching to hold the body within the confines of the Persian rug that had been the only splurge in their entire life together. Tonight it did not matter. What blood had managed to escape the thick, rolled mat would have to be expunged, the hole filled and reset with the pallet of turf Todd had purchased almost a month before and watered religiously every night as he slowly drank himself to madness.

Because standing here now, under the influence of the bloody moon, madness had come to roost. The neighborhood had gone to plague and there would be no rescue. Things had passed beyond that mark. The price of blood had been paid.

Todd stumbled into the tomb-darkness of the house to help pull the body to the pit.

# Chapter 38: Dead Echo

Patsy Standish felt like a brick had landed squarely on her forehead. She'd slept very little the night before, what with the horrors that had taken place during the fading afternoon. She had been ill at ease the entire day, more so than usual, but suddenly at 6:47 (she knew precisely when because the clock had stopped on her kitchen wall at that very instant) the dull pulse that had grown to the full-sized migraine that had her now had begun. The first piece of the horror had come when she believed someone knocked on her kitchen door, light, furtively. She'd even twisted around on the sofa to stare out through the kitchen to the carport door but of course no one had been there. She'd been living here too long to be even mildly surprised. This place toyed with its captives like a young cat with a crippled mouse.

Then the pulse had come again, drawing her to her feet, the sensation more like a warning than the discomfort it would soon become. She'd paused where she stood, her ears pricked to every nuance but finding nothing. There was no smell of corruption on the air, no cloying footsteps echoing above her head, no tinkling laughter. She peered down the hall toward the bedroom but knew that was not it either. Because her eyes were unwittingly dragging themselves back toward the carport door. And as her body followed, the temperature seemed to drop with every step she took in that direction.

She laid her hand on the doorknob, feeling as if she were about to pass from one world into another, turned it. Pulled it back as she stepped out of its described arc and moved on to the storm door, pushing it out toward the car. Stepping outside, the pulse ramped up to the dire warning throb she'd first expected it to be, but now that she was here, it proved impossible to recede back into the house while whatever had drawn her continued on its lethal course. She'd had to know, had to see. Because, this time, it was murder.

The smell-taste of it was right there in the back of her throat.

She moved away from the door, her eyes darting right and left, trying to find whatever this new source of disquiet was. But met with no luck, not really, because whatever it was, was after all, everywhere. Nothing stirred. No one moved. It was as if hers was the only soul having drifted here, far away from any chance of help. She ran her hand unconsciously over the hood of the car and walked slowly along the driver's side, still trying to---

And she heard the scream. Very clear, very loud, the power of someone beating a garbage can, in the still summer air. At first she couldn't tell where it came from, but by the time she cleared the eve of the carport, there was no mistake. A clear range of sight existed all the way down to the cross street, Stickler, and she saw what appeared to be a stumbling woman crossing it to one of the houses on the other side. The screams were hers, and as Patsy craned her neck to shore up the details of this macabre drama the others came into view. A mob in hot pursuit (neighbors! the frantic voice pointed out), many with tools in their hands.

And the throb eased over into migraine world.

She watched, speechless, while the mob chased the woman into the house. Watched, as for a while they attempted to get in, scratching and pounding at the walls and door, until simply wandering around like ghosts in the dying summer light, like people looking for shells on a beach. Looking and shuffling around until they began trailing away. And still she watched. She looked up and down the street, but there was no one else apparent as witness to the crime that had just been committed! The migraine deepened, screwed down on itself, dropping her to her knees on the hot concrete, her shaking arms barely holding her upright.

Then the car moving down the street toward her. She didn't have the strength to hide, to even stand up, and for a moment, when it slowed down and then came to a full stop, she thought, almost contentedly, that now she too would die, she would die and the whole fucking thing would just be over.

But it wasn't like that at all.

The BMW idled in the street for a moment, the driver obscured behind the tinted, raised glass. Then the window on the passenger side came down and a strange man's voice called out from the interior. "Mrs. Standish! Are you all right?" She hadn't the slightest idea to whom it could belong, or why he'd be concerned in the first place, one of that cabal of murderers, but she slowly shook her head back and forth and even attempted a smile. Even now she could not imagine why.

And she'd said something. She had no idea what but the voice inside the car had laughed and told her to take care, that that was the most important thing of all. Then the window had gone up and the car dwindled down to the end of the street and took a right. She didn't have to follow it to know where it was going.

At first true dark she'd gone back inside.

A great calm had descended after the violence of the day and the house was silent. Patsy sat on the sofa running the wild scene through her mind. Trying to find some kind of sense in this great tragedy building around her. Because something kept nagging at the back of her mind.

The car. It seemed so familiar...but for the life of her Patsy could not place it. And let's be serious. There were probably half a million BMWs of that size and color all over the world. Still...it was significant. She could feel it. Which brought her endlessly back to the woman she'd seen. Who was she? Why had she been hunted like a dog? Patsy had been able to see the vague figure of the woman, the color of her hair (it had been brown), but as far as the rest there was really not much to go on.

But somehow she felt responsible.

Of course she was not so naïve to think the neighborhood had not taken on a savage personality of its own in these last days. She knew it had. She'd felt it building that first day on the trails and since then it'd steadily increased. Not that the random hauntings had gotten progressively worse (they'd already been terrible from the beginning), but there was an air of menace now, without as well as within, so palpable it seemed to carry its cottony fibers visible into the stony depths of night. Look what it had turned her neighbors into: a vicious mob set on the murder of a stranger. And she knew this woman was not the only one. She could hear the truth leaking in all around her in whispers of death and depravity. No, this neighborhood had gathered on itself siege mentality; there had might as well be electrified fences up along the borders, not to keep the likes of her in, but the outsiders out, dull to the game. She had to be realistic. From her kitchen window she could see the neighborhood going to seed. She now knew the mailman had been killed, probably in the same general fashion as this woman today. God knows what else was happening behind the closed doors, in the fenced-off yards. People were dying around her! That was a fact. She could try to deny its reality by making joking comments to murders when they happened along in their victim's car, but Jesus Christ! how could she now, alone, right here!?

She hunched her head into her shoulders like a guilty child after a spanking. "No," she whispered. "This is not about me. I haven't done anything. I just want Terri back." There it was in three little sentences except that two of them were lies. There was always Tomas Lorca and the image she held in her head, bent over the kitchen table while he went at her from behind.

That had been the final trigger.

Whatever the fuck was now taking hold of this place, it was childish to deny that event the significance she knew it demanded. She had done something. Some of these things were her fault. It was irrevocable.

And Terri was still as far away this very night, with the scent of murder and corruption in the air, as she'd been the night Patsy had seen her bloody shoe resting on the asphalt.

*

At one minute past midnight she heard the faint knock on her door. She sat, waiting, in complete darkness because she'd known he'd come. And now he was here. She stood up in the coal darkness of the living room (she'd been sitting for hours staring straight ahead, waiting for the laughter, the footsteps, the cold hand around her throat) and moved into the kitchen, pacing everything with her hand out in front, unwilling to shed light on what she knew would come.

Again, the faint rapping.

Her hand was on the knob (for just a moment her mind railed at her to let it go, for God's sake, just let it go!) and then she was turning the deadbolt. She didn't bother peeking through the slat. She pulled the door back into darkness, stepped deeper into the black herself. A man's shaggy head was silhouetted in the moonlight which cast a spectral glow throughout the neighborhood. A phosphorescent ghostly white shimmering on the grass tops. He came in and the smell followed. Something carrion. A dog after rolling in something dead.

He stepped closer and Patsy saw he was naked. Sweaty. Darker smears on his white belly could have been tracks of blood. His voice was hoarse when he spoke.

"I need you," he said.

She nodded. Made no move toward him.

He went down on his knees on the kitchen floor. His eyes were like two white diamonds shining in a jeweler's carpet. Laced through with red. He smiled and his teeth were those of a dog. A shiver passed through her.

"You're frightened," he said.

"Yes."

The eyes flashed again in the darkness. Silence. Then, "Take my hand," and she did, coming a step closer. Shivered again.

"So cold," she protested and he placed his other hand over hers.

"I've come to warm you," he said seductively. Pulled her down to the floor with him. Pulled her T-shirt over her head and grasped a breast in one dirty hand.

"Terri," she begged, but his finger was to her mouth.

"Shhh," he said. "Everything in good time. Can't you feel her getting closer? Are you blind to the things taking place around us?"

"No...I just want her. That's all." By now Tomas was undoing and sliding her jeans down around her ankles. His hands still rough and cold. He pushed her legs into a V and crawled on all fours into the valley. She looked down at him, wondering at the seduction of insanity, trying to form reason here in this envelope of madness. Lost it in the minutiae.

"And you'll have her," he said, working himself stiff with his hand. "You'll have her," and he rose up from the floor, pressing his sweaty body against hers. The smell increased, divided, her reason (what very little was left) swept away. Then he was pushing hard inside her, driving past her reluctance. His mouth at her throat, his slavering tongue running the gauntlet of her chin. "Yes, ma'm, you'll have her," he grunted savagely and began his pig-thrusting while she did her best to imagine other worlds and the peace that could inhabit them.

*

Right before dawn he left having sated himself. They'd never left the kitchen floor and now Patsy was a reek of pain, her back, shoulders, her thighs. Her sex. Everything had been plowed under. And when he was finished that had been that. He'd pulled himself free and stood up, groaning in the darkness. Looked down at her lying there and turned to the kitchen door, leaving like a wraith having scourged a village. Through the street-facing kitchen window where she'd crawled, Patsy watched his naked form move effortlessly, unabashed, down the street toward his house. She wondered for a moment if there were any others left awake and alert in this hideous hour as witness. She wondered then, also, if hers was the only house he'd visited. When he finally passed full into the darkness she fell away from the window and sobbed against the refrigerator door. She could feel the man's rancid semen lubricating her thighs and was suddenly afraid she'd be sick. For the life of her, she seemed in a dream, a nightmare of the worst fabrication, because surely she had not gone so far, truly, to abide such things in the middle of the night? She thought of her lost husband, her mind refusing to pull his name into focus.

The stickiness razed her mind with guilt. For all things now and the terrible lost things she'd never realize again, only pine after them until her dying day.

She stumbled off the floor to her feet, steadying herself on the kitchen island while an assault of nausea rocked her frame. Little white stars bloomed and popped before her eyes and the room pitched and rolled. The bathroom! She had to get it out! Using both hands to help her along, she fought past the few obstacles in the kitchen, a chair, the corner of the table, finally making it to the bathroom door. The darkness here proved too tomb-like for willing entrance and she fumbled along the wall for the light switch. The sudden blast of white caused her to reel back against the wall, throwing both arms before her eyes. She ducked her head and started forward like a penitent bowed before an overworked god. She was thankful now she was naked and sat down on the toilet, one hand on both walls of the nook. Then she forced out what she could and wiped away the rest. Or at least the rest she could get at.

She began to feel better, her mind to clear.

In another couple of minutes she was able to rise and stand without the support of her hands. She closed her eyes and counted slowly to thirty. Opened them and stared straight ahead at the cabinet facing her. A towel. Yes. She gingerly took it off the rack and unfolded it, expecting anything, and finding only what she desired. A small sigh escaped her. "Wash your hands," she murmured like someone's parent, and likewise she moved two feet over and turned on the taps in the sink. She kept her eyes to the bowl as the water heated, not wanting to see what wild beast from some roasting hell she now resembled. Shortly, steam began to rise and she took one end of the towel and wet it, rubbing in a little soap, all the while keeping her eyes fixed to the job. She washed her face, neck, resoaped for her chest and privates. Worked to undo the unthinkable and was almost pleased with the results.

Again, she was almost human.

Her bedraggled hair hung down to shield her eyes and she raised her hands to part it. Decided the moment was right to regard her handiwork and looked into the mirror.

The sight almost stopped her heart.

The mirror looked upon some other dimension now. Everything a broken and smoking ruin. No architectural line could be ascertained in the rubble, which seemed far more encompassing than any World War II atrocity she remembered from high school. She could practically feel the heat pressing up against her naked body from behind. But these things didn't hold her. In fact this phantasmagoria paled before the truth of her sight.

Terri stood alone in the rubble.

Her clothes were in tatters, blood-smeared, along with her face, the hair burned from one side of her head. One eye seemed cool and lifeless, confused.

"Terri!" Patsy screamed, spinning around to pluck her daughter from the madness of the vision, but finding only the shower door awaiting her attack. She ripped it open, scrabbled inside the plastic cubicle and tore at its surface until the futility hit her and she spun back round again.

The scene was much the same as before except now Terri held her little arms out in mute supplication. Her mouth moved but she was too far away, the mirror now more like a television screen, all grainy and shot through, and Patsy could see nothing of her own shape or form in the glass. Only Terri. And her entreaties.

Patsy lurched from the shower and fell hard against the cabinet that held the sink. Terri now only mere inches away from her frantic eyes but separated (oh God! no, please no!) by the immensity of this fugue. Her hands flew to the glass and she began to plead with it, but Terri, heedless, continued to gesture, the grieving love in her eyes bringing Patsy soon to silence. She moaned and put her head in her hands, pulled disconsolately at her hair. But then, unexpectedly, she heard a whispering. Just a sibilant murmur far back in her mind, but if she concentrated, words slowly began to form in its puddle. "Terri?" she whispered back, her head still in her hands as the dawning came on. Yes! Yes! Surely! Her eyes flashed back to the mirror. Terri was still there, beckoning, her lips moving, and suddenly Patsy could understand what she was saying. "Quiet, Momma, quiet. I'm here," over and over again. Patsy slumped to her knees on the tile floor, her elbows barely keeping her eye-level with the counter. Terri looked her straight in the eyes, seemingly terrified of the tenuousness of the moment. Every once in a while the image would flicker and fade like a bad signal wiffing out on the radio.

"What is it baby?" Patsy heard herself say.

Again the murmur coalescing into coherence. "No, no, don't," the voice said. Terri's voice.

"Baby," Patsy moaned. Her heart pounded, waiting until some final moment to explode into shards of death. And it was for this that Patsy prayed, to be struck down from this pentacle of want, to flow softly into whatever shadowy world her daughter now inhabited.

"Momma," she heard again and the sob stopped up tight in her throat. Terri had stepped through the rubble and was now standing in the clear, her hands straight out as if pressed against the opposite side of the glass which held them apart. Patsy put up a finger to the center of her child's hand and the look on the girl's face softened. "Don't Momma," she said. "Quit looking for me. Don't do it."

"Terri, please, please..."

The child squatted down, her figure so close but foreshortened to no more than six inches. Patsy could have covered her whole form with the palm of one hand and shivered violently at the thought. "It's all lies, Momma. It's evil. This place is evil," and even as she said it Patsy knew she was not referring to the cataclysm on the other side of the mirror. Her blood began to run cold.

"Tell me," she whispered.

The voice was louder in her head now, just as if Terri had her lips pressed fast to her ear, relaying some imperative secret the mother had overlooked. "You've got to get away," the child was saying. "This is not right. I was afraid of the light and followed you. I know it wasn't right but everything was so confusing..." and her voice bore the maturity of one who'd seen beyond the curtain of earthly reality. The true beat of immensity, finality.

"But I want you, Terri...I'll do anything, baby...anything..."

"I know, Momma, but it's not right. It's a trick, a fugue (again the maturity of expression), a lie. I'm gone. I know that now, and I'm afraid for you..."

Patsy looked at the tiny figure in the mirror and felt her heart tear a little more. "I can't Terri...I can't let you go..."

The tiny face was inches from her finger. "I know, Momma, but you have to. This is all just an echo. Everything here nothing but a dead echo," and Patsy could not ascertain whether she meant the place behind the glass or the world itself. Maybe she was not listening acutely enough, not searching for the clarity of the prophecy. Her daughter said "everything" and perhaps at this moment she should throw off ideas of puzzles and mysteries. Accept the word as gospel.

She began to cry.

"Don't Momma," she heard but couldn't. The cruelty of the universe mashing her flat. "Listen to me," the little voice continued. "They're using me to get to you but it won't work. "There are..." and this time her voice filed down another register as if in mind of interlopers, "evil things here. There have always been, and they look for weakness. These tricks are not what they—" and suddenly the voice was knifed from her head. Patsy dashed the tears from her eyes and tried to fix on the tortured figure squatting in the glass before her. Terri was crouched down lower to the ground, casting frantic glances over both shoulders. In the back of her mind Patsy heard a small, terrifying bell of laughter ring out. Its source unmistakable.

Terri turned back to her mother. Actually pressed her face up against the pane of reality that separated the two. "Please, Momma, do something. Get away! They won't leave me alone!" and with this the laughter mushroomed, broke into two distinct registers.

In the far right corner of the mirror the girls from the attic rounded a broken wall and stopped side-by-side. One of them pointed in Terri's direction and the other laughed for the third time. The scene began to go grainy again, distorted as if a wash of water were trilling down the mirror's length. Terri turned to her mother one last time. "Momma! Do it! Get away!" and then she was off and running through the murky, scrambled backdrop of doom and ruin.

Patsy lurched forward, mindless, her hands in claws and her teeth bared, plunging ahead, striking the glass with such force to break it from the wall. She felt more than heard the tinkling crash of glass breaking, a warm coat of heat painting her forehead, and then she felt nothing at all.

# Chapter 39: Pieces and Parts

The last thing on James Arnold's mind when he walked into the precinct that day was Carolyn Skate. His afternoon had been spent in the company of a convicted serial killer in Angola State Prison, a small, unassuming man who had picked up prostitutes and driven railroad spikes through their brains. So far they had eight; Arnold was sure there were more. Everything just depended on how much sanity you were willing to give up, listening to the twisted little fuck. He talked to Shelly in the crow's nest, as they called it, told him the interview had been about as productive as a black politician at a Klan rally, and made his way back to his desk. Amid the usual scrabble of notes, papers, newspaper articles, napkins and Styrofoam coffee cups he saw the number. Skate's. But the name beneath wasn't hers, but somebody named Bills. He sat down and thumbed the note into better view. Beverly Bills. He looked off into the middle distance, thinking. Nope, the name didn't ring a bell but it was definitely Skate's number. He looked down at his watch. Almost 4:30. Odds were she'd still be in. He thought about the twisted little fuck again and nodded. Maybe she could give him an insight he'd so far overlooked. It was worth a try.

The phone was picked up on the fourth ring by an obviously harried voice on the other end. Arnold assumed, correctly, this was Beverly Bills and introduced himself. The relief in her voice was immediate and surprising, at least from Arnold's point of view. "Oh, I'm so glad you called! I was afraid I wouldn't be able to talk to you today, and I really don't know what to do! The phone's been ringing off the wall, and I've had to cancel patients right and left! You know, I'm really not—" and Arnold cut her off with a well-directed cough.

"Slow down, Ms. Bills. I just got in and saw the message. What's the problem?"

"Something's happened to Doctor Skate!" The woman's voice sounded like she was winded from running. Close to panic. Somewhere in the background Arnold heard another phone ring and distinctly heard the word "shit" issue from the ear piece.

He coughed again, louder this time, and went to his cop voice. "Ms. Bills, ma'am. Ms. Bills, listen. Forget the other lines. I want you to talk to me. Whatever else is coming in can wait. Trust me."

His tone seemed to sooth her, or at least to help put her mind on track. "Yeah, okay," she said. "Let me flip off the system. Oh, it's been going all day and—"

"Ms. Bills," he said again, putting some more sandpaper to his cop voice. "Tell me what's wrong."

"I told you! Something's happened to Doctor Skate!"

Arnold settled back in his chair and put his thumb and middle finger to the crest of his nose. Closed his eyes and kneaded the flesh there. "Tell me what you know, Ms. Bills, not what you think. What you know. Slow down and take it nice and easy. First off, how did you get my number?"

"It was in her book, right on top. Your name, that you're a detective."

"Okay, great. You did good. If something has happened to Doctor Skate you've called the right guy. Now, what makes you think something's happened to her?"

"Well, she's not here! All day! She's loaded down with appointments and she's not here! I've called her home...I don't know what else to do. Some people have been very angry."

"Forget those people, Beverly," (he decided to make this more personal by using her first name. It worked with some people.) "Listen to me. Has she failed to come in to work before, even with lesser work loads?"

"Not that I know of. I've worked here a little over six months and this is the first time as far as I know."

"Okay, okay. Good. You called me. You did right. You say you called her house. How many times?"

"Five, ten, a lot."

"Okay. It just rings? An answer phone? What?"

"An answer phone."

"Now listen to me, Beverly. I know you probably had a bad day, trust me I know, but you need to think." He glanced back at his watch. "Tell me when you saw her last."

"About five yesterday afternoon. I told her I had to get a present..."

"Okay, five o'clock yesterday. What was she doing? Was she with a patient?"

"Ahh, no, I think one had just left. She was going over things on her desk."

"What sort of things?"

"I don't know. Papers, maybe, something in her computer."

"Okay. What were you doing?"

"I, uh. Oh yeah, I had a message. A patient had called wanting to speak to her."

"And you came to give her the message...okay. Was she close to closing up shop for the day?"

"Well, it looked like she might've been. I don't know..."

"You usually deliver messages in person?" Arnold had been to the office (boy, had he) and knew the layout. It seemed a little odd.

"No...I don't. But this person...I don't know, there was something odd about her. She seemed confused, desperate. Then she hung up on me."

"So you got an odd call." He skin was beginning to prickle more and more. "Who was it?"

She didn't even pause for breath, or to consult any note. "Patsy Standish," she said. "Doctor Skate seemed interested."

Arnold sat bolt upright in his chair. Until now he'd thought it all could be a false alarm. Now he had the sneaking suspicion it wasn't. His voice betrayed nothing. "Beverly, you don't mind if I call you Beverly, do you?" he began, his mind already racing on to other things.

"No, no, of course not."

"Okay, great. Here's the deal. Close up now. Leave a message on the answering machine if you haven't yet, whatever you need to do. Finish out anything you may have pressing and go home. If she's not there, she's not there. Nothing you can do about it. Other than what you've just done which was exactly right. I'm gonna be taking it up at this end, don't worry. She's an old friend of mine so I'm not gonna worry about the 24 hour bit. If you say something's wrong, I'm taking your word for it. We good?"

"Yeah, okay. I thought the right thing to do would be—"

"All right. One more thing. I want you to keep trying her home number. The second you get her, if you get her, call me. Got it?"

"Yeah I got it."

"Fine, here's my number. I've got my phone with me all the time. I'll get right back to you. Promise."

"Okay Mister, uh, I mean, Detective Arnold. I'll do just that."

"Great. If I need anything from you I'll call the office tomorrow."

"What if she's still not here?"

"Let's worry about those things when and if they come," he said though he could hardly believe it himself.

*

It was past ten and Arnold remained at his desk. The precinct was never a quiet place but Arnold had long training on filtering disturbances. And right now he was in his own little world. A world that seemed to be getting messier by the minute. Though he seldom wrote anything down, on a pad before him was a list of names. This is how it looked:

Bill Camp—dog catcher ?

Samuel "Jester" Johnson—mailman ?

Dan Sidworth—electrician D

Miles Placard—former resident 9535. ?

Below this list he'd also scratched the name Carolyn Skate. He didn't like it, not one damn bit. So far, out of these five people, only one had been pronounced dead. The others? The Placard fellow missing from an untouched home, keys still in the ignition of his car, likewise untouched. The mailman gone too. No one had seen him since the day his mail jeep was found, weeks ago now. Arnold didn't make it a habit of assuming things but more often than not his hunches proved accurate. Johnson and Placard were dead men; he could feel it down to his toes. That left the dog catcher. He remembered seeing the piece on the news with the guy being carted off on a stretcher, but, unless things had changed dramatically, that old boy was still at the State House. Okay, so there was one guy he'd have to look into. It'd been a week or two since his lunch with Skate and knowing the present state of mental health facilities, Arnold figured he wouldn't hedge any bets that the guy was still in lockup. No, this shit was starting to get too freaky.

The whole damn neighborhood was becoming nothing but a tragedy magnet. Of course he didn't have the proof that rested in the box in Patsy Standish's attic, but he could connect the dots with the best of them.

The place had gone bad. Again, he was reminded of the story he'd told Skate at lunch. The one that had come to mind after he'd driven through the neighborhood. He could still see that woman's eyes just before she shut the door in his face. He could still hear the gunshots. Well, there were gunshots going off right now in his head and he'd be a fool not to recognize them for such after all he'd been through.

He looked back at the note. Scrawled another name, larger, below his group of four. Underlined it. Circled it. Drew stars at each corner. Breathed deeply and took his chin in his hand. Patsy Standish. She was the hub around which all these objects revolved. He smiled savagely and tapped the pencil against his desk blotter. Yeah, there were some people getting a visit from Detective James Arnold tomorrow, come hell or high water.

Then he bent back to the computer to get the one address he needed.

*

He looked out the curtain and saw it was going to be a long, hot day. Fitting, he thought, and checked his watch. Almost seven. He'd called in already and told them he'd be in the streets. Told dispatch about Beverly Bills and how important it was for them to let him know if she called in. He still didn't trust the gadgetry of technology and insisted on human backup. Phelps told him not to worry and they broke the connection. He considered calling Skate's office but knew she wasn't going to be there. That much was already fixed in his mind. And of course any call from him would likely go spiraling downhill with the excitable Beverly Bills.

"Bill Camp," he whispered, grabbing his car keys from the kitchen counter. "What can you tell me, my man?" and then he was out the door and gone. He'd already done the phone work yesterday and confirmed that the man had been released several days before. Stuck his foot in the door and managed to get the guy's address.

A little less than a half hour later he was slowly trolling down Ranch Street in a small, old subdivision just outside of town. The neighborhood wasn't much to speak of, obviously blue collar, hanging right on the edge of food stamps and weekly wife beatings. Here were cars parked in front yards, grass up above the tires. Rotting boats. Chained dogs raising nine kinds of hell. Then, yeah, right there. Arnold brought the Crown Vic to a stop in the middle of the street and took his survey. There was only one car in the driveway, a beat up, decades-old station wagon, and the front porch light was on. Right in front, through a thin curtain where whomever had sealed off the garage to make a living room, he could see, very faintly, a television playing. Arnold pulled into the driveway. He stopped the engine and got out slowly, taking into account the three-legged cat that hobbled off to the shadows alongside the crumbling stucco of a neighbor's house. He cracked his knuckles and turned toward the front door.

This close in he could hear the television, some morning show trash. Fucking Springer or Montell. The house had skipped its last four or five paintings and the gutter overhead sagged from the freight of detritus it held. Something, maybe that three-legged cat, had damned near scratched through the foot of the front door. Yeah, his job was just an every day vacation. He knocked cop-hard on the door, ignoring the moldy doorbell he knew wouldn't work anyway. He heard the TV shut off. Backed up and fig-leafed his hands, doing his best not to look dangerous. And waited. Absolute silence now. Arnold stepped up to the door again and knocked. He squinted through the curtain and thought he saw movement on the other side. "Mr. Camp," he said. "It's very important that I speak to you."

This time the curtain pulled back a few inches and a haggard face looked through. The man had raccoon circles around his eyes and hadn't seen a razor in a month. The sonofabitch looked like he stunk. Arnold unfolded his hands and flashed his badge at the face in the window. The sunken eyes widened a little but the expressionless face remained. "Mr. Camp," Arnold said again. "I need to ask you a few questions." Then, on an impulse. "I'm here to help. I just want to know what you saw in Leszno's Acres."

The curtain fell back to its place and for a moment Arnold thought his gambit had failed. Then he heard a clumsy fumbling with what must have been several locks and the door creaked back an inch or two. "Wha'di'dyou say?" the man asked and Arnold could smell his breath, like rancid milk and old socks.

"I think people are in danger, Mr. Camp, and I think you can help me understand why." The door came open another couple of inches. The hermitic character stepped into the light. His clothes carried a history of bad lunches that had graduated now to these stomach-churning smells.

"You know I got fired," the man said and sucked at his teeth. "Somebitches dropped me like I was hot. Probably gonna lose my gotdamn house, you know that?"

Arnold shook his head sadly. "I hate to hear that, Mr. Camp. Maybe you can give me an idea why."

The man laughed high and cackling, like a crow high up on a pole. "Shit," he said and spat on the concrete. "I'm crazy. Cain't you see that? M'brains gone screwy."

"How'd it happen?"

Camp closed his eyes and shook his head. A nerve underneath his left eye began to twitch and dance. He swallowed down a large lump in his throat. Arnold decided to press ahead. "Mr. Camp, really. I believe that what happened to you may be happening to others too."

The man's head snapped up. "What happened to me then?" he asked and the venom fairly dripped from the words.

"That's what I'm here to find out."

The statement deflated the defiance in his eyes and he rubbed his face despairingly. "It's that place...it's evil," he managed.

Arnold dropped his voice down to interrogation mode. "What makes it evil, Mr. Camp? What happened to you in Leszno's Acres?"

"You believe in the devil? In Hell?" the defeated man whispered.

"I don't know," Arnold admitted. "I've been a cop a long fucking time."

Camp's eyes widened again at the profanity. A thin smile cut through the cake of grime on his face. "Well I do, mister. You go looking for it and you'll find it too." He turned back to the door and dragged himself inside. "I ain't talking no more about it either. It's here all the time anyway without some know-it-all somebitch come to throw it back in my face." And with that the man shut the door and began the long process of locking it.

Arnold stepped away and listened as the locks clicked into place. He thought about the man on the other side, what it must be like to live like this. In all his years he'd never seen a more haunted individual. More fucked up, yeah, sure, but never more haunted. He breathed in deep and blew out. Squeezed his mouth into a tight pinch and tried to figure what he'd gained. Not much, nothing really, if you wanted to go scientific. But at least his suspicions were confirmed. Whatever had happened to this guy in that godforsaken neighborhood was about a million times worse than the "feeling" he'd told Skate about. And with the memory came distress. Skate. Something terrible had happened. There was no longer any doubt in his mind. The relic of Bill Camp had crystallized that intuition into hard-and-fast fact.

So what now?

He turned in the overgrown yard and looked at the Crown Vic. The sun was getting high and it was going to get bastard hot today. Fitting. He kicked through the grass and climbed inside the cop car. Tapped his foot a few times on the brake pedal. He looked down through the steering wheel at the dashboard panel. Off in the corner was an address and a name scratched in his tight hand on a scrap of paper. He picked it up and considered it like some exotic insect. "Samuel Jester Johnson," he read aloud. "What can you tell me, friend? If you could," he added. He started the car and slowly backed out of the driveway, aware the whole time of a set of fiery, disturbed eyes that tracked him all the way out of sight. He thought probably the best days for Mr. Camp were done.

*

He missed it on the first pass because, ironically, someone had knocked the mailman's mailbox off the post. The drive was unkempt and overgrown enough for someone who'd gone missing, but he still couldn't see any house from here. Arnold kicked around for a couple of minutes in a vague circumference five feet either side of the drive before he found the mailbox and when he did he actually laughed. Something he'd never considered before. Did mailmen actually need mailboxes? It seemed a little foolish. Why not just pick up their mail at the post hub where they worked? Seemed reasonable enough, but he didn't know; maybe they worked in different area codes or zones or whatever the fuck it was they called em. Still, it was a little funny. He bent to his knee and pulled the box from where it'd fallen in a tangle of blackberry vines. Something skittered out from underneath and he let it fall, starting back on his heels. Grass snake, his mind tried, though a darker part of his soul suggested something more lethal...a cottonmouth, for instance, a timber rattler. Regardless, it was gone. Don't be so sure, the voice persisted. Don't forget what's got you out here on this wildfuckinggoose chase to begin with. Put your head up your ass and you're like as not to make it home tonight...

He tried to clear his mind. Looked back down at the mailbox and saw it'd fallen on its other side when he dropped it. Mr. Johnson's name was clearly embossed in neat white letters against a black background. "There you are," he said, trying to get back to business. It wasn't like him to go woolgathering on assignment. That's the kind of shit that ended you up in the hospital. Or worse, the fucking graveyard.

He stood up to his full six one. Hitched his pants a little higher, mainly to brush his hand reassuringly against the butt of the Colt. Walked back to where his car waited in the shade of the drive. He didn't need a map to tell him where he was; just through those trees a couple of miles would be the edge of Leszno's Acres. He felt his flesh goosebump and was immediately, savagely, disappointed with himself. "Get your fucking shit together, man," he spat into the insect-filled chatter. The admonition served to steel his nerves. He climbed in behind the wheel of the Crown Vic and put it in gear.

The drive was a multiple winding S, this winding enforced by gigantic trees in scattered formation. The forest undergrowth, straining for the light the driveway afforded, had thrown long, green arms out from both sides, as if in a race for the middle. Arnold looked, rumpled his brow, and stopped the car. "Just a second," he said and got out. He walked to the front of the car and swiveled his head to see if he was right. Yes indeed, right there. He walked over to the broken vine and took it in his fingers. Sap was still collecting at the broken end. He looked down between his feet and saw the tire tracks. "Sonofabitch," he said, dropping to one knee. "Yep." He put a finger to his lip and glanced over his shoulder. There hadn't been any tire tracks back there. He'd looked. But here they were just as plain as the nose on his face. "Umm hmm," he muttered thinking about the mailbox in a different light. Somebody had rubbed away the tracks up near the road, probably the same sonofabitch who'd broken down the mailbox.

He stood and peered deeper down the way. Just to the left was the slope of a roof, its line unmistakable in the foliage. He decided to leave the car and go the rest of the way on foot. He pushed back his jacket so the butt of the Colt hooked it. Started walking after taking the keys from the ignition and closing the door.

A minute later he came to the clearing. It was a big oval, obviously cut years before. The modest frame house had seen its best years but it still bore the touch of livability. He walked the dusty path up to the front porch and paused to test the wind, his nose doing little rabbit movements. Yeah, there it was again. He'd thought he caught a whiff before the clearing but out here in the open it was unmistakable. The smell of death, rot. He looked at the house suspiciously. Put his hand back to the Colt. Walked up to the first step. He noticed the insect chatter had died down this close to the house and filed it away for later. His flesh had started to goosebump again.

"Hello?" he called for no good reason. Waited a minute. There was no answer. Not surprising. He went up the three steps to the porch and looked around. A rocker and swing at one end. A small iron holder for firewood near the door. Other than that, nothing. The front door was closed, locked, he presumed. He went to it and tried the knob. It turned easily in his hand and he pushed the door back.

The smell was heavier here.

He pulled the Colt from the holster and entered cautiously. Left the door open as he moved farther into the gloom. The room was sparsely furnished: a small television, a chair in front of it several feet away. Against the far wall a threadbare couch. Curtains hanging closed on the windows. Through an alcove he could see a refrigerator, still humming faintly. Strange, the electricity, he thought. He pushed through the entrance and regarded the kitchen. It was a complement to the other room, spartan, clean, with only a thin sheen of dust. A table with one chair sat dead center. The counters and sink, empty. He moved back into the room he'd first entered. Thought about trying the lights and then decided not to. Toward the back wall there was another entrance to a hallway. It would lead back to the bedrooms. He crossed the space and looked down its short length. It was darker here, the smell larger. He looked down at the gun again. Put his hand over his nose to stifle the smell.

The first door on the right was a bedroom, the door missing, though the hinges were still in place. Again, the economy of furniture mimicked the rest of the house. A bed before a curtained window, a small chair on the other wall with a mailman's uniform laid across it. An ageless bureau with a cloudy mirror. That and the oppressive smell.

He wrinkled his nose and backed out into the hallway. Two more doors and the hall ended in a window, it, like its predecessors, heavily curtained. The stoutest piece of furniture, a thick, high-legged chair, sat directly before it. He found nothing in the bathroom, less in the other bedroom, the latter really only a closet for a clutter of old junk. But still the smell.

And then his eye had it. In the ceiling, about halfway down near the first bedroom, was a heavy eye-bolt screw. Arnold walked up until he stood directly beneath it. He reached up and put his middle finger through the eyelet and pulled down gingerly. The door gave a bit and he came out from underneath. Pulled with one hand while training the Colt into the yawning darkness that unfolded as the door swung down. There was no ladder, but the smell was like a heavy wet blanket of corruption. He fetched a well-used handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it to his face. His eye happened to fall back on the chair at the end of the hall.

He was just getting ready to retrieve it when he heard a set of loud thumps from outside.

Footsteps. On the porch.

Then breaking glass.

He left the attic door hanging and edged back down the hallway toward the front door, the Colt in a two-fisted upright grip. He stayed quiet, not willing to give whoever was out there an idea of where he was. He reached the entrance to the den and peeked around the doorjamb. Broken glass was scattered along the floor near the windows that looked out to the porch. Nothing appeared to have been thrown through, or at least nothing he could see. He eased across the den, fanning the gun slowly left and right, following with his eyes. Then to the front door. He took his left hand off the gun and turned the doorknob, got into position, and flung it back to the wall, barreling outside in the same motion, clocking left and then spinning back right, his finger tight on the trigger.

No one.

But there were huge, muddy bootprints all over the stoop and up and down the porch. Where the window was busted hung a rotted strip of material, dripping foul brown water. Keeping his back to the wall, Arnold edged over to get a better look, counting off the seconds in his head as a little trick for sharpened concentration. He ripped the fabric free and held it out for a better look. It seemed to be a strip of old shirt or pants leg but it was so old and dirty he couldn't be sure. "What the fuck?" he whispered, dropping it to the dirty porch. Because now there was a different smell. Swampy. He squinted and moved toward the stoop.

Crack!

The sound came from around the back of the house, right side. Like a big limb falling. Something forcing its way through a thick tangle of underbrush. "Halt Motherfucker!" he yelled, breaking for the corner of the house. A second later he went down on one knee and back to the two-fisted grip, fanning the area with the Colt. About twenty yards deep in the bracken, away through a vast knot of undergrowth and hanging vines something was bulling through. The sun afforded him slight glimpses of the form, shaggy, human-like, bent over and trudging forward like a person moving against a high wind.

"Motherfucker I Said Stop!" Arnold yelled again. The figure ranged ahead, disappeared into thicker foliage. Arnold fired the gun once into the air, the noise shocking and final in the quiet afternoon. To no effect. The sonofabitch was getting away. "Goddammit!" Arnold shouted, jumping off the porch and skirting the edge of the clearing, straining into the underbrush to get a clear view of the stranger. To get a clear shot. Nothing. The figure had gone too deep. And there was no trail, no fucking trail at all. Not through there. He could still hear the sound of the man's escape, but getting fainter now.

The sonofabitch was getting away!

Arnold sprinted farther to the right, thinking a shadow there was a break in the forest, but it wasn't much. No trail, anyway. He shook his head and gritted his teeth. "Motherfucker," he spat again. Hunched his shoulders and bulled into the thick foliage himself.

It only took about five minutes for him to lose everything. The figure, his sense of direction. He stopped in a wild tangle of vines he'd managed to pull around him in his bullheadedness and cursed prodigiously. Sweat dripping off the tip of his nose, his clothes a ragged mess. The adrenaline that had pushed him forward now cramping his muscles, making him realize the futility of his situation. He wasn't gonna find a motherfucking soul out here. Shit, he'd be lucky now to find his own way out.

Maybe that was the plan from the start, a bastard voice whispered in his mind.

"No goddammit, I don't think so," he said though he hardly believed it. He shook his head and wiped at the sweat. Looked up for the sun but the canopy was too thick overhead. Shook his head again and let fly another string of invectives. Realized that if it was a trap he'd fallen in without a second thought. Couldn't justify his training with reality. "Okay, fucker," he said. "Time to use your head." He found a stout branch at his feet and picked it up, determined to bludgeon his way through.

Which is exactly what he did for the next fifteen minutes.

And then, unexpectedly, he came to a dirt trail. Double-rutted so that a car or truck could pass along, though he couldn't imagine why, this far on the ass-end of Nowhere. He began to walk in the direction he thought would bring him to the road. Almost too tired to care about the figure that'd got him out here in the first place.

Coming around a curve between two enormous white oaks he saw the car. Skate's. It came like a cold splash of water in a drunk's face. For a second he thought he was hallucinating, and was only convinced of the truth, when he walked up and put his hand on the cool hood of the BMW. "Well fuck me running," he said. He glanced over his shoulder, suddenly caught in the midst of an eerie chill.

He'd thought he would find something out here, but this wasn't what he expected. He walked slowly around the vehicle looking for signs of an accident. The car was dirty, but other than that, unharmed. Then the reality hit him again: Carolyn Skate was dead. The woman he'd once made love to on her office couch was dead. The car confirmed it. He shook his head and looked off into the underbrush again. It was quiet. Too quiet. He sucked air through his teeth and walked over to the driver's side door. Used the handkerchief to open it because he knew the dusting crew would be all over this thing just as soon as he reported it.

If you report it.

He stopped cold, wondering where the random thought had come from. Because of course he'd report it; he was a cop. This was obviously a crime scene...

He tried to concentrate. Leaned in to see if he could find anything useful and that's when he saw it. A blood splash on the lower panel of the car door. He wasn't surprised but it did drive the point home. Skate was dead. Someone had killed her and driven her car out here where no one would look. Except someone did. And what was the only connection between these pieces? That goddamn neighborhood. Somehow it all came from there.

He turned away from the car and saw the figure.

It was standing about twenty yards away within a ring of trees, just off the path. Looking his way. Arnold's reaction was immediate.

"Motherfucker Step Out Of The Trees With Your Hands Up!" He planted both feet squarely and trained the wide bore of the Colt on the unresponsive stranger. "Motherfucker I'm Gonna Shoot You If You Don't Get Your Motherfucking Hands In The Air! Now Motherfucker!" The figure remained hunched and dull. Arnold pulled the trigger and a large chunk of bark exploded from the tree closest to the figure and rained down in pieces all around it. Arnold heard a loud grunt, like a boar's, amid the ringing in his ears, and the figure lurched out onto the path. A sudden, nauseating stench washed over Arnold, bringing tears to his eyes. The figure wavered in the film. Took another step forward.

"Okay," he said and pulled the trigger for the third time that day. The shot took the stranger in the shoulder and spun him around to fetch up against the massive trunk of a nearby cypress. It grunted again but made no other sound. It didn't go down either. Arnold watched as it peeled itself from the tree trunk, his brow furrowed in consternation when he saw no blood. Not a single drop. He paused for a moment, looking down the pistol barrel, not quite sure to believe what he was seeing. The steel jackets he had in the Colt could punch a hole in an engine block. They could kill a fucking elephant. The figure took another step his direction and Arnold shot it directly in the chest.

The blast raised the figure off its feet and violently backward, his ass kicking up a cloud of dust when it landed. But it still didn't go all the way down. It just sat there in the dust, its feet splayed out in front of it with a gaping hole in its chest and its eyes never wavering from the man with the gun. Arnold felt his testicles draw up and an ice-water chill envelope him.

He fired again and this time the shot sheared off the left side of the thing's head, the red, baleful eye on that side suddenly extinguished. Ten feet away Arnold saw a piece of skull attached to a drift of matted hair come to a rolling stop in the dust.

The figure began to stir and just as suddenly sat up. The head looked like a large ice cream scoop had lifted most of it away. But the sonofabitch was getting back up! Even now it was scrabbling to its feet, the one good eye blazing hate in Arnold's direction.

The detective began backing up.

# Chapter 40: History Lesson

Lorca stood in the tomb-silence of the dark house. Every blind pulled, every light off. That, save for the plethora of candles arranged seemingly helter skelter around the room. He'd cleared the floor of furniture that afternoon, pushed everything back to the walls and rolled the rug up and tossed it into a corner. The chalked pentagram glowed white in the flickering light. He had the books open to various pages here and there in the darkness, the lines on the paper like thin, glowing spider legs.

The visions were coming together in his head.

Things lost in the jumbled mess of years slowly coalescing into coherence here in this black space. He'd shucked his clothes earlier in the bathroom, preparing for this encounter in the pale innocence of the flesh. His skin rippled along his arms, his dick standing straight out in the excitement of the budding moment. His face one of an apprentice's, ecstatic with the keys to the Kingdom.

He rubbed his hands together and the texture of the scar drew his eyes down. He held the hand closer to his face, running the forefinger of his other hand along the ridges, tracing the grooves. He realized now it was a brand, a reminder of an unfinished job.

And now he would finish it.

His earliest days at Leszno's Farm circled around him. Sometimes he could see pictures in the air, voices whispering just beneath the buzz of the air conditioner. He thought often of Eduardo, Meeta, the Old Man. Less of the girl. In fact, he could not recall her name. They had not been siblings by birth, only circumstance, and, of course, that had ended with the Fire. For years he'd believed his destiny had been set in California, with the cabal of Satanists, but he realized now he'd been wrong all along. The scar was proof. His destiny had always been here. At Leszno's Farm. He would do what that worthless fuck, Eduardo, had failed. His lust had taken precedence over duty and for that he'd burned.

Sacrifice.

That was the key. He knew that now. He saw how his life had been a sacrifice, all the running, the deceptions, the little lessons coming in slowly over time. Hell, the lawyer had admitted as much those many years ago. No doubt Lorca had always been a ghost, but now the ghost had come home.

He could feel the spirits moving in the air around him. He could feel them in the ground. Eager, hungry to start the Feeding. Of course, he'd been too young the first time, but this place had known for him. It had brought him home, too, in due course. It had paid him to come home. Some long ago wrangle by Eduardo, or maybe the Old Man, though Lorca didn't think the latter had had any choice in the matter. Eduardo had killed him. Probably poison, maybe something else. In the end it hadn't mattered. The Old Man had been dead and Meeta and the land had been his for the taking.

It was only now, so many years distanced from the trigger of his life, that Lorca realized how close he had come to being that sacrifice. Because he knew now what Eduardo had intended to do to the girl and him. And he really couldn't blame him; hell, in different circumstances...one never knew. But this place did. It made its own rules; it took what it wanted and used it whichever way suited its will. Eduardo had not known this and the flames had taken him down.

Lorca paced over to the front window and looked out. His curtains were always open at night, and many times he stood just so, naked, surveying his domain. But no, he must stop such thoughts. He realized that had been the very fall of Eduardo and he'd have to be careful not to follow in those damned footsteps. It was difficult, though, with so much power at your fingertips. To have your brain playing with the thought, the inkling, that just maybe it was about you. No. He shook his head and looked around the room guiltily, as if someone might have read his mind. No.

Sometimes he would leave the house and walk the neighborhood. So much like a ghost town populated by shadows. Except many of these shadows were flesh and blood. Their minds dulled by the Power that festered here, that had always festered here. The Power that was waiting to explode. Like a dead body, long in the ground, the Power was getting anxious to reveal itself.

Lorca saw vast plagues in the future, open graveyards of the waiting dead. A great changing of the guard. It was almost the time for the spirits to walk the earth again and many were in great pains to begin. And the living would melt before them. All those years in the ground or floating in the empty spheres between, lusting for a life of flesh, of bone, and being forever unsatisfied. Ah, now those selfsame spirits were ravenous, bellowing from their caves and hovels for release, and that was just what Lorca intended to give them.

His reward would be great.

He knew the foolishness of Eduardo's plan. It was like a picture in his mind, a photograph so long in the living room one took no notice of the details, but they were there. They always had been there.

The problem had been Meeta. It all made sense now. Odd, really, that such pains would take place to set plans into action, and then be foiled by one woman's infertility. But that was the truth. Of course, Eduardo had tried to skirt the issue by bringing in the children but they'd not been born of the blood of the land. Lorca had been an outsider then, and only after years of experience, of learning, had he been allowed back to finish this thing.

It had taken the right woman. That was another thing Eduardo had not realized. Everything started with women. It was man's greatest delusion that this was not so. The womb was the seat of creation, the singularity of good and evil and the only thing men could do was view it from a distance. And tend it like a garden.

That's how he'd known she was the one. Her or one like her. Strong-willed, but lost, eager for a man's companionship. Incomplete without it. He saw it on her face that very first day and she'd known it too. Of course, it had terrified her, and why not? One liked to believe a soul was built on love and compassion, but men, especially men like him, knew the opposite.

That's why he'd known he'd have her. And what better way than through love, compassion. The love of a child; the need to have that child at any cost. This is what he'd known early as the plan slowly formed in his mind. And now it was upon him.

He smiled in the darkness and rubbed his hands in anticipation. He moved to the front door, opened it, and stepped outside. It was cooler than normal and Lorca felt his skin ripple in the faint breeze. He stood on the porch, hands on bare hips, and looked out over the dying neighborhood.

It was so much better than California. Here, he bore the mark of the Reaper, that figure of fantasy, that great taker of life. He went where he wanted, when he wanted, and there was not a finger lifted to dissuade him. It was marvelous, like a ghost in the flesh. But a ghost with a voice, with inclination, with Power.

People no longer locked their doors, some because they couldn't, others because they dared not, like some hideous version of Andy Griffith's Mayberry. On his nocturnal walks he visited these houses, many of them tombs now. He would set out walking and go where his nose led him. It satisfied his voyeur's nature.

In the last several weeks he'd discovered all manner of obscenity. People dead of pills, gunshot wounds, slit wrists in the bathtub. And still no one came. On hot days the corruption carried on the wind with full sails, and yet no one came. It was amazing, the variety. Many clutching notes, a loved one's relic in their stiffening hands. Figures bent over couches, stretched out in recliners, some clothed, others not. Lorca wandered these places like a museum curator, straightening a picture here, turning upright a spilled vase. The smell didn't bother him. The dead bore no prejudice; he was just as likely to find a body in a bedroom as a kitchen; the laundry room as a study. And yet this was not the most bizarre. These were the houses where the living and dead co-existed, many times the murderer going on with their business as if nothing amiss had transpired. Lorca had walked, naked (again they didn't see him if he wished it; if he did they did, but nothing changed with their routine), in rooms where the remnant of whatever family had lived there went about their business as usual. A family of four, reduced now by the moldering corpse slumped over the kitchen table, laughing over a sitcom as they ate from TV trays. People sleeping in beds with the dead, perhaps with one of those yard masks over their faces to staunch the smell. Grass grown up around bodies lying in back yards. Sometimes they would look up as he entered, nod in his direction, even offer him a drink. See to his needs before they dismissed him and headed off to whatever hell they inhabited. He knew of a man who got up every morning and went to work (a certain number had to for the sake of propriety, after all) as he had every day for the past fourteen years; his wife lying in pieces in the guest bathroom, bags of lye piled high in the tub. Women would wave to him as he passed on the street, women busy tending withering gardens under the moon, women who'd murdered their children and buried them with the very spades they worked the ground with now. Some of these houses were now infested with rats, mice, roaches the size of oak leaves. One man limped about his house amid a scree of squirrels, his flesh bitten and raw, just beginning to show the first signs of rabies infection. Sometimes he found people crying, others praying. But no one left, not for good. The ones who went to work returned, the dead continued lying in their places, the living to tend their nonsense routines. Sometimes he'd have to turn off untended water faucets, the people inside slogging through inch deep water throughout the house, as oblivious somnambulists shuffling through their daydreams. He'd taken steak knives out of the hands of infants, smoothed the hair of sobbing adults. A caretaker really. A gardener.

He snapped back from his revelries and looked down, his dick a soldier at attention. He smiled and went back inside. The shadows were gathering in the darkness, pulling their substance from it, pushing the air back to the walls. He stared across the floor to the pentagram, pulsing rhythmically white as the time approached. He stepped to the lowest point, held his hands out from his side, and began a low, guttural mumbling that soon morphed into the staccato pace of a chant.

The air began to swirl in the room and he stepped within the figure.

# Chapter 41: Decision Time

Patsy lay on the living room floor, having rolled off the couch almost an hour before. Her stomach cramped as if she'd swallowed poison and her throat was dry sandpaper. Regardless, she stayed put, only occasionally opening her eyes to stare at the ceiling or look through the front window. The curtains were partially drawn and she could see the leaves of the maple outside swaying gently in the sunlight. It made her hungry for her lost life. The one that had died with her family. More and more she came to long for that moment again, to somehow replay the tragedy so that she could, at least, join them. Her head a little more this way, perhaps to throw the seatbelt off altogether. These thoughts seemed to help her stomach. Though it still gnawed, gnawed.

Being eaten alive.

She rolled into a ball and pawed with her memories. The good with the bad because all were sweet now in this seeming extremis.

She did not know what she'd done. Well, at least, that's what she told herself...but the kitchen table, her laying open to the insidious stranger, well, she did remember that. How cold he made her...how dirty. She felt of the grave now, but doomed to some unimaginable purgatory, no damp, soulless void, just the knowledge that key decisions had been bungled. To lay, drained, on the floor of a newly-bought house, knowing that everything good was in the past.

Terri had finally convinced her of that. Poor baby Terri. Lost somewhere in a real purgatorial hell. Pursued by demons. Every time the image crossed her mind she felt another piece of herself die, just wither and die within her. Because she had to believe what her daughter's poor ghost had warned, hell, she'd been told as much at Sunday School all those years before when she'd been a member, albeit shortly, of the First Baptist Church. Lies dressed up for comfort. They were so easy to believe when you had nothing else.

And she'd seen Terri, dammit, felt her presence in the house from the first moment, the very first day. Craziness, she had thought. A yearning gone rancid. She thought she'd do anything to have Terri back, but she realized now the folly of those thoughts, the price of a promise. And now that she'd gone over, she suddenly realized how nonsensical her whole train of thought must have been to bring her to this point. Made her wonder how well her reasoning was at this very minute.

The neighborhood was dead and she'd killed it. She hadn't pulled the trigger but her hand was still on the gun.

She knew there were dead people in those houses. The air outside bore testament. Every day she waited for a gamut of police cars to stream into the neighborhood followed by ambulances, hearses. It would be a long time before they'd see anything like this again. If ever.

But they didn't.

Surely those people were missed at work, tardy on a call to a close relative, but still no one came. That was the worst, that somehow, this was being allowed. And she was a part of it. No, no...she had to be realistic. Not a part...the key.

Another bout of cramps advanced like a swarm of ants and she cried out in the stillness of the house, curling up into a tighter ball. With Terri it had never been like this, even at the beginning. Because she knew; she didn't have to have a test to know.

She was pregnant.

From him.

It was so hard for her to line up the points on the compass. When she looked back to her months at this new home it all seemed staged. Like she had been walking through the whole thing in a daze. Blindfolded.

She'd given herself to whatever he was like a common whore. Simply opening the door and letting him sodomize her. Then letting him back in...for this. She relaxed her legs and cupped her small belly in her hands, remembering how it used to be when she was pregnant with Terri. John and she had sat for hours sometimes, her hands cradled just so, his ear down to her taut skin, listening for the heartbeat. And now there was nothing but emptiness, everywhere but inside her. Because, oh yes, inside there was something growing.

Something terrible.

She wondered if it would take the full nine months to reach term and thought not. How could this neighborhood remain so for another year? How would someone not know by that time?

She thought about her soul and wondered when she'd lost it. Had it been the moment she entered this place? The first time she'd seen Terri in the attic? The walk on the trails? She didn't think so. This sort of proposition had to be entered into willingly and that she'd done. From the very moment she decided she'd do whatever it took to have Terri back. And now this. Terri was as far away as ever and here she was, pregnant. As if this thing growing in her womb could ever replace her daughter. Had she been so naive? She wondered if all the lost held such views when the point of salvation was done. It was so hard to hunt down the good in the world but the bad always came calling with a smile on its face. And she'd been dumb enough to fall for it.

Perhaps it'd been the pure chance of an afterlife. Because she'd ceased to believe in that possibility after the accident. And then her daughter had come back. She'd actually seen her, heard her voice. Spoken with her. If this was true, if she was not insane, then she'd been gravely mistaken indeed. She'd let her despair lead her off the edge of a cliff from which there was no return.

Or was there?

The rogue thought trailed through her mind. A possibility.

She rolled over to her elbows and worked herself into a sitting position. Breathed deeply to try and settle her nerves. Gradually she was able to stand. She made her way to the window and looked out. Just another day. The yards, most of them at least, ragged, sure, but nothing really to draw the eye. Even now, some neighbor struggled behind a push-mower to snap his lawn back into shape and Patsy wondered what foul mess the man lived among within the walls of his home?

The house creaked under its weight but Patsy didn't move. There were no longer visitations during the day. Of course at night she heard any number of things creeping along the bricks outside, howls that echoed long into the darkness, but the days were different ever since...and this was the hardest part to accept. Ever since she'd let him...

A semblance of normality reigned in the daylight.

A cushion. Anything to buy time while whatever he'd put inside her developed. The thought coursed a lethal wave of nausea through her again and she bent double, her vision blurring, fully expecting to vomit on the floor. But it passed. Like an ill wind through winter-scarred trees, it passed, and she was left stupefied and listless before the window. Looking out on the bones of a dead world. Where would she go from here? Where could she go?

She thought about Carolyn Skate, that poor woman running across the neighbor's yard with the mob closing in. She remembered the laughing neighbor who drove past in the woman's BMW, just another nice drive. Gone. All gone. In a way she'd killed her too. She didn't think there would be any more lifelines, if, in fact, Skate had been one in the first place. Patsy had only seen her once so the thread was tenuous at best, but...

But she came...

The thought sent an ache through her belly. A persistent little reminder, getting bigger every day. Yes, the woman had come. For some reason she'd been concerned enough to drive out here.

To die.

Because that was it in a nutshell. One meeting had been enough to whet her appetite and the second phone call had been a death knell. This thing was that pervasive. That deadly. And Patsy carried its spawn in her belly. Not something forced upon her; something she'd gone to willingly.

She lowered her head to her chest and watched the falling tears splash off the floor. There were a great many and they solved nothing. Like watching a person burn behind a plate glass window. A helpless witness.

Was that what she'd become?

She wiped her forearm across her face and grimaced. Was it? Because if so she was no better than the helpless schoolgirl she'd been all those years ago, at the mercy of her grandmother. Always at the mercy of someone, and now that someone had no mercy. Her line had run out.

Or had it?

Again the random, niggling thought.

She remembered meeting John, how he'd said he thought he recognized her from somewhere, that he knew her. Up until now she'd always considered it a line he'd used to open conversation, but now she wasn't so sure. Hadn't the same thing happened with this Lorca? He'd said he recognized her right from the start too.

An easy target. A girl, and now a woman, who could be pressed into any shape, as malleable as lead. A fucking puppet on a string. A dupe. There were a thousand other names for people like her and none of them were good.

She thought about the box she'd found in the attic. Everything had been right there in plain view, the dangerousness of this place, and she'd ignored them because they hadn't fit her plan. The new life. To somehow put everything back together again and move forward. Jesus, it was sad now that she knew the roll of the dice. Because, goddammit, she'd always known she was heading for something like this. She'd always known she was doomed. Right from the start. Better for everyone if she'd simply walked off into that field all those years ago and laid down and died. It would have been better for everyone.

And with this thought came another. The gun. All she had to do was put it in her mouth and maybe, just maybe, this whole fucking thing would come to a screaming halt. It was such a simple thing, really, just a little pull and she'd be gone. For a fleeting moment the thought crystallized in her head, made the feasibility of itself real. She could see the whole thing, even the seconds after, when she'd lie dead and bleeding on the kitchen floor. Because that's where she'd do it, where else would be more suitable? How long would it take someone to find her?

She had to think not long.

Lorca would be back. That was sure. He'd come to figure out how he'd let that one little detail slip through his fingertips. At this thought her heart jerked wildly in her chest and her breath came in a violent intake of air. She whirled her head around, staring down the hallway toward the bedroom.

It was right there in the side table. She knew because she'd put it there herself. All loaded up with nowhere to go. "Oh my God," she said, stumbling toward the couch. Surely not.

She made her way down the hall, steadying herself with hands on both walls, the gnawing ache in her belly getting worse the closer to the bedroom she got. As if the thing inside her could read her mind. As if it was actively taking action to deny her this new idea.

But she didn't think she'd be that lucky.

She made the bedroom and stood holding on to the doorframe. She was so dizzy the effort to stand was almost beyond her. In the next minute or two, perhaps, it would be. She blinked her eyes hard and started around the foot of the bed, the side table like a tunneled bulls eye. She fell against the bed and clawed at the drawer. Pulled it open. Frantically rampaged through its scant contents for the thing that was no longer there.

Gone.

The sonofabitch had taken it. Reading her mind before the thought even crossed it. "No, no, no..." she moaned, giving up the search and collapsing back on the bed, the ache in her belly letting up as if the creature there realized it too.

A puppet on a fucking string...

But then the random thought again.

She quit wailing into her hands and pushed herself to a sitting position. Yes, there it was again. So simple, brutal. Unlike anything that had ever passed through her mind before. Therefore not surprising as a last option. Maybe, just one more chance. With gritted teeth she regained her feet and shuffled over to the closet. It was closed and her hand shook as she pulled it open.

So simple, really.

She walked inside and looked around.

Ran her hands along the rows of coat hangers and stared off into some vast, unknown distance.

# Chapter 42: Coming To Terms

James Arnold pulled into his driveway at 10: 37 p.m. Far too much had happened and he'd thought the ride would help. But of course that had been pure fantasy. He was no closer to understanding the events now than when he lived them. He rolled to a stop just outside the closed garage door and cut the engine. Sat staring emptily into space, wondering, his mind a state of flux. Nothing in his career had prepared him for what had happened today. Nothing in his life. He'd gone to the mailman's house on a hunch and found something completely beyond his experience. But what?

Could he honestly believe his eyes, his ears, his instincts? Ordinarily these were the only things a true detective could rely on, but how, now, with this? "Jesus God," he murmured and worked the latch, opening the door to the night. He got out of the car, leaving his briefcase, all the accoutrements he usually carried in with him when he got home, a security blanket for a child. There was no security now.

He walked up the flagstone path to the front door, mindlessly fumbling with the keys, and let himself inside. The house was dark, ominous, and he hurriedly switched on the foyer light and the others on the way to the kitchen, leaving a swath of illumination behind him. Like a scared housewife left alone while her husband was out of town. The sheer humiliation of the thing brought a grimace to his face.

He threw the keys into the bowl by the microwave, loosened his tie, and looked down at his feet. The mud had long ago turned to dirt and dust and the rest of his clothes were no better. Like he'd been in a fight with a buzz saw, as he mother would have said. He shook his head and toe-heeled both shoes off. They were ruined, of course. The pants, the shirt, likewise, but that was okay. He needed them to believe. He hadn't been scared of the bogeyman since he was five.

And now, all these years later, here he was again.

He recalled the conversation with Camp that morning (God, how it seemed another lifetime ago) and the look in the man's eyes. Not much different, he figured, than the one he had right this minute, that is, if he had the guts to go look in the mirror in the bathroom. "Just fucking crazy," he whispered to the room. He wiped a hand across his forehead and it came back dirty. No, this was real.

It had been Skate's car. Point one.

He had been accosted by...something. Point two. He didn't need the gun for evidence. He'd checked it already and there were two chambered bullets left. He'd fired four times. He could count each one, tick them off on his fingers: the one in the air, the second at the tree, the third and fourth at whatever had been in the woods. And after all that, the motherfucker had still kept coming.

It was hard to recount now, in the familiar sanity of his home. The mad tear down the trail, afraid to look back, just running, running, until he passed Skate's car and went on like Ichabod Crane pursued by the Headless Horseman. Running and running until his breath caught like a knot in his chest and he thought his heart would explode. Finally, stumbling into the clearing where the house was, smelling that same awful smell that had almost pulled him into the attic, and then on down the drive until he got to the Crown Vic. Hardly believing his eyes when he saw it, as if half-expecting to awaken, sweating and hoarse, in his bed in this very house, free from the nightmare as the new day dawned. But that's not how it had gone. He'd hurriedly rushed over to the car and unlocked the door, his eyes darting about the undergrowth while his hand refused to step up, finally hearing the dry click of the lock, and then, mercifully, tearing the door open and flopping down in the driver's seat. Engaging the engine and backing pell mell down that twisting sonofabitch, branches flopping and scratching overhead and along the side panels as he got out. Dust flying in front of the car as if all the hounds of hell were in hot pursuit.

But no...that was too clichéd. He had to be truthful with himself, especially if he ever wanted to come to terms with any of this. A man. He'd been running from a huge, hulking man with half his head blown away by the bullet Arnold had put there. Up on its feet and moving like nothing doing. The moment like a framed picture with a light trained on it.

"A goddamn monster," he said now and laughed at the absurdity of the statement. Then he shook his head again because absurd or not, it was the truth. Unless he'd somehow gone over the bend and had no recollection as to how, then that simple statement was true. He'd shot a man twice today. A big man who hadn't bled a drop, who'd picked himself up off the ground with half his head lying in scattered piles among the leaves and tree trunks. A man who had pursued him like a ghoul in a child's nightmare.

That's what he was dealing with.

And with this thought came another. Something that had gone through his mind just before the world turned on him. The weird idea that he wouldn't report it. He still remembered how alien that thought had been earlier in the bright, sunlit day. It had come right after his slipshod investigation of the mailman's house, after he'd been blindly led outside to stumble around in the woods...until he found the car. Skate's car. Almost as if that thing had been leading him to it. He tried to swallow the lump that had suddenly formed in his throat. It was the first time the idea had crossed his mind and that was another failure of judgment, until now...

He moved over to the cabinet next to the refrigerator and took out the bottle of Jim Beam. Spun off the top and downed a belt, fighting for equilibrium with his eyes closed and watering and his chest heaving like a fist. Then it was down, a fiery ball of glass in his stomach. He took two steps to the right and spit into the sink. Turned on the faucet and took a great draught of water. Breathed deeply a couple of times until the threat of vomiting receded. Yeah, he thought, nodding his head as the pieces clicked together. Led. There's no way you'd have found the car if you hadn't been chasing whatever it was in the woods. It would still be sitting right there with no one the wiser.

But it had and he did.

He took another, more realistic, swig from the bottle and this time it wasn't so bad. His brain was buzzing slightly, and as always, right on the cusp of a drunk, his mind seemed to run cleaner, clearer. So, okay, it was goddamned odd, but of the whole incident, finding the car was the most mundane. But it was also proof, as far as he was concerned, that Carolyn Skate was dead. And that made it personal.

He grit his teeth and took another sip. Now it was like nothing.

And he thought about reporting it again, within the same breath knowing he wouldn't. Of course he could relate his suspicions to others but for what reason? So far the connection between Skate's disappearance and whatever was happening at Leszno's Acres was tenuous at best. Of course, if someone took the time to connect all the dots, as he had, patterns would begin to show, but there was no one alive he would describe the "feeling" he'd told Skate about. That feeling he'd had while driving through the neighborhood.

He was alone with this knowledge.

He walked over to the kitchen table and sat down. Took his gun from the holster and placed it on the table in front of him. Sat. Thinking. What did he know? He needed to place all facts in order and look at them rationally. The only other person who could help him piece through this nightmare was dead. He remembered the conversation he'd had with Skate several days before (and that, also, like someone else's memories). Her patient, this mysterious woman, Patsy Standish. She lived at Leszno's Acres. She'd come to Skate of her own accord for that one pivotal meeting, the one that had ultimately cost Skate her life. And from what he remembered of Skate's account, the woman had also spoke of ghosts. Supernatural entities that, somehow, were plaguing her dead daughter. Like something from a cheap horror film. But, if he was to believe his own senses, real.

The thought took his mind back. Across the years to his childhood. In all honesty he'd never dreamed of being a cop. He'd wanted to be an astronaut, dreamed of walking on the moon, of perhaps someday building encampments on Mars. But all that had been fluff; he did possess a regimented mind (he could think long and hard over seemingly mundane points until a crack of light appeared) but his math skills had never developed to the degree necessary. He'd ended up as a high school English teacher in his early twenties. Something he hardly ever thought about now. Just a quick three-year stint before his real life began, but sometimes it came back. Times like now.

He quit after his brother died. Five years his junior, dead after a high school drinking bout. Edward had left home with a band of friends just after dark on that terrible night and been found dead, asphyxiated on his own vomit early the next morning. It had been in the summer and James still remembered the hysterical afternoon phone call from his mother. A call so broken and discombobulated that he'd had no idea what she was saying until the phone was taken by his father and the story related in more lucid terms.

And everything had just stopped.

Ed had been his only sibling, a sweet kid who was always smiling. Happy with life, with who he was. And then one morning to receive the phone call that said he was dead. No longer for this world. Wrenched free with no warning. Just a bleak sounding toll of doom.

James Arnold had never taught another class.

He remembered the hell of the funeral, his parents reduced to husks. Ghosts moving in a void from which there was no escape. He remembered his brother's body in the coffin, the waxy face so like a mannequin's, the glued lips like some awful cardboard cutout of the person who'd once lived inside. And it was the cruelty of the situation that really ate him, continued even after all these years. He'd been a good kid, As and Bs on his report cards, never a single behavior referral. And then, one night, a simple mistake of judgment and he was gone forever.

It shook everything Arnold had held sacred. Because until that moment he'd believed life was fair, good. He believed that a benevolent God looked down from His Heaven and bestowed gifts on the good and meted out punishment on the bad. Another fantasy. Perhaps, initially, that had been the investigation that had led him to police work. He'd simply wanted to know. And, my God, over the years how he'd been proved wrong. Every bit of foulness was allowed to exist in the world, even as goodness was so frequently snuffed out. And the stain it left on the living. His parents were old now, had been old since that day. They'd split two years after Ed's death, his mother staying in the house where they'd lived since the boys were born and his father off to a squalor of cheap apartments and boarding houses. He'd lost his job, his mother, eventually, the house. They both lived, now, in tiny rent-controlled duplexes surrounded by people that Arnold usually found himself chasing. He helped out but it really didn't matter. They'd died (for want of a better word) when Ed died. His parents were living ghosts and that's what he'd had to live with all his adult life.

He gripped the bottle and drank out of the neck. Put it back on the table and noticed his hands weren't shaking anymore.

He'd been a realist from that moment forward, seeing his younger brother dead in his coffin, his parents' daunting lack of interest in anything thereafter. It had made him so. Standing there before the casket it had struck him how utterly useless his life had become. An English teacher. Droning on and on about made-up lives and trying to make them important. So much letters on a page. Useless. A week later he'd registered for the police academy and the rest, as they say, was academic. Now, years later, he was no closer to understanding anything. People lived, people died. There seemed no rhyme or reason. These things happened according to the whim of others, of nature, of circumstance. There was no balance to attain. It just was.

But...

His eyes drifted back to the bottle. Hypnotizing, really, like a snake. His knuckles were white. He drank again, felt a little more of himself slip away. Because that's what he wanted, release. An end to the plague in his mind. He'd long ago reconciled himself to the belief that dead was dead. From the dark we come and into the dark we leave, but...

How could this philosophy account for today?

Sure there were men who could take two blasts from a Colt and keep on ticking, but he'd never seen one who didn't bleed. Or any who could pick themselves off the ground, minus half a head, and continue on as if nothing was wrong. No. That spoke of something beyond reality. That spoke of something beyond the grave.

His hand started to shake again and he took another belt. His mind was getting wishy now, but what good was reason? And in the absence of reason there was only instinct. He'd felt it earlier when he decided not to report the incident. What did it say? Merely a name, over and over. Patsy Standish, Patsy Standish. He could sit here all night trying to drink it away and it would remain like a stone in a shoe. She was the key.

Somehow she was the link between all the disappearances and general weirdness that seemed to circle that desolate spate of land like vultures over a corpse. Whatever was going on had started with her; Skate had known as much and it had gotten her killed. Now he knew it too and it very well might mean that he'd get his also, but there was no shying away from the facts. That was the only reality he had left. The only fact he could check.

With this thought he stood up and walked back to the cabinet. Replaced the bottle. Moved over to the sink and washed his face in cold water. Slapped himself red to bring him around. He closed his eyes as if praying and gripped the counter top until his hands spasmed. He left the kitchen and entered the bathroom, threw his clothes in a pile on the floor and stood before the mirror naked, sizing himself up. Reality or not, he'd always believed lives headed toward some crescendo. Nothing preordained (or so he'd long believed) but a crescendo nonetheless. Perhaps it was the English teacher whispering out from the deeps of his mind, trying to put order where there was none.

Regardless, his was fast approaching.

Everything in his mind screamed as much. He'd reverted back to the reptile brain, that cold, calculating knowledge that was neither good nor bad. It just was. Like instinct. Reason told him to shower and go to bed, get up tomorrow and consider the next steps. Perhaps it would be a good idea to bring in some heavies...

But the other thing in his mind, the only thing that mattered now, was the voice telling him to go, to go now because it was almost too late.

# Chapter 43: Going In

At the last second something told him not to pull in. Like a hot blast to the skull, he jerked the Crown Vic back right, holding the road, trying to come to terms with this thing that was suddenly upon him. He checked the rearview, glad to find the road clear, slowing now to forty, then thirty-five. He scanned the area to his left, vainly seeking whatever had warned him, but of course, came away with nothing. Now he was to thirty miles an hour. A lone highway light ahead hinted of a turn off and he slowed more. There...and he pulled off the roadway to a dirt cut in the high grass growing alongside. Twenty feet in he came to a stop. The lake, he remembered. Odds were, this was another way in. His skin goosefleshed. The earlier drinks he'd downed at his house had, by now, ground away to an edginess that he could deal with. His head felt clear enough; his hands were no longer shaking. He'd already made up his mind: if this was it, this was it. He let his foot off the brake and coasted into the cover of the foliage. Cut the engine. Got out.

It was after three in the morning and he was dressed head to toe in black, replete with ski-mask. Like some TV cat burglar. He looked around to get a lay of the land. Put his hand to his side to feel the reassurance of the Colt. He'd reloaded it before leaving, doubting even then the effectiveness of the weapon if what he'd seen that afternoon was true.

The road (four-wheel trail, actually) curved out ahead around the lake. Night sounds cascaded around him, cicadas, frogs. Somewhere farther in a dog howled, lonesome and strange in the stillness of the night. Unearthly.

Even now he had to ask himself what the fuck he was doing. His plan was simple enough, he was going to pay a visit to Patsy Standish, and afterward.... Insanity, really. The woman would probably try to have him arrested and he almost wished she would. Because at least that way led to some understandable conclusion. He'd probably even be able to write it off to the guys at the precinct. Of course, it would bring to light again his indiscretions with Skate, but he'd deal with that; hell, right now, that almost looked like an agreeable outcome.

But inside, where the fear lived, he knew that wasn't going to be an option. This was it. Tonight, whatever hell had hold of this place, would pay for all. He pulled the black leather gloves from his back pocket and put them on slowly. He hadn't prayed in years (had never even felt the need or the inclination since Ed's death) but now found himself wishing he could. But he didn't know what to pray for, nor who to pray to. It was late in the game, too late to change directions. He thought it would only diminish him, somehow, if he vacillated. But he still held out a thread of doubt. If he could pray for anything, it would be that he was wrong. Mistaken. Perhaps Skate had had a greater hold on him than he'd ever suspected, and maybe, just maybe, this was the real end of their relationship. Being picked up like a madman by people he'd probably know, had worked with for years. It might ruin his career, but then again, it might save his sanity.

Regardless, he was going in.

He put the keys in his pocket and closed the door. Checked to make sure it was locked. Good. One thing he'd forgotten was a flashlight but he didn't think he'd need it. The moon was a bloody red eye in the cloudless sky, so bright the trees cast shadows. He walked on another thirty yards down the path and came to the lake. Heard it lapping restlessly against the ragged banks even though there wasn't a hint of wind. The surface was choppy and disturbed, the whole area colder than it had any right to be. He didn't know how he knew this, but he did. Just a little niggling certainty. He continued along, getting his bearings as he went.

The neighborhood was simplicity itself, one road leading in to a grid of parallel streets beyond. He'd checked the map after his first visit and knew it backed up to an undisturbed, wooded area where a creek ran through, doubtless, a future second filing if and when the builders were ever cleared to continue. That area was probably where this trail led; it looked to head in the right direction. If he followed it on down there'd eventually be only one street left between him and the Standish house. He'd already been down that street once before and knew what the back of her house looked like from the neighbor's driveway which back up to her property.

But of course things looked different in the night than they did at day. Not to mention this stealthy attack was nothing like he'd envisioned at home. No, there he'd simply seen himself pulling into her driveway and knocking on the door. Of course, that had been really no better, considering the hour, but the imperative was there. Tonight was the night. Something had built to a head.

He could feel it.

So...new plan. He'd circle around the back of the property, here in no-man's land, and play it by ear. It was late sure, but there were plenty enough blue collar workers living back here, who'd probably (in regular circumstances) be leaving for work or coming home. That part didn't really bother him. If his feelings were right on this place, most people had stopped going to work a while back. He didn't know how he knew this; he just knew it. Okay. From back here he'd have to cut through a backyard, cross the street to somebody else's front yard, and from there he'd be in Standish's backyard. And from there...?

Again, play it by ear.

He thought it through while walking down the thin-cut path and now the lake was behind him almost sixty yards. The trail led in the direction he'd thought, now a straight line back to the borderline of the last street. The houses would be lined up on his left, the creek farther out to his right. He moved stealthily down the gravel path, mindful of the expanse of wooded darkness stretching off on both sides.

The moon was directly overhead, illuminating the path in its red glow, throwing his shadow out behind him.

He looked up from his feet and froze. There were two forms standing nearly forty feet farther along, their hands linked.

Facing his direction.

Sentries, the first word that came to mind. Nowhere to hide, they'd seen him. They had to. Arnold withdrew the gun from his hip holster and settled into a firing stance. Held it up in the same two-handed grip he'd used earlier in the day at the mailman's. Only difference now, he said nothing, issued no challenge. Stealth was the key here, he still knew that, and he'd hold onto that supposed advantage until he had no other choice.

So they stood facing one another, these three black forms. Two together and the other off down the road, S.W.A.T.-like, with the Colt boring down its lethal line. Nothing moved. He felt the seconds bearing away like the metronome on a piano. Still nothing, no fear, no seeming realization really from the strange two. He crabbed a couple of steps forward, his eyes slit behind the mask, his forefinger like a piece of lead against the trigger.

The forms made no movement, just continued their silent staring as if they'd been doing nothing other since the dawn of time. Completely devoid of characteristics, two vague, linked shadows on the trail. Tenuous at best.

Arnold sidled up a few feet closer, never letting the gun deviate from its line. Sweat had broken out inside his camouflage, wetted his hair underneath the mask. He licked his lips and started up closer. Where he could see them better. However, proximity proved no advantage, the figures were clothed in black, their skin likewise. From his vantage point, now less than fifteen feet away, the only feature he could make out were four shiny red eyes, unblinking, staring his direction. Their heads swiveled as one to follow his motion. Neither spoke, this late night couple, with a cloaked man with a Colt inching up on them. Ready to kill them.

Underneath the blood-red moon Arnold spoke. "Who the fuck are you?" he spat quietly, venomously.

Nothing. Just the laser point of their eyes.

He pointed the gun at head-level to break the hold of those terrible eyes but failed. The two stood like mannequins in a clothing shop, seemingly oblivious to his presence. Then they moved simultaneously and he almost blew his cover. They turned to gaze at each other, their red eyes disappearing into the void as they did so. Arnold scrabbled back to the verge of the trail, pushing up into the profusion of undergrowth that bulged out of the slight ditch on both sides. A conscious, studied effort not to start firing here and now in this hinterland of oddity. Everything in his primitive mind screaming to shoot, just to start firing and getting the fuck out of there, but his cop-instincts overruling the reptilian as he held his ground, feeling the skeletal poke of branches along his spine.

The couple moved back toward the undergrowth with no word. They simply turned and began stepping away from the man in their path. Within seconds they were to the edge of the trail, and the next, fading like a wave into its black, prickling depths. Two lovers on some eternal stroll.

Arnold was left standing in the road, alone. His shadow stretching to the edge of the deeper darkness they'd descended into. His breath came in tight little hitches. Slowly, slowly, the Colt fell back to his side. There was no sound of motion through the obviously thick undergrowth. Even the cicadas had scaled back. Ten seconds after their disappearance and Arnold was left wondering what, or even if, he'd seen anything at all.

"Oh, fuck..." he whispered. Now his hands began to shake and he hurriedly clicked the gun over to Safety. Lucky for him his nerves had stood and he'd not started firing wildly away at the pair. At the shadows. He moved away from the side of the trail, back to the center. Shook his head. Pure fucking craziness, he thought. What the fuck was that? But it only served to confirm his being out here in the first place. And if he'd gone blasting away everyone in a two-mile radius would know by now. He shook his head and slid the gun back to its place on his hip.

What now?

He almost laughed at the absurdity. He had to continue on. It was writ in his blood now, a sudden realization of destiny. This was it. Come whatever devils from hell it entailed, this was it.

He bent once more to stare into the gloom that had sucked up the pair. Nothing. Might as well have been a figment of the imagination for the evidence they had left behind. He started back up the trail sideways, keeping an eye behind him just in case. Fifty yards farther along he thought he glimpsed a change in the shadows back there but all that was in the past now.

Now there was only Patsy Standish.

He forced himself not to look back. Kept moving steadily down the trail. Up ahead he could see the first house, the cut-in where the asphalt gained the four-wheeler trail. The foliage had thinned this close in and he instinctively bent low, moving forward, his senses alive to any unfamiliar movement. Then he noticed something. Every light in the neighborhood was off, porch and patio, street lights. Nothing but a stretch of black in the night. If the moon had not been so prominent he'd have found himself in utter darkness.

He was at the cut-in. It led out, left, to the last parallel street in the neighborhood with Patsy Standish's street. In the darkness he could probably sneak down this street with no one being the wiser, but he immediately cast this thought away. Stick to the plan. He continued on along the trail running alongside a haphazard wall of wood and hurricane fences which backed up creek side. He needed a house with no fence (there'd be less chance of dogs), somewhere he could slip through to the front street.

The grass had gone wild back here, but the trail angled off in a sweep to the right, and if he wanted to find a throughway he'd have to leave it and hunt through the high grass. The feeling was not good. It prickled at his instincts but there was nothing to be done for it. So as quietly as possible he slipped off the trail and wove through the underbrush to the line of fences. Even as he did he considered the unavoidable folly of the plan. Regardless of his stealth, he could not pass through the thick foliage silently. He was constantly stepping on twigs in the darkness, their snaps like dry bones, pulling through wired tangles of vines and stickers. At times it felt like he was pulling the whole goddamn place along behind him. But still no dogs. By this time they should have been raising holy hell, especially any belonging to the houses he was closest to. But there was nothing. Well, he'd take it any way he could, even if this did feel like a trap; and he, the bug skirting the edge of a vast spider web. He wanted the gun in his hand but right now both were busy threading through the foliage that seemed almost sentiently against him getting through.

He stumbled in the thick quilt of darkness and found himself pressed against a wood fence. He glanced left and saw only more wood fence. Right, it looked a little better. No more than twenty paces ahead the fence gave out on another yard. Either there was no fence at all or perhaps even a hurricane-style which would prove easy pickings. He inched along the framework, lifting each foot ponderously now in the vain attempt for complete silence. There were still no dogs, no hurled challenges from someone's back porch. So far so good, he thought ironically.

Ten seconds later found him, hands on the top waist-high rail of a hurricane fence, staring across a dead backyard to the equally silent house thirty feet away. One simple jump and he'd be on the property. From his rough calculations he should be almost halfway down the street in front, not far from Patsy Standish's backyard once he crossed it.

He sucked in his breath and propelled himself over with his forearms. Landed like a wraith, silently, a bruise of deeper darkness in the sepulchral night. He stared hard at the silent house, straining his eyes under the red moon-glow for any blur of movement. If he got too far in and encountered a dog, well, his cover was blown. It would be end-game before it even got started. He squatted down and tried to lose the thought. He didn't see anything and that was good. He did, however, unholster the Colt and held it tightly in his right hand. Once again, the less surprises the better.

Something was not right.

Not that everything was wrong already with the entire situation, but right here, in this backyard, something was not right. A siren screamed as much in his head. He thought he heard a noise behind him, somewhere out there past the fence, in the wild miasma of foliage. Something heavy, ponderous, moving in stealth. If he listened hard he thought he could hear a whispering, a barely discernable sibilant rustling of words of which he had no understanding. But perhaps it was nothing. Nerves, he told himself. Nothing was sneaking up from behind.

He turned back to the yard and began inching forward, his eyes never leaving the dark, screened-in porch, waiting for the second a hidden light would burst to life and he'd have to deal with some irate, sleep-befuddled property owner. He almost wished it so because he didn't think that was how this was going to play out.

And with this thought he stepped on something lying in the grass. Felt his knee on that side give out. Let himself go with the momentum so he didn't pop something, and found himself a second later face down in the grass, his heart hammering wildly, but thankfully, unhurt. "Whathafuck...?" he muttered, crawling to his knees. The first thought was a kid had left a toy in the yard and he'd tripped over it, but even this he doubted. It had been soft, yielding.

There was a long, black shape sprawled in the grass.

And then he began to smell it. He'd been a detective far too long to be mistaken. The smell of putrefaction. A body releasing itself to the elements. He looked and the moon revealed a ghastly picture.

The body had been here a while, Arnold guessed a week, week and a half. The skin had already blackened and begun to slough away. Bloating had come and gone. The mouth was pulled into the familiar rictus of agony, the eyes fallen in. The sticky sweet smell climbed over the area now, disturbed when Arnold had tripped over the body. He fought hard to maintain a clinical detachment.

What the hell was this guy doing here?

The house took on more ominous portent. Was it empty? And if not, how could someone leave another family member, hell anybody, out here, obviously, for days? Things closed around him. For the first time that day an inkling of the reality of what he'd stumbled across scrabbled through his brain. This was beyond anything in his experience. Something catastrophic was commencing right here, in this neighborhood. It went beyond the mailman, beyond Carolyn Skate. Beyond even Patsy Standish. An engine had been set in motion, something not of this world.

His skin went clammy and wet, kneeling there in the grass under the blood-red moon, squatting beside the body. Again, he wanted to get out, just scale the fence and beat a retreat back to the car. Kill anything that got in his way on the way to it.

But he couldn't let it go.

It was not for Skate, not for anybody but himself, and even now he didn't know why. He could feel in his bones the very real probability that he would not see the coming day. He was a man on the last lonely walk to the gas chamber, the electric chair, and with the thought came another, that of acceptance. Free will clicking over to fate. At some point the intersection blurred until the outcome fixed like a rigid piece of machinery in some monstrous engine. There was no going back.

He stood up, backed away from the body. Chanced another look at the darkened shell of the house. It gazed back unflinchingly, mocking his distress, building it up around him. He wondered what he'd find if he went inside; more bodies, the house a cemetery unto itself, or living people sleeping like the dead, unmindful of one of their own rotting away just on the other side of the door? Inhuman, whatever he'd find. Of that he was certain. Something had drained the humanity away from here, stripped back the years to a time of reptilian coldness. A reign of brutal disregard.

No. Fuck the house. Arnold backed away from the body and sidled down to the corner where the hurricane fence met the wall. Jumped over with the same stealth he'd used in the back. Up ahead, twenty, twenty-five feet maybe, the street. Same oppressive darkness. No sound. But there was the feel, the very real sense of expectation, of waiting. Something crouching in the darkness, ready to pounce.

Arnold slunk along the side to the other corner of the house. Fixed himself like a shadow to the wall and scanned the street in both directions. The moonlight was more fragile now, coming in indistinct slashes through an incoming bank of clouds. Still nothing moved, but a burgeoning breeze carried in with this new front seemed to harbor sounds just on the verge of perceptibility. He was reminded of minutes before when the sibilant rustling on the other side of the fence had seemed to do the same. It was no matter.

The next few minutes were crucial. If someone spotted him crossing the street to the neighbor's driveway the game was done. He thought about the thing he'd shot in the woods that day. How it had gotten up and pursued him like a ghoul from a child's nightmare. The air seemed to compress around him. In the darkness he bent to be sure he hadn't missed something.

His sense of direction appeared true. Even as dark as this, the house just cattycornered from where he stood looked like the one that backed up to the Standish house. The same green Ford pickup stood halfway down the drive, pulled over far enough for whatever other car the family possessed to make it by. Distance from here to there about forty yards. At his prime, in high school, he could make it in 4.8 seconds. Just a blink really. Now, what? Five, five and a half tops? A black figure running in a black night, their shadows incongruent for no more than six seconds.

A calculated risk.

He glanced both directions one more time, assuring himself he'd not missed anything, and broke from the side of the house, his eyes firmly fixed on the truck that had become the most important finish line in his life.

The sprint was surreal, thoughtless. He found himself almost immediately squatting down by the driver's side door of the pickup, his heartbeat barely jibbed by the run. He crabbed around to the front of the truck, its nose situated in a deeper darkness than he'd found on the side. Put his hand on the Colt and counted slowly to fifty.

No approaching footsteps, no shouted challenges.

He peered down the driveway to the backyard. Another hurricane fence the only thing that separated him from the Standish yard now. He could see small trees back there sidling with the breeze. A metal boat on sawhorses provided him cover to within ten feet of the fence. And there he saw the gate. Opened.

An invitation of sorts.

His blood chilled a few more degrees and he stepped through the opening onto the property of the woman he'd come for.

The house was as dark as the rest, just a vague hump bookended on both sides by overgrown hedges. He slunk back into the corner where two six foot wood fences met, an inky black pool at their intersection. Squatted down in the grass. Two windows along the back wall, both curtained, no light filtering along the edges. Farther left an enclosed patio, siding instead of screen. A door. Then to the end with the large hedge and an extension of the wood fence back to the side of the house. He'd try through the patio.

He scaled along the side of the wood fence separating the Standish yard with her neighbor on the left. Moved into the pool of shadow a derelict basketball goal painted on the ground. Outside the patio room a small square of concrete and he walked across it to the door. Tried the knob and found it unlocked. He pushed it open, expecting anything from an assault to a bleeting alarm. Nothing. He moved into the room, closed the door behind him and stood in the cloistered silence. Vague furniture shapes lined the walls, what appeared to be a small table set before a couch. The room smelled unused. A few steps ahead another door. This would empty out to the carport. He put his hand on the knob and turned. Unlocked. He opened the door quietly, peered around the jamb to the carport. As he expected, no light.

But a strangeness hit him immediately.

The screen door to the carport entrance of the house was pulled back, standing out in a vertical line from the wall. Nothing out of the ordinary, really, you'd have to do that when unloading groceries from the car, moving a heavy piece of furniture inside. Or...moving something out. He inched out of the room and along the thin corridor between the house and carport utility room. Then he saw it; the carport door to the kitchen also ajar.

He pulled the Colt from his hip. Nobody slept with their kitchen door open to the night. Not for about the last fifty years.

He eased himself inside and nudged the door shut with his elbow. Nothing appeared disturbed but he didn't dare turn on a light. Right now he was just another intruder on private property. He passed through the kitchen/dining room to the living room entrance and paused. The couch was knocked askew and there was a general feeling of disorder. There'd been some sort of scuffle. He grit his teeth and went back to the two-handed grip. A hall led out to his right, like the throat of some prodigious beast. He walked slowly down its length, counting off each footstep in the darkness, pausing at each door he came to for the sound of breathing, or something worse.

At the end of the hall his foot went into something sticky. He quickly backed away and cursed himself again for not bringing a flashlight. Total fucking ignorance! Should have left the goddamn whiskey alone, the small voice in his head chided.

He moved into the bedroom. Stood in the doorway listening for a hint of anything though his hyper-alert senses found nothing. He took his left hand off the Colt and made a decision. Fumbled his hand along the wall until he came to the light switch. Clicked it over to whatever grim horror awaited.

*

He'd seen worse, but it hardly mattered now.

The fight had started here; the bed was a mess, one leg broken and tilting to that side, the covers lying in a pile near the bureau. A scattering of broken glass all over the floor. And blood. Not a lot, but there were some sizeable pools like the one he'd stepped in over by the door. His eyes landed on a bloody coathanger by the closet door. He'd tracked the blood across the room to the bed, a perfect half boot print. Compromising a crime scene like some amateur asshole.

Worse, the room was empty. No Patsy Standish.

He slumped against the wall, his mind rattling to all zeros. And at this nadir he heard the sound of a child's laughter. A little girl's probably. Coming from somewhere toward the front of the house. Then a voice, "Mister, what are you doing back there?"

Another tittering of laughter, this time another child. Another girl.

"Mister?" the speaker said again, high-pitched and mocking. "Are you all right?" This time both exploded into true laughter.

The sound was like a knife run along a chalkboard. There was something so menacing in the ruefully playful tone of the unseen children that for just a moment he looked for a way out. Then he realized what he was doing and shook his head, tried to convince himself it was still just a little of the whiskey. Fogging up his instincts. That was all it was. What else could it be?

He stepped out of the room and into the hall, being careful to clear the puddle of blood by the door, the second time though it hardly mattered now. The hallway was doubly ominous. There were no further sallies, the laughter (if there had ever in fact been any) had died away. James Arnold stood in the hallway and looked down its short length to the living room. Everything a shade, mere slippery outlines in a terrible darkness. He'd left the light on in the bedroom and its glow directed him to another set of switches set just off to the wall to his left. He flipped the switch into the ON position and the hallway was suddenly aglow. It made the living room come into better contrast, but there was no one there. Just as deserted as before unless someone (something! his mind kept saying) was laying for him. He tried to shake off the thought by moving up a few steps. The laughter almost stopped him again. Almost.

"What is this shit?" he said, aggravation suddenly overcoming fear. He moved into the living room. Saw an elongated shadow from the kitchen disappear against the door jamb. He crouched down and flowed toward it, clearing the door and laying the barrel of the gun down. When he did he saw the girls. Two dirty little children, so familiar they could have been sisters. They were standing by the carport door. Smiling as if a great secret lay before them. He dropped the gun down by his side, tossing aside what Skate had told him.

"What are you doing here?" he said.

The girls looked at each other and giggled again. Then their eyes found him and he hadn't been wrong about the hint of malice. His hand felt like a rock against the pistol grip of the Colt.

"We live here," the taller of the two said, the voice of the one he'd heard from the bedroom. She held out her hands as if to envelope the room and Arnold saw the caked-in filth. The familiar smell from the neighbor's backyard crawled across the floor to his feet. He backed up a step into the deeper gloom of the living room.

Tried hard to keep his voice steady amid a rising knot of hysteria.

"Where's Mrs. Standish?" he said. "What happened here?"

Both girls laughed again but the sound was the grating scrape of tomb doors. He saw their teeth were blindingly white, out of place amid the dirt and torn clothing.

"Gone," the one who'd been silent up until now replied.

"Gone," Arnold repeated. "Where did she go?"

"Oh, you'll see," the same girl said and they began to move toward him. He, involuntarily, stepped back until his thighs pressed against the couch. Stupidly, he watched as the gun came up in front of him again, pointed at the children. It ticked as if it held a will of its own.

The girls laughed again and slowed, moved past him to the left. Back toward the hallway, toward the bedroom with the blood.

"Hey!" he said and they both stopped. Grinned horribly, expectantly, in his direction.

"Sir?" the bigger one said, sarcasm dripping from her lips. It was then he also noticed the thin trill of drool cascading a red line down her chin, soaking the shoulder of the cerements she wore.

"I said, 'where's Mrs. Standish?'"

They stood in the entrance to the hallway and for a twisted moment Arnold felt he could see through them, the floor uninterrupted where it should have been. It stopped him coming any closer and this time he felt his finger twitching on the trigger. Only a gigantic effort of will kept him from pulling it.

"She was naughty and they've taken her away," the quiet one said. This time no laughter followed and the four eyes pointed his direction hardened to black diamonds.

"Who?" Arnold managed. The air was suddenly much too thick, the girls' images wavering before him like vapor.

"Why, everybody!" the taller girl said and both turned as one and scrabbled down the hall, disappearing into the bedroom on the right before Arnold had so much as a moment to think. One second they were there, the next...gone. Leaving him alone with the cryptic comment, pointing the Colt down an empty hallway where the girls had been.

His paralysis broke a second later.

He ran back down the hallway to the bedroom, almost slipping in the coagulating blood, fanning the room with the gun, not sure if he could keep himself from pulling the trigger this time.

But there was no one.

The room was empty.

He barged into the adjoining bathroom. Nothing. Then, quickly to the closet with like results. He went to his knees, flung the skirt of the broken bed up, and looked frantically underneath it but there was nothing but dust and broken wood.

Vanished.

So this was crazy. He could actually feel his mind slipping toward some immense hole from which there was no escaping. On his knees on the floor he wiped his free hand across his forehead and remembered the mask. Flung it off and watched it fall to the bed. He stood up, trance-like with no further ideas, and left the bedroom. Made his way drunkenly down the hall to the kitchen entrance. The carport door was still open, flung wide to the counter. A penetrating darkness held fast outside. He moved through the kitchen. Stepped outside to the carport.

Sounds drifting in the stillness. The same, faint sibilant rustling of voices in his mind.

There were shapes moving in the night now and he squatted down by the side of the Impala. Checked his eye to the Colt to make sure it was still there. Then he crept down the passenger side of the car, keeping his head down. Yes, people moving freely in the street now, but the voices seemed to come from somewhere else. Directly across the street from the driveway a front door opened and a wraith appeared, the shape of a naked woman, shuffling zombie-like from her home, wandering down the walk from her door to the street. No one seemed to take any heed of her, naked or not. They simply filtered out to the street and moved in tandem away toward the back of the neighborhood.

Arnold watched until they all passed down the street.

He moved around the Impala to the shadow underneath the porch awning. Skirted the rail to where it opened on the front yard. Fifteen feet ahead to the right he pulled up close to the maple that shaded the porch. Scanned the street with jumping eyes. Back behind the houses on this side an orange glow flickered in the night sky. From the looks, a bonfire, and a big one at that. The last of the stragglers were just now rounding the corner in that direction. Arnold remembered what the girl inside had said and began ghosting through the yards, picking up cover where he could in bushes and beside trees, staying clear of the houses in case some late-comers ventured out to the darkness.

It took him about a minute to reach the house on the corner. Pitch black like the rest. Crouching down in an azalea bed ringed with a thick mat of monkey grass, he peeked around the corner and saw the conflagration. Just at the end of the street that ran perpendicular to Standish's. A large clearing had been cut in the underbrush across the ditch which ended the road. Moving shadows bobbed and lurched among the tongues of flame. The voices were louder here, chanting. Some grotesque cadence of sound that made the ear sick just to listen to it.

Standish, he thought. With a fatal certitude, he knew the woman had been brought here. The nightmarish scene chilled him and, again, he wished he could pray, this far out on his lonely limb. The rest of the world seemed very far away, unreal. His life had been a countdown to this moment. The thought came as real as the flames that spiraled up into the night-black sky.

The woman was in trouble; if he didn't do something she would die, if she wasn't dead already.

He eased around the house and started in the direction of the bonfire, keeping in the long shadows oozing out from the fences. There were no other random shadows bobbing about; whatever had drawn the ghostly disciples was building to some kind of crescendo in the clearing. He took this as gospel.

The last house before the clearing offered no obvious dangers. The chanting was louder now (though no more intelligible than before) and Arnold was not immune to the idea that other sentries had been placed. In fact, he could not be sure that the ones conducting whatever was going on were not already aware of his presence. There had been the two on the trail, the little girls in Standish's house. Surely, he had to assume all these incidents were related. Regardless...

The high grass started at the end of the fence row, little spindly trees beginning to make a comeback after the assault from the bulldozers that had leveled the land. He wished he had the mask but saw in his mind's eye it resting on the bed in the bloody bedroom. So many mistakes.... He wondered how many more he'd be allowed this night because he'd never been one for luck. He took the measure. If he cut through here and jogged right through the narrow drainage canal, outlined as a deeper murk in the general black, he could push through to the clearing and get an idea what was going on. Or, at least, that was the plan.

A cruel ten minutes later, lying flat-stomached on the ground, his face a mass of scratches and his clothes ribboned from the push, he was no more than thirty feet from the center of the clearing, just outside its tangled extremity. But what he saw had no definition in the world he'd come to know. Too much a thing of ancient nightmare to clarify fully in his mind. But his eyes didn't deceive him.

Just off center of the bonfire, tied naked to an inverted cross, hung the nude and bloody body of a women he knew had to be Patsy Standish.

# Chapter 44: Fall Out

For a moment he couldn't get his mind around it. The bonfire, the gathering of people, the inverted cross. He'd heard about shit like this, devil worshippers and Big Foot fan clubs, but had never given them any special attention. Outside of working their crimes, that is. Fucking loonies or kids playing around mostly. Satanic graffiti scrawled on walls and used condoms he'd seen in dirty abandoned buildings held about equal interest, that being next to nothing. But this was real.

He tried to estimate the number of people he was dealing with, probably upwards of thirty. Moving and chanting like a bunch of stoned-out junkies. What the fuck had happened to these people? Surely the whole fucking neighborhood hadn't lost its mind? But from the looks of this, well...it still didn't change the facts. He'd stumbled across some sort of devil worshipper's coven, and right now, this very second, the woman he'd come to talk to (save, his mind persisted) was strapped upside down to a cross. Arnold seemed to remember something like that from a Bible story he'd heard as a kid once or twice but couldn't come up with a name. Paul, Peter? Not that it mattered; he knew the name of this one.

He squinted through the flames and tried to see if she was still breathing. It looked like it, but then again, it was hard to tell amid the fire and moving bodies. She was completely nude, blood running down in a line from between her legs. Ropes were tied around her wrists and ankles but Arnold couldn't see if these nuts were more serious than that. Surely not fucking spikes or nails but her hands and legs were bloody too. Jesus Christ, how long could a person hang upside down like that? He bit his lip and tried to think.

And the chanting stopped.

At first he thought he'd been spotted, considered standing up and throwing down on these motherfuckers, but thankfully, reason held sway. He dug in a little deeper, hoping for some unforeseen advantage if he just kept holding out. If these nuts were serious they'd surely be able to overwhelm him, like it or not. Six shots before reloading. That's what he had.

Something appeared to be happening just out of sight. A murmur was building on the other side of the fire and even the people closest to Arnold began spreading out, giving ground. Then a man moved into the clearing and slowly eyed the contingent of people gathered around. He was also completely nude, his prick standing out like a divining rod. Many of the gatherers acquiesced, their heads to the ground, their arms splayed out before them. He turned Arnold's direction and the detective saw the man's head was shaved to the scalp, his face bloodied and black, his chest bleeding from the symbols carved there. Two five-pointed stars, one on either side of his chest, another inverted cross traced upon his breastbone. He held his arms out to his acolytes. The naked woman Arnold had watched from Patsy Standish's carport broke from the crowd and sidled up to the man. He grabbed her by the hair and spun her around, forced her down to her knees, though the expression on her face never changed from the one of drugged oblivion it already held. Then he bent her over and squatted behind her, fumbled with his cock for a moment before he began working her like something from a barnyard. Arnold shook his head and turned away, aghast. This shit was off the hook. The others likewise began shedding their clothes (at least those who'd had them on in the first place) and joined in on the rite. There were no clear delineations; men went with men, women with women, everything in between. All proceeding with a grim, silent determination that was evil to watch.

Arnold felt the air around him curdle and spasm. Shapes began to dance in the air, the sibilant voices returning as if to urge the participants on to more depravities. He watched a man grapple with a collie, a woman abused with a garden rake. His finger itched at the trigger to just have this done but still he dared not move.

Something else was approaching, not someone.

The smoke from the fire hung in the air like a funeral pall. Steam bubbled yellow and thick from the ground, forming shapes amid the revelers. In the orgy of sex, suddenly other forms coalesced from the miasma until the clearing was a wild montage of the living and dead, twisting and turning upon one another. A throwback to another, more ancient, sadistic, orgy, perhaps played again and again right here as the generations piled up around them. The man of the shaved head threw it back and pulled out of the woman balled on the ground before him. He shot viciously across her back and the crowd howled. Others working to their own frenzied finish, men and women, living and dead, sprawled in the dust of the clearing, sawing away at each other until, eventually a vast silence took the land. Sedate flesh writhed on the ground. A couple no more than fifteen feet away from Arnold grunted like pigs after a rut, their skin slicked with perspiration.

The shaved man pushed the woman away, his prick spent. He backed up, his arms outstretched, his face a mask of blood. His eyes shone with the hardness of stones in a Druidic altar. The acolytes inched toward him on their knees, all human decency lost as they crawled over as one to be closest to their magus. His arms descended as if calling for a silence he already owned. He uttered a guttural command and all motion ceased. Walked over through the stirring dust to stand several feet from the cross where the Standish woman hung. She moved slightly in the night, a woman embedded in nightmare, her eyes fluttering, her face devoid of reason. Her tongue lolled suddenly out of her mouth. The man pointed at her and smiled draconically.

"THIS BITCH," he bellowed, his bullfrog voice carrying to every corner of the clearing, "HAS DEFIED ME!" He reached across and grabbed a handful of her hair, wrenched it savagely. The crowd mooned over it like kids at a puppet show. The Colt had grown huge and cold in Arnold's hand. He felt a flashpoint fast approaching. "PICKED FOR SUCH A GREAT DUTY, SHE HAS FAILED!" he continued, twisting his hand into her hair, forcing her head to an excruciating angle. She began to moan, low, like an injured cat. Her hands flexed at the end of the crossbeams. "SHE TOOK IT UPON HERSELF TO UNDO WHAT I HAVE BEEN INSTRUCTED, THIS GREAT WORK, AND NOW PEOPLE," and with this he sneered malevolently, "NOW SHE WILL FUCKING PAY!"

Arnold's mind raced in his skull, trying to make sense of this madness. A random memory surfaced of the bloody coathanger on the floor of the bedroom, the bloody track etched from the woman's pubis in ragged tendrils to her chest. No, he thought. Surely... but he didn't have long to consider the implication.

Someone was walking toward the shaved priest. Some old shambling man, his pate as bald as an egg, skinny shanks trembling as he presented the machete. The shapes in the air began to move faster, as if stirred by some fell wind. The roar from the fire intensified. A woman screamed and broke from the group, charged into the depths of the flame. A shower of livid sparks railed into the sky and Arnold watched in horror as the burning shape thrashed and blackened, logs knocked askew, her screams dwindling to horrible burbling shrieks. The priest watched it all in silence, every eye in the clearing suddenly diverted from its purpose as the black legs in the fire kicked weakly and were consumed like wax. No one in the crowd moved. Another woman seemed to be holding back a young boy, hellbent on the same fate. A man standing beside her clubbed the boy on the side of the head with a shovel and the escalation ceased. Amid popping sounds of fat, the crowd found the man again, this time with machete upraised.

"TO EVERYTHING ITS PURPOSE!" he screamed, raising the blade over his head and turning to the woman on the cross.

Time stopped. For Arnold it was as if he was the only moving piece in a moment of still-life. His eyes took in everything effortlessly: the childlike crowd down on their knees before the homicidal maniac, the body still twitching nervously in the depths of the flames, the woman moaning like some old testament prophet, and finally, worse than all the rest, the face of the high priest, no more than something dug out of the deepest pit of hell.

He was moving before he even knew it.

Breaking free of his concealment, not a word of warning, the gun swinging up into position, reverting back to the two-fisted grip. Groups of eyes suddenly swung his way but it was no matter. He locked down on the priest, the man suddenly moving now too, turning away from the woman, surprise on his face as he sought the source of the disturbance.

"Motherfucker you're going down," Arnold muttered and pulled the trigger.

The first shot missed but the next caught the man somewhere in the upper chest or shoulder, spinning him around and then to the ground. Arnold was moving ahead now, mowing through the crowd like an automaton. People moved out of his way, shying away from the Colt like it was a snake. The shaved-head motherfucker was trying to get up again and Arnold fired a third shot, catching him in the back and seeming to punch him into the very ground itself. Arnold was no more than twenty feet away, smoke drizzling from the muzzle of the gun, the body twitching momentarily before it went completely still. Arnold watched the right hand claw randomly at the ground, then it froze up. Arnold heard moans break around him, a woman wailing high and hard to the moon. He stopped and fanned the clearing with the Colt, wishing someone would make a go at him, knowing as he thought so he only had three shots left. He chanced another look at the form in the dust and tore his attention away once satisfied the man was gone.

The woman on the cross opened her eyes, stricken, twisting at the ropes that bound her hands and feet. A freshet of blood welled from points on her wrists and feet. From this close up Arnold saw she had indeed been impaled with long, rusty spikes, railroad ties. Her head was at eye-level and he walked up to her, mindless of the cacophony of noise rising up on all fronts.

"Mrs. Standish," he said, using every bit of reserve he had left to calm his voice. She looked confused, lost, as if suddenly finding herself in the midst of a nightmare from which, up til now, she'd been ignorant of. "I'm going to get you out of here." And with this he looked to the spikes. He took hold of the closest with his free hand, began working it back and forth. The wood was old and worm-chewed and the spike moved freely. The woman reared back her head and screamed, bestial, a universe of agony. He didn't let it stop him. Behind him the crowd had grown eerily quiet and he reminded himself that time was short. Once the immensity of what he'd done hit, there was no telling what sort of retribution would be forthcoming.

The first spike kicked out of the wood.

Without a pause, Arnold moved over and attacked the second. Within moments, it too, was free. He watched with uncanny fascination as the hands clenched and splayed, blood welling out from the holes. She'd stopped screaming, looked as if she'd passed out from the pain and that was all right with him.

One to go.

It, unfortunately, was above his head and there was nothing close by with which he could reach it. He thrust his hand into his back pocket and withdrew the buck knife he'd pulled from the drawer in the kitchen right before leaving the house. It had a six-inch blade and could shave hair. He took another look at the woman, glanced over his shoulder at the crowd and noticed they were coming out of their fugue. There was a nest of them huddled around the priest's body, some even then eying him like hungry dogs. He knew it wouldn't be easy but was not surprised. As far as he could tell, they had one chance. It would hurt like hell but it was all they had.

He clenched his teeth and slashed at the bonds that held her left hand. The knife moved as if through butter and then he was on the other. He moved in close to catch her and she fell. The spike in her feet gave out from the weight, heeling over as the weight of her body pulled the bonds that bound her tighter still around the ankles. She woke up screaming again, her breasts at her chin, her eyes bulged to plate size. He grabbed her at the waist and went up on tiptoe, slashing randomly at the ropes. He nicked her once and then he was through. Her body came down in a tumble in his arms.

He sunk to the ground, cradling her body, the Colt like an iron rod against her back. She cried out something incomprehensible and Arnold let her be, stood up from the woman and turned back to the crowd.

An old man, unclothed, edged forward with a garden trowel, growling far down in his throat and Arnold didn't even pause. He raised the gun and drilled him between the eyes, the man's brain exiting in a spray from the back of his head. Bits of bone, blood. The violence was enough to staunch a few of the others' forward momentum but Arnold knew he'd only bought a second or two.

He turned back to the woman and scooped her into his arms. Looked around the clearing wildly. It was a long way back to the highway and he'd never make it carrying her like this. This place was a power keg about to fucking blow. She began mewling like some damaged animal and he pulled her tighter, his eyes busy on a random search.

And then...right there. One thin chance.

On the far side of the clearing was a four wheeler. He hadn't been able to see it from his hiding spot but it drew him like a magnet now. It was rigged out with a deer rack. If only the keys...

He stumbled in that direction. Shot a naked, charging woman in the abdomen and watched her fly backward, knocking down two others on the way. Please God, he tried. The keys...please. He laid the woman across the rack, noticing the fall of hair along her back, how her hands went seemingly lifeless almost to the ground. He couldn't worry about that now. All he wanted was to get the hell out. The crowd seemed to sense his purpose and closed ranks. Shovels, garden rakes, hoes, all these things coming to light. It wouldn't be long. He raised the gun and fired twice more, the last two, one directly at the closest interloper and the next a random punch into the crowd. Unearthly howls rained out and Arnold flipped the gun around to the handle. Threw it like a boomerang at the horde. It caught a maniacal youngster in the forehead and he went down like a dead fall.

Mere seconds left.

Arnold strattled the tank and looked down at the ignition. Right there, some god looking over them from its heaven. He turned the key and the engine fired to life, its roar a clarion bell of life.

But it wasn't over.

He looked up from the gauges and saw how close they were. Feet really, no more. Something hard and sharp bounced off his forehead and he almost went over. Blinked his eyes to still the stars. It couldn't be but had the crowd somehow pulled the priest to his feet? Arnold shook his head and dropped the ATV into gear. No, no, he'd shot that motherfucker three times. Three goddamn times. The lurching thing at the mailman's house entered his mind now like a raging hurricane. No, no, fuck no. He couldn't think about that now. He thought he saw the man's eyes open and he let off the clutch, the machine surging ahead, the front rack catching a crazed man in the chest. Arnold felt the wheels grind him under, felt a million hands and fists clutching at him, pummeling. Others had formed a tight circle around where he could have sworn he'd seen the priest standing. With one arm on the woman and the other on the handlebar he screamed forward, cutting a zigzag swath through the mass of bodies, letting the other thing go; there was no time. Something else hit him just above the right eye and it was suddenly full of blood, an icy jab of steel between his ribs but his throttle-hand never faltered. He felt hands pulling at the woman but his arm was a steel buttress, his hand a metal clamp.

He veered off just in time to miss the edge of the bonfire and then, miraculously, he was free of the crowd. There were stragglers at every point but he could steer around them, through them if it served. At the edge of the clearing something hit him hard in the back of the head and his mouth snapped shut, breaking teeth. Then he was into the underbrush, throttle wide open, doing his best to avoid the bigger saplings in his way, praying there were no hidden rocks to dodge. The woman's body bounced on the rack like an unwieldy sack of potatoes and the ground gave way before them. He remembered the ditch at the end of the road and forced the handle bars right, hoping to ride the incline and not dump them both in the rill. He could barely see now and his shirt was soaked where the blade had gone in. He fought the sensation to cough, terrified of its implication.

The ATV made the far bank like a lopsided hobbyhorse and Arnold slumped forward, trying to see with his only good eye. When they burst through the brush to the gravel it was like entering an empty stage.

But that was only for a moment.

*

The phantom of the land had grown large. Never had its power been so immense. It pulsed like blood and its effect, enthralling. A new birth. Its masquerades done, it came to full flower. Its time a tolling bell across the land.

Not everyone still alive in the neighborhood had been drawn to the bonfire. Only the simple or the easily-led had regressed that far. The others, many, had simply holed up in their homes, cringing at the sounds and escapades their minds could only dimly imagine. But they were by no means out of the fire.

*

In Rebecca Bourgeouis house the toilets in both bathrooms suddenly burbled with a thick wet gasp and coughed gouts of filth against the walls and ceiling. She heard it from her place, hunched near the fireplace, and by the time she made her way into the hallway the sickening stream was already an inch deep and growing. She screamed and charged to the front door, her throat closing from the poisonous fumes that wove a noxious web through the house. It was locked, stuck, refusing to release its hostage.

She beat and clawed at the door like some caged animal in the grip of a flood.

*

All along Samane Street gas stoves began clicking to life. The handles and knobs ghosted past the lighting elements and poured streams of gas into the homes, unlit. Some of these inhabitants were up, some sleeping worrisomely through ghastly nightmares, some dead. The action took no notice. Gas continued to flow, lights to flicker in some insane choreography of speed, faster and faster as each second passed. Filaments in bulbs failed, sparks ignited. Fires began in great gouts of energy as bulbs exploded.

All through the neighborhood the conflagration had begun.

*

Families of dead slowly stirred to motion. Stinking abattoirs in bedrooms wriggled like the decomposing bodies of animals giving birth to fly larvae. Bodies reanimated in the tall grass of backyards, clawing hands punched up through the soil of flowerbeds where they'd been buried. A sooty, slime-covered body scraped its way up the chimney in Tod Holsteins' house around the corner.

*

The lake bubbled as if heated to boiling. Thick masses of flesh rolling to the surface. Rotted hands and burning red eyes. Some of these things made it to the bank and once there heaved themselves ashore, the bodies so newly incorporated that the flesh refused to hold. A nauseating, fishy stench glued to the very air itself.

*

Pace Boyd walked mindlessly from his study and opened the bedroom door on his wife and little daughter. They were huddled in a corner and screamed when they saw him. His look never changed as he brought the twelve-gauge up and pulled the trigger. Then he backed away from the spattered walls and entered the kitchen, paused as if ascertaining the hissing there. He pulled a Bic lighter from his pocket. Held it out before him and smiled right up until the moment of the explosion.

*

A murder of crows lined along the ridge vent of a house started up an unearthly cawing. The by-now mindless band of rabid squirrels turned upon one another until all were torn asunder. Worms were expelled from the ground like thin, fleshy fingers. Everything that could escape did and the land drained of canines, cats, feral owls. Their sounds agonized and lost.

*

Cracks began forming in the soil along the borders of the Acres. Steam issuing up as if from a percolating kettle. The sibilant voices grew to higher registers though the sounds were no longer vague human utterances, no language alive nor lost.

The death throes of the land were upon it.

*

James Arnold knew none of these things as fact though he felt each and every one. Idling in the gravel of the Dead End he fought to maintain consciousness. He tried to wipe away the blood from his eye but it just kept coming. The pain in his side almost stole his breath away, and he was getting so tired. He wanted to simply pull over to the side of the road and sleep off this terrible nightmare. Come what may.

But there was the woman.

Then, a noise behind him and he turned, almost blacking out from the pain. Standish, coming around. She gripped the rack with her bloody hands and looked around in confusion, apparently no more aware of her surroundings than a new-born infant. It gave Arnold a place to focus his mind.

He heard sounds of commotion somewhere behind him, obviously the bonfire demons, but paid it no heed.

"Mrs. Standish," he whispered, fighting to hold the coughing reflex at bay. "It's okay. I've got you now." She moved her body so as to get a look at his face. She seemed not to know she was bloody and naked, or perhaps more rightly, not to care.

"Who are you?" she managed.

He almost laughed. "Your savior," he said. "Scoot up behind me and I'll get you out of here." He felt her warm body press up against his own, her naked breasts below his shoulder blades, her wet hair and lips against his neck as she laid her head on his shoulder.

"You're bleeding," she said emotionlessly.

"We're all bleeding," he replied and placed his other hand on the handle bars. "Hold on tight," and her arms were already encircling his stomach, the shock keeping her from crying out when she locked hands. "We're not out of this yet."

He bore down on the throttle just as houses began to explode all around them.

Dull, muffled explosions of gas erupting shifted roofs on the houses they passed. Flames raged through broken windows, locked doors stridently held back the heat. All futile. At the corner of the Dead End and Samane, just as the four-wheeler rounded the turn a storm cap blew straight into the air, vast gouts of sludge following. The cap bounced off a company truck like a gong sounding. Arnold bent down low over the handle bars and cranked the throttle to its limit.

Now they had a straight shot to the highway but Arnold knew better than to hope, not in this hell of uncertainty. They flew down the gauntlet of burning houses, forms spilling from some of them into the yards, as far as the street. He swerved to avoid hands, gnashing teeth. Standish screamed in his ear, his vision wobbling like a heat dream. To the left her house exploded like a war-zone strike, the maple shattered to bits of flying wood, the leaves dashed to floating cinders.

The street became a Dantesque tunnel, some uncharted pathway in hell.

He saw the man standing in the street with the rifle a second before he heard the shot. Arnold jerked the handle bars right and felt something rip the air beside them. There was no pain, no hurry, no concern. The man was reloading when the four-wheeler caught him in the hip and spun him broken to the ditch on the other side of the road. Arnold saw the headlights of a car illuminate the area. He didn't want to consider what that meant; he just kept his hand on the throttle, his shoulders hunched over the tank, the reassuring brace of the woman coiled around him.

Another engine fired to life somewhere outside his range of vision and the glare of headlights shown on the road from behind them. Instinctively he knew the ATV wouldn't make it to the highway. Not on the road.

Just before the last intersection before the straight shot past the lake a jacked-up 4X4 reared out of a carport and blocked the road ahead. It made his decision for him. "Hold on," he muttered over his shoulder and ripped the ATV left, through the cleft of ditch there, thirty feet in front of the 4X4, into the overgrown field toward the lake. He heard the truck lurch forward, its lights razing the land drunkenly, but never looked back. Grass and weeds melted before them and Arnold knew they were one large hole or rock from destruction, though this thought seemed childish and disconnected, not part of the world they inhabited. He just kept his eye on the darkness in front of them, swerving instinctively around things he felt more than saw. He heard a loud disruption behind them and the headlights of the 4X4 miraculously winked out. Arnold again chanced another prayer of thanks to the God of his childhood, the One he'd lost so many years before, and had now, oddly, found in this terrible place.

The lake was just off to their right, his Crown Vic resting, he hoped, on the darkened, outer bank. But there were things moving in the darkness. Human and otherwise. Hell was not giving up easily tonight, it seemed.

He rounded the bank in a wide ellipse, not daring his diminishing vision and weakness to sort through the maze of assassins he felt moving shadow-like through the tall grass. Another great stench filled the air, but he closed his mind to it when he saw the familiar shape of the Crown Vic no more than fifty yards ahead. He screamed up to it in a cloud of dust and flying rocks. Took his hand off the throttle and searched frantically in his pocket for the keys. Right there...good. He drew them out and unpeeled the woman's fingers from his waist. Placed the keys into her bloody hand. He had so little strength left he was afraid he wouldn't be heard, but his voice surprised him.

"Mrs. Standish," he said, turning his head to the side. "Take the keys and get the hell out of here." He could sense forms creeping up from all sides. "There's a radio...call for help, they'll hear you, but for God's sake go!"

He felt her slide off the seat behind him, limp around to the car door and fumble with the lock. Arnold revved the engine of the ATV. Time was tight...so fucking tight. His failing vision saw the door come open, the picture of her naked body strangely arousing this close to the edge. She started to get in and stopped, turned her face his direction. "Why'd you do this?" she asked.

"I couldn't even begin to tell you," he replied, gunning the engine again. "Get the fuck out of here!" and he jammed the ATV into gear and spun around to face the lake. Oh, yes. All sorts of things were out there now coming to get them and Arnold almost laughed. Shook his head as he heard Standish start up the Crown Vic and race away. It was dark and these dumb fucks probably wouldn't know who was on the ATV in the first place. Forms advanced from seemingly everywhere but Arnold sensed she'd make the highway. She'd seemed lucid enough right there at the end.

He remembered the cluster of bodies around the high priest, how he thought that sonofabitch had actually stood up. He couldn't let it go. He fought back another cough and gunned the engine, starting back toward the back of the neighborhood and the clearing. Nothing else on his mind.

# Epilogue

No one was ever sure exactly what happened that night at Leszno's Acres. The disturbance was noted early on, and fire trucks and ambulances were dispatched in haste, but by the time any of them reached the neighborhood it was a pyre. Fires burned indiscriminately for hours up and down every street; gas mains blew; people died. Five firemen were sent to the hospital for exhaustion and smoke inhalation. The story made every national news channel. And it wasn't purely from the scope of the disaster, but from its inexplicable nature. Bodies were discovered in the rubble for weeks thereafter, skeletons in the field near the lake, rotting bodies in the ditches. The stench paled anything the paper mill had ever produced over the course of the scorching days that followed.

Patsy Standish escaped to spend the next month in the hospital, her mind on the verge of collapse. The strange holes in her wrists and feet, the rope burns...all went unanswered. Her house had been reduced to a smoldering foundation and it was supposed by those who chose to guess these injuries had been sustained in the apocalypse that had befallen the neighborhood. She was never able, or willing some also guessed, to say for sure. She was eventually released and disappeared from record.

Detective James Arnold did not report to work the following day and was never seen again. Money and manpower failed to turn up the faintest clue as to how, or why, a naked, hysterical woman was found driving his Crown Vic since polygraph tests given later showed no anomalies in her testimony.

She simply didn't remember anything and he was gone.

Carolyn Skate's car was discovered by a hunting party the next spring which opened new lines of query as to her own disappearance, but these, like the others went unsolved. Many nights detectives puzzled over the significance of a missing psychologist and mailman. Nothing connected the two and none of the bones found in the missing man's attic were consistent with either.

In fact, the disappearances and the bones remain a mystery to this day.

The survivors of the neighborhood were unable to provide any worthwhile avenues of exploration. Of clues there were none. Of suspicions there were many.

Random tongues again recalled the history of the place; its wretchedness once more validated, this time on a national stage.

The remaining shells of houses were demolished, bulldozed. The utility poles removed. Anything remaining of value sold at auction. A vast fence was erected in the attempt to hold off curiosity seekers.

Months faded into years and the undergrowth once more advanced its claim. Leszno's Acres was once again empty.

Haunted.

*

On a bright summer day in the summer of 2022 a car driving down Highway 27 pulled off into the overgrown spit of land that had once been Samane Drive. The fence had long since been overtaken by honeysuckle and poison ivy, and the driver, a woman, had to push hard against the ramshackle gate (to little effect) against the wall of weeds that had grown through the broken asphalt.

She looked through the fence. Nothing could be seen of the neighborhood. Only a vast stretch of tall, waving grass and new-growth forest.

Her name was Gabrielle Hernandez and she'd lived her once as a little girl. The deed to this land was hers, had been for years, but she'd never come back, never even thought of it. The snapshots in her mind had always been too bizarre and frightful for contemplation.

But things had changed of late.

She had dreams now, of this place, of what she could do here.

A great elation filled her soul as she stood, gazing enraptured, through the fence out over the land. Land that was hers now...

the end

