Metaphorically, Milburn people in general took off their shirts. Omar Norris happily went back on the bottle full time, and when his wife kicked him out of the house, returned to his boxcar without a qualm and prayed into the neck of a half-empty fifth that the heavy snow was gone for good. The town relaxed during these days of temporary, warming relief. Walter Barnes wore a gaudy pink-and-blue-striped shirt to the bank, and for eight hours felt deliciously unbankerlike; Sears and Ricky made timeworn jokes about Elmer Scales suing the weatherman for inconstancy. For two days lunchtimes at the Village Pump were crowded with strangers out for drives. Clark Mulligan’s business doubled during the final two days of his Vincent Price double feature, and he held the pictures over for another week. The gutters ran with black water; if you weren’t careful, cars dodging too close to the curbs could drench you from the neck down. Penny Draeger, Jim Hardie’s former girlfriend, found a new man, a stranger with a shaven head and dark glasses who said to call him G and was exciting and mysterious and came from nowhere and said he was a sailor—heady stuff for Penny. In the sunlight, with the sound of water everywhere, Milburn was a spacious town. People pulled on rubber boots to keep their shoes dry and went for walks. Milly Sheehan hired a boy from down the block to hang her storm windows and the boy said, “Gee, Mrs. Sheehan, maybe you won’t even need these until Christmas!” Stella Hawthorne, lying in a scented tub, decided that it was time to send Harold Sims back to the spinster librarians who would be impressed by him: she’d rather have her hair done. Thus for two days resolutions were made, long hikes were taken; men did not resent getting out onto the highway in the morning and driving to their offices; in this false spring, spirits lifted.

But Eleanor Hardie grew exhausted with worry and polished the hotel’s banisters and counters twice in one day, and John Jaffrey and Edward Wanderley and the others lay underground, and Nettie Dedham was taken off to an institution still mouthing the only two syllables she would ever wish to say; and Elmer Scales’s gaunt body thinned down even further as he sat up with the shotgun across his lap. The sun went down earlier each evening, and at night Milburn contracted and froze. The houses seemed to draw together; the streets which were spangled by day darkened, seemed to narrow to oxcart width; the black sky clamped down. The three old men of the Chowder Society forgot their feeble jokes and trekked through bad dreams. Two spacious houses stood ominously dark; the house on Montgomery Street contained horrors, which flickered and shifted from room to room, from floor to floor; in Edward Wanderley’s old house on Haven Lane, all that walked was mystery: and for Don Wanderley, when he would see it, the mystery would lead to Panama City, Florida, and a little girl who said “I am you.”

He was never sure whether this was a dream: in the night he heard a dreadful noise, the sound of the wind blowing all that snow back over his drive. It seemed like wakefulness; and it seemed too that he heard another sound—a sound like music blown on the wind. He thought: I’m dreaming this. But his muscles ached and wobbled as he got out of bed, and his head spun. He went to his window, which looked down the side of the house onto the roof of the old stables and the first third of his drive. He saw a three-quarter moon hanging above desolate trees. The next thing he saw was so much like a scene from one of Ricky’s odder movies that afterward he knew that he could not actually have witnessed it. The wind blew, as he had feared, and gauzy sheets of snow drifted onto his drive; everything was starkly black and white. A man dressed in minstrel’s clothing stood on top of the snow-mountain going down to the road. A saxophone white as his eyes hung from his mouth. As Lewis looked, not even trying to force his foggy mind to make sense of this vision, the musician blew a few half-audible bars, lowered the saxophone and winked. His skin seemingly as black as the sky, he stood weightlessly on snow into which he should have sunk up to his waist. Not one of your old spirits, Lewis, jealous of your tenancy, come for your blackbirds and snowdrops; go back to bed and dream in peace. But still stupid with exhaustion, he watched on and the figure changed—it was John Jaffrey grinning at him from the impossible perch, shoe-blacking spread on his face and hands: white eyes, white teeth. Lewis stumbled back into bed.

He went to the entry hall, kicked off his loafers and put on his boots.

Pulling his khaki jacket over his shoulders, he went back through the house to the kitchen. Lewis put a kettle full of cold water on a burner and looked through the kitchen window. Like the trees in front of the house, his woods shone and glistened; snow lay damp and squashy on the lawn, whiter and deeper beneath the wet trees further away. He would take his walk while the kettle boiled, and then come back and have breakfast.

Outside, warmth surprised him; and more than that, the warm, almost laundered-feeling air seemed a protection, a cocoon of safety. The menacing suggestiveness of his woods had been rinsed away—shining with their beautiful muted colors of tree bark and lichen, with the mushy snow beneath like a swipe of watercolor, Lewis’s woods had none of the hard-edged illustrationlike quality he had seen in them before.

He took his path backward again, loafing along and breathing deeply; he smelled the mulch of wet leaves beneath the snow. Feeling youthful and healthy, his chest full of delicate air, he regretted drinking too much at Sears’s house. It was foolish to blame himself for Freddy Robinson’s death; as for whispers of his name, hadn’t he heard those all his life? It was snow falling from a branch—meaningless noise to which his guilty soul gave meaning.

He needed a woman’s company, a woman’s conversation. Now that it was finally over with Christina Barnes, he could invite Annie, the blond waitress from Humphrey’s, out to his house for a good dinner and let her talk to him about painters and books. Her intelligent conversation would be an exorcism of the past month’s worries; maybe he would invite Anni too, and they both would talk about painters and books. He’d stumble a bit, trying to keep up, but he would learn something.

And then he thought that maybe he’d get Stella Hawthorne away from Ricky for an hour or two and just luxuriate in the fact of that astonishing face and bristling personality sitting across the table from him.

Blissful, Lewis turned around and realized why he had always run his path in the opposite direction: on this long return stretch with its two angled sections, you were nearly at the house before you could see it. Going the other way preserved for as long as possible his illusion that he was the only white man on a densely wooded continent. He was surrounded by quiet trees and dripping water, by white sunshine.

There were two points that destroyed Lewis’s illusion of being Daniel Boone striking out through alien wilderness, and he reached the first of these after ten minutes of walking. Midpoint on his walk: he saw the tubular top half of a yellow oil truck, its lower section cut off by the curve of the long field, steaming toward Binghamton. So much for Daniel Boone. He turned down the straight path to the kitchen door.

By now he was hungry, and glad that he had remembered to buy bacon and eggs the last time he was in Milburn. He had coffee beans to grind, stoneground bread to toast, tomatoes to grill. After breakfast he’d call the girls and invite them out for dinner and let them tell him what books to read: Stella would wait.

He was halfway home when he began to smell food. Puzzled, he cocked his head. Unmistakably, it was the smell of breakfast—the breakfast he had just imagined. Coffee, bacon, eggs. Uh oh, he thought, Christina. After Walter had left for work and Peter for school, she had climbed into the station wagon and come out for a scene. She still had a key to the back door.

Soon he was close enough to see the house through the last of the trees, and the breakfast smells were stronger. His boots heavy, he trudged forward, thinking of what he could say to Christina. It would be difficult, especially if she were affecting a meek repentant mood, as the breakfast odors seemed to prove she was … then, still in the last section of the woods, he realized that her car was not drawn up before the garage.

And that was where she always put her car: the parking area was out of sight of the road, near the back door: in fact it was where everyone parked. But not only was Christina’s station wagon not drawn up on the puddly brick court, no car at all was there.

He stopped walking and looked carefully at the gray stone height of the house. Only a few trees stood in his way, and the size of the house made them insignificant —thin stalks. For a moment the house looked even larger than he knew it was.

As a drift of breeze brought the odors of coffee and bacon to him, Lewis looked at his house as if for the first time: an architect’s copy of an illustrator’s idea of a Scottish castle, a folly of a kind, the building too appeared to glisten, as the wet trees had. It was the end of a quest in a story. Lewis with his soaking boots and hungry belly looked at the house with a frozen heart. The windows glittered in their casements.

It was the castle of a dead, not a captive, princess.

Slowly Lewis approached the house and left the temporary safety of the woods. He crossed the brick court where the car should have been. The odors of breakfast were maddeningly strong. Lewis cautiously opened the kitchen door; he entered.

The kitchen was empty, but not undisturbed. Signs of occupation and activity lay everywhere. Two plates were laid out on the kitchen table—his best china. Polished silver had been set beside the plates. Two candles, not lighted, stood in silver holders near the plates. A can of frozen orange juice had been set out before his blender. Lewis turned to the stove: empty pans sat atop unlighted burners. The smell of cooking was overwhelming. His kettle whistled, and he turned it off.

Two slices of bread had been placed beside the toaster.

“Christina?” he called, thinking—not very rationally —that it still might be a practical joke. There was no answer.

He turned back to the stove and sniffed the air over the pans. Bacon. Eggs in butter. Superstitiously he touched the cold iron.

The dining room was just as he had left it; and when he went into the living room, that too was undisturbed. He picked up a book on the arm of a chair and looked at it quizzically, though he had put it there the night before. He stood in the living room for a moment, here where no one had come, smelling a breakfast no one had cooked, as if the room were a refuge. “Christina?” he called. “Anybody?”

Upstairs a familiar door clicked shut.

“Hello?”

Lewis moved to the base of the stairs and looked up. “Who’s there?” Sunlight drifted in from a window on the landing; he saw dust motes spinning lazily above the stairs. The house was noiseless; for the first time its vast size seemed a threat. Lewis cleared his throat.

“Who’s there?”

After a long moment he began to climb the stairs. When he reached the landing he looked out of the little window set in its casement—sunlight, dripping trees— and continued on to the top.

Here the hallway was light, silent, empty. Lewis’s bedroom was on the right, two old rooms with the adjoining wall removed. One of the old doors had been sealed off, the other replaced with an elaborately grained slab of monkeywood hand-fashioned into a door. With its heavy brass knob, Lewis’s bedroom door closed with a distinctively chunky sound, and that was the sound he had heard.

Lewis stood before the door, unable to make himself open it. He cleared his throat again. He could see the double expanse of his bedroom, the carpet, his slippers beside the bed, his pajamas over a chair, the windows from which he had looked that morning. And he could see the bed. What made him afraid to open the door was that on the bed he envisioned the fourteen years’ dead body of his wife. He raised his hand to knock; he held his fist an inch from the door; lowered it again. Lewis touched the doorknob.

He forced himself to turn the heavy knob. The lock disengaged. Lewis closed his eyes and pushed.

He opened them to hazy sunlight from the long windows opposite the door; an edge of a chair, hung with blue-striped pajamas; the reek of rotting flesh.

Welcome, Lewis.

Lewis bravely stepped around the door and into the pool of early light that was his bedroom. He looked at the empty bed. The foul odor dissipated as quickly as it had come. Now he could smell only the cut flowers on the table before the window. He went to the bed and hesitantly touched the bottom sheet, which was warm.

“Ach, Lewis. They run when they see me. On a day like this you want to go out with the dogs? Come for schnapps instead.”

“Then we go out,” Lewis said. “Please.”

“No,” Peter said, burying himself deeper in his locker.

“I bet he’s in Greenwich Village already.”

“Yeah.”

“Time to get to History. You read the chapter?”

“No.”

“Bullshit,” Drexler laughed. “See you there.”

Peter nodded. Not long after he was alone. Leaving his books in his locker but taking his coat, he slammed the metal panel shut and ran down the hall to the bathroom. He shut himself in a toilet and waited for the first period bell to ring.

Ten minutes later he peeked out of the bathroom door. The hallway was empty, and he raced down the corridor. Then he continued unseen down the stairs and out the door.

A hundred yards off to the side, a first-period gym class sweated over calisthenics on the muddy field; two girls were already doing punishment laps around the track. Nobody saw him: school was already deep in its round of self-enclosed activity, marching to the sound of bells.

A block away on School Road, Peter turned off into a sidestreet and from there zigzagged through town, avoiding the square and the shopping district, until he reached Underhill Road, which led to Route 17. He jogged down Underhill Road for half a mile, by now well out of town and in sight only of bare fields ending in stands of trees.

When the highway came in sight, he walked across a squelchy knoll and climbed over a double strip of thick aluminum nailed to a series of white posts. Peter ran across the lanes to the median, climbed another aluminum fence, waited for a break in the traffic and then ran across to the other side of the highway. Then he held out his arm, thumb extended, and began to walk backward down the highway.

He had to see Lewis: he had to talk to Lewis about his mother.

From the bottom of his mind floated the image of himself leaping on Lewis, swinging at him with his fists, battering at the handsome face …

But then came the opposite image of Lewis laughing, Lewis telling him not to worry about anything, that he had not come back from Spain to have affairs with people’s mothers.

If Lewis said that, he could tell him about Jim Hardie.

“This is against my principles,” the man said, rolling away.

“Pardon?”

“Against my principles. Hitchhiking is pretty dangerous, especially for good-looking kids like you. I don’t think you should do it.”

Peter laughed out loud, startling both the driver and himself.

“Promise me you won’t do it again. Promise me, son.”

“Okay, I promise,” Peter said.

“The Lord knows you made that promise.” The man released Peter’s arm, and the boy scrambled out of the car. “Hold on, son, wait up. Just a sec.” Peter fidgeted by the side of the car, shifting on his feet, while the man leaned over and picked up one of the leaflets on the back seat. “This will help you, son. Read it and keep it. It’s got an answer in it.”

“An answer?”

“That’s right. Show it to your friends.” He handed Peter a cheaply printed pamphlet: The Watchtower.

The driver picked up speed on the highway; Peter shoved the little magazine in his pocket and turned around to go up Lewis’s drive.

The drive had been pointed out to him, but he had never seen Lewis’s house—never seen more of it than the gray peaks which could be glimpsed from the highway. As he began to walk up the drive, these peaks disappeared. The drifted snow had melted, and the drive shone, catching the sun at a hundred mirrorlike points. Seeing the top of the house from the road, Peter had never recognized how far the house sat from the highway, how enclosed it was by trees. When he reached the first curve of the drive, he was able partially to see the house between their trunks, and for the first time he began to question what he was doing.

He came closer. A smaller extension of the drive curved off to the front of the house, which looked as long as a city block. Faceted windows threw back the light. The major section of the drive trailed around the side of the house and ended at a brick courtyard flanked by what looked to Peter like stables—he saw only a corner of these. He could not imagine himself entering such an imposing place: it looked like you could wander a week in it without finding your way out. This evidence of Lewis’s separateness, his otherness, put all of Peter’s plans in doubt.

Going in there seemed ominously like going into the silent house on Montgomery Street.

Peter walked around to the rear of the building, trying to relate this massive grandeur to what he thought of Lewis. For Peter, who knew nothing of the house’s history, it seemed regal: it demanded a different conception of its owner. Still, the rear of the house was better: a door on a brick court, the homely wooden fronts of the stables, this was at a level with which he was more comfortable. He had just noticed the paths leading into the woods when he heard a voice speaking in his mind.

Imagine Lewis in bed with your mother, Peter. Imagine him lying on top of her.

“No,” he whispered.

Imagine how she looks moving under him naked, Peter. Imagine—

Peter froze and the voice ceased simultaneously. A car had turned into the drive from the highway. Lewis had come home. Peter thought for a second if he should wait exposed in the courtyard for Lewis to see him as he drove in, and then the car shifted up and was too near the house and he could not bear to see Lewis while the echo of the voice still hung in his mind, and he ran to the side of the stables and crouched down. His mother’s station wagon rolled into the courtyard behind the house.

Peter groaned softly, and heard laughter whispering along the painted boards of the old stables.

He flattened himself out on the snow and looked through the gnarled stalks of a rosebush as his mother got out of the station wagon. Her face was drawn, pale with concentrated feeling—a taut angry expression he had never seen. As he watched from beside the stables, she leaned back into the car and tapped the horn twice. Then she straightened up, walked around the front of the car, skirted the puddles on the flat red bricks and went up to the little door in the rear of the house. He thought she would knock, but she dug in her bag for a moment, took out a key and let herself in. He heard her call Lewis’s name.

“Lew-iss!” Otto stood in diffuse light on the other side of the little factory surrounded by white machinery, supervising while cheese was poured into round flat wooden molds. As each mold was filled, Otto’s son, Karl, took it to the weighing machine, recorded its weight and the mold number, and then stacked it in a corner. Otto said something to Karl and then came across the wooden floor to grasp Lewis’s hand. “How good to see you, my friend. But Lew-iss, you look so got-awful tired! You need some of my homemade schnapps.”

“And you look busy,” Lewis said. “But I’d be grateful for the schnapps.”

“Busy, don’t worry about busy. Karl is handling everything now, I should worry about Karl? He is a good cheesemaker. Almost as good as me.”

Lewis smiled and Otto slapped him on the back and lumbered off to his office, a small enclosure near the loading bay. Otto sank down in his ancient chair behind the desk, making the springs creak; Lewis across the desk from him. “Now, my friend.” Otto bent over and removed a decanter and two thimble glasses from a drawer. “Now we have a good drink. To make your cheeks red again.” He tipped liquid from the decanter into the glasses.

The liquor burned Lewis’s throat, but tasted like a distillation of massed flowers. “Delicious.”

“Of course it is delicious. I make it myself. I suppose you brought your gun, Lew-iss?”

Lewis nodded.

“So. I thought you were the kind of friend who comes into my office and drinks my schnapps and eats my beautiful new cheese”—Otto pushed himself out of his chair and went the short distance to a low refrigerator —”but all the time thinks only about going out and shooting something.” He placed a block of cheese veined with wine down before Lewis and cut off sections with his knife. This was one of the speciality cheeses Otto made to sell under his own name; the wheels of cheddar went to a combine. “Now tell me. Am I right?”

“You’re right.”

“I thought so. But it is fine, Lew-iss. I bought a new dog. Very good dog. This dog can see two-three miles— can smell for ten! Pretty soon I think I give this dog Karl’s job.”

The winy cheese was as good as Otto’s schnapps. “Do you think it might be too wet to take a dog out?”

“No, no. Under those big trees it won’t be so wet. You and me, we’ll find some animal. Maybe even a fox, huh?”

“And you’re not afraid of the game warden?”

“No! They run when they see me. They say, uh uh, here is that crazy old German—with a gun yet!”

Listening to Otto Gruebe’s buffoonery, sitting in his office with a fresh glass of the powerful brandy and his mouth full of intricate tastes, Lewis thought that Otto represented a kind of alternative Chowder Society— a less complicated, but equally valuable friendship.

“Let’s go out and see that dog,” he said.

“Let’s see the dog, hey? Lew-iss, when you see my new dog, you will go down on your knees and propose marriage to her.”

Both men put on their coats and left the office. Outside, Lewis noticed a tall skinny boy of roughly Peter Barnes’s age up on the loading bay. He wore a purple shirt and tight jeans, and he was piling up the heavy molds for pickup. He stared at Lewis for a moment, then ducked his head and smiled.

As they walked toward the kennels Lewis said, “You hired a new boy?”

“Yes. You saw him? He was the poor boy who found the body of the old lady who kept the horses. She lived near you.”

“Rea Dedham,” Lewis said. When he glanced over his shoulder, the boy was still looking at him, half-smiling; Lewis swallowed and turned away.

“Ya. He was very disturbed, and he could not stand to live near there anymore, he is a very sensitive boy, Lew-iss, and so he asked me for a job and got a room in Afton. So I gave him a broom and let him clean the machinery and stack the cheese. It is good until after Christmas, then we cannot afford him so much anymore.”

Rea Dedham; Edward and John; it pursued him even here.

Otto let the new dog out of its kennel, and was hunkering down beside it, rubbing his hands up and down its coat. It was a hound, lean and gray with muscular shoulders and haunches; the bitch did not yip like the other dogs or leap around with joy to be out of the kennel, but stood attentively beside Otto, looking about with alert blue eyes. Lewis too bent to pet it, and the hound accepted his hand and sniffed his boots. “This is Flossie,” Otto said. “What a dog, hey? What a beauty you are, my Flossie. Shall we take you out now for a liddle while, my Flossie?”

For the first time the bitch showed animation, tilting its head and swishing its tail. The well-schooled animal, Otto jug-eared and happy beside it, the nearness of the trees and the pervasive odors of cheesemaking, all of this seemed to swing Lewis in an arc away from the blue-jeaned boy behind him and the Chowder Society which lurked behind the boy, and he said, “Otto, I want to tell you a story.”

“Ya? Good. Tell me, Lew-iss.”

“I want to tell you about how my wife died.”

Otto cocked his head and for a moment absurdly resembled the hound kneeling before him. “Ya. Good.” He nodded, and reflectively ran a finger around the base of the hound’s ears. “You can tell me when we go up in the woods for an hour or two, hey? I’m glad, Lew-iss. I’m glad.”

Lewis suspected that if they tried anything like that this time, they’d have to clear it with Flossie first. The sleek little animal was wholly businesslike. She did not go after birds or squirrels like half the other dogs, but padded along in front of them, tilting her head from side to side, her tail switching. “Flossie is going to make us work,” he said.

“Ya. I paid two hundred dollars to look like a fool in front of a dog, hey?”

Once they were up the valley and into the trees Lewis felt his tension begin to leave him. Otto was showing off the dog, whistling to make it go out on a wide tangent, whistling again to call it back.

Now they were moving through thick woods. As Otto had predicted, it was colder and dryer up here than in the valley. In exposed territory melting snow made rivulets, and marshy ground beneath the remaining snow sucked at their boots, but under a curtain of conifers it was as if the thaw had never come. Lewis lost sight of Otto for ten minutes at a time, then caught flashes of his red jacket between green fir needles and heard him communicating with the dog. Lewis lifted his Remington to his shoulder and sighted down on a pine cone; the dog switched and skirmished up ahead, looking for a scent.

Half an hour later, when she found one, Otto was too tired to follow it. The dog began baying, and streaked off to their right. Otto lowered his blunderbuss and said, “Ach, let it go, Flossie.” The dog whimpered, turned around to stare disbelievingly at the two men: What are you clowns doing, anyhow? Then it lowered its tail and walked back. Ten yards off, it sat down and began licking its hindquarters.

“Flossie has given up on us,” Otto said. “We are not in her class. Have a liddle drink.” He offered Lewis a flask. “I think we need to be warm, hey, Lewis?”

“Can you build a fire around here?”

“Sure I can. I saw a liddle deadfall back a teeny bit —lots of dry wood in there. You just scoop a hole in the snow, get your tinder and presto. Fire.”

Seeing that the hill came to its rise only twenty yards above them, Lewis climbed up while Otto went back to the deadfall to collect dry wood and tinder. Flossie, no longer interested, watched him stumble upward toward the ridge.

He did not expect what he found: they had come farther than he had thought and below him, down a long forested slope, was a streak of highway. On the other side of the highway the woods resumed again, but the few cars traveling the highway were a despoilation. They ruined his fragile mood of well-being.

And then it was as if Milburn had reached out even here, to point at him on the crest of a wooded hill: one of the cars moving rapidly down the highway was Stella Hawthorne’s. “Oh, God,” Lewis muttered, watching Stella’s Volvo cross through the space directly before him. It, and the woman driving it, brought the night and the morning back to him. He might as well have pitched a tent on the square; even out in the woods, Milburn whispered behind him. Stella’s car traveled up the road; her turn indicator flashed, and she pulled onto the shoulder. A moment later another car pulled in beside her. A man got out and went around to Stella’s window and rapped until she opened her door.

Lewis turned away and went back down the slippery hill to Otto.

He had already started a little fire. At the bottom of a hole scooped in the snow, on a bed of stones, a flame licked at tinder. Otto fed it a larger twig, then another, then a handful, and the single flame grew into a dozen. Above this Otto built a foot-high tepee of sticks. “Now, Lew-iss,” he said, “warm your hands.”

“Any schnapps left?” Lewis took the flask and joined Otto on a fallen log dusted of its snow. Otto dug in his pockets and withdrew a homemade sausage sliced neatly in half. He gave half to Lewis, and bit into his own half. The fire leaped up into the tepee and warmed Lewis’s ankles through his boots. He extended his hands and feet and around a bit of sausage said, “One night Linda and I went to a dinner in one of the suites of the hotel I owned. Linda didn’t live through the night. Otto, I think the same thing that got my wife is after me.”

Of course she isn’t in danger, he told himself: this isn’t her house. She can’t be in danger. She’ll find out Lewis isn’t here and then she’ll go back home. But it was too much like the other time, he looking in a window and waiting at a door while another person prowled within an empty house. She’ll just go home.

He touched the door, expecting it to be locked; but it swung open an inch.

This time he would not go in. He was afraid of too much—only part of it was the possibility of meeting his mother in the house and having to invent an explanation for his being there.

But he could do that. He could say that he wanted to talk to Lewis about—about anything. Cornell University. Fraternities.

He saw Jim Hardie’s crushed head sliding down a mottled wall.

Peter took his hand off the door and stepped down into the brick court. He took several steps backward, looking up at the rear of the house. It was a fantasy anyhow: his mother’s angry face had made it clear that she would not accept any fairytales about advice on fraternities.

He backed up further, the fortresslike back of Lewis’s house seeming for a moment almost to lean over and follow him. A curtain twitched, and Peter was unable to move further. Someone was behind the curtain, someone not his mother. He could see only white fingers holding back the fabric. Peter wanted to run, but his legs would not move.

The figure with white hands was lowering its face to the glass and grinning down at him. It was Jim Hardie.

Inside the house, his mother screamed.

Peter’s legs unlocked, and he ran across the court and through the back door.

He went rapidly through the kitchen and found himself in a dining room. Through a wide doorway he could see living-room furniture, light coming in through the front windows. “Mom!” He ran into the living room. Two leather couches flanked a fireplace, antique weapons hung on one wall. “Mom!”

Jim Hardie walked into the room, smiling. He showed the palms of his hands, demonstrating to Peter that his intentions were not violent. “Hi,” he said, but the voice was not Jim’s. It was not the voice of any human being.

“You’re dead,” Peter said.

“It’s funny about that,” the Hardie-thing replied. “You don’t really feel that way after it happens. You don’t even feel pain, Pete. It feels almost good. No, it definitely feels pretty good. And of course there’s nothing left to worry about. That’s a big plus.”

“What did you do to my mother?”

“Oh, she’s fine. He’s upstairs with her now. You can’t go up there. I’m supposed to talk to you. Hi!”

Peter looked wildly at the wall of spears and pikes, but it was too far away. “You don’t even exist,” he shouted, almost crying. “They killed you.” He pulled a lamp from a table beside one of the couches.

“It’s hard to say,” Jim said. “You can’t say I don’t exist, because here I am. Did I say Hi yet? I’m supposed to say that Let’s—”

Peter threw the lamp at the Hardie-thing’s chest as hard as he could.

It went on talking for the seconds the lamp was in the air.”—sit down and—”

The lamp exploded it into a shower of lights like sparks and crashed into the wall.

Peter ran down the length of the living room, almost sobbing with impatience. At the room’s other end he passed through an arch, and his feet skidded on black and white tiles. To his right was the massive front door, to his left a carpeted staircase. Peter ran up the stairs.

When he reached the first landing he stopped, seeing that the staircase continued. Down at the other end of the gallerylike hall, he could see the foot of another staircase, which evidently led to another area of the house. “Mom!”

Then he heard a whimpering noise, very near. He moved to Lewis’s monkeywood door and opened it— his mother made another strangled whimpering noise. Peter ran into the room.

And stopped. The man from Anna Mostyn’s house stood near a large bed that Peter knew must have been Lewis’s. Striped pajamas hung from a chair. The man wore the dark glasses and knit cap. His hands were around Christina Barnes’s neck. “Master Barnes,” he said. “How you young people get around. And how you poke your charming noses into other people’s business. You’ll be needing the ferule, I’m thinking.”

“Mom, they’re not real,” he said. “You can make them disappear.” His mother’s eyes protruded and her body moved convulsively. “You just can’t listen to what they say, they get inside your head and make you hypnotized.”

“Oh, we had no need to do that,” the man said.

Peter moved to the broad shelf beneath the windows and picked up a vase of flowers.

“Boy,” the man said.

Peter cocked his arm. His mother’s face was turning blue, and her tongue protruded. He made a frantic mewing sound in his throat and took aim at the man. Two cold small hands closed around his wrist. A wave of rotten air, the odor of an animal left dead for days in the sun, went over him.

“That’s a good boy,” the man said.

Stella took a pack of cigarettes from her bag, lit one and then silently offered the pack to Harold.

“I said, what’s the big idea? I had to drive twenty-five miles to get here.” He pushed the cigarettes away.

“It was your idea to meet, I believe. At least that is what you said on the telephone.”

“I meant at your house, goddamnit. You knew that.”

“And then I specified here. You did not have to come.”

“But I wanted to see you!”

“Then what is the difference to you whether we meet here or in Milburn? You can say what you want to say here.”

Sims punched the dashboard. “Damn you. I’m under stress. A great deal of stress. I don’t need problems from you. What’s the point of meeting out here on this godforsaken part of the highway?”

Stella looked around them, “Oh, I think it’s really a rather pretty spot. Don’t you? It’s quite a beautiful spot. But to answer your question, the point of course is that I did not want you to come to my house.”

He said, “You don’t want me to come to your house,” and for a moment looked so stupid that Stella knew she was an enigma to him. Men to whom you were an enigma were thoroughly useless.

“No,” she said gently. “I did not.”

“Well, Jesus, we could have met in a bar somewhere, or in a restaurant, or you could have come to Binghamton—”

“I wanted to see you alone.”

“Okay, I give up.” And he lifted his hands as if literally giving something away. “I suppose you’re not even interested in what my problem is.”

“Harold,” she said, “you’ve been telling me all about your problems for months now, and I have listened with every appearance of interest.”

Abruptly, he exhaled loudly, put a hand over hers and said, “Will you leave with me? I want you to go away with me.”

“That’s not possible.” She patted his hand, then lifted the hand off hers. “Nothing like that is going to happen, Harold.”

“Come away with me next year. That gives us plenty of time to break the news to Ricky.” He squeezed her hand again.

“Besides being impertinent, you are being foolish. You are forty-six. I am sixty. And you have a job.” Stella felt almost as though she were speaking to one of her children. This time she very firmly removed his hand and placed it on the steering wheel.

“Oh hell,” he moaned. “Oh hell. Oh goddam it. I only have a job until the end of the year. The department isn’t recommending me for promotion, and that means I have to go. Holz broke the news to me today. He said he was sorry to do it, but that he was trying to move the department in a new direction, and I wasn’t cooperating. Also, I haven’t published enough. Well, I haven’t published anything in two years, but that isn’t my fault, you know I did three articles and every other anthropologist in the country got published—”

“I have heard all this before,” Stella interrupted. She stubbed out her cigarette.

“Yeah. But now it’s really important. The new guys in the department have just aced me out. Leadbeater got a grant to live on an Indian reservation next term and a contract with Princeton University Press and Johnson’s got a book coming out next fall … and I get the axe.”

What he was saying finally reached Stella through her impatience with the sound of his voice. “Do you mean to say, Harold, that you invited me to run away with you when you don’t even have a job?”

“I want you with me.”

“Where did you plan to go?”

“I dunno. Maybe California.”

“Oh, Harold, you are being insufferably banal,” she exploded. “Do you want to live in a trailer park? Eat tacoburgers? Instead of moaning to me you ought to be writing letters and trying to find a new job. And why should you think that I would enjoy sharing your poverty? I was your mistress, not your wife.” At the last second she restrained herself from adding, “Thank God.”

In a muffled voice, Harold said, “I need you.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“I do. I do need you.”

She saw that he was working himself up to the point of tears. “Now you are being not only banal, but self-pitying. You really are a very self-pitying man, Harold. It took me a long time to see it, but lately when I have thought of you, I have seen you with a big placard around your neck which reads ‘Deserving Case.’ Admit it, Harold, things have not been very satisfactory between us lately.”

“Well, if I disgust you so much why do you go on seeing me?”

“You did not have much competition. And in fact, I do not intend to go on seeing you. In any case you will be far too busy applying for jobs to cater to my whims. And I will be too busy looking after my husband to listen to your complaints.”

“Your husband?” Sims said, now really stunned.

“Yes. He is far more important to me than you, and at this moment he needs me much more. So I am afraid this is it. I will not see you anymore.”

“That dried up little … that old clothes horse … ? He can’t be.”

“Watch out,” Stella warned.

“He’s so insignificant,” Sims wailed. “You’ve been making a fool of him for years!”

“All right. He is anything but dried up, and I will not listen to you insult him. If I have had an experimental approach to men during my life, Ricky has accommodated himself to it, which I dare say is more than you would be capable of doing, and if I have made a fool of anyone it is myself. I think it is time I retired into respectability. And—if you cannot see that Ricky has four or five times your own significance, then you are deluding yourself.”

“Jesus, you can really be a bitch,” Harold said, his little eyes as wide as they could get.

She smiled. ” ‘You’re the most terrifying, ruthless creature I’ve ever known,’ as Melvyn Douglas said to Joan Crawford. I cannot remember the name of the movie, but Ricky is very fond of the line. Why don’t you call him up and ask him the name of the picture?”

“God, when I think of the men you must have turned into dogshit.”

“Few of them made the transformation so successfully.”

“You bitch.” Harold’s mouth was thinning dangerously.

“You know, like all intensely self-pitying men, you really are very crude, Harold. Would you please get out of my car?”

“You’re angry,” he said in disbelief. “I lose my job and you just dumped on me, and you’re angry.”

“Yes, I am. Please get out, Harold. Go back to your little heaven of self-regard.”

“I could. I could get out right now.” He leaned forward. “Or I could force you to see reason by making you do what you enjoy so much.”

“I see. You’re threatening to rape me, are you, Harold?”

“It’s more than a threat.”

“It’s a promise, is it?” she asked, seeing real brutishness in him for the first time. “Well, before you start slobbering over me, I’ll make you a promise too.” Stella lifted a hand to the underside of her lapel and pulled out a long hatpin: she had carried it with her for years now, ever since a man in Schenectady had followed her all day through shops. She held the hatpin out before her. “If you make one move toward me, I promise you I’ll plant this thing in your neck.” Then she smiled: and it was the smile that did it.

He scrambled out of the seat as if given an electric shock and slammed the door behind him. Stella reversed the car to the restraining fence, changed gears and shot out across the oncoming traffic.

“GOD DAMN IT!” He pounded a fist into the palm of the other hand. “I HOPE YOU HAVE AN ACCIDENT!”

Sims picked up a stone from the gravelly shoulder and threw it across the highway. Then he stood for a moment breathing heavily. “Jesus, what a bitch.” He ran his fingers through his cropped hair; he was far too angry to drive all the way back to the university. Sims looked at the forest which began down the slope, saw the puddles of icy water between the trees, and then looked across the four lanes of road to the dry higher ground.

“It is a pretty damn good reason,” Otto said.

“I thought so too. But Linda thought I was being hard on the girl. She’d never refused to clean the room before. The girl was upset by the guests, said they were bad or something. It was crazy.”

Lewis took another slug of the brandy, and Otto added a branch to the fire. Flossie came nearer and lay with her hindquarters close to the flames.

“Were these guests Spanish, Lew-iss?”

“Americans. A woman from San Francisco named Florence de Peyser and a little girl, her niece. Alice Montgomery. A cute little girl about ten. And Mrs. de Peyser had a maid who traveled with her, a Mexican-American woman named Rosita. They stayed in a big suite at the top of the hotel. Really, Otto, you couldn’t imagine people less spooky than those three. Of course, Rosita could have kept the suite clean and probably did, but it was our girl’s job to go in there once a day and she refused, so I fired her. Linda wanted me to change the schedule around and let one of the other girls do it.”

Lewis stared into the fire. “People heard us fighting about it and that was rare too. We were out in the rose garden, and I guess I yelled. I thought it was a matter of principle. So did Linda. Of course. I was stupid. I should have switched the schedule like Linda wanted. But I was too stubborn—in a day or two, she would have swung me around to her point of view, but she didn’t live long enough.” Lewis bit off a piece of the sausage and for a time chewed silently without tasting. “Mrs. de Peyser invited us to dinner in the suite that same night. Most nights we ate by ourselves and stayed out of people’s way, but now and then a guest would invite us to join them for lunch or dinner. I thought Mrs. de Peyser was extending herself to be gracious, and I accepted for us.

“I should not have gone. I was very tired—exhausted. I’d been working hard all day. Besides arguing with Linda, I had helped load two hundred cases of wine into the storeroom in the morning, and then I played obligation games in a tennis tournament all afternoon. Two doubles matches. What I really needed was a quick snack and then bed, but we went up to the suite around nine. Mrs. de Peyser gave us drinks, and then we had arranged with the waiter that the meal was to be brought up around a quarter to ten. Rosita would serve it, and the waiter could go back to the dining room.

“Well, I had one drink and felt woozy. Florence de Peyser gave me another, and all I was fit for was trying to make conversation with Alice. She was a lovely little girl, but she never spoke unless you asked her a question. She was suffocated by good manners, and so passive that you thought she was simple-minded. I gathered that her parents had shunted her off onto her aunt for the summer.

“Later I wondered if my drink had been drugged. I began to feel odd, not sick or drunk exactly, but dissociated. Like I was floating above myself. But Florence de Peyser, who had given us a jaunt on her yacht—well, it was just impossible. Linda noticed that I wasn’t feeling well, but Mrs. de Peyser pooh-poohed her. And of course I said I felt fine.

“We sat down to eat. I managed to get down a few bites, but I did feel very light-headed. Alice said nothing during the meal, but looked at me shyly from time to time, smiling as if I were an unusual treat. That was not how I felt. In fact, it may have been only alcohol on top of weariness. My senses were screwy—my fingers felt numb, and my jaw, and the colors in the room seemed paler than I knew they were—I couldn’t taste the food at all.

“After dinner, her aunt sent Alice to bed. Rosita served cognac, which I didn’t touch. I was able to talk, I know, and I may have seemed normal to anyone but Linda, but all I wanted to do was get to bed. The suite, large as it was, seemed to tighten down over me—over the three of us at the table. Mrs. de Peyser kept us there, talking. Rosita melted away.

“Then the child called me from her room. I could hear her voice saying ‘Mr. Benedikt, Mr. Benedikt,’ over and over again, very softly. Mrs. de Peyser said ‘Would you mind? She likes you very much.’ Sure, I said, I’d be happy to say good night to the girl, but Linda stood up before I could and said, ‘Darling, you’re too tired to move. Let me go.’ ‘No,’ said Mrs. de Peyser. The child wants him.’ But it was too late. Linda was already going toward the girl’s bedroom.

“And then it was too late for everything. Linda went into the bedroom and a second later I knew something was horribly wrong. Because there wasn’t any noise. I had heard the child half-whispering when she called to me, and I should have heard Linda speaking to her.

It was the loudest silence of my life. I was aware, fuzzy as I was, of Mrs. de Peyser staring at me. That silence ticked on. I stood up and began to go toward the bedroom.

“Linda began to shriek before I got halfway. They were terrible shrieks … so piercing …” Lewis shook his head. “I banged open the door and burst in just as I heard the noise of breaking glass. Linda was frozen in the window, glass showering all over. Then she was gone. I was too shocked and terrified even to call out. For a second I couldn’t move. I looked at the girl, Alice. She was standing on her bed with her back flattened against the wall. For a second—for less than a second—I thought she was smirking at me.

“I ran to the window. Alice started sobbing behind me. It was much too late to help Linda, of course. She was lying dead, way down on the patio. A little crowd of people who had come out of the dining room for the evening air stood around her body. Some of them looked up and saw me leaning out of the broken window. A woman from Yorkshire screamed when she saw me.”

“She thought you had pushed her,” Otto said.

“Yes. She made a lot of trouble for me with the police. I could have spent the rest of my life in a Spanish jail.”

“Lew-iss, couldn’t this Mrs. de Peyser and the liddle girl explain what really happened?”

“They checked out. They were booked for another week, but while I was making statements to the police, they packed up and left.”

“But didn’t the police try to find them?”

“I don’t know. I never found them again. And I’ll tell you a funny thing, Otto. The story has a joke ending. When she checked out, Mrs. de Peyser paid with an American Express card. She made a little speech to the desk clerk too—said she was sorry to go, that she wished she could do something to help me, but that it was impossible, after the shock she and Alice had had, for them to stay on. A month later we heard from American Express that the card was invalid. The real Mrs. de Peyser was dead, and the company could not honor any debts on her account.” Lewis actually laughed. One of the sticks in the fire tumbled down onto the coals, showering sparks out over the snow. “She stiffed me,” he said, and laughed again. “Well, what do you think of that story?”

“I think it is a very American sort of story,” Otto said, “You must have asked the child what happened— at least what made her stand up on the bed.”

“Did I! I grabbed her and shook her. But she just cried. Then I carried her over to her aunt and got downstairs as fast as I could. I never had another chance to talk to her. Otto, why did you say it was an American sort of story?”

“Because, my good friend, everyone in your story is haunted. Even the credit card was haunted. Most of all the teller. And that, my friend, is echt Amerikanisch.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Lewis. “Look, Otto, I sort of feel like going off by myself for a little while. I’ll just wander around for a few minutes. Do you mind?”

“Are you going to take your fancy rifle?”

“No. I’m not going to kill anything.”

“Take poor Flossie along.”

“Fine. Come on, Flossie.”

The dog jumped up, all alertness again, and Lewis, who was now really unable to sit still or to pretend in any way that he was unaffected by the feelings which had sprung out at him from his memories, walked off into the woods.

Peter chopped at him with his free hand, expecting that the scrawny reeking child would blow apart like the Jim Hardie-thing downstairs. Instead the boy ducked the blow and kicked at his ankles with a bony foot which hit him like a sledgehammer. The kick dumped Peter on the ground.

“Make him look, brat,” the man said.

The boy nipped behind Peter, clamped his head between two ice-hard hands and turned him around by force. The terrible foulness intensified. Peter realized that the boy’s head was just behind his own and screamed “Get away from me!” but the hands on his head increased their pressure. It felt as though the sides of his skull were being pushed together. “Let me go!” he yelled, and this time he did fear that the boy would crush his skull.

His mother’s eyes were closed. Her tongue stuck out further.

“You killed her,” he said.

“Oh, she is not dead yet,” the man said. “She is merely unconscious. We need her to be alive, don’t we, Fenny?”

Peter heard horrible squeals from behind him. “You strangled her,” he said. The pressure of the boy’s hands lessened to its original level: enough to hold him as if in a clamp.

“But not to death,” the man said, giving a mock-pedantic inflection to the words. “I may have crushed her poor little windpipe a little, and the poor darling probably has a very sore throat. But she does have a pretty neck, doesn’t she, Peter?”

He dropped one hand, and held Christina Barnes up with the other as if she weighed no more than a cat. The exposed portion of her neck wore large purple bruises.

“You hurt her,” Peter said.

“I am afraid that I did. I only wish that I could perform the same service to you. But our benefactor, the charming woman whose house you broke into with your friend, has decided that she wants you for herself. At the moment, she is occupied with more urgent business. But great treats are in store for you, Master Barnes, and for your older friends. By that time, neither you nor they will know up from down. You will not know if you’re reaping or sowing, isn’t that right, idiot brother?”

The boy gripped Peter’s head painfully tightly and made a whinnying noise.

“What are you?” Peter said.

“I am you, Peter,” the man said. He was still holding his mother up with one hand. “Isn’t that a nice simple answer? Of course it is not the only answer. A man named Harold Sims who knows your older friends would undoubtedly say that I am a Manitou. Mr. Donald Wanderley has been told that my name is Gregory Benton, and that I am a resident of the city of New Orleans. Of course I once spent several entertaining months in New Orleans, but I can’t be said to be from there. I was born with the name Gregory Bate, and that was how I was known until my death in the year 1929. Fortunately, I had entered into an agreement with a charming woman known as Florence de Peyser which spared me the usual indignities attendant upon death, which I am afraid I rather feared. And what do you fear, Peter? Do you believe in vampires? In werewolves?”

The resonant voice had been unreeling in Peter’s mind, lulling and soothing him, and it was a moment before he realized that he had been asked a direct question. “No,” he whispered, and then:

(Liar went through his mind)

and the man holding his mother by the throat altered and Peter knew in every cell that what he was looking at was not merely a wolf, but a supernatural being in wolf form whose only purpose was to kill, to create terror and chaos and to take life as savagely as possible: saw that pain and death were the only poles of its being. He saw that this being had nothing in it that was human, and that it only dressed in the body it had once owned. He saw too, now that it was letting him see deeply into it, that this pure destructiveness was not its own master any more than a dog is: another mind owned and directed it as surely as the creature owned the dreadful purity of its evil. All of this Peter saw in a second. And the next second brought an even worse recognition: that in all of this blackness lived a morally fatal glamour.

“I don’t …” he uttered, trembling.

“Oh, but you do,” the werewolf said, and put his dark glasses back on. “I saw perfectly well that you do. I could have been a vampire just as easily. That is even more beautiful. And perhaps even closer to the truth.”

“What are you?” Peter asked again.

“Well, you could call me Dr. Rabbitfoot,” the creature said. “Or you could call me a nightwatcher.”

Peter blinked.

“Now I am afraid we must leave you. Our benefactor will arrange another meeting with you and your friends in due time. But before we take our leave, we must satisfy our hunger.” It smiled. Its teeth were gleamingly white. “Hold him very still,” it commanded, and the hands pushed with terrible force on the sides of Peter’s head. He began to cry.

Still smiling, the creature pulled Christina Barnes closer to him and, dipping its head to her neck, slid its mouth over her skin. Peter tried to leap forward, but the frozen hands held him back. The creature began to eat.

Peter tried to scream, and the dead child holding him moved its hands to cover his mouth. It pressed Peter’s head against its chest. The smell of putrefaction, his terror and despair, the horror of being clasped against the revolting body and the greater horror of what was happening to his mother—he blacked out.

Peter ran out of the bedroom and down the hall until he found a bathroom. Then he turned on the hot water and scrubbed his face and hands over and over, working up the lather and rinsing it off, then taking the soap again and working it between his palms. He was sobbing. His mother was dead: she had come to see Lewis, and they had killed her. They had done to her what they did to animals: they were dead creatures that lived like vampires on blood. But they were not vampires. Nor were they werewolves; they could just make you think they were. They had sold themselves long ago to whatever owned them. Peter remembered green light leaking from beneath a door, and nearly vomited into the sink. She owned them. They were nightwatchers— night-things. He smeared Lewis’s soap over his mouth, rubbing and rubbing to rid himself of the smell of Fenny’s hands.

Peter remembered Jim Hardie seated at the bar in a seedy country tavern, asking him if he would like to see all of Milburn go up in flames, and knew that unless he could be stronger, braver and smarter than Jim, that what would happen to Milburn would be worse than that. The nightwatchers would systematically ruin the town—make it a ghost town—and leave behind only the stench of death.

Because that’s all they want, he said to himself, remembering Gregory Bate’s naked face, all they want is to destroy. He saw Jim Hardie’s taut face, the face of Jim drunk and hurling himself into a wild scheme; the face of Sonny Venuti leaning toward him with her pop eyes; of his mother as she left the station wagon on the brick court; and chillingly, of the actress at the party last year, looking at him with a smiling mouth and expressionless eyes.

He dropped Lewis’s towel on the bathroom floor.

They’ve been here before.

There was only one person who could help him— who might not think he was lying or crazy. He had to get back to town and see the writer who was staying in the hotel.

The loss of his mother went through him once again, shaking tears from him; but he did not have time to cry now. He went out into the hall and past the heavy door. “Oh, mom,” he said. “I’ll stop them. I’ll get them. I’ll—” But the words were hollow, just a boy’s defiance. They want you to think that.

Peter did not look back at the house as he ran down the drive, but he felt it back there, watching him and mocking his puny intentions—as if it knew that his freedom was only that of a dog on a leash. At any second he could be pulled back, his neck bruised, his wind cut off …

He saw why when he reached the end of Lewis’s drive. A car was parked on the verge of the highway, and the Jehovah’s Witness who had given him a lift was inside it, looking at him. He blinked his lights at Peter: glowing eyes. “Come along,” the man called. “Just come along, son.”

Peter ran out into the traffic. An oncoming car squealed around him, another car skidded to a stop. Half a dozen horns cried out. He reached the median and ran across the empty other half of the highway. He could still hear the Witness calling to him. “Come back. It’s no good.”

Peter disappeared into the underbrush on the far side of the highway. Among the noises and confusions of traffic, he clearly heard the Witness starting up his car to track him back to town.

Flossie sniffed at the base of a tree, checked that he was still there, and trotted on.

The worst part of the story was that he had allowed Linda to go into the child’s room alone. Sitting at the de Peyser table, woozy, even more exhausted than he was now, he had sensed that the entire situation was somehow false, that he was unknowingly playing a part in a game. That was what he had not told Otto: that sense of wrongness which had come over him during dinner. Beneath the food’s absence of taste had lain the faint taste of garbage, and in the same way beneath the superficial chatter of Florence de Peyser had lain something which had made him see himself as a marionette forced into dance. Feeling that, why had he continued to sit, to struggle to appear normal—why hadn’t he taken Linda by the arm and hurried out?

Don too had said something about feeling like a player in a game.

Because they know you well enough to know what you will do. That is why you stayed. Because they knew you would.

The slight wind shifted; turned colder. The hound lifted its nose, sniffed and turned into the direction of the wind. She began to move more quickly.

“Flossie!” he yelled. The hound, already thirty yards ahead of him and visible only when he saw it coursing between the trees, emerged into an opening and glanced back at Lewis over its shoulder. Then she amazed Lewis by lowering her head and growling. The next second she flashed away.

Looking ahead, he saw only the bushy shapes of fir trees, interspersed with the bare skeletons of other trees, standing on ground mottled white. Melting snow moved sluggishly downhill. His feet were cold. Finally he heard the dog barking, and went toward the sound.

When he finally saw the dog, she began to whine. She was standing in a small glacial hollow, and Lewis was at the hollow’s upper edge. Boulders like Easter Island statues, crusted with quartz, littered the bottom of the hollow. The dog glanced up at him, whined again, wriggled her body, and then flattened out alongside one of the boulders. “Come back, Flossie,” he said. The dog pressed herself onto the ground, switching her tail.

“What is it?” he asked her.

He stepped into the hollow and slipped two yards down on cold mud. The dog barked once sharply, then turned in a tight circle and flattened herself out again on the ground. She was looking at a stand of fir trees growing up on the far side of the hollow. As Lewis slogged through the mud, Flossie crept forward toward the trees.

“Don’t go in there,” he said. The dog crept up to the first of the trees, whining; then it disappeared under the branches.

He tried to call it out. The hound would not return. No sound came from within the thick cluster of firs. Frustrated, Lewis looked up at the sky and saw heavy clouds scudding on the north wind. The two days’ respite from snow was over.

“Flossie.”

The dog did not reappear, but as he looked at the dense curtain of fir needles he saw an astonishing thing. Stitched into the pattern of needles and branches was the outline of a door. A dump of dark needles formed the handle. It was the most perfect optical illusion he had ever seen: even the hinges were represented.

Lewis took a step forward. He was at the spot where Flossie had flattened herself out on the ground. The illusion grew more perfect the closer to the trees he went. Now the needles seemed almost to be suggesting the grain of polished wood. It was the way they alternated colors and shades, darker green above lighter above darker, a random pattern solidifying into the whorls on a slab of monkeywood.

It was the door to his bedroom.

It wanted him to open it. Lewis stood in his wet boots in a cold, lifting breeze and knew that all the inexplicable occurrences of his life since that day in 1929 had led him to this: they put him in front of an impossible door to an unforseeable experience. If he had just been thinking that the story of Linda’s death was—as Don said of the story of Alma Mobley—without point or ending, then there behind the door was its meaning. Even then Lewis knew that the door led not to one room but many.

Lewis could not refuse it. Otto, rubbing his hands before a twigfire, was only a part of an existence too trivial to insist on its worth—too trivial to hold to. For Lewis, who had already made his decision, his past, especially the latest years in Milburn, was dull lead, a long ache of boredom and uselessness from which he had been shown the way out.

Thus Lewis turned the brass knob and fell into his place in the puzzle.

He stepped, as he knew he would, into a bedroom. He recognized it immediately: the sunny bedroom, filled with Spanish flowers, of the ground-floor apartment he and Linda had kept in the hotel. A silky Chinese rug stretched beneath his feet to each of the room’s corners; flowers in vases, still hungry for the sun, picked up the golds, reds and blues of the rug and shone them back. He turned around, saw the closing door, and smiled. Sun streamed through the twin windows. Looking out, he saw a green lawn, a railed precipice and the top of the steps down to the sea which glimmered below. Lewis went to the canopied bed. A dark blue velvet dressing gown lay folded across its foot. At peace, Lewis surveyed the entire lovely room.

Then the door to the lounge opened, and Lewis turned smiling to his wife. In the haze of his utter happiness, he moved forward, extending his arms. He stopped when he saw that she was crying.

“Darling, what’s wrong? What happened?”

She raised her hands: across them lay the body of a short-haired dog. “One of the guests found her lying on the patio. Everybody was just coming out from lunch, and when I got there they were all standing around staring at the poor little thing. It was horrible, Lewis.”

Lewis leaned over the body of the dog and kissed Linda’s cheek. “I’ll take care of it, Linda. But how the devil did it get there?”

“They said someone threw it out of a window … oh, Lewis, who in the world would do a thing like that?”

“I’ll take care of it. Poor sweetie. Just sit down for a minute.” He took the corpse of the dog from his wife’s hands. “I’ll straighten it out. Don’t worry about it anymore.”

“But what are you going to do with it?” she wailed.

“Bury it in the rose garden next to John, I guess.”

“That’s good. That’s lovely.”

Carrying the dog, he went toward the lounge door, then paused. “Lunch went all right otherwise?”

“Yes, fine. Florence de Peyser invited us to join her in the suite for dinner tonight. Will you feel like it after all that tennis? You’re sixty-five, remember.”

“No, I’m not.” Lewis faced her with a puzzled expression. “I’m married to you, so I’m fifty. You’re making me old before my time!”

“Absentminded me,” Linda said. “Really, I could just kick myself.”

“I’ll be right back with a much better idea,” Lewis said, and went through the door to the lounge.

The dog’s weight slipped off his hands, and everything changed. His father was walking toward him across the floor of the parsonage living room. “Two more points, Lewis. Your mother deserves a little consideration, you know. You treat this house as though it were a hotel. You come in at all hours of the night.” His father reached the armchair behind which Lewis stood, swerved off in the direction of the fireplace, and then marched back to the other side of the room, still talking. “Sometimes, I am told, you drink spirits. Now I am not a prudish man, but I will not tolerate that. I know you are sixty-five—”

“Seventeen,” Lewis said.

“Seventeen, then. Don’t interrupt. No doubt you think that is very grown up. But you will not drink spirits while you live under this roof, is that understood? And I want you to begin showing your age by helping your mother with the cleaning. This room is henceforth your responsibility. You must dust and clean it once a week. And see to the grate in the mornings. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“Good. That is point one. Point two concerns your friends. Mr. James and Mr. Hawthorne are both fine men, and I would say I have an excellent relationship with both of them. But age and circumstance divide us. I would not call them friends, nor would they call me their friend. For one thing, they are Episcopalians, just one step from popery. For another, they possess a good deal of money. Mr. James must be one of the richest men in all of New York, Do you know what that means, in 1928?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It means that you cannot afford to keep up with his son. Nor can you keep up with Mr. Hawthorne’s son. We lead respectable and godly lives, but we are not wealthy. If you continue to associate with Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne, I foresee the direst consequences. They have the habits of the sons of wealthy men. As you know, it is my plan to send you to the university in the autumn, but you will be one of the poorest students at Cornell, and you must not learn such habits, Lewis, they will lead only to ruin. I will forever regret your mother’s generosity in using her own funds to provide the wherewithal to purchase you a motorcar.” He was on another circuit of the room. “And people are already gossiping about the three of you and that Italian woman on Montgomery Street I know clergymen’s sons are supposed to be wild, but … well, words fail me.” He paused midpoint on the track from the corner of the room and looked seriously into Lewis’s eyes. “I assume that I am understood.”

“Yes, sir. I understand. Is that all?”

“No. I am at a loss to account for this.” His father was holding out to him the corpse of a short-haired hound. “It was lying dead on the walk to the church door. What if one of the congregation had seen it there? I want you to dispose of it immediately.”

“Leave it to me,” Lewis said. “I’ll bury it in the rose garden.”

“Please do so immediately.”

Lewis took the dog out of the living room, and at the last minute turned to ask, “Do you have Sunday’s sermon prepared, father?”

No one answered. He was in an unused bedroom at the top of the house on Montgomery Street. The room’s only furniture was a bed. The floorboards were bare, and greasepaper had been nailed over the only window. Because Lewis’s car had a flat tire, Sears and Ricky were off borrowing Warren Scales’s old flivver while Warren and his pregnant wife shopped. A woman lay on the bed, but she would not answer him because she was dead. A sheet covered her body.

Lewis moved back and forth on the floorboards, willing his friends to return with the farmer’s car. He did not want to look at the covered shape on the bed; he went to the window. Through the greasepaper he could see only vague orange light. He glanced back at the sheet. “Linda,” he said miserably.

He stood in a metal room, with gray metal walls. One light bulb hung from the ceiling. His wife lay under a sheet on a metal table. Lewis leaned over her body and sobbed. “I won’t bury you in the pond,” he said. “I’ll take you into the rose garden.” He touched his wife’s lifeless fingers under the sheet and felt them twitch. He recoiled.

As he watched horrified, Linda’s hands crept up beneath the sheet. Her white hands folded the sheet down over her face. She sat up, and her eyes opened.

Lewis cowered at the far end of the little room. When his wife swung her legs off the morgue table, he screamed. She was naked, and the left side of her face was broken and scraped. He held his hands out in front of him in a childish gesture of protection. Linda smiled at him, and said, “What about that poor dog?” She was pointing to the uncovered slab of table, where a short-haired hound lay on its side in a puddle of blood.

He looked back in horror at his wife, but Stringer Dedham, his hair parted in the middle, a brown shirt concealing his stumps, stood beside him. “What did you see, Stringer?” he asked.

Stringer smiled at him bloodily. “I saw you. That’s why I jumped out of the window. Don’t be a puddin’ head.”

“You saw me?”

“Did I say I saw you? Guess I’m the puddin’ head. I didn’t see you. Your wife’s the one saw you. What I saw was my girl. Saw her right through her window, morning of the day I helped out on the thresher. Gosh, I must be a real moron.”

“But what did you see her doing? What did you try to tell your sisters?”

Stringer bent back his head and laughed, and blood gushed out of his mouth. He coughed. “Golly gee, I couldn’t hardly believe it, it was just amazin’, friend. You ever see a snake with its head cut off? You ever see that tongue dartin’ out—and that head just a stump of a thing no bigger than your thumb? You ever see that body workin’ away, beatin’ itself in the dust?” Stringer laughed loudly through the red foam in his mouth. “Holy Moses, Lewis, what a godforsaken thing. Honestly, ever since it’s been like I can’t hardly think straight, like my brain’s all mixed up and leakin’ outa my ears. It’s like that time I had the stroke, in 1940, remember? When one side of me froze up? And you gave me baby food on a spoon? Grrr, what a godawful taste!”

“That wasn’t you,” Lewis said, “That was my father.”

“Well, what did I tell you? It’s all mixed up—like someone cut my head off, and my tongue keeps moving.” Stringer gave an abashed red smile. “Say, wasn’t you goin’ to take that poor old dog and drop it in the pond?”

“Oh, yes, when they get back,” Lewis said. “We need Warren Scales’s car. His wife is pregnant.”

“The wife of a Roman Catholic farmer is of no concern to me at the moment,” his father said. “One year at college has coarsened you, Lewis.” From his temporary mooring beside the mantel, he looked long and sadly at his son. “And I know too that this is a coarsening era. Pitch defileth, Lewis. Our age is pitch. We are born into damnation, and for our children all is darkness. I wish that I could have reared you in more stable times—Lewis, once this country was a paradise! A paradise! Fields as far as you could see! Filled with the bounty of the Lord! Son, when I was a boy I saw Scripture in the spider webs. The Lord was watching us then, Lewis, you could feel His presence in the sunlight and the rain. But now we are like spiders dancing in a fire.” He looked down at the literal fire, which was warming his knees. “It all started with the railway. That I’m sure of, son. The railroad brought money to men who’d never had the smell of two dollars together in all their lives. The iron horse spoiled the land, and now financial collapse is going to spread like a stain over this whole country.” And looked at Lewis with the clear shrewd eyes of Sears James.

“I promised her I’d bury her in the rose garden,” Lewis said. “They’ll be back with the car soon.”

“The car.” His father turned away in disgust. “You never listened to the important things I had to tell you. You have forsaken me, Lewis.”

“You excite yourself too much,” Lewis said. “You’ll give yourself a stroke.”

“His will be done.”

Lewis looked at his father’s rigid back. “I’ll see to it now.” His father made no answer. “Good-bye.”

His father spoke without turning around. “You never listened. But mark me, son, it will come back to haunt you. You were seduced by yourself, Lewis. Nothing sadder can be said of any man. A handsome face and feathers for brains. You got your looks from your mother’s Uncle Leo, and when he was twenty-five he stuck his hand into the woodstove and held it there until it was charred like a hickory log.”

Lewis went through the dining-room door. Linda was peeling the sheet off her naked body in the vacant upper room. She smiled at him with bloody teeth. “After that,” she said, “your mother’s Uncle Leo was a godly man all his life long.” Her eyes glowed, and she swung her legs down off the bed. Lewis backed away toward the bare wooden wall. “After that he saw Scripture in spider webs, Lewis.” She moved slowly toward him, twisting on a broken hip. “You were going to put me in the pond. Did you see Scripture in the pond, Lewis? Or were you distracted by your pretty face?”

“Now it’s over, isn’t it?” Lewis asked.

“Yes.” She was close enough for him to catch the dark brown smell of death.

Lewis straightened his body against the rough wall. “What did you see in that girl’s bedroom?”

“I saw you, Lewis. What you were supposed to see. Like this.”

Peter tried to visualize the landscape on his side of the highway, and remembered that only for a mile or so in the vicinity of Lewis’s house was there heavy ground cover—most of the rest of the land, until an eruption of gas stations and drive-ins marked the edges of Milburn, was field. Unless he crawled in ditches for seven miles, the man in the car would be able to see him as soon as he left the stretch of woods.

Come out, son.

The Witness was aimlessly sending out messages, trying to coax him into the car. Peter shut his mind to the whispers as well as he could and plunged on through the woods. Maybe if he kept on running, the Witness would drive down the road far enough to let him think.

Come on, boy. Come out of there. Let me take you to her.

Still protected by the high brambles and the trees, Peter ran until he could see, strung between the massive trunks of oaks, double strands of silvery wire. Beyond the wire was a long curved vacancy of field— empty white ground. The Witness’s car was nowhere in sight. Peter looked sideways, but here the trees were too thick and the brambles too high for him to see the section of highway nearest him. Peter reached the last of the trees and the wire and looked over the field, wondering if he could get across unseen. If the man saw him on the field, Peter knew he would be helpless. He could run, but eventually the man would get him as the thing back in the Montgomery Street house got Jim.

She’s interested in you, Peter.

It was another aimless, haphazard dart with no real urgency in it.

She’ll give you everything you want.

She’ll give you anything you want.

She’ll give you back your mother.

The blue car edged forward into his vision and stopped just past the point where the field began. Peter shuddered back a few feet deeper into the wood. The man in the car turned sideways, resting his arm along the top of the seat, and in this posture of patient waiting looked out at the field Peter would have to cross.

Come on out and we’ll give you your mother.

Yes. That was what they would do. They’d give him back his mother. She would be like Jim Hardie and Freddy Robinson, with empty eyes and amnesiac conversation and no more substance than a ray of moonlight.

Peter sat down on wet ground, trying to remember if any other roads were near. He would have to go through the woods or the man would find him when he crossed the field; was there another road, running parallel to the highway, going back to Milburn?

He remembered nights of driving around the countryside with Jim, all of the footloose journeying of high school weekends and summers: he would have said that he knew Broome County as well as he knew his own bedroom.

But the patient man in the blue car made it difficult to think. He could not remember what happened on the other side of this wood—a developer’s suburb, a factory? For a moment his mind would not give him the information he knew it had, and instead offered images of vacant buildings where dark things moved behind drawn blinds. But whatever lay on the other side of the woods, the other side was where he had to go.

Peter stood up quietly and retreated a few yards farther into the woods before turning his back on the highway and running away from the car. Seconds later he remembered what he was running toward. There was an old two-lane macadam highway in this direction, in Milburn, called “the old Binghamton road” because once it had been the only highway between the two towns: pitted, obsolete and unsafe, it was avoided by nearly all traffic now. Once there had been small businesses dotted along it, fruit markets, a motel, a drugstore. Now most of these were empty, and some of them had been razed. The Bay Tree Market alone flourished: it was heavily patronized by the better-off people of Milburn. His mother had always bought fruit and vegetables there.

If he remembered the distance between the old and new highways correctly, it would take him less than twenty minutes to get to the Market. From there he could get a lift into town and make it safely to the hotel.

Now, seeing in the blank gray air ahead of him that the woods were ending, he went nearer the fence and crept slowly along it for the final thirty yards. He still was not sure if the fruit market was to the left or the right, or how far off it was. All he hoped was that it would be in sight, and show a busy parking lot.

He squelched forward, peering around the few remaining trees.

You’re wasting your time, Peter. Don’t you want to see your mother again?

He groaned, feeling the feathery touch of the Witness’s mind. His stomach went cold. The blue car was parked on the road before him. On the front seat Peter saw a bulky shape he knew was the Witness, leaning back, waiting for him to show himself.

The Bay Tree Market was in sight about a quarter mile down the old highway to Peter’s left—the car faced the other way. If he made a run for it, the man would have to turn his car around on the narrow old road.

That still would not give him enough time.

Peter looked again at the market: there were plenty of cars in the lot. At least one of them would belong to someone he knew. All he had to do was to get there.

In fact, the only thing he could do, apart from rushing the man, was to go openly across the field to the market and see what happened. The man was looking the other way, and at least he would have some time before he was seen.

Peter separated the strands of wire clipped to the trees and climbed through. A quarter of a mile away, in a straight line, was the rear parking lot of the Bay Tree Market. He held his breath and started walking across the field.

The car did a three-point turn behind him and drew up alongside him, just visible in the periphery of his vision. Nice brave boy. Nice boys shouldn’t go hitchhiking, should they? Peter closed his eyes and went stumbling over the field.

Stupid brave boy. He wondered what the man would do to stop him.

He did not have to wait long to find out.

“Peter, I have to talk to you. Open your eyes, Peter.” The voice was Lewis Benedikt’s. Peter opened his eyes and saw Lewis standing twenty yards before him, dressed in baggy trousers, boots, an unfastened khaki army jacket.

“You’re not here,” Peter said.

“Talk sense, Peter,” Lewis said, and began to come toward him. “You can see me, can’t you? You can hear me? I’m here. Please listen to me. I want to tell you about your mother.”

“She’s dead.” Peter stopped walking, unwilling to get closer to the Lewis-creature.

“No, she is not.” Lewis stopped too, as if not wishing to frighten Peter. Off on the road to their side, the car also halted. “Nothing’s that black or white. She wasn’t dead when you saw her in my house, was she?”

“She was.”

“You can’t be sure, Pete. She passed out, just like you.” Lewis opened his hands and smiled at Peter.

“No. They cut—they cut open her throat. They killed her. Just like those animals were killed.” He closed his eyes again.

“Pete, you’re wrong and I can prove it. That man in the car doesn’t want to hurt you. Let’s go to him. Let’s go there now.”

Peter opened his eyes. “Did you really sleep with my mother?”

“People our age sometimes make mistakes. They do things they’re sorry about later. But it didn’t mean anything, Pete. You’ll see when you get home. All you have to do is come home with us, and she’ll be there, just like she always is.” Lewis was smiling toward him with intelligent concern. “Don’t judge her badly because she made one mistake.” He started coming forward again. “Trust me. I always hoped we’d be friends.”

“I did too, but you can’t be my friend because you’re dead,” Peter said. He bent over and picked up a double handful of wet snow. He squeezed it together in his hands.

“You’re going to throw a snowball at me? Isn’t that a little juvenile?”

“I feel sorry for you,” Peter said, and threw the snowball and blew the thing that looked like Lewis into a shower of falling light.

As if shell-shocked, he trudged ahead, walking straight through the space where Lewis had stood. The air tingled on his face. He felt another feathery tickling in his mind, and braced himself.

But no words followed. Instead came a wave of bitterness and anger which nearly knocked him down with its force. It was the same blackness of feeling he had seen when the creature holding his mother had taken off its dark glasses, and the violence of the emotion made him stagger; but there was a wide current of defeat in it.

Peter snapped his head sideways in surprise; the blue car accelerated down the macadam road.

Relief buckled his knees. He did not know why, but he had won. Peter sat heavily, clumsily down in the snow and tried not to cry. After a while he stood up again and continued on toward the parking lot. He was too numb for feeling; he made himself concentrate on getting his legs to move. First one step, then another. His feet were very cold. Another step. Now he was not far from the lot.

Then an even greater sweetness flooded through him. His mother was flying through the parking lot running toward him. “Pete!” she shouted, half-sobbing. “Thank God!”

She reached the cars at the edge of the lot and ran past them onto the field. He stood watching her run toward him, too crowded with feeling to speak, and then trudged forward. She had a large bruise on one cheek and her hair was as tangled as a gypsy’s. A scarf tied around her neck showed a line of red at its center.

“You got away,” he said, stupefied with relief.

“They took me out of the house—that man—” She stood a few yards away from him, and her hands went to her throat. “He cut my neck—I fainted—I thought they were going to kill you.”

“I thought you were dead,” he told her. “Oh, mom.”

“Poor Pete.” She hugged her arms around herself. “Let’s get out of here. We’ll have to get a ride back to town. I guess both of us can just about move that far.”

That she could joke, however feebly, moved him again to the point of tears. He put a hand over his eyes.

“Cry later,” she said. “I think I’ll cry for a week after I sit down. Let’s find a ride.”

“How did you get away from them?” He walked beside her, about to hug her, but she stepped backward, leading him toward the lot. He fell into step with her.

“I guess they thought I was too frightened to move. And when they got me outside, the fresh air sort of revived me. That man relaxed his hold on my arm, and I swung around and belted him with my bag. Then I ran away into the woods. I heard them looking for me. I’ve never never been so scared in my life. After a while they just gave up. Were they looking for you?”

“No,” he said. “No.” And the tension melted in him. “There was someone else, but he left—he didn’t get me.”

“They’ll leave us alone now,” she said. “Now that we’re away from there.”

He looked into her face, and she glanced down. “I owe you a lot of explanations, Peter. But this isn’t the time. I just want to get home and put a real bandage on my throat. We’ll have to think of something to tell your father.”

“You won’t tell him what happened?”

“We’ll just let it die, can’t we?” she asked, and looked pleadingly at him. “I’ll explain everything to you —in time. Let’s just be thankful now that we’re alive.”

They stepped onto the surface of the parking lot.

“Okay,” Peter said. “Mom, I’m so—” He struggled with his emotions, but they were too dense to be expressed. “We have to talk to someone, though. The same man that hurt you killed Jim Hardie.”

She looked back at him, having walked forward toward the crowded middle of the lot “I know.”

“You know?”

“I mean I guessed. Hurry up, Pete. My neck hurts. I want to get home.”

“You said you knew.”

She made a gesture of exasperation. “Don’t cross-examine me, Peter.”

Peter looked wildly around the parking lot and saw the blue car just nosing past the side of the market. “Oh, mom,” he said. “They did. They did. You didn’t get away from them.”

“Peter. Snap out of it. I see someone we can get a ride with.”

As the blue car swung up the lane behind her, Peter walked toward his mother, staring at her. “Okay, I’m coming.”

“Good. Peter, everything will be the way it was again, you will see. We both had a terrible fright, but a hot bath and a good sleep will work wonders.”

“You’ll need stitches in your neck,” Peter said, coming closer.

“No, of course not.” She smiled at him. “A bandage is all I need. It was just a scratch. Peter. What are you doing, Peter? Don’t touch it, it hurts. You’ll start the bleeding again.”

The blue car was now at the top of their row. Peter reached out toward his mother.

“Don’t, Pete, well get our ride in a minute …”

He clamped his eyes shut and swung his arm toward his mother’s head. A second later his fingers were tingling. He yelled: a horn sounded, terrifyingly loud.

When he opened his eyes his mother was gone and the blue car was speeding toward him. Peter scrambled toward the protection of two parked cars and slipped between them just as the blue car raced by, scraping its side against them and making them rock.

He watched it squeeze down to the end of the aisle, and when it cut across to drive up the next aisle, he saw Irmengard Draeger, Penny’s mother, walk out of the back door of the market carrying a sack of groceries. He ran toward her, cutting through the rows of parked cars.

He found Don’s door and knocked.

“Mr. Wanderley,” he said when the writer opened the door.

For Don, the appearance of the shaken teenager outside his room meant the arrival of certainty. The period when the consequences of the final Chowder Society story—whatever that would turn out to be— were limited to its members and a few outlyers was over. The expression of shock and loss on Peter Barnes’s face told Don that what he had been brooding about in his room was no longer the property of himself and four elderly men.

“Come in, Peter,” he said. “I thought we’d be meeting again soon.”

The boy moved like a zombie into the room and sat blindly in a chair. “I’m sorry,” he began, and then closed his mouth. “I want—I have to—” He blinked, and was obviously unable to continue.

“Hang on,” Don said, and went to his dresser and took out a bottle of whiskey. He poured an inch into a water glass and gave it to Peter. “Drink some of this and settle down. Then just tell me everything that happened. Don’t waste time thinking that I might not believe you, because I will. And so will Mr. Hawthorne and Mr. James, when I tell them.”

” ‘My older friends,’ ” Peter said. He swallowed some of the whiskey. “That’s what he called them. He said you thought his name was Greg Benton.”

Peter twitched, uttering the name, and Don felt the shock of a conviction hitting his nerves: whatever the danger to himself, he would destroy Greg Benton.

“You met him,” he said.

“He killed my mother,” Peter said flatly. “His brother held me and made me watch. I think—I think they drank her blood. Like they did to those animals. And he killed Jim Hardie. I saw him do it, but I got away.”

“Go on,” Don said.

“And he said someone—I can’t remember his name —would call him a Manitou. Do you know what that is?”

“I’ve heard of it.”

Peter nodded, as if this satisfied him. “And he turned into a wolf. I saw him. I saw him do it.” Peter set the glass down on the floor, then looked at it again and picked it up and took another sip. His hands trembled badly enough nearly to splash the whiskey over the lip of the glass. “They stink—they’re like rotten dead things—I had to scrub and scrub. Where Fenny touched me.”

“You saw Benton turn into a wolf?”

“Yes. Well, no. Not exactly. He took off his glasses. They have yellow eyes. He let me see him. He was— he was nothing but hate and death. He was like a laser beam.”

“I understand,” Don said. “I’ve seen him. But I never saw him without his glasses.”

“When he takes them off, he can make you do things. He can talk inside your head. Like ESP. And they can make you see dead people, ghosts, but when you touch them, they sort of blow up. But they don’t blow up. They grab you and they kill you. But they’re dead too. Somebody else owns them—their benefactor. They do what she wants.”

“She?” Don asked, and remembered a lovely woman holding this handsome boy’s chin at a dinner party.

“That Anna Mostyn,” Peter said. “But she was here before.”

“Yes, she was,” Don said. “As an actress.”

Peter looked at him with grateful surprise.

“I just figured out some of the story, Peter,” Don said. “Just in the past few days.” He looked at the shivering boy in the chair. “It looks like you figured out a lot more than I did and in a shorter time.”

“He said he was me,” Peter said, his face distorting. “He said he was me, I want to kill him.”

“Then we’ll do it together,” Don said.

Peter interrupted him. “Anything she wants them to do.”

“That’s right. But we’re not helpless. We can fight back. And we’ll do it. We’ll get rid of them however we can. That’s a promise.”

“But they’re already dead,” Peter said. “How can we kill them? I know they’re dead—they have that smell—”

He was beginning to slide into panic again, and Don reached over and took his hand. “I know because of the stories. These things aren’t new. They’ve probably been around for centuries—for longer than that. They’ve certainly been talked about and written about for hundreds of years. I think they are what people used to call vampires and werewolves—they’re probably behind a thousand ghost stories. Well, in the stories, and I think that means in the past, people found ways to make them die again. Stakes through the heart or silver bullets —remember? The point is that they can be destroyed. And if it takes silver bullets, that’s what we’ll use. But I don’t think we’ll need them. You want revenge and I do too, and we’ll get it.”

“But that’s just them,” Peter said, looking straight at Don. “What do we do about her?”

“That’ll be harder. She’s the general. But history is full of dead generals.” It was a facile answer, but the boy seemed calmer. “Now I think you’d better tell me everything, Peter. Begin with how Jim died, if that’s the beginning. The more you remember, the more you’ll help us. So try to tell it all.”

“Because I knew no one would believe me but you. You heard the music.”

Don nodded.

“And nobody will, will they? They’ll think it’s like Mr. Scales and the Martians.”

“Not quite. The Chowder Society will. I hope.”

“You mean Mr. James and Mr. Hawthorne and …”

“Yes.” He and the boy looked at each other, knowing that Lewis was dead. “We’ll be enough, Peter. It’s the four of us against her.”

“When do we start? What do we do?”

“I’ll meet with the others tonight. I think you ought to go home. You have to see your father.”

“He won’t believe me. I know he won’t. Nobody would, unless they …” The boy’s voice trailed off.

“Do you want me to come with you?”

Peter shook his head.

“I will if you want me to.”

“No. I won’t tell him. It wouldn’t do any good. I’ll have to tell him later.”

“Maybe that’s better. And if you want help when the times comes, I’ll give it to you. Peter, I think you’ve been brave as hell. Most adults would have folded up like tissue paper. But you’re going to have to be even braver from now on. You might have to protect your father as well as yourself. Don’t open your door to anybody unless you know who they are.”

Peter nodded. “I wont. You bet I won’t. But why are they here, anyhow? Why is she here?”

“That’s what I’m going to find out tonight.”

Peter stood up and began to leave, but when he put his hands in his pockets, he touched a folded pamphlet. “I forgot. The man in the blue car gave me this after he took me to Mr. Benedict’s house.” He brought out The Watchtower and smoothed it out on Don’s desk. Beneath the name, in large black letters on the cheap pulpy paper, were the words DR. RABBITFOOT LED ME TO SIN.

Don ripped the pamphlet in half.

It’s not like I forgot she was sixty, he told himself: I worried about that plenty. “I came to that bitch with clean hands,” he said out loud, and saw the words vaporize before him. She had betrayed him. She had insulted him. She had never—he could see it now—really taken him seriously.

And what was she, anyhow? An old bag with no morals and a freakish bone structure. Intellectually, she hardly counted.

And she wasn’t really adaptable. Look at her view of California—trailer parks and tacoburgers! She was shallow—Milburn was where she belonged. With that stuffy little husband, talking about old movies.

“Yes?” he said. He had heard a quick, gasping noise, very near.

“Do you need help?” No one answered, and he put his hands on his hips and looked around.

It had been a human noise, a sound of pain. “I’ll help if you tell me where you are,” he said. Then he shrugged, and walked toward the area where he thought the sound had come from.

He stopped as soon as he saw the body lying at the base of the fir trees.

It was a man—what was left of a man. Sims forced himself to look at him. That was a mistake, for he nearly vomited. Then he realized that he would have to look again. His ears were roaring. Sims bent over the battered head. It was, as he had feared, Lewis Benedikt. Near his head was the body of a dog. At first Sims had thought that the dog was a severed piece of Lewis.

Trembling, Sims straightened up. He wanted to run. Whatever kind of animal had done that to Lewis Benedikt was still nearby—it couldn’t be more than a minute away.

Then he heard crashing in the bushes, and was too scared to move. He visualized some huge animal leaping out at him from behind the firs—a grizzly. Sims opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

A man with a face like a Halloween pumpkin emerged from around the fir trees. He was breathing hard, and he held a huge blunderbuss of a shotgun pointed at Sim’s belly. “Hold it there,” the man said. Sims was certain that the frightening-looking creature was going to blow him in half, and his bowels voided.

“I ought to kill you stone dead right now,” the man said.

“Please …”

“But this is your lucky day, killer. I’m taking you to a telephone and gedding the police to come. Hey? Why did you do this to Lewis, hey?”

When Sims could not answer, understanding only that this horrible peasant would not kill him after all, Otto inched around behind him and prodded him in the back with the barrels of the shotgun. “So. Play soldier, scheisskopf. March. Mach schnell.”

Don lifted the two books he had taken from the Milburn library just before Peter had come. They supported the notion he’d had while talking to the three men in Sears’s library: he thought he knew what they were fighting. Sears and Ricky would tell him why. Then, if their story fit his theory, he would do what they had asked him to Milburn for: he would give them their explanation. And if the explanation seemed lunatic, perhaps it was—perhaps it was even wrong; but Peter’s story and the copy of The Watchtower proved that they had long since lurched into a time when madness offered a truer picture of events than sanity. If his mind and Peter Barnes’s had shattered, Milburn had shattered to their pattern. And out of the cracks had crawled Gregory and Fenny and their benefactor, all of whom they must destroy.

Even if it kills us, Don thought. Because we are the only ones who have a chance of doing it.

The headlights of a car appeared in a swirl of falling snow. After a moment, Don saw the outline of a high dark car behind them, and the car swung to the curb on the other side of Haven Lane. The lights died. First Ricky, then Sears got out of the old black Buick. Don left his own car and trotted across the street to join them.

“And now Lewis,” Ricky said to him. “Did you know?”

“Not definitely. But I thought so.”

Sears, who had been listening to this, nodded impatiently. “You thought so. Ricky, give him the keys.” As Don opened the door, Sears grumbled behind him, “I hope you’ll tell us how you got your information. If Hardesty fancies himself as the town crier, I’ll arrange to have him spitted.”

The three men went into a black entryway; Sears found the light switch. “Peter Barnes came to me this afternoon,” Don said. “He saw Gregory Bate kill his mother. And he saw what must have been Lewis’s ghost.”

“Oh, God,” Ricky breathed. “Oh, my God. Oh poor Christina.”

“Let’s get the heat going before we say any more,” Sears requested. “If everything’s blowing up in our faces, I for one at least want to be warm.” The three of them began wandering through the ground floor of the house, lifting dust sheets off the furniture. “I will miss Lewis very much,” Sears said. “I used to malign him terribly, but I did love him. He gave us spirit. As your uncle did.” He dropped a dust sheet on the floor. “And now he is in the Chenango County morgue, apparently the victim of a savage attack by some sort of animal. A friend of Lewis’s accused Harold Sims of the crime.

Under different circumstances, that would be comic.” Sears’s face sagged. “Let’s take a look at your uncle’s office, and then take care of the heating. I don’t know if I can bear this anymore.”

Sears led him into a large room at the rear of the house while Ricky switched on the central heating boiler. “This was the office.” He flicked a switch, and track lights on the ceiling shone on an old leather couch, a desk with an electric typewriter, a file cabinet and a Xerox machine; on a broad shelf jutting out below narrower shelves filled with white boxes sat a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a cassette recorder.

“The boxes are the tapes he made for his books?”

“I guess so.”

“And you and Ricky and the others never came here after he died?”

“No,” Sears said, gazing at the well-ordered office. It evoked Don’s uncle more wholly than any photograph —it radiated the contentment of a man happy in what he did. This impression helped to explain Sears’s next words. “I suppose that Stella told you we were afraid to come in here. There might be some truth in that. But I think that what really kept us away was guilt.”

“And that was part of the reason you invited me to Milburn.”

“Yes. I think all of us except Ricky thought you would—” He made a shooing-away gesture with his hands. “Somehow magically dispel our guilt. John Jaffrey most of all. That is the wisdom of hindsight.”

“Because it was Jaffrey’s party.”

Sears nodded curtly, and turned out of the office. “There still must be most of a cord of wood out in back. Why don’t you bring some of it in so we can have a fire?”

“Then why did you ask?”

Ricky sneezed violently, and Sears said, “It happened in 1929—October of 1929. That was a long time ago. When Ricky asked John about the worst thing he’d ever done, all that we could think about was your Uncle Edward—it was only a week after his death. Eva Galli was the last thing on our minds.”

“Well, now we have truly crossed the Rubicon,” said Ricky. “Up until you said the name, I still wasn’t sure that we’d tell it. But now that we’re here we’d better go on without stopping. Whatever Peter Barnes told you had better wait until we’re done—if after that you still want to stay in the same room with us. And I suppose that somehow what happened to him must be related to the Eva Galli affair. Now; I’ve said it too.”

“Ricky never wanted you to know about Eva Galli,” said Sears. “Way back when I wrote to you, he thought it would be a mistake to rake it all up again. I guess we agreed with him. I certainly did.”

“Thought it would muddy the waters,” Ricky said through his cold. “Thought it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with our problem. Spook stories. Nightmares. Premonitions. Just four old fools losing their marbles. Thought it was irrelevant. It was all so mixed up anyhow. Should have known better when that girl came looking for a job. And now with Lewis gone …”

“You know something?” Sears said. “We never even gave Lewis John’s cufflinks.”

“Slipped our minds,” Ricky said, and drank some of his Old Parr. He and Sears were already deep in the well of their story, concentrated on it so wholly that Don, seated near them, felt invisible.

“Well, what happened to Eva Galli?” he asked.

Sears and Ricky glanced at each other; then Ricky’s eyes went to his glass and Sears’s to the fire. “Surely that’s obvious,” Sears said. “We killed her.”

“The two of you?” Don asked, thrown off balance It was not the answer he had expected.

“All of us,” Ricky answered. “The Chowder Society. Your uncle, John Jaffrey, Lewis, and Sears and myself. In October, 1929. Three weeks after Black Monday, when the stock market collapsed. Even here in Milburn, you could see the beginnings of the panic. Lou Price’s father, who was also a broker, shot himself in his office. And we killed a girl named Eva Galli. Not murder— not outright murder. We’d never have been convicted of anything—maybe not even of manslaughter. But there would have been a scandal.”

“And we couldn’t face that,” Sears said. “Ricky and I had just started out as lawyers, working in his father’s firm. John had qualified as a doctor only the year before. Lewis was the son of a clergyman. We were all in the same fix. We would have been ruined. Slowly, if not immediately.”

“That was why we decided on what we tried to do,” said Ricky.

“Yes,” said Sears. “We did an obscene thing. If we’d been thirty-three instead of twenty-three, we would probably have gone to the police and taken our chances. But we were so young—Lewis wasn’t even out of his teens. So we tried to conceal it. And then at the end—”

“At the end,” Ricky said, “we were like characters in one of our stories. Or in your novel. I’ve been reliving the last ten minutes for two months now. I even hear our voices, the things we said when we put her in Warren Scales’s car …”

“Let’s start at the beginning,” Sears said.

“Let’s start at the beginning. Yes.”

“Which house on Montgomery Street?” Don asked. “The one Freddy Robinson lived in?”

“Why yes. The one across the street from John’s house. Miss Mostyn’s house. She bought that house, and set it up with new furniture and a piano and a gramophone. And she smoked cigarettes and drank cocktails, and she wore her hair short—a real John Held girl.”

“Not entirely,” Sears said. “She was no bubble-headed flapper. The time for those had passed, anyhow. And she was educated. She read quite widely. She could speak intelligently. Eva Galli was an enchanting woman. How would you describe the way she looked, Ricky?”

“Like a nineteen-twenties Claire Bloom,” Ricky said immediately.

“Typical Ricky Hawthorne. Ask him to describe someone, and he names a movie star. I guess you can take it as an accurate description. Eva Galli had all this exciting modernity about her, what was modernity for Milburn at any rate, but there was also a refinement about her—an air of grace.”

“That’s true,” said Ricky. “And a certain mysteriousness we found terribly attractive. Like your Anna Mobley. We knew nothing about her but what she hinted—she had lived in New York, she had apparently spent some time in Hollywood as an actress in silents. She did a small part in a romance called China Pearl. A Richard Barthelmess movie.”

Don took a piece of paper from his pocket and wrote down the name of the film.

“And she was obviously partly of Italian ancestry, but she told Stringer at one point that her maternal grandparents were English. Her father had been a man of considerable substance, one gathered, but she had been orphaned when just a child and was raised by relatives in California. That was all we knew about her. She said that she had come here for peace and seclusion.”

“The women tried to take her under their wing,” Sears said. “She was a catch for them too, remember. A wealthy girl who had turned her back on Hollywood, sophisticated and refined—every woman of position in Milburn sent her an invitation. The little societies women here had in those days all wanted her. I think that what they wanted was to tame her.”

“To make her identifiable,” Ricky said. “Yes. To tame her. Because with all her qualities, there was something else. Something fey. Lewis had a romantic imagination then, and he told me that Eva Galli was like an aristocrat, a princess or some such, who had turned her back on the court and gone off to the country to die.”

“Yes, she affected us too,” said Sears. “Of course, for us she was out of reach. We idealized her. We saw her from time to time—”

“We paid court,” Ricky said.

“Absolutely. We paid court to her. She had politely refused all the ladies’ invitations, but she had no objections to five gangling young men showing up on her doorstep on a Saturday or Sunday. Your uncle Edward was the first of us. He had more daring than we other four. By this time, everybody knew that Stringer Dedham had lost his head over her, so in a sense she was seen as under Stringer’s patronage—as if she always had a ghostly duenna by her side. Edward slipped between the cracks of convention. He paid a call on her, she was dazzlingly charming to him, and soon we all got into the habit of calling on her. Stringer didn’t seem to mind. He liked us, though he was in a different world.”

“The adult world,” Ricky said. “As Eva was. Even though she could only have been two or three years older than us, she might have been twenty. Nothing could have been more proper than our visits. Of course some of the elderly women thought they were scandalous. Lewis’s father thought so too. But we had just enough social leeway to get away with it. We paid our visits in a group, after Edward had broken the ground, about once every two weeks. We were far too jealous to allow any one of us to go alone. Our visits were extraordinary. It was like slipping out of time altogether. Nothing exceptional happened, even the conversation was ordinary, but for those few hours we spent with her, we were in the realm of magic. She swept us off our feet. And that she was known to be Stringer’s fiancee made it safe.”

“People didn’t grow up so fast in those days,” Sears said. “All of this—young men in their early twenties mooning about a woman of twenty-five or -six as if she were an unattainable priestess—must seem risible to you. But it was the way we thought of her—beyond our reach. She was Stringer’s, and we all thought that after they married we’d be as welcome at his house as at hers.”

The two older men fell silent for a moment. They looked into the fire on Edward Wanderley’s hearth and drank whiskey. Don did not prod them to speak, knowing that a crucial turn in the story had come and that they would finish telling it when they were able.

“We were in a sort of sexless, pre-Freudian paradise,” Ricky finally said. “In an enchantment. Sometimes we even danced with her, but even holding her, watching her move, we never thought about sex. Not consciously. Not to admit. Well, paradise died in October, 1929, shortly after the stock market and Stringer Dedham.”

“Paradise died,” Sears echoed, “and we looked into the devil’s face.” He turned his head toward the window.

The other two followed his gaze and saw white flakes blizzarding against the window. “If his wife can find him, Omar Norris will have to be out plowing before morning.”

Ricky drank more of his whiskey. “It was tropically hot,” he said, melting the present storm in the unseasonal October of nearly fifty years before. “The threshing got done late that year. It seemed folks couldn’t get down to work. People said money worries made Stringer absentminded. The Dedham girls said no, that wasn’t it, he’d gone by Miss Galli’s house that morning. He’d seen something.”

“Stringer put his arms in the thresher,” Sears said, “and his sisters blamed Eva. He said things while he was dying, wrapped up in blankets on their table. But you couldn’t make head or tail of what they thought they heard him say. ‘Bury her,’ that was one thing, and ‘cut her up,’ as though he’d seen what was going to happen to himself.”

“And,” said Ricky, “one other thing. The Dedham girls said he screamed something else—but it was so mixed up with his other screams that they weren’t sure about it. ‘Bee-orchid.’ ‘Bee-orchid,’ just that. He had been raving, obviously. Out of his head with shock and pain. Well, he died on that table, and got a good burial a few days later. Eva Galli didn’t come to the funeral. Half the town was on Pleasant Hill, but not the dead man’s fiancee. That fueled their tongues.”

“The old women, the women she had ignored,” Sears said. “They laid into her. Said she’d ruined Stringer. Of course half of them had unmarried daughters and they’d had their eyes on Stringer long before Eva Galli showed up. They said he made some discovery—an abandoned husband or an illegitimate child, something like that. They made her out to be a real Jezebel.”

“We didn’t know what to do,” Ricky said. “We were afraid to visit her, after Stringer died. She might be grieving as much as a widow, you see, but she was unattached. It was our parents’ place to console her, not ours. If we had called on her, the female malice would have gone into high gear. So we stewed—just stewed. Everybody assumed that she’d pack up and move back to New York. But we couldn’t forget those afternoons.”

“If anything, they became more magical, more poignant,” Sears said. “Now we knew what we had lost. An ideal—and a romantic friendship conducted in the light of an ideal.”

“Sears is right,” Ricky said. “But in the end, we idealized her even more. She became an emblem of grief—of a fractured heart. All we wanted to do was to visit her. We sent her a note of condolence, and we would have gone through fire to see her. What we couldn’t go through was the iron-bound social convention that set her apart. There weren’t any cracks to slip through.”

“Instead she visited us,” Sears said. “At the apartment your uncle lived in then. Edward was the only one who had his own place. We got together to talk and drink applejack. To talk about all the things we were going to do.”

“And to talk about her,” Ricky said. “Do you know that Ernest Dowson poem: ‘I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion’? Lewis found it and read it to us. That poem went through us like a knife. ‘Thy pale lost lilies.’ It certainly called for more applejack. ‘Madder music and stronger wine.’ What idiots we were. Anyhow, she turned up one night at Edward’s apartment”

“And she was wild,” Sears said. “She was frightening. She came in like a typhoon.”

“She said she was lonely,” Ricky said. “Said she was sick of this damned town and all the hypocrites in it. She wanted to drink and she wanted to dance, and she didn’t care who was shocked. Said this dead little town and all its dead little people could go to hell as far as she was concerned. And if we were men and not little boys, we’d damn the town too.”

“We were speechless,” Sears said. “There was our unattainable goddess, cursing like a sailor and raging … acting like a whore. ‘Madder music and stronger wine.’ That’s what we got, all right. Edward had a little gramophone and some records, and she made us crank it up and put on the loudest jazz he had. She was so vehement! It was crazy—we’d never seen any woman act that way, and for us she was, you know, sort of a cross between the Statue of Liberty and Mary Pickford. ‘Dance with me, you little toad,’ she said to John, and he was so frightened by her that he scarcely dared touch her. Her eyes were just blazing.”

“I think what she felt was hate,” Ricky said. “For us, for the town, for Stringer. But it was hatred, and it was boiling. A cyclone of hate. She kissed Lewis while they were dancing, and he jumped back like she burned him. He dropped his arms, and she spun off to Edward and grabbed him and made him dance. Her face was terrible—rigid. Edward was always more worldly than the rest of us, but he too was shaken by Eva’s wildness— our paradise was crumbling all around us, and she kicked it into powder with every step. With every glance. She did seem like a devil; like something possessed. You know how when a woman gets angry, really angry, she can reach way back into herself and find rage enough to blow any man to pieces—how all that feeling comes out and hits you like a truck? It was like that. ‘Aren’t you little sissies going to drink?’ she said. So we drank.”

“It was unspeakable,” Sears said. “She seemed twice our size. I think I knew what was coming. There was only one thing that could be coming. We were simply too immature to know how to handle it.”

“I don’t know if I saw it coming, but it came anyhow,” Ricky said. “She tried to seduce Lewis.”

“He was the worst possible choice,” Sears said. “Lewis was only a boy. He may have kissed a gal before that night, but he certainly had done no more than that. We all loved Eva, but Lewis probably loved her most—he was the one who found that Dowson poem, remember. And because he loved her most, her performance that evening and her hatred stunned him.”

“And she knew it,” Ricky said. “She was delighted. It pleased her, that Lewis was so shocked he could scarcely utter a word. And when she pushed Edward away and went after Lewis, Lewis was frozen stiff with horror. As if he had seen his mother begin to act that way.”

“His mother?” Sears asked. “Well, I suppose. At least it tells you the depth of his fantasy about her— our fantasy, to be honest. And he was dumbstruck. Eva snaked her arms around him and kissed him. It looked like she was eating half his face. Imagine that—those hate-filled kisses pouring over you, all that fury biting into your month. It must have been like kissing a razor. When she drew back her head, Lewis’s face was smeared with lipstick. Normally it would have been a funny sight but it was somehow horrifying. As if he was smeared with blood.”

“Edward went up to her and said, ‘Cool down, Miss Galli,’ or something of the sort. She whirled on him, and we felt that enormous pressure of hatred again. ‘You want yours, do you, Edward?’ she said. ‘You can wait your turn. I want Lewis first. Because my little Lewis is so pretty.”

“And then,” Ricky said, “she turned to me. ‘You’ll get some too, Ricky. And you too, Sears. You all will. But I want Lewis first. I want to show him what that insufferable Stringer Dedham saw when he peeked through my windows.’ And she started to take off her blouse.”

” ‘Please, Miss Galli,’ Edward said,” Sears remembered, “but she told him to shut up and finished taking off her blouse. She wore no bra. Her breasts were in period. Small and tight, like little apples. She looked incredibly lascivious. ‘Now, pretty little Lewis, why don’t we see what you can do?’ She began eating his face again.”

Ricky said, “So we all thought we knew what Stringer had seen through her window. Eva Galli making love with another man. That, as much as her nakedness and what she was doing to Lewis, was a moral shock. We were hideously embarrassed. Finally Sears and I took a shoulder apiece and pulled her away from Lewis. Then she really swore. It was incredibly ugly. ‘Can’t you wait for it, you little so and sos and et ceteras and et ceteras?’ She began unbuttoning her skirt while she swore at us. Edward was nearly in tears. ‘Eva,’ he said, ‘please don’t.’ She dropped her skirt and stepped out of it. ‘What’s wrong, you pansy, afraid to see what I look like?”

“We were miles out of our depth,” Sears continued. “She pulled off her slip. She went dancing up to your uncle. ‘I think I’ll take a bite out of you, little Edward,’ she said and leaned toward him—toward his neck. And he slapped her.”

“Hard,” Ricky said. “And she slapped him back even harder. She put all her weight behind it. It sounded as loud as a gun going off. John and Sears and I practically fainted. We were helpless. We couldn’t move.”

“If we could have, we might have stopped Lewis,” Sears said. “But we stood like tin soldiers and watched him. He took off like an airplane—he just flew across the room and tackled her. He was sobbing and slobbering and wailing—he had snapped. He gave her a real football tackle. They went down like a bombed building. And they made a noise as loud as Black Monday’s crash. Eva never got up.”

“Her head hit the edge of the fireplace,” Ricky said. “Lewis crawled up on her back and kneeled over her and raised his fists, but even he saw the blood coming out of her mouth.”

Both old men were panting.

“Because the silence seemed immense,” Ricky said. “It closed in on us like—like the snow out there. Finally Lewis said, ‘We’ll have to get the police.’ ‘No,’ Edward said. ‘We’ll all go to jail. For murder.’

“Sears and I tried to tell him that no one had committed murder, but Edward said ‘How will you like being disbarred then? Because that’ll happen.’ John checked her for pulse and respiration, but of course there was none. ‘I think it’s murder,’ he said. ‘We’re sunk.’ “

“Ricky asked what we were supposed to do,” Sears said, “and John said, ‘There’s only one thing we can do. Hide her body. Hide it away where it won’t be found.’ We all looked at her body, and at her bloody face, and we all felt defeated by her—she had won. That’s how it felt. Her hatred had provoked us to something very like murder, if not murder under the law. And now we were talking about concealing our act— both legally and morally, a damning step. And we agreed to it.”

Don asked, “Where did you decide to hide her body?”

“There was an old pond five or six miles out of town. A deep pond. It’s not there anymore. It was filled in and they built a shopping center on the land. Must have been twenty feet deep.”

“Lewis’s car had a flat tire,” Sears said, “so we wrapped the body in a sheet and left him there with her and went off into town to find Warren Scales. He had come in to shop with his wife, we knew. He was a good soul, and he liked us. We were going to tell him that we ruined his car, and then buy him a better one— Ricky and I paying the lion’s share.”

“Warren Scales was the father of the farmer who talks about shooting Martians?” Don asked.

“Elmer was Warren’s fourth child and first son. He wasn’t even thought of then. We went along downtown and found Warren and promised to bring his car back in an hour or so. Then we went back to Edward’s and carried the girl down the stairs and put her in the car. Tried to put her in the car.”

Ricky said, “We were so nervous and afraid and numb and we still couldn’t believe what had happened or what we were doing. And we had great difficulty in fitting her into the car. ‘Put her feet in first,’ someone said, and we slid the body along the back seat, and the sheet got all tangled up, and Lewis started to swear about her head being caught and we pulled her halfway out again and John screamed that she moved. Edward called him a damned fool and said he knew she couldn’t move—wasn’t he a doctor?”

“Yet finally we got her in—Ricky and John had to sit in back with the body. We had a nightmarish trip through town.” Sears paused and looked into the fire. “My God. I was driving. I just remembered that. I was so rattled that I couldn’t remember how to get to the pond. I just backtracked and drove around and went four or five miles out of our way. Finally someone told me how to get there. And we got onto that little dirt road which led down to the pond.”

“Everything seemed so sharp,” Ricky said. “Every leaf, every pebble—flat and sharp as a drawing in a book. We got out of that car and the world just hit us between the eyes. ‘Do we have to do this?’ Lewis asked. He was crying. Edward said, ‘I wish to God we didn’t.’ “

“Then Edward got back behind the wheel,” Sears said. “The car was ten-fifteen yards from the pond, which fell off almost immediately to its full depth. He switched on the ignition. I cranked it up. Edward retarded the spark, put it in first, popped the clutch and jumped out. The car crawled forward.”

Both men fell silent again, and looked at each other. “Then—” Ricky said, and Sears nodded. “I don’t know how to say this …”

“Then we saw something,” Sears said. “We hallucinated. Or something.”

“You saw her alive again,” Don said. “I know.”

Ricky looked at him with a tired astonishment. “I guess you do. We saw her face through the rear window. She was staring at us—grinning at us. Jeering at us. We damn near dropped dead. The next second the car splashed into the pond and started to sink. We all ran forward and tried to look into the side windows. I was scared silly. I knew she was dead, back in the apartment—I knew it. John jumped into the water just as the car started to go down. When he came back up he said he had looked through the side window and …”

“And he didn’t see anything on the back seat,” Sears told Don. “He said.”

“The car went down and never came back up. It must be still down there, under thirty thousand tons of fill,” Ricky said.

“Did anything else happen?” Don asked. “Please try to remember. It’s important.”

“Two things did happen,” Ricky said. “But I need another drink, after all that.” He poured some of the whiskey into his glass and drank before resuming. “John Jaffrey saw a lynx on the other side of the pond. Then we all saw it. We jumped about a mile—it made us even guiltier, being seen. By even an animal. It switched its tail and disappeared back into the woods.”

“Fifty years ago, were lynxes common around here?”

“Not at all. Maybe farther north. Well, that was one. The other was that Eva’s house burned, caught on fire. When we walked back to town we saw the neighbors all standing around, watching the volunteers try to put it out.”

“Did any of them see how it started?”

Sears shook his head, and Ricky continued the story. “Apparently it just started by itself. Seeing it made us feel worse, as if we had caused that too.”

“One of the volunteers said something odd,” Sears remembered. “All of us must have looked so haggard, standing around looking at the fire, and the firemen assumed we were worried about the other houses on the street. He said the other buildings were safe because the fire was getting smaller. He said from what he had seen, it looked like part of the house exploded inward— he couldn’t explain it, but that’s the way it looked to him. And the fire was only in that part of the house, up on the second floor. I saw what he was talking about. You could see some of the beams, and they were buckled in toward the fire.”

“And the windows!” Ricky said. “The windows were broken, but there was no glass on the ground—they burst inward.”

“Imploded,” Don said.

Ricky nodded. “Yes. I couldn’t remember the word. I saw a light bulb do it once. Anyhow, the fire ruined the second floor, but the first floor wasn’t touched by it. A year or two later a family bought the place and had it rebuilt. We were all back at work, and people had stopped wondering what had happened to Eva Galli.”

“Except for us,” Sears said. “And we didn’t talk about it. We had a few nasty moments when the developers started filling in that pond fifteen-twenty years ago, but they never found the car. They just buried it. And whatever was inside it.”

“Nothing was inside it,” Don said. “Eva Galli is here now. She’s back. For the second time.”

“Back?” Ricky said, jerking his head up.

“She is back as Anna Mostyn. And before, she came here as Ann-Veronica Moore. As Alma Mobley, she met me in California and killed my brother in Amsterdam.”

“Miss Mostyn?” Sears asked incredulously.

“Is that what killed Edward?” Ricky asked.

“I’m sure it is. He probably saw whatever Stringer saw—she let him see it.”

“I will not believe that Miss Mostyn has anything to do with Eva Galli, Edward or Stringer Dedham,” Sears said. “The idea is ridiculous.”

“What is ‘it’?” Ricky asked. “What did she let him see?”

“Herself changing shape,” Don said. “And I think she planned for him to see it, knowing it would literally scare him to death.” He looked at the two old men. “Here’s another. I think that in all probability she knows we are here tonight. Because we are unfinished business.”

“Changing shape indeed,” Sears said, less charitably. “You’re saying that Eva Galli and Edward’s little actress and our secretary are all the same person?”

“Not a person. The same being. The lynx you saw on the other side of the pond was probably her too. Not a person at all, Sears. When you felt Eva Galli’s hate that day she came to my uncle’s apartment, I think you perceived the truest part of her. I think she came to provoke the five of you into some kind of destruction— to ruin your innocence. I think it backfired, and you injured her. At least that proves it can be done. Now she has come back to make you pay for it. Me, too. She took a detour from me to get my brother, but she knew that eventually I’d turn up here. And then she would be able to get us one by one.”

“Was this the idea you said you’d tell us about?” Ricky asked.

Don nodded.

“What in the world makes you imagine that it is anything but a particularly bad idea?” Sears asked.

“Peter Barnes, for one,” Don answered. “I think this will convince you too, Sears. And if it fails, I’ll read you something from a book that should work. But Peter first. He went to Lewis’s house today, as I told you before.” He recounted everything that had happened to Peter Barnes—the trip to the abandoned station, the death of Freddy Robinson, the death of Jim Hardie in Anna Mostyn’s house and the final, terrible events of the morning. “So I think it’s inescapable that Anna Mostyn is the ‘benefactor’ Gregory Bate mentioned. She animates Gregory and Fenny—Peter says he knew intuitively that Gregory was owned by something, that he was like a savage dog obeying an evil master. Together, they want to destroy the whole town. Just like Dr. Rabbitfoot in the novel I was planning.”

“They’re trying to make that novel come true?” Ricky asked.

“I think so. They also called themselves nightwatchers. They’re playful. Think of those initials. Anna Mostyn, Alma Mobley, Ann-Veronica Moore. That was playfulness—she wanted us to notice the similarity. I’m sure she sent Gregory and Fenny because Sears had seen them before. Or years ago, they appeared to him because she knew she’d be able to use them now. And it’s no accident that when I saw Gregory in California, I thought of him being like a werewolf.”

“Why no accident, if that’s what you’re claiming he is?” Sears asked.

“I’m not claiming that. But creatures like Anna Mostyn or Eva Galli are behind every ghost story and supernatural tale ever written,” Don said. “They are the originals of everything that frightens us in the supernatural. I think in stories we make them manageable. But the stories at least show that we can destroy them. Gregory Bate isn’t a werewolf any more than Anna Mostyn is. He is what people have described as a werewolf. Or as a vampire. He feeds on living bodies. He sold himself to his benefactor for immortality.”

Don took up one of the books he had brought with him. “This is a reference book, the Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend. There’s a long entry under ‘Shapeshifting,’ written by a professor named R. D. Jameson. Listen to this: ‘Although no census of shapeshifters has been taken, the number of them found in all parts of the world is astronomical.’ He says they appear in the folklore of all peoples. He goes on for three columns—it’s one of the longest entries in the book. I’m afraid it isn’t actually of much help to us, apart from showing that these beings have been talked about in folk history for thousands of years, because Jameson doesn’t recount ways, if any, in which the legends say these creatures can be destroyed. But listen to the way he ends the entry: ‘The studies made of shapeshifting foxes, otters, etc., are sound but miss the central problem of shapeshifting itself. Shapeshifting in folklore is clearly connected with hallucination in morbid psychology. Until the phenomena in both areas have been scrutinized with care, we are not able to go beyond the general observation that nothing is, in fact, what it seems to be.’ “

“Amen,” said Ricky.

“Precisely. Nothing is what it seems to be. These beings can convince you that you are losing your mind. That’s happened to each of us—we’ve seen and felt things we argued ourselves out of later. It can’t be true, we tell ourselves; such things do not happen. But they do happen, and we did see them. You did see them. You did see Eva Galli sit up on the car seat, and you saw her appear as a lynx a moment later.”

“Just suppose,” Sears said, “that one of us had a rifle along that day, and had shot the lynx. What would have happened?”

“I think you would have seen something extraordinary, but I can’t imagine what it would have been. Maybe it would have died. Maybe it would have shifted to some preferred form—maybe, if it had been in great pain, it would have gone through a series of changes. And maybe it would have been helpless.”

“A lot of maybes,” Ricky said.

“That’s all we have.”

“If we accept your theory.”

“If you have a better one I’ll listen to it. But through Peter Barnes we know what happened to Freddy Robinson and Jim Hardie. Also, I checked with her agent and found out some things about Ann-Veronica Moore. She came literally from nowhere. There is no record at all of her in the town she said she was born in. Because there couldn’t be—there never was an Ann-Veronica Moore until the day she enrolled in acting class. She just arrived, plausible and well documented, at the door of a theater, knowing it was a way to get to Edward Wanderley.”

“Then these—these things you think exist—are even more dangerous. They have wit,” Sears said.

“Yes, they do have wit. They love jokes, and they make longterm plans, and like the Indians’ Manitou, they love to flaunt themselves. This second book gives a good example of that.” He picked it up and showed the spine to the two men. “I Came This Way, by Robert Mobley. He was the painter Alma claimed was her father. I made the mistake of never looking at his autobiography until today. Now I think that she wanted me to read it and discover that in calling herself Mobley she was making a pun on an earlier appearance. The fourth chapter is called ‘Dark Clouds’—it’s not a very well-written autobiography, but I want to read you a few paragraphs from that chapter.”

Don opened the book to a marked page, and neither of the two old men stirred.

” ‘Even in a life so apparently fortunate as mine has been, dark and troubling periods have intruded and marked months and years with indelible grief. The year 1958 was one such; only by hurling myself with the utmost concentration into my work, I believe, did I maintain my sanity during that year. Knowing the sunny watercolors and rigid formal experimentation in oils which had been characteristic of my work during the five years previous, people have often questioned me about the stylistic transformation which led to my so-called Supernatural Period. I can say now only that my mind was very likely unbalanced, and the violent disorder of my emotions found expression in the work I forced myself to do.

” ‘The first painful event of the year was the death of my mother, Jessica Osgood Mobley, whose affection and wise advice had …’ I’ll skip a page or two here.” Don scanned the page, and turned it over. “Here we are. ‘The second, even more shattering loss was the death by his own hand in his eighteenth year of my elder son, Shelby. I shall mention here only the circumstances surrounding Shelby’s death which led directly to my work of the so-called Supernatural Period, for this book is chiefly an account of my life in painting: yet I must assert that my son’s was a gay, innocent and vibrant spirit, and I am certain that only a great moral shock, the apprehension of a hitherto unsuspected evil, could have led him to take his life.

” ‘Shortly after the death of my mother, a spacious house near our own was sold to an evidently prosperous, attractive woman in her mid-forties whose sole family consisted of a niece of fourteen who had become her ward after the death of the girl’s parents. Mrs. Florence de Peyser was friendly and reserved, a woman with charming manners who wintered in Europe as my own parents had: in fact she seemed altogether more representative of another age than our own, and for a time I speculated about doing her portrait in watercolor. She collected paintings, as I saw when invited to her house, and was even knowledgeable about my own work— though my abstractions of the period would have fitted oddly with her French Symbolists! But for all Mrs. de Peyser’s charm, the principle attraction of her household soon became her niece. Amy Monckton’s beauty was almost ethereal, and I believe that she was the most feminine being I have ever seen. Every action she undertook, be it merely entering a room or pouring a cup of tea, spoke a volume of quiet grace. The child was an enchantment, entirely self-possessed and modest— as delicate as (but perhaps more intelligent than) Pansy Osmond, for whose sake Henry James’s Isobel Archer sacrificed herself so willingly. Amy was a welcome guest in our home: both of my sons were drawn to her.’

“And there she is,” Don said. “A fourteen-year-old Alma Mobley, under the guidance of Mrs. de Peyser.

Poor Mobley didn’t know what he was letting into his house. He goes on: ‘Though Amy was the same age as Whitney, my younger son, it was Shelby—sensitive Shelby—who became closer to her. At the time, I thought it was proof of Shelby’s politesse, that he gave so much time to a girl four years younger than himself. And even when I picked up clear signs of affection (poor Shelby blushed when the girl’s name was mentioned), I could never have imagined that they indulged in any behavior of a morbid, degrading or precocious kind. In truth, it was one of the delights of my life to observe my tall, handsome son walking through our garden with the pretty child. And I was not surprised, though perhaps a bit amused, when Shelby confided to me that when she was eighteen and he twenty-two, he would marry Amy Monckton.

” ‘After several months I noticed that Shelby had become increasingly withdrawn. He was no longer interested in his friends, and in the last months of his life, he concentrated exclusively on the de Peyser household and Miss Monckton. They had lately been joined by a servant of sinister and Latin appearance named Gregorio. I distrusted Gregorio on sight, and attempted to warn Mrs. de Peyser about him, but was informed that she had known him and his family for many years, and that he was an excellent chauffeur. I felt I could say no more.

” ‘In this short account I can say only that my son became haggard in appearance and secretive in manner during the last two weeks of his life. I played the heavy parent for the first time in my life and forbade him to communicate with the de Peyser household. His attitude led me to believe that under Gregorio’s influence, he and the child were experimenting with drugs—perhaps also with illicit sensuality. That noxious and debasing weed, marijuana, was even then to be found in the lower sections of New Orleans. And I feared also that they experimented too with some gimcrack form of Creole mysticism. That sort of thing suits the drug milieu.

” ‘Whatever Shelby had been drawn into, its results were tragic. He disobeyed my orders and continued clandestinely to frequent the de Peyser house; and on the last day of August he returned home, took the service revolver I kept in a drawer in my bedroom, and shot himself. It was I, painting in my studio, who heard the shot and discovered his body.

” ‘What occurred next must have been the result of shock. I did not think to call the police or an ambulance: I wandered outside, imagining somehow that help would already have arrived. I found myself on the road outside our house. I was looking at Mrs. de Peyser’s residence. What I saw there nearly made me lose consciousness.

” ‘I imagined I saw the chauffeur Gregorio standing at an upper window, sneering down at me. Malevolence seemed to flow from him. He was exultant I tried to scream and could not. I looked down and saw something worse. Amy Monckton stood by the side of the house, similarly staring at me, but with a calm, expressionless gaze and a grave face. Her feet were not touching the ground! Amy appeared to be floating nine or ten inches above the grass. Exposed to them, I felt an utter terror, and pressed my hands to my face. When I removed them and could see again, they were gone.

” ‘Mrs. de Peyser and Amy sent flowers to Shelby’s funeral, but by then had gone to California. Though I was and am now convinced that I had imagined my last sight of the child and the chauffeur, I burned the flowers rather than let them adorn Shelby’s coffin. The paintings of my so-called Supernatural Period, which I propose now to discuss, flowed from this experience.’ “

Don looked at the two old men. “I read that for the first time today. You see what I mean by flaunting themselves? They want their victims to know, or at least to suspect, what sort of things happened to them. Robert Mobley got a shock that nearly unhinged him, and he did the best paintings of his life; Alma wanted me to read about it and know that she had lived in New Orleans with Florence de Peyser under another name and killed a boy as surely as she killed my brother.”

“Why hasn’t Anna Mostyn killed us already?” Sears asked. “She’s had every opportunity. I can’t even pretend not to be convinced by what you’ve told us, but why has she waited? Why aren’t the three of us as dead as the others?”

Ricky cleared his throat. “Edward’s actress told Stella that I’d be a good enemy. I think what she was waiting for was the moment when we knew exactly what we were up against.”

“You mean now,” Sears said.

“Do you have a plan?” Ricky asked.

“No, just a few ideas. I’m going to go back to the hotel and pick up my things and move back here. Maybe in the tapes she made with my uncle there’ll be some information we can use. And I want to break into Anna Mostyn’s home. I hope you will come with me. We might find something there.”

“What you’ll find in there is a long walk on a short pier,” Sears said.

“No, I don’t think they’ll be there anymore. The three of them will know that we’ll try the house first. They’ll have found somewhere else already.”

Don looked at Sears and Ricky. “There is just one thing left to say. As Sears asked, what would have happened if you’d shot the lynx? That’s what we’ll have to find out. This time we’ll have to shoot the lynx, whatever that will mean.”

He smiled at them. “It’s going to be a hell of a winter.”

Sears James rumbled something affirmative. Ricky asked, “What do you suppose the odds are that we three and Peter Barnes will ever see the end of it?”

“Rotten,” Sears answered. “But you’ve certainly done what we asked you here to do.”

“Do we tell anybody?” Ricky asked. “Should we try to convince Hardesty?”

That’s absurd,” Sears snorted. “We’d end up in the booby hatch.”

“Let them think they’re fighting Martians,” Don said. “Sears is right. But I’ll give you a much better bet than the one you gave me.”

“What’s that?”

“I bet your perfect secretary won’t come to work tomorrow.”

When the old men left him in his uncle’s house, Don built up the fire and sat in Ricky’s warm place on the couch. While snow piled up on the roof and tried to wind its way around doors and window frames, he remembered a warm-chilly night, the smell of burning leaves, a sparrow lighting on a rail and a pale already loved face shining at him with luminous eyes from a doorway. And a naked girl looking out of a black window and pronouncing words he only now understood: “You are a ghost.” You Donald. You. It was the unhappy perception at the center of every ghost story.

“Stop babbling, Ricky,” he said, and blasted his horn and rolled across Wheat Row to the north end of the square.

“You didn’t have to blow the horn, that was a green light,” Ricky pointed out.

“Humpf. Everybody else is going too fast to stop.”

Don, in the back seat, held his breath and prayed that the traffic lights on the other end of the square would turn green before Sears reached them. When they passed the steps to the hotel, he saw the lights facing Main Street flash to amber; the lights switched to green just as Sears put the entire palm of his hand down on the button and floated the long car like a galleon onto Main Street.

Even with the headlights on, the only objects truly visible were traffic lights and the red and green pinpoints of illumination on the Christmas tree. All else dissolved in swirling white. The few approaching cars appeared first as streamers of yellow light, then as shapeless forms like large animals: Don could see their colors only when they were immediately alongside, a proximity Sears acknowledged with another imperious blast of the Lincoln’s horn.

“What do we do when we get there, if we ever do?” Sears asked.

“Just have a look around. It might help.” Ricky looked at him in a way that was as good as speaking, and Don added, “No. I don’t think she’ll be there. Or Gregory.”

“Did you bring a weapon?”

“I don’t own a weapon. Did you?”

Ricky nodded; held up a kitchen knife. “Foolish, I know, but …”

Don did not think it was foolish; for a moment he wished that he too had a knife, if not a flamethrower and a grenade.

“Just out of curiosity, what are you thinking about at this moment?” Sears asked.

“Me?” Don asked. The car began to drift slowly sideways, and Sears turned the wheel very slightly to correct it.

“Yes.”

“I was just remembering something that used to happen back when I was a prep school student in the Midwest. When we had to choose our colleges, the staff would give us talks about ‘the East.’ ‘The East’ was where they wanted us to go—it was simple snobbery, and my school was very old-fashioned in that way, but the school would look better if a big proportion of its seniors went on to Harvard or Princeton or Cornell— or even a state university on the East Coast. Everybody pronounced the word the way a Muslim must pronounce the word Mecca. And that’s where we are now.”

“Did you go East?” Ricky asked. “I don’t know if Edward ever mentioned it.”

“No. I went to California, where they believed in mysticism. They didn’t drown witches, they gave them talk shows.”

“Omar never got around to plowing Montgomery Street,” Sears said; Don, surprised, turned to his window and saw that while he had talked they had reached the end of Anna Mostyn’s street. Sears was right. On Maple, where they were, hard-packed snow about two inches deep showed the treads and deep grooves of Omar Norris’s plow; it was like a white riverbed cut through high white banks. On Montgomery, the snow lay four feet deep. Already filling up with fresh snowfall, deep indentations down the middle of the road indicated where two or three people had fought through to Maple.

Sears turned off the ignition, leaving the parking lights on. “If we’re going through with this, I see no point in waiting.”

The three men stepped out onto the glassy surface of Maple Street. Sears turned up the fur collar of his coat and sighed. “To think I once balked at stepping into the two or three inches of snow on Our Vergil’s field.”

“I hate the thought of going into that house again,” Ricky said.

All three could see the house through the swirls of falling snow. “I’ve never actually broken into a house before,” Sears said. “How do you propose to do it?”

“Peter said that Jim Hardie broke a pane of glass in the back door. All we have to do is reach in and turn the knob.

“And if we see them? If they are waiting for us?”

“Then we try to put up a better fight than Sergeant York,” Ricky said. “I suppose. Do you remember Sergeant York, Don?”

“No,” Don said. “I don’t even remember Audie Murphy. Let’s go.” He stepped into the drift left by the plow. His forehead was already so cold it felt like a metal plate grafted onto his skin. When he and Ricky were both on top of the drift they reached down to Sears, who stood with his arms extended like a small boy, and pulled him forward. Sears lumbered forward and up like a whale taking a reef, and then all three men stepped from the top of the drift into the deep snow on Montgomery Street.

The snow came up past their knees. Don realized that the two old men were waiting for him to begin, so he turned around and began to move up the street toward Anna Mostyn’s house, doing his best to step in the deep depressions made by an earlier walker. Ricky followed, using the same prints. Sears, off to the side and stumping through unbroken snow, came last. The bottom of his black coat swept along after him like a train.

It took them twenty minutes to reach the house. When all three were standing in front of the building, Don again saw the two older men looking at him and knew that they would not move until he made them do it. “At least it’ll be warmer inside,” he said.

“I just hate the thought of going in there again,” Ricky said, not very loudly.

“So you said,” Sears reminded him. “Around the back, Don?”

“Around the back.”

Once again he led the way. He could hear Ricky sneezing behind him as each of them plowed on through snow nearly waist-high. Like Jim Hardie and Peter Barnes, they stopped at the side window and looked in; saw only a dark empty chamber. “Deserted,” Don said, and continued around to the rear of the house.

He found the window Jim Hardie had broken, and just as Ricky joined him on the back step, reached in and turned the handle of the kitchen door. Breathing heavily, Sears joined them.

“Let’s get in out of the snow,” Sears said. “I’m freezing.” It was one of the bravest statements Don had ever heard, and he had to answer it with a similar courage. He pushed the door and stepped into the kitchen of Anna Mostyn’s house. Sears and Ricky came in close behind him.

“Well, here we are,” Ricky said. “To think it’s been fifty years, or near enough. Should we split up?”

“Afraid to, Ricky?” Sears said, impatiently brushing snow off his coat. “I’ll believe in these ghouls when I see them. You and Don can look at the rooms upstairs and on the landings. I’ll do this floor and the basement”

And if the earlier statement had been an act of courage, this, Don knew, was a demonstration of friendship: none of them wanted to be alone in the house. “All right” he said. “I’ll be surprised if we find anything too. We might as well start.”

Sears led as they left the kitchen and went into the hall. “Go on,” he said—commanded. “I’ll be fine. This way will save time, and the sooner we get it over with, the better.” Don was already on the stairs, but Ricky had turned questioningly back to Sears. “If you see anything, give a shout.”

“So were Alma’s rooms,” Don said. He and Ricky could hear Sears’s footsteps on the boards of the lower room. The sound brought a new awareness flooding across Ricky’s features. “What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me. Your whole face changed.”

Ricky blushed. “This is the house we dream about. Our nightmares are set here. Bare boards, empty rooms —the sound of something moving around, like Sears just now, down below. That’s how the nightmare begins. When we dream it, we’re in a bedroom—up there.” He pointed up the staircase. “On the top floor.” He went up a few steps. “I have to go up there. I have to see the room. It might help to—to stop the nightmare.”

“I’ll go with you,” Don said.

When they reached the landing, Ricky stopped short “Didn’t Peter tell you this was where—?” He pointed to a dark smear down the side of the wall.

“Where Bate killed Jim Hardie.” Don swallowed involuntarily. “Let’s not stay here any longer than we have to.”

“I don’t mind splitting up,” Ricky hastily said. “Why don’t you take Eva’s old bedroom and the rooms on the next landing, and I’ll prowl around on the top floor? It’ll go faster that way. If I find anything, I’ll call for you. I want to get out of here too—I can’t stand being here.”

Don nodded, agreeing with him wholeheartedly. Ricky continued up the stairs, and Don climbed to a half-landing and swung open the door to Eva Galli’s bedroom.

“Ricky?” he said, and knew that his voice was no louder than the whispers behind him. The dim light guttered; and from the moment he could no longer see the walls, Don felt that he was in a much larger room —the walls and ceiling had flown out, expanded, leaving him in a psychic space he did not know how to leave. A cold mouth pressed against his ear and said or thought the word “Welcome.” He swung around to the source of the sound, thinking belatedly that the mouth, like the greeting, had been only a thought. His fist met air.

As if playfully to punish him, someone tripped him, and he landed painfully on hands and knees. A carpet met his hands. This gradually took on color—dark blue —and he realized that he could see again. Don lifted his head and saw a white-haired man in a blazer the color of the carpet and gray slacks above mirror-polished black loafers standing before him: the blazer covered a prosperous little paunch. The man smiled down in a rueful fashion and offered him a hand; behind him other men moved. Don knew immediately who he was.

“Have a little accident, Don?” he asked. “Here. Take my hand.” He pulled him upright. “Glad you could make it. We were waiting for you.”

“I know who you are,” Don said. “Your name is Robert Mobley.”

“Why, of course. And you read my memoir. Though I wish you could have been more complimentary about the writing. No matter, my boy, no matter. No apologies necessary.”

Don was looking around the room, which had a long, slightly pitched floor ending at a small stage. There were no doors he could see, and the pale walls rose almost to cathedral height: way up, tiny lights flashed and winked. Under this false sky, fifty or sixty people milled about, as if at a party. At the top end of the room, where a small bar had been set up, Don saw Lewis Benedikt, wearing a khaki jacket and carrying a bottle of beer. He was talking to a gray-suited old man with sunken cheeks and bright, tragic eyes who must have been Dr. John Jaffrey.

“Your son must be here,” Don guessed.

“Shelby? Indeed he is. That’s Shelby over there.” He nodded in the direction of a boy in his late teens, who smiled back at them. “We’re all here for the entertainment which promises to be very exciting.”

“And you were waiting for me.”

“Well, Donald, without you none of this could have been arranged.”

“I’m getting out of here.”

“Leave? Why, my boy, you can’t! You’ll have to let the show roll on, I’m afraid—you’ve already noticed there are no doors here. And there’s nothing to fear— nothing here can harm you. It’s all entertainment, you see—mere shadows and pictures. Only that.”

“Go to hell,” Don said. “This is some kind of charade she set up.”

“Amy Monckton, you mean? Why, she’s only a child. You can’t imagine—”

But Don was already walking away toward the side of the theater. “It’s no good, dear boy,” Mobley called after him. “You’re going to have to stay with us until it’s over.” Don pressed his hands against the wall, aware that everybody in the room was looking at him. The wall was covered in a pale felt-like material, but beneath the fabric was something cold and hard as iron. He looked up to the winking dots of light. Then he pounded the wall with the flat of his hand—no depression, no hidden door, nothing but a flat sealed surface.

The invisible lights dimmed, as did the imitation stars. Two men took him, one holding an arm, the other a shoulder. They forcibly turned him to face the stage, on which a single spotlight shone. In the middle of the spot stood a placard board. The first placard read:

It was a high-angled shot of Montgomery Street, taken from over the roof of Anna Mostyn’s house. Immediately after he recognized the setting, the characters appeared. He, Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne struggled up the middle of Montgomery Street: he and Ricky looking at the house for as long as they were in frame, Sears looking down as if consciously to give contrast to the shot. There was no sound, and Don could not remember what they had said to each other before marching toward the house. Three faces in fast-cut closeups: their eyebrows crusted with white, they looked like soldiers conducting a mopping-up operation in some Arctic war. Ricky’s tired face was obviously that of a man with a bad cold. He was suffering: it was much clearer to Don now than it had been outside the house.

Then a shot of his reaching in through the broken window. An exterior camera followed the three men into the house, tracking them through the kitchen and into the dark hallway. More unheard conversation; a third camera picked up Don and Ricky climbing the stairs, Ricky pointing to the bloodstain. On Ricky’s civilized face was the expression of pain he had seen. They parted, and the camera left Don just as he pushed at the door to Anna Mostyn’s bedroom.

Don uneasily watched the camera following Ricky up the stairs. A jump-cut to the end of an empty corridor: Ricky seen in silhouette pausing on a landing, then going up to the top floor. Another jump cut: Ricky entering the top floor, trying the first door and entering a room.

Inside the room now: Ricky came through the door with the camera watching him like a hidden assailant. Ricky breathing heavily, looking at the room with open mouth and widening eyes—the room of the nightmare, then, as he had guessed. The camera began to creep toward him. Then it, or the creature it represented, sprang.

Two hands gripped Ricky’s neck, choking him. Ricky fought, pushing at his murderer’s wrists, but was too weak to break his grip. The hands tightened, and Ricky began to die: not cleanly, as on the television programs this “commercial” imitated, but messily, with streaming eyes and bleeding tongue. His back arched helplessly, fluids streamed from his eyes and nose, his face began to turn black.

Peter Barnes said they can make you see things, Don thought, that’s all they’re doing now …

Ricky Hawthorne died in front of him, in color on a twenty-six inch screen.

Maybe this is where it ends, he thought, and went through into the bedroom.

And forced himself to stand still: even the breath in his body wanted to flee. It was the room of the dream, and every atom of it seemed pervaded with the Chowder Society’s misery. Here they had each sweated and gone cold with fear; on this bed—now with a single gray blanket thrown over the bare mattress—each had struggled helplessly to move. In the prison of that wretched bed they had waited for life to end. The room stood only for death: it was an emblem of death, and its bare cold bleakness was its image.

He remembered that Sears was, or soon would be, in the cellar. But there was no cellar-beast: just as there was no sweating Ricky Hawthorne pinned to the bed. He turned around slowly, taking in all of the room.

On a side wall hung the only anomaly, a small mirror.

(Mirror, mirror on the wall … who’s the scaredest of them all?)

(Not I, said the little red hen.)

Ricky went around the bed to approach the mirror. Set opposite the window, it reflected a white section of sky. Tiny flakes of snow drifted across its surface and disappeared at the bottom of the frame.

When Ricky got closer to the mirror a whisper of breeze slid against his face. He bent forward and a sparse handful of snowflakes spun out to touch his cheek.

He made the mistake of looking directly into what he now confusedly thought must be a small window open directly to the weather.

A face appeared before him, a face he knew, wild and lost; then he glimpsed Elmer Scales moving clumsily through the snow; carrying a shotgun. Like the first apparition, the farmer was splashed with blood; the jug-eared face had starved down to skin-covered bone, but in Scales’s fierce gauntness was something which forced Ricky to think he saw something beautiful— Elmer always wanted to look at something beautiful: this bubbled to the surface of Ricky’s mind and broke. Elmer was screaming into the blaring storm, lifting his gun and shooting at a small form, flipping it over in a spray of blood …

Then Elmer and his target blew away and he was looking at Lewis’s back. A naked woman stood in front of Lewis, soundlessly mouthing words. Scripture, he read, then see Scripture in the pond, Lewis? The woman was not living, nor was she beautiful, but Ricky saw the lineaments of returned desire in the dead face and knew he was looking at Lewis’s wife. He tried to back away and escape the vision, but found he could not move.

Just when the woman closed on Lewis, both she and he melting into unrecognizable forms, Ricky saw Peter Barnes crouching in a corner of the storm. No—in a building, some building he knew but could not recognize. Some long-familiar corner, a worn carpet, a curved tan wall with a dim light in a sconce … a man like a wolf was bending over terrified Peter Barnes, grinning at him with white prominent teeth. This time there was no melting, merciful snowfall to hide the dreadful thing from Ricky Hawthorne: the creature leaned over cowering Peter Barnes, picked him up and like a lion killing a gazelle, broke his back. Lionlike, it bit into the boy’s skin and began to eat.

Now Don was banging the walls upstairs—looking for a secret panel, Sears imagined, and shook his head. That all three of them were still alive and prowling through the house proved to Sears that Eva had moved on and left nothing behind.

He opened the door to the cellar. Wooden steps led down into complete blackness. Sears flicked the switch, and a bulb at the top of the steps went on. Its light revealed the steps and concrete floor at their bottom, but seemed to extend only seven or eight feet from the bottom of the steps. Apparently it was the only light; which meant, Sears realized, that the cellar was unused. The Robinsons had never turned the basement into a den or family room.

He went down a few steps and peered into the murk. What he could see looked like any Milburn cellar: extending under the whole of the house, about seven feet high, with walls of painted concrete block. The old furnace sat near the wall at the far end, casting a deep many-armed shadow which met and melted smoothly into the gloom; on one side stood the tall tubular cylinder for hot water and two disconnected iron sinks.

Sears heard a thump from upstairs, and his heart leaped: he was vastly more nervous than he wished to acknowledge. Tilting his head back toward the top of the stairs, he listened for further noises or sounds of distress, but heard none: probably no more than a slamming door.

Come down and play in the dark, Sears.

Sears took a step further down and saw his gigantic shadow advance along the concrete floor. Come on, Sears.

He did not hear the words spoken in his mind, he saw no images or pictures: but he had been commanded, and he followed his bloated shadow down onto the concrete floor.

Come and see the toys I left for you.

He reached the concrete floor and experienced a sick thrill of pleasure that was not his own.

Sears spun around, afraid that something was coming for him from under the wooden staircase. Light banded the concrete in stripes, streaming between the wood: nothing was there. He would have to leave the protection of the light and look into the corners of the cellar.

He moved forward, wishing wholeheartedly that he too had brought a knife, and his shadow melted away into dark. Then all doubt left him. “Oh, my God,” he said.

John Jaffrey was stepping out into the shadowy light beside the furnace. “Sears, old friend,” he said. His voice was toneless. “Thank heavens you’re here. They told me you would be, but I didn’t know—I mean I—” He shook his head. “It’s all been so confused.”

“Stay away from me,” Sears said.

“I saw Milly,” John said. “And do you know, Milly just won’t let me in the house. But I warned her. I mean, I told her to warn you—and the others. About something. Can’t remember now.” He lifted his sunken face and twisted his mouth into a ghastly smile. “I went over. Isn’t that what Fenny said to you? In your story? That’s right. I went over, and now Milly won’t—won’t open—ah—” He raised his hand to his forehead. “Oh, it’s just awful, Sears. Can’t you help me?”

Sears was backing away from him, unable to speak.

“Please. Funny. Here in this place again. They made me come here—wait for you. Please help me, Sears. Thank heavens you’re here.”

Jaffrey lurched into the light, and Sears saw fine gray dust covering his face and outstretched hands, his bare feet. Jaffrey was moving in a painful, senile circle, his eyes too seemingly covered by a mixture of dust and drying tears—this spoke of more pain than his addled words and shuffling walk, and Sears, who remembered Peter Barnes’s story about Lewis, at last felt more pity than fear.

“Yes, John,” he said, and Dr. Jaffrey, apparently unable to see in the light from the naked bulb, turned toward his voice.

Sears went forward to touch Dr. Jaffrey’s extended hand. At the last minute he closed his eyes. A tingling sensation passed through his fingers and traveled halfway up his arm. When he opened his eyes, John was no longer there.

He stumbled into the staircase, painfully bumping his ribs. Toys. Sears began mechanically to rub his hand against his coat: would he have to find more creatures shambling and dazed like John?

But no, that was not what he would have to do. Sears soon discovered the reason for the plural noun. He walked out of the light toward the furnace and saw a heap of clothing dumped by the far wall. A pile of discarded boots and rags: it was eerily like the scrubby bodies of the sheep on Elmer Scales’s farm. He wanted to turn away: all the truly bad things had begun back there, with him and Ricky freezing on a cold white hill. Sears saw a flaccid hand, a swirl of blond hair. Then he recognized one of the rags as Christina Barnes’s coat; it lay flat, nearly empty, flung over a second flattened and emptied body, and it enveloped a gray deflated thing ending in blond hair which was Christina’s body.

Instinctively, the shout escaping him, he called for the other two; then Sears forced control on himself and went to the bottom of the stairs and began methodically, loudly, shamelessly to repeat their names.

“So do you,” Sears said.

“Yeah. Suppose I do. I never saw bodies like those two, exactly. Even Freddy Robinson wasn’t that bad. You ever seen bodies like that, Sears James? Hey?”

Sears shook his head.

“No. You’re damn right Nobody ever did. And I’m gonna have to store ’em up in the jail until the meat wagon can get in here. And I’m the poor son of a bitch who has to take Mrs. Hardie and Mr. Barnes along to see those goddamned things to identify them. Unless you’d like to do that for me, Mr. James?”

“It’s your job, Walt,” Sears said.

“Shit. My job, is it? My job is finding out who did what to those people—and you two old buzzards just sit there, don’t you? You found ’em by accident I suppose. Just happened to break into that particular house, just happened to be taking a walk on a goddamned day like this, I suppose, and just thought you’d try a little housebreaking—Jesus, I oughta lock all three of you in the same cell with them. Along with torn-up Lewis Benedikt and that nigger de Souza and the Griffen boy who froze to death because his hippy mommy and daddy were too cheap to put a heater in his room. God damn. That’s what I ought to do, all right.” Hardesty, now entirely unable to hide his anger, spat into the fireplace and kicked at the fender. “Jesus, I live in that fucking jail, I really oughta haul you three assholes along and see how you like it.”

“Walt,” Sears said. “Cool down.”

“Sure. By God, if you two weren’t nothin’ but a couple of hundred-year-old lawyers with teeth in the palms of your hands, I’d do it.”

“I mean, Walt,” Sears calmly said, “if you will stop insulting us for a moment, that we’ll tell you who killed Jim Hardie and Mrs. Barnes. And Lewis.”

“You will. Hot damn. Guess I don’t have to get out the rubber hoses after all.”

Silence for a moment: then Hardesty said, “Well? I’m still here.”

“It was the woman who calls herself Anna Mostyn.”

“Swell. Just dandy. Okay. Anna Mostyn. Okay. It was her house, so she’s the one. Good work. Now. What did she do, suck ’em dry, like a hound’ll do to an egg? And who held ’em down, because I know no woman could have taken that crazy Hardie kid by herself. Huh?”

“She did have help,” Sears said. “It was a man who calls himself Gregory Bate or Benton. Now hold on to yourself, Walt, because here comes the difficult part. Bate has been dead for almost fifty years. And Anna Mostyn—”

He stopped. Hardesty had clamped both eyes shut.

Ricky took it up. “Sheriff, in a way you were right about all this from the beginning. Remember when we looked at Elmer Scales’s sheep? And you told us about other incidents, lots of them, that happened in the sixties?”

Hardesty’s bloodshot eyes flew open.

“It’s the same thing,” Ricky said. “That is, we think it’s probably the same thing. But here, they’re out to kill people.”

“So what’s this Anna Mostyn?” Hardesty asked, his body rigid. “A ghost? A vampire?”

“Something like that,” Sears said. “A shapeshifter, but those words will do.”

“Where is she now?”

“That’s why we went to her house. To see if we could find anything.”

“And that’s what you’re gonna tell me. Nothing more.”

“There is no more,” Sears said.

“I wonder if anyone can lie like a hundred-year-old lawyer,” Hardesty said, and spat once more into the fire. “Okay. Now let me tell you something. I’m going to put out a bulletin on this Anna Mostyn, and that’s all she wrote. That’s all I’m gonna do. You two old buzzards and this kid here can spend the rest of the winter ghost-hunting, for all I’m concerned. You’re screwball—as far as I’m concerned, you’re plumb outa your heads. And if I get some goddamned killer who drinks beer and eats hamburgers and takes his kid out for a drive on Sundays, then I’m gonna call you up and laugh in your faces. And I’ll see that people around here never stop laughing when they hear your names. You understand me?”

“Don’t shout at us, Walt,” Sears said. “I’m sure we all understand what you said. And we understand one thing more.”

“Just what the hell is that?”

“That you’re frightened, Sheriff. But you have a lot of company.”

“Um.”

“Did you go lots of places?”

“Yes.”

“How come you can hang around Milburn so long? Don’t you have a ship to get back to?”

“Shore leave.”

“Why don’t you ever want to do anything but go to the movies?”

“No reason.”

“Well, I just like being with you.”

“Um.”

“But why don’t you ever take off your shades?”

“No reason.”

“Someday I’ll take them off.”

“Later.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“A terrible thing. I don’t want to tell you now. There’ll be time when it’s all over.”

“You’re frightening me.”

“I’m frightened too.”

“Well, I’m frightened because you’re frightened.” For a time, the Hawthornes simply held each other.

“You know what killed Lewis, don’t you?”

“I think so.”

“Well, I discovered an astonishing thing about myself. I can be a coward. So please don’t tell me. I know I asked, but don’t. I just want to know it’ll end.”

“Sears and I will make it end. With young Wanderley’s help.”

“He can help you?”

“He can. He has already.”

“If only this terrible snow would stop.”

“Yes. But it won’t.”

“Ricky, have I given you an awful time?” Stella propped herself up on an elbow to look into his eyes.

“A worse time than most women would,” he said. “But I rarely wanted any other women.”

“I am sorry that I ever had to cause you pain. Ricky, I’ve never cared for any man as much as I have cared for you. Despite my adventures. You know that’s all over, don’t you?”

“I guessed.”

“He was an appalling man. He was in my car, and I just overwhelmingly realized how much better than he you were. So I made him get out.” Stella smiled. “He shouted at me. It seems I am a bitch.”

“At times you certainly are.”

“At times. You know, he must have found Lewis’s body right after that.”

“Ah. I wondered what he was doing up there.”

Silence: Ricky held his wife’s shoulder, aware of her timeless profile beside him. If she had not looked like that could he have endured it so long? Yet if she had not looked like that, she would not have been Stella— it was an impossible speculation.

“Tell me something, baby,” she breathed. “Who was this other woman you used to want?”

Ricky laughed; then both of them, at least for a time, were laughing.

But even in an immobilized town, things happen. Dozens of cars went off the roads and stayed nose down for days, buried under fresh drifts. Walter Barnes sat in his television room nursing a succession of drinks and watched an endless round of giveaway shows with the sound turned off. Peter cooked their meals. “I could understand a lot of things,” Barnes told his son, “but I sure as hell can’t understand that.” And went back to his quiet, nonstop drinking. One Friday night, Clark Mulligan put the first reel of Night of the Living Dead back in the projector for the Saturday-noon showing, turned off all the lights, flipped the broken lock on the fire door and decided once again not to bother with it and went back out into the blizzard to find Penny Draeger’s body lying half-covered with snow beside an abandoned car. He slapped her face and rubbed her wrists, but nothing he could do would put breath back in her throat or change the expression on her face—G had finally allowed her to take off his dark glasses.

And Elmer Scales finally met the man from Mars.

Elmer’s chair faced his picture window, and with the lights off, he could see about as far as the barn— a big shape in the darkness. Except for where he had shoveled, the snow was waist-high: enough to slow down any sort of creature who was after more of his animals. Elmer did not need light to scribble down the random lines he thought of: by now he did not even have to look at the paper. He could write while staring out the window.

Sometimes it seemed his father was there in the dark room with him, trying to explain something about the old plow horses he’d finally replaced with a John Deere, trying to say that those were good horses, you got to care for them boy, they done good by us, those five kids you got could get a lot of pleasure outa nice old horses like that—horses dead for twenty-five years! —trying to tell him something about the car. Watch them two lawyer boys, sonny, banged up my car and lost it, drove it into a swamp or something, gave me cash dollars but nobody can trust boys like that, no matter how rich they daddies are—creaky old voice getting at him just like when the old man was alive. Elmer wrote it all down, getting it mixed up with the poetry that wasn’t poetry.

Then he saw a shape gliding toward the window, coming toward him through the snow and night with shining eyes. Elmer dropped the pencil and jerked up the shotgun, nearly firing both barrels through the picture window before he realized that the creature was not running away—that it knew he was there and was coming for him.

Elmer kicked away the chair and stood up. He patted his pockets to make sure he was carrying the extra shells, and then lifted the shotgun and sighted down the barrel, waiting for the thing to get close enough for him to see what it really was.

As it advanced, he began to doubt. If it knew he was there, waiting to blast it all the way back to the barn, why wasn’t it running away? He cocked the hammers. The thing was coming up his walk, going between the two big drifts, and Elmer finally saw that it was much shorter than what he had seen before.

Then it left the walk and came over the snow to press its face against the window and he saw that it was a child.

Elmer lowered the gun, numb with confusion. He could not shoot a child. The face at the window peered in at him with a frantic, lost appeal—it was the face of misery, of every human wretchedness. With those yellow eyes, it begged him to come out, to give it rescue.

Elmer moved to the door, hearing his father’s voice behind him. He paused with his hand on the doorknob, the shotgun dangling from his other hand, and then opened the door.

Freezing air, powdery snow blew in his face. The child was standing on the walk with its head averted. Someone said, “Thank you, Mr. Scales.” Elmer jerked his head back and saw the tall man standing on the snowdrift to his left. Way up there, balancing on the snow like a feather, he was smiling gently down at the farmer. His face was ivory, and his eyes were vibrant accumulations of—it seemed to Elmer—a hundred shades of gold.

He was the most beautiful man Elmer had ever seen, and Elmer knew that he could not shoot him if he stood in front of him for a decade with a loaded and cocked shotgun.

“You—why—uh,” Elmer managed to say.

“Precisely, Mr. Scales,” the beautiful man said, and effortlessly stepped down from the snowbank onto the path. When he was facing Elmer, the golden eyes seemed to shimmer with wisdom.

“You’re no Martian,” Elmer said. He did not even feel the cold anymore.

“Why, of course not. I’m part of you, Elmer. You can see that, can’t you?”

Elmer nodded dumbly.

The beautiful thing put a hand on Elmer’s shoulder. “I’m here to talk to you about your family. You’d like to come with us, wouldn’t you, Elmer?”

Elmer nodded again.

“Then there are a few details you have to take care of. At the moment you’re slightly—encumbered? You cannot imagine the harm done to you by the people around you, Elmer. I am afraid there are things about them you have to know.”

“Tell me,” Elmer said.

“With pleasure. And then you will know what to do?”

Elmer blinked.

Hardesty went to the sink in his office, rinsed out his mouth, and bent down to look into the mirror. There was Rip van Shitstorm indeed, the famous hat-sucker, a sight which gave him no pleasure, and he was about to turn away when he finally recorded that behind him and to his left, just visible over his shoulder, the door to the utility cells was open wide.

And that was impossible. He unlocked that door only when Leon Churchill or some other deputy brought in another body waiting to be shipped up to the county morgue—the last time it had been Penny Draeger, her long silky black hair fouled and matted with dirt and snow. Hardesty had lost track of time since the discovery of Jim Hardie’s and Mrs. Barnes’s bodies and the beginning of the heavy snow, but he thought that Penny Draeger must have come in at least two days ago—that door had stayed locked ever since. But now it was open—open to its fullest extent—as if one of the bodies back there had strolled out, seen him sleeping with his head on his cheek, and turned around to go back to its cell and its sheet.

He walked past the file cabinets and his battered desk to the door, swung it back and forth reflectively for a moment, and then went through to the corridor which led to the cells. Here stood a tall metal door which he had not touched since leaving the Draeger girl’s body; and it too was unlocked.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Hardesty said, for while the deputies had keys to the first door, only he had the key to this, and he had not even looked at the metal door for two days. He took the big key from the ring which hung beside his holster, fit it into the slot, and heard the mechanism clicking shut, driving the bolt. He looked at the key for a second, as if trying to see if it would open the door by itself, and then experimented by unlocking it: difficult as ever, the key taking a lot of pressure before it would move. He began to pull the door open, almost afraid to look behind it to the cells.

He remembered the screwball story Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne had tried to tell him: something out of Clark Mulligan’s horror movies. A smokescreen for whatever they really knew, a thing you’d have to be crazy to believe. If they had been younger, he would have swung on both of them. They were ridiculing him, hiding something. If they weren’t lawyers …

He heard a noise from the cells.

Hardesty yanked at the door and stepped through onto the narrow concrete walkway between the utility cells. Even in the darkness, the air seemed full of some dirty pink light, hazy and very faint. The bodies lay beneath their sheets, mummies in a museum. He could not have heard a noise, not possibly; unless he had heard the jail itself creaking.

He realized that he was frightened, and detested himself for it. He couldn’t even tell who most of them were any more, there were so many of them, so many sheet-covered bodies … but the corpses in the first cell on his right, he knew, were Jim Hardie and Mrs. Barnes, and those two were never going to make any more noise again ever.

He looked into their cell through the bars. Their bodies were on the hard floor beneath the cot against the far wall, two still white forms. Nothing wrong there. Wait a second, he thought, trying to remember the day he had put them in the cell. Didn’t he put Mrs. Barnes on top of the bunk? He was almost certain … he peered in at them. Now wait, now just hold it up a minute here, he thought, and even in the cold of the unheated cells, began to sweat. A white-covered little parcel that could only be the Griffen baby—frozen to death in his own bed—lay on the cot. “Now just wait a goddamned second,” he said, “that can’t be.” He’d put the Griffen baby with de Souza, in a cell on the other side of the corridor.

What he wanted to do was lock the doors behind him again and open a fresh bottle—get out of this place right away—but he pushed open the cell door and stepped in. There had to be some explanation: one of the deputies had come back here and rearranged the bodies, made a little more room … but that too couldn’t be, they never came back here without him … he saw Christina Barnes’s blond hair leaking out from beneath the edge of her sheet. Just a second before the sheet had been tucked securely around her head.

He backed away toward the cell door, now absolutely unable to stand so near the body of Christina Barnes, and when he had reached the threshold of the cell looked wildly around at the other bodies. They all seemed subtly different, as if they’d moved an inch or so, rolled over and crossed their legs while his back had been turned. He stood in the entrance to the cell, now unpleasantly conscious that his back was turned to all those other bodies, but unable to stop looking at Christina Barnes. He thought that even more of her hair was frothing out from beneath the sheet.

When he glanced at the little form on the cot, Hardesty’s stomach slammed up into his throat. As if the dead child had wriggled forward in its sheet, the top of its bald round head protruded through an opening in the sheet—a grotesque parody of birth.

Hardesty jumped backward out of the cell into the dark corridor. Though he could not see them moving, he had a wild, panicky sense that all of the bodies in the cells were in motion—that if he stayed back here in the dark a second longer, they would point toward him like the needles of a dozen magnets.

From an end cell, one he knew was empty, came a dry rasping voiceless sound. A chuckle. This empty sound of mirth unfolded in his mind, more a thought than a sound. Hardesty backed nervelessly down the corridor until he thumped into the edge of the metal door, then whirled around it and slammed it shut.

Don turned from the window and said to Peter Barnes, “Want some coffee?”

“I’m fine,” the boy said. “Do you see them coming?”

“Not yet. They’ll be here.”

“It’s a terrible night. The worst yet.”

“Well, I’m sure they’ll be here soon,” Don said. “Your father didn’t mind your leaving the house on Christmas Eve?”

“No,” Peter said, and looked truly unhappy for the first time that night. “He’s—I guess he’s mourning. He didn’t even ask me where I was going.” Peter kept his intelligent face steady, not permitting his grief to demonstrate itself in the tears Don knew were close.

Don went back to the window and leaned forward, pressing his hands on the cold glass. “I see someone coming.”

Peter stood up behind him.

“Yes. They’re stopping. It’s them.”

“Mr. James is staying with Mr. Hawthorne now?”

“It was their idea. We all felt safer that way.” He watched Sears and Ricky leave the car and begin to fight their way up the walk.

“I want to tell you something,” Peter said behind him, and Don turned to look at the tall boy. “I’m really glad you’re here.”

“Peter,” Don said, “if we get these things before they get us, it’ll be mostly because of you.”

“We will,” Peter said quietly, and as Don went to the door he knew that he and the boy were equally grateful for each other’s company.

“Come in,” he said to the two older men. “Peter is already here. How’s your cold, Ricky?”

Ricky Hawthorne shook his head. “Stable. You have something you want us to listen to?”

“On my uncle’s tapes. Let me help you with your coats.”

A minute later he was leading them down the hall. “I had quite a struggle to find the right tapes,” he said. “My uncle never marked the boxes he kept them in.” He opened the door to the office. “That’s why the place looks like this.” Empty white boxes and spools of tape covered the floor. Other white boxes littered the desk.

Sears knocked a spool of tape off a chair and lowered himself into it; Ricky and Peter sat on camp chairs against a book-lined wall.

Don went behind the desk. “I guess Uncle Edward had some sort of filing system, but I never found out what it was. I had to go through everything before finding the Moore tapes.” He sat down behind the desk. “If I were another kind of novelist, I’d never have to dream up a plot again. My uncle was told more dirt off the record than Woodward and Bernstein.”

“At any rate,” Sears said, extending his legs deliberately to push over a stack of white boxes, “you found them. And you want us to listen to something. Let’s get to it.”

“Drinks are on the table,” Don said. “You’ll need it. Help yourselves.” While Ricky and Sears poured whiskey for themselves and Peter took a Coke, Don described his uncle’s taping technique.

“He’d just let the recorder run—he wanted to get everything the subject said. During the formal taping sessions, of course, but also during meals, having drinks, watching television—to catch anything the subject came up with. So from time to time, the subject would be left alone in a room with a tape recorder running. We’re going to listen to a couple of moments when that happened.”

Don swiveled his chair around and pushed the “on” button of the recorder on the shelf behind him. “This is set just about on the right spot. I won’t have to tell you what to listen for.” He pushed the “play” button, and Edward Wanderley’s voice filled the room, floating down from the big speakers perched up behind the desk.

“So he beat you because of the money you spent on acting lessons?”

A girlish voice answered. “No. He beat me because I existed.”

“How do you feel about it now?”

Silence for a time: then the other voice said, “Could you get me a drink, please? It’s difficult for me to talk about this.”

“Sure, of course, I understand. Campari soda?”

“You remembered. Lovely.”

“I’ll be right back.”

Noises of the desk chair squeaking, footsteps; the door closed.

In the few seconds of quiet which followed, Don kept his eyes on Sears and Ricky. They watched the spools of tape hissing through the heads.

“Are my old friends listening to me now?” It was another voice: older, brisker, drier. “I want to say hello to all of you.”

“It’s Eva,” Sears said. “That’s Eva Galli’s voice.” Instead of fear, his face showed anger. Ricky Hawthorne looked as if his cold had just grown much worse.

“We parted, the last time we all met, so ignominiously, that I wanted all of you to know that I remember you very well. You, dear Ricky; and you, Sears—what a dignified man you became! And you, handsome Lewis. How lucky you are to be listening today! Haven’t you ever wondered what would have happened if you had gone into the girl’s room instead of letting your wife answer her call? And poor ugly John—let me thank you in advance for having such a wonderful party. I am going to enjoy myself enormously at your party, John, and I am going to leave a present behind—a token of future presents to all of you.”

Don took the reel off the recorder, said, “Don’t say anything now. Listen to the next one first.” He put on a second reel and advanced it to a number he had written on a pad. Then he pushed the “play” button again.

Edward Wanderley: “Do you want to take a break for a little while? I could make us some lunch.”

“Please. Don’t worry about me. I’ll just stay here and look at your books until everything’s ready.”

After Edward left the room, Eva Galli’s voice came again through the speakers.

“Hello, my old friends. And are you joined by a young friend?”

“Not you, Peter,” Don said. “Me.”

“Is Don Wanderley with you? Don, I look forward to seeing you again too. For I will, you know. I will visit each of you and thank you in person for the treatment you gave me some time ago. I hope you are looking forward to the extraordinary things in store for you.” Then she paused, using the spacing of the sentences to form separate paragraphs.

“I will take you places where you have never been.

“And I will see the life run out of you.

“And I will see you die like insects. Insects.”

Don switched off the machine. “There’s one more tape I want to play, but you can see why I thought you ought to hear them.”

Ricky still looked shaken. “She knew. She knew we were all going to sit here … and listen to her. To her threats.”

“But she spoke to Lewis and John,” Sears said. “That’s rather leading.”

“Exactly. You see what that means. She can’t predict things, she can just make good guesses. She thought one of you would go through these tapes shortly after my uncle’s death. And stew over them for a year, until she celebrated the anniversary of Edward’s death by killing John Jaffrey. Obviously she thought you would write to me, and that I would come out to take possession of the house. Of course putting my name on that tape meant that you would have to get in touch with me. It was always part of her plan that I come here.”

Ricky said, “As it was we stewed pretty well on our own.”

“I think she caused your nightmares. Anyhow, she wanted all of us here so that she could get us one by one. Now I want you to hear the last tape.” He removed the spent reel from the machine and took up the third reel beside him and placed it on the recorder.

A lilting southern voice came through the big speakers.

“Don. Didn’t we have a wonderful time together? Didn’t we love each other, Don? I hated leaving you— really, I was heartbroken when I left Berkeley. Do you remember the smell of burning leaves when you walked me home, and the dog barking streets away? It was all so lovely, Don. And look at what a wonderful thing you made of it! I was so proud of you. You thought and thought about me, and you came so close. I wanted you to see, I wanted you to see everything and have your mind open up to all the possibilities we represent —right through the stories about Tasker Martin and the X.X.X.—”

He switched it off. “Alma Mobley,” he said. “I don’t think you have to hear the rest of it.”

Peter Barnes stirred in his chair. “What’s she trying to do?”

“To convince us of her omnipotence. To get us so scared that we’ll give up.” He leaned forward over the desk. “But these tapes prove that she’s not omnipotent. She makes mistakes. So her ghouls can make mistakes. They can be defeated.”

“Well, you’re not Knute Rockne and this isn’t the big game,” Sears said. “I’m going home. To Ricky’s home, that is. Unless there are other ghosts you want us to hear.”

Surprisingly, Peter answered him. “Mr. James, pardon me, but I think you’re wrong. This is the big game—it’s a stupid term and I know that’s why you used it, but getting rid of these horrible things is the most important thing we’ll ever do. And I’m glad we found out that they can make mistakes. I think it’s wrong to be sarcastic about it. You wouldn’t act like that if you ever saw them—if you ever saw them kill someone.”

Don waited resignedly for Sears to crush the boy, but the lawyer merely drained his whiskey and leaned forward to speak quietly to Peter. “You forget I have seen them. I knew Eva Galli, and I saw her sit up after she was dead. And I know the beast who killed your mother, and his pathetic little brother—the one who held you and made you watch—I knew him too. When he was merely a retarded schoolboy I tried to save him from Gregory, just as you must have tried to save your mother, and like you I failed. And like you I am morally offended to hear that creature’s voice, in any of her guises—I am morally outraged to hear that preening voice. It is unspeakable, that she taunts us in this way, after what she has done. I suppose I meant only that I would be more comfortable with some specific action.” He stood up. “I am an old man, and I am accustomed to expressing myself in whatever manner I please. Sometimes I fear I am rude.” Sears smiled at the boy. “That too might be morally offensive. But I hope that you live long enough to enjoy the pleasure of it.”

If I ever need a lawyer, Don thought, you’re the one I want.

It seemed to have worked for the boy as well. “I don’t know if I’d have your style,” Peter said, returning the old man’s smile.

Don went back to the tape recorder: Alma Mobley lay within it, trapped on a few spools of coated amber stuff.

Frowning, he pushed the “play” button. Silky at first, sunny, her voice resumed.

“—and Alan McKechnie and all the other stories I used to hide the truth from you. It’s true, I did want you to see: your intuition was better than anyone else’s. Even Florence de Peyser became curious about you. But what good would it have done? Like your ‘Rachel Varney,’ I have lived since the times when your continent was lighted only by small fires in the forest, since Americans dressed in hides and feathers, and even then our kinds have abhorred each other. Your kind is so bland and smug and confident on the surface: and so neurotic and fearful and campfire-hugging within. In truth, we abhor you because we find you boring. We could have poisoned your civilization ages ago, but voluntarily lived on its edges, causing eruptions and feuds and local panics. We chose to live in your dreams and imaginations because only there are you interesting.

“Don, you make a grave mistake if you underestimate us. Could you defeat a cloud, a dream, a poem? You are at the mercy of your human imaginations, and when you look for us, you should always look in the places of your imagination. In the places of your dreams. But despite all this talk about imagination, we are implacably real, as real as bullets and knives—for aren’t they too tools of the imagination?—and if we want to frighten you it is to frighten you to death. For you are going to die, Donald. First your uncle, then the doctor, then Lewis. Then Sears, and after Sears, Ricky. And then you and whomever you have enlisted to help you. In fact, Donald, you are dead already. You are finished. And Milburn is finished with you.” Now the Louisiana accent had vanished; even femininity had gone from the voice. It was a voice with no human resonance at all. “I am going to shatter Milburn, Donald. My friends and I will tear the soul from this pathetic town and crush its bare bones between our teeth.”

A hissing silence followed: Don yanked the tape from the machine and tossed it into a cardboard box. In twenty minutes he had all his uncle’s tapes in boxes. He carried the cartons into the living room and methodically fed all of the tapes into the wood fire, where they smoked and curled and stank and finally melted down to black bubbles on the burning logs. If Alma could see him, he knew, she’d be laughing.

You’re dead already, Donald.

“Like hell I am,” he said out loud. He remembered the haggard face of Eleanor Hardie, into which age had so suddenly burrowed; Alma had been laughing at him and the Chowder Society for decades, belittling their achievements and engineering their tragedies, hiding in the dark behind a false face, waiting for the moment to jump out and say boo.

And Milburn is finished with you.

“Not if we can get to you first,” he said into the fire. “Not if this time we shoot the lynx.”

“And what is innocence?” Narcissus enquired of his friend.

For a second he had a mad impulse to do just that, floor the accelerator and sail down the fifty yards to the bottom of the hill and then smash the Lincoln through the snow, crashing through it around Omar on his slow-motion throne and exploded out of the big drift onto the highway—it was as if Elmer were telling him to do it. Get that car moving, Mr. James, I need you bad—

Sears blew his horn, mashing his hand down on the button, Omar turned around to gape at him: when he saw the Lincoln, he jabbed one finger in the air, and through the glass behind the cab Sears saw him weave on the seat, his face covered with a snow-crusted ski mask, and knew two things at once. Omar was drunk and half-dead with exhaustion; and he was yelling at him, telling him to turn around and not come down the hill. The Lincoln’s tires would never hold on the slope.

Elmer’s dogged, wheedling voice had kept him from seeing it.

The Lincoln, idling, rolled a few inches down the long hill. Omar switched off the plow and stood up half-out of the cab, supporting himself on one of the struts to the blade. He held a hand out palm-forward like a traffic cop. Sears stamped on his brake pedal, and the Lincoln shuddered on the slippery plowed surface. Omar was making circular motions with his free hand, telling him to turn around or back up.

Sears’s car lurched another six inches down the slope and he grabbed for the handbrake, no longer thinking of how to handle the car but just trying to stop it. He heard Elmer saying Sears—need—need— that dogged, high-pitched voice urging the car forward.

And then saw Lewis Benedikt at the bottom of the hill running toward him, waving his arms to make him stop, a khaki jacket flapping out behind him, his hair blowing.

—need—need—

Sears released the handbrake and pushed his foot down on the accelerator. The Lincoln skidded forward, its rear tires whining, and plummeted down the long hill, fishtailing from side to side. Behind Lewis’s running figure, Sears saw a blurry Omar Norris standing stock-still on the snowplow.

Traveling at seventy-five miles an hour, the Lincoln sliced through the figure of Lewis Benedikt; Sears opened his mouth and shouted, twisting the wheel savagely to the left. The Lincoln spun three fourths of the way around and jolted the snowplow with its right rear fender before plunging into the huge curling drift.

His eyes closed, Sears heard the mushy, sickening thud of a heavy object striking the windshield: a moment later he felt the atmosphere about him become thicker: in the next endless second the car crumped to a stop as if he’d hit a wall.

He opened his eyes and saw he was in darkness. Sears’s head stung where he had struck it in the crash. He put one hand to a temple and felt blood; with the other he switched on the interior lights. Omar Norris’s masked face, jammed against the windshield, peered with an empty eye in at the passenger seat. Five feet of snow held the car like cement

“Now, little brother,” said a deep voice from the back of the car.

A small hand, earth embedded under its nails, reached forward to brush against Sears’s cheek.

Disgust for these obscene beings kindled up in him. He would not die passively at their hands. Sears threw himself forward and grunted, aiming the only punch he had thrown in sixty years: it caught Gregory Bate’s cheekbone and slid, tearing the flesh, into a damp, reeking softness. Glistening fluid slid over the torn cheek.

“So you can be hurt,” Sears said. “By God, you can.”

Snarling, they flew at him.

“You know where you can put this job,” Hardesty said, and belched. “You can shove it. Hear me, Hawthorne?”

“I hear you, Walt.” Ricky sat on the couch and glanced over at Stella, whose face was averted into her cupped hands. Mourning already, he thought, mourning because she let him go alone, because she sent him out of here without a blessing, without even thanks. Don Wanderley squatted on the floor beside Stella’s chair and put an arm over her shoulders.

“Yeah, you hear me. Well, listen. I used to be a Marine, you know what, lawyer? Korea. Had three stripes, hear that?” A loud crash: Hardesty had fallen into a chair or knocked over a lamp. Ricky did not answer. “Three goddamned stripes. A leatherneck. You could call me a goddamned hero, I don’t mind. Well, I didn’t need you to tell me to go out to that farm. Neighbor went in there around eleven—found ’em all. Scales killed ’em all. Shot ’em. And afterward laid down under his goddamned tree and blew his head apart. State cops took all the bodies away in a helicopter. Now you tell me why he did it, lawyer. And you tell me how you knew something happened out there.”

“Because I once borrowed his father’s car,” Ricky said. “I know it doesn’t make sense, Walt.”

Don looked up at him from beside Stella, but she merely pushed her face deeper into her hands.

“Doesn’t make—shit. Beautiful. Well, you can find a new sheriff for this town. I’m clearin’ out as soon as the county plows get in. I can go anywhere—record like mine. Anywhere? Not because of out there—not because of Scales’s little massacre. You and your rich-bitch friends been sittin’ on something all along—all along—and whatever it is does things—meaner’n a stirred-up hog. Right? It got into Scales’s place, didn’t it? Got into his head. Can go anywhere, can’t it? And who called all this down on us, hey Mr. Lawyer? You. Hey?”

Ricky said nothing.

“You can call it Anna Mostyn, but that’s just sheer plain lawyer’s crap. Goddamn it, I always thought you were an asshole, Hawthorne. But I’m tellin’ you now, anything shows up around here with ideas about moving me around, I’m gonna blow it in half. You and your buddies got all the fancy ideas, if you got any buddies left, you can take care of things around here. I’m stayin’ in here until the roads get clear, sent the deputies home, anybody comes around here I shoot first. Questions later. Then I get out.”

“What about Sears?” Ricky asked, knowing that Hardesty would not tell him until he asked. “Has anyone seen Sears?”

“Oh, Sears James. Yeah. Funny about that. State cops found him too. Saw his car half-buried in a drift, bottom of Underhill Road, snowplow all fucked over … you can bury him whenever the hell you want, little buddy. If everybody in this goddamned freakshow town doesn’t end up cut to pieces or sucked out dry or blown in half. Ooof.” Another belch, “I’m pig-drunk, lawyer. Gonna stay that way. Then I cut outa here. To hell with you and everything about you.” He hung up.

Ricky said, “Hardesty’s lost his mind and Sears is dead.” Stella began to weep; soon he and she and Don were in a circle, arms around each other for that primitive consolation. “I’m the only one left,” Ricky said into his wife’s shoulder. “My God, Stella. I’m the only one left.”

Eventually the town heard about Sheriff Hardesty: how he was holed up in his office with all those bodies waiting in the utility cells. Two of the Pegram boys had snowmobiles, and they coasted up the door of the sheriff’s office to check him out—see if he was as nutty as the rumor said. A whiskery face jammed itself up against the window as they climbed off the snowmobiles: Hardesty lifted his pistol so the boys could see it and shouted through the glass that if they didn’t pull off those damn ski masks and show their faces they wouldn’t have any faces left. Most people knew someone who had a friend who’d had to go past the sheriff’s office and swore that he heard Hardesty shouting in there, yelling at nothing or at himself—or at whatever it was that could move freely around Milburn in this weather, sliding in and out of their dreams, exulting in shadows whenever they’d just turned their heads: whatever it was that could account for that music some of them had heard around midnight on Christmas night— inexplicable music that should have sounded joyful but was instead wound full of the darkest emotions they knew. They pushed their heads into their pillows and told themselves it was a radio or a trick of the wind— they’d tell themselves anything rather than believe that something was out there that could make a noise so fearsome.

Peter Barnes got out of bed that night, having heard the music and imagining that this time the Bate brothers and Anna Mostyn and Don’s Dr. Rabbitfoot were making a special trip to get him. (But there was another cause, he knew.) He locked his door and climbed back into bed and pushed his hands down on his ears; but the wild music got louder, coming down his street, and louder still.

It stopped directly in front of his house: sliced off in the middle of a bar, as if a button on a tape recorder had been pushed. The silence was more charged with possibilities than the music had been. Finally Peter could stand the tension no longer, and softly left his bed and looked out of his window onto the street.

Down there, down where he had once seen his father marching off to work looking dumpy and Russian, stood a line of people in bright moonlight. Nothing could stop him from recognizing the figures standing on the fresh snow where the road should have been. They stood gazing up at him with shadowed eyes and open mouths, the town’s dead, and he would never know if they stood there only in his mind or if Gregory Bate and his benefactor had stirred these facsimiles and made them move: or if Hardesty’s jail and a half-dozen graves had opened to let their inhabitants walk. He saw Jim Hardie staring up at his window, and the insurance salesman Freddy Robinson, and old Dr. Jaffrey and Lewis Benedikt, and Harlan Bautz—he had died while shoveling snow. Omar Norris and Sears James were beside the dentist. Peter’s heart moved to see Sears— he’d known that was why the music had sounded again. A girl stepped out from behind Sears, and Peter blinked to see Penny Draeger, her once-exciting face as blank and dead as all the others. A small group of children stood mutely beside a tall scarecrow with a shotgun, and Peter nodded, mouthing the word “Scales” to himself: he had not known. Then the crowd divided to let his mother come forward.

She was not the lifelike ghost he had seen in the Bay Tree Market’s parking lot: like the others, his mother was washed of life, too empty even for despair. She seemed animated only by need—need at a level beneath all feeling. Foreshortened by his angle of vision, Christina came forward over the snow to the boundary of their property; she extended her arms up to him and her mouth moved. He knew that no human words could have issued from that mouth, from that driven body— it must have been only a moan or a cry. She, they, all were asking him to come out: or were they pleading for surcease, for sleep? Peter began to cry. They were eerie, not frightening. Standing out there below his window, so pitiably drained, they were as if merely dreamed. The Bates and their benefactor had sent them, but it was him they needed. The tears cold on his cheeks, Peter turned away from the window; so many, so many, so many.

Face up, he lay back on his bed; stared with open eyes at the ceiling. He knew they would go: or would he look out in the morning to see them all still there, frozen into place like snowmen? But the music blared into life again, suddenly as present as a bright slash of red, and yes, they would be drifting away, following Dr. Rabbitfoot’s bright tempo.

He went downstairs in the dark; at the foot of the stairs saw a line of light beneath the television room door. Peter gently pushed it open.

The television showed a pattern of moving dots divided by a slowly upward-drifting black bar. The strong brown smell of whiskey filled the room. His father lay back in the chair with his mouth open, tie undone, the skin on his face and neck gray and parchmentlike: breathing with the soft rattling inhalations of an infant. A nearly empty bottle, a full glass in which the ice had melted, sat beside him on the table. Peter went to the television set and switched it off. Then he tenderly shook his father’s arm.

“Mnn.” His father’s eyes opened cloudy and dazed. “Pete. Heard music.”

“You were dreaming.”

“What time?”

“Near one.”

“I was thinking about your mother. You look like her, Pete. My hair, her face. Lucky—could’ve looked like me.”

“I was thinking about her too.”

His father got out of the chair, rubbed his cheeks, and gave Peter a look of unexpected clarity. “You’re grown up, Pete. Funny. I saw it just now—you’re a grown man.”

Peter, embarrassed, said nothing.

“Didn’t want to tell you earlier. Ed Venuti called me up this afternoon—heard it from the state cops. Elmer Scales, farmer a little way out of town? Had his mortgage with us. All those kids? Ed says he killed them all. Shot all the kids and then shot his wife and then killed himself. Pete, this town is going crazy. Just plain sick and crazy.”

“Let’s get upstairs,” Peter said.

And if good old Sam (assistant manager down at Horn’s Tire Recapping Service and a shark at poker) or good old Ace (retired foreman from a shoe factory in Endicott and a terrible bore, but sent his son through medical school) were not outside, catching your eye with a starved glance which meant take your eyes off me, you bastard, then it was even worse: because what you saw looked not murderous but dead. The streets impassable except on foot, nine-foot, twelve-foot drifts, a constant swirl of white in the air, a glooming sky. The houses on Haven Lane and Melrose Avenue looked vacant, drapes drawn against the desolation outside. In town, snow drifted up to the roofs and sheeted across the streets; windows reflected chill emptiness. Milburn looked as though everyone in town were lying still under a sheet in one of Hardesty’s cells; and when someone like Clark Mulligan or Rollo Draeger, who had lived all his life in Milburn, looked at it now a cold whisper of wind brushed across his heart.

That was in the daytime. Between Christmas and New Year’s Day, ordinary people in Milburn, those who had never heard of Eva Galli or Stringer Dedham and thought of the Chowder Society (if they thought of it at all) as a collection of museum pieces, wound up going to bed earlier and earlier—at ten, then at nine-thirty—because the thought of all that black weather out there made them want to close their eyes and not open them again until dawn. If the days were threatening, the nights were ferocious. The wind tore around the corners of the houses, rattling shutters and storm windows, and two or three times a night a big gust flattened itself against the wall like an enormous wave—hard enough to make the lights sway. And it often seemed to ordinary people in Milburn that mixed up with all that banging and hissing outside were voices—voices that couldn’t contain their glee. The Pegram boys heard something tapping at their bedroom window, and in the morning saw the prints of bare feet outside on a drift. Grieving Walter Barnes was not the only person in Milburn who thought the whole town was going crazy.

On the last day of the year the mayor finally got through to all three of the deputies and told them that they had to get Hardesty out of the office and into a hospital—the mayor was afraid that looting would begin soon if they couldn’t get the streets plowed. He appointed Leon Churchill acting sheriff—the biggest and dumbest of the deputies, the one most likely to follow orders—and told Leon that if he didn’t patch up Omar Norris’s plow himself and start clearing the streets, he’d be out of a job permanently. So on New Year’s Day Leon walked to the municipal garage and found that the plow wasn’t as bad as it had looked. Sears James’s big car had bent some of the plates, but everything still worked. He took the plow out that morning, and in the first hour developed more respect for Omar Norris than he’d ever had for the mayor.

But when the deputies got to the sheriff’s office all they found was an empty room and a smelly cot. Walt Hardesty had disappeared sometime during the previous four days. He had left behind six empty bourbon bottles but no note or forwarding address—certainly nothing to tell of the gut-panic he’d felt one night when he lifted his head from his desk to pour himself another drink and heard more noises from back in the utility cells. At first it had sounded to Hardesty like conversation, and then like the sound a butcher makes when he slaps raw steak on the counter. He hadn’t waited for whoever it was back there to start coming down the corridor, but had put on his hat and his jacket and slipped out into the blizzard. He made it as far as the high school before a hand closed over his elbow and a calm voice said in his ear, “Isn’t it time we met, sheriff?” When Leon’s plow uncovered him, Walt Hardesty looked like a piece of carved ivory: a life-size ivory statue of a ninety-year-old man.

“You called it,” was all she’d say.

“It’s good drinking weather, anyhow,” Humphrey said.

He glanced over his shoulder at the rolled-up parcel on the back seat. His poor weapons, found in Edward’s house. They were almost childishly crude. Now that he had a plan and the three of them were going to fight, even the depressive weather seemed to imply their defeat. He and a tense seventeen-year-old boy and an old man with a bad cold: for a moment it seemed comically hopeless. But without them, hope did not exist.

“The deputy doesn’t plow as good as Omar,” Peter said beside him. It was merely to interrupt the silence, but Don nodded: the boy was right. The deputy had trouble holding the plow at a steady level, and when he was through with a street it had an oddly terraced look. The three-and four-inch variations in the road made the car jounce like a fairground trolley. On either side of the street they could see mailboxes tilted crazily into the snowbanks—Churchill had skittled them with the edge of the plow.

“This time we’re going to do something,” the boy said, making it half a question.

“We’re going to try,” Don said, glancing at the boy. Peter looked like a young soldier who’d seen a dozen firelights in two weeks—looking at him, you could taste the bitterness of spent adrenalin.

“I’m ready,” he said, and while Don heard the firmness in it he also heard ragged nerves and wondered if the boy, who had done so much more than he and Ricky Hawthorne, could endure any more.

“Wait until you hear what I have in mind,” Don said. “You might not want to go through with it. And that would be okay, Peter. I’d understand.”

“I’m ready,” the boy repeated, and Don could feel him shivering. “What are we going to do?”

“Go back into Anna Mostyn’s house,” he answered. “I’ll explain it at Ricky’s.”

Peter slowly exhaled. “I’m still ready.”

“Psychological warfare,” Ricky said.

“Yes. But I’ve been thinking about one thing she said. It … call it. It could explain where she is. I think she meant it as a clue, or a hint, or whatever you want to call it.”

“Go on,” said Ricky.

“She said that we—human beings—are at the mercy of our imaginations, and if we want to look for her, or for any of them, we should look in the places of our dreams. In the places of our imaginations.”

” ‘In the places of our dreams,’ ” Ricky repeated. “I see. She means Montgomery Street. Well. I should have known we weren’t through with that house.” Peter extended one arm along the top of the couch and rolled deeper into it: rejection. “We deliberately didn’t bring you the first time we went there,” Ricky said to the boy. “Of course now you have even more reason for not wanting to go. How do you feel about it?”

“I have to go,” Peter said.

“It almost has to be what she means,” Ricky continued, still gently probing the boy with his eyes. “Sears and Lewis and John and I all had dreams about that house. We dreamed about it almost every night for a year. And when Sears and Don and I went there, when we found your mother and Jim, she didn’t attack us physically, but she attacked our imaginations. If it’s any consolation, the thought of going back there scares the hell out of me too.”

Peter nodded. “Sure it does.” Finally, as if another’s admission of fear gave him courage, he leaned forward. “What’s in the package, Don?”

Don reached down and picked up the rolled blanket beside his chair. “Just two things I found in the house. We might be able to use them.” He lay the bundle on the table and unrolled it. All three of them looked at the long-handled axe and the hunting knife which now lay uncovered on the blanket.

“I spent the morning sharpening and oiling them. The axe was rusty—Edward used it for his firewood. The knife was a gift from an actor—he used it in a film and gave it to my uncle when his book was published. It’s a beautiful knife.”

Peter leaned over and picked up the knife. “It’s heavy.” He turned it over in his hands: an eight-inch blade with a cruel dip along the top end and a groove from tip to base, fitted with a hand-carved handle, the knife was obviously designed for one purpose only. It was a machine for killing. But no, Don remembered; that was how it looked; not what it was. It had been made to fit an actor’s hand: to photograph well. But beside it the axe was brutal and graceless. “Ricky has his own knife,” Don said. “Peter, you can take the Bowie knife. I’ll carry the axe.”

“Are we going there right away?”

“Is there any point in waiting?”

Ricky said, “Hang on. I’ll go upstairs and tell Stella that we’re going out. I’ll say that if we don’t come back in an hour, she should call whoever is at the sheriff’s office these days and have a car sent to the Robinson house.” He left them and began going up the staircase.

Peter reached forward and touched the knife. “It won’t take an hour,” he said.

“Don’t worry about me,” said Ricky. He sounded older and weaker than Don had ever heard him. “You know, I saw the movie that knife came from. Big scene—a long scene about it being forged. Man making it melted down a piece of asteroid or meteor he had— used it in the knife. Supposed to have—” Ricky stopped and breathed heavily for a moment, making sure that Peter Barnes was listening to him. “Supposed to have special properties. Hardest substance anyone ever saw. Like magic. From space.” Ricky smiled. “Typical movie foolishness. Looks like a dandy knife, though.”

Peter pulled it from the pocket of his duffel coat and for a second each of them—almost embarrassed to be caught in such childishness—looked at it again. “Outer space worked wonders for Colonel Bowie,” Ricky said. “In the movie.”

“Bowie—” Peter started to say, remembering something from a grade-school history class, and then clamped his mouth shut on the rest of the sentence. Bowie died at the Alamo. He swallowed, shook his head, and turned toward the Galli house. It was what he should have learned from Jim Hardie: good magic lay only in human effort, but bad magic could come from around any corner.

“Let’s go,” Don said, and looked hard at Peter to make sure he knew enough to keep quiet.

In the hallway, Don pointed to the cellar door. He and Ricky took their knives from their pockets, and Don pulled the door open. The writer led them soundlessly down the wooden steps to the basement.

Peter knew that this and the landing would be the worst places for him. He took a quick glance under the staircase and saw only a floating spider web. Then he and Don went slowly toward the octopus-armed furnace while Ricky Hawthorne moved down the other side of the basement. The big knife felt solid and good in his hands, and even when he knew that he would soon have to look at the place where Sears had found his mother and Jim Hardie, Peter also knew that he would not pass out or yell or do anything childish: the knife seemed to pass some of its competence into him.

They reached the deeply shadowed area beside the furnace. Don stepped behind the furnace with no hesitation, and Peter followed, gripping the handle of the knife. You have to slash up, he remembered from some old adventure story. If you bring the blade down its easier to take away from you. He saw Ricky coming around from the other side, already shrugging.

Don lowered the axe; both men looked beneath the workbench across the near wall. Peter shivered. That was where they had been. Of course nothing was there now: he knew by the way Don and Ricky straightened up that no Gregory Bate had jumped out, ready to begin talking … there wouldn’t even be bloodstains. Peter sensed that the men were waiting for him to move, and he bent quickly and took a second’s glance beneath the workbench. Only shadowed cement wall, a gray cement floor. He straightened up.

“Top floor now,” Don whispered, and Ricky nodded.

When they reached the brown stain on the landing Peter clutched the knife tightly and swallowed; looked quickly back over his shoulder to make sure Bate wasn’t standing down there in a Harpo Marx wig and sunglasses, grinning up at them; and checked the next flight of stairs. Ricky Hawthorne turned to interrogate him with a kind look. He nodded—okay—and continued softly after the men.

Outside the first bedroom door at the top of the house Ricky paused and nodded. Peter hefted his knife: it might be the room the old men had dreamed about, whatever that meant, but it was also the room where he had met Freddy Robinson, the room where he might have died. Don stepped in front of Ricky and put his hand very firmly on the knob. Ricky glanced at him, set his mouth, nodded. Don turned the knob and pushed the door open. Peter saw an abrupt line of sweat run down the side of the writer’s face, as sudden as a tapped spring, and everything in him went dry. Don moved rapidly through the door, bringing the axe up as he went. Peter’s legs carried him into the room as if an invisible cord pulled him along.

He took in the bedroom in a series of snapshotlike tableaux: Don beside him, crouching, axe held up to one side; an empty bed; dusty floor; a bare wall; the window he had forced open centuries ago; Ricky Hawthorne planted beside him open-mouthed, holding out his knife as if he were trying to give it away; a wall with a small mirror. An empty bedroom.

Don lowered his axe, the tension cautiously leaving his face; Ricky Hawthorne began to prowl around the room as if he’d have to see every inch of it before he could believe that Anna Mostyn and the Bates weren’t hiding there. Peter realized that he was holding the knife slackly at his side; he realized that he was relaxed. The room was safe. And if this room was safe, then the house was too. He looked at Don, who lifted the edges of his mouth in a closed smile.

Then he felt idiotic, standing inside the door smiling at Don, and he went forward, double-checking all the places Ricky Hawthorne had already examined. Nothing under the bed. An empty closet. He went up to the far wall; a muscle jumped in the small of his back, loosening with a snap like a rubber band. Peter brushed his fingers against the wall: cold. And dirty. Gray stuff came away on his fingers. He glanced into the mirror.

Shockingly loud, Ricky Hawthorne’s voice shouted at him from across the room: “Not the mirror, Peter!”

But it was already too late. He’d been caught by a breeze from the depth of the mirror, and turned unthinkingly to look deeply into it. His own face was fading to a pale outline and beneath the outline, on the other side of it swimming up, was the face of a woman. He did not know her, but he took her in as if he were in love: light freckles, softly brown-blond hair, soft shining eyes, the mouth bracketed by the most tender lines he’d ever seen. She touched all the tension in him, all the feeling he had, and he saw things in her face that he knew were beyond his understanding, promises and songs and betrayals he would not know for years. He felt all the shallowness and insularity of his relationships with the girls he had known and kissed and strained against, and saw that the areas in him which had gone out to women had never been enough, had never been complete. And, in a rush of tenderness, an enveloping nimbus of emotion, she was speaking to him. Beautiful Peter. You want to be one of us. You already are one of us. He did not move or speak, but he nodded and said yes. And so are your friends, Peter. You can live through all time, singing the one song which is my song—you can be with me and them forever, moving like a song. Just use the knife, Peter, use your knife, you know how, do it beautifully, raise your knife, lift your knife, raise your knife and turn—

He was bringing the knife up when the mirror went falling, still musically speaking, though he couldn’t hear it so well for the sound of a blow and a voice near his head: the mirror hit the floor and split.

“It was a trick, Peter,” Ricky Hawthorne was saying. “I should have warned you before, but I was afraid to speak,” his face and experienced eyes so near to Peter’s own face that Peter, looking down in shock, saw in surreal close-up the tight loops in the knot of Ricky’s bow tie. “Just a trick.” Peter trembled and embraced him.

When they separated, Peter bent down to the two halves of the mirror and held his palm over one of the pieces. A delicious wind (the one song which is my song) lilted up from it. He felt or sensed Ricky stiffening beside him: half of a tender mouth glimmered beneath his hand, just visible. He drove his heel into the broken mirror, then brought it down again and again, splitting the silvery glass into a scattered jigsaw puzzle.

“We don’t have to let it happen,” Don said.

“You talk so brave sometimes.” Peter shook his head. “She said I already was one of them. Because when I saw Gregory turn into—you know—he said he was me. It was like Jim. Just keeping going. Never stopping. Never doubting.”

“And you liked that in Jim Hardie,” Don said, and Peter nodded, his face marked with tears. “I would too,” Don said. “Energy is always likeable.”

“But she knows I’m the weak link,” Peter said, and put his hand to his face. “She tried to use me, and it almost worked. She could use me to get you and Ricky.”

“The difference between you—between all of us— and Gregory Bate,” Don said, “is that Gregory wanted to be used. He chose it. He sought it.”

“But she almost made me choose it too,” Peter said. “God, I hate them.”

Ricky spoke from the back seat. “They’ve taken your mother, most of my friends and Don’s brother, Peter. We all hate them. She could do to any of us what she did to you back there.”

As Ricky continued to speak comfortingly from the back, Don drove on, no longer bothering to notice the desolation caused by the snow: there would be more of it in an hour, in a day or two at the most, and then Milburn would not only be sealed off from outside but a sprung trap. One more heavy snow would see a wave of death to take half the town.

“Stop the car,” Peter said. “Stop.” He laughed. “I know where they are. The place of dreams.” His laughter was high-pitched and tremulous, spiraled out of the boy’s hysteria. “The place of dreams, didn’t she say? And what’s the only place in town that stayed open all during the storms?”

“What in the world are you talking about?” Don asked, turning around on the seat to look at Peter’s face, suddenly open and sure.

“There,” Peter said, and Don followed the line of his pointing finger.

Across the street from them, in giant red neon letters:

Ricky had simply assumed that she was not fit to join them. Even a boy was of more use than she. She looked again at her watch. Another minute had gone by.

Stella went to the downstairs closet and put on her coat: then she took it off, thinking that, after all, maybe she would not be able to help Ricky. “Nuts,” she said out loud, and pulled the coat on again and went out the door.

At least it was not snowing now: and Leon Churchill, who had gaped at her since he was a boy of twelve, had cleared some of the streets. Len Shaw from the service station, another remote-control conquest, had cleared their driveway as soon as his plow could make it to the Hawthorne house;—in an unfair world, Stella had no compunctions about taking unfair advantage of her looks. She started her car easily (Len, denied Stella, had given almost erotic attention to the Volvo’s engine) and rolled down the drive out into the street.

By now Stella, having decided to go there, was in an almost frantic hurry to get to Montgomery Street. Direct access was blocked by the unplowed roads, and she put her foot down on the accelerator and followed the maze of streets Leon had opened—she groaned when she realized that she was being taken all the way over to the high school. From there she’d have to cut down School Road to Harding Lane, and then over on Lone Pine Road back the way she had started and then on Candlemaker Street past the Rialto. Working out this circuitous map in her head, Stella let the car get nearly to her normal driving speed. The drops and elevations left by Churchill’s handling of the plow jolted her against the wheel, but she took the corner into School Road quickly, not seeing in the woolly light that the level of the roadbed dropped seven inches. When the front end slammed down onto the packed snow, Stella floored the accelerator, still trying to think of the roads that could take her to Montgomery once she got off Candlemaker Street.

The rear end of the car spun out sideways, struck a metal fence and a mailbox, and then continued to revolve around so that Stella was traveling astraddle the road: in a cold panic, she wrenched at the wheel just as the car dropped into another of Churchill’s terraces. The car rolled up on its side, wheels spinning, and then dropped down, still traveling, onto the metal fence.

“Damn,” she said, and clenched her hands on the wheel and breathed deeply, forcing herself to stop trembling. She swung the door open and looked down. If she edged off the seat and let her legs dangle, she would be only three or four feet from the ground. The car could stay where it was—in any case, it had to. She’d need a tow-truck to pull it off the fence. Stella let her legs hang out of the open door, took another deep breath and pushed herself off the seat.

She landed hard, but stayed on her feet and began walking down School Road without once looking back at her car. Door open, key in the ignition, leaning against the fence like a stuffed toy—she had to get to Ricky. Ahead of her a quarter of a mile down the road, the high school was a fuzzy dark-brown cloud.

Stella had just realized that she would have to hitchhike when a blue car appeared out of the gray blur behind her. For the first time in her life, Stella Hawthorne turned to face an oncoming car and stuck out her thumb.

The blue car rolled toward her and began to brake. Stella lowered her arm as the car drew up beside her. When she bent down and looked in she saw a pudgy man bending sideways and giving her a shy welcoming look. He leaned across the seat and opened the passenger door for her. “It’s against my principles,” he said, “but you look like you need a ride.”

Stella got in and leaned back against the seat forgetting for the moment that this helpful little man would not be able to read her mind. Then she and the car started forward and she said, “Oh, please excuse me, I just had an accident and I’m not thinking right. I must—”

“Please, Mrs. Hawthorne,” the man said, turning his head to smile at her. “Don’t waste your breath. I assume you were going to Montgomery Street. You needn’t bother. That was all a mistake.”

“You know me?” Stella asked. “But how did you know—”

The man silenced her by reaching out with a boxer’s quickness and tightening his hand around her hair. “Soft,” he said, and his voice, formerly as shyly ingratiating as the man’s appearance, was the quietest she’d ever heard.

“Mr. Mulligan?” Peter asked quietly.

Ricky came up to the counter and looked over. “Oh, no.” He drew his knife from his coat pocket. “We still don’t know that what we’re trying to do is possible, do we? For all we know, we need wooden stakes or silver bullets or a fire or …”

“No,” Peter said. “We don’t need any of those things. We have everything we need right here.” The boy was very pale, and he avoided looking over the counter at Mulligan’s body, but the determination set deeply in his face was unlike anything Don had ever seen: it was fear’s negation. “That was just how they killed vampires and werewolves—what they thought were vampires and werewolves. They could have used anything.” He challenged Don directly. “Isn’t that what you think?”

“Yes,” Don said, not adding that it was one thing to offer a theory in comfortable rooms, another to stake your life on it.

“I do too,” Peter said. He held his knife, blade up, so rigidly that Don could sense the tautness of his muscles all the way up his arm. “I know they’re inside. Let’s go.”

Then Ricky spoke and simply said what was obvious. “We don’t have a choice.”

Don lifted his axe and held the head pressed flat against his chest; went quietly to the doors to the stalls; slipped inside. The other two followed him.

As his eyes adjusted, he saw only the rounded backs of the seats stretching away. The heavy blade of the axe pressed against his chest. The movie’s soundtrack filled his head with shouts and cries. It played to an empty theater. And of all the spectacles to which their enemy had treated him, Don thought that this was surely the strangest—the horror on the screen, the turmoil of voices and music washing out in darkness over all those empty seats. He looked sideways toward Peter Barnes and even in the dark saw the set of his face. He pointed to the far aisle; then bent forward to see Ricky, who was only a shadow against the wall, and motioned toward the wide middle aisle. Peter immediately moved away toward the other side of the theater. Ricky went more slowly to the center, and checked Peter and Don’s position before bending down to make sure Gregory or Fenny was not hiding in the row. Then they advanced forward, checking each row in turn.

And what if Ricky finds them? Don thought. Could we get to him in time to save him? He’s exposed, way out there in the open.

But Ricky, holding his knife out to one side, moved down the wide center aisle, looking calmly on either side of him as if he were looking for a lost ticket—he was being as thorough as he had been in Anna Mostyn’s house.

Don moved in tandem with the others, straining to see into the darkness between the rows. Candy wrappers, torn paper, what looked like a winter’s worth of dust, rows of seats, some torn, some taped together, a few in every row with broken arms—and in the middle of each row, a well of darkness that wanted to suck him toward it. Above him, ahead of him, the film paraded a succession of images Don caught as disconnected frames whenever he looked up from the floor of the theater. Corpses pushing themselves up from their graves, cars rolling dangerously fast around corners, a girl’s stricken face … Don glanced up at the screen and thought for a moment he was seeing a film of himself in Anna Mostyn’s cellar.

But no, of course not, the scene was just part of the film, a man unlike him in a cellar unlike Anna’s. The movie family had barricaded themselves in a basement, and the soundtrack boomed with the sounds of doors closing: maybe that’s how you fight them, you just hole up until they go away … you bite down and close your eyes and hope they get your brother, your friend, anybody, before they get you … and that, he realized, was what the nightwatchers had done. He looked over the rows of seats, seeing them filled with Gregory’s victims, and then saw Ricky and Peter looking curiously back at him. He was two rows behind. Don bent forward again, found himself staring stiffly with embarrassment at a flattened popcorn box, and moved hurriedly down the broad steps to catch up with the others.

“They’re here, though,” Peter whispered. “They have to be.”

“There’s the projection booth,” Don said. “The toilets. And Mulligan must have had some sort of office.”

On the screen a door slammed: noise of life walled in, and of death walled in with it.

“Maybe the balcony,” Peter said, and glanced up at the screen. “And what’s behind there? How do you get there?”

Again, a door slammed. Inhuman voices matching the scale of the people on the screen, inflated with assumed emotions, fell toward them from the speakers.

The door clicked open with a flat, ticking noise—the sound made when a metal bar, depressed, lifts a catch; then it slammed shut again.

“Of course,” Ricky said, “that’s where they’d”—but the other two were not paying attention. They had recognized the sound, and were staring at the entrance to a lighted cavernous tunnel to the right of the screen. Above the tunnel a white sign read EXIT.

The soundtrack blared down on them, to their side giant forms enacted a pantomime romantic enough for the music, but what they listened to was a light, dry noise coming down the exit corridor toward the light: a noise like clapping hands. It was the sound of bare feet.

A child appeared at the end of the corridor and paused at the edge of the light. He looked toward them—an apparition from a thirties’ study of rural poverty, a small boy with shivering sides and prominent ribs and a smudgy, shadowy face that would never be invaded by thought. He stood in the last traces of the corridor’s light, drool forming on his lower lip. The boy raised his arms, holding his bunched hands level before him, and made the gesture of pumping up and down on an iron bar. Then he tilted back his head and giggled; and again made the gesture of closing a heavy door.

“My brother is telling you that the doors are locked,” said a voice from above them. They whirled around, Don hefting the axe in his arms, and saw Gregory Bate standing on the stage beside the red curtains flanking the screen. “But three such brave adventurers wouldn’t have it otherwise, would they? You have come for this, haven’t you? Especially you, Mr. Wanderley—all the way from California. Fenny and I were sorry not to have been properly introduced there.” He moved easily to the center of the stage, and the movie broke and flowed over the surface of his body. “And you really think that you can harm us with those medieval objects you carry? Why, gentlemen …” He flung out his arms, his eyes glowing. Every part of him was printed with gigantic forms—an open hand, a falling lamp, a splintering door.

And beneath all that, Don saw what Bate had demonstrated to Peter Barnes—that the gentlemanly diction and theatrical manner were insubstantial clothing over a terrible concentration, a purpose as implacable as a machine’s. Bate was standing on the stage, smiling down at them. “Now,” he said, his tone like a god’s summoning light.

Don jumped sideways, hearing something rush past him, and saw Fenny’s mad little body crashing into Peter Barnes. None of them had seen the child move; now he was already on top of Peter, forcing his arms to the floor of the theater, snarling, holding Peter’s knife harmlessly away while he wriggled on top of him, making a squealing noise that got lost in the screams from the speakers.

Don raised his axe and felt a strong hand close over his wrist. (Immortal whispered up his arm, don’t you want to be?)

“Wouldn’t you like to live forever?” Gregory Bate said in his ear, blowing foulness toward his face. “Even if you must die first? It’s a good Christian bargain, after all.”

The hand spun him easily around, and Don felt his own strength draining out as if Bate’s hand on his wrist drew it out of him like a magnet. Bate’s other hand took his chin and tilted it up, forcing Don to look into his eyes. He remembered Peter telling him how Jim Hardie had died, how Bate had sucked him down into his eyes, but it was impossible not to look: and his feet seemed to be floating, his legs were water, at the bottom of the shining gold was a comprehensive wisdom and beneath that was total mindlessness, a rushing violence, pure cold, a killing winter wind through a forest.

“Watch this, you scum,” he dimly heard Ricky saying. Then Bate’s attention snapped away from him, and his legs seemed to be filled with sand, and the side of the werewolf’s head moved past his face as slowly as a dream. Something was making an appalling racket, and Bate’s profiled head slid past his own, marble skin and an ear as perfect as a statue’s—Bate flung him away.

“Do you see this, you filth?” Ricky was shouting, and Don, lying all tumbled over his axe (now what was that for?), half-wedged beneath one of the front-row seats, looked dreamily up and saw Ricky Hawthorne sawing into the back of Fenny’s neck.

“Bad,” he whispered, and “no,” and no longer sure that it was not really just a part of the giant shadowy action blazing on above them all, saw Gregory slap the old man down onto Peter Barnes’s motionless body.

Stella nodded.

“And you heard what I said? No need to go to Montgomery Street—no need at all. Your husband isn’t there anymore. He didn’t find what he was looking for, so he went elsewhere.”

“Who are you?”

“A friend of a friend. A good friend’s good friend.” Still holding her hair, the man reached across the wheel to move the automatic shift, and drove slowly off. “And my friend is very eager to meet you.”

“Let me go,” Stella said.

He yanked her toward him. “Enough, Mrs. Hawthorne. You have a very exciting time ahead of you. So—enough. No fighting. Or I’ll kill you here. And that would be a terrible waste. Now promise me you’ll be quiet. We are just going into the Hollow. Okay? You’ll be quiet?”

Stella, terrified and fearful that the handful of hair was about to be ripped from her head, said, “Yes.”

“Very intelligent.” He let her hair fall slack and pressed his hand against the side of her head. “You’re such a pretty woman, Stella.”

She recoiled from his touch.

“Quiet?”

“Quiet,” she breathed, and the driver went on slowly toward the high school. She looked back through the rear window and saw no other cars: her own, tilted against the fence, grew smaller behind her.

“You’re going to kill me,” she said.

“Not unless you force me to do it, Mrs. Hawthorne. I am quite a religious person in my present life. I would hate to have to take a human life. We’re pacifists, you know.”

“We?”

He pursed his lips at her in an ironic little smile, and gestured toward the back seat. She looked down and saw dozens of copies of The Watchtower scattered there.

“Then your friend is going to kill me. Like Sears and Lewis and the others.”

“Not quite like that, Mrs. Hawthorne. Well, perhaps just a little bit like Mr. Benedikt. That was the only one our friend conducted by herself. But I can promise you that Mr. Benedikt saw many unusual and interesting things before he passed away.” They were going by the school now, and Stella heard a familiar grinding noise before recognizing it: she looked frantically out the window and saw the town snowplow chugging into a twelve-foot drift.

“In fact,” the man continued, “you could say that he had the time of his life. And as for you, you will have an experience many would envy—you will see directly into a mystery, Mrs. Hawthorne, a mystery which has endured in your culture for centuries. Some would say that would be worth dying for. Especially since the alternative is dying quite messily right here.”

Now even the snowplow was a block behind them. The next clear street, Harding Lane, was twenty feet ahead, and Stella saw herself being driven away from safety—from Leon on the plow—toward terrible danger, passive at the hands of this maniac Jehovah’s Witness.

“In fact, Mrs. Hawthorne,” the man said, “since you are cooperating so nicely—”

Stella kicked out as hard as she could and felt the toe of her boot connect solidly with his ankle. The man yelped with pain and twisted toward her. She threw herself at the wheel, getting her body between it and the man, who was clubbing her on the head, and forced the car toward the snowbank left by the plow.

Now if Leon would only look, she prayed: but the car thudded almost noiselessly into the bank.

The man tore her off the wheel and forced her back against the door, twisting her legs painfully beneath her. Stella raised her hands and struck his face, but the man put all his weight on her and batted her hands away. Be still! shouted in her mind, and Stella nearly lost consciousness. Stupid, stupid woman.

She opened her eyes wide and looked at the face above hers—pouchy with excess flesh, black open pores on the thick nose, sweat on the forehead, meek bloodshot eyes; the face of a prim little man who would tell hitchhikers that it was against his principles to pick them up. He was hitting her on the side of the head, and every blow released a spray of saliva over her. Stupid woman!

Grunting, he brought a knee up between her legs and leaned forward and put his hands on her throat.

Stella flailed at his sides and then managed to hook a hand under his chin: it was not enough. He continued to crush her throat, the voice in her mind repeating stupid stupid stupid …

She remembered.

Stella dropped her hands, pulled at her lapel with her right hand, found the pearl base of the hatpin. She used all the strength in her right arm to drive the long pin into his temple.

The meek eyes bulged and the monotonous word repeating in her mind became a babble of astonished voices. What what (she) no this (sword) woman what— the man’s hands went limp on her throat, and he dropped onto her like a boulder.

Then she was able to scream.

Stella scrambled to open the door and fell backward out of the car. For a moment after she rolled over she lay panting on the ground, tasting the blood in her mouth mix with dirty snow and rock salt. She pushed herself up, saw his balding head lolling off the edge of the seat, whimpered and got to her feet.

Stella turned away from the car and ran down School Road toward Leon Churchill, who was now standing by the side of the plow, gazing at something dark he had evidently uncovered. She shouted his first name, slowed to a walk, and the deputy swiveled to watch her come toward him.

Leon glanced back at the dark thing in the snow and then trotted toward her: Stella was too distraught to see that the deputy was nearly as shocked as herself. When he caught her, he spun her halfway around and said, “Uh now Mrs. Hawthorne you don’t want to look at that what’s the matter anyhow you had an accident Mrs. Hawthorne?”

“I just killed a man,” she said. “I hitchhiked in his car. He tried to hurt me. I stuck a hatpin in his head. I killed him.”

“He tried to hurt you?” Leon asked. “Uh—” He glanced back at his plow, and then looked again at Stella Hawthorne’s face. “Come on, let’s have a look. It happened up there?” He pointed to the blue car. “You had an accident.”

As he marched her along toward the car, she tried to explain. “I had an accident in my car, he stopped to give me a ride and then he tried to hurt me. He did hurt me. And I had a long hatpin …”

“Well, you didn’t kill him, anyhow,” Leon said, and looked at her almost indulgently.

“Don’t patronize me.”

“He ain’t in the car,” Leon said. He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her to face the open door, the empty front seat.

Stella nearly fainted.

Leon held her up and tried to explain. “See, what probably happened is you got shook up after the accident, this guy who gave you a lift went away to get help, and you maybe even passed out a little bit. You banged yourself up when the car went off the road. Why don’t I take you home on the plow, Mrs. Hawthorne?”

“He’s not there,” Stella said.

A large white dog jumped on top of the snowbank from the front yard of one of the neighboring houses, walked along the top and jumped down to the road in a shower of snow.

“Yes, please take me home, Leon,” Stella said.

Leon looked anxiously toward the school. “Yeah, I gotta get to the office anyhow. You stay right here and I’ll come back with the plow in five seconds.”

“Fine.”

“Not much of a chariot,” Leon said, and smiled at her.

Screams, moans, the sound of rushing wind filled the theater.

—live forever

—live forever

Don stretched out his legs, dazedly looking at the pile of bodies lying beneath the risers to the stage. The old man’s white face twisted toward him, lying across the body of a barefoot child. Peter Barnes was at the bottom of the heap, feebly moving his hands.

“We should have concluded matters two years ago,” Bate purred. “So much trouble would have been saved if we had. You remember two years back, don’t you?”

Don heard Alma Mobley saying His name is Greg. We knew each other in New Orleans, and remembered a moment so vividly that it was as if he were there again: he standing on a corner in Berkeley and looking in shock at a woman in the shadows beside a bar named The Last Reef. A leaden sense of betrayal made it impossible to move.

“So much trouble,” Bate repeated. “But it makes this moment all the sweeter, don’t you think?”

Peter Barnes, bleeding from a cheek, pushed himself halfway out of the tangle.

“Alma,” Don managed to say.

Bate’s ivory face flickered. “Yes. Your Alma. And your brother’s Alma. Mustn’t forget David. Not nearly as entertaining as you.”

“Entertaining.”

“Oh, yes. We enjoy entertainment. Only proper, since we have provided so much of it. Now look at me again, Donald.” He reached down to pull Don up from the floor, smiling coldly.

Peter groaned: pulled himself clear. Don looked confusedly across at him and saw that Fenny also was moving, rolling over, his smudgy face a soundless screaming grimace.

“They hurt Fenny,” Don said, blinking, and saw Bate’s hand slowly reaching toward him. He shot his legs out and squirmed away from Bate, moving faster than he ever had in his life. Don rolled to his feet, halfway between Gregory and Peter, who was—

—live forever—

blinking at the squirming, grimacing form of Fenny Bate. “They hurt Fenny,” Don said, the meaning of Fenny’s agony going through him like an electric current. The giant sounds of the film opened up again in his ears.

“You don’t,” he said to Bate, and looked under the seats. His axe lay out of reach.

“Don’t?”

“You don’t live forever.”

“We live much longer than you,” Bate said, and the civilized veneer of his voice cracked open to reveal the violence beneath it. Don backed toward Peter, looking not at Bate’s eyes but at his mouth.

“You won’t live another minute,” Bate said, and took a step forward.

“Peter—” Don said, and looked over his shoulder at the boy.

Peter was holding the Bowie knife above Fenny’s writhing body.

“Do it,” Don shouted, and Peter brought the knife down into Fenny’s chest. Something white and foul exploded upward, a reeking geyser, from Fenny’s ribcage.

Gregory Bate launched himself toward Peter, howling, and knocked Don savagely over the first row of seats.

Ricky Hawthorne at first thought he was dead, the pain in his back was so bad that he thought only death or dying could account for it, and then he saw the worn carpet under his face, the loops of thread seeming inches high and heard Don shouting: so he was alive. He moved his head: the last thing he could remember was cutting open the back of Fenny Bate’s neck. Then a locomotive had run into him.

Something beside him moved. When he lifted his head to see what it was, Fenny’s bare streaming chest leaped—seeming six feet long—a yard into the air. Small white worms swam across the white skin. Ricky recoiled, and though his back felt as though it were broken, forced himself to sit up.

To his side, Gregory Bate was lifting Peter Barnes off the floor, howling as if his chest were a cave of winds. A section of the beam from the projector caught Gregory’s arms and Peter’s body, and swarming blotches of black and white moved over them for a second. Still howling, Bate threw Peter into the screen.

Ricky could not see his knife, and went on his knees to scrabble for it. His fingers closed around a bone handle, and a long blade reflected a line of gray light. Fenny thrashed beside him, rolling over onto his hand, and uttered a thin eee, dead air rushing out. Ricky snatched the knife from under Fenny’s back, feeling his hand come away wet, and made himself stand.

Gregory Bate was just scrambling up onto the stage to leap through the rip in the screen after Peter, and Ricky threw out his free hand and grasped the thick collar of his pea jacket. Bate suddenly went rigid, his reflexes as good as a cat’s, and Ricky knew in terror that he would kill him, spinning around with pulverizing hands and slashing teeth, if he did not do the only possible thing.

Before Bate could move, Ricky slammed the Bowie knife into his back.

Now he could hear nothing, not the noises on the soundtrack, not the cry that must have come from Bate: he stood still gripping the bone handle, deafened by the enormity of what he had done. Bate fell back down and turned around and showed Ricky Hawthorne a face to carry with him all his life: eyes full of tearing wind and blizzard and a black mouth open as wide as a cavern.

“Filth,” Ricky said, almost sobbing.

Bate fell toward him.

“Get away, Ricky,” Don said, but the old lawyer was unable to move. Bate began to crawl toward him.

He stepped beside Ricky and Bate tilted back his head and looked straight into his eyes.

—live forever

Don hurriedly raised the axe over his head and brought the sharpened blade down into Bate’s neck, cutting down deeply into the chest. With the next blow he severed the head.

“Let me,” he said, and both Ricky and Don stared up at him with white faces.

When Peter was down on the floor of the theater beside them, he took the axe from Don and brought it weakly, glancingly down, his hysteria and loathing spoiling the blow; then he felt suddenly stronger, as strong as a logger, felt as if he were glowing, filled with light, and raised it effortlessly, all the pain leaving him, and brought the axe down again; and again; and again; and then moved to Fenny.

When they were only shreds of skin and smashed bones a zero breeze lifted off their ruined bodies and swirled up into the beam from the projector, passing Peter with such force that it knocked him aside.

Peter bent down into the mess and picked up the Bowie knife.

“By God,” Ricky said, and tottered into one of the seats.

When they left the theater, limping, their minds numb, they felt an impatient, hurrying wind even in the lobby—a wind that seemed to swirl through the empty space, rattling posters and the bag of potato chips on the candy counter, searching the way out— and when they broke open the doors, it streamed over them to join the worst blizzard of the season.

“There’ll be a lot of accidents on the roads this afternoon,” his father said.

“And we finally got a doctor to come give her a sedative, and Mr. Hawthorne has a terrible cold the doctor said could turn into pneumonia if he doesn’t rest, so Don Wanderley and I are taking care of them both.”

“Let me get this straight, Pete. You were with this Wanderley and Mr. Hawthorne?”

“That’s right,” Peter said.

“Well, I wish you’d thought of calling before this. I was worried half to death. You’re all I have, you know.”

“I’m sorry, Dad.”

“Well, at least you’re with good people. Try to get home when you can, but don’t take any chances in the storm.”

“Okay, Dad,” Peter said and hung up, grateful that his father had sounded sober, and even more grateful that he had asked no more questions.

He and Don made soup for Ricky, and brought it up to the guest-room where the old man was resting while his wife slept undisturbed in their bedroom.

“Don’t know what happened to me,” Ricky said. “I just couldn’t move another step. If I’d been alone, I would have frozen to death out there.”

“If any of us had been alone,” Don said, and did not have to finish the sentence.

“Or if there had been only two of us,” Peter said. “We’d be dead. He could have killed us easily.”

“Yes, well he didn’t,” Ricky said briskly. “Don was right about them. And now two-thirds of what we have to do is accomplished.”

“You mean we have to find her,” Peter said. “Do you think we can do it?”

“We’ll do it,” Don said. “Stella might be able to tell us something. She might have learned something— heard something. I don’t think there’s any doubt that the man in the blue car was the same man who was after you. We should be able to talk to her tonight.”

“Will it do any good?” Peter asked. “We’re snowed in again. We’ll never be able to drive anywhere, even if Mrs. Hawthorne does know something.”

“Then we’ll walk,” Don said.

“Yes,” Ricky said. “If that’s what it takes, we’ll walk.” And lay back against the pillows. “You know, we’re the Chowder Society now. The three of us. After Sears was found dead I thought—I said I was the only one left. I felt terribly bereft. Sears was my best friend; he was like my brother. And I’ll miss him as long as I live. But I know that when Gregory Bate cornered Sears, Sears put up a hell of a good scrap. He did his best to save Fenny once a long time ago, and I know he did his best against them when his time came. No, there’s no need to feel bad about Sears—he probably did better than any of us could have done alone.”

Ricky put his empty soup bowl down on the bedside table. “But now there’s a new Chowder Society, and here we all are. And there’s no whiskey and no cigars, and we’re not dressed right—and good heavens, look at me! I’m not even wearing a bow tie.” He plucked at the open collar of his pajama shirt and smiled at them. “And I’ll tell you one other thing. No more awful stories and no nightmares either. Thank God.”

“I’m not so sure about the nightmares,” Peter said.

“A huge dose of vitamins.”

“Well, I feel much better. All revved up. I still have that terrific cold, of course, but I’ve had that so long that it feels like a friend. But listen here, Don. After what we’ve been through, I couldn’t feel closer to you. If Sears felt like my brother, you feel like my son. Closer than my son, in fact. My boy Robert can’t talk to me—I can’t talk to him. That’s been true since he was about fourteen. So I think I’m going to adopt you spiritually, if you don’t object.”

“It makes me too proud of myself to object,” Don said, and took Ricky’s hand.

“You sure there were just vitamins in that shot?”

“Well.”

“If this is how dope makes you feel, I can understand how John became an addict.” He lay back and closed his eyes. “When all this is over, assuming we’re still alive, let’s stay in touch. I’ll take Stella on a trip to Europe. I’ll send you a barrage of postcards.”

“Of course,” Don said, and started to say something, but Ricky was already asleep.

Stella Hawthorne, her hair in a scarf, looked up at Don from beside her husband on the guest-room bed. “I woke up an hour or so ago,” she said, “and I got lonely, so I came down here to Ricky. Is that food? Oh, you’re lovely, both of you.” She smiled at Peter, who was standing shyly in the door.

“While the two of you were eating us out of house and home I had a little talk with Stella,” Ricky said. He took the tray and put it on Stella’s lap, and then removed one of the plates. “What luxury this is! Stella, we should have had maids years ago.”

“I think I mentioned that once,” Stella said. Though still obviously shaken and exhausted by shock, Stella had improved enormously during the evening; she did not look like a woman in her forties now, and perhaps she never would again, but her eyes were clear.

Ricky poured wine for himself and Stella and cut off a piece of steak. “There’s no doubt that the man who picked up Stella was the same one who followed you, Peter. He even told Stella that he was a Jehovah’s Witness.”

“But he was dead,” Stella said, and for a moment the shock swept wholly back into her face. She snatched at Ricky’s hand and held it. “He was.”

“I know,” Ricky said, and turned to the other two again. “But after she came back with help, the body was gone.”

“Will you please tell me what is going on?” Stella said, now almost in tears.

“I will,” said Ricky, “but not now. We’re not finished yet. I’ll explain everything to you this summer. When we get out of Milburn.”

“Out of Milburn?”

“I’m going to take you to France. We’ll go to Antibes and St. Tropez and Aries and anywhere else that looks good. We’ll be a pair of funny-looking old tourists together. But first you have to help us. Is that all right with you?”

Stella’s practicality saw her through. “It is if you’re really promising, and not just bribing me.”

“Did you see anything else around the car when you came back with Leon Churchill?” Don asked.

“No one else was there,” Stella replied, calmer again.

“I don’t mean another person. Any animals?”

“I don’t remember. I felt so—sort of unreal. No, nothing.”

“You’re sure? Try to remember how it looked. The car, the open door, the snowbank you hit—”

“Oh,” she said, and Ricky paused with the fork halfway to his mouth. “You’re right. I saw a dog. Why is that important? It jumped on top of the snowbank from someone’s yard, and then jumped down onto the street. I noticed it because it was so beautiful. White.”

“That’s it,” Don said.

Peter Barnes looked back and forth from Don to Ricky, his mouth open.

“Wouldn’t you like some wine, Peter? And you, Don?” Ricky asked.

Don shook his head, but Peter said, “Sure,” and Ricky passed him his glass.

“Can you remember anything the man said?”

“It was all so horrible … I thought he was crazy. And then I thought he knew me because he called me by name, and he said I shouldn’t go to Montgomery Street because you weren’t there anymore—where were you?”

“I’ll tell you all about it over a Pernod. This spring.”

“Anything else you remember?” Don asked. “Did he say where he was taking you?”

“To a friend,” Stella said, and shuddered. “He said I’d see a mystery. And he talked about Lewis.”

“Nothing more about where his friend was?”

“No. Wait. No.” She looked down at her plate, and pushed the tray down toward the foot of the bed. “Poor Lewis. That’s enough questions. Please.”

“You’d better leave us,” Ricky said.

Peter and Don were at the door when Stella said, “I

remember. He said he was taking me to the Hollow. I’m sure he said that.”

“That’s enough for now,” Ricky said. “See you in the morning, gentlemen.”

“You ought to be in bed,” Don said.

“Like the dickens I ought to be in bed! Can’t you smell how close we’re getting?”

“I can only smell eggs,” Don said. “Peter, get some plates out of the cupboard.”

“How many houses are there in the Hollow? Fifty? Sixty? No more than that. And she’s in one of them.”

“In there waiting for us,” Don said, and Peter, putting plates on the Hawthorne’s kitchen table, paused and set the final plate down more slowly. “And we must have had two feet of snow last night. It’s still snowing. You wouldn’t call it a blizzard anymore, but we could easily have another blizzard by this afternoon. There’s a snow emergency over most of the state. Do you want to hike over to the Hollow and knock on fifty or sixty doors?”

“No, I want us to think,” Ricky said, and carried the pan of eggs to the table and spooned a portion onto each plate. “Let’s get some bread in the toaster.”

When everything was ready, toast and orange juice and coffee, the three of them ate breakfast, following Ricky’s lead. He seemed vibrant, sitting at the table in his blue dressing gown; almost elated. And he had obviously been thinking a great deal about the Hollow and Anna Mostyn.

“It’s the one part of town we don’t know well,” Ricky said. “And that’s why she’s there. She doesn’t want us to find her yet. Presumably she knows that her creatures are dead. For the moment, her plans have been delayed. She’ll want reinforcements, either more like the Bates or more like herself. Stella got rid of the only other one around with a hatpin.”

“How do you know he was the only other one?” Peter asked.

“Because I think we would have encountered any others, if they were here.”

They ate in silence for a moment.

“So I think she’s just holed up—in a vacant building, most likely—until more of them arrive. She won’t be expecting us. She’ll think we won’t be able to move, in this snow.”

“And she’ll be vengeful,” Don said.

“She might also be afraid.”

Peter snapped his head up. “Why do you say that?”

“Because I helped kill her once before. And I’ll tell you something else. If we don’t find her soon, everything we have done will be wasted. Stella and the three of us bought time for the whole town, but as soon as outside traffic gets in …” Ricky bit into a piece of toast. “Things will be even worse than before. She won’t just be vengeful, she’ll be rabid. Twice we’ve blocked her. So we’d better lay out everything we can come up with about the Hollow. And we’d better do it now.”

“Wasn’t it originally the place where the servants lived?” Peter asked. “Back when everybody had servants?”

“Yes,” Ricky said, “but there has to be more. I’m thinking of what she said on Don’s tape. ‘In the places of your dreams.’ We found one of those places, but I’m thinking that there must be another one, someplace where we could have been lured if we hadn’t found Gregory and Fenny at the Rialto. But I just can’t think…”

“Do you know anybody who lives there?” Don asked.

“Of course I do. I’ve lived here all my life. But I can’t for the life of me see the connection …”

“What did the Hollow used to be like?” Peter asked. “In the old days.”

“In the old days? Back when I was a boy, you mean?

Oh, much different—much nicer. It was a lot cleaner than it is now. A bit raffish. We used to think of it as the Bohemian section of town. There was a painter who lived in Milburn then—did magazine covers. He lived there, and he had a splendid white beard and wore a cape—he looked just the way we thought painters should look. Oh, we used to spend a lot of time down there. Used to be a bar with a jazz band. Lewis liked to go there—had a little dancehall. Like Humphrey’s place, but smaller and nicer.”

“A band?” Peter asked, and Don too lifted his head.

“Oh, yes,” Ricky said, not noticing their excitement. “Only a little six-eight piece band, pretty good for anything you’d hear out here in the sticks …” He picked up the plates and took them to the sink; ran hot water over them. “Oh, Milburn was lovely in those days. We all used to walk for miles—down to the Hollow and back, hear some music, have a beer or two, take a hike out into the country …” His arms deep in soapy water, Ricky abruptly ceased all movement. “Good Lord. I know. I know.” Still holding a soapy plate, he turned toward them. “It was Edward. It was Edward, you see. We used to go down to see Edward in the Hollow. That was where he moved when he wanted his own apartment. I was in YPSL, my father hated that—” Ricky dropped the plate, and stepped unseeing over the shattered pieces—”and the owner was one of our first black clients. The building’s still there! The town council condemned it last spring, and it’s supposed to be demolished next year. We got Edward that apartment—Sears and I.” He wiped his hands on his dressing gown. “That’s it. I know that’s it. Edward’s apartment. The place of your dreams.”

“Because Edward’s apartment …” Don began, knowing that the old man was right.

“Was where Eva Galli died and our dreams began,” Ricky said. “By God, we’ve got her.”

“So you’re sure you can find the place?” Peter asked.

“I’m reasonably sure,” Ricky said. “Now, let’s have a look at ourselves.” They looked like three snowmen, padded out with so many layers of clothing. “Ah, hats. Well, I have a lot of hats.” He fitted a high fur hat over Peter’s head, put a red hunting cap that must have been half a century old on his own head, and told Don, “This one was always a little big on me.” It was a soft green tweed, and it fitted Don perfectly. “Got it to go fishing with John Jaffrey. Wore it once. Hated fishing.” He sneezed and wiped his nose with a peach tissue from his coat pocket. “In those days, I always preferred hunting.”

But even before the weather changed, walking was difficult for them. Their feet began to feel the cold first, and their legs tired from the effort of wading through the deep snow. They soon gave up the luxury of speech —it took too much energy. Their breath condensed on the heavy wool scarves, and the moisture turned cold and froze. Don knew that the temperature was dropping faster than he’d ever seen it: the snow came down harder, his fingers tingled in the gloves, even his legs began to feel the cold.

And sometimes, when they turned a corner and looked down a street hidden by a long wide drift peaked up fifteen feet high, he thought the three of them resembled photographs of polar explorers—doomed driven men with blackened lips and frozen skin, small figures in a rippling white landscape.

Halfway to the Hollow, Don was sure that the temperature had reached several degrees below zero. His scarf had become a stiff mask over his face, varnished by his breath. Cold bit at his hands and feet. He and Peter and Ricky were just straggling past the square; lifting their feet out of deep snow and leaning forward to get distance on the next step. The tree the mayor and the deputies had set up in the square was visible only as scattered green branches protruding through a mountain of white. Clearing Main Street and Wheat Row, Omar Norris had buried it.

By the time they reached the traffic lights, the brightness had left the air and the piled snow no longer sparkled: it seemed as gray as the air. Don looked up and saw thousands of flakes swirling between dense clouds. They were alone. Down Main Street, the tops of a few cars sat like inverted saucers on the drifts. All the buildings were closed. New snow spun around them: the air was darkening to black.

“Ricky?” he asked. He tasted frozen wool: his cheekbones, open to the air, burned.

“Not far,” Ricky gasped. “Keep on going. I’ll make it.”

“How are you doing, Peter?”

The boy peered out at Don from under the snow-crusted fur cap. “You heard the boss. Keep on going.”

Ricky fell down backward, and sat up chest high in the snow like a doll. Peter bent down to offer him an arm. Don turned around to see if he could help, and felt the snowladen wind pound against his back. He called, “Ricky?”

“Just have to. Sit. For a little.”

He breathed deeply, and Don knew how the cold would be scraping against his throat, how it would chill his lungs.

“No more than two-three blocks,” Ricky said. “God my feet.”

“I just had a hell of a thought. What if she’s not there?”

“She’s there,” Ricky said, and took Peter’s hand and pulled himself up. “It’s there. Few more blocks.”

When Don turned back into the storm he could not see for a moment; then he saw thousands of fast-moving particles of white veering toward him, so close together they were like lines of force. Vast semitransparent sheets cut him off from Ricky and Peter. Only partially visible beside him, Ricky motioned him on.

Don was never sure when they crossed into the Hollow: in the storm, it was no different from the rest of Milburn. Perhaps the buildings seemed marginally shabbier: perhaps fewer lights shone dimly in the depths of rooms, seeming thousands of feet away. Once he had written in his journal that the area had a “sepia ’30’s prettiness”: that seemed unutterably remote now. All was dark gray dirty brick and taped windows. But for the few dim lights flickering behind curtains, it seemed ominous and deserted. Don remembered other facile words he had written in his journal: if trouble ever comes to Milburn, it won’t start in the Hollow. Trouble had come to Milburn, and here in the Hollow, on a sunny day in mid-October fifty years before, it had started.

The three of them stood in the weak light of a street lamp, Ricky Hawthorne tottering, squinting across the street at three identical high brick buildings. Even in the noises of the storm Don could hear him breathing. “Over there,” Ricky said harshly.

“Which one?”

“Can’t tell,” Ricky said, and shook his head, causing a shower of snow to whirl off the red hunting cap. “Just can’t.” He peered up into the storm: pointed his face like a dog. The building on the right. Then back to the building in the middle. He raised the hand which held his knife and used it to point at the windows on the third floor. They were curtainless, and one was half-open. “There. Edward’s apartment. Just there.”

The street lamp over them died, and light faded all about them.

Don stared at the windows high up on the desolate building, half expecting to see a face appear there, beckoning toward them; fear worse than the storm froze him.

“Finally happened,” Ricky said. “Storm blew down the power lines. You afraid of the dark?”

The three of them floundered across the drifted street.

“Coats,” Don whispered, thinking that the sodden garments would slow them down; he lay the axe down in the dark, unbuttoned his coat and dropped it on the floor. Then the scarf, stinking of wet wool; his chest and arms were still constricted by the tight sweaters, but at least the heaviest weight no longer pulled at his shoulders. Peter too removed his coat, and helped Ricky with his.

Don saw their white faces hovering before him, and wondered if this was the last act—they had the weapons which had destroyed the Bate brothers, but the three of them were limp as rags. Ricky Hawthorne’s eyes were closed: thrown back, its muscles lax, his face was a death mask.

“Ricky?” Don whispered.

“A minute.” Ricky’s hand trembled as he raised it to blow on his fingers. He inhaled, held the air for a long moment, exhaled. “Okay. You’d better go first. I’ll bring up the rear.”

Don bent down and picked up the axe. Behind him Peter wiped the blade of the Bowie knife against his sleeve. Don found the bottom step with his numb toe and climbed onto it. He glanced back. Ricky stood behind Peter, propping himself against the staircase wall. His eyes were closed again.

“Mr. Hawthorne, do you want to stay down here?” Peter whispered.

“Not on your life.”

With the other two following him, Don crept up the first flight of steps. Once, three well-off young men just beginning their practices in law and medicine and a preacher’s son of seventeen had gone up and down these stairs: each of them close to twenty in the century’s twenties. And up these stairs had come the woman with whom they were infatuated, as he had been infatuated with Alma Mobley. He reached the second landing, and peeked around the corner to the top of the last flight of stairs. With part of his mind, he wished to see an open door, an empty room, snow blowing unnoticed into an empty apartment …

What he saw instead made him pull back. Peter looked over his shoulder and nodded; and finally Ricky appeared on the landing to look up at the door at the top of the stairs.

A phosphorescent light spilled out from beneath the door, illuminating the landing and the walls a soft green.

Silently, they came up the final set of stairs into the phosphorescent light.

“On three,” Don whispered, and cradled his axe just below the head. Peter and Ricky nodded.

“One. Two.” Don gripped the top of the banister with his free hand. “Three.”

They hit the door together, and it broke open under their weight.

Each of them heard a single distinct word; but the voice delivering it was different for each of them. The word was Hello.

It was in the East Fifties, and it was so familiar to him because quite near—somewhere very near—was a cafe with outdoor tables where he had met David for lunch whenever he was in New York.

This was not a hallucination—not a mere hallucination. He was in New York, and it was summer. Don felt a weight in his left hand, and looking down, saw that he was carrying an axe. An axe? Now what … ? He dropped the axe as if it had jumped in his hand. His brother called, “Don! Over here!”

Yes, he had been carrying an axe … they had seen green light … he had been turning, moving fast …

“Don!”

He looked across the street and saw David, looking healthy and extremely prosperous, standing up at one of the outdoor tables, grinning at him and waving. David in a crisp lightweight blue suit, aviator glasses smoked over his eyes, their bows disappearing into David’s sun-blond hair. “Wake up!” his brother called over the traffic.

Don rubbed his face with his freezing hands. It was important not to appear confused in front of David— David had asked him to lunch. David had something to tell him.

New York?

But yes, it was New York, and there was David, looking at him amusedly, happy to see him, full of something to say. Don looked down at the sidewalk. The axe was gone. He ran between the cars and embraced his brother and smelled cigars, good shampoo, Aramis cologne. He was here and David was alive.

“How do you feel?” David asked.

“I’m not here and you’re dead,” came out of his mouth.

David looked embarrassed, then disguised it behind another smile. “You’d better sit down, little brother. You’re not supposed to be talking like that anymore.” David held his elbow and led him to a chair beneath one of the sun umbrellas. A martini on the rocks chilled a sweating glass.

“I’m not supposed … Don began. He sat heavily in the chair; Manhattan traffic went down the pleasant East Fifties street; on the other side, over the top of the traffic, he read the name of a French restaurant painted in gold on dark glass. Even his cold feet could tell that the pavement was hot.

“You bet you’re not,” David said. “I ordered a steak for you, all right? I didn’t think you’d want anything too rich.” He looked sympathetically across the table at Don. The modish glasses hid his eyes, but David’s whole handsome face exuded warmth. “Is that suit okay, by the way? I found it in your closet. Now that you’re out of the hospital, you’ll have to shop for some new clothes. Use my account at Brooks, will you?” Don looked down at what he wore. A tan summer suit, a brown-and-green-striped tie, brown loafers. It all looked a little out of date and shabby beside David’s elegance.

“Now look at me and tell me I’m dead,” David said.

“You’re not dead.”

David sighed happily. “Okay. Good. You had me worried there, pal. Now—do you remember anything about what happened?”

“No. Hospital?”

“You had about the worst breakdown anyone’s ever seen, brother. It was the next thing to a one-way ticket. Happened right after you finished that book.”

“The Nightwatcher?”

“What else? You just blanked out—and when you’d say anything, it was just crazy stuff about me being dead and Alma being something awful and mysterious. You were in outer space. If you don’t remember any of this, it’s because of the shock treatments. Now we have to get you settled again. I talked to Professor Lieberman, and he says he’ll give you another appointment in the fall—he really liked you, Don.”

“Lieberman? No, he said I was …”

“That was before he knew how sick you were. Anyhow, I got you out of Mexico and put you in a private hospital in Riverdale. Paid all the bills until you got straightened out. The steak’ll be here in a minute. Better get that martini down. The house red isn’t bad here.”

Don obediently sipped at his drink: that familiar cold potent taste. “Why am I so cold?” he asked David. “I’m frozen.”

“Aftereffect of the drug therapy.” David patted his hand. “They told me you’d feel like that for a day or two, cold, not too sure of yourself yet—it’ll go away. I promise you.”

A waitress came with their food. Don let her take away his martini glass.

“You had all these disturbed ideas,” his brother was saying. “Now that you’re well again, they’ll shock you. You thought my wife was some kind of monster who had killed me in Amsterdam—you were convinced of it. The doctor said you couldn’t face the fact that you’d lost her: that’s why you never came out here to talk about it. You wound up thinking that what you wrote in your novel was real. After you mailed the book off to your agent, you just sat in a hotel room, not eating, not washing—you didn’t even get up to shit. I had to go all the way down to Mexico City to bring you back.”

“What was I doing an hour ago?” Don asked.

“You were getting a sedative shot. Then they put you in a cab and sent you down here. I thought you’d like to see the place again. Something familiar.”

“I’ve been in a hospital for a year?”

“Nearly two years. For the past few months, you’ve been making great progress.”

“Why can’t I remember it?”

“Simple. Because you don’t want to. As far as you’re concerned, you were born five minutes ago. But it’ll all come back slowly. You can recuperate in our place on the Island—lots of sun, sand, a few women. Like the sound of that?”

Don blinked and looked around. His entire body felt unreasonably cold. A tall woman was just now coming down the block toward them, pulled along by an enormous sheepdog on a leash—the woman was slender and tanned, she wore sunglasses pushed up into her hair, and for a moment she was the emblem of what was real: the epitome of all not hallucinated or imagined, of sanity. She was no one important, she was a stranger, but if what David was telling, him was the truth, she meant health.

“You’ll see plenty of women,” David said, almost laughing. “Don’t burn out your eyes on the first one who crosses your path.”

“You’re married to Alma now,” Don said.

“Of course. She’s dying to see you. And you know,” David said, still smiling, holding a fork with a neatly speared section of meat, “she’s kind of flattered about that book of yours. She feels she contributed to literature! But I want to tell you something,” and David hitched his chair closer. “Think about the consequences of it, if what you said in that book was true. If creatures like that really existed—and you thought they did, you know.”

“I know,” Don said. “I thought—”

“Wait. Let me finish. Can’t you see how puny we’d look to them? We live—what? A miserable sixty-seventy years, maybe. They’d live for centuries—for a century of centuries. Becoming anything they want to become. Our lives are made by accident, by coincidence, by a blind combination of genes—they make themselves by will. They would detest us. And they’d be right. Next to them, we would be detestable.”

“No,” Don said. “That’s all wrong. They’re savage and cruel, they live on death …” He felt as though he were about to be sick. “You can’t say those things.”

“Your problem is that you’re still caught up in the story you were telling yourself—even though you’re out of it, that story is still hanging around in your memory somewhere. You know, your doctor told me he never saw anything like it—when you flipped, you flipped into a story. You’d be walking down the hall in the hospital, and you’d be carrying on a conversation with people who weren’t there. You were all wrapped up in some sort of plot. Impressed the hell out of the doctors. You’d be talking to them, and they’d talk back, but you answered back like you were talking to some guy named Sears or another guy named Ricky …” David smiled and shook his head.

“What happened at the end of the story?” Don asked.

“Huh?”

“What happened at the end of the story?” Don set down his fork and leaned forward, staring at his brother’s bland face.

“They didn’t let you get there,” David said. “They were afraid to—looked like you were setting yourself up to get killed. See, that was part of your problem. You invented these fantastic beautiful creatures, and then you ‘wrote’ yourself into the story as their enemy. But nothing like that could ever be defeated. No matter how hard you tried, they’d always win in the end.”

“No, that isn’t …” Don said. That wasn’t correct: he could only remember the vague outlines of the “story” David was talking about, but he was sure David was wrong.

“Your doctors said it was the most interesting way for a novelist to commit suicide they ever heard of. So they couldn’t let you push it to the end, do you see? They had to bring you out of it.”

Don sat as if in freezing wind.

“What?” said Ricky, snapping up his head and seeing before him Sears’s beloved library: the glass-fronted bookcases, the leather chairs drawn into a circle, the dark windows. Immediately across from him, Sears drew on his cigar and gazed at him with what looked like mild annoyance. Lewis and John, holding their whiskey glasses and dressed like Sears in black tie, appeared to be more embarrassed than annoyed.

“What dream?” Ricky said, and shook his head. He too was in evening dress: by the cigar, by the quality of the darkness, by a thousand familiar details, he knew they were at the last stage of a Chowder Society meeting.

“You dozed off,” John said. “Right after you finished your story.”

“Story?”

“And then,” Sears said, “you looked right at me and said, ‘You’re dead.’ “

“Oh. The nightmare,” Ricky said. “Oh, yes. Did I really? My goodness, I’m cold.”

“At our age, we all have poor circulation,” said Dr. Jaffrey.

“What’s the date?”

“You really were out,” Sears said, lifting his eyebrows. “It’s the ninth of October.”

“And is Don here? Where is Don?” Ricky looked frantically around the library, as if Edward’s nephew might be hiding under a chair.

“Really, Ricky,” Sears grumped. “We just voted on writing to him, if you remember. It is extremely unlikely that he should appear before the letter is written.”

“We have to tell him about Eva Galli,” Ricky said, remembering the vote. “It’s imperative.”

John smiled thinly, and Lewis leaned back in his chair, looking at Ricky as if he thought he’d lost his mind.

“You do make the most amazing reversals,” Sears said. “Gentlemen, since our friend here evidently needs his sleep, perhaps we’d better call it a night.”

“Sears,” Ricky said, suddenly galvanized by another memory.

“Yes, Ricky?”

“Next time we meet—when we meet at John’s house—don’t tell the story you have in mind. You cannot tell that story. It will have the most appalling consequences.”

“Stay here a moment, Ricky,” Sears ordered, and showed the other two men out of the room.

He came back carrying the freshly fired-up cigar and a bottle. “You seem to need a drink. It must have been quite a dream.”

“Was I out long?” He could hear, down on the street, the sound of Lewis trying to start up the Morgan.

“Ten minutes. No longer. Now what was that about my story for next time?”

Ricky opened his mouth, tried to recapture what had been so important only minutes before, and realized that he must look very foolish. “I don’t know any more. Something about Eva Galli.”

“I can promise you I was not going to speak about that. I don’t imagine any of us ever shall, and I think that really is for the best, don’t you?”

“No. No. We have to—” Ricky realized he was going to mention Donald Wanderley again, and blushed. “I suppose it must have been part of my dream. Is my window open, Sears? I’m actually freezing. And I feel so tired. I can’t imagine what …”

“Age. No more or less. We’re coming to the end of our span, Ricky. All of us. We’ve lived long enough, haven’t we?”

Ricky shook his head.

“John’s dying already. You can see it in his face, can’t you?”

“Yes, I thought I saw …” Ricky said, thinking back to a time at the start of the meeting—a plane of darkness sliding across John Jaffrey’s forehead—which now seemed to have happened years before.

“Death. That’s what you thought you saw. It’s true, my old friend.” Sears smiled benignly at him. “I’ve been giving this a lot of thought, and you mentioning Eva Galli—well, it stirs it all up. I’ll tell you what I’ve been thinking.” Sears drew on the cigar and leaned massively forward. “I think Edward did not die of natural causes. I think he was given a vision of such terrible and unearthly beauty that the shock to his poor mortal system killed him. I think we have been skirting the edges of that beauty in our stories for a year.”

“No, not beauty,” Ricky said. “Something obscene— something terrible.”

“Hold it. I want you to consider the possibility of another race of beings—powerful, all-knowing, beautiful beings. If they existed, they would detest us. We would be cattle compared to them. They’d live for centuries—for a century of centuries, so that you and I would look like children to them. They would not be bound by accident, coincidence or a blind combination of genes. They’d be right to detest us: beside them, we would be detestable.” Sears stood up, put down his glass, and began to pace. “Eva Galli. That was where we missed our chance. Ricky, we could have seen things worth our pathetic lives to see.”

“They’re even vainer than we are, Sears,” Ricky said. “Oh. Now I remember. The Bates. That’s the story you can’t tell.”

“Oh, that’s all finished now,” Sears said. “Everything is finished now.” He walked to Ricky, and leaned on his chair looking down at him. “I fear that from now on all of us are—is it hors commerce or de combat?”

“In your case, I am sure it is hors de combat,” Ricky said, remembering his lines. He felt terribly ill, shivering, he felt the onslaught of the worst cold of his life: it lay like smoke in his lungs and weighted his arms like a winter’s worth of snow.

Sears leaned toward him. “That’s true for all of us, Ricky. But still, it was quite a journey, wasn’t it?” Sears plugged the cigar in his mouth and reached out to palp Ricky’s neck. “I thought I saw swollen glands. You’ll be lucky not to die of pneumonia.” Sears’s massive hand circled Ricky’s throat.

Helplessly, Ricky sneezed.

Don shook his head.

David put down his knife and fork. “Let’s try an experiment. I can prove to you that you want to live. Okay?”

“I know I want to live.” He looked across the indisputably real street and saw the indisputably real woman walking up the other side, still tugged along by the sheepdog. No: not walking up the other side, he realized, but coming down it, as she had just come down his side. It was like a film in which the same extra is shown in different scenes, in different roles, jarring you with his presence, reminding you that this is only invention. Still, there she was, moving briskly behind the handsome dog, not an invention but part of the street.

“I’ll prove it. I’m going to put my hands around your throat and choke you. When you want me to stop, just say stop.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

David reached quickly across the table and gripped his throat. “Stop,” he said. David tightened his muscles, and went up off his chair, knocking the table aside. The carafe toppled and bubbled wine over the tablecloth. None of the other diners appeared to notice, but went on eating and talking in their indisputably real way, indisputably forking food into their indisputably real mouths. “Stop,” he tried to say, but now David’s hands were bearing down too hard, and he could not form the word. David’s face was that of a man writing a report or casting a fly: he knocked the table over with his hip.

Then David’s face was not his, but the head of an antlered stag or the huge head of an owl or both of those.

Shockingly near, a man explosively sneezed.

Peter opened his mouth, closed it again. “I—”

“You could thank him, Peter,” his mother said dryly.

“That movie probably shook him up,” Mulligan said. “It has that effect on people. I’ve seen it hundreds of times by now, but it still gets me. That’s all it was, Pete. A movie.”

“A movie?” Peter said. “No—we were coming up the stairs …” He held out his hand and saw the Bowie knife.

“That’s where the reel ended. Your mother said you were interested in seeing how it all looks from up here. Since you’re the only people in the theater, there’s no harm in that, is there?”

“Peter, what in the world are you doing with that knife?” his mother asked. “Give it to me immediately.”

“No, I have to—ah. I have to—” Peter stepped away from his mother and looked confusedly around at the little projection booth. A corduroy coat draped from a hook; a calendar, a mimeographed piece of paper had been tacked to the rear wall. It was as cold as if Mulligan were showing the movie in the street.

“You’d better settle down, Pete,” Mulligan said. “Now here you can see our projectors, the last reel is all ready to go in this one, see, I get them all set up beforehand and when a little mark shows up in a couple of the frames I know I have so many seconds to start up the—”

“What happens at the end?” Peter asked. “I can’t get straight in my head just what’s—”

“Oh, they all die, of course,” Mulligan said. “There’s no other way for it to end, is there? When you compare them with what they’re fighting, they really do seem sort of pathetic, don’t they? They’re just accidental little people, after all, and what they’re fighting is—well, splendid, after all. You can watch the ending up here with me, if you’d like. Is that okay with you, Mrs. Barnes?”

“He’d better,” Christina said, sidling toward him.

“He went into some kind of trance down there. Give me that knife, Peter.”

Peter put the knife behind his back.

“Oh, he’ll see it soon enough, Mrs. Barnes,” Mulligan said, and flicked up a switch on the second projector.

“See what?” Peter asked. “I’m freezing to death.”

“The heaters are broken. I’m liable to get chilblains up here. See what? Well, the two men are killed first, of course, and then … but watch it for yourself.”

Peter bent forward to look through the slot in the wall, and there was the empty interior of the Rialto, there the hollow beam of light widening toward the screen …

Beside him, an unseen Ricky Hawthorne loudly sneezed, and he was aware of everything shifting again, the walls of the projection booth seemed to waver, he saw something recoil in disgust, something with the huge head of an animal recoiling as if Ricky had spat on it, and then Clark Mulligan locked back into place again, saying, “Film has a rough spot there, I guess, it’s okay now,” but his voice was trembling, and his mother was saying, “Give me the knife, Peter.”

“It’s all a trick,” he said. “It’s another slimy trick.”

“Peter, don’t be rude,” his mother said.

Clark Mulligan looked toward him with concern and puzzlement on his face, and Peter, remembering the advice from some old adventure story, brought the Bowie knife up into Mulligan’s bulging stomach. His mother screamed, already beginning to melt like everything around him, and Peter locked both hands on the bone handle and levered the knife up. He cried out in sorrow and misery, and Mulligan fell back into the projectors, knocking them off their stands.

“Look, Ricky,” he heard Don saying, and the voice was compelling enough to make him turn his head. When he saw what was happening on the floor of the apartment, he sat up. “Peter did it,” he heard Don say beside him.

The boy was standing six feet away from them, his eyes intent on the body of the woman lying some little way from them. Don was on his knees, rubbing his neck. Ricky met Don’s eyes, saw both horror and pain there, and then both of them looked back down at Anna Mostyn.

For a moment she looked as she had when he had first seen her in the reception room at Wheat Row: a young woman with a lovely fox face and dark hair: even now the old man saw the real intelligence and false humanity in her oval face. Her hand clutched the bone handle protruding out just below her breastbone; dark blood already poured from the long wound. The woman thrashed on the floor, contorting her face; her eyes fluttered. Random flakes of snow whirled in through the open window and settled down on each of them.

Anna Mostyn’s eyes flew open, and Ricky braced himself, thinking she would say something; but the lovely eyes drifted out of focus, not seeming to recognize any of the men. A wave of blood gushed from her wound; then another boiled out, sheeting across her body and touching the knees of the two men; she half-smiled, and a third wave rushed across her body and pooled on the floor.

For an instant only, as if the corpse of Anna Mostyn were a film, a photographic transparency over another substance, the three of them saw a writhing life through the dead woman’s skin—no simple stag or owl, no human or animal body, but a mouth opened beneath Anna Mostyn’s mouth and a body constrained within Anna Mostyn’s bloody clothing moved with ferocious life: it was as swirling and varied as an oil slick, and it angrily flashed out at them for the moment it was visible; then it blackened and faded, and only the dead woman lay on the floor.

In the next second, the color of her face died to chalky white and her limbs curled inward, forced by a wind the others could not feel. The dead woman drew up like a sheet of paper tossed on a fire, drawing in, her entire body curling inward like her arms and legs. She fluttered and shrank before them, becoming half her size, then a quarter of her size, no longer anything human, merely a piece of tortured flesh curling and shrinking before them, hurtled and buffeted by an unfelt wind.

The tenement room itself seemed to exhale, releasing a surprisingly human sigh through whatever was left of her throat. A green light flashed about them, flaring like a thousand matches: and the remainder of Anna Mostyn’s body fluttered once more and disappeared into itself. Ricky, by now leaning forward on his hands and knees, saw how the particles of snow falling where the body had been spun around in a vortex and followed it into oblivion.

Thirteen blocks away, the house across the street from John Jaffrey’s on Montgomery Street exploded into itself. Milly Sheehan heard the crack of the explosion, and when she rushed to her front window she was in time to see the facade of Eva Galli’s house fold inward like cardboard, and then break up into separate bricks flying inward to the fire already roaring up through the center of the house.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” Peter asked. “It’s all over now. We did it all.”

“Yes, Peter,” Ricky said. “It’s all over.”

And for a moment the two men exchanged glances of agreement. Don stood up and walked as if idly to the window and saw only a slackening storm. He turned to the boy and embraced him.

“He asks how I feel,” Ricky said, supported by pillows on his bed in the Binghamton hospital. “Pneumonia is no fun. It affects the system adversely. I advise you to refrain from getting it.”

“I’ll try,” Don said. “You almost died. They just got the highway open in time for the ambulance to bring you up here. If you hadn’t pulled through, I’d have had to take your wife to France this spring.”

“Don’t tell that to Stella. She’ll run in here and pull my tubes out.” He smiled wryly. “She’s so eager to get to France she’d even go with a pup like you.”

“How long will you have to stay in here?”

“Two more weeks. Apart from the way I feel, it’s not too bad. Stella has managed to terrify all the nurses, so they take excellent care of me. Thank you for the flowers, by the way.”

“I missed you,” Don said. “Peter misses you too.”

“Yes,” Ricky said simply.

“It’s a funny thing about this whole affair. I feel closer to you and Peter—and Sears, I guess I have to say—than anyone since Alma Mobley.”

“Well, you know my thoughts about that. I blurted them all out when that young doctor doped me to the gills. The Chowder Society is dead, long live the Chowder Society. Sears once said to me that he wished he wasn’t so old. I was a bit taken aback at the time, but I agree with him now. I wish I could see Peter Barnes grow up—I wish I could help him. You’ll have to do that for me. We owe him our lives, you know.”

“I know. Whatever we don’t owe to your cold.”

“I was completely befuddled, back in that room.”

“So was I.”

“Well, thank God for Peter. I’m glad you didn’t tell him.”

“Agreed. He’s been through enough. But there is still a lynx to be shot.”

Don nodded.

“Because,” Ricky continued, “otherwise she’ll just come back again. And keep on coming back until all of us and most of our relatives are dead. I’ve supported my children for too long to want to see them go that way. And as much as I hate to say it, it looks like it’s your job.”

“In every way,” Don said. “It was really you who destroyed both Gregory and Fenny. And Peter killed their boss. I have to take care of the remaining business.”

“I don’t envy you the job. But I do have confidence in you. You have the knife?”

“I picked it up off the floor.”

“Good. I’d hate to think of it being lost. You know, back in that terrible room I think I saw the answer to one of the puzzles Sears and I and the others used to talk about. I think we saw the reason for your uncle’s heart attack.”

“I think so too,” Don said. “Just for a second. I didn’t know that you saw it too.”

“Poor Edward. He must have walked into John’s spare bedroom, expecting at the worst to find his actress in bed with Freddy Robinson. And instead she— what? Threw off the mask.”

Ricky was now very tired, and Don stood up to go. He put a stack of paperback books and a bag of oranges on the table beside Ricky’s bed.

“Don?” Even the old man’s voice was grainy with exhaustion.

“Yes?”

“Forget about pampering me. Just shoot me a lynx.”

The schools reopened; businessmen and bankers went back to work, taking down their shutters and facing the mounds of paperwork that had accumulated on their desks; slowly, the joggers and walkers began to appear on Milburn’s streets again. Annie and Anni, Humphrey Stalladge’s two good-looking barmaids, grieved for Lewis Benedikt and married the men they were living with; they conceived within a week of one another. If they had boys, they’d name them Lewis.

Some businesses never did open up again: a few men had gone bankrupt—you have to pay rent and property taxes on a shop, even if it is buried under a snowdrift. Others closed for more somber reasons. Leota Mulligan thought about running the Rialto by herself, but sold the site to a franchise chain and married Clark’s brother six months later: Larry was less a dreamer than Clark had been, but he was a dependable man and good company and he liked her cooking. Ricky Hawthorne quietly closed down the law office, but a young attorney in town persuaded him to sell him the firm’s name and goodwill. The new man took back Florence Quast and had new nameplates made for the door and the front of the building. Hawthorne, James was now Hawthorne, James and Whittacker. “Pity his name isn’t Poe,” Ricky said, but Stella didn’t think that was funny.

During all this time, Don waited. When he saw Ricky and Stella, they talked about the travel brochures that now covered the enormous coffee table; when he saw Peter Barnes, they talked about Cornell, about the writers the boy was reading, about how his father was adjusting to life without Christina. Twice Don and Ricky drove to Pleasant Hill and placed flowers on all the graves which had come into being since John Jaffrey’s funeral. Buried together in a straight line were Lewis, Sears, Clark Mulligan, Freddy Robinson, Harlan Bautz, Penny Draeger, Jim Hardie—so many new graves, separate piles of earth, still lumpy. In time, when the earth had settled, they would have their headstones. Christina Barnes was buried farther off beneath another heap of raw earth, on half of the double plot Walter Barnes had bought. Elmer Scales’s family had been buried closer to the top of the hill, in the Scales family plot first purchased by Elmer’s grandfather: a weatherworn stone angel guarded over them. There too they put flowers.

“No sign of a lynx yet,” Ricky said as they drove back to town.

“No lynx,” Don answered. Both of them knew that when it came, it would not be a lynx; and that the waiting might take months, years.

Don read, looked forward to his dinners with Ricky and Stella, watched entire sequences of movies on television (Clark Gable in a bush jacket turning into Dar Duryea in a gangster’s nipped-in suit turning into graceful, winning Fred Astaire in a Chowder Society tuxedo), found he could not write; waited. Often he woke himself up in the middle of the night, weeping. He too had to heal.

He threaded his uncle’s projector and set up the screen and discovered that his hands were trembling so badly that it would have taken him three tries to light a cigarette. Just the sequence of setting up Eva Galli’s only movie brought back the apparition of Gregory Bate in the Rialto, where all of them could have died. And he found that he feared that Eva Galli would have Alma Mobley’s face.

He had attached the speakers in case someone had added a musical sound track: made in 1925, China Pearl was a silent film. When he switched the projector on and sat back to watch, holding a drink to help his nerves, he discovered that the print had been altered by the distribution company. It was not just China Pearl, it was number thirty-eight in a series called “Classics of the Silent Screen”; besides a soundtrack, a commentary had been added. That meant, Don knew, that the film had been heavily edited.

“One of the greatest stars of the silent era was Richard Barthelmess,” said the announcer’s colorless voice, and the screen showed the actor walking down a mock-up of a street in Singapore. He was surrounded by Hollywood Filipinos and Japanese dressed as Malays—they were supposed to be Chinese. The announcer went on to describe Barthelmess’s career, and then summarized a story about a will, a stolen pearl, a false accusation of murder: the first third of the film had been cut. Barthelmess was in Singapore looking for the true murderer, who had stolen “the famous Pearl of the Orient.” He was aided by Vilma Banky, who owned a bar “frequented by waterfront scum” but “as a Boston girl, has a heart the size of Cape Cod …”

Don turned the speakers off. For ten minutes he watched the lipsticked little actor gaze soulfully at Vilma Banky, topple villainous “waterfront scum,” run about on boats: he hoped that if Eva Galli would appear in this butchered version, he would recognize her. Vilma Banky’s bar housed a number of women who draped themselves over the customers and languorously sipped tall drinks. Some of these prostitutes were plain, some of them were stunning: any of them, he supposed, could have been Eva Galli.

But then a girl appeared framed in the doorway of the bar, studio fog boiling behind her, and pouted at the camera. Don looked at her sensual, large-eyed face, and felt his heart freeze. He hurriedly switched on the soundtrack.

“… the notorious Singapore Sal,” crooned the announcer. “Will she get to our hero?” Of course she was not the notorious Singapore Sal, that was an invention of whoever had written the inane commentary; but he knew she was Eva Galli. She sauntered through the bar and approached Barthelmess; she stroked his cheek. When he brushed her hand away, she sat down on his lap and kicked one leg in the air. The actor dumped her on the floor. “So much for Singapore Sal,” gloated the announcer.

Don yanked out the speaker leads, stopped the film and backed it up to Eva Galli’s entrance, and watched the sequence again.

He had expected her to be beautiful, and she was not. Beneath the makeup, she was just a girl of ordinary good looks; she looked nothing like Alma Mobley. She had enjoyed the business of acting, he saw, playing the part of an ambitious girl playing a part had amused her—how she would have enjoyed stardom! As Ann-Veronica Moore, she had played at it again; even Alma Mobley had seemed fitted for the movies. She could have molded that passive beautiful face over a thousand characters. But in 1925, she had miscalculated, made a mistake: cameras exposed too much, and what you saw when you looked at Eva Galli on screen was a young woman who was not likable. Even Alma had not been likable; even Anna Mostyn, when truly seen—as at the Barnes’s party—seemed coldly perverse, driven by willpower. They could for a time evoke human love, but nothing in them could return it. What you finally saw was their hollowness. They could disguise it for a time, but never finally, and that was their greatest mistake; a mistake in being. Don thought he could recognize it anywhere now, in any nightwatcher pretending to be man or woman.

“You can always come to see me,” Don said. “You never have to think twice about it. I mean that, Peter. I’ll never be anything but happy to see you. That’s a guarantee.”

“I was hoping you’d say something like that. Ricky’s leaving in a week or two, isn’t he?”

“Yes. I’m driving them to the airport next Friday. They’re both very excited about their trip. But if you want to see Ricky now, all I have to do is call him up. He’ll come.”

“No, please don’t,” the boy said. “It’s bad enough I’m bothering you …”

“For God’s sake, Peter,” Don said. “What’s the matter?”

“Well, it’s just that I’ve been having an awful time lately. That’s why I wanted to see you.”

“I’m glad you did. What’s wrong?”

“I keep seeing my mother,” Peter said. “I mean, I dream about her all the time. It’s like I’m back in Lewis’s house, and I’m seeing that Gregory Bate grab her again—and I keep dreaming about the way he looked on the floor of the Rialto. All those smashed-up pieces of him moving around. Refusing to die.” He was close to tears.

“Have you talked to your father about it?”

Peter nodded. “I tried. I wanted to tell him everything, but he won’t listen. Not really. He looks at me like I’m five years old and telling him some made-up nonsense. So I stopped before I really started.”

“You can’t blame him, Peter. Nobody who hadn’t been with us could believe it. If he can listen to part of it and not tell you you’re crazy, maybe that’s enough. Part of him was listening. Maybe part of him believes it. You know, I think there’s another problem too. I think you’re afraid that if you give up the horror and fear, that you’ll also be giving up your mother. Your mother loved you. And now she’s dead, and she died in a terrible way, but she put her love into you for seventeen or eighteen years, and there’s a lot of it left. The only thing you can do is carry on with it.”

Peter nodded.

Don said, “I once knew a girl who spent all day in a library and said she had a friend who protected her from vileness. I don’t know how her life turned out, but I do know that nobody can protect anybody else from vileness. Or from pain. All you can do is not let it break you in half and keep on going until you get to the other side.”

“I know that’s true,” Peter said, “but it just seems so hard to do.”

“You’re doing it right now. Coming here and talking to me is part of getting to the other side. Going to Cornell will be another big part of it. You’ll have so much work to do that you won’t be able to brood about Milburn.”

“Can I see you again? After I’m in college?”

“You can come to see me anytime at all. And if I’m not in Milburn, I’ll write to let you know where I am.”

“Good,” Peter said.

But it was a false peace, and Don still waited. He never let Peter see his own tension, but it grew every week.

He had watched new arrivals to Milburn, had managed to look at all the tourists who checked into the Archer Hotel, but none of them had given him the thrill of fear Eva Galli had projected across fifty years. Several nights after drinking too much, Don dialed Florence de Peyser’s telephone number and said, “This is Don Wanderley. Anna Mostyn is dead.” The first time, the person at the other end simply replaced the phone in its cradle; the second time, a female voice said, “Isn’t this Mr. Williams at the bank? I think your loan is about to be recalled, Mr. Williams.” The third time, an operator’s voice told him that the telephone had been switched to an unlisted number.

The other half of his anxiety was that he was running out of money. His bank account had no more than two or three hundred dollars in it—now that he was drinking again, enough for only a couple of months. After that he would have to find a job in Milburn, and any sort of job would keep him from patrolling the streets and shops, searching for the being whose arrival Florence de Peyser had promised.

He spent two or three hours every day, now that the weather was warm, sitting on a bench near the playground in Milburn’s only park. You have to remember their time scale, he told himself: you have to remember that Eva Galli gave herself fifty years to catch up with the Chowder Society. A child growing up unobtrusively in Milburn could give Peter Barnes and himself fifteen or twenty years of apparent safety before beginning to play with them. And then it would be someone everybody knew; it would have a place in Milburn; it would not be as visible as a stranger. This time, the nightwatcher would be more careful. The only limit on its time would be that it would want to act before Ricky died of natural causes—so perhaps it had to be ready in ten years.

How old would that make it now? Eight or nine. Ten, perhaps.

If.

But perhaps children were quicker at seeing real difference than adults.

He knew he would have to make up his mind quickly: his account had shrunk to a hundred and twenty-five dollars. But if he took the girl away and he was wrong, what was he: a maniac?

He started wearing the Bowie knife strapped to his side beneath his shirt when he went to the playground.

Even if he was right and the girl Ricky’s “lynx,” she could stick to her role—if he took her away, she could damage him irreparably by not revealing anything and waiting for the police to find them. But the nightwatcher wanted them dead: if he was right, he did not think she would let the police and the legal system punish him for her. She liked gaudier conclusions than that.

She seemed to take no notice of him, but the child began to appear in his dreams, sitting off to one side, observing him expressionlessly, and he imagined that even when she was sitting on a swing, seemingly absorbed, she peeked at him.

Don had only one real clue that she was not the ordinary child she appeared to be, and he clung to it with a fanatic’s desperation. The first time he had seen her, he had gone cold.

Don closed out his account and took his remaining money away in cash; he could not sleep, even when he drank too much; he knew he was falling back into the patterns of his breakdown after David’s death. Each morning, he taped the big knife to his side before walking to the park.

If he did not act, he knew, one day he would not be able to leave his bed: his indecision would spin back into every atom of his life. It would paralyze him. This time he would not be able to write his way out of it.

One morning he motioned to another of the children, and the little boy shyly came up to him.

“What’s the name of that girl?” he asked, pointing.

The boy shuffled his feet, blinked and said, “Angie.”

“Angie what?”

“Don’t know.”

“Why doesn’t anybody ever play with her?”

The boy squinted at him, cocking his head; then, deciding that he could be trusted, leaned forward charmingly, cupping his hands beside his mouth to tell a dark secret. “Because she’s awful.” He scampered away, and the girl swung back and forth, back and forth, higher and higher, uncaring.

Angie. Sitting inside his sweaty clothes under a warm eleven o’clock sun, he froze.

That night, in the midst of some harried dream, Don fell out of bed and staggered to his feet, holding a head which felt as though it had fractured like a dropped plate. He went into the kitchen for a glass of water and aspirin, and saw—imagined he saw—Sears James sitting at the dining-room table playing solitaire. The hallucination looked at him disgustedly, said, “It’s about time you straightened out, isn’t it?” and went back to its game.

He returned to the bedroom and began throwing clothes into a suitcase, taking the Bowie knife from the top of the dresser and rolling it up in a shirt.

At seven o’clock, unable to wait any longer, he drove to the park, went to his bench and waited.

The girl appeared, walking across the damp grass, at nine. She wore a shabby pink dress he had seen many times before, and she moved swiftly, wrapped as ever in her private isolation. They were alone for the first time since Don had thought of watching the playground. He coughed, and she looked directly at him.

And he thought he understood that all of these weeks, he sitting rooted to his bench and fearing for his sanity, she obliviously, concentratedly playing by herself, had been part of her game. Even the doubt (which still would not leave him) was part of the game. She had tired him, weakened him, tortured him as she had surely tortured John Jaffrey before persuading him to jump from the bridge into a freezing river. If he was right.

“You,” he said.

The girl sat on a swing and looked across the playground to him.

“You.”

“What do you want?”

“Come here.”

She stood up off the swing and began to march toward him. He couldn’t help it—he was afraid of her. The girl paused two feet in front of him and looked into his face with unreadable black eyes.

“What’s your name?”

“Angie. Nobody ever talks to me.”

“Angie what?”

“Angie Messina.”

“Where do you live?”

“Here. In town.”

“Where?”

She pointed vaguely east—the direction of the Hollow.

“You live with your parents?”

“My parents are dead.”

“Then who do you live with?”

“Just people.”

“Have you ever heard of a woman named Florence de Peyser?”

She shook her head: and maybe it was true, maybe she had not.

He looked up toward the sun, sweating, unable to speak.

“What do you want?” the girl demanded to know.

“I want you to come with me.”

“Where?”

“For a ride.”

“Okay,” she said.

Trembling, he left the bench. As simple as that. As simple as that. No one saw them go.

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? Did you kidnap a friendless girl and drive without sleeping, hardly eating, stealing money when your own melted away … did you point a knife toward her bony chest?

What was the worst thing? Not the act, but the ideas about the act: the garish film unreeling through your head.

Don opened his eyes and saw the open-air restaurant about him, the gilt lettering across the street. David sat across the table, still handsome, still radiating concern, but dressed in a moldering sack which once had been a suit; the lapels were gray with fine dust, the seams sprouted white threads. Mold grew up the sleeves.

His steak and a half-full wineglass were before him; in his right hand he held a fork, in his left a bone-handled Bowie knife.

Don freed a button on his shirt and slid the knife between his shirt and his skin. “I’m sick of these tricks,” he said. “You’re not my brother, and I’m not in New York. We’re in a motel room in Florida.”

“And you haven’t had nearly enough sleep,” his brother said. “You really look like you’re in terrible shape.” David propped one elbow on the table and lifted the smoky aviator glasses off his eyes. “But maybe you’re right. It doesn’t unsettle you so much anymore, does it?”

Don shook his head. Even his brother’s eyes were right; that seemed indecent, that she should have copied his eyes so exactly. “It proves I was right,” he said.

“About the little girl in the park, you mean. Well, of course you were right about her. You were supposed to find her—haven’t you worked that out yet?”

“Yes. I did.”

“But in a few hours little Angie, the poor orphan girl, will be back in the park. In ten or twelve years, she’ll be just about the age for Peter Barnes, wouldn’t you say? Of course, poor Ricky will have killed himself long before that.”

“Killed himself.”

“Very easy to arrange, dear brother.”

“Don’t call me brother,” Don said.

“Oh, we’re brothers all right,” David said, and smiled as he snapped his fingers.

In the motel room, a weary-looking black man settled back into the chair facing him and unclipped a tenor saxophone from the strap around his neck. “Now me, of course, you know,” he said, putting the saxophone down on a bedside table.

“Dr. Rabbitfoot.”

“The celebrated.”

The musician had a heavy, authoritative face, but instead of the gaudy minstrel’s getup Don had imagined him wearing, he dressed in a rumpled brown suit shot with iridescent threads of a paler, almost pinkish brown; and he too looked rumpled, tired from a life spent on the road. Dr. Rabbitfoot’s eyes were as flat as the little girl’s, but their whites had turned the yellow of old piano keys.

“I didn’t imagine you very well.”

“No matter. I don’t take offense easy. You can’t think of everything. In fact, there’s a lot you didn’t think of.” The musician’s breathy confidential voice had the timbre of his saxophone. “A few easy victories don’t mean you won the war. Seems like I be reminding folks of that a lot. I mean, you got me here, but where did you get yourself? That’s an example of the kind of thing you gotta keep in mind, Don.”

“I got face to face with you,” Don said.

Dr. Rabbitfoot lifted his chin and laughed: and in the middle of the laugh, which was hard and explosive, as regular as a stone skipping over water, Don was in Alma Mobley’s apartment, all of the luxurious objects in their old places around him, and Alma was seated on a cushion before him.

“Well, that’s hardly new, is it?” she asked, still laughing. “Face to face—that’s a position we knew many times, as I remember it. Top to tail, too.”

“You’re despicable,” he said. These transformations were starting to work: his stomach burned and his temples ached.

“I thought you got beyond that,” she said in her glancing, sunshiny voice. “After all, you know more about us than nearly anyone on this planet. If you don’t like our characters, at least you should respect our abilities.”

“No more than I respect the sleazy tricks of a nightclub magician.”

“Then I’ll have to teach you to respect them,” she said and leaned forward and was David, half his skull flattened and his jaw broken and his skin broken and bleeding in a dozen places.

“Don? For God’s sake, Don … can’t you help me? Jesus, Don.” David pitched sideways on the Bokhara rug and groaned with pain. “Do something—for God’s sake …”

Don could not bear it. He ran around his brother’s body, knowing if he bent over to help David they would kill him, and opened the door of Alma’s apartment, shouted “No!” and saw that he was in a crowded, sweaty room, a nightclub of some sort (It’s only because I said nightclub, he thought, she picked up the word and yanked me into it) where black and white people sat together at small round tables facing a bandstand.

Dr. Rabbitfoot was sitting on the edge of the bandstand, nodding at him. The saxophone was back on its chain, and he fingered the keys as he spoke.

“You see, boy, you got to respect us. We can take your brain and turn it to cornmeal mush.” He pushed himself off the stand and came toward Don. “Pretty soon”—and now, shockingly, Alma’s voice came from his wide mouth—”you don’t know where you are or what you’re doing, everything inside you is all mixed up, you don’t know what’s a lie and what isn’t.” He smiled. Then in the doctor’s voice again, and lifting the saxophone toward Don, he said, “You take this horn here. I can tell little girls I love them through this horn, and that’s probably a lie. Or I can say I’m hungry, and that sure as hell ain’t no lie. Or I can say something beautiful, and who knows if that’s a lie or not? It’s a complicated business, see?”

“It’s too hot in here,” Don said. His legs were trembling and his head seemed to be spinning in wide arcs. The other musicians on the stand were tuning up, some of them hitting the A the piano player fed them, others running scales: he was afraid that when they started to play, the music would blow him to pieces. “Can we leave?”

“You got it,” said Dr. Rabbitfoot. The yellow around his pupils shone.

The drummer splashed a cymbal, and a throbbing note from a bass vibrated through the humid air like a bird, taking his stomach with it, and all the musicians came in together, the sound hitting him like an enormous breaker.

And he was walking along a Pacific beach with David, both of them barefoot, a seagull gliding overhead, and he didn’t want to look at David, who wore the dreadful moldering gravesuit, so he looked at the water and saw shimmering, iridescent layers of oil sliding through the pools around them. “They just got it all,” David was saying, “they watched us so long they know us right down to the ground, you know? That’s why we can’t win—that’s why I look this way. You can get a few lucky breaks like you did back in Milburn, but believe me, they won’t let you get away now. And it’s not so bad.”

“No?” Don whispered, almost ready to believe it, and looked past David’s terrible head and saw behind them, up on a bluff, the “cottage” he and Alma had stayed in, several thousand years before.

“It’s like when I first went into practice,” David explained, “I thought I was such hot stuff, Don—Jesus, I thought I’d turn the place upside down. But the old guys in that firm, Sears and Ricky, they knew so many tricks, they were smooth as grease, man. And I was the only thing that got turned upside down. So I just settled down to learn, brother, I apprenticed myself to them, and I decided that if I was ever going to go anywhere I had to learn to be just like they were. That’s how I got ahead.”

“Sears and Ricky?” Don asked.

“Sure. Hawthorne, James and Wanderley. Isn’t that what it was?”

“In a way it was,” Don said, blinking into a red sun.

“In a big way. And that’s what you have to do now, Don. You have to learn to honor your betters. Humility. Respect, if you like. See, these guys, they live forever, and they know us inside out, when you think you got them pinned down they wiggle out and come up fresh as flowers—just like the old lawyers in my first firm. But I learned, see, and I got all this.” David gestured encompassingly around, taking in the house, the ocean, the sun.

“All this,” Alma said, beside him now in her white dress, “and me too. Like your saxophone player says, it’s a complicated business.”

The patterns of oil in the water deepened, and the sliding colors wrapped around his shins.

“What you need, boy,” Dr. Rabbitfoot said beside him, “is a way out. You got an icicle in your belly and a spike through your head, and you’re as tired as three weeks of a Georgia summer. You gotta get to the final bar. You need a door, son.”

“A door,” Don repeated, ready to drop, and found himself looking at a tall wooden door upended in the sand. A sheet of paper was pinned to it at eye level; Don trudged forward and saw the typed letters on the sheet.

1. The Management requests that all guests depart by noon, or pay another night’s cabin rental.
2. We respect your property, please respect ours.
3. No frying, grilling or boiling in the cabins.
4. The Management wishes you a hearty welcome, a happy stay and a purposeful departure.

The Management.

Don opened the door and walked through. Broiling Florida sun fell on him, lay across the shining asphalt of the parking lot. Angie was standing before him, holding open the door of his car. Don staggered and leaned on the baking red flank of a Chevrolet van; the man who resembled Adolf Eichmann, immured in his concrete booth, turned his head to stare at him. Light gleamed from his thin gold spectacles.

Don got in the car.

“Now just drive on out,” Dr. Rabbitfoot said beside him, leaning back into the car seat. “You found that door you needed, didn’t you? It’s all gonna work out fine.”

Don pulled out into the exit lane. “Which way?”

“Which way, son?” The black man giggled, and then gave his breathy, explosive laugh. “Why, our way. That’s the only way you got. We’re just gonna get off by ourselves somewhere in the countryside, you see that?”

And of course, he did see it: turning out onto the highway in the direction away from Panama City, he saw not the road but a broad field, a checkered tablecloth on grass, a windmill turning in a scented breeze. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t do that.”

“Fine, son. You just drive.”

Don peered ahead, saw the yellow line dividing the highway, gasped for air. He was tired enough to fall asleep driving.

“Boy, you stink like a goat. You need a shower.”

As soon as the musical voice had ceased, a shattering rain hit the windshield. He switched on the wipers, and when the windows cleared for a moment, saw sheets of rain bouncing off the highway, slicing down through suddenly darkened air.

He screamed and, not knowing he was going to do it, stamped on the accelerator.

The car squealed forward, rain pouring in through the open window, and they shot over the edge of the highway and plummeted down the bank.

Alma Mobley stood on the tracks, holding up her hands as if that would stop them: she flickered out like a light bulb as the car jounced over the tracks and went on gathering speed toward the access road.

“You damned cracker,” Dr. Rabbitfoot shouted, violently rocked into him and then rocked back against the door.

Don felt a sudden pain in his shirt, clasped his hand over it, and found the knife. He ripped open his shirt, shouting something that was not words, and when the black man lunged at him, met him with the blade.

“Damn … cracker,” Dr. Rabbitfoot managed to gasp. The knife bumped against a rib, the musician’s eyes widened and his hand closed around Don’s wrist, and Don pushed, willing it: the long blade scraped past the rib and found the heart.

Alma Mobley’s face appeared across the windshield, wild and raddled as a hag’s, screeching at him. Don’s head was jammed into Dr. Rabbitfoot’s neck; he felt blood pouring out over his hand.

The car lifted six inches off the ground, hoisted by an internal blast of wind that battered Don against the door and tore his shirt up into his face. They bounded off the access road and rode on the nightwatcher’s death down into the Gulf.

A thousand screaming voices surrounded him.

“Now, you bastard,” he whispered, waiting for the moan from the spirit inhabiting that disappearing form.

A whirling pencil winked into invisibility: vibrant greenish light colored everything like a flash of green lightning. Cracker, hissed a voice from nowhere, and the car pitched violently, and shafts of color as violent as that, as if the car were a prism, burst out from the center of the pinwheeling water.

Don aimed at a spot inches above the vortex and shot out his hands, throwing himself forward just as his ear recorded that the last hissing of the voice had become an angry, enduring buzz.

His hands closed around a form so small that at first he thought he had missed it. His motion carried him forward, and his joined hands struck the edge of the window and he tumbled off the seat into the water.

The thing in his hands stung him.

LET ME GO!

It stung him again, and his hand felt the size of footballs. He scraped his palms together and rolled it into his left hand.

RELEASE ME!

He squeezed his fingers down into his palm, and was stung again before the enormous voice in his head dampened into a thin, wriggling shriek.

Crying now, partly from pain but far more from a savage sense of triumph that made him feel he was shining like the sun, streaming light from every pore, he used his right hand to take the knife from the sodden car seat and push the passenger door open against the lapping water of the Gulf.

Then the voice in his mind widened out like a hunting horn. The wasp stung him twice rapidly, hitting the base of two fingers.

Don crawled sobbing across the seat and dropped out into the waist-high water. Time to see what happens when you shoot the lynx. He stood up and saw a row of men standing seventy yards off outside the sheds, staring at him in the sun. An overweight man in a security guard’s uniform was running down to the edge of the water.

Time to see what happens. Time to see. He waved the security guard away with his right hand, and dropped the left into the water to stun the wasp.

The guard saw the knife in his hand, and put his own hand on his holster. “You okay?” he shouted.

“Get away!”

“Look, buddy—”

RELEASE ME!

The guard lowered his hand, backed a few inches up the beach, bewilderment chasing the belligerence from his face.

YOU HAVE TO LET ME GO!

“Like hell I do,” Don said, and came up onto the sand and went to his knees, cramping his left hand down again. “Time to shoot the lynx.”

He raised the knife over his swollen, flaming left hand and curled back the fingers a fraction of an inch at a time. When a part of the wasp’s body, struggling legs and a bloated hindquarters, was uncovered, he slashed down with the knife, laying open his hand.

NO! YOU CANNOT DO THIS!

He tilted his palm and dropped the severed section of the wasp onto the sand. Then he slashed down again and cut the remainder of the wasp in half.

NO! NO! NO! NO! CANNOT!

“Hey, mister …” said the security guard, coming nearer across the sand. “You cut your hand all to hell.”

“Had to,” Don said, and dropped the knife beside the pieces of the wasp. The enormous flaring voice had become a shrill piping scream. The guard, still red-faced and fuddled, looked down at the pieces of the wasp, twitching and rolling feverishly over the sand. “Wasp,” he said. “Thought maybe that freak storm took you off the … uh …” He rubbed his mouth. “It prob’ly stung you right then, huh? Jeeze, I never knew those things live when they’re … uh …”

Don was winding his shirt around his wounded hand, and he dropped it back into salt water to help it heal.

“Guess you wanted revenge on the l’il sonofabitch, huh?” the guard said.

“I did,” Don said, and met the man’s baffled eyes and laughed. “That’s right, I did.”

“Yeah, you got it too,” the guard said. Both of them watched the severed pieces of wasp rolling in the wet sand. “That thing ain’t ever gonna give up the ghost.”

“Doesn’t look like it.” Don used his shoe to scrape sand over the wriggling sections of the wasp. Even then dimples and depressions in the sand showed that the thing continued to struggle.

“Tide’ll come in and take it,” the guard said. He motioned toward the sheds, the rank of curious men. “Can we do anything for you? We could get a truck out here, call from the plant to get your car hauled out.”

“Let’s do that. Thank you.”

“You got somewhere you got to go in a hurry?”

“Not in a hurry,” Don said, knowing all at once what he had to do next. “But there’s a woman I have to meet in San Francisco.” They began to go toward the sheds and the quiet men. Don stopped to look back; saw only sand. Now he could not even find the spot where he had buried it.

“Tide’ll take that l’il bastard halfway to Bolivia,” the fat guard said. “You don’t want to worry about that anymore, friend. It’ll be fishfood by five o’clock.”

Don tucked the knife into his belt and experienced a wave of love for everything mortal, for everything with a brief definite life span—a tenderness for all that could give birth and would die, everything that could live, like these men, in sunshine. He knew it was only relief and adrenalin, but it was all the same a mystical, perhaps a sacred emotion. Dear Sears. Dear Lewis. Dear David. Dear John, unknown. And dear Ricky and Stella, and dear Peter too. Dear brothers, dear humankind.

“For a guy whose car is turning into salt rust, you look awful happy,” the guard said.

“Yes,” Don answered. “Yes, I am. Don’t ask me to explain it.”