Mystery Walk

FOUR

Potter's Clay

17

The old woman's hands, wet with clay, moved like brown hummingbirds to give shape to the formless lump that sat on the spinning potter's wheel before her. Vase or jar? she asked herself, her foot rhythmically tapping the horizontal wooden bar that controlled the wheel's speed. Oiled gears meshed with a quiet hissing of friction. She was partial to vases, but jars sold more quickly; Mrs. Blears, owner of the Country Crafts Shoppe twenty miles away in Selma, had told her there was a real market for her small, wide-mouthed jars glazed in dark, earthen colors. They could be used for anything from sugar jars to holding lipsticks, Mrs. Blears said, and people paid a bit more for them if there was the Rebekah Fairmountain signature on the bottom. After all, Rebekah had been written up both in the Selma Journal and in Alabama Craftsman magazine, and she'd won first prize for most original pottery sculpture four years in a row at the Alabama State Fair. She did the sculpture only once in a while now, to challenge herself, but stuck mainly to the jars, vases, and mugs the crafts shop ordered, because blue ribbons didn't make a very filling meal.

Midmorning sunlight streamed in through two windows before her, slanting across the wood-floored workroom and glinting off the finished pieces arranged on pineboard shelves: there were cups and saucers the color of red autumn leaves, dishes as dark blue as a midnight sky, a series of jars ranging in hue from pink to deep purple, black mugs with a finish as rough as pine bark, unglazed pieces painted with brightly colored Choctaw figures. The workroom was a hodgepodge of colors and shapes, a riot of creativity; at the center of it sat the old woman, smoking a plain clay pipe and regarding the material that lay before her. She had smoothed the sides, wetting her fingers from a can of water to keep the clay soft, and had already worked over several small imperfections that might crack in the kiln's drying heat. Now it was time to decide.

She saw a vase in this one. A tall vase with a fluted rim, glazed deep red like the blood that flows through a woman's heart when she's with the man she loves. Yes, she thought; a beautiful dark red vase to hold white wild flowers. She added more clay from a box at her side, wet her fingers again, and went to work.

Rebekah Fairmountain's strong-boned, deeply furrowed face was spattered with clay; her flesh was the color of oiled mahogany, her eyes pure ebony. Straight silver hair fell to her shoulders from beneath a wide-brimmed straw sunhat, and she wore clay-smeared Sears overalls over a plaid shirt. As she worked, her eyes narrowed with concentration, and blue whorls of smoke wisped from the right side of her mouth; she was puffing rabbit tobacco that she'd gathered in the forest, and its distinctive burned-leaves aroma filled the workroom. Her house was set far off the main road and surrounded by dense forest; even so, the electric company was running lines out to provide lights to some of her neighbors, but she didn't want that false, cheerless lighting.

A covey of quail burst out of the brush off in the distance, scattering for the sky. Their movement through the window caught Rebekah's attention; she watched them for a moment, wondering what was stalking through the woods after them. Then she saw a faint haze of dust rising in the air, and she knew a car was drawing near. Mailman? she wondered. Too early in the day. Bill collector? Hope not! She reluctantly left the potter's wheel and rose from her chair, stepping to the window.

When she saw it was John Creekmore's car, her heart leapt with joy. It had been Christmas since she'd last seen her daughter and grandson. She opened the screen door and went out to where the Olds was pulling up in front of the white house, built separately from the pottery workshed. Ramona and little Billy were already getting out, but where was John? Something bad had happened, Rebekah told herself as she saw their faces. Then she broke into a hobbled run, and embraced her daughter, feeling the tension that hung around her like a shroud.

Rebekah pretended not to notice Billy's swollen eyes. She tousled his hair and said, "Boy, you're going to be tall enough to snag the clouds pretty soon, aren't you?" Her voice was raspy, and trembled with the excitement of seeing them.

"There've been too many martyrs in this family already. So: you went to this Falconer revival, and you think it was him, do you?"

"Yes," Ramona said. "I know it was."

"How do you know?"

"If I have to explain that to you, you don't know me very well. I wish I'd never gone there! I was a fool to go!"

"But it's done." Rebekah's dark eyes glittered. "Have you told Billy?"

"No, not yet."

"Are you?"

"I . . . don't think the time is right for that. I think it would be too much for him. Last night . . . what he thought was his father came for him, and took him out on the road. He was almost killed by a truck."

Rebekah frowned, then nodded grimly. "It's after him already, then. He may be able to see, child, but he may not be able to know what he sees, or be able to help. Our family's been full of both good and bad fruit. There were the no-'counts, like your great-uncle Nicholas T. Hancock, who was the king of the flimflammin' spirit merchants until he got shot in the head in a crooked poker game. But then there was your great-great-grandmother Ruby Steele, who started that organization in Washington, D.C., to study the afterlife. What I'm tryin' to say to you is: if Billy can't help, there's no use in him bein' able to see. If he can't go forward, he'll go backward. And he's got a lot of tainted white blood in him, Ramona."

"I think he can help. He's helped already."

"And you want him to start the Mystery Walk?"

"I want him to continue it. I think he started when he went down into that basement."

"Do you believe that?"

"I believe Thomas was strong. I believe our enemy hasn't begun to show us all his tricks. Changing shapes to deceive is only part of it."

"Then it's important for Billy to start the Walk now," Ramona said. "I want him to know what kind of thing tried to kill him the other night."

"If he's not ready, the ritual could do him damage. You know that, don't you?"

"Yes."

The front door opened and closed. Billy came into the kitchen with wet clay on his hands. He was carrying a particularly large pinecone he thought his gram would like to see.

"That's a mighty hefty pinecone." Rebekah laid it on the table before her. Then she looked into Billy's eyes. "How'd you like to stay here for a few days?"

"I guess so. But we're goin' back to Daddy, aren't we?"

Ramona nodded. "Yes. We are."

"Did you see my new piece?" Rebekah asked. "It's going to be a tall vase."

"I saw it. I think it ought to be . . ." He thought hard. "Red, maybe. Real dark red, like Choctaw blood."

Rebekah paused and nodded. "Why," she said, an expression of pleasure stealing across her face, "I hadn't thought of that!"

18

Billy was awakened by his grandmother who stood over the bed holding a bull's-eye lantern that cast a pale golden glow upon the walls. Through the open window a single cicada sang in an oak tree like a buzz saw's whine, the note rising and falling in the midnight heat. Billy thought he could smell woodsmoke.

"Get dressed," Rebekah said, and motioned with the lantern toward his clothes, laid across the back of a chair. In a pocket of the jeans was the piece of coal, which she'd carefully examined when he showed it to her; earlier in the evening she'd put a coating of shellac on it so the black wouldn't rub off on his clothes or hands.

He rubbed his eyes and sat up. "What time is it?"

"Time starts now," she replied. "Come on, get up."

He rose and dressed, his mind still fogged with sleep. His stomach heaved and roiled, and he feared throwing up again. He didn't know what was wrong with him; after a supper of vegetable soup and chicken wings, Gram had given him a mug of something that was oily and black and tasted like molasses. She'd said it was to keep his system "regular," but within twenty minutes of drinking it he'd been outside, throwing up his supper into the grass. He'd heaved until there was nothing left to come up, and now he felt light-headed and weak. "Can I have some water?" he asked.

"Later. Put your shoes on."

He yawned and struggled with his shoelaces. "What's wrong? Where are we goin'?"

"Just outside, for a little walk. Your mother's going to meet us."

Billy wiped the last ghosts of sleep out of his eyes. Gram was still wearing her overalls and plaid shirt, but she'd taken off her hat and her silver hair gleamed in the lantern's light; there was a brightly colored scarf tied around her forehead like a sweatband. "Follow me," she said when he was ready to go.

They left the house through the kitchen door. The sky was filled with stars, the moon as orange as a bloated pumpkin. Billy followed his grandmother to the small smokehouse, and saw a column of white smoke curling up from the chimney. Suddenly Ramona stepped out of the darkness into the lantern's wash, and she placed a firm hand on his shoulder. His heart began beating harder, because he knew that whatever secret lessons he was supposed to learn were about to begin.

Ramona brushed off his shirt and straightened his collar, as if preparing him for church. She was smiling, but Billy had seen the worry in his mother's eyes. "You're going to do just fine," she said in a small, quiet voice.

"Yes ma'am." He was trying to be brave, though he eyed the smokehouse nervously.

"Are you afraid?"

He nodded.

His grandmother stepped forward and stared down at him. "Too afraid?" she asked, watching him carefully.

He paused, knowing they wouldn't teach him if he didn't want to learn; but he wanted to know why he'd seen Will Booker crawl up from the coal pile. "No," he said. "Not too afraid."

"Once it starts, it can't be stopped," Rebekah said, as a last warning to both of them. Then she leaned down in front of Billy, her old back and knees cracking, and held up the lantern so the light splashed across his face. "Are you strong, boy?"

"Sure. I've got muscles, and I can—"

"No. Strong in here." She thumped his chest, over the heart. "Strong enough to go into dark places and come back out again, stronger still. Are you?"

The old woman's gaze defied him. He glanced up at the white column of smoke and touched the outline of the piece of coal in his pocket; then his spine stiffened and he said firmly, "Yes."

"Good. Then we're ready." Rebekah straightened up and threw back the latch of the smokehouse door. A wave of heat slowly rolled out, making the lantern's light shimmer. Ramona took Billy's hand and followed her mother inside, and then the door was shut again and bolted from within.

A pinewood fire, bordered by rough stones, burned on the earthen floor; directly above it, hanging down several feet from the ceiling, was a circular metal flue, through which the smoke ascended to the chimney. The fire, Billy saw, had been burning for some time, and the bed of coals on which it lay seethed red and orange. There were wooden racks and hooks for hanging meat; Rebekah hung the lantern up on one and motioned for Billy to sit down in front of the fire. When he'd situated himself, the hot glow of the flames like a tight mask across his cheeks, his grandmother unfolded a heavy quilt from where it had lain on a storage rack and draped it around Billy's shoulders, working it tightly so only his hands and face were free. Brightly colored blankets had been draped along the smokehouse walls to seal in the heat and smoke. A dark purple clay owl dangled from one of the hooks, its ceramic feathers gleaming; from another hook hung a strange red ceramic mask, from another what looked like a hand gripping a heart, and from a fourth hook a grinning white ceramic skull.

Ramona sat on his right. The old woman reached up to the flue, touched a small lever, and a baffle clanked shut. Smoke began to drift to all sides, slowly and sinuously. Then Rebekah reached into a bag in the corner and came up with a handful of wet leaves; she spread them over the fire, and the smoke instantly thickened, turning bluish gray and curling low to the floor She took three more objects from the storage rack—a blackened clay pipe, a leather tobacco pouch decorated with blue and yellow beads, and a battered old leather-bound Bible—and then eased herself down to the floor on Billy's left. "My old bones can't take too much more of this," she said quietly, arranging the items in front of her. Flames leapt, scrawling crooked shadows across the walls; burning leaves sparked and crackled. The smoke was getting dense now, and bringing tears to Billy's eyes; sweat dripped down his face and off the point of his chin.

"This is the beginning," Rebekah said, looking at the boy. "From this time on, everything is new and has to be relearned. You should first of all know who you are, and what you are. A purpose sings in you, Billy, but to understand it you have to learn the song." The firelight glinted in her dark eyes as her face bent closer to his. Beads of sweat rolled down from her forehead into the sweatband. "The Choctaw song, the song of life sent to us from the Giver of Breath. He's in this Book"—she touched the Bible—"but He's everywhere, too. Inside, outside, in your heart and soul, and in the world. . . ."

"I thought He lived in church," Billy said.

"In the church of the body, yes. But what's brick and wood?" Rebekah opened the pouch and began to fill the pipe with a dark, oily-looking mixture of bark and herbs, plus green shreds from a fernlike plant that grew on the banks of the distant stream. "Hundreds of years ago, all this was Choctaw land," and she motioned with a broad sweep of her hand that stirred the layers of smoke. "Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia . . . our people lived here in peace, as farmers near to the earth. When the whites came, they wanted this land because they saw how good it was; the Giver of Breath decreed to us that we should accept them, and learn to live in the white world while other tribes fought and perished. The Choctaw survived, without fighting, but now we're the people no one remembers. Still, our blood runs strong and proud, and what we've learned in our minds and hearts goes on. The Giver of Breath is God of the Choctaw, but no different from the white man's God—the same God, without favorites, with love for all men and women. He speaks in the breeze, in the rain, and in the smoke. He speaks to the heart, and can move a mountain by using the hand of a man." She finished with the pipe, touched a smoldering twig to the tobacco, and puffed on it to get it going. Then she took it from her mouth, her eyes watering, and gave it to Billy, who looked at her with bewilderment. "Take it," Rebekah said. "It's for you. Ramona, we need more leaves, please."

Billy took the pipe while his mother fed more wet leaves to the fire. He took a tentative puff that almost knocked his head off, and he was convulsed with coughing for a moment. The smoke and heat seemed to be closing in, and he could hardly breathe. Panic streaked through him, but suddenly his grandmother's hand was on his arm and she said, "It's all right. Relax; now try it again."

He did, as acrid gray smoke bellowed from the fire. The pipe smoke seared the back of his throat as he drew it in, and black dots spun before his eyes.

"You'll get used to it," Rebekah said. "Now where was I? Oh, yes. The Giver of Breath. God of the Choctaws. God of the white man. He also gives gifts of talent, Billy, to use for His good. Inhale the smoke, all the way. Yes, that's right. Some people can paint beautiful pictures, some can make sweet music, others work with their hands, and some with their wits; but in all people is the seed of talent, to do something of value in this world. And doing that—perfecting that talent, making the seed grow to good fruit— should be the aim of this life."

Billy inhaled again and coughed violently. The quilt was damp with his sweating, and still the heat continued to mount. "Even me, Gram? Is that seed in me?"

"Yes. Especially in you." She took off the kerchief, wiped her eyes with it, and handed it across the boy to Ramona, who mopped at the freely running sweat on her face and neck.

Billy stared into the fire. His head was full of a burning-rope odor, and now the smoke even tasted sweet. The flames seemed to he flaring brighter; they held beautiful glints of rainbow colors, entrancing him. He heard himself speak as if from a distance: "What kind of seed is it?"

"Billy, all three of us share something very special, something that's been passed down to us through the generations. We don't how how it began, or where it will end, but . . . we can see the dead, Billy, and we can speak to them."

He trembled, watching the flames shoot out brilliant green-and-orange lights. Through the thick haze of smoke shadows capered on the walls. "No," he whispered. "That's . . . evil, like . . . like Daddy says!"

"Your father's wrong," Ramona said, "and he's afraid. There's dignity in death. But sometimes . . . there are those who need help in passing over from this world to the next, like Will Booker did. Will couldn't rest until he was lying next to his folks, but his spirit—his soul—will go on. Call them haunts, or ghosts, or revenants—but some of them cling to this world after death, out of confusion, pain, or fear; some of them are stunned and wander looking for help. But all of them have to find peace—they have to give up their emotions, and the feelings they had at the instant of death if those feelings are keeping them here in this world—before they can pass over. I'm not saying I understand death, and I'm not saying I know what Heaven and Hell are going to be like, but death itself isn't evil, Billy; it's the call to rest after a long day's work."

Billy opened his eyes and put a trembling hand to his forehead. You're in the darrrrrk place, a voice in his head hissed. It became Jimmy Jed Falconer's thunderous roar: YOU'RE A GUEST OF SATAN! "I don't want to go to Hell!" he moaned suddenly, and tried to fight free of the constricting blanket. "I don't want Satan to get me!"

Rebekah quickly gripped his shoulders and said, "Shhhhhh. It's all right now, you're safe right here." She let him lean his head on her shoulder and rocked him gently while Ramona added wet leaves to the fire. After another moment he calmed down, though he was still shaking. The heat was stifling now, but most of the smoke had risen to the ceiling where it undulated in thick gray layers. "Maybe Hell's just something a man made up," she said softly, "to make some other man afraid. I think that if Hell exists, it must be right here on this earth . . . just like Heaven can be, too. No, I think death's apart from all that; it's another step in who and what we are. We leave the clay behind and our spirits take flight." She tilted his face up and looked into his eyes. "That's not saying, though, that there isn't such a thing as evil. ..."

Billy blinked. His grandmother was a shadowy form, surrounded by a halo of reddish white light. He felt weary and struggled to keep his eyes open. "I'll . . . fight it," he mumbled. "I'll hit it . . . and kick it, and ..."

"I wish it was as simple as that," Rebekah said. "But it's cunning and takes all kinds of shapes. It can even make itself beautiful. Sometimes you don't see it for what it is until it's too late, and then it scars your spirit and gets a hold on you. The world itself can be an evil place, and make people sick to their guts with greed and hate and envy; but evil's a greedy hog that walks on its own legs, too, and tries to crush out any spark of good it can find."

As if in a dream, Billy lifted the pipe and drew from it again. The smoke tasted as smooth as a licorice stick. He was listening very carefully to his grandmother, and watching the undulating smoke at the ceiling.

The old woman brushed a sweat-damp curl from his forehead. "Are you afraid?" she asked gently.

"No," he replied. "But I'm . . . kinda sleepy."

"Good. I want you to rest now, if you can." She took the pipe from him and knocked the ashes into the fire.

"Can't," he said. "Not yet." And then his eyes closed and he was drifting in the dark, listening to the fire's soft crackling; the dark wasn't frightening, but instead was warm and secure.

Rebekah eased him to the ground, tucking the blanket in around him so he'd continue sweating. Ramona added more leaves to the fire and then they left the smokehouse.

19

Billy came awake with sudden start. He was alone. The fire had burned down to red embers; the heat was still fierce, and thick smoke had settled in a calm, still cloud at the ceiling. His heart was beating very fast, and he struggled to get free of the blanket. The grinning ceramic skull glinted with low red light.

And suddenly something began to happen in the fire. Flames snapped and hissed. As Billy stared, transfixed, a long fiery coil slowly rose from the embers. It rattled, sending off tiny red sparks.

A burning, spade-shaped head with eyes of sizzling cinders rose up. Red coils tangled and writhed, pushing the fiery length of flaming rattlesnake out of the fire and toward Billy. Its eyes fixed upon him, and when its jaws opened drops of burning venom, like shining rubies, drooled out. The snake slithered closer, with a noise like paper charring, across the clay floor, Billy tried to pull away, but he was tangled up in the blanket. He couldn't find his voice. The flame-rattler touched his blanket; the cloth sparked and burned. It reared back, its body a seething red, to strike.

Billy started to kick at it, but before he could, something gray and almost transparent swooped down from the cloud of smoke at the ceiling.

It was a large, fierce-looking eagle, its body and wings wraithlike, flurrying smoke. With a high, angered shriek that echoed within Billy's head, the smoke-eagle dropped through the air toward the flame-rattler, which reared back and spat sparks from between its burning fangs. The eagle swerved and dived again, its smoky claws gripping at the back of the snake's head. The two enemies fought for a few seconds, the eagle's wings beating at the air. Then the fire-snake's tail whipped up, striking into the eagle, and the eagle spun away.

Balancing on tattered wings, the smoke-eagle dropped down again, its claws clamping just behind the snake's head; the flame-rattler buried its burning jaws within the eagle's breast, and Billy could see its dripping fangs at work. But then the eagle slashed downward, and parts of the rattler's body hissed through the air in fragments of fire. Coils of flame wrapped around the eagle's form, and both of them whirled in a mad circle for a few seconds like a burning gray cloth. The eagle's wings drove them both upward, up into the cloud of smoke, and then they were gone except for a few droplets of flame that fell back into the embers.

Sweat blinded Billy, and he frantically rubbed his eyes to clear them, expecting the strange combatants to come hurtling back. "It's sin, Billy," a quiet voice said from just behind the boy. Startled, Billy looked around. His father, gaunt and sad-eyed, sat there on the clay floor in overalls and a faded workshirt. "Daddy!" Billy said, astounded. "What're you doing here?"

The man shook his head gravely. "This is all sin. Every last bit of it."

"No, it's not! Gram said ..."

John leaned forward, his blue eyes blazing with reflected firelight. "It is rotten, filthy, black evil. That woman is trying to mark your soul, son, so you'll belong to Satan for the rest of your life."

"But she says there are things I have to learn! That I've got a purpose in me, to . . ."

Billy almost reached out for him. His father's eyes were bright and pleading, and he could tell how much his father was hurting for him. Still . . . something wasn't right. He said, "How . . . how did you get here? We came in the car, so . . . how did you get here?"

"I came on the bus as fast as I could, to save you from Satan's pitchfork. And he'll stick you, Billy; oh yes, he'll stick you hard and make you scream if you stay in this dark place. . . ."

"No. You're wrong. Gram said . . ."

"I don't care what she said!" the man told him. "Take my hand."

Billy stared at the fingers. The fingernails were black. "You're not . . . my daddy," he whispered, recoiling in terror. "You're not!"

And suddenly the man's face began to melt like a wax candle, as Billy saw him clearly for what he was. The nose loosened and oozed down on thick strands of flesh; beneath it was a black, hideous snout. A cheek slid down to the point of the chin like a raw egg, then fell away. The lower jaw collapsed, exposing a thin mouth with two curved yellow tusks. One blue eye rolled out of the head like a marble, and underneath it was a small, terrible red orb that might have belonged to a savage boar. As the face crumbled, that red eye was unblinking. "Boy," the thing whispered in a voice like fingernails drawn down a blackboard, "get out of here! Run! Run and hide, you little peckerhead!"

Billy almost lurched to his feet in panic. The awful face—the same face he'd seen on the road—loomed closer, red in the flickering light. It thundered, "RUN!" But as before, Billy was frozen with fear.

The thing paused, and then roared with laughter that hurt Billy's head. The second blue eye rolled out of its face, and the two red orbs glittered. Billy almost leaped up and ran—but then the image of the majestic eagle surfaced in his mind, and he steeled himself. He looked the beast in the face, determined not to show he was afraid. The thing's laughter faded. "All right," it whispered, and seemed to draw away from him. "I have better things to do. Finish this travesty. Learn all you can, and learn it well. But don't turn your back on me, boy." The shape began to melt down into a black, oily puddle on the floor The misshapen mouth said, "I'll be waiting for you," and then the figure was gone. The shimmering puddle caught blue fire, and in an instant it too had vanished.

Something touched his shoulder, and he spun away with a husky groan of fear.

"Lord God, boy," Rebekah said, her eyes narrowed. "What's got into you?" She eased herself down before the fire again, as Ramona added wood and leaves to the embers. "You're shakin' like a cold leaf! We've just been gone for five minutes!" She stared at him for moment, and tensed. "What happened?"

"Nothin'. Nothin' happened. I didn't see a thing!"

Rebekah glanced quickly at her daughter, then back to the boy. "All right," she said. "You can tell me when you like." She helped him to the edge of the fire again, and he stared sightlessly into it as she began to knead his neck and shoulders with her strong brown hands. "Havin' this gift—this talent, I guess you could call it—isn't an easy thing. No kind of real responsibility is ever easy. But sometimes responsibility blocks you off from other people; they can't see into your head, they can't understand your purpose, and they mock you for doin' what you think is right. Some people will be afraid of you, and some may hate you ."

As the old woman spoke, Ramona looked at her son, examined his face in the firelight. She knew he'd be a fine-looking young man, handsome enough to knock the girls for a loop when he went to Fayette County High School; but what would his life be like? Shut off from other people? Feared and hated by the community, as both she and her mother had been? She recalled Sheriff Bromley's words, that things would never be the same for Billy again, and she felt an aching in her heart. He was growing up right now, in front of her eyes, though she knew that in following the Mystery Walk it was essential to keep part of childhood always within you as a shelter from the storm of the world, and also because a child's vision and understanding were most times better than a grown-up's hard, rational view of the world.

". . . but usin' that talent right is harder still," Rebekah was saying. "You've got to think of yourself as a gate, Billy, on the edge between this world and the next. You've got to learn to open yourself up, and let those in need pass through. But you'll have to keep their fear and pain inside yourself, like a sponge soaks up water, so they can pass through with an unburdened soul. That's not an easy thing to do, and I can't help you learn it; that'll come from within you, when the time is right. And doing it once doesn't make the next time any simpler, either, but you'll find you can stand it. The first one is the worst, I guess, 'cause you don't know what to expect."

"Does it hurt?"

"Kind of. Oh, not the same hurt like gettin' a shot at the doctor's office, or scrapin' your knee on a rock, but it hurts in here"—she touched the center of her chest— "and in here"—and then her forehead. "It's a hurt you'll inherit from those you're trying to help. And I won't say you'll be able to help all the time, either; some revenants just won't give up this world, maybe because they're too afraid to go on. If they were mean or crazy in life, they may try to do . . . worse things, like hurtin' people." She felt his shoulders tense under her hands. "Or, more rightly, they scare folks into hurtin' themselves, one way or another."

Billy watched the wet leaves curl, blacken, and burn. He sat still trembling from seeing that awful boar-thing, and now he tried to puzzle out what his grandmother was saying. "I thought when you passed on it was like going to sleep, and if you were good you went to Heaven. Isn't that right?"

"But what if you had to go to sleep, but didn't want to? Wouldn't you toss and turn for a while, your restless self just makin' you miserable? And what if you were doin' something real important, or plannin' big things, or lookin' forward to a fine tomorrow when all the lights went out? Or what if you tried to sleep with an awful pain in you? Then you'd need help, wouldn't you, to rest easy? I'm not saying all revenants cling to this world; most of them find their own way through. In your lifetime you might only be called on to help two or three, but you will be called, and you'll have to do something with it. ..."

"Like what?" He blew sweat off his upper lip; he was still very dizzy, and heard his grandmother's voice as if listening to crosscurrents of echoes from out of a dark, deep cave.

"I put mine into pottery," Rebekah told him. "Your mother put hers into her needlepoint. Your great-grandfather could sing up a storm in a hot tub on a Saturday night. That's up to you to find, when you have so much hurt inside you that you'll have to get rid of it or . . ." Her voice trailed off.

"Or what, Gram?" Billy prompted.

The old woman said softly, "Or you could lose yourself in other people's pain. Several members of our family . . . lost themselves that way, and took their own lives out of despair A couple of them tried to escape their purpose in liquor and drugs. One of your uncles, a long way back, lost his mind and spent his life in an asylum. ..."

That hit him like a fist to the back of his head. Tears welled in his eyes; maybe he was already about to "lose his mind," he thought with numbed horror After all, hadn't he seen a smoke-eagle and a fire-serpent fighting right in front of him? Hadn't he seen something evil dressed up in his daddy's skin? He sobbed, and haltingly he told his grandmother and Ramona what he'd witnessed. They listened intently, and it seemed to him that his grandmother's eyes were as black as coals in her brown, seamed face.

When he was finished, Rebekah dipped her sweatband in a bucket of cool well-water she'd brought in and wiped his face. The water's chill in the stifling smokehouse heat sent a delicious shock through him, calming his feverish brain. "They're pictures in your head, Billy. There'll be more before you're through. I think everybody has some eagle and some snake in them; they fight to pull your spirit high or drag it to the ground. The question is: which one do you let win, and at what price? The second thing you saw"—a shade seemed to pass before her face, like a thundercloud before the sun—"is what I warned you to watch for. You must've shown it you weren't afraid—but it won't give up so easily. Ramona, will you pass me that jug?" She unscrewed the sealed brown bottle Ramona had brought in with her and poured into the cup a thick dark liquid that smelled of sassafras and cinnamon.

"There may come a time, Billy," Rebekah continued softly, "when evil tries to crush you out, like someone snuffing a candle. It'll try to work on your weaknesses, to turn things around in your head so up is down and inside is out. I've seen that thing too, Billy—what looks like a wild boar—and it's so loathsome you can hardly bear to look at it. It used to taunt me in the night, when I was younger than your mother, and one morning not long ago I woke up to find all of my pottery shattered on the floor in the workshed. My house has caught fire before, for no reason at all. You remember that yellow mutt I had, named Chief? I never told you what really happened to him, but I found him scattered in the woods behind the house, like something had just torn him to pieces. That was the last dog I ever had. And what I mean to say is that the thing you saw—what my father used to call the 'shape changer' because it can take on any form it pleases—has been our enemy for a long, long time. Almost everyone in our family's seen it; it's a dangerous, sly beast, Billy, and it tries to hurt us through the people and things we care for. It probes for a weakness, and that's why we have to keep ourselves strong. If we don't, it could work on our mind—or maybe physically hurt us too."

"What is it?" His voice had dropped to a frail whisper "Is it the Devil, Gram?"

"I don't know. I just know it's very old, because even the first Choctaw spirit healers used to weave stories of the 'beast with skin of smoke.' There are tales of the shape changer going back hundreds of years—and some in our family, those who weren't strong enough to resist it, were either beguiled by its lies or torn to pieces by its hatred. You never know what it's planning, but it must sense a threat in you or it wouldn't have come to take a look at you."

"Why, Gram? Why does it hate us?"

"Because it's a greedy beast that uses fear to make itself stronger. It feeds like a hog at a trough on the human emotions of despair, torment, and confusion; sometimes it traps revenants and won't let them break away from this world. It feeds on their souls, and if there's a Hell, I suppose that must be it. But when we work to free those revenants, to take their suffering into ourselves and do something constructive with it, we steal from the shape changer's dinner table. We send those poor souls onward to where the shape changer can't get at them anymore. And that's why the beast wants nothing more than to stop your Mystery Walk."

"I don't know what to do!" he whispered.

"You have to believe in yourself, and in the Giver of Breath. You have to keep pressing forward, no matter what happens, and you can't turn away from your responsibility. If you do, you make a weak hole in yourself that the shape changer might try to reach into. The beast doesn't care about your mother or me anymore, Billy, because most of our work is done; it's you, the new blood, he's watching."

"Can it hurt me, Gram?"

"I don't know," she said, and thought of Chief's carcass scattered through the brush, pieces of him hanging from low tree branches as if he'd exploded from within.

"I want you to drink this, Billy. It'll help you sleep. We can talk more about it later " She gave him the cup of liquid from the jug. Its inviting aroma drifted up to him. His head felt like a lead cannonball, his bones aching from the heat. He thought he could easily fall asleep without drinking this stuff, but he sipped at it anyway; it was pleasantly sweet, though just underneath the sugar was a musky taste, like the smell of wild mushrooms growing in a green, damp place.

"All of it," Rebekah said. Billy drank it down. She smiled. "That's very good."

He smiled in return, through a mask of running sweat. The boar-thing was fading now, as all nightmares do in time. He stared into the embers, saw all the hundred variations of color between ale orange and dark violet, and his eyelids began to droop. The last thing he remembered seeing before the darkness closed in was the ceramic owl, watching over him from its smokehouse hook.

They left him lying on his back on the clay floor, the blanket wrapped around him like a heavy shroud. Outside, Rebekah locked the door. "No need for us to look in on him again until morning." She stretched, hearing her backbone creak. "Seems to me he understood everything pretty much, but it's his confidence needs working on. We'll start again tomorrow night."

"Will he be safe?" Ramona asked as they walked to the house, following the track of Rebekah's lantern.

"I hope so. He saw his twin natures, the good and the bad at war inside him, and he looked the shape changer in the face." They reached the back door, and Ramona stopped to peer through the darkness at the smokehouse. Rebekah laid a hand on her shoulder "Billy's already being poked and prodded, picked at for a weak spot. I didn't know it would start so soon. He resisted this time, but it won't return in that form again. No, the foe will be different and stronger. But so will Billy be, different and stronger."

"Should he know about the black aura yet?"

"No. He'll grow into seeing it, just like you did. I don't want to put that on him just yet." She regarded her daughter, her head cocked to one side. "He'll sleep through the day. If you hear him cry out, you're not to go in there and wake him up. His old life is being shattered so the new one can start. Do you understand?"

"Yes," Ramona said. "It's just that . . . he's alone."

"And that's how it has to be. After these three days are over you might be at his side, but the rest of the way he has to go alone. You knew that before you brought him to me." Rebekah squeezed her daughter's shoulder gently. "I was wrong about him; his blood may be tainted, but his heart and soul are strong. He'll make you proud, girl. Now come on and I'll make us a pot of tea."

Ramona nodded and followed her mother into the house, shutting the screen door quietly.

Within the smokehouse, the boy had curled up like an infant about to emerge into light.

FIVE

Black Aura

20

"Billy?" Coy Granger called out toward the grocery store's small magazine rack. "Found it for you!" He held up a dusty plastic-wrapped needlepoint kit. "It was buried in a box back in the storeroom. Now you say you need some roofin' nails?"

Billy had grown into a handsome young man in the seven years since he'd visited his grandmother and sweated himself into a stupor in her smokehouse. Still, there was a wariness in his eyes, a careful shell to protect himself against the whispers he overheard in the halls of Fayette County High. They could talk about him all they liked; he didn't care, but once he heard his mother's or grandmother's name mentioned, he turned upon the offender with a vengeance. He wasn't mean, though, and was unprepared for the mean tricks used in after-school fights by country boys who were growing up to be the spitting images of their fathers; crotch kicks and eye gouges were common, and many times Billy had found himself ringed by gleefully shouting kids while his face banged into somebody's kneecap. There was no one he could really call a close friend, though he dreamed of being popular and going out on Saturday nights to Fayette with the gregarious bunch of kids who seemed to get along so well with just about everybody. It had taken him a long time to accept the fact that people were afraid of him; he saw it in their eyes when he walked into a room, heard it when conversations were cut off in his presence. He was different—it was difference enough that he was dark-skinned and obviously of Indian heritage—and since entering Fayette County High he'd been effectively isolated. His crust of caution went deep, protecting his self-respect and his still-childlike sense of wonder at the world.

He read a lot—damaged hardbacks and paperback novels he sometimes found at garage sales. He'd come across a real find several weeks ago: a boxful of old National Geographies brought up from someone's basement, where they'd been moldering for a while. His treks—through forests, following the disused railroad tracks and old logging roads—were taking him farther and farther away from home; often, when the weather wasn't too chilly, he'd take a bedroll out into the woods and spend the night, content with his own company and listening to the forest noises that punctuated the darkness. Out in the velvet black you could see shooting stars by the hundreds, and sometimes the faint blinking lights of an airplane headed for Birmingham. In the daytime he enjoyed the sun on his face, and could track deer like an expert, sometimes coming up within twenty feet or so of them before they sensed him.

His curiosity always burned within him to take one more step, to just round the next curve or top the next ridge; the world was beckoning him away from Hawthorne, away from the house where his quiet mother and his grim-lipped father waited for him.

"Here you go," Granger said, and laid the packs of nails on the counter along with the other items—bread, bacon, sugar, milk, and flour—that Billy had come for. John owed Granger a good deal of money, and sent Billy in for groceries these days; Granger knew the Creekmores were just getting by on the skin of their teeth, and that those roofing nails would be used to try to hold that shack they called a house together for one more hot summer The last time that Granger had demanded his money, at the end of winter, Billy had worked for him in the afternoons for free, delivering groceries; now Billy was working out John Creekmore's gasoline and oil tab at the filling station. "Want me to put this on your credit?" he asked the boy, trying to keep a hard edge out of his voice; though he honestly liked Billy, his feelings for John Creekmore's credit were showing through.

"No sir," Billy said, and took out a few dollars from his jeans.

"Well! John go to market early this year?" He started adding up figures on a notepad.

"Mom sold some of her pieces to a dealer in Fayette. I don't think this is enough to take care of what we owe you, but . . ."

Granger took the money and shrugged. "It's all right. I'll still be here." He made change and handed back the few coins. "Too bad John didn't get that job at the sawmill, huh? They pay pretty good up there, I understand."

"Yes sir, but they only hired five new men, and Dad says over fifty showed up to get work." Billy started sacking the groceries. "I guess a lot of folks need the money pretty bad, what with the droughts we've been having."

"Yes," Coy agreed. He couldn't think of any family offhand who needed money any worse than the Creekmores. Perhaps the only business that was really thriving in Hawthorne was the Chatham brothers' sawmill; they had owned the family mill for over forty years, still housed in the same run-down wooden structure with most of the same engines and belts running the saws. "Well, maybe they'll be hirin' more in the fall. Have you given any thought to your own future?"

Billy shrugged. Mr Dawson, who taught auto mechanics at Fayette County, had told him he was pretty quick at catching on to how machines worked and would probably make a good wrench-jockey after high school; the boy's adviser, Mr Marbury, had said his grades were very high in English and reading comprehension, but not quite high enough to get him a junior-college scholarship. "I don't know. I guess I'll help out my dad for a while."

Coy grunted. The Creekmore land hadn't produced a good crop in three years. "You ought to get into the construction business, Billy. I hear some of the contractors up around Fayette are going to be hirin' laborers. That's good pay, too. You know, I think Hawthorne's a losin' proposition for a bright young man like you. I wouldn't say that to just anybody, but there's a real spark in you. You think, you reason things out. Nope. Hawthorne's not for you, Billy."

"My folks need me." He grinned. "I'm the only one who can keep the Olds running."

"Well, that's no kind of a future." The bell over the front door clanged, and Billy looked up as Mrs. Pettus and Melissa—her radiant blue-eyed face framed by a bell of hair the color of pale summer straw—came into the grocery store. Billy forgot to breathe for an instant; he saw her every day at Fayette County High, but still there was a quiver of electric tension down in his stomach. The school dance—May Night—was less than two weeks away, and Billy had been trying to muster the courage to ask her before anyone else did, but whenever he thought he was about to approach her he'd remember that he had no money or driver's license, and that his clothes had been worn by someone else before him. Melissa always wore bright dresses, her face scrubbed and shining. Billy picked up his sacked groceries, wanting to get out before Melissa saw his grease-stained hands and shirt.

"My, my!" Coy said. "Don't you two look lovely this afternoon!"

"That's what ladies do best!" Mrs. Pettus said merrily. She put a protective arm around her daughter as the Creekmore boy stepped past.

"Hi," Billy blurted out.

Melissa smiled and nodded her head, and then her mother pulled her on into the store.

He watched her over his shoulder as he neared the door, and saw her look quickly back at him. His heart pounded. And then the cowbell clanged over his head and he ran into someone who was coming through the door.

"Whoa there, Billy!" Link Patterson said, trying to sidestep. "You gatherin' wool, boy?" He grinned good-naturedly; in another instant the grin had frozen on his face, because Billy Creekmore was staring at him as if he'd sprouted horns from the top of his head.

Billy's blood had gone cold. Link Patterson looked healthy and well fed, possibly because he was one of the few men who'd gotten a job at the sawmill and his life had taken a turn for the better; his wife was expecting their second child in October, and he'd just made the first payment on a trailer parked outside the town limits. But Billy saw him enveloped in a purplish black haze of light, a hideous cocoon that slowly writhed around him.

Link laughed nervously. "What's wrong? Looks like you'd seen a . . ." The word ghost lay in his mouth like cold lead, and he swallowed it.

Billy slowly reached out; his fingers touched the haze, but felt nothing. Link shrank back a step. "Boy? What the hell's wrong with you?"

Coy Granger, Mrs. Pettus, and Melissa were watching. Billy blinked and shook his head. "Nothing, Mr Patterson. Sorry. I . . . sorry." And then he was out the door and gone, hurrying along the road with the sack of groceries clamped in the crook of an arm. With a few more steps he began running, feeling scared and sick. What did I see? he asked himself, and didn't stop running even when he passed the green, grown-over ruin of the Booker house.

"Pack of Kents, Coy," Link Patterson said. As Granger got his cigarettes, Link stepped to the window and peered out, watching Billy running away. He could hear the high singsong of the saws; in fifteen minutes he'd be on the line, called in to fill the shift for a man who'd gotten sick and had to go home. "That Creekmore boy is . . . really strange, ain't he?" Link said, to no one in particular.

Mrs. Pettus answered. "He's got that wicked seed in him, that's what. My Melissa sees him at school every day and he's always picking fights, isn't he?"

"No, Momma," she replied, and pulled away from her mother's arm. "That's not how it is."

"Always picking fights. And he's such a nice-lookin' boy, too, to have such bad blood in him."

"Billy's all right," Coy said. "He's a smart boy. He'll go far if he can cut himself loose from that farm. Link, here're your cigarettes. How's work at the mill?"

"In bits and pieces," Link joked, trying to summon up a grin. The way Billy had stared at him had made him jittery. He paid for the cigarettes, went out to his pickup truck, and drove on toward the mill.

Link parked his truck in the gravel lot, took a few pulls from a cigarette to calm his jittery nerves, then crushed it out and put on his heavy canvas safety gloves. Then he walked the few dozen yards to the main building, past bunks of yellow pine logs sitting alongside the railroad tracks; they were newly arrived, oozing sap, and ready to be hauled into the small pond behind the mill before the hot weather made them harden and swell. He went up a flight of rickety stairs to the main hall.

Before he opened the door, the noise of the saws was simply irritating; when he stepped inside, into a golden haze of sawdust and friction heat thrown off by the whirring circular saws, band saws, and ponies, the shrill scream of machinery pounded into his forehead like a sledgehammer. He fished earplugs from his pocket and screwed them in place, but they helped hardly at all. The smell of raw lumber and sawdust in the air scratched the back of Link's throat. He clocked in next to the glassed-in office where Lamar Chatham sat at his desk, the telephone to one ear and an index finger plugging the other.

The mill was working at full speed. Link saw where he was needed—the master sawyer, Durkee, was operating the headrig and and aligning the logs, a two-man job that was slowing down the flow of timber—and hurried toward the far end of the line. He took his place next to the whining headrig and began operating the long lever that sped up or braked the circular saw, while grizzled old Durkee judged the raw logs and maneuvered them so they'd go into the headrig at the proper angle and speed. Link worked the lever, adjusting the saw's speed to Durkee's shouted orders.

The logs kept coming, faster and faster Link settled down to the routine, watching the oil-smeared gauge set into the machinery next to him, reading the saw's speed.

Bare light bulbs hung from the ceiling, illuminating the mill with a harsh and sometimes unreliable light: many men who'd worked the mill were missing fingers because they couldn't judge exactly where a fast-spinning sawrim was, due to poor lighting. Link let himself relax, became part of the trembling headrig. His mind drifted to his new trailer. It had been a good buy, and now that his second child was on the way it was good that he, Susie, and his son Jeff were out of that shack they'd lived in for years. It seemed that finally things were working out his way.

Durkee shouted, "This one's as punky as a rotten tooth!" and jabbed at the wood with a logger's hook. "Damn, what sorta shit they tryin' to pass through here!" He reached out, pushed the log's far end a few inches to line it up correctly, and made a motion with his forefinger to give the saw more speed. Link pushed the lever forward. The log started coming through, sawdust whirling out of the deepening groove as the teeth sank in. The headrig vibrated suddenly, and Link thought: This sonofabitch is gonna come a—

And then there was a loud crack! that vibrated through the mill. Link saw the log split raggedly as the saw slipped out of line. Durkee roared, "SHUT HER DOWN!" and Link wrenched the lever back, thinking I've screwed up, I've screwed up, I've . . .

Something flew up like a yellow dagger. The three-inch-long shard of wood pierced Link's left eye with a force that snapped his head back. He screamed in agony, clutched at his face, and stumbled forward, off-balance; instinctively he reached out to keep himself from going down . . . and the saw's scream turned into a hungry gobbling.

"Help!" Durkee shouted. "Somebody cut the master switch!"

Link staggered, blood streaming down his face. He lifted his right hand to clear his eyes, and saw in his hazed half-vision the wet nub of white bone that jutted from the mangled meat of his forearm. His hand, the fingers still twitching, was already moving down the conveyor belt wrapped in its bloody canvas glove.

And then the stump of his ruined arm shot blood like a firehose.

Voices cut through the haze above him. ". . . call the doc, hurry . . ."

"... bandage it . . . tourniquet in the. . . !"

". . . somebody call his wife!"

"My hand," Link whispered. "Find ... my hand. . . ." He couldn't remember now which hand was hurt, but he knew it had to be found so the doctor could stitch it back on. The sawdust around him was wet, his clothes were wet, everything was wet. A black wave roared through his head. "No!" he whispered. ". . . Not fair, not this way!" Tears streamed down his cheeks, mingling with the blood. He was aware of someone knotting a shirt around his forearm; everything was moving in slow motion, everything was crazy and wrong. . . .

"... too much blood, the damned thing's not gonna . . ." a disembodied voice said, off in the distance. A shout, full of sharp echoes: "... ambulance!" and then fading away.

The black wave came back again, seemingly lifting him up from where he sat. It scared him, and he fought against it with his teeth gritted. "NO!" he cried out. "I WON'T LET IT . . . be . . . like this. . . ." The voices above him had merged into an indistinct mumbling. His eye hurt, that was the worst of it, and he couldn't see. "Clean my eye off," he said, but no one seemed to hear. A surge of anger swelled in him, searing and indignant. There was still so much to do, he realized. His wife to take care of! The new baby! The trailer he was so proud of and had put so much work into! I won't let it be like this! he screamed inwardly.

The light was fading. Link said, "I don't want it to get dark."

Above him, an ashen-faced and blood-spattered Durkee looked at the ring of stunned men and said, "What'd he say? Anybody hear him? Jesus, what a mess!" Durkee went down on his knees, cradling the younger man's head. Now that all the saws were quiet, they could hear an ambulance coming, but it was still on the other side of Hawthorne.

There were droplets of blood across the front of Lamar Chatham's white shirt. He was trembling, his hands curled into helpless fists at his sides. His brain was working furiously on two tracks: how to make up the work that was being lost and how to smooth this thing over with the safety inspectors. He saw Link Patterson's gloved hand lying on a conveyor belt like a large squashed spider; the air was rank with blood and icy with shock.

Durkee rose to his feet. He let out a long sigh and shook his head. "Somebody else'll have to close his eyes. I've had enough." He walked past Chatham without looking back.

21

John Creekmore stood stiffly in an ill-fitting black suit, the sun hot on his neck through a break in the pines. As Reverend Laken spoke, John looked back over bis shoulder at the figure sitting up the hill perhaps fifty yards away, watching the funeral through the rows of small granite tombstones. Billy had been up there since John had arrived, before the funeral had started. The boy hadn't moved a muscle, and John knew the others had seen him up there too. John looked away, trying to concentrate on what Hawthorne's new minister was saying, but he could feel Billy sitting back amid the pines; he shifted his weight uneasily from one foot to the other, not knowing what to do with his hands.

"Amen," Reverend Laken finally said. The coffin was cranked down into the ground, and Susie sobbed so terribly John had to walk away from her. He stood and stared up at his son for a moment. Billy was motionless. John thrust his hands into his pockets and walked carefully toward him between the mounds of earth, his shoes slipping on the carpet of fresh pine needles. The boy's face was a tight mask of secrets; John knew that Ramona and Billy kept a world of secrets from him—dark things that had to do with the time Billy had spent at his grandmother's house. John didn't want to know what they were, fearing contamination, but for one thing he could be happy: Rebekah Fairmountain had gone to her hellish reward two years ago. Ramona and Billy had found her on the day after Christmas, sitting with her eyes closed in her easy chair, a yellowed picture of her late husband and a red vase full of wild flowers on a table at her side.

John reached his son. "What're you doin' here?"

"I wanted to come."

"People saw you sittin' up here. Why didn't you come down?" He shook his head, amber lights glinting in his eyes; he was unable to explain his feelings, but when he'd seen that strange black haze clinging to Link Patterson he'd known something terrible was about to happen. He hadn't told his mother about it until later, after Mr Patterson was lying dead up at the sawmill and the whole town knew there'd been an awful accident. As he'd watched the coffin being lowered, he'd wondered if he had had the power to change the man's destiny, perhaps with a single word of warning, or if the accident was already waiting for Link Patterson to step into it and nothing Billy could've said or done would've mattered.

"What did you come for?" John asked. "I thought you were supposed to be workin' at the gas station this afternoon."

"I asked for the afternoon off. It doesn't matter anyway."

"The hell it don't!" John felt a flush of unreasoned anger heat his face. "People see you sittin' up here among the graves, what are they gonna think? Damn it, boy! Don't you have a lick of sense anymore?" He almost reached down and hauled Billy to his feet, but restrained himself; lately his nerves had been on edge all the time, and he lost his temper like a shatterpated fool. A pang of shame stabbed him. This is my son! he thought. Not a stranger I don't even know! He abruptly cleared his throat. "You ready to go home now?"

They walked down the hill together, past the new grave with its bright bouquets of flowers, and to the Olds. The car was held together with more wire and odd junkyard pieces than Frankenstein's monster. The engine, when it finally caught, sounded as if it were gargling nuts and bolts. They drove out of the cemetery and toward home.

John saw it first: a white pickup truck with Chatham brothers stenciled on its side in red was parked in front of the house. "Now what?" he said, and then thought: could be it's a job! His hands tightened around the steering wheel. Sure! They needed a new man on the line, since Link was ... He was sickened at what he was thinking, but—sickened or not—his heart was beating harder in anticipation.

Lamar Chatham himself was sitting on the front porch with Ramona. He rose to his feet, a short heavy man in a seersucker suit, as the Olds approached.

John stopped the car, then stepped out. He was sweating profusely in the dark suit. "Howdy, Mr Chatham," he called.

The man nodded, chewing on a toothpick. "Hello, Creekmore."

"My son and I went to pay our respects to Link Patterson. That was a terrible thing, but I guess a man can't be too careful around those saws. I mean, when you're workin' fast you've got to know what you're doin'." He caught Ramona's dark gaze on him, and again he felt a hot surge of anger. "I hear the mill's gonna be shut down for a while."

"That's right. I've been waitin' to speak to you."

"Oh? Well . . . what can I do for you, then?"

Chatham's fleshy face looked loose and slack, and there were gray patches beneath his blue eyes. He said, "Not you, Creekmore. I've been waitin' to speak to your boy."

"My boy? What for?"

Chatham took the toothpick from his mouth. "I meant to go to the funeral," he said, "but I had business. I sent some flowers, you probably saw 'em there. Orchids. One thing about funerals: they're supposed to be final, ain't they?"

"I guess so," John agreed.

"Yeah." He gazed off at the field for a moment, where a new crop of corn and pole beans were straggling out of the dusty earth. "I came to see your wife, and we had a good long talk about . . . things. But she says I should speak to Billy." He looked at John again. "Your wife says that Billy can do what has to be done."

"What? What has to be done?"

"Billy," the other man said quietly, "I need to talk to you, boy. ..."

"Talk to me, damn it!" John's face flamed.

Ramona's voice was as soft as a cool breeze, but carried strength as well. "Tell him," she said.

"All right." Chatham inserted his toothpick again, looking from Billy to John and back again. "Yes ma'am, I will. First off, I want you all to know I don't believe in ... in haunts." He gave a little lopsided grin that slipped off his uneasy face like thin grease. "Nosir! Lamar Chatham never believed in anything he couldn't see! But, you know, the world's just full of superstitious folks who believe in rabbit's feet and demons and . . . and especially haunts. Now you take rugged men who work hard for a livin', and who work in a place that maybe—maybe—is dangerous. Sometimes they can be more superstitious than a gaggle of old farm women." He let out a nervous burp of a laugh, his cheeks swelling like a bullfrog's. "Link Patterson's been dead three days, and now he's buried. But . . . sometimes superstitions can get hold of a man's mind and just gnaw at him. They can chew a man down to nothin'."

"Like that damned saw did to Link," John said bitterly, all hopes of a job dashed to the winds. And worse, this bastard Chatham wanted Billy!

"Yeah. Maybe so. Sawmill's closed now. Shut down."

"About time some work was done to make that place safe. Those belts and drive gears ain't been changed for years, I hear tell."

"Maybe. Well, that ain't the reason the mill's shut down, Creekmore." He poked the toothpick at an offending bit of barbecue. "The mill's shut down," he said, "because the men won't work. I hired new ones. They walked out on me in less than an hour, yesterday. Production's fallin' behind. We turn a pretty fair profit, but too many days like these last few and"—he whistled and drew the stump of his index finger across his thick neck in a slashing gesture—"the whole town suffers for it. Hell, the sawmill is Hawthorne!"

"So what's that to us?"

"I came to see your wife because of who she is, and what her reputation says she can do. . . ."

"Get off my land."

"Now just a min—"

"GET OFF, I SAID!" he roared, and rushed the porch. Chatham stayed planted like a slab of wood, his thickset body tensed for a fight. He'd been a logging man since he was old enough to swing an ax, and he'd never run from a tangle yet in any of the rough camps where muscle was king. His posture and steady glare flared a warning, and John stopped halfway up the porch steps, his fists knotted and the cords in his neck as tense as piano wires. "Maybe you've got money," John snarled, "and maybe you wear fancy suits and fancy rings and you can work men like dogs, but this is my land, mister! And I'm tellin' you to move off of it, right now!"

"Creekmore," Chatham said with a hiss of breath between his teeth, "I own half this town. My brother owns the other half. Paper can be torn up, do you understand me? It can be misplaced. Listen, I don't want no trouble. Hell, I'm tryin' to offer your boy a job and pay him for it, too! Now back off, man!"

In the porch swing, Ramona saw the trapped-animal look in her husband's eyes, and her heart ached. She sat with her hands clasped in her lap as John said, "I don't ... I don't . . . want you here. ..."

And then Billy was coming up the steps, passing his father. He walked right up to Lamar Chatham and looked him directly in the eyes. "Are you threatening my father, Mr Chatham?"

"No. 'Course not. Hell, there's a lot of steam needs to be blowed off around here! Ain't that right, John?"

The other man whispered, "Damn you . . . damn you. ..."

"What is it you want with me?" Billy asked him.

"Like I say, I had a long talk with your mother We came to an understandin', and she's asked me to talk to you. ..."

John made a strangling sound; then he stepped back down the stairs and stood facing the pond. He clamped his hands to his ears.

Chatham paid him no attention. "I don't believe in haunts, Billy. No such thing in my book. But a lot of the men do. They won't work and I had to close the mill because . . . because of the saw Link Patterson stuck his hand into."

"The saw? What about it?"

Chatham glanced uneasily at Ramona Creekmore, then looked back into the boy's face. There were amber glints in Billy's eyes, and his gaze seemed so deeply penetrating Chatham thought he felt the short hairs at the back of his neck stir. Chatham said, "The saw screams. Like a man."

22

Twilight framed the sawmill against a sky of blue and gold. Shards of sunlight lay across the gravel parking lot like pieces of broken glass, and bunked piles of timber threw dark blue shadows.

"You drink yet, boy?" Lamar Chatham asked as he switched off the pickup's ignition and took the keys out.

"No sir."

"Time you started. Open that glove compartment there and fetch the bottle."

It was a flask of moonshine that Billy could smell even before Chatham uncapped it. The man took a swig and closed his eyes; Billy could almost see the veins in his bulbous nose lighting up. "You believe me when I say I don't think there's such a thing as a haunt?"

"Yes sir."

"Well, I'm a goddamned liar, boy. Sheeeit! My old daddy used to tell me ghost stories that made the hair on my ass curl! You won't catch me closer than a mile to a cemetery, that's for truth!" He passed the flask to Billy. "Mind you now, I don't care what you or your momma can or can't do. I've heard the stories about your mother, and I was there that night at the Falconer tent revival. That was one hell of an uproar. Once you go in my mill and ... do whatever it is that has to be done, then I figure my men will come on back to work. And I'll make sure every last one of them knows what you did . . . even if you don't do a damned thing. Get my drift?"

Billy nodded. His insides were quaking. When he'd said he would help Mr. Chatham, his father had looked at him as if he were a leper But Mr Chantham had said he'd pay fifty dollars and so wasn't it right, Billy reasoned, that he help out the family as much as he could? Still, he didn't know exactly what he was supposed to do; he'd brought his good-luck piece of coal, but he knew that whatever had to be done would have to come from inside him, and he was on his own. Before he'd left the house, his mother had taken him inside and talked to him quietly, telling him that his time had come now, and he would have to do the best he could. Oh, she'd said, she could go with him this time to give him confidence, but it would all be his work anyway; there might not even be anything in the sawmill, she'd told him, but if there was it could be part of Link Patterson, in agony and unable to find its way across. Draw it to you with trust, and remember the lessons your grandmother taught you. Most importantly: blank the fear out of your mind, if you can, and let the revenant find you. It'll be searching for help, and it'll be drawn to you as if you were a candle in the dark.

As Billy had climbed into the white pickup truck, Ramona had stood on the porch and said to him, "Remember, son: no fear. I love you."

The light was slowly fading. Billy sniffed at the moonshine and then took a drink. It felt like lava at the back of his throat, and bubbled down his gullet searing tissues all the way to his stomach; it reminded him of the stuff Gram had made him drink to clean his stomach out before he'd gone into the smokehouse.

Sometimes at night, on the edge of sleep, he seemed to relive that entire strange experience. He'd stayed inside that sweltering smokehouse for three days, wrapped in the heavy blanket, with nothing to eat and only home-brewed "medicines" to drink. Lulled by the fierce heat, he'd drifted in the dark, losing all sense of time and space; his body had seemed cumbersome, like a suit of armor, trapping his real self within it. He was aware, though locked into sleep, of his mother and Gram looking in on him, and sitting with him for a while: he could tell the difference in their heartbeat, in their rhythms of breathing, in the aromas of their bodies and the sound of air parting around them as they moved. The crackling of the burning wood and leaves had become a kind of music alternating between soft harmony and rough pandemonium; smoke at the ceiling rustled like a silk shirt as it brushed the boards.

When he'd finally awakened and had been allowed out of the smokehouse, the morning sunlight had pierced his skin like needles, and the quiet forests had seemed a riot of cacophonous noise. It was several more days yet before his senses had settled down enough for him to feel comfortable again, yet even so he was and had remained fantastically aware of colors, aromas, and sounds; thus the pain was terrible when they'd returned home from Gram's, and his father had hit Ramona a backhanded blow across the face and then stropped Billy with a belt. Then the house was filled with his father's voice, torn between begging their forgiveness and loudly reading Bible verses.

Billy looked at the golden streamers of cloud across the sky and thought of how the papier-mâché decorations would look in the Fayette County High gym on May Night. He wanted very much to go to that dance, to fit in with all the others; he knew it might be his last chance. If he said no to Mr Chatham now, if he let everybody know he was just a scared kid who didn't know anything about haunts or spirits, then maybe he could ask Melissa Pettus, and maybe she'd go with him to May Night and he'd get a job as a mechanic in Fayette and everything would be just fine for the rest of his life. Anyway, he'd hardly known Link Patterson, so what was he doing here?

Chatham said nervously, "I want to get through with this before it gets dark. Okay?"

Billy's shoulders slowly sagged forward. He got out of the truck.

They walked in silence up the wooden steps to the sawmill's entrance. Chatham fumbled with a ring of keys and then unlocked the door; before he stepped inside he reached in and switched on several banks of dimly glowing blubs that studded the raftered ceiling.

Greased machinery gleamed in the mixture of electric light and the last orange sunlight that filtered through a series of high, narrow windows. The smells of dust, woodsap, and machine oil thickened the air, and the place seemed hazed with a residue of sawdust. Chatham closed the door and motioned to the far end of the building. "It happened up there, right at the headrig. I'll show you." His voice sounded hollow in the silence.

Chatham stopped ten feet away from the headrig and pointed at it. Billy approached the saw, his shoes stirring up whorls of dust, and gingerly touched the large, jagged teeth. "He should've been wearin' safety glasses," Chatham said. "It wasn't my fault. Punky timber comes in all the time, it's a fact of life. He ... he died about where you're standin'."

Billy looked at the floor. Sawdust had been spread over a huge brown stain; his mind went back to the stained floor in the Booker house, the hideous mark of death hidden with newspapers. The saw's teeth were cold against his hand; if he was supposed to feel anything here, he didn't: no electric shock, no sudden sure realization, nothing.

"I'm gonna turn it on now," Chatham said quietly. "You'd best stand back."

Billy retreated a few paces and put his hands in his pockets, gripping in his right hand the lump of coal. Chatham unlocked a small red box mounted to the wall; there was a series of red buttons and a red lever. He slowly pulled the lever down and Billy herd a generator come to life. The lights brightened.

A chain rattled, and an engine moaned as it gained power. The headrig's circular saw began spinning, slowly at first, then rapidly picking up speed until it was a silver-blue blur. It hummed—a machine sound, Billy thought; not a human sound at all. He could feel Mr. Chatham watching him. He thought of faking it, of pretending to hear something because Chatham seemed to expect it. But no, no, that wouldn't be right. He looked over his shoulder and raised his voice to be heard above the saw's metallic noise. "I don't hear any . . ."

The saw's voice abruptly changed; it made a shrill sound like a startled cry of pain, then what might have been a harsh grunt of surprise. The noise rippled and faded, and then the machine-humming had returned again.

Billy stared at it, his jaw slack. He wasn't certain what he'd heard; now the saw was quiet, running almost silently but for the clatter of chains. He stepped away from it a few paces, and heard Chatham's harsh breathing behind him.

And then there was a high, terrible scream—an eerie union of a human voice and the sound of the spinning saw—that reverberated through the mill.

The scream faded and died; then came back, stronger than before, more frantic and anguished. With the third scream the windows rattled in their loose casements. Billy had broken out in a cold sweat, the urge to flee from this place gnawing at the back of his neck; he put his hands to his ears to block out the next scream, but he heard it in his bones. He twisted around, saw Chatham's bleached face and terror-stricken eyes; the man was reaching for the lever, to cut power to the headrig.

The scream carried a high note of desperate pleading; and it was the same scream over and over, rising in the same pattern of notes to an abrupt end. Billy's decision was made: whatever this was, he wouldn't run from it. "No!" he shouted. Chatham froze. "Don't turn it off!" Each scream was seemingly louder than the one before, each one freezing his spine a little harder. He had to get outside to think, he had to figure out what to do, he couldn't stand this sound anymore and his whole brain was about to burst open. . . .

Billy turned and started for the door, his hands clamped over his ears. Just a machine noise, he told himself. That's all . . . that's all . . . that's . . .

The sound suddenly changed pitch. Through the screaming there was a hushed metallic whisper that stopped the boy in his tracks.

Billlleeeee. . . .

"Jesus Christ!" Chatham croaked. He was plastered against the wall, his face shiny with sweat. "It . . . knows you're here! It knows you!"

Billy turned and shouted, "It's just a noise, that's all! It's just a . . . just a . . ." The words choked in his throat; when his voice bubbled up again it was in a frantic yell: "You're dead! You're dead! You're . . . !"

Above the headrig a light bulb popped and exploded, raining hot fragments of glass. Then another, in the next row of bulbs; blue sparks of electricity leaped from the sockets.

"It's a demon! It's the goddamned Devil himself!" Chatham grasped the red lever and started to throw it. Above his head a bulb exploded and glass hornets stung the man's scalp; he yelped in pain and huddled to the floor, his arms up to protect his head. Two more blubs blew at the same time, zigzagging arcs of electricity. The air was full of ozone, and Billy could feel his hair dancing on his head.

Billlleeeee . . . Billlleeeee . . . Billlleeeee. . . .

"STOP IT!" Bulbs were popping all across the mill now, glass tinkling down into the machinery like off-key piano notes. An instant of sheer panic shook through Billy, but he stood firm until it had passed. No fear, he remembered his mother saying. And then he tasted blood in his mouth and realized he'd bitten into his lower lip. He concentrated on rooting himself to the floor, on clinging to what his mother had told him before he'd left the house. The mill's air had turned tumultuous, thick and hazed; most of the bulbs had exploded, the rest throwing harsh shadows. "STOP IT!" Billy shouted again. "STOP IT, MR. PATTERSON!"

Down at the other end of the mill, another bulb popped. The saw's scream faltered, fading to a low moan, a rumbling that seemed to shake the floor He'd called the thing by name, Billy realized, and that had made a difference. It was, in its own way responding. He stepped past the cowering man on the floor "You don't have to stay here anymore!" Billy shouted. "You can . . . you can go on to where you're supposed to be! Don't you understand?"

Softer: Billlleeeee . . . Billlleeeee. . . .

"You don't belong here anymore! You've got to go on!"

Billlleeeee. . . .

"LISTEN TO ME! You . . . you can't go home anymore, not to your wife and kids. You've just got to . . . stop trying so hard to stay here. There's no sense in . . ." And then something seemed to crash into him, staggering him back; he moaned, feeling panic bloom in his head like a dark flower. He went to his knees in the sawdust, and his head was jarred as a savage pain sliced into his left eye. There was a burning fever of rage and agony in him, bubbling up to the top of his throat; and then his mouth opened as if it had been forced by rough, spectral hands, and he heard himself cry out, "No no it's not my time yet! I want to be back again, I'm lost, I'm lost and I can't find my way back! ..."

Chatham whined like a dog, watching the boy writhe and jerk.

Billy shook his head to clear it. He shouted, "You can't come back! I saw Link Patterson buried today! You can't come back, you have to let everything go! No no I'm lost, I've got to find my way back! You have to rest and forget the pain! You have to help me I'm lost oh God help me!" And then he howled in torment, because he'd had the quick and clear vision of his right hand being chewed away to bloody bone; he cradled the phantom injury to his chest, and rocked back and forth with tears streaming down his cheeks. "I feel it!" he moaned. "I feel how it was for you! Oh God . . . please . . . just let the pain go, let everything go . . . just rest and let go. No fear ... no fear . . . no . . ."

The headrig vibrated, about to tear its cleats from the floor. Billy looked up, saw something like a thin blue haze between him and the machine. It undulated and began to take on the shape of a man. "You don't have to be afraid," Billy whispered. His arm was on fire, and he gritted his teeth to hold back a scream. "I've got the pain now. Just ..."

And then the blue haze moved toward him, thickening and roiling; when it touched him he was enveloped with cold and sheer dread, and he recoiled from it, trying to crawl away through the dust. Terror of the unknown swept through him, and he clenched his hands against the floor as if resisting a huge frigid wave. He heard himself shrieking, ". . . let gooooooooo! . . ."

The windows shattered with the noise of shotguns going off, all exploding outward as if from a terrible, awesome pressure.

And then the saw was humming again, the headrig slowing its rocking motions, slowing, slowing . . .

A last light bulb flickered, flickered, and went out. The remaining few buzzed and blinked, and raw sparks jumped from the open sockets. The saw's sound pitched softer, until there was only the noise of the humming generator.

Lying on his side in the dust, Billy heard the mill's door slam shut. Then, in another moment, an engine started. Tires threw gravel. He raised his head with an effort, one side of his face pasted with sawdust, and saw that Mr. Chatham had fled. He lay back down again, totally exhausted; within him flowed the currents of desperate emotions, of fear and confusion and loss. He was sure that he now held within himself the emotions that had bound Link Patterson to this sawmill, to this world, perhaps even to the moment of physical death. He wasn't certain if he'd done it right or not, but he didn't think there was anything left of Mr. Patterson; the revenant had passed on, leaving its pain behind.

Billy forced himself to his feet. The saw was spinning silently, and he turned off the power. Billy clutched his right wrist and worked his hand. There was a needles-and-pins sensation in it, as if the blood flow had been cut off. A soft, warm breeze was blowing in through the shattered windows; in the last blue light a fine mist of golden dust was stirred up and floated through the air to coat the silent sawmill machinery.

When he was strong enough to move, Billy started home. His legs were leaden, and a dull pressure throbbed at his temples; for one thing he was grateful though—the feeling was slowly seeping back into his right hand. He took a shortcut through the dark and quiet forest, with the man in the moon grinning down, and prayed he'd never have to do anything like what happened tonight again. I'm not strong enough, he told himself. I never was.

Nearer Hawthorne, he was startled by something moving at the crest of a rise, there amid pines and boulders. It looked like a large man in the moonlight, but there was something animalish and disturbing about it. Billy stood still for a moment, his senses questing, but the figure was gone. As he skirted the rise, he thought he'd seen moonlight glinting wetly off what might have been curved, sharp tusks.

And he remembered the beast's warning and promise.

I'll be waiting for you.

23

"Feed the fire, brothers and sisters!" Jimmy Jed Falconer roared, his face licked with firelight above the bright yellow suit. "Feed the fire and starve the Devil!"

He stood on a wooden platform out in the middle of a dusty dumping ground near Birmingham. A backdrop had been constructed to hold the huge falconer crusade banner.

Falconer grinned. Before him was a huge crackling circle of fire, feeding on hundreds of pounds of paper and several hundred black vinyl discs. There was a line of teen-agers waiting to throw their record albums into the flames and people with boxes of books obtained from school and public libraries. The service had been going on for almost three hours, starting with psalm singing, then one of J.J. Falconer's most searing sermons on the Devil trying to consume America's youth, followed by an hour-long healing session that had left people dancing and talking in tongues.

Burning pages wafted into the air like fiery bats. Embers puffed out and drifted down. Records cracked and melted. "Here, gimme those, son." Falconer carefully leaned over the platform's edge and took several records from a heavyset young man with newly cropped black hair and acne scars. He looked at the jacket art, all psychedelic drawings and pictures, and held up one of them, by a group called Cream. "Yeah, this'll 'blow your mind,' won't it? It'll send you to Hell, that's what it'll do!" He sailed the record into the fire, to shouts and applause. The Jefferson Airplane flew into the flames next, followed by Paul Revere and the Raiders. "Is this what the Lord wants you to hear?" he asked, baiting the crowd. "Does He want you to grow your hair to your knees and take drugs and 'blow your mind'?" He tossed Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs into the flames.

There were resounding cheers as Falconer broke a Beatles record over his knee, then held it at the jacket's edge, with his other hand clamping shut his nostrils. He threw it in to burn. "Folks, if somebody tells you that everybody's growin' long hair and fillin' themselves full of LSD and runnin' away from the Commies like yellow cowards, then you tell them this: I'm the American majority, and I'm proud to . . ."

Suddenly he couldn't draw a breath. A sharp, cold pain ripped across his chest, and he felt as if he might pass out. He held the microphone at his side, afraid that it might pick up his whimper of agony; then he was sinking down to his knees, his head bent over, and he heard people clapping and hollering, thinking that this was all part of his message. He squeezed his eyes shut. Oh God, he thought. Not again . . . please . . . take this pain away. He struggled to draw in air, his chest heaving, but he stayed crouched on his knees so no one could see his graying face.

"Burn it!" he heard a high, merry voice shout.

A hand gripped his fleshy shoulder "Dad?"

Falconer looked up into his son's face. The boy was growing into a handsome young man, with a lean strong body that looked trim in the tan suit he wore. He had a long, sharp-chinned face topped with a mass of thickly curled red hair, and now his deep-set, electric-blue eyes glinted with concern. "You all right, Dad?"

"Lost my breath," Falconer said, and tried to struggle to his feet. "Let me rest for just a minute."

Wayne glanced out at the congregation, and realized they were waiting for someone to lead them. He grasped the microphone his father held.

"No, Wayne," Falconer said, grinning, with the sweat running down his face. "I'm fine. Just lost my breath is all. It's the heat."

"The TV cameras are on us, Dad," Wayne said, and pulled the microphone away from his father As Wayne straightened up and turned toward the congregation, his face abruptly pulled tight, the blue eyes widening and the perfect white teeth showing in a wide smile that hung on the edge of a grimace. His body tensed, as if gripping the microphone had sent a charge of power through him.

"The glory of the Lord is with us tonight!" Wayne crowed. "It's cracklin' in the air, it's fillin' our hearts and souls, it's put my daddy on his knees because it's not a weak thing, no it's not a frail thing, no it's not a feeble thing! If you want to listen to sex- and drug-music and you want to read sex- and drug-books, you'll be real happy in Hell, neighbors! Lord says WHAT?"

"BURN IT!"

Wayne balanced on the edge, seemingly about to leap into the fire himself. "Lord says WHAT?"

"Burn it! Burn it! Burn ..."

Falconer knew the boy had them now. The local TV station cameras were aimed at the young healer. Falconer rose unsteadily to his feet. The pain was gone and he knew he'd be all right. But he wanted to get back to the Airstream trailer to rest, then he'd return and give the benediction. He made his way across the platform to the steps. All eyes were on Wayne. Falconer stopped for a moment to turn back and watch his son. Wayne's entire body seemed to glow with energy, with wonderful strength and youth. It was Wayne who'd come up with the idea of holding a "sin-burning," sure that there would be local media coverage. The ideas and plans just seemed to pop out of the boy's head fully formed; Wayne had suggested they move the Crusade into Louisiana, Mississippi, and Georgia, and into Florida where they could work year-round. The schedules had been drawn up, and for the past seven years the Crusade had expanded like a tick on a bloodhound. Now Wayne was talking about pushing the Crusade into Texas, where there were so many little towns and so far apart, and he wanted Falconer to buy a Fayette radio station that was about to lose its license. Wayne was taking flying lessons, and had already piloted the Crusade's Beechraft on short business trips.

The boy was strong and had God in his heart, Falconer knew, but still . . . something ate at Wayne, day and night. Something drove him, and tried to control him. He had fits of moods and temper, and sometimes he locked himself in the prayer chapel at home for hours on end. And Wayne had been complaining of a strange recurring nightmare lately, some nonsense about a snake and an eagle. Falconer couldn't make heads or tails of it.

Falconer was tired. He felt a sudden and awful pang of jealousy, and of anger at growing older and heavier and weaker.

He walked toward the trailer. His heart was deteriorating, the doctors had told him. Why, as he'd asked himself many times, was he afraid to ask Wayne to heal his heart, to patch up the leaks and make him strong again?

His answer was always the same as well: Because he was deeply afraid that Wayne's healing Toby had been a strange—and terrible—fluke. And if Wayne tried to heal him and nothing happened, then . . . What had stayed with him for seven years was the voice of that Creekmore woman, the Hawthorne Valley witch, raised to tell everybody that he and his young son were murderers of the worst kind. Down deep inside, far from the light, in a dark place that knew neither God nor Satan but was instead wholly frightened animal, a nerve of truth had been trembling for seven long years. What if? What . . . if . . . ?

What if Wayne already knew? And had known since he'd touched the legs of a little girl whose frightened mind had kept her from wanting to walk.

"No," Falconer said. "No. The Lord's workin' through my son. He healed a dumb animal, didn't he? He's healed more than a thousand people." He shook his head. He had to shut off his thinking before it was harmful. He reached the shining silver trailer, unlocked it, and stepped inside. There was a plaque on the wall that said believe, and that was good enough for him.

SIX

May Night

24

They had driven in silence since leaving the house. John Creekmore watched the road unwinding before him in the yellow glare of the headlights; he was purposely keeping their speed ten miles per hour below the limit. "You sure you want to do this?" he asked, finally, without looking at his son. "I can turn the car around on the next dirt road."

"I want to go," Billy said. He was wearing a spotless but tightly fitting dark suit, a starched white shirt, and a bright paisley tie.

"Your choice. I've said all I can, I guess." His face was set and grim; he looked much the same as he had when he'd stepped out of the house one morning last week and had seen the scarecrow dummy hanging by its neck from an oak-tree limb. It was wrapped with used toilet paper Ever since that evening Billy had gone up to the sawmill with Lamar Chatham the air had been ugly; Chatham had gone around telling everybody with ears what had happened, and the story soon became embellished and distorted to the point that it was said Billy was in command of the demons that infested the mill. John knew all of that was ridiculous, but he wasn't given the chance to explain; when he'd last gone over to Curtis Peel's to play checkers, the other men had frozen him out, talking and looking right through him as if he were invisible. Less than ten minutes after he'd gotten there, they'd all decided they'd had enough and left, but John had seen them later, sitting on the benches in front of Lee Sayre's hardware store; Sayre was with them, the center of attention, and Ralph Leighton was grinning like a hyena. "Did your mother put you up to this?" John asked suddenly.

"No sir."

"Don't you know who's gonna be there, son? Just about everybody in the junior and senior classes, and a lot of their folks too! And everybody knows!" He tried to concentrate on his driving as the road snaked to the left. Fayette County High wasn't far now, just a mile or so ahead. "You ever ask anybody to go with you?"

Billy shook his head. He'd gathered the courage to call out Melissa's name in the hallway one day; when she'd turned toward him, Billy had seen her pretty face blanch. She'd hurried away as if he were offering her poison.

"Then I don't see why you want to go."

"It's May Night. It's the school dance. That's why."

John grunted. "No, that's not all of it, is it? I think you want to go because you want to prove something." He flicked a glance at the boy.

"I want to go to May Night, that's all."

He's stubborn as a deaf mule, John thought, and he's got a hell of a lot of guts, I'll say that for him. Billy was different, stronger-willed, somehow, and much more intense. Looking into his eyes was like seeing a thunderstorm on the horizon, and you didn't know which way the storm would turn or how fast it was moving.

"You may think you're not different," John said quietly, "but you're wrong. Lord knows I've prayed over you, Billy, and over your mother too. I've prayed until my head aches. But the Lord isn't gonna change you, son, not until you turn away from this . . . this black belief."

Billy was silent for a moment. The lights of Fayette brightened the sky before them. "I don't understand it," he said. "Maybe I never will, and maybe I'm not supposed to. But I think that part of Mr. Patterson was in that mill, Dad; it was a scared and hurt part, and too confused to know what to—"

"You don't know what you're talkin' about!" John snapped.

"Yes I do, Dad." The strength of his voice frightened John. "I helped Mr Patterson. I know I did."

John felt the quick, hot urge to strike his son across the face. Seventeen or not, the boy had no right to dispute his father's word. In John's way of thinking the boy was like a corrupting tarbaby, and John was afraid some of that evil tar might fix itself to him, too.

The county high school stood just outside the Fayette city limits. It was a large, two-storied red brick building that had gone up in the early forties and had survived, like a defiant dinosaur, the ravages of weather, vandalism, and county-education budget cuts. A gymnasium had been built off to the side in the mid-fifties, a square brick structure with a band of louvered windows beneath the slate roof. Outside the gym was a fenced-in football field, home to the Fayette County High Bulldogs. The parking lot held a varied assortment of vehicles, from rusted-out pickups to spit-shined sports cars. The school building itself was dark, but a few bright streamers of light shot out through the gym's open windows, and in the air there was the growl of a bass guitar and the high notes of laughter.

John slowed the car to a halt. "I guess this is the place. You sure you want to go through with it?"

"Yes sir."

"You don't have to, you know."

"I do have to."

"Ask me, you're lettin' yourself in for misery." But then Billy was opening the door, and John knew his mind was set. "What time do you want me to come for you?"

"Ten o'clock?"

"Nine-thirty," John said. He fixed his son with a hard gaze. "When you go through them doors, you're on your own. Anything happens to you in there, I can't help. You got your money?"

Billy felt in his pocket for the couple of dollars he'd brought along. "Yes sir. Don't worry, there are chaperones inside."

"Well," John said, "I guess I'll go on, then. Anybody says something to you that don't set well, you just remember . . . you're a Creekmore, and you can be proud of that." Billy shut the door and started to walk away, but John leaned toward the open window and said, "You look real good, son." And then, before the boy could respond, he was driving away across the lot.

Billy walked to the gym. His nerves were jangling, his muscles knotted up; he was ready for the unexpected. The gates to the football field were open, and Billy could see the huge mound of bits and pieces of wood—probably waste from the sawmill, he realized—that would be ignited later in the evening for the traditional May Night bonfire; then the ashes would be spread over the field before summer tilling and the replanting of grass for next season. From the gym's open doors came the tinny sounds of electric guitars playing "Alley Cat"; a large blue-and-gold poster hung across the front of the gym, and read may night! junior-senior sockhop! 2.50 admission! with the drawing of a stocky bulldog dressed in football gear.

He paid his admission to a pretty dark-haired girl who sat at a desk just inside the gym. Golden and blue streamers crisscrossed the exposed metal rafters, and at the ceiling's center hung a large mirrored globe that cast reflected shards of light over the dancing mob. Papier-mâché planets painted in Day-Glo colors dangled on wires, high enough not to be yanked down but low enough to be stirred by the crowd's motion. On the brick wall behind the bandstand, where a group with the legend purple tree stenciled across the bass drumhead began to hammer out "Pipeline," was a large banner proclaiming seniors '69 welcome the age of aquarius!

A chaperone, a thin geometry teacher named Edwards, materialized out of the crowd and pointed at Billy's feet. "Shoes off if you're going to stay on the floor. Otherwise, you go up into the bleachers." He motioned toward a sea of shoes scattered in a corner, and Billy took off his dusty loafers. How all those shoes would ever get back to their owners was a mystery, he thought as he placed his shoes with the others. He stood against the wall, underneath a stretched-tight American flag, and watched as the dancers Boog-a-looed and Ponied and Monkeyed to strident electric chords. Almost everyone had a date, he saw; the few boys who'd come stag—fat, or with terminal acne—sat up in the green-painted bleachers. Chaperones paced the dance floor. A glued-together couple passed Billy in search of their shoes, and he could smell the distinct aroma of moonshine.

"Well, well," someone said. "Is that Billy Creekmore standing over there by his lonesome?"

Billy looked to one side and saw Mr Leighton leaning against the wall several feet away, wearing a checked coat and a shirt open at the collar; his crew cut looked as sharp as a bed of nails. "Where's your date, Billy?"

"I came stag."

"Oh? Didn't you ask anybody? Well, I guess that's your own business. How's your momma doin'? Ain't seen her in a month of Sundays."

"She's fine."

"Lots of pretty girls here tonight," Leighton said in a silk-smooth voice. His grin stopped south of his eyes, and in them Billy saw a cunning kind of anger. " 'Course, all of them have dates. Sure a shame you don't have a pretty girl to dance with, maybe cuddle up to after the dance is over. My boy's out there with his girl. You know Duke, don't you?"

"Yes sir." Everyone knew Duke Leighton, the senior-class cutup; Duke was a year older than Billy, but he'd failed the eighth grade. He'd been an All-American linebacker for the Bulldogs two seasons in a row, and had won a football scholarship to Auburn.

"He's goin' with Cindy Lewis," Leighton said. "She's head cheerleader at Indian Hills High." The rich kids' school, Billy knew.

"You ought to know a lot of people here, Billy. Lot of people know you."

Leighton's voice was getting louder, as if he were pretending to shout over the music, but the shout was exaggerated. Billy noticed uneasily that he was being watched by some of the kids who hung around the edge of the dance floor; and he saw some of them whispering to each other.

"Yep!" Leighton said, very loudly. "Everybody knows Billy Creekmore! Heard you had a job up at the sawmill for a while, ain't that right? Huh?"

He didn't reply; he could feel people watching, and he shifted his position uneasily. To his horror, he realized there was a small hole in his left sock.

"What'd you do up there for the Chathams, Billy? Kinda sweep the place up? Did you do an Indian dance, or . . ." Billy turned away and started walking, but Leighton hurried after him and grasped his sleeve. "Why don't you show everybody your Indian dance, Billy? Hey! Who wants to see an Indian dance?"

Billy said, in a quiet and dangerous voice, "Let go of my arm, Mr Leighton."

"What're you gonna do?" the man sneered. "Put a curse on me?"

Billy looked into his fierce, unreasoning glare and decided to play this game his way. He leaned closer to Leighton, until their faces were only a few inches apart, and he whispered, "Yes. I'll make your legs rot off to stumps. I'll make your hair catch fire. I'll make frogs grow in your fat belly."

Leighton's hand fell away, and he wiped his fingers on his trousers. "Sure you will. Yeah, sure. You listen to me, boy. Nobody wants you here. Nobody wants you in this school, or in this town. One damned witch is e—" He stopped suddenly, because Billy's eyes had flared. He stepped back a few paces, mashing down shoes. "Why don't you just get the hell out of here?"

"Leave me alone," Billy said, and walked away. His heart was pounding. The Purple Tree was playing "Double Shot," and the crowd was going wild.

Billy walked around the gym to a booth that sold Cokes and corndogs. He bought a Coke, drank it down, and was about to throw the crumpled cup into a trashcan when fingers grazed his cheek. He turned around; there was a short, shrill scream and four figures backed away from him. A girl said, her voice brimming with delicious terror, "I touched him, Terry! I really touched him!" There was a chorus of braying laughter, and someone off to the side asked, "Talked to any ghosts lately, Creekmore?"

He ducked his head down and pushed past a boy in a Bulldog letter jacket; his face flamed, and he knew that coming to this dance, that trying to pretend he was just like the others and could fit in after all, had been an awful mistake. There was nothing to do now but to try to get out of here, to withdraw from people yet again. Suddenly someone shoved him from the rear, and he almost went down; when he turned he saw perhaps eight or nine grinning faces, and a couple of boys with clenched fists. He knew they wanted to fight so they could show off in front of their girls, so he backed away from them and then started across the packed dance floor, twisting through a human maze of gyrating bodies. A heavyset boy with a mop of dark hair pushed his girl friend into Billy; she let out a mouselike squeak when she looked up into his face, and then the boy pulled her away to let her cower in his arms.

They're using me to scare their girl friends, Billy thought, like I was a horror movie at the drive-in! Rather than angering him, that realization struck him as being funny. He grinned and said, "Boo!" at the next girl whose boyfriend thrust her forward; she almost went gray with shock, and then the people who recognized him—people he saw every day in the high-school halls—were moving out of his way, making a path for him to get through. He laughed and bent over like a hunchback, letting his arms dangle, and moved along the human corridor like a lurching ape. Give 'em a show! he thought. That's what they want! Girls screamed, and even their protective boyfriends edged away. Now he was getting more attention than the Purple Tree, and he knew he was making a damned fool of himself but he wanted to turn around on them the fearful image they had of him; he wanted to rub it in and let them see how stupid it was to be afraid. He grimaced like a ghoul, reaching out toward a girl whose boyfriend slapped his hands away and then backed into the crowd; he danced and jerked his head as if he'd been struck by the palsy, and now he heard people laughing and he knew he was about to break through . . . just about to break through—

And then he abruptly stopped, a cold chill running through him. He was facing Melissa Pettus, radiant in a pink dress and with pink ribbons in her long flowing hair; she was pressed close to a boy named Hank Orr, and she was cowering away from Billy.

Billy stared at her, and slowly straightened up. "You don't have to be afraid," he said, but his voice was lost in the bass-boom as the Purple Tree started to play "Down in the Boondocks."

Something wet hit him in the face and streamed into his eyes. He couldn't see for a few seconds, and from off to one side he heard a snort of laughter. When Billy had cleared his eyes, he saw Duke Leighton grinning several feet away; the boy was bulky, already getting fat. A slim red-haired girl clung to one arm, and his other hand held a plastic watergun.

And then Billy could smell the reek of beer rising off of himself, and he realized that Leighton had filled that gun with beer instead of water, it was one of his many practical and sometimes cruel jokes. Now if a chaperone happened to get a whiff of Billy's clothes, Billy would be immediately thrown out. He reeked like a shithouse on a hot summer night.

"Want some more, Spookie?" Leighton called out, to a chorus of laughter. He grinned slickly, as his father had.

Anger surged within Billy. At once he propelled himself forward, shoving through several couples to get at Leighton. The other boy laughed and sprayed him in the eyes again, and then someone edged out a foot and Billy tripped over it, sprawling on the gym floor. He struggled to his feet, half blinded with beer, and a hand caught roughly at his shoulder; he spun to strike at his attacker.

It was a chaperone, a short and stocky history teacher named Kitchens; the man grabbed bis shoulder again and shook him. "No fighting, mister!" he said.

"I'm not! Leighton's trying to start trouble!"

Kitchens stood at least two inches shorter than Billy, but he was a large-shouldered man with a deep chest and a crew cut that was a holdover from his Marine days. His small dark eyes, glanced toward Duke Leighton, who was standing in a protective circle of football buddies. "What about it, Duke?"

The other boy raised empty hands in a gesture of innocence, and Billy knew the watergun had been passed to safety. "I was just mindin' my own business, and old Spookie wanted to fight."

"That's a damned lie! He's got—"

Kitchens leaned toward him. "I smell liquor on you, mister! Where you keepin' it, in your car?"

"No, I'm not drinking! I was ..."

"I saw him with a flask, Mr Kitchens!" someone said through the crowd, and Billy was almost certain it was Hank Orr's voice. "Throw him out!"

Kitchens said, "Come on, mister," and started pulling Billy toward the door "You rule-breakers got to learn some respect!"

Billy knew it was pointless to struggle, and maybe it was for the best that he get kicked out of the May Night dance.

"I ought to take you to the boys' adviser, that's what I ought to do," Kitchens was saying. "Drinking and fighting is a bad combination."

Billy looked back and caught the reflection of light off Melissa Pettus's hair; Hank Orr had his arm around her waist, and was pulling her toward the dance floor.

"Come on, pick out your shoes and get out of here!"

Billy stopped, resisting the man's tugging. He had seen—or thought he'd seen—something that had driven a freezing nail of dread into his stomach. He blinked, wishing he wouldn't see it, but yet, there it was, right there, right there. . . .

A shimmering black haze hung around Hank Orr and Melissa Pettus. It undulated, throwing off ugly pinpoints of purplish light. He heard himself moan, and Kitchens stopped speaking to stare at him. Billy had seen the black aura glittering around another couple who were walking on the edge of the dance floor; he saw it again, from the corner of his eye: it was enveloping a senior girl named Sandra Falkner, who was doing the Jerk with her boyfriend. Panic roiled in Billy's stomach; he wildly looked around, sure of impending disaster. The black aura glittered around a biology teacher named Mrs. Carson. A very weak aura, more purple than black, undulated around a senior football player named Ous Tompkins. He saw it yet again, clinging to a fat boy who was sitting up in the bleachers eating a corndog.

"Oh God," Billy breathed. "No . . . no . . ."

"Come on," Kitchens said, more uncertainly. He let go of the boy and stepped back, because the boy suddenly looked as if he might throw up. "Find your shoes and get out."

"They're going to die," Billy whispered hoarsely. "I can see . . . Death in this place. . ."

"Are you drunk, mister? What's wrong with you?"

"Can't you see it?" Billy took a faltering few steps toward the crowd. "Can't anybody else see it?"

"Shoes or not, you're getting your ass out of here!" Kitchens grasped his arm to shove him toward the door, but the boy broke free with an amazing strength and then he ran toward the dance floor, sliding in his socks. He pushed through the throng hanging around the floor, almost slipping on a spilled Coke, then he was through them and reaching for Melissa Pettus, reaching through the black haze to touch and warn her that Death was very hear. She jerked away from him and screamed. Hank Orr stepped in his way, purplish black tendrils glittering around his body, and brought his fist up in a quick arc that snapped Billy's head back. Billy staggered and fell, hearing the shout "FIGHT! FIGHT!" ringing in his ears. A forest of legs crowded around, but Purple Tree kept on playing "Rolling on the River."

"Get up!" Hank Orr said, standing over him. "Come on, you . . . freak! I'll stomp your ass!"

"Wait . . . wait," Billy said. His head was filled with stars, exploding novas and planets. "The black aura ... I see it . . . you've got to get—"

"FIGHT! FIGHT!" someone yelled gleefully. The Purple Tree stopped in midchord. Shouts and laughter echoed through the gym.

"You're going to die!" Billy wailed, and the blood drained out of Orr's face. He raised his fists as if to protect himself, but he didn't dare touch Billy Creekmore again. "You . . . and Melissa . . . and Sandra Falkner . . . and ..." There was a sudden stunned silence except for kids whooping and laughing on the other side of the gym. Billy started to rise to his feet, his lower lip swelling like a balloon, but then the crowd parted and the boys' adviser, Mr Marbury, came through like a steam engine, smoke swirling from the bowl of the pipe clenched between his teeth.

Close in his wake was Mr Kitchens. Marbury hauled Billy up with a hand clamped at the back of his neck, and bellowed "OUT!" He shoved Billy so fast the boy was sliding across the floor, through the throng, and past the scattered shoes toward the door.

"He's drunk as a skunk!" Kitchens was saying. "Picking fights all over the place!"

"I know this boy. He's a troublemaker. Drinkin', huh? Where'd you get the booze?"

Billy tried his best to shake free, but then he was propelled through the door and Marbury spun him around. "I asked you a question, Creekmore!"

"No! I'm not . . . drunk. . . ."He could hardly talk because his lip was swelling so fast. Bells still pealed in his head. "Not drunk! Something's gonna happen! I saw it . . . saw the black aura! ..."

"Saw what? I've had a gutful of you, boy! You smell like you've been swimmin' in booze! I ought to suspend you on the spot!"

"No . . . please . . . listen to me! I don't know what's going to happen, but . . ."

"I do!" Marbury said. "You're gonna stay out of that gym! And come Monday mornin' I'm gonna have a long talk with your parents! Go on, now! If you want to drink and fight, it'll be somewhere else!" He shoved Billy backward. Faces peered out, watching and smirking; one of them belonged to Ralph Leighton. Marbury turned and stalked to the door, then faced Billy again. "I said get out of here!"

"How about my shoes?"

"We'll mail 'em to you!" Marbury said, and then he vanished within the gym.

Billy looked at Mr Kitchens, who stood a few feet away from him and who now began edging toward the door. "They're going to die," he told the man. "I tried to warn them. They won't listen."

"You come back in the gym again, mister, and I might help the boys clean your clock." Kitchens glared at him for a few seconds, then went into the gym.

Billy stood in the darkness, weaving on his feet. He shouted, "THEY'RE GOING TO DIE!" and in another few seconds someone closed the gym door. He staggered to it and hammered on the metal; he could feel the bass-drum vibrations of Purple Tree knocking back, and he knew everybody was dancing and having a good time again. I can't stop it, he told himself; whatever it is, I can't stop it! But I have to keep trying! If he couldn't get back inside, he'd stop them when they came out; he walked away from the gym on weak, rubbery legs and sat down on a curb facing the parking lot. He could see the vague shapes of people huddled in their cars, and moonlight glanced off an upturned bottle in the backseat of a spiffy red Chevy. He wanted to sob and scream, but he gritted his teeth together and held everything inside.

Within fifteen minutes he heard shouting and laughter from the football field, and he stood up to see what was happening. Kids were leaving the gym to congregate around the mound of timber; a couple of the chaperones were dousing the wood with gasoline, and the bonfire was about to be lighted. People chased each other around the field like wild stallions, and some of the girls started doing impromptu Bulldogs cheers. Billy stood at the fence, his hands gripped into the metal mesh. A lighter sparked, and the flame touched the gasoline-soaked wood at several places around the base; the wood, most of it rough kindling, caught quickly. Fire gnawed toward the top of the pile. More students were coming out to ring the bonfire as the flames grew brighter; the heap was about twelve or thirteen feet tall, Billy saw, and some practical joker had set a chair on top of it. Sparks danced into the sky. As Billy watched, some of the kids linked hands and started to sing Fayette County High's alma mater:

Nestled in the quiet valley

Home we love and always will;

Stands our revered alma mater

Below the woodland and the hills . . .

The bonfire was growing into a huge finger of flame. Billy leaned against the fence, rubbing his swollen lip. In the quick orange spray of sparks from a wet piece of wood Billy saw Melissa Pettus and Hank Orr, holding hands and standing near the bonfire's base. The aura around them had turned blacker still, and seemed to be spreading out its dark, twisting tentacles. He saw Sandra Falkner's face, brushed with orange light, as she stood looking up toward the bonfire's crest. She was almost cocooned in the black aura. Gus Tompkins was standing to her left, and back about ten feet.

Billy's fingers clenched the fence as the cold realization struck him: they were all out here now, all the kids who were enveloped by the ugly aura, and most of them were standing closest to the fire. The blackness seemed to be reaching toward itself, connecting, drawing all the victims together.

A red glow pulsated at the bonfire's center. The chair collapsed, to a scattering of applause and whoops.

. . . We give thanks for all God's blessings.

Underneath his crowning sky;

Home of learning and of friendship,

Our alma mater, Fayette County . . .

"GET AWAY FROM THE FIRE!" Billy screamed.

The bonfire heaved, as if something were growing within it. Suddenly there were several ear-cracking pops that stopped all laughter. From the fire's center exploded three multicolored streaks of light that shot in different directions over the field.

Roman candles, Billy thought. How did Roman candles get inside the. . . ?

But then there was an earth-shuddering whummmmmp! and the entire mound of flaming timbers exploded from within. Billy had time to see jagged shards of wood flying like knives before a hot shock wave hit him like a brick wall, flinging him to the ground so hard the breath burst from his lungs. The earth shook again, and again; the air was filling with whistlings and shrieks, human and fireworks noises.

Billy sat up, his head ringing, his face scorched with heat; he numbly realized his hands were bleeding, and he'd left most of their skin in the fence's mesh. Caught all along the fence were shards of wood that could've sliced through him like butcher knives. Roman candles shot across the field, a golden flower of sparks opened up high in the air, M-80s hammered at the sky, purple and blue and green fireworks zigzagged from the center of the bonfire's rubble. People were running, screaming, rolling on the ground in agony. Kids with their hair and clothes on fire were dancing now to a new and hideous rhythm, others were staggering around like sleepwalkers. Billy stood up; a rain of cinders was falling, and the air stank of black powder. He saw a boy crawling away from the still-exploding bonfire, and then Billy was running toward the center of the field to help. He grasped the boy's blackened shirt and hauled him away several yards as Roman candles rocketed overhead. A girl was screaming for her mother, over and over again, and when Billy grabbed her hand to pull her away from the mound of fire her skin came off like a glove; she moaned and passed out.

A green pinwheel whistled toward Billy's face; as he ducked it he smelled his hair burn. A red star exploded in the sky, washing the field with bloody light. The chilling shriek of the Civil Defense air-raid siren began whooping from atop the high school, cutting through the night like a clarion of disaster.

Billy grasped the collar of a boy whose shirt had been all but blown off his back, and he screamed, "I TOLD YOU! I TRIED TO WARN YOU!" The boy's face was as pale as marble, and he walked on as if Billy were invisible. Billy looked wildly around, saw June Clark lying on the ground in a fetal curl, Mike Blaylock lying on his back with a shard of wood through his right hand, Annie Ogden on her knees as if praying to the bonfire. Above the screaming, he heard the sound of sirens approaching from Fayette; suddenly his knees gave way and he sat on the black ground as fireworks kept whistling all around him.

Someone staggered out of the haze before him and stood looking down. It was Mr. Kitchens, blood leaking from both his ears. A white spray of sparks exploded behind him, and his face worked as if he were trying very hard to open his mouth. Finally, he said in a hoarse, chilling whisper, "You. . . !"

25

The Creekmores found their son sitting on the floor in a corner of the tense, crowded Fayette County Hospital waiting room. They had heard the Civil Defense siren, and Ramona had sensed tragedy.

Billy's face was heat-swollen, his eyebrows all but singed away. There was a thin blanket draped across his shoulders, and resting in his lap were his bandaged hands. The stark overhead lighting made the Vaseline smeared on his face shine, and his eyes were closed as if he were asleep, removing himself from the noise and tension by sheer willpower alone.

John stood behind his wife, his spine crawling from being stared at by all the other parents. Someone at the high school, where they'd stopped first, had told him that Billy was dead and the boy's body had already been carried away in an ambulance, but Ramona had said no, she'd have known if her son was dead.

"Billy?" Ramona said, in a trembling voice.

The boy's eyes opened painfully. He could hardly see through the swollen slits, and the doctors had told him there were maybe forty wood slivers in his cheeks and forehead but he'd have to wait until the burned kids were treated.

She bent down beside him and hugged him gently, her head leaning against his shoulder. "I'm all right, Mom," Billy said through blistered lips. "Oh God . . . it was so terrible. . . ."

John's face had been gray ever since they'd left the school and had seen those bodies lying under the blankets, the gurneys being pushed along the hallway with burned teenagers on them, parents shrieking and sobbing and clinging to each other for support. The night was filled with ambulance sirens, and the burned-flesh stink floated in the hospital like a brown haze. "Your hands," he said. "What happened?"

"I lost some skin, that's all."

"Dear God, boy!" John's face crumpled like old sandpaper, and he put his hand against the tiled wall to support himself. "Lord God, Lord God I never saw anything like what I saw at that school!"

"How'd it happen, Dad? One minute it was just a bonfire, like every year. Then it all changed."

"I don't know. But all those pieces of wood . . . they cut those kids up, just cut them to ribbons!"

"A man there said I did it," Billy said tonelessly. "He said I was drunk, and I did something to the fire to make it explode."

"That's a damned lie!" John's eyes blazed. "You didn't have a thing to do with it!"

"He said I have Death inside me. Is that right?"

"NO! Who said that to you? Show him to me!"

Billy shook his head. "It doesn't matter now, anyway. It's all over. I just . . . wanted to have fun, Dad. Everybody wanted to have a good time. . . ."

John gripped his son's shoulder, and felt something like deep ice crack inside him. Billy's gaze was strangely dark and blank, as if what had happened had blown all the mysterious fuses in his head. "It's all right," John said. "Thank God you're alive."

"Dad? Was I wrong to go?"

"No. A man goes where he wants to, and he has to go some places he don't want to, as well. I expect you've done a little of both tonight." Farther along the corridor, someone wailed in either pain or sorrow, and John flinched from the sound.

Ramona wiped her eyes on her sleeve and looked at the tiny slivers embedded in Billy's face, some of them dangerously close to having blinded him. She had to ask, though she already suspected the answer "Did you know?"

He nodded. "I tried to tell them, I tried to warn them something was going to happen, but I ... I didn't know what it was going to be. Mom, why did it happen? Could I have changed it if I'd done anything different?" Tears slipped down his Vaseline-smeared cheeks.

"I don't know," Ramona replied; an honest answer to a mystery that had plagued her all her life.

There was a sudden commotion over at the far side of the waiting room, where a corridor led to the main doors. Ramona and John both looked up, and saw people thronging around a large, thick-bellied man with gray curly hair and a boy about Billy's age, lean and red-haired. A shock of recognition pierced Ramona. That bitter night at the tent revival replayed itself in her mind—it had never been very far beneath the surface, not in all of seven years. A woman grasped Falconer's hand and kissed it, begging him to pray for her injured daughter; a man in overalls pushed her aside to get to Wayne. For a few seconds there was a shoving melee of shoulders and arms as the parents of hurt and dying kids tried to reach Falconer and his son, to get their attention, to touch them as if they were walking good-luck charms. Falconer let them converge on him, but the boy stepped back in confusion.

Ramona stood up. A state trooper had come in, trying to settle everybody back down again. Through the mass of people, Ramona's hard gaze met the evangelist's, and Falconer's soft, fleshy face seemed to darken. He came toward her, ignoring the appeals for prayer and for healing. He looked down at Billy, his eyes narrowing, then back into Ramona's face. Wayne stood behind him, wearing jeans and a blue knit shirt with an alligator on the breast pocket. He glanced at Billy and for an instant then-eyes held; then the boy's gaze locked upon Ramona, and she thought she could actually feel the heat of hatred.

"I know you," Falconer said softly. "I remember you, from a long time ago. Creekmore."

"That's right. And I remember you, as well."

"There's been an accident," John told the evangelist. "My boy was there when it happened. His hands are all cut up, and he ... he saw terrible things. Will you pray for him?"

Falconer's eyes were locked with Ramona's. He and Wayne had heard about the bonfire explosion on the radio, and had come to the hospital to offer consolation; running into this witch-woman again was the last thing he'd expected, and he feared the influence her presence might have on Wayne. His bulk dwarfed her, but somehow, under her hard and appraising stare, he felt very vulnerable and small.

"Have you brought your boy here to heal?" she asked him.

"No. Only to minister, alongside me."

Ramona turned her attention to the boy, and stepped a pace closer to him. Billy saw her eyes narrow, as if she'd seen something that scared her about Wayne Falconer, something he wasn't able yet to see, perhaps. Wayne said, "What're you looking at?"

"Don't mind her. She's crazy." Falconer took the boy's arm and started to herd him away; suddenly a hollow-eyed man in blue jeans and a T-shirt stood up from his seat and grasped Wayne's hand. "Please," the man said, his voice sad and raspy, "I know who you are and what you can do. I've seen you do it before. Please ... my son's hurt bad, they brought him in a little while ago and they don't know if he's gonna . . ." The man clung to Wayne's hand as if he were about to collapse, and his bathrobed wife rose to support him. "I know what you can do," he whispered. "Please . . . save my son's life!"

Billy saw Wayne glance quickly at his father. The man said, "I'll give you money. I've got money, is that what you want? I'll turn to the Lord, I'll go to church every Sunday and I won't drink or gamble no more. But you've got to save him, you can't let those . . . those doctors kill him!"

"We'll pray for him," Falconer said. "What's his name?"

"No! You've got to touch him, to heal him like I've seen you do on television! My son's all burned up, his eyes are all burned!" The man gripped at Falconer's sleeve as other people thronged around. "Please let your boy heal him, I'm begging you!"

"Well just look who's here, everybody!" Falconer suddenly boomed, and pointed toward Ramona. "The Creekmores! Wayne, you know all about them, don't you? The mother's a Godless witch, and the boy calls up demons like he did at a certain sawmill around here! And now here they stand, on the eve of the worst disaster in Fayette history, turning up like bad pennies!"

"Wait," John said. "No, you're wrong, Reverend Falconer. Billy was at the high school, and he got hurt—"

"Hurt? You call that hurt? Look at him, everybody! Why isn't he all burned up, like the son of this poor soul here?" He gripped the man's shoulder. "Why isn't he dyin', like some of your sons and daughters are right this minute? He was out there with the other young people! Why isn't he burned up?"

All eyes turned toward Ramona. She was silent, unprepared for Falconer's attack. But she understood that he was trying to use her and Billy as scapegoats, to avoid explaining why Wayne couldn't go from room to room in this hospital and heal everyone in them.

"I'll tell you why," Falconer said. "Maybe there are forces working behind this woman and boy that are better left alone by Christian folk! Maybe these forces, and God only knows what they are, protected this boy. Maybe they're inside him, and he carries Death and destruction with him like a plague—"

"Stop it!" Ramona said sharply. "Stop trying to hide behind smoke! Boy!" She'd addressed Wayne, and now she moved past the evangelist to face his son. Billy rose painfully to his feet and held onto his father's arm. "Do you know what you're doing, son?" she asked softly, and Billy saw him wince. "If you do have a healing gift, it's not to be used for wealth or power. It can't be part of a show. Don't you understand that by now? If you're pretending to heal folks, you've got to stop giving them false hope. You've got to urge them to see a doctor, and to take their medicines." Her hand came up, and gently touched Wayne's cheekbone.

He suddenly thrust his jaw forward and spat in her face.

"Witch!" he shouted in a strident and frightened voice. "Get away from me!"

John leaped forward, his fists clenched. Instantly two men blocked his way, one of them shoving him back against the wall, the other pinning him there with an arm across his throat. Billy didn't have a chance to fight, for he was facing a knot of desperate and fearful people who wanted to stomp him under their shoes.

Falconer's voice raised above the din of shouting. "Hold on now, folks! We don't want any trouble on our hands, do we? We've got enough to concern ourselves with tonight! Leave 'em be!"

Ramona wiped her face with the back of her hand. Her gaze was gentle but full of deep sadness. "I'm sorry for you," she told Wayne, and then turned to Falconer "And for you. How many bodies and souls have you killed in the name of God? How many more will you destroy?"

"You're Godless trash," the evangelist said. "My son carries Life inside him, but yours spreads Death. If I were you, I'd take my trash with me and get out of this county." His eyes glinted like cold diamonds.

"I've said my piece." She took a few steps, stopped, and stared at a man and woman who blocked her path. "Move," she said, and they did. John was shaking, rubbing his throat and glaring at Falconer. "Let's go home," Ramona told her men; she was close to tears, but damned if she'd let any of these people see her cry!

"We gonna just let this filth walk out of here?" someone shouted from the other side of the waiting room.

"Let them go," Falconer said, and the crowd quietened down. "Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord! You'd better pray, witch! You'd better pray real hard!"

Ramona stumbled on her way across the room, and Billy took her weight on his shoulder to lead her out. John kept looking back, afraid of being jumped. Shouts and catcalls followed them all the way. They got in the Olds and drove away, passing ambulances that were bringing dead teen-agers wrapped in black rubber bags.

J.J. Falconer hurried Wayne out of the waiting room before anyone else could stop them. His face was flushed, his breathing rapid, and he motioned Wayne toward a utility room. Amid brooms and mops and cans of detergent, Falconer leaned against a wall and dabbed his face with a handkerchief.

"Are you all right?" Wayne's face was shadowed and grim; a single light bulb hung on a cord just above his head.

"Yeah. It's just ... the excitement. Let me get my breath." He sat down on a detergent can. "You handled yourself pretty good out there."

"She scared me, and I didn't want her touching me."

He nodded. "You did real fine. That woman's pure trouble. Well, we'll see what we can do about her. I've got friends in Hawthorne. Yeah, we'll see. . . ."

"I didn't like what she said to me, Dad. It . . . made me hurt to hear her."

"She speaks in Satan's language, trying to trick and confuse you, and make you doubt yourself. Somethin's got to be done about her and that . . . that mongrel of hers. Vic Chatham told me the whole story, about what his brother Lamar saw up at the mill. That boy spoke to the Devil up there, and went wild and almost tore the place apart. Somethin's got to be done about both of them, and soon."

"Dad?" Wayne said after another moment. "Could I . . . could I heal a dying person, if I . . . tried hard enough?"

Falconer carefully folded his damp handkerchief and put it away before answering. "Yes, Wayne. If you tried hard enough, and prayed strong enough, you could. But this hospital is not the proper place to heal."

Wayne frowned. "Why not?"

"Because it's . . . not a house of God, that's why. Healing is only right in a sanctified place, where people have gathered to hear the Lord's Word."

"But . . . people have a need right here."

Falconer smiled darkly and shook his head. "You've got that witch's voice in your head, Wayne. She's confused you, hasn't she? Oh sure, she'd like to see you go from room to room in this hospital, and heal everybody. But that wouldn't be right, because it's God's Will that some of these young people die here tonight. So we let the doctors work on 'em, and do all they can, but we know the mysterious ways of the Lord, don't we?"

"Yes sir."

"That's right." When he stood up, he winced and gingerly touched his chest. The pain was almost gone now, but it had felt like an electric shock. "Now I'm feelin' a bit better. Wayne, I want you to do me a favor. Will you go outside and wait in the car?"

"Wait in the car? Why?"

"These poor folks will expect you to heal if you stay here, so I think it's best if you wait while I pray with them."

"Oh." Wayne was puzzled, and still disturbed by what the witch had said to him. Her dark eyes had seemed to look straight to his soul, and she'd scared the daylights out of him. "Yes sir, I guess that would be best."

"Good. And will you slip around to the side door? If you go back out through that waitin' room, there might be another commotion."

Wayne nodded. The woman's voice echoed in his head: Do you know what you're doing, son? Something within him suddenly seemed to be tottering over a cliff's edge, and he jerked himself back with the savage thought: She's as evil as sin itself, her and the demon boy, and they should both be cast into the Lord's fire! Lord says what? BURN THEM! "We'll get them, won't we, Dad?"

"We'll get 'em," Falconer replied. "Just leave it to me. Come on, I'd best get out there. Remember: out the side way, okay?"

"Yes sir." A low flame of rage was burning inside Wayne. How dare that woman touch him like that! He wished now that he'd struck her across the face, knocked her to her knees for everyone to see. He was still shaking from being so close to them. Their darkness, he knew, was pulling at him, trying to lure him. There would be a next time, he told himself; oh yes, and then . . .

He had the vague beginnings of a headache. He said, "I'm ready now," and followed his father out of the utility room.

26

John was awake in the dark, thinking.

Ramona shifted softly in the crook of his arm; they'd slept closer in the last three nights, since what had happened at Fayette County Hospital, than they had in many years. His throat was still bruised from where a man's forearm had pressed against it, and he'd been hoarse the next day until he'd accepted a tea of sassafras root and dandelion that Ramona had brewed for him.

The kids who'd died in the accident had been buried the previous day. John's trips into town during the last few days had been brief; at Lee Sayre's hardware store no one would come to wait on him, and when he went to get a haircut Curtis Peel suddenly announced he'd close up for the afternoon. So he drove into Fayette for a bucket of roofing pitch, and decided to let his hair grow longer While he was in Fayette, he heard from a clerk that somebody had hidden two crates of assorted fireworks down inside the bonfire, and the intense heat had made them all go off at once. The troopers had said that the amount of black powder had been equal to a couple of short sticks of dynamite; it had looked like a kid's prank, done by somebody who'd thought the fireworks going off would take the others by surprise, but all that explosive powder in such a small space, the heat of the gasoline-fed fire, and the small, sharp shards of wood had added up to seven deaths and a score of terrible injuries. One boy, a senior football player named Gus Tompkins, was still lingering at the Burn Center Hospital in Birmingham, blinded and shocked dumb.

By the light of the anger he'd felt toward Jimmy Jed Falconer, John had seen amazing things, both true and unsettling, about his own life and beliefs. He hadn't been able to understand why Falconer had deliberately tried to hurt Ramona and Billy, tried to stir up the crowd against them like that; the man had spouted one lie after another about them, had even tried to make it out that Billy had been to blame for the accident! Thinking about these things had started rusted wheels turning in his head; there was pain, yes, but it seemed that for the first time in a very long while he was being powered from his own dynamo, not from the cast-off sparks of someone else's.

Now it seemed to him that Falconer was a man of God, but yet he was still only a man, too. And that boy of his could heal, but not all the time and not everybody. It was too simple to say that a man belonged either to God or to Satan; no, even the best of men had bad days—or bad thoughts—and every once in a while might slip off the righteous path. Did that necessarily damn you to Hell for eternity? Falconer himself had slipped off, by his lies, and so had the boy, by his actions; did that make them more human, or did it mean that Satan was at work in their lives?

And what about Ramona and Billy? What was this power they had, to lay the dead to rest? Where did it come from: God? Satan? Neither one, or a combination of both? And what if he'd been wrong, all these years, about Ramona and her mother?

He started to roll over on his side, but then he realized how quiet it was; usually the crickets in the grass were fiddling fit to bust on a warm summer night like . . .

The house was suddenly filled with a white glare. John sat up abruptly, half blinded, and heard a loud metallic clanging and crashing outside, seemingly all around the house. He grabbed his pants off a chair and struggled into them as Ramona sat up in bed. "What is it?" she asked frantically. "What's that sound?" He drew aside the curtains to look out the small window; bright beams of light cut into his eyes, and he couldn't see a thing out there. He said, "Stay here!" and ran for the front door. He stepped out onto the porch, shielding his eyes from the light. White orbs ringed the house, and now he could make out human shapes, banging together pots and pans and iron pipes. The raucous rough music rang in John's head, and dull terror throbbed within him as he realized the shapes were sheeted in Klan garb. Cars had been pulled up close to the house, their headlights all switched on at the same time. "What do you want?" John shouted, pacing from one side of the porch to the other, like a trapped animal. "Get off my land!"

The clanging went on, in rhythmic cadence. Then the screen door opened and Billy came out on the porch, his face peeling as if from sunburn; there were still thick bandages on his hands, but the doctor had said they'd be fine after the raw places scabbed over. Ramona was behind him, wrapped in her gray robe; she was carrying a long carving knife.

"Stop it! You damned dogs, what do you want?" John thought of the old pistol he had, wrapped in oily rags in a drawer, and he started to go get it when the clanging suddenly died.

One of the hooded shapes stepped forward, silhouetted in bright light, and pointed toward John. "Creekmore," the man said, and John knew it was Lee Sayre's voice even muffled through the mask, "this town's suffered enough misery from that woman and her boy! Surely you know by now they're not gonna renounce their ways! So we've come to set forth our terms. ..."

"Terms?" John said. "Lee, what're you talkin' about?"

"No names, Creekmore! You took an oath!"

"That was when I was on the other side of that mask! What are y'all supposed to be? A vigilante squad? A hangin' party? Did you bring your tar and feathers? What right do you have runnin' your cars up on my land and raisin' hell like—"

"Every right!" Sayre bellowed.,"Because of the uniform we wear, and because we live in this town!"

"We've got the right to beat your ass too, Creekmore!" someone called out—Ralph Leighton's voice. "You'd best watch your mouth!"

Sayre said firmly, "We want the woman and the boy out of Hawthorne. We want 'em out tonight. John, you and your parents were all born and raised here, and you've always been a good, God-fearin' man. For years you were able to keep that woman in her place, but now that the boy's got the demon in him too the both of them are too strong for you. But we've decided you can stay here if you want to, John. It's not your fault you've been saddled with this corruption. ..."

"NO!" John shouted. "This is our home, damn it! This is my wife and son you're talkin' about!"

"It's been decided," Sayre said. "We want them gone before something else happens around here."

"We want that accursed boy out of this town!" Ralph Leighton stepped forward, jabbing a finger at Billy. "First the crops went bad after he was born, and the land ain't been too good ever since! Then Dave Booker killed his whole family, and guess who was the Booker boy's friend? Then Link Patterson got sliced up at the sawmill, and we all know about that! Now there are fine kids lying in the ground and in the hospital, and just guess who was there to see it happen? My son got a faceful of splinters and broke his arm, but thank God he'll be all right, or I'd be carryin' a gun right now! He told me he heard that boy shout that everybody was going to die, that the boy was cursin' everybody and puttin' some kind of spell on 'em! Even J.J. Falconer himself said the boy's just like the mother! That boy spreads Death with him wherever he goes!"

"You lyin' sonofabitch!" John shouted, trembling with rage.

"Who's stirred you up?" Ramona's voice carried over the angered yelling, and she stepped forward to the edge of the porch. She stared down at the sheeted shapes. "You're like dumb cattle, stampeded this way and that by the sound of thunder! You don't understand a thing about me or my son! Did that evangelist put you up to this?"

"Come on," Leighton shouted. "Time's wastin'!" He moved toward the house, and the ring of Klansmen closed in. "Put that knife down, you squaw-cat, 'fore I have to take it and cut off your tits. . . ." And then he grunted with pain and surprise, because John had leaped upon him, driving him to the ground. They cursed and rolled, grappling at each other as the Klansmen cheered Leighton on.

A rock crashed through the window behind Ramona. Then another stone was flung, hitting her on the shoulder. She gasped and went down on her knees, and then a white hooded shape leaped up onto the porch and kicked the knife from her hand. The Klansman looked up as Billy came at him like a whirlwind; the boy couldn't clench his hands yet to make fists, so he hit him with a shoulder block that lifted the man up and carried him off the porch and onto the ground on his back, sounding like a potato sack as he hit.

John had ripped the hood from Leighton's head and was hammering blows to the man's face. Leighton staggered and fell to his knees, his robes grimed with dirt; he yelled through purple, pulped lips, "Somebody get the bastard!"

Ramona screamed. Billy saw light glint off a length of iron pipe as one of the figures lifted it high. He shouted, "Look out!" John started to turn, but the pipe came down with terrible force upon the back of his head, staggering him forward. Leighton hit him in the stomach, and even as John fell the pipe came down again, its arc ending with an awful crunching sound.

There was a sudden silence. John lay on his stomach, his legs twitching, his fingers clawed into the dirt.

And then Billy, with a scream of rage that ripped through the night, leaped from the porch and flung himself onto the man who'd struck his father; they careened backward, slamming over the hood of a red Chevy. Billy forced his stiff fingers around the iron pipe, and he held onto it as someone gripped his hair and yanked him off. He rammed an elbow back into a set of teeth and pulled free, turning upon the Klansmen. With his first blow he broke a man's nose; he dodged a cast-iron skillet that had been used to make the raucous noise, came up under it, and slammed his weapon into an unprotected shoulder.

An arm caught him around the throat from behind; he kicked back into a shinbone, wrenching free as an aluminum pot swung for his head. He drove the pipe deep into someone's stomach and heard an agonized retching from inside the hood. He spun and struck again, blindly swinging the pipe with all his strength; the man in front of him backed away, but a skillet caught him a glancing blow on the shoulder and drove him to the ground.

"Kill him!" Leighton shrieked. "Go on, finish him off!"

Billy reared up and struck into a blue-jeaned kneecap. The Klansman howled with pain and hopped away like an injured toadfrog. Then someone landed on his back, pushing his face into the dirt. He struggled wildly, expecting the back of his head to be caved in.

Then there was a crack! like a car backfiring and the weight was off him. Around him a forest of legs scurried for the safety of their cars; Billy looked up, saw his mother on the porch holding his father's pistol in a shaky, two-handed grip. Sparks leaped with her next shot, and Billy heard a windshield crack. Engines caught, and now the vehicles were racing away from the house, their tires throwing up tails of mud.

Two cars banged into each other on the narrow drive leading down to the highway. Ramona fired two more shots that went wild before the old pistol jammed up. Then the night was filled with red taillights, and tires shrieked on the highway. As Billy rose to his feet, he saw the last of the red lights disappear He was breathing hard, his head spinning, and his agonized hand let the iron pipe drop to the ground.

"COWARDS!" Billy shouted. "YOU DAMNED DIRTY COWARDS!" And then he heard his mother sob, and he turned to see her leaning over his father's body. He saw how white his father's face was, and how red the blood was that spilled from his mouth and nostrils. "Dad? ..." Billy whispered.

Ramona looked up at her son with terror in her eyes. "Go get help, Billy! Run!"

27

Almost every afternoon in June, and now through July, the man and woman had sat together on the front porch. Crickets sang in the high grass, and a single cicada whined in the top branches of the big oak tree, mimicking the sawmill's distant noise. A soft breeze went by, cooling the sweat on Billy's face and back as he worked atop the roof, tearing up the rows of rotten shingles. His hair was a tangle of reddish black curls, commas of it sticking damply to his forehead; the summer sun had tanned him to a rich dark coppery color, and the physical work he'd been doing—the work of two men done by one, since his father had been hurt—had tightened the muscles in his shoulders and back so they were sharply defined under the flesh. The roof had leaked all through June, but this was the first chance he'd had to strip off the shingles and look for holes that he'd later plug with roofing pitch.

Billy had tried to get a job as a mechanic in every gas station for fifteen miles around, but when the owners learned his name their eyes went blank, like shutters being closed over windows. He'd been offered a job sweeping up in a broomcorn warehouse on the far side of Rossland City, but the place stank and was hot as hell and they expected him to be so grateful he'd work almost for free; he'd decided he would do better putting all his time and energy into the farm. All the houses and even the trailers in Hawthorne had electricity now, except for the Creekmore place, which sat so far off the highway no one from Alabama Power ever came to inquire.

Still, Billy felt the stirring of wanderlust in his soul. Yesterday, while tilling the ground for a sprinkling of tomato seeds, he'd looked up into the clear blue sky and seen a hawk, riding the breezes that carried to the east, and he'd wanted to see the land through the hawk's eyes. Beyond the valley's forested crown, he knew, were more towns and people, and roads and woods and cities and seas and deserts; beyond the valley were things both wondrous and fearful. They were calling to him, using such messengers as hawks and high, fast-moving clouds and a distant road seen from the top of a hill.

He ripped up another few shingles and dropped them over the roof's edge to the ground. He could hear his mother's voice, reading the Twenty-seventh Psalm to his father; it was one of his favorites, and hardly a day went by that he didn't ask to hear it. She finished, and he heard his father say, in his slurred unsteady voice, " 'Mona? Where's Billy?"

"He's gone up on the roof to tear off the old shingles."

"Oh. Yeah. That needs to be done. I meant to do that myself. Think he needs any help?"

"No, I believe he can do it by himself. Do you want another sip of tea?"

There was a slurping sound. Billy ripped off three shingles and tossed them over his shoulder.

"That's mighty good, 'Mona. Think you could read the Twenty-seventh Psalm to me today? Sure is a strong, hot sun up there ain't it? Cornfield'll need a dose of well-water pretty soon, I reckon. ..."

Billy concentrated on his work while his father's mind skipped tracks like a scratched-up record. Then John lapsed into silence, and Ramona began to read the psalm again.

The doctor in Fayette had said the first lead pipe blow had fractured John Creekmore's skull; the second had driven bone splinters into the brain. John had lain in a coma for two weeks, in a charity-ward bed. What was left when he came out of the hospital was more child than man; in his eyes there was a look of painful bewilderment, but he seemed to remember nothing at all of what had happened. He recognized Ramona and Billy as his wife and son, but he made no demands on them and the day was just fine if he could sit out on the porch in the shade, or down at the pond listening to the bullfrogs. He slept a lot, and often he would ask the strangest questions, as if things were at a low boil inside his head and there was no telling what might pop up from the soup of memory.

Sometimes the gnaw of guilt got too bad inside Billy, and he'd have to get away by himself into the woods for a day or so. He knew that what had happened to his father would have been averted had he not gone to the May Night dance; no, he'd wanted to show the other kids that he was just like them and he could fit in . . . but he'd been wrong. He wasn't like them; he wasn't like anybody else. And now his father had been made to pay for it. The police had never found out who'd buried those fireworks within the bonfire, just as Sheriff Bromley had never found out who'd struck those blows to the back of John Creekmore's head; everybody had airtight alibis, the sheriff had told Ramona. It was true that Ralph Leighton's face looked as if a mule had kicked it, but his wife and son and three hunting buddies said they'd all been together playing cards the night John was hurt. They'd all sworn that Ralph had tripped down some steps and fallen right on his face.

Billy sensed movement, and looked toward the highway to see dust rising into the air. A black, battered old Volkswagen van had turned off and was coming up the road to the house. The ruts must've been too much for the suspension though, because in another moment the van stopped and a man wearing a straw hat climbed out of the driver's seat. Billy called down, "Mom! Somebody's coming!"

Ramona glanced up from the Bible and saw the figure walking slowly up the road. "Hon? We're gonna have some company."

"Company," John repeated. One half of his face was drawn tight, the other was loose and immobile. He could only speak from one side of his mouth, and on the dead half of his face the eye was a cold blue stone.

Ramona stood up. There was something written across the black van's side, but she couldn't quite make out what it said. The man was short and rounded, and now he paused to shrug off the jacket of his seersucker suit; he pegged the jacket on a finger, let it rest across his shoulder, and then continued up the slight incline, visibly huffing and puffing.

He stopped underneath the spreading oak to catch his breath. "Ma'am, I certainly hope this is the Creekmore property. If it isn't, I'm afraid I'm going to have to sit in this shade and rest."

"It is. Who might you be?"

"Ah!" The man's round, cherubic face brightened. There were spots of color on his cheeks, and he had a gray, neatly clipped mustache above a wildly sprouting goatee. "I stopped at a residence just down the way, but when I asked directions, they were quite rude. These roads around here do twist and turn, don't they? So: are you Ramona Creekmore?"

"I might be, or I might not be. I haven't heard your name yet."

The little man, who reminded Ramona of a short, fat goat, smiled and took out his wallet. The smile faltered a fraction when Billy walked out from around the house to see what was going on. "And you must be Billy," the man said.

"Yes sir."

There was a stony silence from Ramona. She stepped down off the porch as the man produced a dog-eared white business card; she took it, looked at it briefly, and then handed the card to Billy. Written across the card in an ornate script was Dr. Reginald Mirakle, Performer Extraordinaire.

"We don't need any doctors; we've seen enough to last us for a long time."

The man's canny gray eyes darted toward John Creekmore, sitting motionless in his chair with the Bible on his lap. "Oh. No, ma'am, you misunderstand. I'm not a medical doctor. I'm a ... a performer."

"You mean a charlatan?"

He raised gray eyebrows as thick as caterpillars. "Some have said so in the past, I'm afraid. But that's neither here nor there. If I may? . . ." He took the card back from Billy and replaced it in his wallet. "Mrs. Creekmore, might I trouble you for a glass of water? I've driven from Haleyville this morning, and it sure is warm on the road."

Ramona paused for a few seconds, mistrustful of the man. But then she said, "All right. Billy, keep the man company, will you?" And then she went back onto the porch and inside the house. John called out to the man, "Howdy!" and then he was silent again.

Dr. Mirakle eyed the house, then looked out toward the cornfield where the scraggly stalks and scarecrow stood. "Billy," he said quietly. "Does anyone ever call you William?"

"No sir."

"How old are you?"

"Seventeen. I'll be eighteen in November."

"Ah, yes. Eighteen usually follows seventeen. Then you're twenty, and thirty; and pretty soon you're fifty-eight." He folded his jacket carefully and laid it on the porch floor, then took off his hat. Sweat gleamed on his balding pate, and two horns of gray hair stood up from each side of his head.

"Billy," Mirakle said, "have you ever been to a carnival?"

"No sir."

"Never?" Mirakle asked incredulously. "Why, when I was your age I could smell candied apples and popcorn in the air two days before the carnival got to town! And you've never been? Why, you've missed out on one of the best things life has to offer: fantasy."

Ramona came out with the man's glass of water. He drank half of it at a gulp. She said, "Now just what can we do for you?"

"Fine house you've got here," Mirakle said. He finished the water at his leisure, pretending not to notice the woman's hard stare. Then he said quietly, "I've searched for this house since the first of June. I had no idea if it was real or not. But here it is, and here are both of you. I've covered most of the northern half of Alabama looking for you."

"Why?" Ramona asked.

"In my line of work," the man said, "I travel a great deal. I meet a lot of people, and I hear a great many stories. Most of them untruths, or at best half-truths, like the tale of the giant ghost boy who walks the forest near Moundville. Or the rebel who still haunts his ruined plantation and fires at hunters who stray too near. Or the black dog that runs the road between Collinsville and Sand Rock. Maybe there was a grain of truth there once, but who knows? A gnarled oak on a moonlit night could become a giant boy. A plantation house creaks and groans with age, and someone hears a ghost walking. A wild dog runs from a car's headlights. Who knows?" He shrugged and ran a hand through his unruly hair to smooth it. "But . . . when one hears a tale about living people; well, that makes a difference. An old man in Montgomery told me that what I did was pretty fair, but had I ever heard of the Indian woman in north Alabama who could lay the dead to rest!"

Ramona's spine stiffened.

"I disregarded that story at first. But my profession draws the type of person who might be interested in the spirit world, and in four months on the road I might hit a hundred small towns. Soon I heard the story again, and this time I heard a name as well: Creekmore. In the next town, I began asking some questions. It wasn't until much later that I heard about the boy. But by then I had to know if you were real or simply a half-truth. I began searching, and asking questions along the way." He smiled again, lines crinkling around his eyes. "It wasn't until several days ago that I heard of Hawthorne, from a man who lives in Chapin. It seems there was an accident involving a pickup truck and a large oak tree. ..."

"Yes," the woman said.

"Ah. Then I believe my search is over." He turned his gaze toward Billy. "Are the stories about you true, young man? Can you see and talk to the dead?"

The way that question came out caught Billy off-guard. He glanced at his mother; she nodded, and he said, "Yes sir, I can."

"Then is it also true that you exorcised a demon from a house where a murder took place? That you have a power over Death itself? That you called up Satan in a deserted sawmill?"

"No. All those are made-up stories."

"That's usually the way tales are spread. A grain of truth is taken and a luster is spun around it, like an oyster with a pearl. But there is the grain of truth in those stories, isn't there?"

"Sort of, I guess."

"People talk to hear their damned lips flap!" Ramona told him. "I know full well what's said about us. Now I'd like to hear why you searched us out so long and hard."

"No need to get upset," Mirakle said. "Folks are afraid of you, but they respect you, too. As I said, I'm a performer. I have my own show, and I travel with carnivals. . . ."

"What kind of show?"

"I'm pleased you ask. It's a show that goes back to the rich vaudeville heritage of England. As a matter of fact, I learned it from an aged magician who'd performed the very same show in his heyday, in London before the Second World War."

"Mister," Ramona said, "your tongue takes more turns than a snake on wet grass."

Mirakle smiled. "What I perform, Mrs. Creekmore, is a ghost show."

An alarm bell went off in Ramona's head. She said, "Good day, Mr. Doctor Mirakle. I don't think we're interested in—"

But Billy asked, "What's a ghost show?" and the sound of curiosity in his voice made his mother uneasy. She thought of ghost-chasing charlatans, false seers, seances in dark rooms where painted skeletons danced on wires and "dire warnings" were spoken through voice-distorting trumpets: all the nasty tricks her grandmother had seen and told her to be wary of.

"Well, I'll just tell you. What I'd like to do, though, is sit down underneath that oak tree there and rest my legs, if that's okay." Billy followed him, and Ramona came down off the porch as Mirakle eased himself to the ground at the tree's base. He looked up at Billy, his gray eyes sparkling with crafty good humor "The ghost show," he said reverently. "Billy, imagine a theater in one of the great cities of the world—New York, London, Paris perhaps. Onstage is a man—perhaps me, or even you—in a black tuxedo. He asks for volunteers from the audience. They tie him securely into a chair. Then a black cloth is draped around his body, and the cloth tied to the chair's legs. He is carried into a large black cabinet. The cabinet's doors are padlocked, and the volunteers go to their seats as the houselights dim. The lights go out. The audience waits, as a minute passes. Then another. They shift nervously in their seats." Mirakle's gaze danced from Billy to Ramona and back to the boy again.

"And then ... a muted noise of wind. The audience feels it across their faces; it seems to come from all directions, yet from no direction in particular. There is the scent of flowers on the edge of decay and then ... the distant, echoing sound of a funeral bell, tolling to twelve midnight. Above the audience there is a scattering of bright lights that slowly take on the shape of human faces, hovering in midair: the spirit guides have arrived. Music sounds; the blare of trumpets and rattle of drums. Then . . . boom!" He clapped his hands together for emphasis, startling both of his listeners. "A burst of red flame and smoke at center stage! BOOM! Another, stage right, and BOOM! on the left as well! The air is filled with smoke and the odor of brimstone, and the audience knows they are on a perilous voyage, into the very domain of Death itself! A wailing dark shape darts across the stage, leaps high, and soars to the ceiling; strange blue and purple lights dance in the air; moans and clanking noises fill the theater. A chorus of skeletons take center stage, link arms and kick their bony legs, accompanied by the dissonant music of a spectral orchestra. Sheeted spirits fly through the air, calling out the names of some members of the audience, and predicting events that only the all-seeing dead could know! And when the audience is driven to a peak of excitement and wonder, Old Scratch himself appears in a grand burst of red sparks! He clutches his pitchfork and prowls the stage, casting fireballs from the palms of his hands. He glares at the audience, and he says in a terrible, growling voice: 'Tell your friends to see Dr Mirakle's Ghost Show . . . or I'll be seeing you!' And Satan vanishes in a grand display of pyrotechnic artistry that leaves the eyes dazzled. The lights abruptly come up; the volunteers return, unlocking the black cabinet. The form within is still securely covered with the shroud, and underneath that he is still tied exactly as before! He rises, to the applause of a stunned and pleased audience."

Mirakle paused for a few seconds, as if regaining his breath. He smiled at Billy. "And that, young man, is a ghost show. Mystery. Magic. Delicious terror. Kids love it."

Ramona grunted. "If you can find a way to put all that in a sack, you could go into the fertilizer business."

Mirakle laughed heartily; as his face reddened, Billy saw the broken blue threads of veins in his nose and across his cheeks. "Ha! Yes, that's a possibility I hadn't thought of! Ha!" He shook his head, genuine mirth giving his face a rich glow. "Well, well. I'll have to consider it."

"You're a faker," Ramona said. "That's what it boils down to."

Mirakle stopped laughing and stared at her. "I'm a performer. I'm a supernatural artiste. I admit the ghost show isn't for everyone's taste, and I suppose that with movies and television the effect of a ghost show has taken a beating, but rural people still like them."

"You haven't answered my question yet. What are you doing here?"

"In a few days I'm going to be joining Ryder Shows, Incorporated. I'll be touring with them on the carnival circuit for the rest of the summer; then, in the fall, Ryder Shows becomes part of the state fair, in Birmingham. I need to upgrade my ghost show, to give it style and dazzle; there's a lot of work to be done, maintaining the machinery—which is in a Tuscaloosa warehouse right now—and getting the show in shape for Birmingham. I need an assistant." He looked at Billy. "Have you finished high school yet?"

"Yes sir."

"No," Ramona snapped. "My son workin' with a ... a fake thing like that? No, I won't hear of it! Now if you'd please get your caboose on down the road, I'd be grateful!" She angrily motioned for him to get up and leave.

"The pay would be quite equitable," Mirakle said, looking up at the boy. "Forty dollars a week."

"No!"

Billy dug his hands into his pockets. Forty dollars was a lot of money, he thought. It would buy tar and shingles for the roof, caulking for the windows, white paint for the weathered walls; it would buy new brake shoes for the Olds, and good tires too; it would buy gasoline and kerosene for the lamps, milk and sugar and flour and everything his folks would ever need. Forty dollars was a world of money. "How many weeks?" he heard himself ask.

Mirakle smiled. "The state fair ends on the thirteenth of October. Then I'll need you to help get my equipment back to Mobile, for winter storage. You'll be home by the sixteenth, at the latest."

Ramona grasped his arm and squeezed it. "I forbid it," she said. "Do you hear me? This 'ghost show' stuff is blasphemy! It mocks everything we stand for!"

"You sound like Dad used to," Billy said quietly.

"I know what you're thinkin'! Sure, forty dollars a week is a lot of money and it could be put to good use, but there's better ways of makin' an honest dollar than . . . than puttin' on a sideshow!"

"How?" he asked her.

She was silent, the wheels turning fiercely in her brain for an answer. How, indeed?

"You'd be my assistant," Mirakle said. "You'd get a real taste of show business. You'd learn how to work in front of an audience, how to hold their attention and make them want more. You'd learn . . . what the world is like."

"The world," Billy said in a soft, faraway voice. His eyes were dark and troubled as he looked back at his father again, then at his mother. She shook her head. "It's a lot of money, Mom."

"It's nothing!" she said harshly, and turned a baleful gaze on Mirakle. "I didn't bring my son up for this, mister! Not for some sham show that tricks people!"

"Fifty dollars a week," Billy said. Mirakle's smile disappeared. "I'll do it for fifty, but not a red cent less."

"What? Listen, do you know how many kids I can get to work for thirty a week? A few thousand, that's all!"

"If you looked so long and hard to find my mother and me, I figured you must think I could add something to that show of yours that nobody else could. I figure I'm worth the fifty dollars to you, and I think you'll pay me. Because if you don't, I won't go, and all that looking you did will be wasted time. I also want a week's pay in advance, and I want three days to fix the roof and put brake shoes on the car."

Mirakle shot up from the ground, sputtering as if he'd been dashed with cold water. His head barely came up to Billy's shoulder "Nope! Won't have it, not at all!" He strode to the porch, got his seersucker jacket, and put his hat on; the seat of his trousers was dusty, and he brushed it off with red-faced irritation. "Try to take advantage of me, huh?" He marched past Ramona and Billy, dust stirring up around his shoes. After ten steps his stride slowed; he stopped and let out a long sigh. "Forty-five dollars a week and two days," he said, looking over his shoulder.

Billy kicked at a pebble and considered the offer. He said, "Okay. Deal."

Mirakle clapped his hands together? Ramona clutched her son's arm and said, "So fast? Just like that, without talkin' it over? ..."

"I'm sorry, Mom, but I already know what you'd say. It won't be so bad; it'll just be . . . pretending, that's all."

Mirakle walked back to them and thrust out his hand. Billy shook it. "There's no business like show business!" the man crowed, his face split by a grin. "Now did you say you wanted thirty dollars in advance?" He brought out his wallet again, opening it with a flourish. Billy saw, sealed in a plastic window, a yellowing picture of a smiling young man in a service uniform.

"Forty-five," Billy said, evenly and firmly.

Mirakle chuckled. "Yes, yes of course. I like you, William. You drive a hard bargain. And speaking of driving, do you have your license? No? You can drive a car, can't you?"

"I've driven the Olds a few times."

"Good. I'll need you at the wheel some." He counted out the bills. "There you are. It just about breaks me, too, but ... I suppose you'll put it to good use. Is there a motel around here that might take a personal check?"

"The Bama Inn might. It's in Fayette. There's a Travel-Lodge, too." Behind him Ramona abruptly turned and walked back toward the house.

"Ah, that's fine. I'll see you, then, in two days. Shall we say at four in the afternoon? We'll be meeting Ryder Shows in Tuscaloosa, and I'd like to get on the road before dark." He put his wallet away and shrugged into his jacket, all the time staring at Billy as if afraid the boy might change his mind. "We're set then? It's a deal?"

Billy nodded. He'd made his decision, and he wouldn't back down from it.

"You'll have to work hard," Mirakle said. "It won't be easy. But you'll learn. In two days, then. A pleasure meeting you, Mrs. Creekmore!" he called out, but she stood with her back to him. He walked off down the road, his stubby legs moving carefully as he avoided sliding on loose stones; he turned around to wave, and from the porch John suddenly called out, "Come back soon!"

28

"It's finished," Billy said, and stood on the ladder to appraise his work. It was a good job; chinks and holes in the roof had been filled in with pitch, and new shingles laid down smoothly and evenly. Midafternoon sunlight burned down upon Billy's back as he descended the ladder with his jar of roofing nails and his hammer. The gloves he wore were matted with pitch, and black streaks of it painted his chest and face. He scrubbed his face and hair with strong soap, then put away the ladder and the pitch bucket.

He let the sun dry his hair as he stood and looked in all directions. I'll be back, he told himself. Sure I will be, in mid-October. But something within him told him that when he did come back, he wouldn't be the same Billy Creekmore who'd left. He walked past the Olds—new brake shoes installed, the tires put back on but one of them already dangerously flat—and around the house to the front porch. John was in his favorite chair, a glass of lemonade at his side, the Bible in his lap. John smiled at him. "Sun's sure hot today."

Something clenched hard in Billy's stomach and throat; he managed to return the smile and say, "Yes sir, sure is."

Inside, Ramona was sitting in the front room, in the old gray easy chair. Her hands were gripping the armrests; beside her, on the floor, was a battered brown suitcase packed with her son's clothes.

"I'll be fine," Billy said.

"Tuscaloosa isn't so far away, y'know. If you don't like what you've gotten yourself into, you can just catch the bus and come home."

"I won't give it up at the first sign of trouble, though," he reminded her. "I'll stick with it as long as I can."

"A carnival." Ramona frowned and shook her head. Her eyes were red and puffy, but all of her crying was done. Her son was going out into the world, following the winding road of his Mystery Walk, and that was what the Giver of Breath had decreed. "I went to one of those once, when I was a little girl. The lights cut your eyes, and the noise sounds like a tea party in Hell. They show freaks at those things, poor people who can't help the way they were born. And folks stand around and laugh." She was silent for a moment. "Don't let them make a freak out of you, son. Oh, they'll try, just like the folks in Hawthorne have tried; but don't let them. You'll be tested, mark my words."

"I know."

"Do you understand"—she turned her face toward him—"that the Mystery Walk is more than the ritual your grandmother took you through? The ritual was to get your head opened up, to expand your senses; it was to make you ready for what's ahead. You began your Mystery Walk when you were ten years old and saw the Booker boy's revenant, but your whole life will be a Mystery Walk, just like mine has been. Events will hinge on events, like a series of opening doors; people will touch and be touched by you, and you must never belittle the power of the human touch. It can work wonders."

She leaned slightly toward him, her eyes shining. "You'll have to go into places that are dark, son, and you'll have to find your way out alone. What you saw in the smokehouse—the shape changer—isn't the only kind of darkness in this world. There's human darkness, too, misery and pain and torment that comes right from the soul. You'll see that kind, too.

"But the shape changer will be back, Billy. I'm sure of that. It's still picking at you, maybe even without you knowing it. Your grandmother was never certain of what the shape changer's limits were, or what it was capable of doing. I'm not, either ... but expect the unexpected, always."

He thought of the boar-thing, and its whispered promise: I'll be waiting for you.

"How did you feel," she asked, "after . . . what you did at the sawmill?"

"I was afraid. And I was mad, too." For a couple of weeks afterward he'd had nightmares of a spinning saw blade grinding his arm down to bloody pulp. Sometimes he felt a fierce, jagged pain stabbing his left eye. Worse then the pain, though, was a hot center of anger that had raged in him until he'd attacked the Klansmen in the front yard; afterward both the phantom pain and the rage had steadily faded.

"Those were the emotions that kept Link Patterson chained to this world," Ramona said. "When you persuaded the revenant to give them up, he was able to pass on. You'll have those feelings inside you again; what will you do with them? The next time might be worse. You'll have two choices: you can turn the emotions into something creative, or into something mean and violent. I don't know, that's up to you."

"I'll handle it."

"And then there's the other thing." She gazed out the window for a moment, dreading to see dust rise off the road. That man would be here soon. "The black aura."

Billy's heart gave a cold kick.

"You'll see it again. That's why I stopped goin' out, stopped goin' to church or to town; I just don't want to know who'll be the next to die. That night at the tent revival, I saw it around a couple of people who that Falconer boy said was healed; well, those people were near death, and so they stopped takin' their medicine and went home and died. I believe that the human mind can work miracles, Billy: mighty, earth-movin' miracles. The human mind can heal the body; but sometimes the mind can make the body sick, too, with imagined ailments. What do you think went on in the minds of those families whose loved ones went to the Crusade and were told to throw away their medicines and not to go to the doctor anymore? Well, they probably cursed the name of God after their loved ones died, because they'd been filled with false hope and then death struck. They were made to turn their backs on the idea of death, to close their eyes to it; and that made it so much more terrible when they lost their loved ones. Oh, I'm not sayin' give up hope, but everybody gets sick, Christians and sinners alike, and medicines are to be used to help . . . plus a good old-fashioned dollop of sunshine, laughter, and faith. The human touch spreads; when Wayne Falconer played God, he turned good people with brains into stupid sheep ripe for the shearing."

"Are you sure those people died afterwards?" Billy asked. "Maybe the black aura got weaker, and they regained their health. ..."

She shook her head. "No. I saw what I saw, and I wish to God I hadn't because now I know. I know and I have to be silent, because what can one aging old witch do?" She paused for a moment, and Billy saw in her eyes a deep concern that he couldn't fully understand. "The worst evil—the very worst—wears the robes of a shepherd, and then it strikes down those who've trusted in it. Oh, Lord. ..." She gave a deep sigh, and then was silent.

Billy put his hand on her shoulder, and she covered it with her own. "I'll make you proud of me, Mom. You'll see."

"I know. Billy, you're goin' a long ways. ..."

"Just to Tuscaloosa. . . ."

"No," she said quietly. "First to Tuscaloosa. Then . . . your Mystery Walk will be different from mine, just as mine was different from my mother's. You'll walk a further path, and you'll see things I never dreamed of. In a way, I envy you; and in a way, I fear for you. Well ..." She rose up from her chair, and in the afternoon light Billy saw all the strands of silver in her hair. "I'll make you some sandwiches while you get dressed. Lord only knows when you'll have a chance to eat."

He went to his chest of drawers and got out the clothes he'd planned to wear on the trip—clean blue jeans and a green-and-blue madras shirt. He dressed hurriedly, wanting to have time to talk to his father before he had to go. Then he took the gleaming piece of good-luck coal from the dirty jeans he'd worn atop the roof, and put it in his pocket. His heart was beating like a drum corps. He took his suitcase out to the porch, where his father was squinting toward the road, his head cocked to one side as if listening.

"Hot day," John said. "Listen to that corn rustic"

"Dad?" Billy said. "I don't know if you can understand me or not, but . . . I'm going away for a while. See? My suitcase is all packed, and . . ." There was a lump in his throat, and he had to wait until it subsided. "I'll be gone until October." A sudden thought speared him: Your Dad won't be here, come October. He forced it away, looking at the good side of his father's face.

John nodded. "Crickets sure like to sing on a hot day, don't they?"

"Oh, Dad ..." Billy said. His throat constricted and he grasped one of his father's leathery hands, dangling over the chair arm. "I'm sorry, it was because of me this happened to you, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. ..." Tears burned his eyes.

"Splash!" John said, and grinned. "Did you see that? Old bullfrog jumped down at the pond!" He squinted and leaned forward, visoring his eyes with his free hand. "Looky there. Company's comin'."

Dust was rising off the road. Not now! Billy said mentally. It's too soon! Birds scattered up out of the lumbering van's path; the vehicle didn't stop this time, but braved the rocks and ruts all the way up to the front yard. On the van's sides, written in spooky-looking white letters, was dr. mirakle's ghost show.

"Who's our company today?" John asked, the grin stuck lopsided on his face.

"The man I told you about, hon," Ramona said from behind the screen door; she came on out carrying a paper sack with a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, a bologna sandwich, and two red apples in it. Her eyes glazed over as the van's door opened and Dr. Mirakle, looking as if he'd slept in his seersucker suit and straw hat, stepped out.

"Fine afternoon, isn't it!" he called and approached the house on his stubby legs; his wide smile lost wattage with every step he took, as he felt Ramona Creekmore's icy glare on him. He cleared his throat and craned his neck to see the roof. "All finished?"

"He's finished," Ramona said.

"Good. Mr. Creekmore, how are you today?"

John just stared at him.

Mirakle stepped up to the edge of the porch. "Billy? It's time to go now."

As Billy bent to pick up his suitcase, Ramona caught at his arm. "Just a minute! You promise me one thing! You take good care of my boy! You treat him like you'd treat a son of your own! He's a hard worker, but he's nobody's mule. You treat my boy fair. Will you promise me that?"

"Yes, ma'am," Mirakle said, and bowed his head slightly. "I do so promise. Well . . . I'll take this on to the van for you, then." He reached up and took the suitcase, then carried it to the van to give them a moment alone.

"Billy." John's voice was slow and sluggish; his blue eyes were dull, hazed with half-remembered days when the young man standing before him was a little boy. A smile worked around the good edge of his mouth, but wouldn't take hold.

"I'm going away, Dad. I'll work hard, and I'll mail you money. Everything'll be fine. ..."

"Billy," John said, "I ... I want ... to read you something." Emotion had thickened his speech, made it more difficult for him to say the right words. He was trying very hard to concentrate; he turned in the Bible to the Book of Matthew, and searched for a particular passage. Then he began to read, with difficulty: "Matthew seven, verses thirteen and fourteen. 'Enter ye in . . .at the strait gate; for wide is the gate, and broad is the way that . . . leadeth to destruction, and . . . many there be which ... go in thereat. Because strait is the gate and . . . narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be . . . that find it.' " He closed the Bible and lifted his gaze to his son. "I'm readin' better," he said.

Billy leaned down, hugged him and kissed his cheek; he smelled of Vitalis, and Billy was reminded of the times they used to get their hair cut together at Curtis Peel's. When he raised up, his father's eyes were shining. "Good-bye, Dad," Billy said.

Ramona put her arm around her son, and they started walking toward Dr. Mirakle's van. "Be careful," she said, her voice husky with emotion. "Be strong and proud. Brush your teeth twice a day, and hang your clothes up at night. Just remember who you are: you're Billy Creekmore, there's Choctaw blood in your veins, and you can walk with the likes of anybody!"

"Yes ma'am. I'll send the money every week, and I'll . . ." He glanced up at the van, and a shadow of true fear passed over him; he felt like a shipwrecked sailor, slowly drifting away from land. "I'll be fine," he said, as the feeling began to fade. "You should take the car down to the gas station and put air in the tires. I meant to do it myself, but . . . time just got away. . . ."

"You write now, you hear? Mind your manners, and say your prayers. ..."

Mirakle had leaned over and opened the passenger door. Billy climbed up into the slightly greasy interior; when he closed the door, his mother said, "Remember who you are! You've got Choctaw blood in your veins, and ..."

Mirakle started the engine. "Are you ready, Billy?"

"Yes sir." He looked toward the house, waved at his father, and then said to Ramona, "I love you." The van started moving.

"I love you!" she called back, and walked alongside the van as it eased over the ruts. "Get your sleep, and don't stay out until all hours of the night." She had to walk faster, because the van was picking up speed. Dust blossomed from beneath the tires. "Do right!" she called out.

"I will!" Billy promised, and then his mother was left behind as the van moved away. Ramona stood shielding her face from the dust as the black van reached the highway. It turned left and disappeared behind the curtain of full green trees, but Ramona stood where she was until the sound of its engine had faded, leaving faint echoes in the hills.

29

Ramona turned away and walked back to the house through the hanging layers of dust. She sat on the porch with John for a few minutes more, and told him she was going to take the car down to the gas station, then drive in to Fayette for a little while, and she'd be gone for maybe two hours. He nodded and said that was fine. In the house, she took two dollars from the kitchen cookie jar, made sure John would have everything he needed while she was gone, then took the car keys from where they lay on the mantel. It was four-twenty when she got on the road, and she wanted to reach a particular shop in Fayette before it closed at five.

In Fayette, Ramona parked the Olds near a rather run-down pawnshop and loan service. Arranged in the window were displays of cheap rhinestone rings, radios, a couple of electric guitars, a trombone, and a few cheap wristwatches. Above the doorway a sign read hap's pawns and loans and you're always happy when you trade with hap. She stepped into the shop, where a single ceiling fan stirred the heavy, dusty air "Is Mr. Tillman in today?" she asked a sallow-faced woman behind one of the counters.

"Hap?" The woman had flame-red dyed hair and one glass eye that looked off into empty space; with her good eye she quickly appraised Ramona. "Yeah, he's back in his office. What do you want to see him a—" But Ramona was already moving, heading back along an aisle toward the shop's rear "Hey! Lady! You can't go back there!"

Ramona stepped through a green curtain into a narrow, dank corridor. She rapped on a door and entered the office without being asked in.

"Hap" Tillman's thick body was reclining in his chair, his legs up on the desktop, as he smoked a Swisher Sweet cigar and paged through a Stag magazine. Now he sat up, outraged that someone had dared to invade his inner sanctum, and was about to curse a blue streak when he saw it was Ramona Creekmore. The red-haired woman stuck her head in. "Hap, I told her not to come back here."

"It's okay, Doris." He had a fleshy, square-jawed face and wore a stark-black toupee that was entirely at odds with his gray eyebrows. "I know Mizz Creekmore. You can leave us be."

"I told her not to come back," Doris said; she shot Ramona a black look and closed the door.

"Well! Mizz Creekmore, what a surprise to see you of all people!" Tillman tapped ash off his Swisher Sweet and plugged the cigar into his mouth. Around his desk was a sea of stacked boxes; over in one corner were black filing cabinets, and on the wall hung a calendar that showed a well-endowed woman in a bikini straddling a watermelon. "Whatever can I do for you today?"

She said, "I want to know."

"What?" he asked. "Did I hear you right?"

"Yes, I want to know. Now."

"Shit you say!" Tillman leaped up, belching out smoke like a furnace, and stepped past Ramona to throw open the door. He peered out into the empty corridor, then closed the door again and locked it. "That bitch Doris listens outside my office," he told her. "I've caught her at it twice. Damn it, lady, you've got an awful short memory! We did business. Know what that means? Business means we got a binding contract!"

"I think I already know, Mr. Tillman. But I ... I have to make sure. It's important. ..."

"My ass is important, too! We may have done business, but a lot of it was out of the kindness of my heart. I pulled a lot of strings!" He tried to stare her down and failed. Shaking his head, he puffed on his cigar and retreated behind the fortress of his boxes and desk. His eyes glinted. "Oh, I see. Sure. It's blackmail, is that it?"

"No. It's not that at—"

Tillman's head darted forward. "It better not be! I may be in deep, but you're in deeper! You just remember that, if you try to get me in trouble!"

"Mr. Tillman," Ramona said patiently, and stepped closer to his desk. "I wouldn't be here asking you about this if I didn't think it was very, very important. I'm not going to blackmail anybody. I'm not going to cause any trouble. But I'm not leaving here until I know."

"Lady, you signed a goddamned contract. ..."

"I don't care if I signed ten contracts!" Ramona shouted, and instantly the man winced and put a finger to his lips to shush her.

"Please . . . please," Tillman said, "keep your voice down! Sit down and calm yourself, will you?" He motioned toward a chair, and reluctantly Ramona sat down. He puffed on his cigar for a moment, trying to think what to do.

"Shitfire, lady!" Tillman crushed the cigar in an ashtray, and sparks jumped like tiny red grasshoppers. "It's just . . . it's just not ethical! I mean, there's a lot to think about, and I wish you'd—"

"I've thought about it," Ramona said. "Now do you tell me or do I have to go see a policeman?"

"You wouldn't," he sneered. Tillman sat down, and faced Ramona in silence for a moment. Then he sighed deeply and said, "I'm a born fool for doin' business with a crazy woman!" He slid the top drawer out of his desk and reached into the slot, his fingers searching for the strip of masking tape; he found it, peeled it off, and brought it out. Stuck to the tape was a small key. He looked up at Ramona. "Don't you ever show your face in my shop again," he said gravely. "Do you understand me, lady?" He stood up, went to one wall, and lifted a framed paint-by-numbers picture of a harbor scene. There was a combination safe behind it. Tillman dialed it open, careful to stand in front of it so Ramona couldn't see the numbers.

"You may fool everybody else," he said, "but not me, lady. Nosir! You and that boy of yours are natural-born con artists! Pretendin' to talk to ghosts! That's the biggest fool thing I ever heard tell of!" He brought a small metal strongbox out of the safe, laid it on his desk. "Everybody else might be afraid of you, but I'm not! Nosir!" He opened the strongbox with the little key, and flipped through index cards. "Creekmore," he read, and brought the card out. It was slightly yellowed with age; Tillman couldn't suppress a wicked grin as he read it. Then he handed it to the woman. "Here!"

Ramona looked at it, her mouth set in a tight, grim line.

"Ha!" Tillman laughed. "Bet that galls your Indian ass, doesn't it?"

She handed the card back and rose from her chair. "It's as I thought. Thank you."

"Yeah, that's a real hoot, ain't it!" Tillman returned the card to the strongbox, closed the lid, and locked it. "But you know my motto: You're always happy when you trade with Hap!"

She looked into his ugly, grinning face and felt the urge to slap it crooked. But what good would that do? Would it change things, or make them right?

"Yeah, that's a real dipsy-doodle!" Tillman chuckled, put the box away in the safe, and closed it, spinning the combination lock. "Forgive me if I don't see you to the door," he said sarcastically, "but I've got a business to—" He turned toward Ramona, but she was already gone. He opened the door and yelled out, "AND DON'T COME BACK!"

SEVEN

Ghost Show

30

Satan came shambling out into the red spotlight. There was a chorus of screams and jeers. Behind the foul-smelling mask, Billy said, "Don't forget to tell your friends to see Dr. Mirakle's Ghost Show . . . or I'll be seeing you!" He shook his plastic pitchfork at the dozen or so people who sat before the stage, and heard the muffled thump! as Dr. Mirakle sneaked back inside the black cabinet and closed the lid. Haze drifted in the air from the smoke bombs Mirakle had exploded. At the tent's ceiling bobbed papier-mâché ghosts and skeletons as eerie tape-recorded organ music played.

Billy was glad to get backstage and take off the mask of his Satan suit. Last night someone had pelted him with a tomato. He switched the laboring engine to reverse, which drew all the wires and dangling figures backward behind the stage curtain. Then Billy turned on the tent's lights. Dr. Mirakle was "freed" from the black cabinet—though the lock was a fake and had never been locked at all—and the night's last show was over.

Billy checked all the chains and wires that operated the Ghost Show figures, then went out to pick up the litter of cigarette butts and empty popcorn boxes. Dr. Mirakle went backstage, as he did every night, to place the prop figures in their little individual boxes, like small white coffins. They had one more day in a shopping-center parking lot south of Andalusia; about this time tomorrow night the carnival would be on its way to another small town.

When he was finished, Billy went backstage and washed his hands in a bucket of soapy water, then changed into a fresh shirt.

"And where are you going?" Mirakle asked, carefully placing a ghost into a styrofoam box.

Billy shrugged. "I thought I'd just walk up the midway, see What's going on."

"Of course, even though you know every game on the midway is as crooked as a pig's tail. Let's see: clean hands, fresh shirt, combed hair—if I recall my ancient history, 'spiffing up' is what I used to do when I was about to meet a member of the opposite sex. Do you have a certain young lady in mind?"

"No sir."

"Walking up the midway, eh? You wouldn't be planning to visit a certain sideshow that's got all the roustabouts in such agitation, would you?"

Billy grinned. "I thought I might look in on it." The Jungle Love show, down at the far end of the midway, had joined the carnival at the first of the week. There were pictures of the girls out front, and a red-painted legend read see tigra! santha the pantha! barbie balboa! leona the lioness! Not all of the girls were so attractive, but one picture had caught Billy's eye when he'd strolled over there a few days before. The girl in it had short, curly blond hair, and it looked as if all she wore was a black velvet robe. Her legs were bare and shapely, and her pretty gamine face sent out a direct sexual challenge. Billy felt his stomach do slow flipflops every time he looked at that picture, but he hadn't had the time yet to go inside.

Mirakle shook his head. "I did tell your mother I'd look after you, you know, and I hear some rough customers hang around that exhibition.'"