The Totem

ONE

It sniffed at the shoe. Mud and dampness. And it choked. It scurried back and settled on its haunches, puzzled by the odd sensation in its throat. Then the choking spasm passed, and it was staring at the shoe. It waited, almost sniffed the shoe again, then made its choice, and scuttled toward the pile of clothing in one corner. Blue and stiff, yet muddy, damp just like the shoe. And once again it felt that sharp constriction in its throat-which made it angry- and it cuffed at the clothing. Then it snarled.

Over to one side, another kind of shoe, this one dark and scuffed, light spots showing through the surface, a faint odor, partly sweat, and partly from the animal the hide had once belonged to. It was sniffing closer. Then it bit the leather, and it shook its head, the shoe flopping one way, then another. But the clothes that hung down brushed against its head, and that annoyed it, so it pawed up at the clothing, snagged a pocket, pulling, and some clothes dropped down upon it. Smothered, frightened, it fumbled to get out from under, snarling, pawing, and the clothes dropped free. Then it smelled soap and chemicals, and it was growling. As it bit hard into the cloth and held the garment, tearing, it heard noises coming down the hallway out there. It turned, staring, But the door was closed. The noises stopped. It went back to the garment, snarling, tearing.

Something raided. It swung toward the door. The handle moved. It stiffened, garment hanging from its teeth. The handle kept moving. Then the door came open, and she stepped in. Dropping the garment from its mouth, it bared its teeth and snarled at her.

She breathed in sharply. "Warren?"

And it sprang at her. She stumbled back. Her elbow hit the door. The door swung shut behind her, and she fell against the doorjamb, fumbling with the handle, as it sprang at her again. She scrambled toward the dresser to avoid it.

"Warren!"

But it only snarled and kept coming.

"Warren!"

She kicked at it, throwing pictures off the dresser, dodging toward the bed, climbing, screaming. When it leaped the final time, it caught her not quite balanced on the bed so that they both went crashing off the other side, her back slamming hard on the floor as it came clawing at her throat. She screamed and hit at it. She struck it on the nose, the throat. It felt the blood pour over its lips, a salt taste in its mouth, and gagged. It pawed to clear the salt taste, angered by the gagging, slashed its teeth down toward her face, but in that moment's hesitation, she had gripped the table near the bed and scrambled from the floor to kick at it. The shoe came toward its face, but there was time to dodge, and now it sank its teeth hard into her leg. She wailed and kicked to free the leg, but it was growling, biting, and it felt the blood spurt into its mouth, that same salt taste. It gagged again as, shouting, she twisted her leg and jerked free. Something hard smashed against its shoulder, glass and a lampshade falling past. The pain surged through its shoulder. Whining, it was stunned. Then she wasn't before it any longer. She was stumbling past it toward the door, and it was turning, snarling, leaping as she reached the door and grabbed the handle, pulling, squeezing out to reach the hallway, slamming the door.

It banged against the door and clawed to move the handle. She was out there, screaming. But the handle wouldn't move. It heard her out there screaming, and it dimly understood that she was gripping at the handle, pulling at the door. It knew that there was no way to reach her. More than that, it understood the danger. Others would be coming. They would trap it. Have to get away. It swung to find an exit, saw the open window, the screen, then the porch and the open air, and it was charging forward, leaping, slamming at the screen. The mesh pressed, cutting at its face. The screen gave way, and it was falling through, the porch rising up to meet it. Darkness. Pain. It shook its head, the salt taste flooding its mouth. Then it could see again, and spitting, gagging, it vaulted across the railing toward the bushes.

"Warren!" it heard someone screaming.

TWO

Slaughter heard as he came driving toward the outskirts. He reached for the microphone. "I've got it, Marge." He switched on the siren and the emergency flasher, staring now at Dunlap. "Well, that drink will have to wait." He pressed hard on the gas pedal, racing past the houses, swerving onto a sidestreet, people staring, as the siren wailed and he was concentrating on the street that stretched before him.

Five o'clock. The forest had become increasingly dark as they hiked down through it toward the cruiser. The sun had been low toward the mountains, and the dusk among the trees had lengthened. They'd almost lost their way, but then Slaughter had noticed the big boulder that he'd chosen as a landmark. It was farther to the left than he had figured, and they'd cut across, then found the loggers' road, and worked along it to the gate. He'd heard that skittering noise again but hadn't paid attention, just had wanted to get over to the cruiser, and he'd slowly backed the cruiser, Dunlap outside watching to make sure the rear wheels didn't jolt down into a sinkhole. Soon he'd swung the cruiser so the front was facing downward. Dunlap got in, and they'd bumped across the saplings and bushes down the road to reach the highway. Even so, the fading light made driving harder, and Slaughter's eyes were strained as he finally moved out from the trees to cross the rangeland. All he wanted was a drink and then some supper, thinking he would check in at the station first, but now he wouldn't have the chance, staring at Dunlap who was fumbling with his camera, both hands shaking, his tongue persistent at his lips.

"You ought to have a bottle with you for emergencies."

"I left a pint back in my room. I figured I'd be brave."

"Well, I can't take the time to drop you off."

"Hell, I wouldn't want you to."

Slaughter squealed around a corner, swerving just in time to miss a young boy in a wagon, thinking, Sure, if you're not careful, you'll hit one kid, rushing to find out about another. Slow down. There's no point in racing if you never get there.

But he couldn't force himself to slow. He strained to watch for people stepping from a corner or from cars parked on the side. He roared through an intersection, one car coming at him from the other way, then swung around another corner as he saw the people up there and the cars along the street and one tall woman standing, crying, other women grouped around her.

As everyone turned toward the cruiser, Slaughter reached down to flick off the siren and the flasher. Other people were crossing toward the house, and at last he was forced to slow. He stopped by a car before the house, double-parking, switching off the engine, reaching for his hat. A plumber's truck was coming toward him. It stopped as he slipped out from the cruiser, walking toward the lawn. He glanced toward the truck and saw a tall man jump out, running toward the group of women, and he guessed that this was the husband as they both came to the women at the same moment. Pushing through, Slaughter vaguely had the sense of Dunlap just behind him. He didn't want Dunlap learning too much, but he couldn't take the time to send him to the cruiser.

The woman clung to her husband.

"Peg, what happened?"

"He attacked me."

"Who?" And that was Slaughter, stepping closer.

She kept sobbing. "Warren did." She gasped for breath.

And Slaughter had a name at least.

"My God, what happened to your leg?" the husband blurted.

They stared at the blood that oozed down her leg and across her shoe.

"He bit me."

"Bit?" her husband said.

"I'm telling you. I couldn't keep away from him."

"Where is he?" Slaughter asked.

"The window. He was crawling like an animal."

Slaughter hurried toward the house. It was a single-story with a porch along the front and down the left side. He guessed that Warren was the boy he'd heard about when Marge had called, and he was thinking that he'd better look in through the windows rather than go into the house and risk the chance of something coming at him. He passed the aspen in the front yard and charged up the stairs. The porch rumbled under him as he looked first in at the living room and, seeing nothing, rushed along the side. Another window toward the living room, but he didn't look through it. He stopped, frowning at a broken screen that hung out from another window. Then he drew his gun-a gun against a little boy?-and swallowed, looking in at what had been a bedroom. But the place was wrecked in there, and he could see the blood, both on the floor inside and on the porch out here, turning toward where it was on the railing just above the broken bushes at the side. He stared off toward the gravel lane back there and sprinted toward the front again.

The woman had continued sobbing as her husband held her. People stood back from them, watching, murmuring to each other.

"Did he break out through the bedroom window?" Slaughter asked.

She nodded, gasping for more breath.

"He ran down toward that lane in back?"

"I didn't see. I only heard the noise, and when I looked in, he was gone. What in God's name made him do it?"

"I don't know yet. But believe me, I'll do everything I can to find out."

"I don't understand why he would bite me." She sobbed uncontrollably as Slaughter ran toward the cruiser, picking up the microphone.

"Marge, we've got a situation here. That young boy had some kind of breakdown. He attacked his mother. Now he's running loose. I want everybody looking for him. Have you got that?"

"Affirmative."

"The same address you gave me. And one thing more. I want the medical examiner."

"Somebody's dead?" Marge asked in alarm.

"Just get him. There's no time to talk about it. I'll call back in fifteen minutes."

Slaughter hung up the microphone. He hadn't thought to ask the mother, but he knew the answer even so, although he had to check for certain, and he slipped out from the cruiser, staring at Dunlap who was near him, and then running toward the woman yet again.

She continued to cling to her husband.

"Mrs. Standish." He had seen the name on the mailbox. "Mrs. Standish, look, I know that this is hard for you, but please, I need to ask some questions."

She slowly turned to him.

This would bring the trouble into the open, Slaughter knew, but he had to ask the question. He glanced at the people near him, turning so his back was to them.

"Did your son complain about an animal that maybe got too rough with him? A dog that bit him, or a cat? Anything like that?"

They stared at him.

"But I don't understand," the woman said.

"No bites at all," the husband said. "We told him not to play with animals he didn't know."

"He cut himself," the woman said, and Slaughter looked at her.

"What is it?" she was asking.

"I don't know. Just tell me how he cut himself."

"Some broken glass," her husband said. "A barrel in the lane back there."

Slaughter felt puzzled. He'd been certain that the boy was bitten. "Several weeks ago. Think back. Did anything seem strange to you?"

"This morning."

"What?"

"He cut himself this morning. Why a dog bite? Why is that important?"

Slaughter couldn't bring himself to say it. "We've had trouble with those wild dogs in the hills. It's nothing. Look, I need a picture of your son. To help my men identify him."

He hoped that he'd changed the subject, and they looked at him and slowly nodded, walking toward the house, Slaughter just behind them. He really didn't understand now. If the boy had not been bitten, why had he behaved the way he did? Maybe what he'd said to Marge was true. The boy just had a breakdown. Maybe they mistreated him. Maybe he fought back and ran from home. The only way to know was to find the boy, and as the couple went inside the house, Slaughter turned to frown toward the sun. It was almost below the western mountains. Dusk would be here soon, then night, and how on earth they'd find the boy when it was dark, he didn't know.

He peered in at the living room. The place was absolutely clean and ordered. Surely anyone who kept a home so well was not the type to beat a child. But he'd been fooled that way back in Detroit, and he was wishing that his men were here so they could set out, looking for the boy.

The husband came back with a picture. Blond and bright-faced, blue eyes, in his Sunday suit. The boy was much like Slaughter's son had been at this age, and he had some trouble looking at the picture. God, the boy must be in terror out there. Slaughter couldn't show his feelings, though. He simply told the father, "Thank you. I'll return it."

"Listen, my wife's too upset to come back out and talk about this. Find him, will you?"

Slaughter heard the sirens, pivoting as two cruisers pulled up in the street. "We'll have him back. I promise." Then he paused. "I think your wife should see a doctor."

"She'll be all right once she rests a little."

"No, I mean her leg. A human bite. It's probably infected."

"I'll take care to clean it."

"Take her to a doctor," Slaughter told him. "I'll check back to see about it. Look, I have to go."

He stepped from the porch, the photograph in his hand, the policemen coming toward him.

"This is who we're looking for," he said. "Warren is his name, and he's no doubt scared. But stay away from him. He's just a kid, but he attacked his mother, and I don't want any of you hurt."

They waited, looking at the picture.

"You two check the streets down this way. You two check the other way. I'll take the lane in back. Remember. Don't get careless just because he's little. I don't know what's happened here, but something isn't right."

Abruptly Slaughter faced the people on the lawn. "Everything's okay now. We'll take care of things. I want you all to go back to your homes."

But they just stood and looked at him.

"Come on. Let's move it."

Slaughter approached them, gesturing for them to leave, and slowly they dispersed.

"You'll know soon enough how this turns out. Just go back to your homes."

He turned toward his men. They were getting in their cars, and he was all alone, except for Dunlap.

"There's no chance to take you to your room," Slaughter said.

"I was hoping there wasn't."

"Hey, I know you need a story, but if word of this gets out, I told you there'll be a panic."

"I'll be careful."

"I assume I have your promise on that."

Dunlap nodded, looking puzzled. "But if the boy wasn't bitten."

"Yes, I know. It doesn't make much sense." They got in the car.

At the corner, Slaughter steered right, then right again, slowing as he started up the lane. He'd had to make a choice: here or where the lane continued to the left. But this direction took them toward the house the boy had fled from, and he figured that would be the place to start his search, so he was staring up the lane, then at the backyards and the houses on each side.

"I can't watch for everything. You check the yards on your side. I'll check over here."

"Hell, a kid, he could be anywhere."

"Just think of how the yards would look to someone small. A crawl space underneath a shed. A low spot in some bushes. Places an adult would never figure."

"Or he's maybe half a mile from here."

"Don't even think that," Slaughter told him. He was driving past the backyard of the house now, slowing even more, then stopping.

"What's the matter?"

"I just want to look at something."

Slaughter stepped from the cruiser, walking toward a metal barrel near the gravel lane. What made him stop was the blood along the rim and down the barrel. He studied the blood on the ground as well, noticing the large drops leading toward the house. He peered inside the barrel, saw the rusty cans, the broken glass, the blood across it, and the woman had been right. So why then had the kid behaved the way he did?

He glanced around for places where the boy could hide, stooped to check underneath some bushes by the shed, then straightened, walking to the cruiser. Dunlap asked him, "Anything?" But Slaughter only shook his head and worked the gearshift, driving slowly down the lane.

The radio crackled. "Chief, it's Marge. I haven't found the medical examiner."

Slaughter grabbed the microphone. "Well, keep trying. Stay there until you get him. I need lots of help on this. I've got plenty of questions."

They were at a side street now. Slaughter saw a German shepherd on a chain in one backyard. The dog was lunging, held back by the chain as it glared at them. Slaughter studied it a moment. Then he looked across the street toward where the lane continued. Far along it, at the end, he saw the large trees of the city park and all the places where a boy could hide, not to mention all the places in the backyards of the lane. He was looking both ways on the side street. A cruiser went by, and Slaughter nodded grimly to the driver. Then staying to the search plan, he moved across the side street and down the lane. The thing is, he was thinking, we don't have much time until it's dark, and what the hell is that kid doing now? He maybe just was angry at his mother. What, though, if he's crazy? How do we behave if someone traps him and the kid attacks again?

THREE

The medical examiner scowled. He had been a star in his profession once, back in Philadelphia, but that had been ten years ago. Born and raised in Potter's Field, he had left the town to go to school. A doctor's son, he'd wanted to be like his father. He had guessed that he would be a surgeon, but when he had finished pre-med, staying on at Boston for his training, he had found that diagnostics more than surgery attracted him. His father had approved. After all, those specialties were quite compatible. A lot of men could cut, but not as many could detect a cause, and a combination of both could earn considerable fees.

But the son had soon determined he would specialize much more than that. Searching out diseases not just in the living but the dead as well. Pathology, and in particular those duties strictly relegated to a medical examiner. The father had been livid, but for reasons that the son had not expected. Granted that a medical examiner had little chance to make the money that a surgeon could. "But autopsies!" the father had shouted. "You should want to cure the living, not dissect the dead!" The son had not been able to explain himself. The best that he could manage was the notion that determining the cause of death could help prevent another death just like it. But the argument was not convincing, even to himself. He sensed that there was another reason, although that reason wasn't clear to him, but he had made his choice, and despite his father's angry objections, he had continued with his studies.

Even when his father threatened not to pay his tuition, he'd persisted, working part-time, getting money any way he could. As well as with his father, he had trouble with some teachers. They felt that working with the dead was self-defeating for a doctor, and they had tried to change his mind, but he was adamant. Everyone agreed, though: he was good at what he did. He finished in the upper tenth of all his classes, and when he completed all his training, he had little trouble finding work. By then, he and his father no longer spoke to one another. He was certain he would not go back to Potter's Field. The place he chose was Philadelphia, and in five years, he rose from simply being on the staff to acting as assistant medical examiner. The hard jobs he was always given. More than that, he sought them out: the murders that were mystifying, and those deaths that no one understood, those suicides that maybe had been awkward accidents. He solved them all. It got so other members of the staff would come to watch him do his work. There were betting pools to see how long he might be stymied by a body's puzzle. Homicide detectives hoped that he would be assigned to their investigations. Reporters interviewed him. Magazines did stories on him. Once he even had an article devoted to him in Time.

And so his star had risen, with it self-understanding. He grew to comprehend that what attracted him were riddles from mute witnesses, the pleasures of the chase. Oh, sure, if he had stayed in diagnostics, he'd have had his share of puzzles, but the kind he worked with now were so much different, so more final and detached. He didn't have to bother with compassion, even fear, both in himself and in his patient. He could be objective, logical, and most important, uninvolved. A body there before him, he had this and this to learn about it; he would learn these things, and then this problem would be finished. Except for his excitement as he sensed that he was getting closer to the clue that he was looking for, he never felt emotion. No, that wasn't true. He often felt frustration, but excitement and frustration were related, one the polar feeling of the other, and the satisfaction of his work was in his scientific method, in his order, in the truths that he uncovered.

"After all, it doesn't matter. Nothing does," he often told himself. What profit if you diagnose a living person and that patient dies because there isn't a way to cure him? Granted, there were times when you could find out what was wrong with someone and stop the illness. But the end was still the same. If not on this occasion, maybe the next time, and finally the end was certain. Every person died. There wasn't any way to stop that. People just marked time. He couldn't bear the thought of caring for a patient and then failing.

"Self-defeat," his father had said when he first suggested that he'd like to be a medical examiner. His father had been wrong, though, for the self-defeat was not his study of the dead but how his father had prolonged the agony of someone's living. Tomorrow and tomorrow. Life is just a sequence of small losses. All those phrases now occurred to him, but back then he had not been wise enough to understand them, to call them up against his father. It was just a matter of one's viewpoint. Life was either good, or else it wasn't. In the long run, did it matter if you saved a man from this disease and spared him for another? The final truth was what he studied on the table.

Something else. A corollary. He would never have the strength to watch a patient die. He didn't have the courage. He was fearful of mistakes, and even if he made none, he was fearful of the look in someone's eyes should he be forced to pronounce a death sentence. He could never tolerate responsibilities of ultimate consequence. Certainly he had responsibilities in this profession, but if he failed, what difference did it make? A murderer would walk the streets. A suicide would never be detected. But he couldn't change what they had done; he couldn't replay time and alter things. The pain of what they did was past. He hadn't been connected with it.

The medical examiner was not so unaware that he didn't realize the causes for his attitude. His mother, for example, who had died when he was very young but not so young that he didn't remember how her body tortured her. Lung cancer. And he'd seen his father helpless to preserve her. Yes, his father the physician who was powerless when it most counted. Each day watching as she wasted. No, although he himself had long since learned to mute the power of that memory, he had not forgotten. She had been the only person close to him who'd ever died and filled him with grief. He didn't know why that should be, how his mother had made so strong a mark on him. Perhaps because he loved her, and that startled him. Because he knew a child's love had little substance. So he told himself. But if he'd really loved her, she had been the only one he ever loved. For sure, he didn't love his father. New thought: could it be that he had set out, insecure, to imitate his father, and then facing up to how he felt about the man, he had determined to annoy him? Self-defeat? His father maybe had been right. It could be that he himself had ruined his own chance to have a lucrative career just to get back at his father.

But he knew that wasn't true. He'd chosen this job because he liked it. The pleasure of practicing medicine without the obligations. His mind worked best without the setbacks of emotion. So his talents made him famous, but his life became a muddle. He could not commit himself to anyone. He had no use for friendship. People only let you down, he thought. Or die or get sick or leave. There were only different ways of losing. Better to be careful. So he concentrated exclusively on his work and lived alone and went out seldom. Personal distractions didn't matter either, he was thinking. Have a drink and just forget them.

One day he had been too busy for a shower. One day he had guessed he didn't need to shave. His pants went unpressed, his shoes unshined. He wasn't so slovenly that his manner and appearance were offensive, but the edge was off, the shimmer gone, and now in retrospect he knew that he had started acting like a loser. Self-defeat? Could it be that he had always been a loser, but that losing wasn't any good unless you first had been a winner? Had he courted his own losses? Or else could it be- he thought about this often-that when he had made his choice between the living and the dead he himself had started dying? Other people whom he worked with didn't have that problem, so the job was not at fault here. For a time he had a lover, but she couldn't tolerate his lifeless manner, and indeed he'd forced her to leave, certain that she'd one day leave him anyway. Besides, the dead were much more lovely. He would often go down to the morgue at night and, solitary, stare at certain corpses. Not the ones who were disfigured by a fire, say, or a traffic accident. But those who having died peacefully were much more radiant than they could ever have been when alive. The peace that passeth understanding. Quiet and at rest. A pewter sheen upon their faces and their bodies. Like some statues but much better. Or when working late at night, he'd pause before he cut a body open, meditating on perfection, and when he at last was forced to cut, he would do it lovingly, with care, so much so that, responsive to his care, the body gave up all its secrets. But the process took much longer each day. What before had taken two hours now would last a half a day. And sometimes all alone and working late, he'd occupy himself with just one body until the dawn.

So that was how they brought him down. Because when all his theorizing had been prolonged and exhausted, after he had put up all his layered explanations, he in time had come to understand his motives. He was fascinated by the dead, in love with them, and all he needed to discover that truth was one late hour's gentle touching of a young girl's lifeless body. He had looked up, and his supervisor had been standing in the doorway, watching him. There was no need for accusations or explanations. No word passed between them, but they both knew what had happened. One week later he resigned, effective when a person could be found to take his place, and without thinking, he went back to his birthplace, Potter's Field. His father had been dead by then, so it was easy to return. He sometimes thought that he had wanted to return since he'd first left the place, except his father would have been there. His credentials had been so impressive that he hadn't required a recommendation from his superior in Philadelphia. He'd asked; the local hospital had hired him.

And here he'd stayed, and here he had been happy. Understanding bred control. He settled in his father's house. He did his job, and he passed the time. He continued drinking but not as much as before. On occasion, he looked at Slaughter's sometimes puffy face and thought that Slaughter ought to cut back on the beer, but really it was he himself who liked the beer, and he at last had found a friend in Slaughter. Because Slaughter's life was his profession, as his own was, and a friendship based on work was something that the medical examiner could handle. People who were good at what they did, who related to you on that basis, seldom disappointed you. And besides, although this was a weakness, he had come to like the man, perhaps in part because he sensed that Slaughter felt that way toward him.

And so he frowned at it. The body of the cat down in the hollow. He stood along the rim and looked down at the mangled head, and it was blown apart, all right. Slaughter's magnum bullet had shattered the skull. There were bits of blood and brain and bone and fur that had been blasted back along the slope behind it. There were insects crawling on those pieces, on the carcass and the bloody skull, flies that clustered buzzing on the blood as well.

When he had parked his car and walked across the dusty field to reach the hollow, he had heard a noise down in there. He'd seen a dog run from the hollow, glancing furtively, its ears back, its tail low, as it had loped away. He had seen a bloody strand of sinew hanging from its mouth, and although he'd have to check the textbooks in his office, he was certain that he'd read somewhere that rabies could be passed on from the meat of tainted animals. He didn't have a gun. He wouldn't know how to use it even if he had one (that had been another block between his father and himself; his father was a hunter; he himself had not been interested). If Slaughter had been here now, the medical examiner would have been eager for Slaughter to shoot the dog. Either that or trap it. But that second way was risky, and the dog might be too clever for them. Better just to shoot it. Never mind who owned it. Never mind that he himself would want a living animal for observation and testing. That dog was a danger. It was running toward the cattle pens, and he was bothered by the damage that the dog could do if rabies were indeed the problem here. Oh, this soon the dog would not develop symptoms, but it certainly could leave the virus if it drank from where the cattle drank, and they would then contract it. He watched as the dog disappeared among the bushes by the cattle pens, as the cattle shifted slightly, brown shapes in a group across there, and he licked his lips and looked up at the summer sun.

It was noon, and he was thirsty, worn down by the heat. He'd left his suit coat in the car, had pulled down his tie and fumbled to open his top shirt button. Now he rolled his sleeves up, and he walked down into the hollow. Every sound he made was vivid to him, the dry sand crunching underneath his shoes-he never wore the cowboy boots so many of the townsfolk wore, his suits still those that he had owned back in the East-and he was positive that he would waste his time by doing tests on what was in a heap before him. There were only bits and hints of brain, and worse, they were contaminated, fly eggs on them now, corruption settling in. The cat had been a large one, black, a massive torn. He could understand why Slaughter had been startled when it suddenly came leaping at him, but he wished that Slaughter had shot it somewhere else besides the head. Well, that couldn't be changed, and for certain, he couldn't leave it here. In case it was contagious, he would have to seal it in a bag and then destroy it.

He waited, thinking, at last climbing back up the slope and crossing through the dust and bushes toward his car at the curb. He opened the trunk and reached in for the kit he always carried with him for emergencies. Lab coat, rubber gloves, a cap and face mask. Once he had them on, the face mask stifling in the mid-day heat, he chose a plastic bag, a pair of forceps, and he returned to the hollow. There, he used the forceps on the bits of bone and brain, dropping all those pieces in the open bag he held.

The process took a half an hour. He made sure that he found them all. Then he went up on the rim and searched among the bushes. When he was satisfied, he used a stick to push the carcass into the bag, put the stick in there as well, and noticed a piece of ragged flesh that had been hidden by the body. When he gripped it with the forceps, setting it inside the bag, he paused to guarantee that he'd been thorough. Sure, the blood that soaked the sand, dry now, rustlike, but he couldn't leave it, and he had to go back to the car again, to get the shovel in the trunk, the lye he always kept there, and fifteen minutes later he was finished, the sand scooped into the bag, the hollow pale with sprinkled lye. He walked back to his car, tied the plastic bag and put it in another bag and then inside the trunk. He put the sack of lye, the shovel, his lab coat and cap and face mask in yet another bag, careful with the gloves he took off, locked the trunk, and didn't know another way he could have done it. He would drive now to the office, go down to the furnace in the basement, and arrange for what he'd gathered to be incinerated.

Abruptly he was conscious of silence. No wind, no cars going by or people talking, no sound over at the cattle pens. Well, Saturday, he thought, there won't be much going on. But he had the odd sensation that he was not alone. Of course, he thought. My rubber gloves, my lab coat, cap, and face mask. I'd have looked like I was from another planet. Sure, the neighborhood is inside, staring past the drapes at me. But when he looked, he saw no movement at any windows, and he did his best to stop his premonition as he got in his car and drove away.

He headed toward the hospital, glancing in his rearview mirror where he saw two men come from the Railhead bar. He saw a woman emerge from a house and get in her car. He thought he saw, reflected dimly, workers from the stockpens walking down the street behind him. It seemed as if the world had once again resumed its motion the instant he left that place, and he was thinking he should get control of his imagination. Keep your mind in order.

Because really this was something that engaged him. If he didn't dare consider all the trouble that was maybe on the verge of breaking out, he found the problem in the abstract quite attractive. He was intrigued the way he once had been in Philadelphia. A riddle to be solved. A secret ready for him to discover. He was driving, glancing at a cat that perched in royal splendor on a porch rail. He was passing a young boy who walked a cocker spaniel. And because the day was hot, he leaned his elbow out the open window, his arm hairs shifting in the wind that the motion of the car made. He was almost startled by the excitement that he was feeling. Ten blocks later, he turned up the driveway toward the parking stalls behind the hospital. He waved to a man from the childrens' ward who drove out past him toward the street. He reached the back and pulled in at his parking space, getting out, his key in hand to open the trunk when something slowed him and then stopped him.

It was something that he'd grown so used to that he'd long ago stopped being aware of it. Except last night when he and Slaughter had been talking in the office, and he'd noticed it, but Slaughter had first turned to it, unconsciously reminding him, and anyway the thing had been so much in keeping with their conversation that of course he would have noticed then, but normally it simply blended with the background, and it wasn't worth consideration. Now when everything that he'd been mulling through distracted him, the sound had changed, had drawn attention to itself.

He stood motionless, his head turned, his hand still outstretched to unlock the trunk. Even when he shifted his body toward the trees back there, his hand remained outstretched and stiff until he noticed it and lowered it slowly to his side. He felt his muscles tighten. He almost couldn't make them work as he walked squinting toward the trees. In all the years he'd worked here, he had never gone back in them, never once been curious. There was a dry streambed, he knew, that in the spring was filled with rushing snowmelt from the mountains. But a flashflood was not a thing to walk near, and he'd always watched it from the distance of his parking space. The trees here all had leaves, their branches bare in the early spring, and there had been no trouble seeing. But in June now, everything was like a jungle back there, the trees thick, drooping, the bushes full and vine enshrouded, not to mention that there was a rusty fence.

He had a fear of snakes, of things that crawled and he couldn't see, but he was thinking only of the sound beyond the trees now as he reached the fence, and glancing at the thick high grass beyond it, he gripped the sagging post to balance for a foothold on the wire.

There was no need to climb the fence. The post continued sagging as he gripped it, and his weight kept pressing, and the post snapped softly, weakly, toppling toward the ground where it hung bobbing in the wires.

He looked down at ants, a hundred of them, next a thousand. They were scurrying to flee the ruptured nest inside the base of the post, rice-shaped eggs gripped by their pincers, rushing off in all directions. He lurched back, revolted. All those ugly crawling things. His skin began to itch. His mouth tasted sour. He was conscious of the irony that he could look at burned and mutilated corpses, maggots on them, and be concerned only about how much damage had occurred within the lungs, and yet he couldn't bear to see these insects and their crazy panicked scurrying below him. Well, he thought, in the morgue he had control, but here the situation governed him, and as the sound beyond the trees became even stranger, he made himself go near the fence. He stepped across the sagging fallen wires, avoiding where the ants were, staring at them even as he worked around them toward the trees.

He felt the bushes clutch his pants, and he was turning forward, stooping underneath a tree branch, soon encircled by the trees. The ground sloped: long grass, vines that clung hard to his pant cuffs. Everything was close and dark and humid. Then the trees gave out, and he was looking at the streambed. It was deep between the banks, dry, with sand, and here and there a rock or water-polished piece of driftwood. He saw tiny tracks of animals in the sand. He glanced along one track and saw movement ten feet to his right along the bank- a chipmunk up on its hind legs staring at him, in an instant darting into a hole beside a tree root. Then the chipmunk poked its head out, blinking at him.

He glanced toward the streambed once more, swallowed, and with one leg cautiously before him, he eased down the loose earth of the bank. The sand at the bottom was soft beneath him, and he didn't like that feeling, didn't like the lacerated tire he saw wedged among the silt and rocks. He was eager to get up on the other side, edging slowly up, then listing off balance, clutching at a tree root up there, but the clutching was instinctive, and abruptly he released his grip, scrambling upward, dropping to his knees and clawing.

At last, he reached the level, and he stood there, breathing, glancing all around. He brushed the dirt from his pantlegs, staring at his hands. The noise was even stranger, though, and slightly to his left, not straight ahead. He angled toward it, stooping past more trees, avoiding bushes, suddenly free of them, stark sunlight on him, open air before him, just the houses past the yards here, the white fence all along this back end of the houses.

He prepared to climb the wooden fence when he thought better. Down there to his left, the sound was even closer, stronger. From that backyard two lawns down. He walked along the fence, and then he saw it, tangled in its chain, the doghouse scratched and bitten, splinters and blood spots on the lawn, an Irish setter, and the sound it made was chilling. Not a growl exactly, not a bark. Much lower, almost speaking, deep within its throat, long and drawn out, suddenly a sequence of quick choking, then that drawl-like laryngitic moaning. He stared at the bloody lips, the froth that dripped in great gobs from their corners, and as it stopped biting at the chain and went back to the bone-revealing sore that it was chewing on its left hind leg, he gripped the fence, peered down at the unmowed yard, and gasped, desperate to control the churning in his stomach. He'd seen what he could only term the face of evil. Later he would recollect how those peculiar words occurred to him. He'd judge and weigh them, hoping to condemn their wild emotion, but he knew that they were fitting. He had never seen such open, brutal, insane evil, and his instinct was to flee, to repel the image from his sight.

Instead, he rushed along the fence until he faced another backyard, climbing over, straining to see every portion of this yard in case there was a dog in here as well, but there was nothing, just a tiny plastic wading pool, and he ran past it, hurrying along the side until he reached the sidewalk in the front, and then he swung across the next yard toward the front door of the house in back of which the dog was baying even more grotesquely.

If he'd been the man he claimed to be, he would have known what next would happen, would have paid attention to the weed-choked lawn, the untrimmed bushes, would have understood the owner here. But he was taken up with urgency. He gripped the wobbly railing, charging up the stairs. On the porch, he pressed the doorbell, but the sound of a television blared out from the open windows so he couldn't hear the doorbell. He couldn't even hear the dog now, and he pressed the button once again, staring through the screen door past the open main door in there, toward the shadowy living room. He realized that the doorbell wasn't working. As a crowd cheered on the television, he banged at the screen door. He shouted, "Hey, is anybody home?", hammering so fiercely that the wood trembled and a shadow moved in there, pale against the murky sofa, a man coming to the door.

The man was husky, naked to the waist, a can of beer in one hand. He was surly, unshaven. "Yeah, what is it?"

"Look, your dog-"

"I know. The bastard won't stop barking.'

"It needs treatment."

"What?"

"You've got to get it to a vet," the medical examiner blurted.

"Up your ass. I told the neighbors I was working on it. Hell, I even got a special collar." "I don't-" "One with batteries. The kind that every time the dog barks sends a shock to stop it barking."

The medical examiner was speechless.

"Who the hell are you? I've never seen you anywhere," the man said.

"I'm…" The medical examiner explained who he was.

"You live around here?"

"No, I-"

"Then up your ass, I said. If this isn't where you live, why don't you mind your own damned business?"

There was no way that the medical examiner was going to make him understand. He gripped the door to pull it open, heading in.

"Hey, now wait a minute. What the hell do you think you're doing?" the man demanded, blocking him.

"I've got to use your phone."

"The beer store has one on the corner."

"There's no time."

The crowd cheered on the television. As the medical examiner squirmed to get past the man, he saw beyond the sofa where the television showed two boxers slugging at each other.

"Hey, buddy, I'm through being patient." The man shoved him hard.

"Rabies."

"Don't be nuts. The dog just had her shots."

"Christ, go back and look at her."

"The collar makes her act that way."

"I can't afford to take the chance."

The two men struggled toward the middle of the room.

"I have to phone a vet."

"If you're not out of here, you're going to have to phone an ambulance."

The medical examiner slipped past the man, dodging toward the phone that he had seen beside the sofa.

"Get out," the man ordered.

But the medical examiner was dialing.

"Okay, buddy, don't forget I warned you."

As a woman's voice came on the phone to tell him "Animal Associates," the medical examiner turned just in time to see the hand that held the beer can lunging toward him. He was vaguely conscious of the other hand that set him up and held him steady. But the blow that split his lips and shocked him backward he was never conscious of at all. He had a sense of someone moaning, and he wondered through the spinning darkness what that murky cheering was about.

FOUR

They ran with the bloodhounds up the steep slope through the trees. The dogs were silent, sniffing as they forged up higher, and the men who held their leashes were exhausted.

"This is crazy," one man said and pulled back on the leash to slow the dog. "If we keep on like this, we'll be useless in an hour."

He was gasping, taking in long breaths, exhaling like a bellows.

"Never mind an hour. Fifteen minutes is more like it," another man said and swallowed, breathing, reaching for a tree to get his balance. "I say take it slower."

They were five miles up from where they'd left the pickup truck. They hadn't organized the search until almost three o'clock. It took that long to get their knapsacks and their dogs. Then there had been instructions, and the dogs had needed time to find the scent. The search had really started at three-thirty. Running with the weight of knapsacks, rifles, walkie-talkies, and ammunition, they had labored through the forest, climbing bluffs and crossing ridges, stumbling down and up through gorges, and a tangle of dead timber had been just about enough to finish them. They had to carry each dog through the tangle, but the dogs had not refound the scent across there, and the men had struggled with the squirming dogs to carry them back to the first edge of the tangle. Bodine must have tried to cross, then given up. But they themselves had managed to get through here. Why not Bodine? "Never mind," one of the state policemen said. "Let's just keep moving."

So they had worked higher, and although they'd only gone five miles, they'd needed several hours.

"Christ, six-thirty."

"Hey, it must be time to eat."

"Another mile yet. If this guy's in trouble, one more mile could be enough to help him."

Which was understandable, so looking at the shadows stretching darker through the forest, they moved farther, higher, through the mountains. Slower, though. They couldn't run up ridges as if they were sprinting around the local baseball field. They knew their breathing should be constant, their heartbeats steady. Keep things smooth and even. They had hurried at the start, but that had been because they were impatient. Now that this had become routine, now that it was boring, they were moving much less frantically. Something broke a branch up to their right, and they were staring, but the deer that showed itself and ran away only made them laugh.

"I don't see why that guy went up here anyhow. If it was me, if I was chasing some wild dogs, I wouldn't try it on my own."

They heard the helicopter roaring closer. It had been a muffled droning far off to their right, but now it skimmed across the trees above them, and they saw the insignia of the U.S. Lands and Forest bureau.

"Air search to police," a man's voice crackled from the walkie-talkie.

They halted on an open bluff and squinted toward a line of trees that obscured the helicopter. They had little trouble hearing it, however.

Once again the static from the walkie-talkie. "Air search to police."

The man in charge, a sergeant, gave his dog's leash to a trooper beside him. He fumbled with the straps that looped his walkie-talkie across his shoulder. Then he pressed a button and put the walkie-talkie to his ear as he leaned back against a boulder. "Roger, air search. We can hear you. What's the problem? Over."

"Is that you on the bluff I just passed?"

"Roger. Affirmative. Ten-four. Over," the sergeant answered.

The man beside him winced. He was well aware that there were special words you had to use with walkie-talkies. "Affirmative" was better than "yes," which sounded like a hiss. But he'd seen some men pick up a walkie-talkie, and they suddenly were like some god-damned hotshot actor in a police movie. "Roger. Ten-four." A smug look in their eyes like they were getting screwed while they were talking. Jesus.

A crackle from the walkie-talkie. "I just wanted to be certain. I'm done for today. The ground's too dark to see much."

Except us, the second man thought. Sure, you saw the bunch of us, all right. You're just eager to get back to town and celebrate Saturday night in a bar.

"Roger," the sergeant responded.

Christ, the second man thought.

The sergeant continued, "Anything that looked suspicious? Over."

"I checked all along the slope to the north of you. I checked the lakes up that way. Nothing. Some nice elk at Wind-shift Basin."

"Well, we'll keep moving with the dogs then. There's a lake another mile above us, and we'll camp there. Over."

"Just make sure you cuddle close, boys. It gets awful lonely on your own in the woods."

"We've got the dogs to keep us company. Over."

"Yeah, but you should see what I'll have. Nighty-night, boys."

"Roger. Ten-four. Out." The sergeant brought the walkie-talkie down.

"Aw, go screw yourself," the second man grumbled. He wasn't certain if he meant the man up in the helicopter or the sergeant, but the sergeant grinned at him, and so the second man decided, raising up his hand to make an obscene gesture toward the far-off roaring of the helicopter. Soon the noise dimmed, becoming fainter, at last inaudible, and the men now looked at one another. Throughout the afternoon, they'd heard the chopper roaring near them in the mountains. They had gradually become accustomed to it, at last so familiar with it that they hadn't been aware that they were hearing it. They heard it now, though, or rather heard its absence, and they missed it, somehow incomplete without its reassuring presence. "Let's get moving," the sergeant said. He reached for the leash he'd handed over, and they let the dogs go on, straining to keep up with them.

"What a way to spend a weekend," someone said.

"Saturday, and hell, we won't be back at least till Sunday evening."

"Well, if you boys worked as good as you complained," the sergeant told them, "we'd have found this Bodine long ago."

The dogs began to slacken and then cower.

FIVE

It was crouched behind the deer cage, watching as the black and white police car reached the end of the lane, stopped a moment, and then drove toward the swimming pool. The thought of water made it gag again, and when it crawled out from its cover to be certain that the car continued moving, it saw people diving from the high board, splashing into the water, and it had to turn away to keep from retching. There were people over by the swings and slides, children and a mother. They were laughing. A man and a woman strolled toward the deer cage. In the cage, the deer had long since shifted toward the side away from it. They stared at it, their withers rippling nervously, and it was bothered by them just as much as by the people coming near. It only wanted to be on its own, to hole up somewhere safe, to stop the spasms racking through it. Finally the man and woman reached the deer cage, and it scurried through the bushes up the slope. It dimly recollected that a walkway angled across the slope above there, and it reached the walkway, wooden steps that cut up high across the slope, and it was running up them. In the sunlight, it pawed at its eyes and squinted. Once it stumbled, falling, and it scrambled up on all fours, rasping, whining. Then it reached the top, and it could see the mansion over there. Once its mother had taken it here to visit the place, a big, tall, old-time house with many rooms and stairways, and it still retained the image of those dark corners, all those sheltered crannies it could hide in. Squinting far around, glancing toward the park down there, the people, it shivered and turned toward the mansion again. It saw the trees around the place, the bushes, and the gravel driveway that led up to the front steps, and it saw the car parked in the front, and it was ducking toward the bushes, moving closer. All those shadowy rooms. The front door suddenly came open, and it paused among the bushes. Now a man came out, and he was talking to a woman. They had boxes in their hands.

"The afternoon's been slow. I don't think anyone will come up now."

"Well, I've got guests. I can't stay any longer."

They closed the door. The man reached to put a key inside the lock.

"No, I didn't tell you," the woman said. "Eva phoned to tell me she couldn't find her key."

"Well, she can get mine from me in the morning."

"No, she wants to do her work before tonight. She has to go away tomorrow."

"I can't leave the place unlocked," the man said.

"Only for ten minutes. I expected her before this."

"If vandals get here sooner, you know how the owners will react."

"From what I hear, they still have plans to sell the place. It doesn't make a difference."

"Just remember. It was your idea."

"Such a gentleman."

They started down the stairs.

It crouched behind the bushes, watching as they put the boxes in the car.

"I'll drive you home," the woman said.

"No, that's all right. I need the walk. So when's your next shift?"

"Not for two weeks. Sunday afternoon."

"They've got me chairing meetings."

"Well, I'll see you later."

Nodding, the man walked down the gravel driveway, and the woman got in her car, driving past the man. She blared her horn. The man waved, and soon both the man and car were out of sight.

It waited just a while. Then it crept out from the bushes, running toward the porch. It huddled by the steps and looked around, then scampered up the steps and turned the knob, and it was in there.

Very quiet. Everything smelled musty. It remembered the large big hallway, bigger than the living room at home, and there were tables, stacks of papers to one side, and a box where people put their money in.

Its mother had, at any rate, She had explained about historical societies and how an old house like this had to be preserved for people to appreciate the way things used to be. It hadn't understood the words exactly, but it sort of had the sense that this old place was special, and it hadn't liked the musty smell back then, but now it did.

The hall was shadowy, rooms on both sides, old-time furniture in there, guns up on the wall and maps and faded oval photographs. It listened, but there wasn't any movement in the house, and it crept forward. Now it faced a big room with the longest table it had ever seen, big-backed chairs along it, plates and glasses set out, knives and forks and more spoons than it understood, as if a party soon would be here, people eating. There were ghosts here, it was sure, but oddly, that was comforting. The staircase wound up toward the second floor, a caged-in elevator to the side. Its mother had explained about the elevator, how the platform rose without an engine. You simply had to pull down on the rope that dangled in there, and a pulley then would turn to raise you. But the cage had boards across the front, and anyway it never would have stepped inside there. All those bars. The place was too much like a trap.

It walked a little farther, pausing as the floor creaked. No, it had made that noise itself. There wasn't anybody in here, and it wondered where to go. Up the stairs or to the cellar. No, the cellar would be a trap as well, and boards creaking, it was inching up the stairs.

But it stopped as the front door opened. It turned, the daylight out there strong, painful, staring at the man who stood within the open doorway. This man had just left. He'd walked until he'd disappeared along the gravel driveway. That was why there hadn't been a warning, why there hadn't been a car sound to alarm it, and it hissed now as the man came forward.

"Yeah, that's just what I expected. Leave the door unlocked, she says. God damn it, kid, get out of here."

It hissed again.

"What's your name? I'm mad enough to call the cops."

It growled then, and the man hesitated, frowning.

"None of that damned stuff. You get your ass on down here."

One more step. The man was at the bottom of the stairs. He reached, and it was leaping, body arcing down the stairs to jolt the man and send him sprawling.

"Hey, God damn it." But the man apparently expected that it next would try to scramble past him toward the open door. The man lunged to the side to block it, his neck uncovered, and it dove in straight below the chin.

"Jesus."

They struggled. It could feel the blood spurt into its mouth. It gagged again. The taste was not unpleasant, even in a way compelling, although the choking was an agony. It chewed and swallowed, gagging.

Abruptly it couldn't breathe.

The man was squeezing at its throat. It felt the pressure in its chest. It squirmed. It twisted.

"God-damned kid."

Then teeth free, it was snarling at the hands around its throat. It tried to bite the hands but only nipped the acrid, cigarette-vile, suit-coat sleeves, and suddenly one leg was underneath it, pushing, as it flew high to one side, its body slamming on the wooden floor and rolling hard against a table.

Even so, its instinct was automatic. Turning, it scrambled on all fours and braced to spring again. The man rolled, coming to his feet. They stared at one another.

Then the man looked at the blood across his clothes. He touched his neck. "My God!" He understood now, his hands up, stumbling backward.

It leaped, but not strongly enough to drop the man, just knock him farther backward. "Oh, my God!" the man kept saying. And the open door was suddenly behind the man. The man was out there, kicking as it leapt again. Its shoulder took the kick. The jolt spread through its body. Falling, it landed on that shoulder. It crawled back and snarled.

Snarled not just toward the man but toward the carsound coming up the lane now. It could see beyond the man toward where the car was coming into view. A different car. A different woman driving. It was staring, crawling farther toward the stairs. Its shoulder wasn't working. It snarled and stumbled up the stairs. Then as it heard the car door out there squeak open, as the man glanced quickly out there, it mustered the little strength it retained and scuttled farther up the stairs. The stairs kept winding. It reached the second floor, and out of sight from down there, it huddled, tensing.

"Mr. Cody!" It heard the woman's voice outside, the rushing footsteps on the porch. "Good Lord! Your throat! The… Mr. Cody!"

It heard the heavy body slump to the floor.

"Never mind me. Get in there and use the phone," the man rasped. "Call the cops, an ambulance. Watch for some kid, something, on the stairs."

Panicked, much less certain now of what it should be doing, it swung to face the hallway up here, looking for a place to hide. It scurried. But at least the place was dark up here. At least its eyes no longer hurt.

SIX

"You've got to help me."

The medical examiner blinked at the shirtless man. The television news was droning.

"I don't-"

"Hey, you didn't give me any choice. I didn't mean to hit you that hard."

The afternoon came back to him. His head hurt when he moved it, and his lips and nose felt like they belonged to someone else. When he touched them, they were senseless, swollen, but he felt the blood, and he was groaning.

"Look. My dog. You've got to help me," the man said.

"What's the matter?"

"She's not moving. She just lies there, staring at me."

"Jesus, stay away from her."

"I am. My Christ, if only I had listened. Can I get it if she licked me?"

The medical examiner struggled to sit up. "When?"

"This morning. She was acting fine then."

"Wash your hands! I hope you didn't touch your mouth. You don't have any cuts she might have licked?"

"I can't remember."

"What?"

"I don't have any cuts. I can't remember if I touched my mouth."

"I told you, wash your hands." The effort of the conversation made him dizzy. He slumped back. "Use disinfectant. Mouthwash. Gargle. Change your clothes." He gripped the sofa to brace himself and stand. He fell back. Then he took a breath and made it to his feet. The blood was all across his tie and shirt. He started feeling angry, and that helped him. "Hurry up. Wash your hands." Then suddenly he thought about the hand that had split his lip and smashed his nose. He bolted down the hallway, shoving past the man who was going into the bathroom. "Get away. I've got to wash my face."

The medical examiner soaped his hands and scrubbed his face, scrubbed it until it hurt, and still he continued scrubbing. He peered at the blood that mingled with the soap upon his hands and dripped down toward the swirling water in the sink. He continued scrubbing. Then he grabbed a towel and scoured his face until the porous cloth was bloody.

"Rubbing alcohol!" he ordered, fumbling in the cabinet behind the mirror, but he couldn't find it. "Alcohol!" he shouted, and the man jerked open the door below the sink. They saw the bottle at the same time, and the medical examiner grabbed it, twisting off the cap, and splashing his nose, his lips. But he needed more. He leaned his face down sideways toward the sink. He poured. The hot sweet alcohol was flooding, burning. He snorted. Then the effort took its toll, and he sank onto his knees.

"My God, you're just as crazy as that dog out there," the man said.

"You don't know the half of it. Just wash your hands and face and gargle like I told you."

He slowly came to his feet. The man was at the sink, swabbing soap around his hands. The medical examiner cringed. Lord, I might need shots. Then he stumbled from the bathroom, down the hallway toward the kitchen. Out there, through the window, he saw the dog stretched out, the blood and foam around her mouth, slack-jawed, staring off at nothing.

That was all he needed. He groped from the kitchen toward the phone.

He had to concentrate to dial. The phone kept ringing on the other end. At last, an answering machine told him to leave a message. What's the matter with them? Saturday. He peered down at his watch. Of course. They're only open in the morning. They won't be there this late. He was flipping through the phone book. Vets. Vets. And then he had it, dialing.

This time someone answered. A woman.

"Dr. Owens," he blurted.

"Who's calling, please?"

"The medical examiner."

"I'm sorry. He's not in right now. Give me your number. He'll call you back."

The medical examiner felt his heartbeat stop.

"No, wait a second," she said. "He's just coming in the door."

Muffled voices. Bumps and echoes as the phone was being transferred.

"Dr. Owens here."

The medical examiner identified himself. "There's a dog I think has rabies."

The vet didn't speak for a moment. "Rabies? You're certain."

"No. I told you I just think that's what it is. The dog has got some kind of collar that sends shocks to stop her from barking. Hell, this could be heat exhaustion or distemper. I don't know. You'd better get over here."

"Don't touch her."

"Hey, don't worry."

"Slaughter called and said this might turn up. I hope it hasn't."

"Well, we'll know damn sure in a little while." The medical examiner saw the man come down the hallway. He asked for the address. Then he quickly told Owens, and he hung up, and the two men tried to keep their eyes away from one another. "Turn that television off."

"-Fifteen other steers have been discovered, disemboweled the same way. Local ranchers still are baffled, " the announcer finished saying.

"No. I changed my mind. I want to hear this." "Weatherwise, the weekend has been-"

"Turn it off."

The man went over, pressed a button, and the screen became blank, mercifully silent. The man shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "I don't know how to make this up to you. You want a beer?"

"I'd like a couple, but I can't right now." The medical examiner stared at his trembling hands.

"I didn't mean to hit you that hard. Hey, I'm really sorry."

"Just forget it."

They waited.

Thirteen minutes later, the van pulled up in front. It was white and dusty. animal associates, the red words said along the side. A young man got out, tall and trim. As the medical examiner hurried from the house toward the sunset-tinted street, the man yanked at the back doors of the van and leaned in to get something.

"You're the medical examiner?" the man asked, puzzled by the blood on his shirt.

"That's right."

"I'm sorry I took so long. I had to go down to the clinic for this van. I don't like taking chances."

He pulled out padded overalls, stepping into the legs, then tugging on the arms and drawing up the zipper. "Has it bitten anyone?"

"It licked its owner."

"I don't like that. What about your face?"

"The owner hit me."

"Broke your lip there?"

The medical examiner nodded.

"I don't like that either. Help me with this gear."

The vet brought out a padded helmet, its leather edges coming down around his shoulders. In the front, a wire grill kept the face protected, and the medical examiner helped the vet put on padded gloves.

"Tour name's Owens?"

"That's right. Help me with these shoe protectors. Where's the dog?"

"In the back."

"Well, let's get to it."

Owens grabbed his satchel, almost like a doctor's. As they turned, the medical examiner looked up to see the shirtless man on the porch.

"That's the owner?" Owens kept walking.

"If you want to call him that."

The man stepped off the porch. "Look, I had no way of understanding."

"Never mind that. Show me where the dog is." They reached a gate along the side, and Owens told them, "On second thought, you'd better not go in there." He shut the gate behind him, walking down along the side of the house.

"It's on a chain," the medical examiner said.

Owens peered around the corner. Then he straightened, walking slowly out of sight.

The medical examiner and the dog's owner frowned at one another. Without speaking, they crossed to the next yard and walked along the fence.

The medical examiner kept staring toward the corner of the house. He saw the backyard getting bigger as his line of sight improved, and then he saw a shadow. Then he stopped as he saw Owens standing by the dog. But he couldn't see the dog too well, and so he walked a few more feet, and he was gazing at the slack-jawed, bloody, froth-edged mouth, the blinking eyes, the heaving withers. 'Jesus."

"What are you guys doing?"

The gruff voice came from behind them, and the medical examiner turned to see a man in tennis clothes come out the back door, staring at them.

"Get your face back in the house," the owner of the dog said. "You're the cause of this."

"I beg your pardon?"

"This man's dog is sick," the medical examiner explained.

"Yes, I know it is. The damned thing won't stop barking."

The owner of the dog started toward his neighbor.

The medical examiner hurried to stop him. "Don't be foolish. You've got trouble as it is."

Behind them, he heard Owens saying, "What a mess," and they turned. "Whose idea was this collar anyhow?"

"The neighbors kept complaining."

"Hell, I ought to see you jailed for this." Owens set his bag down, reaching in to get a hypodermic, leaning close, preparing to slip the needle into the dog.

The dog bit his padded wrist, and Owens squirmed. "Take it easy, girl. What's the dog's name?"

"Irish."

"Take it easy, Irish."

But the dog kept its teeth clamped onto the padded wrist, and Owens had to slip the needle in with one hand while he squirmed to free the other.

Still, the dog would not release the wrist. Owens had to crouch there, waiting. In a minute, though, he tugged his wrist free, standing, watching as the dog's head settled onto the ground, its eyes closed, motionless.

"Christ, you killed her."

"Just as well as far as I'm concerned," the neighbor said on the steps behind them.

The owner of the dog again started toward him.

"I didn't kill her," Owens said, "although I'll likely have to."

The owner didn't know which man to turn to. "Is it rabies?"

"Rabies? What the hell?" the neighbor said on the steps behind them.

"I don't know yet," Owens said. "I'll need to get the dog to the clinic and run some tests." He pointed toward the bowls of food and water by the back door. "This dog's chain is too short. She couldn't reach her water. She could just be vicious from the heat. What the hell is wrong with you?"

No one spoke then, only stared at where the owner looked around, then glanced down at the grass. "I thought the bowls were close enough. I guess I wasn't thinking. I've had problems."

"Sure, his wife moved out last week," the neighbor said. "She couldn't stand him."

The owner suddenly began to sob. When the medical examiner avoided looking at him, he saw Owens fumbling with his thick gloves to release the chain hooked to the collar. Owens tugged to free the chain from where the dog was tangled in it. Twisting, pushing at the dog, he had the chain at last unhooked. Then he peered down at the mangled back leg, shook his head, and stooped to pick the dog up.

Still the medical examiner could hear the owner sobbing. "Let's get you inside. You've had a lot of things go wrong today."

He tried to ease the owner along the fence. The owner shoved his hand away and stared as Owens straightened with the dog.

The dog was large and heavy. Owens stumbled with the weight. The owner hurried along the fence and opened the gate to let him through.

The medical examiner frowned at the neighbor.

"Well, I didn't mean to make him cry," the neighbor said. "How was I to know?"

The medical examiner gestured with contempt, walking away.

"At least, the dog quit barking," the neighbor said.

Furious, the medical examiner kept walking. He joined Owens and the dog's owner at the van, where the owner obeyed instructions and stepped inside to spread a plastic sheet on the floor of a cage. Then he got out, and Owens set the dog in, making sure to lock the cage.

The owner wiped at his tears.

"I'll handle it from here. You'd better go back in the house," Owens said.

"I'm coming with you."

"No, I've got a lot of tests to run. I'll phone you," Owens said. 'You'd be in the way."

"I promise."

"Sorry." Owens glanced at the medical examiner, then started walking toward the backyard. "I left my bag behind the house."

As Owens disappeared, the medical examiner told the owner, "Well, you heard him."

"This is my dog. I'm responsible."

"You should have thought of that before." And then, "I'm sorry. I didn't have to say that. Even so, he's right. There's nothing you can do. Just go back in the house. We'll call you."

"Hell, it's Saturday."

The medical examiner was puzzled.

"I'm all alone."

There was nothing the medical examiner could think to say. He turned as Owens came across the lawn, carrying his bag.

Owens peered in the van toward the dog and shook his head. "Even with that plastic sheet, I'm going to have to disinfect the van. I'm going to have to burn these clothes and get a new bag. What a mess."

"Well, maybe you won't have to. It could be this is something else."

"You wouldn't care to bet on that."

The medical examiner just shook his head.

"I thought not. Let's get moving. Do you need a ride?"

"My car is through those trees in back."

"I'll see you at the office then." Owens shut the rear doors.

Walking with him, looking in the front, the medical examiner was not surprised to see the plastic sheet that Owens had spread out where he was sitting.

"Hey, I think we ought to bring this man along." The medical examiner gestured toward the owner who was staring at the back doors of the van.

"Oh, that's just fine. That's really fine." Owens tried to keep his voice low. "Look, I did my best to play it down. I have to kill the dog to do the final tests. You want this man along to see that?"

There wasn't any need to answer.

"Fine then. I'll be at the clinic." Owens turned the key and got the engine going. Then he sighed and shook his head in disgust before he put the van in gear and drove away.

SEVEN

Dunlap stared down at his trembling hands. Everything considered, he was doing very well, he guessed. Oh, sure, he'd started shaking, and his stomach felt like he was going to throw up, but he hadn't thrown up, and although he was sweating, that was maybe from the heat as much as anything. Who's kidding who? The sun is almost down. The air is cooling off. You're sweating for a drink, and buddy, do you need one. There were times when he suspected he would scream. That's just dramatics, he told himself. You were looking for a story. Now you've got it. He was not yet certain what was going on here. Rabies, maybe. Could be something more. Whatever, it was getting out of hand, and if he screwed this story up the way he'd screwed up many others, simply out of weakness, there was no one he could blame except himself. You'll get your drink. Just keep control.

This thing tonight is almost finished.

Is it? Maybe it's just getting started. And he shook his head and gripped the dashboard as the cruiser swerved sharply around the corner, skidding past the swimming pool and up the tree-lined gravel driveway.

He watched as Slaughter grabbed the microphone. "It's Slaughter, Marge. I'm almost there. Make sure you send those other units. What about the ambulance?"

"It's on its way."

"I hope so."

Dunlap focused his gaze down past the trees and toward the park spread out below him-the lake, a stream that twisted toward it, swings and slides, and cages that looked like a zoo, and people down there staring toward the siren. When he glanced ahead, the road curved, and abruptly he could see beyond the trees up to the hilltop, a wide three-story mansion up there, the last rays of the sunset glinting off the windows. The place was old, expensive, of a size that nobody could afford to build these days, the driveway curving past the front porch, columns with a roof above the driveway, like a Southern mansion, showing signs of age though, dark and rough and grainy, somehow very western all the same. He saw the cruiser that had hurried here before them, and another car, civilian, and two officers who stood at the front door, talking to somebody in there.

Slaughter skidded to a stop. Dust cloud settling, Dunlap got quickly out, Slaughter putting on his hat and hurrying before him through the dusk. They reached the front steps. These were stone, and both men rushed up, their footsteps scratching on the stone. The two policemen had already turned to them.

"He's up there on the second level," one of them said.

"Or the third. You're sure he's even up there?" Slaughter asked.

"Talk to these people."

A man was slumped inside the doorway, his shirt and suit a mass of blood, his throat ripped open, his hands clutched at his wound.

"The ambulance," a woman blurted.

"On its way. You're sure he's up there?" Slaughter asked.

"Mr. Cody-this is Mr. Cody-said the boy ran up the stairs as I stopped in the driveway."

"That's your car?"

She nodded.

"Better move it. There'll be a lot of traffic coming up here."

Even as he said that, they turned toward a cruiser speeding up the driveway. Just behind it, siren wailing, came the ambulance.

"Can you walk?"

The man nodded, struggling weakly to get off the floor.

"Here, let me help you. I don't want you in the way if something happens." Slaughter turned to face the two policemen. "Watch those stairs. Make sure the boy doesn't get away." Slaughter held the man and worked with him across the stone porch, then down the steps. Two attendants ran from the ambulance, policemen from the other cruiser running with them.

"Is there any place to get down from the second story?" Slaughter asked the woman who was helping him to move the man out of danger.

"A roof above the servants' quarters in the back. I don't know how he'd jump down and not hurt himself."

"The trees around the house. Are there any he could lean to and climb down?"

"I never thought… I just don't know."

"The back," Slaughter told the two policemen coming toward him. "Make sure no one leaves the building. It's the kid we're looking for."

"The kid?"

Slaughter realized that these two men had not been with him at the boy's house. "Never mind. Just make sure no one leaves. Be careful of the roof above the servants' quarters."

Slaughter gave the injured man to the two men from the ambulance. They stared, and Slaughter looked down at the blood across his own hands and his shirt. "A young boy bit him. That's right, isn't it?" he asked the woman.

She was nodding.

"Bit me," Dunlap heard the injured man repeating, his voice distorted, rasping. Added to what he'd been feeling, Dun-lap was fearful that the jagged throat would do the job and make him sick. He had to glance away.

More sirens, two police cars skidding up the gravel driveway, a dust cloud rising behind them. Slaughter hurried toward them.

Dunlap frowned in the middle of it all. The two men from the ambulance had opened out the back and set the injured man inside. The woman was inside her car and moving it. Slaughter stood between the cruisers, talking to the officers who'd just arrived.

Dunlap turned to face the mansion, squinting through the dusk toward the two policemen at the front door. This was all too much. He was shaking even worse as he walked toward the woman who was getting from her car where she had moved it to the side.

"What is this place?"

"The Baynard mansion."

"Who?"

And Dunlap learned then about Baynard who had been the richest man around here. Back in 1890. "He had cattle all across the valley, and he built this place up here to suit a Southern woman he had married."

There was something automatic in the way she said it, Dunlap thought. As if she'd said it many times before. He listened with wonder as in bits and pieces she explained how Baynard had brought from the South the wood, the furniture, the bushes, everything to make his wife feel more at home. And then his wife had gone back South one summer where she died. Either that, or else she left him, and he lied about her dying.

"No one knows for sure," the woman said. "We've tried to find the record of her death. We never managed. She had reasons if she left him. He was hardly ever home, tending business, working as a senator. Plus, there were rumors about certain kinds of parties on the third floor. But he said she died, and everyone agreed to that, and he came back and never left the house again."

Dunlap was amazed that she seemed more concerned with what she said than with the preparations going on around them. He learned how people said that Baynard wandered through the house for days on end. The cause of death was claimed to be a heart attack, but everyone suspected he just drank himself to death. And one thing more-the rumors that he killed her, that she told him she was leaving, and an overbearing man like him, he flew into such a rage that she was dead before he even knew he'd struck her. Then he hid the body, and he wasted in his grief. At last he killed himself, and people in the family hushed it up.

"But those are rumors, as I said." The woman shrugged. "Nobody ever proved it, though in recent years they looked for her. They never were successful."

"But back in eighteen-ninety… how come you know all about this?"

"I'm a member of the Potter's Field Historical Society."

"I still don't understand."

So she explained. "No one lives here. Baynard had two children. They grew up to manage the estate. Then they had children, and this new set gave the mansion to the county to avoid the taxes. They're not very wealthy now. They live in houses down the hill beside the swimming pool. We've fixed this place up just the way it used to be. The plumbing's from the eighteen-nineties. We even shut the power off. To get around at night, you have to use a flashlight, either that or candles or a lantern if you want to be authentic."

Dunlap faced the mansion. Oh, that's swell, he thought. So now we've got a haunted house. The only thing that's missing is a thunderstorm.

Well, there wouldn't be a storm, but sundown would do just as fine. He saw the orange distorted disc where it was almost behind the western mountains. In a while, the grounds would be completely dark, except for flashlights, headlights, maybe even candles, lanterns as this woman had suggested, and the search up through the mansion for the little boy. He felt his scalp tighten as the woman said beside him, "Whose child is it?"

"I don't know."

Exhausted, Dunlap walked toward Slaughter, who spoke to four policemen.

"We need nets," Dunlap heard as he came closer.

"Nets?"

And Dunlap saw that it was Rettig, standing with the young policeman Dunlap had gone to Slaughter's with this morning. That seemed several days ago.

"You heard me. Nets. You think that we should club him, do you?" Slaughter asked. "Or shoot him?"

"But nets, I don't know where you'd find them."

"Try a sporting-goods store, or that zoo down in the park. Rettig, you're in charge of that. The rest of you, I want you watching both sides of the mansion. Let's get moving."

They stared at Slaughter. Then they hurried toward the mansion.

"Hold it," Slaughter told them.

They spun to face him.

"Give your keys to this man. I want your headlights on the building."

They glanced at Dunlap who had not expected this. Instinctively, he held his hand out. Then he had a set of car keys. Mindless, he expected more, but then he realized that Rettig would take one car. These keys fit another. Slaughter's was the third car, and the fourth had been driven by the two policemen who were in the mansion. They separated to watch the sides as Slaughter shoved a ring of keys at him.

"You understand?"

"I think so," Dunlap said. "I'll spread the cars out so they're pointed toward the windows."

"Run the engines. I don't want the batteries to die. And use the searchlights by the sideview mirrors."

"What about the woman's car?"

"You've got the right idea."

Dunlap nodded, running toward the cruisers. Slaughter's car he recognized, and Rettig now was driving down the gravel driveway, siren wailing. Dunlap went toward the car beside where Rettig had been parked, and got in, fumbling for a key to fit, and started the engine. In a while he understood that someone else could just as easily have done this, but the tactic was a way for Slaughter to distract him.

It helped. There wasn't any doubt about that. Breathing quickly, taken up with interest, Dunlap adjusted to the burning in his stomach. He was glad to be in motion, driving the cruiser toward the mansion, aiming straight ahead and stopping where he judged that the headlights would be most effective. He groped down to turn them on. He found the switch upon the searchlight, and he flicked it, and this right side of the mansion, almost to the second story, was bright against the dusk.

He got out, running now toward Slaughter's car and did the same, this time aiming toward the left side of the mansion, and the place was lit up there as well. The woman had been watching, and she didn't need to have somebody tell her. She was getting in her car to move it once again, aiming toward the front door, and the sun was down below the mountains, the park a murky gray below him, but the windows reflected all the headlights, and people wouldn't have to stumble in the darkness.

Dunlap heard another car. He thought it was a cruiser, but the siren wasn't wailing, and he didn't see the silhouette of domelights on the roof. As it stopped where he was watching, he could see the mother and the father. Oh, dear God, no.

They scrambled out. "Where's Slaughter?"

"I'm not certain."

Even as he said that, Slaughter came out from the mansion, standing on the porch, the glare of headlights on him, staring at them. He and the parents approached each other, the parents hurrying.

"You shouldn't be here," Slaughter told them. Dunlap saw that he was angry. "How'd you know?"

"We have a neighbor with a police radio. Have you found him?"

Slaughter pointed toward the upper stories. "He's in there. That's as much as I've been told. I'm asking you to go back home and wait to hear from me."

Dunlap thought that Slaughter, standing in the headlights' glare, seemed to age a dozen years, his cheeks sagging, dark lines underneath his eyes.

"But why should he be hiding? Let me go inside and talk to him," the woman said.

"No, I don't think so." Slaughter looked down at the ground and scraped a bootsole in the dust. "I think that you should let me handle this." He looked at them.

"You heard my wife. She's going up to talk to him," the husband said.

"I'm sorry. I can't let you."

"That's what you think."

The husband and wife moved forward. Slaughter stepped ahead to cut them off.

"Those headlights, those police cars. Hell, you've scared him half to death," the husband said.

"I didn't want to tell you, but you evidently haven't heard the rest of it. Your son attacked again. A man this time. The man was bitten in the throat."

The wife froze, her mouth open. "Oh, my God."

The husband gasped.

"The man is over in that ambulance. Go take a look, and then you'll know why I can't let you in there."

They turned toward where Slaughter pointed as the two white-coated men stepped from the back of the ambulance and shut the doors.

"We've done all we can here," one of them shouted.

Slaughter nodded, and the two men rushed to get inside the front. The siren started as the engine roared, the lights went on, and they were swerving in a circle, speeding down the gravel driveway.

Dunlap watched until he couldn't see it anymore. He turned and saw the woman crying.

"Please. I think that you should leave here," Slaughter said.

"I want to stay," the woman sobbed.

Slaughter raised both arms and let them flop down loose against his sides. "At least stay in the car. The best thing you can do is aim your car lights toward the house. And please, don't get in the way. We've got too much to do. I promise, we'll watch out for his safety."

She wept as her husband held her, both of them nodding.

"Thank you," Slaughter said.

They moved weakly toward their car.

And then they heard it. Everybody did. They all turned, mother, father, Slaughter, Dunlap, the policemen by the house, staring toward the upper levels.

Deep inside, above there, from which floor wasn't certain, something, someone started howling. It was like a coyote or a dog, a wolf up in the mountains, worse though, mournful, hoarse and hollow, rising, baying, howling, then diminishing, then rising once again.

It went on two more times like that, chilling, echoing from somewhere deep above there. Dunlap felt his backbone shiver. Then it ended, and the night, except for idling engine motors, finally was quiet.

"What the hell was that?" a man blurted from the right side of the mansion.

"I'm not sure I want to know," another shouted back.

And Slaughter started racing toward the front door of the mansion.

EIGHT

The state policemen huddled frightened by the fire. They had planned to reach the lake by sunset, but the dogs kept holding back and whimpering, and the men had traveled slower than they'd wanted. Soon dusk was thick around them, and they never could have seen Bodine even if he'd been ten feet away from them. They had struggled through the underbrush, their arms and legs scratched by bushes, and the dogs had held back so fiercely that the men were forced to grab the dogs and carry them.

"These dogs of yours are really prizes," one man told the sergeant.

"I don't understand it. They don't act this way without a reason."

"Sure, they figure they've gone far enough today. They figure it's about time we carried them."

"A cougar maybe."

"Down this low?"

"A bear then."

"Come on, Charlie. These dogs just gave out on us. Admit it."

But the sergeant didn't want to. He was speechless for a moment, a dog held in his arms as he worked through the underbrush. "All right, what about those wild dogs we've been looking for? Maybe they're what my dogs are smelling."

And everybody else apparently had thought of that already because no one spoke then, and their lack of banter was self-conscious as they struggled through the bushes.

One man tumbled, breaking branches, groaning as the dog yelped in his arms beneath him.

"Watch my dog."

"Your dog? For Christ sake, what about me?"

"Well, I know plenty of guys like you, but I'll never get another dog like that one."

"Thanks a lot."

"No, what he says is true," another said. "He'd never get another dog so lazy."

And that seemed to bring their spirits back. They laughed a little, waiting as the fallen man got up and struggled to lift the dog.

"Well, the dog isn't stupid anyhow," someone said. "He figures why walk if someone'll carry him."

And that helped even better. They were laughing freely as another trooper ordered, "Quiet."

"What's the matter?"

"Listen to those noises. Off there to the right."

They wrestled with the dogs to keep them silent, staring toward the darkness, and they heard it. Branches breaking, fir-tree needles brushing. Not a lot of noise and not too loud, not even close, but there was something nonetheless that they heard moving through the murky forest to the right.

And then it stopped.

The dogs struggled harder in their arms.

"It could be nothing."

"Well, I don't intend to wait here until I know. That lake can't be too far ahead."

The sergeant chuckled. "Some tough bunch I brought with me. A little noise, and you boys start to panic."

"You're the one who mentioned those wild dogs."

"But think about it. Five of us. Our own dogs. Nothing's going to bother us."

"So you agree then that those wild dogs could be out there watching us?"

"No. I agree to nothing. Except that it's late and I'm tired. Let's get moving."

"That's exactly what I said. Let's get the hell out of here."

Someone snickered then, and they continued through the underbrush. They glanced from side to side, and when another noise came louder from the right, they increased speed.

"Heavy pine cones."

"No, the sky is falling. Don't you know that?"

"Just shut up."

At last they were in the open, staring at the murky ripples on the lake. They had a distance yet to go, about a hundred yards, but there were hardly any bushes, just a few trees by the lake, and even in the darkness, they were more at ease now, walking with less tension toward the lake.

They heard a branch snap behind them, and they turned but kept on walking. As they reached the lake, they sensed the glow before they saw the moon begin to show above the mountains.

Their inclination was to build a fire, but they had to stake the dogs first, to take care that their leashes were secure. Then they had to feed the dogs, but only one man was required for that, so they let the sergeant do that while they looked around for firewood.

There wasn't much. People often camped up here, and there weren't many trees by the lake, the dead wood long since gathered, so the men, despite their apprehension, had to go back to the forest. They used flashlights, scanning the trees and bushes first before they stepped in, gathering dead branches, pine cones, fallen leaves, going back, their arms full, toward the sergeant and the dogs beside the lake.

"Well, what's the matter?" one man asked the sergeant.

"They're not eating."

"No wonder. Look at what you gave them."

"Kibble. That's what they eat every night."

"They must want something else."

"They understand they have to eat what they're served."

"I wish my kids would understand that."

Another man walked over. "You don't mean to tell me I packed that dog food up here just so your damned pooches could turn their noses up."

"They look a little sick to me," the first man said.

"No, they're not sick. They're scared," the sergeant said, and since until now he hadn't acknowledged that there might be trouble, they were struck by his remark. They stood there facing him, then glancing at the dogs.

"Well, never mind. Let's get that fire started." But the second trooper said that very faintly, and he turned to where the last two men were working on the fire.

They fumbled with matches, trying to ignite the leaves. One hand shook a little, and a match went out. The other match kept burning, though, and soon the flames spread through the leaves and pine needles, crackling toward the branches, and the branches now were burning, their large flames spreading toward the logs above them.

The men grouped around the fire, holding their palms out, rubbing them together, then rubbing their arms and shoulders. They glanced at the shimmer on the lake, at the ripple of the fire's light across the trees. They looked at the dogs, then at the darkness around them. It was several seconds before one man said what everybody else was thinking.

"We don't have a lot of wood."

"For now it's plenty."

"But in an hour…"

"Damn it, then, let's get some more. I'm hungry."

Even with the crackling of the fire, they heard a noise back in the forest.

"You go do it. I'll stay here and fix the supper," one man said.

"Thanks a lot for volunteering."

The sergeant patted one of his dogs and told it, "That's all right. I'm with you." Then he moved toward his men at the fire. "So you want to do the cooking? That's just fine. You stay and help him. You and you come with me."

They surprised him when there wasn't any argument. The two men he had chosen were reluctant, that was true, but nonetheless they turned and followed where he led them toward a section of the forest where the noises hadn't been. They aimed their flashlights through the trees before they went in for more wood, and this time they came out with big chunks, stout and heavy branches that would last them. Just to guarantee that the job was done, they made three other trips, always to a different section of the forest, and they came back, dropping wood where they had put the rest, and they could smell the coffee boiling.

"Not too hot. I don't like coffee that's been burned."

"Well, you can do the cooking then."

"I wanted to, but you were too afraid to get the wood. I did it for you."

"That's the last I want to hear about that. Everybody did his job," the sergeant said. He gingerly drew the coffee pot a little farther from the fire. "Ow," he said and reached his fingers to his mouth.

"Here, use these gloves."

They heard three noises then, in three separate sections of the forest.

But the sergeant, although he stiffened, didn't look. "So what's for supper?"

They frowned toward the forest.

"I asked you what's for supper," the sergeant said.

"Oh… Spaghetti. Freeze-dried sauce."

"That sounds real fine."

The dogs were whimpering again, though, and the sergeant tried but couldn't hide his worry now. The moon was higher. He went over to the dogs and patted them again. "I let them drink some water from the lake. I wonder if they're still a little thirsty."

From the three separate places in the forest, they heard noises. Then, a distance to their left, they heard a fourth sound.

"This is stupid. This is just our imagination," one man said.

"Those noises? Hell, they're not my imagination."

"No, I mean what's causing them."

"Deer or maybe elk?"

"It's possible," the sergeant said. "They come down here at night to drink. They see us here and don't know what to do. Your water's boiling, by the way."

They looked down at the pot beside the fire.

"Right. I wasn't thinking." And the man in charge of cooking paused a moment before fumbling in his pack, then pouring noodles into the boiling water.

"Hey, you said spaghetti."

"What's the problem? Noodles are the same."

"Well, maybe they're the same to you. But-"

"Quiet."

And they listened to the noises from the forest.

"That's not deer, if you ask me."

"I didn't ask you."

"You're all crazy," someone said. "I've camped here a dozen times. I even brought my wife and kid once. You hear noises like that from the forest all the time."

"So how come you picked up your rifle?"

"I'm just checking that I didn't get some dirt in it."

"Good idea. I think I'll check mine as well."

"Now I've had just about enough," the sergeant said.

They turned to him.

"First of all, those noodles need some stirring. Second, if you wave those guns around, you're going to end up shooting somebody. Take it easy. What Jack says is true. You hear those noises in the forest all the time."

They stared at him.

"I'll help you with the sauce," the sergeant said. "Here, someone fill that plastic sack with water. Put more wood on the fire."

It was obvious what he was doing, trying to distract them, but they did what they were told, and everything was better for a moment, although the man who went down to the water's edge made sure he didn't stay too long. They heard him splashing by the lakeshore, and he came up toward them, water dripping from the plastic sack.

"Let's figure on the worst," the sergeant said. "Suppose it is wild dogs. They're not about to come at us. Hell, higher in the mountains, I've seen wolves so close their eyes were lit up by the fire. But they never came in toward us. They're just curious. The main job is to find Bodine. If you boys still are nervous when you bed down, we'll arrange to have a guard in shifts. That's fair enough?"

They thought about it, slowly nodding.

"Stir those noodles like I told you."

"I once knew an Indian," a man said.

"Good for you."

They laughed.

"No, just listen. He did odd jobs for my father when my father was alive and had the ranch. The Indian was David Sky-hawk, and I felt about him as if he was my brother. Oh, that Indian was something. Six-foot-three and built like some thick tree trunk. He's the man who taught me how to shoot and hunt and fish. My father never had much time for that. Well, anyway, he used to take me camping. In the summers we'd go up here, sometimes for a week or more. We'd often go up so high that I'd swear to God nobody else had ever been there. And he told me lots of things about these mountains. Once we camped so far we needed horses. We rode up, leading pack mules till we reached this crazy draw. It wasn't much, just steep slopes like a V, a stream that wound along the bottom, boulders on the ridges. Hell, there wasn't any undergrowth. There wasn't much of anything. The only reason we chose it was a kind of gametrail that would take us to the high end, and we started up the gametrail when the horses went crazy. I was only twelve then, so if only my horse had gone crazy, that wouldn't have proved much. Sky-hawk's horse began to act up too, though, and no matter what we tried, we couldn't get those horses up the gametrail. They were whinnying and shying back. Then the pack mules started acting up. They tried to turn, and there was hardly any room to do that. We were scared they'd lose their footing and tumble down the slope, so we dismounted, and we kept our hands across the horses' muzzles while we squirmed around to go back down the gametrail. Even as it was, we almost lost one pack mule. I asked Skyhawk what was wrong, and he just said that we should try another passage."

"That's some story."

No one laughed, though.

"I'm not finished. So we went back to the entrance to the draw and found another way, and all day I saw Skyhawk glancing past his shoulder toward where we had come from, and I asked him again what was wrong, but he just wouldn't answer. Everything went fine from then on. We came to a spring, and it was nearly dark then, so we camped and made a fire just like now, and we were eating, and I asked him once again. He almost didn't tell me, but he shrugged at last and said it was a superstition. There were places in these mountains where we shouldn't ever go, he told me. Places like that draw back there. You didn't know until you got up in them, and you never saw a bird or animal, but even then you might not notice if you didn't have a horse or dog or something like that with you. They could sense the trouble right away. There wasn't any way to keep from sensing it. They simply wouldn't go up in those places. If you tried to force them, they'd start acting crazy like our horses had back in that draw. 'What causes it?' I asked him, and he said he had no idea. His people knew that there were certain places that you never went to, and they didn't question that tradition. Spirits maybe. Some terrible thing that once had happened there. The point was that they marked those places and they didn't go there. Some bad medicine, he said, and Skyhawk was no dummy. He'd been to school. He knew the difference between fact and superstition, but he said the only difference was that people hadn't learned the facts behind the superstition. They just understood the consequences. He said that he had seen a whole pack train go crazy in a mountain meadow once. He'd seen a herd of elk go crazy like that once as well. The year before, he said, he'd gone out camping by himself. He'd pitched his tent and gone to sleep, and for no reason, he suddenly woke while it was dark and found that he was shaking, sweating. He crawled from his tent and packed his gear. He went as fast as he was able through the darkness to a different section of the mountains."

Now the man stopped, looking at them.

"That's the story?" someone asked. "Christ, what the hell was that about?"

"The point is, he'd been to that spot many times. It was a special place for him. But he said that those spooky feelings sometimes show up where they shouldn't be. They move, he told me, and he never went back to that site again."

"For Christ sake, that big Indian was fooling you. He was telling ghost stories by the campfire."

"No, I'm positive he wasn't fooling. He was serious."

"Hell, you were only twelve."

"That Indian was close to me. He never played that kind of joke. And anyhow, I saw the way those horses acted."

"So they smelled a cougar or a snake."

"Or something else."

"Hey, I know. Bigfoot."

They laughed.

"Yeah, that's right. That Indian was frightened by a Sasquatch."

They laughed even harder.

"You know, Freddie, sometimes that big mouth of yours makes me want to smash it in."

Now none of them was laughing.

"Take it easy," the sergeant said.

"No, the boy here wants to teach me."

"That'll do, I said," the sergeant told them. "We've got problems without starting in on one another."

And they did what they were told, because the noises were much louder now, and everyone was turning.

"Now you've really got us jumpy. You and those damned stories about spooks."

The rest of them were picking up their rifles.

"Supper's ready."

"Save it."

"I don't know," the sergeant said. The dogs were whimpering. The moon was higher. "Maybe that's Bodine. If he's been hurt up here, he might have seen our fire and tried crawling toward it. That would explain the noises we've been hearing."

"He'd have shouted."

"Could be he's not able."

"But the noises are from different sections."

"There's his wife and son, remember. Could be all three of them are hurt. Maybe separated."

"That's a lot of 'could be's."

"But at least an explanation."

The noises became louder.

"Hell, I'm going out there. I want to find out what that is," the sergeant said.

"I don't think that's a good idea."

"It's the only one we've had. And anyway, suppose it is Bo-dine. We've got to help him." The sergeant looked at them. "I can't order you, I guess. Is anybody coming with me?"

They glanced toward the ground, toward the dogs, anywhere except toward the sergeant.

"Yeah, okay. If no one else will, I'll volunteer." It was the man who'd just told the story. 'This is getting on my nerves just waiting here."

The sergeant smiled. "That's fine. I'm glad to have you."

So they clutched their rifles, and they started from the campfire toward the darkness. Out there, they could hear the noises.

"Hey, be careful," one man said.

"Don't worry."

The sergeant and his companion now had disappeared beyond the firelight. Those who stayed beside the fire heard the footsteps brushing through the mountain grass. The distance was sufficient that in a moment the weak sound didn't carry, and the three men stood there staring at the darkness, and they waited.

"They should reach the forest soon."

"Just give them time."

"The sauce is burning."

One man stooped and grabbed a glove to pull the pan out from the fire's edge.

"They should turn on their flashlights."

"Just give them time, I said. They'll want to save the batteries. They'll need them for a lot of hours yet."

But there were no lights near the forest.

"Okay, I'm convinced. They're taking too long. They've had too much time to reach the forest."

At once they heard barking.

"What's that?"

"They're in trouble. Let's go help them."

"Wait. We're still not sure yet."

"What the hell's the matter with you? They're in trouble."

The man who had stooped to move the sauce was clutching his rifle. "I'm not going to wait here while they need me." He moved toward the forest. Then he turned and looked at them. "You're coming?"

They hesitated.

"To hell with you."

He continued moving forward.

"Use your flashlight."

He was just beyond the firelight as the last two men heard the howling. Not just barking as before, but howling.

"No!" somebody shouted from the darkness out there. "No, stay back!"

The howling intensified. Then they heard the rifle shot.

"No! Stay back! My God, no! Run!"

They started backing toward the fire, staring toward the darkness. There were sounds of movement in the darkness to their right and left. They lurched farther back, staring, aiming. As the snarling figures hurtled toward them, one man fired, but he was overpowered, and the other man kept stumbling back. He felt cold water in his boots and realized that he'd stepped into the lake. He was shooting, tugging at his rifle's bolt and shooting yet again, his eyes unsteady from his panic, peering at the swirling howling figures on the lakeshore, but the water held them back as he kept shooting. He dropped one and then another, and he worked the bolt and pulled the trigger, and the pin snapped down on empty. All his other bullets were inside his knapsack by the fire. The figures twisted, snarling, on the shore. He couldn't see them clearly, only made out silhouettes against the fire behind them, heard his partners screaming off there in the darkness as he drew his handgun, eager now to save his bullets for their final rush at him. The water. Sure. They don't like coming in the water. Otherwise they would have charged me. In a rush, he waded farther out, and suddenly, attentive only to what faced him on the lakeshore, he ignored what might be rising behind him, lost his balance as the muck beneath him sloped much deeper, and he fell back, completely swallowed by the water.

NINE

Everything was speeding up. The medical examiner didn't have the time to think things through, to make sure that he did things properly. When Owens left to take the dog down to the clinic, for example, he himself had stayed behind to calm the owner. All the while he stood there talking with the man, at last walking with him toward the house, the medical examiner wanted to rush through the streets to get to Owens and to watch him do the tests. At the same time, he was thinking that he ought to get in touch with Slaughter, to tell him what was going on. But what was going on? He didn't know yet. There was nothing positive. For all he could predict, the tests would indicate some other problem, and he didn't want to trouble Slaughter, didn't want to bother him without a reason. So he'd gone inside the house and stayed there briefly until he'd reassured the owner. Then he hurried from the house ("Don't go out in the backyard. You could be infected by the doghouse or the chain.") and frantically realized that he'd left his car at the hospital. He ran through the backyard of the house next door. The man in tennis clothes came out to tell him, "Hey, if I'd wanted people cutting through here, I'd have put in a sidewalk." But the medical examiner didn't answer. He simply clambered up the fence and jumped down on the other side, racing through the long grass toward the trees and then the dry creek. He no longer cared about the snakes or other things that might be hiding there. He thought only about his car, about the tests that Owens soon would be performing.

He scrambled from the dry creek, through the trees and bushes toward the fence that he had toppled, jumping across the ants' nest, running to reach his car. But as he stood there, breathing hard, fumbling in his pocket for his keys, he suddenly remembered the objects in the trunk of his car: the plastic bags, the dead cat, and the blood-soaked dirt. How much danger did they pose? He couldn't take the chance. They might be so contaminated that they'd spread the disease. Until he had time to examine them, he needed to make sure that they were safely stored in medical-waste containers.

The process took twenty minutes. Only then was he able to hurry to his car and speed away. He swerved up the driveway toward the back of the veterinary clinic. The sun had set now. In the darkness, except that the rear doors were closed and Owens' van was parked before them, this was much like when he'd come here Friday morning, seeing old Doc Markle dead and staring at the mangled steer, when everything had started for him. He skidded to a stop beside the van and jumped out. He gripped the door beside the two big double-doors, and Owens hadn't locked it. As he rushed inside, he squinted from the blazing lights and was mindful once again of Friday morning. Had it started only yesterday? He saw the dog up on the table, a protective plastic sheet beneath it, Owens there beside it in his lab coat and his face mask.

Owens turned to him, his voice muffled by the face mask. "The dog was dead before I got here."

"Is that common?"

"Sometimes the paralysis can set in very quickly."

The medical examiner understood what Owens was referring to. An animal with rabies would go through several stages. First it acted normally until the virus worked along the nerves. Then the brain became infected, and the victim was excited, furious. At last the virus spread back through the total nervous system, and the animal was lethally paralyzed.

"But I saw it in the active stage. Several hours later, and it's dead? Paralysis shouldn't be that quick."

"Maybe. I agree with you. This could be something else," Owens said. "You'll find a coat and face mask in that locker over there."

The medical examiner went across to get them, also finding a pair of rubber gloves. He put them on, and he was conscious of the buzzing lights up in the ceiling as he walked back to the table.

"First, let's get this collar off." Owens fumbled to unsnap it, staring at the battery attachment. "What I'd like to do to that guy." He set it aside. "You ought to meet some people who come in here, wanting us to make their dog mute, cut its voice box out, its vocal cords. Hell, I'd like to cut on them. At least they wouldn't talk so much then. And they wonder why a dog without a voice will bite somebody when it's got no other way to warn him off." Owens' face was red above his mask. He shook his head. "Well, let's get to it."

"How can I help?"

"I need that scalpel."

Four quick strokes, and Owens peeled the scalp off. They stared at the blood-smeared skull.

Then the drill. Owens flicked the switch. The bit was whirring, grinding through the bone. Four holes, widely spaced to form the corners of a square. And then the saw. Owens used it neatly, its motor buzzing as he cut from one hole to another, swiftly, gently, not too deeply. Then the job was done, and he was prying at the skull bone.

"Well, the brain is swollen and discolored. You can see that slight pink color. Indications. On the other hand, distemper sometimes looks like that. I need to take the brain out and dissect it."

The medical examiner again handed him the scalpel, then forceps, and Owens placed the brain in a glass dish on the table.

"Ammon's horn," the medical examiner said.

"That's right." Owens cut past the hippocampal region. Then he had it. "You can do the slides."

"Which way do you want them? Pressed or done in sections?"

"The sections take too long. Just do impressions. What we're looking for will show up just as well."

So the medical examiner, instead of placing tissue from that portion of the brain into fixing fluid and embedding it within paraffin, a process that took several hours, simply pressed a bit of tissue on the slide and smeared it evenly, then looked around to find a microscope.

"Over by that cabinet."

The microscope had ajar of Seller's stain beside it. The medical examiner put stain across the specimen to make sure that what he was looking for would stand out in contrast. He arranged the slide and peered down through the lenses.

"Can you see them?" Owens asked.

The medical examiner kept peering.

"What's the matter? You should see them."

But the medical examiner just turned to him and shook his head. "I think you'd better look."

"You mean you didn't see them, and we have to do the other tests?"

"I mean that you should have a look."

Now Owens frowned as he peered down through the lenses.

What the medical examiner had looked for was some evidence of Negri bodies. Negri was a scientist in Italy who first identified them in the early 1900s. They were tiny, round, and sometimes oval bodies in the protoplasm of the nerve cells in that portion of the brain called Ammon's horn. No one knew exactly what they were. In current theories, they were either rabies virus particles, or else degenerative matter from the cells affected by the virus. Maybe both. But seeing them was certain proof that rabies was at work here. And the medical examiner had seen them. On the other hand, he maybe hadn't.

"I don't get it," Owens said. "Something's wrong here. These things shouldn't look like that."

The medical examiner understood. He watched as Owens peered down through the microscope again. Because the things he'd seen were neither round nor oval. They were oblong with an indentation on one side.

"They look like god-damned peanuts," Owens said. "What's going on here?"

"This could be some related virus."

"What? You tell me what."

"I just don't know."

"You bet you don't, and I don't either. Rabies is something I'd recognize, and you can bet there's nothing in the books about these things we're looking at."

"We'll have to do the antibody test."

"It takes a couple of hours, and the mouse test takes at least a week. I want to know what this thing is."

"We have to guess for now it's rabies. Or a virus that has all its symptoms."

"Which is fine if no one were exposed to it," Owens said. "But what about that owner? And yourself? If this is rabies, you'll have to take the serum shots, but we don't know if they'd do any good."

They studied one another, and the medical examiner reached up to touch his mask, the swollen lip beneath it. He'd forgotten. Or more truthfully, he'd tried to keep from thinking of those shots. "I'll take them anyway."

"But what if they don't work well with the virus? What if there's a bad reaction?"

"Hell, if I've already got it, I'll be dead soon anyway. What difference does it make?"

The medical examiner suddenly remembered something that the owner had first told him, that he'd let slip by in the excitement, something that the rabies serum shots reminded him about.

"He said his dog had been inoculated."

"What?"

"The owner. He mentioned that the dog had received its shots."

"What's his name?"

The medical examiner told him.

"Okay, there isn't any other animal clinic, so his file will have to be here. Try some other slides. Make sure we didn't do them wrong. I'll come back in a minute." Owens hurried toward the door that led down to the offices in front.

The medical examiner obeyed the instructions he'd been given. His legs were shaking as he stumbled toward the microscope. He peered at all the slides, and each one was the same, and he was really scared now.

Owens pushed the door open so forcefully that the medical examiner flinched.

"He was right." Owens had a file in one hand, raising it. "That dog is five years old. It had its puppy shots, its boosters every year."

"Well, could the boosters be the cause of this? Contamination in the vaccine?"

"I don't know, but sure as hell I'm going to learn."

"Even if the vaccine were prepared correctly, could it have been so strong that it caused the virus?"

"In the case of rabies, maybe. With a weak dog. One chance in a hundred thousand. But I don't know how the vaccine would produce the thing we're looking at."

"One chance might be all this thing might need."

They frowned at each other.

"Look, I've got to make a call." The medical examiner grabbed the phone and dialed. Marge was answering. "I've got to talk to Slaughter."

"He's been looking everywhere for you," she said. "He's at the Baynard mansion."

"What?"

Then she told him the rest, and he felt sicker.

"I'm on my way."

He hung up, turning to Owens. "Run the antibody test, the fluoroscope. I'll get back as soon as I can manage."

"But what's wrong?"

There wasn't time to explain. The medical examiner tugged off his gloves and face mask. Urgent, he yanked at the door to meet the darkness.

TEN

It kept howling.

"Jesus. Lord, I wish that thing would stop."

The policemen stood in the glare of the headlights, a net spread out before them. Rettig had come back a little while ago. He'd looked everywhere to find a net, the sporting-goods stores, the zoo down in the park as Slaughter had suggested, but he hadn't seen one. He'd been frantic since the stores had all been closed, and he'd been forced to call the owners, but they hadn't been home. Then as he had given up and started back to Slaughter, he had slammed his brakes on, staring at the restaurant across the street. It hadn't done well, and the business had been sold. A seafood place in cattle country. Why had anyone put money in it? But the decorations still were in there, and he saw the heavy sea nets hanging in the window. He had run across. The doors were locked. He didn't know the owners. He finally pulled out his gun and smashed the back-door window.

Slaughter hadn't liked that, but he didn't want to say so. After all, the man had tried. At least they had the net now, and that really was what mattered. He told his men how they would have to do this as the howling kept on from the upper stories, and they clearly didn't want to go in. For that matter, Slaughter didn't want to go himself. "The main thing is, don't hurt the boy." He glanced to see if Dunlap heard that. If this thing turned sour, he wanted to avoid accusations about police brutality. He wanted all his men to know without a doubt that they were only to restrain the boy.

"But what if he attacks us?"

"Just don't hurt him. Keep the net between you and the boy. We'll get him tangled in it. After that, we shouldn't have much problem."

Slaughter looked at Dunlap again, hoping that Dunlap understood how clear and cautious every order had been. He squinted from the headlights aimed toward the porch. He saw the mother and the father, and they still weren't in their car. He saw the woman from the Potter's Field Historical Society, the other cruisers that had gotten here not long ago, the headlights of another cruiser speeding up the gravel driveway.

"Well, we've got enough men. Let's do it."

But the headlights weren't another cruiser. Slaughter recognized the car. It was the medical examiner's, and Slaughter told them, "Wait a second," as he stepped from the porch.

The medical examiner got out of his car and rushed forward.

"Where have you been? I've been looking-" Slaughter stopped talking when he saw the blood across the man's shirt, the mangled lips. "What happened to your face?"

"There isn't time to explain. I know this thing's a virus, but I'm not sure if it's rabies."

"Is it just as bad?"

"It's maybe worse. It seems to work much faster. There's a dog that passed through one stage of the virus sooner than it should have. We're still doing tests."

"Well, what about this boy up there?"

The medical examiner winced as he heard the howling from the upper stories. "That's a boy who's doing that?" His face was twisted with the shock of disbelief.

"I have to think it is. There could be some stray dog up there, but we don't have a reason to believe that."

"God, I once heard someone sound like that."

"A case of rabies?"

"Back in med school. But the other symptoms weren't the same as this. A victim of rabies might get vicious, even bark and snap at someone."

"Bark?"

"The muscles in the neck constrict. The person tries to talk, but all the words come out like barking."

"This is howling."

"That's exactly what I mean. The symptoms aren't the same. It sounds more like an animal. Besides, I never heard of anyone with rabies who had actually attacked someone. Oh, I read cases in the medical books but never met a doctor who'd actually seen it happen."

"Then we don't know any more than when we started."

"That's not true. We know there's something, and we're fairly certain it's contagious."

"But the parents claim the boy was never bitten."

"Sure, and I just saw a dog that had its shots, and now it's dead back at the vet's."

The howling started again.

"Damn. I should have thought. The moon," the medical examiner said.

"Now you've lost me."

"Look at it." He pointed toward the almost full moon that was shining toward the mansion. 'That symptom is at least consistent. Victims of rabies are enraged by light. Their eyes are sensitive. They seek out darkness. When the moon rises, they start reacting to it."

"Howling?"

"Rapid dogs will, and in this case one small boy."

"They say he cut his hand on glass this morning."

"That's too soon. It takes about a week before the rabies virus starts to show symptoms. But if this thing is quicker than the normal virus, if the glass had been licked by an infected animal, that would be enough to transmit it. When you catch the boy, the first thing I want to do is see that cut."

The howls were rising.

"It's like something, someone, crazy," Slaughter told him.

"Lunacy, they used to call it. Madness from the moon."

Slaughter didn't want to talk about this anymore. "I've got to go in after him."

"I'll bring my bag."

"We'll need it." Slaughter hurried up the stone steps to his men. "Is everybody ready?"

They nodded tensely.

"Keep your gloves on. Rettig, hold the net at that end. You three hold it at the other end and in the middle. Just remember. No one hurt him."

Slaughter looked at Dunlap again to make sure he'd heard, and they started in.

Dunlap followed.

"No, you stay out here," Slaughter told him.

"But I want to see the end of this."

"I don't have time to keep you safe from trouble. I've got plenty as it is to think about."

"I'll stay back out of danger."

"You're damned right you will. You'll stay there on the porch."

"You're hiding something, Slaughter."

For the first time, Slaughter felt enraged by him. "I beg your pardon?"

"You heard what I said. You're not sure you can keep your men controlled. You don't want someone like me up there to see trouble."

"I've had just about enough from-"

"Parsons told you to cooperate."

"About the commune but not this. He doesn't even know about this."

"But he'll be damned mad if you screw up his p.r. tactics. Look, you need as many witnesses as you can get. I've handled this about as well as anybody. I've been helping."

Slaughter couldn't stand here arguing. He squinted at the headlights, at the medical examiner approaching, and abruptly made his choice. "All right, I'm going to take a chance on you. The first time you get in the way, you'll find your ass out on the porch."

"That's what I figured."

"Then we understand each other." Slaughter turned to the medical examiner. "You'll need these gloves."

"Hey, I will too," Dunlap said.

"You won't be close enough to need them."

They crossed the long, wide hallway toward the curving staircase. Men were spread out at the bottom, the net before them.

"Ready with your flashlights?" Slaughter asked.

They nodded, turning on the flashlights, beams arcing up the stairs. He heard their breathing and smelled their sweat.

"Okay, let's do it."

Footsteps shuffling, scraping, they started, the net spread out before them, up the staircase.

ELEVEN

It was waiting for them. It had scurried to the final landing. Now it heard their footsteps and their whispers, saw their sweeping flashlight beams. They still were quite a distance down there, but in time they would be up here, and it hissed as it swung in search of cover.

But there weren't any rooms behind it, just this one big open space that stretched from end to end. It didn't understand, although it did retain a far off memory of someone who'd explained this. There were slight projections from each corner, spaces behind, but these would be too obvious. It needed something else. And then it saw what it was looking for. A perfect hiding place and one it could attack from if it had to.

It was scurrying to reach the place, and all the while, it kept glancing at the glow that swept in through the window and spread cold and pale across the floor. It started howling again. It couldn't stop itself, was powerless to fight the urge, just crouched there, head up, howling long and high, its throat constricted painfully, and then the urge had been relieved, and it was scurrying.

The darkness in this hiding place was wonderful, the blackness soothing and secure. It closed its eyes to rest them after all the strain of squinting at that cold pale glow that spilled in through the windows. It was breathing quickly, nervous even though the hiding place was comforting. It licked its lips and tasted yet again the scabs of blood that clung in specks against its mouth. That salt taste that it now had grown accustomed to and even had begun to crave. But the salt taste had been liquid, and that recollection made it gag again. Nonetheless it wanted that warm sweetly salted liquid. It was caught in oppositions, both attracted and repelled, and without conscious effort, it was howling even more fiercely.

TWELVE

They stopped down on the second landing.

"It's up on the third floor."

"Maybe," Slaughter told them.

"But you heard it howling."

"We don't know if there's a dog in here as well. I say we do this as we planned it. Dunlap, you're so anxious to be helpful. Shine that flashlight up the stairs. Don't wait to yell if you see movement."

"Oh, don't worry. If there's anything on those stairs, I'll yell my god-damned head off."

"Are you sorry that you came now?"

"I wouldn't miss it for the world."

"You must want that story bad."

"You have no idea."

But then Slaughter saw the way the flashlight beam was shaking, and he took the light away from him. "I don't know if it's booze or nerves, but I don't want my life depending on you. Here, you'd better take this." And he gave the flashlight to the medical examiner. "You do it just the way I told him." He turned to his men. "Okay, we work along this big hall up here, checking all the rooms. I don't expect to find him on this level, but I can't depend on expectation."

With the net spread before them, they moved through the darkness. When they reached the first doors on each side, they stopped and looked at Slaughter.

"Try the left side. I'll stay here and watch the other."

Breathing hoarsely, they went slowly in. But there was nothing. They shone flashlights in the corners and the closets, just an old-time bedroom with a canopy above the bed, a net that came down to keep out mosquitoes. They looked underneath the bed, and they came out, checking all the other rooms along the hallway. Other beds, a playroom, and a study, all rigged out as if a hundred years ago, maps and photographs and guns up on the walls, a chair that looked as if old Baynard had risen from it only a moment ago, but nobody was in there, and they came out, staring down the hall toward where the medical examiner was aiming the flashlight up the stairs.

"I guess we know he's up there," Slaughter said.

They faced the stairs and started up. Their flashlight beams were making crazy angles on the walls and ceiling. The men shuffled as if at any moment they expected some small figure to come hurtling toward them, but instead they reached the final landing, and they swung their beams across the big top-story room.

"Well, I don't get it," Slaughter said. "What is this place?" His voice echoed.

"You've never been here?" Rettig asked.

"Always meant to. Never took the time."

"The ballroom," Rettig told him. "Baynard's wife was Southern, and she didn't like the people out here. She was used to parties, dances, fancy dinners. Baynard built this place to suit her, and the ballroom was his special effort. Once a month at least he had a celebration. Ranchers, those with money, used to come from miles around, better people from the town, congressmen and senators. He paid their way. They'd come up from the railroad in carriages he sent for them. He even brought an orchestra from Denver. They would dance and eat and-"

"What's the matter?" Slaughter asked him.

In the dark, the flashlight beams angling across the ballroom, Slaughter felt his stomach burning.

"Well, I used to hear about it from my father's father, but I never knew if it was true or not. He said the parties sometimes got a little out of hand."

"I don't know what you mean."

Rettig continued, "You can see the way the balcony juts out from that end. Well, the orchestra played up there. With that solid wooden railing, the musicians couldn't see too much of what went on below them. In the corners and the sides there, you can see the slight partitions that come out."

"They're triangles."

"That's right. You see those padded benches on the sides."

"Well, what about them?"

"Rumors, I suppose. My father's father said that wives were swapped up here, that people went with different partners in around the back of those things. He said there were secret doors that you could go in for privacy."

"He knew that for a fact?"

"He never was invited. No one ever found a secret door."

"Then that's just a rumor, like you said. I mean, a thing like that, somebody would have told."

"And maybe not have been invited anymore."

"But Baynard's wife. Why would she have gone along with this? You said that she was from society."

"I didn't mention that she also had a reputation. Baynard was the one who had to go along with it. To keep her with him. Then the parties got a little out of hand. She found a man she liked much better than the rest. Some people say she left with him. Others say that Baynard killed her. But they never found the body."

"Oh, that's swell. So now you've got us searching through some kind of haunted house. Just keep your mind on what you're doing. Dunlap, you stay here. We'll check this right end. Then we'll move down toward the other. Shout if anything slips past us. Everybody ready?"

They nodded, then slowly worked across to search the corner to their right, moving around the triangle. They knocked the wood in case they might find a secret door. They crossed to search the other corner. Then they moved along the big wall, going around the triangle on that side.

"Nothing so far," Slaughter said. "We still have two partitions and the balcony. We've almost got him. Let's be careful."

They moved up toward the far end.

"Like I said, be careful."

There was nothing in the far left corner, nothing in the right.

"Okay, he's up there in the balcony. He's got to be."

They started up the narrow stairs but bumped against each other; there wasn't room for the four of them.

"This isn't working," Slaughter told them.

They were grateful for the chance to wait.

"Rettig, you stay back. You other three go up," Slaughter told them. "Rettig will be just behind you."

Rettig breathed out with relief. The other three looked tense, aiming their flashlights up the narrow stairway.

"What about on top of those partitions?" one man asked.

"No. How could he climb up on them?"

And in that brief distraction, their faces turned out toward the ballroom, everything began to happen. First, the snarling, then the hurtling body. It came off the balcony, a half-seen diving figure that swooped past them, slamming hard at Rettig, men now scrambling, shouting, bodies rolling on the floor. Slaughter heard the snarling, Rettig's screaming, as he tried to get in past the scrambling bodies. He saw Rettig struggling upward, something hanging on him. He saw Rettig falling backward then, the extra weight upon him as they crashed against the near partition, the old boards cracking, and the men were rushing forward with the net.

"Where is he?"

"Here, I've got him!"

Rettig kept screaming. Then the net swung through the flashlight beams toward where he struggled with the figure on the padded bench beside the triangle.

"Oh, Jesus, get him off me!" Rettig shouted, and he kicked, the figure thumping, snarling on the floor.

The net fell. They had him. Arms and legs were lashing out, entangled worse with every effort. Slaughter pushed between his men and saw them roll the boy and get the net around his back and chest, and there was no way that the boy could get out. He was powerless, except for where he slashed his teeth against the net and snarled at them.

The medical examiner hurried next to Slaughter, set down his bag, and reached inside to grab a hypodermic. "Keep him steady."

"You don't think we'll let him go."

The medical examiner pulled out a vial, slipped a needle into it, and eased out the plunger to get liquid into the chamber. Standing by a flashlight, he pushed slightly on the plunger until liquid spurted from the needle. Then he looked at Slaughter. "Pull his shirtsleeve up."

"You're kidding. In that net. I couldn't move it."

"Rip a patch out then. I don't care. Let me see some skin."

Through the webbing, Slaughter tugged and ripped the shirtsleeve. He was quick, afraid the boy might get at him. The medical examiner swabbed alcohol across the skin and leaned close to press the needle.

One loud yelp. The medical examiner kept pushing gently on the plunger. Then he straightened, and he looked at Slaughter. "In a minute."

"Why are these bricks here?" someone said, and Slaughter turned. Too much was going on.

"I don't-"

Then he saw where Rettig's fall had broken the partition. In there, as he shone his flashlight, he saw a wall of bricks. He glanced at Rettig who was slumped across the padded bench, his hands up to his throat.

"Are you all right? He didn't bite you, did he?" Slaughter asked.

Rettig felt all over his body. He breathed, gasped, and swallowed, breathing once again. He nodded, wiping his mouth. "I think I only lost my wind." He tried to stand but gave out, slumping once more on the bench. "I'll be okay in just a second. What bricks?"

"There behind you."

Rettig turned, still trying hard to breathe. "I don't know anything about them. I don't think they should be here."

Slaughter didn't even need to ask him. Rettig was already going on. "I guessed that this one sounded different from the others. Much more solid, heavier."

"What's that supposed to mean?" a policeman asked.

"Baynard's wife. I think we know what happened to her." The group became silent.

Slaughter felt Dunlap beside him.

They peered down at the small boy who was tangled, now unconscious, in the net.

"A little kid and all this trouble. Hell, I didn't really understand how little he would be," Slaughter said.

They stood around the boy and stared at him.

"We'd better get him to the hospital," the medical examiner said. "You too, Slaughter. Rettig, you as well. I want to check both of you."

"He never touched me," Slaughter said.

"The cat did. If this virus is like rabies, you're long due to start your shots. Rettig, I don't know. If you don't have a bite, there won't be any problem."

"But I wasn't bitten," Slaughter told him. "Only scratched."

"You want to take the risk?"

Slaughter shook his head to tell him no.

"That's what I thought. Don't worry. You've got company. I need the shots as well."

"But you weren't bitten either."

"No. But with this bloody lip, I can't take any chances. The boy is harmless now. You men can lift him. Stay clear of his head."

They looked at Slaughter, who nodded. One man held the boy's legs while another gripped his shoulders.

"Hell, he doesn't weigh a thing."

"That's what I said. A little kid and all this trouble," Slaughter answered. "It's enough to make you-"

Hollow and disgusted, he watched as the men worked with the boy to reach the stairs. "Here, someone grab that corner of the net before we have an accident," he ordered, and they moved clumsily down the stairs.

Slaughter kept his flashlight aimed before them. On the second landing, they turned, heading toward the bottom, and he heard the idling cruisers now. He saw the headlights glaring through the open door, the mother and the father out there, and the woman from the organization that ran this place, an officer beside them.

"Take it careful," one man said and paused to get a better grip around the boy's shoulders. "Okay. Now I've got him." They reached the bottom, moving across the hall toward the entrance.

"Rettig, tell that woman what we found up there. Those bricks could mean a dozen things, and none of them important."

"You don't think so."

"I have no opinion. But she should know about the damage."

They went onto the porch. The mother and the father now were running.

"Is he-?"

"Just sedated. Everything considered, he's been lucky. Stay away from him," the medical examiner said. "I don't want you contaminated. You can see him at the hospital."

They didn't look convinced.

"It's simply a precaution," Slaughter said, stepping close. "We still don't know what we're dealing with. Let's put him in the back seat of my car," he told his men.

"You'd better set him on a blanket. We can burn it at the hospital," the medical examiner said.

"Do we have to be that careful?"

The medical examiner only stared at him.

"I'll get a blanket from my trunk," the father said and hurried.

"Good. That's very good. We need your help."

They moved toward the cruiser. Slaughter opened the back door, and the father spread the blanket.

"Thank you," Slaughter told him. "I know how hard-"

He looked at where the mother stood beside the cruiser, weeping. "-how hard this must be for you."

They set the boy inside, and the medical examiner leaned in to check him. He stayed in there quite a while. When he came out, even in the darkness, Slaughter saw how pale his face had suddenly become.

"I have to talk."

"What is it?"

"Over there."

The medical examiner walked toward the trees. Slaughter followed.

"What's the matter?"

"I just killed him."

"What?"

"I should have thought." The medical examiner rubbed his forehead.

"Come on, for Christ sake. Make some sense."

"The sedative. I should have thought. The dog I found. I called a vet who came and took one look and gave the dog a sedative."

"But what's-?"

"The dog had reached the stage of paralysis by then. The sedative was just enough to kill it. That boy in your back seat isn't breathing."

"Oh, my God."

"You understand now. I'm not sure exactly how this virus works, but it's damned fast. I know that much. He was maybe on the verge of becoming paralyzed. The sedative precipitated everything. It slowed his body's metabolism until it killed him."

"You can't blame yourself."

"You're damned right I can. I should have paid attention! I just killed him. " The medical examiner closed his eyes, shaking.

Slaughter turned to see the father leaning toward the back seat.

"I don't… Something's wrong!" the father blurted.

Slaughter watched the mother crying as the father scrambled in. He saw his men, the cruisers, their headlights glaring at the mansion, saw the woman Rettig talked to start to run up toward the mansion. He sensed the moon above him and the medical examiner beside him shaking as he felt his world begin to tumble and a creature in the park below him started howling at the moon. Dunlap stood to one side, taking pictures. Slaughter didn't even have the strength for anger anymore. He let the man continue taking pictures, flasher blinking.