Desperation

“Are you Steve.” the boy asked.

Steve nodded. “That’s me. Steve Ames. This is Cynthia Smith. And you’re my phone—pal.”

The boy smiled wanly at that.

“That was good timing, David. You’ll probably never know how good. It’s nice to meet you. David Carver, isn’t it.”

He stepped forward and shook the boy’s free hand, enjoying the look of surprise on his face. God knew the kid had surprised him, coming through on the phone that way.

“How do you know my last name.”

Cynthia took David’s hand when Steve let it go. She shook it once, firmly. “We found your Humvee or Win-nebago or whatever it is. Steve there checked out your baseball cards.”

“Be honest,” Steve said to David. “Do you think Cleve-land’s ever gonna win the World Series.”

“I don’t care, just as long as I’m around to see them play another game,” David said with a trace of a smile.

Cynthia turned toward the woman from the laundry—mat, the one they might have shot if they’d had guns. “And this is-”

“Audrey Wyler,” the dark-haired woman said. “I’m a consulting geologist for Diablo Mining. At least, I was.” She scanned the ladies’ room with large dazed eyes, taking in the carton of liquor bottles, the bins of beer—cans, the fabulous fish swimming on one dirty tiled wall. “Right now I don’t know what I am. What I feel like is meatloaf three days left over.”

She turned, little by little, toward Marinville as she spoke, much as she had turned toward Steve outside the laundrymat, and took up her original scripture.

“We have to get out of town. Your pal here says the road out is blocked, but I know another one. It’s goes from the staging area down at the bottom of the embank-ment out to Highway 50. It’s a mess, but there are ATVs in the motor-pool, half a dozen of them-”

“I’m sure your knowledge will come in very handy, but I think we ought to pass that part by, for the time being,” Marinville said. He spoke in a professionally soothing voice, one Steve recognized right away. It was how the boss talked to the women (it was invariably women, usu-ally in their fifties or early sixties) who set up his literary lectures-what he called his cultural bombing runs. “We had better talk things over a little, first. Come on into the theater. There’s quite a setup there. I think you’ll be amazed.”

“What are you, stupid.” she asked. “We don’t need to talk things over, we need to get out of here.” She looked around at them. “You don’t seem to grasp what has hap-pened here.

This man, Collie Entragian-”

Marinville raised his flashlight and shone it full into his face for a moment, letting her get a good look. “I’ve met the man, as you can see, and I grasp plenty. Come on out front, Ms. Wyler, and we’ll talk. I see you’re impatient with that idea, but it’s for the best. The carpenters have a saying-measure twice, cut once.

It’s a good saying. All right.”

She gave him a reluctant look, but when he started toward the door, she followed. So did Steve and Cynthia. Outside, the wind screamed around the theater, making it groan in its deepest joints.

The dark shape ofacar, one with lightbars on the roof, rolled slowly north through the windscreaming dark, away from the rampart that marked China Pit at the south end of Desperation. It rolled with its lights off; the thing behind the wheel saw quite well in the dark, even when that darkness was stuffed with flying grit.

The car passed the bodega at the town’s south end. The fallen sign reading MEXICAN FOOD’s was now mostly cov-ered by blowing sand; all that still showed in the weak glow of the porch bulb was CAN FOO. The cruiser drove slowly on up the street to the Municipal Building, turned into the lot, and parked where it had before. Behind the wheel, the large, slumped figure wearing the Sam Browne belt with the badge on the cross-strap was singing an old song in a tuneless, droning voice: “And we’ll go danc in, baby, then you’ll see… How the magic’s in the music and the music’s in me…

The creature in the driver’s seat killed the Caprice’s engine and then just sat there, head down, fingers tapping at the wheel. A buzzard flapped out of the flying dirt, made a last—minute course adjustment as the wind gusted, then landed on the hood of the cruiser. A second fol-lowed, and a third. This latest arrival squalled at his mates, then squirted a thick stream of guano onto the car’s hood.

They lined up, looking in through the dirty windshield. “Jews,” the driver said, “must die.

And Catholics. Mor-mons, too. Tak.”

The door opened. One foot swung out, then another.

The figure in the Sam Browne belt stood up, slammed the door shut. It held its new hat under its arm for the time being. In its other hand it held the shotgun the woman, Mary, had grabbed off the desk. It walked around to the front door. Here, flanking the steps, were two coyotes. They whined uneasily and shrank down on their haunches, grinning sycophantic doggy grins at the approaching figure, which passed them with no acknowl-edgement at all.

It reached for the door, and then its hand froze. The door was ajar. A vagary of the wind had sucked it most of the way shut… but not completely.

“What the fuck.” it muttered, and opened the door. It went upstairs fast, first putting the hat on (jamming it down hard; it didn’t fit so well now) and then shifting the shotgun to both hands.

Acoyote lay dead at the top of the stairs. The door which led into the holding area was also standing open. The thing with the shotgun in its hands stepped in, knowing already what it would see, but the knowing did not stop the angry roar which came out of its chest. Out-side, at the foot of the steps, the coyotes whined and cringed and squirted urine. On the police-cruiser, the buz-zards also heard the cry of the thing upstairs and fluttered their wings uneasily, almost lifting off and then settling back, darting their heads restlessly at each other, as if to peck.

In the holding area, all the cells which had been occu-pied were now standing open and empty.

“That boy,” the figure in the doorway whispered. Its hands were white on the stock of the shotgun. “That nasty little drug user.”

It stood there a moment longer, then stepped slowly into the room. Its eyes shifted back and forth in its expres-sionless face. Its hat-a Smokey-style with a flat brim—was slowly rising again as the thing’s hair pushed it up. It had a great deal more hair than the hat’s previous owner. The woman Collie Entragian had taken from the detention area and down the stairs had been five-six, a hundred and thirty pounds. This thing looked like that woman’s very big sister: six-three, broad-shouldered, probably two hun-dred pounds.

It was wearing a coverall it had taken from the supply shed before driving back out of what the mining company called Rattlesnake Number Two and the townspeople had for over a hundred years called the China Pit. The coverall was a bit tight in the breast and the hip, but still better than this body’s old clothes; they were as useless to it now as Ellen Carver’s old concerns and desires. As for Entragian, it had his belt, badge, and hat; it wore his pistol on her hip.

Of course it did. After all, Ellen Carver was the only law west of the Pecos now. It was her job, and God help anyone who tried to keep her from doing a good one.

Her former son, for instance.

From the breast pocket of the coverall it took a small piece of sculpture. A spider carved from gray stone. It canted drunkenly to the left on Ellen’s palm (one of its legs on that side was broken off), but that in no way dissi-pated its ugliness or its malevolence. Pitted stone eyes, purple with iron that had been volcano-cooked millennia ago, bulged from above its mandible, which gaped to show a tongue that was not a tongue but the grinning head of a tiny coyote. On the spider’s back was a shape which vaguely resembled a country fiddle.

“Tak!” the creature standing by the desk said. Its face was slack and doughy, a cruel parody of the face of the woman who, ten hours before, had been reading her daughter a Curious George book and sharing a cup of cocoa with her. Yet the eyes in that face were alive and aware and venomous, hideously like the eyes of the thing resting on her palm.

Now she took it in her other hand and raised it over her head, into the light of the hanging glass globe over the desk. “Tak ah wan! Tak ah lah! Mi him, en tow! En tow!”

Recluse spiders came hurrying toward it from the dark-ness of the stairwell, from cracks in the baseboard, from the dark corners of the empty cells. They gathered around it in a circle. Slowly, it lowered the stone spider to the desk.

“Tak!” it cried softly. “Mi him, en tow.”

Aripple went through the attentive circle of spiders. There were maybe fifty in all, most no bigger than plump raisins. Then the circle broke up, streaming toward the door in two lines. The thing that had been Ellen Carver before Collie Entragian took her down into the China Pit stood watching them go. Then it put the carving back into its pocket.

“Jews must die,” it told the empty room. “Catholics must die. Mormons must die.

Grateful Dead fans must die.” It paused. “Little prayboys must also die.”

It raised Ellen Carver’s hands and began tapping Ellen Carver’s fingers meditatively against Ellen Carver s collarbones.

PART III

THE AMERICAN WEST: LEGENDARY SHADOWS “HoLy shit!” Steve said. “This is amazing.”

“Fucking weird is what it is,” Cynthia replied, then looked around to see if she had offended the old man. Billingsley was nowhere in sight.

“Young lady,” Johnny said. “Weird is the mosh pit, the only invention for which your generation can so far take—credit. This is not weird. This is rather nice, iii fact.”

“Weird,” Cynthia repeated, but she was smiling. Johnny guessed that The American West had been built in the decade following World War II, when movie the-aters were no longer the overblown Xanadus they had been in the twenties and thirties, but long before mailing and multiplexing turned them into.Dolby-equipped shoe-boxes. Billingsley had turned on the pinspots above the—screen and those in what once would have been called the orchestra-pit, and Johnny had no trouble seeing the place. The auditorium was big but bland. There were vaguely art-deco electric wall-sconces, but no other grace-notes. — Most of the seats were still in place, but the red plush was faded and threadbare and smelled powerfully of mildew. The screen was a huge white rectangle upon which Rock Hudson had once clinched with Doris Day, across which—Charlton Heston had once matched chariots with Stephen Boyd. It had to be at least forty feet long and twenty feet high; from where Johnny stood, it looked the size of a drive-in screen.

There was a stage area in front of the screen-a kind of architectural holdover, Johnny assumed, since vaudeville must have been dead by the time this place was built. Had—it ever been used. He supposed so; for political speeches,

or high school graduations, maybe for the final round of the Cowshit County Spelling Bee. Whatever purposes it had served in the past, surely none of the people who had attended those quaint country ceremonies could have pre-dicted this stage’s final function.

He glanced around, a little worried about Billingsley now, and saw the old man coming down the short, narrow corridor which led from the bathrooms to the backstage area, where the rest of them were clustered. Old fella ’s got a bottle stashed, he went back for a quick snort, that’s all, Johnny thought, but he couldn’t smell fresh booze on the old guy when he brushed past, and that was a smell he never missed now that he had quit drinking himself.

They followed Billingsley out onto the stage, the group of people Johnny was coming to think of (and not entirely without affection) as The Collie Entragian Survival Soci-ety, their feet clumping and echoing, their shadows long and pallid in the orchestra sidelights.

Billingsley had turned these on from a box in the electrical closet by the stage-left entrance. Above the tatty red plush seats, the weak light petered out in a hurry and there was only dark-ness ascending to some unseen height. Above that-and on all sides as well—the desert wind howled. It was a sound that cooled Johnny’s blood… but he could not deny the fact that there was also something strangely attractive about it… although what that attraction might be, he didn’t know.

Oh, don’t lie. You know. Billingsley and his friends knew as well, that’s why they came here. God made you to hear that sound, and a room like this is a natural ampli-fier for it.

You can hear it even better when you sit in the front of the screen with your old pals, throwing legendary shadows and drinking to the past. That sound says quit-ting is okay, that quitting is in fact the only choice that makes any sense. That sound is about the lure of empti-ness and the pleasures of zero.

In the middle of the dusty stage and in front of the curtainless screen was a living room—easy chairs, sofas, standing lamps, a coffee-table, even a TV. The furniture stood on a big piece of carpet. It was a little like a display in the Home Living section of a department store, but what Johnny kept coming back to was the idea that if Eugene Ionesco had ever written an episode of The Twi—light Zone, the set would probably have looked a lot like this. Dominating the decor was a fumed-oak bar. Johnny ran a hand over it as Billingsley snapped on the standing lamps, one after—the other. The electrical cords, Johnny saw, ran through small slits in the lower part of the screen. The edges of these rips had then been mended with electrical tape to keep them from widening.

Billingsley nodded at the bar. “That come from the old Circle Ranch. Part of the Clayton Loving auction, it was Buzz Hansen n me teamed together and knocked it down for seventeen bucks. Can you b’lieve it.”

“Frankly, no,” Johnny said, trying to imagine what an item like this might go for in one of those precious little shops down in SoHo. He opened the double doors and saw the bar was fully stocked. Good stuff, too. Not primo but good. He closed the doors again in a hurry. The bottles inside called to him in a way the bottle of Beam he’d taken out of the Owl’s had not.

Ralph Carver sat down in a wing-chair and looked out over the empty seats with the dazed hopefulness of a man who dares to think he may be dreaming after all. David went over to the television. “Do you get anything on this-oh, I see.” He had spotted the VCR underneath. He squatted down to look at the cassettes stacked on top of it “Son-” Billingsley began, then gave up.

David shuffled through the boxes quickly-Sex-Starved Co-eds, Dirty Debutantes, Cockpit Honeys, Part 3-and then put them back. “You guys watch these.”

Billingsley shrugged. He looked both tired and embar rassed. “We’re too old to rodeo, son. Someday maybe you’ll understand.”

“Hey, it’s your business,” David said, standing up. ‘I was just asking.”

“Steve, look at this,” Cynthia said. She stepped back raised her arms over her head, crossed them at the wrists and wiggled them. A huge dark shape flapped lazily on the screen, which was dingy with several decades’ worth of accumulated dust. “A crow. Not bad, huh.”

He grinned, stepped next to her, and placed his hands together out in front of him with one finger jutting down.

“An elephant!” Cynthia laughed. “Too cool!”

David laughed with her. It was an easy sound, cheerful and free. His father turned his head toward it and smiled himself.

“Not bad for a kid from Lubbock!” Cynthia said.

“Better watch that, unless you want me to start in calling you cookie again.”

She stuck her tongue out, eyes closed, fingers twiddling in her ears, reminding Johnny so strongly of Terry that he laughed out loud. The sound startled, almost frightened him. He supposed that, somewhere between Entragian and sundown, he had pretty much decided that he would never laugh again… not at the funny stuff, anyway.

Mary Jackson, who had been walking around the onstage living room and looking at everything, now glanced up at Steve’s elephant. “I can make the New York City skyline,”

she announced.

“My ass!” Cynthia said, although she looked intrigued by the concept.

“Let’s see!” David said. He was looking up at the screen as expectantly as a kid waiting for the start of the newest Ace Ventura movie.

“Okay,” Mary said, and raised her hands with the fin-gers pointing up. “Now, let’s see…

give me a second.

I learned this in summer camp, and that was a long time ago—“What the fuck are you people doing.” The strident voice startled Johnny badly, and he wasn’t the only one. Mary gave a little scream. The city skyline which had begun to form on the old movie screen went out of focus and disappeared.

Audrey Wyler was standing halfway between the stage—left entrance and the living-room grouping, her face pale, her eyes wide and hot. Her shadow loomed on the screen behind her, making its own image, all unknown to its cre-ator: Batman’s cloak.

“You guys’re as insane as he is, you must be. He’s out there somewhere, looking for us.

Right now. Don’t you remember the car you heard, Steve. That was him, coming back!

But you stand here… with the lights on… playing party-games!”

“The lights wouldn’t show from the outside even if we had all of them on,” Billingsley said. He was looking at Audrey in a way that was both thoughtful and intense.

as if, Johnny thought, he had the idea he’d seen her some—where before. Possibly in Dirty Debutantes. “It’s a movie theater, remember. Pretty much soundproof and light proof. That’s what we liked about it, my gang.”

“But he’ll come looking. And if he looks long enough and hard enough, he’ll find us.

When you’re in Despera tion, there aren’t that many places to hide.”

“Let him,” Ralph Carver said hollowly, and raised the Ruger.44. “He killed my little girl and took my wife away. I saw what he’s like as much as you did, lady. So let him come. I got some Express Mail for him.”

Audrey looked at him uncertainly for a moment. He looked back at her with dead eyes.

She glanced at Mary found nothing there to interest her, and looked at Bill ingsley again.

“He could sneak up. A place like this must have half a dozen ways in. Maybe more.”

“Yup, and every one locked except for the ladies’-room window,” Billingsley said. “I went back there just now and set up a line of beer-bottles on the windowledge inside. If he opens the window, it’ll swing in, hit the bottles, knock em over, smash em on the floor. We’ll hear him, ma’am, and when he walks out here we’ll fill him so full of lead you could cut im up and use im for sinkers He was looking at her closely as he uttered this grandi osity, eyes alternating between her face, which was okay and her legs, which were, in John Edward Marinville s umble opinion, pretty fooking spectacular.

She continued to look at Billingsley as if she had never seen a bigger fool. “Ever heard of keys, oldtimer. The cops have keys to all the businesses in these little towns “To the open ones, that’s so,” Billingsley replied qui etly. “But The American West hasn’t been open for a long time. The doors ain’t just locked, they’re boarded shut The kids used the fire escape to get in up front, but that ended last March, when it fell down.

Nope, I reckon we’re as safe here as anywhere.”

“Probably safer than out on the street,” Johnny said.

Audrey turned to him, hands on her hips. “Well, what do you intend to do. Stay here and amuse yourselves by making shadow-animals on the goddam movie screen.”

“Take it easy,” Steve said.

“You take it easy!” she almost snarled. “I want to get out of here!”

“We all do, but this isn’t the time,” Johnny said. He looked around at the others. “Does anyone disagree.”

“It’d be insanity to go out there in the dark,” Mary said. “The wind’s got to be blowing fifty miles an hour, and with the sand flying the way it is, he’d be apt to pick us off one by one.”

“What do you think’s going to change tomorrow, when the storm ends and the sun comes out.” Audrey asked. It was Johnny she was asking, not Mary.

“I think that friend Entragian may be dead by the time the storm ends,” he said. “If he’s not already.”

Ralph looked over and nodded. David hunkered by the TV, hands loosely clasped between his knees, looking at Johnny with deep concentration.

“Why.” Audrey asked. “How.”

“You haven’t seen him.” Mary asked her.

“Of course I have. Just not today. Today I only heard him driving around… walking around… and talking to himself. I haven’t actually seen him since yesterday.”

“Is there anything radioactive around here, ma’am.” Ralph asked Audrey. “Was it ever, like, some sort of dumping ground for nuclear waste, or maybe old weap-ons. Missile warheads, or something. Because the cop looked like he was falling apart.”

“I don’t think it was radiation sickness,” Mary said. “I’ve seen pictures of that, and-”

“Whoa,” Johnny said, raising his hands. “I want to make a suggestion. I think we should sit down and talk this out. Okay. It’ll pass the time, if nothing else, and an idea of what we should do next may come Out of it.” He looked at Audrey, gave her his most winning smile, and was delighted to see her relax a little, if not exactly melt. Maybe not all of the old charm had departed after all. “At the very least, it will be more constructive than making shadows on the movie screen.”

His smile faded a little and he turned to look at them: Audrey, standing on the edge of the rug in her gawky—sexy dress; David, squatting by the TV; Steve and Cyn-thia, now sitting on the arms of an overstuffed easy chair that looked like it might also have come from the old Circle Ranch; Mary, standing by the screen and looking schoolteacherly with her arms folded under her breasts; Tom Billingsley, now inspecting the open upper cabinet of the bar, with his hands tightly clasped behind his back; Ralph in the wing-chair at the edge of the light, with his left eye now puffed almost completely shut. The Collie Entragian Survival Society, all present and accounted for What a crew, Johnny thought. Manhattan Transfer in the desert.

“There’s another reason we have to talk,” he said. He glanced at their shadows bobbing on the curtainless movie screen. For a moment they all looked to him like the shadows of giant birds. He thought of Entragian, telling him buzzards farted, they were the only birds that did. Of Entragian saying Oh shit, we’re all beyond why you know that. Johnny thought that might well be the scariest thing anyone had said to him in his whole life Mostly because it rang true.

Johnny nodded slowly, as if in agreement with some interior speaker, then went on.

“I’ve seen some extraordinary things in my life, but I’ve never had what I could in any way characterize as a supernatural experience. Until-maybe-today. And what scares me the most about it is that the experience may be ongoing. I don’t know. All I can say for sure is that things have happened to me in the last few hours that I can explain.”

“What are you talking about.” Audrey sounded close to tears. “Isn’t what’s happening bad enough without turning it into some kind of a… a campfire story.”

“Yes,” Johnny said, speaking in a low, compassionate voice that he hardly recognized.

“But that doesn’t change things.”

“I listen and talk better when I’m not starving to death, Mary remarked. “I don’t suppose there’s anything to eat in this place, is there.”

Tom Billingsley shuffled his feet and looked embar rassed. “Well, no, not a whole lot, ma’am. Mostly we came here in the evenings to drink and talk over the old days.”

She sighed. “That’s what I thought.”

He pointed vaguely across toward the stage-right en trance. “Marty Ives brought in a little bag of somethin a r couple of nights ago. Probably sardines. Marty loves sar-dines and crackers.”

“Yuck,” Mary said, but she looked interested almost in spite of herself. Johnny supposed that in another two or three hours even anchovies would look good to her.

“I’ll take a peek, maybe he brought in something else,” Billingsley said. He didn’t sound hopeful.

David got up. “I’ll do it, if you want.”

Billingsley shrugged. He was looking at Audrey again and seemed to have lost interest in Marty Ives’s sardines. “There’s a light-switch to the left just as you get offstage. Straight ahead you’ll see some shelves. Anything people brought to eat, they most generally put it on those. You might find some Oreos, too.”

“You guys might’ve drunk a tad too much, but at least you kept the minimum nutrition needs in mind,” Johnny said. “I like that.” The vet gave him a glance, shrugged, and went back to Audrey Wyler’s legs. She seemed not to notice his interest in them. Or to care.

David started across the stage, then went back and picked up the.45. He glanced at his father, but Ralph was staring vacantly out into the house again, at red plush seats which faded back into the gloom. The boy put the gun carefully into the pocket of his jeans so that only the handle stuck out, then started offstage. As he passed Billingsley he said, “Is there running water.”

“This is the desert, son. When a building goes vacant, they turn the water off.”

“Crud. I’ve still got soap all over me. It itches.”

He left them, crossed the stage, and leaned into the opening over there. A moment later the light came on. Johnny relaxed slightly-only realizing as he did that part of his mind had expected something to jump the boy—and realized Billingsley was looking at him.

“What that kid did back there-the way he got out of that cell-that was impossible,”

Billingsley said.

“Then we must still be back there, locked up,” Johnny said. He thought he sounded all right-pretty much like himself-but what the old veterinarian was saying had already occurred to him. Even a phrase to describe it had occurred to him-unobtrusive miracles.

He would have written it down in his notebook, if he hadn’t dropped it beside Highway 50. “Is that what you think.”

“No, we’re here, and we saw him do what he did,” Billingsley said. “Greased himself up with soap and squeezed out through the bars like a watermelon seed.

Looked like it made sense, didn’t it. But I tell you, friend not even Houdini could have done it that way. Because of the head. He shoulda stuck at the head, but he didn’t.” He looked them over, one by one, finishing with Ralph Ralph was looking at Billingsley now instead of at the seats, but Johnny wasn’t sure he understood what the old guy was saying. And maybe that was for the best.

“What are you driving at.” Mary asked.

“I’m not sure,” Billingsley replied. “But I think we d do well to kind of gather ‘round young Master Carver He hesitated, then added: “The oldtimers say that any campfire does on a cold night.”

It picked the dead coyote up and examined it. “Soma dies; pneuma departs; only sarx remains,” it said in a voice that was a paradox: both sonorous and entirely without tone.

“So it has always been; so shall it always be; life sucks, then you die.”

It carried the animal downstairs, paws and shattered head dangling, body swaying like a bloody fur stole. The creature holding it stood for a moment inside the main doors of the Municipal Building, looking out into the blowy dark, listening to the wind. “So cah set!”

it exclaimed, then turned away and took the animal into the Town Office. It looked at the coathooks to the right of the door and saw immediately that the girl-Pie, to her brother—had been taken down and wrapped in a drape.

Its pale face twisted in anger as it looked at the child s covered form.

“Took her down!” it told the dead coyote in its arms “Rotten boy took her down! Stupid, troublemaking boy’ Yes. Feckless boy. Rude boy. Foolish boy. In some ways that last was the best, wasn’t it.

The truest. Foolish prayboy trying to make at least some part of it come right as if any part of a thing like this ever could be, as if death were an obscenity that could be scrubbed off life’s wall by a strong arm. As if the closed book could be reopened and read again, with a different ending.

Yet its anger was twisted through with fear, like a yellow stitch through red cloth, because the boy was not giving up, and so the rest of them were not giving up. They should not have dared to run from (Entragian her it them) even if their cell doors had been standing wide open. Yet they had. Because of the boy, the wretched over-blown prideful praying boy, who had had the insolence to take down his little cunt of a sister and try to give her something approximating a decent burial—A kind of dull warmth on its fingers and palms. It looked down and saw that it had plunged Ellen’s hands into the coyote’s belly all the way to the wrists.

It had intended to hang the coyote on one of the hooks, simply because that was what it had done with some of the others, but now another idea occurred. It carried the coyote across to the green bundle on the floor, knelt, and pulled the drape open. It looked down with a silent snarling mouth at the dead girl who had grown inside this present body.

That he should have covered her!

It pulled Ellen’s hands, now dressed in lukewarm blood-gloves, out of the coyote and laid the animal down on top of Kirsten. It opened the coyote’s jaws and placed them around the child’s neck. There was something both grisly and fantastic about this tableau de Ia mort; it was like a woodcut illustration from a black fairy-tale.

“Tak,” it whispered, and grinned. Ellen Carver’s lower lip split open when it did. Blood ran down her chin in an unnoticed rill. The rotten, presumptuous little boy would probably never view this revision of his revision, but how nice it was to imagine his reaction to it if he did! If he saw how little his efforts had come to, how easily respect could be snatched back, how naturally zero reasserted itself in the artificially concocted integers of men.

It pulled the drape up to the coyote’s neck. Now the child and the beast almost seemed to be lovers. How it wished the boy were here! The father, too, but especially the boy.

Because it was the boy who so badly needed instruction.

It was the boy who was the dangerous one.

There was scuttering from behind it, a sound too low to be heard… but it heard it anyway. It pivoted on Ellen’s knees and saw the recluse spiders returning. They came through the Town Office door, turned left, then streamed up the wall, over posters announcing forthcoming town business and soliciting volunteers for this fall’s Pioneer Days extravaganza. Above the one announcing an infor-mational meeting at which Desperation Mining Corpora-tion officials would discuss the resumption of copper mining at the so-called China Pit, the spiders re-formed their circle.

The tall woman in the coverall and the Sam Browne belt got up and approached them.

The circle on the wall trembled, as if expressing fear or ecstasy or perhaps both. The woman put bloody hands together, then opened them to the wall, palms out. “Ah lah.”

The circle dissolved. The spiders scurried into a new shape, moving with the precision of a drill-team put-ting on a halftime show. I, they made, then broke up, scurried, and made an H. An E followed, an A, another T, another E—It waved them off while they were still scrambling around up there, deciding how to fall in and make an R.

“En tow,” it said. “Ras.”

The spiders gave up on their R and resumed their faintly trembling circle.

“Ten ah.” it asked after a moment, and the spiders formed a new figure. It was a circle, the shape of the mi. The woman with Ellen Carver’s fingerprints looked at it for several moments, tapping Ellen’s fingers against Ellen’s collarbones, then waved Ellen’s hand at the wall. The figure broke up. The spiders began to stream down to the floor.

It walked back out into the hall, not looking at the spi-ders streaming about its feet. The spiders would be avail-able if it needed them, and that was all that mattered.

It stood at the double doors, once more looking out into the night. It couldn’t see the old movie house, but that was all right; it knew where The American West was, about an eighth of a mile north of here, just past the town’s only intersection. And, thanks to the fiddlebacks, she now knew where they were, as well.

Where he was. The shitting little prayboy.

Johnny Marinville told his story again-all of it, this time. For the first time in a good many years he tried to keep it short-there were critics all over America who would have applauded, partly in disbelief. He told them about stopping to take a leak, and how Entragian had planted the pot in his saddlebag while he was doing it. He told them about the coyotes-the one Entragian had seemed to talk to and the others, posted along the road at intervals like a weird honor guard-and about how the big cop had beaten him up. He recounted the murder of Billy Rancourt, and then, with no appreciable change in his voice, about how the buzzard had attacked him, seem-ingly at Collie Entragian’s command.

There was an expression of frank disbelief on Audrey Wyler’s face at this, but Johnny saw Steve and the skinny little girl he’d picked up somewhere along the way ex-change a look of sick understanding. Johnny didn’t glance around to see how the others were taking it, but instead looked down at his hands on his knees, concentrating as he did when he was trying to work through a tough patch of composition.

“He wanted me to suck his cock. I think that was sup-posed to start me gibbering and begging for mercy, but I didn’t find the idea as shocking as Entragian maybe expected.

Cocksucking’s a pretty standard sexual demand in situations where authority’s exceeded its normal bounds and restrictions, but it’s not what it looks like. On the surface, rape is about dominance and aggression. Underneath, though, it’s about fear-driven anger.”

“Thank you, Dr. Ruth,” Audrey said. “Next ye vill be discussink ze imberdence.”

Johnny looked at her without rancor. “I did a novel on the subject of homosexual rape.

Tiburon. Not a big critical success, but I talked to a lot of people and got the basics down pretty well, I think. The point is, he made me mad instead of scaring me. By then I’d decided I didn’t have a lot to lose, anyway. I told him that.I’d take his cock, all right, but once it was in my mouth I’d bite it off. Then… then…

He thought harder than he had in at least ten years, nod-ding to himself as he did.

“Then I threw one of his own nonsense-words back at him. At least it seemed like nonsense to me, or something in a made-up language. It had a guttural quality…

“Was it tak.” Mary asked.

Johnny nodded. “And it didn’t seem to be nonsense to the coyotes, or to Entragian, either. When I said it he kind of recoiled… and that’s when he called the buzzard bombing-strike down on me.”

“I don’t believe that happened,” Audrey said. “I guess you’re a famous writer or something, and you’ve got the look of a guy who isn’t used to having doubt cast, so to speak, but I just don’t believe it.”

“It’s what happened, though,” he said. “You didn’t see anything like that. Strange, aggressive animal behavior.”

“I was hiding in the town laundrymat,” she said. “I mean, hello. Are we talking the same language here.”

“But-”

“Listen, you want to talk about strange and aggressive animal behavior.” Audrey asked.

She leaned forward, eyes bright and fixed on Marinville’s. “That’s Collie you’re talking about. Collie as he is now. He killed everyone he saw, everyone who crossed his path.

Isn’t that enough for you. Do we have to have trained buz-zards, as well.”

“What about spiders.” Steve asked. He and the skinny girl were in the chair instead of sitting on the arms now, and Steve had his arm around her shoulders.

“What about them.”

“Did you see any spiders kind of… well… flocking together.”

“Like birds of a feather.” She was favoring him with a gaze that said CAUTION, LUNATIC AT WORK.

“Well, no. Wrong word. Travelling together. In packs. Like wolves. Or coyotes.”

She shook her head.

“What about snakes.”

“Haven’t’seen any of them, either. Or coyotes in town. Not even a dog riding a bike and wearing a party hat. This is all news to me.”

David came back onto the stage with a brown bag in his hands, the kind that convenience-store clerks put small purchases in-Twinkies and Slim Jims, cartons of milk, single cans of beer. He also had a box of Ritz crackers under his arm. “Found some stuff,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” Steve said, eyeing the box and the little bag. “That should certainly take care of hunger in America. What does it come to, Davey. One sardine and two crackers apiece, do you think.”

“Actually, there’s quite a lot,” David said. “More than you’d think. Um He paused, looking at them thought-fully, and a little anxiously. “Would anybody mind if I said a prayer before I hand this stuff around.”

“Like grace.” Cynthia asked.

“Grace, yeah.”

“It works for me,” Johnny said. “I think we can use all the grace we can lay our hands on.”

“Amen,” Steve said.

David put the bag and the box of crackers down between his sneakers. Then he closed his eyes and put his hands together again before his face, finger to finger. Johnny was struck by the kid’s lack of pretension. There was a simplicity about the gesture that had been honed by use into beauty.

“God, please bless this food we are about to eat,” David began.

“Yeah, what there is of it,” Cynthia said, and immedi-ately looked sorry that she had spoken. David didn’t seem to mind, though; might not have even heard her.

“Bless our fellowship, take care of us, and deliver us from evil. Please take care of my mom, too, if it’s your will.” He paused, then said in a lower voice: “It’s probably not, but please, if it’s your will. Jesus’ sake, amen.” He opened his eyes again.

Johnny was moved. The kid’s little prayer had touched him in the very place Entragian had tried and failed to reach.

Sure it did. Because he believes it. In his own humble way, this kid makes Pope John Paul in his fancy clothes and Las Vegas hat look like an Easter-and-Christmas Christian.

David bent over and picked up the stuff he’d found, seeming as cheerful as a soup-kitchen tycoon presiding over Thanksgiving dinner as he rummaged in the bag.

“Here, Mary.” He took out a can of Blue Fjord Fancy Sardines, and handed it to her.

“Key’s on the bottom.”

“Thank you, David.”

He grinned. “Thank Mr. Billingsley’s friend. It’s his food, not mine.” He handed her the crackers. “Pass em—“Take what you need and leave the rest,” Johnny said expansively. “That’s what us Friends of the Circle say… right, Tom.”

The veterinarian gave him a watery gaze and didn’t reply.

David gave a can of sardines to Steve and another to Cynthia.

“Oh, no, honey, that’s okay,” Cynthia said, trying to give hers back. “Me’n Steve can share.”

“No need to,” David said, “there’s plenty. Honest.”

He gave a can to Audrey, a can to Tom, and a can to Johnny. Johnny turned his over twice in his hand, as if trying to make sure it was real, before pulling off the wrapper, taking the key off the back, and inserting it in the tab of metal at the end of the can. He opened it. As soon as he smelled the fish, he was savagely hungry. If anyone had told him he would ever have such a reaction to a lousy can of sardines, he would have laughed.

Something tapped him on the shoulder. It was Mary, holding out the box of crackers. She looked almost ecstatic. Fish-oil ran down from the corner of her mouth to her chin in a shiny little runnel. “Go on,” she said. “They’re wonderful on crackers. Really!”

“Yep,” Cynthia said cheerfully, “everything tastes better when it shits on a Ritz, that’s what I always say.”

Johnny accepted the box, looked in, and saw there was only a single cylinder of waxed paper left, half-full. He took three of the round dark orange crackers. His growling stomach protested this forbearance, and he found himself unable to keep from taking three more before passing the box to Billingsley. Their eyes met for a moment, and he heard the old man saying not even Houdini could have done it that way. Because of the head. And of course there was the phone-three transmission-bars showing when it had been in the kid’s hands, none at all when he had held it in his own.

“This settles it once and for all,” Cynthia said, her mouth full. She sounded the way Mary looked. “Food is way better than sex.”

Johnny looked at David. He was sitting on one arm of his father’s chair, eating. Ralph’s can of sardines sat in his lap, unopened, as the man continued to look out over the rows of empty seats. David took a couple of sardines from his own can, laid them carefully on a cracker, and gave them to his dad, who begaz—to chew mechanically, doing it as if his only goal was to clear his mouth again. Seeing the boy’s expression of attentive love made Johnny uncomfortable, as if he were violating David’s privacy. He looked away and saw the box of crackers on the floor. Everyone was busy eating, and no one paid Johnny any particular attention when he picked up the box and looked into it.

It had gone all the way around the group, everyone had at least half a dozen crackers (Billingsley might have taken even more; the old goat was really cramming them in), but that cylinder of waxed paper was still in there, and Johnny could have sworn that it was still half-full; that the number of crackers in it had not changed at all.

Ralph recounted the crash of the Carver family as clearly as he could, eating sardines between bursts of talk. He was trying to clear his head, trying to come back-for David’s sake more than his own-but it was hard. He kept seeing Kirstie lying motionless at the foot of the stairs, kept seeing Entragian pulling Ellie across the holding area by the arm.

Don’t worry, David, I’ll be back, she had said, but to Ralph, who believed he had heard every turn and lift of Ellie’s voice in their fourteen years of marriage, she had sounded already gone. Still, he owed it to David to try and be here. To come back himself, from wherever it was his shocked, over-stressed-and guilty yes, there was that, too-mind wanted to take him.

But it was hard.

When he had finished, Audrey said: “Okay, no revolt from the animal kingdom, at least.

But I m very sorry about your wife and your little girl, Mr. Carver. You too, David.”

“Thanks,” Ralph said, and when David added, “My mom could still be okay,” he ruffled the boy’s hair and told him yes, that was right.

Mary went next, telling about the Baggie under the spare tire, the way Entragian had mixed “I’m going to kill you” into the Miranda warning, and the way he had shot her husband on the steps, completely without warning or provocation.

“Still no wildlife,” Audrey said. This now seemed to be her central concern. She tilted her sardine-can up to her mouth and drank the last of the fish oil without so much as a flicker of embarrassment.

“You either didn’t hear the part about the coyote he brought upstairs to guard us or you don’t want to hear it Mary said.

Audrey dismissed this with a wave of her hand. She was sitting down now, providing Billingsley with at least another four inches of leg to look at. Ralph was looking, too, but he felt absolutely nothing about what he was seeing. He had an idea there was more juice in some old car batteries than there was in his emotional wiring right now.

“You can domesticate them, you know,” she said “Feed them Gaines-burgers and train them like dogs, in fact.”

“Did you ever see Entragian walking around town with a coyote on a leash.” Marinville asked politely.

She gave him a look and set her jaw. “No. I knew him to speak to, like anyone else in town, but that was all. I spend most of my time in the pit or the lab or out riding I’m not much for town life.”

“What about you, Steve.” Marinville asked. “What’s your tale.”

Ralph saw the rangy fellow with the Texas accent exchange a glance with his girlfriend-if that was what she was-and then look back at the writer. “Well, first off, if you tell your agent I picked up a hitchhiker, I guess I’ll lose my bonus.”

“I think you can consider him the least of your worries at this point. Go on. Tell it.”

They both told it, alternating segments, both clearly aware that the things they had seen and experienced upped the ante of belief considerably. They both ex-pressed frustration at their inability to articulate how awful the stone fragment in the lab! storage area had been, how powerfully it had affected them, and neither seemed to want to come out and say what had happened when the wolf (they agreed that that was what it had been, not a coyote) brought the fragment out of the lab and laid it before them. Ralph had an idea it was something sexual, although what could be so bad about that he didn’t know.

“Still a doubting Thomas.” Marinville asked Audrey when Steve and Cynthia had finished. He spoke mildly, as if he did not want her to feel threatened. Of course he doesn’t want her to feel threatened, Ralph thought. There’s only seven of us, he wants us all on the same team. And he’s really not too bad at it.

“I don’t know what I am.” She sounded dazed. “I don’t want to believe any of this shit—just considering it freaks me severely-but I can’t imagine why you’d lie.” She paused, then said thoughtfully: “Unless seeing those people hung up in Hernando’s Hideaway…

I don’t know, scared you so badly that…

“That we started seeing things.” Steve asked.

She nodded. “The snakes you saw in the house-that at least makes sense of a sort. They feel this kind of weather coming as much as three days in advance sometimes, and go for any sheltered place. As for the rest… I don’t know. I’m a scientist, and I can’t see how-”

“Come on, lady, you’re like a kid pretending her mouth is stitched shut so she won’t have to eat the broccoli,” cynthia said. “Everything we saw dovetails with what Mr. Marinville there saw before us, and Mary saw before him and the Carvers saw before them. Right down to the knocked-over piece of picket fence where Entragian greased the barber, or whoever he was. So quit the I’m-a—scientist crap for awhile. We’re all on the same page; you’re the one that’s on a different one.

“But I didn’t see any of these things!” Audrey almost wailed.

“What did you see.” Ralph asked. “Tell us.”

Audrey crossed her legs, tugged at the hem of her dress “I was camping. I had four days off, so I packed up Sally and headed north, into the Copper Range. It’s my favorite place in Nevada.” Ralph thought she looked defensive as if she had taken a ribbing for this sort of behavior in the past.

Billingsley looked as if he had just wakened from a dream… one of having Audrey’s long legs wrapped around his scrawny old butt, perhaps. “Sally,” he said “How is Sally.”

Audrey gave him an uncomprehending look for a moment, then grinned like a girl.

“She’s fine.”

“Strain all better.”

“Yes, thanks. It was good liniment.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“What’re you talking about.” Marinville asked.

“I doctored her horse a year or so back,” Billingsley said. “That’s all.”

Ralph wasn’t sure he would let Billingsley work on his horse, if he had one; he wasn’t sure he would let Billingsley work on a stray cat… But he supposed the vet might have been different a year ago. When you made drinking a career, twelve months could make a lot of changes. Few of them for the better.

“Getting Rattlesnake back on its feet has been pretty stressful,” she said. “Lately it’s been the switchover from rainbirds to emitters. A few eagles died-”

“A few.” Billingsley said. “Come now. I’m no tree hugger, but you can do better than that.”

“All right, about forty, in all. No big deal in terms of the species; there’s no shortage of eagles in Nevada. As you know, Doe. The greens know it, too, but they treat each dead eagle as if it were a boiled baby, just the same What it’s really about-and all it’s about-is trying to stop us from mining the copper. God, they make me so tired sometimes. They come out here in their perky little foreign cars, fifty pounds of American copper in each 7 one, and tell us we’re earth-raping monsters. They-”

“Ma’am.” Steve said softly. “Pardon, but ain’t a one of us folks from Greenpeace.”

“Of course not. What I’m saying is that we all felt bad about the eagles-the hawks and the ravens too, for that matter-in spite of what the treehuggers say.” She looked around at them, as if to evaluate their impression of her honesty, then went on. “We leach copper out of the ground with sulfuric acid. The easiest way to apply it is with rainbirds-they look like big lawn-sprinklers. But rainbirds can leave pools. The birds see them, come down to bathe and drink, then die. It’s not a nice death, either.”

“No,” Billingsley agreed, blinking at her with his watery eyes. “When it was gold they were taking out of China Pit and Desatoya Pit-back in the fifties-it was cyanide in the pools. Just as nasty. No greenie-treehuggers back then, though. Must have been nice for the company, eh, Miss Wyler.” He got up, went to the bar, poured himself a finger of whiskey, and swallowed it like medicine.

“Could I have one about the same.” Ralph asked.

“Yessir, I b’Iieve you could,” Billingstey said. He handed Ralph his drink, then set out more glasses. He offered warm soft drinks, but the others opted for spring—water, which he poured out of a plastic jug.

“We pulled the rainbirds and replaced them with distribution heads and emitters,”

Audrey said. “It’s a drip-system, more expensive than rainbirds-a lot-but the birds don’t get into the chemicals.”

“No,” Billingsley agreed. He poured himself another tot. This he drank more slowly, looking at Audrey’s legs again over the rim of his glass.

A problem.

Maybe not yet… but there could be, if steps weren’t taken.

The thing that looked like Ellen Carver sat behind the desk in the now-empty holding area, head up, eyes gleaming lustrously. Outside, the wind rose and fell, rose and fell.

From closer by came the pad-click of paws ascending the stairs. They stopped outside the door. There came a coughing growl. Then the door swung open, pushed by the snout of a cougar. She was big for a female-perhaps six feet from snout to haunches, with a thick, switching tail that added another three feet to her overall length.

As the cougar came through the door and into the holding area, slinking low to the board floor, her ears laid back against her wedgeshaped skull, the thing cored into her head a little further, wanting to experience a bit of what the cougar was feeling as well as to draw her. The animal was frightened, sorting through the smells of the place and finding no comfort in any of them. It was a human den-place; but that was only part of her problem.

The cougar smelled a lot of trouble here. Gunpowder, for one thing; to the cougar, the smell of the fired guns was still sharp and acrid. Then there was the smell of fear, like a mixture of sweat and burned grass. There was the smell of blood, too-coyote blood and human blood, mixed together. And there was the thing in the chair, looking down at her as she slunk toward it, not wanting to go but not able to stop. It looked like a human being but didn’t smell like one. It didn’t smell like anything the cougar had ever scented before. She crouched by its feet and voiced a low whining, mewing sound.

The thing in the coverall got out of the chair, dropped to Ellen Carver’s knees, lifted the cougar’s snout, and looked into the cougar’s eyes. It began to speak rapidly in that other language, the tongue of the unformed, telling the cougar where she must go, how she must wait, and what she must do when the time came. They were armed and would likely kill the animal, but she would do her job first.

As it spoke, Ellen’s nose began to trickle blood. It felt the blood, wiped it away. Blisters had begun to rise on Ellen’s cheeks and neck. Fucking yeast infection! Noth-ing more than that, at least to start with! Why was it some women simply could not take care of themselves.

“All right,” it told the cougar. “Go on, now. Wait until it’s time. I’ll listen with you.”

The cougar made its whining, mewing sound again, licked with its rough tongue at the hand of the thing wearing Ellen Carver’s body, then turned and padded out of the room.

It resumed the chair and leaned back in it. It closed Ellen’s eyes and listened to the ceaseless rattle of sand against the windows, and let part of itself go with the animal.

“You had some downtime coming, you saddled up, and you went camping,” Steve said. “What then.”

“I spent four days in the Coppers. Fishing, taking plc-tures-photography’s what I do for fun. Great days. Then, — three nights ago, I came back. Went right to my house, which is north of town.”

“What brought you back.” Steve asked. “It wasn’t bad weather on the way, was it.”

“No. I had my little radio with me, and all I heard was fair and hot.”

“All I heard, too,” Steve said. “This shit’s a total mystery.”

“I had a meeting scheduled with Allen Symes the company comptroller, to summarize the switchover from rainbirds to heads and emitters. He was flying in from Arizona. I was supposed to meet him at Hernando’s Hide away at nine o’clock, the morning before last.

That’s what we’d taken to calling the lab and the offices out there on r the edge of town.

Anyway, that’s why I’m wearing this damned dress, because of the meeting and because Frank Geller told me that Symes doesn’t-didn’t-like women — . in jeans. I know everything was okay when I got back from my camping trip, because that’s when Frank called _ me and told me to wear a dress to the meeting. That night, around seven.”

“Who’s Frank Geller.” Steve asked.

“Chief mining engineer,” Billingsley said. “In charge of reopening the China Pit. At least he was.” He gave—Audrey a questioning look.

She nodded. “Yes. He’s dead.”

“Three nights ago,” Marinville mused. “Everything in Desperation was peachy three nights ago, at least as far as you know.”

“That’s right. But the next time I saw Frank, he was hung up on a hook. And one of his hands was gone.

“We saw him,” Cynthia said, and shivered. “We saw his hand, too. At the bottom of an aquarium.”

“Before all that, during the night, I woke up at least twice. The first time I thought it was thunder, but the second time it sounded like gunshots. I decided I’d been dreaming and went back to sleep, but that must be around the time he… got started. Then, when I got to the mining office…

At first, she said, she hadn’t sensed anything wrong—certainly not from the fact that Brad Josephson wasn’t at his desk. Brad never was, if he could help it. So she had gone out back to Hernando’s Hideaway, and there she had seen what Steve and Cynthia would come along and see themselves not long after-bodies on hooks. Appar-ently everyone who had come in that morning. One of them, dressed in a string tie and dress boots that would have tickled a country-and-western singer, had been Allen Symes. He had come all the way from Phoenix to die in Desperation.

“If what you say is right,” she said to Steve, “Entragian must’ve gotten more of the mining people later on. I didn’t count-I was too scared to even think of counting them-but there couldn’t have been more than seven when I was there. I froze. I might even have blacked out for a little while, I can’t say for sure. Then I heard gun-shots. No question what they were that time. And someone screaming. Then there were more gunshots and the screaming stopped.”

She went back to her car, not running-she said she was afraid that panic would take her over if she started running-and then drove into town. She intended to report what she’d found to Jim Reed. Or, if Jim was out on county business, as he often was, to one of his deputies, Entragian or Pearson.

“I didn’t run to the car and I didn’t go speeding into town, but I was in shock, just the same. I remember feeling around in the glove compartment for my ciga-rettes, even though I haven’t smoked in five years. Then I saw two people go running through the intersection. You know, under the blinker-light.”

They nodded.

“The town’s new police-car came roaring through right after them. Entragian was driving it, but I didn’t know that then. There were three or four gunshots, and the people he was chasing were thrown onto the sidewalk one right by the grocery store, the other just past it. There was blood. A lot. He never slowed, just went on through the intersection, heading west, and pretty soon I heaid more shots. I’m pretty sure I heard him yelling ‘Yee haw,’ too.

“I wanted to help the people he’d shot if I could. I drove up a little way, parked, and got out of my ca That’s probably what saved my life, getting out of my car. Because everything that moved, Entragian killed it Anyone. Anything. Everything. There were cars and trucks sitting dead in the street like toys, all zigzagged here and there, at least a dozen of them. There was an El Camino truck turned on its side up by the hardware store.

Tommy Ortega’s, I think. That truck was almost his girlfriend.”

“I didn’t see anything like that,” Johnny said. “The Street was clear when he brought me in.”

“Yeah-the son of a bitch keeps his room picked up you have to give him that. He didn’t want anyone wan dering into town and wondering what had happened that s what I think.

He hasn’t done much more than sweep the mess under the rug, but it’ll hold for awhile.

Espe cially with this goddam storm.”

“Which wasn’t forecast,” Steve said thoughtfully.

“—Right, which wasn’t forecast.”

“What happened then.” David asked.

“I ran up to the people he shot. One of them was Evelyn Shoenstack, the lady who runs the Cut n Curl and works part-time in the library. She was dead with her brains all over the sidewalk.”

Mary winced. Audrey saw it and turned toward her.

“That’s something else you need to remember. If he can see you and he decides to shoot you, you’re gone.” She passed her eyes over the rest of them, apparently wanting to be sure they didn’t think she was joking. Or exagger ating. “He’s a dead shot. Accent on the dead.”

“We’ll keep it in mind,” Steve said.

“The other one was a delivery guy. He was wearing a Tastykake uniform. Entragian got him in the head, too, but he was still alive.” She spoke with a calm Johnny rec-ognized.

He had seen it in Vietnam, in the aftermath of half a dozen firefights. He’d seen it as a noncombatant, of course, notebook in one hand, pen in the other, Uher tape—recorder slung over his shoulder on a strap with a peace sign pinned to it. Watching and listening and taking notes and feeling like an outsider. Feeling jealous. The bitter thoughts which had crossed his mind then-eunuch in the harem, piano-player in the whorehouse-now struck him as insane.

“The year I was twelve, my old man gave me a.22,” Audrey Wyler said. “The first thing I did was to go out-side our house in Sedalia and shoot a jay. When I went over to it, it was still alive, too, It was trembling all over, staring straight ahead, and its beak was opening and closing, very slowly. I’ve never in my whole life wanted so badly to take something back. I got down on my knees beside it and waited for it to be finished. It seemed that I owed it that much. It just went on trembling all over until it died. The Tastykake man was trembling like that. He was looking down the street past me, although there wasn’t anybody there, and his forehead was covered with tiny beads of sweat. His head was all pushed out of shape, and there was white stuff on his shoulder. I had this crazy idea at first that it was Styrofoam poppers-you know, the packing stuff people put in the box when they mail something fragile.-and then I saw it was bone chips. From his, you know, his skull.”

“I don’t want to hear any more of this,” Ralph said abruptly.

“I don’t blame you,” Johnny said, “but I think we need to know. Why don’t you and your boy take a little walk around backstage. See what you can find.”

Ralph nodded, stood up, and took a step toward David.

“No,” David said. “We have to stay.”

Ralph looked at him uncertainly.

David nodded. “I’m sorry, but we do,” he said.

Ralph stood where he was a moment longer, then sat down again.

During this exchange, Johnny happened to look over at Audrey. She was staring at the boy with an expression r that could have been fear or awe or both. As if she had never seen a creature quite like him. Then he thought of the crackers coming out of that bag like clowns out of the little car at the circus, and he wondered if any of them had ever seen a creature quite like David Carver. He thought of the transmission-bars, and Billingsley saying not even Houdini could have done it. Because of the head. They were concentrating on the buzzards and the spiders and the coyotes, on rats that jumped Out of stacks of tires and houses that might be full of rattlesnakes; most of all they were concentrating on Entragian, who spoke in tongues and shot like Buffalo Bill. But what about David. Just what, exactly, was he.

“Go on, Audrey,” Cynthia said. “Only maybe you could, you know, drop back from R to PG-13.” She lifted her chin in David’s direction. Audrey looked at her vaguely for a moment, not seeming to understand. Then she gathered herself and continued.

“I was kneeling there by the delivery guy, trying to think what I should do next-stay with him or run and call someone-when there were more screams and gun shots up on Cotton Street. Glass broke. There was a spun tering sound-wood-and then a big clanging, banging sound-metal. The cruiser started to rev again. It seems like that’s all I’ve heard for two days, that cruiser revving He peeled out, and then I could hear him coming my way I only had a second to think, but I don’t guess I would have done anything different even if I’d had longer. I ran “I wanted to get back to my car and drive away, but I didn’t think there was time. I didn’t think there was even time to get back around the corner and out of sight. So I went into the grocery store. Worrell’s. Wendy Worrell was lying dead by the cash register. Her dad-he’s the butcher as well as the owner-was sitting in the little office area, shot in the head. His shirt was off. He must have been just changing into his whites when it happened.”

“Hugh starts work early,” Billingsley said. “Lots earlier than the rest of his family.”

“Oh, but Entragian keeps coming back and checking,” Audrey said. Her voice was light, conversational, hysteri-cal. “That’s what makes him so dangerous. He keeps coming back and checking. He’s crazy and he has no mercy, but he’s also methodical.”

“He’s one sick puppy, though,” Johnny said. “When he brought me into town, he was on the verge of bleeding out, and that was six hours ago. If whatever’s happening to him hasn’t slowed down He shrugged.

“Don’t let him trick you,” she almost whispered.

Johnny understood what she was suggesting, knew from what he had seen with his own eyes that it was impossible, knew also that telling her so would be a waste of breath.

“Go on,” Steve said. “What then.”

“I tried to use the phone in Mr. Worrell’s office. It was dead. I stayed in the back of the store for about a half an hour. The cruiser went by twice during that time, once on Main Street, then around the back, probably on Mesquite, or Cotton again. There were more gunshots. I went upstairs to where the Worrells live, thinking maybe the phone up there would still be live. It wasn’t. Neither was Mrs. Worrell or the boy. Mert, I think his name was. She was in the kitchen with her head in the sink and her throat cut. He was still in bed. The blood was everywhere. I stood in his doorway, looking in at his posters of rock musicians and basketball players, and outside I could hear the cruiser going by again, fast, accelerating.

“I went down the back way, but I didn’t dare open the back door once I got there. I kept imagining him crouched down below the porch, waiting for me. I mean, I’d just heard him go by, but I still kept imagining him waiting for me.

“I decided the best thing I could do was wait for dark. Then I could drive away. Maybe.

You couldn’t be sure. Because he was just so unpredictable. He wasn’t always on Main Street and you couldn’t always hear him and you’d start thinking well, maybe he’s gone, headedfor the hills, and then he’d be back, like a damn rabbit coming out of a magician’s hat.

“But I couldn’t stay in the store. The sound of the flies was driving me crazy, for one thing, and it was hot. I don’t usually mind the heat, you can’t mind it if you live _ in central Nevada, but I kept thinking I smelled them. So I—waited until I heard him shooting somewhere over by the town garage-that’s on Dumont Street, about as far east as you can go before you run out of town-and then I left Stepping out of the market and back onto the sidewalk was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life Like being a soldier and stepping out into no-man’s-land At first I couldn’t move at all; I just froze right where I was. I remember thinking that I had to walk, I couldn t run because I’d panic if I did, but I had to walk. Except I couldn’t. Couldn’t. It was like being paralyzed.

Then I heard him coming back. It was weird. As if he sensed me Sensed someone, anyway, moving around while his back was turned. Like he was playing a new kind of kid s game, one where you got to murder the losers instead of just sending them back to the Prisoner’s Base, or some thing. The engine… it’s so loud when it starts to rev. So powerful. So loud. Even when I’m not hearing it. I m imagining I hear it. You know. It sounds kind of like a catamount getting f… like a wildcat in heat. That’s what I heard coming toward me, and still I couldn’t move I could only stand there and listen to it getting closer I thought about the Tastykake man, how he was shivering like the jay I shot when I was a kid, and that finally got me going. I went into the laundrymat and threw myself down on the floor just as he went by. I heard more screaming north of town, but I don’t know what that was about, because I couldn’t look up. I couldn’t get up I must have lain there on that floor for almost twenty mm utes, that’s how bad I was. I can say I was way beyond scared by then, but I can’t make you understand how weird it gets in your bead when you’re that way. I lay there on the floor, looking at dust-balls and mashed-up cigarette butts and thinking how you could tell this was a laundrymat even down at the level I was, because of the smell and because all of the butts had lipstick on them. I lay there and I couldn’t have moved even if I’d heard him coming up the sidewalk. I would have lain there until he put the barrel of his gun on the side of my head and-”

“Don’t,” Mary said, wincing. “Don’t talk about it.”

“But I can’t stop thinking about it!” she shouted, and something about that jagged on Johnny Marinville’s ear as nothing else she’d said had. She made a visible effort to get herself under control, then went on. “What got me past that was the sound of people outside. I got up on my knees and crawled over to the door. I saw four people across the street, by the Owl’s. Two were Mexican-the Escolla boy who works on the crusher up at the mine, and his girlfriend. I don’t know her name, but she’s got a blonde streak in her hair-natural, I’m almost sure-and she’s awfully pretty. Was awfully pretty. There was another woman, quite heavy, I’d never seen her before. The man with her I’ve seen playing pooi with you in Bud’s, Tom. Flip somebody.”

“Flip Moran. You saw the Flipper.”

She nodded. “They were working their way up the other side of the street, trying cars, looking for keys. I thought about mine, and how we could all go together. I started to get up. They were passing that little alley over there, the one between the storefront where the Italian restaurant used to be and The Broken Drum, and Entragian came roaring right out of the alley in his cruiser. Like he’d been waiting for them. Probably he was waiting for them. He hit them all, but I think your friend Flip was the only one killed outright.

The others just went skidding off to one side, like bowling-pins when you miss a good hit. They kind of grabbed each other to keep from falling down. Then they ran. The Escolla boy had his arm around his girlfriend. She was crying and holding her arm against her breasts. It was broken. You could see it was, it looked like it had an extra joint in it above the elbow. The other woman had blood pouring down her face. When she heard Entragian coming after them-that big, powerful engine—she spun around and held her hands up like she was a crossing guard or something. He was driving with his right hand and leaning out the window like a locomotive engineer. He shot her twice before he hit her with the car and ran her under. That was the first really good look I got at him, the first time I knew for sure who I was dealing with.”

She looked at them one by one, as if trying to measure the effect her words were having.

“He was grinning. Grinning and laughing like a kid on his first visit to Disney World.

Happy, you know. Happy.”

Audrey had crouched there at the laundrymat door, watching Entragian chase the Escolla boy and his girl north on Main Street with the cruiser. He caught them and ran them down as he had the older woman-it was easy to get them both at once, she said, because the boy was trying to help the girl, the two of them were running together. When they were down, Entragian had stopped, backed up, backed slowly over them (there had been no wind then, Audrey told them, and she had heard the sound of their bones snapping very clearly), got out, walked over to them, knelt between them, put a bullet in the back of the girl’s head, then took off the Escolla boy’s hat, which had stayed on through everything, and put a bullet in the back of his head.

“Then he put the hat back on him again,” Audrey said.

“If I live through this, that’s one thing I’ll never forget, no matter how long I live-how he took the boy’s hat off to shoot him, then put it back on again. It was as if he was saying he understood how hard this was on them, and he wanted to be as considerate as possible.”

Entragian stood up, turned in a circle (reloading as he did), seeming to look everywhere at once. Audrey said he was wearing a big, goony smile. Johnny knew the kind she meant. He had seen it. In a crazy way it seemed to him he had seen all of this-in a dream, or another life.

It’s just dem old kozmic Vietnam blues again, he told himself. The way she described the cop reminded him of certain stoned troopers he had run with, and certain sto-ries he had been told late at night-whispered tales from grunts who had seen guys, their own guys, do terrible, unspeakable things with that same look of immaculate good cheer on their faces. It’s Vietnam, that’s all, coming at you like an acid flashback.

All you need now to com-plete the circle is a transistor radio sticking out of some-one’s pocket, playing “People Are Strange” or “Pictures of Matchstick Men.”

But was that all. A deeper part of him seemed to doubt the idea. That part thought something else was going on here, something which had little or nothing to do with the paltry memories of a novelist who had fed on war like a buzzard on carrion… and had subsequently produced exactly the sort of bad book such behavior probably warranted.

All right, then-if it’s not you, what is it.

“What did you do then.” Steve asked her.

“Went back to the laundrymat office. I crawled. And when I got there, I crawled into the kneehole under the desk and curled up in there and went to sleep. I was very tired. Seeing all those things… all that death… it made me very tired.

“It was thin sleep. I kept hearing things. Gunshots, explosions, breaking glass, screams. I have no idea how much of it was real and how much was jvst in my mind. When I woke up, it was late afternoon. I was sore all over, at first I thought it had all been a dream, that I might even still be camping. Then I opened my eyes and saw where I was, curled up under a desk, and I smelled bleach and laundry soap, and realized I had to pee worse than ever in my life. Also, both my legs were asleep.

“I started wiggling out from under the desk, telling myself not to panic if I got a little stuck, and that was when I heard somebody come into the front of the store, and I yanked myself back under the desk again. It was him. I knew it just by the way he walked. It was the sound of a man in boots.

“He goes, ‘Is anyone here.’ and came up the aisle between the washers and dryers. Like he was following my tracks, In a way he was. It was my perfume. I hardly ever wear it, but putting on a dress made me think of it, made me think it might make things go a little smoother at my meeting with Mr. Symes.” She shrugged, maybe a little embarrassed.

“You know what they say about using the tools.”

Cynthia looked blank at this, but Mary nodded.

“It smells like Opium,’ he says. ‘Is it, miss. Is that what you’re wearing.’ I didn’t say anything, just curled up there in the kneehole with my arms wrapped around my head. He goes, ‘Why don’t you come out. If you come out, I’ll make it quick. If I have to find you, I 11 make it slow.’ And I wanted to come out, that’s how much he’d gotten to me. How much he’d scared me I believed he knew for sure that I was still in there some where, and that he was going to follow the smell of my perfume to me like a bloodhound, and I wanted to get out from under the desk and go to him so he’d kill me quick I wanted to go to him the way the people at Jonestown must have wanted to stand in line to get the Kool-Aid. Only I couldn’t. I froze up again and all I could do was lie there and think that I was going to die needing to pee. I saw the office chair-I’d pulled it out so I could get into the knee hole of the desk-and I thought, ‘When he sees where the chair is, he’ll know where I am.’ That was when he came into the office, while I was thinking that. ‘Is someone in here.’ he goes. ‘Come on out. I won’t hurt you. I just want to question you about what’s going on. We’ve got a big problem. — Audrey began to tremble, as Johnny supposed she had trembled while she had been hedgehogged in the kneehole of the desk, waiting for Entragian to come the rest of the way into the room, find her, and kill her. Except she was smiling, too, the kind of smile you could hardly bring yourself to look at.

“That’s how crazy he was.” She clasped her shaking hands together in her lap. “In one breath he says that if you come out he’ll reward you by killing you quick; in the next he says he just wants to ask you a few questions Crazy. But I believed both things at once.

So who’s the craziest one. Huh. Who’s the craziest one.

“He came a couple of steps into the room. I think it was a couple. Far enough for his shadow to fall over the desk and onto the other side, where I was. I remember thinking that if his shadow had eyes, they’d be able to see me. He stood there a long time. I could hear him breathing. Then he said ‘Fuck it’ and left. A minute or so later, I heard the street door open and close. At first I was sure it was a trick. In my mind’s eye I could see him just as clearly as I can see you guys now, opening the door and then closing it again, but still standing there on the inside, next to the machine with the little packets of soap in it. Standing there with his gun out, waiting for me to move. And you know what. I went on thinking that even after he started roaring around the streets in his car again, looking for other people to murder. I think I’d be under there still, except I knew that if I didn’t go to the bathroom I was going to wet my pants, and I didn’t want to do that. Huh-uh, no way. If he was able to smell my perfume, he’d smell fresh urine even quicker. So I crawled out and went to the bathroom-I hobbled like an old lady because my legs were still asleep, but I got there.”

And although she spoke for another ten minutes or so, Johnny thought that was where Audrey Wyler’s story essentially ended, with her hobbling into the office bath-room to take a leak. Her car was close by and she had the keys in her dress pocket, but it might as well have been on the moon instead of Main Street for all the good it was to her. She’d gone back and forth several times between the office and the laundrymat proper (Johnny didn’t doubt for a moment the courage it must have taken to move around even that much), but she had gone no farther. Her nerve wasn’t just shot, it was shattered. When the gunshots and the maddening, ceaselessly revving engine stopped for awhile, she would think about making a break for it, she said, but then she would imagine Entragian catching up to her, running her off the road, pulling her out of her car, and shooting her in the head. Also, she told them, she had been convinced that help would arrive. Had to.

Despera-tion was off the main road, yes, sure, but not that far off, and with the mine getting ready to reopen, people were always coming and going.

Some people had come into town, she said. She had seen a Federal Express panel truck around five that after-noon and a Wickoff County Light and Power pickup around noon of the next day, yesterday. Both went by on Main Street. She had heard music coming from the pickup. She didn’t hear Entragian’s cruiser that time, but five minutes or so after the pickup passed the laundrymat, there were more gunshots, and a man screaming “Oh, don’t! Oh, don’t!” in a voice so high it could have been a girl’s.

After that, another endless night, not wanting to stay, not quite daring to try and make a break for it, eating snacks from the machine that stood at the end of the dryers, drinking water from the basin in the bathroom. Then a new day, with Entragian still circling like a vulture.

She hadn’t been aware, she said, that he was bringing people into town and jugging them.

By then all she’d been able to think about were plans for getting away, none of them seeming quite good enough. And, in a way, the laundrymat had begun to feel like home…

to feel safe. Entragian had been in here once, had left, and hadn’t returned. He might never return.

“I hung onto the idea that he couldn’t have gotten everyone, that there had to be others like me, who saw what was going on in time to get their heads down. Some would get out. They’d call the State Police. I kept telling myself it was wiser, at least for the time being, to wait. Then the storm came, and I decided to try to use it for cover. I’d sneak back to the mining office. There’s an ATV in the garage of the Hideaway-”

Steve nodded. “We saw it. Got a little cart filled with rock samples behind it.”

“My idea was to unhook the gondola and drive north-west back to Highway 50. I could grab a compass out of a supply cabinet, so even in the blow I’d be okay. Of course I knew I might go falling into a crevasse or something, but that didn’t seem like much of a risk, not after what I’d seen. And I had to get out. Two nights in a laundrymat… hey, you try it. I was getting ready to do it when you two came along.”

“I damn near brained you,” Steve said. “Sorry about that.”

She smiled wanly, then looked around once more. “And the rest you know,” she said.

Idon’t agree, Johnny Marinville thought. The throb in his nose was increasing again. He wanted a drink, and badly. Since that would be madness-for him, anyway—he pulled the bottle of aspirin out of his pocket and took two with a sip of spring-water. I don’t think we know any-thing. Not yet, anyway.

Mary Jackson said: “What do we do now. How do we get out of this mess. Do we even try, or do we wait to be rescued.”

For a long time no one replied. Then Steve shifted in the chair he was sharing with Cynthia and said, “We can’t wait. Not for long, anyway.

“Why do you say that.” Johnny asked. His voice was curiously gentle, as if he already knew the answer to this question.

“Because somebody should’ve gotten away, gotten to a phone outside of town and pulled the plug on the murder—machine. No one did, though. Even before the storm started, no one did. Something very powerful’s happening here, and I think that counting on help from the outside may only get us killed. We have to count on each other, and we have to get out as soon as possible. That’s what I believe.”

“I’m not going without finding out what happened to my mom,” David said.

“You can’t think that way, son,” Johnny said.

“Yes I can. I am.”

“No,” Billingsley said. Something in his voice made David raise his head. “Not with other lives at stake. Not when you’re… special, the way you are. We need you, son.

“That’s not fair,” David almost whispered.

“No,” Billingsley agreed. His lined face was stony. “It ain’t.”

Cynthia said, “It won’t do your mother any good if you-and the rest of us-die trying to find her, kiddo. On the other hand, if we can get out of town, we could come back with help.”

“Right,” Ralph said, but he said it in a hollow, sick way.

“No, it’s not right,” David said. “It’s a crock of shit, that’s what it is.”

“David!”

The boy surveyed them, his face fierce with anger and sick with fright. “None of you care about my mother, not one of you. Even you don’t, Dad.”

“That’s untrue,” Ralph said. “And it’s a cruel thing to say.”

“Yeah,” David said, “but I think it’s true, just the same. I know you love her, but I think you’d leave her because you believe she’s already dead.” He fixed his father with his gaze, and when Ralph looked down at his hands, tears oozing out of his swollen eye, David switched to the vet-erinarian. “And I’ll tell you something, Mr. Billingsley. Just because I pray doesn’t mean I’m a comic-book wizard or something. Praying’s not magic. The only magic I know is a couple of card tricks that I usually mess up on anyway.”

“David-” Steve began.

“If we go away and come back, it’ll be too late to save her! I know it will be! I know that!” His words rang from the stage like an actor’s speech, then died away. Outside, the indifferent wind gusted.

“David, it’s probably already too late,” Johnny said. His voice was steady enough, but he couldn’t quite look at the kid as he said it.

Ralph sighed harshly. His son went to him, sat beside him, took his hand. Ralph’s face was drawn with weari-ness and confusion. He looked older now.

Steve turned to Audrey. “You said you knew another way out.”

“Yes. The big earthwork you see as you come into town is the north face of the pit we’ve reopened. There’s a road that goes up the side of it, over the top, and into the pit. There’s another one that goes back to Highway 50 west of here. It runs along Desperation Creek, which is just a dry—wash now. You know where I mean, Tom.”

He nodded.

“That road-Desperation Creek Road-starts at the motor-pool. There are more ATVs there.

The biggest only seats four safely, but we could hook up an empty gondola and the other three could ride in it.”

Steve, a ten-year veteran of load-ins, load-outs, snap decisions, and rapid getaways (often necessitated by the combination of four-star hotels and rock-band assholes), had been following her carefully. “Okay, what I suggest is this. We wait until morning. Get some rest, maybe even a little sleep. The storm might blow itself out by then-”

“I think the wind has let up a little,” Mary said. “Maybe that’s wishful thinking, but I really think it has.”

“Even if it’s still going, we can get up to the motor—pool, can’t we, Audrey.”

“I’m sure we can.”

“How far is it.”

“Two miles from the mining office, probably a mile and a half from here.”

He nodded. “And in daylight, we’ll be able to see Entragian. If we try to go at night, in the storm, we can’t count on that.”

“We can’t count on being able to see the… the wildlife, either,” Cynthia said.

“I’m talking about moving fast and armed,” Steve said. “If the storm plays out, we can head up to the embank-ment in my truck-three up front in the cab with me, four back in the box. If the weather is still bad-and I actually hope it will be-I think we should go on foot. We’ll attract less attention that way. He might never even know we’re gone.”

“I imagine the Escolla boy and his friends were thinking about the same way when Collie ran em down,” Billingsley said.

“They were headed north on Main Street,” Johnny said. “Exactly what Entragian would have been looking for. We’ll be going south, toward the mine, at least ini-tially, and leaving the area on a feeder road.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “And then bang, we’re gone.” He went over to David-the boy had left his father and was sitting on the edge of the stage, staring out over the tacky old theater seats-and squatted beside him. “But we’ll come back. You hear me, David. We’ll come back for your mom, and for anyone else he’s left alive. That’s a rock-solid promise, from me to you.

David went on staring out over the seats. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I know I need to ask God to help me straighten out my head, but right now I’m so mad at him that I can’t. Every time I try to compose my mind, that gets in the way. He let the cop take my mother! Why. Jesus, why.”

Do you know you did a miracle just a little while ago. Steve thought. He didn’t say it; it might only make David’s confusion and misery worse. After a moment Steve got up and stood looking down at the boy, hands shoved deep into his pockets, eyes troubled. -

The cougar walked slowly down the alley, head lowered, ears flattened. She avoided the garbage cans and the pile of scrap lumber much more easily than the humans had done; she saw far better in the dark. Still, she paused at the end of the alley, a low, squalling growl rising from her throat. She didn’t like this. One of them was strong-very strong.

She could sense that one’s force even through the brick flank of the building, pulsing like a glow. Still, there was no question of disobedience. The outsider, the one from the earth, was in the cougar’s head, its will caught in her mind like a fishhook. That one spoke in the language of the unformed, from the time before, when all animals except for men and the outsider were one.

But she didn’t like that sense of force. That glow.

She growled again, a rasp that rose and fell, coming more from her nostrils than her closed mouth. She slipped her head around the corner, wincing at a blast of wind that ruffled her fur and charged her nose with smells of brome grass and Indian paintbrush and old booze and older brick. Even from here she could smell the bitterness from the pit south of town, the smell that had been there since they had charged the last half-dozen blast-holes and reopened the bad place, the one the animals knew about and the men had tried to forget.

The wind died, and the cougar padded slowly down the path between the board fence and the rear of the theater. She stopped to sniff at the crates, spending more time on the one which had been overturned than on the one which still stood against the wall. There were many intermingled scents here. The last person who had stood on the over-turned crate had then pushed it off the one still against the wall. The cougar could smell his hands, a different, sharper smell than the others. A skin smell, undressed somehow, tangy with sweat and oils. It belonged to a male in the prime of his life.

She could also smell guns. Under other circumstances that smell would have sent her running, but now it didn’t matter. She would go where the old one sent her; she had no choice. The cougar sniffed the wall, then looked up at the window. It was unlocked; she could see it moving back and forth in the wind. Not much, because it was recessed, but enough for her to be sure it was open. She could get inside. It would be easy. The window would push in before her, giving way as man-things sometimes did.

No, the voice of the unformed said. You can’t.

An image flickered briefly in her mind: shiny things. Man-drinkers, sometimes smashed to bright fragments on the rocks when the men were done with them. She under-stood (in the way that a layperson may vaguely under-stand a complicated geometry proof, if it is carefully explained) that she would knock a number of these man—drinkers onto the floor if she tried to jump through the window. She didn’t know how that could be, but the voice in her head said it was, and that the others would hear them break.

The cougar passed beneath the unlatched window like a dark eddy, paused to sniff at the firedoor, which had been boarded shut, then came to a second window. This one was at the same height as the one with the man-drinkers inside of it, and made of the same white glass, but it wasn’t unlatched.

It’s the one you’ll use, though, the voice in the cougar’s head whispered. When I tell you it’s time, that’s the one YOU II use.

Yes. She might cut herself on the glass in the window, as she had once cut the pads of her feet on the pieces of man-drinkers up in the hills, but when the voice in her head told her that the time had come, she would jump at the window. Once inside, she would continue to do what the voice told her. It wasn’t the way things were supposed to be… but for now, it was the way things were.

The cougar lay below the bolted men’s-room window, curled her tail around her, and waited for the voice of the thing from the pit. The voice of the outsider. The voice of Tak. When it came, she would move. Until it did, she would lie here and listen to the voice of the wind, and smell the bitterness it brought with it, like bad news from another world.

Mary watched the old veterinarian take a bottle of whiskey out of the liquor cabinet, almost drop it, then pour himself a drink. She took a step toward Johnny and spoke to him in a low voice. “Make him stop. That’s the one with the drunk in it.”

He looked at her with raised eyebrows. “Who elected you Temperance Queen.”

“You shithead,” she hissed. “Don’t you think I know who got him started. Don’t you think I saw.”

She started toward Tom, but Johnny pulled her back and went himself. He heard her little gasp of pain and supposed he might have squeezed her wrist a little harder than was exactly gentlemanly. Well, he wasn’t used to being called a shithead. He had won a National Book Award, after all. He had been on the cover of Time. He had also fucked America’s sweetheart (well, maybe that was sort of retroactive, or something, she hadn’t really been America’s sweetheart since 1965 or so, but he had still fucked her), and he wasn’t used to being called a shit-head. Yet, Mary had a point. He, a man not unacquainted with the highways and byways of Alcoholics Anonymous, had nevertheless given that kiddy favorite, Mr. Drunken Doggy Doctor, his first shot of the evening. He’d thought it would pull Billingsley together, get him focused (and they had needed him focused, it was his town, after all) but hadn’t he also been a teeny-tiny bit pissed off at the tosspot vet awarding himself a loaded gun while The National Book Award Kid had to be contented with an unloaded.22.

No. No, dammit, the gun wasn’t the issue. Keeping the old man wired together enough to he of some help, that was the issue.

Well, maybe. Maybe. It felt a little bogus, hut you had to give yourself the benefit of the doubt in some situa-tions-especially the crazy ones, which this certainly was. Either way, it maybe hadn’t been such a good idea. He had had a large number of not-such-good—ideas in his life, and if anyone was qualified to recognize one when he saw it, John Edward Marinville was probably that fellow.

“Why don’t we save that for later, Tom.” he said, and smoothly plucked the glass of whiskey out of the vet’s hand just as he was bringing it to his lips.

“Hey!” Billingsley cawed, making a swipe at it. His eyes were more watery than ever, and now threaded with bright red stitches that looked like tiny cuts.”Ginime that!”

Johnny held it away from him, up by his own mouth, and felt a sudden, appallingly strong urge to take care of the problem in the quickest, simplest way. Instead, he put the glass on top of the bar, where ole Tommy wouldn’t be able to reach it unless he jumped around to one side or the other. Not that he didn’t think Tommy was capable of jumping for a drink; ale Tommy had gotten to a point where he would probably try to fart “The Marine Hymn” if someone promised him a double. Meantime, the others were watching, Mary rubbing her wrist (which was red, he observed-but just a little, really no big deal).

“Gimme!” Billingsley bawled, and stretched out one hand toward the glass on top of the bar, opening and closing his fingers like an angry baby that wants its sucker back. Johnny suddenly remembered how the actress-the one with the emeralds, the one who had been America’s number one honeybunny in days of yore, so sweet sugar wouldn’t melt in her snatch-had once pushed him into the pool at the Bel-Air, how everyone had laughed, how he himself had laughed as he came out dripping, with his bottle of beer still in his hand, too drunk to know what was happening, that the flushing sound he heard was the remainder of his reputation going down the shitter. Yes sir and yes ma’am. there he had been on that hot day in Los Angeles, laughing like mad in his wet Pierre Cardin suit, bottle of Bud upraised in one hand like a trophy, everyone else laughing right along with him; they were all having a great old time, he had been pushed into the pool just like in a movie and they were having a great old time, hardy-har and hidey ho, welcome to the wonderful world of too drunk to know better, let’s see you write your way out of this one, Marinville.

He felt a burst of shame that was more for himself than for Tom, although he knew it was Tom they were looking at (except for Mary, who was still making a big deal of her wrist), Tom who was still saying “Gimme that baack!” while he clenched and unclenched his hand like Baby Fucking Huey, Tom who was already shot on only three drinks. Johnny had seen this before, too; after a cer tam number of years spent swimming around in the bottle drinking everything in sight and yet seeming to remain almost stone-sober, your booze-gills had this weird ten-dency to suddenly seal themselves shut at almost the first taste. Crazy but true. See the amazing Late-Stage Alco — _ holic, folks, step right up, you won’t believe your eyes.

He put an arm around Tom, leaned into the brown aroma of Dant that hung around the man’s head like a fumey halo, and murmured, “Be a good boy now and you can have that shot later.”

Tom looked at him with his red-laced eyes. His chapped, cracked lips were wet with spit.

“Do you promise.” he whispered hack, a conspirator’s whisper, breathing out more fumes and running it all together, so it became Dervapromiz.

“Yes,” Johnny said. “I may have been wrong to get you started, but now that 1 have, I’m going to maintain you That’s all I’ll do, though. So have a little dignity, all right.”

Billingsley looked at him. Wide eyes full of water. Red lids. Lips shining. “1 can’t,” he whispered.

Johnny sighed and closed his eyes for a moment, When he opened them again, Billingsley was staring across the stage at Audrey Wy]er.

“Why does she have to wear her damned skirt so short.” he muttered. The smell of his breath was strong enough for Johnny to decide that maybe this wasn’t just a case of three drinks and you’re out; Old Snoop Doggy Doc had chipped himself an extra two or three somewhere along the line.

“I don’t know,” he said, smiling what felt like a big false gameshow host’s smile and leading Billingsley back toward the others, getting him turned away from the bar and the drink sitting on top of it. “Are you complaining.”

“No,” Billingsley said. “No, I… I just…” He looked nakedly up at Johnny with his wet drunk’s eyes. “What was I talking about.”

“It doesn’t matter.” A gameshow host’s voice was now coming out of the gameshow host’s grin: big, hearty, as sincere as a producer’s promise to call you next week. “Tell me something-why do they call that hole in the ground China Pit. I’ve been wondering about that.”

“I imagine Miss Wyler knows more about it than I do,” Billingsley said, but Audrey was no longer on the stage; as David and his father joined them, looking concerned, Audrey had exited stage-right, perhaps looking for some-thing else to eat.

“Oh, come on,” Ralph said, unexpectedly conversa-tional. Johnny looked at him and saw that, despite all his own problems, Ralph Carver understood exactly how the land lay with old Tommy. “I bet you’ve forgotten more local history than that young lady over there ever learned. And it is local history, isn’t it.”

“Well… yes. History and geology.”

“Come on, Tom,” Mary said. “Tell us a story. Help pass the time.”

“All right,” he said. “But it ain’t purty, as we say around here. — Steve and Cynthia wandered over. Steve had his arm around the girl’s waist; she had hers around his, with her fingers curled in one of his belt-loops.

“Tell it, oldtimer,” Cynthia said softly. “Go on.” So he did.

“Long before anyone ever thought of mining for copper here, it was gold and silver,”

Billingsley said. He eased himself down into the wing-chair and shook his head when David offered him a glass of spring-water. “That was long before open-pit mining was thought of, either. In 1858, an outfit called Diablo Mining opened Rattlesnake Number One where the China Pit is now. There was gold, and a good bit of it.

“It was a shaft-mine-back then they all were-and they kept chasing the vein deeper and deeper, although the company had to know how dangerous it was. The sur-face up there on the south side of where the pit is now ain’t bad-it’s limestone, skarn, and a kind of Nevada marble. You find wollastonite in it lots of times. Not valu-able, but pretty to look at.

“Underneath, on the north side of where the pit is now, that’s where they sank the Rattlesnake Shaft. The ground over there is bad. Bad for mining, bad for farming, bad for everything. Sour ground is what the Shoshone called it. They had a word for it, a good one, most Shoshone words are good ones, but I disremember it now. All of this is igneous leavings, you know, stuff that was injected into the crust of the earth by volcanic eruptions that never quite made it to the surface. There’s a word for that kind of leavings, but I disremember that one, too.”

“Porphyry,” Audrey called over to him. She was standing on the right side of the stage, holding a bag of pretzels. “Anyone want some of these. They smell a little funny but they taste all right.”

“No, thanks,” Mary said. The others shook their heads. “Porphyry’s the word,”

Billingsley agreed. “It’s full of valuable stuff, everything from garnets to uranium, but a lot of it’s unstable. The ground where they sank Rattle-snake Number One had a good vein of gold, but mostly it was hornfels-cooked shale. Shale’s a sedimentary rock, not strong. You can snap a piece of it in your hands, and when that mine got down seventy feet and the men could hear the walls groaning and squeaking around them, they decided enough was enough. They just walked out. It wasn’t a strike for better pay; they just didn’t want to die. So what the owners did was hire Chinese. Had them shipped on flatback wagons from Frisco, chained together like convicts. Seventy men and twenty women, all dressed in quilted pajama coats and little round hats. I imagine the owners kicked themselves for not thinking of using them sooner, because they had all sorts of advantages over white men. They didn’t get drunk and hooraw through town, they didn’t trade liquor to the Shoshone or Paiute, they didn’t want whores. They didn’t even spit tobacco on the sidewalks. Those were just the bonuses, though. The main thing was they’d go as deep as they were told to go, and never mind the sound of the hornfels squeaking and rubbing in the ground all around them. And the shaft could go deeper faster, because it didn’t have to be so big-they were a lot smaller than the white miners, and could be made to work on their knees. Also, any Chinese miner caught with gold-bearing rock on his person could be shot on the spot. And a few were.”

“Christ,” Johnny said.

“Not much like the old John Wayne movies,” Bill-ingsley agreed. “Anyway, they were a hundred and fifty feet down-almost twice as deep as when the white miners threw down their picks-when the cave-in hap-pened. There are all kinds of stories about it. One is that they dug up a waisin, a kind of ancient earth-spirit, and it tore the mine down. Another is that they made the tommyknockers mad.”

“What’re tommyknockers.” David asked.

“Troublemakers,” Johnny said. “The underground ver-sion of gremlins.”

“Three things,” Audrey said from her place at stage—right. She was nibbling a pretzel.

“First, you call that sort of mine-work a drift, not a shaft. Second, you drive a driftway,

you don’t sink it. Third, it was a cave-in, pure and simple. No tommyknockers, no earth—spirits.”

“Rationalism speaks,” Johnny said. “The spirit of the century. Hurrah!”

“I wouldn’t go ten feet into that kind of ground,” Audrey said, “no sane person would, and there they were, a hundred and fifty feet deep, forty miners, a couple of bossmen, at least five ponies, all of them chipping and tromping and yelling, doing everything but setting off dynamite. What’s amazing is how long the tommy—knockers protected them from their own idiocy!”

“When the cave-in finally did happen, it happened in what should have been a good place,” Billingsley re-sumed. “The roof fell in about sixty feet from the adit.” He glanced at David. “That’s what you call the entrance to a mine, son. The miners got up that far from below, and there they were stopped by twenty feet of fallen hornfeLs skarn, and Devonian shale. The whistle went off, and the folks from town came up the hill to see what had hap pened.

Even the whores and the gamblers came up. They could hear the Chinamen inside screaming, begging to be dug out before the rest of it came down. Some said they sounded like they were fighting with each other. But no one wanted to go in and start digging. That squealing sound hornfels makes when the ground’s uneasy was louder than ever, and the roof was bowed down in a couple of places between the adit and the first rockfall.”

“Could those places have been shored up.” Steve asked.

“Sure, but nobody wanted to take the responsibility for doing it. Two days later, the president and vice president of Diablo Mines showed up with a couple of mining engi neers from Reno. They had a picnic lunch outside the adit while they talked over what to do, my dad told me. Ate it spread Out Ofl linen while inside that shaft-pardon me the drift-not ninety feet from where they were, forty human souls were screaming in the dark.

“There had been cave-ins deeper in, folks said they sounded like something was farting or burping deep down in the earth, but the Chinese were still okay-still alive, anyway—behind the first rockfall, begging to be dug out. They were eating the mine-ponies by then, I imagine, and they’d had no water or light for two days The mining engineers went in-poked their heads in, anyway-and said it was too dangerous for any sort of rescue operation.”

“So what did they do.” Mary asked.

Billingsley shrugged. “Set dynamite charges at the front of the mine and brought that down, too. Shut her up.”

“Are you saying they deliberately buried forty people alive.” Cynthia asked.

“Forty-two counting the line-boss and the foreman,” Billingsley said. “The line-boss was white, but a drunk and a man known to speak foul language to decent women. No one spoke up for him. The foreman either, far as that goes.”

“How could they do it.”

“Most were Chinese, ma’am,” Billingsley said, “so it was easy.

The wind gusted. The building trembled beneath its rough caress like something alive.

They could hear the faint sound of the window in the ladies’ room banging back and forth. Johnny kept waiting for it to yawn wide enough to knock over Billingsley’s bottle booby-trap.

“But that’s not quite the end of the story,” Billingsley said. “You know how stuff like this grows in folks’ minds over the years.” He put his hands together and wiggled the gnarled fingers. On the movie screen a gigantic bird, a legendary death-kite, seemed to soar. “It grows like shadows.”

“Well, what’s the end of it.” Johnny asked. Even after all these years he was a sucker for a good story when he heard one, and this one wasn’t bad.

“Three days later, two young Chinese fellows showed up at the Lady Day, a saloon which stood about where The Broken Drum is now. Shot seven men before they were subdued. Killed two. One of the ones they killed was the mining engineer from Reno who recommended that the shaft be brought down.”

“Drift,” Audrey said.

“Quiet,” Johnny said, and motioned for Billingsley to go on.

“One of the ‘coolie-boys’-that’s what they were called-was killed himself in the fracas. A knife in the back, most likely, although the story most people like is that a professional gambler named Harold Brophy flicked a playing-card from where he was sitting and cut the man’s throat with it.

“The one still alive was shot in five or six places. That didn’t stop em from taking him out and hanging him the next day, though, after a little sawhorse trial in front of a kangaroo court. I bet he was a disappointment to them; according to the story, he was too crazy to have any idea what was happening. They had chains on his legs and cuffs on his wrists and still he fought them like a cata-mount, raving in his own language all the while.”

Billingsley leaned forward a little, seeming to stare at David in particular. The boy looked back at him, eyes wide and fascinated.

“All of what he said was in the heathen Chinee, but one idea everyone got was that he and his friend had gotten out of the mine and come to take revenge on those who first put them there and then left them there.”

Billingsley shrugged.

“Most likely they were just two young men from the so—called Chinese Encampment south of Ely, men not quite so passive or resigned as the others. By then the story of the cave-in had travelled, and folks in the Encampment would have known about it. Some probably had relatives in Desperation. And you have to remember that the one who actually survived the shootout didn’t have any En glish other than cuss-words. Most of what they got from him must have come from his gestures. And you know how people love that last twist of the knife in a tall tale Why, it wasn’t a year before folks were saying the Chi nese miners were still alive in there, that they could hear em talking and laughing and pleading to be let out moaning and promising revenge.”

“Would it have been possible for a couple of men to have gotten out.” Steve asked.

“No,” Audrey said from the doorway.

Billingsley glanced her way, then turned his puffy, red rimmed eyes on Steve. “I reckon,”

he said. “The two of them might’ve started back down the shaft together, while the rest clustered behind the rockfall. One of em might have remembered a vent or a chimney-”

“Bullshit,” Audrey said.

“It ain’t,” Billingsley said, “and you know it. This is an old volcano-field. There’s even extrusive porphyry east of town-looks like black glass with chips of ruby in it: garnets, they are. And wherever there’s volcanic rock there’s shafts and chimneys.”

“The chances of two men ever-”

“It’s just a hypothetical case,” Mary said soothingly “A way of passing the time, that’s all.”

“Hypothetical bullshit,” Audrey grumbled, and ate another dubious pretzel.

“Anyway, that’s the story,” Billingsley said, “miners buried alive, two get out, both insane by then, and they try to take their revenge. Later on, ghosts in the ground. If that ain’t a tale for a stormy night, I don’t know what is.” He looked across at Audrey, and on his face was a sly drunk’s smile. “You been diggin up there, miss. You new folks. Haven’t come across any short bones, have you.”

“You’re drunk, Mr. Billingsley,” she said coldly.

“No,” he said. “I wish I was, but I ain’t. Excuse me, ladies and gents. I get yarning and I get the whizzies. It never damn fails.”

He crossed the stage, head down, shoulders slumped, weaving slightly. The shadow which followed him was ironic both in its size and its heroic aspect. His hootheels clumped. They watched him go.

There was a sudden flat smacking sound that made them all jump. Cynthia smiled guiltily and raised her sneaker. “Sorry,” she said. “A spider. I think it was one of those fiddleheads.”

“Fiddlebacks,” Steve said.

Johnny bent down to look, hands planted on his legs just above the knees. “Nope.”

“Nope, what.” Steve asked. “Not a fiddleback.”

“Not a singleton,” Johnny said. “A pair.” He looked up, not quite smiling. “Maybe,” he said, “they’re Chinese fiddlebacks.”

Tak! Can ah wan me. Ah lah.

The cougar’s eyes opened. She got up. Her tail began switching restlessly from side to side. It was almost time. Her ears cocked forward, twitching, at the sound of someone entering the room behind the white glass. She looked up at it, all rapt attention, a net of measurement and focus. Her leap would have to be perfect to carry her through, and perfection was exactly what the voice in her head demanded.

She waited, that small, squalling growl once more rising up from her throat… but now it came out of her mouth as well as from her nostrils, because her muzzle was wrinkled back to show her teeth. Little by little, she began to tense down on her haunches.

Almost time.

Almost time. Tak ah ten.

Billingsiey poked his head into the ladies’ first, and shone his light at the window. The bottles were still in place. He had been afraid that a strong gust of wind might open the window wide enough to knock some of them off the ledge, causing a false alarm, but that hadn’t happened and now he thought it very unlikely that it would. The wind was dying.

The storm, a summer freak the likes of which he had never seen, was winding down.

Meantime, he had this prohlem. This thirst to quench.

Except, in the last five years or so, it had come to seem less and less like a thirst than an itch, as if he had con-tracted some awful form of poison ivy-a kind that affected one’s brain instead of one’s skin. Well, it didn’t matter, did it. He knew how to take care of his problem, and that was the important thing. And it kept his mind off the rest, as well. The madness of the rest. if it had just been danger, someone out of control waving a gun around, that he thought he could have faced, old or not, drunk or not. But this was nothing so cut and dried. The geologist woman kept insisting that it was, that it was all Entragian, but Billingsley knew better. Because Entragian was different now. He’d told the others that, and Ellen Carver had called him crazy. But.

But how was Entragian different. And why did he, Billingsley, somehow feel that the change in the deputy was important, perhaps vital, to them right now. He didn’t know.

He should know, it should be as clear as the nose on his face, but these days when he drank everything got swimmy, like he was going senile. He couldn’t even remember the name of the geologist woman’s horse, the mare with the strained leg—“Yes I can,” he murmured. “Yes I can, it was Was what, you old rummy. You don’t know, do you.

“Yes I do, it was Sally!” he cried triumphantly, then walked past the boarded-up firedoor and pushed his way into the men’s room. He shone his flashlight briefly on the potty. “Sally, that’s what it was!” He shifted his light to the wall and the smoke-breathing horse which galloped there. He couldn’t remember drawing it-he’d been in a blackout, he supposed-but it was indubitably his work, and not bad of its kind. He liked the way the horse looked both mad and free, as if it had come from some other world where goddesses still rode bareback, sometimes leaping whole leagues as they went their wild courses.

His memories suddenly clarified a little, as if the pic-ture on the wall had somehow opened his mind. Sally, yes. A year ago, give or take. The rumors that the mine was going to be reopened were just beginning to solidify into acknowledged fact. Cars and trucks had started to show up in the parking lot of the Quonset hut that served as mining headquarters, planes had started to fly into the airstrip south of town, and he had been told one night—right here in The American West, as a matter of fact, drinking with the boys-that there was a lady geologist living Out at the old Rieper place. Young. Single.

Suppos-edly pretty.

Billingsley needed to pee, he hadn’t lied, but that wasn’t his strongest need right now.

There was a filthy blue rag in one of the washbasins, the sort of thing you wouldn’t handle without tongs unless you absolutely needed to. The old veterinarian now plucked it up, exposing a bottle of Satin Smooth, rotgut whiskey if ever rotgut whiskey had been bottled… but any port in a storm.

He unscrewed the cap and then, holding the bottle in both hands because of the way they were shaking, took a long, deep drink. Napalm slid down his throat and exploded in his gut. It burned, all right, but what was that Patty Loveless song that used to play all the time on the radio. Hurt me, baby, in a real good way.

He chased the first gulp with a smaller sip (holding the bottle easier, now; the shakes were gone), then replaced the cap and put the bottle back in the sink.

“She called me,” he muttered. Outside the window, the cougar’s ears flicked at the sound of his voice. She tensed down a little more on her haunches, waiting for him to move closer to where she was, closer to where her leap would bring her. “Woman called me on the phone. Said her horse was a three-year-old mare named Sally. Yessir.”

He put the rag back over the bottle, not thinking about it, hiding by habit, his mind on that day last summer. He had gone out to the Rieper place, a nice adobe up in the hills, and a fellow from the mine-the black guy who later became the office receptionist, in fact-had taken him to the horse. He said Audrey had just gotten an urgent call and was going to have to fly off to company head-quarters in Phoenix. Then, as they walked to the stable, the black fellow had looked over Billingsley’s shoulder and had said…

“He said, ‘There she goes now,’” Billingsley mur-mured. He had again focused the light on the horse gal-loping across the warped tiles and was staring at it with wide, remembering eyes, his bladder temporarily for-gotten. “And he called to her.”

Yessir. Hi, Aud! he’d called, and waved. She had waved back. Billingsley had also waved, thinking the sto-ries were right: she was young, and she was goodlooking. Not moviestar-knockout goodlooking, but mighty fine for a part of the world where no single woman had to pay for her own drinks if she didn’t want to. He had tended her horse, had given the black man a liniment sample to put on, and later she’d come in herself to buy more. Marsha had told him that; he’d been over near Washoe, looking after some sick sheep. He’d seen her around town plenty since, though. Not to talk to, nosir, not hardly, they ran with different crowds, but he’d seen her eating dinner in the Antlers Hotel or the Owl’s, once at The Jailhouse in Ely; he’d seen her drinking in Bud’s Suds or the Drum with some of the other mining folk, rolling dice out of a cup to see who’d pay; in Worrell’s Market, buying gro-ceries, at the Conoco, buying gas, in the hardware store one day, buying a can of paint and a brush, yessir, he had seen her around, in a town this small and this isolated you saw everybody around, had to.

Why are you running all this through your dumb head. he asked himself, at last starting toward the potty. His boots gritted in dirt and dust, in grout that had crumbled out from between decaying tiles. He stopped still a little bit beyond aiming-and-shooting distance, flashlight beam shining on the scuffed tip of one boot while he pulled down his fly. What did Audrey Wyler have to do with Collie. What could she have to do with Collie. He didn’t recall ever seeing them together, or hearing that they were an item, it wasn’t that. So what was it. And why did his mind keep insisting it had something to do with the day he’d gone out to look at her mare. He hadn’t even seen her that day. Well… for a minute… from a distance…

He lined himself up with the potty and pulled out the old hogleg. Boy, he had to go.

Drink a pint and piss a quart, wasn’t that what they said.

Her waving… hurrying for her car… headed for the airstrip… headed for Phoenix.

Wearing a business-suity kind of rig, sure, because she wasn’t going to any Quonset hut mining headquarters out in the desert, she was going someplace where there was a carpet on the floor and the view was from more than three stories up. Going to see the big boys.

Nice legs she had m get-ting on but I am ‘t too old to appreciate a pretty knee… nice, yessir, but—And suddenly it all came together in his mind, not with a click but with a big loud ka-pow, and for a moment, before the cougar uttered her coughing, rising growl, he thought the sound of breaking glass was in his mind, that it was the sound of understanding.

Then the growl began, quickly rising to a howl that started him urinating in pure fear. For a moment it was impossible to associate that sound with anything which had ever walked on the earth. He wheeled, spraying a pin-wheel of piss, and saw a dark, green-eyed shape splayed out on the tiles. Bits of broken glass gleamed in the fur on its back. He knew what it was immediately, his mind quickly putting the shape together with the sound in spite of his startlement and terror.

The mountain lion-the flashlight showed it to be an extremely large female-raised her face to his and spat at him, revealing two rows of long white teeth. And the.30-.06 was back on the stage, leaned up against the movie screen.

“Oh my God no,” Billingsley whispered, and threw the flashlight past the cougar’s right shoulder, missing it intentionally. When the snarling animal snapped its head around to see what had been thrown at it, Billingsley broke for the door.

Cynthia was pouring herself a fresh glass of spring-water when the cougar let go its first cry. The sound of it unwound all her nerves and muscles. The plas tic bottle slipped from her relaxing fingers, hit the floor between her sneakers, and exploded like a balloon water bomb. She knew the sound for what it was-the yowl of a wildcat-immediately, although she had never heard such a sound outside of a movie theater. And, of course—weird but true-that was still the case.

He ran with his head down, tucking himself back into his pants with the hand that had been holding the flash-light. The cougar loosed another of its screaming, dis-traught cries-the shriek of a woman being burned or stabbed, deafening in the closed bathroom—and then launched herself at Billingsley, front paws splayed, long claws out. These sank through his shirt and into his back as he groped for the doorhandle, slicing through scant muscle, flaying him in bloodlines that came together like a V. Her big paws snagged in the waistband of his pants and held for a moment, pulling the old man-who was screaming himself now-back into the room. Then his belt broke and he went tumbling backward, actually landing on top of the cougar. He rolled, hit the glass—littered floor on his side, got to one knee, and then the cougar was on him. She knocked him onto his back and went for his throat. Billingsley got his hand up and she bit off the side of it. Blood beaded on her whiskers like skarn-garnets. Billingsley screamed again and shoved his other hand under the shelf of her chin, trying to push her back, trying to make her let go.

He felt her breath on his cheek, pushing like hot fingers. He looked past her shoulder and saw the horse on the wall, his horse, prancing wild and free. Then the cougar lunged forward again, shaking his hand.in her jaws, and there was only pain. It filled the world.

Then it was a man screaming. Tom Billingsley screaming.

She turned, saw Steve stare at Marinville, saw Mar-inville look away, cheeks leaden, lips pressed together but trembling all the same. In that moment the writer looked weak and lost and oddly female with his long gray hair, like an old woman who’s lost track not only of where she is but of who she is.

Still, what Cynthia felt most for Johnny Marinville in that moment was contempt.

Steve looked to Ralph, who nodded, grabbed his gun, and ran toward the stage-left opening. Steve caught up with him and they disappeared that way, running abreast. The old man screamed again, but this time the cry had a gruesome liquid quality, as if he were trying to gargle and scream at the same time, and it didn’t last long. The cougar yowled again.

Mary went to Steve’s boss and held out the shotgun she had up until then barely let go of.

“Take it. Go help them.”

He looked at her, biting his lip. “Listen,” he said. “I have lousy night-vision. I know how that sounds, but-”

The wildcat screamed, the sound so loud it seemed to drill into Cynthia’s ears.

Gooseflesh danced up her back.

“Yeah, like a gutless blowhard, that’s how it sounds,” Mary said, and turned away. That got Marinville moving, but slowly, like someone who has been roused from a deep sleep.

Cynthia saw Billingsley’s rifle leaning against the movie screen and didn’t wait for him.

She grabbed the gun and sprinted across the stage, going with it held high over her head like a freedom fighter in a poster-not because she wanted to look romantic but because she didn’t want to run into something and risk having the gun go off. She might shoot someone up ahead of her.

She ran past a couple of dusty chairs standing by what looked like a defunct lighting control-panel, then down the narrow hall they had taken to get to the stage in the first place. Brick on one side, wood on the other. A smell of old men with too much time on their hands. And too much jizz, judging from their video library.

There was another animal scream-much louder now—but no more noise from the old man.

Not a good sign. A door banged open not far ahead, the sound slightly hollow, the sound only a public restroom door can make when it’s banged against tile.

So, she thought. The men s or the women’s, and it must be the men’s, ‘cause that s where the toilet is.

“Look out!” Ralph’s voice, raised in a near-scream “Jesus Christ, Steve-”

From the cat there came a kind of spitting roar. There was a thud. Steve yelled, although whether in pain or sur prise she couldn’t tell. Then there were two deafening explosions.

The muzzle-flashes washed the wall outside the men’s room, for a moment revealing a fire extin guisher on which someone had hung a ratty old sombrero She ducked instinctively, then turned the corner into the bathroom. Ralph Carver was holding the door propped open with his body. The bathroom was lit only by the old man’s flashlight, which lay in the corner with the lens pointed at the wall, spraying light up the tiles and kicking back just enough to see by. That faint light and the rolling smoke from Ralph’s discharged rifle gave what she was looking at a sultry hallucinatory quality that made her think of her half a dozen experiments with peyote and mescaline.

Billingsley was crawling, dazed, toward the urinals, his head down so far it was dragging on the tiles. His shirt and undershirt had been torn open down the middle. His back was pouring blood. He looked as if he had been flogged by a maniac.

In the middle of the floor, a bizarre waltz was going on The cougar was up on her hind legs, paws on Steve Ames’s shoulders… Blood was pouring down her flanks but she did not seem to be seriously hurt. One of Ralph s shots must have missed her entirely; Cynthia saw that half of the horse on the wall had been blown to smithereens Steve had his arms crossed in front of his chest; his elbows and forearms were against the cougar’s chest.

“Shoot it!” he screamed. “For Christ’s sake, shoot it again!”

Ralph, his face a drawn mask of shadows in the faint light, raised the rifle, aimed it, then lowered it again with an anguished expression, afraid of hitting Steve.

The cat shrieked and darted its triangular head forward. Steve snapped his own head back. They tangoed drunk-enly that way, the cat’s claws digging deeper into Steve’s shoulders, and now Cynthia could see blood-blossoms spreading on the coverall he wore, around the places where the cat’s claws were dug in. Its tail was lashing madly back and forth.

They did another half-turn, and Steve collided with the potty in the middle of the floor. It crashed over on its side and Steve tottered on the edge of balance, frantically holding off the lunging cougar with his crossed arms. Beyond them, Billingsley had reached the far corner of the men’s room yet continued trying to crawl, as if the wildcat’s attack had turned him into some sort of windup toy, doomed to go on until he finally ran down.

“Shoot this fucking thing!” Steve yelled. He managed to get one foot between the lower part of the potty’s frame and its canvas catchbag without falling, but now he was out of backing room; in a moment or two the cougar would push him over. “Shoot it, Ralph, SHOOT IT!”

Ralph raised the rifle again, eyes wide, gnawing at his lower lip, and then Cynthia was slammed aside. She reeled across the room and caught the middle washbasin in a line of three just in time to keep herself from smashing face-first into the wall-length steel mirror. She turned and saw Marinville stride into the room with the stock of Mary’s gun laid against the inside of his right forearm. His matted gray hair swung back and forth, brushing his shoulders. Cynthia thought she had never seen anyone in her life who looked so terrified, but now that he was in motion, Marinville didn’t hesitate; he socked the shotgun’s double muzzle against the side of the animal’s head.

“Push!” he bellowed, and Steve pushed. The cat’s head rocked up and away from him. Its luminous eyes seemed to be lit from within, as if it were not a living thing at all but some sort of jack-o’-lantern. The writer winced, turned his head slightly away, and pulled both triggers. There was a deafening roar that dwarfed the sound of Carver’s rifle. Bright light leaped from the barrel, and then Cynthia smelled frying hair. The cougar fell side-ways, its head mostly gone, the fur on the back of its neck smouldering.

Steve waved his arms for balance. Marinville, dazed, made only a token effort to catch him, and Steve-her nice new friend-went sprawling.

“Oh Christ, I think I shit myself,” Marinville said, almost conversationally, and then: “No, I guess it was just the wind in the willows. Steve, you okay.”

Cynthia was on her knees beside him. He sat up, looked around dazedly, and winced as she tentatively pressed a finger to one of the blood-blossoms on the shoulder of the coverall.

“I think so.” He was trying to get up. Cynthia put an arm around his waist, braced, hauled. “Thanks, boss.”

“I don’t believe it,” Marinville said. He sounded com-pletely natural to Cynthia for the first time since she’d met him, like a man living a life instead of playing a role. “I don’t believe I did it. That woman shamed me into it. Steven, are you all right.”

“He’s got punctures,” Cynthia said, “but never mind that now. We have to help the old guy.”

Mary came in with Marinville’s gun-the one that was unloaded-held up by one shoulder.

Her hands were wrapped around the end of the barrel. To Cynthia her face looked almost eerily composed. She surveyed the scene—even more dreamlike now, not just tinged with gunsmoke but hazed with it-and then hurried across the room toward Billingsley, who made two more tired efforts to crawl into the wall and then collapsed from the knees upward, his face going last, first tilting and then sliding down the tiles.

Ralph reached for Steve’s shoulder, saw the blood there, and settled for gripping his arm high on the bicep. “I couldn’t,” he said. “I wanted to, but I couldn’t. After the first two rounds I was afraid of hitting you instead of it. When you finally got turned around so I could make a side-shot, Marinville was there.”

“It’s okay,” Steve said. “All’s well that ends well.”

“—1 owed it to him,” the writer said with a winning—quarterback expansiveness Cynthia found rather nause-ating. “If it hadn’t been for me, he wouldn’t have been here in the-”

“Get over here!” Mary said, her voice cracking. “Jesus Christ, oh man, he’s bleeding so bad!”

The four of them gathered around Mary and Bill-ingsley. She had gotten him onto his back, and Cynthia winced at what she saw. One of the old geezer’s hands was mostly gone-all the fingers but the pinky chewed to stubs-but that wasn’t the worst. His lower neck and shoulder had been flayed open. Blood was spilling out in freshets. Yet he was awake, his eyes bright and aware.

“Skirt,” he whispered hoarsely. “Skirt.”

“Don’t try to talk, oldtimer,” Marmnville said. He bent, scooped up the flashlight, and trained it on Billingsley. It made what had looked bad enough in the shadows even worse. There was a pond of blood beside the old guy’s head; Cynthia didn’t understand how he could still be alive.

“I need a compress,” Mary said. “Don’t just stand there, help me, he’s going to die if we don’t stop the bleeding right now!”

Too late, babe, Cynthia thought but didn’t say.

Steve saw what looked like a rag in one of the sinks and grabbed it. It turned out to be a very old shirt with Joe Camel on it. He folded the shirt twice, then handed it to Mary. She nodded, folded it once more, then pressed it against the side of Billingsley’s neck.

“Come on,” Cynthia said, taking Steve’s arm. “Back on stage. If there’s nothing else, I can at least wash those out with water from the bar. There’s plenty on the bottom “No,” the old man whispered. “Stay! Got to… hear this.”

“You can’t talk,” Mary said. She pushed harder on the side of his neck with the makeshift compress. The shirt was already darkening. “You’ll never stop bleeding if you talk.”

He rolled his eyes toward Mary. “Too late doc-torin.” His voice was hoarse. “Dyin.”

“No you’re not, that’s ridiculous.”

“Dyin,” he repeated, and moved violently beneath her hands. His torn back squelched on the tiles, a sound that made Cynthia feel nauseated. “Get down here… all of you, close…

and listen to me.”

Steve glanced at Cynthia. She shrugged, then the two of them knelt beside the old man’s leg, Cynthia shoulder to shoulder with Mary Jackson. Marinville and Carver leaned in from the sides.

“He shouldn’t talk,” Mary said, but she sounded doubtful.

“Let him say what he needs to,” Marinville said. “What is it, Tom.”

“Too short for business,” Billingsley whispered. He was looking up at them, begging them with his eyes to understand.

Steve shook his head. “I’m not getting you.”

Billingsley wet his lips. — ‘Only seen her once before in a dress. That’s why it took me too long to figure out… what was wrong.”

Astartled expression had come over Mary’s face. “That’s right, she said she had a meeting with the comp-troller! He comes all the way from Phoenix to hear her report on something important, something that means big bucks, and she puts on a dress so short she’ll be flashing her pants at him every time she crosses h-er legs. I don’t think so.”

Beads of sweat ran down Billingsley’s pale, stubbly cheeks like tears. “Feel so stupid,”

he wheezed. “Not all my fault, though. Nope. Didn’t know her to talk to. Wasn’t there the one time she came into the office to pick up more liniment. Always saw her at a distance, and out here women mostly wear jeans. But I had it. I did. Had it and then got drinking and lost track of it again.” He looked at Mary. “The dress would have been all right…

when she put it on. Do you see. Do you understand.”

“What’s he talking about.” Ralph asked. “How could it be all right when she put it on and too short for a business meeting later.”

“Taller,” the old man whispered.

Marinville looked at Steve. “What was that. It sounded like he said-”

“Ta lleb” Billingsley said. He enunciated the word carefully, then began to cough. The folded shirt Mary held against his neck and shoulder was now soaked. His eyes rolled back and forth among them. He turned his head to one side, spat out a mouthful of blood, and the coughing fit eased.

“Dear God,” Ralph said. “She’s like Entragian. Is that what you’re saying, that she’s like the cop.”

“Yes… no,” Billingsley whispered. “Don’t know for sure. Would have… seen that right away… but…

“Mr. Billingsley, do you think she might have caught a milder dose of whatever the cop has.” Mary asked.

He looked at her gratefully and squeezed her hand.

Marinville said, “She’s sure not bleeding out like the cop.

“Or not where we can see it,” Ralph said. “Not yet, anyway.

Billingsley looked past Mary’s shoulder. “Where…

where…

He began coughing again and wasn’t able to finish, but he didn’t need to. A startled look passed among them, and Cynthia turned around. Audrey wasn’t there.

Neither was David Carver.

The thing which had been Ellen Carver, taller now, still wearing the badge but not the Sam Browne belt, stood on the steps of the Municipal Building, staring north along the sand-drifted street, past the dancing blinker-light. It couldn’t see the movie theater, but knew where it was. More, it knew what was going on inside the movie theater. Not all, but enough to anger it. The cougar hadn’t been able to shut the drunk up in time, but at least she had drawn the rest of them away from the boy. That would have been fine, except the boy had eluded its other emissary as well, at least temporarily.

Where had he gone. It didn’t know, couldn’t see, and that was the source of its anger and fear. He was the source. David Carver. The goddamned shitting prayboy. It should have killed him when it had been inside the cop and had had the chance-should have shot him right on the steps of his own damned motor home and left him for the buzzards. But it hadn’t, and it knew why it hadn’t. There was a blankness about Master Carver, a shielded quality. That was what had saved Little Prayboy earlier.

Its hands clenched at its sides. The wind gusted, blowing Ellen Carver’s short, red-gold hair out like a flag. Why is he even here, someone like him. Is it an acci-dent. Or was he sent.

Why are you here. Are you an accident. Were you sent.

Such questions were useless. It knew its purpose, tak ah lah, and that was enough. It closed its Ellen-eyes, focusing inward at first, but only for a second-it was unpleasant.

This body had already begun to fail. It wasn’t a matter of decay so much as intensity; the force inside it-can de lach, heart of the unformed-was literally pounding it to pieces… and its replacements had es-caped the pantry.

Because of Prayboy.

Shitting Prayboy.

It turned its gaze outward, not wanting to think about the blood trickling down this body’s thighs, or the way its throat had begun to throb, or the way that, when it scratched Ellen’s head, large clumps of Ellen’s red hair had begun to come away under its nails.

It sent its gaze into the theater instead.

What it saw, it perceived in overlapping, sometimes contradictory images, all fragmentary. It was like watch-ing multiple TV screens reflected in a heap of broken glass. Primarily the eyes of the infiltrating spiders were what it was looking through, but there were also flies, cockroaches, rats peering out of holes in the plaster, and bats hanging from the auditorium’s high ceiling. These latter were projecting strange cool images that were actu-ally echoes.

It saw the man from the truck, the one who had come into town on his own, and his skinny little girlfriend leading the others back to the stage. The father was shouting for the boy, but the boy wasn’t answering. The writer walked to the edge of the stage, cupped his hands around his mouth, and screamed Audrey’s name. And Audrey, where was she. No way of telling for sure. It couldn’t see through her eyes as it saw through the eyes of the lesser creatures. She’d gone after the boy, certainly. Or had she already found him. It thought not. Not yet, anyway. That it would have sensed.

It pounded one hand against Ellen’s thigh in anxiety and frustration, leaving an instant bruise like a rotten place on the skin of an apple, then shifted focus once more. No, it saw, they were not all onstage; the prismatic quality of what it was seeing had misled it.

Mary was still with old Tom. If Ellen could get to her while the others were preoccupied with Audrey and David, it might solve all sorts of problems later on. It didn’t need her now, this current body was still service-able and would continue so for awhile, but it wouldn’t do to have it fail at a crucial moment. It would be better safer, if.

The image that came was of a spiderweb with many silk-wrapped flies dangling from it.

Flies that were drugged but not dead.

“Emergency rations,” the old one whispered in Ellen Carver’s voice, in Ellen Carver’s language. “Knick-knack paddywhack, give the dog a bone.”

And Mary’s disappearance would demoralize the rest take away any confidence they might have gained from escaping, finding shelter, and killing the cougar. It had thought they might manage that last; they were armed, after all, and the cougar was a physical being, sarx and soma and pneuma, not some goblin from the metaphysical wastes. But who could have imagined that pretentious old—windbag doing it.

He called the other one on a phone he had. You didn’t guess that, either. You didn’t know until the yellow truck came.

Yes, and missing the phone had been a lapse, some thing right in the front of Marinville’s mind that it should have picked up easily, but it didn’t hold that against itself At that point its main goals had been to get the old fool jugged and replace Entragian’s body before it could fall apart completely. It had been sorry to lose Entragian, too Entragian had been strong.

If it meant to take Mary, there would never be a better time than now. And perhaps while it did that, Audrey would find the boy and kill him. That would be won derful. No worries then. No sneaking around. It could replace Ellen with Mary and pick the rest off at its leisure And later. When its current (and limited) supply of bodies ran out. Snatch more travellers from the highway7 Perhaps. And when people, curious people, came to town to see what the hell was going on in Desperation, what then. It would cross that bridge when it got to the river it had little memory and even less interest in the future. For now, getting Mary up to China Pit would be enough.

Tak went down the steps of the Municipal Building, glanced at the police-car, then crossed the street on foot. No driving, not for this errand. Once it reached the far sidewalk, it began to run in long strides, sand spurting up from beneath sneakers which had been sprung out to the sides by feet which were now too big for them.

Onstage, Audrey could hear them still calling David’s name… and hers. Soon they would spread out and begin to search. They had guns, which made them dangerous. The idea of being killed didn’t bother her—not much, anyway, not as it had at first-but the idea that it might happen before she was able to kill the boy did. To the cougar, the voice of the thing from the earth had been like a fishhook; in Audrey Wyler’s mind it was like an acid-coated snake, winding its way into her, melt-ing the personality of the woman who had been here before it even as it enfolded her. This melting sensation was extremely pleasant, like eating some sweet soft food. It hadn’t been at first, at first it had been dismaying, like being overwhelmed by a fever, but as she collected more of the can tahs (like a child participating in a scavenger hunt), that feeling had passed. Now she only cared about finding the boy. Tak, the unformed one, did not dare approach him, so she must do it in Tak’s place.

At the top of the stairs, the woman who had been five—feet-seven on the day Tom Billingsley had first glimpsed her stopped, looking around. She should have been able to see nothing-there was only one window, and the only light that fell through its filthy panes came from the blinker and a single weak streetlamp in front of Bud’s Suds-but her vision had improved greatly with each can tah she had found or been given. Now she had almost the vision of a cat, and the littered hallway was no mys-tery to her.

The people who had hung out in this part of the build-ing had been far less neatness—minded than Billingsley and his crew. They had smashed their bottles in the cor-ners instead of collecting them, and instead of fantasy fish or smoke-breathing horses, the walls were decorated with broad Magic Marker pictographs. One of these, as primi-tive as any cave-drawing, showed a horned and mis-shapen child hanging from a gigantic breast. Beneath it was scrawled a little couplet: LITTLE BITTY BABY SMITTY, I SEEN YOU BITE YOUR MOMMY’ S TITTY. Paper trash-fast—food sacks, candy wrappers, potato-chip bags, empty cigarette packs and condom envelopes-had drifted along both sides of the hail. A used rubber hung from the knob of the door marked MANAGER, pasted there in its own long-dried fluids like a dead snail.

The door to the manager’s office was on her right. Across from it was one marked JANITOR. Up ahead on the left was another door, this one unmarked, and then an arch with a word written on it in ancient black paint half flaked away. Even her eyes couldn’t make out what the word was, at least from this distance, but a step or two closer and it came clear: BALCONY. The archway had been boarded up, but at some point the boards had been pulled away and heaped to either side of it. Hanging from the top of the arch was a mostly deflated sex-doll with blond Arnel hair, a red-ringed hole of a mouth, and a bald rudi-mentary vagina. There was a noose around its neck, the coils dark with age.

Also around its neck, hanging against the doll’s sagging plastic bosom, was a hand—lettered sign which looked as if it might have been made by a hard-working first-grader.

It was decorated with a red-eyed skull and crossbones at the top. DONT COME OUT HERE, it said. REDY TO FALL DOWN. IM SERIAS. Across from the balcony was an alcove which had once probably held a snackbar. At the far end of the hall were more steps go-ing up into darkness. To the projectionist’s booth, she assumed.

Audrey went to the door marked MANAGER, grasped the knob, and leaned her brow against the wood. Outside, the wind moaned like a dying thing.

“David.” she asked gently. She paused, listened. “David, do you hear me. It’s Audrey, David. Audrey Wyler. I want to help you.”

No answer. She opened the door and saw an empty room with an ancient poster for Bonnie and Clyde on the wall and a torn mattress on the floor. In the same Magic Marker, someone had written I’M A MIDNIGHT CREEPER, ALL-DAY SLEEPER below the poster.

She tried the janitor’s cubby next. It wasn’t much bigger than a closet and completely empty. The unmarked door gave on a room that had probably once been a supply closet.

Her nose (keener now, like her eyesight) picked up the aroma of long-ago popcorn. There were a lot of dead flies and a fair scattering of mouseshit, but nothing else.

She went to the archway, swept aside the dangling dolly with her forearm, and peered out. She couldn’t see the stage from back here, just the top half of the screen. The skinny girl was still yelling for David, but the others were silent. That might not mean anything, but she didn’t like not knowing where they were.

Audrey decided that the sign around the dolly’s neck was probably a true warning. The seats had been taken out, making it easy to see the way the balcony floor heaved and twisted; it made her think of a poem she’d read in college, something about a painted ship on a painted ocean. If the brat wasn’t out on the balcony, he was somewhere else.

Somewhere close. He couldn’t have gone far. And he wasn’t on the balcony, that much was for sure. With the seats gone, there was nowhere to hide, not so much as a drape or a velvet swag on the wall.

Audrey dropped the arm which had been holding the half-deflated doll aside. It swung back and forth, the noose around its neck making a slow rubbing sound. Its blank eyes stared at Audrey. Its hole of a mouth, a mouth with only one purpose, seemed to leer at her, to laugh at her. Look at what you’re doing, Frieda Fuckdolly seemed to be saying.

You were going to become the most highly paid woman geologist in the country, own your own con-sulting firm by the time you were thirty-five, maybe win the Nobel Prize by the time you were fifty… weren’t those the dreams. The Devonian Era scholar, the summa cum laude whose paper on tectonic plates was published in Geology Review, is chasing after little boys in crum-bling old movie theaters. And no ordinary little boy, either. He’s special, the way you always assumed you were special. And if you do find him, Aud, what then. He’s strong.

She grabbed the hangman’s noose and yanked hard, snapping the old rope and pulling out a pretty country-fair bunch of Arnel hair at the same time. The doll landed face-down at Audrey’s feet, and she drop-kicked it onto the balcony. It floated high, then settled. Not stronger than Tak, she thought. I don’t care what he is, he’s not stronger than Tak. Not stronger than the can tahs, either. It’s our town, now. Never mind the past and the dreams of the past; this is the present, and it’s sweet. Sweet to kill, to take, to own. Sweet to rule, even in the desert. The boy is just a boy. The others are only food. Tak is here now, and he speaks with the voice of the older age; with the voice of the unformed.

She looked up the hail toward the stairs. She nodded, her right hand slipping into the pocket of her dress to touch the things that were there, to fondle them against her thigh.

He was in the projection booth. There was a big padlock hanging on the door which led into the basement, so where else could he be.

“Him en tow,” she whispered, starting forward. Her eyes were wide, the fingers of her right hand moving ceaselessly in the pocket of her dress. From beneath them came small, stony clicking sounds.

3 The kids who partied hearty upstairs in The American West until the fire escape fell down had been slobs, but they had mostly used the hail and the manager’s office for their revels; the other rooms were relatively untouched, and the projectionist’s little suite-the booth, the office cubicle, the closet-sized toilet-stall-was almost exactly as it had been on the day in 1979 when five ciga-rette-smoking men from Nevada Sunlite Entertainment had come in, dismantled the carbon-filament projectors, and taken them to Reno, where they still languished, in a warehouse filled with similar equipment, like fallen idols.

David was on his knees, head down, eyes closed, hands pressed together in front of his chin. The dusty linoleum beneath him was lighter than that which surrounded him.

Straight ahead was a second lighter rectangle. It was here that the old projectors-clattery, baking-hot dinosaurs that raised the temperature in this room as high as a hun-dred and twenty on some summer nights-had stood. To his left were the cut-outs through which they had shone their swords of light and projected their larger-than-life shadows: Gregory Peck and Kirk Douglas, Sophia Loren and Jayne Mansfield, a young Paul Newman hustling pool, an old but still vital Bette Davis torturing her wheel-chair-bound sister.

Dusty coils of film lay here and there on the floor like dead snakes. There were old stills and posters on the walls. One of the latter showed Marilyn Monroe standing on a subway grating and trying to hold down her flaring skirt. Beneath a hand-drawn arrow pointing at her panties, some wit had printed Carefully insert Shaft A in Slot B, making sure tool is seated firmly & cannot slip out. There was an odd, decayed smell in here, not quite mildew, not quite dry-rot, either. It smelled curdled, like something that had gone spectacularly bad before finally drying up.

David didn’t notice the smell any more than he heard Audrey softly calling his name from the hall which ran past the balcony. He had come here when the others had run to Billingsley-even Audrey had gone as far as stage—left at first, perhaps to make sure they were all going down the hall-because he had been nearly overwhelmed by a need to pray.

He had an idea that this time it would just be a matter of getting to someplace quiet and opening the door-this time God wanted to talk to him, not the other way around. And this was a good place to do it. Pray in your closet and not in the street, the Bible said, and David thought that was excellent advice. Now that he had a closed door between him and the rest of them, he could open the one inside him.

He wasn’t afraid of being observed by spiders or snakes or rats; if God wanted this to be a private meeting, it would be a private meeting. The woman Steve and Cyn-thia had found was the real problem-she for some reason made him nervous, and he had a feeling she felt the same about him. He had wanted to get away from her, so he had slipped over the edge of the stage and run up the center aisle. He was under the sagging balcony and into the lobby before Audrey turned back from the stage-left side of the movie screen, looking for him. From the lobby he had come up to the second floor, and then had simply let some interior compass-or maybe it was Reverend Martin’s “still, small voice”-lead him up here.

He had walked across the room, barely seeing the old curls of film and the remaining posters, barely smelling the odor which might or might not have been celluloid fantasies stewed by the desert sun until they fell apart. He had stopped on this patch of linoleum, considering for a moment the large holes at the corners of the lighter rect-angle shape, holes where the kingbolts which held the projector firmly in place had once gone. They reminded him (I see holes like eyes) of something, something which fluttered briefly in his mind and then was gone. False memory, real memory, intuition. All of the above. None of the above. He hadn’t known, hadn’t really cared. His priority then had been to get in touch with God, if he could. He had never needed to more than now.

Yes, Reverend Martin said calmly inside his head. And this is where your work is supposed to pay off You keep in touch with God when the cupboard’s full so you can reach out to him when it’s empty. How many times did I tell you that last winter and this spring.

Alot. He just hoped that Martin, who drank more than he should and maybe couldn’t be entirely trusted, had been telling the truth instead of just mouthing what David’s dad called “the company line.” He hoped that with all his mind and heart.

Because there were other gods in Desperation.

He was sure of it.

He began his prayer as he always did, not aloud but in his mind, sending words out in clear, even pulses of thought: See in me, God. Be in me. And speak in me, if you mean to, if it’s your will.

As always at these times when he felt really in need of God, the front of his mind was serene, but the deeper part, where faith did constant battle with doubt, was terrified that there would be no answer. The problem was simple enough. Even now, after all his reading and praying and instruction, even after what had happened to his friend, he doubted God’s existence. Had God used him, David Carver, to save Brian Ross’s life.

Why would God do a wild and crazy thing like that. Wasn’t it more likely that what Dr. Waslewski had called a clinical miracle and what David himself had thought of as an answered prayer had actually been nothing more than a clinical coinci-dence.

People could make shadows that looked like ani-mals, but they were still only shadows, minor tricks of light and projection. Wasn’t it likely that God was the same kind of thing.

Just another legendary shadow.

David closed his eyes tighter, concentrating on the mantra and trying to clear his mind.

See in me. Be in me. Speak in me if it’s your will.

And a kind of darkness came down. It was like nothing he had ever known or experienced before. He sagged side-ways against the wall between two of the projection—cutouts, eyes rolling up to whites, hands falling into his lap. A low, guttural sound came from his throat. It was followed by sleeptalk which perhaps only David’s mother could have understood.

“Shit,” he muttered. “The mummy’s after us.

Then he fell silent, leaning against the wall, a silver runner of drool almost as fine as a spider’s thread slipping from one corner of what was, essentially, still a child’s mouth.

Outside the door which he had shut in order to be alone with his God (there had once been a bolt on it, but that was long gone), approaching footsteps could now be heard.

They stopped outside the door. There was a long, listening pause, and then the knob turned. The door opened. Audrey Wyler stood there. Her eyes widened when they happened on the unconscious boy.

She came into the fuggy little room, closed the door behind her, and looked for something, anything, to tilt and prop under the knob. A board, a chair. It wouldn’t hold them off for long if they came up here, but even a thin margin might mean the difference between success and failure at this stage. But there was nothing.

“Fuck,” she whispered. She looked at the boy, realizing without much surprise that she was afraid of him. Afraid even to go near him.

Tak ah wan! The voice in her head.

“Tak ah wan!” This time out of her mouth. Assent. Both helpless and heartfelt.

She went down the two steps into the projection-booth proper and crossed, wincing at each gritting step, to where David leaned on his knees against the wall with the cut—outs in it. She kept expecting his eyes to fly open-eyes that would be filled with an electric-blue power. The right hand in her pocket squeezed the can tahs together once more, drawing strength, then-reluctantly-left them.

She dropped to her own knees in front of David, her cold and shaking fingers clasped before her. How ugly he was! And the smell coming from him was even more offensive to her. Of course she had stayed away from him; he looked like a gorgon and stank like a stew of spoiled meat and sour milk.

“Prayboy,” she said. “Ugly little prayboy.” Her voice had changed into something that was neither male nor female. Black shapes had begun to move vaguely beneath the skin of her cheeks and forehead, like the beating membranous wings of small insects. “Here’s what I should have done the first time I saw your toad’s face.”

Audrey’s hands-strong and tanned, chipped here and there with scabs from her work—settled around David Carver’s throat. His eyelids fluttered when those hands shut off his windpipe and stopped his breath, but just once.

Just once.

“Why’d you stop.” Steve asked.

He stood in the center of the improbable onstage living room, beside the elegant old wetbar from the Circle Ranch. His strongest wish at that moment was for a fresh shirt.

All day he had been baking (to call the Ryder van s air conditioning substandard was actually to be chari table), but now he was freezing. The water Cynthia was dabbing onto the punctures in his shoulders ran down his back in chill streams. At least he’d been able to talk her out of using Billingsley’s whiskey to clean his wounds like a dancehall girl fixing up a cowpoke in an old movie “I thought I saw something.” Cynthia spoke in a low voice.

“Waddit a puddy-tat.”

“Very funny.” She raised her voice to a shout. “David. Dayyyy-vid!”

They were alone onstage. Steve had wanted to help Marinville and Carver look for the kid, but Cynthia had insisted on washing out what she called “the holes in your hide”

first. The two men had disappeared into the lobby. Marinville had a new spring in his step, and the way he carried his gun made Steve think of another kind of old movie-the kind where the grizzled but heroic white hunter slogs through a thousand jungle perils and finally succeeds in plucking an emerald as big as a doorknob from the forehead of an idol watching over a lost city.

“What. What did you see.”

“I don’t really know. It was weird. Up on the balcony. For a minute I thought it was—you’ll laugh-a floating body.”

Suddenly something in him changed. It wasn’t like a light going on; it was more as if one had been turned out. He forgot about the stinging of the wounds in his shoul-ders, but all at once his back was colder than ever. Almost cold enough to start him shivering. For the second time that day he remembered being a teenager in Lubbock, and how the whole world seemed to go still and deadly before the benders arrived from the plains, dragging their some-times deadly skirts of hail and wind. “I’m not laughing,” he said. “Let’s go on up there.”

“It was probably just a shadow.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Steve. You okay.”

“No. I feel like I did when we came into town.”

She looked at him, alarmed. “Okay. But we don’t have a gun—“Fuck that.” He grabbed her arm. His eyes were wide, his mouth pinched. “Now. Christ, something is really wrong. Can’t you feel it.”

“I… might feel something. Should I get Mary. She’s back with Billingsley-”

“No time. Come or stay here. Suit yourself.”

He shrugged up the sides of the coverall, jumped off the stage, stumbled, grabbed a seat in the front row to steady himself, then ran up the center aisle. When he got to its head, Cynthia was right behind him, once again not even out of breath. The chick could motor, you had to give her that.

The boss was just coming out of the box office, Ralph Carver behind him. “We’ve been looking out at the street,” Johnny said. “The storm is definitely… Steve. What’s wrong.”

Without answering, Steve looked around, spotted the stairs, and pelted up them. Part of him was still amazed at the speed with which this feeling of urgency had grabbed hold.

Most of him was just scared.

“David! David, answer if you hear me!”

Nothing. A grim, trash-lined hallway leading past what were probably the old balcony and a snackbar alcove Narrow stairs going farther up at the far end. No one here Yet he had a clear sense that there had been, and only a short time ago.

“David!” he shouted.

“Steve. Mr. Ames.” It was Carver. He sounded almost as scared as Steve felt. “What’s wrong. Has something happened to my son.”

“I don’t know.”

Cynthia ducked under Steve’s arm and hurried down the hallway to the balcony entrance.

Steve went after her A frayed length of rope was hanging down from the top of the arch, still swaying a little.

“Look!” Cynthia pointed. At first Steve thought the thing lying out there was a corpse, then registered the hair for what it was-some kind of synthetic. A doll. One with a noose around its neck.

“Is that what you saw.” he asked her.

“Yes. Someone could have ripped it down and then maybe drop-kicked it.” The face she turned up to his was drawn and tense. In a voice almost too low to hear, she whispered, “God, Steve, I don’t like this.”

Steve took a step back, glanced left (the boss and David’s father looked at him anxiously, clutching their weapons against their chests), then looked right. There his heart whispered… or perhaps it was his nose, picking up some lingering residue of Opium, that whispered. Up there. Must be the projection-booth.

He ran for it, Cynthia once more on his heels. He went up the narrow flight of stairs and was groping for the knob in the dimness when she grabbed the back of his pants to hold him where he was.

“The kid had a pistol. If she’s in there with him, she could have it now. Be careful, Steve.”

“David!” Carver bawled. “David, are you okay.”

Steve thought of telling Cynthia there was no time to be careful, that that time had passed when they lost track of David in the first place… but there was no time to talk, either.

He turned the knob and shoved the door hard with his shoulder, expecting to encounter either a lock or some other resistance, but there was none. The door flew open; he flew into the room after it.

Across from him, against the wall with the projection—slots cut into it, were David and Audrey. David’s eyes were half-open, but only their bulging whites showed. His face was a horrid corpse-color, still greenish from the soap but mostly gray. There were growing lavender patches beneath his eyes and high up on his cheekbones. His hands drummed spastically on the thighs of his jeans. He was making a soft choking sound. Audrey’s right hand was clamped around his throat, her thumb buried deep in the soft flesh beneath his jaw on the right, the fingers dig-ging in on the left. Her formerly pretty face was contorted in an expression of hate and rage beyond anything Steve had ever seen in his life-it seemed to have actually dark-ened her skin, somehow. In her left hand she held the.45 revolver David had used to shoot the coyote. She fired it three times, and then it clicked empty.

The two-step drop into the projection-booth almost cer-tainly saved Steve at least one more hole in his already perforated hide and might have saved his life. He fell for-ward like a man who has misjudged the number of stairs in a flight, and all three bullets went over his head. One thudded into the doorjamb to Cynthia’s right and show-ered splinters into her exotic hair.

Audrey voiced a ululating scream of frustration. She threw the empty gun at Steve, who simultaneously ducked and raised one hand to bat it away. Then she turned back to the slumping boy and began to throttle him with both hands again, shaking him viciously back and forth like a doll. David’s hands abruptly quit thrumming and simply lay on the legs of his jeans, as limp as dead starfish.

5 “Scared,” Bi LLingstey croaked. It was, so far as Mary could tell, the last word he ever managed to say His eyes looked up at her, both frantic and somehow con—fused. He tried to say something else and produced only a weak gargling noise.

“Don’t be scared, Tom. I’m right here.”

“Ah. Ah.” His eyes shifted from side to side, then came back to her face and seemed to freeze there. He took a deep breath, let it out, took a shallower one, let it out.

and didn’t take another.

“Tom.”

Nothing but a gust of wind and a hard rattle of sand from outside.

“Tom!”

She shook him. His head rolled limply from side to side, but his eyes remained fixed on hers in a way that gave her a chill; it was the way the eyes in some painted portraits seemed to stay on you no matter where you were in the room. Somewhere-in this building but sounding very far away, just the same-she could hear Marinville s roadie yelling for David. The hippie-girl was yelling, too Mary supposed she should join them, help them search for David and Audrey if they were really lost, but she was reluctant to leave Tom until she was positive he was dead She was pretty sure he was, yes, but it surely wasn’t like it was on TV, when you knew—“Help.”

The voice, questioning and almost too weak to be heard over the slackening wind, still made Mary jump and cup a hand over her mouth to stifle a cry.

“Help. Is anyone there. Please help me m hurt.’ Awoman’s voice. Ellen Carver’s voice. Christ, was it9 Although she had been in the company of David’s mother for only a short time, Mary was sure she was right almost as soon as the idea occurred to her. She got to her feet sparing another quick glance at poor Tom Billingsley s contorted face and staring eyes. Her legs had stiffened up on her and she staggered for balance.

“Please,” the voice outside moaned. It was in the alley which ran behind the theater.

“Ellen.” she asked, suddenly wishing she could throw her voice like a ventriloquist. It seemed she could trust nothing now, not even a hurt, scared woman. “Ellen, is that you.”

“Mary!” Closer now. “Yes, it’s me, Ellen. Is that Mary.”

Mary opened her mouth, then closed it again. That was Ellen Carver out there, she knew it, but…

“Is David all right.” the woman out there in the dark asked, then swallowed back a sob.

“Please say that he is.”

“So far as I know, yes.” Mary walked over to the broken window, skirting the pooi of the cougar’s blood, and looked out. It was Ellen Carver out there, and she didn’t look good.

She was slumped over her left arm, which she was holding against her breasts with her right. What Mary could see of her face was chalky white. Blood was trickling from her lower lip and from one nostril. She looked up at Mary with eyes so dark and desperate they seemed hardly human.

“How did you get away from Entragian.” Mary asked.

“I didn’t. He just… died. Bled everywhere and died. He was driving me in his car-taking me up to the mine, I think-when it happened. The car went off the road and turned over.

One of the back doors popped open. Lucky for me or I’d still be inside, caught like a bug in a can. I… I walked back to town.”

“What happened to your arm.”

“It’s broken,” Ellen said, hunching over it further. There was something unattractive about the pose; Ellen Carver looked like a troll in a fairy story, hunched protec-tively over a bag of ill-gotten gold. “Can you help me in. I want to see my husband, and I want to see David.”

Apart of Mary cried out in alarm at the idea, told her that something here did not compute, but when Ellen held up her good arm and Mary saw the dirt and blood smeared on it, and the way it was trembling with exhaustion, her fundamentally kind heart overruled the wary lizard of instinct living far back in her brain. This woman had lost her young daughter to a madman, had been in a car-wreck on the way to what would have most likely been her own murder, had suffered a broken arm, and walked through a howling windstorm back to a town filled mostly with corpses. And the first person she meets suddenly suc-cumbs to a bad case of the jimjams and refuses to let her in.

Uh-uh, Mary thought. No way. And, perhaps absurdly: That’s not how I was raised.

“You can’t come in this window. There’s a lot of broken glass. Something… an animal jumped through it Go a little farther along the back of the theater. You 11 come to the ladies’ room. That’s better. There are even some boxes to stand on. I’ll help you in.

Okay.”

“Yes. Thank you, Mary. Thank God I found you.” Ellen gave her a horrible, grimacing smile-gratitude, shoe licking humility, and what might have been terror all mixed together-and then shuffled on, head down, back bent. Twelve hours ago she had been Mrs. Suburban Wifemom, on her way to a nice middle-class vacation in Lake Tahoe, where she had probably planned to wear her new resort clothes from Talbot’s over her new under wear from Victoria’s Secret. Daytime sun with the kids nighttime sex with the comfy, known partner, postcards home to the friends-having a great time, the air is so clean, wish you were here. Now she looked and acted like a refugee, a no-age warhag fleeing some ugly desert bloodbath.

And Mary Jackson, that sweet little princess-votes Democratic, gives blood every two months, writes poetry-had actually considered leaving her out there to moan in the dark until she could consult with the men And what did that mean. That she had been in the same war, Mary supposed. This was how you thought, how you behaved, when it happened to you. Except she wouldn’t. Be damned if she would.

Mary crossed the hall, listening for any further shouts from the theater. There were none.

Then, just as she pushed open the ladies’-room door, three gunshots rang out. They were muffled by walls and distance, but there was no doubt about what they were. Shouts followed them. Mary froze in place, pulled in two different direc-tions with equal force.

What decided her was the soft sound of weeping from beyond the unlatched ladies—room window.

“Ellen. What is it. What’s wrong.”

“I’m stupid, that’s all, stupid! I bumped my bad arm putting up another crate to stand on!” The woman outside the window-she was just a blur of shadow on the frosted glass—began sobbing harder.

“Hold on, you’ll be inside in a jiffy,” Mary said, and hurried across the room. She set aside the beer-bottles Billingsley had put up on the windowledge and was lifting the hinged window, trying to think how best to help Ellen into the room without hurting her further, when she remembered what Billingsley had said about the cop: that he was taller. Dear God, David’s father had said, a look of thunderstruck understanding on his face. She ’s like Entragian. Like the cop.

Maybe she’s got a broken arm, Mary thought coldly, maybe she really does. On the other hand—On the other hand, hunching over like that was actually a very good way to disguise one’s true height, wasn’t it.

The lizard which usually kept its place on the back wall of her brain suddenly leaped forward, chirping in terror. Mary decided to pull back, take a moment or two and think things over… but before she could, her arm was seized by a strong hot hand. Another one banged open the window, and all of Mary’s strength ran out of her like water as she looked into the grinning face staring up at her. It was Ellen’s face, but the badge pinned below it (I see you’re an organ donor) belonged to Entragian.

It was Entragian. Collie Entragian somehow living in Ellen Carver’s body.

“No!” she screamed, yanking backward, heedless of the pain as Ellen’s fingernails punched into her arms and brought blood. “No, let go of me!”

“Not until I hear you sing ‘Leavin’ on a Jet Plane,’ you cunt,” the Ellen-thing said, and as it yanked Mary forward through the window it was still holding open, blood burst from both of Ellen’s nostrils in a gush. More blood trickled from Ellen’s left eye like gummy tears. “Oh the dawn is breakin’, it’s early morn…

Mary had a confused sensation of flying toward the board fence on the other side of the lane.

“The taxi-driver is blowin’ his horn…”

She managed to get one blocking arm up, but not enough; she took most of the impact with her forehead and went to her knees, head ringing. She could feel warmth spreading over her lips and chin. Join the nose-bleed club, babe, she thought, and staggered to her feet “Already I’m so lonesome! could cryyyyy…

Mary took two large, lunging strides, and then the cop (she couldn’t stop thinking of it as the cop, only now wearing a wig and falsies) grabbed her by the shoulder, almost tearing one arm off her shirt as it whirled Mary around.

“Let g-” Mary began, and then the Ellen-thing clipped her on the point of the chin, a crisp and elementary blo that put out the lights. It caught Mary under the arms on her way down and pulled her close. When it felt Mary s breath on Ellen’s skin, the faint anxiety which had been on Ellen’s face cleared.

“Gosh, I love that song,” it said, and slung Mary over her shoulder like a sack of grain.

“It turns me all gooshy inside. Tak!”

She disappeared around the corner with her burden Five minutes later, Collie Entragian’s dusty Caprice was once more on its way out to the China Pit, headlights cut ting through the swirls of sand driven by the dying wind As it drove past Harvey’s Small Engine Repair and the bodega beyond it, a thin blue-white sickle of moon appeared in the sky overhead.

Even in the boozy, druggy days, Johnny Mar-inville’s recall had been pretty relentless. In 1986, while riding in the back seat of Sean Hutter’s so-called Party—mobile (Sean had been doing the Friday-night East Hampton rounds with Johnny and three others in the big old ‘65 Caddy), he had been involved in a fatal accident. Sean, who had been too drunk to walk, let alone drive, had rolled the Partymobile over twice, trying to make the turn from Eggamoggin Lane onto Route B without slowing down. The girl sitting next to Hutter had been killed. Sean’s spine had been pulverized. The only Party—mobile he ran these days was a motorized Cadding wheel-chair, the kind you steered with your chin.

The others had suffered minor injuries; Johnny had considered himself lucky to get off with a bruised spleen and a broken foot. But the thing was, he was the only one who remembered what had happened. Johnny found this so curious that he had questioned the survivors carefully, even Sean, who kept crying and telling him to go away (Johnny hadn’t obliged until he’d gotten what he wanted; what the hell, he figured, Sean owed him). Patti Nickerson said she had a vague memory of Sean saying Hold on, we ’re going for a ride just before it happened, but that was it. With the others, recall simply stopped short of the accident and then picked up again at some point after it, as if their memories had been squirted with some amnesia-producing ink. Sean himself claimed to remember nothing after getting out of the shower that afternoon and wiping the steam off the mirror so he could see to shave. After that, he said, everything was black until he’d awakened in the hospital. He might have been lying about that, but Johnny didn’t think so. Yet he himself remembered everything. Sean hadn’t said Hold on, we’re going for a ride; he had said Hang on, we’re going wide. And laughing as he said it. He went on laughing even when the Partymobile had started to roll. Johnny remembered Patti screaming “My hair!

Oh shit, my hair!” and how she had landed on his crotch with a ball-numbing thud when the car went over. He remembered Bruno Gartner bellowing. And the sound of the Partymobile’s collapsing roof driv-ing Rachel Timorov’ s head down into her neck, splitting her skull open like a bone flower. A tight crunching sound it had been, the sound you hear in your head when you smash an icecube between your teeth. He remembered shit. He knew that was part of being a writer, but he didn’t know if it was nature or nurture, cause or effect. He sup-posed it didn’t matter. The thing was, he remembered shit even when it was as confusing as the final thirty seconds of a big fireworks display.

Stuff that overlapped seemed to automatically separate and fall into line even as it was happening, like iron filings lining up under the pull of a magnet. Until the night Sean Hutter had rolled his Party—mobile, Johnny had never wished for anything different. He had never wished for anything different since… until now. Right now a little ink squirted into the old memory cells might be just fine.

He saw splinters jump from the jamb of the projection—booth door and land in Cynthia’s hair when Audrey fired the pistol. He felt one of the slugs drone past his right ear. He saw Steve, down on one knee but apparently okay, bat away the revolver when the woman hucked it at him. She lifted her upper lip, snarled at Steve like a cornered dog, then turned back and clamped her hands around the kid’s throat again.

Go on! Johnny shouted at himself. Go on and help him! Like you did before, when you shot the cat!

But he couldn’t. He could see everything, but he couldn’t move.

Things began to overlap then, but his mind insisted on sequencing them, neatening them, giving them a coherent shape, like a narrative. He saw Steve leap at Audrey, telling her to quit it, to let the boy go, cupping her neck with one hand and grabbing her wrists with the other. At this same moment, Johnny was slammed past the skinny girl and into the room with the force of a stuntman shot from a cannon. It was Ralph, of course, hitting him from behind and bawling his son’s name at the top of his lungs.

Johnny flew out over the two-step drop, knees bent, convinced he was going to sustain multiple fractures at the very least, convinced that the boy was dying or already dead, convinced that Audrey Wyler’s mind had snapped under the strain and she had fallen under the delusion that David Carver was either the cop or a minion of the cop… and all the time his eyes went on recording and his brain kept on receiving the images and stonng them. He saw the way Audrey’s muscular legs were spread, the material of her skirt strained taut between them. He also saw he was going to touch down near her.

He landed on one foot, like a skater who has forgotten his skates. His knee buckled. He let it, throwing himself forward into the woman, grabbing her hair. She pulled her head back and snapped at his fingers. At the same instant (except Johnny’s mind insisted it was the next instant, even now wanting to reduce this madness to something coherent, a narrative which would flow in train), Steve tore her hands away from the kid’s throat.

Johnny saw the white marks of her palms and fingers there, and then his momentum was carrying him by. She missed biting him, which was the good news, but he missed his grip on her hair, which was the bad.

She voiced a guttural cry as he collided with the wall. His left arm shot out through one of the projection-slots up to the shoulder, and for one awful moment he was sure that the rest of him was going to follow it-out, down, goodbye. It was impossible, the hole was nowhere near big enough for that, but he thought it anyway.

At this same moment (his mind once more insisting it was the next moment, the next thing, the new sentence) Ralph Carver yelled: “Get your hands off my boy, bitch!”

Johnny retrieved his arm and turned around, putting his back to the wall. He saw Steve and Ralph drag the screaming woman off David. He saw the boy collapse against the wall and slide slowly down it, the marks on his throat standing out brutally. He saw Cynthia come down the steps and into the room, trying to look everywhere at once.

“Grab the kid, boss!” Steve panted. He was struggling with Audrey, one hand still clamped on her wrists and the other now around her waist. She bucked under him like a canyon mustang. “Grab him and get him out of h-”

Audrey screamed and pulled free. When Ralph made a clumsy attempt to get his arms around her neck and put her in a headlock, she shoved the heel of one hand under his chin and pushed him back. She retreated a step, saw David, and snarled again, her lips drawing away from her teeth. She made a move to go in his direction and Ralph said, “Touch him again and I’ll kill you. Promise.”

Ah, fuck this, Johnny thought, and snatched the boy up. He was warm and limp and heavy in his arms. Johnny’s back, already outraged by nearly a continent’s worth of motorcycling, gave a warning twinge.

Audrey glanced at Ralph, as if daring him to try and make good on his promise, then tensed to leap at Johnny. Before she could, Steve was on her once more. He grabbed her around the waist again, then pivoted on his heels, the two of them face to face. She was uttering a long and continuous caterwauling that made Johnny’s fill-ings ache.

Halfway through his second spin, Steve let her go. Audrey flew backward like a stone cast out of a sling, her feet stuttering on the floor, still caterwauling. Cynthia, who was behind her, dropped to her hands and knees with the speed of a born playground survivor.

Audrey collided with her shin-high and went over backward, sprawling on the lighter—colored rectangle where the second projector had rested. She stared up at them through the tumble of her hair, momentarily dazed.

“Get him out of here, boss!” Steve waved his hand at the steps leading up to the projection-booth door. “There’s something wrong with her, she’s like the animals!”

What do you mean, like them. Johnny thought. She fucking well is one. He heard what Steve was telling him, but he didn’t start toward the door. Once again he seemed incapable of movement.

Audrey scrambled to her feet, sliding up the corner of the room. Her upper lip was still rising and falling in a jagged snarl, eyes moving from Johnny and the uncon-scious boy cradled in his arms to Ralph, and then to Cyn-thia, who had now also gotten to her feet and was pressing against Steve’s side. Johnny thought briefly and longingly of the Rossi shotgun and the Ruger.44. Both were in the lobby, leaning against the ticket-booth. The booth had offered a good view of the street, but it had been easier to leave the guns outside it, given the limited space. And neither he nor Ralph had thought to bring them up here He now believed that one of the scariest lessons this nightmare had to offer was how lethally unprepared for survival they all were. Yet they had survived. Most of them, anyway. So far.

“Tak ah lah!”

The woman spoke in a voice that was both frightening and powerful, nothing like her earlier one, her storytelling voice-that one had been low and often hesitant. To Johnny, this one seemed only a step or two above a dog’s bark. And was she laughing. He thought that at least part of her was. And what of that strange, swimming darkness just below the surface of her skin. Was he really seeing that.

“Mm! Mm! Mm en tow!”

Cynthia cast a bewildered glance at Steve. “What’s she saying.” Steve shook his head.

She looked at Johnny.

“It’s the cop’s language,” he said. He cast his peculiarly efficient recollection back to the moment when the cop had apparently sicced a buzzard on him. “Timoh!” he snapped at Audrey Wyler. “Candy-latch!”

That wasn’t quite right, but it must have at least been close; Audrey recoiled, and for a moment there was a very human look of surprise on her face. Then the lip lifted again, and the lunatic smile reappeared in her eyes.

“What did you say to her.” Cynthia asked Johnny.

“I have no idea.”

“Boss, you gotta get the kid out. Now.”

Johnny took a step backward, meaning to do just that Audrey reached into the pocket of her dress as he did and brought it out curled around a fistful of something. She stared at him-only at him, now, John Edward Marinville, Distinguished Novelist and Extraordinary Thinker-with her snarling beast’s eyes. She held her hand out, wrist up “Can tah!” she cried… laughed. “Can tah, can tak’ What you take is what you are! Of course! Can tah, can tak, mi tow! Take this! So tah!”

When she opened her hand and showed him her offering, the emotional weather inside his head changed at once… and yet he still saw everything and sequenced it, just as he had when Sean Hutter’s goddamned Party—mobile had rolled over. He had kept on recording every-thing then, when he had been sure he was going to die, and he went on recording everything now, when he was suddenly consumed with hate for the boy in his arms and overwhelmed by a desire to put something-his motor-cycle key would do nicely-into the interfering little prayboy’s throat and open him like a can of beer.

He thought at first that there were three odd-looking charms lying on her open palm-the sort of thing girls sometimes wore dangling from their bracelets-But they were too big, too heavy. Not charms but carvings, stone carvings, each about two inches long. One was a snake. The second was a buzzard with one wing chipped off. Mad, bi—lging eyes stared out at him from beneath its bald dome. The third was a rat on its hind legs. They all looked pitted and ancient.

“Can tah!” she screamed. “Can tah, can tak, kill the boy, kill him now, kill him!”

Steve stepped forward. With her attention and concen-tration fully fixed on Johnny, she saw him only at the last instant. He slapped the stones from her hand and they flew into the corner of the room. One-it was the snake—broke in two. Audrey screamed with horror and vexation.

The murderous fury which had come over Johnny’s mind dissipated but didn’t depart completely. He could feel his eyes wanting to turn toward the corner, where the carvings lay. Waiting for him. All he had to do was pick them up.

“Get him the fuck out of here!” Steve yelled. Audrey lunged for the carvings. Steve seized her arm and yanked her back. Her skin was darkening and sagging. Johnny thought that the process which had changed her was now trying to reverse itself… without much success. She was what. Shrinking”. Diminishing. He didn’t know the right word, but—“GET HIM OUT!”

Steve yelled again, and smacked Johnny on the shoulder. That woke him up. He began to turn and then Ralph was there.

He had snatched David from Johnny’s arms almost before Johnny knew it was happening. Ralph bounded up the stairs, clumsy but pow—erful, and was gone from the projection-booth without a single look back.

Audrey saw him go. She howled-it was despair Johnny heard in that howl now-and lunged for the stones again. Steve yanked her back. There was a peculiar rip-ping sound as Audrey’s right arm pulled off at the shoulder. Steve was left holding it in his hand like the drumstick of an overcooked chicken.

Audrey seemed unaware of what had happened to her. One-armed, the right side of her dress now dark-ening with blood, she made for the carvings, gibbering in that strange language. Steve was frozen in place, look-ing at what he held-a lightly freckled human arm with a Casio watch on the wrist. The boss was equally frozen. If it hadn’t been for Cynthia, Steve later thought, Audrey would have gotten to the carvings again. God knew what would have happened if she had; even when she had been obviously focusing the power of the stones on the boss, Steve had felt the backwash. There had been nothing sexual about it this time. This time it had been about murder and nothing else.

Before Audrey could fall on her knees in the corner and grab her toys, Cynthia kicked them deftly away, sending them skittering along the wall with the cutouts in it. Audrey howled again, and this time a spray of blood came out of her mouth along with the sound.

She turned her head to them, and Steve staggered backward, actually raising a hand, as if to block the sight of her from his vision.

Audrey’s formerly pretty face now drooped from the front of her skull in sweating wrinkles. Her staring eye-balls hung from widening sockets. Her skin was black-ening and splitting. Yet none of this was the worst; the worst came as Steve dropped the hideously warm thing he was holding and she lurched to her feet.

“I’m very sorry,” she said, and in her choked and failing voice Steve heard a real woman, not this decaying monstrosity. “I never meant to hurt anyone. Don’t touch the can tahs. Whatever else you do, don’t touch the can tabs!”

Steve looked at Cynthia. She stared back, and he could read her mind in her wide eyes: I touched one. Twice. How lucky was Very, Steve thought. I think you were very lucky. I think we both were.

Audrey staggered toward them and away from the pitted gray stones. Steve could smell a rich odor of blood and decay. He reached out but couldn’t bring himself to actually put a restraining hand on her shoulder, even though she was headed for the stairs and the hallway headed in the direction Ralph had taken his boy. He couldn’t bring himself to do it because he knew his fin-gers would sink in.

Now he could hear a plopping, pattering sound as parts of her began to liquefy and fall off in a kind of flesh rain. She mounted the steps and lurched out through the door.