The Burning

Prologue

The Man from the Government stood at the edge of the windswept plain and stared out at the carnage before him.

It was far, far worse than he'd been led to believe. He'd been told the numbers, even had in his courier pouch a description of the worst atrocities, but there was no way that the scope of the massacre could have been conveyed by mere words.

Hardened though he was, he was forced to glance away, looking out beyond the bodies. To the north, he saw barren ground broken by occasional scrub brush. To the south, a series of small hills, beyond which was the lake. Overhead, the sky was full of clouds, their white innocence contrasting sharply with the rent flesh on the field below.

Girding himself, the Man allowed his gaze to fall once again upon the ground. The bodies-or body parts--lay strewn in every conceivable position, stacked several deep, human mixed with horse, testifying to the unbridled ferocity of the slaughter. Fingerless hands on the ends of severed arms emerged from the rotting viscera of gutted torsos; butchered legs rested atop mutilated man faces and hairy horse heads. The soil had been stained a deep dark crimson, but it was obvious that before the blood had sunk into the ground, there had been pools, rivers, lakes of it, blood so thick the red tide would have reached halfway up his boots.

As terrible as the sight was, the smell was a thousand times worse, an overwhelming stench of death and decomposition, shit and spoilage, piss and putrefaction.

The only noise on the plain was the cawing of carrion birds and the buzzing of flies, both so loud and overpowering that it was nearly impossible for him to maintain a coherent train of thought.

It was his job to scout the location, however, to determine what was needed and then report back. Holding his breath, the Man stepped forward, attempting to pace off the dimensions of the massacre site, though it was impossible to walk a straight line through the jumble of mangled corpses and the constant startled flight of birds and bugs. He advanced carefully, wincing as he trod upon a man's detached genitals, nearly slipping in a still-sticky patch and pitching forward into a battered chest cavity, saving himself only by crunching a skull with his right boot.

This would not be easy work. The crew would have to be much larger than originally anticipated, and once they were through, their silence had to be assured. If any of this ever got out ...

But of course it would not get out. President Grant had given strict orders that everything was to be conducted with the utmost secrecy, knowledge restricted to a very few, and it was the Man's duty to carry out the president's wishes and make sure that everything went as planned. Congress was watching Grant like a hawk, but out here in the wilderness there were no overseers and there was still some discretion. The president could deal with the situation in his own way.

Because General Grant knew war.

He knew bloodshed.

He knew horror.

He knew how to handle this.

The Man from the Government kept pacing, marking off measurements. He worked as fast as he could, but it was still close to sundown before he finally made his way back to his horse and took off across the countryside the way he had come.

He returned a month later, after the cleanup, after the bonfire. \

Bone fire.

It was the only way to dispose of the evidence, but smoke from the burning bodies had been visible for fifty miles, the foul-smelling black soot falling on homesteads more than a day away. They'd had to post a perimeter of guards to keep away people from the city curious to discover what was happening.

Other than that, though, the cleanup had gone well, and indeed, upon inspection, there appeared to be no evidence of the terrible events that had occurred on this spot. Holding his hat so it would not be blown off, the wind whipping his coattails, the Man from the Government strode over the ground, examining it as he went. He thought that at one point, near a patch of mud, the soil appeared redder than it should, but the variation in hue was so slight that it would be noticed only by someone specifically looking for it.

He was not slow, but he was methodical, and by the end of the afternoon, he was satisfied that any crisis had been averted, that there was no evidence anything out of the ordinary had occurred here.

He climbed upon his horse. It was a two-hour ride back to camp, another two days to a telegraph office. It was fortunate that the atrocity had happened here, far from civilization and the prying eyes of humanity.

He might not return to his camp and his aides until after nightfall, but that inconvenience was a small price to pay for the ease of completing this mission, which could have been so much more difficult.

Tomorrow, they would pull up stakes, and once he reached the telegraph office on Friday, he would cable to Hogue, who would inform the president that all was right, that the field had been successfully cleaned and cleared.

They were safe.

At least for now.

One

Flagstaff, Arizona

Angela Ramos stood in line in front of the university's housing office and, for the fourth time in ten minutes, looked at her watch. The line had not moved. Oh, there'd been a barely perceptible shift forward, but it was the result of students shuffling their feet, closing spaces, pressing ahead incrementally in the hope that it would somehow spur the workers in the office to speed up, and not the result of genuine progress.

She was here because she'd been promised on-campus housing, and she held in her hand a computer-printed form stating exactly that. But when she'd arrived and checked in at Admissions and Records, Angela had received notice that, due to overenrollment this semester, she would not be able to stay in one of the dorms. Preference had been given to upper-classmen and returnees, and spaces for freshmen were allotted based on distance from home. As a student from California, she hadn't traveled far enough to merit accommodations.

This is totally unacceptable, she planned to say when she finally reached the head of the line and got a chance to confront someone from the housing office. In her mind her voice came out firm, resolved and authoritative. She saw herself meeting the eyes of her nemesis and not backing down. It never worked out that way in real life, though, which was why she was using this time to prepare and practice the speech she would give to the university automaton she would have to face.

A kid about her age with a huge halo of retro hair who'd been walking down the sidewalk toward the back of the line stopped when he saw how many students were already ahead of him. "How long have you guys been standing on line?" he asked in a thick New York accent.

"A half hour," a clean-cut young man two spaces in front of her answered.

"Shit," the hairy guy said, and walked away.

Angela watched him go. Why, she wondered, did people from the East Coast say "on line" instead of "in line"? People in a queue weren't standing on a line. They were the line. The line consisted of the people in it.

Already she was getting annoyed by differences in speech patterns?

This was going to be one long afternoon.

It was one long afternoon. Either everyone in front of her had unbelievably complicated problems or the people who worked in the housing office were totally incompetent. By the time she was inside the building and at the front desk, her righteous diatribe had been honed to perfection. After hearing a brief outline of Angela's problem and determining that it wasn't the fault of misfiled paperwork, the secretary at the counter instructed her to go down the hall to office 1A and speak to a housing administrator.

Angela strode purposefully down the corridor, her confidence bolstered by the authoritative click of her heels on the institutionally tiled floor. Man, woman, it didn't matter; she'd been promised a dorm room and she was going to give the housing administrator living hell until her problem was solved. Only she didn't.

Edna Wong, the elderly woman in office 1A, was friendly, apologetic and understanding, and of course Angela did not have the heart to jump down the old lady's throat as she'd planned. In fact, as always, she eventually found herself apologizing to the housing administrator for being such an inconvenience. She hated herself for backing off even as she did it, but he alternative was to blame this nice old woman for something that wasn't her fault. She was just a part of the machine, a cog in the system.

"I can't tell you how sorry I am that this happened," he administrator told her. "Rest assured, you will get top priority for housing next semester. But there are roughly twenty-five or twenty-six of you who have been displaced because of this mix-up, and despite our promise to you, I'm afraid we simply have no more room in our on-campus housing."

"I understand, Mrs. Wong."

"Call me Edna."

"-but I have no place to live. I assumed that I did because of the letter you sent me, and now I'm ... 'm homeless. I literally have nowhere to go. I don't know anyone in this state, I've never been here before, I don't have much money. I would have made other arrangements or figured something out if I'd been told ahead of time, but this was just sprung on me today, and ..." She had to stop, look away and bite her lip to keep from crying. Mrs. Wong-Edna-reached across the desk and took Angela's hand in hers. "Don't worry. Everything will turn out all right."

Angela didn't trust herself to respond.

"I want to help you," the housing administrator said kindly. She rummaged through her desk. "Since you got such a raw deal, and it is our fault ..." She handed Angela a three-by-five card. "Here. We have a bulletin board out front with students looking for roommates, but I haven't put this on the board yet. Why don't you take it?"

Angela read the card:

Wanted. Female roommate, no smoking, no drugs, to share furnished two-bedroom, one-bath apartment. $275 per month plus utilities. Call Chrissie Paige. 555-4532.

"In fact, let me call for you. I know Chrissie."

The old woman not only set up an appointment for Angela to meet Chrissie Paige and look at the apartment that afternoon; she also vouched for her, promising that Angela was reliable and trustworthy and would make a great roommate. Just the fact that she was willing to stick her neck out left Angela feeling so grateful that she almost started crying again.

"Don't do that, dear," Edna begged. She smiled brightly. "Everything's going to be fine. Despite the

problems computers cause us, people can always find a way to work things out. NAU's a terrific school, and Flagstaff's a wonderful town. You're going to have a great semester. And next term, if you still want it, you'll be at the top of the list for on-campus housing."

"Thank you," Angela said. "Thank you so much."

"You're welcome, dear."

State Street was located off what must have once been the downtown district, just across old Route 66 north of the railroad tracks, a series of blocks with closely packed buildings of faded brick or rough-hewn stone, several of them three or four stories tall-what passed for high-rises here in Flagstaff. All looked as though they'd seen better days, but at the same time the area seemed on the upswing. There was a small used bookstore, a health-food store and a couple of cafe-style restaurants. There was even a church with gargoyles lining its peaked roof, and Angela didn't think she'd ever seen gargoyles in real life before.

The apartment building itself was an old Victorian home that had been subdivided and converted. The Standout in an eclectic neighborhood that included a couple of California-style Craftsman cottages, a Tudor home, a log cabin and several homes that appeared to be made from chunks of lava, the apartment house boasted not only an incredibly ornate facade but a rolling lawn three to four times bigger than any other on the block.

Chrissie Paige was waiting on that lawn when Angela drove up. Tan and frizzy-haired, wearing a halter top and cutoff jeans, the girl, like a lot of the students she'd seen in Flagstaff, looked somewhat hippieish, which Angela found oddly comforting. That era had always seemed to her to have a greater sense of community than the fractured world in which she'd grown up. There'd always been a few neohippies back in Los Angeles, but as with everything else, that look was inevitably tied to some musical movement or other. Appearance and culture in California were always connected to entertainment. Here the lifestyle seemed somehow more real, more organic. She liked that.

The other girl stood, brushed grass off her cutoffs. "Are you Angela? I'm Chrissie."

"Hi," Angela said shyly. She felt slightly embarrassed, as though Mrs. Wong-Edna-had forced Chrissie to see her against her will, but that wore off almost instantly as the other girl led her up the lawn to the house, chatting happily.

"This place was originally built by one of the Babitts. The Babbitts practically owned northern Arizona. You know Bruce Babbitt, who used to be secretary of the Interior? His family. You'll see buildings up here named after them, department stores, almost everything. Anyway, one of the cousins or something built this place fifty, sixty years ago. I think it was empty for a while-no one could afford it-so eventually someone bought the house and subdivided it into apartments. I think that was in the sixties or seventies. And here we are."

Chrissie led her through the front door into an elaborate foyer. Straight ahead was a long wide hallway, to the right a curving staircase of dark wood that led to the second floor. Angela followed Chrissie upstairs, where a hallway identical to the one on the ground floor stretched toward the rear of the house. They stopped at the first doorway on the left. "My place," Chrissie said, opening the door. "I don't know if Edna told you or if you saw the ad, but it's a two-bedroom. We have a small kitchen, one bathroom and a sitting room. As you can see, it's pretty big, though. And the view from the bedroom windows is awesome. You have to look over the roof of the house next door, but you get a perfect view of the San Francisco Peaks. By next month, they'll be covered with yellow when the aspens change. It's pretty spectacular."

Angela peeked through the open doorways of the two bedrooms. Both were larger than her bedroom back home, and though hers was the smaller of the two, it had a full-sized four-poster bed rather than the headboardless twin she was used to, and an oversized dresser that could hold twice as many clothes as she owned.

"Of course, you can decorate it however you want, put up pictures, posters, whatever."

"Wow," Angela said, walking into the room and looking around. She glanced out the window, saw the mountains. "Only two hundred and seventy-five for his place?"

"It's haunted," Chrissie offered.

Angela looked over at the other girl to see if she was joking, but she didn't appear to be.

"It's true. I mean, that's the rumor. I've never actually seen anything. But Winston and Brock, downstairs, say that they've heard stuff. Moaning, mumbling, the usual."

"Here?"

"No. In the house. Not your room in particular. In fact, I haven't heard any stories about our apartment at all. They all seem to be downstairs. But supposedly,

that's the reason the rent's so cheap. I don't believe in ghosts or gods or anything supernatural myself, but in the interest of full disclosure I thought I'd better lay all the cards on the table in case you're the type of person who worries about that stuff."

Angela was intrigued. "You don't believe in gods?

ny gods? Not even ... God?"

"No." Chrissie smiled. "You do, I take it?"

Angela reddened, feeling embarrassed, though there

was no reason why she should. "I'm Catholic," she admitted.

"That's cool. You don't preach to me, I won't preach to you, and the two of us should get along just fine."

Angela couldn't let it go. She was far from a perfect

catholic-she'd engaged in premarital sex, was vascilatingly pro-choice-but she couldn't imagine not believing in God at all. It seemed so ... brave.

"Just so you know, Winston and Brock are a couple, they're gay. So if you have a problem with that-"

"No, no. Of course not."

"Good

"But ... aren't you worried?" she asked Chrissie. "I mean, about not believing in God? What if you're wrong? After you're dead-"

"I'll be worm food. Listen," Chrissie said, "I really don't want to blow this up into a big deal here. If this is going to bother you ..."

"No," Angela assured her. "I was just ... curious."

"Are you sure? This is Flagstaff, average snowfall one million feet. We're going to be spending a lot of time indoors together this winter."

Angela smiled. "I'd like that."

Chrissie nodded, satisfied. "Okay, then. I'm the one actually renting this apartment-I'll be subletting it to you-so what I need is first-month's rent and a security deposit of, oh, a hundred bucks. If you can swing it. If not ..." She smiled. "Que sera, sera. I guess that part could be waived."

"Thank you," Angela said. "I'll take it. And I can give you a security deposit. I'm just ..." She took a deep breath. "You saved me. I was supposed to be in a dorm, and the computer screwed everything up, and I was going to be homeless. So I'm grateful."

"Good," Chrissie said. "I'm glad. I think this is going to work out just fine."

"Me, too." Angela took one last look out the window before following Chrissie back into the sitting room.

Snowstorms and gay neighbors and a haunted apartment and an atheist roommate.

She smiled.

This was going to be an exciting semester.

Two

Canyonlands National Park, Utah

The sun was angry when it awoke. Henry Cote could feel it through the curtains, see it in the thin sliver of white-hot light that entered through the part in the drapes and reproduced itself on the opposite wall, obliterating his photo of Sarah by the beach. The sun was angry and it was going to take out that anger on him. He knew it, he resigned himself to the fact, and though it was his day off and he'd been planning to sleep in, Henry forced himself to get out of bed. He needed his morning coffee, and he wanted to make it and drink it before the temperature in the cabin rose above eighty-five, before it got so hot that the sweat the steaming Folgers would coax from his pores decided to linger all day.

Lack of air-conditioning could do strange things to a man.

The park service had been promising them new accommodations for the past decade, but the funding bills passed by Congress always provided just enough money for maintenance, none for upgrades. Both Democrats and Republicans were equally guilty of publicly expressing support for the parks-and privately voting to finance pet projects in their home districts at the expense of much-needed improvements to places like Zion and Arches and Canyonlands. Which was why the American people had to pay to go to national parks these days.

Even though they owned the parks. Fucking country was going to hell in a handbasket. As he walked over to the kitchenette, he looked at the photo of Sarah, wondering what she was doing now, where she lived, whom she was with. Whoever it was, he could be pretty damn sure it wasn't a ranger or other park-service employee. Not only had Sarah hated the low pay; she'd despised the lifestyle as well, complaining every single night about the heat or the cold, the rain or the snow, the lack of TV or radio reception or, most frequently, the distance from civilization. Complaining.

Every single night.

Sarah was not temperamentally suited to a life outdoors, was the type of person for whom the lack of a local Nordstrom was considered a severe hardship, while he felt uncomfortable and unhappy in any city with a population greater than four digits. Which was why their marriage had been so short. And so disastrous.

He plugged in the coffeemaker, and thought of the dream he'd had last night as he shook the old grounds in the filter and poured in water. It had been a long time since he'd shown any interest in sex. That wasn't a complaint, merely an observation. Hell, if he'd had more of a libido, perhaps he and Sarah could have weathered a few of those early storms and their relationship would still be standing today. But the problem was, and always had been, that he ended up thinking of the parts of a woman's body as ... well, parts of a woman's body. The vagina was a tube not unlike the intestine or trachea. The breasts were fatty (issue covered in skin. The ass, of course, was the hind end of the gastrointestinal tract and the location where waste elimination occurred.

Put simply, it was hard for him to become aroused when his view of sex was so clinical and detached.

But last night, he'd dreamed of two Oriental beauties who had come to his cabin from the desert, twins of indeterminate age who had strolled naked toward him across the sand, their forms gradually coalescing from the shimmering heat waves like the rider in Lawrence of Arabia. They were beautiful. He'd fought in Vietnam but, unlike most of his fellow soldiers, had not partaken of any of the local feminine pleasures. No reason, really. Oh, maybe he'd taken the training films about diseases a little more seriously than his buddies, but that wouldn't have deterred him had he

really been interested. He just ... hadn't been attracted. These two, though ... They'd walked all the way to his cabin, moving in a slinky, sexy manner that should have been impossible given their bare feet and the irregular drifts of sand. Their breasts were small, but the nipples were large, and only sparse thatches of pubic hair sprouted between their legs. The two women reached him much faster than expected, as though the desert between his cabin and the horizon had been foreshortened, and they stopped mere inches in front of him. The one on the right reached between her thighs, slid an index finger into her obviously wet opening and then pressed it to his lips. And he'd awakened completely erect. That should have been cause for celebration-he couldn't remember the last time he'd been aroused in a dream or anything else-but instead it left him feeling uneasy. There was something about those identical women that did not sit well with him, something disturbing he could not quite put his finger on.

Having set up the coffee, he turned on the freestanding oscillating fan he'd placed near the fireplace, and looked again at the angry light streaming through the curtain crack.

Angry light.

It was an Indian thing, Henry supposed, this personification of the natural world. He'd heard a lot of tribesmen say similar things about wind and rain and animals and land, and he wondered if the predisposition wasn't in his genes. According to his father, their family was part Papago on his grandfather's side, but Henry wasn't sure how much store he put by that. Everyone on the damn planet seemed to be part Indian these days, every suburban accountant who dragged his family out to the national park bragging that he was one-quarter Cherokee or Choctaw, or was Navajo on his father's grandmother's cousin's uncle's side. Hell, Henry had been born in Phoenix and, except for that stint in the army, had spent all of his life in the Four Corners states. He knew firsthand how Jim Crow this area of the country still was, how whites and Indians didn't mix, lived basically in two separate societies, and he had his doubts that a whole lot of -interbreeding had gone on in more enlightened days of yore. More likely, it was all a crock of shit

Which was why he kept his own suspected heritage a secret.

Still, he sometimes thought that perhaps he did have Indian blood in his veins, and that his hidden background had led him to this job, to this place, had made him who he was, caused him to think of things like angry suns and kind rocks and playful plants. Hell, maybe that same inborn sense was at work with his dream, creating that strange sense of dread he felt when he thought of those Asian twins.

By now, the cabin was filled with the smell of coffee, and he walked back over to the counter and poured himself a cup, drinking it while the breeze generated by the fan blew in his direction. The breeze was cool now, but that wouldn't last, and even if he kept all the drapes closed, by noon it would be circulating hot air.

Maybe he'd go into Moab today, give himself a treat, hang out at Arby's or McDonald's or some other air-conditioned fast-food joint. Or maybe he'd get in his Jeep and do a little backcountry exploring; if he was going to be hot, he might as well have fun at the same time.

No, Henry thought, he wasn't going into the back-country alone.

He might meet the twins.

That was ridiculous. It was damn near the stupidest idea he'd ever come up with-and he'd thought up some whoppers in his time.

But ...

But it wasn't really stupid, was it? He wanted to pretend that such a notion was absurd, wanted to act as though he was being foolish by even considering a thought like that, but the truth was that he was being all too reasonable and realistic.

They were out there.

In the desert.

And they wanted him.

He knew it was true, though he didn't know how he knew, and even in the burgeoning warmth of this summer morning he felt cold, his skin suddenly alive with goose bumps. He was hard again, his erection tenting out the front of his boxers, and that also frightened him.

Ray Daniels lived in the next cabin down from his, but Ray was on duty today, as was Jill Kittrick, who bunked with her husband in one of the newer cottages farther up the road. Ordinarily, he enjoyed being alone and appreciated the solitude Canyonlands offered, but today it made him uneasy, and he decided to eat a quick breakfast and get his ass to town, It would make him feel safer.

Moab was crowded.

It was always crowded in the summer months, what with the tourists to the national parks and the hordes of extreme cyclists who came from all over the country to off-road on the sandstone, but that usually thinned out after Labor Day. Today, though, the highway was one long traffic jam, and every parking lot seemed to be full. Henry was grateful for that. There was safety in numbers, and though he never thought he'd find himself echoing that trite cliche, those were words to live by now.

He got some gas, stopped by the grocery store for bread and cereal, beans and tortillas, then hit a couple of camping-supply stores to check out the latest gear. He saw some people he knew, stopped for a few moments to chat with each of them, got into a conversation about conservation with a family who'd been on one of his ranger talks out at the park yesterday, and, as planned, spent the sizzling lunch hour at an air-conditioned fast-food joint.

But still he didn't feel comfortable. He found himself looking at the Chinese restaurant with suspicion, eyeing a Japanese family with mistrust. He was not a bigoted man, never had been, but that dream-nightmare had really thrown him off.

He drove around aimlessly for a while, then ended up spending two or three hours at the Boy Howdy Bar, one of his hangouts from the old days, content to nurse a couple of beers through the hottest part of the afternoon. He was settling up his tab and just getting ready to leave when his ear caught part of a conversation from two men at the opposite end of the counter.

"... swear to God. It was a gook ghost. Someone he'd offed in the jungle, he figured, back in the war ..."

Chills coursed down Henry's arms as he got his change from the bartender. He walked over to the two men. "... and it was crouching by the foot of his bed!"

"Excuse me," Henry said. "I couldn't help overhearing you."

The man closest, a fat guy with a beard and a Cat hat, frowned at him. "Yeah?"

"Was this ... ghost you're talking about anywhere near Canyonlands? I mean, did it happen around the national park? Is that where your friend saw it?"

Cat hat snorted. "Omaha, dude."

"Oh." Henry backed off, turned around, ignoring the laughter that built behind him as he headed for the door. Outside, the sun was bright, too bright, and he blinked back tears as his eyes adjusted.

Angry.

It was not only the sun that was angry, he realized. Those two twins had been angry, too. Oh, they'd hidden it behind their nudity and their blatant sexuality, and it had taken him until now to realize it was even there, but behind the sensuous attitude was a seething anger, a terrifying rage.

And they were out in the desert somewhere.

Looking for him.

Henry shivered. He no longer saw the two women as figments of his imagination-if he ever had. The reason he had been so excited by the conversation of those men in the bar- a gook ghost-was because he believed that the naked twins were supernatural entities of some sort, spectral beings trying to contact him, and he'd briefly hoped that they'd appeared to someone else as well.

What the hell was wrong with him? Was he going crazy?

Henry had never in his life experienced anything like this. He was one of the rangers who made a specific effort to debunk "ancient astronaut" explanations of the cave drawings in Canyonlands rather than let visitors hold to their preconceived interpretations, and he would have thought that it would take multiple objectively verifiable sightings and hard documentation to convince him of the existence of anything as flaky as a "supernatural entity" or "spectral being." Yet he had rolled over like a backseat bimbo and after one confusing dream was now afraid to hike or drive the backcountry alone.

Indian genes again.

The alcohol had not strengthened his courage, had weakened it if anything, and he realized that he still did not want to return to his cabin. Ector was on duty at the visitors' center in Arches today; maybe he'd stop by there, shoot the breeze for a while. Ector was broad-minded, had been into that New Agey shit back in the 1980s. Maybe Henry would hint around about the naked Asian babes, test the waters. It couldn't hurt.

Feeling more confident now that he had a plan, Henry got into his Jeep and turned onto the highway, heading north. But once outside the city limits, he kept his attention focused squarely on the highway, on the double lanes of blacktop, not looking at the desert, not wanting to see the sand, and it wasn't until he had pulled into the visitors' center parking lot and Was faced with the building and the enveloping cliffs behind it that he was finally able to relax.

Three

Bear Flats, California

Sawdust and wood chips. The smell of sap and freshly cut trees. The fragrance of the forest permeated the air in town, and Jolene didn't realize until now how much she'd missed it. Even with the windows up, it seeped through the vent, a warm, welcoming, delicious scent that meant ... home.

The highway sloped in a gentle curve past a new McDonald's and The Store, both of which had been built since her last visit three years ago. Downtown, Sam Griedy's Hardware had gained an Ace sign, the Chinese restaurant had been repainted and was now called Golden Palace instead of Jade Palace, but other than that, Bear Flats remained frozen in time, a small Sierra community virtually untouched by the wider world around it.

She liked that.

She counted on it.

She needed it.

"Are we there yet, Mom?"

Jolene glanced at Skylar in the backseat. As always, the expression on her son's face was serious, almost solemn. He looked at her with clear, sad eyes, patiently awaiting the answer to his question, and it was all she could do not to cry. She forced herself to smile at him. "We're almost there. We're almost at Grandma's house."

She'd sworn when she'd left Bear Flats that if she ever had a child, she would never subject him or her to the type of chaotic, emotionally unstable upbringing she'd had, but history really did repeat itself, and she now found herself returning home divorced and defeated with her son in tow, her son who had gone from being a happily gurgling little infant to a grave and overly sober boy as a result of the turmoil in their household the past few years.

He'd been through far too much for an eight-year-old child.

The past six months had been especially harsh. She and Frank had been at each other's throats every moment they were together, and though she knew it wasn't good for Skylar to be around such constant hostility and told herself after each blowup that she couldn't and wouldn't allow it to happen again, she and Frank were like oil and water, and not even concern for the welfare of their son could keep the two of them from going at it. She wondered sometimes if they hadn't both been order guards, if they'd had separate jobs working for different companies and had seen each other only morning and night the way normal couples did, whether they would have gotten along better, whether the resentments and irritations that had escalated into hatred would have retreated back into minor annoyances. But they'd both worked out of the border patrol's Yuma office, and their differences had widened into gulfs with the pressures of the job, exacerbating problems that turned out to be not so trivial after all. Seeing the same faces over and over, throwing people back like catch-and-release fish only to capture them trying to enter the country illegally yet again, had made her more sympathetic to the plight of the immigrants, whereas Frank had become hardened against them. She remembered talking to him after September 11. (She refused to use the appellation 9/11. What was next, calling Christmas 12/251 Referring to the Fourth of July as 7/4? Where was this numbers madness going to end?) She'd told him they were lucky the hijackers had entered the country through Canada. "Could you imagine the hysteria if they'd come in from Mexico?"

He'd reacted with outrage, yelling at her, telling her that there were a lot more criminals entering through Mexico than Canada and who knew what kind of atrocities they had planned? It was lenient attitudes like hers, he said, that were weakening America's defenses. This was a racial thing with him, she realized, just as it was with a lot of people, and it was at that moment she understood that he was not the man she'd thought he was.

Still, she'd stuck it out, trying to make it work for Skylar's sake, remaining through the increasingly rancorous arguments, answering Frank's slaps with thrown dishes, knowing deep down that it was over but not able to make the break. It was not just Frank she hated, Jolene came to realize. It was their house; it was their friends; it was Arizona; it was her job; it was the border; it was everything in her life except Skylar.

The family in the gulch had been the last straw.

She had been the one who'd found them. It had been in a remote section of the Sonora far from Organ Pipe and the drug route where Frank and a team were patrolling. She'd gone off-road to follow a trace of a track that instinct told her might lead somewhere, and, though it was against regulations, had left her vehicle without radio authorization and continued on foot when she spotted what she thought was a coyote's trail marker. It turned out it wasn't. And then she'd found the family. There'd been three of them-a mother, a father, a little girl-and they'd been at the bottom of a gulch, arms around each other not as though they'd been huddling together for warmth but as though they'd fallen asleep in a gentle embrace and had simply never awakened. That had obviously been some time ago, however, for the bodies were desiccated, skin parchmentlike and horrendously wrinkled over visible skulls, ragged color-faded clothes flattened out against bony frames. The mechanics of the bodies had been clearly visible, a matter-of-fact breakdown of biological processes that was neither romantic nor mysterious but merely routine and distressingly physical.

It was impossible to tell what had killed them. The heat? The cold? Starvation? Dehydration? They were a good twenty miles from the border-at a point where the crossing would have been made without benefit of road or nearby town on the Mexican side- and likely they'd run out of food before they got this far, surviving for days perhaps on desert plants and captured rodents.

She'd stood there for a long time-too long-staring at the dead family, trying to imagine how it must have felt for them to end their lives here in this dry, terrible place. They hadn't died alone-they'd had one another-but in a way that must have been worse, because they couldn't have perished all at once. One of them would have had to go first, and Jolene imagined that it must have been the girl. They'd probably carried her as far as they could, hoping to find a house or a road or someone to help them, maybe even praying at the last for a patrol to find them so they could be deported and thus saved. But they'd wandered farther and farther astray, and finally she imagined the| exhausted parents, unable to carry the girl any longer,| deciding to stay and wait for rescue, then gradually^ giving up as they grew weaker and weaker, as their daughter's body started to rot in the heat.

Who had gone next? And had the last one to dies simply cuddled against the others, praying for an ends to it all? How long ago had that been? How long had they lain here, undiscovered, unmourned? Years, it looked like, and Jolene wondered if the hell they'd endured back home, wherever that was, had been worth the risk of death to them, if they would still have made the trip if they'd known how it would turn out.

She decided then and there to take Skylar back with[ her to Bear Flats. She didn't know if it was because' this family had risked all-and lost-and the only thing she had to do in order to escape her life was pack a few belongings, get in a car and drive; or whether she was tired of seeing death and sufferings and human misery day in and day out as part of her job. Maybe it was just the weariness she felt when she thought of all the paperwork she'd have to fill out/ and the lack of understanding and interest she'd receive from a callous, uncaring Frank.

Whatever the reason, she'd turned in her resignation that afternoon, effective immediately, no two weeks' notice, with the resulting complete abdication of accrued benefits. She'd gone home, packed a suitcase of clothes each for herself and Skylar, loaded up the back of the Blazer with some of her more personal and precious possessions as well as most of his books and toys, written a quick note to Frank, then picked up her son at school and hit the road.

Now they were here.

Jolene drove past the lumber mill with its twin black chimney stacks, corrugated-tin outbuildings, iind pyramids of logs stacked next to the side of the road, then, without thinking, navigating almost by sense memory, swerved down the sloping dirt alley behind the mill, bouncing onto Second Street. A quick turn onto Fir, and they were there.

She pulled to a stop on the gravel driveway next to her mother's beat-up Impala. The place looked the same as always, only more so. The paint on the small house was not only peeling but faded, and the twin T poles holding up the clothesline in the side yard were slanting so far over that Jolene doubted a full-length towel could dry on them without dragging on the ground. The porch was a mess of dead plants in broken pots.

"We're here!" she announced cheerfully to Skylar, feigning an optimism she did not feel. She kept an eye on the ripped screen door, waiting for it to open and her mother to appear, but the door remained closed, the inside of the house dark. "Unbuckle. Let's stretch our legs."

They both unfastened their seat belts and got out of the car. The air was cooler here than in Arizona, but more humid and filled with that wonderful sawmill smell. She felt more comfortable in the mountains than in the desert, more at home. It was as though this was where she belonged, and she wondered if the feelings Skylar was experiencing were along the same lines-or if he simply felt lost and uprooted. Probably the latter, and Jolene realized that it was her responsibility to make the transition easier for him.

The transition?

Yes. They were going to stay here.

She had no intention of going back to Arizona.

The two of them walked across the crunchy gravel to the porch, where the peeling wood creaked and groaned beneath their weight. She'd called her mother yesterday from San Diego and told her they were on their way up, though she'd declined to elaborate on the reasons. Unless her mom was in the bathroom, she had to have seen the Blazer pull into the driveway and even if she was in the bathroom, she had to have heard their footsteps on the creaking porch. The fact that she had not come out to greet them did not bode well. Jolene rapped on the warped frame of the screen door. "It's me, Mom!" she called.

As always, the door was unlocked, and she pulled it open and walked in. Skylar took her hand, a sign of nervousness. He'd been here three years ago for a short visit, but Jolene was not sure how well he remembered it. Glancing around at the darkened room with its drab and well-worn furniture, she couldn't help comparing it with the bright sunniness of their place in Yuma, and she tried to see the house through Skylar's eyes. He probably thought the house was sad and depressing.

It was.

"We're here, Mom!" she announced.

Her mother emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dish towel. "About time. I expected you hours ago."

No hello for her, no hug for Skylar, no smile for either of them. She'd been in the kitchen, so she had seen the Blazer pull in.

"Frank called," her mother said accusingly.

Skylar looked up at her nervously, and Jolene squeezed his hand, held it tight. "I've decided to-" Leave him, was what she wanted to say, but that was a little harsh to announce in front of Skylar, and it would initiate a conversation with her mother that she didn't want to have right now. "-take a little time nil," she said.

"That's not the way Frank put it."

"Mom, can we talk about this later?"

Her mother threw the dish towel over her shoulder, turned, headed back into the kitchen. "Whatever."

This was starting off badly, and for a brief moment, Jolene thought about walking straight out to the car and driving as fast as she could as far away from here as possible. But the truth was that she had nowhere else to go. She couldn't afford to stay in hotels for more than a week or two, didn't have enough for the rent and security deposit that an apartment would require, and didn't have any friends or relatives in far-fllung locales who would put her up indefinitely. It was either Yuma or her mom.

"I don't think Grandma likes me anymore," Skylar whispered, looking at the empty kitchen doorway. His hand was hot and sweaty in hers.

Damn her, Jolene thought, but she smiled for her son's sake. "Of course she does. She's just busy, is all. Come on, let's go help her out."

Jolene strode confidently forward into the kitchen, where her mother was washing dishes in the sink. "Anything Skylar can help you with?" she asked.

Thankfully, her mother turned around, smiling, and motioned the boy over. "I'll wash. You dry. How does that sound?"

Skylar gave his grandmother a brief, hesitant smile, then accepted the dish towel from her hands.

Maybe it will be all right after all, Jolene thought. Maybe this will work out.

"It was hell," Jolene whispered fiercely. "It wasn't good for me and it wasn't good for Skylar." She glanced instinctively toward the closed door of the guest bedroom-her old room-hoping that the boy really was asleep and not just pretending so he could listen in on the conversation.

"Frank said-"

"Frank lied, Mom! How many times do I have to tell you? Jesus!"

"He just seems like a good man to me."

"He is. In a way. But we're like oil and water-we don't mix. And it was only a matter of time before someone ended up in the hospital." She glanced again toward the door, lowered her voice even more. "And I had to make sure it wasn't Skylar!"

Her mother sighed. "I just hope you know what you're doing."

"Trust me, Mom." / can't fuck things up any more than you did, she wanted to add, but she kept that thought to herself.

"So what are your plans? Are you going to look for a job around here?"

"I don't know. I just got here. Give me a day at least to settle in and figure things out."

"You were on the road for a day and a half. That didn't give you time to think? You didn't-"

"Jesus, Mom. Can't you just try to be supportive for once in your life?"

They were silent after that, the two of them seated on opposite sides of the living room, glaring at each other, and Jolene felt like a kid again, as though she were back in high school and her mom was clamping down on her for one of those unfathomable and unexplained reasons.

Finally she stood, pretending to yawn and stretch. "I guess I'll go to bed. It's been a long day."

"Okay."

"See you in the morning, Mom."

"Good night." "Good night."

"I'm glad you're back," her mother said without feeling.

"Yeah," Jolene lied. "Me, too."

Four

Upper Darby, Pennsylvania

Dennis Chen finished loading the car and looked up at the roof rack. For the umpteenth time, he checked the ropes, pulling on them to make sure he'd tied everything down tight enough. From the porch, his mother watched silently, and he sensed her disapproval even though he couldn't see her from this angle. Inside the front seat of the Tempo, his sister, Cathy, was rearranging his glove compartment in order to fit in the traveler's first aid kit she'd given him.

Dennis was twenty-three years old, and he'd never been out of the greater Philadelphia area. He knew a lot of people like that, knew men and women even older than himself who'd never ventured more than fifty miles from their birthplace, who lived their entire lives within a proscribed radius, and he could think of nothing more depressing. That was not going to happen to him, and it was why he had decided to make this break and to do it while he was still relatively young and unencumbered.

He wanted to travel. Even as a boy, he'd felt the pull of the open road, and though his career aspirations had varied over the years, from train engineer in grammar school to truck driver in junior high to UN ambassador in high school, they all had one element in common: travel.

This was merely the realization of a long-delayed dream.

His mom had cried when he'd told her of his plans, and even though he'd pointed out that she and his dad had traveled halfway around the world to get here, uprooting themselves from their families, their friends, their culture and even their language, she did not seem to understand the parallels. In her mind, what he was planning was a lot more foolish and dangerous.

She'd been working on him for the past month, trying to get him to cancel his trip. "Your job!" she kept telling him in Cantonese. "You can't quit your job!"

But the truth was that people quit jobs all the time, especially in his business. He'd been working for a rental-car agency for the past three years, ever since dropping out of college to his mother's great shame and embarrassment, and he'd worked his way up to manager, not through any great skill or aptitude or commitment or desire, but because he was still there. Amid a turnover rate that averaged about one employee every four months, his staying power had marked him as stable and reliable, and the owner of the franchise had promoted him up the short ladder to manager.

Managing a rental-car office had never been his career goal, however. It had been only a way to earn money while he figured out what he wanted to do with his life. And since he lived at home and had minimal expenses, he'd been able to save quite a lot over the past few years-enough to get him across country at least. If things didn't work out, he could always come back, but for now he was free, and the feeling was liberating.

He just wished his dad could be here to see this.

And to help him with the packing.

He checked the ropes again.

"Don't forget to keep your cell phone charged," Cathy said from inside the car. "And keep it on\ You always forget to turn it on."

"I will," he promised.

She emerged from the door on the passenger side, having found room for the first aid kit. "Who knows what kind of wackos are out there? We need to be able to get in touch with you, and you need to be able to call the police."

"Don't go!" their mother cried in Cantonese. "Stay here!"

"Mom'll be okay," Cathy promised.

"Thank you," Dennis said sincerely. He and his sister never really spoke seriously, never had the sort of heart-to-hearts that siblings were probably supposed to have, but he thought now that maybe they didn't need to. They understood these things automatically, without saying what the other was thinking, instinctively grasped the real intent behind superficial discussions.

He was going to miss Cathy more than he'd thought.

"If you strike it rich at the Gold Mountain, we're coming to live with you," she said.

Chinese humor.

He pulled on the roof-rack ropes, just for something to do. He was finished packing, there was no real reason for him to remain, and it was already after two. It was time for him to go, but there seemed something small about such a departure. He was completely uprooting his life, seismically disrupting the lives of his mother and sister. Simply saying good-bye, getting into the car and driving away seemed like an anti-climactic way to recognize the event. He couldn't help thinking that his farewell should be more momentous. But he'd said good-bye to his friends yesterday, and his only family was here with him now, in front of the row house.

They were not a family that was demonstrably emotional, that went in for public displays of affection. Nevertheless, he walked over to his mom and gave her a big hug. She was stiff against him and small. He could feel the bones beneath her clothes and skin, and he realized for the first time how fragile she was.

How old.

It shocked him, and the sadness that followed the shock almost made him reconsider. Who knew how much time she had left? Was it really fair of him to abandon her like this? Was it fair to himself to squander the remaining time they had together? He let go of his mom, stepped back.

But then Cathy was hugging him, taking the initiative, and her embrace was excited, exuberant, and he knew once again that he'd made the right decision. He hugged her back tightly, with meaning, and he promised himself that if things did go well for him, he would send for them.

"Drive carefully," Cathy told him. "And keep your cell phone on."

"I know, I know."

His mother made him promise to call them every night at seven, no matter where he was or what he was doing, and he said he would. He was exhilarated to be setting out on his own, but at the same time it seemed good-it seemed right-to maintain the tether.

The time had come, and he got into the car, waving. Tears were rolling down Cathy's face, and to his surprise, his mother was crying as well. His own vision was blurring, so, deciding to speed things up, he

started the engine, shouted out good-bye in Cantonese and with a quick wave was off.

He forced himself to concentrate on the traffic, on the route, on the specific series of steps that would get him to the interstate, purposely not thinking of his mother and his sister and what he was leaving behind.

By the time he was on Route 76, though, heading west, he was thinking about the future rather than the past, and sadness had given way to anticipation. It felt good to be on the highway,

traveling, and he pushed in a mix CD that he'd made just for the occasion, old-school rock songs that dealt with travel and the open road and the lure of new places.

He had no destination, not really, but something seemed to be calling to him out there. He could admit it to himself now that he was alone. Yes, he wanted to travel, and yes, he was using this journey for the cliched objective of "finding himself." But there was something else as well, something more, a purpose to this trip, though he did not yet know what it was. He'd had a dream the other night about driving down a desert road into a wall of smoke. Within the smoke, he could see eyes, hundreds of them, Chinese eyes, staring out at him, filled with a malevolence that scared him. Above the wall of smoke, as tall as the sky, rose a dark figure with a triangular head that beckoned him forward.

Dennis was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a religious person. His mom was Buddhist, as had been his dad, but he and his sister were nothing. They'd grown up amid Christians and Jews, had watched Christmas specials and hunted for Easter eggs at the park with their friends and were steeped in the Western religious traditions of American society, but the two of them had fallen through the cracks, neither fish nor fowl, and as they'd had no formal training in any religion, only this sort of peripheral exposure, nothing had ever taken. They'd never felt the need to explore any of these theories or philosophies in depth, never required an overarching theory of supernatural causation to get along in the world. They'd been perfectly happy to trust in the rational workings of a natural world without anthropomorphizing the laws of science.

But ...

But he had the sense now that there was some sort of ultimate purpose to his journey, that there was an unknown element pulling him on, and while that should have made him feel uncomfortable, it didn't.

It made him anxious to get out there.

Smiling, pushing his old car to seventy-five in order to keep up with the flow of traffic, he headed west.

Dennis tried to run, but the man with the bat swung hard against the back of his legs, bringing him down in a wild explosion of unimaginable agony. The man was screaming at him in English, but it seemed like a foreign language and Dennis couldn't understand a word of what his pursuer was saying. The bat came down again, this time against the small of his back, and Dennis heard something crack, felt something crack, and suddenly his legs no longer worked. His arms were dragging deadweight as he tried to right . himself.

In the distance, he could hear a train, its lonesome whistle sounding ghostly in the moonless night. Above, crows flapped, moving back and forth, forth and back, cawing, their cries like mocking laughter.

The man slammed a booted foot down on his head, grinding cheek and forehead, ear and eye, into the hard dirt. He said something else in his nonsense English, something low and serious, something final, and Dennis tensed up, waiting for the end.

He awoke drenched in sweat, feeling not as though he'd escaped from a nightmare but as though he'd survived an actual attack. His muscles ached, even his bones were sore, and he got out of bed and walked over to the motel window, pushing aside the curtain and looking out. He was in some small city in western Pennsylvania-he didn't even know the name of it- and though he was well aware that his funds were finite, he'd forgone several smaller, dirtier independent motels in favor of the more expensive Holiday Inn because of cleanliness and comfort and habit. He knew he would have to change that attitude if he expected to survive for any length of time out here, but this first night, he wanted to cling to some semblance of normalcy.

The thing was, the beating he'd dreamed about had occurred right here, where the Holiday Inn was standing. Only it had been years ago, decades maybe, and the motel hadn't been there. Instead, it had been some sort of steel yard or lumberyard. Did he feel so guilty for staying at this overpriced motel that he was mentally beating himself up about it? He didn't think so. Neither did he think he'd had some sort of random nightmare. He had the feeling that there was meaning here, that he was tapping into something.

Dennis smiled slightly. He'd become awfully self-important since leaving home.

On the other side of the highway, a train went by, a freight train, and he shivered at the sound of its whistle, an echo from his dream.

It was a long way to morning, but he did not feel tired. If he hadn't already paid for the room and it hadn't been so expensive, he would've packed up his stuff right now and taken off. The idea of night driving appealed to him. But he owed it to his mom and Cathy to act responsibly, and he didn't want a cop to come across his mangled corpse on some back road after he'd fallen asleep and crashed into a tree, and then call his mom to tell her he was dead. No, he'd stay here, wait until morning, try to go back to sleep.

That was easier said than done, however, and he ended up watching the last half of an Emmanuelle movie on HBO before finally dozing off.

He'd been planning to get an early start in the morning, but he didn't awaken until after nine, and by the time he showered, shaved, packed and availed himself of the complimentary breakfast, it was nearly ten thirty.

He didn't leave Pennsylvania until after noon.

Five

Flagstaff, Arizona

College life was great!

Angela had never suspected it would be anything less, but NAU had exceeded her most optimistic expectations. Northern Arizona University had been on the short list of colleges offering scholarships that would give her enough money to actually attend the school, and when she'd come here with her parents to visit, she'd been very impressed with the scenic beauty of the Flagstaff area. The campus itself had been impressive as well, all red brick and vine-covered rock, its streets fronted by wrought iron gates, and it had looked to her more like an Eastern Ivy League campus than the cow town college she'd been expecting. Indeed, even after she'd seen Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, in central California, the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and the University of Nevada in Reno, it was NAU that had remained in her mind, and gut instinct told her that this would be a good place to attend school.

It was more than good. Her initial impressions had been correct-there was definitely a hippieish vibe to the place, and she thought that was wonderful. The competitiveness of Los Angeles, the fractious tribalism with which she'd grown up, was nowhere in evidence, and instead the mood was mellow, casual, live-and-let-live, an attitude and lifestyle that immediately made her feel comfortable.

Oh, she had a few minor quibbles. Sports seemed to be far too big a deal here, particularly for a university with no nationally ranked team, but as Chrissie had said, the winters were harsh, and since NAU had a domed stadium, attending sporting events was one of the few social options open for students during the cold months. Although Angela swore otherwise, Chrissie promised her that by the first week in December, she, too, would be gratefully attending a football game.

But she just loved her fellow Babbitt House residents. And the homesickness she'd been expecting had never materialized. She and Chrissie had bonded instantly and despite their divergent backgrounds had become, in a matter of weeks, the closest of friends. While Angela still regularly called and e-mailed her friends back home, lately it had been more out of obligation than necessity because she was as happy here as she'd ever been back in L.A. Winston and Brock were great, like her own Queer Eye team navigating the world of college and Arizona for her. She didn't know Drew and Lisa that well, a married couple who were both grad students and lived at the end of the upstairs hall-they pretty much kept to themselves- but Randy, who lived alone in the apartment next to theirs, and Kelli and Yurica, who had the other downstairs apartment, were all nice and were quickly becoming friends.

She'd even met someone.

His name was Brian Oakland, he was from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and he was a junior majoring in forestry. He wasn't exactly what she thought of as her type-not that she had a type-but he was interesting and attractive, and the two of them had hit it off instantly. They'd been on only one date, nothing hot and heavy, so it was too early to call what they had a relationship, but the date had gone well, they'd already scheduled another, and they were spending an awful lot of time on the phone. She hadn't told her parents yet, figuring it was better to be safe than sorry. She planned to go home for Thanksgiving, and if she and Brian were still seeing each other by then, she'd tell them about him. But if they weren't... well, then it was better for her parents not to know anything had happened at all.

Besides, he wasn't even Catholic.

She was still trying to think of a way to break that to them.

Of course, they'd be shocked if they heard some of the discussions she and her new friends had about religion. Just last night, Winston and Brock had invited her and Chrissie over for a potluck dinner. She'd made a salad, Chrissie a Mississippi mud pie, and Winston and Brock had come up with a spectacular seafood pasta dish. Afterward, they lounged around on the overstuffed living room furniture, and Angela asked Chrissie why she thought some people made religion the bedrock of their lives while other people had no need of religion at all, why her parents, for example, thought about God constantly while Chrissie didn't even believe he existed. She always felt more comfortable talking about this subject with other people around, although she wasn't sure why. Maybe it kept things from getting too personal, gave her an asy out if the talk turned uncomfortable.

Chrissie shrugged. "Well, I think a lot of people are like children. They can't control themselves or behave 'in a rational, civilized manner, so they have to be threatened with punishment from Daddy in order to bring them in line. It's why so many screwups and alcoholics and drug addicts become religious. They need to think that they'll be punished after they die or else they'll just keep on doing what they're doing. They have to be ordered to behave."

Every time Chrissie said something like that, Angela was shocked anew. Part of her completely understood what her friend was saying and even agreed with some of it. But part of her recoiled, expecting a bolt of lightning to strike Chrissie dead at any second.

"Maybe those people really are saved. Maybe God helps them turn their lives around."

"Then why's there so much recidivism? How come God can't save all of them all the time?"

"Religion does help a lot of people," Angela said. "It gives them faith, gives them hope... ."

"Yeah, but I just don't believe there's an invisible man in the sky monitoring your every move and taking notes so he can punish or reward you after you die, an invisible man so petty and vain that if you don't kiss his ass every Sunday, he'll let you burn in hell for all eternity."

"Leave her alone," Winston said.

"She brought it up," Chrissie pointed out.

"I did," Angela admitted, "although I wasn't trying to start an argument or convert anyone or anything. I was just curious."

"I came from a religious family, too," Winston confided. "So I know where you're coming from."

"He just ran like hell from it when he found out that God hated him and he was going to burn forever because he loved men," Brock said, grinning.

Winston pushed him. "Infidel."

It was time to change the subject.

"So," Angela said, "tell me about the ghost."

Winston and Brock looked at each other.

"Come on! Chrissie told me this house was haunted, and she said you guys're the experts. You're the ones who've had a close encounter."

"Encounters," Brock said quietly.

Winston sighed. "I know this sounds ridiculous. Believe me, I'm not some hippie-dippie, fuzzy-headed New Age touchy-feely guy-"

Brock raised an eyebrow.

"Okay, I am. But I never believed in ghosts before moving here. Didn't even have an open mind. As far as I was concerned, they were figments of gullible, overactive imaginations."

"But you believe now," Chrissie said in a low spooky voice.

"Laugh all you want, but yes, I do." He glanced at Brock. "We both do."

Brock nodded.

"The first time we heard it, we were sitting right here, in this room. Dan Hamlyn, who used to live in Kelli and Yurica's place a few semesters back, was with us. We'd just finished watching a movie. And, no, not a scary one. A comedy. Mother, I think, the Albert Brooks movie. I was gathering up the glasses and the popcorn bowls, Dan was getting ready to leave, and we heard moaning from the kitchen."

Brock's nodding became more emphatic. "Like someone was in pain, like he'd been hit in the head or something."

"Although we weren't sure it was a he. It could've been a she. It was impossible to tell."

"Scared the hell out of us, though, and all three of us hurried into the kitchen to see what it was."

Angela glanced toward the closed kitchen door. She wanted to feel frightened, but she didn't. She liked a good ghost story as well as the next person, but there was something about the telling of this tale that was too pat, that made her think it had been concocted for her benefit.

"Of course there was nothing there," Winston said. "The room was empty, and the window was closed. We searched the whole apartment, but there was no one here except us.

"The next time it happened was morning, I believe. Last winter. It was still dark out, but it wasn't that early. Six o'clock or something. I remember I was already up and eating a bagel because I had an early class."

"This time it came from the linen closet," Brock said. "And we knew no one could be hiding in there because it's barely big enough for a couple of sheets and our towels."

Winston chimed in. "It was like mumbling or muttering but really fast and really high-pitched. Gibberish. We couldn't make out a word of it. The creepy thing was that it didn't stop. We opened the closet door, tossed everything out on the floor, and it was still there. It wasn't coming from behind the closet, or above it or below it or anything. It was right there in front of us, like the ghost who was doing it was right in front of us and we couldn't see it. Scared the hell out of me, let me tell you."

"And that's it?" Angela asked.

"It's happened a couple of times since, but, yeah, that's pretty much it. I know it doesn't sound like much, and you probably think it's sound seeping in from another apartment or something, but I'm telling you, it's eerie. You can feel it. We hadn't even heard anything about this, but I started doing a little research and found out that this house is listed on a national registry of haunted places. Supposedly, it's the reason no one would buy the place and why they had to subdivide it into apartments. After I approached the owners with this news, the rent was dropped-on the condition that we keep our mouths shut about it. We have, pretty much, but word still leaked out, and one girl even moved because of it."

"Jen," Chrissie said.

"Yeah. Jen. She said she saw something in her bedroom, though I'm not sure she did. I'm pretty sure she just imagined it."

Angela smiled. "Her ghost is imagination. Yours is real, though."

"That's about the size of it."

"Well, call me the next time he-or she-shows up. I want to hear it."

"You don't," Winston said. "But I will."

The opportunity to do so came more quickly than any of them expected.

Angela and Chrissie returned to their own apartment soon after. It was getting late, so they flipped a coin for first shower. Angela won, and she quickly washed and changed into her pajamas. After saying good night to Chrissie, she went to bed and was asleep in a matter of minutes.

She was awakened by a knock on the bedroom door, and she had time to glance groggily at the clock on her nightstand and see that it was two fifteen before the knock came again, louder this time. She got up, pulled on her robe and opened the door a crack. Chrissie stood in the short hallway, holding her own robe closed, looking half-asleep. Behind her, through the living room, Angela could see that the front door of the apartment was open. Winston was standing in the outer hall, hair disheveled, wearing only light green drawstring pants. He saw her, and the expression on his face caused her heart to skip a beat, sent a bolt of fear through her body. She knew what he was going to say even before he said it.

"The ghost. It's down there right now. You want to hear it?"

She didn't. Not at this time of night. Despite her skepticism and the lightheartedness of their previous conversation, the idea of encountering a ghost was given weight and gravity by the hour, a seriousness it did not possess in the daytime or early evening. She was frightened, but she was the one who'd brought it up, she was the one who'd made the request, and she swallowed hard, nodded.

"Are you coming?" she asked Chrissie. The other girl shook her head, and Angela could tell that despite her professions of disbelief, her friend was frightened as well.

Angela followed Winston downstairs, where several other residents were already gathered around his apartment's open front door. Most were in their sleepwear, but despite the potential for casual camaraderie, no one was talking or visiting and the expression on each face was the same. Everyone was silent, expectant, on edge.

She heard it.

The sound was muffled from here in the hallway, but it was still audible, and it was definitely coming from somewhere inside. Goose bumps popped up on her arms and legs; peach-fuzz hair on the back of her neck bristled. An unintelligible babbling, an incomprehensible alien jabber, issued from the apartment behind the open door. Winston led her past Randy, Kelli and Yurica, into the living room, into the kitchen. "Come in, everyone!" he announced. "Catch it quick before it stops!"

He was trying for a party atmosphere, attempting to keep things light and fun, but Angela could see that he was scared, and by the tense clinging way Brock held his hand, she knew that Brock felt the same. Everyone else was silent, listening, afraid to speak.

The ghost's voice was as flat as ordinary conversation yet at the same time as sharp as an audiophile CD. It was high-pitched, sounding either angry or excited, and Winston and Brock were right: it was impossible to tell if it was male or female. It seemed to be coming from the oven, and while that should have been funny, it wasn't. Although ghosts were supposed to be ephemeral, Angela had the sense that the owner of the voice had been here forever, that although the house had been built around it and furniture brought in, these were the things that were transitory, and the voice would remain long after the oven had been removed and the house torn down.

All of a sudden it stopped.

No one knew what, if anything, was being said, but the voice seemed to cut off in midsentence, and after such hyperactive gibbering the silence seemed heavy and ringing in Angela's ears.

"Show's over, folks!" Winston announced, still trying to keep the tone light. But no one was having any of it, and the residents drifted away, back to their rooms, quiet and subdued. Winston caught Angela's eye, and she understood now how shallow and cavalier she'd been earlier in the evening, how she'd completely misread the situation. She wished she'd stayed upstairs with Chrissie, that she'd immediately gone back to sleep and experienced none of this. But she had experienced it, and now she was afraid to even walk back up to their apartment, afraid of what she might hear in the walls on the way, afraid of what she might see in the shadows darkening the top of the steps.

Winston and Brock obviously sensed her mood because they both accompanied her upstairs, acting as bodyguards. They saw and heard nothing, however, and when the three of them reached her apartment, Chrissie opened the door. "So?" she asked.

Angela didn't know what to say.

"It was coming from the oven," Brock said.

"Did you ... see anything?"

They all shook their heads. "Just the voice," Winston said. "As always."

Angela turned toward Winston, tried to smile. "I'd like to say thank you for a good time, but ..."

"See you in the morning," Winston said as he and Brock turned away and started back down the stairs.

Angela walked into the apartment, Chrissie closing and locking the door behind her. "Was it scary?" Chrissie asked.

She nodded. "Yeah," she admitted. "It was." She didn't want to talk about it, didn't want to even think about it, so she forced a yawn and, wiggling her fingers good-night, retired to her room.

Where she lay in bed, unable to sleep.

Chrissie went into her room, and in the other apartments everyone else settled back down for the night, but Angela remained awake, listening for any sound in the now silent house, her body rife with gooseflesh at the recollection of that insane incomprehensible babbling. What was it? What caused it? What did it mean? Those were all questions for which she had no answer, for which no one had an answer, and when she finally did fall asleep she dreamed of a black gelatinous creature with no eyes and too many teeth that lived under the Babbitt House and waited for her.

Her second date with Brian was the next night, and though she longed to tell him about the ghost, she didn't. It was too embarrassing. She knew it had happened, knew what she'd heard, but outside of the Babbitt House, in the ordinary world of cars and other people and stores and restaurants, any account of her experience would sound ridiculous.

But it was on her mind all through dinner and the movie afterward. Brian could obviously tell that something was amiss, but he didn't know her well enough to butt in, and he chose to give her some space. For that, she was grateful. She perked up enough for a make-out session in the car, and on the way home she took the initiative to ask him out to a free jazz concert on Friday. He seemed surprised, and she wasn't sure if that was because she was being so forward-he was from Wisconsin-or whether he'd simply assumed from her behavior that she wasn't interested, but he happily said yes.

Angela didn't know how Brian felt, but as far as she was concerned, they were practically boyfriend and girlfriend. Such a concept seemed quaint and maybe even a little lame in these days of the hookup, which was why she didn't mention it, but sometime, and soon, they were going to have to talk about exclusivity.

He brought her back to the Babbitt House, parking on the street in front of the open lawn. At night, set back as it was, the mansion looked scary, forbidding. There were no lights on as far as she could tell, but it was Wednesday and it wasn't that late, so she knew someone had to be home.

What if they weren't?

"Would you like to come in?" she offered, hoping the nervousness wouldn't register in her voice.

"Yeah," he said. "That'd be great."

They got out of the car, and she took his arm, grateful for the support. She didn't think of herself as some dainty little maiden who needed the protection of a big strong man, but walking into a dark haunted house all by herself wasn't exactly something she relished doing. Brian was talking easily, casually, but all of her attention was on the front of the Victorian building as they strode up the endless lawn. She thought she saw movement in the upper right window-Randy's apartment-but the window remained dark, and she didn't like that. It was probably something ordinary and innocent, but in this mood her mind turned it into something completely wrong: Randy naked and spying on her ... a murderer who had killed Randy ... a ghost.

They reached the front entrance. Angela withdrew her key, used it to unlock the door.

The entry way was pitch-black.

"Careful!" Winston's voice called from the darkness. He emerged from his apartment, shining a flashlight on the floor so they could see where they were walking. "The power went out. Brock's checking the circuit breakers out back."

"What happened?" Angela asked.

"We don't know. The streetlights are on and none of the other houses on the street seem to be affected, so it's probably just the old crappy wiring in this place. Maybe too many computers or microwaves were on at once."

At that second, the lights came back on, as did televisions and stereos from the various apartments. All of a sudden, the house was filled with life, and Angela let out a deep breath, her muscles relaxing. She didn't realize how tense and anxious she'd been. Brian seemed embarrassed. Kelli was coming down the hall, Chrissie down the stairs, and Winston was still standing in the doorway of his apartment, flashlight in hand.

"Maybe I should go," Brian said.

There'd be no privacy here tonight, so Angela nodded. "Yeah, it's getting late."

"I'll call you tomorrow."

In front of the crowd, she gave him an awkward kiss good night, then waved as she watched him walk across the lawn to the street. She closed the door after he got into his car.

"How did it go?" Chrissie asked.

Angela thought for a moment, then smiled. "Pretty good," she said. But through the open doorway of Winston and Brock's apartment, she could see the kitchen on the other side of the living room. She recalled that alien babble and shivered.

"Come on," she said. "Let's go upstairs. I'll tell you all about it."

Six

Bear Flats, California

Jolene and Skylar walked through town, checking out the small shops, dropping in at the library, getting themselves acquainted with Bear Flats. Or, in Jolene's case, reacquainted. Her mom had wanted to watch Skylar, but as long as there was alcohol in the house, Jolene was not about to leave her son alone with his grandmother. The boy'd had a tough enough time of it already without putting him through that. She'd told her mother as much, and that had led to an argument, and Jolene had no doubt that the old woman was hitting the bottle right now. By the time they returned, Skylar's nice grandma would be gone, replaced with the same nasty bitter woman Jolene had grown up with.

She really did need to find somewhere else to live.

But it was good to be back in town.

Holding Skylar's hand, she crossed the highway to Mag's Ham Bun, where her mom had told her Leslie Finch was now manager. She and Leslie had been best friends in high school, but despite a few short phone calls and promises to get together when she came back to visit, they hadn't seen each other in ... how long? Six years? Eight?

Jolene pushed open the heavy oak door of the restaurant and stood for a moment in the foyer while she waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. It was eleven o'clock, too early for the lunch crowd, and the place was nearly empty. One old man sat at the bar, nursing a beer, and what looked like a family of tourists were looking over menus in the first booth along the wall, but other than that, the restaurant appeared to be unoccupied.

"Do you want to eat here?" Jolene asked.

Skylar shrugged. "Sure."

A freestanding sign announced please seat yourself, so they did, choosing a booth halfway down from the tourist family. The waitress who greeted them and passed out menus a few moments later was elderly and unfamiliar. Jolene asked her, "Does Leslie Finch work here?"

"Leslie!" the waitress called out, nearly making her jump.

Leslie Finch emerged from the short dark hallway that led to the restrooms and the kitchen, looking not like a small-town waitress but like a successful young businesswoman. Maybe it was the dim lighting, but to Jolene's eyes, Leslie appeared to be only a few years older than she had in high school. She still had the same trim figure, and though her hair was shorter and cut more stylishly, it was the same wavy brown it had been when they were teenagers. Leslie looked a hell of a lot better than she herself did, and Jolene was at once pleased and embarrassed.

"Oh, my God!" Leslie said as she approached the table. "Jo? Is that you?"

At least she was still recognizable. Jolene smiled. "Yeah. It's me."

"And is this your little guy?"

"This is Skylar." She prodded him gently with an elbow. "This is my friend Ms. Finch. Say hello."

"Hi," the boy said shyly.

"Hi, Skylar. How old are you?"

"Eight." He turned back toward Jolene. "Could I have a Coke?"

"You have milk or lemonade." She smiled at Leslie. "Are you busy? Do you have time?"

"No, I'm not, and yes, I do. Can I join you?"

"I was hoping you would. I thought we could catch up on old times."

"Or new times." Leslie beckoned over the waitress. "Do you know what you guys want to order?" she asked Jolene.

"Grilled cheese sandwich and lemonade," Skylar announced.

"Okay," Jolene told him. She smiled at Leslie. "Pick something for me. You know what's good here."

The waitress returned, they gave their orders, and Leslie informed them in a voice that brooked no argument that the meal would be on the house. "So what brings you back?" she asked as the waitress left.

Jolene did not want to go into detail, not with her son sitting here, so she looked meaningfully at Leslie, shot a sideways glance at Skylar, then looked at her friend again with an expression that she hoped the other woman would be able to read. "I'm making a few changes," she said simply.

Leslie nodded, let it lie, and Jolene could tell that her friend understood.

They were still in sync after all these years.

The conversation shifted to neutral topics: old acquaintances, the restaurant, the town. Leslie assured her as their food arrived that the character of Bear Flats had not changed one whit in the intervening years. "Oh, it's the same as it always was. Everyone's stunningly uninformed, depressingly small-minded and bitterly jealous of ... well, everyone else."

Jolene laughed.

"So why am I still here, right?" Leslie shook her head as she dipped a french fry in ketchup. "I ask myself that every day. Part of it's just ... inertia. It's easier, more comfortable, the devil you know and all that. The coward's way out, I know, but you kind of get used to things the way they are, and it gets harder and harder to change. I often wish that I'd done what you did, just taken off for greener pastures and not looked back."

"It's not all it's cracked up to be."

Again, Leslie let that lie, and for that, Jolene was grateful. The two of them needed to talk later, she thought. Really talk. There was so much she wanted to say.

"You look like you're doing well, though," Jolene offered.

Leslie smiled. "By Bear Flats standards, yeah. And I'm not unhappy. I'm just ... restless sometimes, you know?"

"Yeah."

"So how's your mom doing?"

Jolene shrugged. "The same."

"Are you staying with her?"

"For the moment."

"Ah, the old dynamics never change, do they?"

"Not really," she admitted.

"You could always bunk with me while you're in town. I have plenty of room."

"Lezzie Finch!" Jolene said in a tone of mock shock.

Leslie threw a napkin at her. "I can't believe you remember that!"

Both of them laughed. The frustrated boys on the varsity football team had dubbed her "Lezzie" their senior year because two of them had asked her out and she'd turned them down. It was a nickname that had spread rapidly through Bear Flats High. Jolene's own sexuality had been called into question because of her friendship with Leslie and her complete disdain for nearly everyone and everything in Bear Flats- including the boys. Not that she'd cared. One advantage of having no respect for your peers was that it removed the power of peer pressure.

"So are you back permanently," Leslie asked, "or just here for a visit?"

Jolene glanced at Skylar. "That's up in the air."

Her friend nodded.

They finished eating, going into more detail about people they'd known in high school and what had become of them. A few more patrons had come into the restaurant while they ate, but the place was by no means crowded, and Jolene asked, "Is business always this slow?"

"Lately," Leslie admitted. "That new McDonald's is killing us. It's the off-season, though. Once the mill's at full capacity and people are employed again, things'U pick up." She downed the last of her iced tea. "Why don't the two of you stop by my house? I'd love to show it to you. You're not in any hurry to get back, are you?"

"No," Jolene said. "But can you afford to take time off?" She leaned forward conspiratorially. "That waitress is already mad at you. She keeps looking over here."

Leslie laughed. "Audra? That's just the way she is. Don't sweat it. Besides, this is a special occasion. And, conscientious worker that I am, I have enough sick and vacation time saved up to take a cruise to China. I practically live in this building. Come on, it'll just take twenty minutes or so. If there's a problem here, have my cell. They can reach me."

Jolene nodded, smiling. "Okay. Sounds great."

Leslie went over to talk to their waitress and the other employees before heading back to her office. "I'll meet you outside!" she called out. "It'll just be a moment!"

Jolene took out three dollars for a tip and left it on the table. Their meal might be comped, but she still didn't want to stiff the waitress. Skylar used his straw to suck up the last of his lemonade, and the two of them walked outside to wait. After the dimness of the restaurant, the world seemed impossibly bright, and they were both still blinking when Leslie emerged from the building. She was wearing sunglasses, obviously an old hand at this transition thing.

"I'm just over there on Bluebird Lane, past the Presbyterian church. We could drive, but I usually like to walk. Would that be okay? take a shortcut through the woods behind Ray's."

Jolene laughed. "Is that the path where we used to-?"

"The very one."

"With the graves?"

"Yep."

"Graves?" Skylar said worriedly. It was the first time he'd spoken since ordering his lunch.

"It's daytime," Jolene reassured him. "And we'll just be passing by. Besides, I'm here." She took his hand and squeezed it, and he squeezed back. These days, he usually considered himself too old to be holding his mom's hand, especially in public, but he did not let go as the two of them followed Leslie across the small parking lot and down the sidewalk.

The path had hardly changed. It no longer started in a vacant lot, beginning instead in the narrow empty space between two recently erected buildings, but once she was off the street, everything was familiar. Jolene could not recall the last time she'd been here, but her feet remembered the details and idiosyncrasies of the trail as though it were yesterday, automatically stepping over a half-buried boulder protruding from the hard-packed earth, skirting to the left to avoid a sticker bush around the first bend. She would have expected the trees and underbrush to have become overgrown or burned or cut down or changed in some way-and perhaps they had-but to her eye everything looked exactly the same. The old oak they'd christened the hanging tree silhouetted against the midday sun, the line of knotty pines that delineated the upper and lower halves of the town, the view of the sawmill's smokestack above the woods-everything was just as she remembered it.

Leslie in the lead, they walked through the forested area just above Bluebird Lane. Ahead, in the darkest part of the copse, Jolene could see a square of white picket fence set off from the trail on a small sunken section of ground. Within that square, she knew, were two graves with their weathered granite tombstones reading simply, Mother and Daughter. The graves had been there since before anyone in town could remember, and the rumor had always been that the unnamed mother and daughter were witches. Why else hadn't they been buried in the pioneer cemetery with everyone else? Why else were their names unmentioned on the gravestones? Generations of kids had frightened their siblings, their friends and themselves making up stories about this trail and the grave site, and Jolene and Leslie had been no different. One summer in junior high, they'd even teamed with Jimmy Payton and Cal Smyth and charged a quarter for fake haunted tours. They'd taken kids down the path, making up stories about gruesome events that they said had happened at various spots, culminating in a trip to the grave site, where Jimmy, dressed in black and wearing a mask, had jumped out from behind a tree and sent everyone running screaming up the trail the way they'd come.

The four of them had made over twenty dollars that summer.

"Want to know something freaky?" Leslie asked as they passed by the picket fence. "I've heard shit from there." She glanced quickly at Skylar. "Stuff, I mean. I've heard stuff. Sorry," she told Jolene. "I didn't-"

"It's nothing he hasn't heard from his father," Jolene said. She looked at Skylar. "But that's still a bad word, right?"

"I know, Mom."

"Okay."

"Anyway," Leslie said, "I know you're not going to believe me, but every once in a while I walk by here- and it's not even night, sometimes it's in the middle of the day like now-and I hear ... I don't know, like, mumbling or something. Chanting. The first time, I thought it was the wind or sound carrying up from the street, some sort of aural illusion. I even thought it might be a trick, some kid's high-tech version of our haunted tour; I thought there might be a hidden speaker with a tape loop or something. But the second time, I was brave, and I walked over and ..." She took a deep breath. "It was definitely coming from one of the graves. I couldn't tell which one. I just ran."

It was not hard for Jolene to believe. She looked to the left. Even in the daytime, the grave site exuded an aura of dread, and although she was a grown woman, she felt the same way she had as a child and as a teenager, experienced the same sense of irrational foreboding. She'd forgotten that feeling, and she wished now that they'd driven, that Skylar had not seen the grave site. She glanced down at him. As always, his expression was unreadable, serious, grave.

Grave.

"How many times have you heard things?" she asked.

"Four," Leslie admitted.

"And you still walk this way?"

"Yeah. But it's been a while since the last one. And it's not all that scary after the first few times. You kind of get used to it."

Still, they were silent until they were past the site, until the square of white pickets had been swallowed by bushes and weeds and could no longer be seen behind them.

"Who paints that fence?" Jolene asked. "Did anybody ever figure that out?"

"Good question," Leslie said. "I don't know the answer. Maybe someone does, but it's not general knowledge." She smiled. "We should set up a camera with a motion sensor on it."

"Cal always used to ask about that, remember? He thought it was some long-lost relative, a witch who lived in town disguised as a normal person."

"A witch?" Skylar said anxiously.

"Just a joke," Jolene told him. They definitely should not have come this way.

The path sloped down, passed through an empty field grown high with meadow grass, then ended on Bluebird Lane. Ahead down the narrow road, Jolene could see the white steeple of the

Presbyterian church peeking out from between the pines.

"Almost there," Leslie said cheerily.

Her house was a small log cabin set back against the trees. In front was a vegetable garden ringed by a border of wildflowers. That surprised Jolene. Businesswoman she could see, but gardener? People changed, she realized, and though she and Leslie still had an easy rapport and seemed to have instantly fallen back into their old roles, she recognized that she no longer really knew her friend.

It was a sobering thought.

The cabin was bigger than it looked. Inside, there was a large sitting room, a decent-sized kitchen and three bedrooms. One was Leslie's room, another was her office, and the third was a guest room. "I've never used it," Leslie admitted. "In the three years since I bought this place, I've never had an overnight guest." She caught Jolene's raised eyebrow. "That kind. So if you two wanted to inaugurate the room, it's available."

Jolene looked over at Skylar, standing next to the window and looking out at the garden. She was going to have to make some decisions about their future ... and pretty quickly. He was supposed to be in school right now. She'd yanked him out when she left Frank, and she hadn't even called the school to explain. They'd no doubt called to find out why he'd been absent for the past week, and she just hoped that Frank had taken care of the problem.

If she really was planning to stay in Bear Flats for any length of time, she had to get Skylar enrolled. And since it was the beginning of the school year, it would be better to do it now. It wasn't good for a third grader to miss too much class time; he'd fall behind. Besides, for a boy as shy as Skylar, each day that went by would make it harder for him to make friends and fit in.

Life was so damn complicated.

She looked around the cabin. Honestly, she would much rather be living here than with her mother, but making that transition wouldn't be easy. No matter how carefully she finessed it, her mom would end up hurt and angry, and she might even take it out on Skylar, cutting him out entirely. The boy couldn't handle another emotional loss right now.

The best thing to do would be for her to find a job and get her own place, rent an apartment.

The expression on her face must have betrayed her emotions, because Leslie walked over and put a hand on her shoulder. "Don't worry. Everything's going to be all right," she promised, smiling sympathetically.

Jolene patted her friend's hand, looking over at Skylar by the window. "I hope so," she said.

Skylar didn't like Bear Flats. There was nothing to do here. The town was boring and way too small. Plus all these trees and the fact that it was in the mountains ...

He missed the desert.

He didn't like his grandma much either. Oh, she was nice to him and all-most of the time-but even when she was on her best behavior, there was something unstable about her, something unpredictable, something that reminded him of Dad.

He didn't miss his father. He felt guilty about that, but deep down he knew that he and his mom were better off by themselves. Only he wondered what came next, what they were going to do. Were they going to stay in this place and live here forever? Was this just a stop on their way to New York or Chicago or Los Angeles or some big city? Were they going to wait awhile and then go back home to Yuma?

He didn't know because his mom wouldn't tell him.

He hadn't exactly asked, but the way he saw it, he shouldn't have to. It was her job to explain what was going on.

And she hadn't done that.

He rolled over on the small cot, turned from his back to his side to his stomach, uncomfortable in every position. As bad as the cot was, he'd had no trouble falling asleep until tonight. Whether it was the altitude or the stress of being here, he'd been tired at the end of each day and was out like a light the second his head hit the pillow. This evening, though, he'd tossed and turned, unable to stop his brain from thinking about spooky stuff.

Those graves had really freaked him out.

Skylar flipped onto his back again, then sat up against the wall. He'd been thinking about that grave site all day long. His mom and her friend had acted like it was nothing, especially afterward, but he saw through that. They were scared of it, too. All afternoon, he'd found himself obsessing about those graves, wondering who was buried there. In a way, he wished that they'd stopped and he'd been able to get a closer look. He might not have been brave enough to do more than take a quick glance, but he still would have known what the gravestones actually looked like instead of relying on his overactive imagination. For, in his mind, there was a large stone marker and a small one, both weathered by time, the words Mother and Daughter chiseled in spooky horror-show letters. He imagined that nothing grew on top of the graves, the cursed ground bare of even a stray weed, and that wild animals instinctively avoided the site, afraid.

He tried to tell himself that the mother and daughter had probably been pioneers who'd been buried close to their cabin, but the witch theory seemed much more plausible, and he shivered as he thought about what the grave site looked like at night under the full moon.

Tick tick tick.

There was a light tapping on the window.

Heart thudding in his chest, Skylar glanced over at his mom. She was dead asleep, mouth open and snoring. Not only that, but she was way over on the other side of the room, a distance that suddenly seemed like miles.

Tick tick tick.

The tapping continued, grew louder. It could have been a windblown branch knocking lightly against the glass were it not for the fact that the noise was syncopated, a repeating rhythmic pattern no wind could have created. He'd been avoiding the window, not wanting to look at it, afraid of what he might see, but now he hazarded a glance at the drapeless pane.

A Yoda-like face peered in at him, a small wrinkled head, brown instead of green, partially illuminated by the light of the moon. The eyes shifted slowly, taking in the room, looking for something.

Him.

The beady eyes locked on his own, and the corners of the mouth slid upward into a malevolent smile. It was the most terrifying face he had ever seen, and his mouth went suddenly dry. He shut his eyes tightly, afraid of being hypnotized by those evil orbs, afraid of seeing the teeth inside that horrible mouth, afraid of ... just afraid.

"Mom!" he screamed.

She awoke immediately, leaping up out of bed and instinctively rushing to his cot. He opened his eyes. He expected the face to disappear-whether monsters were real or imagined, the presence of grown-ups usually made them flee-but to his horror, the terrible creature was still there and watching them, two brown wrinkled hands placed on the window to either side of the eyes in an effort to assist the viewing.

His mom saw it, too, and she let out a loud high scream that caused his grandma to shout out from her bedroom and finally made the thing at the window pull away and disappear into the darkness of night. A second later, the lights went on and his grandma was in the room, wearing dirty pajamas, her hair wild, her face without makeup looking old and a little scary itself. "What is it?" she demanded. "What happened?"

"Someone was at the window!" his mom said, her voice breathless and still almost loud enough to be a scream.

Someone?

"It was a monster," Skylar said. His voice came out small and babyish, and he should have been embarrassed by that but wasn't.

His grandma went over to the window, looked out. She put her hands to the sides of her eyes like a reverse image of the creature. "Don't be ridiculous," she said. "It was probably just a kid from-"

"He's not being ridiculous," his mom said, and that made him feel good. Her arms tightened around him. "It was ... I don't know what it was, but it didn't look human."

"Well, I don't see anything out there now." His grandma turned away from the window and faced them. Skylar saw not sympathy or understanding in her eyes but disapproval.

"Turn on the yard lights," his mom commanded. "Check."

The old woman must have heard the same seriousness in her voice that he did, because instead of refusing, as he'd expected, she left the room and walked down the hallway. A moment later, the exterior of the house was flooded with light. Holding his hand, taking him with her, his mom moved over to the window. All was was had fled.

The outside lights flicked off, and his grandma returned. "Nothing," she announced. He thought she sounded pleased.

His mom didn't say anything, and he didn't either. But she continued to hold his hand, and while he knew that creature might still be out there, might even be watching them from some vantage point within the trees, he no longer felt afraid.

"I'm going back to bed," his grandma said. "I'll see you in the morning. If you see any other monsters? Don't call me."

She disappeared around the corner. Skylar and his mom looked at each other and after a beat, they both burst out laughing. It was the first time he'd laughed since leaving Yuma, and even under these bizarre circumstances it felt good. Through the thin walls, he heard his grandmother's wordless sounds of disapproval-they both did-and that only made them laugh all the harder.

His mom wiped the tears from her eyes. "We're going to have to get some drapes in here," she said. It was meant as a joke, sort of, but it brought them back to the here and now, and they both stopped laughing.

Skylar looked at his cot, then over at his mom's bed. She knew what he was thinking before he even said it, and she let go of his hand and put an arm around his shoulders. "You can stay with me tonight," she told him.

He felt grateful that she hadn't made him ask-he felt like a baby enough as it was-and he crawled into the bed first, taking the space against the wall, away from the window. She climbed in after and gave him a kiss on the forehead before turning in the opposite direction. "Good night," she said.

"Good night," he replied.

But it was a long time before either of them fell asleep.

Seven

Kansas City, Missouri

Dennis was awakened by the train.

It shook the cheap motel like an earthquake, accompanied by a deep bass rumbling that he felt in his gut and that threatened to turn his stomach to Jell-O. It was the train's whistle that had shaken him from sleep, a loud sustained blast of air horn powerful enough to penetrate the plaster walls, cut through the static of the television he hadn't turned off and yank him from the deepest REM.

He'd seen the tracks in the daytime, of course. In fact, the highway he'd been taking had followed them for most of the afternoon. But he hadn't expected passing trains to sound so close. Or so loud.

The Midwest was weird. Especially the small towns. He'd spent all of his life in a large Eastern metropolitan area, so it was strange to him to see streets and neighborhoods where the houses had no fences, the yards no boundaries or definition. Stranger still was to see train tracks that seemed to run right through people's back lawns, tracks that were not segregated in a certain section of the city or fenced off in any way but proceeded over yards and down streets as though their builders had been completely oblivious to the community around them.

He wondered now what it was like for the people in those places. Were they awakened every night like this, jarred from sleep by trains speeding past only inches from their bedrooms? Or did they eventually adjust to the all-encompassing noise?

The train was long, but finally it passed, and Dennis lay there listening to the receding sound of its whistle. He tried for several minutes to fall back asleep but couldn't, so he flipped on the nightstand lamp, got out of bed and got a drink of warm flat Coke from the can atop the dresser. His cell phone lay next to the TV, charging, and he picked it up and looked, hoping for messages, but there were none. Earlier in the evening, when he'd called home to check in, he'd missed his mother and sister so much that he almost felt like crying. Travel was much more stressful than he'd been expecting. And much less fun. The lure and excitement of the open road had faded. Most of the time he was alone, driving through unfamiliar territory, listening to local radio stations that depressed the hell out of him. Hearing the voices of his mother and his sister made him realize what he had left behind.

But still he could not go back.

Not yet.

He did not know why, but he knew it was so.

The problem was, his money was going much faster than expected. Even with his skipping breakfasts and sometimes lunches, eating off the dollar menu at fast-food restaurants, and staying at the cheapest fleabag motels, his plan for a grand tour of the United States was destined to be over before it was finished unless something changed.

And all of his sightseeing side trips didn't help.

He toyed with the idea of stopping for a while in some picturesque town and taking a menial job. Janitor or newspaper deliveryman or box boy. In the abstract, the idea was romantic, exciting, and when imagining such scenarios before, he'd always ended up meeting some gorgeous woman or getting involved in some type of adventure. In real life, however, he knew that he would simply be performing manual labor with sullen teenagers in a dead-end community. He needed some way to get money, though. Maybe he'd just buy a lottery ticket. He sat back down on the bed and looked up. The dull yellowish glow of the lamp illuminated a water stain on the ceiling. He thought of his own room at home with its clean walls and modern furniture. It might be a long time before he had something that nice again. He sighed. Right now, even his job at the rental agency didn't seem so bad.

Still, he had that strange nagging sense that he was supposed to be doing this, that there was a reason for this trip. In his mind was an image from the dream that the train whistle had cut short: a walking mountain, a huge hulking creature that stood over a field filled with bloody corpses. The image frightened him but spoke to him, and was reminiscent of that triangular-headed behemoth he had dreamed of before, the one who had beckoned him down the road toward the wall of smoke.

Dennis sat there for a few moments, not sure he could fall asleep but not wanting to stay up. The rug under his bare feet felt grainy, dirty. He listened carefully for the sound of any more trains, heard nothing and, deciding to give sleep a shot, finally switched off the lamp, lay back down and closed his eyes. This time, he had no dreams. He felt better in the morning. For breakfast, he bought a paper cup of bitter coffee from the gas station where he filled up the car, and then he was on the road again, the dejection and discouragement of the night before little more than a memory. No matter how the day ended up, it always started well, and essential optimist that he was, he began each morning thinking that today things would be different.

This time he was right.

He was planning to drive straight through to evening. He still had half a bag of leftover Doritos that would suffice for lunch, and if he could make better time, perhaps he could buy himself a free day down the road. By noon, however, after four straight hours of nearly identical woods and rolling hills, with nothing but bad music and fire-and-brimstone sermonizers on the radio, he was ready for some sort of diversion, desperate for a distraction or amusement that would take him out of himself.

ENTER IF YOU DARE!!

The sign was impossible to miss. Bright yellow against the mellow green of the trees, its letters a shocking red, the sign was designed to attract the attention of passersby. It definitely attracted his, and Dennis looked at the cartoonish illustration of a haunted castle and the name below it: the keep. His mood brightened considerably, and was boosted even more when he saw the big red arrow up ahead pointing to a small paved parking lot and a series of old wooden buildings. A plank fence in front of the buildings was painted like a castle wall, with names of the exhibits within displayed on fake windows: The Haunted Skeleton, The Petrified Tree, The Noose of Justice, The Garden of Natural Wonders.

It was a tourist trap, one of those roadside attractions he'd heard about, read about and seen in bad horror movies but had never before encountered in real life. He pulled into the parking lot, swinging into a space next to the entrance. The only other vehicle in the lot was a beat-up red pickup truck in the corner. Dennis assumed it belonged to the proprietor. He got out of the car, stretched his tired limbs, breathed deeply. The air seemed heavier and more humid than it had when he'd been in the car and moving.

The entrance to The Keep was through a gate in the fence that was open and made to look like a drawbridge. Behind it was the largest building, and Dennis stepped inside a shabby gift shop filled with printed T-shirts, novelty knickknacks, polished-rock bookends and crappy children's toys. A tired-looking older woman with incongruous Jackie O. glasses sat on a high stool behind the cash register, working on a crossword puzzle book. He walked up to the counter. "I'd like to see The Keep," he said.

"One dollar," she told him without looking up. The price was definitely right. He withdrew his

wallet, took out a dollar bill and handed it to her. The woman's eyes met his for a brief second, and though he didn't think about it until later, the emotion he saw in them was fear. She pulled a purple ticket from a large roll, tore it in half and handed him the stub. "Right through there," she said, pointing. On the far wall was a painting of a castle, in the middle of it a real door.

"Thanks," he said. He walked over, pushed open the door and found himself in a darkened room. Fluorescent lights sputtered to life as the door closed behind him, and on the floor he could see several large pieces of drywall with what looked like Indian carvings on them. Two long tables on either side of the room were host to a variety of pots and grinding stones. But the focal point of the room was a built-in alcove covered by a clear sheet of glass. Behind the glass, propped up against the wall was a skeleton.

Dennis walked over to the alcove, peering in. He had no doubt that the skeleton was real. The bones weren't clean and bleached like the ones in movies or Halloween displays: rather the skull was cracked and yellowed, the ribs chipped and deteriorating, the legs and arms dirty and discolored. On the wall above and behind the figure were painted the words The Haunted Skeleton, and below that was a short description of how the man who had discovered this intact specimen in a river cave had died under mysterious circumstances, and how the succession of subsequent owners had all come to bad ends. The paragraph concluded, "Although it has been behind glass and has not been touched since entering The Keep in 1999, the proprietors will sometimes discover that the skeleton has moved on its own in the middle of the night, and more than one customer has returned to reveal that they have had nightmares about the skeleton and have seen its image in their own homes! Believe it or don't!"

Dennis smiled, kept walking.

He passed through a series of rooms in the connected buildings he'd seen from the parking lot, most of them filled with local Indian and pioneer artifacts. In the last chamber, which was larger than the others and had a much higher ceiling, there was a full-sized replica of a gallows. A worn thick-roped noose hung from the center beam, and text on a laminated board attached to the adjacent wall read, "The Noose of Justice. This was used to hang Niggers and Kikes in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when those outsiders threatened to disrupt forever the idyllic life created by our forebears... ."

Dennis looked away from the words, glancing back up at the noose. He had a queasy, unpleasant feeling in the pit of his stomach. He was shocked and offended by the blatantly racist description, and he felt more than a little uneasy when he considered how far out in the middle of nowhere he really was. He thought of that one lone pickup in the parking lot.

If he disappeared, no one would know where he was. His body might never be found.

Niggers and Kikes.

He'd left his cell phone in the car.

Dennis looked again at the description. There were a lot of militia groups in Missouri, weren't there? For all he knew, this little tourist attraction was a front for some white supremacist organization.

He suddenly felt the need to get as far away from here as possible. He considered doubling back the way he'd come, but those dark rooms filled with old artifacts and that skeleton in the alcove now seemed a lot more sinister than they had, and instead he pressed ahead and walked outside to the Garden of Natural Wonders. This property was much bigger than he'd originally thought. According to the small hand-painted signs that pointed toward three diverging paths, the Petrified Tree was off to his right, the Ancient Indian Burial Ground was straight ahead, and the Olde Faithful Geyser and exit were off to the left.

He took the path on the left.

The trail looked as though it ran along the side of the buildings back toward the entrance, but several yards in, after a short jog around a bush, the dirt path suddenly veered off in another direction, through a copse of trees behind the buildings, opening out before a small rocky rise. A series of stone steps had been carved into the side of the low ridge, and, curious, Dennis climbed them, holding on to the welded pipes that served as a railing. What was this?

Before him was a pit filled with what looked like liquid clay, a bubbling grayish green mud that gurgled and popped as though boiling.

"It's where they used to throw them."

Dennis jumped at the sound of the voice. He whirled around to see a gnomish little man standing to the right of him.

He pretended he hadn't been startled. "Throw who?" he asked, keeping his voice calm.

"Evildoers," the old man said. "Witches, unbelievers. You know." He looked at Dennis as if he should know, and Dennis wanted to say, / don't know, I don't want to know, I don't care, I only stopped here because I was tired of driving and got suckered by your sign.

Instead, he just nodded.

Niggers and Kikes.

He turned to go.

"Did you see my noose?"

Dennis stopped, a chill caressing his spine.

"Bought it off a farmer. He had it in his barn all these years."

Dennis didn't know what to say. He forced out a noncommittal smile that he hoped was polite.

"I saw a video once of a fat guy trying to hang himself. He put the noose around his neck, then jumped off a picnic table. He weighed so much that his head popped off; his neck wasn't strong enough to support the weight underneath, you see?"

Why is the old man telling me this? Dennis wondered.

Was it because he was Chinese?

Niggers and Kikes.

He should've stayed in Pennsylvania. He should never have left.

Why had he left his damn cell phone in the car?

The gnomelike man had moved closer. / can take him if I have to, Dennis thought. The old man was scrawny and his breath came out in a hard, harsh wheeze. One kick to the balls and he would be down. Then Dennis could run away. Unless, of course, the man's compatriots were waiting farther up the path.

"I was going to add a sex room to The Keep, but my old lady put her foot down. I have stories. ... I remember one time I ate out this one skank's pussy. She'd filled it up with salsa before spreading her legs." His laugh turned into a cough. "It was like chowing down on an old fish taco."

"I have to go," Dennis said disgustedly. The old man grabbed his arm, bony fingers digging painfully into muscle. "They're coming back," he said, and there was fear as well as fervor in his eyes. "They're rising again." Against his will, Dennis felt a twinge of alarm. "Who?" he forced himself to ask. "Them."

As if on cue, a hand popped out of the muck, a spindly skeletal arm attached to a horribly wrinkled palm from which protruded five writhing clawlike fingers. It shot up from the middle of the pit, grasping at air.

"I told you!" the old man cried, and began beating down the arm with a long-handled wooden pole that looked like an extra-thick broomstick handle. Dennis hadn't seen the pole before, didn't know where it had come from- had it been meant for him?

-and he stepped back as the old man began whaling on the spindly arm. "Fuck you!" the man said vehemently, his face turning red, his breath growing harsher and raspier. "Get back in there!"

The force with which the hand and arm were being assaulted would have shattered a normal limb, but the wrinkled skeletal appendage remained unfazed, the clawlike fingers trying to grab the attacking staff. Then the pole hit sideways, hard against the wrist, and Dennis heard something crack, saw the wizened hand flop forward, limp, even as the arm continued to stretch upward from the boiling mud.

He was reminded of his dream on the first night of his trip, where he'd been beaten by that man in the steel yard yelling crazily at him in incomprehensible English. There were echoes of that fury here, and with a shout of glee, the old man renewed his efforts, spurred on by his success, seemingly getting his second wind as he two-handedly swung the long stick like a baseball bat.

Feeling scared and more than a little sickened, Dennis hurried up the path toward the exit, the trail sloping down the small ridge and past a deadfall of old trees and brush before reaching the wooden fence separating The Keep from the parking lot. The path followed the fence past the series of buildings until it reached a previously unnoticed gate. Dennis pushed the gate open-and he was out.

The parking lot was still empty save for his car and the red pickup, and he ran across the gravel-strewn asphalt until he reached the Tempo. Pulling out his keys as he ran, he unlocked the door and gratefully got inside. Minutes later, he was back on the road, heading west, The Keep in his rearview mirror.

What was that arm that had popped out of the mud pit? Was it some mechanical device used to trick tourists? He didn't think so, but he didn't dare think beyond that, didn't really want to know the truth, and he pushed the image from his mind as he accelerated past the speed limit and drove as fast as he could away from The Keep.

The Tempo died half an hour out of Selby, a nondescript town on the border between forest and farmland. There was a series of bumps; then suddenly the car had no power. Dennis pushed down on the gas pedal, flooring it, but instead of accelerating, the car lost speed at an alarming rate. In a matter of seconds, he was stopped in the middle of the road. There were no other cars coming from either direction, and he hadn't seen another vehicle for the past forty-five minutes, but he moved the car to the side of the road just in case, pushing on the doorframe while trying to steer. The Tempo slid onto the dirt shoulder, and Dennis slammed the door shut.

"Damn it!"

He pulled out his wallet, found his AAA card, flipped open his cell phone and tried to call, but he was out of range. It was not until he'd walked a mile or so down the road that he was finally able to get through, and it was forty minutes after he returned to his car, his head full of Deliverance daymares-

Niggers and Kikes

-that a tow truck came and towed him back to the Ford dealer in Selby.

He expected to be given the runaround because he was an outsider with Pennsylvania plates, and he was not disappointed. The service manager was dressed in a blue blazer and greeted him with a used-car dealer's smile, but when Dennis pressed for a time estimate, the man's Joe Friendly routine disappeared. "We're very busy right now," he said flatly, though Dennis could see only two vehicles in the dealership's service bays. "It'll be a day or two before we can take a look at it. Depending on the problem and what you decide to do, we can have work completed maybe two days after that."

Four days!

Dennis wanted to assert his customer's rights, wanted to speak to someone higher up, the manager or owner of the dealership, but he sensed that that would only add time to the estimate, so he said nothing. He tried the polite route. "I'm just passing through and I'm in kind of a hurry, so any help you could give me would be great."

The service manager's smile was back. "We'll do what we can," he promised insincerely.

His insurance covered the price of a loaner car, but since he was from out of town and out of state, the dealership made him put the rental on his Visa card and said he could get the insurance company to reimburse him once he got back home. He drove out with a car even older and crappier than his own, and the first thing he did was hunt down a place to stay.

Sclby must have gotten more through traffic than lie thought bci;ui\( farther along the highway was an entire motel row and alter getting a rate card from each of the six motor inns, he decided to stay at the

Budget Arms, the last and cheapest lodge in town.

There was a sign in the office window: help wanted. Out of curiosity, he asked the clerk behind the counter what the job was while the man ran his credit card.

"Uh, kind of ... my job." The clerk grinned sheepishly. "I'm bailing tomorrow for the Ramada Inn down the block. Why? You interested?"

Dennis shrugged noncommittally.

"Well, it's yours for the taking. The misers who own this place don't pay much, but they don't ask questions either. And they're under a deadline here." He motioned toward Dennis' loaded car. "If you're just looking for a quick buck, want to make a little gas money so you can keep on truckin', this is a good gig. Long-term, though? I wouldn't recommend it."

"Thanks," Dennis said. He finished checking in, then took the key and walked over to his room. He looked inside. Bed, TV, window air conditioner. It wasn't the best place he'd stayed ... but it wasn't the worst either.

He unpacked the car, put his suitcases into the room, took the boxes and bags off the roof-he was becoming an old hand at this-then locked everything up and headed back to the motel office. The bell above the door jingled as he stepped inside. Before the clerk could ask what he needed, Dennis took the help wanted sign from the window and carried it over to the desk. He looked at the man.

"I'll take it," he said.

Eight

Canyonlands National Park, Utah

"Jesus."

Henry glanced up at the surface of the cliff in front of him. Overnight, someone had defaced the petro-glyphs that had been etched and painted onto these walls over nine centuries ago and had withstood rain and wind, heat and cold, conquering Spaniards, westward-migrating pioneers and the National Park Service. He had been here only yesterday afternoon, stationed at this very spot to answer tourists' questions, and everything had been the same as it had always been.

Now, though ...

Now lizards had been changed into boats, spirals into squares, horses into cars. People had been crossed out and scribbled over, and geometric symbols had been obliterated entirely, leaving only indented sections of chiseled rock. He'd never seen anything like this before and had no idea how such a feat could be completed in a single night. Even with a team of vandals driving cherry pickers and wielding power tools, there was virtually no way such a massive and wholesale destruction of historically significant rock art could be accomplished.

His gaze moved from the lowest pictographs, at eye level, to the weathered etchings at the top, nearly two stories above his head. For some reason he imagined those naked Oriental twins crawling up the precipitous face of the cliff, stone implements in hand, chipping away at the ancient Indian drawings and purposefully disfiguring them, the two sisters working throughout the night, moonlight shining on their bare flesh as they scurried over the sheer stone wall.

He pressed down on the erection that was growing in his pants, grateful there was no one else here.

He needed to report this. Nothing of this nature had ever occurred in the park to his knowledge, at least not to this extent, and it was incumbent upon him to inform the superintendent and to set the wheels in motion for the investigation that would hopefully catch the perpetrators so they could not do it again. What had been lost here could never be regained, and the most important thing now was to make sure that it did not happen again.

He was about to radio in a report when he suddenly

thought of another nearby site with hundreds of Anasazi petroglyphs and pictographs. It was more secluded, not on the park maps given out to visitors, but still accessible by Jeep. Quickly, he made the call to the superintendent, explaining what had happened, giving the exact location, then said that he wanted to check another site and see if it, too, had been ^vandalized.

"Don't touch anything," Healey warned, and Henry switched the radio off without answering. Asshole. Who in the fuck did he think he was talking to?

Putting the Jeep into gear, Henry drove away from the butte, then took a barely visible trail over the flat ground toward an adjacent confluence of mesas, speeding around a freestanding column of weathered sandstone into a wide box canyon. Halfway to the canyon's far side, he braked to a halt, sending up a cloud of dust that quickly overwhelmed the vehicle.

He jumped over the side and moved away from the Jeep, toward the canyon wall, waiting for the dust to clear.

He saw what he'd known he'd see.

The pictures on the rock had been transformed.

A sun with extended rays had been changed into what looked like a train track going into a tunnel. Two stylized humanoid figures were now posts on the porch of a Western building, a small forest of pine trees had been turned into a collection of sledgehammers, and a herd of wild horses were now railroad boxcars.

He caught movement out of the corner of his eye, something off to the left that darted quickly from north to south, but when he turned his head in that direction he saw nothing. Again there was movement in his peripheral vision, a furtive rush by something dark and vaguely formed, but once again when he looked directly at the spot where it should be, he saw only sand and rock. It was hot out, and sunny, but Henry suddenly felt as chilled as if it were a winter midnight.

It was impossible for a person or persons to have defaced the park's petroglyphs to this extent in one night.

But it might not be impossible for something else.

He whipped his head around quickly, hoping to glimpse one of those fleeing forms, catch it off guard, but there was only the canyon. He made his way back to the car, alert for any sign of movement. Leaning over the closed Jeep door, Henry turned on the two-way radio-and gibberish issued from the speaker, a harsh yet singsongy chatter that sounded like nothing he'd ever heard before and sent a rash of shivers down his body.

He pressed the talk button. "Cote here."

No answer, only that strange gibberish, clear above the static. He realized that the walls of the canyon were too high; the radio wouldn't work in this spot.

He was cut off.

Henry Cote had done a lot of brave things in his life, from facing down an armed Viet Cong to leaping off a cliff into Wolf Canyon Lake on a drunken dare. But he was not feeling brave now, and he quickly jumped in the Jeep, fired it up and hightailed it out of the canyon, heading for paved roads and other people and the rational world.

Healey was waiting for him in the administration building behind the visitors' center. The superintendent waved Henry into his office, then shut the door behind them.

"I found more vandalism at Little-" Henry began.

"There's more than that."

The chill was back. So much for the rational world.

"Something's going on here," the superintendent said quietly.

Henry looked at him.

"I want you to keep this under your hat. I know it's going to get out because the police are involved, but it isn't just the vandalism. For one thing, Laurie Chambers is missing. She's been gone nearly two days. I haven't told anyone, and I waited a day just to make sure myself-you know how she is; she could've just gone out on an overnight and forgot about the time- but she hasn't checked in and ... and no Jeeps have been checked out of the pool. Her truck's still at her cabin."

"Jesus," Henry said, sitting down. "Laurie?"

"I know."

"She knows this country like the back of her hand."

"There's more."

Henry steeled himself.

"This is the part I don't want to get out. You understand me? I wouldn't even be telling you if you hadn't found what you had out there." He took a deep breath. "There's a dead body. A woman. She's not Laurie, too small, but she's someone, and I found her here in the building, in the workroom. I haven't told Pedley or Jill or Raul or anyone. The police are on their way, but I told them to keep things quiet. I don't want to alarm anyone unnecessarily."

"I understand why you don't want the public to know," Henry said. A decade or so back, there'd been a serial killer on the loose near Yosemite, and attendance had fallen precipitously, jeopardizing several park projects. Canyonlands was much more primitive, much more remote and much less popular than Yosemite. "But why not tell us? What's the point?"

"I need time to figure out what to say. I don't want | to get everyone all ... panicked."

"No one's going to panic. Who do you think you're dealing with here?"

"Nevertheless, keep it to yourself until I say so, got | it? I'll decide when the time is right."

From down the road leading into the park came the whine of sirens.

Henry stood, and despite the circumstances it was all he could do not to smile. "Good luck with that," he said.

The body had been beaten into unrecognizability. Along with the other rangers on duty, Henry peeked around the corner of the doorframe into the workroom. He'd imagined the dead woman's body lying naked on one of the long worktables next to the battered tools and artifacts like a corpse ready to be autopsied. So it was a surprise to see it slumped on the floor next to one of the bookcases in faded jeans and a torn bloodstained T-shirt, her head a pulpy red mess dripping on the dark bruised skin of her neck. A forensics team was examining the body, inspecting it with gloved fingers, touching it with metal calipers, photographing and videotaping it from various angles.

Her, he had to remind himself. She was a her, not an it.

The woman did not appear to be a park employee or anyone he recognized, and quick conversations with the other lookiloos confirmed that they were just as much in the dark as he was. Speculation was rife that one of their own had murdered the woman-who else could have gotten into the building at night?-but Henry did not believe it for a second, and he knew from their earlier conversation that the superintendent didn't either. No, this was of a piece with the vandalism out there, and he could easily imagine those naked twins beating the woman to death with the same primitive tools with which they defaced the rock art, then carrying her body back here.

He shifted his legs slightly, pressing them together, trying to keep down his erection.

Despite the day's heat, the night was chill, and, unable to sleep, Henry walked onto the small porch of his cabin, staring out at the desert, half expecting to see two female figures sauntering sexily toward him. He thought about the defaced cliffs. He wanted to believe that the vandalism was random, pointless, but he kept coming back to those twins. Somewhere deep down, he knew the two were connected, and he could not help wondering if the revised artwork was meant as a message, was a way for something to tell him ... tell him ... tell him what? He didn't know, had not even the faintest clue, and as much as anything else, it was the incomprehensibility of it all that gnawed at him, that kept his brain spinning and unable to sleep.

Henry glanced toward the other cabins, saw nothing but darkness. A porch light had been turned on at Laurie Chambers' place-Why? Was it supposed to act as some sort of homing beacon, drawing her back?-but other than that, the cabins appeared deserted. Ironic, he thought, that the one cabin that appeared to be occupied was the dead woman's.

Dead woman's?

She's only missing, he told himself, but he thought about the bloody pulpy face of the body in the workroom and knew in his gut that Laurie had been murdered, too.

A meteor streaked across the starry southern sky, visible for a fraction of a second in his peripheral vision, and he was reminded of those shadows in the box canyon, those brief glimpses of darting black forms that he'd been given and that even in broad daylight had scared the living hell out of him. Were they still there now? he wondered. If so, what were they doing? He had the sudden desire to drive out to the canyon and see for himself. It was stupid, he knew; it was wrong; it violated every rule and every scrap of common sense he had, but he wanted to see the rock art at night, to look for those mysterious dark forms and see if they were once again defacing ancient cliff drawings.

Must be that Indian blood in his veins.

He didn't hesitate, didn't try and talk himself out of it, but immediately went back inside the cabin, got his keys and closed the front door. Before he could change his mind, he was in the Jeep and off.

But of course he was not about to change his mind. The desire to be out there in the canyons, to see for himself what went on at night, was strong within him, a drive, almost a need, and though he didn't understand it, he accepted it.

Henry knew the trails of the park like the back of his cock, and once off the pavement he sped over eroded sandstone and hard-packed dirt as easily as if he'd been navigating city streets on a bright sunny day. There were numerous other cliffs and rocks containing petroglyphs, but instinct led him back to the box canyon, and once again he arrived in a cloud of dust. He braked to a stop and waited until the dust had settled before he got out of the Jeep. He'd brought several flashlights and a high-powered handheld halogen, and he trained the powerful search beam on the cliff directly before him. The light played across the dark rock wall, illuminating the train track going into a tunnel, the collection of sledgehammers, but not showing anything new. He shone the light around the canyon, but it revealed nothing and served only to make the surrounding darkness blacker, so he shut it off, waiting for his eyes to adjust.

The world was silent, and that seemed strange. He could hear the snickering of his shoes on the sand, the ticking of the Jeep's engine cooling down, but that was it. Ordinarily, the cries of nocturnal animals from owls to coyotes sounded in these canyons, but tonight all was still, and Henry found that extremely disconcerting.

He wished he'd brought his shotgun.

But he knew a gun wouldn't do any good against what was out here.

He stood next to the Jeep.

Waited.

Watched.

And then he saw them. Shadows on the canyon floor, two shadows moving in tandem across the moonlit sand, and Henry's heart accelerated from its usual laconic tom-tom to the rat-a-tat-tat of a high-powered assault rifle. They were not hiding as they had been earlier in the day, not confining themselves to the edges of his vision, but sliding directly toward him in full view, defiant, proud, threatening. He realized as they moved closer that they were upright. Not only were the shadows autonomous, unattached to any concrete form or object; they were not, as he had originally thought, projected onto the ground. That was an optical illusion fostered by distance. They were flat and one-dimensional, but they stood like people, feet to the sand, head in the air, and though they glided rather than walked, they were human figures.

He was frightened but excited, and made no effort to escape. The shadows reached him, began slowly and sensuously swirling about his body. He saw silhouetted nipples, outlines of perfect vaginal clefts. He was aroused as he had never been before, and he reached down, half-hypnotized, and unfastened his jeans, pulling down his briefs, freeing himself, letting the pants fall around his ankles. The shadows bent before him, appeared to be kissing his quivering erection, and although there was no sensation of touch and he could feel nothing, the sight was too much for him, and he began spurting, thrusting uselessly into the air as his seed spilled onto the sand below.

The shadows rushed over to where the thick drops congealed on the ground, and began licking them up.

The semen disappeared.

It was impossible, it made no sense, but Henry did not question it, was not even surprised. His penis had finished, was now starting to shrink, but he took it in his hand and milked a few last drops, watching as the semen fell onto the sand and the twins' shadows gobbled it up.

Were the shadows more solid now, less ephemeral? He thought so, but he could not be sure.

The dark flat figures continued to swirl about him, and there was a hunger evident in their movements, a craving he sensed and felt and that frightened him to the core.

He turned and fled.

It was an instinctive reaction and a stupid one. He'd been close by the Jeep and the only place to go was away from it, but that meant he was abandoning his only hope of getting out of the canyon and back to the real world. It didn't make any difference, though. The shadows refused to follow him, and when he looked back, he saw them retreating the way they'd come, looking like two predators on the prowl.

Where were they going now?

The seductive sensuality they'd exhibited around him was gone, and once again their purposeful glide seemed menacing, predacious. He waited until their dark forms had blended with the blackness of the canyon before he ran back to the Jeep, jumping in and driving out of there as fast as he could go.

What had happened? What had he done? He was filled with the unshakable certainty that he had helped them, had given them strength. Whatever occurred from here on in, he was part of it; he was involved. He thought of Laurie, of the dead woman in the workroom. In his mind Henry saw once again the sickening spectacle of the shadows hungrily devouring his semen. He felt tired, drained, frustrated, scared and, most of all, used. And as the Jeep bumped over the rounded sandstone he had to blink back tears so he could see the way back to the road.

Nine

The Keep, Missouri

It was long after midnight, but Hank Gifford lay awake, his eyes on an infomercial promoting some type of kitchen gadget, his mind on the mud pits out back. Next to him, Arlene snored loudly in her sleep, drooling on the edge of his pillow. He would have pushed her back to her own side of the bed, but that might wake her up, and the last thing he wanted to do was listen to her meaningless talk in the middle of the night.

The mud pits had him worried because he wasn't there to watch them. It was unavoidable. He couldn't monitor the situation twenty-four hours a day. But what if one of them got out when he wasn't looking, when he was asleep? He imagined a spindly shriveled form slinking along the trails of the garden, sneaking into the museum, working its way up to the house.

Of course, if he saw one of them out, he'd shoot it and stuff it. That would be a great addition to The Keep.

Except ... what if he didn't see it? What if he was asleep when it got into the house? What if he awoke with the sulfur smell of the pits in his nostrils to see a skeletal figure climbing atop Arlene, ripping her face off and turning toward him with a terrible grin of malicious glee?

That's what worried him; that's what kept him up.

Hank picked up the remote control from the nightstand and pressed the mute button, listening. The house was silent. Good. He turned the sound back up a little. He was tempted to go out and check on the mud pits, but while he'd gone there with his flashlight at night many times before, he was afraid to do so now.

They're rising again.

He'd been telling that to the customers, and it was true. He didn't know how he knew it, but he did. They were rising, all of the heathens and unbelievers who had been fed to the pits. He had no idea how many of them were down there, their bodies sunk in the muck-no records had been kept of such things-but his daddy had told him all those years ago that every last one of them had been taken care of by the men of the towns, that after the purges none had been left in this part of Missouri.

That could mean ten.

It could mean a hundred.

He'd always known they would rise again. His daddy had told him that, too. One of the infidels had apparently sworn it with his last breath-at least that's how the story went-and the men of the towns had believed him. Even as good Christians they'd recognized the truth behind the heathen curse, and-

The bedroom's south wall exploded as though hit with a battering ram.

Arlene awoke screaming, and Hank scrambled out from under the blanket, off the bed. The right leg of his pajama bottom got stuck on the stray wire that stuck out from the side of the box springs, but he pulled hard, ripping the material, and continued his frantic escape. They're out, he thought wildly. They're attacking. Debris was flying all about; dust was everywhere. A piece of brick zoomed by his head, smashing the mirror on the dresser. He hazarded a look back, beheld a gigantic black form larger than the house. It wasn't them, he saw. It was a train. Even through the cloud of dust, he could make out the headlight on the front of the locomotive, the slanting grille that protruded through the hole in their wall. Only ...

Only it wasn't a train. Not really. It was ...

Something else.

But he didn't have time to think about that. The house was collapsing around his ears, and Arlene had been pinned to the bed by a fallen beam. The end of the rabbeted board lay embedded in her back, and blood gushed from her mouth onto the pillow-his pillow-each time she tried to cry out. He knew he should try to help her, but he turned without pause and attempted to run out of the room, away from the big black form that looked like a train but was not a train. The wall in front of him dropped, the doorway disappearing in a hail of plaster and wood as structural support gave way, and he staggered backward only to be slammed from behind by something that was at once hard and soft, something sticky and mushy but backed by a substance as hard as steel. He was knocked sideways to the floor as the bed fell atop him, Arlene's crushed and bloody body mashing hard against his own, her lifeless lips dripping into his ear. For a brief second, behind her, above her, in back of the broken bed, he could see the massive object that looked like a locomotive.

There was a noise, a roar, as of a hundred people screaming in unbearable agony.

And then there was death.

Ten

Flagstaff, Arizona

Angela had high hopes for date number four.

The third date had gone well. The jazz concert had been pretty nice, even though the music was more her parents' speed than hers. Brian had obviously felt the same way, because he suggested they skip out at intermission, and they ended up walking along the sidewalks of the campus at night, talking about their pasts, their futures, their visions of the world. The evening was chill, fall beginning to creep in after sunset even though summer still ruled the day, but that only made them pull closer and gave a pleasant edge to the otherwise tranquil stroll. They'd ended up at his dorm, doing what people usually did at the conclusion of a successful date.

This time they decided to try a rock concert.

The auditorium was packed. They arrived early, but still the parking lot was jammed, the lines were long, and inside there was standing room only. The buzz was all about the band, none of the usual small talk by friends and couples, and Angela eavesdropped on the closest conversation, a gaggle of high school girls who couldn't seem to decide who was cuter: the guys in Hoobastank or the members of Lightyear, the band playing here tonight. Ordinarily, that would have been ( the death knell for Angela's interest in the group, but : on the other side of her, two older male music majors were speaking admiringly in measured tones about the band as well.

"This should be interesting," she shouted. The preconcert music had suddenly cranked up several decibels.

"What?" Brian shouted back.

i said, 'This should be interesting'!"

He nodded. "They're really good!"

The lights dimmed.

Even though Lightyear was from the Phoenix area, what locals referred to as "the Valley," the band members were still Arizonans, and the crowd treated them like conquering hometown heroes. A huge roar greeted the musicians as they took to the stage, and though Angela had gone to a lot of concerts and a lot of clubs back in Los Angeles, she had never experienced a reaction like this. She, too, got caught up in '· the excitement, and as the band slammed into its first song, she felt the way she had the first time she'd seen Pearl Jam: as if she were in the presence of greatness.

The concert was amazing. She was an old hand at this stuff, jaded as only an L.A. native could be, but after the show she wanted to hit the table at the back of the hall and buy the group's CD. These guys were definitely going places. The lines were too big, though, and she wasn't sure she had enough money with her, so she decided to pick one up tomorrow at Hastings. If they didn't have any CDs in stock, she'd order one.

Brian was silent on the way back home. She expected him to stop off somewhere-a coffeehouse so they could talk, even a lovers' lane so they could make out-but he drove her directly back to Babbitt House. Despite the good vibes left over from the concert, and even before he said a word, she had a queasy sensation in the pit of her stomach, a bad feeling.

"I don't think this is working."

The car was pulling to a stop in front of the lawn, and his eyes were still on the road, not on her.

Where was this coming from? She thought things were going great. Not just tonight but overall. They had fun together, they never seemed to run out of conversation, and physically ... well, they were both obviously into each other. She'd even e-mailed her friends in L.A. about him because it looked like this was going to last awhile.

And now it wasn't "working"?

When had this happened?

She looked at him and found that although she was surprised, she was not surprised. That bad feeling had been trying to tell her something and on some level she'd understood.

Angela cleared her throat. "Why?" she asked, not trusting herself to say more. There was a sudden distance between them, they were no longer a we or an us but two separate people, and she was now asking the question of a stranger.

The car had stopped, but he remained looking out the front window, would still not turn to face her. "I just ... I don't know. Sometimes you can tell, you know, if things are working out or not. ..."

Why hadn't he said anything about this before? He'd obviously been thinking about it for a while because nothing had happened tonight that could have possibly resulted in a change of heart. She grew angry as she recalled their light conversation at dinner, the easy good time they'd had before the start of the concert. He'd been lying the whole time, putting on an act, and she hated him for it. Why had he gone out with her tonight? Why hadn't he canceled? Because he already had the tickets, wanted to see the show and thought it was too late to line up anyone else? She was suddenly sure that was the case.

She said nothing, let him hang there.

"I don't know," he said. "I haven't met someone else, if that's what you're thinking. It's just that I thought ... well, maybe I should meet someone else. I mean, I like you and all, and we had some fun, but neither of us thought there was any real future in this relationship, did we?"

She had. She stupidly had, and it was all she could do right now not to cry like a baby.

He looked at her, finally, and the expression on his face implored her to agree with him, begged her not to cause a scene.

"Fine," she said. It was all she could say, and though she wished she had some witty rejoinder or were mature enough to behave as though none of this bothered her, she was not that composed or sophisticated, and she was just grateful that she didn't trip over the curb or slam her skirt in the car door as she exited the vehicle.

"Do you want me to-" he began.

"No," she said without turning around, not knowing what she was turning down and not caring. She didn't want anything from him at this point. She continued walking toward the house, willing him to leave, waiting to hear the sound of his car, and was grateful when she finally heard him pull away and head up the street.

She stopped walking, breathed.

What the hell had just happened?

It wasn't any big deal. She knew that intellectually. She'd gone on a couple of dates, and it hadn't worked out. It had happened before and would no doubt happen again. The thing was, she'd invested herself this time; she'd really liked this guy, and she'd thought it had a serious chance of working out.

No. That wasn't it.

What really bothered her, what left her feeling emotionally beaten up, was the fact that she hadn't seen this coming. Before, she'd always had a good bead on the romantic reality of every relationship or potential relationship in which she'd been involved. She'd been able to read the emotional truth of any situation, and the fact that she'd been so tone-deaf this time shook her to the core.

And, bottom line, it always hurt to be rejected.

She continued up the lawn, reached the front door. Chrissie was going to be out, on a date of her own, and Angela was glad. She didn't want her roommate home right now. She wasn't up to facing people or answering questions; she just wanted to crawl into bed and watch TV and be by herself. Tomorrow they could dissect what had happened. Maybe morning would give her some perspective.

She took out her key, opened the door-

And Winston and Brock were waiting for her in the foyer.

"We saw what went down." Winston said sympathetically. "We happened to be-"

"Spying," Brock finished for him. "And we could tell from your body language what was happening."

"When you stopped on the lawn after he drove away? My heart broke."

"We're so sorry."

Angela didn't know whether to be grateful or annoyed. She was a little bit of both, but she was thankful to have such caring friends, and though it was a cliched Lifetime channel sentiment, she realized that knowing Winston and Brock were there for her made it easier to deal with the rejection. She declined their offer to come into their apartment and commiserate, though. "I'd rather be alone," she told them.

"Understood," Winston said. "Understood."

"Thank you."

"But a word of advice?"

"Hit me."

"When life gives you lemons-" Winston began.

"-throw them at your enemies." Brock smiled. "Aim for the eyes. Do as much damage as possible."

"Exactly. Take whatever you're given and use it as a weapon."

Laughing, she threw her arms around them. "I love you guys."

"We love you, too," Winston told her.

She felt better as she walked up the stairs, but she was still glad that she didn't run into anyone else, and when Chrissie arrived home early, gave a small knock on her door and asked if she was awake, Angela remained silent in the dark.

There was a traffic jam on the way to school the next morning. The highway was clear, but getting to it took her nearly twenty minutes-even though it was only four blocks away. Despite the series of one-way streets in the old downtown district, traffic usually flowed well here, and when Angela looked east and saw that all of the southbound roads were jammed, even the one coming from the Snowbowl and the Grand Canyon, she knew that there was something seriously wrong.

She didn't know what it was, though, until she reached the campus and arrived late to her first class, Cultural Anthropology. The room was abuzz with the news, and even the instructor had deviated from his planned topic to discuss the day's events.

A tunnel had been discovered under the street.

A tunnel crammed with corpses.

All of the information was secondhand, but it appeared as though the corpses were old, perhaps mummified. If so, this was a significant archaeological find, and the professor said he was planning to make arrangements for the class to view the site once the police were through, perhaps as early as this afternoon. "Keep an eye on the department bulletin board. I'll post on the Web site, but since a lot of you probably have classes in this building throughout the day, it might be easier for you to just stop by. I want to stress that this is entirely voluntary and won't affect your grade. In fact, it's not even going to be extra credit. This is strictly for those who have a special interest in local prehistory, an opportunity for you to be in on the ground floor, as it were, of what could be a major discovery in the field."

He started rhapsodizing about the possibilities of what they might come across. "As you know, there are several notable archaeological sites in the Flagstaff area, most prominently Wupatki and Walnut Canyon. But the unearthing of what may be a tomb in downtown Flagstaff, an area not previously known to house any significant dwellings or artifacts, by people who did not typically inter their dead in this manner, could prove to be important and consequential. We have the potential to learn more about how these people lived and died from this single discovery than from any prior dig."

Angela raised her hand. "Who found it?" she asked.

"From what I've been told, city workers were digging a trench under State Street for the new expanded sewer system when they came across a hard rock slab that turned out to be the roof of the tunnel."

The remainder of the class period was spent on a series of digressions regarding the burial customs of local tribes and the Anasazi. "Are you going?" a guy who sat several seats away from her asked as Angela made her way out into the corridor with the rest of the students. She looked around in surprise to make sure he was talking to her and not someone else. The two of them had never said a word to each other before. She did not even know his name.

"Uh, yeah," she said.

"Me, too. See you there, huh?" He smiled and waved as he started toward the elevator on the opposite end of the corridor.

She watched him go. This morning, after she'd told Chrissie about Brian, as they'd grabbed their hurried respective breakfasts, her roommate had said nonchalantly, "It's probably for the best. You're too young to be tied down. Have some fun first." She'd been surprised and hurt by the comment, had thought her friend was not taking her feelings seriously. But now she thought Chrissie might be right.

She turned in the opposite direction and took the stairway down to her next class.

It was clear by early afternoon that the bodies were not that old, that not only were they not from some ancient Indian tribe, but they probably weren't even pioneers. Still, Dr. Welkes intended to lead his classes on a tour of the underground chamber to view the bodies, and the mystery remained. Who were these people and why were so many of them crammed into a short tunnel under State Street? For the police had discovered that the tunnel began beneath an old hotel that was in the process of being renovated, and ended a few yards away in the basement of what had been a department store and was now a series of boutique shops. Both buildings had been constructed in the late 1800s, placing the date of death sometime around the turn of the last century.

But why were there so many corpses? Police counted thirty-three in that confined space. The professor and his graduate assistants had already scoured Flagstaff newspapers from that time period and found no mention of any unusual burials

or mass deaths, no sudden surge of missing persons. Waiting in front of the professor's office at the appointed time, one of the grad assistants speculated that the deaths had been from disease and the tunnel had been used as some sort of quarantine area.

"At this point, that's as valid a theory as any other," Dr. Welkes said. He looked at his watch. "It's about that time. Shall we go?"

There were around twenty of them gathered in the hall, and they picked up their books and backpacks, following the professor toward the stairs. Angela looked around for the nameless guy who'd spoken to her after class. She was disappointed he hadn't shown, but that was more than made up for by the excitement of seeing what one wit was calling "the tunnel of death."

There was a tap on her shoulder. It was Brenda, a girl who sat behind her in Dr. Welkes' class and who was also in her American Lit class. "Angela, could I carpool with you?" she asked. "I live on campus and I don't have a car."

"Sure," Angela told her.

"If any of you have flashlights, bring them!" the professor announced as he started down the stairs. "It's going to be dark down there!"

Two more people ended up carpooling with her, and hers was the first vehicle behind the professor's Jeep. He led them to a designated parking area behind the closed hotel. A policeman was waiting for them, and when all of the students had parked their cars and assembled on the sidewalk, the officer led them under the yellow crime scene ribbon into the hotel.

If this had been an amusement park ride, it could not have been designed any better. The lobby of the hotel, in the early stages of renovation, was devoid of furniture, and the ceiling and floor were composed of dark stripped wood. Tattered sections of old wallpaper hung against dirty white walls, and the out-of-service elevator was visible as a broken metal box through the open double doors. The hotel looked for all intents and purposes like a haunted building, and the lack of electric illumination combined with dim fractured sunlight seeping through the dusty front windows only emphasized the resemblance.

The students had been talkative and enthusiastic on the way over, even while waiting on the sidewalk for everyone to arrive, but the atmosphere of this place was deadly, and ever since entering, they had all been silent, cowed.

Afraid.

Angela didn't know about anyone else, but she was afraid, and she wasn't quite sure why. She thought of that terrible mumbling in Winston and Brock's apartment, and maybe that was part of it, but it seemed to her that what frightened her was more than a resemblance to something that had happened before. This was something new, even if along the same lines, and her dread was amplified by not knowing what was to come.

One girl from Dr. Welkes' advanced course stopped in the middle of the lobby, her face chalky, and said she'd changed her mind: she didn't want to see the corpses; she'd wait for them outside. Angela knew how she felt, and part of her wanted to flee as well, but her curiosity was stronger than her fear, and as the other girl turned and exited, she followed the policeman, the professor and her classmates through a service door and into a stairwell.

"Lights on!" Dr. Welkes called, and those who had flashlights turned them on. The policeman had a strong, powerful beam that illuminated a large swath of the area before them, but here in the back of the crowd it was dark, and Angela was glad her dad had made her pack an emergency flashlight in the trunk. Brenda had nothing with her and so she stuck close by.

They started down.

At the bottom, moving single file, they passed two industrial washing machines with adjacent dryers and a massive furnace, half-disassembled, before reaching more crime scene tape. The officer held up the yellow ribbon as they ducked underneath it. Beyond was a janitor's closet and, at the back of that, an ancient metal door that had been recently pried open. Crumbling and irregularly broken brick around the exposed doorjamb testified to the fact that prior to this it had been sealed shut for many years.

The policeman's powerful beam shone into the darkness.

And they saw the bodies.

One by one, they walked into the tunnel. The corpses were farther down, not near the entrance but a few yards in, beneath the street rather than below the hotel. Even from her vantage point near the end of the line, Angela could see them, however, and she wished she'd turned around with the other girl and waited outside. It seemed suddenly hard to breathe, and her hand on the flashlight was sticky with sweat.

The bodies were unmoved; the police had left them exactly as they had been found, huddled along the sides of the tunnel, crammed into impossible positions, shoved against each other. Sunken eye sockets were granted life by moving flashlights, and though these weren't mummies, they looked like they were. Clothes had rotted into colorless rags and the skin beneath was horribly wrinkled, stuck fast to bone, all trace of fat and muscle long gone. Every one of them, no matter the pose or placement, appeared to be smiling, that familiar skull's rictus grinning into the passing beams.

Angela didn't want to be here. She was not claustrophobic-or had not been until now-but she was filled suddenly with a desire to escape from this passage. It was more powerful than an urge or impulse, more like an increasingly desperate need, and with each step she took into the tunnel it grew stronger until finally she stopped, unable to go any farther. Behind her, Brenda said, "What's wrong?" Ahead, at the front of the line, Dr. Welkes was speculating about the identity of these dead people.

And a hand reached out to grab her.

A corpse hand.

Then she was screaming, and then everyone was screaming. The bodies were alive, moving, and people were scrambling over each other, pushing each other aside to rush back out of the tunnel the way they'd come. Angela heard the professor's cry of surprise and the policeman's roar of bewilderment behind her as the beam of her flashlight hit an undersized corpse that was rocking back and forth on its haunches, bobbing its insanely grinning head at her. She tried to leap over it but was pushed by someone in back of her. She stumbled over the rocking body and went sprawling, landing atop another skeletal form making its

way grimly across the floor toward the open doorway. She felt skin the texture of sandpaper, smelled the scent of foul dust in her nostrils. For a brief second, her lips touched hair-dead brittle hair-then she jumped up, .knocking into another student before finally reaching the open area near the tunnel's entrance and bolting put into the janitor's closet.

Like the others in front of her, she did not stop there but dashed into the basement and up the stairs to the lobby. Instinct was telling her to continue outside, onto the street, but the others had stopped near the door, and she immediately understood why. Embarrassment. Here in the dark dismantled lobby, the horror of what they'd experienced was still fresh, real, but on the other side of those doors, they would have to explain their fear and panic, would have to notify anonymous passersby that there were mummies or zombies under the street, that the dead bodies that had been discovered were alive.

And none of them were willing to do that.

Besides, who was to say whether it had really happened or whether they'd simply scared themselves and imagined it all?

She was. She could still feel the sharp pressure on the skin of her arm where the corpse's bony fingers had grabbed her.

Brenda was sobbing, as were several of the other students, both male and female. Dr. Welkes and the police officer had finally run up, so everyone was accounted for; everyone had made it out alive.

"Jesus!" the policeman kept shouting, his voice too loud in the empty lobby. "Jesus!"

He was the one Angela felt sorry for. He was going to have to write this up, put it in a report, explain what had happened to a group of skeptical cops, who would then have to release the information to the newspaper and the public. And she had no doubt that the bodies in the tunnel would be still once again, that whatever team came out to investigate would find nothing unusual or out of the ordinary, no sign of animation amongst the decaying corpses. That was the way these things always worked.

They stood there in various states of denial or emotional recovery, looking at each other. Angela expected someone to take charge, thought the policeman or the professor would tell them what to do, but both men seemed lost in their own thoughts as they repeated, "Jesus! Jesus!" and muttered incoherent words, respectively.

So they didn't talk about what had happened, didn't try and find another cop or fireman or public-safety worker to verify what was down there, made no effort even to get together later and discuss what they'd seen. They simply ended up wandering aimlessly out the front doors onto the sidewalk where the fortunate girl from the advanced class waited for them, completely unaware of the horror that had transpired beneath her feet.

Angela drove Brenda and the other two students who'd carpooled with her back to school, none of them speaking, then drove immediately home-where she told everyone in Babbitt House what had happened. Randy wasn't in, but the others were, and Angela gathered them in the first-floor foyer, in front of Winston and Brock's apartment, and described in detail what she'd seen. The cone of silence that had existed with her fellow anthropology students had shattered, and now she couldn't seem to stop talking, telling and retelling specific scenes over and over again as her friends and roommate plied her with questions. None of them seemed to doubt her, and she found that surprising. If she'd heard such a story from one of them, she would not have believed a word of it.

Of course, they'd all heard the ghost the other night, too.

Come to think of it, maybe she would have believed it.

It was Chrissie who finally put a stop to the show and dragged her upstairs to their apartment. Angela didn't realize until they were behind closed doors, until she gratefully sank into the couch, how bone tired she was. It was as if all of a sudden everything caught up with her, and her body, which had been running on adrenaline, finally succumbed to the stress of the day and collapsed in on itself. She stared numbly at the television while Chrissie turned it on.

"Do you think it'll be on the news?" her roommate asked.

"I don't know," Angela admitted. "It just happened. And I didn't see any news cameras there. But maybe word's leaked out by now."

Chrissie, too, accepted without question that what Angela said had actually occurred, and she thought that for someone who claimed not to believe in "ghosts or gods or anything supernatural," Chrissie seemed oddly uncritical. She wondered if her friend was changing her mind.

Angela was so exhausted and stressed-out she could have sat there for the rest of the evening, unmoving, unthinking, but she felt dirty-soiled and contaminated by her contact with those carcasses-and what she wanted more than anything else was a hot shower to wash off whatever freakish germs had attached themselves to her, to scrub her skin totally clean. She'd sat down only a few moments before, but she got up again, quickly, as though staying on the couch even a second longer might infect it with some incurable disease. "I'm going to take a shower," she announced. "Could you burn my clothes in the incinerator for me?"

"We don't have-" Chrissie began, then laughed. "Oh. Joking."

She was joking-but not really. She honestly didn't care whether she saw the clothes she was wearing ever again, and she knew it would be a long time and a lot of hard washes before she put any of them on.

Angela went into the bathroom, turned on the water to warm it up, then took off her clothes, dumping them on the floor rather than in the hamper. There was a black spot on her skin where the corpse had first grabbed her. It was not a bruise but looked more like mold or rot. She saw it first in the mirror, then examined it more closely by sitting on the toilet and holding that section of arm as close to her eyes as possible. The mark was not in the shape of fingers or a hand, as might be expected, but was instead an amorphous blob that resembled an amoeba. She touched it, picked at it with a fingernail, but, though the spot somewhat resembled paint or ink, she could not scrape any of it off her skin. In the shower, she used a loofah and Comet cleanser, scrubbing as hard as she could, but again was unable to remove the stain or even lighten the blackness. The skin around it grew red and raw, but the mark remained.

She was worried and scared. She thought she should tell Chrissie, thought she should go to the emergency room at the hospital, but instead, irrationally, decided to sleep, telling herself that it would be all right in the morning, that everything would be fine. Angela finished showering, put on her pajamas, dashed into her bedroom and locked the door before climbing into bed and getting under the covers. "Good night!" she called out to Chrissie.

"Angela!"

"Good night!"

"Are you-"

"I'm tired! I'm going to bed! We'll talk about it in the morning!"

In the morning, the black spot on her skin was gone, but dark mold grew on each of the four corners of her top sheet in identical amoeba-like blobs. It seemed thicker than it had when it was on her skin, hairier mul somehow more malevolent. Disgusted, frightened, Angela kicked the covers off and dashed away from the bed. She quickly slipped on her robe, unlocked the door and called Chrissie, who came running into the room, obviously hearing the fear in her voice.

"What is it?" Chrissie demanded, but she saw even before she finished the sentence. Her eyes widened at the sight of the sheet's black corners. "Oh, my God!"

"Don't touch it!" Angela shouted.

But she was too late. The sheet was lying half on and half off the bed, tangled up with the comforter, and Chrissie reached for the corner closest to the edge. Her finger poked the black mold, then jerked away instantly. A look of revulsion transformed her face, and Chrissie backed toward the door as though she were being menaced by a slow-moving knife-wielding maniac.

"It was on my skin last night," Angela said. "The black stuff. I should've told you, I should've gone to the hospital, I should've ... I don't know. What do you think it is? It looks like some kind of mold. Should we take the sheet in to-"

"Bitch!" Chrissie shouted. And slammed the door.

What the hell? Angela hurried after her roommate, opening the door and following her into the sitting room. "Chrissie?"

Her friend turned, and the expression on her face was angry, threatening.

Black, she thought. They call that kind of look black.

She stared at Chrissie's pointing finger, looking for mold, but the skin was clear.

"Stay away from me, you stupid brown bitch," Chrissie ordered, and there was real venom in her voice. She shoved her way past a stunned Angela and returned to her own room.

The door closed.

Locked.

Eleven

Bear Flats, California

The kitchen smelled of bacon, eggs ... and booze.

Jolene's jaw clenched, the muscles under her ear hurting in that tight tense way she remembered from childhood. Her mother was sitting in her usual spot at the breakfast table, dipping toast into the last bit of yolk on her plate, smiling and humming softly to herself. Jolene remembered this from her childhood as well, the "good" time, as she'd always thought of it. This was her mom at her peak, not drunk enough to be abusive, not sober enough to be self-pitying, with just enough of a buzz on to make her feel calm, content, at ease. If her mother could have stayed this way throughout the day, perhaps life at home wouldn't have been so bad, but this stage was merely a respite between the desperate highs and lows, and although it was the best stage in the cycle, it was also the shortest.

"Hurry up and eat your breakfast," Jolene told Sky-lar. "We have a busy day."

The boy sat down silently at the table while Jolene got him a plate of bacon. He was still a little shy and nervous around his grandmother, and although Jolene pretended not to notice, she did.

And was grateful.

She didn't want him feeling too comfortable with her, getting too close. He would only end up being hurt.

"Here," she said, setting the plate down. "Orange juice or milk?"

"Milk," Skylar told her.

She was finally going to try and enroll him in third grade at Bear Flats Elementary this morning. It was strange to realize he would be attending the same school she'd gone to when she was his age. He was dreading the prospect because it meant that this was not just a vacation or hiatus but a permanent move, and she had mixed feelings for much the same reason.

If they really were going to relocate here, maybe it was time for her to start thinking seriously about finding a job.

Her mother must have read her mind. "You know," she said helpfully, "if you want to make yourself useful, Anna May Carter let out that she needs some help down at the historical society. Theo Frye up and bailed on her after all these years, and the new museum's set to open in a few months. I'm not sure how much it pays, but it's work."

Jolene had heard about the new museum. It was the talk of the town, although God knew why. It's not as if Bear Flats was a big tourist destination or a site of historical significance. In the real world, moving the museum from its small storefront downtown to the old Williams residence was as insignificant as the renovation of a Taco Bell bathroom in Tucson. But here in Bear Flats, residents were excited that the history of their community would finally be displayed in a venue more appropriately impressive.

As embarrassed as she was to admit it, Jolene, too, felt a sense of pride knowing that the town's historical artifacts would be housed in the former residence of its lone millionaire. She must be more of a yokel than she thought.

"Thanks, Mom," she said. "I'll check it out."

After breakfast, she and Skylar drove to the school. She'd been hoping and half expecting to get him in today-which was why they'd gone so early-but the principal informed her that there were forms to sign and process, and that Skylar could not start class until the transcripts from his previous school had been sent, faxed or e-mailed over. It would be another day or two at least.

In the school parking lot, she called Leslie from her cell phone. "Hey, it's me, Jolene."

"Jo!"

"I was wondering if you could do me a favor: watch Skylar for me while I meet with Anna May Carter for an hour or so."

"Sure. No problem." There was a pause. "Anna May?"

"My mother says she needs someone to help with the museum's move now that Theo Frye's gone. I think my mom talked to her about me."

"I'm sure I can find you something better than that."

"I don't know if I want anything better," Jolene admitted. "This sounds like a temp job or at least a job I wouldn't feel guilty about quitting, and I need to just sort some things out in my mind before I make any long-term commitments. I promise, though: if I decide to stay and look for permanent employment, you'll be the first person I'll hit up for a job."

Leslie laughed. "It's a deal."

Leslie wasn't working until three, so Jolene dropped Skylar off at her house. She felt guilty for doing so. The boy was obviously uncomfortable-even under the best of circumstances he had difficulty adjusting to new surroundings-but she couldn't very well take him on what was essentially a job interview, as casual as it might be. And he would definitely be better off with Leslie than with her mother. Jolene told him to be good, promised to be back as soon as possible and left quickly, before Skylar said something that would make her reconsider.

It would be good for him to get away from her, she told herself. It would be good for him to get to know Leslie.

As it happened, Anna May needed help right away and had a grant from the county that would allow her to pay nearly twice minimum wage for the estimated two-month transition period. "It's a part-time job," the old lady said, "but you won't find a higher-paying one anywhere in town. Or one that's so rich with interesting information. You'll earn and learn, I like to say."

The two of them met in the old museum, next to the Hallmark store on Main, and Jolene said that she would be willing to start today if she could get off in time to pick up her son before three.

"No problem," Anna May promised. "We're very flexible around here." She patted Jolene's shoulder. "Besides, I know you're a good hard worker. And your mama told me about what a difficult time you're having."

Jolene forced herself to say nothing. If her mother had been blabbing about her situation all over town, there were undoubtedly a dozen different versions of events all currently circulating.

"Let's go out to the Williams place. I've been boxing things up here since seven, and I think it's time to take some of them over. Besides, I can show you what our plans are for the future, and you can help me with a few things I haven't been able to do on my own."

"This sounds like mostly physical labor," Jolene said. "Are you sure you wouldn't be better off just hiring some high school boy?"

Anna May laughed. "No. I want someone who understands the importance of what we're doing. Someone smart I can talk to. Besides, between the two of us, we can lift almost anything that needs to be lifted. If not, there's always George and his dolly. He can be here in a heartbeat."

Jolene was still not sure she'd be any better at this than a muscle-bound teenager, but she didn't say any more, and after they'd loaded eight of the ten packed boxes into the historical society's van and she'd called Leslie to tell her the revised schedule, Anna May drove the two of them to the Williams house.

It was as nice as Jolene remembered it. Chester Williams had died over five years ago, but someone had obviously been keeping the place up. The landscaped flowers were in full bloom, the windows spotlessly clean.

"I'll bet you're happy to have gotten this home," Jolene offered.

"Oh, it's wonderful!" Anna May said enthusiastically. "The Williams estate not only donated the house but everything in it! Combined with our existing archives, plus extra donations, we'll be able to turn this into an authentic eighteen-eighties residence and remake the grounds into a sustainable homestead with native plants. That'll take a while, of course. For now, we're just going to relocate our museum, but our goal is to eventually turn this into a destination-worthy learning experience."

Jolene found herself smiling. And not in a cynical or superior way. She was genuinely caught up in the other woman's enthusiasm and despite her initial dismissive attitude found herself thinking that the Bear Flats museum really could be the crown jewel of the county. She imagined school kids from all of the other mountain communities coming here for field trips, families visiting on weekends.

Anna May unlocked the house's front door, and the two of them carried in the boxes, placing them in the center of the front room. Couches, chairs, a bureau and a coffee table had been shoved against the far wall, and the middle of the room was filled with boxes from previous trips. "We'll get these sorted once everything's moved over," Anna May said. "Right now, I'm just trying to figure where everything's going to go."

Jolene peered down the hallway toward the kitchen.

"Do you want to look around? Go ahead. I'm just going to look through a few of these closets and see if there's anything that can be thrown out. We're thinking of having a rummage sale to

raise money."

Jolene walked through the dining room, the family room, a formal parlor and a study, then checked out the bedrooms upstairs. Like the exterior of the building, the rooms of the house were in perfect shape. It looked like a museum already. By the time she walked back downstairs, Anna May was in the pantry off the kitchen.

Jolene opened a narrow door on the opposite side of the kitchen and saw a series of steps leading down. She flipped a switch next to the door and a light went on.

Anna May emerged from the pantry carrying a notebook.

"What's down here?" Jolene asked, gesturing.

"Like I said, I haven't had time to go over everything in detail. That's one of the reasons I need someone. I'm still going through the closets, but why don't you look around and see what you can find? If you come across anything interesting, call me. Or, if you want, you can start cataloging the items downstairs. Just grab that other notebook on the counter that says Inventory and continue on with the next number in sequence. It's pretty simple to figure out. All you have to do is copy the other examples and put one of those little orange stickers on each item you write down."

Jolene picked up the notebook and a pen, and walked down the steps to the basement. It was chilly and damp, but that was not what made her shiver as she passed beneath the floor of the kitchen. No, it was the feeling of the place, the emotional rather than physical atmosphere. Maybe she'd been conditioned by too many movies, but the vibe here was that of a haunted house, and she found herself wondering exactly where and how Chester Williams had died. Beneath her foot, a stair creaked. Ahead, the far corner of the basement lay in shadow, illumination from the single bare bulb unable to reach that section of the * room. She reached the bottom of the steps and looked * around. She'd been expecting a massive storehouse of C covered furniture and arcane treasures from Williams' t storied travels. Instead she found herself in a medium- sized space only slightly larger than her mother's living room, with a low bare wood ceiling, a dirty wooden floor, a workbench with tools along the west wall and few leftover household items scattered around the » open area in the middle.

Maybe it had been cleaned out before being donated to the historical society.

No. If that were the case, the basement wouldn't have been so dusty.

Most likely, this was an area of the house that simply hadn't been used for years, perhaps decades.

She walked slowly through the dark room, still feeling the strange sense of cold dread that had come over her as she'd descended the stairs. Up ahead, near the south wall, she could see a square outline on the floor.

Was that a trapdoor?

Jolene moved closer, pushed aside a wicker basket. Yes. The light here was dim, but that was definitely a recessed handle lying flush with the wood.

Was there a basement beneath the basement?

If there was, it had not been entered in quite some time. The floor here was covered by a coating of dust even thicker than that in the center of the room. Jolene heard Anna May's footsteps above her. She glanced up at the cobweb-covered ceiling, then looked down at the floor, wondering what was beneath it. She'd never heard of a double basement before and couldn't imagine what the reason for its existence might be, but whatever it was, she had the feeling it was not wholesome.

Wholesome?

What kind of word was that?

She didn't know, but it fit.

Jolene bent down, touched the handle of the trapdoor and jerked her hand away the second her fingers touched the cold metal, her heart pounding. She wasn't brave enough to open it herself, wasn't sure she even had the right to, so she called up to Anna May, and when she didn't get an answer she bounded back up the stairs to the sunlight and the real world. It felt as though she'd emerged from Dracula's dungeon. Windows had never been so welcome. Anna May was indeed in a hallway closet that appeared to be right over that section of the basement, and Jolene explained to the older woman what she had found.

Anna May's face lit up. "Oh, this is exciting! A secret cellar! This is the kind of find I live for." She put down her notebook on a closet shelf and followed Jolene back through the kitchen.

"Do you have a flashlight or something?" Jolene asked. "The basement itself is pretty dark and I'm not sure there's any light ... down there."

"I'll be right back!" Anna May ran out to the van and returned a few moments later with two flashlights. "A good historian is always prepared," she said as she handed one to Jolene.

The two of them descended the stairs.

Once again, Jolene experienced a profound uneasiness upon entering the basement, and as she led Anna May to the trapdoor, goose bumps accompanied what appeared to her to be a significant drop in temperature. They were prepared to work hard and pull together on the small handle in order to open the door, but it must have had some type of spring hinge because it came up fairly easily, revealing a primitive ladder bolted to the edge of the opening and going down six feet or so to a hard dirt floor. They shone their lights into the darkness and saw what appeared to be a bookcase in the center of an otherwise empty chamber. There seemed to be no books on the shelves, only a series of small unidentifiable items.

Jolene had even more trepidation about going into this lower cellar than she'd had about entering the basement they were in. She was not just wary of the room; she was afraid of it. But Anna May had already pushed her flashlight into the waistband of her pants and had started down the ladder, and the only thing Jolene could do was follow.

The air smelled dirty and old, like someone had gone to the bathroom down here a long, long time ago.

Anna May stood in front of the bookcase. "What's this?" she asked, puzzled. She picked up a rounded brown leathery object and its identical twin.

They were ears.

Jolene shone her flashlight beam. On the shelf next to the ears were several fingers and what could only have been a penis. Hanging on hooks from the ceiling at an angle, not visible from above, were scalps: long black braids and ponytails that must have been Indian.

"Oh, my!" Anna May exclaimed, and the utterance was so incongruous that Jolene almost laughed.

Almost.

But the sight was so gruesome that it killed all thoughts of humor, overwhelming everything with its inexplicable horror. Neither of them said anything more but simply shone their lights on the other shelves, illuminating more ears and fingers, toes and genitals, a hand, a foot, even what looked like a black shrunken heart. Why were these here? Had Chester Williams saved these body parts as souvenirs?

From what? A war? Or had he been some sort of serial killer, hoarding portions of his victims in this concealed cellar?

She'd had a gut feeling when she'd first seen the trapdoor that nothing good could be behind a room so secret, buried so deep in the earth, and she'd been right.

"What is this?" she asked.

She meant all of it-the subbasement, the shelves, the scalps-but Anna May assumed that she meant the specific object she was prodding with her finger, and she turned guilelessly around. "I think it's a dick."

Again, Jolene thought, under other circumstances, she might have laughed.

But not here.

Not now.

"Look at this," Anna May said excitedly. She was crouching down and shining her beam on the bottom shelf of the bookcase. Reaching out, she drew forth an object that was instantly recognizable. A book of some sort, a bound volume with a filigreed cover.

Anna May opened the book to the first page, began turning subsequent pages slowly while Jolene shone her light on it. "It's a diary!" she said. "It's Chester Williams' diary!" She turned to the last page. "No. It can't be. It starts in 1874 and stops in 1876. He wasn't even born yet. The name on the overleaf is Chester Williams, though. ... It must have been his father's! Or grandfather's!" She looked up at Jolene with a triumphant smile on her face. "Didn't I tell you this was fascinating work?"

Jolene tried to smile back, but she was more frightened than fascinated, and for some reason she kept thinking of that terrible face she and Skylar had seen in their bedroom window. The brown wrinkled head would lit perfectly on one of these shelves next to the fingers and toes.

"Let's go back up," she said. "It's getting a little stuffy down here, and I have allergies."

"Fascinating," Anna May murmured, looking at the book.

"I have an idea. Why don't we switch? You stay down here and do inventory, and I'll go upstairs."

"No, no. We'll both go back up. There's a lot I still need to show you. But I'm definitely coming down here later. There's so much food for thought." She looked around the small dark room. "What do you suppose this was? And why are all of these body parts here?"

"I don't know," Jolene said honestly.

And she didn't want to know.

Skylar sat on a couch in front of the TV, flipping channels while Ms. Finch sat on another couch, flipping the pages of a magazine. His mom's friend was nice and all, but it was obvious she had no kids and didn't know what to do now that she'd been suckered into babysitting one. He felt sorry for her in a way, and for the first time he was glad that he'd be starting school soon. At least around other kids his own age he'd be able to relax and be himself and not worry so much about the adults around him.

He still didn't want to be here, though.

Last night, he'd had a dream that his dad had come to Bear Flats to kidnap him and take him back to Yuma. It was more of a nightmare than a dream, because he didn't want to go with his dad, and he could tell from the look in his old man's eyes that there was some serious craziness in store once the two of them were alone. But he did want to go back to Yuma, and that part of the dream was pretty cool.

If only his dad had taken off, and he and his mom had stayed in Arizona.

The phone rang, and Ms. Finch jumped up to get it like a person grateful to finally have something to do-which made Skylar feel even worse. She took the call in another room, so he wasn't able to eavesdrop, but she was back almost immediately.

"I'm sorry," Ms. Finch said, "but that was the restaurant. They need me. I have to go in for ten or fifteen minutes."

"Can I stay here?" Skylar asked.

"No. Not by yourself. But I'll make it quick. And you can have fries and a Coke while I work things out. How does that sound?"