The Burning

"Can we walk instead of drive?" He couldn't believe what he was saying even as his mouth formed the words. The last thing he wanted to do was pass by that haunted grave site ... yet that was exactly what he was asking Ms. Finch to do.

"Sure," she told him. "Just let me put on my shoes."

Why had he suggested a stupid thing like that?

Because he'd been thinking about those graves-Mother Daughter-ever since they'd passed by them the other day.

And he wanted to see them again.

It was true. The grave site had never been far from his mind, and though just the idea of it frightened him, he was also intrigued by it. He supposed that was why he'd asked to walk by the spot.

Ms. Finch changed from sandals to her tennis shoes and grabbed her purse, and the two of them were out the door. They walked down the road, past the church, then turned into the woods and started up the trail. The path seemed darker this time, spookier, although that might have been because he now knew what lay ahead. Ms. Finch didn't seem to notice, though, and they talked on the way. The conversation was easy, casual, and he thought that maybe she wasn't as desperate to get rid of him as he'd thought she was. She told him about his mom as they walked, what she'd been like as a kid, and although it was weird to think about, it was also kind of nice. His mom didn't talk much about the past, he realized. He wondered why.

They reached the part where the trees grew bigger, thicker, closer together, and there, in the darkest part, exactly as he remembered, was the square of white picket fence. It was off to the side of the trail, and it was just as creepy as he remembered. He suddenly wished they hadn't walked, and at that moment he wanted nothing more than to hurry by and not look back. But, as before, his mouth betrayed him, and he blurted out, "Can I look at it?"

Why had he said that?

Ms. Finch hesitated.

"Just for a second," he promised.

She nodded. "Okay."

"Did you really hear voices?" he asked as they walked over the sunken ground to the fence.

"Yes," she said. "I did."

They didn't say anything after that, and when he peeked over the pickets and saw the gravestones, they looked just as he'd expected them to look: gray and weathered, the words Mother and Daughter etched onto the granite in fancy old-fashioned script.

"Come on," Ms. Finch said. "Let's go." There was a hint of urgency in her voice, and he wanted to believe that it was because she had to get to the restaurant, but he didn't think that was it.

They turned away-

And heard mumbling.

Chills coursed down his body, as fluid as water poured on him from above. The source of the sound was unclear, but the mumbling grew in volume, and he had no doubt that it was coming from beneath the ground. They were words, sentences, but not like any he had ever heard before, a superfast jumble of high-pitched syllables with no apparent pauses.

He thought of that evil face at the window with its beady eyes and malevolent grin.

This was the language of that terrible visage.

"Go!" Ms. Finch ordered, pulling his arm. He offered no resistance but allowed himself to be led away, and the two of them hurried over the sunken ground back to the trail, the babbling growing ever louder behind them.

"What is it?" he asked as they rushed up the path. "Do you think it's real?" He knew it was real, but he wanted to hear from her that it wasn't, wanted the reassurance of an adult telling him that there no monsters, no boogeymen, that there was nothing to worry about.

"It's the same thing I heard before," she told him, and though she wasn't quite as frightened as he was, the fear was still there.

They did not slow down until they reached the buildings and the street.

He wanted to tell Ms. Finch about that face at the bedroom window, wanted her to know that whatever was out in the woods by those graves had reached out to him and his mom after they'd passed by here the last time. But she was striding briskly down the sidewalk toward Mag's Ham Bun, and he definitely got the impression that she did not want to talk about this, a suspicion that was confirmed when she said with false cheer, "Hot today, isn't it? I'll bet that Coke sounds good."

"Yeah," he said. But he wasn't thinking about hot days or cool drinks. He was thinking of that creepy babble coming from those graves, and his skin prickled with the memory of it.

Mother Daughter

He thought of that horrible face he and his mom had seen.

And he wondered what they'd see at the window tonight.

Twelve

Barstow, California

"I'm telling you, no trains have been hijacked. No unauthorized engines are on any tracks anywhere on the grid or have been for the past week."

"I saw it in Colorado, just past Grand Junction. If I hadn't diverted myself onto a siding, I would've been killed and you and the company would've been out a hell of a lot of money."

"I know what you said. I read the report."

"Then?"

"Then what?" Holman scratched his balding head. "Look, Tom, I don't know what happened. Maybe you were tired. Maybe you imagined it, maybe ... maybe it was an optical illusion of some sort. The only thing I'm certain of is that you didn't encounter a rogue engine on that route."

"Or a ghost engine?"

"Now you're just being an asshole."

"I saw it, Pete. From far off, around a curve. It wasn't some quick glimpse of a vague shape. It was a black locomotive. I watched it speed toward me, and it made me take sixteen off on a siding. When it got close, its lights practically blinded me. I saw it!"

Sure you did, Holman wanted to say, but he remained silent. He glanced out the window. In the desert sky, the clouds looked like a herd of miniature tyrannosauruses jumping over a hurdle to attack an oversized dachshund.

This life did things to a man. Holman didn't know if it was the rootlessness or the loneliness or the fact that they had to live with that endless repetitive rhythm hour after hour, day after day, but whatever the reason, railroaders were far more likely to be hypochondriacs, paranoiacs and conspiracy theorists than || your average man on the street.

At least in his experience.

And Tom Miller was exhibit A.

The engineer left his office frustrated and angry, and Holman sighed as he swiveled in his seat and looked out again at the sky. Hell, he was getting squirrelly himself. He'd been in the freight yard office for going on three years now, and he spent more time watching clouds than he did trains. It was the randomness of the clouds that appealed to him, the amorphous ever-changing shapes he enjoyed watching. The herd of miniature tyrannosauruses he'd seen a few minutes back had coalesced into a segmented snake; the giant dachshund was now a sinking Titanic.

Trains never did that. Boxcars were always boxcars, flatcars always flatcars, and, like he was a child, it was only the occasional anachronistic caboose that brightened up his day and gave him any joy at all.

"There!" Tom shouted from the outer office. "There! I told you, you son of a bitch! I told you!"

Holman went out to see what the commotion was and found the engineer sitting in front of the computer, logged on to an amateur site, one maintained by train fanatics who used digital webcams to record specific sections of track in order to capture the scheduled passing of passengers and freights.

This time, they'd caught something else.

Holman stared in shock at the image on-screen.

It was indeed a black locomotive but one unlike any he had ever seen. It was racing down a section of track that the streaming crawl identified as east central Colorado, past a train on a siding that could have been Tom's, could have been someone else's. The strange thing was: the engine had no markings, no detail, not even a recognizable design. It was as if a child's drawing of a locomotive had been granted three-dimensionality and been brought to life. There was about it the same sort of simplistic relationship to reality.

Only ...

Only there was a malevolence to it as well, and a sense of wild fury. The engine looked sinister in its bulky blocky blackness, and the way it sped past that stationary freight on the siding, the speed with which it passed and the sheer volume of smoke that poured out at that moment, bespoke a tremendous anger. Holman had no doubt that if the other train had been on the same track, the locomotive would have smashed right through it and continued on unscathed.

Tom hit a key on the computer and the mystery train repeated its approach and passing.

"I told you!"

"What is it?" Holman wondered, and realized he'd been speaking aloud only when everyone else in the office chimed in with "I don't know" and "You got me" and "I've never seen anything like that before."

Ghost engine, Tom had said. He hadn't been joking, and Holman now understood why. Since his father's day there'd been tales of ghost trains, retellings of the Flying Dutchman story transferred to the rails, knockoffs of other myths concocted by bored conductors or imagined by tired engineers on late-night runs. Neither he nor anyone he'd ever met had believed any of them, but he thought now of the adage that behind every legend was a grain of truth.

He watched the dark engine speed past the webcam.

Or more than a grain.

"What do you think now?" a triumphant Tom demanded.

"I believe you," Holman said simply.

That seemed to throw him. "Then, uh, what do you think it is?"

"I have no idea. But it didn't register on any of our sensors and didn't show up on the grid."

"A ghost engine?" Tom said. The triumph was gone from his voice.

"Maybe so," Holman admitted. "Maybe so."

Thirteen

Selby, Missouri

Luke, the previous desk clerk, had been right. This job just flat-out sucked.

Dennis sat behind the counter, reading a Barry Welch paperback about a coven of witches in a Utah time-share community, glancing up every so often to see if anyone on the highway was even considering turning in to the motel parking lot. There'd been no one checking in or out all morning, and the only human contact he'd had was when the grotesquely overweight man in 110 had come in to complain that the ice from the ice machine melted too fast.

Dennis had promised to inform the owner.

He hadn't told his mom or his sister that he was working here. They thought he was still tooling around the countryside, exploring the wonders of this great land. If they found out he was spending his days behind a ratty counter in a fleabag motel in Selby, Missouri, humoring psychotic behemoths, they'd demand his return faster than he could say "I'm fine," his mom with an insufferable I-told-you-so attitude, Cathy with a sense of politely masked disappointment that would be even harder for him to face.

Two more weeks and he was out, he decided. By that time, he should have enough money to coast all the way to the coast.

He turned back to his novel.

"She's a stupid old witch and a*crazy old bitch! She's a stupid old witch and a crazy old bitch!"

Dennis' head snapped up at the sound of the children's singsong voices.

"She's a stupid old witch and a crazy old bitch! She's a stupid old witch and a crazy old bitch!"

He knew that chant. He'd forgotten about it until now, but when he was a little kid, a group of neighborhood boys had said that to his mother when they saw her on the street. Cathy had been too young to know what was going on, but he had been mortally embarrassed, and it was not until his father, home from work, had caught the boys at it, lectured them and threatened to tell their parents that the taunts had finally stopped.

The kids now were also shouting the refrain at an elderly Chinese woman as she walked along the sidewalk in front of the motel, and Dennis experienced a weird feeling of deja vu. He was the adult now, in a position to stop those kids the way his father had done, and he checked to make sure the register was locked, then ran out from behind the counter, out of the office and onto the sidewalk.

"Stop that right now!" he ordered. "Leave that woman alone!"

The old lady hurried off as the kids turned toward him. There were three of them-two skinny dirty boys wearing cutoffs and T-shirts, and one belligerent fat boy in jeans and torn Hawaiian shirt-and they faced him with sullen resentment. "Who are you?" one of the skinny kids demanded.

"It's none of your business."

"Was that your mama?" The fat kid laughed derisively.

"Go home!" he ordered. "Get out of here!"

"No!" they all shouted.

"Now!"

"Chink!" the fat boy yelled at him, picking up a piece of gravel from the sidewalk and throwing it.

He ran at the kid, but the punk stood his ground, and it was only after Dennis yelled, "I'm going to kick your fucking ass!" in the most threatening voice he could manage that the little shit finally took off, his friends following.

Dennis slowed, stopped, as the boys dashed around the corner. What the hell was wrong with kids these days? Even in small towns in the middle of nowhere, they seemed to have lost their fear of adults. When he was little, even the wimpiest grown-up was someone to be feared and respected. Now it took direct threats to coax even a halfhearted response out of them.

He started back toward the motel office. Chink. He almost laughed. Had he ever heard that word in real life before? He'd read it in old books, but that was about it. The word never even showed up in movies, as far as he knew.

Social progress apparently came very slowly to the hinterlands.

Niggers and Kikes.

He flashed back to the "Noose of Justice" at The Keep, and the smile on his lips faded. Suddenly the child's anachronistic racism didn't seem so benign. There was a history of intolerance here, he realized, an entire culture he'd never been exposed to on the East Coast, and more than ever before, he felt like a stranger in a strange land.

He walked back into the office, went back behind the counter, picked up his book and waited for customers who didn't come.

That night, he dreamed of a world that had to be hell. Under a blazing red sky, on an endless expanse of burning sand, he was being herded with hundreds of other young men by tall black creatures on horseback. To his eye, the creatures resembled elongated Abraham Lincolns, but against the red sky they were only silhouettes, no details of their features visible. Around him, the other young men cried and wailed, gnashing their teeth, and he knew with certainty that they were all going to die.

For that, he was grateful. They all were. Anything was better than this existence, and as the fiery red sky turned black, a dark hulking mass loomed out of the nothingness behind them, and a shadow fell that was cool and welcome and familiar.

The shadow of death.

In the morning, Dennis awoke late. This was his day off, and he planned to spend it exploring Selby. He was acquainted with the town in a broad, general, touristy sort of way. He knew where the fast-food restaurants were, the grocery store, the gas stations, the major cross streets. But beyond that, Selby was a blur of indistinguishable homes to him, and he thought it would be a good idea to get to know the community in which he was living, even if he was here only temporarily.

He could have driven, but the town was small and instead he decided to walk. He followed the sidewalk, then turned off Main Street onto Crescent Avenue, where an elementary school segued into a park and then into a junior high school.

There was something familiar about this town. No, not familiar. Welcome. No, not welcome, exactly. Comfortable. No, not that either ...

He didn't know what the feeling was, couldn't describe it. His mother believed in reincarnation and probably would have said that he'd been here before in a previous life. There was some of that flavor to the experience, although he didn't really believe in reincarnation, and once again he had the feeling that he was caught up in something bigger than himself, that there was a reason for him to have embarked on this journey-and a reason he was here in Selby right now.

He followed Crescent to its end. A row of tall trees, their upper branches swaying ominously in a wind that had not made it down to the ground, lined the cross street at which Crescent terminated, and instead of turning left or right on the other street, Dennis continued walking forward. Something led him through the trees, where he found, not the forest he'd been expecting, but what appeared to be the beginnings of a new housing development. There were trees at the edges of the open space before him, but they'd been cut down and bulldozed into deadfalls, and the dusty acreage ahead had been completely sheared of all vegetation.

He paused for a moment to take it all in, then pressed on, walking through deep-tread truck tracks, past color-coded stakes, until he reached the far opposite end of the nascent subdivision. This was the line to which the wilderness had been pushed back, and he climbed over a pile of debris, then passed between trees and overgrown bushes, until he came to the purpose of his journey, the reason he had been led here.

It was a graveyard.

At least he assumed it was. But there were none of the ritual accoutrements usually associated with ceme- teries. No tombstones, no crosses, no mowed grass, no clearly delineated grave sites. There were only occasional irregular mounds within the unmarked open space, and a few intermittent boulders that could have been randomly deposited rocks but appeared to him to have been deliberately placed. Dennis stood at the periphery of the small clearing. An effort had been made to hide this burial ground, to make it appear to be nothing more than an ordinary plot of land, and he wondered why.

The nearby elms were still swaying to a wind he could not feel, and the morning sun had not yet risen over the tops of the trees, keeping the graveyard in slightly darkened semishadow. It was creepy and he wanted to leave, but he stood his ground, sure that he was supposed to learn something here, to take something from this.

What was it with all this mystical crap lately? There was absolutely no objective reason for him to think that he was meant to do anything. Yet he did. Deeply. And he had no idea why. He would have ascribed it to the fact that he'd been alone and on his own for the past few weeks, but the belief had been with him since the beginning of his trip, was, in some strange way, the reason for the trip.

He thought of that mountain monster in his dream, that giant behind the wall of smoke.

He was afraid to move forward, he realized, afraid to actually step into the graveyard. To do so would be blasphemous. He knew it instinctively. He felt it in his bones.

Bones.

Whose bones were here? Dennis wondered, looking over the untamed plot of land. And why had so much effort gone into hiding this little cemetery? He forced himself to walk into the shadowed clearing, bracing

himself for a psychic assault that never came. He stepped gingerly over one of the disguised mounds, stopped and bent down in front of a crooked rock protruding from the earth. Was there writing on the speckled gray surface? He squinted, looked closer. If there had been, the characters had long since been weathered away, because he saw nothing save the natural roughness of stone, the generic pores and cracks that made it look like every other rock around town.

He had a sudden urge to dig down under one of the mounds, to see what was under there.

He had a sneaking suspicion it would not be human.

The trees stopped moving, the high wind dying, and the sun emerged from above the elms, a crescent sliver of light like the crack of a door opening onto the shadowed ground below. Dennis stood. He had missed his chance. Whatever he was supposed to have learned or taken from this place had not been imparted to him. That window was closed.

He walked slowly back the way he had come, wondering whether the hidden graveyard was scheduled to be razed and graded. Despite all of the work going on around it, the small plot of land and its barrier of trees and bushes had remained untouched until now, and Dennis found that ominous. It was as though a protective force field had been set up around the site to keep destruction at bay.

On the other side of the bulldozed brush, workmen had arrived and were starting up tractors and Caterpillars. No one stopped or questioned him as he made his way across the cleared ground to the road, and he continued his exploration of the town, walking up and down residential streets, discovering a topless bar in Selby's industrial district, buying a Coke at a mom-and-pop grocery store located next to a boarded-up dairy. Selby was bigger than he'd expected and more varied than it appeared from the highway, but no matter where he went or what he saw, the makeshift cemetery remained on his mind, a nagging image that refused to be dislodged from his brain.

Still, he was determined to learn about his temporary home if for no other reason than to talk about it with Cathy at some later date when they could both look back on this experience and laugh. So after a quick Jack in the Box lunch, he got in his car and drove in the opposite direction of the new development and the hidden graveyard, passing a cluttered hodgepodge of thrift stores, auto dealers, beauty salons and churches.

Selby's lone radio station was an automated country channel that seemed to play the same songs in the same order on a continuous twenty-four-hour loop. The motel owner kept it on in the office all day and all night, and if Dennis had to hear Tim McGraw one more time, he was going to break that damn radio and throw it through the fucking window.

He sorted through the CDs in his car, wishing he'd brought along more. It was strange how his musical requirements had changed on this trip. The recent rock CDs and downloads he'd listened to endlessly in his bedroom back home had quickly lost their luster, and the music he craved was quirkier, more individualist fare. One CD he wished he had now was a self-titled release by Brigit's Well, a classically trained Celtic duo. He'd bought it at an Irish festival a few years back, after hearing the two women perform, and though he'd listened to it only sporadically since, the haunting tunes had stayed with him, and at odd times he found himself thinking about the music.

Like now.

The buildings thinned out. He passed a lumberyard; the fenced lots and downscale offices of plumbers, roofers, construction companies and tree trimmers; and a sprawling junkyard filled with endless rows of cars, bikes and other wheeled vehicles, before the city was replaced with farmland.

A nice place to visit, he thought.

But he wouldn't want to live here.

It was still early afternoon when he returned to the hotel. He tried calling some of his friends back in Pennsylvania, but none of them answered, and after leaving voice mail messages, he dialed his mom's number. Cathy was still at school-he'd call her after dinner-but it was still nice to talk to someone from the real world, even if it was only his mother.

He spent the remainder of the afternoon watching reruns of old comedies on TV, losing himself in the mass media of the larger culture in order to keep from thinking about the smallness of the town in which, for the moment, he lived.

He was scheduled to work at five in the morning, the beginning of a thirteen-hour shift, but he could not sleep, and sometime after midnight Dennis found himself walking down the sidewalk carrying a flashlight. He tried to pretend he was simply out for a stroll, attempting to tire himself out so he'd be able to sleep, but the truth was that he had a specific destination. And he knew exactly what it was.

The graveyard.

Bulldozers and heavy equipment had been hard at work during the day on the land adjacent to the street, but as before, the forest beyond the deadfall was untouched, and the hidden cemetery was exactly the same as it had been earlier this morning.

Protected

He could not help wondering about the site's improbable survival, and the thought sent a chill down his spine.

The mounds looked different at night, more uniform, less random, darkness smoothing out the distinctions, making the place look more like a regular graveyard. There were shadows here now, shadows created by the moonlight that had no obvious source and that moved stealthily around the edges of the clearing even in the total absence of wind.

Only ...

Only one of the shadows was not a shadow at all. It was a man, an old man, who came limping in from between the trees at the opposite end of the graveyard and knelt down before one of the not-so-randomly positioned rocks. He was carrying what looked like a black cloth bag, the kind magicians sometimes used in the service of a trick, and as Dennis hid behind a tree, holding his breath and hoping he would not be seen, the man withdrew a live chicken from the bag. Grasping the clucking, thrashing animal by the neck, he slit its throat with a knife that suddenly appeared in his hand, and as the animal spasmed its last, he held the wound open wide, letting the blood fall onto the protruding rock. The man was whispering something, a chant perhaps, but Dennis could not make out any of the words.

What was this? Some sort of Santeria ritual? It seemed unlikely here in the white-bread bowels of the ,4idwest, but he could think of no other explanation or the bizarre rite he was witnessing.

The kneeling man placed a finger on the rock, in the blood, then touched it to his forehead and bowed deeply.

Dennis could not see the old man's face-for all he knew, the man was Hispanic and a Santeria practitioner-but he was glad of that. Something told him he didn't want to see the features of that shadowed face.

Maybe it wasn't Santeria but Satanism.

The idea did not seem as far-fetched as it should have, and Dennis tried not to make any noise as the man crammed the dead broken chicken back in the black bag. If push came to shove and a fight broke out, he had no doubt that he could physically take the old guy ... but he was not sure that was all that was at work here.

The man stood and spoke out loud two words that could have been Spanish but sounded like "bo sau"- "revenge" in Cantonese-then hobbled off the way he had come. A darkness descended over the graveyard upon his exit, and Dennis realized that for the few moments the man had been there, the moon had shone its light directly onto the spot where he'd been kneeling.

Dennis crept out from behind the tree and stepped into the clearing, walking carefully around the suddenly uniform mounds, shining his flashlight on the ground until he reached the blood-soaked rock. The small standing stone was wet and shiny, and where the blood had spilled on the adjacent ground there were two jet-black stains in the shape of Chinese characters. He wished now that he had allowed his mom to teach him to read and write Chinese the way she'd wanted to. But it was too late for that now, and the best he could do was commit the characters to memory and try to find out later what they meant.

Bo sau.

Revenge.

He wanted to touch the bloody characters but was afraid to do so. There was an aura of malignancy about the shapes, a sense that whatever venom they possessed could be imparted to anyone who touched them, and Dennis backed fearfully away, wondering what exactly the old man had done. He had never been so frightened in his life, and though he continued to think he'd been meant to see this, he still did not know why. For the first time, it occurred to him that whatever had led him here, whatever had compelled him to take this trip, might not be so benign.

He turned back the way he'd come, vowing never to return to this spot.

This spot"? Hell, there was no reason for him to stay in this town. He'd earned enough cash to get him to Colorado at the very least, maybe all the way to California if he skipped a few meals and spent a couple of nights in his car. He could go back to the motel right now, pack up his stuff, catch a few winks, then, in the morning, collect what he was owed from the owner and be off. If need be, he could get another crappy job in another podunk town and stay there for a week or so to pick up some extra cash.

But he was not going to remain in Selby another day.

That settled it. Feeling better, feeling lighter, as though a great burden had been lifted, Dennis made his way past the deadfall, over the graded land of the soon-to-be subdivision and back onto the sidewalk.

Ten minutes later, he was sorting through his belongings and filling up suitcases, thinking about what he'd need before he hit the road.

If only he'd packed his Brigit's Well CD ...

Fourteen

Flagstaff, Arizona

In her dream, Angela was living in a tent in the woods with an ugly little monkey that was her baby. She was hiding but from whom or what she did not know, and that made her feel even more tense and anxious than if she had known the identity of her pursuer. She peeked out from between the flaps of her tent to make sure no one was near the camp, listened for a moment to ensure that she heard no unfamiliar noises in the surrounding woods, then quickly emerged, baby in one hand, pail in the other, to get water from the creek a few yards down the hill.

The baby chittered in her arms, showing its fangs.

There was no sign of anyone about, no indication that another person was anywhere near the woods, but something felt off, something felt wrong, and she wished she had waited to get the water.

It was too late to turn back now, though. She was already out and halfway there, so she might as well go through with it. She sprinted between a tree and a manzanita bush-or came as close to sprinting as she could with her arms full-and saw the creek just ahead. Reaching it, she knelt down, scooped up a bucket of the fresh clear water.

And a shadow fell upon her.

She looked up, startled, heart pounding crazily.

It was Chrissie, but it was not Chrissie. She was a man instead of a woman, and she was standing on the opposite side of the creek dressed in some sort of gray uniform that looked familiar but that Angela could not quite place. There was a striped hat and overalls ...

An engineer.

The man who was Chrissie was a train engineer.

With a vicious snarl, the man stepped into the water, drew from behind his back a lantern and swung it at Angela's head. Angela put up her hands to ward off the blow, but her baby was in her hands, and the metal edge of the lantern struck the monkey full in the face, causing it to cry out once, shrilly, before a splatter of blood erupted from the back of its shattered skull, spraying all over Angela. The drops that landed in her open mouth tasted salty, sickening.

Then Angela was running over train tracks, over soft ground covered with dry leaves, over hard dirt roads, toward town, never looking back, knowing she was being chased but afraid to see how close her pursuer was getting.

Once in town, she ducked into a shop. She'd never seen the shop before, but she knew its layout perfectly and ran through a doorway hung with beaded curtains, down a narrow flight of steps and into-

The tunnel.

It was crammed not with dead bodies but with living people, and they were all hiding there, the same way she was. She knew instantly that it was the engineer from whom they were seeking sanctuary.

Footsteps sounded on the floor above their heads. The slow deliberate knocking of boots on wood.

Engineer's boots.

Around her, women started sobbing; men whimpered; a child cried. Angela tried to push her way through the densely packed crowd, wanting to get as far away from the entrance as possible, knowing that this time the engineer would ignore all of the others, that this time he had come for her. But the wall of bodies held fast, no one willing to give up space or pass his or her advantage to Angela.

The boot steps started down the stairs.

Someone screamed, and then the man who was Chrissie was standing in the doorway, larger than life, bloody lantern in his hand. He looked in on them and laughed, a deep echoing basso profundo, but made no effort to enter the tunnel. Instead, he withdrew, and seconds later the door was shut.

Sealed.

And as the boot steps retreated up the stairs, and in the darkness the air became thicker, warmer, harder to breathe, she knew with a certainty that went all the way to the core of her being that they were going to die.

Angela awoke gasping, as though she really had been trapped in that airless tunnel and had just now escaped. She was in her own room, in her own bed, and through the wall she could hear Chrissie opening and closing the drawers of her dresser.

It sounded like boot steps on stairs.

Angela shivered and remained in bed. Whether because of her dream or that last encounter with her roommate, she was afraid to face Chrissie, and she remained safely in bed, hiding, until she heard the sound of the shower, whereupon she quickly kicked off the blanket and jumped up.

Instinctively, she looked down at her bed. She'd thrown out the moldy sheets and the clothes she'd been wearing when the corpse had grabbed her-she'd tied everything up in a Hefty garbage sack and tossed the whole thing in a Dumpster in back of a gas station on her way to school yesterday-but the mold on her bed was back, and this time it covered a much larger area. Beneath the strange thick hairiness, the bottom half of her sheet resembled skin, human skin that had been pulled tight enough to reveal the capillaries within. She backed away, disgusted but unable to take her eyes off the sight. She'd been sleeping on that. With horror, she recalled that her feet under the blanket had felt warm and comfortable, as though resting on velvet, and she nearly gagged when she thought of her toes touching that terrible corpse-spawned mold.

What was going on here? What kind of alternate universe had she entered?

She quickly glanced down at her bare feet, at the legs of her pajama bottoms, grateful to see that there were no black spots, no mold, nothing out of the ordinary. Inwardly, she breathed a sigh of relief, but she knew that she'd be checking on herself every ten minutes for the rest of the day just to make sure there was no sign of unusual growth on her skin.

Should she go to the student health center and get herself examined? Probably. She'd almost done so twenty times yesterday, deciding against it only out of fear of what she might learn. Which was no doubt what she'd end up doing today.

There was a clunk in the pipes as someone in another apartment turned on a faucet. Angela listened. The shower was still on but would not be for long. An ardent environmentalist, Chrissie took short showers in order to conserve water, and Angela wanted to «be out of the Babbitt House before her roommate emerged from the bathroom. She slipped on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, slid into some sandals, tied her hair back with a scrunchie, grabbed her books and purse and sped out of the bedroom, through the sitting room and into the hall.

Where she didn't breathe a whole lot easier.

The second-floor hallway was empty, but the atmosphere was heavy, oppressive, what she imagined it must feel like to be in a haunted house. She was hoping that her own perceptions were simply skewed, that there'd been no objectively verifiable change to the house itself. But after what she'd experienced, she could not be sure that that was true, and she knew she wouldn't be able to relax until she was outside and in the open air.

She thought of the mold on her bed, the sheet that looked like skin.

Angela hurried downstairs, grateful not to run into anyone. On the first floor, she passed by the open entrance to Winston and Brock's apartment. Neither of them was visible, but through the doorway, she saw a large black spot on their usually immaculate white couch. She sped past, feeling cold, her chest tight as she held her breath.

"Angela!"

She heard Winston calling from behind her, and though she didn't want to, she stopped, turned around. He was coming out of the apartment, and he moved next to her, arms outstretched.

"Chrissie told us what happened," he said sympathetically. She was focused on a stain that darkened Winston's collar: black mold. She glanced up at his face and saw his look of concern slide into a sly gleeful grin. "Serves you right, you stupid brown bitch!"

From inside the doorway came the sound of Brock's derisive laughter.

Stupid brown bitch.

Those were the same exact words Chrissie had used.

She ran out the front door, onto the lawn, tears stinging her eyes. There was silence behind her, but in her mind she heard everyone in the building laughing, saw all of them lined up at the windows, pointing at her, the tips of their fingers covered with black mold.

Her hands were shaking as she withdrew the ke\ chain from her purse, her fingers fumbling as she tried to find the right one. Not wanting to encounter Chris-sie, she'd come home late last night after hiding in the university library until it closed, so her usual parking spot had been taken and she'd been forced to park up the street. Fortunately. She did not want to be anywhere near Babbitt House right now.

She got in, took off. She was crying as she drove down the street and circled back toward the highway, and she was still crying when she finally made it through the center of town to school.

Being in Dr. Welkes' class was weird.

Half of the students weren't there, and most of those who had shown up were like zombies or drug addicts: glassy-eyed and staring, movements lethargic and skin pale. The professor himself seemed out of it. He attempted to continue on as though nothing had happened, and though he'd no doubt given this same lecture on the Anasazi many, many times, he stumbled over his words, got lost in his thoughts, let sentences trail off with no resolution. It was as if they'd all been damaged or affected by their experience in some deep indefinable way and were no longer able to function in the normal world.

She felt the same way herself.

She wondered if the cop did, too.

Angela realized that she had no idea if news had leaked out to the general population, if the policeman had filed a report, if a journalist covering the police beat had picked up on it, if there were stories in the newspaper or segments on the TV news. She'd been living in her own hermetically sealed environment, and since no one from the outside had contacted her, she did not know what was going on in the real world.

The class seemed to last forever, and when Dr. Welkes dismissed them early, there was a rush to escape from the room. Angela had chosen a seat near the door today and as a result was one of the first people out. Not wanting to see, talk to or be with her fellow students, she hurried to the far end of the corridor and took the stairs down instead of the elevator.

Her next class was political science, but she decided to skip it, and having nowhere else to go, she found herself in front of Edna Wong's desk in the university's housing office, sobbing as she described Chrissie's sudden shift in attitude and the racist echoes of Winston's unprovoked attack.

The housing administrator was sympathetic, understanding, all of the things Angela had expected her to be, but unless she was mistaken, there was something else present as well, a knowledge of what had transpired, an awareness of events that went beyond what Angela had told her.

Edna leaned forward. "I'm not supposed to ask this, so this is off the record and I'm going to deny I ever said it." She shot a quick glance toward the closed door. "Are they all white? Your roommates?"

Puzzled, Angela nodded. "Yes."

"I thought so."

"Do you think that has something to do with it?"

"Maybe, maybe not," the old woman answered cryptically. "It's too early to know."

"Too early?" This was getting stranger by the second.

The housing administrator did not directly respond but appeared to change the subject. She, it seemed, had heard about the fateful field trip to the recently discovered tunnel, and she asked Angela to explain what had happened in her own words. "Be honest," she said. "Tell me everything, no matter how unbelievable it sounds."

So she did, even telling the old lady about the corpse hand grabbing her and the subsequent spreading of the black mold.

Edna expressed no surprise, simply nodded.

Suddenly, Angela was not sure she wanted to be here.

"What is your ethnic background? You are Hispanic, correct?"

Angela nodded, blushing, though there was no reason for her to be embarrassed.

"Interesting," Edna said. Then she smiled brightly and put a hand on Angela's. The tears and despair were gone now, replaced by wariness and curiosity. This wasn't going at all the way she'd thought it would. "We don't have any housing available at the moment, dear, but even if we did, I'd ask you not to leave for a week or so anyway. I'd like you to ... keep an eye on the situation. Do you think you could do that for me? You're my first priority if housing becomes available, and believe me, I'll keep my eye out for you and let you know if anything comes up, but until then if you could monitor what goes on, without subjecting yourself to any uncomfortable situations ..." The housing administrator's voice trailed off.

Angela nodded, though the thought of returning to Babbitt House created knots in her stomach. In her mind, she saw black mold spreading from apartment to apartment as each of the residents waited in the hall to call her a stupid brown bitch.

The nod turned into a shake. "No," she said, and it felt weird putting her foot down like this with someone so much older than she, someone in a position of authority. "I can't."

Edna smiled sympathetically. "I understand, dear. I understand completely. And I would never make you do something that you didn't feel confident about." She swiveled in her seat, punched a key on her computer. "What I can do is try to arrange a swap. It's been a few weeks-there are bound to be complaints in here, people who don't get along with their roommates. Maybe I can find one who'll be willing to switch with you."

Angela felt even weirder about that. She couldn't justify putting someone else into her situation. After all, the mold was still there, spreading, infecting people.

She was living in a goddamn science fiction story.

"Shouldn't we ... call somebody?" she suggested. "Something's going on there. Maybe the police are already working on it-I don't know-but there have to be some professors here, microbiologists or something, who would be interested in studying my bed-sheets, who might be able to do something about it."

"They can't do anything," Edna said, and the certainty in her voice once again made Angela think that the old woman knew more than she was telling. She felt cold, and thought that perhaps she ought not to have been as open as she had been.

The housing administrator's phone rang, and Angela took the opportunity to leave. "I have to go," she said, standing, grabbing her books.

"Wait a moment," Edna said.

But Angela didn't wait. She gave a quick wave, then was out the door and hurrying down the corridor. She strode past the front desk and out of the housing office, grateful to be out in the open air. Back in California, it was still summer, but here in Flagstaff the air was tart and tangy, something she found refreshing.

She needed to call her parents, e-mail her friends back in California. She needed some grounding. Part of her was thinking it might be time to just pull up stakes and head home, forfeit her scholarship money, find a part-time job for the next three months, then transfer to East Los Angeles Community College for the spring semester. But she'd worked too long and too hard to get where she was, and she'd never been a quitter. Just getting out of her neighborhood and going off to college had been a battle-a battle most of her peers had lost-and she wasn't about to let a few horror-show special effects send her scurrying back to the safety of the familiar.

Was this the way people in monster movies rationalized their behavior? Was this why they always acted so stupidly?

She wasn't acting stupidly, Angela told herself. She was being brave.

Outside of the building, she saw the student who had asked whether she was going on the field trip to the tunnel, the one who hadn't shown up. He'd been in class today, but she'd been distracted and hadn't paid much attention to him. Although now that she thought about it, he was one of the few who hadn't seemed dazed or scared or completely out of it. He and the other students who hadn't come.

"Hey!" he called, catching sight of her. "Wait up!"

She did. Out of curiosity more than anything else.

"What was with that class today?" he asked as he reached her.

She looked at him. She still didn't know his name, and she doubted that he knew hers. There was something irritating about his assumed intimacy, yet at the same time she was grateful for it, thankful to have human contact that was not ... weird.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I don't believe I know your name."

He grinned. "Derek," he said. "Derek Scott. And you're ... ?"

"Angela Ramos."

"So, Angela, what was with that class today?"

He was still smiling, which meant that he was curious but not worried, and she wasn't sure how much to tell him. She was acutely conscious of how crazy the whole thing sounded.

He gave her an in. "Is it because of all those bodies? I heard someone freaked out down there and there was a stampede."

So that was the story going around?

"I wish I'd gone."

"Why didn't you?" she asked.

"Something came up." As though worried she might take that to mean girlfriend trouble, he added quickly, "I had to pick up my brother from school. My mom's car broke down." "

So he was interested. And local.

That emboldened her.

"You're lucky you didn't go," she said. She looked at Derek, took a deep breath and told him everything. She wasn't sure he'd believe any of it, let alone all of it, but she needed to get it out. Derek's reaction was a far cry from Edna Wong's subdued acknowledgment. He didn't ask any questions while she spoke, but the look on his face said it all. He did believe it, and her story not only shocked but frightened him.

When she got to the part about the black mold on her bed and how Chrissie had touched it and undergone an instant personality change, Derek stopped her. "What did you do with the sheet and blanket? Did you take it in somewhere and have it analyzed?"

"I was going to," Angela admitted, "but I ... threw it all away."

"What!"

It had been a stupid move then and seemed even stupider now. She had no idea why she'd done such a

thing, and the only reason she could come up with was that she'd been contaminated, too, just like Chris-sie. The black stuff had been on her arm originally, and even though she'd scrubbed it off and it hadn't come back, maybe some trace memory remained and caused her to protect the mold rather than try to eradicate it.

Where was that bedding now? she wondered. Had the mold broken free of the garbage sack? Was it even now spreading around the city? A feeling of panic gripped her.

"It was on my sheet again this morning," she told Derek. "Even worse. Unless someone's been in my room, it's still there."

"We have to tell someone." She could hear the fear in his voice and it both terrified and reassured her. At last someone was having a normal reaction to what was going on. "I have an Intro to Microbiology class. The instructor might know what to do. If not, he'll probably know who does. Come on!"

Derek grabbed her hand and practically pulled her down the sidewalk through the light crowd of students.

Finally, she thought. And the two of them hurried across campus toward the science building.

Fifteen

Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia

Josh McFadden gulped the cold dregs from his cup while he tried to decide what to do, finishing off the vile liquid more so he would have something with which' to occupy himself than from any real desire for coffee.

The last thing he needed right now was more caffeine.

He was jittery enough as it was.

Josh stood in the doorway of his office looking out at the rolling lawn, Technicolor green in the fresh light of the new day. Where identical rows of white headstones, a man-made monument to order, a blatant refutation of the chaos of war, should have stood, disorder and confusion had reasserted themselves. Sometime during the night, the memorial park had been vandalized. Someone-or a group of someones- had dug up what appeared at first glance to be a considerable number of graves, disinterring the bodies. These corpses, in various states of decomposition, were not just strewn about the grounds but had been thrown deliberately over the white gravestones, their dark irregular shapes marring the perfect symmetry of the cemetery.

In the center of the park, cutting a jagged swath through the aligned rows of identical stone markers, digging deep into the grass and exposing the black soil underneath, were tracks from twin sets of narrow wheels, a heavy vehicle that had left destruction in its wake. From here, it looked like a bulldozer had smashed through the east gate and driven on a vaguely slanted course toward the older section of the cemetery.

No.

Not a bulldozer.

A train.

Josh didn't know how he knew it, but that seemed right. He wasn't an expert or anything, but the ruts in the ground looked like those that would be made by an engine that had gone off its tracks.

The thing was, the train seemed to have simply disappeared once it reached a certain point. Either that or it had retreated so perfectly, backtracking along the same path so precisely, that no evidence of its withdrawal was visible.

There was something eerie about that, eerie and unfathomable, and rather than think about it, Josh was spurred to action, going into the office and calling Tank, his supervisor. Let that overmuscled asshole earn his paycheck and deal with the problem. It was about time he did some work around here.

Meanwhile, Josh was the one alone in the graveyard.

Even though the train was gone and it was daytime.

He didn't think that made much difference, and he'd locked himself in the office, phone in hand, ready at a second's notice to dial 911, until the cavalry arrived.

The entire cemetery was soon overrun with Pentagon types, soldiers, FBI agents and even a few ordinary cops who wanted in on the action but were quickly turned away. Everyone had a job to do and everyone did it, and both Josh and Washington Carter, his job-share partner, were quizzed by an endless stream of investigators, asked the same questions over and over again until their brains were numb. Certainly no one suspected either of them of anything, but water flowed downhill, and Josh knew that the two of them would get the blame for what happened. He might as well start sending out resumes right now.

What he couldn't understand-what no one could understand-was how such destruction could have occurred without anyone hearing it. The fences and gates were also wired to the hilt with the most elaborate and up-to-date security systems known to man, yet none of the alarms had been triggered when that behemoth had crashed through the barrier into the cemetery.

It wasn't until later, much later, after all of the information on the affected graves had been recorded, that they learned that every one of the disinterred bodies had been a Civil War veteran.

There was probably a reason for that, Josh thought. It probably meant something.

But neither he nor anyone else could figure out what.

Sixteen

Canyonlands National Park, Utah

Henry stood on the sand, looking out over the water.. He was naked but unashamed. Proud, in fact, though he realized why only when his penis started to grow and he felt one tongue licking his balls, another sliding up and down the crack of his ass. He looked down to see the twins slavishly working on his nether regions, and as a family floated by in a sailboat, he hoped they could see these two gorgeous babes who so desperately desired him.

The old Henry wanted to tell the woman behind him that she was licking the spot where he shit, that she might even get some kind of disease from it, but . the new Henry reveled in this forbidden debauchery, and he experienced a strange triumphant sense of pleasure from the submissiveness of the Asian twin in back of him.

The one licking his scrotum began moving her head slightly as her tongue flicked faster against his testicles. The underside of his erect penis rubbed against the silky smooth hair on top of her head, the sensation building to a fever pitch, and then he was coming, then he was spurting, what felt like a cup, a quart, a gallon of sperm pumping into her straight black hair.

It didn't drip onto her ears or bare back but was absorbed into the hair, and as he watched, the blackness began to grow. It was no longer hair but a shadow of hair, of a head, of a body, of a person, a shadow that expanded to cover the sand, the water and finally the sky before engulfing him as well.

Henry awoke with his underwear off and his penis stuck to his hairy stomach with dried crusted semen.

He tried to sit up, but it was painful and felt like the skin was being ripped from his cock. He examined the organ, trying to determine the best way to liberate it, before finally wetting his palm with spit, rubbing his penis and gradually working it free.

Grimacing, he sat up. The events of the dream (nightmare'?) had been fantastic, but the location was real. Of that he was sure. Although he couldn't place it, Henry knew he'd seen that spot before. He glanced up at the photo of Sarah by the beach but knew that wasn't the place. The truth was, he was not even sure it was the ocean, at least not in a traditional sense. Yes, the water extended as far as the eye could see, but the waves were microscopic, barely up to his ankle. That could have meant that the whole thing was some type of symbol or metaphor for something else, but he didn't think so. He was sure he'd actually been to that site, though the harder he tried to recall it, the more knowledge of it seemed to slip away.

He found his underwear balled up at the foot of the bed. He had no idea how his briefs had gotten there or how they'd gotten off his body. He hoped he'd done it himself in his sleep, but he couldn't be sure and that worried him. Henry went into the small bathroom, tossed his underwear in the hamper and took a long shower, crubbing his skin until everything was gone, then letting the hot water hit his back until it began to run out. He got dressed, made and ate breakfast, then» paced around the inside of his cabin, glancing out ocasionally at the overcast sky. It was his day off again, and the superintendent had made it clear that until further notice, all rangers and park employees not on duty were to remain in their cabins. Henry understood that this was a precautionary measure, that a lot of strange, unexplained, dangerous things were going on||» out there ... but the thought of staying indoors all day still made him stir-crazy.

He glanced over at his bookshelf. Next to there Canon, the collected works of Edward Abbey and E Wallace Stegner-were a handful of books from his past, along with a few newer volumes lent to him by friends that he hadn't gotten around to reading. He chose one of these and settled down on the couch. Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. He'd been a big Tom Robbins fan back in the days when books had meant something to him, when fiction and literature had provided him with a road map for life, and he was looking forward to visit once again with an old trusted friend. But he was put off by the author photo on the dust flap. This was Tom Robbins? His heart sank as he looked at the black-and-white shot. Gone was the happy hairy hippie with the wide, open smile pictured on the back of Still Life with Woodpecker or even the grinning New Age loon from Skinny Legs and All. In his place was a sober pretentious yuppie wearing the expression of someone too preoccupied with himself to give anyone else the time of day.

Henry put the book down without reading a single word of it. He was getting to be an old fuck. Music made him sad now, too, songs he hadn't heard for a long time filling him with an almost unbearable melancholy. Just last night, he'd heard an old John Prine song carried on the wind from someone else's cabin, and all of a sudden he'd started crying. Of course, he'd been half drunk, so that might have had something to do with it, but still ...

He'd been drunk a lot lately. It was the only way he seemed to be able to deal with what was happening.

They'd found Laurie Chambers yesterday in a ravine in the Maze. Or, rather, a hiker had found her. He'd called it in on his cell phone, and a helicopter had had to retrieve her body. She'd been mauled and half-eaten, most likely by predatory animals after the fact, and authorities were still waiting for an autopsy to determine the cause of death.

Henry already knew the cause of death.

The twins.

Laurie had been found in a remote environmentally sensitive area, but all about her the cliff walls had been defaced, the sandstone carved and etched with nonsensical drawings: top hats and train tracks, horses, guns and suns. What did it mean? Henry wondered. What was the point of it all? For there was a point, and it did mean something. Of that he was sure.

He felt the way he had as a teenager in algebra class, where, try as he might, he simply could not grasp the concepts his teacher was trying to impart to him; no matter how much he studied, understanding remained frustratingly out of reach.

A shadow passed over the sun, bathing the room in darkness.

Shadow? Sun?

It was heavily overcast and had been since he'd awakened.

Henry got up from the couch, walked to the window. The dark translucent object that had been shading the already filtered sunlight moved away from the glass onto the narrow porch, standing free. It was, as perhaps he should have known, a shadow of human size, the silhouette of a naked woman. One of the twins? From the other window in the kitchenette, another human shadow detached itself. This one, to his surprise, was that of a man. <&>

He turned around. The entire cabin, he saw now, II was aswarm with shadows, both inside and out. On |the porch, a small crowd of swirling shapes seemed to be circling the building, jostling for position as they circumnavigated his home. In the bathroom, the small frosted window appeared to be winking at him as a| shadow near the sink bopped back and forth in front of it. In the kitchenette, the form of a man wavered near the refrigerator.

What the hell was going on?

He was not as scared as he could have been or perhaps should have been, and that was good. Rather than standing there frozen in place, he opened the front door and strode out on the porch, ready to do battle. The caravan of shadows passed over him, around him, through him for all he knew, but he felt nothing. "Get out of here!" he ordered. He lashed out at the moving band, hoping to scatter them, but the shadows continued on, unwilling or unable to stop.

Henry looked out at the desert leading up to his door.

And saw the twins.

They were darker than the other shadows, more substantial, almost three-dimensional, and they were standing in the same spot they had been in his first dream of them.

He was starting to get scared now, but he stepped off the porch and walked toward them anyway. As he did so, the other shadows fled his cabin, dispersing into the air, into the ground, until only the sisters were left. It was as if the others had come to the house to get his attention, to direct his focus toward the twins. There were no features visible on those black blank faces, but he knew they were watching him nevertheless, and they waited until he was within spitting distance before they glided across the sand away from him. To his surprise, they headed not back into the desert but toward the other rangers' cabins.

He wanted to shout at them, wanted to tell them to stay away, wanted to keep them from his friends and coworkers, but he was afraid to speak up. Besides, he knew it wouldn't do any good. He had no control over them.

He wondered if he really wanted to protect the other rangers-or if he simply wanted to keep the twins to himself.

He realized that he already had the beginnings of an erection.

He followed the flowing shadows to Ray Daniels' cabin, where alarm bells went off instantly in his brain. The cabin's shades were drawn, but the front door was wide open-and Ray never left his front door open. The two forms blended with the darkness of the interior, disappearing from sight, and Henry slowed his pace, an instinct for self-preservation warning him not to rush in. Hoping the twins would reemerge, he waited a moment, squinting into the gloom, trying to see any sign of movement, but within the dark doorway all remained still.

And silent.

The hair on Henry's arms prickled. There was no noise, not even the sound of birdsong or lizardscuttle.

Just like in the canyon.

He wanted to run away. Something bad was in that cabin, and there was no way this situation could turn out okay. But he steeled himself for the worst and forced himself to put one foot in front of the other. "Ray!" he called out. "Ray! You home?"

Silence.

Henry took a deep breath, walked up the single step to the porch and poked his head inside the cabin. "Ra-" His voice died as he saw his friend's body.

Ray was lying nude on the floor, what was left of his face gnawed to the bone, the terror in his intact eyes in direct contrast with the death's-head grin of his exposed lower skull. In the ranger's clutching right hand was a corner of the Navajo throw rug he'd bought last year at Third Mesa. His left hand was a stump, fingers nowhere in sight, a puddle of blood pooled around it.

Henry was sickened. But not surprised.

He looked to the left, catching movement out of the corner of his eye. A thin line of light issued from beneath an improperly closed blind in the kitchen, offering faint illumination that revealed two dark figures seated at the breakfast table.

The twins.

They were seated across from each other and though no sound issued from their shadow lips, they were laughing, rocking slightly in their chairs, their bodies jiggling with mirth.

Once again, he had the feeling he was supposed to glean something from this, that he was being given a message or warning, that something was trying to impart information, but he had no clue what it could be.

Confused, scared, but above all angry, Henry strode over to the closest window and pulled the shade nearest him. It rolled up with a loud snap and light poured into the cabin. He moved to the next one, pulled it open. And the next one. And the next one. By the time he looked over at the breakfast table to see the reaction of the twins, they were gone.

Good, he thought, satisfied.

He looked out of the cabin's windows toward the flat expanse of desert to the west. And froze.

In the middle of the sand stood a train.

The sight was more threatening and far more frightening than that simple description made it sound. For the train was bathed in darkness, not merely black, but suffused with an aura of dread that could be sensed even from here. This was no shadow or slightly more substantial shade; it was a concrete presence in the desert. There was an antique steam engine with accompanying tender, four passenger cars and a caboose. He could see a yucca that had been squashed under one of the engine's metal wheels, could see the odd murky heat waves shimmering around its irregular surface. How it had gotten there and where it had come from-

he would not venture to guess, but there was no doubt that it had arrived.

He remembered a story his father had told him about seeing a ghost once on a train in Nebraska. His dad had been riding the rails looking for work, using the freights, as so many migrants had at that time, to get him from seasonal fruit picking in California to corn harvesting in the Midwest. It was night, of course, and he'd lost his lone fellow traveler back in Wyoming when the man had hopped off at his hometown. The night air was cold, and Henry's father was huddled in a corner of the boxcar, wrapped in a stolen horse blanket. It was practically pitch-black, with only a thin sliver of moonlight showing from a crack in the closed door. And then It wasn't.

There was strange luminescence in the opposite corner. Not the radiance of an electric light or a gas flame but a vague gray glow that gradually brightened into a sickly green. For a brief moment, his father said, he'd seen the form of a man, an Indian warrior, and though the ephemeral figure was fierce in its appearance, he had felt no fear. The ghost disappeared, not §< fading away, but blinking out of existence, though a remnant of that gray glow remained for several moments longer. They were passing through an area where the railroad had been built through Indian territory, and his father assumed it was his own

native || ancestry that had allowed him this glimpse of a spirit long departed. Henry thought of that now, looking at the train in the sand. He watched for a few more seconds out the window, then exited through Ray's back door to get a better view. Other rangers, he saw, were walking out of their cabins, too, having also noticed the phantom locomotive. The train was no hallucination; it was really there-not that he'd needed any proof-but he was still a little surprised that other people could see it. Jill was on duty, as was her husband, Chris, but / Stuart, Pedley, Raul and Murdoch were all converging on the well-worn trail that linked the park service housing units.

He joined them. Although the dark train was still more than a mile off, everyone stopped at the edge of the path, afraid to move closer. The feeling of dread emanating from those motionless black cars was powerful even this far away, and Henry remained alert, on edge, ready to bolt should even a puff of steam emerge from the smokestack.

"Slow train to the coast," Stuart whispered next to him.

Henry remembered the euphemism. They'd used it in the army to refer to someone who'd died. There was one kid in basic training who had keeled over while running, been taken to the infirmary and never returned, and when asked for details about what had happened, the DI had said simply, "He took the slow train to the coast." That was Henry's first exposure to the phrase, but like everyone else in his unit, he'd used it excessively over the next three years, eight months and twenty-eight days. It had been decades since he'd heard, said or even thought of the term, though, and the image conjured by Stuart's whisper frightened him even more.

Slow train to the coast.

The coast.

He thought of his dream, the vast expanse of water, and that linguistic connection, tenuous as it might be, caused his skin to ripple with gooseflesh. Again he sensed meaning and purpose just beyond his reach.

All of them were quiet, those who dared speak whispering like Stuart. The train waited-like a lion, Henry thought-and the rangers waited, too, wondering what was going to happen next, whether the train was going to speed away, disappear into thin air, turn and crash into them and their cabins ... or sit there forever until one of them grew brave enough to approach it and investigate.

He looked from Stuart to Pedley to Raul to Murdoch, then turned back toward the train.

Why was it here? What was its purpose?

Were the twins on it?

The desire to learn the answer to that question was almost enough to get him to walk across the sand to find out.

Almost.

There was the blast of a steam whistle, one short quick burst that made them jump as one. There were noises in that sound that should not have been present in the whistle of a train, subliminal tones he could neither hear nor identify but that for some reason made Henry think of multitudes screaming. He was about to run away, following an instinctive desire to flee back into a cabin so he wouldn't be out in the open, when the black train took off, not starting slowly, and picking up steam, but departing instantly at full speed, like accelerated film footage. In seconds, it was past the dunes and gone from sight.

"What in fuck's name was that?" Raul breathed.

"Yeah," Stuart said.

"Ray's dead," Henry told them numbly.

"A train?" the superintendent said skeptically. He looked around at the faces of the rangers before him and obviously did not see what he'd hoped to see. Henry looked around, too. There was no embarrassment or hesitancy on the features of his coworkers, only grim determination and barely concealed fear.

Hope disappeared from Healey's face. He sat down resignedly on one of Ray's chairs. "Tell me what happened."

All eyes turned toward Henry. He was now the point man for all of this mumbo jumbo. He'd found Ray's body, and though he hadn't said anything about the twins, they all knew by now that he was the one who'd discovered the vandalized rock art. Which apparently granted him some sort of authority.

Sighing, Henry explained in a matter-of-fact, step-by-step manner exactly what had happened. He left out the part about the shadows in his cabin and following the shades of the Oriental babes over to Ray's, but in order to keep the story as emotionally true as possible, he described his uneasy feelings and the certainty he'd felt while looking at Ray's cabin that something terrible had happened inside. Then he talked about the train. They'd all seen that, so he held nothing back, describing that black locomotive in all of its hellish glory, explaining how even from far away he'd sensed its dark power. The others nodded as he spoke. He saw the fear on their faces, recognized it, felt it again himself.

"I guess what we're saying," he told Healey, "is that we need some assurances that something will be done to protect us. We're out there every day while you're safely in your office-"

"My office isn't that safe," the superintendent pointed out.

"All the more reason for us to come up with ... some sort of plan." Henry realized he was floundering. He had no place left to go.

"There's something out there," Stuart said. "And I don't want to meet it face-to-face."

Henry glanced out the open door. The state police had left only a few minutes prior, taking with them signed statements from the witnesses and, under plastic, Ray's body. It was the same forensics team that had come out to examine the still-unidentified woman and Laurie Chambers, and one investigator had joked that they ought to set up a satellite station here at Canyonlands, though no one had laughed. Henry thought now that the remark had hit too close to home. They were all on edge, waiting for someone else to die, and he wondered if any of the other rangers were thinking of quitting or, at the very least, transferring to another park. He certainly was.

No. That wasn't true. He was thinking about leaving Canyonlands in an objective, disassociated way, but he was not actually considering it.

Because of the twins.

There was a stirring between his legs, and he tried to think of something gross so he wouldn't get an erection: run-over squirrels, squished bugs, dog shit.

He suddenly realized that everyone was looking at him again. He'd zoned out and had no idea what turn the dialogue had taken. It seemed as though someone had asked a question and was waiting for his response. His gaze settled on Healey. "I'm sorry," he said, shaking his head to indicate his distracted state. "What?"

"I said," the superintendent repeated with exaggerated patience, "what do you think we can do to alleviate this problem?"

His mind ran down a host of options: restricting access to sections of the park, always working in teams of three, hiring a shaman... .

He thought of the twins.

Henry looked around the room at his fellow employees. "I don't know," he admitted. "I don't think there's anything we can do."

Seventeen

Bear Flats, California

"I can't believe it," Leslie said.

Jolene leaned back on her friend's couch, sipped her wine. "Believe it."

"But I don't understand why you haven't gone back. I mean, this is amazing stuff here. Aren't you the least bit curious?"

Jolene sighed. How could she explain to her friend the utter wrongness of that cellar, the horrible fear she'd felt while down there, the terrifying nightmares she'd been having ever since? She couldn't, she realized. Those were feelings too profound for words, sensations that could not be translated into language. "No," she lied. "I'm not curious."

They were silent for a moment, both of them sipping their drinks.

"A penis?" Leslie said finally. "Really?"

Jolene nodded.

"So you think Chester or one of the other Wil-liamses was some kind of serial killer?"

"I guess," Jolene said.

But that wasn't what she really thought, was it? That wasn't the reason she hadn't gone back. The truth was that her fear ran far deeper than that, was far more primal. It was the childhood fear of ghosts and monsters and the vast unfathomable unknown, and it was connected to the face she and Skylar had seen through the window at night. And the graves.

"Do you think I could see it?"

"The penis?" she said, stalling.

"The house. Everything."

Jolene shook her head.

"Come on!" Leslie prodded. "What's gotten into you?"

"Nothing."

"Why? Do you think Anna May would be against it?"

"No," Jolene admitted. "One thing I'll say for Anna May is that her commitment to history is pretty pure. She's not planning to hush this up to save reputations or protect the family because they donated the house. She's keeping quiet until she finds out everything she can and gets an accurate picture, but she intends to go public with all this and tell everyone."

"A house of horror brings in a lot more tourists than a dusty old museum."

"It's not even that. She genuinely thinks all information should be available no matter how gruesome or damaging or embarrassing it might be. I kind of admire her for that."

"Information deserves to be free. Isn't that the computer hackers' code or something?"

"I don't know." Jolene thought for a moment, finished her drink, then sighed. "I guess I can take you over there if you want. I do feel kind of bad for bailing on poor Anna May. I should at least apologize. She's called my mom's house about a dozen times over the past week, and I've been ducking her."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"Now, about your mom's house ... ," Leslie said.

Jolene groaned. "One problem at a time, please."

Leslie laughed.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad, Jolene thought. Maybe she'd built up the cellar experience in her mind so much that it had been blown way out of proportion and she was obsessing over something that wasn't nearly as horrific as she believed it to be.

She hoped.

They drove over to the Williams place in Jolene's car. Anna May's Oldsmobile was parked in the circular driveway, and Jolene pulled to a stop behind it, tapping lightly on the horn to announce their presence. Maybe the old woman wasn't as skittish as she was, but Jolene knew that if she were working in this house and someone surprised her by showing up without warning, she'd probably have a heart attack. The place was spooky. Even if she hadn't seen what she'd seen, she'd be creeped-out by the building. Especially on a day like today, where the sun was hidden behind a dark bank of threatening clouds, and the entire town lay under a gloomy shadow.

By the time they got out of the car, Anna May was on the porch. She was smiling widely, and for that, Jolene was thankful. At least the old woman wasn't angry with her. Although that also ratcheted up her guilt another notch. How could she have been so thoughtless as to abandon Anna May without an explanation?

She wasn't thoughtless, Jolene told herself. She was scared.

She found herself wondering if the reason Anna May was working alone was because the other members of the historical society had been frightened away, too.

"Mrs. Carter!" Leslie called. She bounced up the porch steps and gave the old woman a hug. "Haven't seen you in a while."

"I've been busy," Anna May said. "As you can see."

Indeed, the interior of the house was filled with boxes, papers and pictures that had been brought over from the old museum. The Williams family's furniture had been temporarily pushed against the wall along with other donated pieces. Jolene glanced over at Leslie, who shot her a "What do we say now?" look. Neither of them knew how to bring up the questions they really wanted to ask.

They needn't have worried. Anna May was eager to describe her most recent discoveries. In all her years of researching the history of Bear Flats and Pinetop County, she said, she had never run into such | a treasure trove of bizarre and fascinating findings,

"This house," Anna May said, marveling, "is a twelve-year-old boy's dream. There's a secret passage from one bedroom to another; there are double attics and, of course, that hidden cellar. It's like a house built for the underground railroad." Her eyes took on an excited gleam. "Although when you read the diary, you'll find that Chester Williams-the first Chester Williams-was definitely not the kind of man who would have been involved with that."

Jolene shivered.

"I'll let you read it after I'm finished," Anna May said. "It's ..." She shook her head. "I can't even describe it. But there are big revelations in there. Major revelations."

"What happens?" Leslie asked. "Can't you even give us a hint?"

The old woman grinned. "Murder!" she whispered excitedly.

A file folder filled with papers slid from the slanted top of a box onto the floor, and all three of them jumped at the sound. Leslie laughed. "We're a brave bunch, aren't we?"

It was the opening Jolene needed. "How have you been able to work here all by yourself?" she asked Anna May. Her voice dropped. "Especially after what we found."

"I don't know," the old woman mused, seriously considering the question. "It is very ... spooky, I must admit. But it's so exciting that I suppose I forget and lose myself in the adventure of it all." She smiled broadly. "Do you want to see what I found this morning?"

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

"We do!" Leslie announced for both of them.

Anna May led them along a pathway between the stacked boxes to the parlor. She picked up something from atop an antique table that at first glance looked like the corpse of a baby tied up with string. "I found this in a closet behind one of the closets." She held up the object and for the first time they could see it clearly. It was a marionette. Made from glued-together body parts, mummified pieces of nose and toes wrapped in motley and attached by gutstring to cross-hatched sticks, the figure grinned at her, small white teeth, like the teeth of children, embedded in its upward-angled mouth.

Jolene's blood ran cold. The face of the marionette looked like the face that had peered in at her and Skylar through the window, down to the brown parchment skin, and she turned away from it, hoping the other two couldn't see the trembling in her hands. "I have to pick up my son from school," she said.

"You have forty-five minutes," Leslie told her. "The school's two minutes away."

"It is scary," Anna May admitted, putting the maronette back down on the table. "A lot of the items I've come across have been. And that diary ..." She shook her head. "I assume that's why you didn't come back after that first day?" she asked Jolene. "You got scared off?"

"I'm sorry," Jolene said. "Really. I meant to call you, and I feel so bad that I didn't, but ..."

"Don't worry about it." The old lady smiled. "Theo was frightened away, too. I don't blame either of you. I guess I just get so ... carried away with finding out new things, I just don't think about everything else around it. History's my life. I love it. The good, the bad and the ugly."

"The older generation's made of sterner stuff," Leslie jokingly offered.

"I think you're right," Jolene said seriously.

"Oh, pshaw," Anna May said, smiling.

Jolene wasn't sure she'd ever heard anyone actually say "pshaw" before.

"So what is it with all this?" Leslie asked. "Do you think Chester Williams' father or grandfather or whatever really was a serial killer? And why did the rest of the family keep all this stuff? You'd think they'd throw it away. I mean, I can see keeping quiet about an old relative and not wanting anyone to know you had a murderer in the family, but to hold on to these body parts as family heirlooms or something?" She shook her head. "We're talking Texas Chainsaw Massacre here. The Williamses had to be one seriously disturbed brood."

There was a thump from the floor above. "Hold on a moment," Anna May said. She moved quickly back between the boxes and up the stairs. "I'll be right back!" she called. Her footsteps stomped up the stairs.

"What do you think that was?" Jolene asked. Her first irrational thought was that Anna May had found something alive in some secret room in the house.

Or something not alive.

"Sounds like something fell," Leslie said simply.

Yes. That had to be it. Her friend was undoubtedly right. But as they walked slowly about the parlor, looking at artifacts and photographs, Jolene was acutely aware that she could hear no noise coming from upstairs, that aside from the sounds of their own movement, the house was silent.

Leslie tentatively touched the marionette. "God, that thing's creepy."

"Everything here is."

"Remember when we were kids, how old-man Williams seemed like such a tight ass? One of those upper-crust stiffs too good to associate with the likes of normal people? Who would've guessed he was sitting here with body parts in his mansion?"

Jolene nodded, feeling cold. "And his wife was dead by then, so he was all alone in here with these secret rooms and his hidden cellar and souvenirs from his family's kills. What do you think he did at night? I saw no TV; there aren't a lot of books. Maybe he just sat here and made things like that." She pointed to the marionette.

"It just goes to show: you never know what's going on behind other people's closed doors."

Jolene looked up at the ceiling. There was still no noise from upstairs, and the definition of "I'll be right back" had been stretched well beyond its limit. Something was wrong.

There was another thump on the ceiling above them, this one louder than the first. Much louder.

It sounded like a body falling to the floor.

"Anna May?" Jolene called.

No answer.

She and Leslie shared a quick glance; then the two of them were rushing between the boxes and up the stairs, pausing only for a second at the head of the hallway before pushing open doors and peeking into rooms.

"Oh, God!" Leslie screamed.

Jolene hurried across the hall to where her friend was staggering away from an open door. Even before she got there, she could see Anna May's brutally beaten body, could see the mushy mass of red that had been her face, the indented cavity that had been her chest, the spreading puddle of blood on the floor. But it was not until she was actually in the doorway that she could see the slashes across the old woman's legs, slashes so deep that the white of bone showed through the red of flesh. It was from these gashes that the bulk of the blood was flowing, and there still appeared to be the remnants of a rhythm to the outpouring of thick crimson, the dying throb of a pulse. She had to have been killed only seconds before.

Fingers dug deep and suddenly into Jolene's arm, and for a brief flash of an instant she thought she was about to be slaughtered as well, but it was Leslie. "Who did it?" her friend demanded, looking up and down the hallway. "Where are they?"

That's what she wanted to know, too. There was no one in the bedroom. No killer, either human or animal. But on the walls of the room was what appeared to be a creeping black mold. The consistency of the substance seemed more shadow than fungus, as though the mold was in the process of evolving or, more accurately, as though it was in that place, in that space, but on another plane or in another dimension and was trying to break through.

No, Jolene thought. That wasn't right. It was more like a scene from the past was being overlaid on the present and they were seeing the ghosts of things that once were.

Anna May's bloody body was no ghost, however, and she and Leslie backed away from the door, both of them still looking furtively around the hall as though expecting some sort of phantom to jump out from another doorway at any time. "Let's get out of here," Jolene said. "We'll call the police, let them figure out what happened."

Leslie was already starting to regain some of her composure, and as the two of them hurried back down the stairs, she whipped out her cell phone and called 911. "Anna May Carter's been murdered!" she shouted. "We're at the Williams mansion! ... I don't know! It's on Fistler! ... They'll know where it is-just tell them to get over here fast! ... Leslie Finch." They were downstairs by now and making their way through the maze toward the front door. "No, we don't want to wait! ... Okay, we'll wait in the car, but if we see anything, we're out of here!" They ran outside as Leslie finished talking to the dispatcher. She turned toward Jolene as they sprinted across the asphalt toward the car. "They want us to wait here. I told them we'll stay in the car. The phone's still on, in case something happens, so don't say anything you don't want recorded for posterity."

Already they could hear sirens, and for once the sound had a soothing effect on her. Jolene opened the driver's door and jumped in, the image of Anna May's brutally murdered body front and center in her mind, overriding everything else. Suddenly the bodies of the family she'd found in the gulch seemed nice, comforting, almost pleasant.

"She didn't scream," Leslie said as Jolene automatically locked all of the car's doors. "She didn't make a sound."

Jolene hadn't thought of that, but it was true, and in a way that was the oddest thing of all. The reaction to pain was instinctive. Even if she'd died almost instantly, Anna May should have cried out at the first blow. And why hadn't they heard the footsteps of her murderer?

Because he was a ghost.

She didn't want to go there, didn't want to think about that.

It had been less than three minutes since Leslie's call, but the first police car was already arriving. Even for a town this small, that was damned impressive. Two other cars followed, skidding to stops in the circular driveway, a total of six officers emerging with guns drawn.

Thank God, Jolene thought.

One officer, obviously the man in charge, motioned for them to remain in the car, then led four of the others into the house. One remained near the first patrol car, pistol drawn and at the ready should mayhem spill out into the driveway. She and Leslie were silent, waiting, listening, and they sat like that for what seemed like an hour but was probably only ten minutes or so. She hoped this wasn't going to take forever, because she had to pick up Skylar from school pretty soon. If the police had to interview them and take statements, she'd probably have to call her mom and tell her to pick up the boy.

She didn't want her mom picking him up.

Two policemen emerged from the house with stunned looks on their faces. One was holstering his gun; the other had already put his weapon away and was numbly carrying a Yu-Gi-Oh! backpack.

Skylar's backpack.

Jolene's heart lurched in her chest and it was suddenly difficult to breathe. She unlocked and opened the car door in one impossibly perfect motion and was running toward the front of the house before Leslie could even get out a surprised, "What's the matter?" She flew past the startled cops and dashed inside the house calling her son's name at the top of her lungs, the rational and suddenly subservient part of her brain telling her this was a stupid move, that there were three rattled cops at a murder scene, that she was likely to get herself accidentally shot.

"Skylar!" she screamed. "Skylar!"

There was some sort of answer-not her son's voice but the deeper baritone of one of the policemen-and it seemed to come from downstairs.

The cellar.

She should have known. She was terrified to go back there again, frightened to the bone by the very idea, but her fear for her son was far greater and she was not going to let anything or anyone stop her. She sped through the messy maze into the kitchen, then took the steps to the basement two at a time. As she'd feared, as she'd known, the trapdoor to the secret cellar was open and two of the policemen were looking down at it.

"Skylar!" she screamed, and the two men turned slowly toward her. The blank expressions on their faces sent a searing bolt of pure terror straight through her, and like a wild animal she shoved the men aside and looked into the cellar.

Where Skylar was naked, rocking back and forth on the dirt floor in his own excrement, laughing to himself like a person who had gone completely insane.

"Hey."

The voice came from right next to him, and Skylar jumped, whirling around, but the school hallway was empty, no one in front, no one in back, the doors to all of the classrooms closed. He desperately had to pee, but he was suddenly afraid to even walk down to the end of the hall, let alone go alone into the boys' bathroom. He wondered, if he returned to class, whether he'd be able to hold it until recess.

No way.

Luckily, the door to another class opened a little ways up ahead, and a girl walked out carrying a hall pass just like his. She strode purposefully toward the restrooms, and he followed, feeling braver now that his courage was being shown up by a girl. He'd almost caught up to her by the time they'd reached the bathrooms, and he pushed open the door marked boys while the girls door was still swinging.

The lights were off-part of the efforts by the school to save money on electricity-but the high, frosted

window and double skylight were not enough to fully illuminate the tall space, and though it was a sunny day, in here it felt overcast. The gray tiled room was empty, and, frightened, he quickly sped over to the closest urinal, pulling down his zipper as he walked, in a hurry to get out of here.

"Hey."

Skylar jumped, almost peeing on his shoe. It was the same voice, and it echoed between the tiles, the added reverberation making it sound not only strange but sinister. It had followed him here, and his heart was pounding in his chest like a jackhammer. He tried to finish quickly before it came again, and planned to run out of the bathroom even if he wasn't fully zipped and haul back to class and the safety of other people.

"Hey."

He'd peed enough. He could make it to recess. He stopped, shoved his penis back into his pants and turned without flushing.

"Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey hey. Heyheyheyhey ..."

The voice sped up, became higher. Other words were added, words he didn't understand, and in seconds it was the voice from the grave.

Mother Daughter

A shadow passed over the skylight, over the window. The bathroom was thrown into darkness, and Skylar started screaming. "Help! Help!"

The alien language now sounded like laughter.

He was afraid to run, afraid to move. He was no longer alone in the restroom-of that he was sure- and the only thing he could do was keep calling for help and hope a teacher or a janitor heard his cries and came to rescue him.

Suddenly there was a light, although where it came from he could not say. It illuminated an area between himself and the door, and Skylar saw a small figure dancing on the tiled floor, held up by strings. His breath was coming in short harsh gasps that hurt his throat. It was a puppet, a brown ugly-looking thing with a hideous grinning face that reminded him of something he had seen before. The puppet seemed to be growing, getting bigger, but he realized that was because it was moving closer to him, the mysterious light accompanying it as it danced crazily.

Skylar had stopped screaming. He didn't know when, didn't know why, but when he tried to yell again for help, he couldn't. His voice had disappeared. The only sound that came out was a parched croak.

But he shouldn't have to keep yelling. Someone should be here by now. Hadn't anyone heard him call? He'd been screaming at the top of his lungs.

The puppet drew closer.

Skylar backed up until he was against the metal wall of the first stall and could move no more. There was a shadow behind the light now. He could see an outline of the figure that was working the puppet. The light remained in place, the puppet moved out of it,, and the controlling figure stepped into the breach.

It was the old man he and his mom had seen that night at the bedroom window, and he realized now why the puppet's terrible face had looked so familiar. It was a smaller version of this one.

"Skylar," the man said with a strange accent.

It knew his name!

"Hey."

"No," was all he could get out.

"I have so much to show you," the old man said, and Skylar started whimpering.

The figure grinned at him.

And took his hand.

Eighteen

Flagstaff, Arizona

According to the tests, there was nothing there.

That was flat-out impossible.

Angela and Derek listened to Dr. Mathewson's exasperated description of the analyses performed on the black mold.

"I know it's there," the professor said. "I can see it. We all can see it. But when examined microscopically, analyzed spectrographically or tested for chemical interaction with various solutions, it's as if it doesn't even exist. It's as though,we're looking at"-he moved his fingers in a wispy motion above his head-"air."

Angela had no idea how such a thing could be true. But she believed it. As far as she was concerned, there'd been more magic than science involved here since the beginning. That still didn't tell them what they were dealing with, and she knew the lack of hard facts frustrated both the professor and Derek. She was frustrated, too, but for different reasons. She didn't necessarily require a rational explanation for all that was going on, but she still wanted to know what was happening and why.

Part of her felt guilty, as though she'd brought it on herself, as though this was some sort of cosmic punishment being meted out to her.

That was her parents' influence. And the church's.

She'd spent the previous night at Derek's house. At first, she'd declined his offer, worried about what his family might think, but he drove her there, introduced her, and gave his mom a thumbnail sketch of what was going on, and his mother insisted that Angela sleep in the guest room.

"Thank you," she said gratefully. "It's only for tonight. I promise."

"For as long as it takes to get your situation sorted out," his mother said.

"Derek has a girlfriend!" his brother, Steve, called in a singsong voice. "Derek has a girlfriend!"

"Shut up," Derek told him.

"Derek has a girlfriend!"

"He's my half brother," Derek told Angela, motioning toward a mantel where photographs of the family were displayed. She saw pictures of Mrs. Yount with two different husbands.

"Mom!" Steve whined.

"Derek!" his mother warned.

It felt good to be in a family environment once again. It had been nice to be on her own and in the adult universe, too, but when things got rough, having a family around made it much easier to face the world.

She'd used up nearly all of her anytime minutes calling her own family and her friends back in California, and they probably thought she was having some type of nervous breakdown. No doubt as a result of living away from home for the first time. She'd told them everything, and they believed none of it. Why would they? The story was ludicrous. She'd moved into a haunted house with a bunch of colorful characters; then she'd been grabbed by a living corpse in a tunnel full of corpses and after that, black mold had started growing on her sheets, black mold that her roommate touched and that turned her and everyone else in the apartment building into racist assholes? It sounded like the plot of a grade-Z horror movie.

Besides, her family and friends were too far away to help anyway.

At least Derek had turned out to be a stand-up guy.

She glanced over at him, talking to the professor. The two of them were looking over a series of printouts. She was not sure Derek understood any more of it than she did, but at least he was in there; at least he was trying.

Dr. Mathewson dropped the papers in defeat.

"So what now?" Derek asked.

The professor shook his head. "I'm going to speak to my colleagues here, confer with others at universities that have better and more sophisticated equipment, contact the CDC and ... keep on trying. We'll nail it eventually, but I'm afraid I have nothing to offer you at this time."

"Thanks anyway," Angela said. "For trying."

"Thank you," he told them. "This is a real challenge. At the very least, I'll get a paper out of it."

Once outside, Derek looked around at the stone buildings of the university. "There are a lot of smart minds hard at work behind those walls. You'd think we could find one that could crack this for us or at least come up with a usable theory."

"Right now, I just want to go back and get my stuff while everyone else is at school." They'd both decided to skip classes and take off work for the day, and Derek had agreed to help her load up everything of hers from Babbitt House and temporarily store it in his garage until she could find a new place to live.

"All right, then," he told her. "Let's go."

If, before, the ornate facade and rolling lawn of the Victorian residence had seemed charmingly bohemian for an apartment building, those features now seemed scary and threatening. The gingerbread on the structure gave it the appearance of a haunted house, and the vast lawn separated it from the rest of the street, keeping it isolated. Her clothes were in there, her PC, assorted books and CDs, but she was tempted to leave everything and give up her rights to it just to get away from this place. She did not want to go back in that building.

Derek had already started up the walk, however, and he turned around. "Come on. Let's get this over with."

He was right, and she hurried to catch up with him.

Stupid brown bitch.

She hoped Chrissie was not going to be here. Or Winston.

The front door was locked. Angela withdrew her key ring from her purse and was sorting through the keys to find the one for the front door when a water balloon burst on the cement of the walkway next to Derek's feet. The air was filled with the tart, sickening stench of urine. "Not by the hair on my chinny chin chin!" Randy yelled from above. Angela heard his window slam shut.

At precisely that instant, as though choreographed, Kelli and Yurica stuck their heads out of the window next to the front door-their living room window- and yelled in unison: "Go back to Mexico, slut!" Giggling, they ducked back inside.

"This place is a goddamn loony bin," Derek said.

"It's the mold," Angela told him. She paused. "At least I think it is." She opened the front door.

Derek cringed, ready to duck at the first sign of anything coming at them, but there was nothing. "Do you think this is happening to Dr. Welkes? And everyone else who went down in that tunnel?"

"I don't know," Angela admitted, and they walked inside.

Ordinarily, at this time of day, Babbitt House was empty and quiet save for one or two residents who might be home studying and perhaps listening to music. Now, however, it seemed that everyone was home, and though she couldn't see them behind the closed doors or through the walls, she could sense them there, listening, watching, waiting.

And there was ...

Something else.

A noise.

It had started off as a low hum, barely audible as they walked through the front door. Within seconds, however, mumbling was coming not only from Winston and Brock's apartment but from all of the apartments, like surround sound. It was the same unintelligible chattering she'd heard before-the ghost-and it seemed to freak out even Derek.

"What the hell is that." he .asked, his voice shaky.

"It's a ghost," Angela admitted. "This place is haunted."

"Is that from the mold, too?"

"No. It's in addition to the mold."

"Jesus Christ," Derek breathed.

The babbling took on a more frantic tone.

"Let's hurry up," Angela said, "and get out of here."

The two of them dashed up the stairs. She half expected blood or dark water to start oozing from the walls, the whole building to begin tumbling down, but they made it to the top without incident.

At the far end of the hallway stood Drew and Lisa, both of them dressed only in underwear, standing stock-still, like statues. That alien voice was still babbling, the sound issuing from all around them as though speakers were hidden in every wall, and what might have been a comic tableau under other circumstances was transformed into a disturbing scene of unfathomable horror.

They had to do this quickly.

Angela strode to the closed door of her apartment, trying the knob. It was locked. She knocked loudly. "Chrissie?" She was hoping against hope that her roommate was not in, and the lack of an answer briefly let her think that she'd be able to remove her belongings unimpeded. But the moment she put her key in the lock, turned it and tried to open the door, she met resistance. Her fleeting sense of relief dissipated. She pushed harder, trying to force open the door, but Chrissie was leaning on it from the other side. "Bitch!" Chrissie screamed. "Brown fucking beaner bitch!"

Derek touched her arm. "Come on," he said. "Let's go. Let's get out of here. Let the police handle it."

"No!" Angela insisted, more angry now than scared. "Those are my things, and I'm taking them with me."

"Bitch!" Chrissie screamed.

"Fuck you!" Angela yelled back. She retreated a step, then shoved her shoulder against the door like she'd seen cops do in movies. Derek's hand closed over hers on the knob, and then the two of them were pressing their combined weight against the door. Gradually, it gave way before them, Chrissie's strength no match for theirs.

The door flew open.

Angela sucked in her breath. Next to her, Derek did the same. Mold had grown throughout the apartment, creeping over everything. The couch was completely black, as were the television and kitchen counter. Inky tendrils climbed up the walls like tree branches, exploding into a galaxy of jet stars on the ceiling. The floor was covered with a dark carpet of fungus.

And the smell ...

The two of them moved no farther than the doorway. Chrissie was naked and screaming at them, her skin milky and untouched by the terrible infestation, her eyes wild with rage, but it was not she that prevented them from going inside. It was the overwhelming transformation of the apartment itself. Angela barely recognized the place. It looked like a bat cave. And she knew with certainty that her bedroom had to be even worse. That was where the mold had started, and there was no way it had escaped unscathed. No doubt all of her belongings had succumbed to this creeping corpse-spawned blight.

She and Derek backed out and closed the door just as Chrissie rushed them, arms extended, hands clawed, shrieking. "You ugly brown-" There was a hard thump as she hit the door.

"Let's get out of here," Derek said.

Angela nodded. Down the hall, Drew and Lisa were still frozen like statues.

Although they were closer now.

She and Derek hurried down the stairs. Winston and Brock were in the entryway, standing before the now-open door of their apartment, from whence that crazy jabbering was issuing at earsplitting levels. The last time she'd been allowed a glimpse into their living quarters, she'd thought she'd seen a black spot on the couch. Now the black was everywhere, not as comprehensive or concentrated as it was upstairs ... but still bad.

She was afraid they might have problems with her two former friends, thought she and Derek might have to fight their way out of the house, but she'd obviously seen too many movies because no such confrontation occurred. Winston and Brock glared at them and called her names like "beaner" and "brown bitch" that echoed Chrissie's words exactly, but she and Derek made it outside without further incident and ran over the lawn toward the street and the safety of the car.

"Holy shit!" Derek exclaimed after they'd gotten in and locked the doors behind them. "That was intense!"

Angela was too tired to do anything but nod. She felt drained and at the same time keyed up. Her knotted stomach was cramping, and she hoped she wouldn't vomit. Hazarding a glance back at Babbitt House, she saw identical black shapes in every one of the windows facing the street. It had to be mold ... but the shapes looked like shadows or silhouettes of people, and out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw one of them move. She quickly turned away. "Come on," she said. "Drive. Fast."

Derek started the car, pulled away from the curb, heading up the street toward the hulking mountains that towered over the city. "Where?" he asked.

"It all started in that tunnel," she said, "with that ... zombie. Let's go to the police station, find the policeman, see what he knows. He was there. He saw what really happened."

"What's his name?"

"I don't know, but it should be easy to find out."

Her cell phone rang, and Angela took it out of her purse, surprised. She peered at the small screen, but the number was blocked so she couldn't see who it was. She pressed the button to answer. "Hello?"

It was Edna Wong.

She wanted to talk.

* * *

They met in a little downtown health food restaurant called Mountain Oasis. There was no privacy, but these were the off-hours and the only other patron was a gray-bearded Karl Marx look-alike who was eating soup while he read an impressively thick book through depressingly thick eyeglasses.

Angela and Derek were already in the neighborhood and arrived ten minutes before Edna, who had to fight the traffic from NAU. The old woman walked through the doorway just as their decaf iced teas were being refilled, and Angela waved her over. She and Derek had been sitting at the table in virtual silence, trying to decompress, to absorb what had happened, unable to talk yet about what they'd seen.

They were seated opposite each other, and Edna took a chair from an adjoining table and sat down facing both of them. "You want to know about the tunnel," she said without preamble.

"Yes," Angela told her. Derek nodded.

"Okay, then." The housing administrator took a deep breath. "I only know rumors. Maybe they're true, maybe not. Maybe they're just stories. But I'll tell you what I heard.

"When I was a little girl, Flagstaff was an almost completely white city. Oh, you'd see Indians in town from time to time, but it wasn't like today. The state's Hispanic population all seemed to live down by Tucson and never ventured above Phoenix, and I'd never even seen anyone who was African-American. As far as I knew, there were only three Asian families in town, including mine.

"The thing was, it had not always been this way. At one time, in the early 1900s, after the railroad came in, after they'd built the station, there were quite a few Chinese families living here, doing the work no one else wanted to do." She smiled ruefully. "Coolie labor. But there was as much anti-immigrant sentiment then as there is today, more probably, and a lot of locals were resentful, claiming that the Chinese were taking jobs away from white Arizonans."

The waitress stopped by, pad in hand, and Edna smiled at her. "Just water, please."

"Sure thing," the girl said cheerfully.

"I'll leave a big tip," Edna promised.

The waitress laughed. "Don't worry about it."

"Anyway," Edna continued, "there were some beatings and a few scattered attacks. Tarring and feathering. An attempted lynching. Flagstaff was still considered the wild frontier back then, and lawlessness and vigilantism were not unknown in these parts. Some people could see the writing on the wall, and a few of the local businesses who relied heavily on cheap Chinese labor created 'safe rooms' just in case." She paused. "And tunnels."

"Is that-?" Angela began.

Edna nodded. "Yes. At least, that's what I was told. Eventually, there were riots, anti-Chinese riots. Stores and businesses that hired Chinese workers were looted; rooming houses and shacks where they boarded were burned. There was thousands of dollars' worth of damage, dozens of injuries, and several people died. None of them were Chinese, though. This part's documented. You can look it up in newspaper articles from that time in the university library. I have."

The waitress brought her water, and Edna thanked the girl, taking a long sip. "The Chinese workers and their families all seemed to have disappeared. No one knew what had happened to them. Eventually, after things had calmed down, a few were found working at the hotel or at the mill. Supposedly they'd hidden in the secret rooms and the tunnels while all the chaos was going on above. But many of the families never returned, and the story passed down to me was that

later, maybe at night when it was safe, they'd left the city. The rumor was that they'd ridden the rails east."

Angela suddenly understood. "But they didn't leave," she said, stunned. "They never left the tunnel. They died in there. That's what we saw."

Edna nodded soberly. "But there were tunnels" she said. "Plural. At least that's what I heard. So ..." She trailed off.

"So there could be more," Derek said.

"Yes."

He looked down at the floor. "There could be bodies under us right now."

"They were supposed to be somewhere in this downtown district," Edna agreed.

Angela suddenly felt a lot less secure. With all of the gangs and violence and big-city problems of Los Angeles, she thought she'd be living a peaceful bucolic little life here in northern Arizona. She never could have imagined something like this. "But-" Her voice came out thin and cracked, and she cleared her throat. "But they were moving," she said. "At least some of them were. That one hand grabbed me. And what's that black mold? We tried to have it tested, but it doesn't even show up. It's not there. So it has to be some kind of magic or something. Is there some sort of curse on those tunnels and the people who died there? Or is it ...? I don't know. What is it?"

"That I can't tell you," Edna said. "All I know is that the tunnels were supposed to be part of an underground railroad for Chinese immigrants to protect them from vigilante mobs. Beyond that, I'm as much in the dark as you. But I thought knowing about the history might help you somehow or at least give you a place to start."

"Thank you," Angela said. But she wasn't sure it did help.

Edna thought for a moment, then sighed. "Well, maybe there is something else. I don't know. But I'll tell you anyway." She took another long sip of water. "When I was a little girl, my uncle came to visit us from Missouri. He was very tall for someone who was Chinese, very charismatic. He had some kind of glamorous job, although I don't remember what it was* Anyway, he stayed for about a week and it was wonderful. But one day, my parents were out somewhere and my uncle asked me to show him where my grandfather was buried. It wasn't in a real cemetery, since Chinese weren't allowed to be buried with Caucasian^ at that time. It was a makeshift cemetery out on the north end of town that was shared with other outcasts^ Indians had their own burial grounds, but the rest of us, the other minority groups-and there were only a handful of families all total-made do with this little plot in the forest, a little clearing of unowned land. My uncle bought a chicken first and put it in this black bag. I thought that was very odd. I kept asking him what he was going to do with it. I was fascinated| really. But he wouldn't say. Then when I showed him my grandfather's grave, he knelt down before it and started doing some kind of ... ritual is the only word to describe it. He started whispering some sort of chant-I knew some of the words but not all of them-then he took out the chicken and slit its throat! He let the blood drip on the grave, then put his fingers in it. He wrote some Chinese characters on the gravestone-I couldn't read yet, so I don't know what he wrote-then he put some blood on his forehead! stood up and bowed. Two words I remember he did say were 'bo sau.' Revenge. He gave me a lecture and told me my mother and father should be doing this, loo. We all should. But I got scared and started crying, and then he picked me up and then we left.

"When I told my mother about it, I remember she seemed scared. I think she even shivered, although that may just be my memory. But what she said was, He's trying to raise the dead.' That was enough to scare me, and it's all we ever said about it. My uncle left the next day, and I never knew if that was why, if my parents kicked him out or he stormed off, but he never came back to visit.

"I know my parents were never involved in any such thing, and I've never heard of anything else like it since. But my uncle said all good Chinese should perform that ritual, and I've thought about that over the years, wondered if there were others. Now I'm wondering if it's not connected to those bodies in the tunnel."

They were silent, no one sure of what to say after that. Angela's head was spinning.

"More iced tea?" the waitress asked cheerily, stopping by.

They acquiesced, fooled around for a few moments putting sugar in their glasses, squeezing lemon, stirring. Edna sipped her water.

Trying to raise the dead

It had to be related.

Derek began updating Edna on the most recent events, including their aborted sojourn into Babbitt House, and the old woman, shocked and frightened, said they had to call the police. And tell the county health authorities. "This could be the beginning of an epidemic," she said.

Neither of them had thought of it that way, and they both realized Edna was right.

"You don't know anything about this mold or fungus or whatever it is, do you?" Angela asked.

Edna shook her head. "I'm sorry, no. I've told you everything I know that could possibly help. This I never heard of."

Angela thought about the riots. Mob violend spread through crowds much like a disease or viru infecting ordinarily rational people. Maybe this blad mold had been around back then, too. Maybe it had sparked the anti-Chinese sentiment that had led to these horrible consequences. Maybe Flagstaff had been built on ground saturated with this toxic spore, and unearthing the tunnel had once again released it into the general population.

She agreed with Edna that the authorities needed to be notified, but she had no confidence that the people sent out to investigate wouldn't be affected, too. She glanced suspiciously over at Derek. Had he been contaminated? He hadn't actually touched the mold And he looked okay. But ...

Perhaps the best thing to do would be to cut her losses and speed back to California as quickly as Greyhound bus could carry her.

A cell tone rang out at the table, and all of them checked their phones. It was Edna's, and she looke down at the text message. "I have to go," she said. "Problems at the office. As always." She smile kindly, touching Angela's arm. "I'm so sorry, dear. This just hasn't been your semester, has it?"

Angela smiled back. "That's the understatement of the year."

The housing administrator took out two dolla from her purse and placed the bills under the shaker. "If you need me, you know where to find me.

"Thank you," Angela said.

"Thanks," Derek echoed.

Edna hurried off, and the two of them looked at each other. "What now?" Derek asked. "Police station?"

Angela quickly finished the last of her iced tea. "Yeah," she said. "Let's go."

Nineteen

Washington, D.C.

Greg Rossiter stared glumly out the window of his office at the cubicles of junior FBI agents, all of whom wanted his job.

His old office had had a window that looked outside. At the city. At the sky.

He pulled the shades, hiding the outer office from view. Ever since The X-Files had gone off the air, his stock had gone down in the bureau. Sad but true. No matter that he had successfully investigated over fifty cases in the last five years and had worked on two high-profile incidents featuring objective, verifiable supernatural phenomena-the presence of that fucking TV show had granted him more legitimacy than any closed case could. Now he was on the outs, considered passe, a relic from another era.

Just like Fox Mulder had been.

Goddamn, he hated that program.

Rossiter paced restlessly around the room before returning to his desk. Everything was focused on counterterrorism these days. That, too, had knocked his career off track. Not that he didn't understand, but, shit, there were other domestic threats as well, other crimes, other dangers that deserved the bureau's full attention.

Like vampires.

It was strange how dispassionate he was about the paranormal phenomena he had encountered. Uncovering the existence of these monsters hadn't turned him into a paranoid Chicken Little but had left him surprisingly unaffected. His job was still just a job to him, not a crusade, not a lifestyle, and instead of spending every waking moment worried about the infiltration of the supernatural, he was more concerned with how such things affected his career trajectory. He wasn't sure if that was good or bad.

The door opened, and his assistant poked her head into the room. "Sir?"

He looked up, scowling. "What is it?"

"The director wants to see you."

The director? Rossiter stood, straightened his tie, made sure his shirt was tucked in properly. "Where? In his office?"

"Yes. Now."

A lot of agents, he knew, would be quaking in their boots at the very thought of such a summons, but he thrived on opportunities like these, knew how to work them to his advantage. They were openings, not challenges, and if he played his cards right, he could use this brief meeting to jump-start his stalled career.

But what did the director want to see him about? That was the only variable here.

It didn't matter. Even a dressing-down could be spun into gold if the spinner knew what he was doing.

And he did.

Rossiter looked at his ghostly reflection in the window to check his hair, then strode purposefully out of his office, past the cubicles of the junior agents, down the outside corridor to the bank of elevators. Once inside the elevator, he stared straight ahead, a neutral expression on his face, acutely conscious of the fact that he was being observed.

He was expecting others to be present at the meeting-his immediate supervisor perhaps, other agents with whom he'd worked-but he was unprepared for the level of high-powered attendees that greeted him, and though he tried not to let it show, the sight of the White House chief of staff, the national-security adviser and the head of the Secret Service all seated in a semicircle in front of the director's desk left him feeling overwhelmed and slightly intimidated. Still, he acted as if this happened every day, as though he were used to such company, and he took the remaining empty chair and sat down quietly, waiting to be told why he was here.

"Agent Rossiter," the director said curtly. "There's been an incident in Manhattan, and as you're reported to have some experience with unusual or ostensibly unexplainable occurrences, I've decided to bring you in on the case."

"Thank you, sir."

"Put simply, Grant's Tomb has been defiled. We've blocked off Riverside Drive to keep the public away, and the area around the building itself has been cordoned off. Bomb scare's the cover story. As you doubtlessly know, the sepulchre is guarded at all times, as well as being monitored by our best surveillance equipment, so theoretically such a thing should not be able to occur. In fact, we have no idea how it did occur, and this colossal security failure is what we've been discussing for the past forty-five minutes." He glanced disapprovingly around the room, and Rossiter was amused to note that the other men looked chastened. "To state the facts, President Grant's body has been removed from its final resting place and ... butchered. The desecration was conducted with such ferocity that it would be easy to conclude that it was perpetrated by a wild animal, although obviously it would require a human to disinter the corpse. The purposeful dismantling of the body, however, and the distribution of the parts, imply that the entire operation was human in origin. In addition, the tomb's walls have been defaced with childish drawings.

"His wife's corpse remains untouched."

There was silence in the room. Rossiter was not sure what to say. "Are there photos yet?" he asked.

"Yes. And streaming video that you can access, as well as a written report by the answering officer."

"I'll need to see the site for myself. I'll need to talk to on-duty personnel. I'll get over there right away and-"

"After." The director cleared his throat, looked around the room. "The president wants to see you first."

The president!

The situation was progressing from good to great.

Still, Rossiter was cautious. "May I ask what this is concerning?"

The chief of staff frowned at him. "At this point, everything is on a need-to-know basis. All you need to know right now is that you are to report immediately to the president in the company of Director Horn."

"Yes, sir," Rossiter answered.

The director frowned again, although whether it was at the chief of staff or himself Rossiter could not say. The director handed Rossiter a manila file folder, emphasizing that despite the high profile and public visibility of the crime scene, he was to do his utmost to ensure that word of what had occurred did not leak out to the press. "The last thing we need is publicity. Particularly right now."

That seemed to be a cue for the others to stand and take their leave. None of the men offered so much as a good-bye. They simply filed out of the room. The director stood up, pressing an intercom button on his desk. "Have a car ready," he ordered. Rossiter couldn't hear the response-he was not sure the director had even waited for one. He knew only that Horn was striding purposefully toward a nearly hidden side door in the office, making a single brusque motion indicating that Rossiter was to accompany him.

They took a private elevator to the first floor, where they got into a black town car with darkened windows. The director remained silent on the short trip through the D.C. streets, and Rossiter followed his example. There were questions he wanted to ask: Did the bureau believe that the tomb desecration had a supernatural cause? Was that why he had been called in? Were any connections suspected between this and the disinterring of Civil War dead at Arlington? But he sensed that this was a time to remain quiet, and he did.

The car passed through the White House gate and rolled smoothly by the guard shack without stopping. The residence, he noticed through the smoked glass, was partially hidden behind scaffolding and a gigantic billowing sheet of bright red tarp.

"Christo's new project?" he joked.

The quip was met with flat silence.

"They're making a few cosmetic repairs to the building. Touch-ups." They were the first words the director had spoken since leaving his office.

Rossiter said nothing, kept his eyes open and his mouth shut. He'd been in D.C. now for well over a dozen years, through three administrations, and he had never seen anything like this. He had no idea what sort of lunatic impulse had made him joke about the appearance of the White House; he'd merely been fishing for information about this obviously extraordinary sight, and he'd stupidly thought a stab at camaraderie would yield results. He should have known better.

One step back.

So much for the career rehabilitation.

The car stopped on the side of the White House opposite the construction. The door was opened for them by a uniformed marine. They stepped out from the backseat and were immediately ushered into one of the building's side entrances. Rossiter had been to the White House only once before, as part of a formal ceremony, and had entered through the front along with everyone else. This private entrance was new to him, but he remained passive, stoic, acting as though this sort of thing happened to him all the time.

They were led through a narrow winding corridor that did not seem to intersect any rooms, hallways or public spaces, and emerged in the antechamber of the Oval Office, where the chief of staff and the head of the Secret Service were already waiting, having beaten them there. Two other men were standing in the room as well, but the national-security adviser was missing. Rossiter had no idea what this could be about, but it had to be big.

The door to the Oval Office opened, and the president emerged. He looked taller than he did on TV, more presidential, and although Rossiter hadn't voted for him, he could see now why a majority of the country had. At the moment, the president was striding purposefully toward them with his shirtsleeves rolled up and his tie loosened. It may have been an affectation, but it got across the point that the man was busy and here to work, and Rossiter found himself standing < more stiffly at attention.

"Gentlemen," he said by way of greeting. His eyes locked on Rossiter's. "You're Agent Rossiter?"

"Yes, sir."

"Follow me. I have something to show you."

All seven of them, the president in the lead, strode down a tall wide hallway to a closed door guarded by military personnel. One of the uniformed men opened the door, and they stepped inside a large gallery that looked as though it hadn't been redecorated since Abraham Lincoln's day.

Only ...

Only the far end of the room was discreetly covered by a thick navy blue curtain that stretched from floor to ceiling and completely covered everything in back [ of it. The curtain was so jarringly out of place and so hastily put together that it was clear it did not belong and was not intended for use in some ceremony or celebration. Before Rossiter could even think about the possibilities implied by the drapery, the president | led them behind it.

And stopped.

Where a wall had once been, there was now a gaping hole surrounded by rubble. Beyond the missing section of room, Rossiter could see a series of other | galleries with shattered walls and that fluttering red | tarp outside at the far end. The entire east wing of the White House looked as though it had been|| crashed into by a gigantic wrecking ball or massive vehicle of some sort. A train, he thought, looking at the shape of the opening and the scarred floor. Throughout all of the affected rooms, military personnel were bustling about, although whether they were searching for the perpetrators or clues or were merely ^ trying to secure the area, Rossiter could not say.

The others had apparently seen the destruction already, but though presumably Horn had been told of it and knew what to expect, the FBI director still seemed shocked, and his normally unflappable demeanor was nowhere in evidence. "My God."

Rossiter remained unmoving and impassive, hoping the contrast would be self-evident.

The chief of staff cleared his throat. "The president believes that a train crashed into the White House and caused this damage."

"It was a train," the president insisted. "I didn't see it, but I heard it. And we all felt it." He looked around the room as though daring anyone to disagree. "It may have been invisible, but it was there, and it crashed through the east wing, whistle blowing, steam engine at full power... . Did I mention that it was a steam engine? Well, it was." For the first time, the president seemed distracted, unfocused. "I happened to be in the briefing room over there"-he pointed through the gaping wall-"along with most of the cabinet. We saw the impact. We saw the train crash through the walls, even though we couldn't see the train, and we saw the people scrambling out of the way, saw the desks and furniture smashed and shoved aside. Amazingly, only one man died. But that man was Jordan Mayhew. A Secret Service agent. My daughter's Secret Service agent." His eyes met Rossiter's. "I need to know what happened here. I'm told you're the man for the job, that you have some experience with this sort of occurrence."

"Well, yes, Mr. President, but-"

"No buts. Find out what this thing is, whether it's a ghost train or some sort of invisible weapon or stealth bomb or death ray. As silly as this sounds, I'm betting on ghost train. I'm a stubborn man, but I'm not a stupid man, and while my worldview has never encompassed the supernatural, I know what I heard; I know what I saw. We all do. Examine whatever's necessary in here. Interview anyone you need. I'm giving you unfettered access to my staff. But I want you on this ASAP."

"Yes, sir."

"You heard about what happened at Arlington, I assume?"

"Yes," Rossiter answered. "But I'm not on that case, and I don't really-"

"You're on it now." The president glared at the director. "I want Agent Rossiter in charge of anything that could be even tangentially connected to this, with the authority to coordinate any unexplained unsolved cases that he deems pertinent to his investigation. I don't care about your ordinary chain of command- I want it suspended until this is solved. Do I make myself clear?"

"Yes, sir, Mr. President."

It was all Rossiter could do not to smile. In one quick trip to the White House, his fortunes had completely reversed themselves and instead of languishing forgotten in the bowels of the FBI building, he was being given special assignments and unprecedented authority by the president of the United States. His career was not only back on track, it was further along than he had ever expected it to be.

Assuming he got results.

The pressure was on him now. He had been granted the opportunity of a lifetime, but it was up to him what he did with it. If he fucked this up, he'd be lucky to be scrubbing toilets.

The president focused his gaze on Rossiter. "That was a ghost train, too. At Arlington. No one's ever going to admit that publicly, and everyone's afraid to admit it even to me, but we know that's the case, and obviously these two are connected. What I want to know is, why is this happening, what's causing it, and can we expect more such attacks in the future?""

I'll find out," Rossiter said confidently.

"I want daily reports."

"We'll set up a morning briefing," the chief of staff said. "But right now, Mr. President-"

"I know, I know." He nodded at Rossiter. "Stay as long as you need, be as thorough as you can, do whatever you need to do, but solve this."

"Yes, sir."

The others left, leaving Rossiter alone with Horn.

The director was scowling, and Rossiter didn't want to piss him off any more than he doubtlessly was already, but he needed to get to work and fast. "Do you think I could have a few agents to help me with legwork?" "You're the boss," the director said sarcastically.

Great.

"I'm going to oversee the situation here, talk to some of these military investigators, see what I can come up with on my own. After that, I want to take a look at Grant's Tomb."

"Be very careful," Horn said. "You're balanced over quicksand here."

It sounded like a warning rather than a threat, and Rossiter decided to take it that way. "I will, sir. And thanks."

Defiled?

That was putting it mildly.

He had seen the photos and the video on his laptop on the way over, so Rossiter had been expecting severe damage, but he was still taken aback by the savagery of the desecration. It seemed not only much more immediate in person but much more extensive.

True, Grant's wife had been left alone, but the sarcophagus of the president had been smashed open, and the body inside thrown onto the stone floor and ripped apart, arms and legs dispersed to the four corners of the tomb, the formally dressed torso beaten as though it were an old rug. Small fragments were all that remained of the skull, and where the head should have been, there were only oddly shaped pieces of leathery skin and muscle, resting with clumps of wiry hair and teeth on a bed of fine crumbling powder next to the shattered bronze busts that had been positioned around the interior of the crypt.

The marble walls of the oversized room had been defaced but not with spray paint or marking pens or any of the usual suspects. No, this graffiti had been chiseled onto the stone, and on the pendentives below the dome, the perpetrators had carved serial pictures of a single train.

Rossiter focused on those four images. There were other carved pictures as well-people, mountains, abstract shapes-but it was the train that interested him because he had the feeling the artist was trying to impart a message with it, that the pictures were meant to tell them something about what was going on.

He just couldn't figure out what the hell it was.

The carvings were detailed, though. He had to give the perp that. He only hoped they were detailed enough, because one of the first things he intended to do was transmit photos to someone who knew trains, with the hope that if the make and model of the vehicle could be identified, they might learn something about the perpetrator or even the locomotives that had crashed into the cemetery and the White House.

A long shot, he knew, but with no prints or physical evidence so far, they didn't have much else to go on.

Already, in his mind, he was lining up intelligence sources for information about ghost trains, poltergeist phenomena and even military PK experiments. While he was at it, he needed to consult with experts on American literature and folktales to see if there were any regional stories about invisible locomotives. Sometimes legends were grown from a grain of truth.

One of the older members of the forensics team, a bald, fat guy whose name Rossiter had already forgotten, stood up and looked at him with an expression somewhere between awe and horror on his face. "Can you believe that that used to be the president of the United States?" he said, motioning toward the fragments of skull on the floor. "That was General Grant? All these years, he's been lying here intact and now, poof, he's gone. We're witnessing history. This is the end of an era."

Rossiter eyed him coldly. "Yeah," he said. "Now get back to work."

Twenty

Milner, Wyoming

"BRIGIT'S WELL."

It was the name on the blackboard marquee outside the coffeehouse that caused Dennis to stop in Milner. And stay. The speed limit through the center of town was twenty-five miles an hour, and he'd slowed to that as he passed by the local shops and businesses. The first stoplight turned yellow as he approached, and assuming this was a speed trap and a cop was hiding nearby for the express purpose of ticketing drivers with out-of-state plates, Dennis stopped. As he waited, he looked to his right and saw the coffeehouse with its freestanding blackboard.

And he turned right at the corner and pulled into the first open parking space he found.

He'd arrived in town on Monday and Brigit's Well wasn't scheduled to play until Saturday night, but he'd been acting on gut instinct this whole trip, spurred by the undoubtedly false premise that there was a reason behind his journey, that he was being led across country for a specific purpose-and if anything was a sign, this was it.

Also, he had to admit, he was excited to hear Brig-it's Well again. Finding the duo out here in the middle of nowhere was like seeing an old friend amid a gathering of strangers, and there was something comforting about that. He wondered if they had a new CD out. He hoped so, although even if they didn't, he'd buy another copy of the old one again, for traveling music.

Just the thought cheered him up, and while Milner was not exactly the garden spot of the Western world, he was happy to be here.

While he told himself that he was driving aimlessly across country, seeing America, California had always been his unspoken destination. He and Cathy had always wanted to see Los Angeles, and from the outset his vague plans for the future had always involved finding a job and starting a new life in Southern California. Yet for some reason, as he'd crossed from Missouri to Nebraska, he'd moved north instead of south, heading not toward Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona but through Nebraska into Wyoming.

Until he'd landed here.

The strange and unbelievably realistic dreams he'd been having ever since leaving home had intensified as soon as he'd started heading north, and for a while he'd been afraid to fall asleep at night. If he hadn't been even more afraid of drugs, he would have bought some No-Doz or other over-the-counter medication to ward off sleep, but instead he simply toughed it out. Certain cities seemed to be flash points, where the nightmares came hard and heavy. In Kearney, Nebraska, he'd been tormented by visions of bloody skeletons working hard on some unseen project, swinging hammers in the bright morning sun while he lay gut-shot behind them on the sand, trying to hold in his spilling intestines with his fingers. In Brubeck, Wyoming, he dreamed he was floating paralyzed down a river while on the shore cowboys with long knives cut up piles of stacked bodies, saving noses and ears for souvenirs, stringing them on long leather cords that hung from their belts. He wondered if he got out a map of the United States, put marks on all of the places where he'd had these terrible dreams and then connected the dots, whether some type of recognizable shape or pattern would be formed.

In all of the dreams, behind the events, not causing them but watching them, was that giant spirit, the one he'd seen in back of the smoke at the end of the road, beckoning him. He spotted it in the sky, above the trees, above the mountains. Sometimes its head was triangular, sometimes oval, sometimes square. Sometimes it was made of fur, sometimes rock, sometimes bark. But it was always there, and Dennis had the feeling that it was trying to communicate with him, trying to tell him something, though he had no idea what.

He probably could have stayed in Milner for the week without unduly straining his wallet, but there wasn't much to do here and he'd gotten in the habit of working. Since he'd be hanging around town anyway, Dennis thought he might as well see if he could make some extra cash. He found a temp job delivering newspapers for the local daily, the Milner Sentinel, an old-fashioned publication that was delivered in the late afternoon rather than the early morning. The regular guy was on vacation for a week, so it was his job to pick up the bundled papers from the printer and then drop them off at the homes of the individual paperboys, who then delivered them to subscribers. He had to be at the printer's by two thirty each afternoon, and he generally finished dropping off the last bundle around four.

For his efforts, he got fifteen bucks a day-which just about covered his meals in Milner, if not the motel. Although the city was too small to have a real Chinatown, there was a Chinese restaurant and an adjacent Chinese-owned gas station, and Dennis ended up spending a lot of his spare time hanging around there, chatting with the owners and the workers. He got to know them only because most of the other people in town-the white people-had been so universally unfriendly. He hated to think it was a racial thing, not in this day and age, but after that incident with the kid in front of the motel in Selby-

Chink!

-and after visiting The Keep, he could not help wondering if this entire section of the country was hostile to minorities, particularly to people of Asian descent.

This was what it must have felt like to be a black man in the South in the early 1960s, he thought.

Last night, he'd gone to eat at the restaurant and Carl Fong, the twenty-something son of the gas station's owner, had invited him over to his table. The crowd had grown to five by the end of the meal, and when Carl said they were going to cruise around for a while and asked Dennis if he wanted to join them, he said yes.

These were not the kind of people with whom he would ordinarily hang-were what his sister mockingly called "yellow trash"-but still, it was fun to find himself crammed in the backseat of an old Jeep Cherokee, speeding up and down the quiet streets of the town, racing a flat-topped farm boy down Main Street, yelling come-ons to a gaggle of drunken middle-aged women stumbling out of a bar without their husbands. It was an eye-opener, in a way, because growing up in a large metropolitan area, he'd always had friends from a wide variety of backgrounds. Aside from his family, he had never hung out exclusively with people who were Chinese. But here in Milner he had no choice, and it was kind of weird to have everything filtered through that lens.

Like himself, Carl and his friends seemed caught between worlds, neither fully Chinese nor fully American, neither Buddhist nor Christian, but having grown up in a closed community where they were social as well as cultural outcasts, they had a harder edge to their outlook, a more cynical and aggressive attitude than he was used to.

After buying a twelve-pack at a liquor store near the edge of town, they drove out by the river and parked.

"You ever think that serial killers are, like, doing God's work?" Carl asked, taking a swig of Bud.

The others laughed.

"No, I'm serious. All these religious guys always want one thing: to get to heaven. It's the focus of their fucking lives. Everything they do is so they can get there. Maybe God sent these killers to do his bidding and help them out, send them on their way."

The laughter was a little more tentative. It was hard to tell sometimes whether Carl was joking with his outrageous statements or whether deep down he really believed some of the crap he spewed. As the outsider Dennis didn't feel qualified to comment at all. He figured it was his job just to listen.

Jack Chu tossed his empty beer can toward the water, clearing his throat. "I had a dream about that last night. Kind of."

A dream? Dennis focused his attention on the younger boy.

"It wasn't here-it was someplace else. And it wasn't now. It was a long time ago. I was this foreman guy. We were supposed to be building something, but my job was to kill the men who didn't work. There was this one dude taking a break, drinking out of this canteen? I smacked his head with a hammer. This other guy was taking a piss and I shot him. Two other guys were talking, and I shot them, too."

Carl Fong laughed. "Sounds like a good dream."

Uneasy chuckles.

Dennis was hoping some of the others had had weird dreams as well, and he wanted to open up and relate the stories of his own nightmares, but the conversation was already moving on to sex and he lost his chance. Later, in his motel room, he was still wired and not sleepy, so he turned on Letterman and picked up the copy of the afternoon's newspaper that he'd saved for himself. The top story was about a graveyard that had been unearthed by construction workers while excavating an undeveloped plot of land for The Store. A tractor and backhoe had simultaneously shattered two rotted pine coffins and brought to light the decomposing remains of the interred men. Judging by the shreds of decayed clothing, jewelry and symbolic money that had been buried with the bodies, it appeared to have been a Chinese cemetery, a disused and previously unknown burial ground from a forgotten past.

Dennis thought of the hidden graveyard he had discovered back in Selby, remembered the man he had seen perform some sort of ritual at the grave site, the words he had spoken that sounded like "bo sau."

Revenge.

Coincidence?

There were no coincidences.

He had a tough time sleeping after that, and he brought the paper with him to the gas station the next morning. It was news to Carl Fong and his friends that there'd been a previous Chinese community in Milner, one large enough to require its own cemetery, and they immediately asked their parents and some of the older residents whether they knew anything about it. Everyone expressed surprise and admitted that they'd never heard of such a community before. Of course, the history of the Chinese in America was spotty at best. Records had not been kept on members of society who lived on the margins, who were ostracized by the mainstream, and out of shame, families had not passed down information on failure and rejection, instead emphasizing only positive success stories-of which there were very few in the early days. Listening to Carl's parents and some of the other old-timers talk, Dennis understood why his mom had been so fearful about his making this trip. For years, throughout the United States, Chinese immigrants had been illicitly sold as slaves, beaten and robbed by thugs, their murders never investigated by an uncaring justice system. Word of the harshness of life in America had spread to China, and before coming here, most emigres had known what to expect, had been duly warned that with new opportunities came great risk. Even in California, where the Chinese community in San Francisco had grown fast and early, spreading throughout the northern half of the state to provide an entire support system for the miners of the gold rush, it had been illegal for anyone of Chinese ancestry to own property. Up through the twentieth century! In fact, it was because of the Chinese community's growing economic clout and burgeoning population that such laws were passed-white America had been afraid of being taken over by the yellow peril.

He'd assumed his mother had been simply overcautious, fearful of a land and country she still did not fully understand. But perhaps she knew more than she was telling.

He called his mother just before lunch and wanted to talk to her about this, but their conversations had become so generic and superficial that he had no idea how to bring it up. As always, they ended up discussing the minutiae of her day, and as always, she ended up begging him to come home.

After finishing his route and delivering newspaper bundles to the paperboys, Dennis swung by the site where The Store was to be built and got out of the car to see if he could check out the cemetery. But there was a fence around the lot, workmen all around, and numerous no trespassing signs posted, so he simply stood on the sidewalk watching, not even trying to get in. He remained there for a while trying to get a feel for the place, hoping he'd pick up on some of the same strange vibes that had overtaken him at the hidden graveyard in Selby, but there was nothing. When a belligerent construction worker wearing a head scarf and wielding a shovel finally demanded, "What are you staring at?" Dennis decided that it was time to go.

He stayed in his motel room that night, declining to accompany Carl and his friends on their nighttime rounds. It was fun to do once, to take a vacation from his reality and sample someone else's world. But it was depressing as well, because he knew that if he had been born here instead of in Pennsylvania, this would be his lifestyle, too. He was only a visitor. This was how they lived.

He watched the last half of Robocop, then called his sister, feeling sad. He told her about the Chinese cemetery, and her response was a matter-of-fact, "I'll bet that Store's going to be haunted."

He laughed. "Maybe," he said. There was a pause. "But ..."

"But what?"

He didn't know what to tell her because he didn't know what he was thinking, didn't know what he felt.

There was just a vague unease about dreams and graveyards and the history of the Chinese in America that didn't quite make sense.

The conversation concluded awkwardly, and Dennis clicked off feeling worse than he had felt before he'd called.

At least he had Brigit's Well to look forward to. Although just thinking about going to a coffeehouse to see a female duo play Celtic music made him feel like the biggest banana on the planet, especially when he realized that it was the sole reason he had stayed over in this town.

He wished Cathy were here.

She was a banana, too.

Carl and his friends were much more hard-core. He doubted they would be caught dead listening to Brigit's Well.

After a night's sleep filled with terrible nightmares that he could not for the life of him remember, Dennis ate breakfast at Waffle House, spending the morning at the park writing down the events of the last few days in a spiral notebook he'd bought at Walgreens. He'd decided to keep a journal of his travels, and though he'd only just started, he figured he'd go back and fill in the blanks as time allowed. For lunch he went over to the Golden Phoenix.

"I saw it," Jack Chu said from his post at the cash register as Dennis walked in.

Carl and the others were seated around the first table, laughing. "Yeah, right," Victor Yee taunted.

Dennis picked up a menu. "What?" he said.

"I saw a black train engine last night."

If this was a joke, he didn't get it. "Aren't most engines black?"

"No! This one wasn't even on the tracks. It was next to the tracks! In the field behind my house."

"Did your mom or dad or anyone else see it?" Carl asked.

"No, but-"

"You dreamed it."

"No, I didn't!" He turned toward Dennis. "I think it was a ghost train."

The others were laughing even harder, but Dennis didn't laugh at all. There was something in Jack's face that made him realize the boy was totally serious, and there was something about the image of a ghostly black train in an open field that pulled at him, that dovetailed with the graveyards and the nightmares and everything else he'd encountered on this trip. He could even see the massive engine in his mind, and he wondered if it had appeared in one of the dreams from last night that he'd forgotten.

Over egg rolls and chow fun, they discussed Jack's ghost train. As the conversation went on, as the need to make each other laugh abated and the desire to rag on the youngest member of their group was sated, Carl and his friends conceded that Jack really did seem to believe he'd seen something strange. It was Bobby Lam who suggested that they stake out the field tonight at the same time Jack claimed to have spotted the train. "We'll see if it comes back."

"And if not," Carl said, "we'll drink beer."

They all laughed.

Dennis decided to go with them. He didn't really think anything would show up, not two nights in a row, not with all of them waiting there, but there was still a chance, and as he was flying by the seat of his pants on this trip, allowing himself to be overtaken by events, he figured it would be a good idea.

But two hours in, with both six-packs consumed and every topic of conversation having seemingly run its course, he was not so sure. It was after midnight, and his motel room, bed and television were sounding pretty good to him right now. He looked back toward Jack's house, then across the empty field. What was he doing out here? If his friends back in Pennsylvania could see him now, they'd be laughing their asses off. Cathy would give him a lecture and say he'd been corrupted by the ignorant yahoos who populated the hinterlands. Even his mom, superstitious as she was, would think he was wasting his time on nonsense.

He was about to suggest that they give it up when ...

Something changed.

They all felt it. A shift in the air. A drop in temperature. The faint whiff of foul-smelling smoke. On the hood of the car, Carl and Bobby sat up, and Jack ran around from where he'd been leaning on the trunk, breathing heavily. Victor, who was taking a piss by a tree off to the right, hurried back, still zipping up. It was coming.

Dennis heard it from far off, not a chug-chug-chug like a normal train, but more of a whooosh, like wind or water heard at a great distance. They were all swiveling their heads in various directions, trying to determine from where it would appear. Would it come up from the ground or down from the sky? Would it crash into one of the houses or just pass through it ghostlike? Would it come in on the real rails and then veer off?

It simply appeared. Not in place, but at the edge of the field, in motion, heading not toward them or Jack's house but toward the line of windbreak poplars to the west. The locomotive was indeed black, with a tender behind it and an old-fashioned passenger car behind that. After those three, the train grew more indistinct. Dennis had the impression that more cars were coupled to the train, but the night was dark, the rear of the railroad blurry, and it was impossible to tell what was there and what wasn't. Even the three visible sections did not seem to have the heft of reality, and though they weren't exactly transparent, they were, in some indefinable way, ephemeral.

The train stopped.

And passengers got on.

They were ghost passengers, but he could still see them clearly in the moonlight, shambling out from between the close-growing poplars, climbing up the step on the side of the passenger car, grabbing the assistance bar and pulling themselves in through the open door. The people whose graves have been disinterred, Dennis thought, and he knew that was right the second it occurred to him. He saw baggy shirts and coolie hats, pigtails and sandaled feet.

They were leaving Milner, going someplace better.

Something in the scene spoke to him on a deep level he didn't even know existed. He was not frightened, as he probably should have been, but, rather, moved, touched by the knowledge that after untold decades these souls were free. He saw a woman go up the steps to the passenger car, holding the hand of a little girl. With each person who climbed onto the train, the black locomotive became a little less evanescent, a little more substantial.

The whooshing noise had stopped when the train did, but there was another sound now, a more organic sound that seemed to be coming from the smokestack and that reminded him of mUsic. He stood still, listening, and thought he had never heard anything so wonderful: so peaceful and comforting and welcoming. There were no words, not even a tune, just strange swirling tones, but to him it sounded like an invitation, and before he knew it he was walking forward, toward the train.

This was why he'd driven across country, why he'd come on this trip.

"Hey!" Carl said. "What the fuck are you doing?"

He was vaguely cognizant of the fact that Carl was talking to him, but he didn't answer, kept walking across the rough grass of the field, his attention focused on the black railroad cars in front of him. He wasn't dead, wasn't a ghost, so he probably wouldn't even be able to get on the train, but he knew he had to try. This was his purpose. This was why he was here.

"Stop!" "Get back here!" "Don't!"

They were all yelling at him now, but the call of the train was even stronger and he continued on. No one tried to stop him, and he realized that it was because they were afraid to get any closer.

Why wasn't he afraid?

He didn't know.

The smoke smell was strong, the temperature somewhere around freezing and falling with each

step, but neither of those elements deterred him, and he forged ahead until he was standing before the passenger car. The others had all gotten aboard; there was no one waiting in line. Through the windows he could see nothing, no faces, no silhouettes, only impenetrable darkness.

He had a moment of hesitation.

Then he thought of the woman holding the hand of the little girl, heard in his ears and felt in his mind the soothing voice of the railroad and grabbed hold of the metal bar to pull himself up the steps.

Only the bar wasn't metal.

"Dennis!" Jack yelled from somewhere far behind him.

And he was on the train.

Twenty-one

Bear Flats, California

Jolene, sitting in Leslie's living room, slammed the leather-bound diary shut with trembling fingers.

Was it really bound with leather¹?

She had the sudden urge to drop the book and wash her hands, her arms, her entire body, but she forced herself to remain as she was. She was just being paranoid-although it was hard not to be paranoid after what she'd seen, after what she'd read. Surreptitiously, she looked down at the cover of the diary to see if she could spot veins, hair, fingerprints.

Skylar lay asleep on the couch next to her, his fingers clutching her blouse and holding on to the material tightly, as though he was afraid to let go. Across the room, her mother, completely sober, sat unmoving in her chair, the expression on her blanched face not exactly concerned and caring, but definitely less self-absorbed than Jolene had ever seen it. Leslie stood in the kitchen doorway, leaning on the frame, a drink in her hand. The sound of ice cubes clinking in the glass was loud in the stillness. She was trembling, too. "I thought you were going to read it out loud," she said.

Jolene took a deep breath. She looked down at her son, brushing a wisp of hair from his forehead to calm herself down.

"They want revenge," Skylar had told her after he'd been brought to the hospital and sedated, after a doctor had confirmed that no bones were broken and he had not been sexually assaulted. She wasn't sure he understood the concept of "revenge," wasn't even sure he knew who "they" were. But she was sure of one thing: this was why he'd been abducted; this was why he'd been released.

To relay this message.

They want revenge.

But who had taken him? And how had he ended up in the cellar?

That, she still didn't know.

Despite the circumstances, the police, in all of their literal-mindedness, had not seen any harm in allowing Jolene to take the diary out of the Williams house, and she had done so hoping it would provide some clues. But after reading one random page, she'd been so horrified that she'd shut the book, refusing to read more.

"I don't want to read it aloud," she said. "Skylar might wake up. He might hear it."

Leslie's voice was uncharacteristically solemn. "Is it that bad?"

Jolene nodded. The page she'd read, near the back of the diary, had described a man who had been killed and gutted for no reason other than he'd trespassed on the Williams land. The man's innards had been fed to hogs, and the hands and feet had been hung out to dry with the beef jerky in order to make chew toys for the hounds. There had not been much graphic detail, at least not by today's slasher-movie standards, but there'd been an obvious joy in the telling, in the remembering of what was clearly a satisfying event, and the tone had turned her stomach. She thought of her last sight of Anna May, an image that would remain burned forever in her mind, the old woman's body beaten and slashed, a spreading puddle of blood on the floor.

They want revenge.

"Let me read it," Leslie said, walking over.

"It's all yours." Jolene handed her the diary, once again experiencing an instinctive desire to wash her hands or at least wipe them on her pants. Leslie sat down on the floor in front of her, opened the elaborately bound book and started quickly skimming pages.

Jolene looked across the room at her mother, who met her glance with a small apologetic smile, then turned her gaze down at her son. Asleep, he sgemed smaller than he did when awake, and it broke her heart to see a furrowed brow where there should have been only smooth skin and an angelic expression. She touched his fist, which was still holding tightly to her blouse, and could feel the tension in his muscles. Life had been tough enough for the little guy already. Now this. Could he ever hope to emerge unscathed?

Counseling, the doctor had told her, and while that carried its own stigma, it was probably the only way through this.

"Jesus," Leslie breathed. She glanced quickly over to make sure Skylar was still asleep.

"What is it?" Jolene said tiredly. "Hit me."

"I know who's in those graves," Leslie said. "The ones on the path." She looked up from the diary.

There were goose bumps on Jolene's arms.

"It's a Chinese woman and her half-and-half daughter. They were discovered living with a miner up in Hells Canyon and Chester Williams gleefully rallied the town and had all three of them lynched. I gather it happened quite a while before the other events in this diary, when he was younger, but it seems to have been some kind of turning point in his life because he doesn't just mention it; he goes into detail. 'I pulled the rope hard and the girl flew up into the tree,' he writes. 'We laughed as her legs continued to dance.' " Leslie turned the page. "After that, the man was buried in the cemetery, the one by the golf course, and the mother and daughter, not being Christians, were buried out in the woods, where the path is now."

Jolene shivered.

The family in the gulch

Yes. That's exactly what it reminded her of. Strangers in a strange land who, looking for a better life, found only death. She wondered who had been hanged first, the woman or the girl. She hoped the woman had gone first. As a mother, she could think of no fate so horrible as being forced to watch one's child killed.

Unconsciously, her arm snaked around Skylar's shoulders, held him tight.

Leslie was looking at her, face pale. "He cut off their thumbs after they were dead, and kept them. It says here that all these years later, he still liked to take them out and look at them."

Jolene glanced over at her mom, expecting some sort of reaction, but there was nothing. Her mom had actually known the most recent Chester Williams, this man's grandson. She would have expected her mom to have some sort of emotional response to these revelations.

"There were more than two thumbs in that basement," Leslie said.

Jolene thought of what her son had said- They want revenge -and for the first time thought she might know who "they" were.

"Those two weren't the only ones," Jolene said softly. "There were more."

Leslie nodded. "I'll keep reading."

He dreamed of the face from the window, that brown wrinkled head and those horrible grinning teeth. Only the face wasn't at the window. It was directly above his, looking at him from inches away, and Skylar realized from the gentle side-to-side movement of the head and the corresponding sway of his own prone form that the man was carrying him.

Except it wasn't a man.

It had been at one time, but that was long, long ago. The thing that held him now, that had taken him from the bathroom at school and was now bringing him somewhere else, was a corpse but more than a corpse, a monster of some kind, though not one that Skylar recognized or could identify.

And he was not himself. He was a puppet. He had somehow been transformed into a marionette, and the corpse thing was transporting him through some sort of tunnel deep underground to ... where?

He didn't know, was afraid to even wonder.

"/ have so much to show you," the monster said sibilantly, and though he was speaking an unfamiliar language, Skylar understood him perfectly. The monster jerked on his strings, and Skylar was pulled into a sitting position in the crook of skeletal arms. He saw, in hollows within the surrounding dirt, a little boy who'd had his head, hands and feet chopped off, a man and woman who'd been buried alive, an old man who'd been strangled, a teenage girl who'd been cut in half.

They all appeared to be relatives of the monster carrying him. Skylar saw similarities in the cast of features, in the color of skin.

"They want revenge," the thing whispered in his ear, and at that, the severed head of an old hag opened its opaque white eyes and shrieked.

Skylar awoke clutching his mom's midsection. More than a dream, what he had experienced was a memory, a re-creation of actual events. His heart was pounding, but he hadn't awakened crying or screaming, and for that, he was grateful. Ms. Finch was here and his grandma was, too, and he didn't want to embarrass himself in front of them.

Although, looking around, he could tell instantly that they were just as scared as he was. Maybe more. They'd been talking about something while he'd been asleep, something spooky, and while he was curious about it, he didn't really want to know.

He let go of his mom, sat up.

"Are you okay, hon?" she asked.

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He had never been less okay in his life. Even being back with his dad would be a picnic compared with this.

Why did the monster let me go? he wondered.

He had no idea. He'd sensed the creature's rage and hate, knew that behind that terrible grin was a furious evil that wanted nothing more than to tear him limb from limb and laugh as the blood flowed. He was one of those the monster wanted to take revenge against. But it had held back for some strange reason he did not understand, and he realized that it was not the one calling the shots. It was as much a puppet as he himself was. There was another force behind the monster, an entity far more powerful that was using it to communicate with him. He had the feeling that it had something to do with all of those dead bodies he'd been shown, although how or why he couldn't figure out.

He looked at his mom. "Are we staying here tonight?" he asked.

"Yes," she said but did not elaborate. He was sure it was because of that face at the window, and he was glad not to be going back to his grandma's.

The old lady stood up. "I'll take him to bed," she said. "I'm tired myself. We can both get a little shut-eye."

He didn't want to sleep with his grandma-he wanted to sleep with his mom-but he didn't say anything as his mom said, "Okay." She gave him a big kiss and a long hug, and he squeezed her back, grateful that she was here. "Night night," she told him.

He pulled away. "Night night."

He followed his grandma to the bedroom door but would not go in until she'd turned on the light. Out in the front room, his mom and Ms. Finch were talking. He hummed a song as he kicked off his shoes and crawled into bed, not wanting to hear what they said, not wanting to know what they were discussing. He gave his grandma a cursory "Good night," then rolled over and plugged his ears as he tried to fall asleep.

He hoped he would not dream.

There were more.

A lot more.

Leslie had barely made a dent in the diary by the time Skylar awoke just before midnight, but already she'd encountered more murders than the Manson family could have dreamed of. The language was arcane and formal, the setting far enough in the past to be emotionally distant, but still the horror came through, and the trivialization of death that usually accompanied history was nowhere in evidence. Even through the filters, she knew this Chester Williams had been an evil, psychotic son of a bitch.

He had stabbed men and shot them, hanged children and flayed women, eviscerated the corpses of those he had killed, and all, apparently, with the tacit knowledge and blessing of the community.

Leslie felt sickened, as much by the dispassionate tone of Williams' writing as by the horrific events his words described.

The strange thing was, his victims were all Chinese. Or seemed to be. References were made to other earlier killings, to wars and to a great project that took many lives and that Chester Williams was apparently instrumental in getting off the ground, but those were beyond the scope of this diary, and Leslie wondered if there was an earlier journal or perhaps a series of them still hidden in the Williams mansion.

All of the murders he wrote about, however, were of Chinese people. He seemed to have some special sort of hatred toward them, and while prejudice was probably fairly common back then, the extent of his animosity was definitely extreme.

Leslie looked at the book in her hands. She still had three-fourths of the diary to go. What was going to happen in the later years?

Major revelations, Anna May had said. Murder!

She hadn't been lying.

Leslie explained to Jolene about the killings, speaking quietly so as not to disturb Skylar and his grandmother.

"I wish Anna May was here," Jolene sighed. "She might be able to put this in context."

"Your mom might know-"

She waved Leslie away. "Don't even."

"Anyway, what context? Let's be honest. The guy was a psycho. Period."

"And his son after him, and his son after him."

"If Anna May had really known anything, she would have been a little more cautious, you know what I'm saying? But you saw her. She was like a kid in a candy store. She had no clue anything would or could happen to her."

"What I want to know is who-or what-kidnapped Skylar. It's like it was all ... planned, you know? That's the scary part. He was probably abducted when I was on my way to see you, before we'd even thought about going to see Anna May, and he was probably locked up down there in the cellar when we were just starting to talk about heading over there. It dropped him off so I could find him. It knew what we were going to do before we did it."

"Maybe we weren't meant to find him. Not us specifically."

"That's the thing," Jolene said. "I think we were."

"Why?"

"I don't know."

Leslie thought for a moment. "I'll bet those voices from the graves were speaking Chinese."

"But what were they saying?" Jolene ran an exasperated hand through her hair. Her voice was still low so her mother and son could not hear, but there was an intensity there that Leslie had not seen before. "I feel like we're on the Titanic or something here and we can just see this little bitty piece of ice, but there's this big giant iceberg underneath it and it's going to rip our boat to shreds."

It was an apt metaphor and Leslie realized that it perfectly captured the way she felt, too. "But what can we do?"

"Sit tight and wait for it to hit."

"Or read as much as we can and prepare ourselves." Leslie moved onto the couch, scooted close to Jolene and opened the diary so they could both read.

Twenty-two

Canyonlands National Park, Utah

Henry left the burning burger in the frying pan on the stove and stood dumbly in front of the television. It was the end of the NBC Nightly News, the segment that usually featured a semihumorous puff piece in order to make the transition between the horror of world events and the glitzy superficiality of the following entertainment program a little less jarring. Today, however, it was one of those Robert Ripley-ish stories about bizarre human behavior and unexplainable events. He'd missed the first part of the piece, but a shot of Salt Lake City had captured his attention, and he'd tuned in, growing increasingly rapt as the story unfolded.

Apparently, Indian men from all over the country were making a pilgrimage to Utah. By plane, by train, by car, by bike, by foot, they were riding, driving, rolling and walking to the Beehive State from their various reservations. If there was a reason for this migration or a specific destination, the participants weren't telling, and the few men that the reporter tried to interview either refused to answer questions or claimed that they didn't know why they were participating in this lemminglike journey. According to the reporter, several wives in several states had filed police reports, unaware of this mass migration, knowing only that their spouses had apparently gone missing.

Gone missing.

When had the smoothly flowing "disappeared" changed into the awkward and grammatically suspect "gone missing?" Could a person really "go missing"? Henry had his doubts.

The piece ended with a promise that NBC news would keep viewers informed of this story as it continued to unfold.

Smelling the burning burger, Henry hurried back to the kitchenette and moved the frying pan to a cold section of the stove. He took a bun out of the package. Something about the bizarre pilgrimage seemed naggingly familiar to him-or, more correctly, seemed as though it should be familiar to him-and while he saw no real similarities, he was reminded of the strange events that had been happening at the park lately. Healey said there were rumblings of spooky occurrences at a few of the other national parks, though nothing as documented and definitely nothing of this magnitude. Perhaps there was some sort of curse affecting the whole nation, the psychic equivalent of a massive storm that covered vast geographic areas.

Indian blood talking again.

But did he have Indian blood and was it talking? For he felt no compulsion to start on a mysterious sojourn, to hop in his Jeep and take off down the highway or tie on his tennis shoes and start walking the roads.

Of course, he was already here in Utah, the travelers' ostensible destination.

He got ketchup out of the refrigerator, and mustard. Too lazy to slice onions and tomatoes, he plopped the burned patty on the bun, doused it with condiments and stood eating it over the counter. He glanced out the kitchen window, tilting his head to see sideways, looking at the spot where the train had been. There'd| been wind, as usual, before they'd made it out into| the desert to investigate, but not enough to erase the deep grooves that had been carved in the sand and stretched in a straight line toward the horizon.

Whatever the train had been, it was not merely a shade or phantom. It was corporeal; it existed in the physical world.

But what did it mean? What did any of it mean?

According to the news piece, some of the Indians were traveling to Utah by train. Was that the reason the train had appeared? He didn't think so. There --might be a connection, but if there was, it was something much more subtle and complicated, something he probably couldn't even grasp.

And it involved death.

Henry glanced at the television, where the news was over and cameras were recording the arrival of well-dressed stars at a Hollywood gala. He wished he were there ... or in Chicago ... or New York ... anyplace where there were a lot of people and so many electric lights that a permanent bubble of illumination kept the darkness of the natural world at bay. He smiled ironically, looking up at Sarah's photograph on the wall. He'd come around to her point of view after all.

Something passed in front of the television.

He jumped, startled, swiveling his head to look all around the cabin, but nothing was there. Only his furniture.

And a thick fuzzy shadow in the corner by the fireplace.

He sucked in his breath. The shadow moved, separated into two thinner shadows like a single-celled organism dividing in half. He recognized the two halves immediately. They were naked, they were female, and they were moving slowly toward him across the cabin.

The twins.

"No," Henry whispered.

But he had no willpower, and he pulled down his pants, and the shadows swirled around his growing organ, touching it but not touching it, until he was thrusting in the air and spurting onto his own tile floor.

And the shadows licked it up.

And grew darker.

He spent all the next day in the visitors' center, doing busy work. Everyone did. Ranger talks had been canceled, trails closed, and the backcountry declared off-limits to both hikers and off-roaders, who were to be redirected to Arches. All of their outdoor duties had been suspended until further notice. Healey was taking no chances, and Henry actually admired the superintendent for that. For all intents and purposes, Canyonlands was shut down, and it couldn't be easy on Healey with park officials from Washington breathing down his neck and demanding rational explanations that just weren't there.

They were all on edge, short-tempered with each other and frightened by every stray creak in the building's wooden floor. They were like soldiers under siege, trapped in a fort in hostile territory, and though Moab was only a few miles away, with gas stations and stores, fast-food restaurants and motels, it felt to him as though they were out in the wilderness, far, far away from civilization.

After work, to let off steam, he did drive into Moab, meeting Ector at the Boy Howdy for beers. But his friend was churlish and untalkative, the atmosphere in the normally laid-back bar seemed tense, as though a fight might break out at any second, and he ended up leaving after only about twenty minutes. On his way back through town, he glanced at the Chinese and Japanese restaurants, and shivered at the shadows thrown by the bonsai-shaped foliage and the orange setting sun.

Back at his cabin, he felt as though he were going stir-crazy. He'd always been comfortable here in Canyonlands. Ever since he'd started working at the park, he'd felt at home amid the stark beauty of the land, happy within the confines of his little cabin. But now he felt restless and ill at ease, and for the first time he wished he had a bigger place.

He made himself a ham sandwich, watched the news, got tired of TV and turned on his stereo, tried to read a book, couldn't concentrate, turned on the TV again.

The lights went out.

It was dark now, night. He felt his way over to the supply cabinet where he kept his emergency gear and pulled out a battery-powered lantern that he immediately switched on and placed atop the coffee table. In the odd glow of the fluorescent light, he found candles, and he went about setting them up at prearranged points around the room, lighting them. The cabin wasn't fully illuminated, but at least he could see.

Why was there a blackout, though, and was just his place affected or all of them? He glanced out the window but could see no lights on in any of the other cabins. Taking out a flashlight, he made his way over to the phone, intending to call Stuart and find out what was going down, but the phone was dead, too.

That set off alarm bells.

A knock on the door made him jump. He immediately thought of the twins, saw in his mind's eye Ray's bloody body on the floor of his cabin. He remained in place, unmoving, hardly daring to breathe, hoping whatever was out there would give up and go away.

The knocking came again.

"Who is it?" he called, looking around for his rifle. His heart was hammering in his chest, not just because of who-or what-might be on the other side of his door, but because he shouldn't have to look for his rifle. It should have been resting in the same spot in the back of his broom closet that it always was.

Only it wasn't.

It had been taken.

The knocking continued.

"What?" he yelled, frustrated. He looked under his bed, tried his clothes closet, checked behind the couch. Nothing. He still had his ax by the fireplace, and he picked it up, hefted it in his hand and, before he could change his mind, opened the door, stepping back in case he needed room to swing.

A group of four Indians stood on his doorstep.

He frowned. Behind them, he could see a pickup truck on the road, lights on, engine still idling, man in the driver's seat. He didn't know why he hadn't heard the noise from inside the cabin. "Yes?" he said cautiously.

"We're here to pick you up," said the Indian on the left, an older gentleman with a bandanna and a ponytail.

He should have been confused. And he was. But he also should have been frightened. And he wasn't. He stepped onto the porch and the Indians nodded.

"Let's go," Ponytail said.

"Where?" Henry asked, realizing with something like amazement that if the answer was right, he would accompany them.

"To the Point."

The answer was right.

Twenty-three

Jarrett, Nevada

"Children! Children! Stay away from there! Brian, get back!"

Bees crawled over the outside of the kindergarten classroom dozens thick, individual insects falling onto the ground below like drops of water melting from an icicle. Miss Iris had never seen anything like it. She'd already called the custodian, who was on his way over to take care of the problem, but the kids were fascinated by the bees, and though Ashley Curtis had already been stung, the teacher was having a hard time keeping the other kids away.

Just as frightening was the black mold that was growing on the wall next to the bee swarm, just below the eave of the building.

Neither the bees nor the mold had been there an hour ago.

"Back in the room!" she ordered. "Everyone back inside!"

"But it's recess!" Joel complained.

"We'll have recess after Mr. Gehring takes care of the bees. But if you don't listen to me and go back inside right now, there won't be any recess at all."

That got them. There was moaning and whining, but they dutifully filed back into the classroom and took their places on the learning rug. A train went by on the tracks next to the school, rattling the windows as it always did, and though most of the kids were used to it by now, some of the boys still craned their necks to see over the desks. Miss Iris sat down in her chair, picked up Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and started reading. The children joined in, chanting the parts they knew, and soon the missed recess was forgotten.

"It's done!" the custodian announced a while later, poking his head in the door.

"Thank you, Mr. Gehring," Miss Iris said, and the class repeated it in unison: "Thank you, Mr. Gehring!"

"I've roped off that area of the playground, so you kids stay away from there, you understand? There might still be poison."

"I'll make sure they do," Miss Iris promised.

She read the children another story, then had them go to the art tables and draw pictures of their families for the upcoming back-to-school night. Afterward, she allowed them to go outside for recess. "Remember what Mr. Gehring said," she told them as she led the line of students out the door to the playground. "There's still poison on the wall and it can make you very sick. So stay behind the rope, okay?"

"Okay!" they responded.

Miss Iris dismissed them and went to look at the spot where the bees had swarmed, but instead of running off to play on the swings and slides, the children accompanied her, being careful to stay far away from the yellow rope. The bees were gone, but the black mold remained on the side of the building and it had grown in the last forty minutes. It was no longer merely an amorphous shape but now looked like a profile of George Washington's head. It resembled one of their art projects, the silhouettes they cut out of black paper.

Miss Iris' heart skipped a beat. This was no accidental resemblance. The face on the wall was too perfectly formed, too specific for that. Its shape was deliberate, although that made no logical sense whatsoever.

And the bees were coming back.

They heard the insects before they saw them, a buzzing that started out faintly, like an alarm clock beeping someplace far away, growing louder, until by the time they saw the fuzzy dark cloud swooping down between the trees toward the school building, the noise sounded to Miss Iris like two vibrators shoved up against her ears.

"Back inside!" she ordered, but her voice was lost in the din and before she could recalibrate the volume and say it again, the bees-hundreds of them, maybe thousands-had flown straight to the wall despite the residue of poison, swarming over the mold, conforming precisely to its contours, their teeming mass taking on the appearance of a three-dimensional George Washington. They were moving constantly, wings beating, legs working, bodies twitching, and the combined motion gave the appearance of a face that was alive.

And talking.

The children, who'd been hitting each other and squealing and jockeying for position, were standing still now, as though listening intently to something, and Miss Iris noticed that the noise of the bees had altered appreciably. The sound was no longer merely buzzing but buzzing with rhythm, tone, color. Buzzing that sounded eerily like a voice. When combined with the movement of the face, it appeared as though George Washington was speaking.

She couldn't make out what was being said, but the children seemed to hear something, and they listened carefully, even the squirmiest ones. Before she could order them inside, they were running as one away from the wall and toward the center of the playground. "Class!" she called, starting after them. She assumed they were rushing out to play, though the uniformity of their movements worried her, but it was clear almost instantly that they were following orders, not running for fun.

The first kids reached the playground equipment-

And began smashing their faces into the metal poles of the monkey bars and the support posts of the swings.

"Oh, my God!" she screamed. She rushed after them. "Stop! Brian! Joel!"

Other kids had reached the equipment and were slamming their jaws down on the monkey bars, biting the sides of the slides. Blood was everywhere, gushing from eighteen small mouths, dripping down dresses and shirts, falling on the asphalt. Eerily, the children did not cry out, made no sound, but attacked themselves and bled in silence.

Lisa Johnson spit out her remaining teeth, yanking one from the right side with her fingers, then picked up a handful of wood chips from the play area and bit into it.

Joey Higgins took two small sticks and placed them in the holes where his top two front teeth had been.

Others began doing the same, putting sticks and wood chips into their mouths, shoving the small pieces hard into their bleeding gums, smiling crazily at each other, and she realized with a sickening lurch of her stomach what they were doing.

They were making wooden teeth.

Back on the wall, George Washington appeared to be laughing uproariously, his uninhibited guffaw the sound of bees buzzing, and though Miss Iris considered herself something of a tough customer, her eyelids fluttered, the world went black, and she fell to the ground in a faint.

She awoke moments later, screaming, when Ashley Curtis began knocking her teeth out with a rock.

Twenty-four

Flagstaff, Arizona

"This seems wrong," Angela said as Derek found a parking space in the south lot and pulled into it.

"I know," he said. "But real life's still going on. We have classes, we have jobs, and if we don't show up, we'll flunk and get fired."

She smiled. "That's the part they don't show you in movies. Usually, everyone drops everything and fights the monster or solves the mystery and once the problem's solved you assume they're going to live happily ever after. They don't show the part where they get fired from their job and

can't pay rent and end up being evicted and homeless."

"We're still going to fight the monster and solve the mystery. We just have to do it after work and after class."

Angela was suddenly serious again. "What do you think's happening at Babbitt House?" In her mind, she saw the Victorian house covered with black mold that was starting to spread to adjacent homes.

"I don't know."

"I want to go by there later."

"Angela ..."

"We'll just drive past. That's it. You speed by, and I'll look out the window."

"We'll see." He looked at his watch. "Right now, I need to get my ass to work and you need to go to class. We'll meet in the quad at eleven, then go see Dr. Mathewson and find out if he's had any luck."

"He would've called us if he had," she pointed out.

"Maybe something'll happen this morning. Never can tell."

They waved, heading in opposite directions, and Angela started off toward class. It had been awkward saying good-bye, she thought. They'd spent almost every second of the last few days together, and though there was nothing romantic between them, there was still an intimacy, and it seemed as though parting should involve a hug, a touch, something that would acknowledge the closeness.

Attending Algebra and then English Composition was decidedly strange. After the surreal chaos of the past several days, to sit in an ordinary classroom, surrounded by students dutifully taking notes, listening to an instructor lecture on an academic topic, felt very peculiar. Several times, particularly during the math class, she found herself looking at the exposed section of arm where the corpse had grabbed her as she searched for signs of anything amiss, trying to detect stray black spots of mold that might still be on her skin.

Chrissie had a music appreciation class right now, and Angela wondered if her roommate-former roommate-was there or had given up going to school entirely and was spending all of her time in a decaying Babbitt House, looking at the moldy black walls, ranting and raving about Mexicans and growing crazier by the minute.

Something in that train of thought seemed important to her, as though it might hold the key to part of this mystery or at least might shed some further light on what was happening, but though the connection was on the tip of her brain, it could not make the leap to consciousness and the more she tried to pin it down, the farther away it seemed to slip.