The Collection

Where someone was screaming.

His father.

Full Moon ran down the hallway, not noticing if Lone Cloud was following him, not caring. He heard only the screams, and he remembered clearly, though he had forgot­ten it until now, how his father had screamed when they'd killed him, how the screams had continued long past the point when his father should have been dead, how he'd heard them clearly even as he drove away in the truck.

He reached the doorway at the end of the hall.

His father stood alone in the center of the windowless room, screaming. There were no pauses for breath, only one long continuous cry. He had heard that scream before, in the soundtrack to his nightmares, a hellish variation on the orig­inal death screams he had head on the Row.

His father was skinned and scalped, and though it had been years—decades—ago that it had occurred, the blood was still flowing, still fresh. It oozed from exposed muscu­lature, droplets forming into drops, drops into rivulets, the rivulets cascading down skinless flesh, puddling on the floor, dark crimson against the lighter rose.

"Father!" Full Moon cried.

His voice was lost amidst the screams, and the frozen muscles of his father's face did not even twitch as Full Moon yelled, the white staring eyes not budging from their focus on nothing.

Instinctively, without making a conscious decision to do so, he raised the rifle to his shoulder and shot his father in the face.

The screams died instantly as his father's head exploded, his skinned body falling in a heap. There was a jerking spasm, then a shifting and shrinking of the form on the floor as it compressed itself into a fetal position and began to melt, the now liquefied substance of his father soaking into the floor.

The walls and ceiling of the room darkened almost imperceptibly, and then the room was empty, the floor dry, and it was as if his father had never been there.

Full Moon was shaking, breathing heavily, the air harsh in his throat and lungs. He turned, but Lone Cloud was not behind him, and he hurried back down the hall toward the front of the building, reloading as he ran. He saw another red room off to his right, and he stopped, grabbing the door­frame.

He watched Lone Cloud shoot his screaming father in the face.

He watched Lone Cloud's father melt into the floor.

"Come on!" Full Moon yelled.

The two of them ran outside.

Death Row was no longer silent. A hot wind was blow­ing, and it carried with it screams. The screams of men, women, and children, pitched at different tones and vol­umes, all sounding without pause. The street still appeared to be empty, but it felt as though it wasn't, and the two of them looked through the swirling sand for a sign of move­ment.

A black cowboy-hatted figure walked toward them through the dust from the far end of the street.

Full Moon raised his rifle. Lone Cloud took the .45 from his belt and aimed it.

"What's going to happen if we kill them?" Lone Cloud asked.

Full Moon shook his head. "I don't know."

"You think anyone's ever tried this before?"

"I don't know."

The figure walking toward them was carrying a hatchet, and as he drew closer, Full Moon could see that it was the man with the beard. The one who had cut off the top of his father's head.

Full Moon raised the .22, sighted the man, and shot him in the chest. The man's head jerked back at the same time that his chest exploded, dark liquid spewing out from be­hind, and though he hadn't heard the report, Full Moon knew that Lone Cloud had shot the man as well.

"Behind you!" Lone Cloud yelled.

Full Moon swiveled as he heard the thunderous sound of Lone Cloud's gun. He saw, for a second, the man with the mustache, arm raised, a knife clutched in his fist, but then the man was gone, disappearing instantly, appearing sec­onds later far off to the left. Lone Cloud shot again, this time hitting the man in the arm. The man dropped the knife, and Lone Cloud shot once more, hitting the man in the gut. Mus­tache doubled over and fell, unmoving, onto the dirt.

The wind had died down by this time, and the tempera­ture had dropped. Full Moon tried to reload his rifle, but his hands were shaking and he dropped a shell. He took another one from his pocket and inserted it in the chamber.

"Two down," Lone Cloud said. "One to go."

"I give up!"

They looked to their left at the sound of the voice. Patch-Eye emerged from the sheriff's office, arms raised in sur­render. He began walking toward them, and there was something about the lack of hesitation in his movements, his obvious lack of fear, that made Full Moon uneasy.

Full Moon raised his rifle. "Stop right there!" he ordered.

The man continued walking.

Lone Cloud gripped his .45, straightened his arm.

"Wait," Full Moon said. "Don't shoot him. Let's hear what he has to say."

"Halt!" Lone Cloud yelled.

Patch-Eye moved toward them, arms still raised. This close, Full Moon could see that his skin was not all skin. Most of it was, but it was so old that it was cracked and split, and the fissures were filled with what looked like painted hair. It was as though the form they were looking at was a mask, a hastily repaired costume that hid the real creature within.

"I don't think he's human," Full Moon said.

"We killed the other two, we can kill him. Whatever he is, he can die."

Lone Cloud had not even finished the sentence when the knife sliced open his upper arm. He screamed, dropping the gun.

Patch-Eye stood unmoving, arms still raised.

Full Moon jumped back, startled. His grip on the rifle tightened, and he glanced quickly to the left and the right. Who had thrown the knife? Beard and Mustache were still lying on the ground. And Patch-Eye had had his arms up the entire time.

Or had he?

Full Moon had been half looking at Lone Cloud as he spoke. Could Patch-Eye have moved that fast, throwing the knife and then immediately putting his hands back up in the air?

"Why are you trying to kill us?" Full Moon asked.

Patch-Eye looked at him, smiling. "Why are you trying to kill us?"

"Why did you come looking for me?"

"Why did you come looking for me?"

"You killed my father."

"And you killed my friends."

"You killed my father's father. And his father." Full Moon swung the rifle over. "And now I'm going to kill you."

"This isn't part of the deal," Patch-Eye said.

"What deal?"

"This wasn't in the bargain."

Before Full Moon could ask another question, the man's face exploded in a spray of red.

Lone Cloud dropped the shotgun and fell to his knees. He rolled over on his left side, clutching his wounded right arm and closing his eyes. "Got the fucker," he said.

The wind was now completely gone. Full Moon looked from one body to another, then glanced down the street. Be­hind the windows of the buildings, he saw faces. The faces of the dead. Some were faces he knew, others were familiar but not immediately recognizable, related to faces he knew. One by one, they disappeared, winking out of existence like lights that had been switched off. The faces were still trou­bled as they stared at him, still frightened or in pain, as though their owners did not realize what had happened, but in the instant before they winked out of existence, an ex­pression of gratitude passed over each.

Full Moon bent down next to Lone Cloud, and as he helped his friend stand and saw the dirt of Death Row blur and shift in his sight, he realized that he was crying.

He left Lone Cloud at the hospital in Rojo Cuello.

He'd planned to stay, to wait around until his friend's arm was patched up, but that was going to take several hours, and because it was a knife wound, the hospital was required to inform the police, and there would probably be several more hours of questioning.

Lone Cloud told him to leave, to drop him off and go.

To return and confront Black Hawk.

There was an ambulance in front of the casino when he arrived back at the reservation. Inside, a huge crowd had gathered around one of the blackjack tables, and Full Moon pushed his way through the gawkers until he reached the front.

"Jesus," he breathed.

John and Tom Two-Feathers moved next to him, and he turned toward them. "What is it?" he asked.

John licked his lips. "Black Hawk," he said.

Full Moon looked down again at the floor. All that was left of the council leader was a brown spiderlike thing that walked lamely around in a closed circle, hissing and spitting at those who looked upon it. The two paramedics, who had obviously arrived some time ago, stood with their stretcher, unsure of what to do.

This wasn't in the bargain.

Full Moon climbed onto the top of the blackjack table, raising his arms for silence. He glanced around the casino, making sure everyone could see him, and he told them what had happened. He told them of his father and his father's fa­ther and all of the other tribe members who had been killed on Death Row over the years, their deaths blamed on either outlaws or cowboys, whites or Mexicans. He told them what he had seen, what he had heard, what he had learned, and there was silence in the casino.

The thing that had been Black Hawk screamed, a high, piercing, almost birdlike sound, and Full Moon jumped off the table.

"This is for my father," he said.

He lifted his leg, brought his boot down hard on the crea­ture's body. There was a loud crack and a lower squelching sound, and the hairy brown legs protruding from beneath his boot jerked once and then were still. Red blood spread out­ward in uneven rivulets, slowly pushing a gum wrapper and cigarette butt across the cement floor.

"What was he?" someone asked, and everyone looked around, searching the faces of the older people, who shook their heads, confused.

"Traitor!" White Dog yelled, and spit on the dead body of the Black Hawk thing.

The other council members, gathered behind the para­medics, were backing up, frightened by the mood of the room.

"Kill them, too!" someone yelled. A woman.

Jimmy Big Hands and White Dog grabbed Ronnie, the nearest council member.

"Let him go," Full Moon said quietly.

"What?"

"Let him go. Let them all go."

"But they knew!" White Dog yelled.

"They knew, but they are still here. They are not like him. They are like us."

He didn't like using words like us and them. It made him uncomfortable, and he thought of the whites on the Row who had stood and watched and laughed as his grandfather had been murdered in the street. But, like it or not, it was true, and once again he held up his hands. "It's over!" he an­nounced. "Death Row is dead. It's over."

He looked around the room at the members of the tribe, the eyes, old and young, that were trained on him, and suddenly he felt like crying. Other people were crying already. Older people mostly. People who remembered. He saw the faces of the men and women he'd grown up with, his friends and fam­ily. He scanned the crowd for Rosalie but didn't see her.

"She's at home," John said, touching his elbow.

He nodded, and the crowd parted before him as he started to walk. The people were silent as he headed toward the door, and he walked out of the casino, outside, and into the sunlight.

He looked up at the sky, the sun, the clouds, breathing deeply, the tears beginning to flow.

His father, he knew, would have been proud.

The Show

In high school, a student in my class claimed to have seen a snuff film. No one thought he really had, but he traded on that story for our entire senior year. I didn't believe him either, but the idea haunted me, and when I was in college I decided to write a story about a teenage boy who watches a snuff movie. I had just seen Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd on TV, and it occurred to me that maybe snuff films were not mur­ders staged specifically for the camera but were, like Sweeney Todd, filmed plays, events produced for live audiences that also happened to be recorded. I liked the idea of the boy going to a snuff "show," and wrote this story.

***

My parents were fighting again in the front of the house, my dad calling my mom a stupid boring bitch, my mom calling my dad a cheap insensitive bastard. I closed the door to my room and cranked up my stereo, hoping it would drown out the screaming, but their words ran as an angry undertone to my music, the meanings clear even if the words weren't. I lay on the bed, reading a Rolling Stone, forcing my mind to concentrate on something else.

When the phone rang, I answered it immediately. I half hoped it would be for one of my parents, which would at least provide a momentary break in the battle, but it was only Jimmy. "Hey," I said. "How's it going?"

"Parents fighting again?"

"What else?"

He cleared his throat. "How'd you like to do something different tonight? I mean really different?"

"What?"

"I can't tell you."

"Knock off the crap."

"Look, do you want to do something tonight, or do you want to sit there alone and listen to them fight?"

He had a point. "Okay," I said. "What's the plan?"

"You just meet me at my house in fifteen minutes. I'll drive. We have to be there by eight." He laughed. "You're gonna love this. It's gonna blow you away."

My curiosity was stimulated and he knew it. "What is it?"

"You'll see. And make sure you bring some bucks. It cost twenty dollars last night, but the guy who took me said it's sometimes more." He laughed again. "See you."

I hung up the phone and slipped on my shoes. I pulled a shirt from the pile next to my bed, grabbed the pickup keys from the dresser, and carefully opened my bedroom door. They were still arguing, their screaming now more furious, their words more overwrought. They were in the living room, and I crept down the hall into the kitchen and snuck out the side door.

Outside it was still hot. The dry desert heat had not dissi­pated with nightfall, and Phoenix was not blessed with a breeze. Above me, the sky was clear and I could see billions of stars. There was no moon.

I pulled up in front of Jimmy's house five minutes later. He was already outside, sitting on the hood of his Jeep, wait­ing. He walked toward me as I hopped out of the pickup, his boots clicking loudly on the asphalt driveway, and there was something in his expression I didn't like. "All right," I said. "What're we doing?"

"We're going to a snuff show," he said.

I stared at him, not sure I was hearing right. "What did you say?"

"I didn't want to tell you until we were there, but then I thought it would be better to prepare you for it."

"A snuff movie? One of those movies that show someone actually getting killed?"

"Not a movie," Jimmy said. "I didn't say snuff movie. I said snuff show. This is a live show."

My mouth felt suddenly dry. "You're bullshitting me." "I'm serious. I saw it. I was there last night." "It has to be fake," I said. "It can't be real."

"It's real."

"I know a guy who saw one of those movies, and he said it was real cheap and amateurish. He said you could tell it was fake. I mean, if legitimate movies have a tough time showing realistic deaths, these guys with no budgets at all must be really bad at it."

"It's not a movie," Jimmy said. "And it's real."

I looked at the expression on his face, and there was no horror or revulsion in it. There was only an open interest and what appeared to be a look of excited anticipation. Jimmy was not stupid, and I realized that if he thought the show was real, it probably was real. I thought suddenly how little I really knew my best friend.

"Come on," he said, motioning toward his Jeep. "It's get­ting late. Let's go."

I shook my head. "I don't think I want to go."

"Yes, you do," he said. "Come on."

And I followed him to the Jeep.

We drove in silence. I looked out at the empty streets of Phoenix as we drove toward the outskirts of the city. I really didn't want to see this. But I remembered the time when Jimmy and I were both eight and we had seen an even younger boy hit by a brakeless Buick. The car had slammed into the boy's tricycle, and the kid had been carried halfway down the street, his head smashed into the vehicle's grille. I had thrown up then, as had Jimmy, and I had had nightmares for months. But in school, on my papers, I had drawn endless variations of the accident, and I realized that I was both attracted to and repelled by the incident.

Despite my conscious objections, I had a similar perverse interest in seeing the snuff show.

I was repulsed by the very thought of it, but I wanted to see it.

The buildings of the city became more run down and spaced farther apart. The fast food franchises were replaced by neon-lit massage parlors and bars. We traveled through one stretch of road which was still desert, though it was technically within the city limits.

Jimmy pulled into a crowded parking lot in front of a low pink building. A string of white Christmas lights hung in an inverted arc over the warped wooden door, and a faded mural on the side of the building had a picture of an eight-ball and a pool cue. The building was flanked on both sides by vacant lots in which tumbleweeds and cacti grew in abundance. Jimmy looked at me. "You have your wallet?"

"In my front pocket," I said. "I'm taking no chances."

We got out of the Jeep and walked across the gravel parking lot to the door of the building. Jimmy pulled open the door and walked in.

A table was situated right next to the entrance. On the table was a metal cashbox and two stacks of papers, each weighted down with chunks of rock. A fat, bearded man who looked like Charlie Daniels nodded at us from behind the table. "Thirty-five," he said.

Jimmy pulled two twenties from his pocket, and the man gave him a five. "Sign the release," the man said.

I paid my money, then looked over the form the man gave me. It was a pseudo-legal document which stated that I knew exactly what was occurring there tonight and that I was directly involved in the actions. I didn't know if such a document would hold up in court, but I understood that the people in charge were trying to intimidate the viewers from talking about what they'd seen. I signed on the line at the bottom.

The man glanced over the form. "Address and driver's li­cense," he said, handing it back to me.

I felt suddenly afraid, intimidated myself, but I filled out the information anyway. I followed Jimmy down a short, dark hallway.

We went into a large, crowded room. In the center of the room, a woman was tied naked to a chair. Her mouth was gagged, but her eyes looked wildly around, as if searching for some means of escape. There were large bruises and welts on her white skin. Standing around the woman in a rough semicircle, quiet and shuffling, were thirty or forty people, mostly men, some women. Next to the chair, on a table, was a pistol, two knives, a screwdriver, a hammer, a hacksaw, and a length of wire.

Jimmy and I stood silently with the rest of the crowd. I felt suddenly sick to my stomach. I could see from the bound woman's frantic eyes that she was scared to death. She was about to be killed. And all of the people standing impassively around her had paid money to watch her die.

I stared at my shoes, looked around the unfurnished room, counted the cracks in the plaster ceiling—anything to keep from looking into the haunted eyes of the doomed woman. Once I glanced toward her, and I saw her squirming crazily, trying to release herself from her bonds, but the ropes were tight and the gag was securely in place. I looked quickly away.

Finally, a man came in and began setting up a videotape camera. He brought with him two sets of lights, which he placed at right angles to the woman. The room, which had been warm, grew even warmer with the lights, and the still air was heavy with human sweat. I was not sure I'd be able to stay for this.

And then the cameraman took off the woman's gag and she started screaming. Her voice was high, raw, filled with utter terror, and her screams came in short staccato bursts. The cameraman began filming. I put my hands over my ears. The people around me watched dully, their faces un­readable.

A man wearing a woman's stocking over his head came into the room and walked up to the woman. He pawed her naked body, touching her everywhere. She struggled so hard to get away from him that the chair tipped over. He calmly righted it and continued with his exploration of her body.

The whole thing lasted little more than half an hour. The stockinged man used the hacksaw to cut off big toes and fin­gers. He used the wire to tie breasts. The smell of sweat in the enclosed room was soon overpowered by the stronger smell of blood and death.

The man used both knives.

She was already unconscious from the hammer blows when he shot her in the head.

I had seen it all, I had not thrown up, I had not turned away. But I felt filthy, unclean, covered with blood although none of the flying blood had touched me. The document I had signed had been right—I was part of the murder, I was responsible. And I felt as guilty as if I had been wielding the knives.

I said nothing to Jimmy on the way back, and I got into my pickup without even saying goodbye.

At home, my parents had finished fighting. My mom was sobbing in the bedroom, and my dad was drinking from a bottle and watching TV. He looked accusingly at me as I let myself in. "Where the hell have you been all night?" he de­manded.

"Jimmy's," I said.

He turned back to the TV, and I walked down the hall to my bedroom.

In my dreams, the woman was naked and screaming and begging for her life. And I smashed her face with the ham­mer, bringing it down again and again and again.

I did not call Jimmy for two weeks.

He did not call me.

When Jimmy finally did call, his voice was worried, scared. "Did you get anything in the mail lately?" he asked straight out.

"Like what?"

"Can you come over?" he asked. "Now?"

I didn't really want to go over to Jimmy's, but something in his voice told me that I should. "I'll be right there," I said.

My parents were arguing again. Or rather, my dad was arguing. My mom was crying incoherently, obviously drunk. She had been drunk a lot this past week, and she had been less willing to engage him in battle than usual. I wasn't sure if that was a good sign or not.

I drove to Jimmy's with the windows down. It was cooler tonight, and there was no need for the air conditioner.

He was again sitting on the hood of his Jeep, just as he had on the night we'd gone to the snuff show. Merely seeing him again made me feel unclean, brought back to me the horrible depravity of that night, and my stomach started churning. I remembered that he'd said he'd gone the night before, and I wondered if he'd gone since then. I could not imagine anyone wanting to sit through that butchery more than once.

He came toward me, and I saw that he was carrying a piece of paper in his hand. "Did you get one of these?" he asked.

I took the paper from him. It was a cheaply printed flyer from the snuff show. "Thinking of Suicide?" the headline read. "If your life is not worth living, do not end it alone. Call us and we will help you put an end to your misery." Underneath this was a telephone number.

"Jesus," I said. "We're on their mailing list."

"My sister almost found this," Jimmy said. He looked at it again. "I mean, it doesn't really look that suspicious or anything, but..." His voice trailed off.

There was silence between us for a moment. "Have you gone back since?" I asked.

He shook his head. "You?"

"No." I looked at him. "How come you went back a sec­ond time?"

He shrugged. "I thought it might be fun."

"Fun." I got back into my pickup and took off, without even looking at Jimmy. I wondered how he slept at night. I wondered if he had nightmares.

Driving home, the streets and buildings all seemed dirty and dingy.

I spent most of the next day in Metro Center, keeping out of the heat, staying within the artificial environment of the mall. I saw no one I knew, which was just as well. I went through bookstores, record stores, clothing stores, trying to sort out the thoughts in my head.

It was after six when I finally got back home, and no one was around. I went into the kitchen to make myself a sand­wich and saw the flyer on the table.

"Thinking of Suicide?"

On the floor next to the table were three crumpled sheets of stationery. I picked one up and uncrumpled it. "Dear Dan," it said in my mother's handwriting. I picked up the next ball of paper. "Dear Dan," it said. She had gotten no further on her last note. There was only my name again: "Dear Dan."

"No!" I screamed aloud.

I ran out to the pickup and drove over to Jimmy's. He was out of the house before I was halfway up the lawn. "What's up?" he asked, puzzled.

"Get in the truck!" I screamed. "We have to get to the show!"

He asked me no questions but immediately hopped into the cab. I peeled out, following his directions, hoping my short detour to his house would not make me too late.

It was twenty minutes before we reached the pink build­ing. I leaped out of the pickup and dashed through the door.

"Fifteen dollars," Charlie Daniels said. "And sign the re­lease."

I threw him the money, scrawled my signature and ran down the hall.

"Address and driver's license," he called after me.

The camera was already rolling as I burst into the room. My mother, bound and naked, was seated on the chair. Her mouth was not gagged, but she was not screaming. Her eyes looked dead. The people staring at her were silent, uncom­fortable.

"Mom!" I cried.

And then the man started up the chainsaw.

The Mailman

When I was a little boy, my mom and dad used to take me to the county fair each summer. Once, when I was around five or six, I was walking a few steps behind them and was accosted by a dwarf who demanded, "Give me a quarter." He was pushy, insistent, and frightened me, and it was not until I had run to catch up with my parents and saw him approach another fairgoer with the same belligerent demand that I realized he was just trying to round up customers for a ring-toss game.

I used that incident as the starting point for "The Mailman."

***

If Jack had known that the mailman was a dwarf he never would have moved into the house. It was as simple as that. Yes, the neighborhood was nice. And he'd gotten a fantastic deal on the place—the owner had been transferred to New York by the company he worked for and had to sell as quickly as possible. But all that was beside the point.

The mailman was a dwarf.

Jack got the cold sweats just thinking about it. He had moved in that morning and had been innocently unpacking lawn furniture, setting up the redwood picnic table under the pine tree, when he had seen the blue postal cap bobbing just above the top of the small front fence. A kid, he thought. A kid playing games.

Then the mailman had walked through the gate and Jack had seen the man's small body and oversized head, his fat little fingers clutching a stack of letters. And he had run as f fast as he could in the other direction, away from the dwarf, aware that the movers and neighbors were staring at him but not caring. The mailman dropped the letters in the mail-slot of the door and moved on to the next house while Jack stood alone at the far end of the yard, facing the opposite direction, trying to suppress the panic that was welling within him.

The dwarf jumped out from somewhere and grabbed Jack's arm. "You got a quarter? Gimme a quarter!" He held out a fat tiny hand no larger than Jack's.

The young boy looked around, confused, searching for Baker, for his father, for anyone. His glance met, for a sec­ond, that of the dwarf, and he saw an adult's face at his child's level, old eyes peering cruelly into his young ones. A hard, experienced mouth was strung in a straight line across a field of five o 'clock shadow. Jack looked immediately away.

"Gimme a quarter!" The dwarf pulled him across the sawdust to a booth, where he pointed to a pyramid of stacked multicolored glass ashtrays. "You'll win a prize! Gimme a quarter! "

Jack's mouth opened to call for help, but it would not open all the way and no sound came out. His eyes, confused, frantic, now darted everywhere, searching in vain for a fa­miliar face in the carnival crowd. He put one sweaty hand into the right pocket of his short pants and held tight to the two quarters his father had given to him.

"I know you have a quarter! Give it to me!" The dwarf was starting to look angry.

Jack felt a firm strong hand grab the back of his neck, and he swung his head around.

"Come on, Jack. Let's go." His father smiled down at him—safety, reassurance, order in that smile.

Jack relaxed his grip on the coins in his pocket and looked up gratefully at his father. He grabbed his father's arm and the two of them started to walk down the midway toward the funhouse, where Baker was waiting. As he walked, he turned back to look at the dwarf.

The little man was scowling at him. "I'll get you, you lit­tle son of a bitch." His voice was a low, rough growl.

Frightened, Jack looked up. But his father, ears at a higher level, hearing different sounds, was unaware of the threat. He had not heard it. Jack gripped his father's hairy arm tighter and stared straight ahead, toward Baker, mak­ing a conscious effort not to look back. Beneath his wind-breaker and T-shirt, his heart was thumping wildly. He knew the dwarf was staring at him, waiting for him to turn around again. He could feel the hot hatred of the little man's eyes on

his back.

"I'll get you," the dwarf said again.

Jack sorted through the mail in his hand. The envelopes were ordinary—junk, bills, a couple of letters—but they felt tainted, looked soiled to his eyes, and when he thought of those stubby fat fingers touching them, he dropped the en­velopes onto the table.

Maybe he could sell the house. Or call the post office and get the mailman transferred. He had to do something.

The fear was once again building within him, and he picked up the remote control and switched on the TV. The Wizard of Oz was on, a munchkin urging Dorothy to "follow the yellow-brick road!" He switched off the TV, his hands shaking. The house seemed suddenly darker, his unpacked boxes throwing strange shadows on the walls of the room. He got up and switched on all the lights on the first floor. It would be a long time before he'd be able to fall asleep.

Jack unpacked in the morning but spent the afternoon shopping, staying far away from his house. He noticed two mailmen on the way to the mall, but they were both of normal size.

Why hadn't he checked?

How could he be so stupid?

He arrived home at five thirty, long after the mailman was supposed to have come and gone. Was supposed to have. For there he was in his absurd blue uniform, lurching ever so slightly to the right and to the left, not quite balanced on his stumpy legs, three houses up from his own.

Jack jumped out of the car and ran into the house, shut­ting and locking the door behind him, hurriedly closing the drapes. He crouched down behind the couch, out of view from any window, closing his eyes tightly, his hands balled into tense fists of fear. He heard the light footsteps on the porch, heard the metal clack of the mail slot opening and closing, heard the small feet retreat.

Safe.

He waited several minutes before standing up, until he was certain the dwarf was gone. He was sweating, and he re­alized his hands were shaking.

"Gimme a quarter."

His experience with the dwarf at the carnival had been scary, but though he'd never forgotten the rough voice and small cruel face, it would not have been enough to terrify him so thoroughly and utterly that he now shuddered in fear when he saw a man under four feet tall. No, it was Vietnam that did that. It was the camp. For it was there that he saw the dwarf again, that he realized the little man really was after him and had not simply been making empty threats. It was there that he learned of the dwarf's power.

The guards were kind to him at first; or as kind as could be expected under the circumstances. He was fed twice a day; the food was adequate; he was allowed weekly exer­cise; he was not beaten. But one day the food stopped com­ing. And it was three more days before he was given a cupful of dirty water and a small dollop of nasty tasting gruel served on a square of old plywood. He ate hungrily, drank instantly, and promptly threw up, his starved system unable to take the sudden shock. He jumped up, pounding on the door, demanding more food, delirious and half-crazy. But the only thing he got for his trouble was a beating with wooden batons which left huge welts on his arms and legs and which he was sure had broken at least one rib.

Sometime later—it could have been hours, it could have been days—two guards he had never seen before entered his cell. "Kwo ta?" one of them demanded angrily.

"English," he tried to explain through cracked and swollen lips. "I only speak—"

He was clubbed on the back of the neck and fell face­down on the floor, a bolt of pain shooting through his shoul­ders and side.

"Kwo ta?" the man demanded again. He nodded, hoping that was what they were looking for, not sure to what he was agreeing. The men nodded, satis­fied, and left. Another man returned an hour or so later with a small cupful of dirty water and a few crusts of hard bread smeared with some sort of rice porridge. He ate slowly this time, drank sparingly, and kept it down.

He was taken outside the next day and, though the bright­ness of the sun burned his light-sensitive eyes, he was grate­ful to be out of the cell. Hands manacled, he was shoved against a bamboo wall with several other silent, emaciated prisoners. He glanced around the camp and saw a group of obviously high-ranking officers nearby. One of the men shuffled his feet, moving a little to the right, and, in a mo­ment he would never forget, he saw the dwarf.

He was suddenly cold, and he felt the fear rise within him. It couldn't be possible. It couldn't be real. But it was possible. It was real. The dwarf was wearing a North Viet­namese army uniform. He was darker than before and had vaguely Oriental eyes. But it was the same man. Jack felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

Kwo ta.

Quarter.

The Vietnamese guards had been trying to say "quarter." The dwarf smiled at him, and he saw tiny white baby teeth. The small man said something to another officer, and the other officer strode over, pushing his face to within an inch of Jack's. "Gi meea kwo ta," the man said in a thick musical accent.

And Jack began to scream.

He spent the rest of his incarceration in solitary, where he was beaten regularly and fed occasionally, and when he was finally released he weighed less than ninety pounds and was albino white, with bruises and welts and running sores all over his body. He saw several guards on his way to the airstrip, but though he looked wildly around before stepping onto the plane, he saw no sign of the dwarf.

But the dwarf was waiting for him when he arrived at Vandenburg, disguised as a cheering onlooker. Jack saw the horrible face, the oversized head on its undersized body, between the legs of another POW's family. He had in his hand a small American flag which he was waving enthusiasti­cally. He was no longer Vietnamese—his hair was blond, his light skin red with sunburn—but it was without a doubt the same man.

Then the face faded back into the crowd as friends and families of the newly released men rushed forward onto the tarmac.

He had avoided dwarves and midgets ever since and had been pretty successful at it. Occasionally, he had seen the back of a small man in a mall or supermarket, but he had al­ways been able to get away without being seen.

He had had no problems until now.

He picked up the mail from where it had fallen through the slot, but the envelopes felt cold to his touch, and he dropped them on the table without looking at them.

The next day he left the house before noon and did not re­turn until after dark. He was afraid of seeing the dwarf at night, afraid the small man would come slinking up the steps in the darkness to deliver the mail, but the mail had already been delivered by the time he returned home.

He returned the next night a little earlier and saw the dwarf three houses up from his own, in the exact spot he'd seen him before, and he quickly ran inside and locked the door and closed the curtains, hiding behind the couch.

He was gone the next three afternoons, but he realized he could not be away every day. It was not practical. He only had three more weeks until he started teaching, and there was still a lot of unpacking to do, a lot of things he had to work on around the house. He could not spend each and every afternoon wandering through shopping centers far from his home in order to avoid the mailman.

So he stayed home the next day, keeping an eye out for the mailman, and by the end of the week he had settled into a routine. He would hide in the house when the mailman came by, shutting the curtains and locking the doors. Often he would turn on the stereo or turn up the television before the mailman arrived, but he would inevitably shut off all sound before the mailman actually showed up and sit quietly on the floor, not wanting the dwarf to know he was home.

And he would hear the rhythmic tap tap tapping of the little feet walking up the wooden porch steps, a pause as the mailman sorted through his letters, then the dreaded sound of metal against metal as those stubby fingers forced open the mail slot and pushed in the envelopes. He would be sweating by then, and he would remain unbreathing, afraid to move, until he heard the tiny feet descend the steps.

Once there was silence after the mail had been delivered, and Jack realized that though he had heard the mail slot open, he had not heard it fall shut. The dwarf was looking through the slit into the house! He could almost feel those horrid little eyes scanning the front room through the limited viewspace offered by the slot. He was about to scream when he heard the slot clack shut and heard the light footsteps re­treat.

Then the inevitable happened.

As always, he waited silently behind the couch until the mailman had left and then gathered up his mail. Amidst the large white envelopes was a small blue envelope, thicker than the rest, with the seal of the postal service on the front. He knew what that envelope was—he'd gotten them many times before.

Postage due.

Heart pounding, he looked at the "AMOUNT" line, knowing already how much he owed.

Twenty-five cents.

A quarter.

And he stood there unmoving while the shadows length­ened around him and the room grew dark, and he wondered where the dwarf went after work.

The next morning Jack went to the main branch of the post office. The line was long, filled with businessmen who needed to send important packages and women who wanted to buy the latest stamps, but he waited patiently. When it was his turn, he walked up to the front counter and asked the clerk if he could talk to the postmaster. He was not as brave as he'd planned to be, and he was aware that his voice qua­vered slightly.

The postmaster came out, a burly man on the high side of fifty, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a fixed placating smile. "How many I help you, sir?"

Now that he was here, Jack was not sure he could go through with it. His head hurt, and he could feel the blood pulsing in his temples. He was about to make something up, something meaningless and inconsequential, when he thought of the dwarf's cruel little face, thought of the de­mand on the postage due envelope. "I'm here to complain about one of your mailmen," he said.

The postmaster's eyebrows shot up in surprise. "One of our mail carriers?" Jack nodded. "Where do you live, sir?"

"Glenoaks. Twelve hundred Glenoaks."

The postmaster frowned. "That's Charlie's route. He's one of our best employees." He turned around. "Charlie!" he called.

Jack's hands became sweaty.

"He's right in the back there," the postmaster explained. "I'll have him come out here, and we'll get this mess straightened out."

Jack wanted to run, wanted to dash through the door the way he had come, to hop in the car and escape. But he re­mained rooted in place. The post office was crowded. Noth­ing could happen to him here. He was safe.

A man in a blue uniform rounded the corner.

A normal-sized man.

"This is Charlie," the postmaster said. "Your mail car­rier."

Jack shook his head. "No, the man I'm talking about is ... short. He's about three feet high."

"We have no one here who fits that description."

"He delivers my mail every day. He delivers my neigh­bors' mail."

"Where do you live?" Charlie asked.

"Twelve hundred Glenoaks."

"Impossible. I deliver there."

"I've never seen you before in my life!" Jack looked from one man to the other. He was sweating, and he smelled his own perspiration. His mouth was dry, and he tried un­successfully to generate some saliva. "Something weird's going on here."

"We'll help you in any way we can, sir," the postmaster said.

Jack shook his head. "Forget it," he said. He turned and strode toward the door. "Forget I even came by."

The next day he received no mail at all, though looking out the window, he saw the dwarf happily walking down the other side of the street, delivering to other homes. The next day, the same thing. Jack stayed on the porch the following afternoon, and before he knew it the little man was walking up his sidewalk, whistling, holding a fistful of letters, a cheerful look on his cruel hard face. Jack ran inside the house, locked the door, and dashed into the back bathroom. He sat down on the toilet and remained there for over an hour, until he was sure that the dwarf was gone.

Finally, he washed his face, opened the bathroom door, and walked down the hallway to the living room.

The mail slot opened, two letters fell through, and the slot closed. He heard that low, rough laugh and the quick steps of the dwarf running off the porch.

The gun felt good in his hands. It had been a long time. He had not held a pistol since Vietnam, but using firearms was like riding a bike and he had forgotten nothing. He liked the weight against his palm, liked the smooth way the trig­ger felt against his finger. His aim was probably not as good as it had once been—after all, he had not practiced for al­most thirty years—but it would not need to be that good at the close range at which he planned to use it.

He waited behind the partially open curtains for the mail­man.

And Charlie stepped up the walk.

Jack shoved the pistol in his waistband and yanked open the door. "Where is he?" he demanded. "Where's the god­damn dwarf?"

The mailman shook his head, confused. "I'm sorry, sir. I don't know what you're talking about."

"The dwarf! The little guy who usually delivers the mail!"

"I'm the mailman on—"

Jack pulled out the gun. "Where is he, goddamn it?"

"I—I d-don't know, sir." The mailman's voice was shaking with fear. He dropped the letters in his hand and they fluttered to the walk. "P-please don't shoot me."

Jack ran down the porch steps, shoving his way past the mailman, and hopped into his car. With the pistol on the seat beside him where he could easily reach it, he drove up and down the streets of the neighborhood, looking for the small man in the tiny blue postal uniform. He had been driving for nearly ten minutes and had almost given up, the lure of the pistol fading, when he saw the dwarf crossing the street a block and a half ahead. He floored the gas pedal.

And was broadsided by a pickup as he sped through the closest intersection, ignoring the stop sign.

The door crumpled in on him, a single jagged shard of metal piercing his arm. The windshield and windows shat­tered, harmless safety glass showering down on him, but the steering wheel was forced loose and pushed through his chest. In an instant that lasted forever, he felt his bones snap, his organs rupture, and he knew the accident was fatal. He did not scream, however. For some strange reason, he did not scream.

From far off, he heard sirens, and some part of his brain told him that Charlie the mailman had called the police on him, though he knew they would be too late to do any good. Nothing could save him now.

He moved his head, the only part of his body still mobile, and saw another man staggering dazedly toward the side­walk.

And then the dwarf appeared. He was wearing street clothes, not a postal uniform, but he still had on a mailman's hat. There was a look of concern on his face, but it was a false expression, and Jack could sense the glee behind the mask.

"I'll call the paramedics," the dwarf said, and his voice was not low and rough but high and breathless. He patted his pockets, and Jack suddenly knew what was coming next. He wanted to scream but could not. "Do you have a quarter for the phone?"

Jack wanted to grab the pistol but could not move his hands. He tried to twist away, but his muscles would not work.

The dwarf smiled as he dug through Jack's pockets. A moment later, he pulled away from the wreckage. He held up a silver coin, dulled by a streak of wet red blood.

Jack closed his eyes against the pain for what seemed like hours, but heard no noise. He opened his eyes.

The dwarf laughed cruelly. He put the quarter in his pocket, tipped his hat, and walked down the street, whistling happily, as the sirens drew closer.

Monteith

How well can one person really know another? It's a question that has been asked often and one that has been addressed by numerous writers over the years. This is my take on it as a child of the suburbs, some­one who grew up in the 1960s, when husbands went off to work each morning and wives stayed home.

***

Monteith.

Andrew stared at the word, wondering what it meant. It was written in his wife's hand, on a piece of her personal­ized stationery, penned with a calligraphic neatness in what looked to be the precise center of the page. There was only the one word, and Andrew sat at the kitchen table, paper in hand, trying to decipher its meaning. Was it the name of a lover? A lawyer? A friend? A coworker? Was it a note? A re­minder? A wish?

Monteith.

He had missed it totally on his first trip through the kitchen, had simply placed his briefcase on the table and hurried to the bathroom. Coming back to pick up his brief­case afterward, he'd seen the note but had not given it any thought, his brain automatically categorizing it as a telephone doodle or something equally meaningless. But the preciseness of the lettering and the deliberate positioning of the word on the page somehow caught his eye, and he found himself sitting down to examine the note.

Monteith.

He stared at the sheet of stationery. The word bothered him, disturbed him in a way he could not quite understand. He had never read it before, had never heard Barbara utter it in his presence, it set off no subconscious alarms of recog­nition, but those two syllables and the aura of sophisticated superiority that their union generated in his mind made him uneasy.

Monteith.

Did Barbara have a lover? Was she having an affair?

That was the big worry, and for the first time he found himself wishing that he had not gotten sick that afternoon, had not taken off early from work, had not come home while Barbara was out.

He stood up, hating himself for his suspicions but unable to make them go away, and walked across the kitchen to the telephone nook in the wall next to the door. He picked up the phone, took the address book out from underneath, and began scanning the pages. There was no "Monteith" listed under the M's, so he went through the entire alphabet, the entire book to see if Monteith was a first rather than last name, but again he had no luck.

Of course not, he reasoned. If Monteith was her lover, she would not write down his name, address, and phone number where it might be stumbled across. She'd hide it, put it someplace secret.

Her diary.

He closed the address book and stood there for a mo­ment, unmoving. It was a big step he was contemplating.

His jealous imagination and unfounded paranoia was about to lead him into an invasion of his wife's privacy. He was about to break a trust that had existed between them for fif­teen years on the basis of... what? Nothing. A single am­biguous word.

Monteith.

He looked back at the table, at the sheet of stationery on top of it.

Monteith.

The word gnawed at him, echoed in his head though he had not yet spoken it aloud. He was still thinking, had not really decided what to do, when his feet carried him into the living room ... through the living room ... into the hall... down the hall.

Into the bedroom.

The decision had been made, and he strode across the beige carpet and opened the single drawer of the nightstand on Barbara's side of the bed, taking out the small pink diary. He felt only a momentary twinge of conscience, then opened the book to the first page. It was blank. He turned to the next page—blank. The next—blank.

He flipped quickly through the pages, saw only blank-ness, only white. Then something caught his eye. He stopped, turned the pages back.

In the middle of the middle page, written in Barbara's neatest hand, was a single two-syllable word.

Monteith.

He slammed the book shut and threw it back in the drawer. He breathed deeply, filled with anger and an undefinable, unreasonable feeling that was not unlike dread.

She was having an affair.

Monteith was her lover.

He thought of confronting her with his suspicions, asking her about Monteith, who he was, where she'd met him, but he could not, after all the discussions, after all the argu­ments, admit to snooping. After all he had said over the years, he could not afford even the appearance of invading her privacy. He could not admit to knowing anything. On the other hand, maybe she wanted him to learn of her indiscre­tion, maybe she wanted him to comment on it, maybe she was looking for his response. After all, she had left the sta­tionery on the table where he was certain to find it. Was it not reasonable to assume that she had wanted him to see the note?

No, he had come home early, before he was supposed to. If this had been a usual day, she would have removed it by the time he returned from work, hidden it away somewhere.

Andrew's head hurt and he felt slightly nauseous. The house seemed suddenly hot, the air stifling, and he hurried from the room. He did not want to go through the kitchen again, did not want to see that note on the table, so he turned instead toward the back of the house, going through the rec room into the garage, where he stood just inside the door­way, grateful for the cool darkened air. He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, but the air he inhaled was not clean and fresh as he had expected. Instead, there was a scent of decay, a taste of something rotten. He opened his eyes, reached for the light switch, and flipped it on.

A dead woodchuck was hanging from an open beam in the far dark corner of the garage.

Andrew's heart skipped a beat, and he felt the first flutterings of fear in his breast. He wanted to go back into the house, back to the bedroom, back to the kitchen even, but, swallowing hard, he forced himself to move forward. He crossed the open empty expanse of oil-stained concrete and stopped before the far corner. This close, he could see that the woodchuck had been strangled to death by the twine which had been wrapped around its constricted throat and tied to the beam. Hundreds of tiny gnats were crawling on the animal's carcass, their black pinprick bodies and clear miniscule wings moving between the individual hairs of the woodchuck and giving it the illusion of life. The insects grouped in growing black colonies on the white clouded eyes, swarmed over the undersized teeth and lolling tongue in the open mouth.

Bile rose in Andrew's throat, but he willed himself not to vomit. He stared at the dead animal. There was something strange about the discolored lower half of the carcass, but he could not see what it was because of the angle at which it hung. Holding his breath against the stench of rot, he took another step forward.

A section of the woodchuck's underside had been shaved and an M carved into the translucent, pinkish white skin.

Monteith.

Was this Monteith? Gooseflesh prickled on Andrew's arms. The thought seemed plausible in some crazy, irrational way, but he could think of no logical basis for such an as­sumption. A woodchuck named Monteith? Why would Bar­bara have such an animal? And why would she kill it and mutilate it? Why would she write its name in her diary, on her stationery?

He tried to imagine Barbara tying the twine around the woodchuck's neck in the empty garage, hoisting the squirm­ing, screaming, fighting animal into the air, but he could not do it.

How well did he really know his wife? he wondered. All these years he'd been kissing her goodbye in the morning when he left for work, kissing her hello at night when he re­turned, but he had never actually known what she did during the times in between. He'd always assumed she'd done housewife-type things—cooking, cleaning, shopping—but he'd never made the effort to find out the specifics of her day, to really learn what she did to occupy her time in the hours they weren't together.

He felt guilty now for this tacit trivialization of her life, for the unspoken but acted-upon assumption that his time was more important than hers. He imagined her putting on a false face for his homecoming each evening, pretending with him that she was happy, that everything was all right, while her lonely daylight hours grew more confining, more depressingly meaningless.

So meaningless that she'd turned to animal sacrifice?

He stared at the hanging insect-infested woodchuck, at the M carved on its underside. Something was wrong with this scenario. Something was missing. Something did not jibe.

He spit. The smell was starting to get to him, he could taste it in his mouth, feel it in his lungs, and he hurried out of the garage before he threw up, opening the big door to let in the outside air. He took a series of deep, cleansing breaths as he stood at the head of the driveway, then walked over to the hose to get a drink. He splashed the cold rubbery-tasting water onto his face, let it run over his hair. Finally, he turned off the faucet and shook his head dry.

It was then that he saw the snails.

They were on the cracked section of sidewalk next to the hose, and they were dead. He squatted down. Barbara had obviously poured salt on three snails she'd found in the gar­den, and she'd placed the three dissolving creatures at the points of a rough triangle on the sidewalk. Two of the shells were now completely empty and had blown over, their black openings facing sideways, the drying mucus that had once been their bodies puddled on the concrete in amoeba-like patterns, but the third snail had not yet dissolved completely and was a mass of greenish bubbles.

With a safety pin shoved through its center.

Andrew pushed the third shell with a finger, looking more closely. The pink plastic end of the safety pin stood out in sharp relief against the brown shell and green bubbling body. He stood. He'd never had any great love for snails, had even poured salt on them himself as a youngster, but he had never been so deliberately cruel as to impale one of the creatures on a pin. He could not understand why Barbara would make a special effort to torture one of them, what pleasure or purpose she could hope to gain from such an ac­tion.

And why had she placed three of them at the corners of a triangle?

Between the woodchuck and the snails, there was a sense of ritualism emerging that made Andrew extremely uncom­fortable. He wished he'd never seen the stationery on the table. He wished he'd never followed up on it. Always be­fore, he had phoned ahead prior to coming home. Even on those few occasions when he had left work ill, he had tele­phoned Barbara to let her know he was coming home, be­lieving such advance notice an example of common courtesy. This time, however, he had not phoned home, and he was not sure why he hadn't.

He wished he had.

Monteith.

Maybe it wasn't the name of a lover after all. Maybe it was some sort of spell or invocation.

Now he was being crazy.

Where was Barbara? He walked out to the front of the house, looked up and down the street for a sign of her car, saw nothing. He wanted to forget what he had seen, to go in­side and turn on the TV and wait for her to come home, but the knot of fear in his stomach was accompanied by a mor­bid and unhealthy curiosity. He had to know more, he had to know what was really going on—although he was not sure that this had any sort of reasonable explanation.

The thought occurred to him that he was hallucinating, imagining all of this. He'd left work because of severe stom­ach cramps and diarrhea, but perhaps he was sicker than he'd originally believed. Maybe he didn't have a touch of the flu—maybe he was in the throes of a full-fledged nerv­ous breakdown.

No. It would be reassuring to learn that there was some­thing wrong with himself instead of Barbara. It would re­lieve him to know that this insanity was in his mind, but he knew that was not the case. His mental faculties were at full power and functioning correctly. There really was a muti­lated woodchuck in the garage, a triangle of tortured snails on the sidewalk, an empty diary with only one word on one page.

Monteith.

Were there other signs he had missed, other clues to Bar­bara's ... instability? He thought that there probably were and that he would be able to find them if he looked hard enough. He walked around the side of the garage to the back yard. Everything looked normal, the way it always did, but he did not trust this first surface impression and he walked past the line of covered, plastic garbage cans, across the re­cently mowed lawn to Barbara's garden. He looked up into the branches of the lemon tree, the fig tree, and the avocado tree. He scanned the rows of radishes, the spreading squash plants. His gaze had already moved on to the winter-stacked lawn furniture behind the garage before his brain registered an incongruity in the scene just passed, a symmetrical square of white tan amidst the free-form green.

He backtracked, reversing the direction of his visual scan, and then he saw it.

In the corner of the yard, next to the fence, nearly hidden by the corn, was a small crude hut made of Popsicle sticks.

He stared at the square structure. There was a small door and a smaller window, a tiny pathway of pebbles leading across the dirt directly in front of the miniature building. The house was approximately the size of a shoebox and was poorly constructed, the globs of glue used to affix the crooked roof visible even from here.

Had this been made by one of the neighborhood kids or by Barbara? Andrew was not sure, and he walked across the grass until he stood in front of the hut. He crouched down. There were pencil markings on the front wall—lightly ren­dered shutters on either side of the two windows, bushes drawn next to the door.

The word Monteith written on a mailbox in his wife's handwriting.

Barbara had made the house.

He squinted one eye and peered through the open door.

Inside, on the dirt floor, was an empty snail shell impaled by a safety pin.

He felt again the fear, frightened more than he would have thought possible by the obsessive consistency of Bar­bara's irrationality. He stood, and his eye was caught by a streak of purple graffiti on the brick fence in front of him. He blinked. There, above the Popsicle-stick house, on the brick fence wall, half-hidden by the grape vines and the corn stalks, was a crude crayon drawing. The picture was simple and inexpertly drawn, the lines crooked and wavering, and he would have ascribed its origin to a child had it not been for the subject of the illustration.

Himself.

He pushed aside the grape vines and stepped back to get a better view, to gain perspective. Seen from this angle, it was obvious whom the rendering was supposed to represent. Distance flattened out the jagged veerings of the crayon which occurred at each mortared juncture of brick, lent sub­stance to the rough hesitations of line. He was looking at his own face simplified into caricature and magnified fivefold. The receding hairline, the bushy mustache, the thin lips: these were the observations of an adult translated into the artistic language of a child.

Barbara had drawn this picture.

He noticed dirt spots on the brick where mudballs had obviously been thrown at his face.

The question nagged at him: Why? Why had she done all of this?

He dropped to his hands and knees, crawled through the garden, fueled now by his own obsession. There was more here. He knew it. And he would find it if he just kept look­ing.

He didn't have to look long.

He stopped crawling and stared at the cat's paw protrud­ing from the well-worked ground beneath the largest tomato plant. The paw and its connected portion of leg were pointed straight up, deliberately positioned. Dried blackened blood had seeped into the gray fur from between the closed curled toes.

Maybe Monteith was the name of the cat, Andrew thought. Maybe she accidentally killed a neighbor's cat and had guiltily buried the animal out here to hide the evidence.

But that wasn't like Barbara. Not the Barbara he knew. If she'd accidentally killed a pet, she would have immediately gone to the owner and explained exactly what had hap­pened.

Perhaps, he thought, she had deliberately killed the ani­mal in order to provide nutrients for her soil, for her plants. Or as part of a ritual sacrifice to some witch's earth deity in order to ensure the health of her crop.

He thought of the woodchuck in the garage.

He wondered if there were dead animals hanging in other garages on the street, if pets were buried in other back yards. Perhaps the neighborhood wives took turns meeting at each others' houses while their husbands were gone, performing dark and unnatural acts together. Perhaps that was where Barbara was right now.

Such are the dreams of the everyday housewife.

The tune to the old Glen Campbell song ran through his head, and he suddenly felt like laughing.

An everyday housewife who gave up the good life for me.

The laughter stopped before it reached his mouth. What if Monteith wasn't the name of an animal at all but the name of a child? What if she had killed and sacrificed a child and had buried the body under the dirt of the garden? If he dug down, below the cat's paw, would he find hands and feet, fingers and toes?

He did not want to know more, he decided. He'd already learned enough. He stood up, wiped his hands on his pants, and began walking back across the yard toward the house.

What would he do when he saw her? Confront her? Sug­gest that she seek help? Try to find out about her feelings, about why she was doing what she was doing?

Would she look the same to him, he wondered, or had the woodchuck and the snails and the cat and everything else permanently altered the way in which he viewed her? Would he now see insanity behind what would have been perfectly normal eyes, a madwoman beneath the calm exterior?

He didn't know.

It was partially his fault. Why the hell had he come home early? If he had just come home at the normal time, or if Barbara, damn her, had just been home, he never would have found all this. Life would have just continued on as normal.

The question was: Did his newfound knowledge auto­matically mean that he gave up his right to happiness with Barbara? Part of him said no. So what if she sacrificed ani­mals? She had, in all probability, been doing that for years without his knowledge, and they'd had what he'd always considered a good life. Unless she was unhappy, unless this was all part of some twisted way she was trying to exorcise her negative feelings about their marriage, couldn't he ig­nore what he had learned and continue on as normal?

Monteith.

It was Monteith he couldn't live with. He could live with the animals, with the fetishes, with the graffiti. If Monteith was some god or demon she worshiped, he could live with that. But the idea that she was seeing another man behind his back, that Monteith was a lover, that he couldn't abide.

Perhaps she was with Monteith now, both of them naked in some sleazy motel room, Barbara screaming wildly, pas­sionately.

But why couldn't he live with that? If she had been doing this for years and it had not affected their relationship until now, why couldn't he just pretend as though he didn't know and continue on as usual? He could do it. It was not out of the question. He would just put it out of his mind, make sure that he did not come home early anymore without first checking with Barbara.

He walked into the house through the garage, walked back to the kitchen, sat down at the table.

He stared at the piece of stationery, but did not pick it up.

Ten minutes later, he heard the sound of a key in the latch. He looked up as Barbara walked in.

Her gaze flitted from his face to the paper and quickly back again.

Was that worry he saw on her features?

"I felt sick," he said dully. "I came home early."

She smiled at him, and the smile was genuine, all tiace of worry gone—if it had been there at all. She walked over to him, patted his head with one hand, picked up the stationery with the other. She gave him a quick peck on the cheek. "Other than that, how was your day?"

He looked at her, thought for a moment, forced himself to smile back. "Fine," he said slowly. "Everything was fine."

Pillow Talk

When my wife and I were dating, we used to go to this bargain theater and basically see whatever movie hap­pened to be playing that week. One night we sat in front of two young women who were commiserating with each other about their nonexistent love lives. Just before the movie started, one of the young women said that sometimes at night she fell asleep hugging her pillow. It was an odd image, and I found myself wondering if a man would ever do such a thing.

And then I thought, what if a man did?

And what if the pillow hugged him back?

* * *

When my pillow first started talking to me, I ignored it. I only heard it speaking when I drifted into sleep, and I put it down to the inevitable merging of the material world and the dream world which occurs when the waking mind relin­quishes its hold on consciousness.

But when I woke up one morning and felt the pillow pulsing beneath my head, I knew something was wrong.

I jumped out of bed, simultaneously throwing the pillow away from me. It landed flat on the floor next to my dresser and was perfectly still. I bent down closely to peer at it but could see nothing out of the ordinary. I touched it with my foot, prodding it, half afraid it would leap up at me and at­tack, but there was no movement at all. I thought, perhaps, that I had dreamed the whole thing.

Then I heard the pillow speak.

It was a soft voice, whispery and seductive, neither male nor female. At first, it might sound like the rustling of dry sheets on a quiet morning or the gentle stirring of clean linen on a clothesline. But those soft sounds formed human words, turned those words into sentences, used those sen­tences to express thoughts.

"I want you," the soft voice said.

I ran from the room in a blind panic, not stopping until I was outside the apartment. I was wearing nothing but my underwear, but I didn't care. I was breathing heavily, not from the exertion of running, but from fear. I did not feel, as people often do in books or movies, that I was going mad. I knew I was sane. I knew the pillow had actually spo­ken to me.

I shivered as I recalled the whispery sound of those words. I want you. I had no idea what that meant. For all I knew, the pillow planned to kill me. But I perceived no threat in the words. Instead, I sensed an undercurrent of erotic longing.

And that scared me even more.

I heard the door to the next apartment open. A little girl came out to get the newspaper. She looked at me and gig­gled, averting her eyes. I forced myself to gather my courage and go back into the apartment. I looked around carefully, afraid that the pillow was hiding behind a door or a couch, but it was nowhere to be seen. I crept down the hall to the bedroom. It was still lying on the floor next to my dresser. I slammed shut the bedroom door, grabbed some dirty clothes out of the hamper in the bathroom, put them on and left.

It was after twelve noon before I was brave enough to re­turn to the apartment. Even in the harsh heat of midday, my fears did not seem stupid or childish. The pulse of that pil­low beneath me, the horror of that soft voice was still very real, and I came back to my apartment with a newly charged pitchfork and a large plastic bag.

The pillow was still lying on the floor.

Had it moved?

I couldn't be sure, so I stabbed it with the pitchfork and tossed it into the bag, using a wire twist tie to seal the open­ing.

Inside the bag, the pillow jumped.

I fell back, shocked, though I had been preparing myself for exactly that. In a series of short leaps, the plastic sack moved across the floor. Fighting down the dread that was building within me and threatening to take over, concentrat­ing on my anger and trying to nurture my aggressive feel­ings, I grabbed the squirming plastic bag and took it outside.

The second I crossed the threshold, the pillow stopped fighting me. The movement died. I did not stop to ponder the reason for this sudden good luck, I simply ran to my car, opened the trunk, and threw in the bag. I drove to the dump, still keyed up, and was gratified to see that a pile of wood and leaves was in the process of being burned. Taking the bag out of the trunk, I threw it on the fire, not daring to move until I saw the greenish black plastic sizzle and evaporate, until I saw the pillow inside blacken and wither and burn.

I had expected to feel relieved, as if a heavy burden had been lifted from my shoulders, but the anxiety I'd been ex­periencing stayed with me. I felt no joy after the pillow had been destroyed; I felt no freedom. My dread became less im­mediate, but it was still there. The pillow was gone, but it had won its war. It had done its job. I drove home feeling frustrated.

Before going to bed, I took a spare pillow from the hall closet—the pillow guests use when they sleep on the couch. I was still nervous, tense, but the sight of the new pillow made me smile. I took off my clothes, turned down the blan­ket, and got into bed. The pillow felt soft and comforting, re­assuring in its ordinariness. My body was dog-tired, but I'd expected to have trouble falling asleep, afraid that my over­taxed and overactive brain would keep me up all night. My mind, however, was tired as well from the day's exertions, and I fell almost instantly into a deep, dreamless slumber.

I awoke to the sound of the pillow whispering in my ear. "Take me," it said, and there was no mistaking the intent be­hind that statement.

"Take me," it whispered again.

I'd been sleeping with one hand under the pillow, which in some grotesque way could have been considered a posi­tion of perverse embrace. My mouth was open, drooling onto the pillow cover, and in the second before I leapt out of bed, I felt the cloth press upward against my mouth.

As if to kiss me.

I spent the rest of the night sleeping outside, in my clothes, on the stoop.

In the morning, I was angry. My fear had turned to fury, as fear will do after a suitable gestation period. I refused to be intimidated by whispering voices, I refused to let squares of padded cloth rule my life. I boldly went inside, closed the bedroom door, showered, shaved, and made breakfast.

After I ate, I took every piece of linen in the house and threw it into the Dumpster outside the apartment complex. None of it fought me. None of it even moved. I would have taken the linen to the dump but I was too angry. I refused to have my life dictated by inanimate objects, and I refused to devote anymore time to this ludicrous pursuit. I threw the sheets and pillows and bedspreads into the blue metal con­tainer, then afterward, in a gesture of supreme disgust, I emptied my garbage on top of the linen.

"Eat shit," I said.

And this time I really did feel good. The dread, the ten­sion, the nervousness left me and was replaced by a sense of optimistic finality. The horror was over.

I slept that night on a bare bed, with no pillow, no covers. And the feeling was nice.

In the morning, after breakfast, I went outside. I'd been intending to stop by, see a couple of friends, maybe catch a movie, but the sight that greeted me on the apartment stoop stopped me cold.

A trail of sheets and pillowcases, covers and comforters led from behind the building, where the Dumpster was lo­cated, to my door. On my doorstep, leaning upright, as if they'd been trying to get inside, were three pillows.

It wasn't the pillows, I realized. It was the apartment. There was a spirit in the apartment, or a demon, which ani­mated the linen. Factory-made cloth in and of itself could not be malevolent, could not be alive. Something else was doing this.

I took only my wallet, leaving everything else, afraid even my clothes could be contaminated, and spent the morn­ing looking for a motel. I found one close to the library, and I spent the afternoon among the stacks of books, reading everything I could about poltergeists and TK and the super­natural.

I ate alone in the coffee shop across the street from the motel, staring through the plate glass window next to my table at the black square window of my room. I thought of white sheets climbing up the cold glass, shutting in the room from the outside world, and I shivered. Maybe I would spend the night in the car.

But no. I was being paranoid. There was no way the ... whatever it was ... could track me there.

It was dark when I returned to my room, and even in the antiseptic light of the motel lamp, the two long pillows on the bed appeared somewhat threatening. "Better safe than sorry," I mumbled to myself. And I threw the pillows in the bathroom and closed the door.

In my dream, a gorgeous woman, the most perfect I'd ever seen, offered me her body. I hemmed and hawed, nerv­ous, not believing that such a woman would desire me, but she pushed me onto my back and began unbuttoning my shirt. She unbuckled my pants, pulled them down, then slipped out of her own clothes, revealing a body surpassing even the high expectations generated by her beautiful face and covered figure. She lowered herself onto me, kissing me, pressing against me, moaning with passion, promising pleasure. It was the most realistic dream I'd ever had, and definitely the most arousing. I awoke on the brink of or­gasm, feeling as though I was still inside her, feeling her still-thrusting her hips with me.

And I saw the pillow pushing rhythmically against my crotch.

In one instant, my glance took in the open bathroom door, the pillow pulsing between my legs and the other pil­low moving up the bed toward my face. I was too confused to react spontaneously. I knew the pillows were having their way with me, but in my sleepbound mind I saw the gorgeous face and figure of my dream lover.

I came, ejaculating heavily into the pillow, which sud­denly increased its movement. I threw the pillow off me, and it landed on the carpet, glinting wetly in the diffused light from the bathroom. I grabbed the other pillow and heaved it against the wall.

I was breathing heavily, both with panic and with the ex­ertion of my sexual activity. Other than my breathing, the room was silent.

I could hear the pillow perfectly.

"Good," it whispered, its seductive voice sounding sated. "So good."

Sickened, appalled by what had just transpired, feeling both guilty and victimized, I put on my pants and dashed out of the room to my car. I locked the doors and sat unmoving in the dark, listening to my own breathing and the sound of my heart, trying to stop my hands from shaking.

Good.

So good.

The clock in my car said it was twelve thirty. I was tired, but I could not sleep. I stayed there, unmoving, wide-awake, until dawn. At a little past three, a square white shape inched its way up the side of the motel room window. Moonlight glinted off my semen, and I felt like vomiting.

I wanted to kill the pillow.

But how can you kill a piece of cloth filled with stuffing?

My vacation was almost over, and I realized that I'd have to return to work in three days. Where would I live? How could I live, knowing that whenever I tried to sleep, my pil­lows would try to attack me?

Have sex with me.

Kill me.

Rape me.

I knew, deep down, that the pillows meant to do me no physical harm. But what they did want to do was so terrify­ing, so perversely alien, that I could not think about it. I could not handle it. So I stared at the window and tried to figure out my next move. The rational ideas I discarded al­most immediately. Rationality was not a legitimate defense against the irrational. What was next? An exorcist? Spiritu­alist? Faith healer?

When dawn arrived and the coffee shop opened up across the street, I went in for some breakfast. I ordered hash browns and eggs with orange juice. I stared at my plate after the waitress brought it, and I could think of no way to escape from this horror. No matter where I went, no matter what I did, this would continue. I knew that, even if I slept alone on a hard park bench, some article of cloth would find me and attack me.

Rape me.

I took a bite of my egg and used the napkin to wipe my mouth.

"Thank you," the cloth whispered.

I dropped the white napkin and stared at it. It looked for all the world like a miniature pillow. As I stared, I noticed that one of the creases looked almost like a smile. A smile of unbridled lust. I felt no shock, though. I felt no terror. I was too jaded for that. I'd gone through too much.

I looked down at the napkin, then across the street at the motel. In the bright light of early morning, I could clearly see the white squares against the motel room glass. But they no longer seemed like they were waiting to pounce. They no longer seemed malevolent.

They seemed forlorn.

Like they were waiting for me to come home.

I picked up the napkin. It was soft and silken. "Kiss me," it whispered. "Touch me." I looked across the street at the motel room window, and I found myself becoming aroused.

What was it they did to help people get over their fears? Made them face those fears? Made them confront their problems? I knew there was no way I could escape from the pillows. I would have to meet them head on.

The waitress brought my check, which I paid. I waited until she left the room before standing so she wouldn't see my erection.

I walked back across the street and stood for a moment in front of the window. The two pillows were pressed against the glass. The one which had taken advantage of me the night before looked soiled, dirty, and disgusting, covered with a crust of dried semen. But the other pillow, long and white, soft and supple, looked clean and fresh and innocent.

Inviting.

I licked my dry lips, thought for a moment, and took the key out of my pocket.

I went into the room and closed the door behind me.

Maya's Mother

I wrote the story "Bumblebee" for Richard Chizmar's anthology Cold Blood. A horror story set in contem­porary Phoenix with a noirish detective for a protago­nist, it was written quickly. I cashed my check when payment arrived, shelved the book when I got it, and promptly forgot about the piece.

But readers didn't.

I don't think Cold Blood sold particularly well, but more than any other story I've written, "Bumblebee" has inspired fans to write and ask for a sequel. I finally wrote one many years later for the paperback magazine Palace Corbie. It was titled "The Piano Player Has No Fingers" (all of the stories in that issue were titled "The Piano Player Has No Fingers"; the gimmick for the issue was that all contributors would write a story using that as the title). I thought that would be the end of it, but still the requests kept coming.

So for those of you who asked, here's another one.

***

It was hot as I drove through the desert to the Big Man's. The place was out past Pinnacle Peak and at one time had probably been the only house out there, but now the city was creeping in, and there were only a few miles of open space between the last subdivision and the dirt road that led to the Big Man's compound.

I turned onto the unmarked drive, slowing down, peering through my dusty windshield. The Big Man had made no ef­fort to landscape his property, but there was a lot more out here than just cacti and rocks. Doll parts were hanging on the barbed wire fence: arm and leg, torso and head. Mesquite crosses stood sentry by the cattle guard. A blood-drenched scarecrow with a coyote skull on its shoulders faced the road, arms raised.

I hadn't expected him to be so spooked—or at least not so superstitious—and I was starting to get a little creeped out myself as I ventured farther into the desert and away from civilization. He wouldn't say over the phone why he wanted to hire me, had said only that he had a case he wanted handled, but the few details he'd given me were enough to pique my interest.

His house was on a small rise, surrounded by saguaros, and was one of those Frank Lloyd Wrightish structures that had bloomed out here in the late fifties/early sixties when the Master himself had set up his architectural school north of Scottsdale. It was, I had to admit, damned impressive. Low, geometric, all rock and windows, it blended perfectly with the environment and bespoke an optimism for the fu­ture that had died long before they'd built the square shoe-box that was my dingy Phoenix apartment complex.

One of the Big Man's men was out front to greet me, and he ushered me inside after allowing me to park my dirty shitmobile next to a veritable fleet of gleaming Mercedes Benzes. The interior of the house was just as impressive as the outside. Lots of light. Potted palms. Hardwood floors and matching furniture. I was led to an extra-wide doorway and ushered into a sunken living room approximately five times the size of my entire apartment. "He's here," the flunky said by way of an introduction.

And I finally got to meet the Big Man.

I'd heard of him, of course. Who in Phoenix hadn't? But I'd never met him, seen him, or even spoken to him. I looked at the man before me, underwhelmed. I'd been ex­pecting someone more impressive. Sydney Greenstreet, maybe. Orson Welles. Instead, this Richard Dreyfuss look-alike stood up from the couch, shook my hand, and intro­duced himself as Vincent Pressman.

Time was when I wouldn't have even returned the man's phone call. I worked strictly for the good guys, followed all of the guidelines necessary to maintain my investigator's li­cense, dealt only with the law-abiding who had been screwed or were in some type of jam. I still try to keep it that way whenever possible, but there are gray areas now, and while I try to rationalize my behavior, I sometimes sit alone at night and think about what I do and realize that perhaps I'm not as pure and honest as I like to think I am.

Which is a long way of saying that I now take cases that interest me. There are only so many lost dogs and missing teenagers and two-timing spouses that a man can handle.

And the Big Man's case interested me.

As I said, he didn't tell me much, but the hints had been tantalizing. Water turned to blood. A shadow that followed him from room to room, building to building. Obscene calls received on a disconnected phone. He claimed he didn't know who was behind all this, but I had the feeling he did, and I figured I could act as an intermediary between the two, bring them together and settle things out of court, as it were, without any bloodshed.

At least that was my plan.

I sat down as directed on a white love seat, facing the Big Man across a glass coffee table. He cleared his throat. "I've heard you're into this stuff, this supernatural shit."

I shrugged.

"I've had this place bugged and debugged, scanned by every electronic device known to man, and no one's been able to come up with an explanation for what's happening here."

"But you don't think your house is haunted."

He glared at me with cold steely eyes and, Richard Dreyfuss lookalike or not, I saw for the first time a hint of what made Vincent Pressman the most feared underworld figure in the Southwest. "I told you, someone's after me."

I nodded, acting calmer than I felt. "And I asked you who it was."

He sighed, then motioned for everyone else to leave the room. He stared at me, his eyes never leaving my own, and I held the gaze though it was beginning to make me feel un­comfortable. He did not speak until we heard the door click shut. Then he leaned back on the couch, glanced once to­ward the door, and started talking.

"I had this maid working for me. Guatemalan bitch. She looked like a goddamn man, but her daughter was one fine piece of poon. Maya, her name was. Skinny little thing. Big tits. Always coming on to me. I don't usually like 'em young—I'm not a pedophile, you understand—but this babe got to me. She was sixteen or so, and she was always loung­ing around in her bikini, going to the fridge for midnight snacks in panties and a T-shirt. You know the drill.

"Anyway, bitch mama gives me this warning, dares to tell me that I'd better stay away from her little girl. I see the daughter later, and she's got this bruise on her cheek, like she's been hit, beaten. I call mama in, give her a warning, tell her if she ever touches one hair on that girl's head I'll have her cut up and fed to the coyotes." He smiled. "Just try­ing to put a scare into her, you understand."

I nodded.

"So the girl comes back later, thanks me. One thing leads to another, I take her into my room and ... I fucked her." The Big Man's voice dropped. "The thing is, after I came, after I finished, I opened my eyes, and she was . . . she wasn't there. She was a rag doll. A full-sized rag doll." He shook his head. "I don't know how it happened, how they did it, but it happened instantly." He snapped his fingers. "Like that! One second I was holding her ass, rubbing my face in her hair, the next I felt her ass turn to cloth, was rub­bing my face in yarn. Scared the fuck out of me. I jumped out of bed, and that doll was smiling at me, a big old dumb-ass grin stitched onto her head."

He licked his lips nervously. "It didn't even look like Maya. Not really. I called on the intercom, ordered my men to make sure the girl and her mom didn't leave the house, told them to hunt them down and find them, especially the mom. When I turned back around, the bed was empty. Even the doll was gone."

He was silent for a moment.

"They were gone, too," I prodded. "Weren't they?"

He nodded. "Both of them, and it was after that that the weird shit started happening. I put the word out, told my men to find the maid, have her picked up, but, as you know, she seems to have disappeared off the face of the fucking earth."

"So you want me to find the woman."

He leaned forward. "I want you to stop this shit. I don't care how you do it, just do it. Find her if you have to, leave her out of it, I don't care. I just want this curse gone." He sat back. "Afterward, after it's over, then I'll decide how to deal with her."

I nodded. We both knew how he was going to deal with her, but that was one of those things he didn't want spelled out and I didn't want confirmed.

I thought of Bumblebee, and while the memory of that situation remained sharp, the emotions had faded, and it seemed somehow more fun in retrospect.

Well, maybe not fun.

Interesting.

Kind of the way this seemed interesting.

"How did you find me?" I asked. "Phone book?"

"I told you: I heard you handle this stuff."

"From who?"

He smiled. "I have my sources."

I didn't like that. I hadn't told anyone about Bumblebee, and the only people who knew were either dead or had fled.

"Word is that you're in tight with the wetbacks, too. I fig­ured that can't hurt."

"You hear a lot of words."

"I wouldn't be where I am if I didn't."

I looked at him for what seemed an appropriate length of time. "All right," I said. "I'll do it. But it'll be twenty-five hundred plus expenses." That was far more than I usually charged, but I knew the Big Man could afford it.

He agreed to my terms without question, and I knew that I could have and should have asked for more. But I'd always been bad at this part of the game, and once again my stu­pidity had screwed me out of a big payday.

"You have a picture of this maid?" I asked. "And a name?"

He shook his head.

"Not even her name?"

"I never used her name. Didn't matter to me." He mo­tioned toward the foyer. "Maybe Johnny or Tony knows."

The arrogance of the powerful. I'd forgotten to take that into consideration.

One of the flunkies came hurrying up. Pressman asked the maid's name but the flunky didn't know, and he hurried out, returning a few moments later, shaking his head.

The Big Man smiled. "I guess that means we forgot to pay her social security tax."

"But the girl's name is Maya?" I asked.

He nodded.

"Maya's mother, then. I'll start there."

"Do what you have to," he told me. "But I want results. I expect people to complete the jobs I hire them to do, and I don't like to be disappointed. Are we understood?"

It was one of those movie moments. He'd probably seen the same movies I had and was playing his role to the hilt, but I felt as though I'd just sold my soul to the Mob, as though I'd jumped in over my head, painted myself into a corner, and was being forced to sink or swim. It was a scary feeling.

But it was also kind of cool.

I nodded, and Pressman and I shook hands. I had to re­mind myself not to get too caught up in the glamour of it all. These were the bad guys, I told myself. I was only working for them on a temporary basis. I was not one of them and never wanted to be.

I drove back through the desert. There was only one per­son I knew who might be able to decipher this: Hector Marquez. Hector was a former fighter, a local light heavyweight who'd gotten railroaded by Armstrong and his goons a few years back for a payroll heist he'd had nothing to do with. I'd gotten him a good lawyer—Yard Stevens, an old buddy who still owed me a slew of favors—but even that had not been enough to counter the manufactured evidence and co­erced witnesses Armstrong had lined up, and Yard had told me, off the record, that probably the best thing for Hector would be if he disappeared. I'd relayed the message, and ever since there'd been a warrant out for Hector's arrest.

I hadn't seen him after his disappearance, but I knew someone who knew someone who could get in touch with him, and I put the word out. I expected a long-distance phone call, expected Hector to be hiding either in Texas or California, but he was still right here in the Valley, and the woman who called on his behalf said that he wanted to meet with me personally.

We set up the meeting for midnight.

South Mountain Park.

A lot of bodies had been dumped there over the years, and though the city had been trying for decades to clean up its image, the park remained a haven for gangbangers, drunken redneck teens, and the occasional naive couple looking for a lover's lane.

In other words, not exactly a family fun spot.

The view was spectacular, though, and as I got out of my car and looked over the edge of the parking lot, I could see the lights of the Valley stretching from Peoria to Apache Junction. Phoenix looked cleaner at night. The lights cut clearly through the smog, and everything had a sweeping cinematic quality that reminded me of how it had been in the old days.

I was suddenly illuminated by headlights, and I turned around to see three silhouetted men standing in front of a parked Chevy. One of them started toward me.

It had been three years since I'd seen Hector, and he definitely looked the worse for wear. He was probably in his late twenties but he looked like a man in his early fifties, and his old smooth-faced optimism had been buried under lines and creases of disillusionment and disappointment. His fighter's body had long since softened into pudge.

"Hector," I said.

He walked up to me, hugged me. The hug lasted a beat longer than was polite, and I understood for the first time that he had really and truly missed me. I didn't know why he'd stayed away if he was still living in the Valley, but I could only assume that it was because he hadn't wanted to get me into trouble, and I felt guilty for not making an effort to keep in touch.

He pulled back, looked me over. "How goes it, man?"

"My life doesn't change."

"Solid."

"As a rock."

He laughed, and I saw that he had a new silver tooth in the front.

"I don't know if Liz told you what I'm looking for, but I'm working on a case and I need to find a Guatemalan witch used to work as a maid. Her daughter's named Maya. I thought you might be able to introduce me to someone, set me up."

Hector thought for a moment. "I don't know much about Guatemalans. But you talk to Maria Torres. She run a small I bodega on Central between Southern and Baseline. In an I old house by the Veteran's Thrift. Her son married to a Guatemalan girl. She can get you in."

"You couldn't've told me that over the phone?" I ribbed him. "I had to come all the way out here in the middle of the night?"

"I wanted to see you again, bro."

I smiled at him. I'm not a touchy-feely guy, but I grasped his shoulder. "I wanted to see you too, Hector. It's good to see you again."

We caught up a bit on our respective lives, but it was clear that Hector's friends were getting antsy, and when the lights flashed and the horn honked, he said he'd better get going.

"I'll call," I promised. "We'll get together somewhere. In the daytime. Away from Phoenix."

He waved.

The next morning I learned that Hector had been fol­lowed.

Armstrong was the one who called me. Gleefully, I thought. He told me they'd found Hector in a Dumpster, burned beyond recognition. His teeth had been knocked out first and his fingertips sliced off so there'd be no possibility of positive identification. The cops had been able to ID the men with him, however, and one of the women who'd come down to claim the body of her husband said that Hector had been hanging with these guys and had ridden with them last night and was in all probability the other man.

The lieutenant paused, savoring his story. "That Dump­ster smelled like a fuckin' burnt tamale."

I hung up on him, feeling sick. Immediately, I picked up the phone again and dialed the Big Man's number. I was so furious that my hand hurt from gripping the receiver so tightly, and when he answered the phone himself and gave me that silky smooth "Hello," it was all I could do not to yell at him.

"You killed Hector Marquez," I said without preamble.

"Is this—?"

"You know damn well who this is, and you killed Hector Marquez."

"Sorry. I don't know anyone by that name."

"I'm off this case. You can find some other sucker to do your dirty work."

"I wouldn't do that." The Big Man's voice was low, filled with menace.

"Fuck you."

He sighed. "Look, I'm sorry. If something happened to someone you know—and I'm not saying it did or that I'm in any way involved—then it was probably a mistake. If you'd like, I could look into it for you."

"I want you to make sure it never happens again. If I'm going to continue, I need to have your word that no one is going to be murdered, no one I talk to is going to be at­tacked. You want to follow me, fine. But just because I'm getting information from someone doesn't mean they're in­volved with this. You let me handle this my own way, or I'm off. You can threaten me all you want, but those are my terms, those are my rules, that's the deal. Take it or leave it."

"I understand," he said smoothly. "A slight misunder­standing. As I said, I am in no way connected to the death of your friend, but I think I have enough clout that I can assure you nothing like it will ever happen again. You have my word, and I'm sorry for your loss." He paused. "Do you have any leads?"

"Hector was a friend."

"I said I'm sorry."

I was still furious, but I knew enough not to push it. I might be brave when I'm angry, but I'm not stupid. I took a deep breath. "Hector gave me the name of a woman who might offer me an in to the Guatemalan community. I'll ask around. See what I can find out about this Maya and her mother."

There was silence on the line, but I knew he was nodding. "Keep me informed," he said.

"Of course."

I was still furious, but I pretended I wasn't, and we ended on a false note of rapprochement. I wondered after I hung up what kind of man could treat human life so casually, could order deaths as other people ordered dinner, and I told my­self that the kind of man who could do that was the kind of man who would statutorily rape the daughter of his house­keeper.

The kind of man I would take on as a client.

I didn't want to think about that, and I walked into the kitchen to make my morning wake-up coffee.

Maria Torres's bodega was closed when I arrived, so I went to a nearby McDonald's to get some coffee. There were gang members signing near the blocked bathrooms and a host of hostile faces among the silently staring people at the tables, so I paid for my order, took the covered cup, and went out to wait in my car.

I didn't have to wait long. Before the coffee was even cool enough to drink, a dark, overweight woman in a white ruffled skirt walked down the street and stopped in front of the barred door of the bodega. She sorted through a massive keyring, used one of the keys to open the door, and flipped the Closed sign in the window to Open.

I went over to talk to her.

The woman was indeed Maria Torres, and when I told her that Hector had said she could put me in touch with a Guatemalan woman who might know Maya's mother, she nodded and started telling me in broken English a long involved story about her son and how he'd met and married this Guatemalan girl over the wishes of her and her family. It was clear that she hadn't heard what had happened to Hec­tor, and I didn't want to be the one to tell her, so I simply waited, listened, nodded, and when she finally got around to telling me her daughter-in-law's name and address, I wrote it down.

"Does she speak English?" I asked.

"Therese?" Maria smiled widely. "More better than me."

I thanked her, and to show my appreciation, I bought a trinket from her store, a little rainbow-colored "friendship bracelet" that I could either give to my niece or toss away, depending on how the mood struck me.

The Guatemalans lived in a ghetto of a ghetto in the slums of south Phoenix. It was a bad area on a good day, and there hadn't been a lot of good days since the beginning of this long, hot summer.

I found the house with no problem—a crummy plywood shack on a barren lot with no vegetation—and I got out of my car and walked up to the section of plywood that I as­sumed to be the door.

I should've brought a tape recorder, I thought as I knocked. But it didn't really matter, because no one was home. I walked over to the neighbors on both sides, but one of the houses was empty and the tired skinny old man in the other spoke no English. My attempts at pidgin Spanish elicited from him only a blank look.

I decided to head home, get my tape recorder, then come back and see if Therese had returned, but when I reached the front door of my apartment, the phone was ringing, and it continued to ring as I unlocked and opened the door. Some­one was sure anxious to talk to me, and I hurried over, picked up the receiver.

It was the Big Man.

I recognized the voice but not the tone. Gone was the ar­rogant attitude, the sureness and confidence born of long-held power.

The Big Man sounded scared.

"She's hit me!" he said.

"Maya's mother?"

He was frantic. "Get over here now!"

"What happened?"

"Now!"

I drove like a bat out of hell. I did not slow down even through Paradise Valley with its hidden radar cameras, and I sped up Scottsdale Road at nearly twice the speed limit, fig­uring I'd have the Big Man pay off any tickets that were sent to me through the mail.

One of Pressman's flunkies was waiting for me at the door of the house, and I was quickly ushered in and taken to the bedroom, where the Big Man was seated on a chair next to the gigantic waterbed, stripped to the waist. He looked at me with frightened eyes as I entered.

I felt a sudden coldness in my gut.

His right arm had withered to half its normal size and was blackening with rot. No less than three doctors, all of them obviously very highly paid specialists, were standing around him, one of them injecting something into the arm, the other two talking low amongst themselves.

"That bitch cursed me!" he shouted, and there was both anger and fear in his voice. "I want her found! Do you un­derstand me?"

The flunkies and I all nodded. None of us were sure who he was talking to, and it was safer at this point not to ask.

The Big Man grimaced as the needle was pulled out of his arm. He looked at me, motioned me over, and one of the doctors stepped aside so I could get close.

"Is there any way to reverse this?" he asked through grit­ted teeth. "Can I get this curse taken off me somehow?"

"I don't know," I admitted.

"Well, find out!"

He screamed, and the arm shrunk another six inches be­fore our eyes. The doctors looked at each other, obviously at a loss. They seemed nervous, and it occurred to me for the first time that though they might be tops in their field, the best and the brightest the Mayo Clinic had to offer, they were just as afraid of the Big Man's wrath as anyone else. It was a sobering thought.

I started out of the bedroom, intending to find a phone, make a few calls, and see if anyone of my acquaintance knew anything about the lifting of Guatemalan arm-shrinking spells. I turned around in the doorway, wanting to ask the Big Man something else, but he screamed again and, with a sickeningly wet pop his arm disappeared, its tail-end nub sucked into his shoulder, the skin closing behind it as if it had never existed.

I hurried out of the room.

No one I knew had any info or any ideas, so I figured the best idea was to once again stake out Therese's shack. I told one of the Big Man's flunkies to let him know that I'd gone to find out about the spell and Maya's mother. The flunky looked about as thrilled as I felt to be telling the Big Man anything right now, and I quickly left before he could de­cline and insist that I do it myself.

Luckily for me, Therese was home. Alone. I put on my most official-looking expression in order to intimidate her into talking. I told her I was working for Vincent Pressman, hoping that the name carried weight even down here, and said that he wanted to know the current whereabouts of his former maid and her daughter Maya.

Word about the situation must have already spread through the Guatemalan community because Therese blanched at Pressman's name, and quickly crossed herself when I mentioned Maya.

"You know something about this," I said.

She nodded, obviously frightened. I got the feeling she wasn't supposed to be talking to outsiders.

"What's going on?" I asked. "What's happening to Mr. Pressman?"

The woman looked furtively about. "He mess with the wrong woman. She a ... how you call it? ... Very power­ful, uh ..."

"Witch?" I offered helpfully

"Yes! Witch! She curse him. She will kill him but she want him to suffer first." Therese crossed herself again.

"What about her daughter, Maya?"

"Daughter dead."

"What?"

"Mother kill her. She have to. Cannot live with shame. Now she blame him for daughter's death, too. His fault she have to kill girl." She shook her head. "It bad. Very bad."

I asked about removing the curse, asked if there was any­one else who could do it, another witch perhaps, but Therese said that only the one who applied the curse could lift it. She told me the other limited options for dealing with the situa­tion, but they were all horrible, and I asked if I could talk to someone who knew more about the black arts than she did, but she would not give me any names, not even for a pair of Andrew Jacksons.

I wanted to stop by my place, pick up a few phone num­bers, some people I knew who weren't Guatemalan but might be able to tell me something about lifting curses, but Armstrong was waiting for me outside my apartment, and with typically piggish glee he told me that since I was one of the last people to see Hector alive, I was automatically a suspect in his murder. I denied everything as I desperately tried to think of who could have seen me with him, who could have ratted me out, but Armstrong motioned for me to get in the cruiser so we could go down to the station and talk.

All the way over, my stomach was tied up in knots. Not because of Hector—I was innocent, and I knew there was no way that even Armstrong could make that stick—but be­cause I needed to talk to the Big Man. He was waiting with his one arm to hear what I'd found, but I sure as hell couldn't call from a police station, and I sat in the interro­gation room as I waited for someone to talk to me, and pre­tended I was in no hurry to do anything.

An hour or so later, a smirking Armstrong joined me. He asked me a shitload of stupid questions, then leaned smugly back in his chair. "In my estimation, you're a flight risk," he said. "I can keep you in custody for twenty-four without cause, and I think I'm going to do that while we sort through what you said and check out your alibis."

He grinned at me. He knew I was innocent, but this was his idea of fun, and I made no comment and pretended as though I didn't care one way or the other as I was led to a holding cell.

I was awakened in the middle of the night by a cowed young sergeant who was accompanied by an intimidating man in a smartly fitted business suit, and I knew that the Big Man had tracked me down and had me sprung.

I was happy to be out, but I didn't like being this close to someone that powerful, and I vowed to be careful who I took on as clients in the future—no matter how interesting their cases might be.

A limo was waiting outside, and we drove in silence out to the desert.

It was late at night, but the Big Man was awake. He was also limping. It looked like he was wearing a diaper, but I saw the grimace of pain on his face as he sat down, and I knew something else had happened, something far worse than mere incontinence.

I was afraid to ask, but I had to know. "What happened?"

"My cock," he said, his voice barely above a mumble. "It attacked me."

"What?"

"I woke up, and it'd turned into a snake. It was biting my leg and whipping around and biting my stomach, and I could feel its poison spreading through me. So I ran into the kitchen and got a knife and I cut it off."

It took a moment for that to sink in. Pressman had cut off his own penis? I imagined Maya's mother cackling to her­self as she wove that spell.

"The doctors sewed me up, but they couldn't sew it back on. It was still alive. We had to kill it." He grimaced, using his arm to grab the side of the sofa and support himself. "So what'd you find out?"

I told him the truth. "Maya's dead. Her mother killed her. Now she blames you for that, too." I motioned toward his crotch. "So this is going to go on. You're going to be tor­tured until you die. And then she'll own you after death. She'll be able to do whatever she wants with your soul."

"I'll kill her," he said. "I'll find that bitch and kill her."

"Won't do any good. The whammy's on, and as I under­stand it, killing her won't stop it. All of the Guatemalans are terrified. She's one powerful woman."

"So what are my options?"

I shrugged. "Only three that I see. One: get her to stop, convince her to lift the curse, which, considering the situa­tion, I don't think is going to happen. Two: put up with this shit until you die and then go gently into her vindictive lit­tle hands ..." I trailed off.

"And three?"

I looked at him. "You can take your own life. That will put an end to it. Her curse is meant to kill you ... eventu­ally. But if you take matters into your own hands, if you in­terrupt it and thwart her plans, all rights revert back to you."

I was playing it cool, playing it tough, but the truth was, I was scared shitless. Not of the Big Man, not anymore, but of what I'd gotten into here, of the powers we were dealing with. I was out of my depth, but Pressman was still putting it all on my shoulders. I was supposed to be the expert, and it was a role I neither deserved nor wanted.

He was actually considering the benefits of suicide.

"So if I eat my gun—"

"No," I said. "It has to be stabbing or hanging."

He slammed his hand down on the back of the couch. "Why?" He glared at me. "What fucking difference does that make?"

"I don't know why," I said. "But it does make a differ­ence. I don't make the rules, I just explain them. And for some reason, those are the only two ways that are guaran­teed to get you out from under the curse. A shooting might work, but then again, it might not. And you'll only get one chance at this, so you'd better make sure it counts."

He shook his head, lurched away from the sofa. "Fuck that. There's no way in hell I'm going to off myself because some little wetback bitch put her voodoo on me. I'll take my chances. I'm going to find her and get rid of her and we'll see if that works."

That's what he said on Thursday.

On Friday, his teeth fell out.

On Saturday, he began shitting rocks.

His men did find the maid, and the cops found her later, her teeth knocked out, her arm amputated, her private parts cut open, her anus stuffed with gravel. Like Hector, she was in a Dumpster, having been left there to die, and over the next few days several other Guatemalans, who I suppose had some relationship to Maya's mother, were also found murdered.

But it didn't stop for the Big Man. His travails grew worse, and by midweek, he was able to walk only with the help of serious painkillers.

I asked around, checked my other sources, even went out to see Bookbinder, but the first facts proved true, and no one knew of a way to get around the witch's handiwork.

I stayed away, stayed home, tried to stay out of it, tried not to think about it, but finally he called me in, and I went. There was almost no trace left of that hard, confident crime lord I'd met the first day. He was broken and blubbering, drunk and wasted, and he told me that he wanted to hang himself.

Only he was too weak to do it on his own.

I told him he could have some of his men help him, but he said he didn't want them to do it and they probably wouldn't anyway. He also wanted to make sure he did everything right, that nothing went wrong.

"You're the only one who knows that shit," he said, his voice slurred.

I nodded reluctantly.

He grabbed my shoulder. I think he wanted to make sure he had my full attention, but it seemed more as though he used me to steady himself. "I don't want to suffer after death," he whispered. His eyes were feverish, intense. "And I don't want that wetback bitch to win." His voice rose. "Your daughter was the best fuck I ever had!" he shouted to the air. "I took that whore the way she liked it! I gave her what she wanted! I gave her what she wanted!"

I left him in the bedroom, went out to the garage and found a rope, and set it up, throwing it over the beam, tying the knots.

He changed his mind at the last minute. A lot of people do. It's a hard way to go, a painful, ugly way, and the sec­ond he jumped off the chair, he started to claw at the rope and flail away in the air.

I thought about helping him. Part of me wanted to help him.

But I didn't.

I let him thrash about, watching him die, until he was still. I'll probably go to hell for that, but I can't seem to muster up much remorse for it. I wish I could say that I let him die for his own sake, so Maya's mother wouldn't own his soul, but the truth was that I did it because I wanted him dead. I thought we'd all be better off without him.

"That's for Hector," I said softly.

I stood there for a moment more, watching him swing, and I actually did feel bad. No one deserved what had hap­pened to the Big Man, and I was glad he'd escaped, glad he wouldn't have to suffer it anymore.

But I was also glad he was gone.

I walked out of the bedroom, down the hallway to the front of the house, where I found one of his men eating crackers in the kitchen.

"Call the cops," I said. "He's dead."

The flunky looked at me dumbly. He knew what had gone down, but it still seemed to catch him off guard. "What'll I tell them?"

I patted his cheek on my way out. "Don't worry. You'll think of something."

I walked outside and got in my car, driving as quickly as I could away from the house. The air in the vehicle was sti­fling, but I didn't mind, and I felt as though I'd just been re­leased from a prison as I followed the dirt road through the desert, past the crosses and the doll parts and the skull-headed scarecrows, toward the distant white smog of Phoenix, shimmering in the heat.

Colony

When H. R. Haldeman died, I found myself thinking about the labyrinthine nightmare that was Watergate. Which led me to think about conspiracy theories. What if Haldeman wasn't really dead? I thought. What if he was only pretending to be dead but had really gone underground?

Why, though? What would be the reason?

Years later, when Hong Kong reverted back to China, I was reminded of Britain's war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands (or Islas Malvinas). I had not known until the war that Britain had any remaining colonies. I'd been under the impression that the em­pire was history. Obviously I was wrong, and I won­dered if there were other far-flung properties under British rule that I did not know about.

Somewhere down the line, those two unrelated bits of random speculation coalesced into this story.

***

It was awkward.

He had campaigned on a cost-cutting platform, pledging to reduce spending and staff, and now with the White House employees all assembled before him, he wanted to remain impassive, impartial, detached.

But he could not. These were real people before him. Real people with real jobs and real bills to pay. On the cam­paign trail, they'd been merely a faceless statistic, a theoret­ical conceit. But now as Adam stared out at the faces of these workers, many of whom had been employed here for longer than he'd been alive, he felt embarrassed and ashamed. He realized, perhaps for the first time, that his de­cisions for the next four years would have human conse­quences, would take their toll on individual lives—not an earth-shattering conclusion by any means, but one which he now understood emotionally as well as intellectually.

He was not going to go back on his promises, though. As hard as it was, as painful as it might be, he was going to stick to the specifics of his campaign platform. There would be none of the waffling and indecision and half measures that had so afflicted his predecessors.

Hell, that's what he had criticized and run against in his bid for the presidency.

It was why he had been elected.

He'd been intending to announce the layoffs here and now, to do the firings en masse and get them over with, but he could not. Instead, he smiled out at his domestic staff and gave a generic "We're-All-In-This-Together, Let's-Put-Our-Petty-Differences-Aside-For-The-Good-Of-The-Country" speech. It had worked well in Dallas and Tampa, had knocked 'em dead in a longer variation at the nominating convention and after the general election, and it sufficed here in a more specific, more intimate incarnation.

He smiled and waved at the applauding workers, walked away, and turned toward Tom Simons, his chief of staff, as he headed down the hall to the Oval Office. "I want a list of all employees, their job positions, and their years of service. Also get me that cost-cutting analysis we put together."

"You got it."

"I'll speak to the groups individually, by job classifica­tion, explain the situation."

Simons nodded. "You want to do it in the Oval Office?"

"Yeah."

"I'll get right on it."

They parted halfway down the corridor and Adam con­tinued on to the Oval Office alone. He was struck each time he entered the room by how small it was. All the rooms in the White House were smaller than he'd imagined them to be. The building had been designed and constructed a long time ago, of course, but he'd expected the rooms to be big­ger than those in his Palm Springs house, and the fact that they weren't left him feeling disappointed and a little un­easy.

He walked over to his desk, sat down, swiveled his chair I, around to look out the window. He was filled with a strange I lethargy, a desire to just sit here and do nothing. For the first I time in his life, he had no real boss, no one standing over I him, and if he chose to unplug his phone and spend the afternoon staring out at the lawn, he could do so.

Power.

There would be demands on his time, of course. Obliga­tions and commitments. A lot of pressure, a lot of responsi­bility. But the federal government ran itself for the most part. He didn't need to micromanage everything. And if he wanted to, he could simply let it all slide.

No. He had to stop thinking that way. He had gone after this job for a reason. He had ideas. He had an agenda. And I he planned to go down in history as an effective activist, as a competent administrator and visionary leader, not as the first slacker president.

Simons led in the first group of employees—butlers and maids—sometime later, and Adam stood, smiling blandly, wanting to appear friendly and personable but not wanting to instill a false sense of security. "I'm sure Mr. Simons told you why I've asked you here to the Oval Office." He nod­ded toward the chief of staff. "As I'm sure you're well aware, we have a fairly serious budget crisis facing us this year, and as I'm sure you're also aware, I promised the American people that I would cut government spending by a third and that I would not exempt myself from this edict. I will receive no special privileges but will sacrifice along with everyone else. This means, I'm afraid, that we will be eliminating some White House staff positions. We've looked at this from every angle, and while we've considered cutting the total number of employees by doing away with certain departments, we have decided that it is fairer to sim­ply cut each department by a third."

A balding elderly man in a butler's uniform stepped for­ward. "Excuse me, sir?"

Adam held up his hand. "Don't worry. The layoffs will be by seniority—"

"There aren't going to be any layoffs, sir. You can't make any cuts in staff."

Adam smiled sympathetically. "Mr.—?"

"Crowther, sir."

"Mr. Crowther, I understand your concern, and believe me I sympathize."

"I don't think you do understand, sir. I'm sorry, but you can't fire any of us."

"Can't fire you?"

"We report directly to Buckingham Palace."

Adam looked over at Simons, who shrugged, equally confused.

"We're not under you. We work for you, but we're not employed by you. Sir."

Adam shook his head. "Hold on here."

"We report to Buckingham Palace."

He was growing annoyed. "What does Buckingham Palace have to do with anything?"

"Ahh." The butler nodded. "I understand now. Nobody told you. No one explained to you."

"Explained what?"

"You are not the head of the United States government."

"Of course I am! I'm ... I'm the president!"

"Well, you are the president, but the presidency is a fic­tion, a powerless position created by the Palace. The presi­dent is a figurehead. Someone to make speeches and television appearances, to keep the masses happy."

"The president is the leader of the Free World."

"I'm afraid, sir, that that distinction belongs to the Queen of England."

Crowther was still as calm and unruffled as ever, and there was something unnerving about that. It was under­standable that the butler would try to save his job or the jobs of his friends, it was even conceivable that he would lie in order to accomplish that goal, but this was so bizarre, so far out of left field, that it made no sense. If this was a lie, it was a damn creative one.

If this was a lie?

Adam looked into the butler's eyes.

Yes. If.

He licked his lips, cleared his throat, tried to project a confidence he did not really feel. "We fought and won a war of independence over two hundred years ago," he said. "The Declaration of Independence is our seminal national docu­ment."

"Independence?" The butler laughed. "America's not in­dependent. That was a PR stunt to placate the natives."

The rest of the hired help was nodding in agreement.

Adam felt cold. There was nothing to indicate that this was a joke, and the casual, almost nonchalant way in which the butlers and maids were reacting to the whole situation gave everything a boost of verisimilitude. He looked over at Simons for help, but his chief of staff was staring blankly back at him, obviously shaken.

Did Simons believe it?

Yes, he thought. And he did, too. He did not know why, but he knew that Crowther was telling the truth, and as he stared out at the faces of the domestic staff, he felt like the stupidest kid in class, the one who did not catch on to con­cepts until well after everyone else.

His entire worldview and take on history had been in­stantly changed by a meeting with a group of servants he'd intended to fire.

He took a deep breath. "You're saying we're ... still a colony?"

"Quite right, sir."

"But independence is the bedrock of our national charac­ter. We pride ourselves on not only our national independ­ence but our personal freedom. Our individuality is what makes us American."

"And we encourage that. It is why America is our most productive colony."

Colony.

It was as if all of the air had been vacuumed out of his lungs. He licked his lips, trying to drum up some saliva. He had never been so frightened in his life. Not during his first term as a senator when he'd been broke and read in the newspaper that the staff member with whom he had been having an affair was about to file a multimillion dollar sex­ual harassment suit against him, not when he'd been on the Armed Services committee and a right-wing wacko who had |; threatened his life showed up after hours at his home. He did not know why he was so scared, but he was, and the Oval Office felt suddenly hot, stifling. Five minutes ago, he had intended to keep one of his minor campaign promises to the nation and lay off some members of the White House staff. Now he was cowering before a group of servants, intimi­dated by their unnatural calm, by their proper British ac­cents. He felt powerless, impotent, emasculated, but he forced himself to maintain the facade, to keep up the benev­olent leader demeanor. "I'm sorry," he said. "I don't believe you."

"That's perfectly all right, sir. Nixon and Carter had a dif­ficult time believing it as well." Crowther smiled. "Ford and Reagan accepted it instantly."

He couldn't resist. "Clinton? The Bushes?"

"They all got used to it, sir. As will you."

"So you're saying the United States is ruled by ... ?"

"The queen."

"But the queen's a figurehead as well. Britain has a par­liamentary democracy—"

The butler chuckled. "Parliamentary democracy? No such thing. Again, it keeps the peasants happy, makes them think they're somehow involved. The truth is, the prime minister's like you. A front. It's the queen who runs every­thing. Always has, always will."

"You're lying."

"I'm not."

"I don't accept this. I was elected by a majority of the citizens of the United States to be their leader, and I will not take orders from anyone else."

"Oh yes you will, sir. You will take your orders from the queen."

Adam faced the butler. "And I damn sure won't take any orders from a two-bit monarch with a tabloid—"

"Stop right there, sir." There was something threatening in the butler's stance now, an intimation of menace in his voice. "You will bow before the queen and you will most as­suredly submit to her authority."

"And if I don't?"

"We had Kennedy shot; we can arrange something for you as well."

There was silence in the Oval Office.

He faced Crowther, trying not to let his nervousness show."The queen ordered—?"

"The queen had nothing to do with it, sir. It was a deci­sion by the operatives in this country, based on her own best interests. She was never told." He paused. "There are a lot of things we have not told the queen."

"Then you are disloyal."

"I beg to differ, sir. Sometimes the queen does not realize where her own interests lie. It is our responsibility to deter­mine what is best for her and best for the motherland and carry out those actions to the best of our abilities."

The butler looked from Adam to Simons. "I'm sure you two would like to be alone for a while so you can ... absorb all this, so we will leave you in peace." He motioned with his head and the maid nearest the door opened it. The ser­vants began filing out. "When would you like to meet again, sir?"

"Never."

Crowther chuckled. "Very well. You will let me know."

He let himself out of the room, closing the door behind him with a flourish that could only be considered mocking.

Adam turned toward his chief of staff. "So what do you make of that?"

Simons was shaking his head, still not able to speak.

"You think it's true?"

Simons nodded. "Looks that way."

"So what do we do?"

"What can we do?"

"Before we can do anything, I need to know the chain of command. Are we going to be simply following orders, or are we going to be given a certain level of autonomy?"

Simons smiled wryly. "You mean, is the queen a micro-manager?"

Adam snorted. "The queen. Can you believe this shit? Did you ever, in your wildest fucking dreams, ever think that something like this could happen?"

"What amazes me is the extent of it. They've corrupted our history from its simplest to its most complex level, from grammar school civics to graduate public policy. Every sin­gle person not directly involved in this ... travesty believes the same lie. In all my years in politics, in all my years of public life, I've never even had any suspicions that some­thing like this could be the case."

"I was a senator for twelve years," Adam said. "How do you think I feel, knowing that all of my effort and hard work was merely irrelevant grease for the public relations ma­chine?" He kicked the swivel chair behind his desk. "Fuck!"

"What are we going to do?" Simons asked.

"I don't know."

"What do you want to do?"

Adam thought for a moment, looked at him. "I want," he said quietly, "to secure our country's independence."

***

They met that night, his election team, in a Denny's cof­fee shop. Derek, his dirty trickster, was along to scan for bugs or other listening devices, and when he'd checked the table and the surrounding plastic plants and had set up a small black square to detect long-range microphone waves, they started talking.

"The first thing we need to do," Simons said, "is get the First Lady out of here. We need to send her on a goodwill trip to Japan or something. Get her as far away from British influence as possible. Who knows how low they'd stoop?"

Adam nodded. "Agreed."

Paul Frederickson cleared his throat. The secretary of state had been with him ever since his first senatorial cam­paign and, next to Simons, Adam trusted his opinion more than anyone else's.

"Go ahead, Paul."

"I think what we need to do first is discover the extent of the infiltration. This Crowther told you that all of the previ­ous presidents had come around. Does that mean that they'd been converted, that they truly believed this was the best form of government for the United States, or does that mean that they accepted the way things were but didn't like it?"

"I would suspect the latter." Ted Fitzsimmons.

"We need to talk to them, find out how much they know. They can probably tell the players well enough to put to­gether a scorecard we can use."

"Good idea," Adam said.

"We need to know about the various branches as well. Ju­diciary? Do the members of the Supreme Court know? Leg­islative? Any senators? We know that not all of them know, but maybe some of them do. FBI? CIA? Branches of the military? We need to be able to assess our strengths and weaknesses before we can formulate a plan of action."

They talked through the night, into the wee hours of the morning, and Adam could barely keep his eyes open by the time they left the restaurant and split up. He felt good, though. Assignments had been delegated and at least a rough idea of where they were headed had been hashed out. He no longer felt as hopeless and despairing of the situation as he had when he'd called the meeting.

He said goodbye to Simons on the sidewalk, then got into the presidential limousine. "The White House," he told the driver.

"Yes sir." The man started the car, looked at him in the rearview mirror, smiled. "God save the queen."

Adam forced himself to smile back. "God save the queen."

The military was all his.

It was the best news he'd had all week. The only hold the British had over the armed forces was the basic lie, the knowledge that each and every person in uniform believed that the United States was a sovereign nation and that they were supposed to uphold the U.S. Constitution, democracy's blueprint.

But he was still commander in chief.

It was a loophole, although not a particularly practical one. What could he do? Stage a coup and invade Britain? It would look like war. People would think him a dangerous lunatic, irrationally attacking a longtime ally, and he'd be in­stantly impeached. He needed to wage a backstage battle, a behind-the-scenes war. He needed to free America from Britain without letting the public know. He needed to make the myth a reality.

But how?

War at least was feasible. He was commander in chief, and the military was one thing he did legitimately control. It was messy, but as a last resort it might have to do.

There was a knock on the door of the Oval Office and Si­mons entered, carrying a manila folder stuffed with papers.

"What have you found out?"

The chief of staff sat down in a chair on the opposite side of the desk and leaned forward, whispering, "The Secret Service is all theirs. Technically, the FBI's under their juris­diction as well, but we seem to have most of them. The di­rector has assured me that as many operatives as we need are at our disposal."

"Do you believe him?"

"Do we have a choice?"

"What about—"

"The other presidents? They won't talk. I don't know if they've been bought or threatened, but we can't get word one out of them."

"I can't believe that."

"Maybe they got to them before we could." He paused. "The Bushes seemed scared."

"CIA?"

"Theirs."

Adam thought for a moment. "The director can get us op­eratives?"

Simons nodded.

"Crowther. The butler," he said. "I want him gotten rid of."

"Do you think that's a good idea?"

"Consider it the first shot. We'll gauge from their reac­tion how they'll respond to ... other incidents."

For the first time since all this had started, Tom Simons smiled.

In the morning, his breakfast was not made, his clothes were not ready. When he returned to his bedroom, the sheets had not been changed.

"You'll pay for this," one of the maids hissed at him in the hallway.

He smiled at her, leaned forward. "You're next," he whis­pered, and he was gratified to see a look of fear cross her face. "Now make my fucking bed."

He continued down the hallway, feeling good. Simons had called first thing with the news: Crowther had been taken care of. Somehow, just knowing that cheered him up, made him feel better. The entire atmosphere of the White House seemed to have changed with this one bold stroke. He had been skulking around for the past two weeks, certain that the staff saw him as yet another weak puppet who had been cowed into submission, but now he walked boldly through the corridors, noting with pleasure that the domes­tic workers were all in fear of him.

Maybe they would be able to pull this off.

The others were waiting for him in the conference room. Derek had already swept the place for bugs and positioned his listening-device detector on the table, and twin sets of FBI agents were positioned at the doors.

"So what's our next move?" Adam asked.

Paul Frederickson looked up at him. "Nixon."

"Nixon?"

The secretary of state nodded. "I've been thinking about it for the past week. If the president is only a figurehead, then all that hype about Nixon's so-called imperial presi­dency has to be British disinformation. How could Nixon try to circumvent the Constitution and grab additional powers for himself when he never had the power attributed to him in the first place?"

Adam smiled. "Yes! He put up a fight. He tried to do what he was elected to do."

"And they crushed him. They must have been behind his disgrace."

"Get me whoever you can from Nixon's cabinet and staff, people who would know about this."

"Done," Frederickson said. "Haldeman's already on his way."

"Haldeman?" Adam frowned. "I thought he was dead."

"Reports of his death are greatly exaggerated. He's in hiding."

"Good," Adam said. "Now we're getting somewhere."

Simons spoke up. "Crowther said that Carter didn't buy into it either. You think—?"

"Carter wouldn't talk to us, but we could feel out some of his underlings, see what we can get."

Adam nodded. "Do it."

"Those Clinton scandals must have been played up for a reason as well. The pressure was kept on him even after he left office."

"Look into it."

There was a knock on the south door and one of the FBI agents opened it carefully. He spoke for a moment to the person outside, and then the door opened wider. Larry Her­bert, Frederickson's assistant walked in.

Followed by H. R. Haldeman.

He was older but still instantly recognizable. The crew cut was back, but its severity was offset by a pair of soften­ing bifocals. Haldeman nodded at them. "Gentlemen."

Frederickson stood, looked at his assistant. "I assume you briefed him on the way over?"

Haldeman sat down in an empty seat. "Yes, he did. And I must say that I'm very happy to have you people in the fight."

They talked about the Nixon days, about the memos from Buckingham Palace, the hotline calls from the queen, the prepared speeches that Nixon refused to give, the complic­ity of certain cabinet members. Crowther had been around then as well, and Haldeman was shocked to learn that Adam had had the butler eliminated.

"Just like that?" he said.

Adam felt a surge of pride. "Just like that."

Haldeman shook his head worriedly. "You don't know what you're in for. There are going to be repercussions."

"That's why you're here. So we can pick your brain. I did this intentionally, to raise the stakes."

Haldeman sighed.

"There's nothing you can give us?"

"We've been training paramilitary groups for years, planning to overthrow the British."

"The militias?"

Haldeman snorted, waved his hand dismissively. "Para­noid cranks. And those hayseeds are too stupid to be able to handle something like this. No, we put together the inner-city gangs. We founded the Crips, the Bloods, and their brethren. We'd recruited minorities for the military in Viet­nam and it worked beautifully, so we decided to do the same with our revolutionary force. We couldn't let the British know what was happening, though, so we disguised them as independent organizations, rival youth groups fighting over drugs and neighborhood turf. We established them as crimi­nals, made sure they got plenty of publicity, plenty of air-time on news programs, and now they're believed to be such an intrinsic part of contemporary American life that even if one of them breaks ranks the myth is secure."

"You think it'll work?"

"Eventually. But we've already been doing this for twenty years, and we probably won't be ready for another ten or fifteen. We don't have the numbers. Britain can recruit from Australia, Canada, all of their colonies. If we went at them right now, we wouldn't stand a chance. Besides, some­thing like this takes planning."

"We need more immediate results."

"Sorry. I can't help you there."

They continued talking, sharing secrets, comparing strategies until midafternoon. Haldeman had to fly back to Chicago, and Adam walked with him to the limo. "Thank you for coming," he said, shaking the other man's hand.

"Anything for my country," Haldeman said.

Adam smiled. "You still think of this as your country?"

"Always."

Adam watched the limo roll down the drive and through the White House gates, and suddenly an idea occurred to him. He hurried back into the White House. Several of his advisors had suggested that the entire domestic staff be ex­ecuted as a way of provoking British forces in Washington to show themselves, but after talking to Haldeman he knew that that would be a suicidal gesture. This idea, though, was a good one.

This idea might work.

He ran into Simons in the corridor. "Gather everyone to­gether again," he said. "I have a plan."

"Hello?"

Even on the amplified speakerphone of the hotline, the queen's voice was distant, muffled.

"Greetings, Your Majesty." Adam made sure his tone was properly subservient.

"Why are you contacting us? If we wish to speak with you, we will initiate the dialogue."

"I'm calling to apologize, Your Majesty. As you may or may not have heard, there's been some miscommunication here at our end. Apparently, some of your subjects seem to believe that I and my people are somehow involved in the disappearance of the head of my domestic staff, Crowther."

"We have heard rumors to that effect."

He attempted to make his voice sound simultaneously obsequious toward her and condescending toward everyone else. "I would like to invite you to the White House so that we might have a face-to-face discussion on some of these matters. I am afraid I am fairly dissatisfied with some of your representatives here, and I believe you would be as well. I have nothing but the utmost respect for you and your position, and I fear that your underlings here are doing a dis­service to both you and Britain."

Silence on the other end.

He held his breath, waiting.

"It has been some time since we have visited the States," the queen allowed. "And your accusations, we must admit, are somewhat alarming. We will come to visit the colonies and judge for ourselves. The proper people will be in touch."

Communication was abruptly cut off, and there was only silence on the hotline's speakerphone. Adam stared at the red phone for a moment, then a smile spread slowly across his face.

He turned toward Simons, pumped his fist in the air.

"Yes!"

***

She arrived on the Concorde two days later.

All the arrangements had been made. Outside White House grounds, everything continued on as usual, but within, FBI agents had rounded up and detained all domes­tic staff members and all known or suspected British agents. Outside contacts and government workers who were suspi­cious about the sudden lack of communication were pla­cated with the promise that the queen would be arriving to sort everything out—a fact they could double-check with Buckingham Palace.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had assured him that the National Guard was ready for its demonstration and that the other branches of the armed forces were available as backup.

Everything was in place.

The second the limousine carrying the queen passed onto the White House grounds, and the iron gates closed behind it, National Guard troops blocked off the street and sur­rounded the area. Simultaneously, the White House press secretary put out the news that a bomb threat had been made against the queen and that precautions—including the use of armed guards—were being taken.

Adam waited in the Oval Office, the document he'd had drawn up by the chief justice of the Supreme Court sitting on his desk, a pen next to it. He was nervous, hands sweaty, but he was determined to go through with the plan. He would be assassinated if they failed—he had no doubt about that—but there was a good chance that they would not fail.

He was imagining his place in history when there was a knock on the door. He stood, composed himself, cleared his throat. "Yes?" he enquired.

The door opened and a host of British dignitaries and American cabinet members entered the room, parting to allow the queen to pass by.

The queen.

She looked just like she did on TV and in magazine pho­tographs. Even knowing the extent of her power, even with all the knowledge of her position that he'd gained recently, he could sense no aura of exaggerated importance about her, no intimidating demeanor, none of the dictatorial trappings he would have expected. It was an illusion, though. He knew that. And he bowed extravagantly as she stopped before his desk. "Your Majesty."

She acknowledged his servility with a barely perceptible nod and sat down in the specially provided chair opposite him. "Now," she said, "tell us what you have to say."

"I'd prefer to do this alone," he said, motioning toward the gathered dignitaries.

"Anything you say to us can be said in front of them."

"I'm afraid that they might have a vested interest. May we speak in private?"

She nodded, dismissing the others with a slight wave of her hand. Everyone else, American and British, filed out of the room. The door closed behind them.

Outside the office, Adam knew, FBI agents were disarm­ing and subduing the British, herding them downstairs with their compatriots. A trickle of sweat slid from under his left armpit, down the side of his body, hidden by his suit jacket.

"I want a guarantee that there aren't going to be any repercussions simply because I tell you the truth."

"We give you our word," she told him.

" 'Our' word? What about your word? I don't mean to be disrespectful," he said, "but I'd like some assurances that you, personally, guarantee that your underlings will not seek reprisals."

She looked at him as if he was a bug she had squashed on the floor. "You have my word," she said.

"And that is legally binding?"

"The word of the British sovereign has been legally bind­ing for hundreds of years. It is law."

"Very well." He stood, pushed the document and pen across the desk toward her. "I want you to sign this."

The queen blinked. "What did you say to me?"

"I want you to sign this document."

She regarded him with an expression centered some­where between horror, disgust, and outrage. "You dare to make demands on us?”

He met her eyes. "Yes."

He saw hesitance, what might be the first faint stirrings of apprehension, and it made him feel good.

"What is this?" she demanded, motioning toward the document.

"A real declaration of independence. A contract ceding the United States of America to its citizens and declaring that you and your nation relinquish all rights—"

"Never!"

"Never say never."

"Pembroke!" she called loudly. "Lewis!"

There was a pause.

Silence.

"They're not coming," Adam said. "We've captured them." He walked slowly around the huge desk. "Now all we need is your signature."

"You're loony!"

"Maybe so, but you're going to sign that contract."

"I most certainly will not!" In one quick movement, she was out of her chair, across the room, and almost to the door. He lunged at her, and she stepped aside, allowing him to shoulder the wall. He felt a sharp pain in his side as she jabbed him with a bony fist.

"Goddamn it!" He reached for her arm, but she was al­ready running away, toward the opposite side of the office, yelling for help.

He tackled the queen, and her purse flew across the Oval Office. She was small but wiry, and she squirmed out of his grasp, kicking him hard in the chest with a high-heeled shoe. She scrambled for her purse and was opening it, pulling something out, when he landed on her. He wrenched her right arm behind her back, causing her to cry out. Still hold­ing her, he struggled to his feet and forced her over to the desk.

He held her around the neck with his left hand, while he loosened his grip on her arm with his right. "Sign it!" he or­dered, forcing her hand onto the desk.

"Fuck you!" she screamed. She tried to break away, but he was stronger than she was and she received only a more tightly pinched neck in return.

"Pick up the pen!" he ordered.

"No!"

"I'll break your arm, you shriveled old bitch." He in­creased the pressure.

Angrily, she picked up the pen.

He held her hand to the paper. "Sign it."

She hesitated.

"Now!" he screamed.

She quickly scrawled her signature. He moved her over to the left side of the desk and compared her written name with the example of her signature Simons had provided.

It was good.

He let her go.

A surge of pride coursed through him, an expression of pure patriotism he had not felt since ... well, ever.

The queen had run immediately to the door and was rub­bing her sore wrist, begging to be released. She was crying, and he thought with satisfaction that she wasn't such a tough old broad after all.

He picked up the document, placed it in his middle desk drawer, and locked it.

The United States was officially a sovereign nation.

They were free.

He looked at the queen. She was no longer crying, and he could see no tears on her overly made-up face, but she was still frowning and rubbing her wrist, and he smiled at her, feeling good.

"God bless America," he said.

Confessions of a Corporate Man

I worked as a technical writer in the early 1990s be­cause at the time I could not support myself writing fiction. Being a bearded, long-haired liberal arts guy, I found it a bit surreal after seven years of college to find myself sitting in an office surrounded by well-groomed business, accounting, and public administra­tion types. Even more surreal was how seriously they took their petty little turf wars and how ridiculous were their priorities.

"Confessions of a Corporate Man" is my slightly exaggerated take on those days.

***

We sharpened pencils for the War and walked over to Ac­counting en masse. The Finance Director and his minions were working on spreadsheets, and unsuspecting. We had the advantage of surprise.

We screamed as one, on my cue, and when the account­ants looked up, we drove the pencils through their eyes and into their brains. It was glorious. I was in charge of dis­patching the director himself, and I shoved the pencil in hard, feeling it puncture membrane and spear through gelatin into flesh. The director's fat hands lashed out, trying to grab me, but then he was twitching and then he was still.

I straightened up and looked around the department. The War had been awfully short, and we had won virtually with­out a fight. Bodies were already quiet and cooling, blood and eye juice leaking onto graph paper and computer print­outs.

We would get medals for this if we were working for any sort of fair corporation, but as it stood we would probably only get notepads to commemorate our victory.

I pulled my pencil out of the Finance Director's head and gave the high sign.

We were back at our desks before the end of Break

Restructuring went smoothly. Personnel were reassigned, duties shifted, and control of the company was decentral­ized. A temporary truce was called on account of our over­whelming victory, and all hostilities were suspended. A vice president was executed—beheaded in the Staff Lounge with a paper cutter—and we successfully managed to meet the Payroll.

The acting CEO refused to hire temps or to recruit out­side the organization, so we ended up making coffee during the period of Restructuring. I still felt we deserved medals, but this time we did not even get our notepads. Although the Dow took no notice of my triumph, our stock shot up five points on the Pacific Exchange, and I felt vindicated.

We sent condoms through the Vacuum Tubes, back and forth, forth and back, and the women in the Whorehouse did a thriving lunchtime business. New lubrication machines were installed in the Cafeteria.

There were more changes made. The secretaries no longer had to wear masks, and pets were once again allowed in the Steno Pool. Purchasing picked a crippled child for its mascot. Machine Services switched to a mollusk.

The next War would be catered, we said. For the next War we would have hot dogs.

We all laughed.

And then ...

And then things changed.

A questionnaire began making the rounds of the depart­ments. A questionnaire on official black Bereavement sta­tionery. No one would take credit for its authorship, and word of its existence preceded by days its appearance in the Inter-Office Mail. We received the questionnaire on Thurs­day, along with a note to complete it and return it to Person­nel by Friday morning, and we were afraid to disobey.

"If Batman were a fig," it asked, "would he still have to shave?"

"If the president was naked and straddling a bench, would his mama's stickers still have thorns?"

The mood in our department grew somber, and there was a general feeling that the questionnaire had something to do with our routing of Accounting. In an indirect way, I was blamed for its existence.

I was pantsed on the day our Xerox access was denied.

I was paddled on the day our Muzak was cut off.

A month passed. Two. Three. There was another execu­tion—a sales executive who failed to meet his quotas—but the uneasy truce remained between departments, and the War did not resume. No battles were fought.

In June, when the Budget was submitted for the New Fiscal Year, we discovered that it contained a major capital outlay for construction of a new Warehouse near the Crema­torium. If the corporation was doing well enough to finance such frivolity, why had we never received our notepads?

Morale was low enough as it was, and I decided that our efforts needed to be rewarded—even if we had to do the re­warding ourselves. With funds liberated from the Safe, we bankrolled a Friday afternoon party. I brought the drinks, Jerry the chips, Meryl supplied the music, and Feena sup­plied the frogs. There was nude table dancing.

It was a hot time in the old office that day, but the party was cut short by Mike from Maintenance. He'd come up to install some coax cable, and when he saw that we were en­joying ourselves on company time, his face clouded over. He stood silently and whipped Kristen hard with a length of cable. She screamed as the connector end bit into the flabby flesh of her buttocks. A drop of blood flew into my highball, and Kristen fell from the desk, clutching her backside.

I turned on Mike. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

He pointed a dark stubby finger in my face. I could see the grease under his fingernails. "This party was not ap­proved."

"I approved it," I told him. "I'm head of the department."

He grinned at me, but the corners of his mouth did not turn up and it looked more like a grimace. His greasy finger was still pointing at me. "We're taking you out," he said. "This is War."

It started immediately.

I'd expected some lag time, a reasonable number of days in which attempts could be made to talk, communicate, ne­gotiate. I'd assumed, at the very least, that Maintenance would need time to draw up plans, map out a strategy, but it was clear that they must have been contemplating this for a while.

It began the morning after the party.

The bathroom was booby-trapped and Carl got caught.

I'd always allowed him a little leeway and so didn't im­mediately go looking for him when he did not return from lunch on time. But when an hour passed and Carl still had not shown, I became suspicious. Taking David with me, I ventured into the Hall. My eyes were drawn instantly to the crude white cross painted on the door of the men's room.

And to Carl's head posted on the cleaning cart outside.

David gasped, but I grabbed his arm and drew him for­ward. Carl's head was impaled on the handle of a mop. His eyes had been stapled shut, his mouth Scotch-taped, and Kleenex had been shoved into his ears.

Maintenance.

"Come on!" I quickly pulled David back into the safety of our department. I was worried but tried not to let it show. I had to maintain the illusion of confidence in order to keep up morale, but I realized that Maintenance was the only de­partment allowed unlimited access to every room in the building, the only department whose workers remained in the building at night. Their potential power was incredible.

"What'll we do?" Meryl asked. She was scared, practi­cally shaking.

"Stockpile the weapons," I told her. I turned to David and Feena. "Post a watch in the doorways. No one gets in or out without my okay. I don't care who they are."

They nodded and hurried to carry out my orders, grateful that there was someone to take charge, someone to tell them what to do. I wished at that moment that there was a person to whom I could turn, a person higher up on the hierarchical ladder to whom I could pass the buck, but I had gotten us into this and it was up to me to get us out.

I felt woefully unprepared for such a task. I had been able to plan and pull off the Accounting coup because I'd been dealing with the tunnel-visioned minds of task-oriented number crunchers, but going up against the freewheeling, physical men from Maintenance was quite another matter. These minds were not constrained by the limits of their job descriptions. These were people who were accustomed to working on their own, who were used to dealing with prob­lems individually.

I shut the door, locked it, waited for five o'clock.

In the Whorehouse, the women were getting restless. The number of work orders had dropped, and the lack of trade left them with no department accounts to which they could charge expenses. The women blamed the demise of Ac­counting for their falling fortunes, and tremors against my department and myself moved from the ground up, echoing through the chain of command. The Break Room was de­clared off-limits to us, its entrance guarded by Maintenance men. We could no longer leave our desks to go to the bath­room.

This was Mike's doing.

We found John in the Burster.

Al in the Forms Decollator.

I had not thought either machine capable of performing its function on anything other than paper, but at the foot of the Burster, in a pile that would have been neat were it not for the formlessness of tissue and the liquidity of blood, was the body of John, trimmed neatly and cut into legal-sized squares.

Al's body had been divided into three layers and the parts lay separated in the metal rows designed for tripartite forms.

The rollers were covered with red blood and flecks of white tissue.

It was only the fourth day of hostilities and already we had lost two of our best men. I had not expected things to become so serious so quickly, and I knew that this mis­calculation might cost us our lives.

I spent that morning's Break with Jerry and David. We were Breaking in teams now, going to the Break Room heavily armed. We sat down at a table, facing the door. All three of us knew that we had to hit back hard and fast, and at the very least make a statement with our actions, but we were uncertain as to how we should proceed. Jerry wanted to ambush a custodian, take him out. He thought we should amputate the arms, legs, and penis and send them back to Mike through the Vacuum Tubes or the Inter-Office Mail. David said we should sabotage the Coffee Machine, poison the backup Coffee Maker, and send a memo to all depart­ments except Maintenance to inform them of what was hap­pening.

I thought we should strike at the head, assassinate Mike, and both of them quickly agreed that that would be best.

We returned to our department, alert for snipers in the hall, but something did not seem quite right. I looked past Computer Operations and saw what looked like refracted light from around the corner of the hallway.

From the battle site.

I said nothing, simply pushed Jerry and David into our department and ordered them to close and lock the door. When the door was shut, I continued down the hall, creep­ing slowly across the carpet. I heard the sound of clicking calculators, the rustle of paper. I peeked my head around the corner.

Maintenance had been promoted to Accounting.

I stared at the suddenly full department in disbelief. We had brought down the entire Accounting department and had received nothing for our efforts. Maintenance booby-trapped the bathroom and two machines and had been re­warded with a promotion!

Mike, wearing the Three-Piece Suit of the Finance Di­rector, grinned at me from his oversized desk. "See you in Chapter Eleven," he said.

I blinked.

"The company's going down."

I tried to see the CEO, to tell him that things had gotten out of hand. The War was no longer confined merely to intra­mural battles; a single department was now aggressively pursuing and systematically working toward the total de­struction of the Corporation.

But the secretary refused to hear my petition. She drew from her desk a flowchart of the Corporation hierarchy, cir­cled in red the position of my department, and calmly handed the paper to me.

"The CEO sees nobody," she said.

On the Dow, the news was mixed. There were rumors that changes were afoot, but the nature of those changes was clearly not known to Outsiders, and we ended the week in plus territory.

Jerry took out a custodian masquerading as an account­ant, cutting off arms, legs, and genitals, tagging them as Fixed Assets and returning them to the Finance Director's office. I probably should have disciplined him for acting without my okay, but, in truth, I was grateful, and I pro­moted him to division supervisor.

We hung the custodian/accountant scalp above the top of our door, and though it was gone in the morning, our point had been made. Mike knew we were a department to fear.

That afternoon, miniature mines were placed under the carpet in the hallway and electrified gates were installed outside the Accounting offices.

Figures were juggled.

Budgets were slashed.

The Corporation's profit margin plummeted, at least on paper, and though in memo after memo I tried to tell the CEO that those numbers were manufactured by Mike and not to be trusted, he chose to ignore me and instituted a waist-tightening program. Medical benefits were cut, dental benefits eliminated, and several open positions were left un­filled.

A new and virtually incomprehensible complaint process was instituted by Accounting, and immediately afterward paychecks—all paychecks, Corporation-wide—were incor­rectly calculated. My paycheck was halved, and under the new guidelines I could not contest the figures for a minimum of six months.

At the bottom of my check, instead of the rubber-stamped signature of the old Finance Director, was a carica­tured rainbow-colored stamp of Mike's grinning, ugly face.

I was furious, and I slammed my check down on my desk, ordered David to take a hostage. He nodded, said, "Yes sir," but wouldn't look at me, wouldn't meet my gaze.

I knew he was hiding something. "David," I said.

"Meryl's defected," he told me. "She's transferred over as a clerk."

That was it. That was the last straw. I had taken an awful lot of crap from Mike and his Maintenance accountants, but this time he had gone too far. Ceasefire or no ceasefire, it was time to take up arms.

"War!" I cried.

David stared, blinked, then the corners of his mouth turned upward. He whooped joyfully, grabbed a sharpened pencil. "War!"

The cry was taken up by Feena, Jerry, Kristen, the others. I felt good all of a sudden, the anger and depression of a few moments before having fled in the face of this energizing purpose. This was what we were good at. This was what we were trained for. Full-fledged fighting. Not the guerilla skir­mishing in which we'd been forced to participate.

I lifted my ruler. "War!"

"Huh!" they responded. "Good God, ya'll!"

We were ready.

We posted the declaration of renewed hostilities on the Employee Bulletin Board.

Mike responded in kind with a statement signed in blood.

We met in the Warehouse.

The Maintenance men had heavier weapons—hammers and screwdrivers, wire cutters and soldering guns—but we had the brains, and at close quarters our weapons—scissors and staplers, X-Acto knives and paper clips—were just as deadly.

It was a short war, and more one-sided than I would have expected. Mike planned an ambush, but the positioning of his men was obvious and uninspired, and it was easy for my people to sneak behind them and stab them with the scissors. We entered through the back, through the Loading Dock, and David took out two custodians, Jerry bringing down their heaviest hitter, the Electrician, slitting his throat with an X-Acto knife.

And then it was me and Mike.

We faced each other on the floor of the Warehouse. Rep­resentatives from other departments were in attendance, peeking from behind boxes, sitting on shelves. Mike had a hammer in one hand, pliers in the other, and he kept saying, "Fucker, fucker," growling it. He seemed stupid to me, then. Stupid and almost pathetic, and I wondered how I could have ever feared someone with such an obviously limited vocabulary.

I grinned at him. "You're going down," I said.

I shot him in the eye with a paper clip, quickly reloaded my rubber band, and shot his other eye. Both shots were true, and though he didn't drop the hammer or pliers, he was screaming, shielding his damaged eyes with his right arm. I had a metal ruler in my belt, and I pulled it out, moving in close. He heard me coming, swung at me, but he was blinded and running on panic, and I hit his cheek with the ruler, followed it with a flat-out smack to the nose. He dropped the pliers, swung futilely with the hammer, but he'd lost and he knew he'd lost, and to the cheers of my depart­ment I leaped upon him, tearing open his neck with my sta­ple remover, the metal fangs ripping out chunks of his flesh as he squealed in pain and rage and fear.

And then it was over.

There was silence for a moment, then pandemonium. From behind one of the boxes rushed the CEO's secretary, and she tried to hug me, but I pushed her away. "Remember your place in the hierarchy," I told her.

We were carried back to our offices on the shoulders of Computer Operations and the dwarves.

To celebrate our victory, we performed the Ritual. I or­dered a virgin from the steno pool, a high school grad who had been destined for the Whorehouse because of her poor shorthand skills, and we tied her down with rubber bands and laid her out on top of my desk. Feena rubber-cemented shut her eyes; I Wited-Out her nipples. We took turns with her.

I shrunk Mike's head and kept it on my desk as a paper­weight, and when the stock market reached record levels, led by our corporation, I sent his head to the CEO through the Inter-Office Mail.

This time, we got our notepads.

Blood

Before I moved in with my wife, I lived on macaroni and cheese. I spent so much time standing in front of my stove, stirring pots of boiling macaroni, that I used to stare down into the swirling, roiling water and imagine that I could see shapes in the foam the way some people see shapes in clouds.

I decided to write a story about it.

***

Alan stood and stretched as the whistle blew and halftime began. His gaze moved downward from the television to the clock on the VCR. Twelve forty. No wonder his stomach was growling.

He walked into the kitchen, took a medium-sized glass pot from the drying rack next to the sink, filled it with water, sprinkled in some salt, placed the pot on the stove's front burner, and turned the gas to "High." Opening the cupboard, he drew out a package of macaroni and cheese. He pulled off the top of the box, took out the small foil packet of dried cheese, and dumped the macaroni into the water.

It would be several minutes before the water started to boil, he knew. Not wanting to stand there in the kitchen, he returned to the living room and switched channels on the TV until he found another game. He watched it until a commercial came on, then went to the bathroom to wash his hands. When he returned to the kitchen to check on his lunch, small bubbles were starting to rise through the clear water from the hill of macaroni at the bottom of the pot. He quickly took a spoon from the drawer and began stirring, scraping. He didn't want the macaroni to stick to the bottom. It was hell to wash, almost impossible to get off.

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and looked down idly as he stirred. The water bubbled, a thin film of white foam seeping upward from the macaroni and whirlpooling into the center of the pot. The foam thickened, thinned, swirling about as he stirred, maintaining a roughly circular shape even as the metal spoon cut through its heart, sliced its edges.

He stared at the water, fascinated both by the amazing mechanics of boiling and by the shifting patterns of the bub­bles and the film on top. The effect was kaleidoscopic, though the only colors he could see were the translucent brown of the Vision Ware, the pale wheat of the macaroni, and the pure white of the foam. He continued to look down as he stirred, imagining he could make out vague shapes in the boiling water, impressionistic outlines of elephants and birds and—

a face.

He peered closely at the contents of the pot, hardly be­lieving what he was seeing. He blinked. The features of the face, formed by clear spaces in the white foam circle, were somehow familiar to him though he could not immediately place their antecedent. As the water bubbled, individual pieces of macaroni rising to the top, the face seemed to move, eyes peering around, mouth opening and closing as if to speak.

He stopped stirring for a second.

The face smiled up at him.

Alan stepped backward as a chill passed through him. He was suddenly aware of the dim emptiness of the kitchen, of the fact that he was alone in the apartment. Unreasonably frightened, he shut off the gas. The bubbles died down as the heat disappeared, the foam face dissipating, swirling out­ward in fading tendrils to reveal the cooked macaroni below.

He was cold, but he was sweating, and he used a paper towel to wipe the sides of his face. His lips were dry, and he licked them, but his mouth had no saliva to spare. From the living room, he heard the roar of a football crowd. The noise sounded muffled, far off.

He thought for some reason of his mother, of his sister. Strange. He had not thought of them in years.

He looked down at the spoon shaking in his trembling hand. This was stupid. There was nothing to be afraid of. What the hell was wrong with him? Halftime would be over soon and the game would start again. He had to hurry up and finish lunch.

He turned the gas on again and tried not to pay attention as the still hot water began almost instantly to bubble. But he could not help noticing with a shiver of fear that the foam was again beginning to swirl, again beginning to take on the features of a face: eyes, nose, mouth.

He stirred. Quickly, harshly, rapidly. But the face re­mained intact.

He pulled out the spoon, afraid now to touch the water even through this metal conduit, and began to back away.

He heard a noise, a low whispery sound somewhere be­tween the quiet constant hissing of the gas flame and the percolating bubble of the boiling water. He had the distinct impression that the sound was a voice, a voice repeating a single word, but he could not make out what that word was. Summoning all of his courage, he looked into the pot.

The foam mouth closed, then opened, then closed, and seeing this movement timed with the whispering sound, he knew what word was being spoken.

"Blood," the face said. "Blood."

Blood.

What could that mean? He had spent all afternoon think­ing about it. More than anything else, the word had sounded to him like a command, an order.

A request for sustenance.

But that was crazy. A random pattern formed by boiling macaroni was demanding blood? If he had read this in a story, he would have dismissed it as laughably implausible. If he had heard someone else mention it, he would have con­sidered that person a candidate for the rubber room. But he was sitting here thinking about it, had been doing so for hours, and the scary part was that he was actually trying to logically, rationally, analyze the situation.

But that wasn't really the scary part, was it?

No, the scary part was not that he believed this was hap­pening and that therefore his mind was going. The scary part was that his mind was not going, that this thing really ex­isted. This creature, this being, this demon, this ghost, this whatever-it-was could actually be conjured up by making macaroni and cheese.

But could it be conjured up at any time, or was it only on Saturdays and only at lunchtime?

He didn't know.

That night the apartment seemed much darker than it did ordinarily. There were shadows on the sides of the couch and at the foot of the bed, echoes of darkness in the corners of the rooms.

He went to sleep early.

He left the lights on.

He dreamed of a man in a doorway with an ax.

He had the rest of the week to think about what had oc­curred. Afraid, he stayed away from the apartment as much as possible, leaving early for work, coming home late. He cooked no meals for himself but ate out for breakfast, lunch, and dinner: Jack in the Box, Der Weinerschnitzel, Taco Bell, McDonald's.

He'd thought the fear would abate with the coming of a new day, that as the hours passed the horror of the occur­rence would dim. He thought he'd be able to find a rational explanation for what he had seen, what he had heard.

But it had not happened.

He recalled with perfect and profound clarity the con­tours of the bubbly foam face, the way the boiling water had made it smile. He heard in his head the whispered word.

Blood.

There was nothing he could do, he realized. He could move, get a new apartment, but what would that accom­plish? The impetus for this horror might lie not in his home but in himself. He could never cook again, or at least never make macaroni and cheese, but he would always know that the face was there, waiting, unconjured, below the surface reality of his daily life.

Blood.

He had to confront it.

He had to try it again.

***

Everything was the same. He put in the water, put in the salt, put in the macaroni, turned on the flame, and out of the pot's swirling contents emerged a face. He was not as fright­ened this time, perhaps because he had been prepared for the sight, but he was nonetheless unnerved. He stared down at the white foam.

"Blood," the mouth whispered. "Blood."

Blood.

There was something hypnotic about the word, some­thing almost... seductive. It was still terrifying, still horri­fying, but there was also something attractive about it. As he looked at the face, saw its vague familiarity, as he listened to the whisper, heard its demand, Alan could almost under­stand what was wanted with the blood. In a perverse way that was not at all understood by his conscious mind, he felt that it made a kind of sense.

Outside, a dog barked. Alan looked up. The barking came closer, and through the open window he heard the sound of paws on the dirty sidewalk of his small patio. The animal continued to bark loudly, annoyingly.

Alan looked down into the swirling pot of macaroni.

"Blood," the face whispered.

Nodding to himself, Alan opened the cupboard under the sink and drew out the small hand-held hatchet he used to cut rope. He moved out of the kitchen and walked across the liv­ing room to the front door.

Apparently no one had ever done the dog harm or had in any way subverted the animal's natural trust. With virtually no coaxing at all, the innocent pet happily followed him into the apartment on the soothing-voiced promise of lunch. Alan searched through the kitchen for something resembling dog food, found a can of beef stew, and walked into the bath­room, dumping the contents of the can into the tub. The animal hopped over the low porcelain side and began grate­fully chowing down.

He cut off the dog's head with one chop of the hatchet.

Blood spurted wildly from the open neck and severed ar­teries, but he caught some of it in the water glass he used for brushing his teeth.

He hurried back to the kitchen and poured the blood slowly into the simmering pot. The blood swirled and whirlpooled into the center before mixing with the water and spreading outward. The foam turned red, the mouth smiled.

Alan stirred the macaroni. The mouth pursed, opened, closed, and beneath the bubble and hiss he heard a new whisper.

"Human," the face said, "blood."

Alan's heart began to pound, but he was not sure this time if it was entirely from fear.

His palms were sweaty and, as he wiped them on his pants, Alan told himself that he was being crazy. A dog was one thing. But he was about to cross over the line and com­mit a serious criminal act. A violent act. An act for which he could spend the rest of his life in jail. It was not too late to back out now. All he had to do was go home, throw away the pot, never make macaroni and cheese again.

He got out of the car, smiling at the child.

He used the hatchet to cut off the boy's arm.

The kid had not even started screaming by the time he had grabbed the arm, hopped in the car and taken off, the child's shocked brain not yet able to process the insane in­formation it was being fed by its senses. Alan dropped the arm into the bucket even as he put the car into gear.

It was a clean getaway.

Back home, curtains closed, he poured water into the pot, added salt, dumped in the package of macaroni. The face ap­peared as the water started to boil. It looked stronger this time, more clearly defined.

The mouth smiled at him as he poured in the child's blood.

As the water turned pink, then red, as he stared at the happy, bubblefoam face, he felt the mood shift in the kitchen, a palpable, almost physical, dislocation of air and space. He shivered violently. A change came over him, a subtle shifting of his thoughts and emotions, and he seemed to realize for the first time exactly what it was that he had done. The mad savagery of his actions, the complete insan­ity of his deeds hit him hard and instantly, and he was filled with a sudden horror and revulsion so profound that he stag­gered backward and began retching into the sink. For a few blissful seconds, he heard only the harsh sounds of his own vomiting, but when he stood, wiping his mouth, he realized that the kitchen was alive with the sounds of whispering. He heard the bubbling of the water, and above that the voice of the macaroni, calling to him, whispering promises, whisper­ing threats.

Against his will, he found himself once again leaning over the stove, looking into the pot.

"Make me," the face whispered. "Eat me."

Moving slowly, as if underwater, as if in a dream, he drained the macaroni, added butter, added milk, poured in the package of powdered cheese. The finished product was neither cheese orange nor blood red but a sickening muddy brown that looked decidedly unappetizing. Nevertheless, he dumped the contents of the pot into a bowl, brought it over to the table, and ate.

The aftertaste was salty and slightly sour, and it left his mouth dry. But when he drank a glass of milk, the taste dis­appeared completely.

After lunch, he chopped the boy's arm into tiny pieces, wrapped the pieces in plastic wrap, put them in an empty milk carton, buried the milk carton deep within the garbage sack, and took the sack out to the trash can in the garage.

That night, he dreamed that he was a small child. He was sleeping in his current bed, in his current bedroom, in his current apartment, but the furniture was different and the decorations on the wall consisted of posters of decades-old rock stars. From another room he heard screams, terrible I horrible heart-stopping screeches which were suddenly cut off in midsound. Part of his brain told him to break the win­dow and jump out, run, escape, but another told him to feign sleep. Instead he did neither, and he was staring wide-eyed at the door when it burst open.

The man in the doorway held an ax.

He woke up sweating, clutching his pillow as if it were a life preserver and he a drowning man who could not swim. He sat up, got out of bed, turned on the light. In the garage, he knew, the pieces of the boy's arm were lying individually wrapped inside a milk carton in the trash.

On the stove in the kitchen was the pot. And in the cup­board six boxes of macaroni and cheese.

He did not sleep the rest of the night but remained in a chair, wide awake, staring at the wall.

The next day was Monday, and Alan called in sick, ex­plaining to his supervisor that he had a touch of the stomach flu. In truth, he felt fine, and not even the recollection of what he had ingested had any emotional effect on his ap­petite.

He had two eggs, two pieces of toast, and two glasses of orange juice for breakfast.

All morning, he sat on the couch, not reading, not watch­ing TV, just waiting for lunchtime. He thought back on last night. The man in his dream, the man with the ax, had seemed vaguely familiar to him at the time, and seemed even more so now, but he could not seem to place the figure. It would have helped had he been able to see a face rather than just a backlit silhouette, but his memory had nothing to go on other than a bodily outline that somehow reminded him of a person from his past.

At eleven o'clock, he went into the kitchen to make lunch.

The face when it appeared was less ephemeral, more con­crete. There were wrinkles in the water, details in the foam, and the accompanying change that came over the kitchen was stronger, more obvious. A wall of air moved through him, past him. The light from the window dimmed, dying somehow before it reached even partway into the room. He looked down. This face was scarier, more brutal. Evil. It smiled, and he saw inside the mouth white bubble teeth. "Blood," it said.

Alan took a deep breath. "No."

"Blood."

Alan shook his head, licked his lips. "That's all. No more."

"Blood!" the face demanded.

Alan turned down the flame, watched the elements of the face disperse. Details dissolving into simplistic crudity.

"Blood!" the voice ordered, screaming.

And then it was gone.

***

The shabbily dressed man on the street corner was facing oncoming traffic, holding up a sign: I Will Work for Food. Alan drove by, shaking his head. He'd never seen such peo­ple before the Reagan years, but now they were impossible not to notice. This was the fourth man this month he'd seen holding up a similar sign. He felt sorry for such people, but he wasn't about to let one of them work at his home and he could not imagine anyone else doing so either. For all he knew, such a man would use the opportunity to scope out his house, check out his television, stereo, and other valuables, casing the joint for a future robbery. There was no way for a person such as himself to check out the credentials or refer­ences of a homeless man. No one knew who these men were—

No one knew who these men were.

Blood.

He felt the urge again, and he pulled into the parking lot of a supermarket and turned around. He did not want to, but he was compelled. It was as if another being had taken con­trol of the rational portion of his mind and was using the thought processes there to carry out its will while the real Alan was shunted aside and left screaming. He made an­other U-turn in the middle of the street and slowed down next to the homeless man, smiling.

"I need some help painting my bedroom," he said smoothly. "I'll pay five bucks an hour. You interested?"

"I sure am," the man said.

"Good. Hop in the car."

Alan killed the man in the living room while he was tak­ing off his coat. It was messy and ugly, and the blood spurted all over the tan carpet and the off-white couch, but it had to be done this way. The homeless man was bigger than he was and probably stronger, and he needed both the element of surprise and the partial incapacitation provided by the undressing in order to successfully carry out the mur­der.

The larger man stumbled, trying to get all the way out of his jacket and free his arms to defend himself, while Alan hacked at his neck with the hatchet.

It was a full ten minutes before he was lying still on the floor, and Alan filled up the measuring cup with his blood.

The macaroni and cheese tasted good.

He had a hard time going to sleep that night. Though his body was dog tired, his mind rebelled and refused to quiet down, keeping him awake until well after midnight.

When he finally did slip into sleep, he dreamed.

Again, it was the man in the doorway. But this time he could see the man's face, and he knew why the outline of the thick body was familiar, why the contours of the form were recognizable.

It was his father.

As always, his father walked through the door, ax in hand, blood still dripping from the dark blade. This time, however, Alan was not a child and his father not a middle-aged man. The surroundings were the same—the old posters on the wall, the aging toys—but he was his real age, and his father, walking slowly toward him, had the dried parchment skin of a corpse.

With a sibilant rustling of skin on sweater, a sharp crackle of bone, his father sat next to him on the bed. "You've done a good job, boy," he said. His voice was the same as Alan re­membered, yet different—at once whisperingly alien and comfortably familiar.

Had this ever happened?

He remembered flashes of his past, pieces of an unknown puzzle which he had never before stopped to organize or an­alyze. Had he and his father really stumbled across the bod­ies as they had both told the police? Or had it happened another way?

Had it happened this way?

The pressure of his father's body seated on the side of the bed, the sight of the dark bloody ax in his lap seemed famil­iar, and he knew the words that his father was speaking to him. He had heard them before.

The two of them said the final words in tandem: "Let's get something to eat."

Then he was awake and sweating. His father had killed both his mother and his sister. And he had known.

He had helped.

He stumbled out of bed. The apartment was dark, but he did not bother to turn on the lights. He felt his way along the wall, past furniture, to the kitchen, where, by the light of the gas flame, he poured water into the pot and started it boil­ing.

He poured in the salt and macaroni.

"Yes," the face whispered. Its features looked almost three-dimensional in the darkness, lit from below by the flame. "Yes."

Alan stared dumbly.

"Blood," the face said.

Alan thought for a moment, then pulled open the utensil drawer, taking out his sharpest knife.

The face smiled. "Blood."

He did not think he could go through with it, but it turned out to be easier than expected. He drew the blade across his wrist, pressing hard, pushing deep, and the blood flowed into the pot. It looked black in the night darkness.

He realized as he grew weaker, as the pain increased, as the foam face of his father grew red and smiled, that there would be no one left to eat the macaroni and cheese.

If he had not been so weak, he would have smiled him­self.

And I Am Here, Fighting with Ghosts

I've always liked this story. It was rejected by nearly every magazine on the planet before finally finding a home, so maybe my perception is skewed and it's re­ally not very good. But it has resonance for me be­cause it's essentially four of my dreams that I altered a bit and strung together with a loose narrative thread. I stole the title from a line in Ibsen's play A Doll's House.

***

I cannot always tell anymore. It used to be easy, there was a sharp distinction between the two. But the difference has become progressively less pronounced, the distinctions blurred, since Kathy left.

I have no visitors now. They, too, left with Kathy. And if I go into town I am avoided, whispered about, the butt of nervous jokes. Now children tell horror stories about me to frighten their little brothers.

And their brothers are frightened.

And so are they.

And so are their parents.

So I leave the grounds as little as possible. When I go to the store, I load up on groceries and then stay inside my lit­tle domain until my supplies run out and I must venture forth again.

When I do make the trek into town, I notice there are names carved into the gates outside of the driveway. Ob­scene names. I never see the culprits, of course. And if they ever see me coming down the wooded drive toward them, I'm sure they run like mad.

They do not know that their town is on the outskirts. They do not know that my house is on the border. They do not know that I am the only thing protecting them.

The last time I went for supplies, the town was no longer the town. It was the fair. But I didn't question it; it seemed perfectly natural. And I was not disoriented. I had intended to go into Mike's Market when I came to town, but after I reached the midway I knew that the funhouse was where I was supposed to go.

I heard the funhouse before I saw it. The laughter. Outra­geous, raw, uninhibited laughter. Continuous laughter. It came from a mechanical woman—a fifteen-foot Ap­palachian woman with dirty limbs and dirtier clothes and a horribly grinning gap-toothed mouth. She was hinged at the waist, and she robotically doubled over, up and down, up and down, with Appalachian guffaws.

The woman scared me. But I bought my ticket and rushed past her into the funhouse, into a black hole of a maze that twined and intertwined and wound around, ending in a grimy colorless room with no furniture and with win­dows which opened on painted scenes. The room was built on a forty-five-degree slant and the door entered in the bottom right corner. I had to fight the incline to reach the exit at the top left.

Through the fake windows I could still hear the Ap­palachian woman laughing.

The door at the top opened onto an alley. A real alley. And when I stepped through the door, the funhouse was gone. The door was now a wall.

The alley smelled like French food. It was narrow and dark and cobblestoned, and it retained the lingering odors of souffles and fondue. There was a dwarf hiding in one of the doorways, staring at me. There was something else in an­other doorway that I was afraid to acknowledge.

The tap on my shoulder made me jump.

It was the Appalachian woman, only she was no longer mechanical but human and my height and not laughing. With one hand, she pointed down a dark stairway that opened into the ground on the side of the alley. The other hand held a rolling pin. "Turn off the light at the end of the hall," she commanded.

I stepped down the stairs and it was cold. But that was not the only reason I shivered.

I turned around, intending to climb back up.

The woman was still pointing. I could see her silhouette against the overcast sky above the alley, framed by the stair­well entrance. "Turn off the light at the end of the hall," she repeated.

I started down.

The hallway was long, extraordinarily long. And dark. Doors opened off to each side, but somehow I knew that they did not lead anywhere. At the end of the hall were two rooms, one of which was lighted, one of which was dark.