The House

The HOUSE

Bentley Little

A SIGNET BOOK

Prologue

California

Teddy had lived in the airport for the past eight years.

He knew it was a problem, knew it was a serious phobia, but he had not been able to venture outside the terminal in all that time. He could not remember exactly what had compelled him to seek refuge here, but it no longer mattered. This was his home, this was his world, and he was happy with it. He found money on the floor, in the coin returns of vending machines and pay phones; he begged for spare change when necessary; he bought his food in the snack bars and mini Pizza Huts and junior Burger Kings that made up the terminal's restaurant row. He purchased or shoplifted shorts and T-shirts from the gift shop. He read the magazines and newspapers that people left on chairs, the printed material they bought in order to waste time while waiting for their flights.

The airport terminal was heated and air-conditioned, open twenty-four hours, and it was constantly filled with people, a broad cross section of society. He was never bored here. There was always someone to talk with, a lonely traveler or waiting relative, and he would strike up a conversation, absorb the distilled story of a person's life, make up some impressive lies about his own, and move on, a little richer for the encounter.

He was a "people person," as they liked to say, and there was nothing he enjoyed more than meeting new people, making new friends, talking and listening, experiencing vicariously the life he had renounced.

He kept himself well groomed, storing his clothes in a locker and changing each day, washing his laundry in a bathroom sink at night, drying everything with the wall mounted hand-dryers, giving himself sponge baths, washing and combing his hair with travelpak toiletries from the gift shop. Save for the times when he was compelled to ask for money, no one would ever mistake him for a homeless person, and while he had been here so long that he knew work schedules and shift changes, knew when security guards patrolled the airport and the routes they took, was able to easily avoid detection by airport personnel, he had still been seen often enough around the terminal that many of the store clerks, janitors, and other airport workers knew him, believed him to be a frequent flyer, and treated him with the utmost respect.

But lately, he'd had the suspicion that he was not alone.

Something was living in the airport with him.

The idea chilled him to the bone. There was nothing concrete, no real proof, only a vague feeling that his living space was being invaded by another permanent resident, but that was enough to put him on edge.

Something else was living here.

Not someone.

Something.

He didn't know why he thought that, but he did, and it frightened him. He knew that he could, if necessary, leave the terminal, leave the airport, disappear into the chaotic bustle of Los Angeles, but he did not even consider that an option. Logically, intellectually, it made sense, but emotionally it was another story. Whether superstition or psychosis, he knew that he could never leave the terminal, and any plan that considered that a possibility was strictly off-limits.

Which meant that he was stuck here.

With whatever else lived in the airport.

In the daytime, the idea didn't bother him. But at night, like now, when the crowds faded, when the lights were switched to half power, when the world outside turned black . . .

He shivered.

Last week, he had returned from the bathroom after a quick shampoo to his seat near the windowed east wall of the Delta wing, and his magazines had been moved.

Not just moved. Tampered with. The page he'd marked in Newsweek had been ripped out, the Playboy he'd kept hidden between the other periodicals had been placed on top and opened to the centerfold, and his People magazine had been thrown on the floor.

There'd been no one else in this wing of the terminal for the past hour and he'd seen no one on his way to or from the bathroom, but the proof was there, and he'd quickly gathered up his stuff and hurried back to a more populated section of the terminal.

The next night, he'd had no magazines or newspapers with him and was about to settle down to a little nap when he saw, on the section of seats he'd chosen, an array of magazines spread out: Guns and Ammo, Hunting, American Hunter, Hunter and Prey. On the carpeted floor in front of the seats, drawn with spilled cherryIcee, was the outline of a bloody claw and, next to that, a toothy smile.

It was hunting him.

It had been a warning, Teddy thought. Or a game being played with him. Either way, he didn't like it, and he quickly gathered together today's belongings as he suddenly noticed that this area of the terminal was emptying out and that outside night had already fallen. He saw himself reflected in the huge window that faced the runway, a ghost against the blackness, and the insubstantiality of his form made him nervous, made him feel as though he'd already died.

He quickly headed back toward the shops. Ever since the warning, he'd stayed near people, stayed near the light. Security guards had looked at him suspiciously several times, and he realized that he was in danger of giving himself away, of breaking cover, but he could not help it. He was afraid to be alone.

Afraid of what might find him.

Afraid of what it might do to him.

He looked behind him as he walked. At the far end of the darkened wing, by the empty lounge and boarding area that had once been occupied by Pan Am, he saw a jet-black shadow, a shifting amorphous shape that fluttered from an unused flight desk down the corridor to the seat where he'd been sitting.

He started running. Sweat was pouring down his face and his heart was pounding crazily. He was gripped by the absurd but unshakable notion that the shadow, the creature, the monster, the whatever-it-was, had seen him and was chasing after him and was going to down him and devour him in front of the snack bar.

But he reached the snack bar with no problem, saw a security guard and a cashier, a businessman reading a newspaper at a small table, a young couple trying to soothe a crying baby, and when he looked back toward the darkened wing he saw nothing out of the ordinary.

Breathing heavily, still shaking, he walked into the snack bar. He was aware of how he looked and when he walked up to the cashier, asked for a cup of water, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and saw the look she shot the security guard, he immediately dug through his pocket for spare change and amended his order to a small coffee.

He didn't really want coffee, but he wanted to sit down and get his equilibrium back, wanted to be near other people, and he thanked the cashier and grabbed a seat near the pile of luncheon trays at the back of the small eating area.

What the hell was going on? Was he going crazy?

Possibly. He knew he wasn't the most normal person in the world to begin with. But he didn't think he was hallucinating here, didn't think he was suffering from delusions. Something had tampered with his magazines, something had drawn thatIcee picture.

And he had seen that black shadow shape.

He glanced up from the Formica table. The security guard was still looking at him, and he thought that he should check himself out in a mirror to make sure his appearance was presentable. He couldn't afford to destroy his entire life, to blow almost a decade's worth of clean responsible living simply because he was frightened.

Because something was hunting him.

There were rest rooms adjacent to the snack bar, and he left his newspaper, briefcase, and coffee on the table as he walked over to the men's room.

"Could you watch my stuff?" he called to the cashier.

He put on his best Important Traveler voice, and she smiled at him and nodded. "Sure."

"Thanks."

He felt a little better. His disguise was in place and he was safely ensconced here with other people. He walked into the bathroom, looked at himself in the mirror.

He hadn't shaved yet today and was starting to look a little raggedy, but his sweat-clumped hair was the main problem, and he took out a comb, held it under the faucet and ran it through his hair.

Much better.

He realized suddenly that he had to take a whiz, and he walked over to the closest urinal, unzipping his pants --and saw out of the corner of his eye a fluttering black shape.

It was there for only a second, in one of the mirrors, and he whirled around, already zipping up, his mouth suddenly dry, his heart once again pounding.

A cold hand touched his shoulder.

"No!" he screamed, jerking around.

But there was nothing there.

He ran out of the rest room as fast as he could.

Wyoming It was an omen, her mother would have said, and Patty was not so sure she disagreed. Hube would laugh at her if she told him that, would make fun of her and her mother and her entire family, would tell her to move into the twentieth century, but Hube didn't know as much as he thought he did. There were a lot of things science could explain, but there were a lot of things it couldn't, and Patty wasn't so close-minded that she automatically dismissed anything that didn't agree with her preconceived notions.

She stared at the crow sitting atop the garbage can.

The crow stared back at her, blinked.

It had been there when she'd come out to hang the wash on the line, the biggest crow she'd ever seen, and it had not flown away as she walked past it but had sat and watched her as she hung up the underwear and the socks and the towels. She'd told it to shoo, had stomped her foot and made threatening movements, but the crow had not been afraid. It seemed to know that she wouldn't hurt it, and it seemed to have its own agenda.

It wasn't going to leave until it did what it had come here to do.

Just what that was, Patty didn't know, but she couldn't help thinking that the black bird was trying to warn her, that it had been sent here for a purpose, in order to tell her something, and it was up to her to figure out exactly what that was.

She wished her mother were here.

Patty stared at the crow for a few moments longer, then walked past it, into the house. She'd call her mother. That's what she'd do. She'd describe the crow, spell out the precise chain of events, and see if her mother could figure it out.

The crow cawed once as she entered the house. Twice more at the precise second she picked up the kitchen phone to dial.

She wished Hube were here as well. He might have some smart answer for why the crow's cries were timed so specifically to her movements, but she doubted that even he could fail to notice the correlation.

The line was busy, and she heard one more quick caw as she hung up the receiver. She opened the back door to check on the crow once again, but it was gone. She walked outside, hurried around the house, but it was nowhere to be seen. Not on the roof, not on the porch, not on the ground or any of the trees. She didn't even see any birds in the sky. It was as if it had just disappeared.

She walked up the front steps of the house and turned for a moment to look at the view. She could see the Tetons, rising grandly up, the permanent snowcaps blending in with today's white ceiling of autumn sky.

Directly before her, on the other side of the pasture, the overgrown meadow, its grass brown and dry, sloped up and away from their ranch, the end of the meadow indistinguishable from the beginning of the foothills.

She looked to her right, past the garage at the side of the house, but saw no dust trail clouding up the road.

She wished Hube would hurry up and get back. He was supposed to have gone into town for coffee and bread flour, but it seemed like he'd been away for far too long. She hoped the truck hadn't had engine trouble again. The last thing they needed was another mechanic's bill. They were still paying off the water pump from July. They couldn't afford to have anything else go wrong. Not with winter coming on.

Patty walked into the house, automatically stomping her feet on the outside of the doorsill though she hadn't walked through any mud. She reached for the living room phone on the small oak table next to the couch and was about to dial her mother's number once again when out of the corner of her eye, through the mesh of the screen, she saw movement outside. She stopped, slowly put the receiver back in its cradle, and walked back over to the doorway.

She could see them coming from the mountains. Dozens of them. It looked like a small army, speeding down the side of the hill toward the sloping meadow.

A small army.

For the runners were all the size of children. She could see that even from here. Only they weren't children.

Something about the build of their bodies, the way they moved, indicated to her that they were older than that.

Much older.

They reached the high grass and leaped into it, and then she could see only the movement of the grass stalks, what looked like a narrow band of wind whipping through the center of the meadow.

What were they? Leprechauns? Elves? Something supernatural.

Not dwarves or midgets or children. Even from this far away, their strangeness, their otherness, was apparent. They were not human.

She watched the grass whip back and forth, the narrow stream of movement heading straight toward the ranch. She stood her ground, not moving, and she realized that she was not as afraid as she should have been.

But that changed.

The grass in front of the pasture began to thrash wildly and then they emerged into the open, clutching weapons made of baseball bats and animal skulls, horseshoes and bones. They were made up like clowns: red noses, white faces, colored lips, and rainbow hair.

Only she wasn't sure it was makeup.

They kept streaming into the pasture from the tall grass. Five of them. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. Nothing slowed them down, and their stubby legs pumped for all they were worth, carrying them around the clump of boulders in the center of the pasture, jumping over the small fenceHube had built for the cows. They were accompanied by what looked like a swarm of insects.

Bees, maybe. Or beetles.

Patty closed the front door, locked it. But she knew, even as she did so, that she would not be safe in the house. Her only hope was to run, to get out before they overran her home and hope that it slowed them down enough to let her escape. She had no idea what they were or what they wanted, but she knew it was not good, and she could not believe she'd been so stupid as to just stand there and watch them approach when she could have been fleeing.

This was what the crow's appearance had foretold, she knew. The crow had been an omen, a warning, and she probably would have known that if she'd paid a little more attention to her mother growing up and a little less attention to boys.

A judgmental review of her entire life passed through her mind as she ran through the house and out the back door, locking it behind her. A critique of her faults and shortcomings, an analysis in hindsight of her mistakes and misjudgments. The thrust of it all seemed to be that she could have avoided finding herself in this predicament if she'd done things differently, but she did not really believe that to be the case.

She could not hope to outrun them. She knew that.

So she ran toward the barn, thinking that if she could get to the old root cellar and lock it from the inside, she might be able to survive. The house was between her and the creatures and she was counting on it to hide her movements, to shield her whereabouts, at least until she could get into the cellar, but even before she reached the barn she heard the rattle of bones behind her.

Grunts and the sharp exhalation of breath. She looked over her shoulder as she ran and they were upon her, moving faster than humanly possible, streaming around the house, over the dirt. Tiny hands grabbed her upper thighs, reached between her legs to pull at her crotch.

They were already swarming past her, around her, and even as the hands on her legs yanked her down, she was tripping over the ones in front. One, the leader apparently, stood on the stump to the right of the clothesline, jumping up and down and shaking what looked like a maraca made from the skull of a rat.

The creatures were even smaller than she'd originally thought, two feet high at the most, but they were powerfully built and they all had weapons and there were far too many of them. They rolled her over, onto her back, and one held each side of her head. Two took her left arm, two her right, two more each foot, spreading her limbs.

One continued to grab between her legs.

She was crying hysterically, but even through her tears she could see that she'd been wrong at first. It was not just bees or beetles that accompanied the creatures but a whole host of bugs. And they were all strangely wrong, profoundly changed and disturbingly incorrect versions of ordinary insects.

Onto her face alighted a butterfly with the screaming head of a baby. It spit on her nose and flew away.

She was going to die and she knew it, and she was crying out for all she was worth, hoping someone--the returningHube , a passing hiker, a visiting rancher-- might hear her, but the clownish monsters did not seem to care and made no effort to gag her mouth or stifle her. They let her scream, and more than anything else, it was their lack of concern, their certainty that no one would come to her rescue, that impressed upon her the dire hopelessness of her predicament.

The creature holding the left side of her head looked down on her, opened its mouth, and the sound of a piano emerged from between its green lips.

The one with the rat-skull maraca jumped up and down on the stump, pointed at her, yelled, and the sound that came out of its mouth was that of a string quartet.

She was no longer screaming, but was crying, sobbing, tears and snot pooling in the various indentations of her face.

The skull of a possum was placed on her chest.

As if in a dream, she heard the sound of Hube's truck in the drive and then in front of the house, heard him slam the pickup's door and call out her name. For a very brief fraction of a second, she considered yelling at the top of her lungs, telling him to get out of here, save himself. But her love was not that altruistic and she did not want to die alone here with these monsters. She wanted her husband to save her, and she screamed out his name: "Hube!"

"Patty?" he called.

"Hube!"

She wanted to say more, wanted to be able to impart additional information, wanted to tell him that he should bring his shotgun from the truck so he could blow these monsters to Kingdom Come, but her brain and her mouth could not seem to get it together and she just kept screaming out his name.

"Hube!"

She was raised up, tilted forward, and was able to see her husband dash around the corner of the house and run into a wall of the clown creatures. They leaped onto his head, onto his chest, onto his arms, dragging him down. Weapons were lifted, bones and baseball bats, skulls and horseshoes.

The one on the stump jumped up and down, ordered Hube'smurder in the voice of a string quartet.

They beat him to death with the sound of a symphony.

Michigan This was the life.

Jennings followed the guide through the brush, bow extended. Last year, he'd taken Gloria to Palm Springs, and the year before that to Hawaii, but this year, by God, he'd put his foot down, and they'd booked their time share in northern Michigan. He was going to do something he wanted for once, and if that meant that Gloria had to either watch videos in the condo or shop at The Store in this little podunk town, then so be it.

He'd arranged for several short hunting trips during their two-week stay. One daylong duck-hunting expedition.

One overnight bear hunt.

And this one.

A three-day bow hunting trip.

Of the three, this was the best, the one he was enjoying the most. He'd never used bow and arrow before, and though it had taken him a while to get used to both the physicality and limitations of this sport, the guide, Tom, told him that he was a natural. He felt that himself, and he found that he liked the added handicaps bow hunting placed on him. It made him feel more in tune with nature, like he was a part of this forest rather than just a dilettantish intruder, and that resulted in his increased enjoyment of the hunt. It gave everything a slight edge, and while they hadn't bagged any game yet, even his misses were more exciting and more fulfilling than some of his rifle scores.

There were four of them on this trip: Tom; himself; Jud Weiss, a retired deputy sheriff from Arizona; and Webb Deboyar , an air-traffic controller from Orlando, Florida. Jud and Webb were still at the campsite, and Tom was taking him out on his solo, an elk tracking that would hopefully lead to a kill and mounted antlers over the fireplace back home.

The two of them had been tracking this elk, a big bull, since before noon, and by Jennings' watch it was already pushing three. The time had flown, though. It was exhilarating being out here like this, taking part in nature's cycle, and he could not remember ever having felt more alive.

Tom suddenly held up a hand, motioned for him to halt.

Jennings stood in place and followed the guide's gaze.

It was the bull elk.

Unmoving, the animal was standing in a copse of bushes on the other side of a dying fir tree. Jennings probably would have missed it on his own, would have blundered ahead and scared the beast away, realizing what it was too late to shoot, but Tom knew these woods like the proverbial back of his hand, and he'd spotted the animal instantly.

Jennings' blood was rushing, the adrenaline pumping.

He was psyched, and as silently as he could, he repositioned his bow, notched the arrow, and drew back the line. The plan was simple: he would shoot the elk, and if it wasn't a clean kill, if the beast was injured and not killed, Tom would finish it off.

The details of that had been a little too gruesome even for Jennings back in the trading post where they'd started, but now the idea of leaping onto the animal with a big buck knife, subduing it in hand-to-hoof combat, and cutting out its heart seemed like the pinnacle of raw experience, and he wished Tom had taught him how to do it.

The elk moved, looked up, looked at them.

"Now!" Tom yelled.

Jennings aimed the arrow, let it fly.

He brought the elk down with one shot.

Tom immediately ran forward, through the underbrush, through the bushes, knife extended. Jennings followed the guide stumblingly, saw the other man leap on the animal, cut it open.

The hairy skin split and the stomach contents spilled out.

His father's body emerged from the open wound.

Jennings dropped his bow, backed away, all of the saliva suddenly drained from his mouth. Tom was scrambling away from the dead animal as well, an expression of shock and uninhibited fear on his face. The knife in his hand was dripping blood, and he gripped it tightly, pointed outward.

Jennings felt a warm wetness spread from his crotch down his leg as he pissed in his pants. He wanted to scream but could not, and neither he nor Tom said a word, made a sound.

His father rose to his feet. He was wearing a suit, but both the suit and his skin were covered with blood and a clear sort of viscousgoo . He was smaller than he used to be, almost dwarfish, but he hadn't aged at all or at least the age had not registered on his face. Jennings' initial dumb thought was that his father hadn't died, they'd buried the wrong man, but he remembered seeing his father's body and knew that he had died and that this was some sort of ... monster.

His father bounded instantly away from the gutted elk and toward Tom. The guide started stabbing outward, but his reactions were slow and the knife cut only air.

Tom's neck was broken with one quick snap, and then his father changed directions and loped across the small open space toward him, grinning crazily.

There was elk blood on his teeth.

Jennings tried to get away, clawed his way through the brush, through the bushes, started heading back through the trees toward camp, but his father caught him before he'd gone more than a few feet. He was knocked to the ground, and he felt the weight of his father's compacted body on his back. Strong hands slipped around his neck, fingers digging into his flesh.

Dad! he wanted to scream.

But the air in his lungs could not escape to form words, and the world around him faded, and he saw only blackness.

New York Shelly emerged from the bathroom and glanced over at Sam on the bed. He looked up from his magazine, smiled warmly at her, and she turned away. He was getting maudlin as he grew older and it was something that had begun to irritate her. He cried now in movies formulaic, simplistic, emotionally manipulative movies that were transparent in their sentimentality even to fTJtwasann°ying to hear his light occasional sniffles next to her, to see his finger wipe wetness from the corners of his eyes. He had not cried when David died, nor when his own parents had passed on, yet he was now shedding tears for not particularly well-drawn fictional characters artificially embroiled in embarrassingly contrived plots.

She wondered sometimes why she had married him.

Shaking her head, Shelly walked over to the dresser, picked up her brush and--there was another face in the mirror.

She blinked, closed her eyes. Looked away, looked back. But the face was still there, an ancient hag with impossibly wrinkled parchment skin, dark eyes narrowed into an evil slit, a hard cruel smile on a nearly lipless mouth.

Mary Worth.

Shelly backed up, all of the saliva in her mouth suddenly gone, but she could not look away. She could see a reversed image of the bedroom in the mirror, Sam sitting up, leaning against the headboard, reading his magazine. In the foreground was the face, just on the other side of the mirrored dresser, staring back at her with malevolent intensity. She'd thought at first that it was unattached to a body, but the longer she looked the more she saw, and she could now make out hunched shoulders beneath a black robe, although she could not say whether the body had been there all along or had materialized before her eyes. Mary Worth.

It was exactly the face she had expected to see all those years ago, when she and her sisters and her friends had had sleepovers and had played those nighttime party games indulged in by every schoolgirl in America. "Mary Worth had been their favorite, and they had dutifully taken turns standing before the mirror with their eyes closed repeating "Mary Worth, Mary Worth, Mary Worth 'The story was that if you said her name a hundred times, she would appear. None of them had ever been brave enough to make it to a hundred, chickening out and running squealing back to their beds and sleeping bags somewhere around forty or forty-five, and she knew that she herself had always purposely kept it under fifty, no matter what she told her sisters and her friends, because that, too, seemed a magical number and she'd been afraid that Mary Worth might have been partially present by that point and she did not want to see her at all.

Shelly could not remember who had initially taught her the ritual or where she had first learned of it, and she could not recall ever having seen a picture of Mary Worth or ever having the hag described to her. All she'd known was that Mary Worth was ancient and utterly terrifying.

But she realized now that the face in the mirror was exactly how she'd pictured Mary Worth in her mind.

Shelly stared into the mirror, blinked.

Where was her reflection?

She had not realized it until this second, but although everything else in the bedroom was reflected exactly, she herself was not in the mirror.

Mary Worth had taken her place.

If before she had been frightened, now she was utterly terrified, and she watched with growing horror as the old crone withdrew from her robe a long silver knife, wrinkled bony fingers clutching the blackened hilt. Shelly quickly looked around the room to make sure there was no real Mary Worth present, then glanced down at her own body to make sure there was no superimposition upon her frame, to make sure she was not wearing a black robe and withdrawing a knife of which she was unaware.

No.

But in the mirror she was still not visible and Mary Worth, her twisted smile growing broader, turned around, gripping the knife tightly, and walked over toward where Sam lay on the bed reading.

Shelly was staring into the mirror as the old crone began to stab, and she whirled around when Sam started screaming behind her.

There was still no Mary Worth, but Sam was thrashing around on the bed, sudden slices opening up the skin of his chest and thigh, blood both welling and spurting, depending on the location of the slash, covering his skin and his fallen magazine, the pink sheets and pillowcases, the headboard and the nightstand and the Indian rug on the hardwood floor.

There was no noise save for Sam's ear-piercing screams, and that was perhaps the most frightening thing of all.

In the mirror, Mary Worth was laughing, cackling, but there was no accompanying sound. Her voice, if she had one, was trapped behind the glass, audible only in that world, and while her actions were manifest in the real bedroom, her form and voice were not.

How had Mary Worth come? No one had invoked her name.

There was a missing piece here. Shelly could buy the concept of summoning up an evil spirit, but she did not quite believe that Mary Worth was able to show up on her own, without being called. That wasn't the way it was supposed to work, and while the story she'd been told might be part of a children's game, there was a kernel of truth to all legends.

Sam had stopped screaming. He was dead, but Mary Worth continued to stab, and his lifeless body jerked on the mattress with the force of her knife blows.

Shelly was not screaming either. She was not panicking, not afraid, and while she was probably just in shock, Sam's murder was not the horrifyingly cataclysmic event that it should have been. Indeed, she felt detached from it, the scene next to her in the room as distant, flat, and removed as something on television, the reflection in the mirror only slightly more immediate because of the frightening visage of Mary Worth.

Mary Worth.

Even the monster was not as terrifying as she had been. Shelly was getting used to the crone, and she thought that perhaps she had summoned the hag, had subconsciously wanted her to do just what she was doing.

No.

She and Sam might have drifted apart. Maybe she didn't even love him anymore. But never in her most vicious fantasies had she ever wished him dead. This was all Mary Worth's doing, not hers.

But she would be blamed for it.

The knowledge hit her all of a sudden. She once again faced the bed, saw her husband's bloody body, his chest cavity hacked open so wide that portions of organs were visible through the rent skin and muscle.

She turned back toward the mirror.

In the glass, Mary Worth was once again standing in her place on the other side of the dresser, looking back at her.

And she was smiling.

Daniel "Wake up."

Daniel heard his wife's voice, felt her hands gently shaking him awake, but it had been a long time since he'd gotten up this early and his body resisted. He moaned, turned over, dug deeper into the blankets.

"Your interview's at ten," she said, and there was a no-nonsense undercurrent to the surface pleasantry of her voice that made him suck in a deep breath, throw off the blankets, and sit up.

Margot was already dressed, ready for work, and she stood next to the bed, looking down at him. "I'm sorry,"

she said, "but I'm leaving and I'm dropping off Tony, and I want to make sure you're up before I go. Otherwise, you'll never make it."

"I'm up," he said, standing. He tried to kiss her, but she wrinkled her nose and pulled away.

"Scope," she said.

"That's romantic."

"Tell me about it." She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. "Give me a call at the office after your interview. I want to know how it goes."

He picked up his pants from the floor next to the bed.

"I can take Tony, you know."

"It's out of your way. Besides, I have a little extra time." She started down the hall. "I'm serious about that Scope. Nothing'11 lose you a job faster than B.O. or bad breath."

He followed her out to the living room, where Tony was waiting by the front door, backpack in hand. All of the drapes were open, and outside four or five identically dressed adolescents were leaning against the low brick wall that separated their weed patch of a yard from the sidewalk. One kid with a shaved head ground out the butt of the cigarette he'd been smoking on top of the wall and flicked it into their yard.

Margot must have seen the look on Daniel's face because she frowned at him, pointing her finger. "Don't you say anything to those boys. We have to live here and Tony has to go to their school. Anything you do to them, they'll take out on him."

Tony said nothing, but the pleading in his son's eyes told him that he agreed with his mother one hundred percent, and Daniel nodded. "Fine," he said.

He watched them walk outside, waved good-bye, and shut and locked the door behind them before heading back to the bathroom to take a shower.

The hot water felt good on his skin, and he stayed in the shower longer than he needed to, enjoying the warm steam that fogged up the room and the comforting sensation of the pulsing water against his sleep-sore back.

It had been over a year since corporate downsizing had caused him to be laid off from his last job at Thompson Industries, and though the nightly news told him continuously that leading economic indicators were up and the stock market was at an all-time high, he had no immediate prospects of finding a job and saw no change on the horizon. He'd gone to every employment agency in the Philadelphia metropolitan area during the past thirteen months, but nothing had turned up in all that time and the market was oversaturated with similarly displaced middle-management workers all competing for the same positions.

More than once he'd wanted to move, but Margot was still employed, still bringing home a paycheck, and the truth was that the house was the only tangible asset they had. It was their anchor, bought and paid for, left to them fair and square by her parents, and if Pennsylvania wasn't his favorite state, that was just too damn bad because if worst came to worst, if Margot lost her job and their phone and gas and electricity were cut off, they could always huddle in the living room in their sleeping bags and eat crackers stolen from restaurant salad bars.

He smiled to himself as he shut off the shower, amused at his own train of thought. As Margot always said, he shouldn't be so melodramatic.

He'd always been melodramatic, though.

It kept life interesting.

Daniel dried, shaved, brushed his teeth, combed his hair, dressed. In his suit, he looked conservative, presentable, respectable. He straightened his tie, looked at himself in the mirror, practiced smiling. He didn't hold out a whole lot of hope for today. The fact that he was being interviewed instead of just rejected outright was of course a good sign, but he'd been to dozens of similar interviews since he'd been unemployed and none of them had amounted to anything.

Still, it had been quite a while since he'd had any interview at all, and at the very least, this would enable him to keep in practice.

He drove into downtown Philly and paid five bucks to park in an underground lot beneath the Bronson Building. Cutting Edge Software, the firm with the job opening, owned the top three floors, and he took an elevator up, quickly putting Chapstick on his too-dry lips before the metal doors slid open.

He was ushered immediately into the personnel office, where a young efficient-looking woman who could not have been more than a year out of college introduced herself as the personnel director. She bade him sit in one of the padded chairs opposite her desk, and the two of them talked for the next half hour or so. It was an interview, but it felt more like a conversation, and Daniel found that he liked this relaxed informal approach.

They hadn't discussed the job specifically, had instead talked mostly about him, his life, his interests, but he knew she'd probably gotten a good read on him from the discussion, and he was gratified when she stood and said, "I think you'd work well here. You're self motivated, intelligent, and I think you could do a good job. I'd like you to meet the president of our firm and talk to him for a few minutes."

He followed her out of the office, down a carpeted hallway to a bigger office. She rapped on the sill of the open doorway, then motioned for Daniel to walk in.

The president of the company was one of those men who tried too hard to be jovial and just-one-of-the-guys, and who referred to himself in company literature as "W. L. (Bud) Williams." Daniel hated men with nicknames.

And he hated men who used only their initials even more. Together they were a lethal combination.

"Never trust a man who doesn't use the name his parents gave him," his father had always said, and it was advice that Daniel had taken to heart.

Still, he needed the job and he couldn't afford to pick and choose, and he sat across the desk from W. L. (Bud)

Williams and smiled.

The president looked over the resume in his hand. "I

see here that you've worked as a tech writer before."

Daniel nodded. "Yes. For the City of Tyler."

"Did you like the job?"

"No," he answered truthfully, realizing his mistake even as he said it. He scrambled quickly for damage control. "I mean, I liked the work, but I didn't like . . . a few of the people I worked with."

"Is that why you quit?"

"Yes, sir."

"We like team players here at Cutting Edge."

"No problem there," Daniel lied. "I'm a team player.

That was just a fluke."

The president smiled. "Yes." He stood. "Well, thank you for coming."

Daniel stood as well, offering his hand. "Thank you for seeing me."

"We'll call you," W. L. (Bud) Williams said as he shook Daniel's hand.

But they wouldn't, Daniel knew. He'd put his foot in his mouth and flunked the test, and he left the building dejected and resentful, ticked off even more when he took the elevator down to the garage and realized that he'd wasted five dollars on parking.

In for a penny, in for a pound, he thought. He was in the city and had already wasted five bucks, what were a few dollars more? He drove to McDonald's and bought himself a value meal, consoling himself with junk food, taking the sting off his disappointment.

He was back home by noon, just in time to catch an old John Ford western on AMC. He sat in his recliner in front of the television, but he couldn't concentrate on the film and instead brooded about his dismal efforts to secure employment. On the screen, John Wayne rode through the desert sand in front of majestic red peaks that rose dramatically out of the earth behind him, and Daniel wondered what it would be like to live in Arizona.

The West was supposed to have a booming job market these days, and once again he found himself thinking that it might be better to just pull up stakes and follow the sun rather than sit here in this crummy row house and wait for something to turn up.

At least he wasn't such a macho jerk that he resented Margot for bringing home a paycheck. He was grateful that she had a job, and he had no hangups about having to be the primary breadwinner of the household. He and Margot weren't in competition, they were a team, one for all and all for one, and he was proud of her success.

Still, for his own sake, he wanted to work. He wasn't creative, was not an artist or a writer or a musician, and he had nothing productive to do with his free time. More than the money, it was the desire to dispel this feeling of uselessness that he wanted.

The phone rang. Margot. He'd forgotten that he was supposed to call her, and he quickly apologized before giving her a thumbnail sketch of his morning.

She sighed sympathetically. "Doesn't look good, huh?"

"I'm not holding my breath."

"Don't worry," she said. "Something'11 turn up."

"Yeah."

"Are you busy this afternoon?"

He snorted. "Yeah. Right."

"I need you to go to the store and pick up some hamburger buns and ground beef. I forgot my ATM card and have no cash."

"I don't have any cash either."

"My card's either on the dresser or the bathroom sink."

"The sink?"

"I don't want a lecture."

"Sorry."

"I'll pick up Tony on my way home."

"I can do it."

"You can do it tomorrow. We'll switch cars."

Daniel understood. "He's embarrassed by the Buick?"

"He didn't say anything, but yeah. You know how kids are at that age. Embarrassed by everything."

"Especially parents."

Margot laughed. "Especially parents." There was noise in the background, talking. "Wait a sec," she said.

There was a pause, the sound of muffled voices as she conversed with another woman. "Gottago," she said, coming back on the line. "We have a crisis here. Make sure you stop by the store."

"I will. Love you."

"Me too. Bye."

He hung up the phone and switched off the TV, walking through the kitchen and down the hall. The house seemed silent with the television off, too silent, uncomfortably silent, and Daniel immediately began whistling a mindless tune in order to generate some noise.

He was filled with a vague sense of unease as he entered the bedroom, a feeling that intensified as he passed the dresser and approached the narrow doorway that led to the bathroom. It was a strange sensation, one he didn't immediately recognize, and it took him a few moments to realize that it was fear. Not the rational fear of physical danger he'd sometimes experienced as an adult, but a baseless, groundless, superstitious dread he associated with childhood. A fear of the boogeyman was what it was, a fear of ghosts, an emotion he hadn't experienced in decades, and though he felt stupid, he turned around, expecting to see a shape or figure behind him, unable to shake the feeling that he was being watched even after he saw that the room was empty.

Where the hell had this come from? A moment ago he had been on the phone to Margot, having a normal conversation, talking about buying food for dinner, now he was getting the shit spooked out of him walking through his own bedroom.

It was irrational, he knew, and made no sense, but the feeling did not go away, not even when he found Margot's ATM card next to her hairbrush on the tiled counter next to the sink, not even when he hurried out of the bedroom and back down the hall.

It was only when he was finally outside, on the stoop, locking the front door of the house, that the panic left him, that he finally felt as though he could breathe.

Stress.

Maybe he'd been counting on getting that Cutting Edge job more than he thought.

Either that or his house had suddenly become haunted within the past five minutes.

Maybe Margot had died.

Or Tony.

He pushed the thoughts out of his mind. This way lay compulsion. Obsession. There were no ghosts, nothing weird, only his overactive imagination which, after lying in a coma for the past two decades, had suddenly decided to announce its existence.

Stress.

It had to be stress.

Nevertheless, he breathed a little easier when he was in the car and on the road to the grocery store and the house was safely behind him.

After dinner, Daniel sat with Tony at the kitchen table, helping his son with homework while Margot did the dishes.

Tony finally finished his assignment and asked if he could watch TV.

"Only until eight-thirty," Daniel told him. "Then it's time for bed. This is a school night."

"But, Dad--"

"No buts."

Tony slumped out of the kitchen and through the swinging door out to the living room.

"Next year, we'll let him stay up until nine," Margot said.

"If he keeps his grades up."

She smiled. "Never thought you'd turn into your father, did you?'

Daniel pushed back his chair, walked over to the sink, and put his hands on her shoulders, giving her right ear a quick kiss. "I love you, Mrs. Anderson."

"I know."

"Aren't you supposed to say, 'I love you too'?"

"Actions speak louder than words." She dropped her voice. "I thought I'd show you later."

He grinned. "That's why I love you."

From outside, there was the sound of a nunmuffled Charger engine, an earthquake rumble that roared to a crescendo before dying.

"Your brother's here." Daniel returned to his seat.

"Be nice to him."

"Always am."

"Brian looks up to you."

"How much you want to bet that he brings up the fact that I'm still unemployed?"

She looked out the kitchen window, quickly went back to washing, pretending as though she didn't know anyone was here. "Shut up."

Brian knocked once, walked in. He nodded to his sister, sat down at the kitchen table. "Hey, buddy, you found a job yet?"

"No."

"I got a lead on something. It might not pan out, but this guy at the site has a brother who deejays. You know, parties and dances and shit like that? He's looking for someone to help him haul equipment. It's a part-time gig, nights mostly, but, hey, it's something. Might even pick up a few tips."

Daniel shook his head. "I don't think so."

"Why not, man? Haul in a few speakers, hang, listen to some tunes, get paid for it? Can't get much breezier than that."

"Dance music depresses me."

"You really want to depress yourself, listen to Pet Sounds. You know, by The Beach Boys? Most depressing goddamn album ever put to vinyl. I bum out every time I hear that thing."

The employment opportunity was forgotten as Brian began riffing on music, chronicling his likes and dislikes over the past twenty years. Just as well. He wasn't a bad guy, but he was a flake and a half, and he only brought up these so-called "job opportunities" to lord over Daniel the fact that he was working and Daniel wasn't. Brian was six years older than Margot, five years older than Daniel, and though he'd always been loving and supportive in his way, he'd also been slightly resentful that they both had better paying, more respectable jobs than he did, and ever since Daniel had been out of work, he'd been in hog heaven.

It was after eleven before Brian finally left, grabbing his sister around the waist and spinning her once around the kitchen floor. They stood in the doorway, waving, as he woke up half the neighborhood with his car and drove off.

Daniel closed the door, locked it, and Margot kissed him. "Thanks."

Daniel smiled wryly. "Hey, he's family."

"You went above and beyond. Ready for your reward?"

"I've been ready all night."

"Let me go check on Tony."

Margot went down the hall to Tony's room, and Daniel double-checked the doors to make sure they were locked before turning off the lights and heading back to their bedroom. Margot was already standing before the dresser, loosening her hair, and he closed and locked the door behind him as he stepped into the room. He glanced toward the narrow bathroom doorway, saw darkness, shadow. There was a vague feeling of unease, a sense once again that something was wrong, and he walked quickly over to the bathroom and turned on the light, gratified to see that there was nothing out of the ordinary.

This afternoon, taking out the trash, he'd seen a shadow down the alley behind their house, a shadow he couldn't identify but that looked vaguely familiar: small, almost dwarfish, wearing a tattered gown or smock that billowed in the breeze. It had been around two o'clock, probably the least scary time of day, but the blocky shadows cast by east-facing garages had covered the narrow alley and, along with the slightly overcast sky, had contributed to an uncharacteristically solemn scene. He'd tossed the Hefty bag into the garbage can, turned back toward his yard, and seen, out of the corner of his eye, movement. He looked down the alley and saw, several houses away, on a protruding section of white fence, the shadow of a small figure with longish hair and a raggedy knee-length gown that blew in the breeze. The figure did not move, was perfectly still, only its hair and tattered clothing waving in the wind, and the sight had instantly rung some mental bell. He knew he'd seen it before, but he could not remember where or when. He scanned both sides of the alley, looking for the figure that was creating the shadow, but saw nothing.

The shadow raised a hand. Beckoned.

A wave of cold washed immediately over him. He'd been afraid, instinctively frightened, though he had not known why, and he'd hurried quickly out of the alley, through the yard, into the house, locking the back door and closing the drapes so he wouldn't be able to see.

Daniel took off his shoes and pants, sat heavily down on the bed. The thought of the shadow had stayed with him all evening, haunting him, taunting him with its almost-recognizable familiarity, and though he had wanted to say something to Margot about it, he had not.

He was aware how stupid it all sounded, and he did not want her to think that he was sitting here alone each day, inventing fantasies to frighten himself, letting his imagination work overtime because he had nothing better to do.

He unbuttoned his shirt, threw it on the floor, leaned back on the bed.

Margot had finished with her hair and had taken off her clothes. She started toward the bathroom. "I'm going to take a quick shower."

He sat up on one elbow. "Don't."

She stopped, looked at him, eyebrows raised.

"I like it dirty."

Smiling, she walked over to him, crawled into bed. "I

like it that you like it dirty."

Afterward, they lay there, spent and sweating. Daniel reached for the remote, turned on the TV, started flipping through channels. Margot snuggled next to him.

"Have you noticed," she said finally, "that Tony's been acting a little . . . strange lately?"

He looked at her. "Strange how?"

"I don't know. Secretive. Suspicious. He seems to be spending a lot of time alone in his room."

"A boy? In his room? Alone? Secretive? Suspicious?"

Daniel smiled. "Hmmm. I wonder what he could be doing."

She hit his shoulder. "Knock it off."

"You might check the stiffness of his sheets."

"You can be a real jerk sometimes."

"I'm sorry, but it's perfectly normal--"

"It's not normal. That's what I'm trying to tell you. I

know about that. I do wash his underwear, you know.

But this is ... different."

"What? Drugs? Shoplifting? Gangs?"

"Nothing like that."

"What then?"

"I don't know. But it's kind of ... spooky."

Spooky.

He didn't say anything, pretended to watch TV. She went off to take her shower, returned and climbed into bed next to him, and soon afterward, he felt her body relax, felt the pattern of her breath change as the even rhythm of sleep overtook her.

He waited for a few moments, then carefully extricated himself from her arms, moved closer to the edge of the bed. He stared at her while she slept, gently touched her hair. She was so beautiful and he was so happy with her, but the chilling thought that it would not last forced itself into his mind and would not be dislodged. It was the same feeling he'd had this morning an anxious, maddening sense that something was going to happen to her and Tony, and he found himself thinking again of the shadow.

Spooky.

He rolled over, onto his back, and closed his eyes, forcing himself to think of nothing, forcing himself to fall asleep. It took a long time. On the television, he heard a talk show give way to an infomercial, heard the infomercial end and a movie begin.

It was halfway through the movie before he finally drifted off.

He dreamed, and in his dream, the small shadow was in his house, and he sat in a chair, paralyzed, in the living room, as it roamed down the hall looking for his wife, looking for his son.

Laurie Laurie Mitchell looked across the boardroom at the other department heads dutifully making notes on their legal pads.

Boardroom.

Bored room was more like it.

She glanced surreptitiously at her watch. Hoffman was still droning on about maximizing the division's profits, some generic claptrap he'd picked up at an executive seminar, and it didn't appear that he would be concluding his filibuster anytime soon.

God, she hated these meetings.

Outside the windows, the sky was clear, cloudless, and she could see all the way to the bay, the small dark shape of Alcatraz Island visible in the sea of blue space between two adjoining buildings. She found herself wondering what would happen if a major earthquake hit while they were up here. Would the building stand or would it collapse? If it collapsed, would they ride it down, squashing the floors beneath them, or would the structure topple over, sending them flying into space? More than likely, there'd be a random pattern of destruction, different areas on different floors that crumbled or remained intact, arbitrarily killing those who happened to have the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Morbid, perhaps, but at least it made the time go by.

She glanced once more around the room, at her coworkers and peers, and thought, not for the first time, that she didn't belong here. She'd been hired by Automated Interface just out of college, had worked her way up the corporate ladder and had held her current position for the past five years, but she still sometimes felt like an imposter, a child playing dress-up who had somehow successfully fooled adults into believing that she was one of them.

Did she have anything in common with these people at all?

No. It was a fake plastic yuppie world she lived in, and it was one of the cruel tricks of fate that she happened to have an aptitude for this business, that she happened to be good at this job.

She'd grown up far differently, in a rural town south of the Bay Area, at the tail end of the hippie movement, and her parents had raised both her and Josh nontraditionally, teaching them a reverence for nature, emphasizing individuality, all the counterculturecliches . The obsession with appearances, the focus on finances and materialism that were so much a part of the lives of her peers were completely foreign to her. At the same time, she recognized the need to fit in, and she had no problem putting on the mask of conformity, buying the right clothes, ordering the right food, doing everything necessary to facilitate her created persona of successful businesswoman.

It was why she was where she was today.

It was funny how life turned out. Her parents had been killed in a freak auto accident her senior year in high school, and amid the devastating grief and bottomless sense of loss, she'd been surprised to learn that her parents had actually written a will, and that they'd specifically earmarked funds for her and Josh's college education.

She never would have suspected such a straight request from either her mother or her father, but it was there in black and white, and the lawyer said that the money could only be used for books and tuition. Anything else, and the money would be donated to Green peace.

So, in a way, her hippie parents were responsible for her becoming the business executive she was today.

She had the feeling they'd be proud of her, though.

A half hour later, Hoffman finally finished talking, the meeting finally ended, and the various department heads went back to their offices. Tom Jenson, the division development coordinator, asked her if she wanted to go out for drinks after work, but she begged off, saying that she wanted to get a head start on the weekend.

"I don't blame you," he said. "It's been a crappy week."

Laurie smiled. "See you Monday."

She left work an hour early, walking downtown. A

cable car filled with Japanese tourists clattered past her, and she waved at one man who snapped her picture.

As she did each Friday, she stopped off to see her brother at The Shire. He'd been managing the bookstore for three years now, and it was nice to see him finally find a job that he liked, but recently he'd been delving a little too deeply into Eastern religion and philosophy books.

An interest he'd inherited from their mom.

It was one of the reasons she liked to check up on him.

Josh was helping a customer when she walked into the shop, and she waved at him and busied herself with the magazines while he talked with the customer about the works of Carlos Casteneda .

The customer finally bought a book and left, and Laurie walked over to the counter. "How goes it?" she asked.

He looked at her. "I was about to ask you the same question."

"That bad, huh?"

He nodded.

She placed her purse down on the counter and sighed.

"It's been a long week."

"Tell me about it."

She described the petty infighting and office politics that had been indulged in since the division's recent restructuring, moved on to the boring meetings and endless memos, and finished with a lawsuit being filed against the company by an ex-clerk whom she had hired.

"Sounds like a party."

"Yeah. Right."

"How are things with you and Matt?"

"Fine. No problems there."

"You could always get another job."

"No. It's not the work, it's . . . it's the position. Ever since I took that promotion, I've had to spend all my time dealing with human resources rather than what's important."

He smiled. " 'Human resources'?"

"I admit it. I've been corrupted. I'm a corporate shill."

"Like I said, you could find another job."

She shook her head.

"You're under a lot of stress. That's your main problem. I have this book--"

"Josh."

"I'm serious. It's about spiritual awareness and energy management. There's a lack of spirituality in your life.

That's at the root of your problems. It's what's at the root of most of the world's problems."

"I really don't want to hear it right now."

"Laurie--"

"Look, I'm glad you have a hobby, and it's really interesting and everything, but I just don't believe that I

can walk into your store and buy a five-dollar vanity press book and find out answers to questions that the greatest minds in the history of the world couldn't solve."

"You don't have to be hostile."

"Yes, Josh, I do. I do because every time I come in here, you're trying to shove some new religion down my throat. I just want you to be my brother and give me a shoulder to cry on and not try to convert me all the time."

"You're just too closed-minded."

"If Albert Einstein didn't know the meaning of life, then neither do you."

He turned away, and she reached out and grabbed his arm, sighing. "I'm sorry. It's been a boring day and a long week, and I didn't mean to take it out on you."

He turned, smiled wryly. "What are brothers for?"

She hugged him. "I just need to go home, take a hot bath, relax with Matt, and watch a crummy movie." She picked up her purse from the counter. "I'll call you later, okay?"

He nodded.

"And next time we'll discuss your wacky religions."

He laughed. "Deal."

She waved good-bye and walked outside onto the crowded sidewalk. She'd taken BART to work this morning but decided to walk home. It wasn't that far, and she needed the exercise. She also wanted some time to think.

At the corner, at the stoplight, a convertible pulled next to her, its driver idly flipping through stations on a radio loud enough to be heard halfway down the block:

rap, dance, metal, alternative. The light changed, the convertible took off, and as she walked across the street she heard the fading drone of a currently hot rock band.

She missed the music of the seventies. To the mainstream public, it was the decade of disco, but she'd been into fusion and progressive rock, movements on the edge of the mainstream that took chances, expanded boundaries, celebrated artistic ambition and musical ability.

Everyone now had been ground down into mediocrity, afraid to shoot too high, afraid of being ridiculed as pretentious, and the result was a music scene that was terminally banal.

Art.

That's what she respected.

Which was why she was so happy with Matt.

They'd been going together for a year, living together for the past four months, and while the situation at work had been up and down, she'd never been happier at home.

Matt, she thought, was a true artist. He created his work not for money, not for fame, not for recognition by his peers.

He did it because he had to.

He didn't look or dress the part either, and that's what had sold her on his integrity. There were two looks for artists in San Francisco: designer duds and an up-to-the minute coif, or thrift-store clothes and uncombed hair.

Matt looked more like a sales clerk or a civil servant-- average--and the fact that he didn't feel obligated to play into the media's conception of an artiste made her think he was the real thing.

In actuality, he did work as a sales clerk. At Montgomery Ward's. Cameras and Luggage. He used the money he earned at his nine-to-five to fund his art: films he shot in and around Golden Gate Park with "found"

actors--people he picked off the street to read his scripts. When he completed a film, he copied it onto videotape, passed the tapes out to friends and coworkers, and told them to copy the film and pass it on as well. Most of the people who watched his work, she knew, were not even aware that he was the filmmaker.

He always acted as though this were just some low-budget movie he'd discovered and wanted to share with them.

She found that charming.

Matt's Mustang was in the driveway when she arrived home, and her spirits lifted as she hurried across the small yard and up the porch steps. The front door was unlocked--as usual--and she opened the door and went inside. She was about to pull her Ricky Ricardo routine and yell "Honey, I'm home!" but instead she decided to surprise him, and she moved quietly through the living room.

There was the sound of someone peeing in the bathroom, and she walked over to the open door --where a nude blond woman was sitting on the toilet, legs spread.

Matt, her artist, was kneeling before the toilet, his head in the woman's lap.

There was no silent second of shock, no delay of any kind. She ran instantly into the bathroom and yanked Matt up by his hair. "Get out!" she screamed. "Get the hell out of my house!"

His erect penis was bouncing around comically and the woman was frantically trying to recover her clothes, but Laurie did not let up. She dug her fingers into Matt's upper arm and shoved him as hard as she could into the hall, picking his clothes up from the floor next to the tub and throwing them after him. She did not touch the woman but continued screaming all the while, anguished, angry invectives that included both of them.

The woman, pants and T-shirt now on, ran past her out of the bathroom clutching panties, bra, nylons, shoes.

Laurie was crying. She didn't want to, wanted to wait until after they were gone, wanted to appear only mad, not hurt, but she couldn't help it and she was sobbing as she screamed, "Fuck you, Matt! Fuck you, you pervert!

Fuck you!"

Still only half-dressed, the two of them ran down the hallway, through the living room, out the front door.

They did not bother to close the door behind them, and Laurie caught a glimpse of Matt scrambling into his car, fumbling with his keys, before she slammed the door shut and dead-bolted it.

She slumped to the floor, leaning against the hard cold wood. It had all happened so fast. One minute she'd been happy, excited, ready to relax with Matt and begin her weekend; the next, her entire life had been turned upside down and it felt as though her guts had been scooped out as she realized that the man she loved had betrayed her. She hadn't had time to think, to absorb the shock, she'd simply been thrown in the water and forced to swim.

She sat there, crying, and after a while the tears stopped. The hurt had not lessened, but it had stabilized.

It was no longer an intruder but a part of her, and she could deal with it. She stood, wiped her eyes, wiped her face, and went back down the hall to the bathroom.

Walking over to the toilet, she grimaced with distaste and flushed, almost gagging.

She washed her hands in the sink, scrubbing hard, then walked into the bedroom, slumping onto the bed.

She was still shaking with anger, but beneath the anger she felt hollow, empty. Her thoughts were rushing a mile a minute, scenes from the past months with Matt running through her head as she tried to determine whether she should have seen this coming.

She sometimes thought it would be easier if she were a lesbian. At least she understood the female mind set.

And she wouldn't have to put up with asshole men who tried to tell her what to think and how to act and then betrayed her.

She leaned back onto the mattress.

Lesbian.

She remembered when she was little, promising to marry a girl who lived . . . where? Next door? Down the street? She couldn't remember. She couldn't recall the girl's name either, but she remembered the way she'd looked, dirty and thin, pretty in a natural, unaware, unself-conscious way. Even now, the memory stirred her, and Laurie sat up again, shaking her head.

What was wrong with her?

Maybe she was attracted to women. Maybe she'd been repressing her true feelings all these years and that was why she'd consistently picked losers, why she'd failed in her relationships with men each and every time.

No. She thought of Matt's blond bimbo, naked, frantically putting on her clothes, and there was no interest whatsoever, not even a subliminal attraction, only a white-hot anger and a burning core of hate. She'd always considered herself a nonviolent person, a pacifist, but she understood now how people could kill.

If there'd been a gun in the house, she probably would've shot both of them.

She sighed, thought for a moment, then stood and began rummaging through the closet and the drawers of the dresser, taking everything of Matt's and tossing it onto the floor. She gathered it all up, took it out to the living room, threw it on the couch, then went systematically through the rest of the house until she'd found everything he owned.

She threw it all out into the yard, everything, even his art, heaving his camera as hard as she could on the ground, stomping on his precious videotapes before tossing the shattered cassettes onto the grass. The driveway, the yard, the sidewalk were all covered with clothes and books, electronic equipment and CD's, and a group of kids playing baseball in the street had stopped to stare at her, but she didn't care, and she slammed the door again and locked it, already feeling better.

She'd leave it overnight, give him a chance to come back for it. But if his shit was still there in the morning, she'd call the Children's Hospital or some other charity and have them haul it away.

It was a morning without fog, a morning without clouds, and Laurie stood on the stoop staring up at the sky. It was rare in San Francisco that the sun shone this early in the day, that blue showed through before noon, and despite everything that had happened recently, the uncharacteristically good weather brightened her spirits, made her feel, for the first time in over a week, slightly hopeful.

Tia Guiterrez , the young woman next door, waved from her porch. "Beautiful day, huh?"

Laurie nodded. "For once."

"You should call in sick, take the day off."

"You should, too."

Tia smiled. "I am."

Laurie smiled back. It had been a long time since she'd taken a day off. And she had accumulated plenty of vacation hours. But, no, she couldn't. There was too much work to do. There was theMieger account to go over: the customized software that the manufacturer had ordered had apparently not been satisfactory, and now Mieger was pushing for upgrades that he wanted for free and done yesterday. And she was supposed to chair a meeting on flexible benefits packages at three o'clock.

She couldn't take off today.

But she could walk to work. She went back inside, checked her hair in the mirror, popped a few vitamin C's, and picked up her purse and briefcase. Stepping out of the house and locking the door behind her, she waved to Tia, still on the porch, and started off. The day was indeed beautiful, and the sun felt good on her skin, warm and fresh and invigorating. People seemed friendlier on a day like this, and she said more hellos to strangers in the next hour than she had in the past six months.

She was twenty minutes late by the time she reached the office, but no one noticed and no one cared, and she told Mara to hold all of her calls for the next hour while she reviewed the Mieger file.

She didn't review the file, though. She seemed to be having difficulty concentrating, and after reading and rereading the same memo four or five times, Laurie finally gave it up and walked over to the window, looking between the buildings at the bay.

What was she doing here?

It was a question she asked herself periodically but for which she could not seem to find a satisfactory answer.

There comes a point, she thought, when what you do as a temporary stopgap until you "find" yourself hardens into your actual personality. The person you pretended to be, while waiting to discover who you are, becomes the real you.

Was that what had happened to her?

Yes.

She'd been the responsible one, and she'd tried to take care of Josh after their parents had died, to provide for him, to give him as stable a life as she could under the circumstances. She'd always intended to move on at some point, to abandon this job and this lifestyle once her brother settled down and got himself established, but Josh never had settled down, never had gotten himself established, and she'd been promoted onward and upward and at some point it had just not made sense to think about quitting and doing something else.

So here she was.

To top it off, she was now all alone. The foundation of the stable loving relationship in which she'd thought she'd been involved had turned out to be built on quicksand, and she was going to have to start over from scratch--although, after all this time, she was not sure that she still knew how.

Laurie sighed, stared once again out the window, looking down at the street and its tiny toy cars below. Her period was two days late. That's what she was really concerned about, that's what was really on her mind.

And while a baby would certainly force a change in her life, she did not want to be carrying Matt's child. She wanted nothing more to do with that sick loser, and despite the fact that her biological clock was winding down, she was not sure that she wanted to be a mother at all. She didn't have any burning desire to reproduce, no deep-seated need to cuddle with something small and cute and fetchingly defenseless, no inclination toward spending the next eighteen years of her life catering to the material needs and overseeing the intellectual and emotional development of another human being.

She wasn't sure she was ready for the responsibilities of taking care of a kitten, let alone a baby.

What if she was pregnant? Would she abort it? She wasn't sure. She didn't think so, but she couldn't rule it out. At this point, she had no feelings for whatever might be growing inside her, no protective maternal urges, no bond of any sort. But how could she tell? She might keep it and it might turn out to be a good thing.

It might force her to make just the changes she needed in order to slough off this midlife malaise or whatever it was that seemed to "be afflicting her.

Or maybe not.

Laurie looked once more out the window, once more toward the bay, then walked back over to her desk and tried once again to get through theMieger file.

Before heading home, she stopped by the bookstore.

Josh was busy, discussing Taoism with an obviously likeminded customer. She wasn't in the mood to hang around for an hour or however long it took for him to wind down, so after browsing politely, waiting a respectable ten minutes, she smiled at him, blew him a kiss good-bye, and started out the door.

"Wait!" he called after her, holding up a hand.

She mimed dialing a phone. "I'll call you," she said in the exaggeratedly simplistic tone she'd use on a deaf person attempting to read her lips.

Her brother nodded from across the store, circled his thumb and forefinger in an "OK" gesture, and turned back toward the customer.

It was late afternoon, the sun already hidden behind two of the taller buildings, and in the shadows of the city this morning's cheerful warmth had disappeared.

Above, the sky was still blue and cloudless, but the hidden sinking sun had robbed it of its attraction and Laurie felt cold, lonely, and curiously uneasy as she walked down the littered sidewalk toward her neighborhood.

There were a lot of cars on the street but very few pedestrians, and something about it all didn't seem right to her.

Maybe she was pregnant. Maybe her hormones were all out of whack and affecting her emotions.

Twenty minutes later, she was out of the downtown business district and passing through an interim area of old buildings and Victorian homes that had been converted into boutiques and coffeehouses when she saw up ahead, parked by the curb in front of Starbuck's, Matt's Mustang.

Her heart started racing. Maybe it wasn't Matt's.

Maybe it was someone else's, someone who had the same car in the same color and a similar bumper sticker on the back window. She took a few steps forward, then stopped, looking at the license plate.

It was Matt's.

What was he doing here? He didn't even like coffee.

He was probably here on a date.

But why was he staying this close to her neighborhood?

She'd expected him to keep as far away from her as possible, had assumed that out of common decency he'd relocate to another area of the city. The last thing she figured he'd do was hang around here. Didn't he have any shame?

Maybe the bitch he was with lived in this area.

That would make sense. He'd probably met the slut when he'd been off one day, cruising around the neighborhood, pretending to work on his art, while she really had been at work at Automated Interface.

She thought of waiting for him by his car, embarrassing him, causing a scene, informing him loudly in front of a group of strangers that she was pregnant, but she knew that was just a fantasy. Even now, looking at his car, her heart was pounding so hard it was interfering with her breathing, and there was no way she could get up enough nerve to face him. Not now. Not yet.

She considered continuing down the sidewalk, pretending as though she hadn't noticed, ignoring him if he happened to walk out to his car at the exact moment she passed by, but she decided against it and opted for crossing the street and cutting down the alley that led to Union.

The alley was dark, the flanking buildings blocking out what was left of the late afternoon light. Her uneasiness returned. The shadows here made her nervous, and she hurried over the pitted, eroded asphalt toward the opposite end, not running, not wanting to make that concession to fear, but striding quickly, hoping that her anxiety did not show. She pretended as though it was only the normal physical dangers of the city that worried her, that she was afraid of gangs and muggers and derelicts and drug addicts, but that was not the case. She could spin it that way, rationalize it, but her nervousness was based on something less concrete, something ephemeral that she could not even put her finger on, and whether it was stress or hormones or another entirely unrelated cause, all she wanted was to get out of this alley and off the streets and back home.

The girl was waiting for her at the alley's end.

Laurie was almost to Union, about to step off the rough asphalt onto the sidewalk, when she saw movement in the shadowed darkness to her right, a flash of white that startled her and made her suck in her breath.

It was a girl of about ten or eleven, a thin waiflike child with dirty hair and face and even dirtier clothing:

a white party dress covered with smudges and handprints and mud-edged rips. Her physical appearance resembled that of someone who'd been beaten or abused, but there was no sense of victimization about her, no fear or hesitancy or the sort of emotional withdrawal that would be expected after such an attack. Indeed, the child seemed remarkably self-possessed, and she stepped in front of Laurie, looking up at her. "Hello."

"Hi," Laurie said, and she wasn't aware of it until she'd spoken the word, but there was something old fashioned about the girl, an anachronistic formality evidenced by her "Hello," by her purposeful walk and self-assured bearing, that under other circumstances would probably be cute and charming but here, in the alley, seemed unnatural and more than a little disconcerting.

There was also something vaguely erotic about the child, something sensual in the way her hair fell over the left side of her face, the way she stood, hips out, bare legs slightly spread beneath her dirty dress.

What kinds of thoughts were these?

Laurie looked into the girl's face, saw raw beauty beneath the dirt and grime, saw a knowing, adult expression on those child's features, and she felt a strange and unfamiliar stirring within her, a feeling that was almost... sexual.

Sexual?

What the hell was wrong with her?

The girl smiled up at her slyly. "Do you want to see my underwear?"

Laurie shook her head, backed away, but the girl was already lifting up her dirty dress, exposing clean white underpants beneath, and Laurie was looking. She didn't know what was going on here, but the tight cotton and clearly outlined private parts were somehow arousing, and she was unable to turn away.

The girl laughed, a high child's giggle that segued halfway through into a woman's throaty chuckle. She turned around in a circle, still holding up her dress, exposing her pantied buttocks.

Laurie was frightened more than anything else. She did not know what was happening, but she had the sense that she should, that she was supposed to know who this child was and why she was doing this.

The girl was once again facing her, and she smiled knowingly. "Do you want to see my pussy?"

Laurie turned and ran.

She was almost to Union and could've walked around the girl and out to the street, but even the idea of running back through the shadowed alley and perhaps meeting up with Matt seemed preferable to moving any closer to the child and risking accidental contact.

She was out of breath when she reached the sidewalk, but she turned left and kept running, past Matt's unmoved car on the other side of the street, past businesses and houses, up the hill, not stopping until she was home.

She locked the doors, drew the drapes.

She dreamed that night of the girl, and in her dream the child was naked and in bed with her. She was kissing the girl on the lips, and those lips were soft and knowing, the girl's smooth body warm and deliciously sensual, the feel of her budding breasts achingly erotic.

Laurie had never been this aroused before, and though she became aware at some point that this was not real, that she was dreaming, she did not want it to end and she purposely tried to prolong the dream, to manipulate its specifics in order to draw it out. She was rubbing herself against the girl, feeling soft femininity between her legs, and she was wet, wetter than she had ever been in her life, her lubricating juices dripping down her thighs, smearing the skin between them. There was no penetration, but she was already reaching orgasm, and she bit her lip to keep from crying out, involuntary spasms wracking her body as wave after wave of pleasure coursed through her, spreading outward from between her legs.

When she awoke, her period had come.

Norton Fall had arrived early this year. It was the end of August and school had just started, but already the trees outside the classroom window were a red and yellow rainbow against the flat gray of the Iowa sky.

Norton Johnson hated to be inside on a day like today. It ran counter to every impulse in his body, and it was on days like this that he seriously considered taking the Board up on their offer and retiring.

There was no way he could retire, though. He turned back toward his class, stared out at the blank bored teenage faces before him. These kids needed him. They didn't know it, but they did. The other teachers in school might think of him as a dinosaur, a relic from an earlier age, but he knew that the only way these students would ever learn anything, the only way they would ever overcome the lax parenting and media overstimulation that was their world, was through someone who cared enough to hold their noses to the grindstone.

Straight teaching. That's what they needed. Lectures, note taking , reading, essays, tests. Not this "cooperative learning,"

not the current fads of the current educational "experts."

He'd been here before. In the late sixties, early seventies.

When teachers had "rapped" to their students.

When one of the English classrooms had had beanbag chairs and pillows instead of desks. When students had been allowed to design their own course curriculum and grade their own papers, giving themselves the scores they thought they deserved. He alone had resisted that foolishness, had insisted that there was nothing wrong with the tried and true methods of teaching to which he'd been subjected and that he'd been successfully using for years.

He'd been laughed at then, too. But those days had come. And they'd gone.

And he was still here.

The current educational fallacy was that facts and dates weren't important, that students were better off learning "concepts" rather than information, and he was determined to wait out this trend as well, to remain at the school, to continue on as department chairman until this too had passed.

Still . . .

He looked wistfully out the window. The air probably smelled like fireplace smoke. The slight breeze rattling the trees was probably brisk and cold.

He forced himself to continue on with his lecture.

The fact was, as much as he hated to admit it, his mind wandered more often these days than it had in the past. He was not senile or unfocused or unable to concentrate. It was not that. It was simply that his priorities now were different. Intellectually, his work remained paramount, but emotionally his needs were shifting. He no longer received the same satisfaction from teaching as he had before. He sometimes found himself wanting to gratify simpler, more basic desires.

The verities of old age.

Norton glanced up at the clock above the blackboard.

The period was winding down, so he gave a short talk on Mengele and Nazi experimentation and, as always, there was an appreciable increase in the level of attention paid by the class.

He attempted, as usual, to place the information in historical perspective, to give it some context, to impress on the kids why this subject was important. To make them think.

"We're facing the fallout even now," he said. "The Nazi experiments on human beings, onerous as they were, yielded valuable scientific information that could now be put to good use. Therein lies the dilemma. Is that knowledge tainted because of the way in which it was obtained? A lot of people believe that no good can come of evil and that recognition of the worth of this information would indirectly validate what the Nazis did. There are other people who believe that knowledge is knowledge, it is neither good nor evil in and of itself, and the method by which it was obtained should have no bearing on its validity. Still others believe that if any good can come of this evil, all of those people would not have died in vain. It's a complex question with no easy answer."

The bell rang.

"Think about it over the weekend. You may have to write an essay." He smiled as the students picked up their books and papers, groaning. "And enjoy your days off."

"We always do!" Greg Wass yelled as he sped out the door.

The weather was still gorgeous after school, and Norton cut across the football field to Fifth Street. At the edge of the field, in the dirt border adjoining the chain link fence that separated school property from the sidewalk, he saw a line of huge red ants marching from a hole in the ground to a discarded lunch sack, and he stopped for a moment to watch them. It had always seemed ironic to him that the ant, the Nazi of the insect kingdom, was the bug most frequently subjected to genocide.

Flies and gnats, spiders and beetles, were usually killed individually. But ants were squashed or sprayed with poison, killed a hundred, two hundred at a time, entire colonies wiped out in one stroke.

He frowned, recalling a memory from his childhood, when he and a neighbor girl had set fire to an anthill, dousing the small mound of dirt and the surrounding grassy ground with kerosene before dropping a match and watching the little insect bodies shrivel and blacken.

They'd thrown other bugs into the fire as well, beetles and spiders, whatever they could catch, and they'd almost tossed in a kitten but the flames had sputtered out before they could capture the animal.

He closed his eyes. Where had that memory come from?

He felt suddenly ill at ease, slightly queasy, and he took a deep breath and walked through the open gate onto the sidewalk. The day no longer seemed so perfect, and instead of strolling slowly, enjoying the cool weather and the premature season, he hurried down Fifth Street toward home.

Carole was cooking dinner in the kitchen when he arrived, but he wasn't in the mood to talk to her, so he called out a cursory greeting, threw his briefcase on the hall tree, grabbed a Newsweek from the magazine rack, and locked himself in the bathroom. He stayed in there for almost a half hour, until Carole knocked on the door and asked if he was going to spend the night on the toilet or come out and eat. He yelled that he'd be out in a minute, and when he walked into the dining room, the table was set and the good china was out. In the center of the table was a full salad bowl, a plate of mashed potatoes, and a small basket of rolls.

Uh-oh, he thought.

Carole emerged from the kitchen carrying a silver tray upon which sat a delicious-smelling roast.

"What is it?" he asked as she placed the tray on the table.

"What is what?"

"This." He gestured around the table. "What's up?"

"Nothing," she said. "I'm in a good mood and I

wanted to have a nice dinner. Is that a crime?"

"No, it's not a crime. But you don't usually go to all this trouble unless you want something. Or . . ." He looked at her. "Did you have an accident? Is the car dented?"

She glared at him. "That's insulting. I told you, I was just in a good mood." She paused. "Was."

They stared at each other for a moment, then Carole turned and strode back into the kitchen. Norton sat down to eat. The food looked delicious, and he piled his plate high with generous helpings of everything. Carole returned, placing a glass of milk before him.

They ate for a while in silence, a welcome change and a state of affairs he thoroughly enjoyed, but Carole was obviously discomfited by the lack of conversation, and she finally broke down.

"Don't you even want to know why I'm in a good mood? Why I'm happy?"

He sighed. "Why are you happy?"

"Because we had our first CLO meeting of the season."

"So what are you doing this year? Annie again? The world always needs more amateur productions of Annie.'"

She slammed her fork down on the table. "You pompous ass."

"What are you talking about?"

"Why do you always have to belittle everything that I do?"

"I don't belittle everything you do."

"What do you call it, then?"

"I'm not--"

"Not what? Criticizing? You sure the hell are. And for your information, we're doing Sondheim's Company this year." She glared at him. "And don't you dare say we don't have the talent for it."

"I wasn't going to," he said.

But he was. That was exactly what he'd been about to say. And he was only able to claim the high road now because she talked faster than he did and hadn't allowed him to put his foot in his mouth.

Why did he do this? he wondered. What compelled him to attack her, to disparage her abilities, to mock her accomplishments, to denigrate everything she did?

It wasn't that he thought himself superior, as she often suggested. It wasn't that he felt inferior and belittled others in an attempt to make up for it, either. No, it was simpler than that. Simpler, and at the same time, more complex.

He liked to hurt people.

The ants.

He took a deep breath, stared down at his mashed potatoes. It was a hard admission to make, a clear-eyed yet withering self-assessment, an understanding of himself that he'd rather not possess. Not many people could recognize or acknowledge such a base and reprehensible motive Jesus, he thought. He was even using this as fodder for self-congratulation, complimenting himself for recognizing that he was a bastard.

What the hell was wrong with him?

It had all started with those damn ants.

He looked across the table at Carole. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm . . . I've just had a bad day."

"It's not only today," she told him.

"I know, I know--"

"No. You don't know."

"What do you want me to do, Carole? I said I'm sorry."

"You're an arrogant, self-centered jerk sometimes."

CCT___??

"I don't want to talk to you right now, Nort . Just shut up and eat your dinner."

They finished the rest of the meal in silence, and afterward he went out into the living room to watch a documentary on the Civil War on A&E while she retreated into the kitchen.

He finished grading the last test paper and put it on the pile, shaking his head. He hadn't had high expectations to begin with, but the scores were even worse than he thought they'd be.

Kids seemed to be getting dumber and dumber each year.

He sighed, grabbed his cup, finished off the last lukewarm swallow of coffee. They weren't really stupid, these students, but they weren't educated and had no desire to be so. They had no intellectual guidance, no one to tell them what they should know and why they should know it. "The post-literate generation," he'd heard them called, and that was as good a description as any. They did not read, were not conversant with the essential facts and ideas at the core of Western culture, were not even up on current events, but they had an encyclopedic knowledge of twenty-year-old television shows and bad popular music. Even his best students were smart in the wrong way: media-savvy kids who dealt in trivia, the intellectual currency of their time.

It was a sad state of affairs.

Norton rubbed his tired eyes, looked up at the clock over the bookcase. Midnight. Carole had gone to sleep several hours ago, and he should have too, but there'd been that Civil War show and then these tests to grade, and now it was already Thursday. He stood, stretched.

He could've done what most of his colleagues did and postponed the grading for another day. Or he could have given a scantron test instead of an essay test and let the machine grade them.

But he wasn't about to sacrifice his principles, to change his teaching habits for the sake of expediency, and though he was bone-tired and would only be able to catch a few hours of sleep, at least he could face himself in the morning.

He walked into the kitchen, put his cup in the dishwasher, then walked down the hallway to the bathroom to take out his bridge.

Carole was dead asleep and snoring when he went into the bedroom, and she did not wake up even when he turned on the light. He took off his clothes, carefully folded them, and placed them on the cedar chest at the foot of the bed, then once again turned off the light. He felt his way through the darkness over to the bed, lifted the covers, and got in.

Carole moaned, stirred, rolled over.

Her body felt warm next to his, almost hot. She often called him a "corpse" because of their difference in body temperatures, and he had to smile when she said that because it wasn't too far off the mark. He was getting on in years, and a lifetime of soft self-indulgence had probably made his body even more decrepit than it ordinarily would be. He was old and he knew it, and he wouldn't be surprised when his heart or his liver or one of his other organs started to give out.

Carole was quite a bit younger than he was, forty five to his sixty-two, and there was something comforting about knowing that he would die first. It was selfish, of course, but he'd always been selfish to a certain extent and the charge didn't bother him. He wouldn't have to carry on without her, wouldn't have to make another seismic shift in his life. It would be hard on her, of course, but she was stronger than he was, she could handle it. Hell, she'd probably remarry.

So why was he such a prick to her?

He wasn't a prick all the time. Even she had to admit that. He'd been head over heels for her when they'd first married, and while the passion may have cooled, he did still love her. Only these days, he seemed to be annoyed by her more often than entranced, easily irritated by her behavior, what she said and what she did consistently rubbing him the wrong way. He didn't know why. It was probably his fault. He didn't think she had changed over the years. But he had. Something in his life had shifted, some nascent gene of solitary bachelorhood kicking in as he got older, making him prefer to remain alone rather than in the company of others. There'd been a settling in his ways, a hardening of his attitudes, and though he still loved Carole, still cared about her, still needed her, it had become increasingly hard to like her, to be with her.

He glanced next to him. She remained very attractive, though. Even in sleep, even with her mouth open, her hair wild, face cream clumped on her cheeks, chin and forehead, she was an extremely pretty woman. And he could not imagine going to bed without her stretched out beside him. He still enjoyed being with her when she was awake as well--it was talking to her that was becoming increasingly difficult. When they sat alone in a room, he reading, she sewing, one or both of them watching TV, each performing separate activities, it was nice. Only talk brought out their differences, only conversation brought out his annoyance and hostility, made him feel that perhaps he should have remained a single man.

If they were both mute, they could have a happy life.

He settled into sleep beside her, and she turned onto her side. He stretched one arm over her shoulder, resting his hand on her breast, and she pressed her buttocks against his groin, automatically finding, even in sleep, the position they'd discovered to be most comfortable.

Despite his tiredness and the lateness of the hour, he did not fall asleep instantly but drifted slowly off, his mind focusing on nothing and everything, his thoughts moving from Carole to school to old friends to his

trip to Italy to the president's recent trip to Japan, floating gradually away in ever-widening circles, his brain making connections of logic that were at first tenuous, then not there at all but seemed perfectly natural as sleep overtook him.

He was awakened by violent shaking.

Norton sat up immediately, his panicked heart thumping as though it were about to burst through his chest. He thought at first it was an earthquake but realized almost instantly that only the bed was shaking, that the hanging plant next to the curtained window was still, that the rest of the room was not in motion.

A foot kicked his leg. A hand lashed out at his midsection.

It was Carole.

She was having convulsions.

He had no idea what to do, and even as he kicked off the covers and twisted around, grabbing her shoulders, trying to hold her down and stop her from shaking, he was cursing himself for not attending the CPR seminar the last time they'd had a teacher's in-service day. He hadn't thought there'd ever be a practical use for it.

Carole was in better health than he was, and he couldn't see himself doing anything to help a stranger except dial 911, so he'd chosen to stay in his classroom and rearrange his bulletin boards instead of attend the emergency medical training.

Now he felt lost and frightened and completely out of his depth. Carole's eyes were wide open and jiggling crazily in their sockets as her entire head shook in staccato spasms. Her mouth was open, tongue hanging out, looking twice as long as he knew it to be, and saliva was flying out in all directions, strings of it stretched over her cheeks and chin, independent spray hitting the pillow and the blanket and his arm. Beneath his hands, the muscles of her chest and shoulders were knotted and tight, much stronger than any muscles he'd ever felt before, and they were jerking nonstop in a frighteningly unnatural way.

He didn't know what was happening. He was pretty sure this wasn't a heart attack, but whether it was an epileptic fit or a stroke or the result of some sort of brain tumor, he had no clue. It was like something out of a movie, like a possession, and he had no idea if he was supposed to be holding her still or leaving her alone or giving her some kind of medicine. He'd heard somewhere that if someone was having a fit you were supposed to put a wallet in their mouth to keep them from swallowing their tongue, but Carole's tongue was flopping around outside her mouth, and she appeared in no danger of swallowing it.

The fit wasn't letting up.

He didn't know how much time had passed since she'd started convulsing, since the shaking had awakened him, but even adjusting for his skewed perceptions, it had to have been several minutes.

Shouldn't it have stopped by now?

If anything, the muscles beneath his grip were becoming more rigid, their vibrating spasms stronger and more violent. How long could a body continue undergoing something like this without sustaining permanent damage?

Wasn't her brain being smacked around in that jerking head? Weren't her organs being knocked about inside her chest cavity?

There'd been no sound coming out of her mouth, only the unnaturally silent, almost sibilant noises of her convulsing body, overpowered by the loud wood-on-wood sound of the headboard hitting the wall, but now there was a low humming coming from somewhere deep within her throat, a humming broken by vibrato as the sound escaped her wildly shaking head.

He let go, got off her, leaped from the bed. This had gone too far. It wasn't slowing or abating, and it was obvious that his attempt to hold her still, to force her body to stop shaking, to will her convulsions to end, was not working at all.

He ran out of the bedroom, ran for the phone, picked it up from the alcove in the hall, dialing 911 at the same time he tried to lift the receiver to his head. He told the robotically calm woman at the other end of the line who he was, where he was, and what was happening, and though the entire conversation probably took no more than one minute, it felt like fifteen. The woman promised to immediately dispatch paramedics and an ambulance, and he dropped the phone without bothering to hang up and ran back down the hallway to the bedroom.

By the time he returned, the attack was all over. Car ole had stopped convulsing.

She was dead.

Stormy Stormy Salinger drove back from Taos along the series of interconnected roads that led through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The highway was faster, but he preferred the back way, and he hauled ass on the stretches between villages to make up the time.

Through the windshield, the huge sky was light blue, the ever-present white clouds retreating to infinity like a Georgia O'Keeffe painting.

He loved this drive. The meadows, the streams, the trees, the ranches. This was why he had moved here, why he had left Los Angeles. He shut off the air conditioning, rolled down the car window, felt the wind in his face, smelled pine and hay, dust and water.

In L.A., he'd been afraid to roll down his windows as he drove. Not just because of the potential forcarjackings and robberies, not just because he'd be hit up for money by the homeless vets who staked out intersections and on-ramps, but because the air itself was poisonous.

The dirtiest air in the country, year in and year out.

Hell, even on days that had what southern California's TV weathermen called "good air quality," it was still rare to see the San Gabriel Mountains until you were almost on top of them.

That was not a way to live.

He'd grown tired of Los Angeles: the place, the people, the lifestyle. He'd grown tired of his friends as well, their smugness, their self-absorption, their condescending attitude toward anyone outside their clique, the mandatory elitism that afflicted what passed for their culture.

He'd fallen in with a group of film snobs--hip writers for entertainment publications, young academics from prestigious film schools, wannabe indie figures--people with little in common save their interest in cinema. As a successful video distributor, a lifelong movie fan who had made millions working on the fringes of filmdom, he himself was an inspiration to his friends, proof that the wall could be breached, yet he knew that while they pretended to be supportive of him and had no qualms about taking advantage of his generosity, they were, at the same time, jealous, and when a serious discussion of film came about--as it often did--his opinions were treated with slightly less respect, just to let him know that he was not really in their intellectual league.

That had always irritated the hell out of him.

He was the only member of the group who exhibited even the least bit of independence, who did not automatically fall in with the prevailing opinion and conform to preexisting tastes with lockstep homogeneity. They were nobodies, really, but they always acted as though they were society's arbiters of filmic quality, and it was a given that any film of which they approved was a work of art. They'd sit around and summarily dismiss contemporary comedies, yet rhapsodize about a Laurel and Hardy pie fight. It wasn't that the pie fight was intrinsically better than, say, the slapstick antics in a Jim Carrey movie, it was just that they considered it "classic," and that was automatically supposed to elevate its level of quality.

He'd grown increasingly tired of this intellectual incestuousness over the years, weary of the monotonic interests and attitudes. It was partly his fault. They were his friends and he had chosen them. He'd made his bed and had to lie in it.

So he'd simply pulled up stakes one day, sold off his Brentwood estate, and relocated to Santa Fe.

Now he conducted his business from here.

Stormy sped through Truchas, the small village where Robert Redford had filmed The Milagro Beanfield War.

He'd first visited New Mexico as a teenager, on a trip with his family, and he had never forgotten the place.

They'd done the tourist loop--White Sands, Carlsbad Caverns, Santa Fe, Taos Pueblo--and it had made a big impression on him. He was a city kid, born and bred in Chicago, and the dry heat, the open space, and the spectacular sky had all spoken to him in a way that nothing else had. He'd realized even then that this was where he wanted to live when he grew up, where he wanted to spend his life.

But the movie and video business was centered in southern California, and by the time he'd made enough money to move here, he'd gotten sucked into that L.A.

lifestyle, and it was not until several years later that he finally made the break.

It was a decision he'd never regretted.

He passed through Chimayo and could not help glancing down the small one-lane road that led to El Santuario .

The small adobe church had always creeped him out. All those crutches and braces hanging in the small dark room with the miracle dirt. Legend had it that the church was built on dirt that had healing powers, and each year, hordes of believers flocked to the spot to have their diseases and deformities cured, the ones who claimed to find relief from infirmity leaving their walking aides behind. He wasn't a religious man himself, he neither believed nor disbelieved, but there seemed something paganistic and primitive, something pre-Christian about this sort of Christianity. Maybe he'd just been watching too many of the movies he distributed, but the whole thing made him uneasy.

Ten minutes later, he hit the highway and was speeding toward downtown Santa Fe.

He arrived back at his office before three.

"How'd it go?" Joan asked as he walked through the door.

"Who knows? That bastard's impossible to read." He sat down in the oversized chair behind his desk, opened the jar of candy next to his computer, and popped a handful of M&Ms into his mouth. He'd been in Taos talking to the organizer of the film festival, trying to get one of his properties shown in competition this year. He had what he thought was a legitimate find, a retelling of Macbeth on an Indian reservation, made by an untrained twenty-five-year-old Hopi kid who'd financed the film by working as a park ranger at Betatakin and saving his money over several summers.

It was one of those success stories that the entertainment media seemed to love so much these days, and he knew he could get a lot of hype out of it. The movie was part of a package deal he'd made with Four Corners, a local distributor that'd gone belly-up, and while most of the titles were routine action flicks, this was an honest to-God film, and for the first time in his life, Stormy saw the opportunity to present to the viewing public a legitimate work by an undiscovered talent.

Maybe he'd try to take it to Sundance.

That would certainly up his cache in the business.

And, besides, the kid deserved it.

He tried to imagine the reaction of his old L.A. friends when they discovered that he was distributing a film that had been shown in competition at Sundance, and the pictures in his mind made him smile.

"You want me to call back tomorrow?" Joan asked.

"Apply a little pressure?"

Stormy nodded. "Tell him to make sure he watches the tape. And tell him he has forty-eight hours. Sun dance is interested."

Her eyes widened. "Really?"

Stormy grinned. "No." He paused dramatically. "At least not yet."

"We have a winner here, don't we?"

"I think we do," he said.

He worked late sorting through contracts. Joan had already left, so Stormy closed up the office and locked up. Roberta would be at her class by the time he got home, so on the way back, he pulled into the drive-thru lane at Burger King and ordered a Whopper, fries, and a chocolate shake. Roberta was constantly harping on him about his dietary habits, claiming that a person who ate the way he did didn't deserve to be wealthy, as though it were his moral obligation to eat gourmet meals all the time, but he failed to see how the fact that his taste in food was different from hers made him a deserving candidate for poverty. Like most overweight people, she put far too much emphasis on food, considered it a much too important part of life. If she considered sex as important as eating and put as much effort into their lovemaking as she did deciding what she ate, they might still have a marriage.

Sex.

It had been what? A month? Two months? He wasn't sure. They hadn't done it in a while, that he knew.

He tried to remember the first girl he'd ever had.

What was her name? Dawn? Donna? Something like that. Strange that he couldn't recall. Weren't you always supposed to remember your first? She'd been poor and dirty. He remembered that much. And that had been part of the allure. She was not like the perfectly scrubbed examples of femininity that were invited over to the house; she was different, wild, and he had liked that. She'd made him do things to her that he hadn't even known about, and in that one summer he had learned everything about sex he had ever needed to know.

It had been all downhill from there.

He hadn't thought of that girl in a long time, and he tried to recall what had happened, why they had broken up. It had probably been after the fire, after they'd moved, but he couldn't remember for sure.

He sighed. It didn't matter. He pulled up in front of the house, parked next to the ocotillo on the edge of the driveway. He sat for a moment in the car, staring through the windshield at the darkened windows of the house, and not for the first time, he wished that he had never gotten married, that he had never met Roberta.

On Friday, as usual, he left the office early and went to The Hogan. It was a regular bar, not an artist's bar, and there were none of the phony Southwest accoutrements that supposedly lent ambience to Santa Fe's nipper hangouts and that he found so annoying and distracting.

Jimbowas working today, and Stormy asked for a Bud Liteand stood at the bar waiting for his order while the bartender moved to fill it. There were two guys halfway down the counter having a loud conversation, and Stormy tuned it in.

"Whatever happened to strongmen?" the guy closest to him was saying. "Remember how we always called leaders of countries we didn't like 'Strongmen'? There was Panamanian Strongman Manuel Noriega, Libyan Strongman Mohammar Khadafi . We never used 'General,','President,' or whatever the hell their official title was. It was always 'Strongman.' Why don't we do that anymore?"

"You're drunk," his companion said.

"Maybe so. But it's a legitimate question."

"We only do that if we want to provoke a confrontation with them," Stormy offered. "We do it to teach our people that these are bad guys. It gets the public ready for war."

The drunk looked up. "Who are you, you anti-American son of a bitch?"

His friend put a restraining hand on his arm.

Stormy smiled apologetically. "Sorry. Didn't mean to butt in."

The drunk pointed. "I know your mama. She was giving pony rides, handing out ass candy."

Jimboarrived with his beer, and Stormy paid. "Thanks."

He headed over to a table next to the jukebox at the far end of the room.

"I'm talking to you!" the drunk yelled.

"Shut up!" his friend told him.

Stormy ignored the man, sipped his beer. It had been a good afternoon. Taos had taken the Hopi kid's film, and had not only put it in competition but had given it one of the coveted prime-time slots. To top it off, the straight-to-video Fat Lady, a horror sexploitation flick that he'd picked up after a minor studio had dropped it, had just gotten a rave review in Fangoria , the slice-and dice bible. Which meant that sales and rentals would probably go through the roof.

Sometimes life was good.

He looked at his watch. Four-ten. Ken was supposed to meet him here at four-fifteen, but his friend was chronically late and he was prepared to wait until four thirty. He took another sip of beer, a small one, trying to make it last.

To his surprise, Ken arrived on time for once. He flagged down Carlene, the waitress, ordered a Miller, and settled heavily into the chair opposite Stormy.

"Nice day at the office?"

"It's always a party when you work for a coroner. I

told you, anytime you want you can come on down and I'll give you a tour, let you see what it's like."

"No thanks."

"We had a cancer death today."

"I take it that's worse than a regular death?"

"Looking at it's not that bad, but the smell . . ." Ken shook his head. "When you pop someone open with colon cancer, that's a smell you won't forget."

"This is really appetizing. Are we going to order some hors d'oeuvres?"

Ken grinned. "Sure. Liver pate?"

"That's truly disgusting."

"You're a wussboy ."

"And you're a senseless psycho who's completely inured to blood and guts."

Ken shrugged. "You get used to it. I mean, before AIDS, we used to buy our lunch at McDonald's and put the sacks on top of the open bodies and eat. Sometimes, if people came to visit, we'd intentionally gross them out and play catch with, like, a spleen. You know, just to freak them." He laughed. "But now everyone's pretty careful. AIDS and O.J., man. They've really put a damper on the body biz. Things just aren't as fun anymore."

Carlene arrived with Ken's beer, and Stormy asked for another for himself.

"I'm telling you," Ken said. "You oughta put shit like that in a movie. Show'em what it's like in a real coroner's office. People'd love it."

"I don't make movies, I distribute them. And aside from the Faces of Death crowd, I don't think there's a big market for stuff like that. There aren't as many weirdos in the world as you might think there are."

"Speaking of weird, I was talking to Tom Utchaca yesterday about what's happening out by the reservation."

"What is happening out by the reservation?"

"A lot of strange shit's been going down."

Stormy leaned forward. This was getting interesting.

"You know Tom, right? He's not stupid and he's not superstitious." Ken lowered his voice. "He says his father's come back to the reservation."

"I thought his father was dead."

"He is."

Stormy blinked, started to say something, closed his mouth.

"Said he saw him in back of his parents' old place.

The house is abandoned, I guess, and he was driving by on his way somewhere and saw his father standing there in the empty field. He stopped the car because he wanted to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing, and his father smiled and waved at him and started walking over.

"Tom took off.

"And he's not the only one. A lot of the people say their dead are coming back. Tom doesn't know what the hell to think, but he said the word going around the reservation is that the netherworld is full, that there's no more room for the dead and some of them are leaking out, coming back into our world."

Against his will, Stormy felt a slight tingle pass down his spine. "Are these supposed to be ghosts or actual resurrected bodies?"

"Bodies. Resurrected and restored. They're not rotting zombies, they're back and good as new. Tom said his father looked like he did in his prime."

"You don't actually believe this shit, do you?"

"I've known Tom a long time, and I haven't seen anything myself yet but, yeah, I believe him."

"You deal with dead bodies every day. How can you--?"

"How can I what?" He paused. "You know, the more I learn, the more I realize how little I

know. It's a cliche , but I thought I knew everything when I got out of school, and when I first started this job I wouldn't have believed a story like that if Tom's father had walked into my bedroom and grabbed my dick. But I've learned over the years to listen to more than just the textbook facts in my head. I've learned to read people and situations.

And as crazy as this sounds, I think it's legitimate. I think it's true."

Stormy wanted to laugh at his friend, wanted to berate him for falling for such superstitious crap, but the sincerity of Ken's belief lent it a verisimilitude that Stormy found disconcerting.

"The thing is, it's not just the dead. Seems that people on the reservation have seen dolls that are . . . animated.

Those kachinas they make for the tourists. I gather the dollmakers won't even go near the workshop anymore.

It's all closed up."

"Tom told you all this?"

"Oh, no. You know him. I only found out about his father because I asked him. I'd heard elsewhere that some strange stuff was happening, and I wanted to check on it."

Stormy stared down into the bottom of his empty glass. Something about all this sounded vaguely familiar, but he was not quite able to put his finger on it. Had it been in a movie? He didn't think so. The connection was more real, more personal, more immediate. The specifics of it eluded him, but he saw these strange occurrences as an extension of something that had happened before--although he did not know what that "something"

was.

He cleared his throat. "The 'animated' dolls. They walk? At night?"

Ken nodded. "You got it."

He could have guessed that. It was logical. What else would animated dolls do? But he hadn't guessed. He had known. Or remembered. He wasn't sure which. In his mind was a picture of a ragged primitive doll rocking slowly on unbending legs, making its determined way down a long dark hallway.

A long dark hallway?

He didn't want to think about this, and he was grateful that Carlene brought his beer over to the table at just that moment. He paid her and tipped her, made some small talk to try and keep her there, but The Hogan was getting crowded as other people got off work and she had to hurry over to fill their orders.

Ken was about to tell him something else about the reservation, some other supernatural event that had happened, but Stormy cut him off before he got out the first word, changing the subject, asking if Ken had had a chance to look at any of the videotapes he'd lent him last week. He had, and he'd really hated one of them, and he started going off on it, telling Stormy how much he'd disliked the movie, and Stormy pretended to be offended, pretended to defend the film, but inside he breathed a sigh of relief, thankful they'd gotten off the subject of the reservation.

But it was still there, in his mind, and he thought about it through drinks, through dinner, on the way home, and by the time he went to bed that night, crawling next to an already sleeping Roberta, he was almost positive that he himself had once owned a doll that had been alive.

Mark Kristen is dead.

Mark was sitting alone in the large corner booth of Denny's in Indio when the knowledge came to him, and it took a moment for the information to register. He was holding the cup of cold coffee in his hand, pretending to drink so the waitress wouldn't come over and ask if he wanted a refill, staring out the window at the rusted boxcars sitting unattached on the train tracks across the highway. The sky was brightening, the high desert clouds now sunrise pink against the light blue background sky.

Early morning traffic--cross-country trucks and occasional cars--was beginning to congest the formerly empty roadway outside.

Then the realization hit him.

Kristen is dead.

He nearly dropped the cup but managed through a sheer effort of will to force his trembling hands to replace it on the saucer. He had no idea how she had died or why, there were no specifics, but he knew with certainty that she was gone.

He was the only one left.

He had not seen his sister in over a decade. When he'd left home, she'd been a sixteen-year-old girl with braces, just emerging from that ugly duckling stage, the beautiful woman she would become visible in the arrangement of her features but still a year or so away. It had been harder to leave Kristen than his parents or friends or anyone else, and it was for her that he'd almost stayed. He'd tried all that summer to convince her to come with him, to convince her that she could only escape by uprooting herself and running like hell as far away from Dry River as she could, but she'd told him that she didn't want to escape, didn't need to escape, was happy where she was.

Now she was dead.

In the back of his mind, he'd known it would come to this, and he felt guilty for not making more of an effort to save her, for not going back to talk to her. Of course, he'd sent letters, but that was not the same, and his letters had always been about himself, not her, about where he was, what he was doing, where he was going.

He had not felt bad when his father died. The information had come to him, he'd registered it, then gone on with his life. It was then that he should have gone back for Kristen. He'd thought about it. He'd been living in Colorado Springs at the time, working in a frame shop, and had been on his afternoon break, sitting on the steps in back of the shop, smoking, looking up at the clouds, when the knowledge came to him that his father was gone. He knew he should feel sad, and part of him had wanted to feel sad, but too much had happened over too long a time, and all he could feel was a slight regret that the two of them had not been able to make a closer connection.

He'd finished smoking his cigarette, ground out the butt with his boot, and gone back into the shop to finish his afternoon shift.

That was when he should have returned home. That was when he should have gone back for Kristen.

He'd considered it, and that night in his apartment he'd gotten as far as dialing the number of the house. Strange how he hadn't forgotten the number after all those years. But he'd hung up after the first ring and had spent the rest of the evening staring at the phone.

He'd half hoped that Kristen would call him, but of course she couldn't. Even if she had sensed something, she didn't know his current phone number.

The next day he'd quit his job at the frame shop, collected his last paycheck, and sent a postcard to Kristen as he headed toward Utah.

Kristen.

He'd failed her. More than anything else in the world, he had wanted to protect her, save her, keep her from becoming trapped like all the rest of them, but in that he had failed utterly. He had not been there for her when she'd needed him, had been too afraid for himself to go back for her.

The smart thing now would be for him to keep moving, not look back, to grieve for Kristen on his own, in his own way, and to continue on with his life. He had not gone home in all this time; there was no reason for him to return now. Everything would be auctioned off and sold in an estate sale when he could not be located and then it would all be over.

But he could not do that. Not this time. He owed it to Kristen to tie things up, to go back.

And he had to know how she'd died.

Dawn was giving way to morning, and outside the window he could see date palms where before there had only been trees. He picked up his cup, drank the last dredges of the cold coffee. Denny's was starting to fill up. There were families of travelers in two of the booths to his right, casually clothed construction workers ordering breakfast at the counter.

Mark reached down for his backpack. Through the door walked an old woman and her teenage niece or granddaughter. The young girl was dark, with long black hair, and for some reason she reminded him of Kristen.

All of a sudden he felt like crying.

He scooted out of the booth, left a dollar in the ashtray for the coffee and a tip, and walked quickly outside.

He stood in front of the restaurant, breathing deeply.

The air was warm and dry and felt good in his lungs, each breath seeming to siphon away the tears threatening to well up in his eyes.

What had Kristen been like as an adult? he wondered.

Or had she ever been an adult? She was twenty-six years old, but years meant nothing. In his mind, he still saw her the way she was when he'd left, obsessed with cute boys and popular music and schoolgirl gossip. He remembered how she'd cried when he left and how he'd promised to come back and visit, and he remembered the way her arms had felt around him as she'd hugged him goodbye.

He began to cry.

Angrily, he wiped away the tears. He took a deep breath, shouldered his backpack, started walking. Most people, he knew, would want someone to talk to, a shoulder to cry on, but he was glad he was alone. Grief, he believed, was a private experience, not meant to be shared. He did not want to think about other people's needs at this moment, whether he was soaking their good shirt with his tears, whether he was keeping them from an appointment or making them late for a meal, whether he was being too needy or too emotional or not emotional enough. He needed at this moment to be completely alone, completely selfish, so that he could feel what he had to feel for as long as he had to feel it without the influence of another person affecting his emotions.

A pickup sped past him, and a half-full McDonald's cup splattered on the ground at his feet, coffee splashing onto the cuffs of his jeans. He heard a harsh laugh as the driver drove away.

"Asshole," Mark mumbled.

Still, the encounter had brought him back into the real world, the practical world, and for that he was grateful.

He thought for a moment, then hurried across the highway to the opposite side. He faced the oncoming traffic, held out his thumb. He'd been heading for southern California, planning to look for construction work in Los Angeles, but now he was going to do something he should have done a long, long time ago.

He was going to go home.

The Land Rover drove down Highway 60, the driver silent, Mark still mulling over in his mind the fact that his sister was gone. He'd slept last night in the desert outside of Quartzite, and though he'd expected to spend the entire night unable to sleep, staring up at the stars, he had dozed off almost immediately after crawling into his sleeping bag and had not awakened until the sun had come up over the mountains.

The Power was fading. As long as Kristen had been alive, as long as there had been that blood connection, he had been able to tap into it, reference it, but now it was growing weaker by the hour, only a faint pulse remaining, and soon it would be gone. Already, he was having to use his own memory, to rely on his own thoughts and hunches. He was dismayed to realize how much he had relied on The Power, how much a part of him it was, and now that it was disappearing, he felt more isolated than he ever had in his life, as though one of his senses--his sight or his hearing--had been taken away.

He hadn't even been aware of how often he used it.

That was a little scary.

He probably wouldn't have gotten into this vehicle if he hadn't been able to take a reading of the driver.

It looked like his hitchhiking days were over.

Kristen was the real loss, though. Not having The Power was a mere inconvenience. Kristen's death was a tragedy.

They drove toward Phoenix, a series of dying desert towns bleeding into each other, empty cinderblock buildings in the open spaces between them making it difficult to determine where one town ended and the next began.

Through the side window, Mark saw a rock shop.

Faded pink paint on a dirty window read: sale!!

agates! jasper! geodes! Tireless cars sat on blocks next to the store, their exposed axles rusted and sagging, wrecked corners of their bodies twisted into unrecognizability.

A white cross near a burned section of desert memorialized some driver's death, and Mark wondered who was taking care of Kristen's burial arrangements. Would Billings still be there? he wondered. Would the assistant have remained even after their parents' deaths? Would Kristen have kept him on or would she have let him go?

Did Kristen have any friends? Maybe they were seeing to the arrangements.

He just hoped he didn't arrive too late. He wanted to be there for the funeral. And if there was no funeral, if the county or some social services agency simply provided her with a generic burial, he wanted to make sure that that was rectified, that she was put to rest with dignity.

Kristen deserved at least that much.

Mark closed his eyes, lulled by the heat and silence and the motion of the Land Rover. In his mind, he saw Kristen as she'd looked the last time he'd seen her:

shorts and a tank top, hair long and straight and blond, sunlight glinting off her braces, tears in her eyes, the house behind her.

The house.

He did not think of the house too often, tried not to think of it at all. He remembered as a child watching Giant on television and being freaked out by how eerily similar the gothic ranch house was to that of his own family. Like the structure in the movie, their home sat alone on a flat desert plain, an island of darkness in an endless sea of tan. Two and a half stories with a wraparound porch, the house, with its deep gray-black wood and permanently shuttered windows, its gables and wrought-iron weathervanes, gave the impression of age, permanence, and old-fashioned authoritarian power. It was an intimidating building, and it had always frightened his friends from school, had always been the recipient of wide-eyed stares and hesitant approaches, treated with trepidation and barely concealed fear--unlike the house in the movie, which, despite its appearance, had been treated as though it was not unusual, not out of the ordinary, yet another average ranch building.

The movie had disturbed him. It was not traditionally scary, was a light epic drama with comedic overtones, but the specter of the ranch house, its dark prominence, had been more than a little unsettling. Halfway through the film, the interior of the house had changed, been remodeled, and that wasn't so bad. The lighter walls and furniture looked fake, setbound , and that had enabled him to disassociate the movie home from his own.

His father, he remembered, had loved that film.

He'd known early on that there was something different about his family. They hadn't socialized with the other people in the extended series of adjoining ranches known as the town of Dry River, his parents keeping to themselves, associating only with his father's assistant Billings and with the occasional old friends or relatives who visited from back east. Even when Mark had started going to school and making friends of his own, he had the impression that his parents disapproved, that they would rather he not bring any other kids home--which seemed to be fine with his friends since they were afraid of the house anyway. He'd ended up spending most of his childhood at other people's houses, inventing a family that did not exist in the stories he told, lying and exaggerating in order to make his parents seem more normal, expanding his personal mythology to include Kristen when she'd come along.

It had been the ritualization of their lives, he supposed, that had first caused him to start thinking about moving away, the fact that his father made them eat breakfast every morning at exactly six o'clock, made them eat dinner at six each evening, made them sit in exactly the same spots each time, made them all go to bed at precisely nine o'clock, made them sit in separate rooms for an hour each night reciting their Daily Words.

Other parents didn't do that, he knew. People sometimes said prayers, ate together, but they didn't regiment their lives to the extent that his parents did.

And they did not beat their children when some slight mistake or miscalculation made them a second or two late for one of these ritualized practices.

As his parents did.

But, still, they were his family. And there was no way that he could leave Kristen. She needed him. He took the heat that would have otherwise fallen on her. And he kept her from buying into their parents' wackiness completely, kept her grounded as much as possible in the real world.

Then it had happened.

Even now, goose bumps popped up on his arms when he thought about it.

It had been a Saturday afternoon. Midsummer. Monsoon season. Kristen and his parents had gone into town, and he was alone. Billings was somewhere on the property, seeing to the chickens. Mark did not like being by himself in the house, even though he had lived there his entire life, and until now he had successfully avoided finding himself in this predicament, had not been alone in here since the time when he was five and had gotten lost in the maze of passageways and his father had rescued him, screaming, from a darkened hall that seemed to have no end.

He was older now, a high school graduate, but he still felt like a little kid, still felt that same sense of oppressive fear as he sat in his bedroom and realized that there was no one home but himself. He considered going outside, finding something to do in the barn or in the field or in the coops until his parents returned, but his room was upstairs and he didn't want to have to walk all the way down the hall, down the stairs, through the living room and through the sitting room in order to go outside.

It was a long way to the front door, and he thought it would be better if he just sat in here and waited with the door closed until someone else came home.

He had a stereo by his bed, and he kept his tunes cranked up while he read a car magazine, trying not to think of the silent emptiness of the house surrounding him, but the afternoon storm hit an hour or so later and, as often happened, the electricity went out. His lights flicked off, his music fading into a slowing deep-bassed growl before disappearing completely.

The window in his room overlooked the drive and the front yard, but the clouds were dark today and very little light entered the room. It wasn't like night, but it wasn't like daytime either, and there was something about this in-between state that accentuated the ominous aspects of the house.

He grabbed his magazine, pretending as though he wasn't scared, as though there was nothing out of the ordinary here. He was hoping that Billings had come in through the back door and was doing something in the kitchen or the workroom, but when Mark walked out from his bedroom, the silence of the house was total, and he realized that the assistant was still outside somewhere and he was all alone in the house.

The hallway before him was dark. No windows opened onto here save one small inset square of stained glass at the far end, above the staircase. All of the doors to the other rooms were closed. There were goose bumps on his arms, and Mark ran as quickly as he could down the corridor, taking the steps two at a time as he sped downstairs.

This stairwell opened onto another hallway and he was already sprinting down it when he noticed movement somewhere in front of him.

He stopped in his tracks, heart pounding.

There was a small figure standing alone at the darkened end of the hall, pale white against the deep red and brown of the walls, floor, and ceiling.

Billings' daughter.

The girl was supposed to have been retarded. She did not live with her father in the house but slept on a cot next to the incubation room because she liked to be near the baby chicks. Billings never talked about her, and their parents had warned him and Kristen many times that they were not to speak of her in front of the assistant.

Mark had not seen her in some time, had, in fact, almost forgotten about her, and he did not think he had ever seen her inside the house, but the girl still looked the same. She was at least as old as Kristen--she'd been around ever since he could remember--but she looked younger. Ten or eleven at the most.

Something about that did not sit well with him.

He stood in place, staring down the hallway at her, wondering how she'd gotten inside.

"Mark."

He had never heard her speak before, and the sound of her voice chilled him. She did not sound retarded at all. Her voice instead was clear, soft, feminine. It was not loud, but it carried clearly in the silent hallway, and there seemed something unnatural about it. She was wearing only a thin white shift, and though there was no light behind her, he could tell that she wore nothing underneath it.

The girl beckoned to him, one pale arm motioning for him to approach, and his chill intensified. There was a cold breeze blowing through the hall, even though the air conditioner was off and all of the windows in the house were closed. The only sound was the slight flapping of the girl's shift against her bare legs and the overloud pumping of his heart.

"Mark." She spoke again, smiling slightly, beckoning, and he began walking toward her, not wanting to admit his fear, not wanting to acknowledge his apprehension.

He prayed desperately that his parents would come home right now, that Billings would enter the house looking for his daughter. He did not know why, but he did not want to be alone with this girl, and while even an hour ago he would have laughed had someone suggested that he would be trembling nervously at the sight of the assistant's retarded daughter, he was not laughing now.

His hands were sweaty, and he wiped them on his pants, stopping maybe ten feet in front of the girl. Behind her was a chair, a dark mahogany chair that matched perfectly the adjacent wall but that he could not remember having ever seen before.

The breeze blew against his face, caressed his hair. He tried to pretend as though nothing was wrong. "Hey,"

he said, "where's your dad?"

"Mark," the girl repeated.

Maybe it was the only word she knew, he thought.

Maybe it was the only word she could say.

But her voice still didn't sound retarded, and this time there'd seemed something . . . sensual in it.

She moved slightly to her left, repositioned the chair, and bent slowly over its seat, smiling at him, her shift hiking up to expose the creamy whiteness of bare buttocks.

"Fuck me," she said softly. "Fuck me in the ass."

Shocked, he backed up, shaking his head. "No . . ."

"I like it hard. Fuck me hard."

There was something wrong here, something fundamentally awry, something that went far deeper than an over experienced underage girl and her frighteningly unnatural nymphomania. He could feel it, sense it, a palpable presence in the hallway, a malevolence in the setting and the situation that included Billings' daughter but was not limited to her. Whatever he had feared in this house, whatever subliminal danger he had felt, it was here, now, and Mark knew that he had to get out and get away as quickly as possible before something horrible happened.

He continued backing up, keeping his eyes on the girl.

"I want it," she said. "I want it now."

"No."

"I want you to fuck my ass."

"No!" he said more firmly.

"Your father does it." She smiled at him over her shoulder and there was evil in that smile, a corruption that went far beyond mere sex, a deeply depraved immorality of which this was only the simplest and most obvious manifestation. "He makes it hurt."

Mark ran. He turned tail and ran back upstairs to his room, and he heard behind him the girl's mocking laughter, the soft sounds echoing and amplifying in the dark hall and stairwell.

He had not come out until his family had returned home and Kristen had knocked on his door to tell him that he had to help unload groceries from the car.

It was after that that he had been able to tap into The Power. It had always been there, he supposed, and he attributed the dread and apprehension he felt about the house to its low-level influence, but the encounter with Billings' daughter had somehow jump-started it, kicked it into gear. It truly was like a sixth sense to him, and he didn't have to think about it or concentrate on using it. Like seeing or hearing or smelling or touching or tasting, it was a physical response to people and places and things that he experienced, a natural part of him that provided sensory input which his brain accepted and sorted.

He could sense now the corruption in the house, in his parents, and he knew that sooner or later he would have to leave. He did not belong here, he did not fit in, and either he had to reject the house or the house would reject him.

He did not want to know what would happen if that occurred.

He received no such vibes from Billings--the assistant was a complete blank--and that frightened him. He and Billings had always gotten along famously, the assistant was like an uncle to him, but now every time he saw the man he thought of his daughter, and the traits that had made Billings seem so kind and caring before now made him seem false and secretive, and Mark stayed as far away from him as possible.

His parents seemed to realize that something had happened, they seemed to recognize his newfound Power, and their attitudes toward him shifted. Not profoundly but subtly. He was still required to follow his father's rules, to be in certain places and do certain things at certain times, but there was a wariness now, a slight emotional distancing, and while nothing changed in their behavior toward his sister, he got the feeling that they would not mind at all if he left the fold.

He'd begun staying out of the house as much as possible, staying at friends' homes, sleeping outside when he could, camping out on the porch, but he'd seen her again one night, in the door of the first chicken coop, white in the moonlight, beckoning to him, and he'd hurried back into the house, back up to his room, hearing once again the sound of her light laughter behind him.

He tried after that to convince Kristen to leave with him, to run away, but though she too was not happy with the house, though he sensed within her a secret unacknowledged fear of Billings' daughter, there was no way that she was willing to leave their parents. He told her that they could write or call, let their mother and father know where they were and why they had left, but she put her foot down. This was her home and she did not want to leave.

He worked on Kristen the rest of the summer, but his entreaties seemed to have the opposite effect of that intended. She became more resolute in her intention to stay, more devoted to her current life. She understood why he wanted to leave, and though, for selfish reasons, she wanted him to remain, Kristen told him that she would always love him and always support him in his choices, whatever they were.

And then one night the retarded girl came into his bedroom.

She looked retarded this time, and she did not speak, but the eroticism of her movements had not lessened, and the juxtaposition of her mental handicap and her obvious sensuality was truly disturbing.

He had locked the door to his room, had locked his window, and he quickly looked around to see which one had betrayed him. Both door and window were closed and locked, untouched.

The girl giggled.

He clutched the blanket tightly, pulling it to his chin, sliding back against the headboard, and pulling his feet under him as far as they would go. He was terrified and he wanted to scream, but his brain seemed to have lost all power over the actions of his body and only a dry exhalation of air escaped from between his lips.

The girl bent over, her shift sliding up, and grabbed her ankles. He could see once again her pale buttocks, and she looked between her legs at him and smiled.

He knew then and there that he had to leave. Whether Kristen went with him or not, he had to get out of this house.

He did scream then, and Kristen and his parents were at his door in a matter of seconds, and he rushed around the bent-over girl to unlock and open the door, but of course she was gone by the time they entered the room.

Though his parents roughly insisted that he had had a nightmare and was acting like a child, and Kristen claimed to believe him, he used The Power and understood that his parents did believe it had happened and Kristen, bless her kind heart, did not.

He'd taken off the next morning, telling Kristen and no one else, pretending he was just going into town to meet some friends. Leaving, he'd seen the girl in the dormer window of the attic, white against the darkness, waving at him, and while he could not see the details of her face, he'd known that she was smiling.

"Hey! You okay?"

Mark opened his eyes to see the driver of the Land Rover looking at him. He shook his head, blinked.

"Huh? Yeah."

"I thought you were having some sort of fit or something there. You were thrashing around, kicking the door."

"Sorry."

"Looked like you were having a seizure."

He surreptitiously pressed down on his erection.

"Nightmare," Mark said, shaking his head. "It was just a nightmare."

Daniel Someone had thrown a dead cat into their yard, one of the punks who hung out on the street no doubt, and as Daniel gingerly picked up the stiff body with his shovel he vowed to kick the shit out of the little bastard who'd done this. It was probably random, not personal, but that didn't make it any less offensive, and he found himself thinking that whether they owned their house or not, maybe it was time for them to leave. The neighborhood was going downhill and they should probably get out while they could still get a decent price for their home, before the street segued completely into slum.

Margot wouldn't buy that, though. This was her neighborhood, this was the street on which she'd grown up, and in her mind it was the same now as it had been then. She seemed to see this area through rose-colored glasses, her mind filling in niceties that were no longer there. The houses to either side of them were falling into disrepair, their small lawns little more than dirt patches dotted with weeds, their tenants an endless succession of increasingly trashy renters, but to Margot's eyes they were simply the residences of her childhood friends with new owners.

Grimacing, Daniel held the shovel in front of him, walking through the backyard and out to the alley, where he deposited the cat in a garbage can. He was probably supposed to call the city and report this, have Animal Control come out and take care of the body, but he wanted to get rid of the cat as quickly and quietly as possible. He didn't want to draw attention to what had happened. He didn't want to give the perpetrators the satisfaction.

He glanced up and down the alley before walking back through the gate and was gratified to see nothing unusual, no strange shadows, nothing out of the ordinary. He returned the shovel to the garage and went inside the house, where Margot was finishing her orange juice and yelling for Tony to hurry up and brush his teeth, they had to go. He slipped a quick hand up her skirt, but she pulled away and shot him a look of annoyance.

"Why're you up so early today?" she asked. "You don't have an interview do you?"

"No." He thought of telling her the truth, that he'd had a nightmare and couldn't fall back asleep, that when he'd gone out to pick up the paper he'd found a dead cat in their front yard, but he didn't want to worry her before she went off to work, and he said, "I was going to clean the house today. I thought I'd get an early start."

She looked at him skeptically.

"It's true!"

He was trapped now, he'd painted himself in a corner, so after Margot and Tony left, he swept and mopped, dusted and vacuumed, and it was past lunchtime before he finally finished. He slept most of the afternoon, dozing off during the hottest part of the day, and only a chance call from a phone solicitor woke him before it was time to pick up Tony.

Waiting in the parking lot of Tony's school, the need to move struck him once again. School was not even out yet and there was a group of tough-looking boys smoking openly on the sidewalk in front of the administration building, all of them wearing white T-shirts and identically baggy pants. They were joined by two slutty -looking young girls dressed far too provocatively for their age.

Then the bell rang and the floodgates were turned loose. Hordes of students streamed out from doorways and hallways, walking, running, talking, screaming. Individuals separated from the crowd, moving toward their parents' cars. A large contingent headed over to the two waiting school buses. Others started walking home in pairs or small groups.

He looked for Tony, tried to spot his son's face amid the sea of similar-looking students, and finally saw him walking alone toward the car. One skinhead near the administration building halfheartedly threw a Coke can, yelling, "Pussy! Going to ride home with your daddy and your mommy?" but Daniel pretended he didn't hear it for Tony's sake and smiled as his son got into the car.

"How was school?" he asked.

"Great," Tony said sarcastically.

Daniel laughed at the boy's tone of voice. "Well, at least it's Friday."

"Yeah," he said. "At least it's Friday."

They did not talk on the way home. Daniel got into an old Joe Jackson song on the radio, listening to the lyrics, singing along in his head, remembering when that album had first come out, and it wasn't until they were pulling into the driveway that he realized he and Tony had not spoken since leaving the school. He glanced over at his son. "Is everything all right?"

Tony nodded.

"You sure? Nothing you want to talk about?"

"No." Tony grabbed his books, got out of the car.

Daniel followed the boy into the house. Margot wasn't home yet, but she'd be back from work within the next hour, and he decided to start making dinner. She had a series of stressful meetings today and though she'd told him she'd fix something when she got home, he thought it would be a nice surprise if he made dinner tonight, gave her a little treat.

He looked through Margot's cookbooks, looked through the refrigerator and cupboards to see what they had, and finally decided on a hamburger casserole from Julia Child. The instructions classified it as a "quick and easy"

dish, estimated preparation time fifteen minutes, but he knew himself and he figured he'd be lucky if he finished within the hour.

Tony plopped his books down on the kitchen counter and grabbed a can of Dr Pepper from the refrigerator before heading off toward his bedroom.

"Homework!" Daniel called out.

"It's Friday!"

"Do it today and your weekend will be free."

"I'll do it Sunday."

Daniel thought of arguing with him, but decided to let the boy go. He picked up the books from the counter and carried them into the living room, where he placed them on the coffee table on top of the pile of today's newspapers.

It took over an hour to prepare the meal, and Margot came home before he was finished, but she was touched by his thoughtfulness and she gave him a big hug as he slid the casserole dish into the oven. "I love you, Mr. Mom."

He turned around, gave her a quick kiss. "I love you, too."

Dinner wasn't great, but it was better than he'd expected, and Margot praised the meal to high heaven, exaggerating its quality to such an embarrassing extent that Tony rolled his eyes and said, "Give it a rest, Mom."

Daniel laughed, looked over at his wife. "Is this your subtle way of telling me you want me to cook dinner more often?"

"No--" she began.

"No!" Tony repeated.

"--I'm just touched by your thoughtfulness and I

wanted to let you know."

Tony pushed back his chair, stood. "This is getting too pukey for me. I'm out of here."

They watched him go, smiling.

"It really is pretty good," she said. "I'm proud of you."

"Thanks."

As always, he offered to do the dishes and, as always, she turned him down. So he went out to the living room and watched the last part of the local news, then the national news. There was nothing on after that except reruns, game shows, and syndicated entertainment news, so he shut off the television and walked back into the kitchen, where Margot was eating an orange over the sink.

"Where's Tony?" she asked.

He shrugged. "I don't know. His room, I guess."

"Hiding in there?" She looked at him significantly.

"Why don't you go see what he's doing."

"He's all right.

"Why don't you check?"

He understood her concern, thought of his son walking alone through the crowds of students at school, thought of him sitting silently in the car, and nodded.

"Okay."

The door to the boy's bedroom was closed, and Daniel walked quietly down the hallway and stood outside it for a moment, listening. He heard nothing, and he reached for the knob, turned it, pushed open the door.

Tony moved quickly, trying to hide something beneath the unmade covers of his bed.

A bolt of primal parental terror shot through Daniel.

Drugs, was his first thought.

He walked toward the bed, desperately trying not to think the worst. Let it be a Playboy, he prayed. Let it be a Penthouse.

He forced himself to smile at his son. "What you got there, sport?" He reached for the covers, pulled them up.

It was not drugs. It was not porno magazines.

It was a figure, a doll, the body made from an old 7Eleven Big Gulp cup, the arms straws, the hands and fingers toothpicks, the legs and feet bent toilet-paper tubes. The face was paper, topped by whisk-broom bristle hair, and it was the face that stopped him cold. A

seemingly haphazard composite of eyes, nose, and mouth culled from disparate newspaper photos, the face nonetheless possessed a strange unity, an off-center cohesion that seemed natural in an unnatural way and awakened within him a dread deja vu.

He had seen the face before.

In the House When he was a child.

In the House But he couldn't quite remember where.

"What is that?" he demanded.

Tony shrank back, shaking his head. "Nothing."

"What do you mean, 'nothing'?" He was aware that he was yelling, but he couldn't help it, and though he was addressing his son, his gaze remained fixed on the figure. It repulsed and frightened him at the same time.

There was something abhorrent in its makeup, something repugnant about its form and shape and the way ordinary objects had been used in its construction. But it was the doll's familiarity that frightened him, the sense that he had seen it before and could not quite place it.

"What is it?" Margot ran up behind him, an edge of panic in her voice. "What's happening? What's wrong?"

Tony was still cowering on the bed before him. "Nothing!"

he told his mom. "I was working on an art project and Dad went crazy!"

"Art project?" Daniel said. "For school?"

"No, I'm doing it on my own."

"Then why were you trying to hide it?"

"I didn't want you to see it!"

"What's going on?" Margot pushed past him, stood before the bed. She looked down at the doll. "Is this what all the commotion was about?"

"Yeah," Tony admitted.

Margot turned on Daniel. "Why are you screaming at him? Because of this? I thought you'd caught him using drugs or something."

"Mom!"

Daniel stood there, not sure what to say, not sure how to defend himself. Margot was acting as though there was nothing unusual here, nothing out of the ordinary, and it threw him. Couldn't she tell that there was something the matter with the doll? Couldn't she see?

Obviously not.

Maybe it was him. Maybe there really was nothing wrong. Maybe he was just overreacting.

Daniel looked once more at the doll, again felt repulsed, scared.

He tried to tell himself that he was having some sort of breakdown, that the stress from being out of work for so long had finally gotten to him, but he did not believe it.

Wasn't that the definition of mental illness, though?

If you had it, you didn't know it?

He didn't believe that either.

What did he believe?

He believed that Tony's doll was evil. He believed that his son was doing something wrong in making it and that he knew it was wrong and that's why he had tried to hide it. He believed that, for whatever reason, Margot couldn't tell what was happening and didn't understand.

"It's not for school?" Daniel asked again.

Tony shook his head.

"Then throw it away. If you want art supplies, we'll get you art supplies."

"We can't afford--" Margot started to say.

"I don't want art supplies!" Tony said. "I just want you to leave me alone!"

Margot pulled at Daniel's sleeve, pulled him toward the door. "Come on."

Daniel stood his ground. "I don't want that thing in the house."

"What's the matter with you?" Margot frowned at him.

"I'll do it in the garage," Tony said.

Daniel didn't know what to say, didn't know what to do. He knew his attitude appeared irrational, but he could not seem to articulate his aversion to the figure, could not seem to explain and communicate his feelings toward the horrid object. The threads were there but he could not pull them together. He glanced from Tony to Margot. He did not want to get into a fight with them over this. He knew the truth, felt it in his gut, but he was aware that he was in the intellectually weaker position here and that in a fair fight he would lose.

It was best to back off, throw the thing away later, when they were both out of the house.

He allowed himself to be led by Margot out of the room, and she waited until Tony's door was closed and they were safely in the kitchen before confronting him.

"What was that back there? What did you think you were doing?"

He didn't even try to explain. Out of the room, away from the figure, it almost seemed silly even to him, and he could think of no way to defend himself that would sound even remotely plausible.

"If that's all he's doing by himself in there, making 'art projects,' then we should consider ourselves lucky."

"Yeah," Daniel said. "You're right."

But he didn't think that at all.

He walked back into the living room, nipped on the television, found a movie.

The thing was, Tony didn't seem to really understand what the doll was either. He obviously knew enough to try to keep it hidden from his parents, obviously felt as though it was something he should not be doing, but there'd been no deception or dishonesty in his defense of his "art project." He'd seemed as naive as Margot in that way, sincere in his straightforward appeal. It was as if, on one level, he recognized the abnormal and abhorrent nature of the object, and on another level he saw it as merely an ordinary product of an ordinary hobby.

He didn't seem to understand what he was doing or why.

He was like . . . like a baby playing with fire.

What made him think of that analogy?

Daniel didn't know, but it was accurate nevertheless.

There was a danger here. He sensed it. And he would not feel comfortable until that thing was out of his son's room and out of his house.

Margot finished the dishes and came out in the living room with him. She sat next to him on the couch, read the newspaper, snuggled into the crook of his arm, but there was tension between them, and though they tried, they could not regain the relaxed and happy atmosphere of dinner.

The doll.

The shadow in the alley.

`Something was going on here that he couldn't quite grasp. It was like a word on the tip of his tongue that he knew but could not immediately articulate. He had the strong feeling that on some level he did understand what was happening, that somewhere inside him was the key that would unlock this puzzle, but he could not seem to find it.

They went to bed at eleven, made love quietly, perfunctorily, then rolled over, automatically moving to opposite sides of the mattress.

He lay awake long after Margot fell asleep, long after the timer shut off the TV, staring up at the ceiling through the silent darkness.

Silent?

No, not quite.

There was a rustling whisper of movement from down the hall.

From Tony's room.

Ordinarily, he would not have been able to hear the noise, so subtle was its intonation, but in this quiet the faint sibilance was clearly audible, its changing location pinpointed by slight increases and decreases in volume.

He listened carefully. It was a sound he had heard before, a long time ago In the House --and, soft as it was, it sent a powerful chill through him. He could not quite place it, but its origin was in his past and there was something about it that frightened him. Daniel closed his eyes, concentrated on listening.

The noise faded, moving away from their bedroom door, then grew louder, returning.

It was the sound of ... a doll patrolling the halls, hunting little boys who dared to leave their rooms.

What in God's name had made him think of that?

He didn't know, but it was the image that came to his mind, and it stayed there, refusing to budge. His first instinct was to get Tony and Margot out of the house.

They might be in danger. But he could not act on that impulse. As concerned as he was for their safety, he was paralyzed, afraid to get out of bed, afraid to wake up Margot, afraid even to move.

It would not harm Tony, he told himself. Tony had made it.

And it wasn't after Margot.

It was after him.

Just as it had been in the House.

He heard it outside, shuffling by on toilet-paper-tube feet.

He held his breath, praying that it would not stop in front of their bedroom, praying that Margot had locked their door.

He waited until both Margot and Tony left.

Then he searched through Tony's room.

Daniel wasn't sure what he thought he'd find. Some clue, he supposed. Something that would jog his memory, something that would let him know what was going on.

Something.

But there was only the doll itself, at the bottom of his son's closet, in a plastic grocery sack sitting atop a jumbled pile of old worn-out sneakers. There were no notes, no diary, no hints as to why Tony was working on the disturbing figure, no reference of any kind to anything remotely connected to the object. There were only Tony's books and toys and tapes and clothes. His rock collection and bug collection and a pile of old homework.

And the doll.

Daniel carried the sack out of the closet and put it on the bed, taking out the nearly finished figure. He picked the doll up gingerly.

It was as repugnant as it had been before, and once again it seemed familiar to him. He thought of the noises in the night, in the hall, his certainty that the doll was on the prowl, looking for him, and though it was daytime and he could hear the sounds of the street outside, the television in the family room, he was acutely aware of the fact that he was alone in the house with this horrible figure.

Its expression was fixed, formed from the newspaper photos, but it seemed different from yesterday, more purposely hostile, its eyes narrowed, its teeth bared.

Maybe he remembered it incorrectly, but he could have sworn the eyes had been more open, the mouth closed.

Maybe Tony had altered the face after their confrontation.

There was no indication that the doll could ever be mobile, much less animate, and its taped and stapled limbs hung limply down as he gripped the midsection, but Daniel had the impression that it was playing possum, pretending to be dead when it wasn't.

That was ridiculous.

Of course it was. This whole thing was ridiculous. It was ridiculous for him to be secretly searching through his son's room in the first place. But he felt no embarrassment, and no matter how much he tried to intellectually discount his feelings, they were still there.

He looked down at the doll and was suddenly afraid.

What would happen when Tony finished his "project,"

when the doll was complete?

He didn't know and he didn't want to find out.

He knew what he had to do.

Daniel shoved the doll back in the bag and carried it outside. He dropped it on the grass next to the back porch and walked into the garage, wheeling out the barbecue.

Opening the lid, he picked the sack up off the ground and unceremoniously dumped the doll into the ashes.

He walked back into the garage, emerged with lighter fluid and a book of matches. He knew this was going to extremes, but he could not be sure if he simply tore the doll up and threw it away that it wouldn't return, that it wouldn't drag its pieces out of the alley and over the fence and through the backyard to his bedroom. He couldn't afford to chance that.

He'd seen the Telly Savalas Twilight Zone. He knew how these things worked.

His feelings did not make any kind of rational sense-- the fact that he was referencing a TV

show as validation for his actions should have told him that--but as he doused the doll with lighter fluid and put a match to it, he felt an absurd sense of exhilaration. He saw the face go up in flames, the toilet-paper tubes blacken and crumble, the Big Gulp cup melt off its wax and burn, and for the first time since he'd seen Tony with the doll, he was able to breathe easily.

He would tell Tony that he had gotten rid of the doll when his son came home, and he would forbid him to make another one. He should have done that last night.

It might seem irrational to Margot, but he was still the boy's father, and if he wanted to enforce an irrational rule or prohibition, well, he wouldn't be the first father to have done so.

The components of the doll had all burned themselves out, but he turned on the hose and soaked everything with water, just to make sure, before going back into the garage and getting a shovel. He scooped up the ashes from the barbecue, dumped them in the plastic sack, and tossed everything in one of the trash cans in the alley.

He mashed down the sack with his foot, transferred garbage from one of the other cans to throw on top of it, then replaced the lid. Once again, he found himself looking up the alley for any sign of the small strange shadow he'd seen before.

Nothing.

He hurried back into his yard.

Were these things connected? The doll and the shadow? The inexplicable feelings of fear and discomposure he'd been experiencing? He had the sense that they were, but he could not imagine how and he could not begin to comprehend the meaning behind it.

He pushed the barbecue and carried the shovel back into the garage, then walked into the house and washed his hands in the kitchen sink before getting himself a Diet Coke from the fridge. He'd left the television on in the family room and, coincidentally enough, The Twilight Zone was on the Sci-Fi channel. It was the episode in which a girl disappeared into the wall of her house, the one he'd always assumed had been the inspiration for Poltergeist, and as he watched it for the fiftieth time, alarm bells began going off in his head once again. There was a connection here, something he knew he should be picking up on but just couldn't quite figure out.

He stared at the television, watched the mother and the father kneel before the wall, calling to their little girl, and it came to him.

The House.

That was it. The House. The home in which he'd been born and where he'd spent the first eleven years of his life. He could remember very little about the House, only flashes of images, portions of events, but there was something about it that reminded him of the girl lost in the walls.

There'd been something scary about the House.

The fact that he could recall almost nothing at all about his childhood home disturbed him. He knew why, of course, and though it wasn't really surprising, it was unsettling to realize just how easily he fit into that cliched niche, that stereotypical pattern so often exploited by headline-grabbing doctors and the media during sweeps weeks.

He couldn't remember because that was where his mom had died.

He was disappointed in himself that he was so predictable, so typical, and the thought occurred to him that everything else that seemed to be happening--his uneasiness, the shadow, the doll--could all be part of some psychological problem that could be traced back to this one event.

But that wasn't be possible. He'd lived a perfectly normal life all these years. The normal, happy life of a well adjusted man, a husband, a father. The House had not affected him at all.

Perhaps his long stretch of unemployment had put stress and pressures on him that he couldn't recognize, wasn't able to acknowledge.

He should try to find out if that was the case. A psychiatrist would be the best idea, he supposed, but he was loath to go that route. Despite all the positive propaganda distilled through the media over the past decade, there was still a stigma attached to it in his mind, and he couldn't picture himself lying on a couch, spilling his guts, and letting some stranger give him advice on how he should act and how he should feel and how he should live his life.

Besides, they didn't have the money for it.

And, truth to tell, he didn't really believe that his perceptions were off, that what he was thinking, feeling, and experiencing was part of some mental disorder or buried emotional problem.

He had seen the shadow.

There was something wrong with Tony's doll.

There was a reason for him to feel uneasy.

A psychiatrist might be able to help him remember, though. Might be able to recall his memories of the House.

Why did he think of it as "the House"? he wondered.

With a capital "H"? He wasn't sure. He couldn't even get a clear picture in his mind of the House's exterior.

Or his bedroom. Or any of the other rooms inside the structure. He could see only a long hallway. And a dark corner with a window seat. And an image of an overflowing bathtub.

Had there been a doll in the House? A doll like Tony's?

He wished his dad were still alive. His dad would help him remember.

Daniel stared at the television as The Twilight Zone ended and a commercial came on. It was not normal for him to block out such a large part of his life. And to such an extent. He acknowledged that that was of legitimate concern, but what worried him far more than the fact that he was repressing his childhood memories was the idea that they were somehow connected to what was going on in his life now.

And that Tony was being drawn into it.

Whatever was happening, he wanted it to end. He didn't want to see strange figures or unusual events, and most of all, he did not want anything to happen to his wife or his son.

It had been a long time since he'd gone to church.

Several years. But, sitting on the couch, he closed his eyes and folded his hands and, for the first time since he could remember, prayed.

"Dear God," he said softly. "Please keep Margot and Tony safe. Don't let anything happen to them. Help them be healthy and happy and live until they're a hundred years old. Amen."

Margot picked up Tony after school, and they stopped by the grocery store before coming home. Daniel helped his wife carry sacks from the car, while Tony went straight to his bedroom.

He noticed the doll's absence immediately.

"Mom!" He was running out to the kitchen even as Daniel was setting down sacks on the counter and Margot was putting milk in the refrigerator.

"Mom!"

Frowning, Margot closed the refrigerator door and looked up. "What?"

"Dad took my project! He stole my project!"

Margot glared at him. "You didn't ..."

Daniel looked at her, shrugged. "I threw it away."

She glared at him. "Why did you do that? You didn't have to do that."

Yes I did, he wanted to respond, but he kept silent.

"Mom?" Tony said, imploring her with his eyes to somehow bring back the doll.

"Where is it?" Margot demanded. "Where did you put it?"

"It's gone." Daniel turned to face his son. "And that's the end of it."

"Mom!"

"Why is it so important?" Daniel asked him. "What's so important to you about that doll?"

Tony reddened. "It's not a doll!" he yelled.

"It's a doll. And why does it mean so much to you?"

"Daniel," Margot said warningly.

"It's my project!"

"It's not something you're doing for school. Why are you doing it?"

"You can make another one--" Margot began.

"No!" Daniel shouted, and both of them jumped. He pointed at Tony. "You are not going to make another one! Do you hear me?"

The boy said nothing, looked to his mom. Margot was silent.

"You are forbidden to make one of those things again. And if I catch you doing it, you'll be grounded for a month. Do you understand me?"

Tony angrily turned and stalked down the hall, slamming the door to his room.

"I mean it!" Daniel called after him.

"What was that?" Margot demanded. "What the hell is wrong with you?"

He shook his head. "You wouldn't understand."

"Try me."

"I just don't like that doll."

"Why? It's evil?"

He whirled to face her, thrilled that she'd seen it too, but when he met her eyes he saw only anger there. She was being sarcastic, he realized.

"You need to get some help," she told him. "I don't know what's happening with you, but I don't like it. You need to see a psychiatrist."

A psychiatrist.

It was a chance, an opportunity.

But he didn't take it.

"I'm not going to a shrink," he said.

She looked at him. "You need to do something."

"I just don't want a doll like that in our house." He turned without looking at her and walked out to the family room. He switched on the TV, the local news, and a few moments later he heard her angrily slamming cupboards and drawers as she put away the groceries.

Laurie Laurie sat across from Josh at the small wrought-iron table adjacent to the coffeepot at the rear of the bookstore.

She hadn't slept well all week and when he'd called her on it, she told him about the dreams.

In a way, she was grateful. It had not been a conscious thought, but clearly she'd felt the need to talk about what was happening, and when her brother commented on her haggard appearance for the third time and sat her down, demanding Laurie tell him what was wrong, she did. She told him everything, beginning with her encounter with the girl in the alley, giving detailed descriptions of each and every dream, explaining how she'd lain awake as long as possible, not wanting to fall asleep. She was not embarrassed discussing the sexual nature of the dreams with Josh, but she did tone down her reaction, ashamed of how much she had enjoyed the encounters with the child.

The dreams had changed since the first one, evolved.

It had happened slowly over the past two weeks, and at first she wasn't even aware of it. The girl had sucked her in with sex, had used intimacy to gain her trust, but the dreams had become increasingly nonerotic , increasingly grotesque and chaotic, and they were now to the point where she considered them nightmares.

Last night, the girl, wearing the same dirty shift she'd had on in the alley, had taken Laurie's hand and led her through a blighted urban landscape, past the rubble of demolished buildings, past trash-can fires warming dirty homeless men, to a tarpaper shack that housed a butcher shop. Inside, a muscular tattooed man in a bloodstained apron was passing a monstrous rat through the blade of his band saw. On the floor were scraps of fat and muscle, the teeth and toes of children. The butcher looked up from his work, smiled at her. "Glad you're home, dear.

Take off your clothes and sit on the stump."

And then she'd been in a dark forest, sitting, legs spread, on an upended log, as the girl crouched before her and painfully inserted twigs into her bleeding vagina.

"Almost done," the girl kept saying. "Almost done."

The dream had made no sense on any sort of rational level, but there was something about it that rang true to her, that frightened and at the same time spoke to her, and while she did not exactly feel that this was something that had happened or would happen, Laurie thought it could happen, and that was what disturbed her the most.

Josh frowned at her, concerned. "Dreams are not just manifestations of the subconscious," he said. "Sometimes they're the means used to communicate with us, a portal between this world or this plane of existence and others."

It was a cliche , the same type of New Age claptrap she'd made fun of all these years, but it was exactly what she'd been feeling, put into words.

Only it sounded so frightening spoken aloud like this, its implications huge.

"Recurring dreams are scary enough, but the fact that you have a recurring character in your dreams, a figure you saw in reality under what I would say are pretty strange circumstances . . ." He trailed off. "It's scary, Lor."

She smiled wryly. "Tell me about it."

"You have no idea who this girl is? You've never met her before? Never dreamed about her in the past?"

"That's the thing. She seems familiar to me." Laurie paused. "Sort of." She looked across the table at her brother. "I mean, I think I know her from someplace, but I can't for the life of me figure out where. I don't know if she's someone I met or imagined or saw in a movie. There wasn't a girl on our street like that, was there? When we were little?"

"Not when you were with us. But maybe before."

She frowned. "Before?"

"Yeah. If your birth mother was around we could--"

Laurie's heart stopped in her chest. It suddenly seemed impossible to breathe. "My 'birth mother'?"

"Yeah."

Laurie tried to will the saliva back in her mouth. She felt dizzy.

"I thought . . ." Josh shook his head. "You don't remember?"

"I didn't know."

"You didn't know you were adopted?"

She stared at him numbly. "I thought you were my real brother."

"I am your real brother."

"I mean--"

"We may not be biologically related, but I'm your brother, and Mom and Dad were your parents. We're all family."

"How long have you known?"

"Always." He seemed uncomfortable. "I thought you knew, too. I wouldn't've said anything if--"

"Were you born when they adopted me?"

"Yeah. I was pretty little. You were, I don't know, eight or nine, I guess, when Mom and Dad brought you home. Which meant that I was four or five, but I still sort of remember it."

She stood. For the first time in her life, she knew what writers meant when they described their characters' heads as "spinning." "This is too much to take. I need . . . time. I need to think about this. I

need to absorb it."

Josh looked worried. "I still love you, Lor . I couldn't love you more if you were my Siamese twin."

She put a hand on his shoulder. "I know. I love you, too."

"Okay. Let's talk about this, then. Obviously, we need to work this out. I thought you knew all along. I don't know how you could not--"

"I don't want to talk about it." She tried to smile, did not entirely succeed. "Not right now. I think ... I think I'm going to go for a walk. I need some time to think."

He nodded.

"I'm sorry," he said as she headed toward the door.

She turned, smiled kindly. "You have nothing to be sorry for."

Then she was out of the shop and on the sidewalk, and there were tears in her eyes. She wiped them angrily away. She had nothing to complain about. Her family had been loving, caring, supportive, always there for her.

They'd brought her up to be the person she was today.

But it still felt as if her life had suddenly turned upside down, as if the rug had been yanked out from under her. She'd just found out that her brother wasn't her real brother, her parents hadn't been her real parents.

She was related to strangers she didn't even know, and she wasn't related to the people she knew and loved.

On the scale of problems, it was low priority. She wasn't a crack-addicted teenager knocked up by her stepfather. She wasn't a battered wife with no education and no prospects. Like anorexia and bulimia, hers was strictly an affluent, upwardly mobile concern.

But it still had a major impact on her life.

Who were her biological parents?

That was the big question. She tried to remember something from before she'd been adopted, some scrap of memory from her previous life, but as hard as she tried to recall the past, her mind remained stubbornly in the present.

She never thought much about her early childhood, she realized, and when she did her thoughts were confined to specific subjects, specific instances, specific images.

She'd never stopped to analyze it before, but she understood now that the reason was because most of her early years were a blank.

_

She frowned. Not noticing that she never thought J F

about her childhood, not wondering why, was as strange as the memory blank itself.

It was all strange, and she was tempted to ascribe a deliberate design to it, to recognize a supernatural reason behind it all, but she knew that was stupid. It was probably the dreams that had put her in this frame of mind, that had encouraged her to see anything unusual in this. The truth was, it was probably a perfectly natural reaction for a child to block out memories of parents who had died that early in her life.

Died?

Yes. Her biological parents had died. She knew that much. She could not remember how or why, could not bring to mind any specifics, but the certainty was there, so strong that even though she had no memories or concrete proof, she did not doubt it.

Laurie paused at the corner, thought about crossing the street, but turned right instead. In a kind of daze, she stopped at a coffee stand, bought a mocha, and continued on up the sidewalk.

How had her parents died? she wondered. She had the feeling that they'd both died at once, so it couldn't have been old age or disease. It had to have been catastrophic.

Fire? Plane crash? Murder? Had it been something simple or one of those bizarre, convoluted occurrences? Had her father caught her mother with another woman and then joined in the fun only to have the woman's jealous boyfriend kill all three of them?

Had her parents been aspiring actors who were conned into doing a snuff film and killed, their murders recorded on camera and now available on video?

She would probably never know.

She slowed to look at the series of newsracks on the side of the street, sipping her coffee as she peered through the faded plastic windows. She'd always been attracted to supernatural stories in lurid tabloids, the more outrageous the headline the better. She told herself that it was camp, a kitsch, postmodern irony, that she liked to read those stories because they were so bad they were funny, so outrageous they were entertaining, but the truth was that she was genuinely interested in the bizarre tales. She felt some sort of affinity for those subjects, and she could not help wondering now if that could be traced back to her first family.

A headline caught her eye: minister's family flees HAUNTED HOUSE.

She'd lived in a haunted house as a child.

The knowledge came to her not as a revelation, not as a sudden memory breakthrough, but casually, gently, as though it were something she'd always known and often thought about and had just been reminded of by the tabloid. She reread the headline, stared at the obviously fake photograph of a clergyman, his wife, and his daughter looking up at a dilapidated house over which towered a huge horned demon.

Now that she was actively seeking them, memories of her early childhood seemed to be seeping slowly back into her consciousness. But she was no longer sure she wanted to know about life before her adoption. She was curious, of course, but that was balanced by a growing feeling of dread, the impression that there were things in her past she was better off not knowing.

She could see the house in her mind: a dark Victorian mansion located in a clearing in the woods. The surrounding trees were giant, old-growth redwoods, so it must have been in Washington, Oregon, or northern California. As for why the house was haunted, the specifics of it, she had no idea. She knew only that there was something frightening about the house, something she'd sensed even as a young child.

She could not remember having any brothers or sisters, but there'd been another man living with them, hadn't there? An uncle? One of her dad's old army buddies?

She could not remember his precise relation to them, could not recall his name, but she could see him in her mind, a nattily dressed man with a thin mustache.

She didn't think he was British, but something in her memory of him reminded her of an elegant English actor whose name she did not know.

There had been another child, but she had not lived with them, had only come over to visit, to play.

Dawn.

The girl from down the way.

The girl she'd promised to marry.

Laurie remembered her now, remembered her name, but her appearance was confused with that of the girl from the alley, the girl in her dreams. Dawn was the one aspect of her previous life that had not been submerged and buried, that she had not entirely blocked out, but in her reminiscences, the girl had been another hippie kid who lived down the street from where she remembered growing up, and Josh had known her as well. She realized now, though, that her memory had transferred the girl from one place, one time, to another. Dawn had been from before. Before her birth parents had died, before she'd been adopted.

In her mind, she saw Dawn standing between two redwoods, smiling at her, beckoning her toward the forest.

The dimensions of the scene expanded as she mentally reconstructed details of the memory. She had not been allowed to go into the woods surrounding the house.

Her parents had instilled within her a fear of the forest, and she'd been aware of the dangers lurking therein since before she'd been allowed to play outside the house. Dawn knew perfectly well that she wasn't supposed to go into the woods, but the other girl tried to lure her in anyway, cajoling her, calling her names, promising her fun, excitement, and lifelong friendship.

Laurie hadn't succumbed--not this time--but Dawn had not quit trying, and it had been a constant battle between her parents' orders and her friend's desires.

Had Dawn had a hand in her parents' deaths?

For some reason, Laurie thought she had. What a small child could have to do with the murder of two adults she did not quite understand, but the feeling was there anyway.

The murder of two adults?

Yes.

This was getting a little too creepy.

Laurie finished her coffee, tossed the paper cup into a wastebasket next to the entrance of a small cafe, and tried to concentrate on the here and now, focusing on the street, on the shops, on the people walking by, trying not to think about her newfound memories.

An hour ago, a half hour ago, she had never even considered the fact that she might be adopted. It was not something that had ever crossed her mind. Now she was recalling a whole other history of herself, a back story she'd never known existed that was already sending out repercussions through the years.

There was too much here, too much to sift through.

She couldn't think about it all right now. She needed time to sort things out.

She arrived once again at The Shire. She'd walked around the block, and she pushed open the door and went into the bookstore. Josh was with a customer, a Doug Henning look-alike, but he excused himself and hurried over when he saw her, a worried frown on his face. "Are you all right?"

She smiled weakly. "I'm fine. Go back to your customer."

"He can wait."

She felt the tears welling up in her eyes. Biological relation or not, he was her brother, the only brother she'd ever known, and while he might be a flake and a screw up in many ways, she was lucky to have him, and she couldn't ask for a better or more caring sibling.

She reached out, hugged him. "I love you," she said, the tears rolling down her cheeks. "I love you, Josh."

He hugged her back, held her tight. "I love you, too."

Matt was waiting on the porch when she arrived home.

Her first instinct was to drive on, not stop, keep going and not return until he was gone, but though her hands were shaking and she felt like jelly inside, she forced herself to park the car, get out, stride purposely up the walkway. She fixed the most angrily resolute expression possible on her face.

Matt moved down the steps toward her. "Laurie--"

"I don't want to talk to you," she said firmly.

"I came to apologize."

"You are no longer in my life, there is no connection between us, you have no reason to apologize to me."

"Yes I do, because--"

"Please leave," she said. She took out her key, unlocked and opened the door.

"Laurie!"

She turned to look at him. "Obviously, you don't know me at all. Even after all that time together. Let me spell it out for you: I don't forgive and forget. We're not going to be friends; we're not even going to be acquaintances.

At this point, we do not have any relationship at all. It's over. You get one chance with me, and you blew it. I don't give second chances."

He stared up at her.

She glared back.

"Then I guess here's your key." He looked at her dejectedly with that hurt, wounded expression that had always made her feel sorry for him and want to mother him, but she refused to fall for it this time, refused to give in.

She held out her hand, accepted the key, and walked inside without looking back.

Her hands were still shaking as she closed the door, and she turned the lock and threw the dead bolt, leaning against the frame, not wanting him to see her pass in front of the window. She waited. A minute. Two minutes. Three.

She hadn't heard him leave, hadn't heard any sound at all, but she figured he had to have left by now and she hazarded a look around the corner of the curtains.

He was gone.

She had to admit that part of her was gratified that he'd come crawling back, but she was not even remotely tempted to start up with him again. Whatever they'd had was dead and could not be rekindled. He'd killed it. As painful and awkward and horrible as it had been, though, she was glad he'd stopped by. She felt stronger now, more sure of herself, and for the first time, she was happy that the relationship had ended.