The Servants of Twilight

PART FOUR: THE CHASE

In Ventura, they abandoned the yellow Cadillac. They searched along another residential street until Charlie found a dark blue Ford LTD whose owner had been unwise enough to leave the keys in the ignition. He drove the LTD only two miles before stopping again, in a poorly lit parking lot behind a movie theater, where he removed the license plates and tossed them in the trunk. He took the plates off a Toyota parked nearby and put those on the LTD.

With a little luck, the Toyota's owner wouldn't notice that his plates were missing until tomorrow, perhaps later. Once he did notice, he might not bother reporting the incident to the police, at least not immediately. Anyway, the police wouldn't put stolen plates on the hot sheet the way they would if the entire car was stolen, wouldn't have every cop in the state looking for just a pair of tags, and wouldn't be likely to connect this small crime with the bigger theft of the LTD.

They'd treat the plate-nabbing report as just a case of vandalism.

Meanwhile, the stolen LTD would have new tags and a new identity, and it would, in effect, cease to be a hot car.

They left Ventura, heading north, and reached Santa Barbara at 9:50 Thesday night.

Santa Barbara was one of Charlie's favorite getaway places when the pressures of work became overwhelming. He usually stayed at either the Biltmore or the Montecito Inn. This time, however, he chose a slightly shabby motel, The Wile-Away Lodge, at the east end of State Street.

Considering his well known taste for the finer things in life, this was about the last place anyone would look for him.

There was a kitchenette unit available, and Charlie took it for a week, signing the name Enoch Flint to the register and paying cash in advance, so he wouldn't have to show the clerk a credit card.

The room had turquoise draperies, burnt-orange carpet, and bedspreads in a loud purple and yellow pattern; either the decorator had been limited by a tight budget and had bought whatever was available within a certain price range-or he had been a blind beneficiary of the Equal Opportunity Employment Act.

The pair of queen-size beds had mattresses that were too soft and lumpy.

A couch converted into a third bed, which looked even less comfortable.

The furniture was mismatched and well used. The bathroom had an age-yellowed mirror, lots of cracked floor tiles, and a vent fan that wheezed asthmatically. In the kitchen alcove, out of sight from the bedroom, there were four chairs and a table, a sink with a leaky faucet, a battered refrigerator, a stove, cheap plates and cheaper silverware, and an electric percolator with complimentary packets of coffee, Sanka, sugar, and non-dairy creamer. It wasn't much, but it was cleaner than they had expected.

While Christine put Joey to bed, Charlie brewed a pot of Sanka.

When she came into the kitchenette a few minutes later, Christine said,

"Mmmmm, that smells heavenly."

He poured two cups for them." How's Joey?"

"He was asleep before I finished tucking him in. The dog's on the bed with him, and I usually don't allow that, but, what the hell, I figure any day that starts out with a bomb attack and goes downhill from there is a day you should be allowed to have your dog on your bed."

They sat at the kitchen table, by a window that presented a view of one end of the motel parking lot and a small swimming pool ringed by a wrought-iron fence in need of paint. The wet macadam and the parked cars were splashed with orange neon light from the motel's sign. The storm was winding down again.

The coffee was good, and the conversation was better. They talked about everything that came to mind-politics, movies, books, favorite vacation spots, work, music, Mexican foodeverything but Grace Spivey and the Twilight. They seemed to have an unspoken agreement to ignore their current circumstances. They desperately needed a respite.

But, to Charlie, their conversation was much more than that; it was a chance to learn about Christine. With the obsessive curiosity of a man in love, he wanted to know every detail of her existence, every thought and opinion, no matter how mundane.

Maybe he was only flattering himself, but he suspected that his romantic interest in her was matched by her interest in him.

He hoped that was the case. More than anything, he wanted her to want him.

By midnight, he found himself telling her things he had never told anyone before, things he had long wanted to forget. They were events he thought had lost the power to hurt him, but as he spoke of them he realized the pain had been there all the while.

He talked about being poor in Indianapolis, when there wasn't always enough food or enough heat in the winter because the welfare checks were used first for wine, beer, and whiskey. He spoke of being unable to sleep for fear that the rats infesting their tumble-down shack would get up on the bed with him and start chewing on his face.

He told her about his drunken, violent father, who had beaten his mother as regularly as if that were a husband's duty. Sometimes the old man had beaten his son, too, usually when he was too drunk and unsteady to do much damage. Charlie's mother had been weak and foolish, with her own taste for booze; she hadn't wanted a child in the first place, and she had never interfered when her husband struck Charlie.

"Are your mother and father still alive?" Christine asked.

"Thank God, no! Now that I've done well, they'd be camping on my doorstep, pretending they'd been the best parents a kid ever had. But there was never any love in that house, never any affection." "You've come a long way up the ladder," Christine said.

"Yeah. Especially considering I didn't expect to live long."

She was looking out at the parking lot and swimming pool.

He turned his eyes to the window, too. The world was so quiet and motionless that they might have been the only people in it.

He said, "I always thought my father would kill me sooner or later. The funny thing is, even way back then, I wanted to be a private detective because I saw them on TV-Richard Diamond and Peter Gunn-and I knew they were never afraid of anything.

Iwas always afraid of everything, and more than anything else Iwanted not to be afraid."

"And now, of course, you're fearless," she said with irony.

He smiled." How simple it seems when you're just a kid."

A car pulled into the lot, and both of them stared at it until the doors opened and a young couple got out with two small children.

Charlie poured more Sanka for both of them and said, "I used to lie in bed, listening to the rats, praying that both my parents would die before they got a chance to kill me, and I became real angry with God because He didn't answer that prayer. I couldn't understand why He would let those two go on victimizing a little kid like me. I couldn't defend myself. Why wouldn't God protect the defenseless? Then, when I got a little older, I decided God couldn't answer my prayers because God was good and wouldn't ever kill anyone, not even moral rejects like my folks. So I started praying just to get out of that place. 'Dear God, this is Charlie, and all I want is to some day get out of here and live in a decent house and have money and not be scared all the time." "

He suddenly recalled a darkly comic episode he hadn't thought about in years, and he laughed sharply at the bizarre memory.

She said, "How can you laugh about it? Even though I know things turned out pretty well for him, I still feel terrible for that little boy back there in Indianapolis. As if he's still there."

"No, no. It's just. I remembered something else, something that is funny in a grim sort of way. After a while, after I'd been praying to God for maybe a year, I got tired of how long it took for a prayer to be answered, and I went over to the other side for a while."

" Other side?"

Staring out the window as a squall of rain whirled through the darkness, he said, "I read this story about a man who sold his soul to the devil.

He just one day wished for something he really needed, said that he'd sell his soul for it, and poof, the devil showed up with a contract to sign. I decided the devil was much more prompt and efficient than God, so I started praying to the devil at night."

"I assume he never showed up with a contract."

"Nope. He turned out to be as inefficient as God. But then one night it occurred to me that my parents were sure to wind up in Hell, and if I sold my soul to the devil I'd wind up in Hell, too, right there with my folks, for all eternity, and I was so frightened I got out of bed in the dark, and I prayed with all my might for God to save me. I told Him I understood he had a big backlog of prayers to answer, and I said I realized it might take awhile to get around to mine, and I groveled and begged and pleaded for Him to forgive me for doubting Him. I guess I made some noise because my mother came in my room to see what was up.

She was as drunk as I'd ever seen her. When I told her I was talking to God, she said, 'Yeah? Well, tell God your daddy's out with a whore somewhere again, and ask Him to make the bastard's cock fall off." "

"Good heavens," Christine said, laughing but shocked. He knew she wasn't shocked by the word or by his decision to tell her this story; she was shaken, instead, by what his mother's casual crudity revealed about the house in which he'd been raised.

Charlie said, "Now, I was only ten years old, but I'd lived all my life in the worst part of town, and my parents would never be mistaken for Ozzie and Harriet, so even then I knew what she was talking about, and I thought it was the funniest thing I'd ever heard. Every night after that, when I'd be saying my prayers, sooner or later I'd think of what my mother had wanted God to do to my father, and I'd start to laugh. I couldn't finish a prayer without laughing. After a while, I just stopped talking to God altogether, and by the time I was twelve or thirteen I knew there probably wasn't any God or devil and that, even if there was, you have to make your own good fortune in this life."

She told him more about her mother, the convent, the work that had gone into Wine & Dine. Some of her stories were almost as sad as parts of his youth, and others were funny, and all of them were the most fascinating stories he had ever heard because they were her stories.

Once in a while, one of them would say they ought to be getting some sleep, and they both really were exhausted, but they kept talking anyway, through two pots of Sanka. By I:30 in the morning, Charlie realized that a compelling desire to know each other better was not the only reason they didn't want to go to bed.

They were also afraid to sleep. They often glanced out the window, and he realized they both expected to see a white Ford van pull into the motel parking lot.

Finally he said, "Look, we can't stay up all night. They can't find us here. No way. Let's go to bed. We need to be rested for what's ahead."

She looked out the window. She said, "If we sleep in shifts, one of us will always be awake to keep a guard."

"It's not necessary. There's no way they could have followed US.,$

She said, "I'll take the first shift. You go sleep, and I'll wake you at. say four-thirty." He sighed." No. I'm wide awake. You sleep."

"You'll wake me at four-thirty, so I can take over?"

"All right."

They took their dirty coffee cups to the sink, rinsed them then were somehow holding each other and kissing gently, softly.

His hands moved over her, lightly caressing, and he was stirred by the exquisite shape and texture of her. If Joey had not been in the same room, Charlie would have made love to her, and it would have been the best either of them had ever known. But all they could do was cling to each other in the kitchenette, until at last the frustration outweighed the pleasure. Then she kissed him three times, once deeply and twice lightly on the corners of his mouth, and she went to bed.

When all the lights were out, he sat at the table by the window and watched the parking lot.

He had no intention of waking Christine at four-thirty. Half an hour after she joined Joey in bed, when Charlie was sure she was asleep, he went silently to the other bed.

Waiting for sleep to overtake him, he thought again of what he'd told Christine about his childhood, and for the first time in more than twenty-five years, he said a prayer. As before, he prayed for the safety and deliverance of a little boy, though this time it was not the boy in Indianapolis, whom he had once been, but a boy in Santa Barbara who by chance had become the focus of a crazy old woman's hatred.

Don't let Grace Spivey do this, God. Don't let her kill an innocent child in Your name. There can be no greater blavphei?(V than that. If You really exist, if You realty care, then surely this is the time to do one of Your miracles. Send a flock, of ravens to pluck out the old woman's eyes. Send a migh(vflood to ash her away.

Something. At least a heart attack, a stroke, so" iething to stop her.

As he listened to himself pray, he realized why he had broken the silence between God and himself after all these years. It was because, for the first time in a long time, on the run from the old woman and her fanatics, he felt like a child, unable to cope, in need of help.

In Kyle Barlowe's dream he was being murdered, a faceless adversary was stabbing him repeatedly, and he knew he was dying.

yet it didn't hurt and he wasn't afraid. He didn't filit back, just surrendered, and in that acquiescence he discovered the most pro('ound sense of peace he had ever known. Although he was being killed, it was a pleasant dream, not a nightmare, and a p;irt of him somehow knew that not all of him was being killed.

just the bad part of him, just the old Kyle who had hated the world, and when that part of him was finally disposed of. he would be like everyone else, which is the only thing he had ever wanted in life. To be like everyone else.

The telephone woke him. He fumbled for it in the darkness.

"Hello?"

"Kyle'?" Mother Grace.

"It's me," he said, sleep instantly dispelled.

"Much has been happening," she said.

He looked at the illuminated dial of the clock. It was 4:06 in the morning.

He said, "What? What's been happening?"

"We've been burning out the infidels," she said cryptically.

"I wanted to be there if anything was going to happen."

"We've burned them out and salted the earth so they can't return," she said, her voice rising.

"You promised me. I wanted to be there."

"I haven't needed you-until now," Mother Grace said.

He threw off the covers, sat up on the edge of the bed, grinning at the darkness." What do you want me to do?"

"They've taken the boy away. They're trying to hide him from us until his powers increase, until he's untouchable."

"Where have they taken him?" Kyle asked.

"I don't know for sure. As far as Ventura. I know that much.

I'm waiting for more news or for a vision that'll clarify the situation.

Meanwhile, we're going north."

"Who?"

"You, me, Edna, six or eight of the others."

"After the boy?"

"Yes. You must pack some clothes and come to the church.

We're leaving within the hour."

"I'll be there right away," he said.

"God bless you," she said, and she hung up.

Barlowe was scared. He remembered the dream, remembered how good it had felt in that dream, and he thought he knew what it meant: He was losing his taste for violence, his thirst for blood. But that was no good because, now, for the first time in his life, he had an opportunity to use that talent for violence in a good cause. In fact his salvation depended upon it.

He must kill the boy. It was the right thing. He must not entirely lose the bitter hatred that had motivated him all his life.

The hour was late; Twilight drew near. And now Grace needed him to be the hammer of God.

Wednesday morning, rain was no longer falling, and the sky was only half obscured by clouds.

Charlie got up first, showered, and was making coffee by the time Christine and Joey woke.

Christine seemed surprised that they were still alive. She didn't have a robe, so she wrapped a blanket around herself and came into the kitchen looking like an Indian squaw. A beautiful Indian squaw." You didn't wake me for guard duty," she said.

"This isn't the marines," Charlie said, smiling, determined to avoid the panic that had infected them yesterday.

When they were too keyed up, they didn't act; they only reacted. And that was the kind of behavior that would eventually get them killed.

He had to think; he had to plan. He couldn't do either if he spent all his time looking nervously over his shoulder. They were safe here in Santa Barbara, as long as they were just a little cautious.

"But we were all asleep at the same time," Christine said.

"We needed our rest."

"But I was sleeping so deeply. they could've broken in here, and the first thing I would've known about it was when the shooting started."

Charlie looked around, frowning." Where's the camera? Are we filming a Sominex commercial?"

She sighed, smiled." You think we're safe?"

"Yes."

"Really?"

" We made it through the night, didn't we?"

Joey came into the kitchen, barefoot, in his underpants, his hair tousled, his face still heavy with sleep. He said, "I dreamed about the witch."

Charlie said, "Dreams can't hurt you."

The boy was solemn this morning. There was no sparkle in his bright blue eyes." I dreamed she used her magic to turn you into a bug, and then she just stepped on you."

"Dreams don't mean anything," Charlie said." I once dreamed I was President of the United States. But you don't see any Secret Service men hanging around me, do you?"

"She killed. in the dream she killed my mom, too," Joey said.

Christine hugged him." Charlie's right, honey. Dreams don't mean anything."

"Nothing I've ever dreamed about has ever happened," Charlie said.

The boy went to the window. He stared out at the parking lot.

He said, "She's out there somewheres."

Christine looked at Charlie. He knew what she was thinking.

The boy had thus far been amazingly resilient, bouncing back from every shock, recovering from every horror, always able to smile one more time.

But maybe he had exhausted his resources; maybe he wasn't going to bounce back very well any more.

Chewbacca padded into the kitchenette, stopped at the boy's side, and growled softly.

"See?" Joey said." Chewbacca knows. Chewbacca knows she's out there somewheres."

The boy's usual verve was gone. It was disturbing to see him so gray-faced and bereft of spirit.

Charlie and Christine tried to kid him into a better mood, but he was having none of it.

Later, at nine-thirty, they ate breakfast in a nearby coffee shop.

Charlie and Christine were starved, but they repeatedly had to urge Joey to eat. They were in a booth by one of the big windows, and Joey kept looking out at the sky, where a few strips of blue seemed like gaily colored ropes holding the drab clouds together. He looked as glum as a six-year-old could look.

Charlie wondered why the boy's eyes were drawn repeatedly to the sky.

Was he expecting the witch to come sailing in on her broom?

Yes, in fact, that was probably just what he was worried about.

When you were six years old, it wasn't always possible to distinguish between real and imaginary dangers. At that age you believed in the monster-that-lives-in-the-closet, and you are convinced that something even worse was crouching under your bed. To Joey, it probably made as much sense to search for broomsticks in the sky as to look for white Ford vans on the highway.

Chewbacca had been left in the car outside the coffee shop.

When they were finished with breakfast, they brought him an order of ham and eggs, which he devoured eagerly.

"Last night it was hamburgers, this morning ham and eggs,"

Christine said." We've got to find a grocery store and buy some real dog food before this mutt gets the idea that he's always going to eat this well."

They went shopping again for clothes and personal effects in a mall just off East State Street. Joey tried on some clothes, but listlessly, without the enthusiasm he had shown yesterday. He said little, smiled not at all.

Christine was obviously worried about him. So was Charlie.

They were finished shopping before lunch. The last thing they bought was a small electronic device at Radio Shack. It was the size of a pack of cigarettes, a product of the paranoid T0s and '80s that would not have had any buyers in a more trusting era: a tap detector that could tell you if your telephone line was being monitored by a recorder or a tracing mechanism of any kind.

In a phone booth near the side entrance of Sears, Charlie unscrewed the earpiece on the handset, screwed on another earpiece that came with the tap detector. He removed the mouthpiece, used a car key to short the inhibitor that made it impossible to place a long-distance call without operator assistance, and dialed Klemet-Harrison in Costa Mesa, toll-free. If his equipment indicated a tap, he'd be able to hang up in the first fraction of a second after the connection was made and, most likely, cut the line before anyone had a chance even to determine that the call was from another area code.

The number rang twice, then there was a click on the line.

The meter in Charlie's hand gave no indication of a tap.

But instead of Sherry Ordway's familiar voice, the call was answered by telephone company recording: "The number you have dialed is no longer in service. Please consult your directory for the correct number or dial the operator for.

Charlie hung up.

Tried it again.

He got the same response.

With a presentiment of disaster chewing at him, he dialed Henry Rankin's home number. It was picked up on the first ring, and again the meter indicated no tap, but this time the voice was not a recording.

"Hello?" Henry said.

Charlie said, "It's me, Henry. I just called the office-"

"I've been waiting here by the phone, figuring you'd try me sooner or later," Henry said." We got trouble, Charlie. We got lots of trouble."

From outside the booth, Christine couldn't hear what Charlie was saying, but she could tell something bad had happened.

When he finally hung up and opened the folding door, he was ashen.

" What's wrong?" she asked.

He glanced at Joey and said, "Nothing's wrong. I talked to Henry Rankin. They're still working on the case, but there's nothing new to report yet."

He was lying for Joey's sake, but the boy sensed it just as Christine did, and said, "Whatd she do now? Whatd the witch do now?"

"Nothing," Charlie said." She can't find us, so she's throwing tantrums down there in Orange County. That's all."

" What's a tantrum?" Joey asked.

"Don't worry about it. We're okay. Everything's ticking along as planned. Now let's go back to the car, find a supermarket, and stock up on groceries."

Walking through the open-air mall and all the way out to the car, Charlie looked around uneasily, with a visible tension he hadn't shown all morning.

Christine had begun to accept his assurances that they were safe in Santa Barbara, but now fear crawled up out of her subconscious and took possession of her once more.

As if it were an omen of renewed danger, the weather worsened again. The sky began to clot up with black clouds.

They found a supermarket, and as they shopped, Joey moved down the aisles ahead of them. Ordinarily, he scampered ahead, searching for items on their shopping list, eager to help. Today he moved slowly and studied the shelves with little interest.

When the boy was far enough away, Charlie said softly, "Last night my offices were torched."

"Torched?" Christine said. There was suddenly a greasy, roiling feeling in her stomach." You mean. burned?"

He nodded, taking a couple of cans of Mandarin orange slices from the shelf and putting them in the shopping cart." Everything's…

lost… furniture, equipment, all the files… gone." He paused while two women with carts moved past them.

Then: "The files were in fire-proof cabinets, but someone got the drawers open anyway, pulled out all the papers, and poured gasoline on them."

Shocked, Christine said, "But in a business like yours, don't you have burglar alarms-"

"Two systems, each independent of the other, both with backup power sources in case of a blackout," Charlie said.

"But that sounds fool-proof."

"It was supposed tove been, yeah. But her people got through somehow."

Christine felt sick." You think it was Grace Spivey."

"I know it was Grace. You haven't heard everything that happened last night. Besides, it had to be her because there's such a quality of rage about it, such an air of desperation, and she must be angry and desperate right now because we've given her the slip. She doesn't know where we've gone, can't get her hands on Joey, so she's striking out wherever she can, flailing away in a mad frenzy."

She remembered the Henredon desk in his office, the Martin Green paintings, and she said, "Oh, dammit, Charlie, I'm so sorry. Because of me, you've lost your business and all your-"

"It can all be replaced," he said, although she could see that the loss disturbed him." The important files are on microfilm and stored elsewhere. They can be recreated. We can find new offices. Insurance will cover most everything. It's not the money or the inconvenience that bothers me. It's the fact that, for a few days at least, until Henry gets things organized down there, my people won't be able to keep after Grace Spivey-and we won't have them behind us, supporting us.

Temporarily, we're pretty much on our own."

That was a disturbing thought.

Joey came back with a can of pineapple rings." Can I have these, Mom?"

"Sure," she said, putting the can in the cart. If it would have brought a smile to his small glum face, she'd have allowed him to get a whole package of Almond Joys or some other item he was usually not permitted to have.

Joey went off to scout the rest of the aisle ahead.

To Charlie, Christine said, "You mentioned that something else happened last night. It

He hesitated. He put two jars of applesauce in the cart. Then, with a look of sympathy and concern, he said, "Your house was also torched."

Instantly, without conscious intent, she began to catalogue what she had lost, the sentimental as well as the truly valuable things that this act of arson had stolen from her: all Joey's baby pictures; the fifteen-thousand-dollar oriental carpet in the living room, which was the first expensive thing she'd owned, her first gesture of self-indulgence after the years of self-denial her mother had demanded of her; photographs of Tony, her long-dead brother; her collection of Lalique crystal.

For an awful moment she almost burst into tears, but then Joey returned to say that the dairy case was at the end of this aisle and that he would like some cottage cheese to go with the pineapple rings. And Christine realized that losing the oriental carpets, the paintings, and even the old photographs was of little importance as long as she still had Joey. He was the only thing in her life that was irreplaceable. No longer on the verge of tears, she told him to get the cottage cheese.

When Joey moved away again, Charlie said, "My house, too."

For a moment she wasn't sure she understood." Burned?"

"To the ground," he said.

"Oh my God."

It was too much. Christine felt like a plague-carrier. She had brought disaster to everyone who was trying to help her.

"Grace is desperate, you see," Charlie said excitedly." She doesn't know where we've gone, and she really thinks that Joey is the Antichrist, and she's afraid she's failed in her God-given mission.

She's furious and frightened, and she's striking out blindly. The very fact that she's done these things means we're safe here. Better than that, it means she's rapidly destroying herself. She's gone too far.

She's stepped way, way over the line.

The cops can't help but connect those three torchings with the murders at your place last night and with the bomb at Miriam Rankin's house in Laguna. This is now the biggest story in Orange County, maybe the biggest story in the whole state. She can't go around blowing up houses, burning them down. She's brought war to Orange County, for Christ's sake, and no one's going to tolerate that. The cops are going to come down hard on her now. They're going to be grilling her and everyone in her church. They'll go over her affairs with a microscope. She'll have made a mistake last night; she'll have left incriminating evidence. Somewhere. Somehow. One little mistake is all the cops need. They'll seize on it and pull her alibi apart.

She's done for. It's only a matter of time. All we've got to do is lie low here for a few days, stay in the motel, and wait for the Church of the Twilight to fall apart."

" hope you're right," she said, but she wasn't going to get her hopes up. Not again.

Joey returned with the cottage cheese and stayed close to them for a while, until they entered an aisle that contained a small toy section, where he drifted away to look at the plastic guns.

Charlie said, "We'll finish shopping, get a bunch of magazines, a deck of cards, a few games, whatever we need to keep us occupied for the rest of the week. After we've taken everything back to the room, I'll get rid of the car-"

"But I thought it wouldn't turn up on any hot sheets for a few days yet.

That's what you said."

He was trying not to look grim, but he couldn't keep the worry out of either his face or his voice. He took a package of Oreos from the cookie section and put them in the cart." Yeah, well, according to Henry, the cops have already found the yellow Cadillac we abandoned in Ventura, and they've already linked it with the stolen LTD and the missing plates. They lifted fingerprints from the Caddy, and because my prints are on file with my PI license application, they made a quick connection."

"But from what you said, I didn't think they ever worked that fast."

"Ordinarily, no. But we had a piece of bad luck."

"Another one?"

"That Cadillac belongs to a state senator. The police didn't treat this like they would an ordinary stolen car report."

"Are we jinxed or what?"

"Just a bit of bad luck," he said, but he was clearly unnerved by this development.

Across the aisle from the cookies were potato chips, corn chips, and other snack foods, just the stuff she tried to keep Joey away from. But now she put potato chips, cheese puffs, and Fritos in the cart. She did it partly because she wanted to cheer Joey up-but also because it seemed foolish to deny themselves anything when the time left to them might be very short.

"So now the cops aren't just looking for the LTD," she said.

"They're looking for you, too."

"There's worse," he said, his voice little more than a whisper.

She stared at him, not sure she wanted to hear what he had to tell her.

During the last couple of days, she'd had the feeling they were all caught in a vise. For the past few hours, the jaws of the vise had loosened a bit, but now Grace Spivey was turning the handle tight again.

He said, "They found my Mercedes in the garage in Westwood. A phone tip sent them to it. In the trunk. they found a dead body."

Stunned, Christine said, "Who?"

"They don't know yet. A man. In his thirties. No identification. He'd been shot twice."

"Spivey's people killed him and put him in your car?" she asked, keeping an eye on Joey as he checked out the toy guns at the end of the aisle.

"Yeah. That's what I figure. Maybe he was in the garage when they attacked us. Maybe he saw too much and had to be eliminated, and they realized they could use his body to put the police on my tail. Now Grace doesn't have just her thousand or two thousand followers out looking for us; she's got every cop in the state helping with the search."

They were at a standstill now, speaking softly but intently, no longer pretending to be interested only in groceries.

"But surely the police don't think you killed him."

"They have to assume I'm involved somehow."

"But won't they realize it's related to the church, to that crazy woman-"

"Sure. But they might think the guy in my trunk is one of her people and that I've eliminated him. Or even if they do suspect I'm being framed, they've still got to talk to me. They've still got to put a warrant out for me."

The whole world was after them now. It seemed hopeless.

Like a toxic chemical, despair settled into her bones, leeching her strength. She just wanted to lie down, close her eyes, and sleep for a while.

Charlie said, "Come on. Let's get the shopping done, take everything back to the motel, and then dump the car. I want to hole up inside before some cop spots our license plates or recognizes me."

"Do you think the police know we headed for Santa Barbara after we left Ventura?"

"They can't know for sure. But they've got to figure we were running from L.A., moving north, so Santa Barbara's a good bet."

As they went up and down the remaining aisles, as they checked out and paid for the groceries, Christine found it difficult to breathe. She felt as if a spotlight were trained on them.

She kept waiting for sirens and alarms.

Joey became even more lethargic and solemn than before. He sensed that they were hiding something from him, and maybe it wasn't good to withhold the truth, but she decided it would be worse to tell him that the witch had burned down their house.

That would convince him they were never going back, never going home again, which might be more than he could handle.

It was almost more than she could handle.

Because maybe it was the truth. Maybe they'd never be able to go home again.

Charlie drove the LTD into the motel lot, parked in the slot in front of their unit-and saw movement at the small window in the kitchenette. It might have been his imagination, of course.

Or it might have been the maid. He didn't think it was either.

Instead of switching the engine off, he immediately threw the LTD into reverse and began backing out of the parking space.

Christine said, "What's wrong?"

"Company," he said.

"What? Where?"

In the rear seat, in a voice that was the essence of terror, Joey said,

"The witch."

In front of them, as they backed away from it, the door to their unit began to open.

How the hell did they find us so soon? Charlie wondered.

Not wanting to waste the time required to turn the car around, he kept it in reverse and backed rapidly toward the avenue in front of the motel.

Out in the street, a white van appeared and swung to the curb, blocking the exit from the Wile-Away Lodge.

Charlie saw it in the rearview mirror, jammed on the brakes to avoid hitting it.

He heard gunfire. Two men with automatic weapons had come out of the motel room.

"Get down!"

Christine looked back at Joey." Get on the floor!" she told him.

"You too," Charlie said, tramping on the accelerator again, pulling on the steering wheel, angling away from the van behind them.

She popped her seatbelt and crouched down, keeping her head below the windows.

If a bullet came through the door, she'd be killed anyway.

There wasn't anything Charlie could do about that. Except get the hell out of there.

Chewbacca barked, an ear-rupturing sound in the closed car.

Charlie reversed across the lot, nearly sideswiping a Toyota, clipping one corner of the wrought-iron fence that encircled the swimming pool.

There was no other exit to the street, but he didn't care. He'd make an exit of his own. He drove backwards, over the sidewalk and over the curb. The undercarriage scraped, and Charlie prayed the fuel tank hadn't been torn open, and the LTD slammed to the pavement with a jolt.

The engine didn't cut out. Thank God. His heart pounding as fast as the sedan's six people and that I've eliminated him. Or even if they do suspect I'm being framed, they've still got to talk to me. They've still got to put a warrant out for me."

The whole world was after them now. It seemed hopeless.

Like a toxic chemical, despair settled into her bones, leeching her strength. She just wanted to lie down, close her eyes, and sleep for a while.

Charlie said, "Come on. Let's get the shopping done, take everything back to the motel, and then dump the car. I want to hole up inside before some cop spots our license plates or recognizes me."

"Do you think the police know we headed for Santa Barbara after we left Ventura?"

"They can't know for sure. But they've got to figure we were running from L.A., moving north, so Santa Barbara's a good bet."

As they went up and down the remaining aisles, as they checked out and paid for the groceries, Christine found it difficult to breathe. She felt as if a spotlight were trained on them.

She kept waiting for sirens and alarms.

Joey became even more lethargic and solemn than before. He sensed that they were hiding something from him, and maybe it wasn't good to withhold the truth, but she decided it would be worse to tell him that the witch had burned down their house.

That would convince him they were never going back, never going home again, which might be more than he could handle.

It was almost more than she could handle.

Because maybe it was the truth. Maybe they'd never be able to go home again.

Charlie drove the LTD into the motel lot, parked in the slot in front of their unit-and saw movement at the small window in the kitchenette. It might have been his imagination, of course.

Or it might have been the maid. He didn't think it was either.

Instead of switching the engine off, he immediately threw the LTD into reverse and began backing out of the parking space.

Christine said, "What's wrong?"

"Company," he said.

"What? Where?"

In the rear seat, in a voice that was the essence of terror, Joey said,

"The witch."

In front of them, as they backed away from it, the door to their unit began to open.

How the hell did they find us so soon? Charlie wondered.

Not wanting to waste the time required to turn the car around, he kept it in reverse and backed rapidly toward the avenue in front of the motel.

Out in the street, a white van appeared and swung to the curb, blocking the exit from the Wile-Away Lodge.

Charlie saw it in the rearview mirror, jammed on the brakes to avoid hitting it.

He heard gunfire. Two men with automatic weapons had come out of the motel room.

"Get down!"

Christine looked back at Joey." Get on the floor!" she told him.

"You too," Charlie said, tramping on the accelerator again, pulling on the steering wheel, angling away from the van behind them.

She popped her seatbelt and crouched down, keeping her head below the windows.

If a bullet came through the door, she'd be killed anyway.

There wasn't anything Charlie could do about that. Except get the hell out of there.

Chewbacca barked, an ear-rupturing sound in the closed car.

Charlie reversed across the lot, nearly sideswiping a Toyota, clipping one corner of the wrought-iron fence that encircled the swimming pool.

There was no other exit to the street, but he didn't care. He'd make an exit of his own. He drove backwards, over the sidewalk and over the curb. The undercarriage scraped, and Charlie prayed the fuel tank hadn't been torn open, and the LTD slammed to the pavement with a jolt.

The engine didn't cut out. Thank God. His heart pounding as fast as the sedan's six cylinders, Charlie kept his foot on the accelerator, roaring backwards into State Street, tires screaming and smoking, nearly hitting a VW that was coming up the hill, causing half a dozen other vehicles to brake and wheel frantically out of his path.

The white Ford van pulled away from the motel exit, which it had been blocking, drove into the street again, and tried to ram them. The truck's grille looked like a big grinning mouth, a shark's maw, as it bore down on them. Two men were visible beyond the windshield. The van clipped the right front fender of the LTD, and there was a tortured cry of shredding metal, a shattering of glass as the car's right headlight was pulverized.

The LTD rocked from the blow, and Joey cried out, and the dog bleated, and Charlie almost bit his tongue.

Christine started to rise to see what was happening, and Charlie shouted at her to stay down as he shifted gears and drove forward, east on State, swinging wide around the back of the white van. It tried to ram him in reverse, but he got past it in time.

He expected the crumpled fender to obstruct the tire and eventually bring them to a stop, but it didn't. There were a few clanging-tinkling sounds as broken pieces of the car fell away, but there was no grinding noise of the sort that an impacted tire or an obstructed axle would make.

He heard more gunfire. Bullets thudded into the car, but none of them entered the passenger compartment. Then the LTD was moving fast, pulling out of range.

Charlie was grinding his teeth so hard that his jaws hurt, but he couldn't stop.

Ahead, at the corner, on the cross-street, another white Ford van appeared on their right, swiftly moving out from the shadows beneath a huge oak.

Jesus, they're everywhere!

The new van streaked toward the intersection, intent on blocking Charlie. To stay out of its way, he pulled recklessly into oncoming traffic. A Mustang swung wide of the LTD, and behind the Mustang a red Jaguar jumped the curb and bounced into the parking lot of a Burger King to avoid a collision.

The LTD had reached the intersection. The car was responding too sluggishly, though Charlie pressed the accelerator all the way to the floor.

From the right, the second van was still coming. It couldn't block him now; it was too late for that, so it was going to try to ram him instead.

Charlie was still in the wrong lane. The driver of an oncoming Pontiac braked too suddenly, and his car went into a slide. It turned sideways, came straight at them, a juggernaut.

Charlie eased up on the accelerator but didn't hit the brakes because he would lose his flexibility if he stopped completely and would only be delaying the moment of impact.

In a fraction of a second, he considered all his options. He couldn't swing left into the cross-street because it was crowded with traffic. He couldn't go right because the car was bearing down on him from that direction. He couldn't throw the van into reverse because there was lots of traffic behind him, and, besides, there was no time to shift gears and back up. He could only go forward as the Pontiac slid toward him, go forward and try to dodge the hurtling mass of steel that suddenly loomed as large as a mountain.

A strip of rubber peeled off one of the Pontiac's smoking tires, spun into the air, like a flying snake.

In another fraction of a second, the situation changed: The Pontiac was no longer coming at him broadside, but was continuing to turn, turn, turn, until it had swiveled one hundred and eighty degrees from its original position. Now its back end pointed at the LTD, and, though it was still sliding, it was a smaller target than it had been. Charlie wrenched the steering wheel to the right, then left again, arcing around the careening Pontiac, which shrieked past with no more than an inch to spare.

The van rammed them. Fortunately, it caught only the last couple inches of the LTD. The bumper was torn off with a horrendous sound, and the whole car shuddered and was puslied sideways a couple of feet. The steering wheel abruptly had a mind of its own; it tore itself out of Charlie's grasp, spun through his clutching hands, burning his palms, and he cried out in pain but got hold of it again. Cursing, blinking back the tears of pain that briefly blurred his vision, he got the car pointed eastward again, stood on the accelerator, and kept going. When they were through the intersection, he swung back into his own lane. He hammered the horn, encouraging the cars in front of him to get out of his way.

The second white van-the one that had ripped away their bumper-had gotten out of the mess at the intersection and had followed them. At first it was two cars back of them, then one; then it was right behind the LTD.

With the subsidence of gunfire, both Christine and Joey sat up again.

The boy looked out the rear window at the van and said, "It's the witch!

I can see her! I can see her!"

"Sit down and put your seatbelt on," Charlie told him." We might be making some sudden stops and turns."

The van was thirty feet back but closing.

Twenty feet.

Chewbacca was barking again.

Belted in, Joey held the dog close and quieted it.

Traffic in front of them was closing up, slowing down.

Charlie checked the rearview mirror.

The van was only fifteen feet back of them.

Ten feet.

"They're going to ram us while we're moving," Christine said.

Barely touching the brakes, Charlie whipped the car to the right, into a narrow cross-street, leaving the heavy traffic and commercial development of State Street behind. They were in an older residential neighborhood: mostly bungalows, a few two story houses, lots of mature trees, cars parked on one side.

The van followed, but it dropped back a bit because it couldn't make the turn as quickly as the LTD. It wasn't as maneuverable as the car.

That's what Charlie was counting on.

At the next corner he turned left, cutting his speed as little as possible, almost standing the LTD on two wheels, almost losing control in a wild slide, but somehow holding on, nearly clipping a car parked too close to the intersection. A block later he turned right, then left, then right, then right again, weaving through the narrow streets, putting distance between them and the van.

When they were not just one but two corners ahead of the van, when their pursuers could no longer see which way they were turning, Charlie stopped making random turns and began choosing their route with some deliberation, street by street, heading back toward State, then across the main thoroughfare and into the parking lot of another shopping center.

"We're not stopping here?" Christine said.

" Yeah."

' 'But-"

"We've lost them."

"For the moment, maybe. But they-"

"There's something I have to check on," Charlie said.

He parked out of sight of the traffic on State Street, between two larger vehicles, a camper and a pickup truck.

Apparently, when the second white van had grazed the back of the LTD, tearing off the rear bumper, it had also damaged the exhaust pipe and perhaps the muffler. Acrid fumes were rising through the floorboards, into the car. Charlie told them to crank their windows down an inch or two. He didn't want to turn off the engine if he could help it; he wanted to be ready to move out at a moment's notice; but the fumes were just too strong, and he had to shut the car down.

Christine unhooked her seatbeit and turned to Joey." You okay, honey?"

The boy didn't answer.

Charlie looked back at him.

Joey was slumped down in the corner. His small hands were fisted tight.

His chin was tucked down. His face was bloodless.

His lips trembled, but he was too scared to cry, scared speechless, paralyzed with fear. At Christine's urging, he finally looked up, and his eyes were haunted, forty years too old for his young face.

Charlie felt sick and sad and weary at the sight of the boy's eyes and the tortured soul they revealed. He was also angry. He had the irrational urge to get out of the car right now, stalk back to State Street, find Grace Spivey, and put a few bullets in her.

The bitch. The stupid, crazy, pitiful, hateful, raving, disgusting old bitch!

The dog mewled softly, as if aware of its young master's state of mind.

The boy produced a similar sound and turned his eyes down to the dog, which put its head in his lap.

As if by magic, the witch had found them. The boy had said that you couldn't hide from a witch, no matter what you did, and now it seemed that he was correct.

"Joey," Christine said, "are you all right, honey? Speak to me, baby.

Are you okay?"

Finally the boy nodded. But he still wouldn't-or couldn'tspeak. And there was no conviction in his nod.

Charlie understood how the boy felt. It was difficult to believe that everything could have gone so terribly wrong in the span of just a few minutes.

There were tears in Christine's eyes. Charlie knew what she was thinking. She was afraid that Joey had finally snapped.

And maybe he had.

The churning black-gray clouds at last unleashed the pent-up storm that had been building all morning. Rain scoured the shopping center parking lot and pounded on the battered LTD.

Sheet lightning pulsed across large portions of the dreary sky.

Good, Charlie thought, looking out at the water-blurred world.

The storm-especially the static caused by the lightning-gave them a little more cover. They needed all the help they could get.

"It has to be in here," he said, opening Christine's purse, dumping the contents on the seat between them.

"But I don't see how it could be," she said.

"It's the only place they could have hidden it," he insisted, frantically stirring through the contents of the purse, searching for the most likely object in which a tiny transmitter might have been concealed." It's the only thing that's come with us all the way from L.A. We left behind the suitcases, my car. this is the only place it could've been hidden."

"But no one could've gotten hold of my purse-"

"It might've been planted a couple of days ago, when you weren't suspicious or watchful, before all this craziness began," he said, aware that he was grasping at straws, trying to keep his desperation out of his voice but not entirely succeeding.

If we aren't unwittingly carrying a transmitter, he thought, then how the hell did they find us so quickly? How the hell?

He looked out at the parking lot, turned and glanced out of the back window. No white vans. Yet.

Joey was staring out the side window. His lips were moving, but he wasn't making a sound. He looked wrung-out. A few raindrops slanted in through the narrow gap at the top of the window, struck the boy's head, but he didn't seem to notice.

Charlie thought of his own miserable childhood, the beatings he had endured at the hands of his father, the loveless face of his drunken mother. He thought about the other helpless children, all over the world, who became victims because they were too small to fight back, and a renewed, powerful current of anger energized him again.

He picked up a green malachite compact from the pile of stuff that had been in Christine's purse, opened it, lifted out the powder puff, took out the cake of powder, dropped them both in the litter bag that hung on the dashboard. He quickly examined the compact, but he couldn't see anything unusual about it. He hammered it against the steering wheel a couple of times, smashed it, examined the pieces, saw nothing suspicious.

Christine said, "If we have been carrying a transmitter, something they've been able to home in on, itd need a strong power source, wouldn't it?"

"A battery," he said, taking apart her tube of lipstick.

"But surely it couldn't operate off a battery that small."

"You'd be surprised what modern technology has made possible.

Microminiaturization. You'd be surprised."

Although all four of the windows were down an inch or two, letting in a bit of fresh air, the glass was steaming up. He couldn't see the parking lot, and that made him uneasy, so he started the engine again and switched on the defroster, in spite of the exhaust fumes that seeped in from the damaged muffler and tailpipe.

The purse contained a gold fountain pen and a Cross ballpoint. He took them both apart.

"But how far would something like that broadcast?" Christine asked.

"Depends on its sophistication."

"More specifically?"

"A couple of miles."

"That's all?"

"Maybe five miles if it was really good."

"Not all the way to L.A.?"

"No."

Neither of the pens was a transmitter.

Christine said, "Then howd they find us all the way up here in Santa Barbara?" While he carefully examined her wallet, a penlight, a small bottle of Excedrin, and several other items, he said, "Maybe they have contacts in various police agencies, and maybe they learned about the stolen Caddy turning up in Ventura. Maybe they figured we were headed toward Santa Barbara, so they came up here and started cruising around, just hoping to strike it lucky, just driving from street to street in their vans, monitoring their receivers, until they got close enough to pick up the signal from the transmitter."

"But we could have gone a hundred other places," Christine said." I just don't see why they would've zeroed in on Santa Barbara so quickly."

"Maybe they weren't just looking for us here. Maybe they had search teams working in Ventura and Ojai and a dozen other towns."

"What are the odds of their finding us just by cruising around in a city this size, waiting to pick up our transmitter's signal?"

"Not good. But it could happen. It must have happened that way. How else would they find us?"

"The witch," Joey said from the back seat." She has.

magic powers. witch powers. stuff like that." Then he lapsed into moody silence again, staring out at the rain.

Charlie was almost ready to accept Joey's childish explanation.

The old woman was inhumanly relentless and seemed to possess an uncanny gift for tracking down her prey.

But of course it wasn't magic. There was a logical explanation. A hidden, miniaturized transmitter made the most sense.

But whether it was a transmitter or something else, they must figure it out, apply reason and common sense until they found the answer, or they were never going to lose the old bitch and her crazies.

The windows had unsteamed.

As far as Charlie could see, there were still no white vans in the parking lot.

He had looked through everything in the purse without finding the electronic device that he had been sure would be there. He began to examine the purse itself, seeking lumps in the lining.

"I think we should get moving again," Christine said nervously.

"In a minute," Charlie said, using her nail file to rip out the well-stitched seams in the handles of her purse.

"The exhaust fumes are making me sick," she said.

"Open your window a little more."

He found nothing but cotton padding inside the handles of the purse.

"No transmitter," she said.

"It's still got to be the answer."

"But if not in my purse. where?

"Somewhere," he said, frowning.

"You said yourself that it had to be in the purse."

"I was wrong. Somewhere else. " He tried to think. But he was too worried about the white vans to think clearly.

"We've got to get moving," Christine said.

"I know," he said.

He released the emergency brake, put the car in gear, and drove away from the shopping center, splashing through large puddles.

"Where now?" Christine asked.

"I don't know."

For a while they drove aimlessly through Santa Barbara and neighboring Montecito, mostly staying away from main thoroughfares, wandering from one residential area to another, just keeping on the move.

Here and there, at an intersection, a confluence of overflowing gutters formed a lake that made passage difficult or impossible.

The dripping trees looked limp, soggy. In the rain and mist, all the houses, regardless of color or style, seemed gray, drab.

Christine was afraid that Charlie had run out of ideas. Worse, she was afraid he had run out of hope. He didn't want to talk.

He drove in silence, staring morosely at the storm-swept streets.

Until now she hadn't fully realized how much she had come to depend upon his good humor, positive outlook, and bulldog determination. He was the glue holding her together. She never thought she would say such a thing about a man, any man, but she had to say it about Charlie: Without him, she would be lost.

Joey would speak when spoken to, but he didn't have much to say, and his voice was frail and distant like the voice of a ghost.

Chewbacca was equally lethargic and taciturn.

They listened to the radio, changing from a rock station to a country station, to one that played swing and other jazz. The music, regardless of type, sounded flat. The commercials were all ludicrous: When you were running from a pack of lunatics who wanted to kill you and your little boy, who cared whether one brand of motor oil, Scotch, blue jeans, or toilet tissue was better than another brand? The news was all weather, and none of it good: flooding in half a dozen towns between L.A. and San Diego; high waves smashing into the living rooms of expensive homes in Malibu; mud slides in San Clemente, Laguna Beach, Pacific Palisades, Montecito, and points north along the stormy coastline.

Christine's personal world had fallen apart, and now the rest of the world seemed dead set on following her example.

When Charlie finally stopped thinking and started talking, Christine was so relieved she almost wept.

He said, "The main thing we've got to do is get away from Santa Barbara, find a safe place to hide out, and lie low until Henry can get the organization functioning again. We can't do anything to help ourselves until all my men are focused on Grace Spivey, putting pressure on her and on the others in that damned church."

"So how do we get out of town?" she asked." This car's hot."

"Yeah. Besides, it's falling apart."

"Do we steal another set of wheels?"

"No," he said." The first thing we need is cash. We're running out of money, and we don't want to use credit cards everywhere we go because that leaves a trail. Of course, it doesn't matter if we use cards here because they already know we're in Santa Barbara, so we'll start milking our plastic for all the cash in it."

When at last Charlie swung into action, he moved with gratifying speed.

First they went to a telephone booth, searched the yellow pages, and made a note of the addresses of the nearest Wells Fargo and Security Pacific bank offices. In Orange County, Charlie had his accounts at the former, Christine at the latter.

At one Security Pacific office, Christine used her Visa card to get a cash advance of one thousand dollars, which was the maximum allowable.

At another branch, she obtained a five-hundred dollar advance on her Mastercard. At a third office, using her American Express Card she bought two thousand dollars worth of traveller's checks in twenty- and hundred-dollar denominations. Then, outside the same bank, she used her automatic teller card to obtain more cash. She was permitted to withdraw three hundred dollars at a time from the computerized teller, and she was allowed to make such withdrawals twice a day. Therefore, she was able to add six hundred bucks to the fifteen hundred that she had gotten from Visa and Mastercard. Counting the two thousand in traveller's checks, she had put together a bankroll of forty-one hundred dollars.

"Now let's see what I can add to that," Charlie said, setting out in search of a Wells Fargo office.

"But this ought to be enough for quite a while," she said.

"Not for what I've got in mind," he said.

"What is it you've got in mind?"

"You'll see."

Charlie always carried a blank check in his wallet. At the nearest Wells Fargo branch, after presenting an array of ID and after speaking at length with the manager, he withdrew $7,500 of the $8,254 in his personal checking account.

He was worried that the police might have informed his bank of the warrant for his arrest and that the Wells Fargo computer would direct any teller to call the authorities the moment he showed up to withdraw money. But luck was with him. The cops weren't moving quite as fast as Grace Spivey and her followers.

At other banks, he obtained cash advances on his Visa, Mastercard, Carte Blanche, and American Express cards.

Twice, in their travels back and forth across town, they saw police cruisers, and Charlie tried to duck out of their way. When it wasn't possible to duck, he held his breath, sure that the end had come, but they were not stopped. He knew they were swiftly running out of luck.

At any moment a cop was going to notice their license plate number-or Spivey's people were going to make contact again.

Where was the transmitter if not in Christine's purse? There had to be a transmitter somewhere. It was the only explanation.

Minute by minute, his uneasiness grew until, at last, he found himself sheathed in a cold sweat.

By late afternoon, they had put together a kitty of more than fourteen thousand dollars.

Rain was still falling.

Darkness was settling in early.

"That's it," Christine said." Even if there was some way to squeeze out a few hundred dollars more, the banks are all closed.

So now what?"

They stopped at a small shopping center, where they bought a new purse for Christine, a briefcase in which Charlie could carry the neat stacks of cash they had amassed, and a newspaper.

A headline on the bottom half of the front page caught his attention: CULT LEADER SOUGHT IN WAKE OF ARSON, BOMBINGS.

He showed the story to Christine. Standing under an awning in front of a dress shop, they read the piece all the way through, while rain hissed and pattered and gurgled in the settling twilight. Their names-and Joey's were mentioned repeatedly, and the article said Chaflie was wanted for questioning in a related homicide investigation, but fortunately there were no pictures.

"So the police aren't just looking for me," Charlie said.

"They want to talk to Grace Spivey, too. That's some consolation, anyway."

"Yeah, but they won't be able to pin anything on her," Christine said."

She's too slippery, too clever."

" A witch isn't scared of cops," Joey said grimly.

"Don't be pessimistic," Charlie told them." If you'd seen her with those holes in her hands, if you'd heard her raving, you'd know she's teetering right on the edge. Wouldn't surprise me if she bragged about what she'd done next time the cops talk to her."

Christine said, "Listen, they're probably looking for her down in Orange County, or maybe in L.A., but not up here. Why don't we call the cops-anonymously, of course-and tell them she's in the neighborhood?"

" Excellent idea," he said.

He made the call from a pay phone and kept it brief. He spoke with a desk sergeant named Pulaski and told him that the incident at the Wile-Away Lodge, earlier in the day, had involved Grace Spivey and the Church of the T. He described the white vans and warned Pulaski that the TWilighters were armed with automatic weapons. He hung up without answering any of the sergeant's questions.

When they were in the car once more, Charlie opened the paper to the classified ads, found the "For Sale" section under the heading

"Automobiles," and began reading.

The house was small but beautifully kept. It was a Cape Codstyle structure, unusual for California, pale blue with white shutters and white window frames. The lamps at the end of the walk and those on the porch pillars were brass ship's lamps with flameshaped bulbs. It looked like a warm, snug haven against the storm and against all the other vicissitudes of life.

Charlie had a sudden longing for his own home, back in North Tkjstin.

Belatedly, he felt the terrible impact of the news that Henry had given him this morning: His house, like Christine's, had been burned to the ground. He had told himself insurance would cover the loss. He had told himself there was no use crying over spilt milk. He had told himself that he had more important things to worry about than what he had lost in the fire.

But now, no matter what he told himself, he could not dispel the dull ache that took possession of his heart. Standing here in the chilly February darkness, dripping rainwater, weary and worried, burdened by his responsibility for the safety of Christine and Joey (a crushing weight that grew heavier by the hour), he was overcome by a poignant yearning for his favorite chair, for the familiar books and furnishings of his den.

Stop it, he told himself angrily. There's no time for sentiment or self-pity. Not if we're going to stay alive.

His house was rubble.

His favorite chair was ashes.

His books were smoke.

With Christine, Joey, and Chewbacca, Charlie climbed the porch steps of the Cape Cod F, — ,use and rang the bell.

The door was opened by a white-haired, sixtyish man in a brown cardigan sweater.

Charlie said, "Mr. Madigan? I called a little while ago about-"

"You're Paul Smith," Madigan said.

"Yes," Charlie said.

"Come in, come in. Oh, you've got a dog. Well, just tie him up there on the porch."

Looking past Madigan at the light beige carpet in the living room, Charlie said, "Afraid we'll track up your carpet. Is that the station wagon there in the driveway?"

"That's it," Madigan said." Wait a moment, and I'll get the keys.

They waited in silence on the porch. The house was on a hill above Santa Barbara. Below, the city twinkled and shimmered in the darkness, beyond curtains of blowing rain.

When Madigan returned, he was wearing a raincoat, hood, and high-top galoshes. The amber light from the porch lamps softened the wrinkles in his face; if they had been making a movie and looking for a gentle grandfatherly type, Madigan would have been perfect casting. He assumed Christine and Joey were Charlie's wife and son, and he expressed concern about them being out in such foul weather.

"Oh, we're originally from Seattle," Christine lied." We're used to duck weather like this."

Joey had retreated even further into his private world. He didn't speak to Madigan, didn't smile when the old man teased him.

However, unless you knew what an outgoing boy he usually Was, his silence and solemnity seemed like nothing worse than shyness.

Madigan was eager to sell the Jeep wagon, though he didn't realize how obvious his eagerness was. He thought he was being cool, but he kept pointing out the low mileage (32,000), — the like-new tires, and other attractive features.

After they had talked awhile, Charlie understood the man's situation.

Madigan had retired a year ago and had quickly discovered that Social Security and a modest pension were insufficient to support the lifestyle that he and his wife had maintained previously. They had two cars, a boat, the Jeep wagon, and two snowmobiles. Now they had to choose between boating and winter sports, so they were getting rid of the Jeep and snowmobiles.

Madigan was bitter. He complained at length about all the taxes the government had sucked out of his pockets when he'd been a younger man."

If they'd taken just ten percent less," he said, "I'd have had a pension that would've let me live like a king the rest of my life. But they took it and peed it away. Excuse me, Mrs. Smith, but that's exactly what they did: peed it away."

The only light was from two lamps on the garage, but Charlie could see no visible body damage on the wagon, no sign of rust or neglect. The engine caught at once, didn't sputter, didn't knock.

"We can take it for a spin if you'd like," Madigan said.

"That won't be necessary," Charlie said." Let's talk a deal."

Madigan's expression brightened." Come on in the house."

"Still don't want to track up your carpet."

"We'll go in by the kitchen door."

They tied Chewbacca to one of the posts on the back porch, wiped their feet, shook the rain off their coats, and went inside.

The pale-yellow kitchen was cheery and warm.

Mrs. Madigan was cleaning and chopping vegetables on a cutting board beside the sink. She was gray-haired, round-faced, as much a Norman Rockwell type as her husband. She insisted on pouring coffee for Charlie and Christine, and she mixed up a cup of hot chocolate for Joey, who wouldn't speak or smile for her, either.

Madigan asked twenty percent too much for the Jeep, but Charlie agreed to the price without hesitation, and the old man had trouble concealing his surprise.

"Well. fine! If you come back tomorrow with a cashier's check-"

"I'd like to pay cash and take the Jeep tonight," Charlie said.

"Cash?" Madigan said, startled." Well. urn. I guess that'd be okay. But the paperwork-"

"Do you still owe the bank anything, or do you have the pink slip? "

"Oh, it's free and clear. I have the pink slip right here."

"Then we can take care of the paperwork tonight."

"You'll have to have an emissions test run before you'll be able to apply for registration in your name."

" I know. I can handle that first thing in the morning."

"But if there's some problem-"

"You're an honest man, Mr. Madigan. I'm sure you've sold me a first-rate machine."

"Oh, it is! I've taken good care of her."

"That's good enough for me."

"You'll need to talk to your insurance agent-"

"I will. Meanwhile, I'm covered for twenty-four hours."

The haste with which Charlie wanted to proceed, combined with the offer of cash on the spot, not only surprised Madigan but made him uneasy and somewhat suspicious. However, he was being paid eight or nine hundred more than he had expected to get, and that was enough to insure his cooperation.

Fifteen minutes later, they left in the Jeep wagon, and there was no way that Grace Spivey or the police could trace the sale to them if they didn't bother to file an application for registration.

Though rain was still falling, though an occasional soft pulse of lightning backlit the clouds, the night seemed less threatening than it had before they'd made their deal with Madigan.

"Why did it have to be a Jeep?" Christine asked as they found the freeway and drove north on 101.

"Where we're going," Charlie said, "we'll need four-wheeldrive."

"Where's that?"

"Eventually. the mountains."

"Why?"

"I know a place where we can hide until Henry or the police find a way to stop Grace Spivey. I'm part owner of a cabin in the Sierras, up near Tahoe."

" That's so far away. "

"But it's the perfect place. Remote. It's a sort of time-sharing arrangement with three other owners. Each of us has several weeks there every year, and when none of us is using it, we rent it out. It was supposed to be a ski chalet, but it's hardly occupied during the worst of the winter because the road into it was never paved. It was planned to be the first of twenty chalets, and the county had promised to pave the road, but everything fell through after the first one was built. So now, there's still just a one-lane dirt track that's never plowed, and getting in there in the winter isn't easy. Bad investment, as it turned out, but now maybe I'll get my money's worth."

"We keep running, running. I'm not used to running away from problems."

"But there's nothing we can do here. It's all up to Henry and my other men. We've just got to stay out of sight, stay alive.

And no one will ever look for us up in the mountains."

From the back seat, in a low voice filled with weariness and resignation, Joey said, "The witch will. She'll come after us.

She'll find us. We can't hide from the witch."

As usual, Grace could not steep.

After leaving Santa Barbara and driving north for a while ten of them in two white vans and one blue Oldsmobile-they had finally stopped at a motel in Soleded. They had lost the boy.

Grace was certain he was still heading into the northern part of the state-she felt it in her bones-but she didn't know where in the north.

She had to stop and wait for news-or holy guidance.

Before they checked into the motel, she had tried to put herself into a trance, and Kyle had done everything he could to help her, but she hadn't been able to break through the barrier between this world and the next. Something lay in her way, a wall she had never encountered before, a malignant and inhibiting force. She had been sure that Satan was there, in the back of the van, preventing her from entering the spirit realm. All her prayers had not been sufficient to dispel the devil and bring her close to God, as she had desired.

Defeated, they had stopped for the night at the motel and had taken dinner together in the coffee shop, most of them too weary and too scared to eat much or to talk. Then they had all gone to their separate rooms, like monks to cells, to pray and think and rest.

But sleep eluded Grace.

Her bed was firm and comfortable, but she was distracted by voices from the spirit realm. Even though she was not in a trance.

they spoke to her from beyond, called out warnings that she could not quite understand, asked questions she could not quite discern. This was the first time since she had received the Gift that she was unable to commune with the spirit world, and she was both frustrated and afraid.

She was afraid because she knew what this meant: The devil's power on earth was increasing rapidly, the Beast's confidence had grown to such an extent that he could now boldly interfere between Grace and her God.

Twilight was coming faster than expected.

The gates of Hell were swinging open.

Although she could no longer understand the spirit voices, although their cries were muffled and distorted, she detected an urgency in all of them, and she knew the abyss loomed ahead.

Maybe if she rested, got a little sleep, she would be stronger and better equipped to break through the barrier between this world and the next. But there was no rest. Not in these desperate times.

She had lost five pounds in the last few days, and her eyes stung from lack of sleep. She longed for sleep. But the incomprehensible spirit voices continued to assault her, a steady stream of them, a torrent, a flood of other-worldly messages. Their urgency infected her, pushed her to the brink of panic.

Time was running out. The boy was growing stronger.

Too little time to do all that was necessary.

Too little time. Maybe no time at all.

She was overwhelmed not only by voices but by visions, as well. As she lay in her bed, staring at the dark ceiling, the shadows abruptly came to life, and the folds of the night were transmuted into leathery black wings, and something hideous descended from the ceiling-No! — fell atop her, flapping and hissing, spitting in her face, something slimy and cold-oh God, no, please! — with breath that reeked of sulfur. She gagged and flailed and tried to cry out for help, but her voice failed her the way she had failed God. Her arms were pinned. She kicked. Her legs were pinned. She writhed. She bucked. Hard hands pawed at her.

Pinched her. Struck her. An oily tongue lapped her face.

She saw eyes of crimson fire glaring down at her, a grinning mouth full of viciously sharp teeth, a stoved-in nose, a nightmare visage that was partly human, partly porcine, partly like the face of a bat. She was finally able to speak but only in a whisper. She frantically called out some of the names of God, of saints, and those holy words had an effect on the shadowdemon; it shrank from her, and its eyes grew less bright, and the stench of its breath faded, and, mercifully, it rose from her, swooped up toward the ceiling, whirled away into a tenebrous corner of the room.

She sat up. Threw back the tangled covers. Scrambled to the edge of the bed. Reached for the nightstand lamp. Her hands were shaking. Her heart was hammering so hard that pain spread across her chest, and it seemed her breastbone would fracture.

She finally switched on the bedside lamp. No demon crouched in the room.

She turned on the other lamps, went into the bathroom.

The demon wasn't there, either.

But she knew it had been real, yes, terribly real, knew it wasn't just imagination or lunacy. Oh, yes. She knew. She knew the truth. She knew the awful truth-but what she didn't know was how she had gotten from the bathroom to the floor at the foot of the queen-size bed, where she next found herself. Apparently she had passed out in the bathroom and had crawled to the bed. But she couldn't remember anything. When she came to, she was naked, on her belly, weeping softly, clawing at the carpet.

Shocked, embarrassed, confused, she found her pajamas and pulled them on-and became aware of the serpent under the bed.

Hissing. It was the most wicked sound she had ever heard. It slithered out from beneath the bed, big as a boa constrictor, but with the supremely evil head of a rattlesnake, the multi-faceted eyes of an insect, and venom-dripping fangs as big as hooked fingers.

Like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, this one spoke: "Your God cannot protect you any more. Your God has abandoned you.

She shook her head frantically: no, no, no, no!

With a sickening sinuosity, it coiled itself. Its head reared up.

Its jaws fell open. It struck, biting her in the neck — and then, without knowing how she had come to be there, she found herself sitting, some time later, on a stool in front of the dresser mirror, staring into her own bloodshot, watery eyes. She shivered. Her eyes, even the flat reflection of them, contained something she didn't want to see, so she looked elsewhere in the mirror, at the reflection of her age-wrinkled throat, where she expected to find the mark of the serpent. There was no wound. Impossible. The mirror must be lying. She put one hand to her throat. She could not feel a wound, either. And she had no pain.

The serpent hadn't bitten her, after all. Yet she remembered so clearly.

She noticed an ashtray in front of her. It was overflowing with cigarette butts. She was holding a smouldering cigarette in her right hand. She must have been sitting here an hour or more, smoking constantly, staring into the mirror-yet she couldn't remember any of it. What was happening to her?

She stubbed out the cigarette she'd been holding and looked into the mirror again, and she was shocked. She seemed to see herself for the first time in years. She saw that her hair was wild, frizzy, tangled, unwashed. She saw how sunken her eyes were, ringed with crepe-like flesh that had an unhealthy purplish tint.

Her teeth, my God, they looked as if they hadn't been brushed in a couple of weeks; they were yellow, caked with plaque! In addition to banishing sleep, the Gift had driven many other things out of her life; she was aware of that. However, until now, she hadn't been so painfully aware that the Gift-the visions, the trances, the communications with spirits-had caused her to completely neglect personal hygiene. Her pajamas were spotted with food and cigarette ashes. She raised her hands and looked at them with amazement. Her fingernails were too long, chipped, dirty. There were traces of dirt in her knuckles.

She had always valued cleanliness, neatness.

What would her Albert say if he could see her now?

For one devastating moment, she wondered if her daughter had been correct in having her hospitalized for psychiatric evaluation. She wondered if she was not a visionary after all, not a genuine religious leader, but simply a disturbed old woman, senile, plagued by bizarre hallucinations and delusions, deranged. Was the Scavello boy really the Antichrist? Or just an innocent child? Was Twilight actually coming?

Or was her fear of the devil only a foolish old woman's demented fantasy? She was suddenly, gut-twistingly sure that her "holy mission" was, in fact, merely the crusade of a pitiful schizophrenic.

No. She shook her head violently. No!

These despicable doubts were planted by Satan.

This was her Gethsemane. Jesus had endured an agony of doubt in the Garden of Gethsemane, near the brook of Kedron. Her Gethsemane was in a more humble location: a nondescript motel in Soleded, California. But it was every bit as important a turning point for her as Jesus's experience in the garden had been for Him.

She was being tested. She must hold on to her faith in both God and herself. She opened her eyes. Looked in the mirror again. She still saw madness in her eyes. No!

She picked up the ashtray and threw it at her reflection, smashing the mirror. Glass and cigarette butts rained over the dresser and the floor around it.

Immediately she felt better. The devil had been in the mirror.

She had smashed the glass and the devil's hold on her. Self-confidence flooded into her once more.

She had a sacred mission.

She must not fail.

Charlie stopped at a motel shortly before midnight. They got one room with two king-size beds. He and Christine took turns sleeping. Although he was positive they couldn't have been followed, although he felt safer tonight than he had felt last night, he now believed that a watch must be kept at all times.

Joey slept fitfully, repeatedly waking from nightmares, shivering in a cold sweat. In the morning he looked paler than ever, and he spoke even less than before.

The rain had subsided to a light drizzle.

The sky was low, gray, bleak, and ominous.

After breakfast, when Charlie pointed the station wagon north again, toward Sacramento, Christine rode in the back seat with the boy. She read to him from some of the story books and comics they had bought yesterday. He listened but asked no questions, showed little interest, never smiled. She tried to engage him in a card game, but he didn't want to play.

Charlie was increasingly worried about Joey, increasingly frustrated and angry, too. He had promised to protect them and put a stop to Spivey's harassment. Now all he could do for them was help them run, tails between their legs, toward an uncertain future.

Even Chewbacca seemed depressed. The dog lay in the cargo area behind the rear seat, rarely stirring, rising only a few times to look out one of the windows at the soot-colored day, then slumping back down, out of sight.

They arrived in Sacramento before ten o'clock in the morning, located a large sporting goods store, and bought a lot of things they would need for the mountains: insulated sleeping bags in case the heating system in the cabin was not strong enough to completely compensate for winter's deep-freeze temperatures; rugged boots; ski suits-white for Joey, blue for Christine, green for Charlie; gloves; tinted goggles to guard against snowblindness; knitted toboggan caps; snowshoes; weatherproof matches in watertight cans; an ax; and a score of other items.

He also bought a Remington 30-gauge shotgun, and a Winchester Model 100 automatic rifle chambered for a.308 cartridge, which was a light but powerful weapon; he stocked up on plenty of ammunition, too.

He was sure Spivey wouldn't find them in the mountains.

Positive.

But just in case.

After a quick and early lunch at McDonalds, Charlie connected the electronic tap detector to a pay phone and called Henry Rankin.

The line wasn't bugged, and Henry didn't have much news. The Orange County and Los Angeles papers were still filled with stuff about the Church of the Twilight. The cops were still looking for Grace Spivey.

They were still looking for Charlie, too, and they were getting impatient; they were beginning to suspect he hadn't turned himself in because he actually was guilty of the murder about which they wanted to question him. They couldn't understand that he was avoiding them because Spivey might have followers within the police department; they refused even to consider such a possibility. Meanwhile, Henry was busy getting the company back on its feet and was, for the time being, headquartering the agency in his own house. By tomorrow they would again be working fullsteam on the Spivey case.

At a service station, they used the rest rooms to change into the winter clothing they had purchased. The mountains were not far away.

In the Jeep wagon once more, Charlie headed east toward the Sierras, while Christine continued to sit in back, reading to Joey, talking to him, trying hard-but without much success-to draw him out of his shell.

The rain stopped.

The wind grew stronger.

Later, there were snow flurries.

Mother Grace rode in the Oldsmobile. Eight disciples followed in the two white vans. They were on Interstate 5 now, in the heart of California's farm country, passing between immense flat fields, where crops flourished even in the middle of winter.

Kyle Barlowe drove the Olds, now anxious and edgy, now bored and drowsy, sometimes oppressed by the tedium of the long drive and the rain-grayed landscape.

Although the church's sources of information-in various police departments and elsewhere-had no news about Joey Scavello and his mother, they headed north from Soleded because Grace said the boy and his protectors had gone that way. She claimed to have received a vision in the night.

Barlowe was pretty sure she'd had no vision and that she was just guessing. He knew her too well to be fooled. He understood her moods.

If she'd really had a vision, she would be. euphoric. Instead, she was sullen, silent, grim. He suspected she was at a loss but didn't want to tell them that she was no longer in contact with the spirit world.

He was worried. If Grace had lost the ability to talk with God, if she could not journey to the other side to commune with angels and with the spirits of the dead, did that mean she was no longer God's chosen messenger? Did it mean that her mission no longer had His blessing? Or did it mean that the devil's power on earth had grown so dramatically that the Beast could interfere between Grace and God? If the latter were true, Twilight was very near, and the Antichrist would soon reveal himself, and a thousand-year reign of evil would begin.

He glanced at Grace. She was staring ahead, through the rain, at the arrow-straight highway, lost in thought. She looked older than she had last week. She had aged ten years in a few days. She seemed positively ancient. Her skin looked lifeless, brittle, gray.

Her face wasn't the only thing that was gray. All her clothes were gray, too. For reasons Barlowe didn't fully understand, she always dressed in a single color; he thought it had a religious significance, something to do with her visions, but he wasn't sure. He was accustomed to her monochromatic costumes, but this was the first time he had ever seen her in gray. Yellow, blue, fire-red, apple-red, blood-red, green, white, purple, violet, orange, pink, rose-yes, she had worn all of those, but always bright colors, never anything as somber as this.

She hadn't expected to dress in gray; this morning, after leaving the motel, they'd had to go shopping to buy her gray shoes, gray slacks, a gray blouse and sweater because she had owned no gray clothes. She had been in great distress, almost hysterical, until she'd changed into a completely gray outfit." It's a gray day in the spirit world," she had said." The energy is all gray. I'm not synchronized. I'm not in tune, not in touch. I've got to get in touch!" She had wanted jewelry, too, because she liked jewelry a lot, but it wasn't easy to find gray rings and bracelets and broaches. Most jewelry was bright. She'd finally had to settle for just a string of gray beads. Now it was odd to see her without a single ring on her pale, leathery hands.

A gray day in the spirit world.

What did that mean? Was that good or bad?

Judging from Grace's demeanor, it was bad. Very bad. Time was running out. That's what Grace had said this morning, but she hadn't been willing to elaborate. Time was running out, and they were lost, driving north on just a hunch.

He was scared. He still worried that it would be a terrible thing for him to kill anyone, that it would be backsliding into his old ways, even if he was doing it for God. He was proud of himself for resisting the violent impulses which he had once embraced, proud of the way he had begun to fit into society, just a little bit, and he was afraid that one murder would lead to another. Was it right to kill-even for God? He knew that was wrong-thought, but he couldn't shake it. And sometimes, when he looked at Grace, he had the unsettling notion that perhaps he had been wrong about her all along, that perhaps she wasn't God's agent-and that was more wrong-thought. The thing was. Grace had taught him that there were such things as moral values, and now he could not avoid applying them to everything he did.

Anyway, if Grace was right about the boy-and surely she was-then time was running out, but there was nothin, to be done but drive, wait for her to regain contact with the spirit world, and call the church in Anaheim once in a while to learn if there was any news that might help.

Barlowe put his foot down a little harder on the accelerator.

They were already doing over seventy, which was maybe about as fast as they ought to push it in the rain, even on this long straight highway.

But they were Chosen, weren't they? God was watching over them, wasn't He? Barlowe accelerated until the needle reached 80 on the speedometer.

The two vans accelerated behind him, staying close.

The Jeep wagon was, as Madigan had promised, in fine shape.

It gave them no trouble at all, and they reached Lake Tahoe on Thursday afternoon.

Christine was weary, but Joey had perked up a bit. He was showing some interest in the passing scenery, and that was a welcome change. He didn't seem any happier, just more alert, and she realized that, until today, he had never seen snow before, except in magazine pictures, on TV, and in the movies.

There was plenty of snow in Tahoe, all right. The trees were crusted and burdened with it; the ground was mantled with it.

Fresh flurries sifted down from the steely sky, and according to the news on the radio, the flurries would build into a major storm during the night.

The lake, which straddled the state line, was partly in California and partly in Nevada. On the California side of the town of South Lake Tahoe, there were a great many motels-some of them surprisingly shabby for such a lovely and relatively expensive resort area-lots of touristy shops and liquor stores and restaurants. On the Nevada side, there were several large hotels, casinos, gambling in just about every form, but not as much glitz as in Las Vegas. Along the northern shore, there was less development, and the man-made structures were better integrated with the land than they were along the southern shore.

On both sides of the border, and both in the north and south, there was some of the most beautiful scenery on the face of the earth, what many Europeans have called "America's Switzerland": snow-capped peaks that were dazzling even on a cloudy day; vast, primeval forests of pine, fir, spruce, and other evergreens; a lake that, in its ice-free summer phase, was the cleanest, clearest, and most colorful in the world, iridescent blues and glowing greens, a lake so pure you could see the bottom as far as sixty and eighty feet down.

They stopped at a market on the north shore, a large but rustic building shadowed by tamarack and spruce. They still had most of the groceries they'd bought in Santa Barbara yesterday, the stuff they'd never had a chance to put in the refrigerator and cupboards at the Wile-Away Lodge.

They'd disposed of the perishables, of course, and that was what they stocked up on now: milk, eggs, cheese, ice cream, and frozen foods of all kinds.

At Charlie's request, the cashier packed the frozen food in a sturdy cardboard box with a lid, separate from the goods that were not frozen.

In the parking lot, Charlie carefully poked a few holes in the box. He had purchased nylon clothesline in the market, and with Christine's assistance, he threaded the rope through the holes and looped it around the box and secured it to the luggage rack on top of the Jeep. The temperature was below freezing; nothing carried on the roof would thaw on the way to the cabin.

As they worked (with Chewbacca watching interestedly from inside the Jeep), Christine noticed that a lot of the cars in the market lot were fitted with ski racks. She had always wanted to learn to ski. She often promised herself that she would take lessons with Joey one day, the two of them beginning and learning together, just as soon as he seemed old enough. It would have been fun. Now it was probably just one more thing they would never get to do together.

That was a damned grim thought. Uncharacteristically grim.

She knew she had to keep her spirits up, if only for Joey's sake.

He would sense her pessimism and would crawl away even deeper into the psychological hole he seemed to be digging for himself But she couldn't shake off the gloom that weighed her down.

Her spirits had sunk, and there seemed to be no way to get them afloat again.

She told herself to enjoy the crisp, clean mountain air. But it just seemed painfully, bitingly cold. If a wind sprang up, the weather would be insufferable.

She told herself that the snow was beautiful and that she should enjoy it. It looked wet, cold, and forbidding.

She looked at Joey. He was standing beside her, watching as Charlie tied the final knot in the clothesline. He was more like a little old man than a child. He didn't make a snowball. He didn't stick out his tongue and catch snowflakes. He didn't run and slide on the icy portions of the parking lot. He didn't do any of the things a small boy could be expected to do when setting foot on a snowy landscape for the first time in his life.

He's just tired, and so am I, Christine told herself. It's been a long day. Neither of us has had a restful night since last Saturday. Once we've had a good supper, once we've each gotten eight solid hours in the sack without nightmares and without waking up a dozen times to the imagined sound of footsteps.

then we'll feel better. Sure we will. Sure.

But she couldn't convince herself either that she would feel better tomorrow or that their circumstances would improve. In spite of all the distance they'd driven and the remoteness of the haven toward which they were making their way, she did not feel safe. It wasn't just that there were a couple of thousand religious fanatics who, more than anything else, wanted them dead. That was bad enough. But there was also something curiously suffocating about the huge trees rising on all sides and pressing close from every direction, something claustrophobic about the way the mountains walled them in, an indefinable menace in the stark shadows and the gray winter light of this high fastness. She would never feel safe here.

But it wasn't just the mountains. She wouldn't have felt safer anywhere else.

They left the main road that circled the lake, turned onto a twolane blacktop that rose up a series of steep slopes, past expensive homes and getaway chalets that were tucked back in among the densely packed and massive trees. If there hadn't been light in those houses, glowing warmly in the purple-black shadows beneath the trees, you wouldn't have known most of them were there. Even on the day-side of eventide, lights were needed here.

Snow was piled high on both sides of the road, and in some places new drifts reduced traffic to a single lane. Not that there were many other vehicles around: They passed only two-another Jeep Wagon with a plow on the front, and a Toyota Land Rover.

Near the end of the paved road, Charlie decided it would be a good idea to put the chains on the tires. Although a plow had been through recently, the drifts were inching farther across the pavement here than on the lower slopes, and there were bigger patches of ice. He pulled into a driveway, which ran across the face of the mountain and was level, stopped, and got the chains from the back. He required twenty minutes to complete the job, and he was unhappily aware of how fast the sunlight was fading from behind the snow-spitting clouds.

With chains clanking, they drove on, and soon the paved road ended in a one-lane dirt track. This, too, was plowed for the first half mile, but because it was narrower than the lower road, it tended to drift shut faster. Nevertheless, slowly but steadily, the Jeep clawed its way upward.

Charlie didn't attempt to keep a conversation going. There was no point in making the effort. Ever since they'd left Sacramento earlier in the day, Christine had become steadily less communicative. Now, she was almost as silent and withdrawn as Joey.

He was dismayed by the change in her, but he understood why she was having difficulty staving off depression. The mountains, which usually conveyed an uplifting feeling of openness and freedom, now seemed paradoxically restraining, oppressive. Even when they passed through a broad meadow and the trees fell back from the roadway, the mood of the landscape didn't change.

Christine was probably wondering if coming here had been a serious mistake.

Charlie was wondering, too.

But there had been nowhere else to go. With Grace's people looking for them, with the police searching for them throughout California, unable to trust the authorities or even Charlie's own employees, they hadn't much choice but to go to ground in a place where no one would spot them, which meant a place with few people.

Charlie told himself that they had done the wisest thing, that they had been cautious in the purchase of the Jeep, that they had planned well and had moved with admirable speed and flexibility, that they were in control of their destiny. They would probably be here only a week or so, until Grace Spivey was brought to heel either by his own men or the police.

But in spite of what he told himself, he felt as if they were out of control, fleeing in near-panic. The mountain seemed not a haven but a trap. He felt as if they had walked out on a gangplank.

He tried to stop thinking about it. He knew he wasn't being entirely rational. For the moment, his emotions had the upper hand. Until he could think calmly again, it was best to put Grace Spivey out of his mind as much as possible.

There were considerably fewer houses and cabins along the dirt lane than there had been along the paved road, and after a third of a mile there were none visible at all.

At the end of the first half mile, the dirt road was no longer plowed.

It vanished under several feet of snow. Charlie stopped the Jeep, pulled on the emergency brake, and switched off the engine.

"Where's the cabin?" Christine asked.

"Half a mile from here."

"What now?"

"We walk."

"In snowshoes?"

"Yep. That's why we bought 'em."

"I've never used them before."

"You can learn."

"Joey-',

"We'll take turns carrying him. Then he can stay at the cabin while you and I come back for-"

"Stay there by himself?"

"He'll have the dog, and he'll be perfectly safe. Spivey can't have known we were coming here; she's not around anywhere."

Joey didn't object. He didn't even appear to hear what they'd said. He was staring out the window, but he couldn't be looking at anything because the glass was fogged by his breath.

Charlie got out of the station wagon and winced as the winter air bit at his face. It had grown considerably colder since they had left the market down by the lake. The snowflakes were enormous and falling faster than before. They spun down from the lowering sky on a gently shifting breeze that became a little less gentle, more insistent, even as he paused for a moment to look around at the forest. The trees shouldered against one another and seemed to be crouching, ready to pounce, at the edges of the meadow.

For some reason he thought of an old fairytale: Little Red Riding Hood.

He could still remember the spooky illustration in the storybook he'd had when he'd been a child, a picture of Red making her way through a gloomy, wolf-haunted forest.

That made him think of Hansel and Gretel, lost in the woods.

And that made him think of witches.

Witches who baked children in ovens and ate them.

Jesus, he had never realized how gruesome some fairytales were!

The snowflakes had grown slightly smaller and were-falling faster by the second.

Softly, softly, the wind began to howl.

Christine was surprised by how quickly she learned to walk in the cumbersome snowshoes, and she realized how difficult-and perhaps impossible-the journey would have been without them, especially with the heavy backpacks they carried. In some places, the wind had almost scoured the meadow bare, but in other places, wherever the land presented even the slightest windbreak, drifts had piled up eight, ten, or twelve feet deep, even deeper. And of course snow had filled in every gully and hole and basin in the land. If you were to attempt to cross an unseen depression without snowshoes, you might find yourself sinking down into a deep well of snow out of which it would be difficult or impossible to climb.

The gray afternoon light, which had a disconcerting artificial quality, played tricks with snow-glare and shadow, giving a false sense of distance, distorting shapes. Sometimes it even caused a mounting ridge of snow to look like a depression until she reached it and realized she must climb instead of descend as she'd expected.

Joey found it more difficult to adapt to snowshoes than she did, even though he had a small pair suitable for a child. Because the day was fast fading and because they didn't want to finish unloading the Jeep entirely in the dark, they didn't have time for him to learn snowshoeing right now. Charlie picked him up and carried him.

Chewbacca was a big dog but still light enough so he didn't break through the crust on top of the snow. He also had an instinct for avoiding places where the crust was thin or nonexistent, and he could often find his way around the deepest snow, moving from one wind-scoured spot to another. Three times he sank in; once he was able to dig his way up and out by himself, but twice he had to be helped.

From the abandoned Jeep, they went up a slope for three hundred yards, until they reached the end of the meadow. They followed the snow-hidden road into the trees, bearing right along the top of a broad ridge, with a table of forested land on their right and a tree-choked valley on their left. Even though nightfall was still perhaps an hour away, the valley dropped down through shades of gray and blue and purple, finally into blackness, and there were no spots of light down there, so she supposed there were no dwellings.

By now she knew that Charlie was a considerably more formidable man than either his size or general appearance would indicate, but she was nevertheless surprised by his stamina. Her own backpack was beginning to feel like a truckload of cement blocks, but though Charlie's pack was bigger and heavier than hers, he did not seem to be bothered by it. In addition, he carried Joey without complaint and stopped only once in the first quarter-mile to put the boy down and relieve cramping muscles.

After a hundred yards, the road angled away from the rim of the valley, moving across the mountain instead of uphill, but then turned and sloped upward again in another fifty yards. The trees became thicker and bigger and bushier, and in places the sheltered lane was so deep in shadow that night might as well have come already. In time they arrived at the foot of another meadow, broader than the one where they'd parked the Jeep, and about four hundred yards long.

"There's the cabin!" Charlie said, the words bursting out of him with plumes of crystallized breath.

Christine didn't see it.

He stopped, put Joey down again, and pointed." There. At the far end, just in front of the tree line. There's a windmill beside it."

She saw the windmill first because her eye caught the movement of the spinning blades. It was a tall, skeletal mill, nothing picturesque about it, more like an oil derrick than anything a Dutchman would recognize, very businesslike and somewhat ugly.

Both the cabin and the mill blended well with the trees behind them, although she supposed they would be more visible earlier in the day.

"You didn't tell me there was a windmill," she said." Does that mean electric light?"

"Sure does." His cheeks, nose, and chin were pink from the cold, and he sniffed to clear a runny nose." And plenty of hot water."

"Electric heat?"

"Nope. There's a limit to what a power mill can provide. even in a place as windy as this."

The jacket snap at Joey's throat had come undone, and his scarf was loose. Christine stooped to make adjustments. His face was more red than pink, and his eyes were tearing from the cold.

"We're almost there, Skipper."

He nodded.

After catching their breath, they started uphill once more, with Chewbacca bounding ahead as if he understood that the cabin was their final destination.

The place was constructed of redwood that had silvered slightly in the harsh weather. Though the cedar-shingled roof was steeply sloped, some snow clung to it anyway. The windows were frosted. Snow had drifted over the front steps and onto the porch.

They took off their snowshoes and gloves.

Charlie retrieved a spare key from a cleverly hidden recess in one of the porch posts. Ice cracked away from the door as he pulled it open, and the frozen hinges squealed briefly.

They went inside, and Christine was surprised by how lovely the cabin was. The downstairs consisted of one enormous room, with a kitchen occupying the far end, a long pine dining table just this side of the kitchen, and then a living area with a polished oak floor, braided rag rugs, comfortable dark green sofas and armchairs, brass lamps, paneled walls, draperies in a Scottish-plaid pattern that was dominated by greens to complement the sofas and chairs, and a massive rock fireplace almost as big as a walk-in closet. Half the downstairs was open all the way to the second-floor ceiling, and was overlooked by a gallery.

Up there, three closed doors led to three other rooms: "Two bedrooms and a bath," Charlie said. The effect was rustic yet quite civilized.

A tiled area separated the front door from the oak floor of the living room, and that was where they removed their snow-crusted boots. Then they took an inspection tour of the cabin. There was some dust on the furniture, and the air smelled musty. There was no electricity because the breakers were all thrown in the fuse box, which was out in the battery room below the windmill, but Charlie said he would go out there and remedy the situation in a few minutes. Beside each of the three fireplaces-the big one in the living room and a smaller one in each of the bedrooms-were stacks of split logs and kindling, which Charlie used to start three fires. All the fireplaces were equipped with Heatolators, so the cabin would be reasonably warm even in the bitter heart of winter.

"At least no one's broken in and wrecked things," he said.

"Is that a problem?" Christine asked.

"Not really. During the warmer months, when the road's open all the way, there's nearly always somebody staying here. When the road is snowed shut and there's no one here to look after the place, most would-be looters wouldn't even know there was a cabin this far into the woods. And the ones who do know.

well. they probably figure the trek isn't worth what little they'd find to carry away. Still, first time you arrive each spring, you wonder if you're going to discover the place has been wrecked."

The fires were building nicely, and the vents of the Heatolator in the downstairs mantel were spewing welcome droughts of warm air into the big main room. Chewbacca had already settled down on the hearth there, head on his paws.

"Now what?" Christine asked.

Opening one of the backpacks and removing a flashlight from it, Charlie said, "Now you and Joey take everything out of these bags while I go out and see about getting us some electricity."

She and Joey carried the backpacks into the kitchen while Charlie pulled his boots on again. By the time he had gone out to the windmill, they were stashing canned goods in the cabinets, and it almost seemed as if they were an ordinary family on an ordinary skiing holiday, getting settled in for a week of fun. Almost. She tried to instill a holiday mood in Joey by whistling happy songs and making little jokes and pretending that she was actually going to enjoy this adventure, but either the boy saw through her charade or he wasn't even paying attention to her, for he seldom responded and never smiled.

With the monotonous humming-churning of the windmill's propellers above him, Charlie used a shovel to clear the snow from the wooden doors that protected the steps that led down to the room under the windmill. He descended two flights of steps that went rather deeply into the ground; the battery room was below the frost line. When he reached the bottom, he was in a hazyblue darkness that robbed the whiteness from the snowflakes sifting down around him, so they looked as if they were bits of gray ash. He took the flashlight from his coat pocket and snapped it on. A heavy metal door stood in front of him. The cabin key worked this lock, too, and in a moment he was in the battery room, where everything appeared to be in order: cables; twenty heavy-duty, ten-year storage batteries lined up side by side on two sturdy benches; a concrete pallet holding all the machinery; a rack of tools.

A foul odor assaulted him, and he immediately knew the cause of it, knew he would have to deal with it, but first he went to the fuse box and pushed all the breakers from OFF to ON. That done, the wall switch by the door brought light to the two long fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling.

The light revealed three dead, decaying mice, one in the middle of the room, the other two in the corner by the first battery bench.

It was necessary to leave tins of poisoned bait here, especially during the winter when mice were most likely to come seeking shelter, for if the rodents were left to their own devices they would eat the insulation from all the cables and wires, leaving a ruined electrical system by the time spring arrived.

The mouse in the middle of the small chamber had been dead a long time.

The process of decomposition had pretty much run its course in the tiny corpse. There were bones, fur, scraps of leathery skin, little else.

The two in the corner were more recent casualties. The small bodies were bloated and putrescent. Their eye sockets were alive with squirming maggots. They had been dead only a few days.

Queasy, Charlie went outside, got the shovel, returned, scooped up all three of the creatures, took them out to the woods behind the mill, and pitched them off into the trees. Even when he had disposed of them, even though a blustery wind was huffing up the mountainside and scrubbing the world clean as it passed, Charlie couldn't get the stink of death out of his nostrils.

Oddly, the smell stayed with him all the way back to the battery room, where, of course, it still hung on the damp musty air.

He didn't have time for a really thorough inspection of the equipment, but he wanted to give it a quick once-over to be sure the mice had died before they had done any serious damage.

The wires and cables were lilitly nibbled in a few places, but there didn't seem to be any reason to worry that they'd lose their lights to rodent sabotage.

He had almost satisfied himself as to the system's integrity when he heard a strange, threatening noise behind him.

The day was melting into darkness. Color was seeping out of the landscape through which they drove, leaving the trees and hills and everything else as gray as the surface of the highway.

Kyle Barlowe switched on the headlights and hunched over the steering wheel of the Oldsmobile, grinning.

Now. Now they had something real to go on. Now they had a solid lead.

Information. A logical plan. They weren't just going on a hunch and a prayer any more. They were no longer driving blind, heading north merely because it seemed like a good idea.

They knew where the boy was, where he must be. Now they had a destination, and now Barlowe was beginning to believe in Mother Grace's leadership again.

She was in the seat beside him, slumped against the door, briefly lost in one of those short but mile-deep sleeps that came to her with decreasing frequency. Good. She needed her rest.

The confrontation was coming. The showdown. When they were face to face with the devil, she would need all the energy she could muster.

And if Grace wasn't God's messenger, why had this vital information been conveyed to them? This proved she was right, meant well, told the truth, and should be obeyed.

For the moment his doubts had receded.

Barlowe looked in the rearview mirror. The two vans were still behind him. Crusaders. Crusaders on wheels instead of horseback.

When Charlie heard the strange noises behind him, he dropped into a defensive crouch as he turned. He expected to see Grace Spivey standing in the doorway to the battery room, but the disturbance had no human source. It was a rat.

The filthy thing was between him and the doorway, but he was sure it hadn't come in from the snow because part of what he had heard was the thump it made as it scurried out from under some machinery. It was hissing, squeaking, glaring at him with bloody eyes, as if threatening to prevent his escape.

It was a damned big rat, but in spite of its size, which indicated that it had once been well fed, it didn't look healthy now.

Its pelt wasn't smooth, but oily and matted and dull. There was something dark and crusted at its ears, probably blood, and there was bloody foam dripping from its mouth. It had been the poison. Now, pain-wracked and delirious, it might be a bold and vicious opponent.

And there was another, even less pleasant possibility to consider. Maybe it hadn't been the poison. Maybe the foam at its mouth was an indication of rabies. Could rodents carry rabies just as easily as dogs and cats? Every year in the California mountains, the state's vector control officers turned up a few rabid animals. Sometimes, portions of state parks were even put off limits until it could be ascertained whether there was a rabies epidemic.

This rat was most likely affected by the poison, not rabies.

But if he was wrong, and if the rat bit him.

He wished he had brought the shovel back into the battery room after disposing of the three dead mice. He had no weapon except his revolver, and that was too powerful for this small job, like going hunting for pheasant with a cannon.

He straightened up from his crouch, and his movement agitated the rat.

It came at him.

He jumped back against the wall.

It was coming fast, screeching. If it ran up his legHe kicked, catching it squarely with the reinforced toe of his boot. The kick threw it across the room, and it struck the wall, shrieking, and dropped to the floor on its back.

Charlie reached the door and was through it before the rat got on its feet. He climbed the stairs, picked up the shovel that was leaning against the base of the mill, and went back down.

The rat was just inside the open door to the battery room. It was making a continuous racket, a wailing-hissing-whining noise that Charlie found bone-chilling. It rushed him again.

He swung the shovel like a mallet, struck the rat, again, a third time, until it stopped making noise, then looked at it, saw it quivering, struck it again, harder, and then it was still and silent, obviously dead, and he slowly lowered the shovel, breathing hard.

How could a rat that size have gotten into the closed battery room?

Mice, yes, that was understandable, because mice needed only the smallest chink or crevice to get inside. But this rat was bigger than a dozen mice; it would require a hole at least three or four inches in diameter, and because the ceiling of the small room was of reinforced concrete, the walls of cinder block and mortar, there was no way the beast could have chewed open an entrance.

And the door to the room was metal, inviolable and unviolated.

Could it have been locked in this past autumn, when the last vacationers closed up the place, or when the real estate management firm had come up to "winterize" the cabin? No. It would have eaten the poison bait and would have been dead months ago. It had been poisoned recently; therefore, it had only recently gotten into the battery room.

He circled the chamber, searching for the rat's passage, but all he found were a couple of small chinks in the mortar where a mouse-but never anything larger-might have squirmed through after first gaining access to the air space between the double-thick block walls.

It was a mystery, and as he stood staring at the dead rat, he had the creepy feeling that the brief and violent encounter between him and this disgusting creature was more than it appeared to be, that it meant something, that the rat was a symbol of something. Of course, he had grown up with the terror of rats, which had infested the shack in which he had spent his childhood, so they would always have a powerful effect on him.

And he couldn't help thinking of old horror comics and horror movies in which there'd been scenes in ancient graveyards with rats skulking about. Death. That's what rats usually symbolized.

Death, decay, the revenge of the tomb. So maybe this was an omen. Maybe it was a warning that death-in the form of Grace Spivey-was going to come after them up here on the mountain, a warning to be prepared.

He shook himself. No. He was letting his imagination run away with him. Like in his office, on Monday, when he'd looked at Joey and thought he had seen only a bare skull where the boy's face should have been. That had been imagination-and this, too. He didn't believe in such things as omens. Death wouldn't find them here. Grace Spivey wouldn't discover where they had gone. Couldn't. Not in a thousand years.

Joey was not going to die.

The boy was safe.

They were all safe.

Christine didn't want to leave Joey alone in the cabin while she and Charlie returned to the Jeep for more of their supplies. She knew Grace Spivey wasn't near. She knew the cabin was safe, that nothing would happen in the short time she was gone. Nevertheless, she was terrified that they would find her little boy dead when they got back.

But Charlie couldn't carry everything by himself; it was wrong of her to expect him to do it. And Joey couldn't come along because he would slow them down too much now that the last of the daylight was rapidly fading and the storm was getting dangerously fierce. She had to go, and Joey had to stay. No choice.

She told herself it might even be good for him to be left alone with Chewbacca for a while, for it would be a demonstration of her and Charlie's confidence in the safety of their chosen hiding place. He might regain some self-assurance and hope from the experience.

Yet, after she hugged him, kissed him, reassured him, and left him on the green sofa in front of the fireplace, she almost could not find the strength to turn and leave. When she closed the cabin door and watched as Charlie locked it, she was nearly overcome by fear so strong it made her sick to her stomach.

Moving off the porch, descending the snow-covered steps, she felt an aching weakness in her legs that was almost incapacitating. Each step away from the cabin was like a step taken on a planet with five times the gravity of this world.

The weather had deteriorated dramatically since they had come up the mountain from where they had parked the Jeep, and the extreme hostility of the elements gradually began to occupy her thoughts and push her fear toward the back of her mind. The wind was a steady twenty to thirty miles an hour, gusting to at least fifty at times, racing across the mountain with a banshee shriek, shaking the enormous trees. The snowflakes were no longer large and fluffy, but small, hard-driven by the wind, mounting up on the ground at a startling rate. They had not worn ski masks earlier, on the way up to the cabin, but Charlie had insisted they wear them on the way down. And although she initially objected because the mask felt smothering, she was glad she had it, for the temperature had fallen drastically and now must be around zero or lower, even without taking into account the wind-chill factor. With the protection of the mask, icy needles of wind still managed to prick and numb her face; without it, she would surely have suffered frostbite.

When they reached the station wagon, daylight was fading as if the world was in a pot onto which a giant lid was being lowered. Snow was already drifted around the Jeep's tires, and the lock was half frozen and stubborn when Charlie tried the key in it.

They stuffed their backpacks full of cans and boxes of food, canned matches, ammunition for the guns, and other things.

Charlie strung the three tightly rolled sleeping bags on a length of clothesline and tied one end of the line around his waist so he could drag the bags behind him; they were lightweight, made of a cold-resistant vinyl that would slide well on the snow, and he said he was sure they wouldn't give him much trouble. She carried the rifle, which was equipped with a shoulder strap, and Charlie carried the shotgun. Neither of them could handle a single additional item without buckling under the load, yet there was still more in the station wagon.

"We'll come back for it," Charlie said, shouting to be heard above the roaring wind.

"It's almost dark," she protested, having realized how easily you could become lost at night, in a blinding snowstorm.

" Tomorrow," he said." We'll come back tomorrow."

She nodded, and he locked the Jeep, although the foul weather was surely a sufficient deterrent to thieves. No self-respecting criminal, in the habit of living an easy life off the labors of others, would be out on a night like this.

They headed back toward the cabin, moving with considerably less speed than they had on the way down, slowed by the weight of what they carried, by the wind that hammered at them, and by the fact that they were now climbing instead of descending.

Walking in snowshoes had been surprisingly easy-until now.

As they made their way up the first meadow, the muscles in Christine's thighs began to pull, then those in her calves, and she knew that she would be stiff and sore in the morning.

The wind whipped up the snow that was already on the ground, dressed itself in crystalline cloaks and robes that flapped and swirled, formed whirling funnels that danced through the twilight. In the swiftly dying light, the snow devils seemed like spirits, cold ghosts roaming the lonely reaches of the top of the world.

The hills felt steeper than when she and Charlie had first made this trip with Joey and the dog. Her snowshoes were certainly twice as large as they had been then. and ten times heavier.

Darkness fell when they were in the woods, before they even reached the upper meadow. They were in no danger of getting lost because the snow-covered ground had a vague natural luminosity, and the clear swath of the road provided an unmistakable route through the otherwise densely packed trees.

However, by the time they reached the upper meadow, the storm's fury eliminated the advantage of the snow's slight phosphorescence. New snow was falling so heavily, and the wind was kicking up such thick clouds of old snow that, had there not been lights on at the cabin, they would without doubt have become disoriented and would have been in serious risk of wandering aimlessly, back and forth, around in circles, until they collapsed and died, less than four hundred yards from safety.

The dim, diffuse, amber glow at the cabin windows was a welcome beacon.

On those occasions when the gale-driven snow temporarily blocked that beacon, Christine had to resist panic, stop and wait until she glimpsed her target again, for when she kept on without being able to see the lights, she always headed off in the wrong direction within a few steps.

Although she stayed close to Charlie, she frequently could not see him, either; visibility sometimes declined to no more than two or three feet.

The aching in her leg muscles grew worse, and the throbbing in her shoulders and back became unbearable, and the night's chill somehow found its way through all her layers of clothes, but though she cursed the storm she also welcomed it. For the first time in days, she was beginning to feel safe. This wasn't just a storm; it was a damned blizzard! They were shut off from the world now. Isolated. By morning they would be snowbound.

The storm was the best security they could have. At least for the next day or so, Grace Spivey would not be able to reach them even if, by some miracle, she learned their whereabouts.

When they finally reached the cabin, they found Joey in a better mood than when they'd left. There was color in his face again. He was energetic and talkative for the first time in a couple of days. He even smiled. The change in him was startling and, for a moment, mysterious, but then it became clear that he took the same comfort from the storm as Christine did. He said, "We'll be okay now, huh, Mom? A witch can't fly a broom in a blizzard, can she, huh?"

"Nope," Christine assured him as she took off the backpack she'd been carrying." All the witches are grounded tonight."

" FWA rules," Charlie said.

Joey looked at him quizzically." What's FWA?"

"Federal Witch Administration," Charlie said, pulling off his boots."

That's the government agency that licenses witches."

"You gotta have a license to be a witch?" the boy asked.

Charlie feigned surprise." Oh, sure, whatd you think-just anybody can be a witch? First, when a girl wants to be a witch, she's got to prove she has a mean streak in her. For instance, your mom would never qualify. Then a would-be witch has got to be ugly because witches are always ugly, and if a pretty lady like your mom wants to be a witch she's got to go have plastic surgery to make herself ugly."

" Wow," Joey said softly, wide-eyed." Really?"

"But that's not the worst of it," Charlie said." The hardest thing if you want to be a witch is finding those tall, pointy black hats."

" It is?"

"Well, just think about it once. You've gone shopping with your mom when she was buying clothes. You ever see any of those tall, pointy black hats in any stores you were ever in?"

The boy frowned, thinking about it.

"No, you haven't," Charlie said as he carribd one of the heavy backpacks into the kitchen." Nobody sells those hats because nobody wants witches coming in their stores all the time. Witches smell like the wings of bats and tails of newts and salamander tongue and all those other weird things they're always cooking in their cauldrons. Nothing will chase off a storekeeper's customers faster than a witch who reeks of boiled pig's snout."

"Yuck," Joey said.

"Exactly," Charlie said.

Christine was so happy and relieved to see Joey acting like a six-year-old again that she had trouble holding back tears. She wanted to put her arms around Charlie, squeeze him tight, and thank him for his strength, for his way with children, for just being the man he was.

Outside, the wind howled and huffed and wailed and whistled.

Night hugged the cabin. Snow dressed it.

In the living room fireplace, the big logs sputtered and crackled.

They worked together to make dinner. Afterwards, they sat on the floor in the living room, where they played Old Maid and Tic-Tac-Toe, and Charlie told knock-knock jokes that Joey found highly amusing.

Christine felt snug. Secure.

In South Lake Tahoe, the snowmobile shop was about to close when Grace Spivey, Barlowe, and the eight others arrived. They had come from just down the street, where they had all purchased ski suits and other insulated winter clothing. They had changed into their new gear and now looked as if they belonged in Tahoe. To the surprise and delight of the owner of Mountain Country Sportmobile-a portly man whose name was Orley Treat and who said his friends called him "Skip"-they purchased four Skidoos and two custom-designed flatbed trailers to haul them.

KyIe Barlowe and a churchman named George Westvec did most of the talking because Westvec knew a lot about snowmobiles, and Barlowe had a knack for getting the best price possible on anything he bought. His great size, forbidding appearance, and air of barely controlled violence gave him an advantage in any bargaining session, of course, but his negotiating skills were not limited to intimidation. He had a first-rate businessman's knack of sensing an adversary's strengths, weaknesses, limits, and intentions. This was something he had learned about himself only after Grace had converted him from a life of self-hatred and sociopathic behavior, and it was a discovery that was as gratifying as it was surprising. He was in Mother Grace's everlasting debt not only because she had saved his soul but because she had provided him the opportunity to discover and explore the talents which, without her, he would never have known were there, within himself.

Orley Treat, who was too beefy to have such a boyish nickname as "Skip," kept trying to figure out who they were. He kept asking questions of Grace and Barlowe and the others, such as whether they belonged to a club of some kind or whether they were all related.

Keeping in mind that the police were still interested in talking to Grace about certain recent events in Orange County, worried that one of the disciples would inadvertently say too much to Treat, Barlowe sent everyone but George Westvec to scout the nearby motels along the main road and find one with sufficient vacancies to accommodate them.

When they paid for the snowmobiles with stacks of cash, Treat gaped at their money in disbelief. Barlowe saw greed in the man's eyes, and figured Treat had already thought of a way to doctor his books and hide this cash from the IRS. Even though his curiosity had an almost physically painful grip on him, Treat stopped prying into their business because he was afraid of queering the deal.

The white Ford vans weren't equipped with trailer hitches, but Treat said he could arrange to have the welding done overnight.

"They'll be ready first thing in the morning. say. ten o'clock."

"Earlier," Grace said." Much earlier than that. We want to haul these up to the north shore come first light."

Treat smiled and pointed to the showroom windows, beyond which winddriven snow was falling heavily in the sodium-glow of the parking lot lights." Weatherman's calling for maybe eighteen inches. Stormfront won't pass until four or five o'clock tomorrow morning, so the road crews won't have the highway open around to the north shore until ten, even eleven o'clock.

No point you folks starting out earlier."

Grace said, "If you can't have the hitches on our trucks and the Skidoos ready to go by four-thirty in the morning, the deal's off."

Barlowe knew she was bluffing because this was the only place they could get the machines they needed. But judging from the tortured expression on Treat's face, he took her threat seriously.

Barlowe said, "Listen, Skip, it's only a couple of hours worth of welding. We're willing to pay extra to have it done tonight."

"But I've got to prep the Skidoos and-"

"Then prep them."

"But I was just closing for the day when you-"

"Stay open a couple more hours," Barlowe said." I know it's inconvenient. I appreciate that. I really do. But, Skip, how often do you sell four snowmobiles and two trailers in one clip?"

Treat sighed." Okay, it'll be ready for pickup at four-thirty in the morning. But you'll never get up to the north shore at that hour."

Grace, George Westvec, and Barlowe went outside, where the others were waiting.

Edna Vanoff stepped forward and said, "We've found a motel with enough spare rooms to take us, Mother Grace. It's just a quarter of a mile up the road here. We can walk it easy."

Grace looked up into the early-night sky, squinting as the snow struck her face and frosted her eyebrows. Long tangled strands of wet frizzy gray hair escaped the edges of her knitted hat, which she had pulled down over her ears." Satan brought this storm. He's trying to delay us. Trying to keep us from reaching the boy until it's too late. But God will get us through."

By nine-thirty Joey was asleep. They put him to bed between clean sheets, under a heavy blue and green quilt. Christine wanted to stay in the bedroom with him, even though she wasn't ready for bed, but Charlie wanted to talk to her and plan for certain contingencies.

He said, "You'll be all right by yourself, won't you, Joey?"

"I guess so," the boy said. He looked tiny, elfin, under the huge quilt and with his head propped on an enormous feather pillow.

"I don't want to leave him alone," Christine said.

Charlie said, "No one can get him here unless they come up from downstairs, and we'll be downstairs to stop them."

"The window-"

"It's a second-story window. They'd have to put a ladder up against the house to reach it, and I doubt they'd be carrying a ladder."

She frowned at the window, undecided.

Charlie said, "We're socked in here, Christine. Listen to that wind.

Even if they knew we were in these mountains, even if they knew about this particular cabin-which they don't-they wouldn't be able to make it up here tonight."

"I'll be okay, Mom," Joey said." I got Chewbacca. And like Charlie said, it's against FWA rules for witches to fly in a storm."

She sighed, tucked the covers in around her son, and kissed him goodnight. Joey wanted to give Charlie a goodnight kiss, too, which was a new experience for Charlie, and as he felt the boy's lips smack his cheek, a flood of emotions washed through him: a poignant sense of the child's profound vulnerability; a fierce desire to protect him; an awareness of the purity of the kid's affection; a heart-wrenching impression of innocence and sweet simplicity; a touching and yet quite frightening realization of the complete trust the boy had in him. The moment was so warm, so disarming and satisfying, that Charlie couldn't understand how he could have come to be thirty-six without having started a family of his own.

Maybe it had been his destiny to be here, waiting for Christine and Joey, when they needed him. If he'd had his own family, he wouldn't have been able to go to the wall for the Scavellos as he had done; these recent deeds, all beyond the call of duty, would have fallen to one of his men-who might not have been as clever or as committed as Charlie was. When Christine had walked into his office, he had been rocked by her beauty and by a feeling that they were meant to meet, one way or another, that they would have found each other in a different fashion if Grace Spivey hadn't acted to bring them together now. Their relationship seemed… inevitable. And now it seemed equally inevitable and right that he should be Joey's protector, that he should one day soon become the child's legal father, that each night he should hear this small boy say, "Goodnight, Daddy," instead of "Goodnight, Charlie."

Destiny.

That was a word and a concept to which he had never given much thought.

If anyone had asked him last week if he believed in destiny, he would probably have said he did not. Now, it seemed a simple, natural, and undeniable truth that all men and women had a destiny to fulfill and that his lay with this woman and this child.

They closed the heavy draperies at the bedroom window, and left a lamp on with a towel draped over the shade to soften the light. Joey fell asleep while they were arranging the towel.

Chewbacca had curled up on the bed, too. Christine quietly motioned for the dog to get down, but it just stared mournfully at her. Charlie whispered that Chewbacca could stay where he was, and finally he and Christine retreated from the room with exaggerated stealth, leaving the door ajar an inch or two.

As they went downstairs she looked back a couple of times, as if having second thoughts about leaving the boy alone, but Charlie held her arm and steered her firmly to the table. They sat and had coffee and talked, while the wind moaned in the caves and grainy snow tapped at the windows or hissed along the glass.

Charlie said, "Now, once this storm is past and the roads are open farther down the mountain, I'll want to go into the market to use the pay phone, call Henry Rankin, see what's up. I'll be going in every two days, at least, maybe even every day, and when I'm gone I think you and Joey ought to hole up in the battery room, under the windmill. It-"

"No," she said quickly." If you go down the mountain, we go with you."

"It'll get tiring if it has to be done every day."

"I can handle it."

"But maybe Joey can't."

"We won't stay here alone," she said adamantly.

"But with the police looking for us, we'll be more noticeable as a group, more easily-"

"We go with you everywhere," she said." Please. Please."

He nodded." All right."

He got a map that he had purchased at the sporting goods store in Sacramento, spread it out on the table, and showed her their back door escape route, which they would use if, against all odds, Spivey's people showed up, and if there was enough time to escape. They would go farther up the mountain, to the top of the next ridge, turn east into the valley that lay that way, find the stream at the bottom of the valley, and follow it south toward the lake. It was a journey of four or five miles-which would seem like a hundred in the snow-blanketed wilderness.

But there would be good landmarks all the way and little chance of getting lost as long as they had the map and a compass.

Gradually, their conversation drifted away from Grace Spivey, and they talked about themselves, exploring each other's past, likes and dislikes, hopes and dreams, getting a better fix on each other than they'd had an opportunity to do thus far. In time they moved away from the table, switched off all the lights, and sat on the big sofa in front of the stone hearth, with nothing but the softly flickering firelight to hold back the shadows. Their conversation became more intimate, and more was said with fewer words, and finally even their silences conveyed a richness of information.

Charlie couldn't remember the first kiss; he just suddenly realized that they had been touching and kissing with increasing ardor for some time, and then his hand was on her breast, and he could feel her erect nipple through her blouse, hot upon the center of his palm. Her tongue moved within his mouth, and it was very hot, too, and her lips were scaring, and when he touched her face with his fingertips the contact was so electrifying that it seemed as if sparks and smoke should issue from it. He had never wanted or needed a woman a fraction as much as he did Christine, and judging from the way her body arched against him and the way her muscles tensed, she wanted and needed him with a passion equal to his own. He knew that, in spite of their circumstances, in spite of the less than ideal trusting place that fate had provided, they would make love tonight; it was inevitable.

Her blouse was unbuttoned now. He lowered his mouth to her breasts.

"Charlie. " she said softly.

He licked her swollen nipples, first one, then the other, lovingly.

"No," she said, but she did not push him away with any conviction, only halfheartedly, wanting to be convinced.

"I love you," he said, meaning it. In just a few days, he had fallen in love with her exquisitely composed face, with her body, with her complex mind and wit, with her courage in the face of adversity, with her indomitable spirit, with the way she walked, with the way her hair looked in the wind…

"Joey. " she said.

"He's sleeping."

"He might wake up.

Charlie kissed her throat, felt the throbbing of her pulse against his lips. Her heart was beating fast. So was his.

"He might come out to the gallery… look down and see us," she said.

He led her away from the firelight, to a long, deep sofa that was under the gallery overhang, out of sight. The shadows were deep and purple.

"We shouldn't," she said, but she kept kissing his neck, his chin, lips, cheeks, and eyes." Even here… if he wakes up. "

"He'll call to us first," Charlie said, breathless, aching with need."

He won't just come down into a dark living room."

She kissed his nose, each corner of his mouth, planted a chain of kisses along his jaw line, kissed his ear.

His hands moved over her body, and he thrilled to the perfect form and texture of her. Each sweet concavity and convexity, each enticing angle, the swell of breasts and hips, the taut flatness of belly, the ripeness of buttocks, the sleek roundness of thigh and calf-all of her seemed, to the millimeter, a precise definition of ideal femininity.

"All right," she said weakly." But silently.

"Not a sound," he promised.

"Not a sound."

"Not one small sound.

The wind moaned at the window above the sofa, but he gave voice to his own intense pleasure only in his mind.

It's the wrong moment, she thought hazily. The wrong place.

The wrong time. The wrong everything.

Joey. Might. Wake up.

But although it should matter, it didn't seem to, not much, not enough for her to resist.

He had said he loved her, and she had said she loved him, and she knew they had both meant it, that it was true, real. She didn't know for sure how long she had loved him, but if she thought about it hard enough she would probably be able to fix the precise moment in which respect and admiration and affection had been transformed into something better and more powerful. After all, she had known him only a few days; the moment of love's birth should not be difficult to pin down in that brief span of time. Of course, at the moment, she couldn't think hard about anything, or clearly; she was swept away, though such a condition was out of character for her.

In spite of their protestations of love, it wasn't merely love that induced her to cast caution aside and take the risk of being overheard in the midst of their passion: it was good, healthy lust, too. She had never wanted a man as much as she wanted Charlie. Suddenly she had to have him within her, couldn't breathe until he took her. His body was lean, the muscles hard and well defined; his sculpted shoulders, his rocklike biceps, smooth broad chest-everything about him excited her to an extent that she had never been excited before. Every nerve in her body was many times more sensitive than before; each kiss and touch, each stroke he took within her, was so explosively pleasurab'ie that it bordered on pain, astonishing pleasure, pleasure that filled her and drove out everything else, every other thought, until she clung mindlessly to him, amazed at the abandon with which she embraced him, unable to understand or resist the primitive rutting fever that possessed her.

The need to be quiet, the oath of silence, had a strangely powerful erotic effect. Even when Charlie climaxed, he did not cry out, but gripped her hips and held her against him and arched his back and opened his mouth but remained mute, and somehow, by containing the cry he also contained his energy and virility, for he didn't lose his erection, not even for a moment, and they paused only to change positions, remaining welded together, but sliding around on the sofa until she was on top, and then she rode him with a pneumatic fluidity and a sinuous rhythm that was unlike anything he had ever known before, and he lost track of time and place, lost himself in the soft, silken, silent song of flesh and motion.

She had never in her life been so lacking in self-consciousness while making love. For long moments she forgot where she was, even who she was; she became an animal, a mindlessly copulating organism intent on taking pleasure, oblivious of all else. Only once was the hypnotic rhythm of their lovemaking interrupted, and that was when she was suddenly stricken by the feeling that Joey had come downstairs and was standing in the shadows, watching them, but when she lifted her head from Charlie's chest and looked around, she saw nothing but the shadowy forms of the furniture, backlit by the dying fire, and she knew she was only imagining things. Then love-lust-sex seized her again with a power that was startling and even scary, and she gave herself to the act, was unable to do anything else, was lost, utterly.

Before they were done, Charlie had been shaken by three orgasms, and he had lost count of the number of times she had climaxed, but he didn't need a scorecard to know that neither of them had ever experienced anything like this in the past. When it was over, he was still trembling, and he felt drugged. They lay for a time, neither speaking, until they gradually became aware of the wind howling outside and realized that the dying fire had allowed a chill to creep back into the room. Then, reluctantly, they dressed and went upstairs, where they prepared the second bedroom for her.

"I should sleep with Joey and let you have this bed," she said.

"No. You'll only wake him if you go in there now. The poor kid needs his rest."

"But where will you sleep?" she asked.

"In the gallery."

"On the floor?"

"I'll put a sleeping bag at the head of the stairs."

For a moment anxiety replaced the dreaminess in her eyes." I thought you said there was no way they could get here tonight even if-"

He put a finger to her lips." There isn't any way. No way at all. But it wouldn't do for Joey to find me sleeping in your bed in the morning, would it? And most of the sofas downstairs are too soft for sleeping.

So if I'm going to use a sleeping bag, I might as well put it at the head of the stairs."

"And keep a gun at your side?"

"Of course. Even though I won't need it. I really won't, you know. So let's get you tucked in."

When she was under the covers, he kissed her goodnight and backed out of the room, leaving her door ajar.

In the gallery, he looked at his watch and was startled to see how late it was. Could they have been making love for almost two hours?

No. Surely not. There had been something frighteningly, deliciously animalistic about their coupling; they had indulged with an abandon and an intensity that stole the meaning from time, but he had never thought of himself as a rampaging stud, and he could not believe that he had performed so insatiably for so long. Yet his watch had never run fast before; surely it couldn't have gained an extra hour or more in just the past thirty minutes.

He realized he was standing there, alone, outside her bedroom door, grinning like the Cheshire cat, full of self-satisfaction.

He built up the fire downstairs, carried a sleeping bag to the gallery and unrolled it, switched off the landing light, and slipped into the bedroll. He listened to the storm raging outside, but not for long.

Sleep came like a great dark tide.

In the dream, he was tucking Joey into bed, straightening the covers, fluffing the boy's pillow, and Joey wanted to give him a goodnight kiss, and Charlie leaned over, but the boy's lips were hard and cold on his cheek, and when he looked down he saw the boy no longer had a face but just a bare skull with two staring eyes that seemed horribly out of place in that otherwise calcimined countenance.

Charlie hadn't felt lips against his cheek but a fleshless mouth, cold teeth. He recoiled in terror. Joey threw back the covers and sat up in bed. He was a normal little boy in every respect except for having only a skull instead of a complete head. The skull's protuberant eyes fixed on Charlie, and the boy's small hands began unbuttoning his Space Raiders pajamas, and when his shallow little chest was revealed it began to split open, and Charlie tried to turn and run but couldn't, couldn't close his eyes either, couldn't look away, could only watch as the child's chest cracked apart and from it streamed a horde of red-eyed rats like the one in the battery room, ten and then a hundred and then a thousand rats, until the boy had emptied himself and had collapsed into a pile of skin, like a deflated balloon, and then the rats surged forward toward Charlie — and he woke, sweating, gasping, a scream frozen in his throat. Something was holding him down, constraining his arms and legs, and for a moment he thought it was rats, that they had followed him out of the dream, and he thrashed in panic until he realized he was in a zippered sleeping bag. He found the zipper, pulled the bag open, freed himself, and crawled until he came to a wall in the darkness, sat with his back to it, listening to his thunderous heartbeat, waiting for it to subside.

When at last he had control of himself, he went into Joey's room, just to reassure himself. The boy was sleeping peacefully.

Chewbacca raised his furry head and yawned.

Charlie looked at his watch, saw that he had slept about four hours.

Dawn was nearing.

He returned to the gallery.

He couldn't stop shaking.

He went downstairs and made some coffee.

He tried not to think about the dream, but he couldn't help it. He had never before had such a vivid nightmare, and the shattering power of it led him to believe that it had been less a dream than a clairvoyant experience, a foreshadowing of events to come. Not that rats were going to burst out of Joey. Of course not. The dream had been symbolic. But what it meant was that Joey was going to die. Not wanting to believe it, devastated by the very idea that he would fail to protect the boy, he was nevertheless unable to dismiss it as only a dream; he knew; he felt it in his bones: Joey was going to die. Maybe they were all going to die.

And now he understood why he and Christine had made love with such intensity, with such abandon and fiercely animalistic need. Deep down, they both had known that time was running out, subconsciously, they had felt death approaching, and they had tried to deny it in that most ancient and fundamental of life-affirming rituals, the ceremony of flesh, the dance done lying down.

He got up from the table, left his half-finished coffee, and went to the front door. He wiped at the frosted glass until he could look out at the snow-covered porch. He couldn't see much of anything, just a few whirling flakes and darkness. The worst of the storm had passed. And Spivey was out there. Somewhere.

That's what the dream had meant.

By dawn the storm had passed.

Christine and Joey were up early. The boy was not as ebullient as he had been last night. In fact he was sinking back into gloom and perhaps despair, but he helped his mother and Charlie make breakfast, and he ate well.

After breakfast, Charlie suited up and went outside, alone, to sight-in the rifle that he had purchased yesterday in Sacramento.

More than a foot of new snow had fallen during the night.

The drifts that sloped against the cabin were considerably higher than they had been yesterday, and a couple of first-floor windows were drifted over. The boughs of the evergreens dropped lower under the weight of the new snow, and the world was so silent it seemed like a vast graveyard.

The day was cold, gray, bleak. At the moment no wind blew.

He had fashioned a target out of a square of cardboard and two lengths of twine. He tied the target around the trunk of a Douglas Fir that stood a few yards downhill from the windmill, then backed off twenty-five yards and stretched out on his belly in the snow. Using one of the rolled-up sleeping bags as a makeshift bench rest, he aimed for the center of the target and fired three rounds, pausing between each to make sure the cross hairs were still lined up on the bull's-eye.

The Winchester Model 100 was fitted with a 3-power telescope sight which brought the target right up to him. He was firing 180 grain soft-point bullets, and he saw each of them hit home.

The shots cracked the morning stillness all across the mountain and echoed back from distant valleys.

He got up, went to the target, and measured the point of average impact, which was the center point of the three hits. Then he measured the distance from the point of impact to the point of aim (which was the bull's-eye where he had lined up the cross hairs), and that figure told him how much adjustment the scope required.

The rifle was pulling low and to the right. He corrected the elevation dial first, then the windage dial, then sprawled in the snow again and fired another group of three. This time he was gratified to see that every shot found the center of the target.

Because a bullet does not travel in a straight line but in a curving trajectory, it twice crosses the line of sight-once as it is rising and once as it is falling. With the rifle and ammunition he was using, Charlie could figure that any round he fired would first cross the line of sight at about twenty-five yards, then rise until it was about two and a half inches high of the mark at one hundred yards, then fall and cross the line of sight a second time at about two hundred yards.

Therefore, the Winchester was now sighted-in for two hundred yards.

He didn't want to have to kill anyone.

He hoped killing wouldn't be necessary.

But now he was ready.

Christine and Charlie put on their snowshoes and backpacks and went down the mountain to the lower meadow to finish unloading the Jeep.

Charlie was carrying the rifle, slung over one shoulder.

She said, "You're not expecting trouble?"

"No. But what's the use of having the gun if I don't always keep it close by?"

She felt better about leaving Joey alone this morning than she had last night, but she still wasn't happy about it. His high spirits had been short-lived. He was withdrawing again, retreating into his own inner world, and this change was even more frightening than it had been the last time it happened because, after his recovery yesterday evening, she had thought he was permanently back with them. If he withdrew into silence and despair again, perhaps he would slip even deeper than before, and perhaps this time he would not come out again. It was possible for a once perfectly normal, outgoing child to become autistic, cutting off most or all interaction with the real world. She'd read about such cases, but she'd never worried about it as much as she worried about diseases and accidents because Joey had always been such an open, joyous, communicative child. Autism had been something that could happen to other people's children, never to her extroverted little boy. But now. This morning he spoke little.

He didn't smile at all. She wanted to stay with him every minute, hug him a lot, but she remembered that being left alone for a while last evening had convinced him that the witch must not be near, after all.

Being left to his own resources this morning might have that same salutary effect again.

Christine didn't glance back as she and Charlie headed downhill, away from the cabin. If Joey was watching from a window, he might interpret a look back as an indication that she was afraid for him, and her own fear would then feed his.

Her breath took frosty form and wreathed her head. The air was bitterly cold, but because there was no wind, they didn't need to wear ski masks.

As first she and Charlie didn't speak, just walked, finding their way through the new soft snow, sinking in now and then in spite of the showshoes, searching for a firmer crust, squinting because the glare of the snow was fatiguing to the eyes even under a sunless sky like this one. However, as they reached the woods at the base of the meadow, Charlie said, "Uh. about last night-"

"Me first," she said quickly, speaking softly because the air was so still that a whisper carried as well as a shout." I've been sort of.

well, a little embarrassed all morning."

"About what happened last night?"

"Yes."

"You're sorry it happened?"

"No, no."

"Good. Because I'm sure not sorry."

She said, "I just want you to know… that the way I was last night…

so eager… so aggressive… so.

"Passionate?"

"It was more than passion, wouldn't you say?"

"I'd say."

"My God, I was like… an animal or something. I couldn't get enough of you."

"It was great for my ego," he said, grinning.

"I didn't know your ego was deflated."

"Wasn't. But I never thought of myself as God's gift to women, either

" "But after last night you do, huh?"

"Absolutely."

TWenty yards into the woods, they stopped and looked at each other and kissed gently.

She said, "I just want you to understand that I've never been like that before."

He feigned surprise and disappointment." You mean you're not sex crazy?"

"Only with you."

"That's because I'm God's gift to women, I guess."

She didn't smile." Charlie, this is important to me-that you understand. Last night. I don't know what got into me."

" I got into you."

"Be serious. Please. I don't want you to think I've been like that with other men. I haven't. Not ever. I did things with you last night that I've never done before. I didn't even know I could do them. I was really like a wild animal. I mean. I'm no prude but-"

"Listen," he said, "if you were an animal last night, then I was a beast. It's not like me to completely surrender control of myself like that, and it certainly isn't like me to be that.

well, demanding. rough. But I'm not embarrassed by the way I was, and you shouldn't be, either. We've got something special, something unique, and that's why we both felt able to let go the way we did. At times it was maybe crude-but it was also pretty terrific, wasn't it?"

"God, yes."

They kissed again, but it was a brief kiss interrupted by a distant growling-buzzing.

Charlie cocked his head, listening.

The sound grew louder.

"Plane?" she said, looking up at the narrow band of sky above the tree-flanked lane.

"Snowmobiles," Charlie said." There was a time when the mountains were always quiet, serene. Not any more. Those damned snowmobiles are everywhere, like fleas on a cat."

The roar of engines grew louder.

"They wouldn't come up this far?" she asked worriedly.

G'Might."

"Sounds like they're almost on top of us."

"Probably still pretty far off. Sound is deceptive up here; it carries a long way."

" But if we do run into some snowmobilers — "

"We'll say we're renting the cabin. My name's. Bob. mmm. Henderson. You're Jane Henderson. We live in Seattle. Up here to do some cross-country skiing and just get away from it all. Got it?"

"Got it," she said.

"Don't mention Joey."

She nodded.

They started downhill again.

The sound of snowmobile engines grew louder, louder-and then cut out one at a time, until there was once again only the deep enveloping silence of the mountains and the soft crunch and squeak of snowshoes in the snow.

When they reached the next break in the tree line, at the top of the lower meadow, they saw four snowmobiles and eight or ten people gathered around the Jeep, almost three hundred yards below. They were too far away for Christine to see what they looked like, or even whether they were men or women; they were just small, dark figures against the dazzling whiteness of the snowfield. The station wagon was half buried in drifted snow, but the strangers were busily cleaning it off, trying the doors.

Christine heard faint voices but couldn't understand the words.

The sound of breaking glass clinked through the crisp cold air, and she realized these were not ordinary snowmobile enthusiasts.

Charlie pulled her backward, into the darkness beneath the trees, off to the left of the trail, and both of them nearly fell because snowshoes were not designed for dodging and running. They stood under a gigantic hemlock. Its spreading branches began about seven feet above the ground, casting shadows and shedding needles on the thin skin of snow that covered the earth beneath it. Charlie leaned against the enormous trunk of the tree and peered around it, past a couple of other hemlocks, between a few knobcone pines, toward the meadow and the Jeep. He unsnapped the binocular case that was clipped to his belt, took out the binoculars.

"Who are they?" Christine asked as she watched Charlie focus the glasses. Certain that she already knew the answer to Lier question but not wanting to believe it, not having the strength to believe it." Not just a group of people who like winter sports, that's for sure. They wouldn't go around busting the windows out of abandoned vehicles."

"Maybe it's a bunch of kids," he said, still focusing." Just out looking for a little trouble."

"Nobody goes out in deep snow, comes this far up a mountain, just looking for trouble," she said.

Charlie took two steps away from the hemlock, held the binoculars with both hands, peering downhill. At last he said, "I recognize one of them. The big guy who came into her office at the rectory, just as Henry and I were leaving. She called him Kyle."

"Oh Jesus."

The mountain wasn't a haven, after all, but a dead end. A trap.

Suddenly the loneliness of the snow-blasted slopes and forests made their retreat to the cabin appear short-sighted, foolish. It seemed like such a good idea to get away from people, where they would not be spotted, but they had also removed themselves from all chance of help, from everyone who might have come to their assistance if they were attacked. Here, in these cold high places, they could be slaughtered and buried, and no one but their murderers would ever know what had happened to them.

"Do you see. her?" Christine asked.

"Spivey? I think. yeah. the only one still sitting in a snowmobile. I'm sure that's her."

:'But how could they find us?"

'Somebody who knew I was part owner of the cabin. Somebody remembered it and told Spivey's people."

"Henry Rankin?"

:'Maybe. Very few people know about this place."

'But still… so quickly!"

Charlie said, "Six… seven… nine of them. No. Ten. Ten of them."

We're going to die, she thought. And for the first time since leaving the convent, since losing her religion, she wished that she had not turned entirely away from the Church. Suddenly, by comparison with the insanity of Spivey's cult beliefs, the ancient and compassionate doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church were immeasurably appealing and comforting, and she wished she could turn to them now without feeling like a hypocrite, wished she could beg God for help and ask the Blessed Virgin for her divine intercession. But you couldn't just reject the Church, put it entirely out of your life-then go running back when you needed it, and expect to be embraced without first making penance. God required your faith in the good times as well as the bad. If she died at the hands of Spivey's fanatics, she would do so without making a final confession to a priest, without the last rites or a proper burial in consecrated ground, and she was surprised that those things mattered to her and seemed important after all these years during which she had discounted their value.

Charlie put the binoculars back into the case, snapped it shut.

He unslung the rifle from his shoulder.

He said, "You head back to the cabin. Fast as you can. Stay in the trees until you reach the bend in the trail. After that they can't see you from the lower meadow. Get Joey suited up. Pack some food in your knapsack. Do whatever you can to get ready.

"You're staying here? Why?"

"To kill a few of them," he said.

He unzipped one of the pockets in his insulated jacket. It was filled with loose cartridges. When he exhausted the rounds already in the rifle, he would be able to reload quickly.

She hesitated, afraid to leave him.

"Go!" he said." Hurry! We haven't much time."

Heart racing, she nodded, turned, and made her way through the trees, heading upslope, shuffling as fast as the snowshoes would allow, which wasn't nearly fast enough, repeatedly raising her arms to push branches out of her way. She was thankful that the huge trees blocked the sun and prevented much undergrowth because it would have tangled in the snowshoes and snagged her ski suit and held her back.

Successful rifle shooting requires two things: the steadiest possible position for the gunman, and the letting-off of the trigger at exactly the right time and with the easiest possible pull. Very few riflemen-hunters, military men, whatever-are any good at all. Too many of them try to shoot off-hand when a better position is available, or they exert all the pull on the trigger in one swift movement that throws their aim entirely off.

A rifleman shoots best from a prone position, especially when he is aiming down a slope or into a basin. After taking off his snowshoes, Charlie moved to the perimeter of the forest, to the very edge of the meadow, and dropped to the ground. The snow was only about two inches deep here, for the wind came across the meadow from the west and scoured the land, pushing most of the snow eastward, packing it in drifts along that flank of the woods.

The slope was steep at this point, and he was looking down at the people below, where they were still milling around the Jeep station wagon. He raised the rifle, resting it on the heel of the palm of his left hand; his left arm was bent, and the left elbow was directly under the rifle.

In this position the rifle wouldn't wobble, for it was well supported by the bones of the foreamn, which served as a pillar between the ground and the weapon.

He aimed at the dark figure in the lead snowmobile, though there were better targets, for he was almost certain it was Grace Spivey. Her head was above the vehicle's windscreen, which was one less thing to worry about: no chance of the shot being deflected by the Plexiglas. If he could take her out, the others might lose their sense of commitment and come apart psychologically. It ought to be devastating for a fanatic to see his little tin God die right in front of his eyes.

His gloved finger was curled around the trigger, but he didn't like the feel, couldn't get the right sense of it, so he stripped the glove off with his teeth, put his bare finger on the trigger, and that was a great deal better. He had the cross hairs lined up on the center of Grace Spivey's forehead because, at this distance, the bullet would fall past the sight line by the time it hit its target and would come in about an inch lower. With luck-right between her eyes. Without luck but with skill, it would still take her in the face or throat.

In spite of the sub-zero air, he was perspiring. Inside his ski suit, sweat trickled down from his armpits.

Could you call this self-defense? None of them had a gun on him at the moment. He wasn't in imminent danger of his life.

Of course, if he didn't eliminate a few of them before they got closer, they would overwhelm him. Yet he hesitated. He had never before done anything this. cold blooded. A small inner voice told him that, if he resorted to an ambush of this sort, he would be no better than the monsters against which he found himself pitted. But if he didn't resort to it, he would eventually die-as would Christine and Joey.

The cross hairs were on Spivey's forehead.

Charlie squeezed the trigger but didn't take up all the pull in one tug because the initial pressure would throw the rifle off target just a little, so he kept the trigger mostly depressed, on the wire-edge of firing, until he brought the cross hairs back onto target, and then, almost as an after-thought but with a clean quick squeeze, he took up the last few ounces of pull. The rifle fired, and he flinched but not in anticipation of the blast, only in delayed reaction to it, by which time it was too late for the bullet to be deflected, for it was already out of the barrel. An anticipatory flinch was what you had to avoid, and the two-stage pull always fooled the subconscious a little, just enough that the muzzle blast was a slight surprise.

There was another surprise, a bad one, when he thought he saw Spivey lean forward in the snowmobile, reaching for something, lowering her profile, just as he let off the shot. Now, lining up the scope again, he couldn't see her, which meant either that he had hit her and that she had collapsed below the windscreen of the snowmobile-or that she had, indeed, bent down at the penultimate moment, saved by fate, and was now crouching out of the line of fire.

He immediately brought the rifle around on one of the others.

A man standing by the Jeep. Just turning this way in reaction to the shot. Not gifted with split-second reactions, confused, not fully aware of the danger.

Charlie fired. This time he was rewarded by the sight of his target pitching back, sprawling in the snow, dead or mortally wounded.

Moving at the edge of the woods, Christine had reached the bend in the open land and, out of sight of those below, had moved out onto the easier ground, when she heard a shot and then, a second or two later, another. She wanted to go back to Charlie, wanted to be there helping him, knew she couldn't do a damn thing for him. She didn't even have time to look back. Instead she doubled her efforts, huffing out a fog of breath, trying to walk lightly on the snow, breaking through the crust because of her haste, searching frantically for wind-scoured stretches of ground where she could make better time.

But what if something happened to Charlie? What if he was never able to rejoin her and Joey?

She wasn't an outdoors type. She wouldn't know how to survive in these wintry wastes. If they had to leave the cabin without Charlie, they'd get lost in the wilderness, either starve or freeze to death.

Then, as if nature was intent on honing Christine's fear to a razor's edge, as if in mocking glee, snow flurries began to fall again.

When the first man was hit and went down, most of the others dived for cover alongside the Jeep wagon, but two men started toward the snowmobiles, making perfect targets of themselves, and Charlie lined up on one of them. This shot, too, was well placed, taking the man high in the chest, pitching him completely over one of the snowmobiles, and when he went down in a drift he stayed there, unmoving.

The other- nan dropped, making a hard target of himself.

Charlie fired anyway. He couldn't tell if he had scored this time because his prey was now hidden by a mound of snow.

He reloaded.

He wondered if any of them were hunters or ex-military men with enough sawy to have pinpointed his position. He considered moving along the tree line, finding another good vantage point, and he knew the shadows under the trees would probably cover his movement. But he had a hunch that most of them were not experienced in this sort of thing, were not cut out for guerrilla warfare, so he stayed where he was, waiting for one of them to make a mistake.

He didn't have to wait long. One of those who had taken shelter by the Jeep proved too curious for his own good. When half a minute had passed with no gunfire, the Trose slightly to look around, still in a half-crouch, ready to drop, probably figuring that a half-crouch made him an impossible target when, in fact, he was giving Charlie plenty at which to aim. Most likely, he also figured he could fall flat and hug the ground again at the slightest sound, but he was hit and dead before the sound of the shot could have reached him.

Three down. Seven left. Six-if he had also killed Spivey.

For the first time in his life, Charlie Harrison was glad that he had served in Vietnam. Fifteen years had passed, but battlefield cunning had not entirely deserted him. He felt the hearttwisting terror of both the hunter and the hunted, the battle stress that was like no other kind of stress, but he still knew how to use that tension, how to take advantage of that stress to keep himself alert and sharp.

The others remained very still, burrowing into the snow, hugging the Jeep and the snowmobiles. Charlie could hear them shouting to one another, but none of them dared move again.

He knew they would remain pinned down for five or ten minutes, and maybe he should get up now, head back to the cabin, use that lead time. But there was a chance that if he outwaited them he would get another clear shot the next time they regained a little confidence. For the moment, anyway, there was no danger of losing any advantage by staying put, so he remained at the perimeter of the woods. He reloaded again. He stared down at them, exhilarated by his marksmanship but wishing he wasn't so proud of it, savagely delighted that he had brought down three of them but also ashamed of that delight.

The sky looked hard, metallic. Light snow flurries were falling.

No wind yet. Good. Wind would interfere with his shooting.

Below, Spivey's people had stopped talking. Preternatural silence returned to the mountain.

Time ticked by.

They were scared of him down there.

He dared to hope.

At the cabin, Christine found Joey standing in the living room. His face was ashen. He had heard the shooting. He knew." It's her."

"Honey, get your ski suit on, your boots. We're going out soon."

"Isn't it?" he said softly.

"We've got to be ready to leave as soon as Charlie comes."

"Isn't it her? "

"Yes," Christine said. Tears welled up in the boy's eyes, and she held him." It'll be okay. Charlie will take care of us."

She was looking into his eyes, but he was not looking into hers. He was looking through her, into a world other than this one, a place of his own, and the emptiness in his eyes sent a chill up her spine.

She had hoped that he could dress himself while she stuffed things into her backpack, but he was on the verge of catatonia, just standing there, face slack, arms slack. She grabbed his ski suit and dressed him, pulling it on over the sweater and jeans he already wore. She pulled two pair of thick socks onto his small feet, put his boots on for him, laced them up. She put his gloves and ski mask on the floor by the door, so she wouldn't forget them when it was time to leave.

As she went into the kitchen and began choosing food and other items for the backpack, Joey came with her, stood beside her. Abruptly he shook off his trance, and his face contorted with fear, and he said, "Brandy? Where's Brandy?"

"You mean Chewbacca, honey."

"Brandy. I mean Brandy!"

Shocked, Christine stopped packing, stooped beside him, put a hand to his face." Honey… don't do this… don't worry your mommy like this. You remember. I know you do. You remember… Brandy's dead."

"No." "The witch-"

"No! "

"— killed him."

He shook his head violently." No. No! Brandy!" He called desperately for his dead dog." Brandy! Braaannndeeeee!"

She held him. He struggled." Honey, please, please. "

At that moment Chewbacca padded into the kitchen to see what all the commotion was about, and the boy wrenched free of Christine, seized the dog joyfully, hugged the furry head.

"Brandy! See? It's Brandy. He's still here. You lied. Brandy's not hurt. Brandy's okay. Nothin' wrong with good old Brandy."

For a moment Christine couldn't breathe or move because pain immobilized her, not physical pain but emotional pain, deep and bitter. Joey was slipping away. She thought he had accepted Brandy's death, that all of this had been settled when she'd forced him to name the dog Chewbacca instead of Brandy Two. But now. When she spoke his name, he didn't respond or look at her, just murmured and cooed to the dog, stroked it, hugged it.

She shouted his name; still he didn't respond.

She should never have let him keep this look-alike. She should have made him take it back to the pound, should have made him choose another mutt, anything but a golden retriever.

Or maybe not. Maybe there was nothing she could have done to save his sanity. No six-year-old could be expected to hold himself together when his whole world was crumbling around him. Many adults would have cracked sooner. Although she had tried to pretend otherwise, the boy's emotional and mental problems had been inevitable.

A good psychiatrist would be able to help him. That's what she told herself. His retreat from reality wasn't permanent. She had to believe that was true. She had to believe. Or there was no point in going on from here.

She lived for Joey. He was her world, her meaning. Without him…

The worst thing was that she didn't have time to hold and cuddle and talk to him now, which was something he desperately needed and something she needed, as well. But Spivey was coming, and time was running out, so she had to ignore Joey, turn away from him when he needed her most, get control of herself, and ram things into the backpack. Her hands shook, and tears streamed down her face. She had never felt worse. Now, even if Charlie saved Joey's life, she might still lose her boy and be left with only the living but empty shell of him. But she kept on working, yanking open cupboard doors, looking for things they would need when they went into the woods.

She was filled with the blackest hatred for Spivey and the Church of the Twilight. She didn't just want to kill them. She wanted to torture them first. She wanted to make the old bitch scream and beg for mercy; the disgusting, filthy, rotten, crazy old bitch!

Softly, cooingly, Joey said, "Brandy. Brandy. Brandy," and stroked Chewbacca.

Seven minutes passed before any of Spivey's people dared rise up to test whether Charlie was still sighting down on them.

He was, and he opened fire. But though this was the opportunity he had been waiting for, he was sloppy, too tense and too eager. He jerked the trigger instead of squeezing it, threw the sights off target, and missed.

Instantly, there was return fire. He had figured they were armed, but he hadn't been absolutely sure until now. Two rifles opened up, and the fire was directed toward the upper end of the meadow. But the first rounds entered the woods fifty yards to the left of him; he heard them cracking through the trees. The next shots hit closer, maybe thirty-five yards away, still to his left, but the gunmen kept shooting, and the shots grew closer. They knew in general-though not precisely-where he was, and they were trying to elicit a reaction that would pinpoint his location.

As the shots came closer, he put his head down, pressed into the thinning shadows at the edge of the forest. He heard bullets slamming through the branches directly overhead. Scraps of bark, a spray of needles, and a couple pine cones rained down around him, and a few bits and pieces even fell on his back, but if the riflemen below were also hoping for a lucky hit, they would be disappointed. The fire slowly moved off to his right, which indicated they knew only that the shots had come from above and did not know for sure which corner of the meadow harbored their assailant.

Charlie raised his head, lifted the rifle again, brought his eye to the scope-and discovered, with a start, that their shooting had another purpose, too. It was meant to cover two Twilighters who were running pell-mell for the forest at the east end of the meadow.

"Shit! " he said, quickly trying to line up a shot on one of the two.

But they were moving fast, in spite of the drifting snow, kicking up clouds of crystalline flakes. Just as he got the cross hairs on one of them, both men plunged into the darkness between the trees and were gone.

The TWilighters down by the Jeep stopped firing.

Charlie wondered how long it would take the two in the woods to work their way up through the trees and come in behind him.

Not long. There wasn't a lot of underbrush in these forests. Five minutes. Less.

He could still do some damage, even if those remaining in the meadow did not show themselves. He brought one of the snowmobiles into the bull's-eye in his scope and pumped two rounds through the front of it, hoping to smash something vital. If he could put them on foot, he would slow them down, make the chase more fair. He targeted another snowmobile, pumped two slugs into the engine. The third machine was half hidden by the other two, offering less of a target, and he fired five times at that one, reloading the rifle as needed, and all his shooting finally made it possible for them to pinpoint him. They began blasting from below, but this time all the shots were coming within a few yards of him.

The fourth snowmobile was behind the Jeep, out of reach, so there was nothing more he could do ' He put on the glove he had stripped off a few minutes ago, then slithered on his belly, deeper into the woods, until he found a big hemlock trunk to put between himself and the incoming bullets. He had taken off his snowshoes earlier, when he had needed to be in a prone position to get the most from his rifle. Now he put them on again, working as rapidly as possible, trying to make as little noise as be could, listening intently for any sounds made by the two men coming up through the eastern arm of the forest.

He had expected to hear or see them by this time, but now he realized they would be extremely cautious. They would figure he had seen them making a break for the trees, and they would be sure he was lying in wait for them. And they knew he enjoyed the advantage of familiarity with the terrain. They would move slowly, from one bit of cover to the next, thoroughly studying every tree and rock formation and hollow that lay ahead of them, afraid of an ambush. They might not be here for another five or even ten minutes, and once they got here they'd waste another ten minutes, at least, searching the area until they were sure he had pulled back. That gave him, Christine, and Joey maybe a twenty-or twenty-five-minute lead.

As fast as he could, he moved through the woods, heading toward the upper meadow and the cabin.

Snow flurries were still failing.

A wind had risen.

The sky had darkened and lowered. It was still morning, but it felt like late afternoon. Hell, it felt later than that, much later; it felt like the end of time.

Chewbacca stayed beside Joey, as if he sensed that his young master needed him, but the boy no longer paid attention to the dog. Joey was lost in an inner world, oblivious of this one.

Biting her lip, repressing her concern for her son, Christine had finished stuffing provisions into her backpack, had made a pile of everything that ought to go into Charlie's pack, and had loaded the shotgun by the time he returned to the cabin. His face was flushed from the bitter air, and his eyebrows were white with snow, but for a moment his eyes were the coldest thing about him.

"What happened?" she asked as he came across the living room to the dining table, leaving clumps of melting snow in his wake.

"I blew them away. Like ducks in a barrel, for God's sake."

Helping him off with his backpack and spreading it on the table, she said, "All of them?"

"No. I either killed or badly wounded three men. And I might've nipped a fourth, but I doubt it."

She began frantically tucking things into the waterproof vinyl pack."

Spivey?"

"I don't know. Maybe. Maybe I hit her. I don't know."

"They're still coming?"

"They will be. We've got maybe a twenty minute head start."

The pack was half full. She paused, a can of matches in her hand.

Staring hard at him, she said." Charlie? What's wrong?"

He wiped at the melting snow trickling down from his eyebrows.

"I… I've never done anything like that. It was… slaughter. In the war, of course, but that was different. That was war.

"So is this."

"Yeah. I guess so. Except… when I was shooting them.

I liked it. And even in the war, I never liked it."

"Nothing wrong with that," she said, continuing to stuff things into the backpack." After what they've put us through, I'd like to shoot a few of them, too. God, would I ever!"

Charlie looked at Joey." Get your gloves and mask on, Skipper."

The boy didn't respond. He was standing by the table, his face expressionless, his eyes dead.

" Joey?" Charlie said.

The boy didn't react. He was staring at Christine's hands as she jammed various items into the second backpack, but he didn't really seem to be watching her.

"What's wrong with him?" Charlie asked.

"He. he just. went away," Christine said, fighting back the tears that she had only recently been able to overcome.

Charlie went to the boy, put a hand under his chin, lifted his head.

Joey looked up, toward Charlie but not at him, and Charlie spoke to him but without effect. The boy smiled vaguely, humotlessly, a ghastly smile, but even that wasn't meant for Charlie; it was for something he had seen or thought of in the world where he had gone, something that was light-years away. Tears shimmered in the corners of the boy's eyes, but the eerie smile didn't leave his face, and he didn't sob or make a sound.

"Damn," Charlie said softly.

He hugged the boy, but Joey didn't respond. Then Charlie picked up the first backpack, which was already full, and he put his arms through the straps, shrugged it into place, buckled it across his chest.

Christine finished with the second pack, made sure all the flaps were securely fastened, and took that burden upon herself.

Charlie put Joey's gloves and ski mask on for him. The boy offered little or no assistance.

Picking up the loaded shotgun, Christine followed Charlie, Joey, and Chewbacca out of the cabin. She looked back inside before she closed the door. A pile of logs blazed in the fireplace.

One of the brass lamps was on, casting a circle of soft amber light. The armchairs and sofas looked comfortable and enticing.

She wondered if she would ever sit in a chair again, ever see another electric light. Or would she die out there in the woods tonight, in a grave of drifted snow?

She closed the door and turned to face the gray, frigid fastness of the mountains.

Carrying Joey, Charlie led Christine around the cabin and into the forest behind it. Until they were into the screen of trees, he kept glancing around nervously at the open meadow behind them, expecting to see Spivey's people come into sight at the far end of it.

Chewbacca stayed a few yards ahead of them, anticipating their direction with some sixth sense. He struggled a bit with the snow until he reached the undrifted ground within the forest, and then he pranced ahead with an eager sprichtliness, unhindered by rock formations, fallen timber, or anything else.

There was some brush at the edge of the forest, but then the trees closed ranks and the brush died away. The land rose, and the earth became rocky and difficult, except for a shallow channel that, in spring, was probably filled with run-off from the melting snowpack, pouring down from higher elevations. They stayed in the channel, heading north and west, which was the direction they needed to go. Their snowshoes were strapped to their backpacks because, for the next few hours, they would be mostly under the huge trees, where the mantle of snow was not particularly deep. In fact, in places, the boughs of the densely grown evergreens were so tightly interlaced that the ground beneath them was bare or virtually so.

Nevertheless, there was sufficient snow for them to leave a clear trail.

He could have stopped and tried brushing away their tracks, but he didn't bother. Waste of time. The signs he would leave by trying to eradicate their footprints would be just as obvious as the footprints themselves, for the wind couldn't gain much force in the deepest part of the forest, at least not down here at floor level, and it would not soften and obliterate the brush marks. They could only press on, keep moving, and hope to outrun their pursuers. Perhaps later, if and when they crossed any stretches of open land, the increasing wind might be strong enough to help them out, obscure their passage.

if.

If they ever made it through this part of the woods and onto a stretch of open ground.

If they weren't brought down by Spivey's hounds in the next half hour or forty-five minutes.

if.

The woods were shadowy, and they soon found that the narrow eye holes of the ski masks limited their vision even further.

They tripped and stumbled because they didn't see everything in their path, and at last they had to take the masks off. The subzero air nipped at them, but they would just have to endure it.

Charlie became acutely aware that their lead on Spivey's people was dwindling. They had been at the cabin almost five minutes. So they were now just fifteen minutes ahead of the pack, maybe even less. And because he couldn't move as fast as he wanted while carrying Joey, Charlie had little doubt that their lead was narrowing dangerously, minute by minute.

The land rose more steeply; he began to breathe harder, and he beard Christine panting behind him. His calves and thighs were knotted, beginning to ache already, and his arms were weary with the burden of the boy. The convenient channel began to curve eastward, which wasn't the way they needed to go. It was still heading more north than east, so they could continue to follow it for a short while, but soon he would have to put the boy down in order to make his way overconsiderably less hospitable terrain. If they were going to escape, Joey would have to walk on his own.

But what if he wouldn't walk? What if he just stood there, staring, empty-eyed?

Grace crouched within the snowmobile, staying down out of the line of fire, though her old bones protested against her cramped position.

It was a black day in the spirit world. This morning, discovering this disturbing development, she thought she would not be able to dress in harmony with the spectral energies. She had no black clothes. There had never been a black day prior to this.

Never. Fortunately, Laura Panken, one of her disciples, had a black ski suit, and they were nearly the same size, so Grace swapped her gray suit for Laura's black outfit.

But now she almost wished she weren't in contact with the saints and with the souls of the dead. The spectral energies radiating from them were uniformly unsettling, tinged with fear.

Grace was also assaulted with clairvoyant images of death and damnation, but these didn't come from God; they had another source, a taint of brimstone. With emotionally unsettling visions, Satan was trying to destroy her faith, to terrorize her. He wanted her to turn, run, abandon the mission. She knew what the Father of Lies was up to. She knew. Sometimes, when she looked at the faces of those around her, she didn't see their real countenances but, instead, rotting tissue and maggot-ridden flesh, and she was shaken by these visions of mortality.

The devil, as wise as he was evil, knew she would never give in to temptation, so he was trying to shatter her faith with a hammer of fear.

It wouldn't work. Never. She was strong.

But Satan kept trying. Sometimes, when she looked at the stormy sky, she saw things in the clouds: grinning goat heads, monstrous pig faces with protruding fangs. There were voices in the wind, too. hissing, sinister voices made false promises, told lies, spoke of perverse pleasures, and their hypnotic descriptions of these unspeakable acts were rich in images of the mutant beauty of wickedness.

While she was crouched in the snowmobile, hiding from the rifleman at the top of the meadow, Grace suddenly saw a dozen huge cockroaches, each as large as her hand, crawling over the floor of the machine, over her boots, inches from her face. She almost leapt up in revulsion. That was what the devil wanted; he hoped she would present a better target and make an easy job of it for Charlie Harrison. She swallowed hard, choked on her revulsion, and remained pressed down in the small space.

She saw that each cockroach had a human head instead of the head of an insect. Their tiny faces, filled with pain and selfdisgust and terror, looked up at her, and she knew these were damned souls who had been crawling through Hell until, moments ago, Satan had transported them here, to show her how he tortured his subjects, to prove his cruelty had no limits. She was so afraid that she almost lost control of her bladder. Staring at the beetles with human faces, she was supposed to wonder how God could permit the existence of Hell. That's what the devil meant for her to do. Yes. She was supposed to wonder if, by permitting Satan's cruelty, God was indeed cruel Himself.

She was supposed to doubt the virtue of her Maker. This vision was intended to bring despair and fear deep into her heart.

Then she saw that one beetle had the face of her dead husband, Albert.

No. Albert was a good man. Albert had not gone to Hell. It was a lie.

The tiny face peered up, screaming yet making no sound. No. Albert was a sweet man, sinless, a saint. Albert in Hell? Albert damned for eternity? God wouldn't do such a thing. She was looking forward to being with Albert again, in Heaven, but if Albert had gone the other way.

She felt herself teetering on the edge of madness.

No. No, no, no. Satan was lying. Trying to drive her crazy.

He'd like that. Oh, yes. If she was insane, she wouldn't be able to serve her God. If she even questioned her sanity, she would also be questioning her mission, her Gift, and her relationship with God. She must not doubt herself. She was sane, and Albert was in Heaven, and she had to repress all doubts, give herself completely to blind faith.

She closed her eyes and would not look at the things crawling on her boots. She could feel them, even through the heavy leather, but she gritted her teeth and listened to the rifle fire and prayed, and when eventually she opened her eyes, the cockroaches were gone.

She was safe for a while. She had pushed the devil away.

The rifle fire had stopped, too. Now, Pierce Morgan and Denny Rogers, the two men who had been sent into the woods to circle around behind Charlie Harrison, called from the upper end of the meadow. The way was clear. Harrison was gone.

Grace climbed out of the snowmobile and saw Morgan and Rogers at the top of the meadow, waving their arms. She turned to the body of Carl Rainey, the first man shot. He was dead, a big hole in his chest. The wind was drifting snow over his outflung arms. She knelt beside him.

Kyle eventually came to her." O'Conner is dead, too. And George Westvec." His voice quaked with anger and grief.

She said, "We knew some of us would be sacrificed. Their deaths were not in vain."

The others gathered around: Laura Panken, Edna Vanoff, Burt Tully. They looked as angry and determined as they did frightened. They would not turn and run. They believed.

Grace said, "Carl Rainey. is in Heaven now, in the arms of God.

So are. " She had trouble remembering first nanies for O'Conner and Westvec, hesitated, once again wishing that the Gift did not drive so much else out of her mind." So are. George Westvec and.

Ken. Ken. uh. Kevin

Kevin O'Conner. all in Heaven."

Gradually the snow knitted a shroud over Rainey's corpse.

"Will we bury them here?" Laura Panken-asked.

"Ground's frozen," Kyle said.

"Leave them. No time for burials," Grace said." The Antichrist is within our reach, but his power grows by the hour. We can't delay."

Two of the Skidoos were out of commission. Grace, Edna, Laura, and Burt Tully rode in the remaining two, while Kyle followed them on foot to the top of the meadow where Morgan and Rogers were waiting.

A sadness throbbed through Grace. Three men dead.

They moved forward, proceeding in fits and starts, only when the way ahead had been scouted, wary of running into another ambush.

The wind had picked up. The snow flurries grew thicker. The sky was all the shades of death.

Soon she would be face to face with the child, and her destiny would be fulfilled.