The Town

1

Scott carried the flashlight as the three of them made their way up the hidden path to the secret spot on the cliff. They should have all brought flashlights, Adam knew, but Scott was the only one who’d thought to do it, and the going was slow because he and Dan were forced to stand in place until Scott climbed up each section of trail, then turned around and illuminated the way so the two of them could follow.

It was an arduous journey, the ascent at least twice as difficult at night as it had been in the daytime. When they stopped to rest at the curve in the switchback, Adam looked over the edge at the road below. To the left, he could see the diner, the shape of its roof defined by the lights around the building, two lone pickups in the parking lot. To the right and down the sloping highway, he could see some of the lights of town, the ones not hidden by the cottonwoods or the canyon dropoff. The highway itself was empty, not a single vehicle on it.

Adam turned toward Scott. “What if there aren’t any cars?” he asked, secretly hoping that there wouldn’t be.

“Don’t worry,” Scott said. He motioned with the flashlight. “Come on. Let’s go.”

They continued up the trail.

This section of the path was shorter, and ten minutes later they were at the clearing.

It was freezing out tonight, but Adam was sweating from the climb, and so he took off his jacket. The cold air felt good against his skin, and he stood there enjoying it, looking down over the wall at the still silent highway, as next to him Scott sat down hard in the dirt. “Whew!”

“The tough part’ll be going down,” Dan said from behind them.

Scott snorted. “You’re crazy. We can slide down on our asses if we have to. Piece of cake.”

Adam checked out what he could see of the town, getting his bearings and trying to find his own house, but it was blocked from view by a low hill. He wondered what he would do if he looked down and saw their van pull into the diner’s parking lot. He’d told his parents that he was spending the night at Scott’s, and they said that was okay as long as the two of them remained at his friend’s house and didn’t go anywhere. He’d lied and said they were just going to watch the Star Wars movies on video.

To be honest, he was surprised that his parents had even let him stay overnight. They knew Scott, but they had never met Scott’s parents, and though he’d falsely portrayed his friend’s mom and dad as kind, caring, loving, happy Mike and Carol Brady clones, he was still surprised they had let him go. Back in California, they never would have been so lax, and while part of him was happy for this change, another, more responsible part was worried by it. He tried to tell himself that it was nothing, that they were acting this way because they believed this was a better, safer environment, but he could not make that rationalization stick. Deep in his heart he believed that they did not care as much about him as they used to.

His sweat had dried, and now he could feel the cold. He slipped back into his jacket and sat down next to Scott in the dirt. Dan remained standing, looking over the edge. Above them, a half-moon turned everything into silhouette.

“So what’s the plan?” Dan asked.

“You know what the plan is. Keep a lookout.” Scott turned toward Adam. “You take over when he gets tired.”

Adam nodded.

There was something different about Scott lately, too, although once again it was not anything he could pin down. Like his parents, his friend had seemed preoccupied recently, as though something was worrying him. And while Scott’s interests and actions were the same as they’d always been, a cruelty and harshness had crept in where before there had been playfulness.

None of them spoke as they waited. Adam picked up the flashlight between them and shone it on the dirt around him.

“What are you doing?” Scott said.

“Looking for spiders,” he explained. “I want to make sure there are no bugs here.”

“Don’t worry. If there are, you’ll feel them.”

The light played over the small indentations made by their feet before settling, near the wall, on an object with a red-and-gold pattern that he immediately recognized. He leaned forward for a closer look, not believing what he saw.

There in the dirt, half hidden, chipped and cracked with age, was a wooden Russian spoon.

The hairs on the back of his neck bristled. He scooted forward, picked up the object. He could not have said what about the spoon so unnerved him, but finding it here seemed somehow—meaningful. That was stupid, he knew. There’d been a lot of Russians in McGuane over the years, and finding a piece of discarded trash like this was perfectly natural.

But it did not feel natural. It felt preordained, as though it had been left here specifically for him, as though he was supposed to find it. He could not help thinking that the fact that it was a Russian spoon and he was Russian and he had found it way up here in their little secret hideout had some deeper, hidden meaning.

“What’s that?” Dan asked, walking over.

He handed the other boy the spoon as though it was nothing to him. “A Russian spoon.”

“What’s it doing up here?”

“You got me.”

“Somebody keep an eye on the highway,” Scott said.

Dan handed the spoon back to Adam, and they returned to their original positions.

They lapsed back into silence, and Adam found himself wondering how this little clearing had come to be, who had constructed the path up to it. Its origin still seemed suspect to him, and the spoon made him think that maybe Molokans had built it.

But for what purpose? He looked at the low sandstone wall that separated Dan from the cliff drop-off. It was almost like a fort, like someplace built to be defended.

He had avoided thinking about the cave until now, had not even looked at the hanging succulents covering its entrance when they’d arrived here, but the image of that alcove in the cliff, with its hint of ritualism and unknown purpose, was imprinted permanently on his brain, and he could not get away from it. Even in avoidance, it dominated his thinking about this place, and he was acutely conscious of the fact that the cave was facing his back. He was tempted to turn around, to look at it—to make sure nothing was coming out of it

—but he remained facing forward, willing himself not to give in to temptation and fear.

Fear?

Yes. There was something scary about the hidden cave behind them. He was reminded of the banya, and when he thought about the cave he imagined the shadow of a Russian man burned into the rock of the back wall.

He wished he hadn’t come here. He had a bad feeling about this.

The spoon suddenly felt strange in his hand, and he tossed it over the edge. Dan ducked, thinking it was a rock, and turned on him. “What the hell was that?”

“The spoon.”

“What did you throw it at me for?”

“I wasn’t throwing it at you. I was just throwing it.”

Dan looked at him, and Adam knew he understood.

Adam stood. “I don’t like this place,” he admitted. “It’s creepy.”

“It’s haunted,” Scott said.

Adam looked at him, and he shrugged. “I told you. There are a lot of haunted places in McGuane.”

“And you think this is one of them?” Adam asked.

“You said it yourself, didn’t you?” Scott stood, walked over to the wall. “I don’t like the cave.”

Full-fledged chills rippled over nearly all of Adam’s body. His mouth felt dry.

“Let’s get out of here.” Dan’s voice was low, quiet, as though he didn’t want to be overheard.

“Nah, we’ll be all right.” Scott looked down on the empty highway. “Let’s give it another ten minutes.”

“I don’t like the cave either,” Adam said.

“I don’t know what it is, but it didn’t seem that scary to me in the daytime.”

“I thought it was scary.”

“You didn’t say anything.”

Adam looked at his feet. “Yeah, well…”

“I’m bored,” Dan said. “Let’s go.”

Scott smiled. “Bored? You’re scared.”

“So am I,” Adam told him.

“Another ten minutes.” He looked at the two of them.

“Come on. You know we’re not going to be coming up here again. This is our only chance.” He bent down, picked something up out of the dirt. “Here. I got a rock.”

Adam took a deep breath, avoided looking at the succulents hanging over the cave entrance. “Ten minutes,” he agreed. He looked at Dan. “It’s a long walk down.”

The Indian boy didn’t say a word, started picking up his own rocks.

“Did you ever take a picture of the bathhouse?” Dan asked a few moments later.

Scott paused for a moment, as if deciding what to say. “Yeah,” he admitted finally.

Adam looked at him. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

Another pause. “The pictures turned out… weird.”

“Weird?”

“There were people in them. Fat old Russians taking a steam bath. The bathhouse looked all new, and…” He trailed off. “I think I took pictures of the past, pictures of something that happened before.”

Adam’s mouth was dry again. “What did you do with them? Did you send them off to the Enquirer?”

“I threw them away. Destroyed them, actually. In the garbage disposal. They were… starting to change.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Dan demanded.

“I don’t know,” Scott admitted.

“That’s it,” Adam announced. “I’m going.”

“You said ten minutes.”

“I changed my mind.”

“Just wait. You don’t want to go down by yourself.”

Adam stopped. He was right.

“Besides, I have the flashlight.”

Adam glared at his friend.

Dan cleared his throat. “Don’t you think there’s been a lot of… scary stuff going on lately?”

Scott snorted. “There’s always scary stuff. You know this town.”

“But doesn’t it seem more… active?”

The two of them shared a look, and Adam glanced from one to the other. “What’s that about?” he said.

Dan shook his head. “Nothing.”

The look again.

“Tell me.”

Scott moved closer. “There are a lot of people who are saying it’s your fault. Not you personally. I mean your family.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I think it’s an anti-Molokan thing.” Dan shrugged. “It’s a rumor.”

Adam backed up, his heart leaping into his throat. “You guys brought me up here to kill me! You’re going to push me off the cliff!”

Scott blinked, genuinely startled, then burst out laughing. Dan started laughing, too.

“You’re… not?” Adam asked hopefully.

“Hell no!” Scott could barely get the words out. “Where’d you come up with a loony idea like that?”

“It’s not that loony,” he said.

His friends’ laugher trailed off. “No,” Dan said. “I guess it’s not. Not these days.”

Scott punched his shoulder. “Even if you were the cause of it, I wouldn’t rat you out. We’re buds, bud. And any fan of Spiderman is a friend of mine.”

“It’s not your fault,” Dan said. “We know that.”

“Then why’s—”

“Who the fuck knows?” Scott shook his head. “Most people are dipshits.”

Adam thought he heard a rustle behind him, and he picked up the flashlight and shone it around the clearing, but there was nothing there. Behind the succulents, he could see the blackness of the cave.

“Did you hear that?”

The other two nodded.

“What do you think it was?”

Dan’s voice was quiet again. “My people call them Na-ta-whay. Uninvited guests.”

“Ghosts?”

“Some of them. Demons mostly, though. My father says they’re homeless and they’re looking for a place to stay, and sometimes they invite themselves over to someone’s house or a store or a building.”

Scott walked back over to the edge. “I thought it was the mine that attracted them.”

“That too.”

“You need to get your stories straight.”

Adam shivered. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Wait a minute!” Scott was looking over the edge of the sandstone wall. “Cars! Two of them!”

“Places!” Dan said, hurrying over and picking up some rocks.

This was wrong, Adam thought. But it was also cool. And exciting. And he picked up a rock of his own and looked over the edge at the highway below. Off to the right, coming up the road toward the diner, he could see two sets of headlights.

“On my count,” Scott said.

The vehicles drew closer, closer.

“Heave ’em!”

Adam threw his rock, and was filled simultaneously with horror and elation as he saw it tumble into the darkness, heard it hit, heard the shatter of glass, the thunk of metal, and the squealing of tires as the driver of the first car slammed on his brakes and jackknifed into the opposite lane. Behind him, the other driver swerved to miss the first vehicle, and one of the other rocks hit his car.

The three of them ducked behind the wall, crouching on the dirt. Scott was giggling, but Dan was silent, and Adam assumed that the other boy already felt guilty about what they’d just done. Adam’s own heart was pounding so loud that even the noises right next to him sounded muffled. He had not expected there to be an accident. He’d known what they were planning to do, of course, but somehow the outcome of it had been softened in his brain. His focus had been on the action rather than the result.

But he had to admit that there was something vaguely gratifying about the sneak attack. His mind told him that it was in the same category as drive-by shootings or other acts of random violence, that he was no better than the vandals who had spray-painted graffiti all over his house. But emotionally it was a kick, and he’d gotten from it the same sort of thrill that he got from a roller-coaster ride, the thrill of the forbidden and dangerous.

Scott ventured a peek over the side, quickly ducked back down. “They’re looking up here,” he said.

Dan’s voice was worried. “Did they see you?”

“No. It’s too dark.”

Adam licked his lips. “I hope they don’t come up here.”

“They’ll never find the path.”

“But how’ll we get down?”

“We’ll wait ’til they’re gone.”

There was a loud sound behind them, and Adam stood, turned—

And a policeman grabbed his arm.

Adam looked up into a cold, hard face, and his heart stopped as he heard a deep, grave voice intone, “You’re under arrest.”

2

Julia was in the passenger seat next to him, crying, and Gregory wanted to hit her. They were both wearing today’s wrinkled clothes that they’d grabbed from the floor after being awakened by the phone call. He was angry at Adam and annoyed at being roused from sleep, but she was devastated, taking it personally, taking it hard, wailing that it was her fault, that she’d been a poor mother.

Her whining irritated him, and he was tempted to shout out, “Yes! It’s your fault! You are a poor mother!” But he gripped the steering wheel tighter, gritted his teeth, and said nothing.

Her sobs had been reduced to sniffles by the time they reached the police station and got out of the van.

They’d been given no details over the phone, had been told merely that their son had been arrested for malicious mischief, but the sergeant behind the desk who made them sign the release papers said that Adam and two friends had been up at the old lookout above the highway near the diner, throwing rocks at cars. One car had a dented trunk, and another had a cracked front windshield, a shattered rear windshield, and a damaged hood.

The station lobby was empty save for them. There was no sign of the car owners, and obviously the other boys’ parents had not yet arrived.

“It’s pure luck we caught ’em,” the policeman said. “A patron at the diner noticed a flashlight moving up the old lookout trail, and he told Sam Wright, who called us. We intercepted the boys by coming up behind them, off the topside trail. We surprised them at the lookout, but not before they had thrown the rocks and damaged the cars.

“There’ll be no criminal charges pressed,” he concluded. “But Mr. Redfield and Mr. Robson, the drivers of the damaged vehicles, have the option of filing a civil complaint in order to collect damages.”

“Give me their names and numbers,” Gregory said. “I’ll contact them. I’ll make it right.”

The policeman smiled thinly. “You’re the one won the lottery, aren’t you?’

Gregory looked at Julia, nodded.

“Ought to spend a little less time counting your cash, a little more time taking care of your boy, maybe.”

Gregory nodded, not wanting to argue. Next to him, Julia started quietly crying again, and though he still wanted to hit her, he put his arm around her and pretended to be comforting.

“Charlie’ll bring the boy out.” The desk sergeant nodded toward a metal door with a small window of mesh-reinforced safety glass. He wrote down the names and telephone numbers of the victims on the back of a business card, handed it to Gregory. “Here you go.” He smiled. “And good luck. The way those two were talking, you’re going to need it.”

Gregory led Julia away from the desk, over to the door. They stood, waiting for Adam to be brought out.

Behind them, the door to the station opened, and a couple who were obviously the parents of one of the other boys came in, the woman crying, the man angry. Gregory turned away, not wanting to face them, not wanting to talk to them. He didn’t know if this stunt had been Adam’s idea or one of the other kids’, but it didn’t really matter. He intended to concentrate only on his family and let the other parents handle theirs.

The lookout.

He knew exactly where it was, though he had never been there. He was surprised that it was still referred to as “the lookout” after all these years. He was also surprised that the cop was so nonchalant about finding kids up there.

He remembered what had happened at the lookout before.

Gregory shivered as he recalled hearing the news for the first time. It had been his sophomore year in high school. A group of seniors—guys on the football team and a couple of cheerleaders—had gone up there to party after one of the games. According to what he’d heard afterward, things had gotten rough. And crazy. One of the girls had volunteered for a gang bang. The other had refused to put out, and the girl had ended up dead, sacrificed on the sand, her body staked down with miner’s pikes, her head severed and tossed into the shallow cave.

There’d been rumors of drugs, LSD-laced snacks, enhanced beer, but as far as he knew, none of that had ever come up in the trial, and though the trial had taken place up in Phoenix and they’d received only newspaper and television reports, since the kids’ families had all moved away and out of town, coverage had been pretty thorough, and for that year people had talked of little else.

The boys had all received life sentences, and the feeling around town was that they’d been lucky they hadn’t gotten the death penalty.

After that, the town council had voted to seal off the cave, to destroy the path and the little outcropping that was the lookout itself. That hadn’t happened—it would have been too difficult, and the lookout was right above the highway, which could have caused problems—but for Gregory’s remaining years in McGuane, just the memory of that incident had scared everyone away from the spot. He’d assumed that that sort of self-prohibition would last forever, growing into the kind of local myth that tainted a locale in perpetuity, but obviously that had not occurred, and it seemed to him ironic that it was his son who had committed another crime at that location.

Although Adam and his friends probably weren’t the first. The desk sergeant had not seemed especially shocked or angry about the matter, and he hadn’t mentioned anything about it being unusual. Maybe the location’s past had been forgotten.

No. That was too hard to believe.

Maybe the story hadn’t been passed on to the younger generation because it was too brutal, despite its obvious use as a cautionary tale.

That was possible.

But there’d been… something else. Something about the incident with the cheerleaders and the football players that had made it seem even stranger and scarier than did the details he could recall. He couldn’t remember what it was, though, and he wondered if Paul or Deanna might. It was on the tip of his brain, nagging at his consciousness, but it would not be made clear, and he found that frustrating. It was like trying to remember the name of a specific song or a character actor in a movie and not being able to fall asleep because of it.

What was it? What was he thinking of?

A statue. That was it. There’d been some sort of statue. They’d been worshiping it, holding some kind of ceremony. It hadn’t just been a party, it had been a ritual, and the cheerleader had been killed not in some drug-induced frenzy but deliberately, purposefully, as part of some twisted religious service.

It all came back to him now. The statue had been of a dwarf. Neither he nor any of his friends had seen the statue before it had been seized as evidence for the trial, but they’d heard about it, and it was the word “dwarf” that had really fired up his imagination, lending the entire business an eerieness that made the situation even more morbidly fascinating than it had been already. He’d imagined the statue in its alcove, in the shallow cave, a small, forbidden god, and just the idea of it had led to nightmares.

He hadn’t remembered any of this when he’d first decided to move back to McGuane. The town had seemed a lot more innocent in his memory than he now knew it to be, and he marveled at how the mind glossed over events from the past, remaking them in a nicer image.

Julia turned toward him. “What are we going to do?” she asked.

He looked at her, annoyed.

“Are we going to talk to him? Ground him?”

Gregory felt his anger rise again. “Oh, I’ll do a lot more than that.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You heard me.”

“We’ve never hit any of the kids.”

“Maybe it’s about time we did.”

“Knock if off,” she said. “We have to decide how we’re going to handle this before he comes out.”

“I’ve already decided.”

“Gregory—”

“I’m going to beat some sense into him. Like I should have done a long time ago.”

“You are not.” Her voice was deadly serious and filled with a conviction he had not really heard from her before. “You are not going to lay a hand on that boy.”

He had not been entirely serious about his stated course of action, had said it more to irritate her than because he had any intention of doing it, and he found himself backing down in the face of her determined opposition. “We’ll ground him,” he conceded. “And we’ll give him a lecture and make sure he understands what he’s done.”

She nodded. “Okay.”

Behind them, the woman’s crying grew louder as the desk sergeant talked to her, and another couple walked into the station, an Indian man and a white woman, obviously the third boy’s parents.

Before them, the metal door opened, and a uniformed officer ushered a sick-looking Adam out into the lobby. The boy stared at the floor and would not meet his father’s eyes. Something about his son’s cowed, guilty passivity irked Gregory. Next to him, Julia started crying again. Adam seemed to shrink even further into himself.

He grabbed his son’s arm, squeezing hard, but though Adam grimaced, he did not cry out or complain. That was one point in the boy’s favor.

He looked down at his son, tried to rein in his anger. “Come on,” he said evenly. “We’re going home.”

3

He’d actually sold something today, and Jesse Tallfeather was feeling pretty good. Two hundred and twenty bucks for a combination birdbath-fountain in which the water cascaded down a rocky hill from the top of a cement saguaro cactus. It wouldn’t stave off the inevitable, but it might buy him another week or so. And at this point, that was about the best he could hope for.

He locked up the yard fence, then walked back into the statuary office to close out the register. The sun had passed over the mountains, and though the sky above was still blue, it was dark down here, and he flipped on the light in the office as he walked through the door.

The statue was standing directly in front of the cash register counter.

He stopped, feeling a sickening lurch in his stomach that he recognized as fear.

It was the statue of a man. A small man. A dwarf or a midget. In addition to its mysterious appearance, there was something disturbing about it, some irregularity in the features of the face that made him feel uneasy, and he thought of that day in the yard when the statues had moved. He’d successfully concentrated on the here and now since then, had not allowed himself to dwell on what he thought he’d seen that day, and had almost succeeded in convincing himself that it had not happened.

Na-ta-whay.

The statue had not been here five minutes ago, the last time he’d walked through. He looked around the small room, glanced out the windows, hoping to see someone running away, some practical joker who had placed the statue here, but there was no one.

He knew that already, though, didn’t he? No person had brought that statue to the office.

His first instinct was to run, to get away from the statuary as quickly as possible. He could leave, lock the door behind him, taking a chance that no one would break in and steal from the register in the middle of the night. Hopefully, in the morning, the statue would be gone. But even if it wasn’t, it would be a lot easier to deal with in the new light of day. And he would have the night to try and formulate some plan.

But what if he awoke at 3 A.M. to see the statue standing at the foot of his bed?

He shivered, feeling cold. He would lock up, he decided, then go talk to the chief and the council, tell them what was happening, bring them over to see—

The statue moved.

He sucked in his breath, holding it. It was only a wobble, a slight rocking of the pedestal base, but the movement was visible and unaided, and in the silence of the office, the creak of weighted cement on wood sounded as loud as a shotgun blast.

Jesse was frozen in place. He wanted to run, but fear kept him from it, and in a quickflash image, he saw in his mind an army of statues moving through the yard toward the office, where their leader waited. A glance out the window told him that was not so, but the feeling lingered, and the sky was getting dark, and he decided that the best course of action would be to get the hell out.

Behind him, the office door slammed shut. He had not closed it after walking in, and he was near enough that it hit the pinky edge of his left hand, the force of the contact making him cry out.

The statue laughed.

It wobbled again.

Jesse fumbled behind him for the doorknob, unwilling to take his eyes off the statue for even a second. The doorknob would not turn, and the statue lurched forward. There was no movement in its legs or stubby arms, no change in the cast expression on its disturbingly peculiar face. The entire object pushed itself across the wooden floor toward him, almost as though there were a person encased inside who was attempting to maneuver despite the limitations of cement imprisonment.

He looked around for some sort of weapon.

Nothing.

He had a toolbox behind the counter, and there was a hammer in it that he could use to smash the shit out of this damn thing, but the statue was between here and there, and though its movements were slow and jerky, he was afraid to go around it.

Logically, there was not much the statue could do to him even if it did reach him. It stood slightly higher than his waist, so he was much bigger than it was, and it could not move its arms. He could knock it down and it would not be able to get up.

But there was nothing logical here, and that reasoning did not apply.

Na-ta-whay.

He tried the door again. Still locked, still closed. The lights went off.

In the darkness, he heard the squeak of movement and the subtle lilt of laughter.

He jumped out the window.

Or rather he tried to. In his mind, during the second in which he’d come up with the idea and acted upon it, he’d seen himself leaping heroically, jumping out amid the broken glass, rolling on the dirt outside, running away to safety. But it was a double window, divided into two by a metal frame that slid open and shut on the right side. Even in his skinniest days, he’d been larger than the space it afforded him, and he jumped headfirst, hands out, feeling the pain in his fisted knuckles as they broke through the glass and were sliced, followed a split second later by even more excruciating pain as the glass cut into his face.

And then he stopped, his midsection denting the metal of the sliding right window but not breaking it. He was halted in midleap by the too-small frame digging into his gut and forcing the air out of him. The remaining shards of glass cut into his sides, slicing open skin and muscle, as his head and upper torso flopped over and smacked the outside office wall beneath the window.

From the stomach down, he was still inside the office. And he felt the statue shove itself between his spread legs.

The wind had been knocked out of him and he could not scream, but the force of the cement smashing into his groin tripled both the pain and the need to express his agony verbally, and he gasped like a fish, feeling like he was suffocating as the contradictory impulses that made him need to both scream and breathe collided somewhere in his airless lungs and throat.

His survival instinct was strong, however, and though he was still gulping air and exhaling it too quickly, his chest feeling as though it was about to burst, he marshaled enough of his senses to move his arms and legs. He kicked out at the statue at the same time he tried to position his hands against the bottom of the windowsill.

At least the statue was limited in its movements and could only lurch forward or backward. At least it was not truly sentient.

He tried to wiggle out, using his hands as leverage against the outside wall of the office.

And then he felt cement hands grabbing his feet and pulling him back inside. He kicked, struggled, tried to grab hold of the windowsill, but it was no use.

His death was slow.

Very slow.

And bloody.

4

It was the first concert she’d attended in nearly a month, and Deanna picked a seat that was near the front so she could see the performers, but next to one of the wooden posts so she wouldn’t have to share a table with anyone. Paul was going to be working the soundboard—the kid he’d hired part-time had called in sick—and she didn’t want to sit with anyone else.

The concert tonight was by a singer from Benson, an older woman heavily into Patsy Cline. She’d never really been a big Patsy Cline fan, and she doubted that she would like this woman all that much, but Paul had been so loving, caring, and attentive the past few days that she wanted to reward him, and when he’d asked her to come and help fill out what was sure to be a less-than-sellout crowd, she had happily obliged.

Besides, she didn’t want to break this mood, and she figured the best way to keep it rolling was to spend as much time as possible with him.

They’d had a little makeout session in his office before the singer and her band showed up. Paul had wanted to do it on the floor, but she’d drawn the line at that. The floor was filthy, and despite their desire, they weren’t the hormone-enraged adolescents they had been in high school. They could wait until later to consummate their evening. It had been a hot and heavy petting zoo in the office, however, and they’d both come out feeling high. Even though they were adults, it still got the juices flowing to be doing something slightly forbidden, and she was already planning what would happen when they got home.

Around her, the seats began filling. Either the singer or Patsy had a bigger fan vase in McGuane than Paul had thought, and pretty soon nearly all of the chairs and tables were taken. Only two waitresses were working tonight, and they were earning their pay, taking and filling orders that would have kept four girls running.

Deanna sipped her coffee. She was glad things were back on an even keel. It had been a rough couple of weeks. She didn’t know what was wrong, didn’t know what had happened between them, but there’d been a chill, a kind of emotional estrangement, and they’d fought a lot, for no reason, though it never seemed to be the fault of either of them.

Julia had seemed somewhat distant lately, too, and it occurred to her that the problem lay with herself, not her husband or her friends. She was the nucleus around which this was occurring, and it was only logical to assume that she was somehow the cause.

But she knew that was not the case. She seldom listened to gossip or rumor, and almost never believed it, but she was not deaf, and she knew that there were a lot of problems in McGuane right now. Interpersonal problems as well as… other things.

And she was not the cause of that.

She didn’t know what was.

But it made her uneasy.

The lights dimmed, and Deanna looked over her shoulder, saw Paul at the soundboard. She gave a little wave, and he smiled and waved back.

The stage lights clicked on, and to the applause of the audience a slightly overweight woman with a lined but pretty face led a group of guys along the open aisle next to the wall and onto the stage.

“Howdy!” the woman announced. “I’m Linette Daniels, and this here’s my band, the Crazies!”

There was a guitarist, a bass player, a drummer, a fiddler, and a pedal-steel player, and they immediately ripped into a typically turbocharged version of “Orange Blossom Special.” Linette did a little buck dance, to the delight of the crowd, and then the musicians downshifted into “She’s Got You” and she started singing.

The woman did a fair Patsy Cline impression, Deanna thought, but it was precisely because of that that her interest began to wander. The monotonous whining and yelping was as off-putting coming from this woman as it had been from Patsy herself, and Deanna found herself reverting to crowd-gazing. There were quite a few people here that she knew, but an equal number that she didn’t. She watched a grossly overweight man awkwardly attempt to dance with a lithe little teenager who looked like his daughter but was obviously his wife or girlfriend. A small section of the café had been cleared and set aside for dancing, but they were the only two on the floor. Her attention wandered to a skinny cowboy sitting alone next to the stage who had what was without a doubt the longest neck she’d ever seen on a human being. He made Audrey Hepburn look like Stubby Kaye, and his head was rocking back and forth in time to the music, flopping around on that huge neck like a plum on the end of a bendable straw.

It was a peculiar-looking crowd, and she was having fun just watching the offstage show when her gaze alighted on something that made her heart skip a beat.

A shadow.

It was short, squat, almost simian, and she watched it scuttle along the edge of the crowd toward the side of the stage. It was not flat, like an ordinary shadow, but seemed to be three-dimensional, as though it was a being in its own right, which was appropriate, because there seemed to be no original source to which it corresponded.

The shadow started to climb up the metal rigging to the right of the stage, and she saw that it was a self-contained entity. There were no ties to anything else. Its form ended at its feet.

The figure climbed hand over hand until it was at the top of the rigging near the ceiling, but no one else seemed to be looking at it. Even those audience members who weren’t intently watching the singer and her band had not noticed the shadow. Deanna looked quickly around, checked out the waitresses. They were busy running back and forth between the tables and the counter, and they had not spotted it either.

Couldn’t anyone else see it?

She scooted her chair to the left, saw the small figure crawl along the rigging pipes until it was directly above the stage. There was something unnatural about it, a deformity visible even in its silhouetted shape that marked it as inhuman. That made no logical sense, but she knew it to be true, and though she wanted to look away, she did not.

The shadow began fiddling with the center spotlight.

Deanna stood, pointing and screaming, as she realized what it was trying to do, but the concert was too loud, and though a few of the people around her saw her pointing and looked in the direction of her finger, no one seemed to hear her.

The light fell.

It crashed on Linette, the huge, blocky casing landing corner-down on the singer’s bleached-blond head, crushing her skull and shearing off the entire right side of her face. Blood was everywhere—spurting, spraying, misting—and the song ended unnervingly, not with a scream but with a quiet “uh” that cut off Linette’s voice as the musicians continued obliviously for a few more bars.

The shadow was jumping up and down on the rigging in a furious assault, and seconds later the entire thing collapsed, lights and pipes, wires and metal bars falling forward onto the audience.

People were screaming, scrambling to get away. Screeching feedback from the speakers drowned out even the screams, and it was as though the entire scene was taking place in some overloud movie. Deanna’s mind focused on and absorbed individual events, recording them with a clarity she had never known before: the musicians, covered with spraying blood, dropping their instruments, stumbling back; a stray light swinging from an attached cord and smashing into the face of the long-necked man, knocking him flat; an intact section of rigging falling onto one of the big tables, crushing several couples beneath it; a stray bar of metal spearing through the foot of an older woman, pinning her to the floor as she tried to run.

Where was the shadow?

At the same time she was backing up, trying not to be knocked down by the surging, panicked crowd, Deanna was scanning the ceiling above the stage for any sign of the dark figure.

There it was.

She saw it swinging through the rafters like an ape, and then she was knocked to the ground by a screaming old man who did not even stop to see if she was all right but continued running over her.

She struggled to her feet, leaned back against a post for protection and scanned the ceiling for the figure. Her eyes found the place where it had been, but it was not there, and her eyes darted back and forth, searching.

She found it.

In the rafters directly above.

It was looking down at her, and for a split second she saw glowing white teeth grinning in its dark shadow face.

And then a speaker came crashing down on her head.