Bag of Bones

CHAPTER 5

After that I was mostly in the zone. I came out a few times—when that scratched-out scrap of genealogy fell from inside one of my old steno books, for instance—but those interludes were brief. In a way it was like my dream of Mattie, Jo, and Sara; in a way it was like the terrible fever I’d had as a child, when I’d almost died of the measles; mostly it was like nothing but itself. It was just the zone. I was feeling it. I wish to God I hadn’t been. George came over, herding the man in the blue mask ahead of him. George was limping now, and badly. I could smell hot oil and gasoline and burning tires. “Is she dead?” George asked.

“Mattie?”

“Yes.”

“John?”

“Don’t know,” I said, and then John twitched and groaned. He was alive, but there was a lot of blood. “Mike, listen,” George began, but before he could say more, a terrible liquid screaming began from the burning car in the ditch. It was the driver. He was cooking in there. The shooter started to turn that way, and George raised his gun. “Move and I’ll kill you.”

“You can’t let him die like that,” the shooter said from behind his mask. “You couldn’t let a dog die like that.”

“He’s dead already,” George said. “You couldn’t get within ten feet of that car unless you were in an asbestos suit.” He reeled on his feet. His face was as white as the spot of whipped cream I’d wiped off the end of Ki’s nose. The shooter made as if to go for him and George brought the gun up higher.

“The next time you move, don’t stop,” George said, “because I won’t.

Guaranteed. Now take that mask off.”

“I’m done fucking with you, Jesse. Say hello to God.” George pulled back the hammer of his revolver. The shooter said, “Jesus Christ,” and yanked off his mask. It was George Footman. Not much surprise there. From behind him, the driver gave one more shriek from within the Ford fireball and then was silent. Smoke rose in black billows. More thunder roared. “Mike, go inside and find something to tie him with,” George Kennedy said. “I can hold him another minute—two, if I have to—but I’m bleeding like a stuck pig. Look for strapping tape. That shit would hold Houdini.” Footman stood where he was, looking from Kennedy to me and back to Kennedy again. Then he peered down at Highway 68, which was eerily deserted. Or perhaps it wasn’t so eerie, at that—the coming storms had been well forecast. The tourists and summer folk would be under cover. As for the locals… The locals were… sort of listening.

That was at least close. The minister was speaking about Royce Merrill, a life which had been long and fruitful, a man who had served his country in peace and in war, but the old-timers weren’t listening to him. They were listening to us, the way they had once gathered around the pickle barrel at the Lakeview General and listened to prizefights on the radio. Bill Dean was holding Yvette’s wrist so tightly his fingernails were white. He was hurting her… but she wasn’t complaining. She wanted him to hold onto her. Why? “Mike!” George’s voice was perceptibly weaker. “Please, man, help me. This guy is dangerous."

“Let me go,” Footman said. “You’d better, don’t you think?”

“In your wettest dreams, motherfuck,” George said.

I got up, went past the pot with the key underneath, went up the cement-block steps. Lightning exploded across the sky, followed by a bellow of thunder.

Inside, Rommie was sitting in a chair at the kitchen table. His face was even whiter than George’s. “Kid’s okay,” he said, forcing the words.

“But she looks like waking up. . I can’t walk anymore. My ankle’s totally fucked.” I moved for the telephone.

“Don’t bother,” Rommie said. His voice was harsh and trembling. “Tried it. Dead. Storm must already have hit some of the other towns. Killed some of the equipment. Christ, I never had anything hurt like this in my life.”

I went to the drawers in the kitchen and began yanking them open one by one, looking for strapping tape, looking for clothesline, looking for any damned thing. If Kennedy passed out from blood-loss while I was in here, the other George would take his gun, kill him, and then kill John as he lay unconscious on the smoldering grass. With them taken care of, he’d come in here and shoot Rommie and me. He’d finish with Kyra. “No he won’t,” I said. “He’ll leave her alive.” And that might be even worse.

Silverware in the first drawer. Sandwich bags, garbage bags, and neatly banded stacks of grocery-store coupons in the second. Oven mitts and potholders in the third- “Mike, where’s my Mattie?”

I turned, as guilty as a man who has been caught mixing illegal drugs.

Kyra stood at the living-room end of the hall with her hair falling around her sleep-flushed cheeks and her scrunchy hung over one wrist like a bracelet. Her eyes were wide and panicky. It wasn’t the shots that had awakened her, probably not even her mother’s scream. I had wakened her. My thoughts had wakened her.

In the instant I realized it I tried to shield them somehow, but I was too late. She had read me about Devore well enough to tell me not to think about sad stuff, and now she read what had happened to her mother before I could keep her out of my mind.

Her mouth dropped open. Her eyes widened. She shrieked as if her hand had been caught in a vise and ran for the door.

“No, Kyra, no!” I sprinted across the kitchen, almost tripping over Rommie (he looked at me with the dim incomprehension of someone who is no longer completely conscious), and grabbed her just in time. As I did, I saw Buddy Jellison leaving Grace Baptist by a side door. Two of the men he had been smoking with went with him. Now I understood why Bill was holding so tightly to Yvette, and loved him for it—loved both of them. Something wanted him to go with Buddy and the others… but Bill wasn’t going.

Kyra struggled in my arms, making big convulsive thrusts at the door, gasping in breath and then screaming it out again. “Let me go, want to see Mommy, let me go, want to see Mommy, let me go—”

I called her name with the only voice I knew she would really hear, the one I could use only with her. She relaxed in my arms little by little, and turned to me. Her eyes were huge and confused and shining with tears. She looked at me a moment longer and then seemed to understand that she mustn’t go out. I put her down. She just stood there a moment, then backed up until her bottom was against the dishwasher. She slid down its smooth white front to the floor. Then she began to wail—the most awful sounds of grief I have ever heard. She understood completely, you see. I had to show her enough to keep her inside, I had to… and because we were in the zone together, I could.

Buddy and his friends were in a pickup truck headed this way. BAMM CONSTRUCTION, it said on the side.

“Mike!” George cried. He sounded panicky. “You got to hurry!”

“Hold on!”

I called back. “Hold on, George!”

Mattie and the others had started stacking picnic things beside the sink, but I’m almost positive that the stretch of Formica counter above the drawers had been clean and bare when I hurried after Kyra. Not now.

The yellow sugar cannister had been overturned. Written in the spilled sugar was this:

“No shit,” I muttered, and checked the remaining drawers. No tape, no rope. Not even a lousy set of handcuffs, and in most well-equipped kitchens you can count on finding three or four. Then I had an idea and looked in the cabinet under the sink. When I went back out, our George was swaying on his feet and Footman was looking at him with a kind of predatory concentration. “Did you get some tape?” George Kennedy asked.

“No, something better,” I said. “Tell me, Footman, who actually paid you? Devore or Whitmore? Or don’t you know?”

“Fuck you,” he said. I had my right hand behind my back. Now I pointed down the hill with my left one and endeavored to look surprised. “What the hell’s Osgood doing?

Tell him to go away!” Footman looked in that direction—it was instinctive—and I hit him in the back of the head with the Craftsman hammer I’d found in the toolbox under Mattie’s sink. The sound was horrible, the spray of blood erupting from the flying hair was horrible, but worst of all was the feeling of the skull giving way—a spongy collapse that came right up the handle and into my fingers. He went down like a sandbag, and I dropped the hammer, gagging. “Okay,” George said.

“A little ugly, but probably the best thing you could have done under… under the…” He didn’t go down like Footman—it was slower and more controlled, almost graceful—but he was just as out. I picked up the revolver, looked at it, then threw it into the woods across the road. A gun was nothing for me to have right now; it could only get me into more trouble. A couple of other men had also left the church; a carful of ladies in black dresses and veils, as well. I had to hurry on even faster. I unbuckled George’s pants and pulled them down. The bullet which had taken him in the leg had torn into his thigh, but the wound looked as if it was clotting. John’s upper arm was a different story—it was still pumping out blood in frightening quantities. I yanked his belt free and cinched it around his arm as tightly as I could. Then I slapped him across the face. His eyes opened and stared at me with a bleary lack of recognition. “Open your mouth, John!” He only stared at me. I leaned down until our noses were almost touching and screamed, “OPEN YOUR MOUTH,/ DO IT?

OW,/” He opened it like a kid when the nurse tells him just say aahh. I stuck the end of the belt between his teeth. “Close!” He closed. “Now hold it,” I said. “Even if you pass out, hold it.” I didn’t have time to see if he was paying attention. I got to my feet and looked up as the whole world went glare-blue. For a second it was like being inside a neon sign. There was a black suspended river up there, roiling and coiling like a basket of snakes. I had never seen such a baleful sky. I dashed up the cement-block steps and into the trailer again. Rom-mie had slumped forward onto the table with his face in his folded arms. He would have looked like a kindergartner taking a timeout if not for the broken salad bowl and the bits of lettuce in his hair. Kyra still sat with her back to the dishwasher, weeping hysterically. I picked her up and realized that she had wet herself. “We have to go now, Ki.”

“I want Mattie! I want Mommy! I want my Mattie, make her stop being hurt,/Make her stop being dead,/” I hurried across the trailer. On the way to the door I passed the end-table with the Mary Higgins Clark novel on it. I noticed the tangle of hair ribbons again—ribbons perhaps tried on before the party and then discarded in favor of the scrunchy. They were white with bright red edges. Pretty. I picked them up without stopping, stuffed them into a pants pocket, then switched Ki to my other arm. “I want Mattie! I want Mommy! Make her come back./” She swatted at me, trying to make me stop, then began to buck and kick in my arms again.

She drummed her fists on the side of my head. “Put me down! Land me!

Land me!”

“No, Kyra.”

“Put me down! Land me,/Land me,/PUT ME DOWN,/” I was losing her. Then, as we came out onto the top step, she abruptly stopped struggling. “Give me Stricken! I want Stricken!” At first I had no idea what she was talking about, but when I looked where she was pointing I understood. Lying on the walk not far from the pot with the key underneath it was the stuffed toy from Ki’s Happy Meal. Strickland had put in a fair amount of outside playtime from the look of him—the light-gray fur was now dark-gray with dust—but if the toy would calm her, I wanted her to have it. This was no time to worry about dirt and germs. “I’ll give you Strickland if you promise to close your eyes and not open them until I tell you. Will you promise?”

“I promise,” she said. She was trembling in my arms, and great globular tears—the kind you expect to see in fairy-tale books, never in real life—rose in her eyes and went spilling down her cheeks. I could smell burning grass and charred beefsteak. For one terrible moment I thought I was going to vomit, and then I got it under control. Ki closed her eyes.

Two more tears fell from them and onto my arm. They were hot. She held out one hand, groping. I went down the steps, got the dog, then hesitated. First the ribbons, now the dog. The ribbons were probably okay, but it seemed wrong to give her the dog and let her bring it along. It seemed wrong but… It’s gray, Irish, the UFO voice whispered.

IOU don’t need to worry about it because it’s gray. The stufd toy in your dream was black. I didn’t know exactly what the voice was talking about and had no time to care. I put the stuffed dog in Kyra’s open hand. She held it up to her face and kissed the dusty fur, her eyes still closed. “Maybe Stricken can make Mommy better, Mike. Stricken a magic dog.”

“Just keep your eyes closed. Don’t open them until I say.”

She put her face against my neck. I carried her across the yard and to my car that way. I put her on the passenger side of the front seat. She lay down with her arms over her head and the dirty stuffed dog clutched in one pudgy hand. I told her to stay just like that, lying down on the seat. She made no outward sign that she heard me, but I knew that she did. We had to hurry because the old-timers were coming. The old-timers wanted this business over, wanted this river to run into the sea. And there was only one place we could go, only one place where we might be safe, and that was Sara Laughs. But there was something I had to do first. I kept a blanket in the trunk, old but clean. I took it out, walked across the yard, and shook it down over Mattie Devote. The hump it made as it settled around her was pitifully slight. I looked around and saw John staring at me. His eyes were glassy with shock, but I thought maybe he was coming back. The belt was still clamped in his teeth; he looked like a junkie preparing to shoot up. “Iss ant eee,” he said—This can’t be. I knew exactly how he felt. “There’ll be help here in just a few minutes. Hang in there. I have to go.”

“Go air?” I didn’t answer.

There wasn’t time. I stopped and took George Kennedy’s pulse. Slow but strong. Beside him, Footman was deep in unconsciousness, but muttering thickly. Nowhere near dead. It takes a lot to kill a daddy. The jerky wind blew the smoke from the overturned car in my direction, and now I could smell cooking flesh as well as barbecued steak. My stomach clenched again. I ran to the Chew, dropped behind the wheel, and backed out of the driveway. I took one more look—at the blanket-covered body, at the three knocked-over men, at the trailer with the line of black bulletholes wavering down its side and its door standing open. John was up on his good elbow, the end of the belt still clamped in his teeth, looking at me with uncomprehending eyes. Lightning flashed so brilliantly I tried to shield my eyes from it, although by the time my hand was up, the flash had gone and the day was as dark as late dusk.

“Stay down, Ki,” I said. “Just like you are.”

“I can’t hear you,” she said in a voice so hoarse and choked with tears that I could barely make out the words. “Ki’s takin a nap wif Stricken.”

“Okay,” I said. “Good.”

I drove past the burning Ford and down to the foot of the hill, where I stopped at the rusty bullet-pocked stop-sign. I looked right and saw the pickup truck parked on the shoulder. BAMM CONSTRUCTION on the side.

Three men crowded together in the cab, watching me. The one by the passenger window was Buddy Jellison; I could tell him by his hat. Very slowly and deliberately, I raised my right hand and gave them the finger. None of them responded and their stony faces didn’t change, but the pickup began to roll slowly toward me. I turned lift onto 68, heading for Sara Laughs under a black sky.

Two miles from where Lane Forty-two branches off the highway and winds west to the lake, there stood an old abandoned barn upon which ILFHEN one could still make out faded letters reading DONCASTER DAIRY. As we approached it, the whole eastern side of the sky lit up in a purple-white blister. I cried out, and the Chevy’s horn honked—by itself, I’m almost positive. A thorn of lightning grew from the bottom of that light-blister and struck the barn. For a moment it was still completely there, glowing like something radioactive, and then it spewed itself in all directions. I have never seen anything even remotely like it outside of a movie theater. The thunderclap which followed was like a bombshell. Kyra screamed and slid onto the floor on the passenger side of the car with her hands clapped to her ears. She still clutched the little stuffed dog in one of them. A minute later I topped Sugar Ridge.

Lane Forty-two splits left from the highway at the bottom of the ridge’s north slope. From the top I could see a wide swath of TR-90—woods and fields and barns and farms, even a darkling gleam from the lake. The sky was as black as coal dust, flashing almost constantly with internal lightnings. The air had a clear ochre glow. Every breath I took tasted like the shavings in a tinderbox. The topography beyond the ridge stood out with a surreal clarity I cannot forget. That sense of mystery swarmed my heart and mind, that sense of the world as thin skin over unknowable bones and gulfs. I glanced into the rearview mirror and saw that the pickup truck had been joined by two other cars, one with a V-plate that means the vehicle is registered to a combat veteran of the armed services. When I slowed down, they slowed down. When I sped up, they sped up. I doubted they would follow us any farther once I turned onto Lane Forty-two, however. “Ki? Are you okay?”

“Sleepun,” she said from the footwell. “Okay,” I said, and started down the hill. I could just see the red bicycle reflectors marking my turn onto Forty-two when it began to hail—great big chunks of white ice that fell out of the sky, drummed on the roof like heavy fingers, and bounced off the hood.

They began to heap in the gutter where my windshield wipers hid. “What’s happening?” Kyra cried. “It’s just hail,” I said. “It can’t hurt us.”

This was barely out of my mouth when a hailstone the size of a small lemon struck my side of the windshield and then bounced high into the air again, leaving a white II mark from which a number of short cracks radiated. Were John and George Kennedy lying helpless out in this? I turned my mind in that direction, but could sense nothing. When I made the left onto Lane Forty-two, it was hailing almost too hard to see. The wheelruts were heaped with ice.

The white faded out under the trees, though. I headed for that cover, flipping on my headlights as I went. They cut bright cones through the pelting hail. As we went into the trees, that purple-white blister glowed again, and my rearview mirror went too bright to look at. There was a rending, crackling crash. Kyra screamed again. I looked around and saw a huge old spruce toppling slowly across the lane, its ragged stump on fire. It carried the electrical lines with it. BIOCKED in, I thought.

This end, probably the other end, too. ’re here. For better or jor worse, we’re here. The trees grew over Lane Forty-two in a canopy except for where the road passed beside Tidwell’s Meadow. The sound of the hail in the woods was an immense splintery rattle. Trees were splintering, of course; it was the most damaging hail ever to fall in that part of the world, and although it spent itself in fifteen minutes, that was long enough to ruin a season’s worth of crops. Lightning flashed above us. I looked up and saw a large orange fireball being chased by a smaller one.

They ran through the trees to our left, setting fire to some of the high branches. We came briefly into the clear at Tidwell’s Meadow, and as we did the hail changed to torrential rain. I could not have continued driving if we hadn’t run back into the woods almost immediately, and as it was the canopy provided just enough cover so I could creep along, hunched over the wheel and peering into the silver curtain falling through the fan of my headlights. Thunder boomed constantly, and now the wind began to rise, rushing through the trees like a contentious voice.

Ahead of me, a leaf-heavy branch dropped into the road. I ran over it and listened to it thunk and scrape and roll against the Chevy’s undercarriage. Please, nothing bigger, I thought… or maybe I was praying. Please let me get to the house. Please let us get to the house.

By the time I reached the driveway the wind was howling a hurri cane.

The writhing trees and pelting rain made the entire world seem on the verge of wavering into insubstantial gruel. The driveway’s slope had turned into a river, but I nosed the Chevy down it with no hesitation—we couldn’t stay out here; if a big tree fell on the car, we’d be crushed like bugs in a Dixie cup.

I knew better than to use the brakes—the car would have heeled sideways and perhaps have been swept right down the slope toward the lake, rolling over and over as it went. Instead I dropped the transmission into low range, toed two notches into the emergency brake, and let the engine pull us down with the rain sheeting against the windshield and turning the log bulk of the house into a phantom. Incredibly, some of the lights were still on, shining like bathysphere portholes in nine feet of water. The generator was working, then… at least for the time being.

Lightning threw a lance across the lake, green-blue fire illuminating a black well of water with its surface lashed into surging whitecaps. One of the hundred-year-old pines which had stood to the left of the railroad-tie steps now lay with half its length in the water. Somewhere behind us another tree went over with a vast crash. Kyra covered her ears.

“It’s all right, honey,” I said. “We’re here, we made it.”

I turned off the engine and killed the lights. Without them I could see little; almost all the day had gone out of the day. I tried to open my door and at first couldn’t. I pushed harder and it not only opened, it was ripped right out of my hand. I got out and in a brilliant stroke of lightning saw Kyra crawling across the seat toward me, her face white with panic, her eyes huge and brimming with terror. My door swung back and hit me in the ass hard enough to hurt. I ignored it, gathered Ki into my arms, and turned with her. Cold rain drenched us both in an instant. Except it really wasn’t like rain at all; it was like stepping under a waterfall.

“My doggy!” Ki shrieked. Shriek or not, I could hardly hear her. I could see her face, though, and her empty hands. “Stricken! I drop Stricken!”

I looked around and yes, there he was, floating down the macadam of the driveway and past the stoop. A little farther on, the rushing water spilled off the paving and down the slope; if Strickland went with the flow, he’d probably end up in the woods somewhere. Or all the way down to the lake.

“Stricken!” Ki sobbed. “My DOGGY!”

Suddenly nothing mattered to either of us but that stupid stuffed toy. I chased down the driveway after it with Ki in my arms, oblivious of the rain and wind and brilliant flashes of lightning. And yet it was going to beat me to the slope—the water in which it was caught was running too fast for me to catch up.

What snagged it at the edge of the paving was a trio of sunflowers waving wildly in the wind. They looked like God-transported worshippers at a revival meeting: Is, Jeesus! Thankya Lawd! They also looked familiar. It was of course impossible that they should be the same three sunflowers which had been growing up through the boards of the stoop in my dream (and in the photograph Bill Dean had taken before I came back), and yet it was them; beyond doubt it was them. Three sunflowers like the three weird sisters in Macbeth, three sunflowers with faces like searchlights. I had come back to Sara Laughs; I was in the zone; I had returned to my dream and this time it had possessed me.

“Stricken!” Ki bending and thrashing in my arms, both of us too slippery for safety. “Please, Mike, please!”

Thunder exploded overhead like a basket of nitro. We both screamed. I dropped to one knee and snatched up the little stuffed dog. Kyra clutched it, covered it with frantic kisses. I lurched to my feet as another thunderclap sounded, this one seeming to run through the air like some crazy liquid bullwhip. I looked at the sunflowers, and they seemed to look back at me—Hello, Irish, it’s been a long time, what do you say? Then, resettling Ki in my arms as well as I could, I turned and slogged for the house. It wasn’t easy; the water in the driveway was now ankle-deep and full of melting hailstones. A branch flew past us and landed pretty much where I’d knelt to pick up Strickland. There was a crash and a series of thuds as a bigger branch struck the roof and went rolling down it.

I ran onto the back stoop, half-expecting the Shape to come rushing out to greet us, raising its baggy not-arms in gruesome good fellowship, but there was no Shape. There was only the storm, and that was enough.

Ki was clutching the dog tightly, and I saw with no surprise at all that its wetting, combined with the dirt from all those hours of outside play, had turned Strickland black. It was what I had seen in my dream after all.

Too late now. There was nowhere else to go, no other shelter from the storm. I opened the door and brought Kyra Devore inside Sara Laughs.

The central portion of Sara—the heart of the house—had stood for almost a hundred years and had seen its share of storms. The one that fell on the lakes region that July afternoon might have been the worst of them, but I knew as soon as we were inside, both of us gasping like people who have narrowly escaped drowning, that it would almost certainly withstand this one as well. The log walls were so thick it was almost like stepping into some sort of vault. The storm’s crash and bash became a noisy drone punctuated by thunderclaps and the occasional loud thud of a branch falling on the roof. Somewhere—in the basement, I guess—a door had come loose and was clapping back and forth. It sounded like a starter’s pistol. The kitchen window had been broken by the topple of a small tree. Its needly tip poked in over the stove, making shadows on the counter and the stove-burners as it swayed. I thought of breaking it off and decided not to. At least it was plugging the hole.

I carried Ki into the living room and we looked out at the lake, black water prinked up in surreal points under a black sky. Lightning flashed almost constantly, revealing a ring of woods that danced and swayed in a frenzy all around the lake. As solid as the house was, it was groaning deeply within itself as the wind pummelled it and tried to push it down the hill.

There was a soft, steady chiming. Kyra lifted her head from my shoulder and looked around.

“You have a moose,” she said. “Yes, that’s Bunter.”

“Does he bite?”

“No, honey, he can’t bite. He’s like a… like a doll, I suppose.”

“Why is his bell ringing?”

“He’s glad we’re here. He’s glad we made it.”

I saw her want to be happy, and then I saw her realizing that Mattie wasn’t here to be happy with. I saw the idea that Mattie would never be here to be happy with glimmer in her mind… and felt her push it away.

Over our heads something huge crashed down on the roof, the lights flickered, and Ki began to weep again.

“No, honey,’, I said, and began to walk with her. “No, honey, no, Ki, don’t. Don’t, honey, don’t.”

“I want my mommy! I want my Mattie!”

I walked her the way I think you’re supposed to walk babies who have colic. She understood too much for a three-year-old, and her suffering was consequently more terrible than any three-year-old should have to bear. So I held her in my arms and walked her, her shorts damp with urine and rainwater under my hands, her arms fever-hot around my neck, her cheeks slathered with snot and tears, her hair a soaked clump from our brief dash through the downpour, her breath acetone, her toy a strangulated black clump that sent dirty water trickling over her knuckles. I walked her. Back and forth we went through Sara’s living room, back and forth through dim light thrown by the overhead and one lamp. Generator light is never quite steady, never quite still—it seems to breathe and sigh. Back and forth through the ceaseless low chiming of Bunter’s bell, like music from that world we sometimes touch but never really see. Back and forth beneath the sound of the storm. I think I sang to her and I know I touched her with my mind and we went deeper and deeper into that zone together. Above us the clouds ran and the rain pelted, dousing the fires the lightning had started in the woods. The house groaned and the air eddied with gusts coming in through the broken kitchen window, but through it all there was a feeling of rueful safety.

A feeling of coming home.

At last her tears began to taper off. She lay with her cheek and the weight of her heavy head on my shoulder, and when we passed the lakeside windows I could see her eyes looking out into the silver-dark storm, wide and unblinking. Carrying her was a tall man with thinning hair. I realized I could see the dining-room table right through us. Our reflections are ghosts already, I thought.

“Ki? Can you eat something?”

“Not hung’y.”

“Can you drink a glass of milk?”

“No, cocoa. I cold.”

“Yes, of course you are. And I have cocoa.”

I tried to put her down and she held on with panicky tightness, scrambling against me with her plump little thighs. I hoisted her back up again, this time settling her against my hip, and she subsided.

“Who’s here?” she asked. She had begun to shiver. “Who’s here ’sides us?”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s a boy,” she said. “I saw him there.” She pointed Strickland toward the sliding glass door which gave on the deck (all the chairs out there had been overturned and thrown into the corners; one of the set was missing, apparently blown right over the rail). “He was black like on that funny show me and Mattie watch. There are other black people, too. A lady in a big hat. A man in blue pants. The rest are hard to see.

But they watch. They watch us. Don’t you see them?”

“They can’t hurt us.”

“Are you sure? Are you, are you?”

I didn’t answer.

I found a box of Swiss Miss hiding behind the flour cannister, tore open one of the packets, and dumped it into a cup. Thunder exploded overhead.

Ki jumped in my arms and let out a long, miserable wail. I hugged her, kissed her cheek.

“Don’t put me down, Mike, I scared.”

“I won’t put you down. You’re my good girl.”

“I scared of the boy and the blue-pants man and the lady. I think it’s the lady who wore Mattie’s dress. Are they ghosties?’

“Yes.”

“Are they bad, like the men who chased us at the fair? Are they?”

“I don’t really know, Ki, and that’s the truth.”

“But we’ll find out.”

“Huh?”

“That’s what you thought. “But we’ll find out.’”

“Yes,” I said. “I guess that’s what I was thinking. Something like that.”

I took her down to the master bedroom while the water heated in the kettle, thinking there had to be something left of Jo’s I could pop her into, but all of the drawers in Jo’s bureau were empty. So was her side of the closet. I stood Ki on the big double bed where I had not so much as taken a nap since coming back, took off her clothes, carried her into the bathroom, and wrapped her in a bathtowel. She hugged it around herself, shaking and blue-lipped. I used another one to dry her hair as best I could. During all of this, she never let go of the stuffed dog, which was now beginning to bleed stuffing from its seams.

I opened the medicine cabinet, pawed through it, and found what I was looking for on the top shelf: the Benadryl Jo had kept around for her ragweed allergy. I thought of checking the expiration date on the bottom of the box, then almost laughed out loud. What difference did that make?

I stood Ki on the closed toilet seat and let her hold on around my neck while I stripped the childproof backing from four of the little pink-and-white caplets. Then I rinsed out the tooth-glass and filled it with cold water. While I was doing this I saw movement in the bathroom mirror, which reflected the doorway and the master bedroom beyond. I told myself that I was only seeing the shadows of windblown trees. I offered the caplets to Ki. She reached for them, then hesitated. “Go on,” I said. “It’s medicine.”

“What kind?” she asked. Her small hand was still poised over the little cluster of caplets.

“Sadness medicine,” I said. “Can you swallow pills, Ki?”

“Sure. I taught myself when I was two.”

She hesitated a moment longer—looking at me and looking into me, I think, ascertaining that I was telling her something I really believed.

What she saw or felt must have satisfied her, because she took the caplets and put them in her mouth, one after another. She swallowed them with little birdie-sips from the glass, then said: “I still feel sad, Mike.”

“It takes awhile for them to work.”

I rummaged in my shirt drawer and found an old Harley-Davidson tee that had shrunk. It was still miles too big for her, but when I tied a knot in one side it made a kind of sarong that kept slipping off one of her shoulders. It was almost cute.

I carry a comb in my back pocket. I took it out and combed her hair back from her forehead and her temples. She was starting to look put together again, but there was still something missing. Something that was connected in my mind with Royce Merrill. That was crazy, though…

wasn’t it?

“Mike? What cane? What cane are you thinking about it?”

Then it came to me. “A candy cane,” I said. “The kind with stripes.”

From my pocket I took the two white ribbons. Their red edges looked almost raw in the uncertain light. “Like these.” I tied her hair back in two little ponytails. Now she had her ribbons; she had her black dog; the sunflowers had relocated a few feet north, but they were there.

Everything was more or less the way it was supposed to be.

Thunder blasted, somewhere close a tree fell, and the lights went out.

After five seconds of dark-gray shadows, they came on again. I carried Ki back to the kitchen, and when we passed the cellar door, something laughed behind it. I heard it; Ki did, too. I could see it in her eyes.

“Take care of me,” she said. “Take care of me cause I’m just a little guy. You promised.”

“I will.”

“I love you, Mike.”

“I love you, too, Ki.”

The kettle was huffing. I filled the cup to the halfway mark with hot water, then topped it up with milk, cooling it off and making it richer.

I took Kyra over to the couch. As we passed the dining-room table I glanced at the IBM typewriter and at the manuscript with the cross-word-puzzle book lying on top of it. Those things looked vaguely foolish and somehow sad, like gadgets that never worked very well and now do not work at all.

Lightning lit up the entire sky, scouring the room with purple light. In that glare the laboring trees looked like screaming fingers, and as the light raced across the sliding glass door to the deck I saw a woman standing behind us, by the woodstove. She was indeed wearing a straw hat, with a brim the size of a cartwheel.

“What do you mean, the river is almost in the sea?” Ki asked.

I sat down and handed her the cup. “Drink that up.”

“Why did the men hurt my mommy? Didn’t they want her to have a good time?”

“I guess not,” I said. I began to cry. I held her on my lap, wiping away the tears with the backs of my hands.

“You should have taken some sad-pills, too,” Ki said. She held out her cocoa. Her hair ribbons, which I had tied in big sloppy bows, bobbed.

“Here. Drink some.”

I drank some. From the north end of the house came another grinding, crackling crash. The low rumble of the generator stuttered and the house went gray again. Shadows raced across Ki’s small face.

“Hold on,” I told her. “Try not to be scared. Maybe the lights will come back.” A moment later they did, although now I could hear a hoarse, uneven note in the gennie’s roar and the flicker of the lights was much more noticeable.

“Tell me a story,” she said. “Tell me about Cinderbell.”

“Cinderella.”

“Yeah, her.”

“All right, but storyguys get paid.” I pursed my lips and made sipping sounds.

She held the cup out. The cocoa was sweet and good. The sensation of being watched was heavy and not sweet at all, but let them watch. Let them watch while they could.

“There was this pretty girl named Cinderella—”

“Once upon a time! That’s how it starts! That’s how they all start!”

“That’s right, I forgot. Once upon a time there was this pretty girl named Cinderella, who had two mean stepsisters. Their names were… do you remember?”

“Tammy Faye and Vanna.”

“Yeah, the Queens of Hairspray. And they made Cinderella do all the really unpleasant chores, like sweeping out the fireplace and cleaning up the dogpoop in the back yard. Now it just so happened that the noted rock band Oasis was going to play a gig at the palace, and although all the girls had been invited…”

I got as far as the part about the fairy godmother catching the mice and turning them into a Mercedes limousine before the Benadryl took effect.

It really was a medicine for sadness; when I looked down, Ki was fast asleep in the crook of my arm with her cocoa cup listing radically to port. I plucked it from her fingers and put it on the coffee-table, then brushed her drying hair off her forehead.

“Ki?”

Nothing. She’d gone to the land of Noddy-Blinky. It probably helped that her afternoon nap had ended almost before it got started. I picked her up and carried her down to the north bedroom, her feet bouncing limply in the air and the hem of the Harley shirt flipping around her knees. I put her on the bed and pulled the duvet up to her chin. Thunder boomed like artillery fire, but she didn’t even stir. Exhaustion, grief, Benadryl. . they had taken her deep, taken her beyond ghosts and sorrow, and that was good. I bent over and kissed her cheek, which had finally begun to cool. “I’ll take care of you,” I said. “I promised, and I will.” As if hearing me, Ki turned on her side, put the hand holding Strick-land under her jaw, and made a soft sighing sound. Her lashes were dark soot against her cheeks, in startling contrast to her light hair. Looking at her I felt myself swept by love, shaken by it the way one is shaken by a sickness. Take care of me, I’m just a little guy. “I will, Ki-bird,” I said. I went into the bathroom and began filling the tub, as I had once filled it in my sleep. She would sleep through it all if I could get enough warm water before the generator quit entirely. I wished I had a bath-toy to give her in case she did wake up, something like Wilhelm the Spouting Whale, but she’d have her dog, and she probably wouldn’t wake up, anyway. No freezing baptism under a handpump for Kyra. I was not cruel, and I was not crazy. I had only disposable razors in the medicine cabinet, no good for the other job ahead of me.

Not efficient enough. But one of the kitchen steak knives would do. If I filled the washbasin with water that was really hot, I wouldn’t even feel it. A letter T on each arm, the top bar drawn across the wrists-For a moment I came out of the zone. A voice—my own speaking as some combination of Jo and Mattie—screamed: What are you thinking about? Oh Mike, what in God’s name are you thinking about? Then the thunder boomed, the lights flickered, and the rain began to pour down again, driven by the wind. I went back into that place where everything was clear, my course indisputable. Let it all end-the sorrow, the hurt, the fear. I didn’t want to think anymore about how Mattie had danced with her toes on the Frisbee as if it were a spotlight. I didn’t want to be there when Kyra woke up, didn’t want to see the misery fill her eyes. I didn’t want to get through the night ahead, the day that was coming beyond it, or the day that was coming after that. They were all cars on the same old mystery train. Life was a sickness. I was going to give her a nice warm bath and cure her of it. I raised my arms. In the medicine cabinet mirror a murky figure—a Shape—raised its own in a kind of jocular greeting. It was me. It had been me all along, and that was all right. That was just fine.

I dropped to one knee and checked the water. It was coming in nice and warm. Good. Even if the generator quit now, it would be fine. The tub was an old one, a deep one. As I walked down to the kitchen to get the knife, I thought about climbing in with her after I had finished cutting my wrists in the hotter water of the basin. No, I decided. It might be misinterpreted by the people who would come here later on, people with nasty minds and nastier assumptions. The ones who’d come when the storm was over and the trees across the road cleared away. No, after her bath I would dry her and put her back in bed with Strickland in her hand. I’d sit across the room from her, in the rocking chair by the bedroom windows. I would spread some towels in my lap to keep as much of the blood off my pants as I could, and eventually I would go to sleep, too.

Bunter’s bell was still ringing. Much louder now. It was getting on my nerves, and if it kept on that way it might even wake the baby. I decided to pull it down and silence it for good. I crossed the room, and as I did a strong gust of air blew past me. It wasn’t a draft from the broken kitchen window; this was that warm subway-air again. It blew the %ugh $tuff crossword book onto the floor, but the paperweight on the manuscript kept the loose pages from following. As I looked in that direction, Bunter’s bell fell silent. A voice sighed across the dim room. Words I couldn’t make out. And what did they matter? What did one more manifestation—one more blast of hot air from the Great Beyond—matter? Thunder rolled and the sigh came again. This time, as the generator died and the lights went out, plunging the room into gray shadow, I got one word in the clear:

Nineteen.

I turned on my heels, making a nearly complete circle. I finished up looking across the shadowy room at the manuscript of My Childhood Friend. Suddenly the light broke. Understanding arrived. Not the crossword book. Not the phone book, either. My book. My manuscript.

I crossed to it, vaguely aware that the water had stopped running into the tub in the north-wing bathroom. When the generator died, the pump had quit. That was all right, it would be plenty deep enough already.

And warm. I would give Kyra her bath, but first there was something I had to do. I had to go down nineteen, and after that I just might have to go down ninety-two. And I could. I had completed just over a hundred and twenty pages of manuscript, so I could. I grabbed the battery-powered lantern from the top of the cabinet where I still kept several hundred actual vinyl records, clicked it on, and set it on the table. It cast a white circle of radiance on the manuscript—in the gloom of that afternoon it was as bright as a spotlight.

On page nineteen of My Childhood Friend, Tiffi Taylor—the call-girl who had re-invented herself as Regina Whiting—was sitting in her studio with Andy Drake, reliving the day that John Sanborn (the alias under which John Shackleford had been getting by) saved her three-year-old daughter, Karen. This is the passage I read as the thunder boomed and the rain slashed against the sliding door giving on the deck:

FRIEND, by Noonan/Pg. 19

over that way, I was sure of it,” she said, “but when I couldn’t see her anywhere, I went to look in the hot tub.” She lit a cigarette. “What I saw made me feel like screaming, Andy—Karen was underwater. All that was out was her hand… the nails were turning purple. After that… I guess I dived in, but I don’t remember; I was zoned out. Everything from then on is like a dream where stuff runs together in your mind. The yard-guy—Sanborn—shoved me aide and dived. His foot hit me in the throat and I couldn’t swallow for a week. He yanked up on Karen’s arm. I thought he’d pull it off her damn shoulder, but he got her. He got her.”

In the gloom, Drake saw she was weeping. “God. Oh God, I thought she was dead. I was sure she was.”

I knew at once, but laid my steno pad along the left margin of the manuscript so I could see it better. Reading down, as you’d read a vertical crossword-puzzle answer, the first letter of each line spelled the message which had been there almost since I began the book: owls under stud 0

Then, allowing for the indent next-to-last line from the bottom: owls under studio Bill Dean, my caretaker, is sitting behind the wheel of his truck. He has accomplished his two purposes in coming here-welcoming me back to the TR and warning me off Mattie Devore. Now he’s ready to go. He smiles at me, displaying those big false teeth, those Roebuckers. “If you get a chance, you ought to look r the owls,” he tells me. I ask him what Jo would have wanted with a couple of plastic owls and he replies that they keep the crows from shitting up the woodwork. I accept that, I have other things to think about, but still… “It was like she’d come down to do that errand special,” he says. It never crosses my mind—not then, at least that in Indian lklore, owls have another purpose.” they are said to keep evil spirits away. If Jo knew that plastic owls would scare the crows off, she would have known that. It was just the sort of inj3rmation she picked up and tucked away. My inquisitive wij. My brilliant scatterbrain.

Thunder rolled. Lightning ate at the clouds like spills of bright acid.

I stood by the dining-room table with the manuscript in my unsteady hands.

“Christ, Jo,” I whispered. “What did you find out?” And why didn’t you tell me? But I thought I knew the answer to that. She hadn’t told me because I was somehow like Max Devore; his great-grandfather and my own had shit in the same pit. It didn’t make any sense, but there it was.

And she hadn’t told her own brother, either. I took a weird kind of comfort from that. I began to leaf through the manuscript, my skin crawling. Andy Drake rarely frowned in Michael Noonan’s My Childhood Friend. He scowled instead, because there’s an owl in every scowl.

Before coming to Florida, John Shackleford had been living in Studio City, California. Drake’s first meeting with Regina Whiting occurred in her studio. Ray Garraty’s last-known address was the Studio Apartments in Key Largo. Regina Whiting’s best friend was Steffie Underwood.

Steffi’s husband was Towle Underwood—there was a good one, two for the price of one. Owls under studio. It was everywhere, on every page, just like the K-names in the telephone book. A kind of monument, this one built—I was sure of it—not by Sara Tidwell but by Johanna Arlen Noonan. My wife passing messages behind the guard’s back, praying with all her considerable heart that I would see and understand. On page ninety-two Shackleford was talking to Drake in the prison visitors’

room—sitting with his wrists between his knees, looking down at the chain running between his ankles, refusing to make eye-contact with Drake.

FRIEND, by Noonan/Pg. 92

only thing I got to say. Anything else, fuck, what good would it do?

Life’s a game, and I lost. You want me to tell you that I yanked some little kid out of the water, pulled her up, got her motor going again? I did, but not because I’m a hero or a saint…”

There was more but no need to read it. The message, owls under studio, ran down the margin just as it had on page nineteen. As it probably did on any number of other pages as well. I remembered how deliriously happy I had been to discover that the block had been dissolved and I could write again. It had been dissolved all right, but not because I’d finally beaten it or found a way around it. Jo had dissolved it. Jo had beaten it, and my continued career as a writer of second-rate thrillers had been the least of her concerns when she did it. As I stood there in the flicker-flash of lightning, feeling my unseen guests swirl around me in the unsteady air, I remembered Mrs. Moran, my first-grade teacher.

When your efforts to replicate the smooth curves of the Palmer Method alphabet on the blackboard began to flag and waver, she would put her large competent hand over yours and help you. So had Jo helped me. I riffled through the manuscript and saw the key words everywhere, sometimes placed so you could actually read them stacked on different lines, one above the other. How hard she had tried to tell me this. .

and I had no intention of doing anything else until I found out why. I dropped the manuscript back on the table, but before I could re-anchor it, a furious gust of freezing air blew past me, lifting the pages and scattering them everywhere in a cyclone. If that force could have ripped them to shreds, I’m sure that it would have. No./ it cried as I grabbed the lantern’s handle. No, finish the job./ Wind blew around my face in chill gusts—it was as if someone I couldn’t quite see was standing right in front of me and breathing in my face, retreating as I moved forward, huffing and puffing like the big bad wolf outside the houses of the three little pigs. I hung the lantern over my arm, held my hands out in front of me, and clapped them together sharply. The cold puffs in my face ceased. There was now only the random swirling air coming in through the partially plugged kitchen window. “She’s sleeping,” I said to what I knew was still there, silently watching. “There’s time.” I went out the back door and the wind took me at once, making me stagger sideways, almost knocking me over. And in the wavering trees I saw green faces, the faces of the dead. Devore’s was there, and Royce’s, and Son Tidwell’s. Most of all I saw Sara’s.

Everywhere Sara.

No! Go back! You don’t need no truck with no owls, sugar! Go back!

Finish the job! Do what you came Jr!

“I don’t know what I came for,” I said. “And until I find out, I’m not doing anything.”

The wind screamed as if in offense, and a huge branch split off the pine standing to the right of the house. It fell on top of my Chevrolet in a spray of water, denting the roof before rolling off on my side.

Clapping my hands out here would be every bit as useful as King Canute commanding the tide to turn. This was her world, not mine… and only the edge of it, at that. Every step closer to The Street and the lake would bring me closer to that world’s heart, where time was thin and spirits ruled. Oh dear God, what had happened to cause this? The path to Jo’s studio had turned into a creek. I got a dozen steps down it before a rock turned under my foot and I fell heavily on my side. Lightning zigged across the sky, there was the crack of another breaking branch, and then something was falling toward me. I put my hands up to shield my face and rolled to the right, off the path. The branch splashed to the ground just behind me, and I tumbled halfway down a slope that was slick with soaked needles. At last I was able to pull myself to my feet. The branch on the path was even bigger than the one which had landed on the roof of the car. If it had struck me, it likely would have bashed in my skull.

Go back! A hissing, spiteful wind through the trees.

Finish it! The slobbering, guttural voice of the lake slamming into the rocks and the bank below The Street.

Mind your business! That was the very house itself, groaning on its foundations. Mind your business and let me mind mine!

But Kyra was my business. Kyra was my daughter.

I picked up the lantern. The housing was cracked but the bulb glowed bright and steady—that was one for the home team. Bent over against the howling wind, hand raised to ward off more falling branches, I slipped and stumbled my way down the hill to my dead wife’s studio.

C bi;P T R At first the door wouldn’t open. The knob turned under my hand so I knew it wasn’t locked, but the rain seemed to have swelled the wood… or had something been shoved up against it? I drew back, crouched a little, and hit the door with my shoulder. This time there was some slight give.

It was her. Sara. Standing on the other side of the door and trying to hold it shut against me. How could she do that? How, in God’s name? She was a fucking ghost!

I thought of the BAMM CONSTRUCTION pickup… and as if thought were conjuration I could almost see it out there at the end of Lane Forty-two, parked by the highway. The old ladies’ sedan was behind it, and three or four other cars were now behind them. All of them with their windshield wipers flopping back and forth, their headlights cutting feeble cones through the downpour. They were lined up on the shoulder like cars at a yard sale. There was no yard sale here, only the old-timers sitting silently in their cars. Old-timers who were in the zone just like I was. Old-timers sending in the vibe.

She was drawing on them. Stealing from them. She’d done the same with Devore—and me too, of course. Many of the manifestations I’d experienced since coming back had likely been created from my own psychic energy. It was amusing when you thought of it. Or maybe “terrifying” was the word I was actually looking for. “Jo, help me,” I said in the pouring rain. Lightning flashed, turning the torrents a bright brief silver. “If you ever loved me, help me now.” I drew back and hit the door again. This time there was no resistance at all and I went hurtling in, catching my shin on the jamb and falling to my knees.

I held onto the lantern, though. There was a moment of silence. In it I felt forces and presences gathering themselves. In that moment nothing seemed to move, although behind me, in the woods Jo had loved to ramble—with me or without me—the rain continued to fall and the wind continued to howl, a merciless gardener pruning its way through the trees that were dead and almost dead, doing the work of ten gentler years in one turbulent hour. Then the door slammed shut and it began. I saw everything in the glow of the flashlight, which I had turned on without even realizing it, but at first I didn’t know exactly what I was seeing, other than the destruction by poltergeist of my wife’s beloved crafts and treasures. The framed afghan square tore itself off the wall and flew from one side of the studio to the other, the black oak frame breaking apart. The heads popped off the dolls poking out of the baby collages like champagne corks at a party. The hanging light-globe shattered, showering me with fragments of glass. A wind began to blow—a cold one—and was quickly joined and whirled into a cyclone by one which was warmer, almost hot. They rolled past me as if in imitation of the larger storm outside. The Sara Laughs head on the bookcase, the one which appeared to be constructed of toothpicks and lollipop sticks, exploded in a cloud of wood-splinters. The kayak paddle leaning against the wall rose into the air, rowed furiously at nothing, then launched itself at me like a spear. I threw myself flat on the green rag rug to avoid it, and felt bits of broken glass from the shattered light-globe cut into the palm of my hand as I came down. I felt something else, as well—a ridge of something beneath the rug. The paddle hit the far wall hard enough to split into two pieces.

Now the banjo my wife had never been able to master rose in the air, revolved twice, and played a bright rattle of notes that were out of tune but nonetheless unmistakable—wish I was in the land of cotton, old times there are not forgotten. The phrase ended with a vicious BLUNK!

that broke all five strings. The banjo whirled itself a third time, its bright steel fittings reflecting fishscale runs of light on the study walls, and then beat itself to death against the floor, the drum shattering and the tuning pegs snapping off like teeth. The sound of moving air began to-how do I express this? — toj3cus somehow, until it wasn’t the sound of air but the sound ofvoices—pant-ing, unearthly voices full of fury. They would have screamed if they’d had vocal cords to scream with. Dusty air swirled up in the beam of my flashlight, making helix shapes that danced together, then reeled apart again. For just a moment I heard Sara’s snarling, smoke-broken voice: “Git out, bitch/You git on out/This ain’t none o/yours—” And then a curious insubstantial thud, as if air had collided with air. This was followed by a rushing wind-tunnel shriek that I recognized: I’d heard it in the middle of the night. Jo was screaming. Sara was hurting her, Sara was punishing her for presuming to interfere, and Jo was screaming. “No!” I shouted, getting to my feet. “Leave her alone! Leave her be!” I advanced into the room, swinging the lantern in front of my face as if I could beat her away with it. Stoppered bottles stormed past me—some contained dried flowers, some carefully sectioned mushrooms, some woods-herbs.

They shattered against the far wall with a brittle xylophone sound. None of them struck me; it was as if an unseen hand guided them away. Then Jo’s rolltop desk rose into the air. It must have weighed at least four hundred pounds with its drawers loaded as they were, but it floated like a feather, nodding first one way and then dipping the other in the opposing currents of air. Jo screamed again, this time in anger rather than pain, and I staggered backward against the closed door with a feeling that I had been scooped hollow. Sara wasn’t the only one who could steal the energy of the living, it appeared. White semeny stuff ectoplasm, I guess—spilled from the desk’s pigeonholes in a dozen little streams, and the desk suddenly launched itself across the room. It flew almost too fast to follow with the eye. Anyone standing in front of it would have been smashed flat There was a head-splitting shriek of protest and agony—Sara this time, I knew it was—and then the desk struck the wall, breaking through it and letting in the rain and the wind. The rolltop snapped loose of its slot and hung like a jointed tongue. All the drawers shot out. Spools of thread, skeins of yarn, little flora/fauna identification books and woods guides, thimbles, notebooks, knitting needles, dried-up Magic Markers—Jo’s early remains, Ki might have called them. They flew everywhere like bones and bits of hair cruelly scattered from a disinterred coffin. “Stop it,” I croaked. “Stop it, both of you. That’s enough.” But there was no need to tell them. Except for the furious beat of the storm, I was alone in the ruins of my wife’s studio. The battle was over. At least for the time being.

I knelt and doubled up the green rag rug, carefully folding into it as much of the shattered glass from the light as I could. Beneath it was a trapdoor giving on a triangular storage area created by the slope of the land as it dropped toward the lake. The ridge I’d felt was one of the trap’s hinges. I had known about this area and had meant to check it for the owls. Then things began to happen and I’d forgotten. There was a recessed ring in the trapdoor. I grabbed it, ready for more resistance, but it swung up easily. The smell that wafted up froze me in my tracks.

Not damp decay, at least not at first, but Red—Jo’s favorite perfume.

It hung around me for a moment and then it was gone. What replaced it was the smell of rain, roots, and wet earth. Not pleasant, but I had smelled far worse down by the lake near that damned birch tree. I shone my light down three steep steps. I could see a squat shape that turned out to be an old toilet—I could vaguely remember Bill and Kenny Auster putting it under here back in 1990 or ’91. There were steel boxes—filing cabinet drawers, actually—wrapped in plastic and stacked up on pallets. Old records and papers. An eight-track tape player wrapped in a plastic bag. An old VCR next to it, in another one. And over in the corner-I sat down, hung my legs over, and felt something touch the ankle I had turned in the lake. I shone my light between my knees and for one moment saw a young black kid. Not the one drowned in the lake, though—this one was older and quite a lot bigger. Twelve, maybe fourteen. The drowned boy had been no more than eight. This one bared his teeth at me and hissed like a cat. There were no pupils in his eyes; like those of the boy in the lake, his eyes were entirely white, like the eyes of a statue. And he was shaking his head. Don’t come down here, white man. Let the dead rest in peace. “But you’re not at peace,” I said, and shone the light full on him. I had a momentary glimpse of a truly hideous thing. I could see through him, but I could also see into him: the rotting remains of his tongue in his mouth, his eyes in their sockets, his brain simmering like a spoiled egg in its case of skull.

Then he was gone, and there was nothing but one of those swirling dust-helixes. I went down, holding the lantern raised. Below it, nests of shadows rocked and seemed to reach upward.

The storage area (it was really no more than a glorified crawlspace) had been floored with wooden pallets, just to keep stuff off the ground. Now water ran beneath these in a steady river, and enough of the earth had eroded to make even crawling unsteady work. The smell of perfume was entirely gone. What had replaced it was a nasty riverbottom smell and—unlikely given the conditions, I know, but it was there—the faint, sullen smell of ash and fire. I saw what I’d come for almost at once.

Jo’s mail-order owls, the ones she had taken delivery of herself in November of 1993, were in the northeast corner, where there were only about two feet between the sloped pallet flooring and the underside of the studio. Gorry, baa they looked real, Bill had said, and Gorry if he wasn’t right: in the bright glow of the lantern they looked like birds first swaddled, then suffocated in clear plastic. Their eyes were bright wedding rings circling wide black pupils. Their plastic feathers were painted the dark green of pine nee-dies, their bellies a shade of dirty orange-white. I crawled toward them over the squelching, shifting pallets, the glow of the lantern bobbing back and forth between them, trying not to wonder if that boy was behind me, creeping in pursuit. When I got to the owls, I raised my head without thinking and thudded it against the insulation which ran beneath the studio floor. Thump once r yes, twice r no, asshole, I thought.

I hooked my fingers into the plastic which wrapped the owls and pulled them toward me. I wanted to be out of here. The sensation of water running just beneath me was strange and unpleasant. So was the smell of fire, which seemed stronger now in spite of the damp. Suppose the studio was burning? Suppose Sara had somehow set it alight? I’d roast down here even while the storm’s muddy runoff was soaking my legs and belly.

One of the owls stood on a plastic base, I saw—the better to set him on your deck or stoop to scare the crows, my dear—but the base the other should have been attached to was missing. I backed toward the trapdoor, holding the lantern in one hand and dragging the plastic sack of owls in the other, wincing each time thunder cannonaded over my head. I’d only gotten a little way when the damp tape holding the plastic gave way. The owl missing its base tilted slowly toward me, its black-gold eyes staring raptly into my own.

A swirl of air. A faint, comforting whiff of Red perfume. I pulled the owl out by the hornlike tufts growing from its forehead and turned it upside down. Where it had once been attached to its plastic base there were now only two pegs with a hollow space between them. Inside the hole was a small tin box that I recognized even before I reached into the owl’s belly and chivvied it out. I shone the lantern on its front, knowing what I’d see: JO’s NOTIONS, written in old-fashioned gilt script. She had found the box in an antiques barn somewhere.

I looked at it, my heart beating hard. Thunder boomed overhead. The trapdoor stood open, but I had forgotten about going up. I had forgotten about everything but the tin box I held in my hand, a box roughly the size of a cigar box but not quite as deep. I spread my hand over the cover and pulled it off.

There was a strew of folded papers lying on top of a pair of steno books, the wirebound ones I keep around for notes and character lists.

These had been rubber-banded together. On top of everything else was a shiny black square. Until I picked it up and held it close to the side of the lantern, I didn’t realize it was a photo negative.

Ghostly, reversed and faintly orange, I saw Jo in her gray two-piece bathing suit. She was standing on the swimming float with her hands behind her head.

“Jo,” I said, and then couldn’t say anything else. My throat had closed up with tears. I held the negative for a moment, not wanting to lose contact with it, then put it back in the box with the papers and steno books. This stuff was why she had come to Sara in July of 1994; to gather it up and hide it as well as she could. She had taken the owls off the deck (Frank had heard the door out there bang) and had carried them out here. I could almost see her prying the base off one owl and stuffing the tin box up its plastic wazoo, wrapping both of them in plastic, then dragging them down here, all while her brother sat smoking Marlboros and feeling the vibrations. The bad vibrations. I doubted if I would ever know all the reasons why she’d done it, or what her frame of mind had been… but she had almost certainly believed I’d find my own way down here eventually. Why else had she left the negative?

The loose papers were mostly photocopied press clippings from the Castle Rock Call and from the ekly News, the paper which had apparently preceded the Call. The dates were marked on each in my wife’s neat, firm hand. The oldest clipping was from 1865, and was headed ANOTHER HOME SAFE. The returnee was one Jared Devore, age thirty-two. Suddenly I understood one of the things that had puzzled me: the generations which didn’t seem to match up. A Sara Tidwell song came to mind as I crouched there on the pallets with my lantern shining down on that old-timey type. It was the ditty that went The oldjlks do it and the youngjlks, too / And the oldjlks show the youngjlksjust what to do…

By the time Sara and the Red-Tops showed up in Castle County and settled on what became known as Tidwell’s Meadow, Jared Devore would have been sixty-seven or — eight. Old but still hale. A veteran of the Civil War.

The sort of older man younger men might look up to. And Sara’s song was right—the old folks show the young folks just what to do.

What exactly had they done?

The clippings about Sara and the Red-Tops didn’t tell. I only skimmed them, anyway, but the overall tone shook me, just the same. I’d describe it as unfailing genial contempt. The Red-Tops were “our Southern blackbirds” and “our rhythmic darkies.” They were “full of dusky good-nature.” Sara herself was “a marvelous figure of a Negro woman with broad nose, full lips, and noble brow” who “fascinated men-folk and women-folk alike with her animal high spirits, flashing smile, and raucous laugh.”

They were, God keep us and save us, reviews. Good ones, if you didn’t mind being called full of dusky good-nature.

I shuffled through them quickly, looking for anything about the circumstances under which “our Southern blackbirds” had left. I found nothing. What I found instead was a clipping from the Call marked July 19th (go down nineteen, I thought), 1933. The headline read WTERA GUIDE, CARETAKER, CANNOT SAVE DAUGHTER. According to the story, Fred Dean had been fighting the wildfires in the eastern part of the TR with two hundred other men when the wind had suddenly changed, menacing the north end of the lake, which had previously been considered safe. At that time a great many local people had kept fishing and hunting camps up there (this much I knew myself). The community had had a general store and an actual name, Halo Bay. Fred’s wife, Hilda, was there with the Dean twins, William and Carla, age three, while her husband was off eating smoke. A good many other wives and kids were in Halo Bay, as well.

The fires had come fast when the wind changed, the paper said’like marching explosions.” They }jumped the only firebreak the men had left in that direction and headed for the far end of the lake. At Halo Bay there were no men to take charge, and apparently no women able or willing to do so. They panicked instead, racing to load their cars with children and camp possessions, clogging the one road out with their vehicles.

Eventually one of the old cars or trucks broke down and as the fires roared closer, running through woods that hadn’t seen rain since late April, the women who’d waited found their way out blocked.

The volunteer firefighters came to the rescue in time, but when Fred Dean got to his wife, one of a party of women trying to push a balky stalled Ford coupe out of the road, he made a terrible discovery. Billy lay on the floor in the back of the car, fast asleep, but Carla was missing. Hilda had gotten them both in, all right—they had been on the back seat, holding hands just as they always did. But at some point, after her brother had crawled onto the floor and dozed off and while Hilda was stuffing a few last items into the trunk, Carla must have remembered a toy or a doll and returned to the cottage to get it. While she was doing that, her mother had gotten into their old Desoto and driven away without rechecking the babies. Carla Dean was either still in the cottage at Halo Bay or making her way up the road on foot. Either way the fires would run her down.

The road was too narrow to get a vehicle turned around and too blocked to get one of those pointed in the right direction through the crush. So Fred Dean, hero that he was, set off on the run toward the smoke-blackened horizon, where bright ribbons of orange had already begun to shine through. The wind-driven fire had crowned and raced to meet him like a lover.

I knelt on the pallets, reading this by the glow of my lantern, and all at once the smell of fire and burning intensified. I coughed… and then the cough was choked off by the iron taste of water in my mouth and throat. Once again, this time kneeling in the storage area beneath my wife’s studio, I felt as if I were drowning. Once again I leaned forward and retched up nothing but a little spit.

I turned and saw the lake. The loons were screaming on its hazy surface, making their way toward me in a line, beating their wings against the water as they came. The blue of the sky had been blotted out. The air smelled of charcoal and gunpowder. Ash had begun to sift down from the sky. The eastern verge of Dark Score was in flames, and I could hear occasional muffled reports as hollow trees exploded. They sounded like depth charges.

I looked down, wanting to break free of this vision, knowing that in another moment or two it wouldn’t be anything so distant as a vision but as real as the trip Kyra and I had made to the Fryeburg Fair. Instead of a plastic owl with gold-ringed eyes, I was looking at a child with bright blue ones. She was sitting on a picnic table, holding out her chubby arms and crying. I saw her as clearly as I saw my own face in the mirror each morning when I shaved. I saw she was about Kyra’s age but much plumper, and her hair is black instead of blonde. Her hair is the shade her brother’s will remain until it finally begins to go gray in the impossibly distant summer of 1998, a year she will never see unless someone gets her out of this hell. She wears a white dress and red knee-stockings and she holds her arms out to me, calling Daddy, Daddy. I start toward her and then there is a blast of organized heat that tears me apart for a moment—I am the ghost here, I realize, and Fred Dean has just run right through me. Daddy, she cries, but to him, not me. Daddy!

and she hugs him, unmindful of the soot smearing her white silk dress and her chubby face as he kisses her and more soot begins to fall and the loons beat their way in toward shore, seeming to weep in shrill lamentation. Daddy the fire is coming! she cries as he scoops her into his arms. I know, be brave, he says. We’re gonna be all right, sugarplum, but you have to be brave. The fire isn’t just coming,’ it has come. The entire east end of Halo Bay is inflames and now they’re moving this way, eating one by one the little cabins where the men like to lay up drunk in hunting season and ice-fishing season. Behind A1 Leroux’s, the washing Marguerite hung out that morning is in flames, pants and dresses and underwear burning on lines which are themselves strings of fire. Leaves and bark shower down,’ a burning ember touches Carla’s neck and she shrieks with pain. Fred slaps it away as he carries her down the slope of land to the water. Don’t do it! I scream. I know all this is beyond my power to change, but I scream at him anyway, try to change it anyway. Fight it! For Christ’s sake, fight it! Daddy, who is that man?

Carla asks, and points at me as the green-shingled roof of the Dean place catches fire. Fred glances toward where she is pointing, and in his face I see a spasm of guilt. He knows what he’s doing, that’s the terrible thing—4way down deep he knows exactly what he is doing here at Halo Bay where The Street ends. He knows and he’s ajaid that someone will witness his work. But he sees nothing. Or does he? There is a momenta doubtful widening of the eyes as if he does spy something—a dancing helix of air, perhaps. Or does heidel me? Is that it? Does he jel a momentary cold draft in all this heat? One that jeh like protest ing hands, hands that would restrain if they only had substance? Then he looks away,’ then he is wading into the water beside the Deans’ stub of a dock. Fred! I scream. For God’s sake, man, look at her! Do you think your wife put her in a white silk dress by accident? Is that anyone’s idea of a play-dress? Daddy, why are we going in the water? she asks. To get away from the fire, sugarplum. Daddy, I can’t swim! You won’t have to, he replies, and what a chill l]gel at that/Because it’s no lie—she won’t have to swim, not now, not ever. And at least Fred’s way will be more merciful than Normal Auster’s when Normal’s turn comes—more merciful than the squalling handpump, the gallons of eezing water. Her white dress floats around her like a lily. Her red stockings shimmer m the water. She hugs his neck tightly and now they are among the fleeing loons,’ the loons spank the water with their powerful wings, churning up curds of jam and staring at the man and the girl with their distraught red eyes. The air is heavy with smoke and the sky is gone. I stagger after them, wading—I can Jel the cold of the water, although I don’t splash and leave no wake. The eastern and northern edges of the lake are both on fire now there is a burning crescent around us as Fred Dean wades deeper with his daughter, carrying her as if to some baptismal rite. And still he tells himself he is trying to save her, only to save her, just as all her lij Hilda will tell herself that the child just wandered back to the cottage to look fir a toy, that she was not left behind on purpose, left in her white dress and red stockings to be JSUND by her father, who once did something unspeakable. This is the past, this is the Land of Ago, and here the sins of the fathers are visited on the children, even unto the seventh generation, which is not yet. He takes her deeper and she begins to scream. Her screams mingle with the screams of the loons until he stops the sound with a kiss upon her terrified mouth. “Love you, Daddy loves his sugarplum,” he says, and then lowers her. It is to be a full-immersion baptism, then, except there is no shorebank choir singing “Shall V Gather at the River” and no one shouting Hallelujah! and he is not letting her come back up. She struggles furiously in the white bloom of her sacrificial dress, and after a moment he cannot bear to watch her,’ he looks across the lake instead, to the west where the fire hasn’t yet touched (and never will), to the west where skies are still blue. Ash sifts around him like black rain and the tears b I UI–IEN IXLPQKA pour out of his eyes and as she struggles furiously beneath his hands, trying to free herself)qom his drowning grip, he tells himself It was an accident, just a terrible accident, I took her out in the lake because it was the only place I could take her, the only place left, and she panicked, she started to struggle, she was all wet and all slippery and I lost my good hold on her and then I lost any hold on her and then-I]rget I’m a ghost. I scream “Kia/ Hold on, Ki!” and dive. I reach her, I see her terrified face, her bulging blue eyes, her rosebud of a mouth which is trailing a silver line of bubbles toward the surface where Fred stands in water up to his neck, holding her down while he tells himself over and over that he was trying to save her, it was the only way, he was trying to save her, it was the only way. I reach for her, again and again I reach r her, my child, my daughter, my Kia (they are all Kia, the boys as well as the girls, all my daughter), and each time my arms go through her. Worse—oh, far worse—is that now she is reaching)$r me, her dappled arms floating out, begging Jr rescue. Her groping hands melt through mine. I cannot touch, because now I am the ghost. I am the ghost and as her struggles weaken I realize that I can’t I can’t oh I couldn’t breathe—I was drowning. I doubled over, opened my mouth, and this time a great spew of lake-water came out, soaking the plastic owl which lay on the pallet by my knees. I hugged the jo’s NOTIONS box to my chest, not wanting the contents to get wet, and the movement triggered another retch. This time cold water poured from my nose as well as my mouth. I dragged in a deep breath, then coughed it out. “This has got to end,” I said, but of course this was the end, one way or the other.

Because Kyra was last. I climbed up the steps to the studio and sat on the littered floor to get my breath. Outside, the thunder boomed and the rain fell, but I thought the storm had passed its peak of fury. Or maybe I only hoped. I rested with my legs hanging down through the trapthere were no more ghosts here to touch my ankles, I don’t know how I knew that but I did-and stripped off the rubber bands holding the steno notebooks together. I opened the first one, paged through it, and saw it was almost filled with Jo’s handwriting and a number of folded typed sheets (Courier type, of course), single-spaced: the fruit of all those clandestine trips down to the TR during 1993 and 1994. Fragmentary notes, for the most part, and transcriptions of tapes which might still be down below me in the storage space somewhere. Tucked away with the VCR or the eight-track player, perhaps. But I didn’t need them. When the time came—if the time came—I was sure I’d find most of the story here. What had happened, who had done it, how it was covered up. Right now I didn’t care. Right now I only wanted to make sure that Kyra was safe and stayed safe. There was only one way to do that. Lye stille. I attempted to slip the rubber bands around the steno books again, and the one I hadn’t looked at slipped out of my wet hand and fell to the floor. A torn slip of green paper fell out. I picked it up and saw this:

For a moment I came out of that strange and heightened awareness I’d been living in; the world fell back into its accustomed dimensions. But the colors were all too strong, somehow, objects too emphatically present. I felt like a battlefield soldier suddenly illuminated by a ghastly white flare, one that shows everything. My father’s people had come from The Neck, I had been right about that much; my great-grandfather according to this was James Noonan, and he had never shit in the same pit as Jared Devore. Max Devore had either been lying when he said that to Mattie… or misinformed… or simply confused, the way folks often get confused when they reach their eighties. Even a fellow like Devore, who had stayed mostly sharp, wouldn’t have been exempt from the occasional nick in his edge. And he hadn’t been that far off at that. Because, according to this little scratch of a chart, my great-grandfather had had an older sister, Bridget. And Bridget had married—Benton Auster. My finger dropped down a line, to Harry Auster. Born of Benton and Bridget Noonan Auster in the year 1885. “Christ Jesus,” I whispered. “Kenny Auster’s grandfather was my granduncle. And he was one of them. Whatever they did, Harry Auster was one of them. That’s the connection.” I thought of Kyra with sudden sharp terror. She had been up at the house by herself for nearly an hour. How could I have been so stupid? Anyone could have come in while I was under the studio. Sara could have used anyone to-I realized that wasn’t true. The murderers and the child victims had all been linked by blood, and now that blood had thinned, that river had almost reached the sea. There was Bill Dean, but he was staying well away from Sara Laughs.

There was Kenny Auster, but Kenny had taken himself and his family off to Taxachusetts. And Ki’s closest blood relations—mother, father, grandfather—were all dead. Only I was left. Only I was blood. Only I could do it. Unless-I bolted back up to the house as fast as I could, slipping and sliding my way along the soaked path, desperate to make sure she was all right. I didn’t think Sara could hurt Kyra herself, no matter how much of that old-timer vibe she had to draw on… but what if I was wrong? What if I was wrong?

Ki lay fast asleep just as I had left her, on her side with the filthy little stuffed dog clutched under her jaw. It had put a smudge on her neck but I hadn’t the heart to take it away from her. Beyond her and to the left, through the open bathroom door, I could hear the steadyplink-plonk-plink of water falling from the faucet and into the tub. Cool air blew around me in a silky twist, caressing my cheeks, sending a not unpleasurable shiver up my back. In the living room Bunter’s bell gave a dim little shake. Water’s still warm, sugar, Sara whispered. Be her friend, be her daddy. Go on, now. Do what I want. Do what we both want. And I did want to, which had to be why Jo at first tried to keep me away from the TR and from Sara Laughs. Why she’d made a secret of her possible pregnancy, as well. It was as if I had discovered a vampire inside me, a creature with no interest in what it thought of as talk-show conscience and op-ed page morality. A part that wanted only to take Ki into the bathroom and dunk her into that tub of warm water and hold her under, watching the red-edged white ribbons shimmer the way Carla Dean’s white dress and red stockings had shimmered while the woods burned all around her and her father. A part of me would be more than glad to pay the last installment on that old bill. “Dear God,” I muttered, and wiped my face with a shaking hand. “She knows so many tricks. And she’s so fucking strong.” The bathroom door tried to swing shut against me before I could go through, but I pushed it open against hardly any resistance. The medicine-cabinet door banged back, and the glass shattered against the wall. The stuff inside flew out at me, but it wasn’t a very dangerous attack; this time most of the missiles consisted of toothpaste tubes, toothbrushes, plastic bottles, and a few old Vick’s inhalers. Faint, very faint, I could hear her shouting in frustration as I yanked the plug at the bottom of the tub and let the water start gurgling out. There had been enough drowning on the TR for one century, by God. And yet, for a moment I felt an incredibly strong urge to put the plug back in while the water was still deep enough to do the job. Instead I tore it off its chain and threw it down the hall. The medicine-cabinet door clapped shut again and the rest of the glass fell out. “How many have you had?” I asked her. “How many besides Carla Dean and Kerry Auster and our Kia? Two? Three? Five? How many do you need before you can rest?” All of them! the answer shot back. It wasn’t just Sara’s voice, either; it was my own, as well. She’d gotten into me, had snuck in by way of the basement like a burglar… and already I was thinking that even if the tub was empty and the water-pump temporarily dead, there was always the lake. All of them! the voice cried again. All of them, sugar! Of course—only all of them would do. Until then there would be no rest for Sara Laughs. “I’ll help you to rest,” I said. “That I promise.” The last of the water swirled away… but there was always the lake, always the lake if I changed my mind. I left the bathroom and looked in on Ki again. She hadn’t moved, the sensation that Sara was in here with me had gone, Bunter’s bell was quiet… and yet I felt uneasy, unwilling to leave her alone. I had to, though, if I was to finish my work, and I would do well not to linger. County and State cops would be along eventually, storm or no storm, downed trees or no downed trees.

Yes, but… I stepped into the hall and looked uneasily around. Thunder boomed, but it was losing some of its urgency. So was the wind. What wasn’t fading was the sense of something watching me, something that was not-Sara. I stood where I was a moment or two longer, trying to tell myself it was just the sizzle of my overcooked nerves, then walked down the hall to the entry. I opened the door to the stoop… then looked around again sharply, as if expecting to see someone or something lurking behind the far end of the bookcase. A Shape, perhaps. Something that still wanted its dust-catcher. But I was the only Shape left, at least in this part of the world, and the only movement I saw was ripple-shadows thrown by the rain rolling down the windows. It was still coming down hard enough to redrench me as I crossed my stoop to the driveway, but I paid no attention. I had just been with a little girl when she drowned, had damned near drowned myself not so long ago, and the rain wasn’t going to stop me from doing what I had to do. I picked up the fallen branch which had dented the roof of my car, tossed it aside, and opened the Chevy’s rear door. The things I’d bought at Slips ’n Greens were still sitting on the back seat, still tucked into the cloth carry-handle bag Lila Proulx had given me. The trowel and the pruning knife were visible, but the third item was in a plastic sack. nt this one in a special bag? Lila had asked me. Always sa]b, never sorry.

And later, as I was leaving, she had spoken of Kenny’s dog Blueberry chasing seagulls and had given out with a big, hearty laugh. Her eyes hadn’t laughed, though. Maybe that’s how you tell the Martians from the Earthlings—the Martians can never laugh with their eyes. I saw Rommie and George’s present lying on the front seat: the Stenomask I’d at first mistaken for Devore’s oxygen mask. The boys in the basement spoke up then—murmured, at least—and I leaned over the seat to grab the mask by its elastic strap without the slightest idea of why I was doing so. I dropped it into the carry-bag, slammed the car door, then started down the railroad-tie steps to the lake. On the way I paused to duck under the deck, where we had always kept a few tools.

There was no pick, but I grabbed a spade that looked up to a piece of gravedigging. Then, for what I thought would be the last time, I followed the course of my dream down to The Street. I didn’t need Jo to show me the spot; the Green Lady had been pointing to it all along. Even had she not been, and even if Sara Tidwell did not still stink to the heavens, I think I would have known. I think I would have been led there by my own haunted heart.

There was a man standing between me and the place where the gray forehead of rock guarded the path, and as I paused on the last railroad tie, he hailed me in a rasping voice that I knew all too well.

“Say there, whoremaster, where’s your whore?”

He stood on The Street in the pouring rain, but his cutters’

outfit—green flannel pants, checked wool shirt—and his faded blue Union Army cap were dry, because the rain was falling through him rather than on him. He looked solid but he was no more real than Sara herself.

I reminded myself of this as I stepped down onto the path to face him, but my heart continued to speed up, thudding in my chest like a padded hammer.

He was dressed in Jared Devore’s clothes, but this wasn’t Jared Devore.

This was Jared’s great-grandson Max, who had begun his career with an act of sled-theft and ended it in suicide… but not before arranging for the murder of his daughter-in-law, who’d had the temerity to refuse him what he had so dearly wanted.

I started toward him and he moved to the center of the path to block me.

I could feel the cold baking off him. I am saying exactly what I mean, expressing what I remember as clearly as I can: I could feel the cold baking off him. And yes, it was Max Devore all right, but got up like a logger at a costume party and looking the way he must have around the time his son Lance was born. Old but hale. The sort of man younger men might well look up to. And now, as if the thought had called them, I could see the rest shimmer into faint being behind him, standing in a line across the path. These were the ones who had been with Jared at the Fryeburg Fair, and now I knew who some of them were. Fred Dean, of course, only nineteen years old in ’01, the drowning of his daughter still over thirty years away. And the one who had reminded me of myself was Harry Auster, the firstborn of my great-grandfather’s sister. He would have been sixteen, barely old enough to raise a fuzz but old enough to work in the woods with Jared.

Old enough to shit in the same pit as Jared. To mistake Jared’s poison for wisdom. One of the others twisted his head and squinted at the same time—I’d seen that tic before. Where? Then it came to me: in the Lake-view General. This young man was the late Royce Merrill’s father.

The others I didn’t know. Nor did I care to.

“You ain’t a-passing by us,” Devore said. He held up both hands. “Don’t even think about trying. Am I right, boys?”

They murmured growling agreement—the sort you could hear coming from any present-day gang of headbangers or taggers, I imagine but their voices were distant; actually more sad than menacing. There was some substance to the man in Jared Devore’s clothes, perhaps because in life he had been a man of enormous vitality, perhaps because he was so recently dead, but the others were little more than projected images.

I started forward, moving into that baking cold, moving into the smell of him—the same invalid odors which had surrounded him when I’d met him here before.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he cried.

“For a constitutional,” I said. “And no law against it. The Street’s the place where good pups and vile dogs can walk side-by-side. You said so yourself.”

“You don’t understand,” Max-Jared said. “You never will. You’re not of that world. That was our world.”

I stopped, looking at him curiously. Time was short, I wanted to be done with this… but I had to know, and I thought Devore was ready to tell me.

“Make me understand,” I said. “Convince me that any world was your world.” I looked at him, then at the flickering, translucent figures behind him, gauze flesh heaped on shining bones. “Tell me what you did.”

“It was all different then,” Devore said. “When you come down here, Noonan, you might walk all three miles north to Halo Bay and see only a dozen people on The Street. After Labor Day you might not see any one at all. This side of the lake you have to walk through the bushes that are growing up wild and around the fallen trees—there’ll be even more of em after this storm—and even a deadfall or two because nowadays the townfolk don’t club together to keep it neat the way they used to. But in our time—! The woods were bigger then, Noonan, distances were farther to go, and neighboring meant something. Life itself, often enough. Back then this really was a street. Can you see?”

I could. If I looked through the phantom shapes of Fred Dean and Harry Auster and the others, I could. They weren’t just ghosts; they were shimmerglass windows on another age. I saw a summer afternoon in the year of… 1898? Perhaps 1902? 1907?

Doesn’t matter. This is a period when all time seems the same, as if time had stopped. This is a time the old-timers remember as a kind of golden age. It is the Land of Ago, the Kingdom of lyhen-I-Was-a-Boy. The sun washes everything with the fine gold light of endless late July; the lake is as blue as a dream, netted with a billion sparks of reflected light. And The Street! It is as smoothly grassed as a lawn and as broad as a boulevard. It is a boulevard, I see, a place where the community fully realizes itself. It is the main conduit of communication, the chief cable in a township criss-crossed with them. I’djblt the existence of these cables all along—even when Jo was alive I jlt them under the surface, and here is theirpoint of origin. Folks promenade on The Street, all up and down the east side of Dark Score Lake they promenade in little groups, laughing and conversing under a cloud-stacked summer sky, and this is where the cables all begin. I look and realize how wrong I have been to think of them as Martians, as cruel and calculating aliens. East of their sun nypromenade looms the darkness of the woods, glades and hollows where any miserable thing may await, from a hot lopped off in a logging accident to a birth gone wrong and a young mother dead bejre the doctor can arrive from Castle Rock in his buggy.

These are people with no electricity, no phones, no County Rescue Unit, no one to rely upon but each other and a God some of them have already begun to mistrust. They live in the woods and the shadows of the woods, but on fine summer asoernoons they come to the edge of the lake. They come to The Street and look in each other’s faces and laugh together and then they are truly on the TR—in what I have come to think of as the zone. They are not Martians,’ they are little lives dwelling on the edge of the dark, that’s all.

I see summerpeoplefrom Warrington’s, the men dressed in whiteflanneh, two women in long tennis dresses still carrying their rackets. A jllow riding a tricycle with an enormous ont wheel weaves shakily among them.

The party of summer j$1k has stopped to talk with a group of young men from town; the)llows from away want to know if they can play in the townies’ baseball game at IVAR-rington’s on Tuesday night. Ben Merrill, Royce’s father-to-be, says Ayuh, but we won’t go easy on ya just cause you’re from N’Yawk. The young men laugh; so do the tennis girls.

A little farther on, two boys areplaying catch with the sort of raw homemade baseball that is known as a horsey. Beyond them is a convention of young mothers, talking earnestly of their babies, all sajly prammed and gathered in their own group. Men in overalls discuss weather and crops, politics and crops, taxes and crops. A teacher from the Consolidated High sits on the gray stone]$rehead I know so well, patiently tutoring a sullen boy who wants to be somewhere else and doing anything else. I think the boy will grow up to be Buddyjellison’s father. Horn broken—watch for finger, I think.

All along The Street jlks are fishing, and they are catching plenty; the lake fairly teems with bass and trout andpickerel. An artist-another summerjllow, judging from his smock and nancy berethas set up his easel and is painting the mountains while two ladies watch respectfully. A giggle of girls passes, whispering about boys and clothes and school.

There is beauty here, and peace. Devore’ s right to say this is a world I never knew. It’s “Beautiful,” I said, pulling myself back with an effort. “Yes, I see that. But what’s your point?”

“My point?” Devote looked almost comically surprised. “She thought she could walk there like everyone else, that’s the fucking point! She thought she could walk there like a white gal! Her and her big teeth and her big tits and her snotty looks. She thought she was something special, but we taught her different. She tried to walk me down and when she couldn’t do that she put her filthy hands on me and tumped me over.

But that was all right; we taught her her manners. Didn’t we, boys?”

They growled agreement, but I thought some of them—young Harry Auster, for one—looked sick.

“We taught her her place,” Devore said. “We taught her she wasn’t nothing but a nigger. This is the word he uses over and over again when they are in the woods that summer, the summer of1901, the summer that Sara and the Red-bps become the musical act to see in this part of the world. She and her brother and their whole nigger family have been invited to Warrington ’ s to play J$r the summer people,’ they have been rid on champagne and ersters. . or so says Jared Devore to his little school of devotedllowers as they eat their own plain lunches of bread and meat and salted cucumbers out of lard-buckets given to them by their mothers (none of the young men are married, although Oren Peebles is engaged).

It it isn’t her growing renown that upsetsjared Devore. It isn’t the fact that she has been to Warrington’s; it don’t cross his eyes none that she and that brother of hers have actually sat down and eaten with white j$1ks, taken bread join the same bowl as them with their blacknigger fingers. The jolks at Warrington’s are flatlanders, after all, and Devore tells the silent, attentive young men that he’s heard that in places like New Irk and Chicago white women sometimes even fuck blackniggers. Naw! Harry Auster says, looking around nervously, as if he expected a w white women to come tripping through the woods way out here on Bowie Ridge. No white woman’d fuck a nigger! Shoot a pickle! Devore only gives him a look, the kind that says When you’re my age. Besides, he doesn’t care what goes on in New York and Chicago; he saw all the flatland he wanted to during the Civil War… and, he will tell you, he never jsught that war to free the damned slaves. They can keep slaves down there in the land of cotton until the end of the eternity, as far asjared Lancelot Devore is concerned. No, he J$ught in the war to teach those cracker sons of bitches south of Mason and Dixon that you don’t pull out of the game just because you don’t like some of the rules. He went down to scratch the scab off the end of old Johnny Reb’s nose.

Tried to leave the United States of America, they had/The Lord/ No, he doesn’t care about slaves and he doesn’t care about the land of cotton and he doesn’t care about blackniggers who sing dirty songs and then get treated to champagne and ersters (]ared always says oysters in just that sarcastic way) in payment jor their smut. He doesn’t care about anything so long as they keep in their place and let him keep in his. But she won’t do it. The uppity bitch will not do it. She has been warned to stay off The Street, but she will not listen. She goes anyway, walking along in her white dress just as if there was a white person inside it, sometimes with her son, who has a blacknigger African name and no daddy—his daddy probably just spent the one night with his mommy in a haystack somewhere down Alabama and now she walks around with the get of that just as bold as a brass monkey. She walks The Street as if she has a right to be there, even though not a soul will talk to her-“But that’s not true, is it?” I asked Devore. “That’s what really stuck in old great-granddaddy’s craw, wasn’t it? They did talk to her. She had a way about her—that laugh, maybe.

Men talked to her about crops and the women showed off their babies. In fact they gave her their babies to hold and when she laughed down at them, they laughed back up at her. The girls asked her advice about boys. The boys… they just looked. But how they looked, huh? They filled up their eyes, and I expect most of them thought about her when they went out to the privy and filled up their palms.” Devore glowered.

He was aging in front of me, the lines drawing themselves deeper and deeper into his face; he was becoming the man who had knocked me into the lake because he couldn’t bear to be crossed. And as he grew older he began to fade. “That was what Jared hated most of all, wasn’t it? That they didn’t turn aside, didn’t turn away. She walked on The Street and no one treated her like a nigger. They treated her like a neighbor.” I was in the zone, deeper in than I’d ever been, down where the town’s unconscious seemed to run like a buried river. I could drink from that river while I was in the zone, could fill my mouth and throat and belly with its cold minerally taste. All that summer Devote had talked to them. They were more than his crew, they were his boys: Fred and Harry and Ben and Oren and George Armbruster and Draper Finney, who would break his neck and drown the next summer trying to dive into Eades Quarry while he was drunk. Only it was the sort of accident that’s kind of on purpose. Draper Finney drank a lot between July of I 90 I and August of 1902, because it was the only way he could sleep. The only way he could get the hand out of his mind, that hand sticking straight out of the water, clenching and unclenching until you wanted to scream Won’t it stop, won’t it ever stop doing that. All summer long Jared Devore filled their ears with nigger bitch and uppity bitch. All summer long he told them about their responsibility as men, their duty to keep the community pure, and how they must see what others didn’t and do what others wouldn’t. It was a Sunday afternoon in August, a time when traffic along The Street dropped steeply. Later on, by five or so, things would begin to pick up again, and from six to sunset the broad path along the lake would be thronged. But three in the afternoon was Low tide. The Methodists were back in session over in Harlow for their afternoon Song Service; at Warrington’s the assembled company of vacationing flat-landers was sitting down to a heavy mid-afternoon Sabbath meal of roast chicken or ham; all over the township families were addressing their own Sunday dinners. Those who had already finished were snoozing through the heat of the day—in a hammock, wherever possible. Sara liked this quiet time. Loved it, really. She had spent a great deal of her life on carny midways and in smoky gin-joints, shouting out her songs in order to be heard above the voices of redfaced, unruly drunks, and while part of her loved the excitement and unpredictability of that life, part of her loved the serenity of this one, too. The peace of these walks. She wasn’t getting any younger, after all; she had a kid who had now left purt near all his babyhood behind him. On that particular Sunday she must have thought The Street almost too quiet. She walked a mile south from the meadow without seeing a soul even Kito was gone by then, having stopped off to pick berries. It was as if the whole township were deserted. She knows there’s an Eastern Star supper in Kashwakamak, of course, has even contributed a mushroom pie to it because she has made friends of some of the Eastern Star ladies. They’ll all be down there getting ready. What she doesn’t know is that today is also Dedication Day jr the new Grace Baptist Church, the first real church ever to be built on the TR. A slug of locals have gone, heathen as well as Baptist. Faintly, jqom the other side of the lake, she can hear the Methodists singing. The sound is sweet and faint and beautiful,’ distance and echo has tuned every sour voice. She isn’t aware of the men—most of them very young men, the kind who under ordinary circumstances dare only look at her from the corners of their eyes—until the oldest one among them speaks. “llnow, a black whore in a white dress and a red belt! Damn if that ain’t just a little too much colorjet lakeside.

What’s wrong with you, whore? Can’t you take a hint?” She turns toward him, ajaid but not showing it. She has lived thirty-six years on this earth, has known what a man has and where he wants to put it since she was eleven, and she understands that when men are together like this and full of redeye (she can smell it), they give up thinkingjr themselves and turn into a pack of dogs. If you show fiar they will fall on you like dogs and likely tear you apart like dogs. Also, they have been layingjr her. There can be no other explanation jr them turning up like this. “What hint is that, sugar?” she asks, standing her ground. Where is everyone? Where can they all be? God damn! Across the lake, the Methodists have moved on to”?just and Obey,” a droner if there ever was one. “That you ain’t got no business walking where the white Jblks walk,” Harry Auster says. His adolescent voice breaks into a kind of mouse-squeak on the last word and she laughs. She knows how unwise that is, but she can’t help it—she’s never been able to help her laughter, any more than she’s ever been able to help the way men like this look at her breasts and bottom. Blame it on God. “Why, I walk where I do,” she says. “I was told this was common ground, ain’t nobody got a right to keep me out. Ain’t nobody has. You seen em doin it?”

“IOU see us now,” George Armbruster says, trying to sound tough. Sara looks at him with a species of kindly contempt that makes George shrivel up inside. His cheeks glow hot red. “Son,” she says, “you only come out now because the decent folks is all somewheres else. Why do you want to let this old filla tell you what to do? Act decent and let a lady walk.” I see it all. As Devore fades and fades, at last becoming nothing but eyes under a blue cap in the rainy afternoon (through him I can see the shattered remains of my swimming float washing against the embankment), I see it all. I see her as she starts jrward, walking straight at Devore. If she stands here jawing with them, something bad is going to happen. She Jels it, and she never questions her tidings. And if she walks at any of the others, ole massa’ll bore in on her from the side, pulling the rest after. Ole massa in the little ole blue cap is the wheeldog, the one she must face down. She can do it, too. He’s strong, strong enough to make these boys one creature, his creature, at least jr the time being, but he doesn’t have herjrce, her determination, her energy. In a way she welcomes this conjontation.

Reg has warned her to be careful, not to move too fast or try to make real friends until the rednecks (only Reggie calls them “the bull gators”) show themselves—how many and how crazy—but she goes her own course, trusts her own deep instincts. And here they are, only seven of em, and really just the one bull gator.

I’m stronger than you, ole massa, she thinks, walking toward him. She fixes her eyes on his and will not let them drop,’ his are the ones that drop, his the mouth that quivers uncertainly at one corner, his the tongue that comes out as quick as a lizard’s tongue to wet the lips, and all that’s good… but even better is when he falls back a step. When he does that the rest of them cluster in two groups of three, and there it is, her way through. Faint and sweet are the Methodists, faithy music carrying across the lake’s still surface. A droner of a hymn, yes, but sweet across the miles.

When we walk with the Lord in the light of His word, what a glory He sheds on our way…

I’m stronger than you, sugar, she sends, I’m meaner than you, you may be the bull gator but I’m the queen bee and if you don’t want me stingin on you, you best clear me the rest of my path.

“I3u bitch,” he says, but his voice is weak; he is already thinking this isn’t the day, there’s something about her he didn’t quite see until he saw her right up close, some blacknigger hougan he didn’t Jel until now, better wait br another day, better- Then he trips over a root or a rock (perhaps it’s the very rock behind which she will finally come to rest)

and falls down. His cap falls off, showing the big old bald spot on top of his head. His pants split all the way up the seam. And Sara makes a crucial mistake. Perhaps she underestimates Jared Devore’s own very considerable personal jrce, or perhaps she just cannot help herself—the sound of his britches ripping is like a loud fart. In any case she laughs that raucous, smoke-broken laugh which is her trademark. And her laugh becomes her doom.

Devore doesn’t think. He simply gives her the leather from where he lies, big]bet in pegged loggers’ boots shooting out like pistons. He hits her where she is thinnest and most vulnerable, in the ankles. She hollers in shockedpain as the left one breaks,’ she goes down in a tumble, losing her furled parasol out of one hand. She draws in breath to scream again and Jared says from where he is lying, “Don’t let her! Dassn’t let her holler!”

Ben Merrill falls on top of her full-length, all one hundred and ninety pounds of him. The breath she has drawn to scream with whooshes out in a gusty, almost silent sigh instead. Ben, who has never even danced with a woman, let alone lain on top of one like this, is instantly excited by the el of her struggling beneath him. He wriggles against her, laughing, and when she rakes her nails down his cheek he barely J%is it. The way it seems to him, he’s all cock and a yard long. When she tries to roll over and get out from under that way, he rolls with her, lets her be on top, and he is totally surprised when she drives her J3rehead down on his. He sees stars, but he is eighteen years old, as strong as he will ever be, and he loses neither consciousness nor his erection.

Oren Peebles tears away the back of her dress, laughing. “Pig-pile!” he cries in a breathy little whisper, and drops on top of her. Now he is dry-humping her topside and Ben is dry-humping just as enthusiastically from underneath, dry-humping like a billygoat even with the blood pouring down the sides of his head j%m the split in the center of his brow, and she knows that if she can’t scream she is lost. If she can scream and if Kito hears, he’ll run and get help, run and get Reg- But bejre she can try again, ole massa is squatting beside her and showing her a long-bladed knij. “Make a sound and I’ll cut your nose off,” he says, and that’s when she gives up. They have brought her down after all, partly because she laughed at the wrong time, mostly out of pure buggardly bad luck. Now they will not be stopped, and best that Kito should stay away—please God keep him back where he was, it was a good patch of berries, one that should keep him occupied an hour or more. He loves berry-picking, and it won’t take these men an hour. Harry Auster yanks her hair back, tears her dress off one shoulder, and begins to sucker on her neck.

Ole massa the only one not at her. Old massa standing back, looking both ways along The Street, his eyes slitted and wary; old massa look like a mangy timber-wolf done eaten a whole generation of chickenhouse chickens while managing to avoid every trap and snare. “Hey Irish, quit on her a minute,” he tells Harry, then widens his wise gaze to the others. “Get her in the puckies, you damn jols. Get her in there deep.”

They don’t. They can’t. They are too eager to have her. They arm-yank her behind the Jrehead of gray rock and call it good. She doesn’t pray easily but she prays now. She prays r them to let her live. She prays]r Kito to stay clear, to keep filling his bucket slow by eating every third handful. She prays that if he does take a notion to catch up with her, he will see what’s happening and run the other way as fast as he can, run silent and get Reg. “Stick this in your mouth,” George Armbruster pants. ’?lnd don’t you bite me, you bitch.” They take her top and bottom, back and front, two and three at a time. They take her where anybody coming along can’t help but see them, and ole massa stands off a little, looking first at the panting young men grouped around her, kneeling with their trousers down and their thighs scratched from the bushes they are kneeling in, then he peers up and down the path with his wild and wary eyes. Incredibly, one of them—it is Fred Dean—says “Sorry, ma’am” after he’s shot his load Jeh like halfway up to east bejeezus. It’s as if he accidentally kicked her in the shin while crossing his legs. And it doesn’t end. There’s come down her throat, come running down the crack of her ass, the young one has bitten the blood right out of her leso breast, and it doesn’t end. They are young, and by the time the last one has finished, the first one, oh God, the first one is ready again. Across the river the Methodists are now singing “Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine” and as ole massa approaches her she thinks, It’s almost over, woman, he the last, hold on hold steady and it be over. He looks at the skinny redhead and the one who keeps squinching his eye up and tossing his head and tells them to watch the path, he’s going to take his turn now that she’s broke in. He unbuckles his belt, he unbuttons his flies, he pushes down his underwear—dirty black at the knees and dirty yellow at the crotch-and as he drops a knee on either side of her she sees that ole massa’ s little massa is just as floppy as a snake with its neck broke and bejre she can stop it, that raucous laugh bursts all unexpected from her again—even lying here covered with the hot jelly spend of her rapists, she can’t help but see the funny side. “Shut up/” Devore growls at her, and smashes the heel of one hard hand across her face, breaking her cheekbone and her nose. “Shut up that howling/”

“Reckon it might get stif-/br if it was one of your boys layin here with his rosy red ass stuck up in the air, sugar?” she asks, and then, For the last time, Sara laughs.

49o Devore draws his hand back to hit her again, his naked loins lying against her naked loins, his penis a flaccid worm between them. But here he can bring the hand down a child’s voice cries, “Ma/What they doin to you, Ma? Git off my mama, you bastards/” She sits up in spite of Devore’s weight, her laughter dying, her wide eyes searching Kito out and finding him, a slim young boy of eight standing on The Street, dressed in overalls and a straw hat and brand-new canvas shoes, carrying a tin bucket in one hand. His lips are blue with juice. His eyes are wide with confusion and fright. “Run, Kito!” she screams. “Run away h—”

Red fire explodes in her head,’ she swoons back into the bushes, hearing ole massa from a great distance: “Get him. Dassn’t let him ramble, now.”

Then she’s going down a long dark slope, she’s lost in a Ghost House corridor that leads only deeper and deeper into its own convoluted bowels,’ from that deep falling place she hears him, she hears, her darling one, he is screaming. I heard him screaming as I knelt by the gray rock with my carry-bag beside me and no idea how I’d gotten to where I was—I certainly had no memory of walking here. I was crying in shock and horror and pity. Was she crazy? Well, no wonder. No fucking wonder. The rain was steady but no longer apocalyptic. I stared at my fishy-white hands on the gray rock for a few seconds, then looked around. Devore and the others were gone. The ripe and gassy stench of decay filled my nose—it was like a physical assault. I fumbled in the carry-bag, found the Stenomask Rommie and George had given me as a joke, and slipped it over my mouth and nose with fingers that felt numb and distant. I breathed shallowly and tentatively. Better. Not a lot, but enough to keep from fleeing, which was undoubtedly what she wanted.

“No!” she cried from somewhere behind me as I grabbed the spade and dug in. I tore a great mouth in the ground with the first swipe, and each subsequent one deepened and widened it. The earth was soft and yielding, woven through with mats of thin roots which parted easily under the blade. “No! Don’t you dare!” I wouldn’t look around, wouldn’t give her a chance to push me away.

She was stronger down here, perhaps because it had happened here. Was that possible? I didn’t know and didn’t care. All I cared about was getting this done. Where the roots were thicker, I hacked through them with the pruning knife. “Leave me be!” Now I did look around, risked one quick glance because of the unnatural crackling sounds which had accompanied her voice—which now seemed to make her voice. The Green Lady was gone. The birch had somehow become Sara Tidwell: it was Sara’s face growing out of the criss-crossing branches and shiny leaves. That rain-slicked face swayed, dissolved, came together, melted away, came together again. For a moment all the mystery I had sensed down here was revealed. Her damp shifting eyes were utterly human. They stared at me with hate and supplication. “I ain’t done!” she cried in a cracked, breaking voice. “He was the worst, don’t you understand? He was the worst and it’s his blood in her and I won’t rest until I have it out!”

There was a gruesome ripping sound. She had inhabited the birch, made it into a physical body of some sort and intended to tear it free of the earth. She would come and get me with it if she could; kill me with it if she could. Strangle me in limber branches. Stuff me with leaves until I looked like a Christmas decoration. “No matter how much of a monster he was, Kyra had nothing to do with what he did,” I said. “And you won’t have her.”

“Yes I will!” the Green Lady screamed. The ripping, rending sounds were louder now. They were joined by a hissing, shaky crackle. I didn’t look around again. I didn’t dare look around. I dug faster instead. “Yes I will have her!” she cried, and now the voice was closer.

She was coming for me but I refused to see; when it comes to walking trees and bushes, I’ll stick to Macbeth, thanks. “I will have her! He took mine and I mean to take his!”

“Go away,” a new voice said. The spade loosened in my hands, almost fell. I turned and saw Jo standing below me and to my right. She was looking at Sara, who had materialized into a lunatic’s hallucination—a monstrous greenish-black thing that slipped with every step it tried to walk along The Street.

She had left the birch behind yet assumed its vitality somehow—the actual tree huddled behind her, black and shrivelled and dead. The creature born of it looked like the Bride of Frankenstein as sculpted by Picasso. In it, Sara’s face came and went, came and went. The Shape, I thought coldly. It was always real… and if it was always me, it was always her, too. Jo was dressed in the white shirt and yellow slacks she’d had on the day she died. I couldn’t see the lake through her as I had been able to see it through Devore and Devore’s young friends; she had materialized herself completely. I felt a curious draining sensation at the back of my skull and thought I knew how. “Git out, bitch!” the Sara-thing snarled. It raised its arms toward Jo as it had raised them to me in my worst nightmares. “Not at all.” Jo’s voice remained calm.

She turned toward me. “Hurry, Mike. You have to be quick. It’s not really her anymore. She’s let one of the Outsiders in, and they’re very dangerous.”

“Jo, I love you.”

“I love you t—” Sara shrieked and then began to spin. Leaves and branches blurred together and lost coherence; it was like watching something liquefy in a blender. The entity which had only looked a little like a woman to begin with now dropped its masquerade entirely. Something elemental and grotesquely inhuman began to form out of the maelstrom. It leaped at my wife. When it struck her, the color and solidity left Jo as if slapped away by a huge hand. She became a phantom struggling with the thing which raved and shrieked and clawed at her. “Hurry, Mike!” she screamed. “Hurry/” I bent to the job.

The spade struck something that wasn’t dirt, wasn’t stone, wasn’t wood.

I scraped along it, revealing a filthy mold-crusted swatch of canvas.

Now I dug like a madman, wanting to clear as much of the buried object as I could, wanting to fatten my chances of success as much as I could.

Behind me, the Shape screamed in fury and my wife screamed in pain. Sara had given up part of her discorporate self in order to gain her revenge, had let in something Jo called an Outsider. I had no idea what that might be and never wanted to know. Sara was its conduit, I knew that much. And if I could take care of her in time-I reached into the dripping hole, slapping wet earth from the ancient canvas. Faint stencilled letters appeared when I did: j. M. MCCUTDIE SAWMILL.

Mccurdie’s had burned in the fires of ’33, I knew. I’d seen a picture of it in flames somewhere. As I seized the canvas, the tips of my fingers punching through and letting out a fresh billow of green and gassy stench, I could hear grunting. I could hear Devore. He’s lying on top o/her and grunting like a pig. Sara is semiconscious, muttering unintelligibly through bruised lips which are shiny with blood. Devore is looking back over his shoulder at Draper Finney and Fred Dean. They have raced after the boy and brought him back, but he won’t stop yelling, he’s yelling to beat the band, yelling to wake the dead, and if they can hear the Methodists singing “How I Love to ll the Story” over here, then they may be able to hear the yowling nigger over there.

Devore says “Put him in the water, shut him up.” The minute he says it, as though the words are magic words, his cock begins to stifn. “What do you mean?” Ben Merrill asks. “You know goddam well, “Jared says. He pants the words out, jerking his hips as he speaks. His narrow ass gleams in the afternoon light. “He seen us! I3u want to cut his throat, get his blood all over you? Fine by me. Here. Take my knij, be my guest!”

“N-No, Jared!” Ben cries in horror, actually seeming to cringe at the sight of the knij. He is finally ready. It takes him a little longer, that’s all, he ain’t a kid like these other ones. But now—!

Never mind her smart mouth, never mind her insolent way of laughing, never mind the whole township. Let them all show up and watch if they like. He slips it to her, what she’s wanted all along, what all her kind want. He slips it in and sinks it deep. He continues giving orders even as he rapes her. Up and down his ass goes, tick-tock, just like a cat’s tail. “Somebody take care of him! Or do you want to spend jrty years rotting in Shawshank because of a nigger boy’s tattle?” Ben seizes one of Kito Tidwell’s arms, Oren Peebles the other, but by the time they have dragged him as far as the embankment they have lost their heart.

Raping an uppity nigger woman with the gall to laugh at Jared when he jll down and split his britches is one thing. Drowning a scared kid like a kitten in a mud-puddle… that’s another one altogether. They loosen their grip, staring into each other’s haunted eyes, and Kito pulls jee. “Run, honey!” Sara cries. “Run away and get—"Jared clamps his hands around her throat and begins choking. The boy trips over his own berry bucket and thumps gracelessly to the ground. Harry and Draper recapture him easily. “What you going to do?” Draper asks in a kind of desperate whine, and Harry replies “What I have to.” That’s what he replied, and now I was going to do what I had toin spite of the stench, in spite of Sara, in spite of my dead wife’s shrieks. I hauled the roll of canvas out of the ground. The ropes which had tied it shut at either end held, but the roll itself split down the middle with a hideous burping sound.

“Hurry/” Jo cried. “I can’t hold it much longer!” It snarled; it bayed like a dog. There was a loud wooden crunch, like a door being slammed hard enough to splinter, and Jo wailed. I grabbed for the carry-bag with Slips ’n Greens printed on the front and tore it open as Harry the others call him Irish because of his carrot-colored hair—grabs the struggling kid in a clumsy kind ofbearhug and jumps into the lake with him. The kid struggles harder than ever,’ his straw hat comes off and floats on the water. “Get that!” Harry pants. Fred Dean kneels and fishes out the dripping hat. Fred’s eyes are dazed, he’s got the look of a fighter about one round from hitting the canvas. Behind them Sara Tidwell has begun to rattle deep in her chest and throat like the sight of the boy’s clenching hand, these sounds will haunt Draper Finney until his final dive into Eades Quarry. Jared sinks his fingers deeper, pumping and choking at the same time, the sweat pouring off him. No amount of washing will take the smell of that sweat out of these clothes, and when he begins to think of it as “murder-sweat,” he burns the clothes to get shed of it. Harry Auster wants to be shed of it all to be shed of it and never see these men again, most of all Jared Devore, who he now thinks must be Lord Satan himself. Harry cannot go home and face his father unless this nightmare is over, buried. And his mother! How can he ever face his beloved mother, Bridget Auster with her round sweet Irish face and graying hair and comrting shelf of bosom, Bridget who has always had a kind word or a soothing handler him, Bridget Auster who has been Saved, shed in the Blood of the Lamb, Bridget Auster who is even now serving pies at the picnic they’re having at the new church, Bridget Amter who is mamma,’ how can he ever look at her again—or she him—if he has to stand in court on a charge of raping and beating a woman, even a black woman?

So he yanks the clinging boy away—Kito scratches him once, just a nick on the side of the neck, and that night Harry will tell his mamma it was a bush-pricker that caught him unawares and he will let her put a kiss on it—and then he plunges the child into the lake. Kito looks up at him, his face shimmering, and Harry sees a little fish flick by. A perch, he thinks. For an instant he wonders what the boy must see, looking up through the silver shield of the surface at the face of thejllow who’s holding him down, thejllow who’s drowning him, and then Harry pushes that away. Just a nigger, he reminds himself desperately.

That’s all he is, just a nigger. No kin of yours.

Kito’s arm comes out of the water his dripping dark-brown arm. Harry pulls back, not wanting to be clawed, but the hand doesn’t reach Jr him, only sticks straight up. The fingers curl into a fist. Open. Curl into a fist. Open. Curl into a fist. The boy’s thrashing begins to ease, the kickingjet begin to slow down, the eyes looking up into Harry’s eyes are taking on a curiously dreamy look, and still that brown arm sticks straight up, still the hand opens and closes, opens and closes. Draper Finney stands on the shore crying, sure that now someone will come along, now someone will see the terrible thing they have done the terrible thing they are in fact still doing. Be sure your sin will find you out, it says in the Good Book. Be sure. He opens his mouth to tell Harry to quit, maybe it’s still not too late to take it back, let him up, let him live, but no sound comes out. Behind him Sara is choking her last. In front of him her drowning son’s hand opens and closes, opens and closes, the reflection of it shimmering on the water, and Draper thinks Won’t it stop doing that, won’t it ever stop doing that? And as if it were a prayer that something is now answering, the boy’s locked elbow begins to bend and his arm begins to sag,’ the fingers begin to close again into a fist and then stop. For a moment the hand wavers and then I slammed the heel of my hand into the center of my forehead to clear these phantoms away. Behind me there was a frenzied snap and crackle of wet bushes as Jo and whatever she was holding back continued to struggle. I put my hands inside the split in the canvas like a doctor spreading a wound. I yanked. There was a low ripping sound as the roll tore the rest of the way up and down.

Inside was what remained of them—two yellowed skulls, forehead to forehead as if in intimate conversation, a woman’s faded red leather belt, a molder of clothes… and a heap of bones. Two ribcages, one large and one small. Two sets of legs, one long and one short. The early remains of Sara and Kito Tidwell, buried here by the lake for almost a hundred years.

The larger of the two skulls turned. It glared at me with its empty eyesockets. Its teeth chattered as if it would bite me, and the bones below it began a tenebrous, jittery stirring. Some broke apart immediately; all were soft and pitted. The red belt stirred restlessly and the rusty buckle rose like the head of a snake.

“Mike/” Jo screamed. “Quick, quick/”

I pulled the sack out of the carry-bag and grabbed the plastic bottle which had been inside. Lye stille, the Magnabet letters had said; another little word-trick. Another message passed behind the unsuspecting guard’s back. Sara Tidwell was a fearsome creature, but she had underestimated Jo… and she had underestimated the telepathy of long association, as well. I had gone to Slips ’n Greens, I had bought a bottle of lye, and now I opened it and poured it, smoking, over the bones of Sara and her son.

There was a hissing sound like the one you hear when you open a beer or a bottled soft drink. The belt-buckle melted. The bones turned white and crumpled like things made out of sugar—I had a nightmare image of Mexican children eating candy corpses off long sticks on the Day of the Dead. The eyesockets of Sara’s skull widened as the lye filled the dark hollow where her mind, her prodigious talent, and her laughing soul had once resided. It was an expression that looked at first like surprise and then like sorrow.

The jaw fell off; the nubs of the teeth sizzled away.

The top of the skull caved in.

Spread fingerbones jittered, then melted.

“Ohhhhhh…”

It whispered through the soaking trees like a rising wind… only the wind had died as the wet air caught its breath before the next onslaught. It was a sound of unspeakable grief and longing and surrender. I sensed no hate in it; her hate was gone, burned away in the corrosive I had bought in Helen Auster’s shop. The sound of Sara’s going was replaced by the plaintive, almost human cry of a bird, and it awakened me from the place where I had been, brought me finally and completely out of the zone. I got shakily to my feet, turned around, and looked at The Street. Jo was still there, a dim form through which I could now see the lake and the dark clouds of the next thundersquall coming over the mountains. Something flickered beyond her—that bird venturing out of its safe covert for a peek at the re-arranged environment, perhaps—but I barely registered that. It was Jo I wanted to see, Jo who had come God knew how far and suffered God knew how much to help me. She looked exhausted, hurt, in some fundamental way diminished. But the other thing—the Outsider—was gone. Jo, standing in a ring of birch leaves so dead they looked charred, turned to me and smiled. “Jo! We did it!” Her mouth moved. I heard the sound, but the words were too distant to make out. She was standing right there, but she might have been calling across a wide canyon. Still, I understood her. I read the words off her lips if you prefer the rational, right out of her mind if you prefer the romantical. I prefer the latter. Marriage is a zone, too, you know. Marriage is a zone. — So that’s all right, isn’t it? I glanced down into the gaping roll of canvas and saw nothing but stubs and splinters sticking out of a noxious, uneasy paste. I got a whiff, and even through the Stenomask it made me cough and back away.

Not corruption; lye. When I looked back around at Jo, she was barely there. “Jo! Wait!” —Can’t help. Can’t stay. Words from another star system, barely glimpsed on a fading mouth. Now she was little more than eyes floating in the dark afternoon, eyes which seemed made of the lake behind them. — Hurry… She was gone. I slipped and stumbled to the place where she’d been, my feet crunching over dead birch leaves, and grabbed at nothing. What a fool I must have looked, soaked to the skin, wearing a Stenomask askew over the lower half of my face, trying to embrace the wet gray air. I got the faintest whiffof Red perfume… and then only damp earth, lakewater, and the vile stink of lye running under everything. At least the smell of putrefaction was gone; that had been no more real than…

Than what? Than what? Either it was all real or none of it was real. If none of it was real, I was out of my mind and ready for the Blue Wing at Juniper Hill. I looked over toward the gray rock and saw the bag of bones I had pulled out of the wet ground like a festering tooth. Lazy tendrils of smoke were still rising from its ripped length. That much was real. So was the Green Lady, who was now a soot-colored Black Lady—as dead as the dead branch behind her, the one that seemed to point like an arm. Can’t help… can’t stay… hurry. Couldn’t help with what? What more help did I need? It was done, wasn’t it? Sara was gone: spirit follows bone, good night sweet ladies, God grant she lye stille.

And still a kind of stinking terror, not so different from the smell of putrescence which had come out of the ground, seemed to sweat out of the air; Kyra’s name began to beat in my head, Ki-Ki, Ki-Ki, Ki-Ki, like the call of some exotic tropical bird. I started up the railroad-tie steps to the house, and although I was exhausted, by the time I was halfway up I had begun to run. I climbed the stairs to the deck and went in that way. The house looked the same—save for the broken tree poking in through the kitchen window, Sara Laughs had stood up to the storm very well—but something was wrong. There was something I could almost smell… and perhaps I did smell it, bitter and low. Lunacy may have its own wild-vetch aroma. It’s not the kind of thing I would ever care to research. In the front hall I stopped, looking down at a heap of paperback books, Elmore Leonards and Ed Mcbains, lying on the floor. As if they had been raked off the shelf by a passing hand. A flailing hand, maybe. I could also see my tracks there, both coming and going. They had already begun to dry. They should have been the only ones; I had been carrying Ki when we came in. They should have been, but they weren’t.

The others were smaller, but not so small that I mistook them for a child’s. I ran down the hall to the north bedroom crying her name, and I might as well have been crying Mattie or Jo or Sara. Coming out of my mouth, Kyra’s name sounded like the name of a corpse. The duvet had been thrown back onto the floor. Except for the black stuffed dog, lying where it had in my dream, the bed was empty. And Ki was gone.

I reached for Ki with the part of my mind that had for the last few weeks known what she was wearing, what room of the trailer she was in, and what she was doing there. There was nothing, of course—that link was also dissolved. I called for Jo—I think I did—but Jo was gone, too. I was on my own. God help me. God help us both. I could feel panic trying to descend and fought it off. I had to keep my mind clear. If I couldn’t think, any chance Ki might still have would be lost. I walked rapidly back down the hall to the foyer, trying not to hear the sick voice in the back of my head, the one saying that Ki was lost already, dead already. I knew no such thing, couldn’t know it now that the connection between us was broken. I looked down at the heap of books, then up at the door. The new tracks had come in this way and gone out this way, too. Lightning stroked the sky and thunder cracked. The wind was rising again. I went to the door, reached for the knob, then paused.

Something was caught in the crack between the door and the jamb, something as fine and floaty as a strand of spider’s silk.

A single white hair. I looked at it with a sick lack of surprise. I should have known, of course, and if not for the strain I’d been under and the successive shocks of this terrible day, I would have known. It was all on the tape John had played for me that morning. . a time that already seemed part of another man’s life. For one thing, there was the time-check marking the point where John had hung up on her. Nine-jorty A.M… Eastern Daylight, the robot voice had said, which meant that Rogette had been calling at six-forty in the morning. . if, that was, she’d really been calling from Palm Springs. That was at least possible; had the oddity occurred to me while we were driving from the airport to Mattie’s trailer, I would have told myself that there were no doubt insomniacs all over California who finished their East Coast business before the sun had hauled itself fully over the horizon, and good for them. But there was something else that couldn’t be explained away so easily. At one point John had ejected the tape. He did it because, he said, I’d gone as white as a sheet instead of looking amused. I had told him to go on and play the rest; it had just surprised me to hear her again. The quality of her voice. Christ, the reproduction is good.

Except it was really the boys in the basement who had reacted to John’s tape; my subconscious co-conspirators. And it hadn’t been her voice that had scared them badly enough to turn my face white. The underhum had done that. The characteristic underhum you always got on TR calls, both those you made and those you received. Rogette Whitmore had never left TR-90 at all. If my failing to realize that this morning cost Ki Devote her life this afternoon, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. I told God that over and over as I went plunging down the railroad-tie steps again, running into the face of a revitalized storm.

It’s a blue-eyed wonder I didn’t go flying right off the embankment.

Half my swimming float had grounded there, and perhaps I could have impaled myself on its splintered boards and died like a vampire writhing on a stake. What a pleasant thought that was. Running isn’t good for people near panic; it’s like scratching poison ivy. By the time I had thrown my arm around one of the pines at the foot of the steps to check my progress, I was on the edge of losing all coherent thought. Ki’s name was beating in my head again, so loudly there wasn’t room for much else. Then a stroke of lightning leaped out of the sky to my right and knocked the last three feet of trunk out from beneath a huge old spruce which had probably been here when Sara and Kito were still alive. If I’d been looking directly at it I would have been blinded; even with my head turned three-quarters away, the stroke left a huge blue swatch like the aftermath of a gigantic camera flash floating in front of my eyes. There was a grinding, juddering sound as two hundred feet of blue spruce toppled into the lake, sending up a long curtain of spray, which seemed to hang between the gray sky and gray water. The stump was on fire in the rain, burning like a witch’s hat. It had the effect of a slap, clearing my head and giving me one final chance to use my brain. I took a breath and forced myself to do just that. Why had I come down here in the first place? Why did I think Rogette had brought Kyra toward the lake, where I had just been, instead of carrying her away from me, up the driveway to Lane Forty-two? Don’t be stupid. She came down here because The Street’s the way back to Warrington’s, and Vrrington’s is where she’s been, all by herself, ever since she sent the boss’s body back to Calij$rnia in his privatejet. She had sneaked into the house while I was under Jo’s studio, finding the tin box in the belly of the owl and studying that scrap of genealogy.

She would have taken Ki then if I’d given her the chance, but I didn’t.

I came hurrying back, afraid something was wrong, afraid someone might be trying to get hold of the kid-Had Rogette awakened her? Had Ki seen her and tried to warn me before drifting off again? Was that what had brought me in such a hurry? Maybe. I’d still been in the zone then, we’d still been linked then. Rogette had certainly been in the house when I came back. She might even have been in the north-bedroom closet and peering at me through the crack. Part of me had known it, too. Part of me had felt her, felt something that was not-Sara. Then I’d left again.

Grabbed the carry-bag from Slips ’n Greens and come down here. Turned right, turned north. Toward the birch, the rock, the bag of bones. I’d done what I had to do, and while I was doing it, Rogette carried Kyra down the railroad-tie steps behind me and turned left on The Street. Turned south toward Warrington’s. With a sinking feeling deep in my belly, I realized I had probably heard Ki… might even have seen her. That bird peeking timidly out from cover during the lull had been no bird. Ki was awake by then, Ki had seen me—perhaps had seen Jo, as well—and tried to call out. She had managed just that one little peep before Rogette had covered her mouth. How long ago had that been? It seemed like forever, but I had an idea it hadn’t been long at all—less than five minutes, maybe. But it doesn’t take long to drown a child. The image of Kito’s bare arm sticking straight out of the water tried to come back—the hand at the end of it opening and closing, opening and closing, as if it were trying to breathe for the lungs that couldn’t—and I pushed it away. I also suppressed the urge to simply sprint in the direction of Warrington’s. Panic would take me for sure if I did that. In all the years since her death I had never longed for Jo with the bitter intensity I felt then. But she was gone; there wasn’t even a whisper of her. With no one to depend on but myself, I started south along the tree-littered Street, skirting the blowdowns where I could, crawling under them if they blocked my way entirely, taking the noisy branch-breaking course over the top only as a last resort. As I went I issued what I imagine are all the standard prayers in such a situation, but none of them seemed to get past the image of Rogette Whitmore’s face rising in my mind. Her screaming, merciless face.

I remember thinking This is the outdoor version of the Ghost House.

Certainly the woods seemed haunted to me as I struggled along: trees only loosened in the first grand blow were falling by the score in this follow-up cap of wind and rain. The noise was like great crunching footfalls, and I didn’t need to worry about the noise my own feet were making. When I passed the Batchelders’ camp, a circular prefab construction sitting on an outcrop of rock like a hat on a footstool, I saw that the entire roof had been bashed flat by a hemlock.

Halfa mile south of Sara I saw one of Ki’s white hair ribbons lying in the path. I picked it up, thinking how much that red edging looked like blood. Then I stuffed it into my pocket and went on. Five minutes later I came to an old moss-caked pine that had fallen across the path; it was still connected to its stump by a stretched and bent network of splinters, and squalled like a line of rusty hinges as the surging water lifted and dropped what had been its upper twenty or thirty feet, now floating in the lake. There was space to crawl under, and when I dropped to my knees I saw other knee-tracks, just beginning to fill with water.

I saw something else: the second hair ribbon. I tucked it into my pocket with the first. I was halfway under the pine when I heard another tree go over, this one much closer. The sound was followed by a scream—not pain or fear but surprised anger. Then, even over the hiss of the rain and the wind, I could hear Rogette’s voice: “Come back/Don’t go out there, it’s dangerous/” I squirmed the rest of the way under the tree, barely feeling the stump of a branch which tore a groove in my lower back, got to my feet, and sprinted along the path. If the fallen trees I came to were small, I hurdled them without slowing down. If they were bigger, I scrabbled over with no thought to where they might claw or dig in. Thunder whacked. There was a brilliant stroke of lightning, and in its glare I saw gray barnboard through the trees. On the day I’d first seen Rogette I’d only been able to catch glimpses of Warrington’s lodge, but now the forest had been torn open like an old garment—this area would be years recovering. The lodge’s rear half had been pretty well demolished by a pair of huge trees that seemed to have fallen together.

They had crossed like a knife and fork on a diner’s plate and lay on the ruins in a shaggy X. Ki’s voice, rising over the storm only because it was shrill with terror: “Go away! I don’t want you, white nana! Go away!” It was horrible to hear the terror in her voice, but wonderful to hear her voice at all. About forty feet from where Rogette’s shout had frozen me in place, one more tree lay across the path. Rogette herself stood on the far side of it, holding a hand out to Ki. The hand was dripping blood, but I hardly noticed. It was Kyra I noticed. The dock running between The Street and The Sunset Bar was a long one—seventy feet at least, perhaps a hundred. Long enough so that on a pretty summer evening you could stroll it hand-in-hand with your date or your lover and make a memory. The storm hadn’t torn it away—not yet—but the wind had twisted it like a ribbon. I remember newsreel footage at some childhood Saturday matinee, film of a suspension bridge dancing in a hurricane, and that was what the dock between Warring-ton’s and The Sunset Bar looked like. It jounced up and down in the surging water, groaning in all its slatted joints like a wooden accordion. There had been a rail—presumably to guide those who’d made a heavy night of it safely back to shore—but it was gone now. Kyra was halfway out along this swaying, dipping length of wood. I could see at least three rectangles of blackness between the shore and where she stood, places where boards had snapped off. From beneath the dock came the disturbed clung-clung-clung of the empty steel drums that were holding it up.

Several of these drums had come unanchored and were floating away. Ki had her arms stretched out for balance like a tightrope walker in the circus. The black Harley-Davidson tee-shirt flapped around her knees and sunburned shoulders.

“Come back!” Rogette cried. Her lank hair flew around her head; the shiny black raincoat she was wearing rippled. She was holding both hands out now, one bloody and one not. I had an idea Ki might have bitten her.

“No, white nana!” Ki shook her head in wild negation and I wanted to tell her don’t do that, Ki-bird, don’t shake your head like that, very bad idea. She tottered, one arm pointed up at the sky and one down at the water so she looked for a moment like an airplane in a steep bank.

If the dock had picked that moment to take a hard buck beneath her, Ki would have spilled off the side. She regained some precarious balance instead, although I thought I saw her bare feet slide a little on the slick boards. “Go away, white nana, I don’t want you! Go… go take a nap, you look tired!”

Ki didn’t see me; all her attention was fixed on the white nana. The white nana didn’t see me, either. I dropped to my belly and squirmed under the tree, pulling myself along with my clawed hands. Thunder rolled across the lake like a big mahogany ball, the sound echoing off the mountains. When I got to my knees again, I saw that Rogette was advancing slowly toward the shore end of the dock. For every step she took forward, Kyra took a shaky, dangerous step backward. Rogette was holding her good hand out, though for a moment I thought this one had begun to bleed as well. The stuff running through her bunchy fingers was too dark for blood, however, and when she began to talk, speaking in a hideous coaxing voice that made my skin crawl, I realized it was melting chocolate.

“Let’s play the game, Ki-bird,” Rogette cooed. “Do you want to start?”

She took a step. Ki took a compensatory step backward, tottered, caught her balance. My heart stopped, then resumed racing. I closed the distance between myself and the woman as rapidly as I could, but I didn’t run; I didn’t want her to know a thing until she woke up. If she woke up. I didn’t care if she did or not. Hell, if I could fracture the back of George Footman’s skull with a hammer, I could certainly put a hurt on this horror. As I walked, I laced my hands together into one large fist.

“No? Don’t want to start? Too shy?” Rogette spoke in a sugary Romper Room voice that made me want to grind my teeth together. “All right, 17l start. Happy! What rhymes with happy, Ki-bird? Pappy… and nappy… you were taking a nappy, weren’t you, when I came and woke you up. And lappy. . would you want to come and sit on my lappy, Ki-bird? We’ll feed each other chocolate, just like we used to… I’ll tell you a new knock-knock joke…”

Another step. She had come to the edge of the dock. If she’d thought of it, she could simply have thrown rocks at Kyra as she had at me, thrown until she connected with one and knocked Ki into the lake. But I don’t think she got even close to such a notion. Once crazy goes past a certain point, you’re on a turnpike with no exit ramps. Rogette had other plans for Kyra.

“Come on, Ki-Ki, play the game with white nana.” She held out the chocolate again, gooey Hershey’s Kisses dripping through crumpled foil.

Kyra’s eyes shifted, and at last she saw me. I shook my head, trying to tell her to be quiet, but it was no good—an expression of joyous relief crossed her face. She cried out my name, and I saw Rogette’s shoulders go up in surprise.

I ran the last dozen feet, raising my joined hands like a club, but I slipped a little on the wet ground at the crucial moment and Rogette made a kind of ducking cringe. Instead of striking her at the back of the neck as I’d meant to, my joined hands only glanced off her shoulder.

She staggered, went to one knee, and was up again almost at once. Her eyes were like little blue arc-lamps, spitting rage instead of electricity. “I3u/” she said, hissing the word over the top of her tongue, turning it into the sound of some ancient curse: Heeyuuuu/

Behind us Kyra screamed my name, stagger-dancing on the wet wood and waving her arms in an effort to keep from falling in the lake. Water slopped onto the deck and ran over her small bare feet. “Hold on, Ki!” I called back. Rogette saw my attention shift and took her chance—she spun and ran out onto the dock. I sprang after her, grabbed her by the hair, and it came off in my hand. All of it. I stood there at the edge of the surging lake with her mat of white hair dangling from my fist like a scalp. Rogette looked over her shoulder, snarling, an ancient bald gnome in the rain, and I thought It’s him, it’s Devore, he never died at all, somehow he and the woman swapped identities, she was the one who committed suicide, it was her body that went back to California on the jet-Even as she turned the other way again and began to run toward Ki, I knew better. It was Rogette, all right, but she’d come by that hideous resemblance honestly. Whatever was wrong with her had done more than make her hair fall out; it had aged her as well. Seventy, I’d thought, but that had to be at least ten years beyond the actual mark.

I’ve known a lot offlks name their kids alike, Mrs. M. had told me. They think it’s cute. Max Devote must have thought so, too, because he had named a son Roger and his daughter Rogette. Perhaps she’d come by the Whitmore part honestly—she might have been married in her younger years—but once the wig was gone, her antecedents were beyond argument.

The woman tottering along the wet dock to finish the job was Kyra’s aunt.

Ki began to back up rapidly, making no effort to be careful and pick her footing. She was going into the drink; there was no way she could stay up. But before she could fall, a wave slapped the dock between them at a place where some of the barrels had come loose and the slatted walkway was already partly submerged. Foamy water flew up and began to twist into one of those helix shapes I had seen before. Rogette stopped ankle-deep in the water sloshing over the dock, and I stopped about twelve feet behind her. The shape solidified, and even before I could make out the face I recognized the baggy shorts with their fading swirls of color and the smock top. Only Kmart sells smock tops of such perfect shapelessness; I think it may be a federal law. It was Mattie. A grave gray Mattie, looking at Rogette with grave gray eyes. Rogette raised her hands, tottered, tried to turn. At that moment a wave surged under the dock, making it rise and then drop like an amusement-park ride. Rogette went over the side. Beyond her, beyond the water-shape in the rain, I could see Ki sprawling on the porch of The Sunset Bar. That last heave had flipped her to temporary safety like a human tiddlywink. Mattie was looking at me, her lips moving, her eyes on mine. I had been able to tell what Jo was saying, but this time I had no idea. I tried with all my might, but I couldn’t make it out. “Mommy/Mommy/” The figure didn’t so much turn as revolve; it didn’t actually seem to be there below the hem of the long shorts. It moved up the dock to the bar, where Ki was now standing with her arms held out. Something grabbed at my foot. I looked down and saw a drowning apparition in the surging water. Dark eyes stared up at me from beneath the bald skull. Rogette was coughing water from between lips that were as purple as plums. Her free hand waved weakly up at me. The fingers opened… and closed. Opened… and closed. I dropped to one knee and took it. It clamped over mine like a steel claw and she yanked, trying to pull me in with her. The purple lips peeled back from yellow toothpegs like those in Sara’s skull. And yes—I thought that this time Rogette was the one laughing. I rocked on my haunches and yanked her up. I didn’t think about it; it was pure instinct. I had her by at least a hundred pounds, and three quarters of her came out of the lake like a gigantic, freakish trout.

She screamed, darted her head forward, and buried her teeth in my wrist.

The pain was immediate and enormous. I jerked my arm up even higher and then brought it down, not thinking about hurting her, wanting only to rid myself of that weasel’s mouth. Another wave hit the half-submerged dock as I. did. Its rising, splintered edge impaled Rogette’s descending face. One eye popped; a dripping yellow splinter ran up her nose like a dagger; the scant skin of her forehead split, snapping away from the bone like two suddenly released windowshades. Then the lake pulled her away. I saw the torn topography of her face a moment longer, upturned into the torrential rain, wet and as pale as the light from a fluorescent bar. Then she rolled over, her black vinyl raincoat swirling around her like a shroud. What I saw when I looked back toward The Sunset Bar was another glimpse under the skin of this world, but one far different from the face of Sara in the Green Lady or the snarling, half-glimpsed shape of the Outsider. Kyra stood on the wide wooden porch in front of the bar amid a litter of overturned wicker furniture. In front of her was a waterspout in which I could still see—very faintly—the fading shape of a woman. She was on her knees, holding her arms out. They tried to embrace. Ki’s arms went through Mattie and came out dripping. “Mommy, I can’t get you!” The woman in the water was speaking—I could see her lips moving. Ki looked at her, rapt. Then, for just a moment Mattie turned to me. Our eyes met, and hers were made of the lake. They were Dark Score, which was here long before I came and will remain long after I am gone. I put my hands to my mouth, kissed my palms, and held them out to her. Shimmery hands went up, as if to catch those kisses. “Mommy don’t go/” Kyra screamed, and flung her arms around the figure. She was immediately drenched and backed away with her eyes squinched shut, coughing. There was no longer a woman with her; there was only water running across the boards and dripping through the cracks to rejoin the lake, which comes up from deep springs far below, from the fissures in the rock which underlies the TR and all this part of our world.

Moving carefully, doing my own balancing act, I made my way out along the wavering dock to The Sunset Bar. When I got there I took Kyra in my arms. She hugged me tight, shivering fiercely against me. I could hear the small dicecup rattle of her teeth and smell the lake in her hair.

“Mattie came,” she said. “I know. I saw her.”

“Mattie made the white nana go away.”

“I saw that, too. Be very still now, Ki. We’re going back to solid ground, but you can’t move around a lot. If you do, we’ll end up swimming.” She was good as gold. When we were on The Street again and I tried to put her down, she clung to my neck fiercely. That was okay with me. I thought of taking her into Warrington’s, but didn’t. There would be towels in there, probably dry clothes as well, but I had an idea there might also be a bathtub full of warm water waiting in there.

Besides, the rain was slackening again and this time the sky looked lighter in the west. “What did Mattie tell you, hon?’ I asked as we walked north along The Street. Ki would let me put her down so we could crawl under the downed trees we came to, but raised her arms to be picked up again on the far side of each. “To be a good girl and not be sad. But I am sad. I’m very sad.” She began to cry, and I stroked her wet hair. By the time we got to the railroad-tie steps she had cried herself out… and over the mountains in the west, I could see one small but very brilliant wedge of blue. ’gxll the woods fell down,” Ki said, looking around. Her eyes were very wide. “Well… not all, but a lot of them, I guess.” Halfway up the steps I paused, puffing and seriously winded. I didn’t ask Ki if I could put her down, though. I didn’t want to put her down. I just wanted to catch my breath. “Mike?”

“What, doll?”

“Mattie told me something else.”

“What?”

“Can I whisper?”

“If you want to, sure.” Ki leaned close, put her lips to my ear, and whispered. I listened. When she was done I nodded, kissed her cheek, shifted her to the other hip, and carried her the rest of the way up to the house.

“T’wasn’t the stawm of the century, chummy, and don’t you go thinkin that it was. Nossir. So said the old-timers who sat in front of the big Army medics’ tent that served as the Lakeview General that late summer and fall. A huge elm had toppled across Route 68 and bashed the store in like a Saltines box. Adding injury to insult, the elm had carried a bunch of spitting live lines with it. They ignited propane from a ruptured tank, and the whole thing went kaboom. The tent was a pretty good warm-weather substitute, though, and folks on the TR took to saying they was going down to the MAS4 for bread and beer—this because you could still see a faded red cross on both sides of the tent’s roof. The old-timers sat along one canvas wall in folding chairs, waving to other old-timers when they went pooting by in their rusty old-timer cars (all certified old-timers own either Fords or Chevys, so I’m well on my way in that regard), swapping their undershirts for flannels as the days began to cool toward cider season and spud-digging, watching the township start to rebuild itself around them. And as they watched they talked about the ice storm of the past winter, the one that knocked out lights and splintered a million trees between Kittery and Fort Kent; they talked about the cyclones that touched down in August of 1985; they talked about the sleet hurricane of 1927. Now them was some stawms, they said. There was some stawms, by Gorry. I’m sure they’ve got a point, and I don’t argue with them—you rarely win an argument with a genuine Yankee old-timer, never if it’s about the weather—but for me the storm of July 21, 1998, will always be the storm. And I know a little girl who feels the same. She may live until 2100, given all the benefits of modern medicine, but I think that for Kyra Elizabeth Devore that will always be the storm. The one where her dead mother came to her dressed in the lake.

The first vehicle to come down my driveway didn’t arrive until almost six o’clock. It turned out to be not a Castle County police car but a yellow bucket-loader with flashing yellow lights on top of the cab and a guy in a Central Maine Power Company slicker working the controls. The guy in the other seat was a cop, though—was in fact Norris Ridgewick, the County Sheriff himself. And he came to my door with his gun drawn.

The change in the weather the TV guy had promised had already arrived, clouds and storm-cells driven east by a chilly wind running just under gale force. Trees had continued to fall in the dripping woods for at least an hour after the rain stopped. Around five o’clock I made us toasted-cheese sandwiches and tomato soup… comfort food, Jo would have called it. Kyra ate listlessly, but she did eat, and she drank a lot of milk. I had wrapped her in another of my tee-shirts and she tied her own hair back. I offered her the white ribbons, but she shook her head decisively and opted for a rubber band instead. “I don’t like those ribbons anymore,” she said. I decided I didn’t, either, and threw them away. Ki watched me do it and offered no objection. Then I crossed the living room to the woodstove. “What are you doing?” She finished her second glass of milk, wriggled off her chair, and came over to me.

“Making a fire. Maybe all those hot days thinned my blood. That’s what my mom would have said, anyway.” She watched silently as I pulled sheet after sheet from the pile of paper I’d taken off the table and stacked on top of the woodstove, balled each one up, and slipped it in through the door. When I felt I’d loaded enough, I began to lay bits of kindling on top. “What’s written on those papers?” Ki asked. “Nothing important.”

“Is it a story?”

“Not really. It was more like… oh, I don’t know. A crossword puzzle. Or a letter.”

“Pretty long letter,” she said, and then laid her head against my leg as if she were tired. “Yeah,” I said. “Love letters usually are, but keeping them around is a bad idea.”

“Why?”

“Because they…” Can come back to haunt you was what rose to mind, but I wouldn’t say it. “Because they can embarrass you in later life.”

“Oh.”

“Besides,” I said. “These papers are like your ribbons, in a way.”

“You don’t like them anymore.”

“Right.” She saw the box then—the tin box with JO’s NOTIONS written on the front. It was on the counter between the living room and the sink, not far from where old Krazy Kat had hung on the wall. I didn’t remember bringing the box up from the studio with me, but I suppose I might not have; I was pretty freaked. I also think it could have come up… kind of by itself. I do believe such things now; I have reason to. Kyra’s eyes lit up in a way they hadn’t since she had wakened from her short nap to find out her mother was dead. She stood on tiptoe to take hold of the box, then ran her small fingers across the gilt letters. I thought about how important it was for a kid to own a tin box. You had to have one for your secret stuff the best toy, the prettiest bit of lace, the first piece of jewelry. Or a picture of your mother, perhaps. “This is so… pretty,” she said in a soft, awed voice. “You can have it if you don’t mind it saying JO’s NOTIONS instead of KI’s NOTIONS. There are some papers in it I want to read, but I could put them somewhere else.” She looked at me to make sure I wasn’t kidding, saw I wasn’t. “I’d love it,” she said in the same soft, awed voice. I took the box from her, scooped out the steno books, notes, and clippings, then handed it back to Ki. She practiced taking the lid off and then putting it back on. “Guess what I’ll put in here,” she said. “Secret treasures?”

“Yes!” she said, and actually smiled for a moment. “Who was Jo, Mike? Do I know her? I do, don’t I? She was one of the fridgearator people.”

“She—” A thought occurred. I shuffled through the yellowed clippings. Nothing. I thought I’d lost it somewhere along the way, then saw a corner of what I was looking for peeking from the middle of one of the steno notebooks. I slid it out and handed it to Ki. “What is it?”

“A backwards photo. Hold it up to the light.” She did, and looked for a long time, rapt. Faint as a dream I could see my wife in her hand, my wife standing on the swimming float in her two-piece suit. “That’s Jo,” I said. “She’s pretty. I’m glad to have her box for my things.”

“I am too, Ki.” I kissed the top of her head.

When Sheriff Ridgewick hammered on the door, I thought it wise to answer with my hands up. He looked wired. What seemed to ease the situation was a simple, uncalculated question. “Where’s Alan Pangborn these days, Sheriff?.”

“Over New Hampshire,” Ridgewick said, lowering his pistol a little (a minute or two later he holstered it without even seeming to be aware he had done so). “He and Polly are doing real well. Except for her arthritis. That’s nasty, I guess, but she still has her good days. A person can go along quite awhile if they get a good day every once and again, that’s what I think. Mr. Noonan, I have a lot of questions for you. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“First off and most important, do you have the child? Kyra Devore?”

“Where is she?”

“I’ll be happy to show you.” We walked down the north-wing corridor and stood just outside the bedroom doorway, looking in. The duvet was pulled up to her chin and she was sleeping deeply. The stuffed dog was curled in one hand we could just see its muddy tail poking out of her fist at one end and its nose poking out at the other.

We stood there for a long time, neither of us saying anything, watching her sleep in the light of a summer evening. In the woods the trees had stopped falling, but the wind still blew. Around the eaves of Sara Laughs it made a sound like ancient music.

EPILOGUE It snowed for Christmas—a polite six inches of powder that made the carollers working the streets of Sanford look like they belonged in It’s a Wonderful Lij. By the time I came back from checking Kyra for the third time, it was quarter past one on the morning of the twenty-sixth, and the snow had stopped. A late moon, plump but pale, was peeking through the unravelling fluff of clouds.

I was Christmasing with Frank again, and we were the last two up. The kids, Ki included, were dead to the world, sleeping off the annual bacchanal of food and presents. Frank was on his third Scotch—it had been a three-Scotch story if there ever was one, I guess—but I’d barely drunk the top off my first one. I think I might have gotten into the bottle quite heavily if not for Ki. On the days when I have her I usually don’t drink so much as a glass of beer. And to have her three days in a row… but shit, kemo sabe, if you can’t spend Christmas with your kid, what the hell is Christmas for?

“Are you all right?” Frank asked when I sat down again and took another little token sip from my glass.

I grinned at that. Not is she all right but are you all right. Well, nobody ever said Frank was stupid. “You should’ve seen me when the Department of Human Services let me have her for a weekend in October. I must have checked on her a dozen times before I went to bed… and then I kept checking. Getting up and peeking in on her, listening to her breathe. I didn’t sleep a wink Friday night, caught maybe three hours on Saturday. So this is a big improvement. But if you ever blab any of what I’ve told you, Frank—if they ever hear about me filling up that bathtub before the storm knocked the gennie out—I can kiss my chances of adopting her goodbye. I’ll probably have to fill out a form in triplicate before they even let me attend her high-school graduation.” I hadn’t meant to tell Frank the bathtub part, but once I started talking, almost everything spilled out. I suppose it had to spill to someone if Iwas ever to get on with my life. I’d assumed that John Storrow would be the one on the other side of the confessional when the time came, but John didn’t want to talk about any of those events except as they bore on our ongoing legal business, which nowadays is all about Kyra Elizabeth Devore. “I’ll keep my mouth shut, don’t worry. How goes the adoption battle?”

“Slow. I’ve come to loathe the State of Maine court system, and DHS as well. You take the people who work in those bureaucracies one by one and they’re mostly fine, but when you put them together…”

“Bad, huh?”

“I sometimes feel like a character in Bleak House. That’s the one where Dickens says that in court nobody wins but the lawyers. John tells me to be patient and count my blessings, that we’re making amazing progress considering that I’m that most untrustworthy of creatures, an unmarried white male of middle age, but Ki’s been in two foster-home situations since Mattie died, and—”

“Doesn’t she have kin in one of those neighboring towns?”

“Mattie’s aunt. She didn’t want anything to do with Ki when Mattie was alive and has even less interest now. Especially since—”

“—since Ki’s not going to be rich.”

“Yeah.”

“The Whitmore woman was lying about Devore’s will.”

“Absolutely. He left everything to a foundation that’s supposed to foster global computer literacy. With due respect to the numbercrunchers of the world, I can’t imagine a colder charity.”

“How is John?”

“Pretty well mended, but he’s never going to get the use of his right affn back entirely. He damned near died of blood-loss.” Frank had led me away from the entwined subjects of Ki and custody quite well for a man deep into his third Scotch, and I was willing enough to go. I could hardly bear to think of her long days and longer nights in those homes where the Department of Human Services stores away children like knickknacks nobody wants. Ki didn’t live in those places but only existed in them, pale and listless, like a well-fed rabbit kept in a cage. Each time she saw my car turning in or pulling up she came alive, waving her arms and dancing like Snoopy on his doghouse. Our weekend in October had been wonderful (despite my obsessive need to check her every half hour or so after she was asleep), and the Christmas holiday had been even better. Her emphatic desire to be with me was helping in court more than anything else… yet the wheels still turned slowly. Maybe in the spring, Mike, John told me. He was a new John these days, pale and serious. The slightly arrogant eager beaver who had wanted nothing more than to go head to head with Mr. Maxwell “Big Bucks” Devore was no longer in evidence. John had learned something about mortality on the twenty-first of July, and something about the world’s idiot cruelty, as well. The man who had taught himself to shake with his left hand instead of his right was no longer interested in partying ’til he puked. He was seeing a girl in Philly, the daughter of one of his mother’s friends. I had no idea if it was serious or not, Ki’s “Unca John” is closemouthed about that part of his life, but when a young man is of his own accord seeing the daughter of one of his mother’s friends, it usually is. Maybe in the spring: it was his mantra that late fall and early winter. What am I doing wrong? I asked him once—this was just after Thanksgiving and another setback.

Nothing, he replied. Single-parent adoptions are always slow, and when the putative adopter is a man, it’s worse. At that point in the conversation John made an ugly little gesture, poking the index finger of his left hand in and out of his loosely cupped right fist. That’s blatant sex discrimination, John. I3ah, but usually it’s justified. Blame it on every twisted asshole who ever decided he had a right to take off some little kid’s pants, if you want,’ blame it on the bureaucracy, if you want,’ hell, blame it on cosmic rays if you want. It’s a slow process, but you’re going to win in the end. I3u’ve got a clean record, you’ve got Kyra saying “I want to be with Mike” to every judge and DHS worker she sees, you’ve got enough money to keep ajger them no matter how much they squirm and no matter how many Jrms they throw at you… and most of all, buddy, you’ve got me. I had something else, toowhat Ki had whispered in my ear as I paused to catch my breath on the steps. I’d never told John about that, and it was one of the few things I didn’t tell Frank, either. Mattie says I’m your little guy now, she had whispered. Mattie says you’ll take care of me. I was trying to—as much as the fucking slowpokes at Human Services would let me—but the waiting was hard. Frank picked up the Scotch and tilted it in my direction. I shook my head. Ki had her heart set on snowman-making, and I wanted to be able to face the glare of early sun on fresh snow without a headache.

“Frank, how much of this do you actually believe?” He poured for himself, then just sat for a time, looking down at the table and thinking. When he raised his head again there was a smile on his face.

It was so much like Jo’s that it broke my heart. And when he spoke, he juiced his ordinarily faint Boston brogue. “Sure and I’m a half-drunk Irishman who just finished listenin to the granddaddy of all ghost stories on Christmas night,” he said. “I believe all of it, you silly git.” I laughed and so did he. We did it mostly through the nose, as men are apt to do when up late, maybe in their cups a little, and don’t want to wake the house. “Come on—how much really?”

“All of it,” he repeated, dropping the brogue. “Because Jo believed it. And because of her.” He nodded his head in the direction of the stairs so I’d know which her he meant. “She’s like no other little girl I’ve ever seen. She’s sweet enough, but there’s something in her eyes. At first I thought it was losing her mother the way she did, but that’s not it.

There’s more, isn’t there?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s in you, too. It’s touched you both.” I thought of the baying thing which Jo had managed to hold back while I poured the lye into that rotted roll of canvas. An Outsider, she had called it. I hadn’t gotten a clear look at it, and probably that was good. Probably that was very good. “Mike?” Frank looked concerned. “You’re shivering.”

“I’m okay,” I said. “Really.”

“What’s it like in the house now?” he asked. I was still living in Sara Laughs. I procrastinated until early November, then put the Derry house up for sale. “Quiet.”

“Totally quiet?” I nodded, but that wasn’t completely true. On a couple of occasions I had awakened with a sensation Mattie had once mentioned—that there was someone in bed with me. But not a dangerous presence. On a couple of occasions I have smelled (or thought I have) Red perfume. And sometimes, even when the air is perfectly still, Bunter’s bell will shiver out a few notes. It’s as if something lonely wants to say hello. Frank glanced at the clock, then back at me, almost apologetically. “I’ve got a few more questions—okay?”

“If you can’t stay up until the wee hours on Boxing Day morning,” I said, “I guess you never can. Fire away.”

“What did you tell the police?”

“I didn’t have to tell them much of anything. Footman talked enough to suit them—too much to suit Norris Ridgewick. Footman said that he and Osgood—it was Osgood driving the car, Devore’s pet broker—did the drive-by because Devore had made threats about what would happen to them if they didn’t. The State cops also found a copy of a wire-transfer among Devore’s effects at Warrington’s. Two million dollars to an account in the Grand Caymans. The name scribbled on the copy is Randolph Footman. Randolph is George’s middle name. Mr. Footman is now residing in Shawshank State Prison.”

“What about Rogette?”

“Well, Whitmore was her mother’s maiden name, but I think it’s safe to say that Rogette’s heart belonged to Daddy. She had leukemia, was diagnosed in 1996. In people her age—she was only fifty-seven when she died, by the way—it’s fatal in two cases out of every three, but she was doing the chemo. Hence the wig.”

“Why did she try to kill Kyra? I don’t understand that. If you broke Sara Tidwell’s hold on this earthly plane of ours when you dissolved her bones, the curse should have… why are you looking at me that way?”

“You’d understand if you’d ever met Devore,” I said. “This is the man who lit the whole fucking TR on fire as a way of saying goodbye when he headed west to sunny California. I thought of him the second I pulled the wig off, thought they’d swapped identities somehow. Then I thought Oh no, it’s her all right, it’s Rogette, she’s just lost her hair somehow.”

“And you were right. The chemo.”

“I was also wrong. I know more about ghosts than I did, Frank. Maybe the most important thing is that what you see first, what you think first… that’s what’s usually true. It was him that day. Devore. He came back at the end. I’m sure of it. At the end it wasn’t about Sara, not for him.

At the end it wasn’t even about Kyra. At the end it was about Scooter Larribee’s sled.” Silence between us. For a few moments it was so deep that I could actually hear the house breathing. You can hear that, you know. If you really listen. That’s something else I know now. “Christ,” he said at last. “I don’t think Devore came east from California to kill her,” I said. “That wasn’t the original plan.”

“Then what was? Get to know his granddaughter? Mend his fences?”

“God, no. You still don’t understand what he was.”

“Tell me, then.”

“A human monster. He came back to buy her, but Mattie wouldn’t sell. Then, when Sara got hold of him, he began to plan Ki’s death. I suspect that Sara never found a more willing tool.”

“How many did she kill in all?” Frank asked. “I don’t know for sure. Idon’t think I want to. Based on Jo’s notes and clippings, I’d say that there were perhaps four other… directed murders, shall we call them?

… in the years between 1901 and 1998. All children, all K-names, all closely related to the men who killed her.”

“My God.”

“I don’t think God had much to do with it. . but she made them pay, all right.”

“You’re sorry for her, aren’t you?”

“Yes. I would have torn her apart before I let her put so much as a finger on Ki, but of course I am. She was raped and murdered. Her child was drowned while she herself lay dying. My God, aren’t you sorry for her?”

“I suppose I am. Mike, do you know who the other boy was? The crying boy? Was he the one who died of blood-poisoning?”

“Most of Jo’s notes concerned that part of it—it’s where she got started. Royce Merrill knew the story well. The crying boy was Reg Tid-well, Junior. You have to understand that by September of 1901, when the Red-Tops played their last show in Castle County, almost everyone on the TR knew that Sara and her boy had been murdered, and almost everyone had a good idea ofwho’d done it. “Reg Tidwell spent a lot of that August hounding the County Sheriff, Nehemiah Bannerman. At first it was to find them alive Tidwell wanted a search mounted—and then it was to find their bodies, and then it was to find their killers… because once he accepted that they were dead, he never doubted that they’d been murdered. “Bannerman was sympathetic at first.

Everyone seemed sympathetic at first. The Red-Top crowd had been treated wonderfully during their time on the TR—that was what infuriated Jared the most—and I think you can forgive Son Tidwell for making a crucial mistake.”

“What mistake was that?” Why, he got the idea that Mars was heaven, I thought. The TR must have seemed like heaven to them, right up until Sara and Kito went jr a stroll, the boy carrying his berry-bucket, and never came back. It must have seemed that they’d finally jund a place where they could be black people and still be allowed to breathe.

“Thinking they’d be treated like regular folks when things went wrong, just because they’d been treated that way when things were right.

Instead, the TR clubbed together against them. No one who had an idea of what Jared and his prot6gs had done condoned it, exactly, but when the chips were down…”

“You protect your own, you wash your dirty laundry with the door closed,” Frank murmured, and finished his drink. “Yeah. By the time the Red-Tops played the Castle County Fair, their little community down by the lake had begun to break up—this is all according to Jo’s notes, you understand; there’s not a whisper of it in any of the town histories. “By Labor Day the active harassment had started—so Royce told Jo. It got a little uglier every day—a little scarier—but Son Tidwell flat didn’t want to go, not until he found out what had happened to his sister and nephew. He apparently kept the blood family there in the meadow even after the others had taken off for friendlier locations. “Then someone laid the trap. There was a clearing in the woods about a mile east of what’s now called Tidwell’s Meadow; it had a big birch cross in the middle of it. Jo had a picture of it in her studio. That was where the black community had their services after the doors of the local churches were closed to them. The boy—Junior—used to go up there a lot to pray or just to sit and meditate. There were plenty of folks in the township who knew his routine. Someone put a leghold trap on the little path through the woods that the boy used.

Covered it with leaves and needles.”

“Jesus,” Frank said. He sounded ill. “Probably it wasn’t Jared Devore or his logger-boys who set it, either—they didn’t want any more to do with Sara and Son’s people after the murders, they kept right clear of them. It might not even have been a friend of those boys. By then they didn’t have that many friends. But that didn’t change the fact that those folks down by the lake were getting out of their place, scratching at things better left alone, refusing to take no for an answer. So someone set the trap. I don’t think there was any intent to actually kill the boy, but to maim him?

Maybe see him with his foot off, condemned to a lifetime crutch? I think they may have gotten that far in their imagining.

“In any case it worked. The boy stepped in the trap… and for quite awhile they didn’t find him. The pain must have been excruciating. Then the blood-poisoning. He died. Son gave up. He had other kids to think about, not to mention the people who’d stuck with him. They packed up their clothes and their guitars and left. Jo traced some of them to North Carolina, where many of the descendants still live. And during the fires of 1933, the ones young Max Devore set, the cabins burned flat”

“I don’t understand why the bodies of Sara and her son weren’t found,” Frank said. “I understand that what you smelled—the putres-cence-wasn’t there in any physical sense. But surely at the time… if this path you call The Street was so popular…”

“Devore and the others didn’t bury them where I found them, not to begin with. They would have started by dragging the bodies deeper into the woods—maybe up to where the north wing of Sara Laughs stands now. They covered them with brush and came back that night. Must have been that night; to leave them any longer would have drawn every carnivore in the woods. They took them someplace else and buried them in that roll of canvas. Jo didn’t know where, but my guess is Bowie Ridge, where they’d spent most of the summer cutting.

Hell, Bowie Ridge is still pretty isolated. They put the bodies somewhere; we might as well say there.”

“Then how… why…”

“Draper Finney wasn’t the only one haunted by what they did, Frank-they all were. Literally haunted. With the possible exception of Jared Devore, I suppose. He lived another ten years and apparently never missed a meal.

But the boys had bad dreams, they drank too much, they fought too much, they argued… bristled if anyone so much as mentioned the Red-Tops…”

“Might as well have gone around wearing signs reading: ICK US, WE’re GUILTY,” Frank commented. “Yes. It probably didn’t help that most of the TR was giving them the silent treatment. Then Finney died in the quarry-committed suicide in the quarry, I think—and Jared’s logger-boys got an idea. Came down with it like a cold. Only it was more like a compulsion. Their idea was that if they dug up the bodies and reburied them where it happened, things’d go back to normal for them.”

“Did Jared go along with the idea?”

“According to Jo’s notes, by then they never went near him. They reburied the bag of bones—without Jared Devore’s help—where I eventually dug it up. In the late fall or early winter of 1902, I think.”

“She wanted to be back, didn’t she? Sara. Back where she could really work on them.”

“And on the whole township. Yes. Jo thought so, too. Enough so she didn’t want to go back to Sara Laughs once she found some of this stuff out. Especially when she guessed she was pregnant.

When we started trying to have a baby and I suggested the name Kia, how that must have scared her! And I never saw.”

“Sara thought she could use you to kill Kyra if Devore played out before he could get the job done—he was old and in bad health, after all. Jo gambled that you’d save her instead. That’s what you think, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And she was right.”

“I couldn’t have done it alone. From the night I dreamed about Sara singing, Jo was with me every step of the way. Sara couldn’t make her quit.”

“No, she wasn’t a quitter,” Frank agreed, and wiped at one eye. “What do you know about your twice-great-aunt? The one that married Auster?”

“Bridget Noonan Auster,” I said. “Bridey, to her friends. I asked my mother and she swears up and down she knows nothing, that Jo never asked her about Bridey, but I think she might be lying. The young woman was definitely the black sheep of the family—I can tell just by the sound of Mom’s voice when the name comes up. I have no idea how she met Benton Auster. Let’s say he was down in the Prout’s Neck part of the world visiting friends and started flirting with her at a clambake.

That’s as likely as anything else. This was in 1884. She was eighteen, he was twenty-three. They got married, one of those hurry-up jobs.

Harry, the one who actually drowned Kito Tidwell, came along six months later.”

“So he was barely seventeen when it happened,” Frank said. “Great God.”

“And by then his mother had gotten religion. His terror over what she’d think if she ever found out was part of the reason he did what he did.

Any other questions, Frank? Because I’m really starting to fade.” For several moments he said nothing—I had begun to think he was done when he said, “Two others. Do you mind?”

“I guess it’s too late to back out now. What are they?”

“The Shape you spoke of. The Outsider. That troubles me.” I said nothing. It troubled me, too. “Do you think there’s a chance it might come back?”

“It always does,” I said. “At the risk of sounding pompous, the Outsider eventually comes back for all of us, doesn’t it? Because we’re all bags of bones. And the Outsider. · Frank, the Outsider wants what’s in the bag.” He mulled this over, then swallowed the rest of his Scotch at a gulp. “You had one other question?”

“Yes,” he said. “Have you started writing again?”

I went upstairs a few minutes later, checked Ki, brushed my teeth, checked Ki again, then climbed into bed. From where I lay I was able to look out the window at the pale moon shining on the snow. Have you started writing again? No. Other than a rather lengthy essay on how I spent my summer vacation which I may show to IZYRA in some later year, there’s been nothing. I know that Harold is nervous, and sooner or later I suppose I’ll have to call him and tell him what he already guesses: the machine which ran so sweet for so long has stopped. It isn’t broken—this memoir came out with nary a gasp or missed heartbeat—but the machine has stopped, just the same. There’s gas in the tank, the sparkplugs spark and the battery bats, but the wordygurdy stands there quiet in the middle of my head. I’ve put a tarp over it. It’s served me well, you see, and I don’t like to think of it getting dusty. Some of it has to do with the way Mattie died. It occurred to me at some point this fall that I had written similar deaths in at least two of my books, and popular fiction is heaped with other examples of the same thing. Have you set up a moral dilemma you don’t know how to solve? Is the protagonist sexually attracted to a woman who is much too young for him, shall we say? Need a quick fix? Easiest thing in the world. “When the story starts going sour, bring on the man with the gun.” Raymond Chandler said that, or something like it—close enough for government work, kemo sabe.

Murder is the worst kind of pornography, murder is let me do what I want taken to its final extreme. I believe that even make-believe murders should be taken seriously; maybe that’s another idea I got last summer.

Perhaps I got it while Mattie was struggling in my arms, gushing blood from her smashed head and dying blind, still crying out for her daughter as she left this earth. To think I might have written such a hellishly convenient death in a book, ever, sickens me.

Or maybe I just wish there’d been a little more time.

I remember telling Ki it’s best not to leave love letters around; what Ithought but didn’t say was that they can come back to haunt you. I am haunted anyway… but I will not willingly haunt myself, and when I closed my book of dreams I did so of my own free will. I think I could have poured lye over those dreams as well, but from that I stayed my hand.

I’ve seen things I never expected to see and felt things I never expected to feel—not the least of them what I felt and still feel for the child sleeping down the hall from me. She’s my little guy now, I’m her big guy, and that’s the important thing. Nothing else seems to matter half so much.

Thomas Hardy, who supposedly said that the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones, stopped writing novels himself after finishing Jude the Obscure and while he was at the height of his narrative genius. He went on writing poetry for another twenty years, and when someone asked him why he’d quit fiction he said he couldn’t understand why he had trucked with it so long in the first place. In retrospect it seemed silly to him, he said. Pointless. I know exactly what he meant. In the time between now and whenever the Outsider remembers me and decides to come back, there must be other things to do, things that mean more than those shadows. I think I could go back to clanking chains behind the Ghost House wall, but I have no interest in doing so.

I’ve lost my taste for spooks. I like to imagine Mattie would think of Bartleby in Melville’s story.

I’ve put down my scrivener’s pen. These days I prefer not to.

Center Lovell, Maine:

May 25th, 1997—February 6th, 1998

STEPHEN KING was born in 1947 and has lived most of his life in the state of Maine, attending the University of Maine at Orono, where he met his wife, the novelist Tabitha King. He began writing stories when he was nine years old, encouraged by an aunt who paid him a quarter each time he finished one. Mr. King was teaching high school English when his first novel, Carrie, was accepted for publication. He has since written and published more than thirty novels, including The Shining, The Stand, It, Desperation, and The Green Mile. His stories and novellas have been collected in four volumes, with a fifth to be published in 1999.

Numerous films have been based on his stories, including three— Carrie, Stand by Me, and Shawshank Redemption—that received Academy Award nominations. His most recent volume in the Dark Tower series, begun while he was in college, is l’zard and Glass, published in 1997. Among many honors for his work over the years, he received in 1996 the O.

Henry First Prize Award for his short story, “The Man in the Black Suit,” and in 1997 the Poets & Writers’ Writers for Writers Award for his support of writers, writing, and reading. Since 1991 he has played rhythm guitar and sung vocals for The Rock Bottom Remainders, a band of writers that performs now and then around the country to promote literacy. Year after year he roots (so far in vain) for the Red Sox to win the World Series.