Books Of Blood Vol 4

REVELATIONS

HERE HAD been talk of tornadoes in Amarillo; of cattle, cars, and sometimes entire houses lifted up and dashed to the earth again, of whole communities laid waste in a few devastating moments. Perhaps that was what made Virginia so uneasy tonight. Either that or the accumulated fatigue of traveling so many empty highways with just the deadpan skies of Texas for scenery, and nothing to look forward to at the end of the next leg of the journey but another round of hymns and hellfire. She sat, her spine aching, in the back of the black Pontiac and tried her best to get some sleep. But the hot, still air clung about her thin neck and gave her dreams of suffocation. So she gave up her attempts to rest and contented herself with watching the wheat fields pass and counting the grain elevators bright against the thunderheads that were beginning to gather in the northeast.

In the front of the vehicle Earl sang to himself as he drove. Beside her, John-no more than two feet away from her but to all intents and purposes a million miles' distance-studied the Epistles of St. Paul, murmuring the words as he read. Then, as they drove through Pantex Village ("They build the warheads here," Earl had said cryptically, then said no more) the rain began. It came down suddenly as evening was beginning to fall, lending darkness to darkness, almost instantly plunging the Amarillo-Pampa Highway into watery night.

Virginia rolled up her window The rain, though refreshing, was soaking her plain blue dress, the only one John approved of her wearing at meetings. Now there was nothing to look at beyond the glass. She sat, the unease growing in her with every mile they covered to Pampa, listening to the vehemence of the downpour on the roof of the car, and to her husband speaking in whispers at her side.

"Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and rise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.

"See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise,

"Redeeming the time, because the days are evil."

He sat, as ever, upright, the same dog-eared, soft-backed Bible he'd been using for years open in his lap. He surely knew the passages he was reading by heart. He quoted them often enough, and with such a mixture of familiarity and freshness that the words might have been his, not Paul's, newly minted from his own mouth. That passion and vigor would in time make John Gyer America's greatest evangelist, Virginia had no doubt of that. During the grueling, hectic weeks of the tri-state tour her husband had displayed unprecedented confidence and maturity. His message had lost none of its vehemence with this newfound professionalism-it was still that old-fashioned mixture of damnation and redemption that he always propounded-but now he had complete control of his gifts. In town after town-in Oklahoma and New Mexico and now in Texas-the faithful had gathered to listen by the hundreds and thousands, eager to come again into God's kingdom. In Pampa, thirty-five miles from here, they would already be assembling, despite the rain, determined to have a grand stand view when the crusader arrived. They would have brought their children, their savings, and most of all, their hunger for forgiveness.

But forgiveness was for tomorrow. First they had to get to Pampa, and the rain was worsening. Earl had given up his singing once the storm began, and was concentrating all his attention on the road ahead. Sometimes he would sigh to himself and stretch in his seat. Virginia tried not to concern herself with the way he was driving, but as the torrent became a deluge her anxiety got the better of her. She leaned forward from the backseat and started to peer through the windshield, watching for vehicles coming in the opposite direction. Accidents were common in conditions like these: bad weather and a tired driver eager to be twenty miles further down the road than he was. At her side John sensed her concern.

"The Lord is with us," he said, riot looking up from the tightly printed pages, though it was by now far too dark for him to read.

"It's a bad night, John," she said. "Maybe we shouldn't try to go all the way to Pampa. Earl must be tired."

"I'm fine," Earl put in. "It's not that far,"

"You're tired," Virginia repeated. "We all are."

"Well, we could find a motel, I guess," Gyer suggested. "What do you think, Earl?"

Earl shrugged his sizeable shoulders. "Whatever you say, boss," he replied, not putting up much of a fight.

Gyer turned to his wife and gently patted the back of her hand. "We'll find a motel," he said. "Earl can call ahead to Pampa and tell them that we'll be with them in the morning. How's that?"

She smiled at him, but he wasn't looking at her.

"I think White Deer's next off the highway," Earl told Virginia. "Maybe they'll have a motel."

INfact, the Cottonwood Motel lay a half mile west of White Deer, in an area of waste ground south of U.S. 60, a small establishment with a dead or dying cottonwood tree in the lot between its two low buildings. There were a number of cars already in the motel parking lot and lights burning in most of the rooms; fellow fugitives from the storm presumably. Earl drove into the lot and parked as close to the manager's office as possible, then made a dash across the rain-lashed ground to find out if the place had any rooms for the night. With the engine stilled, the sound of the rain on the roof of the Pontiac was more oppressive than ever.

"I hope there's space for us," Virginia said, watching the water on the window smear the neon sign. Gyer didn't reply. The rain thundered on overhead. "Talk to me, John," she said to him.

"What for?"

She shook her head. "Never mind." Strands of hair clung to her slightly clammy forehead; though the rain had come, the heat in the air had not lifted. "I hate the rain," she said.

"It won't last all night," Gyer replied, running a hand through his thick gray hair. It was a gesture he used on the platform as punctuation; a pause between one momentous statement and the next. She knew his rhetoric, both physical and verbal, so well. Sometimes she thought she knew everything about him there was to know; that he had nothing left to tell her that she truly wanted to hear. But then the sentiment was probably mutual. They had long ago ceased to have a marriage recognizable as such. Tonight, as every night on this tour, they would lie in separate beds, and he would sleep that deep, easy sleep that came so readily to him, while she surreptitiously swallowed a pill or two to bring some welcome serenity.

"Sleep," he had often said, "is a time to commune with the Lord." He believed in the efficacy of dreams, though he didn't talk of what he saw in them. The time would come when he would unveil the majesty of his visions, she had no doubt of that. But in the meantime he slept alone and kept his counsel, leaving her to whatever secret sorrows she might have. It was easy to be bitter, but she fought the temptation. His destiny was manifest, it was demanded of him by the Lord. If he was fierce with her he was fiercer still with himself, living by a regime that would have destroyed lesser men, and still chastizing himself for his pettiest act of weakness.

At last, Earl appeared from the office and crossed back to the car at a run. He had three keys.

"Rooms Seven and Eight," he said breathlessly, the rain dripping off his brow and nose. "I got the key to the interconnecting door, too."

"Good," said Gyer.

"Last two in the place," he said. "I'll drive the car around. The rooms are in the other building."

THE interior of the two rooms was a hymn to banality. They'd stayed in what seemed like a thousand cells like these, identical down to the sickly orange bedcovers and the light-faded print of the Grand Canyon on the pale green walls. John was insensitive to his surroundings and always had been, but to Virginia's eyes these rooms were an apt model for Purgatory. Soulless limbos in which nothing of moment had ever happened, nor ever would. There was nothing to mark these rooms out as different from all the others, but there was something different in her tonight.

It wasn't talk of tornadoes that had brought this strangeness on. She watched Earl to-mg and fro-ing with the bags, and felt oddly removed from herself, as though she were watching events through a veil denser than the warm rain falling outside the door. She was almost sleepwalking. When John quietly told her which bed would be hers for tonight, she lay down and tried to control her sense of dislocation by relaxing. It was easier said than done. Somebody had a television on in a nearby room, and the late-night movie was word-for-word clear through the paper-thin walls.

"Are you all right?"

She opened her eyes. Earl, ever solicitous, was looking down at her. He looked as weary as she felt. His face, deeply tanned from standing in the sun at the open-air rallies, looked yellowish rather than its usual healthy brown. He was slightly overweight too, though this bulk married well with his wide, stubborn features.

"Yes, I'm fine, thank you," she said. "A little thirsty."

"I'll see if I can get something for you to drink. They probably have a Coke machine."

She nodded, meeting his eyes. There was a subtext to this exchange which Gyer, who was sitting at the table making notes for tomorrow's speech, could not know. On and off throughout the tour Earl had supplied Virginia with pills. Nothing exotic, just tranquilizers to soothe her increasingly jangled nerves. But they-like stimulants, makeup, and jewelry-were not looked kindly upon by a man of Gyer's principles, and when, by chance, her husband had discovered the drugs, there had been an ugly scene. Earl had taken the brunt of his employer's ire, for which Virginia was deeply grateful. And though he was under strict instructions never to repeat the crime, he was soon supplying her again. Their guilt was an almost pleasurable secret between them. She read complicity in his eyes even now, as he did in hers.

"No Coca-Cola," Gyer said.

"Well, I thought we could make an exception-"

"Exception?" Gyer said, his voice taking on a characteristic note of self-regard. Rhetoric was in the air, and Earl cursed his idiot tongue. "The Lord doesn't give us laws to live by so that we can make exceptions, Earl. You know better than that."

At that moment Earl didn't much care what the Lord did or said. His concern was for Virginia. She was strong, he knew, despite her Deep South courtesy and the accompanying facade of frailty; strong enough to bring them all through the minor crises of the tour, when the Lord had failed to step in and help his agents in the field. But nobody's strength was limitless, and he sensed that she was close to collapse. She gave so much to her husband; of her love and admiration, of her energies and enthusiasm. More than once in the past few weeks Earl had thought that perhaps she deserved better than the man in the pulpit.

"Maybe you could get me some ice water?" she said, looking up at him with lines of fatigue beneath her gray-blue eyes. She was not, by contemporary standards, beautiful. Her features were too flawlessly aristocratic. Exhaustion though lent them new glamour.

"Ice water, coming right up," Earl said, forcing a jovial tone that he had little strength to sustain. He went to the door.

"Why don't you call the office and have someone bring it over?" Gyer suggested as Earl made to leave. "I want to go through next week's itinerary with you."

"It's no problem," Earl said. "Really. Besides, I should call Pampa, and tell them we're delayed," and he was out of the door and onto the walkway before he could be contradicted.

He needed an excuse to have some time to himself. The atmosphere between Virginia and Gyer was deteriorating by the day, and it was not a pleasant spectacle. He stood for a long moment watching the rain sheet down. The cottonwood tree in the middle of the lot hung its balding head in the fury of the deluge. He knew exactly how it felt.

As he stood on the walkway wondering how he would be able to keep his sanity in the last eight weeks of the tour, two figures walked from the highway and crossed the lot. He didn't see them, though the path they took to Room Seven led them directly across his line of vision. They walked through the drenching rain from the waste ground behind the manager's office-where, back in 1955, they had parked their red Buick-and though the rain fell in a steady torrent it left them both untouched. The woman, whose hairstyle had been in and out of fashion twice since the fifties, and whose clothes had the same period look, slowed for a moment to stare at the man who was watching the cottonwood tree with such rapt attention. He had kind eyes, despite his frown. In her time she might have loved such a man, she thought; but then her time had long gone, hadn't it? Buck, her husband, turned back to her-"Are you coming, Sadie?" he wanted to know-and she followed him onto the concrete walkway (it had been wooden the last time she was here) and through the open door of Room Seven.

A chill ran down Earl's back. Too much staring at the rain, he thought; that and too much fruitless longing. He walked to the end of the patio, steeled himself for the dash across the lot to the office and, counting to three, ran.

Sadie Durning glanced over her shoulder to watch Earl go, then looked back at Buck. The years had not tempered the resentment she felt toward her husband, any more than they'd improved his shifty features or his too-easy laugh. She had not much liked him on June 2, 1955, and she didn't much like him now, precisely thirty years on. Buck Durning had the soul of a philanderer, as her father had always warned her. That in itself was not so terrible; it was perhaps the masculine condition. But it had led to such grubby behavior that eventually she had tired of his endless deceptions. He-unknowing to the last-had taken her low spirits as a cue for a second honeymoon. This phenomenal hypocrisy had finally overridden any lingering thoughts of tolerance or forgiveness she might have entertained, and when, three decades ago tonight, they had checked into the Cottonwood Motel, she had come prepared for more than a night of love. She had let Buck shower, and when he emerged, she had leveled the Smith and Wesson .38 at him and blown a gaping hole in his chest. Then she'd run, throwing the gun away as she went, knowing the police were bound to catch her, and not much caring when they They'd taken her to Carson County Jail in Panhandle, and, after a few weeks, to trial. She never once tried to deny the murder. There'd been enough deception in her thirty-eight years of life as it was. And so when they found her defiant, they took her to Huntsville State Prison, chose a bright day the following October, and summarily passed 2,250 volts through her body, stopping her unrepentant heart almost instantaneously. An eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth. She had been brought up with such simple moral equations. She'd not been unhappy to die by the same mathematics.

But tonight she and Buck had elected to retrace the journey they'd taken thirty years before, to see if they could discover how and why their marriage had ended in murder. It was a chance offered to many dead lovers, though few, apparently, took it up. Perhaps the thought of experiencing again the cataclysm that had ended their lives was too distasteful. Sadie, however, couldn't help but wonder if it had all been predestined, if a tender word from Buck, or a look of genuine affection in his murky eyes, could have stayed her trigger finger and so saved both their lives. This one-night stand would give them an opportunity to test history. Invisible, inaudible, they would follow the same route as they had three decades ago. The next few hours would tell if that route had led inevitably to murder.

Room Seven was occupied, and so was the room beside it. The interconnecting door was wide, and fluorescent lights burned in both. The occupancy was not a problem. Sadie had long become used to the ethereal state; to wandering unseen among the living. In such a condition she had attended her niece's wedding, and later on her father's funeral, standing beside the grave with the dead old man and gossiping about the mourners. Buck however-never an agile individual-was more prone to carelessness. She hoped he would be careful tonight. After all, he wanted to see the experiment through as much as she did.

As they stood on the threshold and cast their eyes around the room in which their fatal farce had been played out, she wondered if the shot had hurt him very much. She must ask him tonight, she thought, should the opportunity arise.

THERE had been a young woman with a plain but pleasant face in the manager's office when Earl had gone in to book the rooms. She had now disappeared to be replaced by a man of sixty or so, wearing half a week's growth of mottled beard and a sweat-stained shirt. He looked up from a nose-close perusal of yesterday's Pampa Daily News when Earl entered.

"Yeah?"

"Is it possible to get some ice water?" Earl inquired. The man threw a hoarse yell over his shoulder. "Laura May? You in there?"

Through the doorway behind came the din of the late-night movie-shots, screams, the roar of an escaped beast-and then Laura May's response.

"What do you want, Pa?"

"There's a man wants room service," Laura May's father yelled back, not without a trace of irony in his voice. "Will you get out here and serve him?"

No reply came; just more screams. They set Earl's teeth on edge. The manager glanced up at him. One of his eyes was clouded by a cataract.

"You with the evangelist?" he said.

"Yes... how did you know it was-?"

"Laura May recognized him. Seen his picture in the paper.

"That so?"

"Don't miss a trick, my baby."

As if on cue Laura May emerged from the room behind the office. When her brown eyes fell on Earl she visibly brightened.

"Oh..." she said, a smile quickening her features, "what can I do for you, mister?" The line, coupled with her smile, seemed to signal more than polite interest in Earl; or was that just his wishful thinking? Except for a lady of the night he'd met in Pomca City, Oklahoma, his sex life had been nonexistent in the last three months. Taking a chance, he returned Laura May's smile. Though she was at least thirty-five, her manner was curiously girlish; the look she was giving him almost intimidating direct. Meeting her eyes, Earl began to think that his first estimation had not been far off.

"Ice water," he said. "I wondered if you had any? Mrs. Gyer isn't feeling so well."

Laura May nodded. "I'll get some," she said, dallying for a moment in the door before returning into the television room. The din of the movie had abated-a scene of calm, perhaps, before the beast emerged again-and in the hush Earl could hear the rain beating down outside, turning the earth to mud.

"Quite a gully washer tonight, eh?" the manager observed. "This keeps up, you'll be rained out tomorrow."

"People come out in all kinds of weather, " Earl said. "John Gyer's a big draw."

The man pulled a face. "Wouldn't rule out a tornado," he said, clearly reveling in the role of doomsayer. "We're just about due for one."

"Really?"

"Year before last, wind took the roof off the school. Just lifted it right off."

Laura May reappeared in the doorway with a tray on which a jug and four glasses were placed. Ice clinked against the jug's sides.

"What's that you say, Pa?" she asked.

"Tornado."

"Isn't hot enough," she announced with casual authority. Her father grunted his disagreement but made no argument in return. Laura May crossed toward Earl with the tray, but when he made a move to take it from her she said, "I'll take it myself You lead on." He didn't object. It would give them a little while to exchange pleasantries as they walked to the Gyers' room; perhaps the same thought was in her mind. Either that, or she wanted a closer view of the evangelist.

They went together as far as the end of the office block walkway in silence. There they halted. Before them lay twenty yards of puddle-strewn earth between one building and the next.

"Shall I carry the jug?" Earl volunteered. "You bring the glasses and the tray."

"Sure," she replied. Then, with the same direct look she'd given him before, she said, "What's your name?"

"Earl," he told her. "Earl Rayburn."

"I'm Laura May Cade."

"I'm most pleased to meet you, Laura May."

"You know about this place, do you? she said. "Papa told you, I suppose."

"You mean the tornadoes?" he asked. "No," she replied, "I mean murder."

SADIE stood at the bottom of the bed and looked at the woman lying on it. She has very little dress-sense, Sadie thought; the clothes were drab, and her hair wasn't fixed in a flattering way. She murmured something in her semi comatose state, and then-abruptly-she woke. Her eyes opened wide. There was some unshaped alarm in them; and pain too. Sadie looked at her and sighed.

"What's the problem?" Buck wanted to know. He'd put down the cases and was sitting in a chair opposite the fourth occupant of the room, a large man with lean, forceful features and a mane of steel-gray hair that would not have shamed an Old Testament prophet.

"No problem," Sadie replied.

"I don't want to share a room with these two," Buck said.

"Well this is the room where... where we stayed," Sadie replied.

"Let's move next door," Buck suggested, nodding through the open door into Room Eight. "We'll have more privacy."

"They can't see us," Sadie said.

"But I can see them," Buck replied, "and it gives me the creeps. It's not going to matter if we're in a different room, for Christ's sake." Without waiting for agreement from Sadie, Buck picked up the cases and carried them through into Earl's room. "Are you coming or not?" he asked Sadie. She nodded. It was better to give way to him. If she started to argue now they'd never get past the first hurdle. Conciliation was to be the keynote of this reunion, she reminded herself, and dutifully followed him into Room Eight.

On the bed, Virginia thought about getting up and going into the bathroom where, out of sight, she could take one or two tranquilizers. But John's presence frightened her. Sometimes she felt he could see right into her, that all her private guilt was an open book to him. She was certain that if she got up now and rooted in her bag for the medication, he would ask her what she was doing. If he did that, she'd blurt the truth out for sure. She didn't have the strength to resist the heat of his accusing eyes. No, it would be better to lie here and wait for Earl to come back with the water. Then, when the two men were discussing the tour, she would slip away to take the forbidden pills.

There was an evasive quality to the light in the room. It distressed her, and she wanted to close her lids against its tricks. Only moments before, the light had conjured a mirage at the end of the bed; a moth-wing flicker of substance that had almost congealed in the air before flitting away.

Over by the window, John was again reading under his breath. At first, she caught only a few of the words.

"And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth..." She instantly recognized the passage; its imagery was unmistakable.

"...and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power."

The verse was from The Revelations of St. John the Divine. She knew the words that followed by heart. He had declaimed them time after time at meetings.

"And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads."

Gyer loved Revelations. He read it more often than the Gospels, whose stories he knew by heart but whose words did not ignite him the way the incantatory rhythms of Revelations did. When he preached Revelations, he shared the apocalyptic vision and felt exulted by it. His voice would take on a different note. The poetry, instead of coming out of him, came through him. Helpless in its grip, he rose on a spiral of ever more awesome metaphor: from angels to dragons and thence to Babylon, the Mother of Harlots, sitting upon a scarlet-colored beast.

Virginia tried to shut the words out. Usually, to hear her husband speak the poems of Revelations was a joy to her, but not tonight. Tonight the words seemed ripe to the point of corruption, and she sensed-perhaps for the first time-that he didn't really understand what he was saying; that the spirit of the words passed him by while he recited them. She made a small, unintentional noise of complaint. Gyer stopped reading.

"What is it?" he said.

She opened her eyes, embarrassed to have interrupted him.

"Nothing," she said.

"Does my reading disturb you?" he wanted to know. The inquiry was a challenge, and she backed down from it.

"No," she said. "No, of course not."

In the doorway between the two rooms, Sadie watched Virginia's face. The woman was lying of course, the words did disturb her. They disturbed Sadie too, but only because they seemed so pitifully melodramatic: a drug-dream of Armageddon, more comical than intimidating.

"Tell him," she advised Virginia. "Go on. Tell him you don't like it."

"Who are you talking to?" Buck said. "They can't hear you.

Sadie ignored her husband's remarks. "Go on," she said to Virginia. "Tell the bastard."

But Virginia lust lay there while Gyer took up the passage again, its absurdities escalating.

"And the shapes of the locusts were unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men."

"And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions."

Sadie shook her head: comic-book terrors, fit to scare children with. Why did people have to die to grow out of that kind of nonsense?

"Tell him," she said again. "Tell him how ridiculous he sounds."

Even as the words left her lips, Virginia sat up on the bed and said: "John?"

Sadie stared at her, willing her on. "Say it. Say it."

"Do you have to talk about death all the time. It's very depressing."

Sadie almost applauded. It wasn't quite the way she would have put it, but each to their own.

"What did you say?" Gyer asked her, assuming he'd heard incorrectly. Surely she wasn't challenging him?

Virginia put a trembling hand up to her lips, as if to cancel the words before they came again, but they came nevertheless.

"Those passages you read. I hate them. They're so..."

"Stupid," Sadie prompted.

unpleasant," Virginia said.

"Are you coming to bed or not?" Buck wanted to know.

"In a moment," Sadie replied over her shoulder. "I just want to see what happens in here."

"Life isn't a soap opera," Buck chimed in. Sadie was about to beg to differ, but before she had a chance the evangelist had approached Virginia's bed, Bible in hand.

"This is the inspired word of the Lord, Virginia," he said.

"I know John. But there are other passages

"I thought you liked the Apocalypse."

"No," she said, "it distresses me."

"You're tired," he replied.

"Oh yes," Sadie interjected, "that's what they always tell you when you get too close to the truth. 'You're tired,' they say, 'why don't you take a little nap?"'

"Why don't you sleep for a while?" Gyer said. "I'll go next door and work."

Virginia met her husband's condescending look for fully five seconds, then nodded.

"Yes," she conceded, "I am tired."

"Foolish woman," Sadie told her. "Fight back, or he'll do the same again. Give them an inch and they take half the damn state."

Buck appeared behind Sadie. "I've asked you once," he said, taking her arm, "we re here to make friends. So let's get to it. He pulled her away from the door, rather more roughly than was necessary. She shrugged off his hand.

"There's no need for violence, Buck," she said.

"Ha! That's rich, coming from you," Buck said with a humorless laugh. "You want to see violence?" Sadie turned away from Virginia to look at her husband. "This is violence," he said. He had taken off his jacket; now he pulled his unbuttoned shirt open to reveal the shot wound. At such close quarters Sadie's .38 had made a sizeable hole in Buck's chest, scorched and bloody. It was as fresh as the moment he died. He put his finger to it as if indicating the Sacred Heart. "You see that, sweetheart mine? You made that."

She peered at the hole with no little interest. It certainly was a permanent mark; about the only one she'd ever made on the man, she suspected.

"You cheated from the beginning, didn't you?" she said.

"We're not talking about cheating, we're talking about shooting," Buck returned.

"Seems to me one subject leads to the other," Sadie replied. "And back again."

Buck narrowed his already narrow eyes at her. Dozens of women had found that look irresistible, to judge by the numbers of anonymous mourners at his funeral. "All right," he said, "I had women. So what?"

"So I shot you for it," Sadie replied flatly. That was about all she had to say on the subject. It had made for a short trial.

"Well at least tell me you're sorry," Buck burst out.

Sadie considered the proposition for a few moments and said: "But I'm not!" She realized the response lacked tact, but it was the unavoidable truth. Even as they'd strapped her into the electric chair, with the priest doing his best to console her lawyer, she hadn't regretted the way things had turned out.

"This whole thing is useless," Buck said. "We came here to make peace and you can't even say you're sorry. You're a sick woman, you know that? You always were. You pried into my business, you snooped around behind my back-"

"I did not snoop," Sadie replied firmly "Your dirt came and found me."

"Dirt?"

"Oh yes, Buck, dirt. It always was with you. Furtive and sweaty."

He grabbed hold of her. "Take that back!" he demanded.

"You used to frighten me once," she replied coolly. "But then I bought a gun."

He thrust her away from him. "All right," he said, "don't say I didn't try. I wanted to see if we could forgive and forget, I really did. But you're not willing to give an inch, are you?" He fingered his wound as he spoke, his voice softening. "We could have had a good time here tonight, babe," he murmured. "Just you and me. I could have given you a bit of the old jazz, you know what I mean? Time was, you wouldn't have said no.

She sighed softly. What he said was true. Time was she would have taken what little he gave her and counted herself a blessed woman. But times had changed.

"Come on, babe. Loosen up," he said smokily, and began to unbutton his shirt completely, pulling it out of his trousers. His belly was bald as a baby's. "What say we forget what you said and lie down and talk?"

She was about to reply to his suggestion when the door of Room Seven opened and in came the man with the soulful eyes accompanied by a woman whose face rang a bell in Sadie's memory.

"Ice water," Earl said. Sadie watched him move across the room. There'd not been a man as fine as that in Wichita Falls; not that she could remember anyway. He almost made her want to live again.

"Are you going to get undressed?" Buck asked from the room behind her.

"In a minute, Buck. We've got all night, for Christ's sake."

"I'm Laura May Cade," the woman with the familiar face said as she set the ice water down on the table.

Of course, thought Sadie, you're little Laura May. The girl had been five or six when Sadie was last here; an odd, secretive child, full of sly looks. The intervening years had matured her physically, but the strangeness was still in evidence in her slightly off-center features. Sadie turned to Buck, who was sitting on the bed untying his shoes.

"Remember the little girl?" she said. "The one who you gave a quarter to, just to make her go away?"

"What about her?"

"She's here."

"That so?" he replied, clearly uninterested.

Laura May had poured the water and was now taking the glass across to Virginia.

"It's real nice having you folks here," she said. "We don't get much happening here. Just the occasional tornado..."

Gyer nodded to Earl, who produced a five-dollar bill and gave it to Laura May. She thanked him, saying it wasn't necessary, then took the bill. She wasn't to be bribed into leaving, however.

"This kind of weather makes people feel real peculiar," she went on.

Earl could predict what subject was hovering behind Laura May's lips. He'd already heard the bones of the story on the way across, and knew Virginia was in no mood to hear such a tale.

"Thank you for the water-" he said, putting a hand on Laura May's arm to usher her through the door. But Gyer cut in.

"My wife's been suffering from heat exhaustion," he said. "You should be careful, ma'am," Laura May advised Virginia, "people do some mighty weird things-"

"Like what?" Virginia asked.

"1 don't think we-" Earl began, but before he could say "want to hear," Laura May casually replied:

"Oh, murder mostly."

Virginia looked up from the glass of ice water in which her focus had been immersed.

"Murder?" she said.

"Hear that?" said Sadie, proudly. "She remembers."

"In this very room," Laura May managed to blurt before Earl forcibly escorted her out.

"Wait," Virginia said as the two figures disappeared through the door. "Earl! I want to hear what happened."

"No you don't," Gyer told her.

"Oh yes she does," said Sadie very quietly, studying the look on Virginia's face. "You'd really like to know, wouldn't you, Ginnie?"

For a moment pregnant with possibilities, Virginia looked away from the outside door and stared straight through into Room Eight, her eyes seeming to rest on Sadie. The look was so direct it could almost have been one of recognition. The ice in her glass tinkled. She frowned.

"What's wrong?" Gyer asked her.

Virginia shook her head.

"I asked you what was wrong," Gyer insisted.

Virginia put down her glass on the bedside table. After a moment she said very simply: "There's somebody here, John."

"What do you mean?"

"There's somebody in the room with us. I heard voices before. Raised voices."

"Next door," Gyer said.

"No, from Earl's room.

"It's empty. It must have been next door."

Virginia was not to be silenced with logic. "I heard voices, I tell you. And I saw something at the end of the bed. Something in the air."

"Oh my Jesus," said Sadie, under her breath. "The goddamn woman's psychic."

Buck stood up. He was naked now but for his shorts. He wandered over to the interconnecting door to look at Virginia with new appreciation.

"Are you sure?" he said.

"Hush," Sadie told him, moving out of Virginia's line of vision. She said she could see us.

"You're not well, Virginia," Gyer was saying in the next room. "It's those pills he fed you..

"No," Virginia replied, her voice rising. "When will you stop talking about the pills? They were just to calm me down, help me sleep."

She certainly wasn't calm now, thought Buck. He liked the way she trembled as she tried to hold back her tears. She looked in need of some of the old jazz, did poor Virginia. Now that would help her sleep.

"I tell you I can see things," she was telling her husband.

"That I can't?" Gyer replied incredulously. "Is that what you're saying? That you can see visions the rest of us are blind to?"

"I'm not proud of it, damn you," she yelled at him, incensed by this inversion.

"Come away, Buck," Sadie said. "We're upsetting her. She knows we're here."

"So what?" Buck responded. "Her prick of a husband doesn't believe her. Look at him. He thinks she's crazy."

"Well we'll make her crazy if we parade around," said Sadie. "At least let's keep our voices down, huh?"

Buck looked around at Sadie and offered up a dirty rag of a smile. "Want to make it worth my while?" he said sleazily. "I'll keep out of the way if you and me can have some fun."

Sadie hesitated a moment before replying. It was probably perverse to reject Buck's advances. The man was an emotional infant and always had been. Sex was one of the few ways he could express himself. "All right, Buck," she said, "just let me freshen up and fix my hair."

An uneasy truce had apparently been declared in Room Seven.

"I'm going to take a shower, Virginia," Gyer said. "I suggest you lie down and stop making a fool of yourself. You go talking like that in front of people and you'll jeopardize the crusade, you hear me?"

Virginia looked at her husband with clearer sight than she'd ever enjoyed before. "Oh yes," she said, without a trace of feeling in her voice, "I hear you."

He seemed satisfied. He slipped off his jacket and went into the bathroom, taking his Bible with him. She heard the door lock, and then exhaled a long, queasy sigh. There would be recriminations aplenty for the exchange they'd just had. He would squeeze every last drop of contrition from her in the days to come. She glanced around at the interconnecting door. There was no longer any sign of those shadows in the air; not the least whisper of lost voices. Perhaps, just perhaps, she had imagined it. She opened her bag and rummaged for the bottles of pills hidden there. One eye on the bathroom door, she selected a cocktail of three varieties and downed them with a gulp of ice water. In fact, the ice in the jug had long since melted. The water she drank down was tepid, like the rain that fell relentlessly outside. By morning, perhaps the whole world would have been washed away. If it had, she mused, she wouldn't grieve.

"I asked you not to mention the killing," Earl told Laura May. "Mrs. Gyer can't take that kind of talk."

"People are getting killed all the time," Laura May replied, unfazed. "Can't go around with her head in a bucket."

Earl said nothing. They had just gotten to the end of the walkway. The return sprint across the lot to the other building was ahead. Laura May turned to face him. She was several inches' the shorter of the two. Her eyes, turned up to his, were large and luminous. Angry as he was, he couldn't help but notice how full her mouth was, how her lips glistened.

"I'm sorry," she said, "I didn't mean to get you into trouble."

"Sure I know. I'm lust edgy."

"It's the heat," she returned. "Like I said, puts thoughts into people's heads. You know." Her look wavered for a moment; a hint of uncertainty crossed her face. Earl could feel the back of his neck tingle. This was his cue, wasn't it? She'd offered it unequivocally. But the words failed him. Finally, it was she who said: "Do you have to go back there right now?"

He swallowed; his throat was dry. "Don't see why," he said. "I mean, I don't want to get between them when they're having words with each other."

"Bad blood?" she asked.

"I think so. I'm best leaving them to sort it out in peace. They don't want me."

Laura May looked down from Earl's face. "Well I do," she breathed, the words scarcely audible above the thump of the rain.

He put a cautious hand to her face and touched the down of her cheek. She trembled, ever so slightly. Then he bent his head to kiss her. She let him brush her lips with his.

"Why don't we go to my room?" she said against his mouth. "I don't like it out here."

"What about your Papa?"

"He'll be dead drunk, by now. It's the same routine every night. Just take it quietly. He'll never know."

Earl wasn't very happy with this game plan. It was more than his job was worth to be found in bed with Laura May. He was a married man, even if he hadn't seen Barbara in three months. Laura May sensed his trepidation.

"Don't come if you don't want to," she said.

"It's not that," he replied.

As he looked down at her she licked her lips. It was a completely unconscious motion, he felt sure, but it was enough to decide him. In a sense, though he couldn't know it at the time, all that lay ahead-the farce, the bloodletting, the inevitable tragedy-pivoted on Laura May wetting her lower lip with such casual sensuality. "Ah shit," he said, "you're too much, you know that?"

He bent to her and kissed her again, while somewhere over toward Skellytown the clouds gave out a loud roll of thunder, like a circus drummer before some particularly elaborate acrobatics.

IN Room Seven Virginia was having bad dreams. The pills had not secured her a safe harbor in sleep. Instead she'd been pitched into a howling tempest. In her dreams she was clinging to a crippled tree-a pitiful anchor in such a maelstrom-while the wind threw cattle and automobiles into the air, sucking half the world up into the pitch black clouds that boiled above her head. Just as she thought she must die here, utterly alone, she saw two figures a few yards from her, appearing and disappearing in the blinding veils of dust the wind was stirring up. She couldn't see their faces, so she called to them.

"Who are you?"

Next door, Sadie heard Virginia talking in her sleep. What was the woman dreaming about? she wondered. She fought the temptation to go next door and whisper in the dreamer's ear, however.

Behind Virginia's eyelids the dream raged on. Though she called to the strangers in the storm they seemed not to hear her. Rather than be left alone, she forsook the comfort of the tree-which was instantly uprooted and whirled away-and battled through the biting dust to where the strangers stood. As she approached, a sudden lull in the wind revealed them to her. One was male, the other female; both were armed. As she called to them to make herself known they attacked each other, opening fatal wounds in neck and torso.

"Murder!" she shouted as the wind spattered her face with the antagonists' blood. "For God's sake, somebody stop them! Murder!"

And suddenly she was awake, her heart beating fit to burst. The dream still flitted behind her eyes. She shook her head to rid herself of the horrid images, then moved groggily to the edge of the bed and stood up. Her head felt so light it might float off like a balloon. She needed some fresh air. Seldom in her life had she felt so strange. It was as though she was losing her slender grip 6n what was real; as though the solid world were slipping through her fingers. She crossed to the outside door. In the bathroom she could hear John speaking aloud-addressing the mirror, no doubt, to refine every detail of his delivery. She stepped out onto the walkway. There was some refreshment to be had out here, but precious little. In one of the rooms at the end of the block a child was crying. As she listened a sharp voice silenced it. For maybe ten seconds the voice was hushed. Then it began again in a higher key. Go on, she told the child, you cry; there's plenty of reason. She trusted unhappiness in people. More and more it was all she trusted. Sadness was so much more honest than the artificial bonhomie that was all the style these days: that facade of empty-headed optimism that was plastered over the despair that everyone felt in their heart of hearts. The child was expressing that wise panic now, as it cried in the night. She silently applauded its honesty.

IN the bathroom, John Gyer tired of the sight of his own face in the mirror and gave some time over to thought. He put down the toilet lid and sat in silence for several minutes. He could smell his own stale sweat. He needed a shower, and then a good night's sleep. Tomorrow: Pampa. Meetings, speeches; thousands of hands to be shaken and blessings to be bestowed. Sometimes he felt so tired, and then he'd get to wondering if the Lord couldn't lighten his burden a little. But that was the Devil talking in his ear, wasn't it? He knew better than to pay that scurrilous voice much attention. If you listened once, the doubts would get a hold, the way they had of Virginia. Somewhere along the road, while his back had been turned about the Lord's business, she'd lost her way, and the Old One had found her wandering. He, John Gyer, would have to bring her back to the path of the righteous; make her see the danger her soul was in. There would be tears and complaints; maybe she would be bruised a little. But bruises healed.

He put down his Bible and went down on his knees in the narrow space between the bath and the towel rack and began to pray. He tried to find some benign words, a gentle prayer to ask for the strength to finish his task, and to bring Virginia back to her senses. But mildness had deserted him. It was the vocabulary of Revelations that came back to his lips, unbidden. He Jet the words spill out, even though the fever in him burned brighter with every syllable he spoke.

"WHAT do you think?" Laura May had asked Earl as she escorted him into her bedroom. Earl was too startled by what was in front of him to offer any coherent reply. The bedroom was a mausoleum, founded, it seemed, in the name of Trivia. Laid out on the shelves, hung on the walls and covering much of the floor were items that might have been picked out of any garbage can: empty Coke cans, collections of ticket stubs, coverless and defaced magazines, vandalized toys, shattered mirrors, postcards never sent, letters never read-a limping parade of the forgotten and the forsaken. His eye passed back arid forth over the elaborate display and found not one item of worth among the junk and bric-a-brac. Yet all this inconsequential had been arranged with meticulous care so that no one piece masked another. And-now that he looked more closely-he saw that every item was numbered, as if each had its place in some system of junk. The thought that this was all Laura May's doing shrank Earl's stomach. The woman was clearly verging on lunacy.

"This is my collection," she told him.

"So I see," he replied.

"I've been collecting since I was six." She crossed the room to the dressing table, where most women Earl had known would have arranged their toiletries. But here were arrayed more of the same inane exhibits. "Everybody leaves something behind, you know," Laura May said to Earl, picking up some piece of dreck with all the care others might bestow on a precious stone and examining it before placing it back in its elected position.

"Is that so?" Earl said.

"Oh yeah. Everyone. Even if it's only a dead match or a tissue with lipstick on it. We used to have a Mexican girl, Ophelia, who cleaned the rooms when I was a child. It started as a game with her, really. She'd always bring me something belonging to the guests who'd left. When she died I took over collecting stuff for myself, always keeping something. As a memento."

Earl began to grasp the absurd poetry of the museum. In Laura May's neat body was all the ambition of a great curator. Not for her mere art. She was collecting keepsakes of a more intimate nature, forgotten signs of people who'd passed this way, and who, most likely, she would never see again.

"You've got it all marked," he observed.

"Oh yes," she replied, "it wouldn't be much use if I didn't know who it all belonged to, would it?"

Earl supposed not. "Incredible," he murmured quite genuinely. She smiled at him. He suspected she didn't show her collection to many people. He felt oddly honored to be viewing it.

"I've got some really prize things," she said, opening the middle drawer of the dressing table, "stuff I don't put on display."

"Oh?" he said.

The drawer she'd opened was lined with tissue paper, which rustled as she brought forth a selection of special acquisitions. A soiled tissue found beneath the bed of a Hollywood star who had tragically died six weeks after staying at the motel. A heroin needle carelessly left by X; an empty book of matches, which she had traced to a homosexual bar in Amarillo, discarded by Y The names she mentioned meant little or nothing to Earl, but he played the game as he felt she wanted it played, mingling exclamations of disbelief with gentle laughter. Her pleasure, fed by his, grew. She took him through all the exhibits in the dressing-table drawer, offering some anecdote or biographical insight with every one.

When she had finished, she said: "I wasn't quite telling you the truth before, when I said it began as a game with Ophelia. That really came later."

"So what started you off?" he asked.

She went down on her haunches and unlocked the bottom drawer of the dressing table with a key on a chain around her neck. There was only one artifact in this drawer. This she lifted out almost reverentially and stood up to show him.

"What's this?"

"You asked me what started the collection," she said. "This is it. I found it, and I never gave it back. You can look if you want."

She extended the prize toward him, and he unfolded the pressed white cloth the object had been wrapped up in. It was a gun. A Smith and Wesson .38, in pristine condition. It took him only a moment to realize which motel guest this piece of history had once belonged to.

"The gun that Sadie Durning used..." he said, picking it up. "Am I right?"

She beamed. "I found it in the scrub behind the motel, before the police got to searching for it. There was such a commotion, you know, nobody looked twice at me. And of course they didn't try and look for it in the light."

"Why was that?"

"The '55 tornado hit, just the day after. Took the motel roof right off; blew the school away. People were killed that year. We had funerals for weeks."

"They didn't question you at all?"

"I was a good liar," she replied, with no small satisfaction.

"And you never owned up to having it? All these years?"

She looked faintly contemptuous of the suggestion. "They might have taken it off me," she said.

"But it's evidence."

"They executed her anyway, didn't they?" she replied. "Sadie admitted to it all, right from the beginning. It wouldn't have made any difference if they'd found the murder weapon or not."

Earl turned the gun over in his hand. There was encrusted dirt on it.

"That's blood," Laura May informed him. "It was still wet when I found it. She must have touched Buck's body to make sure he was dead. Only used two bullets. The rest are still in there."

Earl had never much liked weapons since his brother-in-law had blown off three of his toes in an accident. The thought that the .38 was still loaded made him yet more apprehensive. He put it back in its wrapping and folded the cloth over it.

"I've never seen anything like this place," he said as Laura May kneeled to return the gun to the drawer. "You're quite a woman, you know that?"

She looked up at him. Her hand slowly slid up the front of his trousers.

"I'm glad you like what you see," she said.

"SADIE...? Are you coming to bed or not?"

"I just want to finish fixing my hair."

"You're not playing fair. Forget your hair and come over here."

"In a minute."

"Shit!"

"You're in no hurry, are you, Buck? I mean, you're not going anywhere?"

She caught his reflection in the mirror. He gave her a sour glance.

"You think it's funny, don't you?" he said.

"Think what's funny?"

"What happened. Me getting shot. You getting the chair. It gives you some perverse satisfaction."

She thought about this for a few moments. It was the first time Buck had shown any real desire to talk seriously. She wanted to answer with the truth.

"Yes," she said, when she was certain that was the answer. "Yes, I suppose it did please me, in an odd sort of way."

"1 knew it," said Buck.

"Keep your voice down," Sadie snapped, "she'll hear us."

"She's gone outside. I heard her. And don't change the subject." He rolled over and sat on the edge of the bed. The wound did look painful, Sadie thought.

"Did it hurt much?" she asked, turning to him.

"Are you kidding?" he said, displaying the hole for her. "What does it fucking look like?"

"I thought it would be quick. l never wanted you to suffer."

"Is that right?" Buck said.

"Of course. I loved you once, Buck. I really did. You know what the headline was the day after?"

"No," Buck replied, "I was otherwise engaged, remember?"

"'MOTEL BECOMES SLAUGHTERHOUSE OF LOVE,' it said. There were pictures of the room, of the blood on the floor, and you being carried out under a sheet."

"My finest hour," he said bitterly. "And I don't even get my face in the press."

"I'll never forget the phrase. 'Slaughterhouse of Love!' I thought it was romantic. Don't you?" Buck grunted in disgust. Sadie went on anyway. "I got three hundred proposals of marriage while I was waiting for the chair, did I ever tell you that?"

"Oh yeah?" Buck said. "Did they come and visit you? Give you a bit of the old jazz to keep your mind off the big day?"

"No," said Sadie frostily.

"You could have had a time of it. I would have."

"I'm sure you would," she replied.

"Just thinking about it's getting me cooking, Sadie. Why don't you come and get it while it's hot?"

"We came here to talk, Buck."

"We talked, for Christ's sake," he said. "I don't want to talk no more. Now come here. You promised." He rubbed his abdomen and gave her a crooked smile. "Sorry about the blood and all, but I ain't responsible for that."

Sadie stood up.

"Now you're being sensible," he said.

As Sadie Durning crossed to the bed, Virginia came in out of the rain. It had cooled her face somewhat, and the tranquilizers she'd taken were finally beginning to soothe her system. In the bathroom, John was still praying, his voice rising and falling. She crossed to the table and glanced at his notes, but the tightly packed words wouldn't come into focus. She picked up the papers to peer more closely at them. As she did so she heard a groan from the next room. She froze. The groan came again, louder. The papers trembled in her hands. She made to put them back on the table but the voice came a third time, and this time the papers slipped from her hand.

"Give a little, damn you..." the voice said. The words, though blurred, were unmistakable; more grunts followed. Virginia moved toward the door between the rooms, the trembling spreading up from her hands to the rest of her body. "Play the game, will you?" the voice came again; there was anger in it. Cautiously, Virginia looked through into Room Eight, holding onto the door lintel for support. There was a shadow on the bed. It writhed distressingly, as if attempting to devour itself. She stood, rooted to the spot, trying to stifle a cry while more sounds rose from the shadow Not one voice this time, but two. The words were jumbled. In her growing panic she could make little sense of them. She couldn't turn her back on the scene, however. She stared on, trying to make some sense of the shifting configuration. Now a smattering of words came clear, and with them, a recognition of the event on the bed. She heard a woman's voice protesting. Now she even began to see the speaker, struggling beneath a partner who was attempting to arrest her flailing arms. Her first instinct about the scene had been correct: it was a devouring, of a kind.

Sadie looked up into Buck's face. That bastard grin of his had returned; it made her trigger finger itch. This is what he'd come for tonight. Not for conversation about failed dreams, but to humiliate her the way he had so often in the past, whispering obscenities into her neck while he pinned her to the sheets. The pleasure he took in her discomfort made her seethe.

"Let go of me!" she shouted, louder than she'd intended.

At the door, Virginia said: "Let her alone."

"We've got an audience," Buck Durning grinned, pleased by the appalled look on Virginia's face. Sadie took advantage of his diverted attention. She slipped her arm from his grasp and pushed him off her. He rolled off the narrow bed with a yell. As she stood up, she looked around at the ashen woman in the doorway. How much could Virginia see or hear? Enough to know who they were?

Buck was climbing over the bed toward his sometime murderer. "Come on," he said. "It's only the crazy lady."

"Keep away from me," Sadie warned.

"You can't harm me now, woman. I'm already dead, remember." His exertions had opened the gunshot wound. There was blood smeared all over him; over her too, now she saw. She backed toward the door. There was nothing to be salvaged here. What little chance of reconciliation there had been had degenerated into a bloody farce. The only solution to the whole sorry mess was to get out and leave poor Virginia to make what sense of it she could. The longer she stayed to fight with Buck, the worse the situation would become for all three of them.

"Where are you going?" Buck demanded.

"Out," she responded. "Away from you. I said I loved you, Buck, didn't I? Well... maybe I did. But I'm cured now.

"Bitch!"

"Goodbye Buck. Have a nice eternity."

"Worthless bitch!"

She didn't reply to his insults. She simply walked through the door and out into the night.

Virginia watched the shadow pass through the closed door and held on to the tattered remains of her sanity with white-knuckled fists. She had to put these apparitions out of her head as quickly as possible or she knew she'd go crazy. She turned her back on Room Eight. What she needed now was pills. She picked up her handbag, only to drop it again as her shaking fingers rooted for the bottles, depositing the contents of the bag onto the floor. One of the bottles, which she had failed to seal properly, spilled. A rainbow assortment of tablets rolled across the stained carpet in every direction. She bent to pick them up. Tears had started to come, blinding her. She felt for the pills as best she could, feeding half a handful into her mouth and trying to swallow them dry. The tattoo of the rain on the roof sounded louder and louder in her head; a roll of thunder gave weight to the percussion.

And then, John's voice.

"What are you doing, Virginia?"

She looked up, tears in her eyes, a pill-laden hand hovering at her lips. She'd forgotten her husband entirely. The shadows and the rain and the voices had driven all thought of him from her head. She let the pills drop back to the carpet. Her limbs were shaking. She didn't have the strength to stand up.

"I... I. .. heard the voices again," she said.

His eyes had come to rest on the spilled contents of bag and bottle. Her crime was spread for him to see quite plainly. It was useless to try and deny anything; it would only enrage him further.

"Woman," he said. "Haven't you learned your lesson?"

She didn't reply. Thunder drowned his next words. He repeated them, more loudly.

"Where did you get the pills, Virginia?"

She shook her head weakly.

"Earl again, I suppose. Who else?"

"No," she murmured.

"Don't lie to me, Virginia!" He had raised his voice to compete with the storm. "You know the Lord hears your lies, as I hear them. And you are judged, Virginia! Judged."'

"Please leave me be," she pleaded.

"You're poisoning yourself."

"I need them, John," she told him. "I really do." She had no energy to hold his bullying at bay; nor did she want him to take the pills from her. But then what was the use of protesting? He would have his way, as always. It would be wiser to give up the booty now and save herself unnecessary anguish.

"Look at yourself," he said, "groveling on the floor."

"Don't start on me, John," she replied. "You win. Take the pills. Go on! Take them!"

He was clearly disappointed by her rapid capitulation, like an actor preparing for a favorite scene only to find the curtain rung down prematurely. But he made the most of her invitation, upending her handbag on the bed, and collecting the bottles.

"Is this all?" he demanded.

"Yes," she said.

"I won't be deceived, Virginia."

"That's all!" she shouted back at him. Then more softly: "I swear... that's all."

"Earl will be sorry. I promise you that. He's exploited your weakness-"

"... no!"

"-your weakness and your fear. The man is in Satan's employ, that much is apparent."

"Don't talk nonsense!" she said, surprising herself with her own vehemence. "I asked him to supply them." She got to her feet with some difficulty. "He didn't want to defy you, John. It was me all along."

Gyer shook his head. "No, Virginia. You won't save him. Not this time. He's worked to subvert me all along. I see that now. Worked to harm my crusade through you. Well I'm wise to him now. Oh yes. Oh yes."

He suddenly turned and pitched the handful of bottles through the open door and into the rainy darkness outside. Virginia watched them fly and felt her heart sink. There was precious little sanity to be had on a night like this-it was a night for going crazy wasn't it? with the rain bruising your skull and murder in the air-and now the damn fool had thrown away her last chance of equilibrium. He turned back to her, his prefect teeth bared.

"How many times do you have to be told?"

He was not to be denied his scene after all, it seemed.

"I'm not listening!" she told him, clamping her hands over her ears. Even so she could hear the rain. "I won't listen!"

"I'm patient, Virginia," he said. "The Lord will have his judgment in the fullness of time. Now, where's Earl?"

She shook her head. Thunder came again; she wasn't sure if it was inside or out.

"Where is he?" he boomed at her. "Gone for more of the same filth?"

"No!" she yelled back. "I don't know where he's gone."

"You pray, woman," Gyer said. "You get down on your knees and thank the Lord I'm here to keep you from Satan."

Content that his words made a striking exit line, he headed out in search of Earl, leaving Virginia shaking but curiously elated. He would be back, of course. There would be more recriminations, and from her, the obligatory tears. As to Earl, he would have to defend himself as best he could. She slumped down on the bed, and her bleary eyes came to rest on the tablets that were still scattered across the floor. All was not quite lost. There were no more than two dozen, so she would have to be sparing in her use of them, but they were better than nothing at all. Wiping her eyes with the back of her hands, she kneeled down again to gather the pills up. As she did so she realized that someone had their eyes on her. Not the evangelist, back so soon? She looked up. The door out to the rain was still wide open, but he wasn't standing there. Her heart seemed to lose its rhythm for a moment as she remembered the shadows in the room next door. There had been two. One had departed; but the other...?

Her eyes slid across to the interconnecting door. It was there, a greasy smudge that had taken on a new solidity since last she'd set eyes on it. Was it that the apparition was gaining coherence, or that she was seeing it in more detail? It was quite clearly human; and just as apparently male. It was staring at her, she had no doubt of that. She could even see its eyes, when she concentrated. Her tenuous grasp of its existence was improving. It was gaining fresh resolution with every trembling breath she took.

She stood up, very slowly. It took a step through the interconnecting door. She moved toward the outside door, and it matched her move with one of its own, sliding with eerie speed between her and the night. Her outstretched arm brushed against its smoky form and, as if illuminated by a lightning flash, an entire portrait of her accoster sprang into view in front of her, only to disappear as she withdrew her hand. She had glimpsed enough to appall her however. The vision was that of a dead man; his chest had been blown open. Was this more of her dream, spilling into the living world? She thought of calling after John, to summon him back, but that meant approaching the door again, and risking contact with the apparition. Instead she took a cautious step backward, reciting a prayer beneath her breath as she did so. Perhaps John had been correct all along. Perhaps she had invited this lunacy to herself with the very tablets she was even now treading to powder underfoot. The apparition closed in on her. Was it her imagination, or had it opened its arms, as if to embrace her?

Her heel caught on the skirt of the coverlet. Before she could stop herself she was toppling backward. Her arms flailed, seeking support. Again she made contact with the dream-thing; again the whole horrid picture appeared in front of her. But this time it didn't disappear, because the apparition had snatched at her hand and was grasping it tight. Her fingers felt as though they'd been plunged into ice water. She yelled for it to let her be, flinging up her free arm to push her assailant away, but it simply grasped her other hand too.

Unable to resist, she met its gaze. They were not the Devil's eyes that looked at her-they were slightly stupid, even comical, eyes-and below them a weak mouth which only reinforced her impression of witlessness. Suddenly she was not afraid. This was no demon. It was a delusion, brought on by exhaustion and pills; it could do her no harm. The only danger here was that she hurt herself in her attempts to keep the hallucinations at bay.

Buck sensed that Virginia was losing the will to resist. "That's better," he coaxed her. "You just want a bit of the old jazz, don't you, Ginnie?"

He wasn't certain if she heard him, but no matter. He could readily make his intentions apparent. Dropping one of her hands, he ran his palm across her breasts. She sighed, a bewildered expression in her beautiful eyes, but she made no effort to resist his attentions.

"You don't exist," she told him plainly. "You're only in my mind, like John said. The pills made you. The pills did it all."

Buck let the woman babble; Let her think whatever she pleased, as long as it made her compliant.

"That's right, isn't it?" she said. "You're not real, are you?"

He obliged her with a polite reply. "Certainly," he said, squeezing her "I'm just a dream, that's all." The answer seemed to satisfy her. "No need to fight me, is there?" he said. "I'll have come and gone before you know it."

THE manager's office lay empty. From the room beyond it Gyer heard a television. It stood to reason that Earl must be somewhere in the vicinity. He bad left their room with the girl who'd brought the ice water, and they certainly wouldn't be taking a walk together in weather like this. The thunder had moved in closer in the last few minutes. Now it was almost overhead. Gyer enjoyed the noise and the spectacle of the lightning. It fueled his sense of occasion.

"Earl!" he yelled, making his way through the office and into the room with the television. The late movie was nearing its climax, the sound turned up deafeningly loud. A fantastical beast of some kind was treading Tokyo to rubble; citizens fled, screaming. Asleep in a chair in front of this papier-mâché apocalypse was a late middle-aged man. Neither the thunder nor Gyer's calls had stirred him. A tumbler of spirits, nursed in his lap, had slipped from his hand and stained his trousers. The whole scene stank of bourbon and depravity. Gyer made a note of it for future use in the pulpit.

A chill blew in from the office. Gyer turned, expecting a visitor, but there was nobody in the office behind him. He stared into space. All the way across here he'd had a sense of being followed, yet there was nobody on his heels. He canceled his suspicions. Fears like this were for women and old men afraid of the dark. He stepped between the sleeping drunkard and the ruin of Tokyo toward the closed door beyond.

"Earl?" he called out, "answer me!"

Sadie watched Gyer open the door and step into the kitchen. His bombast amazed her. She'd expected his subspecies to be extinct by now. Could such melodrama be credible in this sophisticated age? She'd never much liked church people, but this example was particularly offensive; there was more than a whiff of malice beneath the flatulence. He was riled and unpredictable, and he would not be pleased by the scene that awaited him in Laura May's room. Sadie had already been there. She had watched the lovers for a little while, until their passion became too much for her and had driven her out to cool herself by watching the rain. Now the evangelist's appearance drew her back the way she'd come, fearful that what-ever was now in the air, the night's events could not end well. In the kitchen, Gyer was shouting again. He clearly enjoyed the sound of his own voice.

"Earl! You bear me? I'm not to be cheated!"

In Laura May's room Earl was attempting to perform three acts at the same time. One, kiss the woman he had just made love with; two, pull on his damp trousers; and three, invent an adequate excuse to offer Gyer if the evangelist reached the bedroom door before some illusion of innocence had been created. As it was, he had no time to complete any of the tasks. His tongue was still locked in Laura May's tender mouth when the lock on the door was forced.

"Found you!"

Earl broke his kiss and turned toward the messianic voice. Gyer was standing in the doorway, rain-plastered hair a gray skull cap, his face bright with fury. The light thrown up on him from the silk-draped lamp beside the bed made him look massive. The glint in his come-to-the-Lord eyes was verging on the manic. Earl had heard tell of the great man's righteous wrath from Virginia; furniture had been trashed in the past, and bones broken.

"Is there no end to your iniquity?" he demanded to know, the words coming with unnerving calm from between his narrow lips. Earl hoisted his trousers up, fumbling for the zipper.

"This isn't your business..." he began, but Gyer's fury powdered the words on his tongue.

Laura May was not so easily cowed. "You get out," she said, pulling a sheet up to cover her generous breasts. Earl glanced around at her; at the smooth shoulders he'd all too recently kissed. He wanted to kiss them again now, but the man in black crossed the room in four quick strides and took hold of him by hair and arm. The movement, in the confined space of Laura May's room, had the effect of an earth tremor. Pieces of her precious collection toppled over on the shelves and dressing table, one exhibit falling against another, and that against its neighbor, until a minor avalanche of trivia hit the floor. Laura May was blind to any damage however. Her thoughts were with the man who had so sweetly shared her bed. She could see the trepidation in Earl's eyes as the evangelist dragged him away, and she shared it.

"Let him be!" she shrieked, forsaking her modesty and getting up from the bed. "He hasn't done anything wrong!"

The evangelist paused to respond, Earl wrestling uselessly to free himself. "What would you know about error, whore?" Gyer spat at her. "You're too steeped in sin. You with your nakedness, and your stinking bed."

The bed did stink, but only of good soap and recent love. She had nothing to apologize for, and she wasn't going to let this two-bit Bible-thumper intimidate her.

"I'll call the cops!" she warned. "If you don't leave him alone, I'll call them!"

Gyer didn't grace the threat with a reply. He simply dragged Earl out through the door and into the kitchen. Laura May yelled: "Hold on, Earl. I'll get help." Her lover didn't answer. He was too busy preventing Gyer from pulling out his hair by the roots.

Sometimes, when the days were long and lonely, Laura May had daydreamed dark men like the evangelist. She had imagined them coming before tornadoes, wreathed in dust. She had pictured herself lifted up by them-only half against her will-and taken away. But the man who had lain in her bed tonight had been utterly unlike her fever-dream lovers; he had been foolish and vulnerable. If he were to die at the hands of a man like Gyer-whose image she had conjured in her desperation-she would never forgive herself.

She heard her father say: "What's going on?" in the far room. Something fell and smashed; a plate perhaps, from off the dresser, or a glass from his lap. She prayed her Papa wouldn't try and tackle the evangelist. He would be chaff in the wind if he did. She went back to the bed to root for her clothes. They were wound up in the sheets, and her frustration mounted with every second she lost searching for them. She tossed the pillows aside. One landed on the dressing table; more of her exquisitely arranged pieces were swept to the floor. As she pulled on her underwear her father appeared at the door. His drink-flushed features turned a deeper red seeing her state.

"What you been doing, Laura May?"

"Never mind, Pa. There's no time to explain."

"But there's men out there-"

"I know. I know. I want you to call the sheriff in Panhandle. Understand?"

"What's going on?"

"Never mind. Just call Alvin and be quick about it or we're going to have another murder on our hands."

The thought of slaughter galvanized Milton Cade. He disappeared, leaving his daughter to finish dressing. Laura May knew that on a night like this Alvin Baker and his deputy could be a long time coming. In the meanwhile God alone knew what the mad-dog preacher would be capable of.

From the doorway, Sadie watched the woman dress. Laura May was a plain creature, at least to Sadie's critical eye, and her fair skin made her look wan and insubstantial despite her full figure. But then, thought Sadie, who am I to complain of lack of substance? Look at me. And for the first time in the thirty years since her death she felt a nostalgia for corporality. In part because she envied Laura May her bliss with Earl, and in part because she itched to have a role in the drama that was rapidly unfolding around her.

In the kitchen an abruptly sobered Milton Cade was blabbering on the phone, trying to rouse some action from the people in Panhandle, while Laura May, who had finished dressing, unlocked the bottom drawer of her dressing table and rummaged for something. Sadie peered over the woman's shoulder to discover what the trophy was, and a thrill of recognition made her scalp tingle as her eyes alighted on her .38. So it was Laura May who had found the gun; the whey-faced six-year-old who had been running up and down the walkway all that evening thirty years ago, playing games with herself and singing songs in the hot still air.

It delighted Sadie to see the murder weapon again. Maybe, she thought, I have left some sign of myself to help shape the future. Maybe I am more than a headline on a yellowed newspaper, a dimming memory in aging heads. She watched with new and eager eyes as Laura May slipped on some shoes and headed out into the bellowing storm.

VIRGINIA sat slumped against the wall of Room Seven and looked across at the seedy figure leaning on the door lintel across from her. She had let the delusion she had conjured have what way it would with her; and never in her forty-odd years had she heard such depravity promised. But though the shadow had come at her again and again, pressing its cold body onto hers, its icy, slack mouth against her own, it had failed to carry one act of violation through. Three times it had tried. Three times the urgent words whispered in her ear had not been realized. Now it guarded the door, preparing, she guessed, for a further assault. Its face was clear enough for her to read the bafflement and the shame in its features. It viewed her, she thought, with murder on its mind.

Outside, she heard her husband's voice above the din of the thunder, and Earl's voice too, raised in protest. There was a fierce argument going on, that much was apparent. She slid up the wall, trying to make out the words. The delusion watched her balefully.

"You failed," she told it.

It didn't reply.

"You're just a dream of mine, and you failed."

It opened its mouth and waggled its pallid tongue. She didn't understand why it hadn't evaporated. But perhaps it would tag along with her until the pills had worked their way through her system. No matter. She had endured the worst it could offer. Now, given time, it would surely leave her be. Its failed rapes left it bereft of power over her.

She crossed toward the door, no longer afraid. It raised itself from its slouched posture.

"Where are you going?" it demanded.

"Out," she said. "To help Earl."

"No," it told her, "I haven't finished with you."

"You're just a phantom," she retorted. "You can't stop me."

It offered up a grin that was three parts malice to one part charm. "You're wrong, Virginia," Buck said. There was no purpose in deceiving the woman any longer; he'd tired of that particular game. And perhaps he'd failed to get the old jazz going because she'd given herself to him so easily, believing he was some harmless nightmare. "I'm no delusion, woman," he said. "I'm Buck Durning." She frowned at the wavering figure. Was this a new trick her psyche was playing? "Thirty years ago I was shot dead in this very room. Just about where you're standing in fact."

Instinctively, Virginia glanced down at the carpet at her feet, almost expecting the bloodstains to be there still.

"We came back tonight, Sadie and I," the ghost went on. "A one-night stand at the Slaughterhouse of Love. That's what they called this place, did you know that? People used to come here from all over, just to peer in at this very room; just to see where Sadie Durning had shot her husband Buck. Sick people, Virginia, don't you think? More interested in murder than love. Not me... I've always liked love, you know? Almost the only thing I've ever had much of a talent for, in fact."

"You lied to me," she said. "You used me."

"I haven't finished yet," Buck promised. "In fact I've barely started."

He moved from the door toward her, but she was prepared for him this time. As he touched her, and the smoke was made flesh again, she threw a blow toward him. Buck moved to avoid it, and she dodged past him toward the door. Her untied hair got in her eyes, but she virtually threw herself toward freedom. A cloudy hand snatched at her, but the grasp was too tenuous and slipped.

"I'll be waiting," Buck called after her as she stumbled across the walkway and into the storm. "You hear me, bitch? I'll be waiting!"

He wasn't going to humiliate himself with a pursuit. She would have to come back, wouldn't she? And he, invisible to all but the woman, could afford to bide his time. If she told her companions what she'd seen they'd call her crazy; maybe lock her up where he could have her all to himself. No, he had a winner here. She would return soaked to the skin, her dress clinging to her in a dozen fetching ways; panicky perhaps; tearful; too weak to resist his overtures. They'd make music then. Oh yes. Until she begged him to stop.

SADIE followed Laura May out.

"Where are you going?" Milton asked his daughter, but she didn't reply. "Jesus!" he shouted after her, registering what he'd seen. "Where'd you get the goddamn gun?"

The rain was torrential. It beat on the ground, on the last leaves of the cottonwood, on the roof, on the skull. It flattened Laura May's hair in seconds, pasting it to her forehead and neck.

"Earl?" she yelled. "Where are you? Earl?" She began to run across the lot, yelling his name as she went. The rain had turned the dust to a deep brown mud; it slopped up against her shins. She crossed to the other building. A number of guests, already woken by Gyer's barrage, watched her from their windows. Several doors were open. One man, standing on the walkway with a beer in his hand, demanded to know what was going on. "People running around like crazies," he said. "All this yelling. We came here for some privacy for Christ's sake." A girl-fully twenty years his junior-emerged from the room behind the beer drinker. "She's got a gun, Dwayne," she said. "See that?"

"Where did they go?" Laura May asked the beer drinker.

"Who?" Dwayne replied.

"The crazies!" Laura May yelled back above another peal of thunder.

"They went around the back of the office," Dwayne said, his eyes on the gun rather than Laura May. "They're not here. Really they're not."

Laura May doubled back toward the office building. The rain and lightning were blinding, and she had difficulty keeping her balance in the swamp underfoot.

"Earl!" she called. "Are you there?"

Sadie kept pace with her. The Cade woman had pluck, no doubt of that, but there was an edge of hysteria in her voice which Sadie didn't like too much. This kind of business (murder) required detachment. The trick was to do it almost casually, as you might flick on the radio, or swat a mosquito. Panic would only cloud the issue; passion the same. Why, when she'd raised that .38 and pointed it at Buck there'd been no anger to spoil her aim, not a trace. In the final analysis, that was why they'd sent her to the chair. Not for doing it, but for doing it too well.

Laura May was not so cool. Her breath had become ragged, and from the way she sobbed Earl's name as she ran it was clear she was close to the breaking point. She rounded the back of the office building, where the motel sign threw a cold light on the waste ground, and this time, when she called for Earl, there was an answering cry. She stopped, peering through the veil of rain. It was Earl's voice, as she'd hoped, but he wasn't calling to her.

"Bastard!" he was yelling, "you're out of your mind. Let me alone!"

Now she could make out two figures in the middle distance. Earl, his paunchy torso spattered and streaked with mud, was on his knees in among the soap weed and the scrub. Gyer stood over him, his hands on Earl's head, pressing it down toward the earth.

"Admit your crime, sinner!"

"Damn you, no!"

"You came to destroy my crusade. Admit it! Admit it!"

"Go to hell!"

"Confess your complicity, or so help me I'll break every bone in your body!"

Earl fought to be free of Gyer, but the evangelist was easily the stronger of the two men.

"Pray!" he said, pressing Earl's face into the mud. "Pray!"

"Go fuck yourself," Earl shouted back.

Gyer dragged Earl's head up by the hair, his other hand raised to deliver a blow to the upturned face. But before he could strike, Laura May entered the fray, taking three or four steps through the dirt toward them, the .38 held in her quaking hands.

"Get away from him," she demanded.

Sadie calmly noted that the woman's aim was not all it could be. Even in clear weather she was probably no sharpshooter. But here, under stress, in such a downpour, who but the most experienced marksman could guarantee the outcome? Gyer turned and looked at Laura May. He showed not a flicker of apprehension. He's made the same calculation I've just made, Sadie thought. He knows damn well the odds are against him getting harmed.

"The whore!" Gyer announced, turning his eyes heavenward. "Do you see her, Lord? See her shame, her depravity? Mark her! She is one of the court of Babylon!"

Laura May didn't quite comprehend the details, but the general thrust of Gyer's outburst was perfectly clear. "I'm no whore!" she yelled back, the .38 almost leaping in her hand as if eager to be fired. "Don't you dare call me a whore!"

"Please, Laura May..." Earl said, wrestling with Gyer to get a look at the woman, "... get out of here. He's lost his mind."

She ignored the imperative.

"If you don't let go of him she said, pointing the gun at the man in black.

"Yes?" Gyer taunted her. "What will you do, whore?"

"I'll shoot! I will! I'll shoot."

OVERon the other side of the office building Virginia spotted one of the pill bottles Gyer had thrown out into the mud. She stooped to pick it up and then thought better of the idea. She didn't need pills any more, did she? She'd spoken to a dead man. Her very touch had made Buck Durning visible to her. What a skill that was! Her visions were real, and always had been; more true than all the secondhand revelations her pitiful husband could spout. What could pills do but befuddle this newfound talent? Let them lie.

A number of guests had now donned jackets and emerged from their rooms to see what the commotion was all about.

"Has there been an accident?" a woman called to Virginia. As the words left her lips a shot sounded.

"John," Virginia said.

Before the echoes of the shot had died she was making her way toward their source. She already pictured what she would find there: her husband laid flat on the ground; the triumphant assassin taking to his muddied heels. She picked up her pace, a prayer coming as she ran. She prayed not that the scenario she had imagined was wrong, but rather that God would forgive her for willing it to be true.

The scene she found on the other side of the building confounded all her expectations. The evangelist was not dead. He was standing, untouched. It was Earl who lay flat on the miry ground beside him. Close by stood the woman who'd come with the ice water hours earlier. She had a gun in her hand. It still smoked. Even as Virginia's eyes settled on Laura May a figure stepped through the rain and struck the weapon from the woman's hand. It fell to the ground. Virginia followed the descent. Laura May looked startled. She clearly didn't understand how she'd come to drop the gun. Virginia knew, however. She could see the phantom, albeit fleetingly, and she guessed its identity. This was surely Sadie Durning, she whose defiance had christened this establishment the Slaughterhouse of Love.

Laura May's eyes found Earl. She let out a cry of horror and ran towards him.

"Don't be dead, Earl. I beg you, don't be dead!"

Earl looked up from the mud bath he'd taken and shook his head.

"Missed me by a mile," he said.

At his side, Gyer had fallen to his knees, hands clasped together, face up to the driving rain.

"Oh Lord, I thank you for preserving this your instrument, in his hour of need..."

Virginia shut out the idiot drivel. This was the man who had convinced her so deeply of her own deluded state that she'd given herself to Buck Durning. Well, no more. She'd been terrorized enough. She'd seen Sadie act upon the real world; she'd felt Buck do the same. The time was now ripe to reverse the procedure. She walked steadily across to where the .38 lay in the grass and picked it up.

As she did so, she sensed the presence of Sadie Durning close by. A voice, so soft she barely heard it, said, "Is this wise?" in her ear. Virginia didn't know the answer to that question. What was wisdom anyhow? Not the stale rhetoric of dead prophets, certainly. Maybe wisdom was Laura May and Earl, embracing in the mud, careless of the prayers Gyer was spouting, or of the stares of the guests who'd come running out to see who'd died. Or perhaps wisdom was finding the canker in your life and rooting it out once and for all. Gun in hand, she headed back toward Room Seven, aware that the benign presence of Sadie Durning walked at her side.

"Not Buck...?" Sadie whispered, "...surely not."

"He attacked me," Virginia said.

"You poor lamb."

"I'm no lamb," Virginia replied. "Not anymore."

Realizing that the woman was perfectly in charge of her destiny, Sadie hung back, fearful that her presence would alert Buck. She watched as Virginia crossed the lot, past the cottonwood tree, and stepped into the room where her tormentor had said he would be waiting. The lights still burned, bright after the blue darkness outside. There was no sign of Durning. Virginia crossed to the interconnecting door. Room Eight was deserted too. Then, the familiar voice.

"You came back," Buck said.

She wheeled around, hiding the gun from him. He had emerged from the bathroom and was standing between her and the door.

"I knew you'd come back," be said to her. "They always do."

"I want you to show yourself-" Virginia said.

"I'm naked as a babe as it is," said Buck, "what do you want me to do: skin myself? Might be fun, at that."

"Show yourself to John, my husband. Make him see his error."

"Oh, poor John. I don't think he wants to see me, do you?"

"He thinks I'm insane."

"Insanity can be very useful," Buck smirked, "they almost saved Sadie from Old Sparky on a plea of insanity. But she was too honest for her own good. She just kept telling them, over and over: 'I wanted him dead. So I shot him.' She never had much sense. But you... now, I think you know what's best for you."

The shadowy form shifted. Virginia couldn't quite make out what Durning was doing with himself but it was unequivocally obscene.

"Come and get it, Virginia," he said, "grub's up."

She took the .38 from behind her back and leveled it at him.

"Not this time," she said.

"You can't do me any harm with that," he replied. "I'm already dead, remember?"

"You hurt me. Why shouldn't I be able to hurt you back?"

Buck shook his ethereal head, letting out a low laugh. As he was so engaged the wail of police sirens rose from down the highway.

"Well, what do you know?" Buck said. "Such a fuss and commotion. We'd better get down to some jazzing, honey, before we get interrupted."

"I warn you, this is Sadie's gun-"You wouldn't hurt me," Buck murmured. "I know you women. You say one thing and you mean the opposite." He stepped toward her, laughing.

"Don't," she warned.

He took another step, and she pulled the trigger. In the instant before she heard the sound, and felt the gun leap in her hand, she saw John appear in the doorway. Had he been there all along, or was he coming out of the rain, prayers done, to read Revelations to his erring wife? She would never know The bullet sliced through Buck, dividing the smoky body as it went, and sped with perfect accuracy toward the evangelist. He didn't see it coming. It struck him in the throat, and blood came quickly, splashing down his shirt. Buck's form dissolved like so much dust, and he was gone. Suddenly there was nothing in Room Seven but Virginia, her dying husband and the sound of the rain.

John Gyer frowned at Virginia, then reached out for the door frame to support his considerable bulk. He failed to secure it, and fell backward out of the door like a toppled statue, his face washed by the rain. The blood did not stop coming however. It poured out in gleeful spurts; and it was still pumping when Alvin Baker and his deputy arrived outside the room, guns at the ready.

Now her husband would never know, she thought. That was the pity of it. He could never now be made to concede his stupidity and recant his arrogance. Not this side of the grave, anyhow. He was safe, damn him, and she was left with a smoking gun in her hand and God alone knew what price to pay.

"Put down the gun and come out of there!" The voice from the lot sounded harsh and uncompromising.

Virginia didn't answer.

"You hear me, in there? This is Sheriff Baker. The place is surrounded, so come on out, or you're dead."

Virginia sat on the bed and weighed up the alternatives. They wouldn't execute her for what she'd done, the way they had Sadie. But she'd be in prison for a long time, and she was tired of regimes. If she wasn't mad now, incarceration would push her to the brink and over. Better to finish here, she thought. She put the warm .38 under her chin, tilting it to make sure the shot would take off the top of her skull.

"Is that wise?" Sadie inquired, as Virginia's finger tightened.

"They'll lock me away," she replied. "I couldn't face that."

"True," said Sadie. "They'll put you behind bars for a while. But it won't be for long."

"You must be joking. I just shot my husband in cold blood."

"You didn't mean to," Sadie said brightly, "you were aiming at Buck."

"Was I?" Virginia said. "I wonder."

"You can plead insanity, the way I should have done. Just make up the most outrageous story you can and stick to it." Virginia shook her head; she'd never been much of a liar. "And when you're set free," Sadie went on, "you'll be notorious. That's worth living for, isn't it?"

Virginia hadn't thought of that. The ghost of a smile illuminated her face. From outside, Sheriff Baker repeated his demand that she throw her weapon through the door and come out with her hands high.

"You've got ten seconds, lady," he said, "and I mean ten."

"I can't face the humiliation," Virginia murmured. "I can't."

Sadie shrugged. "Pity," she said. "The rain's clearing. There's a moon.

"A moon? Really?"

Baker had started counting.

"You have to make up your mind," Sadie said. "They'll shoot you given half the chance. And gladly."

Baker had reached eight. Virginia stood up.

"Stop," she called through the door.

Baker stopped counting. Virginia threw out the gun. It landed in the mud.

"Good," said Sadie. "I'm so pleased."

"I can't go alone," Virginia replied.

"No need."

A sizeable audience had gathered in the lot: Earl and Laura May of course, Milton Cade, Dwayne and his girl, Sheriff Baker and his deputy, an assortment of motel guests. They stood in respectful silence, staring at Virginia Gyer with mingled expressions of bewilderment and awe.

"Put your hands up where I can see them!" Baker said. Virginia did as she was instructed.

"Look," said Sadie, pointing.

The moon was up, wide and white.

"Why'd you kill him?" Dwayne's girl asked.

"The Devil made me do it," Virginia replied, gazing up at the moon and putting on the craziest smile she could muster.