Desperation

Cynthia looked up at Steve for a moment, her faced pinched and white. He put his arm around her waist and followed Johnny up the stairs.

Audrey made it about halfway down the short but steep flight of stairs leading to the second-floor hall, then fell. The sound of her inside her blood-soaked dress was grisly-a splashing sound, almost. Yet she was still alive. She began to crawl, her hair hanging in strings, mercifully obscuring most of her dangling face. At the far end, by the stairs leading down to the lobby, Ralph stood with David in his arms, staring at the oncoming creature.

“Shoot her!” Johnny roared. “For God’s sake, some-body shoot her!”

“Can’t,” Steve said. “No guns up here but the kid’s, and that one’s empty.”

“Ralph, get downstairs with David,” Johnny said. He started carefully down the hail.

“Get down before.

But the thing which had been Audrey Wyler had no fur-ther interest in David, it seemed.

It reached the arched entrance to the balcony, then crawled through it. Almost at once the support timbers, dried out by the desert cli-mate and dined upon by generations of termites, began to groan. Steve hurried after Johnny, his arm still around Cynthia. Ralph came toward them from the other end of the hall. They met just in time to see the thing in the soaked dress reach the balcony railing. Audrey had crawled over the mostly deflated sex-doll, leaving a broad streak of blood and less identifiable fluids across its plastic midsection. Frieda’ s pursed mouth might have been expressing outrage at such treatment.

What remained of Audrey Wyler was still clutching the railing, still attempting to pull itself up enough to dive over the side when the supports let go and the balcony tore away from the wall with a large, dusty roar. At first it slipped outward on a level, like a tray or a floating plat-form, tearing away boards from the edge of the hallway and forcing Steve and the others back as the old carpet first tore open and then gaped like a seismic fault.

Laths snapped; nails squealed as they divorced the boards to which they had been wedded. Then, at last, the balcony began to tilt. Audrey tumbled over the side. For just a moment Steve saw her feet sticking out of the dust, and then she was gone. A moment later and the balcony was gone, too, falling like a stone and hitting the seats below with a tremendous crash. Dust boiled up in a miniature mushroom cloud.

“David!” Steve shouted. “What about David. Is he alive.”

“I don’t know,” Ralph said. He looked at them with dazed and teary eyes. “I’m sure he was when I brought him out of the projection-booth, but now I don’t know. I can’t feel him breathing at all.”

ALL the doors leading into the auditorium had been chocked open, and the lobby was hazed with dust from the fallen balcony. They carried David over to one of the street—doors, where a draft from the outside pushed the worst of the drifting dust away.

“Put him down,” Cynthia said. She was trying to think what to do next-hell, what to do first-but her thoughts kept junking up on her. “And lay him straight. Let’s turn his airways into freeways.”

Ralph looked at her hopefully as he and Steve lowered David to the threadbare carpet.

“Do you know anything about… this.”

“Depends on what you mean,” she said. “Some first aid-including artificial respiration—from when I was back at Daughters and Sisters, yeah. But if you’re asking if I know anything about ladies who turn into homicidal maniacs and then decay, no.”

“He’s all I got, miss,” Ralph said. “All that’s left of my family.”

Cynthia closed her eyes and bent toward David. What she felt relieved her enormously—the faint but clear touch of breath on her face. “He’s alive. I can feel him breathing.” She looked up at Ralph and smiled. “I’m not surprised you couldn’t. Your face is swelled up like an inner tube.”

“Yeah. Maybe that was it. But mostly I was just so afraid He tried to smile back at her and failed. He let out a gusty sigh and groped backward to lean against the boarded-over candy counter.

“I’m going to help him now,” Cynthia said. She looked down at the boy’s pale face and closed eyes. “I’m just going to help you along, David. Speed things up. Let me help you, okay. Let me help you.”

She turned his head gently to one side, wincing at the fingermarks on his neck. In the auditorium, a hanging piece of the balcony gave up the ghost and fell with a crash. The others looked that way, but Cynthia’s concen-tration remained on David. She used the fingers of her left hand to open his mouth, leaned forward, and gently pinched his nostrils shut with her right hand. Then she put her mouth on his and exhaled. His chest rose more steeply, then settled as she released his nose and pulled away from him. She bent to one side and spoke into his ear in a low voice. “Come back to us, David. We need you. And you need us.”

She breathed deep into his mouth again, and said, “Come back to us, David,” as he exhaled a mixture of his air and hers. She looked into his face. His unassisted breathing was a little stronger now, she thought, and she could see his eyeballs moving beneath his blue-tinged lids, but he showed no signs of waking up.

“Come back to us, David. Come back.”

Johnny looked around, blinking like someone just back from the further reaches of his thoughts. Where’s Mary You don’t suppose the goddam balcony fell on her, do you.”

“Why would it have.” Steve asked. “She was with the old guy.”

“And you think she’s still with the old guy. After all the yelling. After the goddam balcony fell off the goddam wall.”

“You’ve got a point,” Steve said.

“Here we go again,” Johnny said, “I knew it. Come on, I guess we better go look for her.”

Cynthia took no notice. She knelt with her face in front of David’s, searching it earnestly with her eyes. “I dunno where you are, kid, but get your ass back here. It’s time to saddle up and get out of Dodge.”

Johnny picked up the shotgun and the rifle. He handed the latter to Ralph. “Stay here with your boy and the young lady,” he said. “We’ll be back.”

“Yeah. What if you’re not.”

Johnny looked at him uncertainly for a moment, then broke into a sunny grin. “Burn the documents, trash the radio, and swallow your death capsule.”

“Huh.”

“How the fuck should 1 know. Use your judgement. I can tell you this much, Ralph: as soon as we’ve collected Ms. Jackson, we’re totally historical. Come on, Steve Down the far lefthand aisle, unless you’ve an urge to climb Mount Balcony.”

Ralph watched them through the door, then turned back to Cynthia and his son. “What’s wrong with David, do you have any idea. Did that bitch choke him into a coma9 He had a friend who was in a coma once, David did. He came out of it-it was a miracle, everyone said-but I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. Is that what’s wrong with him, do you think.”

“I don’t think he’s unconscious at all, let alone in a coma. Do you see the way his eyelids are moving. It’s more like he’s asleep and dreaming… or in a trance.”

She looked up at him. Their eyes met for a moment, and then Ralph knelt down across from her. He brushed his son’s hair off his brow and then kissed him gently between the eyes, where the skin was puckered in a faint frown. “Come back, David,” he said. “Please come back.”

David breathed quietly through pursed lips. Behind his bruised eyelids, his eyes moved and moved.

In the men’s room they found one dead cougar, its head mostly blown off, and one dead veterinarian with his eyes open. In the ladies’ room, they found nothing… or so it seemed to Steve.

“Shine your light back over there,” Johnny told him. When Steve retrained the flashlight on the window he said, “No, not the window. The floor underneath it.”

Steve dropped the beam and ran it along half a dozen beer-bottles standing against the wall just to the right of the window.

“The doc’s booby-trap,” Johnny said. “Not broken but neatly set aside. Interesting.”

“I didn’t even notice they were gone from the window—ledge. That’s good on you, boss.”

“Come on over here.” Johnny crossed to the window, held it up, peeked out, then moved aside enough for Steve to join him. “Cast your mind back to your arrival at this bucolic palace of dreams, Steven. What’s the last thing you did before sliding all the way into this room. Can you remember.”

Steve nodded. “Sure. We stacked two crates to make it easier to climb in the window. I pushed the top one off, because I figured if the cop came back here and saw them piled up that way, it would be like a pointing arrow.”

“Right. But what do you see now.”

Steve used his flashlight, although he didn’t really need to; the wind had died almost completely, and all but the most errant skims of dust had dropped. There was even a scantling of moon.

“They’re stacked again,” he said, and turned to Johnny with an alarmed look. “Oh shit! Entragian came while we were occupied with David.

Came and took her was how he meant to finish, but he saw the boss shaking his head and stopped.

“That’s not what this says.” Johnny took the flashlight and ran it along the row of bottles again. “Not smashed set neatly aside in a row. Who did that. Audrey. No she went the other way-after David. Billingsley. Not pos-sible, considering the shape he was in before he died. That leaves Mary, but would she have done it for the cop.”

“I doubt it,” Steve said.

“Me too. I think that if the cop had shown up back here _ she would have come running to us, screaming bloody murder. And why the stacked crates. I’ve got some per-sonal experience of Collie Entragian; he’s six-six at least, probably more. He wouldn’t have needed a step up to get in the window. To me those stacked crates suggest either LL. a shorter person, a ruse to get Mary into a position where she could be grabbed, or maybe both. I could be over—deducing, I suppose, but-”

“So there could be more of them. More like Audrey.”

“Maybe, but I don’t think you can conclude that out of what we see here. I just don’t think she would have put those beer-bottles aside for any stranger. Not even a bawling little kid. You know. I think she would have come to get us.”

Steve took the flashlight and shone it on Billingsley’ s tile fish, so joyful and funky here in the dark. He wasn’t surprised to find that he no longer liked it much. Now it _ was like laughter in a haunted house, or a clown at mid—night. He snapped the light off.

“What are you thinking, boss.”

“Don’t call me that anymore, Steve. I never liked it that much to begin with.”

“All right. What are you thinking, Johnny.”

Johnny looked around to make sure they were still alone. His face, dominated by his swelled and leaning nose, looked both tired and intent. As he shook out another three aspirin and dry-swallowed them, Steve real-ized an amazing thing: Marinville looked younger. In spite of everything he’d been through, he looked younger.

He swallowed again, grimacing at the taste of the old pills, and said: “David’s mom.”

“What.”

“It could have been. Take a second. Think about it. You’ll see how pretty it is, in a ghastly kind of way.”

Steve did. And saw how completely it made sense of the situation. He didn’t know where Audrey Wyler’s story had parted company from the truth, but he did know that at some point she had been gotten to… changed by the stones she had called the can tahs.

Changed. Afflicted with a kind of horrible, degenerative rabies. What had happened to her could have happened to Ellen Carver, as well.

Steve suddenly found himself hoping Mary Jackson was dead. That was awful, but in a case like this, dead might be better, mightn’t it. Better than being under the spell of the can tahs. Better than what apparently hap-pened when the can tahs were taken away.

“What do we do now.” he asked.

“Get out of this town. By any means possible.”

“All right. If David’s still unconscious, we’ll carry him. Let’s do it.”

They started back to the lobby.

David Carver walked down Anderson Avenue past West Wentworth Middle School.

Written on the side of the school-building in yellow spray-paint were the words IN THESE SILENCES SOMETHING MAY RISE. Then he turned an Ohio corner and began walking down Bear Street. That was pretty funny, since Bear Street and the Bear Street Woods were nine big suburban blocks from the junior high, but that’s the way things worked in dreams. Soon he would wake up in his own bedroom and the whole thing would fall apart, anyway.

Ahead of him were three bikes in the middle of the street. They had been turned upside down, and their wheels were spinning in the air.

“And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, I have dreamed a dream,” someone said, “and I have heard say of thee, that thou canst understand a dream to interpret it.”

David looked across the street and saw Reverend Martin. He was drunk and he needed a shave. In one hand he held a bottle of Seagram’s Seven whiskey. Between his feet was a yellow puddle of puke. David could barely stand to look at him. His eyes were empty and dead.

“And Joseph answered Pharaoh, saying, It is not in me: God shall give Pharaoh an answer of peace.” Reverend Martin toasted him with the bottle and then drank. “Go get em,” he said. “Now we’re going to discover if you know where Moses was when the lights went out.”

David walked on. He thought of turning around; then a queer but strangely persuasive idea came to him: if he did turn around, he would see the mummy tottering after him in a cloud of ancient wrappings and spices.

He walked a little faster.

As he passed the bikes in the street, he noted that one of the turning wheels made a piercing and unpleasant sound:

Reek-reek-reek. It made him think of the weathervane on top of Bud’s Suds, the leprechaun with the pot of gold under his arm. The one in—Desperation! I’m in Desperation, and this is a dream! I fell asleep while I was trying to pray, I’m upstairs in the. old movie theater!

“There shall arise among you a prophet, and a dreamer of dreams,” someone said.

David looked across the Street and saw a dead cat-a cougar-hanging from a speed-limit sign. The cougar had a human head. Audrey Wyler’s head. Her eyes rolled at him tiredly and he thought she was trying to smile. “But if he should say to you, Let us seek other gods, you shalt not hearken unto him.”

He looked away, grimacing, and here, on his own side of Bear Street, was sweet Pie standing on the porch of his friend Brian’s house (Brian’s house had never been on Bear Street before, but now the rules had apparently changed). She was holding Melissa Sweetheart clasped in her arms. “He was Mr. Big Boogeyman after all,” she said. “You know that now, don’t you.”

“Yes. I know, Pie.”

“Walk a little faster, David. Mr. Big Boogeyman’s after you.”

The desert-smell of wrappings and old spices was stronger in his nose now, and David walked faster still. Up ahead was the break in the bushes which marked the entrance to the Ho Chi Minh Trail. There had never been anything there before but the occasional hopscotch grid or KATHI LOVES RUSSELL chalked on the sidewalk, but today the entrance to the path was guarded by an ancient stone statue, one much too big to be a can tah, little god; this was a can tak, big god. It was a jackal with a cocked head, an open, snarling mouth, and buggy cartoon eyes that were full of fury. One of its ears had been either chipped away or eroded away. The tongue in its mouth was not a tongue at all but a human head-Collie Entragian’s head, Smokey Bear hat and all.

“Fear me and turn aside from this path,” the cop in the mouth of the jackal said as David approached. “Mi tow, can de lach: fear the unformed. There are other gods than yours—can tah, can tak. You know I speak the truth.”

“Yes, but my God is strong,” David said in a conversa-tional voice. He reached into the jackal’s open mouth and seized its psychotic tongue. He heard Entragian scream-and felt it, a scream that vibrated against his palm like a joy-buzzer. A moment later, the jackal’s entire head exploded in a soundless shardless flash of light. What remained was a stone hulk that stopped short at the shoulders.

He walked down the path, aware that he was glimpsing plants he had never seen anywhere in Ohio before-spiny cactuses and drum cactuses, winter fat, squaw tea, Rus-sian thistle… also known as tumbleweed. From the bushes at the side of the path stepped his mother. Her face was black and wrinkled, an ancient bag of dough. Her eyes drooped. The sight of her in this state filled him with sorrow and horror.

“Yes, yes, your God is strong,” she said, “no argument there. But look what he’s done to me. Is this strength worth admiring. Is this a God worth having.” She held her hands out to him, displaying her rotting palms.

“God didn’t do that,” David said, and began to cry. “The policeman did it!”

“But God let it happen,” she countered, and one of her eyeballs dropped out of her head.

“The same God who let Entragian push Kirsten downstairs and then hang her body on a hook for you to find. What God is this. Turn aside from him and embrace mine. Mine is at least honest about his cruelty.”

But this whole conversation-not just the petitioning but the haughty, threatening tone of it-was so foreign to David’s memory of his mother that he began to walk for—ward again.

Had to walk forward again. The mummy was behind him, and the mummy was slow, yes, but he reck-oned that this was one of the ways in which the mummy caught up with his victims: by using his ancient Egyptian magic to put obstacles in their path.

“Stay away from me!” the rotting mother-thing screamed. “Stay away or I’ll turn you to stone in the mouth of a god! You’ll be can tah in can tak!”

“You can’t do that,” David said patiently, “and you’re not my mother. My mother’s with my sister, in heaven, with God.”

“What a joke!” the rotting thing cried indignantly. Its voice was gargly now, like the cop’s voice. It was spitting blood and teeth as it talked. “Heaven’s a joke, the kind of thing your Reverend Martin would spiel happily on about for hours, if you kept buying him shots and beers-it’s no more real than Tom Billingsley’s fishes and horses! You won’t tell me you swallowed it, will you. A smart boy like you. Did you. Oh Davey! I don’t know whether to laugh or cry!” What she did was smile furiously. “There s no heaven, no afterlife at all…

not for such as us. Only the gods-can taks, can tahs, can-”

He suddenly realized what this confused sermon was about: holding him here. Holding him so the mummy could catch up and choke him to death. He stepped for-ward, seized the raving head, and squeezed it between his hands. He surprised himself by laughing as he did it, because it was so much like the stuff the crazy cable-TV preachers did; they grabbed their victims upside the head and bellowed stuff like “Sickness come owwr!

Tumors come OWWT! Rheumatiz come owwwT! In the name of _ Jeeeesus!” There was another of those soundless flashes, and this time not even the body was left; he was alone on the path again.

He walked on, sorrow working at his heart and mind, thinking of what the mother-thing had said. No heaven, no afterlife at all, not for such as us. That might be true or it might not be; he had no way of knowing. But the thing had also said that God had allowed his mother and sister to be killed, and that was true… wasn’t it.

Well, maybe. How’s a kid supposed to know about stuff like that.

Ahead was the oak tree with the Viet Cong Lookout in it. At the base of the tree was a piece of red-and-silver paper-a 3 Muskies wrapper. David bent over, picked it up, and stuck it in his mouth, sucking the smears of sweet chocolate off the inside with his eyes closed. Take, eat, he heard Reverend Martin say-this was a memory and not a voice, which was something of a relief. This is my body, broken for you and for many. He opened his eyes, fearing he might nevertheless see Reverend Martin’s drunken face and dead eyes, but Reverend Martin wasn’t there.

David spat the wrapper out and climbed to the Viet Cong Lookout with the sweet taste of chocolate in his mouth. He climbed into the sound of rock-and-roll music.

Someone was sitting cross-legged on the platform and looking out at the Bear Street Woods. His posture was so similar to Brian’s-legs crossed, chin propped on the palms of his hands-that for a moment David was sure it was his old friend, only grown to young adulthood. David thought he could handle that. It wouldn’t be any stranger than the rotting effigy of his mother or the cougar with Audrey Wyler’s head, and a hell of a lot less distressing.

Slung over the young man’s shoulder was a radio on a strap. Not a Walkman or a boombox; it looked older than either. There were two circular decals pasted to its leather case, one a yellow smile-guy, the other the peace sign. The music was coming from a small exterior speaker. The sound was tinny but still way cool, hot drums, killer rhythm guitar, and a somehow perfect rock-and-roll vocal: “I was feelin”… so bad… asked my family doctor just what I had…”

“Bri.” he asked, grabbing the bottom of the platform and pulling himself up. “That you.”

The man turned. He was slim, dark-haired under a Yan-kees baseball cap, wearing jeans, a plain gray tee-shirt, and big reflector shades-David could see his own face in them. He was the first person David had seen in this… whatever-it-was… that he didn’t know.

“Brian’s not here, David,” he said.

“Who are you, then.” If the guy in the reflector sun glasses started to rot or to bleed out like Entragian, David was vacating this tree in a hurry, and never mind the mummy that might be lurking somewhere in the woods below. “This is our place. Mine and Bri’s.”

“Brian can ‘t be here,” the dark-haired man said pleas antly. “Brian’s alive, you see.”

“I don’t get you.” But he was afraid he did.

“What did you tell Marinville when he tried to talk to the coyotes.”

It took David a moment to remember, and that wasn’t surprising, because what he’d said hadn’t seemed to come from him but through him. “I said not to speak to them in the language of the dead. Except it wasn’t really me who-”

The man in the sunglasses waved this off. “The way Marinville tried to speak to the coyotes is sort of the way we’re speaking now: si em, tow en can de lach. Do you understand.”

“Yes. ‘We speak the language of the unformed.’ The language of the dead.” David began to shiver. “I’m dead too, then… aren’t I. I’m dead, too.”

“Nope. Wrong. Lose one turn.” The man turned up the volume on his radio—“I said doctor… Mr. M.D…

and smiled. “The Rascals,” he said. “Felix Cavaliere on vocals. Cool.”

“Yes,” David said, and meant it. He felt he could listen to the song all day. It made him think of the beach, and cute girls in two-piece bathing suits.

The man in the Yankees cap listened a moment longer, then turned the radio off. When he did, David saw a ragged scar on the underside of his right wrist, as if at some point he had tried to kill himself. Then it occurred to him that the man might have done a lot more than just try wasn’t this a place of the dead.

He suppressed a shiver.

The man took off his Yankees cap, wiped the back of his neck with it, put it back on, and looked at David sen ously. “This is the Land of the Dead, but you’re an excep tion.

You’re special. Very.”

“Who are you.”

“It doesn’t matter. Just another member of the Young Rascals-Felix Cavaliere Fan Club, if it comes to that,” the man said. He looked around, sighed, grimaced a little. “But I’ll tell you one thing, young man: it doesn’t surprise me at all that the Land of the Dead should turn out to be located in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio.” He looked back at David, his faint smile fading. “I

guess it’s time we got down to business. Time is short. You’re going to have a bit of a sore throat when you wake up, by the way, and you may feel disoriented at first; they’re moving you to the back of the truck Steve Ames drove into town. They feel a strong urge to vacate The American West-take it any way you want-and I can’t say I blame them.”

“Why are you here.”

“To make sure you know why you’re here, David… to begin with, at least. So tell me: why are you here.”

“I don’t know what you’re-”

“Oh please,” the man with the radio said. His mirror shades flashed in the sun. “If you don’t, you’re in deep shit. Why are you on earth. Why did God make you.”

David looked at him in consternation.

“Come on, come on!” the man said impatiently. “These are easy questions. Why did God make you. Why did God make me. Why did God make anyone.”

“To love and serve him,” David said slowly.

“Okay, good. It’s a start, anyway. And what is God. What’s your experience of the nature of God.”

“I don’t want to say.” David looked down at his hands, then up at the grave, intent man—the strangely familiar man-in the sunglasses. “I’m scared I’ll get in dutch.” He hesitated, then dragged out what he was really afraid of: “I’m scared you’re God.”

The man uttered a short, rueful laugh. “In a way, that’s pretty funny, but never mind.

Let’s stay focused here. What do you know of the nature of God, David. What is your experience.”

With the greatest reluctance, David said: “God is cruel.”

He looked down at his hands again and counted slowly to five. When he had reached it and still hadn’t been fried by a lightning-bolt, he looked up again. The man in the jeans and tee-shirt was still grave and intent, but David saw no anger in him.

“That’s right, God is cruel. We slow down, the mummy always catches us in the end, and God is cruel. Why is God cruel, David.”

For a moment he didn’t answer, and then something Reverend Martin had said came to him-the TV in the corner had been broadcasting a soundless spring-training baseball game that day.

“God’s cruelty is refining,” he said.

“We’re the mine and God is the miner.”

“Well-”

“And all cruelty is good. God is good and cruelty is good.”

“No, hardly any of it’s good!” David said. For a single f: horrified second he saw Pie, dangling from the hook on the wall, Pie who walked around ants on the sidewalk because she didn’t want to hurt them.

“What is cruelty done for evil.”

“Malice. Who are you, sir.”

“Never mind. Who is the father of malice.”

“The devil… or maybe those other gods my mother talked about.”

“Never mind can tah and can tak, at least for now. We have bigger fish to fry, so pay attention. What is faith.’ That one was easy. “The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

“Yeah. And what is the spiritual state of the faithful.

“Urn… love and acceptance. I think.”

“And what is the opposite of faith.”

That was tougher-a real hairball, in fact. Like one of those damned reading-achievement tests. Pick a, b, c, or d. Except here you didn’t even get the choices. “Dis-belief.” he ventured.

“No. Not disbelief but unbelief. The first is natural, the second willful. And when one is in unbelief, David, what is that one’s spiritual state.”

He thought about it, then shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Yes you do.”

He thought about it and realized he did. “The spiritual state of unbelief is desperation.”

“Yes. Look down, David!”—He did, and was shocked to see that the Viet Cong Lookout was no longer in the tree. It now floated, like a magic carpet made out of boards, above a vast, blighted countryside. He could see buildings here and there amid rows of gray and listless plants.

One was a trailer with a bumper-sticker proclaiming the owner a Snapple-drinkin’, Clinton-bashin’ son of a bitch; another was the mining Quonset they’d seen on the way into town; another was the Municipal Building; another was Bud’s Suds. The grinning leprechaun with the pot of gold under his arm peered out of a dead and strangulated jungle.

“This is the poisoned field,” the man in the reflector sunglasses said. “What’s gone on here makes Agent Orange look like sugar candy. There will be no sweet-ening this earth.

It must be eradicated-sown with salt and plowed under. Do you know why.”

“Because it will spread.”

“No. It can’t. Evil is both fragile and stupid, dying soon after the ecosystem it’s poisoned.”

“Then why-”

“Because it’s an affront to God. There is no other reason. Nothing hidden or held back, no fine print. The poisoned field is a perversity and an affront to God. Now look down again.”

He did. The buildings had slipped behind them. Now the Viet Cong Lookout floated above a vast pit. From this perspective, it looked like a sore which has rotted through the skin of the earth and into its underlying flesh. The sides sloped inward and downward in neat zigzags like stairs; in a way, looking into this place was like looking into (walk a little faster) apyramid turned inside out. There were pines in the hills south of the pit, and some growth high up around the edges, but the pit itself was sterile-not even juniper grew here.

On the near side-it would be the north face, David supposed, if the poisoned field was the town of Despera-tion-these neat setbacks had broken through near the bottom. Where they had been there was now a long slope of stony rubble. At the site of the landslide, and not too far from the broad gravel road leading down from the rim of the pit, there was a black and gaping hole. The sight of it made David profoundly uneasy. It was as if a monster buried in the desert ground had opened one eye. The land-slide surrounding it made him uneasy, too. Because it looked somehow… well… planned.

At the bottom of the pit, just below the ragged hole, was a parking area filled with ore—freighters, diggers, pickup trucks, and tread-equipped vehicles that looked sort of like World War II tanks. Nearby stood a rusty Quonset hut with a stove-stack sticking crooked out of the roof. WELCOME TO RATTLESNAKE #2, read the sign on the door.

PROVIDING JOBS AND TAX-DOLLARS TO CENTRAL NEVADA SINCE 1951. Off to the left of the metal building was a squat concrete cube. The sign on this one was briefer:

POWDER MAGAZINE

AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

Parked between the two buildings was Collie Entra-gian’s road-dusty Caprice. The driver’s door stood open and the domelight was on, illuminating an interior that looked like an abattoir. On the dash, a plastic bear with a noddy head had been stuck beside the compass.

Then all that was sliding behind them.

“You know this place, don’t you, David.”

“Is it the China Pit. It is, isn’t it.”

“Yes.”

They swooped closer to the side, and David saw that the pit was, in its way, even more desolate than the poi—soned field. There were no whole stones or outcrops in the earth, at least not that he could see; everything had been reduced to an awful yellow rubble.

Beyond the parking area and the buildings were vast heaps of even more radically crumbled rock, piled on black plastic.

“Those are waste dumps,” his guide remarked. “The stuff piled on the plastic is gangue—spoil. But the corn pany’s not ready to let it rest, even now. There’s more in it, you see…

gold, silver, molybdenum, platinum. And copper, of course. Mostly it’s copper. Deposits so diffuse it’s as if they were blown in there like smoke. Mining it used to be uneconomic, but as the world’s major deposits of ore and metal are depleted, what used to be uneco nomic becomes profitable. The oversized Hefty bags are collection pads-the stuff they want precipitates out onto f: them, and they just scrape it off. It’s a leaching process spell it either way and it comes to the same. They’ll go on working the ground until all of this, which used to be a mountain almost eight thousand feet high, is just dust in the wind.”

“What are those big steps coming down the side of the pit.”

“Benches. They serve as ringroads for heavy equipment around the pit, but their major purpose is to minimize earthslides.”

“It doesn’t look like it worked very well back there.” David hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Up here, either.” They were nearing another area where the look of vast stairs descending into the earth was obliterated by a tilted range of crumbled rock.

“That’s a slope failure.” The Viet Cong Lookout swooped above the slide area. Beyond it, David saw net-works of black stuff that at first looked like cobwebs. As they drew nearer, he saw that the strands of what looked like cobwebbing were actually PVC pipe.

“Just lately it’s been a switchover from rainbirds to emitters.” His guide spoke in the tone of one who recites rather than speaks. David had a moment of deja vu, then realized why: the man was repeating what Audrey Wyler had already said. “A few eagles died.”

“A few.” David asked, giving Mr. Billingsley’s line.

“All right, about forty, in all. No big deal in terms of the species; there’s no shortage of eagles in Nevada. Do you see what they replaced the rainbirds with, David. The big pipes are distribution heads-can taks, let’s say.”

“Big gods.”

“Yes! And those little hollow cords that stretch between them like mesh, those are emitters. Can tahs. They drip weak sulfuric acid. It frees the ore… and rots the ground.

Hang on, David.”

The Viet Cong Lookout banked-also like a flying carpet-with David holding onto the edge of the boards to keep from tumbling off. He didn’t want to fall onto that terrible gouged ground where nothing grew and streams of brackish fluid flowed down to the plastic col-lection pads.

They sank into the pit again and passed above the rusty Quonset with the stove-stack, the powder magazine, and the cluster of machinery where the road ended. Up the slope, above the gaping hole, was a wide area pocked with other, much smaller holes. David thought there had to be fifty of them at least, probably more. From each poked a yellow-tipped stick.

“Looks like the world’s biggest gopher colony.”

“This is a blast-face, and those are blast-holes,” his new acquaintance lectured. “The active mining is going on right here. Each of those holes is three feet in diameter and about thirty feet deep. When you’re getting ready to—shoot, you lower a stick of dynamite with a blasting cap 7 on it to the bottom of each hole. That’s the igniter. Then you pour in a couple of wheelbarrows’ worth of ANFO—stands for ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. Those assholes who blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City used ANFO. It usually comes in pellets that look like white BBs.”

The man in the Yankees cap pointed to the powder magazine.

“Lots of ANFO in there. No dynamite-they used up the last on the day all this started to happen-but plenty of ANFO.”

“I don’t understand why you’re telling me this.”

“Never mind, just listen. Do you see the blast-holes.”

“Yes. They look like eyes.”

“That’s right, holes like eyes. They’re sunk into the porphyry, which is crystalline. When the ANFO is deto-nated, it shatters the rock. The shattered stuff contains the 7 ore. Get it.”

“Yes, I think so.”

“That material is trucked away to the leach pads, the distribution heads and emitters-can tah, can tak-are laid over it, and the rotting process begins. Voila, there you have it, leach-ore mining at its very finest. But see what the last blast-pattern uncovered, David!”

He pointed at the big hole, and David felt an unpleasant, debilitating coldness begin to creep through him. The hole seemed to stare up at him with a kind of idiot invitation.

“What is it.” he whispered, but he supposed he knew. “Rattlesnake Number One. Also known as the China Mine or the China Shaft or the China Drift. The last series of shots uncovered it. To say the crew was surprised would be an understatement, because nobody in the Nevada mining business really believes that old story. By the turn of the century, the Diablo Company was claiming that Number One was simply shut down when the vein played out. But it’s been here, David. All along. And now—“Is it haunted.” David asked, shivering. “It is, isn’t it.”

“Oh yes,” the man in the Yankees cap said, turning his silvery no-eyes on David. “Yes indeed.”

“Whatever you brought me up here for, I don’t want to hear it!” David cried. “I want you to take me back! Back to my dad! I hate this! I hate being in the Land of the-”

He broke off as a horrible thought struck him. The Land of the Dead, that was what the man had said. He’d called David an exception. But that meant—“Reverend Martin… I saw him on my way to the Woods. Is he…

The man looked briefly down at his old-fashioned radio, then looked back up again and nodded. “Two days after you left, David.”

“Was he drunk.”

“Toward the end he was always drunk. Like Billingsley.”

“Was it suicide.”

“No,” the man in the Yankees cap said, and put a kindly hand on the back of David’s neck. It was warm, not the hand of a dead person. “At least, not conscious suicide. He and his wife went to the beach. They took a picnic. He went in the water too soon after lunch, and swam out too far.”

“Take me back,” David whispered. “I’m tired of all this death.”

“The poisoned field is an affront to God,” the man said. “I know it’s a bummer, David, but-”

“Then let God clean it up!” David cried. “It’s not fair for him to come to me after he killed my mother and my sister-”

“He didn’t-”

“I don’t care! I don’t care! Evcn if he didn’t, he stood aside and let it happen!”

“That’s not true, either.”

David shut his eyes and clapped his hands to his ears. He didn’t want to hear any more.

He refr—sed to hear any more. Yet the man’s voice came through anyway. It was relentless. He would be able to escape it no more than Jonah had been able to escape God. God was as relentless as a bloodhound on a fresh scent. And God was cruel.

“Why are you on earth.” The voice seemed to come from inside his head now.

“I don’t hear you! I don’t hear you!”

“You were put on earth to love God-”

“No!”

“-and serve him.”

“No! Fuck God! Fuck his love! Fuck his service!”

“God can’t make you do anything you don’t want to-”

“Stop it! I won’t listen, I won’t decide! Do you hear. Do you-”

“Shh-listen!”

Not quite against his will, David listened.

PART IV

THE CHINA PIT: GOD IS CRUEL

Johnny was ready to suggest that they just get going-Cynthia could hold the kid’s head in her lap and cushion it from any bumps-when David raised his hands and pressed the heels of his palms to his temples. He took a deeper breath. A moment later his eyes opened and looked up at them: Johnny, Steve, Cynthia, his father. The faces of the two older men were as puffed and discolored as those of journeymen fighters after a bad night in a tank town; all of them looked tired and scared, jumping like spooked horses at the slightest sound. The ragtag remains of The Collie Entragian Survival Society.

“Hi. David,” Johnny said. “Great to have you back. You’re in-”

“-Steve’s truck. Parked near the movie theater. You brought it down from the Conoco station.” David struggled to a sitting position, swallowed, winced. “She must’ve shook me like dice.”

“She did,” Steve said. He was looking at David cau-tiously. “You remember Audrey doing that.”

“No,” David said, “but I was told.”

Johnny shot a glance at Ralph, who shrugged slightly—Don ‘t ask me.

“Is there any water. My throat’s on fire.”

“We got out of the theater in a hurry and didn’t bring anything but the guns,” Cynthia said. “But there’s this.” She pointed to a case of Jolt Cola from which several bottles had already been taken. “Steve keeps it on hand for Mr. Marinville.”

“I’m a freak about it since I quit drinking,” Johnny said. “Gotta be Jolt, God knows why.

It’s warm, but-”

David took one and drank deeply, wincing as the car-bonation bit into his throat but not slowing down on that account. At last, with the bottle three-quarters empty, he put his head back against the side of the truck, closed his eyes, and burped ringingly.

Johnny grinned. “Sixty points!”

David opened his eyes and grinned back.

Johnny held out the bottle of aspirin he had liberated from the Owl’s. “Want a couple.

They’re old, but they seem to work all right.”

David thought it over, then took two and washed them down with the rest of the Jolt.

“We’re getting out,” Johnny said. “We’ll try north first-there are some trailers in the road, but Steve says he thinks we can get around them on the trailer-park side. If we can’t, we’ll have to go south to the pit-mine and then take the equipment road that runs northwest from there back to Highway 50. You and I’ll sit up front with-”

Johnny raised his eyebrows. “Pardon.”

“We have to go up to the mine, okay, but not to leave town.” David’s voice sounded hoarse, as if he’d been crying. “We have to go down inside the pit.”

Johnny glanced at Steve, who only shrugged and then looked back at the boy. “What are you talking about, David.” Steve asked. “Your mother. Because it would probably be better for her, not to mention the rest of us, if we-”

“No, that’s not why… Dad.” The boy reached out and took his father’s hand. It was an oddly adult gesture of comfort. “Morn’s dead.”

Ralph bowed his head. “Well, we don’t know that for sure, David, and we mustn’t give up hope, but I guess it’s likely.”

“I do know for sure. I’m not just guessing.” David’s face was haggard in the light of the crisscrossing flash-light beams. His eyes settled on Johnny last. “There’s stuff we have to do. You know it, don’t you. That’s why you waited for me to wake up.”

“No, David. Not at all. We just didn’t want to risk moving you until we were sure you were okay.” Yet this felt like a lie to his heart. He found himself filling up with a vague, fluttery nervousness. It was the way he felt in the last few days before beginning a new book, when he understood that the inevitable could not be put off much longer, that he would soon be out on the wire again, clutching his balance-pole and riding his stupid little unicycle.

But this was worse. By far. He felt an urge to hop the kid over the head with the butt of the Rossi shotgun knock him out and shut him up before he could say any thing else.

Don’t you fuek us up, kid, he thought. Not when we’re starting to see a tiny bit of light at the end of the tunnel.

David looked back at his father. He was still holding Ralph’s hand. “She’s dead but not at rest. She can’t be as long as Tak inhabits her body.”

“Who’s Tak, David.” Cynthia asked.

“One of the Wintergreen Twins,” Johnny said cheer—fully. “The other one is Tik.”

David gave him a long, level look, and Johnny dropped his eyes. He hated himself for doing it but couldn’t 7 help it.

“Tak is a god,” David said. “Or a demon. Or maybe nothing at all, just a name, a nonsense syllable-but a dangerous nothing, like a voice in the wind. It doesn matter.

What does is that my mom should be put to rest Then she can be with my sister in…

well, in wherever there is for us after we die.”

“Son, what matters is that we have to get out of here,” Johnny said. He was still managing to keep his voice gentle, but now he could hear an undercurrent of impa tience and fear in it. “Once we get to Ely, we’ll contact 7 the State Police-hell, the FBI. There’ll be a hundred cops on the ground and a dozen helicopters in the air by noon tomorrow, that I promise you. But for now-”

“My mom’s dead, but Mary’s not,” David said. “She s still alive. She’s in the pit.”

Cynthia gasped. “How did you know she was even gone.”

David smiled wanly. “Well, I don’t see her, for one thing. The rest 1 know the same way I know it was Audrey who choked me. I was told.”

“By who, David.” Ralph asked.

“I don’t know,” David said. ‘—1 don’t even know if it matters. What matters is that he told me stuff. True stuff. I know it was.”

“Story-hour’s over, pal,” Johnny said. There was a raggedness in his voice. He heard it, but he couldn’t help it. And was it surprising. This wasn’t a panel-discussion on magical realism or concrete prose, after all. Story-hour was finished; bug-out time had arrived. He had absolutely no desire to listen to a bunch of shit from this spooky little Jesus Scout.

The Jesus Scout slid out of his cell somehow, killed the coyote Entragian set as a guard, and saved your mis-erable life, Terry spoke up inside his head. Maybe you should listen to him, Johnny.

And that, he thought, was why he had divorced Terry in the first place. In a fucking nutshell. She had been a divine lay, but she had never known when to shut up and listen to her intellectual betters.

But the damage was done; it was now too late to derail this train of thought. He found himself thinking of what Billingsley had said about David’s escape from the jail cell. Not even Houdini, hadn’t that been it. Because of the head. And then there was the phone.

The way he’d sent the coyotes packing. And the matter of the sardines and crackers. The thought which had gone through his own head had been something about unobtrusive miracles, hadn’t it.

He had to quit thinking that way. Because what Jesus Scouts did was get people killed.

Look at John the Bap-tist, or those nuns in South America. or—Not even Houdini.

Because of the head.

Johnny realized there was no point in gilding the lily, or doing little mental tap-dances, or-this was the oldest trick of all-using different voices to argue the question into incoherence. The simple fact was that he was no longer just afraid of the cop, or the other forces which might be loose in this town.

He was also afraid of David Carver.

“It wasn’t really the cop who killed my mother and sister and Mary’s husband,” David said, and gave Johnny a look that reminded him eerily of Terry. That look used to drive him to the edge of insanity. You know what I’m talking about, it said. You know exactly, so don ‘t waste my time by being deliberately obtuse. “And whoever I talked to while I was unconscious, it was really God. Only God can’t come to people as himself; he’d scare them to death and never get any business done at all. He comes as other stuff. Birds, pillars of fire, burning bushes, whirlwinds…

“Or people,” Cynthia said. “Sure, God’s a master of disguise.”

The last of Johnny’s patience broke at the skinny girl’s makes-sense-to-me tone. “This is totally insane!” he shouted. “We have to get gone, don’t you see that. We’re parked on goddam Main Street, shut up in here without a single window to look out of, he could be anywhere-up front behind the fucking wheel, for all we know! Or… I don’t know… coyotes… buzzards…

“He’s gone,” David said in his quiet voice. He leaned forward and took another Jolt from the case.

“Who.” Johnny asked. “Entragian.”

“The can tak. It doesn’t matter who it’s in-Entragian or my mother or the one it started with-it’s always the same. Always the can tak, the big god, the guardian. Gone. Can’t you feel it.”

1don’t feel anything.”

Don’t be a gonzo, Terry said in his mind.

“Don’t be a gonzo,” David said, looking intently up at him. The bottle of Jolt was clasped loosely in his hands. Johnny bent toward him. “Are you reading my mind.” he asked, almost pleasantly. “If you are, I’ll thank you to get the hell out of my head, sonny.”

“What I’m doing is trying to get you to listen,” David said. “Everyone else will if you will! He doesn’t need to send his can tahs or can tak against us if we’re in dis-agreement with one another-if there’s a broken window, he’ll get in and tear us apart!”

“Come on,” Johnny said, “don’t go all guilt-trippy. None of this is my fault.”

“I’m not saying it is. Just listen, okay.” David sounded almost pleading. “You can do that, there’s time, because he’s gone. The trailers he put in the road are gone, too. Don’t you get it. He wants us to leave.”

“Great! Let’s give him what he wants!”

“Let’s listen to what David has to say,” Steve said.

Johnny wheeled on him. “I think you must have for-gotten who pays you, Steve.” He loathed the sound of the words as soon as they were out of his mouth, but made no effort to take them back. The urge to get out of here, to jump behind the wheel of the Ryder truck and just roll some miles-in any direction but south-was now so strong it was nearly panic.

“You told me to stop calling you boss. I’m holding you to that.”

“Besides, what about Mary.” Cynthia asked. “He says she’s alive!”

Johnny turned toward her-turned on her. “You may want to pack your suitcases and travel Trans-God Air-ways with David, but I think I’ll pass.”

“We’ll listen to him,” Ralph said in a low voice.

Johnny stared at him, amazed. If he had expected help from anyone, it had been from the boy’s father. He’s all I got, Ralph had said in the lobby of The American West. All that’s left of my family.

Johnny looked around at the others, and was dismally astounded to see they were in agreement; only he stood apart. And Steve had the keys to the truck in his pocket. Yet it was him the boy was mostly looking at. Him. As it was him, John Edward Marinville, that people had been mostly looking at ever since he had published his first novel at the impossibly precocious age of twenty-two. He thought he had gotten used to it, and maybe he had, but this time it was different. He had an idea that none of the others-the teachers, the readers, the critics, the editors, the drinking buddies, the women-had ever wanted what this boy seemed to want, which was not just for him to listen; listening, Johnny was afraid, was only where it would start.

The eyes were not just looking, though. The eyes were pleading.

Forget it, kid, he thought. When people like you drive, the bus always seems to crash.

if it wasn’t for David, 1 think your personal bus would have crashed already, Terry said from Der Bitchen Bunker inside his head. 1 think you’d be dead and hung up on a hook somewhere. Listen to him, Johnny. For Christ’s sake, listen!

In a much lower voice, Johnny said: “Entragian’s gone. You’re sure of that.”

“Yes,” David said. “The animals, too. The coyotes and wolves-hundreds of them, it must have taken, maybe thousands-moved the trailers off the road. Dumped them over the side and onto the hardpan. Now most of them have drawn away, into ml him, the watchman’s circle.” He drank from the bottle of Jolt. The hand holding it shook slightly. He looked at each of them in turn, but it was Johnny his eyes came back to. Always Johnny. “He wants what you want. For us to leave.”

“Then why did he bring us here in the first place.” “He didn’t.”

“What.”

“He thinks he did, but he didn’t.”

“I don’t have any idea what you’re-”

“God brought us,” David said. “To stop him.”

In the silence which followed this, Steve discov-ered he was listening for the wind outside. There was none. He thought he could hear a plane far away-sane people on their way to some sane destination, sleeping or eating or reading U.S. News & World Report—but that was all.

It was Johnny who broke the silence, of course, and although he sounded as confident as ever, there was a look in his eyes (a slidey look) that Steve didn’t like much. He thought he liked Johnny’s crazed look better the wide eyes and terrified Clyde Barrow grin he’d had on when he put the shotgun up to the cougar’s ear and blew its head of f. That there was a half-bright outlaw in Johnny was something Steve knew very well-he’d seen flickers of that guy from the start of the tour, and knew it was the outlaw Bill Harris had feared when he laid down the Five Commandments that day in Jack Appleton’s office—but Clyde Barrow seemed to have stepped out and left the other Marinville, the one with the satiric eyebrow and the windbag William F. Buckley rhetoric, in his place.

“You speak as if we all had the same God, David,” he said. “I don’t mean to patronize you, but I hardly think that’s the case.”

“But it is the case,” David replied calmly. “Compared to Tak, you and a cannibal king would have the same God. You’ve seen the can tahs, I know you have. And you’ve felt what they can do.”

Johnny’s mouth twitched-indicating, Steve thought, that he had taken a hit but didn’t want to admit it. “Per-haps that’s so,” he said, “but the person who brought me here was a long way from God. He was a big blond policeman with skin problems. He planted a bag of dope in my saddlebag and then beat the shit out of me.”

“Yes. I know. The dope came from Mary’s car. He put something like nails in the road to get us. It’s funny, when you think about it-funny-weird, not ha-ha. He went through Desperation like a whirlwind-shot people, stabbed them, beat them, pushed them out windows, ran them down with his car-but he still couldn’t just come up to us, any of us, and take out his gun and say ‘You’re coming with me.’ He had to have a… I don’t know the word.” He looked at Johnny.

“Pretext,” Steve’s erstwhile boss said.

“Yes, right, a pretext. It’s like how, in the old horror movies, a vampire can’t just come in on his own. You have to invite him in.”

“Why.” Cynthia asked.

“Maybe because Entragian-the real Entragian-was still inside his head. Like a shadow. Or a person that’s locked out of his house but can still look in the windows and pound on the doors. Now Tak’s in my mother—what’s left of her-and it would kill us if it could… but it could probably still make the best Key lime pie in the world, too. If it wanted to.”

David looked down for a moment, his lips trembling, then looked back up at them.

“Him needing a pretext to take us doesn’t really matter. Many times what he does or says doesn’t matter-it’s nonsense, or impulse. Although there are clues. Always clues. He gives himself away, shows his real self, like someone who says what he sees in inkblots.”

Steve asked, “If that doesn’t matter, what does.”

“That he took us and let other people go. He thinks he took us at random, like a little kid in a supermarket, just pulling any can that catches his eye off the shelf and drop… ping it into his mom’s cart, but that’s not what happened.”

“It’s like the Angel of Death in Egypt, isn’t it.” Cyn-thia said in a curiously flat voice.

“Only in reverse. We had a mark on us that told our Angel of Death-this guy Entragian-to stop and grab instead of just going on by.”

David nodded. “Yeah. He didn’t know it then, but he does now-mi him en tow, he’d say—our God is strong, our God is with us.”

“If this is an example of God being with us, I hope r I never attract his attention when he’s in a snit,” Johnny said. — “Now Tak wants us to go,” David said, “and he knows that we can go. Because of the free-will covenant. That s what Reverend Martin always called it. He… he…

“David.” Ralph asked. “What is it. What’s wrong.” David shrugged. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that God never makes us do what he wants us to do. He tells us, that’s all, then steps back to see how it turns out. Reverend Martin’s wife came in and listened for awhile while he was talking about the free-will covenant. She said her mother had a motto: ‘God says take what you want, and pay for it.’ Tak’s opened the door back to Highway 50… but that isn’t where we’re supposed to go. If we do go, if we leave Desperation without doing what God sent us here to do, we’ll pay the price.

He glanced at the circle of faces around him once again, and once again he finished by looking directly at Johnny Marmnville.

“I’ll stay no matter what, but to work, it really has to be all of us. We have to give our will over to God’s will, and we have to be ready to die. Because that’s what it might come to.”

“You’re insane, my boy,” Johnny said. “Ordinarily I like that in a person, but this is going a little too far, even for me. I haven’t survived this long in order to be shot or r pecked to death by buzzards in the desert. As for God, as far as I’m concerned, he died in the DMZ back in 1969.

Jimi Hendrix was playing ‘Purple Haze’ on Armed Ser-vices Radio at the time.”

“Listen to the rest, okay. Will you do that much.”

“Why should I.”

“Because there’s a story.” David drank more Jolt, gri-macing as he swallowed. “A good one. Will you listen.”

“Story-hour’s over. I told you that.”

David didn’t reply.

There was silence in the back of the truck. Steve was watching Johnny closely. If he showed any sign of moving toward the Ryder’s back door and trying to run it up, Steve meant to grab him. He didn’t want to-he had spent a lot of years in the savagely hierarchical world of backstage rock, and knew that doing such a thing would make him feel like Fletcher Christian to Johnny’s Captain Bligh-but he would if he had to.

So it was a relief when Johnny shrugged, smiled, hun-kered down next to the kid, and selected his own bottle of Jolt. “Okay, so story-hour’s extended. Just for tonight.” He ruffled David’s hair. The very self-consciousness of the gesture made it oddly charming.

“Stories have been my Achilles’ heel practically since I ditched the stroller. I have to tell you, though, this is one I’d like to hear end with ‘And they lived happily ever after.’”

“Wouldn’t we all,” Cynthia said.

“I think the guy I met told me everything,” David said, “but there are still some parts I don’t know. Parts that are blurry, or just plain black. Maybe because I couldn’t understand, or because I didn’t want to.”

“Do the best you can,” Ralph said. “That’ll be good enough.”

David looked up into the shadows, thinking—summoning, Cynthia thought-and then began.

“Billingsley told the legend, and like most leg-ends, I guess, most of it was wrong. It wasn’t a cave-in that closed the China Shaft, that’s the first thing. The mine was brought down on purpose. And it didn’t happen in 1858, although that was when the first Chinese miners were brought in, but in September of 1859. Not forty Chi-nese down there when it happened but fifty-seven, not two white men but four.

Sixty-one people in all. And the drift wasn’t a hundred and fifty feet deep, like Billingsley said, but nearly two hundred. Can you imagine. Two hun dred feet deep in hornfels that could have fallen in on them at any moment.”

The boy closed his eyes. He looked incredibly fragile like a child who has just begun to recover from some ter rible illness and may relapse at any moment. Some of that look might have been caused by the thin green sheen of soap still on his skin, but Cynthia didn’t think that was all of it. Nor did she doubt David’s power, or have a problem with the idea that he might have been touched by God She had been raised in a parsonage, and she had seen this look before… although never so strongly.

“At ten minutes past one on the afternoon of September twenty-first, the guys at the face broke through into what they at first thought was a cave. Inside the opening was a pile of those stone things. Thousands of them. Statues of certain animals, low animals, the timoh sen cah. Wolves, coyotes, snakes, spiders, rats, bats. The miners were amazed by these, and did the most natural thing in the world: bent over and picked them up.”

“Bad idea,” Cynthia murmured.

David nodded. “Some went crazy at once, turning on their friends-heck, turning on their relatives-and trying to rip their throats out. Others, not just the ones farther back in the shaft who didn’t actually handle the can tahs, but some who were close and actually did handle them, seemed all right, at least for awhile. Two of these were brothers from Tsingtao-Ch’an Lushan and Shih Lushan Both saw through the break in the face and into the cave which was really a kind of underground chamber. It was round, like the bottom of a well. The walls were made of faces, these stone animal faces. The faces of can taks, I think, although I’m not sure about that. There was a small kind of building to one side, the pirin moh-I don’t know what that means, I’m sorry-and in the middle, a round hole twelve feet across. Like a giant eye, or another well.

A well in a well. Like the carvings, which are mostly ani-mals with other animals in their mouths for tongues. Can tak in can tah, can tah in can tak.”

“Or camera in camera,” Marinville said. He spoke with an eyebrow raised, his sign that he was making fun, but David took him seriously. He nodded and began to shiver.

“That’s Tak’s place,” he said. “The mi, well of the worlds.”

“I don’t understand you,” Steve said gently.

David ignored him; it was still Marinville he seemed to be mostly talking to. “The force of evil from the mi filled the can tahs the same way the minerals fill the ground itself—blown into every particle of it, like smoke. And it filled the chamber I’m talking about the same way. It’s not smoke, but smoke is the best way to think about it, maybe. It affected the miners at different rates, like a dis-ease germ. The ones who went nuts right away turned on the others. Some, their bodies started to change the way Audrey’s did at the end. Those were the ones who had touched the can tahs, sometimes picked up whole hand-fuls at once and then put them down so they could… you know… go at the others.

“Some of them were widening the hole between the shaft and the chamber. Others were wriggling through. Some acted drunk. Others acted as if they were having convulsions.

Some ran across to the pit and threw them-selves into it, laughing. The Lushan brothers saw a man and a woman fucking each other-I have to use that word, it was the furthest thing in the world from making love—with one of the statues held between them. In their teeth.”

Cynthia exchanged a startled look with Steve.

“In the shaft itself, the miners were bashing each other with rocks or pulling each other out of the way, trying to get in through the hole first.” He looked around at them somberly. “I saw that part. In a way it was funny, like a Three Stooges show. And that made it worse. That it was funny. Do you get it.”

“Yes,” Marinville said. “I get it very well, David. Go on.”

“The brothers felt it all around them, the stuff that was coming out of the chamber, but not as anything that was inside them, not then. One of the can tahs had fallen at Ch’an’s feet. He bent to pick it up, and Shih pulled him away. By then they were about the only ones left who seemed sane. Most of the others who weren’t affected right away had been killed, and there was a thing-like a z snake made of smoke-coming out of the hole. It made a squealing sound, and the brothers ran from it. One of the white men was coming down the crosscut about sixty feet up, and he had his gun out. ‘What’s all the commotion about, chinkies.’ he asked.”

Cynthia felt her skin chill. She reached out for Steve, and was relieved when his fingers folded over hers. The boy hadn’t just imitated a gruff bossman’s tone; he seemed actually to be speaking in the voice of someone else.

“‘Come on now, fellows, gettee-backee-workee, if you don’t want a bullet in the guts.’ “But he was the one who got shot. Ch’an grabbed him around the neck and Shih took away his gun. He put the barrel here”-David poked his forefinger up under the shelf of his jaw-”and blew the guy’s head off.”

“David, do you know what they were thinking when they did that.” Marinville asked.

“Was your dream-friend able to take you in that far.”

“Mostly I just saw.”

“Those can tah things must’ve gotten to them after all Ralph said. “They wouldn’t have shot a white man, other wise. No matter what was going on or how bad they wanted to get away.”

“Maybe so,” David said. “But God was in them too I think, the way he’s in us now. God could move them to his work, no matter if they were mi en tak or not because-mi him en tow-our God is strong. Do you understand.”

“I think I do,” Cynthia said. “What happened then, David.”

“The brothers ran up the shaft, pointing the foreman s pistol at anyone who tried to hold them back or slow them down. There weren’t many; even the other white guys hardly gave them a glance when they ran by. They all wanted to see what was going on, what the miners had found. It drew them, you see. You do see, don’t you.”

The others nodded.

“About sixty feet in from the adit, the Lushan brothers 7 stopped and went to work on the hanging wall. They didn’t talk about it; they saw picks and shovels and just went to work.”

“What’s a hanging wall.” Steve asked.

“The roof of a mineshaft and the earth above it,” Mar-inville said.

“They worked like madmen,” David went on. “The stuff was so loose that it started falling out of the ceiling right away, but the ceiling didn’t give way. The screams and howls and laughter coming up from below… I know the words for the sounds I heard, but I can’t describe how horrible they were. Some of them were changing from human to something else. There was a movie I saw one time, about this doctor on a tropical island who was changing animals into men-”

Marinville nodded. “The Island of Dr. Moreau.”

David said, “The sounds I heard from the bottom of the mine-the ones I heard with the Lushan brothers’ ears—were like that movie, only in reverse. As if the men were turning into animals. I guess they were. I guess that’s sort of what the can tahs do. What they’re for.

“The brothers… I see them, two Chinese men who look almost enough alike to be twins, with pigtails hanging down their sweaty bare backs, standing there and looking up and chopping away at the hanging wall that should have come down after about six licks but didn’t, looking back along the shaft every two or three strokes to see who was coming. To see what was coming. Pieces of the ceiling fell in front of them in big chunks. Sometimes pieces of it fell on them, too, and pretty soon their shoul-ders were bleeding, and their heads-blood was stream-ing down their faces and necks and chests, as well. By then there were other sounds from below. Things roaring. Things squelching.

And still the roof wouldn’t come down. Then they started seeing lights farther down—maybe candles, maybe the ’seners the crew-bosses wore.

“What-” Ralph began.

“Keroseners. They were like these little lighted boxes of oil you put on your forehead with a strip of rawhide. You’d fold a piece of cloth underneath to keep your skin from getting too hot. And then someone came running out of the darkness, someone they knew. It was Yuan Ti. He was a funny guy, I guess-he made animals out of pieces of cloth and then put on shows with them for the kids.

Yuan Ti had gone crazy, but that wasn’t all. He was big ger, so big he had to bend almost double in order to run up the shaft. He was throwing rocks at them, calling them names in Mandarin, condemning their ancestors, commanding them to stop what they were doing.

Shih shot him with the foreman’s gun. He had to shoot him a lot before Yuan Ti would lie down and be dead. But the others were coming, screaming for their blood. Tak knew what they were doing, you see.”

David looked at them, seemed to consider them. His eyes were dreamy, half in a trance, but Cynthia had no sense that the boy had ceased to see them. In a way, that was the most terrible part of what was happening here. David saw them very well… and so did the force inside him, the one she could sometimes hear stepping forward to clarify parts of the story David might not have fully understood.

“Shih and Ch’an went back to work on the hanging wall, digging into it with their picks like madmen-which they’d be before it was over for them. By then the part 7 of the ceiling they were working on was like a dome over their heads”-Davjd made curving gestures with his hands, and Cynthia saw that his fingers were trembling “and they couldn’t reach it very well with their picks any more. So Shih, the older, got on his younger brother s shoulders and dug into it that way. The stuff fell out in showers, there was a pile almost as high as Ch an Lushan’s knees in front of them, and still the ceiling wouldn’t come down.”

“Were they possessed of God, David.” Marinville asked. There was no sarcasm in his voice now. “Pos-sessed by God. What do you think.”

“I don’t think so,” David said. “I don’t think God has to possess, that’s what makes him God. I think they wanted what God wanted-to keep Tak in the earth. To bring the ceiling down between them and it, if they could.

“Anyway, they saw ’seners coming up from the mine. — Heard people yelling. A whole mob of them. Shih left off on the hangwall and went to work on one of the crossbar supports instead, hitting it with the butt of his pick. The miners coming up from below threw rocks at them, and ‘—quite a few hit Ch’an, but he stood firm with his brother on his shoulders. When the crossbar finally came down,

the ceiling came down with it. Ch’an was buried up to his knees, but Shih was thrown clear. He pulled his brother out. Ch’an was badly bruised, but nothing was broken. And they were on the right side of the rockfall-that must have seemed like the important thing.

They could hear the miners-their friends, cousins, and in the case of Ch’an Lushan, his intended wife-screaming to be let out. Ch’an actually started to pull some of the rocks away before Shih yanked him back and reasoned with him.

“They still could reason then, you see.

“Then, as if the people trapped on Tak’s side of the fall knew this had happened, the screams for help changed to yelling and howling. The sounds of… well, of people who weren’t really people at all anymore. Ch’an and Shih ran. They met folks-some white, some Chinese—coming in as they ran out. No questions were asked except for the most obvious one, what happened, and since the answer was just as obvious, they had no trouble. There’d been a cave-in, men were trapped, and the last thing anyone cared about just then were a couple of scared China-boys who happened to get out in the nick of time.”

David drank the last of his soda and set the empty bottle aside.

“Everything Mr. Billingsley told us is like that,” he said. “Truth and mistakes and outright lies all mixed up.”

“The technical term for it is ‘legend-making,’ “Mar-inville said with a thin, strained smile.

“The miners and the folks from town could hear the Chinese screaming behind the fallen hanging wall, but they didn’t just stand around; they did try to dig them out, and they did try to shore up the first sixty feet or so. But then there was another fall, a smaller one, and another couple of crossbars snapped. So they pulled back and waited for the experts to show up from Reno. There was no picnic outside the adit-that’s a flat lie. Right around the time the mining engineers were getting of f the stage in Desperation, there were two cave-ins-real cave-ins, big ones-at the mine. The first was on the adit side of the hanging wall the Lushan brothers had pulled down. It sealed of f the last sixty feet of the drift like a cork in a bottle. And the thump it made coming down-tons and tons of skarn and hornfels-set off another one, deeper in.

That ended the screams, at least the ones close enough to the surface for people to hear. It was all over before the mining engineers got up from town in an ore-wagon. They looked, they sank some core rods, they listened to the story, and when they heard about the second cave-in, which people said shook the ground like an earthquake and made the horses rear up, they shook their heads and said there was probably nobody left alive to rescue. And even if there was, they’d be risking more lives than they could hope to save if they tried to go back in.”

“And they were only Chinese,” Steve said.

“That’s right, little chink-chink China-boys. Mr. Bill-ingsley was right about that. And while all this was going on, the two China-boys who had escaped were out in the desert near Rose Rock, going mad. It got to them in the end, you see. It caught up with them. It was almost two weeks before they came back to Desperation, not three days. It was the Lady Day they walked into-you see how he got the truth all mixed up with the lies. — but they didn’t kill anyone there. Shih flashed the fore-man’s gun, which was empty, and that was all it took. They were brought down by a whole pack of miners and cowboys. They were naked except for loincloths. They were covered with blood. The men in the Lady Day felt like that blood must have been from all the folks they had murdered, but it wasn’t. They’d been out in the desert, calling animals to them… just like Tak called the cougar that you shot, Mr. Marinville. Only the Lushan brothers didn’t want them for anything like that. They only wanted to eat. They ate whatever came-bats, buzzards, spiders, rattlesnakes.”

David raised an unsteady hand to his face and wiped first his left eye and then his right.

“I feel very sorry for the Lushan brothers. And I feel like I know them a little. How they must have felt. How they must have been grateful, in a way, when the madness finally took them over completely and they didn’t have to think anymore.

“They could have stayed out there in the Desatoya foothills practically forever, I guess, but they were all Tak had, and Tak is always hungry. It sent them into town, because there w—s nothing else it could do. One of them, Shih, was killed right there in the Lady Day. Ch’an was hung two days later, right about where those three bikes were turned upside down in the street… remember those. He raved in Tak’s language, the language of the unformed, right up until the end. He tore the hood right off his head, so they hung him barefaced.”

“Boy, that God of yours, what a guy!” Marinville said cheerfully. “Really knows how to repay a favor, doesn’t he, David.”

“God is cruel,” David said in a voice almost too low to hear.

“What.” Marinville asked. “What did you say.”

“You know. But life is more than just steering a course around pain. That’s something you used to know, Mr. Marinville. Didn’t you.”

Marinville looked off into the corner of the truck and said nothing.

The first thing Mary was aware of was a smell—sweetish, rank, nauseating. Oh Peter, dammit to hell, she thought groggily. It’s the freezer, everything’s spoiled!

Except that wasn’t right; the freezer had gone off during their trip to Majorca, and that had been a long time ago, before the miscarriage. A lot had happened since then. A lot had happened just recently, in fact. Most of it bad. But what.

Central Nevada’s full of intense people.

Who said that. Marielle. In her head it certainly sounded like Marielle.

Doesn’t matter, if it’s true. And it is, isn’t it.

She didn’t know. Didn’t want to know. What she mostly wanted was to go back into the darkness part of her was trying to come out of. Because there were voices (they’re a dastardly bunch) and sounds (reek-reek-reek) that she didn’t want to consider. Better to just lie here and—Something scuttered across her face. It felt both light and hairy. She sat up, pawing her cheeks with both hands. An enormous bolt of pain went through her head, bright dots flashed across her vision in sync with her suddenly elevated heartrate, and she had a similarly bright flash of recall, one even Johnny Marinville would have admired.

Ibumped my bad arm putting up another crate to stand on.

Hold on, you’ll be inside in a jiffy.

And then she had been grabbed. By Ellen. No; by the thing (Tak) that had been wearing Ellen. That thing had slugged her and then boom, boom, out go the lights.

And in a very literal sense, they were still out. She had to flutter her lids several times simply to assure herself that her eyes were open.

Oh, they’re open, all right. Maybe it’s just dark in this place… but maybe you’re blind.

How about that for a lovely thought. Mare. Maybe she hit you hard enough to blind y—Something was on the back of her hand. It ran halfway across and then paused, seeming to throb on her skin. Mary made a sound of revulsion with her tongue pressed to the roof of her mouth and flapped her hand madly in the air, like a woman waving off some annoying person. The throbbing disappeared; the thing on the back of her hand was gone.

Mary got to her feet, provoking another cymbal-crash of pain in her head which she barely noticed. There were things in here, and she had no time for a mere headache.

She turned slowly around, breathing that sickish-sweet aroma that was so similar to the stench that had greeted her and Pete when they had returned home from their mini—vacation in the Balearic Islands. Pete’s parents had given them the trip as a Christmas present the year after they had been married, and how great it had been… until they’d walked back in, bags in hand, and the stench had hit them like a fist. They had lost everything: two chickens, the chops and roasts she’d gotten at the good discount meat—cutter’s she’d found in Brooklyn, the venison-steaks Peter’s friend Don had given them, the pints of strawberries they’d picked at the Mohonk Mountain House the previous summer.

This smell… so similar…

Something that felt the size of a walnut dropped into her hair.

She screamed, at first beating at it with the flat of her hand. That did no good, so she slid her fingers into her hair and got hold of whatever it was. It squirmed, then burst between her fingers. Thick fluid squirted into her palm. She raked the bristly, deflating body out of her hair and shook it of f her palm. She heard it hit something… splat. Her palm felt hot and itchy, as if she had reached into poison ivy. She rubbed it against her jeans.

Please God don ‘t let me be next, she thought. Whatever happens don’t let me end up like the cop. Like Ellen.

She fought the urge to simply bolt into the black surrounding her. If she did that she might brain herself, disembowel herself, or impale herself, like an expendable character in a horror movie, on some grotesque piece of mining equipment. But even that wasn’t the worst. The worst was that there might be something besides the scut-tering things in here with her. Something that was just waiting for her to panic and run.

Waiting with its arms held out.

Now she had a sense-perhaps it was only her imagina-tion, but she didn’t think so-of stealthy movement all around her. A rustling sound from the left. A slithering from the right. There was a sudden low squalling from behind her, there and gone before she could scream.

That last one wasn’t anything alive, she told herself. At least I don’t think so. I think it was a tumbleweed hit-ting metal and scraping along it. I think I’m in a little building somewhere. She put me in a little building for safekeeping and the fridge is out, just like the lights, and the stuff inside has spoiled.

But if Ellen was Entragian in a new body, why hadn’t he/she just put her back in the cell where he’d put her to start with. Because he/she was afraid the others would find her there and let her out again. It was as plausible a reason as any other she could think up, and there was a thread of hope in it, as well. Holding onto it, Mary began to shuffle slowly forward with her hands held out.

It seemed she walked that way for a very long time—years. She kept expecting something else to touch her, and at last something did. It ran across her shoe. Mary froze. Finally it went about its business. But what fol-lowed it was even worse: a low, dry rattle coming out of the darkness at roughly ten o’clock. So far as she knew, there was only one thing that rattled like that. The sound didn’t really stop but seemed to die away, like the whine of a cicada on a hot August afternoon. The low squalling returned. This time she was positive it was a tumbleweed sliding along metal.

She was in a mining building, maybe the Quonset where Steve and the girl with the wild hair, Cynthia, had seen the little stone statue that had fright-ened them so badly.

Get moving.

Ican ‘t. There ’s a rattlesnake in here. Maybe more than one. Probably more than one.

That’s not all that’s in here, though. Better get moving, Mary.

Her palm throbbed angrily where the thing in her hair had burst open. Her heart thudded in her ears. As slowly as she could, she began inching forward again, hands out. Terrible ideas and images went with her. She saw a snake as thick as a powerline dangling from a rafter just ahead of her, fanged jaws hinged wide, forked tongue dancing. She would walk right into it and wouldn’t know until it battened on her face, injecting its poison straight into her eyes. She saw the closet-demon of her childhood, a bogey she had for some reason called Apple Jack, slumped in the corner with his brown fruit-face all pulled in on itself, grinning, waiting for her to wander into his deadly embrace; the last thing she’d smell would be his cidery aroma, which was for the time being masked by the stench of spoilage, as he hugged her to death, all the time covering her face with wet avid uncle—kisses. She saw a cougar, like the one that had killed poor old Tom Billingsley, crouched in a corner with its tail switching. She saw Ellen, holding a baling hook in one hand and smiling a thin waiting smile which was like a hook itself, simply marking time until Mary got close enough to skewer.

But mostly what she saw was snakes.

Rattlers.

Her fingers touched something. She gasped and almost recoiled, but that was just nerves; the thing was hard, unliving. A straight-edge at the height of her torso. A table. Covered with an oilcloth. She thought so. She walked her fingers across it, and forced herself to freeze when one of the scuttery things touched her.

It crawled over the back of her hand and down to her wrist, almost surely a spider of some sort, and then was gone. She walked her hand on, and here was something else investi-gating her, more of what Audrey had called “wildlife.” Not a spider. This thing, whatever it was, had claws and a hard surface.

Mary forced herself to hold still, but couldn’t keep entirely quiet; a low, desperate moan escaped her. Sweat ran down her forehead and cheeks like warm motor-oil, stung in her eyes. Then the thing on her hand gave her an obscene little squeeze and was gone. She could hear it click-dragging its way across the table. She moved her hand again, resisting the clamor of her mind to pull back. If she did, what then. Stand here trembling in the dark until the stealthy sounds around her drove her crazy, sent her running in panicked circles until she bashed herself unconscious again.

Here was a plate-no, a bowl-with something in it. Congealed soup. Her fingers fumbled beside it and felt a spoon. Yes, soup. She felt beyond it, touched what could have been a salt—or pepper-shaker, then something soft and flabby. She suddenly remembered a game they had played at slumber-parties when she was a girl in Mamaro-neck. A game made to be played in the dark. You’d pass around spaghetti and intone These are the dead man guts, pass around cold Jell-O and intone These are the dead man ’s brains.

Her hand struck something hard and cylindrical. It fell over with a rattle she recognized at once… or hoped she did: batteries in the tube of a flashlight.

Please, God, she thought, groping for it. Please God let it be what it feels like.

The squalling from outside came again, but she barely heard it. Her hand touched a cold piece of meat (this is the dead man ’sface) but she barely felt it. Her heart was hammering in her chest, her throat, even in her sinuses.

There! There!

Cold, smooth metal, it tried to squitter out of her grip, but she squeezed it tight. Yes, a flashlight; she could feel the switch lying against the web of skin between her Y thumb and forefinger.

Now let it work, God. Please, okay.

She pressed the switch. Light sprang out in a widening cone, and her yammering heartbeat stopped dead in her ears for a moment. Everything stopped dead.

The table was long, covered with lab equipment and—rock samples at one end, covered with a checked piece of tablecloth at the other. This end had been set, as for dinner, with a soup-bowl, a plate, silverware, and a water—glass. A large black spider had fallen into the waterglass and couldn’t get out; it writhed and scratched fruitlessly. The red hourglass on its belly showed in occasional—flickers. Other spiders, most also black widows, preened and strutted on the table. Among them were rock——scorpions, stalking back and forth like parliamentarians, their stingers furled on their backs. Sitting at the end of the table was a large bald man in a Diablo Mining Corpo-ration tee-shirt. He had been shot in the throat at close range. The stuff in the soup-bowl, the stuff she had touched with her fingers, wasn’t soup but this man s clotted blood.

Mary’s heart re-started itself, sending her own blood crashing up into her head like a piston, and all at once the flashlight’s yellow fan of light began to look red and shimmery. She heard a high, sweet singing in her ears.

Don’t you faint, don’t you dare—The flashlight beam swung to the left. In the corner under a poster which read GO AHEAD, BAN MINING, LET THE BASTARDS FREEZE IN THE DARK! was a roiling nest of rattlesnakes. She slid the beam along the metal wall, past congregations of spiders (some of the black widows she saw were as big as her hand), and in the other corner were more snakes. Their daytime torpor was gone,

and they wnthed together, flowing through sheetbends and clove hitches and double diamonds, occasionally shaking their tails.

Don’t faint, don’t faint, don’t faint—She turned around with the light, and when it happened upon the other three bodies that were in here with her, she understood several things at once. The fact that she had discovered the source of the bad smell was only the least of them.

The bodies at the foot of the wall were in an advanced state of decay, delirious with maggots, but they hadn’t been simply dumped. They were lined up… perhaps even laid out. Their puffy, blackening hands had been laced together on their chests. The man in the middle really was black, she thought, although it was impossible to tell for sure. She didn’t know him or the one on his right, but the one on the black guy’s left she did know, in spite of the toiling maggots and the decomposition. In her mind she heard him mixing I’m going to kill you into the Miranda warning.

As she watched, a spider ran out of Collie Entragian’s mouth.

The beam of the light shook as she ran it along the line of corpses again. Three men.

Three big men, not a one of the three under six-feet-five.

Iknow why I’m here instead of in jail, she thought. And I know why I wasn’t killed. I’m next. When it’s through with Ellen m next.

Mary began to scream.

The an tak chamber glowed with a faint red light that seemed to come from the air itself.

Something which still looked a bit like Ellen Carver walked across it, accompa-nied by a retinue of scorpions and fiddlebacks. Above it, around it, the stone faces of the can taks peered down. Across from it was the pirin moh, a jutting facade that looked a bit like the front of a Mexican hacienda. In front of it was the pit-the mi, well of the worlds. The light could have been coming from here, but it was impossible to tell for sure. Sitting in a circle around the mouth of the mi were coyotes and buzzards. Every now and then one of the birds would rustle its feathers or one of the coyotes would flick an ear; if not for these moves, they might have been stones themselves.

Ellen’s body walked slowly; Ellen’s head sagged. Pain pulsed deep in her belly. Blood ran down her legs in thin, steady streams. It had stuffed a torn cotton tee-shirt into Ellen’s panties and that had helped for awhile, but now the shirt was soaked through. Bad luck it had had, and not just once. The first one had had prostate cancer—undiagnosed-and the rot had started there, spreading through his body with such unexpected speed that it had been lucky to get to Josephson in time. Josephson had lasted a little longer, Entragian-a nearly perfect speci-men-longer still. And Ellen. Ellen had been suffering from a yeast infection. Just a yeast infection, nothing at all in the ordinary scheme of things, but it had been enough to start the dominoes falling, and now…

Well, there was Mary. It didn’t quite dare take her yet, not until it knew what the others were going to do. If the writer won out and took them back to the highway, it would jump to Mary and take one of the ATVs (loaded down with as many can tahs as it could transport) up into the hills. It already knew where to go: Alphaville, a vegan commune in the Desatoyas.

They wouldn’t be vegans for long after Tak arrived.

If the wretched little prayboy prevailed and they came south, Mary might serve as bait.

Or as a hostage. She would serve as neither, however, if the prayboy sensed she was no longer human.

It sat down on the edge of the mi and stared into it. The mi was shaped like a funnel, its rough walls sliding in toward each other until, twenty-five or thirty feet down, nothing was left of the mouth’s twelve-foot diameter but a hole less than an inch across. Baleful scarlet light, almost too bright to look at, stormed out of this hole in pulses. It was a hole like an eye.

One of the buzzards tried to lay its head in Ellen’s bloodstinking lap; it pushed the bird away. Tak had hoped looking into the mi would be calming, would help it decide what to do next (for the mi was where it really lived; Ellen Carver was just an outpost), but it only seemed to increase its disquiet.

— Things were on the verge of going badly wrong. Looking back, it. saw clearly that some other force had perhaps been working against it from the start.

It was afraid of the boy, especially in its current weak-ness. Most of all it was terrified of being completely shut up beyond the narrow throat of the mi again, like a genie in a bottle. But that didn’t have to be. Even if the boy brought them, it didn’t have to be. The others would be weakened by their doubts, the boy would be weakened by his human concerns-especially his concern for his mother-and if the boy died, it could close the door to the outside again, close it with a bang, and then take the others. The writer and the boy’s father would have to die, but the two younger ones it would try to sedate and save.

Later, it might very well want to use their bodies.

It rocked forward, oblivious to the blood squelching between Ellen’s thighs, as it had been oblivious of the teeth falling out of Ellen’s head or the three knuckles that had exploded like pine-knots in a fireplace when it had clipped Mary on the chin. It looked into the funnel of the well, and the constricted red eye at the bottom.

The eye of Tak.

The boy could die.

He was, after all, on—y a boy… not a demon, a god, or a savior.

Tak leaned farther over the funnel with its jagged crystal sides and murky reddish light.

Now it could hear a sound, very faint-a kind of low, atonal humming. It was an idiot sound… but it was also wonderful, compelling. It closed its stolen eyes and breathed deeply, sucking at the force it felt, trying to get as much inside as it could, wanting to slow-at least temporarily-this body’s de-generation. It would need Ellen awhile longer.

And besides, now it felt the mi’s peace. At last.

“Tak,” it whispered into the darkness. “Tak en tow mi, tak ah lah, tak ah wan.”

Then it was silent. From below, deep in the humming red silence of the mi, came the wet—tongue sound of something slithering.

David said, “The man who showed me these things—the man who guided me-told me to tell you that none of this is destiny.” His-arms were clasped around his knees and his head was bent; he seemed to be speaking to his sneakers. “In a way, that’s the scariest part. Pie’s dead, and Mr. Billingsley, and everyone else in Desperation, because one man hated the Mining Safety and Health Administration and another was too curious and hated being tied to his desk. That’s all.”

“And God told you all this.” Johnny asked.

The boy nodded, still without looking up.

“So we’re really talking miniseries here,” Johnny said. “Night One is the Lushan Brothers, Night Two is Josephson, the Footloose Receptionist. They’ll love it at ABC.”

“Why don’t you shut up.” Cynthia said softly.

“Another county heard from!” Johnny exclaimed. “This young woman, this roadbabe with attitude, this flashing female flame of commitment, will now explain, complete with pictures and taped accompaniment by the noted rock ensemble Pearl Jam-”

“Just shut the fuck up,” Steve said.

Johnny looked at him, shocked to silence.

Steve shrugged, embarrassed but not backing down. “The time for whistling past the graveyard’s over. You need to cut the crap.” He looked back at David.

“I know more about this part,” David said. “More than I want to, actually. I got inside this one. I got inside his head.” Hepaused. “Ripton. That was his name. He was the first.”

— And still looking down between his cocked knees at his sneakers, David began to talk.

The man who hates MSHA is Cary Ripton, pit—foreman of the new Rattlesnake operation. He is forty—eight, balding, sunken-eyed, cynical, in pain more often than not these days, a man who desperately wanted to be a mining engineer but wasn’t up to the math and wound up here instead, running an open-pit. Stuffing blast-holes full of ANFO and trying not to choke the prancing little faggot from MSHA when he comes out on Tuesday afternoons.

When Kirk Turner runs into the field office this after-noon, face blazing with excitement, to tell him that the last blast-pattern has uncovered an old drift-mine and that there are bones inside, they can see them, Ripton ’s first impulse is to tell him to organize a party of volun-teers, they’re going in. All sorts of possibilities dance in his head. He is too old a hand for childish fantasies about lost goldmines and troves of Indian artifacts, much too old, but as he and Turner rush out, part of him is thinking about those things just the same, oh yes.

The cluster of men standing at the foot of the newly turned blast-field, eyeing the hole their latest explosions have uncovered, is a small one: seven guys in all, counting Turner, the crew boss. There are right now fewer than ninety men working for the Desperation Mining Corporation. Next year, if they’re lucky-if the copper-yield and the prices both stay up-there may be four times that number.

Ripton and Turner walk up to the edge of the hole. There is a dank, strange smell coming out of it, one Cary Ripton associates with coalgas in the mines of Kentucky and West Virginia. And yes, there are bones. He can see them scattering back into the canted, downsloping dark-ness of an old-fashioned square-drift mine, and while it’s impossible to tell for sure about all of them, he sees a ribcage which is almost certainly human. Farther back, tantalizingly close but still just a little too far for even a powerful flashlight to show clearly, is something that could be a skull.

“What is this.” Turner asks him. “Any idea.”

Of course he does; it’s Rattlesnake Number One, the old China Shaft. He opens his mouth to say so, then closes it again. This is not a matter for a blast-monkey like Kirk Turner, and is certainly not one for his crew, nitro-boys who spend their weekends in Ely gambling, whoring, drinking… and talking, of course. Talking about any thing and everything. Nor can he take them inside. He thinks they would go, that their curiosity would drive them in spite of the obvious risks involved (a drift-mine this old, running through earth this uneasy, shit, a loud yell might be enough to bring the roof down), but the talk would get back to the prancing little MSHA faggot in no time flat, and when it did, losing his job would be the least of Ripton ’s worries. The MSHA fag (all hat and no cattle is how Frank Geller, the chief mining engineer, sums him up) likes Ripton no more than Ripton likes him, and the foreman who leads an expedition into the long-buried China Shaft today might find himself in federal court facing a fifty-thousand-dollar fine and a possible five years in jail, the week after next. There are at least nine red-letter regulations expressly forbidding entry into “unsafe and unimproved structures.” Which this of course is.

Yet those bones and old dreams call to him like troubled voices from his childhood, like the ghost of every unfulfilled ambition he has ever held, and he knows even z then that he isn’t going to turn the China Shaft meekly over to the company and the federal pricks without at least one look inside for himself He instructs Turner, who is bitterly disappointed but not really argumentative (he understands about MSHA as well as Ripton… maybe, as a blast-monkey, even better), to have yellow RESTRICTED AREA tapes placed across the opening. He then turns to the rest of the crew and reminds them that the newly uncovered drift, which might turn out to be a historical and archaeological treasure trove, is on DMC property. “I don’t expect you to keep this quiet for-ever,” he tells them, “but as a favor to me I’d like you to keep your mouths shut for the next Jew days. Even with your wives. Let me notify the brass. That part should be easy, at least-Symes, the comptroller, is coming in from Phoenix next week. Will you do that for me.”

They say they will. Not all will be able to keep their promise even for twenty-four hours, of course-some men are just no good at keeping secrets-but he thinks he com-mands enough respect among them to buy twelve hours and four would probably be enough. Four hours after quitting time. Four hours in there by himself with a flash-light, a camera, and an electric follow-me for any sou-venirs he may decide to collect. Four hours with all those childhood fantasies he is too old a hand to think about. And if the roof should pick that moment, after almost a hundred and forty years and untold blasts shaking the ground all around it, to let go. Let it. He’s a man with no wife, no kids, no parents, and two brothers who have forgotten he’s alive. He has a sneaking suspicion that he wouldn ‘t be losing that many years, in any case. He’s been feeling punk for almost six months now, and just lately he had taken to pissing blood.

Not a lot, but even a little seems like a lot when it’s yours you see in the toilet bowl.

If I get out of this, maybe I’ll go to the doctor, he thinks. Take it as a sign and go to the damned doctor. How about that.

Turner wants to take some pictures of the exposed drift after he clocks out. Ripton lets him. It seems the quickest way to get rid of him.

“How far in do you think we punched it.” Turner asks, standing about two feet beyond the yellow tape and snap-ping pictures with his Nikon-pictures that, with no flash, will show nothing but a black hole and a few scattered bones that might belong to a deer.

“No way to tell,” Ripton says. In his mind he’s invento-rying the equipment he’ll take in with him.

“You ain’t gonna do nothin dumb after I’m gone, are you.” Turner asks.

“Nope,” Ripton says. “I have too much damned respect for Mining Safety to even think of such a thing.”

“Yeah, right,” Turner says, laughing, and early the next morning, around two o’clock, a much larger version of Gary Ripton will enter the bedroom Turner shares with his wife and shoot the man as he sleeps. His wife, too. Tak!

It’s a busy night for Gary Ripton. A night of killing (not one of Turner’s blast-crew lives to see the morning sun) and a night of placing can tahs; he has taken a gunnysack filled with them when he leaves the pit, over a hundred in all. Some have broken into pieces, but he knows even the fragments retain some of their queer, unpredictable power. He spends most of the night placing these relics, leaving them in odd corners, mailboxes, glove compart-ments. Even in pants pockets! Yes! Hardly anyone locks their houses out here, hardly anyone stays up late out here, and the homes belonging to Turner’s blast—crew are not the only ones Gary Ripton visits.

He returns to the pit, feeling as trashed-out as Santa Claus returning to the North Pole after the big night… only Santa ’s work ends once the presents have been dis-tributed.

Ripton ’s is only beginning. it’s quarter to five; he has over two hours before the first members of Pascal Martinez ’s small Saturday day-crew show up. It should be enough, but there is certainly no time to waste. Gary Ripton ’s body is bleeding so badly he’s had to stuff his underwear full of toilet paper to absorb it, and twice on his way out to the mine he has had to stop and yark a gutful of blood out the window of Gary’s pickup truck, it’s splashed all down the side. in the first tentative and somehow sinister light of the coming day, the drying blood looks like tobacco-juice.

In spite of his need to hurry, he’s stopped dead for a moment by what the headlights show when he arrives at the bottom of the pit. He sits behind the wheel of the old truck with his eyes wide.

There are enough desert animals on the north slope of the China Pit to fill an ark: wolves, coyotes, hopping baldheaded buzzards, flapping owls with eyes like great gold wedding—rings; cougars and wildcats and even afew scruffy barncats. There are wild dogs with their ribs arcing against their scant hides in cruel detail-many are escapees from the raggedy-ass commune in the hills, he knows-and running around their feet unmolested are hordes of spiders and platoons of rats with black eyes.

Each of the animals coming out of the China Shaft car-ries a can tah in its mouth. They lope, flap, and scurry iq the pit-road like a flood of weird refugees escaping some underground world. Below them, sitting patiently like customers in a Green Stamp redemption center two days before Christmas-take a number and wait-are more animals. What they’re waiting for is their turn to go into the dark.

Tak begins to laugh with Gary Ripton ’s vocal cords. “What a hoot!” he exclaims.

Then he drives on to the field office, unlocks the door with Ripton ’s key, and kills Joe Prudum, the night watchman. Old Joe isn’t much of a night watchman; comes on at dark, doesn ‘t have the slightest idea any-thing’s going on in the pit, and doesn’t think there’s any-thing strange about Gary Ripton showing up first thing in the morning. He ’s using the washer in the corner to do some laundry, he’s sitting down to have his topsy-turvy version of dinner, and everything ’s cozy right up to the moment when Ripton puts a bullet in his throat.

That done, Ripton calls the Owl’s Club in town. The Owl’s is open twenty-four hours a day (although, like a vampire, it’s never really alive), it’s where Brad Josephson, he of the gorgeous chocolate skin and long, sloping gut, eats breakfast six days a week… and always at this brutally early hour. That will come in handy now. Ripton wants Brad on hand, and quickly, before the black man can be polluted by the can tahs. The can tahs are useful in many ways, but they spoil a man or woman for Tak ’s greater work. Ripton knows he can take someone from Martinez’s crew if he needs to, perhaps even Pascal himself, but he wants (well, Tak wants, actually) Brad. Brad will be useful in other ways.

How long do the bodies last if they’re healthy. he asks himself as he approaches the phone. How long if the one you push into overdrive hasn’t been incubating a juicy case of cancer to start with.

He doesn’t know, but thinks he will probably soon have a chance to find out.

“Owl’s,” says a woman ’s voice in his ear-the sun’s not even up and she sounds tired already.

“Howdy, Denise,” he says. “How they hangin.”

“Who ’s this.” Deeply suspicious.

“Cary Ripton, hon. You don’t recognize my voice.”

“You must have a bad case of morning mouth, darlin. Or are you coming down with a cold.”

“Gold, I guess,” he says, grinning and wiping blood off his lower lip. It is oozing out from between his teeth. Down below it feels like all of his innards have come loose and are floating in a sea of blood. “Listen, hon. is Brad in.”

“Right over in the corner where he always is, livin large and eatin nasty-four eggs, home fries, ‘bout half a pound of limpfried bacon. I hope when he finally vapor—locks, he — does it somewheres else. What you want Brad for at this hour of a Sat’d’y mornin.”

“Company business.”

“Well shut my mouth n go to heaven,” she says. “You want to take care of that cold, Rip—you sound really congested.”

“Just with love for you,” he tells her.

“Huh,” she says, and the phone goes down with a clunk. “Brad!” he hears her yell.

“Phone! For you! Mr. Wonderful!” A pause while Brad is probably asking her what she’s talking about. “Find out for yourself” she says, and a moment later Brad Josephson is on the line. He says hello like a man who knows perfectly well that Publishers Clearinghouse doesn’t call at five in the morning to tell you you won the big one.

“Brad, it’s Gary Ripton,” he says. He knows just how to get Brad out here; he got the idea from the late great Kirk Turner. “Have you got your camera gear in your car.” Of course he does. Brad is, among other things, an ardent birdwatcher. Fancies himself an amateur orni-thologist, in fact. But Gary Ripton can do better than birds this morning. A lot better.

“Yes, sure, what’s the deal.”

Ripton leans back against the poster taped up in the corner, the one showing a dirty miner pointing like Uncle Sam and saying GO AHEAD, BAN MINING, LET THE BASTARDS FREEZE IN THE DARK! “If you hop in your car and drive out here right now, I’ll show you,” Ripton says. “And—f you get here before Pascal Martinez and his boys, I’ll give you a chance at the most amazing pictures you’ll ever take in your life.”

“What are you talking about.” Josephson sounds excited now.

“The bones of forty or fifty dead Chinese, to start with, how’s that sound.”

“What-”

“We punched into the old China Shaft yesterday after-noon. Less than twenty feet in you’ll get the most amazing-”

“I’m on my way. Don’t you move. Don’t you goddam move.

The phone clicks in his ear and Ripton grins with red lips. “I won’t,” he says. “Don’t worry about that. Can de lach! Ah ten! Tak!”

Ten minutes later, Ripton-now bleeding from the navel as well as the rectum and penis—walks across the crumbled bottom of the pit to the China Slope. Here he spreads his arms like an evangelist and speaks to the ani-mals in the language of the unformed. All of them either fly away or withdraw into the mine. It will not do for Brad Josephson to see them.

No, that would not do at all.

Five minutes after that Josephson comes down the steep grade of the pit-road, sitting bolt-upright behind the wheel of an old Buick. The sticker on the front reads MINERS GO DEEPER AND STAY LONGER. Ripton watches him from the door of the field office. It wouldn’t do for Brad to get a good look at him, either, not until he gets a little closer.

No problem there. Brad parks with a scrunch of tires, gets out, grabs three different cameras, and trots toward the field office, pausing only to gape at the open hole twenty feet or so up the slope.

“Holy shit, it’s the China, all right,” he says. “Got to be. Come on, Gary! For Christ’s sake, Martinez ‘11 be here any time!”

“Nah, they start a little later on Saturday,” he says, grinning. “Cool your jets.”

“Yeah, but what about old Joe. He could be a prob-”

“Cool your jets, i said! Joe’s in Reno. Granddaughter popped a kid.”

“Good! Great! Have a cigar, huh.” Brad laughs a little wildly.

“Come in here,” Ripton says. “Got something to show you.

“Something you brought out.”

“That’s right,” Ripton says, and in a way it’s true, in a way he does want to show Brad something he brought out. Josephson is still frowning down at his swinging cameras, trying to sort out the straps, when Ripton grabs him and throws him to the back of the room. Josephson squawks indignantly. Later he will be scared, and still later he’ll be terrified, but right now he hasn’t noticed Joe Prudum ’s body and is only indignant.

“For the last time, cool your jets!” Ripton says as he steps outside and locks the door.

“Gosh! Relax!”

Laughing, he goes to the truck and gets in. Like many Westerners, Gary Ripton believes passionately in the right of Americans to bear arms; there’s a shotgun in the rack behind the seat and a nasty little hideout gun-a Ruger Speed-Six-in the glovebox. He loads the shotgun and lays it across his lap. The Ruger, which is already loaded, he simply puts on the seat beside him. His first impulse is to tuck it into his belt, but now he’s all but swimming in blood down there (Ripton, you idiot, he thinks, don’t you know men your age are supposed to get the old prostate tickled every year or so), and soaking Ripton ’s pistol in it might not be a good idea.

When Josephson ’s ceaseless hammering at the field—office door begins to annoy him, he turns on the radio, juices the volume, and sings along with Johnny Paycheck, who is telling whoever wants to listen that he was the only hell his mama ever raised.

Pretty soon Pascal Martinez shows up for some of that good old Saturday-morning time and a half He’s got Miguel Rivera, his amigo, with him. Ripton waves. Pascal waves back. He parks on the other side of the field office, and then he and Mig walk around to see what Ripton ’s doing here on Saturday morning, and at this ungodly hour. Ripton sticks the shotgun out the window, still smiling, and shoots both of them. it’s easy.

Neither tries to run. They die with puzzled looks on their faces. Ripton looks at them, thinking of his granddaddy telling about the passenger pigeons, birds so dumb you could club them on the ground. The men out here all have guns but few of them think, way down deep, that they will ever have to use one. They are all show and no go. Or all hat and no cattle, — f you like that better.

The rest of the crew arrives by ones and twos-no one worries much about the timeclock on Saturdays. Ripton shoots them as they come and drags their bodies around to the back of the field office, where, they soon begin to stack up beneath the clothes dryer’s exhaust-pipe like cordwood. When he runs out of shotgun shells (there’s plenty of ammo for the Ruger, but the pistol is useless as a primary weapon, not accurate at a distance greater than a dozen feet), he finds Martinez’s keys, opens the back of his Cherokee, and discovers a beautiful (and completely illegal) Jver Johnson auto under a blanket. Next to it are two dozen thirty-round clips in a Nike shoebox. The arriving miners hear the shots as they ascend the north side of the pit, but they think it’s target-shooting, which is how a good many Saturdays start in the China Pit. It’s a beautiful thing.

By seven forty-five, Ripton has killed everyone on Pascal Martinez’s A-crew. As a bonus, he gets the one—legged guy from Bud’s Suds who has come out to service the coffee-machine. Twenty-five bodies behind the field office.

The animals start moving in and out of the China Shaft again, streaming toward town with can tahs in their mouths. Soon they will quit for the day, waiting for the cover of night to start again.

In the meantime, the pit is his… and it is time to make the jump. He wants out of this unpleasantly decaying body, and if he doesn ‘t make the switch soon, he never will.

When he opens the door, Brad Josephson rushes him. He has heard the gunfire, he has heard the screams when Ripton ’s first shot hasn’t put his victim down cleanly, and he knows that rushing is the only option he has. He expects to be shot, but of course Gary can ‘t do that. Instead he grabs Josephson ’s arms, calling on the last of this body’s strength to do it, and shoves the black man against the wall so hard that the entire prefab building shakes. And it’s not just Ripton now, of course; it’s Tak’s strength. As if to confirm this, Josephson asks how in God’s name he got so tall.

“Wheaties!” it exclaims. “Talc!”

“What are you doing.” Josephson asks, trying to squirm away as Ripton ’s face bears down on his and Ripton ’s mouth comes open. “What are you d-”

“Kiss me, beautiful!” Ripton exclaims, and slams his mouth down on Josephson ’s. He makes a blood-seal through which he exhales. Josephson goes rigid in Rip—ton ’s arms and begins to tremble wildly. Ripton exhales and exhales, going out and out and out, feeling it happen, feeling the transfer. For one terrible moment the essence of Tak is naked, caught between Ripton, who is collaps-ing, and Josephson, who has begun to swell like a float on the morning of the Thanksgiving Day Parade. And then, instead of looking out of Ripton ’s eyes, it is looking out of Josephson ’s eyes.

It feels a wonderful, intoxicating sense of rebirth. It is filled not—only with the strength and purpose of Tak, but with the greasefired energy of a man who eats four eggs and half a pound of limp bacon for breakfast. It feels… feels.

“I feel GRRRREA T!” Brad Josephson exclaims in a boisterous Tony the Tiger voice. It can hear a tenebrous creaking that is Brad’s backbone growing, the taut silk—across-satin sound that is his muscles stretching, the thawing-ice sound of his skull expanding. He breaks wind repeatedly, the sound like the reports of a track—starter s gun.

It drops Ripton ’s body-the body feels as light as a burst seedpod-and strides toward the door, listening to the seams of Josephson ’s khaki shirt tear open as his shoulders widen and his arms lengthen. His feet don’t grow as much, but enough to burst the laces of his tennis shoes.

Tak stands outside, grinning hugely. It has never felt better. Everything is in its eye. The world roars like a waterfall. A recordsetting erection, a pantsbuster if ever there was one, has turned the front of his jeans into a tent.

Tak is here, liberated from the well of the worlds. Tak is great, Tak will feed, and Tak will rule as it has always ruled, in the desert of wastes, where the plants are migrants and the ground is magnetic.

It gets into the Buick, splitting the seam running up the back of Brad Josephson ’s pants all the way to the belt-loops. Then, grinning at the thought of the bumper-sticker on the front of the car-MINERS GO DEEPER AND STAY LONGER-it swings around the field office and heads back toward Desperation, stretching out a rooster-tail of dust behind the fastmoving car.

David stopped. He still sat with his back against the wall of the Ryder truck, looking down at his sneakers. His voice had grown husky with talking. The others stood around him in a semicircle, pretty much as Johnny sup-posed the wise old wallahs had once stood around the boy Jesus while he gave them the scoop, the lowdown, the latest buzz, the true gen. Johnny’s clearest view was of the little punk-chick, Steve Ames’s catch of the day, and she looked pretty much the way he himself felt: mesmer-ized, amazed, but not disbelieving. And that, of course, was the root of his disquiet. He was going to get out of this town, nothing was going to stop him from doing that, but it would be a lot easier on the old ego if he could simply believe the boy was deluded, rapping tall tales straight out of his own imagination. But he didn’t think that was the case.

You know it’s not, Terry said from her cozy little place in Der Bitchen Bunker.

Johnny squatted to get a fresh bottle of Jolt, not feeling his wallet (genuine crocodile, Barneys, three hundred and ninety-five dollars), which had worked most of the way out of his back pocket, slip all the way out and drop to the floor. He tapped David’s hand with the neck of the bottle. The boy looked up, smiling, and Johnny was shocked at how tired he looked. He thought about David’s explana-tion of Talc-trapped in the earth like an ogre in a fairy—tale, using human beings like paper cups because it wore their bodies out so rapidly-and wondered if David’s God was much different.

“Anyway, that’s how he does it,” David said in his husky voice. “He goes across on their breath, like a seed on a gust of wind.”

“The kiss of death instead of the kiss of life,” Ralph said.

David nodded.

“But what kissed Ripton.” Cynthia asked. “When he went into the mine the night before, what kissed him.”

“I don’t know,” David said. “Either I wasn’t shown or I don’t understand. All I know is that it happened at the well I told you about. He went into the room… the chamber… the can tahs drew him, but he wasn’t allowed to actually touch any of them.”

“Because the can tahs spoil people as a vessel for Tak,” Steve half-said, half-asked.

“Yes.”

“But Talc has a physical body. I mean, he-it-we’re not just talking about an idea, are we.

Or a spirit.”

David was shaking his head. “No, Tak’s real, it has a being. It had to get Ripton into the mine because it can’t get through the mi-the well. It has a physical body, and the well is too small for it. All it can do is catch people, inhabit them, make them into can tak. And trade them in when they wear out.”

“What happened to Josephson, David.” Ralph asked. He sounded quiet, almost drained.

Johnny found it increasingly difficult to look at Carver looking at his son.

“He had a leaky heart valve,” David said. “It wasn’t a big deal. He could have gone on without any problem for years, maybe, but Talc got hold of him, and just…

David shrugged. “Just wore him out. It took two and a half days. Then he switched to Entragian. Entragian was strong, he lasted most of a whole week… but he had very fair skin. People used to kid him about all the sun—bum creams he had.”

“Your guide told you all this,” Johnny said.

“Yes. I guess that’s what he was.”

“But you don’t know who he was.”

“I almost know. I feel like I should know.”

“Are you sure he didn’t come from this Talc. Because there’s an old saying: ‘The devil can wear a pleasing aspect.’ “He wasn’t from Talc, Johnny.”

“Let him talk,” Steve said. “All right.”

Johnny shrugged and sat down. One of his hands almost touched his fallen wallet as he did so. Almost, but not quite.

“The back part of the hardware store here in town is a clothes store,” David resumed.

“Work clothes, mostly. Levi’s, khakis, Red Wing boots, stuff like that. They order special for this one guy, Curt Yeoman, who works—worked-for the telephone company. Six-foot—seven, the tallest man in Desperation. That’s why Entragian’s clothes weren’t ripped when he took us, Dad. Saturday night, Josephson broke into the True Value and grabbed a set of khakis in Curt Yeoman’s size. Shoes, too. He took them to the Municipal Building and actually put them in Collie Entragian’s locker. Even then he knew who he was going to use next, you see.”

“Was that when he killed the Police Chief.” Ralph asked.

“Mr. Reed. No. Not then. He did that Sunday night. By then Mr. Reed didn’t matter much, anyway. Ripton left him one of the can tahs, you see, and it messed Mr. Reed up.

Bad. The can tahs do different things to different people. When Mr. Josephson killed him, Mr. Reed was sitting at his desk and-”

Looking away, clearly embarrassed, David made his right hand into a tube and moved it rapidly up and down in the air.

“Okay,” Steve said. “We get the picture. What about Entragian. Where was he all weekend.”

“Out of town, like Audrey. The Desperation cops have-had-a law-enforcement contract with the county. It means a lot of travelling. Friday night, the night Ripton killed the blast-crew, Entragian was in Austin. Saturday night he slept at the Davis Ranch. Sunday night-the last night he was really Collie Entragian-he spent on Shoshone tribal land. He had a friend up there. A woman, I think.”

Johnny walked toward the back of the Ryder truck, then wheeled around. “What did he do, David. What did it do. How did we get to where we are now. How did it happen without anyone finding out. How could it happen.” He paused. “And another question.

What does Tak want. To get out of its hole in the ground and stretch its legs. Eat pork rinds. Snort cocaine and drink Tequila Sunrises. Sorew some NFL cheerleaders. Ask Bob Dylan what the lyrics to ‘Gates of Eden’ really mean. Rule the earth. What.”

“It doesn’t matter,” David said quietly.

“Huh.”

“All that matters is what God wants. And what he wants is for us to go up to the China Pit. All the rest is just… story-hour.”

Johnny smiled. It felt tight and a little painful, too small for his mouth. “Tell you what, sport: what your God wants doesn’t matter in the least to me.” He turned back to the Ryder truck’s rear door and ran it up. Outside, the air seemed almost breathlessly still and strangely warm in the wake of the storm. The blinker pulsed rhythmically at the intersection. Crossing the street at regular intervals were rippled sand dunes. Seen in the nebulous light of the westering moon and the yellow pulse of the blinker-light, Desperation looked like an outpost in a science fiction movie.

“I can’t stop you if you mean to go,” David said.

“Maybe Steve and my dad could, but it wouldn’t do any r good. Because of the free-will covenant.”

“That’s right,” Johnny said. “Good old free will.” He jumped down from the back of the truck, wincing at another twinge of pain in his back. His nose was hurting again, too.

Bigtime. He looked around, checking for coy-otes or buzzards or snakes, and saw nothing. Not so much as a bug. “Frankly, David, I trust God about as far as I can sling a piano.” He looked back in at the boy, smiling.

“You trust him all you want. I guess it’s a luxury you can r still afford. Your sister’s dead and your mother’s turned into Christ-knows-what, but there’s still your father to get through before Talc goes to work on you personally.”

David jerked. His mouth trembled. His face crumpled and he began to cry.

“You bitch!” Cynthia shouted at Johnny. “You cunt—She rushed to the back of the truck and kicked at him Johnny dodged back, the toe of her small foot missing his chin by only an inch or two. He felt the wind of it. Cyn thia stood on the edge of the truck, waving her arms for balance. She probably would have fallen into the street if Steve hadn’t caught her by the shoulders and steadied her.

“Lady, I never pretended to be a saint,” Johnny said, — and it came out the way he wanted-easy and ironic and amused-but inside he was horrified. The wince on the kid’s face… as if he’d been slugged by someone he’d counted on as a friend. And he’d never been called a bitch in his life. A cunt, either, for that matter.

“Get out!” Cynthia screamed. Behind her, Ralph was down on one knee, clumsily holding his son and staring out at Johnny in a kind of stunned disbelief. “We don’t need you, we’ll do it without you!”

“Why do it at all.” Johnny asked, taking care to stay out of range of her foot. “That’s my point. For God. What did he ever do for you, Cynthia. that you should spend your life waiting for him to buzz you on the old intercom or send you a fax. Did God protect you from the guy who jobbed your ear and broke your nose.”

“I’m here, ain’t I.” she asked truculently.

“Sorry, that’s not enough for me. I’m not going to be the punchline of a joke in God’s little comedy club. Not if I can help it. I can’t believe any of you are seriously con-templating going up there. The idea is insane.”

“What about Mary.” Steve asked. “Do you want to leave her. Can you leave her.”

“Why not.” Johnny asked, and actually laughed. It was just a short bark of sound… but it was not without amusement, and he saw Steve shy away from it, dis-gusted. Johnny glanced around for animals, but the coast was still clear. So maybe the kid was right-Tak wanted them to go, had opened the door for them. “I don’t know her any more than I know the sandhogs he-it, if you like that better-killed in this town. Most of whom were probably so brain-dead they didn’t even know they were gone. I mean, don’t you see how pointless all this is. If you should succeed, Steve, what’s your reward going to be. A lifetime membership at the Owl’s Club.”

“What happened to you.” Steve asked. “You walked up to that cougar big as life and blew her head off. You were like the fucking Wolverine. So I know you’ve got guts. Had em, anyway. Who stole em.”

“You don’t understand. That was hot blood. You know what my trouble is. If you give me a chance to think, I’ll take it.” He took another step backward. No God stopped him.

“Good luck, you guys. David, for whatever it’s worth, you’re an extraordinary young man.”

“If you go, it’s over,” David said. His face was still against his father’s chest. His words were muftled but audible. “The chain breaks. Tak wins.”

“Yeah, but when playoff-time comes, he’s ours,” Johnny said, and laughed again. The sound reminded him of cocktail parties where you laughed that same meaning-less laugh at meaningless witticisms while, in the back—ground, a meaningless little jazz combo played meaning—less renditions of meaningless old standards like “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” and “Papa Loves Mambo.” It was the way he had been laughing when he climbed out of the pool at the Bel-Air, still holding his beer in one hand. But so what. He could laugh any fucking way he wanted to.

He bad once won the National Book Award, after all.

“I’m going to take a car from the mining-office lot. I’m going to drive like hell until I get to Austin, and then I’m going to make an anonymous call to the State Police, tell them some bad shit’s happened in Desperation. Then I’ll take some rooms in the local Best Western and hope you guys show up to use them. If you do, drinks are on me. One way or another, I’m stepping off the wagon tonight. I think Desperation’s cured me of sobriety for ever.” He smiled at Steve and Cynthia, standing side by side in the back of the truck with their arms around each other. “You two are crazy not to come with me now, you know. Somewhere else you could be good together. I can see that. All you can do here is be can tahs for David s cannibal God.”

He turned and began to walk away, head down, heart pounding. He expected to be followed by anger, invec tive, maybe pleas. He was ready for any of them, and per baps the only thing that could have stopped him was the thing Steve Ames did say, in the low, almost toneless voice of a man who is only conveying a fact.

“I don’t respect you for this.”

Johnny turned around, more hurt by this simple decla ration than he would have believed possible. “Dear me, be said. “I’ve lost the respect of a man once in charge of throwing out Steven Tyler’s barf-bags. Ratfuck.”

“I never read any of your books, but I read that story you gave me, and I read the book about you,” Steve said “The one by the professor in Oklahoma. I guess you were a hellraiser, and a shit to your women, but you went to Vietnam without a rifle, for God’s sake… and tonight the cougar… what happened to all that.”

“Ran out like piss down a drunk’s leg,” Johnny said. “I suppose you don’t think that happens, but it does. The last of mine ran out in a swimming pool. How’s that for absurd.”

David joined Steve and Cynthia at the back of the truck.

He still looked pale and worn, but he was calm. “Its mark is on you,” he said. “It will let you go, but you’ll wish you stayed when you start smelling Tak on your skin.”

Johnny looked at the boy for a long time, fighting an urge to walk back to the truck—fighting it with all the considerable force of will at his disposal. “So I’ll wear lots of aftershave,” he said. “Bye, boys and girls. Live right.”

He walked away, and as fast as he could. Any faster and he would have been running.

There was silence in the truck; they watched until Johnny was out of sight, and still no one said anything. David stood with his father’s arm around him, thinking he had never felt so hollow, so empty, so utterly done in. It was over. They had lost. He kicked one of the empty Jolt bottles, his eye following its skitter to the wall of the truck, where it bounced and came to rest next to—David stepped forward. “Look, Johnny’s wallet. It must have fallen out of his pocket.”

“Poor baby,” Cynthia said.

“Surprised he didn’t lose it sooner,” Steve said. He spoke in the dull, preoccupied tone of a man whose real thoughts are somewhere else entirely. “I kept telling him a guy on a motorcycle trip ought to have a wallet with a chain on it.” A ghost of a grin touched his lips. “Getting those motel rooms in Austin may not be as easy as he thinks.”

“I hope he sleeps in the damn parking lot,” Ralph said. “Or beside the road.”

David barely heard them. He felt the way he had that day in the Bear Street Woods-not when God was speaking to him, but when he had become aware that God was going to.

He bent forward and picked up Johnny’s wallet. When he touched it, something that felt like a wallop of electricity exploded in his head. A small, plo—sive grunt escaped him. He fell against the wall of the truck, clutching the wallet.

“David.” Ralph asked. His voice was distant, his concern echoing over a thousand miles.

Ignoring him, David opened the wallet. There was cur-rency in one compartment and a squash of papers—memoranda, business cards, and such-in another. He ignored both and thumbed a snap on the wallet’s left inte-rior side, releasing an accordion of sleeved photographs. He was faintly aware of the others moving in around him as he looked through the pictures, using one finger to spool back through the years: here was a bearded Johnny and a beautiful dark-haired woman with high cheekbones and thrusting breasts, here a gray-mustached Johnny at the railing of a yacht, here a ponytailed Johnny in a tie—dyed jabbho, standing beside an actor who looked like Paul Newman before Newman ever thought of selling red-sauce and salad dressing. Each Johnny was a little younger, the head-hair and facial hair darker, the lines in the face less carven, until—“Here,” David whispered. “Oh God, here.” He tried to take the photo out of its transparent pocket and couldn’t; his hands were shaking too badly. Steve took the wallet, removed the picture, and handed it to the boy. David held it in front of his eyes with the awe of an astronomer who has discovered a brand-new planet.

“What.” Cynthia asked, leaning closer.

“It’s the boss,” Steve said. “He was over tbere-’in country,’ he usually calls it-almost a year, researching a book. He wrote a few magazine pieces about the war, too, I think.” He looked at David. “Did you know that picture was there.”

“I knew something was there,” David said, almost too faintly for the others to hear. “As soon as I saw his wallet on the floor. But… it was him.” He paused, then re-peated it, wonderingly. “It was him.”

“Who was who.” Ralph asked.

David didn’t answer, only stared at the picture. It showed three men standing in front of a ramshackle cinderblock building-a bar, judging from the Budweiser sign in the window.

The sidewalks were crowded with Asians. Passing in the street at camera left, frozen forever into a half-blur by this old snapshot, was a girl on a motorscooter.

The men on the left and right of the trio were wearing polo shirts and slacks. One was very tall and held a note-book. The other was festooned with cameras. The man in the middle was wearing jeans and a gray tee-shirt. A Yan-kees baseball cap was pushed far back on his head. A strap crossed his chest; something cased and bulky hung against his hip.

“His radio,” David whispered, touching the cased object.

“Nope,” Steve said after taking a closer look. “That’s a tape-recorder, 1968-style.”

“When I met him in the Land of the Dead, it was a radio.” David could not take his eyes from the picture. His mouth was dry; his tongue felt large and unwieldy. The man in the middle was grinning, he was holding his reflector sunglasses in one hand, and there was no ques-tion about who be was.

Over his head, over the door of the bar from which they had apparently just emerged, was a handpainted sign. The name of the place was The Viet Cong Lookout.

She didn’t actually faint, but Mary screamed until something in her head gave way and the strength deserted her muscles. She staggered forward, grabbing the table with one hand, not wanting to, there were black widows and scorpions crawling all over it, not to mention a corpse with a nice tasty bowl of blood in front of him, but she wanted to go tumbling face-first onto the floor even less.

The floor was the domain of the snakes.

She settled for dropping to her knees, holding onto the edge of the table with the hand that wasn’t holding the flashlight. There was something strangely comforting about this posture. Calming. After a moment’s thought she knew what it was: David, of course.

Being on her knees reminded her of the simple, trusting way the boy had knelt in the cell he’d shared with Billingsley. In her mind she heard him saying in a slightly apologetic tone, I wonder if you ’d mind turning around… I have to take off my pants. She smiled, and the idea that she was smiling in this nightmare place-that she could smile in this night-mare place—calmed her even more. And without thinking about it, she slipped into prayer herself for the first time since she was eleven years old. She’d been at summer camp, lying in a stupid little bunk in a stupid mosquito—infested cabin with a bunch of stupid girls who would probably turn out to be mean and of a pinchy nature. She had been overwhelmed with homesickness, and had prayed for God to send her mother to take her home. God had declined, and from then until now, Mary bad consid-ered herself to be pretty much on her own.

“God,” she said, “I need help. I’m in a room filled with creepy-crawlies, mostly poisonous, and I’m scared to death. If you’re there, anything you can do would be appreciated. A-”

Amen, it was supposed to be, but she broke off before she could finish saying it, her eyes wide. A clear voice spoke in her head-and not her own voice, either, she was sure of it. It was as if someone had just been waiting, and not very patiently, for her to speak first.

There’s nothing here that can hurt you, it said.

On the other side of the room, the beam of her flash-light illuminated an old Maytag washer-dryer set. A sign over them read: NO PERSONAL LAUNDRY! THIS MEANS U!

Spiders moved back and forth across the sign on long, strutting legs. There were more on top of the washing machine. Closer by, on the table, a small scorpion appeared to be investigating the crushed remains of the spider she had torn out of her hair. Her hand still throbbed from that encounter; the thing must have been full of poison, maybe enough to kill her if it had injected her instead of just splashing her. No, she didn’t know who that voice belonged to, but if that was the way God answered prayers, she supposed it was no wonder the world was in such deep shit. Because there was plenty here that could hurt her, plenty.

No, the voice said patiently, even as she turned the flashlight past the decomposing bodies lined up on the floor and discovered another writhing tangle of snakes. No, they can’t. And you know why.

“I don’t know anything,” she moaned, and focused the flashlight’s beam on her hand.

Red and throbby, but not swelling. Because it hadn’t bitten her.

Hmmmm. That was sort of interesting.

Mary put the light back on the bodies, running it from the first one to Josephson to Entragian. The virus which had haunted these bodies was now in Ellen. And if she, Mary Jackson, was supposed to be its next home, then the things in here really couldn’t hurt her. Couldn’t damage the goods.

“Spider should have bitten me,” she murmured, “but it didn’t. It let me kill it instead.

Nothing in here has hurt me.” She giggled, a high-pitched, hysterical sound. “We’re pals!”

You have to get out of here, the voice told her. Before it comes back. And it will. Soon, now.

“Protect me!” Mary said, getting to her feet. “You will, won’t you. If you’re God, or from God, you will!”

No answer from the voice. Maybe its owner didn’t want to protect her. Maybe it couldn’t.

Shivering, Mary reached out toward the table. The black widows and the smaller spiders—brown recluses—scuttered away from her in all directions. The scorpions did the same.

One actually fell off the side of the table. Panic in the streets.

Good. Very good. But not enough. She bad to get out of here.

Mary stabbed the black with the flashlight until she found the door. She crossed it on legs that felt numb and distant, trying not to tread on the spiders that were scur-rying everywhere. The doorknob turned, but the door would only go back and forth an inch or so. When she yanked it hard, she could hear what sounded like a pad-lock rattling outside. She wasn’t very surprised, actually.

She shone the light around again, running it over the poster-LET THE BASTARDS FREEZE IN THE DARK-and the rusty sink, the counter with the coffeemaker and the little microwave, the washer-dryer set. Then the office area with a desk and a few old file cabinets and a time—clock on the wall, a rack of timecards, the potbellied stove, a toolchest, a few picks and shovels in a rusty tangle, a calendar showing a blonde in a bikini. Then she was back to the door again. No windows; not a single one. She shone the light down at the floor, thinking briefly of the shovels, but the boards were flush with the corrugated metal walls, and she doubted very much if the thing in Ellen Carver’s body would give her time enough to dig her way out.

Try the dryer, Mare.

That was she herself, had to be, but she was damned if it sounded like her… and it didn’t feel exactly like a thought, either.

Not that this was the time to worry about such things. She hurried over to the dryer, taking less care about where she put her feet this time and stepping on several of the spiders. The smell of decay seemed stronger over here, riper, which was strange, since the bodies were on the other side of the room, but—A diamondback rattler poked up the dryer’s lid and began slithering out. It was like coming face to face with the world’s ugliest jack-in-the—box. Its head swayed back and forth. Its black preacher’s eyes were fixed sol-emnly on her. Mary took a step backward, then forced herself forward again, reaching out to it. She could be wrong about the spiders and snakes, she knew that. But what if this big fellow did bite her. Would dying of snakebite be worse than ending up like Entragian, killing everything that crossed her path until her body exploded like a bomb.

The snake’s jaws yawned, revealing curved fangs like whalebone needles. It hissed at her.

“Fuck you, bro,” Mary said. She seized it, pulled it out of the dryer-it was easily four feet long-and flung it across the room. Then she banged down the lid with the base of the flashlight, not wanting to see what else might be inside, and pulled the dryer away from the wall. There was a pop as the pleated plastic exhaust-hose pulled out of the hole in the wall. Spiders, dozens of them, scattered from beneath the dryer in all directions.

Mary bent down to look at the hole. It was about two feet across, too small to crawl through, but the edges were badly corroded, and she thought…

She went back across the room, stepping on one of the scorpions-crrunch-and kicking impatiently at a rat which had been hiding behind the bodies… and, most likely, gorging on them. She seized one of the picks, went back to the exhaust-hole, and pushed the dryer a little far-ther aside to give herself room. The smell of putrefaction was stronger now, but she hardly noticed. She worked the short end of the pick through the hole, pulled upward, and gave a little crow of delight when the tool yanked a furrow nearly eighteen inches long through the rotted, rusted metal.

Hurry, Mary-hurry!

She wiped sweat off her forehead, inserted the pick at the end of the furrow, and yanked upward again. The pick lengthened the slit at the top of the hole even more, then came loose so suddenly that she fell over backward, the pick jarring loose from her hand. She could feel more spi-ders bursting under her back, and the rat she’d kicked earlier-or maybe one of his relatives-crawled over her neck, squeaking. Its whiskers tickled the underside of her jaw.

“Fuck off!” she cried, and batted it away. She got to her feet, took the flashlight off the top of the dryer, clasped it between her upper left arm and her left breast. Then she leaned forward and folded back the two sides of the slit she’d made like wings.

She thought it was big enough. Just.

“God, thank you,” she said. “Stay with me a little more, please. And if you get me through this, I promise I’ll stay in touch.”

She got on her knees and peered out through the hole. The stench was now so strong it made her feel like gag-ging. She shone the light out and down.

“God!” she screamed in a high, strengthless voice. “Oh Jesus, NO!”

Her first shocked impression was that there were hun-dreds of bodies stacked behind the building she was in—the whole world seemed to be white, slack faces, glazed eyes, and torn flesh. As she watched, a buzzard that had been roosting on the chest of one man and pulling meat from the face of another took to the air, its wings flapping like sheets on a clothesline.

Not that many, she told herself. Not that many, Mary old kid, and even if there were a thousand, it wouldn ‘t change your situation.

Still, she couldn’t go forward for a moment. The hole was big enough to crawl out of, she was sure it was, but she would…

“I’ll land on them,” she whispered. The light in her hand was jittering uncontrollably, picking out cheeks and brows and tufted ears, making her think of that scene at the end of Psycho where the cobwebby bulb in the base-ment starts swinging back and forth, sliding across the wrinkled mummy-face of Norman’s dead mother.

You have to go, Mary, the voice told her patiently. You have to go now, or it will be too late.

All right… but she didn’t have to see her landing zone. No way. Not if she didn’t want to.

She turned off the flashlight and tossed it out through the hole. She heard a soft thunk as it landed on… well, on something. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and slipped out. Rust-ragged metal pulled her shirt out of her jeans and scraped her belly. She tilted forward, and then she was falling, still with her eyes squeezed shut. She put her hands out in front of her. One landed on someone’s face-she felt the cold, unbreathing prow of the nose in her palm and the eyebrows (bushy ones, by the feel) under her fingers. The other hand squashed into some cold jelly and skidded.

She pressed her lips together, sealing whatever wanted to come out of her-a scream or a cry of revulsion—behind them. If she screamed, she’d have to breathe. And if she breathed, she’d have to smell these corpses, which had been lying out here in the summer sun for God knew how long. She landed on things that shifted and belched dead breath.

Telling herself not to panic, to just hold on, Mary rolled away from them, already rubbing the hand which had skidded in the jelly-stuff on her pants.

Now there was sand beneath her, and the sharp points of small, broken rocks. She rolled once more, onto her belly, got her knees under her, and plunged both hands into this rough, broken scree, rubbing them back and forth, dry-washing them as best she could.

She opened her eyes and saw the flashlight lying by an outstretched, waxy hand. She looked up, wanting-needing-the cleanliness and calm disconnection of the sky. A brilliant white cres-cent of moon rode low in it, seeming almost to be impaled on a sharp devil’s prong of rock jutting from the east side of the China Pit.

I’m out, she thought, taking the flashlight. At least there’s that. Dear God, thank you for that.

She backed away from the deadpile on her knees, the flashlight once more clamped between her arm and breast, still dragging her tingling hands through the broken ground, scouring them.

There was light to her left. She looked that way, and felt a burst of terror as she saw Entragian’s cruiser. Would you step out of the car, please, Mr. Jackson. he’d said, and that was when it had happened, she decided, when everything she’d once believed solid had blown away like dust in the wind.

it’s empty, the car’s empty, you can see that, can ‘t you.

Yes, she could, but the residue of the terror remained. It was a taste in her mouth, as if she had been sucking pennies.

The cruiser-road-dusty, even the flasher bars on the roof now crusted with the storm’s residue-was standing next to a small concrete building that looked like a pillbox emplacement. The driver’s door had been left open (she could see the hideous little plastic bear next to the dash-board compass), and that was why the domelight was on.

Ellen had brought her out here in the cruiser, then gone somewhere else. Ellen had other fish to fry, other hooks to bait, other joints to roll. If only she’d left the keys—Mary got to her feet and hurried to the car, jogging bent over at the waist like a soldier crossing no-man’s-land. The cruiser reeked of blood and piss and pain and fear. The dashboard, the wheel, and the front seat were splashed with gore. The instruments were unreadable. Lying in the footwell on the passenger’s side was a small stone spider. It was an old thing, and pitted, but just looking at it made Mary feel cold and weak.

Not that she would have to worry about it much; the cruiser’s ignition slot was empty.

“Shit!” Mary whispered fiercely. “Shit on toast!” She turned and shone her light first on a cluster of mining equipment and then over to the base of the road leading up the pit’s north slope. Packed dirt surfaced with gravel, at least four lanes wide to accommodate the heavy equip-ment she had just been looking at, probably smoother than the highway she and Peter had been on when the goddam cop stopped them… and she couldn’t drive the police—cruiser up and out of here because she didn’t have the fucking key.

if I can’t, I have to make sure he can’t either. Or she. Or whatever in hell it is.

She bent into the car again, wincing at the sour smell (and keeping an eye on the nasty statuette in the footwell, as if it might come to life and leap at her). She yanked the hood release, then walked around to the front of the car. She felt along the top of the grille for the catch, found it, and raised the Caprice’s hood. The engine inside was huge, but she had no trouble spotting the air-cleaner. She leaned over it, grasped the butterfly nut in the center, and applied pressure. Nothing happened.

She hissed with frustration and blinked more sweat out of her eyes. It stung. A little over a year ago, she had read poems as part of a cultural event called “Women Poets Celebrate Their Sense and Sexuality.” She had worn a suit from Donna Karan, and a silk blouse underneath. Her hair had been freshly done, feathered in bangs across her brow. Her long poem, “My Vase,” had been quite the hit of the evening. Of course all that had been before her visit to the historic and beautiful China Pit, home of the unique and fascinating Rattlesnake Number Two mine. She doubted if any of the people who had heard her read “My Vase”—smooth sided fragrance of stems brimmed with shadows curved like the line of a shoulder the line of a thigh — at that event would recognize her now. She no longer recognized herself.

Her right hand, the one she was using on the air—cleaner, itched and throbbed. The fingers slipped. A nail tore painfully, and she gasped. “Please God, help me do this, I wouldn’t know the distributor cap from the camshaft, so it has to be the carburetor. Please help me be strong enough to-”

This time when she applied pressure, the butterfly nut turned.

“Thanks,” she panted. “Oh yeah, thanks very much. You stay close. And take care of David and the others, will you. Don’t let them leave this shithole without me.”

She spun the butterfly nut off and let it fall into the engine. She pulled the air-cleaner off its post and tossed it aside, revealing a carburetor almost as big as… well, almost as big as a vase. Laughing, Mary squatted, got a fistful of China Pit, pushed down a metal flap—thingie over one of the carb’s chambers, and stuffed the sand and rock in. She added two more handfuls, filling the throat of the carburetor, strangling it, then stepped back.

“Let’s see you drive that, you bitch,” she panted.

Hurry. Mary, you have to hurry.

She shone the flashlight over the parked equipment. There were two pickup trucks among the bigger, bulkier stuff. She walked across to them and shone the light into the cabs. No keys here, either. But there was a hatchet in with the litter of equipment in the back of the Ford F-150, and she used it to flatten two tires on both trucks. She started to throw the hatchet away, then reconsidered. She shone the light around once more, and this time she saw the gaping vaguely square hole twenty yards or so up from the bottom of the pit.

There. The source of all this trouble.

She didn’t know how she knew that, if it was the voice or God or just some intuition of her own, and she didn’t care. Right now she only cared about one thing: getting the bloody hell out of here.

She snapped off the flash-the moon would give her all the light she needed, at least for awhile-and began to trudge up the road which led out of China Pit.

The Literary Lion stood by the computers set up at one end of the long table, looking across the lab toward the far wall, where over a dozen people had been hung on hooks like experimental subjects in a Nazi deathcamp All pretty much the way Steve and Cynthia had described it, except for one thing: the woman hanging just beneath the words YOU MUST WEAR A HARDHAT, the one whose head was cocked so far over to the right that her cheek lay on her shoulder, looked weirdly like Terry.

You know that’s just your imagination, don ‘t you.

Did he. Well, maybe. But, God!… the same red-gold hair… the high forehead and slightly crooked nose…

“Never mind her nose,” he said. “You got a crooked nose of your own to worry about. So just get out of here, okay.”

But at first he couldn’t move. He knew what he had to do-cross the room and start going through their pockets, pulling the car-keys-but knowing wasn’t the same as doing. To reach in, to feel the stiff dead skin of their legs under his hand with only the thin pocket—material between him and it… to handle their stuff… not just car-keys but pocket-knives and nail-clippers and maybe aspirin-tins—Everything people keep in their pockets is hyphenated he thought. How fascinating.

— ticket-stubs, money-clips, change-purses—“Stop,” he whispered. “Just go on and do it.”

The radio blurted static like gunfire. He jumped. No music. It was past midnight, and the local shitkickers had signed off. They would be back with another load of Travis Tritt and Tanya Tucker come sunrise, but with any luck, John Edward Marinville, the man Harper’s had once called the only white male writer in America who matters, would be gone.

If you go, it’s over.

Brushing at his face as though the thought were an annoying fly he could shoo away, Johnny started across the room. He supposed he was deserting them, in a manner of speaking, but be real-they had the means to leave themselves if they wanted to, didn’t they. As for him, he was heading back to a life where folks didn’t spout nonsense languages and rot before your eyes. A life where you could count on people’s last growth-spurts to have taken place by the time they were eighteen. His leather chaps brushed against each other as he approached the corpses. Yes, all right, so for the moment he felt less like a literary lion than one of the ARVN looters he had seen in Quang Tn, looking for gold religious medallions on the corpses, sometimes even separating the buttocks of the dead in hopes of finding a diamond or pearl, but that was a specious comparison… and would turn out to be a transitory feeling, he was quite sure.

Looting corpses wasn’t what he was here for at all. Keys-a set that matched one of the cars in the parking lot-was what he was here for and all he was here for. Furthermore—Furthermore the dead girl under YOU MUST WEAR A HARDHAT really did look like Terry. A strawberry-blonde with a bullet-hole in her lab coat. Of course, Terry’s strawberry-blond days were long gone, she was mostly gray now, but—You ‘II wish you stayed when you start smelling Tak on your skin.

“Oh, please,” he said. “Let’s not be puerile.”

He looked to the left, wanting to get his eyes off the dead blonde who looked so much like Terry-Terry back in the days when she had been able to drive him wild just by crossing her legs or flipping her hip at him-and what he saw made him grin hopefully.

There was an ATV over there. Parked inside the garage door like it was, he thought there was a better than even chance that the keys would be in the ignition. If they were, he would at least be spared the indignity of going through the pockets of Entragian’s victims-or maybe he had been Josephson when he’d done this, not that it mattered. All he’d have to do would be unhook the ore—carrier, run up the garage door, and ride away…

… when you start smelling Tak on your skin.

Maybe he would smell it to start with, but he wouldn smell it for long. David Carver might be a prophet, but he was a young prophet, and there were a few things he didn’t seem to realize, direct line to God or no. One was the simple fact that stink washed off.

Yes indeed it did. That was one of the few things in life Johnny was entirely sure of.

And the key to the ATV was, praise God, in the ignition.

He leaned in, turned the key to Accessory, and observed there was also more than three—quarters of a tank of gas. “All sevens, baby,” he said, arid laughed. “Rolling all sevens now.”

He went to the back of the little Jeep-like vehicle and examined the ore-cart coupling. No problem there, either. Just a glorified cotter pin was all it was. He’d find a hammer…

knock it out…

Not even Houdini could have done it, Marinville. It was the old rumdum’s voice this time. Because of the head. And what about the phone. What about the sardines.

“What about them. There were just a few more cans in the bag than we thought, that’s all.”

He was sweating, though. Sweating the way he had in ‘Nam, sometimes. It wasn’t the heat, although it had been hot, and it hadn’t been the fear, although you were afraid even when you were sleeping. Mostly it had been the sick sweat that came with knowing you were in the wrong place at the wrong time with fundamentally good people who were spoiling themselves, maybe forever, by doing the wrong thing.

Unobtrusive miracles, he thought, only once again he z. Jteard the words in the old rumdum’ s voice. He was, by God, chattier dead than alive. Why, if it wasn’t for the boy, you’d still be in a jail cell now, wouldn’t you. Or dead. Or worse. And you deserted him.

“if I hadn’t distracted that coyote with my jacket, David’d be dead now,” Johnny said.

“Leave me alone, you old fool.”

He spotted a hammer lying on a worktable against the wall. He headed in that direction.

“Tell me something, Johnny,” Terry said, and he froze in his tracks. “When exactly was it that you decided to deal with your fear of dying by giving up real life completely.”

That voice wasn’t in his head, he was all but sure of it. Hell, he was sure of it. It was Terry, hanging on the wall. Not a lookalike, not a mirage or a hallucination, but Terry. If he turned around now he would see her with her head raised, her cheek no longer on her shoulder, looking at him as she had always looked at him when he fucked up-patient because Johnny Marinville fucking up was the usual course of things, disillusioned because she was the only one who kept expecting him to do better. Which was dumb, like betting on the Tampa Bay Bucs to win the Super Bowl. Except sometimes, with her-for her-he had done better, had risen above what he had come to think of as his nature. But when he did, when he excelled, when he fucking flew over the landscape, did she ever say anything then. Well, maybe “Change the channel, let’s see what’s on PBS,” but that was about the extent of it.

“You didn’t even give up living for writing,” she said. “That would at least have been understandable, if con-temptible. You gave up living for talking about writing. I mean Jesus, Johnny!”

He stalked to the table on trembling legs, meaning to throw the hammer at the bitch, see if that would shut her up. And that was when he heard the low growling from his left.

He turned his head in that direction and saw a timber—wolf-very likely the same one that had approached Steve and Cynthia with the can tah in its mouth-standing in the doorway leading back to the offices. Its eyes glowed at him. For a moment it hesitated, and Johnny allowed himself to hope-maybe it was afraid, maybe it would back off. Then it was running at him full-tilt, its muzzle wrinkling back to expose its teeth.

The thing which had been Ellen had been concen-trating on the wolf-using the wolf to finish with the writer-so deeply that it was in a state akin to hypnosis Now something, some disruption in the expected flow ot things, interrupted Tak’s concentration. It pulled back for a moment, holding the wolf where it was, but turning toward the Ryder truck with the rest of its tenible curi osity and dark regard. Something had happened at the truck, but Tak was unable to tell what it was. There was a feeling of disorientation, a sense of waking in a room where the positions of all the furniture had been subtly altered.

Perhaps, if it wasn’t trying to be in two places at the same time—“Mi him, en tow!” it growled, and sent the wolf at the writer. So much for the man who would be Steinbeck; the thing on four legs was fast and strong, the thing on two, slow and weak. Tak pulled its mind out of the wolf its vision of Johnny Marinville first dimming, then fading out as the writer turned, groping for something on the worktable with one hand while his eyes went wide with fright.

It turned its full mind toward the truck and the others although the only one of the others who mattered, who had ever mattered (would that it had understood earlier) was the shitting prayboy.

The bright yellow rental truck was still parked on the street-through the overlapping eyes of the spiders and with the low-to-the-ground heat-vision of the snakes Tak saw it clearly-but when it tried to go inside, it was unable. No eyes in there. Not even one tiny scuttering spider. No. Or was it Prayboy again, blocking its vision.

No matter. It didn’t have time to let it matter. They were in there, all of them, they had to be, and Tak would have to leave it at that, because something else was wrong, as well.

Something even closer to home.

Something wrong with Mary.

Feeling strangely and uncomfortably harried, feeling driven, it let the Ryder truck fade and now centered on the field office, looking through the uneasily shifting eyes of the creatures which filled it. It registered the out-of-place dryer first, then the fact that Mary was gone. She’d gotten out somehow.

“You bitch!” it screamed, and blood flew out of Ellen’s mouth in a fine spray. The word wasn’t good enough to express its feelings, and so it lapsed into the old language, spitting invective as it got to its feet… and staggered for balance on the edge of the mi. The weakness of this body had advanced in a way that was appalling. What made it worse was that it didn’t have a body to which it could immediately go, if necessary; for the time being, it was stuck with this one. It thought briefly of the animals, but there were none here capable of serving Tak in that way. Tak’s presence drubbed even the strongest of its human vessels to death in a matter of days. A snake, coyote, rat, or buzzard would simply explode immediately upon or moments after Tak’s entry, like a tin can into which someone drops a lit stick of dynamite. The timberwolf might serve for an hour or two, but the wolf was the only one of its kind left in these parts, and currently three miles away, dealing with (and by now probably dining on) the writer.

It had to be the woman.

It had to be Mary.

The thing that looked like Ellen slipped out through the rift in the wall of the an tak and limped toward the faint purple square that marked the place where the old shaft now opened into the outside world. Rats squeaked eagerly around Ellen’s feet as it went, smelling the blood flowing out of Ellen’s stupid, sickly cunt. Tak kicked them aside, cursing them in the old language.

At the entrance to the China Shaft it paused, looking down. The moon had passed behind the far side of the pit, but it still shed some light, and the domelight inside the police—cruiser shed a little more. Enough for Ellen’s eyes to see that the cruiser’s hood was up and for the creature now inhabiting Ellen’s brain to understand that the sly os pa had fucked the motor up somehow. How had she gotten out of the field office. And how had she dared do this. How had she dared.

For the first time, Tak was afraid.

It looked left and saw that both pickups were standing on flats. It was like the Carvers’ RV all over again, only this time it was on the receiving end, and it didn’t like the feeling one bit. That left the heavy equipment, and although it knew where the keys were-sets for everything in one of the field office file cabinets-they would do it no good; there was nothing down there it could drive. Cary Ripton had known how to run the heavy stuff, but Tak had lost Ripton’s physical skills the moment it left him for Josephson. As Ellen Carver, it had some of Ripton’s, Josephson’s, and Entragian’s memories (although even these were now fading like overexposed photographs) but none of their abilities.

Oh, the bitch! Os pa! Can fin!

Clenching and unclenching Ellen’s fists nervously, aware of her sodden panties and the soaked shirt inside them, aware that Ellen’s thighs were painted with blood, Tak closed Ellen’s eyes and looked for Mary.

“Mi him, en tow! En tow! En Tow!”

At first there was nothing, just blackness and the slow flux of cramps deep down in Ellen’s stomach. And terror. Terror that the os pa bitch was gone already. Then it saw what it was looking for, not with Ellen’s eyes but with ears inside of Ellen’s ears: a sudden alien echo of sound that made the shape of a woman.

It was a circling bat that had seen Mary as she struggled up the road toward the northern rim of the pit, and Mary was a long way from fresh, gasping for breath and turning around every dozen steps or so. Checking for pursuit. The bat “saw” the smells coming off her quite clearly, and what Tak picked up was encouraging. It was the smell of fear, mostly. The sort which might tilt into panic with one hard push.

Still, Mary was only four hundred yards or so from the top, and after that the going would be downhill. And while Mary was tired and breathing hard, the bat did not sense the bitter metallic aroma of exhaustion in the sweat which surrounded her. Not yet, at least.

There was also the fact that Mary was not bleeding like a stuck pig. This next-to-useless Ellen Carver body was. The bleeding wasn’t out of control-not yet-but would be before much longer. Perhaps taking time to collect itself, to rest in the comforting glow of the mi, had been a mistake, but who would have believed this could happen.

What about sending the can toi to stop her”. Those that were not on the perimeter as part of the mi him.

It could, but what fucking good would it do. lt could surround Mary with snakes and spiders, with hissing wildcats and laughing coyotes, and the bitch would very likely walk right through them, parting them the way Moses had supposedly parted the Red Sea. She must know that “Ellen” couldn’t damage her body, not with the can toi, not with any other weapon. If she didn’t know it, she’d still be in the field office, probably crouched in the corner, all but catatonic with fear, unable to make a sound after screaming herself hoarse.

How had she known. Had it been the prayboy. Or had it been a message from the prayboy’s God, David Carver’s can tak. No matter. The fact that Ellen’s body was starting to come apart and Mary had a half-mile head start, those things didn’t matter, either.

“I’m coming just the same, sweetheart,” it whispered, and began making its way along one of the benches, moving away from the mineshaft and toward the road.

Yes. Coming just the same. It might have to beat this body to finders in order to catch up with the os pa, but it would catch up.

Ellen turned her head, spat blood, grinned. She no longer looked much like the woman who had been consid-ering a run for the school board, the woman who had enjoyed lunch with her friends at China Happiness, the woman whose deepest, darkest sexual fantasies involved making love to the hunk in the Diet Coke commercials.

“It doesn’t matter how fast you hurry, os pa. You’re not getting away.

The dark shape dive-bombed her again, and Mary swatted it away. “Fuck off!” she panted at it.

The bat veered, cheeping, but didn’t go far. It circled her like some sort of spotter-plane, and Mary had an unpleasant idea that that was just what it was. She looked up and saw the rim of the pit ahead and above her. Closer now—maybe only two hundred yards-but it still looked mockingly far off. It felt as if she were tearing each breath out of the air, and it hurt going down. Her heart was ham mering, and there was a deep stitch in her left side. She had actually thought she was in pretty good shape for a woman who was thirtysomething, as if using the Nordic-Track and the StairMaster three times a week at Gold’s Gym could get you ready for something like this.

Suddenly the fine gravel surface of the road slid out from under her sneakers, and her trembling legs weren’t able to correct her balance in time. She was able to avoid going flat on her face by dropping to one knee, but her jeans tore, she felt the sting of the gravel biting through her skin, and then warm blood was flowing down her lower leg.

The bat was on her at once, cheeping and battering its wings in her hair.

“Get out, you cocksucker!” she cried, and boxed a closed fist at it. It was a lucky punch.

She felt the fine-grained surface of one wing give way under the blow and then the bat was fluttering on the road ahead of her mouth opening and closing, staring at her-or seeming to-with its useless little eyes. Mary struggled to her feet and stamped on it, voicing a sharp, almost birdlike cry of satisfaction as it crunched beneath her sneaker.

She started to turn again, then glimpsed something down below. A shadow moving among shadows.

“Mary.” It was Ellen Carver’s voice that came floating up, but at the same time it wasn’t.

It was gargly, full. If you hadn’t been through the hell of the last six or eight hours, you might have thought it was Ellen with a bad cold. “Wait, Mare! I want to go with you! I want to see David! We’ll go see him together!”

“Go to hell,” Mary whispered. She turned and began to walk again, tearing breath out of the air and rubbing at the pain in her side. She would have run if she could.

“Mary-Mary-quite-contrary!” Not quite laughing, but almost. “You can’t get away, dear—don’t you know that.”

The rim looked so far away that Mary forced herself to quit looking at it and lowered her head to her sneakers. The next time the voice behind her called her name, it sounded closer. Mary made herself walk a little faster. She fell twice more before she got to the rim, the second time hard enough to knock the wind out of her, and it took her precious, precious seconds of first kneeling and then standing with her head down and her hands on her thighs to get it back. She wished Ellen would call again, but she didn’t. And now Mary didn’t want to look back. She was too afraid of what she might see.

Five yards from the top, however, she finally did. Ellen was less than twenty yards below her, panting soundlessly through a mouth dropped so wide open that it looked like an airscoop. Blood misted out with each exhalation; her blouse was drenched with it. She saw Mary looking at her, grimaced, reached out with clawed hands, tried to sprint forward and grab her. She couldn’t.

Mary, however, found that she couU sprint. It was mostly the look in Ellen Carver’s eyes. Nothing human in them. Nothing at all.

She reached the top of the pit, the air now screaming thinly in and out of her throat. The road ran flat across thirty yards of rim, then tilted down. She could see a tiny yellow spark in the blackness of the desert floor, winking on and off: the blinker in the center of town.

Mary set her eyes on this and ran a little faster.

“What are you doing, David.” Ralph asked tightly. After a short period of concentration which was probably silent prayer, David had begun walking toward the back door of the Ryder truck. Ralph had moved instinctively, putting his body between his son and the handle that ran the door up. Steve saw this and sympathized with the feeling behind it, but didn’t guess it would do much good. If David decided he was going to leave, David would leave.

The boy held up the wallet. “Taking this back.”

“No you don’t,” Ralph said, shaking his head rapidly. “No way. For God’s sake, David, you don’t even know where that man is-out of town by now, is my guess. And good riddance to bad rubbish.”

“I know where he is,” David said calmly. “I can find him. He’s close.” He hesitated, then added: “I’m sup-posed to find him.”

“David.” To his own ears, Steve’s voice sounded tenta-tive. oddly young. “You said the chain was broken.”

“That was before I saw the picture in his wallet. I have to go to him. I have to go now.

It’s the only chance we have.”

“I don’t understand,” Ralph said, but he stepped away from the door. “What does that picture mean.”

“There’s no time, Dad. I’m not sure I could explain even if there was.”

“Are we coming with you.” Cynthia asked. “We’re not, are we.”

David shook his head. “I’ll come back if I can. With Johnny, if I can.”

“This’s nuts,” his father said, but he spoke hollowly, with no strength. “If you go wandering around out there, you’ll be eaten alive.”

“No more than the coyote ate me alive when I got out of the cell,” David said. “The danger isn’t if I go out there; it’s if we all stay in here.”

He looked at Steve, then at the rear door of the Ryder truck. Steve nodded and ran the door up on its tracks. The desert night slipped in, pressed against his face like a cold kiss.

David went to his father and began to hug him. As Ralph’s arms went around the boy in response, David felt that enormous force grab at him again. It ran through him like hard rain. He jerked convulsively in his father’s arms, gasping, then took a blind step backward. His hands, shaking wildly, were held out before him.

“David!” Ralph cried. “David, what-”

And it was over. As quickly as that. The force left. But he could still see the China Pit as he had seen it for a moment in the circle of his father’s arms; it had been like looking down from a low-flying plane. It glimmered in the last of the moonlight, a wretched alabaster sinkhole.

He could hear the ruffle of the wind in his ears and a voice (mi him, en tow! mi him, en tow!) calling. A voice that wasn’t human.

He made an effort to clear his mind and look around at them-so few left now, so few of The Collie Entragian Survival Society. Steve and Cynthia standing together, his father bending down toward him; behind them, the moon—drenched night.

“What is it.” Ralph asked unsteadily. “Christ Al-mighty, what now.”

He saw he had dropped the wallet, and bent to pick it up. Wouldn’t do to leave it here, gosh no. He thought of putting it into his own back pocket, then thought of how it had fallen out of Johnny’s and dumped it down the front of his shirt instead.

“You have to go to the pit.” he told his father. “Daddy, you and Steve and Cynthia have to go out to the China Pit right now. Mary needs help. Do you understand. Mary needs help!”

“What are you talk-”

“She got out, she’s running down the road toward town, and Tak is chasing her. You have to go now. Right now!”

Ralph reached for him again, but this time in a tenta-tive, strengthless way. David ducked easily beneath his arm and jumped from the Ryder truck’s tailgate into the street.

“David!” Cynthia cried. “Splitting up like this… are you sure it’s right.”

“No!” he shouted back. He felt desperate and confused and more than a little stunned. “I know how wrong it feels, it feels wrong to me, too, but there’s nothing else! I swear to you! There’s just nothing else!”

“You get back in here!” Ralph bawled.

David turned, dark eyes meeting his father’s frantic gaze. “Go, Dad. All three of you.

Now. You have to. Help her! For God’s sake, help Mary!”

And before anyone could ask another question, David Carver turned on his heel and went pelting off into the dark. With one hand he pumped the air; the other he held against the front of his shirt, cupping John Edward Marinville’s genuine crocodile wallet, three hundred and ninety-five dollars, Barneys of New York.

RaLph tried to jump out after his son. Steve grabbed him by the shoulders, and Cynthia grabbed him around the waist.

“Let me go!” Ralph shouted, struggling… but not struggling too hard, at that. Steve felt marginally encour-aged. ‘Let me go after my son!”

“No,” Cynthia said. “We have to believe he knows what he’s doing, Ralph.”

“I can’t lose him, too,” Ralph whispered, but he relaxed, quit trying to pull away from them. “I can’t.”

“Maybe the best.way to make sure that doesn’t happen is to go along with what he wants,” Cynthia said.

Ralph drew a deep breath, then exhaled it. “My son went after that asshole,” he said. He sounded as if he were talking to himself. Explaining to himself. “He went after that conceited asshole to give him back his wallet, and if we asked him why, he’d say because it’s God’s will. Am 1 right.”

“Yeah, probably,” Cynthia said. She reached out and touched Ralph’s shoulder. He opened his eyes and she smiled at him. “And you know the bitch of it. it’s probably the truth.”

Ralph looked at Steve. “You wouldn’t leave him, would you. Pick up Mary, take that equipment-road back to the highway, and leave my boy behind.”

Steve shook his head.

Ralph put his hands to his face, seemed to gather him-self, dropped his hands, and stared at them. There was a stony cast to his features now, a look of resolves taken and bridges burned. A queer thought came to Steve: for the first time since he’d met the Carvers, he could see the son in the father.

“All right,” Ralph said. “We’ll leave God to protect my kid until we get back.” He jumped off the back of the truck and looked grimly down the street. “It’ll have to be God.

That bastard Marinville sure won’t do it.”

The thought which flashed across Johnny’s mind as the wolf charged him was the kid saying that the crea-ture running this show wanted them to leave town, would be happy to let them go. Maybe it was a little glitch in the kid’s second sight… or maybe Tak had just seen a chance to pick one of them off and was taking it. Never look a gift-horse in the mouth, and all that.

In either case, he thought, I am royally fucked.

You deserve to be, sweetheart, Terry said from behind him-yeah, that was Terry, all right, helpful to the end.

He brandished the hammer at the oncoming wolf and yelled “Get outta here!” in a shrill voice he barely recog-nized as his own.

The wolf broke left and turned in a tight circle, growling as it went, hindquarters low to the ground, tail tucked. One of its powerful shoulders struck a cabinet as it completed its turn, and a teacup balanced on top of it fell off and shattered on the floor. The radio coughed out a long, loud bray of static.

Johnny took one step toward the door, visualizing how be would pelt down the hail and out into the parking lot—fuck the ATV, he’d find wheels elsewhere-and then the wolf was in the aisle again, head down and hackles up, eyes (horribly intelligent, horribly aware eyes) glowing. Johnny retreated, holding the hammer up in front of him like a knight saluting the king with his sword, waggling it slightly. He could feel his palm sweating against the hammer’s perforated rubber sleeve. The wolf looked huge, the size of a full—grown German Shepherd at least. By comparison, the hammer looked ridiculously small,

the kind of pantry-cabinet accessory one kept around for repairing shelves or installing picture-hooks.

“God help me,” Johnny said… but he felt no presence here; God was just something you said, a word you used when you could see the shit once more getting ready to obey the law of gravity and fall into the fan. No God, no God, he wasn’t a suburban kid from Ohio still three years away from his first encounter with a razor, prayer was just a manifestation of what psychologists called “magical thinking,” and there was no God.

If there was, why would he come see about me, anyhow. Why would he come see about me after I left the others back in that truck.

The wolf suddenly barked at him. It was an absurd sound, high-pitched, the kind of bark Johnny would have expected from a poodle or a cocker spaniel. There was nothing absurd about its teeth, though. Thick curds of spit flew out from between them with each high-pitched bark.

“Get out!” Johnny yelled at it in his shrill, wavering voice. “Get out right now!”

Instead of getting out, the wolf screwed its hindquarters down toward the floor. For a moment Johnny thought it was going to take a crap, that it was every damn bit as scared as he was, and it was going to take a crap on the laboratory floor. Then, a split second before it happened, be realized the wolf was preparing not to crap but to leap. At him.

“No, God no, please!” he screamed, and turned to run-back toward the ATV and the bodies hanging stiffly on their hooks.

In his head he did this; his body moved in the opposite direction, forward, as if directed by hands he could not see. There was no sense of being possessed, but a clear and unmistakable feeling of being no longer alone. His terror fell away. His first powerful instinct-to turn and run-also fell away. He took a step forward instead, pushing off from the table with his free hand. He cocked the hammer back to beyond his right shoulder and hurled it just as the wolf launched itself at him.

He expected the hammer to spin and was sure it would sail over the animal’s head-he had pitched at Lincoln Park High School about a thousand years ago and still knew the feeling of one that was going to be wild-high—but it didn’t. It was no Excalibur, just a plain old Crafts—man hammer with a perforated rubber sleeve on it to _ improve the grip, but it didn’t turn over and it didn’t go high.

What it did was strike the wolf dead center between the eyes.

There was a sound like a brick dropped on an oak plank. The green glare whiffed out of the wolf s eyes they turned into old marbles even as the’ blood began to pour out of the animal’s center-split skull. Then it hit him in the chest, driving him back against the table again, set ting off a brilliant burst of pain in the small of his back For a moment Johnny could smell the wolf-a dry smell almost cinnamony, like the spices the Egyptians had used to preserve the dead. For that moment the animal’s bloody face was turned up ‘to his, the teeth which should by all rights have torn out his throat leering impotently.

Johnny could see its tongue, and an old crescent-shaped scar on its muzzle. Then it dropped on his feet, like something loose and heavy wrapped in a ratty old steamer blanket Gasping, Johnny staggered away from it. He bent to pick up the hammer, then whirled around so clumsily he almost fell, sure that the wolf would be on its feet and coming for him again; there was no way he could have gotten it with the hammer like that, absolutely no way, that baby had been going high, your muscles remembered what it felt like when you’d uncorked one that was going all the way to the backstop, they remembered it very well But the wolf lay where it had fallen.

Is it time to reconsider David Carver’s God. Terry asked quietly. Stereo Terry now; she had a place in his head, and she also had a place on the wall under you MUST WEAR A HARDHAT.

“No,” he said. “It was a lucky shot, that’s all. Like the one-in-a-thousand at the carny when you actually do win your girlfriend the big stuffed panda-bear.”

Thought you said it was going high.

“Well, I was wrong, wasn’t I. Just like you used to tell me six or a dozen times every fucking day, you great bitch.” He was shocked by the hoarse, almost teary quality of his voice. “Wasn’t that pretty much your refrain 7 throughout the course of our charming union. You’re wrong, Johnny, you’re wrong, Johnny, you’re totally fucking wrong, Johnny.”

You left them, Terry’s voice said, and what stopped him was not the contempt he heard in that voice (which was, after all, only his own voice, his own mind up to its old bicameral tricks) but the despair. You left them to die. Worse, you continue to deny God even after you called on him… and he answered. What kind of man are you.

“A man who knows the difference between God and a free-throw,” he told the woman with the strawberry-blond hair and the bullet-hole in her lab coat. “A man who also knows enough to get while the getting’s good.”

He waited for Terry to respond. Terry didn’t. He con-sidered what had just happened a final time, scanning it with his nearly perfect recall, and found nothing but his own arm, which apparently hadn’t forgotten everything it had learned about throwing a fastball, and an ordinary Craftsman hammer. No blue light. No Cecil B. DeMille special effects.

No London Philharmonic swelling with a hundred violins’ worth of phony awe in the background. The terror and emptiness and despair he felt were transi-tory emotions; they would pass. What he was going to do right now was divorce the ATV from the ore-cart behind it, using the hammer to knock loose the cotter-pin cou-pling. What he was going to do next was get the ATV run-ning and get the hell out of this creepy little—“Not bad, ace,” said a voice from the doorway.

Johnny wheeled around. The boy was standing there. David. Looking at the wolf. Then he raised his unsmiling face to Johnny.

“A lucky shot,” Johnny said. “Think that was it.”

“Does your father know you’re out, David.”

“He knows.”

“If you came here to try and persuade me to stay, you’re shit out of luck,” Johnny said.

He bent over the coupling between the ore-cart and the ATV and took a swing at the cotter pin. He missed it completely and smashed his hand painfully against an angle of metal. He cried out and stuck his scraped knuckles into his mouth. Yet he had hit the leaping wolf dead between the eyes with the hammer, he—Johnny blocked the rest. He pulled his hand out of his mouth, tightened his grip on the hammer’s rubber sleeve, and bent over the coupling again. This time he hit it pretty well-not dead center, but close enough to pop the cotter pin free and send it rolling across the floor. It stopped beneath the dangling feet of the woman who looked like Terry.

And I’m not going to read anything into that, either.

“If you came to talk theology, you’re similarly out of luck,” Johnny said. “If, however, you’d like to accom pany me west to Austin-”

He broke off. The boy now had something in his hand was holding it out to him. Between them, the dead wolf lay on the lab floor.

“What’s that.” Johnny asked, but he knew. His eyes weren’t that bad yet. Suddenly his mouth felt very dry. Why are you chasing me. he thought suddenly-to what he did not precisely know, only that it wasn’t the kid. Why can’t you lose my scent. Just leave me alone.

“Your wallet,” David said. His eyes on him, so steady “It fell out of your pocket, in the truck. I brought it to you It’s got all your ID in it, in case you forget who you are “Very funny.”

“I wasn’t joking.”

“So what do you want.” Johnny asked harshly. A reward. Okay. Write down your address, I’ll send you either twenty bucks or an autographed book. Want a base ‘ball signed by Albert Belle. I can do that. Whatever you want. Whatever strikes your fancy.”

David looked down at the wolf for a moment. “Pretty good shot for a man who can’t even hit a coupling dead on from four inches away.”

“Shut up, wiseguy,” Johnny said. “Bring me the wallet if you’re coming. Toss it over if you’re not. Or just keep the goddam thing.”

“There’s a picture in it. You and two other guys stand ing in front of a place called The Viet Cong Lookout. A bar, I think.”

“Yeah, a bar,” Johnny agreed. He flexed his hand uneasily on the shaft of the hammer, barely feeling the sting run across his scraped knuckles. “The tall guy in that picture’s David Halberstam. Very famous writer. Histo nan. Baseball fan.”

“I was more interested in the ordinary-sized guy in the middle,” David said, and all at once a part of Johnny-a deep, deep part-knew what the child was driving at, what the child was going to say, and that part moaned in protest.

“The guy in the gray shirt and the Yankees hat. The guy that showed me the China Pit from my Viet Cong Lookout. That guy was you.

“What crap,” Johnny said. “The same kind of crazed crap you’ve been spouting ever since—Softly, perfectly on key, and still holding the wallet out to him on one hand, David Carver sang: “Well I said doctor… Mr. M.D It was like being slugged square in the middle of the chest. The hammer spilled out of Johnny’s hand. “Stop it,” he whispered.

can you tell me… what’s aiim’ me… And he said yeah-yeah-yeah-”

“Stop it!” Johnny screamed, and the radio burped up another burst of static. He could feel stuff starting to move inside him. Terrible stuff. Sliding. Like an ava-lanche beginning under a surface that only looks solid. Why did the boy have to come. Because he was sent, of course. It wasn’t David’s fault. The real question was why couldn’t the boy’s terrible master let either of them go.

“The Rascals,” David said. “Only back then they were still the Young Rascals. Felix Cavaliere on vocals. Very cool. That’s the song that was playing when you died, wasn’t it, Johnny.”

Images beginning to slide downhill through his mind while Felix Cavaliere sang, I was feelin’ so bad: ARVN soldiers, many no bigger than American sixth-graders, pulling dead buttocks apart, looking for hidden treasure, a nasty scavenger hunt in a nasty war, can tah in can tak; coming back to Terry with a dose in his crotch and a monkey on his back, wanting to score so bad he was half out of his mind, slapping her in an airport concourse when she said something smart about the war (his war, she had called it, as if he had invented the fucking thing), slapping her so hard that her mouth and nose bled, and although the marriage had limped along for another year or so, it had really ended right there in Concourse B of the United terminal at LaGuardia, with the sound of that slap; Entra-gian kicking him as he lay writhing on Highway 50, not. kicking a literary lion or a National Book Award winner or the only white male writer in America who mattered but just some potbellied geezer in an overpriced motor cycle jacket, one who owed God a death like anyone else, Entragian saying that the proposed title of Johnny’s book made him furious, made him sick with rage.