Desperation

“I won’t go back there,” Johnny said hoarsely. “Not for you, not for Steve Ames or your father, not for Mary, not for the world. I won’t.” He picked up the hammer again and slammed it against the ore-cart, punctuating his refusal. “Do you hear me, David. You’re wasting your time. I won’t go back. Won’t! Won’t! Won’t!”

“At first I didn’t understand how it could have been you,” David said, as if he hadn’t heard. “It was the Land of the Dead-you even said so, Johnny. But you were alive. That’s what I thought, at least. Even when I saw the scar.” He pointed atJohnny’s wrist. “You died… when7 1966. 1968. I guess it doesn’t matter. When a person stops changing, stops feeling, they die. The times you ye tried to kill yourself since, you were just playing catch up. Weren’t you.” And the child smiled at him with a sympathy that was unspeakable in its innocence and kind ness and lack of judgement.

“Johnny,” David Carver said, “God can raise the dead”

“Oh Jesus, don’t tell me that,” he whispered. “I don want to be raised.” But his voice seemed to reach him from far away, and curiously doubled, as if he were coming apart in some strange but fundamental way. Frac turing like hornfels.

“It’s too late,” David said. “It’s already happened.”

“Fuck you, little hero, I’m going to Austin. Do you hear me. Fucking AUSTIN!”

“Tak will be there ahead of you,” David said. He was still holding out the wallet, the one with the picture of Johnny and David Halberstam and Duffy Pinette standing outside that sleazy little bar, The Viet Cong Lookout. A dive, but it had the best jukebox in the ‘Nam.

A Wurlitzer In his head Johnny could taste Kirin beer and hear the Rascals, the drive of the drums, the organ like a dagger, and how hot it had been, how green and how hot, the sun like thunder, the earth smelling like pussy every time it rained, and that song had seemed to come from every where, every club, every radio, every shithole juke; in a way, that song was Vietnam: I ivasfeelin’ so bad, I asked my family doctor just what I had.

That’s the song that was playing when you died, wasn it, Johnny.

“Austin,” he whispered in a feeble, failing voice. And still there was that sense of twinning, that sense of twoness.

“If you leave now, Tak will be waiting for you in a lot of places,” David said, his implacable would-be jailer, still holding out his wallet, the one in which that hateful picture was entombed. “Not just Austin. Hotel rooms. Speaking halls. Fancy lunches where people talk about books and things. When you’re with a woman, it’ll be you who undresses her and Tak who has sex with her. And the worst thing is that you may live like that for a long time. Can de lach is what you’ll be, heart of the unformed. Mi him can mi. The empty well of the eye.”

Iwon’t! he tried to scream again, but this time no voice came out, and when he struck at the ore-cart again, the hammer dropped free of his fingers. The strength left his hand. His thighs turned watery and his knees began to unhinge. He slipped onto them with a choked and drown-ing cry. That sense of doubling. of twinning, was even stronger now, and he understood with both dismay and resignation that it was a true sensation. He was literally dividing himself in two. There was John Edward Mar-inville, who didn’t believe in God and didn’t want God to believe in him; that creature wanted to go, and understood that Austin would only be the first stop. And there was Johnny, who wanted to stay. More, who wanted to fight. Who had progressed far enough into this mad super-naturalism to want to die in David’s God, to burn his brain in it.and go out like a moth in the chimney of a kerosene lamp.

Suicide! his heart cried out. Suicide, suicide!

ARVN soldiers, war’s deadeyed optimists, looking for diamonds in assholes. A drunk with a bottle of beer in his hand and his wet hair in his eyes, climbing out of a hotel swimming pool, laughing as the cameras flashed. Terry’s nose bleeding below her hurt, incredulous eyes while a voice from the sky announced that United’s flight 507 to Jacksonville was boarding at Gate B-7. The cop kicking him as he writhed on the centerline of a desert highway.

It makes me furious, the cop had said. It makes me sick with rage.

Johnny felt himself leave his own body, felt himself grasped by hands that were not his own and turned out of his flesh like change from a pocket. He stood ghostlike beside the kneeling man and saw the kneeling man holding his hands out.

“I’ll take it,” the kneeling man said. He was weeping. “I’ll take my wallet, what the fuck, give it back.”

He saw the boy come to the kneeling man and kneel beside him. He saw the kneeling man take the wallet and then put it in the front pocket of the jeans beneath the chaps so he could press his hands together finger-to—finger, as David had done.

“What do I say.” the kneeling man asked, weeping. “Oh David, how do I start, what do I say.”

“What’s in your heart,” the kneeling boy said, and that was when the ghost gave up and rejoined the man. Clarity streaked into the world, lighting it up-lighting him up—like napalm, and he heard Felix Cavaliere singing I said baby, it’s for sure, I got the fever, you got the cure.

“Help me, God,” Johnny said, raising his hands to a place where they were even with his eyes and he could see them well. “Oh God, please help me. Help me do what I was sent here to do, help me to be whole, help me to live. God, help me to live again.”

I’m going to catch you, bitch! it thought trium-phantly.

At first, chances of that had seemed slim. It had gotten within twenty yards of the os pa near the top of the pit—sixty short feet-but the bitch had been able to find a little extra and beat it to the top. Once she started down the other side, Mary had been able to extend her lead in a hurry, from twenty yards to sixty to a hundred and fifty. Because she could breathe deeply, she could cope with her body’s oxygen debt. Ellen Carver’s body, on the other hand, was rapidly losing the ability to do either. The vaginal bleeding had become a flood, something that would kill the Ellen-body in the next twenty minutes or so anyway.

… but if Tak was able to catch Mary, it wouldn’t matter how much the remains of Ellen Carver bled; it would have a place to go. But as it came over the rim of the pit, something had ruptured in Ellen’s left lung, as well. Now with every exhale it was not just spraying a fine mist of red but shooting out liquid jets of blood and tissue from both Ellen’s mouth and nose. And it couldn’t get enough fresh oxygen to keep up the chase. Not with just one working lung.

Then, a miracle. Running too fast for the grade and trying to look back over her shoulder at the same time, the bitch’s feet tangled together and she took a spectacular tumble, hitting the gravel surface of the road in a kind of swandive and ploughing downhill for almost ten feet before she came to a stop, leaving a dark drag-mark behind her. She lay face-down with her arms extended, trembling all over. In the starlight her splayed hands looked like pale creatures fished out of a tidepool. Tak saw her try to get a knee under her. It came partway up, then relaxed and slid back again.

Now! Now! Tak ah wan’ Tak forced the Ellen-body into a semblance of a run, gambling on the last of that body’s energy, gambling on its own agility to keep from tripping and falling as the bitch had done. The back-and-forth of its respiration had become a kind of wet chugging in Ellen’s throat, like a piston running in thick grease. Ellen’s sensory equipment was graying out at the edges, getting ready to shut down. But she would last a little longer. Just a little. And a little was all it would take.

Ahundred and forty yards.

Ahundred and twenty.

Tak ran at the woman lying in the road, screaming in soundless, hungry triumph as it closed the gap.

Mary could hear something coming, something that was yelling nonsense words in a thick, gargly voice Could hear the thud of shoes on the gravel. Closing in But it all seemed unimportant. Like things heard in a dream. And surely this had to be a dream…

didn’t it.

Get up, Mary! You have to getup!

She looked around and saw something awful but not in the least dreamlike bearing down on her. Its hair flew out behind it. One of its eyes had ruptured. Blood exploded from its mouth with each breath. And on its face was the look of a starving animal abandoning the stalk and staking everything on one last charge.

GET UP, MARY! GET UP!

1can’t, I’m scraped all over and it’s too late anyway, she moaned to the voice, but even as she was moaning she was struggling with her knee again, trying to cock it under her.

This time she managed the trick and struggled upward with the knee as her center, trying to pull herself out of gravity’s well this one last time.

The Ellen-thing was in full sprint now. It seemed to be exploding out of its clothes as it came. And it was scream ing: a drawn-out howl of rage and hunger packed in blood.

Mary got on her feet, screaming herself now as the thing swooped down, reaching out, grasping for her with its fingers. She threw herself into a full downhill run, eyes bulging, mouth sprung open in a full-jawed but silent scream.

Ahand, sickeningly hot, slapped down between her shoulderblades and tried to twist itself into her shirt. Mary hunched forward and almost fell as her upper body swayed out beyond the point of balance, but the hand slipped away.

“Bitch!” An inhuman, guttural growl-from right behind her-and this time the hand closed in her hair. It might have held if the hair had been dry, but it was slick-almost slimy-with sweat. For a moment she felt the thing’s fingers on the back of her neck and then they were gone. She ran down the slope in lengthening leaps, her fear now mingling with a kind of crazy exhilaration.

There was a thud from behind her. She risked a look back and saw that the Ellen-thing had gone down. It lay curled in on itself like a crushed snail. Its hands opened and closed on thin air, as if still searching for the woman who had barely managed to elude it.

Mary turned and focused on the blinker-light. It was closer now… and there were other lights, as well, she was sure of it. Headlights, and coming this way. She focused on them, ran toward them.

She never even registered the large shape which passed silently above her.

ALL over.

It had come so close-had actually touched the bitch’s hair-but at the last second Mary had eluded it. And even as she began to draw away again, Ellen’s feet had crossed and Tak went down, listening to the rupturing sounds from inside the Ellen-body as it rolled onto its side, grasping at the air as if it might find handholds in it.

It rolled over onto Ellen’s back, staring up at the star—filled sky, moaning with pain and hate. To have come so close!

That was when it saw the dark shape up there, blotting out the stars in a kind of gliding crucifix, and felt a sudden fresh burst of hope.

It had thought of the wolf and then dismissed the idea because the wolf was too far away, but it had been wrong to believe the wolf was the only can toi vessel which might hold Tak for a little while.

There was this.

“Mi him,” it whispered in its dying, blood-thick voice. “Can de lach, mi him, mm en tow.

Tak!”

Come to me. Come to Tak, come to the old one, come to the heart of the unformed.

Come to me, vessel.

It held up Ellen’s dying arms, and the golden eagle flut-tered down into them, staring into Tak’s dying face with rapt eyes.

“Don’t Look at the bodies,” Johnny said. He was rolling the ore-cart away from the ATV.

David was helping.

“I’m not, believe me,” David said. “I’ve seen enough bodies to last me a lifetime.”

“I think that’s good enough.” Johnny started toward the driver’s side of the ATV and tripped over something. David grabbed his arm, although he, Johnny, hadn’t come especially close to falling. “Watch it, Gramps.”

“You got a mouth on you, kid.”

It was the hammer he’d tripped on. He picked it up, turned to toss it back onto the worktable, then reconsid-ered and stuck the rubber-sleeved handle into the belt of his chaps. The chaps now had enough blood and dirt grimed into them to look almost like the real thing, and the hammer felt right there, somehow.

There was a control-box set to the right of the metal door. Johnny pushed the blue button marked up, mentally prepared for more problems, but the door rattled smoothly along its track. The air that came in, smelling faintly of Indian paintbrush and sage, was fresh and sweet-like heaven. David filled his chest with it, turned to Johnny, and smiled. “Nice.”

“Yeah. Come on, hop in this beauty. Take you for a spin…, David climbed into the front passenger seat of the vehicle, which looked like a high—slung, oversized golf—cart. Johnny turned the key and the engine caught at once. As he ran it out through the open door, it occurred to him that none of this was happening. It was all just part of an idea h&d had for a new novel. A fantasy tale, perhaps even an outright horror novel. Something of a departure for John Edward Marinville, either way.

Not the sort of stuff of which serious literature was made, but so what. He was getting on, and if he wanted to take himself a little less seriously, surely he had that right. There was no need to shoulder each book like a backpack filled with rocks and then sprint uphill with it.

That might be okay for the kids, the bootcamp recruits, but those days were behind him now. And it was sort of a relief that they were.

Not real, none of this, nah, no way. In reality he was just out for a ride in the old convertible, out for a ride with his son, the child of his middle years. They were going to Milly’s on the Square. They’d park around the side of the ice-cream stand, eat their cones, and maybe he’d tell the kid a few war stories about his own boyhood, not enough to bore him, kids had a low tolerance for tales that started “When I was a boy,” he knew that, he guessed every dad who didn’t have his head too far up his own ass did, so maybe just one or two about how he’d tried out for base-ball more or less as a lark, and goddamned if the coach hadn’t—“Johnny. Are you all right.”

He realized he had backed all the way to the edge of the street and was now just sitting here with the clutch in and the engine idling.

“Huh. Yeah. Fine.”

“What were you thinking about.”

“Kids. You’re the first one I’ve been around in… Christ, since my youngest went off to Duke. You’re okay, David. A little God-obsessed, but otherwise quite severely cool.”

David smiled. “Thanks.”

Johnny backed out a little farther, then swung around and shifted into first. As the ATV’s high-set headlights swept Main Street, he saw two things: the leprechaun weathervane which had topped Bud’s Suds was now lying in the street, and Steve’s truck was gone.

“If they did what you wanted, I guess they’re on their way up there,” Johnny said.

“When they find Mary they’ll wait for us.”

“Will they find her, do you think.”

“I’m almost positive they will. And I think she’s okay. It was close, though.” He glanced over at Johnny and this time he smiled more fully. Johnny thought it was a beau—tiful smile. “You’re going to come out of this all right, too, I think. Maybe you’ll write about it.”

“I usually write about the stuff that happens to me. Dress it up a little and it does fine.

But this… I don’t know.”

They were passing The American West. Johnny thought of Audrey Wyler, lying in there under the ruins of the bal-cony. What was left of her.

“David, how much of Audrey’s story was true. Do you know.”

“Most of it.” David was looking at the theater, too, craning his neck to keep it in view a moment or two longer as they passed. Then he turned back to Johnny. His face was thoughtful… and, Johnny thought, sad. “She wasn’t a bad person, you know. What happened to her was like being caught in a landslide or a flood, something like that.”

“An act of God.”

“Right.”

“Our God. Yours and mine.”

“Right.”

“And God is cruel.”

“Right again.”

“You’ve got some damned tough ideas for a kid, you know it.”

Passing the Municipal Building now. The place where the boy’s sister had been killed and his mother snatched away into some final darkness. David looked at it with eyes Johnny couldn’t read, then raised his hands and scrubbed at his face with them. The gesture made him look his age again, and Johnny was shocked to see how young that was.

“More of them than I ever wanted to have,” David said. “You know what God finally told Job when he got tired of listening to all Job’s complaints.”

“Pretty much told him to fuck off, didn’t he.”

“Yeah. You want to hear something really bad.”

“Can’t wait.”

The ATV was riding over ridges of sand in a series of toothrattling jounces. Johnny could see the edge of town up ahead. He wanted to go faster, but anything beyond second gear seemed imprudent, given the short reach of the headlights. It might be true that they were in God’s hands, but God reputedly helped those who helped them-selves. Maybe that was why he had kept the hammer.

“I have a friend. Brian Ross, his name is. He’s my best friend. Once we made a Parthenon entirely out of bottlecaps.”

“Did you.”

“Uh-huh. Brian’s dad helped us a little, but mostly we did it ourselves. We’d stay up Saturday nights and watch old horror movies. The black-and-white ones. Boris Karloff was our favorite monster. Frankenstein was good, but we liked The Mummy even better.

We were always going to each other, ‘Oh shit, the mummy’s after us, we better walk a little faster.’ Goofy stuff like that, but fun. You know.”

Johnny smiled and nodded.

“Anyway, Brian was in an accident. A drunk hit him while he was riding to school. I mean, quarter of eight in the morning, and this guy is drunk on his ass. Do you believe that.”

“Sure,” Johnny said, “you bet.”

David gave him a considering look, nodded, then went on. “Brian hit his head. Bad.

Fractured his skull and hurt his brain. He was in a coma, and he wasn’t supposed to live.

But-”

“Let me guess the rest. You prayed to God that your friend would be all right, and two days later, bingo, that boy be walkin n talkin, praise Jesus my lord n savior.”

“You don’t believe it.”

Johnny laughed. “Actually, I do. After what’s happened to me since this afternoon, a little thing like that seems perfectly sane and reasonable.”

“I went to a place that was special to me and Brian to pray. A platform we built in a tree.

We called it the Viet Cong Lookout.”

Johnny looked at him gravely. “You’re not kidding about that.”

David shook his head. “I can’t remember which one of us named it that now, not for sure, but that’s what we called it. We thought it was from some old movie, but if it was, I can’t remember which one. We had a sign and everything. That was our place, that’s where I went, and what I said was-” He closed his eyes, thinking. “What I said was, ‘God, make him better. If you do, I’ll do some—thing for you. I promise.’ “David opened his eyes again. “He got better almost right away.”

“And now it’s payback time. That’s the bad part, right.”

“No! I don’j mind paying back. Last year I bet my dad five bucks that the Pacers would win the NBA champion-ship, and when they didn’t, he tried to let me off because he said I was just a kid, I bet my heart instead of my head. Maybe he was right-”

“Probably he was right.”

“-but I paid up just the same. Because it’s bush not to pay what you owe, and it’s bush not to do what you promise.” David leaned toward him and lowered his voice… as if he was afraid God might overhear. “The really bad part is that God knew I’d be coming out here, and he already knew what he wanted me to do. And he knew what I’d have to know to do it. My folks aren’t reli-gious-Christmas and Easter, mostly-and until Brian’s accident, I wasn’t, either. All the Bible I knew was John three-sixteen, on account of it’s always on the signs the zellies hold up at the ballpark. For God so loved the world.”

They were passing the bodega with its fallen sign now. The LP tanks had torn off the side of the building and lay in the desert sixty or seventy yards away. China Pit loomed ahead.

In the starlight it looked like a whited sepulchre.

“What are zellies.”

“Zealots. That’s my friend Reverend Martin’s word. I think he’s… I think something may have happened to him.” David fell silent for a moment, staring at the road. Its edges had been blurred by the sandstorm, and out here there were drifts as well as ridges spilled across their path. The ATV took them easily. “Anyway, I didn’t know anything about Jacob and Esau or Joseph’s coat of many colors or Potiphar’s wife until Brian’s accident.

Mostly what I was interested in back in those days”-he spoke, Johnny thought, like a nonagenarian war veteran describing ancient battles and forgotten campaigns-”was whether or not Albert Belle would ever win the American League MVP.”

He turned toward Johnny, his face grave.

“The bad thing isn’t that God would put me in a posi-tion where I’d owe him a favor, but that he’d hurt Brian to do it.”

“God is cruel.”

David nodded, and Johnny saw the boy was on the verge of tears. “He sure is. Better than Tak, maybe, but pretty mean, just the same.”

“But God’s cruelty is refining… that’s the rumor, anyway. Yeah.”

“Well… maybe.”

“In any case, he’s alive, your friend.”

“Yes-”

“And maybe it wasn’t all about you, anyway. Maybe someday your pal is going to cure AIDS or cancer. Maybe he’ll hit in sixty straight games.”

“Maybe.”

“David, this thing that’s out there-Tak-what is it. Do you have any idea. An Indian spirit. Something like a manitou, or a wendigo.”

“I don’t think so. I think it’s more like a disease than a spirit, or even a demon. The Indians may not have even known it was here, and it was here before they were. Long before. Tak is the ancient one, the unformed heart. And the place where it really is, on the other side of the throat at the bottom of the well… I’m not sure that place is on earth at all, or even in normal space. Tak is a complete outsider, so different from us that we can’t even get our minds around him.”

The boy was shivering a little, and his face looked even paler. Maybe that was just the starlight, but Johnny didn’t like it. “We don’t need to talk about it anymore, if you don’t want to. All right.”

David nodded, then pointed up ahead. “Look, there’s the Ryder van. It’s stopped. They must have found Mary. Isn’t that great.”

“It sure is,” Johnny said. The truck’s headlights were half a mile or so farther on, shining out in a fan toward the base of the embankment. They drove on toward it mostly in silence, each lost in his own thoughts. For Johnny, those questions were mostly concerned with identity; he wasn’t entirely sure who he was any longer. He turned to David, meaning to ask if David knew where there might be a few more sardines hiding—hungry as he was, he wouldn’t even turn his nose up at a plate of cold lima beans-when his head suddenly turned into a soundless, brilliant airburst. He jerked backward in the driver’s seat shoulders twisting. A strangled cry escaped him. His mouth was drawn down so radically at the corners that it looked like a clown’s mask. The ATV swerved toward the left side of the road.

David leaned over, grabbed the wheel, and corrected their course just before the vehicle could nose over the edge and tumble into the desert. By then Johnny’s eyes were open again. He braked instinctively, throwing the boy forward. Then they were stopped, the ATV idling in the middle of the road not two hundred feet from the Ryder van’s taillights. They could see people standing back there, red-stained silhouettes, watching them.

“Holy shit,” David breathed. “For a second or two there-”

Johnny looked at him, dazed and amazed, as if seeing him for the first time in his life.

Then his eyes cleared and he laughed shakily.

“Holy shit is right,” he said. His voice was low, almost strengthless-the voice of a man who has just received a walloping shock. “Thanks, David.”

“Was it a God-bomb.”

“What.”

“A big one. Like Saul in Damascus, when the cataracts or whatever they were fell out of his eyes and he could see again. Reverend Martin calls those God-bombs. You just had one, didn’t you.”

All at once he didn’t want to look at David, was afraid of what David might see in his eyes. He looked at the Ryder’s taillights instead.

Steve hadn’t used the extraordinary width of the road to turn around, Johnny noticed; the rental truck was still pointed south, toward the embankment. Of course. Steve Ames was a clever old Texas boy, and he must have sus pected this wasn’t finished yet. He was right. David was right, too-they had to go up to the China Pit-but the kid had some other ideas that were maybe not so right.

Fix your eyes, Johnny, Terry said. Fix your eyes so you can look at him without a single blink. You know how to.2 do that, don’t you.

Yes, he certainly did. He remembered something an old literature prof of his had said, back when dinosaurs still walked the earth and Ralph Houk still managed the New York Yankees. Lying is fiction, this crusty old reptile had proclaimed with a dry and cynical grin, fiction is art, and therefore all art is a lie.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, stand back as I prepare to practice art on this unsuspecting young prophet.

He turned to David and met David’s concerned gaze with a rueful little smile. “No God—bombs, David. Sorry to disappoint you.”

“Then what just happened.”

“I had a seizure. Everything just came down on me at once and I had a seizure. As a young man, I used to have one every three or four months. Petit mal. Took medica-tion and they went away. When I started drinking heavily around the age of forty-well, thirty—five, and there was a little more involved than just booze, I guess-they came back. Not so petit by then, either. The seizures are the main reason I keep trying to go on the wagon.

What you just saw was the first one in almost”-he paused, pre-tending to count back-”eleven months. No booze or cocaine involved this time, either. Just plain old stress.”

He got rolling again. He didn’t want to look around now; if he did he would be looking to see how much of it David was buying, and the kid might pick up on that. It sounded crazy, paranoid, but Johnny knew it wasn’t. The kid was amazing and spooky… like an Old Testament prophet who has just come striding out of an Old Testa-ment desert, skinburned by the sun and brainburned by God’s inside information.

Better to tuck his gaze away, keep it to himself, at least for the time being.

From the corner of his right eye he could see David studying him uncertainly. “Is that really the truth, Johnny.” he asked finally. “No bullshit.”

“Really the truth,” Johnny said, still not looking directly at him. “Zero bullshit.”

David asked no more questions… but he kept glancing over at him. Johnny discovered he could actually feel that glance, like soft, skilled fingers patting their way along the top of a window, feeling for the catch that would unlock it.

Tak sat on the north side of the rim, talons digging into the rotted hide of an old fallen tree. Now literally eagle-eyed, it had no trouble picking out the vehicles below. It could even see the two people in the ATV: the writer behind the wheel, and, next to him, the boy.

The shitting prayboy.

Here after all.

Both of them here after all.

Tak had met the boy briefly in the boy’s vision and had tried to divert him, frighten him, send him away before he could find the one that had summoned him. It hadn’t been able to do it. My God is strong, the boy had said, and that was clearly true.

It remained to be seen, however, if the boy’s God was strong enough.

The ATV stopped short of the yellow truck. The writer and the boy appeared to be talking. The boy’s dama started walking toward them, a rifle in one hand, then stopped as the open vehicle began moving forward again. Then they were together once more, all those who remained, joined again in spite of its efforts.

Yet all was not lost. The eagle’s body wouldn’t last long-an hour, two at the most-but right now it was strong and hot and eager, a honed weapon which Tak grasped in the most intimate way. It ruffled the bird’s wings and rose into the air as the dama embraced his damane. (It was losing its human language rapidly now, the eagle’s small can toi brain incapable of holding it. and reverting back to the simple but powerful tongue of the unformed.) It turned, glided out over the well of darkness which was the China Pit, turned again, and spiraled down toward the black square of the drift. It landed, uttering a single loud quowwwk! as its talons sorted the scree for a good grip. Thirty yards down the drift, pallid reddish-pink light glowed. Tak looked at this for a moment, letting the light of the an tak fill and soothe the bird’s primitive marble of a brain, then hopped a short distance into the tunnel. Here was a little niche on the left side. The eagle worked its way into it and then stood quiet, wings tightly folded, waiting.

Waiting for all of them, but mostly for Prayboy. It would rip Prayboy’s throat out with one of the golden eagle’s powerful talons, his eyes with the other; Prayboy would be dead before any of them knew what had happened. Before the os dam himself knew what had hap-pened, or even realized he was dying blind.

Steve had brought a blanket-an old faded plaid thing-along to cover the boss’s scoot with in the event that he did end up having to transport the Harley to the West Coast in the back of the truck. When Johnny and David pulled up in the ATV, Mary Jackson had this blanket wrapped around her shoulders like a tartan shawl. The truck’s rear door had been run up and she was sitting there with her feet on the bumper, holding the blanket together in front of her. In her other hand was one of the few remaining bottles of Jolt. She thought she had never tasted anything sweeter in her whole life. Her hair was plastered flat against her head in a sweaty helmet. Her eyes were huge. She was shivering in spite of the blanket, and felt like a refugee in a TV newsclip. Something about a fire or an earthquake. She watched Ralph give his son a fierce one-armed hug, the Ruger.44 in his other hand, actually lifting David up off his feet and then setting him down again.

Mary slid to the ground, and staggered a little. The muscles of her legs were still trembling from her run. I ran for my life, she thought, and that’s something I’ll never be able to explain, not by talking, probably not even in a poem-how it is to run not for a meal or a medal or a prize or to catch a train but for your very fucking life.

Cynthia put a hand on her arm. “You okay.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “Give me five years and I’ll be in the goddam pink.”

Steve joined them. “No sign of her,” he said-meaning Ellen, Mary supposed. Then he went over to David and Marinville. “David. All right.”

“Yes,’—David said. “So’s Johnny.”

Steve looked at the man he had been hired to shepherd, his face noncommittal. “That so.”

“I think so,” Marinville said. “I had…” He glanced at David. “You tell him, cabbage.

You got the head on you.”

David smiled wanly at that. “He had a change of heart. And if it was my mother you were looking for… the thing that was inside my mother… you can stop. She’s dead.”

“You’re sure.”

David pointed. “We’ll find her body about halfway up the embankment.” Then, in a voice which struggled to be matter-of-fact and failed, he added: “I don’t want to look at her. When you move her out of the way, I mean. Dad, I don’t think you should, either.”

Mary walked over to them, rubbing the backs of her thighs, where the ache was the worst. “The Ellen-body is finished, and it couldn’t quite catch me, So it’s stuck in its hole again, isn’t it.”

“Ye-es…

Mary didn’t like the doubtful sound of David’s voice. There was more guessing than knowing in it.

“Did it have anyone else it could get into.” Steve asked. “Is there anyone else up here. A hermit. An old prospector.”

“No,” David said. More certain now.

“It’s fallen and it can’t get up,” Cynthia said, and pumped her fist at the star-littered sky.

“Yesss!”

“David.” Mary asked.

He turned to her.

“We’re not done, even if it is stuck in there. Are we. We’re supposed to close the drift.”

“First the an tak,” David said, nodding, “then the drift, yeah. Seal it in, like it was before.” He glanced at his father.

Ralph put an arm around him. “If you say so, David.”

“I’m up for it,” Steve said. “I can’t wait to see where this guy takes his shoes off and puts his feet up on the hassock.”

“I was in no particular hurry to get to Bakersfield, anyway,” Cynthia said.

David looked at Mary.

“Of course. It was God that showed me how to get out, you know. And there’s Peter to think about. It killed my husband. I think I owe it a little something for Peter.”

David looked at Johnny.

“Two questions,” Johnny said. “First, what happens when this is over. What happens here. If the Desperation Mining Corporation comes back in and starts working the China Pit again, they’ll most likely reopen the China Shaft. Won’t they. So what good is it.”

David actually grinned. To Mary he looked relieved, as if he had expected a much tougher question. “That’s not our problem-that’s God’s problem. Ours is to close the an tak and the tunnel from there to the outside. Then we ride away and never look back.

What’s your other question.”

“Could I take you out for an ice cream when this is over. Tell you some high school war stories.”

“Sure. As long as I can tell you to stop when they get, you know, boring.”

“Boring stories are not in my repertoire,” Johnny said loftily.

The boy walked back to the truck with Mary, slipping his arm around her waist and leaning his head against her arm as if she were his mother. Mary guessed she could be that for awhile, if he needed her to be. Steve and Cynthia took the cab; Ralph and Johnny Marinville sat on the floor of the box a across from Mary and David.

When the truck stopped halfway up the grade, Mary felt David’s grip on her waist tighten and put an arm around his shoulders. They had come to the place where his mother-her shell, anyway-had finished up. He knew it as well as she did. He was breathing rapidly and shal-lowly through his mouth. Mary put a hand on the side of his head and urged him wordlessly with it. He came will-ingly enough, putting his face against her breast. The light, rapid mouth-breathing went on, and then she felt the first of his tears wetting her shirt. Across from her, David’s father was sitting with his knees pulled up to his chest and his hands over his face.

“That’s all right, David,” she murmured, and began stroking his hair. “That’s all right.”

Doors slammed. Feet crunched on the gravel. Then, faintly, Cynthia Smith’s voice, full of horror: “Oh jeez, look at her!”

Steve: “Be quiet, stupid, they’ll hear you.”

Cynthia: “Oh sugar. Sorry.”

Steve: “Come on. Help me.”

Ralph took his hands away from his face, wiped a sleeve across his eyes, then came across to Mary’s side of the truck and put his arm around David. David groped for his father’s hand and took it. Ralph’s stricken, streaming eyes met Mary’s, and she began to cry herself.

She could now hear shuffling steps from outside as Steve and Cynthia carried Ellen out of the road. There was a pause, a little grunt of effort from the girl, and then the footsteps came back to the truck. Mary was suddenly sure that Steve would walk around to the back and tell the boy and his father some outrageous lie-foolishness about how Ellen looked peaceful, like she was maybe just taking a nap out here in the middle of nowhere.

She tried to send him a message: Don’t do it, don’t come back here and tell well-meaning lies, you can only make things worse. They ‘ye been in Desperation, they’ve seen what’s there, don’t try to kid them about what’s out here.

The steps paused. Cynthia murmured. Steve said some-thing in return. Then they got back into the truck, the doors slammed, the engine revved, and they started off again.

David kept his face pressed against her a moment or two longer, then raised his head.

“Thanks.”

She smiled, but the truck’s rear door was still up and she supposed enough light was getting in for David to see that she had also wept. “Any time,” she said. She kissed his cheek. “Really.”

She clasped her arms around her knees and looked out the back of the truck, watching the dust spume up. She could still see the blinker-light, a yellow spark in the wide sweep of the dark, but now it was going in the wrong direction, drawing away from them.

The world-the one she had always thought to be the only world-also seemed to be drawing away from her now. Malls, restau-rants, MTV, Gold’s Gym workouts, and occasional hot sex in the afternoon, all drawing away.

And it’s all so easy, she thought. As easy as a penny slipping through a hole in your pocket.

“David.” Johnny asked. “Do you know how Tak got into Ripton in the first place.”

David shook his head.

Johnny nodded as if that was what he had expected and sat back, resting his head against the side of the truck. Mary realized that, as exasperating as Marinville could be, she sort of liked him. And not just because he had come back with David; she had sort of liked him ever since… well, since they were looking for guns, she guessed. She’d scared him, but he had bounced back. She guessed he was the kind of guy who had made a second career out of bouncing back from stuff. And when he wasn’t concentrating on being an asshole, he could be amusing.

The.30-.06 was lying beside him. Johnny felt around for it without raising his head, picked it up, and laid it across his knees. “I suspect I may miss a lecture tomorrow evening,” he said to the ceiling. “It was to be on the subject ‘Punks and Post-literates: American Writ-ing in the Twenty-first Century.’ I shall have to return the advance. ’sad, sad, sad, George and Martha.’ That’s from-”

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf…” Mary said. “Ed-ward Albee. We’re not all bozos on this bus.”

“Sorry,” Johnny said, sounding startled.

“Just be sure to put the apology in your journal,” she said, without the slightest idea of what she was talking about. He lowered his head to look at her, frowned for a moment, then started laughing. After a moment, Mary joined him. Then David was also laughing, and Ralph joined in. His was surprisingly high-pitched for a big man, a kind of cartoon tee-bee, and thinking that made Mary laugh even harder. It hurt her scraped stomach, but the hurt didn’t stop her.

Steve pounded on the back of the cab. It was impossible to tell if his muffled voice was amused or alarmed “What’s going on.”

In his best lion’s voice, Johnny Marinville roared back “Be quiet, you Texas longhorn!

We’re discussing litera ture back here!”

Mary screamed with laughter, one hand pressed to the base of her throat, the other curled against her throbbing belly. She wasn’t able to stop until the truck reached the crest of the embankment, crossed the rim, and started down the far side. Then all the humor went out of her at once. The others stopped at about the same time.

“Do you feel it.” David asked his father.

“I feel something.”

Mary started shivering. She tried to remember if she had been shivering before, while she was laughing, and couldn’t. They felt something, yes, she had no doubt that they did.

They might have felt even more if they had been out here earlier, if they’d had to get up this same road before the bleeding thing just behind could—Push it out of your head, Mare. Push it out and lock the door.

“Mary.” David asked.

She looked at him.

“It won’t be much longer.”

“Good.”

Five minutes later-very long minutes-the truck stopped and the cab doors opened. Steve and Cynthia came around to the back. “Hop out, you guys,” Steve said “Last stop.”

Mary worked herself out of the truck, wincing at every move. She hurt all over, but her legs were the worst. If she had sat in the back of the truck much longer, she reckoned she probably wouldn’t have been able to walk at all.

“Johnny, do you still have those aspirin.”

He handed them over. She took three, washing them down with the last of her Jolt. Then she walked around to the front of the truck.

They were at the bottom of the China Pit, first time for the others, second for her. The field office was near; looking at it, thinking of what was inside and of how close she had probably come to ending her existence in there, made her feel like screaming. Then her eyes fixed on the cruiser, the driver’s door still open, the hood still raised, the air-cleaner still lying by the left front tire.

“Put your arm around me,” she told Johnny.

He did, looking down at her with a raised eyebrow.

“Now walk me over to that car.”

“Why.”

“There’s something I have to do.”

“Mary, the sooner we start, the sooner we finish,” David said.

“This’ll only take a second. Come on, Shakespeare. Let’s go.”

He walked her over to the car, his arm around her waist, the.30-.06 in his free hand. She supposed he could feel her trembling, but that was all right. She nerved herself, gnawing at her lower lip, remembering the ride into town in the back of this car. Sitting with Peter behind the mesh. Smelling Old Spice and the metallic scent of her own fear. No doorhandles. No window-cranks. And nothing to look at but the back of Entragian’ s sunburned neck and that stupid blank-eyed bear stuck to the dashboard.

She leaned into Entragian’s stink-except it was really Tak ’s stink, she knew that now—and ripped the bear off the dashboard. Now its blank can toi eyes stared directly up at hers, as if asking her what all this foolishness could possibly be about, what good it could possibly accom-plish, what evil it cojild possibly change.

“Well,” she told it, “you ’re gone, motherfucker, and that’s step one.” She dropped it to the rough surface of the pit and then stamped down on it. Hard. She felt it crunch under her sneaker. It was, in some fundamental way, the most satisfying moment of the whole miserable nightmare.

“Don’t tell me,” Johnny said. “It’s some new variation of est therapy. A symbolic affirmation expressly designed for stressful life-passages, sort of an ‘I’m okay, you’re stomped to shit’ kind of thing. Or-”

“Shut up,” she said, not unkindly. “And you can let loose of me now.”

“Do I have to.” His hand moved on her waist. “I was just getting familiar with the topography.”

“Too bad I’m not a map.”

Johnny dropped his hand and they walked back to the others.

“David.” Steve asked. “Is that the place.”

He pointed past the cluster of heavy machinery and to the left of the rusty Quonset with the stove-stack. About—twenty yards up the slope was the squarish hole she had seen earlier. Then she hadn’t given it much consideration, as she’d had other fish to fry—staying alive, chiefly-but now looking at it gave her a bad feeling. A weak-in the knees feeling. Well, she thought, I did the bear, anyway it’ll never stare at anyone else cooped up in the back of that police-cruiser There’s that much.

“That’s it,” David said. “China Shaft.”

“Can tak in can tah,” his father said, as if in a dream “Yes.”

“And we have to blow it up.” Steve asked. “Just how do we go about that.”

David pointed to the concrete cube near the field office “First we have to get inside there.”

They walked over to the powder magazine. Ralph yanked at the padlock on the door, as if to get the feel of it, then racked the Ruger. The metallic clack-clack sound it made was very loud in the stillness of the pit. “The rest of you stand back,” he said. “This always works great in the movies, but in real life, who knows.”

Wait a sec, wait a sec,” Johnny said, and ran back to the Ryder truck. They heard him rummaging through the cartons of stuff just behind the cab, then: “Oh! There you are, you ugly thing.”

He came back carrying a black Bell motorcycle helmet with a full face-shield. He handed it to Ralph. “Brain bucket deluxe. I hardly ever wear this one, because there’s too much of it. I get it over my head and my claus trophobia kicks in. Put it on.”

Ralph did. The helmet made him look like a futuristic welder. Johnny stepped back from him as he turned to the lock again. So did the others. Mary had her hands on David’s shoulders.

“Why don’t you guys turn around.” Ralph said. His voice was muffled by the helmet.

Mary kept expecting David to protest-concern for his father, perhaps even exaggerated concern, wouldn’t be unusual, given the fact that he had lost the other two members of his family in the last twelve hours-but David said nothing. His face was only a pale blur in the dark, impossible to read, but she sensed no agitation in him. Certainly the shoulders under her hands were calm enough, at least for now.

Maybe he saw it was going to be all right, she thought. In that vision he had… or whatever it was. Or maybe—She didn’t want to finish that thought, but was slow closing it off.

— maybe he just knows there ’s no other choice.

There was a long moment of silence-very long, it seemed to Mary-and then a high whipcrack rifle report that should have echoed and didn’t. It was just there and then gone, absorbed by the walls and benches and valleys of the open pit. In its aftermath she heard one startled bird-cry-Quowwwk! — and then nothing more. She wondered why Tak hadn’t sent the animals against them as it had sent them against so many of the people in town.

Because the six of them together were something special. Maybe. If so, it was David who had made them special, the way a single great player can elevate a whole team.

They turned and saw Ralph bent over the padlock (to Mary he looked like the Pieman bent over Simple Simon on the Howard Johnson’s signs), peering at it through the helmet’s faceplate. The lock was now warped and twisted, with a large black bullet-hole through the center of it, but when he yanked on it, it continued to hold fast.

“One more time,” he said, and twirled his finger at them, telling them to turn around.

They did and there was another whipcrack. No bird-cry followed his one. Mary supposed whatever had called was far away by now, although she had heard no flapping wings. Not that she would have, probably, with two gun-shots ringing in her ears.

This time when Ralph yanked, the lock’s arm popped free of its ruined innards. Ralph pulled it off the hasp and threw it aside. When he took Johnny’s helmet off, he was grinning.

David ran to him and gave him a high-five. “Good go-ing, Dad!”

Steve pulled the door open and peered in. “Man! Darker than a carload of assholes.”

“Is there a light-switch.” Cynthia asked. “No windows, there must be.”

He felt around, first on the right, then the left. “Watch for spiders,” Mary said nervously.

“There could be spiders.”

“Here it is, I got it,” Steve said. There was a click-click, click-click, but no light.

“Who’s still got a flashlight.” Cynthia asked. “I must’ve left mine back in the damned movie theater. I don’t have it, anyway.”

There was no answer. Mary had also had a flashlight—the one she’d found in the field office-and she thought she had tucked it into the waistband of her jeans after dis-abling the—pickup trucks. If so, it was gone now. The hatchet, too. She must have lost both items in her flight from the pit.

“Crap,” Johnny said. “Boy Scouts we ain’t.”

“There’s one in the truck, behind the seat,” Steve said. “Under the maps.”

“Why don’t you go get it.” Johnny said, but for a moment or two, Steve didn’t move.

He—was looking at Johnny with a strange expression, one Mary couldn’t quite read, on his face. Johnny saw it, too. “What. Some-thing wrong.”

“Nope,” Steve said. “Nothing wrong, boss.”

“Then step on it.”

Steve Ames marked the exact moment when control over their little expeditionary force passed from David to Johnny; the moment when the boss became the boss again. Why don’t you go get it, he’d said, a question that wasn’t a question at all but the first real order Mar-inville had given him since they’d started out in Con-necticut, Johnny on his motorcycle, Steve rolling leisurely along behind in the truck, puffing the occasional cheap cigar. He had called him boss (until Johnny told him to stop) because it was a tradition in the entertainment busi-ness: in the theater, sceneshifters called the stage manager boss; on a movie set, key grips called the director boss; out on tour, roadies called the tour-manager or the guys in the band boss. He had simply carried that part of his old life over into this job, but he hadn’t thought of Johnny as the boss, in spite of his booming stage-voice and his chin—thrust-forward, I-know-exactly-what-I’ rn-doing manner, until now. And this time, when Steve had called him boss, Johnny hadn’t objected.

Why don’t you go get it.

Anominal question, just six words, and everything had changed.

What’s changed. What, exactly.

“I don’t know,” he muttered, opening the driver’ s-side door of the Ryder truck and starting to rummage through the crap behind the seat. “That’s the hell of it, I don’t really know. — The flashlight-a long-barrelled, six-battery job-was under a crushed litter of maps, along with the first-aid kit and a cardboard box with a few road-flares in it. He tried the light, saw that it worked, and jogged back to the others.

“Look for spiders first,” Cynthia said. Her voice was just a little too high for normal conversation. “Spiders and snakes, just like in that old song. God, I hate em.”

Steve stepped into the powder magazine and shone his light around, first running it over the floor, then the cinderblock walls, then the ceiling. “No spiders,” he reported. “No snakes.”

“David, stand right outside the door,” Johnny said. “We shouldn’t all cram in there together, I think. And if you see anyone or anything-”

“Give a yell,” David finished. “Don’t worry.

Steve centered the beam of the flashlight on a sign in the middle of the floor-it was on a stand, like the one in restaurants that said PLEASE WAIT FOR HOSTESS TO SEAT you. Only what this one said-in big red letters-was:

WARNING WARNING WARNING

BLASTING AGENTS AND BOOSTERS MUST BE KEPT

SEPARATE!

THIS IS A FEDERAL REGUL4TION CARELESSNESS WITH EXPLOSIVES WILL NOT BE TOLERATED!

The rear wall was studded with spikes driven into the cinderblock. Hung on these were coils of wire and fat _ white cord. Det-cord, Steve assumed. Against the right and left walls, facing each other like bookends with no books between them, were two heavy wooden chests. The _ one marked DYNAMITE and BLASTING CAPS and USE EXTREME CAUTION was open, the lid up like the lid of a child’s toybox. The other, marked simply BLASTING AGENT in black letters against an orange background, was padlocked shut.

“That’s the ANFO,” Johnny said, pointing at the pad locked cabinet. “Acronym stands for ammonium nitrate and fuel oil.”

“How do you know that.” Mary asked.

“Picked it up somewhere,” he said absently. “Just picked it up somewhere.”

“Well, if you think I’m gonna blow the padlock off that one, you’re nuts,” Ralph said.

“You guys have any ideas that don’t involve shooting.”

“Not just this second,” Johnny said, but he didn’t sound very concerned.

Steve walked toward the dynamite chest.

“No dyno in there,” Johnny said, still sounding weirdly serene.

He was right about the dynamite, but the chest was far from empty. The body of a man in jeans and a George town Hoyas tee-shirt was crammed into it. He had been shot in the head. His glazed eyes stared up at Steve from below what might once have been blond hair. It was hard to tell.

Steeling himself against the smell, Steve leaned over and worked at the keyring hanging on the man’s belt.

“What is it.” Cynthia asked, starting toward him. A beetle came out of the corpse’s open mouth and trundled down his chin. Now Steve could hear a faint rustling. More insects under the dead guy. Or maybe one of his nice new friend’s beloved rattlers.

“Nothing,” he said. “Stay where you are.”

The keyring was stubborn. After several fruitless efforts to depress the clef-shaped clip holding it to the belt-loop, Steve simply tore the whole thing off, loop and all. He closed the lid and crossed the room with the keyring. Johnny, he noticed, was standing about three paces inside the door, gazing raptly down at his motor-cycle helmet. “Alas, poor Urine,”

he said. “I knew him well.”

“Johnny. You okay.”

“Fine.” Johnny tucked the motorcycle helmet under his arm and smiled winningly at Steve… but his eyes looked haunted.

Steve gave the keys to Ralph. “One of these, maybe.” It didn’t take long. The third key Ralph tried slid into the padlock on the chest marked BLASTING AGENT. A moment later the five of them were looking inside. The chest had been partitioned into three bins.

Those on the ends were empty. The one in the middle was half full of what looked like long cheesecloth bags. Littered among them were a few escapees: round pellets that looked to Steve like whitewashed birdshot. The bags had drawstring tops. He lifted one out. It looked like a bratwurst and he guessed it weighed about ten pounds. Written on the side in black were the letters ANFO. Below them, in red: CAU—TION: FLAMMABLE, EXPLOSIVE.

“Okay,” Steve said, “but how are we going to set it off with no booster. You were right, boss-no dynamite, no blasting caps. Just a guy with a.30-.30 haircut. The demolitions foreman, I assume.”

Johnny looked at Steve, then at the others. “I wonder if the rest of you would step out,with David for a moment. I’d like to speak to Steve alone.”

“Why.” Cynthia asked instantly.

“Because I need to,” Johnny said in an oddly gentle voice. “It’s a little unfinished business, that’s all. An apology. I don’t apologize well under any circumstances, but I’m noi sure I could do it at all with an audience.”

Mary said, “I hardly think this is the time-”

The boss had been signalling him-signalling urgently-with his eyes. “It’s okay,” Steve said. “It’ll be quick.”

“And don’t go empty-handed,” Johnny said. “Each of you take a bag of this instant Fourth of July.”

“My understanding is that without something explosive to boost it, it’s more like Instant Campfire,” Ralph said.

“I want to know what’s going on here,” Cynthia said. She sounded worried.

“Nothing,” Johnny told her, his voice soothing.

“Really.”

“The fuck there ain’t,” Cynthia said morosely, but she went with the others, each of them carrying a bag of ANFO.

Before Johnny could say anything, David slipped back inside. There were still traces of dried soap on his cheeks, and his lids were tinged purple. Steve had once dated a girl who’d worn eyeshadow that exact same color. On David it looked like shock instead of glamour.

“is everything okay.” David asked. He glanced briefly at Steve, but it was Johnny he was talking to.

“Yes. Steve, give David a bag of ANFO.”

David stood a moment longer, holding the bag Steve handed him, looking down at it, lost in thought. Abruptly he looked up at Johnny and said, “Turn out your pockets. All of them.”

“What-” Steve began.

Johnny shushed him, smiling oddly. It was the smile of someone who has bitten into something which tastes both bitter and compelling. “David knows what he’s doing.”

He unbuckled the chaps, turned out the pockets of his jeans underneath, handing Steve his goods-the famous wallet, his keys, the hammer which had been stuck in his belt-to hold as he did. He bowed forward so David could look into his shirt pocket. Then he unbuckled his pants and pushed them down. Underneath be was wearing blue bikini briefs. His not inconsiderable gut hung over them. I–Ic looked to Steve like one of those rich older guys you saw strolling along the beach sometimes. You knew they were rich not just because they always wore Rolexes and Oakley sunglasses, but because they dared walk along in those tiny spandex ballhuggers in the first place. As if, once your income passed a certain figure, your gut became another asset.

The boss wasn’t wearing spandex, at least. Plain old COttOn.

He did a three-sixty, arms slightly raised, giving David ill the angles and bruises, then pulled up his jeans again.

The chaps followed. “Satisfied. I’ll take off my boots, if you’re not.”

“No,” David said, but be poked a hand into the pockets of the chaps before stepping back.

His face was troubled, but not exactly worried. “Go on and have your talk. But hurry it up.”

And he was gone, leaving Steve and Johnny alone.

The boss moved to the rear of the powder magazine, as far from the door as possible.

Steve followed. Now he could smell the corpse in the dynamite chest under the stronger fuel-oil aroma of the place, and he wanted to get out of here as soon as possible.

“He wanted to make sure you didn’t have a few of those can tahs on you, didn’t he. Like Audrey.”

Johnny nodded. “He’s a wise child.”

“I guess he is.” Steve shuffled his feet, looked at them, then back up at the boss. “Look, you don’t need to apolo-gize for buzzing off. The important thing is that you came back.

Why don’t we just-”

“I owe a lot of apologies,” Johnny said. He began taking his stuff back, rapidly returning the items to the pockets from which they had come. He took the hammer last, once more tucking it into the belt of his chaps. “It’s really amazing how much fuckery a person can get up to in the course of one lifetime. But you’re really the least of my worries in that respect, Steve, especially now. Just shut up and listen, all right.”

“All right.”

“And this really does have to be speedy. David already suspects I’m up to something; that’s another reason why he wanted me to turn out my pockets. There’ll come a moment-very soon now-when you’re going to have to grab David. When you do, make sure you get a good grip, because he’s going to fight like hell. And make sure you don’t let—“Why.“

“Will your pal with the creative hairdo help if you ask her to.”

“Probably, but-”

“Steve, you have to trust me.

“Why should I.”

“Because I had a moment of revelation on the way up here. Except that’s way too stiff; I like David’s phrase better. He asked me if I got hit by a God-bomb. I told him no, but that was another lie. Do you suppose that’s why God picked me in the end. Because I’m an accomplished liar. That’s sort of funny, but also sort of awful, you know it.”

“What’s going to happen. Do you even know.”

“No, not completely.” Johnny picked up the.30-.06 in one hand and the black-visored helmet in the other. He looked back and forth between them, as if comparing their relative worth.

“I can’t do what you want,” Steve said flatly. “I don t trust you enough to do what you want.”

“You have to,” Johnny said, and handed him the rifle “I’m all you have now.”

“But-”

Johnny came a step closer. To Steve he no longer looked like the same man who had gotten on the Harley Davidson back in Connecticut, his absurd new leathers creaking, showing every tooth in his head as the photog raphers from Life and People and the Daily News circled him and clicked away. The change was a lot more than a few bruises and a broken nose. He looked younger, stronger. The pomposity had gone Out of his face, and the somehow frantic vagueness as well. It was only now, observing its absence, that Steve realized how much of the time that look had been there-as if, no matter what he was saying or doing, most of Marinville’s attention was taken up by something that wasn’t. Something like a misplaced item or a forgotten chore.

“David thinks God means him to die in order to close Tak up in his bolthole again. The final sacrifice, so to speak. But David’s wrong.” Johnny’s voice cracked on the last word, and Steve was astonished to see that the boss was almost crying. “It’s not going to be that easy for him.”

“What-”

Johnny grabbed his arm. His grip so tight it was painful. “Shut up, Steve. Just grab him when the time comes. It’s up to you. Come on now.” He bent into the chest, grabbed a bag of ANEO by its drawstring, and tossed it to Steve. He got another for himself.

“Do you know how to set this shit off without any dyno or blasting caps.” Steve asked.

“You think you do, don’t you. What’s going to happen. Is God going to send down a lightning-bolt.”—“That’s what David thinks,” Johnny said, “and after the sardines and crackers, I’m not surprised. I don’t think it’ll come to anything that extreme, though. Come on. The hour groweth late.”

They walked out into what was left of the night and joined the others.

At the bottom of the slope, twenty yards below the ragged yawn that was China Shaft, Johnny stopped them and told them to tie the drawstrings of the bags together in pairs.

He slipped one of these pairs around his own neck, the sacks hanging down on either side of his chest like the counterweights of a cuckoo clock. Steve took another pair, and Johnny made no objection when David took the last set from his father and slipped the joined drawstrings around his own neck. Ralph, troubled, looked at Johnny. Johnny glanced at David, saw David was staring up at the drift opening, then looked back at the boy’s father, shook his head, and tapped a finger against his lips. Quiet, Dad.

Ralph looked doubtful but said nothing.

“Everybody all right.” Johnny asked.

“What’s going to happen.” Mary asked. “I mean, what’s the plan.”

“We do what God tells us,” David said. “That’s the plan. Come on.

It was David who led, going up the slope sidesaddle to keep from falling. There was no wide gravel road here, not even a path, and the ground was evil. Johnny could feel it trying to crumble out from under his boots at every upward lurch. Soon his heart was pounding and his bat-tered nose was throbbing in sync. He had been a good boy over the last few months, but a lot of chickens (not to mention some roast ducks and a few caviar—stuffed quail) were now coming home to roost nevertheless.

Yet he felt good. Everything was simple now. That was sort of wonderful.

David was in the lead, his father behind him. Steve and Cynthia next. Johnny and Mary Jackson brought up the rear.

“Why have you still got that motorcycle helmet.” she asked.

Johnny grinned. She reminded him of Terry, in an odd way. Terry as she had been back in the old days. He held the helmet up, stuck on his hand like a puppet. “Ask not for whom the Bell tolls,” he said. “It tolls for thee, thou storied honeydew.”

She gave a small, breathless laugh. “You’re nuts.”

If it had been forty yards uphill instead of twenty, Johnny wasn’t sure he could have made it. As it was, the pounding of his heart had become so rapid it seemed like one steady thrum in his chest by the time David reached the ragged tunnel opening. And his thighs felt like spaghetti.

Don’t weaken now, he told himself. You’re into the final straightaway.

He made himself move a little faster, suddenly afraid that David might simply turn and go into the shaft before he could get there, It was possible, too. Steve thought the boss knew what was going on, but in fact the boss knew precious little. He was being handed the script a page ahead of the rest of them, that was all.

But David waited, and soon they were all clustered on the slope in front of the opening.

A dank smell issued from it, chilly and charred at the same time. And there was a sound Johnny associated with elevator shafts: a faint, windy whisper.

“We ought to pray,” David said, sounding timid. He held his hands out to either side of him.

His father took one of his hands. Steve put down the.30-.06 and took the other. Mary took Ralph’s, Cynthia took Steve’s. Johnny stepped between the two women, dropped the helmet between his boots, and the circle was complete.

They stood in the darkness of China Pit, smelling the dank exhaled breath of the earth, listening to that faint roar, looking at David Carver, who had brought them here.

“Whose father.” David asked them.

“Our father,” Johnny said, stepping easily onto the road of the old prayer. as if he had never been away. “Who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come-”

The others joined in, Cynthia, the minister’s daughter, first, Mary last.

“-thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.”

Through the amen, Cynthia continued on: “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever, amen.” She looked up with the little twinkle Johnny had come to like quite a lot. “That’s the way I learned it—kind of a Protestant dance-mix, y’know.”

David was looking at Johnny now.

“Help me do my best,” Johnny said. “If you’re there, God-and I now have reason to believe you are-help me to do my best and not weaken again. I want you to take that request very seriously, because I have a long history of weakening. David, what about you. Anything to say.”

David shrugged and shook his head. “Said it already.” He let go of the hands holding his, and the circle broke.

Johnny nodded. “Okay, let’s do it.”

“Do what.” Mary asked. “Do what. Will you please tell me.”

“I’m supposed to go in,” David said. “Alone.”

Johnny shook his head. “Nope. And don’t start in with your God-told-me-to stuff, because right now he’s not telling you anything. Your TV screen has got a PLEASE STAND BY sign on it, am I right.”

David looked at him uncertainly and wet his lips.

Johnny lifted a hand toward the waiting darkness of the drift and spoke in the tone of a man conveying a large favor. “You can go first, though. How’s that.”

“My dad-”

“Right behind you. He’ll catch you if you fall.”

“No,” David said. He suddenly looked scared—terrified. “I don’t want that. I don’t want him in there at all. The roof might cave in, or-”

“David! What you want doesn’t matter.”

Cynthia grabbed Johnny’s arm. She would have been digging into him if she hadn’t nibbled her nails to the quick. “Leave him alone! Christ, he saved your fucking 4fe!

Can’t you quit badgering him.”

“I’m not,” Johnny said. “At this point he’s badger—ing himself. If he’ll just let go, remember who’s in charge…”

He looked at David. The boy muttered something under his breath, far too low to hear, but Johnny didn’t have to hear it to know what he had said.

“That’s right, he’s cruel. But you knew that. And you have no control over the nature of God anyway. None of us do. So why won’t you relax.”

David made no reply. His head was bowed, but not in prayer this time. Johnny thought it was resignation. In some way, the boy knew what was coming, and that was the worst part. The cruelest part, if you liked. It’s not going to be that easy for him, he had told Steve in the powder magazine, but back there he hadn’t really under-stood how hard hard could be. First his sis, then his mother; now—“Right,” he said in a voice that st5unded as dry as the ground they were standing on. “First David, then Ralph, then you, Steve. I’ll be behind you. Tonight-sorry, this morning-it’s a case of ladies last.”

“If we have to go in, I want to go in with Steve,” Cyn-thia said.

“Okay, fine,” Johnny said at once-it was as if he had been expecting this. “You and I can switch places.”

“Who put you in charge, anyway.” Mary asked.

Johnny turned on her like a snake, startling her into a precarious step backward. “Do you want to have a go.” he asked with a kind of dangerous good cheer. “Because if you do, lass, I’d be happy to turn it over to you. I asked for this no more than David did. So what do you think. Want to put-urn on Big Chiefs headdress.”

She shook her head, confused.

“Easy, boss,” Steve murmured.

“I’m easy,” Johnny said, but he wasn’t. He looked at David and his father, standing side by side, heads down, hands entwined, and wasn’t easy. He could barely believe the enormity of what he was allowing. Could barely believe. Couldn’t believe at all, was more like it. How else could he go on, except with merciful incomprehen-sion held before him like a shield. How could anyone.

“Want me to take those bags, Johnny.” Cynthia asked timidly. “You still sound pretty out of breath, and you look all in, if you don’t mind me saying.”

“I’ll be fine. It’s not far now. Is it, David.”

“No,” David said in a small, trembling voice. He appeared not to be just holding his father’s hand now but caressing it as a lover might do. He looked at Johnny with hopeless, pleading eyes. The eyes of someone who almost knows.

Jojinny looked away, sick in his stomach, feeling simul-taneously hot and cold. He met Steve’s bewildered, con-cerned eyes and tried to send him another message: Just hold him. When the time comes. Out loud he said: “Give David the flashlight, Steve.”

For a moment he didn’t think Steve would do it. Then he pulled the flashlight out of his back pocket and handed it over.

Johnny lifted his hand to the blackness of the shaft again. Toward the dead cold smell of old fire and the faint roaring sound from deep in the middle of the murdered mountain.

He listened for some comforting word from Terry, but Terry had split the scene. Maybe just as well.

“David.” His voice, trembling. “Will you light us on our way.”

“I don’t want to,’, David whispered. Then, pulling in a deep breath, he looked up at a sky in which the stars were just beginning to pale and screamed: “I don ‘t want to! Haven’t I done enough. Everything you asked. This isn’t fair! THIS ISN’T FAiR AND I DON’T WANT To!”

The last four words came out in a desperate, throat—tearing shriek. Mary started forward.

Johnny grabbed her arm.

“Take your hand off me,” she said, and started forward again.

Johnny yanked her back again. “Be still.”

She subsided.

Johnny looked at David and silently raised his hand to the drift again.

David looked up at his father with tears running down his cheeks. “Go away, Dad. Go back to the truck.”

Ralph shook his head. “If you go in, I go in.”

“Don’t. I’m telling you. It won’t be good for you.”

Ralph simply stood his ground and looked patiently at his son.

David looked back up at him, then at Johnny’s out-stretched hand (a hand which now did not simply invite but demanded), and then turned and walked into the drift. He clicked on the light as he went, and Johnny saw motes dancing in its bright beam… motes and something else.

Something that might have caused the heart of an old prospector to beat faster. A glint of gold, there and then gone.

Ralph followed David. Steve came next. The light moved in the boy’s hand, tracing first along a rock wall, then an ancient support with a trio of symbols carved into it-some long-dead Chinese miner’s name, perhaps, or the name of his sweetheart, left far behind in the marsh—side huts — of Pc Yang-and then to the floor, where it picked out a litter of bones: cracked skulls and ribcages that curved like ghastly Cheshire cat grins. It shifted upward again and to the left. The gold-gleam came again, this time brighter and more defined.

“Hey, look out!” Cynthia cried. “Something’s in here with us!”

There was a fluttering explosion in the dark. It was a sound Johnny associated with his Connecticut childhood, pheasant exploding out of the underbrush and into the air as twilight drew down toward dark. For a moment the smell of the mine was stronger, as unseen wings drove the ancient air against his face in pulses.

Mary screamed. The flashlight beam jagged upward at an angle, and for just one moment it pinpointed a night-marish midair apparition, something with wings and glar-ing golden eyes and outstretched talons. It was David the eyes were glaring at, David it wanted.

“Look out!” Ralph yelled, and threw himself over David’s back, driving him down to the bone-littered floor of the shaft.

The flashlight fell from the boy’s hand as he went down, kicking up just enough light to be confusing. Unclear shapes strove together in its reflected glow: David under his father, and the shadow of the eagle flexing and swelling above them both.

“Shoot it!” Cynthia screamed. “Steve, shoot it, it’s gonna tear his head off—”

Johnny grabbed the barrel of the.30-.06 as Steve brought it up. “No. A gunshot’ll bring the whole works down on top of us.”

The eagle screeched, wings battering Carver’s head.

Ralph tried to fend the bird off with his left hand. It seized one of his fingers in the hook of its beak and tore it off. And then its talons plunged into Ralph Carver’s face like strong fingers into dough.

“DADDY, NO!” David shrieked.

Steve shoved into the tangle of shadows, and when the side of his foot kicked the downed flashlight, Johnny was treated to a better view than he wanted of the bird with Ralph’s head in its grip. Its wings sent furious skirts of dust in mbtion from the floor and the old shaft walls. Ralph’s head wagged wildly from side to side, but his body covered David almost completely.

Steve drew the rifle back, meaning to swing it, and the butt cracked against the wall.

There wasn’t room. He jabbed it forward instead, like a lance. The eagle turned its gimlet gaze on him, talons shifting their grip on Ralph. Its wings were soft thunder in the closed space. Johnny saw Ralph’s finger jutting from the side of its beak. Steve jabbed forward again, this time catching the eagle squarely and knocking the finger out of the beak. Its head was driven back against the wall. Its talons flexed. One drove deeper into Ralph’s face. The other lifted, plunged into his neck, and ripped it open. The bird screamed, per-haps in rage, perhaps in triumph. Mary screamed with it.

“GOD, No!” David howled, his voice cracking. “OH GOD, PLEASE MAKE IT STOP HURTING MY DADDY!”

This is hell, Johnny thought calmly, stepping forward and then kneeling. He seized the talon buried in Ralph’s throat. It was like grabbing some exotically ugly curio which had been upholstered in alligator-hide. He twisted it as hard as he could and heard a brittle tearing sound. Above him, Steve—drove forward with the stock of the.30-.06 again, slamming the eagle’s head against the rock side of the shaft. There was a crunch.

Awing battered down on Johnny’s head. It was like the buzzard in the parking lot all over again. Back to the future, he thought, let go of the talon in favor of the wing, and yanked.

The bird came toward him, squalling its ugly, ear-splitting cry, and Ralph came with it, pulled by the talon still buried in his cheek, temple, and orbit of his left eye. Johnny thought Ralph was either unconscious or already dead. He hoped he was already dead.

David crawled out from under, face dazed, his shirt soaked with his father’s blood. In a moment he would seize the flashlight and plunge deeper into the mine, if they weren’t quick.

“Steve!” Johnny shouted, reaching blindly over his head and encircling the eagle’s back.

It plunged and twisted in his hold like the spine of a bucking bronco. “Steve, finish it!

Finish it!”

Steve drove the stock of the rifle into the bird’s gullet, tilting its shadowy head toward the ceiling. At that moment Mary darted forward. She seized the eagle’s neck and wrung it with bitter efficiency. There was a muffled crack, and suddenly the talon buried in Ralph’s face relaxed. David’s father fell to the floor of the mine, his forehead striking a ribcage and powdering it to dust.

David turned, saw his father lying motionless and face-down. His eyes cleared. He even nodded, as if to say Pretty much what I expected, then bent to pick up the flashlight. It was only when Johnny grabbed him around the waist that his calm broke and he began to struggle.

“Let go!” he screamed. “it’s my job! MiNE!”

“No, David,” Johnny said, holding on for dear life. “It’s not.” He tightened his grip across David’s chest with his left hand, wincing as the boy’s heels printed fresh pain on his shins, and let his right hand slide down to the boy’s hip. From there it moved with a good pickpocket’s unob-trusive speed. Johnny took from David what he had been instructed to take… and left something, too.

“He can’t take them all and then not let me finish! He can’t do that! He can’t!”

Johnny winced as one of David’s feet connected with his left kneecap. “Steve!”

Steve was staring with horrified fascination at the eagle, which was still twitching and slowly fanning one wing. Its talons were red.

“Steve, goddammit!”

He looked up, as if startled out of a dream. Cynthia was kneeling beside Ralph, feeling for a pulse and crying loudly.

“Steve, come here!” Johnny shouted. “Help me!”

Steve came over and grabbed David, who began to struggle even harder.

“No!” David whipped his head from side to side in a frenzy. “No, it’s my job! It’s mine!

He can’t take them all and leave me! Do you hear. HE CAN’T TAKE THEM ALL AND-”

“David! Quit it!”

David stopped struggling and merely hung in Steve’s arms like a puppet with its strings cut. His eyes were red and raw. Johnny thought he had never seen such desola-tion and loss in a human face.

The motorcycle helmet was lying where Johnny had dropped it when the eagle attacked.

He bent, picked it up, and looked at the boy in Steve’s arms. Steve looked the way Johnny felt-sick, lost, bewildered.

“David-” he began, “is God in you.” David asked. “Can you feel him in there, Johnny. Like a hand. Or a fire.”

“Yes,” Johnny said.

“Then you won’t take this wrong.” David spit into his face. It was warm on the skin below Johnny’s eyes, like tears.

Johnny made no effort to wipe away the boy’s spittle. “Listen to me, David. I’m going to tell you something you didn’t learn from your minister or your Bible. For all I know it’s a message from God himself. Are you listening.”

David only looked at him, saying nothing.

“You said ‘God is cruel’ the way a person who’s lived his whole life on Tahiti might say ’snow is cold.’ You knew, but you didn’t understand.” He stepped close to David and put his palms on the boy’s cold cheeks. “Do you know how cruel your God can be, David.

How fantas-tically cruel.”

David waited, saying nothing. Maybe listening, maybe not. Johnny couldn’t tell.

“Sometimes he makes us live.”

Johnny turned, scooped up the flashlight, started down the drift, then turned back once again. “Go to your friend Brian, David. Go to your friend and make him your brother.

Then start telling yourself there was an accident out on the highway, a bad one, a no—brain drunk crossed the centerline, the RV you were in rolled over and only you survived.

It happens all the time. Just read the paper.”

“But that’s not the truth!”

“It might as well be. And when you get back to Ohio or Indiana or wherever it is you hang your hat, pray for God to get you over this. To make you well again. As for now, you’re excused.”

“I’ll never say another… what. What did you say.”

“I said you’re excused.” Johnny was looking at him fixedly. “Excused early.” He turned his head. “Get him out of here, Steven. Get them all out of here.”

“Boss, what-”

“The tour’s over, Tex. Get them into the truck and up the road. If you want to be safe, I’d get going right now Johnny turned and went jogging down into China Shaft the light bobbing ahead of him into the black. Soon that was gone, too.

He tripped over something in spite of the flash—light, almost went sprawling, and slowed to a walk. The Chinese miners had dropped what stuff they had in their frantic, useless rush to escape, and in the end they had dropped themselves, as well. He walked over a littered landscape of bones, powdering them to dust, and moved the light in a steady triangle-left to right, down to the floor, up to the left again-to keep the landscape clear and current in his mind. He saw that the walls fairly jostled with Chinese characters, as if the survivors of the cave-in had succumbed to a sort of writing mania as death first approached and then overtook them.

In addition to the bones, he saw tin cups, ancient picks with rusty heads and funny short handles, small rusty boxes on straps (what David had called ’seners, he imag ined), rotted clothes, deerskin slippers (they were tiny, slippers for infants, one might have thought), and at least three pairs of wooden shoes. One of these held the stub of a candle that might have been dipped the year before Abe Lincoln was elected president.

And everywhere, everywhere scattered among the remains, were can tahs: coyotes with spider-tongues, spt ders with weird albino ratlings poking from their mouths spread—winged bats with obscene baby-tongues (the babies were leering, gnomish). Some depicted night-marish creatures that had never existed on earth, halfling freaks that made Johnny’s eyes hurt. He could feel the can tahs calling to him, pulling him as the moon pulls at salt water. He had sometimes been pulled in that same way by a sudden craving to take a drink or to gobble a sweet dessert or to lick along the smooth velvet lining of a woman’s mouth with his tongue. The can tahs spoke in tones of madness which he recognized from his own past life: sweetly reasonable voices proposing unspeakable acts. But the can tahs would have no power over him unless he stopped and bent and touched them. If he could avoid that-avoid despair that would come disguised as curiosity-he reckoned he would be all right.

Had Steve gotten them out yet. He’d have to hope so, and hope that Steve could manage to get them a good dis-tance away in his trusty truck before the end came. A hell of a bang was coming. He only had the two bags of ANFO hung around his neck on the knotted drawstrings, but that would be plenty, all they had ever needed. It had seemed wiser not to tell the others that, though. Safer.

Now he could hear the soft groaning sound of which David had spoken: the squall and shift of hornfels, as if the very earth were speaking. Protesting his intrusion. And now he could see a dim zigzag of red light up ahead. Hard to tell how far away in the dark. The smell was stronger, too, and clearer: cold ashes. To his left, a skeleton-probably not Chin—ese, judging by its size—knelt against the wall as if it had died praying. Abruptly it turned its head and favored Johnny Marinville with its dead, toothy grin.

— Get out while there’s still time. Tak ah wan. Tak ah lah.

Johnny punted the skull as if it were a football. It disin-tegrated (almost vaporized) into bone-fragments and he hurried on toward the red light, which was coming through a rift in the wall. The hole looked just big enough for him to squeeze through.

He stood outside it, looking into the light, not able to see much from the drift side, hearing David’s voice in his head almost as a trance-subject must hear the voice of the hypnotist who has put him under: 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…

Johnny tossed the flashlight aside-he wouldn’t need it anymore-and squeezed through the gap. As he passed into the an talc, that murmuring elevator-sound they had heard at the entrance to the drift seemed to fill his head with whispering voices… enticing, cajoling, forbidding. All around him, turning the an tak chamber into a fan-tastic hollow column lit in dim scarlet tones, were carved stone faces: wolf and coyote, hawk and eagle, rat and scorpion. From the mouth of each protruded not another animal but an amorphous,

reptilian shape Johnny could barely bring himself to look at… and could not really see, in any case. Was it Tak. The Tak at the bottom of the mi. Did it matter.

How had it gotten Ripton.

If it was stuck dOwn there, exactly how had it gotten Ripton.

He suddenly realized he was crossing the an tak, walking toward the mi. He tried to stop his legs and dis-covered he couldn’t. He tried to imagine Cary Ripton making the same discovery and found it was easy.

Easy.

The long bags of ANFO swung back and forth against his chest. Images danced crazily in his mind: Terry grab-bing his belt-loops and yanking him tight to her belly as he began to come, the best orgasm of his life and it had gone nowhere but into his pants, tell that one to Ernest Hemingway; coming out of the pool at the Bel-Air, laughing, hair plastered to his forehead, holding up the beer-bottle as the cameras flashed; Bill Harris telling him that going across country on his motorcycle might change his life and his whole career… if he was really up to it, that was. Last of all he saw the cop’s empty gray eyes staring at him in the rearview mirror, the cop saying he thought Johnny would shortly come to understand a great deal more about pneuma. soma, and sarx than he had previously.

About that he had been right.

“God, protect me long enough to get this done,” he said, and allowed himself to be drawn toward the mi. Could he stop even if he tried. Best not to know, maybe.

There were dead animals lying in a rotting ring around the hole in the floor-David Carver’s well of the worlds. Coyotes and buzzards, mostly, but he also saw spiders and a few scorpions. He had an idea that these last protec-tors had died when the eagle had died. Some withdrawing force had hammered the life out of them just as the life had been hammered from Audrey Wyler almost as soon as Steve had slapped the can tahs out of her hand.

Now smoke began to rise out of the mi… except it wasn’t smoke at all, not really. It was some sort of greasy brown-black muck, and as it began to curl toward him, Johnny saw it was. alive. It looked like clutching three—fingered hands on the ends of scrawny arms.

They were not ectoplasmic, those arms, but neither were they strictly physical. Like the carved shapes looming above and all around him, looking at them made Johnny’s head hurt, the way a kid’s head hurt when he staggered off some viciously swerving amusement park ride. It was the stuff that had crazed the miners, of course. The stuff that had changed Ripton. The glassless windows of the pirin moh leered at him, telling him…

what, exactly. He could almost hear—(cay de mun) Open your mouth.

And yes, his mouth was open, wide open, like when you go to the dentist. Please open wide, Mr. Marinville, open wide, you lousy contemptible excuse for a writer, you make me furious, you make me sick with rage, but go on, open wide, cay de mun, you fucking grayhaired pre-tentious motherfucker, we’ll fix you up, make you good as new, better than new, open wide open wide cay de mun OPEN WIDE—The smoke. Muck. Whatever it was. Those were no longer hands on the ends of the arms but tubes. No… not tubes…

Holes.

Yes, that was it. Holes like eyes. Three of them. Maybe more, but three he could see clearly. A triangle of holes, two on top and one underneath, holes like whispering eyes,

like blast-holes—That’s right, David said. That’s right, Johnny. To blast Talc right into you, the way it blasted itself into Cary Ripton, the only way it has to get out of the hole it’s in down there, the hole that’s too small for anything but this stuff this jizz, two for your nose and one for your mouth.

The brownish-black muck twisted toward him, both horrible and enticing, holes that were mouths, mouths that were eyes. Eyes that whispered. Promised. He realized he had an erection. Not exactly a great time for one, but when had that ever stopped him.

Now… sucking… he could feel them sucking the air out of his mouth… his t—oat…

He snapped his mouth shut and yanked the motorcycle helmet down over his head. He was just in time. A moment later the brownish ribbons encountered the plexi face-shield and spread over it with an unpleasant wet smooching sound. For a moment he could see spreading suckers like kissing lips, and then they were gone, lost in filthy smears of brown particulate matter.

Johnny reached out, seized the brown stuff floating before him, and twisted it in opposite directions, as if he were wringing out a facecloth. There was a needling sen-sation in his palms and fingers, and the flesh went numb but the brown stuff tore away, some of it drawing back toward the mi, some dripping to the chamber’s floor.

He reached the edge of the hole, standing between a heap of feathers that had been a buzzard and a coyote lying dead on its side. He looked down, reaching up to touch the hanging bags of ANFO as he did, caressing them with tingling, half-numb hands.

Do you know how to set this shit off without dyno or blasting caps. Steve had asked. You do, don’t you. Or you think you do.

“I hope I do,” Johnny said. His voice was flat and strange inside the helmet. “I hope I-”

“THEN COME ON!” a mad voice cried out from below him. Johnny recoiled in terror and surprise. It was the voice of the cop. Of Collie Entragian. “COME ON! TAK AH SM! PIRIN MOH! COME ON, YOU ROTTEN COCKSUCKER! LET’s SEE HOW BRAVE YOU ARE! TAK!”

He tried to take a step backward, maybe think this over, but tendrils of muck curled around his ankles like hands and jerked his feet out from under him. He went into the well in a graceless feet-first dive, hammering the back of his head against the edge as he fell. If not for the helmet, his skull would likely have been crushed in. He curled the bags of ANFO protectively against his chest, making breasts of them.

Then the pain came, first biting, then searing, then seeming to eat him alive. The Mi was funnel-shaped, but the descending, narrowing circle was lined with crystal outcrops of quartz and cracked hornfels. Johnny slid down this like a kid down a slide that has grown crooked glass thorns. His legs were protected to some degree by the leather chaps and his head was protected by the motorcycle helmet, but his back and buttocks were shredded in moments. He put down his forearms in an effort to brake his slide. Needles of stone tore through them. He saw his shirt-sleeves turn red; an instant later they were in ribbons.

“YOU UKE THAT.” the voice from the bottom of the mi gibed, and now it was Ellen Carver’s voice. “TAK AH LAH, YOU INTERFERING BASTARD! EN TOW! TEN AH LAK!” Raving.

Cursing him in two languages.

Insane in any dimension, Johnny thought, and laughed in his agony. He lurched forward, meaning to somersault or die trying. Time to tenderize the other side, he thought, and laughed harder than ever. He could feel blood pouring into his boots like warm water.

The brown-black vapor was all around him, whispering and smearing gaping sucker—mouths across the helmet’s faceplate. They appeared, disappeared, then appeared again, rubbing and making those low, suggestive smooch-ing sounds. He couldn’t get off his back the way he wanted to, couldn’t somersault. The angle of descent was too steep. He turned over on his side instead, clutching at the crystal outcrops that were tearing him open, slashing his hands and not caring, needing to stop himself before he was literally cut to ribbons.

Then, suddenly, it was over.

He lay folded at the bottom of the funnel, bleeding everywhere, it felt like, his slit nerves trying to drown out all rational thought with their mindless screaming. He looked up and saw a wide swath of blood marking his path down the inclined, curving wall. Strips of cloth and leather-his shirt, his Levi’s, his chaps-hung from some of the jutting crystals.

Smoke curling up between his legs, coming from the hole at the bottom of the funnel and trying to seize his crotch.

“Let go,” he said. “My God commands it.”

The brownish-black smoke fell back, curling around his thighs in filthy banners.

“I can let you live,” a voice said. It was no wonder, Johnny thought, that Tak was caught on the other side of the funnel. The hole to which it narrowed was stringent, no more than an inch across. Red light pulsed in it like a wink. “I can heal you, make you well, let you live.”

“Yeah, but can you win me a goddam Nobel Prize for Literature.”

Johnny slipped the bags of ANFO off his neck, then yanked the hammer from his belt.

He’d have to work fast. He was cut in what felt like a billion places, and already he could feel the grayness of blood-loss crowding in on his mind. It made him think of Connecticut again, and the way the fogs came in after dark during the last weeks of March and the first weeks of April. The oldtimers called it strawberry spring, God knew why.

“Yes! Yes, I can do that!” The voice from the narrow red throat sounded eager. It also sounded frightened. “Anything! Success… money… women… and I can heal you, don’t forget that! I can heal you!”

“Can you bring David’s father back.”

Silence from the mi. Now the brownish-black mist coming out of the hole found the long confusion of slashes along his back and legs, and suddenly he felt as if he had been attacked by moray eels… or piranhas. He screamed.

“I can make the pain stop!” Talc said from its tiny hole. “All you have to do is ask-and stop yourself, of course.”

With sweat stinging his eyes, Johnny used the claw end of the hammer to tear open one of the ANFO bags. He tilted the slit over the tiny hole, spread the cloth, and poured through one cupped, bloody hand. The red light was obliterated at once, as if the thing down there feared it might inadvertently set off the charge itself.

“You can’t!” it screamed, its voice muffled now-. but Johnny heard it clearly enough in his head, just the same. “You can’t, damn you! An lab! An lab! Os dam! You bastard!”

An lah yourself Johnny thought. And a big fat can de lach in the bargain.

The first bag was empty. Johnny could see dim white-ness in the hole where there had been only black and pulsing red before. The gullet leading back to Tak’s world or plane… or dimension… wasn’t that long, then. Not in physical terms of measurement.

And was the pain in his back and legs less.

Maybe I’ve just gone numb, he thought. Not a new state for me, actually.

He grabbed the second bag of ANFO and saw one entire side of it was sopped through with his blood. He felt a growing weakness to go along with the fog in his head. Had to be quick now. Had to go like the wind.

He tore open the second bag with the hammer’s claw, trying to steel himself against the shrieks in his head; Talc had lapsed entirely into that other language now.

He turned the bag over the hole and watched ANFO pellets pour out. The whiteness grew brighter as the gullet filled. By the time the bag was empty, the top layer of pel-lets was only three inches or so down.

Just room enough, Johnny thought.

He became aware that a stillness had fallen here in the well, and in the an tak above; there was only that faint whispering, which could have been the calling of ghosts that had been penned up in here ever since the twenty-first of September, 1859.

If so, he intended to give them their parole.

He fumbled in the pocket of his chaps for what seemed an age, fighting the fog that wanted to blur his thoughts, fighting his own growing weakness. At last his fingers touched something, slipped away, came back, touched it again, grasped it, brought it out.

Afat green shotgun shell.

Johnny slipped it into the eyehole at the bottom of the mi, and wasn’t surprised to find it was a perfect fit, its blunt circular top seated firmly against the ANFO pellets.

“You’re primed, you bastard,” he croaked.

No, a voice whispered in his head. No, you dare not.

Johnny looked at the brass circlet plugging the hole at the bottom of the mi. He gripped the handle of the hammer, his strength flagging badly now, and thought of what the cop had told him just before he stuck him in the back of the cruiser. You ’re a sorry excuse for a writer, the cop had said. You’re a sorry excuse for a man, too.

Johnny shoved the helmet off with the heel of his free left hand. He was laughing again as he raised the hammer high above his head, and laughing as he brought it down squarely on the base of the shell.

“GOD FORGIVE ME, I HATE CRITICS!”

He had one fraction of a moment to wonder if he had succeeded, and then the question was answered in a bloom of brilliant, soundless red. It was like swooning into a rose.

Johnny Marinville let himself fall, and his last thoughts were of David-had David gotten out, had David gotten clear, was he all right now, would he be all right later.

Excused early, Johnny thought, and then that was gone, too.

PART V

HIGHWAY 50: EXCUSED EARLY There were dead animals lying in a rough ring around the truck-buzzards and coyotes, mostly-but Steve barely noticed them. He was all but eaten alive with a need to get out of here. The steep sides of the China Pit seemed to loom over him like the sides of an open grave. He reached the truck a little ahead of the others (Cynthia and Mary were flanking David, each of them holding one of the boy’s arms, although be did not seem to be stag-gering) and tore open the passenger door.

“Steve, what-” Cynthia began.

“Get in! Ask questions later!” He butt-boosted her up into the seat. “Push over! Make room!”

She did. Steve turned to David. “Are you going to be a problem.”

David shook his head His eyes were dull and apathetic, but that didn’t completely convince Steve. The boy was nothing if not resourceful; he had proved that before he and Cynthia ever met him.

He boosted David into the truck, then looked at Mary. “Get in. We’ll have to bundle a little, but if we’re not friends by now-”

She scrambled into the cab and closed the door as Steve hurried around the front of the truck, stepping on a buz-zard as he went. It was like stepping on a pillowcase stuffed with bones.

How long had the boss been gone. A minute. Two. He had no idea. Any sense of time he might once have had was completely shot. He swung into the driver’s seat, and allowed himself just one moment to wonder what they’d do if the engine wouldn’t start.

The answer, nothing, came at once. He nodded at it, turned the key, and the engine roared to life. No suspense there, thank God. A second later they were rolling.

He turned the Ryder truck in a big circle, skirting the heavy machinery, the powder magazine, and the field office. Between these latter two buildings was the dusty police—cruiser, driver’s door open, front-seat area plas-tered with Collie Entragian’s blood.

Looking at it-into it-made Steve feel cold and a little dizzy, the way he felt when he looked down from a tall building.

“Fuck you,” Mary said softly, turning to look back at the car. “Fuck you. And I hope you hear me.”

They hit a bump and the truck rattled terrifically. Steve flew up and off the seat, his thighs biting into the bottom arc of the steering wheel, his head bumping the ceiling. He heard a muffled clatter as the stuff in the back flew around. The boss’s stuff, mostly.

“Hey,” Cynthia said nervously. “Don’t you think you got the hammer a little too far down for rocktop, big boy.”

“No,” Steve said. He looked into the mirror outside his window as they began tearing up the gravel road which led to the rim of the pit. It was the drift opening he was looking for, but he couldn’t see it-it was on the other side of the truck.

About halfway to the rim they hit another bump, a bigger one, and the truck actually seemed to leave the road for an instant or two. The headlights corkscrewed, then dipped as the truck dove deep on its springs. Both Mary and Cynthia screamed. David did not; he sat crooked between them, a lifesized doll half on the seat and half on Mary’s lap.

“Slow down!” Mary screamed. “If you go off the road we’ll go all the way to the bottom!

SLOW DOWN, YOU ASSHOLE!”

“No,” he repeated, not bothering to add that going off this road, which was as wide as a California freeway, was the least of his worries. He could see the pit-rim ahead. The sky above it was now a dark, brightening violet instead of black.

He looked past the others and into the mirror outside the passenger window, searching for the dark mouth of the tunnel in the darker well of the China Pit, can tak in can tah, and then didn’t have to bother. A square of white light too brilliant to look at suddenly lit up the pit-floor. It lashed out of the China Shaft like a burning fist and filled the cab of the truck with savage brilliance.

“Jesus, what’s that.” Mary screamed, throwing a hand up to shield her eyes.

“The boss,” Steve said softly.

Aheavy thud seemed to run directly beneath them, a muffled battering-ram of sound. The truck began to shiver like a frightened dog. Steve heard broken rock and gravel begin to slide. He looked out his window and saw, in the dying glare of the blast, black nets of PVC pipe-emitters and distribution heads-sliding down the pit-face. The porphyry was in motion. China Pit was falling in on itself.

“Oh my God, we’re gonna be buried alive,” Cynthia moaned.

“Well, let’s see,” Steve said. “Hang on.”

He jammed the gas-pedal to the floor-it didn’t have far to go, either-and the truck’s engine responded with an angry scream. Almost there, honey, he thought at it.

Almost there, come on, work with me, beautiful, be there for me—That battering-ram rumble went on and on beneath them, seeming at one moment to fade, then coming back like a wave-form. As they reached the rim of the pit, Steve saw a boulder the size of a gas station go bouncing down the slope on their right. And, more ominous than the rumble from below them, he heard a growing whisper from directly beneath them. It was, Steve knew, the gravel surface of the road. The truck was northbound; the road was headed south. In only a few moments it would collapse down into the pit like a dropped carpet-runner.

“Run, you bitch!” he screamed, pounding on the wheel with his left fist. “Run for me!

Now! Now!”

The Ryder truck surged over the rim of the pit like a clumsy yellownosed dinosaur. For a moment the issue was still in doubt, as the crumbled earth under the rear wheels ran out and the truck wallowed first sideways and then backward.

“Go!” Cynthia screamed. She sat forward, clutching the dashboard. “Oh please go! For God’s sake get us out of h-”

She was thrown back in the seat as the wheels found purchase again. Just enough. For a moment the headlights went on stabbing at the lightening sky, and then they were rushing across the rim, headed north. From behind them, out of the pit, rose an endless flume of dust, as if the ear-lier freak storm had started up all over again, only con-fined to.this one location. It rose in the sky like a pyre.

The trip down the north side of the embankment was less adventurous. By the time thcy were running across the two miles of desert between the pit and the town, the sky in the east was a bright salmon-pink. And, as they passed the bodega with the fallen sign, the sun’s upper arc broke over the horizon.

Steve jammed on the brakes just past the bodega, at the south end of Desperation’s Main Street.

“Holy shit,” Cynthia murmured in a low voice.

“Mother Machree,” Mary said, and put a hand to her temple, as if her head hurt.

Steve could say nothing at all.

Until now he and Cynthia had only seen Desperation in the dark, or through veils of blowing sand, and what they had seen had been glimpsed in frantic little snatches, their perceptions honed to a narrow focus by the mortal sim-plicities of survival. When you were trying to stay alive, you just saw what you had to see; the rest went by the board.

Now, however, he was seeing it all.

The wide street was empty except for one lazily blowing tumbleweed. The sidewalks were drifted deep with sand-drifted completely under in places. Broken windowglass twinkled here and there. Trash had blown everywhere. Signs had fallen down. Powerlines lay snarled in the street like broken distributor beads. And The American West’s marquee now lay in the street like a grand old yacht that has finally gone on the rocks. The one remaining letter-a large black R-had finally fallen off.

And everywhere there were dead animals, as if some lethal chemical spill had taken place. He saw scores of coyotes, and from the doorway of Bud’s Suds there ran a long, curving pigtail of dead rats, some half-covered with the sand skirling about in a light morning breeze. Dead scorpions lay on the fallen leprechaun weathervane. They looked to Steve like shipwreck survivors who had died badly on a barren island. Buzzards lay in the Street and on the roofs like dropped heaps of soot.

“And thou shalt set bounds unto the people round about,” David said. His voice was dead, expressionless. “And you shall say, ‘Take heed to yourselves that you go not up into the mount.’”

Steve looked into his rearview mirror, saw the embank—ment of the China Pit looming against the brightening sky, saw the dust still pouring out of its sterile caldera, and shuddered.

“‘Go not up into the mount, or touch the border of at whosoever toucheth the mount shall be surely put to death: There shall not be a band touch it, but he shall surely be stoned or shot through. Whether it be beast or man, it shall not live.’ “The boy looked up at Mary, and his face began to shiver apart and become human. His eyes filled with tears.

“David-” she began.

“I’m alone. Do you get it. We came upon the mountain and God slaughtered them all.

My family. Now I’m alone.”

She put her arms around him and pressed his face against her.

“Say, Chief,” Cynthia said, and put a hand on Steve s arm. “Let’s blow this shithole of a town and find us a cold beer, what do you say.”

Highway 50 agaIn.

“Down thisway,” Mary said. ‘We’re close now.”

They had passed the Carvers’ RV. David bad turned his face against Mary’s breasts again as they approached it, and she put her arms around his head and held him. For almost five minutes he didn’t move, didn’t even seem to breathe. The only way she could tell for sure that he was alive was by the feel of his tears, slow and hot, wetting her shirt—In a way she was glad to feel them, thought them a good sign.

The storm had also struck the highway, she saw; sand covered it completely in places, and Steve had to wallow the Ryder truck through several drifts in low gear.

“Would they have closed it.” Cynthia asked Steve once. “The cops. Nevada Public Works. Whatever.”

He shook his head. “Probably not. But you can bet there wasn’t much of anyone out last night-lots of inter-state truckers holed up in Ely and Austin.”

“There it is!” Mary cried, and pointed at a sunstar twin-kling about a mile ahead of them.

Three minutes later they were pulling up to Deirdre’s Acura. “Do you want to come in the car with me, David.” she asked. “Assuming the damned thing will even start, that is.”

David shrugged.

“The cop let you keep your keys.” Cynthia asked.

“No, but if I’m lucky…

She hopped out of the truck, landed in a loose dune of sand, and made her way to the car.

Looking at it brought Peter back in a rush-Peter, who had been so goddamned, absurdly proud of his James Dickey monograph, never guessing that the planned follow-up wasn’t going to happen…

The car doubled in her sight, then blurred into prisms.

Chest hitching, she wiped an arm across her eyes, then knelt and felt around under the front bumper. At first she couldn’t find what she was looking for and it all seemed like too much. Why did she want to follow the Ryder truck to Austin in this car, anyway.

Surrounded by memories. By Peter.

She laid her cheek against the bumper-soon it would be too hot to touch, but for now it was still night-cool—and let herself cry.

She felt a hand touch hers, tentatively, and looked around. David was standing there, his gaunt, too-old face hanging over a slim boy’s chest in a bloodstained baseball tee-shirt.

He looked at her solemnly, not quite holding her hand but touching her fingers with his, as if he would like to hold it.

“What’s wrong, Mary.”

“I can’t find the little box,” she said, and pulled in a large, watery sniff. “The little magnetic box with the spare key in it. It was under the front bumper, but I guess it must have fallen off. Or maybe the boys who took our license plate took that, too.” Her mouth twisted and she began to cry again.

He dropped to his knees beside her, wincing as some thing pulled in his back. She saw, even through her tears, the bruises on his throat where Audrey had tried to choke him—ugly black-purple blotches like thunderheads.

“Shhh, Mary,” he said, and felt along the inside of the bumper with his own hand. She could hear his fingers fluttering in that darkness, and suddenly wanted to cry out: Be careful! There might be spiders! Spiders!

Then he showed her a small gray box. “Give it a shot why don’t you. if it doesn’t start He shrugged to show it didn’t matter much, one way or the other-there was always the truck.

Yes, always the truck. Except Peter had never ridden in the truck, and maybe she did want the smell of him a little longer. The feel of him. That’s a nice set of cantaloupes, ma ‘am, he’d said, and then touched her breast.

The memory of his smell, his touch, his voice. The glasses he wore when he drove. Those things would hurt, but—“Yeah, I’ll come with you,” David said. They were kneeling in front of Deirdre Finney’s car, facing each other that way. “If it starts, that is. And if you want.”

“Yes,” she said. “I do want.”

Steve and Cynthia joined them, helped them to their feet.

“I feel like I’m a hundred and eight,” Mary said. “Don’t worry, you don’t look a day over eighty-nine Steve said, and smiled when she made as if to pop him one. “Do you really want to try making Austin in that little car. What if it gets stuck in the sand.”

“One thing at a time. We’re not even sure it’ll start, are we, David.”

“No,”’david said in a kind of sigh. He was going away from her again, Mary could feel it, but she didn’t know what to do about it. He stood with his head bent, looking at the Acura’ s grille as if all the secrets of life and death were there, the emotion draining out of his face again, leaving it distant and thoughtful. One hand was wrapped loosely around the gray metal Magna—Cube with the spare key in it.

“If it does start, we’ll caravan,” she told Steve. “Me behind you. If I get stuck, we’ll hop into the truck. I don’t think we will, though. It isn’t such a bad car, actually. If my goddamned sister-in-law just hadn’t used it as a dope—stash…” Her voice trembled and she closed her lips tightly.

“I don’t think we’ll have to go far to get in the clear,” David said without looking up from the Acura’s grille. ‘Thirty miles. Forty. Then open road.”

Mary smiled at him. “I hope you’re right.”

“There’s a slightly more important question,” Cynthia said. “What are we going to tell the police about all this. The real police, I mean.”

No one said anything for a moment. Then David, still looking at the grille of the Acura, said: “The front part. Let them figure out the rest for themselves.”

“I don’t get you,” Mary said. She actually thought she did, but wanted to keep him talking. Wanted him out here with the rest of them mentally as well as physically.

“I’ll tell about how we had flat tires and the bad cop took us back to town. How he got us to go with him by saying there was a guy out in the desert with a rifle. Mary, you tell about how he stopped you and Peter. Steve, you tell about how you were looking for Johnny and Johnny phoned you. I’ll say how we escaped after he took my mother away.

How we went to the theater. How we called you on the phone, Steve. Then you can tell how you came to the theater, too. And that’s where we were all night. In the theater.”

“We never went up to the pit at all,” Steve mused. Testing it. Tasting it.

David nodded. The bruises on his throat glared in the strengthening sun. Already the day was beginning to grow hot. “Right,” he said.

“And-sorry, David, I have to-your dad. What about him.”

“Went looking for my mom. He wanted me tos—y with you guys in the theater, so I did.”

“We never saw anything,” Cynthia said.

“No. Not really.” He opened the Magna-Cube, took out the key inside, gave it to Mary.

“Why don’t you try the engine.”

“In a sec. What are the authorities going to think about what they do find. All the dead people and dead animals. And what will they say. What will they give out.”

Steve said: “There are people who believe a flying saucer crashed not too far from here, back in the forties. — Did you know that.”

She shook her head.

“In Roswell, New Mexico. According to the story, there were even survivors. Astronauts from another 2 world. I don’t know if any of it’s true, but it might be. The evidence suggests that something pretty outrageous hap-pened in Roswell. The government covered it up, what—L ever it was. The same way they’ll cover this up.”

Cynthia punched his arm. “Pretty paranoid, cookie.” He shrugged. “As to what they’ll think… poison gas, maybe. Some weird shit that belched out of a pocket in the earth and made people crazy. And that’s not so far wrong, is it. Really.”

“No,” Mary said. “I think the most important thing is that we all tell the same story, just the way that David out-lined it.”

Cynthia shrugged, and a ghost of her old pert who-gives-a-shit look came over her face.

“Like if we break down and tell them what really happened they’re going to believe us, right.”

“Maybe they wouldn’t,” Steve said, “but if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not spend the next six weeks taking polygraph tests and looking at inkblots when I could spend them looking at your exotic and mysterious face.”

She punched his arm again. A little harder this time She caught David watching this byplay and nodded to him. “You think I got a mysterious and exotic face.”

David turned away, studied the mountains to the north. Mary went around to the driver’s door of the Acura and opebed it, reminding herself she’d have to pull the seat up before she could drive-Peter had been a foot taller than she. The glovebox was open from when she’d been pawing around in it for the registration, but surely a bulb as small as the one in there couldn’t draw more than a trickle of juice, could it. Well, it wasn’t exactly life and death in any—“Oh my Lord,”

Steve said in a soft, strengthless voice.

“Oh my dear Lord, look.”

She turned. On the horizon, looking small at this dis-tance, was the north face of the China Pit embankment. Above it was a gigantic cloud of dark gray dust. It hung in the sky, still connected to the pit by a hazy umbilicus of rising dust and powdered earth: the remains of a mountain rising into the sky like poisoned ground after a nuclear blast. It made the shape of a wolf, its tail pointing toward the newly risen sun, its grotesquely elongated snout pointed west, where the night was still draining sullenly from the sky.

The snout hung open. Protruding from it was a strange shape, amorphous but somehow reptilian. There was something of the scorpion in that shape, and of the lizard as well.

Can tak, can tah.

Mary screamed through raised hands. Looked up at the shape in the sky, eyes bulging over her dirty fingers, head shaking from side to side in a useless gesture of negation.

“Stop,” David said, and put his arm around her waist. “Stop, Mary. It can’t hurt us. And it’s going away already. See.”

It was true. The hide of the skywolf was tearing open in some places, appearing to melt in others, letting the sun shine through in long, golden rays that were both beau-tiful and somehow comical-the sort of shot you expected to see at the end of a Bible epic.

“I think we ought to go,” Steve said at last.

“I think we never should have come in the first place,” Mary said faintly, and got into the car. Already she could smell the aroma of her dead husband’s aftershave.

David stood watching as she pulled the seat forward and slipped the key into the ignition. He felt distant from himself, a creature floating in space somewhere between a dark star and a light one. He thought of sitting at the kitchen table back home, sitting there. and playing slap-jacks with Pie. He thought he would see Steve and Mary and Cynthia, nice as they were, dead and in hell for just one more game of Slap-jacks in the kitchen with her-Pie with a glass of Cranapple juice, him with a Pepsi, both of them giggling like mad. He would see him-self in hell, for that matter. How far could it be, after all, from Desperation.

Mary turned the key in the ignition. The engine cranked briskly and started almost at once. She grinned and clapped her hands.

“David. Ready to go.”

“Sure. I guess.”

“Hey.” Cynthia put a hand on the back of his neck. “You all right, my man.”

He nodded, not looking up.

Cynthia bent over and kissed his cheek. “You have to fight it,” she whispered in his ear.

“You have to fight it, you know.”

“I’ll try,” he said, but the days and weeks and months ahead looked impossible to him.

Go to your friend Brian, Johnny had said. Go to your friend and make him your brother.

And that might be a place to start, yes, but after that.

There were holes in him that cried out in pain, and would go on crying out for so much of the future. One for his mother, one for his father, one for his sister. Holes like faces.

Holes like eyes.

In the sky, the wolf had gone except for a paw and what might have been-perhaps-the tip of a tail. Of the rep-tilian thing in its mouth there was no sign.

“We beat you,” David whispered, starting around to the passenger side of the car. “We beat you, you son of a bitch, there’s that.”

Tak, whispered a smiling, patient voice far back in his mind. Tak ah lah. Tak ah wan.

He turned his mind and heart from it with an effort.

Go to your friend and make him your brother.

Maybe. But Austin first. With Mary and Steve and Cynthia. He intended to stay with them as long as pos-sible. They, at least, could understand… and in a way no one else would ever be able to. They had been in the pit together.

As he reached the passenger-side door, he closed the small metal box and slipped it absently into his pocket. He stopped suddenly, free band frozen in midair as it reached for the doorhandle.

Something was gone; the shotgun shell.

Something bad been put in its place: a piece of stiff paper.

“David.” Steve called from the open window of the truck. “Something wrong.”

He shook his head, opening the car door with one hand and taking the folded paper from his pocket with the other. It was blue. And there was something familiar about it, although he couldn’t remember having a paper like this in his pocket yesterday. There was a ragged hole in it, as if it had been punched onto something. As if—Leave your pass.

It was the last thing the voice had said on that day last fall when he had prayed for God to make Brian better. He hadn’t understood, but he had obeyed, had hung the blue pass on a nailhead. The next time he’d shown up at the Viet Cong Lookout-a week later. two.-it had been gone. Taken by some kid who wanted to write down a girl’s telephone number, maybe, or blown off by the wind. Except… here it was.

All I want is lovin’, all I need is lovin”.

Felix Cavaliere on vocal, most severely cool.

No, he thought. This can’t be.

“David.” Mary. Far away. “David, what is it.”

Can’t be, he thought again, but when he unfolded it, the words printed at the top were completely familiar:

WEST WENTWORTH MIDDLE SCHOOL 100 Viland Avenue Then, in big black tabloid type:

EXCUSED EARLY

And, last of all:

Parent of excused student must sign this pass.

Pass must be returned to attendance office.

Except now there was more. A brief scrawled message below the last line of printing.

Something moved inside him. Some huge thing. His throat closed up, then opened to let out a long, wailing cry that was only grief at the top. He swayed, clutching at the Acura’s roof, lowered his forehead to his arm, and began to sob. From some great distance be heard the truck doors opening, heard Steve and Cynthia racing toward him. He wept. He thought of Pie, holding her doll and smiling up at him. He thought of his mother, dancing to the radio in the laundry room with the iron in one hand, laughing at her own foolishness. He thought of his father, sitting on the porch with his feet cocked up on the rail, a book in one hand and a beer in the other, waving to him as he came home from Brian’s, pushing his bike up the drive-way toward the garage in the thick twilight. He thought of how much he had loved them, how much he would always love them.

And Johnny. Johnny standing on the dark edge of the China Shaft, saying Sometimes he makes us live.

David wept with his head down and the EXCUSED EARLY pass now crumpled in his closed fist, that huge thing still moving inside him, something like a landslide… but maybe not so bad.

Maybe, in the end, not so bad.

“David.” It was Steve, shaking him. “David!”

“I’m all right,” he said, raising his head and wiping his eyes with a shaking hand.

“What happened.”

“Nothing. I’m okay. Go on. We’ll follow you.” Cynthia was looking at him doubtfully.

“Sure.” He nodded.

They went back, looking over their shoulders at him.

David was able to wave. Then he got into the Acura and closed the door.

“What was it.” Mary asked. “What did you find.”

She reached for the folded piece of stiff blue paper, but David held it in his own hand for the time being. “Do you remember when the cop threw you into the holding area where we were.” he asked. “How you went for the gun.”

“I’ll never forget it.”

“While you were fighting with him, a shotgun shell fell off the desk and rolled over to me. When I had a chance, I picked it up. Johnny must have stolen it out of my pocket when he was hanging onto me. In the mineshaft. After my dad was killed. Johnny used the shell to set off the ANFO. And when he took it out of my pocket, he put this in.”

“Put what in. What is it.”

“It’s an EXCUSED EARLY pass from my school back in Ohio. Last fall I poked it on a nail in a tree and left it there.”

“A tree back in Ohio. Last fall.” She was looking at him thoughtfully, her eyes very large and still. “Lastfall!”

“Yes. So I don’t know where he got it… and I don’t know where he had it. When he was in the powder maga-zine, I made him empty out all his pockets. I was afraid he might have picked up one of the can tahs. He didn’t have it then. He stripped right down to his underwear, and he didn’t have it then.”

“Oh, David,” she said.

He nodded and handed the blue pass over to her. “Steve will know if this is his handwriting,” he said. “I bet you a million dollars it is.”

David—Stay ahead of the mummy IJohn 4/8 Remember!

She read the scrawled message, her lips moving. “I’d bet a million of my own that it’s his, if I had a million,”

she said. “Do you understand the reference, David.”

David took the blue pass. “Of course. First John, chapter four, verse eight. ‘God is love.’”

She looked at him for a long time. “Is he, David. Is he love.”

“Oh, yes,” David said. He folded the pass along its crease. “I guess he’s sort of…

everything.”

Cynthia waved. Mary waved back and gave her a thumbs-up. Steve pulled out and Mary followed him, the Acura’s wheels rolling reluctantly through the first ridge of sand and then picking up speed.

David put his head back against the seat, closed his eyes, and began to pray.

Bangor, Maine November 1, 1994—December 5, 1995