Dragon Tears

1

Now they know.

He is a good dog, good dog, good.

They are all together now. The woman and the boy, the stinky man, the not-so-stinky man, and the woman without a boy. All of them smelling of the touch of the thing-that-will-kill-you, which is why he knew they had to be together.

They know it, too. They know why they are together. They stand in front of the people food place, talking to each other, talking fast, all excited, sometimes all talking at once, while the women and the boy and the not-so-stinky man are always sure to keep the stinky man up-wind from them.

They keep stooping down to pet him and scratch behind his ears and tell him he’s a good dog, good, and they say other nice things about him that he can’t really understand. This is the best. It is so good to be petted and scratched and liked by people who will, he is pretty sure, not set his fur on fire, and by people who do not have any cat smell on them, none.

Once, long after the little girl who called him Prince, there were some people who took him into their place and fed him and were nice to him, called him Max, but they had a cat. Big cat. Mean. The cat was called Fluffy. Max was nice to Fluffy. Max never once chased Fluffy. In those days Max never chased cats. Well, hardly ever. Some cats, he liked. But Fluffy did not like Max and did not want Max in the people place, so sometimes Fluffy stole Max’s food, and other times Fluffy peed in Max’s water bowl. During the day when the nice people were gone from their place to some other place, Max and Fluffy were left alone, and Fluffy would screech, all crazy and spitting, and scare Max and chase him around the place. Or jump off high things onto Max. Big cat. Screeching. Spitting. Crazy. So Max understood that it was Fluffy’s place, not Max’s and Fluffy’s place, just Fluffy’s, so he went away from the nice people and was just Fella again.

Ever since, he worries that when he finds nice people who want to take him into their place and feed him forever, they will have cat smell on them, and when he goes to their place with them and walks in the door with them, there will be Fluffy. Big. Mean. Crazy.

So now it is nice that none of these people has any cat smell, because if one of them wants to be a family with him, he will be safe, and he won’t have to worry about pee in his water bowl.

After a while, they are so excited talking to each other that they aren’t petting him so much and saying how good he is, so he gets bored. Yawns. Lies down. Might sleep. He is tired. Busy day, being a good dog.

But then he sees the people in the food place, looking out the windows of the food place. Interesting. At the windows, looking out. Looking at him.

Maybe they think he is cute.

Maybe they want to give him food.

Why wouldn’t they want to give him food?

So he gets up and pads to the food place. Head high. Prance a little. Wag the tail. They like that.

At the door, he waits. Nobody opens it. He puts one paw on it. Waits. Nobody. He scratches. Nobody.

He goes out where the people at the window can see him. He wags his tail. He tilts his head, pricks up one ear. They see him. He knows they see him.

He goes to the door again. Waits. Waits.

Waits.

Scratches. Nobody.

Maybe they don’t know he wants food. Or maybe they’re scared of him, think he’s a bad dog. He doesn’t look like a bad dog. How could they be scared? Don’t they know when to be scared, when not? He would never jump off high places on top of them or pee in their water bowls. Stupid people. Stupid.

Finally he decides he’s not going to get any food, so he goes back to the nice people he brought together. On his way he keeps his head up, prances, wags his tail, just to show the people at the window what they’re missing.

When he gets back to the women and the boy and the stinky man and the not-so-stinky man, something is wrong. He can feel it and smell it.

They are scared. This is not new. They have all been scared since he first smelled each of them. But this is a different scared. Worse scared.

And they have a little trace of the just-lie-down-and-die smell. Animals get that smell sometimes, when they’re old, when they’re very tired and sick. People, not so often. Though he knows a place where people have that smell. He was there earlier in the night with the woman and the boy.

Interesting.

But bad interesting.

He is worried that these nice people have even a little bit of the just-lie-down-and-die smell. What is wrong with them? Not sick. Maybe the stinky man, sick a little, but not the rest of them. Not old, either.

Their voices are different, too. A little excited, not so much as before. Tired, a little. Sad, a little. Something else… What? Something. What? What?

He sniffs around their feet, one at a time, sniffs sniffs sniffs sniffs, even the stinky man, and suddenly he knows what’s wrong with them, and he can’t believe it, can’t.

He is amazed. Amazed. He backs away, looks at them, amazed. All of them have the special smell that says do-I-chase-it-or-does-it-chase-me? — do-I-run-or-do-I-fight? — am-I-hungry-enough-to-dig-something-out-of-its-hole-and-eat-it-or-should-I-wait-and-see-if-people-will-give-me-something-good? It is the smell of not knowing what to do, which is sometimes a different kind of fear smell. Like now. They are afraid of the thing-that-will-kill-you, but they are also afraid because they don’t know what to do next.

He is amazed because he knows what to do next, and he is not even a people. But sometimes they can be so slow, people. All right. He will show them what to do next. He barks, and of course they all look at him because he’s not a dog that barks much.

He barks again, then runs past them, downhill, runs, runs, and then stops and looks back and barks again. They stare at him. He is amazed.

He runs back to them, barks, turns, runs downhill again, runs, runs, stops, looks back, barks again.

They’re talking. Looking at him and talking. Like maybe they get it.

So he runs a little farther, turns, looks back, barks. They’re excited. They get it. Amazing.

2

They did not know how far the dog was going to lead them, and they were agreed that the five of them would be too conspicuous on foot, as a group, at almost two o’clock in the morning. They decided to see if Woofer would be as eager to run ahead and lead the van as he was to lead them on foot, because in the vehicle they would be considerably less of a spectacle.

Janet helped Detective Gulliver and Detective Lyon quickly take the Christmas-tree lights off the van. They were attached with metal clips in some places and with pieces of masking tape in others.

It seemed doubtful that the dog was going to lead them directly to the person they were calling Ticktock. Just in case, however, it made a lot of sense not to draw attention to themselves with strings of red and green lights.

While they worked, Sammy Shamroe followed them around the Ford, telling them, not for the first time, that he had been a fool and a fallen man, but that he was going to turn over a new leaf after this. It seemed important to him that they believe he was sincere in making a commitment to a new life — as if he needed other people to believe it before he would be convinced himself.

“I never really thought I had anything the world really needed,” Sammy said, “thought I was pretty much worthless, just a hype artist, smooth talker, empty inside, but now here I am saving the world from an alien. Okay, not an alien, actually, and not saving the world all by myself, but helping to save it damn sure enough.”

Janet was still astonished by what Woofer had done. No one was quite sure how he knew that the five of them were living under the same bizarre threat or that it would be useful for them to be brought together. Everyone knew that animals’ senses were in some respects weaker than those of human beings but in many respects stronger, and that beyond the usual five senses they might have others that were difficult to understand. But after this, she would never look at another dog — or any animal, for that matter — in quite the same way that she had regarded them before.

Taking the dog into their lives and feeding him when she could least afford it had turned out to be perhaps the smartest thing she had ever done.

She and the two detectives finished removing the lights, rolled them up, and put them in the back of the van.

“I’ve quit drinking for good,” Sammy said, following them to the rear door. “Can you believe it? But it’s true. No more. Not one drop. Nada.”

Woofer was sitting on the sidewalk with Danny, in the fall of light under a streetlamp, watching them, waiting patiently.

Initially, when she learned that Ms. Gulliver and Mr. Lyon were police detectives, Janet had almost grabbed Danny and run. After all, she had left a dead husband, killed by her own hand, moldering on desert sands in Arizona, and she had no way of knowing if the hateful man was still where she had left him. If Vince’s body had been found, she might be wanted for questioning; there might even be a warrant for her arrest.

More to the point, no authority figure in her life had been a friend to her, with the possible exception of Mr. Ishigura at Pacific View Care Home. She thought of them as a different breed, people with whom she had nothing in common.

But Ms. Gulliver and Mr. Lyon seemed reliable and kind and well-meaning. She did not think they were the type of people who would let Danny be taken away from her, though she had no intention of telling them she’d killed Vince. And Janet certainly did have things in common with them — not least of all, the will to live and the desire to get Ticktock before he got them.

She had decided to trust the detectives largely because she had no choice; they were all in this together. But she also decided to trust them because the dog trusted them.

“It’s five minutes till two,” Detective Lyon said, checking his wristwatch. “Let’s get moving, for God’s sake.”

Janet called Danny to her, and he got into the back of the van with her and Sammy Shamroe, who pulled the rear door shut after them.

Detective Lyon climbed into the driver’s seat, started the engine, and switched on the headlights.

The rear of the van was open to the front compartment. Janet, Danny, and Sammy crowded forward to look over the front seat and through the windshield.

Serpentine tendrils of thin fog were beginning to slither across the coast highway from the ocean. The headlights of an oncoming car, the only other traffic in sight, caught the lazily drifting mist at just the right angle and created a horizontal ribbon of rainbowlike colors that began at the right-hand curb and ended at the left-hand curb. The car drove through the colors, carrying them off into the night.

Detective Gulliver was still standing out on the sidewalk with Woofer.

Detective Lyon released the handbrake and put the van in gear. Raising his voice slightly, he said, “Okay, we’re ready.”

On the sidewalk, Detective Gulliver could hear him because the van’s side window was open. She talked to the dog, made a shooing motion with her hands, and the dog studied her quizzically.

Realizing that they were asking him to lead them where he had wanted to lead them just a couple of minutes ago, Woofer took off downhill, north along the sidewalk. He ran about one-third of a block, stopped, and looked back to see if Detective Gulliver was following. He seemed pleased to discover that she was staying with him. He wagged his tail.

Detective Lyon took his foot off the brake and let the van drift downhill, close behind Detective Gulliver, keeping pace with her, so the dog would get the idea that the vehicle was also following him.

Though the van was not moving fast, Janet gripped the seat behind Detective Lyon’s head to steady herself, and Sammy clutched the headrest behind the empty passenger seat. With one hand, Danny held fast to Janet’s belt, and stood on his tiptoes to try to see what was happening outside.

When Detective Gulliver had almost caught up with Woofer, the dog took off again, sprinted to the end of the block and stopped at the intersection to look back. He watched the woman approaching him, then studied the van for a moment, then the woman, then the van. He was a smart dog; he would get it.

“Wish he’d just talk to us and tell us what we need to know,” Detective Lyon said.

“Who?” Sammy asked.

“The dog.”

After Detective Gulliver followed Woofer across the intersection and halfway along the next block, she stopped and let Detective Lyon catch up to her. She waited until Woofer was looking at her, then opened the passenger door and got into the van.

The dog sat down and stared at them.

Detective Lyon let the van drift forward a little.

The dog pricked up his ears lopsidedly.

The van drifted.

The dog got up and trotted farther north. He stopped, looked back to be sure the van was still coming, then trotted farther.

“Good dog,” Detective Gulliver said.

“Very good dog,” Detective Lyon said.

Danny said proudly, “He’s the best dog there is.”

“I’ll second that,” said Sammy Shamroe, and rubbed one hand on the boy’s head.

Turning his face into Janet’s side, Danny said, “Mama, the man really stinks.”

“Danny!” Janet said, appalled.

“It’s okay,” Sammy said. He was inspired to launch into another of his earnest but rambling assurances of repentance. “It’s true. I stink. I’m a mess. Been a mess for a long time, but that’s over now. You know one reason I was a mess? Because I thought I knew everything, thought I understood exactly what life was about, that it was meaningless, that there was no mystery to it, just biology. But after this, after tonight, I have a different view on things. I don’t know everything, after all. It’s true. Hell, I don’t know diddly-squat! There’s plenty of mystery in life, something more than biology for sure. And if there’s something more, who needs wine or cocaine or anything? Nope. Nothing. Not a drop. Nada.”

One block later, the dog turned right, heading east along a steeply rising street.

Detective Lyon turned the corner after Woofer, then glanced at his wristwatch. “Two o’clock. Damn, time’s just going too fast.”

Outside, Woofer rarely turned his head to glance at them any more. He was confident that they would stay with him.

The sidewalk along which he padded was littered with bristly red blooms from the large bottlebrush trees that lined the entire block. Woofer sniffed at them as he proceeded east, and they made him sneeze a couple of times.

Suddenly Janet thought she knew where the dog was taking them. “Mr. Ishigura’s nursing home,” she said.

Detective Gulliver turned in the front seat to look at her. “You know where he’s going?”

“We were there for dinner. In the kitchen.” And then: “My God, the poor blind woman with no eyes!”

Pacific View Care Home was in the next block. The dog climbed the steps and sat at the front door.

3

After visiting hours, no receptionist was on duty. Harry could look through the glass in the top of the door and see the dimly lit and totally deserted public lounge.

When he rang the bell, a woman’s voice responded through the intercom. He identified himself as a police officer on urgent business, and she sounded concerned and eager to cooperate.

He checked his wristwatch three times before she appeared in the lounge. She didn’t take an extraordinarily long time; he was just remembering Ricky Estefan and the girl who had lost an arm at the rave, and each second blinked off by the red indicator light on his watch was part of the countdown to his own execution.

The nurse, who identified herself as the night supervisor, was a no-nonsense Filipino lady, petite but not in the least fragile, and when she saw him through the portal in the door, she was less sanguine than she had been over the intercom. She would not open up to him.

First of all, she didn’t believe he was a police officer. He couldn’t blame her for being suspicious, considering that after all he had been through during the past twelve or fourteen hours, he looked as if he lived in a packing crate. Well, actually, Sammy Shamroe lived in a packing crate, and Harry didn’t look quite that bad, but he certainly looked like a flophouse dweller with a long-term moral debt to the Salvation Army.

She would only open the door the width of the industrial-quality security chain, so heavy it was surely the model used to restrict access to nuclear-missile silos. At her demand, he passed through his police ID wallet. Although it included a photograph that was sufficiently unflattering to resemble him in his current battered and filthy condition, she was unconvinced that he was an officer of the law.

Wrinkling her cute nose, the night supervisor said, “What else have you got?”

He was sorely tempted to draw his revolver, shove it through the gap, cock the hammer, and threaten to blow her teeth out through the back of her head. But she was in her middle to late thirties, and it was possible that she had grown up under — and been toughened by — the Marcos regime before emigrating to the US, so she might just laugh in his face, stick her finger in the barrel, and tell him to go to hell.

Instead, he produced Connie Gulliver, who was for once a more presentable police officer than he was. She grinned through the door glass at the pint-sized Gestapo Florence Nightingale, made nice talk, and passed her own credentials through the gap on demand. You would have thought they were trying to get into the main vault at Fort Knox instead of a pricey private nursing home.

He checked his watch. It was 2:03 A.M.

Based on the limited experience they’d had with Ticktock, Harry guessed that their psychotic Houdini required as little as an hour but more commonly an hour and a half of rest between performances, recharging his supernatural batteries in about the same amount of time that a stage magician needed to stuff all the silk scarves and doves and rabbits back up his sleeves to get ready for the late show. If that was the case, then they were safe at least until two-thirty and probably until three o’clock.

Less than an hour at the outside.

Harry was so intently focused on the blinking red light of his watch that he lost track of what Connie said to the nurse. Either she charmed the lady or came up with an incredibly effective threat, because the security chain was removed, the door was opened, their ID wallets were returned to them with smiles, and they were welcomed into Pacific View.

When the night supervisor saw Janet and Danny, who had been out of sight on the lower front steps, she had second thoughts. When she saw the dog, she had third thoughts, even though he was wagging his tail and grinning and, quite clearly, being intentionally cute. When she saw — and smelled — Sammy, she almost became intractable again.

For policemen, as well as for house-to-house salesmen, the supreme difficulty was always getting through the door. Once inside, Harry and Connie were no easier to dislodge than the average vacuum-cleaner salesman intent on scattering all manner of sample filth on the carpet to demonstrate the superior suction of his product.

When it became clear to the Filipino nurse that resistance to them was going to disturb the home’s patients more than would cooperation, she spoke a few musical words in Tagalog, which Harry assumed was a curse on their ancestors and progeny, and led them through the facility to the room of the patient they sought.

Not surprisingly, in all of Pacific View’s accommodations, there was only one eyeless woman with lids sewn shut over empty sockets. Her name was Jennifer Drackman.

Mrs. Drackman’s handsome but “distant” son — they were told in whispered confidence while in transit — paid for three shifts of the finest private nurses, seven days a week, to care for his “mentally disoriented” mother. She was the only patient in Pacific View provided with such “suffocating” ministrations on top of the already “extravagant” care that the facility offered in its minimum package. With those and a number of other loaded words, the night supervisor made it clear, ever so politely, that she didn’t care for the son, felt the private nurses were unnecessary and an insult to the staff, and thought the patient was creepy.

The private nurse on the graveyard shift was an exotically beautiful black woman named Tanya Delaney. She was not sure of the propriety and wisdom of letting them disturb her patient at such an ungodly hour, even if some of them were police officers, and briefly she threatened to be even more of a barrier to their survival than the night supervisor had been.

The gaunt, mealy, bony woman in the bed was a ghastly sight, but Harry could not look away from her. She compelled attention because within the horror of her current condition there was a tragically faint but undeniable ghost of the beauty that had once been, a specter that haunted the ravaged face and body and, by refusing to relinquish entire possession of her, allowed a chilling comparison between what she most likely had been in her youth and what she had become.

“She’s been sleeping.” Tanya Delaney spoke in a whisper, as they all did. She stood between them and the bed, making it clear that she took nursing seriously. “She doesn’t sleep peacefully very often, so I wouldn’t like to wake her.”

Beyond the piled pillows and the patient’s face, on a nightstand that also held a cork-bottom tray with a chrome carafe of ice-water, stood a simple black-lacquered picture frame with a photograph of a good-looking young man of about twenty. An aquiline nose. Thick dark hair. His pale eyes were gray in the black-and-white photo and were surely gray in reality, the precise shade of slightly tarnished silver. It was the boy in blue jeans and a Tecate T-shirt, the boy licking his lips with a pink tongue at the sight of James Ordegard’s blood-soaked victims. Harry remembered the hateful glare in the boy’s eyes after he’d been forced back behind the yellow crime-scene tape and humiliated in front of the crowd.

“It’s him,” Harry said softly, wonderingly.

Tanya Delaney followed his gaze. “Bryan. Mrs. Drackman’s son.”

Turning to meet Connie’s eyes, Harry said, “It’s him.”

“Doesn’t look like the ratman,” Sammy said. He had moved to the corner of the room farthest from the patient, perhaps remembering that the blind supposedly compensated for their loss of sight by developing better hearing and a sharper sense of smell.

The dog mewled once, briefly, quietly.

Janet Marco pulled her sleepy boy tighter against her side and stared worriedly at the photograph. “Looks a little like Vince… the hair… the eyes. No wonder I thought Vince was coming back.”

Harry wondered who Vince was, decided it wasn’t a priority, and said to Connie, “If her son really does pay all of her bills—”

“Oh, yes, it’s the son,” said Nurse Delaney. “He takes such good care of his mother.”

“—then the business office here will have an address for him.” Connie finished.

Harry shook his head. “That night supervisor won’t let us look at the records, no way. She’ll guard them with her life until we come back with a warrant.”

Nurse Delaney said, “I really think you should go before you wake her.”

“I’m not asleep,” said the white scarecrow in the bed. Her permanently shut eyelids didn’t even twitch, lay slack, as if the muscles in them had atrophied over the years. “And I don’t want his photo here. He forces me to keep it.”

Harry said, “Mrs. Drackman—”

“Miss. They call me Mrs. but I’m not. Never was.” Her voice was thin but not frail. Brittle. Cold. “What do you want with him?”

“Miss Drackman,” Harry continued, “we’re police officers. We need to ask you some questions about your son.”

If they had the opportunity to learn more than Ticktock’s address, Harry believed they should seize it. The mother might tell them something that would reveal some vulnerability in her exceptional offspring, even if she had no idea of his true nature.

She was silent a moment, chewing on her lip. Her mouth was pinched, her lips so bloodless they were almost gray.

Harry looked at his watch.

2:08.

The wasted woman raised one arm and hooked her hand, as lean and fierce-looking as a talon, around the bed rail. “Tanya, would you leave us alone?”

When the nurse began to voice a mild objection, the patient repeated the request more sharply, as a command.

As soon as the nurse had gone, closing the door behind her, Jennifer Drackman said, “How many of you are there?”

“Five,” Connie said, failing to mention the dog.

“You aren’t all police officers, and you aren’t here just on police business,” Jennifer Drackman said with perspicacity that might have been a gift she’d been given to compensate for the long years of blindness.

Something in her tone of voice, a curious hopefulness, induced Harry to answer her truthfully. “No. We’re not all cops, and we’re not here just as cops.”

“What has he done to you?” the woman asked.

He had done so much that no one could think how to put it into words succinctly.

Interpreting the silence correctly, the woman said, “Do you know what he is?” It was an extraordinary question, and revealed that the mother was aware, at least to some degree, of the son’s difference.

“Yes,” Harry said. “We know.”

“Everyone thinks he’s such a nice boy,” the mother said, her voice tremulous. “They won’t listen. The stupid fools. They won’t listen. All these years… they won’t believe.”

“We’ll listen,” Harry said. “And we already believe.”

A look of hope flickered across the ravaged face, but hope was an expression so unfamiliar to those features that it could not be sustained. She raised her head off the pillows, a simple act that made the cords go taut with strain under the sagging skin of her neck. “Do you hate him?”

After a moment of silence, Connie said, “Yes. I hate him.”

“Yes,” Janet Marco said.

“I hate him almost as much as I hate myself,” the invalid said. Her voice was now as bitter as bile. For a moment the ghost of beauty past was no longer visible in her withered face. She was sheer ugliness, a grotesque hag. “Will you kill him?”

Harry was not sure what to say.

Bryan Drackman’s mother was at no such loss for words: “I’d kill him myself, kill him… but I’m so weak… so weak. Will you kill him?”

“Yes,” Harry said.

“It won’t be easy,” she warned.

“No, it won’t be easy,” he agreed. He glanced at his watch again. “And we don’t have much time.”

4

Bryan Drackman slept.

His was a deep, satisfying sleep. Replenishing.

He dreamed of power. He was a conduit for lightning. Though it was daylight in the dream, the heavens were almost night-dark, churning with the black clouds of Final Judgment. From that storm to end all storms, great surging rivers of electric current flowed into him, and from his hands, when he willed them, flashed lances and balls of lightning. He was Becoming. When that process was someday concluded, he would be the storm, a great destroyer and cleanser, washing away what had been, bathing the world in blood, and in the eyes of those who were permitted to survive, he would see respect, adoration, love, love.

5

Through the eyeless night came blind hands of fog, seeking. White vaporous fingers pressed inquisitively against the windows of Jennifer Drackman’s room.

Lamplight glimmered in the cold beads of sweat on the water carafe, and burnished the stainless steel.

Connie stood with Harry at the side of the bed. Janet sat in the nurse’s chair, holding her sleeping boy on her lap, the dog lying at her feet with its head upon its paws. Sammy stood in the corner, wrapped in shadows, silent and solemn, perhaps recognizing a few elements of his own story in the one to which they listened.

The withered woman in the bed appeared to shrivel further while she spoke, as though she needed to burn her very substance for the requisite energy to share her dark memories.

Harry had the feeling that she’d held fast to life all these years only for this moment, for an audience that would not merely listen patronizingly but would believe.

In that voice of dust and corrosion, she said, “He’s only twenty years old. I was twenty-two when I became pregnant with him… but I should begin… a few years before his… conception.”

Simple calculation revealed she was now only forty-two or forty-three. Harry heard small startled sounds and nervous fidgeting from Connie and the others as the awareness of Jennifer’s relative youth swept through them. She looked more than merely old. Ancient. Not prematurely aged by ten or even twenty years, but by forty.

As thickening cataracts of fog formed over the night windows, the mother of Ticktock spoke of running away from home when she was sixteen, sick to death of school, childishly eager for excitement and experience, physically mature beyond her years since she’d been thirteen but, as she would later realize, emotionally underdeveloped and not half as smart as she thought she was.

In Los Angeles and later in San Francisco, during the height of the free-love culture of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, a beautiful girl had a choice of like-minded young men with whom to crash and an almost infinite variety of mind-altering chemicals with which to experiment. After several jobs in head shops, selling psychedelic posters and Lava lamps and drug paraphernalia, she went for the main chance and started selling drugs themselves. As a dealer and a woman who was romanced by suppliers for both her sales ability and her good looks, she had the opportunity to sample a lot of exotic substances that were never widely distributed on the street.

“Hallucinogens were my main thing,” said the lost girl still wandering somewhere within the ancient woman on the bed. “Dehydrated mushrooms from Tibetan caves, luminescent fungus from remote valleys of Peru, liquids distilled from cactus flowers and strange roots, the powdered skin of exotic African lizards, eye of newt, and anything that clever chemists could concoct in laboratories. I wanted to try it all, much of it over and over, anything that would take me places I’d never been, show me things that no one else might ever see.”

In spite of the depths of despair into which that life had led her, a frigorific wistfulness informed Jennifer Drackman’s voice, an eerie longing.

Harry sensed that a part of Jennifer would want to make all the same choices if given a chance to live those years again.

He had never entirely rid himself of the chill that had seeped into him during the Pause, and now coldness spread deeper into the marrow of his bones.

He checked his watch. 2:12.

She continued, speaking more quickly, as if aware of his impatience. “In nineteen-seventy-two, I got myself knocked up…”

Not sure which of three men might be the father, nevertheless she had at first been delighted by the prospect of a baby. Although she could not coherently have defined what the relentless ingestion of so many mind-altering chemicals had taught her, she felt that she had a great store of wisdom to impart to her offspring. It was then one small step of illogic to decide that continued — even increased — use of hallucinogens during pregnancy would result in the birth of a child of heightened consciousness. Those were strange days when many believed that the meaning of life was to be found in peyote and that a tab of LSD could provide access to the throne room of Heaven and a glimpse of the face of God.

For the first two to three months of her term, Jennifer had been aglow with the prospect of nurturing the perfect child. Perhaps he would be another Dylan, Lennon, or Lenin, a genius and peacemaker, but more advanced than any of them because his enlightenment had begun in the womb, thanks to the foresight and daring of his mother.

Then everything had changed with one bad trip. She could not recall all of the ingredients of the chemical cocktail that marked the beginning of the end of her life, but she knew that among other things it had contained LSD and the powdered carapace of a rare Asian beetle. In what she had believed to be the highest state of consciousness that she had ever achieved, a series of luminous and uplifting hallucinations had suddenly turned terrifying, filling her with a nameless but crippling dread.

Even when the bad trip ended and the hallucinations of death and genetic horrors had passed, the dread remained with her — and grew day by day. She did not at first understand the source of her fear, but gradually she focused on the child within and came to understand that in her altered state of mind she had been sent a warning: her baby was no Dylan, but a monster, not a light unto the world but a bringer of darkness.

Whether that perception was in fact correct or merely drug-induced madness, whether the child inside her was already a mutant or still a perfectly normal fetus, she would never know, for as a result of her overwhelming fear, she set out upon a course of action that in itself might have introduced the final mutagenic factor which, enhanced by her pharmacopeia of drugs, made Bryan what he was. She sought an abortion, but not from the usual sources, for she was afraid of midwives with their coat hangers and of back-alley doctors whose alcoholism had driven them to operate beyond the law. Instead, she resorted to strikingly untraditional and, in the end, riskier methods.

“That was in ‘seventy-two.” She clutched the bed rail and squirmed under the sheets to pull her half-paralyzed and wasted body into a more comfortable position. Her white hair was wire-stiff.

The light caught her face from a slightly new angle, revealing to Harry that the milk-white skin over her empty eye sockets was embroidered with a network of thread-fine blue veins.

His watch. 2:16.

She said, “The Supreme Court didn’t legalize abortion until early ‘seventy-three, when I was in the last month of my term, so it wasn’t available to me until it was too late.”

In fact, had abortion been legal, she still might not have gone to a clinic, for she feared and distrusted all doctors. She first tried to rid herself of the unwanted child with the help of a mystic Indian homeopathic practitioner who operated out of an apartment in Haight-Ashbury, the center of the counterculture in San Francisco at that time. He had first given her a series of herb potions known to affect the walls of the uterus and sometimes cause miscarriages. When those medications did not work, he tried a series of potent herbal douches, administered with increasing pressure, to flush the child away.

When those treatments failed as well, she turned in desperation to a quack offering a briefly popular radium douche, supposedly not radioactive enough to harm the woman but deadly to the fetus. That more radical approach was equally unsuccessful.

It seemed to her as if the unwanted child was consciously aware of her efforts to be free of it and was clinging to life with inhuman tenacity, a hateful thing already stronger than any ordinary unborn mortal, invulnerable even in the womb.

2:18.

Harry was impatient. She had told them nothing, thus far, that would help them deal with Ticktock. “Where can we find your son?”

Jennifer probably felt she would never have another audience like this one, and she was not going to tailor her story to their schedule, regardless of the cost. Clearly, in the telling there was some form of expiation for her.

Harry could barely stand the sound of the woman’s voice, and could no longer tolerate the sight of her face. He left Connie by the bed and went to the window to stare out at the fog, which looked cool and clean.

“Life became, like, really a bad trip for me,” Jennifer said.

Harry found it disorienting to hear this pinched and haggard ancient use such dated slang.

She said her fear of the unborn was worse than anything she had experienced on drugs. Her certainty that she harbored a monster only increased daily. She needed sleep but dreaded it because her sleep was troubled by dreams of shocking violence, human suffering in infinite variety, and something unseen but terrible moving always in shadows.

“One day they found me in the street, screaming, clawing at my stomach, raving about a beast inside of me. They put me in a psychiatric ward.”

From there she had been brought to Orange County, under the care of her mother, whom she’d deserted six years earlier. Physical examinations had revealed a scarred uterus, strange adhesions and polyps, and wildly abnormal blood chemistry.

Although no abnormalities were detectable in the unborn child, Jennifer remained convinced that it was a monster, and became more hysterical by the day, the hour. No secular or religious counseling could calm her fears.

Hospitalized for a monitored delivery that was necessitated by the things she had done to be rid of the child, Jennifer had slipped beyond hysteria, into madness. She experienced drug flashbacks rife with visions of organic monstrosities, and developed the irrational conviction that if she merely looked upon the child she was bringing into the world, she would be at once damned to Hell. Her labor was unusually difficult and protracted, and due to her mental condition, she was restrained through most of it. But when her restraints were briefly loosened for her comfort, even as the stubborn child was coming forth, she gouged out her eyes with her own thumbs.

At the window, staring into the faces that formed and dissolved in the fog, Harry shuddered.

“And he was born,” Jennifer Drackman said. “He was born.”

Even eyeless, she knew the dark nature of the creature to which she had given birth. But he was a beautiful baby, and then a lovely boy (so they told her), and then a handsome young man. Year after year no one would take seriously the paranoid ravings of a woman who had put out her own eyes.

Harry checked his watch. 2:21.

At most they had forty minutes of safe time remaining. Perhaps substantially less.

“There were so many surgeries, complications from the pregnancy, my eyes, infections. My health went steadily downhill, a couple of strokes, and I never returned home with my mother. Which was good. Because he was there. I lived in a public nursing home for a lot of years, wanting to die, praying to die, but too weak to kill myself… too weak in many ways. Then, two years ago, after he killed my mother, he moved me here.”

“How do you know he killed your mother?” Connie asked.

“He told me so. And he told me how. He describes his power to me, how it grows and grows. He’s even shown me things…. And I believe he can do everything he says. Do you?”

“Yes,” Connie said.

“Where does he live?” Harry asked, still facing the fog.

“In my mother’s house.”

“What’s the address?”

“My mind’s not clear on a lot of things… but I remember that.”

She gave them the address.

Harry thought he knew approximately where the place was. Not far from Pacific View.

He checked his watch yet again. 2:23.

Eager to get out of that room, and not merely because they urgently needed to deal with Bryan Drackman, Harry turned away from the window. “Let’s go.”

Sammy Shamroe stepped out of the shadow-hung corner. Janet rose from the nurse’s chair, holding her sleeping child, and the dog got to his feet.

But Connie had a question. It was the kind of personal question Harry ordinarily would have asked and that until tonight would have made Connie scowl with impatience because they had already learned the essentials.

“Why does Bryan keep coming here to see you?” Connie inquired.

“To torture me in one way or another,” the woman said.

“That’s all — when he has a world full of people to torture?”

Letting her hand slide off the bed rail, which she had been grasping all this time, Jennifer Drackman said, “Love.”

“He comes because he loves you?”

“No, no. Not him. He’s incapable of love, doesn’t understand the word, only thinks he does. But he wants love from me.” A dry, humorless laugh escaped the skeletal figure in the bed. “Can you believe he comes to me for this?”

Harry was surprised that he could feel a grudging pity for the psychotic child who had entered the world, unwanted, from this disturbed woman.

That room, though warm and comfortable enough, was the last place in creation to which anyone should go in search of love.

6

Fog poured off the Pacific and embraced the night coast, dense and deep and cool. It flowed through the sleeping town, like the ghost of an ancient ocean with a high-tide line far above that of the modern sea.

Harry drove south along the coast highway, faster than seemed wise in that limited visibility. He had decided that the risk of a rear-end collision was outweighed by the danger of getting to the Drackman house too late to catch Ticktock before he had recovered his energy.

The palms of his hands were damp on the steering wheel, as if the fog had condensed on his skin. But there was no fog inside the van. 2:27.

Almost an hour had passed since Ticktock had gone away to rest. On the one hand, they had accomplished a lot in that brief time. On the other hand, it seemed that time was not a river, like the song said, but a crashing avalanche of minutes.

In back, Janet and Sammy rode in uneasy silence. The boy slept. The dog seemed restless.

In the passenger seat, Connie switched on the small overhead map-reading lamp. She cracked open the cylinder of her revolver to be sure there was a round in every chamber.

That was the second time she had checked.

Harry knew what she must be thinking: What if Ticktock had awakened; had stopped time since she had last checked her weapon; had removed all the cartridges; and when she had the chance to shoot him, what if he only smiled while the hammer fell on empty chambers?

As before, in the revolver, a full complement of case heads gleamed. All chambers loaded.

Connie snapped the cylinder shut. Clicked off the light.

Harry thought she looked extremely tired. Face drawn. Eyes watery, bloodshot. He worried that they were going to have to stalk the most dangerous criminal of their careers at a time when they were exhausted. He knew he was far off his usual form. Perceptions dulled, reactions slow.

“Who goes into his house?” Sammy asked.

“Harry and me,” Connie said. “We’re the professionals. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“And us?” Janet asked.

“Wait in the van.”

“Feel like I should help,” Sammy said.

“Don’t even think about it,” Connie said sharply.

“How will you get in?”

Harry said, “My partner here carries a set of lock picks.”

Connie patted one jacket pocket to be sure the folding packet of burglary tools was still there.

“What if he’s not sleeping?” Janet asked.

Checking the names on the street signs as he drove, Harry said, “He will be.”

“But what if he’s not?”

“He has to be,” Harry replied, which pretty much said all that could be said about how frighteningly limited their options were.

2:29. Damn. Time stopped, now going too fast.

The name of the street was Phaedra Way. Letters on the Laguna Beach street signs were too small, hard to read. Especially in the fog. He leaned over the wheel, squinting.

“How can he be killed?” Sammy asked worriedly “I don’t see how the ratman can be killed, not him.”

“Well, we can’t just risk wounding him, that’s for damned sure,” Connie said. “He might be able to heal himself.”

Phaedra Way. Phaedra. Come on, come on.

“But if he’s got healing power,” Harry said, “it comes from the same place all his other power comes from.”

“His mind,” Janet said.

Phaedra, Phaedra, Phaedra…

Letting the van slow because he was sure they were in the area where Ticktock’s street ought to be, Harry said, “Yeah. Will power. Mind power. Psychic ability is the power of the mind, and the mind is seated in the brain.”

“Headshot,” Connie said.

Harry agreed. “At close range.”

Connie looked grim. “It’s the only way. No jury trial for this bastard. Damage the brain instantly, kill him instantly, and he doesn’t have a chance to strike back.”

Remembering how the golem-vagrant had hurled fireballs around his condo bedroom and how instantly white-hot flames erupted from the things he torched, Harry said, “Yeah. For sure, before he has a chance to strike back. Hey! There. Phaedra Way.”

The address they had gotten from Jennifer Drackman was less than two miles from Pacific View Care Home. They located the street at 2:31, slightly more than one hour after the Pause had begun and ended.

It was actually more of a long driveway than a short street, serving only five homes with ocean views, though now the Pacific was lost in fog. Because, from spring through autumn, the entire coastal area was crawling with tourists seeking parking spaces near beaches, a sign was posted at the entrance, sternly announcing PRIVATE — VIOLATORS WILL BE TOWED, but no security gate restricted access.

Harry didn’t make the turn. Because the street was so short and because the van would be loud enough to wake the sleeping and draw attention at that dead hour of the morning, he drove past the turnoff and coasted to a stop two hundred feet farther along the highway.

Everything better, everyone together, so maybe they can all be a family and want a dog to feed and all live in a people place, warm and dry — and then suddenly everything wrong, wrong.

Deathcoming. The woman who has no boy. The not-so-stinky man. Sitting up front in the van, and deathcoming all around them.

He smells it on them, yet it is not an odor. He sees it on them, yet they look no different. It makes no sound, yet he hears it when he listens to them. If he licked their hands, their faces, deathcoming would have no taste of its own, yet he would know it was on them. If they petted or scratched him, he would feel it in their touch, deathcoming. It is one of those few things he senses without really knowing how he knows. Deathcoming.

He is shaking. He cannot stop shaking.

Deathcoming.

Bad. Very bad. The worst.

He must do something. But what? What what what what?

He doesn’t know when the deathcoming will be or where it will be or how it will be. He doesn’t know whether deathcoming will be to both of them or only to one of them. It could be only to one of them, and he senses it on both of them only because it will happen when they are together. He cannot sense this thing as clearly as he can sense the countless odors of the stinky man or the fear on all of them, because it is not really something to be smelled or tasted so much as just felt, a coldness, a dark, a deepness. Deathcoming.

So…

Do something.

So…

Do something.

What what what?

When Harry switched off the engine and doused the headlights, the silence seemed almost as deep as it had been during the Pause.

The dog was agitated, sniffing and whining. If he began to bark, the walls of the van would muffle the sound. Besides, Harry was confident that they were too far from the Drackman house for Ticktock to be disturbed by any sound the dog could make.

Sammy said, “How long before we should figure… you know… you didn’t get him, he got you? Sorry, but I had to ask. When should we run?”

“If he gets us, you won’t have a chance to run,” Connie said.

Harry turned to look at them in the shadowy rear compartment. “Yeah. He’s going to wonder how the hell we found him, and after he kills us, there’ll be another Pause, immediately, while he checks out all of you, everything, trying to figure it out. If he gets us, you’ll know it, because just a few seconds later in real time, one of his golems will probably appear right here in the van with you.”

Sammy blinked owlishly. He wetted his cracked lips with his tongue. “Then, for God’s sake, be sure you kill him.”

Harry opened his door quietly, while Connie left the van on her side. When he stepped out, the dog slipped between the front seats and followed him before he realized what was happening.

He made a grab at the mutt as it brushed past his legs, but he missed.

“Woofer, no!” he whispered.

Ignoring him, the dog padded to the back of the van.

Harry went after him.

The dog broke into a sprint, and Harry ran several steps in pursuit, but the dog was faster and vanished into the heavy fog, heading north along the highway in the general direction of the turnoff to the Drackman house.

Harry was cursing under his breath when Connie joined him.

“He can’t be going there,” she whispered.

“Why can’t he?”

“Jesus. If he does anything to alert Ticktock…”

Harry checked his watch. 2:34.

Maybe they had twenty, twenty-five minutes. Or maybe they were already too late.

He decided they couldn’t worry about the dog. “Remember,” he said, “headshot. Quick and up close. It’s the only way.”

When they reached the entrance to Phaedra Way, he glanced back toward the van. It had been swallowed by the fog.

1

He is not afraid. Not. Not afraid.

He is a dog, sharp teeth and claws, strong and quick.

Creeping, he passes thick, high oleander. Then the people place where he’s been before. High white walls. Windows dark. Near the top, one square of pale light.

The smell of the thing-that-will-kill-you is heavy on the fog. But like all smells in fog, not as sharp, not as easy to track.

The iron fence. Tight. Wriggle. Through.

Careful at the corner of the people place. The bad thing was out there last time, behind the place, with bags of food. Chocolate. Marshmallow. Potato chips. Didn’t get any. But almost got caught. So put just the nose past the corner this time. Sniff sniff sniff. Then the whole head for a look. No sign of the young-man-bad-thing. Was there, not now, safe so far.

Behind the people place. Grass, dirt, some flat stones that people put down. Bushes. Flowers.

The door. And in the door the little door for dogs.

Careful. Sniff. Young-man-bad-thing smell, very strong. Not afraid. Not, not, not, not. He is a dog. Good dog, good.

Careful. Head in, lifting the dog door. It makes a faint squeak. People food place. Dark. Dark. Inside.

The softly fluorescent fog refracted every ray of ambient light on Phaedra Way, from the low mushroom-shaped Malibu lamps along the front walk at one house to the lighted numerals of the address on another, seeming to brighten the night. But, in fact, its slowly churning, amorphous luminosity was deceptive; it revealed nothing and obscured much.

Harry could see little of the houses past which they walked, except that they were large. The first of them was modern, sharp angles looming out of the fog in several places, but the others seemed to be older Mediterranean-style homes from a more graceful era of Laguna’s history than the end of the millennium, sheltered by mature palms and ficuses.

Phaedra Way followed the shoreline of a small promontory that jutted out into the sea. According to the prematurely aged woman at Pacific View, the Drackman house was the farthest out, at the point of the bluff.

Considering how much of his ordeal had seemed to be based upon the darker elements of fairy tales, Harry would not have been at all surprised if they had found a small but preternaturally dark forest at the end of the promontory, filled with lantern-eyed owls and slinking wolves, the Drackman house tucked therein, decidedly gloomy and brooding, in the finest tradition of the residences of witches, warlocks, sorcerers, trolls, and the like.

He almost hoped that was the kind of house he would find. It would be a comforting symbol of order.

But when they reached the Drackman place, only the eerie pall of fog upheld the tradition. In both its landscaping and architecture, it was less menacing than the scary little cottage in the woods for which folk and fairy tales had long prepared him.

Like the neighboring houses, it had palm trees in its shallow front yard. Even in the cloaking mist, masses of bougainvillaea vines were visible climbing one white stucco wall and spreading onto the red tile roof. The driveway was littered with their bright blossoms. A night-light to one side of the garage door illuminated the house number, its glow reflected in beads of dew on the hundreds of bright bougainvillaea blossoms that glimmered like jewels on the driveway.

It was too pretty. He was irrationally angry at its prettiness. Nothing was as it ought to be any more, all hope of order gone.

They quickly checked the north and south sides of the house for signs of occupancy. Two lights.

One was upstairs on the south side, toward the back. A single window, not visible from the front. It might have been a bedroom.

If the light was on, Ticktock must have awakened from his nap, or had never gone to sleep. Unless… some children wouldn’t sleep without a light on, and in many ways Ticktock was a child. A twenty-year-old, insane, vicious, exceedingly dangerous child.

The second light was on the north side, first floor at the rear — or west — corner. Because it was at ground level, they were able to look inside and see a white-on-white kitchen. Deserted. One chair was turned half-away from the glass-topped table, as if someone had been sitting there earlier. 2:39.

Since both lights were toward the back of the house, they did not attempt to gain entrance on the west — or rear — side. If Ticktock was in the upstairs room with the light, awake or asleep, he would be more likely to hear even the furtive noises they would make if they were directly beneath him.

Because Connie had the set of picks, they didn’t even try the windows, but went straight to the front door. It was a big oak slab with raised panels and a brass knocker.

The lock might have been a Baldwin, which was good but not a Schlage. In that gloom, it was difficult to tell the make.

Flanking the door were wide leaded-glass sidelights with beveled panes. Harry put his forehead against one to study the foyer beyond. He could see through the foyer and down a shadowy hallway because of light leaking through a partially open door at the end, which had to be the kitchen.

Connie opened the packet of lock picks. Before starting to work, she did what any good burglar did first — tried the door. It was unlocked, and she let it swing open a few inches.

She jammed the picks into one pocket without bothering to fold up the packet. From the shoulder holster under her corduroy jacket, she withdrew her revolver.

Harry pulled his weapon, too.

When Connie hesitated, he realized that she had broken open the cylinder. She did a Braille check to be sure that cartridges still filled all the chambers. He heard a soft, soft snick as she closed it, evidently satisfied that Ticktock had not been playing any of his tricks.

She crossed the threshold first because she was nearest to it. He followed her.

They stood in the marble-floored foyer for twenty seconds, half a minute, very still, listening. Both hands on their guns, sights just below their lines of vision, Harry covering the left side, Connie covering everything on the right.

Silence.

The Hall of the Mountain King. Somewhere a sleeping troll. Or not sleeping. Maybe just waiting.

Foyer. Not much light, even with that second-hand fluorescent glow leaking down the hall from the kitchen. Mirrors to the left, dark images of themselves in the glass, shadowy forms. To the right was a doorway to either a closet or a den.

Ahead and to the right, a switchback staircase led to a landing, shrouded in shadows, then to an unseen second-floor hall.

Directly ahead, the first-floor hall. Archways and dark rooms off both sides, the kitchen door at the end ajar maybe four or five inches with light beyond.

Harry hated this. He had done it scores of times. He was practiced and skilled. He still hated it.

Silence continuing. Only inner noise. He listened to his heart, not bad yet, fast but steady, not crashing yet, in control.

They were committed now, so he eased the front door shut behind them with no more noise than a padded coffin lid being lowered for the last time in the velvet-curtained hush of a funeral parlor.

Bryan woke from a fantasy of destruction, into a world that offered the satisfaction of real victims, real blood.

For a moment he lay naked on the black sheets, staring at the black ceiling. He was still dream-sodden enough to be able to imagine that he was adrift in the night, out over the lightless sea, beneath a starless sky, weightless, floating.

Levitation was not a power he possessed, nor was he particularly skilled at telekinesis. But he was sure that the ability to fly and to manipulate all matter in all imaginable ways would be his when he had fully Become.

Gradually he became aware of wrinkled folds of silk that were pressing uncomfortably against his back and buttocks, the coolness of the air, a sour taste in his mouth, and a hunger that made his stomach growl. Imagination was foiled. The Stygian sea became only ebony sheets, the starless sky became only a ceiling painted with black semi-gloss, and he had to admit that gravity still exerted a claim on him.

He sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and stood. He yawned and stretched luxuriously, studying himself in the wall of mirrors. Someday, after he had thinned the human herd, there would be artists among those he spared, and they would be inspired to paint him, portraits infused with awe and reverence, like those that featured biblical figures and hung now in the great museums of Europe, apocalyptic scenes on cathedral ceilings where he would be shown as a titan dealing punishment to the wretched masses who died at his feet.

Turning from the mirrors, he faced the black-lacquered shelves on which stood the array of Mason jars. Because he had left one bedside lamp on while he slept, the votive eyes had watched him in his dreams of godhood. They watched him still, adoring.

He recalled the pleasure of blue eyes captured between the palms of his hands and his body, the smooth damp intimacy of their loving inspection.

His red robe lay at the foot of the shelves, where he had dropped it. He picked it up, slipped into it, cinched and knotted the belt.

All the while, he scanned the eyes, and none of them regarded him with scorn or rejected him.

Not for the first time, Bryan wished that his mother’s eyes were part of his collection. If he possessed those eyes of all eyes, he would allow her communion with every convexity and concavity of his well-proportioned body, so she could understand the beauty of him, which she had never seen, and could know that her fears of hideous mutation had been foolish and that her sacrifice of vision had been so pointless, stupid.

If he had her eyes before him now, he would take one gently into his mouth and let it rest upon his tongue. Then he would swallow it whole, so she might see that his perfection was internal as well as external. Thus enlightened, she would lament her misguided act of self-mutilation the night of his birth, and it would be as if the intervening years of estrangement had never happened. The mother of the new god would then come willingly and supportively to his side, and his Becoming would be easier and would move more rapidly toward completion, toward his Ascension to the throne and the beginning of the Apocalypse.

But the hospital staff had disposed of her damaged eyes long ago, in whatever manner they dealt with all dead tissue from tainted blood to an excised appendix.

He sighed with regret.

Standing in the foyer, Harry tried not to look toward the light at the end of the hall where the kitchen door was ajar, so his eyes would adjust to the darkness quicker. It was time to move on. But they had choices to make.

Ordinarily he and Connie would conduct an interior search together, room by room, but not always. Good partners had a reliable and mutually understood routine for every basic situation, but they were also flexible.

Flexibility was essential because there were some situations that weren’t basic. Like this one.

He didn’t think it was a good idea to stay together because they were up against an adversary who had weapons better than guns or submachine guns or even explosives. Ordegard had almost taken out both of them with a grenade, but this scumbag could waste them with ball lightning that he shot off his fingertips or some other bit of magic they hadn’t seen yet.

Welcome to the ‘90s.

If they stayed widely separated, say one of them searching the first floor while the other took the rooms upstairs, they would not only save time when time was at a premium, but they would double their chances of surprising the geek.

Harry moved to Connie, touched her shoulder, put his lips to her ear, and barely breathed the words: “Me upstairs, you down.”

From the way she stiffened, he knew she didn’t like the division of labor, and he understood why. They had already looked through the first floor window into the lighted kitchen and knew it was deserted. The only other light in the house was upstairs, so it was more likely than not that Ticktock was up in that other room. She wasn’t worried that Harry would botch the job if he went up alone; it was just that she had a big enough hate-on for Ticktock that she wanted to have an equal chance to be the one who put the bullet in his head.

But there was neither time for debate nor the circumstances, and she knew it. They couldn’t plan this one. They had to ride the wave. When he moved across the foyer toward the stairs, she didn’t stop him.

Bryan turned away from the votive eyes. He crossed the room toward the open door. His silk robe rustled softly as he moved.

He was always aware of the time, the second and minute and hour, so he knew dawn was still a few hours away. He needn’t be in a rush to keep his promise to the bigshot hero cop, but he was eager to locate him and see to what depths of despair the man had plummeted after experiencing the stoppage of time, the world frozen for a game of hide-and-seek. The fool would know, now, that he was up against immeasurable power, and that escape was hopeless. His fear, and the awe with which he’d now regard his persecutor, would be enormously satisfying and worth relishing for a while.

First, however, Bryan had to satisfy his physical hunger. Sleep was only part of the restorative he needed. He knew that he had lost a few pounds during the most recent creative session. The use of his Greatest and Most Secret Power always took a toll. He was famished, in need of sweets and salties.

Stepping out of his bedroom, he turned right, away from the front of the house, and hurried along the hallway toward the back stairs that led directly down to the kitchen.

Enough light spilled from his open bedroom door to allow him to observe himself in motion both to his left and right, reflections of the young god Becoming, a spectacle of power and glory, striding purposefully to infinity in swirls of royal red, royal red, red upon red upon red.

Connie did not want to split off from Harry. She was worried about him.

In the old woman’s room at the nursing home, he had looked like death warmed over and served on a paper plate. He was desperately tired, a walking mass of contusions and abrasions, and he had seen his world fall apart in little more than twelve hours, losing not merely possessions but cherished beliefs and much of his self-image.

Of course, aside from the part about lost possessions, much the same could be said of Connie. Which was another reason she did not want to separate to search the house. Neither of them had his usual sharp edge, yet considering the nature of this perp, they needed a greater advantage than usual, so they had to separate.

Reluctantly, as Harry moved toward the steps and then started up, Connie turned to the door on the right, off the foyer. It had a lever handle. She eased it down with her left hand, revolver in her right and in front of her. Faintest click of the latch. Ease the door inward and to the right.

Nothing for it but to cross the threshold, clearing the doorway as fast as possible, doorways always being the most dangerous, and slipping to the left as she entered, both hands on the gun in front of her, arms straight and locked. Keeping her back to the wall. Straining her eyes to see in the deep darkness, unable to find and use the light switch without giving away the game.

A surprising plenitude of windows in the north and east and west walls—not so many windows on the exterior, were there? — offered only minor relief from the darkness. Vaguely luminous fog pressed against the panes, like cloudy gray water, and she had the queer feeling of being under the sea in a bathysphere.

The room was wrong. Didn’t feel right somehow. She didn’t know what it was that she sensed, what wrongness, but it was there.

Something was also odd about the wall at her back when she brushed against it. Too smooth, cold.

She let go of the gun with her left hand, and felt behind her. Glass. The wall was glass but it wasn’t a window because it was the wall shared with the foyer.

For a moment Connie was confused, thinking frantically because anything inexplicable was frightening under the circumstances. Then she realized it was a mirror. Her fingers slid across a vertical seam, onto another big sheet of glass. Mirrored. Floor to ceiling. Like the south wall of the foyer.

When she looked behind her, at the wall along which she had been slipping so stealthily, she saw reflections of the north-side windows and the fog beyond. No wonder there were more windows than there should have been. The windowless south and west walls were mirrored, so half the windows she saw were only reflections.

And she realized what bothered her about the room. Although she had kept on the move to the left, putting herself at changing angles to the windows, she hadn’t seen silhouettes of any furniture between her and the grayish rectangles of glass. She hadn’t bumped against any piece of furniture set with its back to the south wall either.

Both hands on the gun again, she eased toward the center of the room, wary of knocking something over and drawing attention. But inch by inch, cautious step by step, she became convinced there was nothing in her way.

The room was empty. Mirrored and empty.

As she neared the center, in spite of the unrelenting gloom, she was able to see a dim image of herself to her left. A phantom with her form, moving across the reflection of the fog-gray east-facing window.

Ticktock was not here.

A chaos of Harrys moved along the upstairs hall, gun-bearing clones in dirty rumpled suits, unshaven faces gray with stubble, tense and scowling. Hundreds, thousands, an uncountable army, they advanced abreast in a single slightly curved line, stretching forever to the left and right. In their mathematical symmetry and perfect choreography, they should have been the apotheosis of order. Even glimpsed with peripheral vision, however, they disoriented Harry, and he could not look directly either left or right without risking dizziness.

Both walls were mirrored floor to ceiling, as were all of the doors to the rooms, creating an illusion of infinity, bouncing his reflection back and forth, reflecting reflections of reflections of reflections.

Harry knew he should check room by room as he advanced, leaving no unexplored territory behind him, from which Ticktock might be able to move in on his back. But the sole light on the second floor was ahead, spilling out of the only open door, and chances were that the bastard who had murdered Ricky Estefan was in that lighted room and no other.

Although he was so tired that his cop instinct had deserted him, trust his reactions to be calm and measured, Harry decided to hell with traditional procedure, go with the flow, ride the wave, and let unexplored rooms at his back. He went directly to the doorway with the light beyond, on his right.

The mirrored wall opposite the open door would give him a look at part of the room before he had to step into the doorway and across the threshold, committing himself. He halted beside the door with his back to the mirrored wall, looking at an angle toward the wedge of the room’s interior that was reflected across the hallway in another length of mirror.

All he could see was a confusion of black planes and angles, different black textures revealed by lamplight, black shapes against black backgrounds, all of it cubistic and strange. No other color. No Ticktock.

Suddenly he realized that, because he was seeing only part of the room, anyone standing in an unrevealed portion of it but looking toward the door might be at such an angle as to see his infinite reflections bouncing from wall to wall.

He stepped into the doorway and crossed the threshold, staying low and moving fast, his revolver held out in front of him with both hands. The hallway carpet did not continue into the bedroom. There was black ceramic tile on the floor instead, against which his shoes made noise, a click-scrape-click, and he froze within three steps, hoping to God he hadn’t been heard.

Another dark room, much larger than the first, what should have been a living room, off the downstairs hall. More windows on the pearly luminescent fog and more reflections of windows.

Connie had a feel for that special oddness now, and wasted less time there than she had in the den off the foyer. The three walls without windows were mirrored, and there was no furniture.

Multiple reflections of her silhouette kept perfect time with her in the dark reflective surfaces, like ghosts, like other Connies in alternate universes briefly overlapping and barely visible.

Ticktock evidently liked to look at himself.

She would like to get a look at him, too, but in the flesh. Silently she returned to the downstairs hall and moved on.

The big walk-in pantry off the kitchen was filled with cookies, hard candies, taffy, chocolates of all kinds, caramels, red and black licorice, tins of sweet biscuits and exotic cakes imported from every corner of the world, bags of cheese popcorn, caramel popcorn, potato chips, tortilla chips, cheese-flavored tortilla chips, pretzels, cans of cashews, almonds, peanuts, mixed nuts, and millions of dollars in cash stacked in tight bundles of twenty- and hundred-dollar bills.

While he examined the sweets and salties, trying to make up his mind what he most wanted to eat, what would be the least like a meal of which Grandma Drackman would have approved, Bryan idly picked up a packet of hundred-dollar bills and riffled the crisp edges with one thumb.

He had acquired the cash immediately after he had killed his grandmother, stopping the world with his Greatest and Most Secret Power and wandering at his leisure into all the places where money was kept in large quantities and protected by steel doors and locked gates and alarm systems and armed guards. Taking whatever he wanted, he had laughed at the uniformed fools with all their guns and their somber expressions, who were oblivious of him.

Soon, however, he’d realized that he had little need of money. He could use his powers to take anything, not merely cash, and to alter sales and public records to create extensive legal support for his ownership if he were ever questioned. Besides, if ever he were questioned, he had only to eliminate those idiots who dared to be suspicious of him, and alter their records to insure no further investigation.

He had stopped piling up cash in the pantry, but he still liked to riffle it under his thumb and listen to the crisp flutter, smell it, and play games with it sometimes. It felt so good to know that he was different from other people in this way, too: he was beyond money, beyond concerns related to things material. And it was fun to think that he could be the richest person in the world if he wanted, richer than Rockefellers and Kennedys, could pile up cash to fill room after room, cash and emeralds if he wanted emeralds, diamonds and rubies, anything, anything, like pirates of old in their lairs and surrounded by treasure.

He tossed the packet of currency back on the shelf from which he’d taken it. From the side of the pantry where he kept food, he took down two boxes of Reese’s peanut butter cups and a family-size bag of Hawaiian-style potato chips, which were a lot oilier than ordinary chips. Grandma Drackman would’ve had a stroke at the very thought.

Harry’s heart knocked so hard and fast that his ears were filled with doubletime drumming that would probably drown out the sound of approaching footsteps.

In the black bedroom, on black shelves, scores of eyes floated in clear fluid, slightly luminous in the amber lamplight, and some were animal eyes, had to be because they were so strange, but others were human eyes, oh shit, no doubt at all about that, some brown and some black, blue, green, hazel. Unhooded by lids or lashes, they all looked scared, perpetually wide with fright. Crazily he wondered if, by looking closely enough, he would be able to see reflections of Ticktock in all the lenses of those dead eyes, the last sight each victim had seen in this world, but he knew that was impossible, and he had no desire to look that close anyway.

Keep moving. The insane sonofabitch was here. In the house. Somewhere. Charles Manson with psychic power, for God’s sake.

Not in the bed, sheets tossed and rumpled, but somewhere.

Jeffrey Dahmer crossed with Superman, John Wayne Gacy with a sorcerer’s spells and magics.

And if not in the bed, awake, oh Jesus, awake and therefore more formidable, harder to get close to.

Closet. Check it. Just clothes, not many, mostly jeans and red robes. Move, move.

The little creep was Ed Gein, Richard Ramirez, Randy Kraft, Richard Speck, Charles Whitman, Jack the Ripper, all the homicidal sociopaths of legend rolled into one and gifted with paranormal talents beyond measure.

The adjoining bathroom. Through the door, no light, find it, just mirrors, more mirrors on all walls and the ceiling.

Back in the black bedroom, heading toward the door, stepping as silently as possible on the black ceramic tiles, Harry didn’t want to look again at the floating eyes but couldn’t stop himself. When he glanced at them again, he realized Ricky Estefan’s eyes must be among those in the jars, though he couldn’t identify which pair they were, couldn’t, under the current circumstances, even remember what color Ricky’s eyes had been.

He reached the door, crossed the threshold, into the upstairs hall, dizzied by infinite images of himself, and from the corner of his eye he saw movement to his left. Movement that was not another Harry Lyon. Coming straight at him and not from out of a mirror, either, coming low. He swiveled toward it, bringing the revolver around, pressure on the trigger, telling himself it had to be a headshot, a headshot, only a headshot would be sure to stop the bastard.

It was the dog. Tail wagging. Head cocked.

He almost killed it, mistaking it for the enemy, almost alerted Ticktock that someone was in the house. He let up on the trigger a fraction of an ounce short of the pressure needed to squeeze off a shot, and would have made the mistake of cursing the dog aloud if his voice hadn’t caught in his throat.

Connie kept listening for gunfire from the second floor, hoping Harry had found Ticktock asleep and would scramble his brain with a couple of rounds. The continued silence was beginning to worry her.

After quickly checking out another mirrored chamber opposite the living room, Connie was in what she assumed would have been the dining room in an ordinary house. It was easier to inspect than the other areas she’d been through, because a band of fluorescent-quality light came under the door from the adjoining kitchen, dispelling some of the gloom.

One wall featured windows, and the other three were mirrored. No furniture, not one stick. She supposed he never ate in the dining room, and he was certainly not the sort of sociable guy who would entertain a lot.

She started to return through the archway to the downstairs hall, then decided to go directly to the kitchen from the dining room. Having looked into the kitchen from an outside window, she knew Ticktock wasn’t there, but she had to sweep it again, just to be sure, before joining Harry upstairs.

Carrying two boxes of Reese’s peanut butter cups and one bag of chips, Bryan left the light burning in the pantry and went into the kitchen. He glanced at the table but didn’t feel like eating there. Heavy fog pressed at the windows, so if he went outside to the patio, he would have no view of the breaking surf on the beach below, which was the best reason for eating out there.

He was happiest, anyway, when the votive eyes watched him; he decided to go upstairs and eat in the bedroom. The glossy white-tile floor was sufficiently polished to reflect the red of his robe, so it seemed as if he walked through a thin, constantly evaporating film of blood as he crossed the kitchen toward the rear stairs.

After pausing to wag his tail at Harry, the dog hurried past him to the end of the hall. It stopped and peered down into the back stairwell, very alert.

If Ticktock was in any of the upstairs rooms that Harry had not yet checked, the dog surely would have shown interest in that closed door. But he had trotted by all of them to the end of the hall, so Harry joined him there.

The narrow stairwell was an enclosed spiral, curving down and around and out of sight like stairs in a lighthouse. The concave wall on the right was paneled with tall narrow mirrors that reflected the steps immediately in front of them; because each was angled slightly toward the one before it, every subsequent panel also partly reflected the reflection in the previous one. Because of the weird funhouse effect, Harry saw his full reflection in the first couple of panels on the right, then fractionally less of himself in each succeeding panel, until he did not appear at all in the panel just this side of the first turn in the stairwell.

He was about to start down the steps when the dog stiffened and nipped a mouthful of trouser cuff to restrain him. By now he knew the dog well enough to understand that the attempt to hold him back meant there was danger below.

But he was hunting danger, after all, and had to find it before it found him; surprise was their only hope. He tried to jerk loose of the dog without making any noise or causing it to bark, but it held fast to his cuff.

Damn it.

Connie thought she heard something just before she entered the kitchen, so she paused on the dining-room side of the door and listened closely. Nothing. Nothing.

She couldn’t wait forever. It was a swinging door. Cautiously, she pulled it toward her, easing around it, rather than pushing the door in where it would block part of her view.

The kitchen appeared deserted.

Harry tugged again, with no better result than he’d gotten before; the dog held tight.

Glancing nervously down the mirrored stairs again, Harry had the terrible feeling that Ticktock was down there and was going to get away, or more likely encounter Connie and kill her, all because the dog wouldn’t let him slip down and behind the perp. So he rapped the dog smartly on the top of the head with the barrel of his revolver, risking its yelp of protest.

Startled, it let go of him, thankfully didn’t bark, and Harry stepped out of the hallway, onto the first stair. Even as he started to descend, he saw a flash of red in the mirror at the farthest curve of the first spiral, another red flash, a billow of red fabric.

Before Harry could register the meaning of what he had seen, the dog shot past him, nearly knocking him off his feet, and it plunged into the stairwell. Then Harry saw more red like a skirt and a red sleeve and part of a bare wrist and a hand, a man’s hand, holding something, somebody coming up, maybe Ticktock, and the dog hurtling toward him.

Bryan heard something, looked up from the boxes of candy in his hands, and saw a pack of snarling dogs erupting toward him, down the staircase, all identical dogs. Not a pack, of course, only one dog reflected repeatedly in the angled mirrors, revealed in advance of its attack, not yet even visible in the flesh. But he only had time to gasp before the beast flew around the curve in front of him. It was moving so fast that it lost its footing and bounced off the concave outer wall. Bryan dropped the candy, and the dog regained enough purchase on the stairs to launch itself at him, crashing into his chest and face, both of them falling backward, the dog snapping and snarling, end over end.

Snarling, a startled cry, and the thump-crash of falling bodies caused Connie to turn away from the open pantry door where shelves were stacked with bundles of cash. She spun toward the arch beyond which the back stairs curved upward out of sight.

The dog and Ticktock spilled onto the kitchen floor, Ticktock flat on his back and the dog on top of him, and for an instant it looked as if the dog was going to tear out the kid’s throat. Then the dog squealed and was flung away from the kid, not thrown by hands or booted with a foot, but sent with a pale flash of telekinetic power, hurled across the room.

It was going down, holy God, right there and then, but going down all wrong. She wasn’t close enough to jam the muzzle of her revolver against his skull and pull the trigger, she was about eight feet away, but she fired just the same, once even as the dog was in the air, again as the dog slammed into the front of the refrigerator. She hit the perp both times, because he didn’t even realize she was in the kitchen until the first shot took him, maybe in the chest, the second in the leg, and he rolled off his back, onto his stomach. She fired again, the bullet spanged off the tile, spraying up ceramic chips, and from his prone position Ticktock held one hand toward her, the palm spread, that strange flash as with the dog, and she felt herself airborne, then slammed into the kitchen door hard enough to shatter all the glass in it and send shockwaves of pain up her spine. Her gun flew out of her hand, and her corduroy jacket was suddenly on fire.

As soon as the snarling dog exploded past Harry and scrambled-bounced-leaped out of sight around the first curve in the narrow spiral staircase, Harry followed, taking the steps two at a time. He fell before he reached the turn, cracked one of the mirrors with his head, but didn’t tumble all the way to the bottom, came up wedged at the midpoint of the well, with one leg twisted under him.

Dazed, he looked around frantically for his weapon, discovered it was still clutched in his hand. He clambered to his feet and continued down, dizzy, one hand braced against the mirrors to keep his balance.

The dog squealed, gunshots boomed, and Harry spiraled down, into the last turn, to the foot of the stairs in time to see Connie catapulted backward, crashing into the door, on fire. Ticktock was lying on his stomach, directly in front of the stairs, facing out toward the kitchen, and Harry leaped off the last step, landed hard on red silk stretched taut across the kid’s back, jammed the muzzle hard against the base of the kid’s skull, saw the gunmetal suddenly glow green and felt the start of what might have been a swift and terrible heat in his hand, but pulled the trigger. The explosion was muffled, like firing into a pillow, the green glow disappeared in the instant it first arose, and he squeezed the trigger again, both rounds into the troll’s brain. That was surely enough, had to be enough, but you never knew with magic, never knew in this pre-millennium cotillion, these wild ‘90s, so he squeezed the trigger again. The skull was coming apart like chunks of rind from a cantaloupe hit with a hammer, and still Harry pulled the trigger, and a fifth time, until there was a terrible spreading mess on the floor and no more rounds in the revolver, the hammer snapping against expended casings with a dry click, click, click, click, click.

2

Connie had stripped off the burning jacket and stamped out the fire by the time Harry realized his gun was empty, climbed off the dead troll, and managed to reach her. It was amazing she’d been able to act fast enough to avoid going up like a torch, because shedding the jacket had been complicated by the fact that her left wrist was broken. She’d suffered a minor burn on the left arm, as well, but nothing serious.

“He’s dead,” Harry said, as if it needed saying, and then he put his arms around her, held her as tightly as he could without touching her injuries.

She returned his hug fiercely, one-armed, and they stood that way for a while, unable to talk, until the dog came sniffing around. He was lame, holding his right rear leg off the floor, but he seemed otherwise all right.

Harry realized that Woofer had not, after all, been the cause of a disaster. In fact, if he hadn’t plunged down those stairs and knocked Ticktock ass over teakettle, thereby preserving the surprise of Connie’s and Harry’s presence in the house for just a few vital additional seconds, they would be dead on the floor, the golem-master alive and grinning.

A shiver of superstitious dread swept through Harry. He had to let go of Connie and return to the body, look at it again, just to be sure Ticktock was dead.

3

They built houses better in the 1940s, with thick walls and lots of insulation, which might have explained why none of the neighbors responded to the gunfire and why no oncoming sirens wailed in the fogbound night.

Suddenly, however, Connie wondered if, in his last moment of life, Ticktock had thrown the world into another Pause, exempting only his own house, figuring to disable them and then kill them at his leisure. And if he had died with the world stopped, would it ever start up again? Or would she and Harry and the dog wander through it alone, among millions of once-living mannequins?

She raced to the kitchen door and through it to the night outside. A breeze, cool on her face, ruffling her hair. Fog swirling, not suspended like a cloud of glitter in an acrylic paperweight. The rumble of waves on the shore below. Beautiful, beautiful sounds of a world alive.

4

They were police officers with a sense of duty and justice, but they were not foolish enough to follow prescribed procedures in the aftermath of this one. No way could they call it in to the local authorities and explain the true circumstances. Dead, Bryan Drackman was just a twenty-year-old man, and there was nothing about him to prove that he’d possessed astonishing powers. To tell the truth would be a ticket to institutionalization.

The jars of eyes, however, floating blindly on the shelves in Ticktock’s bedroom, and the mirrored strangeness of his house would be evidence enough that they had crossed paths with a homicidal psychopath, even if no one ever produced the bodies from which he had removed the eyes. They were able to provide one body, anyway, to support a charge of brutal murder: Ricky Estefan down in Dana Point, eyeless, with snakes and tarantulas.

“Somehow,” Connie said, as they stood in the pantry staring at the shelves laden with cash, “we’ve got to concoct a story to cover everything, all the holes and weirdnesses, the reason why we broke procedures on this case. We can’t just close the door and walk away because too many people at Pacific View know we were there tonight, talking to his mother, seeking his address.”

“Story?” he said blearily. “Dear God in Heaven, what kind of story?”

“I don’t know,” she said, wincing from the pain in her wrist. “That’s up to you.”

“Me? Why me?”

“You’ve always liked fairy tales. Make one up. It has to cover the burning of your house, Ricky Estefan, and this. At least that much.” He was still gaping at her when she pointed to all the piles of cash. “This is only going to complicate the story. Let’s just simplify things by getting it out of here.”

“I don’t want his money,” Harry said.

“Neither do I. Not a dollar of it. But we’ll never know who it was stolen from, so it’ll only go to the government, the same damn government that’s given us this pre-millennium cotillion, and I can’t tolerate the idea of giving it more to waste. Besides, we both know a few people who could sure use it, don’t we?”

“God, they’re still waiting in the van,” he said.

“Let’s bag this cash and take it out to them. Then Janet can drive them away in the van, with the dog, so they don’t get wrapped up in it. Meanwhile, you’ll be putting together a story, and by the time they’re gone, we’ll be ready to call in.”

“Connie, I can’t possibly—”

“Better start thinking,” she said, pulling a plastic garbage bag from a box of them on one shelf.

“But this is crazier than—”

“Not much time,” she said warningly, opening the bag with her one good hand.

“All right, all right,” he said exasperatedly.

“Can’t wait to hear it,” she said, scooping bundles of currency into the first open bag as he opened a second. “It should be highly entertaining.”

5

Good day, good day, good. Sun shining, breeze blowing through his fur, interesting bugs busy in the grass, interesting smells on people’s shoes from faraway interesting places, and no cats.

Everyone there, all together. Ever since this morning early, Janet doing delicious-smelling things in the food room of the people place, the people and dog place, their place. Sammy in his garden, cutting tomatoes off vines, pulling carrots out of the ground— interesting, must’ve buried them in the ground like bones — and then bringing them into the food room for Janet to do delicious things. Then Sammy washing off the stones that people put down over part of the grass behind their place. Washing stones with the hose, yes yes yes yes yes, the hose, splattering water, cool and tasty, everyone laughing, dodging, yes yes yes yes. And Danny there, helping to put the cloth on the table that stands on the stones, arrange the chairs, plates and things. Janet, Danny, Sammy. He knows their names now because they have been together long enough for him to know them, Janet and Danny and Sammy, all together at the Janet-and-Danny-and-Sammy-and-Woofer place.

He remembers being Prince, sort of, and Max because of the cat who peed in his water, and he remembers Fella from everyone for so long, but now he answers only to Woofer.

The others come, too, driving up in their car, and he knows their names almost as well because they’re around so much, visiting so much. Harry, Connie, and Ellie, Ellie who is Danny’s size, all of them coming over to visit from the Harry-and-Connie-and-Ellie-and-Toto place.

Toto. Good dog, good dog, good. Friend.

He takes Toto straight to the garden, where they aren’t allowed to dig — bad dogs if they dig, bad dogs, bad — to show him where the carrots were buried like bones. Sniff sniff sniff sniff. More of them buried here. Interesting. But don’t dig.

Playing with Toto and Danny and Ellie, running and chasing and jumping and rolling in the grass, rolling.

Good day. The best. The best.

Then food. Food! Bringing it out of the people food room and piling it up on the table that stands on the stones in the shade of the trees. Sniff sniff sniff sniff, ham, chicken, potato salad, mustard, cheese, cheese is good, sticks to the teeth but is good, and more, much more food, up there on the table.

Don’t jump up. Be good. Be a good dog. Good dogs get more scraps, usually not just scraps, whole big pieces of things, yes yes yes yes yes.

Cricket jumps. Cricket! Chase, chase, get it, get it, get it, got to have it, Toto too, leaping, jumping, this way, that way, this way, cricket….

Oh, wait, yes, the food. Back to the table. Sit. Chest puffed out. Head cocked. Tail wagging. They love that. Lick your chops, give them the hint.

Here it comes. What what what what? Ham. A piece of ham to start. Good, good, good, gone. A delicious start, a very good start.

Such a good day, a day like he always knew would come, one of lots of good days, one after another, for a long time now, because it happened, it really happened, he went around that one more corner, looked in that one more strange new place, and he found the wonderful thing, the wonderful thing that he always knew was out there waiting for him. The wonderful thing, the wonderful thing, which is this place and this time and these people. And here comes a slice of chicken, thick and juicy!