From a Buick 8

'He must have been wearing gloves,' Ned said.

'You'd think so, yes. Brad couldn't say for sure, but he thought he remembered seeing the guy's hands and thinking they were as white as his face.'

'People sometimes make up details like that afterwards, though,' Huddie commented.

'Eyewitnesses aren't as reliable as we'd like them to be.'

'You done philosophizing?' I asked.

Huddie gave me a grand wave of the hand. 'Continue.'

'Bibi found no traces of blood in the car, but fabric samples taken from the interior of the trunk showed microscopic traces of organic matter. Bibi wasn't able to identify any of it, and the stuff- he called it 'soap-scum' - disintegrated. Every slide he took was clear of the stuff in a week. Nothing left but the staining agent he used.'

Huddie raised his hand like a kid in school. I nodded to him.

'A week later you couldn't see the places where those guys chipped the dashboard and the wheel to get their samples. The wood grew back like skin over a grape. Same with the lining in the trunk. If you scratched a fender with a penknife or a key, six or seven hours later the scratch would be gone.'

'It heals itself?' Ned said. 'It can do that?'

'Yes,' Shirley said. She'd lit another Parliament and was smoking it in quick, nervous little puffs. 'Your father dragooned me into one of his experiments once - got me to run the video camera. He put a long scratch down the driver's-side door, right under the chrome swoop, and we just let the camera run, came back together every fifteen minutes. It wasn't anything dramatic, like something in a movie, but it was pretty damned amazing. The scratch got shallower and started to darken around the edges, like it was working to match the paintjob. And finally it was just gone. All sign of it.'

'And the tires,' Phil Candleton said, taking a turn. 'You shoved a screwdriver into one of em, the air'd start to whoosh out just like you'd expect. Only then the whoosh'd thin to a whistle and a few seconds later that would stop, too. Then out comes the screwdriver.' Phil pursed his lips and made a thpp sound. 'Like spitting out a watermelon seed.'

'Is it alive?' Ned asked me. His voice was so low I could hardly hear it. 'I mean, if it can heal itself - '

'Tony always said it wasn't,' I said. 'He was vehement on the subject. 'Just a gadget,' he used to say. 'Just some kind of goddam thingamajig we don't understand. 'Your dad thought just the opposite, and by the end he was just as vehement as Tony had ever been. If Curtis had lived - '

'What? If he'd lived, what?'

'I don't know,' I said. All at once I felt dull and sad. There was a lot more to tell, but suddenly I didn't want to tell it. I didn't feel up to it and my heart was heavy with the prospect of it, the way your heart can grow heavy at the prospect of toil which is necessary but hard and stupid - stumps to pull before sundown, hay to bundle into the barn before afternoon rain. 'I don't know what would have happened if he'd lived, and that's the God's honest truth.'

Huddie came to my rescue. 'Your dad was bullshit about the car, Ned. I mean bug-eyed bullshit.

He was out there every spare minute, walking around it, taking pictures of it. . . touching it.

That was what he mostly did. Just touching and touching, like to make sure it was real.'

'Sarge d'same way,' Arky put in.

Not exactly, I thought but didn't say. It had been different for Curt. In the end the Buick had been his in a way it had never been Tony's. And Tony had known it.

'But what about Trooper Rafferty, Sandy? Do you think the Buick-?'

'Ate im,' Huddie said. He spoke with dead flat certainty. 'That's what I thought then and it's what I think now. It's what your dad thought, too.'

'Did he?' Ned asked me.

'Well, yes. Ate him or took him away to someplace else.' Again the image of stupid work came to me - rows of beds to be made, stacks of dishes to be washed, acres of hay to be scythed and carried.

'But you're telling me,' Ned said, 'that no scientist has ever been allowed to study that thing since Trooper Rafferty and my father found it? Ever? No physicists, no chemists? No one's ever run a spectrographic analysis?'

'Bibi was back at least once, I think,' Phil said, sounding just the tiniest bit defensive.

'By himself, though, without those kids he used to travel around with. He and Tony and your father wheeled some big machine in there . . . maybe it was a spectrograph, but I don't know what it showed. Do you, Sandy?'

I shook my head. There was no one left to answer that question. Or a lot of others. Bibi Roth died of cancer in 1998. Curtis Wilcox, who often walked around the Buick with a spiral notebook in his hands, writing things down (and sometimes sketching), was also dead. Tony Schoondist, alias the old Sarge, was still alive but now in his late seventies, lost in that confused twilit purgatory reserved for people with Alzheimer's disease. I remembered going to see him, along with Arky Arkanian, at the nursing home where he now lives. Just before Christmas, this was. Arky and I brought him a gold St Christopher's medal, which a bunch of us older fellows had chipped in to buy. It had seemed to me that the old Sarge was having one of his good days. He opened the package without much trouble and seemed delighted by the medallion. Even undid the clasp himself, although Arky had to help him do it up again after he'd slipped it on. When that was finally accomplished, Tony had looked at me closely with his brows knit together, his bleary eyes projecting a parody of his old piercing glare. It was a moment when he really seemed himself. Then his eyes filled with tears, and the illusion was gone. 'Who are you boys?' he'd asked. 'I can almost remember.' Then, as matter-of-factly as someone reporting the weather: 'I'm in hell, you know. This is hell.'

'Ned, listen,' I said. 'What that meeting in The Country Way really boiled down to was just one thing. The cops in California have it written on the sides of some of their cruisers, maybe because their memory is a little bit faulty and they have to write it down. We don't. Do you know what I'm talking about?'

'To serve and protect,' Ned said.

'You got it. Tony thought that thing had come into our hands almost as a result of God's will.

He didn't say it that flat-out, but we understood. And your father felt the same way.'

I was telling Ned Wilcox what I thought he needed to hear. What I didn't tell him about was the light in Tony's eyes, and in the eyes of his father. Tony could sermonize about our commitment to serve and protect; he could tell us about how the men of Troop D were the ones best equipped to take care of such a dangerous res; he could even allow as how later on we might turn the thing over to a carefully chosen team of scientists, perhaps one led by Bibi Roth. He could spin all those tales, and did. None of it meant jack shit. Tony and Curt wanted the Buick because they just couldn't bear to let it go. That was the cake, and all the rest of it was just icing. The Roadmaster was strange and exotic, unique, and it was theirs. They couldn't bear to surrender it.

'Ned,' I asked, 'would you know if your dad left any notebooks? Spirals, they would have been, like the kind kids take to school.'

Ned's mouth pinched at that. He dropped his head and spoke to a spot somewhere bet-ween his knees. 'Yeah, all kinds of them, actually. My mom said they were probably diaries. Anyway, in his will, he asked that Mom burn all his private papers, and she did.'

'I guess that makes sense,' Huddie said. 'It jibes with what I know about Curt and the old Sarge, at least.'

Ned looked up at him.

Huddie elaborated. 'Those two guys distrusted scientists. You know what Tony called them?

Death's cropdusters. He said their big mission in life was to spread poison everywhere, telling people to go ahead and eat all they wanted, that it was knowledge and it wouldn't hurt them - that it would set them free.' He paused. 'There was another issue, too.'

'What issue?' Ned asked.

'Discretion,' Huddie said. 'Cops can keep secrets, but Curt and Tony didn't believe scientists could. "Look how fast those idiots cropdusted the atomic bomb all around the world," I heard Tony say once. "We fried the Rosenbergs for it, but anyone with half a brain knows the Russians would have had the bomb in two years, anyway. Why? Because scientists like to chat. That thing we've got out in Shed B may not be the equivalent of the A-bomb, but then again it might. One thing's for sure, it isn't anybody's A-bomb as long as it's sitting out back under a piece of canvas."'

I thought Huddie was helping the kid understand, but I knew it was just part of the truth, not the whole truth. I've wondered from time to time if Tony and Ned's father ever really needed to talk about it - I mean on some late weekday evening when things at the barracks were at their slowest, guys cooping upstairs, other guys watching a movie on the VCR and eating microwave popcorn, just the two of them downstairs from all that, in Tony's office with the door shut. I'm not talking about maybe or kinda or sorta. I mean whether or not they ever spoke the flat-out truth: There's not anything like this anywhere, and we're keeping it. I don't think so. Because really, all they would have needed to do was to look into each other's eyes. To see that same eagerness - the desire to touch it and pry into it. Hell, just to walk around it. It was a secret thing, a mystery, a marvel. But I didn't know if the boy could accept that. I knew he wasn't just missing his father; he was angry at him for dying. In that mood, he might have seen what they did as stealing, and that wasn't truth, either. At least not the whole truth.

'By then we knew about the lightquakes,' I said. 'Tony called them "dispersal events". He thought the Buick was getting rid of something, discharging it like static electricity. Issues of discretion and caretaking aside, by the end of the seventies people in Pennsylvania - and not just us but everyone - had one very big reason not to trust the scientists and the techies.'

'Three-Mile,' Ned said.

'Yes. Plus, there's more to that car than self-healing scratches and dust-repellent. Quite a bit more.'

I stopped. It seemed too hard too much.

'Go on, tell him,' Arky said. He sounded almost angry, a pissed-off bandleader in the gloaming. 'You told him all dis dat don't mean shit, now you tell im da rest.' He looked at Huddie, then Shirley. 'Even 1988. Yeah, even dat part.' He paused, sighed, looked at Shed B. 'Too late to stop now, Sarge.'

I got up and started across the parking lot. Behind me, I heard Phil say: 'No, hunh-unh. Let him go, kid, he'll be back.'

That's one thing about sitting in the big chair; people can say that and almost always be right. Barring strokes, heart attacks, and drunk drivers, I guess. Barring acts of what we mortals hope is God. People who sit in the big chair - who have worked to get there and work to stay there

- never just say oh fuck it and go fishing. No. Us big-chair folks continue making the beds, washing the dishes, and baling the hay, doing it the best we can. Ah, man, what would we do without you? people say. The answer is that most of them would go on doing whatever the hell they want, same as always. Going to hell in the same old handbasket.

I stood at the roll-up door of Shed B, looking through one of the windows at the thermometer.

It was down to fifty-two. Still not bad - not terrible, anyway - but cold enough for me to think the Buick was going to give another shake or two before settling down for the night. No sense spreading the tarp back over it yet, then; we'd likely just have to do it again later on.

It's winding down: that was the received wisdom concerning the Roadmaster, the gospel according to Schoondist and Wilcox. Slowing like an unwound clock, wobbling like an exhausted top, beeping like a smoke detector that can no longer tell what's hot. Pick your favorite metaphor from the bargain bin. And maybe it was true. Then again, maybe it wasn't. We knew nothing about it, not really. Telling ourselves we did was just a strategy we used so we could continue living next door to it without too many bad dreams.

I walked back to the bench, lighting another cigarette, and sat down between Shirley and Ned.

I said, 'Do you want to hear about the first time we saw what we saw tonight?'

'Yes, sir. I sure do.'

The eagerness I saw on his face made it a little easier to go on.

THEN

Sandy was there when it started, the only one who was. In later years he would say - half-joking -

that it was his one claim to fame. The others arrived on the scene soon enough, but to begin with it was only Sander Freemont Dearborn, standing by the gas-pump with his mouth hung open and his eyes squinched shut, sure that in another few seconds the whole bunch of them, not to mention the Amish and few non-Amish farmers in the area, would be so much radioactive dust in the wind.

It happened a couple of weeks after the Buick came into Troop D's possession, around the first of August in the year 1979. By then the newspaper coverage of Ennis Rafferty's disappearance was dying down. Most of the stories about the missing State Trooper appeared in the Statler County American, but the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a feature piece on the front page of its Sunday edition at the end of July. MISSING TROOPER'S SISTER LEFT WITH MANY QUESTIONS, the headline read, and beneath that: EDITH HYAMS CALLS FOR FULL INVESTIGATION.

Overall, the story played out exactly as Tony Schoondist had hoped it would. Edith believed the men in Troop D knew more than they were telling about her brother's disappearance; she was quoted on that in both papers. What was left between the lines was that the poor woman was half out of her mind with grief (not to mention anger), and looking for someone to blame for what might have been her own fault. None of the Troopers said anything about her sharp tongue and nearly constant fault-finding, but Ennis and Edith had neighbors who weren't so discreet. The reporters from both papers also mentioned that, accusations or no, the men in Ennis's Troop were going ahead with plans to provide the woman with some modest financial support.

The harsh black-and-white photo of Edith in the Post-Gazette didn't help her case; it made her look like Lizzie Borden about fifteen minutes before she grabbed her hatchet.

The first lightquake happened at dusk. Sandy had come off patrol around six that evening in order to have a little chat with Mike Sanders, the County Attorney. They had a particularly nasty hit-and-run trial coming up, Sandy the prime witness for the prosecution, the victim a child who had been left a quadriplegic. Mike wanted to be very sure that the coke-snorting Mr Businessman responsible went away. Five years was his goal, but ten wasn't out of the question. Tony Schoondist sat in on part of the meeting, which took place in a corner of the upstairs common room, then went down to his office while Mike and Sandy finished up. When the meeting was over, Sandy decided to top up the tank in his cruiser before hitting the road for another three hours or so.

As he walked past dispatch toward the back door, he heard Matt Babicki say in a low, just-talking-to-myself voice: 'Oh you fucking thing.' This was followed by a whack. 'Why don't you behave?'

Sandy peeped around the corner and asked if Matt was having that delicate time of the month.

Matt wasn't amused. 'Listen to this,' he said, and boosted the gain on his radio. The SQUELCH

knob, Sandy saw, was already turned as far as it would go toward +.

Brian Cole checked in from Unit 7, Herb Avery from 5 out on the Sawmill Road, George Stankowski from God knew where. That one was almost entirely lost in a windy burst of static.

'If this gets any worse, I don't know how I'm going to keep track of the guys, let alone shoot them any information,' Matt complained. He slapped the side of his radio again, as if for emphasis. 'And what if someone calls in with a complaint? Is it getting ready to thunderstorm outside, Sandy?'

'It "was clear as a bell when I came in,' he said, then looked out the window. 'Clear as a bell now, too . . . as you could see, if your neck had a swivel in it. I was born with one, see?'

Sandy turned his head from side to side.

'Very funny. Haven't you got an innocent man to frame, or something?'

'Good one, Matt. That's a very snappy comeback.'

As he went on his way, Sandy heard someone upstairs wanting to know if the damned TV antenna had fallen down, because the picture had all of a sudden gone to hell during a pretty good Star Trek rerun, the one about the Tribbles.

Sandy went out. It was a hot, hazy evening with thunder rumbling off in the distance but no wind and a clear sky overhead. The light was starting to drain away into the west, and a groundmist was rising from the grass; it had gotten to a height of maybe five feet.

He got in his cruiser (D-14 that shift, the one with the busted headrest), drove it across to the Amoco pump, got out, unscrewed the gas cap under the pull-down license plate, then stopped. He had suddenly become aware of how quiet it was - no crickets chirring in the grass, no birds singing anywhere around. The only noise was a low, steady humming, like the sound one hears if one is standing right under the county powerlines, or near an electrical substation.

Sandy started to turn around, and as he did, the whole world went purple-white. His first thought was that, clear sky overhead or no, he had been struck by lightning. Then he saw Shed B

lit up like . . .

But there was no way to finish the metaphor. There was nothing like it, not in his experience.

If he had been looking at those first few flashes dead on, he guessed he would have been blinded - maybe temporarily, maybe for good. Luckily for him, the shed's front roll-up door faced away from the gas-pump. Yet still the glare was enough to dazzle his eyes, and to turn that summer twilight as bright as noonday. And it made Shed B, a solid enough wooden structure, seem as insubstantial as a tent made out of gauze. Light shot through every crack and unoccupied nail-hole; it flashed out from beneath the eaves through a small cavity that might have been gnawed by a squirrel; it blazed at ground-level, where a board had fallen off, in a great brilliant bar.

There was a ventilator stack on the roof, and it shot the glare skyward in irregular bursts, like smoke-signals made out of pure violet light. The flashes through the rows of windows on the roll-up doors, front and back, turned the rising groundmist into an eerie electric vapor.

Sandy was calm. Startled, but calm. He thought: This is it, motherfucker's blowing, we're all dead. The thought of running or jumping into his cruiser never entered his head. R.un where? Drive where? It was a joke.

What he wanted was crazy: to get closer. It drew him. He wasn't terrified of it, as Mister D

had been; he felt the fascination but not the fear. Crazy or not, he wanted to get closer. Could almost hear it calling him closer.

Feeling like a man in a dream (it crossed his mind that dreaming was a serious possibility), he walked back to the driver's side of D-14, leaned in through the open window, and plucked his sunglasses off the dashboard. He put them on and started walking toward the shed. It was a little better with the sunglasses, but not much. He walked with his hand raised in front of him and his eyes narrowed down to stringent slits. The world boomed silent light all around and throbbed with purple fire. Sandy could see his shadow jumping out from his feet, disappearing, and then jumping out again. He could see the light leaping from the windows in the roll-up door and glaring off the back of the barracks. He could see Troopers starting to spill out, pushing aside Matt Babicki from dispatch, who had been closest and who got outside first. In the flashes from the shed, everyone moved herky-jerky, like actors in a silent film. Those who had sunglasses in their pockets reached to put them on. Some of those who didn't turned and stumbled back in to get them. One Trooper even drew his gun, looked down at it as if to say What the fuck'm I gonna do with this? and put it back in his holster. Two of the Troopers without sunglasses groped gamely on toward the shed nevertheless, heads down and eyes shut and hands held out before them like the hands of sleepwalkers, drawn as Sandy had been toward the stuttery flashes and that low, maddening hum.

Like bugs to a buglight.

Then Tony Schoondist ran through them, slapping them, shoving them, telling them to get the hell back, to return to the barracks and that was an order. He was trying to get his own sunglasses on and kept missing his face with them. He got them where they belonged only after poking one bow into his mouth and the other into his left eyebrow.

Sandy saw and heard none of that. What he heard was the hum. What he saw were the flashes, turning the groundmist smoke into electric dragons. What he saw was the column of stuttery purple light rising from the conical roof-vent, stabbing up into the darkening air like a lance.

Tony grabbed him, shook him. Another silent gunshell of light went off in the shed, turning the lenses of Tony's sunglasses into small blue fireballs. He was shouting, although there was no need to; Sandy could hear him perfectly. There was the humming sound, and someone murmuring Good God almighty, and that was all.

'Sandy! Were you here when this started?'

'Yes!' He found himself shouting back in spite of himself. The situation somehow demanded that they shout. The light flared and glared, mute lightning. Each time it went off, the rear side of the barracks seemed to jump forward like something that was alive, the shadows of the troopers running up its board back.

'What started it? What set it off?'

'I don't know!'

'Get inside! Call Curtis! Tell him what's happening! Tell him to get his ass over here now!'

Sandy resisted the urge to tell his SC that he wanted to stay and see what happened next. In a very elementary way the idea was stupid to begin with: you couldn't actually see anything. It was too bright. Even with sunglasses it was too bright. Besides, he knew an order when he heard it.

He went inside, stumbling over the steps (it was impossible to judge depth or distance in those brilliant stutterflashes) and shuffled his way to dispatch, waving his arms in front of him.

In his swimming, dazzled eyesight, the barracks was nothing but overlaid shadows. The only visual reality for him at that moment were the great purple flashes floating in front of him.

Matt Babicki's radio was an endless blare of static with a few voices sticking out of it like the feet or fingers of buried men. Sandy picked up the regular telephone beside the dedicated 911

line, thinking that would be out, too - sure it would - but it was fine. He dialed Curt's number from the list tacked to the bulletin board. Even the telephone seemed to jump with fright each time one of those purple-white flashes lit the room.

Michelle answered the phone and said Curt was out back, mowing the grass before it got dark.

She didn't want to call him in, that was clear in her voice. But when Sandy asked her a second time, she said, 'All right, just a minute, don't you guys ever give it a rest?'

The wait seemed interminable to Sandy. The thing in Shed B kept flashing like some crazy neon apocalypse, and the room seemed to waver into a slightly different perspective every time it did.

Sandy found it nearly impossible to believe something generating such brilliance could be anything but destructive, yet he was still alive and breathing. He touched his cheeks with the hand not holding the telephone, checking for burns or swelling. There was neither.

For the time being, at least, he told himself. He kept waiting for the cops outside to begin screaming as the thing in the old garage exploded or melted or let something out - something unimaginable with burning electric eyes. Such ideas were a million miles from the usual run of cop-thoughts, but Sandy Dearborn had never felt less like a cop and more like a scared little boy. At last Curt picked up the telephone, sounding both curious and out of breath.

'You have to come right now,' Sandy told him. 'Sarge says so.'

Curt knew what it was about immediately. 'What's it doing, Sandy?'

'Shooting off fireworks. Flashes and sparks. You can't even look at Shed B.'

'Is the building on fire?' '

'Don't think so, but there's no way to tell for sure. You can't see inside. It's too bright.

Get over here.'

The phone at Curt's end crashed down without another word spoken and Sandy went back outside.

If they were going to be nuked, he decided, he wanted to be with his friends when it happened.

Curt came roaring up the driveway marked TROOPERS ONLY ten minutes later, behind the wheel of his lovingly restored Bel Aire, the one his son would inherit twenty-two years later. When he came around the corner he was still moving fast, and Sandy had one horrible moment when he thought Curtis was going to clean out about five guys with his bumper. But Curt was quick on the brake (he still had a kid's reflexes), and brought the Chevy to a nose-dipping hair.

He got out of his car, remembering to turn off the engine but not the headlights, tripping over his own eager feet and almost sprawling on the macadam. He caught, his balance and went running toward the shed. Sandy had just time to see what was dangling from one hand: a pair of welders' goggles on an elastic strap. Sandy had seen excited men in his time - sure, plenty, almost every guy you stopped for speeding was excited in one way or another - but he had never seen anyone as burning with it as Curt was then. His eyes seemed to be bulging right out of his face, and his hair appeared to be standing on end . . . although that might have been an illusion caused by how fast he was running.

Tony reached out and grabbed him on the way by, almost spilling him again. Sandy saw Curt's free hand close into a fist and start to rise. Then it relaxed. Sandy didn't know how close the rookie have come to striking his sergeant and didn't want to know. What mattered was that he recognized Tony (and Tony's authority over him) and stood down.

Tony reached for the goggles.

Curt shook his head.

Tony said something to him.

Curt replied, shaking his head vehemently.

In the still-bright flashes, Sandy saw Tony Schoondist undergo his own brief struggle, wanting to simply order Curt to hand the goggles over. Instead, he swung around and looked at his gathered Troopers. In his haste and excitement, the SC had given them what could have been construed as two orders: to get back and to return to the barracks. Most had chosen to obey the first and ignore the second. Tony took a deep breath, let it out, then spoke to Dicky-Duck Eliot, who listened, nodded, and went back into the barracks.

The rest of them watched Curt run toward Shed B, dropping his baseball cap on the pavement as he went and slipping the goggles over his eyes. Much as Sandy liked and respected the newest member of Troop D, he did not see anything heroic in this advance, not even while it was happening. Heroism is the act of going forward in the face of fear. Curt Wilcox felt no fear that night, not the slightest twinge of it. He was simply bugshit with excitement and a curiosity so deep it was a compulsion. Much later, Sandy would decide the Old Sarge had let Curtis go because he saw there was no chance of holding him back.

Curt stopped about ten feet in front of the roll-up door, raising his hands to block his eyes as a particularly brilliant flash erupted from inside the shed. Sandy saw the light shining through Curt's fingers in purple-white spokes. At the same time, Curt's shadow appeared on the mist like the figure of a giant. Then the light died and through a blot of afterimage Sandy saw Curt advance again. He reached the door and looked inside. He stood that way until the next flash came. He recoiled when it did, then at once went back to the window.

Meanwhile, here came Dicky-Duck Eliot back from his errand, whatever it had been. Sandy saw what he was holding as Dicky-Duck went past. The Sarge insisted that all of his D-cars should go out equipped with Polaroid cameras, and Dicky-Duck had run to fetch one of them. He handed it to Tony, cringing involuntarily as the shed lit up in another silent fusillade of light.

Tony took the camera and jogged across to Curtis, who was still peering into the shed arid recoiling at each new flash (or series of them). Even the welder's goggles weren't enough protection from what was going on in there, it seemed.

Something nuzzled Sandy's hand and he almost screamed before looking down and seeing the barracks dog. Mister Dillon had likely slept through the whole thing until then, snoring on the linoleum between the sink and the stove, his favorite spot. Now he'd emerged to see what all the excitement was about. It was clear to Sandy from the brilliance of his eyes, the peak of his cars, and the high set of his head that he knew something was going on, but his previous terror wasn't in evidence. The flashing lights didn't seem to bother him in the slightest.

Curtis tried to grab the Polaroid, but Tony wouldn't let it go. They stood there in front of the Shed B door, turned into flinching silhouettes by each new flash from the shed. Arguing? Sandy didn't think so. Not quite, anyway. It looked to him like they were having the sort of heated discussion any two scientists might have while observing some new phenomenon. Or maybe it's not a phenomenon at all, Sandy thought. Maybe it's an experiment, and we're the guinea pigs.

He began to measure the length of the dark intervals as he and the others stood watching the two men in front of the shed, one wearing an oversized pair of goggles and the other holding a boxy Polaroid camera, both of them outlined like figures on a laser-lit dancefloor. The flashes had been like chain lightning when they began, but now there were significant pauses. Sandy counted six seconds between . . . ten seconds . . . seven . . . fourteen . . . twenty.

Beside him, Buck Flanders said: 'I think it's ending.'

Mister D barked and made as if to start forward. Sandy grabbed him by the collar and held him back. Maybe the dog just wanted to go to Curt and Tony, but maybe it was the thing in the shed he wanted to go to. Maybe it was calling him again. Sandy didn't care which; he liked Mister Dillon right where he was.

Tony and Curt went around to the walk-in door. There they engaged in another warm discussion.

At last Tony nodded - reluctantly, Sandy thought - and handed over the camera. Curt opened the door, and as he did the thing flashed out again, burying him in a glare of brilliant light. Sandy fully expected him to be gone when it died out, disintegrated or perhaps teleported to a galaxy far, far away where he'd spend the rest of his life lubing X-wing fighters or maybe polishing Darth Vader's shiny black ass.

He had just time to register Curt still standing there, one hand upraised to shield his goggled eyes. To his right and slightly behind him, Tony Schoondist was caught in the act of turning away from the glare, hands upraised to shield his face. Sunglasses were simply no protection; Sandy was wearing his own and knew that. When he could see again, Curt had gone into the shed.

At that moment, all of Sandy's attention switched to Mister Dillon, who was lunging forward in spite of the hold Sandy had on his collar. The dog's former calm was gone. He was growling and whining, ears flat against his skull, muzzle wrinkled back to show the white wink of teeth.

'Help me, help me out here!' Sandy shouted.

Buck Flanders and Phil Candleton also grabbed Mister D's collar, but at first it made no difference. The dog went motoring on, coughing and dripping slobber on the pavement, eyes fixed on the side door. He was ordinarily the sweetest mutt in creation, but right then Sandy wished for a leash and a muzzle. If D turned to bite, one of them was apt to wind up a finger or two shy.

'Shut the door!' Sandy bawled at the Sergeant. 'If you don't want D in there with him, shut the damn door'

Tony looked startled, then saw what was wrong and closed the door. Almost at once Mister Dillon relaxed. The growling stopped, then the whining. He gave out a couple of puzzled barks, as if he couldn't remember exactly what had been bugging him. Sandy wondered if it was the hum, which was appreciably louder with the door open, or some smell. He thought the latter, but there was no way of telling for sure. The Buick wasn't about what you knew but what you didn't.

Tony saw a couple of men moving forward and told them to stay clear. Hearing his normal speaking voice so clearly was calming, but it still seemed wrong. Sandy couldn't help feeling there should have been whoops and screams in the background, movie-soundtrack explosions, perhaps rumbles from the outraged earth itself.

Tony turned back to the windows running along the roll-up door and peered in.

'What's he doing, Sarge?' Matt Babicki asked. 'He all right?'

'He's fine,' Tony said. 'Walking around the car taking pictures. What are you doing out here, Matt? Get in on dispatch, for Christ's sake.'

'The radio's FUBAR, boss. Static.'

'Well, maybe it's getting better. Because this is getting better.' To Sandy he sounded normal on top - like the Sergeant - but underneath, that excitement still throbbed in his voice. And as Matt turned away, Tony added: 'Not a word about this goes out over the air, you hear me? Not in the clear, anyway. Now or ever. If you have to talk about the Buick, it's . . . it's Code D. You understand?'

'Yessir,' Matt said, and went up the back steps with his shoulders slumped, as if he had been spanked.

'Sandy!' Tony called. 'What's up with the dog?'

'Dog's fine. Now. What's up with the car?'

'The car also appears to be fine. Nothing's burning and there's no sign anything exploded.

The thermometer says fifty-four degrees. It's cold in there, if anything.'

'If the car's fine, why's he taking pictures of it?' Buck asked.

'Y's a crooked letter that can't be made straight,' Sergeant Schoondist replied, as if this explained everything. He kept his eye on Curtis, who went on circling the car like a fashion photographer circling a model, snapping photos, tucking each Polaroid as it came out of the slot into the waistband of the old khaki shorts he was wearing. While this was going on, Tony allowed the rest of those present to approach by fours and take a look. When Sandy's turn came, he was struck by how Curtis's ankles lit up green each time the Buick flashed out. Radiation! he thought.

Jesus Christ, he's got radiation burns! Then he remembered what Curt had been doing earlier and had to laugh. Michelle hadn't wanted to call him in to the phone because he was mowing the grass.

And that was what was on his ankles - grass-stains.

'Come outta there,' Phil muttered from Sandy's left. He still had the dog by the collar, although now Mister D seemed quite docile. 'Come on out, don't be pressing your luck.'

Curt started backing toward the door as if he'd heard Phil - or all of them, thinking that same thing. More likely he was just out of film.

As soon as he came through the door, Tony put an arm around his shoulders and pulled him aside. As they stood talking, a final weak pulse of purple light came. It was really no more than a twitch. Sandy looked at his watch. It was ten minutes of nine. The entire event had lasted not quite an hour.

Tony and Curt were looking at the Polaroids with an intensity Sandy couldn't understand. If, that was, Tony had been telling the truth when he said the Buick and the other stuff in the shed was unchanged. And to Sandy, all of it did look unchanged.

At last Tony nodded as if something was settled and walked back to the rest of the Troopers.

Curt, meanwhile, went to the roll-up door for a final peek. The welder's goggles were pushed up on his forehead by then. Tony ordered everyone back into the barracks except for George Stankowski and Herb Avery. Herb had come in from patrol while the lightshow was still going on, probably to take a dump. Herb would drive five miles out of his way to take a dump at the barracks; he was famous for it, and took all ribbing stoically. He said you could get diseases from strange toilet seats, and anyone who didn't believe that deserved what he got. Sandy thought Herb was simply partial to the magazines in the upstairs crapper. Trooper Avery, who would be killed in a rollover car crash ten years later, was an American Heritage man.

'You two have got the first watch,' Tony said. 'Sing out if you see anything peculiar. Even if you only think it's peculiar.'

Herb groaned at getting sentry duty and started to protest.

'Put a sock in it,' Tony said, pointing at him. 'Not one more word.'

Herb noted the red spots on his SC's cheeks and closed his mouth at once. Sandy thought that showed excellent sense.

Matt Babicki was talking on the radio as the rest of them crossed the ready-room behind Sergeant Schoondist. When Matt told Unit 6 to state his twenty, Andy Colucci's response was strong and perfectly clear. The static had cleared out again.

They filled the seats in the little living room upstairs, those last in line having to content themselves with grabbing patches of rug. The ready-room downstairs was bigger and had more chairs, but Sandy thought Tony's decision to bring the crew up here was a good one. This was family business, not police business.

Not strictly police business, at least.

Curtis Wilcox came last, holding his Polaroids in one hand, goggles still pushed up on his forehead, rubber flip-flops on his green feet. His T-shirt read HORLICKS UNIVERSITY ATHLETIC

DEPARTMENT.

He went to the Sergeant and the two of them conferred in murmurs while the rest waited. Then Tony turned back to the others. 'There was no explosion, and neither Curt nor I think there was any sort of radiation leak, either.'

Big sighs of relief greeted this, but several of the Troopers still looked doubtful. Sandy didn't know how he looked, there was no mirror handy, but he still felt doubtful.

'Pass these around, if you want,' Curt said, and handed out his stack of Polaroids by twos and threes. Some had been taken during the flashes and showed almost nothing: a glimmer of grillwork, a piece of the Buick's roof. Others were much clearer. The best had that odd, flat, declamatory quality which is the sole property of Polaroid photographs. I see a world where there's only cause and effect, they seem to say. A world where every object is an avatar and no gods move behind the scenes.

'Like conventional film, or the badges workers in radiation-intensive environments have to wear,' Tony said, 'Polaroid stock fogs when it's exposed to strong gamma radiation. Some of these photos are overexposed, but none of them are fogged. We're not hot, in other words.'

Phil Candleton said, 'No offense to you, Sarge, but I'm not crazy about trusting my 'nads to the Polaroid Corporation of America.'

'I'll go up to The Burg tomorrow, first thing, and buy a Geiger counter,' Curt said. He spoke calmly and reasonably, but they could still hear the pulse of excitement in his voice. Under the cool will-you-please-step-out-of-your-car-sir voice, Curt Wilcox was close to blowing his top.

'They sell them at the Army Surplus store on Grand. I think they go for around three hundred bucks. I'll take the money out of the contingency fund, if no one objects.'

No one did.

'In the meantime,' Tony said, 'it's more important than ever that we keep this quiet. I believe that, either by luck or providence, that thing has fallen into the hands of men who can actually do that. Will you?'

There were murmurs of agreement.

Dicky-Duck was sitting cross-legged on the floor, stroking Mister Dillon's head. D was asleep with his muzzle on his paws. For the barracks mascot, the excitement was definitely over. 'I'm all right with that as long as the needle on the old Geiger doesn't move out of the green,' Dicky-Duck said. 'If it does, I vote we call the feds.'

'Do you think they can take care of it any better than we can?' Curt asked hotly. 'Jesus Christ, Dicky! The Feebs can't get out of their own way, and - '

'Unless you have plans to lead-line Shed B out of the contingency fund - ' someone else began.

'That's a pretty stupid - ' Curt began, and then Tony put a hand on his shoulder, stilling the kid before he could go any farther and maybe hurt himself.

'If it's hot,' Tony promised them, 'we'll get rid of it. That's a promise.'

Curt gave him a betrayed look. Tony stared back calmly. We know it's not radioactive, that gaze said, the film proves it, so why do you want to start chasing your own tail?

'I sort of think we ought to turn it over to the government anyway,' Buck said. 'They might be able to help us . . . you know . . . or find stuff out . . . defense stuff . . .' His voice getting smaller and smaller as he sensed the silent disapproval all around him. PSP officers worked with the federal government in one form or another every day - FBI, IRS, DEA, OSHA, and, most of all, the Interstate Commerce Commission. It didn't take many years on the job to learn most of those federal boys were not smarter than the average bear. Sandy's opinion was that when the feds did show the occasional flash of intelligence, it tended to be self-serving and sometimes downright malicious. Mostly they were slaves to the grind, worshippers at the altar of Routine Procedure. Before joining the PSP, Sandy had seen the same sort of dull go-through-the-proper-channels thinking in the Army. Also, he wasn't much older than Curds himself, which made him young enough to hate the idea of giving the Roadmaster up. Better to hand it over to scientists in the private sector, though, if it came to that - perhaps even a bunch from the college advertised on the front of Curtis's lawn-mowing shirt.

But best of all, the Troop. The gray family.

Buck had petered out into silence. 'Not a good idea, I guess,' he said.

'Don't worry,' someone said. 'You do win the Grolier Encylcopedia, and our exciting home game.'

Tony waited for a few chuckles to ripple across the room and die away before going on. 'I want everyone who works out of this barracks to know what went on tonight, so they'll know what to expect if it happens again. Spread the word. Spread the code for the Buick as well - D as in dog.

Just D. Right? And I'll let you all know what happens next, starting with the Geiger counter. That test will be made before second shift tomorrow, I guarantee it. We're not going to tell our wives or sisters or brothers or best friends off the force what we have here, gentlemen, but we are going to keep each other exquisitely well informed. That's my promise to you. We're going to do it the old-fashioned way, by verbal report. There has been no paperwork directly concerning the vehicle out there - if it is a vehicle - and that's how it's going to stay. All understood?'

There was another murmur of agreement.

'I won't tolerate a blabbermouth in Troop D, gentlemen; no gossip and no pillow-talk. Is that understood?'

It seemed it was.

'Look at this one,' Phil said suddenly, holding up one of the Polaroids. 'The trunk's open.'

Curt nodded. 'Closed again now, though. It opened during one of the flashes, and I think it closed during the next one.'

Sandy thought of Ennis and had an image, very brief but very clear, of the Buick's trunk-lid opening and closing like a hungry mouth. See the living crocodile, take a good look, but for God's sake don't stick your fingers in its mouth.

Curt went on, 'I also believe the windshield wipers ran briefly, although my eyes were too dazzled by then for me to be sure, and none of the pictures show it.'

'Why?' Phil asked. 'Why would stuff like that happen?'

'Electrical surge,' Sandy guessed. 'The same thing that screwed up the radio in dispatch.'

'Maybe the wipers, but the trunk of a car doesn't run on electricity. When you want to open the trunk, you just push the button and lift the lid.'

Sandy had no answer for that.

'The temperature in the shed has gone down another couple of degrees,' Curt said. 'That'll bear watching.'

The meeting ended, and Sandy went back out on patrol. Every now and then, when radioing back to Base, he'd ask Matt Babicki if D was 5-by. The response was always Roger, D is 5-by-5. In later years, it would become a standard call-and-response in the Short Hills area surrounding Statler, Pogus City, and Patchin. A few other barracks eventually picked it up, even a couple over the Ohio state line. They took it to mean Is everything cool back home? This amused the men working out of Troop D, because that was what Is D still

5-by? did mean.

By the next morning, everyone in Troop D was indeed in the picture, but it was business as usual.

Curt and Tony went to Pittsburgh to get a Geiger counter. Sandy was off-shift but stopped by two or three times to check on the Buick just the same. It was quiet in there, the car simply sitting on the concrete and looking like an art exhibit, but the needle on the big red thermometer hung from the beam continued to ease down. That struck everyone as extremely eerie, silent confirmation that something was going on in there. Something beyond the ability of mere State Troopers to understand, let alone control.

No one actually went inside the shed until Curt and Tony got back in Curt's Bel Aire - SC's orders. Huddie Royer was looking through the shed windows at the Buick when the two of them turned up. He strolled over as Curt opened the carton sitting on the hood of his car and took the Geiger counter out. 'Where's your Andromeda Strain suits?' Huddie asked.

Curt looked at him, not smiling. 'That's a riot,' he said.

Curt and the Sergeant spent an hour in there, running the Geiger counter all over the Buick's hull, cruising the pick-up over the engine, taking it into the cabin, checking the seats and dashboard and weird oversized wheel. Curt went underneath on a crawly gator, and the Sergeant checked the trunk, being especially careful about that; they propped the lid up with one of the rakes on the wall. The counter's needle hardly stirred during any of this. The only time the steady cluck-cluck-cluck coming from its little speaker intensified was when Tony held the pick-up close to the radium dial of his wristwatch, wanting to make sure the gadget was working. It was, but the Roadmaster had nothing to tell it.

They broke only once, to go inside and get sweaters. It was a hot day outside, but in Shed B

the needle of the thermometer had settled just a hair below 48. Sandy didn't like it, and when the two of them came out, he suggested that they roll up the doors and let in some of the day's heat.

Mister Dillon was snoozing in the kitchenette, Sandy said; they could close him in there.

'No,' Tony said, and Sandy could see that Curtis went along with that call.

'Why not?'

'I don't know. Just a feeling.'

By three that afternoon, while Sandy was dutifully printing his name in the duty-book under 2nd Shift/3P-llP and getting ready to head out on patrol, the temperature in Shed B had dropped to 47. That was forty degrees colder than the summer day on the other side of those thin wooden walls.

It must have been around six o'clock, while Sandy was parked around the side of Jimmy's Diner on the old Statler Pike, drinking coffee and watching for speeders, that the Roadmaster gave birth for the first time.

Arky Arkariian had been the first person to see the thing that came out of the Buick, although he didn't know what he was seeing. Things were quiet at the Troop D barracks. Not serene, exactly, but quiet. This was due in large measure to Curt and Tony's report of zero radiation emanating from Shed B. Arky had come in from his trailer in Dreamland Park on top of The Bluffs, wanting his own little off-duty peek at the impounded car. He had it to himself; Shed B was for the time being entirely deserted. Forty yards away, the barracks was midshift quiet, which was about as quiet as it ever got. Matt Babicki had clocked out for the night and one of the younger cops was running dispatch. The Sarge had gone home at five o'clock. Curt, who had given his wife some cock-and-bull story about his call-out the night before, was presumably back in his flip-flop sandals and finishing his lawn like a good boy.

At five minutes past seven, the Troop D custodian (by then very pale, very thoughtful, and very scared) went past the kid in the dispatch cubby and into the kitchenette, to see who he could find. He wanted someone who wasn't a rookie, someone who knew the score. He found Huddie Royer, just putting the finishing touches on a big pot of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.

NOW:

Arky

'Well?' the kid ask, and there was so much of his daddy in him just then - the way he sat there on the bench, the way his eyes stared into yours, the way his eyebrows quirk, most of all the headlong impatience. That impatience was his dad all over. 'Well?

'This isn't my part of the story,' Sandy tell him. 'I wasn't there. These other two were, though.'

So then, sure, the kid switch over from Sandy to me and Huddie.

'You do it, Hud,' I say. 'You're used to makin reports.'

'Shit on that,' he tell me right back, 'you were there first. You saw it first. You start.'

'Aw - '

'Well one of you start!' the boy tell us, and wham! He hit his forehead with the butt of his palm, right between the eyes. I had to laugh at that.

'Go on, Arky,' the Sarge tell me.

'Ah, nuts,' I say. 'I ain't never told it, you know, like a story. Don't know how it'll come out.'

'Give it your best shot,' Sarge say, and so I do. It was pretty hard going at first - seemed I could feel the kid's eyes boring into me like nails and I kept thinking, He ain't gonna believe this, who would? But it got easier after a little bit. If you talk about something that happened long ago, you find it open up to you all over again. It open up like a flower. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, I guess. Sitting there that night, talking to Curtis Wilcox's boy, it felt like both.

Huddie join in after awhile and started to help. He remembered all sorts of things, even the part about how it was Joan Baez on the radio. 'Redemption's in the details,' old Sarge used to say (usually when someone left something out of a report that should have been in). And all through it the kid sittin dere on the bench, looking at us, his eyes getting bigger and bigger as the evening darkened and give up its smells like it does in the summer and the bats flew overhead and thunder rumbled all the way in the south. It made me sad to see how much he looked like his father. I don't know why.

He only broke in once. Turned to Sandy, wanting to know if we still had the-

'Yes,' Sandy tell him right off. 'Oh yes. We certainly do. Plus tons of pictures. Polaroids, mostly. If there's one thing cops know about, kiddo, it's preserving the chain of evidence. Now be quiet. You wanted to know; let the man tell you.'

I know by that he mean me, so I started talking again.

THEN

Arky had an old Ford pickup in those days, a standard three-shifter (But I got four if you count d'reverse, he used to joke) with a squeaky clutch. He parked it where he would still be parking twenty-three years later, although by then he would have traded up to a Dodge Ram with the automatic transmission and the four-wheel drive.

In 1979 there was an ancient Statler County schoolbus at the far end of the parking lot, a rust-rotten yellow barge that had been there since the Korean War at least, sinking deeper and deeper into the weeds and the dirt with each passing year. Why no one ever took it away was just another of life's mysteries. Arky nestled his truck in beside it, then crossed to Shed B and looked through one of the windows in the roll-up door, cupping his hands to block the light of the sun, which was on the wester.

There was a light on overhead and the Buick sat beneath it, looking to Arky like a display model, the kind of unit that shows up so pretty under the lights that anyone in his right mind would want to sign on the line and drive that honey home. Everything looked 5-by except for the trunk-lid. It was up again.

I ought to report that to the duty officer, Arky thought. He wasn't a cop, just a custodian, but sometimes trooper gray rubs off. He stepped back from the window, then happened to glance up at the thermometer Curt and the Sergeant had mounted from one of the overhead beams. The temperature in the shed had gone up again, and by quite a lot. Sixty-one degrees in there. It occurred to Arky that the Buick was like some sort of weird refrigerator coil that had now turned itself off (or perhaps burnt itself out during the fireworks show).

The sudden rise in temperature was something else no one knew, and Arky was excited. He started to swing away from the door, meaning to hurry directly across to the barracks. That was when he saw the thing in the corner of the shed.

Nothing but an old bunch of rags, he thought, but something else suggested . . . well, something else. He went back to the glass, once more cupping his hands to the sides of his face.

And no, by God, that thing in the corner was not just a bunch of rags.

Arky felt a flu-like weakness in the joints of his knees and the muscles of his thighs. The feeling spread upward into his stomach, dropping it, and then to his heart, speeding it up. There was an alarming moment when he was almost certain he was going to drop to the ground in a faint.

Hey, y'big dumb Swede - why don't you try breathing again? See if that helps any?

Arky took two big dry gasps of air, not caring much for the sound of them. His old man had sounded like that when he was having his heart attack, lying on the sofa and waiting for the ambulance to come.

He stepped away from the roll-up door, patting the center of his chest with the side of a closed fist. 'Come on, honey. Take up d'slack, now.'

The sun, going down in a cauldron of blood, glared in his eyes. His stomach had continued to drop, making him feel on the verge of vomiting. The barracks all at once looked two, maybe even three miles away. He set off in that direction, reminding himself to breathe and concentrating on taking big, even steps. Part of him wanted to break into a run, and part of him understood that if he tried doing that, he really might faint.

'Guys'd never let you hear the end of dat, and you know it.'

But it wasn't really teasing he was concerned about. Mostly he didn't want to go in looking all wild-eyed and pushing the panic-button like any John Q. in off the road with a tale to tell.

And by the time he got inside, Arky actually did feel a little better. Still scared, but no longer like he was going to puke or just go bolting away from Shed B any old whichway. By then he'd also had an idea which had eased his mind a bit. Maybe it was just a trick. A prank. Troopers were always pulling stuff on him, and hadn't he told Orville Garrett he might come back that evening for a little looky-see at that old Buick? He had. And maybe Orv had decided to give him the business. Bunch of comedians he worked with, someone was always giving him the business.

The thought served to calm him, but in his heart of hearts, Arky didn't believe it. Orv Garrett was a practical joker, all right, liked to have his fun just like the next guy, but he wouldn't make that thing in the shed part of a gag. None of them would. Not with Sergeant Schoondist so hopped up about it.

Ah, but the Sarge wasn't there. His door was shut and the frosted glass panel was dark. The light was on in the kitchenette, though, and music was coming out through the door: Joan Baez, singing about the night they drove old Dixie down. Arky went in and there was Huddie Royer, just dropping a monster chunk of oleo into a pot of noodles. Your heart ain't gonna thank you for dat shit, Arky thought. Huddie's radio - a little one on a strap that he took everyplace - was sitting on the counter next to the toaster.

'Hey, Arky!' he said. 'What're you doing here? As if I didn't know?'

'Is Orv here?' Arky asked.

'Nope. He's got three days off, starting tomorrow. Lucky sucker went fishing. You want a bowl of this?' Huddie held the pot out, took a really good look at him, and realized he was looking at a man who was scared just about to death. 'Arky? What the hell's wrong with you? Are you sick?'

Arky sat down heavily in one of the kitchen chairs, hands dangling between his thighs. He looked up at Huddie and opened his mouth, but at first nothing came out.

'What is it?' Huddie slung the pot of macaroni on to the counter without a second look. 'The Buick?'

'You da d-o tonight, Hud?'

'Yeah. Until eleven.'

'Who else here?'

'Couple of guys upstairs. Maybe. If you're thinking about the brass, you can stop. I'm the closest you're going to get tonight. So spill it.'

'You come out back,' Arky told him. 'Take a look for yourself. And bring some binoculars.'

Huddie snagged a pair of binocs from the supply room, but they turned out to be no help. The thing in the corner of Shed B was actually too close - in the glasses it was just a blur. After two or three minutes of fiddling with the focus-knob, Huddie gave up. 'I'm going in there.'

Arky gripped his wrist. 'Cheesus, no! Call the Sarge! Let him decide!'

Huddie, who could be stubborn, shook his head. 'Sarge is sleeping. His wife called and said so. You know what it means when she does that - no one hadn't ought to wake him up unless it's World War III.'

'What if dat t'ing in dere is World War III?'

'I'm not worried,' Huddie said. Which was, judging from his face, the lie of the decade, if not the century. He looked in again, hands cupped to the sides of his face, the useless binoculars standing on the pavement beside his left foot. 'It's dead.'

'Maybe,' Arky said. 'And maybe it's just playin possum.'

Huddie looked around at him. 'You don't mean that.' A pause. 'Do you?'

'I dunno what I mean and what I don't mean. I dunno if dat t'ing's over for good or just restin up. Neither do you. What if it wants someone t'go in dere? You t'ought about dat? What if it's waitin for you?'

Huddie thought it over, then said: 'I guess in that case, it'll get what it wants.'

He stepped back from the door, looking every bit as scared as Arky had looked when he came into the kitchen, but also looking set. Meaning it. Just a stubborn old Dutchman.

'Arky, listen to me.'

'Yeah.'

'Carl Brundage is upstairs in the common room. Also Mark Rushing - I think, anyway. Don't bother Loving in dispatch, I don't trust him. Too wet behind the ears. But you go on and tell the other two what's up. Arid get that look off your face. This is probably nothing, but a little backup wouldn't hurt.'

'Just in case it ain't nothin.'

'Right.'

'Cause it might be sumptin.'

Huddie nodded.

'You sure?'

'Uh-huh.'

'Okay.'

Huddie walked along the front of the roll-up door, turned the corner, and stood in front of the smaller door on the side. He took a deep breath, held it in for a five-count, let it out. Then he unsnapped the strap over the butt of his pistol - a .357 Ruger, back in those days.

'Huddie?'

Huddie jumped. If his finger had been on the trigger instead of outside the guard, he might have blown off his own foot. He spun around and saw Arky standing there at the corner of the shed, his big dark eyes swimming in his pinched face.

'Lord Jesus Christ!' Huddie cried. 'Why the fuck're you creeping after me?'

'I wasn't creepin, Troop -just walkin like normal.'

'Go inside! Get Carl and Mark, like I told you.'

Arky shook his head. Scared or not, he had decided he wanted to be a part of what was going down. Huddie supposed he could understand. Trooper gray did have a way of rubbing off.

'All right, ya dumb Swede. Let's go.'

Huddie opened the door and stepped into the shed, which was still cooler than the outside . . .

although just how cool it might have been was impossible for either man to tell, because they were both sweating like pigs. Huddie was holding his gun up beside his right cheekbone. Arky grabbed a rake from the pegs close by the door. It clanged against a shovel and both of them jumped. To Arky, the look of their shadows on the wall was even worse than the sound: they seemed to leap from place to place, like the shadows of nimble goblins.

'Huddie - ' he began.

'Shhh!'

'If it's dead, why you go shhh?'

'Don't be a smartass!' Huddie whispered back. He started across the cement floor toward the Buick. Arky followed with the rake-handle gripped tight in his sweaty hands, his heart pounding.

His mouth tasted dry and somehow burnt. He had never been so scared in his life, and the fact that he didn't know exactly what he was scared of only made it worse.

Huddie got to the rear of the Buick and peeped into the open trunk. His back was so broad Arky couldn't see around it. 'What's in there, Hud?'

'Nothing. It's clean.'

Huddie reached for the trunk-lid, hesitated, then shrugged and slammed it down. They both jumped at the sound and looked at the thing in the corner. It didn't stir. Huddie started toward it, gun once more held up by the side of his head. The sound of his feet shuffling on the concrete was very loud.

The thing was indeed dead, the two men became more and more sure of it as they approached, but that didn't make things better because neither of them had ever seen anything like it. Not in the woods of western Pennsylvania, not in a zoo, not in a wildlife magazine. It was just different. So goddam different. Huddie found himself thinking of horror movies he'd seen, but the thing huddled up in the angle where the shed walls met wasn't really like something from those, either.

Goddam different was what he kept coming back to. What they both kept coming back to.

Everything about it screamed that it wasn't from here, here meaning not just the Short Hills but all of Planet Earth. Maybe the entire universe, at least as C-students in science such as themselves understood that concept. It was as if some warning circuit buried deep in their heads had suddenly awakened and begun to wail.

Arky was thinking of spiders. Not because the thing in the corner looked like a spider, but because . . . well . . . spiders were different. All those legs - and you had no idea what they might be thinking, or how they could even exist. This thing was like that, only worse. It made him sick just to look at it, to try and make sense of what his eyes said they were seeing. His skin had gone clammy, his heart was missing beats, and his guts seemed to have gained weight. He wanted to run. To just turn tail and stampede out of there.

'Christ,' Huddie said in a little moan of a voice. 'Ohhhh, Christ.' It was as if he were pleading for it to go away. His gun sagged downward and outward until the barrel was pointed at the floor. It was only two pounds, but his arm could no longer support even that paltry weight.

The muscles of his face also sagged, pulling his eyes wide and dropping his jaw down until his mouth opened. Arky never forgot the way Huddie's teeth gleamed in the shadows. At the same time he began to shiver all over, and Arky became aware he was shivering, too.

The thing in the corner was the size of a very large bat, like the ones that roosted in Miracle Caves over in Lassburg or the so-called Wonder Cavern (guided tours three dollars a head, special family rates available) in Pogus City. Its wings hid most of its body. They weren't folded but lay in messy overlapping crumples, as if it had tried to fold them - and failed - before it died. The wings were either black or a very dark mottled green. What they could see of the creature's back was a lighter green. The stomach area was a cheesy whitish shade, like the gut of a rotted stump or the throat of a decaying swamp-lily. The triangular head was cocked to one side. A bony thing that might have been a nose or a beak jutted from the eyeless face. Below it, the creature's mouth hung open. A yellowish rope of tissue dangled from it, as if the thing had been regurgitating its last meal as it died. Huddie took one look and knew he wouldn't be eating any more macaroni and cheese for awhile.

Beneath the corpse, spread around its hindquarters, was a thin puddle of congealing black goo.

The idea that any such substance could serve as blood made Huddie feel like crying out. He thought: I won't touch it. I'd kill my own mother before I'd touch that thing.

He was still thinking that when a long wooden rod slid into his peripheral vision. He gave a little shriek and flinched back. 'Arky, don't!' he yelled, but it was too late.

Later on, Arky was unable to say just why he had prodded the thing in the corner - it was simply some strong urge to which he had given in before he was completely aware of what he was doing.

When the end of the rake-handle touched the place where the wings were crumpled across each other, there was a sound like rustling paper and a bad smell, like old stewed cabbage. The two of them barely noticed. The top of the thing's face seemed to peel back, revealing a dead and glassy eye that looked as big as a factory ball bearing.

Arky backed away, dropping the rake with a clatter and putting both hands over his mouth.

Above the spread fingers, his eyes had begun to ooze terrified tears. Huddie simply stood where he was, locked in place.

'It was an eyelid,' he said in a low, hoarse voice. 'Just an eyelid, that's all. You joggled it with the rake, you goddam fool. You joggled it and it rolled back.'

'Christ, Huddie!'

'It's dead.'

'Christ, Jesus God - '

'It's dead, okay?'

'Ho . . . Ho-kay,' Arky said in that crazy Swedish accent of his. It was thicker than it had ever been. 'Less get oudda here.'

'You're pretty smart for a janitor.'

The two of them headed back for the door - slowly, backing up, not wanting to lose sight of the thing. Also because both of them knew they would lose control and bolt if they actually saw the door. The safety of the door. The promise of a sane world beyond the door. Getting there seemed to take forever.

Arky backed out first and began taking huge gasps of the fresh evening air. Huddie came out behind him and slammed the door. Then for a moment the two of them just looked at each other. Arky had gone past white and directly to yellow. To Huddie he looked like a cheese sandwich without the bread.

'What-choo laughin about?' Arky asked him. 'What's so funny?'

'Nothing,' Huddie said. 'I'm just trying not to be hysterical.'

'You gonna call Sergeant Schoondist now?'

Huddie nodded. He kept thinking about how the whole top half of the thing's head had seemed to peel back when Arky prodded it. He had an idea he'd be revisiting that moment in his dreams later on, and that turned out to be absolutely correct.

'What about Curtis?'

Huddie thought about it and shook his head. Curt had a young wife. Young wives liked to have their husbands home, and when they didn't get what they wanted for at least a few nights in a row, they were apt to get hurt feelings and ask questions. It was natural. As it was natural for young husbands to sometimes answer their questions, even when they knew they weren't supposed to.

'Just the Sarge, then?'

'No,' Huddie said. 'Let's get Sandy Dearborn in on this, too. Sandy's got a good head.'

Sandy was still in the parking lot at Jimmy's Diner with his radar gun in his lap when his radio spoke up. 'Unit 14, Unit 14.'

'14.' As always, Sandy had glanced at his watch when he heard his unit number. It was twenty past seven.

'Ah, could you return to base, 14? We have a D-code, say again a D-code, copy?'

'3?' Sandy asked. In most American police forces, 3 means emergency.

'No, negative, but we could use some help.'

'Roger.'

He got back about ten minutes before the Sarge arrived in his personal, which happened to be an International Harvester pickup even older than Arky's Ford. By then the word had already started to spread and Sandy saw a regular Trooper convention in front of Shed B - lots of guys at the windows, all of them peering in. Brundage and Rushing, Cole and Devoe, Huddie Royer. Arky Arkanian was pacing around in little circles behind them with his hands stuffed forearm-deep in his pants pockets and lines climbing his forehead like the rungs of a ladder. He wasn't waiting for a window, though. Arky had seen all he wanted to, at least for one night.

Huddie filled Sandy in on what had happened and then Sandy had his own good long look at the thing in the corner. He also tried to guess what the Sergeant might want when he arrived, and put the items in a cardboard box near the side door.

Tony pulled in, parked askew behind the old schoolbus, and came jogging across to Shed B. He elbowed Carl Brundage unceremoniously away from the window that was closest to the dead creature and stared at it while Huddie made his report. When Huddie was done, Tony called Arky over and listened to Arky's version of the story.

Sandy thought that Tony's methods of handling the Roadmaster were put to the test that evening and proved sound. All through his debriefing of Huddie and Arky, Troop D personnel were showing up. Most of the men were off-duty. Those few in uniform had been close enough to come in for a look-see when they heard Huddie give the code for the Buick. Yet there was no loud cross-talk, no jostling for position, no men getting in the way of Tony's investigation or gumming things up with a lot of stupid questions. Above all, there were no flaring tempers and no panic. If reporters had been there and experienced the atavistic power of that thing - a thing which remained awful and somehow threatening even though it was obviously dead - Sandy dreaded to think about what the consequences might have been. When he mentioned that to Schoondist the next day, the Sarge had laughed. 'The Cardiff Giant in hell,' he said. 'That would have been your consequence, Sandy.'

Both of them, the Sarge who was and the Sarge who would be, knew what the press called such information-management, at least when the managers were cops: fascism. That was a little heavy, no doubt, but neither of them actually questioned the fact that all sorts of abuses lay a turn or two down that road. ('You want to see cops out of control, look at LA,' Tony said once. 'For every three good ones, you've got two Hitler Youth dingbats on motorcycles.') The business of the Buick was a bona fide Special Case, however. Neither of them questioned that, either.

Huddie wanted to know if he'd been right not to call Curtis. He was worried Curt would feel left out, passed over. If the Sarge wanted, Huddle said, he could go in the barracks that very second and make a telephone call. Happy to do it.

'Curtis is fine right where he is,' Tony said, 'and when it's explained to him why he wasn't called, he'll understand. As for the rest of you fellows . . .'

Tony stepped away from the roll-up door. His posture was easy and relaxed, but his face was very pale. The sight of that thing in the corner had affected him, too, even through a pane of glass. Sandy felt the same way himself. But he could also sense Sergeant Schoondist's excitement, the balls-to-the-wall curiosity he shared with Curt. The throbbing undertone that said Holy shit, do you fuckin BELIEVE it! Sandy heard it and recognized it for what it was, although he felt none of it himself, not a single iota. He didn't think any of the others did, either. Certainly Huddie's curiosity - and Arky's - had faded quickly enough. 'Gone the way of the blue suede shoe,'

as Curtis might have said.

'You men on duty listen up to me, now,' Tony said. He was wearing his slanted little grin, but to Sandy it looked a bit forced that night. 'There's fires in Statler, floods in Leesburg, and a rash of Piggly Wiggly robberies down in Pogus County; we suspect the Amish.'

There was some laughter at this.

'So what are you waiting for?'

'There was a general exodus of Troopers on duty followed by the sound of Chevrolet V-8 engines starting up. The off-duty fellows hung around for awhile, but nobody had to tell them to move along, move along, come on, boys, show's over. Sandy asked the Sarge if he should also saddle up and ride.

'No, Trooper,' he said. 'You're with me.' And he started briskly toward the walk-in door, pausing only long enough to examine the items Sandy had put into the carton: one of the evidence-documenting Polaroids, extra film, a yardstick, an evidence-collection kit. Sandy had also grabbed a couple of green plastic garbage bags from the kitchenette.

'Good job, Sandy.'

'Thanks, sir.'

'Ready to go in?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Scared as me, or not quite that scared?'

'I don't know.'

'Me, either. But I'm scared, all right. If I faint, you catch me.'

'Just fall in my direction, sir.'

He laughed. 'Come on. Step into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.'

Scared or not, the two of them made a pretty thorough investigation. They collaborated on a diagram of the she'd interior, and when Curt later complimented Sandy on it, Sandy nodded and agreed that it had been a good one. Good enough to take into court, actually. Still, a lot of the lines on it were wavery. Their hands began to shake almost from the moment they entered the shed, and didn't stop until they were back out again.

They opened the trunk because it had been open when Arky first looked in and noticed the thing in the corner, and although it was as empty as ever, they took Polaroids of it. They likewise photo'd the thermometer (which by then had gotten all the way up to seventy degrees), mostly because Tony thought Curt would want them to. And they took pictures of the corpse in the corner, took them from every angle they could think of. Every Polaroid showed that unspeakable single eye.

It was shiny, like fresh tar. Seeing himself reflected in it made Sandy Dearborn feel like screaming. And every two or three seconds, one of them would look back over his shoulder at the Buick Roadmaster.

When they were done with the photos, some of which they took with the yardstick lying beside the corpse, Tony shook out one of the garbage bags. 'Get a shovel,' he said.

'Don't you want to leave it where it is until Curt - '

'Probationary Trooper Wilcox can look at it down in the supply closet,' Tony said. His voice was oddly tight - strangled, almost - and Sandy realized he was working very hard not to be sick.

Sandy's own stomach took a queasy little lurch, perhaps in sympathy. 'He can look at it there to his heart's content. For once we don't have to worry about breaking the chain of evidence, because no district attorney is ever going to be involved. Meantime, we're scooping this shit up.' He wasn't shouting, but a raw little edge had come into his voice.

Sandy took a shovel from where it hung on the wall and slid the blade beneath the dead creature. The wings made a papery and somehow terrible crackling sound. Then one of them fell back, revealing a black and hairless side. For the second time since the two of them had stepped in, Sandy felt like screaming. He could not have told why, exactly, but there was something deep down in his head begging not to be shown any more.

And all the time they were smelling it. That sour, cabbagey reek.

Sandy observed sweat standing out all over Tony Schoondist's forehead in fine little dots.

Some of these had broken and run down his cheeks, leaving tracks like tears.

'Go on,' he said, holding the bag open. 'Go on, now, Sandy. Drop it in there before I lose my groceries.'

Sandy tilted it into the bag and felt a little bit better when the weight slid off the shovel.

After Tony had gotten a sack of the liquid-absorbing red sawdust they kept for oil-spills and sprinkled it over the gooey stain in the corner, both of them felt better. Tony twirled the top of the garbage bag with the creature inside, then knotted it. Once that was done, the two of them started backing toward the door.

Tony stopped just before they reached it. 'Photo that,' he said, pointing to a place high on the roll-up door behind the Buick - the door through which Johnny Parker had towed the car in the first place. To Tony Schoondist and Sandy Dearborn, that already seemed like a long time ago. 'And that, arid there, and over there.'

At first Sandy didn't see what the Sarge was pointing at. He looked away, blinked his eyes once or twice, then looked back. And there it was, three or four dark green smudges that made Sandy think of the dust that rubs off a moth's wings. As kids they had solemnly assured each other that mothdust was deadly poison, it would blind you if you got some on your fingers and then rubbed your eyes.

'You see what happened, don't you?' Tony asked as Sandy raised the Polaroid and sighted in on the first mark. The camera seemed very heavy and his hands were still shivering, but he got it done.

'No, Sarge, I, ah . . . don't guess I do.'

'Whatever that thing is - bird, bat, some kind of robot drone - it flew out of the trunk when the lid came open. It hit the back door, that's the first smudge, and then it started bouncing off the walls. Ever seen a bird that gets caught in a shed or a barn?'

Sandy nodded.

'Like that.' Tony wiped sweat off his forehead and looked at Sandy. It was a look the younger man never forgot. He had never seen the Sarge's eyes so naked. It was, he thought, the look you sometimes saw on the faces of small children when you came to break up a domestic disturbance.

'Man,' Tony said heavily. 'Fuck.'

Sandy nodded.

Tony looked down at the bag. 'You think it looks like a bat?'

'Yeah,' Sandy said, then, 'No.' After another pause he added, 'Bullshit.'

Tony barked a laugh that sounded somehow haggard. 'That's very definitive. If you were on the witness stand, no defense attorney could peel that back.'

'I don't know, Tony.' What Sandy did know was that he wanted to stop shooting the shit and get back out into the open air. 'What do you think?'

'Well, if I drew it, it'd look like a bat,' Tony said. The Polaroids we took also make it look like a bat. But. . . I don't know exactly how to say it, but . . .'

'It doesn't feel like a bat,' Sandy said.

Tony smiled bleakly and pointed a finger at Sandy like a gun. 'Very zen, Grasshoppah. But those marks on the wall suggest it at least acted like a bat, or a trapped bird. Flew around in here until it dropped dead in the corner. Shit, for all we know, it died of fright.'

Sandy recalled the glaring dead eye, a thing almost too alien to look at, and thought that for the first time in his life he could really understand the concept Sergeant Schoondist had articulated. Die of fright? Yes, it could be done. It really could. Then, because the Sarge seemed to be waiting for something, he said: 'Or maybe it hit the wall so hard it broke its neck.'

Another idea came to him. 'Or - listen, Tony - maybe the air killed it.'

'Say what?'

'Maybe - '

But Tony's eyes had lit up and he was nodding. 'Sure,' he said. 'Maybe the air on the other side of the Buick's trunk is different air. Maybe it'd taste like poison gas to us . . . rupture our lungs . . .'

For Sandy, that was enough. 'I have to get out of here, Tony, or I'm gonna be the one who throws up.' But what he really felt in danger of was choking, not vomiting. All at once the normally broad avenue of his windpipe was down to a pinhole.

Once they were back outside (it was nearly dark by then and an incredibly sweet summer breeze had sprung up), Sandy felt better. He had an idea Tony did, too; certainly some of the color had come back into the Sarge's cheeks. Huddie and a few other Troopers came over to the two of them as Tony shut the walk-in side door, but nobody said anything. An outsider with no context upon which to draw might have looked at those faces and thought that the President had died or war had been declared.

'Sandy?' Tony asked. 'Any better now?'

'Yeah.' He nodded at the garbage bag, hanging like a dead pendulum with its strange weight at the bottom. 'You really think it might have been our air that killed it?'

'It's possible. Or maybe just the shock of finding itself in our world. I don't think I could live for long in the world this thing came from, tell you that much. Even if I could breathe the .

. .' Tony stopped, because all at once Sandy looked bad again. Terrible, in fact. 'Sandy, what is it? What's wrong?'

Sandy wasn't sure he wanted to tell his SC what was wrong, wasn't even sure he could. What he'd thought of was Ennis Rafferty. The idea of the missing Trooper added to what they had just discovered in Shed B suggested a conclusion that Sandy didn't •want to consider. Once it had come into his mind, though, it was hard to get it back out. If the Buick was a conduit to some other world, and the bat-thing had gone through it in one direction, then Ennis Rafferty had almost certainly gone through in the other.

'Sandy, talk to me.'

'Nothing wrong, boss,' Sandy replied, then had to bend over and grip his shins in both hands.

It was a good way to stop yourself from fainting, always assuming you had enough time to use it.

The others stood around watching him, still saying nothing, still wearing those long faces that said the King is dead, long live the King.