From a Buick 8

At last the world steadied again, and Sandy straightened up. 'I'm okay,' he said. 'Really.'

Tony considered his face, then nodded. He lifted the green bag slightly. 'This is going into the storage closet off the supply room, the little one where Andy Colucci keeps his stroke-books.'

A few nervous titters greeted this.

'That room is going to be off-limits except for myself, Curtis Wilcox, and Sandy Dearborn.

BPO, people, got it?'

They nodded. By permission only.

'Sandy, Curtis, and me - this is now our investigation, so designated.' He stood straight in the gathering gloom, almost at attention, holding the garbage bag in one hand and the Polaroids in the other. 'This stuff is evidence. Of what I have no current idea. If any of you come up with any ideas, bring them to me. If they seem like crazy ideas to you, bring them to me even quicker. It's a crazy situation. But, crazy or not, we will roll this case. Roll it as we would any other.

Questions?'

There were no questions. Or, if you wanted to look at it the other way, Sandy reflected, there was nothing but questions.

'We ought to have a man on that shed as much as we can,' Tony said.

'Guard duty, Sarge?' Steve Devoe asked.

'Let's call it surveillance,' Tony said. 'Come on, Sandy, stick with me until I get this thing stowed. I don't want to take it downstairs by myself, and that's the God's truth.'

As they started across the parking lot, Sandy heard Arky Arkanian saying that Curt was gonna get mad he dint get called, wait and see, dat boy was gonna be madder'n a wet hen.

But Curtis was too excited to be mad, too busy trying to prioritize the things he wanted to do, too full of questions. He asked only one of those before pelting clown to look at the corpse of the creature they'd found in Shed B: where had Mister Dillon been last evening? With Orville, he was told. Orville Garrett often took Mister D when he had a few days off.

Sandy Dearborn was the one who brought Curtis up to speed (with occasional help from Arky).

Curt listened silently, brows lifting when Arky described how the whole top of the thing's head had appeared to roll back, disclosing the eye. They lifted again when Sandy told him about the smudges on the door and the walls, and how they had reminded him of mothdust. He asked his question about Mister D, got his answer, then grabbed a pair of surgical gloves out of an evidence kit and headed downstairs at what was nearly a run. Sandy went with him. That much seemed to be his duty, somehow, since Tony had appointed him a co-investigator, but he stayed in the supply room while Curt went into the closet where Tony had left the garbage bag. Sandy heard it rustling as Curt undid the knot in the top; his skin prickled and went cold at the sound.

Rustle, rustle, rustle. Pause. Another rustle. Then, very low: 'Christ almighty.'

A moment later Curt came running out with his hand over his mouth. There was a toilet halfway down the hall leading to the stairs. Trooper Wilcox made it just in time.

Sandy Dearborn sat at the cluttered worktable in the supply room, listening to him vomit and knowing that the vomiting probably meant nothing in the larger scheme of things. Curtis wasn't going to back off. The corpse of the bat-thing had revolted him as much as it had Arky or Huddie or any of them, but he'd come back to examine it more fully, revulsion or no revulsion. The Buick -

and the things of the Buick - had become his passion. Even coming out of the storage closet with his throat working and his cheeks pale and his hand pressed to his mouth, Sandy had seen the helpless excitement in his eyes, dimmed only a little by his physical distress. Passion is the hardest taskmaster.

From down the hall came the sound of running water. It stopped, and then Curt came back into the supply room, blotting his mouth with a paper towel.

'Pretty awful, isn't it?' Sandy asked. 'Even dead.'

'Pretty awful,' he agreed, but he was heading back in there even as he spoke. 'I thought I understood, but it caught me by surprise.'

Sandy got up and went to the doorway. Curt was looking into the bag again but not reaching in.

Not yet, at least. That was a relief. Sandy didn't want to be around when the kid touched it, even wearing gloves. Didn't even want to think about him touching it.

'Was it a trade, do you think?' Curt asked.

'Huh?'

'A trade. Ennis for this thing.'

For a moment Sandy didn't reply. Couldn't reply. Not because the idea was horrible (although it was), but because the kid had gotten to it so fast.

'I don't know.'

Curt was rocking back and forth on the heels of his shoes and frowning down at the plastic garbage bag. 'I don't think so,' he said after awhile. 'When you make a swap, you usually do the whole deal at the same time. Right?'

'Usually, yeah.'

He closed the bag and (with obvious reluctance) reknotted the top. 'I'mn going to dissect it,'

he said.

'Curtis, no! Christ!'

'Yes.' He turned to Sandy, his face drawn and white, his eyes brilliant. 'Someone has to, and I can't very well take it up to the Biology Department at Horlicks. Sarge says we keep this strictly in-house, and that's the right call, but who does that leave to do this? Just me. Unless I'm missing something.'

Sandy thought, You wouldn't take it up to Horlicks even if Tony hadn't said a goddam word about keeping it in-house. You can bear to have us in on it, probably because nobody but Tony really wants anything to do with it, but share it with someone else? Someone who doesn't wear Pennsylvania gray and know when to shift the hat-strap from behind the neck to under the chin?

Someone who might first get ahead of you and then take it away from you? I don't think so.

Curt stripped off the gloves. 'The problem is that I haven't cut anything up since Chauncey, my fetal pig in high school biology. That was nine years ago and I got a C in the course. I don't want to fuck this up, Sandy.'

Then don't touch it in the first place.

Sandy thought it but didn't say it. There would have been no point in saying it.

'Oh well.' The kid talking to himself now. Nobody but himself. 'I'll bone up. Get ready. I've got time. No sense being impatient. Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction - '

'What if that's a lie?' Sandy asked. He was surprised at how tired of that little jingle-jangle he had grown. 'What if there's no satisfaction? What if you're never able to solve for x?'

Curt looked up at him, almost shocked. Then he grinned. 'What do you think Ennis would say? If we could ask him, that is?'

Sandy found the question both patronizing and insensitive. He opened his mouth to say so - to say something, anyway - and then didn't. Curtis Wilcox didn't mean any harm; he was just flying high on adrenaline and possibility, as hyped as any junkie. And he really was a kid. Even Sandy recognized that, although they were much of an age.

'Ennis would tell you to be careful,' Sandy said. 'I'm sure of that much.'

'I will,' Curt agreed, starting up the stairs. 'Oh yeah, of course I will.' But those were just words, like the Doxology you rush through in order to get free of church on Sunday morning.

Sandy knew it even if Probationary Trooper Wilcox did not.

In the weeks that followed, it became obvious to Tony Schoondist (not to mention the rest of the Troop D personnel) that there wasn't enough manpower to institute twenty-four-hour surveillance of the Buick in the shed out back. Nor did the weather cooperate; the second half of that August was rainy and unseasonably cold.

Visitors added another headache. Troop D didn't live in a vacuum on top of its hill, after all; the motor-pool was next door, the County Attorney (plus his staff) was just down the road, there were lawyers, there were perps cooling their heels in the Bad Boy Corner, the occasional Boy Scout tour, the steady trickle of folks who wanted to lodge complaints (against their neighbors, against their spouses, against Amish buggy-drivers taking too much of the road, against the State Troopers themselves), wives bringing forgotten lunches or sometimes boxes of fudge, and sometimes just interested John Q.'s who wanted a look at what their tax dollars were buying. These latter were usually surprised and disappointed by the calmness of the barracks, the ho-hum sense of bureaucracy at work. It didn't feel like their favorite TV shows.

One day toward the end of that month, Statler's member of the United States House of Representatives dropped by, along with ten or twelve of his closest media friends, to do a meet-and-greet and to make a statement about the Police Aid, Science, and Infrastructure bill then pending before the House, a bill this fellow just happened to be co-sponsoring. Like many US

Representatives from rural districts, this fellow looked like a small-town barber who had had a lucky day at the dog-track and hoped for a blowjob before bedtime. Standing beside one of the cruisers (Sandy thought it was the one with the busted headrest), he told his media friends how important the police were, especially the fine men and women of the Pennsylvania State Police, most especially the fine men and women of Troop D (that was a bit of information shortfall, there being no female Troopers or PCOs in D at that time, but none of the Troopers offered a correction, at least not while the cameras were rolling). They were, the Representative said, a thin gray line dividing Mr and Mrs John Q. Taxpayer from the evil of the Chaos Gang, and so on and so on, God bless America, may all your children grow up to play the violin. Captain Diment came down from Butler, presumably because someone felt his stripes would lend a little extra tone to the event, and he later told Tony Schoondist in a low growl: 'That toupee-wearing touchhole asked me to fix his wife's speeding ticket.'

And all the time the Representative was blathering and the entourage was touring and the reporters were reporting and the cameras were rolling, the Buick Roadmaster was sitting just fifty yards away, blue as deep dusk on its fat and luxy whitewalls. It sat under the big round thermometer Tony and Curt had mounted on one of the beams. It sat there with its zeroed odometer and dirt wouldn't stick to it. To the Troopers who knew about it, the damned thing felt like an itch between the shoulderblades, the one place you can't . . . quite . . . reach.

There was bad weather to contend with, there were all kinds of John Q.'s to contend with -

many who came to praise the family but who weren't of the family - and there were also visiting police officers and Troopers from other barracks. These last were in some ways the most dangerous, because cops had sharp eyes and nosy minds. What might they have thought if they'd seen a Trooper in a rain-slicker (or a certain janitor with a Swedish accent) standing out there by Shed B like one of those big-hat soldiers guarding the gate at Buckingham Palace? Occasionally walking over to the roll-up door and peering inside? Might a visiting policeman seeing this have been curious about what was in there? Does a bear shit in the woods?

Curt solved this as well as it could be solved. He sent Tony a memo that said it was a shame the way the raccoons kept getting into our garbage and scattering it around, and that Phil Candleton and Brian Cole had agreed to build a little hutch to store the garbage cans in. Curt thought that out behind Shed B would be a good place for it, if the SC agreed. SC Schoondist wrote OK across the top of the memo, and that one did get filed. What the memo neglected to mention was that the Troop hadn't had any real problems with coons since Arky bought a couple of plastic garbage cans from Sears, the kind with the snap-down tops.

The hutch was built, painted (PSP gray, of course), and ready for action three days after the memo landed in Tony's in-basket. Prefab and purely functional, it was just big enough for two garbage cans, three shelves, and one State Trooper sitting on a kitchen chair. It served the dual purpose of keeping the Trooper on watch (a) out of the weather, and (b) out of sight. Every ten or fifteen minutes the man on duty would get up, leave the hutch, and look through one of the windows in Shed B's rear roll-up door. The hutch was stocked with soda, munchies, magazines, and a galvanized pail. The pail had a paper strip reading I COULD NOT HOLD IT ANY LONGER taped to the side. That was Jackie O'Hara's touch. The others called him The Irish Wonder Boy, and he never failed to make them laugh. He was making them laugh even three years later as he lay in his bedroom, dying of esophageal cancer, eyes glassy with morphine, telling stories about Padeen the bogtrotter in a hoarse whisper while his old mates visited and sometimes held his hand when the pain was especially bad.

Later on, there would be plenty of video cameras at Troop D - at all the PSP barracks, because by the nineties, all the cruisers were equipped with dashboard-mounted Panasonic Eyewitness models. These were made specially for law enforcement organizations, and came without mikes. Video of road-stops was legal; because of existing wiretap laws, audio was not. But all of that was later. In the late summer of 1979, they had to make do with a videocam Huddie Royer had gotten for his birthday. They kept it on one of the shelves out in the hutch, stored in its box and wrapped in plastic to make sure it stayed dry. Another box contained extra batteries and a dozen blank tapes with the cellophane stripped off so they'd be ready to go. There was also a slate with a number chalked on it: the current temperature inside the shed. If the person on duty noticed a change, he erased the last observation, wrote in the current one, and added a chalk arrow pointing either up or down. It \vas the closest thing to a written record Sergeant Schoondist would allow.

Tony seemed delighted with this jury-rig. Curt tried to emulate him, but sometimes his worry and frustration broke through. 'There won't be anyone on watch the next time something happens,'

he said. 'You wait and see if I'm not right - it's always the way. Nobody'll volunteer for midnight to four some night, and whoever comes on next will look in and see the trunk-lid up and another dead bat on the floor. You wait and see.'

Curt tried persuading Tony to at least keep a surveillance sign-up sheet. There was no shortage of volunteers, he argued; what they were short on was organization and scheduling, things that would be easy to change. Tony remained adamant: no paper trail. When Curt volunteered to take over more of the sentry duty himself (many of the Troopers took to calling it Hutch Patrol), Tony refused and told him to ease off. 'You've got other responsibilities,' he said. 'Not the least of them is your wife.'

Curt had the good sense to keep quiet while in the SC's office. Later, however, he unburdened himself to Sandy, speaking with surprising bitterness as the two of them stood outside at the far corner of the barracks. 'If I'd wanted a marriage counselor, I would have consulted the goddam Yellow Pages,' he said.

Sandy offered him a smile, one without much humor in it. 'I think you better start listening for the pop,' he said.

'What are you talking about?'

'The pop. Very distinctive sound. You hear it when your head finally comes out of your ass.'

Curtis stared at him, hard little roses of color burning high up on his cheekbones. 'Am I missing something here, Sandy?'

'Yes.'

'What? For God's sake, what?'

'Your job and your life,' Sandy said. 'Not necessarily in that order. You are experiencing a problem of perspective. That Buick is starting to look too big to you.'

'Too . . . !' Curt hit his forehead with the palm of his hand in that way he had. Then he turned and looked out at the Short Hills. At last he swung back to Sandy. 'It's something from another world, Sandy - from another world. How can a thing like that look too big?'

'That's exactly your problem,' Sandy replied. 'Your problem of perspective.'

He had an idea that the next thing Curtis said would be the beginning of an argument, possibly a bitter one. So before Curt could say anything, Sandy went inside. And perhaps that talk did some good, because as August gave way to September, Curt's all but constant requests for more surveillance time stopped. Sandy Dearborn never tried to tell himself that the kid had seen the light, but he did seem to understand that he'd gone as far as he could, at least for the time being. Which was good, but maybe not quite good enough. Sandy thought that the Buick was always going to look too big to Curtis. But then, there have always been two sorts of people in the world. Curt was of the sort who believed satisfaction actually did bring felines back from the other side of the great divide.

He began to show up at the barracks with biology books instead of Field and Stream. The one most commonly observed under his arm or lying on the toilet tank in the crapper was Dr John H.

Maturin's Twenty Elementary Dissections, Harvard University Press, 1968. When Buck Flanders and his wife went over to Curt's for dinner one evening, Michelle Wilcox complained about her husband's 'gross new hobby'. He had started getting specimens from a medical supply house, she said, and the area of the basement which he had designated as his darkroom-to-be only the year before now smelled of mortuary chemicals.

Curt started with mice and a guinea pig, then moved on to birds, eventually working his way up to a horned owl. Sometimes he brought specimens to work. 'You haven't really lived,' Matt Babicki told Orville Garrett and Steve Devoe one day, 'until you go downstairs for a fresh box of ballpoint pens and find a jar of formaldehyde with an owl-eye in it sitting on top of the Xerox machine. Man, that wakes you up.'

Once the owl had been conquered, Curtis moved on to bats. He did eight or nine of those, each specimen from a different species. A couple he caught himself in his back yard; the rest he ordered from a biological supply house in The Burg. Sandy never forgot the day Curtis showed him a South American vampire bat pinned to a board. The thing was furry, brownish on the belly, and velvet-black on the membranous wings. Its tiny pointed teeth were bared in a psychotic smile. Its guts were laid open in a teardrop shape by Curt's increasingly skilled technique. Sandy believed Curt's high school biology teacher - the one who had given him the C - would have been surprised at how fast his old student was learning.

Of course when desire drives, any fool can be a professor.

It was while Curt Wilcox was learning the fine art of dissection from Dr Maturin that Jimmy and Roslyn took up residence in the Buick 8. They were Tony's brainstorm. He had it one day at the Tri-Town Mall, while his wife tried on clothes in Country Casuals. An improbable sign in the window of My Pet caught his eye: COME ON IN AND JOIN OUR GERBIL RIOT!

Tony didn't join the gerbil riot just then - his wife would have had a thousand questions -

but he sent big George Stankowski back the very next day with more cash from the contingency fund and orders to buy a pair of gerbils. Also a plastic habitat for them to live in.

'Should I get them some food, too?' George asked.

'No,' Tony answered. 'Absolutely not. We're going to buy a couple of gerbils and then let them starve to death out in the shed.'

'Really? That seems sort of mean to - '

Tony sighed. 'Get them food, George, yes. By all means get them food.'

The only specification Tony made concerning the habitat was that it fit comfortably on the Buick's front seat. George got a nice one, not top-of-the-line but almost. It was made of a yellow see-through plastic and consisted of a long corridor with a boxy room at either end. One was the gerbil dining room and the other was the gerbil version of Gold's Gym. The dining room had a food-trough and a water-bottle clipped to the side; the gym had an exercise wheel.

'They live better than some people,' Orvie Garrett said.

Phil, who was watching Roslyn take a shit in the food-trough, said: 'Speak for yourself.'

Dicky-Duck Eliot, perhaps not the swiftest horse ever to canter around life's great racetrack, wanted to know why they were keeping gerbils in the Buick. Wasn't that sort of dangerous?

'Well, we'll see about that, won't we?' Tony asked in an oddly gentle voice. 'We'll just see if it is or not.'

On a day not long after Troop D acquired Jimmy and Roslyn, Tony Schoondist crossed his own personal Rubicon and lied to the press.

Not that the representative of the Fourth Estate was in this case very impressive, just a weedy redheaded boy of twenty or so, a summer intern at The Statler County American who would be going back to Ohio State in another week or so. He had a way of listening to you with his mouth hung partway open that made him look, in Arky's words, like a stark raving natural-born fool. But he wasn't a fool, and he'd spent most of one golden September afternoon listening to Mr Bradley Roach. Brad gave the young reporter quite an earful about the man with the Russian accent (by this time Brad was positive the guy had been Russian) and the car the man had left behind. The weedy redhead, Homer Oosler by name, wanted to do a feature story on all of this and go back to college with a bang. Sandy thought the young man could imagine a front-page headline with the words MYSTERY CAR in it. Perhaps even RUSSIAN SPY'S MYSTERY CAR.

Tony never hesitated, just went ahead and lied. He undoubtedly would have done the same thing even if the reporter presenting himself that day had been case-hardened old Trevor Ronnick, who owned the American and had forgotten more stories than the redhead would ever write.

'Car's gone,' Tony said, and there it was: lie told, Rubicon crossed.

'Gone?' Homer Oosler asked, clearly disappointed. He had a big old Minolta camera on his lap.

PROPERTY OF COUNTY AMERICAN was Dymotaped across the back of the case. 'Gone where?'

'State Impound Bureau,' Tony said, creating this impressive-sounding organization on the spot.

'In Philly.'

'Why?'

'They auction unclaimed rolling iron. After they search em for drugs, of course.'

'Course. Do you have any paperwork on it?'

'Must have,' Tony said. 'Got it on everything else. I'll look for it, give you a ring.'

'How long do you think that'll take, Sergeant Schoondist?'

'Awhile, son.' Tony waved his hand at his in/out basket, which was stacked high with papers.

Oosler didn't need to know that most of them were the week's junkalogue from Scranton - everything from updates on retirement benefits to the schedule for autumn softball - and would be in the wastebasket before the Sarge went home. That weary wave of the hand suggested that there were similar piles of paper everywhere. 'Hard keeping up with all this stuff, you know. They say things'll change when we start getting computerized, but that won't be this year.'

'I go back to school next week.'

Tony leaned forward in his chair and looked at Oosler keenly. 'And I hope you work hard,' he said. 'It's a tough world out there, son, but if you work hard you can make it.'

A couple of days after Homer Oosler's visit, the Buick fired up another of its lightstorms. This time it happened on a day that was filled with bright sun, but it was still pretty spectacular.

And all Curtis's worries about missing the next manifestation proved groundless.

The shed's temperature made it clear the Buick was building up to something again, dropping from the mid-seventies to the upper fifties over a course of five days. Everyone became anxious to take a turn out in the hutch; everyone wanted to be the one on duty when it happened, whatever

'it' turned out to be this time.

Brian Cole won the lottery, but all the Troopers at the barracks shared the experience at least to some extent. Brian went into Shed B at around two p.m. to check on Jimmy and Roslyn. They were fine as paint, Roslyn in the habitat's dining room and Jimmy busting heavies on the exercise wheel in the gym. But as Brian leaned farther into the Buick to check the water reservoir, he heard a humming noise. It was deep and steady, the kind of sound that vibrates your eyes in their sockets and rattles your fillings. Below it (or entwined with it) was something a lot more disturbing, a kind of scaly, wordless whispering. A purple glow, very dim, was spreading slowly across the dashboard and the steering wheel.

Mindful of Ennis Rafferty, gone with no forwarding address for well over a month by then, Trooper Cole vacated the Buick's vicinity in a hurry. He proceeded without panic, however, taking the video camera from the hutch, screwing it on to its tripod, loading in a fresh tape, checking the time-code (it was correct) and the battery level (all the way in the green). He turned on the overheads before going back out, then placed the tripod in front of one of the windows, hit the RECORD button, and double-checked to make sure the Buick was centered in the viewfinder. It was.

He started toward the barracks, then snapped his fingers and went back to the hutch. There was a little bag filled with camera accessories in there. One of them was a brightness filter. Brian attached this to the video camera's lens without bothering to hit the PAUSE button (for one moment the big dark shapes of his hands blot out the image of the Buick, and when they leave the frame again the Buick reappears as if in a deep twilight). If there had been anyone there watching him go about his business - one of those visiting John Q.'s curious about how his tax dollars were spent, perhaps - he never would have guessed how fast Trooper Cole's heart was beating. He was afraid as well as excited, but he did okay. When it comes to dealing with the unknown, there's a great deal to be said for a good shot of police training. All in all, he forgot only one thing.

He poked his head into Tony's office at about seven minutes past two and said, 'Sarge, I'm pretty sure something's happening with the Buick.'

Tony looked up from his yellow legal pad, where he was scribbling the first draft of a speech he was supposed to give at a law enforcement symposium that fall, and said: 'What's that in your hand, Bri?'

Brian looked down and saw he was holding the gerbils' water reservoir. 'Ah, what the hell,' he said. 'They may not need it anymore, anyway.'

By twenty after two, Troopers in the barracks could hear the humming clearly. Not that there were many in there; most were lined up at the windows in Shed B's two roll-up doors, hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder. Tony saw this, debated whether or not to order them away, and finally decided to let them stay where they were. With one exception.

'Arky.'

'Yessir, Sarge?'

'I want you to go on out front and mow the lawn.'

'I just mow it on Monday!'

'I know. Seemed like you spent the last hour doing the part under my office window. I want you to do it again just the same. With this in your back pocket.' He handed Arky a walkie-talkie. 'And if anyone comes calling who shouldn't see ten Pennsylvania State Troopers lined up in front of that shed like there was a big-money cockfight going on inside, shoot me the word. Got it?'

'Yeah, you betcha.'

'Good. Matt! Matt Babicki, front and center!'

Matt rushed up, puffing and red-faced with excitement. Tony asked him where Curt was. Matt said he was on patrol.

'Tell him to return to base, code D and ride quiet, got that?'

'Code D and ride quiet, roger.'

To ride quiet is to travel sans flashers and siren. Curt presumably obeyed this injunction, but he was still back at the barracks by quarter to three. No one dared ask him how far he'd come in half an hour. However many miles it might have been, he arrived alive and before the silent fireworks started up again. The first thing he did was to remove the videocam from the tripod.

Until the fireworks were over, the visual record would be Curds Wilcox's baby.

The tape (one of many squirreled away in the storage closet) preserves what there was to see and hear. The Buick's hum is very audible, sounding like a loose wire in a stereo speaker, and it gets appreciably louder as time passes. Curt got footage of the big thermometer with its red needle standing at just a hair past 54. There's dirt's voice, asking permission to go in and check on Jimmy and Roslyn, and Sergeant Schoondist's voice coming back with 'Permission denied' almost at once, brisk and sure, brooking no argument.

At 3:08:41P, according to the time-code on the bottom of the screen, a blush like a violet sunrise begins to rise on the Buick's windshield. At first a viewer might pass this phenomenon off as a technical glitch or an optical illusion or perhaps some sort of reflection.

Andy Colucci: 'What's that?'

Unknown speaker: 'A power surge or a - '

Curtis Wilcox: 'Those of you with goggles better put them on. Those of you without them, this is risky, I'd back the hell off. We have - '

Jackie O'Hara (probably): 'Who took - '

Phil Candleton (probably): 'My God!'

Huddie Royer: 'I don't think we should - '

Sergeant Commanding Schoondist, sounding as calm as an Audubon guide on a nature hike: 'Get those goggles down, fellas, I would. Chop-chop.'

At 3:09:24, that violet light took an auroral leap in all the Buick's windows, turning them into brilliant purple mirrors. If one slows the tape down and then advances it frame by frame, one can see actual reflections appearing in the formerly clear window-glass: the tools hung on their pegs, the orange plow-blade stored against one wall, the men outside, peering in. Most are wearing goggles and look like aliens in a cheap science fiction movie. One can isolate Curt because of the video camera blocking the left side of his face. The hum gets louder and louder. Then, about five seconds before the Buick starts shooting off those flashes, the sound stops. A viewer of this tape can hear an excited babble of voices, none identifiable, all seeming to ask questions.

Then the image disappears for the first time. The Buick and the shed are both gone, lost in the white.

'Jesus Christ, did you guys see that?' Huddie Royer screams.

There are cries of Get back, Holy fuck, and everyone's favorite in times of trouble, Oh shit.

Someone says Don't look at it and someone else says It's pissing lightning in that weirdly matter-of-fact tone one can sometimes hear on cockpit flight recorders, a pilot who's talking without realizing it, who only knows that he's down to the last ten or twelve seconds of his life.

Then the Buick returns from the land of overexposure, looking first like a meaningless clot, then taking back its actual form. Three seconds later it flashes out again. The glare shoots thick rays from every window and then whites out the image once more. During this one Curt says We need a better filter and Tony replies Maybe next time.

The phenomenon continues for the next forty-six minutes, every bit of it captured on tape. At first the Buick whites out and disappears with every flash. Then, as the phenomenon starts to weaken, the viewer can see a vague car-shape sunk deep in soundless lightbursts that are more purple than white. Sometimes the image joggles and there's a fast, blurry pan of human faces as Curtis hurries to a different observation point, hoping for a revelation (or perhaps just a better view).

At 3:28:17, one can observe a jagged line of fire burst up from (or maybe it's through) the Buick's closed trunk. It shoots all the way to the ceiling, where it seems to splash outward like water from a fountain.

Unidentified voice: 'Holy shit, high voltage, high voltage!'

Tony: 'The hell it is.' Then, presumably to Curt: 'Keep taping.'

Curt: 'Oh yeah. You better believe it.'

There are several more of the lightning bolts, some shooting out of the Buick's windows, some rising from the roof or the trunk. One leaps out from beneath the car and fires itself directly at the rear roll-up door. There are surprised yells as the men back away from that one, but the camera stays steady. Curt was basically too excited to be afraid.

At 3:55:03 there's a final weak blip - it comes from the back seat, behind the driver's position - and then there's no more. You can hear Tony Schoondist say, 'Why don't you save the battery, Curt? The show seems to be over.' At that point the tape goes momentarily black.

When the picture resumes at 4:08:16, Curt is onscreen. There's something yellow wrapped around his midsection. He waves jauntily and says, 'I'll be right back.'

Tony Schoondist - he's the one running the camera at that point - replies, 'You better be.'

And he doesn't sound jaunty in the least.

Curt wanted to go in and check on the gerbils - to see how they were, assuming they were still there at all. Tony refused permission adamantly and at once. No one was going in Shed B for quite awhile, he said, not until they were sure it was safe to do so. He hesitated, maybe replaying that remark in his head and realizing the absurdity of it - as long as the Buick Roadmaster was in Shed B it was never going to be safe - and changed it to: 'Everyone stays out until the temperature's back over sixty-five.'

'Someone's gotta go,' Brian Cole said. He spoke patiently, as if discussing a simple addition problem with a person of limited intelligence.

'I fail to see why, Trooper,' Tony said.

Brian reached into his pocket and pulled out Jimmy and Roslyn's water-reservoir. 'They got plenty of those pellets they eat, but without this, they'll die of thirst.'

'No, they won't. Not right away.'

'It might be a couple of days before the temperature in there goes up to sixty-five, Sarge.

Would you want to go forty-eight hours without a drink?'

'I know I wouldn't,' Curt said. Trying not to smile (and smiling a little anyway), he took the calibrated plastic tube from Brian. Then Tony took it from him before it could start to feel at home in Curt's hand. The SC did not look at his fellow scholar as he did this; he kept his eyes fixed on Trooper Brian Cole.

'I'm supposed to allow one of the men under my command to risk his life in order to bring water to a pair of pedigreed mice. Is that what you're telling me, Trooper? I just want to be clear on this.'

If he expected Brian to blush or scuffle, he was disappointed. Brian just kept looking at him in that patient way, as if to say Yes, yes, get it out of your system, boss - the sooner you get it out of your system, the sooner you'll be able to relax and do the right thing.

'I can't believe it,' Tony said. 'One of us has lost his mind. Probably it's me.'

'They're just little guys,' Brian said. His voice was as patient as his face. 'And we're the ones who put them in there, Sarge, they didn't exactly volunteer. We're responsible. Now I'll do it if you want, I'm the one who forgot - '

Tony raised his hands to the sky, as if to ask for divine intervention, then dropped them back to his sides. Red was creeping out of his collar, up his neck, and over his jaw. It met the red patches on his cheeks: howdy-do, neighbor. 'Hair pie!' he muttered.

The men had heard him say this before, and knew better than to crack a smile. It is at this point that many people -perhaps even a majority - would be apt to yell, 'Oh, screw it! Do what you want!' and stamp away. But when you're in the big chair, getting the big bucks for making the big decisions, you can't do that. The D Troopers gathered in front of the shed knew this, and so, of course, did Tony. He stood there, looking down at his shoes. From out front of the barracks came the steady blat of Arky's old red Briggs & Stratton mower.

'Sarge - ' Curtis began.

'Kid, do us all a favor and shut up.'

Curt shut up.

After a moment, Tony raised his head. 'The rope I asked you to pick up - did you get it?'

'Yes, sir. It's the good stuff. You could take it mountain-climbing. At least that's what the guy at Calling All Sports said.'

'Is it in there?' Tony nodded at the shed.

'No, in the trunk of my car.'

'Well thank God for small favors. Bring it over here. And I hope we never have to find out how good it is.' He looked at Brian Cole. 'Maybe you'd like to to go down to the Agway or the Giant Eagle, Trooper Cole. Get them a few bottles of Evian or Poland Spring Water. Hell, Perrier! How about some Perrier?'

Brian said nothing, just gave the Sergeant a little more of that patient look. Tony couldn't stand it and looked away. 'Mice with pedigrees! Hair pie!'

Curt brought the rope, a length of triple-braided yellow nylon at least a hundred feet long. He made a sliding loop, cinched it around his waist, then gave the coil to Huddie Royer, who weighed two-fifty and always anchored when D Troop played tug-of-war agaist the other PSP octets during the Fourth of July picnic.

'If I give you the word,' Tony told Huddie, 'you yank him back like he just caught fire. And don't worry about breaking his collarbone or his thick skull pulling him through the door. Do you understand that?'

'Yes, Sarge.'

'If you see him fall down, or just start swaying on his feet like he's lightheaded, don't wait for the word. Just yank. Got it?'

'Yes, Sarge.'

'Good. I'm very glad that someone understands what's going on here. Fucking hair-pie summer camp snipe-hunt is what it is.' He ran his hand through the short bristles of his hair, then turned to Curt again. 'Do I need to tell you to turn around and come out of there if you sense anything - any slightest thing - wrong?'

'No.'

'And if the trunk of that car comes open, Curtis, you fly. Got it? Fly out of there like a bigass bird.'

'I will.'

'Give me the video camera.'

Curtis held it out arid Tony took it. Sandy wasn't there - missed the whole thing - but when Huddie later told him it was the only time he had ever seen the Sarge looking scared, Sandy was just as glad he spent that afternoon out on patrol. There were some things you just didn't want to see.

'You have one minute in the shed, Trooper Wilcox. After that I drag you out whether you're fainting, farting, or singing "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean".'

'Ninety seconds.'

'No. And if you try one more time to bargain with me, your time goes down to thirty seconds.'

Curtis Wilcox is standing in the sun outside the walk-in door on the north side of Shed B. The rope is tied around his waist. He looks young on the tape, younger with each passing year. He looked at that tape himself from time to time and probably felt the same, although he never said.

And he doesn't look scared. Not a bit. Only excited. He waves to the camera and says, 'I'll be right back.'

'You better be,' Tony replies.

Curt turns and goes into the shed. For a moment he looks ghostly, hardly there, then Tony moves the camera forward to get it out of the bright sun and you can see Curt clearly again. He crosses directly to the car and starts around to the back.

'No!' Tony shouts. 'No, you dummy, you want to foul the rope? Check the gerbils, give em their goddam water, and get the hell out of there!'

Curt raises one hand without turning, giving him a thumbs-up. The picture jiggles as Tony uses the zoom to get in tighter on him.

Curtis looks in the driver's-side window, then stiffens and calls: 'Holy shit!'

'Sarge, should I pull - ' Huddie begins, and then Curt looks back over his shoulder. Tony's juggling the picture again - he doesn't have Curt's light touch with the camera and the image is going everywhere - but it's still easy enough to read the wide-eyed expression of shock on Curtis's face.

'Don't you pull me back!' Curt shouts. 'Don't do it! I'm five-by-five!' And with that, he opens the door of the Roadmaster.

'Stay out of there!' Tony calls from behind the madly jiggling camera.

Curt ignores him and pulls the plastic gerbil condo out of the car, waggling it gently back and forth to get it past the big steering wheel. He uses his knee to shut the Buick's door and then comes back to the shed door with the habitat cradled in his arms. With a square room at either end, the thing looks like some strange sort of plastic dumbbell.

'Get it on tape!' Curt is shouting, all but frying with excitement. 'Get it on tape!'

Tony did. The picture zooms in on the left end of the environment just as soon as Curt steps out of the shed and back into the sun. And here is Roslyn, no longer eating but scurrying about cheerfully enough. She becomes aware of the men gathered around her and turns directly toward the camera, sniffing at the yellow plastic, whiskers quivering, eyes bright and interested. It was cute, but the Troopers from Statler Barracks D weren't interested in cute just then.

The camera makes a herky-jerky pan away from her, traveling along the empty corridor to the empty gerbil gym at the far end. Both of the environment's hatches are latched tight, and nothing bigger than a gnat could get through the hole for the water-tube, but Jimmy the gerbil is gone, just the same -just as gone as Ennis Rafferty or the man with the Boris Badinoff accent, who had driven the Buick Roadmaster into their lives to begin with.

NOW:

Sandy

I came to a stop and swallowed a glass of Shirley's iced tea in four long gulps. That planted an icepick in the center of my forehead, and I had to wait for it to melt.

At some point Eddie Jacubois had joined us. He was dressed in his civvies and sitting at the end of the bench, looking both sorry to be there and reluctant to leave. I had no such divided feelings; I was delighted to see him. He could tell his part. Huddie would help him along, if he needed helping; Shirley, too. By 1988 she'd been with us two years, Matt Babicki nothing but a memory refreshed by an occasional postcard showing palm trees in sunny Sarasota, where Matt and his wife own a learn-to-drive school. A very successful one, at least according to Matt.

'Sandy?' Ned asked. 'Are you all right?'

'I'm fine. I was just thinking about how clumsy Tony was with that video camera,' I said.

'Your dad was great, Ned, a regular Steven Spielberg, but - '

'Could I watch those tapes if I wanted to?' Ned asked.

I looked at Huddie . . . Arky . . . Phil . . . Eddie. In each set of eyes I saw the same thing: It's your call. As of course it was. When you sit in the big chair, you make all the big calls. And mostly I like that. Might as well tell the truth.

'Don't see why not,' I said. 'As long as it's here. I wouldn't be comfortable with you taking them out of the barracks - you'd have to call them Troop D property - but here? Sure. You can run em on the VCR in the upstairs lounge. You ought to take a Dramamine before you look at the stuff Tony shot, though. Right, Eddie?'

For a moment Eddie looked across the parking lot, but not toward where the Roadmaster was stored. His gaze seemed to rest on the place where Shed A had been until 1982 or thereabouts. 'I dunno much about that,' he said. 'Don't remember much. Most of the big stuff was over by the time I got here, you know.'

Even Ned must have known the man was lying; Eddie was spectacularly bad at it.

'I just came out to tell you I put in those three hours I owed from last May, Sarge - you know, when I took off to help my brother-in-law build his new studio?'

'Ah,' I said.

Eddie bobbed his head up and down rapidly. 'Uh-huh. I'm all clocked out, and I put the report on those marijuana plants we found in Robbie Rennerts's back field on your desk. So I'll just be heading on home, if it's all the same to you.'

Heading down to The Tap was what he meant. His home away from home. Once he was out of uniform, Eddie J.'s life was a George Jones song. He started to get up and I put a hand on his wrist. 'Actually, Eddie, it's not.'

'Huh?'

'It's not all the same to me. I want you to stick around awhile.'

'Boss, I really ought to - '

'Stick around,' I repeated. 'You might owe this kid a little something.'

'I don't know what - '

'His father saved your life, remember?'

Eddie's shoulders came up in a kind of defensive hunch. 'I don't know if I'd say he exactly -

'

'Come on, get off it,' Huddie said. 'I was there.'

Suddenly Ned wasn't so interested in videotapes. 'My father saved your life, Eddie? How?'

Eddie hesitated, then gave in. 'Pulled me down behind a John Deere tractor. The O'Day brothers, they - '

'The spine-tingling saga of the O'Day brothers is a story for another time,' I said. 'The point is, Eddie, we're having us a little exhumation party here, and you know where one of the bodies is buried. And I mean quite literally.'

'Huddie and Shirley were there, they can - '

'Yeah, they were. George Morgan was there, too, I think - '

'He was,' Shirley said quietly.

' - but so what?' I still had my hand on Eddie's wrist, and had to fight a desire to squeeze it again. Hard. I liked Eddie, always had, and he could be brave, but he also had a yellow streak.

I don't know how those two things can exist side by side in the same man, but they can; I've seen it more than once. Eddie froze back in '96, on the day Travis and Tracy O'Day started firing their fancy militia machine-guns out of their farmhouse windows. Curt had to break cover and yank him to safety by the back of his jacket. And now here he was trying to squiggle out of his part in the other story, the one in which Ned's father had played such a key role. Not because he'd done anything wrong - he hadn't - but because the memories were painful and frightening.

'Sandy, I really ought to get toddling. I've got a lot of chores I've been putting off, and -

'

'We've been telling this boy about his father,' I said. 'And what I think you ought to do, Eddie, is sit there quiet, maybe have a sandwich and a glass of iced tea, and wait until you have something to say.'

He settled back on the end of the bench and looked at us. I know what he saw in the eyes of Curt's boy: puzzlement and curiosity. We'd become quite a little Council of Elders, though, surrounding the young fellow, singing him our warrior-songs of the past. And what about when the songs were done? If Ned had been a young Indian brave, he might have been sent out on some sort of dream quest - kill the right animal, have the right vision while the blood of the animal's heart was still smeared around his mouth, come back a man. If there could be some sort of test at the end of this, I reflected, some way in which Ned could demonstrate new maturity and understanding, things might have been a lot simpler. But that's not the way things work nowadays. At least not by and large. These days it's a lot more about how you feel than what you do. And I think that's wrong.

And what did Eddie see in our eyes? Resentment? A touch of contempt? Perhaps even the wish that it had been him who had flagged down the truck with the flapper rather than Curtis Wilcox, that it had been him who had gotten turned inside-out by Bradley Roach? Always-almost-overweight Eddie Jacubois, who drank too much and would probably be making a little trip to Scranton for a two-week stay in the Member Assistance Program if he didn't get a handle on his drinking soon? The guy who was always slow filing his reports and who almost never got the punchline of a joke unless it was explained to him? I hope he didn't see any of those things, because there was another side to him - a better side - but I can't say for sure he didn't see at least some of them. Maybe even all of them.

' - about the big picture?'

I turned to Ned, glad to be diverted from the uncomfortable run of my own thoughts. 'Come again?'

'I asked if you ever talked about what the Buick really was, where it came from, what it meant. If you ever discussed, you know, the big picture.'

'Well . . . there was the meeting at The Country Way,' I said. I didn't quite see where he was going. 'I told you about that - '

'Yeah, but that one sounded, you know, more administrative than anything else - '

'You do okay in college,' Arky said, and patted him on the knee. 'Any kid can say a word like dat, jus' roll it out, he bound t'do okay in college.'

Ned grinned. 'Administrative. Organizational. Bureaucratized. Compartmentalized.'

'Quit showing off, kiddo,' Huddie said. 'You're giving me a headache.'

'Anyway, the thing at The Country Way's not the kind of meeting I'm talking about. You guys must've ... I mean, as time went on you must have . . .'

I knew what he was trying so say, and I knew something else at the same time: the boy would never quite understand the way it had really been. How mundane it had been, at least on most days.

On most days we had just gone on. The way people go on after seeing a beautiful sunset, or tasting a wonderful champagne, or getting bad news from home. We had the miracle of the world out behind our workplace, but . that didn't change the amount of paperwork we had to do or the way we brushed our teeth or how we made love to our spouses. It didn't lift us to new realms of existence or planes of perception. Our asses still itched, and we still scratched them when they did.

'I imagine Tony and your Either talked it over a lot,' I said, 'but at work, at least for the rest of us, the Buick gradually slipped into the background like any other inactive case. It - '

'Inactive!' He nearly shouted it, and sounded so much like his father it was frightening. It was another chain, I thought, this link between father and son. The chain had been mangled, but it wasn't broken.

'For long periods of time, it was,' I said. 'Meantime, there were fender-benders and hit-and-runs and burglaries and dope and the occasional homicide.'

The look of disappointment on Ned's face made me feel bad, as if I'd let him down. Ridiculous, I suppose, but true. Then something occurred to me. 'I can remember one bull-session about it. It was at - '

' - the picnic,' Phil Candleton finished. 'Labor Day picnic. That's what you're thinking about, right?'

I nodded. 1979. The old Academy soccer field, down by Redfern Stream. We all liked the Labor Day picnic a lot better than the one on the Fourth of July, partially because it was a lot closer to home and the men who had families could bring them, but mostly because it was just us -just Troop D. The Labor Day picnic really was a picnic.

Phil put his head back against the boards of the barracks and laughed. 'Man, I'd almost forgotten about it. We talked about that damn yonder Buick, kid, and just about nothing else. More we talked, the more we drank. My head ached for two days after.'

Huddie said: 'That picnic's always a good time. You were there last summer, weren't you, Ned?'

'Summer before last,' Ned said. 'Before Dad died.' He was smiling. 'That tire swing that goes out over the water? Paul Loving fell out of it and sprained his knee.'

We all laughed at that, Eddie as loud as the rest of us.

'A lot of talk and not one single conclusion,' I said. 'But what conclusions could we draw?

Only one, really: when the temperature goes down inside that shed, things happen. Except even that turned out not to be a hard and fast rule. Sometimes - especially as the years went by - the temperature would go down a little, then rebound. Sometimes that humming noise would start . . .

and then it would stop again, just cut out as if someone had pulled the plug on a piece of electrical equipment. Ennis disappeared with no lightshow and Jimmy the gerbil disappeared after a humungous lightshow and Roslyn didn't disappear at all.'

'Did you put her back into the Buick?' Ned asked.

'Nah,' Phil said. 'This is America, kid - no double jeopardy.'

'Roslyn lived the rest of her life upstairs in the common room,' I said. 'She was three or four when she died. Tony said that was a fairly normal lifespan for a gerbil.'

'Did more things come out of it? Out of the Buick?'

'Yes. But you couldn't correlate the appearance of those things with - '

'What sort of things? And what about the bat? Did my father ever get around to dissecting it?

Can I see it? Are there pictures, at least? Was it - '

'Whoa, hold on,' I said, raising my hand. 'Eat a sandwich or something. Chill out.'

He picked up a sandwich and began to nibble, his eyes looking at me over the top. For just a moment he made me think of Roslyn the gerbil turning to look into the lens of the video camera, eyes bright and whiskers twitching.

'Things appeared from time to time,' I said, 'and from time to time things - living things would disappear. Crickets. A frog. A butterfly. A tulip right out of the pot it was growing in.

But you couldn't correlate the chill, the hum, or the lightshows with either the disappearances or what your dad called the Buick's miscarriages. Nothing really correlates. The chill is pretty reliable, there's never been one of those fireworks displays without a preceding temperature-drop -

but not every temperature-drop means a display. Do you see what I mean?'

'I think so,' Ned said. 'Clouds don't always mean rain, but you don't get rain without them.'

'I couldn't have put it more neatly,' I said.

Huddie tapped Ned on the knee. 'You know how folks say, "There's an exception to every rule?"

Well, in the case of the Buick, we've got about one rule and a dozen exceptions.

The driver himself is one - you know, the guy in the black coat and black hat. He disappeared, but not from the vicinity of the Buick.'

'Can you say that for sure?' Ned asked.

It startled me. For a boy to look like his father is natural. To sound like his father, too.

But for a moment there, Ned's voice and looks combined to make something more than a resemblance.

Nor was I the only one who felt that. Shirley and Arky exchanged an uneasy glance.

'What do you mean?' I asked him.

'Roach was reading a newspaper, wasn't he? And from the way you described him, that probably took most of his concentration. So how do you know the guy didn't come back to his car?'

I'd had twenty years to think about that day and the consequences of that day. Twenty years, and the idea of the Roadmaster's driver coming back (perhaps even sneaking back) had never once occurred to me. Or, so far as I knew, to anyone else. Brad Roach said the guy hadn't returned, and we'd simply accepted that. Why? Because cops have built-in bullshit detectors, and in that case none of the needles swung into the red. Never even twitched, really. Why would they? Brad Roach at least thought he was telling the truth. That didn't mean he knew what he was talking about, though.

'I guess that it's possible,' I said.

Ned shrugged as if to say, Well there you go.

'We never had Sherlock Holmes or Lieutenant Columbo working out of D Troop,' I said. I thought I sounded rather defensive. I felt rather defensive. 'When you get right down to it, we're just the mechanics of the legal system. Blue-collar guys who actually wear gray collars and have a slightly better than average education. We can work the phones, compile evidence if there's evidence to compile, make the occasional deduction. On good days we can make fairly brilliant deductions. But with the Buick there was no consistency, hence no basis for deduction, brilliant or otherwise.'

'Some of the guys thought it came from space,' Huddle said. 'That it was . . . oh, I don't know, a disguised scout-ship, or something. They had the idea Ennis was abducted by an ET

disguised to look at least passably human in his - its - black coat and hat. This talk was at the picnic - the Labor Day picnic, okay?'

'Yeah,' Ned said.

'That was one seriously weird get-together, kiddo,' Huddie said. 'It seems to me that everyone got a lot drunker'n usual, and a lot faster, but no one got rowdy, not even the usual suspects like Jackie O'Hara and Christian Soder. It was very quiet, especially once the shirts-and-skins touch football game was over.

'I remember sitting on a bench under an elm tree with a bunch of guys, all of us moderately toasted, listening to Brian Cole tell about these flying saucer sightings around the powerlines in New Hampshire - only a few years before, that was - and how some woman claimed to have been abducted and had all these probes stuck up inside her, entrance ramps and exit ramps both.'

'Is that what my father believed? That aliens abducted his partner?'

'No,' Shirley said. 'Something happened here in 1988 that was so . . . so outrageous and beyond belief . . . so fucking awful. . .'

'What?' Ned asked. 'For God's sake, what?

Shirley ignored the question. I don't think she even heard it. 'A few days afterward, I asked your father flat-out what he believed. He said it didn't matter.'

Ned looked as if he hadn't heard her correctly. 'It didn't matter?'

'That's what he said. He believed that, whatever the Buick was, it didn't matter in the great scheme of things. In that big picture you were talking about. I asked him if he thought someone was using it, maybe to watch us . . . if it was some sort of television . . . and he said, "I think it's forgotten." I still remember the flat, certain way he said it, as if he was talking about ... I don't know . . . something as important as a king's treasure buried under the desert since before the time of Christ or something as unimportant as a postcard with the wrong address sitting in a Dead Letter file somewhere. "Having a wonderful time, wish you were here" and who cares, because all that was long, long ago. It comforted me and at the same time it chilled me to think anything so strange and awful could just be forgotten . . . misplaced . . . overlooked. I said that, and your dad, he laughed. Then he flapped his arm at the western horizon and he said,

"Shirley, tell me something. How many nuclear weapons do you think this great nation of ours has got stored out there in various places between the Pennsylvania-Ohio line and the Pacific Ocean?

And how many of them do you think will be left behind and forgotten over the next two or three centuries?"'

We were all silent for a moment, thinking about this.

'I was considering quitting the job,' Shirley said at last. 'I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking about poor old Mister Dillon, and in my mind quitting was almost a done deal. It was Curt who talked me into staying, and he did it without even knowing he was doing it. "I think it's forgotten," he said, and that was good enough for me. I stayed, and I've never been sorry, either.

This is a good place, and most of the guys who work here are good Troops. That goes for the ones who are gone, too. Like Tony.'

'I love you, Shirley, marry me,' Huddie said. He put an arm around her and puckered his lips.

Not a pretty sight, all in all.

She elbowed him. 'You're married already, foolish.'

Eddie J. spoke up then. 'If your dad believed anything, it was that yonder machine came from some other dimension.'

'Another dimension? You're kidding.' He looked at Eddie closely. 'No. You're not kidding.'

'And he didn't think it was planned at all,' Eddie went on. 'Not, you know, like you'd plan to send a ship across the ocean or a satellite into space. In some ways, I'm not even sure he thought it was real.'

'You lost me,' the kid said.

'Me, too,' Shirley agreed.

'He said . . .' Eddie shifted on the bench. He looked out again at the grassy place where Shed A had once stood. 'This was at the O'Day farm, if you want to know the truth. That day. You hafta realize we were out there almost seven goddam hours, parked in the corn and waiting for those two dirtbags to come back. Cold. Couldn't run the engine, couldn't run the heater. We talked about everything - hunting, fishing, bowling, our wives, our plans. Curt said he was going to get out of the PSP in another five years - '

'He said that?' Ned was round-eyed.

Eddie gave him an indulgent look. 'From time to time we all say that, kid. Just like all the junkies say they're going to quit the spike. I told him how I'd like to open my own security business in The Burg, also how I'd like to get me a brand-new Winnebago. He told me about how he wanted to take some science courses at Horlicks and how he was getting resistance from your mom.

She said it was their job to put the kids through school, not him. He caught a lot of flak from her but never blamed her. Because she didn't know why he wanted to take those courses, what had got him interested, and he couldn't tell her. That's how we got around to the Buick. And what he said - I remember this clear as the sky on a summer morning - was that we saw it as a Buick because we had to see it as something.'

'Have to see it as something,' Ned muttered. He was leaning forward and rubbing the center of his forehead with two fingers, like a man with a headache.

'You look as confused as I felt, but I did sort of understand what he meant. In here.' Eddie tapped his chest, above his heart.

Ned turned back to me. 'Sandy, that day at the picnic, did any of you talk about . . .' He trailed off without finishing.

'Talk about what?' I asked him.

He shook his head, looked down at the remains of his sandwich, and popped the last bite into his mouth. 'Never mind. Isn't important. Did my dad really dissect the bat-thing you guys found?'

'Yep. After the second lightshow but before the Labor Day picnic. He - '

'Tell the kid about the leaves,' Phil said. 'You forgot that part.'

And I had. Hell, I hadn't even thought about the leaves in six or eight years. 'You tell him,'

I said. 'You're the one who had your hands on them.'

Phil nodded, sat silent for a few moments, and then began to speak staccato, as if giving a report to a superior officer.

NOW:

Phil

The second lightshow happened midafternoon. Okay? Curt goes into the shed with the rope on when it's over and brings out the gerbil whatchacallit. We see one of the critters is gone. There's some more talk. Some more picture-taking. Sergeant Schoondist says okay, okay, everyone as you were, who's on duty out in the hutch. Brian Cole says 'Me, Sarge.'

'The rest of us go back in the barracks. Okay? And I hear Curtis say to the Sarge, "I'm gonna dissect that thing before it disappears like everything else. Will you help me?" And the Sarge says he will - that night, if Curt wants. Curt says "Why not right now?" and the Sarge says,

"Because you got a patrol to finish. Shift-and-a-half. John Q. is depending on you, boy, and lawbreakers tremble at the sound of your engyne." That's the way he talked, sometimes, like a piney-woods preacher. And he never said engine, always engyne.

'Curt, he don't argue. Knows better. Goes off. Around five o'clock Brian Cole comes in and gets me. Asks will I cover the shed for him while he goes to the can. I say sure. I go out there.

Take a look inside. Situation normal, fi'-by. Thermometer's gone up a degree. I go into the hutch.

Decide die hutch is too hot, okay? There's an L.L. Bean catalogue on the chair. I go to grab that.

Just as I put my fingers on it, I hear this creak-thump sound. Only one sound like it, when you unlatch the trunk of your car and it springs up hard. I go rushing out of the hutch. Over to the shed windows. Buick's trunk's open. All this what I thought at first was paper, charred bits of paper, is whooshing up out of the trunk. Spinning around like they were caught in a cyclone. But the dust on the floor wasn't moving. Not at all. The only moving air was coming out of the trunk.

And then I saw all the pieces of paper looked pretty much the same and I decided they were leaves.

Turned out that was what they were.'

I took my notebook out of my breast pocket. Clicked out the tip of my ballpoint and drew this:

[graphic of a curled crescent-shaped leaf]

'It looks sort of like a smile,' the kid said.

'Like a goddam grin,' I said. 'Only there wasn't just one of them. Was hundreds. Hundreds of black grins swirling and spinning around. Some landed on the Buick's roof. Some dropped back into the trunk. Most of em went on the floor. I ran to get Tony. He came out with the video camera. He was all red in the face and muttering, 'What now, what next, what the hell, what now?' Like that.

It was sort of funny, but only later on, okay? Wasn't funny at the time, believe me.

'We looked in the window. Saw the leaves scattered all across the cement floor. There were almost as many as you might have on your lawn after a big October windstorm blows through. Only by then they were curling up at the corners. Made em look a little less like grins and a little more like leaves. Thank God. And they weren't staying black. They were turning whitish-gray right in front of our eyes. And thinning. Sandy was there by then. Didn't make it in time for the lightshow, but turned up in time for the leafshow.'

Sandy said, 'Tony called me at home and asked if I could come in that evening around seven. He said that he and Curt were going to do something I might want to be in on. Anyway, I didn't wait for seven. I came in right away. I was curious.'

'It killed the cat,' Ned said, and sounded so much like his pa that I almost shivered. Then he was looking at me. 'Tell the rest.'

'Not much to tell,' I said. 'The leaves were thinning. I might be wrong, but I think we could actually see it happening.'

'You're not wrong,' Sandy said.

'I was excited. Not thinking. Ran around to the side door of the shed. And Tony, man, Tony was on me like white on rice. He grabs me around the neck in a choke-hold. "Hey," I says. "Leggo me, leggo me, police brutality!" And he tells me to save it for my gig at the Comedy Shop over in Statesboro. "This is no joke, Phil," he says. "I have good reason to believe I've lost one officer to that goddamned thing. I'm not losing another."

'I told him I'd wear the rope. I was hot to trot. Can't remember exactly why, but I was. He said he wasn't going back to get the goddam rope. I said I'd go back and get the goddam rope. He said, "You can forget the goddam rope, permission denied." So I says, "Just hold my feet, Sarge. I want to get a few of those leaves. There's some not five feet from the door. Not even close to the car. What do you say?"

'"I say you must have lost your friggin mind, everything in there is close to the car," he says, but since that wasn't exactly no, I went ahead and opened the door. You could smell it right away. Something like peppermint, only not nice. Some smell underneath it, making the one on top even worse. That cabbagey smell. Made your stomach turn over, but I was almost too excited to notice. I was younger then, okay? I got down on my stomach. Wormed my way in. Sarge has got me by the calves, and when I'm just a little way inside the shed he says, "That's far enough, Phil. If you can grab some, grab away. If you can't, get out."

'There were all kinds that had turned white, and I got about a dozen of those. They were smooth and soft, but in a bad way. Made me think of how tomatoes get when they've gone rotten under the skin. A little farther away there was a couple that were still black. I stretched out and got hold of em, only the very second I touched em, they turned white like the others. There was this very faint stinging sensation in my fingertips. Got a stronger whiff of peppermint and I heard a sound. Think I did, anyway. A kind of sigh, like the sound a soda can makes when you break the seal on the poptop.

'I started wiggling out, and at first I was doing all right, but then I ... something about the feel of those things in my hands ... all sleek and smooth like they were . . .'

For a few seconds I couldn't go on. It was like I was feeling it all over again. But the kid was looking at me and I knew he wouldn't let it go, not for love or money, so I pushed ahead. Now just wanting to get it over with.

'I panicked. Okay? Started to push backward with my elbows and kick with my feet. Summer. Me in short sleeves. One of my elbows kind of winged out and touched one of the black leaves and it hissed like . . . like I don't know what. Just hissed, you know? And sent up a puff of that peppermint-cabbage stink. Turned white. Like me touching it had given it frostbite and killed it.

Thought of that later. Right then I didn't think about anything except getting the righteous fuck out of there. Scuse me, Shirley.'

'Not at all,' Shirley said, and patted my arm. Good girl. Always was. Better in dispatch than Babicki - by a country mile - and a whole lot easier on the eyes. I put my hand over hers and gave a little squeeze. Then I went on and it was easier than I thought it would be. Funny how things come back when you talk about them. How they get clearer and clearer as you go along.

'I looked up at that old Buick. And even though it was in the middle of the shed, had to be twelve feet away from me easy, all at once it seemed a lot closer than that. Big as Mount Everest.

Shiny as the side of a diamond. I got the idea that the headlights were eyes and the eyes were looking at me. And I could hear it whispering. Don't look so surprised, kid. We've all heard it whispering. No idea -what it's saying - if it's really saying anything - but sure, I could hear it. Only inside my head, going from the inside out. Like telepathy. Might have been imagination, but I don't think so. All of a sudden it was like I was six again. Scared of the thing under my bed. It meant to take me away, I was sure of it. Take me to wherever it had taken Ennis. So I panicked. I yelled, "Pull me, pull me, hurry up!" and they sure did. The Sarge and some other guy -

'

'The other guy was me,' Sandy said. 'You scared the living crap out of us, Phil. You seemed all right at first, then you started to yell and twist and buck. I sort of expected to see you bleeding somewhere, or turning blue in the face. But all you had was . . . well.' And he made a little gesture at me to go on.

'I had the leaves. What was left of them, anyway. When I freaked out, I must have made fists, okay? Clenched down on them. And once I was back outside, I realized my hands were all wet. People were yelling Are you all right and What happened in there, Phil? Me up on my knees, with most of my shirt around my neck and a damn floorburn on my gut from being dragged, and I'm thinking My hands are bleeding. That's why they're wet. Then I see this white goo. Looked like the kind of paste the teacher gives you in the first grade. It was all that was left of the leaves.'

I stopped, thought about it.

'And now I'm gonna tell you the truth, okay? It didn't look like paste at all. It was like I had two fistfuls of warm bull-jizz. And the smell was awful. I don't know why. You could say A little peppermint and cabbage, what's the big deal? and you'd be right, but at the same time you'd be wrong. Because really that smell was like nothing on earth. Not that I ever smelled before, anyway.

'I wiped my hands on my pants and went back to the barracks. Went downstairs. Brian Cole is just coming out of the crapper down there. He thought he heard some yelling, wants to know what's going on. I pay him absolutely no mind. Almost knock him over getting into the can, matter of fact. I start washing my hands. I'm still washing away when all at once I think of how I looked with that cummy-white leaf-gunk dripping out of my fists and how it was so warm and soft and somehow sleek and how it made strings when I opened up my fingers. And that was it. Thinking of how it made strings between my palms and the tips of my fingers. I upchucked. It wasn't like having your guts send your supper back by Western Union, either. It was like my actual stomach making a personal appearance, coming right up my throat and tipping everything I'd swallowed down lately right back out my mouth. The way my ma used to throw her dirty wash-water over the back porch railing. I don't mean to go on about it, but you need to know. It's another way of trying to understand. It wasn't like puking, it was like dying. Only other time I had anything like that was my first road fatality. I get there and the first thing I see is a loaf of Wonder Bread on the yellow line of the old Statler Pike and the next thing I see is the top half of a kid. A little boy with blond hair. Next thing I see is there's a fly on the kid's tongue. Washing its legs. That set me off. I thought I was going to puke myself to death.'

'It happened to me, too,' Huddie said. 'Nothing to be ashamed of.'

'Not ashamed,' I said. 'Trying to make him see, is all. Okay?' I took in a deep breath, smelling the sweet air, and then it hit me that the kid's father was also a road kill. I gave the kid a smile. 'Oh well, thank God for small favors - the commode was right next to the basin, and I didn't get hardly any on my shoes or the floor.'

'And in the end,' Sandy said, 'the leaves came to nothing. And I mean that literally. They melted like the witch in The Wizard of Oz. You could see traces of them in Shed B for awhile, but after a week there was nothing but some little stains on the concrete. Yellowish, very pale.'

'Yeah, and for the next couple of months I turned into one of those compulsive hand-washers,'

I said. 'There were days when I couldn't bring myself to touch food. If my wife packed me sandwiches, I picked em up with a napkin and ate them that way, dropping the last piece out of the napkin and into my mouth so I never had to touch any of it with my fingers. If I was by myself in my cruiser, I was apt to eat with my gloves on. And I kept thinking I'd get sick just the same.

What I kept imagining was that gum disease where all your teeth fall out. But I got over it.' I looked at Ned and waited until he met my eyes. 'I got over it, son.'

He met my eyes, but there was nothing in them. It was funny. Like they were painted on, or something.

Okay?

NOW:

Sandy

Ned was looking at Phil. The boy's face was calm enough, but I sensed rejection in his gaze, arid I think Phil sensed it, too. He sighed, folded his arms across his chest, and looked down as if to say he was done talking, his testimony was finished.

Ned turned to me. 'What happened that night? When you dissected the bat?'

He kept calling it a bat and it hadn't been a bat. That was just a word I'd used, what Curtis would have called a nail to hang my hat on. And all at once I was mad at him. More than mad -

pissed like a bear. And I was also angry at myself for feeling that way, for daring to feel that way. You see, mostly what I was angry at was the kid raising his head. Raising his eyes to mine.

Asking his questions. Making his foolish assumptions, one of which happened to be that when I said bat I meant bat, and not some unspeakable indescribable thing that crept out of a crack in the floor of the universe and then died. But mostly it was him raising his head and his eyes. I know that doesn't exactly make me out to be the prince of the world, but I'm not going to lie about it.

Up until then, what I'd mostly felt was sorry for him. Everything I'd done since he started showing up at the barracks had been based on that comfortable pity. Because all that time when he'd been washing windows and raking leaves and snowblowing his way through the drifts in the back parking lot, all that time he'd kept his head down. Meekly down. You didn't have to contend with his eyes. You didn't have to ask yourself any questions, because pity is comfortable. Isn't it?

Pity puts you right up on top. Now he had lifted his head, he was using my own words back at me, and there was nothing meek in his eyes. He thought he had a right, and that made me mad. He thought I had a responsibility - that what was being said out here wasn't a gift being given but a debt being repaid - and that made me madder. That he was right made me maddest of all. I felt like shoving the heel of my hand up into the shelf of his chin and knocking him spang off the bench. He thought he had a right and I wanted to make him sorry.

Our feelings toward the young never much change in this regard, I suppose. I don't have kids of my own. I've never been married - like Shirley, I guess I married Troop D. But I've got plenty of experience when it comes to the young, both inside and outside the barracks. I've had them in my face plenty of times. It seems to me that when we can no longer pity them, when they reject our pity (not with indignation but with impatience), we pity ourselves instead. We want to know where they went, our comfy little ones, our baby buntings. Didn't we give them piano lessons and show them how to throw the curveball? Didn't we read them Where the Wild Things Are and help them search for Waldo? How dare they raise their eyes to ours and ask their rash and stupid questions?

How dare they want more than we want to give?

'Sandy? What happened when you guys dissected the - '

'Not what you want to hear,' I said, and when his eyes widened a little at the coldness he heard in my voice, I was not exactly displeased. 'Not what your father wanted to see. Or Tony, either. Not some answer. There never was an answer. Everything to do with the Buick was a shimmer-mirage, like the ones you see on I-87 when it's hot and bright. Except that's not quite true, either. If it had been, I think we could have dismissed the Buick eventually. The way you dismiss a murder when six months go by and you all just kind of realize you're not going to catch whoever did it, that the guy is going to slide. With the Buick and the things that came out of the Buick, there was always something you could catch hold of. Something you could touch or hear. Or something you could

THEN

'Oi,' Sandy Dearborn said. 'That smell,'

He put his hand up to his face but couldn't actually touch his skin because of the plastic breathing cup he was wearing over his mouth and nose - the kind dentists put on before going prospecting. Sandy didn't know how it was on germs, but the mask did nothing to stop the smell. It was that cabbagey aroma, and it choked the air of the storage closet as soon as Curt opened the stomach of the bat-thing.

'We'll get used to it,' Curt said, his own breathing cup bobbing up and down on his face. His and Sandy's were blue; the Sergeant's was a rather cute shade of candy-pink. Curtis Wilcox was a smart guy, right about a lot of things, but he was wrong about the smell. They didn't get used to it. No one ever did.

Sandy couldn't fault Trooper Wilcox's preparation, however; it seemed perfect. Curt had swung home at the end of his shift and picked up his dissection kit. To this he had added a good microscope (borrowed from a friend at the university), several packets of surgical gloves, and a pair of extremely bright Tensor lamps. He told his wife he intended to examine a fox someone had shot behind the barracks.

'You be careful,' she said. 'They can have rabies.'

Curt promised her he'd glove up, and it was a promise he meant to keep. Meant for all three of them to keep. Because the bat-thing might have something a lot worse than rabies, something which remained virulent long after its original host was dead. If Tony Schoondist and Sandy Dearborn had needed a reminder of this (they probably didn't), they got it when Curt first closed the door at the foot of the stairs and then bolted it.

'I'm in charge as long as that door's locked,' he said. His voice was flat and absolutely sure of itself. It was mostly Tony he was speaking to, because Tony was twice his age, and if anyone was his partner in this, it was the SC. Sandy was just along for the ride, and knew it. 'Is that understood and agreed? Because if it isn't, we can stop right n - '

'It's understood,' Tony said. 'In here you're the general. Sandy and I are just a couple of buck privates. I have no problem with that. Just for Chrissake let's get it over with.'

Curt opened his kit, which was almost the size of an Army footlocker. The interior was packed with stainless steel instruments wrapped in chamois. On top of them were the dental masks, each in its own sealed plastic bag.

'You really think these are necessary?' Sandy asked.

Curt shrugged. 'Better safe than sorry. Not that those things are worth much. We should probably be wearing respirators.'

'I sort of wish we had Bibi Roth here,' Tony said.

Curt made no verbal reply to that, but the flash of his eyes suggested that was the last thing in the world he wanted. The Buick belonged to the Troop. And anything that came out of it belonged to the Troop.

Curt opened the door of the storage closet and went in, pulling the chain that turned on the little room's green-shaded hanging lamp. Tony followed. There was a table not much bigger than a grade-schooler's desk under the light. Small as the closet was, there was barely room for two, let alone three. That was fine with Sandy; he never stepped over the threshold at all that night.

Shelves heaped with old files crowded in on three sides. Curt put his microscope on the little desk and plugged its light-source into the closet's one outlet. Sandy, meanwhile, was setting up Huddie Royer's videocam on its sticks. In the video of that peculiar postmortem, one can sometimes see a hand reach into the picture, holding out whatever instrument Curt has called for. It's Sandy Dearborn's hand. And one can hear the sound of vomiting at the end of the tape, loud and clear.

That is also Sandy Dearborn.

'Let's see the leaves first,' Curt said, snapping on a pair of the surgical gloves.