From a Buick 8

Tony had a bunch of them in a small evidence bag. He handed it over. Curt opened it and took out the remains of the leaves with a small pair of tongs. There was no way to get just one; by now they were all semi-transparent and stuck together like clumps of Saran Wrap. They were seeping little trickles of fluid, and the men could smell their aroma - that uneasy mix of cabbage and peppermint - immediately. It was not nice, but it was a long way from unbearable. Unbearable was at that point still ten minutes in the future.

Sandy used the zoom in order to get a good image of Curt separating a fragment of the mass from the whole, using the pincers deftly. He'd treated himself to a lot of practice over the last few weeks, and here was the payoff.

He transferred the fragment directly to the stage of the microscope, not attempting to make a slide. Phil Candleton's leaves were just the Coming Attractions reel. Curtis wanted to get to the feature presentation as soon as possible.

He bent over the twin eyepieces for a good long time nevertheless, then beckoned Tony for a look.

'What're the black things that look like threads?' Tony asked after several seconds of study.

His voice was slightly muffled by his pink mask.

'I don't know,' Curt said. 'Sandy, give me that gadget that looks like a Viewmaster. It has a couple of cords wrapped around it and PROPERTY H.U. BIOLOGY DEPARTMENT Dymotaped on the side.'

Sandy passed it to him over the top of the videocam, which was pretty much blocking the doorway. Curt plugged one of the cords into the wall and the other into the base of the microscope. He checked something, nodded, and pushed a button on the side of the Viewmaster thing three times, presumably taking pictures of the leaf fragments on the microscope's stage.

'Those black things aren't moving,' Tony said. He was still peering into the microscope.

'No.'

Tony finally raised his head. His eyes had a dazed, slightly awed look. 'Is it ... could it be like, I don't know, DNA?'

Curt's mask bobbed slightly on his face as he smiled. This is a great scope, Sarge, but we couldn't see DNA with it. Now, if you wanted to go up to Horlicks with me after midnight and pull a bag-job, they've got this really beautiful electron microscope in the Evelyn Silver Physics Building, never been driven except by a little old lady on her way to church and her weekly - '

'What's the white stuff?' Tony asked. The stuff the black threads are floating in?'

'Nutrient, maybe.'

'But you don't know.'

'Of course I don't know.'

'The black threads, the white goo, why the leaves are melting, what that smell is. We don't know dick about any of those things.'

'No.'

Tony gave him a level look. 'We're crazy to be fucking with this, aren't we?'

'No,' Curt said. 'Curiosity killed the cat, satisfaction made him fat. You want to come in and take a peek, Sandy?'

'You took photos, right?'

'I did if this thing worked the way it's s'posed to.'

'Then I'll take a pass.'

'Okay, let's move on to the main event,' Curt said. 'Maybe we'll actually find something.'

The gobbet of leaves went back into the evidence bag and the evidence bag went back into a file cabinet in the corner. That battered green cabinet would become quite the repository of the weird and strange over the next two decades.

In another corner of the closet was an orange Eskimo cooler. Inside, under two of those blue chemical ice packets people sometimes take on camping trips, was a green garbage bag. Tony lifted it out and then waited while Curt finished getting ready. It didn't take long. The only real delay was finding an extension cord so they could plug in both of the Tensor lamps without disturbing the microscope or the attached still camera. Sandy went to get a cord from the cabinet of odds and ends at the far end of the hall. While he was doing that, Curt placed his borrowed microscope on a nearby shelf. (of course, in those close quarters, everything was nearby) and set up an easel on the desktop. On this he mounted a square of tan corkboard. Beneath it he placed a small metal trough of the sort found on the more elaborate barbecue setups, where they are used to catch drippings. Off to one side he put a jar-top filled with Push-pins.

Sandy came back with the extension cord. Curt plugged in the lamps so they shone on the corkboard from either side, illuminating his work-surface with a fierce, even glow that eliminated every shadow. It was obvious he'd thought all of this out, step by step. Sandy wondered how many nights he'd lain awake long after Michelle had gone to sleep beside him. Just lying there and looking up at the ceiling and going over the procedure in his mind. Reminding himself he'd just have the one shot. Or how many afternoons there had been, Curt parked a little way up some farmer's lane with the Genesis radar gun pointed at an empty stretch of highway, calculating how many practice bats he'd have to go through before he dared tackle the real thing.

'Sandy, are you getting glare from these lights?'

He checked the viewfinder. 'No. With white I probably would, but tan is great.'

'Okay.'

Tony unwound the yellow tie holding the neck of the garbage bag shut. The moment he opened it, the smell got stronger. 'Whew, Jesus!' he said, waving a gloved hand. Then he reached in and pulled out another evidence bag, this one a large.

Sandy was watching over the top of the camera. The thing in the bag looked like a shopworn freak show monstrosity. One of the dark wings was folded over the lower body, the other pressed against the clear plastic of the evidence bag, making him think of a hand pressed against a pane of glass. Sometimes when you collared a drunk and shut him in the back of the cruiser he'd put his hands on the glass and look out at the world from between them, a dazed dark face framed by starfish. This was a little like that, somehow.

'Seal's open in the middle,' Curt said, and nodded disapprovingly at the evidence bag. 'That explains the smell.'

Nothing explained it, in Sandy's opinion.

Curt opened the bag completely and reached inside. Sandy felt his stomach knot into a sick ball and wondered if he could have forced himself to do what Curt was doing. He didn't think so.

Trooper Wilcox never hesitated, however. When his gloved fingers touched the corpse in the bag, Tony recoiled a little. His feet stayed put but his upper body swayed backward, as if to avoid a punch. And he made an involuntary sound of disgust behind his cute pink mask.

'You okay?' Curt asked.

'Yes,' Tony said.

'Good. I'll mount it. You pin it.'

'Okay.'

'Are you sure you're all right?'

'Yes, goddammit.'

'Because I feel queasy, too.' Sandy could see sweat running down the side of Curl's face, dampening the elastic that held his mask.

'Let's save the sensitivity-training session for later and just get it done, what do you say?'

Curt lifted the bat-thing to the corkboard. Sandy could hear an odd and rather terrible sound as he did so. It might have been only the combination of overstrained ears and the quiet rustle of clothes and gloves, but Sandy didn't actually believe that. It was dead skin rubbing against dead skin, creating a sound that was somehow like words spoken very low in an alien tongue. It made Sandy want to cover his ears.

At the same time he became aware of that tenebrous rustling, his eyes seemed to sharpen. The world took on a preternatural clarity. He could see the rosy pink of Curtis's skin through the thin gloves he was wearing, and the matted whorls that was the hair on the backs of his fingers.

The glove's white was very bright against the creature's midsection, which had gone a matted, listless gray. The thing's mouth hung open. Its single black eye stared at nothing, its surface dull and glazed. To Sandy that eye looked as big as a teacup.

The smell was getting worse, but Sandy said nothing. Curt and the Sergeant were right in there with it, next to the source. He guessed if they could stand it, he could.

Curt peeled up the wing lying across the creature's middle, revealing sallow green fur and a small puckered cavity that might have held the thing's genitals. He held the wing against the corkboard. 'Pin,' he said.

Tony pinned the wing. It was dark gray and all membrane. There was no sign of bone or blood vessels that Sandy could see. Curt shifted his hand on the thing's midsection so he could raise the other wing. Sandy heard that liquid squelching sound again. It was getting hot in the supply room and had to be even worse in the closet. Those Tensor lamps.

'Pin, boss.'

Tony pinned the other wing and now the creature hung on the board like something out of a Bela Lugosi film. Except, once you could see all of it, it didn't really look much like a bat at all, or a flying squirrel, or certainly any kind of bird.

It didn't look like anything. That yellow prong sticking out from the center of its face, for instance - was it a bone? A beak? A nose? If it was a nose, where were the nostrils? To Sandy it looked more like a claw than a nose, and more like a thorn than a claw. And what about that single eye? Sandy tried to think of any earthly creature that had only one eye and couldn't. There had to be such a creature, didn't there? Somewhere? In the jungles of South America, or maybe at the bottom of the ocean?

And the thing had no feet; its body simply ended in a butt like a green-black thumb. Curt pinned this part of the specimen's anatomy to the board himself, pinching the furry hide away from its body and then impaling a loose fold. Tony finished the job by driving pins into the corkboard through the thing's armpits. Or maybe you call them wingpits, Sandy thought. This time it was Curtis who made an involuntary sound of disgust behind his mask, and he wiped his brow with his forearm. 'I wish we'd thought to bring in the fan,' he said. Sandy, whose head was beginning to swim, agreed. Either the stench was getting worse or it had a cumulative effect.

'Plug in one more thing and we'd probably trip the breaker,' Tony said. 'Then we could be in the dark with this ugly motherfucker. Also trapped, on account of Cecil B. DeMille's got his camera set up in the doorway. Go on, Curt. I'm okay if you are.'

Curt stepped back, snatched a breath of slightly cleaner air, tried to compose himself, then stepped forward to the table again. 'I'm not measuring,' he said. 'We got all that done out in the shed, right?'

'Yeah,' Sandy replied. 'Fourteen inches long. Thirty-six centimeters, if you like that better.

Body's about a handspan across at the widest. Maybe a little less. Go on, for God's sake, so we can get out of here.'

'Give me both scalpels, plus retractors.'

'How many retractors?'

Curt gave him a look that said Don't be a bozo. 'All of them.' Another quick swipe of the forehead. And, after Sandy had handed the stuff over the top of the camera and Curt had arranged it as best he could: 'Watch through the viewfinder, okay? Zoom the shit out of the mother. Let's get the best record we can.'

'People'd still say it's a fake,' Tony said mildly. 'You know that, don't you?'

Curtis then said something Sandy never forgot. He believed that Curtis, already under severe mental strain and in increasingly severe physical distress, spoke the truth of his mind in baldly simple terms people rarely dare to use, because they reveal too much about the speaker's real heart. 'Fuck the John Q.'s,' was what Curtis said. 'This is for us.'

'I've got a good tight shot,' Sandy told him. 'The smell may be bad, but the light's heavenly.' The time-code at the bottom of the little interior TV screen read 7:49:01P.

'Cutting now,' Curt said, and slid his larger scalpel into the pinned creature's midsection.

His hands didn't tremble; any stage-fright accompanying the arrival of the big moment must have come and gone quickly. There was a wet popping sound, like a bubble of some thick liquid breaking, and all at once drops of black goo began to patter into the trough under the easel.

'Oh man,' Sandy said. 'Oh, that really stinks.'

'Fucking foul,' Tony added. His voice was thin and dismayed.

Curt took no notice. He opened the thing's abdomen and made the standard branching incisions up to the pinned wingpits, creating the Y-cut used in any human postmortem. He then used his pincers to pull back the hide over the thoracic area, more clearly revealing a spongy dark green mass beneath a narrow arch of bone. Sandy had never seen anything like it.

'Jesus God, where's its lungs?' Tony asked. Sandy could hear him breathing in harsh little sips.

'This green thing could be a lung,' Curt said.

'Looks more like a - '

'Like a brain, yeah, I know it does. A green brain. Let's take a look.'

Curt turned his scalpel and used the blunt side to tap the white arch above the crenellated green organ. 'If the green thing's a brain, then its particular evolution gave it a chastity belt for protection instead of a safety deposit box. Give me the shears, Sandy. The smaller pair.'

Sandy handed them over, then bent back to the video camera's viewfinder. He was zoomed to the max, as per instructions, and had a nice clear picture.

'Cutting . . . now.'

Curt slipped the lower blade of the shears under the arch of bone and snipped it as neatly as the cord on a package. It sprang back on both sides like a rib, and the moment it did the surface of the green sponge in the thing's chest turned white and began to hiss like a radiator. A strong aroma of peppermint and clove filled the air. A thick bubbling sound joined the hissing. It was like the sound of a straw prospecting the bottom of a nearly empty milkshake glass.

'Think we should get out of here?' Tony asked.

'Too late.' Curt was bent over the opened chest, where the spongy thing had now begun to sweat droplets and runnels of "whitish-green liquid. He was more than interested; he was rapt. Looking at him, Sandy could understand about the fellow who deliberately infected himself with yellow fever or the Curie woman, who gave herself cancer fiddling around with radiation. 'I am made the destroyer of worlds,' Robert Oppenheimer muttered during the first successful detonation of an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert, and then went on to start work on the H-bomb with hardly a pause for tea and scones. Because stuff gets you, Sandy thought. And because, while curiosity is a provable fact, satisfaction is more like a rumor. Or maybe an out-and-out myth.

'What's it doing?' Tony asked. Sandy thought that from what he could see above the pink mask, the Sarge already had a pretty good idea.

'Decomposing,' Curt replied. 'Getting a good picture, Sandy? My head not in your way?'

'It's fine, five-by,' Sandy replied in a slightly strangled voice. At first the peppermint-clove variation had seemed almost refreshing, but now it sat in the back of his throat like the taste of machine-oil. And the cabbagey reek was creeping back. Sandy's head was swimming more strenuously than ever, and his guts had begun to slosh. 'I wouldn't take too long about this, though, or we're going to choke in here.'

'Open the door at the end of the hall,' Curt said.

'You told me - '

'Go on, do what he says,' Tony told him, and so Sandy did. When he came back, Tony was asking Curt if Curt thought snipping the bone arch had sped up the decomposition process.

'No,' Curt said. 'I think touching the spongy stuff with the tip of the shears is what did it.

The things that come out of that car don't seem to get along with us very well, do they?'

Neither Tony nor Sandy had any wish to argue that. The green sponge didn't look like a brain or a lung or anything else recognizable by then; it was just a pustulant, decomposing sac in the corpse's open chest.

Curt glanced toward Sandy. 'If that green thing was its brain, what do you suppose is in its head? Inquiring minds want to know.' And before either of them completely realized what he was doing, Curt reached out with the smaller of his scalpels and poked the blade into the thing's glazed eye.

There was a sound like a man popping his finger in his cheek. The eye collapsed and slid out of its socket whole, like a hideous shed tear. Tony gave an involuntary shout of horror. Sandy uttered a low scream. The collapsed eye struck the thing's furry shoulder and then plopped into the drip-gutter. A moment later it began to hiss and turn white.

'Stop it,' Sandy heard himself saying. 'This is pointless. We're not going to learn anything from it, Curtis. There's nothing to learn.'

Curtis, so far as Sandy could tell, didn't even hear him. 'Holy shit,' he was whispering.

'Holy fucking shit.'

Fibrous pink stuff began to bulge from the vacant eyesocket. It looked like cotton candy, or the insulation people use in their attics. It came out, formed an amorphous node, then turned white and began to liquefy, like the green thing.

'Was that shit alive?' Tony asked. 'Was that shit alive when it - '

'No, that was only depressurization,' Curt said. 'I'm sure of it. It's no more alive than shaving cream when it comes out of the can. Did you get it on tape, Sandy?'

'Oh yeah. For what it's worth.'

'Okay. Let's look in the lower gut and then we're done.'

What came out next killed any real sleep for at least a month. What Sandy was left with were those short dozes from which one wakes, gasping, sure that something one can't quite see has been crouching on one's chest and stealing one's breath.

Curt retracted the hide from the abdominal area and asked Tony to pin it, first on the left and then on the right. Tony managed, although not without difficulty; the work had become very fine and both of them had their faces close to the incision. The reek in that close must have been tremendous, Sandy thought.

Without turning his head Curt groped out, found one of the Tensor lamps, and turned it slightly, intensifying the light pouring into the incision. Sandy saw a folded rope of dark liverish red stuff - intestines - piled on top of a bluish-gray sac.

'Cutting,' Curt murmured, and caressed the edge of his scalpel down the sac's lumpy, bulging surface. It split open and black ichor shot out directly into Curt's face, painting his cheeks and splashing his mask. More of it splattered Tony's gloves. Both men recoiled, crying out, while Sandy stood frozen behind the video camera with his jaw hung down. Pouring out of the rapidly deflating sac was a flood of rough black pellets, each of them wrapped in a swaddle of gray membrane. To Sandy they looked like spider-snacks which had been put up in cobweb shrouds. Then he saw that each pellet had an open glazed eye and that each eye seemed to be staring at him, marking him, and that was when his nerve broke. He backed away from the camera, screaming. The screams were replaced by a gagging sound. A moment later he vomited down the front of his shirt. Sandy himself remembered almost none of that; the five minutes or so following Curt's final incision were pretty much burned out of his memory, and he counted that a mercy.

The first thing he remembered on the other side of that cigarette-burn in the surface of his memory was Tony saying, 'Go on, now, you hear? You guys go on back upstairs. Everything here is under control.' And, close to his left ear, Curt was murmuring another version of the same thing, telling Sandy he was all right, totally cool, fi'-by-fi'.

Five-by-five: that was what lured Sandy back from his brief vacation in the land of hysteria.

But if everything was five-by, why was Curt breathing so fast? And why was the hand on Sandy's arm so cold? Even through the rubber membrane of the glove (which he had so far neglected to take off), Curt's hand was cold.

'I threw up,' Sandy said, and felt the dull heat hit his cheeks as the blood rose there. He couldn't remember ever feeling so ashamed and demoralized. 'Christ Jesus, I threw up all over myself.'

'Yeah,' Curt said, 'you hurled like a hero. Don't worry about it.'

Sandy took a breath and then grimaced as his stomach knotted and almost betrayed him again.

They were in the corridor, but even out here that cabbagey reek was almost overpowering. At the same time he realized exactly where in the hallway he was: standing in front of the rickrack cabinet from which he had scrounged the extension cord. The cabinet's door was open. Sandy wasn't sure, but he had an idea he'd fled down here from the supply room, perhaps with the idea of crawling into the cabinet, pulling the door shut behind him, and just curling up in the dark. This struck him funny and he voiced a single shrill chuckle.

'There, that's better,' Curt said, sounding as pleased as a mother whose child has just managed to tinkle in the potty for the first time. He gave Sandy a pat and looked shocked when Sandy shrank away from his touch.

'Not you,' Sandy said. 'That mung . . . that goo - '

He couldn't finish; his throat had locked up. He pointed at Curt's hand, instead. The slime which had come out of the bat-thing's pregnant dead uterus was smeared all over Curt's gloves, and some of it was now on Sandy's arm as well. Curt's mask, pulled down so it hung against his neck, was also streaked and stained. There was a black crust like a scab on his cheek.

At the other end of the hall, past the open supply room door, Tony stood at the foot of the stairs, talking to four or five gawking, nervous State Troopers. He was making shooing gestures, trying to get them to go back up, but they weren't quite ready to do that.

Sandy walked back down the hall as far as the supply room door, stopping where they could all get a good look at him. 'I'm okay, fellas - I'm okay, you're okay, everybody's okay. Go upstairs and chill out. After we get squared away, you can all look at the video.'

'Will we want to?' Orville Garrett asked.

'Probably not,' Sandy said.

The Troopers went upstairs. Tony, his cheeks as pale as glass, turned to Sandy and gave him a little nod. 'Thanks.'

'Least I could do. I panicked, boss. I'm sorry as hell.'

Curtis clapped him on the shoulder this time instead of just patting. Sandy almost shrank away again before seeing that the kid had pulled off his stained gloves. So that was all right. Better, anyway.

'You weren't alone,' Curt said. 'Tony and I were right behind you. You were just too freaked to notice. We knocked over Huddie's videocam in the stampede. Hope it's okay. If it's not, I guess we'll be passing the hat to buy him a replacement. Come on, let's look.'

The three of them returned to the supply room resolutely enough, but at first none of them was able to go inside. Part of it was the smell, like rotten soup. Most of it was just knowing the bat-thing was still in there, pinned to the corkboard, flayed open and needing to be cleaned up like the weekend road accidents where when you got there the smell of blood and busted guts and spilled gasoline and boiled rubber was like some hideous old acquaintance who would never move out of town; you smelled it and knew that somebody was dead or almost dead, that somebody else would be crying and screaming, that you were going to find a shoe - hopefully not a child's, but all too often it was - lying in the road. For Sandy it was like that. You found them in the road or on the side of the road with the bodies God gave them saying Here, get through life with it just as best you can tortured into new shapes: bones bursting out through pants and shirts, heads twisted halfway around the neck but still talking (and screaming), eyes hanging loose, a bleeding mother holding out a bleeding child like a broken doll and saying Is she still alive? Please, would you check? I can't, I don't dare. There was always blood on the seats in pools and fingerprints of blood on what remained of the windows. When the blood was on the road it was also in pools and it turned purple in the pulse of the red bubblegum lights and you needed to clean it up, the blood and the shit and the broken glass, oh yes, because John Q. and his family didn't want to be looking at it on their way to church come Sunday morning. And John Q. paid the bills.

'We have to take care of this,' the Sarge said. 'You boys know that.'

They knew it. And still none of them moved.

What if some of them are still alive? That was what Sandy was thinking. It was a ridiculous idea, the bat-thing had been in a plastic evidence bag which had been in a sealed Eskimo cooler for six weeks or more, but knowing such an idea was ridiculous wasn't enough. Logic had lost its power, at least for awhile. When you were dealing with a one-eyed thing that had its brain (its green brain) in its chest, the very idea of logic seemed laughable. Sandy could all too easily imagine those black pellets in their gauzy overwrappings starting to pulse and move about like lethargic jumping-beans on the little desk as the fierce glow from the Tensor lamps warmed them back to vitality. Sure, that was easy to imagine. And sounds coming from them. High little mewling noises. The sounds of baby birds or baby rats working to be born. But he had been the first one out, goddammit. He could be the first one back in, at least he could do that much.

'Come on,' Sandy said, and stepped over the threshold. 'Let's get this done. Then I'm going to spend the rest of the night in the shower.'

'You'll have to wait in line,' Tony said.

So they cleaned the mess up as they had cleaned up so many on the highway. It took about an hour, all told, and although getting started was hard, they were almost themselves by the rime the job was finished. The biggest help in getting back on an even keel was the fan. With the Tensor lamps turned off, they could run it with no worries about popping a breaker. Curt never said another word about keeping the supply room's door shut, either. Sandy guessed he'd figured any poor quarantine they might have managed had been breached to a faretheewell.

The fan couldn't clear that sallow stench of cabbage and bitter peppermint entirely, but it drove enough of it out into the hall so that their stomachs settled. Tony checked the videocam and said it appeared to be fine.

'I remember when Japanese stuff used to break,' he said. 'Curt, do you want to look at anything under the microscope? We can hang in a little longer if you do. Right, Sandy?'

Although not enthusiastic, Sandy nodded his head. He was still deeply ashamed of the way he had puked and run; felt he hadn't made up for that yet, not quite.

'No,' Curt said. He sounded tired and dispirited. 'The damn Gummi Bears that fell out of it were its litter. The black stuff was probably its blood. As for the rest? I wouldn't know what I was seeing.'

Not just dispirit but something close to despair, although neither Tony nor Sandy would realize that until later. It came to Sandy on one of those sleepless nights he had just bought and paid for. Lying in the bedroom of his small home in East Statler Heights with his hands behind his head and the lamp on the nighttable burning and the radio on low, sleep a thousand miles away.

Realizing what Curt had come face to face with for the first time since the Buick showed up, and maybe for the first time in his life: that he was almost certainly never going to know what he wanted to know. What he'd told himself he needed to know. His ambition had been to discover and uncover, but so what? Spit on that, Jack, as they used to say when they were kids. All over the United States there were scrambling shirttail grammar school kids who'd tell you their ambition was to play in the NBA. Their futures in almost all cases would turn out to be more mundane. There comes a time when most folks see the big picture and realize they're puckered up not to kiss smiling fate on the mouth because life just slipped them a pill, and it tastes bitter. Wasn't that where Curds Wilcox was now? Sandy thought yeah. His interest in the Buick was likely to continue, but with each passing year that interest would look more and more like what it really was -

ordinary police work. Stakeout and surveillance, writing reports (in journals his wife would later burn), cleaning up the occasional mess when the Buick gave birth to another monstrosity which would struggle briefly and then die.

Oh, and living through the occasional sleepless night. But they came with the territory, didn't they?

Curt and Tony unpinned the monstrosity from the corkboard. They put it back in the evidence bag.

All but two of the black pellets followed, swept into the evidence bag with a fingerprint brush.

This time Curt made sure the seal on the bag was tight all the way across the top. 'Is Arky still around?' he asked.

Tony said, 'No. He wanted to stay, but I sent him home.'

'Then would one of you go upstairs and ask Orv or Buck to start a fire in the incinerator out back? Also, someone needs to put a pot of water on the stove. A big one.'

'I'll do it,' Sandy said, and after ejecting the tape from Huddie's videocam, he did.

While he was gone, Curt took swabs of the viscid black stuff which had come out of the thing's gut and uterus; he also swabbed the thinner white fluid from the chest organ. He covered each swab with Saran Wrap and put them into another evidence bag. The two remaining unborn creatures with their tiny wings wrapped around them (and their unsettling one-eyed stares) went into a third evidence bag. Curt worked competently, but with no zest, much as he would have worked a cold crime-scene.

The specimens and the bat-thing's flayed body eventually wound up in the battered green cabinet, which George Morgan took to calling 'the Troop D sideshow'. Tony allowed two of the Troopers from upstairs to come clown when the pot of water on the stove had reached a boil. The five men donned heavy rubber kitchen gloves and scrubbed down everything they could reach. The unwanted organic leftovers went into a plastic bag, along with the scrub-rags, surgical gloves, dental masks, and shirts. The bag went into the incinerator and the smoke went up to the sky, God the Father, ever and ever, amen.

Sandy, Curtis, and Tony took showers - long enough and hot enough to exhaust the tank downstairs not once but twice. After that, rosy-cheeked and freshly combed, they ended up on the smokers' bench.

'I'm so clean I almost squeak,' Sandy said.

'Squeak this,' Curt replied, but amiably enough.

They sat and just looked at the shed for awhile, not talking.

'A lot of that shit got on us,' Tony said at last. 'Lot of that shit.' Overhead, a three-quarter moon hung in the sky like a polished rock. Sandy could feel a tremble in the air. He thought maybe it was the seasons getting ready to change. 'If we get sick - '

'I think if we were going to get sick, we'd be sick already,' Curt said. 'We were lucky. Damn lucky. Did you boys get a good look at your peepers in the bathroom mirror?'

They had, of course. Their eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot, the eyes of men who have spent a long day fighting a brushfire.

'I think that'll go away,' Curt said, 'but I believe wearing those masks was probably a damn good idea, after all. They're no protection against germs, but at least none of that black crap got in our mouths. I think the results of something like that might have been quite nasty.'

He was right.

NOW:

Sandy

The sandwiches were gone. So was the iced tea. I told Arky to get ten bucks out of the contingency fund (which was kept in ajar in the upstairs closet) and go down to Finn's Cash and Carry. I thought two sixpacks of Coke and one of root beer would probably carry us through to the end.

'I do dat, I miss d'part about d'fish,' Arky said.

'Arky, you know the part about the fish. You know all the parts of this story. Go on and get us some cold drinks. Please.'

He went, firing up his old truck and driving out of the parking lot too fast. A man driving that way was apt to get a ticket.

'Go on,' Ned said. 'What happened next?'

'Well,' I said, 'let's see. The old Sarge became a grandfather, that 'was one thing. It probably happened a lot sooner than he wanted it to, baby born out of wedlock, big hooraw in the family, but everyone eventually calmed down and that girl has gone on to Smith, which is not a bad place for a young lady to get her diploma, or so I understand. George Morgan's boy hit a home run in tee-ball and George went around just about busting his buttons, he was so proud. This was I think two years before he killed the woman in the road and then killed himself. Orvie Garrett's wife got blood poisoning in her foot and lost a couple of toes. Shirley Pasternak came to work with us in 1984 - '

'1986,' she murmured.

"86 it was,' I said, and patted her knee. 'There was a bad fire in Lassburg around that same time, kids playing with matches in the basement of an apartment house. Just goofing. No supervision. When someone says to me that the Amish are crazy to live like they do, I think about that fire in Lassburg. Nine people killed, including all but one of the kids in the basement. The one who got out probably wishes he hadn't. He'd be sixteen now, right around the age boys are generally getting good and interested in girls, and this kid probably looks like the lead actor in a burn-ward production of Beauty and the Beast. It didn't make the national news - I have a theory that multiple-fatality apartment housefires only make the news if they happen at Christmas - but it was bad enough for these parts, thank you very much, and Jackie O'Hara got some terrible burns on his hands, helping out. Oh, and we had a Trooper - James Dockery, his name was - '

'Docker-ty,' Phil Candleton said. "T. But you're forgiven, Sarge, he wasn't here more than a month or two, then he transferred over to Lycoming.'

I nodded. 'Anyhow, this Dockerty won a third prize in the Betty Crocker Bakeoff for a recipe called Golden Sausage Puffs. He got ribbed like a motherfucker, but he took it well.'

'Very well,' Eddie J. agreed. 'He shoulda stayed. He woulda fit in here.'

'We won the tug-of-war that year at the Fourth of July picnic, and - '

I saw the look on the kid's face and smiled at him.

'You think I'm teasing you, Ned, but I'm not. Honest. What I'm doing is trying to make you understand. The Buick was not the only thing happening around here, okay? Not. In fact, there were times when we forgot it entirely. Most of us, anyway. For long stretches of time it was easy to forget. For long stretches of time all it did was sit out back and be quiet. Cops came and went while it did. Dockerty stayed just long enough to get nicknamed Chef Prudhomme. Young Paul Loving, the one who sprained his knee last Labor Day, got transferred out and then got transferred back in three years later. This job isn't the revolving door that some jobs are, but the door turns, all right. There's probably been seventy Troopers through here since the summer of 1979 - '

'Oh, that's way low,' Huddie said. 'Make it a hundred, counting the transfers and the Troops who are on duty here currently. Plus a few bad eggs.'

'Yeah, a few bad eggs, but most of us did our jobs. And Ned, listen - your father and Tony Schoondist learned a lesson the night your father opened up that bat-thing. I did, too. Sometimes there's nothing to learn, or no way to learn it, or no reason to even try. I saw a movie once where this fellow explained why he lit a candle in church even though he "wasn't a very good Catholic anymore. 'You don't fuck around with the infinite,' he said. Maybe that was the lesson we learned.

'Every now and then there was another lightquake in Shed B. Sometimes just a little temblor, sometimes a great-gosh-a'mighty. But people have a really amazing capacity to get used to stuff, even stuff they don't understand. A comet shows up in the sky and half the world goes around bawling about the Last Days arid the Four Horsemen, but let the comet stay there six months and no one even notices. It's a big ho-hum. Same thing happened at the end of the twentieth century, remember? Everyone ran around screaming that the sky was falling and all the computers were going to freeze up; a week goes by and it's business as usual. What I'm doing is trying to keep things in perspective for you. To - '

'Tell me about the fish,' he said, and I felt that anger again. He wasn't going to hear all I had to say, no matter how much I wanted him to or how hard I tried. He'd hear the parts he wanted to hear and call it good. Think of it as the Teenage Disease. And the light in his eyes was like the light in his father's when Curt bent over the bat-thing with his scalpel in his gloved hand.

(Cutting now. I sometimes still hear Curtis Wilcox saying that in my dreams.) Not exactly like it, though. Because the boy wasn't just curious. He was angry, as well. Pissed like a bear.

My own anger rose out of his refusal to take everything I wanted to give, for having the gall to pick and choose. But where did his come from? What was its center? That his mother had been lied to, not just once but over and over as the years passed?

That he himself had been lied to, if only by omission? Was he mad at his father for holding on to a secret? Mad at us? Us? Surely he didn't believe the Buick had killed his father, why would he? Bradley Roach was safely on the hook for that, Roach had unspooled him up the side of a pulled-over sixteen-wheeler, leaving a bloodsmear ten feet long and as tall as a State Trooper, about six-feet-two in the case of Curtis Wilcox, pulling his clothes not just off but inside out as well in the scream of brakes and all the while the radio playing WPND, which billed itself Western Pennsylvania's Country-Fried Radio, what else would it be but country with a half-drunk low rider like Bradley? Daddy sang bass and Momma sang tenor as the coins were ripped out of Curt Wilcox's pants and his penis was torn off like a weed and his balls were reduced to strawberry jelly and his comb and wallet landed on the yellow line; Bradley Roach responsible for all that, or maybe you wanted to save some blame for Dicky's Convenience in Statler that sold him the beer, or maybe for the beer company itself with its goodtime ads about cute talking frogs and funny ballpark beer-men instead of dead people lying by the highway with their guts hanging out, or maybe you want to blame it on Bradley's DNA, little twists of cellular rope that had been whispering Drink more, drink more ever since Bradley's first sip (because some people are just wired up that way, which is to say like suitcase bombs ready to explode, which is absolutely zero comfort to the dead and wounded). Or maybe God was to blame, God's always a popular whipping boy because He doesn't talk back and never writes a column for the Op-Ed page. Not the Buick, though. Right? He couldn't find the Buick in Curt's death no matter how he traced it out. The Buick had been sitting miles away in Shed B, fat and luxy and blameless on whitewall tires that wouldn't take dirt or even the slightest pebble in the treads but repudiated them each and every one, right down to (as far as we could tell) the finest grain of sand. It was just sitting there and minding its business when Trooper Wilcox bled out on the side of Pennsylvania State Road 32. And if it was sitting in the faintest baleful reek of cabbage, what of that? Did this boy think-

'Ned, it didn't reach out for him, if that's what you're thinking,' I said. 'It doesn't do that.' I had to laugh at myself a little, sounding so sure. Sounding as if I knew that for a fact.

Or anything else for a fact, when it came to the Roadmaster. 'It has pull, maybe even a kind of voice, when it's in one of its . . . I don't know . . .'

'Active phases,' Shirley suggested.

'Yes. When it's in one of its active phases. You can hear the hum, and sometimes you can hear it in your head, as well . . . kind of calling . . . but could it reach all the way out to Highway 32 by the old Jenny station? No way.'

Shirley was looking at me as if I'd gone slightly loopy, and I felt slightly loopy. What, exactly, was I doing? Trying to talk myself out of being angry at this unlucky, father-lost boy?

'Sandy? I just want to hear about the fish.'

I looked at Huddie, then Phil and Eddie. All three offered variations of the same rueful shrug. Kids! it said. What are you gonna do?

Finish it. That was what I was going to do. Set aside my anger and finish it. I had spilled the beans (I hadn't known how many beans there were in the bag when I started, I'll grant you that much), and now I was going to clean them up.

'All right, Ned. I'll tell you what you want to hear. But will you at least bear in mind that this place stayed a barracks? Will you try to remember that, whether you believe it or not, whether you like it or not, the Buick eventually became just another part of our day, like writing reports or testifying in court or cleaning puke off the floormats of a cruiser or Steve Devoe's Polish jokes? Because it's important.'

'Sure. Tell me about the fish.'

I leaned back against the wall and raised my eyes to the moon. I wanted to give him his life back if I could. Or stars in a paper cup. All that poetry. All he wanted to hear about was the goddamned fish.

So fuck it, I told him.

THEN

No paper trail: that was Tony Schoondist's decree, and it was followed. People still knew how matters pertaining to the Buick were to be handled, though, what the proper channels were. It wasn't tough. No paperwork, since paper seemed always to find its way to Scranton. One either reported to Curt, the Sarge, or to Sandy Dearborn. They were the Buick guys. Sandy supposed he'd become part of that triumvirate simply by virtue of having been present at the infamous autopsy.

Certainly it wasn't because he had any especial curiosity about the thing.

Tony's no-paper edict notwithstanding, Sandy was quite sure that Curt kept his own records -

notes and speculations - about the Buick. If so, he was discreet about it. Meanwhile, the temperature drops and the energy discharges - the lightquakes - seemed to be slowing down. The life was draining out of the thing.

Or so they all hoped.

Sandy kept no notes and could never have provided a reliable sequence of events. The videotapes made over the years would have helped do that (if it ever needed doing), but there would still be gaps and questions. Not every lightquake was taped, and so what if they had been?

They were all pretty much the same. There were probably a dozen between 1979 and 1983. Most were small. A couple were as big as the first one, and one was even bigger. That big one - the all-time champ - came in 1983. Those who were there sometimes still called '83 The Year of the Fish, as if they were Chinese.

Curtis made a number of experiments between '79 and '83, leaving various plants and animals in and around the Buick when the temperature dropped, but all the results were essentially reruns of what happened with Jimmy and Roslyn. Which is to say sometimes things disappeared, and sometimes they didn't. There was no way of predicting in advance; it all seemed as random as a coin-toss.

During one temperature drop, Curt left a guinea pig by the Roadmaster's left front tire. Put it in a plastic bucket. Twenty-four hours after the purple fireworks were over and the temperature in the shed had gone back to normal, the guinea pig was still in his bucket, hopping and reasonably happy. Before another lightshow, Curt put a cage with two frogs in it directly under the Buick. There were still two frogs in the cage after the lightshow ended. A day later, however, there was only one frog in the cage.

A day after that, the cage was empty.

Then there was the Famous Trunk Experiment of 1982. That one was Tony's idea. He and Curt put six cockroaches in a clear plastic box, then put the box in the Buick's trunk. This was directly after one of the fireworks shows had ended, and it was still cold enough in the Buick so that they could see vapor coming out of their mouths when they bent into the trunk. Three days went by, with one of them checking the trunk every day (always with a rope tied around the waist of the one doing the checking, and everyone wondering what good a damn rope would do against something that had been able to snatch Jimmy out of his gerbil-condo without opening either of the hatches . . .

or the frogs out of their latched cage, for that matter). The roaches were fine the first day, and the second, and the third. Curt and Tony went out on the fourth day to retrieve them, another failed experiment, back to the old drawing board. Only the roaches were gone, or so it seemed when they first opened the trunk.

'No, wait!' Curt yelled. 'There they are! I see em! Running around like mad bastards!'

'How many?' Tony called back. He was standing outside the door on the side of the shed, holding the end of the rope. 'Are they all there? How'd they get out of the damn box, Guru's?'

Curtis counted only four instead of six, but that didn't mean much. Cockroaches don't need a bewitched automobile to help them disappear; they are quite good at that on their own, as anybody who's ever chased one with a slipper knows. As for how they'd gotten out of the plastic box, that much was obvious. It was still latched shut, but now there was a small round hole in one side of it. The hole was three-quarters of an inch across. To Curt and the Sarge, it looked like a large-caliber bullet-hole. There were no cracks radiating out from around it, which might also indicate that something had punched through at an extremely high velocity. Or perhaps burned through. No answers. Only mirages. Same as it ever was. And then the fish came, in June of 1983.

It had been at least two and a halt years since Troop D had kept a day-in-and-out watch on the Buick, because by late 1979 or early 1980 they had decided that, with reasonable precautions, there wasn't much to worry about. A loaded gun is dangerous, no argument, but you don't have to post an around-the-clock guard on one to make sure it won't shoot by itself. If you put it up on a high shelf and keep the kiddies away, that's usually enough to do the trick.

Tony bought a vehicle tarp so anyone who came out back and happened to look in the shed wouldn't see the car and ask questions (in. '81 a fellow from the motor-pool, a Buick-fancier, had offered to buy it). The video camera stayed out in the hutch, mounted on its tripod and with a plastic bag pulled over it to keep it free of moisture, and the chair was still there (plus a good high stack of magazines beneath it), but Arky began to use the place more and more as a gardening shed. Bags of peat and fertilizer, pallets of sod, and flower-planters first began to crowd the Buick-watching stuff and then to crowd it out. The only time the hutch reverted to its original purpose was just before, during, and after one of the lightquakes.

June in The Year of the Fish was one of the most beautiful early summer months in Sandy's memory - the grass lush, the birds all in tune, the air filled with a kind of delicate heat, like a teenage couple's first real kiss. Tony Schoondist was on vacation, visiting his daughter on the west coast (she was the one whose baby had caused all that trouble). The Sarge and his wife were trying to mend a few fences before they got broken down entirely. Probably not a bad plan. Sandy Dearborn and Huddie Royer were in charge while he was gone, but Curtis Wilcox - no longer a rookie

- was boss of the Buick, no doubt about that. And one day in that marvelous June, Buck Flanders came to see him in that capacity.

'Temp's down in Shed B,' he said.

Curtis raised his eyebrows. 'Not exactly the first time, is it?'

'No,' Buck admitted, 'but I've never seen it go down so fast. Ten degrees since this morning.'

That got Curt out to the shed in a hurry, with the old excited light in his eyes. When he put his face to one of the windows in the roll-up front door, the first thing he noticed was the tarp Tony had bought. It was crumpled along the driver's side of the Buick like a scuffed-up rug. It wasn't the first time for that, either; it was as if the Buick sometimes trembled (or shrugged) and slid the nylon cover off like a lady shrugging off an evening wrap by lifting her shoulders.

The needle on the round thermometer stood at 61.

'It's seventy-four out here,' Buck said. He was standing at Curt's elbow. 'I checked the thermometer over by the bird-feeder before coming in to see you.'

'So it's actually gone down thirteen degrees, not ten.'

'Well, it was sixty-four in there when I came to get you. That's how fast it's going down.

Like a . . . a cold front setting in, or something. Want me to get Huddie?'

'Let's not bother him. Make up a watch-roster. Get Matt Babicki to help you. Mark it . . . um,

"Car Wash Detail", Let's get two guys watching the Buick the rest of the day, and tonight as well.

Unless Huddie says no or the temp bounces back up.'

'Okay,' Buck said. 'Do you want to be on the first stand?'

Curt did, and quite badly - he sensed something was going to happen - but lie shook his head.

'Can't. I have court, then there's that truck-trap over in Cambria.' Tony would have screamed and clutched his head if he had heard Curt call the weigh-in on Highway 9 a truck-trap, but essentially that was what it was. Because someone was moving heroin and cocaine from New Jersey over that way, and the thinking was that it was moving in some of the independent truckers' loads.

'Truth is, I'm busier'n a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. Damn!'

He struck his thigh with his fist, then cupped his hands to the sides of his face and peered in through the glass again. There was nothing to see but the Roadmaster, sitting in two bars of sunlight that crisscrossed on the long dark blue hood like the contending beams of spotlights.

'Get Randy Santerre. And didn't I see Chris Soder mooning around?'

'Yeah. He's technically off duty, but his wife's two sisters are still visiting from over Ohio and he came here to watch TV.' Buck lowered his voice. 'Don't want to tell you your business, Curt, but I think both those guys are jagoffs.'

'They'll do for this. They'll have to. Tell them I want regular reports, too. Standard Code D.

And I'll call in by landline before I leave court.'

Curt took a final, almost anguished look at the Buick, then started back to the barracks, where he would shave and get ready for the witness stand. In the afternoon he'd be poking in the backs of trucks along with some boys from Troop G, looking for coke and hoping nobody decided to unlimber an automatic weapon. He would have found someone to swap with if there had been time, but there wasn't.

Soder and Santerre got Buick-watching duty instead, and they didn't mind. Jagoffs never do.

They stood beside the hutch, smoking, shooting the shit, taking the occasional look in at the Buick (Santerre too young to know what to expect, and he never lasted long in the PSP, anyway), telling jokes and enjoying the day. It was a June day so simple and so simply beautiful that even a jagoff couldn't help but enjoy it. At some point Buck Flanders spelled Randy Santerre; a little later on, Orville Garrett spelled Chris Soder. Huddie came out for the occasional peek. At three o'clock, when Sandy came in to drop his ass in the SC's chair, Curtis Wilcox finally got back and spelled Buck out by Shed B. Far from rebounding, the shed's temperature had rolled off another ten degrees by then, and off-duty Troopers began to clog the lot out back with their personal vehicles. Word had spread. Code D.

Around four p.m., Matt Babicki stuck his head into the SC's office and told Sandy he was losing the radio. 'Bad static, boss. Worst ever.'

'Shit.' Sandy closed his eyes, rubbed his knuckles against them, and wished for Tony. This was his first time as acting Sergeant Commanding, and while the temporary bump in his paycheck at the end of the month would no doubt be satisfying, this aggravation was not. 'Trouble with that goddam car. Just what I wanted.'

'Don't take it to heart,' Matt said. 'It'll shoot off a few sparks and then everything'll go back to normal. Including the radio. Isn't that the way it usually goes?'

Yes, that was the way it usually went. Sandy was not, in truth, especially worried about the Buick. But what if someone out on patrol found trouble while communications were FUBAR? Someone who had to call in a 33 - Help me quick - or a 47 - Send an ambulance - or, worst of all, a 10-99: Officer down. Sandy had well over a dozen guys out there, and at that moment it felt as if every one of them was riding him piggyback.

'Listen to me, Matt. Get in my ride - it's Unit 17 - and take it down to the bottom of the hill. You should be clear of interference there. Call every D currently running the roads and tell them base dispatch is temporarily 17. Code D.'

'Aw, Sandy, Jesus! Isn't that a little - '

'I don't have time to listen to your imitation of Siskel and Ebert at the Movies just now,'

Sandy said. He had never felt more impatient with Police Communications Officer Babicki's whiny brand of foot-dragging bullshit than he did then. 'Just do it.'

'But I won't be here to see - '

'No, probably you won't.' Sandy's voice rising a little now. 'That's one you'll absolutely have to put on your TS list before you send it to the chaplain.'

Matt started to say something else, took a closer look at Sandy's face and wisely decided to keep his mouth shut. Two minutes later, Sandy saw him headed down the hill, behind the wheel of Unit 17.

'Good,' Sandy muttered. 'Stay there awhile, you little backtalking pissant.'

Sandy went out to Shed 13, where there was quite a little crowd. Most of them were Troopers, but some were motor-pool guys in the grease-stained green Dickies that were their unofficial uniform. After four years of living with the Buick, none of them was afraid, exactly, but they were a rather nervy group that day, just the same. When you saw twenty degrees roll off the thermometer on a warm summer day, in a room where the air conditioning consisted of an occasionally opened door, it was hard not to believe that something large was in the works.

Curt had been back long enough to set up a number of experiments - all he had time to arrange, Sandy guessed. On the Buick's front seat he'd placed a Nike sneaker box with some crickets in it.

The frog cage was on the back seat. There was only one frog in it this time, but it was a whopper, one of those marsh bullfrogs with the bulgy yellow-black eyes. He had also taken the windowbox of flowers which had been outside Matt Babicki's office window and stuck them in the Buick's trunk.

Last but not least, he took Mister Dillon for a promenade out there, toured him all around the car on his leash, the full three-sixty, just to see what would happen. Orvie Garrett didn't like that much, but Curt talked him into it. In most respects Curt was still a little rough around the edges and a little wet behind the ears, but when it came to the Buick, he could be as smooth as a riverboat gambler.

Nothing happened during D's walk - not that time - but it was clear the Troop mascot would rather have been just about anywhere else. He hung at the end of his leash so hard it choked him a little, and he walked with his head down and his tail lowered, giving the occasional dry cough. He looked at the Buick, but he looked at everything else out there as well, as if whatever it was he didn't like had spread out from the bogus car until it contaminated the whole shed.

When Curt brought him outside again and handed the leash back to Orville, he said, 'There's something going on, he feels it and so do I. But it's not like before.' He saw Sandy and repeated it: not like before.

'No,' Sandy said, then nodded at Mister D. 'At least he's not howling.'

'Not yet,' Orville said. 'Come on, D, let's go back in the barracks. You did good. I'll give you a Bonz.' What Orvie gave Curt was a final reproachful look. Mister Dillon trotted neatly at Trooper Garrett's right knee, no longer needing the leash to keep him at heel.

At four-twenty or so, the TV upstairs in the common room suddenly went goofy. By four-forty, the temperature in Shed B had dropped to forty-nine degrees. At four-fifty, Curtis Wilcox shouted:

'It's starting! I hear it!'

Sandy had been inside to check on dispatch (and what a snafu it was by then, nothing but one big balls-to-the-wall roar of static), and when Curt yelled he was returning across the parking lot, where there were now so many personals you would have thought it was the Police Benefit Rummage Sale or the Muscular Dystrophy Kids' Carnival they put on each July. Sandy broke into a run, cutting through the knot of spectators craning to look in through the side door, which was still, unbelievably, standing wide open. And Curt was there, standing in it. Waves of cold were rolling out, but he seemed not to feel them. His eyes were huge, and when he turned to Sandy he was like a man dreaming. 'Do you see it? Sandy, do you see it?'

Of course he did: a waxing violet glow that was spilling out of the car's windows and seeping up through the crack which outlined the trunk-lid and went spilling down the Buick's sides like some thin radioactive fluid. Inside the car Sandy could clearly see the shapes of the seats and the oversized steering wheel. They were outlines, silhouettes. The rest of the cabin was swallowed in a cold purple glare, brighter than any furnace. The hum was loud and getting louder. It made Sandy's skull ache, made his ears almost wish they were deaf. Not that being deaf would do any good, because you seemed to hear that sound not just with your ears but with your whole body.

Sandy yanked Curt out on to the pavement, then grabbed the knob, meaning to shut the door.

Curt took hold of his wrist. 'No, Sandy, no! I want to see it! I want - '

Sandy peeled his hand off, not gently. 'Are you crazy? There's a procedure we follow on this, a goddam procedure. No one should know that better than you! You helped think it up, for God's sake!'

When Sandy slammed the door shut, cutting off any direct view of the Buick, Curt's eyelids fluttered and he twitched like a man waking out of a deep sleep. 'Okay,' he said. 'Okay, boss. I'm sorry.'

'It's all right.' Not really believing it was. Because the damned fool would have stood right there in the doorway. No question about it in Sandy's mind. Would have stood there and been fried, if frying was on that thing's agenda.

'I need to get my goggles,' Curt said. 'They're in the trunk of my car. I have extras, and they're extra dark. A whole box of them. Do you want a pair?' Sandy still got the feeling that Curt wasn't fully awake, that he was only pretending, like you did when the telephone rang in the middle of the night.

'Sure, why not? But we're going to be cautious, right? Because this is looking like a bad one.'

'Looking like a great one!' Curt said, and the exuberance in his voice, although slightly scary, made Sandy feel a little better. At least Curt didn't sound as if he were sleepwalking any longer. 'But yes, Mother - we'll follow procedure and be as cautious as hell.'

He ran for his car - not his cruiser but his personal, the restored Bel Aire his boy would wind up driving - and opened the trunk. He was still rummaging in the boxes of stuff he kept back there when the Buick exploded.

It did not literally explode, but there seemed to be no other word for what it did do. Those who were there that day never forgot it, but they talked about it remarkably little, even among themselves, because there seemed no way to express the terrifying magnificence of it. The power of it. The best they could say was that it darkened the June sun and seemed to turn the shed transparent, into a ghost of itself. It was impossible to comprehend how mere glass could stand between that light and the outside world. The throbbing brilliance poured through the boards of the shed like water through cheesecloth; the shapes of the nails stood out like the dots in a newspaper photograph or purple beads of blood on top of a fresh tattoo. Sandy heard Carl Brundage shout She's gonna blow this time, she most surely will! From behind him, in the barracks, he could hear Mister Dillon howling in terror.

'But he still wanted to get out and get at it,' Orville told Sandy later. 'I had im in the upstairs lounge, as far from that goddam shed as I could get him, but it didn't make any difference. He knew it was there. Heard it, I imagine - heard it humming. And then he saw the window. Holy Christ! If I hadn't been quick, hadn't grabbed him right off, I think he would have jumped right through it, second story or not. He pissed all over me and I never realized it until half an hour later, that's how scared I was.'

Orville shook his head, his face heavy and thoughtful.

'Never seen a dog like that. Never. His fur was all bushed out, he was foamin at the mouth, and his eyeballs looked like they were poppin right out of his head. Christ.'

Curt, meanwhile, came running back with a dozen pairs of protective goggles. The Troopers put them on but there was still no way of looking in at the Buick; it was impossible to even approach the windows. And again there was that weird silence when they all felt they should have been standing at the center of a cacophony, hearing thunder and landslides and erupting volcanoes. With the shed's doors shut, they (unlike Mister D) couldn't even hear the humming noise. There was the shuffle of feet and someone clearing his throat and Mister Dillon howling in the barracks and Orvie Garrett telling him to calm down and the sound of Matt Babicki's static-drowned radio from dispatch, where the window (now denuded of its flower box, thanks to Curt) had been left open.

Nothing else.

Curt walked to the roll-up door like a man walking into a high wind, head bent and hands raised. Twice he tried to lift his face and look inside Shed B, but he couldn't. It was too bright. Sandy grabbed his shoulder and restrained an urge to shout in his ear. There was no need to shout, but the situation made you want to do it, just the same.

'Quit trying to look. You can't do it. Not yet, anyway. It'll knock the eyes right out of your head.'

'What is it, Sandy?' Curt whispered. 'What in God's name is it?'

Sandy could only shake his head.

For the next half hour the Buick put on the lightshow to end all lightshows, turning Shed B into a kind of fireball, shooting parallel lines of light through all the windows, flashing and flashing, a gaudy neon furnace without heat or sound. If anyone from John Q. Public's family had turned up during that time, God knew what they might have thought or who they would have told or how much those they told might have believed, but no outsiders did turn up. And by five-thirty, the D

Troopers had started to see individual flashes of light again, as if the power-source driving the phenomenon had begun to wobble. It made Sandy think of the way a motorcycle will lurch and spurt when the gas-tank is almost dry.

Curt edged up to the windows again, and although he had to duck down each time one of those bolts of light shot out, he could take little peeks in between. Sandy joined him, ducking away from the brighter pulses (We probably look like we're practicing some weird drill routine, he thought), squinting, eyes dazzled in spite of the triple layer of polarized glass in the goggles.

The Buick was still perfectly intact and apparently unchanged. The tarp lay in its same draped dune, unsinged by any fire. Arky's tools hung undisturbed on their pegs, and the stacks of old County American newspapers were still in the far corner, bundled and tied with twine. A single kitchen match would have been enough to turn those dry piles of old news into pillars of flame, but all that brilliant purple light hadn't charred so much as a single corner of a single Bradlee's circular.

'Sandy - can you see any of the specimens?'

Sandy shook his head, stood back, and took off the goggles Curt had loaned him. He passed them on to Andy Colucci, who was wild for a look into the shed. Sandy himself headed back to the barracks. Shed B was not going to blow up after all, it seemed. And, he was the acting SC, with a job to do.

On the back step, he paused and looked back. Even wearing goggles, Andy Colucci and the others were reluctant to approach the row of windows. There was only one exception, and that was Curtis Wilcox. He stood right there - big as Billy-be-damned, Sandy's mother might have said - as close as he could get and leaning forward to get even closer, goggles actually pressed to the glass, only turning his head aside slightly each time the thing flashed out an especially bright bolt, which it was still doing every twenty seconds or so.

Sandy thought, He's apt to put his eyes out, or at least go snowblind from it. Except he wouldn't. He seemed to have almost timed the flashes, to have gotten in rhythm with them. From where Sandy was, it looked as if Curtis was actually turning his face aside a second or two before each flash came. And when it did come he would for a moment become his own exclamatory shadow, an exotic frozen dancer caught against a great sheet of purple light. Looking at him that way was scary. To Sandy it was like watching something that was there and not there at the same time, real but not real, both solid and mirage. Sandy would later think that when it came to the Buick 8, Curt was oddly like Mister Dillon. He wasn't howling like the dog was, upstairs in the common room, but he seemed in touch with the thing just the same, in sync with it. Dancing with it: then and later, that was how it would come back to Sandy.

Dancing with it.

At ten minutes of six that evening, Sandy radioed down the hill to Matt and asked what was up.

Matt said nothing (Nothing, gramma was what Sandy heard in his tone), and Sandy told him to come on back to base. When he did, Sandy said he was free to step across the parking lot and have a look at Old '54, if he still wanted one. Matt was gone like a shot. When he came back a few minutes later, he looked disappointed.

'I've seen it do that before,' he said, leaving Sandy to reflect on how dense and thankless human beings were, for the most part; how quickly their senses dulled, rendering the marvelous mundane. 'All the guys said it really blew its stack an hour ago, but none of them could describe it.' This was said with a contempt Sandy didn't find surprising. In the world of the police communications officer, everything is describable; the world's cartography must and can be laid out in ten-codes.

'Well, don't look at me,' Sandy said. 'I can tell you one thing, though. It was bright.'

'Oh. Bright.' Matt gave him a look that said Not just a gramma but a loser gramma. Then he went back inside.

By seven o'clock, Troop D's TV reception (always an important consideration when you were off the road) had returned to normal. Dispatch communications were back to normal. Mister Dilloii had eaten his usual big bowl of Gravy Train and then hung out in the kitchen, trolling for scraps, so he was back to normal. And when Curt poked his head into the SC's office at seven forty-five to tell Sandy he wanted to go into the shed and check on his specimens, Sandy could think of no way to stop him. Sandy was in charge of Troop D that evening, no argument there, but when it came to the Buick, Curt had as much authority as he did, maybe even a little more. Also, Curt was already wearing the damn yellow rope around his waist. The rest was looped over his forearm in a coil.

'Not a good idea,' Sandy told him. That was about as close to no as he could get.

'Bosh.' It was Curtis's favorite word in 1983. Sandy hated it. He thought it was a snotty word.

He looked over Curt's shoulder and saw they were alone. 'Curtis,' he said, 'you've got a wife at home, and the last time we talked about her, you said she might be pregnant. Has that changed?'

'No, but she hasn't been to the - '

'So you've got a wife for sure and a maybe baby. And if she's not preg this time, she probably will be next time. That's nice. It's just the way it should be. What I don't understand is why you'd put all that on the line for that goddam Buick.'

'Come on, Sandy - I put it on the line every time I get into a cruiser and go out on the road.

Every time I step out and approach. It's true of everyone who works the job.'

'This is different and we both know it, so you can quit the high school debate crap. Don't you remember what happened to Ennis?'

'I remember,' Curt said, and Sandy supposed he did, but Ennis Rafferty had been gone almost four years by then. He was, in a way, as out-of-date as the stacks of County Americans in Shed B.

And as for more recent developments? Well, the frogs had just been frogs. Jimmy might have been named after a President, but he was really just a gerbil. And Curtis was wearing the rope. The rope was supposed to make everything all right. Sure, Sandy thought, and no toddler wearing a pair of water-wings ever drowned in a swimming pool. If he said that to Curt, would Curtis laugh? No.

Because Sandy was sitting in the big chair that night, the acting SC, the visible symbol of the PSP. But Sandy thought he would see laughter in Curt's eyes, just the same. Curtis had forgotten the rope had never been tested, that if the force hiding inside the Buick decided it wanted him, there might be a single last flash of purple light and then nothing but a length of yellow line lying on the cement floor with an empty loop at the end of it; so long, partner, happy trails to you, one more curious cat off hunting satisfaction in the big nowhere. But Sandy couldn't order him to stand down as he'd ordered Matt Babicki to drive down the hill. All he could do was get into an argument with him, and it was no good arguing with a man who had that bright and twirly let's-play-Bingo look in his eyes. You could cause plenty of hard feelings, but you could never convince the other guy that you had the right side of the argument.

'You want me to hold the other end of the rope?' Sandy asked him. 'You came in here wanting something, and it surely wasn't my opinion.'

'Would you?' Curt grinned. 'I'd like that.'

Sandy went out with him, and he held the rope with most of the coil snubbed around his elbow and Dicky-Duck Eliot standing behind him, ready to grab his belt loops if something happened and Sandy started to slide. The acting SC, standing in the side doorway of Shed 13, not braced but ready to brace if something funny happened, biting his lower lip and breathing just a little too fast. His pulse felt like maybe a hundred and twenty beats a minute. He could still feel the chill in the shed even though the thermometer was by then easing its way back up; in Shed B, early summer had been revoked and what one met at the door was the dank cold of a hunting camp when you arrive in November, the stove in the middle of the room as dead as an unchurched god. Time slowed to a crawl. Sandy opened his mouth to ask Curt if he was going to stay in there forever, then glanced down at his watch and saw only forty seconds had passed. He did tell Curt not to go around to the far side of the Buick. Too much chance of snagging the rope.

'And Curtis? When you open the trunk, stand clear!'

'Roger that.' He sounded almost amused, indulgent, like a kid promising Mother and Dad that no, he won't speed, he won't take a drink at the party, he will watch out for the other guy, oh gosh yes, of course, you bet. Anything to keep them happy long enough to get the Christ out of the house, and then . . . yeeeeeee-HAW!

He opened the driver's door of the Buick and leaned in past the steering wheel. Sandy braced again for the pull he more than half-expected, the yank. He must have communicated the feeling backward, because he felt Dicky grab his belt loops. Curt reached, reached, and then stood up holding the shoebox with the crickets inside. He peered through the holes. 'Looks like they're all still there,' he said, sounding a little disappointed.

'You'd think they'd be roasted,' Dicky-Duck said. 'All that fire.'

But there had been no fire, just light. There wasn't a single scorch-mark on the shed's walls, they could see the thermometer's needle standing in the fifties, and electing not to believe that number wasn't much of an option, not with the shed's dank chill pushing into their faces. Still, Sandy knew how Dicky Eliot felt. When your head was still pounding from the dazzle and the last of the afterimages still seemed to be dancing in front of your eyes, it was hard to believe that a bunch of crickets sitting on ground zero could come through unscathed.

Yet they had. Every single one of them, as it turned out. So did the bullfrog, except its yellow-black eyes had gone cloudy and dull. It was present and accounted for, but when it hopped, it hopped right into the wall of its cage. It had gone blind.

Curt opened the trunk and moved back from it all in the same gesture, a move almost like ballet and one most policemen know. Sandy braced in the doorway again, hands fisted on the slack rope, ready for it to go taut. Dicky-Duck once more snagged a tight hold on his belt loops. And again there was nothing.

Curt leaned into the trunk.

'Cold in here,' he called. His voice sounded hollow, oddly distant. 'And I'm getting that smell - the cabbage smell. Also peppermint. And . . . wait . . .'

Sandy waited. When nothing came, he called Curt's name.

'I think it's salt,' Curt said. 'Like the ocean, almost. This is the center of it, the vortex, right here in the trunk. I'm sure of it.'

'I don't care if it's the Lost Dutchman Mine,' Sandy told him. 'I want you out of there. Now.'

'Just a second more.' He leaned deep into the trunk. Sandy almost expected him to jerk forward as if something was pulling him, Curt Wilcox's idea of a knee-slapper. Perhaps he thought of it, but in the end he knew better. He simply got Matt Babicki's windowbox and pulled it out. He turned and held it up so Sandy and Dicky could see. The flowers looked fine and blooming. They were dead a couple of days later, but there was nothing very supernatural about that; they had been frozen in the trunk of the car as surely as they would have been if Curtis had put them in the freezer for awhile.

'Are you done yet?' Sandy was even starting to sound like Old Gammer Dearborn to himself, but he couldn't help it.

'Yeah. Guess so.' Curtis sounding disappointed. Sandy jumped when he slammed the Buick's trunk-lid back down, and Dick's fingers tightened on the back of his pants. Sandy had an idea ole Dicky-Duck had come pretty close to yanking him right out the doorway and on to his ass in the parking lot. Curt, meantime, walked slowly toward them with the frog cage, the sneaker box, and the windowbox stacked up in his arms. Sandy kept coiling up the rope as he came so Curt wouldn't trip over it.

When they were all outside again, Dicky took the cage and looked wonderingly at the blind bullfrog. 'That beats everything,' he said.

Curt slipped out of the loop around his waist, then knelt on the macadam and opened the shoebox. Four or five other Troopers had gathered around by then. The crickets hopped out almost as soon as Curt took the lid off the box, but not before both Curtis and Sandy had a chance to take attendance. Eight, the number of cylinders in yonder Buick's useless engine. Eight, the same number of crickets that had gone in.

Curt looked disgusted and disappointed. 'Nothing,' he said. 'In the end, that's what it always comes to. If there's a formula - some binomial theorem or quadratic equation or something like that - I don't see it.'

'Then maybe you better give it a pass,' Sandy said.

Curt lowered his head and watched the crickets go hopping across the parking lot, widening out from each other, going their separate ways, and no equation or theorem ever invented by any mathematician who ever breathed could predict where any single one of them might end up. They were Chaos Theory hopping. The goggles were still hung around Curt's neck on their elastic strap. He fingered them for a few moments, then glanced at Sandy. His mouth was set. The disappointed look had gone out of his eyes. The other one, the half-crazed let's-play-Bingo-until-the-money's-all-gone look, had come back to take its place.

'Don't think I'm ready to do that,' he said. 'There must be . . .'

Sandy gave him a chance, and when Curtis didn't finish, he asked: 'There must be what?'

But Curtis only shook his head, as if he could not say. Or would not.

Three days went by. They waited for another bat-thing or another cyclone of leaves, but there was nothing immediate in the wake of the lightshow; the Buick just sat there. Troop D's piece of Pennsylvania was quiet, especially on the second shift, which suited Sandy Dearborn right down to the ground. One more clay and he'd be off for two. Huddle's turn to run the show again. Then, when Sandy came back, Tony Schoondist would be in the big chair, where he belonged. The temperature in Shed B still hadn't equalized with the temperature of the outside world, but was getting there. It had risen into the low sixties, and Troop D had come to think of the sixties as safe territory.

For the first forty-eight hours after the monster light-quake, they'd kept someone out there around the clock. After twenty-four uneventful hours, some of the men had started grumbling about putting in the extra time, and Sandy couldn't much blame them. It was uncompensated time, of course. Had to be. How could they have sent Overtime Reports for Shed B-watching to Scranton? What would they have put in the space marked REASON FOR OVERTIME ACTIVITY?

Curt Wilcox wasn't crazy about dropping the full-time surveillance, but he understood the realities of the situation. In a brief conference, they decided on a week's worth of spot checks, most to be performed by Troopers Dearborn and Wilcox. And if Tony didn't like that when he got back from sunny California, he could change it.

So now comes eight o'clock of a summer evening right around the time of the solstice, the sun not down but sitting red and bloated on the Short Hills, casting the last of its long and longing light. Sandy was in the office, beavering away at the weekend duty roster, that big chair fitting him pretty well just then. There were times when he could imagine himself sitting in it more or less permanently, and that summer evening was one of them. I think I could do this job: that was what was going through his mind as George Morgan rolled up the driveway in Unit D-ll. Sandy raised his hand to George and grinned when George ticked a little salute off the brim of his big hat in return: right-back-atcha.

George was on patrol that shift, but happened to be close by and so came in to gas up. By the nineties, Pennsylvania State Troopers would no longer have that option, but in 1983 you could still pump your go-juice at home and save the state a few pennies. He put the pump on slow automatic and strolled over to Shed B for a peek.

There was a light on inside (they always left it on) and there it was, the Troop D bonus baby, Old '54, sitting quiet with its chrome gleaming, looking as if it had never eaten a State Trooper, blinded a frog, or produced a freak bat. George, still a few years from his personal finish-line (two cans of beer and then the pistol in the mouth, jammed way up in back past the soft palate, not taking any chances, when a cop decides to do it he or she almost always gets it right), stood at the roll-up door as they all did from time to time, adopting the stance they all seemed to adopt, kind of loose and spraddle-legged like a sidewalk superintendent at a city building site, hands on hips (Pose A) or crossed on the chest (Pose B) or cupped to the sides of the face if the day was especially bright (Pose C). It's a stance that says the sidewalk superintendent in question is a man with more than a few of the answers, an expert gent with plenty of time to discuss taxes or politics or the haircuts of the young.

George had his look and was just about to turn away when all at once there was a thud from in there, toneless and heavy. This was followed by a pause (long enough, he told Sandy later, for him to think he'd imagined the sound in the first place) and then there was a second thud. George saw the Buick's trunk-lid move up and down in the middle, just once, quick. He started for the side door, meaning to go in and investigate. Then he recalled what he was dealing with, a car that sometimes ate people. He stopped, looked around for someone else - for backup - and saw no one.

There's never a cop around when you need one. He considered going into the shed by himself anyway, thought of Ennis - four years and still not home for lunch - and ran for the barracks instead.

'Sandy, you better come.' George standing in the doorway, looking scared and out of breath. 'I think maybe one of these idiots may have locked some other idiot in the trunk of that fucking nuisance in Shed B. Like for a joke.'

Sandy stared at him, thunderstruck. Unable (or perhaps unwilling) to believe that anyone, even that dope Santerre, could do such a thing. Except people could, he knew it. He knew something else, as well - incredible as it might seem, in many cases they meant no harm.

George mistook the acting SC's surprise for disbelief. 'I might be wrong, but honest-to-God I'm not pulling your chain. Something's thumping the lid of the trunk. From the inside. Sounds like with his fist. I started to go in on my own, then changed my mind.'

'That was the right call,' Sandy said. 'Come on.'

They hurried out, stopping just long enough so Sandy could look in the kitchen and then bawl upstairs to the common room. No one. The barracks was never deserted, but it was deserted now, and why? Because there was never a cop around when you needed one, that was why. Herb Avery was running dispatch that night, at least that was one, and he joined them.

'Want me to call someone in off the road, Sandy? I can, if you want.'

'No.' Sandy was looking around, trying to remember where he'd last seen the coil of rope. In the hutch, probably. Unless some yo-yo had taken it home to haul something upstairs with, which would be just about par for the course. 'Come on, George.'

The two of them crossed the parking lot in the red sunset light, their trailing shadows all but infinite, going first to the roll-up door for a little look-see. The Buick sat there as it had ever since old Johnny Parker dragged it in behind his tow-truck (Johnny now retired and getting through his nights with an oxygen tank beside his bed - but still smoking). It cast its own shadow on the concrete floor.

Sandy started to turn away, meaning to check the hutch for the rope, and just as he did there came another thump. It was strong and flat and unemphatic. The trunk-lid shivered, dimpled up in the middle for a moment, then went back down. It looked to Sandy as if the Roadmaster actually rocked a little bit on its springs.

'There! You see?' George said. He started to add something else, and that was when the Buick's trunk came unlatched and the lid sprang up on its hinges and the fish fell out.

Of course, it was a fish no more than the bat-thing was a bat, but they both knew at once it was nothing made to live on land; it had not one gill on the side they could see but four of them in a line, parallel slashes in its skin, which was the color of dark tarnished silver. It had a ragged and membranous tail. It unfolded out of the trunk with a last convulsive, dying shiver. Its bottom half curved and flexed, and Sandy could see how it might have made that thumping sound.

Yes, that was clear enough, but how a thing of such size could ever have fit into the closed trunk of the Buick in the first place was beyond both of them. What hit the concrete floor of Shed B

with a flat wet slap was the size of a sofa.

George and Sandy clutched each other like children and screamed. For a moment they were children, with every adult thought driven out of their heads. Somewhere inside the barracks, Mister Dillon began to bark.

It lay there on the floor, no more a fish than a wolf is a housepet, although it may look quite a bit like a dog. And in any case, this fish was only a fish up to the purple slashes of its gills. Where a fish's head would have been - something that at least had the steadying sanity of eyes and a mouth - there was a knotted, naked mass of pink things, too thin and stiff to be tentacles, too thick to be hair. Each was tipped with a black node and Sandy's first coherent thought was A shrimp, the top half of it's some kind of shrimp and those black things are its eyes.

'What's wrong?' someone bawled. 'What is it?'

Sandy turned and saw Herb Avery on the back step. His eyes were wild and he had his Ruger in his hand. Sandy opened his mouth and at first nothing came out but a phlegmy little wheeze. Beside him, George hadn't even turned; he was still looking through the window, mouth hanging slack in an idiot's gape.

Sandy took a deep breath and tried again. What was meant for a shout emerged as a faint punched-in-the-belly wheeze, but at least it was something. 'Everything's okay, Herb - five-by-five. Go back inside.'

'Then why did you - '

'Go inside!' There, that's a little better, Sandy thought. 'Go on, now, Herb. And holster that piece.'

Herb looked down at the gun as if unaware until then that he had drawn it. He put it back in his holster, looked at Sandy as if to ask was he sure. Sandy made little flapping gestures with his hands and thought, Granny Dearborn says go back inside, dad-rattit!

Herb went, yelling for Mister D to shut up that foolish barking as he did.

Sandy turned back to George, who had gone white. 'It was breathing, Sandy - or trying to. The gills were moving and the side was going up and down. Now it's stopped.' His eyes were huge, like the eyes of a child who has been in a car accident. 'I think it's dead.' His lips were quivering.

'Man, I hope it's dead.'

Sandy looked in. At first he was sure George was wrong: the thing was still alive. Still breathing, or trying to breathe. Then he realized what he was seeing and told George to get the videocam out of the hutch.

'What about the r - '

'We won't need the rope, because we're not going in there - not yet, we're not - but get the camera. Fast as you can.'

George went around the side of the garage, not moving very well. Shock had made him gawky.

Sandy looked back into the shed, cupping his eyes to the sides of his face to cut the red sunset glare. There was motion in the shed, all right, but not life's motion. It was mist rising from the thing's silver side and also from the purple slashes of its gills. The bat-thing hadn't decomposed, but the leaves had, and quickly. This thing was staring to rot like the leaves, and Sandy had the feeling that once the process really got going, it would go fast.

Even standing outside, with the closed door between him and it, he could smell it. An acrid, watery reek of mixed cabbage and cucumber and salt, the smell of a broth you might feed to someone if you wanted to make them sicker instead of well.

More mist was rising from its side; it dribbled up from the nest of tangled pink ropes that seemed to serve as its head, as well. Sandy thought he could hear a faint hissing noise, but knew he could just as well be imagining it. Then a black slit appeared in the grayish-silver scales, running north from the tattered nylon of its tail to the rearmost gill. Black fluid, probably the same stuff Huddie and Arky had found around the bat-thing's corpse, began to trickle out -

listlessly at first, then with a little more spirit. Sandy could see an ominous bulge developing behind the split in the skin. It was no hallucination, and neither was the hissing sound. The fish was doing something more radical than decomposing; it was giving in. Yielding to the change in pressure or perhaps the change in everything, its whole environment. He thought of something he'd read once (or maybe seen in a National Geographic TV special), about how when some deep-sea creatures were brought up from their dwelling places, they simply exploded.

'George!' Bawling at the top of his lungs. 'Hurry the hell up!'

George flew back around the corner of the shed, holding the tripod way up high, where the aluminum legs came together. The lens of the videocam glared above his fist, looking like a drunk's eyeball in the day's declining red light.

'I couldn't get it off the tripod,' he panted. 'There's some kind of latch or lock and if I'd had time to figure it out - or maybe I was trying to turn the Christly thing backward - '

'Never mind.' Sandy snatched the videocam from him. There was no problem with the tripod, anyway; the legs had been adjusted to the height of the windows in the shed's two roll-up doors for years. The problem came when Sandy pushed the ON button and looked through the viewfinder.

Instead of a picture, there were just red letters reading LO BAT.

'Judas-fucking-Iscariot on a chariot-driven crutch! Go back, George. Look on the shelf by the box of blank tapes, there's another battery there. Get it.'

'But I want to see - '

'I don't care! Go on!'

He went, running hard. His hat had gone askew on his head, giving him a weirdly jaunty look.

Sandy pushed the RECORD button on the side of the camera's housing, not knowing what he'd get but hoping for something. When he looked into the viewfinder again, however, even the letters reading LO BAT were fading.

Curt's going to kill me, he thought.

He looked back through the shed window just in time to catch the nightmare. The thing ruptured all the way up its side, spilling out that black ichor not in trickles but in a flood. It spread across the floor like backflow from a clogged drain. Following it came a noisome spew of guts, flabby bags of yellowish-red jelly. Most of them split and began to steam as soon as the air hit them.

Sandy turned, the back of his hand pressed hard against his mouth until he was sure he wasn't going to vomit, and then he yelled: 'Herb! If you still want a look, now's your chance! Quick as you can!'

Why getting Herb Avery on-scene should have been the first thing he thought of, Sandy could not later say. At the time, however, it seemed perfectly reasonable. If he had called his dead mother's name, he would have been equally unsurprised. Sometimes one's mind simply passes beyond one's rational and logical control. Right then he wanted Herb. Dispatch is never to be left unattended, it's a rule anyone in rural law enforcement knows, the Fabled Automatic. But rules were made to be broken, and Herb would never see anything like this again in his life, none of them would, and if Sandy couldn't have videotape, he would at least have a witness. Two, if George got back in time.

Herb came out fast, as if he had been standing right inside the back door and watching through the screen all along, and sprinted across the nearly empty parking lot in the red light. His face was both scared arid avid. Just as he arrived, George steamed back around the corner, waving a fresh battery for the video camera. He looked like a game-show contestant who has just won the grand prize.

'Oh mother, what's that smell?' Herb asked, clapping his hand over his mouth and nose so that everything after mother came out muffled.

'The smell isn't the worst,' Sandy said. 'You better get a look while you still can.'

They both looked, and uttered almost identical cries of revulsion. The fish was blown out all down its length by then, and deflating - sinking into the black liquor of its own strange blood.

White billows rose from its body and the innards which had already spilled from that gaping flayment. The vapor was as thick as smoke rising from a pile of smoldering damp mulch. It obscured the Buick from its open trunk forward until Old '54 was nothing but a ghost-car.

If there had been more to see, Sandy might actually have fumbled longer with the camera, perhaps getting the battery in wrongways on the first try or even knocking the whole works over and breaking it in his fumble-fingered haste. The fact that there was going to be damned little to tape no matter how fast he worked had a calming effect, and he snapped the battery home on the first try. When he looked into the viewfinder again, he had a clear, bright view of not much: a disappearing amphibious thing that might have been a fabulous landlocked sea monster or just a fishy version of the Cardiff Giant sitting on a concealed block of diy ice. On the tape one can see the pink tangle that served as the amphibian's head quite clearly for perhaps ten seconds, and a number of rapidly liquefying red lumps strewn along its length; one can see what appears to be filthy seafoam sweating out of the thing's tail and running across the concrete in a sluggish rill. Then the creature that convulsed its bulk out of the Roadmaster's trunk is mostly gone, no more than a shadow in the mist. The car itself is hardly there. Even in the mist, however, the open trunk is visible, and it looks like a gaping mouth. Come closer, children, see the living crocodile.

George stepped away, gagging and shaking his head. 'Man, that smell!'

Sandy thought again of Curtis, who for a change had left as soon as his shift was over. He and Michelle had big plans - dinner at The Cracked Platter in Harrison, followed by a movie. The meal would be over by now and they'd be at the show. Which one? There were three within striking distance. If there had been kids instead of just a maybe baby, Sandy could have called the house and asked the sitter. But would he have made that call? Maybe not. Probably not, in fact. Curt had begun to settle a bit over the last eighteen months or so, and Sandy hoped that settling would continue. He had heard Tony say on more than one occasion that when it came to the PSP (or any law enforcement agency worth its salt), one could best assess a man's worth by the truthful answer to a single question: How are things at home? It wasn't just that the job was dangerous; it was also a crazy job, full of opportunities to see people at their absolute worst. To do it well over a long period of time, to do it fairly, a cop needed an anchor. Curt had Michelle, and now he had the baby (maybe). It would be better if he didn't go bolting off to the barracks unless he absolutely had to, especially when he had to lie about the reason. A wife could swallow only so many rabid fox-tales and unexpected changes in the duty roster. He'd be angry that he hadn't been called, angrier still when he saw the bitched-up videotape, but Sandy would deal with that. He'd have to. And Tony would be back. Tony would help him deal with it.

The following day was cool, with a fresh breeze. They rolled up Shed B's big doors and let the place air out for six hours or so. Then four Troopers, led by Sandy and a stony-faced Trooper Wilcox, went in with hoses. They cleaned off the concrete and washed the final decaying lumps of the fish out into the tall grass behind the shed. It was really the story of the bat all over again, only with more mess and less to show at the end of the day. In the end it was more about Curtis Wilcox and Sandy Dearborn than it was about the ruins of that great unknown fish.

Curt was indeed furious at not having been called, and the two law enforcement officers had an extremely lively discussion on that subject - and others - when they had gotten to a place where no one else on the roster could possibly overhear. This turned out to be the parking lot behind The Tap, where they had gone for a beer after the clean-up operation was finished. In the bar it was just talking, but once outside, their voices started to climb. Pretty soon they were both trying to talk at the same time, and of course that led to shouting. It almost always does.

Man, I can't believe, you didn't call me.

You were off-duty, you were out with your wife, and besides, there was nothing to see.

I wish you'd let me decide-

There wasn't-

-decide that, Sandy-

-any time! It all happened-

Least you could have done was get some half-decent video for the file-Whose file are we talking about, Curtis? Huh? Whose goddam file?

By then the two of them were standing nose to nose, fists clenched, almost down to it. Yes, really on the verge of getting down to it. There are moments in a life that don't matter and moments that do and some - maybe a dozen - "when everything is on a hinge. Standing there in the parking lot, wanting to sock the kid who was no longer a kid, the rookie who was no longer a rookie, Sandy realized he had come to one of those moments. He liked Curt, and Curt liked him.

They had worked together well over the last years. But if this went any farther, all that would change. It depended on what he said next.

'It smelled like a basket of minks.' That was what he said. It was a remark that came from nowhere at all, at least nowhere he could pinpoint. 'Even from the outside.'

'How would you know what a basket of minks smelled like?' Curt starting to smile. Just a little.

'Call it poetic license.' Sandy also starting to smile, but also only a little. They had turned in the right direction, but they weren't out of the woods.

Then Curtis asked: 'Did it smell worse than that whore's shoes? The one from Rocksburg?'

Sandy started laughing. Curt joined him. And they were off the hinge, just like that.

'Come on in,' Curt said. 'I'll buy you another beer.'

Sandy didn't want another beer, but he said okay. Because now it wasn't about beer; it was about damage control. About putting the crap behind them.

Back inside, sitting in a corner booth, Curt said: 'I've had my hands in that trunk, Sandy.

I've knocked on the bottom of it.'

'Me too.'

'And I've been under it on a crawler. It's not a magician's trick, like a box with a false bottom.'

'Even if it was, that was no white rabbit that came out of there yesterday.'

Curtis said, 'For things to disappear, they only have to be in the vicinity. But when things show up, they always come out of the trunk. Do you agree?'

Sandy thought it over. None of them had actually seen the bat-thing emerge from the Buick's trunk, but the trunk had been open, all right. As for the leaves, yes - Phil Candleton had seen them swirling out.