Ghost Story

He smiled at them. "It's going to be a hell of a winter."

Sears James rumbled something affirmative. Ricky asked, "What do you suppose the odds are that we three and Peter Barnes will ever see the end of it?"

"Rotten," Sears answered. "But you've certainly done what we asked you here to do."

"Do we tell anybody?" Ricky asked. "Should we try to convince Hardesty?"

That's absurd," Sears snorted. "We'd end up in the booby hatch."

"Let them think they're fighting Martians," Don said. "Sears is right. But I'll give you a much better bet than the one you gave me."

"What's that?"

"I bet your perfect secretary won't come to work tomorrow."

When the old men left him in his uncle's house, Don built up the fire and sat in Ricky's warm place on the couch. While snow piled up on the roof and tried to wind its way around doors and window frames, he remembered a warm-chilly night, the smell of burning leaves, a sparrow lighting on a rail and a pale already loved face shining at him with luminous eyes from a doorway. And a naked girl looking out of a black window and pronouncing words he only now understood: "You are a ghost." You Donald. You. It was the unhappy perception at the center of every ghost story.

II - The Town Besieged

Narcissus, gazing at his image in the pool, wept.

When his friend; passing by, enquired the reason,

Narcissus replied, "I weep that I have lost my innocence."

His friend answered, "You would wiser weep that you ever had it."

1

December in Milburn; Milburn moving toward Christmas. The town's memory is long, and this month has always meant certain things, maple sugar candy and skating on the river and lights and trees in the stores and skiing on the hills just outside of town. In December, under several inches of snow, Milburn always took on a festive, almost magically pretty look. A tall tree always went up in the square, and Eleanor Hardie matched its lights by decorating the front of the Archer Hotel. Children lined up before Santa Claus in Young Brothers' department store and put in their non-negotiable demands for Christmas-only the older ones noticed that Santa looked and smelled a little bit like Omar Norris. (December always reconciled Omar not only with his wife, but also with himself-he cut his drinking in half, and talked to the few cronies he had about "moonlighting down at the store.") As his father had done, Norbert Clyde always drove his old horse-drawn sleigh through town and gave the kids rides so they would know what real sleighbells sounded like- and would know the feeling of skimming along through pine-smelling air behind two good horses. And as his father had done, Elmer Scales pulled open a gate in one of his pasture fences and let the town people come out to sled down a hill at the edge of his property: you always saw half a dozen station wagons pulled up alongside the fence, and half a dozen young fathers pulling Flexible Flyers laden with excited children up Elmer's hill. Some families pulled taffy in their kitchens; some families roasted chestnuts in their fireplaces. Humphrey Stalladge put up red and green lights over the bar, and started making Tom and Jerries. Milburn wives swapped recipes for Christmas cookies; the butchers took orders for twenty-pound turkeys and gave away recipes for turkey gravy. Eight-year-olds in the grade school cut out trees from colored paper and pasted them to classroom windows. High school kids concentrated more on hockey than English and history, and thought about the records they'd buy with the holiday checks from aunts and uncles. The Kiwanis and Rotary and the Kaycees held a huge party in the ballroom of the Archer Hotel, with three bartenders imported from Binghamton, and cleared several thousand dollars for the Golden Agers fund; from this evening, and from all the cocktail parties the younger, newer residents of Milburn held-the people who still did not look quite familiar to Sears and Ricky, though they might have lived in Milburn for years-people came to work with headaches and queasy stomachs.

This year there still were a few cocktail parties and women still made Christmas cookies, but December in Milburn was different. People who met in Young Brother's department store didn't say "Isn't it nice to have a white Christmas?" but "I hope this snow doesn't keep up"; Omar Norris had to stay on the municipal snowplow all day long, and junior clerks said they'd get into his Santa suit only if someone fumigated it first; the mayor and Hardesty's deputies set up an enormous tree, but Eleanor Hardie didn't have the heart to decorate the front of the hotel-indeed she began to look so harried and lost that a tourist couple from New York City took one glance at her and decided on the spot to keep on going until they found a motel. And Norbert Clyde, the first time ever, didn't take his sleigh out of his barn and grease up the runners: ever since seeing that "thing" on his land, he had gone into a funny decline. You could hear him at Humphrey's or other bars on the outskirts of town, saying that the County Farm Agent didn't know his ass from his elbow, and that if people had any sense they'd start paying a little more attention to Elmer Scales, who didn't open up his gate to let the sledders onto his hill, but skipped dinners and scribbled crazy poetry and waited up nights with his loaded twelve-gauge over his knees. His tribe of children sledded on the hill by themselves, feeling ostracized. Snow fell all day, all night; the drifts at first covered fences, and then reached the eaves of the houses. In the second two weeks of December, the schools were closed for eight days: the high school's heating system failed, and the board shut it down until mid-January, when a heating engineer from Binghamton was finally able to get into town. The grade school closed a few days later: the roads were treacherous, and after the school bus went into a ditch twice in one morning, the parents would have kept their kids home anyway. People of the age of Ricky and Sears-those who were the town's memory-looked back to the winters of 1947 and 1926, when no traffic had come in or out of Milburn for weeks, and fuel had run out and old folks (who were no older than the present ages of Sears and Ricky) had, along with Viola Frederickson of the auburn hair and exotic face, frozen to death.

This December Milburn looked less like a village on a Christmas card than a village under siege. The Dedham girls' horses, forgotten even by Nettie, starved and died in their stables. This December, people stayed in their houses more than they were used to, and tempers wore thin-some broke. Philip Kneighler, one of the new Milburnites, went inside and beat up his wife after his snow blower broke down on his driveway. Ronnie Byrum, a nephew of Harlan Bautz's home on leave from the Marines, objected to the harmless remarks of a man standing beside him in a bar and broke his nose: he would have broken his jaw if two of Ronnie's old high school buddies had not pinned his arms back. Two sixteen-year-old boys named Billy Byrum (Ronnie's brother) and Anthony "Spacemaker" Ortega concussed a younger boy who insisted on talking through the eight-twenty-five showing of Night of the Living Dead at Clark Mulligan's Rialto Theater. All over Milburn couples locked together in their houses quarreled about their babies, their money, their television programs. A deacon of the Holy Ghost Presbyterian Church-the same church of which Lewis's father had once been pastor-locked himself in the unheated building one night two weeks before Christmas and wept and cursed and prayed all night because he thought he was going crazy: he thought he had seen the naked boy Jesus standing on a snowdrift outside the church windows, begging him to come out.

At the Bay Tree Market, Rhoda Flagler pulled a clump of blond hair out of the scalp of Bitsy Underwood because Bitsy had challenged her right to the last three cans of pureed pumpkin: with the trucks unable to make deliveries, all the stocks were getting low. In the Hollow, an unemployed bartender named Jim Blazek knifed and killed a mulatto short-order cook named Washington de Souza because a tall man with a shaven head who dressed like a sailor had told Blazek that de Souza was messing around with his wife.

During the sixty-two days from the first of December to the thirty-first of January, these ten citizens of Milburn died of natural causes: George Fleischner (62), heart attack; Whitey Rudd (70), malnutrition; Gabriel Fish (58), exposure; Omar Norris (61), exposure following concussion; Marion Le Sage (73), stroke; Ethel Bin (76), Hodgkin's Disease; Dylan Griffen (5 months), hypothermia; Harlan Bautz (55), heart attack; Nettie Dedham (81), stroke; Penny Draeger (18), shock. Most of these died during the worst of the snows, and their bodies, along with those of Washington de Souza and several others, had to be kept, stacked and covered with sheets in one of the unused utility cells in Walter Hardesty's tiny jail-the wagon from the morgue in the county seat couldn't make it into Milburn.

The town closed in on itself, and even the ice skating on the river died out. At first, the skating went as it always had: every hour of daylight saw twenty or thirty high school students, mixed in with kids from elementary school, dashing back and forth, playing crack the whip and skating backward: a print by Currier and Ives. But if the high school juniors and seniors who swept off the ice never noticed the death of three old women and four old men and did not much mourn the passing of their dentist, another loss hit them like a slap in the face as soon as they glided out onto the frozen river. Jim Hardie had been the best skater Milburn had ever seen, and he and Penny Draeger had worked out tandem routines which looked to their contemporaries as good as anything you saw in the Olympics. Peter Barnes had been nearly as good, but he refused to come skating this year; even when the weather paused, Peter stayed at home. But Jim was the one they missed: even when he showed up in the morning with bloodshot eyes and a stubble on his cheeks, he had enlivened them all-you couldn't watch him without trying to skate a little better yourself. Now even Penny did not show up. Like Peter Barnes, she had drifted away into privacy. Soon, most of the other skaters did the same: every day more snow had to be shoveled off the river, and some of the boys doing the shoveling thought that Jim Hardie was not in New York after all; they had a feeling that something had happened to Jim -something they didn't want to think about too much. Days before it was proven, they knew that Jim Hardie was dead.

One day during his afternoon break Bill Webb picked up his battered old hockey skates from his locker behind the restaurant and walked over to the river and looked dully at the two untouched feet of fresh snow blanketing it. For this winter, the skating was dead too.

Clark Mulligan never bothered to book the new Disney film he always brought in at Christmas, but ran horror movies all through the season. Some nights he had seven or eight customers, some nights only two or three; other nights he started up the first reel of Night of the Living Dead and knew he was showing it only to himself. Saturday's matinee usually brought out ten or fifteen kids who had already seen the movie but couldn't think of anything else to do. He began letting them in for free. Every day he lost a little more money, but at least the Rialto got him away from home; as long as the power lines stayed up, he could keep warm and busy, and that was all he wanted. One night he walked down from the booth to see if anybody had bothered to sneak in through the fire door, and saw Penny Draeger sitting beside a wolf-faced man wearing sunglasses: Clark hurried back up to his projection booth, but he was sure the man had grinned at him before he could turn away. He didn't know why, but that frightened him -badly.

For the first time in most of their lives, Milburn people saw the weather as malevolent, a hostile force that would kill them if they let it. Unless you got up on your roof and knocked off the snow, the rafter beams would crack and buckle under its weight, and in ten minutes your house would be a frigid ruined shell, uninhabitable until spring; the wind chill factor sometimes brought the temperature down to sixty below, and if you stayed outside for much longer than it took to run from your car to your house, you could near the wind chuckling in your inner ear, knowing that it had you where it wanted you. That was one enemy, the worst they knew. But after Walt Hardesty and one of his deputies identified the bodies of Jim Hardie and Christina Barnes, and word got around about the condition of their bodies, Milburn people drew their drapes and switched on their television instead of going out to their neighbor's party and wondered if it was a bear after all that killed handsome Lewis Benedikt. And when, like Milly Sheehan, they saw that a line of snow had worked in around the storm window and lay like a taunt on the sill, they began to think about what else might get in. So they, like the town, closed in; shut down; thought about survival. A few remembered Elmer Scales standing in front of the statue, waving his shotgun and ranting about Martians. Only four people knew the identity of an enemy more hostile than the murderous weather.

Sentimental Journey

2

"I see on the news that it's worse in Buffalo," Ricky said, talking more for its own sake than because he thought the other two would be interested. Sears was driving his Lincoln in extremely Sears-like style: all the way to Edward's house where they had picked up Don, and now back to the west side of town, he had hunched over the wheel and proceeded at fifteen miles an hour. He blew his horn at every intersection, warning all comers that he did not intend to stop.

"Stop babbling, Ricky," he said, and blasted his horn and rolled across Wheat Row to the north end of the square.

"You didn't have to blow the horn, that was a green light," Ricky pointed out.

"Humpf. Everybody else is going too fast to stop."

Don, in the back seat, held his breath and prayed that the traffic lights on the other end of the square would turn green before Sears reached them. When they passed the steps to the hotel, he saw the lights facing Main Street flash to amber; the lights switched to green just as Sears put the entire palm of his hand down on the button and floated the long car like a galleon onto Main Street.

Even with the headlights on, the only objects truly visible were traffic lights and the red and green pinpoints of illumination on the Christmas tree. All else dissolved in swirling white. The few approaching cars appeared first as streamers of yellow light, then as shapeless forms like large animals: Don could see their colors only when they were immediately alongside, a proximity Sears acknowledged with another imperious blast of the Lincoln's horn.

"What do we do when we get there, if we ever do?" Sears asked.

"Just have a look around. It might help." Ricky looked at him in a way that was as good as speaking, and Don added, "No. I don't think she'll be there. Or Gregory."

"Did you bring a weapon?"

"I don't own a weapon. Did you?"

Ricky nodded; held up a kitchen knife. "Foolish, I know, but…"

Don did not think it was foolish; for a moment he wished that he too had a knife, if not a flamethrower and a grenade.

"Just out of curiosity, what are you thinking about at this moment?" Sears asked.

"Me?" Don asked. The car began to drift slowly sideways, and Sears turned the wheel very slightly to correct it.

"Yes."

"I was just remembering something that used to happen back when I was a prep school student in the Midwest. When we had to choose our colleges, the staff would give us talks about 'the East.' 'The East' was where they wanted us to go-it was simple snobbery, and my school was very old-fashioned in that way, but the school would look better if a big proportion of its seniors went on to Harvard or Princeton or Cornell- or even a state university on the East Coast. Everybody pronounced the word the way a Muslim must pronounce the word Mecca. And that's where we are now."

"Did you go East?" Ricky asked. "I don't know if Edward ever mentioned it."

"No. I went to California, where they believed in mysticism. They didn't drown witches, they gave them talk shows."

"Omar never got around to plowing Montgomery Street," Sears said; Don, surprised, turned to his window and saw that while he had talked they had reached the end of Anna Mostyn's street. Sears was right. On Maple, where they were, hard-packed snow about two inches deep showed the treads and deep grooves of Omar Norris's plow; it was like a white riverbed cut through high white banks. On Montgomery, the snow lay four feet deep. Already filling up with fresh snowfall, deep indentations down the middle of the road indicated where two or three people had fought through to Maple.

Sears turned off the ignition, leaving the parking lights on. "If we're going through with this, I see no point in waiting."

The three men stepped out onto the glassy surface of Maple Street. Sears turned up the fur collar of his coat and sighed. "To think I once balked at stepping into the two or three inches of snow on Our Vergil's field."

"I hate the thought of going into that house again," Ricky said.

All three could see the house through the swirls of falling snow. "I've never actually broken into a house before," Sears said. "How do you propose to do it?"

"Peter said that Jim Hardie broke a pane of glass in the back door. All we have to do is reach in and turn the knob.

"And if we see them? If they are waiting for us?"

"Then we try to put up a better fight than Sergeant York," Ricky said. "I suppose. Do you remember Sergeant York, Don?"

"No," Don said. "I don't even remember Audie Murphy. Let's go." He stepped into the drift left by the plow. His forehead was already so cold it felt like a metal plate grafted onto his skin. When he and Ricky were both on top of the drift they reached down to Sears, who stood with his arms extended like a small boy, and pulled him forward. Sears lumbered forward and up like a whale taking a reef, and then all three men stepped from the top of the drift into the deep snow on Montgomery Street.

The snow came up past their knees. Don realized that the two old men were waiting for him to begin, so he turned around and began to move up the street toward Anna Mostyn's house, doing his best to step in the deep depressions made by an earlier walker. Ricky followed, using the same prints. Sears, off to the side and stumping through unbroken snow, came last. The bottom of his black coat swept along after him like a train.

It took them twenty minutes to reach the house. When all three were standing in front of the building, Don again saw the two older men looking at him and knew that they would not move until he made them do it. "At least it'll be warmer inside," he said.

"I just hate the thought of going in there again," Ricky said, not very loudly.

"So you said," Sears reminded him. "Around the back, Don?"

"Around the back."

Once again he led the way. He could hear Ricky sneezing behind him as each of them plowed on through snow nearly waist-high. Like Jim Hardie and Peter Barnes, they stopped at the side window and looked in; saw only a dark empty chamber. "Deserted," Don said, and continued around to the rear of the house.

He found the window Jim Hardie had broken, and just as Ricky joined him on the back step, reached in and turned the handle of the kitchen door. Breathing heavily, Sears joined them.

"Let's get in out of the snow," Sears said. "I'm freezing." It was one of the bravest statements Don had ever heard, and he had to answer it with a similar courage. He pushed the door and stepped into the kitchen of Anna Mostyn's house. Sears and Ricky came in close behind him.

"Well, here we are," Ricky said. "To think it's been fifty years, or near enough. Should we split up?"

"Afraid to, Ricky?" Sears said, impatiently brushing snow off his coat. "I'll believe in these ghouls when I see them. You and Don can look at the rooms upstairs and on the landings. I'll do this floor and the basement"

And if the earlier statement had been an act of courage, this, Don knew, was a demonstration of friendship: none of them wanted to be alone in the house. "All right" he said. "I'll be surprised if we find anything too. We might as well start."

Sears led as they left the kitchen and went into the hall. "Go on," he said-commanded. "I'll be fine. This way will save time, and the sooner we get it over with, the better." Don was already on the stairs, but Ricky had turned questioningly back to Sears. "If you see anything, give a shout."

3

Don and Ricky Hawthorne were alone on the staircase. "It didn't used to be like this," Ricky said. "Not at all, you know. This place used to be so beautiful, then. The rooms downstairs-and her room, up there on the landing. Just beautiful."

"So were Alma's rooms," Don said. He and Ricky could hear Sears's footsteps on the boards of the lower room. The sound brought a new awareness flooding across Ricky's features. "What is it?"

"Nothing."

"Tell me. Your whole face changed."

Ricky blushed. "This is the house we dream about. Our nightmares are set here. Bare boards, empty rooms -the sound of something moving around, like Sears just now, down below. That's how the nightmare begins. When we dream it, we're in a bedroom-up there." He pointed up the staircase. "On the top floor." He went up a few steps. "I have to go up there. I have to see the room. It might help to-to stop the nightmare."

"I'll go with you," Don said.

When they reached the landing, Ricky stopped short "Didn't Peter tell you this was where-?" He pointed to a dark smear down the side of the wall.

"Where Bate killed Jim Hardie." Don swallowed involuntarily. "Let's not stay here any longer than we have to."

"I don't mind splitting up," Ricky hastily said. "Why don't you take Eva's old bedroom and the rooms on the next landing, and I'll prowl around on the top floor? It'll go faster that way. If I find anything, I'll call for you. I want to get out of here too-I can't stand being here."

Don nodded, agreeing with him wholeheartedly. Ricky continued up the stairs, and Don climbed to a half-landing and swung open the door to Eva Galli's bedroom.

Bare, desolate; then the noises of an invisible crowd: hushing feet and whispers, rattling papers. Don hesitantly took a step deeper into the empty room, and the door crashed shut behind him.

"Ricky?" he said, and knew that his voice was no louder than the whispers behind him. The dim light guttered; and from the moment he could no longer see the walls, Don felt that he was in a much larger room -the walls and ceiling had flown out, expanded, leaving him in a psychic space he did not know how to leave. A cold mouth pressed against his ear and said or thought the word "Welcome." He swung around to the source of the sound, thinking belatedly that the mouth, like the greeting, had been only a thought. His fist met air.

As if playfully to punish him, someone tripped him, and he landed painfully on hands and knees. A carpet met his hands. This gradually took on color-dark blue -and he realized that he could see again. Don lifted his head and saw a white-haired man in a blazer the color of the carpet and gray slacks above mirror-polished black loafers standing before him: the blazer covered a prosperous little paunch. The man smiled down in a rueful fashion and offered him a hand; behind him other men moved. Don knew immediately who he was.

"Have a little accident, Don?" he asked. "Here. Take my hand." He pulled him upright. "Glad you could make it. We were waiting for you."

"I know who you are," Don said. "Your name is Robert Mobley."

"Why, of course. And you read my memoir. Though I wish you could have been more complimentary about the writing. No matter, my boy, no matter. No apologies necessary."

Don was looking around the room, which had a long, slightly pitched floor ending at a small stage. There were no doors he could see, and the pale walls rose almost to cathedral height: way up, tiny lights flashed and winked. Under this false sky, fifty or sixty people milled about, as if at a party. At the top end of the room, where a small bar had been set up, Don saw Lewis Benedikt, wearing a khaki jacket and carrying a bottle of beer. He was talking to a gray-suited old man with sunken cheeks and bright, tragic eyes who must have been Dr. John Jaffrey.

"Your son must be here," Don guessed.

"Shelby? Indeed he is. That's Shelby over there." He nodded in the direction of a boy in his late teens, who smiled back at them. "We're all here for the entertainment which promises to be very exciting."

"And you were waiting for me."

"Well, Donald, without you none of this could have been arranged."

"I'm getting out of here."

"Leave? Why, my boy, you can't! You'll have to let the show roll on, I'm afraid-you've already noticed there are no doors here. And there's nothing to fear- nothing here can harm you. It's all entertainment, you see-mere shadows and pictures. Only that."

"Go to hell," Don said. "This is some kind of charade she set up."

"Amy Monckton, you mean? Why, she's only a child. You can't imagine-"

But Don was already walking away toward the side of the theater. "It's no good, dear boy," Mobley called after him. "You're going to have to stay with us until it's over." Don pressed his hands against the wall, aware that everybody in the room was looking at him. The wall was covered in a pale felt-like material, but beneath the fabric was something cold and hard as iron. He looked up to the winking dots of light. Then he pounded the wall with the flat of his hand-no depression, no hidden door, nothing but a flat sealed surface.

The invisible lights dimmed, as did the imitation stars. Two men took him, one holding an arm, the other a shoulder. They forcibly turned him to face the stage, on which a single spotlight shone. In the middle of the spot stood a placard board. The first placard read:

RABBITFOOT DE PEYSER PRODUCTIONS

TAKES PRIDE IN

PRESENTING

A hand dipped into the light and removed the sign.

A SHORT WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR

The curtain went up to reveal a television set. Don thought it was blank until he noticed details on the white screen-the red brick of a chimney, the "snow" which was real snow. Then the picture jumped into life for him.

It was a high-angled shot of Montgomery Street, taken from over the roof of Anna Mostyn's house. Immediately after he recognized the setting, the characters appeared. He, Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne struggled up the middle of Montgomery Street: he and Ricky looking at the house for as long as they were in frame, Sears looking down as if consciously to give contrast to the shot. There was no sound, and Don could not remember what they had said to each other before marching toward the house. Three faces in fast-cut closeups: their eyebrows crusted with white, they looked like soldiers conducting a mopping-up operation in some Arctic war. Ricky's tired face was obviously that of a man with a bad cold. He was suffering: it was much clearer to Don now than it had been outside the house.

Then a shot of his reaching in through the broken window. An exterior camera followed the three men into the house, tracking them through the kitchen and into the dark hallway. More unheard conversation; a third camera picked up Don and Ricky climbing the stairs, Ricky pointing to the bloodstain. On Ricky's civilized face was the expression of pain he had seen. They parted, and the camera left Don just as he pushed at the door to Anna Mostyn's bedroom.

Don uneasily watched the camera following Ricky up the stairs. A jump-cut to the end of an empty corridor: Ricky seen in silhouette pausing on a landing, then going up to the top floor. Another jump cut: Ricky entering the top floor, trying the first door and entering a room.

Inside the room now: Ricky came through the door with the camera watching him like a hidden assailant. Ricky breathing heavily, looking at the room with open mouth and widening eyes-the room of the nightmare, then, as he had guessed. The camera began to creep toward him. Then it, or the creature it represented, sprang.

Two hands gripped Ricky's neck, choking him. Ricky fought, pushing at his murderer's wrists, but was too weak to break his grip. The hands tightened, and Ricky began to die: not cleanly, as on the television programs this "commercial" imitated, but messily, with streaming eyes and bleeding tongue. His back arched helplessly, fluids streamed from his eyes and nose, his face began to turn black.

Peter Barnes said they can make you see things, Don thought, that's all they're doing now…

Ricky Hawthorne died in front of him, in color on a twenty-six inch screen.

4

Ricky forced himself to open the door of the first bedroom on the top floor of the house. He wished he were home with Stella. She had been very shaken by Lewis's death, though she knew nothing of Peter Barnes's story.

Maybe this is where it ends, he thought, and went through into the bedroom.

And forced himself to stand still: even the breath in his body wanted to flee. It was the room of the dream, and every atom of it seemed pervaded with the Chowder Society's misery. Here they had each sweated and gone cold with fear; on this bed-now with a single gray blanket thrown over the bare mattress-each had struggled helplessly to move. In the prison of that wretched bed they had waited for life to end. The room stood only for death: it was an emblem of death, and its bare cold bleakness was its image.

He remembered that Sears was, or soon would be, in the cellar. But there was no cellar-beast: just as there was no sweating Ricky Hawthorne pinned to the bed. He turned around slowly, taking in all of the room.

On a side wall hung the only anomaly, a small mirror.

(Mirror, mirror on the wall… who's the scaredest of them all?)

(Not I, said the little red hen.)

Ricky went around the bed to approach the mirror. Set opposite the window, it reflected a white section of sky. Tiny flakes of snow drifted across its surface and disappeared at the bottom of the frame.

When Ricky got closer to the mirror a whisper of breeze slid against his face. He bent forward and a sparse handful of snowflakes spun out to touch his cheek.

He made the mistake of looking directly into what he now confusedly thought must be a small window open directly to the weather.

A face appeared before him, a face he knew, wild and lost; then he glimpsed Elmer Scales moving clumsily through the snow; carrying a shotgun. Like the first apparition, the farmer was splashed with blood; the jug-eared face had starved down to skin-covered bone, but in Scales's fierce gauntness was something which forced Ricky to think he saw something beautiful- Elmer always wanted to look at something beautiful: this bubbled to the surface of Ricky's mind and broke. Elmer was screaming into the blaring storm, lifting his gun and shooting at a small form, flipping it over in a spray of blood…

Then Elmer and his target blew away and he was looking at Lewis's back. A naked woman stood in front of Lewis, soundlessly mouthing words. Scripture, he read, then see Scripture in the pond, Lewis? The woman was not living, nor was she beautiful, but Ricky saw the lineaments of returned desire in the dead face and knew he was looking at Lewis's wife. He tried to back away and escape the vision, but found he could not move.

Just when the woman closed on Lewis, both she and he melting into unrecognizable forms, Ricky saw Peter Barnes crouching in a corner of the storm. No-in a building, some building he knew but could not recognize. Some long-familiar corner, a worn carpet, a curved tan wall with a dim light in a sconce… a man like a wolf was bending over terrified Peter Barnes, grinning at him with white prominent teeth. This time there was no melting, merciful snowfall to hide the dreadful thing from Ricky Hawthorne: the creature leaned over cowering Peter Barnes, picked him up and like a lion killing a gazelle, broke his back. Lionlike, it bit into the boy's skin and began to eat.

5

Sears James had inspected the front rooms of the house and found nothing; and nothing, he thought, was what they were most likely to find in all the rest of the house. One empty suitcase scarcely justified going even a foot beyond one's door, in weather like this. He came back into the hall, heard Don walking aimlessly about in a bedroom at the top of the stairs, and made a quick check through the kitchen. Wet footprints, their own, dirtied the floor. A single bleary water glass sat on a dusty counter. An empty sink, empty shelves. Sears chafed his cold hands together and came back out into the dark hallway.

Now Don was banging the walls upstairs-looking for a secret panel, Sears imagined, and shook his head. That all three of them were still alive and prowling through the house proved to Sears that Eva had moved on and left nothing behind.

He opened the door to the cellar. Wooden steps led down into complete blackness. Sears flicked the switch, and a bulb at the top of the steps went on. Its light revealed the steps and concrete floor at their bottom, but seemed to extend only seven or eight feet from the bottom of the steps. Apparently it was the only light; which meant, Sears realized, that the cellar was unused. The Robinsons had never turned the basement into a den or family room.

He went down a few steps and peered into the murk. What he could see looked like any Milburn cellar: extending under the whole of the house, about seven feet high, with walls of painted concrete block. The old furnace sat near the wall at the far end, casting a deep many-armed shadow which met and melted smoothly into the gloom; on one side stood the tall tubular cylinder for hot water and two disconnected iron sinks.

Sears heard a thump from upstairs, and his heart leaped: he was vastly more nervous than he wished to acknowledge. Tilting his head back toward the top of the stairs, he listened for further noises or sounds of distress, but heard none: probably no more than a slamming door.

Come down and play in the dark, Sears.

Sears took a step further down and saw his gigantic shadow advance along the concrete floor. Come on, Sears.

He did not hear the words spoken in his mind, he saw no images or pictures: but he had been commanded, and he followed his bloated shadow down onto the concrete floor.

Come and see the toys I left for you.

He reached the concrete floor and experienced a sick thrill of pleasure that was not his own.

Sears spun around, afraid that something was coming for him from under the wooden staircase. Light banded the concrete in stripes, streaming between the wood: nothing was there. He would have to leave the protection of the light and look into the corners of the cellar.

He moved forward, wishing wholeheartedly that he too had brought a knife, and his shadow melted away into dark. Then all doubt left him. "Oh, my God," he said.

John Jaffrey was stepping out into the shadowy light beside the furnace. "Sears, old friend," he said. His voice was toneless. "Thank heavens you're here. They told me you would be, but I didn't know-I mean I-" He shook his head. "It's all been so confused."

"Stay away from me," Sears said.

"I saw Milly," John said. "And do you know, Milly just won't let me in the house. But I warned her. I mean, I told her to warn you-and the others. About something. Can't remember now." He lifted his sunken face and twisted his mouth into a ghastly smile. "I went over. Isn't that what Fenny said to you? In your story? That's right. I went over, and now Milly won't-won't open-ah-" He raised his hand to his forehead. "Oh, it's just awful, Sears. Can't you help me?"

Sears was backing away from him, unable to speak.

"Please. Funny. Here in this place again. They made me come here-wait for you. Please help me, Sears. Thank heavens you're here."

Jaffrey lurched into the light, and Sears saw fine gray dust covering his face and outstretched hands, his bare feet. Jaffrey was moving in a painful, senile circle, his eyes too seemingly covered by a mixture of dust and drying tears-this spoke of more pain than his addled words and shuffling walk, and Sears, who remembered Peter Barnes's story about Lewis, at last felt more pity than fear.

"Yes, John," he said, and Dr. Jaffrey, apparently unable to see in the light from the naked bulb, turned toward his voice.

Sears went forward to touch Dr. Jaffrey's extended hand. At the last minute he closed his eyes. A tingling sensation passed through his fingers and traveled halfway up his arm. When he opened his eyes, John was no longer there.

He stumbled into the staircase, painfully bumping his ribs. Toys. Sears began mechanically to rub his hand against his coat: would he have to find more creatures shambling and dazed like John?

But no, that was not what he would have to do. Sears soon discovered the reason for the plural noun. He walked out of the light toward the furnace and saw a heap of clothing dumped by the far wall. A pile of discarded boots and rags: it was eerily like the scrubby bodies of the sheep on Elmer Scales's farm. He wanted to turn away: all the truly bad things had begun back there, with him and Ricky freezing on a cold white hill. Sears saw a flaccid hand, a swirl of blond hair. Then he recognized one of the rags as Christina Barnes's coat; it lay flat, nearly empty, flung over a second flattened and emptied body, and it enveloped a gray deflated thing ending in blond hair which was Christina's body.

Instinctively, the shout escaping him, he called for the other two; then Sears forced control on himself and went to the bottom of the stairs and began methodically, loudly, shamelessly to repeat their names.

6

"So you three found them," Hardesty said. "You look pretty shook up, too." Sears and Ricky were seated on a couch in John Jaffrey's house, Don in a chair immediately beside them. The sheriff, still wearing his coat and hat, was leaning against the mantel, trying to disguise the fact that he was very angry. The wet traces of his footprints on the carpet, a source of evident irritation to Milly Sheehan until Hardesty had sent her out of the room, showed a circling path of firm heelprints and squared-off toes.

"So do you," Sears said.

"Yeah. Suppose I do. I never saw bodies like those two, exactly. Even Freddy Robinson wasn't that bad. You ever seen bodies like that, Sears James? Hey?"

Sears shook his head.

"No. You're damn right. Nobody ever did. And I'm gonna have to store 'em up in the jail until the meat wagon can get in here. And I'm the poor son of a bitch who has to take Mrs. Hardie and Mr. Barnes along to see those goddamned things to identify them. Unless you'd like to do that for me, Mr. James?"

"It's your job, Walt," Sears said.

"Shit. My job, is it? My job is finding out who did what to those people-and you two old buzzards just sit there, don't you? You found 'em by accident I suppose. Just happened to break into that particular house, just happened to be taking a walk on a goddamned day like this, I suppose, and just thought you'd try a little housebreaking-Jesus, I oughta lock all three of you in the same cell with them. Along with torn-up Lewis Benedikt and that nigger de Souza and the Griffen boy who froze to death because his hippy mommy and daddy were too cheap to put a heater in his room. God damn. That's what I ought to do, all right." Hardesty, now entirely unable to hide his anger, spat into the fireplace and kicked at the fender. "Jesus, I live in that fucking jail, I really oughta haul you three assholes along and see how you like it."

"Walt," Sears said. "Cool down."

"Sure. By God, if you two weren't nothin' but a couple of hundred-year-old lawyers with teeth in the palms of your hands, I'd do it."

"I mean, Walt," Sears calmly said, "if you will stop insulting us for a moment, that we'll tell you who killed Jim Hardie and Mrs. Barnes. And Lewis."

"You will. Hot damn. Guess I don't have to get out the rubber hoses after all."

Silence for a moment: then Hardesty said, "Well? I'm still here."

"It was the woman who calls herself Anna Mostyn."

"Swell. Just dandy. Okay. Anna Mostyn. Okay. It was her house, so she's the one. Good work. Now. What did she do, suck 'em dry, like a hound'll do to an egg? And who held 'em down, because I know no woman could have taken that crazy Hardie kid by herself. Huh?"

"She did have help," Sears said. "It was a man who calls himself Gregory Bate or Benton. Now hold on to yourself, Walt, because here comes the difficult part. Bate has been dead for almost fifty years. And Anna Mostyn-"

He stopped. Hardesty had clamped both eyes shut.

Ricky took it up. "Sheriff, in a way you were right about all this from the beginning. Remember when we looked at Elmer Scales's sheep? And you told us about other incidents, lots of them, that happened in the sixties?"

Hardesty's bloodshot eyes flew open.

"It's the same thing," Ricky said. "That is, we think it's probably the same thing. But here, they're out to kill people."

"So what's this Anna Mostyn?" Hardesty asked, his body rigid. "A ghost? A vampire?"

"Something like that," Sears said. "A shapeshifter, but those words will do."

"Where is she now?"

"That's why we went to her house. To see if we could find anything."

"And that's what you're gonna tell me. Nothing more."

"There is no more," Sears said.

"I wonder if anyone can lie like a hundred-year-old lawyer," Hardesty said, and spat once more into the fire. "Okay. Now let me tell you something. I'm going to put out a bulletin on this Anna Mostyn, and that's all she wrote. That's all I'm gonna do. You two old buzzards and this kid here can spend the rest of the winter ghost-hunting, for all I'm concerned. You're screwball-as far as I'm concerned, you're plumb outta your heads. And if I get some goddamned killer who drinks beer and eats hamburgers and takes his kid out for a drive on Sundays, then I'm gonna call you up and laugh in your faces. And I'll see that people around here never stop laughing when they hear your names. You understand me?"

"Don't shout at us, Walt," Sears said. "I'm sure we all understand what you said. And we understand one thing more."

"Just what the hell is that?"

"That you're frightened, Sheriff. But you have a lot of company."

Conversation with G

7

"Are you really a sailor, G?"

"Um."

"Did you go lots of places?"

"Yes."

"How come you can hang around Milburn so long? Don't you have a ship to get back to?"

"Shore leave."

"Why don't you ever want to do anything but go to the movies?"

"No reason."

"Well, I just like being with you."

"Um."

"But why don't you ever take off your shades?"

"No reason."

"Someday I'll take them off."

"Later."

"Promise?"

"Promise."

Conversation with Stella

8

"Ricky, what's happening to us? What's happening to Milburn?"

"A terrible thing. I don't want to tell you now. There'll be time when it's all over."

"You're frightening me."

"I'm frightened too."

"Well, I'm frightened because you're frightened." For a time, the Hawthornes simply held each other.

"You know what killed Lewis, don't you?"

"I think so."

"Well, I discovered an astonishing thing about myself. I can be a coward. So please don't tell me. I know I asked, but don't. I just want to know it'll end."

"Sears and I will make it end. With young Wanderley's help."

"He can help you?"

"He can. He has already."

"If only this terrible snow would stop."

"Yes. But it won't."

"Ricky, have I given you an awful time?" Stella propped herself up on an elbow to look into his eyes.

"A worse time than most women would," he said. "But I rarely wanted any other women."

"I am sorry that I ever had to cause you pain. Ricky, I've never cared for any man as much as I have cared for you. Despite my adventures. You know that's all over, don't you?"

"I guessed."

"He was an appalling man. He was in my car, and I just overwhelmingly realized how much better than he you were. So I made him get out." Stella smiled. "He shouted at me. It seems I am a bitch."

"At times you certainly are."

"At times. You know, he must have found Lewis's body right after that."

"Ah. I wondered what he was doing up there."

Silence: Ricky held his wife's shoulder, aware of her timeless profile beside him. If she had not looked like that could he have endured it so long? Yet if she had not looked like that, she would not have been Stella- it was an impossible speculation.

"Tell me something, baby," she breathed. "Who was this other woman you used to want?"

Ricky laughed; then both of them, at least for a time, were laughing.

9

Motionless days: Milburn lay frozen under the accumulating snow. Garage owners took their telephones off their hooks, knowing they already had too much snowplow business with their regular customers; Omar Norris carried a bottle in each of his coat's deep pockets, and rammed the city's plow into twice his usual quota of parked cars-he was on triple time, often plowing the same streets two or three times a day, and sometimes when he got back to the municipal garage, Omar was so drunk that he simply rolled onto a cot in the foreman's office instead of going home. Copies of The Urbanite stood in wrapped bundles at the back of the print room-the newsboys couldn't get to their collection points. Finally Ned Rowles shut the paper down for a week and sent everybody home with a Christmas bonus. "In this weather," he told his staff, "nothing's going to happen except more of this weather. Have yourselves a merry little Christmas."

But even in an immobilized town, things happen. Dozens of cars went off the roads and stayed nose down for days, buried under fresh drifts. Walter Barnes sat in his television room nursing a succession of drinks and watched an endless round of giveaway shows with the sound turned off. Peter cooked their meals. "I could understand a lot of things," Barnes told his son, "but I sure as hell can't understand that." And went back to his quiet, nonstop drinking. One Friday night, Clark Mulligan put the first reel of Night of the Living Dead back in the projector for the Saturday-noon showing, turned off all the lights, flipped the broken lock on the fire door and decided once again not to bother with it and went back out into the blizzard to find Penny Draeger's body lying half-covered with snow beside an abandoned car. He slapped her face and rubbed her wrists, but nothing he could do would put breath back in her throat or change the expression on her face-G had finally allowed her to take off his dark glasses.

And Elmer Scales finally met the man from Mars.

10

It happened on the day before Christmas. The date meant nothing to Elmer. For weeks he had done his chores in a blind rage of impatience, cuffing his children if they came too close and leaving the Christmas arrangements to his wife-she had bought the presents and put up the tree, having given up on Elmer until he realized that what he was waiting up for every night didn't exist and never would wait around to get shot. On Christmas Eve Mrs. Scales and the children went to bed early, leaving Elmer sitting with the shotgun across his lap and his paper and pencil on the table to his right.

Elmer's chair faced his picture window, and with the lights off, he could see about as far as the barn- a big shape in the darkness. Except for where he had shoveled, the snow was waist-high: enough to slow down any sort of creature who was after more of his animals. Elmer did not need light to scribble down the random lines he thought of: by now he did not even have to look at the paper. He could write while staring out the window.

summers them old trees was high enough to glide from

and

Lord Lord farmings a ballbreaking business

and

somethings not a squirrel scratching under the eaves-

lines he knew would come to nothing, were not poetry, were nonsense, but which he had to write down anyhow because they came into his mind. At times they were joined by other lines, part of a conversation someone was having with his father, and these fragments too he wrote down: Warren, can we borrow your automobile? We promise to bring it back real soon. Real soon. Got urgent business.

Sometimes it seemed his father was there in the dark room with him, trying to explain something about the old plow horses he'd finally replaced with a John Deere, trying to say that those were good horses, you got to care for them boy, they done good by us, those five kids you got could get a lot of pleasure outta nice old horses like that-horses dead for twenty-five years! -trying to tell him something about the car. Watch them two lawyer boys, sonny, banged up my car and lost it, drove it into a swamp or something, gave me cash dollars but nobody can trust boys like that, no matter how rich they daddies are-creaky old voice getting at him just like when the old man was alive. Elmer wrote it all down, getting it mixed up with the poetry that wasn't poetry.

Then he saw a shape gliding toward the window, coming toward him through the snow and night with shining eyes. Elmer dropped the pencil and jerked up the shotgun, nearly firing both barrels through the picture window before he realized that the creature was not running away-that it knew he was there and was coming for him.

Elmer kicked away the chair and stood up. He patted his pockets to make sure he was carrying the extra shells, and then lifted the shotgun and sighted down the barrel, waiting for the thing to get close enough for him to see what it really was.

As it advanced, he began to doubt. If it knew he was there, waiting to blast it all the way back to the barn, why wasn't it running away? He cocked the hammers. The thing was coming up his walk, going between the two big drifts, and Elmer finally saw that it was much shorter than what he had seen before.

Then it left the walk and came over the snow to press its face against the window and he saw that it was a child.

Elmer lowered the gun, numb with confusion. He could not shoot a child. The face at the window peered in at him with a frantic, lost appeal-it was the face of misery, of every human wretchedness. With those yellow eyes, it begged him to come out, to give it rescue.

Elmer moved to the door, hearing his father's voice behind him. He paused with his hand on the doorknob, the shotgun dangling from his other hand, and then opened the door.

Freezing air, powdery snow blew in his face. The child was standing on the walk with its head averted. Someone said, "Thank you, Mr. Scales." Elmer jerked his head back and saw the tall man standing on the snowdrift to his left. Way up there, balancing on the snow like a feather, he was smiling gently down at the farmer. His face was ivory, and his eyes were vibrant accumulations of-it seemed to Elmer-a hundred shades of gold.

He was the most beautiful man Elmer had ever seen, and Elmer knew that he could not shoot him if he stood in front of him for a decade with a loaded and cocked shotgun.

"You-why-uh," Elmer managed to say.

"Precisely, Mr. Scales," the beautiful man said, and effortlessly stepped down from the snowbank onto the path. When he was facing Elmer, the golden eyes seemed to shimmer with wisdom.

"You're no Martian," Elmer said. He did not even feel the cold anymore.

"Why, of course not. I'm part of you, Elmer. You can see that, can't you?"

Elmer nodded dumbly.

The beautiful thing put a hand on Elmer's shoulder. "I'm here to talk to you about your family. You'd like to come with us, wouldn't you, Elmer?"

Elmer nodded again.

"Then there are a few details you have to take care of. At the moment you're slightly-encumbered? You cannot imagine the harm done to you by the people around you, Elmer. I am afraid there are things about them you have to know."

"Tell me," Elmer said.

"With pleasure. And then you will know what to do?"

Elmer blinked.

11

Some hours later on Christmas Eve, Walt Hardesty woke up in his office and noticed that the brim of his Stetson bore a new stain-he had knocked over a glass while sleeping at his desk, and the small amount of bourbon remaining in the glass had soaked into his hat. "Assholes," he pronounced, meaning the deputies, then remembered that the deputies had gone home hours before and would not return for two days. He uprighted the glass and blinked around him. The light in his untidy office hurt his eyes but seemed oddly pale-dim and somehow pinkish, as if on some early morning of a Kansas spring forty years before. Hardesty coughed and rubbed his eyes, feeling a little like that bozo in the old story who went to sleep one day and woke up with white hair and a long beard, about a hundred years older. "Rip van Shitstorm," he muttered, and worked for a while at clearing the phlegm from his throat. After that he tried to blot the hatbrim on his shirtsleeve, but the stain, though still damp, had set. He lifted the hat to his nose: County Fair. Well, what the hell, he thought, and sucked at the coffee-colored stain. Lint, dust a faint trace of bourbon came into his mouth along with the disagreeable flavor of wet felt.

Hardesty went to the sink in his office, rinsed out his mouth, and bent down to look into the mirror. There was Rip van Shitstorm indeed, the famous hat-sucker, a sight which gave him no pleasure, and he was about to turn away when he finally recorded that behind him and to his left, just visible over his shoulder, the door to the utility cells was open wide.

And that was impossible. He unlocked that door only when Leon Churchill or some other deputy brought in another body waiting to be shipped up to the county morgue-the last time it had been Penny Draeger, her long silky black hair fouled and matted with dirt and snow. Hardesty had lost track of time since the discovery of Jim Hardie's and Mrs. Barnes's bodies and the beginning of the heavy snow, but he thought that Penny Draeger must have come in at least two days ago-that door had stayed locked ever since. But now it was open-open to its fullest extent-as if one of the bodies back there had strolled out, seen him sleeping with his head on his cheek, and turned around to go back to its cell and its sheet.

He walked past the file cabinets and his battered desk to the door, swung it back and forth reflectively for a moment, and then went through to the corridor which led to the cells. Here stood a tall metal door which he had not touched since leaving the Draeger girl's body; and it too was unlocked.

"Jesus H. Christ," Hardesty said, for while the deputies had keys to the first door, only he had the key to this, and he had not even looked at the metal door for two days. He took the big key from the ring which hung beside his holster, fit it into the slot, and heard the mechanism clicking shut, driving the bolt. He looked at the key for a second, as if trying to see if it would open the door by itself, and then experimented by unlocking it: difficult as ever, the key taking a lot of pressure before it would move. He began to pull the door open, almost afraid to look behind it to the cells.

He remembered the screwball story Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne had tried to tell him: something out of Clark Mulligan's horror movies. A smokescreen for whatever they really knew, a thing you'd have to be crazy to believe. If they had been younger, he would have swung on both of them. They were ridiculing him, hiding something. If they weren't lawyers…

He heard a noise from the cells.

Hardesty yanked at the door and stepped through onto the narrow concrete walkway between the utility cells. Even in the darkness, the air seemed full of some dirty pink light, hazy and very faint. The bodies lay beneath their sheets, mummies in a museum. He could not have heard a noise, not possibly; unless he had heard the jail itself creaking.

He realized that he was frightened, and detested himself for it. He couldn't even tell who most of them were any more, there were so many of them, so many sheet-covered bodies… but the corpses in the first cell on his right, he knew, were Jim Hardie and Mrs. Barnes, and those two were never going to make any more noise again ever.

He looked into their cell through the bars. Their bodies were on the hard floor beneath the cot against the far wall, two still white forms. Nothing wrong there. Wait a second, he thought, trying to remember the day he had put them in the cell. Didn't he put Mrs. Barnes on top of the bunk? He was almost certain… he peered in at them. Now wait, now just hold it up a minute here, he thought, and even in the cold of the unheated cells, began to sweat. A white-covered little parcel that could only be the Griffen baby-frozen to death in his own bed-lay on the cot. "Now just wait a goddamned second," he said, "that can't be." He'd put the Griffen baby with de Souza, in a cell on the other side of the corridor.

What he wanted to do was lock the doors behind him again and open a fresh bottle-get out of this place right away-but he pushed open the cell door and stepped in. There had to be some explanation: one of the deputies had come back here and rearranged the bodies, made a little more room… but that too couldn't be, they never came back here without him… he saw Christina Barnes's blond hair leaking out from beneath the edge of her sheet. Just a second before the sheet had been tucked securely around her head.

He backed away toward the cell door, now absolutely unable to stand so near the body of Christina Barnes, and when he had reached the threshold of the cell looked wildly around at the other bodies. They all seemed subtly different, as if they'd moved an inch or so, rolled over and crossed their legs while his back had been turned. He stood in the entrance to the cell, now unpleasantly conscious that his back was turned to all those other bodies, but unable to stop looking at Christina Barnes. He thought that even more of her hair was frothing out from beneath the sheet.

When he glanced at the little form on the cot, Hardesty's stomach slammed up into his throat. As if the dead child had wriggled forward in its sheet, the top of its bald round head protruded through an opening in the sheet-a grotesque parody of birth.

Hardesty jumped backward out of the cell into the dark corridor. Though he could not see them moving, he had a wild, panicky sense that all of the bodies in the cells were in motion-that if he stayed back here in the dark a second longer, they would point toward him like the needles of a dozen magnets.

From an end cell, one he knew was empty, came a dry rasping voiceless sound. A chuckle. This empty sound of mirth unfolded in his mind, more a thought than a sound. Hardesty backed nervelessly down the corridor until he thumped into the edge of the metal door, then whirled around it and slammed it shut.

Edward's Tapes

12

Don leaned against the window, looking anxiously toward Haven Lane-they should have arrived fifteen or twenty minutes earlier. Unless Sears was in charge. If Sears had insisted on driving, Don had no idea how long the journey from Ricky's house would take. Crawling at five or ten miles an hour through the streets, risking collision at every intersection and stoplight: at least they could not be killed, going at Sears's speed. But they could be isolated, away from what they assumed was the safety of Ricky's and his uncle's houses. If they were out there alone in the snow, on foot, their car off the road, Gregory could close in, talking amiably, waiting until they moved or ran.

Don turned from the window and said to Peter Barnes, "Want some coffee?"

"I'm fine," the boy said. "Do you see them coming?"

"Not yet. They'll be here."

"It's a terrible night. The worst yet."

"Well, I'm sure they'll be here soon," Don said. "Your father didn't mind your leaving the house on Christmas Eve?"

"No," Peter said, and looked truly unhappy for the first time that night. "He's-I guess he's mourning. He didn't even ask me where I was going." Peter kept his intelligent face steady, not permitting his grief to demonstrate itself in the tears Don knew were close.

Don went back to the window and leaned forward, pressing his hands on the cold glass. "I see someone coming."

Peter stood up behind him.

"Yes. They're stopping. It's them."

"Mr. James is staying with Mr. Hawthorne now?"

"It was their idea. We all felt safer that way." He watched Sears and Ricky leave the car and begin to fight their way up the walk.

"I want to tell you something," Peter said behind him, and Don turned to look at the tall boy. "I'm really glad you're here."

"Peter," Don said, "if we get these things before they get us, it'll be mostly because of you."

"We will," Peter said quietly, and as Don went to the door he knew that he and the boy were equally grateful for each other's company.

"Come in," he said to the two older men. "Peter is already here. How's your cold, Ricky?"

Ricky Hawthorne shook his head. "Stable. You have something you want us to listen to?"

"On my uncle's tapes. Let me help you with your coats."

A minute later he was leading them down the hall. "I had quite a struggle to find the right tapes," he said. "My uncle never marked the boxes he kept them in." He opened the door to the office. "That's why the place looks like this." Empty white boxes and spools of tape covered the floor. Other white boxes littered the desk.

Sears knocked a spool of tape off a chair and lowered himself into it; Ricky and Peter sat on camp chairs against a book-lined wall.

Don went behind the desk. "I guess Uncle Edward had some sort of filing system, but I never found out what it was. I had to go through everything before finding the Moore tapes." He sat down behind the desk. "If I were another kind of novelist, I'd never have to dream up a plot again. My uncle was told more dirt off the record than Woodward and Bernstein."

"At any rate," Sears said, extending his legs deliberately to push over a stack of white boxes, "you found them. And you want us to listen to something. Let's get to it."

"Drinks are on the table," Don said. "You'll need it. Help yourselves." While Ricky and Sears poured whiskey for themselves and Peter took a Coke, Don described his uncle's taping technique.

"He'd just let the recorder run-he wanted to get everything the subject said. During the formal taping sessions, of course, but also during meals, having drinks, watching television-to catch anything the subject came up with. So from time to time, the subject would be left alone in a room with a tape recorder running. We're going to listen to a couple of moments when that happened."

Don swiveled his chair around and pushed the "on" button of the recorder on the shelf behind him. "This is set just about on the right spot. I won't have to tell you what to listen for." He pushed the "play" button, and Edward Wanderley's voice filled the room, floating down from the big speakers perched up behind the desk.

"So he beat you because of the money you spent on acting lessons?"

A girlish voice answered. "No. He beat me because I existed."

"How do you feel about it now?"

Silence for a time: then the other voice said, "Could you get me a drink, please? It's difficult for me to talk about this."

"Sure, of course, I understand. Campari soda?"

"You remembered. Lovely."

"I'll be right back."

Noises of the desk chair squeaking, footsteps; the door closed.

In the few seconds of quiet which followed, Don kept his eyes on Sears and Ricky. They watched the spools of tape hissing through the heads.

"Are my old friends listening to me now?" It was another voice: older, brisker, drier. "I want to say hello to all of you."

"It's Eva," Sears said. "That's Eva Galli's voice." Instead of fear, his face showed anger. Ricky Hawthorne looked as if his cold had just grown much worse.

"We parted, the last time we all met, so ignominiously, that I wanted all of you to know that I remember you very well. You, dear Ricky; and you, Sears-what a dignified man you became! And you, handsome Lewis. How lucky you are to be listening today! Haven't you ever wondered what would have happened if you had gone into the girl's room instead of letting your wife answer her call? And poor ugly John-let me thank you in advance for having such a wonderful party. I am going to enjoy myself enormously at your party, John, and I am going to leave a present behind-a token of future presents to all of you."

Don took the reel off the recorder, said, "Don't say anything now. Listen to the next one first." He put on a second reel and advanced it to a number he had written on a pad. Then he pushed the "play" button again.

Edward Wanderley: "Do you want to take a break for a little while? I could make us some lunch."

"Please. Don't worry about me. I'll just stay here and look at your books until everything's ready."

After Edward left the room, Eva Galli's voice came again through the speakers.

"Hello, my old friends. And are you joined by a young friend?"

"Not you, Peter," Don said. "Me."

"Is Don Wanderley with you? Don, I look forward to seeing you again too. For I will, you know. I will visit each of you and thank you in person for the treatment you gave me some time ago. I hope you are looking forward to the extraordinary things in store for you." Then she paused, using the spacing of the sentences to form separate paragraphs.

"I will take you places where you have never been.

"And I will see the life run out of you.

"And I will see you die like insects. Insects."

Don switched off the machine. "There's one more tape I want to play, but you can see why I thought you ought to hear them."

Ricky still looked shaken. "She knew. She knew we were all going to sit here… and listen to her. To her threats."

"But she spoke to Lewis and John," Sears said. "That's rather leading."

"Exactly. You see what that means. She can't predict things, she can just make good guesses. She thought one of you would go through these tapes shortly after my uncle's death. And stew over them for a year, until she celebrated the anniversary of Edward's death by killing John Jaffrey. Obviously she thought you would write to me, and that I would come out to take possession of the house. Of course putting my name on that tape meant that you would have to get in touch with me. It was always part of her plan that I come here."

Ricky said, "As it was we stewed pretty well on our own."

"I think she caused your nightmares. Anyhow, she wanted all of us here so that she could get us one by one. Now I want you to hear the last tape." He removed the spent reel from the machine and took up the third reel beside him and placed it on the recorder.

A lilting southern voice came through the big speakers.

"Don. Didn't we have a wonderful time together? Didn't we love each other, Don? I hated leaving you- really, I was heartbroken when I left Berkeley. Do you remember the smell of burning leaves when you walked me home, and the dog barking streets away? It was all so lovely, Don. And look at what a wonderful thing you made of it! I was so proud of you. You thought and thought about me, and you came so close. I wanted you to see, I wanted you to see everything and have your mind open up to all the possibilities we represent -right through the stories about Tasker Martin and the X.X.X.-"

He switched it off. "Alma Mobley," he said. "I don't think you have to hear the rest of it."

Peter Barnes stirred in his chair. "What's she trying to do?"

"To convince us of her omnipotence. To get us so scared that we'll give up." He leaned forward over the desk. "But these tapes prove that she's not omnipotent. She makes mistakes. So her ghouls can make mistakes. They can be defeated."

"Well, you're not Knute Rockne and this isn't the big game," Sears said. "I'm going home. To Ricky's home, that is. Unless there are other ghosts you want us to hear."

Surprisingly, Peter answered him. "Mr. James, pardon me, but I think you're wrong. This is the big game-it's a stupid term and I know that's why you used it, but getting rid of these horrible things is the most important thing we'll ever do. And I'm glad we found out that they can make mistakes. I think it's wrong to be sarcastic about it. You wouldn't act like that if you ever saw them-if you ever saw them kill someone."

Don waited resignedly for Sears to crush the boy, but the lawyer merely drained his whiskey and leaned forward to speak quietly to Peter. "You forget I have seen them. I knew Eva Galli, and I saw her sit up after she was dead. And I know the beast who killed your mother, and his pathetic little brother-the one who held you and made you watch-I knew him too. When he was merely a retarded schoolboy I tried to save him from Gregory, just as you must have tried to save your mother, and like you I failed. And like you I am morally offended to hear that creature's voice, in any of her guises-I am morally outraged to hear that preening voice. It is unspeakable, that she taunts us in this way, after what she has done. I suppose I meant only that I would be more comfortable with some specific action." He stood up. "I am an old man, and I am accustomed to expressing myself in whatever manner I please. Sometimes I fear I am rude." Sears smiled at the boy. "That too might be morally offensive. But I hope that you live long enough to enjoy the pleasure of it."

If I ever need a lawyer, Don thought, you're the one I want.

It seemed to have worked for the boy as well. "I don't know if I'd have your style," Peter said, returning the old man's smile.

And so, Don reflected after everyone had left, the voices on the tapes had failed: the tapes had drawn the four of them even closer together. Peter's comment to Sears had been expressed in an adolescent fashion, but it had been a tribute all the same; and Sears had shown his enjoyment of it.

Don went back to the tape recorder: Alma Mobley lay within it, trapped on a few spools of coated amber stuff.

Frowning, he pushed the "play" button. Silky at first, sunny, her voice resumed.

"-and Alan McKechnie and all the other stories I used to hide the truth from you. It's true, I did want you to see: your intuition was better than anyone else's. Even Florence de Peyser became curious about you. But what good would it have done? Like your 'Rachel Varney,' I have lived since the times when your continent was lighted only by small fires in the forest, since Americans dressed in hides and feathers, and even then our kinds have abhorred each other. Your kind is so bland and smug and confident on the surface: and so neurotic and fearful and campfire-hugging within. In truth, we abhor you because we find you boring. We could have poisoned your civilization ages ago, but voluntarily lived on its edges, causing eruptions and feuds and local panics. We chose to live in your dreams and imaginations because only there are you interesting.

"Don, you make a grave mistake if you underestimate us. Could you defeat a cloud, a dream, a poem? You are at the mercy of your human imaginations, and when you look for us, you should always look in the places of your imagination. In the places of your dreams. But despite all this talk about imagination, we are implacably real, as real as bullets and knives-for aren't they too tools of the imagination?-and if we want to frighten you it is to frighten you to death. For you are going to die, Donald. First your uncle, then the doctor, then Lewis. Then Sears, and after Sears, Ricky. And then you and whomever you have enlisted to help you. In fact, Donald, you are dead already. You are finished. And Milburn is finished with you." Now the Louisiana accent had vanished; even femininity had gone from the voice. It was a voice with no human resonance at all. "I am going to shatter Milburn, Donald. My friends and I will tear the soul from this pathetic town and crush its bare bones between our teeth."

A hissing silence followed: Don yanked the tape from the machine and tossed it into a cardboard box. In twenty minutes he had all his uncle's tapes in boxes. He carried the cartons into the living room and methodically fed all of the tapes into the wood fire, where they smoked and curled and stank and finally melted down to black bubbles on the burning logs. If Alma could see him, he knew, she'd be laughing.

You're dead already, Donald.

"Like hell I am," he said out loud. He remembered the haggard face of Eleanor Hardie, into which age had so suddenly burrowed; Alma had been laughing at him and the Chowder Society for decades, belittling their achievements and engineering their tragedies, hiding in the dark behind a false face, waiting for the moment to jump out and say boo.

And Milburn is finished with you.

"Not if we can get to you first," he said into the fire. "Not if this time we shoot the lynx."

III - The Last of the Chowder

Society

"Could you defeat a cloud, a dream, a poem?"

-Alma Mobley

"And what is innocence?" Narcissus enquired of his friend.

"It is to imagine that your life is a secret," his friend replied.

"Most particularly, to imagine it a secret between yourself

and a mirror."

"I see," Narcissus said. "It is the illness for

which mirror-gazing is the cure."

1

Near seven o'clock Ricky Hawthorne rolled over in bed and groaned. Feelings of panic, of emergency, filled him, making the darkness admonitory: he had to get out of bed, get moving, to avert some terrible tragedy. "Ricky?" Stella uttered beside him. "Fine, fine," he answered, and sat up in bed. The window at the far end of the room showed dark gray shot through with lazily falling snow-flakes so big they looked like snowballs. Ricky's heartbeat sounded: doom, doom. Someone was in terrible danger; in the instant before shooting into wakefulness, he'd seen an image and known-rendingly -who it was. Now all he knew was that it was impossible for him to stay in bed. He raised the covers and put one leg over the side.

"Was it your nightmare again, baby?" Stella whispered hoarsely.

"No. No, not that. "I'll be okay, Stella." He patted her shoulder and left the bed. The urgency clung. Ricky slid his feet into his slippers, pulled a robe over his pajamas, and padded to the window.

"Honey, you're upset, come back to bed."

"I can't" He rubbed his face: still that wild feeling, trapped in his chest like a bird, that someone he knew was in mortal danger. Snow transformed Ricky's back yard into a range of shifting and dimpled hills.

It was the snow which reminded him: the snow blowing through a mirror in Eva Galli's house, and a glimpse of Elmer Scales, his face distorted by an obligation to a commanding and cruel beauty, running raggedly through the drifts. Raising a shotgun: turning a small form into a spray of blood. Ricky's stomach savagely bent in on itself, shooting pain down into his bowels. He pressed a hand into the soft flesh below his navel and groaned again. Elmer Scales's farm. Where the last stage of the Chowder Society's agony had begun.

"Ricky, what's wrong?"

"Something I saw in a mirror," he said, straightening up now that the pain had dissolved, aware that his statement would be nonsense to Stella. "I mean, something about Elmer Scales. I have to get out to his farm."

"Ricky, it's seven o'clock on Christmas morning."

"Makes no difference."

"You can't. Call him up first."

"Yes," he said, already on his way out of the bedroom, going past Stella's white, startled face. "I'll try that."

He was on the landing outside the bedroom, still with that wakening emergency sounding along his veins (doom, doom) and was torn for a second between rushing into the wardrobe closet and throwing on some clothes so he'd be ready to leave and running downstairs to the telephone.

A noise from downstairs decided him. Ricky put his hand on the banister and descended.

Sears, fully dressed and with the fur-collared coat over his arm, was just coming out of the kitchen. The look of aggressive blandness which was Sears's lifelong expression was gone: his old friend's face was as taut as he knew his own to be.

"You, too," Sears said. "I'm sorry."

"I just woke up," Ricky said. "I know what you're feeling-I want to go with you."

"Don't interfere," Sears said. "All I'm going to do is get out there, have a look around and make sure everything's all right. I feel like a cat on a griddle."

"Stella had a good idea. Let's try to call him first. Then the two of us will go together."

Sears shook his head. "You'll slow me down, Ricky. I'll be safer alone."

"Come on." Ricky put a hand on Sears's elbow and steered him back to the couch. "Nobody's going anywhere until we try the telephone. After that we can talk about what to do."

"There's nothing to talk about," Sears said, but sat down anyhow. He twisted his body to watch Ricky lift the phone off its stand and place it on the coffee table. "You know his number?"

"Of course," Ricky said, and dialed. Elmer Scales's telephone, rang; and rang again; and again. "I'll give him more time," Ricky said, and let it go for ten rings, then twelve. He heard it again: doom, doom, that frantic pulse.

"It's no good," Sears said, "I'd better go. Probably won't make it anyhow, on these roads."

"Sears, it's still early morning," Ricky said, putting down the phone. "Maybe nobody heard it ringing."

"At seven-" Sears looked at his watch. "At seven-ten on Christmas morning? In a house with five children? Does that sound likely to you? I know something is wrong out there, and if I can get there at all, I might be able to stop it from getting worse. I don't intend to wait for you to get dressed." Sears stood up and began putting on his coat.

"At least call Hardesty and let him go out there instead. You know what I saw, back in that house."

"That is a feeble joke, Ricky. Hardesty? Don't be foolish. Elmer won't shoot at me. We both know that."

"I know he won't," Ricky said miserably. "But I'm worried, Sears. This is something Eva's doing-like what she did to John. We should not let her split us up. If we go running in all directions she can get to us- destroy us. We ought to call Don and get him to come with us. Oh, I know something terrible is happening out there, I'm convinced of it, but you'll court something even worse if you try to go there by yourself."

Sears looked down at pleading Ricky Hawthorne, and the impatience on his face melted. "Stella would never forgive me if I let you take that wretched cold outside again. And it would take Don half an hour or more to get there. You can't make me wait, Ricky."

"I could never make you do anything you didn't want to do."

"Correct," Sears said, and buttoned his coat.

"You're not expendable, Sears."

"Who is? Can you name one person you think is expendable, Ricky? I've lost too much time already, so don't make me hang around while you try to justify naming Hitler or Albert de Salvo or Richard Speck or-"

"What in the world are you two talking about?" Stella was in the entrance of the living room, smoothing down her hair with the palms of her hands.

"Nail your husband to the couch and pour hot whiskey into him until I get back," Sears said.

"Don't let him go, Stella," Ricky said. "He can't go alone."

"Is it urgent?" she asked.

"For heaven's sake," Sears muttered, and Ricky nodded.

"Then he'd better go. I hope he can get the car started."

Sears moved toward the hallway, and Stella stepped aside to let him pass. But before he went into the hall, he turned back to look once more at Ricky and Stella. "I'll be back. Don't fret about me, Ricky."

"You realize it's probably too late already."

"It's probably been too late for fifty years," Sears said. Then he turned and was gone.

2

Sears put on his hat and went outside into the coldest morning he could remember. His ears and the tip of his nose immediately began to sting; a moment later the unprotected part of his forehead was also blazing with cold. He moved carefully down the slippery walk, noticing that the previous night's snow had been the lightest in three weeks-only five or six inches of fresh snow lay on the old, and that meant that he had a good chance of being able to take the big Lincoln out onto the highway.

The key stuck halfway into the lock: cursing with impatience, Sears yanked it out and removed a glove to search his pockets for his cigar lighter. The cold bit and tore at his fingers, but the lighter snapped out its flame; Sears played it back and forth over the key, and just when his fingers felt as though they were about to drop off, slotted the key neatly into the lock. He opened the door and slid himself onto the leather seat.

Then the interminable business of starting the engine: Sears ground his teeth and tried to get the engine to turn over by willing it. He saw Elmer Scales's face as he had when coming awake, staring at him with dazed unfocused eyes and saying You gotta get out here, Mr. James, I don't know what I been doin', just get here for Chrissake… the engine gnashed and sputtered, then mercifully caught. Sears fluttered the gas pedal, making the engine roar and then rocked the car back and forth to roll it out of its depression and through the snow which had built up around it.

After he got the car pointed out onto the street, Sears took the ice tool from the dashboard and pushed the powder off the windshield: the big harmless fluffs of snow swirled about him in a soundless dawn. He reversed the tool and used the bladed end to clear an eight-inch hole in the ice directly in front of the steering wheel. He'd let the heater do the rest.

"Things you're better off not knowing, Ricky," he said to himself, thinking of the childish footprints he'd seen in the drifts outside his window three mornings running. The first morning he'd pulled his drapes shut in case Stella came into the guest room to clean; a day later he had realized that Stella had an extremely haphazard approach to housekeeping, and that not even bribery would induce her to enter the guest room-she was waiting until the cleaning woman would be able to come from the Hollow. For two mornings, those prints of bare feet dotted the snow which relentlessly climbed up to the window, even on Sears's protected side of the house. This morning, after Elmer's drugged face had pulled him unceremoniously from sleep, he had seen the prints on the windowsill. How long would it be before Fenny appeared inside the Hawthorne house, trotting gleefully up and down the stairs? One more night? If Sears could lead him away, perhaps he could win more time for Ricky and Stella.

In the meantime he had to see to Elmer Scales and just get here for Chrissake… Ricky too had been tuned into whatever kind of signal that was, but fortunately Stella had appeared to keep him at home.

The Lincoln rolled out onto the street and began bulling through the snow. There's one comfort, Sears thought: at this time of the morning on Christmas day the only other person on the road will be Omar Norris.

Sears pushed Elmer Scales's face and voice out of his consciousness and concentrated on driving. Omar had worked most of the night again, it seemed, because nearly all the streets in the center of Milburn were scraped down to the last four or five inches of hard-packed frozen snow. On these streets, the only danger was of skidding on the glassy cake beneath the wheels and going off into a spin to collide with a buried car… he thought of Fenny Bate on his windowsill, levering up the window, gliding into the house, snuffling for the scent of living things… but no, those windows had storms on them and he had made sure the inner windows were locked.

Maybe he was doing the wrong thing; maybe he ought to turn around and go back to Ricky's house.

But he couldn't do that, he realized. He swung the car through the red light at the top of the square and lifted his foot from the accelerator, letting the car coast into its own angle past the front of the hotel. He could not go back: Elmer's voice seemed almost to get stronger, sounding deep tones of pain, of confusion (Jesus Sears, I can't get my head around what's happening out here). He twitched the wheel and straightened out the car: the only rough spot now would be the highway, those few miles of treacherous hills, cars stacked up in the ditches on both sides… he might be forced to walk.

Jesus Sears I can't figure out all this blood… seems like those trespassers got in finally and now I'm scared bad, Sears, scared real bad…

Sears nudged the accelerator down a fraction of an inch.

3

At the top of Underhill Road he paused: it was much worse than he expected. Through the snow and gloom of the morning he could see the red lights on Omar's plow, pushing maddeningly slowly toward the highway. A nine-foot drift shaped like a surfer's ideal wave curled over all the unplowed section of Underhill Road. If he tried to get around Omar's plow, he'd bury the Lincoln in the drift.

For a second he had a mad impulse to do just that, floor the accelerator and sail down the fifty yards to the bottom of the hill and then smash the Lincoln through the snow, crashing through it around Omar on his slow-motion throne and exploded out of the big drift onto the highway-it was as if Elmer were telling him to do it. Get that car moving, Mr. James, I need you bad-

Sears blew his horn, mashing his hand down on the button, Omar turned around to gape at him: when he saw the Lincoln, he jabbed one finger in the air, and through the glass behind the cab Sears saw him weave on the seat, his face covered with a snow-crusted ski mask, and knew two things at once. Omar was drunk and half-dead with exhaustion; and he was yelling at him, telling him to turn around and not come down the hill. The Lincoln's tires would never hold on the slope.

Elmer's dogged, wheedling voice had kept him from seeing it.

The Lincoln, idling, rolled a few inches down the long hill. Omar switched off the plow and stood up half-out of the cab, supporting himself on one of the struts to the blade. He held a hand out palm-forward like a traffic cop. Sears stamped on his brake pedal, and the Lincoln shuddered on the slippery plowed surface. Omar was making circular motions with his free hand, telling him to turn around or back up.

Sears's car lurched another six inches down the slope and he grabbed for the handbrake, no longer thinking of how to handle the car but just trying to stop it. He heard Elmer saying Sears-need-need- that dogged, high-pitched voice urging the car forward.

And then saw Lewis Benedikt at the bottom of the hill running toward him, waving his arms to make him stop, a khaki jacket flapping out behind him, his hair blowing.

-need-need-

Sears released the handbrake and pushed his foot down on the accelerator. The Lincoln skidded forward, its rear tires whining, and plummeted down the long hill, fishtailing from side to side. Behind Lewis's running figure, Sears saw a blurry Omar Norris standing stock-still on the snowplow.

Traveling at seventy-five miles an hour, the Lincoln sliced through the figure of Lewis Benedikt; Sears opened his mouth and shouted, twisting the wheel savagely to the left. The Lincoln spun three fourths of the way around and jolted the snowplow with its right rear fender before plunging into the huge curling drift.

His eyes closed, Sears heard the mushy, sickening thud of a heavy object striking the windshield: a moment later he felt the atmosphere about him become thicker: in the next endless second the car crumped to a stop as if he'd hit a wall.

He opened his eyes and saw he was in darkness. Sears's head stung where he had struck it in the crash. He put one hand to a temple and felt blood; with the other he switched on the interior lights. Omar Norris's masked face, jammed against the windshield, peered with an empty eye in at the passenger seat. Five feet of snow held the car like cement

"Now, little brother," said a deep voice from the back of the car.

A small hand, earth embedded under its nails, reached forward to brush against Sears's cheek.

The violence of his reaction took Sears by surprise: he rocketed sideways on the seat, getting his body out from under the wheel without planning or forethought, moved by a galvanic revulsion. His cheek felt scraped where the child touched it; and already, in the sealed-off car, he could smell their corruption. They sat forward in the back seat, glowing at him, their mouths open: he had startled them, too.

Disgust for these obscene beings kindled up in him. He would not die passively at their hands. Sears threw himself forward and grunted, aiming the only punch he had thrown in sixty years: it caught Gregory Bate's cheekbone and slid, tearing the flesh, into a damp, reeking softness. Glistening fluid slid over the torn cheek.

"So you can be hurt," Sears said. "By God, you can."

Snarling, they flew at him.

Twelve Noon, Christmas Day

4

Ricky knew that Hardesty was drunk again the moment Walt had finished breathing two words into the telephone. By the time he had uttered as many sentences, he knew that Milburn was without a sheriff.

"You know where you can put this job," Hardesty said, and belched. "You can shove it. Hear me, Hawthorne?"

"I hear you, Walt." Ricky sat on the couch and glanced over at Stella, whose face was averted into her cupped hands. Mourning already, he thought, mourning because she let him go alone, because she sent him out of here without a blessing, without even thanks. Don Wanderley squatted on the floor beside Stella's chair and put an arm over her shoulders.

"Yeah, you hear me. Well, listen. I used to be a Marine, you know what, lawyer? Korea. Had three stripes, hear that?" A loud crash: Hardesty had fallen into a chair or knocked over a lamp. Ricky did not answer. "Three goddamned stripes. A leatherneck. You could call me a goddamned hero, I don't mind. Well, I didn't need you to tell me to go out to that farm. Neighbor went in there around eleven-found 'em all. Scales killed 'em all. Shot 'em. And afterward laid down under his goddamned tree and blew his head apart. State cops took all the bodies away in a helicopter. Now you tell me why he did it, lawyer. And you tell me how you knew something happened out there."

"Because I once borrowed his father's car," Ricky said. "I know it doesn't make sense, Walt."

Don looked up at him from beside Stella, but she merely pushed her face deeper into her hands.

"Doesn't make-shit. Beautiful. Well, you can find a new sheriff for this town. I'm clearin' out as soon as the county plows get in. I can go anywhere-record like mine. Anywhere? Not because of out there-not because of Scales's little massacre. You and your rich-bitch friends been sittin' on something all along-all along-and whatever it is does things-meaner'n a stirred-up hog. Right? It got into Scales's place, didn't it? Got into his head. Can go anywhere, can't it? And who called all this down on us, hey Mr. Lawyer? You. Hey?"

Ricky said nothing.

"You can call it Anna Mostyn, but that's just sheer plain lawyer's crap. Goddamn it, I always thought you were an asshole, Hawthorne. But I'm tellin' you now, anything shows up around here with ideas about moving me around, I'm gonna blow it in half. You and your buddies got all the fancy ideas, if you got any buddies left, you can take care of things around here. I'm stayin' in here until the roads get clear, sent the deputies home, anybody comes around here I shoot first. Questions later. Then I get out."

"What about Sears?" Ricky asked, knowing that Hardesty would not tell him until he asked. "Has anyone seen Sears?"

"Oh, Sears James. Yeah. Funny about that. State cops found him too. Saw his car half-buried in a drift, bottom of Underhill Road, snowplow all fucked over… you can bury him whenever the hell you want, little buddy. If everybody in this goddamned freakshow town doesn't end up cut to pieces or sucked out dry or blown in half. Ooof." Another belch, "I'm pig-drunk, lawyer. Gonna stay that way. Then I cut outta here. To hell with you and everything about you." He hung up.

Ricky said, "Hardesty's lost his mind and Sears is dead." Stella began to weep; soon he and she and Don were in a circle, arms around each other for that primitive consolation. "I'm the only one left," Ricky said into his wife's shoulder. "My God, Stella. I'm the only one left."

Late that night each of them-Ricky and Stella in their bedroom, Don in the guest-room-heard the music playing through the town, exclamatory trumpets and breathy saxophones, the arcadian music of the soul's night the liquid music of America's underside, and they heard in it an extra strain of release and abandonment. Dr. Rabbitfoot's band was celebrating.

5

After Christmas even neighbors stopped seeing each other, and the few optimists who still had plans for New Year's Eve quietly forgot them. All the public buildings stayed closed, Young Brothers and the library, the drugstores and the churches and the offices: on Wheat Row the drifts lapped up against the facades all the way to the rain gutters. Even the bars stayed closed, and fat Humphrey Stalladge stayed in his frame house out behind the tavern listening to the wind and playing pinochle with his wife, thinking that when the county plows got in he'd start making more money than the mint-nothing brought people into bars like bad times. His wife said, "Don't talk like a gravedigger," and that killed the conversation and the pinochle too for a while: everybody knew about Sears James and Omar Norris and, the worst of all, about what Elmer Scales had done. It seemed that if you listened to that snow hissing long enough, you wouldn't just hear it telling you that it was waiting for you, you'd hear some terrible secret -a secret to turn your life black. Some Milburn people snapped awake in the dog-hours of morning, three o'clock, four o'clock, and thought they saw one of those poor Scales kids standing at the foot of the bed, grinning at them: couldn't place which of the boys it was, but it had to be Davey or Butch or Mitchell. And took a pill to get back to sleep and forget the way little Davey or Butch or whoever-it-was looked, with his ribs shining underneath his skin and his skinny face shining too.

Eventually the town heard about Sheriff Hardesty: how he was holed up in his office with all those bodies waiting in the utility cells. Two of the Pegram boys had snowmobiles, and they coasted up the door of the sheriff's office to check him out-see if he was as nutty as the rumor said. A whiskery face jammed itself up against the window as they climbed off the snowmobiles: Hardesty lifted his pistol so the boys could see it and shouted through the glass that if they didn't pull off those damn ski masks and show their faces they wouldn't have any faces left. Most people knew someone who had a friend who'd had to go past the sheriff's office and swore that he heard Hardesty shouting in there, yelling at nothing or at himself-or at whatever it was that could move freely around Milburn in this weather, sliding in and out of their dreams, exulting in shadows whenever they'd just turned their heads: whatever it was that could account for that music some of them had heard around midnight on Christmas night- inexplicable music that should have sounded joyful but was instead wound full of the darkest emotions they knew. They pushed their heads into their pillows and told themselves it was a radio or a trick of the wind- they'd tell themselves anything rather than believe that something was out there that could make a noise so fearsome.

Peter Barnes got out of bed that night, having heard the music and imagining that this time the Bate brothers and Anna Mostyn and Don's Dr. Rabbitfoot were making a special trip to get him. (But there was another cause, he knew.) He locked his door and climbed back into bed and pushed his hands down on his ears; but the wild music got louder, coming down his street, and louder still.

It stopped directly in front of his house: sliced off in the middle of a bar, as if a button on a tape recorder had been pushed. The silence was more charged with possibilities than the music had been. Finally Peter could stand the tension no longer, and softly left his bed and looked out of his window onto the street.

Down there, down where he had once seen his father marching off to work looking dumpy and Russian, stood a line of people in bright moonlight. Nothing could stop him from recognizing the figures standing on the fresh snow where the road should have been. They stood gazing up at him with shadowed eyes and open mouths, the town's dead, and he would never know if they stood there only in his mind or if Gregory Bate and his benefactor had stirred these facsimiles and made them move: or if Hardesty's jail and a half-dozen graves had opened to let their inhabitants walk. He saw Jim Hardie staring up at his window, and the insurance salesman Freddy Robinson, and old Dr. Jaffrey and Lewis Benedikt, and Harlan Bautz-he had died while shoveling snow. Omar Norris and Sears James were beside the dentist. Peter's heart moved to see Sears- he'd known that was why the music had sounded again. A girl stepped out from behind Sears, and Peter blinked to see Penny Draeger, her once-exciting face as blank and dead as all the others. A small group of children stood mutely beside a tall scarecrow with a shotgun, and Peter nodded, mouthing the word "Scales" to himself: he had not known. Then the crowd divided to let his mother come forward.

She was not the lifelike ghost he had seen in the Bay Tree Market's parking lot: like the others, his mother was washed of life, too empty even for despair. She seemed animated only by need-need at a level beneath all feeling. Foreshortened by his angle of vision, Christina came forward over the snow to the boundary of their property; she extended her arms up to him and her mouth moved. He knew that no human words could have issued from that mouth, from that driven body- it must have been only a moan or a cry. She, they, all were asking him to come out: or were they pleading for surcease, for sleep? Peter began to cry. They were eerie, not frightening. Standing out there below his window, so pitiably drained, they were as if merely dreamed. The Bates and their benefactor had sent them, but it was him they needed. The tears cold on his cheeks, Peter turned away from the window; so many, so many, so many.

Face up, he lay back on his bed; stared with open eyes at the ceiling. He knew they would go: or would he look out in the morning to see them all still there, frozen into place like snowmen? But the music blared into life again, suddenly as present as a bright slash of red, and yes, they would be drifting away, following Dr. Rabbitfoot's bright tempo.

When the music had faded, Peter got up from his bed and checked the window. Yes. Gone. They had not even left marks on the snow.

He went downstairs in the dark; at the foot of the stairs saw a line of light beneath the television room door. Peter gently pushed it open.

The television showed a pattern of moving dots divided by a slowly upward-drifting black bar. The strong brown smell of whiskey filled the room. His father lay back in the chair with his mouth open, tie undone, the skin on his face and neck gray and parchmentlike: breathing with the soft rattling inhalations of an infant. A nearly empty bottle, a full glass in which the ice had melted, sat beside him on the table. Peter went to the television set and switched it off. Then he tenderly shook his father's arm.

"Mnn." His father's eyes opened cloudy and dazed. "Pete. Heard music."

"You were dreaming."

"What time?"

"Near one."

"I was thinking about your mother. You look like her, Pete. My hair, her face. Lucky-could've looked like me."

"I was thinking about her too."

His father got out of the chair, rubbed his cheeks, and gave Peter a look of unexpected clarity. "You're grown up, Pete. Funny. I saw it just now-you're a grown man."

Peter, embarrassed, said nothing.

"Didn't want to tell you earlier. Ed Venuti called me up this afternoon-heard it from the state cops. Elmer Scales, farmer a little way out of town? Had his mortgage with us. All those kids? Ed says he killed them all. Shot all the kids and then shot his wife and then killed himself. Pete, this town is going crazy. Just plain sick and crazy."

"Let's get upstairs," Peter said.

6

For some days Milburn stood as still as Humphrey Stalladge's card game after his wife had uttered a word which seemed obscene to both of them: gravediggers and graves were a taboo subject, when everybody in town knew well or was related to one of the sheet-covered bodies in the jail. People settled down in front of the television and ate pizzas from the freezer and prayed that the power lines would stay up; they avoided one another. If you looked outside and saw your next-door neighbor fighting up his lawn to get to his front door, he looked unearthly, transformed by stress into a wild ragged frontier version of himself: you knew he'd damage anyone who threatened to touch his dwindling store of food. He'd been touched by that savage music you had tried to escape, and if he looked through your Thermopane picture window and saw you his eyes were barely human.

And if good old Sam (assistant manager down at Horn's Tire Recapping Service and a shark at poker) or good old Ace (retired foreman from a shoe factory in Endicott and a terrible bore, but sent his son through medical school) were not outside, catching your eye with a starved glance which meant take your eyes off me, you bastard, then it was even worse: because what you saw looked not murderous but dead. The streets impassable except on foot, nine-foot, twelve-foot drifts, a constant swirl of white in the air, a glooming sky. The houses on Haven Lane and Melrose Avenue looked vacant, drapes drawn against the desolation outside. In town, snow drifted up to the roofs and sheeted across the streets; windows reflected chill emptiness. Milburn looked as though everyone in town were lying still under a sheet in one of Hardesty's cells; and when someone like Clark Mulligan or Rollo Draeger, who had lived all his life in Milburn, looked at it now a cold whisper of wind brushed across his heart.

That was in the daytime. Between Christmas and New Year's Day, ordinary people in Milburn, those who had never heard of Eva Galli or Stringer Dedham and thought of the Chowder Society (if they thought of it at all) as a collection of museum pieces, wound up going to bed earlier and earlier-at ten, then at nine-thirty-because the thought of all that black weather out there made them want to close their eyes and not open them again until dawn. If the days were threatening, the nights were ferocious. The wind tore around the corners of the houses, rattling shutters and storm windows, and two or three times a night a big gust flattened itself against the wall like an enormous wave-hard enough to make the lights sway. And it often seemed to ordinary people in Milburn that mixed up with all that banging and hissing outside were voices-voices that couldn't contain their glee. The Pegram boys heard something tapping at their bedroom window, and in the morning saw the prints of bare feet outside on a drift. Grieving Walter Barnes was not the only person in Milburn who thought the whole town was going crazy.

On the last day of the year the mayor finally got through to all three of the deputies and told them that they had to get Hardesty out of the office and into a hospital-the mayor was afraid that looting would begin soon if they couldn't get the streets plowed. He appointed Leon Churchill acting sheriff-the biggest and dumbest of the deputies, the one most likely to follow orders-and told Leon that if he didn't patch up Omar Norris's plow himself and start clearing the streets, he'd be out of a job permanently. So on New Year's Day Leon walked to the municipal garage and found that the plow wasn't as bad as it had looked. Sears James's big car had bent some of the plates, but everything still worked. He took the plow out that morning, and in the first hour developed more respect for Omar Norris than he'd ever had for the mayor.

But when the deputies got to the sheriff's office all they found was an empty room and a smelly cot. Walt Hardesty had disappeared sometime during the previous four days. He had left behind six empty bourbon bottles but no note or forwarding address-certainly nothing to tell of the gut-panic he'd felt one night when he lifted his head from his desk to pour himself another drink and heard more noises from back in the utility cells. At first it had sounded to Hardesty like conversation, and then like the sound a butcher makes when he slaps raw steak on the counter. He hadn't waited for whoever it was back there to start coming down the corridor, but had put on his hat and his jacket and slipped out into the blizzard. He made it as far as the high school before a hand closed over his elbow and a calm voice said in his ear, "Isn't it time we met, sheriff?" When Leon's plow uncovered him, Walt Hardesty looked like a piece of carved ivory: a life-size ivory statue of a ninety-year-old man.

7

Though the weather station predicted more snow all during the first week of January, it held off for two days. Humphrey Stalladge opened up again, working the entire long bar by himself-Annie and Anni, off in the country, were still snowed in-and found business as lively as he had predicted. He put in long days, working sixteen or seventeen hours, and when his wife came in to make hamburgers, he said to her, "Okay. The roads finally get plowed enough so guys can get their cars moving again, and the first place they head to is a bar. Where they stay all day long. Does that make sense to you?"

"You called it," was all she'd say.

"It's good drinking weather, anyhow," Humphrey said.

Good drinking weather? More than that: Don Wanderley, driving with Peter Barnes to the Hawthorne house, thought that this dark gray day, still punishingly cold, was like the weather inside a drunk's mind. It had none of the uncanny flashes of brightness he had seen in Milburn earlier in the winter: no doorposts or chimneys gleamed, no sudden colors jumped forward. There were none of these magician's tricks. Everything that was not white was blurry in the gray clinging weather; with no true shadows and a hidden sun, everything looked heavily shadowed.

He glanced over his shoulder at the rolled-up parcel on the back seat. His poor weapons, found in Edward's house. They were almost childishly crude. Now that he had a plan and the three of them were going to fight, even the depressive weather seemed to imply their defeat. He and a tense seventeen-year-old boy and an old man with a bad cold: for a moment it seemed comically hopeless. But without them, hope did not exist.

"The deputy doesn't plow as good as Omar," Peter said beside him. It was merely to interrupt the silence, but Don nodded: the boy was right. The deputy had trouble holding the plow at a steady level, and when he was through with a street it had an oddly terraced look. The three-and four-inch variations in the road made the car jounce like a fairground trolley. On either side of the street they could see mailboxes tilted crazily into the snowbanks-Churchill had skittled them with the edge of the plow.

"This time we're going to do something," the boy said, making it half a question.

"We're going to try," Don said, glancing at the boy. Peter looked like a young soldier who'd seen a dozen firelights in two weeks-looking at him, you could taste the bitterness of spent adrenalin.

"I'm ready," he said, and while Don heard the firmness in it he also heard ragged nerves and wondered if the boy, who had done so much more than he and Ricky Hawthorne, could endure any more.

"Wait until you hear what I have in mind," Don said. "You might not want to go through with it. And that would be okay, Peter. I'd understand."

"I'm ready," the boy repeated, and Don could feel him shivering. "What are we going to do?"

"Go back into Anna Mostyn's house," he answered. "I'll explain it at Ricky's."

Peter slowly exhaled. "I'm still ready."

8

"It was part of the message on the Alma Mobley tape," Don said. Ricky Hawthorne was leaning forward on his couch, looking not at Don but at the box of Kleenex before him. Peter Barnes glanced at him momentarily, and then turned sideways again, resting his head against the back of the couch. Stella Hawthorne had disappeared upstairs, but not before giving Don a look of the clearest warning. "It was a message for me, and I didn't want to subject anyone else to it," he explained. "Especially not you, Peter. You can both imagine the kind of thing it was."

"Psychological warfare," Ricky said.

"Yes. But I've been thinking about one thing she said. It… call it. It could explain where she is. I think she meant it as a clue, or a hint, or whatever you want to call it."

"Go on," said Ricky.

"She said that we-human beings-are at the mercy of our imaginations, and if we want to look for her, or for any of them, we should look in the places of our dreams. In the places of our imaginations."

" 'In the places of our dreams,' " Ricky repeated. "I see. She means Montgomery Street. Well. I should have known we weren't through with that house." Peter extended one arm along the top of the couch and rolled deeper into it: rejection. "We deliberately didn't bring you the first time we went there," Ricky said to the boy. "Of course now you have even more reason for not wanting to go. How do you feel about it?"

"I have to go," Peter said.

"It almost has to be what she means," Ricky continued, still gently probing the boy with his eyes. "Sears and Lewis and John and I all had dreams about that house. We dreamed about it almost every night for a year. And when Sears and Don and I went there, when we found your mother and Jim, she didn't attack us physically, but she attacked our imaginations. If it's any consolation, the thought of going back there scares the hell out of me too."

Peter nodded. "Sure it does." Finally, as if another's admission of fear gave him courage, he leaned forward. "What's in the package, Don?"

Don reached down and picked up the rolled blanket beside his chair. "Just two things I found in the house. We might be able to use them." He lay the bundle on the table and unrolled it. All three of them looked at the long-handled axe and the hunting knife which now lay uncovered on the blanket.

"I spent the morning sharpening and oiling them. The axe was rusty-Edward used it for his firewood. The knife was a gift from an actor-he used it in a film and gave it to my uncle when his book was published. It's a beautiful knife."

Peter leaned over and picked up the knife. "It's heavy." He turned it over in his hands: an eight-inch blade with a cruel dip along the top end and a groove from tip to base, fitted with a hand-carved handle, the knife was obviously designed for one purpose only. It was a machine for killing. But no, Don remembered; that was how it looked; not what it was. It had been made to fit an actor's hand: to photograph well. But beside it the axe was brutal and graceless. "Ricky has his own knife," Don said. "Peter, you can take the Bowie knife. I'll carry the axe."

"Are we going there right away?"

"Is there any point in waiting?"

Ricky said, "Hang on. I'll go upstairs and tell Stella that we're going out. I'll say that if we don't come back in an hour, she should call whoever is at the sheriff's office these days and have a car sent to the Robinson house." He left them and began going up the staircase.

Peter reached forward and touched the knife. "It won't take an hour," he said.

9

"We'll go in the back again," Don said to Ricky, bending forward to speak into his ear. They were just outside the house. Ricky nodded. "We'll have to be as quiet as we can."

"Don't worry about me," said Ricky. He sounded older and weaker than Don had ever heard him. "You know, I saw the movie that knife came from. Big scene-a long scene about it being forged. Man making it melted down a piece of asteroid or meteor he had- used it in the knife. Supposed to have-" Ricky stopped and breathed heavily for a moment, making sure that Peter Barnes was listening to him. "Supposed to have special properties. Hardest substance anyone ever saw. Like magic. From space." Ricky smiled. "Typical movie foolishness. Looks like a dandy knife, though."

Peter pulled it from the pocket of his duffel coat and for a second each of them-almost embarrassed to be caught in such childishness-looked at it again. "Outer space worked wonders for Colonel Bowie," Ricky said. "In the movie."

"Bowie-" Peter started to say, remembering something from a grade-school history class, and then clamped his mouth shut on the rest of the sentence. Bowie died at the Alamo. He swallowed, shook his head, and turned toward the Galli house. It was what he should have learned from Jim Hardie: good magic lay only in human effort, but bad magic could come from around any corner.

"Let's go," Don said, and looked hard at Peter to make sure he knew enough to keep quiet.

Using their hands, they pushed snow away from the back door to open it; and then, moving quietly in single file, they entered. To Peter the house seemed nearly as dark as it had been on the night he and Jim Hardie had broken in. Until Don had led him through the kitchen, he had not been sure that he would be able to take the first step over the threshold. Even then, he feared for a moment that he would faint or scream-the gloom in the house whispered about him.

In the hallway, Don pointed to the cellar door. He and Ricky took their knives from their pockets, and Don pulled the door open. The writer led them soundlessly down the wooden steps to the basement.

Peter knew that this and the landing would be the worst places for him. He took a quick glance under the staircase and saw only a floating spider web. Then he and Don went slowly toward the octopus-armed furnace while Ricky Hawthorne moved down the other side of the basement. The big knife felt solid and good in his hands, and even when he knew that he would soon have to look at the place where Sears had found his mother and Jim Hardie, Peter also knew that he would not pass out or yell or do anything childish: the knife seemed to pass some of its competence into him.

They reached the deeply shadowed area beside the furnace. Don stepped behind the furnace with no hesitation, and Peter followed, gripping the handle of the knife. You have to slash up, he remembered from some old adventure story. If you bring the blade down its easier to take away from you. He saw Ricky coming around from the other side, already shrugging.

Don lowered the axe; both men looked beneath the workbench across the near wall. Peter shivered. That was where they had been. Of course nothing was there now: he knew by the way Don and Ricky straightened up that no Gregory Bate had jumped out, ready to begin talking… there wouldn't even be bloodstains. Peter sensed that the men were waiting for him to move, and he bent quickly and took a second's glance beneath the workbench. Only shadowed cement wall, a gray cement floor. He straightened up.

"Top floor now," Don whispered, and Ricky nodded.

When they reached the brown stain on the landing Peter clutched the knife tightly and swallowed; looked quickly back over his shoulder to make sure Bate wasn't standing down there in a Harpo Marx wig and sunglasses, grinning up at them; and checked the next flight of stairs. Ricky Hawthorne turned to interrogate him with a kind look. He nodded-okay-and continued softly after the men.

Outside the first bedroom door at the top of the house Ricky paused and nodded. Peter hefted his knife: it might be the room the old men had dreamed about, whatever that meant, but it was also the room where he had met Freddy Robinson, the room where he might have died. Don stepped in front of Ricky and put his hand very firmly on the knob. Ricky glanced at him, set his mouth, nodded. Don turned the knob and pushed the door open. Peter saw an abrupt line of sweat run down the side of the writer's face, as sudden as a tapped spring, and everything in him went dry. Don moved rapidly through the door, bringing the axe up as he went. Peter's legs carried him into the room as if an invisible cord pulled him along.

He took in the bedroom in a series of snapshotlike tableaux: Don beside him, crouching, axe held up to one side; an empty bed; dusty floor; a bare wall; the window he had forced open centuries ago; Ricky Hawthorne planted beside him open-mouthed, holding out his knife as if he were trying to give it away; a wall with a small mirror. An empty bedroom.

Don lowered his axe, the tension cautiously leaving his face; Ricky Hawthorne began to prowl around the room as if he'd have to see every inch of it before he could believe that Anna Mostyn and the Bates weren't hiding there. Peter realized that he was holding the knife slackly at his side; he realized that he was relaxed. The room was safe. And if this room was safe, then the house was too. He looked at Don, who lifted the edges of his mouth in a closed smile.

Then he felt idiotic, standing inside the door smiling at Don, and he went forward, double-checking all the places Ricky Hawthorne had already examined. Nothing under the bed. An empty closet. He went up to the far wall; a muscle jumped in the small of his back, loosening with a snap like a rubber band. Peter brushed his fingers against the wall: cold. And dirty. Gray stuff came away on his fingers. He glanced into the mirror.

Shockingly loud, Ricky Hawthorne's voice shouted at him from across the room: "Not the mirror, Peter!"

But it was already too late. He'd been caught by a breeze from the depth of the mirror, and turned unthinkingly to look deeply into it. His own face was fading to a pale outline and beneath the outline, on the other side of it swimming up, was the face of a woman. He did not know her, but he took her in as if he were in love: light freckles, softly brown-blond hair, soft shining eyes, the mouth bracketed by the most tender lines he'd ever seen. She touched all the tension in him, all the feeling he had, and he saw things in her face that he knew were beyond his understanding, promises and songs and betrayals he would not know for years. He felt all the shallowness and insularity of his relationships with the girls he had known and kissed and strained against, and saw that the areas in him which had gone out to women had never been enough, had never been complete. And, in a rush of tenderness, an enveloping nimbus of emotion, she was speaking to him. Beautiful Peter. You want to be one of us. You already are one of us. He did not move or speak, but he nodded and said yes. And so are your friends, Peter. You can live through all time, singing the one song which is my song-you can be with me and them forever, moving like a song. Just use the knife, Peter, use your knife, you know how, do it beautifully, raise your knife, lift your knife, raise your knife and turn-

He was bringing the knife up when the mirror went falling, still musically speaking, though he couldn't hear it so well for the sound of a blow and a voice near his head: the mirror hit the floor and split.

"It was a trick, Peter," Ricky Hawthorne was saying. "I should have warned you before, but I was afraid to speak," his face and experienced eyes so near to Peter's own face that Peter, looking down in shock, saw in surreal close-up the tight loops in the knot of Ricky's bow tie. "Just a trick." Peter trembled and embraced him.

When they separated, Peter bent down to the two halves of the mirror and held his palm over one of the pieces. A delicious wind (the one song which is my song) lilted up from it. He felt or sensed Ricky stiffening beside him: half of a tender mouth glimmered beneath his hand, just visible. He drove his heel into the broken mirror, then brought it down again and again, splitting the silvery glass into a scattered jigsaw puzzle.

10

Fifteen minutes later they were back in the car, traveling slowly toward the center of town, following the random, looping trail of plowed streets. "She wants to make us like Gregory and Fenny," Peter said. "That's what she meant. 'Live through all time.' She wants to turn us into those things."

"We don't have to let it happen," Don said.

"You talk so brave sometimes." Peter shook his head. "She said I already was one of them. Because when I saw Gregory turn into-you know-he said he was me. It was like Jim. Just keeping going. Never stopping. Never doubting."

"And you liked that in Jim Hardie," Don said, and Peter nodded, his face marked with tears. "I would too," Don said. "Energy is always likeable."

"But she knows I'm the weak link," Peter said, and put his hand to his face. "She tried to use me, and it almost worked. She could use me to get you and Ricky."

"The difference between you-between all of us- and Gregory Bate," Don said, "is that Gregory wanted to be used. He chose it. He sought it."

"But she almost made me choose it too," Peter said. "God, I hate them."

Ricky spoke from the back seat. "They've taken your mother, most of my friends and Don's brother, Peter. We all hate them. She could do to any of us what she did to you back there."

As Ricky continued to speak comfortingly from the back, Don drove on, no longer bothering to notice the desolation caused by the snow: there would be more of it in an hour, in a day or two at the most, and then Milburn would not only be sealed off from outside but a sprung trap. One more heavy snow would see a wave of death to take half the town.

"Stop the car," Peter said. "Stop." He laughed. "I know where they are. The place of dreams." His laughter was high-pitched and tremulous, spiraled out of the boy's hysteria. "The place of dreams, didn't she say? And what's the only place in town that stayed open all during the storms?"

"What in the world are you talking about?" Don asked, turning around on the seat to look at Peter's face, suddenly open and sure.

"There," Peter said, and Don followed the line of his pointing finger.

Across the street from them, in giant red neon letters:

RIALTO

And beneath that, in smaller black letters, one last proof of Anna Mostyn's wit:

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

11

Stella checked her watch for the sixtieth time, and then stood up to compare what it said with the clock on the mantel. The mantel clock was three minutes ahead, as it always was. Ricky and the other two had been gone somewhere between thirty and thirty-three minutes. She thought she knew how Ricky had felt on Christmas morning-that if he didn't get out of the house and start moving, something terrible would happen. And now Stella knew that if she did not get over to the Robinson house in one hell of a hurry that Ricky would be in awful danger. He had said to give them an hour, but that was surely too long. Whatever had frightened Ricky and the rest of the Chowder Society was in that house, waiting to strike again. Stella would never have described herself as a feminist, but she had long ago seen how men mistakenly assumed that they had to do everything themselves. The Milly Sheehans locked their doors and hallucinated-or whatever-when their men died or left them. If some inexplicable catastrophe took their men, they cowered behind female passivity and waited for the reading of the will.

Ricky had simply assumed that she was not fit to join them. Even a boy was of more use than she. She looked again at her watch. Another minute had gone by.

Stella went to the downstairs closet and put on her coat: then she took it off, thinking that, after all, maybe she would not be able to help Ricky. "Nuts," she said out loud, and pulled the coat on again and went out the door.

At least it was not snowing now: and Leon Churchill, who had gaped at her since he was a boy of twelve, had cleared some of the streets. Len Shaw from the service station, another remote-control conquest, had cleared their driveway as soon as his plow could make it to the Hawthorne house;-in an unfair world, Stella had no compunctions about taking unfair advantage of her looks. She started her car easily (Len, denied Stella, had given almost erotic attention to the Volvo's engine) and rolled down the drive out into the street.

By now Stella, having decided to go there, was in an almost frantic hurry to get to Montgomery Street. Direct access was blocked by the unplowed roads, and she put her foot down on the accelerator and followed the maze of streets Leon had opened-she groaned when she realized that she was being taken all the way over to the high school. From there she'd have to cut down School Road to Harding Lane, and then over on Lone Pine Road back the way she had started and then on Candlemaker Street past the Rialto. Working out this circuitous map in her head, Stella let the car get nearly to her normal driving speed. The drops and elevations left by Churchill's handling of the plow jolted her against the wheel, but she took the corner into School Road quickly, not seeing in the woolly light that the level of the roadbed dropped seven inches. When the front end slammed down onto the packed snow, Stella floored the accelerator, still trying to think of the roads that could take her to Montgomery once she got off Candlemaker Street.

The rear end of the car spun out sideways, struck a metal fence and a mailbox, and then continued to revolve around so that Stella was traveling astraddle the road: in a cold panic, she wrenched at the wheel just as the car dropped into another of Churchill's terraces. The car rolled up on its side, wheels spinning, and then dropped down, still traveling, onto the metal fence.

"Damn," she said, and clenched her hands on the wheel and breathed deeply, forcing herself to stop trembling. She swung the door open and looked down. If she edged off the seat and let her legs dangle, she would be only three or four feet from the ground. The car could stay where it was-in any case, it had to. She'd need a tow-truck to pull it off the fence. Stella let her legs hang out of the open door, took another deep breath and pushed herself off the seat.

She landed hard, but stayed on her feet and began walking down School Road without once looking back at her car. Door open, key in the ignition, leaning against the fence like a stuffed toy-she had to get to Ricky. Ahead of her a quarter of a mile down the road, the high school was a fuzzy dark-brown cloud.

Stella had just realized that she would have to hitchhike when a blue car appeared out of the gray blur behind her. For the first time in her life, Stella Hawthorne turned to face an oncoming car and stuck out her thumb.

The blue car rolled toward her and began to brake. Stella lowered her arm as the car drew up beside her. When she bent down and looked in she saw a pudgy man bending sideways and giving her a shy welcoming look. He leaned across the seat and opened the passenger door for her. "It's against my principles," he said, "but you look like you need a ride."

Stella got in and leaned back against the seat forgetting for the moment that this helpful little man would not be able to read her mind. Then she and the car started forward and she said, "Oh, please excuse me, I just had an accident and I'm not thinking right. I must-"

"Please, Mrs. Hawthorne," the man said, turning his head to smile at her. "Don't waste your breath. I assume you were going to Montgomery Street. You needn't bother. That was all a mistake."

"You know me?" Stella asked. "But how did you know-"

The man silenced her by reaching out with a boxer's quickness and tightening his hand around her hair. "Soft," he said, and his voice, formerly as shyly ingratiating as the man's appearance, was the quietest she'd ever heard.

12

Don was the first of them to see Clark Mulligan's body. The theater owner lay huddled on the carpet behind the candy counter-another corpse bearing the signs of the Bate brothers' appetites. "Yes, Peter," he said, turning away from the body, "you're right. They're inside."

"Mr. Mulligan?" Peter asked quietly.

Ricky came up to the counter and looked over. "Oh, no." He drew his knife from his coat pocket. "We still don't know that what we're trying to do is possible, do we? For all we know, we need wooden stakes or silver bullets or a fire or…"

"No," Peter said. "We don't need any of those things. We have everything we need right here." The boy was very pale, and he avoided looking over the counter at Mulligan's body, but the determination set deeply in his face was unlike anything Don had ever seen: it was fear's negation. "That was just how they killed vampires and werewolves-what they thought were vampires and werewolves. They could have used anything." He challenged Don directly. "Isn't that what you think?"

"Yes," Don said, not adding that it was one thing to offer a theory in comfortable rooms, another to stake your life on it.

"I do too," Peter said. He held his knife, blade up, so rigidly that Don could sense the tautness of his muscles all the way up his arm. "I know they're inside. Let's go."

Then Ricky spoke and simply said what was obvious. "We don't have a choice."

Don lifted his axe and held the head pressed flat against his chest; went quietly to the doors to the stalls; slipped inside. The other two followed him.

He flattened himself out against the wall in the dark theater, realizing that he had never considered that the movie might be running. Giant forms moved across the screen, bellowing, rampaging. The Bates must have killed Clark Mulligan less than an hour before the three of them had arrived. Clark had set up the film, started it as he had done every day during the storms, and come down to find Gregory and Fenny waiting for him in the lobby. Don inched sideways along the back wall, looking for a movement in the seats ahead of him.

As his eyes adjusted, he saw only the rounded backs of the seats stretching away. The heavy blade of the axe pressed against his chest. The movie's soundtrack filled his head with shouts and cries. It played to an empty theater. And of all the spectacles to which their enemy had treated him, Don thought that this was surely the strangest-the horror on the screen, the turmoil of voices and music washing out in darkness over all those empty seats. He looked sideways toward Peter Barnes and even in the dark saw the set of his face. He pointed to the far aisle; then bent forward to see Ricky, who was only a shadow against the wall, and motioned toward the wide middle aisle. Peter immediately moved away toward the other side of the theater. Ricky went more slowly to the center, and checked Peter and Don's position before bending down to make sure Gregory or Fenny was not hiding in the row. Then they advanced forward, checking each row in turn.

And what if Ricky finds them? Don thought. Could we get to him in time to save him? He's exposed, way out there in the open.

But Ricky, holding his knife out to one side, moved down the wide center aisle, looking calmly on either side of him as if he were looking for a lost ticket-he was being as thorough as he had been in Anna Mostyn's house.

Don moved in tandem with the others, straining to see into the darkness between the rows. Candy wrappers, torn paper, what looked like a winter's worth of dust, rows of seats, some torn, some taped together, a few in every row with broken arms-and in the middle of each row, a well of darkness that wanted to suck him toward it. Above him, ahead of him, the film paraded a succession of images Don caught as disconnected frames whenever he looked up from the floor of the theater. Corpses pushing themselves up from their graves, cars rolling dangerously fast around corners, a girl's stricken face… Don glanced up at the screen and thought for a moment he was seeing a film of himself in Anna Mostyn's cellar.

But no, of course not, the scene was just part of the film, a man unlike him in a cellar unlike Anna's. The movie family had barricaded themselves in a basement, and the soundtrack boomed with the sounds of doors closing: maybe that's how you fight them, you just hole up until they go away… you bite down and close your eyes and hope they get your brother, your friend, anybody, before they get you… and that, he realized, was what the nightwatchers had done. He looked over the rows of seats, seeing them filled with Gregory's victims, and then saw Ricky and Peter looking curiously back at him. He was two rows behind. Don bent forward again, found himself staring stiffly with embarrassment at a flattened popcorn box, and moved hurriedly down the broad steps to catch up with the others.

When they reached the bottom row without finding anything, Don and Peter went toward the center aisle to join Ricky. "Nothing," Don said.

"They're here, though," Peter whispered. "They have to be."

"There's the projection booth," Don said. "The toilets. And Mulligan must have had some sort of office."

On the screen a door slammed: noise of life walled in, and of death walled in with it.

"Maybe the balcony," Peter said, and glanced up at the screen. "And what's behind there? How do you get there?"

Again, a door slammed. Inhuman voices matching the scale of the people on the screen, inflated with assumed emotions, fell toward them from the speakers.

The door clicked open with a flat, ticking noise-the sound made when a metal bar, depressed, lifts a catch; then it slammed shut again.

"Of course," Ricky said, "that's where they'd"-but the other two were not paying attention. They had recognized the sound, and were staring at the entrance to a lighted cavernous tunnel to the right of the screen. Above the tunnel a white sign read EXIT.

The soundtrack blared down on them, to their side giant forms enacted a pantomime romantic enough for the music, but what they listened to was a light, dry noise coming down the exit corridor toward the light: a noise like clapping hands. It was the sound of bare feet.

A child appeared at the end of the corridor and paused at the edge of the light. He looked toward them-an apparition from a thirties' study of rural poverty, a small boy with shivering sides and prominent ribs and a smudgy, shadowy face that would never be invaded by thought. He stood in the last traces of the corridor's light, drool forming on his lower lip. The boy raised his arms, holding his bunched hands level before him, and made the gesture of pumping up and down on an iron bar. Then he tilted back his head and giggled; and again made the gesture of closing a heavy door.

"My brother is telling you that the doors are locked," said a voice from above them. They whirled around, Don hefting the axe in his arms, and saw Gregory Bate standing on the stage beside the red curtains flanking the screen. "But three such brave adventurers wouldn't have it otherwise, would they? You have come for this, haven't you? Especially you, Mr. Wanderley-all the way from California. Fenny and I were sorry not to have been properly introduced there." He moved easily to the center of the stage, and the movie broke and flowed over the surface of his body. "And you really think that you can harm us with those medieval objects you carry? Why, gentlemen…" He flung out his arms, his eyes glowing. Every part of him was printed with gigantic forms-an open hand, a falling lamp, a splintering door.

And beneath all that, Don saw what Bate had demonstrated to Peter Barnes-that the gentlemanly diction and theatrical manner were insubstantial clothing over a terrible concentration, a purpose as implacable as a machine's. Bate was standing on the stage, smiling down at them. "Now," he said, his tone like a god's summoning light.

Don jumped sideways, hearing something rush past him, and saw Fenny's mad little body crashing into Peter Barnes. None of them had seen the child move; now he was already on top of Peter, forcing his arms to the floor of the theater, snarling, holding Peter's knife harmlessly away while he wriggled on top of him, making a squealing noise that got lost in the screams from the speakers.

Don raised his axe and felt a strong hand close over his wrist. (Immortal whispered up his arm, don't you want to be?)

"Wouldn't you like to live forever?" Gregory Bate said in his ear, blowing foulness toward his face. "Even if you must die first? It's a good Christian bargain, after all."

The hand spun him easily around, and Don felt his own strength draining out as if Bate's hand on his wrist drew it out of him like a magnet. Bate's other hand took his chin and tilted it up, forcing Don to look into his eyes. He remembered Peter telling him how Jim Hardie had died, how Bate had sucked him down into his eyes, but it was impossible not to look: and his feet seemed to be floating, his legs were water, at the bottom of the shining gold was a comprehensive wisdom and beneath that was total mindlessness, a rushing violence, pure cold, a killing winter wind through a forest.

"Watch this, you scum," he dimly heard Ricky saying. Then Bate's attention snapped away from him, and his legs seemed to be filled with sand, and the side of the werewolf's head moved past his face as slowly as a dream. Something was making an appalling racket, and Bate's profiled head slid past his own, marble skin and an ear as perfect as a statue's-Bate flung him away.

"Do you see this, you filth?" Ricky was shouting, and Don, lying all tumbled over his axe (now what was that for?), half-wedged beneath one of the front-row seats, looked dreamily up and saw Ricky Hawthorne sawing into the back of Fenny's neck.

"Bad," he whispered, and "no," and no longer sure that it was not really just a part of the giant shadowy action blazing on above them all, saw Gregory slap the old man down onto Peter Barnes's motionless body.

13

"There's no need to make trouble, is there, Mrs. Hawthorne?" said the man gripping her hair. "You hear me, don't you?" He tugged at her hair, pulling it painfully.

Stella nodded.

"And you heard what I said? No need to go to Montgomery Street-no need at all. Your husband isn't there anymore. He didn't find what he was looking for, so he went elsewhere."

"Who are you?"

"A friend of a friend. A good friend's good friend." Still holding her hair, the man reached across the wheel to move the automatic shift, and drove slowly off. "And my friend is very eager to meet you."

"Let me go," Stella said.

He yanked her toward him. "Enough, Mrs. Hawthorne. You have a very exciting time ahead of you. So-enough. No fighting. Or I'll kill you here. And that would be a terrible waste. Now promise me you'll be quiet. We are just going into the Hollow. Okay? You'll be quiet?"

Stella, terrified and fearful that the handful of hair was about to be ripped from her head, said, "Yes."

"Very intelligent." He let her hair fall slack and pressed his hand against the side of her head. "You're such a pretty woman, Stella."

She recoiled from his touch.

"Quiet?"

"Quiet," she breathed, and the driver went on slowly toward the high school. She looked back through the rear window and saw no other cars: her own, tilted against the fence, grew smaller behind her.

"You're going to kill me," she said.

"Not unless you force me to do it, Mrs. Hawthorne. I am quite a religious person in my present life. I would hate to have to take a human life. We're pacifists, you know."

"We?"

He pursed his lips at her in an ironic little smile, and gestured toward the back seat. She looked down and saw dozens of copies of The Watchtower scattered there.

"Then your friend is going to kill me. Like Sears and Lewis and the others."

"Not quite like that, Mrs. Hawthorne. Well, perhaps just a little bit like Mr. Benedikt. That was the only one our friend conducted by herself. But I can promise you that Mr. Benedikt saw many unusual and interesting things before he passed away." They were going by the school now, and Stella heard a familiar grinding noise before recognizing it: she looked frantically out the window and saw the town snowplow chugging into a twelve-foot drift.

"In fact," the man continued, "you could say that he had the time of his life. And as for you, you will have an experience many would envy-you will see directly into a mystery, Mrs. Hawthorne, a mystery which has endured in your culture for centuries. Some would say that would be worth dying for. Especially since the alternative is dying quite messily right here."

Now even the snowplow was a block behind them. The next clear street, Harding Lane, was twenty feet ahead, and Stella saw herself being driven away from safety-from Leon on the plow-toward terrible danger, passive at the hands of this maniac Jehovah's Witness.

"In fact, Mrs. Hawthorne," the man said, "since you are cooperating so nicely-"

Stella kicked out as hard as she could and felt the toe of her boot connect solidly with his ankle. The man yelped with pain and twisted toward her. She threw herself at the wheel, getting her body between it and the man, who was clubbing her on the head, and forced the car toward the snowbank left by the plow.

Now if Leon would only look, she prayed: but the car thudded almost noiselessly into the bank.

The man tore her off the wheel and forced her back against the door, twisting her legs painfully beneath her. Stella raised her hands and struck his face, but the man put all his weight on her and batted her hands away. Be still! shouted in her mind, and Stella nearly lost consciousness. Stupid, stupid woman.

She opened her eyes wide and looked at the face above hers-pouchy with excess flesh, black open pores on the thick nose, sweat on the forehead, meek bloodshot eyes; the face of a prim little man who would tell hitchhikers that it was against his principles to pick them up. He was hitting her on the side of the head, and every blow released a spray of saliva over her. Stupid woman!

Grunting, he brought a knee up between her legs and leaned forward and put his hands on her throat.

Stella flailed at his sides and then managed to hook a hand under his chin: it was not enough. He continued to crush her throat, the voice in her mind repeating stupid stupid stupid…

She remembered.

Stella dropped her hands, pulled at her lapel with her right hand, found the pearl base of the hatpin. She used all the strength in her right arm to drive the long pin into his temple.

The meek eyes bulged and the monotonous word repeating in her mind became a babble of astonished voices. What what (she) no this (sword) woman what- the man's hands went limp on her throat, and he dropped onto her like a boulder.

Then she was able to scream.

Stella scrambled to open the door and fell backward out of the car. For a moment after she rolled over she lay panting on the ground, tasting the blood in her mouth mix with dirty snow and rock salt. She pushed herself up, saw his balding head lolling off the edge of the seat, whimpered and got to her feet.

Stella turned away from the car and ran down School Road toward Leon Churchill, who was now standing by the side of the plow, gazing at something dark he had evidently uncovered. She shouted his first name, slowed to a walk, and the deputy swiveled to watch her come toward him.

Leon glanced back at the dark thing in the snow and then trotted toward her: Stella was too distraught to see that the deputy was nearly as shocked as herself. When he caught her, he spun her halfway around and said, "Uh now Mrs. Hawthorne you don't want to look at that what's the matter anyhow you had an accident Mrs. Hawthorne?"

"I just killed a man," she said. "I hitchhiked in his car. He tried to hurt me. I stuck a hatpin in his head. I killed him."

"He tried to hurt you?" Leon asked. "Uh-" He glanced back at his plow, and then looked again at Stella Hawthorne's face. "Come on, let's have a look. It happened up there?" He pointed to the blue car. "You had an accident."

As he marched her along toward the car, she tried to explain. "I had an accident in my car, he stopped to give me a ride and then he tried to hurt me. He did hurt me. And I had a long hatpin…"

"Well, you didn't kill him, anyhow," Leon said, and looked at her almost indulgently.

"Don't patronize me."

"He ain't in the car," Leon said. He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her to face the open door, the empty front seat.

Stella nearly fainted.

Leon held her up and tried to explain. "See, what probably happened is you got shook up after the accident, this guy who gave you a lift went away to get help, and you maybe even passed out a little bit. You banged yourself up when the car went off the road. Why don't I take you home on the plow, Mrs. Hawthorne?"

"He's not there," Stella said.

A large white dog jumped on top of the snowbank from the front yard of one of the neighboring houses, walked along the top and jumped down to the road in a shower of snow.

"Yes, please take me home, Leon," Stella said.

Leon looked anxiously toward the school. "Yeah, I gotta get to the office anyhow. You stay right here and I'll come back with the plow in five seconds."

"Fine."

"Not much of a chariot," Leon said, and smiled at her.

14

"Now, Mr. Wanderley," Bate said, "back to the topic we were discussing." He began to move across the aisle toward Don.

Screams, moans, the sound of rushing wind filled the theater.

-live forever

-live forever

Don stretched out his legs, dazedly looking at the pile of bodies lying beneath the risers to the stage. The old man's white face twisted toward him, lying across the body of a barefoot child. Peter Barnes was at the bottom of the heap, feebly moving his hands.

"We should have concluded matters two years ago," Bate purred. "So much trouble would have been saved if we had. You remember two years back, don't you?"

Don heard Alma Mobley saying His name is Greg. We knew each other in New Orleans, and remembered a moment so vividly that it was as if he were there again: he standing on a corner in Berkeley and looking in shock at a woman in the shadows beside a bar named The Last Reef. A leaden sense of betrayal made it impossible to move.

"So much trouble," Bate repeated. "But it makes this moment all the sweeter, don't you think?"

Peter Barnes, bleeding from a cheek, pushed himself halfway out of the tangle.

"Alma," Don managed to say.

Bate's ivory face flickered. "Yes. Your Alma. And your brother's Alma. Mustn't forget David. Not nearly as entertaining as you."

"Entertaining."

"Oh, yes. We enjoy entertainment. Only proper, since we have provided so much of it. Now look at me again, Donald." He reached down to pull Don up from the floor, smiling coldly.

Peter groaned: pulled himself clear. Don looked confusedly across at him and saw that Fenny also was moving, rolling over, his smudgy face a soundless screaming grimace.

"They hurt Fenny," Don said, blinking, and saw Bate's hand slowly reaching toward him. He shot his legs out and squirmed away from Bate, moving faster than he ever had in his life. Don rolled to his feet, halfway between Gregory and Peter, who was-

-live forever-

blinking at the squirming, grimacing form of Fenny Bate. "They hurt Fenny," Don said, the meaning of Fenny's agony going through him like an electric current. The giant sounds of the film opened up again in his ears.

"You don't," he said to Bate, and looked under the seats. His axe lay out of reach.

"Don't?"

"You don't live forever."

"We live much longer than you," Bate said, and the civilized veneer of his voice cracked open to reveal the violence beneath it. Don backed toward Peter, looking not at Bate's eyes but at his mouth.

"You won't live another minute," Bate said, and took a step forward.

"Peter-" Don said, and looked over his shoulder at the boy.

Peter was holding the Bowie knife above Fenny's writhing body.

"Do it," Don shouted, and Peter brought the knife down into Fenny's chest. Something white and foul exploded upward, a reeking geyser, from Fenny's ribcage.

Gregory Bate launched himself toward Peter, howling, and knocked Don savagely over the first row of seats.

Ricky Hawthorne at first thought he was dead, the pain in his back was so bad that he thought only death or dying could account for it, and then he saw the worn carpet under his face, the loops of thread seeming inches high and heard Don shouting: so he was alive. He moved his head: the last thing he could remember was cutting open the back of Fenny Bate's neck. Then a locomotive had run into him.

Something beside him moved. When he lifted his head to see what it was, Fenny's bare streaming chest leaped-seeming six feet long-a yard into the air. Small white worms swam across the white skin. Ricky recoiled, and though his back felt as though it were broken, forced himself to sit up.

To his side, Gregory Bate was lifting Peter Barnes off the floor, howling as if his chest were a cave of winds. A section of the beam from the projector caught Gregory's arms and Peter's body, and swarming blotches of black and white moved over them for a second. Still howling, Bate threw Peter into the screen.

Ricky could not see his knife, and went on his knees to scrabble for it. His fingers closed around a bone handle, and a long blade reflected a line of gray light. Fenny thrashed beside him, rolling over onto his hand, and uttered a thin eee, dead air rushing out. Ricky snatched the knife from under Fenny's back, feeling his hand come away wet, and made himself stand.

Gregory Bate was just scrambling up onto the stage to leap through the rip in the screen after Peter, and Ricky threw out his free hand and grasped the thick collar of his pea jacket. Bate suddenly went rigid, his reflexes as good as a cat's, and Ricky knew in terror that he would kill him, spinning around with pulverizing hands and slashing teeth, if he did not do the only possible thing.

Before Bate could move, Ricky slammed the Bowie knife into his back.

Now he could hear nothing, not the noises on the soundtrack, not the cry that must have come from Bate: he stood still gripping the bone handle, deafened by the enormity of what he had done. Bate fell back down and turned around and showed Ricky Hawthorne a face to carry with him all his life: eyes full of tearing wind and blizzard and a black mouth open as wide as a cavern.

"Filth," Ricky said, almost sobbing.

Bate fell toward him.

Don climbed over the seats carrying the axe, in a desperate hurry to get to Bate before he could tear open Ricky's throat; then he saw the muscular body slump and Ricky, gasping, pushing him off. Bate fell back into the front of the stage and went to his knees. Fluid dribbled from his mouth.

"Get away, Ricky," Don said, but the old lawyer was unable to move. Bate began to crawl toward him.

He stepped beside Ricky and Bate tilted back his head and looked straight into his eyes.

-live forever

Don hurriedly raised the axe over his head and brought the sharpened blade down into Bate's neck, cutting down deeply into the chest. With the next blow he severed the head.

Peter Barnes crawled back out through the screen, dazzled by pain and the beam from the projector. He made himself move across the few feet of bare wood to the edge of the stage, hearing a wild shrieking of voices, thinking that if he could get to the Bowie knife before Gregory Bate saw him, he might at least be able to save Don. Ricky had been killed by the first blow, he knew: he had seen its force. Then the beam of light slipped over his head and he saw what Don was doing. Gregory Bate, headless, squirmed under the blows of the axe; beside him Fenny rolled helplessly back and forth, covered in moving white pulp.

"Let me," he said, and both Ricky and Don stared up at him with white faces.

When Peter was down on the floor of the theater beside them, he took the axe from Don and brought it weakly, glancingly down, his hysteria and loathing spoiling the blow; then he felt suddenly stronger, as strong as a logger, felt as if he were glowing, filled with light, and raised it effortlessly, all the pain leaving him, and brought the axe down again; and again; and again; and then moved to Fenny.

When they were only shreds of skin and smashed bones a zero breeze lifted off their ruined bodies and swirled up into the beam from the projector, passing Peter with such force that it knocked him aside.

Peter bent down into the mess and picked up the Bowie knife.

"By God," Ricky said, and tottered into one of the seats.

When they left the theater, limping, their minds numb, they felt an impatient, hurrying wind even in the lobby-a wind that seemed to swirl through the empty space, rattling posters and the bag of potato chips on the candy counter, searching the way out- and when they broke open the doors, it streamed over them to join the worst blizzard of the season.

15

Don and Peter half-carried Ricky Hawthorne home through the storm; and now there were two convalescents in the Hawthorne home. Peter explained it to his father like this: "I'm staying with Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne, dad-I'm stuck at their house. Don Wanderley and I had to practically bring Mr. Hawthorne home on a stretcher. He's in bed and so is she, because she feels bad after a little accident in her car-"

"There'll be a lot of accidents on the roads this afternoon," his father said.

"And we finally got a doctor to come give her a sedative, and Mr. Hawthorne has a terrible cold the doctor said could turn into pneumonia if he doesn't rest, so Don Wanderley and I are taking care of them both."

"Let me get this straight, Pete. You were with this Wanderley and Mr. Hawthorne?"

"That's right," Peter said.

"Well, I wish you'd thought of calling before this. I was worried half to death. You're all I have, you know."

"I'm sorry, Dad."

"Well, at least you're with good people. Try to get home when you can, but don't take any chances in the storm."

"Okay, Dad," Peter said and hung up, grateful that his father had sounded sober, and even more grateful that he had asked no more questions.

He and Don made soup for Ricky, and brought it up to the guest-room where the old man was resting while his wife slept undisturbed in their bedroom.

"Don't know what happened to me," Ricky said. "I just couldn't move another step. If I'd been alone, I would have frozen to death out there."

"If any of us had been alone," Don said, and did not have to finish the sentence.

"Or if there had been only two of us," Peter said. "We'd be dead. He could have killed us easily."

"Yes, well he didn't," Ricky said briskly. "Don was right about them. And now two-thirds of what we have to do is accomplished."

"You mean we have to find her," Peter said. "Do you think we can do it?"

"We'll do it," Don said. "Stella might be able to tell us something. She might have learned something- heard something. I don't think there's any doubt that the man in the blue car was the same man who was after you. We should be able to talk to her tonight."

"Will it do any good?" Peter asked. "We're snowed in again. We'll never be able to drive anywhere, even if Mrs. Hawthorne does know something."

"Then we'll walk," Don said.

"Yes," Ricky said. "If that's what it takes, we'll walk." And lay back against the pillows. "You know, we're the Chowder Society now. The three of us. After Sears was found dead I thought-I said I was the only one left. I felt terribly bereft. Sears was my best friend; he was like my brother. And I'll miss him as long as I live. But I know that when Gregory Bate cornered Sears, Sears put up a hell of a good scrap. He did his best to save Fenny once a long time ago, and I know he did his best against them when his time came. No, there's no need to feel bad about Sears-he probably did better than any of us could have done alone."

Ricky put his empty soup bowl down on the bedside table. "But now there's a new Chowder Society, and here we all are. And there's no whiskey and no cigars, and we're not dressed right-and good heavens, look at me! I'm not even wearing a bow tie." He plucked at the open collar of his pajama shirt and smiled at them. "And I'll tell you one other thing. No more awful stories and no nightmares either. Thank God."

"I'm not so sure about the nightmares," Peter said.

After Peter Barnes went off to his own room to lie down for an hour, Ricky sat up in bed and looked candidly at Don Wanderley through his glasses. "Don, when you first came here you saw that I didn't like you very much. I didn't like you being here, and until I saw that you were like your uncle in certain ways, I didn't much take to you personally. But I don't have to tell you that's all changed, do I? Good Lord, I'm chattering away like a magpie! What was in that shot the doctor gave me, anyhow?"

"A huge dose of vitamins."

"Well, I feel much better. All revved up. I still have that terrific cold, of course, but I've had that so long that it feels like a friend. But listen here, Don. After what we've been through, I couldn't feel closer to you. If Sears felt like my brother, you feel like my son. Closer than my son, in fact. My boy Robert can't talk to me-I can't talk to him. That's been true since he was about fourteen. So I think I'm going to adopt you spiritually, if you don't object."

"It makes me too proud of myself to object," Don said, and took Ricky's hand.

"You sure there were just vitamins in that shot?"

"Well."

"If this is how dope makes you feel, I can understand how John became an addict." He lay back and closed his eyes. "When all this is over, assuming we're still alive, let's stay in touch. I'll take Stella on a trip to Europe. I'll send you a barrage of postcards."

"Of course," Don said, and started to say something, but Ricky was already asleep.

Shortly after ten o'clock, Peter and Don, who had eaten downstairs, brought a grilled steak, a salad and a bottle of burgundy up to Ricky's room. Another plate on the tray held a second steak for Stella. Don knocked on the door, heard Ricky say "Come in," and entered, carrying the heavy tray.

Stella Hawthorne, her hair in a scarf, looked up at Don from beside her husband on the guest-room bed. "I woke up an hour or so ago," she said, "and I got lonely, so I came down here to Ricky. Is that food? Oh, you're lovely, both of you." She smiled at Peter, who was standing shyly in the door.

"While the two of you were eating us out of house and home I had a little talk with Stella," Ricky said. He took the tray and put it on Stella's lap, and then removed one of the plates. "What luxury this is! Stella, we should have had maids years ago."

"I think I mentioned that once," Stella said. Though still obviously shaken and exhausted by shock, Stella had improved enormously during the evening; she did not look like a woman in her forties now, and perhaps she never would again, but her eyes were clear.

Ricky poured wine for himself and Stella and cut off a piece of steak. "There's no doubt that the man who picked up Stella was the same one who followed you, Peter. He even told Stella that he was a Jehovah's Witness."

"But he was dead," Stella said, and for a moment the shock swept wholly back into her face. She snatched at Ricky's hand and held it. "He was."

"I know," Ricky said, and turned to the other two again. "But after she came back with help, the body was gone."

"Will you please tell me what is going on?" Stella said, now almost in tears.

"I will," said Ricky, "but not now. We're not finished yet. I'll explain everything to you this summer. When we get out of Milburn."

"Out of Milburn?"

"I'm going to take you to France. We'll go to Antibes and St. Tropez and Aries and anywhere else that looks good. We'll be a pair of funny-looking old tourists together. But first you have to help us. Is that all right with you?"

Stella's practicality saw her through. "It is if you're really promising, and not just bribing me."

"Did you see anything else around the car when you came back with Leon Churchill?" Don asked.

"No one else was there," Stella replied, calmer again.

"I don't mean another person. Any animals?"

"I don't remember. I felt so-sort of unreal. No, nothing."

"You're sure? Try to remember how it looked. The car, the open door, the snowbank you hit-"

"Oh," she said, and Ricky paused with the fork halfway to his mouth. "You're right. I saw a dog. Why is that important? It jumped on top of the snowbank from someone's yard, and then jumped down onto the street. I noticed it because it was so beautiful. White."

"That's it," Don said.

Peter Barnes looked back and forth from Don to Ricky, his mouth open.

"Wouldn't you like some wine, Peter? And you, Don?" Ricky asked.

Don shook his head, but Peter said, "Sure," and Ricky passed him his glass.

"Can you remember anything the man said?"

"It was all so horrible… I thought he was crazy. And then I thought he knew me because he called me by name, and he said I shouldn't go to Montgomery Street because you weren't there anymore-where were you?"

"I'll tell you all about it over a Pernod. This spring."

"Anything else you remember?" Don asked. "Did he say where he was taking you?"

"To a friend," Stella said, and shuddered. "He said I'd see a mystery. And he talked about Lewis."

"Nothing more about where his friend was?"

"No. Wait. No." She looked down at her plate, and pushed the tray down toward the foot of the bed. "Poor Lewis. That's enough questions. Please."

"You'd better leave us," Ricky said.

Peter and Don were at the door when Stella said, "I remember. He said he was taking me to the Hollow. I'm sure he said that."

"That's enough for now," Ricky said. "See you in the morning, gentlemen."

And in the morning, Peter and Don were startled to find Ricky Hawthorne already in the kitchen when they came down. He was scrambling eggs, pausing now and then to blow his nose into Kleenex from a convenient box. "Good morning. Do you want to help me think about the Hollow?"

"You ought to be in bed," Don said.

"Like the dickens I ought to be in bed! Can't you smell how close we're getting?"

"I can only smell eggs," Don said. "Peter, get some plates out of the cupboard."

"How many houses are there in the Hollow? Fifty? Sixty? No more than that. And she's in one of them."

"In there waiting for us," Don said, and Peter, putting plates on the Hawthorne's kitchen table, paused and set the final plate down more slowly. "And we must have had two feet of snow last night. It's still snowing. You wouldn't call it a blizzard anymore, but we could easily have another blizzard by this afternoon. There's a snow emergency over most of the state. Do you want to hike over to the Hollow and knock on fifty or sixty doors?"

"No, I want us to think," Ricky said, and carried the pan of eggs to the table and spooned a portion onto each plate. "Let's get some bread in the toaster."

When everything was ready, toast and orange juice and coffee, the three of them ate breakfast, following Ricky's lead. He seemed vibrant, sitting at the table in his blue dressing gown; almost elated. And he had obviously been thinking a great deal about the Hollow and Anna Mostyn.

"It's the one part of town we don't know well," Ricky said. "And that's why she's there. She doesn't want us to find her yet. Presumably she knows that her creatures are dead. For the moment, her plans have been delayed. She'll want reinforcements, either more like the Bates or more like herself. Stella got rid of the only other one around with a hatpin."

"How do you know he was the only other one?" Peter asked.

"Because I think we would have encountered any others, if they were here."

They ate in silence for a moment.

"So I think she's just holed up-in a vacant building, most likely-until more of them arrive. She won't be expecting us. She'll think we won't be able to move, in this snow."

"And she'll be vengeful," Don said.

"She might also be afraid."

Peter snapped his head up. "Why do you say that?"

"Because I helped kill her once before. And I'll tell you something else. If we don't find her soon, everything we have done will be wasted. Stella and the three of us bought time for the whole town, but as soon as outside traffic gets in…" Ricky bit into a piece of toast. "Things will be even worse than before. She won't just be vengeful, she'll be rabid. Twice we've blocked her. So we'd better lay out everything we can come up with about the Hollow. And we'd better do it now."

"Wasn't it originally the place where the servants lived?" Peter asked. "Back when everybody had servants?"

"Yes," Ricky said, "but there has to be more. I'm thinking of what she said on Don's tape. 'In the places of your dreams.' We found one of those places, but I'm thinking that there must be another one, someplace where we could have been lured if we hadn't found Gregory and Fenny at the Rialto. But I just can't think…"

"Do you know anybody who lives there?" Don asked.

"Of course I do. I've lived here all my life. But I can't for the life of me see the connection…"

"What did the Hollow used to be like?" Peter asked. "In the old days."

"In the old days? Back when I was a boy, you mean?

Oh, much different-much nicer. It was a lot cleaner than it is now. A bit raffish. We used to think of it as the Bohemian section of town. There was a painter who lived in Milburn then-did magazine covers. He lived there, and he had a splendid white beard and wore a cape-he looked just the way we thought painters should look. Oh, we used to spend a lot of time down there. Used to be a bar with a jazz band. Lewis liked to go there-had a little dancehall. Like Humphrey's place, but smaller and nicer."

"A band?" Peter asked, and Don too lifted his head.

"Oh, yes," Ricky said, not noticing their excitement. "Only a little six-eight piece band, pretty good for anything you'd hear out here in the sticks…" He picked up the plates and took them to the sink; ran hot water over them. "Oh, Milburn was lovely in those days. We all used to walk for miles-down to the Hollow and back, hear some music, have a beer or two, take a hike out into the country…" His arms deep in soapy water, Ricky abruptly ceased all movement. "Good Lord. I know. I know." Still holding a soapy plate, he turned toward them. "It was Edward. It was Edward, you see. We used to go down to see Edward in the Hollow. That was where he moved when he wanted his own apartment. I was in YPSL, my father hated that-" Ricky dropped the plate, and stepped unseeing over the shattered pieces-"and the owner was one of our first black clients. The building's still there! The town council condemned it last spring, and it's supposed to be demolished next year. We got Edward that apartment-Sears and I." He wiped his hands on his dressing gown. "That's it. I know that's it. Edward's apartment. The place of your dreams."

"Because Edward's apartment…" Don began, knowing that the old man was right.

"Was where Eva Galli died and our dreams began," Ricky said. "By God, we've got her."

16

They dressed in all the warm clothing Ricky had, putting on several layers of underclothes and two shirts- Ricky's shirts couldn't be buttoned over the other two, but they meant two more layers of trapped air-and then sweaters. Two pairs of socks; even Don managed to slide his feet into an old pair of Ricky's lace-up boots. For once, Ricky had a reason to be grateful for his attachment to his clothes. "We have to live long enough to get there," he said, sorting through a box of old wool scarves. "We'll wrap some of these around our faces. It must be about three-fourths of a mile from here to the Hollow. Good thing this is a small town. When we were all in our twenties, we used to walk from this part of town down to Edward's apartment and back two or three times in one day."

"So you're sure you can find the place?" Peter asked.

"I'm reasonably sure," Ricky said. "Now, let's have a look at ourselves." They looked like three snowmen, padded out with so many layers of clothing. "Ah, hats. Well, I have a lot of hats." He fitted a high fur hat over Peter's head, put a red hunting cap that must have been half a century old on his own head, and told Don, "This one was always a little big on me." It was a soft green tweed, and it fitted Don perfectly. "Got it to go fishing with John Jaffrey. Wore it once. Hated fishing." He sneezed and wiped his nose with a peach tissue from his coat pocket. "In those days, I always preferred hunting."

At first Ricky's clothing kept them warm, and as they went through lightly falling snow in a hard bright light, they walked past a few men attacking their driveways with shovels and snow blowers. Children in bright snowsuits played on the drifts, active blots of color in the dazzle of light from the snow. It was five degrees above zero, and the cold attacked the exposed sections of their faces, but they might have been three normal men out on a conventional errand-hunting strayed children or an open store.

But even before the weather changed, walking was difficult for them. Their feet began to feel the cold first, and their legs tired from the effort of wading through the deep snow. They soon gave up the luxury of speech -it took too much energy. Their breath condensed on the heavy wool scarves, and the moisture turned cold and froze. Don knew that the temperature was dropping faster than he'd ever seen it: the snow came down harder, his fingers tingled in the gloves, even his legs began to feel the cold.

And sometimes, when they turned a corner and looked down a street hidden by a long wide drift peaked up fifteen feet high, he thought the three of them resembled photographs of polar explorers-doomed driven men with blackened lips and frozen skin, small figures in a rippling white landscape.

Halfway to the Hollow, Don was sure that the temperature had reached several degrees below zero. His scarf had become a stiff mask over his face, varnished by his breath. Cold bit at his hands and feet. He and Peter and Ricky were just straggling past the square; lifting their feet out of deep snow and leaning forward to get distance on the next step. The tree the mayor and the deputies had set up in the square was visible only as scattered green branches protruding through a mountain of white. Clearing Main Street and Wheat Row, Omar Norris had buried it.

By the time they reached the traffic lights, the brightness had left the air and the piled snow no longer sparkled: it seemed as gray as the air. Don looked up and saw thousands of flakes swirling between dense clouds. They were alone. Down Main Street, the tops of a few cars sat like inverted saucers on the drifts. All the buildings were closed. New snow spun around them: the air was darkening to black.

"Ricky?" he asked. He tasted frozen wool: his cheekbones, open to the air, burned.

"Not far," Ricky gasped. "Keep on going. I'll make it."

"How are you doing, Peter?"

The boy peered out at Don from under the snow-crusted fur cap. "You heard the boss. Keep on going."

The new snow at first fell harmlessly, no more an obstacle than the candyfloss snowfall at the start of their trip; but by the time they had gone three blocks more in a building wind, Don's feet now like two blocks of ice painfully welded to his ankles, the new snow was unequivocally a storm: not falling vertically or spinning prettily, but sleeting down diagonally, at intervals coming in waves like a surf. It stung where it hit. Whenever they reached the end of one of the high-curled drifts snow came straight at them, following the currents of the wind, blasting into their chests and faces.

Ricky fell down backward, and sat up chest high in the snow like a doll. Peter bent down to offer him an arm. Don turned around to see if he could help, and felt the snowladen wind pound against his back. He called, "Ricky?"

"Just have to. Sit. For a little."

He breathed deeply, and Don knew how the cold would be scraping against his throat, how it would chill his lungs.

"No more than two-three blocks," Ricky said. "God my feet."

"I just had a hell of a thought. What if she's not there?"

"She's there," Ricky said, and took Peter's hand and pulled himself up. "It's there. Few more blocks."

When Don turned back into the storm he could not see for a moment; then he saw thousands of fast-moving particles of white veering toward him, so close together they were like lines of force. Vast semitransparent sheets cut him off from Ricky and Peter. Only partially visible beside him, Ricky motioned him on.

Don was never sure when they crossed into the Hollow: in the storm, it was no different from the rest of Milburn. Perhaps the buildings seemed marginally shabbier: perhaps fewer lights shone dimly in the depths of rooms, seeming thousands of feet away. Once he had written in his journal that the area had a "sepia '30's prettiness": that seemed unutterably remote now. All was dark gray dirty brick and taped windows. But for the few dim lights flickering behind curtains, it seemed ominous and deserted. Don remembered other facile words he had written in his journal: if trouble ever comes to Milburn, it won't start in the Hollow. Trouble had come to Milburn, and here in the Hollow, on a sunny day in mid-October fifty years before, it had started.

The three of them stood in the weak light of a street lamp, Ricky Hawthorne tottering, squinting across the street at three identical high brick buildings. Even in the noises of the storm Don could hear him breathing. "Over there," Ricky said harshly.

"Which one?"

"Can't tell," Ricky said, and shook his head, causing a shower of snow to whirl off the red hunting cap. "Just can't." He peered up into the storm: pointed his face like a dog. The building on the right. Then back to the building in the middle. He raised the hand which held his knife and used it to point at the windows on the third floor. They were curtainless, and one was half-open. "There. Edward's apartment. Just there."

The street lamp over them died, and light faded all about them.

Don stared at the windows high up on the desolate building, half expecting to see a face appear there, beckoning toward them; fear worse than the storm froze him.

"Finally happened," Ricky said. "Storm blew down the power lines. You afraid of the dark?"

The three of them floundered across the drifted street.

17

Don pushed open the building's front door, and the other two followed him into the vestibule. They pulled their scarves away from their faces, their breath steaming in the small cold space. Peter brushed snow from his fur hat and the front of his coat; none of them spoke. Ricky leaned against the wall, looking almost too weak to climb the stairs. A dead light bulb hung over their heads.

"Coats," Don whispered, thinking that the sodden garments would slow them down; he lay the axe down in the dark, unbuttoned his coat and dropped it on the floor. Then the scarf, stinking of wet wool; his chest and arms were still constricted by the tight sweaters, but at least the heaviest weight no longer pulled at his shoulders. Peter too removed his coat, and helped Ricky with his.

Don saw their white faces hovering before him, and wondered if this was the last act-they had the weapons which had destroyed the Bate brothers, but the three of them were limp as rags. Ricky Hawthorne's eyes were closed: thrown back, its muscles lax, his face was a death mask.

"Ricky?" Don whispered.

"A minute." Ricky's hand trembled as he raised it to blow on his fingers. He inhaled, held the air for a long moment, exhaled. "Okay. You'd better go first. I'll bring up the rear."

Don bent down and picked up the axe. Behind him Peter wiped the blade of the Bowie knife against his sleeve. Don found the bottom step with his numb toe and climbed onto it. He glanced back. Ricky stood behind Peter, propping himself against the staircase wall. His eyes were closed again.

"Mr. Hawthorne, do you want to stay down here?" Peter whispered.

"Not on your life."

With the other two following him, Don crept up the first flight of steps. Once, three well-off young men just beginning their practices in law and medicine and a preacher's son of seventeen had gone up and down these stairs: each of them close to twenty in the century's twenties. And up these stairs had come the woman with whom they were infatuated, as he had been infatuated with Alma Mobley. He reached the second landing, and peeked around the corner to the top of the last flight of stairs. With part of his mind, he wished to see an open door, an empty room, snow blowing unnoticed into an empty apartment…

What he saw instead made him pull back. Peter looked over his shoulder and nodded; and finally Ricky appeared on the landing to look up at the door at the top of the stairs.

A phosphorescent light spilled out from beneath the door, illuminating the landing and the walls a soft green.

Silently, they came up the final set of stairs into the phosphorescent light.

"On three," Don whispered, and cradled his axe just below the head. Peter and Ricky nodded.

"One. Two." Don gripped the top of the banister with his free hand. "Three."

They hit the door together, and it broke open under their weight.

Each of them heard a single distinct word; but the voice delivering it was different for each of them. The word was Hello.

18

Don Wanderley, caught in a huge dislocation, spun around at the sound of his brother's voice. Warm light fell around him, traffic noises attacked him. His hands and feet were so cold they might have been frostbitten, but it was summer. Summer: New York. He recognized the corner almost immediately.

It was in the East Fifties, and it was so familiar to him because quite near-somewhere very near-was a cafe with outdoor tables where he had met David for lunch whenever he was in New York.

This was not a hallucination-not a mere hallucination. He was in New York, and it was summer. Don felt a weight in his left hand, and looking down, saw that he was carrying an axe. An axe? Now what…? He dropped the axe as if it had jumped in his hand. His brother called, "Don! Over here!"

Yes, he had been carrying an axe… they had seen green light… he had been turning, moving fast…

"Don!"

He looked across the street and saw David, looking healthy and extremely prosperous, standing up at one of the outdoor tables, grinning at him and waving. David in a crisp lightweight blue suit, aviator glasses smoked over his eyes, their bows disappearing into David's sun-blond hair. "Wake up!" his brother called over the traffic.

Don rubbed his face with his freezing hands. It was important not to appear confused in front of David- David had asked him to lunch. David had something to tell him.

New York?

But yes, it was New York, and there was David, looking at him amusedly, happy to see him, full of something to say. Don looked down at the sidewalk. The axe was gone. He ran between the cars and embraced his brother and smelled cigars, good shampoo, Aramis cologne. He was here and David was alive.

"How do you feel?" David asked.

"I'm not here and you're dead," came out of his mouth.

David looked embarrassed, then disguised it behind another smile. "You'd better sit down, little brother. You're not supposed to be talking like that anymore." David held his elbow and led him to a chair beneath one of the sun umbrellas. A martini on the rocks chilled a sweating glass.

"I'm not supposed… Don began. He sat heavily in the chair; Manhattan traffic went down the pleasant East Fifties street; on the other side, over the top of the traffic, he read the name of a French restaurant painted in gold on dark glass. Even his cold feet could tell that the pavement was hot.

"You bet you're not," David said. "I ordered a steak for you, all right? I didn't think you'd want anything too rich." He looked sympathetically across the table at Don. The modish glasses hid his eyes, but David's whole handsome face exuded warmth. "Is that suit okay, by the way? I found it in your closet. Now that you're out of the hospital, you'll have to shop for some new clothes. Use my account at Brooks, will you?" Don looked down at what he wore. A tan summer suit, a brown-and-green-striped tie, brown loafers. It all looked a little out of date and shabby beside David's elegance.

"Now look at me and tell me I'm dead," David said.

"You're not dead."

David sighed happily. "Okay. Good. You had me worried there, pal. Now-do you remember anything about what happened?"

"No. Hospital?"

"You had about the worst breakdown anyone's ever seen, brother. It was the next thing to a one-way ticket. Happened right after you finished that book."

"The Nightwatcher?"

"What else? You just blanked out-and when you'd say anything, it was just crazy stuff about me being dead and Alma being something awful and mysterious. You were in outer space. If you don't remember any of this, it's because of the shock treatments. Now we have to get you settled again. I talked to Professor Lieberman, and he says he'll give you another appointment in the fall-he really liked you, Don."

"Lieberman? No, he said I was…"

"That was before he knew how sick you were. Anyhow, I got you out of Mexico and put you in a private hospital in Riverdale. Paid all the bills until you got straightened out. The steak'll be here in a minute. Better get that martini down. The house red isn't bad here."

Don obediently sipped at his drink: that familiar cold potent taste. "Why am I so cold?" he asked David. "I'm frozen."

"Aftereffect of the drug therapy." David patted his hand. "They told me you'd feel like that for a day or two, cold, not too sure of yourself yet-it'll go away. I promise you."

A waitress came with their food. Don let her take away his martini glass.

"You had all these disturbed ideas," his brother was saying. "Now that you're well again, they'll shock you. You thought my wife was some kind of monster who had killed me in Amsterdam-you were convinced of it. The doctor said you couldn't face the fact that you'd lost her: that's why you never came out here to talk about it. You wound up thinking that what you wrote in your novel was real. After you mailed the book off to your agent, you just sat in a hotel room, not eating, not washing-you didn't even get up to shit. I had to go all the way down to Mexico City to bring you back."

"What was I doing an hour ago?" Don asked.

"You were getting a sedative shot. Then they put you in a cab and sent you down here. I thought you'd like to see the place again. Something familiar."

"I've been in a hospital for a year?"

"Nearly two years. For the past few months, you've been making great progress."

"Why can't I remember it?"

"Simple. Because you don't want to. As far as you're concerned, you were born five minutes ago. But it'll all come back slowly. You can recuperate in our place on the Island-lots of sun, sand, a few women. Like the sound of that?"

Don blinked and looked around. His entire body felt unreasonably cold. A tall woman was just now coming down the block toward them, pulled along by an enormous sheepdog on a leash-the woman was slender and tanned, she wore sunglasses pushed up into her hair, and for a moment she was the emblem of what was real: the epitome of all not hallucinated or imagined, of sanity. She was no one important, she was a stranger, but if what David was telling, him was the truth, she meant health.

"You'll see plenty of women," David said, almost laughing. "Don't burn out your eyes on the first one who crosses your path."

"You're married to Alma now," Don said.

"Of course. She's dying to see you. And you know," David said, still smiling, holding a fork with a neatly speared section of meat, "she's kind of flattered about that book of yours. She feels she contributed to literature! But I want to tell you something," and David hitched his chair closer. "Think about the consequences of it, if what you said in that book was true. If creatures like that really existed-and you thought they did, you know."

"I know," Don said. "I thought-"

"Wait. Let me finish. Can't you see how puny we'd look to them? We live-what? A miserable sixty-seventy years, maybe. They'd live for centuries-for a century of centuries. Becoming anything they want to become. Our lives are made by accident, by coincidence, by a blind combination of genes-they make themselves by will. They would detest us. And they'd be right. Next to them, we would be detestable."

"No," Don said. "That's all wrong. They're savage and cruel, they live on death…" He felt as though he were about to be sick. "You can't say those things."

"Your problem is that you're still caught up in the story you were telling yourself-even though you're out of it, that story is still hanging around in your memory somewhere. You know, your doctor told me he never saw anything like it-when you flipped, you flipped into a story. You'd be walking down the hall in the hospital, and you'd be carrying on a conversation with people who weren't there. You were all wrapped up in some sort of plot. Impressed the hell out of the doctors. You'd be talking to them, and they'd talk back, but you answered back like you were talking to some guy named Sears or another guy named Ricky…" David smiled and shook his head.

"What happened at the end of the story?" Don asked.

"Huh?"

"What happened at the end of the story?" Don set down his fork and leaned forward, staring at his brother's bland face.

"They didn't let you get there," David said. "They were afraid to-looked like you were setting yourself up to get killed. See, that was part of your problem. You invented these fantastic beautiful creatures, and then you 'wrote' yourself into the story as their enemy. But nothing like that could ever be defeated. No matter how hard you tried, they'd always win in the end."

"No, that isn't…" Don said. That wasn't correct: he could only remember the vague outlines of the "story" David was talking about, but he was sure David was wrong.

"Your doctors said it was the most interesting way for a novelist to commit suicide they ever heard of. So they couldn't let you push it to the end, do you see? They had to bring you out of it."

Don sat as if in freezing wind.

"Hello and welcome back," Sears said. "We've all had that dream, but I imagine you must be the first to have it at one of our meetings."

"What?" said Ricky, snapping up his head and seeing before him Sears's beloved library: the glass-fronted bookcases, the leather chairs drawn into a circle, the dark windows. Immediately across from him, Sears drew on his cigar and gazed at him with what looked like mild annoyance. Lewis and John, holding their whiskey glasses and dressed like Sears in black tie, appeared to be more embarrassed than annoyed.

"What dream?" Ricky said, and shook his head. He too was in evening dress: by the cigar, by the quality of the darkness, by a thousand familiar details, he knew they were at the last stage of a Chowder Society meeting.

"You dozed off," John said. "Right after you finished your story."

"Story?"

"And then," Sears said, "you looked right at me and said, 'You're dead.' "

"Oh. The nightmare," Ricky said. "Oh, yes. Did I really? My goodness, I'm cold."

"At our age, we all have poor circulation," said Dr. Jaffrey.

"What's the date?"

"You really were out," Sears said, lifting his eyebrows. "It's the ninth of October."

"And is Don here? Where is Don?" Ricky looked frantically around the library, as if Edward's nephew might be hiding under a chair.

"Really, Ricky," Sears grumped. "We just voted on writing to him, if you remember. It is extremely unlikely that he should appear before the letter is written."

"We have to tell him about Eva Galli," Ricky said, remembering the vote. "It's imperative."

John smiled thinly, and Lewis leaned back in his chair, looking at Ricky as if he thought he'd lost his mind.

"You do make the most amazing reversals," Sears said. "Gentlemen, since our friend here evidently needs his sleep, perhaps we'd better call it a night."

"Sears," Ricky said, suddenly galvanized by another memory.

"Yes, Ricky?"

"Next time we meet-when we meet at John's house-don't tell the story you have in mind. You cannot tell that story. It will have the most appalling consequences."

"Stay here a moment, Ricky," Sears ordered, and showed the other two men out of the room.

He came back carrying the freshly fired-up cigar and a bottle. "You seem to need a drink. It must have been quite a dream."

"Was I out long?" He could hear, down on the street, the sound of Lewis trying to start up the Morgan.

"Ten minutes. No longer. Now what was that about my story for next time?"

Ricky opened his mouth, tried to recapture what had been so important only minutes before, and realized that he must look very foolish. "I don't know any more. Something about Eva Galli."

"I can promise you I was not going to speak about that. I don't imagine any of us ever shall, and I think that really is for the best, don't you?"

"No. No. We have to-" Ricky realized he was going to mention Donald Wanderley again, and blushed. "I suppose it must have been part of my dream. Is my window open, Sears? I'm actually freezing. And I feel so tired. I can't imagine what…"