If It Bleeds

RAT

Ordinarily, Drew Larson’s story ideas came—on the increasingly rare occasions when they came at all—a little at a time, like dribbles of water drawn from a well that was almost dry. And there was always a chain of associations he could trace back to something he’d seen or heard: a real-world flashpoint.

In the case of his most recent short, the genesis had come when he’d seen a man changing a tire on the Falmouth entrance ramp to I-295, the guy down in an effortful squat while people honked and swerved around him. That had led to “Blowout,” labored over for almost three months and published (after half a dozen rejections at larger magazines) in Prairie Schooner.

“Skip Jack,” his one published story in The New Yorker, had been written while he was a grad student at BU. The seed of that one had been planted while listening to the college radio station in his apartment one night. The student DJ had attempted to play “Whole Lotta Love,” by Zep, and the record had begun to skip. The skip went on for nearly forty-five seconds until the breathless kid killed the tune and blurted, “Sorry, guys, I was taking a shit.”

“Skip Jack” was twenty years ago. “Blowout” had been published three years ago. In between, he had managed four others. They were all in the three-thousand-word range. All had taken months of labor and revision. There had never been a novel. He had tried, but no. He had pretty much given that ambition up. The first two efforts at long-form fiction had given him problems. The last try had caused serious problems. He had burned the manuscript, and had come close to burning the house, as well.

Now this idea, arriving complete. Arriving like a long overdue engine pulling a train of many splendid cars.

Lucy had asked him if he’d drive down to Speck’s Deli and pick up sandwiches for lunch. It was a pretty September day, and he told her he’d walk instead. She nodded approvingly and said it would be good for his waistline. He wondered later how different his life might have been if he’d taken the Suburban or the Volvo. He might never have had the idea. He might never have been at his father’s cabin. He almost certainly would never have seen the rat.

He was halfway to Speck’s, waiting at the corner of Main and Spring for the light to change, when the engine arrived. The engine was an image, one as brilliant as reality. Drew stood transfixed and staring at it through the sky. A student gave him a nudge. “Sign says you can walk, man.”

Drew ignored him. The student threw him an odd look and crossed the street. Drew continued to stand on the curb as WALK became DON’T WALK and then WALK again.

Although he avoided western novels (with the exceptions of The Ox-Bow Incident and Doctorow’s brilliant Welcome to Hard Times) and hadn’t seen many western movies since his teenage years, what he saw as he stood on the corner of Main and Spring was a western saloon. A wagon-wheel chandelier with kerosene lanterns mounted on the spokes hung from the ceiling. Drew could smell the oil. The floor was plank. At the back of the room were three or four gaming tables. There was a piano. The man playing it wore a derby hat. Only he wasn’t playing it now. He had turned to stare at what was happening at the bar. Standing next to the piano player, also staring, was a tall drink of water with an accordion strapped to his narrow chest. And at the bar, a young man in an expensive western suit was holding a gun to the temple of a girl in a red dress so low-cut that only a ruffle of lace hid her nipples. Drew could see these two twice, once where they stood and once reflected in the backbar mirror.

This was the engine. The whole train was behind it. He saw the inhabitants of every car: the limping sheriff (shot at Antietam and still carrying the ball in his leg), the arrogant father willing to lay siege to an entire town to keep his son from being taken to the county seat where he would be tried and hung, the father’s hired men on the roofs with their rifles. Everything was there.

When he came home, Lucy took one look at him and said, “You’re either coming down with something or you’ve had an idea.”

“It’s an idea,” Drew said. “A good idea. Maybe the best one I’ve ever had.”

“Short story?”

He guessed that was what she was hoping for. What she wasn’t hoping for was another visit from the fire department while she and the kids stood on the lawn in their nightclothes.

“Novel.”

She put her ham and cheese on rye down. “Oh boy.”

They didn’t call what happened following the fire that almost took their house a nervous breakdown, but that’s what it was. Not as bad as it could have been, but he’d missed half a semester of school (thank God for tenure) and had only regained his equilibrium thanks to twice-weekly therapy sessions, some magic pills, and Lucy’s unfailing confidence that he would recover. Plus the kids, of course. The kids needed a father who wasn’t caught in an unending loop of must finish and can’t finish.

“This one is different. It’s all there, Lucy. Practically gift-wrapped. It’s going to be like taking dictation!”

She just looked at him, a slight frown creasing her brow. “If you say so.”

“Listen, we didn’t rent out Dad’s cabin this year, did we?”

Now she looked not just worried but alarmed. “We haven’t rented it out for two years. Not since Old Bill died.” Old Bill Colson had been their caretaker, and Drew’s mom and pop’s caretaker before that. “You’re not thinking—”

“I am, but only for a couple of weeks. Three at most. To get started. You can get Alice to help with the kids, you know she loves to come and the kids love their auntie. I’ll be back in time to help you pass out the Halloween candy.”

“You can’t write it here?”

“Of course I can. Once I get a running start.” He put his hands to his head like a man with a splitting headache. “The first forty pages at the cabin, that’s all. Or maybe it’ll be a hundred and forty, it might go that fast. I see it! I see it all!” He repeated, “It’ll be like taking dictation.”

“I need to think about it,” she said. “And you do, too.”

“All right, I will. Now eat your sandwich.”

“All of a sudden I’m not that hungry,” she said.

Drew was. He ate the rest of his, then most of hers.

That afternoon he went to see his old department head. Al Stamper had abruptly retired at the end of the spring semester, allowing Arlene Upton, also known as the Wicked Witch of Elizabethan Drama, to finally achieve the position of authority she had so long desired. Nay, lusted for.

Nadine Stamper told Drew that Al was on the back patio, drinking iced tea and taking in the sun. She looked as worried as Lucy had when Drew sprang his idea of going up to the camp in TR-90 for a month or so, and when he went out to the patio, Drew saw why. He also understood why Al Stamper—who had ruled the English Department like a benevolent despot for the last fifteen years—had abruptly stepped down.

“Stop gawking and have some tea. You know you want some.” Al always believed he knew what people wanted. Arlene Upton loathed him in large part because Al usually did know what people wanted.

Drew sat down and took the glass. “How much weight have you lost, Al?”

“Thirty pounds. I know it looks like more, but that’s because I wasn’t carrying any extra to start with. It’s pancreatic.” He saw Drew’s expression and raised the finger he used to quell arguments in faculty meetings. “No need for you or Nadie or anyone else to go crafting any obituaries just yet. The docs caught it relatively early. Confidence is high.”

Drew didn’t think his old friend looked especially confident, but held his tongue.

“Let’s not talk about me. Let’s talk about why you came. Have you decided how you’re going to spend your sabbatical?”

Drew told him he wanted to take another stab at a novel. This time, he said, he was pretty sure he could bring it off. Positive, actually.

“That’s what you said about The Village on the Hill,” Al said, “and you almost lost the wheels off your little red wagon when that one went south.”

“You sound like Lucy,” Drew said. “I didn’t expect that.”

Al leaned forward. “Listen to me, Drew. You’re an excellent teacher, and you’ve written some fine short stories—”

“Half a dozen,” Drew said. “Call the Guinness Book of World Records.”

Al waved this off. “ ‘Skip Jack’ was in Best American—”

“Yes,” Drew said. “The one edited by Doctorow. Who’s been dead lo these many years.”

“Many fine writers have produced almost nothing but short stories,” Al persisted. “Poe. Chekhov. Carver. And although I know you tend to steer clear of popular fiction, there’s Saki and O. Henry on that side of things. Harlan Ellison in the modern age.”

“Those guys did a lot better than half a dozen. And Al, this is a great idea. It really is.”

“Would you care to tell me a little about it? A drone’s eye view, so to speak?” He eyed Drew. “You don’t. I can see that you don’t.”

Drew, who longed to do exactly that—because it was beautiful! damn near perfect!—shook his head. “Better to keep it in, I think. I’m going up to my father’s old cabin for awhile. Long enough to get this thing rolling.”

“Ah. TR-90, correct? The back of beyond, in other words. What does Lucy say about this idea?”

“Not crazy about it, but she’ll have her sister to help with the kids.”

“It’s not the kids she’s worried about, Drew. I think you know that.”

Drew said nothing. He thought about the saloon. He thought about the sheriff. He already knew the sheriff’s name. It was James Averill.

Al sipped his tea, then put the glass down beside a well-thumbed copy of Fowles’s The Magus. Drew guessed there were underlinings on every page: green for character, blue for theme, red for phrases Al found remarkable. His blue eyes were still bright, but they were also a trifle watery now, and red around the rims. Drew didn’t like to think he saw approaching death in those eyes, but thought maybe he did.

Al leaned forward, hands clasped between his thighs. “Tell me something, Drew. Tell me why this is so important to you.”

That night, after making love, Lucy asked him if he really had to go.

Drew thought about it. Really did. She deserved that much. Oh, and so much more. She had stood by him, and when he’d gone through the bad time, he had leaned on her. He kept it simple. “Luce, this might be my last chance.”

There was a long silence from her side of the bed. He waited, knowing if she told him she didn’t want him to go, he would give in to her wishes. At last she said, “All right. I want this for you, but I’m a little bit scared. Can’t lie about that. What’s it going to be about? Or don’t you want to say?”

“I do. I’m dying to spill it, but it’s better to let the pressure build. I told Al the same thing when he asked.”

“Just as long as it’s not about academics screwing each other’s spouses and drinking too much and having midlife crises.”

“Not like The Village on the Hill, in other words.”

She poked him with her elbow. “You said it, Mister, not me.”

“It’s nothing like that.”

“Can you wait, honey? A week? Just to make sure it’s real?” And in a smaller voice: “For me?”

He didn’t want to; he wanted to go north tomorrow and start the day after. But… just to make sure it’s real. That was not such a bad idea, maybe.

“I can do that.”

“All right. Good. And if you do go up there, you’ll be all right? You swear?”

“I’ll be fine.”

He saw the momentary gleam of her teeth as she smiled. “That’s what men always say, isn’t it?”

“If it doesn’t work, I’ll come back. If it starts to be like… you know.”

To this she made no reply, either because she believed him or because she didn’t. It was okay either way. They weren’t going to have an argument about it, that was the important thing.

He thought she had gone to sleep, or was going, when she asked Al Stamper’s question. She had never asked before, not during his first two stabs at writing long form, not even during the ongoing clusterfuck that had been The Village on the Hill.

“Why is writing a novel so important to you? Is it the money? Because we’re doing all right with your salary and the accounting work I’m picking up. Or is it the cachet?”

“Neither of those things, since there’s no guarantee it would be published at all. And if it ended up in a desk drawer, like bad novels all over this round world of ours, I’d be okay with that.” As these words came out of his mouth, he realized they were actually true.

“Then what?”

To Al, he’d spoken about completion. And about the excitement of exploring uncharted territory. (He didn’t know if he actually believed that one, but knew it would appeal to Al, who was a closet romantic.) Such bullshit wouldn’t do for Lucy.

“I have the tools,” he said at last. “And I have the talent. So it might be good. It might even be commercial, if I understand the meaning of that word when it comes to fiction. Good matters to me, but that isn’t the main thing. Not the big thing.” He turned to her, took her hands, and put his forehead against hers. “I need to finish. That’s all. That’s the whole deal. After that I can either do it again, and with a lot less sturm und drang, or let go. Either would be fine with me.”

“Closure, in other words.”

“No.” He had used the word with Al, but only because it was a word Al could understand and would accept. “It’s something different. Something almost physical. Do you remember when Brandon got that cherry tomato stuck in his throat?”

“I’ll never forget it.”

Bran had been four. They were having a meal out at Country Kitchen in Gates Falls. Brandon began making a strangled gagging sound and clutching at his throat. Drew grabbed him, turned him around, and gave him the Heimlich. The tomato had popped out whole, and with an audible thorp sound, like a cork from a bottle. No damage done, but Drew would never forget their son’s supplicatory eyes when he realized he couldn’t breathe, and guessed Lucy never would, either.

“This is like that,” he said. “Only stuck in my brain instead of my throat. I’m not choking, exactly, but I’m not getting enough air, either. I need to finish.”

“All right,” she said, and patted his cheek.

“Do you understand?”

“No,” she said. “But you do, and I guess that’s enough. Going to sleep now.” She turned on her side.

Drew lay awake for awhile, thinking of a little town out west, a part of the country where he had never been. Not that it mattered. His imagination would carry him, he was sure of it. Any necessary research could be done later. Assuming the idea didn’t turn into a mirage in the next week, that was.

Eventually he fell asleep and dreamed of a limping sheriff. A wastrel good-for-nothing son locked in a tiny crackerbox of a jail. Men on rooftops. A standoff that wouldn’t—couldn’t—last long.

He dreamed of Bitter River, Wyoming.

The idea didn’t turn into a mirage. It grew stronger, brighter, and a week later, on a warm October morning, Drew loaded three boxes of supplies—mostly canned food—into the back of the old Suburban they used as a second vehicle. This was followed by a duffel bag full of clothes and toiletries. The duffel was followed by his laptop and the scuffed case containing his pop’s old Olympia portable typewriter, which he wanted as a backup. He didn’t trust the power in the TR; the lines had a tendency to come down when the wind blew, and the unincorporated townships were the last places where power was restored after a blow.

He had kissed the kids goodbye before they left for school; Lucy’s sister would be there to welcome them when they got home. Now Lucy stood in the driveway in a sleeveless blouse and her faded jeans. She looked slim and desirable, but her brow was furrowed as if she had one of her premenstrual migraines coming on.

“You need to be careful,” she said, “and not just about your work. The north country empties out between Labor Day and hunting season, and cell phone coverage stops dead forty miles out of Presque Isle. If you break a leg walking in the woods… or get lost…”

“Honey, I don’t do woods. When I walk—if I walk—I’ll stick to the road.” He took a closer look at her and didn’t care for what he saw. It wasn’t just the furrowed brow; her eyes had picked up a suspicious sheen. “If you need me to stay, I’ll stay. Just say the word.”

“Would you really?”

“Try me.” Praying she wouldn’t.

She was looking down at her sneakers. Now she raised her head and gave it a shake. “No. I understand this is important to you. So do Stacey and Bran. I heard what he said when he kissed you goodbye.”

Brandon, their twelve-year-old, had said, “Bring back a big one, Dad.”

“I want you to call me every day, Mister. No later than five, even if you’re really rolling. Your cell won’t work, but the landline does. We get a bill for it every month, and I called this morning just to be sure. Not only did it ring, I got your pop’s old answering machine message. Gave me a little bit of a chill. Like a voice from the grave.”

“I bet.” Drew’s father had been dead for ten years. They had kept the cabin, using it a few times themselves, then renting it out to hunting parties until Old Bill, the caretaker, died. After that they stopped bothering. One group of hunters hadn’t paid in full and another group had pretty well trashed the place. It hardly seemed worth the hassle.

“You should record a new message.”

“I will.”

“And fair warning, Drew—if I don’t hear from you, I’ll come up.”

“Wouldn’t be a good idea, honey. Those last fifteen miles on Shithouse Road would tear the exhaust right out from under the Volvo. Probably the transmission, too.”

“Don’t care. Because… I’m just going to say this, okay? When stuff goes wrong with one of the short stories, you can put it aside. There’s a week or two of moping around the house, then you’re yourself again. Village on the Hill was a whole different thing, and the next year was very scary for me and the kids.”

“This one is—”

“Different, I know, you’ve said so half a dozen times, and I believe you, even though the only thing I know about it is that it’s not a bunch of randy teachers having key parties in Updike country. Just…” She took him by the forearms, looking up at him earnestly. “If it starts to go wrong, if you start to lose the words like you did with Village, come home. Do you understand me? Come home.”

“I promise.”

“Now kiss me like you mean it.”

He did, gently parting her lips with his tongue and sliding one hand into the back pocket of her jeans. When he pulled back from her, Lucy was flushed. “Yes,” she said. “Like that.”

He got into the Suburban and had made it to the foot of the driveway when Lucy shouted “Wait! Wait!” and came running after him. She was going to tell him she’d changed her mind, she wanted him to stay and try writing the book in his upstairs office, he was sure of it, and he had to battle a desire to step on the gas and go powering down Sycamore Street without looking in the rearview mirror. Instead, he stopped with the Suburban’s back end in the street and rolled down the window.

“Paper!” she said. She was out of breath and her hair was in her eyes. She pooched out her lower lip and blew it back. “Do you have paper? Because I doubt like hell if there’s any up there.”

He grinned and touched her cheek. “Two reams. Think that’ll be enough?”

“Unless you’re planning to write The Lord of the Rings, it should be.” She gave him a level gaze. The furrow had left her brow, at least for the time being. “Go on, Drew. Get out of here and bring back a big one.”

As he turned onto the I-295 entrance ramp where he’d once upon a time seen a man changing a flat tire, Drew felt a lightening. His real life—kids, running errands, chores around the house, picking up Stacey and Brandon from their after-school activities—was behind him. He would come back to it in two weeks, three at the outside, and he supposed he would still have the bulk of the book to write amid the clanging round of that real life, but what was ahead of him was another life, one he would live in his imagination. He had never been able to fully inhabit that life while working on the other three novels, had never quite been able to get over. This time he felt he would. His body might be sitting in your basic no-frills cabin in the Maine woods, but the rest of him would be in the town of Bitter River, Wyoming, where a limping sheriff and three frightened deputies were faced with protecting a young man who’d killed an even younger woman in cold blood in front of at least forty witnesses. Protecting him from angry townspeople was only half of the lawmen’s job. The rest was getting him to the county seat where he would be tried (if Wyoming even had counties in the 1880s; he would find that out later). Drew didn’t know where old man Prescott had gotten the small army of gun thugs he was counting on to keep that move from happening, but he was sure it would come to him eventually.

Everything was eventual.

He merged onto I-95 at Gardiner. The Suburban—120K on the clock—shimmied at sixty, but once he goosed it up to seventy, the shimmy disappeared and the old girl ran smooth as silk. He still had a four-hour run ahead of him, the last hour over increasingly narrow roads culminating in the one TR locals called the Shithouse Road.

He was looking forward to the drive, but not as much as he was looking forward to opening his laptop, connecting it up to the little Hewlett-Packard printer, and creating a document he would call BITTER RIVER #1. For once, thinking about the chasm of white space under the blinking cursor didn’t fill him with a mixture of hope and fear. As he passed the Augusta town line, all he felt was impatience. This time was going to be okay. Better than okay. This time everything would come right.

He turned on the radio and began to sing along with the Who.

Late that afternoon Drew pulled up in front of TR-90’s only business, a shambling, slump-roofed establishment called the Big 90 General Store (as if somewhere there was a Small 90). He gassed the Suburban, which was almost dry, at a rusty old rotary pump where a sign announced CASH ONLY and REGULAR ONLY and “DASH-AWAYS” WILL BE PERSECUTED and GOD BLESS AMERICA. The price was $3.90 a gallon. In the north country, you paid premium prices even for regular. Drew paused on the store’s porch to lift the receiver of the bug-splattered pay phone that had been here when he was a kid, along with what he would swear was the same message, now faded almost to illegibility: DO NOT DEPOSIT COINS UNTIL YOUR PARTY ANSWERS. Drew heard the buzz of the open line, nodded, replaced the receiver in its rusty cradle, and went inside.

“Ayuh, ayuh, still works,” said the refugee from Jurassic Park sitting behind the counter. “Amazin, ain’t it.” His eyes were red, and Drew wondered if he had perhaps been smoking a little Aroostook County Gold. Then the old fella pulled a snot-clotted bandanna from his back pocket and sneezed into it. “Goddam allergies, I get em every fall.”

“Mike DeWitt, isn’t it?” Drew asked.

“Nawp, Mike was my father. He passed on in Feberary. Ninety-seven fuckin years old, and the last ten he didn’t know if he was afoot or on hossback. I’m Roy.” He stuck his hand out over the counter. Drew didn’t want to shake it—that was the one that had been manipulating the snotrag—but he had been raised to be polite, so he gave it a single pump.

DeWitt hooked his glasses down to the end of his beaky nose and studied Drew over them. “I know I look like m’dad, worse luck, and you look like yours. You are Buzzy Larson’s boy, ain’tcha? Not Ricky, t’other one.”

“That’s right. Ricky lives in Maryland now. I’m Drew.”

“Sure, that’s right. Been up with the wife and kiddies, but not for awhile. Teacher, ain’tcha?”

“Yes.” He passed DeWitt three twenties. DeWitt put them in the till and returned six limp singles.

“I heard Buzzy died.”

“He did. My mom, too.” One less question to answer.

“Sorry to hear it. What are you doing up here this time of year?”

“I’m on sabbatical. Thought I’d do a little writing.”

“Oh, ayuh? At Buzzy’s cabin?”

“If the road’s passable.” Only saying it so he wouldn’t sound like a complete flatlander. Even if the road was in bad shape, he’d find a way to bull the Suburban through. He hadn’t come this far just to turn around.

DeWitt paused to snorkel back phlegm, then said, “Well, they don’t call it Shithouse Road for nothin, you know, and there’s probably a culvert or two washed out from the spring runoff, but you got your four-wheel drive, so you should be all right. Course you know Old Bill died.”

“Yes. One of his sons dropped me a card. We couldn’t make it to the funeral. Was it his heart?”

“Head. Put a bullet through it.” Roy DeWitt said this with palpable relish. “He was comin down with the Alzheimer’s, see? Constable found a notebook in his glovebox with all kinds of stuff written down in it. Directions, phone numbers, his wife’s name. Even the fuckin dog’s name. Couldn’t take it, don’tcha see.”

“Jesus,” Drew said. “That’s terrible.” And it was. Bill Colson had been a nice man, soft-spoken, always combed and tucked in and smelling of Old Spice, always careful to tell Drew’s pop—and later, Drew himself—when something needed repairs, and just how much it would cost.

“Ayuh, ayuh, and if you didn’t know that, I don’t s’pose you know he done it in the dooryard of your cabin.”

Drew stared. “Are you kidding?”

“Wouldn’t kid about…” The bandanna appeared, more damp and bedraggled than ever. DeWitt sneezed into it. “…about a thing like that. Yessir. Parked his pickup, put the barrel of his .30-30 under his chin, and pulled the trigger. Bullet went right through and broke the back winda. Constable Griggs was standin right where you are now when he told me.”

“Christ,” Drew said, and in his mind, something changed. Instead of holding his pistol to the dancehall girl’s temple, Andy Prescott—the wastrel son—was now holding it beneath her chin… and when he pulled the trigger, the bullet would exit the back of her skull and break the mirror behind the bar. Using this elderly gore-crow’s story of Old Bill’s death in his own story had an undoubted element of expediency, even strip-mining, but that wouldn’t stop him. It was too good.

“Lousy thing, all right,” DeWitt said. He was trying to sound sad, maybe even philosophical, but there was an unmistakable twinkle in his voice. He also knew when something was too good, Drew thought. “But you know he was Old Bill right to the very end.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning he made his mess in the truck, not in Buzzy’s cabin. He’d never do a thing like that, at least not while he still had some of his right mind left.” He began to hitch and snort again, and scrambled for the bandanna, but this time was a little late to catch all of the sneeze. Which was a juicy one. “He caretook that place, don’tcha see?”

Five miles north of the Big 90, the tar gave out. After five more miles on oiled hardpan, Drew came to a fork in the road. He bore left, onto rough gravel that thumped and pinged off the Suburban’s undercarriage. This was Shithouse Road, unchanged, so far as he could tell, since his childhood. Twice he had to slow to two or three miles an hour in order to waddle the Suburban across washouts where culverts had indeed been plugged in the spring runoffs. Twice more he had to stop, get out, and move fallen trees off the road. Luckily they were birches, and light. One broke apart in his hands.

He came to the Cullum camp—deserted, boarded up, the driveway chained off—and then began counting phone-and-power poles, just as he and Ricky had as kids. A few were leaning drunkenly to starboard or port, but there were still exactly sixty-six between the Cullum camp and the overgrown driveway—also chained off—with the sign out front that Lucy had made when the kids were small: CHEZ LARSON. Beyond this driveway, he knew, were seventeen more poles, ending at the Farrington camp on the shore of Agelbemoo Lake.

Beyond the Farringtons’ place lay a huge swath of unelectrified wilderness, at least a hundred miles on either side of the Canadian border. Sometimes he and Ricky had gone up to look at what they called Last Pole. It held a kind of fascination for them. Beyond that one there was nothing to hold back the night. Drew had once taken Stacey and Brandon to look at Last Pole, and Drew had not missed the so what expression that passed between them. They assumed electricity—not to mention Wi-Fi—went on forever.

He got out of the Suburban and unlocked the chain, having to push and diddle the key before it would finally turn. He should have gotten some 3-in-1 at the store, but you couldn’t think of everything.

The driveway was almost a quarter of a mile long, with branches brushing at the sides and roof of the Suburban the whole way. Overhead were the two lines for the electric and the phone. He remembered them being taut back in the old days, but now they sagged along the diagonal Northern Maine Power cut running in from the road.

He came to the cabin. It looked desolate, forgotten. The green paint was peeling away with no Bill Colson to refresh it, the galvanized steel roof was drifted with fir needles and fallen leaves, and the satellite dish on the roof (its cup also filled with leaves and needles) looked like a joke out here in the woods. He wondered if Luce had been paying the monthly charge on the dish as well as the phone. If so, it was probably money for nothing, because he doubted if it still worked. He also doubted that DirecTV would send the check back with a note saying whoops, we are returning your payment because your dish has shit the bed. The porch was weatherbeaten but appeared sturdy enough (although it wouldn’t do to take that for granted). Beneath it he could see a faded green tarp covering what Drew assumed was a cord or two of wood—maybe the last wood Old Bill had ever brought in.

He got out and stood by the Suburban, one hand on the warm hood. Somewhere a crow cawed. Distant, another crow answered. Other than the babble of Godfrey Brook on its way to the lake, those were the only sounds.

Drew wondered if he was parked on the very spot where Bill Colson had parked his own four-wheel drive and blown his brains out. Wasn’t there a school of thought—maybe back in medieval England—that the ghosts of suicides were forced to remain in the places where they had ended their lives?

He started for the cabin, telling himself (scolding himself) that he was too old for campfire stories, when he heard something blundering toward him. What emerged from the screening pines between the cabin’s clearing and the brook wasn’t a ghost or a zombie apparition but a moose calf tottering on absurdly long legs. It came as far as the little equipment shed beside the house, then saw him and stopped. They stared at each other, Drew thinking that moose—whether young or full-grown—were among God’s ugliest and most unlikely creatures, the calf thinking who knew what.

“No harm here, bud,” Drew said softly, and the calf pricked its ears.

Now came more crashing and blundering, much louder, and the calf’s mother shouldered her way through the trees. A branch fell on her neck and she shook it away. She stared at Drew, lowered her head, and pawed at the ground. Her ears went back and lay flat against her head.

It means to charge me, Drew thought. It sees me as a threat to her baby, and it means to charge me.

He thought of running for the Suburban, but it might be—probably was—too far. And running, even away from the calf, might set the mother off. So he simply stood where he was, trying to send soothing thoughts to the thousand-pound creature no more than thirty yards away. Nothing to worry about here, moms, I’m harmless.

She considered him for maybe fifteen seconds, head lowered and one hoof pawing the ground. It seemed longer. Then she went to her calf (never taking her eyes from the interloper) and put herself between it and Drew. She gave him another long look, seeming to debate her next move. Drew stood motionless. He was badly frightened, but also weirdly exalted. He thought, If she charges me from this distance, I’m either going to be dead or so badly hurt I’ll probably die anyway. If she doesn’t, I’m going to do brilliant work here. Brilliant.

He knew it was a false equivalency even at this moment, with his life at risk—he might as well have been a child believing he would get a bike for his birthday if a certain cloud blotted out the sun—but at the same time he felt it was absolutely true.

Moose Mom suddenly swung her head, butting the calf in the hindquarters. It gave an almost sheeplike cry, nothing like the hoarse blat of Pop’s old moose-call, and trotted toward the woods. The mom followed, pausing to give Drew one final, baleful look: follow me and die.

Drew let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding (a hoary suspense novel cliché that turned out to be true) and started for the porch. The hand holding the keys was shaking slightly. He was already telling himself that he hadn’t been in any danger, not really; if you didn’t bother a moose—even a protective Moose Mom—it wouldn’t bother you.

Besides, it could have been worse. It could have been a bear.

He let himself in, expecting a mess, but the cabin was spick and span. Old Bill’s work, surely; it was even possible Bill had given it one last putting-to-rights on the day he killed himself. Aggie Larson’s old rag rug still lay in the center of the room, threadbare around the edges but otherwise whole. There was a Ranger woodstove up on bricks and waiting to be loaded, its isinglass window as clean as the floor. To the left was a rudimentary kitchen. To the right, overlooking the woods sloping down to the brook, was an oak dining table. At the far end of the room were a swaybacked sofa, a couple of chairs, and a fireplace Drew felt dubious about lighting. God knew how much creosote might have collected in the chimney, not to mention wildlife: mice, squirrels, bats.

The cookstove was a Hotpoint that had probably been new back in the days when the only satellite circling the earth was the moon. Next to it, standing open and somehow corpselike, was an unplugged refrigerator. It was empty except for a box of Arm & Hammer baking soda. The television in the living room area was a portable on a rolling cart. He remembered the four of them sitting in front of it, watching M*A*S*H reruns and eating TV dinners.

Plank stairs ran up the west wall of the cabin. There was a kind of gallery up there, lined with bookcases that mostly held paperbacks—what Lucy had called rainy-day camp reading. Two small bedrooms opened off the gallery. Drew and Lucy had slept in one, the kids in the other. Did they stop coming here when Stacey began to bitch about needing her privacy? Was that why? Or did they just get too busy for summer weeks at camp? Drew couldn’t remember. He was just glad to be here, and glad none of their renters had made off with his mom’s rag rug… although why would they? It had once been pretty damn gorgeous, but was now fit only to be walked over by people in woods-muddy shoes or bare feet wet from wading in the brook.

“I can work here,” Drew said. “Yeah.” He jumped at the sound of his own voice—still nerved up from his stare-down with Moose Mom, he supposed—and then laughed.

He didn’t need to check the electricity, because he could see the red lamp flashing on Pop’s old answering machine, but he flipped the switch for the overhead lights anyway, because the afternoon was starting to thin out. He went over to the answering machine and hit PLAY.

“It’s Lucy, Drew.” She sounded wavery, as if her voice were coming from twenty thousand leagues under the sea, and Drew remembered this old answering gadget was basically a cassette deck. It was sort of amazing that it worked at all. “It’s ten past three, and I’m a little worried. Are you there yet? Call me as soon as you can.”

Drew was amused but also annoyed. He had come up here to avoid distractions, and the last thing he needed was Lucy looking over his shoulder for the next three weeks. Still, he supposed she had valid reasons to be concerned. He could have had an accident on the way up, or broken down on the Shithouse Road. She certainly couldn’t be worried that he was going mental over a book he hadn’t even started to write.

Thinking that brought back a memory of a lecture the English Department had sponsored five or six years before, Jonathan Franzen speaking to a full house on the art and craft of the novel. He had said that the peak of the novel-writing experience actually came before the writer began, while everything was still in his or her imagination. “Even the clearest part of what was in your mind gets lost in translation,” Franzen had said. Drew remembered thinking that it was rather self-centered of the guy to assume that his experience was the general case.

Drew picked up the phone (the receiver was the old dumbbell shape, basic black and amazingly heavy), heard a good strong dial tone, and called Lucy’s cell. “I’m here,” he said. “No problems.”

“Oh, good. How’s the road? How’s the cabin?”

They talked for awhile, then he talked to Stacey, who had just come in from school and demanded the phone. Lucy came back and reminded him to change the answering machine message because it was giving her the creeps.

“All I can promise is to try. This gadget was probably state-of-the-art in the seventies, but that was half a century ago.”

“Do your best. Have you seen any wildlife?”

He thought of Moose Mom, her head lowered as she decided whether or not to charge and trample him to death.

“A few crows, that’s about it. Hey, Luce, I want to haul my crap in before the sun goes down. I’ll call later.”

“Around seven-thirty would be good. You can talk to Brandon, he’ll be back by then. He’s eating dinner at Randy’s house.”

“Roger that.”

“Anything else to report?” There might have been worry in her voice, or that might only have been his imagination.

“Nope. All quiet on the Western Front. Love you, hon.”

“Love you, too.”

He placed the funny old-fashioned receiver back in its cradle and spoke to the empty cabin. “Oh wait, one other thing, honeybunch. Old Bill blew his head off right out front.”

And shocked himself by laughing.

By the time he had his luggage and supplies in, it was past six o’clock and he was hungry. He tried the kitchen faucet, and after a few chugs and thumps in the pipes, began to get splurts of cloudy water that eventually ran cold, clear, and steady. He filled a pot, turned on the Hotpoint (the low hum of the big burner brought back memories of other meals here), and waited for the water to boil so he could add spaghetti. There was sauce, too. Lucy had thrown a bottle of Ragu into one of his boxes of supplies. He would have forgotten.

He considered heating up a can of peas, and decided not to. He was at camp and would eat camp style. No alcohol, though; he had brought none with him and hadn’t bought any at the Big 90. If the work went well, as he expected, he might reward himself with a rack of Bud the next time he went down to the store. He might even find some salad stuff, although he had an idea that when it came to stocking vegetables, Roy DeWitt kept plenty of popcorn and hotdog relish on hand, and called it good. Maybe the odd bottle of sauerkraut for those with exotic tastes.

While he waited for the water to boil and the sauce to simmer, Drew turned on the TV, expecting nothing but snow. What he got instead was a bluescreen and a message that read DIRECTV CONNECTING. Drew had his doubts about that but left the TV alone to do its thing. Assuming it was doing anything.

He was rooting through one of the lower cabinets when Lester Holt’s voice blared into the cabin, startling him so badly that he gave a yell and dropped the colander he’d just found. When he turned around, he saw NBC’s nightly newscast, clear as a bell. Lester was reporting on the latest Trump farrago, and as he turned the story over to Chuck Todd for the dirty details, Drew grabbed the remote and killed the set. It was nice to know it worked, but he had no intention of junking up his mind with Trump, terrorism, or taxes.

He cooked a whole box of spaghetti and ate most of it. In his mind, Lucy waved a tut-tutting finger and mentioned—again—his growing middle-aged spread. Drew reminded her he had skipped lunch. He washed his few dishes, thinking about Moose Mom and suicide. Was there a place for either of them in Bitter River? Moose Mom, probably not. Suicide, maybe.

He supposed Franzen had had a point about the time before writing a novel actually began. It was a good time, because everything you saw and heard was possible grist for the mill. Everything was malleable. The mind could build a city, remodel it, then raze it, all while you were taking a shower or shaving or having a piss. Once you began, however, that changed. Every scene you wrote, every word you wrote, limited your options a little more. Eventually you were like a cow trotting down a narrow chute with no exit, trotting toward the—

“No, no, it’s not like that at all,” he said, once again startled by the sound of his own voice. “Not like that at all.”

Dark came fast in the deep woods. Drew went around turning on the lamps (there were four of them, each shade more awful than the last), and then tackled the answering machine. He listened to his dead father’s message twice, his good old pop who had never, so far as he could recall, said a mean word or raised a hand to his sons (mean words and raised hands had been their mother’s province). It seemed wrong to erase it, but because there was no spare answering machine tape in Pop’s desk, his marching orders from Lucy left him no choice. His recording was brief and to the point: “This is Drew. Please leave a message.”

With that done, he put on his light jacket and went outside to sit on the steps and look at the stars. He was always stunned by how many you could see once you got away from the light pollution of even such a relatively small town as Falmouth. God had spilled a jug of light up there, and beyond the spill was eternity. The mystery of such an extended reality beggared comprehension. A breeze gusted, making the pines sigh in their sorrowful way, and suddenly Drew felt very alone and very small. A shiver went through him and he went back inside, deciding he’d light a small test fire in the stove, just to make sure it wasn’t going to fill the cabin with smoke.

There was a crate flanking each side of the fireplace. One held kindling, probably brought in by Old Bill when he stored his last load of wood under the porch. The other contained toys.

Drew dropped to one knee and rummaged through them. A Wham-O Frisbee, which he vaguely remembered: he, Lucy, and the kids playing four-way out front, laughing it up every time someone skimmed the Frizz into the puckerbrush and had to go get it. A Stretch Armstrong doll he was pretty sure had been Brandon’s, and a Barbie (indecently topless) that had positively been Stacey’s. Other things, though, he either didn’t remember or had never seen before. A one-eyed teddy bear. A deck of Uno cards. A scatter of baseball cards. A game called Pass the Pigs. A top decorated with a circle of monkeys wearing baseball gloves—when he pumped the handle and set it loose, it wobbled drunkenly across the floor and whistled “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” He didn’t care for this last. The monkeys seemed to wave their gloves up and down as the top spun, as if seeking help, and the tune began to sound vaguely sinister as it wound down.

He looked at his watch before reaching the bottom of the crate, saw it was quarter past eight, and called Lucy back. He apologized for being tardy, saying he’d gotten sidetracked by a box of toys. “I think I recognized Bran’s old Stretch Armstrong—”

Lucy groaned. “Oh God, I used to hate that thing. It smelled so weird.”

“I remember. And a few other things, too, but there’s stuff I could swear I never saw before. Pass the Pigs?”

“Pass the what?” She was laughing.

“It’s a kids’ game. What about a top with monkeys on it? Plays ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game.’ ”

“Nope… oh wait a minute. Three or four years ago we rented out the cabin to a family called the Pearsons, remember?”

“Vaguely.” He didn’t at all. If it had been three years ago, he had probably been wrapped up in The Village on the Hill Tied up, more like it. Bound and gagged. Literary S&M.

“They had a little boy, six or seven. Some of the toys must be his.”

“Surprised he didn’t miss them,” Drew said. He was eyeing the teddy bear, which had the piebald look of a toy that had been hugged often and fervently.

“Want to talk to Brandon? He’s here.”

“Sure.”

“Hi, Dad!” Bran said. “You finish your book yet?”

“Very funny. Starting tomorrow.”

“How is it up there? Is it good?”

Drew looked around. The big downstairs room looked mellow in the light of the overheads and the lamps. Even the horrible shades looked okay. And if the stovepipe wasn’t plugged, a little fire would take care of the mild chill.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s good.”

It was. He felt safe. And he felt pregnant, ready to pop. There was no fear about starting the book tomorrow, only anticipation. The words would pour out, he felt sure of it.

The stove was fine, the pipe open and drawing well. As his little fire burned down to embers, he made up the bed in the master bedroom (a joke; the room was hardly big enough to turn around in) with sheets and blankets that smelled only a trifle stale. At ten o’clock he turned in and lay looking up into the dark, listening to the wind sigh around the eaves. He thought of Old Bill committing suicide in the dooryard, but only briefly, and not with fear or horror. What he felt when he considered the old caretaker’s final moments—the round circle of steel pressing into the underside of his chin, the last sights and heartbeats and thoughts—was not much different than he’d felt looking up at the complex and extravagant sprawl of the Milky Way. Reality was deep, and it was far. It held many secrets and went on forever.

He was up early the next morning. He ate breakfast, then called Lucy. She was getting the kids off to school—scolding Stacey because she hadn’t finished her homework, telling Bran he’d left his backpack in the living room—so their conversation was necessarily brief. After the goodbyes, Drew pulled on his jacket and walked down to the brook. The trees on the far side had been logged at some point, opening up a million-dollar view of woods undulating into the distance. The sky was a steadily deepening blue. He stood there for almost ten minutes, enjoying the unassuming beauty of the world around him and trying to empty his mind. To make it ready.

Each semester he taught a bloc of Modern American and Modern British Literature, but because he had been published (and in The New Yorker, no less), his main job was teaching creative writing. He began each class and seminar by talking about the creative process. He told his students that just as most people had a certain routine they followed when they got ready for bed, it was important to have a routine as they prepared for each day’s work session. It was like the series of passes a hypnotist makes as he prepares his subject for the trance state.

“The act of writing fiction or poetry has been compared to dreaming,” he told his students, “but I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. I think it’s more akin to hypnosis. The more you ritualize the preparation, the easier you’ll find it to enter that state.”

He practiced what he preached. When he returned to the cabin, he put on coffee. In the course of his morning, he would drink two cups, strong and black. While he waited for it to brew, he took his vitamin pills and brushed his teeth. One of the renters had shoved his pop’s old desk under the stairs, and Drew decided to leave it there. An odd place to work, perhaps, but strangely cozy. Almost womblike. In his study at home, his last ritualized act before getting to work would have been to straighten his papers into neat piles, leaving an empty space at the left of his printer for fresh copy, but there was nothing on this desk to straighten.

He powered up his laptop and created a blank document. What followed was also part of the ritual, he supposed: naming the doc (BITTER RIVER #1), formatting the doc, and picking a font for the doc. He had used Book Antiqua while writing Village, but had no intention of using it on Bitter River; that would be bad mojo indeed. Aware that there might be power outages, causing him to resort to the Olympia portable, he picked the American Typewriter font.

Was that everything? No, one more thing. He clicked on Autosave. Even if there was an outage, he’d be unlikely to lose his copy, the laptop had a full battery, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

The coffee was ready. He poured himself a cup and sat down.

Do you really want to do this? Do you really intend to do this?

The answer to both was yes, so he centered the blinking cursor and typed

He hit return and sat very still for a moment. Hundreds of miles south of here he supposed Lucy was sitting with her own cup of coffee in front of her own open laptop, where she kept the records of her current accounting clients. Soon she would fall into her own hypnotic trance—numbers instead of words—but right now she was thinking of him. He was quite sure of that. Thinking of him and hoping, maybe even praying, that he didn’t… how had Al Stamper put it?… lose the wheels off his little red wagon.

“Not going to happen,” he said. “It’s going to be like taking dictation.”

He looked at the blinking cursor a moment longer, then typed:

After that, Drew was lost.

He had arranged his teaching schedule to start late in the day from the very start, because when he was working on his fiction, he liked to begin at eight. He always made himself go until eleven even though on many days he found himself struggling by ten-thirty. He often thought of a story—probably apocryphal—he had read about James Joyce. A friend had come into Joyce’s house and found the famous writer at his desk with his head in his arms, a picture of abject despair. When the friend asked what was wrong, Joyce told him he’d only managed seven words all morning. “Ah, but James, that’s good for you,” the friend said. To which Joyce replied, “Perhaps, but I don’t know what order they go in!”

Drew could relate to that story, apocryphal or not. It was the way he usually felt during that torturous last half hour. That was when the fear of losing his words set in. Of course during the last month or so of The Village on the Hill, he had felt that way every rotten second.

There was none of that nonsense this morning. A door in his head opened directly into the smoky, kerosene-smelling saloon known as the Buffalo Head Tavern, and he stepped through it. He saw every detail, heard every word. He was there, looking through the eyes of Herkimer Belasco, the piano player, when the Prescott kid put the muzzle of his .45 (the one with the fancy pearl-handle grips) under the chin of the young dancehall girl and began to harangue her. The accordion player covered his eyes when Andy Prescott pulled the trigger, but Herkimer kept his wide open and Drew saw it all: the sudden eruption of hair and blood, the bottle of Old Dandy shattered by the bullet, the crack in the mirror behind which the whiskey bottle had stood.

It was like no writing experience Drew had ever had in his life, and when hunger pangs finally pulled him from his trance (his breakfast had consisted of a bowl of Quaker Oats), he looked at the info strip on his laptop and saw it was almost two in the afternoon. His back ached, his eyes burned, and he felt exalted. Almost drunk. He printed his work (eighteen pages, fucking incredible) but left them in the output tray. He would go over them tonight with a pen—that was also part of his routine—but he already knew he would find precious little to correct. A dropped word or two, the occasional unintended repetition, maybe a simile that was working too hard or not hard enough. Otherwise it would be clean. He knew it.

“Like taking dictation,” he murmured, then got up to make himself a sandwich.

Over the next three days he fell into a clockwork routine. It was as if he had been working at the cabin all his life—the creative part of it, anyway. He wrote from seven-thirty or so until almost two. He ate. He napped or walked along the road, counting power poles as he went. In the evening, he lit a fire in the woodstove, heated up something from a can on the Hotpoint, then called home to talk to Lucy and the kids. When the call was done, he would edit his pages, then read, choosing from the paperbacks in the upstairs bookcase. Before bed, he damped the fire in the woodstove and went out to look at the stars.

The story rolled. The pile of pages sitting next to the printer grew. There was no dread as he made his coffee, took his vitamins, and brushed his teeth, only anticipation. Once he sat down, the words were there. He felt that each of those days was Christmas, with new presents to unwrap. He barely noticed that he was sneezing quite a lot on the third day, or the slight roughness in his throat.

“What have you been eating?” Lucy asked him when he called that night. “Be honest, Mister.”

“Mostly the stuff I brought, but—”

“Drew!” Dragging it out so it was Drooo.

“But I’m going to buy some fresh stuff tomorrow, after I finish working.”

“Good. Go to the market in St. Christopher. It’s not much, but it’s better than that nasty little store down the road.”

“Okay,” he said, although he had no intention of going all the way to St. Christopher; that was a ninety-mile roundtrip, and he wouldn’t be back until almost dark. It didn’t occur to him until after he’d hung up that he had lied to her. Something he hadn’t done since the last few weeks of working on Village, when everything started to go wrong. When he had sometimes sat for twenty minutes in front of the same laptop he was using now, debating between a grove of willows and a copse of trees. Both seemed right, neither seemed right. Sitting hunched over the laptop, sweating, resisting the urge to pound his forehead until he jarred the right descriptive phrase loose. And when Lucy asked him how it was going—with that I’m worried furrow in her brow—he had replied with that same single word, that same simple lie: Okay.

Undressing for bed, he told himself it didn’t matter. If it was a lie it was a white one, just a device to short-circuit an argument before it could be born. Husbands and wives did it all the time. It was the way marriages survived.

He lay down, turned off the lamp, sneezed twice, and went to sleep.

On his fourth day of work, Drew woke up to plugged sinuses and a moderately sore throat, but no fever he could detect. He could work through a cold, had done so many times in his teaching career; prided himself, in fact, on his ability to bull through while Lucy had a tendency to take to her bed with tissues and NyQuil and magazines at the first sniffle. Drew never scolded her about this, although his mother’s word for such behavior—“spleeny”—often came to mind. Lucy was allowed to pamper herself through her twice- or thrice-yearly colds, because she was a freelance accountant, and thus her own boss. In his sabbatical year that was technically true of him, as well… except it wasn’t. In The Paris Review some writer—he couldn’t remember who—had said, “When you’re writing, the book is the boss,” and it was true. If you slowed down the story began to fade, as dreams did on waking.

He spent the morning in the town of Bitter River, but with a box of Kleenex near at hand. When he finished for the day (another eighteen pages, he was absolutely killing it), he was amazed to see he’d used up half the tissues. The wastebasket beside Pop’s old desk was drifted with them. There was a bright side to this; while struggling with Village, he had regularly filled the wastebasket beside his desk with discarded pages of copy: grove or copse? moose or bear? was the sun brilliant or blazing? There was none of that bullshit in the town of Bitter River, which he was increasingly reluctant to leave.

But leave he must. He was down to a few cans of corned beef hash and Beefaroni. The milk was gone, ditto orange juice. He needed eggs, hamburger, maybe some chicken, and for sure half a dozen frozen dinners. Also, he could use a bag of cough drops and a bottle of NyQuil, Lucy’s old standby. The Big 90 would probably have all that stuff. If it didn’t, he’d bite the bullet and drive to St. Christopher. Turn the white lie he’d told Lucy into the truth.

He made his slow, bumping way out Shithouse Road and pulled in at the Big 90. By then he was coughing as well as sneezing, his throat was a little worse, one ear felt stuffed up, and he thought maybe he had a touch of fever, after all. Reminding himself to add a bottle of Aleve or Tylenol to his shopping basket, he went inside.

Roy DeWitt had been replaced behind the counter by a scrawny young woman with purple hair, a nose ring, and what looked like a chrome stud in her lower lip. She was chewing gum. Drew, his mind still turned on from his morning’s work (and maybe, who knew, that little touch of fever), saw her going home to a trailer up on cement blocks and two or three kids with dirty faces and home haircuts, the youngest a toddler dressed in a saggy diaper and a food-stained tee-shirt saying MOMMY’S L’IL MONSTER. That was a meanly vicious stereotype, and elitist as hell, but that didn’t necessarily make it untrue.

Drew grabbed a market basket. “Do you have any fresh meat or produce?”

“Hamburgers and hotdogs in the cooler. Couple of pork chops, maybe. And we got coleslaw.”

Well, he supposed that was produce of a sort. “What about chicken?”

“Nope. Got eggs, though. Might be able to raise a chicken or two from those, would you keep em in a warm place.” She laughed at this sally, exposing brown teeth. Not gum after all. Chaw.

Drew ended up filling two baskets. There was no NyQuil, but there was something called Dr. King’s Cough & Cold Remedy, also Anacin and Goody’s Headache Powder. He topped off his shopping spree with a few cans of chicken noodle soup (Jewish penicillin, his nana had called it), a tub of Shedd’s Spread margarine, and two loaves of bread. It was the spongy white stuff, pretty industrial, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. He saw soup and a toasted cheese sandwich in his not-too-distant future. Good grub for a man with a sore throat.

The counter woman rang him up, chewing away as she did it. Drew was fascinated by the rise and fall of the stud in her lip. How old would Mommy’s l’il monster be before she had one just like it? Fifteen? Eleven, maybe? He told himself again that he was being an elitist, an elitist asshole, in fact, but his overstimulated mind kept running along a trail of associations just the same. Welcome Walmart shoppers. Pampers, inspired by babies. I love a man with a Skoal ring. Each day is a page in your fashion diary. Lock her up send her b—

“Hundred and eight-seventy,” she said, snapping the flow of his thoughts.

“Holy crow, really?”

She smiled, revealing teeth he could have done without seeing again. “You want to shop out here in the willies, Mr.… Larson, is it?”

“Yes. Drew Larson.”

“You want to shop out here in the willies, Mr. Larson, you gotta be prepared to pay the price.”

“Where’s Roy today?”

She rolled her eyes. “Dad’s in the hospital, over St. Christopher. Got the flu, wouldn’t go see the doctor, had to be a man about it, and it went pneumonia. My sister’s sittin my kids so I can mind his business and lemme tell you, she ain’t happy about it.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” In truth, he didn’t care much one way or the other about Roy DeWitt. What he cared about, what he was thinking about, was DeWitt’s snot-clotted bandanna. And how he, Drew, had shaken the hand that had been using it.

“Not as sorry as I am. We’ll be busy tomorrow with that storm comin in over the weekend.” She pointed two spread fingers at his baskets. “I hope you c’n pay cash for that, the credit machine’s busted and Dad keeps forgettin to get it fixed.”

“I can do that. What storm?”

“A norther, that’s what they’re sayin on the Rivière-du-Loup. Quebec radio station, you know.” She pronounced it Kwa-beck. “Lots of wind and rain. Comin in day after tomorrow. You’re out there on the Shithouse, ain’tcha?”

“Yes.”

“Well, if you don’t want to be out there for the next month or so, you might want to pack up your groceries and your luggage and head back down south.”

Drew was familiar with this attitude. Up here on the TR, it didn’t matter if you were a Maine native; if you didn’t come from Aroostook County, you were considered a namby-pamby flatlander who couldn’t tell a spruce from a pine. And if you lived south of Augusta, you might as well be just another Masshole, by gorry.

“I think I’ll be okay,” he said, taking out his wallet. “I live on the coast. We’ve seen our share of nor’easters.”

She looked at him with what might have been pity. “Not talking about a nor’easter, Mr. Larson. Talking about a norther, comin straight across O Canador from the Arctic Circle. Temperature’s gonna fall off the table, they say. Goodbye sixty-five, hello thirty-eight. Could go lower. Then you got your sleet flyin horizontal at thirty miles per. You get stuck out there on Shithouse Road, you stuck.”

“I’ll be okay,” Drew said. “It’ll be—” He stopped. He had been about to say It’ll be like taking dictation.

“What?”

“Fine. It’ll be fine.”

“You better hope so.”

On his way back to the cabin—the sun flaring in his eyes and kicking off a headache to go with his other symptoms—Drew brooded on that snotty bandanna. Also on how Roy DeWitt had tried to man through it and wound up in the hospital.

He glanced into the rearview mirror and briefly regarded his red, watery eyes. “I am not getting the fucking flu. Not when I’m on a roll.” Okay, but why in God’s name had he shaken that son of a bitch’s hand, when it had undoubtedly been crawling with germs? Ones so big you’d hardly need a microscope to see them? And since he had, why hadn’t he asked for the bathroom so he could wash them? Christ, his kids knew about hand-washing. He’d taught them himself.

“I am not getting the fucking flu,” he repeated, then dropped the visor to keep the sun out of his eyes. To keep it from flaring in his eyes.

Flaring? Or glaring? Was glaring better, or was it too much?

He mused on this as he drove back to the cabin. He brought his groceries in and saw the message light was flashing. It was Lucy, asking that he call back as soon as possible. He felt that tug of annoyance again, the sense that she was looking over his shoulder, but then he realized it might not be about him. After all, not everything was. One of the kids might have gotten sick or had an accident.

He called, and for the first time in a long time—since The Village on the Hill, probably—they argued. Not as bad as some of the arguments they’d had in the first years of their marriage, when the kids had been small and money tight, those had been doozies, but bad enough. She had also heard about the storm (of course she had, she was a Weather Channel addict), and she wanted him to pack up and come home.

Drew told her that was a bad idea. Terrible, in fact. He had established a good working rhythm and was getting awesome stuff. A one-day break in that rhythm (and it would probably end up being two, or even three) might not put the book in jeopardy, but a change in his writing environment could. He would have thought she understood the delicacy of creative work—at least for him—after all these years, but it seemed she didn’t.

“What you don’t understand is how bad this storm is supposed to be. Haven’t you been watching the news?”

“No.” And then, lying for no good reason (unless it was because he felt spiteful toward her just now): “I have no reception. The dish doesn’t work.”

“Well, it’s going to be bad, especially up north in those unincorporated townships near the border. That’s where you are, in case you didn’t notice. They’re expecting widespread power outages because of the wind—”

“Good thing I brought Pop’s type—”

“Drew, will you let me finish? Just this once?”

He fell silent, his head throbbing and his throat aching. In that moment he didn’t like his wife very much. Loved her, sure, always would, but didn’t like her. Now she’ll say thank you, he thought.

“Thank you,” she said. “I know you took your father’s portable, but you’d be down to candlelight and cold food for days, maybe much longer.”

I can cook on the woodstove. It was on the tip of his tongue to say that, but if he broke in on her again, the argument would veer onto a new subject, the one about how he didn’t take her seriously, so on and so on and yada-yada-yada.

“I suppose you could cook on the woodstove,” she said, in a slightly more reasonable tone, “but if the wind blows like they say it’s going to—gale-force sustained, hurricane-force gusts—a lot of trees are going to fall down and you’ll be stuck out there.”

I planned to be out here, anyway, he thought, but again held his tongue.

“I know you were planning to be out there for two or three weeks, anyway,” she said, “but a tree could also knock a hole in the roof and the phone line is going to come down with the power line, and you’ll be cut off! What if something happened to you?”

“Nothing’s going to—”

“Maybe not, but what if something happened to us?”

“Then you’d take care of it,” he said. “I wouldn’t have gone haring off to the middle of nowhere if I didn’t think you could do that. And you have your sis. Besides, they exaggerate the weather reports, you know that. They turn six inches of fresh powder into the storm of the century. It’s all about ratings. This will be the same. You’ll see.”

“Thank you for mansplaining that,” Lucy said. Her tone was flat.

So here they were, going to that sore place he’d hoped to avoid. Especially with his throat, sinuses, and ear throbbing. Not to mention his head. Unless he was very diplomatic, they would be mired in the time-honored (or was dishonored more accurate?) argument about who knew better. From there they—no, she—could move onto the horrors of the paternalistic society. This was a subject upon which Lucy could expatiate endlessly.

“You want to know what I think, Drew? I think when a man says ‘You know that,’ which they do all the time, what they mean is ‘I know that, but you’re too dumb to know that. Hence, I must mansplain.’ ”

He sighed, and when the sigh threatened to turn into a cough, he stifled it. “Really? You want to go there?”

“Drew… we are there.”

The weariness in her tone, as if he were a stupid child that could not seem to get even the simplest lesson, infuriated him. “Okay, here’s a little more mansplaining, Luce. For most of my adult life, I’ve been trying to write a novel. Do I know why? No. I only know it’s the missing piece in my life. I need to do this, and I am doing it. It’s very, very important. You’re asking me to risk that.”

“Is it as important as me and the kids?”

“Of course not, but does it have to be a choice?”

“I think it is a choice, and you just made it.”

He laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough. “That’s pretty melodramatic.”

She didn’t chase that one; she had something else to chase. “Drew, are you okay? Not coming down with something, are you?”

In his mind he heard the scrawny woman with the stud in her lip saying had to be a man about it, and it went pneumonia.

“No,” he said. “Allergies.”

“Will you think about coming back, at least? Will you do that?”

“Yes.” Another lie. He already had thought about it.

“Call tonight, okay? Talk to the kids.”

“Can I talk to you, too? If I promise not mansplain anything?”

She laughed. Well, actually more of a chuckle, but still a good sign. “Fine.”

“I love you, Luce.”

“I love you, too,” she said, and as he hung up, he had an idea—what English teachers liked to call an epiphany, he supposed—that her feelings were probably not much different from his. Yes, she loved him, he was sure of it, but on this afternoon in early October, she didn’t like him much.

He was sure of that, too.

According to the label, Dr. King’s Cough & Cold Remedy was twenty-six per cent alcohol, but after a healthy knock from the bottle that made Drew’s eyes water and brought on a serious coughing fit, he guessed the manufacturer might have lowballed the content. Maybe just enough to keep it off the Big 90’s liquor shelf with the coffee brandy, the apricot schnapps, and the Fireball Nips. But it cleared his sinuses most righteously, and when he spoke to Brandon that evening, his boy detected nothing out of the ordinary. It was Stacey who asked him if he was okay. Allergies, he told her, and repeated the same lie to Lucy when she took back her phone. At least there was no argument with her tonight, just the unmistakable trace of chill in her voice that he knew well.

It was chilly outside, as well. Indian summer seemed to be over. Drew had an attack of the shivers, and built up a good fire in the woodstove. He sat close to it in Pop’s rocker, had another knock of Dr. King’s, and read an old John D. MacDonald. From the credit page at the front, it looked like MacDonald had written sixty or seventy books. No problem finding the right word or phrase there, it seemed, and by the end of his life, he had even attained some critical cred. Lucky him.

Drew read a couple of chapters, then went to bed, hoping his cold would be better in the morning and also hoping he wouldn’t have a cough syrup hangover. His sleep was uneasy and dream-haunted. He couldn’t remember much of those dreams the next morning. Only that in one of them he had been in a seemingly endless hallway lined with doors on both sides. One of them, he felt sure, led to a way out, but he couldn’t decide which one to try, and before he could pick one, he woke up to a cold, clear morning, a full bladder, and aching joints. He made his way to the bathroom at the end of the gallery, cursing Roy DeWitt and his besnotted bandanna.

His fever was still there, but it seemed to be lower, and the combination of Goody’s Headache Powder and Dr. King’s helped with his other symptoms. The work went pretty well, only ten pages instead of eighteen, but still amazing for him. It was true that he had to pause every now and then, looking for the right word or phrase, but he chalked that up to the infection running around in his body. And those words and phrases always came after a few seconds, clicking neatly into place.

The story was getting good. Sheriff Jim Averill had the killer in jail, but the gun thugs had showed up on an unscheduled train, a midnight special paid for by Andy Prescott’s rich rancher daddy, and now they were laying siege to the town. Unlike Village, this book was more about plot than character and situation. That had worried Drew a little to begin with; as a teacher and reader (they weren’t the same, but surely first cousins) he had a tendency to concentrate on theme, language, and symbolism rather than story, but the pieces also seemed to be clicking into place, almost of their own accord. Best of all, there was a strange bond beginning to form between Averill and the Prescott kid, which gave his story a resonance as unexpected as that midnight train.

Instead of going for an afternoon walk, he turned on the TV and after a lengthy hunt through the DirecTV onscreen guide, found the Weather Channel. Having access to such a bewildering array of video input up here in the williwags might have amused him on another day, but not on this one. His long session at the laptop had left him wrung out, almost hollowed out, instead of energized. Why in God’s name had he shaken DeWitt’s hand? Common politeness, of course, and completely understandable, but why in God’s name hadn’t he washed afterwards?

Been through all that, he thought.

Yes, and here it was again, gnawing away. It sort of reminded him of his catastrophic last try at novel-writing, when he would lie awake long after Lucy had gone to sleep, mentally deconstructing and reconstructing the few paragraphs he’d managed that day, picking at the work until it bled.

Stop. That’s the past. This is now. Watch the goddam weather report.

But it wasn’t a report; the Weather Channel would never be so minimalist. This was a fucking opera of doom and gloom. Drew hadn’t been able to understand his wife’s love affair with the Weather Channel, which seemed populated solely by meteorological geeks. As if to underline this, they now gave names to even non-hurricane storms. The one the store clerk had warned him about, the one his wife was so worried about, had been dubbed Pierre. Drew could not conceive of a stupider name for a storm. It was swooping down from Saskatchewan on a northeast track (which made the woman with the lip stud full of shit, it was a nor’easter) that would bring it to TR-90 either tomorrow afternoon or evening. It was packing forty-mile-an-hour sustained winds, with gusts up to sixty-five.

“You might think that doesn’t sound too bad,” said the current weather geek, a young man with a fashionable beard scruff that made Drew’s eyes hurt. Mr. Scruffy was a poet of the Pierre Apocalypse, not quite speaking in iambic pentameter, but close. “What you need to remember, though, is that temperatures are going to fall radically when this front comes through, I mean they’re gonna drop off the table. Rain could turn to sleet, and you drivers up there in northern New England can’t discount the possibility of black ice.”

Maybe I should go home, Drew thought.

But it was no longer just the book that was keeping him. The idea of that long drive out Shithouse Road feeling as drained as he did today made him even more tired. And when he finally made it to something approximating civilization, was he supposed to go tooling down I-95 sipping away at alcohol-laced cold medicine?

“The major thing, though,” the scruffy weather geek was saying, “is that this baby is going to meet a ridge of high pressure coming in from east—a very unusual phenomenon. That means our friends north of Boston could be in for what the old Yankees called a three-day blow.”

Blow on this, Drew thought, and grabbed his crotch.

Later, after an unsuccessful try at napping—all he did was toss and turn—Lucy called. “Listen to me, Mister.” He hated when she called him that, it was like fingers dragged down a blackboard. “The forecast is only getting worse. You need to come home.”

“Lucy, it’s a storm, what my Pop used to call a cap of wind. Not nuclear war.”

“You need to come home while you still can.”

He had had enough of this, and enough of her. “No. I need to be here.”

“You’re a fool,” she said. Then, for the first time he could remember, she hung up on him.

Drew turned on the Weather Channel as soon as he got up the following morning, thinking As a dog returneth to its vomit, so a fool repeateth his folly.

He was hoping to hear that Autumn Storm Pierre had changed course. It had not. Nor had his cold changed course. It didn’t seem worse, but it didn’t seem better, either. He called Lucy and got her voicemail. Possibly she was running errands; possibly she just didn’t want to talk with him. That was okay with Drew either way. She was pissed at him, but she would get over it; no one trashed fifteen years of marriage over a storm, did they? Especially not one named Pierre.

Drew scrambled a couple of eggs and managed to eat half of them before his stomach warned him that stuffing down more might lead to a forcible ejection. He scraped his plate into the garbage, sat down in front of the laptop, and called up the current document (BITTER RIVER #3). He scrolled to where he had left off, looked at the white space beneath the blinking cursor, and started to fill it. The work went all right for the first hour or so, and then the trouble began. It started with the rocking chairs Sheriff Averill and his three deputies were meant to sit in outside the Bitter River jail.

They had to be sitting out front, in full view of the townsfolk and Dick Prescott’s gun thugs, because that was the basis of the clever plan Averill had hatched to get Prescott’s son out of town under the very noses of the hard men who were supposed to keep it from happening. The lawmen had to be seen, especially the deputy named Cal Hunt, who happened to be about the same height and build as the Prescott boy.

Hunt was wearing a colorful Mexican serape and a ten-gallon hat decorated with silver conchos. The hat’s extravagant brim obscured his face. That was important. The serape and hat weren’t Deputy Hunt’s; he said he felt like a fool in a hat like that. Sheriff Averill didn’t care. He wanted Prescott’s men to be looking at the clothes, and not the man inside them.

All fine. Good storytelling. Then the trouble came.

That was where Drew stopped, transfixed by the image of the tiny Bitter River sheriff’s office containing three rocking chairs. No, four rocking chairs, because you had to add one for Averill himself. That was a lot more absurd than the ten-gallon, face-obscuring Stetson Cal Hunt was wearing, and not only because four rockers would fill the whole damn room. The whole idea of rocking chairs was antithetical to law enforcement, even in a small western town like Bitter River. People would laugh. Drew deleted most of the sentence and looked at what was left.

These what? Chairs? Would the sheriff’s office even have four chairs? It seemed unlikely. “Not like there’s a fucking waiting room,” Drew said, and wiped his forehead. “Not in a—” A sneeze surprised him and he let go before he could cover his mouth, spattering the laptop’s screen with a fine spray of spittle, distorting the words.

“Fuck! Goddam fuck!”

He grabbed for tissues to wipe the screen, but the Kleenex box was empty. He got a dishtowel instead, and when he’d finished cleaning the screen, he thought of how much the soggy dishtowel looked like Roy DeWitt’s bandanna. His besnotted bandanna.

Was his fever worse? Drew didn’t want to believe that, wanted to believe the growing heat he felt (plus the increased throbbing in his head) was just the pressure of trying to solve this idiotic rocking chair problem so he could move on, but it certainly seemed like—

This time he managed to turn aside before the sneezing started. Not just one this time but half a dozen. He seemed to feel his sinuses bulging with each one. Like overinflated tires. His throat was throbbing, and so was his ear.

It came to him then. A bench! There might be a bench in the sheriff’s office where people could sit while they waited to do their little bits of business. He grinned and gave himself a thumbs up. Sick or not, the pieces were still falling into place, and was that really surprising? Creativity often seemed to run on its own clean circuit, regardless of the body’s ills. Flannery O’Connor had lupus. Stanley Elkin had multiple sclerosis. Fyodor Dostoyevsky had epilepsy, and Octavia Butler suffered from dyslexia. What was a lousy cold, maybe even the flu, compared to things like that? He could work through this. The bench proved it, the bench was genius.

Brightest bulb in the chandelier? God no, that was an anachronism. Or was it? The bulb part for sure, no lightbulbs in the 1880s, but there were chandeliers back then, of course there were. There was one in the saloon! If he’d had an Internet connection he could have looked at any number of old-time examples of them, but he didn’t. Just two hundred channels of TV, most of it total junk.

Better to use a different metaphor. If it even was a metaphor; Drew wasn’t completely sure. Maybe it was just a comparative… comparative something. No, it was a metaphor. He was sure of it. Almost.

Never mind, that wasn’t the point and this wasn’t a classroom exercise, it was a book, it was his book, so stick to the writing. Eyes on the prize.

Not the ripest melon in the patch? Not the fastest horse in the race? No, those were awful, but—

Then he got it. Magic! He bent and typed rapidly.

Satisfied (well, relatively satisfied), Drew got up, had a knock of Dr. King’s, then chased it with a glass of water to wash the taste out of his mouth: a slimy mixture of snot and cold medicine.

This is like before. This is like what happened with Village.

He could tell himself that wasn’t true, that this time was entirely different, that the clean circuit wasn’t so clean after all because he was running a fever, a pretty high one from the way it felt, and it was all because he’d handled that bandanna.

No you didn’t, you handled his hand. You handled the hand that handled the bandanna.

“Handled the hand that handled the bandanna, right.”

He turned on the cold tap and splashed his face. That made him feel a little better. He mixed Goody’s Headache Powder with more water, drank it off, then went to the door and threw it open. He felt quite sure that Moose Mom would be there, so sure that for a moment (thank you, fever) he actually thought he did see her over there by the equipment shed, but it was only shadows moving in a slight breeze.

He took a number of deep breaths. In goes the good air, out goes the bad, when I shook his hand I must have been mad.

Drew went back inside and sat down at the laptop. Pushing on seemed like a bad idea, but not pushing on seemed even worse. So he began to write, trying to recapture the wind that had filled his sails and brought him this far. At first it seemed to be working, but by lunchtime (not that he had any interest in eating) his interior sails had gone slack. Probably it was being sick, but it was still too much like before.

I seem to be losing my words.

That was what he’d told Lucy, what he’d told Al Stamper, but that wasn’t the truth; it was just what he could give them so they could dismiss it as writer’s block, something he would eventually find his way through. Or it might dissolve on its own. In truth, it was the opposite. It was having too many words. Was it a copse or a grove? Was it flaring or glaring? Or maybe staring? Was a character sunken eyed or hollow-eyed? Oh, and if hollow-eyed was hyphenated, what about sunken eyed?

He shut down at one o’clock. He had written two pages, and the feeling that he was reverting to the nervous and neurotic man who’d almost burned down his house three years ago was getting harder to dismiss. He could tell himself to let go of the small stuff like rocking chairs versus bench, to let the story carry him, but when he looked at the screen, every word there seemed wrong. Every word seemed to have a better one hiding behind it, just out of sight.

Was it possible that he was coming down with Alzheimer’s? Could that be it?

“Don’t be dumb,” he said, and was dismayed at how nasal he sounded. Also hoarse. Pretty soon he’d lose his voice entirely. Not that there was anyone out here to talk to except himself.

Get your ass home. You’ve got a wife and two fine kids to talk to.

But if he did that, he would lose the book. He knew that as well as he knew his own name. After four or five days, when he was back in Falmouth and feeling better, he would open the Bitter River documents and the prose there would look like something someone else had written, an alien story he would have no idea how to finish. Leaving now would be like throwing away a precious gift, one that might never be given again.

Had to be a man about it, and it went pneumonia, Roy DeWitt’s daughter had said, the subtext being just another damn fool. And was he going to do the same?

The lady or the tiger. The book or your life. Was the choice really that stark and melodramatic? Surely not, but he surely felt like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag, there was no doubt about that.

Nap. I need a nap When I wake up, I’ll be able to decide.

So he took another knock of Dr. King’s Magic Elixir—or whatever it was called—and climbed the stairs to the bedroom he and Lucy had shared on other trips out here. He went to sleep, and when he woke up, the rain and wind had arrived and the choice was made for him. He had a call to make. While he still could.

“Hey, honey, it’s me. I’m sorry I pissed you off. Really.”

She ignored this completely. “It doesn’t sound like allergies to me, Mister. It sounds like you’re sick.”

“It’s just a cold.” He cleared his throat, or tried to. “A pretty bad one, I guess.”

The throat-clearing provoked coughing. He covered the mouthpiece of the old-fashioned phone, but he supposed she heard it anyway. The wind gusted, rain slapped against the windows, and the lights flickered.

“So now what? You just hole up?”

“I think I have to,” he said, then rushed on. “It’s not the book, not now. I’d come back if I thought it was safe, but that storm is here already. The lights just flickered. I’m going to lose the power and the phone before dark, practically guaranteed. Here I’ll pause so you can say I told you so.”

“I told you so,” she said. “And now that we’ve got that out of the way, how bad are you?”

“Not that bad,” he said, which was a far bigger lie than telling her the satellite dish didn’t work. He thought he was quite bad indeed, but if he said that, it was hard to gauge how she might react. Would she call the Presque Isle cops and request a rescue? Even in his current condition, that seemed like an overreaction. Not to mention embarrassing.

“I hate this, Drew. I hate you being up there and cut off. Are you sure you can’t drive out?”

“I might have been able to earlier, but I took some cold medicine before I laid down for a nap and overslept. Now I don’t dare chance it. There are still washouts and plugged culverts from last winter. A hard rain like this is apt to put long stretches of the road underwater. The Suburban might make it, but if it didn’t, I could be stranded six miles from the cabin and nine miles from the Big 90.”

There was a pause, and in it Drew fancied he could hear what she was thinking: Had to be a man about it, didn’t you, just another damn fool. Because sometimes I told you so was just not enough.

The wind gusted and the lights flickered again. (Or maybe they stuttered.) The phone gave a cicada buzz, then cleared.

“Drew? Are you still there?”

“I’m here.”

“The phone made a funny sound.”

“I heard it.”

“You have food?”

“Plenty.” Not that he felt like eating.

She sighed. “Then hunker down. Call me tonight if the phone still works.”

“I will. And when the weather breaks, I’ll come home.”

“Not if there are trees down, you won’t. Not until somebody decides to come in and clear the road.”

“I’ll clear them myself,” Drew said. “Pop’s chainsaw is in the equipment shed, unless one of the renters decided to take it. Any gas that was in the tank will have evaporated, but I can siphon some out of the Suburban.”

“If you don’t get sicker.”

“I won’t—”

“I’m going to tell the kids you’re fine.” Talking to herself more than him now. “No sense worrying them, too.”

“That’s a good—”

“This is fucked up, Drew.” She hated it when he interrupted her, but had never had any qualms about doing it herself. “I want you to know that. When you put yourself in this position, you put us in it, too.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Is the book still going well? It better be. It better be worth all the worry.”

“It’s going fine.” He was no longer sure of this, but what else could he tell her? The shit’s starting again, Lucy, and now I’m sick as well? Would that ease her mind?

“All right.” She sighed. “You’re an idiot, but I love you.”

“Love you, t—” The wind whooped, and suddenly the only light in the cabin was the dim and watery stuff coming in through the windows. “Lucy, I just lost the lights.” He sounded calm, and that was good.

“Look in the equipment shed,” she said. “There might be a Coleman lantern—”

There was another of those cicada buzzes, and then nothing but silence. He replaced the old-fashioned phone in its cradle. He was on his own.

He grabbed a musty old jacket from one of the hooks by the door and fought his way to the equipment shed through the late light, raising his arm once to fend off a flying branch. Maybe it was being sick, but the wind felt like it was already blowing forty per. He fumbled through the keys, cold water trickling down the back of his neck in spite of the jacket’s turned-up collar, and had to try three before he found the one that fit the padlock on the door. Once again he had to diddle it back and forth to get it to turn, and by the time it did, he was soaked and coughing.

The shed was dark and full of shadows even with the door wide open, but there was enough light to see Pop’s chainsaw sitting on a table at the back. There were also a couple of other saws, one a two-handed buck, and probably that was good, because the chainsaw looked useless. The yellow paint of the body was almost obscured by ancient grease, the cutting chain was badly rusted, and he couldn’t imagine mustering the energy to yank the starter cord, anyway.

Lucy was right about the Coleman lantern, though. There were actually two of them sitting on a shelf to the left of the door, along with a gallon can of fuel, but one of them was clearly useless, the globe shattered and the handle gone. The other one looked okay. The silk mantles were attached to the gas jets, which was good; with his hands shaking the way they were, he doubted if he would have been able to tie them down. Should have thought of this sooner, he scolded himself. Of course I should have gone home sooner. When I still could.

When Drew tipped the can of fuel to the dimming afternoon light, he saw Pop’s backslanted printing on a strip of adhesive: USE THIS NOT UNLEADED GAS! He shook the can. It was half full. Not great, but maybe enough to last a three-day blow if he rationed his use.

He took the can and unbroken lantern back to the house, started to put them on the dining room table, then thought better of it. His hands were shaking, and he was bound to spill at least some of the fuel. He put the lantern in the sink instead, then shucked the sodden jacket. Before he could think about fueling the lantern, the coughing started again. He collapsed into one of the dining room chairs, hacking away until he felt he might pass out. The wind was howling, and something thudded on the roof. A much bigger branch than the one he’d fended off, from the sound.

When the coughing passed, he unscrewed the tap on the lantern’s reservoir and went looking for a funnel. He didn’t find one, so he tore off a strip of aluminum foil and fashioned a half-assed funnel from that. The fumes wanted to start the coughing again, but he controlled it until he got the lantern’s little tank filled. When it was, he let go and bent over the counter with his burning forehead on one arm, hacking and choking and gasping for breath.

The fit eventually passed, but the fever was worse than ever. Getting soaked probably didn’t help, he thought. Once he got the Coleman lit—if he got it lit—he’d take some more aspirin. Add a shot of headache powder and a knock of Dr. King’s for good measure.

He pumped the little gadget on the side to build pressure, opened the tap, then struck a kitchen match and slipped it through the ignition hole. For a moment there was nothing, but then the mantles lit up, the light so bright and concentrated it made him wince. He took the Coleman to the cabin’s single closet, looking for a flashlight. He found clothes, orange vests for hunting season, and an old pair of ice skates (he vaguely remembered skating on the brook with his brother on the few occasions they’d been up here in the winter). He found hats and gloves and an elderly Electrolux vacuum cleaner that looked about as useful as the rusty chainsaw in the equipment shed. There was no flashlight.

The wind rose to a shriek around the eaves, making his head hurt. Rain lashed the windows. The last of the daylight continued to drain away, and he thought this was going to be a very long night. His expedition to the shed and his struggle to get the lamp lit had occupied him, but now that those chores were done, he had time to be afraid. He was stuck here because of a book that was (he could admit it now) starting to unravel like the others. He was stuck, he was sick, and he was apt to get sicker.

“I could die out here,” he said in his new hoarse voice. “I really could.”

Best not to think of that. Best to load up the woodstove and get it cranking, because the night was going to be cold as well as long. Temperatures are going to fall radically when this front comes through, wasn’t that what the scruffy weather geek had said? And the counter woman with the lip stud had said the same thing. Right down to the same metaphor (if it was a metaphor), which likened temperature to a physical object that could roll off a table.

That brought him back to Deputy Jep, who was not the smartest kid in the classroom. Really? Had he actually thought that would do? It was a shitty metaphor (if it even was a metaphor). Not just weak, dead on arrival. As he loaded the stove, his feverish mind seemed to open a secret door and he thought, A sandwich short of a picnic.

Better.

All foam and no beer.

Better still, because of the story’s western milieu.

Dumber than a bag of hammers. About as smart as a rock. Sharp as a marb—

“Stop it,” he almost begged. That was the problem. That secret door was the problem, because…

“I have no control over it,” he said in his croaky voice, and thought, Dumb as a frog with brain damage.

Drew struck the side of his head with the heel of his hand. His headache flared. He did it again. And again. When he’d had enough of that, he stuffed crumpled sheets of magazine under some kindling, scratched a match on the stovetop, and watched the flames lick up.

Still holding the lit match, he looked at the pages of Bitter River stacked beside the printer, and thought about what would happen if he touched them alight. He hadn’t quite managed to burn down the house when he’d lit up The Village on the Hill, the fire trucks had arrived before the flames could do much more than scorch the walls of his study, but there would be no fire trucks out here on Shithouse Road, and the storm wouldn’t stop the fire once it took hold, because the cabin was old and dry. Old as dirt, dry as your grandmother’s—

The flame guttering along the matchstick reached his fingers. Drew shook it out, tossed it into the blazing stove, and slammed the grate shut.

“It’s not a bad book and I’m not going to die out here,” he said. “Not going to happen.”

He turned off the Coleman to conserve the fuel, then sat down in the wing chair he spent his evenings in, reading paperbacks by John D. MacDonald and Elmore Leonard. There wasn’t enough light to read by now, not with the Coleman off. Night had almost come, and the only light in the cabin was the shifting red eye of the fire seen through the woodstove’s isinglass window. Drew pulled his chair a bit closer to the stove and wrapped his arms around himself to quell the shivers. He should change out of his damp shirt and pants, and do it right away if he didn’t want to get even sicker. He was still thinking this when he fell asleep.

What woke him was a splintering crack from outside. It was followed by a second, even louder crack, and a thud that shook the floor. A tree had fallen, and it must have been a big one.

The fire in the woodstove had burned down to a bed of bright red embers that waxed and waned. Along with the wind, he could now hear a sandy rattling against the windows. The cabin’s big downstairs room was stuperously hot, at least for the time being, but the temperature outside must have fallen (off the table) as predicted, because the rain had turned to sleet.

Drew tried to check the time, but his wrist was bare. He supposed he’d left his watch on the nighttable beside the bed, although he couldn’t remember for sure. He could always check the time and date strip on his laptop, he supposed, but what would be the point? It was nighttime in the north woods. Did he need any other information?

He decided he did. He needed to find out if the tree had fallen on his trusty Suburban and smashed the shit out of it. Of course need was the wrong word, need was for something you had to have, subtext being that if you could get it you might be able to change the overall situation for the better, and nothing in this situation would change either way, and was situation the right word, or was it too general? It was more of a fix than a situation, fix in this context meaning not to repair but—

“Stop it,” he said. “Do you want to drive yourself crazy?”

He was pretty sure a part of him wanted exactly that. Somewhere inside his head, control panels were smoking and circuit breakers were fusing and some mad scientist was shaking his fists in exultation. He could tell himself it was the fever, but he had been in fine fettle when Village had gone bad. Same with the other two. Physically, at least.

He got up, wincing at the aches that now seemed to be afflicting all of his joints, and went to the door, trying not to hobble. The wind tore it from his grasp and bounced it off the wall. He grabbed it and held on, his clothes plastered against his body and his hair streaming back from his forehead. The night was black—black as the devil’s riding boots, black as a black cat in a coalmine, black as a woodchuck’s asshole—but he could make out the bulk of his Suburban and (maybe) tree branches waving above it on the far side. Although he couldn’t be sure, he thought the tree had spared his Suburban and landed on the equipment shed, no doubt bashing in the roof.

He shouldered the door shut and turned the deadbolt. He didn’t expect intruders on such a dirty night, but he didn’t want it blowing open after he went to bed. And he was going to bed. He made his way to the kitchen counter by the shifting, chancy light of the embers and lit the Coleman lantern. In its glare the cabin looked surreal, caught by a flashbulb that didn’t go out but just went on and on. Holding it in front of him, he crossed to the stairs. That was when he heard a scratching at the door.

A branch, he told himself. Blown there by the wind and caught somehow, maybe on the welcome mat. It’s nothing. Go to bed.

The scratching came again, so soft he never would have heard it if the wind hadn’t chosen those few moments to lull. It didn’t sound like a branch; it sounded like a person. Like some orphan of the storm too weak or badly hurt to even knock and could only scratch. Only no one had been out there… or had there been? Could he be absolutely sure? It had been so dark. Black as the devil’s riding boots.

Drew went to the door, freed the deadbolt, and opened it. He held up the Coleman lamp. No one there. Then, as he was about to shut the door again, he looked down and saw a rat. Probably a Norway, not huge but pretty big. It was lying on the threadbare welcome mat, one of its paws—pink, strangely human, like a baby’s hand—outstretched and still scratching at the air. Its brown-black fur was littered with tiny bits of leaf, twig, and beads of blood. Its bulging black eyes were looking up at him. Its side heaved. That pink paw continued to scratch at the air, just as it had scratched at the door. A miniscule sound.

Lucy hated rodents, screeched her head off if she saw so much as a fieldmouse scuttering along the baseboard, and it did no good to tell her the wee sleekit cowerin beastie was undoubtedly a lot more terrified of her than she was of it. Drew didn’t care much for rodents himself, and understood they carried diseases—hantavirus, rat bite fever, and those were only the two most common—but he’d never had Lucy’s almost instinctive loathing of them. What he mostly felt for this one was pity. Probably it was that tiny pink paw, which continued scratching at nothing. Or maybe the pinpricks of white light from the Coleman lantern he saw in its dark eyes. It lay there panting and looking up at him with blood on its fur and in its whiskers. Broken up inside and probably dying.

Drew bent, one hand on his upper thigh, the other holding down the lantern for a better look. “You were in the equipment shed, weren’t you?”

Almost surely. Then the tree had come down, smashing through the roof, destroying Mr. Rat’s happy home. Had he been hit by a tree branch or a piece of the roof as he scuttled for safety? Maybe by a bucket of congealed paint? Had Pop’s useless old McCulloch chainsaw tumbled off the table and fallen on him? It didn’t matter. Whatever it was had squashed him and maybe broken his back. He’d had just enough gas left in his ratty little tank to crawl here.

The wind picked up again, throwing sleet into Drew’s hot face. Spicules of ice struck the globe of the lantern, hissed, melted, and ran down the glass. The rat panted. The rat on the mat needs help stat, Drew thought. Except the rat on the mat was beyond help. You didn’t need to be a rocket scientist.

Except, of course, he could help.

Drew walked to the dead socket of the fireplace, pausing once for a coughing fit, and bent over the stand containing the little collection of fireplace tools. He considered the poker, but the idea of skewering the rat with it made him wince. He took the ash shovel instead. One hard hit ought to be enough to put it out of its misery. Then he could use the shovel to sweep it off the side of the porch. If he lived through tonight, he had no wish to start tomorrow by stepping on the corpse of a dead rodent.

Here is something interesting, he thought. When I first saw it, I thought “he.” Now that I’ve decided to kill the damn thing, it’s “it.”

The rat was still on the mat. Sleet had begun crusting on its fur. That one pink paw (so human, so human) continued to paw at the air, although now it was slowing down.

“I’m going to make it better,” Drew said. He raised the shovel… held it at shoulder height for the strike… then lowered it. And why? The slowly groping paw? The beady black eyes?

A tree had crashed the rat’s home and crushed him (back to him now), he had somehow dragged himself to the cabin, God knew how much effort it had taken, and was this to be his reward? Another crushing, this one final? Drew was feeling rather crushed himself these days and, ridiculous or not (probably it was), he felt a degree of empathy.

Meanwhile, the wind was chilling him, sleet was smacking him in the face, and he was shivering again. He had to close the door and he wasn’t going to leave the rat to die slowly in the dark. And on a fucking welcome mat, to boot.

Drew set down the lantern and used the shovel to scoop it up (funny how liquid that pronoun was). He went to the stove and tilted the shovel so the rat slid onto the floor. That one pink paw kept scratching. Drew put his hands on his knees and coughed until he dry-retched and spots danced in front of his eyes. When the fit passed, he took the lantern back to his reading chair and sat down.

“Go ahead and die now,” he said. “At least you’re out of the weather and can do it where you’re warm.”

He turned off the lantern. Now there was just the faint red glow of the dying embers. The way they waxed and waned reminded him of the way that tiny pink paw had scratched… and scratched… and scratched. It was doing it still, he saw.

I should build up the fire before I go up to bed, he thought. If I don’t, this place is going to be as cold as Grant’s Tomb in the morning.

But the coughing, which had temporarily subsided, would no doubt begin again if he got up and started moving the phlegm around. And he was tired.

Also, you put the rat down pretty close to the stove. I think you brought it in to die a natural death, didn’t you? Not to broil it alive Build the fire up in the morning.

The wind droned around the cabin, occasionally rising to a womanish screech, then subsiding to that drone again. The sleet slatted against the windows. As he listened to these sounds, they seemed to merge. He closed his eyes, then opened them again. Had the rat died? At first he thought it had, but then that tiny paw made another short slow stroke. So not quite yet.

Drew closed his eyes.

And slept.

He awoke with a start when another branch thudded down on the roof. He had no idea how long he had been out. It could have been fifteen minutes, it could have been two hours, but one thing was sure: there was no rat in front of the stove. Apparently Monsieur Rat hadn’t been as badly hurt as Drew had thought; it had come around and was now somewhere in the house with him. He didn’t much care for that idea, but it was his own fault. He had invited it in, after all.

You have to invite them in, Drew thought. Vampires. Wargs. The devil in his black riding boots. You have to invite—

“Drew.”

He started so strongly at the sound of that voice that he almost kicked over the lantern. He looked around and by the light of the dying fire in the stove, saw the rat. He was on Pop’s desk under the stairs, sitting on his back paws between the laptop and the portable printer. Sitting, in fact, on the manuscript of Bitter River.

Drew tried to speak, but at first could only manage a croak. He cleared his throat—which was painful—and tried again. “I thought you just said something.”

“I did.” The rat’s mouth didn’t move, but the voice was coming from him, all right; it wasn’t in Drew’s head.

“This is a dream,” Drew said. “Or delirium. Maybe both.”

“No, it’s real enough,” the rat said. “You’re awake and you’re not delirious. Your fever’s going down. Check for yourself.”

Drew put a hand on his forehead. He did feel cooler, but that wasn’t exactly trustworthy, was it? He was conversing with a rat, after all. He felt in his pocket for the kitchen matches he’d left there, struck one, and lit the lantern. He held it up, expecting the rat to be gone, but he was still there, sitting on his back paws with his tail curled around his haunches and holding his weird pink hands to his chest.

“If you’re real, get off my manuscript,” Drew said. “I worked too hard on it for you to leave a bunch of ratshit on the title page.”

“You did work hard,” the rat agreed (but showing no signs of relocating). He scratched behind one ear, now seeming perfectly lively.

Whatever fell on him must have just stunned him, Drew thought. If he’s there at all, that is. If he was ever there.

“You worked hard and at first you worked well. You were totally on the rails, running fast and hot. Then it started to go wrong, didn’t it? Just like the other ones. Don’t feel bad; wannabe novelists all over the world hit the same wall. Do you know how many half-finished novels are stuck in desk drawers or filing cabinets? Millions.”

“Getting sick fucked me up.”

“Think back, think honestly. It was starting to happen even before that.”

Drew didn’t want to think back.

“You lose your selective perception,” the rat said. “It happens to you every time. On the novels, at least. Doesn’t happen at once, but as the book grows and begins to breathe, more choices need to be made and your selective perception erodes.”

The rat went to all fours, trotted to the edge of Pop’s desk, and sat up again, like a dog begging for a treat.

“Writers have different habits, different ways of getting in the groove, and they work at different speeds, but to produce a long work, there must always come extended periods of focused narration.”

I’ve heard that before, Drew thought. Almost word for word. Where?

“At every single moment during those focused periods—those flights of fancy—the writer is faced with at least seven choices of word and expression and detail. Talented ones make the right choices with almost no conscious consideration; they are pro basketball players of the mind, hitting from all over the court.”

Where? Who?

“A constant winnowing process is going on which is the basis of what we call creative wri—”

“Franzen!” Drew bellowed, sitting upright and sending a bolt of pain through his head. “That was part of the Franzen lecture! Almost word for word!”

The rat ignored this interruption. “You are capable of that winnowing process, but only in short bursts. When you try to write a novel—the difference between a sprint and a marathon—it always breaks down. You see all the choices of expression and detail, but the consequent winnowing begins to fail you. You don’t lose the words, you lose the ability to choose the correct words. They look all right; they look all wrong. It’s very sad. You’re like a car with a powerful engine and a broken transmission.”

Drew closed his eyes tight enough to make spots flare, and then sprang them open. His orphan of the storm was still there.

“I can help you,” the rat announced. “If you want me to, that is.”

“And you’d do this because?”

The rat cocked his head, as if unable to believe a supposedly smart man—a college English teacher who had been published in The New Yorker!—could be so stupid. “You were going to kill me with a shovel, and why not? I’m just a lowly rat, after all. But you took me in instead. You saved me.”

“So as a reward you give me three wishes.” Drew said it with a smile. This was familiar ground: Hans Christian Andersen, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, the Brothers Grimm.

“Just one,” the rat said. “A very specific one. You can wish to finish your book.” He lifted his tail and slapped it down on the manuscript of Bitter River for emphasis. “But it comes with a condition.”

“And that would be?”

“Someone you care for will have to die.”

More familiar ground. This turned out to be a dream where he was replaying his argument with Lucy. He had explained (not very well, but he had given it the old college try) that he needed to write the book. That it was very important. She had asked if it was as important as she and the kids. He had told her no, of course not, then asked if it had to be a choice.

I think it is a choice, she’d said. And you just made it.

“This isn’t actually a magic wish situation at all,” he said. “More of a business deal. Or a Faustian bargain. It’s sure not like any of the fairy tales I read as a kid.”

The rat scratched behind one ear, somehow keeping his balance while he did it. Admirable. “All the wishes in fairy tales come at a price. Then there’s ‘The Monkey’s Paw.’ Remember that one?”

“Even in a dream,” Drew said, “I would not trade my wife or either of my kids for an oat opera with no literary pretensions.”

As the words came out of his mouth, he realized that was why he had seized the idea of Bitter River so unquestioningly; his plot-driven western would never be stacked up against the next Rushdie or Atwood or Chabon. Not to mention the next Franzen.

“I would never ask you to,” the rat said. “Actually, I was thinking of Al Stamper. Your old department head.”

That silenced Drew. He just looked at the rat, which looked back with those beady black eyes. The wind blew around the cabin, sometimes gusting hard enough to shake the walls; the sleet rattled.

Pancreatic, Al had said when Drew commented on his startling weight loss. But, he had added, there was no need for anyone to be crafting obituaries just yet. The docs caught it relatively early. Confidence is high.

Looking at him, though—sallow skin, sunken eyes, lifeless hair—Drew had felt no confidence whatsoever. The key word in what Al had said was relatively. Pancreatic cancer was sly; it hid. The diagnosis was almost always a death sentence. And if he did die? There would be mourning, of course, and Nadine Stamper would be the chief mourner—they had been married for something like forty-five years. The members of the English Department would wear black armbands for a month or so. The obituary would be long, noting Al’s many accomplishments and awards. His books on Dickens and Hardy would be mentioned. But he was seventy-two at least, maybe even seventy-four, and nobody would say he died young, or with his promise unfulfilled.

Meanwhile, the rat was looking at him, its pink paws now curled against its furry chest.

What the hell? Drew thought. It’s only a hypothetical question. And one inside a dream, at that.

“I guess I’d take the deal and make the wish,” Drew said. Dream or no dream, hypothetical question or not, he felt uneasy saying it. “He’s dying, anyway.”

“You finish your book and Stamper dies,” the rat said, as if to make sure Drew understood.

Drew gave the rat a cunning sideways look. “Will the book be published?”

“I’m authorized to grant the wish if you make it,” the rat said. “I’m not authorized to predict the future of your literary endeavor. Were I to guess…” The rat cocked his head. “I’d guess it will be. As I said, you are talented.”

“Okay,” Drew said. “I finish the book, Al dies. Since he’s going to die anyway, that seems okay to me.” Only it didn’t, not really. “Do you think he’ll live long enough to read it, at least?”

“I just told you—”

Drew raised a hand. “Not authorized to predict the future of my literary endeavor, right. Are we done here?”

“There’s one more thing I need.”

“If it’s my signature in blood on a contract, you can forget the whole deal.”

“It’s not all about you, Mister,” the rat said. “I’m hungry.” He jumped onto the desk’s chair, and from the chair to the floor. He sped across to the kitchen table and picked up an oyster cracker, one Drew must have dropped on the day he had the grilled cheese and tomato soup. The rat sat up, grasping the oyster cracker in its paws, and went to work. The cracker was gone in seconds.

“Good talking to you,” the rat said. It disappeared almost as quickly as the oyster cracker, zipping across the floor and into the dead fireplace.

“Goddam,” Drew said.

He closed his eyes, then sprang them open. It didn’t feel like a dream. He closed them again, opened them again. The third time he closed them, they stayed closed.

He awoke in his bed, with no memory of how he’d gotten there… or had he been here all night? That was more than likely, considering how fucked up he’d been thanks to Roy DeWitt and his snotty bandanna. The whole previous day seemed like a dream, his conversation with the rat only the most vivid part of it.

The wind was still blowing and the sleet was still sleeting, but he felt better. There was no question of it. The fever was either going or entirely gone. His joints still ached and his throat was still sore, but neither was as bad as they had been last night, when part of him had been convinced he was going to die out here. Died of pneumonia on Shithouse Road—what an obituary that would have been.

He was in his boxers, the rest of his clothes heaped on the floor. He had no memory of undressing, either. He put them back on and went downstairs. He scrambled four eggs and this time ate them all, chasing each bite with orange juice. It was concentrate, all the Big 90 carried, but cold and delicious.

He looked across the room at Pop’s desk and thought about trying to work, maybe switching from the laptop to the portable typewriter to save the laptop’s battery. But after putting his dishes in the sink, he trudged up the stairs and went back to bed, where he slept until the middle of the afternoon.

The storm was still pounding away when he got up the second time, but Drew didn’t care. He felt almost like himself again. He wanted a sandwich—there was bologna and cheese—and then he wanted to go to work. Sheriff Averill was about to fool the gun thugs with his big abracadabra, and now that Drew felt rested and well, he couldn’t wait to write it.

Halfway down the stairs, he noticed that the toybox by the fireplace was lying on its side with the toys that had been inside spilling out onto the rag rug. Drew thought he must have kicked it over on his sleepwalk to bed the previous night. He went to it and knelt, meaning to put the toys back in the box before starting work. He had the Frisbee in one hand and the old Stretch Armstrong in the other, when he froze. Lying on its side near Stacey’s topless Barbie doll was a stuffed rat.

Drew felt his pulse throbbing in his head as he picked it up, so maybe he wasn’t completely well, after all. He squeezed the rat and it gave a tired squeak. Just a toy, but sort of creepy, all things considered. Who gave their kid a stuffed rat to sleep with, when there was a perfectly good teddy bear (only one eye, but still) in the same box?

No accounting for tastes, he thought, and finished his mother’s old maxim out loud: “Said the old maid as she kissed the cow.”

Maybe he’d seen the stuffed rat at the height of his fever and it had kicked off the dream. Make that probably, or almost certainly. That he couldn’t remember searching all the way to the bottom of the toybox didn’t signify; hell, he couldn’t even remember taking off his clothes and going to bed.

He piled the toys back into the box, made himself a cup of tea, and went to work. He was doubtful at first, hesitant, a little scared, but after a few initial missteps, he caught hold and wrote until it was too dark to see without using the lantern. Nine pages, and he thought they were good.

Damn good.

It wasn’t a three-day blow; Pierre actually lasted four. Sometimes the wind and rain slackened and then the storm would crank up again. Sometimes a tree fell, but none as close as the one that had smashed the shed. That part hadn’t been a dream; he’d seen it with his own eyes. And although the tree—a huge old pine—had largely spared his Suburban, it had fallen close enough to tear off the passenger side mirror.

Drew barely noticed these things. He wrote, he ate, he slept in the afternoon, he wrote again. Every now and then he had a sneezing fit, and every now and then he thought about Lucy and the kids, anxiously waiting for some word. Mostly he didn’t think about them. That was selfish and he knew it and didn’t care. He was living in Bitter River now.

Every now and then he had to pause for the right word to come to him (like messages floating up in the window of the Magic 8 Ball he’d had as a kid), and every now and then he had to get up and walk around the room as he tried to think of how to make a smooth transition from one scene to the next, but there was no panic. No frustration. He knew the words would come, and they did. He was hitting from all over the court, hitting from way downtown. He wrote on Pop’s old portable now, pounding the keys til his fingers hurt. He didn’t care about that, either. He had carried this book, this idea that had come to him out of nowhere while standing on a street corner; now it was carrying him.

What a fine ride it was.

Drew stopped, staring at the page in the typewriter. A bar of sun had just struck across it. He got up and went to the window. There was blue up there. Just enough to make a pair of overalls, Pop would have said, but it was growing. And he heard something, faint but unmistakable: the rrrrrr of a chainsaw.

He put on the musty jacket and went outside. The sound was still some distance away. He walked across the yard, which was littered with branches, to the remains of the equipment shed. Pop’s bucksaw was lying beneath part of a fallen wall, and Drew was able to wiggle it out. It was a two-hander, but he’d be all right with it as long as any downed tree he came to wasn’t too thick. And take it easy, he told himself. Unless you want a relapse.

For a moment he thought about just going back inside and resuming work instead of trying to meet whoever was down the road, cutting a path through the storm’s leavings. A day or two before he would have done just that. But things had changed. An image rose in his mind (they came all the time now, unbidden), one that made him smile: a gambler on a losing streak, abjuring the dealer to hurry up and spin those fucking cards. He wasn’t that guy anymore, and thank God. The book would still be there when he got back. Whether he resumed out here in the woods or back in Falmouth, it would be there.

He tossed the saw in the back of the Suburban and began rolling slowly up Shithouse Road, pausing every now and then to throw fallen branches out of his way before going on. He went almost a mile before he came to the first tree down across the road, but it was a birch, and he made quick work of it.

The chainsaw was very loud now, not rrrrr but RRRRRRR. Each time it ceased Drew would hear a big engine revving as his rescuer came closer, and then the saw would start up again. Drew was trying to cut his way through a much bigger tree and not having much luck when a Chevy 4X4, customized for woods work, came lumbering around the next bend.

The driver pulled up and got out. He was a big man with an even bigger belly, dressed in green overalls and a camo coat that flapped around his knees. The chainsaw he carried was industrial-sized, but looked almost like a toy in the guy’s gloved hand. Drew knew who he was at once. The resemblance was unmistakable. So was the whiff of Old Spice that went with the smells of sawdust and chainsaw gasoline. “Hey there! You must be Old Bill’s boy.”

The big man smiled. “Ayuh. And you must be Buzzy Larson’s.”

“That’s right.” Drew hadn’t known how much he needed to see another human being until this moment. It was like not knowing how thirsty you were until someone handed you a glass of cold water. He stuck out his hand. They shook over the downed tree.

“Your name’s Johnny, right? Johnny Colson.”

“Close. Jackie. Stand back and let me cut that tree for you, Mr. Larson. Take you all day with that buck.”

Drew stood aside and watched as Jackie cranked up his Stihl and zipped it through the tree, leaving a neat pile of sawdust on the leaf- and twig-littered road. Between the two of them, they shifted the smaller half into the ditch.

“How is it the rest of the way?” Drew asked, puffing a little.

“Not terrible, but there’s one bad washout.” He squinted one eye closed and sized up Drew’s Suburban with the other. “That might getcha through, it’s pretty high-sprung. If it don’t, I could tow you, although it might ding up your exhaust system a dight.”

“How did you know to come out here?”

“Your wife had Dad’s number in her old address book. She talked to my ma, and Ma called me. Your wife is some worried about you.”

“Yes, I suppose she is. And thinks I’m a damned fool.”

This time Old Bill’s boy—call him Young Jackie—did his squinting at the tall pines to one side of the road and said nothing. Yankees did not, as a rule, comment on other folks’ marital situations.

“Well, I’ll tell you what,” Drew said. “How about you follow me back to my dad’s cabin? Have you got time to do that?”

“Ayuh, got the day.”

“I’ll pack up my stuff—won’t take long—and we can caravan back to the store. There’s no cell coverage, but I can use the pay phone. If the storm didn’t knock it out, that is.”

“Nah, it’s okay. I called Ma from there. You probably don’t know about DeWitt, do you?”

“Only that he was sick.”

“Not anymore,” Jackie said. “Died.” He hawked, spat, and looked at the sky. “Gonna miss a pretty nice day, by the look. Jump in your truck, Mr. Larson. Follow me half a mile up to the Patterson place. You can turn around there.”

Drew found the sign and picture in the window of the Big 90 both sad and amusing. Amusement was a fairly shitty way to feel, given the circumstances, but a person’s interior landscape was sometimes—often, even—fairly shitty. CLOSED FOR FUNNERAL, the sign said. The picture was of Roy DeWitt next to a plastic backyard pool. He was wearing flip-flops and a pair of low-riding Bermuda shorts beneath the considerable overhang of his belly. He was holding a can of beer in one hand and appeared to have been caught in the middle of a dance step.

“Roy liked his Bud-burgers, all right,” Jackie Colson observed. “You be okay from here, Mr. Larson?”

“Sure,” Drew said. “And thank you.” He held out his hand. Jackie Colson gave it a shake, jumped into his 4X4, and headed down the road.

Drew mounted the porch, put a handful of change on the ledge beneath the pay phone, and called home. Lucy answered.

“It’s me,” Drew said. “I’m at the store, and headed home. Still mad?”

“Get here and find out for yourself.” Then: “You sound better.”

“I am better.”

“Can you make it tonight?”

Drew looked at his wrist and realized he’d brought the manuscript (of course!) but left his watch in the bedroom at Pop’s cabin. Where it would stay until next year. He gauged the sun. “Not sure.”

“If you get tired, don’t try. Stop in Island Falls or Derry. We can wait another night.”

“All right, but if you hear someone coming in around midnight, don’t shoot.”

“I won’t. Did you get any work done?” He could hear hesitance in her voice. “I mean, getting sick and all?”

“I did. And it’s good, I think.”

“No problems with the… you know…”

“The words? No. No problems.” At least not after that weird dream. “I think this one’s a keeper. I love you, Luce.”

The pause after he said it seemed very long. Then she sighed and said, “I love you, too.”

He didn’t like the sigh but would take the sentiment. There had been a bump in the road—not the first, and it wouldn’t be the last—but they were past it. That was fine. He racked the phone and got rolling.

As the day was winding down (a pretty nice one, just as Jackie Colson had predicted), he began seeing signs for the Island Falls Motor Lodge. He was tempted, but decided to press on. The Suburban was running well—some of the thumps and bumps on Shithouse Road actually seemed to have knocked the front end back into line—and if he shaded the speed limit a little and didn’t get stopped by a state cop, he might be able to get home by eleven. Sleep in his own bed.

And work the next morning. That, too.

He came into their bedroom at just past eleven-thirty. He’d taken his muddy shoes off downstairs, and was trying to be quiet, but he heard the rustle of bedclothes in the dark and knew she was awake.

“Get in here, Mister.”

For once that word didn’t sting. He was glad to be home, and even gladder to be with her. Once he was in bed she put her arms around him, gave him a hug (brief, but strong), then turned over and went back to sleep. As Drew was drowsing toward sleep himself—those borderline transition moments when the mind becomes plastic—an odd thought came.

What if the rat had followed him? What if it was under the bed right now?

There was no rat, he thought, and slept.

“Wow,” Brandon said. His tone was respectful and a little awed. He and his sister were in the driveway waiting for the bus, their backpacks shouldered.

“What did you do to it, Dad?” Stacey asked.

They were looking at the Suburban, which was splattered with dried mud all the way up to the doorhandles. The windshield was opaque except for the crescents that had been cut by the windshield wipers. And there was the missing passenger side mirror, of course.

“There was a storm,” Drew said. He was wearing pajama bottoms, bedroom slippers, and a Boston College tee. “And that road out there isn’t in very good shape.”

“Shithouse Road,” Stacey said, clearly relishing the name.

Now Lucy came out as well. She stood looking at the hapless Suburban with her hands on her hips. “Holy crow.”

“I’ll get it washed this afternoon,” Drew said.

“I like it that way,” Brandon said. “It’s cool. You must have done some crazy driving, Dad.”

“Oh, he’s crazy, all right,” Lucy said. “Your crazy daddy. No doubt about that.”

The schoolbus appeared then, sparing him a comeback.

“Come inside,” Lucy said after they’d watched the kids get on. “I’ll fix you some pancakes or something. You look like you’ve lost weight.”

As she turned away, he caught her hand. “Have you heard anything about Al Stamper? Talked to Nadine, maybe?”

“I talked to her the day you left for the cabin, because you told me he was sick. Pancreatic, that’s so awful. She said he was doing pretty well.”

“You haven’t talked to her since?”

Lucy frowned. “No, why would I?”

“No reason,” he said, and that was true. Dreams were dreams, and the only rat he’d seen at the cabin was the stuffed one in the toybox. “Just concerned about him.”

“Call him yourself, then. Cut out the middle man. Now do you want some pancakes or not?”

What he wanted to do was work. But pancakes first. Keep things quiet on the home front.

After pancakes, he went upstairs to his little study, plugged in his laptop, and looked at the hard copy he’d done on Pop’s typewriter. Start by keyboarding it in, or just press on? He decided on the latter. Best to find out right away if the magic spell that had been over Bitter River still held, or if it had departed when he left the cabin.

It did hold. For the first ten minutes or so he was in the upstairs study, vaguely aware of reggae from downstairs, which meant that Lucy was in her study, crunching numbers. Then the music was gone, the walls dissolved, and moonlight was shining down on DeWitt Road, the rutted, potholed track running between Bitter River and the county seat. The stagecoach was coming. Sheriff Averill would hold his badge high and flag it down. Pretty soon he and Andy Prescott would be onboard. The kid had a date in county court. And not long after with the hangman.

Drew knocked off at noon and called Al Stamper. There was no need to be frightened, and he told himself he wasn’t, but he couldn’t deny that his pulse had kicked up several notches.

“Hey, Drew,” Al said, sounding just like himself. Sounding strong. “How did it go up in the wilderness?”

“Pretty well. I got almost ninety pages before a storm came along—”

“Pierre,” Al said, and with a clear distaste that warmed Drew’s heart. “Ninety pages, really? You?”

“I know, hard to believe, and another ten this morning, but never mind that. What I really want to know is how you’re doing.”

“Pretty damn good,” Al said. “Except I’ve got this damn rat to contend with.”

Drew had been sitting in one of the kitchen chairs. Now he bolted to his feet, suddenly feeling sick again. Feverish. “What?”

“Oh, don’t sound so concerned,” Al said. “It’s a new medication the doctors put me on. Supposed to have all kinds of side effects, but the only one I’ve got, at least so far, is the goddam rash. All over my back and sides. Nadie swore it was shingles, but I had the test and it’s just a rash. Itches like hell, though.”

“Just a rash,” Drew echoed. He wiped a hand across his mouth. CLOSED FOR FUNNERAL, he thought. “Well, that’s not so bad. You take care of yourself, Al.”

“I will. And I want to see that book when you finish it.” He paused. “Notice I said when, not if.”

“After Lucy, you’ll be first in line,” Drew said, and hung up. Good news. All good news. Al sounded strong. Like his old self. All fine, except for that damn rat.

Drew found he could laugh at that.

November was cold and snowy, but Drew Larson barely noticed. On the last day of the month, he watched (through the eyes of Sheriff Jim Averill) as Andy Prescott climbed the stairs to the gallows in the county seat. Drew was curious as to how the boy would take it. As it turned out—as the words spilled out—he did just fine. He had grown up. The tragedy (Averill knew it) was that the kid would never grow old. One drunken night and a fit of jealousy over a dancehall girl had put paid to everything that might have been.

On the first of December, Jim Averill turned in his badge to the circuit judge who had been in town to witness the hanging, then rode back to Bitter River, where he would pack his few things (one trunk would be enough) and say goodbye to his deputies, who had done a damn good job when the chips were down. Yes, even Jep Leonard, who was about as smart as a rock. Or sharp as a marble, take your pick.

On the second of December, the sheriff harnessed his horse to a light buggy, threw his trunk and saddle in the back, and headed west, thinking he might try his luck in California. The gold rush was over, but he longed to see the Pacific Ocean. He was unaware of Andy Prescott’s grief-stricken father, laid up behind a rock two miles out of town and looking down the barrel of a Sharps Big Fifty, the rifle which would become known as “the gun that changed the history of the west.”

Here came a light wagon, and sitting up there on the seat, boots on the splashboard, was the man responsible for his grief and spoiled hopes, the man who had killed his son. Not the judge, not the jury, not the hangman. No. That man down there. If not for Jim Averill, his son would be in Mexico now, with his long life—all the way into a new century!—ahead of him.

Prescott cocked the hammer. He laid the sights on the man in the wagon. He hesitated with his finger curled on the cold steel crescent of the trigger, deciding what to do in the forty seconds or so before the wagon breasted the next hill and disappeared from sight. Shoot? Or let him go?

Drew thought of adding one more sentence—He made up his mind—and didn’t. That would lead some readers, perhaps many, to believe Prescott had decided to shoot, and Drew wanted to leave that issue unresolved. Instead, he hit the space bar twice and typed.

He looked at those two words for quite a long time. He looked at the pile of manuscript between his laptop and his printer; with the work of this final session added, it would come in at just under three hundred pages.

I did it. Maybe it will be published and maybe it won’t, maybe I’ll do another and maybe I won’t, it doesn’t matter. I did it.

He put his hands over his face.

Lucy turned the last page two nights later and looked at him in a way he hadn’t seen in a very long time. Maybe not since the first year or two of their marriage, before the kids came.

“Drew, it’s amazing.”

He grinned. “Really? Not just saying that because your hubby wrote it?”

She shook her head violently. “No. It’s wonderful. A western! I never would have guessed. How did you get the idea?”

He shrugged. “It just came to me.”

“Did that horrible rancher shoot Jim Averill?”

“I don’t know,” Drew said.

“Well, a publisher may want you to put that in.”

“Then the publisher—if there ever is one—will find his want unsatisfied. And you’re sure it’s okay? You mean it?”

“Much better than okay. Are you going to show Al?”

“Yes. I’ll take a copy of the script over tomorrow.”

“Does he know it’s a western?”

“Nope. Don’t even know if he likes them.”

“He’ll like this one.” She paused, then took his hand and said, “I was so pissed at you for not coming back when that storm was on the way. But I was wrong and you were rat.”

He took his hand back, once again feeling feverish. “What did you say?”

“That I was wrong. And you were right. What’s the trouble, Drew?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

“So?” Drew asked three days later. “What’s the verdict?”

They were in his old department head’s study. The manuscript was on Al’s desk. Drew had been nervous about Lucy’s reaction to Bitter River, but he was even more nervous about Al’s. Stamper was a voracious, omnivorous reader who had been analyzing and deconstructing prose his entire working life. He was the only person Drew knew who had dared to teach Under the Volcano and Infinite Jest in the same semester.

“I think it’s very good.” Al not only sounded like his old self these days, he looked like it. His color was back and he had put on a few pounds. The chemo had taken his hair, but the Red Sox cap he was wearing covered his newly bald head. “It’s plot-driven, but the relationship between the sheriff and his young captive gives the story quite extraordinary resonance. It isn’t as good as The Ox-Bow Incident or Welcome to Hard Times, I’d say—”

“I know,” Drew said… who thought it was. “I’d never claim that.”

“But I think it ranks with Oakley Hall’s Warlock, which is just behind those two. You had something to say, Drew, and you said it very well. The book doesn’t pound the reader over the head with its thematic concerns, and I suppose most people will just read it for the strong story values—the what-happens-next thing—but those thematic elements are there, oh yes.”

“You think people will read it?”

“Sure.” Al seemed almost to wave this away. “Unless your agent’s a total dummocks, he or she will sell this easily. Maybe even for a fair bit of money.” He eyed Drew. “Although my guess is that was secondary to you, if you thought about it at all. You just wanted to do it, am I right? For once jump off the high board at the country club swimming pool without losing your nerve and slinking back down the ladder.”

“Nailed it,” Drew said. “And you… Al, you look terrific.”

“I feel terrific,” he said. “The doctors have stopped short of calling me a medical marvel, and I’ll be going back for tests every three weeks for the first year, but my last date with the fucking chemo IV is this afternoon. As of rat now all the tests are calling me cancer free.”

This time Drew didn’t jump, and he didn’t bother asking for a repeat. He knew what his old department head had actually said, just as he knew part of him would keep hearing that other word from time to time. It was like a splinter, one lodged in his mind instead of under his skin. Most splinters worked out without infecting. He was pretty sure this one would do that. After all, Al was fine. The deal-making rat at the cabin had been a dream. Or a stuffed toy. Or complete bullshit.

Take your pick.

There was indeed an auction for Bitter River. It happened on March 15th, the same day the season’s final storm hit New England (Winter Storm Tania, according to the Weather Channel). Three of New York’s Big Five publishers participated, and Putnam came out the winner. The advance was $350,000. Not Dan Brown or John Grisham numbers, but enough, as Lucy said while she hugged him, to put Bran and Stacey through college. She broke out a bottle of Dom Pérignon, which she had been saving (hopefully). This was at three o’clock, while they still felt like celebrating.

They toasted the book, and the book’s author, and the book’s author’s wife, and the amazing wonderful kids that had sprung from the loins of the book’s author and the book’s author’s wife, and were fairly tipsy when the phone rang at four. It was Kelly Fontaine, the English Department’s administrative assistant since time out of mind. She was in tears. Al and Nadine Stamper were dead.

He had been scheduled for tests at Maine Medical that day (tests every three weeks for the first year, Drew remembered him saying). “He could have put the appointment off,” Kelly said, “but you know Al, and Nadine was the same way. A little snow wasn’t going to stop them.”

The accident happened on 295, less than a mile from Maine Med. A semi skidded on the ice, sideswiping Nadie Stamper’s little Prius and flicking it like a tiddlywink. It turned over and landed on the roof.

“Oh my God,” Lucy said. “Both of them, gone. How horrible is that? And when he was getting better!”

“Yes,” Drew said. He felt numb. “He was, wasn’t he?” Except, of course, he had that damn rat to contend with. He’d said so himself.

“You need to sit down,” Lucy said. “You’re as pale as windowglass.”

But sitting down wasn’t what Drew needed, at least not first. He rushed to the kitchen sink and vomited up the champagne. As he hung there, still heaving, barely aware of Lucy rubbing his back, he thought, Ellie says the book will be published next February. Between now and then I’ll do whatever the editor tells me, and all the publicity they want once the book comes out. I’ll play the game. I’ll do it for Lucy and the kids. But there’s never going to be another one.

“Never,” he said.

“What, honey?” She was still rubbing his back.

“The pancreatic. I thought that would get him, it gets almost everybody. I never expected anything like this.” He rinsed his mouth from the faucet, spat. “Never.”

The funeral—which Drew couldn’t help thinking of as the FUNNERAL—was held four days after the accident. Al’s younger brother asked Drew if he would say a few words. Drew declined, saying he was still too shocked to be articulate. He was shocked, no doubt about it, but his real fear was that the words would turn treacherous as they had on Village and the two aborted books before it. He was afraid—really, actually afraid—that if he stood at the podium before a chapel filled with grieving relatives, friends, colleagues, and students, what might spill from his mouth was The rat! It was the fucking rat! And I turned it loose!

Lucy cried all through the service. Stacey cried with her, not because she knew the Stampers well but in sympathy with her mother. Drew sat silent, with his arm around Brandon. He looked not at the two coffins but at the choir loft. He was sure he would see a rat running a victory lap along the polished mahogany rail up there, but he didn’t. Of course he didn’t. There was no rat. As the service wound down, he realized he’d been stupid to think there might be. He knew where the rat was, and that place was miles from here.

In August (and a mighty hot August it was), Lucy decided to take the kids down to Little Compton, Rhode Island, to spend a couple of weeks at the shore with her parents and her sister’s family, leaving Drew a quiet house where he could work through the copyedited manuscript of Bitter River. He said he would break the work in half, taking a day in the middle to drive up to Pop’s cabin. He would spend the night, he said, and come back the following day to resume work on the manuscript. They had hired Jack Colson—Young Jackie—to truck away the remains of the smashed shed; Jackie in turn had hired his ma to clean the cabin. Drew said he wanted to see what kind of job they’d done. And to retrieve his watch.

“Sure you don’t want to start a new book there?” Lucy asked, smiling. “I wouldn’t mind. The last one turned out pretty well.”

Drew shook his head. “Nothing like that. I was thinking we ought to sell the place, hon. I’m really going up there to say goodbye.”

The signs on the gas pump at the Big 90 were the same: CASH ONLY and REGULAR ONLY and “DASH-AWAYS” WILL BE PERSECUTED and GOD BLESS AMERICA. The scrawny young woman behind the counter was also pretty much the same; the chrome stud was gone but the nose ring was still there. And she’d gone blond. Presumably because blonds had more fun.

“You again,” she said. “Only you changed your ride, seems like. Didn’t you have a ’Burban?”

Drew glanced out at the Chevy Equinox—purchased outright, still less than 7,000 miles on the clock—standing at the single rusting pump. “The Suburban was never really the same after my last trip up here,” he said. Actually, neither was I.

“Gonna be up there long?”

“No, not this time. I was sorry to hear about Roy.”

“Should have gone to the doctor. Let it be a lesson to you. Need anything else?”

Drew bought some bread, some lunchmeat, and a sixpack.

All the blowdown had been trucked away from the dooryard, and the equipment shed was gone as if it had never been. Young Jackie had sodded the ground and fresh grass was growing there. Also some cheery flowers. The warped porch steps had been repaired and there were a couple of new chairs, just cheap stuff from the Presque Isle Walmart, probably, but not bad looking.

Inside, the cabin was neat and freshened up. The woodstove’s isinglass window had been cleaned of soot and the stove itself gleamed. So did the windows, the dining table, and the pine-plank floor, which looked as if it had been oiled as well as washed. The refrigerator was once more unplugged and standing open, once more empty except for a box of Arm & Hammer. Probably a fresh one. It was clear that Old Bill’s widow had done a bang-up job.

Only on the counter by the sink were there signs of his occupancy the previous October: the Coleman lantern, the tin of lantern fuel, a bag of Halls cough drops, several packets of Goody’s Headache Powder, half a bottle of Dr. King’s Cough & Cold Remedy, and his wristwatch.

The fireplace was scrubbed clean of ash. It had been loaded with fresh chunks of oak, so Drew supposed Young Jackie had either had the chimney swept or done it himself. Very efficient, but there would be no need of a fire in this August heat. He went to the fireplace, knelt, and twisted his head to stare up into the black throat of the chimney.

“Are you up there?” he called… and with no self-consciousness at all. “If you’re up there, come down. I want to talk to you.”

Nothing, of course. He told himself again there was no rat, had never been a rat, except there was. The splinter wasn’t coming out. The rat was in his head. Only that wasn’t completely true, either. Was it?

There were still two crates flanking the spandy-clean fireplace, fresh kindling in one, toys in the other—the ones left here by his kids and those left by the children of whomever Lucy had let the cabin to in the few years they’d rented it. He grabbed the crate and dumped it. At first he didn’t think the stuffed rat was there, and he felt a stab of panic, irrational, but real. Then he saw it had tumbled under the hearth, nothing sticking out but its cloth-covered rump and stringy tail. What an ugly toy it was!

“Thought you’d hide, did you?” he asked it. “No good, Mister.”

He took it over to the sink and dropped it in. “Got anything to say? Any explanations? Maybe an apology? No? What about any last words? You were chatty enough before.”

The stuffed rat had nothing to say, so Drew doused it with lantern fluid and set it on fire. When there was nothing left but smoking, foul-smelling slag, he turned on the water and doused the remains. There were a few paper bags under the sink. Drew used a spatula to scrape what was left into one of these. He took the bag down to Godfrey Brook, tossed it in, and watched it float away. Then he sat down on the bank and looked at the day, which was windless and hot and gorgeous.

When the sun began to sink, he went inside and made a couple of bologna sandwiches. They were sort of dry—he should have remembered to get mustard or mayo—but he had the beer to wash them down. He drank three cans, sitting in one of the old armchairs and reading an Ed McBain paperback about the 87th Precinct.

Drew considered a fourth beer and decided against it. He had an idea that was the one with the hangover in it, and he wanted to get an early start in the morning. He was done with this place. As he was with writing novels. There was just the one, his only child waiting for him to finish with it. The one that had cost his friend and his friend’s wife their lives.

“I don’t believe that,” he said as he climbed the stairs. At the top he looked down at the big main room, where he had started his book and where—for a little while, anyway—he had believed he would die. “Except I do. I do believe that.”

He undressed and went to bed. The beers sent him off to sleep quickly.

Drew awoke in the middle of the night. The bedroom was gilded silver with the light of a full August moon. The rat was sitting on his chest, staring at him with those little black bulging eyes.

“Hello, Drew.” The rat’s mouth didn’t move, but the voice was coming from him, all right. Drew had been feverish and sick the last time they conversed, but he remembered that voice very well.

“Get off me,” Drew whispered. He wanted to strike it away (he wanted to bat the rat, so to speak), but he seemed to have no strength in his arms.

“Now, now, don’t be like that. You called me and I came. Isn’t that the way it works in stories like this? Now just how can I help you?”

“I want to know why you did it.”

The rat sat up, holding his little pink paws to his furry chest. “Because you wanted me to. It was a wish, remember?”

“It was a deal.”

“Oh, you college types with your semantics.”

“The deal was Al,” Drew insisted. “Just him. Since he was going to die of pancreatic cancer anyway.”

“I don’t remember pancreatic cancer ever being specified,” said the rat. “Am I wrong about that?”

“No, but I assumed…”

The rat did a face-washing thing with his paws, turned around twice—the feel of those paws was nauseating, even through the quilt—and then regarded Drew again. “That’s how they get you with magic wishes,” he said. “They’re tricky. Lots of fine print. All the best fairy tales make that clear. I thought we discussed that.”

“Okay, but Nadine Stamper was never a part of it! Never a part of our… our arrangement!”

“She was never not a part of it,” the rat replied, and rather prissily.

It’s a dream, Drew thought. Another dream, got to be. In no version of reality could a man be lawyered at by a rodent.

Drew thought his strength was coming back, but he made no move. Not yet. When he did it would be sudden, and it wouldn’t be to slap the rat or bat the rat. He intended to catch the rat and squeeze the rat. He would writhe, he would squeal, and he would almost certainly bite, but Drew would squeeze until the rat’s belly ruptured and his guts erupted from his mouth and his asshole.

“All right, you might have a point. But I don’t understand. The book was all I wanted, and you spoiled it.”

“Oh boo-hoo,” said the rat, and gave his face another dry wash. Drew almost pounced then, but no. Not quite yet. He had to know.

“Fuck your boo-hoo. I could have killed you with that shovel, but I didn’t. I could have left you out in the storm, but I didn’t. I brought you in and put you by the stove. So why would you repay me by killing two innocent people and stealing the pleasure I felt in finishing the only book I’ll ever write?”

The rat considered. “Well,” he said at last, “if I may slightly change an old punchline, you knew I was a rat when you took me in.”

Drew pounced. He was very fast, but his clutching hands closed on nothing but air. The rat scurried across the floor, but before he reached the wall, he turned back to Drew, seeming to grin in the moonlight.

“Besides, you didn’t finish it. You never could have finished it. I did.”

There was a hole in the baseboard. The rat ran into it. For a moment Drew could see his tail. Then he was gone.

Drew lay looking up at the ceiling. In the morning I will tell myself this was a dream, he thought, and in the morning that was what he did. Rats did not talk and rats did not grant wishes. Al had cheated cancer only to die in a car accident, dreadfully ironic but not unheard-of; it was a shame his wife had died with him, but that was not unheard-of, either.

He drove home. He entered his preternaturally quiet house. He went upstairs to his study. He opened the folder containing the copyedited manuscript of Bitter River and prepared to go to work. Things had happened, some in the real world and some in his head, and those things could not be changed. The thing to remember was that he had survived. He would love his wife and children as best he could, he would teach the best he could, he would live the best he could, and he would gladly join the ranks of one-book writers. Really, when you thought about it, he had nothing to complain about.

Really, when you thought about it, everything was all rat.