The Collection

They were moving against the wind, and he could feel the Blazer strain against the pressure. The buildings were dark shapes silhouetted against the dim sun. As they moved closer to the edge of town, the dust cloud abated a little, though the wind continued to blow strong. A sheet of news­paper flew up against the windshield, flattening in front of Josh's face. He could not see at all, and he braked to a halt, hoping to dislodge the paper, but it remained plastered on the glass. He opened the door, got out and pulled it off, crumpling it up and letting it fly.

It was then that he noticed the bodies on the ground. There were four of them, and they lay facedown on the sidewalk as if they had simply fallen there while walking down the street. The three bodies closest to him were en­tirely unmoving, trash and light debris piled up by the wind in drifts against their sides and shoes, but the body farthest away -that of a young woman- seemed to be trying to get up. Josh took a quick step forward.

"No!" Lydia yelled at him from the car.

He looked back at his wife. Her face was bleached and I terrified, her eyes wild with fear.

"Let's call the police!"

He shook his head. "She's alive!"

"Let's get out of here!"

He waved away her protestations and quickly moved for­ward toward the struggling woman. But she was not strug­gling. She was not moving at all. The head he had seen trying to raise itself was merely the fluttering of a paper sack f that had caught on the woman's hair. The arms attempting to push the body upward were junk food wrappers which had blown against her side and were gyrating in the breeze.

Josh stopped. In a strange objective instant, he saw the en­tire situation as though it was happening to someone else- the abandoned town, the crazy man at the gas station, the bodies on the sidewalk-and it suddenly scared the hell out of him. He backed up slowly, then turned around, hurrying.

Lydia jumped out of the Blazer, screaming, hitting at her legs. His heart leaped in his chest as he rushed forward. "What is it?" he demanded. "What happened?" But he had already seen the pieces of lipstick-stamped tissue clinging to her legs. Her peeked around the open door, looking into the car. The empty McDonald's bags on the floor were moving and writhing, making whispery crackling sounds. A bent paper straw thrust its way insinuatingly upward through the mess on the floor.

He slammed the door. "We have to get out of here." He pulled the tissue from Lydia's legs and felt the thin paper twist sickeningly in his hands. He threw the tissues to the wind, which carried them away, then wiped his hands on his pants, grimacing. "Come on." He grabbed Lydia's hand, leading her down the street. She was still crying, and he could feel her muscles trembling beneath his fingers. They ran across the asphalt. And stopped.

A line of paper was inching toward them, moving against the wind, toothpick wrappers riding atop lunch sacks, crum­pled envelopes and discarded Xerox sheets creeping in tandem-along the ground. Josh swiveled around. Behind them, pages from magazines, spent teabags, cigarette butts, price tags, and grocery sacks rolled with the wind. Above them, in the sky, fluttering Kimwipes and paper towels swooped low over their heads then looped upward to make another dive. His pulse raced.

"In here!" He pulled Lydia to the other side of the street, across the sidewalk, and into a convenience store. Or what was left of a convenience store. For all of the racks and shelves had been tipped over, thrown into the narrow aisles. Rotting food lay on the floor, smashed preserves and spilled soft drinks hardened into glue on the white tile. The store was dark, the only light coming through the front glass wall, but it was quiet, free from a maddening howl of the wind outside, and for that they both were grateful.

Josh looked at his wife. She was no longer crying. There was an expression of resolve on her face, a look of determi­nation in her eyes, and he felt closer to her than he had in a long time. Both of them moved forward spontaneously and hugged each other. Josh kissed her hair, tasting dust and hairspray but not caring. She nuzzled his shoulder.

Then they pulled silently away, and Josh grabbed a nearby display, pushing it against the door. He shoved another small fixture against the door, pressing it hard against the glass. The makeshift barricade would not hold forever, but it would buy them a little time, allow them to think. This was crazy and unbelievable, but they would be able to get out of it if they used their wits.

"Think!" he said. "We need to think! What can we-"

Fire.

"Fire!" he cried. "We can burn them! They're just paper."

Lydia nodded enthusiastically. "We can kill them. It'll work. I'll look for matches. You check by the counter for lighters."

"See if you can find any charcoal or lighter fluid."

She moved toward the back of the small store, stepping over and through the mess, and he hopped the front counter, rummaging through the pile of impulse items on the floor. He noticed that there were no paper products behind the counter.

He was digging through a pile of overturned keychains when, from the back of the store, Lydia screamed; a shrill, hysterical cry so unlike any sound Josh had ever heard her make that it took his burdened brain a second to make the connection. Then he was off and running, vaulting over the front counter and dashing down the nearest aisle to the rear of the building.

She was standing before the row of wall refrigerators which lined the back of the store, mouth open, no sound coming out. He followed her gaze. Behind the glass doors of the refrigerators which had formerly housed beer and milk and soft drinks were the dead naked bodies of eight or nine people, crammed together like sardines. They were facing outward, eyes wide and staring. Toilet paper was wrapped tightly around each of their mouths and wrists and ankles, making them look like hostages.

He instantly grabbed her around the waist, turning her around, away from the sight. He clenched his hands into fists, letting his fingernails dig into his palms, concentrating on the pain in order to clear his mind of fear as he stared through the frosted glass at the bodies. There was terror in each of the dead eyes looking back at him, terror and an even more horrifying fatalism, as if, at the last moment, all of the victims had realized the inevitability of their deaths.

He pressed closer, and it was then that he noticed the cuts. .Paper cuts-some long and straight, others short and curved-crisscrossed the chests, legs, and faces of the naked men and women. There was no blood, and the cuts could only be seen at certain angles, but the patterns they formed looked too regular to be random, too precise to be anything but deliberate.

The cuts looked like writing.

Josh put his hands firmly on Lydia's pliant shoulders and led her up the aisle toward the front of the store, away from the refrigerators, looking back as he did so, afraid of seeing a stray movement out of the corner of his eye. But the bod­ies remained still, the toilet paper wrapped around them un-moving.

"Stay here," he said, leaving Lydia by the front counter. He dashed quickly up and down the chaotic aisles until he found a book of matches and, buried under the sacks of charcoal, a tin of lighter fluid. He ran back to the front of the store. Papers, he saw, were conglomerating against the win­dow and door, fluttering in the wind.

And fluttering against the wind.

He opened the red plastic childproof cap of the lighter fluid. He wasn't exactly sure how he was going to do this, but he was damned if he was going to let the papers get either him or Lydia. He glanced over at her. She seemed to have recovered somewhat and was not dazed with shock as he'd feared she'd be. She seemed cognizant, aware of what was happening, and he thought that she was a hell of a lot stronger than he would have given her credit for.

He pulled away one of the fixtures he'd used to blockade the door. "We're getting out of here," he said. "Think you can make it?"

She nodded suddenly.

He pulled away the shelves. Just in time, he noticed. There was a line of used and dirty Q-tips coming into the store from under the door, sliding silently along the floor, swab to swab, like a giant worm.

Here was a chance to try out his weaponry. He took out a match, struck it, then sprayed lighter fluid on the Q-tips and tossed the match. The tiny swabs went up in flame, twisting into charred blackness. There was agony in their death movements but no sound, and the unnatural sight sent a cas­cade of goose bumps down his arms. He took a deep breath. "Let's go."

He pulled open the door and leaped back, expecting a flood of paper to come flying into the store, but there was nothing, only wind and dust, and he realized that the papers must have seen his fire demonstration. He looked at Lydia. "Can you hold the lighter fluid?"

"Yes," she said.

He handed her the container, took out a match, and grabbed her hand. They walked outside. Around them, above them, papers fluttered and flew in the strong wind, but there was an empty circle surrounding them, and the cir­cle remained the same size as they moved across the street toward the car. The newspapers which covered the Blazer fled as they approached, and they both got in the driver's side, quickly shutting the door. The McDonald's mess on the floor had disappeared.

He reached for the keys in the ignition, but they were not there. He checked on the floor, patted his pockets, looked over at Lydia. "Do you have the keys?"

She shook her head. "You didn't take them with you?"

"I left them here. Shit!" He slammed his hand against the steering wheel, causing the horn to blat loudly. They both jumped.

Outside, the papers were swirling closer, junk food wrap­pers-inching forward along the ground toward them, ripped posters creeping alongside.

"Let's get back to the gas station," Lydia said.

Josh nodded. "I think they need another demonstration to make sure they leave us alone, though. Get out my side."

They got out of the car, and he doused the front seat with lighter fluid.

"What are you doing?" Lydia demanded. "That's our car! We need it! We'll never get out of here without it!"

"We'll get out." He lit a match and threw it onto the front seat. The cloth seat covers went up in a whoosh of flame, and the papers on the street, obviously agitated, whirled in incoherent frenzy, widening the circle around them.

Josh grabbed his wife's hand again, and they started back toward the gas station. Dust blew into their eyes, stinging. They were halfway there when he saw a car coming along the highway toward them. "A car!" he said excitedly. He moved quickly to the center line and waved his arms back and forth in the classic distress signal.

The car came closer.

"Help!" he yelled. "Help!"

The car sped by, honking its horn.

"Asshole!" Josh yelled in frustration, holding up his middle finger. "Goddamn son of a bitch-"

Lydia put a restraining hand on his arm. "Come on, let's go to the gas station. Maybe that old man can help us."

"He can't even help himself. If he could, he wouldn't still be here."

"There will be other cars. This is a major highway. Someone's bound to stop."

"If we create a disaster," Josh said, nodding. He smiled grimly. "Let's go."

The gas station was empty. They searched the office, the garage, the men's and women's bathrooms, but there was no sign of the attendant. It was now nearly five, and though nei­ther of them said anything, they both realized that it would soon be dark. Although the highway itself was clear save for a few stray pieces of windblown trash, the desert surround­ing the gas station was covered with papers and was grow­ing more crowded by the minute.

"What are we going to do?" Lydia asked.

Josh unhooked the hose from one of the gas pumps. "Start a fire."

"What if-?"

"Don't worry," he said.

He pressed down on the handle of the nozzle and poured gas all over the dirt and cement surrounding the two pumps. He stopped pumping and handed her the matchbox, saving a handful of matches for himself. "Go up to the road and tell me when you see a car coming. If anything starts moving to­ward you, use the lighter fluid and torch it."

She started to say something but saw the look of almost fanatic determination on his face and decided against it. She moved slowly across the pavement toward the highway.

Josh continued to pump gas onto the ground, soaking the entire area around the pumps. The hose was not very long, but he moved as close to the building itself as he could and watered the cement with it. The papers surrounding the gas station swirled crazily, frenetically. "A car!" Lydia shouted. "A car!" Josh dropped the hose, ran toward the edge of his gas pool, and struck a match on the pavement. It caught, then sputtered out in the wind. "A car!" Lydia screamed.

He struck another match, dropping it, and the ground ex­ploded in a rush of fire, singeing his face. He ran toward Lydiar feeling the heat against his back, and the second he reached the edge of the highway, there was a thunderous ex­plosion as the pumps blew. The ground shook once, and a moment later pieces of metal fell from the sky. A small hot chunk landed next to Josh's foot and another near Lydia, but none of the fragments touched them.

"Come on!" Josh ran into the highway. The car was not coming from the north but from the south, and he stood in the middle of the northbound lane, waving his arms, franti­cally pointing toward the burning gas station.

The car pulled to a stop a yard or so in front of them. A middle-aged man with graying black hair and a mustache stuck his head out the window. "What happened?"

"Explosion!" Josh said as he and Lydia ran forward. "We

need to get help!"

"Hop in fast," the man ordered. "My wife's going to have a baby, and we don't have time to waste."

They got into the backseat of the car. Looking out the window as the car took off, Josh saw angry papers swarm­ing over the spot where they had stood. Others flew around the spiraling smoke which billowed up from the fire.

He hoped the whole damn town burned down. Josh reached for Lydia's hand, held it, smiled. But she was frowning, looking forward. In the front seat, the man and his wife were silent. The man was concentrating on the road. His wife, next to him, was bundled beneath a heavy blanket, though the temperature in the un-air-conditioned car was so warm it was almost stifling. "You're going to have a baby?" Lydia asked.

"Yes, she is." ;

"Where's the hospital?"

"Phoenix."

"But isn't Tucson closer?"

The man didn't answer.

Lydia scooted forward on the seat. "Mrs.-" she began.

"She's asleep." The man's voice was sharp, too sharp, and Lydia moved back, chastened.

Josh's heart gave a warning leap in his chest. Sitting next to the window, directly behind the passenger seat, he had a perfect view of the space between the wife's seat and the door, and he craned forward to get a better look. His mus­cles tensed as he saw the sleeve hanging off the edge of the seat beneath the blanket, saw the fingers of gum wrappers, the packed tissue paper palm.

But he said nothing, only held Lydia's hand tighter.

"Hope we make it in time," the driver said.

"Yeah," Josh agreed. He looked at Lydia, his mouth dry. The car sped through the desert toward Phoenix.

The Idol

As teenagers, every time we watched Rebel Without a Cause, my brother would invariably suggest that we look for James Dean's lug wrench. We lived in South­ern California, so we knew that the scene in which Dean goes on a field trip, has an altercation with one of his classmates, and throws a lug wrench over the side of a wall into some bushes was filmed at Griffith Park Observatory. It must still be there, my brother al­ways argued. The people who made the movie didn't hike down the hillside and go rummaging through the bushes for it after they filmed that scene. What did lug wrenches cost back then? A buck?

He can't have been the only one to come up with this plan, I thought. A lot of people must have thought the same thing over the years.

But what kind of people were they?

"There! Did you see it?" Matt stopped the VCR and re­wound the tape for a second. "Watch carefully."

James Dean, cooler than cool in his red jacket, backed away from the group of young toughs. "I don't want any trouble," he said. Realizing that the tire iron in his hand could be construed as a weapon, he cocked his arm and hurled it over the cliff.

Matt pressed the Pause/Freeze button on the remote and the image stopped in midframe. Dean and the gang stared, unmoving, at the long piece of metal suspended in the clear blue sky. Matt hit the Frame Advance button and the tire iron, very slowly, began to fall. He stopped the image just before the camera shifted to another angle.

"See. Right there. Right in those bushes."

I shook my head. "This is stupid."

"No, it's not. Hell, if we can find it, we'll make a fortune. Do you know how much shit like that goes for?"

Matt had taped Rebel Without a Cause the night before and was now trying to convince me that we should dig through the bushes down the hill from the Griffith Park Ob­servatory, looking for the lug wrench Dean threw in the film.

"Okay," he said. "Think about it logically. How many people know that that scene was filmed at Griffith Park? Only Southern Californians, right?"

"That narrows it down to two or three million."

"Yeah, but how many of them do you think ever tried this?"

"Lots."

"You're crazy."

"Look, after he died, fans scoured the country trying to find any scrap of memorabilia they could. They were selling napkins he'd touched."

"You really think people went scrambling through the bushes trying to find that piece of metal?"

"Yes, I do."

"Well, I don't. I think it's still there, rusting into the ground."

"Fine. Go look for it. No one's stopping you."

"You know I don't like to drive into Hollywood by my­self." He turned off the VCR. "All you have to do is give me moral support. Just go with me. I'll do all the work. And if I find it, we'll go fifty-fifty." "No deal." "Come on."

"Are you deaf or just dumb? The answer is no." He smiled, suddenly thinking of something. "We could invite the girls. You know, make a day of it: check out the observatory, have a little picnic ..."

It sounded good, I had to admit. Steph had been after me for the past few weeks to take her someplace new and ex­citing and creative instead of doing the same old dinner-and-a-movie routine, and this might fit the bill.

"All right," I agreed. "But I'm not helping you dig. And if you get arrested for vandalism or something, I don't know you."

Matt grinned. "What a pal."

He left the room to call Julie, and I picked up the remote and changed the channel to MTV.

He returned a few moments later. "She can't go. Her grandpa's coming out from St. Louis this weekend and she has to be there." "Well-" I began.

"You promised." He knelt before the couch in a pose of mock supplication. "I won't bother you. You won't even no­tice I'm there. I'll just look through the bushes by myself and you two can do whatever your little hearts desire. All you have to do is drive me there and back."

I laughed. "You're really serious about this, aren't you?" "It's a great idea. Even if someone has thought of this be­fore-which I doubt-I don't think they spent an entire day searching through the bushes to follow up on it."

"You may be right," I told him.

I called Stephanie from his apartment, but she said she couldn't make it either. Finals were coming up and she had some serious studying to do. She'd lost too much reading time already on account of me.

"That's fine," Matt said. "It'll be me and you."

"I'm just driving," I told him. "I'm not going to waste my time following you through the bushes."

"I know," he said.

We stood in the small parking lot just below the observa­tory, looking over the low stone wall, in the same spot Dean had stood some forty years before. Matt was carefully study­ing a map he had drawn, trying to figure out exactly where the tire iron had landed. He walked three paces back from the wall and pretended to throw something over the edge. His eyes followed an arc, focusing finally on a copse of high bushes halfway down the hill. He pointed. "That's it. That's where it is."

I nodded.

"Remember that spot. Remember the landmarks next to those plants. We're going to have to recognize it from the bottom."

I nodded again. "Sure."

He laughed, a half-parody of a greedy cackle. "We're gonna be rich."

"Yeah. Right."

He made a note on his map. "Come on. Let's go."

We walked back up to the main parking lot in front of the observatory and drove down the winding road which led to the park below. We paid the dollar toll, splitting it, and pulled into a spot next to the playground.

Matt looked up the side of the hill, then down at his map.

"The way I figure it, we go straight from here, turn left maybe thirty yards in, and keep going up until we hit the big palm tree."

"Right."

We got out of the car, unloaded our shovels from the trunk, looked around to make sure no one was watching us, and hurried into the brush.

I really had intended not to help him, but I'd had to change my tune. What was I going to do? Sit in the car all day while he went traipsing off into the woods? Besides, it might be fun. And we might actually find something. He kept talking as we climbed, and I must admit, his ex­citement was catching. He was so sure of himself, so confi­dent in his calculations, and I found myself thinking that, yeah, maybe we were the first people ever to search for this thing.

"I'm sure the movie people didn't collect it afterward," he said, hopping a small sticker bush. "You think they'd waste their time digging through acres of brush looking for a cheap, crummy little piece of metal?" He had a point.

We climbed for over an hour. In the car, we'd made it to the top of the hill in five or ten minutes. But walking ... that was another story. I'd read somewhere that Griffith Park covered several square miles, and I could easily believe it.

By the time we reached Matt's palm tree, we were both exhausted.

We stopped and sat under the tree for a moment. "Why the hell didn't we bring a canteen?" I asked. "How could we be so fucking stupid?"

Matt was consulting his map. "Only a little farther. Maybe another fifteen or twenty minutes. A half hour at the most."

I groaned. "A half hour?"

He stood, brushing dead leaves off the seat of his pants. "Let's go. The sooner we get there, the sooner we'll be fin­ished."

"What if it's not even the right place?"

"It's the right place. I went over that videotape twenty times."

I forced myself to stand. "All right. Move out."

It figured. The area where Matt thought the tire iron had landed was surrounded by thick, nearly impenetrable bushes, many of then covered with thorns. We jumped over some, slid under others, and a few we just waded through. My shirt and pants now had holes ripped in them.

"You owe me," I said, as we traversed a particularly dif­ficult stretch of ground. I stepped over a monstrous science fiction-looking beetle. "You owe me big time."

He laughed. "I hear you." He grabbed a low tree branch above his head and swung over several entangled manzanita bushes. I followed suit.

"Shit!"

I heard his cry before I landed. I miscalculated, fell on my side, then stood, brushing off dirt.

We were in a small clearing, surrounded on all sides by a natural wall of vegetation. In the middle of the clearing stood a makeshift wooden shed.

And on the shed wall, carefully painted in white block letters was a single word:

GIANT

"They found it. The fuckers found it." Matt dropped his shovel. He looked as though he had just been punched in the gut. "I thought for sure we'd be the first ones here."

I didn't want to rub it in, but I had told him so. "I warned you," I said.

He stood in silence, unmoving.

I looked over at the shed, at the white-lettered word- GIANT-and though it was hot out and I was sweating, I felt suddenly cold. There was something about the small crude structure, about its very existence, that seemed creepy, that made me want to jump back over the wall of bushes and head straight down the hill to the car. The fanatic interest and posthumous adulation that surrounded people like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis had always dis­turbed me, had always made me feel slightly uncomfortable, and the shed before me increased that feeling tenfold. This was not part of a museum or a collection, this was some sort of... shrine.

And the fact that it was obviously homemade, that it was in the middle of nowhere, hidden in an impossible-to-get-to location, intensified my concern.

I did not want to meet up with the fanatic who had put this together.

Matt still stood silently, staring at the shed.

I feigned a bravery I did not feel. "Let's check it out," I said. "Let's see what's in there."

"Okay." He nodded tiredly. "Might as well."

We walked across the short grass covering the clearing and stepped through the open doorway. After the morning brightness outside, it took our eyes a moment to adjust to the

darkness.

Matt's eyes made the transition first. "Jesus . . ." he

breathed.

Hundreds, maybe thousands, of photographs were pasted onto the walls of the shed. The pictures were of women, some young, some middle-aged, some old.

All of them were naked.

They were in various poses, and at the bottom of each photo was a signature.

But that was not all.

In the center of the room, embedded in a large square chunk of stone, was the tire iron. The tire iron Dean had thrown. The bottom half of the tool, with its curved chisel end, was sunk deep into the rock. The top half, with its rounded wrench end, stuck straight up. The metal was im­maculately polished and showed not a hint of rust.

Obviously someone had been taking care of it.

The chill I'd felt outside returned, magnified.

"Jesus," Matt whispered again. He walked into the center of the room and gingerly fingered the tire iron. "What the hell is this?"

I tried to keep my voice light. "It's what you've been hunting for all morning."

"I know that, dickmeat. I mean, what's this” He ges­tured around the room.

I shook my head. I had no answer.

He climbed on top of the stone slab and straddled the tire iron. Using both hands, he attempted to pull it out. His face turned red with the effort, the veins on his neck and arms bulged, but the tool would not move.

"You know what this reminds me of?" I asked.

"What?"

"The Sword in the Stone.' You know how all those knights tried for years to pull the sword out of the stone but no one could? And then Arthur pulled it out and became king of England?"

"Yeah."

"Maybe if you pull this out, you'll be the next James Dean."

"If I pull it out, we'll both be rich." He strained again, trying to loosen the unmoving piece of metal. He reached down for his shovel and started chipping at the base of the

tool.

I watched him for a moment, then let my gaze wander back over the photos on the wall.

The nude photos.

I turned. Before me, level with my eyes, was a photo­graph of a gorgeous redhead lying on a bed, spread-eagled. Her breasts were small but the nipples were gigantic. Her pubic hair proved that the red hair on her head was natural. The-name scrawled across the bottom of the picture was Kim something.

The photograph next to that was taken from behind. A large bald vagina and a small pink anus were clearly visible between the two spread cheeks of the woman's buttocks. Not as visible was her face, blurred in the background and looking out from between her legs. Her name was Debbie.

Next to that was a picture of Julie.

I stared at the photo for a moment, unable to believe what I was seeing, unwilling to believe what I was seeing. Julie, Matt's girlfriend, was standing, her arms at her sides, her legs spread apart, smiling at the camera.

I looked away. The pose wasn't that intimate or that graphic. All I could see were her overdeveloped breasts and the thick triangle of dark brown pubic hair between her legs. But I did not like looking at my friend's girlfriend naked. It seemed obscene somehow, my viewing of the photo an in­vasion of their privacy.

Matt was still trying to pull the lug wrench out of the stone.

I debated with myself whether I should tell him. On the one hand, he was my friend, my best friend, and I didn't want to see him hurt. On the other hand, this was something he should know about, something he would want to know about, no matter how unpleasant it was, and if I were really his friend I would tell him. I cleared my throat. "Matt?" "What?" He did not even bother to look up. "There's something here you gotta see." "What is it?"

I took a deep breath. "Julie."

He stopped yanking on the tire iron and jumped off the stone. All the color had drained out of his face. "What are you ... ? You're not serious." I pointed at the photo.

He stared at the picture, then looked at the surrounding snapshots. He took a deep breath, then reached out and grabbed the photo of Julie, ripping it off the wall. Beneath her photo was another, older picture of a nude girl with a 1960s beehive hairdo.

"Fuck," he said quietly. He began tearing Julie's photo into tiny pieces, letting the pieces fall onto the dirt. There were tears in his eyes. "Fuck," he repeated.

I knew what he was feeling, but I tried to smooth it over. "Maybe she-"

He turned on me. "Maybe she what? How can you ex­plain this, huh? What possible rational explanation could there be?"

I shook my head. There was nothing I could say.

A tear rolled down his cheek. "Fuck," he said, and the word caught in his throat.

I felt even worse now. I'd never seen Matt cry before, and somehow the sight of that was more disturbing, more intru­sive, than having seen Julie naked. I felt as though I should reassure him, touch his shoulder, clap a hand on his back ... something. But I had never done that before and did not know how to go about it, so I stepped out of the shed, leav­ing him alone with his pain. If I couldn't give him comfort, I could at least give him privacy.

I thought about Stephanie, and for the first time since we'd started going together, I was glad that she was a hard­core Christian. Her straitlaced morality had frustrated and ir­ritated me in the past, and more than once we had almost broken up because of her unbudging commitment to virgin­ity, but for once I was glad that she did not believe in pre­marital sex. I might not be getting any, I might be forced to relieve my sexual tension through masturbation, but at least I knew that Steph's picture was not on that wall.

Why was Julie's?

I had no idea. Maybe an ex-boyfriend had posted it there. Maybe-

"It's right through here!"

I jerked my head toward the bushes.

"God, I've been waiting for this since I was ten!"

Two voices, female, coming this way.

There was a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I hurried back into the little building. "Matt!" I hissed. "Someone's coming!"

"What?"

"Two women are coming this way."

He grabbed the shovels from the center of the room and smiled. There was something in that smile that put me on edge. "You mean we're going to catch them in the act?"

I waved him into silence. "We've got to hide!" I whis­pered.

"Why?"

I didn't know, but I felt it, sensed it, was certain of it. I glanced quickly around the room. In the far corner was a small stack of boxes and packing crates.

"Come on!" I whispered. I led the way over to the boxes, climbed into one, and was grateful to see Matt follow suit.

The voices were close now, just outside the door.

"Do you have your picture?"

"Of course."

We ducked.

I heard them enter the shed. Their voices were silent now, I but their shuffling feet were loud. It sounded like there were a lot more than two of them.

I peeked over the rim of the box, my curiosity getting the better of me. There were more than two of them. The num­ber was closer to fifteen or twenty. There were the two girls I'd heard talking, both of whom were around sixteen or seventeen, and a bunch of other girls in their late teens. They were accompanied by four or five women in their mid-thirties.

I quickly ducked back down before anyone spotted me.

There were whisperings and shuffling noises, and a few nervous coughs and throat-clearings. One of the middle-aged women spoke up. "You know what to do?"

"My mother explained everything to me," one of the teenagers replied.

"You are a virgin?"

"Yes."

"Good. When you are through, you may place your photo next to that of your mother."

Her mother?

Jesus.

The room grew quiet. Too quiet. I could hear Mart's deep breathing in the box next to mine, and my own breathing sounded impossibly amplified. I was terrified that we would be found out, though I could not say why the prospect of dis­covery frightened me so badly.

There was the sound of a belt being unfastened, the sound of a zipper. Something dropped onto the dirt, some­thing soft, and it was followed by a low rustling noise. Someone walked into the middle of the shed.

Then there was silence again.

All of a sudden I heard a sharp gasp. A small moan of pain and an exhalation of air. Another gasp.

I had to know what was going on. Once again, I hazarded a peek over the rim of my box.

And immediately crouched back down.

One of the young girls, the prettiest one, was lowering herself onto the tire iron. She was squatting over the stone, completely naked, the rounded end of the lug wrench al­ready inside her. Her face was contorted, physical pain co­existing with what looked like an underlying spiritual rapture.

The other girls and women were crouched on the ground before her, in a similar squatting position, intently watching her every move.

What the hell was going on here? I stared at the faded brown cardboard of my box, breathing deeply. Were these women part of a fanatic James Dean fan club or was this some sort of bizarre cult?

And what about Julie?

The girl gasped loudly, then moaned.

It was not a moan of pain.

The moans intensified, coming loudly and freely, the girl's breath audible in short heavy pants.

I thought of the photos on the walls, the thousands of photos. Had all of those women done this? They must have.

The girl had said that her mother told her what to do. How had the rest of them found out about it? From their mothers?

How many women knew about this shack?

All of the women in Southern California?

Goose bumps rose on my arms and neck. This was wrong, this was unnatural, and though I should have been aroused, I was frightened. I did not understand what was happening, and I did not want to understand.

Julie.

I found myself thinking of those secret societies of old, of horror movies and novels about the eternal mysteries of women and the secrets they could never share with men. I recalled-

Stephanie

-how, invariably, the men who did attempt to penetrate those mysteries were killed.

If Julie knows, Stephanie knows. They're best friends.

The thought burst into my consciousness. I had been as­suming that Stephanie was not involved in all this, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe she was. Maybe her picture was here, too, somewhere. Or maybe her mother's was. Both she and her mother had been born in Los Angeles.

But she was religious. She was a Christian. And a virgin.

The girl on the stone had been a virgin, too. Apparently, it was a requirement.

Julie had probably been a virgin when she'd come here.

I crouched lower in the box.

On the stone, the girl gasped her last. I heard her jump onto the ground, and then the shed was filled with the sounds of talking and laughing as the girl was congratulated.

"How do you feel?"

"I'll never forget when it happened to me. Greatest mo­ment of my life."

"Wasn't it wonderful?" "Could you feel His presence?"

The girl signed her photo with great fanfare and hung it somewhere on one of the walls.

Finally, after another twenty minutes or so, everyone left.

I stayed crouched in the box for another five minutes, just to be on the safe side, then slowly, painfully, stood. I reached over and hit Matt's box. "Come on," I said. "Let's get the fuck out of here."

I glanced over at the tire iron. Even in the diffused light of the shed, it glistened wetly.

I wondered where the girl had put her picture. Matt stepped silently out of his box. Carrying his shov­els, he walked out the door. I stood for a moment alone, glancing around the room at the overlapping layers of pho­tos. Was Stephanie's here somewhere?

Had she fucked James Dean's lug wrench? The chill returned, and I was suddenly acutely conscious of being alone in the small building. I hurried outside.

We walked back to the car in silence. I opened the trunk when we reached the parking lot, and Matt threw the shov­els inside. We did not speak on the drive home.

I saw Steph the next day, and debated whether or not to ask her about the shed. The question of whether or not she knew of the place was torturing me; my mind had conjured up all sorts of perverse and gruesome scenes. But in the end, I said nothing. I decided I didn't really want to know. A week later, I found the nude Polaroid in her dresser drawer.

She was in the bathroom, getting ready for our date, and I, as usual, was snooping. The photo was lying on top of a pile of panties, and I gingerly picked it up. I had never seen her completely naked, although only a few days before I had finally managed to get her top off in the backseat of my car, and I examined the picture carefully. She was seated, her legs in front of her, knees up, and the pink lips of her vagina were clearly visible.

She was shaved.

I heard the door to the bathroom open, and for a brief sec­ond, I considered confronting her with the photo. Who had taken it? Had she taken it herself with a self-timing camera? Had some guy taken it? Had some girl taken it? But, almost instinctively, I threw it back on top of her panties and hur­ried over to her bed, where I quickly grabbed a magazine and leaned back, pretending to read.

The door opened, and I looked up.

The dresser drawer was still open.

I'd forgotten to close it.

Steph noticed immediately. She looked at the drawer and looked at me, but I smiled, feigned innocence, pretended not to see, and she smiled back and surreptitiously closed the drawer.

She walked across the room and sat next to me on the bed. "I forgot to tell you," she said. "I'm going to have to cancel out on next Saturday."

"Why?"

"Something came up."

I threw aside the magazine. "But we've been planning to go to Disneyland for months."

She put an arm around me. "I know, but my mom and a few of her friends are having, like, a picnic, and I have to

go."

My mouth was suddenly dry. I tried to lick my lips. "Where?"

"Griffith Park."

"Can I go?"

She shook her head. "I'm afraid not. It's only for us girls

this time."

"I won't-"

"No." She smiled, reached over, tweaked my nose. "Jeal­ous?"

I looked at her, looked at the closed drawer, thought for a moment, and shook my head. "No," I said slowly. "No, I

guess I'm not."

"The next weekend we'll do something special. Just us.

"Like what?" I asked.

"You'll see."

"You have something planned?"

She nodded.

"Okay," I said.

We kissed.

Skin

I've always loved the roadside attractions that seemed to" proliferate in the desert Southwest during the 1960s. When I was a child, my parents would stop at those that had some sort of historical significance, but the gross ones, the tacky ones, the ones that promised the things I really wanted to see were off limits. I'd obtain brochures and pamphlets for these tourist spots at the hotels where we stayed, but that was as close as I'd come to them.

I'll go there myself when I grow up, I thought.

But by the time I grew up, most of them were gone.

"Skin" is an homage to those sorts of ancillary va­cation destinations. I couldn't shake my parents' in­fluence completely, though. The house in "Skin" is historically significant. And the family in the story should not have stopped there.

The brown-and-white sign at the side of the road was small, and even though he was wearing his contacts, Ed could not read what it said. He slowed the car as they approached. "What's it say?" he asked Bobette.

"It says 'Historical Landmark. Chapman House. One Mile.'"

Ed turned toward the kids in the back. "Want to stop?"

"Okay," Pam said.

Eda shrugged noncommittally.

"We're stopping." Ed drove slowly, allowing the other cars and trucks on the road to pass him, until he saw another brown-and-white sign, identical to the first. He turned off the highway onto the narrow, barely paved road which ran in a straight line across a grassy meadow to the forest on the other side.

"Here we come!" Pam said. She unbuckled her safety belt and began bouncing up and down in her seat.

Bobette, hearing the click of the belt, looked sternly at her daughter over the headrest. "Young lady, you put that back on right now."

"I was just-"

"Right now."

Pam rebuckled her seat belt.

The road continued in an unwavering line, going through the front line of trees and into the forest before finally widening into a closed cul-de-sac in front of a small brown one-room cabin. The cabin was not log but appeared to be made of wood, with a sod roof. One open window and door faced outward.

"All right," Ed announced. "Hop out. We're here."

It had been several hours since they'd eaten lunch at a Burger King in Cheyenne, and all of their legs were cramped and tired. Pam and Eda jumped about, crunching gravel beneath their tennis shoes, while Ed stretched loudly, groaning. Bobette stood in place, exercising isometrically. They had gotten so used to the artificially cooled air in the car that they had not realized how warm it was outside. The

temperature was well into the nineties, and there was no wind. Above them, the sky was blue and cloudless, and from the bushes they heard the constant buzz of cicadas. "I hope they have a bathroom here," Bobette said. Ed grinned. "There're plenty of bushes." "Very funny."

"And we have empty Coke cups in the car." She shook her head. "You're sick." They moved across the small dirt lot toward the cabin, Ed leading the way. He stopped before another sign, this one mounted on a platform of cemented stones. " 'The Chapman House,'" he read aloud. '"Built in 1896, the Chapman House is believed to be the oldest extant skin dwelling in Wyoming.'" He frowned. "Skin dwelling?" He walked to­ward the cabin, the others following. This close, he could see that the cabin was not made from wood as he'd origi­nally assumed but was made from tanned animal hides stretched taut across a wooden frame. In places, the skin had been stretched thin, lending it a translucent quality, and he could see in the direct sunlight a network of spiderweb veins stretching across the wall.

Bobette shivered. "Gruesome."

Ed shrugged. "I suppose building supplies were scarce in those days. Who knows? Maybe they didn't have the right tools to use traditional materials."

"There's a wooden frame," she pointed out. "And there doesn't seem to be any shortage of wood or stone around

here."

"Come on, let's go inside."

"I'd rather not."

"Come on."

"I'll wait here."

"Suit yourself." He turned to the girls. "You two coming?"

"Yeah!" Pam said excitedly. She and Eda followed him through the low doorway into the cabin. It was dark inside. The one door and window faced east, and while they proba­bly let in plenty of light during the morning, they let in very little now. Across one wall ran a low bench, also made from animal hide, and in the center of the room was a low pit for fires. The floor was dirt.

They should have been excited, they should have been having fun, they should have at least been interested, but somehow all those emotions left them when they passed through the doorway. Pam and Eda's bubbly conversation died almost immediately, and his own curiosity gave way to a feeling remarkably close to dread. There was something heavy and claustrophobic about the air in the cabin, some­thing undefinable which made all of them feel uncomfortable and ill at ease. He found himself staring at a small round patch of light-colored skin sewn into the wall near the window.

"Ed!" Bobbette called from outside. Her voice was loud, a little too loud, and there was a hint of panic in it.

Grateful for a reason to leave the cabin, he stepped back into the sunlight. The girls followed silently. They hurried over to where Bobette stood reading the rest of the sign. "What is it?"

"The cabin was made with human skin," she said. "Not animal skin. Read this."

He scanned the rest of the text. According to the sign, the Chapman House was one of a series of homes and buildings constructed from human skin in this part of Wyoming dur­ing the late 1800s. The builders of the dwellings were not known. He looked at Bobette.

She shivered. "Let's get out of here," she said.

He nodded, motioning for the girls to get into the car. Be­fore closing his own door, he snapped a photograph of the cabin. He didn't really want the picture, but he'd been tak­ing photos of every place they had stopped at and he took this one out of habit, for completeness.

They drove silently back to the highway. Ed tried to con­centrate on his driving, but he found himself thinking of the small round patch of skin he had seen near the window of the cabin. He couldn't get it out of his mind, and he couldn't help thinking that the skin had come from the head of a child. The thought disturbed him, and he drove without speaking, speeding along the highway, passing other cars, as if trying to get as far away from the cabin as possible.

A-little farther on, they saw another small brown histori­cal landmark sign by the side of the road. Ed sped by, but not before Pam had made out the message. " 'Bone House One Mile,'" she read.

"Can we stop?" Eda asked.

"Not today," Bobette told her. "You and your sister just find something to do for a while."

Bone House, Ed thought. It didn't take much imagination to figure out the material from which that building was

made.

He felt the skin prickling on the back of his neck.

The station wagon sped down the highway through the forest. It was late afternoon, and according to his calcula­tions they would reach Singleton by five. He'd made reser­vations there at a Best Western, and check-in time was supposed to be at four, but he figured they'd hold the room for an extra hour. From Singleton, it was a five-hour drive to Yellowstone, where they'd made reservations at the Old Faithful Inn for four nights.

He felt tired already, worn out, and he couldn't wait until they got to the motel and his head hit the mattress. He just wanted to sleep. He just wanted this day to be over. They drove into the outskirts of Singleton just before five. The town was tiny, a few homes scattered amongst the trees, an Exxon station, a Shell station, a restaurant, their hotel, a few stores. It was the sort of picturesque town they had been looking for when planning their itinerary-a post­card community.

But there is something a little off about the buildings, Ed thought, as he pulled into the parking lot. Something is wrong. And looking up at the wall of the motel he knew ex­actly what it was.

The buildings were made of skin and bone.

And the bricks used here and there in construction had a peculiarly red tinge.

He backed up immediately, swinging onto the highway.

"What are you doing?" Bobette demanded, grabbing on to the armrest as the car swerved in reverse. "You'll get us all killed."

"We're getting out of here."

"But we have reservations!"

He glanced at their daughters in the backseat. "Look at the buildings," he whispered quietly. "Look at what they're made out of."

Bobette peered out the window then turned back to him, her face bleached white. "This can't be happening."

A man walking down the sidewalk, wearing farmer's overalls and a plaid shirt, waved at them.

"We're getting out of here," Ed said. "I don't care if we have to drive all night."

Their vacation ended early. They went on to Yellowstone, but somehow the geysers and bears and natural beauty did not interest them as much as they'd thought it was going to a few days before, and they returned home after two days in­stead of four.

They took a different route back, bypassing Singleton en­tirely.

Usually, after a trip, it was depressing to come home. The house inevitably seemed small and confining after the great outdoors, the neighborhood dull and moribund. But this time they were glad to be back, and both the house and neighborhood seemed cheerful and welcoming. They settled in almost immediately, the temporary communal spirit which had possessed them on the trip-in the comfortable space" of the car and in the unfamiliar territories through which they'd traveled-dissipating as they reached familiar ground. They returned to their normal individualized living status: Ed and Bobette holding court in the living room and kitchen, Pam and Eda in their respective bedrooms.

In the past, they'd talked about their vacations almost nonstop for several days after they had ended, Pam in par­ticular, trying to hold on to the feelings they'd experienced, but this time no one made any mention of the trip, and Ed was glad. He dutifully turned in both rolls of film he had taken, and when he got them back a few days later he sorted through them in the car. And there it was.

He stared at the photo. The Chapman House lay low and dark against the background of trees, the brownish skin in the picture looking almost like wood. He could see clearly the small door and smaller window and saw in his mind's eye that tiny patch of round infant skin. He tore the photo into little pieces, dropping them out the car window onto the drugstore parking lot, before heading home.

Neither of the girls had been acting much like themselves since they'd returned from the trip, but Eda was quieter than usual that night, as was Pam, and though Bobette tried to get them to talk during dinner, both refused to answer in any­thing except mumbled monosyllables. After eating, they f both went directly to their rooms.

"I don't know what's going on with them," Bobette said, clearing the dishes. "I tried to talk to them today while you were gone but they ignored me, stared right past me as if I wasn't there. I thought maybe you could try to get them to talk. I mean, I know it wasn't the greatest vacation in the world. I know we ran into some strange scary stuff, but nothing actually happened. It's not the end of the world."

Ed nodded slowly, sitting up. "I'll talk to them."

She looked up, dishes in hand. "Thanks, I-"

But he was already out of the room and moving down the hall.

Ed stood outside Eda's closed door, listening, but heard no music, no TV, no talking, no sounds whatsoever. He shuf­fled across the hall to Pam's door and listened again. He heard whispering from inside the room.

Whispering and a strange whisklike sound.

He pushed open the door.

The girls were both on Pam's bed, holding steak knives they had obviously taken from the kitchen. The classified ad section of the newspaper had been spread over the bed be­tween them, and on top of the newspaper was a partially gut­ted cat. He stared silently. Large portions of the animal's black-and-white fur had been scraped off, leaving the skin whitish pink. He recognized the cat as Mrs. Miller's pet Jake.

The two girls looked at him, caught, cat blood all over their hands.

He was going to scream at them, to beat them, to tell them that tomorrow the whole damn family was going to see a psychiatrist, but his voice, when it came out, was calm and even. "What are you girls doing?" "Making a dollhouse," Eda said. He nodded. "Clean up before you go to bed." He closed the door behind him, heard them lock it, then went out to the kitchen to tell Bobette nothing was wrong.

Two days later, he caught Pam in the garage with the Jancek's dog. This animal was bigger, and she was having trouble with the knife. Next to her, on the floor, was the doll-house. She and Eda had taken apart their old dollhouse and had stretched over the plastic frame the still-wet skin of Mrs. Miller's cat.

"How's it going?" he asked.

She looked up, startled. Something like horror or disgust passed over her face for a second, then was gone. She re­turned to her work. "We're learning," she said. "Where's Eda?"

Pam giggled. "Getting more building materials. She's kind of slow, though." "You girls be careful." "We will, Dad," she said.

Ed left the garage, closing the door. Something was wrong. He could feel it, but he couldn't put a finger on it. He could sense that something was not right, that he was be­having oddly, not the way he used to behave, not the way he was supposed to behave, but he did not know what was making him feel like this.

He went into the house, where Bobette was in the living room, pedaling her exercise bicycle while watching Oprah. There was something so ordinary, so wonderfully pretrip about the scene that he just stood there for a moment watch­ing her. The sight triggered something within him, and for a split second he almost remembered what had eluded him in the garage. It perched on the tip of his brain, unable to be ar­ticulated by his conscious mind, then retreated once again into the shadows, and he was left only with a strange sad­ness as he watched his wife exercise.

She glanced in his direction, frowned. "Something wrong?"

He was filled with sudden anger, anger that she could go on with her normal life after the trip as if nothing had hap­pened. Was she so damned stupid and air-headed that she'd forgotten everything already? Of course something was wrong.

He just didn't know what it was.

"I'm going to the store," he said.

"Okay." She continued pedaling. "Pick up some milk while you're there."

He nodded absently, then stepped out the door, pulling his keys from his pocket.

He returned several hours later. It was dark and well past dinnertime. He had walked through stores, through shop­ping centers, knowing he wanted to buy something but not knowing what it was. Then he had seen what he was look­ing for and everything suddenly clicked into place.

Now he walked across the driveway holding the sack. Pam and Eda came out of the shadows to meet him, and though he had not been expecting them, he was not sur­prised. He took out the boxes and handed one to each child. "These are for you," he said.

He took out one for himself, dropping the sack on the ground.

They unwrapped the boxes.

Bobette was washing dishes when they came through the door. There was an angry expression on her face and a plate of cold food untouched on the table. She looked up, glaring, as she heard the noise behind her, but the lecture that had been on her lips died when she saw the carving knives in their hands. She looked from Ed to Pam to Eda. "What are you doing?" she asked. Her voice was suddenly shaky, scared.

"The house needs redecorating," he told her.

Bobette tried to back up but there was no place to go. She was flat against the sink: She was too stunned to scream as the three of them moved forward.

Ed smiled. "We're going to wallpaper the living room."

His knife went in first. Pam's and Eda's followed.

The Man in the Passenger Seat

I was working at a job I hated, and I stopped off one morning on the way to work to get some money from my bank's ATM. I got the money, walked back to my car, and discovered that I'd forgotten to lock the doors. There was a homeless man lurking on the pe­riphery of the parking lot, and I found myself won­dering what I would have done if the man had opened the passenger door, sat down, and buckled himself in. How would I get him out of the car? And what if he kidnapped me, made me drive him somewhere?

It would be all right, I thought, as long as he didn't injure or kill me.

At least I'd get out of work for the day.

Brian was already late for work, but he knew that if he didn't deposit his paycheck this morning he'd be overdrawn. His credit rating was already hovering just above the lip of the toilet, and he couldn't afford another bounced check.

With only a quick glance at the clock on the dashboard, he pulled into the First Interstate parking lot. He grabbed a pen, a deposit slip, and his paycheck from the seat next to him and sprinted across the asphalt to the bank's instant teller machine. Behind him he heard the sound of a car door slamming, and he glanced back at his Blazer as he pulled out his ATM card.

Someone was sitting in the passenger seat of his car.

His heart lurched in his chest. For a split second he con­sidered going through with the deposit transaction and then going back to his car to deal with the intruder-Kendricks was going to be climbing all over his ass for being late as it was-but he realized instantly that whoever had climbed | into his vehicle might be attempting to steal it, and he pock­eted his card and hurried back to the Blazer.

Why the hell hadn't he locked the car?

He pulled open the driver's door. Across from him, in the passenger seat, hands folded in his lap, was a monstrously overweight man wearing stained polyester pants and a small woman's blouse. Long black hair cascaded about the man's shoulders in greasy tangles. The car was filled with a foul, sickeningly stale smell.

Brian looked at the man. "This is my car," he said, forc­ing a toughness he did not feel.

"Eat my dick with brussels sprouts." The man grinned, revealing rotted, stumpy teeth.

A cold wave washed over Brian. This was not real. This was not happening. This was something from a dream or a bad movie. He stared at the man, not sure of what to say or how to respond. He noticed that the time on the dashboard clock was five after eight. He was already late, and he was getting later by the second.

"Get out of my car now!" Brian ordered. "Get out or I'll call the police!"

"Get in," the man said. "And drive."

He should run, Brian knew. He should take off and get the hell out of there, let the man steal his car, let the police and the insurance company handle it. There was nothing in the Blazer worth his life.

But the man might have a gun, might shoot him in the back as he tried to escape.

He got in the car.

The stench inside was almost overpowering. The man smelled of bad breath and broccoli, old dirt and dried sweat. Brian looked him over carefully as he slid into the seat. There was no sign of a weapon at all.

"Drive," the man said.

Brian nodded. Hell yes, he'd drive. He'd drive straight to the goddamn police station and let the cops nail this crazy bastard's ass.

He pulled onto Euclid and started to switch over to the left lane, but the man said, "Turn right."

He was not sure whether he should obey the request or not. The police station was only three blocks away, and there was still no indication that the man was carrying any sort of weapon-but there was something in the strange man's voice, a hint of danger, an aura of command, that made him afraid to disobey.

He turned right onto Jefferson.

"The freeway," the man said.

Brian felt his heart shift into overdrive, the pumping in his chest cavity accelerate. It was too late now, he realized. He'd made a huge mistake. He should have run when he had the chance. He should have sped to the police station when he had the chance. He should have ...

He pulled onto the freeway.

Several times over the past two years, on the way to work, he had dreamed of doing this, had fantasized about hanging a left onto the freeway instead of continuing straight toward the office, about heading down the highway and just driving, continuing on to Arizona, New Mexico, states beyond. But he had never in his wildest imaginings thought that he would actually be doing so while being kid­napped, hijacked, at the behest of an obviously deranged man.

Still, even now, even under these conditions, he could not help feeling a small instinctive lift as the car sped down the on-ramp and merged with the swiftly flowing traffic. It was not freedom he felt-how could it be under the circum­stances?-but more the guilty pleasure of a truant boy hear­ing the schoolbell ring. He had wanted to skip work and shirk his responsibilities so many times, and now he was fi­nally doing it. He looked over at the man in the passenger seat.

The man smiled, twirling a lock of hair between his fin­gers. "One, two, eat my poo. Three, four, eat some more."

Brian gripped the steering wheel, stared straight ahead, and drove.

There was no traffic, or very little. They traveled east, in the opposite direction of most of the commuters, and the city gradually faded into suburbs, the suburbs into open land. After an hour or so, Brian grew brave enough to talk, and several times he made an effort to communicate with the man and ask where they were going, why this was happen­ing, but the man either did not answer or answered in gib­berish, obscene non sequiturs.

Another hour passed.

And another.

They were traveling through high desert now, flatland with scrub brush, and Brian looked at the clock on the dash­board. Ordinarily, he would be taking his break at this time, meeting Joe and David for coffee in the break room. He thought of them now. Neither, he knew, would really miss him. They would file into the break room as they always did, get their coffee from the machine, sit down at the same table at which they always sat, and when they saw that he wasn't there, they'd shrug and begin their usual conversation.

Now that he thought about it, no one at the company would miss him. Not really. They'd be temporarily inconve­nienced by his absence, would curse him for not being there to perform his regular duties, but they would not miss him.

They would not care enough to call and see if he was all right.

That's what really worried him. The fact that no one would even know he'd been abducted. Someone from per­sonnel might call his apartment-the machinery of bureaucracy would be automatically set in motion and a perfunctory effort would be made to determine why he was not at work-but there would be no reason to assume that anything bad had happened to him. No one would suspect foul play. And he was not close enough to any of his coworkers that one of them would make a legitimate effort to find out what had happened to him. He would just disappear and be forgotten. He glanced over at the man in the passenger seat. The man grinned, grabbed his crotch. "Here's your lunch. I call it Ralph."

Shapes sprang up from the desert. Signs. And beyond the signs, buildings. A billboard advertised "McDonald's, two miles ahead, State Street exit." Another, with the name of a hotel on it, showed a picture of a well-endowed woman in a bikini lounging by a pool.

A green sign announced that they were entering Hayes, population 15,000, elevation 3,000.

Brian looked over at his passenger. A growling whirr spiraled upward from the depths of the man's stomach, and he pointed toward the tall, familiar sign of a fast food restaurant just off the highway. "Eat," he said.

Brian pulled off the highway and drove into the narrow parking lot of the hamburger stand. He started to park in one of the marked spaces, but the man shook his head violently, and Brian pulled up to the microphoned menu in the drive-thru. "What are we getting?" he asked.

The man did not answer.

A voice of scratchy static sounded from the speaker. "May I take your order?"

Brian cleared his throat. "A double cheeseburger, large fries, an apple turnover, and an extra-large Coke."

He looked over at the man in the passenger seat, quizzi­cally, but the man said nothing.

"That'll be four-fifteen at the window."

Brian pulled forward, stopping when his window was even with that of the restaurant's.

"Four-" the teenage clerk started to say.

"Gonads!" the man yelled. "Gonads large and small!" He reached over Brian and grabbed the sack of food from the shelf. Before the clerk could respond, the man had dropped to the floor and pushed down the gas pedal with his free hand. The car lurched forward, Brian trying desperately to steer as they sped out of the parking lot and into the street.

The man sat up, dumping the contents of the bag in Brian's lap. The car slowed down, and there was a squeal of brakes as the pickup truck behind them tried to avoid a col­lision.

"Asshole!" the pickup driver yelled as he pulled past them. He stuck out his middle finger.

The man grabbed a handful of french fries from Brian's lap. "Drive," he said.

"Look-" Brian began.

"Drive."

They pulled back onto the highway. A half hour later they caught up with the pickup. Brian probably would not have noticed and would have passed the vehicle without incident, but, without warning, the man in the passenger seat rolled down his window, grabbed the half-empty cup of Coke from Brian's hand, and threw it out­side. His aim was perfect. The cup sailed across the lane, through the open window of the pickup truck, and hit the driver square in the face. The man screamed in pain and sur­prise, swerving out of control. The pickup sped off the shoulder and down an embankment, colliding with a small paloverde tree.

"Asshole," the passenger said. He chuckled, his laugh high and feminine. Brian looked over at the man. Despite his throwing capa­bilities, the passenger was grossly overweight and in terrible physical condition, no match for Brian. He turned his atten­tion back to the road. They would have to stop for gas soon-at the next town, if they weren't pulled over first- and he knew that he would be able to escape at that time. He would be able to either run away or kick the shit out of the obese bastard.

But though he wanted desperately to kick the crap out of the crazy fucker, he wasn't sure he really wanted to escape. Not yet, anyway. He didn't seem to be in any physical dan­ger, and if he were to be perfectly honest with himself, he was almost, kind of, sort of having fun. In some perverse, al­most voyeuristic way, he was enjoying this, and he knew that if he allowed the situation to remain as is, he would not have to go back to work until they were caught-and he wouldn't even be penalized, he could blame it all on his ab­duction.

But that was insane. He wasn't thinking right. He'd been brainwashed or something, riding with the man. Like Patty Hearst.

After only a few hours?

"Holy shit," the man said. He laughed to himself in that high-pitched voice. "Holy shit."

Brian ignored him.

The man withdrew from his pants pocket a small, lumpy, strangely irregular brown rock. "I bought it from a man in Seattle. It's the petrified feces of Christ. Holy shit." He gig­gled. "They found it in Lebanon."

Brian ignored him, concentrating on the road. On second thought, he wasn't having fun. This was too damn loony to be fun.

But the man was finally talking to him, speaking in co­herent sentences.

"We need gas," the man said. "Let's stop at the next town."

Brian did not escape at the gas station, though he had ample opportunity. He could have leaped out of the car and run. He could have said something to the station attendant. He could have gone to the bathroom and not come back.

But he stayed in the car, paid for the gas with his credit card.

They took off.

For the next hour or so, both of them were silent, al­though Brian did a lot of thinking, trying to guess what was going to happen to him, trying to project a future end to this situation. Every so often, he would glance over at his pas­senger. He noticed that, out here, on the highway, the man did not seem so strange. Here, with the window open, he did not even smell as bad. What had seemed so bizarre, so frightening, in the parking lot of the bank, in the business-suit world of the city, seemed only slightly odd out here on the highway. They drove past burly bikers, disheveled pickup drivers, Hawaiian-shirted tourists, and Brian realized that here there was no standard garb, no norm by which de­viation could be measured. Manners and mores did not apply. There were only the rules of the road, broad guide­lines covering driving etiquette.

Inside the sealed worlds of individual cars, it was any­thing goes.

Brian did not feel comfortable with the man. Not yet. But he was getting used to him, and it was probably only a mat­ter of -time before he came to accept him. That was truly terrifying.

Brian squinted his eyes. Ahead of them, on the side of the road, was a stalled car, a Mercedes with its hood up. Stand­ing next to the vehicle, partially leaning against the trunk, was an attractive young lady, obviously a professional woman, a career woman, with short blond hair and a blue jacket/skirt ensemble that spoke of business. "Pull over," the man said. Brian slowed, stopping next to the Mercedes. "That's okay," the woman began. "A friend of mine has already gone to find a phone to call Triple A-"

"Get in the car!" The man's voice was no longer high and feminine but low and rough, filled with authority backed by a veiled threat of violence.

Brian saw the woman's eyes dart quickly around, assess­ing her options. There was no place to run on the flat desert, but she was obviously trying to decide if she could make it into the Mercedes and close her windows and lock her doors in time. Or if that would even help.

He wanted to tell her to run, to get the hell away from the road, that they wouldn't leave the road to find her, that the man never got out of the car. He wanted to shift into gear and take off, leaving her there safe and unharmed.

But he remained in place and did nothing.

"Get in the car, bitch!" The violence implied in the man's voice was no longer so covert.

The woman's eyes met Brian's, as if searching there for j help, but he looked embarrassedly away.

"Get-" the man started to say.

She opened the door and got into the backseat of the Blazer.

"Drive," the man said.

Brian drove.

None of them spoke for a long time. The landscape changed, became less sandy, more rocky, hilly canyons sub­stituting for rolling dunes. Brian looked at the clock on the dashboard. He would be just getting off his afternoon break now, walking through the hallway from the break room to his desk.

"Panties," the man in the passenger seat said.

Brian turned his head.

Frightened, the woman looked from him to the now grin­ning man. "What?" · "Panties."

The woman licked her lips. "Okay," she said, her voice trembling. "Okay, I'll take them off. Just don't hurt me."

She reached under her skirt, arched her back, and pulled off her underwear. In the rearview mirror, Brian caught a glimpse of tanned thigh and black pubic hair. And then the panties were being handed forward, clean and white and silky.

"Stop," the man said.

Brian pulled over, stopping the car. From the pocket of his blouse, the man took out a black Magic Marker. He laid the underwear flat on his knee and began drawing on the garment, hiding his work with one greasy hand. When he was done, he rolled down his window and reached outside, to the front, grabbing the radio antenna and pulling it back. He quickly and expertly pressed the metal antenna through the white silk and let it bounce back.

The panties flew at the top of the antenna like a flag.

On them he had drawn a crude skull and crossbones.

"Now we are whole." He grinned. "Drive."

The day died slowly, putting up a struggle against the en­croaching night, bleeding orange into the sky. Brian's mus­cles were tired, fatigued from both tension and a day's worth of driving. He stretched, yawned, squirmed in his seat, try­ing to keep himself awake. "I need some coffee," he said.

"Stop."

He pulled onto the sandy shoulder.

"Your turn," the man said to the woman.

She nodded, terrified. "Okay. Just don't hurt me."

The two of them traded places, the woman getting behind the wheel as Brian settled into the backseat.

"Drive."

Brian slept. He dreamed of a highway that led through nothing, a black line of asphalt that stretched endlessly through a desolate, featureless void. The voice was empty, but he was not lonely. He was alone, but he was driving, and he felt good.

When he awoke, the woman was naked.

The driver's window was open, and the woman was shiv­ering, her teeth chattering. None of her garments appeared to be in the car save her bra, which was stretched between the door handle and the glove compartment, over the man's legs, and held two thermos cups filled with coffee. From this angle, Brian could see that her nipples were erect, and he ] found that strangely exciting.

It had been a long time since he'd seen a woman naked.

Too long.

He looked at the woman. No doubt she thought that he and the man in the passenger seat were both criminals, were partners, fellow kidnappers. Since she had come aboard, he had not behaved like a prisoner or a captive and had not been treated like one. He had also not made an effort to let the woman know that he was on her side, that they were in the same position, although he was not quite sure why. Per­haps, on some level, he enjoyed the false perception, was proud, in some perverse way, to be associated with the man in the passenger seat.

But that couldn't be possible.

Could it?

His gaze lingered on the woman's nipples. It could. In a strange way, he was glad he'd been kidnapped. Not simply because he'd been given the chance to see a nude woman, but because an experience this extreme gave perspective to everything else. He knew now that, prior to that moment in the bank parking lot, he had not been living. He'd been sim­ply existing. Going to work, eating, going to sleep, going to work. The motions had been comfortable, but they had not been real, not life, but an imitation of life.

This was life.

It was horrible, it was frightening, it was dangerous, it was crazy, and he did not know what was going to happen from one moment to the next, but for the first time in mem­ory he felt truly alive. He was not comfortable, he was not merely existing. Traveling through the darkness toward an unknown destination with an insane man, he feared for his safety, he feared for his own sanity.

But he was alive.

"We killed Father first," the man in the passenger seat said. His voice was low, serious, almost inaudible, and it sounded as though he was talking to himself, as though he did not want anyone else to hear. "We amputated his limbs with the hacksaw made from Mother's bones and sold his parts for change. We killed Sister second, gutting her like a flopping fish on the chopping block ..."

Brian was lulled by the words, by their rhythm. Again he fell asleep.

When he awoke, both the woman and the man were standing in front of the car. It was daytime, and they were on the outskirts of a large city. Houston, perhaps, or Albu­querque. The woman was still naked, and there were fre­quent honks and excited whoops from men who passed by

in cars.

Brian stared through the windshield. The man held, in one hand, half of the woman's now torn bra, and he dipped a finger in the attached thermos cup as she fell to her knees. He placed his coffee-wet finger on her forehead as though annointing her.

He returned to the car alone.

Brian watched the naked woman run across the highway and down the small embankment on the other side without looking back.

The man got into the passenger seat and closed his door.

"Where are we going?" Brian asked. He realized as he spoke the words that he was asking the question not as a prisoner, not as a captive, but as a fellow traveler ... as a companion. He did not fear the answer, he was merely curi­ous.

The man seemed to sense this, for he smiled, and there was humor in the smile. "Does it matter?"

Brian thought for a moment. "No," he said finally.

"Then drive."

Brian looked at the clock on the dashboard and realized that he didn't know what he would ordinarily be doing at this time.

The man grinned broadly, knowingly. "Drive."

Brian grinned back. "All right," he said. "All right."

He put the Blazer into gear.

They headed east.

Comes the Bad Time

"Comes the Bad Time" was inspired by a shape I thought I saw in a slice of tomato. It was not a face, as in the story. It was more like an object. A vase, per­haps. I was certain that I had seen this shape before, although I could not remember where or when, and over the next few days, I found myself not only look­ing for the object itself but searching for its form and outline elsewhere. "Comes the Bad Time" grew from there.

I never noticed it before, but now that I think about it, quite a few of my stories seem to involve a fear of vegetables. I'm not sure why that is.

When I cut open the tomato and saw Elena's face, I knew it was starting again. Jenny was out in the garden, feeding her plants, and I quickly sliced the tomato into little pieces, put the pieces in a baggie, and dumped the whole thing into the garbage sack. She would find out soon enough, but I wanted to stave off the inevitable as long as possible.

On an impulse, I opened the refrigerator and took out our last two tomatoes. I sliced the first one in half and it was fine. I pushed the two pieces aside.

Both of the second halves had formed into a frighteningly accurate caricature of Elena's face.

I felt the fear rise within me. I looked down at the tomato halves and saw the unnatural convergence of red spokes and clear gelatin and seeds. Elena's features, down to her crooked smile, stared back at me, doubled. I cut the pieces into tiny bits, mashed them with the palm of my hand, and dumped them into the garbage sack as well. The bits of tomato that were clinging to the serrated edge of the knife resembled Elena's lips.

I wiped the knife with a paper towel and threw the towel away just as Jenny walked through the door, She was hot and sweaty but happy. In her hand was a small green zuc­chini. "Look," she said. "Our first harvest of the year."

I tried to smile, but the gesture felt forced and stilted on my face. I watched with horror as she picked the knife up from the sideboard. "Let's wait," I said, attempting to keep my voice light. "You can't eat zucchini raw anyway."

"I just want to see what it looks like."

She cut it open, and she began to scream.

When Elena walked up to our door and asked if she could sleep in the barn, we thought nothing of it. Times were dif­ferent then, people more open, and we immediately recog­nized her as one of our own. Her hair was long and blond and stringy, her tie-dyed dress dirty. She was barefoot and alone, and she obviously had no money. It looked as though she'd been walking for days.

I looked at Jenny and she looked at me, and an unspoken understanding passed between us. We would help this girl.

My gaze returned to Elena. She seemed nervous and scared, and I thought she was probably running away from something. Her parents, perhaps. A relationship. It was hard to tell. A lot of people were running in those days.

She stood on the porch, looking around at the farm, afraid to meet our eyes. She said she was just looking for a place to crash for the night. She didn't need any food or any spe­cial treatment. She simply wanted a place to lie down and sleep. Of course we said she could stay. Instead of the barn, we told her she could have the couch in the living room, and for that she seemed grateful.

She smiled her crooked smile, and I felt good. The dinner that evening was pleasant but average. Elena was net a brilliant conversationalist, and we had to ask all the questions. She would respond with monosyllabic an­swers. Though she looked older, she was only seventeen, and perhaps that was part of the reason.

We could tell that she was tired, so after dinner we set up the bedding on the couch and retired to the bedroom. We heard no sounds from the living room after the first few min­utes and assumed she had fallen instantly asleep.

I was awakened hours later by the screaming. I sat im­mediately upright and felt Jenny do the same next to me. The screams-loud, piercing, and impossibly high-pitched- came in short staccato bursts. I ran into the living room, pulling on a robe, Jenny following.

Elena was having convulsions on the floor. She had fallen off the couch and in the process had knocked over the coffee table and everything on it. Her body was jerking crazily on the floor, her spastically twitching arms running over the broken pieces of a vase, blood flowing from the en­suing cuts. She screamed painfully with each spasm, short harsh cries of unbearable agony, and the expression on her face was one of senseless dementia.

I didn't know what to do. I stood there motionless as Jenny rushed forward and put a pillow under the convulsing girl's head. "Call the ambulance!" Jenny yelled frantically. "Now!"

I ran for the phone and picked it up. Not knowing the number for the ambulance or police, I dialed the operator.

"Wait!" Jenny screamed.

I turned around. Elena's body was floating in the air, mov­ing upward. She was still having convulsions, and the sight of her spastically flailing body floating above the ground, blood pouring from her wounded arms, made me feel very afraid.

Jenny was stepping back, away from Elena, not sure what to do. I grabbed her, held her tight as the girl's body lowered once again and the convulsions stopped. Her bulging eyes closed, then opened again, normal. She licked her lips and winced as her conscious mind felt the pain in her arms. "I'm okay," she said, her voice weak and cracking. "I'm all right."

"You're not all right," Jenny said firmly. "I'm calling a doctor. And you're not leaving this house until you're com­pletely well."

She stayed with us for a month.

Until she died.

I cut up the zucchini and threw it away while Jenny sat in the living room. When I went in to see her, she was sitting straight-backed on the couch, her hands in her lap, afraid to move. "It's here again," she said.

I nodded.

"What does she want with us? What the hell does she want with us?" She burst into tears, her hands trembling fists of frustration in her lap. I rushed over to comfort her and put my arms around her. She rested her head on my shoulder.

"Maybe this is it," I said. "Maybe it'll stop now."

She looked at me, her expression furious. "You know it won't stop now!"

I said nothing, holding her, and we sat like that for a long time.

Around us, we heard noises in the house.

Elena died suddenly. She had been getting steadily better and she had had no subsequent episodes. She'd been help­ing Jenny around the house: doing dishes, cleaning, working in the garden. Though she was by no means talkative, she had opened up somewhat and we had gotten to know her. She was a kind, fairly intelligent girl with lots of potential. Both Jenny and I liked her a lot.

That's why her death was such a shock. We had driven into town for groceries, and Elena had gone along. We'd picked up everything we needed and were almost home when, from the backseat, I heard a low growl. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw nothing. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Jenny turning around. "Elena?" she asked.

"I'm fine," the girl said. "It was nothing." Her voice seemed weak and strained, and I thought of the night she had had the fit.

And floated in the air.

We had never told the doctor about the floating. I wasn't sure why. We had not even discussed it between ourselves, and I thought Jenny was probably trying to pretend to her­self that it had not really happened. I knew better, and I felt myself grow suddenly afraid.

I pulled into the long dirt driveway that led to our farm and heard the back door of the car open.

"Stop the car!" Jenny screamed.

I braked to a halt, slammed the car into park, and jumped out. Elena was lying on the dirt. Both Jenny and I ran over to where she lay. "Elena!" I said. I bent over her.

Her eyes widened crazily and that look of blank demen­tia passed over her features. "I'll get you, you bastard," she said, and her voice was little more than a hiss. "I'll get all of you assholes!"

Her body stiffened and was still. Jenny reached down to check for a pulse. She put a hand around Elena's forearm and shook her head at me. Her face was white with shock.

I felt confused, bewildered, but I told Jenny to take the car up to the house and call the police while I stayed with Elena. She hopped in the car and took off in a cloud of dust, tires sliding. I stared down at the girl. I half expected her to float, to break apart before my eyes, to do something strange and terrifying, but her dead form lay unmoving on the dirt.

The police came, and the coroner, and we had her body cremated. We could find no family or friends, nor could the police, and we scattered her ashes on the hill in back of the barn, where she had liked to lie and stare up at the clouds.

Jenny was right, I knew. It would not stop with the veg­etables. It never did. I too was filled with a sense of dread and terror, but I did my best to conceal it. Jenny needed my support.

The first time it had happened was a few years after Elena's death. That day, we could see the wind. It was clear but visible, and it swirled in the sky following billowy paths to nowhere. We sat outside, watching the wind with amaze­ment. The few clouds above us moved quickly, propelled by the visible wind, converging.

They formed a shape. A face. Elena's face.

I saw it but did not comment on it, my mind noting the fact but not accepting it. The wind dissipated, died, the clouds floated on. We sat there awhile longer, then went into the house. We made dinner together, ate, read our respective books, and went into the bedroom.

The sheets and bedspread had been twisted and molded into the shape of a young woman in the throes of a convul­sive fit.

We both saw this manifestation, and we both screamed. Jenny ran out of the room, panicked, and I grabbed a corner of the bedspread and pulled. The cloth sculpture fell into in­stant disarray.

It went on from there.

For a while, the bad time came every year. One season, we decided to leave the farm, go on vacation, get away from it. We hoped to be gone when the occurrences escalated and to come back after everything had settled back down. When Jenny saw Elena's face in the pattern of autumn leaves that had fallen from one of our trees-a relatively benign mani­festation-we packed our belongings and left, before the real horrors started. We were gone for two weeks, but when we came back the occurrences continued as if we had never left.

We thought of moving the next year, had even gone so far as to look for another place. We found a smaller farm up­state, but when the realtor showed us around the property, we saw Elena's silhouette in the convergence of bushes on the hill above the house. And we knew we could never es­cape.

The bad time did not come for several years after that. But then it came twice one fall. It has come sporadically in the succeeding years, but it has never gone away. The last time it happened, Jenny was almost killed, and as I looked at her now I could tell that she was terrified. I felt helpless and afraid myself. I didn't know what we could do.

We ate frozen pizza that night, not daring to look down at our food, afraid of seeing unnatural patterns in the place­ment of the pepperoni. The noises around us grew, and we ate with the television on. Beneath Dan Rather's voice, I heard scratchings on the roof and arrhythmic knockings f from the basement. Once, I thought I heard high staccato screaming from the barn. I glanced over at Jenny, but she seemed not to have noticed it and I didn't say a thing.

Neither of us took a shower after what had happened the last time.

"What does she want with us?" Jenny whispered fear­fully after we had crawled into bed. "What did we ever do to her? We only tried to help her."

"I don't know," I said, my standard answer.

"What was she?" Jenny snuggled closer. "What is she?"

I looked at Jay Leno on the TV at the foot of our bed. I usually turned the television off after the news, but I didn't want to lie there in silence that night. I didn't want to hear the sounds. Leno asked the audience how many people had taken the NBC tour before getting in line for the show, and there was a scattering of hands. Leno suddenly fell to the floor, jerking spasmodically, his eyes rolling wildly. His twisting, flailing body began to float, and the cameraman cut to a closeup of his face. "I'll get you, you bastard," Leno said, and his voice was Jenny's dying hiss. "I'll get all of you assholes!"

"Shut it off!" Jenny screamed. "Shut the damn thing off!"

I lurched across the bed and reached over to flip off the TV. The screen went blank, but there was a faded white after­image of Elena grinning, her crooked smile seeming to pro­ject outward from the television. I held Jenny close, and we closed our eyes to block out the horror. I'm not sure what she was thinking. I was pray­ing.

I was awakened the next morning by the sound of a car coming up the drive. I reached over Jenny's still sleeping form and opened the curtains. A silver BMW was pulling to a stop next to the barn. I quickly got out of bed, pulled on my jeans, and went to the door. I opened it just as the man started knocking. "Yes?" I said.

He was a youngish man, late twenties or early thirties, and he was dressed neatly and fashionably. His hair was short and stylish, and he was holding a briefcase in his hand. "I think maybe you can help me," he said. He smiled.

I said nothing, only stared, the blood pulsing in my tem­ples, racing through my veins.

His smile was that of Elena.

I killed him with the baseball bat I kept next to the door for just such emergencies. I beat his head to a bloody pulp, and the thick redness splattered all over his neat and trendy clothes. I stepped back, satisfied, waiting to see his form wiggle into the ground the way the others had done, but his inert body lay there, dead and whole and unmoving.

I swallowed hard, the realization dawning on me. This had been a real person, not a manifestation. I felt cold then hot, and I looked again at his bloody form and vomited.

Jenny came out from the bedroom, wide-eyed and fright­ened. "What is it?" she asked. "What happened?" She saw the body and screamed.

I did not call the police but, forcing down my nausea, dragged the dead man to the trash furnace next to the barn, doused him with kerosine, and lit him on fire.The smoke which billowed upward from the furnace's stack was black and smelled horrible.

I returned to the house, where Jenny was already looking through the briefcase. She looked up at me, scared, and held up several photographs of Elena. I sat down next to her, dig­ging through the pile of pictures, There were photos of men and women I had never seen before. All of them bore a strong resemblance to Elena and the young man I had just killed.

There was a crash from the kitchen.

"Oh God," Jenny cried. "Oh God, I can't take much more of this."

Outside, through the window, I saw two forms wave at us from inside the BMW. A male and a female. My skin be­came a field of goose bumps, and I looked at Jenny. Her lips were pale and dry, her cheeks streaked with tears.

What were these people? I wondered.

The throw rug next to the couch moved into the air until it was upright. The corners folded in on themselves and be­neath the shag Elena's face pushed outward. The lips moved silently, then began twitching in hideous convulsions.

The standing lamp next to the recliner fell to the floor, and the white shade colored red, taking on the features of the young man I had murdered.

Both the rug and the lamp smiled crooked smiles.

"What do they want?" Jenny screamed, jumping to her feet. "What the hell do they want from us?"

The car outside started, there were screams from the barn.

"I don't know," I said, holding her. "I don't know."

It went on from there.

Against the Pale Sand

One of my favorite movies of all time is Eraserhead. It's- strange, slow moving, and essentially plotless. "Against the Pale Sand" is a story in that fine tradi­tion.

She sat on the dirty porcelain toilet, staring down at the wrinkled dress and panties which lay in a fallen heap around her ankles. She could see a worn patch in the crotch of the stained panties and a hem of tatters on the once bright green dress. Wind from somewhere outside blew into the bath­room, causing small pinprick goosepimples to assault her bare skin, and she looked up from the floor, her eyes focus­ing on the dilapidated boards which made up the opposite wall. There were holes in most of the planks-knotholes- and the edges of some of the boards had been eaten away by termites. Many of the boards had been used before, else­where, in other houses, other times, and vestiges of previous paint jobs, traces of former lives, could be seen in the thickly whorled patterns of the wood. Very few of the boards met properly, and there were gaps between individual planks and between roof and wall and wall and floor. Next to the toilet, the bathtub gurgled loudly, and a few thick globules of black viscous liquid splattered up from the drain onto the already grimy metal.

It's not coming, she thought. It's not going to happen. Then she felt the familiar rush of cold from inside the toilet bowl, the welcome pull of gentle arctic air. A wet slimy fin­ger reached upward from the stagnant water at the bottom of the bowl and caressed her sensitive skin. Other fingers followed, and she felt a mucilaginous hand lightly skim across the cheeks of her buttocks and slide slowly down the crack of her ass. She was already aroused, and she closed her eyes, relaxing her muscles, as first one cold finger then another entered her. She spread her legs a little and tried to press her body downward. Opening her eyes, she looked at the reflec­tion of her face in the single shard of mirror remaining on the wall above the broken sink. Her mouth was open, tongue pressed involuntarily between cheek and gums, and she was sweating, though cold wind continued to blow through the cracks between the boards.

There was another black gurgle from the bathtub.

A few minutes later the hand, working on its own time, withdrew, though she was far from finished, and she heard it plop back into the still water at the bottom of the toilet. She stood, pulling up her panties and then her dress. She was wet, and she felt a maddeningly unfulfilled tingling between her legs as she pulled the cotton material tight against her crotch.

She wanted to touch herself there, the way she had as a child, but»she dared not.

She opened the bathroom door and walked into the hall. A pale imitation of sunlight streamed in dust-filled pillars through holes in the roof, patchily illuminating the floor where weeds pushed up from between the tiles. She stepped across the hall and walked up the double brick steps into what used to be the living room, She ignored the cocoon and nodded curtly to the toothless old man, drooling and bab­bling to himself in his high chair next to the ruined chimney. Walking into the kitchen, she poured herself a cup of rusty water from the pail in the sink and stared out through the glassless window at the back yard. "Hey! Anybody home?"

The voice, disembodied, its owner hidden behind the oversized growth of weeds on the side of the toolshed, sounded clearly in the now breezeless November air. There was a hint of panic in the voice, a trace of desperation. "Anybody here?"

A man immaculately attired in an expensive gray busi­ness suit, holding a brown leather briefcase in front of him like a shield against the vegetation, emerged from the weeds looking lost and frail and scared. She could see by the path of the trail he had blazed that he had come through the for­est. He stopped at the edge of the clearing, taking in the house, then caught sight of her, dully staring out the kitchen window.

"Boy, am I glad to see somebody," he said.

She dumped the rest of her water back into the pail and ambled over to the ripped screen door. She opened it, star­ing at him. She tried to speak, but all that came out was a high croaking sound. She cleared her throat, coughed, and tried again. "Hello," she said, her mouth forming the word from memory. Her voice sounded slow and awkward even

to herself.

The man put his briefcase down at the edge of the porch and looked up at her, wiping sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his jacket. "My car stalled on me over on Old Pinewood Road," he said, gesturing toward the forest. "I was wondering if you'd let me use your phone."

She cleared her throat again, coughed. "No phone," she said.

His lips formed the outline of a crude word he did not say, and he stomped his foot hard on the ground, sending up a small cloud of cold dust. "You know where there is a phone I could use?"

She shook her head and started to retreat back into the kitchen.

The man took a step forward. "Think I could just have a drink of water or something?" He pulled at the buttoned col­lar behind his tie. "It's a long way back to the road, and my throat's really parched."

She thought for a moment, then cleared her throat. "Come in," she said.

He walked up the series of warped wooden steps onto the porch, opened the screen, and stepped into the kitchen. He stopped just inside the door and stared. A three-legged table sat in the center of the room, piled high with hard bread-crusts and miniscule bones. Against the far wall was a rusted doorless refrigerator; he could see rotting vegetables lying on the appliance's backwardly slanting shelves. Through an­other doorway, he could see into the rest of the house. It looked gutted, abandoned, as though no one had lived there for years.

The woman dipped a tin cup into the dirty pail inside the sink, and he held up his hand. "Fresh water," he said. "I'd like some fresh water."

She did not seem to understand, and he let the matter drop, accepting the proffered cup. He was thirsty.

She watched him, her eyes following the measured bob­bing of his Adam's apple as he drank. From what used to be the living room she could hear the toothless old man's bab­ble moving upward in register, becoming a shrill whine. It was almost time for his supper and he was getting hungry. She walked over to the refrigerator and drew out an old wrinkled potato. She put it in a tin bowl and mashed it with a fork. She carried it in to the toothless old man, placing it on the shelf of his high chair. He cackled, drooling, and shoved his hands in the bowl. He licked the rotten potato from his fingers.

She turned back toward the kitchen and saw the man standing in the doorway, his empty cup dangling from his hand. "You live here?" he asked, shocked. She nodded.

He looked to the ruined fireplace, at the toothless old man who was still shoving his hands in his mouth, babbling incoherently. He walked into the room, unbelieving, trying to take it all in. All the windows were boarded up, though not very well; light still sneaked through the cracks. The couch was slanting backward, its seats ripped, white wool stuffing billowing out through the torn material. Several broken chairs lay in a heap in the center of the room. "Who is that?" he asked, pointing to the old man. She gave him a puzzled expression. "Who is that man in the high chair?" She shrugged. She cleared her throat. "Don't know." His eyes moved over the rest of the room. He walked to­ward the couch, looking around. And he noticed the cocoon.

"What the hell is that?" He walked toward it, curious. "No.¹" the women yelled, running past him. She stood in front of the cocoon and held her hands up to bar his way.

He stopped, suddenly apprehensive. He wasn't sure what he was doing there in the first place. His car had broken down and he'd been looking for a phone. The nearest town-no more than a store and gas station-was a good thirty miles away. He'd only come here for a drink of water. Now that he'd gotten his drink it was time for him to start heading back to the highway to see if he could flag down a ride. There was no reason for him to be looking through this house.

But the place was so damn strange....

He tried to look past the woman at the cocoon. She shifted her position, blocking his view. He could see a slight bluish glow emanating from the object behind her. "I just want to look," he said. "I won't touch."

"No," she said. Her eyes bored into his, glaring.

From the back of the house someplace, from the depths of the dilapidated structure, came a strange mechanical whirring. It rose in pitch until it almost hurt his ears. He winced, looking up at the sound, staring at the bare wood wall though he couldn't see past it. "What is that?" he asked.

She looked at him, uncomprehending, and he shook his head in frustration. He walked through the doorway nearest to him and found himself in what appeared to be a hallway. Brown weeds pushed up through the crumbling floor tiles, and moonlight streamed through large holes in the roof.

Moonlight!

He looked up. Through the holes, he could see darkness and the faint imprints of stars.

That wasn't possible. He had come into the house only seconds ago, and it had been midafternoon. He looked be­hind him, through the doorway, but both the woman and the cocoon were gone. The old man was still in his high chair by the chimney, laughing toothlessly.

The whirring, which had risen to an all but inaudible level, began a downward spiral, dropping in tone until it dis­appeared. He took a few tentative steps forward, toward the source of the sound, and peeked through an open doorway off to the right. Something black and shapeless lunged quickly from the center of the room to its shadowed edge.

He turned back, shocked and scared, running through the doorway the way he'd come. The woman was now lying on the ripped and legless couch, her panties down around her ankles. Both hands were shoved up her hiked dress, working furiously. She was smiling, and her eyes were wet with tears. She was moaning something in an alien tongue.

As he scanned the room quickly, he saw the bluish glow of the now unprotected cocoon in the corner. Forgetting all about the black shape in the room off the hall, he started for­ward, his head craned curiously. The cocoon was lying in a makeshift sandbox, its rough translucent skin flat against the pale sand. It was glowing strangely, the blue light pulsating, and as he watched it slowly cracked open. Blue light and yellow liquid poured out of the crack in a sudden rage, and he felt some of the liquid hit his arm. It felt sticky and alive. As he stood, unmoving, the liquid coalesced into some sem­blance of a shape-something like a twisted tree branch. And now it was pulling him. He tried to peel the dried sub­stance from his arm but only succeeded in getting it all over his hand. Liquid continued to pour out of the cocoon. Some of it glopped onto his shoes, dried, and began pulling as well.

The whirring noise, less mechanical this time, started again.

"No!" he cried.

A glob of liquid spurted onto his face, pulling at his skin.

"No!"

The woman looked up at the cry. She took her hands from beneath her dress and sat up on the couch, pulling on her panties. She stared dully toward the cocoon. She saw the man, now covered with the yellowish drying liquid, waving his arms, screaming. There was a sudden flash of blue-white light, and the man seemed to shrink, deflating beneath the yellow covering like a balloon.

She stood up, walking toward the cocoon. The two halves closed, locking everything in. Through the rough translucent cocoon skin she could see a hunched and twisted form strug­gling to break free. She knew that by tomorrow the form would be gone and the cocoon would be all right again.

In his high chair the old man cackled.

She shook her head slowly and walked into the hallway, where dust-filled pillars of sunlight fell through open holes in the roof, illuminating the weeds which grew through the tiles. She shambled into the bathroom and pulled off her dress, her nipples hardening immediately as wind from out­side somewhere blew into the bathroom through the cracks and knotholes in the ancient boards. She pulled down her panties, letting them fall around her ankles, and sat on the dirty porcelain toilet.

She waited, hoping it would come.

The Pond

This is a story about lost ideals and selling out-moral shortcomings which are not limited to the boomer generation depicted here.

By the way, there really was a group called P.O.P (People Over Pollution). They used to gather each Sat­urday to collect and process recyclable materials. Back in the early 1970s, my friend Stephen Hillenburg and I belonged to an organization called the Youth Science Center, which would offer weekend science classes and field trips. We got to do Kirlian photogra­phy, visit mushroom farms, learn about edible plants on nature walks, tour laser laboratories-and one Sat­urday we worked with People Over Pollution, smash­ing aluminum cans with sledgehammers.

Stephen grew up to create the brilliant and wildly popular cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants.

"Hey hon, what's this?"

Alex looked up from the suitcase he'd been packing. April, kneeling before the box she'd found on the top shelf of the hall closet, held up what looked like a green campaign button. "Pop?" she asked.

"Let me see that." He walked across the room and took 1 the button from her hands. A powerful feeling of flashback I familiarity, emotional remembrance, coursed through him as he looked at the button.

POP.

People Over Pollution.

It had been a long time since he'd thought of that'll acronym. A long time.

He knelt down next to April and peered into the box, see-ing bumper stickers and posters, other buttons, pamphlets with green ecology sign logos.

"What is all this?" April asked.

"People Over Pollution. It was a group I belonged to when I was in college. We collected bottles and cans and newspapers for recycling. We picketed soap companies until they came up with biodegradable detergent. We urged peo­ple to boycott environmentally unsound products."

April smiled, tweaked his nose. "You troublemaking radical you."

He ignored her and began to dig through the box, sorting through the jumbled items.

Buried beneath the bumper stickers and buttons, he found a framed photograph: an emerald green meadow, ringed by huge darker green ponderosa pine trees. A small lake in the center of the meadow grass, its still and perfectly clear water reflecting the cotton puff clouds and deep blue sky above.

Major flashback.

He stared at the photo, reverently touched the dusty glass. He'd forgotten all about the picture. How was that possible? He'd cut it out of an Arizona Highways as a teenager and had framed it because he'd known instantly upon seeing it that this was where he wanted to live. The photo spoke to him on a gut emotional level that struck a chord deep within him. A chord that had never been struck before. He had never been to Arizona at that point, but he'd known from the perfection presented in that scene that this was where he wanted to settle down. He would live in the meadow in a log cabin, just he and his wife, and they would wake each morn­ing to the sound of birdsong, to the natural light of dawn.

The girls with whom he intended to live in this paradise had changed throughout his teens-from Joan to Pam to Rachel-but the location had always remained constant.

How could he have forgotten about the photo? He'd been to Arizona countless times in the intervening years, had scouted a resort site in Tucson and another in Sedona, yet the memory of his old dream had never even suggested it­self to him. Strange.

April leaned over his shoulder, resting her head next to his. She glanced at the photo with disinterest. "What's that?" He shook his head, smiling slightly, sadly, and placed the picture back in the box. "Nothing."

That night he dreamed of the pond.

He could not remember having had the dream before, but it was somehow familiar to him and he knew that he had ex­perienced it in the past.

He was walking along a narrow footpath through the for­est, and as he walked deeper into the woods the sky grew overcast and the bushes grew thicker and it soon seemed as though he was walking through a tunnel. He was afraid and he grew even more afraid as he moved forward. He wanted to turn back, to turn around, but he could not. His feet pro­pelled him onward.

And then he was at the pond.

He stood at the path's end, trembling, chilled to the core of his being as he stared at the dirty body of water before him, at the ripples of bluish white foam that floated upon the stagnant black liquid.

The trees here, the grass, the brush, all were brown and dying. There were no other people about, no animals, not even bugs on the water. The air was still and strangely heavy. Above this spot, dark clouds blotted out all sunlight.

At the far end of the pond was an old water pump.

Alex's heart beat faster. He kept his eyes averted from the rusted hunk of machinery, but he could still see out of the corner of his eye the corrosion on the old metal, the algae-covered tube snaking into the water.

More than anything else, more than the dark and twisted path, more than the horrid pond or the blighted land sur­rounding it, it was the pump that frightened him, its very presence causing goose bumps to ripple down the skin of his arms. There was something in the cold insistence of its po­sition at the head of the pond, in the unnaturally biological contours of its form and the defiantly mechanical nature of its function, that terrified him. He looked up at the sky, around at the trees, then forced himself to face the water pump.

The handle of the pump began to turn slowly, the squeak­ing sound of its movement echoing in the still air.

And he woke up screaming.

The corporation put him up at Little America in Flagstaff. The accommodations were nice, the rooms clean and well furnished, the view beautiful. It was late May, not yet sum­mer and not warm enough to swim, but the temperature was fair, the sky clear and cloudless, and he and April spent the better part of that first day by the pool, she reading a novel, he going over the specs.

The quiet was disturbed shortly after noon by the loud and laughing conversation of a man and a woman. Alex looked up from his papers to see a bearded, ponytailed young man opening the iron gate to the pool area. The young man was wearing torn cut-off jeans, and the blond giggling girl with him had on a skimpy string bikini. The young man saw him staring and waved. "Hey, bud! How's the water?"

The girl hit his shoulder, laughing.

Alex turned back to his papers. "Asshole," he said.

April frowned. "Shhh. They'll hear you."

"I don't care."

Yelling in tandem, the couple leaped into the pool.

"Leave them alone. They're just young. You were young once, weren't you?"

That shut him up. He had been young once. And, now that he thought about it, he had at one time looked very sim­ilar to the sixties throwback now cavorting in the pool.

He'd had a beard and ponytail when he'd marched in the

Earth Day parade.

What the hell had happened to him since then?

He 'd sold out.

He placed the specs on the small table next to his lounge chair, took off his glasses and laid them on top of the papers. He watched the young man grab his girlfriend's breast from behind as she squealed and swam away from him toward the deep end of the pool.

Alex leaned back, looking up into the sea blue sky. Sold out? He was a successful scout for a chain of major resorts. He hadn't sold out. He had merely taken advantage of a for­tunate series of career opportunities. He told himself that he was where he wanted to be, where he should be, that he had a good life and a good job and was happy, but he was uncomfortably aware that the end result of his series of lucky breaks and career opportunities had been to provide him with a job that he would have found the height of hypocrisy in his younger, more idealistic days.

He was not the person he had been.

He found himself wondering whether, if he had been this age then, he would have supported the Vietnam War.

He had supported the war in the Persian Gulf.

He pushed those thoughts from his mind. He was just being stupid. Life was neither as simple nor as morally black and white as he had believed in his college days. That was all there was to it. He was grown up now. He was an adult. He could no longer afford the arrogant idealism of youth.

He watched the couple in the pool kiss, the lower halves of their bodies undulating in the refracted reflection of the chlorinated water, and he realized that, from their perspec­tive, he was probably one walking cliche. A traitor to the six­ties. Yet another amoral baby boomer with fatally skewed priorities.

He felt a warm hand on his shoulder, turned his head to see April staring worriedly at him from her adjacent lounge chair. "Are you okay?"

"Sure," he said nodding.

"It is because of what I said?"

"I'm fine." Annoyed, he turned away from her. He put on his glasses, picked up his spec sheets, and started reading.

He met with the realtors early the next morning, seeing them not one by one but all at the same time in one of Little America's conference rooms. He'd found from past experi­ence that dealing with real estate salespeople en masse gave him a distinct advantage, firmly establishing him as the dominant partner in the relationship, saving him from the sort of high-pressure sales talk that realtors usually used on prospective clients and putting the salespeople in clear com­petition with one another. It worked every time.

After his prepared talk and slide show, he fielded a few quick questions, then scheduled times over the next three days during which he could go with the realtors individually to look at property. This time, the corporation was looking for land outside the confines of the city. Flagstaff already had plenty of hotels and motels, and Little America itself of­fered resort quality accommodations. To compete in this market, they had to offer something different, and it had been decided that a state-of-the-art complex in a heavily forested area outside the city would provide just the edge that they would need.

They would also be allowed more freedom in design and latitude in construction under county rather than city build­ing regulations.

There were more sites to scout than he'd thought, more property available in the Flagstaff area than he'd been led to believe due to a recent land swap between the Forest Service and a consortium of logging and mining companies, and he realized as he penciled in times on his calendar that he and April would probably have to skip their side trip to Oak Creek Canyon this time.

It was just as well, he supposed. Sedona and the Canyon had been awfully overcrowded and touristy the last time they'd been through.

The white Jeep bounced over the twin ruts that posed as a road through this section of forest, and Alex held on to his briefcase with one hand, the dashboard with the other. There were no seat belts or shoulder harnesses in the vehicle, and the damned real estate agent was driving like a maniac.

The realtor yelled something at him, but over the wind and the roar of the engine he could only make out every third word or so: "We're ... southern ... almost..." He as­sumed that they were nearing the property.

Already he had a good impression of this site. Unlike some of the others, which were either too remote-with the cost of water, sewer, and electrical hookups prohibitive-or too close to town, this location was secluded and easily ac­cessible. A paved road over this dirt track would provide a beautiful scenic drive for tourists and guests.

They rounded a curve, and they were there.

At the meadow.

Alex blinked dumbly as the Jeep pulled to a stop, not sure if he was seeing what he thought he was seeing. They were at one end of a huge meadow bordered by giant ponderosas. There was a small lake toward the opposite end, a lake so blue that it made the sky pale by comparison.

It was the meadow whose picture he'd cut out of Arizona Highways.

No, that was not possible.

Was it?

He glanced around. This certainly looked like the same meadow. He thought he even recognized an old lightning-struck tree on a raised section of ground near the shore of the lake.

But the odds against something like this happening were ... astronomical. Thirty years ago, an Arizona High­ways photographer had chanced upon this spot, taken a photo which had been published in the magazine; he himself had seen the photo, cut it out, saved it. And now he was in a position to buy the property for a resort chain? It was too bizarre, too coincidental, too ... Twilight Zone. He had to be mistaken.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" The realtor got out of the Jeep, stretched. "This open space here, this clearing's some thirty acres, but the entire property's eighty acres, mostly that area there beyond those trees." He pointed to the line of pon­derosas south of the water. "You got yourself a small ridge that overlooks the National Forest and has a view clear to

Mormon Mountain."

Alex nodded. He continued to nod as the real estate agent rambled, pretending to listen as the man led him through the high grass to the water.

Should he tell the corporation to buy the meadow? His meadow? Technically, his was only a preliminary recom­mendation, a decision that was neither binding nor final. His choice would then be carefully scrutinized by the board. The corporation's assessors, land use experts, and design techni­cians would go over everything with a fine-toothed comb.

Technically.

But the way it really worked was that he scouted loca­tions, the board rubber-stamped the go-ahead, and the cor­poration's legal eagles swooped down to see how they could pick apart the deals mapped out by the local realtors.

The fate of the meadow lay in his hands.

He stared at the reflection of the trees and the clouds, the green and white reproduced perfectly on the still, mirrored surface of the blue water.

He thought back to his POP years, and he realized, per­haps for the first time, that he had been a selfish environ­mentalist even in his most ecologically active days. There was no contradiction between his work now and his beliefs then. He had always wanted nature's beauty to remain un­spoiled not for its own sake-but so that he could enjoy it.

He had never been one to hike out to remote wilderness areas and enjoy the unspoiled beauty. He had been a couch potato nature lover, driving through national parks and pretty areas of the country and admiring the scenery from his car window. He had objected to the building of homes on forest land that was visible from the highway, but had not objected to the presence of the highway itself.

He'd seen nothing at all wrong with building a home in his dream meadow, though he would have fought to the death anyone else who'd tried to build there.

Now he was on the other side of the coin.

He tried to look at the situation objectively. He told him­self that at least the corporation would protect the lake and the meadow, would preserve the beauty of this spot. Some­one else might simply pave it over. He might not be able to build a house here and live in the wilderness with April, but he could rent a room at the resort, and the two of them could vacation here.

Along with hundreds of other people.

He glanced over at the real estate agent. "Was this spot ever in Arizona Highways!" he asked.

The realtor laughed. "If it wasn't, it should've been. This is one gorgeous spot. Hell, if I had enough money I'd buy the land and build my own house here."

Alex nodded distractedly. They had reached the edge of the lake, and he crouched down, dipping his fingers in the water. The liquid felt uncomfortably warm to his touch. And slimy. Like melted Jell-O. He quickly withdrew his hand.

He stood, shaking the water from his fingers. There was a faint ringing in his ears. He looked around the meadow but found that his whole perspective had changed. The trees no longer seemed so beautiful. Rather than a miraculous exam­ple of the wonders of nature, the forest looked like a fake grove that had been inexpertly planted. The lake looked small and ill-formed, particularly in comparison with some of the pools and lagoons created for the newer resorts. The meadow, he saw now, would be perfect for either a golf course or an intra-resort park. Lighted walking paths or horse trails could be constructed through the grass and the trees. Landscaping could accentuate the meadow's natural beauty.

Accentuate natural beauty?

Something seemed wrong with that, but he could not put his finger on what it was.

"This sounds exactly like what you're looking for," the realtor said.

Alex nodded noncommittally. His gaze swept the short shoreline of the lake. And stopped. In the weeds on the opposite side of the water was a rusted water pump.

A chill passed through him as he stared at the pump. It was nearly identical to the one in his dream, his mind hav­ing conjured correctly even the rounded organic contours of its shape. His heart was pounding crazily, a rap rhythm in­stead of its usual ballad beat. He swiveled toward the real­tor. The agent was staring at him and smiling. What was the expression on the man's face? Was that amusement he saw in those eyes? Was there a hint of malice in that smile?

Jesus, what the hell was wrong with him? There was nothing unusual in the real estate agent's expression. He was being paranoid.

"Should I draw up the papers?" the realtor said jokingly.

Alex forced himself to remain calm, gave the man a cool smile, did not tip his hand. "What other properties can you show me?"

While April was in the shower, he looked at himself in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. For the first time he realized that he was middle aged. Really realized it. His gaze shifted from his thinning hair to his expanding waist to the increasing rigidity of his previously malleable features. His age was not something of which he'd been un­aware-each birthday had been a ritualized reminder of his loss of youth, each New Year's Eve a prompter of the pass­ing of time-but he now understood emotionally what be­fore he had comprehended only as an intellectual concept.

His best years were behind him.

He sucked in his gut, stood sideways in front of the mir­ror, but the effort was too much and he let it fall. That stom­ach was never going to go away. He would never again have the kind of body that females would look at admiringly. The women he found attractive would no longer find him attrac­tive.

He might die of a heart attack.

That's what had brought this on. His heart had been pounding so forcefully and for so long after he'd seen the water pump that he'd honestly been afraid it would burst. It did not seem possible that his unexercised and cholesterol-choked muscle could keep up that pace for so long a time without sustaining damage.

It had, though.

He walked across the carpeted floor of the hotel room and stared out the window at the black silhouette of the San Francisco Peaks. The mountains towered over the lights of Flagstaff but were dwarfed by the vastness of the Arizona night sky. He had two more days of scouting to do, two more days of meetings and sales pitches, but he knew that he had already made his decision.

He was going to recommend that the corporation buy the meadow. He didn't feel as bad about the decision as he thought he would, and that concerned him a little. He stared out the window at the stars, tried to imagine what it would have been like if he really had followed his dream, not allowed himself to be deterred by practicality. Would he have been with April or someone else? Would he still be living there in the meadow, by the lake, or would he have long since given up and, like most of those involved in the back-to-nature movement, joined mainstream society? Would he be where he was now anyway?

He didn't know, he wasn't sure, but he felt a vague sense of sadness and dissatisfaction as he looked into the night.

"Hon?" April called from the bathroom. "Could you bring me my panties from the suitcase?"

"Sure," he answered.

He turned away from the window and walked over to the suitcase on the floor near the bed.

He dreamed of the pond.

He walked down the narrowing, darkening path until he reached the blighted clearing, where the filthy water lay in a sickening pool. He stared at the pond and he was afraid. There were no monsters here, no evil spirits. This was not sacred Indian land that had been unthinkingly desecrated. There were no strange creatures swimming beneath the sur­face of the brackish liquid.

There was only the pond itself. And the pump.

These were the things that were scary. Against his will, he found himself moving across the dead ground to the edge of the water. He looked across the pond at the pump and the hose protruding from its side wig­gled obscenely, moving upward into the air, beckoning him. He awoke drenched in sweat.

Two days later, he faxed his preliminary report, along with the appropriate documents and estimates, to corporate headquarters, then took April out to look at the site. He drove himself this time, using the rental car, so the going was much slower.

He parked the car at the end of the tire-tracked path and said nothing as April got out of the vehicle and looked around. She nodded appreciatively as she took in the trees, the meadow, the lake. "It's pretty." she said.

He'd been expecting something more, something like his own initial reaction when he'd first seen that photo years ago, but he realized that she had never shown that sort of en­thusiasm for anything.

"It is pretty," he said, but he realized as he spoke the words that they no longer held true for him. He knew, ob­jectively, intellectually, that this was a beautiful spot, a prime location for the resort, but he no longer felt it. He re­membered the slick and slimy feel of the water on his fin­gers, and though his hands were dry he wiped them on his pants.

The two of them walked through the high wispy grass to the edge of the lake. As before, the placid surface perfectly reflected the sky above and the scenery around. He let his gaze roam casually across the opposite shore, pretending to himself that he had no object, no aim, no purpose in his vi­sual survey, but the movement of his eyes stopped when he spotted the water pump.

He glanced quickly at April to see if she'd noticed it. She hadn't.

He looked again toward the pump. Its metal was dark, threatening in the midst of the yellow-tan stalks of the weeds, its hose draped suggestively over the small mud bank into the water. He didn't want April to see the pump, he realized. He wanted to protect her from it, to shield her eyes from the sight of that incongruous man-made object in the middle of this natural wilderness. Was it man-made ? What kind of thought was that?

He made a big show of looking at his watch. "We'd bet­ter get back," he said. "It's getting late. We have a lot of things to do, and I have a long day tomorrow. There are a lot of loose ends to tie up."

She nodded, understanding. They turned to go, and she took his hand. "It's nice," she said as they walked back to­ward the car. "You found a good one." He nodded.

In his dream, he brought April to the pond. He said noth­ing, only pointed, like a modern-dress version of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. She frowned. "Yeah? So it's an old polluted pond. What of it?"

Now he spoke: "But why is it polluted? How did it get that way? There are no factories here, no roads to this spot-"

"Who knows? Who cares?"

She obviously didn't feel it. To her, this was nothing more than a small dirty body of water. There was nothing sinister here, nothing malicious. But as he looked up at the blackness of the dead sky he knew that she was being de­ceived, that this was not the case.

He turned around and she was gone, in her place a pillar of salt.

Again, he awoke sweating, though the room's air condi­tioner was blowing cool air toward him. He got out of bed without disturbing April and walked into the bathroom. He did not have to take a leak, did not have to get a drink of water, did not have to do anything. He simply stood before the mirror, staring at himself. His eyes were bloodshot, his lips pale. He looked sick. He gazed into his eyes and they were unfamiliar to him; he did not know what the mind be­hind those eyes was thinking. He leaned forward until his nose was touching the nose behind the glass, until his eyes were an inch away from their mirrored counterparts, and suddenly he did know what that mind was thinking.

He jerked away from the mirror and almost fell backward over the toilet. He took a deep breath, licked his lips. He stood there for a moment, closed his eyes. He told himself that he was not going to do it, that he was going back to bed.

But he let himself silently out of the hotel room without waking April.

He drove to the property.

He parked farther away this time, walking the last several yards through the forest to the meadow.

The meadow.

In the moonlight, the grass looked dead, the trees old and frail and withered. But the lake, as always, appeared full and beautiful, its shiny surface gloriously reflecting the magnif­icent night sky.

He wasted no time but walked around the edge of the lake, his feet sinking in the mud. The opposite shore was rougher than the side with which he was familiar, the tall weeds hiding rocks and ruts, small gullies and sharp, dead branches. He stopped for a moment, crouched down, touched the water with his fingertips, but the liquid felt slimy, disgusting.

He continued walking.

He found the pump.

He stared at the oddly shaped object. It was evil, the pump. Evil not for what it did, not for what it had done, not for what it could do, but for what it was. He moved slowly forward, placed his hand on the rusted metal and felt power there, a low thrumming that vibrated against his palm, re­verberated through his body. The metal was cold to his touch, but there was warmth beneath the cold, heat beneath the warmth. Part of him wanted to run away, to turn his back on the lake and the pump and get the hell out of there, but another - stronger - part of him enjoyed this contact with the power, reveled in the humming which vibrated against his hand.

Slowly, he reached down and pulled the lever up. The metal beneath his fingers creaked loudly in protest after the years of disuse. Yellow brackish liquid began trickling out of the pipe, growing into a stream. The liquid splashed onto the clear water of the lake and the reflection of the sky dark­ened, disappeared. The water near the pump began foaming, the suds blue then brown in the darkness.

He waited for a moment, then pushed the lever down again. He knelt, touched his fingers to the water. Now it felt normal to him, now it felt good.

He rose to his feet. Dimly, from the far side of the clear­ing, he thought he heard April call his name, but her voice was faint and indistinct and he ignored her as he began to strip. He took off his shoes, his socks, his shirt, his pants, his underwear.

He looked across the lake, but there was no sign of April.

There was no one there.

The last time I went skinny-dipping, he thought, I had a beard and a ponytail.

"POP," he said, whispered.

Naked, he dived into the water. His mouth and nostrils were filled instantly with the taste and odor of sulfur, chem­icals. He opened his eyes underwater, but he could see noth­ing, only blackness. His head broke the surface and he gulped air. Above, the sky was dark, the moon gone, the stars faint.

The water felt cool on his skin, good.

He took a deep breath and began to swim across the lake, taking long brisk strokes toward the dark opposite shore.

Roommates

I've known people who have roomed with strangers for "financial reasons, but to me the idea of sharing an apartment with someone I don't know sounds like a prescription for hell. Although I've never had to ad­vertise for a roommate, this is what I think it would be like.

____________________________

I should have charged Ira a cleaning deposit, Ray thought.

He looked around the empty bedroom. The fat son of a bitch had left cigarette butts, old Coke cans, crumpled paper, and other assorted trash all over the stained and dirty carpet. Bushes of fluffy dust had grown in the sharp corners of the room. The small adjoining bathroom was even worse. Used toilet paper clogged the sink and bathtub drain. The water in the toilet was black, the shower curtain covered with mold, and the entire bathroom smelled of rot and decay, dried urine and wet feces, old vomit. He'd almost puked when he'd peeked through the doorway.

I should have charged him a big deposit.

Ray sighed. Hell, if he'd known that Ira had been this much of a pig, he would have kicked him out months ago.

After all, it was his apartment, registered in his name. If any damage occurred, he'd be the one liable for it.

But he'd been a nice guy. He'd left Ira his privacy, had 1 not ventured into the territory beyond the closed door of f Ira's room. He'd even let the fat cow slide on the rent for two months after he'd lost his job. And how had the bastard J repaid him? He'd skipped out, owing Ray nearly a thousand dollars in bills and back rent, leaving behind this putrid pigsty to be cleaned up.

Ray walked over to Ira's bathroom and shut the door, almost gagging on the smell. He had to get this place cleaned up and find another roommate within the next two weeks or he'd be out of an apartment. Rent was due on the first of the month, and there was no way he'd be able to make the pay­ment alone.

But he was going to lay down the law for his next room­mate.

And charge a hefty security deposit.

He took another look around the filthy bedroom and went into the kitchen to get a garbage sack, the broom, the mop, the vacuum cleaner.

The Lysol.

ROOMMATE WANTED

W/M, 28, non-smkr, Ikngfor rmmte

to shrxpenses. 555-5715.

Ray came home from work, threw his tie on the couch, and walked immediately across the living room to check his answering machine.

Nothing.

He sat down on the couch. He was starting to get worried.

The ad had been running in the paper for three days and he hadn't gotten a bite. Not even a nibble. Yesterday he'd stopped off at the university after work and put up a notice on the housing bulletin board, figuring that since it was near the beginning of the semester he'd be able to find a re­spectable, trustworthy college student to room with him. But no one had called from the college, either.

He could feel himself starting to panic. After the Ira dis­aster, he'd sat down and written out a long list of ground rules: "The Law," as he called it. It was his intention to read The Law to all prospective roommates and to get their signed-agreement in case he needed it as proof should he ever have to take them to court. But for the past two days he'd found himself mentally striking items from the list, ad­justing his rules, rationalizing the dropping of standards and requirements.

He sorted through the mail in his hand. There was an en­velope addressed to Ira, and he opened it without hesitation. He had no idea where the pigman was or how to get ahold of him, but he probably wouldn't have forwarded the mail even if he had known. Inside the envelope was an overdue notice from Ira's bank, warning that if his car payment was not received his vehicle would be repossessed.

Ray smiled as he tossed the envelope into the trash. He hoped they'd nail that bastard's ass.

He turned on the TV and was about to start dinner— macaroni and cheese—when the phone rang. He rushed across the room and picked up the receiver before the ma­chine answered it. "Hello?"

"Hello. I'm calling about the apartment?" It was a woman's voice, tentative and hesitant, sounding as though she was not quite sure what to expect.

Ray tried to keep his voice light, to sound as unthreatening as possible, knowing that the woman might not be entirely comfortable with the prospect of sharing an apartment f with a strange man. "The room's still available."

"Room?"

"Well, room and bathroom. You'd have the master bed­room even though the rent would be split evenly."

She was silent.

"If you're worried about rooming with a man—"

"No, it's not that," she assured him.

"Well, would you like to come over and look at the place?"

"Sure. Will you be there tonight? About eight?"

"That'd be fine," Ray said. He did some quick mental calculations. If he skipped dinner, he would just have enough time to vacuum, dump the garbage, and straighten up the living room. He could grab some McDonald's after she left.

"Okay," she said. "I'll see you then."

"What's your name?"

"Lilly."

"Okay, Lilly. I'll see you at eight."

The doorbell rang at seven fifty-five, and Ray ran a hand through his hair and tucked in the back of his shirt before opening the door. "Hello," he said, smiling.

The smile froze on his face.

On the phone, Lilly's voice had been low, sensuous, se­ductive. In person, she was a thin, emaciated wraith, all elbow angles and pointy facial features. The plain white suit she wore accentuated the angular boniness of her frame, and both her light blue eyes and thin-lipped mouth were hard.

She carried in her hands a small, particularly unpleasant-looking monkey, a brown hairy beast with too many teeth.

"I should have told you over the phone that I was look­ing for a place for me and my baby," she said.

Baby? Ray frowned. Was that an affectionate term for her pet or ... ?

"Baby?" he said aloud.

She lifted the monkey. "My daughter." Her voice, which until now had been comparatively soft, was now as cold and hard as her appearance.

"I'm sorry—" Ray began, starting to close the door.

But the woman ignored him, walking into the dining room. "I suppose we could set the altar here," she said.

"Altar?"

"For my baby. The faithful will need a place to worship

her."

"Look ...," Ray said.

She stared at him. "You don't know who this is?" The ugly monkey grimaced at Ray. "She is the Christ child, the Second Coming. She was born to me a virgin and—"

"I'm sorry," Ray said quickly. "You'll have to go." He pressured her toward the door.

The monkey chattered angrily.

"You'll be damned to hell," the woman said, and there was nothing soft about her voice now. "You're like all the rest of them, and you will burn forever in the fiery pit, your skin will melt and your bones—"

"Get out of here now!"

"My baby damns you for eternity!" Lilly was screaming as she backed out the doorway. "Your teeth will crack open and your cock will rot and—"

He slammed the door.

She was still screaming her curses as, with trembling hands, he locked the door and retreated back into the apart­ment.

The answering machine broke the next day, and though he could tell that a message had been left, Ray had no way of hearing what it was. The recording mechanism had gone out on him and would play back only garbled static. On the off chance that it was someone who was interested in look­ing at the apartment, he washed and put away the breakfast dishes and threw away the newspaper that was spread out over the dining room table.

He was just straightening the magazines on the living room coffee table when there was a knock at the door. He ran a quick hand through his hair, rubbed a finger across his teeth, cleared his throat, and opened the door.

The man who stood there could not have been more than three feet high. He was wearing only a dark green bathing suit and his hairless skin was albino white. He was com­pletely bald, and even his eyebrows had been shaved off. "Mr. Feldman?" he asked in a high squeaky voice.

Ray nodded, and the man stepped inside, looking around the apartment. "TV!" he squealed and ran quickly across the living room, plopping down on the floor in front of the tele­vision.

Ray waited a moment, but the small man remained un-moving, mesmerized by the commercial that was on.

"Do you have cable?" he asked.

"The apartment's been rented," Ray said in as an author­itarian voice he could muster. He didn't like lying, but this was just getting too damn weird.

The little man stood up and faced Ray. His lower lip was trembling and tears were forming in his eyes. His small white hands began clasping and unclasping.

"I'm sorry," Ray said, softening. "But I rented the place out yesterday—"

With a loud wail, the man streaked past Ray and out the door. By the time Ray turned around, he was gone, the hall­way outside empty.

"I'm sorry," Ray called out, but there was no answer, no sound outside, and he closed the door.

He walked back into the living room and sat down tiredly on the couch. What the hell was he going to do? The month was almost over, and if things continued the way they were going, he was not going to find a roommate. There was no way he could afford another month by himself—

The front door opened.

Ray jumped to his feet. The man who stood in the door­way must have weighed four hundred pounds. He was bearded and bespectacled, wearing a faded Star Wars T-shirt, which bunched in folds around his gut. Next to him on the stoop were two suitcases and a huge piece of sheet metal. "You saved my life," he said, picking up the suitcases by their handles and clamping the sheet metal beneath his arm. He walked into the apartment, looking around. "Nice place."

"W-What..."

"I saw your invitation at the university."

"That wasn't an invitation. It was an advertisement. I'm just interviewing applicants—"

"Well, you can stop interviewing. I'm here." The man put his suitcases down on the floor. He leaned the sheet metal against the wall next to the dining room table and opened one of the suitcases, taking out a hammer and some nails.

He began nailing the sheet metal to the wall.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?"

"This here's for my war game."

Ray ran across the room. "You're not putting that on my wall."

A cloud passed over the man's face, and his smile faded.

He pushed roughly past Ray and strode into the kitchen, pulling open drawers until he found the one he wanted. picked up two carving knives, one in each hand, and advanced on Ray, the expression on his face one of furious rage. "What's all this talk of knives, boy?" He drew out the) word knives, stretching it into several syllables.

"I—" Ray began.

One of the knives whizzed by his head as the man threw it.

"What's all this talk of knives?"

Ray ducked. "I don't know what you're—"

Another knife flew past his head, embedding itself in the wall above the couch.

"I'm calling the police!" Ray ran toward the phone.

The fat man stood there for a moment, frowned, blinked his eyes, then smiled. He picked up his hammer and began nailing the sheet metal to the wall. "I put game pieces on here," he explained. "They're attached with magnets."

Breathing heavily, angered adrenaline coursing through his veins, Ray turned toward the man, dropping the phone. "Get out!" he yelled. He pulled one of the knives from the wall and advanced on the fat man.

"What'd I do?"

"Get out!" Ray rushed forward, and the man, panicking, dropped his hammer and ran out the door. Ray picked up first one suitcase, then the other, throwing them out the door. Comic books tumbled out. And pewter fantasy figures. And game pieces.

"My board!" the man cried.

Ray picked up the sheet metal and tossed it out the door.

Fury swept over the huge man's face once again. "Knives!" he said.

Ray closed the door just as the man started to run. He turned the lock, drew the dead bolt. There was a loud roar and a monstrous thump as the man rammed into the door, but the door miraculously held.

"I'm calling the police!" Ray said again.

But there was no answer, and he knew the man was gone.

"Hello. My name's Tiffany, and I'm calling in regard to the roommate-wanted ad in the paper." The woman's voice was lilting, almost musical, possessed of a thick southern accent.

Ray said nothing, only sighed tiredly.

"I'm getting desperate. I really need to find a place."

He took off his tie, throwing it on the couch. Cradling the receiver between his neck and shoulder, he started taking off his shoes. "Look, Miss—"

"Tiffany. Tiffany Scarlett. I'm a nurse at St. Jude's." She paused. "Look, if you haven't found a roommate yet, I'd like to come over and look at the place. I don't know what you're looking for, but I'm very quiet, and although my hours are sometimes a little weird because I work the second shift, I can assure you I would not disturb you. You proba­bly wouldn't even notice I was there."

Ray was silent. This was sounding good. Too good. This was exactly what he wanted to hear, and he tried to read be­tween the lines, searching for a catch.

"Just let me come over and take a peek. It's only five thirty. You haven't found a roommate yet, have you?"

"No," he admitted.

"Well then."

"Okay," he said. "Come by at seven."

"Seven it is."

"Do you know how to get here?"

"I have a map."

"See you at seven, then." "Okay. Bye-bye."

"Bye." He hung up the phone, closed his eyes. Please God, he thought, let her be normal.

The knock came at seven sharp. He stood for a moment unmoving, then opened the door.

He immediately stepped back, gagging. The smell was familiar, that unmistakable compound odor of putrescent filth and bodily waste which had permeated Ira's living quarters. He stared at the young woman who stood before him. If she had been clean, she would have been a knockout. She possessed the thin graceful body of a model or a dancer, and her face was absolutely stunning. But she was wearing a man's coveralls stained with food and mud and God knew what, and her face and hands were brown with grime. Her hair stuck out from the sides of her head in greasy matted clumps.

In her hands she held two metal pails filled with dirt.

"This'll do nicely," she said in her thick southern accent. "This'll do fine." She stepped into the apartment and imme­diately dumped both pails of dirt onto the rug.

"What do you think you're doing?" Ray demanded.

"The rest of it's out in the truck," she said. She walked straight into the kitchen and began filling up one of the pails with water.

"You have to leave," Ray said flatly.

Tiffany laughed. "Oh, don't be silly." She walked back into the living room, poured the water on top of the dirt, and dropped to her knees, mixing the dirt and water into mud and spreading it over the carpet.

"That's it!" he roared. He picked her up around the waist and carried her to the door.

"But—" she sputtered.

"No more!" He threw her outside. She fell hard on her buttocks, and before she could get up, he threw her pails out after her. They bounced and clattered across the concrete.

He slammed the door, locked it.

He threw himself down on the couch, opened the paper and started looking through the classified ads.

Ray glanced down at the small square of newspaper in his hand:

GUESTROOM: M. N/Smoker. N/Drugs. N/Parties.

Clean, $350 mth. Mike. 1443 Sherwood #7.

He looked up at the address on the side of the apartment building. This was it. 1443 Sherwood. He smiled. It was even better than he'd expected. He'd known that this ad­dress was in the nicest section of town, and he'd expected it to be well kept, but he hadn't thought it would be this nice. He walked through the wrought iron gates and looked down at the freestanding map of the complex in the entryway, finding number seven.

It was upstairs, and he walked alongside the wide banis­ter, around the corner, until he found the right doorway. He stood there for a moment, looking down at the manicured shrubbery, at the blue swimming pool.

He knocked on the door.

The smell assaulted his nostrils the moment the door opened: the clean scent of flour and sugar. He looked past the smiling man who stood in the vestibule. The floor of the apartment was covered with wet dough, as were the walls. In the center of the room was a barbed wire pen, and in the pen a snorting, snuffing creature that looked almost like a pig.

Almost, but not quite.

"As you can see," the man said, gesturing toward the pen,

"it's just my sister and me—"

"I'll take it," Ray said.

Llama

"Llama" was basically my response to astrology, nu­merology, and those sorts of pseudo-sciences. I wanted to show that patterns can exist, can recur, in nature, in society, and not necessarily mean anything. In the story, the protagonist's wife and unborn child died during the act of childbirth, and this man sees patterns everywhere, in everything, telling him what to do to avenge those deaths. The patterns might exist, but a lot of them are coincidence and have meaning only in the guy's head. They have no real objective meaning at all. That's how I feel about the fortune-telling arts.

When I wrote this story, there really was a llama living across the alley from my friend Dan Cannon's bookstore.

_________________________

Measuring:

The leg of the dead llama was three feet, two inches long.

And everything fell into place.

Three feet, two inches was the precise length of space be­tween the sole of my hanging father's right foot and the ground.

By the time my wife's contractions were three minutes I and two seconds apart, she had only dilated 3.2 centimeters and the decision was made to perform a caesarean.

My wife was declared dead at three twenty.

The date was March 20.

I found the llama in the alley behind the bookstore. It was already dead, its cataract eyes rimmed with flies, and the re­tarded boy was kneeling on the rough asphalt beside it, massaging its distended stomach. The presence of the retarded boy told me that secrets lay within the measurements of the dead animal, perhaps the answers to my questions, and I quickly rushed back inside the store to find a tape measure.

In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt bought a new Ford coupe. The license plate of the coupe, which Roosevelt never drove, was 3FT2.

My father voted for Franklin Roosevelt.

I thought I saw my wife's likeness in a stain in the toilet in the men's room of an Exxon station. The stain was green­ish black and on the right side of the bowl.

I breathed upon the mirror above the blackened sink, and sure enough, someone had written her name on the glass. The letters appeared—clear spots in the fog cloud of con­densation—then faded.

In the trash can, partially wrapped in toilet paper, I saw what looked like a bloody fetus.

I left the llama in the alley undisturbed, did not tell the police or any city authority, and I warned the other shop owners on the block not to breathe a word about the animal to anyone.

I spent that night in the store, sleeping in the back office behind the bookshelves. Several times during the night I awakened and looked out the dusty window to where the un-moving body lay on the asphalt. It looked different in the shadows created by moonlight and streetlamp, and in the lumped silhouette I saw contours that were almost familiar to me, echoes of shapes that I knew had meant something to me in the past but which now remained stubbornly buried in my subconscious.

I knew the dead animal had truths to tell.

Weighing:

The hind end of the llama, its head and upper body still supported by the ground, weighed one hundred and ninety-six pounds.

My dead wife's niece told me that she was sixteen, but I believe she was younger.

I have a photograph of her, taken in a booth at an amuse­ment park, that I keep on the top of my dresser, exactly 3.2 inches away from a similar photo of my wife.

The photo cost me a dollar ninety-six. I put eight quarters into the machine, and when I happened to check the coin re­turn I found four pennies.

My father weighed a hundred and ninety-six pounds at his death. He died exactly a hundred and ninety-six years after his great-great-grandfather first set foot in America. My father's great-great-grandfather hanged himself.

A hundred and ninety-six is the sum total of my age mul­tiplied by four—the number of legs of the llama.

***

The Exxon station where I saw my wife's likeness in a stain in the men's room toilet is located at 196 East 32nd Street.

I do not remember whose idea it was to try the pins. I be­lieve it was hers, since she told me that she'd recently seen a news report on acupuncture that interested her.

I showed her some of the books in my store: the photo­graphic essay on African boys disfigured by rites of passage, the illustrated study of Inquisition torture devices, the book on deformed strippers in an Appalachian sideshow.

She told me that if acupuncture needles placed on the proper nerves could deaden pain, wasn't it logical to assume that needles placed on other nerves could stimulate pleasure?

She allowed me to tie her up, spread-eagled on the bed, and I began by inserting pins in her breasts. She screamed, at first yelling at me to stop, then simply crying out in dumb animal agony. I pushed the pins all the way into her flesh until only the shiny round heads were visible, pressing them slowly through the skin and the fatty tissue of her breasts in a crisscross pattern, then concentrating them around the firmer nipples.

By the time I had moved between her legs, she had passed out and her body was covered all over with a thin shiny sheen of blood.

When the retarded boy finished massaging the llama's distended stomach, he stepped back from the animal and stood there soundlessly. He looked at me and pointed to the ground in front of him. I measured the space between the re­tarded boy and the llama. Five feet, six inches.

At the time my father hanged himself he was fifty-six years old.

My stillborn son weighed five pounds, six ounces.

Five times six is thirty.

My wife was thirty years old when she died.

According to the book Nutritional Values of Exotic Dishes, a single 56-ounce serving of cooked llama meat contains 196 calories.

This information is found on page 32.

The young man did not object when I took him in the men's room of the gas station.

He was standing at the urinal when I entered, and I stepped behind him and held the knife to his throat. I used my free hand to yank down his dress slacks, and then I pressed against him. "You want it, don't you?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

I made him bend over the side of the lone toilet and al­though his buttocks were hairy and repulsed me, I made him accept me the way my wife had. All of me. He tensed, stiff­ened, and gasped with pain, and I felt around in front of his body to make sure he was not aroused. If he had been aroused, I would have had to kill him.

I slid fully in and nearly all the way out fifty-six times be­fore my hot seed shot into him and with my knife pressed against his throat I made him cry out "Oh God! Oh God!" the way my wife had.

I left him with only a slight cut across the upper throat, above the Adam's apple, and I took his clothes and put them in the trunk of my car and later stuffed them with newspa­per and made them into a scarecrow for my dead wife's dying garden.

I hoped the young man was a doctor.

***

I realized the importance of measurements even as a child. When my sister fell out of the tree in our yard, I meas­ured the length of her legs and the total length of her body. Her legs were twenty inches long. Her body was four-foot-five.

My mother was twenty years old when she gave birth to my sister.

My sister died when my father was forty-five.

Requirements:

I was required to pay for the knowledge gained from my sister's measurements.

My sister had two arms and two legs.

I killed two cats and two dogs.

My wife was Jewish. Before coming to the United States, her parents lived 196 miles from the nearest concentration camp and 32 miles from the city where Adolph Hitler spent his youth.

My wife was born in 1956.

I showed Nadine a book on self-mutilation, letting her look at photographs of men who were so jaded, who so craved unique experience, that they mutilated their genitalia. She was fascinated by the subject, and she seemed particu­larly interested in a photo of a man's penis which had been surgically bifurcated and through which had been inserted a metal ring.

She told me that the concept of self-mutilation appealed to her. She said that she had grown tired of sex, that all three of her orifices had been penetrated so frequently, so many times in so many ways, that there were no sensations that were new to her. Everything to which she submitted was ei­ther a repeat or a variation.

I told her I would make her a new opening, a new hole, and I took her to the forest and I tied her to the cross-stakes and I used a knife to cut and carve a slit in her stomach big enough to take me.

She was still alive when I entered her, and her screams were not entirely of pain. She kept crying, "God."

My white semen mixed with her red blood and made pink.

I wanted to kill the doctor who killed my wife, but I saw him only once after her death and it was with a large crowd and the opportunity did not arise again.

So I rented a small apartment and stocked the shelves with medical books and arranged the furniture in a manner consistent with the way I believed a doctor would arrange it.

The apartment number was 56.

I made friends with a young man who, save for the beard, resembled my wife's doctor fairly closely. I invited the young man into my apartment, smiling, then I showed him the gun and told him to strip. He did so, and I made him put on the white physician's clothes I had bought. I forced him into the bathroom, made him shave, then made him put on the surgical mask.

I had purchased a puppy from the pet store the night be­fore, and I had killed the animal by slitting its throat, drain­ing the blood into a glass pitcher. I splashed the blood on the young man and now the illusion was complete. He looked almost exactly like the doctor who had killed my wife. I had written out the lines I wanted the surrogate doctor to say while I killed him, and I'd typed them out and had them bound in plastic.

I cocked the pistol, handed the pages to the young man, told him to speak.

End Exchange:

DOCTOR: I killed your wife.

ME: You wanted her to die!

DOCTOR: She deserved to die! She was a bitch and a whore!

ME: You killed my son!

DOCTOR: I'm glad I did it! He was a son of a bitch and a son of a whore and I knew I couldn't let him be born!

ME: That means that you deserve to die.

DOCTOR: Yes. You have the right to kill me. I killed your wife and son. It is only fair.

I shot him in the groin, shot him in the mouth, shot him in the arms, shot him in the legs, left him there to die.

In the newspaper article, it said he had bled to death four hours after the bullets had entered his body.

He had been a stockbroker.

I have clipped my toenails and fingernails once each week since my wife died. I save the clippings and store them in a plastic trash bag that I keep underneath my bed.

On the tenth anniversary of her death, on what would have been our son's tenth birthday, I will weigh the bag of nail clippings and then set the bag on fire.

I will swallow ten teaspoonfuls of the ashes.

The remainder I will bury with the body of my wife.

I will use the information gained from the weighing to determine the date and manner of my death.

John F. Kennedy was assassinated on the date of my birth.

My initials are J.F.K.

Cataloguing:

My store has sixteen nonfiction books containing infor­mation about llamas. There are five fiction books in which a llama plays an important role. All of these are children's books, and three of them are Hugh Lofting's Dr. Dolittle stories.

I have killed sixteen adults since my wife's death. And five children.

Three of the children were siblings.

The llama has changed my plans. The llama and the retarded boy.

I stare out the window of my store at the dead animal, at the retarded boy next to it, at the occasional gawkers who pass by and stop and whisper. I know that one of them, one of them over whom I have no control, will eventually notify the authorities and they will take the carcass away.

I cannot let that happen.

Or maybe I can.

For the presence of the llama in my alley indicates that I have done wrong and that a sacrifice is demanded.

But who is to be the sacrifice, the retarded boy or myself? Neither of us knows, and we stare at each other. He out­side, next to the animal, me inside, with my books. Through the dirty window he looks vague, faded, although the llama still seems clearly defined. Is this a sign? I don't know. But I know I must make the decision quickly. I must act today. Or tonight.

I have measured the body of the llama and it is four feet, ten inches long.

Tomorrow is April 10.

Full Moon on Death Row

Some years ago, a British editor decided to put to­gether an anthology for which authors would write stories based on titles the editor provided. The titles were all clichéd horror images, and the one assigned to me was "Full Moon on Death Row."

I knew I didn't want to feature a literal full moon or a literal death row. That would've been too easy. And too corny. As luck would have it, Dances with Wolves was on television, and I thought, Aha! I'll make "Full Moon" a Native American man's name. I got the idea for making "Death Row" the name of a street from the song "Sonora's Death Row," which ap­pears on the great Robert Earl Keen Jr.'s album West Textures.

Unfortunately, the anthology never came to pass, the editor disappeared, and I shelved the story. This is its first appearance.

***

He saw the man in the casino.

Full Moon thought at first that he was mistaken, that it was only someone with a cowboy hat and dirty blond mus­tache who looked like the man from Death Row. But then the man turned to face him, staring from across the crowded gaming room, and smiled.

A chill passed through him. It wasn't possible, it couldn't be.

But it was.

It had been thirty-five years, and he himself had grown f from a frightened boy into the middle-aged manager of the tribe's gambling enterprises, but the man with the mustache had not aged a day and looked exactly as he had all those years before, the eyes staring at him from across the noisy smoky room, the same eyes that had haunted his nightmares for the past three decades.

And the man recognized him.

That was the scary part. The cowboy knew who he was. Amidst the turmoil of the room, the people walking from slot machine to roulette wheel to card table, the man stood still, unmoving, staring.

Smiling.

Full Moon looked away. He was sweating, and his legs felt weak. He knew as surely as he knew his own name that the man had not come here to gamble or drink or meet with friends or sightsee or hang out.

He had come for him.

Full Moon looked up, glanced across the room to where the man had been standing.

He was gone.

He saw the other two playing bingo.

Like their compadre, they had not aged a day. Both the man with the patch over his eye and the fat man with the beard looked exactly as they had over three decades ago.

When they'd killed his father.

Full Moon looked around for help, caught the eye of Tom Two-Feathers. He was breathing hard, his heart pounding, but he forced himself to smile at the customers and act as though nothing was wrong while he made his way to the side of the bingo board where Tom was standing.

"What is it?" Tom asked, frowning.

Full Moon gestured toward the left side of the third bingo table. "Do you see—?" he began.

But they were no longer there.

He met that evening with the council, calling them to­gether in a special meeting at his house. Rosalie made sand­wiches, John brought beer. The atmosphere was supposed to be informal, relaxed. But Full Moon felt anything except re­laxed. He had told no one of what he had seen, had spent the better part of the afternoon wondering what he should do, whether he should ignore it, forget it, tell no one, or an­nounce it to everyone, and he had finally decided that the best course of action would be to lay it out before the coun­cil and let them decide what, if anything, was to be done.

By the time the men of the council pulled up in front of his house in two cars and a pickup, he was already starting to wonder if he had made the right decision. Maybe he should have kept it to himself. Maybe he should have dis­cussed it with Lone Cloud first. But it was too late to change his mind now, and he had John get the door while he told Rosalie to either go into the bedroom or stay in the kitchen. "What?" She looked at him as if he had just asked her to strip in public.

"There's something private I have to discuss with the council."

"Private? What do you mean 'private'? There's some­thing you can say to them that you can't say in front of me?"

"I'll tell you about it later," he promised.

"You'll tell me now."

He grabbed her shoulders, held her. "I don't want to fight in front of them. You know what they're like. And you know they don't like women to—"

"You could've told me earlier." She pulled away from I him. "What's with you tonight? Why are you so secretive? What's going on?"

"I'll tell you later."

"So I should just smile and bring in the sandwiches and | keep my mouth shut and leave."

"Exactly," he said.

"I was being sarcastic."

The front door opened. He heard John greeting the coun­cil members. "I know you were," he said, dropping his voice. "But please? Just this once? For me?"

She looked into his eyes, licked her lips. "It's bad, isn't it? Whatever it is, it's bad."

He nodded.

She took a deep breath.

"Please?" he asked.

She sighed, not looking at him. "Okay."

He smiled at her, gave her a quick kiss on the forehead. "I know you're going to listen in," he said. "But at least don't let them see you. Keep the kitchen door closed."

She nodded, kissed him back on the lips. "Don't worry."

He walked out of the kitchen and shook hands with Gra­ham, Ronnie, and Small Raven before nodding to Black Hawk and offering the council leader a seat on the recliner. The old man sat down slowly and awkwardly, and the other council members waited until he was settled before sitting on the couch.

Full Moon was silent until John left the room, then came straight to the point.

"I've seen the men who killed my father," he said. "The men from Death Row."

Silence greeted his announcement. "They were in the casino."

Black Hawk shifted uncomfortably on the chair. "Mus­tache, Beard, and Patch-Eye?" "Yes."

Black Hawk and the others nodded, and Full Moon no­ticed immediately that none of them seemed shocked or sur­prised at the news. None of them seemed even skeptical.

"They looked exactly the same," he told them. "They have-not grown old."

Again the members of the council nodded, as though murderers who never aged were an everyday occurrence. He looked from Graham to Ronnie to Small Raven to Black Hawk. Something was going on here. Something he didn't understand. He could feel it in the air, a subtext to the si­lence. He glanced toward the closed kitchen door where he knew—he hoped—Rosalie was listening.

He cleared his throat. "Has anyone else seen them?" The others looked at each other, shook their heads. "It is only you," Black Hawk said. "You are the one." "Lone Cloud's father was killed there also—" "Have you spoken to Lone Cloud?" "No," Full Moon admitted. "Do not." "Why?"

"This is a council matter. You did the right thing in com­ing to us." Black Hawk leaned forward. "You have told no

one else?"

"No. But I'm going to tell Lone Cloud."

"You cannot. The council—"

"They killed his father, too. He has a right to know."

"What do you expect to accomplish by telling him?" Ronnie asked. "What do you think he can do?"

"It will only bring pain," Graham said.

"Well, what are you going to do?" Full Moon asked.

"What's the council going to do about this?"

Small Raven's voice when he spoke was frightened. "You are not going to go there?"

He had not known it until that moment, but, yes, that was exactly what he was going to do. "I have to," he said.

Black Hawk nodded. "It is right," he said. "If he saw them, he saw them for a reason."

"But—" Ronnie began.

Black Hawk silenced him with a look. "It is not for us to say."

"I'm telling Lone Cloud," Full Moon said.

Black Hawk nodded. "It is yours to decide."

After the council left, Rosalie emerged from the kitchen. She was scared but supportive, and he hugged her and held her and the two of them sat down in the living room with John and told him about Death Row.

It was after midnight by the time they finished talking and Rosalie was tired and wanted to go to bed, but Full Moon was still wide awake. He told her to go on ahead, he was going to stay up for another hour or so.

He wandered outside, looked up through the cotton-woods at the night sky. There was a warm desert breeze tonight and it carried with it the soothing sounds of the Gila River, many miles away.

Many miles away.

He thought of Death Row. He had not been back to the street, or to Rojo Cuello, since his father had been killed. Neither, to his knowledge, had anyone else from the tribe. It was probably a regular city now, like Tucson or Tempe or Casa Grande, with malls and subdivisions and cable TV, but for himself and for most members of the tribe, it was a bad place, an evil place, tainted forever by its history, its charac­ter determined by its past.

He had learned of Death Row from his father. He had been nine, maybe ten, when his father brought him to the hill overlooking the town and pointed out the street to him. It was called "Death Row," his father explained, because so many of their people had died there. Had been murdered there.

His father had been killed on the Row, he said. As had his father before him and his father before him. "They were killed in the street like dogs. Beaten and stabbed while other people, white people, stood there laughing." "But that's against the law."

"Don't make no difference on the Row. The law has no power there. Never has, never will."

"How old is the Row?" Full Moon asked.

A shadow passed over his father's face. "Old."

"How old?"

"It was here before the town. Rojo Cuello grew up

around it."

"Is it older than—?"

"It's older than the tribe," his father said, and that shut him up. Full Moon looked down at the street, and though he'd felt nothing before, there now seemed something sinis­ter about the false fronts on the old buildings, about the wooden sidewalks and the hitching posts. It looked like a street out of a western, the type of movie he loved best, but at the same time it looked different, set apart from that glam­orized screen world in a way that he could not identify.

Older than the tribe.

That scared him, and he wondered why his father had brought him there.

"I will die on Death Row also," his father said quietly.

Full Moon could still remember the horrifying, frighten­ing feeling that had lodged in the pit of his stomach when his father spoke those words. "Let's get out of here," he said.

"It won't happen now."

"If we don't come back, it can't happen at all."

"It don't make no difference."

"Why?" Full Moon was close to panic, as unnerved by his father's attitude of resigned fatalism as by the substance of his words. "We could move. We don't have to stay on the reservation. We could move to California."

"No matter where I move, no matter what I do, I will have to return."

"If you know what's going to happen, then you know how to change it," Full Moon said.

His father shook his head. "If you know what will hap­pen," he said softly, "it will happen."

He had been right.

He'd been killed on the Row less than two years later.

And Full Moon had watched him die.

He stopped the next day by Lone Cloud's house. "You heard?" he asked after his friend had opened the door, in­vited him inside, and the two of them were seated on the couch.

Lone Cloud looked away, nodded. "I heard."

"What do you think?"

"I haven't seen anything."

"I know that. But what do you think?"

"I think they killed our fathers. I think we should blow the fuckers away."

Yes. Full Moon found himself nodding. He'd known that he had to return to Death Row, but he hadn't known why he needed to return or what he was going to do when he got there. But this sounded right. No, it felt right.

"What if they're ..." His voice trailed off.

"Ghosts?" Lone Cloud finished for him.

Full Moon nodded.

"Dead or alive, we kick their asses."

Full Moon smiled. The smile grew. Then he started to laugh. He hadn't realized how tense he'd been, how tightly wound. This whole thing had frightened him more than he was willing to admit, and it felt good to laugh again.

Lone Cloud smiled back at him, but there was no humor in it.

Full Moon thought of the way the man with the mustache had smiled at him from across the casino.

His own smile faded, his laughter dying.

"We're going to kill those sons of bitches," Lone Cloud said.

Full Moon nodded. "Yes," he said.

But was that really what they should do? Was that what their fathers would have wanted? Revenge?

He didn't know.

He felt like a teenager again, unsure and indecisive. His father had not been there for his high school years, but Full Moon had always acted as though he was, behaving the way he thought his father would want him to behave, doing things that he thought would make his father proud. Some­how, though, he had always fallen short. It was not that he had not done well, it was just that he had the feeling that his father would have expected more from him.

What would his father expect him to do now?

"I think we should talk to the council," he said. "Tell them our plans."

Lone Cloud snorted. "What for? It's a free country. We don't need their permission."

"They know more than we do," Full Moon said. "Maybe they can help us."

Lone Cloud thought for a moment. He nodded. "Okay. But we'll tell them. Not ask them. Tell them."

"Deal."

He let Lone Cloud do the talking when they met with the convened council later that afternoon. His friend was typi­cally forceful in his presentation, typically defensive in his attitude.

"No," Black Hawk said vehemently when Lone Cloud finished. "No guns. You cannot bring guns."

"Why not?"

"It is not the way."

"It's our way," Lone Cloud said.

Black Hawk stood with difficulty, his hand shaking as his finger pointed at the younger man. "No!"

"We're not asking you, we're telling you," Lone Cloud said.

The other council members looked nervously at each other.

"You will die!" Black Hawk said. His voice was an en­raged whisper.

"Then what should we do?" Full Moon asked him.

"You are the one who saw the men. You go there—"

"They killed my father, too."

Black Hawk glared at Lone Cloud. "You did not see them."

"What do I do when I get there?" Full Moon asked.

"I do not know. Perhaps it will be revealed to you."

"What do you think?" Full Moon asked his friend as they left the meeting a few minutes later.

"We bring the guns," Lone Cloud told him.

He dreamed that night of a saloon. The type of saloon that could be found in old westerns.

Or on Death Row.

There was no liquor behind the bar of the saloon, only jars filled with organs floating in watered-down blood. Skeletons, posed as stereotypical gamblers, sat around the round oak tables.

Full Moon stood alone in the middle of the saloon. From outside, he heard the sounds of a gunfight: shouting, then shooting, then silence. A moment later, he heard boots on the wooden sidewalk outside. A tall man was silhouetted from behind by the sunlight. He walked through the swinging doors into the saloon, and as he came into the room, Full Moon saw that the man was his father.

His father tipped his hat, and the top of his head came off. Blood poured down his face in even rivulets. "You killed me, son," he said. "You killed me."

They set off in the morning, leaving just after dawn in Lone Cloud's pickup.

Full Moon brought a .22.

Lone Cloud brought a .45 and a shotgun.

They did not speak as they drove through the desert. Lone Cloud was at the wheel, and Full Moon stared through the passenger window at the empty, overgrown parking lots and the abandoned, broken-windowed buildings that period­ically fronted the highway.

He thought about the men he'd seen in the casino. What if they weren't ghosts? he wondered. What if they were reg­ular men, men who just happened to have aged well?

They weren't.

But did that make any difference? He didn't know. The men had killed his father, and Lone Cloud's father, and he supposed they deserved what they were going to get, but it was still a dirty business and the whole situation made him extremely uncomfortable.

Full Moon cleared his throat, turned away from the win­dow. "I've never killed anyone before."

Lone Cloud did not take his eyes off the highway. "Nei­ther have I. But they have."

"What will that make us if we do kill them?"

"They're not alive," Lone Cloud said. "Or, if they are, they're not human."

"Then how are we going to kill them?"

"What do you mean, how? We brought guns."

"What if guns don't work on them?"

"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."

They drove for a moment in silence.

It is only you. You are the one.

"Why did they come to the casino?" Full Moon won­dered aloud. "And how come I was the only one who saw them?"

"Doesn't matter."

"Maybe it does."

"Black Hawk doesn't know any more about this than we do."

Full Moon didn't believe it, but he nodded. "I hope you're right," he said.

Death Row.

Full Moon got out of the pickup and stood on the hill above Rojo Cuello, looking down. The street looked exactly as he remembered it. Around the street, the city had been transformed, the empty ground between buildings paved over with parking lots, built up into condominiums, the buildings themselves torn down or made over.

But Death Row remained unchanged.

He had known that would be the case, and it frightened him. He glanced over at Lone Cloud, and the blanched look on his friend's face mirrored his own emotions perfectly.

For all of his bravado, Lone Cloud was just as scared as he was.

He scanned the street below for the spot where his father had been killed, found it almost instantly.

The past returned in a rush.

He 'd been awakened by his father in the middle of the night, shaken awake, and he opened his eyes to see his fa­ther sitting on the edge of the bed. "Get dressed," his father said. "It's time to go."

"Go where?"

"Rojo Cuello. Death Row."

He cried almost all the way there, begging his father to turn back, but his father drove on through the darkness, re­peating grimly that he had no choice.

Full Moon was supposed to drive the pickup back home.

His father would give his life to Death Row but not his truck.

Truth be told, Full Moon had been frightened more for himself than for his father, filled with dread and terror and the horrifying certainty that he too would be killed, but when his father parked the pickup on the hill above town, gave him the keys, told him to take off, and started walking down the path that led through the weeds and brush on the side of the hill, Full Moon drove down the Rojo Cuello highway instead, his heart thumping so hard it felt as though it would burst through his rib cage as he sped down the winding road to Death Row.

He and his father reached the street at the same time. And he saw the men take his father down. He 'd driven to the street with no plan, with only the vague notion that he would rescue his father and save his life, but his mind had been a terrified blank as he 'd sped down the curving road, and though he often thought later that if he had floored the pedal and barreled down the street he might have run over the murderers, he braked to a stop at the head of Death Row.

His father emerged from between two buildings, walking slow and straight, head held high as though unafraid, and the man with the mustache came out from the lingering sun­rise shadows and shoved a knife deep into his stomach.

Full Moon screamed, and the man looked down the street at him and grinned.

His father fell, clutching his midsection and rolling on the ground, and the other two appeared out of nowhere, the man with the patch laughing as he yanked down his father's pants and cut off his penis, the man with the beard scream­ing as he used a hatchet to hack off the top of his head.

For a brief second, Full Moon considered speeding down the street and running over all three of them, but he knew he'd hit his father's body as well, and then the three men were bending over his father and there were even more knives in their hands, the multiple blades glinting orange in the dawn sun, and he understood that if he did not get out of there then, the men would come after him, too.

He threw the truck into reverse and took off, barely able to see through his tears, looking more at the rearview mir­ror than through the windshield, seeing the men gleefully carving up what was left of his father, and then he smashed into a bush, nearly going off the road, before he quickly righted the vehicle and sped back up the hill, this time keep­ing his eyes on the pavement.

He stopped at the top of the hill and looked down, but Death Row was empty, and he quickly put the truck into gear and took off.

"I don't see anyone down there."

He glanced over at Lone Cloud, wondering how his friend's father had been killed. They had never discussed the details.

Full Moon walked toward the pickup. "It's getting late," he said. "Let's go."

They parked in the middle of the street, in front of an old livery stable at the east end of the Row. The pavement had faded into dirt some yards back, and before them the dusty road narrowed as it passed between the wooden buildings. There was something threatening about the stillness of the street, about the silence and the utter lack of life. One block over, cars and trucks were driving by office buildings and fast food restaurants, but here on Death Row it was as if the modern world did not exist.

Except for them.

Lone Cloud got out of the pickup, tucking the .45 in his belt, the shotgun cradled in his hands. Full Moon followed his friend, holding the .22, ready to shoot anything that moved.

Lone Cloud cleared his throat. The sound was loud, jar­ring. "Do you think they're hiding?" he asked.

Full Moon shrugged.

"You think we should look for them? Or should we wait for them to find us?"

Full Moon did not know, and he was about to shrug again, when he noticed a one-story building halfway down | the street on the left side, situated between a small hotel and what looked like a sheriff's office. The building stuck out, f protruding into the street, and its architectural style was rad­ically different from that of the surrounding structures.

He took a tentative step forward, sucking in his breath. A wave of cold washed over him as he looked at the building. It was their house, their old house, the one his father had built.

The one that had burned down after his father's death.

His father's murder.

How had the house burned down? Was it arson? A fire­place accident? A leaky gas line? He couldn't remember.

Had he ever known?

His gaze was drawn to the blackness within the open doorway. He could not remember the last time he had thought of their old home, but now that he considered it, everything about the situation seemed suspect. And the fact that he could remember no details, that his mind glossed over the specifics of that time, retaining only the broad brushstrokes of occurrence, worried him.

He walked toward the house, toward the open door, his hands gripping the rifle so tightly that his palms and fingers hurt. He heard Lone Cloud following behind him.

It is only you. You are the one.

There was something about Black Hawk's words that didn't sit well with him, that made him uneasy, though he hadn't really thought about it until now. The one? What did that mean? Was he the one chosen to kill these creatures? Or was he the one chosen as a sacrifice to them?

Had his father been sacrificed?

Full Moon stopped walking. He had never thought of that before, had never even considered that the tribe might be complicitous in the killings that had occurred on the Row. But it made sense. He had wondered at the time why the law had never been brought in to investigate, why there had never been any police or FBI or BIA or any sort of officials looking into the murder of his father, but when he'd asked his mother about it, she had told him to shut up, to not say anything, that there was nothing that could be done about Death Row.

He stared at the house, and he remembered how, after their home had burned down, they had been given a new one, a bigger one, one built especially for them by two of the tribe's contractors.

Given?

Since when had the tribe given houses away?

He turned toward Lone Cloud. "After ..." He cleared his throat. "After what happened to your father, you moved, didn't you?"

Lone Cloud nodded. "They were tearing down our old house to build the gas station."

"And they gave you a bigger house?"

Lone Cloud nodded, puzzled. "Yes."

"Payoff," Full Moon said. "They sacrificed our fathers and paid us off."

Lone Cloud shook his head. "What the fuck are you talk­ing about?"

"You don't see it?"

"See what?"

"Why did they let our fathers come here alone? Why didn't they get a posse together? They knew what the Row was like. They knew what happened here. Why didn't they come with our fathers? Or try to stop them?"

"What could they do?"

"Why did they let us come here? Why didn't they want us to bring guns?"

Lone Cloud blinked. He stared down the street. "Black Hawk," he said slowly.

Full Moon nodded.

"He was council leader when our fathers were killed."

"And he was old even then." Full Moon licked his lips. "How long do you think he's been head of the council?"

"You know the tribe's history."

"No, I don't. You tell me."

Lone Cloud thought for a moment. "I don't either," he admitted.

"How old do you think he is?" Full Moon asked. Lone Cloud did not answer, and the only sound on the silent street was their overloud breathing. You are the one.

Damn right, Full Moon thought. He took a deep breath. "Let's do it," he said.

They strode forward. The fear was still there, but it had been shunted aside by anger, and Full Moon was grateful for that. He walked into the black doorway of the house his fa­ther built, Lone Cloud a step behind.

Only it wasn't the house his father built.

The outside was exactly the same, down to the chipped white paint on the right upper edge of the doorframe, but there was no coat closet entryway leading into the living room. There was only a long, narrow, black-floored, black-walled, black-ceilinged hallway that stretched forward to what looked like a blood-red room.