SEEING RED

David J. Schow

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© 2012 / David J. Schow

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION BY T.E.D. KLEIN

RED LIGHT

BUNNY DIDN'T TELL US

INCIDENT ON A RAINY NIGHT IN BEVERLY HILLS

THE WOMAN'S VERSION

LONESOME COYOTE BLUES

NIGHT BLOOMER

ONE FOR THE HORRORS

VISITATION

PULPMEISTER

COMING SOON TO A THEATRE NEAR YOU

THE EMBRACING

BLOOD RAPE OF THE LUST GHOULS

NOT FROM AROUND HERE

AFTERWORD: CRIMSON HINDSIGHT

CRIMSON HINDSIGHT

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

Exactly thirteen months ago, seeking a weekend retreat from the city, I bought myself a cozy little house in the Catskills. Immediately after I moved in, two things occurred: real estate prices began to drop, diminishing the house's market value, and Lyme disease suddenly became the scourge of the East Coast, making me afraid to set foot outside.

And now, having read the last story in this collection, "Not From Around Here," I'm going to be equally afraid to stay inside the house. It won't be so bad when someone's there with me, but whenever I'm alone I'll be listening for a furtive scratching at the window and the patter of feet on the floorboards. It'll probably be hard to get to sleep, and taking a shower without someone standing guard by the door is going to be out of the question. I mean, the house is pretty much ruined for me.

Nice going, Dave. Thanks a lot.

Actually, "Not From Around Here" is extreme even by the standards of this book. It's an authentically nightmarish story that, as they say, pushes the envelope a bit, and it's (as they used to say) Not For The Squeamish. I gather that it's already offended a few people. I doubt I'd have bought it for Twilight Zone.

I did, however, buy a number of the stories you'll find here, and Twilight Zone, I'm proud to say, is where they originally appeared. The first of them, an earlier version of "Pulpmeister," appeared in our December '82 issue, along with an explanation by the author: "I spent a goodly chunk of 1981 writing six violence novels under a pseudonym, more or less exactly as described," he wrote. "Both the series and the publisher shall remain nameless." The photographs he'd sent us showed a strange-looking guy with a moustache, soulful-looking eyes, and an indecently long ponytail; he looked as if one of the Kean children had mated with a tomcat. In one photo, for reasons unknown, he was about to smash a bottle on his desk with a hammer and was smiling bemusedly. After comparing him to L.P. Hartley, S.J. Perelman, and George Gissing (Twilight Zone was nothing if not high-toned), I informed readers that Schow would soon be reappearing in our pages with a four-part nonfiction series chronicling The Outer Limits.

By the time it was over the series had grown to twice that length, Schow had become a familiar name to TZ's readers, and chattily introducing him had become something of a habit. His face, too, had become a familiar one in the magazine, though now, thanks to a new photograph, it looked simply Mephistophelian. So prolific was Schow—and so much more talented than the competition—that during the course of the series we also ran two more of his short stories, "Coming Soon to a Theater Near You" and "Lonesome Coyote Blues," and I later bought another, "The Woman's Version." In doing so, I violated four of my most sacred unwritten rules:

1—No stories about Viet vets.

2—No stories about rock musicians.

3—No writers appearing twice in the same issue.

4— No violence so excessive as to turn readers' stomachs.

I've got nothing against veterans, but stories hearkening back to the bloody days of Vietnam have a way of bringing out the worst in many writers; "all too often," I once wrote, "they are just excuses for macho chest-thumping and a curious kind of in-the-know elitism" that I've always thought of as "Nam-dropping." Still, "Coming Soon" was just too good to pass up; as I said in TZ, it was "both horrifying and humane enough to overcome my prejudices."

The same goes for "Lonesome Coyote Blues," one of the most haunting stories in this book. Rock-and-roll fiction usually leaves me cold (maybe it's all that smug music-industry jargon), but "Blues" is an absolute stunner, at once hip, spooky, and tender. Each time I read it, I'm moved.

Both "Blues" and "Coming Soon" also violated Rule #3. It doesn't look good for a magazine to depend too openly upon a small coterie of writers (though I think The New Yorker once featured an Updike story and a book review in the same issue), and I was reluctant to publish these stories while the Outer Limits series was still running. True to his pulp-writing roots, Schow was willing to appear pseudonymously as "Oliver Lowenbruck"--the hero, incidentally, of "Pulpmeister."

As for Rule #4, "The Woman's Version" comes awfully close. There are some descriptions in it, like that of the "dry cinnamon odor of flesh to which rot was but an ancient memory," that may make your nose wrinkle, and a few that may make you want to wash your hands, such as this one of a landlord who hails from "some unfathomably strange Middle Eastern country":

Gnomelike and dull-eyed, he exuded the smell of stale dates and sour sweat. There were brown gaps between each of his teeth, and the lips of his slicked-back hair were perpetually gravid with droplets of an opaque liquid.

Phew! Not someone you'd want to spend the night with which is precisely the point, since Schow is writing from the perspective of a nasty-minded man-hating spinster whom sex both repels and obsesses. The world is filtered through her sensibility, and it comes out ugly. While for the euphoric young family man of "Not From Around Here" the moon is "a hard silver coin, its white brilliance . . . shimmering on the sea-ripple," for this woman it hangs in the sky "like a slice from a spoiled orange."

The fact is, Schow is something of a chameleon at this game; in story after story he adopts widely varying points of view, and does so convincingly. One story, striking an attitude so determinedly punk that it makes the thugs of A Clockwork Orange sound like preppies, gives the middle class a thorough trashing. ("Fat-assed visitors with their squawking brats and plaid and cellulite and cameras clogged the walking pace . . . None of the men looked stiff; none of the women fuckworthy. They were the missionary position missionaries of America. They were doughy and dissipate.") Another celebrates, those same bourgeois values—the nuclear family, the joys of homeowning, the gorgeous wife and adorable kid and harmless little "marital spats"—with the fervor of a genuine family man (albeit one whose family winds up dead).

Yet there's one quality that nearly all the stories share, for in each case Schow writes with the confidence of a somewhat jaded insider who's seen it all, knows the score, and knows the way things really work. He comes off, in short, as almost preternaturally knowing. In "Red Light," which leads off this collection, his narrator, a photographer, sounds like a genuine pro; so does the narrator of "Lonesome Coyote Blues' who can speak familiarly of the rock hits of the past, as well as of some "cheezoid garage band called Abduction." You can hear the experience in his voice, the affection and the contempt.

In "Pulpmeister," of course, Schow's hero is an authentic insider, our tour guide to a modern-day Grub Street where hacks churn out "prestige soft porn" and "books with numbers instead of titles." Yet in "Night Bloomer" he's an insider too, perfectly at home in the soulless world of the corporation, where the goal of sex is "a good technical orgasm" and adultery's just "a squirt of randiness" and where thinking you're happy is as close to true happiness as you're ever going to get.

The ultimate insider's picture is probably the one offered by "Incident on a Rainy Night in Beverly Hills": the vision of a nationwide conspiracy so loonily ingenious that you almost believe it might be true. (The story also offers, among other pleasures, a novel explanation for why Hollywood makes so many bombs, why Star Wars was so popular, and why it's so hard these days to get real butter with your popcorn.) The analyst in the story sounds genuinely analytical; his screenwriter friend sounds capable of actually turning out a clever script. Indeed, the one thing Schow's heroes have in common is sheer intelligence; no matter what their station in life, their talk is invariably hip, self-aware, cleverly metaphoric, and just plain knowledgeable.

Most of all, it's a knowledge about film. In fact, after savoring tales such its "One for the Horrors," "Coming Soon," and—wait for it—"Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls," you're half convinced that Schow himself must have spent at least twelve hours a day since infancy in the fleapit cinemas described so lovingly in his fiction, taking in movie after movie, and the rest of his waking hours thumbing through movie magazines or watching TV. Even if you've never read The Outer Limits Companion, Schow's astonishingly detailed, painstakingly well-researched book-length retrospective of the classic TV series, these stories alone would suggest a writer unusually savvy about film.

And why not? Schow is a longtime denizen of Hollywood, and peered at from the safety of the opposite coast, the world of his stories seems very much a Hollywood one, where "the past" means old movies and a plot to control the United States is enacted through the movie screen. That staple of traditional fantasy, the quaint little shop full of books left unwritten or uncompleted, has here become a theater showing legendary "lost" films or a mysterious radio station. It's a world where pop culture reigns and where that East Coast icon, Lovecraft, must get by with only two passing references (one of them to a man wearing "a hangdog H.P. Lovecraft face"). When a character in "Visitation" mentions Poe and observes, "All this place needs is a tarn," he seems to have stepped out of an entirely different universe, for out here the cultural coordinates are right off the screen: a woman doesn't kill herself, or get murdered by her boyfriend, or go mad; she "pulls a Marilyn Monroe" or has "a Dorothy Stratten pulled on her," or goes the way of Frances Farmer. While there are nods to TV's Twilight Zone and Leave It to Beaver, almost everything else reminds Schow's characters of a movie they've already seen. The sinister hotel in "Visitation" is "Gothically overstated" and (for reasons made clear in the story) resembles "a Hollywood set for a horror film." A man's heroic death in a fire reminds him, as he dies, of the climax of an old movie. A sidewalk encounter with his neighbors reminds someone else of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and, in a further Eastwood reference, a ticket-taker's voice, "strepthroat dry," reminds another character of "a bad parody of the Man With No Name."

The "strep-throat dry" points up another one of Schow's strengths, an irrepressible sense of the comic. He's too bright, and probably too impatient, to turn out the sort of straight, plodding, journeyman's prose that suffices for so many writers in the genre. His wit is arch and knowing. Why say "smart enough" when you can say "possessing enough intellectual candlepower"? Why opt for a "sickly smile" or some other cliché when you can offer "the smile of a terminal cancer patient laughing at a tumor joke"? Writing "unless you've been out of touch" would be too dull; Schow prefers "unless you've spent the last decade eating wallaby-burgers in the Australian outback." Down a Hollywood street comes not merely "a car" but "a rented LeBaron full of townies from some Texas hog wallow." A character inhabits "the West L.A. smogscape" and another, with mottled complexion, is "a victim of a spill in the birthmark department." A professional skeptic describes his ambition as "to put a bogey in the paranormal plumbing." The main characters in a sleazy horror film are deftly summed up as "the teen hero and his plucky bimbo squeeze"; and as for the film itself, consider the reaction of a critic aptly named Hackamore: "He'd hated it going in. Coming out, he wanted to fuck it till it bled." Whatever you want to say about David Schow's prose, it ain't colorless.

And he can't resist a throwaway gag; he's overflowing with them. He likes to make up mock newspaper headlines, lurid book titles, and parodic names for bands; when you're cursed with an overfertile imagination, it's hard to hide it under a bushel. In "Bunny Didn't Tell Us" the literary equivalent of a Jack Davis E.C. comic, full of ragged texture, raffish detail, and wild caricature, someone isn't merely the wife of a millionaire, she's "married to a toilet-paper tycoon"; a would-be grave robber enjoys a quiet moment to pick his nose, and a series of gruesome gravesite killings becomes an exercise in slapstick horror. In another, grimmer story, a coughing smoker, "with the attitude of a true nicotine addict, puffed his cigarette with relief." Even in a tale as unrelievedly bleak as "Not From Around Here" with its images of bloody bed sheets and broken glass, Schow can't resist a fiendish pun involving a severed limb and his comment on a retarded neighbor: "I've seen more raw intelligence in the eyes of goldfish."

I know that it amuses Schow to think of himself as something of a punk horror writer, a founding member of the "Splatterpunk" school (a name he invented) whose mission in life, like that of a punk rocker, is épater le bourgeois. But judging by the intelligence of his writing, I suspect that he's wrong about his own work. In truth, I think, he's a practitioner of something far more interesting than Splatterpunk and considerably rarer: call it Smart Horror. He's certainly too smart for some of the schlocky paperback originals he used to produce under house names, and for the gory scripts he's turning out today. Personally, I think he's too smart for the genre altogether.

Horror, let's face it, is basically pretty dumb. You're writing about events that are preposterous, and the trick is to dress them up in language so compelling that the reader doesn't care. But when you're really good at it, and as smart as David Schow, your language does more than merely carry the reader along; it becomes a joy in its own right.

Nice going, Dave. Thanks a lot.

- T.E.D. Klein

New York City, June 1989

RED LIGHT

Tabloid headlines always make me laugh. You know: I ABORTED BIGFOOT'S QUINTS, or SEE ELVIS' ROTTING NUDE CORPSE, or EXCLUSIVE ON JACK THE RIPPER'S GRANDSON! Earlier today, while passing one of those Market Street newsvendors, I saw similar hyperbolic screamers, and I laughed. I did not want to laugh; it came out as a sick coughing sound.

TASHA VODE STILL MISSING

Terrorist Kidnapping of International

Cover Girl Not Ruled Out

What the hell did they know about her? Not what I knew. They were like vampires; they sucked. Ethically. Morally.

But what did that make me?

At the top of the dungheap was the good old National Perspirer, loudly thumping the tub. A four-color cover claimed all the hot, steaming poop on Tasha's disappearance, enumerating each of her three Juicy, potential fates. One: She had pulled a Marilyn Monroe. Two: She had had a Dorothy Stratten pulled on her by some gonzo fruitbag lover. Three: She was tucked away in the Frances Farmer suite at some remote, tastefully isolated lunatic asylum.

Or maybe she was forking over richly to manufacture all this furious controversy in order to boost her asking price into the troposphere—in a word, hoax time.

It was pathetic. It made my gut throb with hurt and loss, and downtown San Francisco defused behind a hot saltwash of welling tears. I blamed the emissions of the Cal Trans buses lumbering up and down the street, knowing full well I couldn't cop such a rationalization, because the buses ran off electricity, like the mostly defunct streetcars. Once, I'd nearly been decapitated by a rooftop conductor pole when it broke free of the overhead webwork of wires and came swinging past, boom-low, alongside the moving bus, sparking viciously and banging off a potted sidewalk tree a foot above my head, zizzing and snapping. Welcome to the Bay Area.

I had no real excuse for tears now, and wiped my eyes with the heel of my hand. My left hand; my good hand. I was still getting used to the weight of the new cast on my other one.

One of the street denizens for which Union Square is infamous had stopped to stare at me. I stared back, head to toe, from the clouds of gnats around his matted hair to the solid-carbon crustiness of his bare, black feet. He caught me crying with his mad prophet eyes, and the grin that snaked his face lewdly open suggested that yes, I should howl with grief, I should pull out a Mauser and start plugging pedestrians. I put my legs in gear instead. I left him behind with the news kiosk, the scungy, sensationalist headlines, and all those horrifyingly flawless pictures of her. The bum and I ceased to exist for each other the moment we parted.

I know what happened to Tasha. Like a recurring dream, she showed up unannounced on my doorstep just four days ago. Like a ghost then, like a ghost now.

People read People. The truth, they never really want to know, and for good reason.

Her real name was Claudia Katz. In 1975, nobody important knew my name, or either of hers, and I'd already shot thousands of pictures of her. When I replaced my el cheapo scoop lamps with electronically synchronized umbrella shades so new that their glitter hurt your eyes even when they weren't flashing, I commemorated the event by photographing her. New Year's Eve, 1974—five seconds before midnight, I let a whole roll rip past on autowind, catching her as she passed from one year into the next. Edited down, that sequence won me a plaque. Today, it's noteworthy only because Tasha is the subject.

"Claudia Katz is too spiky and dykey," she explained later, as she pulled off her workout shirt and aired a chest that would never need the assistance of the Maidenform Corporation, breasts that would soon have the subscribership of Playboy eating their fingernails. "Claudia Katz is somebody who does chain-mail-and-leather doggie-collar spreads for Bitch Records. Claudia Katz is not somebody you'll find on the staple page in Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue."

I pushed back an f-stop and refocused. "Part your lips. Stop. Give me the tip of your tongue, just inside your teeth." Her mouth was invitingly moist; the star filters would trap some nice little highlights. Click-whirr click-whirr. "Tilt your head back. Not so much . . . stop." I got a magnified close-up of the muscles beneath her skin, moving through the slow, programmed dance of positions. My big fan was on, making her amber hair float. "Hands together, arms back over your head. Turn, turn, turn . . . whoa, right there, stop!" Click-whirr another thousandth of a second, immobilized. "Sports Illustrated? Why bother aiming it at a bunch of beer-swilling beat-offs in baseball caps, anyway?

"You don't understand the way the world works, do you?" She spoke to the camera lens, because she knew I was in there, watching. "You've got to make people look at your picture and either want you, or want to be you. When they anticipate your next picture, that means they're fantasizing about you. Saying to themselves, 'Geez, I wonder what she looks like in bed, without that damned bathing suit on?'"

It was my privilege to know the answer to that one already. Grinning, I baited her: "The women say that, do they?"

"No, not the women, you dork." The warm, come-hither expression on her face was entirely contrary to her tone. She was, after all, very good at her job. Click-whirr. "The men. When all the men in the country, in the world, lust for you, then you can say no to the lot of them. If all the men want you, then all the women lust to be you. Voilà."

"Excluding lesbians, Tibetan lamas, and some Kalahari bushmen." Her reply begged my sarcasm. She expected it. "Not that, um, lust and envy aren't admirable goals . . ."

If I had not been shooting, her brow would have rearranged and an unfamiliar crease would appear between her eyes, indicating her annoyance at my childish, defeatist, irrelevant, smartass remark. And then she'd say—

"You just don't understand." Right on cue. "But I'll be on top someday. You'll see."

"I'd like to see you on top after you finish your shower." It flew out of my mouth before I could stop it. File a lawsuit if you want. "It's your turn."

She decided not to blow up, and rolled her eyes to keep from giggling. Click-whirr. My heart fumbled a beat. I'd just netted a shot of an honest-to-U.S.-Grant human being, peeking out from behind a cover-girl façade of plastic. Nude from the waist up, sensual not from flaunted sexuality, but because she let you in on the secret that the whole sham was strictly for laughs and wages. A real woman, not a fantasy image. I wanted that photo. It reduced the rest of the roll to an exhausted, mundane repertoire of tit shots—pretty billboard face, pasted-on bedroom eyes of that inhuman chromium color, the "ideal," a dime per double dozen from one shining sea to the next, from the four-star hookers at the Beverly Hills Hotel to the smartly attired, totally paranoid corporate ladies who took their Manhattan business lunches in neat quartets.

"To hell with the shower," she had said then, lunging at me with mischief in her eyes.

I still have that photo. Not framed, not displayed. I don't make the effort to look it at anymore. I can't.

Claudia—Tasha—got precisely what she wanted. That part you know, unless you've spent the last decade eating wallaby-burgers in the Australian outback. The tiny differences in the way we perceived the world and its opportunities finally grew large enough to wedge between us. Her astronomical income had little to do with it. It was me. I made the classic mistake of trying to keep her by blurting out proclamations of love before my career, my life, was fully mobilized. When you're clawing through the riptide of your twenties, it's like a cosmic rule that you cannot be totally satisfied by your emotional life and your professional life simultaneously. We had been climbing partners, until I put everything on hold to fall in love with her. So she left, and became famous. Not many people know my name even today. They don't have to; I pull down a plush enough income. But it did come to pass that everybody wanted Tasha. Everybody still does.

I was halfway through my third mug of coffee at the Hostel Restaurant when I admitted to myself that I was consciously avoiding going home. Bad stuff waited for me out there. A Latino busboy had scampered off with my plate. Past the smoky front windows, Geary Street was a cruise with the bun-boys that gave the Tenderloin its rep. In New York, where things are less euphemistic, they're called fudge-packers. I wondered what gays made of all the media fuss over Tasha.

Nicole was giving me the eye. She's my favorite combat-hardened coffee shop waitress in the charted universe, an elegant willow sprout of West Indies mocha black, with a heaving bosom, and a lilting, exotic way of speaking the English language. When I watch her move about her chores at the Hostel, I think she'd probably jump my bones on the spot if she thought I could click-whirr her into the Tasha Vode saddle—worldwide model, budding cinema star, headliner. And still missing. When I try to formulate some logical nonsense for what happened to her, I fail just like I did with the street bum. Nothing comes out. Instead, I watch Nicole as she strolls over to recharge my cup. She watches me watching her.

"How'd you know I wanted more, Nicole?"

She narrows her panther eyes and blesses me with an evil smile. "Because you white boys always want more, hon."

My house cum studio hangs off the north end of the Fieldings' Point Pier, which is owned by a white-maned, sea-salt type named Dickie Barnhardt, whom no mortal dares address as "Richard." He sold me my home and plays caretaker to his pier. I live in a fabulous, indifferently-planned spill-together of rooms, like building blocks dumped haphazardly into a corner. Spiderwebbing it together are twelve crooked little stairways, inside and out. At first I called it my Dr. Seuss House. On the very top is a lighthouse tower that still works. Dickie showed me how to operate it, and from time to time I play keeper of the maritime flame because the notion is so irresistibly romantic. In return for spiffing up the place, I got another plaque—this one from the U.S. Lighthouse Society in San Francisco. Lighthouses have long been outmoded by navigational technology, and the Society is devoted to a program of historical preservation. There's no use for my little beacon. But there are nights when I cannot bear to keep it dark.

After ten years without a postcard, Tasha knew exactly where to find me. Maybe she followed the light. I answered my downstairs door with the alkaline smell of developer still clinging to my hands; the doorknob was greened from all the times I'd done it. And there she was.

Was I surprised? I knew instantly it was her, knew it from the way the ocean tilted and tried to slide off the edge of the world, knew it because all the organs in my body tried to rush together and clog up my throat.

"You look like you just swallowed a starfish," she said. She was burrowed into a minky-lush fur that hid everything but the tips of her boots. The chill sea breeze pushed wisps of her hair around. I don't have to describe what her face looked like. If you want to know, just haul your ass down to Slater's Periodicals and check out the covers of any half-dozen current glamour and pop-fashion magazines. That's what she looked like, brother.

Her eyes seemed backed up with tears, but maybe tears alone were insufficient to breach the Tasha force field, or maybe she used some brand of eyeliner so expensive that it was tear-resistant. I asked her why she was crying, invited her in, and then did not give her room to answer me. I was too busy babbling, trying to race past ten years in ten minutes and disguise my nervousness with light banter. She sensed my disorientation and rode it out, patiently, the way she used to. I fixed coffee and brandy. She sipped hers with picture-perfect lips, sitting at the breakfast overlook I'd glassed in last summer. I needed the drink. She needed contact, and hinted at it by letting her leg brush mine beneath the booth-style table. My need for chitchat and my awareness of the past hung around, dumbing things up like a stubborn chaperone. Beyond the booth's half-turret of windowpanes, green breakers crashed onto the rocks and foamed violently away.

Her eyes cleared, marking time between me and the ocean outside. They grew darkly stormy, registering the thunderheads that were rolling in with the dusk to lash the beach with an evening sweep of rain.

At last, I ran out of stupid questions.

She closed my hand up in both of hers. My heartbeat meddled with my breathing. She had already guessed which of my odd little Caligari staircases led to the bedroom loft.

The night sky was embossed by tines of lightning somewhere between us and Japan. Fat drops splatted against the seaward hurricane glass and skidded to the right as a strong offshore wind caught and blew them. I had opened the shutters on the shore side, and the wooden blades of the ceiling fan cast down cool air to prickle our flesh, sweat-speckled from fervent but honest lovemaking.

A lot of women had drifted through my viewfinder after Tasha had left me. Except for two or three mental time bombs and outright snow queens, I coupled enthusiastically with all of them. I forgot how to say no. Sometimes I was artificially nice; most of the time I was making the entire sex pay because one of their number had dumped me. The right people found out my name, yes. My studio filled up with eager young lovelies. No brag, just a living. I settled into a pattern of rejecting them about the time they tried to form any sort of lasting attachment, or tried to storm my meticulously erected walls. Some of them were annoyingly persistent, but I got good at predicting when they would turn sloppy and pleading . . . and that made snuffing their flames oddly fulfilling. I was consistent, if not happy. I took a perverse pleasure in booting cover girls out of my bed on a regular basis, and hoped that Joe Normal was envious as hell.

Lust. Envy. Admirable goals, I thought, as she lay with her hair covering my face, both of her legs hugging one of mine. We had turned out to be pretty much alike after all.

When I mumbled, she stirred from her doze. "What . . . ?"

"I said, I want a picture of you, just like you are, right this moment." Her eyes snapped open, gleaming in the faint light. "No?"

She spoke into the hollow of my neck, her voice distant, the sound of it barely impressing the air. "No pictures. No more pictures. Ever."

The businessman part of my brain perked up: What neurosis could this be? Was Tasha Vode abandoning her career? Would it be as successful as her abandonment of me? And what was the difference? For what she earned in a month, I could buy the beach frontage below for several miles in both directions. What difference? I'd gotten her back, against all the rules of reality, and here I was looking for the loophole. Her career had cleaved us apart, and now it was making us cleave back together. Funny how a word can have opposing definitions.

After five minutes of tossing and turning, she decided not to make me work for it. "Got anything warm?" She cracked a helpless smile. "Down in the kitchen, I mean."

"Real cocoa. Loaded with crap that's bad for you. Not from an envelope. Topped with real marshmallows, also packed with whatever carcinogens the cocoa doesn't have."

"Sounds luscious. Bring a whole pot."

"You can help."

"No. I want to watch the storm." Water pelted the glass. Now and then lightning would suggest how turbulent the ocean had gotten, and I thought of firing up my beacon. Perhaps there was a seafarer out there who was as romantic about boats as I was about lighthouses, and had gotten caught in the squall without the latest in high-tech directional doodads.

I lit it up. Then I dusted off an old TV tray for use as a serving platter, and brought the cocoa pot and accoutrements up the narrow stairs, clanking and rattling all the way.

My carbon-arc beam scanned the surface of the water in long, lazy turns. She was facing her diaphanous reflection in the glass, looking through her own image into the dark void beyond.

I had pulled on canvas pants to make the kitchen run, but Tasha was still perfectly naked and nakedly perfect, a siren contemplating shipwrecks. She drifted back from the window. I pitied my imaginary seafarer, stuck out in the cold, away from the warmth of her.

"You know those natives in Africa?" she said as I served. "The ones who wouldn't let missionaries take their pictures because they thought the camera would trap their souls?"

"It's a common belief. West Indians still hold to the voodoo value of snapshots. Mucho mojo. Even bad snapshots." I couldn't help that last remark. What a pro I am.

"You remember April McClanahan?" She spoke toward the sea. To my reflection.

"You mean Crystal Climax, right?"

She nodded. "Also of wide renown as Cherry Whipp."

All three were a lady with whom Tasha had shared a garrett during her flirtation with the hardcore film industry in the early 1970s. Don't swallow the negative hype for a second every woman who is anyone in film or modeling has made similar contacts. Tasha never moved beyond a couple of relatively innocuous missionary-position features, respectable porn for slumming yip-yups, a one-week run at the Pussycat Theatre, max. April, on the other hand, moved into the hard-core mainstream—Hustler covers, videocassette toplines, "fully erect" notices in the film ratings. And no, she didn't get strangled or blow her brains all over a motel room with a Saturday Night Special. Last I heard, she was doing TV commercials for bleach and fabric softener as "Valerie Winston" a sort of Marilyn Chambers in reverse.

"April once told me she'd figured out, with a calculator, that she was responsible for more orgasms in one year than anybody else." Tasha held the big porcelain mug in both hands, to warm her palms. "She averaged out how many movie houses were showing her films, how many times per day, multiplied by however many guys she figured were getting their jollies in the audience per show. Plus whoever was doing likewise to her pictures in God knows how many stroke magazines. Or gratifying themselves to the sex advice column she did for Leather Life. I remember her looking at me and saying, 'Think of all the energy that must produce. All those orgasms were born because of me. Me.'"

"I'm sure there are legions of guys jollying to your photos, too," I said. "No doubt, somebody out there is yanking his crank to Christie Brinkley's smile, right now."

"It's not the same thing. April was tough. She got something back." She sat on the bed facing me, legs tucked. She reminded me of Edvard Eriksen's famous sculpture of the Little Mermaid, rendered not in bronze but coaxed from milk-white moonstone, heated by living yellow electricity called down from a black sky, and warmed by warm Arctic eyes—the warmest blue that exists in our world.

"You mean April didn't mind getting that pornstar rap laid on her literally?"

I could see her sadness being blotted away by acid bitterness. "The people in porn have it easier. The thuds out there in Bozo-land know in their tiny little hearts that porn queens fuck for jobs. Whereas cover girls or legit models who rarely do buff or full-frontal are suspect."

"You can't deny the public their imaginary intrigues."

"What it always boils down to is, 'Climb off it, bitch—who did you really blow to get that last Vogue cover?' They feed off you. They achieve gratification in a far dirtier way, by wanting you and resenting you at the same time. By hating your success enough to keep all the tabloids in business. It's a draining thing, all taking and no giving, like . . ."

"Psychic vampirism?" It was so easy for someone in her position to sense that her public loved her only in the way a tumor loves its host. But a blacker part of my mind tasted a subtle tang of revenge. She'd left me to go chase what she wanted . . . and when she'd finally sunk in her teeth, she'd gotten the flavor of bile and chalk and ashes. I suppose I should have been ashamed of myself for embracing that hateful satisfaction so readily. And from the hurt neutrality on her face, she might have been reading the thoughts in my head. She watched her cocoa instead of drinking it—always a bad sign.

Just as much as I never said no, I never apologized. Not for anything.

After a cool silence, she said, "You're saying to yourself, 'She's got it made, for christsake. What right does she have to be dissatisfied with anything?' Right?"

"Maybe a tiny bit, yeah." She let me take her hand regardless. She needed the contact. The missing ten years settled between us to fog the issue. I was resentful, yes. Did I want to help her? Same answer. When I guiltily tried to pull back my hand, she kept ahold of it. It made me feel forgiven; absolved, almost.

"In science class, in eighth grade, they taught us that when you smell something, your nose is actually drawing in tiny molecular bits of whatever it is you're smelling. Particles."

"Which means you clamped both hands over your mouth and nose whenever you passed a dog turd on the sidewalk after school, am I right?" My prescription for sticky emotional situations is rigid: always—always joke your way out.

Her smile came and went. "The idea stuck in my head. If you smelled something long enough, it would run out of molecules and poof— it wouldn't exist anymore."

"Uh-huh, if you stood around sniffing for a couple of eons." Fortunately, I'd forgotten most of the junk with which school had tried to clog my head. About hard science I knew squat, like math. But I did know that there were billions or trillions of molecules in any given object.

"My point is that each one of us only has so much to give." She cleared her throat, almost as though it hurt her, and pressed valiantly onward. "What if you were to run out of pieces all of a sudden?"

"Happens all the time," I said airily. "That's what a nervous breakdown is. Entertainers who can't give their audiences an ounce more collapse onstage. Corporate guys get physically ill and can't go near a meeting room. People exceed their operational limits . . . and you're in one of the most high-pressure professions there is."

"No." She was shaking her head to prevent me from clouding her train of thought. "I mean run out of pieces literally. Suppose every photo of me ever taken was an infinitesimal piece? Every magazine ad, every negative, every frame of motion picture film—another tiny molecule of me, stolen away to feed an audience that is never satiated. And when someone is fully consumed—vampirized—they move on, still hungry, to pick their next victim by making him or her a star. That's why they're called consumers."

I looked up from the muddy lees in my cup just in time to see the passing lighthouse beam blank the ghost of her reflection from the windowpanes. Just like her smile, it came and went.

Her voice had downshifted into the husky and quavering register of confession. Now I was really uncomfortable. "I know there are celebrities who've had their picture taken two million more times than I have. But maybe they can afford it." She stretched across the bed to place her head on my thigh and hug my waist, connecting herself. "Maybe some of us don't have so many pieces. . . ."

I held her while the storm rallied for a renewed assault. My modest but brave beam of lamplight chopped through it. She did not grimace, or redden, or sob; her tears just began spilling out, coursing down in perfect wet lines to darken my pant leg.

Did I want to help her?

She feared that consumers wanted so much of her that pretty soon there would be nothing left to consume. And Claudia Katz no longer existed, except in my head. I'd fallen in love with her, become addicted to her . . . and now she was clinging to me because Tasha Vode was almost used up, and after that, if there was not Claudia, there was nothing. She had not brought her exhaustion home to my stoop to prove she could still jerk my leash after ten years. She had done it because the so-called friends who had gorged themselves on her personality were now nodding and clucking about celebrity lifestyles and answering their machines and juggling in new appointments to replace her as the undertow dragged her away to oblivion.

I stroked her hair until it was all out of her face. The tears dried while the sea storm churned. She snoozed, curled up, her face at peace, and I gently disengaged. Then, with a zealot's devotion toward proving her fears were all in her imagination, I went downstairs to load up one of my Nikons.

I asked her how she felt the next morning. When she said terrific, I spilled the beans.

"You what—?"

"I repeat for clarity: I took pictures of you while you were asleep. Over a hundred exposures of you wound up in my dark blue sheets, sleeping through a gale. And guess what—you're still among the living this morning." I refilled her coffee cup and used my tongs to pluck croissants out of the warmer.

She cut loose a capacious sigh, but put her protests on hold. "Don't do that again. Or you'll lose me."

I wasn't sure whether she meant she'd fade to nothingness on the spot, or storm out if I defied her superstitions a second time. "You slept like a stone, love. Barely changed position all night." My ego was begging to be told that our mattress gymnastics had put her under, but when I saw the care she took to lift her coffee cup with both hands, I knew better.

"Look at this shit," she said with disgust. "I can barely hold up my head, let alone my coffee. I'm slouching. Models aren't supposed to slouch, for christsake." She forced her sitting posture straight and smiled weakly. Her voice was a bit hoarse this morning, almost clogged.

"Hey lady—slouch away." Worry stabbed at my, insides while I tried to sound expansive and confident. "Do what thou wilt. Sleep all day if that's your pleasure. Just wait till you discover what I've learned to cook in the last ten years. Real salads. Stuff you have to sauté. Food with wine in it. I can artistically dish up all the squares you require. Loaf on the beach. Read my library. I have said it; it is good." I watched a glint of caution try to burn away the happiness in her eyes. She did so want to believe me. "And no more photographs. Promise. Anybody who tries has gotta shoot through yours truly."

She brightened at that. I'd gotten the reaction I wanted from her. It was the challenge-and-reward game. And goddamned if that tiny acid drop of doubt didn't settle into my brain, sizzling—what if what if what if.

What if I was playing it safe because she might be right?

"I don't want to see those pictures," she said. "Don't even develop them."

"I'll toss 'em in the woodstove right now, if that's what you'd like." I'd made my point.

She gave a theatrical shudder. "Don't burn them. That's too much like a horror story I read once. I might shuffle off the coil along with my own pictures."

The rolls of film were lined up on my miscellaneous shelf, downstairs, in the darkroom, the room with the red light bulbs. Expose the film to anything but that mellow, crimson glow and it would blank to silver-nitrate nothingness. The rolls could stay down there, sealed into their little black plastic vials. Forever, if that's what she wanted.

She kept watch on the sea while we destroyed our continental breakfast. "I thought maybe we could brave the overcast later, and drive down past Point Pitt for dinner," I said. "Steaks, salads, and a bottle or two of Cabernet. If anybody asks whether you're Tasha Vode, just blink and say, 'Who?'"

The life had surged back into her expression. "Maybe. Or maybe seafood. But I want you to do something for me, first."

"Your wish . . ."

"Don't you have any work to do today?"

Who were we kidding; I think we both knew I'd do almost anything she asked. "Nothing that can't wait."

"Then carry me back up to the bedroom."

My narrow little stairway was a tight shot, but we negotiated it successfully after a mild bump or two. Our robes got in the way, so we left them crumpled on the stairs about halfway up.

Her need for contact was vital.

Outside the bedroom window it got dark. I did not notice. All I could see was her.

Her eyes were capable of a breathtaking syllabary of expressions, and I felt my own eyes become lenses, trying to record them all. I stopped being friend or lover to be a camera, to trap what it was about her that made total strangers hear those jungle drums. There were thousands, maybe millions of men out there in the darkness, who fantasized about being inside her the way I was now, who played my role and spoke my half of the dialogue whenever they passed a newsstand. Their wanting never ceased.

Her eyes told me they knew what I was up to. They did not approve.

Her calling was one of the few that made you a veteran before puberty was done. If you lucked out, you'd become wealthy while still legally a child: if you weren't so lucky, you'd be left a burned-out has-been before you graduated high school. The attrition rate was worse than that for professional athletes, who could at least fall back on commercials for razors and lite beer when middle age called them out. But she did not seem the sort of human being who could relish the living death of celebrity game shows. Staying beautiful had been an unending war; each touchup a skirmish that stole away another irreclaimable chunk of time. Doing it for ten years, and staying the best, had been draining. Her outside was being used up. Her hipbones felt like flint arrowheads beneath soft tissue paper.

Her hand slid down and felt the cingulum cinched drawstring-tight above my balls. Comprehension dawned in her eyes, followed by that strange tolerance of hers for my various idiocies. I can't relate the exact sequence (to come was, for me, a necessary agony by now), but I was almost certain that her rapid-fire contractions began the instant she slipped the knot of the cingulum. Unbound, I offloaded lavishly. Her fingers whitened with pressure on my shoulders, then relaxed, reddening with blood. I watched the pupils of those warm, Arctic eyes expand hotly in the dimness as she took what was mine. Until that moment, her own orgasms had seemed insubstantial somehow. Disconnected from her. Spasms of her equipment more than sparky showers in her brain. Her breath had barely raised condensation on my skin. Now she came into focus, filled, flushed, and radiating heat.

After holding me for a lapse of time impossible to measure, she said, "Don't try to impress. You're not performing with a capital P." Her eyes saw that I had been intimidated by the imagined skills of her past decade of lovers, and thus the girdle-cord trick. Stupid. "Don't you see? You're the only one who ever gave anything back."

"Tasha, you don't really believe that—"

"Try Claudia." It was not a command but a gentle urging. But it, too, was vital. "You're the only one who can give me back some of myself; replace what the others have taken. Give me more." Her reverent tone bordered on love—that word I could rarely force myself to speak, even frivolously.

Who better to give her back some of herself? I was a goddamn repository of her identity. With other women I had never bothered worrying, and so had never been befuddled as I was now. I'd made love to Claudia, not the exterior self that the rest of the world was busy eating. And now she was steering.

I gave her hack to herself; her eyes said so, her voice said so, and I tried to hush the voice in my head that said I was not being compensated for this drain. I tried to ignore the numberless black canisters of film that beckoned me from the room with the red light. And later, past midnight, when the storm thundered in, I carefully took twice what I had given her. No matter how much we have, as Nicole the waitress would say, we always want more.

"Skull full of sparrow shit," she said the following day as we bumped knees and elbows trying to dress for dinner. "Gorgeous but ditzy. Vacuous. Vapid. Pampered. Transient values. A real spoiled-rotten—"

"I think I get the stereotype," I said. "You're just not stupid enough to be happy as a model anymore, right?"

"Ex-model." She watched the sea bounce back the glare of late afternoon. "You don't believe me, do you?"

"What I believe scares the crap out of me." I tried to veneer what I said with good humor, to defang my fears. "I believe, for example, that you might be a ghost. And ghosts never stay."

She waggled her eyebrows. "I could haunt your lighthouse. Or maybe I'm just your wish-fulfillment."

"Don't laugh. I've often thought that I'm not really earning a living as a photographer." Merely speaking that last word caused the slightest hesitation in the natural flow of her movements; she was that sensitized to it. "I'm not really sleeping with Tas . . . uh, Claudia Katz." She caught that slip, too, but forgave it. "Actually, I'm really a dirtbag litter-basket picker up in the Mission. And all of this is a hallucinatory fantasy I invented while loitering near a magazine rack with Tasha Vode's picture at hand, hm?"

"Ack," she said with mock horror. "You're one of them. The pod-folk."

"Are we gone, or what?"

She stepped back from the mirror, inside of a bulky, deep blue ski sweater with maroon patterning, soft boots of gray suede, and black slacks so tight they made my groin ache. Her eyes filled up with me, and they were the aquamarine color of the sunlit ocean outside. "We're gone," she said, and led the way down the stairs.

I followed, thinking that when she left me again I'd at least have those hundreds of photographs of her in my bed. Ghosts never stay.

Outside, there was a son of a bitch and an asshole.

The son of a bitch was crouched in ambush right next to my front door. His partner, the asshole, was leaning on my XLS, getting cloudy fingerprints all over the front fender. I had backed out the front door, to lock it, and heard his voice talking, before anything else.

"Miss Vode, do you have any comment on your abrupt—"

Tasha—Claudia—started to scream.

I turned as she recoiled and grabbed my hand. I saw the asshole. Any humanity he might have claimed was obliterated by the vision of a huge, green check for an exclusive article that lit up his eyes. A pod man. Someone had recognized us in the restaurant last night and sent him to ambush us in the name of the public's right to know. He brandished a huge audio microphone at us as though it was a scepter of power. It had a red foam windscreen and looked like a phallic lollipop.

Her scream sliced his question neatly off. She scrambled backward, hair flying, trying to interpose me between herself and the enemy, clawing at her head, crushing her eyes shut and screaming. That sound filled my veins with liquid nitrogen.

The son of a bitch was behind us. From the instant we had stepped into the sunlight, he had us nailed in his viewfinder. The video rig into which he was harnessed ground silently away; the red bubble light over the lens hood was on.

And Tasha screamed.

Maybe she jerked her hand away, maybe I let it go, but her grip went foggy in mine as I launched myself at the cameraman, eating up the distance between us like a barracuda. Only once in my whole life had I ever hit a man in anger, and now I doubled my own personal best by delivering a roundhouse punch right into the black-glass maw of his lens, filling his face up with his own camera, breaking his nose, two front teeth, and the three middle fingers of my fist. He faded to black and went down like a medieval knight trapped by the weight of his own armor. I swarmed over him and used my good hand to rip out his electronic heart, wrestling away porta-cam, tape and all. Cables shredded like torn ligaments and shiny tape viscera trailed as I heaved it, spinning, over the pier rail and into a sea the same color as Tasha's eyes. The red light expired.

Her scream . . . wasn't. There was a sound of pain as translucent as rice paper, thin as a flake of mica, drowned out by the roar of water meeting beach.

By the time I cranked my head around—two dozen slow-motion shots, easy—neither of her was there anymore. I thought I saw her eyes, in Arctic-cold afterburn, winking out last.

"Did you see . . . ?"

"You're trespassing!" bellowed Dickie Barnhardt, wobbling toward the asshole with his side-to-side Popeye gait, pressed flat and pissed off. The asshole's face was flash-frozen into a bloodless bas relief of shock and disbelief. His mouth hung slack, showing off a lot of expensive fillings. His mike lay forgotten at his feet.

"Did you see . . . did . . . she just . . ."

Dickie bounced his ashwood walking stick off the asshole's forehead. He joined his fallen mike in a boneless tumble to the planks of the pier. Dickie's face was alight with a bizarre expression that said it had been too long since he'd found a good excuse to raise physical mayhem, and he was proud of his forthright defense of tenant and territory. "You okay?" he said, squinting at me and spying the fresh blood on my hand.

"Dickie . . . did you see what happened to Tasha?" My voice switched in and out. My throat constricted. My unbroken hand closed on empty space. Too late.

He grinned a seaworthy grin and nudged the unconscious idiot at his feet. "Who's Tasha, son?"

I drink my coffee left-handed, and the cast mummifying my right hand gives me something to stare at contemplatively.

I think most often of that videotape, decomposing down there among the sand sharks and the jellyfish that sometimes bob to the surface near Dickie's pier. I think that the tiny bit of footage recorded by that poor, busted-up son-of-a-bitch cameraman would not have mattered one damn if I hadn't shot so much film of Tasha to prove she had nothing to fear. So many pieces. I pushed her right to the edge, cannibalizing her in the name of love.

The black plastic cans of film are still on the shelf down in my darkroom, lined up like inquisitors already convinced of my guilt. The thought of dunking that film in developer makes me want to stick a gun in my ear and pull the trigger, twice if I had the time.

Then I consider another way out, and wonder how long it would take me to catch up with her; how many pieces I have.

I never cried much before. Now, the tears unload at the least provocation. It's sloppy, and messy, and unprofessional, and I hate it. It makes Nicole stare at me the way the street bum did, like I've tipped over into psycholand.

When she makes her rounds to fill my cup, she watches me. The wariness in her eyes is new. She sees my notice dip from her eyes to her sumptuous chest and back, in a guilty but unalterable ritual. I force a smile for her, gamely, but it stays pasted across my face a beat too long, insisting too urgently that everything is okay. She doesn't ask. I wave my unbroken hand over my cup to indicate no more, and Nicole tilts her head with a queer, new expression—as though this white boy is trying to trick her. But she knows better. She always has.

BUNNY DIDN'T TELL US

The grave robbers worked as quickly and silently as they were able. It began to rain lightly.

It sounded more like the opening to a bad grade-school joke, but the fact was that most of the embalming crew on the night shift at Forest Lawn consisted of tae-kwon-do freaks. They spent more of the wee hours showing off new moves than tending the latest batch of customers, and were so self-involved they represented no threat at all. Ditto the hired security. Those guys hated blundering about the vast cemetery in the rain. Professionalism was one matter, superstition another.

Riff favored working in the rain no matter what the scam. Water washed away both guards and their willingness to pry, as well as providing a safe background of white noise for nocturnal endeavors with noise potential.

He and Klondike were knee-deep in the hole. Riff gathered a clump of turf in one hand and squinted at it as he crumbled it apart. Rain funneled in a steady stream from the vee of his hat. "Recently tamped," was all he said, wiping his hand on his grimy topcoat. All around them the rainfall hissed into the thick, manicured landscaping.

Mechanically, Riff jabbed his Folding Army Spade into the dirt, stomped on the edge, and chucked the bladeful of earth over his shoulder to the right. Klondike faced him in the hole, duplicating the moves one half-beat later. Both had learned how to turn out a foxhole in Korea, and in no time they were four feet down, then five.

Kiondike's spade was the first to thump against something solid and hollow. "Bingo," the larger man muttered.

Riff hesitated, then tossed back another gout of dirt anyway. Klondike smelled like a wet bearskin, and his permanent facial shadow of black beard stubble served to camouflage his face in the darkness. Riff did not necessarily enjoy working with someone as coarse as Klondike, but all his life he had made a virtue of never questioning orders.

"Wait" he said, and the big man froze like a pointer. Riff tapped the surface beneath their feet with his spade. "Sounds funny."

"Time," said Riff.

Klondike peeled back the cuff of his glove and read his luminous watch face. "0345 hours," he said. The fingertips of his gloves were stylishly sawn off, and Klondike promptly used the moment of dead time to pick his nose. "Ain't got us much time," he whispered. "Funk-hole's turning to mud."

"I know that," Riff said, hunkering down in the bottom of their excavation and resisting the urge to add you imbecile. He plucked a surgical penlight from a coat pocket and cupped his palm around the beam, leaning close. "Look at this."

The dime-sized dot of light revealed a silver dent—left by Riff's spade—in a smooth surface of brilliant, fire-engine red enamel. Klondike ran his fingers over it, and stared dumbly at his hand while the tiny scar in the otherwise flawless surface refilled with water.

"Bloody hell!" snapped Riff. "Bunny didn't tell us that the guy was buried in his goddamn car!"

Suddenly the drumming of rain on the exposed metal surface seemed to become incriminatingly loud.

Riff's ties to Bunny Beaudine ran back to the middle 1970s, and a half-witted punchline Bunny had formented about finding employment for needy military vets. A decade before, Bunny had been just another seedy Sunset Boulevard pimp, chauffeuring his anemic, scabby stable of trotters around in a creaking, third-hand Cadillac whose paint job was eighty percent primer. Then Bunny discovered cocaine, and his future turned to tinsel. Coke required bodyguards, and Bunny learned to be bad.

Riff suspected that Bunny got a kick out of two things: hiring white dudes to accomplish his dirty work, and vigorously dipping into his inventory for personal gratification, both the ladies and the face Drano.

His usual checklist of dumb jobs included low-power dope deliveries, playing cabbie for the girls—Bunny now captained a fleet of Mercedes, from the cabin of his own Corsair limo—and the odd bit of mop-up. It was a living.

Bunny's strongarm boys packed Magnums and broke bones with the frequency Riff broke wind after a plate of lasagna. Once he'd taken that first job for Bunny (a cash pass deliberately miscounted, as a test for Riff's honesty), Riff understood that there were no handshakes, no clean leavetakings. Since he had no other prospects—1976 was a lousy Job year for vets—it was just as well.

Until this current assignment came along. Riff remembered how it had gone down in Bunny's Brentwood "office."

Bunny had been laughing, flashing his ten-thousand-dollar teeth. "Poor old Desmond," he cackled. "Pour soul."

Riff had gotten a phone call and had shown up precisely on the half hour. "What became of Desmond?" Desmond was one of Bunny's competitors. They cursed each other in private and slapped each other's shoulders, trading power handshakes, whenever anyone else was watching.

Two of Bunny's boys bellowed deep basso laughter from across the room.

"Why, poor old Desmond somehow got his ass blowed off," said Bunn) "Terrible thing. You can't even live in the city anymore . . ."

The watchdogs stopped guffawing at a wave of Bunny's hand. His pinkie ring glittered and his broad-planed African face went dead serious. Riff stood, arms folded, waiting for the show to end so business could become relevant.

"What it is," Bunny said to Riff, "is this. You remember Desmond, Riff, my man?"

"I saw him a few times."

"You remember all those rings and slave bracelets and shit he used to wear all over his hands?"

"Yeah," said Riff. "Mandarin fingernails, too."

"Thems was for tooting. But you recall, right?" Bunny was nodding up and down. So far so good. "One of them rings was a cut-down from that diamond they called the Orb in the papers—stolen from that bitch in Manhattan last year."

"The one married to the toilet-paper tycoon." Riff knew the ring. It was cut down, alright, but was still of vulgar size, and worth at least a hundred grand.

"You got it. Well, here's a little piece of trivia that nobody knows. Poor old Desmond was buried wearing that ring."

Riff was already beginning to get the picture. As with all pimps up from gutter level, Desmond had insisted on burial as lavish as his lifestyle, and in a boneyard as obscene as the diamond he'd hired stolen. Riff looked back at the bodyguards. "Why didn't you just have your goons steal the ring after they blew the back of his head off?" he said, smiling.

Bunny kept his happy face on. "Why, there ain't nobody in the world would finger me; that was a accident, man," he said, his voice singsong and full of bogus innocence. "Besides, we take the ring then, that means Desmond's boys be hunting it, and I don't want to end this life in the trunk of some Mexican's Chevy being drug out of the ocean by the police." He pronounced it po-lice. He shrugged. "But now—now, as far as Desmond's people are concerned, that rock is a permanent resident of Forest Lawn, by the freeway. Ain't nobody gonna miss it."

The goons chuckled on cue. Riff drew Klondike as an accomplice mostly because the hulking halfwit was the wrong color to make it in the world as a bodyguard for Bunny, but the bonus Bunny pushed in Riff's direction erased any objections. The only hitch was that no amount of cash could get Riff clear of Bunny now.

That was how Riff's adventure in the rain had begun.

"Shit!" Klondike beefed. "Asshole pimp six feet under in his muthafuggin' pimpmobile!"

"Watch your language," said Riff. "And keep your voice down!" Slick mud was beginning to join them in the hole, in force. He scooped out the bilge with his hands.

"What kinda car is it?"

Who cares, thought Riff. Dumb question; dumb goon. "Just dig, before we drown." He wanted to find out if they were near a car window they could break, to cut excavation time. They'd been putzing around on the roof for nearly half an hour. Riff realized they were on top when he found the insulated rectangle of the sunroof. The car was gigantic—maybe a full-stretch limousine. He traced the outline of the sunroof with a finger while Klondike continued to bail sludge in an awkward squat.

"Crowbar!" Riff said over his shoulder. Soon the horizon would turn pink-gray with predawn light, and he mentally damned daylight savings time again.

Klondike poked his head out of the hole, did a quick three-sixty, and returned with the crowbar. His own private mudslide was right behind him. Things were getting gooey.

"All clear topside," he said.

Not sure which side the sunroof opened from, Riff had a moment of indecision, and that was when he heard the grinding noise. It was a low whirring basso against the lighter sound of the pattering rain.

The sunroof was opening. Yellow cabin light sprayed upward from the widening hatchway.

Things began happening too fast for Riff to keep track.

He fell backward onto his rump in surprise, thinking, It's one of Bunny's goddamn tricks, goddamn Bunny, it's—

It seemed a funny thing to hear a big lug like Klondike screaming. His voice spiked Riff's ears, cracking high with terror.

"Riff! It's got my leg and I can't . . . Riff, help, HELP ME!"

And in the sickly glow of the limousine's interior lights, Riff saw what had hold of Klondike's leg.

The suit sleeve was crushed black velvet; the cuffs, ruffled lace. The kind of overblown getup a showoff like Desmond would demand to be buried in. The ebony claw dragging Klondike backwards was threaded with luminescent white mold. The brown jelly of rot glistened in the light, and the dagger fingernails that were Desmond's coke-snorting tools, now jagged and cracked, gathered to seat themselves in KIondike's left calf.

Klondike hollered.

Riff was backed into the humid mound of turned earth. He might have yelled, but his throat seemed stuffed up with grave dirt, and his tongue hugged the roof of his mouth in fear.

There was nothing for Klondike to grab as an anchor, and the relentless tow of the slime-clotted hand pulled him, wriggling, to block the light from within the buried car. Another arm slid through the crack of space and snaked around Klondike's waist in a hideous bear-hug, from below. Dense black mud was dripping down into the car as Klondike thrashed to no gain against the dead, locked embrace.

Riff could still see, too well.

The pressure increased. Gray knuckle bones popped through wet splits in the decayed meat, and Klondike screamed one last time.

The sound of his back breaking apart was the splintering of dry bamboo, the crunching of ice between the teeth. It cut off the screaming. Then Klondike, all of him, began to fold into the hole in a way Riff had never seen a human body bend before.

Riff's own body thawed enough to move, and one hand grasped the spade. He took a single step closer.

Klondike's body hung upward in a ludicrous bow-shape, feet and arms in the night air. Something else in his body suddenly gave way with a sharp, breaking carrot noise, and he sagged a few inches further down into the sunroof.

Riff, trembling, raised the spade, blade down. Klondike was dead as a side of beef. Riff was not watching him so much as the moldering hands that pulled him down. There, on the middle finger of one, was the diamond.

When he lifted the spade to strike, the oily, dark mud greasing the roof of the car skimmed his feet from beneath him, and he sprawled headlong on top of what was left of Klondike.

Now Riff screamed, because the groping claw had locked around the lapel of his topcoat three inches from his nose, pulling him inexorably downward along with his inert partner. Klondike's stale, animal odor stung Riff's nostrils for a fast instant before being washed away by the eye-steaming stench of putrefaction. Riffs guts boiled and heaved. He was sinking into the impossibly small sunroof.

He flailed; got his heel against the lip of the hole. Like a hungry spider, the graveyard hand was making for his Adam's apple, and he fought to slow it down. When his fingers sank into the oleaginous dead flesh, he killed the onrushing spasm of revulsion by jerking backward hard enough to dislocate his shoulder.

He had a grip on the ring when he did it.

The thick, drenched tweed of the coat separated with a heavy purr drowned out by the rain. Riff plunged backward and wedged into the rapidly dissolving dirt mound, shuddering uncontrollably, teeth clacking, completely apeshit with panic.

In the sickly yellow glow, he saw that the maggoty flesh of the ring finger had stripped away like a rotten banana peel, exposing a still-clutching skeleton finger. The sound it made against the red enamel was like a fork tine raked against a porcelain sink.

Brown gunk was leaking from between his own fingers, and he opened his fist to reveal a diamond almost as big as a golf ball, nestled in clumps of buttery skin that was warm only because it had been inside Riff's closed hand.

Riff's body would not move; he was frozen from the bowels down, his back married to the pit wall. If he looked away, all he would see were dancing, round-edged rectangles of yellow light.

Klondike's chin was still perched on the edge of the sunroof. The now-ringless hand in lace and black velvet circled his body and tugged.

Klondike's upper row of teeth caught on the rubber insulation strip. Another tug, and his forehead bonked against the hatch. Then the rest of him slid into the hole all at once and he was gone.

Riff was whimpering now, still cemented to the spot, transfixed by the waiting yellow hole. He could just see the upper curve of one of the phony electric braziers on either end of the front windows. Yellow squares overlapped in his pupils; in his mind he saw a million times over the rotting hand emerging again, grasping, pulling up a shoulder, revealing a head and torso

"Here!" he yelled, his bones finally grinding into motion. "Here, goddamnit! Keep it! Bunny wanted it, not me! Take it back!" He flung the diamond without aiming. It bounced on the roof with a thunk, and wandered toward the sunroof like a crystal beebee in a Brobdingnagian puzzle maze.

It decided at last to drop in, and vanished noiselessly.

Riff's treacherous body now insisted that he run, that he set an Olympic record for running in the rain.

The sunroof began to whirr slowly shut, paring away the light. Riff's heartbeat punched away at his throat. The last of the ooze in his hand was rinsed away.

Then he piled out of the hole and hauled his poor white ass toward the freeway at maximum speed. In forty-five minutes the rain changed to a five-alarm downpour, and Riff stood in his own private puddle, facing the singularly unamused gaze of Bunny.

"Turn him out," said Bunny flatly, and two of his boys winnowed Riff down to his waterlogged skivvies.

"I told you I don't have the ring," said Riff, still shivering. "But you're not going to believe that any more than you'll believe that Klondike—"

"Pulled a doublecross, bashed you with a shovel, tied you up with your own coat, and took the diamond?" finished Bunny. His eyes bugged, watery and yellow with sickle-cell. "Shit. Any one o' them things, maybe—but Klondike didn't have enough battery power to invent all four. You're jerking me around, Riff, my friend. Maybe you didn't even make it out to the grave, huh?"

Riff swallowed. Bunny was getting ready to do something nasty.

"I'm not lying," he said carefully. "Klondike is still at the gravesite."

Anticipating Bunny's next accusation, one of the hulks flanking the doorway to the office stepped forward. "I know what you're thinking, boss," he said in a voice as deep and growly as a diesel truck engine. "That boy Desmond is as dead as one of them barbecued chickens in the market. Me and Tango was a hundred percent sure." He back-stepped to his place at the door, and Riff thought of a cuckoo clock.

"You took a hundred percent of my green," said Bunny. "You better be goddamn sure." He said gah-dam.

"Can I have my pants back?" said Riff. Regrettably, it drew Bunny's pique away from his bulldogs and refocused it on himself.

"Give him his duds," said Bunny. "He's going out there with us." He rose to his buggywhip-skinny six-two and wired an expensive pair of rose-tinted shades around his face. "And if you're snowjobbin' me boy—"

"I know." Riff nodded as he fought his way back into his sodden clothing. "I'll have a hard time peddling Veteran's Day poppies wearing a cast up to my eyebrows."

"You got it."

They made the drive in funereal silence, and nobody cared about the dawn and the dirty floor-mop hue it turned the horizon. LA's surface streets were flooding by now, and the homeowners in the Hollywood Hills would be cursing the mudslides, and it was obvious that visitor business at Forest Lawn would be just . . . Well, thought Riff, they were assured of no disturbances, anyway.

The gorilla named Tango broke out three umbrellas in basic black, and nobody moved to share one with Riff, who led them down to Plot #60 from an access road charmingly called Magnolia View Terrace. It proved a lot easier than sneaking up from the freeway. The heavily saturated turf around Desmond's final resting place made their shoes squish. Bunny's Gucci loafers were goners, Riff thought with not a little satisfaction.

Forest Lawn was discreet concerning such peccadilloes as vandalism. No matter what happened to Desmond's grave, the news would never make the Times, and the wad of bills Tango had slapped into the gatekeeper's palm guaranteed privacy for proper mourning.

One of those characteristic Astroturf tarps had been pegged over the hole. Desmond's garish monument stone spired toward outer space like a granite ICBM.

"So what?" Bunny said loudly as a jolt of thunder shook the ground.

"They covered it up!" said Riff.

All three men turned to look at him. "I can see that, null and void," Bunny snapped. "Get on with it!" The pimp stood with his hands deep in the pockets of his black overcoat, Tango's buddy holding an umbrella over him like a dutiful Egyptian slave. Riff never could dredge up the guy's name—the two were as interchangeable as knife-maniac movies—so he pointed at Tango. "Help him," Bunny said, and Tango eyed the tarp doubtfully before stepping sidewise down into the pit. Bunny thought he could hear a noise through the downpour, a kind of electric fly-buzzing. Maybe construction equipment was working somewhere nearby.

Riff held up the corner of the tarp for Tango. There was a very dim yellow glow emanating from beneath it, and water had pooled in its middle, causing it to sag.

As Tango ducked under the tarp, Riff planted his foot dead bang into the bigger man's ass, driving him inside. The tarp flopped wetly back into place. Tango's partner saw it happen, and automatically broke his police revolver from its armpit holster, bringing it to bear on the bridge of Riff's nose.

But by then, Tango had started screaming.

He shot up against the tarp from beneath, hurling water all over the trio just as Bunny shouted, "Blow him away!" meaning Riff, and took a miscalculated backward step that dumped him onto his butt in the mud.

Riff grabbed the big Magnum barrel just as it went off in his face. There was a gentle backward tug as the slug whizzed cleanly through the sleeve of his overcoat. The pistolero's second shot headed off into the stratosphere as the slimed incline of the pit came apart like warm gelatin under his heels. He slid indecorously down into Riff's embrace. As he flailed for balance Riff wrested away the gun and gave him a no-nonsense bash in the face with it that flattened his nose to pulpsteak and rolled his eyeballs up into dreamtown.

It had taken maybe two seconds, total. Riff quickly climbed to the rim of the grave. He knew how, by now. The gunman's semiconscious body oozed slowly downward until his legs were beneath the tarp edge. Then he was pulled the rest of the way inside.

Topside, Bunny was still on his back, trying to scramble his own petite shooting iron past the silver buttons on his double-breasted overcoat. He looked up, glaring hotly, and saw a dripping, mud-caked bog monster pointing an equally mud-caked revolver in his direction. His hands stopped moving and his eyes became very white.

From behind Riff, there came a sound like a green tree branch being twisted in half, followed by nothing except the patter of the new rain. One of the tent pegs popped loose and the tarp sagged into the hole.

Bunny's face was a livid crimson-black with rage. The knowledge he had been outdrawn, however, did not stop him from trying to preserve his image by saying, "I'll kill your ass for this, you know," in his quiet, bad-pimp's hiss.

"What it is, Bunny," said Riff, gesturing with the gun "is you need to climb down into this hole."

"Tango!" Bunny screeched, trying to crawl backward.

Riff frowned and shot Bunny once, in the left leg just below the kneecap. Blood mingled with the mud and gore, spoiling his nine-hundred-dollar suit. "This isn't a movie, Bunny; just get in the hole."

Hiding his pain behind clenched teeth, Bunny began to drag himself toward the pit. When he backed down into it, on top of the tarp, his hands going wrist-deep in the muck, he looked up at Riff and in his best snake-charming voice said. "Why?" mostly to buy a couple of seconds more. It was extra seconds that always counted in rescue time.

"Because I gotta change my life, Bunny," he said, looming over him with the gull.

Buy more seconds. "I'll let you," said Bunny, gasping now. "Anything you want, man, Partners. We'll—"

Riff was about to tell Bunny not to bullshit a bullshitter when the ruglike tarp heaved mightily up, splitting in the middle. The first thing that came out was yellow light. The second thing that came out was a black, velvet-clad arm that captured Bunny's wounded leg in its trash-compacter grip very nicely. Bunny slid three more feet with a loud cry of pain.

One thing about those limos, Riff thought as he turned away and walked back up the slope. He'd noticed it during the ride out in Bunny's own chariot. They sure had a lot of room inside.

Behind him, Bunny's pocket pistol went off four, five times then stopped. No slugs came Riff's way.

Riff pawed around under the limousine's bumper for the magnetic case containing the spare keys, and when he got behind the wheel he involuntarily glanced at the car's sunroof. The two cars were probably a lot alike.

He did not stick around to hear the tiny whirring noise coming from Plot #60. Nor did he ever see the ridiculously fat diamond left at the edge of the grave, as payment. A Forest Lawn worker, finding it later in the day and assuming it to be a cheap crystal because of its large size, took it to his Pasadena apartment and hung it in the kitchen windows where it threw the setting sun's rainbow colors against his breakfast nook for the next fifteen years.

INCIDENT ON A RAINY NIGHT IN BEVERLY HILLS

Jonathan Brill was thinking: The last time I saw Haskell Hammer, he was dead set on becoming a famous writer of screenplays in Hollywood.

The siren song of Southern California has always been the Big Break—a litany everyone babbles and no one truly believes. The Big Break. According to myth, you stumble across it by accident . . . or it mows you down on purpose. The thing in which people believe is the tease, the promise of the litany.

Rain droplets crawled down the windowpanes and blurred the view from the den. Jonathan permitted his gaze to defocus. Across his west lawn was his cul-de-sac; in it was parked his Mercedes. Sensible businessman's gray had been his choice of car color. The driveway beyond meandered down Carla Ridge and insulated him from the old Trousdale Estates branch of Beverly Hills.

Among his home's fourteen rooms, Jonathan Brill's favorite was his den. He inventoried it in terms of material: wood, glass, paper, fiber, canvas, metal.

Teak was for the paneling, mahogany for the sprawling three-quarter administrator's desk, thick oak planks for the pegged library shelving that dominated half the wall space. The narrow, tinted windows through which he watched the rain were Nadia Charas commission work featuring her characteristic lozenge-shaped leaded panes. Floor to ceiling, in ordered ranks, stood the books. Behind the desk was a long, low buffet groaning with reference and overpriced showoff volumes; near the windows was a sideboard with sliding glass doors entombing a matched complement of leatherbound first editions. The carpet was a lush pile in a sober dark brown, directionally combed. Jonathan had been dramatic about arranging the few paintings he liked beneath pinlight spots. The originals included a Picasso ink wash and a Franz von Stuck from the turn of the century—one of the German Symbolist's terrifically popular Sin series, mostly forgotten now. It depicted a voluptuary encoiled by a giant, malevolent snake, the sort of thing Freud would have a field day with. As with the Bruckner aluminum sculpture brooding down from its special nook, to Jonathan the acquisition held meaning beyond art. When admirers mentioned worth, he thought price, and had long ago chosen to make the best of this unfortunate incapacity. The edition of Moby Dick he held cradled to his chest as he stood by the windows had cost one thousand dollars in 1979. It was a miracle of thoughtful bookbindery. It was a thousand-dollar book, an investment, more stable than the messier forms of human transaction that had left Jonathan with his fourteen-room home all to himself this year. Any journeyman shrink could point his or her pipe at Jonathan's overdone den and quack "compensatory surrogate," and they'd be right, but Jonathan found he relished the feeling of control he got from rattling around his house all by himself after the hired help had come and gone. He already knew most of the punchlines that his colleagues would apply to his life—his new life—and dismissed them. They were just envious. His divorce from Janice was history, and now he was free of her forever.

And the last time Haskell Hammer saw me, I was going to grow up to be a successful analyst. He held his thousand-dollar book in one hand and a slug of Grand Marnier in the other, holding his contemplative pose by the rainspattered windows. Shrink to the brats of the stars, he had kidded me. Elbow to the ribs. Ha-ha, sho'nuff.

The pleasant music of his door chimes soured when cycled over and over. The help had clocked out for the day; Jonathan had finally answered the door himself, prepared to dispense with some lunatic Jehovah's Witness or door-to-door Scientologist. Instead he found his old buddy Haskell Hammer crutched against the glowing button, looking as though a bus had mistakenly dropped him off in Hell and he had hoofed it through miles of brimstone just to get back to Hollywood.

Haskell's opening dialogue had seemed depressingly melodramatic. This was the only place I could come . . . you're the only person who'll understand . . . they've choked off my escape avenues . . . they're AFTER me . . .

After a beat of honest shock, Jonathan's professional face slid into position. The personal, the emotional, the reactionary aspects of his anima retreated behind the shield of persona. Ego beats id. Diploma wraps stone.

Haskell had nearly swooned into his arms. Then followed, like a bad movie cliché, the restorative pop of cognac and the sudden clearing of Haskell's eyes that denoted a return to the universe of the rational. He would, of course, have a story to tell. This narrative was to be revealed as soon as he emerged from the shower in Jonathan's guest bathroom, where he had been holed up for nearly half an hour.

Far to the south, lightning belabored Century City. A shudder of thunder freed speckles of water to roll earthward along the panes. Jonathan considered his own reflection, the professional at ease, a still life of sober erudition with his leatherbound tome and balloon glass full of overpriced joy juice. All day the sky had retained the ominous hue of old newsprint; now it was as black and dense as the leaded ornamentation sectioning the glass panes.

He added half an inch to his snifter and slipped the special Arion edition of Moby Dick into its precise vacancy on the oak bookshelf. Melville was just the sort of intimidating bulwark of literature—pronounced lich-ri-cha—that no person of style or means would ever browse idly. The public schools had propagandized against Melville, poor bastard. Even Jonathan would only pick up the book to hold his grand in his hand. It would remain undisturbed on the shelf.

Lightning tines, closer this time, colored the sky again. In the window Jonathan saw the reflection of a silhouette filling the den doorway, behind him. Haskell's hair was slicked blackly back in a wet pompadour and the smell of a fresh cleansing radiated from him. Jonathan dashed a few fingers of cognac into a new glass.

"Can we close the curtains?"

The talk barrier had been broken. Good. Jonathan already knew the window was not visible from the road, but kept it to himself He drew a thin cord and the burgundy drapes swished grandly together, compressing the den, making it a bit more claustrophobic. This was to be a backstage interview.

"Not paranoia, Jon, I swear," he said. Yet his movements seemed nervous and furtive. He accepted the brandy snifter, then jumped away like a suspicious dog. When he moved to the cluster of sofa and chairs near the window, he immediately selected a corner seat that kept his back to the bookshelves and left him in a position to keep a jumpy watch on both the windows and the entrance to the den. "Not paranoia. I'm not crazy, either. Just cautious."

Jonathan stopped down a wince of disappointment. Oh, christ, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, gimme a break!

Sensing this, Haskell perked up. "God, don't I know what that sounds like. When people babble under stress, their dialog would offend the worst B-movie hack. Ever wonder if you were a mouthpiece for some keyboard-basher's rotten cosmic screenplay? You work in Hollywood long enough, you realize that what life needs is pacing, better camera angles, less exposition, and a crack editor to re-order the whole mess into something interesting. And dénouements."

"Stay in my neighborhood long enough," said Jonathan, "And you begin analyzing reflex conversation, plumbing the sordid, crazed, anal retentive depths of have a nice day." He felt a flush of guilt—Haskell had been his friend. After a rush of years he had come to him for help out of the night, obviously as a barrel-bottom last resort. If Jonathan could not fix things, what in hell was his purpose on the planet? "Don't start at the beginning," he said. "Start with whatever is of the most importance."

"Simplicity," said Haskell, uttering a harsh little laugh. "The Conclave."

"Which is?"

"A phalanx of men and women you've never read about in Variety. Consummate business folk. A tiny, elite federation. Compressed, efficient. Mother, are they ever efficient."

"Movers and shakers. What are they into?"

"Movies, what else?" said Haskell as though it was obvious to a child. "They 'make' movies, by helping movies make money. They make reputations. They deal in success, not excess. It's the only game in this town."

"You mean they're a production group?"

"No." Haskell struggled against a vast and insubstantial void, realizing the futility of wrestling with a ghost. He used up dead time by looking from the curtains to the door to Jonathan. He sipped his cognac. With a sigh of frustration—the sound of a drowning man who sees that rescuers do not notice him—lie fought to find a way to encapsulate the ideas in his head and push them out into the light for examination. Jonathan could see the ideas were massy and unwieldy, involving an obvious danger that was easily overlooked, like a hostile gray bull elephant lurking against a gray building. When Jonathan considered that simile, he noticed that Haskell himself had grayed quite a lot in the years since they'd last talked. The black hair was interrupted by frequent striations of dead marble whiteness, where composure had seemingly been bleached away. Where Haskell's hip self-confidence had been bartered away in some devil's pact that left ashes in the soul and a red rime of fear crusting the eyes.

"Jon" he said finally. "Did you ever notice those white vans all over Los Angeles, the ones with the microwave dishes on the roof, and the high beam transmitters that look like someone made a science fiction prop out of two oversized shotgun microphones? Sometimes you see them on residential streets, just sitting there, or parked next to the newspaper machines outside a restaurant. Ever wonder what they're for?"

Jonathan hoped his smile was encouraging. "I've always shrugged them off as TV news, or CIA, or cable-service trucks. Always unmarked. No panel windows, and what glass there is is heavily reflectorized." Two words nattered in his brain, and they were conspiracy paranoia.

"And sometimes with no external gear at all. Just another faceless white van. But in your gut you know they're all kin."

"Right." Jonathan remained casual. It would not do for Haskell to think he was being humored.

"Ever see the film Gimme Shelter?" Haskell was deadpan.

Non sequitur? Jonathan raced to make identification while he kept his face relaxed and friendly. "Yes. A long while ago. The Rolling Stones documentary of the Altamont Speedway concert. Lots of narrative by Melvin Belli, the attorney. Raw, spontaneous footage of a man getting knifed right in front of the stage."

"You remember the story they used to tell about Ben-Hur, the industry story for stuntmen?"

"That's one I'm not familiar with."

"Rumor had it that during the film's climactic chariot race, a stuntman was run over by his own chariot after a muffed fall. Killed. For years, people insisted that if you looked closely enough at the finished footage, you'd actually see the poor son of a bitch getting crushed in living color."

"Just like the stabbing at Altamont."

"Or the riot footage from the Chicago Democratic Convention in Wexler's Medium Cool. Real head bashings; blood you knew wasn't Karo Syrup and food dye. When a truncheon bounces off a head in that film, you feel it pulverizing bone and tissue." He was rolling now, albeit with queasy uncertainty, the kind that treads softly in the psyche. He did not want Jonathan to dismiss him before he reached the crux. His job had always been to make such stories palatable, whether they were true or not, to live creatively through a typewriter. It would be an absurd shame if he botched it with the truth. "Let's escalate now, shall we? Snuff. You've heard of it, I'm sure. Purports to be an actual filmed record of torture and murder. The people you see being killed actually were killed—or so the myth goes. Tell me, Jon, just offhand, what's the current moneymaker playing all over Hollywood and Westwood?"

"Having not made it out to the movies in about three weeks, I'd say that movie The Nam, because it's been on the news so much."

"Uh-huh. Why?"

"Well, because—" Jonathan stopped and sought Haskell's eyes, his glass hesitating midway to his mouth. "Because of that TV actor who was killed during filming. Supposedly you can see him getting blown to smithereens. It got a lot of media. Three-ring coverage."

"Supposedly you can also see the guy's blood on the camera lens. But the only reality you can be sure of is that because of that scene, the film is now minting money fist over asshole, as my little brother used to say." He finished his drink.

"But did that actor—did he . . ."

"His name was Pepperdine," said Haskell.

"Did he really die, or not?"

"There you go, Jon, off down the slide. In your eyes, right now, I can see the thing that's making The Nani such a hit. The lust to know, coupled with the proximity of death, the most undeniable thing there is. Yes, Pepperdine died. What you see in the movies is real. But no accident."

"You're suggesting that this man's death was arranged, premeditated in order that a motion picture could pull in more bucks at the box office?" He was flustered and incredulous. "For god's sake . . ."

"Not only was it arranged," said Haskell, motioning for more cognac. "But it's a perfect example of how I've been making my living for going on five years now."

The Grand Marnier bottle sat on the table between them like an obscenely large salad cruet. The cognac's pleasant orange taste went flat and tacky in Jonathan's mouth.

He rediscovered his voice. "You can't be serious," he said to the curtains as lightning flared outside. Dramatic sting.

"Now you sound like one of those bad B-movie characters." For the first time, a phantom smile wisped past Haskell's lips.

"Backtrack, Haskell. You're going to confess to me that spectacular fluke deaths connected to the movie industry are being engineered for the sole purpose of profit?" He tried to juggle the concept in his head and chanced across a good example. "That, say, the disaster at Three Mile Island was set up so that The China Syndrome would be a hit film?"

"Wait, Jon, just a second. I never asked you to believe me, or anything I'm about to tell you. I've got one reason for coming here."

"Shoot." Ha-ha, another cinematic pun.

Haskell seemed anything but crazy now. Ragged, and harried, and on the brink of some inner breakdown of spirit, yes, but not bereft of sanity. "You predate my involvement with the Conclave by years," he said, fingers laced, contemplating the floor. "We were friends back in our idealistic youth. This whole Conclave thing weighs on my brain; I want to get it out of my head and push it away from me. Because I might not have a whole lot of time left, and like a character in a shabby B-movie—one with simple, easily encapsulated motives—I want to clear my conscience in whatever cheap, shabby way I can. I lucked across your name. I'll get to that later. But I lucked across it, and remembered you'd made a go of your aspiration to psychiatry—shrink to the stars' kids, remember?—so I decided to despoil your doorstep in the dead of night."

"No problem for a friend. And I am a professional ear. It would look like you chose correctly. So let's have it."

"Thank God. I'd hoped you'd cut around the bullshit and deal with the core." He rose, refilled his snifter, and drank down another thunderbolt of liquor. "Cigarettes anywhere?"

Jonathan lit Haskell's and decided against one for himself. Haskell inhaled strength and urgency; expelled psychic cinders and decay. Another guarded glance at the window, and he spoke.

"They propositioned me right after Maureen died. I was ripe with ideas for films, stories, articles, projects all with no takers. Maureen had a stroke. I blamed it on the hours her own career hustling imposed on her—the tryouts, the auditions, the commercial shoots. When she died, I was reactionary and bitter—cannon fodder for any good scheme. The Conclave recognized a good vengeance motive and exploited mine. I wanted to make 'the Industry' pay for my loss of Maureen. After nine months I began to wonder if the Conclave had somehow set up her death in the first place, just because they had a slot on the table of Scripters that needed filling. But by then it didn't matter—that was how my thinking had changed."

"Scripters?"

"That was what they called us. Seven of us. It turned out they had read every unfilmed script I'd ever written, and every page of every story I'd ever submitted anywhere. They said my kind of story logic was what they needed. I wound up helping them to blueprint formulae whereby events are programmed to yield maximum profit. Simply stated, that was our sole aim. Scripters, as opposed to writers. You won't find the vocation on an IRS form anywhere."

"Nor any mention of the Conclave, I gather."

Haskell coughed, and with the attitude of a true nicotine addict, puffed his cigarette for relief. "We were tax immune anyway. The money we got paid never existed. Do you recall the legal flap several years ago concerning the profit breakdown on that space monster film—the one that cost ten million to make, grossed fifteen times that much, and didn't show a profit?"

"I remember. Lawsuits flew like chaff in a typhoon." The Variety rule of thumb stated that a film had to gross two and a half times its cost to break even. The estimate had recently been revised upward to 2.7, but either way it meant that in this particular case there was a boatload of cash that needed to be answered for.

"Conclave smoke," said Haskell. "Haven't you ever stopped to wonder why Hollywood continues to bash its head against the impenetrable brick wall of movie musicals? They never make money—Grease was a fluke—and yet every year we get two or three bombs like Song of Norway or Lost Horizon or Annie. Why? Same reason the alien monster movie didn't make any cash until it got too big to hide."

"Sounds like a whopper of a petty-cash till."

"Studio Advisory Overhead covers a lot of yardage in contractese." He shrugged. "Scripters have to be well paid."

Jonathan tilted his head solemnly. Any elite profession that had only seven experts would have to pay by the shovelful.

"It was a minor vogue among the Scripters themselves to be paid in gold bullion, direct to Swiss accounts. None of us would touch American dollars with a cattle prod. And payment of that sort suited the Conclave just peachy. It gave them both secrecy and control."

"It was enough money to compensate for all the Hollywood ego tripping the job itself denied you?" Jonathan paused a beat, and then said, "Dumb question, I'll wager."

"Their leverage exceeds monetary power," said Haskell. "That's why I'm sitting here spilling this to you, instead of to the law enforcement agencies of our fair state. The Conclave likes fascist governors, and I suppose you've noticed that our own current chief executive is just another creation of media." He cut loose a harsh, jagged laugh. "Metro cops that go for thirty large per year don't even provide nuisance value."

"Money and power," mused Jonathan. "It's almost impossible for me to conceive of that much . . ."

"Incentive? It's easy." Bitterness flushed Haskell's face as he overrode his friend. "Is there anyone you know whose life is worth ten million to you? Or the six, nine, twelve million spent on prints and publicity? Nope. It gets easy to say it: he, she, or it dies . . . if that's what you need to make money, to keep everyone employed and grinning."

The operational clarity of the Conclave was classically pragmatic. Chilling. It demanded utter ruthlessness up front, a petcock shutoff of human emotions.

Said the siren song: Do us a trick and we'll make you a star. But then you have to do us a bigger trick.

"All sorts of ideas fell from the creative hats of the Scripters. When I left, things were turning evil. Let me run some ideas past you, to give you a bigger picture." His tone was now maddeningly reasonable. He might have been discussing market futures. In a way, he was. "Posited: a romanticized gang movie. We set up shootings and knifings at selected theatres with high news visibility. Grownup news commentators frowned, and word of mouth made the film a blockbuster. Remember the first manufactured controversy over gory horror films, that whole riff that they were misogynistic, sexist? A Scripter I worked with, a woman, thought that one up over lunch one afternoon. The more simplistic pop critics ate it whole and regurgitated it to their audiences. It's been more than a decade now, and those goddamn movies are still minting cash!"

"Occasionally, the Conclave votes that a chosen actor should expire—never say die. They graph box office draw over a span of years and pull a final jolt of income by killing off the actor. Funny how John Wayne died of cancer right after making a film about a cowboy who dies of cancer . . . See Blah-Blah's final film! They—we—called it the Rockstar Formula."

"Death equals increased album sales," Jonathan said. "Like with Jim Morrison, or . . ."

"Yeah, well, I don't know about John Lennon or Henry Fonda. Some recent occurrences—look at the Natalie Wood thing—have the earmarks of Conclave jobs but I sure as hell couldn't tell you if they were bona fide or not. You gain an eye for the techniques after a while, but the Conclave is always refining and modifying their approach, in case some outsider starts adding up facts. And sometimes fate intercedes—I think that was the case with Lennon. Random acts still happen, even in the 1980s. But Lennon's death was a profit setup from square one whether it was programmed that way or not."

Jonathan said nothing.

"You have that expression on your face again, Jon. What you're thinking is what I've mulled over a billion times. It is cold. You have to turn yourself off, function only on the medulla level. You consider a problem dispassionately, the way a mathematician faces down an equation."

"You did all this for money?" Suddenly Jonathan was rudely aware of his stained-glass windows, and expensive desk, and sybaritic carpeting, and the things he had done to get them. His eyes picked out his thousand-dollar copy of Moby Dick on the costly oak and peg shelf.

"Not just for money. I'm not sure I can explain why the opportunity appealed to me—explain in any sane way, I mean." He let his open hands fall into his lap.

"I'm not as dumb as you may think," Jonathan said colorlessly. "I've got a pretty fair idea of why you or any other creative mind would go for it: Hollywood doesn't break ground anymore. It's a creative dry well. Screenplays are infinitely rewritable so that studio middle management can stay employed. Directors find their final cuts being edited by the PR department and their endings being dictated by know-nothing preview audiences. The studios have all co-opted each other, and the whole circus has been inside the tight fists of the accountants for at least the past thirty years. People don't watch films today, they watch corporate deal-making in action. Once, filmmakers made their films and then sold them. Now it's the other way around—money isn't to make movies, movies are to make money. The screenplay, as manipulable as hamburger, is just a formality amid formulaic, simpleminded formats, 'name' stars, 'name' directors, and 'hot properties.' The accountants add these raw materials together exactly like mathematicians—and label the result their 'product.' It's borne a system in which any film that doesn't gross a hundred million dollars is deemed a failure. In such a system, the last bastion of true creativity is the guy who can figure out how to present such tired garbage in such a way that it is a success, thanks to millions of moviegoers being conned into believing it is something fresh and original and moving."

Jonathan had an absurd picture of the archetypal Hollywood Meeting. Haskell was pitching the idea for a dark little film indeed, and Jonathan was examining the concept from all angles, trying to decide whether to buy it. "The most creative intellect, therefore," he decided, "would be the person who could compose social events or sculpt media attention unobtrusively. Real death can lure a jaded and reactionary public, and the scenarios must be increasingly complex in order to remain convincingly 'real'. The challenge to any creative mind is obvious: while your legitimate screenplays and ideas were considered disposable, your dictates as a Scripter would have to be elaborate, meticulous, loophole-free . . . and absolute. You see? At last the creator gains control over one facet of the movie making business." The ictus of Jonathan's heartbeat was making his throat throb. "Tell me if I'm warm," he said without humor.

Haskell's gaze abstracted toward the curtains again. "That was the original idea. But like everything in Hollywood, it didn't take too long before the original idea got adulterated."

"That's why you had to leave?"

"That's why I went mad." He drew the last word out into a long hiss. The cognac it seemed, had displaced some of his itchy caution, "Wouldn't a job like that drive you mad?"

Jonathan shook his head. "You're not moonblind. As far as I can see. And I'm an expert at picking out the walnuts, my diplomas all say so. Besides, Haskell, I flat-out don't believe that you've actually snuffed anybody. And that leaves me in a quandary. If the Conclave is real, then you must be lying about your participation—you're no murderer."

"That returns us to the weird white vans. Scripters, are creative talent only. The boogeymen in the white vans execute the janitorial work per se."

"You're afraid a van-load of hitmen is going to tool up my drive? Nobody knows you're here."

"Ascribe it to the caution of the insane. That was how I evaded their clutches, you see. It does no good to run, so I went mad. I went mad to get out and buy time to make sure the Conclave couldn't erase me."

"After you became disenchanted with the . . . adulterations." Jonathan's own voice sounded ominous and melodramatic, and he tried to downshift his attitude into the brand of uncondescending sympathy peculiar to the analyst's calling.

"Actually, the change in the Conclave was fundamental and perfectly predictable," said Haskell. "Their aims became corrupted, people in such a position of power should never acknowledge a higher authority. And yes, I realize it sounds horrible to describe their original aims as pure, but I can't come up with a better description."

"Well, viewed objectively—pragmatically—the Conclave's objectives were pure, I daresay. Uncompromisingly pure." Jonathan was fascinated by the idea.

"Like every bloody damn thing in the industry, it wasn't satisfied with enough. Greed caused them to start monkeying around with chemicals. Additives to the junk movie audiences buy at theatre snack bars. Tiny jolts of light hypnotics, to render the viewer more receptive to planted visual subliminals. The first tryouts were merchandise-oriented—T-shirts, toys, novelizations, dolls, that whole farrago. Screenplays included a lot of subsurface pressure-point stroking for the median consumer. The suggestions, combined with the test drugs, ensured that audiences would buy tie-in merchandise like lab mice sucking up Violet Number Two—all it took was a squirt of mind-booze into the popcorn, and the funny thing was that the whole program was very cheap. Remember when popcorn butter was replaced by that orange, vegetable-oil glop at the snack bar?"

"That greasy stuff that comes in gallon cans and solidifies at room temperature, like candle wax?"

"We phased it under the guise of economization. Every household in America is sympathetic to the idea of frugality, and it was accepted as a necessary evil. Easy as a bread sandwich." Pride still tinged Haskell's voice, perversely. They were, after all, discussing his creativity.

"But so far the orientation was still profit. Money."

"Things changed." Haskell lifted his empty glass and slid it around on the tabletop in a ritualistic pattern. "About the time the government reinstituted draft registration, things began to change. The Conclave was contracted—I think—to ply our usual tactics, plus what we learned from the Popcorn Scenario, to find out if there was a cost-effective way to remilitarize the youth of the country, in order that they might accept the planned reinstatement of the draft itself more readily. The government set the stage economically by informing everyone that we were in a depression period, with very pointed allusions to the 1930s. The period just prior to our last 'good' war."

"And the Conclave . . .?"

"Boiled down, our objective was to make killing and military life seem like adventurous fun, so for our inspiration we went back to the Thirties as well. It was pure serendipity. Inside one of the Scripter offices there was an old copy of Doc Smith's first Lensinan space opera. It turned out that audiences in the 1970s were more receptive to the sort of thing they scoffed at as juvenilia in the 1930s. Our drugs conditioned them to repeat viewings, simultaneously serving the ends of profit and positive reinforcement. The movie we came up with stroked all the correct psychological triggers. The fact that it grossed more money than any film in history at the time proves how on-target our approach was."

"Oh my god . . ." said Jonathan, his mouth stalling in the open position.

"Six months afterward we ripped ourselves off and got secondary reinforcement onto television. We pulled a 40 share. The year after that we phased in the video games, experimenting with non-narcotic hypnosis, using electrical pulses, body capacitance, and keying the pleasure centers of the brain with low-voltage shocks. Jesus, Jonathan, can you see what we accomplished? In something under half a decade, we've programmed an entire generation of warm bodies to go to war for us and love it. They buy what we tell them to. Music, movies, whole lifestyles. And they hate who we tell them to. Khomeini, Qaddafi. Ever notice how the leader of a country we oppose automatically becomes a lunatic? It's simple to make our audiences slaver for blood; that past hasn't changed since the days of the Colosseum. We've conditioned a whole population to live on the rim of Apocalypse and love it. They want to kill the enemy, tear his heart out, go to war so their gas bills will go down! They're all primed for just that sort of dénouement, to satisfy their need for linear storytelling in the fictions that have become their lives! The system perpetuates itself. Our own guinea pigs pay us money to keep the mechanisms grinding away. If you don't believe that, just check out last year's big hit movies . . . then try to tell me the target demographic audience isn't waiting for marching orders."

Haskell rubbed his eyes, making them bloodshot and teary. "Not long after that masterstroke, I decided to take my leave of the whole cesspool. I didn't feel so goddamned superior anymore. To see the manipulation of the masses as something cleaner than outright murder, one-to-one, takes the keenest kind of egomania. I couldn't lie anymore—especially to myself. So, as I've said, I went mad."

To Jonathan, Haskell looked deflated now, slightly shrunken, as if decanting his angst had left him physically diminished. He had become his job. He had been engulfed by his own obsession to leave footprints in the world of cinema, and now was kicking the underpinnings from the obsession itself and cannibalizing his existence. Consuming himself via confession. Jonathan half expected his old friend to dissolve away like a cinematic special effect, leaving a Cheshire Cat rictus that would hold for a single, meaningful beat before fading to permanent black. He appraised Haskell through steepled fingers. After a precarious moment of silence he figured it out. "You didn't really lose your mind."

Haskell nodded, perking up. "I got angry, not crazy. It was to my advantage to convince the Conclave that one was the other." He used the tabletop to resume the liquor and cigarettes ritual, then leaned conspiratorially closer to Jonathan. "After the dazzle of the pay scale diminishes, you begin wondering what happens when Scripters say that's enough—like I was about to. We all just assumed that a letter of resignation could be tendered, everybody would shake hands, and the retiree would traipse off to Monaco to spend his Swiss balance. Four Scripters announced their intentions to quit and did so, amid quite a lot of good cheer, during my tenure. Their replacements were introduced in a matter of days, as if the Conclave had a card file full of emotionally vulnerable hard-cases . . . like mine, like I had been. Even Scripting gets mundane after a few years, right?"

Jonathan nodded, although he could not see how it could possibly get dull. He wanted more cognac for himself but the bottle was drained clean.

"Then I stopped thinking like a schmuck and started thinking like a Scripter again," said Haskell, pointing. "Wouldn't it be much simpler for the Conclave to dispatch a white van to take care of the old blood? And juggle Swiss numbers so the ex-Scripter's balance slides right back into the Conclave coffers? And thereby gain a fail-safe procedure against ex-Scripters multiplying, becoming a goddamned minority practically, and having one of them inevitably spilling the beans the way I'm doing right now?" His smile was sickly but expressive, the smile of a terminal cancer patient laughing at a tumor joke. "So yes, I did go mad. The mad are unpredictable, and if there is one quality the Conclave hates, it's mad unpredictability—because it falls outside the realm of demographics and flowcharts."

"No by-the-book solutions," said Jonathan, understanding Haskell's drift immediately. "No cut-and-dried solutions. Each case is different—almost random, like the real-life, accidental deaths versus the Conclave's planned ones. Yes." He said yes again to himself as he rose and rummaged through the low cherrywood cabinet for another bottle of something suitable. Tension was chewing at his knotted muscles. A pulsing in his head made him aware that his jaws had been squeezing together, grinding his teeth for at least half an hour. Giving up on the cabinet, he said, "Wait a second. Got to go to the kitchen."

Wandering back from his empty kitchen, he stopped in his empty bathroom and forced himself to urinate five drops, and while staring at the brandy bottle he'd scared up, balanced on the tank lid of the toilet, he told himself that he had encountered no real problems. Haskell did not seem violent, although he did seem delusional. There was no foreseeable trouble.

Haskell was peering through a slit in the den curtains when he returned. Jonathan dashed a fresh taste into a clean crystal highball glass for himself and made a point of setting the brandy bottle down on the low table near Haskell's empty snifter.

"The rain's letting up?"

"You're not finished yet, Haskell," Jonathan urged calmly.

He turned. "Yeah. Permit me to tell you how and why I went bonkers, Jon."

"That's not what I meant. You told me how you got into the mess with the Conclave, now I presume you're going to tell me how you got out of it. I take it you evaded the guys in the white vans pretty expertly. You're here, after all."

"Yes." Haskell fingered the flap pocket of his shirt.

"You must have outfoxed them, or found blackmail leverage against them, or both. If they were killing everyone else—"

"I had no desire to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. I plotted my escape as a Scripter, not a fugitive. I took a lot of evidence against them—documents—and I ran to earth, and then I let them find me, apparently insensate, without the documents. They didn't dare kill or lobotomize me in case I'd socked away something that would tip over their monolith in the event of my demise. So they tucked me away in a very cozy asylum, to keep an eye on me for a while. Rather, I let them do it."

"It was all a bluff?"

"No. I went north with two knapsacks full of cash and documents. Both still exist as I speak."

"What, then?" Jonathan was inwardly exasperated. "Your brilliant plan was to finish out your days in a nuthouse?" He nearly startled himself with the word nuthouse.

"Jon, I'm not there now, am I? Haven't you read the papers lately?" Jonathan stopped to review.

Haskell's eyes glinted with something like sick glee. "I'll give you a hint. They're still shoveling corpses out of the wreckage and ashes."

"Briar Lane," Jonathan murmured. "Good God, they filed you away in Briar Lane?"

"Can you think of a more exclusive nuthouse? They keep the patient's entire medical history right at hand there—even the dental records." He resumed his seat, now fiddling with an unidentifiable metal knickknack he'd taken out of his pocket to play with.

"You started the fire at Briar Lane?" Jonathan wanted more alcohol, but cut short his body's urge to reach for the bottle.

"It was a classic old mansion, Jon. Ultra-wealthy incurables only. Pyromaniacs need not apply. The Conclave paid my freight—nothing but the best for those who might turn on you—and access to the files proves pretty goddamn easy if you're not really crazy. Or if you're crazy in the right direction."

"Do you really expect the Conclave to be fooled by the old Hitler ploy? A body charred to unrecognizability and a set of labeled dental proofs, charred or not, are not going to reassure them much . . . from what you've said."

"On the other hand, it's been over a year now since I went nuts and they've seen no provocative action from my presumed blackmail securities. I want them to understand that the Briar Lane incident is their escape valve regarding me—that they should relax, pursue their new projects, maybe even write me off. They don't hurt me and I don't hurt them. Just let me fade, with the money I've stockpiled."

"Can't they connect you to the money?"

"Assumed name," Haskell said, with the air of repeating prepared answers.

"The period during which you vanished? 'Ran to earth'?"

Jonathan was aware of his own sharpened, inquisitive gaze, of his more aggressive posture in the chair. He was automatically grilling Haskell. To atone he added, "Said the devil's advocate," and Haskell's eyebrows arched.

"Jon, the Conclave doesn't believe in what insurance companies call acts of God. They always try to anticipate what sort of scam will be run on them. I'm not the first to try, though I may be the first to succeed. The trick is knowing when to stop thinking like a Scripter. I planned not to plan, and wound up doing the sort of entirely random thing that would never be accepted in fiction. I took my knapsacks full of incriminata and hitchhiked. While I was riding my thumb, they went berserk scouring California, checking banks, monitoring LAX and municipal skyports and bus depots and Union Station and car rental agencies and I wasn't even in California! But California is where they caught me. After I'd come back." His eyes were aglint with some private joke, some fundamental trivium he was purposefully omitting from his story.

"Without the knapsacks?" Jonathan tried to sum the bits and orts of information in order to extrapolate.

Haskell stood up again and paced like Sherlock Holmes about to finger a murderer from suspects congregated before a Victorian hearth. "I know what you're thinking, Jon—with a setup like I've described, it would seem reckless of me to just drop in on you after all these years, entirely by chance, right?"

"I was going to ask why me."

"When I infiltrated the files at Briar Lane, I found a doctors' directory—you know, that binder thing they constantly update with inserts. I looked up your name and hot damn, there you were. It was just like we'd speculated. I'd become a screenwriter—a Scripter—and you'd become a shrink. It even had your home address."

"Conveniently enough," said Jon. "A paranoid mind might see a plot brewing in a simple fact like that."

"Oh yeah. My first thought. I guess that confirms me as a sicko. But consider, Jon: if you'd been seduced by the Conclave, you would've put me under with a drug in the cognac and remanded me to the boys in the white vans for pumping . . . except for one thing. The one thing they weren't able to get out of me when they had me, through drugs or threats or promises, and the one thing they might be desperate enough to try subterfuge to win. The one thing I haven't mentioned yet—the location of the blackmail material. Where I went when I took my little excursion."

"My office could have been bugged without my knowledge, Haskell."

"Now you're thinking like a Scripter. Tempting job, isn't it? At least, the way it looks from the outside. Mass manipulation of entire populations would especially intrigue a psychiatrist or a sociologist. I saw your sheepskins on both, Jon. They're right behind the desk." He watched Jonathan's eyes track to the frames on the wall and back. "But I don't think they'd try something as superhuman as bugging each of my past acquaintances in all of Los Angeles. The Conclave prefers buying people to equipment."

Jonathan gestured impatiently, urging Haskell to get on with it. "So what's the punchline, Haskell? You going to string me along, or tell me whether you trust me or not?"

Haskell smiled. "Ah, now you're in character—do you see? The concerned analyst banking on his patient's faith; just the right amount of deep sobriety and interest." He held his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. "Just enough irritation to prompt the patient to reassure him with the truth." He moved to the closed curtains, arms spread as though entreating an unseen audience. "Is he playing a role?" He brought his hands together in one swift clap. "Or is he for real?"

"All right, Haskell, goddamnit!" His fingers were clawed across the chair arms like marble spiders; his face was indignantly flushed. "I'll play this stupid game just to help you!" He pointed his finger like a weapon. "Here it comes, look out for it! What did you do with the blackmail material?" His eyes were bulging, and when his lips stopped speaking they curled back, loading a full clip of invective.

"THE QUESTION!" Haskell shouted. "At last! And you know what, Jon? I'll answer your question honestly if you'll answer one of mine honestly." He buried his hands in his pockets and leaned against one of the bookcases. "If you're really my pal, then I've gotten this story out of my guts and into the ear of a real human being unlike those bloodless slugs in the Conclave. Plus I've gained a reliable fail-safe for my blackmail material; something very desirable and worth a risk like coming here and exposing myself. Right?"

"Ask." His gaze had turned metallic.

"Have you ever heard of the Conclave before tonight?" Now Haskell had folded his arms. All humor had fled from his face.

"No!"

"Why haven't you had any of the brandy you brought from the kitchen, Jon?"

Jonathan grew flustered. "I thought you—" He stopped, wiped his face. "I was waiting to get rid of the Grand Marnier a bit before I had some." The brandy bottle Jonathan had brought into the room sat untouched, as did Jonathan's highball glass.

"Why don't you have some right now?" Haskell's voice was level, reasoned. Strangely, he looked much healthier now than when he'd stumbled across Jonathan's threshold earlier this evening.

"In good time, Haskell." He sighed, stabbing his finger in the air again. "I refuse to get angry with you. You're—"

"Come off it, Jonathan!" Haskell spun, ran his finger along the spines of the books against which he had been leaning, and drew out Jonathan's thousand-dollar Arion edition of Moby Dick. He let the front cover drop open, revealing a hollow that had been sliced out of the thickness of pages. Secured within the hollow was a small Sanyo tape recorder. Haskell slammed the book shut, dropped it to the carpet with a thump, and pulled from his pocket a cassette tape, waving it in the air. "I took this out while you were in the john, Jonathan! Over half an hour ago!"

Jonathan's mouth was open but his teeth were not clenched anymore. His face went pale and he lost whatever words he had prepared.

"Your eyes went right from the book to the telephone, Jon. You know the number as well as I do: 727-3933. The numbers make a word, Jonathan, that's how we remember it. Punch in that number and a white van will roll up your drive in a neat five minutes." He shook his head slowly. "I was hoping you might not sell me down the river, Jon." He made a furious, frustrated motion with his fist. "Shit! It couldn't have been the money. It had to have been the control they offered you. Had to be."

Jonathan pushed himself slowly up from the recliner. "The tape is part of my hardware, Haskell; it's SOP for anybody who talks to me in as disturbed a state as you brought through the door with you. No plot, no boobytrap . . ." His voice had turned authoritarian and succoring. He was back in character.

"Have a jolt of brandy, Jonathan," Haskell said, indicating the untouched bottle, perceiving in his heart the kind of arrogance it took to carve a hole in a thousand-dollar book for the purpose of subterfuge.

"I will not." Teacher to unruly delinquent. Jonathan turned his back on Haskell and moved toward the desk. He heard Haskell catch up with him, felt his hand grasp his own forearm, expected to be turned back certainly, to be struck, possibly. His fancied control of the situation admitted nothing further.

"I'm afraid I'll have to insist," said Haskell, grasping, and spinning, and striking him, but not in the way he expected.

Jonathan saw Haskell's flat, openhanded blow coming, with little real velocity to cause pain. He could weather the impact and remain standing. Then he saw the metal knickknack from Haskell's pocket between his index and middle fingers, flying to meet him. He felt a sharp needle pain in the muscles of his neck. Haskell jumped away. Jonathan's openhanded grab came up empty.

"Damn!" The tiny puncture stung, enraging him. He lifted the receiver of the desk phone and punched two digits before his hand swelled up and got too fat to function. He dropped the receiver. It clunked on the desktop and fell to the floor, uncoiling the cable. He pawed for the desk edge with an incredulous expression on his face, missed, and followed the phone to the floor, where he lolled like some armless, legless thing attempting locomotion. Haskell stood by the sofa, near the curtains.

"The CIA calls this thing a sting-bee, Jonathan. Like king bee, I guess. Most of your motor coordination will be out for about an hour. As you're discovering, your eyes will still focus and you can hear me perfectly. . . but that's it." He parted the curtains for another check.

"I've done a little deduction, too, Jonathan, with the result of leaving you in another quandary, as you said. Sorry. But here it is: I guessed the Conclave would appeal to you. They must have propositioned you right after your divorce from Janice—same as me. As an acid test, an invitation, they want you to snare me for them, and they give you my story. You arrange for your name to be planted at Briar Lane as a memory key—it's easily predictable, like giving someone a university yellow pages. You'd automatically look up your old compatriots, well, so did I, and this was a specific listing of psychiatrists, which made it a pretty sure thing. In return, you promise to uncover for the Conclave the location of the blackmail leverage, having gained in confidence from me. After all, I'm years in your past; easy enough to screw over for the right kind of carrot.

"But you'd better start worrying about this, Jon: what if I'm a loyalty test for you? My whole story could have been fabricated as a Conclave gambit to test your resiliency—how far do old friendships reach? Did I escape tonight, or did you let me get away? Think about it, when you're explaining to the Conclave why I'm not here and why you don't have what they want. That's part one of your dilemma. Part two is this, if I'm not a test, then you're going to have to cover for me. I anticipated this because I'm a veteran and you're a tyro at this game. You're going to have to dance pretty fast to convince them I'm either dead for real, or impotent as a threat to them, because if you don't, they'll kill you for botching things.

"If you succeed in snowing them, then you'll be in. You'll get to be a Scripter. And after a year, three years, five, you'll get just as sick of it as I have. You see, Jon, you're exactly as I was when I went in. I know how you'll react. And perhaps a few years from now we'll run into each other out there in the wilderness somewhere. As for now, I've just relieved myself of the onus of paranoia that's dogged me ever since I opted out. I've given it to you. And with that shadow hanging over your shoulder, you'll learn how horrible the Conclave really is—you'll learn it in the only meaningful way to be had, and maybe it'll turn you into an ally eventually. As for right now—"

He pulled out Jonathan's billfold, extracted the cash, and replaced it. Jonathan's body was a wet, composureless mail sack. His eyes glared, beaten, amazed, and helpless. Drool rolled out of one corner of his slack mouth and was absorbed into the expensive carpeting.

Haskell ducked out of the den and reappeared with a can of Dr. Pepper from Jonathan's refrigerator, emptying it quickly. "Talk like this always makes me thirsty. Don't worry, Jon, I'm gone, untraceably, just as soon as I make a phone call."

He collected the phone from the floor and tapped the cradle impatiently until he got a dial tone. "You remember the word, of course, Jon? The word they gave us so we'd never forget the phone number? SCREWED."

When he heard the connection go through, Haskell placed the open receiver on the, desktop, tossed the prone form of Jonathan a little mocking salute, and left. Jonathan heard the back door slam, could even feel its vibrations against his cheek through the floor. That was all he could do. Haskell had thoughtfully extinguished the house lights on his way out, and he could see nothing.

Five minutes later, van headlights flashed against the backside of the den's curtains. Then the house fell dark again.

THE WOMAN'S VERSION

The rough thump was distinctly like the sound of a dead body hitting the floor.

In the darkness of her tiny apartment, Leona Koch's eyes snapped open. She had been almost within the succoring, black grasp of sleep when the noise had jolted her back to consciousness. Earlier, it had been the need to use the bathroom; after that, a cold finger of air on her leg, which had escaped her tucked-in fortress of blankets. Now, as sleep left her behind like the receding caboose lamps of a missed train, her irritation at losing the night was edged with her customary wariness. Dark rooms held dangers, she knew, and some late-night noises might be things other than the creaking of the old building, or the coarse young marrieds who lived above her, fighting on the stairwell.

Leona Koch was a devotee of blankets and darkness as psychic armor. Hospital corners with the ends tucked airtight, and opaque window shades pulled sensibly to the sill to deaden the street lamps outside. And no squirming about in bed, she reminded herself, because if her room made some 11:30 P.M. noise, squirming might attract the attention of whatever malignant thing was out there shopping in the middle of the night.

"They never quit . . ." She had always associated such grumblings with terminal bachelors lacking their requisite pipes and slippers, but tonight she felt entitled. The sound of her own voice was thick and coated; the throat infection that had kept her from her desk (right row, third down, in Calex Petroleum's accounting wing) for three straight days was still raging. Now her voice sounded like a wasp trying to fly underwater, she'd have to trudge to the bathroom to clear her throat and spit. Hawking into Kleenexes and watching them accumulate in the bedside wastebasket was like keeping the disease near you. She held by the theory that one could consign a sickness, a bit at a time, down the drain to the neverland that waited wherever the pipes and sewers of civilization ended. But she'd have to get up again.

Leona groped for the cord switch and clicked on her nightstand lamp. A pale forty-watter illuminated the cramped bedroom vestibule. Habitually, she glanced all around her apartment as soon as the light came on, a quick reconnaissance to ensure that nothing had changed in the darkness. It was nominal. No boogeymen.

The next sound from above caused her to sit up in bed a degree quicker than she would have. Something more complex than a thump; this was the sound of a heavy object hitting the floor and breaking, making residual scattering noises. The only revelation brought to her by the heightened awareness of being startled was the fact of her headache leaking slowly back, after being damped less than an hour ago.

"They never quit," she muttered again, noting that people who talked to themselves often repeated a line over and over, as though rehearsing it to use on real people out in the real world. "They never quit." Her breath was shortened, harsh, and painful to her throat. Her two-and-a-half rooms smelled thickly of steam heat, milky tea, and stale bedding.

Leona sat in bed with the light on, waiting for more, still not daring to move around too much, lest the noisemakers cease their activity to eavesdrop on her. She recalled, for the billionth time, how her parents had looked into the dining room and seen her, a modestly pretty four-year-old girl sitting quietly at a table, alone, hands neatly folded, ankles primly crossed, eyes not straying. They had stupidly left her that way, presumably to hie off to the den and flap their lips about how well-behaved their little girl was. That moment, she thought in retrospect, had set her entire ensuing life, the way cake batter forms to the shape of a pan and then sticks to it. She had never truly gotten over the feeling of being abandoned, and never again would trust blindly in the power of Mommy or Daddy to save her. Ever since that horrible moment when something had moved up against the faceted panes of the dining-room window, something outside, something that wanted to see her, her life had assumed a pattern. Then, she had done the only thing she could, lacking her protective cloak of blankets—she had stared dead ahead and tried to make herself invisible. And nothing had befallen her. Years later she would read of Zen and think it an interesting conceit.

A very small noise—an ashtray, perhaps, falling from a table and bouncing on a throw rug.

Something had stalked Leona—oh, she knew what it was, she'd seen it at last, once, long ago, before she learned all the precautions—and now something was making enough timed-release racket above her to rouse her. But she knew this enemy, too, now that she was calmer, more awake, and listening thoughtfully, analyzing each sound.

Mrs. Elvie Rojas, a widow for four of her eighty-six years, had been booked into a convalescent home by her eager and hungry heirs two months before. Her apartment, the one just above Leona's, had been claimed by a stringy and unkempt working-class couple. No mystery there; their history had been etched all over their faces the first time Leona had seen them lugging groceries up the rear stairs: gas-station pump jockey meets career waitress for a first date in the backseat of his Chevy. Or maybe someplace romantic, like the women's john at the Exxon station. Their second or third date would be at some abortion clinic, a regular pit stop for the girl since high school. She stomps out of her parents' split-level to seek connubial bliss with Mr. Grease Clot of the Year and they scan the classifieds for the cheapest rent just when Elvie Rojas has the bad form to vacate.

Elvie was one of the last older tenants to go. Leona supposed that during the Depression their building had been a modest address; now—after the relentless attrition of years, after being endlessly subdivided with apartments quartered, chopped up, and rearranged, after being handed down from one grubby foreign landlord to the next—it was thin-walled, grayly dilapidated, stuffy, and unsafe. To Leona it had become like a dormitory for transients, or a cellblock, considering the nature of the newer tenants.

Over the past eight years the elderly occupants had trickled away, to be replaced by blacks, by Latinos, by wet ends bearing squalling kids.

Leona had been surrounded. Their very alienness intimidated her; she found it best to pretend they did not exist. She did not speak to any of them in passing, and soon enough, they lit out and were replaced by fresh, more threatening faces. No one came to this building to stay anymore. It had become a way station with all the charm of a metropolitan bus depot at three in the morning—from here, people either improved their life, moving upward and out, or receded into oblivion. Leona tried to ignore them. She saved pennies and signed leases, unwilling to dare a step into the less familiar. It probably would not be a matter of choice in the end. If the increasingly dangerous inhabitants did not compel her to flee, the building itself would eventually cave in and absorb her.

The white trash upstairs had proven more irritating by virtue of their proximity to Leona's pocket of existence. The stink of beer, the clogging odor of pot, the blaring radio impinged on her in a way she could not tune out. Then there were the weekend tights, the yelling in stereo. Sometimes he smacked his little wifey and blacked her eyes before their argument calmed into weeping and the rhythmic grunting of copulation. They were animals, thought Leona: the bitch clinging to the ape, she praying for the intervention of a prince who could kiss her out of her caste, he merely waiting for his boss to die. The young American dream.

They were forever tromping lead-footedly about, knocking things over or blundering their furniture into heart-stopping basso skids across the obverse of Leona's ceiling. This, she presumed, was her reward for not complaining about them—not that it would have brought satisfaction. The latest landlord seemed to be from some unfathomably strange Middle Eastern country. Gnomelike and dulleyed, he exuded the smell of stale dates and sour sweat. There were brown gaps between each of his teeth, and the tips of his slicked-back hair were perpetually gravid with droplets of an opaque liquid. He only understood English clearly around the first of each month, and had just bumped the rules so that only cash or money orders were acceptable for rent, this edict due to the untrustworthy nature of the newer tenants.

Something in the room above hit the floor with a leaden whump that rattled the bulbs in Leona's ceiling light fixture.

"God damn it," she muttered, surprising herself by actually letting that out of her mouth. If only they would go away, and leave her to her peace.

She listened. The metronomic noises of fornication had not yet begun. She wondered if Michael Donnelley, at work, thought about her that way, if, when he had asked her to coffee not once but twice, he had in mind the ultimate goal of making nasty between her legs.

And then she thought that that fate might not be so bad, compared with other things. And she remembered bolting to wakefulness just like this, on a different night, long ago, when she was still a child. That night had been windblown and howlingly hostile. She cringed beneath her blankets and squeezed her eyes shut, telling herself over and over that the shape she had seen at the dining-room window had not figured out where her bedroom was, was not peering in at her now, did not seek her consort especially. She made herself invisible. Her breathing slowed from panic speed to normal. She regained control. She opened her eyes.

She had seen the moon hanging there, like a slice from a spoiled orange. It threw the shape lingering outside her bedroom window into silhouette, framing its lank, dead hair and mercifully obscuring the rotted leftovers of a face, the maggots plugging up its nostrils, the gaps where flesh should be, through which she could see the starlight. Despite the bucking October wind outside, its feculent breath steamed her window as he looked in on her, looked right at her as she fought not to twitch, even though she could feel the dead eyes boring through her, even though her stomach was spasming convulsively.

Go away go away go a way go . . . !

Her parents had found her tossing up her dinner of tuna casserole and macaroni and cheese all over the bathroom floor. They cleaned her up and gently returned her to bed. They did not notice her nervously eyeing the window, and she knew they could not save her. Her mother had made the curtains from a Sears floral print bedspread. They were diaphanous, allowing too clear a view of the world outside. They might too easily reveal the shadow, should the shade return to peek in.

Later, she had cut several cardboard clothes boxes to fit just-so underneath her bed, to crowd out whatever demons waited there patiently for a chance at her bare feet. She talked her parents into buying her a night-light. And she learned the trick of stapling her curtains shut, and of placing things to conveniently block the window.

Now, over thirty-five years later, the old habits stuck. Leona continued to rise from her bed in the peculiar, awkwardly acrobatic fashion she'd taught herself while small, to put her outside the reach of whatever might nestle beneath the bed. She still used a night-light—now it was a plastic thing in the shape of a tiny eighteenth-century gas lamp, and it was in her bathroom. And the curtains in her apartment were stapled shut. She had discovered it was a maintenance-free way to keep them closed, when she had lived for a while in a ground-floor room next to a busy sidewalk. Privacy was the rationale; it made good sense.

She half sat, pillows pressing into the small of her back, listening while two full minutes ground past on her alarm clock with no further interruptions from above.

Michael Donnelley seemed a nice man. Over an almost ritualistic lunch date he had ticked off the stand-out events of his life for her in the way she might check a used car for defects that would thwart a resale. His seven-year-old son, Chad. His status as a widower. His tough bout with alcoholism after his wife's death from leukemia, and the touchy convalescence at CareUnit after that. Calex's medical insurance had covered his dry-out, and his status as an account executive with the company was secure. There, Leona, he'd said, forwardly using her first name, now you know all my dirty little secrets.

It had all sounded acceptable to her until he'd let that lie slip. He was shopping; his conversational confessions were littered with honesty, but it was the honesty of a piece of live bait thrown out when the fish scorns a rubber lure. He was being honest instead of charming. He was telling her that his boy needed a mother, that he wanted a surrogate for his wife, and that neither of them was getting any younger. He was suggesting that he could do her a favor since she had not snared a husband—but he had not said any of these things. And that meant that while they were discoursing, pretending to be civilized, he was thinking of her warming the half of his bed left cold by his dead wife. He was imagining her with her nightgown pushed rudely up around her waist and her legs in the air, like the pom-pom princess upstairs looked in the picture Leona's mind formed whenever the cadenced jostling of post-argument rape set the floorboards to creaking above her. She always imagined the grunting.

A shifting, dragging sound came faintly from above. It wandered from the window side of her ceiling toward the short hallway, then stopped. Somebody up there was going to the bathroom. It was not a noise of aggressive misbehavior, but one of aftermath. Perhaps the rodeo upstairs was done for another night.

Michael Donnelley had set off Leona's alarms. She was always alert against attacks on her hard-won independence; her apron strings had been cut with surgical neatness and cauterized. Her armor now included her sensible wardrobe, her books, her modest cooking, her malfunctioning television, and the security of routine. She was living the dream of the independent woman and refused to encumber herself. When Donnelley had started talking, all the warning gongs went off. He was sniffing for a "relationship." And now his dishonest entreaties were efficiently rebuffed. She would know when the time was right for a commitment.

Her problem, as she perceived it, was one of lateral drift. Once one has scored the goal of nondependent existence, she thought, what was one to do with it? For her, snuffing out entanglements had been as direct as clicking off a row of switches. She was a mass of raw potential. Nothing held her. She was free and inertia did not matter because a battery full of power could not stagnate . . . could it?

Someday, she would have to invest some of her accumulated power in a test, to see how her presence changed the world. But not tonight, not while she was sick, and physically unstable, and underslept . . .

When she opened her eyes again, the minute hand on the alarm clock had cranked away another hundred and eighty degrees, her bladder was prodding her, and a dripping noise was leaking irritatingly into earshot from the bathroom. Cold air pushed through her old, nearly transparent blue nightgown; she'd dozed off without covering up. The bed stand light was still blazing, and that woke her up faster, with a tiny stab of panic. It was unnatural to sleep with the lights on, like not dressing for bed. It was dropping off to unconsciousness before everything was secure. It was another of her smart rationalizations.

She sighed, swung her legs from beneath the blankets, and unloaded herself from bed with her usual odd choreography. The dripping tap was probably the shower's hot-water faucet. Again. "Damn it," she said, thinking of her viscid troll of a landlord.

The "improvements" worked on the building by this squalid little man were stopgap jobs, fleeting and cosmetic, and Leona's bathroom was an exemplar of his overwhelming inadequacy. Before she had moved in, a halfhearted attempt to tile the bathroom had been made; it was not a success. Inadequately glued tiles periodically disengaged to shatter in the bathtub, scaring the starch out of her every damned time.

Chunks of grout dropped out to crumble underfoot, leaving a maze of trenches where vermin could hide. Occasionally a drowning cockroach would make a leap for life and land on Leona's leg while she was bathing. After all these years, the sink light was still a naked bulb on a pull chain. The building's horrendous seasonal plumbing problems were evidenced by the bathroom ceiling. It had been replaced about twenty months back with sheets of gypsum board (stamped Sheetrock Firecode), the seams spliced with fat slices of duct tape. It promptly sagged, growing moist and gray once weekly from seepage. Her note to broach this topic before remitting another month's rent, she knew, was taped to the bathroom mirror. As she stepped through the tiny alcove hallway she saw the pinkish glow from the night-light and heard clearly the metronomic dripping sound bap bap bap.

"A slum," she said to herself, rubbing her eyes. She reached for the pull chain she knew to be just above the night-lamp and bap moisture impacted with the back of her hand, making her jump. Bap. So the roof of this sleaze pit was finally leaking all over everything.

It was only as she pulled the chain that she noticed the plastic panes of the little streetlamp were not their usual soft yellow. They were red. The light came on.

Leona saw a daub of blood on the back of her hand. Microscopic motes of plaster dust danced in it as it trailed languidly toward her wrist. Bap. Droplets hung in streaks on the tiny shaving mirror, reflecting themselves. Her note, taped there, was damp and drooping with the red wetness that oozed down the wall in front of her, slowing as it coagulated. The painted porcelain sink was mottled in thickening crimson streaks that converged on the rusty drain. Bap.

Right over her head the make-do ceiling looked insanely like a bisected redwood tree concentric rings of dead brown radiated wetly from a dense maroon bull's-eye. As she looked up, a fresh drop cut loose from the moist center and bap joined the others in the sink. Blood began to steam off the sixty-watt bulb above the mirror.

When she saw her bloodied reflection, her lower lip started trembling. Her heartbeat pulsed painfully in her kidneys, and her stomach felt full of crushed ice. In the mirror, she saw there was just enough lag space behind the open door for something or someone to be hiding.

She jerked clumsily around, wetting herself; a warm finger traced down the inside of her right leg and over the bump of her ankle, to soak into the shabby rug. In that moment she had fully expected a skeletal hand to clamp down on her shoulder from behind, in a graveyard salutation accompanied by the spicy reek of dry, cured, dead flesh. A beetle would clamber off the hand to burrow into the warmth of her thin night clothing. And she would scream and jitter about like a mad victim of St. Vitus.

There was nothing behind the door. Her teeth had bitten away a tissue-fine slice of lip skin . . . and her nails, tucked inside of clenched fists, had left deep purple breves in the soft part of each palm. But none of her own blood had been drawn. Bap.

The gruesome pattern on the bathroom ceiling was now giving up droplets more slowly, and Leona realized with a weird sense of detachment that the blood was drying. Good, it will stop soon and I can go back to bed, she thought irrationally, denying the reality of what she saw.

Bap. A gelid red drop skidded down the front of her nightgown.

Her mind pitched crazily for control and apparently won, though she had to steady herself against the unstained doorjamb. This was real; who was to say it wasn't? Now, her obnoxious neighbors, the sleazy landlord, the decaying deathtrap in which she endured—they all comprised a sitcom scenario much less convincing than the blood dripping from her bathroom ceiling.

Did the grease chimp murder his bimbo? And why should Leona care?

Whistling up the police would take time. They would invade her apartment to dun her with questions and see how shabbily she was living. It was not the image she wished to project. They'd see the curtains stapled shut and scribble things on their pads about how odd she was. Calling the law seemed immediately to be at cross purposes with what Leona wanted to accomplish. But if there had been some kind of mayhem, wasn't it her civic duty to help foster a noiseless neighborhood peace by determining whether the cops needed to be called? And—her mind grasped the notion almost too eagerly—if she discovered something serious enough to warrant calling the cops, would she not have set in motion a series of events that would rid her at last of the losers who had become such a burden to her private existence?

It seemed like logic to Leona, but in her belly it felt like a fiery flash of satori: her precautions, from the stapled drapes on up, for all these years, had worked. The bomb-blast of catastrophe had missed her and hit one floor up. She had lived most of her life as a chicken, afraid, wincing when she tripped over the word xenophobe in the dictionary. For all that time she had been waiting for the moment when she could venture outside her cocoon of safety and see what her stored power could do.

What had happened tonight was the most undeniable of portents. The time was now, and there would be no phone calls to the police.

The sickness in her belly rolled over and became a kind of glowing excitement tinged with residual fear. She looked down at the elongated blood-smear between her breasts; it was talismanic, she now saw, like a standard, singling her out. To return to bed, to relegate what had happened to the realm of nightmare, would be to deny whatever destiny this sequence of events was intended to lead her toward.

Why was she even thinking of going upstairs, she stopped to consider, unless she had just been changed in some chrysalid way?

Carefully she stepped from the bathroom, noticing her constricted quarters seemed uglier now, and somehow used up, like an empty womb. This, too, clicked for her—from this place one either moved up in the world, or . . .

In her mind the voices of her parents chastised her: Yes, quite insane, something about monsters nobody but she can see and things only she could know oh she was such a well-behaved little girl. . . .

Her hands found her robe and belted it about her without looking. She was snug—or secure—when she sprang the double police bolt on the door and peeked out into the real world.

The hallway was unheated, and cold. The building knocked and shifted as though she was moving through the belly of a zeppelin-sized dinosaur settling down to die. Her ear picked out the faraway babbling of a television set, and for a fleeting second her ingrained self took hold and forced her to call out, "Is anyone awake . . . ?" Strong echoes were the only response. No one down here was aware of what had taken place upstairs. They would all hide in their cubicles, trembling, and rightfully so.

Let them, she thought.

The stairway to the third floor was an architect's nightmare, far too narrow and crammed into a corner of the hallway to service—just barely—the subdivided arrangement of rooms. Four steps up, a hard left turn, four more steps, another turn, and four more. Heat rose. Here the air was lukewarm, heavy, and unpleasant—the stink of senile old buildings past their dying time. The risers groaned as Leona stepped cautiously upward.

She drifted past a permanently sealed door suffocated in nails and cheap paint. One less way out, she thought. The brass numerals affixed to the next door were obscured by the same clotted, cream-colored paint that deadened every portal in the building to the same scuffed shoe-sole appearance. This was 307; Leona's was 207. Faint, smoky light seeped from the crack below.

Thinking of opportunities, she knocked. There was no response, immediate or otherwise, as she found when she waited a few beats and knocked again.

The knob was slack and loose. It was blackened by years of dirty hands and rattled when Leona knocked; it ground out a soft-clockwork noise when she twisted it. The front door was unlocked, unbolted, and this was not a revelation. As the knob reached full crank, Leona fancied she heard a papery, rasping sound from within, almost like a dry laugh.

If it was normal, that is, some dreadful bathroom accident, she thought, she could do no worse than possibly distinguish her life with an act of bravery. Yes, officer, I ripped my gown into bandages and bestowed the kiss of life and I didn't even care if they had bad breath or syphilis. Let that smug Mr. Michael Donnelley match that bit of courage for his kid!

Warmer air huffed out against her face as the door swung back. A table lamp glowed near the ragged hide-a-bed sofa in the main room. There were cinderblock and milk-crate shelves loaded not with books, but stray papers and worn-looking knickknacks and dirty gray bar ashtrays. The miasma of recently burned hamburger hung offensively in the air. The ceiling seemed far away and unhealthily browned, as though it filtered all the upward-bound air in the building.

A child's phonograph collected dust in one corner, surrounded by a scatter of overplayed record albums. A champagne bottle that had held a fistful of pitiful, shrunken flowers was distributed around the floor in broken green chunks.

The curtains were wide open to the night. Leona shook her head. Of course.

She knew the path; this bloc was laid out identically to her own rooms. She had to round a corner formed by the conjunction of the capsule kitchen and the hollow where the undersized closet would be. Inside the bathroom, past the half-shut door, she heard the copper slurp of a lethargically feeding bathtub drain. The natter of the TV set, a thousand miles away, might have been an aural hallucination.

Nothing waited to grab her behind the bathroom door. Her heart hammered away nonetheless until the doorknob bonked hollowly against the bathroom wall.

The boy hung half-out of the tub, tubes and viscera and things never meant to dry in the air strung across the floor. One hand was outstretched, like the clutching claw Leona had imagined behind her earlier, and clamped bloodily onto the toilet seat. His eyes were gone. His tongue was gone. His flesh had been rearranged to suit a temperamental and impatient carver. The tiled floor was awash in a half-inch depth of stinking blood. Like the boy, his wife's corpse was naked, gaffed and cleaned out like a trout. She was wedged ass-up, face down, into the narrow space between the tub and the toilet. Her skin—her pelt—covered the floor in slices.

"You're the scoffers," Leona said in a gentle, knowing voice. "You weren't careful. You didn't look out." Didn't kids learn anything anymore? Their lives had trickled down the same pipes into which Leona had spit her disease.

When she heard the door to 307 click shut—it was unmistakably the door through which she had just entered—she closed her eyes, anticipating the consummation of a courtship that had lasted for decades. There would be no bovine grunting and thrusting; she would not have to assume an embarrassingly submissive position. The deliciously itchy fireball down deep in her was nothing like what she felt when dealing with Michael Donnelley. And when she heard the rasping little laugh again, and smelled the dry cinnamon odor of flesh to which rot was but an ancient memory, she smiled, because the thing that had wanted to get her ever since that scary night in the dining room was getting her tonight.

But it had never wanted to hurt her.

Once again, Leona found herself in a messy, reeking bathroom. This time, however, her parents did not need to drag her out and tuck her in. This time she left under her own power. Love could do that to a person; it gave one unsuspected strength.

Her slippers were soon abraded to dirty rags from her night-walk. The shroudlike tatters of her robe were stiff with baked blood. She found a unique joy in no longer fearing people or things. The flies that lit on her to feed were only an annoyance.

After a time she found her way to a street called Willow Avenue, and the house Michael Donnelley had described so proudly. In a small bedroom tucked into the rear of the house, Donnelley's son Chad would be toying with an HO train rig . . . awake far too late for any seven-year-old.

No one had ever warned him what to watch out for, not in this day and age of enlightenment.

Leona tittered softly to herself, brushing hair from her face. The laugh was moist and croaking; the white wisps of hair brittle and dead, now revealing her functioning eye. Her insides rumbled with a sickly, hungering commotion as the blind, pink grubs within her squirmed and tried to feed. A daddy longlegs picked its way downward, mountaineering from the dark socket and withered lids of Leona's absent eye to the light membrane of cobweb beneath her chin. Where her throat had been. Where it would begin a nest.

As Leona had begun hers.

Here was her niche in the world. She was part of a family now, and it was time to grow.

She took her place at Chad's window. When he turned his child's eyes toward her and began screaming, a maternal joy filled her as the emotion she had so long been denied came rushing home at last.

LONESOME COYOTE BLUES

Jake's black Trans Am gobbled up Highway 15 at eighty-eight per.

"How about 'Digger Man,'" Jake shouted from the pilot side, over the din of the radio. The car's Kickers were pumping out "All Down the Line" by the Stones, real cruising music. With the moonroof open, the tune was barely more than bass notes thanks to the slipstream of hot desert air blasting through the car and deadening our ears. Our imaginations filled in the unheard guitar riffs; memory did the same for the lyrics.

"Wrong!" I yelled back. It was a good idea to stick to monosyllables, for comprehension's sake. "Sounds too much like Nigger Man; it'd make people hostile if they heard it on the radio." I watched the green LEDs of the stereo's power booster jump in the dark. "'Cruise Blues,'" I offered, snatching inspiration from what writers called Real Life.

"Nah!" Jake always denied suggestions with Luddite swiftness; it gave him more time to scare up a rational reason for the denial. "That sounds too much like a navy drinking song; you know—crew's blues. And it's too wimpy. Keep thinking."

"'Untitled Soulful Surefire Hit Single Blues.'"

"Don't be an asshole, Lester."

"Okay, okay . . . let me masticate this mentally for a moment, bwana." I was beginning to think Jake was soliciting my suggestions for the sole purpose of shooting them down, so I let him stew a bit. Not maliciously, understand—this was just one of those lull periods you hit during a long haul on the road with nothing to do.

"Live with Me" commenced; some deejay back in Los Angeles was on a Stones binge tonight. Jake submerged his consciousness into the chugging beat, and the Trans Am's needle made a tentative introduction to the century mark. The sleek gas hog was one of the few extravagances I'd known Jake to permit himself. Macho phallic fun. It had actually been a gift from Jake's father—the only such perk ever accepted, given on the occasion of Jake's premature leavetaking from the University of Nebraska. That's right, a present for quitting school. Jake's father was Señor Self-Made, and preferred his only son to whittle out his own niche on the club circuit instead of passively purchasing a dull career via the college route.

The sun had set on L.A. a while back, and somewhere in front of us was the sky-glow of Las Vegas, golden and artificial. I reached back for the beer cooler and racked my knuckles on the steel edging of Jake's guitar case for the fifth or sixth time that evening. I held my fingers against the chilled can for a second before popping the top and sucking away foam. We'd been pounding the trail long enough for the over-cranked stereo to start giving me a headache, but I could stand it for five more minutes. I told myself that every four minutes or so.

The jetwash of warm air blitzing through our open car was stingingly fresh, filtered to purity by the sand and scrub surrounding us. There is no sensation quite so exhilarating as bulleting through the desert night like some low-flying X-15, with all vents cocked open, a cold beer tucked into your crotch, and Uncle Mick and Company thumping time while the landscape scoots by. Our payload was band ordnance; somewhere beneath Jake's Gibson six-string was my own Rickenbacker bass, stereo-wired. We had mobilized with flight-scramble speed and were cutting impressive time. It would be tight: we had to be set up and playing for a weekend Vegas lounge crowd in another two hours, but for now we were entitled to be smug.

Rudy's phone call had set our plans just over three hours ago: "Jake, get your buns up here by the witching hour and you've got a gig." Rudy's style didn't admit to social niceties like hello.

Jake had just crawled from his hide-a-bed, and his characteristic answer was fuzzy with sleep. "No shit?"

"Alfie got clobbered. Some kinda virus. He drinks anything but water and it comes flying out of one end or the other in Olympic time. We need a sub who can crank out our repertoire and do heavy-metal chops, and solo fills that go beyond fingers raping a fretboard or eight-bar sustains . . ."

"Yeah, I got the program," said Jake. "But why me? I mean, there must be fifty or sixty dudes in Vegas who can—"

"Hey, I thought I'd toss you a favor, ace. I don't have time to screw around. Yes or no?"

"How much?" Jake could always do business in his sleep.

"Your cut is two hundred."

"Hell, Rudy, the gas for the trip'll run over forty!"

"You want it or don't you?"

Abruptly, Jake stared at me. I was slouched over the breakfast bar of our apartment, choking down recycled coffee. In two minutes I'd find a dead roach in the dregs and make a fresh pot. Right then I was trying to guess Rudy's end of the argument. Jake quibbling over money? We were stony.

"Cut Lester in for a quarter," Jake said calmly, "and we'll be there in time for the sound check."

I overheard what Rudy yelled next just fine; Jake held the receiver away from his ear: "We already gota bass player!"

"Correction. You already have a novice bass player. Leroy listens to too goddamn much Journey and you know it. Your stage act suffers because he only plays one string. Give him the night off to pick up women."

"But that's another two hundred—"

"Yes or no, Rudy? Lester needs the cash worse than Leroy ever will." Leroy's dad was into computer keyboard manufacture, and had a well-developed sense of family responsibility. Jake and I, yesterday, had been matching quarters to see which of us would have to take up mugging Social Security recipients just to meet Mr. Elkin's outrageous monthly rent.

I didn't have to hear any more, because Jake smiled and nodded to himself. He and Rudy went all the way back to a cheezoid garage band called Abduction; Rudy's gesture was something more than a personal debt kickback and something less than charity. I figured it was the muse Euterpe, looking out for Jake the way she always had. Or maybe Polyhymnia. Either way, Jake never found a leap of faith in the face of impending catastrophe as difficult as I still did. He knew food would turn up as needed, and that our rent would always come from somewhere at the last minute. I wished I could learn the trick that made him so confident.

So there we were, with the old two-lane BT all to our lonesomes, with one more precarious month of life accounted for, a full tank and a full ice chest and no problems except one: Jake could not think of a catchy title for his newest goddamn song, a sweet, slow blues lick he had composed the day after his twenty-eighth birthday and had been refining for two months until it was like mead for the ears.

"How about 'Sweet and Slow'?" I said, turning reverie into reality.

"Sounds like a fucking song?" The set of his jaw said he'd know the right title when he heard it.

L.A. was dwindling out of reception range behind us; the rambling patter of the deejay was phasing in and out in two minute cycles. Then the intro to a Styx tune blared forth, and Jake screamed in mock agony, "Aaaaghh! Automatic dial turner!" He instantly twiddled the knob. We both laughed.

Jake had developed this ground rule in order to keep radio listening sane. The two L.A. stations he favored were close together on the FM band—KPLA was a millimeter past true 96.2, and the more rigidly play-listed KORC (originally a pure pop station as in "pop goes the KORC") sat next door at 97.4. Whenever a deejay got tiresome or the hot-rod-shop-and-dragway ads came on, Jake would flip to the neighboring station. There were a select elite of rock groups dubbed Automatic Dial Turners who got the same treatment—Styx, Boston, Kansas, and any other band named after a place, including Art in America; Rush; Molly Hatchet; and most of the head bangers of the 'Gasm or AC/DC ilk. Flip! The radio hooked to the Kickers was too advanced to have pushbuttons, but Jake's fingers knew the precise tuning distance between frequencies the way they knew how not to get lost amid the frets during a chaotically fast improvisational solo. The only subtlety of which those fingers were incapable was making standard blues stroking dull—and god, was I ever thankful for that blessing.

As for the stuff on the radio, I usually tap my foot but prefer the mid-Fifties to mid-Sixties discography. That's where you pick up those essential twelve-bar blues phrases, the flat thirds and sevenths for the melody lines, and the groundwork laid by the acoustic bass for my trusty Rickenbacker. But I enjoy the rock 'n' roll end, too—I'm the only Marketts fan I know of

With awesome reaction time, Jake flipped backward from KORC to KPLA, which was spinning a Doors oldie, "Five to One." Something strafed quickly past between the two stations—I didn't hear enough to identify a tune. "Hey, you just passed something else," I said unnecessarily.

"Nothing," said Jake, eyes front. The road streaked beneath us. "Maybe a rural station—a lot of these burgs off the highway have low-wattage after-sunset country stations. Or maybe we're picking up Vegas." The idea of getting within reception range of our target pleased him.

"Turn it back. Let's see what it was."

"Aw, don't interrupt Jim Morrison, man," he said with an annoyed grimace.

Suddenly the Trans Am slewed wide into the opposite lane with the frightening drag of a high-speed course change. I caught a flash of Jake cranking the wheel hard, mouth open, and of a darting brown shape whose eyes threw back our headlights during that one second we both stopped breathing.

"Jesus! What the hell was—"

"Coyote, man?" Jake was shaken and panting. We soared out of the looping path we'd taken, and both got facefuls of whirling grit from a dust devil we didn't have time to avoid. For an instant we were in the eye of the vortex, and Jake yelled "Shit!" as sand covered everything and drifted down our collars. His attention was locked to the oncoming road in anticipation of a third surprise. Our speed dipped below seventy for the first time that night. KPLA crackled with static.

I rubbed sand out of my eyes with a groan and felt it sprinkle down from my hair.

"Fucking coyote," Jake said, his tone neutralized by shock. "Geez." I was about to ask him if he wanted to pull over for a minute when he seemed to exhale heavily and come back to normal. He tasted his beer, and getting a mud-pie flavor, chucked the can out the windows "Damn it. Crack us some fresh, huh, Lester?" Stability was restored.

"Did we hit him?" I said, still not sure what had happened. I fished two iced cans from the cooler.

"No." He blew off a squirt of adrenaline like an exhausted jogger. "Whooo, god!" Our road speed began to climb again. "See if you can bring the radio back."

I'd never seen one of those miniature tornadoes at night before, and told Jake so while I tuned. I remembered the faint mystery station between KORC and KPLA, and hunted for it.

"Desert's full of dust devils and coyotes," said Jake. "And tumbleweeds. And ugly birds. Hey, get KPLA back."

"Keep your pants on a second," I said. The frequency was so skinny I had to zero in on it pendulum-style, but I finally pegged it. Fuzzy, and growing stronger; some sort of primal rockabilly performer who wanted wanderin' Wanda to wander back home to me in a Presley drawl. From what I could hear, the guy's backups were pretty fair clones of the Jordanaires. The song died with a flourish and was followed by a girl group (Me, sexist? That's what they're still called in the industry—girl groups. Kiss of death.) belting out something called "Glory Oscy," about a girl named Glory and a guy . . . well, I knew this one by heart even though I'd never heard it before.

"Come on, Lester, you got your fix," Jake said, turning to KPLA. In an eighth of a second he identified the bridge from "Spank Your Thang" and flipped to KORC, where he ran head-on into Van Halen's crappy cover version of the Roy Orbison classic "Pretty Woman." He gnashed his teeth. "Damn! A double dial turner! See what you did, Lester, you jinxed the goddamn thing!"

"Then put it back. I didn't get the call letters of that third station."

"You put it back. You're the oldies fan." He was cranky now. He crushed his empty one-handed and pitched it behind his seat. "We still haven't got a title for the song, Lester. We're almost to the state line." His lower lip was stuck out petulantly, and it looked comical.

"No Deposit, No Return Blues."' I covered my grin with a pull from my own beer.

"How juvenile," he said in such a serious tone that I cracked up completely. He ignored that and wrinkled his upper lip at the radio. "Hell, I can't find it. You try."

"It's all in the fingering, m'boy," I said in a passable W.C. Fields. But it took me a whole minute to relocate the third station, and when I found it, a jock was running his lines: ". . . venerable Elvis, 'Glory Oscy' from yours and mine, the Bouffants, and Buddy Holly's 'Tia Maria'—"

"I like your idea of calling it Somethingorother Blues," Jake interrupted. "But what? How about 'Lonewolf Blues'?"

"Wait a minute, quiet!" I waved my hand to shut him up, but the mystery station picked that moment to phase out again. Dead silence. I ran the pointer all the way back to KPLA, then across. More nothing.

"Well, what?" Jake took both hands off the wheel to exaggerate his shrug.

"Must've heard it wrong," I muttered. "Damn!"

He was clearly short on patience now. "Heard what?"

"Guy just said . . . well, Buddy Holly never did any song called 'Tia Maria.'"

"To your knowledge. So you're wrong. I was wrong once. A long time ago—"

"No, no way. He never did it, Jake. And this jock also said the Bouffants. The Bouffants were on Rooster Records. They went out of business Christ, before 1963."

"So what? They re-formed."

I shook my head. "Not unless two out of three of them just rose from the dead." The facts came back to me. Bus wreck, late 1962, a bad bridge and a Minnesota blizzard. Two of the female trio had died when the bus nosedove into a frozen creek.

"Somebody borrowed the name, Lester." Jake liked to rag me about my weakness for oldies, and the scholarly approach with which I filed them in my head.

I hadn't heard either song clearly enough to make a positive ID. "What about Buddy Holly?" I said after half a mile.

"A fake. There's only a thousand Holly imitators making the club rounds, along with a thousand Elvises. Rain does the Beatles; Strange Daze does the Doors. Or maybe it's a made-up Holly song, you know, like the ones in that movie. Like 'Cindy Lou' was."

I had sat through The Buddy Holly Story fifteen times, and I knew two things about it: Gary Busey's performance as Holly was astonishing even if the plot was dumb, and there was no song called "Tia Maria." No maybes. "Maybe you're right," I said, mostly to shut Jake up. I'd just have to find the bloody frequency again and investigate.

But Jake pressed onward. "Or maybe it's from that disc that MCA released of the demos Holly cut in New Mexico in '56. The album you wore out our stylus on. Come on, Lester, admit you're wrong!"

"It's not on the album, fake!" My hands gathered air in front of me as though I was hefting a double armload of Jake's bullshit. I was in the dark and it bugged me.

"You're right, actually. I know because you played the goddamned album so much I know it inside out." My fists closed methodically and he said, "Okay, okay, truce. So what do you think of 'Lonewolf Blues'?"

I mulled it over; it wasn't that bad. "Sounds kind of Hoyt Axton-ish. Too many wolfs in blues songs for my palate. Maybe that's natural—the music lopes along, it's heavy on alienation or rejection, it's slow and cool, but it can tear you apart, too. Real hobo music, raw and urgent, but not at all in a hurry because it doesn't have to be . . . if you get my drift." I think we were both surprised at what had just dropped out of my mouth, but I added, "I think if you can encompass that feeling in your title, you'll have it."

"Hobo music?" Jake said histrionically. He knew I was still worrying the Holly conundrum in my head.

I put on my snide face and said, "Or why don't we just call it 'Wash and Wear Wolf'?" We both got a giggle out of that, slopping our beers. I bent back to the radio again, tracking the dial to the left until I skipped across something noisy and electric—really psychotic lead guitar riffs done by somebody with octopus dexterity. We both shut up to listen. It sounded like permutated Hendrix. Or maybe, following Jake's earlier thought chain, it was Hendrix mimicking Randy Hansen, or one of his thousand clones. Either way, the work piling out of the Kickers was impressive. I saw Jake's lips whistle in a kind of sobered reverence.

We were back on the mystery station, and now the throaty voice of the deejay was copying through as clear as a Malibu sunset. "You're hooked into KXKVI and goes without sayin' to those that knows that Jimi has just given us his rendition of 'Battle Banner'—"

"Wait a minute! Hendrix never did a song called 'Battle Ban—'

"I've never heard of a station with five call letters befo—"

We paused off at the same time and looked from each other to the dashboard grille, smallest of the Kickers . . . nearly daring something else new to come out.

A glowing green highway sign flashed past us on the right: LAS VEGAS 15 MI./24 KM.

"Jesus, I think we lost it again." Jake spun the dial between KORC and KPLA and got ghostly shadow tunes and static from both. Nothing between. "You found it, Lester; try again. If you catch it, I'll pull over so we can stop and listen without the wind noise . . ."

I knew how Jake idolized Hendrix, so I spared him the speech I'd prepared in order to avenge my Buddy Holly fixation. I searched for KXKVI instead. A few more dead miles blew underneath the Trans Am; thousands of white highway stripes dashed out from between our tailpipes like tracer bullets. I thought of the raggedy-assed coyote we'd almost vaporized earlier. What the hell had he been doing bopping around in the middle of this big, dead sandbox—if not for the purpose of providing us with inspiration? That was how Jake would've viewed it. Hell, he regularly expected these sorts of things to happen! "How about a coyote instead of a wolf," I said. "Lone Coyote Blues."

Jake denied his automatic denial mechanism. "Not bad, Watson. Needs to be more alienated. How about 'Lonesome Coyote Blues'? How's that grab ya?"

"Maybe, baby." It sounded right for the nonce.

"Toss me another beer, wouldya, Lester?" The fringes of civilization were within our sights. We were breasting a slow upgrade in the road, marrying up with the two-thousand-foot elevation of the West's gambling Mecca. Over the hump to Vegas. I was still trying to relocate KXKVI. "Take that friggin' bill, McCluskey!" Jake shouted into the wind, and laid the pedal down in order to pass a mobile-home rig that was crutching up the hill just ahead of us.

We both turned to grab for the beer cooler at the same time. Jake was always impatient. I was the first to glance ahead and see the blazing highbeams of the Safeway Express nailing us, dead bang. Our third surprise of the night.

"Oh, holy . . . !!"

The last thing I felt was the slam of impact as Jake's beloved Trans Am lurched into a billion pieces all around us. They really aren't built very well.

When my eyes slitted open the first thing I saw was Rudy's lopsided pachuco pompadour. He was staring at me the way he might at the steaming remains of a steer hit by a freight train, but there was a hopeful glimmer in his dark eyes, and the makings of his ready grin were in place to greet me. Then I saw glaring white light, and all the hoses darting in and out of me, and the beeping machines, and my eyes rolled ceilingward and I didn't see anything else for two more days.

Sensation mostly pain hammered in the next time I woke up. I was in traction, and chunky casts ran from the underside of my chin to the soles of my feet. I looked like a mummy caught in a white canvas spider web. I took Rudy's word for it that there was an aluminum brace immobilizing my head. I asked for something to drink and a good-looking middle-aged nurse said no liquids and rolled a lemon-flavored swab across my tongue. I was very nearly the hospital's first victim of moisture euphoria.

"I might have a little trouble playing 'Boomtown Shuffle' tonight, Rudy," I croaked, and regretted it. My face was not mobile or healed enough to smile.

"That club date was fifteen days ago, my man." He shook his head slowly from side to side. "We didn't know if you were going to make it . . ."

Thud. Thud. "Who says I made it?" Ouch.

He lowered his voice. "I don't think these medicos are sure, Lester. That's why this joint looks like Frankenstein's West. They almost didn't let me or Leroy or Texas come in."

"What about Jake, Rudy?"

His mouth tightened. Then he gave it to me as the driver of a huge Kenworth truck and trailer had given it to him.

A veteran eighteen-wheel cowboy with several safe-driving citations, he, too, had been fooling with his radio when he looked up, saw Jake's Trans Am straying well over the line, and tried to evade. There had been no time or ditching room. The chromed steel crash bumper and the highballing tonnage behind it had instantaneously compressed the left side of the Trans Am into one third the size before drop-kicking the whole car backward, end over end. We were in the air a long time. I hadn't yet blacked out when we met the pavement in a torquing spray of junked Detroit steel and fiberglass. The truck jackknifed and fell over on its side like a brontosaurus with a snapped neck. Its knobby wheels had still been cranking lethargically around when the driver burrowed up to his CB and called in the highway patrol. Pieces of us had been scattered a hundred yards beyond the strike point. The driver mentioned the broken guitars and caved-in amps, prostrate on the road like the aftermath of a Who concert.

I had been buzz-sawn out of the wreck because I was still alive.

A male nurse bustled in and briskly asked Rudy to leave now please. I think there were tears on my face but I honestly couldn't tell. The nurse had brought another lemon-flavored swab, and that was really all I gave a damn about.

I spent twelve eternities in that cursed hospital bed flat on my back. My guardian angel turned out to be Leroy's father, the guy with all the pull in the microchip racket. He had interceded in the matter of jurisdiction and medical coverage. Rudy, Leroy, Leroy's dad, and their pals visited me every day for a while. Then every other day.

At my request Rudy lugged in a huge Panasonic ghetto blaster that I parked on the edge of my rollaway table. My right hand was about my only fully functional part, and I spent most of my waking time tuning it between 96.2 and 97.4 011 the FM band. And listening. Where KXKVI was supposed to be, there was only a deep-space hiss.

Sometimes I thought I'd found it. They were constantly spiking me with morphine for the pain, so I was never positive. But I did have Rudy do some rock 'n' roll research for me—and Hendrix never recorded any song called "Battle Banner," or any variation thereof, not even on the twenty or thirty necrophiliac compilations assembled on the engineering boards after his death. Elvis never cut a track about anybody named Wanda. Ditto Buddy Holly and "Tia Maria." None of them, not even on bootleg recordings. And Rudy said there was no such animal as KXKVI, even given outlandish assumptions that maybe the VI was a Roman numeral six, or the whole episode was a sham rockshow spinning deceptively faithful parodies.

Trying the radio one more time became my sole self-imposed ritual, performed on the half hour—that is, once for every two checkups on my vital signs. The hospital staff voted to remove the radio; they could all see it was upsetting me. I threatened a coronary and they relented over a period of days. Truthfully, I had no idea whether I had anything left to bust; perhaps they thought I'd start leaking if I held my breath. They laughed too enthusiastically at my wan jokes, and that was a bad sign. So I did what I wanted. I didn't really want to talk to them anymore.

So I talked to the radio whenever they were gone.

Not to the radio—that would be bonker time. I talked to Jake, in the arid whisper that was all that remained of my harmony voice. It had sounded the same since my first lemon-flavored swab. I could take fluids now, but never enough. Nurses popped by to change my baggies; I could see that I was putting out twice the fluid I was taking in, all of it tinted varying shades of red.

"God damn you, Jake," I rasped at the radio. "You fucked up again. You left me behind just to embarrass Rudy and that piss-poor trucker and Leroy's dad and everybody else. No fair." I used my thumb to make the radio needle crawl across the band. Zero. "You didn't even say goodbye, you son of a bitch," I said, staring past the radio. "What the hell are buddies for?" That was the one slip I could not forgive him.

I conked out; woke up suddenly. My short sleep periods were more like blackouts, and creepy, but I didn't bother troubling anyone with that new wrinkle. So far as the dope would permit, I used my wakeup time to play sleuth.

About sixty seconds ago I figured it all out.

I can't prove KXKVI exists, but I know it does. Its playlist is all unborn music—never taped, never cut, never exposed to airplay. You don't hear it until it's your turn to take the big jump into the void. I lucked out; I happened to be with Jake when his ticket came up for punching, and I heard. I think we were both supposed to go. But Jake always had to make a production number out of everything.

I know this because I came awake in the dark a second ago, and there was music registering feebly on the radio. I turned it up a hair. It was a slow, honeyed blues tune, electrified.

Know the words? Hell, I helped make up the title!

And to nudge me along the deejay came on when the tune finished, and repeated his call letters, and the song title. Granted, that might have been the morphine talking, too.

I'd thought the reason I didn't die with Jake in the trash-compacted wreck of his Trans Am was my own stubborn empiricism; my need for some argument to realistically convince me I was dead. Jake, of course, never worried about rationalizations or safety nets. He never lost sleep over the lack of next month's rent.

But now I think the real reason I was left behind was to give Jake another chance to show off. He would have wanted me to hear his radio debut, playing a tune we had both come to love. That was what buddies were for.

My only real regret is that there's no time to let Rudy in on it. I mean, I tried reaching for the nurse buzzer on its vinyl cord, but my restricted hand never made it.

You know, it's a funny and unsettling thing to watch your own heart monitor go flatline and stay there. But not scary; not for me.

I just hope Jake has made room in the band for a bassist.

NIGHT BLOOMER

Steven Keller hated all the bitches at Calex.

When not weathering their stupidity as marginally attractive cogs in Calex's corporate high rise, he resented the living foldout girls flaunting it in the commercials for Calex Petroleum products that clogged up prime-time television. He had pulled far too few consummated dates out of the female staff on the twenty-second floor to suit him; sometimes he went more than a week without getting laid, and that fouled his optimum performance workwise. At home he was perpetually short on clean socks. Most of his dress shirts did too much duty, and had gained skid tracks of grime on the inner collars.

This was not Steven Keller's idea of the joys of upwardly mobile middle management.

That fat old bastard Bigelow had elevatored down this afternoon just to ramrod him. Business as usual. The cost estimates that had sputtered from Steve's printer had displeased Bigelow. That was the word the old lardball had used—displeased. As though he was not one vice-president among many, but a demigod, an Academy Award on the hoof, a fairytale king who demanded per diem groveling in exchange for meager boons.

Displeased. Steve had watched his manila folder slap the desktop and skid to a stop between his own elbows. Before he could lift it or even react, Bigelow had wheeled his toad bulk a full one-eighty and repaired to his eyrie on the thirtieth floor. Steve's own office was illusory. A work area partitioned off from twenty others exactly like it by dividers covered in tasteful brown fabric. His M.A. in business administration hung on a wall that was not a wall, but a reminder that he was just one more rat dressed for success inside the Calex Skinner box. Displeased meant his Thursday was history. The nine-to-five running lights on the twenty-second floor were dark now, and because of the change in illumination levels, Steve could get a different perspective on his slanted reflection in the screen of his word processor. He laboriously reworked the quote sheets on his own time. He looked, he thought, ghostly and haggard. Used.

He punched a key and the revised lists rolled up. Bitches. Bastards. You could say those words on TV nowadays and nobody blinked. Their potency as invective had been bled away by time, and time scared the shit out of Steve. At thirty-five his time was running out. He had passed the point in his life where failure could be easily amortized.

He had spent his life living the introduction to his life. So far it had been all setup and no payoff. It had been a search that at times grew frantic, a dull joke with a foregone punchline. As he watched the printer razz and burp and spit up the new tabulated columnar lists—pleasing, now—he reviewed his existence as a similar readout. As an index of significant events it ran depressingly thin.

Apart from his degree there had been two wives, one at twenty-one and another at twenty-nine. Both were a matter of record now. To Nikki, Steve had suggested what was now called a summary dissolution; the cut-rate legal beavers at Jacoby and Meyers had split them for about two hundred bucks plus tax. With Margaret, the roles had been reversed. She never suggested anything. She simply sought out more sophisticated counsel, and did for Steve's assets what Bigelow's nightly shots of Kaopectate did for the old fart's Sisyphian regularity.

Calex recruitment had been the goal of his entire college career. The dream had been first class; the reality, a budget tour, via steerage.

The face on the screen did not yet require glasses. He supposed that was something. Apart from beaning the class bully with a softball during Phys. Ed at twelve, he could recall no other little victories. He would always remember the sound the ball had made when it bounced off the bigger kid's anthropoid skull—twock! Like a rolling pin breaking a thick candle in half. Steve Kelowicz, school shrimp, did not suspect the full savor of this victory until a week later. The lunchtime poundings ceased. The berserker had shifted his tyranny to less reactionary targets. No vengeance ever came.

Steve's growth was undistinguished, and while his objectives matured, his satisfactions remained childish. He sought those things expected of his station—corporate achievement, the accumulation of possessions, the company of the correct women. As soon as it became legally feasible he Americanized the mistake that had been his last name. A Kelowicz might be a fruit vendor. Keller was a name that begged imprintation on a door panel of plastic veneer, assuredly a proper name for a Calex executive.

As the printer shut down he realized that Bigelow was just a grownup version of the school bully—older, shrewder, more scarred, warier, like a veteran tomcat. Bigelow the Big just might need an unanticipated line drive to depose him from his nest on the thirtieth floor. A home run. It was a miracle that Steve could not force, though he felt entitled to a coup that would end Bigelow's taunts about his being an aging college punk.

Bigelow was just another threat, plumper, more streetwise. But still a bastard, and beatable. Steve's image on the video screen did not supply a very convincing affirmative, but at least he felt a bit better.

And what of all the bitches?

Once in Bigelow's extra-wide chair, Steve could order around the entire executive steno pool and take his pick. His prime advantage over most of the denizens of the thirtieth floor was the fact that he was a decade younger (and, he hoped, infinitely more potent) than the bulk of the veepee staff. The hierarchy inside the corporate headquarters of Calex was supremely feudal and caste-conscious. The peons working on the floors below you were more than literally beneath you. Steve's best sexual conquests so far had been career secretaries entrenched on his own level, women like Rachel Downey, captainess of the copy room, whom he had "dated" twice. He had discovered the hard way that Rachel the Red dyed her hair. Since their tryst had fizzled, he was finding it difficult to get Xerox work sent back to him on time . . . so thanks to her, he was yet again in the fry pan with Bigelow through calculated, long-distance sabotage.

He shut down his machines and piled his work into his briefcase, the leather job with the blunt corners. On his way to the elevators be reviewed his mental checklist of local watering holes for Suits like himself and came up with a few why-nots. Century City, alive with night-light, blazed in through the windows of the twenty-second floor and tried to diminish him. Just as his finger touched the heat-sensitive button, he noticed the car was crawling downward on its own, and he counted along with the orange digits: 28, 27, 26 . . .

The brushed steel doors parted. Bigelow was not inside, lurking in ambush, as he had feared. The only passenger at this time of night was a woman.

He would remember her amber pendant until the moment of his death.

"You look like a man bearing a burden," she said, in the kind of throaty voice that might have conferred an amusing secret to a lover.

"Oh yeah," he said mechanically, stepping in. Then his eyes tarried.

She was barely inside of a clinging, silky-red dress featuring a pattern of black oval dots and scalloped, shorty sleeves. The front of the dress divided neatly over her breasts—not Body Shop silicone nightmares, but a warm swell that was the real, proportionate item. Broad, shiny black belt—real leather—black hose, black heels, large clunky bracelet in enameled ebony, matching the pendulant onyx-drop earrings. The face between those earrings was cheeky and feline, with elliptical sea green eyes, a sharp, patrician nose, and neat small teeth. Her weight was on one leg, the other inclined to an unconscious model's pose. Her hands held before her a large, flat-brimmed sunhat of woven black fibers and a petite clutch brief of papers. Her hair was unbound, strong coffee black-brown, and lots of it. Her expression, which at first had been neutral, now seemed one of avid but cautious curiosity; she examined him with a quizzical, cocked-head attitude.

The doors guillotined shut behind Steve with slow, inexorable Nazi efficiency. Thunk.

"I'm working late again," he said with a shrug, and was suddenly astounded at the bilge his mouth was capable of spewing. He checked her out again, and regretted not spiffing up before quitting the twenty-second floor.

"I'm overtime on behalf of the great god Bigelow." Her pendant, a rough-cut chunk of translucent yellow stone, dallied on a foxtail chain of gold near the hollow of her throat.

The orange floor digits winked from 22 to 21 and Steve's gonads finally kicked into brain override. She spoke first, the mechanism said. You've got twenty floors to fast-talk this muffin into having a martini with you. Chat footholds were already abundant—Bigelow, Calex, their mutual late oil-burning—but he faltered in response, as though the sheer pheromone outflow from this woman was stupefying him. "Uh Bigelow?" Wake up, you moron! Nineteen lit up as one more floor of time ran out.

"Mm. You look like another of his bond slaves." Her eyes appraised him. "Nice to find a kindred spirit."

"Well, you know, we ought to be thankful that he takes the burden of credit off our lowly shoulders."

Her melodic laugh was as pleasing as her voice. She asked him his position, and he told her; she fingered her pendant (it caught even the soft light in the elevator, like a diamond sucking up the colors of the spectrum) and asked point-blank why he did not have Bigelow's job. He said something offhand and ironic in response, and instantly felt self-consciously glib. She saved him again by speaking before he had time to think his unthinking words into a real gaffe.

"You'd fit one of those thirtieth-floor suites just fine. And I'd much prefer working under someone from my own generation."

His brain was afloat with possibilities. "There aren't many clean ways to erase a vice-president." At once he began to fear that this woman, who seemed all too eager to be picked up, might be some sort of planted Bigelow spy.

"Oh, I've got a way." She smiled. "What I've always needed is a man willing to do it."

By now, there was no man in recorded history more willing to do it than Steven Keller.

Not too much later, when they were sweating and short of breath, Vivia told him about the seed.

"I can't see it." He disentangled himself from her hair.

"Just shy of the center." She broke the chain from around her neck and handed him the pendant. "Look at it while I go thrash out the ultimate martini, hm?" With that, she was up and striding across his bedroom, hips switching liquidly. Naked, she was smooth of flank, balletically graceful; Steve's notice did not turn to the pendant until she was out of sight.

When he held it to the candle flame, a tiny silhouette appeared, a dark bead trapped fast in the honey-colored amber. It was boring.

Vivia placed the martini shaker, frosty with condensation, on the nightstand within easy reach. The vermouth had given the ice the barest kiss; the drink was cold, and as she had promised, flawless, as perfect as her body was sleek, as her eyes were hypnotic.

Now Steve's brain was really rocking and rolling, and an imp voice said, Vivia, Vivia Keller, not too shabby . . . but before he could polish off his drink, she was tugging him down, wrapping her thoroughbred legs around him, engulfing him in her cascade of hair. Sometime before dawn she touched the empty shaker and asked if he wanted more.

Not knowing what she was talking about at all, Steve nodded.

It seemed poetic that the perfect martini yielded what could only be called the perfect hangover—murderous, battering, as perfect as bamboo shoots or electroshock. The blatting of Steve's alarm did not penetrate his cognizance until 8:45, and the first thing he heard on the clock radio was an advertisement for a perfume called Objet d'Art. Which, he knew, was manufactured by Michelle Dante Cosmetics, which had been co-opted by Calex Corporation in 1976. It was as though Calex itself had come home to invade his bedroom and whack him on the head with the guilt stick.

The revised cost-estimate sheets waited in his briefcase while he attempted to shower, dress, and drive to work with only five minutes available for each task. He finger-combed his hair in the blurry reflection afforded by the elevator doors and straightened his tie by touch, praying that the shitty coffee on the twenty-second floor would at least deaden his breath to neutral. His eyes itched. In his haste he had climbed into his trousers without underwear, and now felt vulnerably askew belowdecks. The trip up seemed unjustly quick in comparison to the deliciously slow descent he'd taken in the same car a scant thirteen hours previously. When the elevator disgorged him, he won few pitying looks. From the copy room, Rachel Downey saw him vanish into the brown fabricked maze . . . and ignored him.

He found Bigelow seated on his desk, waiting. The bounceback of the ceiling fluorescents from the older man's harsh gold wire-rims gifted Steve with an instant migraine. No human pupils were to be seen behind those thick, black-hole lenses, merely multiple white rectangles of pain-giving light.

"It's nine-thirty-five and twenty seconds, Keller, did you know that? Your eyes are stubbornly red." Bigelow's voice was sepulchral and resonant, the bellows basso of a vast, fat man.

Steve was weary beyond even snideness. "Yes sir. I've brought the revised estimates you asked for on the—"

Upon seeing the proffered sheaf of pages, Bigelow's expression rivaled that of a man whose pet cat has proudly sauntered through the kitchen door with half an eviscerated snake in its jaws. He dropped the sheets into Steve's own roundfile. They fluttered helplessly on the way down. "When you did not deliver these figures to my desk at nine o'clock this morning, I had young Cavanaugh revise them. Good morning, Keller." He slid off the desk, leaving a large buffed area, and trundled out without a backward glance.

Drained and hopeless, Steve just stood there. Cavanaugh did not drink. Cavanaugh was married. Cavanaugh had just neatly eroded another inch off Steve's toehold on the thirtieth floor. Should Bigelow die right this moment, he thought he might lock onto the vice-presidency through simple corporate momentum . . . but not if Cavanaugh kept punching away, infiltrating his projects.

Vivia had been long gone by the time he opened his eyes, leaving neither last name nor current phone number. He stayed in a zombiatic funk through lunchtime, not eating, but his depression eased when he thought of accessing the Calex Building's personnel listings through one of the computer terminals on the twenty-second floor. With his eighth mug of silty company coffee in hand, he waded through the rollups searching for the first initial V.

Vinces and Valeries formed an entire platoon by themselves, with Victors, Vickies, and Veras as the runners-up. Two Vondas, one Vianne, and no Vivia by the time he reached the last-name letter M.

God, what if her last name was Zaniperini?

He'd risked all the computer time he dared, and decided do M thru Z on Monday, even though he'd hoped for a weekend tryst. As it turned out, Bigelow was not finished with him for this Friday, either.

No bulk blocking his doorway; this time Steve got his scorching over the phone: "It has just come to my attention, Keller, that you've been frittering valuable computer time in pursuit of non-Calex—"

He squeezed his eyes shut as slivers of pain aligned themselves along his temples. Knowing full well that Rachel and some of the other bitches on the twenty-second floor were most likely eavesdropping, he held the receiver to his ear and went through the dance, not really giving a damn as Bigelow tiraded onward in his fat-cat drone, the sound of the axle of corporate doom pounding a few more dents into his sinecure at Calex. It had probably been a decade or more since the fat old bastard had last screwed his starched and reedy wife, and maybe sexual frustration was what gave Bigelow the stamina, at his age and with his rotten, cholesterol-gummed clock of a heart, to jump on Steve's head with both heels every time he made the slightest little

Yes sir, he said robotically. No sir. Yes sir. And as with the best forms of torture, there at last came a hiatus.

The elevator doors slid back, revealing an empty car. Once again the twenty-second floor was mostly dark, and Steve stepped in, alone. Going down.

He felt like he was drowning.

"Your door was open."

His heart began to jitterbug with an accelerated thudding so sudden and intense he momentarily feared an internal fuckup. Vivia waited on his sofa, smothered inside of his own brown plush bathrobe. The martini shaker waited on the glass-topped coffee table. It was very likely he had forgotten to lock his door while dashing out that morning; he locked it now, and as he did she stood up to greet him. The robe stayed on the couch.

Deep into the night, she mentioned the seed again, and Bigelow, and a solution to Steve's problem that sounded quite insane.

"It's simple, really, so it doesn't matter if what I say is crazy." She spoke past him, stroking his hair. "Just consider it a gesture. A contract, like marriage. If you'll do this tiny thing for me, I'm all yours. Desperate men have done crazier things for less return. You're shrewd, Steve—indulge me. I promise you it'll be worth it."

She demonstrated how. If he was not convinced, he was certainly intrigued.

Logy, he said, "So this is what you want me for," half jokingly. Out of habit he'd been waiting for the catch to the whole deal; the condition she'd put to him that would render her down to the low rank of all the other Calex women he'd known, the words that would make her cease to be something special. Yes?

What came instead was a shiver of horror that he might never become more special than she deemed him at this moment, that he might never move up-market, as they said in jolly old Great B. That fancy triggered another, spurred by his notion that Vivia was of foreign origin (thus her trace accent, thus her exotic manner)—not of Calex, not of L.A., but somewhere else. Somewhere else was where he needed to go; did he dare risk losing her, after she'd explained her plan bluntly, just because that plan didn't conform to linear corporate logic? This is what you must do to have me, she had said. No tricks.

That was when he decided to do what she asked, and not fake it. This woman would know if her rules were fudged.

He rose to begin dressing. When she rose on one elbow in the bed to watch, and told him how she needed him, he nodded, his blood hot and racing. He left to perform his task, his gesture, before the sun could announce Saturday morning.

Bigelow lived in a fashionably appointed ranch house in Brentwood, on the far side of UCLA. The drive took time even though traffic was sparse—cabbies, police, battleship-sized garbage trucks, and the occasional renegade night person.

Breaking Vivia's amber had proven simple; he'd used a cocktail hammer, and the pendant scattered apart into crushed-ice chips of see-through gold. The seed was tiny, no larger than a watermelon pit, flat and glossy like a legless bug. It was in his pants pocket, inside a plastic box that had once held a mineral tie tack.

Also in the pocket was his Swiss army knife, and in the car's windshield was reflected the full moon—two more of Vivia's odd conditions fulfilled. It had to be done by the full moon, she'd said, so that they might both reap by the next full moon. Steve purposefully put her other instructions on hold while he drove; he wanted nothing to make him feel foolish enough to turn back. He thought of Vivia instead, of gaining her strange trust, of having her body for a long time. Longer than any of the bitches, since she could be many women for him—none of whom mucked about with excuses or mood-killing delays in the name of messy human givens like menstrual periods or birth control. She was admirably void of what to him was standard-issue female bellyaching. Instead she was very no-nonsense, a delicious riddle, perhaps beguiling. He judged her perfect for his needs, and wasted no time thinking of himself as selfish, or as Rachel the Red had called him, a usurer. Rachel read too goddamned many gothic romances.

Bigelow's home occupied the terminus of a paved and winding drive that isolated it from the main road. Steve caught a flicker of a low-wattage all-nighter bulb glowing in a front kitchen window as he cruised the area. He parked around a corner a block and a half away and began his stealthy approach, thankful that the drive was not graveled.

The fat old bastard had once made bragging mention of his bedroom's western exposure, and Steve soon located the window above a precisely clipped hedge of rosebushes.

"You mustn't dig a hole," she had insisted. "You must uproot a living plant, and place the seed in the hole that results from the death of that plant." Luckily for Vivia's instructions, the Bigelow grounds had abundant flora.

He threaded into the tangle of sharp leaves and spiked branches and hefted gently, fighting not to stir up a commotion. A thorn sank into the palm of his hand and he grimaced, but the pain made the contest with the bush personal. For making him bleed, it would die.

He thought of Neanderthal men ripping each other's entrails out, of grappling with Bigelow and wrapping his fingernails around his fat, wheezy windpipe. The bush rattled a bit but was no match for him. When it came up, clods of deep brown dirt hung from its freed roots.

There was no reaction or notice from within the house. Of course, if Bigelow suspected a prowler, he would take no direct action for that function there was a little steel sign at the head of the driveway. Every home in Brentwood had one, and Bigelow's read CONROY SECURITY SYSTEMS/ARMED RESPONSE. The threat implied by that little hexagonal sign compelled Steve to finish up quickly.

There was no need for the pocketknife, since his palm was already slathered with fresh blood. He dabbed the black seed; "consecrating it" was the term Vivia had used. Somewhere in the darkness right in front of him, beyond the window, the impotent Bigelow snored on, hoglike, lying in state next to his frigid cow of a wife. Maybe they lolled in separate beds, genuflecting to that grand old era of Beaver Cleaver, when sex equaled pornography, when nice girls didn't. Steve grinned. Then he groped his way back to the gout in the earth and tamped dirt over the seed with his fingers.

It was in. As Vivia had wanted.

He lugged the rousted bush out with him so that it might not be discovered and replanted by whatever minority Bigelow engaged to manicure his grounds. Walking heel-to-toe in burglar doubletime, palm stinging and wet, Steve felt absurdly victorious, as though he'd just bounced a homer off Bigelow's noggin instead of merely vandalizing a hedge. He had come through for Vivia, and thus gained a kind of control over her, too. In a single day he had galloped the gamut of rough emotions. By the time dawn began to tint the sky, he felt renewed—exhausted yet charged, back in the running, a success in the making, confirmed executive fodder. Definitely up-market.

He ditched the murdered rosebush in a supermarket trash dumpster on his way home.

According to the adage that defines sanity as the first twenty minutes following orgasm, what Casey (Steve's most recent non-Calex blonde) had told him not so long ago was sane, reasoned.

"I don't think you like women very much. Present company excluded, of course."

"Of course." He had stroked her thigh, his lungs burning with immediate umbrage at her remark. Who in hell was this vacant twinkle to pass judgment? They had swapped climax for climax, shared a smoke, and now she was gearing up to pry into his psyche. It always began around the fourth fuck or so, these sloppy digressions into his private feelings. He'd given her a good technical orgasm and this was how she responded. They were past the stage where he could joke off such an accusation, as more tentatively acquainted people can. His fingers traced upward knowingly, commencing in automatic motions guaranteed to shut her up.

Further, in Casey's opinion, some woman had done vast damage to Steve in the past. That he had been avenging that hurt on every woman he'd touched since, trying to distill away the poison inside him. That things could change at last, now that she had arrived on the scene.

In that moment Steve's judgment on Casey banged down like a slamming cell door. Things did change, and quickly. He brought the prying bitch off hard, with some pain. While she was still moist, he slammed into her as though driving nails. The next morning he subtracted her from his Rolodex, hoping she was sore for a long time.

That was lost in the past now.

Now, Steve lay next to Vivia, recalling Casey's words and wondering if they might have been true . . . and whether Vivia might not be the turnaround he didn't even know he had been seeking for most of his adult life.

The past four weeks had been a whirlwind of input for him. When not assimilating and processing the swelling workload dumping downward from Bigelow's office, he was wrapped up in Vivia, who had taken a fervently single-minded interest in his sexual well-being. Bigelow had called in sick in the middle of the first week, and Steve had marveled frankly and quietly. The fat old bastard finally lumbered into the office late on Thursday and botched everything he touched. By Friday—exactly one week after Steve had been carpet-called for using the computer on the sly—Bigelow had mazed his way back to Steve's cubicle in person again . . . but this time it had been to thank him.

Oh, how he had savored that moment!

"You've performed admirably, Keller," he'd croaked, redfaced and dappled with fever-sweat. "You've risen to the occasion and saved my callused old butt; I was beginning to think you didn't have that kind of dedication. I appreciate all your help, and the extra hours you've put in during this . . . uh, time." Steve had said yes sir at the appropriate lulls in the rally-round-the-company spiel, invoking his new prerogative as victor not to rub Bigelow's veiny nose in the events of the past. When the old man finished, he had shuffled out, slump-shouldered. He didn't make another appearance in the office until the following Wednesday. That was when the thought of just what might be growing, unobtrusively, amid the rosebushes in Brentwood, began to gnaw at Steve. "Why my blood, anyway?" he asked Vivia. "Why not his? I mean, he's the object—the victim, right?"

Whenever he brought up the subject of the seed, she seemed to answer by rote. "Whose blood is used for the consecration isn't important. It's who the plant grows nearest to. It leaches away the life essence, thrives on it. As it grows larger, it needs more. Those asleep near it are especially susceptible. It reaches maturity in one month, from one full moon to the next." She draped one of her fine white legs over his. "Then it dies."

"The blood is just to prime the pump? Get it started?"

"Mm." Her hands were upon him. Getting him started.

"Just what is it you've got against Bigelow? You know, I tried to find your company-employee index number on the computer and came up with zilch." She had since given him a last name, but that had not dissipated the mystery.

"What is it you have against him?" she countered, with a trace of irritation. "And what does it matter? You're not the only person privileged to hate him for the things he's done!"

He thought she was sidestepping; then he caught on. Bigelow's blue-rinsed wife lent perspective to the supposition of a squirt of randiness somewhere in his boss' recent past. Promises, perhaps, traded for a bit of extramarital hoop-de-doo with a Calex functionary who had just happened to be Vivia. Unfulfilled promises, naturally—the office rule was that verbal contracts weren't worth the paper they weren't written on. So Vivia had lain back and devised her retaliation. For Steve to bring this matter up in bed, he now saw, was deeply counterproductive.

She did not let him pursue it further, at any rate. "It'll be done soon now, darling, don't worry it." She poured them both another of her stinging-cold, perfect martinis. "And we'll both get what we want."

He was surely getting what he wanted. Vivia seemed satisfied, too. He had long since given her a door key; he usually found her awaiting his pleasure, and he liked that.

"Give me what I want," he said, and she rolled onto him. He thought he was happy.

During the final week, Bigelow did not appear in the Calex Building at all. The scuttlebutt was that he'd suffered a minor stroke.

"I took a stack of escalation briefs out to his house, y'know?" It was Cavanaugh, Steve's former competitor, spreading the news. "Steve, he looked like hell; I mean, pallid, trembling. His eyes were yellow and bloodshot, the works. I was afraid to breathe air in the same room with him, y'know? It's like he got the plague or something!"

Steve nodded, appearing interested. He was learning the executive trait of letting his subordinates do most of the talking. With open hands of sympathy he said, "Well, in the old man's absence I'm stuck with twice the work, and it's time I got back into it."

Cavanaugh was dismissed. That was something else new, and Steve was getting better at it. It made him feel peachy.

While he had made no effort to see what had blossomed at Bigelow's, his desire to know had germinated and grown at a healthy pace. Vivia had said the plant would die with the coming of the next full moon, its task complete. It all sounded like a shovelful of occult hoodoo, as vague as a syndicated horoscope. A thriving plant shouldn't keel over due to a timetable, he thought, horticultural genius that he was. Since the technique appeared to be working and producing results, simple Calex procedure dictated no need to scrutinize the bows and whys. You didn't have to know how a television set worked to enjoy it; how Objet d'Art functioned, to appreciate its scent on women.

Time was running short. Time for Bigelow, time to see what had sprung from the black seed.

"You don't really need to see it," Vivia had agreed. "That would be superficial."

Again he nodded. Her words were reassuring and correct. Once she drowsed off, he went out driving in the wee hours one more time.

He duplicated his original route and found the Brentwood streets unchanged. A blue and white Conroy security car hissed past in the opposite lane. That was the last Steve saw of the local minions of armed response.

Two curious sights awaited him at the bedroom window. The first was Bigelow, tossing about in his bed, sheets askew. He was in the grip of some nightmare, or spasm. His flesh shone greenly under a ghostly-soft nightlight, by which Steve saw the bed stand, littered with medications. The old man's movements were enfeebled and retarded by fitful sleep; the thrashing of a suffocating fish.

Then there was the plant. Against the all-weather white of the ranch house's siding, it was quite visible.

It was confused among the rosebush branches, and resembled a squat tangle of black snakes, diverging wildly as though the shoots wanted nothing to do with each other. Like the chitinous hardness of the seed, the branches were armored in a kind of exoskeleton of deep, lacquered black. The small leaves that had sprouted at the ends of each branch were dead ebony, dull and waxy to the touch, with spade shapes and serrated edges. He leaned closer, to touch, and felt a paper-cut pain in the tip of his finger that caused him to jerk back his hand and bite his lip in the dark.

Kneeling, he unclipped a penlight from his pocket, oblivious to the risk of being spotted, and saw that the skin of the plant was inlaid with downy white fibers, like extremely fine hair. They were patterned directionally, in the manner of scales on a viper; to stroke them one way would be to feel a humid softness while the opposite direction would fill the finger with barbs like slivers of glass. Steve tried to tweezer the tiny quill out with his teeth.

The black plant exuded no odor whatsoever, he noticed. He found that to be the most unsettling aspect of all, since all plants smelled like something, from the whore's perfume of night-blooming jasmine to the clean-laundry scent of carnations. This had all the olfactory presence of a bowl of plastic grapes.

He heard a strangled cough through the windowpanes and saw Bigelow stir weakly in his bed. The moon was ninety-percent full. Tomorrow night it would be perfect.

Watching his superior whittled down in this way, Steve realized that now it wasn't necessary that the old man actually die. Ever since his conjecture about Bigelow's dalliance with Vivia, he'd begun to feel an inexplicable fraternal sympathy for the old goat. Would Steve care to come to such a finish, merely because he'd chased a hit of tail in his declining years? Vivia sure was enthusiastic enough about jumping his bones to get her revenge on Bigelow. And Steve's future with Calex seemed locked without the nastiness of a death to blot it . . . didn't it?

Was he starting to feel sorry for the fat old bastard?

Inside the house, Bigelow let out a congested moan, and the sound put ice into Steve's lungs.

Impulsively he gathered the black plant in two fists and hoisted it upward, hoping to tear loose the roots. The rosebushes rattled furiously, shifting about like pedestrians witnessing an ugly car crash, but the plant remained solidly anchored, unnaturally so. Yanking a mailbox out of a concrete sidewalk would have been easier. Steve's hand skinned upward along the glossy stalks and collected splinter quills all the way up. This time he did scream.

Bigelow stopped flailing. Now he was awake, and staring at the window.

Tears doubling his vision, blood dripping freely from his tightly clenched fists, Steve fled into the night.

Shortly after lunch on Friday, Cavanaugh wandered into Steve's office wearing a hangdog, H.P. Lovecraft face, broadcasting woe. His eyebrows arched at the sight of Steve's bandaged hands, but the younger man was determined to maintain the proper, respectful air of gloom and tragedy.

"I got the phone call ten minutes ago," he said, nearly whispering. "I don't know if you've heard. But, uh—"

"Bigelow?" Steve was mostly guessing.

Cavanaugh closed his eyes and nodded. "Sometime last night. His wife said he saw a prowler. He was reaching for the phone when his heart—"

"Stopped." Steve folded his hands on the desk. The old man had probably hit the deck like a sledgehammered steer.

Cavanaugh stood fast, fidgeting. "Um, Blakely will probably be asking you up to his office on Monday for a meeting . . . you know." Blakely was Bigelow's superior.

Heavy on the was, Steve thought as his line buzzed. He excused himself to speak with Blakely's busty girl Friday, who was calling from the thirtieth floor regarding the meeting that Cavanaugh had just mentioned. And, incidentally, was Mr. Keller possibly free for cocktails after work? Was today too soon? Her name was Connie, and of course he already had her extension. Of course. Polite laugh.

At a flick of the wrist, Cavanaugh faded into the background. That was the last Steve ever saw of him.

Waiting for him at home were Vivia, the martini shaker—perfect—and a toast to success.

It took both his hands to navigate the first glass to his mouth, since both were immobilized into semifunctional scoops by the bandages. The more he drank, the more efficient he became at zeroing-in on his face, and to his chagrin the anesthetizing effect of the alcohol permitted some of last night's bitterness to peek out, and beeline for Vivia.

"Here's to us, to us," he said mostly to his glass. He was on the sofa, and Vivia sat cross-legged, sunk into a leather recliner across from him. His shoes were cockeyed on the floor between them. "Methinks I've just hooked and crooked my merry way into a higher tax bracket, thank you very much to my . . . odd little concubine . . . and her odd little plant. Perhaps we should consider incorporating. Corporeally speaking, that is." His sightline flew to the bedroom door and back.

Vivia raised her glass to him. She was wearing an Oriental print thing far too skimpy and diaphanous to qualify as a robe.

"So now, as—ahem!—partners in non-crime," he said as she refilled their glasses, "you have to fill me in on the plant. Where the hell did you come across something like that? You don't buy that sort of thing down at the Vigoro plant shop. How come people aren't using them to . . . Christ, to bump off everybody?"

She finished off her drink before he was halfway through his, and stretched languorously, purring. "This tastes like pure nectar," she said. "Stick to the subject, wench."

She cocked her head in the peculiar way he'd become so familiar with and mulled her story over before saying, "I had the only seed." That was it.

He remembered the amber and nodded. So far, so logical. "Where'd you get it?"

"I've had it quite a long time. Since birth, in fact." She ran her tongue around the rim of her glass, then recharged the glass by half from the shaker.

"An heirloom?"

"Mm."

She was preparing to lead him off to the sack again, and he fully intended to bed her, but not before he could hurdle her coy non-replies and clear his conscience. "Tell me what happened between you and Bigelow." Instinct had told him to shift gears, and he expected a harsh look.

"I've never really seen the man."

The office coffee was starting to have an unlovely reaction to the quickly gulped booze, and he burped quietly. "Wait a minute." He waved his free hand to make her go back and explain. The surrender-flag whiteness of the bandages hurt his eyes in the room's dim light. "You two had some kind of . . . assignation, or something. You wanted vengeance on him."

"Hm." The corners of her generous mouth twitched upward, then dropped back to neutral, as though she was still learning how to make a smile. "In point of fact, Steven, I never said I wanted vengeance on anything. Perhaps you thought it."

Now this definitely registered sourly. For a crazed, out-of-sync moment he thought she was going to add, No, I wanted vengeance on YOU! like some daffy twist in a 1940s murder mystery. But she just sat there, hugging her knees to her chin, distracting him with her body. Waiting.

"Oh, I get it—you just help a total stranger, out of the blue, to do in his boss, whom you've never met, with the last special black plant seed in the entire universe?" The sarcasm was back in his tone.

"I was interested in you, Steven. No other."

"Why?" Urrrrp, again, stronger this time.

"Except for one thing, you've been perfect for me. You were . . . what is the word? Fertile. You were ripe."

"Where'd I slip up?" Now his head was throbbing, and he feared he might have to interrupt his fact-finding sortie by sicking up on the shag carpeting.

She gave him her quizzical little shrug. "You were supposed to go uproot the plant tonight, you sneak. During the full moon. Not last night, though I don't suppose it'll matter." She rose; her legs flashed in and out of the wispy garment as she approached. "Let me give you a refill. This is a celebration, you know, and I'm ahead of you."

"Ugh, no—wait," he muttered, his brains sloshing around in his skull pan like dirty dishwater. "No more for me." He put out one of his mitts to arrest the progress of the shaker toward his glass and blundered it out of Vivia's grasp. He was reminded of the time he had tried to keep a coffee shop waitress from freshening up his cup by putting his hand over the cup to indicate no more . . . and gotten his fingers scalded.

The shaker bounced on the rug without breaking. Its lid rolled away and ice cubes tumbled out, clicking like dice. Mingled with the ice were several limp, wet, dead black leaves. Gin droplets glistened on them. They were spade-shaped, with serrated edges.

Steve gaped at them numbly. "Oh my god . . ." Poisoned! Unable to grab, he swung at Vivia, who easily danced out of range. He gasped, his voice dropping an octave into huskiness as he felt a shot of pain in his diaphragm. He understood that his body needed to vomit and expel the toxin.

But he wanted to get Vivia first.

He launched himself off the sofa and succeeded only in falling across the coffee table, cleaning it off and landing in a drunken sprawl on nonresponsive mannequin limbs. The feeling in his fingers and toes was gone.

"Oh, Steven, not poison," he heard her say. "What a silly thing to think, darling. I wouldn't do that. I need you. Isn't that what you always wanted—a woman who truly needed you? I mean truly? Not in all the petty ways you so despise?"

His tongue went dead. His throat fought to contract and seal off his airway. If he could force himself to throw up, he might suffocate . . . or save his life. He was incapable of snaring Vivia now, but he sure as hell could use two fingers to chock down his tongue. He saw the expression on her face as he did it.

She watched intently, almost lovingly, with that unusual cocked-head attitude he remembered from their first meeting in the elevator. It reminded him of a cocker spaniel hearing a high-frequency whistle, or a hungry insect inspecting food with its antennae. It was an attitude characteristic of another species.

He heaved mightily. Nothing came up but bubbly saliva.

A tiny, hard object shot up from his gullet to click against the obverse of his front teeth. Its ejection eased his trachea open. While he spat and sucked wind, Vivia stepped eagerly forward with a cry of excitement identical to the sounds she made in bed with him.

She picked up the wet black seed and held it between her thumb and forefinger. She tried to gain his attention while he retched. "This is the one I'll keep always, darling. You may not be aware, but amber takes ages to solidify properly."

He struggled to speak, to ask irrational questions, but could only continue what had begun. Another of the wicked little seeds chucked out with enough force to make a painful dent in the roof of his mouth. It bounced off his dry tongue and escaped. He did not feel it hit. It was chased by fifteen more . . . which were pushed forward and out by a torrent of several hundred.

The last thing Steve did was contract to a fetal ball, hugging his rippling stomach. His breath was totally dammed by the floodtide of beaded black shapes that had clogged up his system and now sought the quickest way out.

"I loved you, Steven, and needed you more than anyone ever has. How many people get that in their lifetime?"

Then he could hear nothing beyond the rainstorm patter of the seeds, gushing forth by the thousands as his body caved in and evacuated everything, a full moon's worth. In the end, he was potent beyond his most grotesque sexual aspirations.

Vivia held the first seed of the harvest, and watched. The sight fulfilled her as a female.

ONE FOR THE HORRORS

He recalled a half-column short article that had said Stanley Kubrick post-edited A Clockwork Orange by something like two-and-a-half minutes, mostly to deter jaded MPAA types from slapping it with an X rating, which probably would have murdered the film in 1971. It might have been consigned to art houses for eternity. Inconceivable.

Clay Colvin strolled through the theater waiting room with its yellowing posters of Maitresse and Fellini's 81/2. Wobbly borax tables were laden with graying copies of Film Quarterly and Variety and Take One amid a scatter of the local nouveau undergrounds — which, Clay thought, weren't really undergrounds anymore but "alternative-press publications." More respectable; less daring, less innovative. Victims of progress in the same way this theatre differed from the big, hyperthyroid single-play houses with their $4.50 admissions.

Predictably, the wall was strewn with dog-eared lobby cards, onesheets, and film schedules citing such theme oriented programs as "Utopian Directors," "Oh-Cult," and "Modern Sex Impressionism." The front exit was a high school gym reject that had been painted over a dozen times or so, the color finally settling on a fingerprinty fire-engine red that also marred the tiny box window set into the door's center. Outside, worn stone-and-tile stairs spiraled beneath a pale metal canopy, down to the street and back into the world proper.

Clay's wife of twenty-one years, Marissa, had died on October 17, 1976, about seventeen hours before his promotion to Western Division Sales Manager finally came through. It would have been the upward bump that would embellish their life together. Her reassurances that the position would be awarded to him "sometime soon" were devoted and unflagging; her belief in him was never half-hearted, not even when her hospital bills had become astronomical. Clay dined on soups and kept a stiff upper.

Guilt at her passing was the last thing Clay would allow himself, for Marissa would not have permitted it. What surprised him was the way he settled into a regimen in the next six months: eight-to-five with overtime on each end, mail stop, and then several hours hitherto devoted to the hospital stop. As substitutes, Clay took his work home, sometimes a movie, rarely a bar, a bit of television or phone calls (which amounted to the same thing), or a dollop of reading matter (damned if you can't make fifty pages a night, old man, he chided himself) prior to slumber in a bed realistically too big for a single person the likes of Clay Francis Colvin, Jr.

A birthday and a half later saw more impressive sales rosters and salary hikes for Clay. A bit more hair and vision lost. Unlike Marissa, his checking account had bounced back robustly. His new gold wire-rims were respectably costly. Comparatively frugal since Marissa's death, he splurged on a Mercedes and fought the cliché of a widower faced with the steep side of late middle age. Although he looked a bit rheumy-eyed in the mirror after missing a bit of sleep, he eventually concluded that he had been dealt to fairly.

It had been an unusually productive Wednesday, and upon spotting a Xerox place during his drive home, Clay pulled over to get some documents duped. From his catercorner viewpoint, the block consisted of the Xerox shop, flanked by a pair of health-food restaurants, a hole-in-the-wall ten-speed store, a pizzeria, and a place called Just Another Bijou—it seemed that the business establishments on the periphery of the university district were the only places open after six o'clock. In the Xerox shop, a thumbtacked flyer caught Clay's eye: he scanned a list of features and discovered the theater he had seen was referred to as J.A. Bijou's. The bill for the night highlighted Frederic March in Death Takes a Holiday and Anthony Adverse, the latter Clay knew to feature a neat Korngold score. He knew both films—of course—and the jump from Xerox shop and dull evening to the lobby of J.A. Bijou's was a short, easy one.

Clay enjoyed himself. More importantly, he came back to the theatre, and without his vested business suit.

What there was: theatre darkness and old cinema chairs of varied lineage and age, in wobbly rows, comfortably broken in. Loose floor boltings. The mustiness of old cushions; not offensive, but rather the enticing odor of a library well stocked with worthwhile classics. Double-billed tidbits like Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon together, for once, or the semi-annual Chaplin and Marx orgies. Clay favored Abbott and Costello; J.A. Bijou's obliged him. Homage programs to directors, to stars, and on one occasion to a composer (Bernard Herrmann). Also cartoon fests, reissues, incomprehensible foreign bits and the inevitable oddball sex-art flicks, which Clay avoided. But the oldies he loved and the better recent items ensured his attendance. It was a crime not to plunk down two bucks—or $1.50 before 6:00 P.M.—to escape and enjoy, as Clay had done frequently in the five months between Anthony Adverse and tonight's offering, Kubrick, who had wound up in an art house, censors or no. Clay enjoyed himself—it was all he required of J.A. Bijou's. He never expected that anything would be required of him, nor did he expect to be blown away in quite the fashion everyone was during the following week.

Clay had an affection for Dwight Frye's bit parts, and Fritz of Frankenstein, was one of his best. After Renfield, of course. It was opening night of a week's worth of Horror Classics, and Clay was in enthusiastic attendance. He, like most of the audience, would cop to a bit of overfamiliarization due to the used-car screenings on the tube after midnight.

There were some unadvertised Fleischer Betty Boops and the normal profusion of trailers before the shadow show commenced. Frankenstein had been the Exorcist of its heyday, evoking nausea and fainting and prompting bold warnings onscreen and ominous lobby posters. Many houses in the 1930S offered battle-ready ambulances and cadres of medics with epsoms primed. Then came the obsessed censors, cleavers raised and hair-triggered to hack out nastiness . . . Quite an uproar.

Soon after Colin Clive's historic crescendo of "It's alive!" filtered into J.A. Bijou's dusty green curtains, Clay's eyelids began a reluctant semaphoric flutter. His late hours and his full work load were tolling expertly, and he soon dozed off during the film, snapping back to wakefulness at intervals. His memory filled in the brief gaps in plot as he rollercoastered from the blackness to the screen and back. It was a vaguely pleasing sensation, like accomplishing several tasks at once. Incredibly, he managed to sleep through the din of the torture scene and the Monster's leavetaking from the castle. He was awakened by a child's voice instead of noise and spectacle.

"Will you play with me?"

The voice of the girl—Little Maria—chimed as she addressed the mute, lumbering Karloff. She handed him a daisy, then a bunch, and demonstrated that they floated on the surface of the pond by which they both sat.

"See how mine floats!"

Together the pair toss blooms into the water, and for the first time a smile creases the Monster's face. Having expended all his daisies, he gestures and the girl walks innocently into his embrace. He hefts her by the arms and lofts her high and wide into the water. Her scream is interrupted by sickly bubbling.

Clay was fully awake now, jolted back in his seat by an image that was the essence of horror—the Monster groping confusedly toward the pond as it rippled heavily with death. There was something odd about the scene as well; the entire audience around Clay, veterans all, shifted uneasily. A more familiar tableau would soon have the girl's corpse outraging the stock of villagers, but for now there was only the Monster and the horrible pond, on which the daisies still floated.

The scene shifted to Elizabeth in her wedding gown, and the crowd murmured. It had been a premiere, of sorts.

Clay dreamed, peacefully. He became aware of impending consciousness as per his usual waking-up manner, a rush of images coming faster and faster and why not a pretty girl?

And up he sat. For the first time, he thought of the drowning scene in Frankenstein. Clay shook his head and rolled out of bed into the real world.

Next on the roster was King Kong.

The college kid who vended Clay's ticket that evening after work was gangly and bearded, his forehead mottled as though by a pox. Five years ago, Clay would have dismissed him as a hippie; ten years, a queer. Now hippies did not exist and he regarded the gay community with a detached, laissez-faire attitude. He queued before the cramped snack bar, to provision himself.

He had taken a dim view of the uninspired "remake" of the 1933 RKO Studios Kong— in fact, had avoided an opportunity to see it for free. The chance to relish the original on a big screen again was pleasant; in this Kong, unlike the new one, the only profiteering fame grubbers were the characters in the play.

Clay conjured various other joys of the original while conversing with the lobby smokers: the glass-painted forests, the delightfully anachronistic dinosaurs of Skull Island. He was told that this was not a "butchered" print, that is, not lacking scenes previously excised by some overzealous moralist in a position of petty authority—shots of Kong jawing a squirming man in tight closeup, picking at Fay Wray's garments with the simian equivalent of eroticism, and a shot of Kong dropping a woman several stories to her death were all intact.

This time around, Clay was more palpably disturbed. He clearly recalled reading an article on Kong concerning scenes that had never made it to the screen in the first place—not outtakes, or restorative footage, or Band-Aids over some editor's butchery—and among those were bits that were streaming out of J.A. Bijou's projection booth now.

Carl Denham's film crew was perched precariously atop a log bridge being shaken by an enraged King Kong. One by one, the marooned explorers plummeted, howling, into a crevasse and were set upon greedily by grotesque, truck-sized spiders. It stopped the show, the film's original producer had claimed, over forty-five years ago. It was enough justification to excise the whole scene; no audience had ever seen it, because it would have stopped the show.

It certainly does, thought an astonished Clay as he watched the men crash to the slimy floor of the pit. Those who survived the killing fall were fated to confront the fantastic black horrors; not only giant spiders but shuffling reptiles and chitinous scorpions the size of Bengal tigers. The audience sat, mouths agape.

New wonders of Skull Island manifested themselves: a triceratops with a brood of young, plodding along via stop motion animation, and a bulky horned mammal Clay later looked up in a paleontology text as an Arsinoittherium. Incredible.

"Where did you come across this print?" he questioned the bearded kid, with genuine awe. He was not alone. Fans, buffs, experts had been drilling the staff since the beginning of the week, and the only answer the harried workers could offer against the clamor was that they had nothing to do with it. The films came from the normal distribution houses, the secretaries of which were unable to fathom what the J.A. Bijou employees were babbling about when they phoned long-distance—an expense, just recently affordable. Word of mouth drew crowds faster than Free Booze or Meet Jesus, and the theatre's limited capacity was starting to show the strain of good business. No one else had ever seen these films. In all of history.

And instead of acting then, when he should have, Clay was content to sit, and be submissively amazed by the miracle.

Recently, two 1950s science-fiction flicks had been shunted into a two-and-a-half hour time slot on Sunday-afternoon television. A quick check of a paperback TV-film book revealed their total running time to be one hundred and sixty minutes. The local independent station not only edited the films to accommodate the inadequate time allotment, but shaved further in order to squeeze in another twenty minutes of used-car rock-and-roll pimple-killing free-offer furniture-warehouse Veg-o-Matic madness per feature. Viewers were naturally pissed, but not pissed enough to lift their telephones. The following week boasted the singularly acrobatic feat of Tod Browning's Dracula corking a one-hour gap preceding a "Wild Kingdom" rerun.

Edited for Television always grated Clay's nerves when it intruded in video white across the bottom of his twenty-four inch screen. The J.A. Bijou wonderfulness was a kind of vengeance realized against the growly box; a warm, full-belly feeling. No one seemed to realize that the J.A. Bijou prints were also of first-rate, sterling caliber and clarity, lacking even a single ill-timed splice. They were all too stunned by the new footage. Justifiably.

Clay sat and viewed Fredric March again, but this time as Dr. Jekyll, mutating into the chunky fiend Hyde without the crucial potion for the first time— a scene never released, along with another sequence where Jekyll witnesses the bloody mauling of a songbird by a cat, which serves as the catalyst for another gruesome transformation.

He watched a print of Murnau's premier vampire movie, Nosferatu (not the remake) clearly not from the 1922 pirate negatives—in short, an impossibility. Bram Stoker's widow had recognized Murnau's film as an unabashed plagiarism of her husband's novel Dracula and won the right in court to have all extant prints and negatives of Nosferatu destroyed. The film survived only because film pirates had already hoarded illegal prints, and it was from these less-than-perfect "originals" that all subsequent prints came. Yet what Clay watched was a crystal-sharp, first-generation original, right down to the title cards.

He saw Lou Chancy, Jr., as Lawrence Stewart Talbot, wrestling a cathedral-sized grizzly bear in The Wolf Man. Not the remake. He watched a version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers a full five minutes longer than normal. Not the remake.

He saw Janet Leigh's naked breasts bob wetly as she cowered through her butcher-knife finish in an incarnation of Hitchcock's Psycho a whole reel more complete. He wondered idly when they would get around to grinding out a tacky remake of this classic as well, before he actually thought about it and realized that second-rate producers had been trying and failing for years

The blanket denials by the film outlet that had shipped the entire festival as a package deal were amusing to hear, as related by J.A. Bijou's staff. The most the tinny voices from L.A. would concede was that maybe the films had conic out of the wrong vault somewhere. That other phone calls were being made to them, along with lengthy and excited letters, was undeniable.

This expanding miracle had hefted an unspoken weight from Clay's shoulders. It was overjoy, giddiness, a smattering of cotton-candied jubilation, a reappearance of fun in his life, sheer and undeniable. A shrink would delve so far beyond this simple idea that Clay would become certifiable; so, no shrinks. Accept the fun, the favor.

The "favor" of J.A. Bijou's was, Clay reasoned, repayment to him, personally, for his basic faith in the films—a faith which endured the years, and which he allowed to resurface when given an opportunity. That made sense, though he did not comprehend the why totally, yet. He did toy with the phrasing, concocting impressive verbiage to explain away the phenomenon, but he always looped back around to the simplicity of his love for the films. He was one with the loose, intimate brotherhood that would remain forever unintroduced, but who would engage any handy stranger in a friendly swap of film trivia.

He felt that despite his happiness, the picture was still incomplete. The miracle of the films he was viewing was a kind of given. Given A, B then follows . . . He discussed his idea with other (unintroduced) J.A. Bijou regulars. Had anyone the power to inform him of the turn of events to follow, Clay would have thought them as whacko as his imaginary psychiatrist would have diagnosed him. If he had told anyone. He didn't.

The projection booth of J.A. Bijou's was a cluttered, hot closet tightly housing two gargantuan, floor-mounted thirty-five millimeter projectors with a smaller sixteen-millimeter rig, along with an editing/ winding table and a refugee bar stool. Knickknacks of film equipment were jumbled together on tiers of floor-to-ceiling shelving. Homemade, egg-carton soundproofing coated the interior walls, throwing soft green shadows under a dim work light. The windows were opaqued with paint and the floors were grimy. A large cardboard box squatted to receive refuse film just beneath a rack on which hung the horribly overused Coming Attractions strips that got spliced hundreds of times per month, it seemed.

J.A. Bijou's air-conditioning system was almost as old as the vintage brownstone that housed the theatre. The first time it gave up the ghost was during the mid-Thursday-afternoon showing of Psycho, just as Vera Miles began poking about the infamous Bates mansion. There was a hideous shriek as metal chewed rudely into metal, followed by a sharp spinning that wound down with a broken, wagon-wheel clunk. The audience nearly went through the ceiling, and afterward, everyone laughed about the occurrence, as things were make-shifted back to order.

The insulation on the cooler's motor held out until Friday night, for the benefit of the overflow audience. The years of humid dampness and coppery, wet decay had been inexorable. The engine sparked and shorted out, fuses blew, and as the blades spun down a second time, the theatre filled up with acrid electrical smoke, from the vents.

Gray smoke wafted dreamily around near the ceiling as the exits were flung open. A few moved toward the fresher air, but most kept stubbornly to their prize seats, waiting.

In the darkness of the booth, the projectionist had concluded that a melted hunk of old film might be jamming the film gate, and was leaning over to inspect it when the lights went out. Sitting in the dark, he groped out for his Cinzano ashtray and butted his Camel as a precaution against mishaps in the dark.

It did not do any good.

When the cardboard film bin later puffed into flames, the projectionist had temporarily abandoned the booth in search of a flashlight. The preview strips quickly blackened, curled, and finally ignited, snaking fire up to the low ceiling of the booth. The egg cartons blossomed a dry orange. The wooden shelves became fat kindling as the roomful of celluloid and plastic flared and caused weird patterns of light to coruscate through the painted glass. It took less than thirty seconds for the people sitting in front of the booth to notice it, dismiss it, and finally check again to verify.

The projectionist raced back. When he yanked open the door, the heat blew him flatly on his ass. People were already panicking toward exits; Clay rose from his seat and saw.

The bearded kid had already scurried to the pizzeria to trip the local fire alarm. Nobody helped the projectionist. The sudden chaos of the entire scene remained as a snapshot image in Clay's mind as he rapidly located a fire extinguisher, tore it from its wall mount, and hurried to the booth. A crackerbox window blew outward and fire licked out of the opening, charring the wall and lighting up the auditorium.

Lightly dazed, the projectionist was up and had one foot wedged over the threshold of the booth entrance, but the sheer heat buffeted him back as he exhausted his own tiny CO_2 canister. He yelled back into the fire; something unintelligible, then he stepped hack, fire-blind and nose to nose with Clay, shouting for him to get out quick.

Clay haltingly approached the gaping doorway and nozzled his larger extinguisher into the conflagrant oven. A better inferno could not have been precipitated if the Monster himself had tipped an ancient oil lamp into dry straw. Clay's effort reduced the doorway to smoke and sizzle, and he stepped up in order to get a better aim on the first projector, which was swathed in flames. He took another excruciating step inside.

The Monster, having tried his misunderstood best, always got immolated by the final reel. Friday night's screening of Psycho keynoted the close of the horror classics festival at J.A. Bijou's. Clay understood as he moved closer to the flaming equipment and films. It would not hurt much.

Above the booth, a termite-ridden beam exploded into hot splinters and smashed down, through the ceiling of the booth, showering barbecue sparks and splitting the tiny room open like a peach crate. It was a support beam, huge, weighty, and as old as the brownstone, and it impacted heavily, crushing the barstool, collapsing the metal film racks, and wiping out the doorway of the booth.

It was a perfect, in-character finish, complemented by the welling sound of approaching sirens.

One of the health-food places threatened a lawsuit after the fire marshal had done his war dance—J.A. Bijou's had been unsafe all along, etcetera. Negligence, they claimed.

The festival package of films was gone, gone to scorched shipment cans and puddles of ugly black plasma. When the projection booth had died, so did they, even though they were being stored at the theater manager's house for safekeeping. They had been, after all, perfect prints, and the door locks at J.A. Bijou's had not yet been updated against a particular kind of desperate collector.

Now the new sprinkler and air-conditioning systems were in. The new projection booth was painted and inspected; the new equipment, spotless and smelling of lubricant. J. A. Bijou's insurance, plus the quick upsurge in income, sparked financial backing sufficient to cause its rebirth in time for the following semester at the university.

With the new goods in place and all tempers balmed, the projectionist's somewhat passionate tale of an unidentified customer supposed to have died in the blaze was quickly forgotten or attributed to his excited state during the crisis. He steadfastly insisted that he had witnessed a death and maintained his original story without deviation despite the fact that no corpse or suggestion of a corpse had ever been uncovered in the wreckage. No one had turned up, tearfully seeking dead relatives.

But no one could explain about the films, either. And from opening night onward, none of the J.A. Bijou staffers bothered to consider why, on full-house nights (weekends, for the college crowd), the ticket count always came up two seats short. Nor could they give a solid, rational reason explaining why J.A. Bijou's was the sole theatre—in the universe, apparently -that featured peculiar, never-before-seen cinema gems regularly. The phone voices still had no answers.

The bearded kid suggested that J.A. Bijou's had a guardian spirit.

Clay relished the cool anonymity of the darkened theatre. As always, the crowds were friendly, but unintroduced. The film bond held them together satisfactorily without commitment. He had been cussing/discussing the so-called auteur theory with a trio of engineering majors seated behind him when the house lights dimmed. You never learned their names.

The first feature was The Man Who Would Be King, staring Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable. Clay had not decided what the second feature would be, yet.

Marissa returned, with the popcorn, as the trailers commenced.

VISITATION

Angus Bond checked into the Hermitage alone, under an assumed name. He had been recognized in consort with too many fanatics to risk a traveling companion, though having Nicholas along would have been comforting. Nicholas was dead.

"Room 713," said the deskman, handing over a bronze key. "One of our suites, mister . . . ah, Orion, yes. Heh." The man's smile looked like a mortician's joke on a corpse, and Angus restrained himself from looking to see if the natty, three-piece clerk's suit was split up the back. The deskman was no zombie.

Close, Angus thought as he hefted his bags. But no.

The Hermitage was as Gothically overstated as Angus had expected it to be. Nothing he saw really surprised him—the ornamental iron gargoyles guarding the lobby doors, the unsettling, Bosch-like grotesques hanging in gilt frames beneath low-wattage display lamps, the Marie Antoinette chandeliers, their hexagonal prisms suggesting the imprisonment of lost souls like dragonflies stuck in amber. None of it moved Angus one way or the other. It was all rather standard haunted house crap; occult chintz to get a rise out of the turistas.

The wine-red carpeting absorbed his footfalls (greedily, he thought). The Hermitage seemed to be the place. At the door to 713, Angus held his key to the feeble light. He knew how to tilt it so the embossed metal threw down the shadow impression of a death's-head.

Satisfied, he unlocked the door and moved his baggage inside, in order that he might unpack and await the coming of the monsters.

The knock on the door jolted him to instant wariness. Angus took a bite out of a hard roll and left it behind on the leather-topped table with the sausage and cheese he had brought.

It was the zombie clerk, carrying a tarnished salver bearing a brilliantly white calling card, face down. Angus noted that the clerk seemed to smell like the sachets tucked into wardrobes by grandmothers to fend off mildew. The stark whiteness of the card cast deathly shadows on the man's pale features. It seemed to light up the hallway much more efficiently than the guttering yellow bulbs in the brass sconces.

"A gentleman to see you, sir," he said, with all the verve of a ventriloquist's dummy.

Angus picked up the card. It bore two words:

IMPERATIVE.

BRAY.

The clerk stood fast. When Angus realized why, he decided to test the water a little.

"Just a minute." He hurried off to fumble briefly through the depths of his greatcoat. There was the telltale clink of change, and he returned to the door with a silver dollar. Instead of placing it on the salver, he contrived to drop it, apparently accidentally, so that the clerk caught it, smoothly interrupting its fall with his free hand. He wore dusty butler's gloves that were going threadbare at the fingertips. He weighed the coin in the palm of his hand.

The air in the draftless hallway seemed to darken and roil thickly, like cream in hot coffee, for just a second. The clerk's features darkened, too, making his eyes appear to glow, the way a light bulb flares just before it burns out. He sucked a quick gulp of air, as though dizzied by an abrupt stab of nausea. His features fought to remain whole, shifting like lard in a skillet, and Angus heard a distant, mad wail. It all took less than a second.

The clerk let the tip slide from the palm of his hand to rattle in the bowl of the metal dish. The queasy, death-rictus smile split across his face again, and he said, "Thank you. Sir."

He left. Angus closed his door and nodded to himself in affirmation.

The stranger was swaddled in fog-dampened tweeds, and crowned with a road-weary homburg that had seen better days a few decades earlier. The initial impression left by the bearing of the man was that he was very old—not withered, or incapacitated in the way of those who wore years gracelessly, but old in the sense of worldly experience. An old man. Angus felt a stab of kinship here, deep in the midst of hazardous and alien territory.

"You are Angus Bond?" said the old man, arching a snow-white eyebrow. "I am Turquine Bray."

"Nicholas Bray's father?" said Angus, ignoring that no one at the Hermitage knew his real name. The stranger had obviously just arrived.

"Grandfather. Paternal. His father was a null spiritual quantity, neither evil, nor good, like most in the world. He lived out his merchant's life and desired nothing but material things. He led a life of tawdriness and despair; but for seeding Nicholas, no residue of his passage, save the grief he caused others, endures. His fate was a well-deserved insignificance. Nicholas superseded him. Blotted him out. Nicholas once told me you were his closest friend."

The words bit Angus lightly, and the way Bray pulled off his glove advised that the late Nicholas had not dispensed his friendship or loyalty frivolously. The two men shook hands in the dank lobby of the Hermitage, the understanding already shared by them in no need of further words concerning Nicholas.

"I cannot say I am pleased to meet you at last, sir, under such circumstances," said Bray. "But I am relieved. Shall we walk outside? The atmosphere in here could make a vulture's eyes water . . . as it is no doubt intended to do."

The basilisk gaze of the clerk tracked them until they passed through the cataracted glass of the lobby's imposing double doors. Outside, the slate gray bulk of the Hermitage's castellated architecture monitored them dispassionately. It diminished behind them as they walked into the dense southern Kentucky woodland that made up the grounds.

"Gloomy," said Bray. "All this place needs is a tarn."

"Notice how the foliage grows together in tangles?" said Angus. "It meshes, with no nutritional support from the earth. The soil is nearly pure alkaline; I checked it. The stuff grows, and yet is dead. It laces together to keep out the sunlight—see? It's always overcast here."

"The appointments of that hotel are certainly Grand Guignol-ish. Like a Hollywood set for a horror film."

"Rather like the supposed 'ambience' one gains by patronizing a more expensive restaurant," said Angus. "I suspect you hit it on the head when you mentioned 'atmosphere.' That seems to be the purpose of all this theatrical embroidery—supernatural furniture. Atmosphere."

"Hm." Bray stepped laboriously over a rotting tree trunk. "Sinister chic."

The iron-colored mud stole dark footprints from them as they walked, their breath condensing whitely in the late January chill. Frost still rimed the dead vegetation, even in late afternoon. Angus was glad he had trotted out his muffler. If Poe could have seen this place, he mused, he would have been scared into a writing diet of musical comedy.

"Have you a room?" said Angus, after both men had stood in contemplative silence for a moment.

"I wanted to assure myself of your presence here, first."

"You followed me, then?" said Angus. "For whatever purpose? You certainly know of Nicholas' death already."

"I need you, Mr. Bond, to tell me the manner in which he died."

Angus sighed with resignation. "Mr. Bray," he said in a tone often rehearsed, "do you know just who I am?"

Bray's steely, chrome-colored eyes shot up to meet with Angus' watery blue ones, and he smiled a cursory smile. "You are Angus Gwyllm Orion Bond. Until roughly two years ago your profession was that of occult debunker—exposer of supernatural hoaxes. Absolute bane of fraudulent mediums, scamming astrologers, warlocks who were more con-men than sorcerers, and all the pop salesmen of lizard's tooth and owlet's wing. Until two years ago."

Bray's breath plumed out as he spoke. His speech was almost a recitation; Angus was impressed with the research.

"Two years ago, you vanished from the considerable media time and space you commanded. You evaporated from the airwaves, the talk shows. Rumor had you seeking the counsel of spiritualists and dabbling in magic yourself. Though you wound up debunking yourself, your books and other franchised items sold better than ever. I presume you've been supporting your now-private life with royalties?"

"Something like that."

"It was at precisely that time that you met up with my grandson. Nicholas was the antithesis of his father—a fantastic intellect and capacity for change. You know how he died."

"It ties together. The change in my life. Nick's death. I'm not sure you'd—"

"I am prepared for the outrageous, Mr. Bond. But I'm only interested in the truth. If the truth is merely outrageous, fire away."

"Nicholas came to my estate one night. He was frantic, pounding on the door, sweating, panicked. He couldn't tell me why. He had just moved into his new home at the time—do you recall it?"

"It was next to your estate. The Spilsbury mansion. Where all those actors were slaughtered by the religious cultists in the rnid-1960s."

"Yes" said Angus. "Of course, by the time Nick moved in, that was ancient history. That place's allotted fifteen minutes of pop fame had been used up years before."

Bray smiled again.

"He was unnerved. When a horse 'smells' a tornado, it gets skittish; the closest Nicholas could speculate was that the house 'felt wrong,' and skittish was the word to describe him. I returned with him, to sit and drink by the fireplace. About forty-five minutes later . . . "Angus regretted his dramatic tone. But what occurred had been bloody dramatic.

"It was the first time I ever witnessed an interface," he said simply. "Mr. Bray, are you aware how supernatural agencies function physically? What enables the paranormal to coexist with the normal universe—yours and mine?"

"Assuming its reality," said Bray, "I'd speculate that it would be like an alternate dimension."

"Good. But not a physical dimension, not like a parallel world just staggered out of sync with our own. The supernatural is a matter of power potentials. It accumulates, in degrees, like a nuclear pile approaching critical mass. When there's too much, it blows off steam, venting into the real world, our world, becoming a temporary reality, sometimes only for a second or two."

"Accumulates? Like dust?" Bray said incredulously. "How?"

"It happens every time someone knocks on wood. Or crosses their fingers for luck, or says gesundheit. Every time one avoids walking under a ladder or lighting three on a match. Every time someone makes a joke about ghosts and doesn't disbelieve what he's saying one hundred percent; every time somebody uses a superstitious expression as a reflex cliché—let the sandman come and take you away; don't let the boogeymnan get you. Every time some idiot in a church mentions the Devil. Any time anyone seriously considers any of millions of minor-league bad-luck totems. It compounds itself exactly like dust, Mr. Bray—each of those things is a conscious, willful act that requires a minute portion of physical energy in some way. The paranormal energy simultaneously prompted by such action remains unperceived, but it is there, and it stacks up, one imperceptible degree at a time. Just like dust. And when you get an extra infusion of high potency metaphysical force—"

"Like that Jim Jones thing?" said Bray. "Or the Spilsbury murders?"

"Precisely. You boost the backlog of power that much more. Whenever it reaches its own critical mass, it discharges into our reality. The house that Nicholas had moved into was a metaphysical stress point; it was still weak, thanks to the Spilsbury thing. A break point that had not completely healed."

"And during this—this interface, all that accumulated power blew through into my grandson's living room?" Bray shook his head. "I find that difficult to believe."

"Too outrageous?" said Angus, stopping suddenly.

Bray's expression dissolved to neutral. "Go on."

"That night, the 'weakness' was not only at the juncture point of that house, but elsewhere. Temporally, it was a 'weak' time period. Nick was in an agitated fear state—a 'weak,' receptive mental condition. But this phenomenon has no regular characteristic save that of overload—you can't count on it venting itself at any regular time, or place, or under any regular conditions. It vented somewhere else that night, and because of the weakened conditions we caught a squirt of it—bam! Two or three seconds; a drop of water from a flood. The flood went somewhere else."

Now Bray was frankly interested. "What was it like?"

"I got an impression of tremendous motive force," said Angus. "Blinding black light; a contradictory thing, I know, but there. The air felt pushed out of my lungs by a giant hand. Everything loose in the living room was blown like summer chaff in a hurricane. Overpowering nausea. Vertigo. Disorientation. I was afraid, but it was a vague, unfocused kind of terror. It was much worse for Nicholas.

"You see, he—like most people—held latent beliefs in supernatural things. I did not. Too many years debunking special effects led to an utter skepticism for things that go bump in the night—for me. I saw raw, turbulent energy. Nicholas saw whatever he did not totally disbelieve. You might see demons, ghouls, vampire lycanthropes, the Old Ones all hungering for your flesh and soul, dragons gobbling you up and farting brimstone, Satan browsing through your body with a hot fondue fork. Or the Christian God, for that matter."

Bray was taken aback, obviously considering what such an experience would mean for him, given his life's collection of myth and superstition, of fairytale monsters and real-life guilts. All of it would manifest to his eyes. All of it, at once. He said, "You mean that every superstitious fear I've ever had is waiting to eat me, on the other side of a paranormal power overload?"

"Not as such," said Angus. "Your belief is what makes it real. True disbelief renders it unreal, back into energy—which is what I saw. But that energy, filtered through Nick's mind, made a monster. He said he was trying to hold the doorway to Hell shut, and something horrifying was pulling from the other side. It gave a good yank and the doorway cracked open for a split instant before the briefness of the squirt closed it for good—but Nick, in that instant, saw what was trying to get him. It scared him white."

Bray was quiet for a long moment. Then: "He moved in with you shortly afterward?"

"Yes."

"You could not debunk the supernatural after that?"

"Not and do it with anything like conviction. Investigating the nature of the phenomenon became paramount."

"Nicholas helped you?"

"He was just the ally I needed. He had a propensity for pure research and a keen mind for deduction. We collected data and he indexed it. Using a computer, we were able to produce flowcharts. One of the first things we discovered was the presence of 'pressure points' in the time flow—specific dates that were receptive to the power burst, as the Spilsbury house had been. Lammas, Beltane, Candlemas, Hallowe'en. Almost all holidays. There are short bursts, long bursts, multidirectional bursts, weak and strong ones. Sometimes the proximity of a weak date will magnetize the power, attracting it to a particular time. But most of it concentrates at one physical place. Of course, there might be a dozen such outbursts in a day. Consider Jack the Ripper's reign over Spitalfields, or World War Two—the phenomenon would damn near become cyclical, feeding on itself."

"I see" said Bray. "But what about—"

"Nicholas?" Angus interrupted his meandering walk, hands in pockets. "I think the road is just above us, there. Shall we climb up out of this muck and make our way back? I have a flask of arrack in my room, to help cut the chill."

"Thank you," Bray said as Angus helped him through a web of creepers.

"Nicholas was very good at charts," said Angus. "He cross-matched all the power bursts—he was the one who called them 'squirts,' by the way—to ebb and flow grids, and to longitudes and latitudes. He calculated in 'weak spots' and compensated for them. He synthesized a means whereby he could predict, with reasonable accuracy, the location and date of a future 'squirt.' Sometimes he was wrong."

"But he was right for at least one," said Bray.

"In Manhattan," said Angus, "in a dilapidated, condemned office complex called the Dixon Building, he and I faced a full-power blast, alone."

"Oh my god—"

"God is right. Nicholas was eaten alive by the demon on the other side of the door. He still believed."

The two old men scrambled up onto the road facing the Hermitage, in the distance. It loomed darkly against the overcast sky, in silhouette, like a dinosaur waiting for dinner.

"In that hotel, tonight, at precisely one-thirty A.M., there will be an interface such as I've described. On paper, at least, it's one of the biggest I've ever seen. There are a lot of superstitious people out there in the world. I can show you the graphs, in my room."

Together, Angus and Bray entered the maw of the Hermitage.

"Have you taken stock of the clientele here yet?" said Bray as Angus shucked his heavy coat. Since Angus had not been able to coax the room's antediluvian steam coil into boosted output and since the fireplace still held cold tinder, both men kept their sweaters on. The arrack was forestalled when Bray produced a travel decanter of cognac from the depths of his overcoat.

"There is a word for this supernatural power," Angus said. "Some call it mana. It's like electricity—neither good nor evil in itself, but available to those who know how to harness it. Devoid of context, there is no 'good' or 'evil.' I am not the only one who has discovered that the interfaces can he charted. Others will be swift to use such power potentials for selfish or harmful ends. They would embrace the iconography of what the unenlightened blanket with the term evil. That desk clerk, for example. I never saw anyone who wanted to be a vampire more, yet to exist as a true vampire would be a pitiable state indeed. I slipped him a silver dollar earlier, one I had charged in accordance with legend as a protective talisman." He dragged a ponderous Victorian chair over to the table where Bray sat nursing his cognac and staring abstractedly through the parted drapes, into the courtyard below them.

Bray saw three men in black awkwardly bearing an enormous footlocker into the lobby. "You mean like a witchcraft amulet?"

Sipping, Angus said, "Amulets are no good if they're not in your possession. This was a talisman—charged by the hook, in this case, the original text of a grimoire called the Liber Daemonorum, published in 1328 by a fellow named Protassus. I have a first edition."

"And the clerk?"

"Since he was behaving by such rigid rules, it was almost boringly simple to anticipate him. He reacted as though he was about to burst at the seams. If not for the gloves he wore, I think that talisman might've burned right through his hand to drop on the floor. But the predictability of a phenomenon or movement does not necessarily decrease its potential threat or danger. Don't kid yourself about the uses some intend for such power. It's backed up like sewage on the other side of the veil, waiting to be tapped, ever-increasing. A lot of bad could be created. Power corrupts." He killed his glass and Bray moved to refill it.

"Why expose yourself to something like that?" said Bray, now concerned. "Surely you've had a bellyful of baring your psyche to the tempest—or can you build some kind of tolerance?"

"To a degree, yes. It's still an ordeal, a mental and physical drain. But I can stand, where others would bend." Angus leaned closer; spoke confidentially: "You've missed a more obvious reason for doing so."

"Nicholas?" Bray said finally. "Vengeance?"

Angus swallowed another firebolt of liquor. "Not as an eye-for-an-eye thing. Nicholas' death convinced me that the phenomenon itself must be interrupted. Each outburst is more powerful. Each comes closer on the heels of the last. It is as though it is creating a bigger and bigger space in our reality in which to exist. The 'valve' must be closed before the continuous escalation makes preventive action impossible."

"By god!" said Bray, his eyes lighting up. "The talisman!"

"I hope that wasn't too ostentatious—announcing my presence in the Hermitage with that stunt. As far as the rest of the congregation here is concerned, I'm just another acolyte."

"I haven't seen too many people since I arrived."

"Well, they'd shun the daylight by nature, anyway," said Angus. "Or what passes for daylight around here." He let his eyes drift into infinity focus, regarding the courtyard below. "You know, the Hermitage is quite an achievement, for what it is. But it isn't 'evil.' The power I spoke of, the mana, is what keeps the sunlight from this place and makes dead trees root in dead ground. Channeled and controlled, the mana could be used to build a perfect womb for something that would be evil by anybody's definition. Something designed by people of ill intent to fit every preconception. Tonight's surge is a big one. Maybe it's going to fuel a birth."

"I don't even want to think about that possibility," said Bray.

"I must." Angus dumped one of his satchels onto the bed. "During that one-thirty juncture tonight, I must try to put a bogey in the paranormal plumbing."

"How?" said Bray, now visibly unnerved and looking about fruitlessly for a clock. "How does one stop that much power, barreling right at you?"

"One doesn't. You turn it against itself, like holding a mirror up to a gorgon's face. It takes, in this special case, not only protective talismans against the sheer forces themselves, but also my anti-belief in the various physical manifestations—the monsters. The power will exhaust itself through an infinite echo effect, crashing back and forth like a violently bouncing ball inside a tiny box." He drained his glass again. "In theory, that is."

"Plausible," Bray said. "But then, you're the expert on this sort of thing. I suppose we'll see the truth early this morning . . ."

"No!" Angus, face flushed with sudden panic. "You must leave this place, before—"

"Leave you here alone, to fight such a fight alone? I admit that two old men may not present much of a threat to the powers you describe, but where in hell am I going to go, knowing that such things transpire?" Bray's hand grew white-knuckled around his glass.

"Your own dormant fears might destroy you," Angus said. "Another death on my conscience."

"What am I to do, then?" Bray stiffened. "You may not believe in revenge, but I do. I insist! I side with you or I am less than a man . . . and that is my final word on the matter, sir." As punctuation, he finished his cognac.

The expression on Angus' face was neutrally sober, but within, he was smiling.

Midnight should have been anticlimactic. It was not.

In the funereal quiet of the lobby, an ebony clock boomed out twelve brass tones that resounded through like strikes on a huge dinner gong. A straggler, dressed in tatters, fell to the wine red carpeting in convulsions, thrashing madly about. The stalwart desk clerk had watched the man inscribe three sixes on his forehead earlier, using hot ashes from the lobby fireplace. The ornamental andirons hissed their pleasure, hotly.

An almost sub-aural dirge, like a deep, constant synthesizer note, emanated from the ground floor and gradually possessed the entire structure. A chilling undercurrent of voices seemed to seep through the building's pipework and the hidden, dead spaces between walls.

In the Grand Ballroom the chandeliers began to move by themselves. Below their ghostly tinkling, a quartet of figures in hooded tabards raised their arms in supplication. Candles of sheep tallow were ignited. Mass was enjoined.

Somewhere near the top of the hotel, someone screamed for nearly a whole minute. Unearthly, lowering noises issued from the grounds, now heavily misted in nightfog. There were the sounds of strange beasts in pain, and vague echoes of something large and massy, moving sluggishly as though trapped in a tar pit. It was starlessly dark outside.

"Are you positive you wish to stay?" said Angus, opening the flask of arrack. Bray's private stock was long gone.

"Yes. Just pour me another glass, please." Each new, alien sound made Bray wince a little, inside the folds of his coat, but he maintained bravely.

From within his shirt, Angus fished out a key on a thin chain of silver links. He twiddled it in each of his satchel's two locks. The first thing he produced from the case was a book lashed together with stained violet ribbons.

"Good God," Bray choked. "Is that the . . ."

"The Liber Daemonorum. Pity this must be destroyed tonight. By burning. Damn shame. This is a collector's item." He heaved the volume onto the bed and the rank smell of foxed and mildewed age-old paper washed toward Bray. Brittle pieces of the ragged hide binding flaked to the floor.

Nearby, probably in the hall outside 713, someone howled like a dog until his voice gave out with an adenoidal squeak.

Bray's attention was drawn from the ancient witchcraft tome to the disk of burnished gold Angus removed from the satchel. It was an unbroken ring, big as a salad plate, with free-cast template characters clinging to its inner borders. It caught the feeble light in the room and threw it around in sharp flashes.

"Gold?" said Bray, awestruck.

"Solid, refined twenty-four karat, pure to the fifth decimal point," said Angus, tossing it to the bed. The heavy chain necklace attached to it jingled; the disk bounced a hard crescent of light off the ceiling directly above. "The purity of the metal used in the talisman has protective value. I won't put it on until a few seconds before deadline—keep it as potent as possible, you understand."

From the satchel came more protective fetishes, mojo bags of donkey teeth, copper thread and travertine, hex stones with glyptic symbols, inked spells on parchment bound with hide thongs, tiny corked vials of opaque liquids. Angus tucked these into his clothing.

Something thumped heavily and repeatedly on the floor above them. Drum chants could be faintly heard.

"Any doubts now about there not being a full house here tonight?" Angus said. Bray's hand quivered in betrayal as he drank. Angus regretted that the academic portion of his mind regarded Bray simply as a handicap; his sense of honor could not refuse the older man. He hoped he would survive what was to follow, but would allow no compromising of his own task. Silence hung between them awhile longer.

"Does it matter where we are when it hits?"

"No. This hotel is the place. The psychos surrounding us are like the creepy trappings—more supernatural furniture. Pay them no heed. What we're dealing with has no form. You can be tricked by illusions; if you even consider for a second that something monstrous before your eyes might possibly be real, you're lost—you must remember that. The demon Nicholas saw was not real, until he thought it might be, making him afraid. Then it ate him up."

"Angus!" Bray stood from his chair. "I can—I can feel something strange . . . palpable, a swelling . . . like a balloon about to burst . . . " He looked around, agitated now.

Angus hauled out his railroad watch. "One-twenty-seven A.M. I set this by the time service in Willoughby late yesterday. Hmm—I suppose no time service is strictly accurate." He slipped quickly into the talisman.

"Exactly like the atmospheric buildup Nicholas sensed, before the squirt at his house," Angus said. "I have no extra power objects, friend Bray. You'll have to stick close behind me. That's about the only aid I can offer you. And something else—" He hurriedly dug a dented tin of Ronson lighter fluid out of the satchel and doused the Liber Daemonorum. The pungent liquid soaked slowly into the comforter on the bed and saturated the book of sorcery. Angus then came up with several disposable plastic cigarette lighters, each gimmicked with electrical tape. "Take one of these, and listen to me. During the confrontation, I may become momentarily transfixed. If that happens, I want you to light the book. It must be burned during the interface if my other, lesser shielding spells are to function. The lighter is modified to produce a long jet of flame when you thumb the wheel. Understand that the book is rare, and dangerous, and the supplicants booked into this place would gladly murder us to get it. If I hesitate, destroy it!"

Bray clutched the lighter tightly, like a crucifix against a vampire.

As though in the grip of an earthquake tremor, the Hermitage shuddered. A chunk of the whorled plaster ceiling disengaged and smashed into chalky crumbles at Angus' feet.

"Remember, Bray!" he shouted. "It's not real—"

The rest of his words were obliterated by a thunderclap concussion of moving air as the oak door to 713 blew off its hinges and slapped the floor like a huge, wooden playing card. The French windows past Bray splintered outward in a shrieking hail of needlelike glass bits. The bottles and rickrack on the table scattered toward the window. The cognac flask pegged Bray's temple and brought blood. The vacuum force of the moving air seemed to suck the breath from him. He screamed Angus' name, soundlessly.

Angus labored toward the door, walking ponderously, like a trapper in a snowbank, one hand holding the outthrust talisman, the other readying the lighter for the Liber Daemonorum crooked against his chest. Outside, the corridor was awash in stunning yellow light. A high-frequency keen knifed into his ears and numbed his brain. He heard his name being called over and over, coupled with a maniacal laugh that kept shifting speeds, accelerating and slowing, a warped record in the hands of a lunatic disc jockey. Through the shimmer and glare Angus thought he could see stunted, writhing shapes—various monsters struggling to be born of his mind. He stared them down and one by one they were absorbed back into the light that produced them, dissolving as though beaten progressively thinner with a mallet until the light shone through and disintegrated them. The talisman began to radiate heat against his chest. The first echo had been achieved.

The maniac sounds were definitely caused by something in terrific pain, fighting him. In the hallway mirror, Angus saw himself vaporize—hair popping aflame, shearing away, skin peeling back as though sandblasted off, skull rushing backward as sugary powder, blood and brains vanishing in a quick cloud of color and stink.

It was an illusion, and he ignored it.

He tried to ignore the dim, background sound of Bray's screaming.

A gray lizard demon, scales caked in glistening slime, breached the outside window to 713 and pounced on Bray's back, ripping and tearing. More rushed in like a floodtide, their alligator snouts rending his clothing, their flying spittle frying through his skin like brown acid. Curved black talons laid open his chest and they began to devour him organ by organ. His lighter went spinning uselessly across the floor.

Angus caught a glimpse of the carnage taking place behind him. Bray was lost.

Angus stopped his advance. Bray was dead.

Bray was dead, and the typhoon of yellow force petered to nothingness in a second. Standing ridiculously alone in the quiet of the cathedral-like hallway, Angus realized, with a plummeting kind of bright, orange horror in his stomach, that he had lost.

He looked up and down the hallway. Nothing.

Then, distant, indecipherable sounds. Hungry sounds.

The book! The book! his mind screamed. His thumb automatically worked the lighter, and a jet of blue propane fire at least half a foot long spurted up, caressing the Liber Daemonorum. It billowed into flame along with his soaked coat sleeve.

But the two iron gargoyles from the lobby were already winging toward Angus with metal-muscled strokes. He heard the grating of their black, iron flesh pumping and looked up to see their diamond eyes fix on him. They peeled to either side of him as the book touched off; one swooped past in a blur, hooking the book away to smother it against its bellows chest, the other jackknifing upward in midair to strafe Angus. He felt cold, sharp pain. His feet left the floor and he crashed onto his back, rolling clumsily, blood daubing into one eye from the gashes the gargoyle's iron, butcher-cleaver claws had carved in his forehead.

His name was still being called, fast and slow and fast and—

"Angus." The tone was first disapproving, then pitying. "Angus, you poor old sod."

Turquine Bray stood over him holding the still-smoking Liber Daemonorum. The violet ribbons were charred.

The iron gargoyles circled high in the corridor, lighting behind Bray. They cringed and fidgeted, like greyhounds, grinding their javelin teeth and snorting mist through cast iron nostrils with impatience.

"Since you've delivered this book to us," Bray said, "I think you're owed a few words." His hands slithered proudly around the tome and his chromium eyes glittered at Angus.

"The gargoyles—" Angus gasped from the floor.

"Oh, yes, they're real enough. They're a bit piqued because I haven't given you to them yet." Angus could see that Bray spoke around a mouthful of needled fangs like the dental work of a rattlesnake. "Your disbelief in monsters posed an intriguing problem. How to chink such metal armor? How to trick you, the expert on all the tricks? You wouldn't believe in the patently unreal, so we made you believe in something else you'd accept with less question. The gargoyles are now real, thanks to your mind. Turquine Bray, however, died in 1974. On Valentine's Day." The Bray thing, its hair gone jet black, eyes sunken to mad ball bearings in seductive, dark pits, grinned wolfishly.

"Impossible!" Breathing was becoming difficult for Angus, as though his lungs were filling with hot candle wax. "Impossible . . . the power burst . . . you existed before the interface took place . . ."

"My dear Angus," the creature rasped in a phlegmatic voice, "you're not paying attention. This power burst was the biggest of all so far. People are more superstitious than ever. They go right on stacking it up. This surge was preceded by what young Nicholas characterized as a 'squirt,' a considerable leakage that primed the paranormal pump, you might say." It pretended to inspect its elongated, spiked nails. "How do you think something as melodramatic as the Hermitage got here in the first place? It came out of your mind. It was what you expected; know-nothing cultists and pop Satanists and horror-movie props—supernatural furniture. It was all an illusion, as was I. But it's real now. The Liber Daemonorum will help to keep our family corporeal."

Two shuffling corpses battered down the stairway door leading into the hallway. Their sightless, maggoty eye sockets sought Angus's prone form. They made for him with inexorable slowness, rotting flesh dropping off their frames in clots. They hungered.

"Your H.P. Lovecraft might be pleased to know that his Old Ones are finally coming home," the monster growled. It stretched cavernously, bursting from its human clothes, revealing a wide body of insectile armor plating with double-jointed, birdlike legs whose hooked toes gathered the carpet up in bunches. "It's all quite real now, friend Angus." The steely, silver eyes transfixed Angus from a nine-foot height. "As are my other friends. Here. Now."

The gargoyles jumped into the air and hovered like carrion birds. From 713 the reptilian scavengers continued to swarm, champing their oversized jaws, streamers of drool webbing the carpeting. Beyond the steaming, toothy thing that had been Bray, Angus saw a translucent horde of ghostly, humanoid leeches. The scuttling things advanced, worrying their bloodless, watchmaker's claws together in anticipation of a dark, burgundy-hued snack.

He recognized them now, all of the monsters, all of his lifetime's research into the occult, echoing back upon him. If he could be made to believe Bray had been real, then anything could follow . . . Zaebos, a demon with a human head and the body of a crocodile, entreated him from the end of the corridor. Near the ceiling floated the Keres, the Greek vampire entities who appear before death. Windigos—cannibalistic Indian ghosts—crowded past the living-dead corpses to get to Angus' position. They licked their lips. Now Angus knew the name of the monster before him, the spirit who had assumed Bray's form to trick him. It was the Master of Ceremonies to the Infernal Court.

"Verdelet!" he croaked, holding the talisman forward. "Swallow this!"

"Now, now," the demon said. "Too late for that hocus-pocus, Angus. You believe now." It waved an ebony claw carelessly, and the talisman melted, sizzling through Angus's clothing, scalding and eating into his chest with a geyser of golden steam.

He managed a howling scream.

"I have nought but gratitude for you, friend Angus," Verdelet said. "Thanks to you, as of this night, the Hermitage is open for business." The last thing Angus heard was the wet sounds of jaws opening.

PULPMEISTER

If my own atrophied story sense had had its say, I suppose I would have been dispatched on the spot. Savate kick. A specially dum-dum'ed .38-caliber slug from a hammerless Smith & Wesson Centennial Airweight would then have followed, scattering my brains in two dozen directions like mattress ticking.

But that sort of convenient plotting only happens in the books.

Alpha Beta's liquor department was the last place in the cosmos I would have picked for a rendezvous with a Spy Crusher, too. Shows you what in hell I know. The son of a bitch didn't add a bullet to my forebrain, either. He just stood two aisles over, arms folded, waiting for me to react, with the same kind of smug expression you see on chimpanzees in the zoo . . . right before they heave one of their turds at you through the bars.

Splat! The Kahlua bottle took advantage of my abrupt slackness of grip and gravitated. It did not explode dramatically across the floor into flying brown wedges of glass and a gooey spray of licor de café; again, that sort of image only occurred in fiction. It just spun around madly. All it needed was a circle of adolescents waiting to smooch.

When I looked back, the man with the unmistakable dress and mien of a black-card-with-red-slash Spy Crusher was gone. The counterman rolled his eyes at an underling as I sheepishly replaced the bottle on the shelf. Other gawkers attracted to my clumsy performance huffed back to their shopping. Embarrassment City.

The man I glimpsed had disappeared, but I was positive it had been Brock deSade. A character I had created.

It's tough to resist the tug of narrative economy, especially when it rings so histrionically across the printed page. I did not create Brock deSade. Sue me now.

That fate had befallen a failed journalist I never had the misfortune to meet: Rocky Stovington, late of the Chicago Tattler, "Rocko" to his intimates, and I hope to god it was a pseudonym. Right now Rocko was holed up somewhere in the West L.A. smogscape, reaming out prestige soft-porn novels for ten large per bang— amazing, when your standard sluice/pump stiffeners drag in less than a thousand per book anywhere else.

How Rocko snagged that cushy assignment is as good an introduction as any to another of the principal characters in this farce—Shayne Byrne. Possibly the least imaginative literary agent on Publishers' Row, but maternal enough to never let any of her stable starve, at least as far as my tummy knew. She had unearthed the porn line on Rocko's behalf. They're called "prestige soft porn" because they're the paperbacks you see on the mainstream fiction racks shoulder to shoulder with Stephen King and John D. MacDonald, with their foil and die-cuts. Thus far, Rocko had humped his merry way through ten of these epics. I had two of the latest ones on my odds and sods shelf— Ginger, the Wanton and Corinne, the Fickle. They all had titles like that. I never read either past the back cover copy: Ready for uncaged sensuality? A firm whip hand is what Corinne craves, but cheat on her and she'll turn the tables. Who dominates who when behind her tame foxiness waits the soul of a lusty wolf? Corinne— if you don't turn her on, she'll turn on you!

Who knows who reads them? Rocko was content enough to love 'em and leave 'em (read: write 'em and forget 'em), full-time. Which meant that Peephole Specials—the novel arm of FancyFree magazine's publishing interests—was ecstatic enough to sign him up for ten titles per contract. Which meant that even though Shayne Byrne took fifteen percent off the top, she was not better off than before, because thanks to this milestone in male chauvinist tale-spinning, Rocko had just become too highfalutin' for his previous alias, "Ingram Gunn," head honcho of Brock deSade: Spy Crusher.

Huzzah for ironic timing.

This was the year that Kraft modified the composition of the artificial "cheese food" in those four-for-a-buck macaroni dinners. Now they were twice the price and tasted like gypsum board and lead shavings. A steady rebound diet of rice flavored with boullion cubes was etching tributaries of orange-slag lunacy into my concentration. I knuckled under and called Shayne from a pay phone. I billed the call to a First National Bank office I knew was closed . . . that ought to give you an idea of how far back this happened.

I'm afraid I babbled a bit.

"Anything, Shayne, anything, I'm destitute, anything as long as it pays money; World War Two junk, bodice rippers, Red Threat novels, TV novelizations. I'll do the comic-book flesh-outs you mentioned in July . . . Listen to me, Shayne—I'll do Spiderman. I'll do the Incredible Hulk, for christsake . . ."

"Sorry, Ollie, they've all been snapped up." Her voice sounded sweet but she kept her huckster's soul. We were a continent apart, had met by mail, and had never been introduced in the flesh, as Rocko undoubtedly would put it. "Nothing new in the pipe until after Labor Day. You know how the Industry plays dead in August. Everybody goes on vacation."

At first, I hadn't known. But I clammed up; I was supposed to be part of the goddamned Industry and did not wish to appear out of touch with its pulsebeat. "Yeah." Mentally I advanced to the preordained next step of my telephone tango with my agent-of-record.

The step called the Ten-Second Pause.

The Ten-Second Pause is like a game show where the contestant and host try to out-stare each other, seeing who will blink first. It's a window of dead air. If the writer breaks down during the Pause, he or she begs, plain and simple. If the agent breaks down, he or she proffers whatever loose tidbits opportunity float to the surface after an Eight Second consideration of her client's straights.

Shayne must have heard my stomach rumbling, nearly three thousand miles to the west.

"Oh—hey, I might have something for you, Ollie. Maybe you could help me out of a rut Rocko stuck me in . . ." Long distance, I could hear silk-wrapped nails drumming on a laminated wood desktop. "You ever see those Spy Crusher books?"

"You mean, um, hard-boiled sex 'n' violence for gun-lobby loons? God, guns and guts?"

"Huh?"

"You know, terse sexist action for the red necks, White Sox, blue-ribbon beer crowd? The books with numbers instead of titles?"

"These have both—huge pastel numbers, itty bitty titles. Think you could do one of those for five thou?"

Here's a check, you gonna cash it or frame it, ha-ha.

"Interested, Ollie?"

"Fascinated. Do tell?"

"I ran off a Xerox of Rocko's bible for the series. Don't worry; it's mostly bullshit to sell the series and it's already sold. Past the first one you can write however you want as long as it's readable on a sixth-grade level."

"Past the first book sounds like there's more than one. You splitting the series between two starving writers? C'mon, Shayne, you know I can handle more than one . . ."

"Listen, Tensor Books is panicked since Rocko dropped out to write Cynthia, the Sinful. They'll want novel outlines from you yesterday and a finished book by this afternoon. You're being hired for speed, not star billing . . . and if you bring off the first one, you'll get more follow-ups than you can stomach."

"Right, okay." Shayne's time lag plus the usual fuckery publishers call "processing" plus late documents meant that it would be four to eight weeks, minimum, before I ever saw a check. But there's some mystic quality about checks due that turns writers into reckless fools.

"Give me the fine print," I said, unsheathing my trusty Razor Point.

It could have been mucho worse.

The Book Bin's amiable clerks suspected I was the one responsible for boosting their back wall sections dry for some months now. The back wall sections—reference and novels M-Z—were the most difficult to monitor from the front counter. One employee or another hovered perpetually at the rim of my vision, watchdogging, maybe wondering what the hell I was doing, branching out into a new section of the store. I kept my eye on them, too. This was research.

I was introduced to Brock deSade: Spy Crusher in the company of the baddest and the best—The Eviscerator, The Annihilist, Commie Stomper, and The Mutilation Squad all stood erect in their wire pockets, with the inevitable salting of Doc Savage oldies in their hairy, masculine company. The Death Merchant was still going strong alongside The Rat Bastards and The S.O.B.s. Some series ran to fifty-plus volumes. Don Pendleton had a whole shelf all to his lonesome.

The first, Spy Crusher I saw was #7: The Kill Cadre. I plucked it and gobbled up Tensor's promotional gambits.

Brock deSade, Spy Crusher, locks horns with a fanatical gang of barbarian zealots, the Kill Cadre! By Ingram Gunn.

So this was fame. All the sister series had "authors" as cute as their titles—Bruno Groin, Christian White, Hawk Hunter, Turk Thrust, Buff Rigid—and the advertising squibs dealt out as many monosyllables and hard Germanic glottals as possible. Everything was calculated to sound not just tough, but primal.

Sex is his middle name! Death is his trademark. Unbridled ACTION and gut-ripping TENSION as seething maniacs plot to napalm AMERICA! Only ONE man stands against them: BROCK deSADE, international troubleshooter, chameleonic specter of intrigue, hard and cold as a.44 Magnum, a keenly honed killing machine with a computer mind! It's a hit-and-miss cross-country juggernaut as dynamiting radicals try to make the SPY CRUSHER EAT FLAMING DEATH!!

Well, okay.

Apparently the Kill Cadre was composed of pussies, since Brock deSade creamed them in time to tackle his next assignment, #8: Deathtrap of Terror. Even more obvious was deSade's healthy showing on the racks you should pardon the expression. There were plenty of cockeyed and vacant pockets. Other hooks in the series had sold briskly. Part of the reason—a cunning strategy on the part of Tensor Books—was that Spy Crusher, at $2.25 per book, was the cheapest violence series on the rack. That explained the doghouse advances.

My pocket was full of bus-fare change from my kitchen's Dunes Hotel ashtray. Actually paying money for a book was part of my strategy. In my mind Tensor was giving it back to me two-thousand fold. The piddling two-percent royalty promised by the fart joke that was their boilerplate contract meant that I'd never see any cash beyond the first whack . . . unless Spy Crusher sold better than Lose Weight with Cocaine, or whatever was currently number one according to the New York Times.

SpyCrusher #7 was worth the out-of-pocket expense just for me to see the Book Bin's overlord grimace his way through a mock coronary at the sight of real money in my outstretched hand. He was a decrepit mental case who trundled about his mildewing paper empire in a motorized wheelchair. He buzzed over and made a face when he saw the cover of the purchase. His grunt was all-knowing. God forbid a derelict such as myself should exhibit anything approaching taste once I ponied up hard American cash. My thought that the star of this feeb's nightstand was probably Corinne, the Fickle restrained me from locking his electric joystick in the direction of the nearest cliff.

I made my exit toting a Book Bin bag of puffed orange plastic. Contents: one Spy Crusher. The rest of the Brock deSade canon was stuffed securely into my Dingo boots, beneath my pants. They ran pretty skinny as novels—fifty-five thousand words each, tops—so it was easy to snug a pair of them down each side of my legs while the clerks weren't watching. Two legs meant eight books; in my haste I wound up with duplicate copies of #3: Banzai Knifekill. I breezed away, having outfoxed the enemy again. So much for real espionage.

A week and a half later I sat down to commence Spy Crusher #13: Death Mongers. Oliver Lowenbruck was about to werewolf into his combat-crouched, patriotically paranoid alter ego, Ingram Gunn, for the first historic time.

Alter ego—now there was an idea. Writer spots the living embodiment of Brock deSade at the supermarket as the first manifestation of latent schizophrenia. Writer has become so suffused with the machismo nonsense required to make deSade's world sound plausible that he has swapped his uneventful leisure moments for the fantasy life of a Spy Crusher.

The first pulpist habit I assimilated was to rehearse everything I did mentally, to see how mundane, normal actions would translate into Spy Crusher prose. It made the boring courtyard of my apartment seem filled with menace in the dark.

Brock's proximity sense tingled red alert as he scanned the black perimeter in efficient hundred-twenty-degree visual sweeps every two seconds. He jacked back the slide of his cobalt-colored service          and faded against the wall, covering the hostile turf while edging with Ninja stealth closer to the door . . .

Could Brock deSade have crept up from behind and captured my basic sanity while I was looking the other way, wondering whether my writing talent could withstand the stoop labor of Spy Crushing? Terrific. I'd spend the balance of my career in a foam closet, my thesaurus swollen up with drool, parroting synonyms for violent causation and excess of sensitiveness.

I pulled open my screen door. It hitched and hit me in the face, causing me to drop my keys in the dark. I cursed the lineage of my landlord for cheapskating on the courtyard lights.

Then I thought: Maybe the landlord didn't cut the lights, you fool. Instantly I regretted leaving the booze in the store, and by the time I got the door unlocked my imagination was in speeding gear:

Brock body-rolled, snapping shots at the silhouette in the doorframe. Whirling dum-dums smashed through the interloper's chest in a flopped-over vee shape that splattered his organs through the exploding picture window. Skull shrapnel flew south as his head disintegrated and his spasming corpse joined the spent brass on the floor. Through the choking cordite fumes, Brock said:

"Why don't you come the rest of the way inside, Mr. Lowenbruck, and close the door?"

His voice was a modulated baritone; the timbre of authority punctuated every—

After a good fifteen seconds of petrification my mind stumbled over the insane hope that this was just a burglar, and it was my turn to pay the poverty tax. I dropped my keys again.

No such good fortune.

"Please," the shadow figure said from the cluttered darkness of my studio. "I'm not a hallucination or a robber." My spider lamp clicked on to reveal him standing by my desk. "Why not let's you and I sit and talk like two rational men?"

I didn't have to squint at him; I'd thumbnailed his physical description so many times that recognition clicked in an instant, it was all outlined in the section of Rocko's Spy Crusher bible subheaded Brock deSade deFined.

He was wearing the buff-colored suit that was pro forma whenever the paperback cover art did not clothe him in night-fighting outfit of black Spandex. He was—undeniably—a Saxon White American Male Protestant. Light brown hair longish over dark brown eyes and every bit of the six-foot-two inches, thirty years, and a hundred and seventy trim fighting pounds Rocko had laid down in the bible, which outlined the parameters of the whole series.

His eyebrows were up. "Satisfied, Mr. Lowenbruck?" One elegantly tapered and veiny hand was poised by the lamp switch. I didn't recall anything from Rocko's bible about elegantly tapered and veiny hands, but there they were. He tilted the lamp hood in order to read the yellowing memo I'd received from Shayne Byrne ages ago.

I'd thumbtacked the memo above the typewriter because I believe in milking positive reinforcement for all the ego reinforcement coaxable. By staring at that memo for the past year I was maximizing editorial karma, bowing to my own Mecca. Its text was ingrained in my memory:

DATE: 7/2

FROM: SHAYNE

TO: OLLIE

SUBJECT: DEATH MONGERS

I never ever read this bilge, as you know, but I must say you've really left Rocko in your wake, writerly speaking. Your first ten pages hooked even me. B.dS. is less comic book, more flesh & blood. POV is realer. Aliver. Tensor will sign you for more in increments of two-book pacts. Herewith your executed contracts. Check to follow. So don't just sit there, start the next one!

- Shayne

The man at my desk mouthed the words as he read, his ninety-six-percent eidetic memory (that was in the bible, too) recording everything. Something that sounded like boy oh boy oh boy fell out of my mouth.

It was him. The guy from the book covers. The man I had spent more than a year hustling through eight kinds of screaming hell and Armageddon. Nine kinds, if you counted #21: Bangkok Blowa way, still in the works.

The man in my living/work/bedroom had a receding hairline. One of his front teeth overlapped the other by a scant millimeter or two. There was a hard little comma of pigment on his neck, like one of those pimples that never goes away by itself. Maybe he picked his nose, maybe he used Sweet 'n' Low, maybe those Italian designer shoes hurt his feet. He was out of Brock deSade's styrene mold, but with the imperfections any real human being would normally possess. He was the difference between pulp casserole fiction and the living, breathing, sweaty item.

"I expected to be blown away on my own doorstep," I choked out at last.

"Oh yes." He gave a dismissive wave of his hand. "All that his perforated corpse arched through the smoke nonsense. Has it ever occurred to you, Mr. Lowenbruck, that a man bashed in the skull as many times as I have been over the course of twenty books would retain neither the presence of mind nor the equilibrium needed to accurately fire a handgun? Have you any genuine idea of how the kick of a .44 Magnum stings your shoulder socket, how the flash blinds you?" He stepped around one of my junk files on the bare wooden floor. "No. No, I'm not armed. Here. I've brought the Kahlua you abandoned at the store. Let's partake, shall we, and chat? We need to, desperately. It's time."

I couldn't stop staring, watching him as he puttered around performing maddeningly commonplace chores. The coffee was already on. He poured two cups and liberally spiked them with double hits. From the desk he exhumed the first hundred manuscript pages of Bangkok Blowaway. He sat. Sipped. Crossed his legs. Yawned. And pored quickly through his own yet-unpublished rampage.

He sneezed more than once. He seemed a bit allergic, perhaps to the dust in my quarters. I got him some toilet paper.

Up around page 100 I generally run afoul of a minor plot traffic jam. For the first half of the hook, you vamp crazily in whatever digressive direction will absorb another five pages. In so doing, you make a paragraph of off-the-cuff outline transmogrify into thirteen thousand real, whole words. At twenty-four bucks per page, give or take, you write for quantity, not quality. You only get one chance to mortar up the gaps that sprout in such high-speed story logic. All the Spy Crushers I'd ever done were deadlined so tightly that there was one draft—period. I literally made them up as I went along. Not everybody can do that and stay entertaining. But after page 100, the story material tended to expand to fit the page count, rather than the reverse.

Brock deSade dropped the manuscript on my pear-crate coffee-table substitute. It scattered like a fan of playing cards. He massaged the bridge of his nose.

"We have got a problem." His eyes accused the paper on the table. "How long did it take you to wri—er, produce that?"

I backtracked. Hard work. "I started the book last Sunday evening."

"Pretty cocky about freewheeling through my life for me, aren't you?" Inflection had drained away, leaving his voice emotionless and metallic. "What's your word rate? Ten thousand per day? How the devil am I supposed to gain any depth at ten thousand words a day? No wonder that last one, Nuke Psychos, was so stupid. Ten thousand words a day?"

I refused to be cowed just because he was getting pissed off. "Hey! Wait a second! That's not my fault. Tania Krebs picked that outline first. I put the damned things in numerical order; it was number six of six—the one I cobbled up after I'd used all the good ideas on the previous five. It's not easy trying to kick spice into your formula, you know. The same basics have already been rehashed five dozen times this season by all your competitors!"

Tania Krebs had letterheaded stationery that claimed she was a "senior editor" at Tensor. She had slithered up the ladder and now had her former boss's job. Spy Crusher was one of her babies. Her job was to ensure my contracts for Spy Crusher always arrived two days before deadline (so I'd sign just to get the overdue cash) and badger me on company time whenever the due dates loomed. I think we both knew we were generating our doles by robbing the grave of Uncle Ian Fleming; we sifted his ashes to finer and finer consistency with each new book, until there was nothing left to turn in that grave and give us spine chills of guilt when the latest two-hundred plus pages were expressed off to New York.

I think Brock deSade realized that, too. He backed down a little. "You're okay with plot and logic," he said. "You rarely leave loose ends hanging. What you're bad at is pacing." He riffled through Bangkok Blowaway again. "Here, look—you dicked around for eons in this chapter with a dumb flashback to childhood. You should have kept the focus on my escape from the cell." Whack—the paper met the table again. "What was the problem? Run short on coffee? Run out of booze?"

That smart line was from Corpse Gambit. Chapter Six. I had written it last year.

"I admit it was boring," I said. "That was a bricks-and-caulk chapter. Too early in the book. But you've got to build each violent scene or the violence becomes redundant too fast. Besides, I needed to lay in some exposition to set up the introduction of Chantelle D'Arcy, otherwise the readers won't realize—"

"That's another thing," he cut in. "Always with the centerfold girls. Long legs, tan thighs, British accents, mammoth boobs. Jesus. The only thing you ever change is their hair color."

"I didn't think you'd object to sleeping with a parade of gorgeous women" I said, hurt now.

"These aren't women, these are Cosmo airheads with Don Rickles' old sarcasm routines and terminal nymphomania. Why not once, just once, let me interface with a woman of personality, of intelligence, of substance. Somebody real."

"Real as you, huh? Don't blame me for the bimbettes, bucko, blame Tania Krebs. She's the one who keeps dunning me to make it rougher, make it rougher, sex and violence, MAKE IT ROUGHER! How do you think my manuscript for #18: The Red Route, turned into Grenade Brigade Raid?"

"You vas only following orders, is that it?"

"I was dancing for nickels, hero. The contract says Writer for Hire. So you and I are both mercenaries."

"Mercenary?" Brock deSade's face paled. "Me? I'm a loyal servant of my country, protecting the rights of—"

This time I cut him off. "Stow that in a cedar chest and maybe some of the stink'll go away. You murder people. You have a license to murder them. You blow off their arms and legs; you garrote, axe, decapitate, bludgeon. You wiretap and entrap, break and enter; you piss all over the Constitution every time you step out of your office. If Nixon had had ten of you, he'd've been a goddamned emperor by now!" I marched to the desk and yanked a drawer off its track. The ancient dado joints separated and the drawer sprang open like a flower. From the junk it dump-trucked on the floor I retrieved a yellow folder.

"This is Rocko's bible for you!" I yelled, flinging it. "Take a good, long look! You're an untaxed millionaire! You were deeded a hundred acres in the Rocky Mountains for free! An estate with solar power and windmills! A private airstrip, thirty automobiles, and a collection of original fucking Impressionist oils! What the hell would a person like that want with—"

"You didn't pay attention to the part about how Vietnam changed my consciousness," he said.

My face got livid. "You're one of the privileged, the super rich, the booted and horsed! If Reagan had somebody as wealthy as you're supposed to be as an ally, what is he doing by letting you risk your neck blowing banana dictators to smithereens? I mean, what the Christ do you pay somebody who has unlimited bread for doing that?"

It had always bugged me. It reminded me of the basic flaw in Mission: Impossible, the longest-running spy show on television. Forget about whether the ideology was right or wrong; old Mr. Phelps and Barney and the gang must have been undercovering for real coolie wages if they had to pull nine straight years of stunts and raids. Just once, I ached for the Impossible Missions Force to come back that stupid tape recorder with 'Forget that action; we might get killed! Besides, Willy has enough in the bank this month.' And the IMF didn't look like it was composed of millionaires.

And who would've gotten the assignments they turned down? I'm still wondering about that one.

Suddenly very much in character, Brock deSade said, "I wouldn't expect you to understand my ethics. Honor and loyalty aren't written into the standard contract. Right?"

I was worried about rubbing his sore spots when it hit me that I made up those sore spots for a living.

"Listen." I was mostly unafraid now. "In a ghost story, when a ghost makes a visitation, he comes for something he didn't get when he was alive. Vengeance, usually. Revenge is the gasoline that powers most of the sociopaths your series competes with. But what wrong have I done you? I've given you what life you've had for the past"—damn it that I had to stop and think! —". . . uh, nine books."

He sighed. "Oliver, it's a two-dimensional life." He clenched and unclenched his hands, working out how to express what he felt. "Damn it, all I do is fuck and kill and unload flinty one-liners on cardboard characters who are even less corporeal than me. It's not the writing, it's the approach I can't stand anymore. And no one, not even Brock deSade, can go on being clouted over the head eighteen times per book!"

"Eighteen?" I winced.

"That's the average"—he nodded gravely—"including knockouts. It's a violence device you don't seem able to resist."

He was right, of course. Brock deSade, out cold, was always a cliffhanging way to wind up a chapter. It was rougher; it kept Tania Krebs from caterwauling. But it was nothing more than a device: cheap, expedient, illogical. The hack's hallmark.

"So what's your reason for showing up here? Just to stop getting hit on the head in the name of Male Oriented Action Fiction?" I quoted the bible. Maybe the last sight of my life would be the bore of Brock deSade's legendary Magnum.

"Oh, I'll admit I thought about dusting you," he said. "If your headless body was found perched at a typewriter containing a note that you couldn't hack Spy Crusher anymore, there wouldn't even be an investigation. There'd be nine books of evidence that you were punch drunk from ultraviolence, crazy enough to blow your own brains out with a Magnum identical to that wielded by your protagonist. You'd be number one on the evening news, all right. The cops and the media just love it when creative types explode. It reaffirms their myth that artists are all dangerous whackos."

That was how I'd already figured it. Plotwise, I was still ahead of him, ghost or not.

"But, as I told you, Oliver, I'm unarmed. We have no cause to fear each other. I think it's reasonable to say we owe each other our lives. Or could you keep alive on those Kraft macaroni and cheese dinners? You could masturbate to the food spreads in Redbook?"

That was a weird image. I suppressed the urge to write it down for future use.

"Never fear," he said. "I have hit upon a solution to the drabness of your formula. And that's why I'm here."

"Hold it! Don't blame me for the dreck Rocko Stovington reeled off his platen; that's ancient history! I made you a hell of a lot more human than the repellent fascist asshole in that bible!"

The insult left him unfazed. "True. True. You seem to have made me whole enough. But you haven't energized the series with the same sort of drive that let you improve me as a character. You began to repeat your plots with the fourth book."

I fought not to scream. Brock deSade was telling the author of his own adventures that he was a sub-par writer. "Are you telling me I'm finished? If I'm finished, who's going to keep you alive?"

"You are."

"Then who's going to write the books, wiseass?"

He grinned and shot his bolt. "Me."

"Oliver? Tania Krebs."

It was as certain as the toast falling jelly-side down, her call. "Hello," I said. Reluctantly.

"Where's the manuscript?" This was Tania's special brand of subtlety; something to put her writers at ease and give them a sense of family, a comfortable part of give-and-take working relationship. It was easy to envision her phoning from a dungeon, receiver held in one leather-winged claw.

My answer was by rote, monosyllabic. The absolute extended deadline for Bangkok Blowaway was still a week distant.

"Oliver. We have schedules. We need the book now. Can you send the first hundred pages? I've got to see some product." She was a human answerphone; the same message tape every time in that nasty, nasal New Jersey twang.

"I'm still in final rewrite," I fibbed.

Across the room, Brock deSade, Spy Crusher, hunched over my typewriter, averaging about seven words a minute. His tan suit was balled into a makeshift pillow on the sofa. Near him amid the chaos on my desk, my coffeepot stood sentry, a silver ding in its side from when he returned the carriage on my Smith-Corona manual too vehemently and sent it flying. I could have sent Tania Krebs my original first hundred pages . . . but now they were stuck together with what would indubitably look like dried blood. Tap tap tap. His tongue was stuck out in concentration; the suggestion of brainpower was comic for the amount of paper actually being produced. Tap tap.

"Don't get so antsy, Tania, you'll have the book by"—I checked the red circles on my Texaco calendar—"the fifteenth. An original, complete, and finished work." I loved throwing her own all-encompassing contractese back at her. "Tania. Have I ever lied to you?"

"You never call," she whined. "I never know if you're making any progress."

"I just told you." Tap tap. Tap.

"Why can't you check with us, let us know where to send galleys, keep us updated? Not often. Say twice a week. So we're both current?" My stepmom used to address me in the same tone whenever she thought I wasn't paying attention. Down deep, she couldn't stand me any more than Tania Krebs.

"Sure thing, Tania," I lied pleasantly. "Listen, gotta run. On your behalf. The story is flowing and the machine is hot." I had a mini-flash of Rocko Stovington word-milling porn in just those terms, while a TV at his feet blared out commercials for Wendy's burgers. The hot and juicy kind.

"Just get it in on time, Oliver." Still the reproach, the patronizing superiority. Fuck her and her galleys.

"'Bye, Tania." Click. Tap tap.

"I got ten more pages while you were snoring through reruns of The Wild Wild West," Brock deSade said, not looking up from the machine. A smoldering cigarette hung from his lips; I hadn't noticed when it had replaced the protruding tongue. I hadn't known Brock deSade smoked. He flicked a long ash into my Dunes ashtray, where it spattered across some pennies. "I think this is, you know, beginning to assume some narrative coherency. I rewrote the outline I showed you yesterday." He sounded hopeful.

He sounded wrong. A sickening realization came home.

Except for Brock deSade's glitter-eyed enthusiasm (and the absence of a fingerprinty glass of bourbon) the whole scene was straight out of Chandler. Writer at Work. Too stylized.

Brock deSade looked and sounded like a tyro.

Sitting before me was everything those Writer's Digest bromides told me was amateur. The guy with the great novel in his head and no time to type it. The guy with the corduroy jacket. Elbow patches optional. Pipe in one pocket. A. Author, Esq. Hollywoodus Bigmouthus. Which meant—

"Give that to me," I said. "Where are you?"

"Fight scene. Chapter two."

I grabbed his short stack of finished copy. It took about five minutes to scan front to back.

It was not precisely disastrous.

Throughout my oppressively silent read-through I could feel him watching me. He tried to pounce every time I made a noise. When I leafed up the final page, he tailgated right in: "Well? Is that a fresh perspective or what?"

"Oh, it's fresh all right. Like fresh roadkill. It still stinks."

He got reactionary, defensive. "What's wrong with it?"

"Just look at it." I pulled a sheet at random and quoted. "He pulled the door to up in the jamb because on the outside it was raining down wetly. Apart from this chainsaw massacre of prepositions and the fact that rain at least on this planet, rarely goes any direction other than down and is almost always wet, rain never just rains in this sort of book. It drives down mercilessly, it patters mournfully, it sheets earthward in an icy torrent, it pounds the streets and sinuses of the city into waterlogged submission beneath an unsympathetic sky of darkest gunmetal gray! To write Brock deSade you've got to hammerlock your adjectives, maximize your verbiage, kick the reader in the teeth with the Spy Crusher's cocky, smartass hipper-than-thou-ness. The Brock deSade on these pages couldn't intimidate a librarian! The plotting is verveless preschool junk! The bible specifies a 'crisp, page-turner mystery-action' style! What you have here would put a proofreader to sleep!"

The face of Brock deSade, Spy Crusher, drooped. He resembled a Saint Bernard puppy caught with a Gucci slipper in his mush and a gallon of piddle on the Kashian. For the quarter second before his eyes resumed their accustomed steeliness, they looked about to start leaking bright tears. Had I actually hurt the feelings of a fictional being?

"So that's your professional opinion, is it?" His timbre of authority quavered, just noticeably.

I never thought I'd feel sorry for a quote, "repellent fascist asshole."

But shit can become New York steak or vice versa, depending on the alimentary direction you take, so I backpedaled. Maybe I could salvage enough of his ego to keep him from decking me with a wheel kick.

"Look, look. Your perspective is good." I realized I sounded like a no-talent Fiction 101 instructor. "But your execution strangles it. This string of prose couldn't hook your own mother." (Oops. Did Brock deSade have a mommy? Did I give him a mommy?) "This stuff about pole-vaulting the Red Wall into the dogs and barbed wire, now that has the ring of experience. It's just outrageous enough to be convincing. It's so weird it probably would go down that way, exactly."

"You have your profession," he said, trying to look tough. "I have mine."

It crashed home: I had made Brock deSade a front-rank Spy Crusher, but not a good writer. I hadn't even made him a good typist.

"That's it! Because of who you are you know just what a bullet zipping past your ear sounds like! You've been tortured by experts! Bones busted! Kicked in the balls!"

"Don't forget hit on the head."

"You've made love to women so pneumatic they could only exist in violence fiction! You know everything about computers, flying planes, politics, spy gimmicks, foreign protocol! For you to exist at all, you have to be an authority on all of that—" I groped for the right word. "All of that bullshit!"

He got sullen. "But all that considered, you're still more important to the series than I am. Is that what you're saying?"

"Quiet!" I pushed past him to get at the shuffled-together drafts on the coffee table. "I think I've just figured out a way for you to do what you want without cutting me out of a job." I retrieved Rocko's dogeared deSade bible. My heart was pounding louder than a landlord on a locked door.

The phone rang, breaking up that golden moment of inspiration.

"That'll probably be Tania again. It's 5:25 in New York and she wants to get in one last stab before she catches her train to Long Island. Unplug her."

In a fast fifteen minutes I reeled out two solid pages of inserts for the bible, drowned in enough pretensions to literary excellence that even the ghost of Papa Hemingway would have emitted a macho little choke. Brock deSade ate it up avidly, even the part about his ability to type a hundred and seventy five words per minute with no errors. I stapled the new material, pages 21-A and 21-B, into the bible between the passages of hard-sell barf describing Brock deSade's "scholarly activism shoulder to shoulder with Vietnam Vets Against the War" and the tear-jerking tragedy of his late spouse, "the most beautiful woman Brock had ever known, accidentally killed by a bomb in the ladies' room of a Belfast department store."

When he read the new stuff, the first thing he did was to offer to run back to the Alpha Beta to get us some champagne for celebration purposes. Now he was behaving like a writer.

I agreed enthusiastically, clapping him on the back. Comrades in conspiracy.

As soon as he was out the door I grabbed the bible and my trusty bottle of white-out. Most of the gunk I had just typed was padding. I found the most disposable paragraph of it and nimbly obliterated it with the correction fluid to give me new writing room. Then I performed a careful bit of surgery, unbending and extracting the staples. They would have to line up perfectly when I reassembled the bible or the tampering would be noticed. The white-out was old and took nearly five minutes to dry completely, but it finally stopped reflecting the desk light.

Some of my most inspired ideas come in last-minute line revisions. Such as:

Brock deSade's most salient characteristic, however, is a fierce, nearly Sicilian loyalty regarding friendship and those who are his allies. For this elite inner circle of staunch confidants, no request is too large to serve his overdeveloped sense of honor. Those who take advantage or exploit his friendship are ruthlessly eliminated, but for those who aid him in his quest for truth and justice, nothing is too much to ask of him.

I had a sound business proposition for the version of Brock deSade that returned from the store.

He never read the revisions. He figured he knew his own bible by heart already.

Tensor forwards Spy Crusher mail by the sack these days. I framed the very first fan letter over my work area, next to the Perma-Plaque of Shayne Byrne's yellowed memo.

7/13/81

Dear Mr. Gunn:

I have never written a letter like this to any author before, but felt I might take some of your valuable time to compliment you on your Brock deSade which I've been a fan for quite some time. Since Bangkok Blowaway (15 books ago, as you know), the series has assumed dimensions of authenticity hitherto uncommon to your "normal" spy rampages.

Having worked in both foreign and domestic CIA posts in addition to some a la carte gigs in Africa and El Salvador, I'm convinced you must have seen similar action firsthand. Nobody who wasn't there could know, buddy, and your unerring eye for gritty detail satisfies someone like me. Yet Brock deSade has also grown—to become multidimensional, unique, even sensitive. A human man instead of a caricature. It's nice to know somebody out there knows whereof he writes.

Well, I don't have anything else to tell you but thanks for all the hours of reading pleasure. As Pendleton used to say, live large and stay hard!

Yours sincerely,

Jefferson "Big Zack" Trumbull (Major, USAF, Ret.)

Tania tends to send us multibook contracts and checks together lately. Apart from that, we don't hear from her much. Tensor, thanks to the success of the revamped Spy Crusher line, has launched Scimitar Books (action paperback originals) and Aardvark, a quality-reprint line.

Principal photography on the second Brock deSade movie just wrapped in West Germany. Paramount. Thirty-million-dollar production floor.

My work center absorbs an entire room of my cottage. I have multi-readout screens—one for each project—and unlimited memory. Unless I want to, I never have to even look at Brock deSade. He lives on the far side of the Rocky Mountain tract, a hundred acres away from me.

I'm his employee. Sort of. I sit on the board of directors of his corporation. After all, he is an independent, untaxed millionaire.

I've agreed to hang around here on what Brock calls the "farm" until one hundred Spy Crushers are in print. Past that point, the series can be farmed out. It'll renew itself via reprints and films. It'll gain a life of its own . . . so to speak.

Oliver Lowenbruck is the only person who does Spy Crusher, and Brock deSade sure as hell can't do the autograph sessions, the New York meetings, the interviews. Which is why Brock deSade can't dump me in the Colorado River wearing stone loafers.

Past Spy Crusher #100, we've agreed to dissolve our partnership amicably. I have an ironclad contract. I wrote it.

He sends over the pages, I tinker here and there, put my cover sheet on it, and off it goes. Tania Krebs and her troll brigade never noticed the style switch; they were too dazzled by the sales figures. Brock deSade's plots make absolutely no sense to me, but as he says, the military sales trend steadily upward. Some nosy newspaper found a Spy Crusher novel on the President's nightstand last week.

Besides, I don't have much time to devote to that sort of writing anymore. Brock deSade got what he wanted. So did I.

I'm editing a "classics" series for Aardvark, and have two original novels in galleys at Scimitar. And a hardcover. At last. From Viking next October, a prestige Christmas release.

With my real name on the spine.

We just turned in #47: Den of Reivers, so I'm halfway home and still reasonably young.

There's only a single dark note I can think of.

When the new, improved Spy Crusher really blasted off, good old Rocko Stovington tried to steal the series back for himself. Tania Krebs showed him the OUT door after his last book, Lucy, the Moist, bombed. He got so obnoxious that Shayne Byrne dumped him as a client. And his personal life got so decrepit that his lover shot him in the face with a target pistol during a quarrel over who was sleeping with whom.

Her name was Corinne, I think.

COMING SOON TO A THEATER NEAR YOU

Jonathan Daniel Stoner recognized the dude inside the Hollywood Magic Shoppe, the fellow poring over the display plaque of artificial eyeballs. He was from the Omicron Cinema; one of the employees.

Always having five minutes to squander, Jack (as Jonathan had been dubbed in the Nam by the few comrades possessing enough intellectual candlepower to add his first and middle names into the sum of a tepid joke hey there's another blood here named Richard Whiskey but we call him Dick Liquor yock yock yock) pulled in. He saw the fake eyeballs were pretty damned authentic. Nested in felt, they had been glossed with some special shellac that made them gleam like real, living, wet eyes. Artificial substitutes, he thought, and his missing right leg sent a wholly imaginary local wince up to his brain.

"Say hey."

The dude from the Omicron looked up. As his face was hit by the combination of the sputtering fluorescents above and the dirty gray daylight sneaking in off Hollywood Boulevard, Jack thought maybe the guy had mononucleosis or something. Superficially he was mere hippie fallout, a decade out of step with the real world and then some, but close up Jack could see his face was the color of a kitchen sink stained by coffee grounds. It was stiff and haunted. Above it was hair skewed in a dozen directions, matted, unwashed; below, a physique withered by hard weather or drugs or both. The eyes were sunken and glazed with the slightly stoned expression Jack had learned from the perimeter snipers at Nest Kilo—burned-out Qui Nohn alumni who just didn't give a shit anymore. The hippie image was jelled by the overpowering miasma (no, stink, call it what it fucking is) of patchouli oil wafting from every pore. To Jack it was like mustard gas. God, he hated that stuff.

The dude had not yet responded or connected. He appeared to be waiting for better input.

"I come to the Omicron all the time," Jack prompted. "Last week it was Dial M for Murder and House of Wax. The two-way 3D glasses were a neat idea." Some management genius had stamped out dual lenses that were red-green for the black-and-white feature, and flipped to polarized lenses for color. The two-dollar matinee had been packed.

It seemed to take the entire geologic ages for the dude to react. "Oh yeah." His voice was arid, rasping. "I seen you . . . lotsa times. Remember your walking stick. Yeah." He turned back to his tray of eyeballs.

Jack shifted his weight from his government-issue cane to his real leg, leaning closer to recapture the dude's notice despite the eye-watering, minty stench. "Uh—what's next?"

Again the slow shift, as though the dude was crippled in a way Jack could not see. Always say handicapped, not crippled, Compton, the XO at Firebase Gloria, had advised with shit-eating sincerity before pitching Jack back in the world. Jack's leg was still missing in action somewhere north of Di An and south of Luke's Castle. At least you've fought your last battle, soldier. Compton was a supreme rectal-cranial inversion.

The dude arm-wrestled his own memory to a draw. "What's next Bloody Mama.  Bonnie and Clyde. That ends Crime Week. For the weekend . . . we got Black Moon. And . . ." He plucked a jade green eyeball from the tray and inspected it through a nonexistent loupe, turning it as you would a jewel. "Some other Louis Malle film." His voice remained strep-throat dry, sounding like a bad parody of the Man With No Name. "My Dinner with André. Maybe."

"Or Atlantic City?" Jack was hoping.

The dude nodded as though it hurt. "I will look for you." He extended his free hand and Jack found himself receiving his first power-to-the-people handshake in ten years. The dude's yogurt pallor was easy to dismiss as the price of toiling in the eternal darkness of a movie theatre, but the papery texture of his flesh made Jack think he was clasping a mummy's hand. The brittle skin seemed to crackle in his grip, the bones beneath rearranging themselves arthritically like dried voodoo talismans. Up-down, once-twice, zomboid and mechanical. Jack remembered the rack of artificial steel and vinyl arms stored near the shelf from which the medicos picked a leg to replace his lost one. It had been like a tombful of dismembered mannequins; limbs and parts devoid of viscera. Hollow, lifeless surrogates. The Omicron dude's dead grasp was what Jack thought shaking with one of those plastic-coated hooks would feel like.

The dude unclasped, then produced from his pocket a slim card in a cashier's-check pattern of waffled green lines, with Good for One Free Admission stamped on front. "Yours," he said. "Got to keep our regulars satisfied."

"Hey, thanks." Abruptly Jack felt like a heel for mentally bumming the dude.

"See you there." He sought the mate for the single glass eye he balanced in his palm, like pairing clearies for luck in marbles.

Jack executed his stiff, clockwork one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and left the store, the thump-click of his workboot and cane in concert barely audible. He practiced to make it unobtrusive; he hated it when newly introduced people gawked at his right leg before looking at his face. He thought he could sympathize with the way women felt about their breasts.

On the Boulevard, somebody had pried out the bronze disk of Rhonda Fleming's sidewalk star, stolen it, leaving a crater. A muscle-bound black superstar, towering above the pedestrians on a hyperthyroidal pair of roller skates with Day-Glo orange wheels, swerved to miss the crater and nearly centerpunched Jack. He and the cacophony of his gigantic ghetto blaster blended into the Friday swarm of walkers before anyone could swear. He'd been wearing an army fatigue shirt with the sleeves ripped off.

Jack steadied himself against the display window of the Hollywood Magic Shoppe and allowed himself ten seconds of hemlock-pure racism. It primed him, erasing the good feeling of copping a free pass to the Omicron and, as he walked through the grimy, humid smog and the abrasive tide of Boulevard flotsam, escalated his irritation into unfocused, hair-trigger anger. Everyone around him on the street was loping along, trying to look badder than everyone else.

Jack's cane attracted no notice on the Boulevard. He was a mundane diversion in the midst of the jarhead Marines on leave, the slutty preteen heartbreakers leaning on the bus-stop posts, the meandering gaggles of Japanese tourists, the smug pairings of smartly leathered punks and overconfident faggots, the Hollywood vets with their straight-ahead stares (the better to avoid the pushy Scientologists just this side of Las Palmas), the garbage-pickers and shopping-bag loonies. The Walk of the Stars seemed perpetually encrusted with a gummy vomit of spilled drinks and litter, like the sticky floor of a porno theatre. The step-in eateries along the maze of blaring rock noise and Iranian jewelry shops display-cased steaming, colorless greasy triangles of pizza, or the oily components hero sandwiches, or peculiar platefuls of what looked like Korean food, varnished for presentation, reminding him of those eyes—preserved, fakely realistic surrogates. The lavender spire of Frederick's pierced the waistline of the Boulevard somewhere behind him, a centerpiece to the whole tacky, vulgar carnival.

You've fought your last battle, crip.

The words fried into Jack's brain, spoken too many times in too many subtle ways. The sentiment ate into his calm like fluoric acid into the fuse of a beer-bottle bomb. This place could really drag you down.

He decided the Omicron pass was not snotty charity, and then forgot about it, feeling a little better.

His grimace in the mirror told him he should pay more attention to his hair. But what the hell—he wouldn't care so much half an hour from now.

The prostitute pulled her sweater over her head. Her corner was by the House of Pancakes on Sunset Boulevard, and Jack always thought there was a terrific joke in that somewhere. The first thing she looked at while she stripped was the fleshtone plastic and metal ornamentation of his right leg.

Traveling light. M-16 on rapid-fire, clips in his shirt, rifle grenades taped across his thighs. Across from him his counterpart, Teller, eased parallel through the elephant grass. They were upfront to flush snipers; the patrol's point man was fifty yards behind them, sauntering down the dead center of the trail because the antipersonnel mines were slyly salted into the borders of the path, where careful soldiers might tread. They all knew the tricks. The patrol was called George for George of the Jungle. Jack and Teller were George's big mavericks. Teller collected VC ears and sometimes their balls. The crumping sound of sixty-millimeter mortar-fire was starting to deafen them. Time to play cautious.

She snubbed an unfiltered Lucky Strike. "They almost took a packet of your shot, lover." Wings of flab curved over her kidneys. Her ass looked a yard wide.

"No," he said, rehearsed. "They didn't. And yes, it all still works." He waited naked on the bed. Exposed.

"Talkers are always comedians." When she went down on him, he saw that the roots of her neon blonde hair were brown.

Ears pricking. Seeing that stupid bastard Teller. Seeing what he cannot. Forgetting his craving for a smoke and using up three more panic seconds ripping loose a rifle grenade and locking it into the muzzle. No time. Wanting to scream they're right above you stupid asshole! No time. Stock to shoulder, finger to trigger, the weapon butts and the tree thirty yards over mushrooms into an orange blossom of fire and screaming Cong. Teller's mouth drops like a stag-party patsy's. Surprise. He sprays the tree uselessly with slugs. The whole goddamn jungle jumps alive with the nasty, spattering racket of automatic-weapons fire like a crazy typewriter noise or water dripped into a pan of hot bacon grease. Not like movie gunfire. The flaming tree lights up the entire perimeter. He is exposed. Has to buy five seconds, has to retreat to better cover while the rest of George charges to bring peace. Backing gingerly through the fronds, onto the trail. Making one step blind because he's watching Teller's head leave his body. It spins.

Flat, sour bile coated his throat. The whore had too much mileage on her and was unappetizing with her duds off. He felt unaroused and ill. With a fatalistic devotion to duty she worked to excite him reflexively, to make his own body betray him. It became boring, repetitious, like a grindhouse stroke flick. He felt cold lying there, watching thin smoke from the ashtray unreel toward the ceiling.

Nothing happens until he lifts his foot, then the mine pops beneath him, smacking air concussively through his head. He doesn't feel the rifle grenade taped to his thigh explode. No details; just a stab of heat and bright light. The dispensary lights hurt his eyes more when he awakes, four days later, thinking George must have finished what Teller started.

She pushed off him immediately and left her sweat on one of his bathroom towels.

"Have a nice day," he said to the empty room, watching daylight fade across his barracks-neat arrangement of serviceable furniture, of homemade bookshelves and desk. He clicked on his TV remote, a P-box project he'd tinkered together two months ago, and browsed the free program guide he habitually picked up every Wednesday at the Mayfair Market. Automatically, for a giggle, he thumbed back to the Community Classifieds.

BEACHED MANATEE SHELLEY WINTERS uses the grand canyon for a toilet! signed, THE SCUMBAG.

If you wanted a good barometer of Hollywood's blue-collar weirdness, you turned to the Community Classifieds, suitably on the inside back page of the TV schedule and printed on pulp stock so cheap that your reading fingers were black by the time you got to the good stuff. For those too illiterate to make the letter column of the L.A. Times, too straight to ever consider undergrounds (now facetiously termed the "alternative press," Jack thought with contempt—another sellout), too normal and mundane to ever air their petty beefs anywhere but a playroom or a bar with a constantly burbling TV set, the Community Classifieds were a steam valve and cheap thrill all rolled into a single weekly page of lunacy. Any local nonentity could phone in a three-line "ad" or editorial comment for free. The paper always had too many to run. The week-to-week progressions offered by the column's stalwarts—people who appeared regularly, flexing their journalistic squatter's right to trade barbs from behind obnoxious pseudonyms—were more entertaining than any diversion offered by the cursed tube of plenty.

COME BACK TO THE FIVE & DIME . . . ZARATHUSTRA: Nonwhite athletically inclined punk-oriented animal lovers (handicapped O.K.) desired For (proto) fringe vidiocy for selective foreign audience. Flat Fee. Working name director. No amateurs or freaks who answer ads like this. 685-8299.

DOES ANYBODY OUT THERE HAVE ONE of those rubber chicken enema bags so popular in the 1950s? Hah, thought so. DR. SLEAZE.

HOUSE NOISE CASSETTES keep your canaries company while you're not at home. $7.95 ea. 747-4414 eves.

FRUSTRATED MILITARY, used athletes, and adventurous college boys call Sid. 556-4348.

Jack's eyes skimmed past two familiar words, then backtracked for the whole message.

THE OMICRON THEATRE should pay US money to attend such a moth-eaten, seat-sprung, paint-peeling, roach-infested garbage dump! Flake off and die, hippie scum! D.W.E., South La Brea.

When he rose to pull a beer from his tiny refrigerator, he rechecked his shirt pocket, forgetting his temporarily unlovely aroma. The free pass was still there, and that decided him for the evening, His car, a 1972 Comet with the pedals displaced to the left, was still undergoing a mileage checkup in the shop, but that did not put the Omicron out of his range. He could still walk, by God.

The Omicron reminded Jack of a kid's bedroom. To an adult, a non-initiate, it sure looked like a trash heap—but there was a comforting order inside for those who cared to delve past the superficial. It would never appeal to the Rolls Royce trade, yet was not as bad as the kung-fu sleaze pits of downtown L.A., which looked razed by Mongols. The Omicron was in essence a "normal" theatre stripped down for combat; its patrons, exemplars of the no-frills class.

Jack assumed the seats were veterans of less fortunate film emporiums long demolished. The heavy draperies, colorless with dust and age, had been hanging around since 1930. The concrete floor had been scoured clean of carpeting long ago and remained unpainted—two-dollar customers spilled an awful lot of crap. During intermissions the auditorium lit up from behind; two emergency floods on battery banks comprised the sole interior illumination. They were mounted high on the corners of the projection booth, like devil horns, and when they clicked on, they threw long shadows from the heads of the audience all the way to the foot of the disused stage in a silhouette mimic of a churchyard's listing headstones. When those lights clicked off, you'd better be sitting, Jack knew, because here there were no niceties like usher bulbs on every other row, or twinkling blue "landing lights" on the aisle like he'd seen at the Vogue Theatre. Even the EXIT signs on each side of the screen were long dysfunctional.

And if the snack bar had been a restaurant, Jack would have found a Grade C certification ditched behind the clotted Coke machine. He suspected the roaches flatbacking it, feet-up in the yellow light of the candy counter's display pane, were victims of the popcorn.

The Omicron was practically Jack's only acknowledged watering hole. Like him, it was tatty in patches, and looked broken down, but he could pass its portals and trade nods of recognition with the dude he had met at the magic shoppe, and that was important. He was a regular here, an initiate, and he appreciated that the caretakers of this dump, unquote, took pains where they counted—with the programming and the quality of the projection.

Oh yeah—and admission was still two American bucks.

Jack's terrific feeling of renewed well-being evacuated through his bowels and good knee when he plunked down his free pass and looked directly up to meet the varnished jade green eyes of the new Omicron employee.

From the third row he could barely see the screen. The crash-and-bash din of the gangster movies could not etch his concentration even in the theatre dark. The tarpaulined shapes in the orchestra pit became ominous, the auditorium, an ambush waiting to happen. He slouched in his seat. His mind chased logic chains like a lab rat on the scent of good, putrid Limburger cheese. None of the available conclusions eased his shock by a mote.

He had shuffled dumbly through the lobby, knowing that to meet the gaze of the candy counter employee, the dude, would now be to let the fear engulf him to the upper lip. Those flat, glassy stares, unwavering, unblinking, like the appraisal of a puff adder, came out of a tray in the Hollywood Magic Shoppe.

The Cong—a supernatural hive intelligence, they could blank a grunt's brain, make themselves invisible. Twelve-year old commandos were kicking President Johnson's butt by proxy. The fear. It could ambush you in the dark.

(On the screen, Bruce Dern, twelve years younger, indulges a sadistic little flash of ultraviolence. Homosexual rape.)

The Omicron staff. Not shell-shocked orts from the dead age of the flower child. Just dead. Fragile, with their mushroom-pale, coolly bleached skin and their fixed, shellacked eyes. Stinking of aftershaves, colognes, patchouli, any heavy oil or preservative base of alcohol. Moving, like

The baby palm lizard he found at the base of a tree. The roiling chaos of maggots revealed when he flipped it over. The legless grubs filling the stomach cavity; their mad dining was what made the lizard appear to be moving. Its flesh remained as an envelope, papery and stiff, a lizard shape to hide the fact of entrails long consumed. Its eyes were gone.

Crazy.

Motive, you dumb gimp! yelled his mind. Motive! The why of a flea-trap cinema overseen by ambulatory dead people, or whatever the hell they were. Certainly not to derail the world and the American Way.

(Robert De Niro, having spent an hour of screen time evacuating his skull with airplane glue, is discovered amid the marsh reeds, his spike in the dirt, a rubber lanyard still making his dead biceps bulge.)

A snap decision in the dark. Jack knew he had to investigate, to resolve. It was what he had always done.

He found temporary satisfaction in the glow bouncing back from the movie screen. One row back and five seats over, a black guy swaddled in a stinking fatigue jacket snored gutturally and no one told him to shut up or get out. In some of the wing chairs, the ones affording an uncomfortably slanted view of the screen, more wineheads dozed unchallenged, their feet on the chair backs. The others this far forward (guys with dates generally holed up further back in the auditorium) seemed totally narcotized by the film. The date duos, the monster-movie preppies, and the good citizens would scurry out during the end credits, while the snoozing derelicts and street dregs of Tinseltown waited to be ushered out under duress. For a couple of bucks over the flat rate for Night Train, a spongehead could blow an entire day sleeping out of the weather and sucking up racy moving pictures. Where did one find zombie fodder? Just haunting the Hollywood streets like gray wraiths, filthy blankets rolled under one arm, with hollow eyes and vacant stares, hanging out long after the sideshow freaks and hookers and male hustlers vacated Hollywood and Sunset and Santa Monica in the predawn. One more bag lady, one more shopping cart loon or religious burnout or sooty panhandler would never be missed.

Intermission came, and with it a few more truths. He slouched down when the auditorium floods blinked on, actually recoiling from the light because he did not wish to be singled out. The decision to stay after closing had already been made. During the second feature he must have touched the pistol in the pocket of his pea coat a hundred times, to ensure it still existed. He packed it around with him almost all the time now.

If trouble leaped out of the trees tonight, it was reasonable to allow that he could win a physical contest against the Omicron's scraggly human cinders, even with a missing leg. Their bones must be like communion wafers now, he thought, his hand seeking the gun unconsciously again.

It was a luxuriously heavy .45 automatic, Marine field issue, and his practice had been to pack it whenever he traveled on foot. Lately it lived in the pocket of the pea coat. The sucker ate an eight-round clip and an extra slug was already in the chamber. It had proven a ready deterrent to muggers, muggers at least marginally human. Provided his thesis was true, even artillery like the monster .45 could not kill someone already dead . . . but it sure as hell was capable of blowing off arms and legs and heads at medium range, and they could not chase you if they didn't have legs.

Provided he could retreat efficiently without one, himself.

He considered odds, and his chances, as the second feature, Bonnie and Clyde, began to unspool.

During one of its chaotic shootouts (Gene Hackman was about to get iced by the feds), Jack switched seats, edging closer to the wall of curtain on the left side of the auditorium. So long as he was not in the firing line between the watchers and the luminous rectangle of screen, he would never be noticed. He knew how to walk in the dark, even theatre dark, even leaning on his damned cane and humping his surrogate leg along. When he reached the fringe of the farthest row of seats, he began to edge toward the nearest EXIT light. The suffocatingly musty curtains unleashed an abandoned-library smell, and his nose tried to sneeze. He held.

In one more minute the early leavers would hurry out. He avoided the stair railing leading to the push-bar exit and angled himself behind the screen. A reversed light closeup of a face thirty feet high confronted him. The boxy, flat-black speaker apparatus, its horizontal planes steeped in brown dust, directed its salvo away from him and out through the million tiny perforations in the screen. Out toward—

He felt a mad, directional itch skittering from his hairline, around one eye, over his nose. Stifling his cry of reaction, he slapped away the cockroach before it could hide in his mouth. Yeah, the curtains were probably alive with the goddamned things. He thought of them congregating in the trough of the filthy Coke machine after closing, leaving their egg cases in the drains or mating in the cigarette butts and piss filling the john's two urinals. Did roaches mate or were they, what did you call it, parthenogenetic? Hermaphroditic? He hated the damn things the way he hated breaking spider webs with his face, the way he hated the monster leeches and vampire mosquitoes he'd met across the ocean. Or rats.

Above him, the screen lit up with an end-credit roll. Backward. He hunkered down and thought about rats for a minute.

The grunge theatre in Chicago is a sleaze pit, cold as a corpse locker, in the bosom of the annual blizzards. Jack and two fellow renegades from Basic are celebrating their first ever weekend passes by touring the Windy City. Their passes are thirty-five hours old; now they are in attendance at a triple bill of skinflicks aimed at the midnight-to-dawn beat-off crowd. The theatre is in the middle of a burned-out DMZ called Division Street. Swindler, grandly polluted on a fifth of George Dickel's finest eighty-proofpaint remover, re-dubs Chicago the Shitty City, tittering at the rhyme. Ford, equally blitzed, elaborates by christening Chi-town the Puckered Red Asshole of the Universe. Jack's laugh goes cheesy and sour. He pulls his boots from tile floor because he has spotted the rats, quietly feeding on the discarded candy boxes and popcorn tubs. During the middle feature, a cowlike naked blonde "accidentally" sets fire to her bed with a smoldering reefer, a special effect that must have taken away half the movie's $1.98 budget. She and her studs—a doo-wop trio of muscle-brained Latino buggerers, greaseballs all—flee the frame as an obvious line of hand-held gas-jet fire sweeps along the bottom of the picture. Swindler hoots and applauds. Jack hears the squealing and realizes it is not part of the sound track. What must be dozens of urban rats have been surprised by the sudden flood of light behind the movie screen. Unpleasant. The rodent army retreats to the darkness, emerging to mingle with the paying customers. Jack watches a soft drink cup manipulate itself patiently across the cold stone floor. Ford spies it and stops giggling. Jack rises to get out. Ford follows. Then Swindler.

Could there be rats in the Omicron? California mice? A voice in Jack's head told him he was obfuscating. Rats were nothing for him to worry about tonight.

The house floods snapped on and the patrons herded noisily out. Jack waited, secreted behind the hanging curtains, weight at ease on his fake leg.

The EXIT door crashed shut—sheet metal hitting a wood jamb and rattling a loose push bar—and did not open again. For sixty seconds he breathed shallowly, listening. Then he inched forward until he could see the auditorium under the glare of the floods.

There were perhaps ten derelicts out there, still snoring. Maintenance movements and sounds echoed toward Jack from the lobby area, then somebody—the new guy, the one with the bottle green eyes—moved down the aisles, waking the bums up. Excuse me excuse me you have to leave now. Jack watched his progress; the same speech for each sleeper. They grunted. Some got the speech twice before reluctantly shuffling out. One nodded and resumed sleeping—the black guy in the fatigue coat. The Omicron employee moved to the next customer. Like shabby, ragtag Conestogas lurching west, they dragged themselves out, all except Fatigue Coat, who had been sitting behind Jack, and to whom the new employee gradually circled back.

Behind Jack, the curtains rustled, moving themselves. Drifts of thin dust sifted down. It might have been the vacuum effect of the front doors closing.

He looked out. The Omicron ticket-taker stood mute vigil over Fatigue Coat, watching him sleep. Watching with fixed eyes whose jade green pupils never expanded or contracted. Watching with the head-cocked attitude and characterless gaze of a praying mantis surveying the struggle of a future meal. The other one, the dude, joined them, dressed exactly as Jack had seen him in the Hollywood Magic Shoppe. He had a baseball bat.

Budget security as well, Jack thought.

The curtains were still moving, wafting as if in an unfelt, warm breeze. There was a faraway, crackling-paper kind of noise.

When the dude swung the bat against the back of Fatigue Coat's neck, it made a sound like five pounds of raw steak smacking a linoleum floor. Jack felt a sympathetic local jab in the area where his backbone met his skull, and the black guy did a forward roll to slump out of sight between the seats. They bent to lift him, and he came up as slack and limp as an abused mattress.

Another roach zigzagged across the back of Jack's hand. It was gone before he could see it, his reaction coming days too late. When his hand shot out to brush it away, he hit the curtain. Three of its mates fell to the floor and scurried away. The crackling paper sound, like hundreds of tiny, drumming fingers, was noticeably louder.

Fatigue Coat was being laboriously dragged toward the orchestra pit. Each Omicron worker had hold of a leg. In their wake a dark, erratic smear shined up from the concrete slope of the aisle. This place was probably hosed down nightly; the stain was something the regular patrons would never notice anyway.

The drumming sound was like light rain in the hush and made Jack think of the Chicago fleapit being silently invaded. He cut the edge of the curtain back a bit further and caught movement within the orchestra pit. The liquid motion resolved in his vision into a roiling whirlpool of scuttling brown bodies. Not rats. Roaches. Millions of them, swarming over each other inside the dark, containing maw of the pit. Not killer cockroaches, those three-inch-long monsters that could fly; merely the tiniest household vermin multiplied a billion-fold before Jack's awed eyes. They moved toward the pit, across the stage floor, around his feet, in a quietly scratching, brittle brown mass like a shoe-sole deep tide of sentient mud. He thought of them detouring up his plastic leg, antennae probing. The hairs on his good leg prickled. He held. The scorpions and paddy leeches had been far worse. Charlie had whittled pungi sticks designed to puncture the sides of the thickest combat boot, and tied goddamn banded kraits to the ceilings of caves, fangs down. Dealing with jungle rot or having fire ants sting your balls was more nightmarish than standing in the center of an American metropolis watching a multitude of cockroaches march like an army. This was civilization, what the short-timers who scrawled their DEROS on their steel longed for.

Deeper now. You have to handle it, Jack thought. Thou shalt deal. The .45 auto, polished to a dull sheen by the pea coat pocket, came out now, shaking in his hand. The shaking pissed him off.

He thought of them living in the seat cushions, the curtains, the cracks in the floor, the moldy planking and rafters, the termite-hollowed superstructure. More than enough breeding room, even if one did not count the snack bar.

The dude and the new employee heaved Fatigue Coat over the lip of the orchestra pit into the riotous, churning sea of chitinous bugs. He seemed to hinge at the waist, like one of those backward-jointed dummies used for the big jump in the cheapest films. He did not look real. Neither did the sheer mass of waiting roaches—at least three vertical feet of them, swarming nearly to the rusted brass rail of the pit. They embraced the body hungrily. The last part of him to submerge into the attack of brown, bullet-like forms was his foot, toes protruding from a demolished sneaker wound with dirty friction tape. Then he was gone, gobbled up, and quickly.

The hammer of the quivering .45 was cocked now. The display below forced Jack to grip the gun tightly in his fist and cock it with his free hand. That was when he fumbled the cane. It dropped away, missing his grab, and hit the edge of the stage, somersaulting into the open, its rubber street tip bouncing it off the orchestra pit rail. It clattered to the bare concrete floor. Loudly.

The EXIT door was still at hand, but Jack did not try to stump toward it. He had heard it being chained shut from his hiding place.

They came for him behind the Omicron screen, clumping in cadence up the exit steps like a two-man funeral procession, and found him backed against the wall, pistol rigidly thrust out before him, a scepter of power, a talisman against evil.

"No closer." His voice did not quaver. The gun was now steady; the threat was defined. His good leg held him locked to the stone wall.

The new employee's voice croaked in monotone: "Excuse me, but you . . . have to leave now . . ." It was speech without vocal cords, without breathing. The glassy jade eyes stared at the dead space between Jack's head and shoulder.

"No." The response Jack's single syllable won surprised and repulsed him. He could not trust the light, but was almost certain the elder Omicron drone smiled at him—a dry and lifeless, skin-cracking grin. It was a manipulated, puppeteered thing, horribly matching the phoniness of the store-bought eyes and Jack's memory of fragile, cured, dead flesh. Grin fixed, eyes fixed, onward they came, purposefully.

Second warnings were for bad movies, too. Jack cut loose his bonus cartridge.

The boom of the shot knocked more dust out of the curtains. It resonated inside the girderwork and made the steel cables securing the screen vibrate. Jack flinched. What even an unmodified .45 bullet could do to a human skull at medium-close range was something seldom depicted in those movies, either. Basically, it made a little hole going in and a huge hole coming out. Frequently it could decapitate the aggressor. That was how Teller had bought it.

A perfect black dot appeared on the dude's forehead just over the right eye. The hair on the back of his head flew apart violently, followed by a cloud of brown, metallic chaff, like pulverized cardboard. It glittered in the air and settled. Then roaches began to boil out of the forehead hole. The grin stayed. The dude took another step forward.

Jack fired convulsively after that.

An eye exploded like a zircon struck with a steel hammer. Dead chalk stubs of shattered teeth were blown east. The head disintegrated into flaking quarters. Roaches flooded out from the neck stump.

Jack swung, dropped sights, and put a slug through the new employee's outstretched hand. No grimace of impact, but it spun him, and he lost balance and tumbled through the curtains headfirst, into the orchestra pit. His buddy, sans head, was still tracking mindlessly toward Jack. Jack squeezed off, and the point-blank blast tore away everything below the screen dude's left kneecap and sent it flying through the movie screen. He crumpled. Freed bugs scattered for cover.

Hurdling along, pole-vaulting, actually, click-thump, he made it to the exit door without falling on his face. Roaches were crawling up his legs now. The case-hardened padlock hasp and tempered chain were no match for the bullet that kicked them apart, and Jack shoved the door, doubling it back against the outside wall with a crash. Outside the paving was slick with rainwater; puddles gleamed back at him in the trapezoid of dim light surrounding his elongated shadow. Good. They hated water. He limped out into the alley.

He never saw the new employee, flailing pathetically in a waist-high quicksand of chewing insects, struggling to stand. Nor did he see the new employee's seams burst, to feed the floodtide now cascading over the fallen walking stick, testing, tasting, analyzing. Angrily.

The .45 burned in his fist. The loss of the cane pushed him into overexertion. At least you've fought your last battle, soldier.

Some guardian angel had abandoned a split haft of broomstick in a garbage dumpster, and that helped him get home. He stopped often, to slap at himself, and after about ten minutes he heard sirens.

The bottle of George Dickel's finest on the countertop was thoughtfully notched so a potential drinker might view how much stock remained. Of the eight ounces inside when Jack burst into the apartment, four vanished before he even sat down.

His leg relaxed at last, and might have screamed. His breath whooshed out and he bolted down another shot straight and neat, letting his gut warm. Sweat dumbed up his clothing with dampness. He rested the .45 on the table, next to the open bottle, and in a few silent minutes he felt better, more relaxed. The gun had cooled.

Bam, he thought. Bam, bam, bam, and the dude popped open and there they were, a hive intelligence, like the Cong, thriving under our noses, living off our garbage, our human garbage, and good old Jack Daniels Stoner had found out.

He took another pull from the bottle. A slower-killing slug, he thought, looking again at the gun.

A hair was stuck to it.

Absently he moved to pluck it front the metal. It moved.

His insides jumped. It was protruding from the barrel, brown and thin and wavering, and it was not a hair.

He thought he saw a madly scurrying roach speed out of the mouth of the gun. Quickly, he slapped at the bare table surface and strained to check the underside. Nothing. It was his imagination dropping into overdrive, fueled by the octane of whiskey. Nothing. The gun was clean.

But those little suckers sure run fast.

He did last rites for the bottle and shuddered. Then, grimly, he started on the leftover beer. Soon he fell asleep on the sofa of his neat, ordered, vermin-free apartment.

And when he woke he knew they had found him. He had ferried their scouts home with him, and now they had him.

His good leg ached horridly. He remembered the aluminum crutch, ugly and unused, still in the foyer closet. Before being fitted with his plastic leg, he had learned to use the crutch as a surrogate. He tensed before jerking open the closet door, and something tiny and brown dashed out of sight behind the jamb. He was certain he had seen this one. He grabbed the crutch, and again his peripheral vision noted quick, dark movement, but by the time it took to turn his head and focus, it was gone—hidden, out of the light.

The countertop! Leaning on the crutch, he humped feverishly across the room. More nothing.

"Damn it!" Frustration and panic lay in wait.

The pistol was still on the table, but not as he thought he had left it. Now its barrel was pointed at the chair where had sat drinking. He knew there were at least three slugs still in the clip, minimum, and never in his life gotten bombed enough to leave any weapon idly aimed at himself, loaded or no.

From the cabinets, the spaces beneath the counter tiles, the interior of the stove, he could feel them monitoring him. They knew where he was. He knew they were there. He stopped the childish bullshit of trying to catch them and started to proceed methodically.

He smacked a spare clip into the gun and reloaded the exhausted one before sliding everything back into the pea coat. He pocketed all the change he could scrounge up. To leave became imperative—not to return to the Omicron, oh, no, not unless one wanted to spend a few months posthumously helming the snack bar, but to get clear of the apartment before they had an opportunity to catch him napping. The quiet walls unnerved him now, pressed against him with the weight of a million tiny, impatient bodies. Most likely they were right above his head and he could not see them, like Teller.

On his way to the door he thought he'd spotted one on the tabletop, maybe the one from the gun. He ignored it. He would never be fast enough to get the little mothers. But he could be fast enough, sharp enough, still, to get out, to survive.

The night was still black and wet. Droplet patterns from the A.M. mist accreted on the metal of his crutch. He walked. He proceeded methodically, with nowhere to go but away.

He was in the crosswalk at La Brea and Santa Monica when the headlights nailed him. An oilslick-black Buick Regal, filled with the resplendence of a coked-out pimp pilot and a pair of chromed hookers, stopped with its front tires over the white line. The riders were pretty jolly for three o'clock in the morning. Jack stared at them through the tinted windshield, realizing they had no idea of what was happening. They celebrated the bliss of their ignorance; they toasted the world in which they moved. To Jack it had always been the place where there was respite from battle. It was a place he had never been allowed, not even after he was back in the world.

An angry black face bared teeth through the open driver's window. "Goddamn hands off the car, muthafuckin bum!" He floored the pedal. Jack jumped as the engine roared and the Buick ran the red, swerving across the lane, ass-skidding like a slot car. Gibes, in high, ridiculing feminine voices, echoed behind.

He stood in the crosswalk, unchallenged, shouting no at the receding taillights. They had thought he was some derelict, more of the human garbage that washed up onto the streets of Hollywood every night. Like the winos in the Omicron, like the Boulevard misfits, like Fatigue Coat. He shouted that they were wrong, and his voice bounced off the Thrifty's and the Burger King and the car wash, and not even the bag lady snoring on the RTD bus bench paid him any mind.

He was just another loon, yelling in an intersection at three in the morning. He felt the crushing weight of his need to tell everyone the truth. But nobody gave a damn about his story from the git.

The light changed. That got him moving; training kept him in uniform motion. As one of George's patrol mavericks, his job was to make practical decisions fast and act instinctively. That was what kept the patrol alive. People he could not see counted on him, while an enemy he could not see tried to kill him. At the curb he thought he saw a stray roach struggling up his pant leg in the wet neon glow of the DON'T WALK sign. His fist swooped down to smash it, faster now, and his plastic leg resounded with its characteristic, drumlike thunk as the bug was flattened into nonexistence. He felt the reflex tremor from leg nerves that no longer existed either.

His body skipped a breath and he froze. The sound his fist had made against his plastic leg was subtly deeper than usual—the difference in pitch between an empty glass and a filled one.

Jack's mouth dried up with amazing speed. His plastic leg was hollow, like the leg of a Ken doll. Lots of empty space down there, where he could not see. Or feel.

He tore open his pea coat and jerked loose the straps that held the prosthetic limb buckled fast to his ruined flesh. From somewhere down there another roach free-fell to land on its back, legs wiggling. Jack pivoted on the crutch and stomped it into the sidewalk cracks.

Keeling madly forward, he grabbed the leg by its jointed plastic ankle and heaved it in a clumsy cartwheel toward a litter basket next to the stoplight pole. He did not see it crash-land; he was watching another roach scurry into the sewer grating, wondering if it had come from him.

He left the leg there, jutting crookedly out of the litter basket, looking like a vaudevillian joke. By dawn some bag lady would scavenge it. Under the chancy light of the mercury-vapor lamps he had no way of telling whether the bugs he now saw scuttering about on his abandoned leg were from within the leg itself or from the garbage already stinking in the overfilled basket. They swarmed and capered as though cheated.

Using his crutch, rather proficiently he thought, he moved purposefully on into the slick, black night. His pant leg fluttered crazily because it was empty, and for that very reason he paid it no mind.

THE EMBRACING

After Tillyard and Althea were injected with the drug, they were released into the labyrinth and no one ever heard their names again.

"I love you—oh please; I can sense you're here with me. Please be with me. Make love to me. Now; quickly, love me."

"Yes," Tillyard managed slowly. His voice, clogged and ragged with disuse, served him reluctantly only because the speech part was important. His nose prickled; his eyes, though sightless, darted about. "Yes. I want to make love to you so badly. It's been so long; I've been so alone." His voice cracked into a sob. "Touch me. Take me." He stretched his left hand out into the darkness. "Love me."

At the second of contact, Tillyard jacked his right arm savagely around, putting his weight and the piston force of his biceps behind the strike. The blunt, bullet-shaped stone in his fist impacted where he knew a skull to he; the wet crunch was amplified by the cathedral acoustics of the cavern. The thing that had briefly touched his arm had time for a single liquid squeal before its reflexes were severed. Tillyard knew how to time the swing, how to place the blow to kill instantly and properly. The thing collapsed to the stone floor, its blood and brains rivuleting away into moist crannies of rock. Tillyard sensed where the corpse had fallen and straddled it, his legs registering the tingle of residual body heat. He cast quickly around and, assured that he was alone (in this chamber of the labyrinth, at least; and for the time being), he knelt and used the stone to puncture the chest of the creature on the floor. Its heart was warni and slick. Tillyard slipped the heart into his bloodbag; he could eat it later. The cavern here was too open and dangerous, and he had to get to close walls and narrow tunnels.

All that was in his mind was her face. The last thing he had ever seen was her face.

A burly pair of Stockboys had whipsawed her against the courtroom wall to restrain her. She had always been more visceral in her reactions while Tillyard—ever the artist, therefore removed from the fantasy existence most people thought of as the real world—was defeated by his limitless capacity for rationalizing even the outrageous. He came to his feet but could not move; his very senses were stunned by the impact of the verdict. Across the room—they had not been permitted a single moment together since their apprehension—Althea was up and moving before Tillyard reacted.

On reflection, Tillyard found woe even in his loving admiration for her more basic expression of humanity. She had known instantly the verdict would doom them both, while Tillyard's mind had to eliminate loopholes first, convincing itself. He stood frozen, thinking. She determined immediately, so fast that perhaps it was on a subliminal level of instinct or chemistry, that since they were doomed, the removal of a single Adjudicator from the world could not damn them any more seriously. She had leaped from her berth in fury, twisting around the guards dogging her, and went for him on the dais.

Of course the Stockboys intercepted her; that's what they were there for. She thrashed as they restrained her and the Adjudicator smiled tolerantly.

Sentence passed, disposition was instantaneous. The medico of the court arranged his leather cases on one of the broad tables. He took great care in the inspection of his ampules, holding them against the light and nodding professorily at each while clucking absently to himself. Finally: "Which first, my lord?"

The Adjudicator, nonplussed by Althea's aborted attack, cocked an eyebrow and said, "Him first. Force her to watch."

The last thing Tillyard had ever seen was her face. The high, round cheekbones that boosted the value of her smile. The conscientiously formed lips, cool and soft; the expressive contrail brows arching above eyes a dark liquid brown, so deep they seemed black. Her features, the familiar topography of her face, were stressed now into anger, into sorrow, into heartbroken loss and utter frustration. But the spirit still burned there, in her eyes, even though it was the end.

They slammed her against the wall and vinyl gloves caught her throat in a choke hold, forcing her to watch as per command. To watch Tillyard.

He was efficiently immobilized by another Stockhoy. The burly mutant held him fast as he struggled, the cords jumping redly out from his neck. Done now with his frittering and spot-checking, the medico of the court approached. Tillyard noted clinically that the medico had some sort of spinal defect that forced him to walk with a crablike shuffle, body averted sideways, and that his left had seemed partially paralyzed. When not in use, it drew up against his chest, like the claw on a child's digging toy.

Across the room she was now silent, fighting to stop the tears that came frugally at first and then coursed down her face. Neither had anything of which to be ashamed; that no one present in the court cared either way was more reason for emotion now. Of all the truths that might have punctuated this moment, of all the declarations Tillyard wanted to hear but did not require of her, nothing was heard. She had decided not to give the bastards any more. Tillyard felt a pang and tears generated in his own eyes.

He was watching her, cataloging the beauties of her face as he was jaboffed. He felt the steel penetrate the crook of his arm; his muscles were tight against the hold of the Stockboy. The demon brew was, as he expected, hot and burning. He imagined his flesh scorching and blackening with its passage. Gritting his teeth, he did not take his eyes off her. Physically denied, they locked onto each other with lines of sight and caring. The chemicals mingled darkly with his blood and made the circuit of his heart once, twice, and in the very distant background Tillyard could hear the flatter of the court officials but ignored it with tears cascading freely down his face. He blinked them away to focus on Althea, and for that moment they were united. Neither said anything about love; it was not necessary.

And then the gray blotches blossomed on Tillyard's corneas. They were like patches of ice, with crystalline border that expanded and began to bleed into each other, linking up like fibrin mesh. Stupidly, Tillyard attempted to peer around the patches slowly scabbing over his eyes, even as he felt his eyes die. He could still see Althea, but now she too faded to gray like a bad video image, becoming blurry and indistinct. At last she was obliterated from view. There was the palpable sensation of something thin and nonporous cleaving to Tillyard's eyes, like decals, but that was ridiculous—it was the drug. And the drug was permanent.

And the picture of Althea he held in his mind was not the one he had just logged. Rather, he thought of how she looked just after they had made love; her eyes dark and sparkling, the relaxed, contented attitude of her face. The neat row of upper teeth visible as she purred in a deliciously low register. He could feel her body manufacture the sound, as he felt all the important and private sounds she made

The muscles in Tillyard's knees suddenly went to rubber and he crashed face-first into the courtroom floor. He fell down the funneling rabbit-hole of his own mind, swimming in alien colors, tumbling, his feet striking his face, into unconsciousness.

"Now her," said the Adjudicator, and Tillyard heard it before he passed out. Abruptly it seemed terribly important to show Althea they could not best him with their drug, to say i love you against its riptide of disorientation, and he tried to force the words out, past his inoperative vocal cords and numb lips. He marshaled his draining strength and pushed—she had to hear it as he was going down; she had to. Now it was important. He pushed and felt the words leave his body. His mind floated for a second, giddy with victory ... and having succeeded, let oblivion suck him down and away.

Althea watched Tillyard collapse in a heap, as though all the bones had been withdrawn from his body without ceremony. He crumpled without a noise, and for a second even the Stockboys holding her were stunned by the grotesque sight.

She wrested loose and managed to reach the huge courtroom doors before they battered her down with truncheons. Blood flowed copiously from a split and swelling eyebrow, and the medico sprinkled some powder into the wound before jamming her with the needle.

The officials of the court had no way of perceiving the massive hallucinations that accompanied the prime function of the drug, the removal of sight. Almost like some sort of bizarre compensation, the show it provided was spectacular.

When she was gone, the Stockboys, in toto, looked expectantly up to the bench, like greyhounds awaiting a table scrap. The Adjudicator pondered a moment, then said, "You may run her through the Stockboy barracks once or twice before taking her to the labyrinth." The mutants looked to each other and grinned.

Three hundred and five—no, six.

In a place where there was no day, no night, no time, and no change whatsoever, Tillyard had a number. Three hundred and six. How many he had killed. Killed and eaten.

Crouched like a Neanderthal man into a tight, secure niche of rock, Tillyard wolfed down the scraps from his hloodbag, the leftovers from the creature he had battered to death almost an hour before. A subjective hour, purely—in the labyrinth there was no time.

It had been long ago, an eternity ago when he had come to consciousness, sprawled on the rock floor. Water, from somewhere above, patted onto his forehead in torturous syncopation bap hap bap. The water smelled like charcoal. He coughed and the convulsion sent shock-waves slamming through his brain; the afterburn of the drug was agonizing—so agonizing that at first he did not realize something was feeding on his left arm. Something with evil little rows of teeth had torn the flesh and was busily lapping up Tillyard's blood with a catlike sandpaper tongue.

Tillyard did not need to see it. Hearing it eat was too much.

"Aahhh!" He lashed blindly out in the dark and heard the thing scuttle angrily back. Thought you were dead, mate, sorry ... It sounded too small to be a part of the genetic trash periodically flushed away into the labyrinth, and so possibly was a denizen of the harsh place, a native, living in the tunnels before there were Adjudicators and medicos and mutant Stockhoys.

Angry with himself now, Tillyard could only think that the first thing he had done in the labyrinth was utter a primitive noise, take a violent action. The essence of irony—wielded in terms of punishment and sculpted by the expert mind of an Adjudicator.

"Since your favorite term for us in your rabble-rousing is barbarian, and you will not desist, you will become as one with us, a savage, that you may perceive the difference. You wrongly believe us cruel and primitive; this causes unrest and dissatisfaction. We will show you what cruel and primitive is. We will show you what it is to be a barbarian."

Tillyard had a following in the arts, and that was both dangerous and frustrating. Dangerous because it gave him an intelligent audience; frustrating because it was an audience that could not be counter-propagandized—his followers would never buy a sudden conversion of viewpoint. The judgment became necessary because it was a personal coup for the Adjudicator; he had decided to make Tillyard a myth-object lesson. They would remember what happened to Tillyard.

And they would take a cue from what would also happen to his overly vocal companion, Althea. Yes. They would learn that association

was as evil as provocation. The pair of dissenters was blinded in the prescribed fashion. They were consigned to the labyrinth according to law, to survive, barbarically, forever. There was no time in the labyrinth.

Tillyard licked the blood off his fingers. He had lost the last two of his right hand eight kills ago; number two hundred ninety-eight.

For three hundred and six kills he had been searching for Althea, yet in all that time he had never once spoken her name, nor had he spoken his own—two shreds of armor that protected him from the things in the labyrinth and their devilish form of low-grade telempathy. They were not creatures of specifics, yet, in the total darkness of the labyrinth and using some baffling furrow of their mutant brains, they were able to detect Tillyard's emanations. The love they registered for the unnamed female blanked out the more crucial message – that Tillyard was a carnivore, intelligent, cunning, physically stronger. The creatures absorbed the dominant emotion and assumed the persona of the female as bait. Tillyard reasoned that names meant nothing. He exploited his advantage ruthlessly; her face was in his mind as he bludgeoned and killed. He thought only of her laughter as the ichorous blood of the creatures crept past his elbows, drenching him. And he remembered her name, hoping that somewhere in the labyrinth she had managed to be as canny.

He bent to the trickle near his head and sniffed. The flow was clear; he drank first and then rinsed the dry and flaking blood from his arms.

There was a disturbance. Mentally he logged a heavy movement in the chamber below him and he froze like a pup on scent, listening. He recognized the wet slap-and-drag motions of one of the huge creatures he had indexed as Shufflers. They were dense and massy, almost impossible to kill with their reptilian plating and tusklike teeth. Their leaden movements were misleading—when angered or frenzied with hunger, they reared up on their hind legs, using teeth and claws to shred. They fixed on motion to attack—theirs were keen, bestial senses rather than human capacities enhanced by mutation—and so Tillyard did not breathe, did not twitch.

Rather than actually feeling the impact of the blow, Tillyard heard the fat paw whistle through the air prior to the sudden strike that numbed his entire body to further sensation. The pain had no time to localize. Tillyard had been hit, he knew he was falling from his hiding place, but was aware of nothing except the white veins of lightning etched across his mind's eye, and the imperative to escape, to avoid contact

Twisting and bitting the rock floor of the cavern caused the roar of blood in his ears to subside. He heard the phlegmatic respiration of the beast as it advanced on him, could smell the oily reptilian stink of it, could feel its bulk cutting across the thick atmosphere of the room. Agony lanced up his legs—landing on his knees, he had managed to break something and could only flop forward onto his face. He groped for the bone knife sheathed next to his bloodbag and found it had clattered away in the fall. One of the Shuffler's taloned feet slapped the damp stone inches away from his face.

The creature gathered Tillyard up into its mitt-like forepaws, rearing back on its hind legs and sweeping him up into the air. Tillyard braced his arms against the thing's hot snout, trying to push away in vain, for next would come the scrabble of paws that would open his guts up and then the slow leaking away of his life into the darkness.

A foreign object blasting through with enormous force almost ripped Tillyard's arm away—it seemed to be a pole or crude spear about four inches in diameter. By the sound, it had homed in on the Shuffler's throat and was imbedded well, but the creature did nothing to indicate the injury was anything more than an annoyance. It clutched its dinner, Tillyard, firmly. There was movement elsewhere in the room, but Tillyard was incapable of discrimination.

Abruptly the Shuffler lurched sharply forward, surprised or pushed from behind by its new attacker. It shrieked, hot saliva splattering Tillyard. He felt the sickening vertigo of its fall and realized he was sandwiched between the massive beast and the floor. The air rushed. Tillyard gave vent to a shriek of his own, abrading his ragged vocal equipment with his own absolute terror. It reverberated in the cavern but he never heard it.

His shoulder blades crunched onto the floor and the Shuffler was on top of him. Its teeth sank into his flesh, and Tillyard mercifully blacked out.

The place to which he wafted dreamily down was pleasant; his pain was filtered out as he descended. He saw Althea's face, the perfect, timeless picture, again. He saw his own face as well, as he remembered it. Of course, he had no inkling of what his face might look like now, but it was a physiognomy yet unmarred by the changes obvious to his sense of touch, a face without the scrub of beard, or the scars, or the crusty pits of his atrophied eyes. A needle, a small puncture in the fabric of his existence, had removed everything from him, had made him a threat no longer to the regime that employed Adjudicators and Stockboys and the rest—or so it was designed. His art, his friends, his lover, his vision had been hacked rudely away. His sight remained. Totally blind, he was enabled to see the regime for the real monsters they were, could see himself as the barbarian they had forced him to become, and could see that as an enemy of that regime he had ceased being a pamphleteer and so might school himself in the more ancient, essential arts of killing and survival.

Of course he could lay down and die. Defeat their purpose. Althea was somewhere in the labyrinth That was why three hundred and six had died so violently. He did not do it to perform for his jailors

He was a machine. One like him could evoke widespread terror. Ten, moving in total darkness, hearing with touch, seeing with sound, practicing their killing art, might cause enough panic to disrupt the regime's control; a hundred could topple the regime itself. Even the canine senses of the Stockboys did not allow stalking by air density, or detecting an oncoming blow by smell. Stockboys were not trained inside the labyrinth.

Tillyard awoke to the feel of a cool hand on his forehead. His body tensed like a spring and he made automatically for the knife no longer at his side. Then the pain gripped him, curling him up fetally, forcing a weak sound to bleed past his lips. The hand had been withdrawn; there had been no killing blow to follow its contact.

The air of the chamber was heavy with the odor of scorching meat. Tillyard fixated on it and spent several moments meditating the pain down to a less sensitive level.

The hand returned, making no hostile motions, but offering a chunk torn from the Shuffler. Steaming juices dribbled down Tillyard's arm, making the meat almost too hot to hold. He ate and swallowed quickly. Back in an almost totally dead section of his mind, he felt the absurd urge to ask for salt.

When the food hit his stomach, Tillyard's brain swam blackly and he finally vomited onto the cavern floor with such force that he lapsed hack into unconsciousness. Sickness or incapacitation of any kind, he thought as lie was pulled down, usually cycled back to the only end product there was in the labyrinth—death. He cursed himself for his weakness, his inability to hang on. Escaping from the Shuffler's belly had most likely depleted any reserve of luck he had stored.

But when he came back up a second time, he found himself neither eviscerated nor dead. Wildly he thought that perhaps he had been killed by the Shuffler and was in a state of fugue between hells or limbos or whatever awaited him past death in the labyrinth. It was highly possible; lie was sick and in shock, reeling with disorientation—until the cool hand returned as well, to stroke his forehead tentatively, leaving little trails through the fever sweat gathered there.

Tillyard's grip on the only concept of time available to him was lost during his achingly slow recuperation. He was fed. The remains of the Shuffler would last a very long time. Time stood in stasis at three hundred and six.

There were no cooing words of promise from his benefactor; no verbal bait. Tillyard could not escape the unease that came from the lack of a palpable threat. He waited, but he never relaxed—the very concept, like salt, was absurd. He was poised on a deadly edge, he felt, unwillingly submitting to some sort of game alien to the labyrinth.

Until he touched her for the first time

The hand was gently swabbing his brow with a scrap of hide or cloth, when, totally on impulse, Tillyard reached out and found her shoulders. She was startled, and with a gasp attempted to pull away, but lie held her locked—not letting her free, yet bringing her no closer. She was smaller, more finely honed than him. His thumbs traced the line of her collarbone and distant memory slammed indecorously home in his brain. He broke the contact after only a few seconds and she retreated, not to come near him again until his belly growled from a lapsed feeding schedule. Her.

The memory of her face and touch became sharp-edged and distinct, almost painfully clear. It never left Tillyard's mind now, and so it was only a matter of time before he took his life in his hands by speaking to her, alone for now in their dank pocket of the labyrinth.

"Come to me." It hurt to speak, as though his throat glands had modified to other purposes and would no longer permit the old way. "I can sense you're here with me."

When there was no verbal response, Tillyard felt relief. She came and crouched close, just out of reach—perhaps she was watching him.

And when he was able to walk, she led him. He did not touch her again. The picture, like a mezzotint on the inside of his skull, burned. Once again, Tillyard's mind was convincing itself, working logically toward a reality.

The creature that led him had to be Althea. But she would not speak—perhaps the best argument for her identity. The hungry tunnel dwellers always talked to him first. Their route was a new one to Tillyard, which brought his caution rushing up quite unbidden. His automatic defenses were humming, like small, terribly costly mechanics or incredibly intricate dermal implants. His natural senses were better than machines.

The pathways through which she led him were uninhabited by any of the usual occupants of the labyrinth. Occasionally he recorded non-natural metal implants in the rock walls—possibly an abandoned industrial adjunct to the maze of caverns and tunnels. Their significance was noted but lost; she led him onward. Deeper.

Tillyard's left hand never lost contact with the haft of his bone knife. She rushed ahead of him, apparently unaware or unconcerned about the traps that might be before them, and Tillyard grudgingly allowed a bit of trust—she had, after all, neatly dispatched the Shuffler that had intended to lunch on him. His paranoia eased back a notch; just then the tunnel dead-ended out. She stopped.

Not quite; he registered a narrow cleft in the rock but she did not continue through it. Rather, she came to him and tugged his arm, indicating that he should precede her now. So this is the game, his mind nagged.

He jerked the knife free and with no hesitation whatsoever stepped through the split in the rock wall. She hung by it, not following. Waiting, it seemed.

There was no life inside. Instead, there was a gentle upward slope scattered with shale chips that had cascaded down from above. Tillyard worked his way up the incline for a while, sniffing for trouble. His leg muscles, recently pressed hack into service, stung in protest, and his back was soon lubricated with sweat. What he caught was no threat, but it stopped him short in surprise.

The air had changed, subtly. There was a greasy sheen to its odor, a tinge of metal, of solvents and moisture. He took a few more steps upward. Various carbons and a sweeter tang he did not immediately recognize. He cocked his head; there was an open space not too far up and the weighty moisture of the cave air seemed to dwindle behind him.

Tillyard's heart began to thump heavily and an icy sweat broke out over his entire body. He began trembling lightly and blew his breath out quicker to compensate. She had shown him the way out of the labyrinth; what was in front of him was topside.

But she was not behind him.

He could smell the air; air moved by breezes and carrying with it the forgotten smells of the outside world. It was like perfume, seductive, holding Tillyard in unmoving awe. He turned and picked his way with infinite care back down the slope, slipping on the shale chips and finally reaching the bottom in a noisy, ass-sliding scatter of loose rock. His scabbed legs did not seem to mind.

Beyond the cleft, she waited.

"It's the way out," he said in his hoarse, nearly useless voice. "Come with me; it's the way out!"

She moved, but not toward the cleft. Her hand traced lightly down his cheek in a caress that seemed to web his lungs in electricity; it became difficult now to breathe. She pulled him toward her.

"It is you," he said.

Touch me. Love me. I've been so alone.

His arms went around her and he found that one of her own was missing at the elbow. Like his severed fingers. You lost pieces of yourself in the labyrinth, and if you survived its denizens, it would consume you, absorbing your soul and being into the rock walls. It might rob you of your voice, even as it had spent endless, painstaking time robbing Tillyard of his, though he still retained that selfish remnant of speaking ability. It might rob you of other things.

"Althea." He said it only once. It was a whisper, sucked quickly into the stone walls without an echo. She held him tighter, her face now buried in the hollow of his neck. He could feel her tears running down his chest. She made no sound.

Take me. Love me.

He forced it out, tears now welling up in his own eyes: "I love you." He said it quietly, his teeth clenched together as though he was in great agony.

His eyes were squeezed tightly shut as he buried the bone knife in her back up to the hilt. She stiffened in his embrace and he could feel her blood pumping out, slicking his fist. With a guttural rasp of air that sounded vaguely like a sigh, she slumped and he supported her. She was dead in an instant. Tillyard knew how to time the swing; how to place the blow to kill instantly and properly. He was a machine.

He laid her corpse gently down at the mouth of the cleft and spent some time squatting near her, touching her face with his callused fingers. She had scars and battlemarks to match his own. It was her right arm that was gone. Their eyes were still good, he thought crazily. They still made tears.

He had spoken her name once in three hundred and six kills, now three hundred and seven. He could whisper that, and the other things, to himself as he climbed, the evaporating tears streaking backward in the dust coating his face, but he did not. Smelling the air, he decided he had no further use for speaking.

The wind was very cold, and the redly setting sun reflected off Tillyard's dead eyes as he crawled, at last, out of the earth to resume his work.

The turd had really hit the turbine, thought Eye Man, with Jocko's small theft from the pumpkin truck. Rude had devised a theory about Jocko. He'd told it to Strongheart and Nobby. Nobby, scared enough to piss bleach, had repeated it to Eye Man, not giving an airborne fuck whether he was believed. Rude was history, too, and Nobby had watched him die.

The theory was that the ghost of Jocko had come back to haunt them until everybody was dead, dead, dead.

This was no trank fantasy. This was real. Growing up could be such a scream, except sometimes you saw how simple it would be to keep screaming until state-funded medication erased all pain from your life. Which still didn't sound too shabby to Eye Man.

None of them had ever thought they might actually grow up, or grow old, or grow dead.

Jocko had always made the other Boulevard punks antsy. The standing joke was to guess what brand of carb cleaner he was snorting this week. He stood a wiry five-five, the kind of sawed-off blood with muscle bumps in his jawbones and a full basket of twitches and tics. His coffee-colored skin had become mottled in a chemical mishap to which he frequently alluded, yet never detailed. Eye Man thought that Jocko had been the victim of a spill in the birthmark department, and had fabricated the notion of a calamity in his misty past to make himself more mysterious, so Chaka or Lindabelle would do the bone dance with him. Otherwise, it was so solly, fuck Gash or don't fuck. But Jocko was weird enough without fictional embellishment. He'd boasted the tallest orange spikes on the street until he'd gotten clipped by the wing mirror of an RTD bus. Beat cops had hustled him off the curb, and he was muttering about Officer Piggy and the right to sit wherever he fucking well pleased, when—whang! The buttcrumbs staffing the emergency ward shaved Jocko's head regardless of whether it was medically necessary. Ho, ho, the name of the game is Shear the Punk. Keep Hollywood straight-edged. Big fucking deal.

After that, Eye Man swore he could see death riding in Jocko's eyes; their sclera had run to a sick ochre that reminded him of pus.

Bad trouble simmered in Jocko's glare. They'd be loitering against the brick wall facing the Orange Drive crosswalk, hustling turistas for coin or sneaking into the Hamburger Hamlet to foul the john, and Jocko would unleash a scream guaranteed to hamper traffic and make pedestrians cut them a wider DMZ. Jocko's wires were beaucoup frayed. Eye Man heard some out-of-towner farting through his face about how Los Angeles rated third in the nation for the number of homeless mental defectives roaming the streets. Right. At least Jocko never shit himself in public without warning.

The upside of Jocko's alien weirdness was power—power that could make them ten, fifteen strong on weekend nights. They sauntered down the Walk of Stars cleaving citizens to either side. At the Seven Seas Lounge they whiffed and drank and shot up and pissed and fucked until they blacked out. Usually somebody's deathmobile could he hijacked to wherever the Scorpion Club had relocated that week, and they could skank and slam and thrash until somebody's momma called Officer Piggy about the ruckus.

Once, Jocko had bitten the ear off some dude in a fight. He always talked about wishing he'd kept it, so it could be worn on a thong like a wartime memento. The only mortal who had ever backed Jocko down, to Eye Man's knowledge, was Rude. Jocko had been pulling his raving 'n' drooling bit, getting hazardous. Rude knew animal tranquilizer when he saw it, and put the flat of his hand to the center of Jocko's forehead. There was a loud, wet beefsteak smack and Jocko's eyes rolled yellowly toward the moon. He hit the deck and did not stir until sunrise. Nobody slept near him because he had filled his pants. He woke up with a nosebleed and no memory of having been such a sphinctroid.

That had happened back when Eye Man and his fellows maintained a nest of sleeping bags and crates and candles inside the shell of the Mecca. During the thirties the Mecca Hotel had been pure swank, a trysting oasis for the celebrated, a stone's hurl from Grauman's Chinese. By the mid-sixties, transients had blessed it with a permanent urinary stench, and the week Jim Morrison died in 197I the iron security bars sprouted across the door and windows. The next decade saw it shut down, then condemned, then gutted. When Eye Man's crew assumed residence, it was on dirt floors interrupted by the basement's ancient and crumbling support pillars.

Then the Mecca had been invaded by key lights and camera track. Eye Man and Jocko and the rest had been evicted by, of all things, a Death Wish sequel using the hotel's husk for local color. In the movie, it was a hideout for dope-dealing rapist punks.

The Seven Seas vanished next. It had gotten refurbished into a yupster disco serving nonalcoholic drinkies. Eye Man didn't know what it was called now, and didn't care a rat fuck. On weekends, the lines outside the place were choked with Iranians in Miami Vice drag, pawing underaged giggle-boxes sporting spike heels, fat arms, and faint mustaches.

Punks were losing the battle for the Boulevard; fewer and fewer manifested on Fridays, after dark. The Boulevard seemed to be evolving into something different. For different people. For eaters of frozen yogurt.

One night, they tried to raise the ghost of the Seven Seas—Jocko and Strongheart and Gash and Lindabelle and Chaka and Nobby and Eye Man and other worthies all got tanked in the Hollywood High School bleachers and wound up in the alley behind the Paramount Theater after the parking attendants had fled for the evening. The old Seven Seas cul-de-sac still bore the back-door entrance sign. Punks had always been required to enter through the rear door, and it was a status they treasured. Eye Man felt that just a wee bit more beer and powder would crank them enough to kick in the now-barred access and introduce a lot of boogie feehs to some genuine hardcore mayhem. Anyone who didn't care for fighting could wrestle with Gash, who was dusted enough not to care who stuck what where or how.

Fucking Gash's sliding-door cunt never failed to make Eye Man think of stirring a vat of chili with a toothpick, or tossing a hot dog into a swimming pool. Fat chicks were always gushers. Staying hard was no strain; feeling any friction at all was the challenge. Had Gash been born with that trench, or had she dug it herself? Either option made Eye Man's dick prefer television nights to getting slimed one more time.

Out came the spraycans and silver markers. PUNK DEATH SQUADS NOW! FUCK INGFUCKINGFUCKING! ELTAS WATCHES YOU AS YOU SLEEP!

Elias had died a long time ago.

The county had turned Jocko into a skinhead just as the news chancres unfurled their gambit to censor punk on the basis that the skinhead faction had been artificially linked to white supremacists. The witch-hunt kicked off, ignoring such plain truth as embodied in "Nazi Punks Fuck Off"—a song in which the Dead Kennedys showed the out door to punks who stirred up shit.

They were under siege from all fronts.

Pissed, Jocko decided he wanted the rusted Seven Seas sign to adorn their hovel at the Mecca. By standing on Rude's shoulders, be was able to wrench it free with an opera's worth of grunting and a few drops of sacrificial blood. Rude reanointed Jocko with Budweiser and got a beer shampoo. Rude's head was mown into a tic-tac-toe crosshatch, with a virulent streak of bright green. His eyes, generic, as colorless as distilled water, turned to the square dead space formerly covered by the sign.

Everyone saw the gang tag—part nickname, part hieroglyphic, all incomprehensible. Anyone who lives near a city has seen it: Cholos and low-riders bickering over turf; Vietnamese clubs leaving memos of their passage; solos marking their layovers and announcing their existence to an uncaring public like dogs lubricating hubcaps. This, however, was not NIKKO-BASLJRA-EL MERO MERO #I or CATHI SUX +DTK or 1411I ST CRIPS RULE. This tag was unreadable in any tongue.

Jocko let fly one of his lunatic assault screams and obliterated the insignia with red spray paint, looping and curling and blotting out from the land of the living all trace of its faded declaration. It drowned beneath his crazed design, strangled by artful, sure strokes.

Somehow the plan to raze the disco and put the boot to wimp buttocks aplenty got buried, too. Dust and budget 'ludes can do the old cups-and-balls trick with one's attention span, that way.

Gash woke up with a quart of jism dripping out of her, and Jocko came to curled around his pilfered sign. Eye Man arose still tangled in Lindahelle. He had slept four hours, and through that time her sleeping hand had enclosed his detumescent cock as though protecting it. Linda-belle was brown on brown, curly-haired and freckled, with big breasts on an otherwise shapeless body. She would never he instant boner bait—like Chaka—but neither was she brain dead, like Gash. Eye Man enjoyed her smile, her smart eyes, her habit of not loudly belaboring the obvious. She provided calm to balance the stormy or extreme personalities of the rest. He did not mind waking up with her, now. When she saw his eyes open, she held a finger to her lips—slihh, our secret— and smiled that smile, pumping him in the dark until he curved up painfully stiff, then rolling on top to work him like modeling clay until he shot off with enough force to bang her head against the Mecca's low basement ceiling.

Rude glided in bearing that morning's booty from the Donut Stop dumpster, off car-packed Highland Avenue, across the street from the Holiday Inn. "Fuckin' old winos," he muttered to whoever cared. "They found out about the dumpster. I got there early and there was still one of them fuckers, ass-up. I was in no fuckin' mood. I kicked the shit outta him and told him to stay the fuck away." He hoisted a pair of battered cartons—his cull of the Donut Stop's throwaways. "Breaky is served."

Getting stale donuts free meant that change could be spent on hot coffee. Yeah, they were sure giving the free enterprise system a run for its bucks.

That afternoon they worked the Chinese, hanging near the forecourt and hustling Japanese tourists for coin. Any normal human could pose for a homey holiday snap with a real live urban punk—for a buck. It bought the beer. Jocko thought posing was pussy, but swilled his share nonetheless. No one ever tried to slap a brew from his hand.

Lindabelle and Chaka had lit off to pump the walking traffic for smokes. One round on the boulevard generally netted plenty, especially after the layer-coifed, hormone-crazed ax heros strutting out of the Guitar Institute of Technology got a hind-brain-full of Chaka. She exploited a sharp Aryan physiognomy and a jailbait contour, a bleached military crop above frank Arctic eyes above an elegant, chewable neck. Between those last two, almost as if in ambush, waited a pouty mouth destined for one specialty, maybe two if you were imaginative. Linda-belle caught Chaka's bounceback, and cigarettes were a smoother gimme than plain cold coin.

Again, Jocko wasn't motivated. He rolled his own from gutter butts. Eye Man guessed Jocko preferred the handmades for their potency—more tar! more nicotine! more rust brown active ingredient! When he smoked, Jocko pulled hard, as if he was inhaling distillate of life essence, selfishly hoarding every wisp of thick gray smoke. Eye Man wondered what leftover lives Jocko was willfully packing into the dead storage of his lungs, what other psyches or failures, what ugly ends. Was he respirating the tobacco-cured breath of people now dead? Famous? Or just stuff too rank for the other Boulevard ciphers?

What load was Jocko taking on, by his own hand?

Eye Man gave it up. Too much like trying to figure out who the hell Beniamino Gigli had been. A bronze LP was mounted on the guy's sidewalk star, but that said zero.

Jocko his own bad self loitered against the wall, casting about for sport and mustering a sullen sneer, until he spotted the pumpkin truck from Half Moon Bay. It slowed, gears gnashing, for the Orange Drive light just as Strongheart polished off a pair of hamhocks from Atlanta. Wifey first, then her baseball-capped breadwinner. Strongheart's kinked 'hawk made him a foot and a half taller than either of them. He then photographed mister and missus beneath the main marquee. Texas Chainsaw Massacre III was afoot. The hick's eyes darted wetly about, as though he feared this monster would eat his Instamatic, but he pressed a humid dollar bill into Strongheart's hand with a shitload of full-bore rural howdy-do. Strongheart grinned back, just as fatuously. The couple's chicken-fried accents were so dense he could not comprehend a syllable.

Jocko's jaundiced eyes caught nothing but the truck, and its load of plump orange pumpkins—the color his hair had been, before. His jaw worked and his eyes reflected back orange glints. His brain was afloat with some proposed violence, naturally involving pumpkins.

"Tricker treat," he mumbled, a truly deranged smile carving its zigzag way across his mottled face. His teeth were as yellow as his eyeballs.

As the light changed, he highstepped out into traffic and snatched a pumpkin from the unstable pyramid weighing down the truck's rear deck. The driver should have missed seeing, but did not. He tapped his brakes, nearly causing a rented LeBaron full of townies from some Texas hog wallow to rear-end him, scissoring Jocko. But Jocko leaped deftly from the pinch line, bristling, just itching for a confrontation if this clodhopping retard was stupid enough to leave his truck and start shoving. Nobby, casing tourists near one of the poster shops, caught wind and laughed, high and shrilly. Imagine an Orthodox Jewish punk and you've got Nobby.

Jocko stood ground in the street, grinning like a sniper, pumpkin cradled, waiting for retaliation. Backed-up cars honked uselessly. The truck driver had left his spine in Half Moon Bay. He spat Hispanic invective and laid his pedal down. The wheezy Ford lurched through the crosswalk at a palsied thirty, its load of pumpkins teetering, its bald retreads feeling every crack in the slurry sealing. A workshirted arm jammed the unilateral peace symbol back in Jocko's direction. Pussy.

"I got me a punkin!" Jocko hooted.

Gash wanted to name it. Rude wanted to eat it. Jocko shunned the sidewalk trade and perched on the stone wall near the pay parking lot. He uncapped his bigmouth silver marker and began to scrawl on the pumpkin, making feedback noises to himself.

Eye Man sucked hard on his teeth, trying to clean them with the rough side of his tongue. His mouth tasted foul and his teeth were scummy. For a while he submerged himself in the pursuit of spare change. He learned, long ago, the art of asking for a berserk amount: "Hey—spare sixty-three cents?" That was good, usually, for a quarter. The Boulevard median had bumped to nearly eighty cents. One black dude Eye Man normally saw hanging near Frederick's of Hollywood had the dick to ask for a buck fifty. Same army trenchcoat (just like Eye Man's), same bedroll. Nobby said the guy had once been a studio attorney; now he was a vagabond who jogged every day around the track field at Hollywood High and slept, so Nobby claimed, on the roof of the gymnasium. Chaka said she'd seen the guy in the laundromat at La Brea and Sunset, relating the story of how he could have been the Black Valentino to a woman with too much time on three dryers and hot mousetrap paranoia dancing in her eyes.

Your given name always changed when you hit Hollywood. That was why the names emblazoned upon the sidewalk stars meant nothing

to Eye Man. You couldn't tell who any of those people might have been. Strongheart had taken his name from a Vine Street star; nobody knew or cared who the fuck Strongheart might have been ... but the name had been resuscitated, and that was all that mattered.

Where the fuck was Sid Vicious' star? Jello's? Wendy 0's? Nothing on the Walk of Stars related to Eye Man's reality.

Fuck it. He was surly and pissed by the time he had meandered down to Hollywood and Highland. He had one crumpled dollar in his

pocket, plus a dime. He thought of bumming a cigarette from a PMS.

They could spare the smokes, but talking to them was like letting some yuppie limpdick try to cornhole you. Punks with Money Suck. You

could peg them at a glance. They were too well turned out; too much chrome and real leather. Eye Man had actually seen one wearing a watch amid the studbands and bike chains and custom-torn boutique hides.

Backed up sheeplike at the crosswalk, tourists gawked. Eye Man squeezed his infected earlobe hard. The most recent piercing had not

gone cleanly. He heard an amplified th-pow! inside his head, and pus squirted onto his fingers. He continued squeezing until he got blood, to rinse it out. The pain cleared his head while the pedestrians cut him some breathing room. He briefly felt the old power of the streets surging back into him.

"Hey, Eye Man." It was Jocko's guttural rasp. "Num-num-numnum-num! His snaky tongue licked wetness from Eye Man's throat. The citizens were thoroughly grossed out. Both punks giggled.

"Wanna catch a flick?" Both were team experts at cinema infiltration. It was absurdly simple. You staked out the alley exit of, say, the Omicron Theatre, and when that door opened, you ittied in and layed low behind the movie screen until the next feature commenced. If a lot of moviegoers streamed out, you simply walked in backward, right through them. It worked almost without fail.

"Naah." Jocko hefted his prize. "Check my punkin. Punkin, right?"

Jocko's signature graffito adorned the pumpkin's furrowed face. On the forehead, in shiny silver, was written POWER CHALLENGE. Behind, NEW ASSAULT, plus the circled A for anarchy. Lines braided and twined. It actually lent the pumpkin a basic sort of Impressionist grimace, the scrunched visage of a fat man with burst hemorrhoids trying to pinch out a drop shipment. There was as much logic to the artwork as there was schematic to the pigment splotches on Jocko's face.

"Know what makes punkins scary?"

Eye Man found himself cheering up. The street was still theirs, where it mattered.

"I'll show you. C'mon. Others'!! follow."

They loped east, enduring no shit from no body. A tall, satanic homeboy wearing a black duster smirked in passing, as though he knew what was going down. Jocko perched his pumpkin on one shoulder for display; the Incredible Two-Headed Punk. Street weenies goggled. Pig-eyed, scrub-shorn grunts on leave, come to shit all over Hollywood, barely noticed them. Fat-assed visitors with their squawking brats and plaid and cellulite and cameras clogged the walking pace. They think we look weird, thought Eye Man. None of them looked stiff; none of the women, fuckworthy. They were the missionary-position missionaries of America. They were doughy and dissipate. A trio of PMSs dealt some sort of stupid power sign; Jocko snarled and gave them the finger. He wanted to smash in their faces. He ached to battering-ram each thunderthighed heifer right in the bunghole, to rip out each dinky pud and cram it into each slackjawed face; then to take a grand diarrhetic shit over the whole massacre.

"We fucking live here," was all he said.

What's a football field wide, Cal Worthington's wet dream, ten lanes across, and never slows to less than sixty on an afternoon unspoiled by gridlock? The Hollywood Freeway, that's what. Jocko loved to park between the bus-stop benches and the wire mesh so he could stare down on all that traffic. It made him think of coursing fresh blood, of sharklike forward motion that never stopped, ever. To stop was death.

Vehicles piled through the underpass, some of them shearing away to snag the Gower offramp at Sunset. The divider below was thin, and battered by a million sideswipes. Flares, oilslicks, skidmarks, car droppings—all of it was ground fine by the stampede rush and absorbed into the street. The tarmac was always uniform; nothing altered its surface for long.

Eye Man took in speeding rooftops in enameled avocado, canary, crimson, wedding-gown white, and said, "There's no place left to go if you die here."

Jocko slapped on his annoyed look. "What?" His eyes timed the hurrying cars.

"It's all machines. Footprints in cement. Little metal records, pressed into the sidewalk. You can piss in John Wayne's footprints. You can pry the records and TV sets and film cameras out of the stars on the sidewalk. Nothing lasts here. Nothing has anyplace to go."

Jocko hocked and spit a phlegmwad through the chainlink. The wet white comet arced into the stream of cars. Consecration. "Don't let that shit eat at you, man."

Eye Man turned. "What happens, Jocko, if you fucking die here, and you're not a fucking star? Who'll give a fuck?"

That made Jocko smile as though he'd figured out something big. His smile was never a fun thing to witness. "Youuu walk the streeeets... 1I It was a lyric Eye Man had forgotten. "Get it?" They had arrived at the middle of the Boulevard overpass.

Eye Man thought Jocko was running on autopilot again.

"Look." Jocko pointed at the graffiti-besmirched retaining wall that ran below the fence. "We are everywhere."

The wall resembled the side of an ancient Bronx subway car—layer upon layer of spray paint and indelible packing ink. It swooped and wove and changed color; it seemed to move if you just glanced. A broad swatch in three colors read STONER'S EVIL: fat letters, outlined and shadowed, blue shading to matte white. The labor of hours, here on the overpass, far more fascinating and intricate than the constipated "art" Los Angeles had commissioned for its freeway web. The municipal murals were already vanishing under new coats of graffiti. ROLLER-BLADE WARRIORS.

Eye Man kept looking at STONE1'S EVIL. This had to have taken hours. Had nobody seen this being painted? Then it occurred to him that despite all the defacement he had wrought; personally, in ten years, you never really saw urban graffiti being implemented. It was just there. It was always just there. And it was always changing.

"Ygor, zee secret panel!" Jocko set down his pumpkin to pry back a head-high slit in the chainlink. He saw Eye Man about to ask what the fuck, and overrode with, "Just watch. We're gonna change everybody's day."

Eye Man played guardian of the sacred pumpkin while Jocko squirmed through the fence. The metal plaits were rusted, nearly fingerthick, much stouter stuff than basic hurricane fencing. Supposedly you could run a semi into its embrace and not sweat about breaking on through to the other side. Jocko behaved as though the slit had always been there and he had always known about it—another fringe benefit of constantly being tuned into a station no one else could hear.

"Hey, Jocko, don't you think -"

Jocko twined his fingers in the diamonds of mesh and yawed into space, chains dangling. He shouted hey you fuckin' aaaassholles but the

flood of cars barreling onward below was too tight to notice him. He reeled back and extended his free hand through the gap in the fence. "Gimme." He meant the pumpkin.

"Jocko. Hey. Let's just book on outta here, huh?" Eye Man could see what Jocko could not: a metro LAPD unit awaiting the green signal at the offramp.

Jocko flared lividly. "Gimme the goddamn punkin, Eye Man, or I rip your fuckin' eyes out and stuff them up Gash's twat! Now!"

He knew Jocko well enough to know he'd have to rumble to keep the pumpkin. Then he thought, Fuck it. What the hell did they owe the civil order of Hollywood Boulevard? To stop now would be pussy. To stop was death. He handed over Jocko's prize and cocked his head in the direction of future threat. "Cops."

"Just gimme." The sickly yellow eyes acknowledged the warning, but Jocko swung back out, heedlessly, acting like a blood in a big hurry to finish a job. He began screaming at the traffic, dangling the pumpkin by its stalk, a deadly bomb waiting to hit a windshield and change everybody's day.

Now the drivers below paid attention. Some signaled, trying to veer from the target lane, the center northbound. Others just sped up, scooting into the dark safety of the overpass, avoiding another fleeting urban danger until another day.

Red, yellow, funeral black, mauve. They zipped past. Orange. The police car's yellow blinker was going like an impatiently tapping foot. Eye Man spotted an elderly Oriental gent halfway across the overpass on their side. The old man's eyes grew questioning beneath his hatbrirn. He was leaning precariously on a crooked walking stick, and his cautious pace faltered as he contemplated the potential harassment in his path. His narrow eyes collected the sight of Jocko, hanging one-handed, brandishing the pumpkin. He stopped where he was.

Eye Man felt the compression velocity of major shit backing up the pipe. The situation was already beyond control. He gave it a try anyway, reaching forward and up to ensnare Jocko's jacket, just as the police car turned toward them.

Jocko shrieked at Eye Man, then bellowed toward the cars, olive drab, cherry lacquer, sky cyan blue, metallic flake emerald. Blood flushed his face; pink mottling red. The streets were theirs, Jocko screeched, and they were everywhere, and a pumpkin was scary because it could fucking kill you. Eye Man got a firmer fistful of Jocko's jacket. It was an old Levi's coat minus sleeves, the rib seams split-latticed with several hundred safety pins. A downward-pointing triangle of dull green leather was stitched across the back like a shield, bordered in hex studs. Jocko's preferred bands were markered in—Minor Threat, Legion of Parasites, D.R.I.—and a wornout Asexuals sticker was pasted near his left kidney. Eye Man recalled each detail of the back of Jocko's jacket very well; when he tried to haul Jocko in, the poorly sewn leather tore loose and Jocko fell, pumpkin and all, still howling about how we fucking live here.

A loud, incoherent bray escaped Eye Man, his vision filling with the swatch of green leather as though it was ectoplasm. His lunge through the rent in the fence was determined, but ultimately lame. Jocko fell. Eye Man watched everything change, for everybody.

The pumpkin splattered the back gate of a tow truck, seeds and stringers and orange goo spraying for yards in every direction. The truck locked brakes and got bashed in the ass by a ghetto Caddy. White, blue, corroded gold. Orange and silver and more orange.

Jocko hit the blank pavement in cruciform and a Datsun longbed stewed to a sideways halt on top of him. It got broad-sided by a limousine late for an LAX pickup. Skidding radials slopped crimson graffiti across two entire lanes.

A Toyota Tercel with cardboard dealer tags kissed the limo's left passenger door at forty. A muscle Mustang spun out to evade and flipped against the concrete barricade, scattering chrome and bright sparks. It slid back into the exit lane on its side, tinted windows spider-webbing, steel grinding and twisting. After a bowling-pin pause it fell over to compact its roof and blow out the glass all around. A staved-in grille was scabbed with racing stripe by whirling fiberglass shrapnel. Surgical blue-gray meets candy-apple scarlet. A summer hail of safety glass flew in diamond cubes.

Spilled gasoline mingled with Jocko's blood. It was the color of pumpkin juice.

The overlapping symphony of collision merged into a nonstop fifteen-second wash of ugliness, sandblasting Eye Mail's ears. Only the woop-woop of the police siren pierced the while noise blast of wreckage. Eye Man saw Chaka and Rude and Lindabelle standing behind the Oriental gent, mouths unhinged, eyes overexposed and blank. The carnage had stuffed them all to bursting. Rude exploded and began yelling at the old man.

"An ambulance! Call an ambulance, you old fuck, Jocko's fucking hurt, what the fuck is wrong with you, CALL A FUCKING AMBULANCE!"

The old man recoiled, lost his footing, and stumbled, falling on his ass like a paper sack full of fragile vegetables. His eyes had gone so wide that his epicanthic folds seemed about to split. Eye Man imagined the slits tearing, the eyes brimming with blood. He saw fear in them, and panic, and incomprehension, but no blood.

Red.

The police flashers stabbed into Eye Man's brain. He reacted much as Rude had—bracing the first available adult and shouting about ambulances that Jocko no longer needed. The reply Eye Man got was a baton, introducing itself to his temple, and when he woke up

:.:

he was staring at Rude, thinking. Oh, jesus, he looks like he got the lungs kicked right outta him.

Somebody in the bullpen had ejaculated in Eye Man's unconsciously open mouth. He coughed up semisolid gunk and probed with his tongue. Through some miracle his teeth were all present, though scummier than ever.

When he could move, he leaned against Rude on a lower bunk. When he could stand, he rinsed out his mouth in the push-button sink above the gang toilet.

"You look like Franken-fucking-stein," he said when he saw Rude's gashed forehead.

"Car door. They bounced my skull off the hood a coupla times when they were patting me down. You got a helluva black eye, man. It goes all the way back to your fuckin' ear."

He touched, winced. "I can't see out of it."

Rude almost sniggered, but it obviously hurt. "Hm. Eye Man."

He was terrified at what irregularity his gingerly feeling fingers might trip over next. His upper lip was split and warm with new blood. He saw himself falling and striking the curbing. His face protested the strain of speech. He said something too mushy to decode.

Rude said, "Huh?"

Eye Man swallowed and tried again. "I said, he couldn't understand

You*"

"Who?"

"That old Chinese fart. You were yelling at him and he was scared green because he couldn't understand what you were saying. I don't think he could speak English." Eye Man's speech was lisping, with overlong pauses; a hard fight not to hurt.

"Cops thought I was assaulting him. Fuck. Stupid old fuck. This is America, goddamnit, why the fuck can't he fuckin' speak English?" "We speak it. We live here."

"We don't live fuckin' anywhere since we got kicked outta the Mecca. We got the Boulevard; that's it."

"S'what I mean."

Rude coughed and cushioned his head with his hands. "Chaka was talking about moving back in with her parents. They posted fuckin' xeroxes of her yearbook picture, can you believe that? Our lost widdle girl. Doesn't look nothing like her."

"It's not her," said Eye Man. "Did she leave?"

"Don't fuckin' ask ine, Holmes, I got to this fuckin' bridal suite the same time you did."

"Uh. Which reminds me. Which one of these scumbags needs broken bones in his life?" Eye Man could still taste the semen, sitting at the back of his throat like tartar sauce. Together he and Rude surveyed the bullpen's catch of the day: semiconscious drunks, overripe derelicts, Santa Monica vags and butt buddies, two or three iron-pumping chicanos and blacks, broadcasting bad. A groid with whitehead pustules all over his face grinned at them. Later that night, once he fell asleep under one of the bunks, Rude and Eye Man pounded the shit out of him, ramming his grin into the steel toilet rim until most of his teeth were out. Eye Man kicked him in the balls until blood soaked the crotch of his pants. Next morning, everyone swore the son of a bitch slipped and fell on his way to take a dump.

A month later, after the narrative got straightened out for everybody, Eye Man had forgotten the groid. The memory was always blotted out by the image of Jocko's blood, staining the ioi forever.

Hallowe'en made Eye Man feel suicidal. Jocko's distorted grin lived in every jack-o'-lantern. He could smell Jocko's blood in every pumpkin pie.

Past jail, fury rode in often and senselessly. Fuck the Dead Kennedys; Eye Man wanted to break a face. Dying young was a bottom line of the punk credo, but this was just too goddamn stupid. Anger and confusion went from bubble to boil, and tiny things, stupid things like rage, began to oscillate.

Eye Man aimed a pointless swing at Rude and Rude broke his nose. He would see Rude one more time in his life.

Sitting in the waiting room of Citizens' Medical Group, holding a wad of toilet tissue to his blood-caked nostrils, Eye Man told Lindahelle to write his name on the medical history form as Isadore Armitage.

Lindabelle was the only one who saw fit to help him. She sheltered him from the contemptuous stares of citizens and stole away the bite of ostracism. At the doctor's, they talked. They were not people of words, and words came painfully, aural witness to the erosion and decay that had rent their unity and stolen their strength.

Kicked out of their Mecca, they were dinosaurs, disaffiliates in Yuppieland. Adaptation was the remaining option. The antibodies were too lethal, and they were too weak. Jocko was no longer around to infuse them with psychotic pep talk and rowdy vinegar.

Four weeks after Eye Man's nose was treated, Lindabelle was humping the seven-to-three shift at Donut Stop. Isadore—Izzy—decided he had logged enough hours sleeping on bare floors and living on starch. He took on Exxon by the tiger tail. He larded his spiky flattop with Lindabelle's styling mousse and raked it straight back. Thus was he qualified for the idiot work of collecting petrodollars through bulletproof Plexiglas and hosing down the lot after midnight. He jumped to a graveyard stocking shift at the Mayfair Market. The pay was shit but the food came free. For this, he had to wear a knit tie. By pooling their incomes, he and Lindabelle could swing renting half of a stuccoed duplex, in a courtyard that had stood right on the border to West Hollywood since the early forties. West Hollywood was now a city with its own mayor. Two useful features of the apartment were walls and a ceiling. It also had hazardously antiquated wiring, more coats of paint on a single door than Izzy thought possible, baby roaches, and the best bathroom either of them had used regularly in nine years. All over Hollywood, houses were being demolished as a part of a bogus "rezoning" project, which meant that local politicos had been heavily buttered and blown. Sprouting from the wreckage were buildings that Izzy thought resembled cellblocks, even down to the uniformed lobby guards—flashy, incredibly shoddy, prohibitively expensive. They ganged up on the stubborn homes that remained and intimidated them into rubble, until the shoulder-to-shoulder cheeseboxes formed concrete canyons, their walls ten feet from the next building. Like Beachwood Drive.

Tiny Naylor's, Schwab's, and the Brown Derby had all shut down and faded into the ghost landscape of nostalgia. Then the Seven Seas had vanished, then the Mecca. Migration would again become imminent for Izzy and Lindabelle just as soon as their Ukrainian landlord got an opportunity to sell out to the developers.

Their first common private bed was a foam pad, their next, a secondhand queensized that squeaked hellaciously. They treated the noise as a rueful joke, adapting. Lindabelle threw out the diaphragm she'd been using since fifteen and got fitted for a replacement. On Thanksgiving, right in the middle of the Twilight Zone Marathon on Channel 5, she announced her second accidental pregnancy and ruined the rerun of "A World of His Own" for Izzy.

Several weeks following her abortion, some airheaded zealot firebombed the Feminist Women's Health Center and another piece of the Boulevard evaporated forever. In the same issue of the Times that broke the arson story, Izzy found the article on Gash's murder, page four.

Poor, fat Gash—real name, Ariel Dixon—had fled into the flesh trade on the east end of Sunset, where white meat was more in demand

by the black, Hispanic, and Korean constituency. She was found with a baseball bat stuffed into her vagina, fat end first. Hemorrhage and trauma had sung the end. Her blood had been used to smear crudities and anatomical funnies on three of the motel room's four cinderblock walls.

Izzy recognized Jocko's signature graffito immediately. A few days later he saw it again—this time in silver spray paint, on the back wall of their duplex.

Crystal-clear paranoia engulfed them both to the roots of their hair. Soon Strongheart was banging on their door with Rude's Ghost of Jocko theory. Eye Man and Lindabelle had ceased to exist for Rude, but Strongheart was much more frightened. Things kept on a-changin It was almost funny: who ya gonna call?

Not the police. The police could not resolve this. Izzy and Linda-belle had learned via harsh play-by-play that the police were never a

solution to anything. You won if you got the cops to ignore you. You von by fading into the cityscape, by becoming invisible. If they noticed you or had to spend their time on you, the booby prize was bars and hassle and little injuries that could linger for a lifetime, like the fucked vision Izzy retained in one eye until the day he died.

After Strongheart's had news, Izzy started walking Lindabelle to and from work, head snapping around at each suspect noise. He wondered suspiciously why payphones waited until his passage to ring by themselves. Soon he was grabbing up the empty receivers. "Jocko ... ?"

He stockpiled memories of Lindabelle's voice, her freckles, the sweep of her curly hair, the shape of her aureola, the sheathed-sword embrace of her cunt on his cock ... just in case she was soon to be stolen.

Strongheart paid another call, even more malignantly broken out than usual in nervous fear. Stubble battled with zits for dominance of his facial real estate. Nobby, he told Izzy in a quavering voice, was in the hospital. Rude was in the morgue.

Death did not alter Rude's complexion; slab fluorescents lent him more color than he'd ever nurtured while breathing. He'd been joyriding to Garden Grove in an Oldsmobile full of punks, following a Mentors gig at the Music Machine. For reasons never pinpointed, the Olds had somersaulted on the southbound ioi. An unanchored tape deck playing a Circle Jerks bootleg had bashed a divot from Rude's crossthatch and scooped out half a cup of brains. Blond, dye green, crusted maroon, bone white. Izzy could not stare at the mangled head for long. Hydrostatic pressure had popped out Rude's clearwater eyes.

The deathmobile had belonged to some pal of Nobby's. Rude had made Nobby sit in the back. It probably saved his life. For now, added Strongheart, jumpy as hell.

When Izzy saw the tattoo, he vomited into the drains on the stainless-steel slab. It had risen across Rude's bare chest in yellow-rimmed violet, the bas relief of a subdermal hemorrhage. It was the second time Izzy had seen it scripted in blood, and it was an ideogram he had come to hate.

Strongheart and Nobby swapped gunshy estimates and struggled to recapture the lost warmth of camaraderie. Nobby agreed that prior to the accident, he, too, had seen Jocko's graffito all over the Boulevard—on mailboxes, defacing RTD buses (and wasn't that an ironic vengeance?), across the blank, dusty windows of closed-down storefronts. Nobby had been ducking ringing payphones just as long as Izzy had. He announced his strategy to hop the next Greyhound for his stepbrother's tract home near Yellow Springs, Ohio, just as soon as he got out of the hospital.

By now Chaka was gone, too. No forwarding address.

Strongheart had discovered Jocko's tag filling a vacant star on Vine Street. Guess where. He had a hammer, and was venturing up there late at night to eradicate the original Strongheart ... before Jocko got a chance to do it his way.

That was when Izzy figured it out.

"Lemme see your driver's license," he said to Lindabelle. He fixed on it the way you triumphantly look at the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle. "Jocko has no reason to come back and bump us off, Strongheart. We're already dead."

Nobby hated mystery. He had bravely bulled over to the confab at Izzy's apartment on crutches. "What the fuck are you talking about?" he said, whining nasally.

"You want to run to Yellow Springs." He turned to Strongheart. "You want to smash Strongheart's star to gravel and you don't even know who Strongheart fucking was."

He tapped the license. "Lindabelle has become this person here." It listed her as Linda Kassia MacGuire. "Rude and Gash flamed out. It happens. Who knows about Chaka? Maybe she did move back in with her parents. I say she became the girl in the yearbook photo again. And me—I stopped being the Eye Man when Rude busted my nose. The only one of us who could never change was Jocko. He belonged to the fucking Boulevard. And look at us now. Just fucking look at us. What a gang of weasel-dicks."

This was too much input for Nobby to track. He sat between his crutches and fidgeted, rubbing his palms compulsively against his knees. Strongheart grew more pitiful, like a dog that knows the shame of bigtime fuckery.

lzzy sighed. Once they had all been linked, unified, powerful. "Look—have you guys seen Jocko's mark anywhere but around the Boulevard?"

No, all around. They still didn't get it.

They could all run, sure. The farther they went, the faster they'd die, shedding their former personae like snake shuckings. The thing that had defined their existence as Boulevard punks had been Jocko, and Jocko had selfishly given the finger to the sentiment that said you couldn't take it with you. That part of each of them had accompanied Jocko right into the fundament of the Boulevard.

To stop was death. But death was not a monster movie, spooks on vendetta, slicing and dicing fornicating teens thirteen interesting ways. Death was when you turned into nothing. That brand of death had yellowed Jocko's eyes ever since the bus had dented his head. Or maybe Rude had fractured Jocko's skull; Izzy remembered the nosebleed.

Either way, Jocko had smelled oncoming oblivion, and despite the punk party stance of nihilism and apocalypse, had said no thanks. He had shied from becoming nothing. Jocko never eased up; never wanted to. He always swam farther out than any of them—fucking Gash, snorting corrosives, yelling loudest, swaggering broadest, bleeding most, passing out in his own shit and puke and never ever calming from full burn. His mark was the most flamboyant. He had been enough of an egomaniac to resent becoming nothing.

If Nobby could blow off about Jocko's ghost, then Izzy felt entitled to his own theory, even if everyone was going to whizz on it.

"I think Jocko wants his, uh, presence felt," Strongheart said after an itchy silence among them.

"Oh, great," said Nobby. "So he sends us greeting cards by wiping out Gash and Rude:'

"I know a lot of people who died," said Lindabelle. "I always thought that if they turned into ghosts, or if there was anything after, your friends would let you know. They'd tell you there was more. You know?"

Izzy thought again of the ringing payphones. Nahh. Jocko would never call.

Nobby squirmed. He didn't cotton to any of this. "So why hasn't Jocko let us know? Why all this haunted-house bullshit—his mark all over everything? Why doesn't he just fucking say so?" His voice veered up into a bitchy-mommy caricature: You never call, you never write, I never know where you are.

"Maybe he has let us know," Izzy said. "Maybe he's screaming his head off. Maybe we just can't speak his new language." He flashed back to the petrified Oriental gent on the overpass. Rude had told him, loud, blatantly—but no message had copied through.

"I want to do the Boulevard tonight," Izzy said. "Nobby, can you get your stuff and meet us at the Chinese?"

"No strain" Nobby grumped. "I hope."

Izzy bit off setting a rendezvous time; that was just too-too fucking adult. Nobby could beard a PMS and check his Timex if he wanted to synchronize that much.

Strongheart scratched his four-day growth, cautious to avoid fresh pimples, ducking from potential pain. He was still punked out. His changes had been interior.

It hurt Izzy to see how dusty his own regalia had gotten in the closet, so quickly. A scream. As the trio walked up La Brea, he had to avoid the conscious impulse to put his arm around Lindabelle, or hold her hand, or some other happy bourgeois bullshit.

The Mecca lot was alive with transplanted green turf and enclosed by hurricane fencing. A garish billboard proclaimed the birth of yet another mini-mall, with deco fountains and pastel and high prices and an automat cinema with six teeny screens, count 'em. Strongheart frowned and took a piss through the fence. Somebody in a passing convertible whistled. Big fucking deal.

Everywhere, graffiti.

Not only did Izzy rarely see others inscribing it, but he could not recall seeing for a second time stuff he had painted himself. At least, he never noticed it after he did it. Your eye tuned out the messages all around you. It was a filter, like the dead-ahead stare of seasoned Boulevard pedestrians. Izzy was well versed in the barrier such a stare erected. You locked eyes with no one, except to challenge, to stare down. No eye contact meant no handouts, no change to be spared. Anybody who bummed coin learned not to bother with such a stare, just as those who cultivated it ultimately did not see whoever was asking. They were there—but they did not exist. The multiform graffiti was there, omnipresent, but no one ever saw it, except for cleanup crews at election time. Those who saw it could not understand. Izzy wondered if it was even worse in New York.

He felt he heard voices all around him, jabbering some highspeed foreign gobble. It was deafening to him.

Straights stared, as usual, blubber-lipped, with the eyes of gila monsters.

Nobby did not bother to show up.

Izzy held his head to still the chorus only he could hear, then said, "Notice?"

Lindahelle's expression said huh? Strongheart spooked, was still looking around for Nobby's runty little hod.

"We haven't seen Jocko's sign once during the whole walk up here."

Strongheart got thrilled. "Yeah. Yeah! Right!" He nodded enthusiastically, mohawk bobbling, his face made even more hideous by his goofy grin. "So?"

"So." Izzy grinned savagely and fast-drew a spray can of paint from the dusty depths of his trenchcoat. "So." He strode through the clots of footprint-oglers in the forecourt of the Chinese and stopped at the cement fistprints of the Duke himself. Jocko was going to love this. "So."

Lindabelle tried to block a laugh of surprise from jumping past her mouth. No go.

Izzy preselected the tourist most likely to protest vandalism, and cut him off. "Fuck with me, stud, and I'm gonna hurtcha." He smiled, big, broad, and friendly.

Then he painted Jocko's mark right over John Wayne's remedial cursive scrawl.

The oldest doorman at Mann's Chinese (formerly Grauman's; everything changes) is named Franklin. He migrates to pursuits at other Boulevard theatres, but always returns to the forecourt, to stand sentry at the main doors, and tear tickets (they're dot-matrix slips of silver register paper, now), and direct the attention of tourists to the souvenir books and maps itemizing the Walk of the Stars. He wears a brocaded scarlet coat and a doorman's cap. He once packed a CO2 pellet pistol to work for the purpose of plugging, quote, "the goddamn sonsabitching pigeons" that roost in the eaves of the forecourt and occasionally soil the postcard-perfect tableau with fresh alabaster feces. Management swiftly terminated Franklin's unusual demonstration of his half-century devotion to the Chinese. They informed Franklin—nicely, since there was no clean way to cashier the old hard-on—that shooting at pigeons in the forecourt might not be such a great idea. Franklin protested, "But I got one, I got one of 'em!" He resented being addressed like a child or a mental defective.

From his post, Franklin saw Izzy add to the forecourt's roster. He hid a private smile much like Lindabelle's.

"So" Izzy said to Strongheart. "You hangin' here?"

Strorigheart spot-checked the tourist flow. The north curb was lined with buses, tip to tail, all the way to Orchid. Japanese tour groups were being herded toward one of the few remaining bastilles of a Hollywood that had existed before rock and roll, or AIDS, or Pruneface Ronny. Or punks.

"I'm gonna stay here a bit," Strongheart said. His comprehension ran no deeper than an antisocial appreciation of Izzy's improvised forecourt ritual. "You just gonna cruise, or ... ?"

"As far as the overpass," said Lindabelle, catching on. She elbowed the spray can in Izzy's coat pocket. It clinked.

"Watch for us," Izzy said.

"I'll do that."

Strongheart saw them off with a tight grin that sat across the bottom of his face like a scar. Then he posed, with foreigners whose names he would never know, for snapshots he would never glimpse, communicating with grand, cartoon gestures, since nobody had the faintest idea of what anybody else was really saying.

Before Izzy and Lindabelle got back, he had earned an unprecedented seventeen bucks.

BLOOD RAPE OF THE LUST GHOULS

Hackamore decided that the crepuscular boobs who formed the mainstay readership of Cineteratologist ("THE review of sleaze, splatter, and hardcore gore!") would never flash on the meaning of his latest metaphor. So he crossed it out. The line The latest steaming shitciod swept from the Augean stables of the stalk-and-slash ghetto was obliterated by indelible red ink that blotted into the crossgrain of his cheapo typing paper just like

Nah. Too predictable.

Hackarnore's big brag was that he could crank out such florid wordage while being, for all practical purposes, asleep. His reputation was solely inside his skullpan, but his own religious appreciation of the power of hype inspired him to push this self-invented bit of badboy promotion to its outer limit whenever he could capture a willing ear. Right now he was doing what he fancied he did best.

Beside his typewriter, the roach had ceased to smolder in its Disneyland ashtray. There were two fingers of juice left in his second bottle of Beck's Dark. Hackamore was on full autopilot.

MegaProd's newest excretion

Shorter, better. The upfront mention of MegaProductions tipped the hand that the reader should gird his bowels for a punch-press ream-out of yet another cinematic stinkeroo. Grinning, Hackamore chugged the dregs of lukewarm foam from the Beck's bottle. He was gearing up to unleash a big one.

His formula for movie reviewing was so ingrained and inflexible that he looked forward to the day when it could become software, a template. To the prefab screed shat forth by the printer, he could insert his around-the-bend adjectives and apocalyptic similes.

The glacier slowness of this puke-em-up crab crawler stri ctly for retards, sexual geeks, and anybody who reads this magazine/bigger floppola than Dolly Parton's left bazoomba/ rather eat a maggoty afterbirth than suffer five seconds of this rabid porcupine diarrhea/should be melted down into guitar picks for the Butthole Surfers/visual AIDS/a gross, crass, no-class, exploitative loser...

He beamed. Thumbed his steel-rims past the bump on the bridge of his nose. And began to do it all over MegaProd's latest excretion, a timeless chunk of celluloid history titled Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls. It had played on the bottom of a triple-header bill.

The first feature had been the cheesy 198I sci-fi flick Siphyloid ("Once it was HUMAN!"), recut so the alien gross-out scenes had been replaced with softcore sex. New title: Blown to Smithereens. It blew, all right. But it didn't merit two bad reviews; Hackamore had already chewed that burger once. Next on the menu had come Chainsaw Cheerleaders II—not a bonafide sequel, but another in a limitless slew of Italian zombie gorefests that masqueraded behind Anglicized titles to guarantee a fast and dirty box-office turnover. This power dose of tits'n'guts was now "framed" by domestically shot and clumsily mismatched new footage featuring Lydia Weir, ex- Chainsaw Cheerleader (and currently bloated gasbag has-been jailbait ingenue, scrounging for coke money). As Cineteratologist informed its public: "She flashes some pallid meat to provide a teaser and tag for seventy solid minutes of hilariously dubbed and totally nonsensical carnage." Hackamore had called it "a burst dyke of unrelenting abattoir slaughter!"

Hackamore knew these things.

Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls was the only movie of the trio worth stabbing with his critical quill. Hollywood Boulevard offered only one theatre where the discriminating cinemaphile might catch three presentations of such caliber at a buck per flick—the World. It had calmed somewhat from the bad old days when armed police prowled the aisles, weapons and cuffs clinking in the darkness as some horror quickie bimbette got her throat opened up in Cinemascope. The snoring junkies and gang scruffs who came to slice up the seats and each other had migrated. The hypejive black dudes, the ons who always argued loud and long with the characters onscreen, still paid to do their thing. But you could find them and their brothers in any other theatre on either side of the Boulevard.

Its raunchy past glory was not what made the World special to Hackamore. It was a magical sanctuary. It was the one place his wife would never follow him, not after she'd blown a Quarter Pounder (with cheese) all over his Reeboks during the third reel of Embryo Suckers. The World had thus been baptized as sanctified turf Whenever Hackamore invoked the name of the place, Chloe reacted like a vampire with a crucifix up its ass. They had both sworn never again ... in different directions. In that instant their marital battle lines had been sketched in. Polarization had begun.

Under an impossible deadline, ducking salvo after salvo from Chloe, he had fled to the World, where Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls waited. He'd hated it going in. Corning out, he wanted to fuck it till it bled. A dynamite followup to his revised opening line—MegaProd's newest excretion—had concretized in his mind when Chloe interrupted, booting open the door and stealing another tiny chunk of his creativity, his palsied career, his cut-rate soul, his life.

"Aren't you done with that shit yet?"

Whatever marginal prettiness she had once possessed had been lost in the war—the determinedly grim battle to rope Hackamore into wedlock (as she had been humorlessly trained to do throughout her entire youth), then forge him into her parents' repressed ideal of a responsible hubby via some calculatedly accidental breeding. Three years of the rhythm method, two children, a sand-dune of bills, and many lifetimes of bitching later, the battle lines were inked in. Then etched in granite.

Chloe had the haunted look of a woman betrayed, one who had hitched her wagon to a falling meteor. Now her plain face looked horsey, punched-in, and sallow. For revenge, she extracted Hackamore's blood as often as she could, jerking his chain with an infantile, though sadistically smug kind of glee.

"You've been sitting on your ass watching stupid gore films all day—while I've been watching Ernie and Waldo since sunup!"

What passed between them telepathically was so familiar it did not require vocalization. Her tone, and the way she sneered words, were the incoming buzz bombs of the latest skirmshh. Hackamore internalized their sting. If he let her see him react, or bristle at her snide bait, she'd score points.

"I'm working. Give me an uninterrupted hour, and I'll take over." There was just a hint of threat in his response. He was dead set against letting her win.

"Working. Tch."

He emptied his lungs in a huge sigh and, with that breath, lost the words in his head. The encyclopedia of resentment in Chloe's whine caused his fingers to flinch back from the typewriter keys. She'd scored first, by stopping his work. He turned in his chair, so they could have at each other face-to. Little Ernie was clutching her green rayon stretch pants for support, his thumb plugged into his face, his china blue eyes bright with fear. Baby Waldo was crooked into one full and sagging breast, smack between a broad, wet patch in the armpit of Chloe's T-shirt and a nipple that aimed at the floor, just like its partner. Her breasts had mutated into pendulant udders while no one was looking.

"Working is when you wake up at a decent hour in the morning, and take a shower and get in the car and punch a clock and get a paycheck every two weeks, like normal people:' she spat angrily. She'd been rehearsing. "Working is having a regular job, and earning enough money to have a goddamn car in the first place—"

With bowed shoulders, he rode out this hailstorm, not rising from his chair because that would provoke her into physical vituperation ("Bald spot! Beanpole! Adam's apple looks like ya swallowed a baseball!"). Or she'd start hurling his stuff around. He let her rage out, and when she started to splutter, he gave her three beats, then overrode.

"Oh, it's the 'get a real job' rap again. Why don't you regurgitate it while I step out for a beer? Call me if you come up with anything new. Be a drone, that's what you're, saying, right, Chloe? Like your brother Malcolm, the no-accountant. Like that fat, flatulent frog who says he's your father." That froze her tirade in mid-rant. Hackamore had been rehearsing, as well. "What you're saying is fuck my career, if it means you have to do without a Toyota and a Trinitron. Am I warm? I told you before—you want a real job, hoist your expanding ass out onto the bricks and snare one. I'll watch the kids. They sleep, they play, they watch cartoons, they help me type. No problem."

This was not the correct answer. Chloe flushed scarlet, her mouth turning mean, her eyes backing darkly into her brow. "You're the husband! You're supposed to support the family! I'm doing my job! I'm raising your children!"

"So, why are you pestering me about watching the kids, if that's your job?" He smiled. It was the calmness and logic she hated most of all.

"Oh, grow up!" She was copping out, slapping on her Patented Chloe Attitude. "Be real. Be normal for a change!"

"Fuck normal." He dredged up his "why fight" expression, then cut her some ceremonial slack. "Chloe, just hang on, all right? Trust me." He held up a thumb and forefinger "I'm this far from the managing editorship of Gnteratolo -"

"Oh,fuck Kreuger and his stupid fucking magazine," she said with a lemon-sucking smile, showing him the middle finger of her free hand. Ernie started howling. Waldo seemed stunned into baby catatonia, half-smothered by the shapeless pillow of his mom's boob. When Chloe turned vulgar, it meant she was preparing to huff offscreen after slamming the door. "Fuck your stupid fucking gore movies!" She gave the birdie to the poster of Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls Hackamore had thurnbtacked to the wall after getting the presskit. "And fuck that stupid fucking writing that never fucking pays!"

Hackamore's control nearly snapped. "Think you can use the word fuck one more time, sweetums?"

"AND FUCK YOU!" she shrieked, in full livid flower now. Slam! Hackamore heard paint flakes and pieces of the door molding sift down. From without came Ernie's best banshee wail. The kid was bugeyed with terror by now.

Hackamore turned back to his typewriter. As Chloe had blossomed into anger, so had his headache as well, with regular thudding, one-two jabs to each temple. His neck muscles were grinding cement. His verve had been bled away, and Chloe's voice hung in the room like a vindictive ghost, telling him what a gross, crass, no-class, exploitative loser he was. He kneaded his eyelids, trying at least to distribute the pain evenly, and when he refocused he was staring at the poster, into the six-inch, dripping Day-Glo lettering: Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls. Softly, he cursed, his brain fighting to ignore the, adrenaline-spiking argument that waited to ambush him beyond the slammed door. It had to cease to exist in order for him to concentrate.

C'mon, he thought, c'mon, the movie was crap, they're all crap, you can reel out this review on automatic, you can rip out Blood Rape's heart without even looking

The poster depicted a skull-faced, rotting goon with one eye dangling from a pink stalk of ligament. Its decaying fist was oversized, in forced perspective, holding a shredded bikini top. Blood drooled from every likely orifice, and gobbets of glistening brown stuff webbed its fingers and were stuck in its broken teeth. Behind the goon, the tilting headstones of a hillside cemetery were silhouetted by a bilious full moon, and a nude cutie cowered in the middle distance, the R-rated bits of her anatomy artfully concealed by the configurations of a grave marker topped by a Star of David. Subtle, thought Hackamore. A masterpiece of lowbrow exploitation hog-calling. It inspired the closing line for his review: But for sleaze fans, it's got a great poster.

That was perfect—just the right amount of chic contempt. Get the one-sheet, forget the film, it said. Hackamore knew it was an insult from which he could work backward. He had written reviews inside-out before. Now to zero-in and annihilate each of the film's flaws, piecemeal.

The imbecilic ending, for one thing. Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls was another in a tediously long line of films that inserted an eleventh-hour kneejerk routine—a last-minute shock to make audiences jump. The effect was illogical, irrelevant to the preceding plot, and totally galvanic. In this case, Hackamore recalled, the Lust Ghouls had all been fricasseed in the morgue fire. The teen hero and his plucky bimbo squeeze had retired to the backseat of his GTO to drop trou and, in Chloe's words, get normal. There followed a quick cut to a rain-slicked alley and a character not seen earlier in the film. He's being stalked, he knows it, and he turns full face into the camera just in time to eat a gutturally razzing chainsaw. Pop to black; roll end credits.

The animals in attendance at the World had jumped on cue. The schlock shock had poked them, and they'd jumped—those that were not already asleep, unconscious, or beyond reality altogether. Stupid!

Hackamore channeled his seething frustration into his writeup, chopping and slicing and dicing the movie into helpless, bleeding chunks, then chasing the chunks around until even the most fleeting, accidental shot of the boom microphone could not escape unskewered. It was gore writing, sort of. It was the brand of relentless napalm attack he thought made him popular with the readers of Cineteratologist (by definition, "a student of the cinema of malforms, monsters, and dcviates quoth Kreuger, who was probably the ultimate fleapit weirdo).

Hackamore sat back and regarded his completed opening zinger: MegaProd's newest excretion, a nwgaturd entitled Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls, is a cinema coprophiliac's delight—this movie eats shit, and if you enjoy similar gustatory pursuits, you'll 'gasm over this ninety-two-minute spree of muff-diving zombie cannibals, tombstone-humping T&A inicrocephalics, and thu nk-spewing graphic mutilation.

Glowing inside now, Chloe exiled to a cold back burner of his mind, Hackamore leaned back in his chair to pat the poster that leered at him from the wall. Nice victim.

When his hand sank into the poster halfway to the elbow, he yelped and jerked it back out. His chair upended, introducing his butt to the hardwood floor with an ungainly thump.

He slammed his eyes shut; struggled to force his raging heartbeat into deceleration. When he stood, his knees were watery and knocking. He shook his head. He had to go easier on the damned imported beer.

It was okay; nothing had really happened.

He squared off with the poster loose-jointedly, like a gunslinger fixing to make some slow-draw schmuck bite the hardpan. Blood Rape's

goon leered back, unchanged. "Awright, pilgrim," he drawled, "let's see you try that one again." He was cocky now, goofy and amused in that silly-slow way good dope could leave you sometimes.

He pushed his arm right through the center of the goon's chest—zip! No resistance. No ectoplasmic goop, either. He reached in until his elbow was gone, and waved his hand around in a void he could not see. Cool air moved past his fingers. He withdrew his hand intact. It was like a very good special effect; no matte lines.

A pressure-valve laugh jumped out of him, sharp and sudden, like a bark. He stifled it. It would not do to have Chloe barging in while he was feeling up another dimension, or marveling with the sort of lopsided smile he saw most on those walking lobotomies who were bussed to visit the zoo in gangs. But for once his vast repository of words had failed him. Confronted with this overwhelming cosmic surprise, all he could find to say was, "Shiiiiiit..."

This was some unique poster, he decided.

He thought of shoving in a broom, or maybe his Polaroid. No. Chloe had already squandered the film on twenty sugar-cute shots of Waldo with his bare rump in the air. A broom or probe was not required yet; so far the poster hadn't done anything hostile. He reinserted his hand, finger-deep, tracing the inside border of the poster all

the way around, to see whether this was some kind of 4-D gap that might contract shut when he wasn't looking and snip his head off, or worse.

Nope. The access, the hole, the void was exactly the same size as the poster.

He knew what came next. He had to see; why wait? And what could possibly be more important?

He packed in a deep breath and breached his hands against the wall on either side of the poster. As his insides gave a rollercoaster horripilation, he leaned forward and penetrated headfirst, right above the dripping Blood Rape logo.

His hands trembled, threatening to dump him. He had to dare himself to pull his eyes open.

What he saw was mundane. But he was so astonished, he felt certain he might faint for the first time in his life, to hang limply, half-in and half-out. What a hoot that would be.

He was looking into a neatly ordered, pastel-coordinated bedroom. By itself, it was unremarkable. But Hackamore had hung the poster on

an exterior wall, and knew that the only thing on the other side of that wall, back in his world, was a five-story drop into the apartment building's collection of trash dumpsters.

He caught his breath. There was Earth-type air in this bedroom, spicy with the lingering suggestion of some bottled scent. There was also a double king-sized bed, covered with a bulky, salmon-colored comforter. A cedar chest stood at the footboard, near a matching antique rocking chair and hassock. There was a vanity with an oval mirror, an escritoire and a dresser and end tables in matched oak. Gallery prints hung framed in stainless steel, under soft, indirect lighting. The carpeting was lustrous brown, with the rich nap agitated in the traffic areas. The whole arrangement looked quite expensive and comfy.

Tilting his head, he noticed a full-length mirror that hung on the back of a half-open closet door. In it, he could see his head protruding from a poster of Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls that hung, somewhat incongruously, on the bedroom wall. He made a face at himself. It was for real.

Air shifted around his face and he heard a door close in an adjacent room: That was enough to freak him into yanking his head swiftly back. He plopped on his ass again, jaw hanging unhinged, metabolism whacking away, his brain pulsing, literally throbbing with excitement.

Quickly, he scanned around his office and when he spotted the pewter stein on his desk, he leaped for it, dumping its cargo of pencils, inkless pens, X-Acto knives, and erasers onto the floor. He used the edge of his sweatshirt to polish the smudges from both sides of the stein's glass bottom, then bounded hack to the poster. He inserted the base of the stein near the bottom line of movie credits, at a depth of about an inch, gently, as though trying not to ripple the surface of a pond. It slid silently through. Then he put his eye to it.

Hackamore gaped.

Strolling into the pastel bedroom was a gorgeous woman with ash-blonde hair that fell well below her shoulder blades. She was sheathed inside a clingy, diaphanous thing that was slit to show off traffic-stopping legs, and curved upward to model modest but perfect breasts. She glided through the room gracefully, and Hackamore imagined her scent as she moved. Her eyes were deep brown and serious, her face darkly complexioned, which made the contrast with her nearly snow-white hair more startling and stimulating. She pulled off a pair of crystal drop earrings, toed away her heels, and stopped to assess herself in the mirror. While Hackamore felt the jig would be up any second, she did not give any indication of noticing his spyglass, though she eyed the poster several times with marked distaste. The ambient light was quite dim; he was probably safe. He watched her shrug at her reflection, then pull a drawstring; the dress unfurled around her and she hung it in the closet. Halfway to the bed she kicked out of a pair of gossamer panties that were almost invisible. Hackamore gulped and nearly dropped his stein through to the other side. Then the mystery woman laid back on the downy comforter and began doing things to herself with a tiny amber bottle of hash oil and a couple of mechanical devices that made Hackamore acutely conscious of the sudden lack of maneuvering room inside his jockey shorts.

Crazily, he wondered if all the presskit recipients had gotten a poster like this one.

The woman petrified, like a cat on alert status. A man entered the room. They commenced a vigorous argument Hackamore could not overhear. He stared. He stared at the man because the man was him.

The naked beauty on the bed was arguing with another Hackamore. Same build, identical male-pattern baldness, equal six-plus height, and equally protuberant-Adam's apple. Hackamore recognized the way the veins on his forehead bulged redly when he was ticked off.

It was like watching a movie starring himself, and he'd seen enough plot twists like this one to extrapolate what came next. The poster was not just a fluke that permitted convenient crosstown voyeurism. He wasn't looking into some other apartment. He was looking into his apartment, in some parallel plane where everything was a ninety-nine-percent matchup except for his Miami Vice wardrobe, his sumptuous digs, and his centerfold-girl cohabitant.

In all likelihood, an enormous bank balance was waiting for him on the other side of Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls.

The moment Hackamore realized this was transcendent. He was at a unique pinnacle of bliss and excitement; it was the high point of his life. And he knew it. Most mortals saw the peaks of their lives only in retrospect. But here, now, Hackamore held his entire future in his hands ... and had a pretty good idea what to do with it.

Naturally, this was the moment that Chloe kicked open the door and commenced fire while Hackamore was still glued to the wall, pulling his prong.

Just as naturally, Hackamore executed the first thought that came to his mind. And Chloe.

It happened so blindingly fast, he automatically thought SMASH CUT TO TWISTED CORPSE.

She bled a lot. It seemed absurd and unfair that she should bleed so much, ruining the floor and splattering everything within range. If he had done her with an electric carving knife, or a straight razor, or a chainsaw, then yes, you'd expect the sweet red stuff to fly by the gallon. But he'd only hit her once with the stein. A semicircular dent embossed her noggin. When the glass bottom of the stein had shattered, it had opened up all her scalp veins and freed the rain of blood.

Chloe was dead dead dead, as Ernie would have burbled.

The spreading blood had soaked her T-shirt logo to unreadability. It was one of Hackamore's shirts, and he knew it said MASTER in big yellow letters. When he stepped over her, a throw rug squished. He saw the cottage cheese of her butt against the taut stretch pants and thought, christ, she must run to two hundred and ten pounds. If he'd killed one of the kids, at least they'd be easier to move.

Two hundred methods for disposing of Chloe's corpse slid through Hackamore's brain, and all of them were from gore movies he'd reviewed. One of his favorites was from Piece by Piece, in which a fitness nut stuffed his wife's flesh down the disposal, her bones in the trash compacter, and her organs into the Cuisinart, to be frappeed into high-protein milkshakes. But Hackamore had no such kitchen toys, and just taking the body anywhere without a car would be a major production.

And why bother? The thought intruded and pushed other considerations aside. Why bother, when the kids were asleep and nobody else knew the poster was hanging there like a big blinking arrow reading THIS WAY our?

Why bother? With such a tasty option, there was no time for Chloe or the kids. Not when he was savoring the thought of giving his overdressed alter ego a healthy shove through the poster in the opposite direction. He could sprawl on top of Chloe and take the rap while Hackamore was busy ripping the poster from the bedroom wall. The guy didn't know how good he had it; why not give him a taste of being real, being normal?

Hackamore stepped over Chloe (squish) and edged up on the poster. The goon still grimaced. The cutie cringed. He poked his nose and eyes through, to reconnoiter. The pastel bedroom was empty. The salmon comforter was still rumpled from where the blonde had been grinding toward ecstasy.

He leaned in a bit further, and listened. No voices. He pulled out and looked again at Chloe. No contest. When he saw her, the only thing he felt was vague dissatisfaction at her caved-in skull. It didn't look real enough.

He clicked off his desk lamp, exhaled his last breath in this unsatisfactory world, and stepped through.

The pain was unexpected, but it was not exactly pain. Passing through the dimensional portal was shivery, uncomfortable, as if a magician had stripped his underwear free while leaving his outer clothing unmolested. His intestinal pipework fluttered.

He pulled his right leg the rest of the way through and stood, apparently intact, in the pastel bedroom. It was cool and dark and the blonde's fragrance still teased the air. On the wall behind him was the poster from Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls, so out of place in this decor.

A wild blur burst from the goon's mouth right in front of Hackamore's face. He recoiled a few fumbling steps backward. By the time he identified the blur as a human hand, it had grabbed the upper edge of the poster. By the time he realized that it was his hand—with a gold ring on the third finger, attached to an arm wearing a silk shirtsleeve pushed to the elbow in accordance with current fashion—the poster was vanishing. The goon's mouth appeared to gulp down the poster as it imploded into the blank wall.

By the time he jumped to do something about it, the poster was gone. His hands closed on air.

He stood alone in the pastel bedroom, in a parallel world where he'd figured every detail to be a ninety-nine-percent matchup. It was so close that his better-dressed self had stepped through the poster at the same time Hackamore had. Like a rubber glove pulling inside out, Hackamore had climbed right through his alternate self—only the other guy had yanked his doorway in after himself. Right about now he'd be tripping over Chloe's cooling body in the dark.

All Hackamore had to do now was follow the smell that smacked him as soon as he reached the bedroom door. It was not perfume—not even to a seasoned gorehound such as himself.

The naked blonde was in the bathtub. In this world, Hackamore found, he did own a razor. And a disposal, a trash compacter, a carving knife, a chainsaw, and a Cuisinart. It looked like all of them had been used on her. She was in the bathtub. Her head was stopping up the toilet. One hand lay palm-up in the sink. The rest of her, freshly butchered, was strewn around the floor and hanging from the robe hooks and towel rods. There were organs that even Hackamore's experienced eye could not name.

At the sound of sirens, Hackamore fled.

When he smashed through the exit door of the fire stairs, he saw the flashhars of several metro police units bouncing red and blue light off the front of the apartment building. The evil fucker that was his other self had alerted the cops before ducking out. That was a nasty plot twist Hackamore had missed.

It was raining lightly outside, a pattering, hissing sound that obscured the commotion of his panic. He felt his way past the trash dumpsters, toward the rear alley. The streetlamps were blown. Here it was safer, darker.

He relaxed. Here it was

He jerked around. Somewhere behind him, at the mouth of the alley, beyond the veil of rain-mist, was a dorlc sitting in the World Theatre, picking his nose in the dark. Scribbling vitriolic notes, and aceing him out, and ripping Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls a brand-new chute.

The burp-start noise brought him full around, widdershins. It was showtime, and he knew it. Lights, camera, etcetera ... and not even the word cut could save him here. There was not even time for a long, long, cinematic scream in smash close-up. There was only time to wish he'd loved the stupid fucking movie, instead.

Then the ripsawing blade rammed in hard, razzing and chewing and spraying chunks, and Hackamore faded to black.

Without billing.

NOT FROM AROUND HERE

This morning I saw an alley cat busily disemboweling a rail lizard. I watched much longer than I had to in order to get the point.

Townies call little hamlets like Point Pitt "bedroom communities." Look west from San Francisco, and you'll see the Pacific Ocean. Twenty minutes by car to any other compass point will bring you to the population-signless borders of a bedroom community. El Granada. Dos Piedras. Half Moon Bay. Summit. Pumpkin Valley (no kidding).

Point Pitt rated a dot on the roadmaps only because of a NASA tracking dish, fenced off on a stone jetty, anchored rock-solid against gales, its microwave ear turned toward the universe. Gatewood was four and three-quarter miles to the north. To drive from Point Pitt to Gate-wood you passed a sprawling, loamy smelling acreage of flat fields and greenhouses, where itinerant Mexicans picked mushrooms for about a buck an hour. I saw them working every morning. They were visible through my right passenger window as I took the coast road up to San Francisco, and to my left every evening when I drove home. On the opposite side of the road, the ocean marked time. The pickers never gazed out toward the sea; they lacked the leisure. My first week of commuting eroded my notice of them. The panorama of incoming surf proved more useful for drive-time meditation. I no longer lacked the leisure.

You had to lean out a bit, but you could also see the Pacific from the balcony rail of our new upstairs bedroom, framed between two gargantuan California pines at least eighty years old. Suzanne fell for the house as soon as we toured it under the wing of the realtor. Our three-year-old, July, squealed "Cave!" and jumped up and down in place, in hyperactive circles of little kid astonishment. Hard to believe, that this cavernous place was ours, that we weren't visiting a higher social class and would soon have to go home. This was home, and we were in love ... goofy as that may sound.

I did not fall in love with the idea that all the decent movies, restaurants, and other urban diversions were still up in San Francisco. Gatewood boasted a single grease-griddle coffee shop that opened two hours before my morning alarm razzed and went dark promptly at five—up here, dinner was obviously a meal eaten at home, with family. Nearby was a mom-and-pop grocery that locked up at 9:00 P.M. Several miles away, in Dos Piedras, was an all-nighter where you could get chips and beer and bread and milk.

It sure wasn't the city. As a town, it wasn't vast enough to merit a stoplight. Point Pitt was no more than a rustic clot of well-built older homes tucked into a mountainside, with an ocean view. Voilà—bedroom community. Any encapsulation made it sound like a travel-folder wet dream, or an ideal environment in which to raise a child. I suspect my shrink knew this. He fomented this conspiracy, with my doctor, to get me away from my beloved city for the sake of my not-sobeloved ulcers.

I became a commuter. The drive was usually soothing, contemplative. I calmed my gut by chugging a lot of milk from the all-night market. We popped for cable TV—sixty channels. We adjusted fast.

It was required that I buy a barn-shaped rural mailbox. Suzanne jazzed it up with our name in stick-on weatherproof lettering: TASKE. The first Sunday after we moved in, I bolted it to the gang post by the feeder road, next to the boxes of our nearest neighbors. The hillside lots were widely separated by distance and altitude, fences and weald. There was much privacy to be had here. The good life, I guessed.

When a long shadow fell across the gang post from behind, I looked up at Creighton Dunwoody for the first time. His box read MR. & MRS. C. DUNWOODY. He had the sun behind him; I was on my knees, wrestling with a screwdriver. It just wouldn't have played for me to say, You have me at a disadvantage, sir, so I gave him something else sparkling, like, "Uh ... hello?"

He squinted at my shiny white mailbox, next to his rusty steel one. It had a large, ancient dent in the top. "You're Taske?" He pronounced it like passkey; it was a mistake I'd endured since the first grade.

I gently corrected him. "Carl Taske, right." I stood and shifted, footto-foot, the essence of nervous schmuckdom, and finally stuck out my hand. Carl Taske, alien being, here.

I almost thought he was going to ignore it when he leaned forward and clasped it emotionlessly. "Dunwoody. You're in Meyer Olson's old house. Good house." He was taller than me, a gaunt farmer type. His skin was stretched over his bones in that brownly weathered way that makes thirty look like fifty, and fifty like a hundred and ten. Like a good neighbor coasting through meaningless chat, I was about to inquire as to the fate of Meyer Olson when Dunwoody cut in, pointblank, "You got any kids?"

"My daughter Jill's the only one so far." And lilly had been well-planned. I couldn't help thinking of farm families with fourteen kids, like litters.

He chewed on that a bit. His attention seemed to stray. This was country speed, not city rush, but I felt like jumping in and filling the dead space. It wouldn't do to appear pushy. I might have to do this a lot with the hayseed set from now on.

"Any pets?" he said.

"Not today." A partial lie. Suzanne had found an orphaned Alsatian at the animal shelter and was making the drive to collect it the next day. "Any guns in your house?"

"Don't believe in guns." I shook my head and kept my eyes on his. The languid, directional focus of his questions made my guard pop up automatically This was starting to sound like more than the standard greenhorn feel-up.

"That's good. That you don't." We traded idiotic, uncomfortable smiles.

In my new master bedroom there were his and hers closets. A zippered case in the back of mine held a twelve-gauge Remington pumpgun loaded with live three-inch Nitro Mag shells. My father had taught me that this was the only way to avoid killing yourself accidentally with an "unloaded" gun, and Suzanne was giving me hell about it now that July was walking around by herself. It was none of Dunwoody's business, anyway.

"How old's your girl?"

"Three, this past May."

"She's not a baby anymore, then."

"Well, technically, no." I smiled again and it hurt my face. The sun was waning and the sky had gone mauve. Everything seemed to glow in the brief starkness of twilight gray.

Dunwoody nodded as though I'd given the correct answers on a geography test. "That's good. That you have your little girl." He was about to add something else when his gaze tilted past my shoulder.

I turned around and saw nothing. Then I caught a wink of reflected gold light. Looking more intently, I could see what looked to be a pretty large cat, cradled in the crotch of a towering eucalyptus tree uphill in the distance. Its eyes tossed back the sunset as it watched us.

Dunwoody was off, walking quickly tip the slope without further comment. Maybe he had to feed the cat. "I guess I'll see ... you later," I said to his back. I doubt if he heard me. His house stood in shadow off a sharp switchback in the road. A wandering, deeply-etched dirt path wound up to the front porch.

Not exactly rudeness. Not the city brand, at least.

The moon emerged to hang full and orange on the horizon, like an ebbing sun. High in its arc it shrank to a hard silver coin, its white brilliance filtering down through the treetops and shimmering on the sea-ripple. Suzanne hopped from bed and strode naked to the balcony, moving out through the French doors. Moonbeams made foliage patterns on her skin; the cool nighttime breeze buffeted her hair, in a gentle contest.

Her thin summer nightgown was tangled up in my feet, beneath the sheets. We'd dispensed with it about midnight. The one advantage to becoming a homeowner I'd never anticipated was the nude perfection of Suzanne on the balcony. She was a blue silhouette, weight on one foot and shoulders tilted in an unconsciously classical pose. After bearing Jilly and dropping the surplus weight of pregnancy, her ass and pelvis had resolved into a lascivious fullness that I could not keep my hands away from for long.

We fancied ourselves progressive parents, and lilly had been installed in our living room from the first. We kept our single bedroom to ourselves. On hair triggers for the vaguest noise of infant distress, Mommy and Daddy were then besieged with the usual wee-hour fire drills and some spectacular demonstrations of eliminatory functions. Marital spats over the baby came and went like paper cuts; that was normal, too. Pain that might spoil a whole day, but was not permanent. lilly's crib was swapped for a loveseat that opened into a single bed. And now she did not require constant surveillance, and was happily ensconced in her first private, real-life room.

Recently, Suzanne had shed all self-consciousness about sex, becoming adventurous again. There was no birth control to fret over. That was a hitch we still didn't discuss too often, because of the quiet pain involved—the permanent kind.

"Carl, come here and look." She spoke in a rapid hush, having spied something odd. "Hurry up!"

I padded out to embrace her from behind, nuzzling into the bouquet of her hair, then looking past her shoulder.

A big man was meandering slowly up the road. The nearest street-lamp was more than a block away, and we saw him as he passed through its pool of light, down by the junction with the coast highway. He was large and fleshy and fat and as naked as we were.

I pulled Suzanne back two paces, into the darkness of the bedroom. The balcony was amply private. Neither of us wanted to be caught peeking.

He seemed to grow as he got closer, until he was enormous. He was bald, with sloping mountain shoulders and vast pizza-dough pilings of flesh pulled into pendant bags by gravity. His knotted boxer's brow hid his eyes in shadow, as his pale belly hung to obscure his sex, except for a faint smudge of pubic hair. The load had bowed his knees inward, and his lumpen thighs jiggled as he ponderously hauled up one leg to drop in front of the other. We heard his bare feet slapping the pavement. His tits swam to and fro.

"There's something wrong with him," I whispered. Before Suzanne could give me a shot in the ribs for being a smartass, I added, "No—something else. Look at him. Closely."

We hurried across to the bedroom's south window so we could follow his progress past the mailboxes in front of the house. He was staring up into the sky as he walked, and his chin was wet. He was drooling. His arms hung dead dumb at his sides as he gazed upward, turning his head slowly one way, then another, as though trying to record distant stars through faulty receiving equipment.

"He's like a great big baby?" Suzanne was aghast.

"That's what I was thinking." I recalled Jilly, when she was only a month out of the womb. The slack, stunned expression of the man below reminded me of the way a baby stares at a crib trinket—one that glitters, or revolves, or otherwise captures the eye of a being who is seeing this world for the first time.

"Maybe he's retarded?"

A shudder wormed its way up my backbone but I successfully hid it. "Maybe he's a local boy they let run loose at night, y'know, like putting out the cat?"

"Yeeugh, don't say that." She backed against me and my hands enfolded her, crossing to cup her breasts. Her body was alive with goosebunips; her nipples condensed to solid little nubs. She relaxed her head into the hollow of my shoulder and locked her arms behind me. Thus entangled, we watched the naked pilgrim drift up the street and beyond the light. My hands did their bit and she purred, closing her eyes. Her gorgeous rump settled in. "Hm. I seem to be riding the rail again," she said, and chuckled.

She loved having her breasts kneaded, and we didn't lapse into the dialogue I'd expected. The one about how her bosom could be a little bit larger, didn't I think so? (What I thought was that every woman I'd ever known had memorized this routine like a mantra. Suzanne played it back every six weeks or so.) Nor did she lapse into the post-sex melancholy she sometimes suffered when she thought of the other thing, the painful one.

Eighteen months after Jilly was born, Suzanne's doctor discovered ovarian cysts. Three, medium-sized, successfully removed. The consensus was that Jilly would be our only child, and Suzanne believed only children were maladjusted. While there was regret that our power of choice had been excised, we still held out hope for a happy accident someday. I was more pragmatic, or maybe more selfish. I wasn't sure I wanted more than one child, and in a sense this metabolic happenstance had neatly relieved me of the responsibility of vasectomy I'd been contemplating. I was hung up on getting my virility surgically removed in an operation that was, a one-way gamble with no guarantees. Frightening. I prefer guarantees—hard-line, black-and-white, duly notarized. A hot tip from a realtor on a sheer steal of a house had more to do with reality than the caprices of a body that turns traitor and hampers your emotional life.

And when Suzanne's tumors were a bad memory, a plague of superstitions followed. For several months she was convinced that I considered her leprous, sexually unclean. From her late mother she had assimilated the irrational fear that once doctors slice into your body with a scalpel, it's matter of borrowed time before the Big D comes pounding at the drawbridge.

The whole topic was a tightly twined nest of vipers neither of us cared to trespass upon anymore. God, how she could bounce back.

Passion cranked up its heat, and she shimmied around so we were face-to-face. The way we fit together in embrace was comfortingly safe. Her hand filled and fondled, and I got a loving squeeze below. "This gets enough of a workout," she slyly opined. Then she patted my waistline. "But we need to exert this. When we get the dog, you can go out running with it, like me."

It was depressingly true. Bucking a desk chair had caused a thickening I did not appreciate. "Too much competition," I muttered. I was afraid to challenge the ulcerations eating my stomach wall too soon. She was in much better physical shape than me. Those excuses served, for now. Her legs were short, well-proportioned, and athletic. Her calves were solid and sleek. Another turn-on.

"Mmiii." Her hands slid up, around, and all over. "Iii that case, come back to bed. I've got a new taste sensation I know you're just dying to try."

The following morning, I met the huge bald man.

He was wearing a circus-tent-sized denim coverall, gumsoled work boots, and an old cotton shirt, blazing white and yellowed at the armpits. He was busily rummaging in Dunwoody's mailbox.

I played it straight, clearing my throat too loudly and standing by.

He started, looking up and yanking his hand out of the box. His head narrowed at the hat-brim line and bulged up and out in the back, as though his skull had been bound in infancy, ritually deformed. His tiny black eyes settled on me and a wide grin split his face. Too wide.

,"G'morn' he said with a voice like a foghorn. My skin contracted. I got the feeling he was sniffing me from afar. His lips continued meaningless movements while he stared.

"Orinly!"

Creighton Dunwoody was hustling down the path from his house. The hillside was steep enough to put his cellar floor above the level of our roof. He wore an undershirt and had a towel draped around his neck; he had obviously interrupted his morning shave to come out and yell. Drooping suspenders danced around his legs as he mountaineered down the path.

Ormly cringed at the sound of his name, but did not move. Birds twittered away the morning, and he grinned hugely at their music.

For one frozen moment we faced off, a triangle with Ormly at the mailboxes. I thought of the three-way showdown at the climax of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Dunwoody stopped to scope us out, made his decision with a grunt, and resumed his brisk oldster's stride toward me. He realized the burden of explanation was his, and he motioned me to approach the mailboxes. His mouth was a tight moue of anger or embarrassment. Maybe disgust. But he bulled it through.

"Mister Taske. This here's Ormly. My boy." He nodded from him to me and back again. "Ormly. Mister Taske is from the city. You should shake his hand."

Dunwoody's presence did not make it any easier to move into Ormly's range. Without the workboots he would still be a foot taller than I was. I watched as his brain obediently motivated his hand toward me. It was like burying my own hand in a catcher's mitt. He was still grinning.

The social amenities executed, Dunwoody said, "You get on back up the house now. Mail ain't till later."

Ormly minded. I've seen more raw intelligence in the eyes of goldfish. As he clumped home, I saw a puckered fist of scar tissue nested behind his left ear. It was a baseball-sized hemisphere, deeply fissured and bone white. A big bite of brains was missing there. Maybe his pituitary gland had been damaged as part of the deal.

Dunwoody batted shut the lid to his mailbox; it made a hollow chunk sound. "S'okay' he said. "Ormly's not right in the head."

I was suddenly embarrased for the older man.

"Sometimes he gets out. He's peaceful, though. He has peace. Ain't nothing to be afraid of:"

I took a chance and mentioned what I'd seen last night. His eyes darted up to lock onto mine for the first time.

"And what were you doin' up that time of night anyhow, Mister Taske?" That almost colonial mistrust of newcomers was back.

"I woke up. Thought I heard something crashing around in the woods." The lie slipped smoothly out. So far, I'd aimed more lies at Dunwoody than truth. It was stupid for me to stand there in my C&R three-piece, calthide attaché case in hand, judging his standards of honesty.

This ain't the city. Animals come down from the hills to forage. Make sure your garbage can lids are locked down or you'll have a mess to clean up."

I caught a comic picture of opening the kitchen door late at night and saying howdy-do to a grizzly bear. Not funny. Nearly forty yards up the bill, I watched Ormly duck the front door lintel and vanish inside. Dunwoody's house cried out for new paint. It was as decrepit as his mailbox.

Dunwoody marked my expression. "Ormly's all I got left. My little girl, Sarah, died a long time ago. The crib death. Primmy—that's my wife; her name was Primrose—is dead, too. She just didn't take to these parts .....His voice trailed off.

I felt like the shallow, yuppie city slicker I was. I wanted to say something healing, something that would diminish the gap between me and this old rustic. He was tough as a scrub bristle. His T-shirt was frayed but clean. There was shaving lather drying on his face, and he had lost a wife, a daughter, and from what I'd seen, ninety percent of a son. I wanted to say something. But then I saw his bare arms, and the blood drained from my face in a flood.

He didn't notice, or didn't care.

I checked my watch in an artificial, diversionary move Dunwoody saw right through. It was it Cartier tank watch. I felt myself sinking deeper.

"Mind if! ask you a question?"

"Uh—no." I shot my cuff to hide the watch, which had turned ostentatious and loud.

"Why do you folks want to live here?" There it was: bald hostility, countrified, but still as potent as snake venom. I tried to puzzle out some politic response to this when he continued. "I mean, why live here when it makes you so late for everything?" His eyes went to my shirtsleeve, which concealed my overpriced watch.

He shrugged and turned toward his house with no leavetakings, as before. All I could register in my brain were his arms. From the wrists to where they met his undershirt, Dunwoody's arms were seeded with more tiny puncture marks than you would have found on two hundred junkies up in the Mission district. Thousands and thousands of scarred holes.

My trusty BMW waited, a sanctuary until the scent of leather upholstery brought on new heartstabs of class guilt. It was simple to insulate oneself with the trappings of upward mobility, with things. My grand exit was marred by sloppy shifting. The closer I drew to the city the better I felt, and my deathgrip on the wheel's racing sleeve gradually relaxed.

Maybe our other neighbors would make themselves apparent in time. Oh bliss oh joy.

Brix became the dog's name by consensus. I stayed as far away from that decision as politely possible. Dad the diplomat.

Jilly had thrilled to its reddish-brown coat, which put her in mind of "bricks," you see. Suzanne went at tedious length about how Alsatians reacted best to monosyllabic names containing a lot of hard consonants. In a word, that was Brix—and he was already huge enough for Jilly to ride bareback. He could gallop rings around Suzanne while she jogged. He never got winded or tired. He looked great next to the fireplace. A Christmas card snapshot of our idyllic family unit would have made you barf from the cuteness: shapely, amber-haired Morn; angelic blond Jillian Heather; Brix the Faithful Canine ... and sourpuss Dad with his corporate, razor cut and incipient ulcers. We were totally nuclear.

I didn't bother with Dunwoody or Ormly again until the night Brix got killed.

It was predestined that the dog's sleeping mat would go at the foot of Jilly's hide-a-bed. While Suzanne and I struggled patiently to indoctrinate the animal to his new name and surroundings, he'd snap to and seek July the instant she called him, They were inseparable, and that was fine. The dog got a piece of Jilly's life; Suzanne and I were fair-traded a small chunk of the personal time we'd sacrificed in order to he called Mommy and Daddy. This payoff would accrue interest, year by year, until the day our daughter walked out the door to play grownup for the rest of her life. It was a bittersweet revelation: starting right now, more and more of her would be lost to us. On the other hand, the way she flung her arms around Brix's ruff and hugged him tight made me want to cry, too.

Since we'd assumed residence in Point Pitt, our lives really had begun to arrange more agreeably. Our city tensions bled off. We were settling, healing. Sometimes I must he forced to drink the water I lead myself to.

Brix quickly cultivated one peculiar regimen. At Jilly's bedtime he'd plunk his muzzle down on the mat and play prone sentry until her breathing became deep and metered. Then he'd lope quietly out to hang with the other humans. When our lights went down, he'd pull an about-face and trot back to his post in Jilly's room. Once or twice I heard him pacing out the size of the house in the middle of the night, and when the forest made its grizzly-bear commotions, Brix would return one or two barks of warning. He never did this while in Jilly's room, which was considerate of him. Barks sufficed. In his canine way, he kept hack the dangers of the night.

So when he went thundering down the stairs barking loudly enough to buzzthe woodwork, I woke up knowing something was not normal. Suzanne moaned and rolled over, sinking her face into the pillows. I extricated myself from the sleepy grasp of her free arm in order to punch in as Daddy the night watchman. The digital clock merrily announced 3:44 A.M. And counting.

Point Pitt was not a place where residents bolted their doors at night, although that was one habit I was in no danger of losing, ever. Because the worst of summer still lingered, we had taken to leaving a few windows open. It wasn't completely foolish to assume some thief might be cruising for a likely smash-and-grab spot. By the time the sheriffs (the district's only real law enforcement) could be summoned, even an inept burglar would have ample time to rip off all the goodies in the house and come back for seconds. While this sort of social shortcoming was traditionally reserved for the big bad city, there was no telling who might start a trend, or when.

Besides, if there were no bad guys, I might be treated to the surreal sight of a live bear consuming my rubbish.

Downstairs a window noisily ceased existence. Breaking glass is one of the ugliest sounds there is. I picked up speed highballing down the stairs.

I thought of the claw hammer Suzanne had been using while hanging plants in her little conservatory and hung the corner wildly, skidding to a stop and embedding a flat wedge of glass into the ball of my right foot. I howled, keeled over, and obliterated a dieffenbachia mounted in a wire tripod. The entire middle section of leaded-glass panes was blown out into the night. Pots swung crookedly in their macrame slings where Brix had leapt through.

Somewhere in the backyard he was having it rabidly out with the interloper, scrabbling and snapping.

Grimacing, I stumped into the kitchen and hit the backyard light switches. Nothing. The floodlamps were still lined up on the counter in their store cartons, with a Post-It note stuck to the center one, reminding me of another undone chore. Outside the fight churned and boiled and I couldn't see a damned thing.

My next thought was of the shotgun. I limped back to the stairs, leaving single footprints in blood on the hardwood floor. Brix had stopped barking.

"Carl?"

"I'm okay," I called toward the landing. To my left was the shattered conservatory window, and the toothless black gullet of the night beyond it. "Brix! Hey, Brix! C'mon, guy! Party's over!"

Only one sound came in response. To this day I can't describe it accurately. It was like the peal of tearing cellophane, amplified a thousand times, or the grating rasp a glass cutter makes. It made my teeth twinge and brought every follicle on my body to full alert.

"Carl!" Suzanne was robed and halfway down the stairs.

"Get me a bandage and some peroxide, would you? I've hacked my goddamn foot wide open. Don't go outside. Get my tennis shoes."

I sat down on the second stair with a thump. When Suzanne extracted the trapezoidal chunk of glass, I nearly puked. There was gash two inches wide, leaking blood and throbbing with each slam of my heartbeat. I thought I could feel cold air seeking tiny, exposed bones down there.

"Jesus, Carl." She made a face, as though I'd done this a just to stir up a boring night. "Brixy whiffs a bobcat, or some fucking dog game, and you have to ruin our new floor by bleeding all over it..."

"Something turned him on enough to take out the conservatory window. Jesus Christ in a Handi-Van. Ouch! Even if it is a bobcat, those things are too bad to mess with."

She swept her hair hack, leaving a smear of blood on her forehead. She handed over the peroxide and left my foot half-taped. "You finish. Let me deal with Jilly before she freaks out."

"Mommy?" Jilly's voice was tiny and sleep-clogged. She'd missed the circus. I sure hadn't heard her roll out of the sack, but Suzanne apparently had. Mommy vibes, she'd tell me later.

After gingerly pulling on my shoes, I stumped to the kitchen door and disordered some drawers looking for a flashlight. Upstairs, Suzanne was murmuring a soothing story about how Daddy had himself an accident and fell on his ass.

I didn't have to look far to find Brix. He was gutted and strewn all over the backyard. The first part I found was his left rear leg, lying in the dirt like a gruesome drumstick with a blood-slicked jag of bone jutting from it. My damaged foot stubbed it; pain shot up my ass and blasted through the top of my head. His carcass was folded backward over the east fence, belly torn lengthwise, organs ripped out. The dripping cavern in the top of his head showed me where his brain had been until ten minutes ago.

The metallic, shrieking noise sailed down from the hills.

And the lights were on up at Dunwoody's place.

When the sheriffs told me Brix's evisceration was nothing abnormal, I almost lost it and started punching. Calling the cops had been automatic city behavior; a conditioned reaction that no longer had any real purpose. Atavistic. There hadn't been enough of Brix left to fill a Hefty bag. What wasn't in the bag was missing, presumed eaten. Predators, they shrugged.

In one way I was thankful we'd only had the dog a few days. Jilly was still too young to be really stunned by the loss of him, though she spent the day retreated into that horrible quiet that seizes children on the level Of pure instinct. I immediately promised her another pet. Maybe that was impulsive and wrong, but I wasn't tracking on all channels myself. It did light her face briefly up.

I felt worse for Suzanne. She had been spared most of the visceral evidence of the slaughter, but those morsels she could not avoid seeing had hollowed her eyes and slackened her jaw. She had taken to Brix immediately, and had always militated against anything that caused pain to animals. There was no way to bleach out the solid and sickeningly large bloodstain on the fence, and I finally kicked out the offending planks. Looking at the hole was just as depressing.

The sheriffs were cloyed, too fat and secure in their jobs. All I had done was bring myself to their attention, which is one place no sane person wants to be. Annoyed at my cowardly waste of their time, they marked up my floor with their boots and felt up my wife with their eyes.

Things were done differently here. That was what impelled me to Dunwoody's place, at a brisk limp.

I had not expected Ornily to answer the door; I couldn't fathom what tasks were outside his capabilities and simply assumed he was too stupid to wipe his own ass. He filled up the doorway, immense and ugly, his face blank as a pine plank (with a knot on the flip side, I knew). He was dressed exactly as before. Perhaps he had not changed. It took a couple of long beats, but he did recognize me.

"Fur paw" he said.

The back of my neck bristled. When Ornily's brain changed stations, he haunted the forest, starkers, in the dead of night; what other pastimes might his damaged imagination offer him? When he spoke, I half expected him to produce one of Brix's unaccounted-for shanks from his back pocket and gnaw on it. Then I realized what he had said: For pa.

"Yeah." I tried to clear the idiocy out of my throat. "Is he home.?" "Home. Yuh." He lurched dutifully out of the foyer, Frankenstein's Monster in search of a battery charge.

I waited on the stoop, thinking it unwise to go where I wasn't specifically beckoned or invited. Another urban prejudice. Wait for the protocol, go through the official motions. Put it through channels. That routine was what had won me the white-lipped holes blooming in my stomach.

Dunwoody weaved out of the stale-smelling dimness holding half  glass of peppermint schnapps. He was wearing a long-sleeved workshirt with the cuffs buttoned.

"I'm sorry to bother you, Mr. Dunwoody, but my dog was killed last night." No reaction. He showed the same disinterest the cops had, and that brought my simmering anger a notch closer to boiling. "More to the point, he was pelted and hung on my back fence with his head scooped out and his guts spread all over the yard. The fence bordering your property, Mr. Dunwoody."

"I heard him barking." He looked down and away. "Saw you kick the slats out." His words billowed toward me in minty clouds; he was tying on a nice, out-of-focus afternoon drunk. "You said you didn't have no pets."

It was an accusation: If you hadn't lied, this would not have happened.

I felt obligated to be pissed off, but my soul wasn't really in it. My need to know was stronger. "Sorry but look, you mentioned wildcats coming out of the hills. Or bears. Maybe I'm no authority on wildlife feeding habits, but what happened was ... " I flashed on Brix's corpse again and my voice hitched. "That was far beyond killing for food."

"I didn't see it." His voice wasn't a full slur. Not yet, but soon. "Woke me up. But I didn't see it. I'm glad I didn't. That part I don't fancy, sir." He scratched an eyebrow. "I think y'all should leave. Go."

"You mean leave Point Pitt?"

"Move elsewhere. Don't live here." He took a long drag on his glass and grimaced, as though choking down cough medicine. "See what happens? This ain't for boys like you, with your fag hairdos and your little Japanese cars and your satellite TV ... aahhh, Christ..."

Ormly loomed behind him, recording all the pain with oddly sad eyes, so much like a dog himself.

A cloudy tear slipped down Dunwoody's face, but his own eyes were clear and decisive as they looked from me to the north. "Go home," he said. "Just go home, please." Then he shut the door in my face.

Dinner was flavorless, by rote. Suzanne had tried to nap and only gotten haggard. July told me she missed Brix.

After bestowing my customary bedtime smackeroo, lilly asked again about getting another pet right now. Her mom had run the same idea past me downstairs. Between them I'd finally be goaded into some reparation.

Suzanne reached for me as soon as I hit my side of the bed. She had already divested herself of clothing, and her movements were brazen and urgent. She wanted to outrun the last twenty-four hours in a steambath of good therapeutic fucking. Her nerves were rawed, and close to the surface; she climaxed with very little effort and kept me inside her for a long, comforting while. Then she kissed me very tenderly, ate two sleeping pills, and chased oblivion in another direction.

My foot felt as if I had stomped on a sharpened pencil. I hobbled to the bathroom, pretending I was Chester in Gunsmoke. The dressing was yellowed from drainage and shadowed with dry brown blood. It gave off a carrion odor. I took my time washing and swabbing and winding on new gauze. I was still pleasantly numb everywhere else.

There was a low thrumming, like that of a large truck idling on the street outside. I felt it before I actually heard it. I checked the window across from the bathroom door, but there was nothing, not even Ormly making his uniformless predawn rounds. With my Bay City paranoid's devotion to ritual, I hobbled downstairs and jiggled all the locked doors. The boarded-up plant nook was secure. I sneaked a couple of slugs of milk straight from the carton. Ulcer maintenance.

July's room was on the far side of the bathroom. When I peeked stealthily in, the vibrational noise got noticeably louder.

Triplechecking everything constantly was as much a habit of new parenthood as my "security insecurity." July was wound up in her Sesame Street sheets. I decided to shut the window, which was curtained but half-open.

The sheet-shape was grotesque enough to suggest that July's entire platoon of stuffed animals was bunking with her tonight. I'd tucked in Wile E. Coyote myself. No more Brix. My throat started to close up with self-pity. I crept closer to plant a sleeptime kiss on July's temple—another parental privilege, so Suzanne told me. lilly's hair was just beginning to shade closer to the coloring of my own.

The low, fluttering noise was coming from beneath her sheets. And something smelled bad in the room. Perhaps she had soiled herself in sleep.

Hunched into July's back was a mass of oily black fur as big as she was. At first my brain rang with a replay of Brix's horrifying inside-out death. The thing spooning with my daughter had one fat paw draped over her sleeping shoulder, and was alive. And purring.

I had the sheet peeled halfway down to reveal more of it when it twisted around and bit me on the wrist.

I took one panicked backward step, jerking away. Ally's plush brontosaurus was feet-up on the floor; I stumbled over it, savaging my injured foot and crashing, sprawl-assed, down on Brix's rug, which smelled doggish and was dusted with his red hair. I had to get up, fast, tear the thing from her back, get the shotgun, to -

I tried to chock my good leg under me and could not. Both had gone thick and unresponsively numb. Then, shockingly, warmth spread at my crotch as my belly was seized by a sudden and powerful orgasm. My arms became as stupid as my legs. Then even my neck muscles lost it, and my forehead thunked into Brix's rug. And I came again.

And again.

Within seconds it was like receiving a thorough professional battering. I was having one orgasm for every three beats of my heart. My useless legs twitched. Saliva ran from the corner of my mouth to pool in my ear; even my vocal cords were iced into nonfunction. And while I lay curled up on the floor, coming and shuddering and coming, the creature that had been in bed with my daughter climbed down to watch.

Its eyes were bronze coins, reflecting candlefire. I thought of the thing I had seen monitoring me from the tree on my first day as a Point Pitt resident.

It was bigger than a bobcat, stockier, low-slung. The fur or hair was backswept, spiky-stiff and glistening, as though heavily lubricated. Thick legs sprouted out from the body rather than down, making its carriage ground-gripping and reptilian. I heard hard leather pads scuff the floor as it neared; saw hooked claws, hooded in pink ligatures, close in on my face.

It was still purring. The head was a cat's, all golden eyes and pointed felt ears, but the snout was elongated into a canine coffin shape. The chatoyant pupils were X-shaped, deep-glowing crosscuts in the iris of each eye, and they widened like opening wounds to drink me in. It yawned. Less than a foot from my face I saw two bent needle fangs, backed by triangular sharkish teeth in double rows. Its breath was worse than the stink of the congealed bandage I had stripped from my foot.

One galvanic sexual climax after another wrenched my insides apart. I was dry-coming; about to ejaculate blood. The creature dipped its head to lick some spittle from my cheek. Its tongue was sandpapery.

I had to kill it, bludgeon its monster skull to mush, blast it again and again until its carcass could hold no more shot. I orgasmed again. I could barely breathe.

It ceased tasting me and the hideous eyes sparked alive, hot yellow now. It padded back to the bed and leaped silently up. July remained limp. I didn't even know if she was already dead or not.

It looked, to make sure I could see. Then it settled in, gripping lilly's shoulders from above with its claws and licking her hair. It opened its mouth. Cartilage cracked softly as its jawbones separated, and the elastic black lips stretched taut to engulf the top of her head.

It sensed how much I hated it. Hate glittered back at me from those molten gash-eyes—my own hate, absorbed, made primal and total, and sent back to me.

Of hate, it knew.

My traitorous body continued its knifing spasms, and tears of pain blurred the view that I was incapable of commanding my eyelids to block out. The lips wormed forward, side-to-side, the slanted teeth seating, then pulling backward. The mouth elongated to full bore and the eyes fixed in a forward stare, glazed as though intoxicated by this meal.

With a mindless alien malice, it looked like it was smiling.

Blackness sucked me down before I could hear the abrasive, porcelain sound of those teeth grinding together, meeting at last through the pale flesh of my little girl's throat.

Moonlight delineated the window in blue-white.

I tried to sit up and rub my face. I was sweat-soaked, and lacquered in scales of dry semen. My balls were crushed grapes. Half my mind tried to wheedle me back into unconsciousness, begging to flee from what it had recorded. The less craven half had kicked me until I awoke, feeling like a frayed net loaded with broken bones, unable to stand or walk. I crawled on my belly to July's bed. Lowering groans slipped from my throat.

I've seen snakes eat their prey. I didn't have to see what was left in July's bed to know what had happened. But to get my legs back, and finish the work begun this night, I forced myself to look.

I took it all in without even a gasp. Only the drapes whispered furtively together, unable to remain still or quiet.

So much blood, blackening the Sesame Street sheets. Her tiny outthrust hand was speckled with it, and cold to the touch. Her pillow was a saturated dark sponge.

I slumped and vomited into my own lap. Nothing much came up as my guts were rent, the sore muscles pulling themselves to tatters. My hand went out and skidded into something like warm gelatin next to the bedpost.

It was the skin of our visitor, piled there like an enormous scalp, greasy black spines rooted in an opaque membrane. It reminded me of Brix's empty pelt. Here was the broad, flat sheath of the back; here, the sleeve of each leg. The reversed tissue was coated with a kind of thick, veined afterbirth that smelled like shit and rotten hamburger. My stomach clenched at the hot stink, and the pain almost put me under again. [swallowed a surge of bile and held.

It was slippery, as heavy as a waterlogged throw rug when I dragged it out of the room.

I knew there was a handful of speed and painkillers waiting for me in the bathroom. I filled the basin from the cold tap and immersed my head. I stared into the clean white gorge of the toilet and decided not to heave.

Suzanne was still safe in the depths of drugged sleep, where there are no true nightmares. On wobbly wino's feet I locked the balcony doors. The bedroom door had a two-way skeleton-key lock that could be engaged from the outside.

My Levi's jacket and shoes were downstairs on the sofa. And the shotgun was where it had been patiently waiting since the day we moved in.

Dunwoody's house was just up the hill.

My shoulder stung as the Remington's recoil pad kicked it, and the works on Dunwoody's back door, mostly shit, blew away to floating wood chaff and fused shrapnel. The door skewed open on its upper hinge, and the inside knob rebounded from the kitchen wall with a clacking cueball noise. It spun madly in place until its energy was used up. The echo of the blast returned softly from the hills.

Two rooms down a narrow hallway, Dunwoody sat watching a black-and-white television that displayed only test-pattern bars. The screen bounced rectangles of light off his wire-rim glasses and made his old-fashioned undershirt glow blue in the darkness. He turned to look at the intruder stepping through the hanging wreckage of his back door, his gaze settling with resigned indifference on the twelve-gauge in my hand. He sighed.

My right wrist was throbbing as though fractured; mean red coronas of inflammation had blossomed around the twin punctures there, and I didn't know how many more gunshots it could stand before breaking. The smell of dry puke swam richly through my head, chased by the fetor of my prize. My eyes were pinpricks; the black capsules were doing their dirty work in the solvents of my stomach. It was the dope as much as the backwash of nausea that made me giddy—dark, toxic waves slopping up on a polluted beach, then receding.

Stiff-legged, lead-footed, I moved into the house. I knew where I was going and what to do when I arrived. My life had a purpose.

I jacked back the slide to reload, retrieved the reeking mess of shed skin with my free hand, and clumped forward. I was going to nestle the barrel right on the bridge of Dunwoody's thin hickory nose. He just sat there, watching my approach. There were no hidey-holes, and Ormly was probably out cruising at this time of night.

"You look foolish with that pumpgun, city boy."

"Foolish enough to spread your reedy old ass all over the wallpaper" My voice was dry and coarse, a rusted thing.

"You want all kind of answers." He spoke like the keeper of knowledge and wisdom, shifting in his easy chair with a snort of contempt. "Big-city know-it-all finds out he don't know it all. Don't know shit." He gulped schnapps from a fingerprinty glass.

I couldn't buy his casual disdain for the gun. Perhaps he thought I wouldn't use it. To dash that little misconception from his mind, I stepped into the room and brought the shotgun to bear.

It tore violently out of my grasp like a runaway rocket, skinning my index finger on the trigger guard. Momentum yanked me the rest of the way into the room, and I got my crippled foot down to keep from falling. It wasn't worth it.

Ormly had been stationed in ambush behind the doorway and had acted with a speed startling for his bulk and presumed intellect. He stood there with the shotgun locked upside down in his bulldozer grip, while Dunwoody watched drops of blood from my hand speckle the floor like small change.

"Get Mister Taske a cloth for his hand, Ormly." Each order was slow, metered, portioned out at rural speed. "Take care of his pumpgun; I'm sure he paid a lot of money for it. And bring me my bottle. You might as well have a seat, Mister Taske. And we'll talk."

The tar-colored pelt had slithered from my grasp and piled up in an oily heap on the floor. It slid around itself, never settling, as if it refused to give up the life it once contained. Dunwoody looked at it.

"It's stronger now, quicker. At its best, since it dropped a hide. Don't gawk at me like I'm nuts. You saw it the first day you was here, and you didn't pay it no mind."

"I thought it was ... some kind of cat' I stammered lamely. "Mountain lion, or

"Yeah, well, you know so goddamn much about mountain cats, now don't you?" he said with derision. "You said you didn't have no pets, no guns. See what happens? It ain't no cat."

Jesus. Anybody with two dendrites of intelligence could see that it weren't no cat. Arguing that now would only keep the old man off the

track. I decided to shut up, and he seemed satisfied that I was going to let him talk without any know-it-all city-boy interruptions. Ormly lumbered back with the schnapps, which Dunwoody offered to me perfunctorily. Let's retch! my stomach announced, and I waved the bottle away.

Ormly backed into his corner like the world's largest Saint Bernard sentry, keeping his eyes on me.

"Ormly was whip-smart." Dunwoody began. "He was my Primmy's favorite. Then she had Sarah. Little Sarah. You'da seen that baby girl, Mister Taske, she woulda busted your heart left and right, she was so perfect. Like your little girl."

"July's dead." It was shockingly easy to say it so soon. "It  that

thing, it -"

"I know. And I know you think me and Ormly is up to something, squirreled away up here, that we're somehow responsible. We ain't. I'd never hurt a little girl, and Ormly's never harmed no person nor animal. It's just ... there's a certain order of things, here?"

I had begun watching the ugly shed skin, still yielding, relaxing. It might reinflate and attack.

"Primmy and I kept a henhouse. We loved fryers and fresh eggs.

One day I went out and all our chickens had been killed." The drama replayed behind his eyes. "You know how chickens run around after you cut off their heads, too dumb to know they're dead? Christ almighty. Twenty chickens, and half of them still strutting around when I got there. Without heads. It came down that night to eat the heads. And left the chickens. We'd been living in Point Pitt for two months."

My brain dipped sickeningly toward blackout. It was an almost pleasing sensation. Ebb tide of the mind; time to go to sleep. I sat down hard in the chair next to Dunwoody's and swallowed some schnapps without even tasting it.

"I had two hounds, Homer and Jethro, and an old Savage and Fox double-barrel, not as fancy as that pumpgun you got, but mean enough to stop a runaway truck dead. I laid up in the chicken coop the next night. 'Long about two in the morning, it stuck its head in and I let it have both barrels in the face. It was as close as you are to me. It yowled and ran off into the woods, and I set Homer and Jethro on it. Next morning. I found them. That thing took two loads of double-ought buckshot in the face and still gutted both my dogs. Ormly loved them old mutts."

I remembered the sound it made, the ground-glass screech. I didn't have to ask whether Dunwoody's dogs had been found with their heads intact.

Dunwoody cleared his throat phlegmatically and hefted himself out of the chair, to pry open a stuck bureau drawer behind the TV set. "Next night, it came back again. Walked into my home bold as you please and took my baby Sarah. It was slow getting out the window. Sluggish, with its belly full. I shot it again like a fool. Didn't do no good. Let me show you something."

He handed across a brown-edged, fuzzy piece of sketchbook paper. "Careful with it. It's real old"

It was a pencil rendering of the Dunwoody house, done in a stark and very sophisticated woodcut style. The trim and moldings stood out in relief. The building was done in calm earth tones, complimented by trees in full bloom. The forest shaded up the hillside in diminishing perspective. The strokes and chiaroscuro were assured. The drawing deserved a good matte and frame. I tilted it toward the light of the television and made out a faded signature in the lower right, done with a modest but not egocentric flourish.

0. Dunwoody.

He handed me a photograph, also slightly foxed, in black-andwhite with waffled snapshot borders. A furry diagonal crease bisected a robustly pregnant woman packed into a paisley maternity dress. She had the bun hairdo and slight bulb nose that had always evoked the 1940S for me—World War II wives, the Andrews Sisters, all of that. Hugging her ferociously was a slim, dark-haired boy of nine or so, smiling wide and unselfconsciously. He had his father's eyes, and they blazed with what Dunwoody would call the smarts.

I tried to equate the boy in the photo with Ormly's overgrown, cartoonish body, or to the imbecilic expression on his face as he stood placidly in his corner. No match.

"Night after it took baby Sarah, it came back. We were laying to bushwhack it outside. It flanked us. Ormly came in for a drink of water, and there it was, all black and bristly and eating away on his mamma. He couldn't do nothing but stand there and scream; all the starch had run right out of him. He looked kinda like you do right now. I ran back in. That was the first time it bit me."

I extended my wrist for him to see, and his eyes lowered with guilt. "Then you know that part already" he said.

Ormly stood parked like a wax dummy while his father went to him and looked over the wasteland of his SOIl, hoping, perhaps to read a glimmer of the past in the dull eyes. There was no light there, only the reflected snow of the TV set, now tuned to nothingness.

"Ormly was crazy with fear and wanted to run. He loved his mamma and his little sister and the dogs, but he knew the sense in running. I was full up with ideas of what a man should do. A man didn't go beggin' to the police. The police don't understand nothing; they don't care and don't want to. A man should settle with his own grief, I thought, and Ormly wanted to be a man, so he hung with me."

Brave kid, I thought. Braver than me.

"Ormly came up with the idea of setting it on fire. He'd seen some monster movie where'd they'd doused the monster with kerosene and

touched it off with a flare gun. We set up for it. We knew it was coming

back, because it knew we didn't like it and would try to kill it. It knew how we felt. We were the ones that had intruded on its territory, and

when you do that, you either make peace or you make a stand. Or you run. And that's what we shoulda done, because we were prideful and we didn't know what we were up against. We shoulda run like hell."

Dunwoody was stoking his own coals now, like a stump revival preacher getting ready to rip Satan a new asshole.

"Sure enough, the son of a bitch came down after us that night. You couldn't have convinced me there was another human soul in Point

Pitt. All the houses were dark. They all knew, that is, everyone but me. When I spotted it crossing the backyard, in the moonlight, it was different than before. It'd dropped its hide, just like a bullsnake" He indicated the rancid leftover on the tile floor with a weak wave of his hand, not wanting to see it.

He did not look at Ormly, either, even as he spoke of him.

"The boy was perfect, by god. He stepped out from his hiding place, exposed himself to danger just so he could dump his pail of gasoline right smack into that thing's open mouth. I set my propane torch to it and it tagged me on the back of the hand —just a scratch, no venom. Or maybe the gas all over my hand neutralized it. We watched it shag ass into the hills, shrieking and dropping embers, setting little fires in the bushes as it ran. We hooted and jumped and clapped each other on the back like we were big heroes or something, and the next morning we tried to find it. All we turned up was a shed skin, like that one. And when the sun went down again, it came back. For Ormly. I swear to you, Mister Taske, it knew who had thought of burning it. But it didn't kill Ormly." The memory shined in Dunwoody's welling eyes. He had witnessed what had happened. "Didn't kill him. It took a big, red mouthful out of the back of his head, and ... and ..."

He extended his scarred arms toward me, Christ-like, seeking some absolution I could not give. Bite marks peppered them everywhere, holes scabbing atop older holes.

"You get so you can't go without," he said dully. "You won't want to. You'll see."

I was aware of speaking in an almost sub-aural whisper. "Why didn't you leave?"

He shook his head sadly, ignoring me. "One day it just showed up. That's all anybody knows. Whether it came down out of the hills or crawled out of the ocean don't really matter. What matters is it came here and decided to stay. Maybe somebody fed it."

The speed maxed out in my bloodstream, hitting its spike point. The murky room resolved to sharp-edged clarity around me in a single headlong second. I'd broken through, and rage sprang me from my chair, to brace Dunwoody so he could no longer retreat into obfuscations or babble.

"Why the hell didn't you leave?" I screamed in his face.

He flinched, then considered his ruined arms again, and avoided the easy answer. "We don't like the city."

I remembered Suzanne, browsing the house. All her remarks about getting back to nature, slowing down, escaping the killer smog, hightailing it from the city as though it was some monster that had corrupted us internally and conspired to consume us. The big, bad neon nightmare. What penetrated now was the truth—that the state of nature is the last thing any thinking being would want. The true state of nature is not romantic. It is savage, primal, unforgivingly hostile. Mercy is a quality of civilization. Out here, stuck halfway between the wilds and the cities, a man had to settle his own grief. And if he could not

My father, the guy who'd taught me to keep all guns loaded, had another adage I'd never had to take seriously yet: Ifyou can't kill it with a gun, son—run.

"You've squared off with it," Dunwoody said. "That choice was yours. Believe me when I say it knows you don't like it." The provincial superiority was seeping back into his tone. "Have you figured it out yet, or has that toe-food crap turned your brain to marl?"

Near the nub of his right elbow, the old man had sustained a fresh bite. It was all I could see. The thing had bitten Dunwoody recently—and Dunwoody had let it.

He sighed at my thickness. "It's coming back. Might even come back tonight. You're new here, after all."

I bolted then, with a strangled little cry. It was a high sound, childish, womanish. A coward's bleat, I thought.

Ormly had left my shotgun on the kitchen table, and I snatched it up as I ran, hurdling the demolished door, heedless of the stabbing pains in my hand, or the blood I could feel welling from the ruptured wound on my foot. My shoe had turned crimson. I ran so fast I did not see Dunwoody nodding to himself, like a man who has made the desired impression, and I missed his final words to his huge, dullwitted son.

"Ormly, you go on with Mister Taske, now. You know what you have to do."

Three feet more.

Three feet more, and the world would be set right. Three feet more to reach the hole in the fence, where Brix had died. Then came three more feet to reach the back door, to the stairs, to our bedroom. Three seconds more and I could shake Suzanne awake, pack her into the BMW, and bust posted limits red-lining it out of this nightmare. If the city wanted us back, no problem. We could scoot by on our plastic for months. My life was not a spaghetti western; I did not bash through my degree and get ulcers so I could do symbol-laden combat with monsters.

And )illy

The south window had been shoved neatly up. The drapes fluttered and there was no hint of broken glass, of the horrorshow trespass my brain had pictured for me. The creature was snuggled between Suzanne's legs on the bed. Eating. It looked very different without its skin.

Thick braids of exposed sinew coiled up each of its legs, filament cable that bunched and flexed. The knobs of its spine were strapped down by double wrapping of inflated, powerful muscle tissue as smoothly grooved and perfect as plastic. It no longer required an envelope of skin. An absurd little triangular flap covered its anus like a pointed tail.

Suzanne's eyes were slitted, locked. She was beyond feeling what was being done to her. Another orgasm hissed past her teeth, gutturally. Nothing more.

The skeleton key dropped from my trembling fingers and bounced on the hardwood floor. The thing on the bed had cranked its blood-slathered muzzle around to dismiss me. I was no big deal.

With a sidelong yank of its head, it worried loose some morsel anchored by stubborn tendons to the chest cavity. It was about halfway to its favorite part. The scraps it had sampled and discarded littered the bed wetly. If it had chanced across any tumors during its methodical progress toward the brain, I was sure it had crunched them up like popcorn. Piggishly, it lapped and slurped.

Suzanne looked at me as she came again, convulsing as much as her sundered body would let her. A thin stringer of frothy lung blood leapt onto her chest.

I kept my eyes in contact with hers as I snapped the trigger of the Remington, thinking how much I loved her.

The Nitro Mag load tore our bed to smithereens. Suzanne's dead arm jerked up, flopped back. Bloodstained goosedown took to the air, drifting. I worked the slide one-handed and fired again. The French doors disintegrated. Rickrack jumped from the bedstands to shatter on the floor.

The creature eased out its caked snout and saw what had just befallen that part of the feast it had been saving for last. Its impossibly wide, hinged maw dropped open to screech at me, as though I owed it something and had reneged. I shot it in the face, as Dunwoody had years ago. It snapped at the incoming shot like a bloodhound at gnats, then obstinately sank its nose back into its grisly dinner.

Suzanne was no longer on the bed. The corpse was not identifiable as anything but dead, butchered meat.

I slammed the bedroom door hard; don't ask why. There was an instant when I might have jammed the barrel between my teeth and swallowed that last shot myself. Instead, a pungent odor hauled me, staggering, to the stair landing.

Downstairs, the floor was wet and sloppy, glistening. Ormly waited for me, a ten-gallon jerry can of gasoline in each massive hand, smiling.

The buffeting heat was so intense that we had to back across the street to avoid getting our eyebrows flash-fried.

I watched the south window of our bedroom grow dreamy behind a sheet of orange flame. There was absolutely no exterior access. The thing had crawled up the front of the house like a fly, and clinging, had opened the window with one paw.

Neither of us saw it jump out, trailing sparks. The expression on Ormly's face frightened me. It was the closest thing to a glimmer of abstract thought I'd yet seen mar his slablike, mannequin countenance. He stared, unblinking, into the skyrocketing licks of fire.

"Hotter," he said. "Stronger. Better this time."

By dawn we were down to smoldering debris. I did not want to scrutinize the wreckage too closely, for fear of recognizing blackened bones.

Ormly stood in the backyard, his face dead with a kind of infinite sadness. I followed his gaze to the ground, and saw a deeply-dug, charred clawprint. The foot that had embossed itself there had been so hot that the grass had been cooked into an unmistakable pattern.

Ormly's mitt-sized hands pushed me toward my BMW, parked past the mailboxes. When I dug in my heels, he plucked me up and carried me. It was too easy to know why.

When night fell, the ground-glass shriek would waft down from the forest, and Point Pitt's new god would return.

Back in the arms of the city, I waited around for fate to come crashing down on my head with charges of murder and arson. Civilized accusations. No one came knocking.

Like I said earlier, this morning I sat and watched a cat disembowel a rail lizard. I watched much longer than I had to in order to get the point. Then my eyelids pushed down to allow swatches of stop-and-go sleep.

The nightmares of my past replaced those of the here and now.

A week after I'd turned thirteen, the school sadist at my junior high decreed that the day had come to pound every last speck of shit out of my rasty white body. Ross Delaney was the eldest son of a local garbagernan—to be fair, he took a lot of socially maladjusting crap just for that. He was coasting through his third encore performance at the seventh-grade level. A seventh-grader who had a down mustache, drove his own jalopy to school, smoked, and hung out with peers destined for big things: aggravated assault, rape, grand theft auto

Ross had made me loan him a pen once in study hall and he'd dismantled it after scrawling on the back of my shirt and laughing like I was the world's biggest a-hole. My buddy Blake and I had discovered a bunch of disposable hypodermic needles while scrounging for intriguing goodies in the trash dumpster of a health clinic, reasoning that it was against some law for them to throw out anything really dangerous, right? Those hypos made primo mini-squirt guns, and that's all Blake and I thought of using them for. They were tech, they were cool. They were enormously appealing to Ross, who threatened to put out my eye with a Lucky if I didn't give him one. Right before lunch, Ross was scooped up by Mr. Shanks, El Principal of the humorless specs and full-length gray plastic raincoat. Needles in school were serious business, and I soon found myself being paged for an interview. I denied everything. Ross' eyes, yellow-brown, settled on me like a pronouncement of execution by hanging.

He laid for me in the parking lot. There was no way around him. He loomed above me. I wanted to say something pacifying, babble that might exonerate us both as rebels cornered by an unfair system. Ross' brain lacked the logic links such a ploy needed to work. Trying to appease him had always been a pussy's game with an automatic loser. Guess who.

The next thing I knew, I was catching Ross' hand with my face.

My neckbones popped as my head snapped around, and my hand made the mistake of contracting into a fist. My left eye filled up with knuckles and stopped seeing. He snagged a handful of my hair and used his knee to loosen all the molars on the side of my head nearest the pavement. I bit tarmac and tasted blood. I curled up. He stared kicking me with his Mexican pimp boots, shouting incoherently, his face totally glazed.

My deck was discarded, so I called for my mom. I honestly thought it was my moment to die, and so reverted to instant babyhood, bawling and dribbling and yowling for my mother. Ross' cohorts ate it up. What a queer, what a pussy, he wants his momma. Ross kicked again and I felt a lung try to jump out my throat. He yelled for me to shut up. Something cracked sharply inside me.

Then something burst inside me.

It wasn't my liver exploding. It was something slag-hot, bursting brightly outward, filling me, popping on full bore like sprinkler systems during a fire, or an airbag in a car crash. The only sensation I can compare it to is the time my cardiologist broke an ampule of amyl nitrate under my nose, to test my pump. Only my internal ampule was full of something more like PCP. I was flooded to the brim—WHAM! My fingertips tingled. Both hands locked into fists. I scared the crap out of myself; I think I yelped. Instead of stopping the tip of Ross' next incoming bonebreaker, I rolled out, stood up, and faced him.

Then I kicked the shit out of him, impossibly enough.

Hesitation scampered behind his eyes when he saw me get up. But there was no mystery in it for him. The medulla section of his primate mind saw an opportunity to stomp some serious ass and would not be denied. If I could stand, the massacre would just be more interesting. Ross roared and came in like a freight train. His fist was black and sooty and callused.

I snatched that meteor out of the air and diverted his momentum, planting my elbow in his mouth, then whip-cracking him into a one-eighty snap that left his gonads open to my foot. They decompressed with a squish and he hit the pavement on hands and knees ... and then I was kicking him, blood flushing my face. Every bullshit, picayune adolescent injustice ever suffered now rushed home, and I went at Ross like a berserk wolverine spiked on crank. Ribs staved inward. Snot and blood lathered his chin.

And I felt good.

Mr. Shanks, the principal, yanked me off of Ross Delaney, school tyrant. He was too horrified by the damage he saw to wonder how I'd done it. I got my fine white ass suspended.

That school had been my introduction to life in the city. Since then, the city had treated me right. My apartment never got robbed; my car never got boosted. Degree. Master's. Wife. Promotion. Child. Success. Suzanne and July had been excited by our move to Point Pitt; I had been the reluctant one.

Now my city had repudiated me. I'd come crawling back after giving it the finger, and the only thing it would show me was an ugly orange tabby tearing the intestines out of a lizard that wasn't dead all the way yet.

In its reptile eyes, the suffering as it was eaten.

I wanted to file a complaint. To protest that none of this was my fault. I didn't want to leave; they made me do it. That would be like trying to make nice to Ross Delaney. Too late for that.

I had spent the night in a parking lot and there was dry snot on my face, from crying. Returning to the city had not erased Suzanne or lilly or poor old goddamn Brix. So much for the snapshot.

The BMW's motor caught on the third try. I noticed blood staining the walnut of the gearshift as I backed out of the alleyway.

I wanted my mommy. But she wasn't around this time, either. Not here.

The blackened garbage dump that, yesterday, had been my new home had cooled. If anyone had come out to investigate, they were gone now. Birds twittered in the forest, above all this folly.

Dunwoody finally spotted me and came out; I have to credit him for having that much iron left. He motioned me into his squalid little home and we sat drinking until the sun went down. I watched Ormly shamble about. Such a waste, there.

The shrieking I expected began to peal down from the woods after dusk. My hands quivered on the arms of Dunwoody's dusty easy chair. They had not stopped shaking since last night.

"You forgot your pun1pgun" said Dunwoody. "Had Ormly fetch it. Only two loads innit though." He drained his schnapps glass and burped, half-in, half-out, a state he clearly wanted to maintain.

The clear liquor trickled into me like kerosene. I thought of it as fuel. I noticed the barrels of the shotgun were warm; that seemed odd, somehow.

Clutching the Remington, I left limping, favoring my gashed foot. Breathing was a chore. My eyes pulsed in time to the pounding of my metabolism as I picked my way to the center of my burned-out grave of a home. One end of the barbequed sofa jutted from the debris like the stem of a sinking ship. Here was the banister—fissured, carbonized, its stored heat energy bled free. Over here, smashed shards of terra cotta from Suzanne's conservatory. Skeletal junk, all exuding the reek of an overflowing ashtray. Soft clouds of soot puffed up with each step I took.

On the border of the feeder road, the streetlamp sputtered blue, then white, throwing tombstone shadows down from the row of mailboxes. The residents of Point Pitt had drawn their curtains. The houses on the hillside were dark against whatever might come in the night. Not secure. Just lacking light and any form of human sympathy.

Dunwoody was the exception. I saw his drawn face appear in a crack of drape, then zip away, then return. I'd lost my Cartier watch, so I used Dunwoody's periodic surveillance to mark time. I couldn't recall losing the watch, not that it mattered. Night vapors tingled the hair on my arms. My last bath had been yesterday afternoon, eons ago, and by now! was as aromatic as stale beef bouillon.

"Come on, come on!" I lashed out at a fire-ravaged plank and it crumbled into brittle charcoal cinders. My voice echoed back from the treeline twice.

Lava-colored eyes emerged to assess me from behind the still standing brick chimney. Chatoyant pupils tossed back the street light in dual crosscut shapes.

A conventional defensive move would draw it out, confident of its own invincibility. I chambered a round as loudly as I could. "This is for you! Come on—it's what you want, right?"

Motion, hesitant, like Ross Delaney, unsure. There was a smear of bright bronze as the eyes darted to a new vantage.

"Come on, hag of shit!" Fuck reaction time. The gun went boom and a mean bite leapt out of the chimney. Pointed chunks of brick flew into the creature's face. It did not blink. The Remington's report settled debris all around.

I dropped the gun into the ashes.

Its outer tissue was pinkish, as though battened with blood from an earlier feed. The alien eyes blazed. When it saw me lose the shotgun it decided, and in three huge bounds the distance between us was reduced to nothing. I saw it in midair, rippling, its thorny claws extruded from their cowls and coming for my face.

I braced myself, the memory of grabbing Ross Delaney's deadly fist still hot. I spoke softly to the woods, to the forest in the distance, to the sea behind me.

"Help me. Mother."

It smashed me down like a truck pasting an old lady in a crosswalk. The opaque talons sank to their moorings in my shoulder. I grabbed, to keep the jaws from my throat, and its fangs pierced the palm of my hand, one-two.

"Mother! Help me!"

I got my other hand up and seized its snout, which was feverishly hot. Stale blood-breath misted into my eyes and the black lips yawned wide for me. Those lips had caressed my daughter's face as they engulfed her. They had made an intimate, ghastly smorgasbord of Suzanne.

I clenched my fist. It tried to jerk its paw back to slash me into confetti, but the claws were trapped in my muscle tissue and would not slide free. The X-shaped eyes dimmed in surprise. It backpedaled, preparing to dig in with its hind legs and free my intestines.

I sat up with its movement, taking a firmer grip and twisting until its lower jaw came away in my hand. Think of halving a head of lettuce; that was the sound it made. Think of pulling a drumstick from a whole tom turkey. It jammed, then wrenched loose, dripping, trailing ruptured tatters of sinew.

It shrieked. Without a mouth, in pain.

Purple blood, thick and gelid, splurted into my face. Under the vapor lamp it looked like chocolate syrup; it stank of vomit or hydrochloric acid. The eyes went from golden to dead ochre, the color of dry leaves.

"You're done here:" I rasped in its face. Still holding the snout, I punched my fist down the ruined wet maw of glottus. My fingers locked around something slick and throbbing and I tore it out. The body on top of me shuddered hideously and lost tension. The legs scrabbled, then went slack, pitching more feebly.

I stared fixedly into the eyes as their incandescence waned.

The residents of Point Pitt had come out at last, to watch. My new neighbors. They dotted the street, milling uncertainly, none daring closer than the mailboxes. They watched as their old god screeched and died. As with department store mannequins, it had been so simple for them to be led, to be arranged.

What difference? That was ended now.

When I extracted the claws from my shoulder, my own blood jetted briefly out. I was still that human. Eyes cold, the limp and stinking carcass slid as I rose. Another shedding. A steel rail of an erection was trying to fight its way out of my pants.

They all stood, nothing more declarative. Silently they waited. The last to arrive were Dunwoody and Ormly, coming down the trail from their home. No one else moved to attack, or assist, or anything. It was not their place to.

Thank you

Reflexively, the dead claws had folded in upon themselves. When I picked up the corpse, it crackled, still seeming to weigh too much for its mass. I remembered the awful sound its discarded skin had made. Purple goo dripped from the jawless mouth. The flat paws dangled harmlessly as I lifted the fatal wound to my lips and drank in long, soul-kiss draughts, quaffing with a passion almost primitive in its purity.

Thank you. Mother.

My communion raced through me to work its changes. My arm ceased bleeding and clotted up. I stopped shaking at last; all of me at once. My vision began to blur. Soon I would be able to see things imperceptible to normal, circular pupils.

I motioned to Ormly and he dutifully clumped forward. He had to be the first one. There was plenty for everybody, but Ormly had to he first.

Things evolve. Always have. Even in the country, things change when it's time. There was growth potential here.

Dunwoody nodded his old man's brand of approval. If I needed any indication that I was going to be benevolent, that was it.

AFTERWORD:

CRIMSON HINDSIGHT

Short story collections have always meant more to me as "books" than novels, mostly because of their ability to display many facets of a single writer under an umbrella more permanent than the scatter of magazines and anthologies in which short fiction generally appears and is soon forgotten. Seeing Red was my first short story collection, most of the stories having been written in the early to mid- 1980s. I gathered them into this home with as much relief as elation—at last these guys had a roof over their heads, or as Karl Wagner preferred to call it, "the sanctuary of A Book."

RED LIGHT

…derives its title from the Siouxsie and the Banshees song found on the Kaleidoscope album (1980), from which also come the terms "shutterslut" and "Kodakwhore," this latter also providing an early working title. It was my first sale to Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine (hereinafter, TZ) under the stewardship of Tappan King, who by 1985 had replaced the original editor, T.E.D. Klein.

"Red Light," won the World Fantasy Award in the category of Short Story for 1987. It is worth noting here that the story thrashed several competing stories from an anthology which had originally rejected "Red Light" from its august company.

As titles go, "Red Light" linked up conveniently enough with Seeing Red, which had also been used as the title of a crime novel by Nelson Ormerod (Scribner's, 1985), the "red" in that book being the color of a stoplight run by the protagonist as she mows down a pedestrian. Guilt ensues. Red Light also briefly became the name of a brand of diet beer churned out by Coors during the fleeting craze for "red" brews in 1995, and while this had nothing to do with the story, it's cool to have long-necks with foiled labels barking out one's title. The result of this titular train wreck is that "Red Light" is frequently cited as "Seeing Red: and, in one ironic cross-pollination thanks to TZ, "Red Zone."

The story also provided my first opportunity to adapt my own work from one medium to another. It was optioned by producer Jeff Fazio for the debut season of his Showtime TV series The Hunger. Rather than hew religiously to the text, I rethought the narrative in rigorously visual terms, gleefully twisting and turning it into a new shape before releasing a pretty damned good script to the merciless even-dozen hands itching to rewrite it ... who, at one point, top-loaded the story with voodoo and gouged-out eyeballs. To his credit, Fazio did his best to drag the story back toward where it started, and the end result, as directed by Christian Duguay, is a not-unworthy acquittal. Despite the sum of the mutations wrought, I got the definite feeling that the key personnel —everyone from Christian through the actors—had actually read the original story and grasped its essence, and how often can you say that about anything that appears on TV? While the exclusionary nature of the "Canadian Content" regs (which favor indigenous writers) prevented me from doing more scripts so long as the series was shot in Montreal, Jeff Fazio showed his gratitude by optioning a whole bagload of other tales either written or recommended by me.

BUNNY DIDN'T TELL US

The first thousand words of this story were written in 1979 or so—everything up to the point where Riff and Klondike realize they're digging up a limousine. The rest came in a flurry four or five years later. The fragment sat in the file all that time, fermenting (or gestating), and it was when "Bunny" was finally sold that I wondered, with terror, whether every new story might take this long to declare itself.

INCIDENT ON A RAINY NIGHT IN BEVERLY HILLS

…is essentially a one-act, one set play for two characters. A horror writer of modest notoriety once testified that this was his favorite of my early stories ... forgetting, I guess, that he had rejected it from one of his many anthologies when it was unpublished. That's okay, though.

THE WOMAN'S VERSION

…was originally titled "Sick Leave" and represents my only short fiction output to result from a bitter six months of life wasted in Chicago, mostly during the historic blizzard of 1978—the snowstorm that got Jane Byrne elected mayor the next year. Later, as I tore "Sick Leave" apart and rebuilt its bones, a windstorm blew out the power in my Hollywood apartment and I actually typed the middle section on a manual typewriter, by candlelight, in 1985. Later that year I got my first electronic typewriter.

Readers of my second novel, The Shaft (1990) may recognize certain aspects of the apartment building or the character of the landlord as familiar. The story was rejected from Twilight Zone by Ted Klein, who promptly referenced it so many times in subsequent letters that I polished it and sent it back. By the time it was bought, my TZ backstock was so piled up that the story was shuffled over to the third issue of Montcalm's digest-sized spillover venue, Night Cry, marking my debut in that short-lived little sister publication. Whereas TZ was garnished with articles, interviews, and entertainment fluff, Night Cry was all fiction, gently hyped as being an outlet for slightly more "intense" stories than would normally appear in TZ. No wonder it was doomed.

LONESOME COYOTE BLUES

…despite a few minor aspects which have dated, remains a special favorite of mine because it represented my first "clean" story sale that is, one without conditions. Ted Klein got it, read it, called me on the phone and said, "Sold." That feeling that you are finally firing on all cylinders is an important watershed for any writer.

It ran in TZ under the "Oliver Lowenbruck" pen-name for the reasons outlined by Ted in his Introduction.

The Bouffants never existed ... not until 1989, when a TV-movie called My Boyfriend's Back (no relation to 1993 teen zombie film of the same title) appeared, starring Sandy Duncan, Jill Eikenberry and Judith Light as members of a 1960 one-hit girl group.

NIGHT BLOOMER

…evoked the single most repulsive editorial "suggestion" I'd ever received, from a blowfish who thought it might be "rilly kewl" to have individual black seeds erupt from each of the protagonist's pores in a shower of pus. "Yeah, yeah," wheezed the blowfish, "it'd be rilly even more horrifying!"

The story was vilified when it appeared in an issue of Weird Tales devoted to my fiction, prompting editor Darrell Schweitzer to note: "I think it's a sound policy to print something really unwholesome once in a while, just to remind people that we can."

When Jeff Fazio read it, in search for stories for The Hunger's second season, I got an adrenalized phone call: "Why didn't you show me this earlier? It's as much of a natural as anything could be!"

Tastes mutate.

ONE FOR THE HORRORS

Shortly following my first-ever fiction sale to a magazine, in 1978, I immediately sold two more stories, both to anthologies which took an excruciatingly long time to collapse in utero. The torment of an acceptance which takes years to culminate in non-publication is the sort of emotional vision quest every writer suffers at one time or another—not that you're given any sort of choice, short of outright withdrawal. (If you plan on working in Hollywood, get used having your time wasted this way.) I didn't sell another story that saw print for three long years and finally sought other avenues of surviving by typing made-up stuff. The curse was broken when Stuart David Schiff took "One for the Horrors" for the venerable Whispers.

"One for the Horrors" turned out to be so suited to Whispers that Stuart bought the damned thing three more times, for various Whispers anthologies ... and never bought anything else. It has since become one of my most-reprinted stories, and also cracked another extremely important market at the time, DAW Books' The Year's Best Horror Stories, then being edited by Karl Edward Wagner.

Please keep in mind that this story was written before the dawn of video time (1980, sez Video Watchdog) and may seem quaint for that reason. It doesn't admit of cable TV; it is locked into an era when i6-millimeter film rental companies did brisk biz and one could still smoke cigarettes in anything called a "lobby." But quaint? The kicking my ass suffered by history was hardly quaint— Frankenstein's subsequent release on videotape and laserdisc with the Little Maria scene intact is just one humiliation, and it turns out I got the anecdote about Janet Leigh's tits all wrong. On the other hand, they did remake Psycho in 1998; that one I predicted correctly two decades before the fact.

Light tone is a neighborhood I rarely visit, but perhaps that was what made this a perfect Whispers story. All I know is those other two stories never sold, anywhere.

VISITATION

…was written-to-order in response to Ares editor Michael Moore's request for a story that would align thematically with their "Nightmare Hotel" issue. For the skinny on how my fiction came to appear in a gaming magazine in the first place, see the notes on "The Embracing."

Years later, in a column titled "The Horror Book of Clichés," I enumerated a list of telltales to earmark mediocre horror stories. Number Ten on that list was "Stories or Books that End just as Somebody Starts to Scream, Bleed, Black Out or Get Eaten."

Guilty.

At least Angus doesn't say "Noooooo!" as the curtain falls. Curiously, this unfortunate closer made the story seem more like a conventional horror tale ... resulting in its being bought for reprint quite a few times.

Nobody says "Nooooo!" Not ever.

One of these resales was to Weird Tales—neither the original nor the Terminus incarnations, but the dreaded (and mercifully short-lived) 1985 resurrection, which sounded like a great idea at the time, but was mismanaged and misrepresented into nonexistence by an inept, amateur publisher, leaving a tarry wake of burned readers, fleeced contributors, and—stop me if you've heard this one—distributors who didn't pay up. This magazine is now a fairly rare collector's item. If you locate a copy, you'll be able to see the elaborate, eldritch cuneiform frame Marcus Nickerson drew for the splash page. He was never paid, either.

PULPMEISTER

The first time I saw Twilight Zone Magazine's debut issue in 1981, I knew I had to get my work in there somehow. Ted Klein's resistance finally crumbled with "Pulpmeister," and from 1982 onward I had something in the magazine every year until it folded in 1989.

"Pulpmeister" is also the only story I substantially rewrote, front to back, before including it in the original edition of Seeing Red. Some of the phrasing still irritates me, but, after correcting the twists of language which grated the most, I decided to stop shuffling the story around before it began to hemorrhage. Having learned that lesson, I kept my mitts off the other stories in the book —except for minor repairs or outright mistakes —thus fixing them in time and form. I discovered then (and still believe) that trying to surf the fickle wave of topicality by constantly "updating" old stories is like playing a video game which you can never win; the only variable is how long you can forestall losing, which is inevitable.

When Twilight Zone: The Movie was released in 1982, I was pleased to see Carol Serling holding "my" issue during her cameo in the George Miller segment (the remake of "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"). As of that issue (December 1982), I finally felt I had passed muster in the Zone.

"Pulpmeister"'s appearance in TZ was illustrated by Marcus Nickerson, who at the time lived mere blocks away from my Hollywood apartment, off Fountain Avenue, very close to the garage where Steppenwolf first rehearsed "Born to be Wild" in late 1967. The walking distance made for a lot of predawn brainstorming (and, once, my arrest). Marcus eventually illustrated "Lonesome Coyote Blues" and "Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You" for TZ and "Visitation" for Weird Tales. He did an excellent EC Comics parody "cover" for "Bunny Didn't Tell Us" that failed to see print. He was my on-call artist for a number of years and projects, and his ability to high-wire differing styles and deliver on ridiculous deadlines (like "by dawn") was never less than reliable, and —dare I say it?—illustrates the gulf separating tyro from pro. He also was (and still is, I presume) an interestingly disciplined guitarist.

COMING SOON TO A THEATRE NEAR YOU

…used to have the most embarrassing single title any so-called writer has yet dared to conceive. It was pretentious, obscure, ponderous, opaque, overlong, cryptic, and just plain stupid. As a title, it was such a nightmarish catastrophe that I went back and expunged it from every note, every scribbled reference, and every title page in the original file. It was a fucking howler, that title, and the only thing worse than making up a title that grotesque is having to listen to someone tell you, with horrid, wrinkly-faced, confidential disapproval, that it's, uh, kinda stanky.

Fragile, china-doll egos and writing do not blend harmoniously.

Because of this story, Ted Klein phoned me in early 1985 and asked if I'd mind coming to New York City. TZ had conducted a reader poll and was planning an awards to-do as a media event to amplify the magazine's visibility; "Coming Soon" had tied with Robert Bloch's "Pumpkin." The ceremony was a fairly lavish affair held in the Tower Suite of the Time-Life Building. I showed up in a three-piece suit with a Bob Bloch speech in my pocket, in order to dominate the short fiction category by pulling double duty, picking up Bob's award on his behalf as well as my own. Humorist Bruce Jay Friedman handed over my Twilight Zone Dimension Award, an etched glass creation that was amazingly dignified for a genre trophy, despite the fact it came with a built-in light (to refract through the glass, you see). The ceremony was covered by USA Today as well as local papers, and for one glorious moment it looked like TZ might have the juice to infiltrate chewy fantasy and horror writing into conventional newsracks and households already prepped by the likes of Stephen King and Steven Spielberg.

No such luck.

Since the organizer of the fete had gone several thousand dollars over budget and not delivered either of the above mentioned Steves in person, the poor guy was fired the very next day, and the Dimension Award was shitcanned, making it, I guess, one of the rarest awards in the field.

But mine still sheds a lovely light.

This was the first of two "Oliver Lowenbruck" stories to appear in TZ (see "Lonesome Coyote Blues"). For details on Oliver's subsequent demise, see the story "Dying Words" (available in Zombie Jam). Ollie's tombstone—sub-inscribed HE FOUGHT THE GOOD FIGHT—is visible in the cemetery scenes in The Crow (1994).

Actually, the original title of this story, which I shall never reveal to anyone (desperately hoping that the few who glimpsed it, having not turned to stone, will do me the courtesy of forgetting it altogether), wasn't as bad as the title I came up with (and quickly changed) for a novella that ultimately left no footprints in the sands of time, either. It, too, was a stinker. But I think I've kilt them both deader than gristle. Don't bother to thank me.

THE EMBRACING

…began as an experiment in completing a story front-to-back, in longhand, before letting it near the typewriter. It was more transcribed than revised.

Ares was a gaming magazine put out roughly from 1980-1984 by Simulations Publications, Inc., which also produced Strategy & Tactics. The Simulations hook was the incorporation of an actual game into each issue of each magazine, complete with die-cut cardboard tokens and pieces. After fending off a year of story submissions, editor Michael Moore (no relation to the guy who filmed Roger & Me) took me on as a the magazine's Media columnist; shortly thereafter he bought "The Embracing" the first story to appear in Ares having nothing to do with that issue's game. SPI's practice was to derive any fiction directly from an issue's game theme; a couple of early ones that were offered to me were "Barbarian Kings" and "Alien Contact." When Michael told me Ares was planning a "Nightmare Hotel" game and issue, I eagerly grabbed the premise and wrote "Visitation," in addition to so much peripheral material that Roger Moore (Michael's replacement) dubbed that issue the "Dave Schow Memorial Issue." By that time, SPI had been subsumed into TSR Hobbies (the Dungeons & Dragons people) under the Dragon Publishing imprint. Ares bit the dirt in early 1984.

Originally titled "Punkin" and aimed straight at the debut issue of Midnight Graffiti, this was probably the "newest" story in Seeing Red, including the previously unpublished tales. It was written in 1986, and my logbook informs me that, strangely, it has been reprinted more times in England than in America.

The title was an attempt to denote the story in purely visual terms and provide a link to the signature graffito mentioned in the narrative. This irritated many of the less adventurous, who persisted in badgering a "name" out of the story. What's it called? That's what it's called. You either get it or you don't. I think Gahan Wilson started this, with his story. I have perpetuated the phenomenon, to a lesser extent, in "DONt WALK" and

The Midnight Graffiti text of the story featured an extra paragraph at the end to better hint at, if not spell out, the kind of haunting that went down. The story appears here as originally written. Those readers who have seen the Midnight Graffiti paperback (Avon, 1990) will notice that this is the story blurbed on the back cover copy; my contribution was going to be a reprint, but at the last minute I completed "Bad Guy Hats" (available in Black Leather Required) and substituted that instead.

Strongheart, by the way, was a dog.

BLOOD RAPE OF THE LUST GHOULS

When I received a contract for this story from Montcalm, the parent company to Gallery, Twilight Zone and Night Cry, some chicken-shit had abbreviated the title to "Blood," explaining that Montcalm's legal department would sniff disdainfully at anything called "Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls." I phoned the magazine and calmly suggested that the title should not be messed with. No one at the magazine even knew there was a problem, except for the gnome who had mucked over the contract to begin with. When I suggested spilling the gnome's own "Blood," up and down the corridors of Montcalm, I was confronted with a dismaying amount of support from his supposed coworkers, who confided more details about the gnome's personal hygiene and repulsive eating habits than I ever needed to know. Clearly, these people were seeking an ear in which to vent, and ultimately, the title went unmolested.

Jeff Potter whipped out a wonderful full-page illustration for this story, depicting the fake movie poster. It's hanging in my office, right now. James O'Barr did a pretty good comic adaptation for Horror: The Illustrated Book of Fear (1990).

NOT FROM AROUND HERE

By now, attentive readers will have noticed that a lot of bad stuff tends to take place around Point Pitt, a fictional Northern California seaside port-of-call I originally invented for a novella titled "Brass' but whose earliest appearance in print came in "Red Light."

When this story was written, The Amityville Horror was more or less the template for the populist horror novel—The Nice New Folks in Town run Afoul of Ancient Nastiness, Good Engages Eee-vil, and by the end, Family Values Prevail. Look around; you'll see the structure everywhere in the wake of The Exorcist.

I really didn't want to write that. But I did want to experiment with that too-sacred family structure, demonstrate it wasn't invulnerable, and tip it over into genuine dread. According to sources I trust, the attempt was mostly successful. It sure shook up Ted Klein.

A decade later, courtesty of Gordon Van Gelder, I received a wonderful academic paper titled: "Escaping the Creature-Text: An Iserian Analysis of David J. Schow's 'Not From Around Here" by Jennifer A. Fisher.

It was longer than the story but don't get me wrong; I love reading papers like this and finding out what I actually meant. On top of that, Ms. Fisher blended in some genuinely pointed observations about the "real" versus "implied" reader, the back-and-forth performance which sparks the "horrific effect," and the three principal types of horror—the "uncanny tale' the "terror fantasy' and the "horror thriller," just in case you think you need to know. The final verdict was that Ms. Fisher "experienced this tale as genuinely horrific," and, for me, a finer endorsement cannot he conceived.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Welcome to Credit Roll Hell. A lot of people need to be thanked, so you might as well resign yourself to paying attention.

First and foremost, my thanks to T.E.D. Klein, who permitted both my fiction and my Outer Limits articles to sneak into Twilight Zone Magazine, and thus became Ollie L's unintentional midwife. He wrote the spiffy introduction at the head of this book.

Next, my corral of editors: Tappan King, Charles Ryan (the first to buy a story of mine for publication), Robert Sabat, Peter Emshwiller (hi, Stoney), Karl Edward Wagner, Stuart David Schiff, Michael Moore (no relation to Roger), Roger Moore (no relation to James Bond), Geoff Golson, Alan Rodgers, R.S. Hadji, Darrell Schweitzer, John Betancourt, David Sutton, Stephen Jones, and—naturally—Tor's own Melissa Ann Singer.

And not only them, but more pals: Robert & Elly Bloch, Tyson Blue, Edward Bryant, Ginjer Buchanan, Tim Caldwell, Nancy Cushing-Jones, Charles de Lint, John Douglas, Bruce Jay Friedman, Charles L. Grant, Beth Gwinn, Lea Harp, David G. Hartwell, Jo Jenson, David Kuehls, Beth Meacham, Keith Nelson, Marcus Nickerson, Lawrence Person, J.K. Potter (for the Night the Lights Went Out in Providence), Lauri Rodich, Jeff Rovin, Kathleen Sarquist, the Satanic Mouseketeers, David Sherman, Dave Silva, Peggy Sniderman, Brinke Stevens, Peter & Susan Straub, Michael Sumbera, Amy Thomson, Tony Timpone & J. Peter Orr, Jim and Elizabeth Trupin, Stan Wiater for the term cineteratology and the immaculate F. Paul Wilson.  A special hello to the Scumbag, who let me quote him.

My gratitude goes to the readership of Twilight Zone Magazine—who voted "Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You" their 1985 Dimension Award for Best Short Story, and to the officials and judges of the 1987 World Fantasy Convention, who chose to honor "Red Light" with the World Fantasy Award for Short Story.

A toast to the memory of four great lost moviehouses: The Pix, the Gordon, the Holly Cinema (from the days of Manager Ramon and the green hot dogs), and to that tarnished triple-bill jewel of Hollywood Boulevard, the World.

Extra special thanks to Brock deSade and Stephen Grave. I know who you are; you know what you did.

—DJS March, 1989

When Thomas Canty proposed artwork for the original edition of Seeing Red, based mostly around interpretations of the frog-eyed visage of Astaroth from Der Golem, he delivered—as was his habit—more than ten finished variations, most of which I was fortunate enough to accumulate. Seeing Red was also noteworthy as the first book that was laid out exactly as I specified, a consideration for which I remain thankful.

Christa Faust continues to prove to me that the impossible can be mastered, and simple stories cannot express the depth of my love for her.

For this edition of Seeing Red special mention must be made of Arthur Byron Cover and Lydia Marano of Babbage Press, without whom you would still be (A) looking for a used copy of that old Tor paperback, or (B) reeling in explosive-decompressive horror from the blasphemous EMR/Alexander Press edition, for which I deeply apologize. Above all, Art & Lydia will always have my gratitude for their perseverance and hard work.

—DJS December, 1998

Important consumer note:

Babbage Press was born of the ignominious ashes of EMR/Alexander, and repairing the spavined, crippled thing that was the abovementioned EMR edition from 1999 took two solid years (“EMR” stood for “Escapist Mind Rot,” wotta riot).  It is mentioned here only in the interest of completeness; in no way do its flaws make it any kind of “collector’s edition.”  If you bought it — or even got it for free — you were ripped off.  The typography was nightmarishly unreadable and under-inked.  During multiple phases of proofreading, the typesetter was so enamored of his PC that none of the oft-repeated corrections managed to survive.  The cover was unvarnished; it arrived “pre-scuffed” from the blacking factory where it had been abused by Third World aborigines who had never experienced the English language firsthand, and toothless Appalachian hillbillies whose adversarial relationship with the printed word was painfully obvious in the finished “product.”  Some disreputable outlets still hawk fugitive stock of this grotesquely derailed, book-like excrescence, which was not released, but escaped.  By squandering your money on this abortion you support no one’s work.

Now, the splendidly overhauled Babbage edition (2002) — which looks almost the same, please pay attention — corrected all the shortcomings and typos.  I only cost a buck more.  It is the preferred text and format.  On the remote chance you might care about the differences, here they are:

The Babbage edition is 1/8th inch thicker at the spine, 1/8th inch taller, with a varnished cover featuring a red “e” within the word RED on the front, back, and spine.  The Babbage colophon is on the spine.

The cover graphic attributes the artwork to “lydia” in bright red on the EMR version.  On the Babbage it is attributed to “LcM 03.02” in a more subdued shade.

The EMR version has completely generic titles and contents pages.

The Babbage edition includes a page of review quotes upfront.  And a proper title page.  And bullets to separate the contents, reflecting just one aspect of the meticulous design work brought to bear on the repair effort.

The Babbage edition features frontispiece artwork (a variation on the cover) before the Contents page.

The Babbage edition also bears an amended Afterword, with the extra stuff dated December, 1998.

So one more time:  Babbage, not EMR.  For autograph seekers, the EMR version is one of one of a very small leper colony of three books I absolutely will not sign under any circumstances.  Go Babbage, Babbage, Babbage.  You have been warned.

—DJS , April 2002

And here we are a decade later, “embracing the digital” with this wholly nonphysical resurrection of Seeing Red.  Years of retrospection have revealed subtle themes for this and each subsequent collection — Lost Angels was about heartbreak and loss; Black Leather Required was the height of splatterpunk.  This themology arrived as an afterthought, mostly via the observations of readers and reviewers, and not as a result of my own strategic brilliance or hubris.  Seeing Red, I learned (and agree with), was a demonstration of the “conventional horror story” as interpreted through my various filters, or assorted takes on what constituted a scary story as the 1980s wound down, in defiance of (and sometimes abetted by) tropes that had come to be accepted as standard-issue furniture for any tale defined as “horror.”  Fair enough.

You may consider it as a time capsule.  Pre-Internet, pre-“mobile device,” when Ronald Reagan was still the Prez and $10 million was a huge budget for a movie.

All due praise for this edition should be directed to the elite Club of Other Daves:  David Niall Wilson of Crossroads Press, and his intrepid co-editor and designer David Dodd.

—DJS , March 2012

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION BY T.E.D. KLEIN

RED LIGHT

BUNNY DIDN'T TELL US

INCIDENT ON A RAINY NIGHT IN BEVERLY HILLS

THE WOMAN'S VERSION

LONESOME COYOTE BLUES

NIGHT BLOOMER

ONE FOR THE HORRORS

VISITATION

PULPMEISTER

COMING SOON TO A THEATRE NEAR YOU

THE EMBRACING

BLOOD RAPE OF THE LUST GHOULS

NOT FROM AROUND HERE

AFTERWORD: CRIMSON HINDSIGHT

CRIMSON HINDSIGHT

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS