HE EGGMAN'S JOURNEY

1

Suicide, Henry had discovered, had a voice. It wanted to explain itself The problem was that it didn't speak much English; mostly it lapsed into its own fractured pidgin. But it didn't matter; just the talking seemed to be enough. Once Henry allowed suicide its voice, his life had improved enormously. He even had nights when he slept again (not a lot of them, but enough), and he had never had a really bad day.

Until today.

It had been Jonesy's body on the Arctic Cat, but the thing now inside his old friend was full of alien images and alien purpose. Jonesy might also still be inside - Henry rather thought he was - but if so, he was now too deep, too small and powerless, to be of any use. Soon Jonesy would be gone completely, and that would likely be a mercy.

Henry had been afraid the thing now running Jonesy would sense him, but it went by without slowing. Toward Pete. And then what? Then where? Henry didn't want to think, didn't want to care.

At last he started back to camp again, not because there was anything left at Hole in the Wall but because there was no place else to go. As he reached the gate with its one-word sign - CLARENDON - ?he spat another tooth into his gloved hand, looked at it, then tossed it away. The snow was over, but the sky was still dark and he thought the wind was picking up again. Had the radio said something about a storm with a one-two punch? He couldn't remember, wasn't sure it mattered.

Somewhere to the west of him, a huge explosion hammered the day. Henry looked dully in that direction, but could see nothing. Something had either crashed or exploded, and at least some of the nagging voices in his head had stopped. He had no idea if those things were related or not, no idea if he should care. He stepped through the open gate, walking on the packed snow marked with the tread of the departing Arctic Cat, and approached Hole in the Wall.

The generator brayed steadily, and above the granite slab that served as their welcome mat, the door stood open. Henry paused outside for a moment, examining the slab. At first he thought there was blood on it, but blood, either fresh or dried, did not have that unique red-gold sheen. No, he was looking at some sort of organic growth. Moss or maybe fungus. And something else . . .

Henry tipped his head back, flared his nostrils, and sniffed gently - he had a memory, both clear and absurd, of being in Maurice's a month ago with his ex-wife, smelling the wine the sommelier had just poured, seeing Rhonda there across the table and thinking, We sniff the wine, dogs sniff each other's assholes, and it all comes to about the same. Then, in a flash, the memory of the milk running down his father's chin had come, He had smiled at Rhonda, she had smiled back, and he had thought what a relief the end would be, and if it were done, than 'twere well it were done quickly.

What he smelled now wasn't wine but a marshy, sulfurous odor. For a moment he couldn't place it, then it came: the woman who had wrecked them. The smell of her wrong innards was here, too.

Henry stepped onto the granite slab, aware that he had come to this place for the last time, feeling the weight of all the years - the laughs, the talks, the beers, the occasional lid of pot, a food-fight in '96 (or maybe it had been '97), the gunshots, that bitter mixed smell of powder and blood that meant deer season, the smell of death and friendship and childhood's brilliance.

As he stood there, he sniffed again. Much stronger, and now more chemical than organic, perhaps because there was so much of it. He looked inside. There was more of that fuzzy, mildev,7ystuff on the floor, but you could see the hardwood. On the Navajo rug, however, it had already grown so thick that it was hard to make out the pattern. No doubt whatever it was did better in the heat, but still, the rate of growth was scary.

Henry started to step in, then thought better of it. He backed two or three paces away from the doorway instead and only stood there in the snow, very aware of his bleeding nose and the holes in his gums where there had been teeth when he woke up this morning. If that mossy stuff was producing some sort of airborne virus, like Ebola or Hanta, he was probably cooked already, and anything he did would amount to no more than locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen. But there was no sense taking unnecessary risks, was there?

He turned and walked around Hole in the Wall to the Gulch side, still walking in the packed tread of the departed Arctic Cat to keep from sinking into the new snow.

2

The door to the shed was open, too. And Henry could see Jonesy, yes, clear as day, Jonesy pausing in the doorway before going in to get the snowmobile, Jonesy holding to the side of the doorway with a casual hand, Jonesy listening to . . . to the what?

To the nothing. No crows cawing, no jays scolding, no wood?peckers pecking, no squirrels scuttering. There was only the wind and an occasional padded plop as a clot of snow slid off a pine or spruce and hit the new snow beneath. The local wildlife was gone, had moved on like goofy animals in a Gary Larson cartoon.

He stood where he was for a moment, calling up his memory of the shed's interior. Pete would have done better - Pete would have stood here with his eyes closed and his forefinger ticking back and forth, then told you where everything was, right down to the smallest jar of screws - but in this case Henry thought he could do without Pete's special skill. He'd been out here just yesterday, looking for something to help him open a kitchen cabinet door that was swelled shut. He had seen then what he wanted now.

Henry inhaled and exhaled rapidly several times, hyperventilating his lungs clean, then pressed his gloved hand tight over his mouth and nose and stepped in. He stood still for a moment, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim. He didn't want to be surprised by anything if he could help it.

When he could see well again, Henry stepped across the empty place where the snowmobile had been. There was nothing on the floor now but an overlaid pattern of oil stains, but there were more patches of that reddish-gold crud growing on the green tarp which had covered the Cat and was now cast aside in the comer.

The worktable was a mess - a jar of nails and one of screws overturned so that what had been kept carefully separate was now mixed together, an old pipe-holder that had belonged to Lamar Clarendon knocked to the floor and broken, all the drawers built into the table's thickness yanked open and left that way. One of them, Beaver or Jonesy, had gone through this place like a whirlwind, looking for something.

It was Jonesy.

Yeah. Henry might never know what it was, but it had been Jonesy, he knew that, and it had clearly been almighty important to him or to both of them. Henry wondered if Jonesy had found it. He would probably never know that, either. Meanwhile, what he wanted was clearly visible in the far comer of the room, hung on a nail above a pile of paint-cans and sprayguns.

Still holding his hand over his mouth and nose, breath held, Henry crossed the interior of the shed. There were at least four of the little nose-and-mouth painters' masks hanging from elastics which had lost most of their snap. He took them all and turned in time to see something move behind the door. He kept himself from gasping, but his heartbeat jumped, and all at once the double lungful of air that had gotten him this far seemed too hot and heavy. Nothing there, either, it had just been his imagination. Then he saw that yeah, there was something. Light came in through the open door; a little more came in through the single dirty window over the table, and Henry had literally jumped at his own shadow.

He left the shed in four big steps, the painters' masks swinging from his right hand. He held onto his lungfill of decayed air until he'd made four more steps along the packed track of the snowmobile, then let it out in an explosive rush. He bent over, hands planted on his thighs above his knees, small black dots flocking before his eyes and then dissolving.

From the east came a distant crackle of gunfire. Not rifles; it was too loud and fast for that. Those were automatic weapons. In Henry's mind there came a vision as clear as the memory of milk running down his father's chin or Barry Newman fleeing his office with rockets on his heels. He saw the deer and the coons and the chucks and the feral dogs and the rabbits being cut down in their dozens and their hundreds as they tried to escape what was now pretty clearly a plague zone; he could see the snow turning red with their innocent (but possibly contaminated) blood. This vision hurt him in a way he had not expected, piercing through to a place that wasn't dead but only dozing. It was the place that had resonated so strongly to Duddits's weeping, setting up a harmonic tone that made you feel as if your head were going to explode.

Henry straightened up, saw fresh blood on the palm of his left glove, and cried 'Ah, shit!' at the sky in a voice that was both furious and amused. He had covered his mouth and nose, he had gotten the masks and was planning on wearing at least two when he went inside Hole in the Wall, but he had completely forgotten the gash in his thigh, the one he'd gotten when the Scout rolled over. If there had been a contaminant out there in the shed, something given off by the fungus, the chances were excellent that it was in him now. Not that the precautions he had taken were any such of a much. Henry imagined a sign, big red letters reading BIOHAZARD AREA! PLEASE HOLD BREATH AND COVER ANY SCRATCHES YOU MAY HAVE WITH YOUR HAND!

He grunted laughter and started back toward the cabin. Well, good God, Maude, it wasn't as if he had planned to live forever, anyway -

Off to the east, the gunfire crackled on and on.

3

Once again standing outside Hole in the Wall's open door, Henry felt in his back pocket for a handkerchief without much hope of finding one . . . and didn't. Two of the unadvertised attractions of spending time in the woods were urinating where you wanted and just leaning over and giving a honk when your nose felt in need of a blow. There was something primally satisfying about letting the piss and the snot fly . . . to men, at least. When you thought about it, it was sort of a blue-eyed wonder that women could love the best of them, let alone the rest of them.

He took off his coat, the shirt under it, and the thermal undershirt beneath that. The final layer was a faded Boston Red Sox tee-shirt with GARCIAPARRA 5 on the back. Henry took this off, spun it into a bandage, and wrapped it around the blood-caked tear in the left leg of his jeans, thinking again that he was locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen. Still, you filled in the blanks, didn't you? Yes, you filled in the blanks and you printed neatly and legibly. These were the concepts upon which life ran. Even when life was running out, it seemed.

He put the rest of his outerwear back on over his goosepimply top half, then donned two of the teardrop-shaped painters' masks. He considered fixing two of the others over his ears, imagined those narrow bands of elastic crisscrossing the back of his head like the straps of a shoulder holster, and burst out laughing. What else? Use the last mask to cover one eye?

'If it gets me, it gets me,' he said, at the same time reminding himself that it wouldn't hurt to be careful; a little dose of careful never hurt a man, old Lamar used to say.

Inside Hole in the Wall, the fungus (or mildew, or whatever it was) had gone forward appreciably even during the short time Henry had been in the shed. The Navajo rug was now covered side to side, with not even the slightest pattern showing through. There were patches on the couch, the counter between the kitchen and the dining area, and on the seats of two of the three stools which stood on the living-room side of the counter. A crooked capillary of red-gold fuzz ran up one leg of the dining-room table, as if following the line of a spill, and Henry was reminded of how ants will congregate on even the thinnest track of spilled sugar. Perhaps the most distressing thing of all was the red-gold fuzz of cobweb hanging high over the Navajo rug. Henry looked at it fixedly for several seconds before realizing what it really was: Lamar Clarendon's dreamcatcher. Henry didn't think he would ever know exactly what had happened here, but of one thing he was sure: the dreamcatcher had snared a real nightmare this time.

You aren't really going any farther in here, are you? Now that you've seen how fast it grows? Jonesy looked all right when he went by, but he wasn't all right, and you know it. You felt it. So . . . you aren't really going on, are you?

'I think so,' Henry said. The doubled thickness of masks bobbed on his face when he spoke. 'If it gets hold of me . . . why, I'll just have to kill myself'

Laughing like Stubb in Moby-Dick, Henry moved farther into the cabin.

4

With one exception, the fungus grew in thin mats and clumps. The exception was in front of the bathroom door, where there was an actual hill of fungus, all of it matted together and growing upward in the doorway, bearding both jambs to a height of at least four feet. This hill-like clump of growth seemed to be lying over some grayish, spongy growth medium. On the side facing the living room, the gray stuff split in two, making a V-shape that reminded Henry unpleasantly of splayed legs. As if someone had died in the doorway and the fungus had overgrown the corpse. Henry recalled an offprint from med school, some article quickly scanned in the search for something else. It had contained photographs, one of them a gruesome medical exarniner's shot he had never quite forgotten. It showed a murder victim dumped in the woods, the nude body discovered after approximately four days. There had been toadstools growing from the nape of the neck, the creases at the backs of the knees, and from the cleft of the buttocks.

Four days, all right. But this place had been clean this morning, only . . .

Henry glanced at his watch and saw that it had stopped at twenty till twelve. It was now Eastern Standard No Time At All.

He turned and peeked behind the door, suddenly convinced that something was lurking there.

Nah. Nothing but Jonesy's Garand, leaning against the wall.

Henry started to turn away, then turned back again. The Garand looked clear of the goo, and Henry picked it up. Loaded, safety on, one in the chamber. Good. Henry slung it over his shoulder and turned back toward the unpleasant red Jump growing outside the bathroom door. The smell of ether, mingled with something sulfurous and even more unpleasant, was strong in here. He walked slowly across the room toward the bathroom, forcing himself forward a step at a time, afraid (and increasingly certain) that the red hump with the leglike extrusions was all that remained of his friend Beaver. In a moment he would see the straggly remains of the Beav's long black hair or his Doc Martens, which Beaver called his 'lesbian solidarity statement'. The Beav had gotten the idea that Doc Martens were a secret sign by which lesbians recognized each other, and no one could talk him out of this. He was likewise convinced that people named Rothschild and Goldfarb ran the world, possibly from a bedrock-deep bunker in Colorado. Beaver, whose preferred expression of surprise was fuck me Freddy.

But there was absolutely no way of telling if the lump in the doorway had once been the Beav, or indeed if it had once been anyone at all. There was only that suggestive shape. Something glinted in the spongy mass of growth and Henry leaned a little closer, wondering even as he did it if microscopic bits of the fungus were already growing on the wet, unprotected surfaces of his eyes. The thing he spotted turned out to be the bathroom doorknob. Off to one side, sporting its own fuzz of growth, was a roll of friction tape. He remembered the mess scattered across the surface of the worktable out back, the yanked-open drawers. Had this been what Jonesy had been out there looking for? A goddam roll of tape? Something in his head - maybe the click, maybe not - said it was. But why? In God's name, why?

In the last five months or so, as the suicidal thoughts came more frequently and visited for longer and longer periods of time, chatting in their pidgin language, Henry's curiosity had pretty much deserted him. Now it was raging, as if it had awakened hungry. He had nothing to feed it. Had Jonesy wanted to tape the door shut? Yeah? Against what? Surely he and the Beav must have known it wouldn't work against the fungus, which would just send its fingers creeping under the door.

Henry looked into the bathroom and made a low grunting sound. Whatever obscene craziness had gone on, it had started and ended in there - he had no doubt of it. The room was a red cave, the blue tiles almost completely hidden under drifts of the stuff. It had grown up the base of the sink and the toilet, as well. The seat's lid was back against the tank, and although he couldn't be positive - there was too much overgrowth to be positive - he thought that the ring itself had been broken inward. The shower curtain was now a solid red-gold instead of filmy blue; most of it had been tom off the rings (which had grown their own vegetable beards) and lay in the tub.

Jutting from the edge of the tub, also overgrown with fungus, was a boot-clad foot. The boot was a Doc Marten, Henry was sure of it. He had found Beaver after all, it seemed. Memories of the day they had rescued Duddits suddenly filled him, so bright and clear it might have been yesterday. Beaver wearing his goofy old leather jacket, Beaver taking Duddits's lunchbox and saying You like this show? But they never change their clothes! And then saying -

'Fuck me Freddy,' Henry told the overgrown cabin. 'That's what he said, what he always said.' Tears running from his eyes and down his cheeks. If it was just wetness the fungus wanted ?and judging by the jungle growing out of the toilet-bowl, it liked wetness just fine - it could land on him and have a feast.

Henry didn't much care. He had Jonesy's rifle. The fungus could start on him, but he could make sure that he was long gone before it ever got to the dessert course. If it came to that.

It probably would.

5

He was sure he'd seen a few rug-remnants heaped up in one comer of the shed. Henry debated going out and getting them. He could lay them down on the bathroom floor, walk over them, and get a better look into the tub. But to what purpose? He knew that was Beaver, and he had no real desire to see his old friend, author of such witticisms as Kiss my bender, being overgrown by red fungus as the pallid corpse in that long-ago medical offprint had been growing its own colony of toadstools. If it might have answered some of his questions about what had happened, yes, perhaps. But Henry didn't think that likely.

Mostly what he wanted was to get out of here. The fungus was creepy, but there was something else. An even creepier sensation that he was not alone.

Henry backed away from the bathroom door. There was a paperback on the dining table, a pattern of dancing devils with pitchforks on its cover. One of Jonesy's, no doubt, already growing its own little colony of crud.

He became aware of a whickering noise from the west, one that quickly rose to a thunder. Helicopters, and not just one, this time. A lot. Big ones. They sounded as if they were coming in at rooftop level, and Henry ducked without even being aware of it. Images from a dozen Vietnam War movies filled his head and he was momentarily sure that they would open up with their machine-guns, spraying the house. Or maybe they'd hose it down with napalm.

They passed over without doing either, but came close enough to rattle the cups and dishes on the kitchen shelves. Henry straight?ened up as the thunder began to fade, becoming first a chatter and then a harmless drone. Perhaps they had gone off to join the animal slaughter at the east end of Jefferson Tract. Let them. He was going to get the fuck out of here and -

And what? Exactly what?

While he was thinking this question over, there was a sound from one of the two downstairs bedrooms. A rustling sound. This was followed by a moment of silence, just long enough for Henry to decide it was his imagination pulling a little more overtime. Then there came a series of low clicks and chitters, almost the sound of a mechanical toy - a tin monkey or parrot, maybe - on the verge of running down. Gooseflesh broke out all over Henry's body. The spit dried up in his mouth. The hairs on the back of his neck began to straighten in bunches.

Get out of here, run!

Before he could listen to that voice and let it get a hold on him, he crossed to the bedroom door in big steps, unshouldering the Garand as he went. The adrenaline dumped into his blood, and the world stood forth brightly. Selective perception, that unacknowl?edged gift to the safe and cozy, fell away and he saw every detail: the trail of blood which ran from bedroom to bathroom, a discarded slipper, that weird red mold growing on the wall in the shape of a handprint. Then he went through the door.

It was on the bed, whatever it was; to Henry it looked like a weasel or a woodchuck with its legs amputated and a long, bloody tail strung out behind it like an afterbirth. Only no animal he'd ever seen - with the possible exception of the moray eel at the Boston Seaquarium - had such disproportionately large black eyes. And another similarity: when it yawned open the rudimentary line that was its mouth, it revealed a nest of shocking fangs, as long and thin as hatpins.

Behind it, pulsing on the blood-soaked sheet, were a hundred or more orange-and-brown eggs. They were the size of large marbles and coated with a murky, snotlike slime. Within each Henry could see a moving, hairlike shadow.

The weasel-thing rose up like a snake emerging from a snake?-charmer's basket and chittered at him. It lurched on the bed ?Jonesy's bed - but seemed unable to move much. Its glossy black eyes glared. Its tail (except Henry thought it might actually be some sort of gripping tentacle) lashed back and forth, then laid itself over as many of the eggs as it could reach, as if protecting them.

Henry realized he was saying the same word, no, over and over in a monotonous drone, like a helpless neurotic who has been loaded up on Thorazine. He shouldered the rifle, aimed, and tracked the thing's repulsive wedge of a head as it twitched and dodged. It knows what this is, it knows at least that much, Henry thought coldly, and then he squeezed the trigger.

It was close range and the creature wasn't up to much in the way of evasion; either laying its eggs had exhausted it or it wasn't doing well in the cold - with the main door open, Hole in the Wan had gotten quite cold indeed. The report was very loud in the closed room, and the thing's upraised head disintegrated in a liquid splatter that blew back against the wall in strings and clots. Its blood was the same red-gold as the fungus. The decapitated body tumbled off the bed and onto a litter of clothes Henry didn't recognize: a brown coat, an orange flagman's vest, a pair of jeans with cuffs (none of them had ever worn cuffed jeans; in junior high school, those who did had been branded shitkickers). Several of the eggs tumbled off with the body. Most landed on either the clothes or the litter of Jonesy's books and remained whole, but a couple hit the floor and broke open. Cloudy stuff like spoiled eggwhite oozed out, about a tablespoonful from each egg. Within it were those hairs, writhing and twisting and seeming to glare at Henry with black eyes the size of pinheads. Looking at them made him feel like screaming.

He turned and walked jerkily out of the room on legs with no more feeling in them than the legs of a table. He felt like a puppet being manipulated by someone who means well but has just begun to learn his craft. He had no real idea where he was going until he reached the kitchen and bent over the cabinet under the sink.

'I am the eggman, I am the eggman, I am the walrus! Goo-?goo-joob!'

He didn't sing this but declaimed it in a loud, hortatory voice he hadn't realized was in his repertoire. It was the voice of a ham actor from the nineteenth century. That idea called up an image ?God knew why - of Edwin Booth dressed as d'Artagnan, plumed hat and all, quoting from the lyrics of John Lennon, and Henry uttered two loud laugh-syllables - Ha! Ha!

I'm going insane, he thought . . . but it was okay. Better d'Artagnan reciting 'I Am the Walrus' than the image of that thing's blood splattering onto the wall, or the mold-covered Doc Marten sticking out of the bathtub, or, worst of all, those eggs splitting open and releasing a load of twitching hairs with eyes. All those eyes looking at him.

He moved aside the dish detergent and the floor-bucket, and there it was, the yellow can of Sparx barbecue lighter fluid. The inept puppeteer who had taken him over advanced Henry's arm in a series of jerks, then clamped his right hand on the Sparx can. He carried it back across the living room, pausing long enough to take the box of wooden matches from the mantel.

'I am he and you are me and we are all together!' he declaimed, and stepped briskly back into Jonesy's bedroom before the terrified person inside his head could seize the controls, turn him, and make him run away. That person wanted to make him run until he fell down unconscious. Or dead.

The eggs on the bed were also splitting open. Two dozen or more of those hairs were crawling around on the blood-soaked sheet or squirming on Jonesy's pillow. One raised its nub of a head and chittered at Henry, a sound almost too thin and high-pitched to be heard.

Still not allowing himself any pause, if he paused he would never get started again (in any direction save doorward, that was), Henry took two steps to the foot of the bed. One of the hairs came sliding across the floor toward him, propelling itself with its tail like a spermatozoon under a microscope.

Henry stepped on it, thumbing the red plastic cap off the spout of the can as he did. He aimed the spout at the bed and squeezed, flicking his wrist back and forth, making sure he got plenty on the floor as well. When the lighter fluid hit the hairlike things, they made high, mewling cries like kittens which had just been born.

'Eggman . . . eggman . . . walrus!'

He stepped on another of the hairs and saw that a third was clinging to the leg of his jeans, holding on with its wisp of a tail and trying to bite through the cloth with its still soft teeth.

'Eggman,' Henry muttered, and scraped it off with the side of his other boot. When it tried to squirm away he stepped on it. He was suddenly aware that he was drenched with sweat, sopping from head to toe, if he went out into the cold like this (and he would have to; he couldn't stay here), he'd probably catch his death.

'Can't stay here, can't take no rest!' Henry cried in his new hortatory voice.

He opened the matchbox, but his hands were shaking so badly he spilled half of them on the floor. More of the threadlike worms were crawling toward him. They might not know much, but they knew he was the enemy, all right; they knew that.

Henry got hold of a match, held it up, put his thumb against the tip. A trick Pete had taught him in the way back when. It was your friends who always taught you the finer things, wasn't it? Like how to give your old pal Beaver a Viking funeral and get n'd of these noisome little snakelets at the same time.

'Eggman!'

He scratched the tip of the match and it popped fire. The smell of the burning sulfur was like the smell that had greeted him when he stepped into the cabin, like the smell of the burly woman's farts.

'Walrus!'

He flung the match at the foot of the bed, where there was a crumpled duvet now soaked with lighter fluid. For a moment the flame guttered down blue around the little stick, and Henry thought it would go out. Then there was a soft flump sound, and the duvet grew a modest crown of yellow flames.

'Goo - goo - joob!'

The flames crawled up the sheet, turning the blood soaked into it black. It reached the mass of jelly - coated eggs, tasted them, and found them good. There was a series of thick popping sounds as the eggs began to burst. More of those mewling cries as the worms burned. Sizzling noises as fluid ran out of the burst eggs.

Henry backed out of the room, squirting lighter fluid as he went. He got halfway across the Navajo rug before the can ran empty. He tossed it aside, scratched another match, and tossed it. This time the flump! was immediate, and the flames sprang up orange. The heat baked against his sweat-shiny face, and he felt a sudden urge - it was both strong and joyful - to cast the painters' masks aside and simply stride into the fire. Hello heat, hello summer, hello darkness, my old friend.

What stopped him was as simple as it was powerful. If he pulled the pin now, he would have suffered the unpleasant awakening of all his quiescent emotions to no purpose. He would never be clear on the details of what had happened here, but he might get at least some answers from whoever was flying the helicopters and shooting the animals. If they didn't just shoot him, too, that was.

At the door, Henry was struck by a memory so clear that his heart cried out inside him: Beaver kneeling in front of Duddits, who is trying to put on his sneaker backwards. Let me fix that, man, Beaver says, and Duddits, looking at him with a wide-eyed perplexity that you could only love, replies. Fit neek?

Henry was crying again. 'So long, Beav,' he said. 'Love you, man - and that's straight from the heart.'

Then he stepped out into the cold.

6

He walked to the far end of Hole in the Wall, where the woodpile was. Beside it was another tarp, this one ancient, black fading to gray. It was frost - frozen to the ground, and Henry had to yank hard with both hands in order to pull it free. Under it was a tangle of snowshoes, skates, and skis. There was an antediluvian ice - auger, as well.

As he looked at this unprepossessing pile of long-dormant winter gear, Henry suddenly realized how tired he was . . . except tired was really too mild a word. He had just come ten miles on foot, much of it at a fast trot. He had also been in a car accident and discovered the body of a childhood friend. He believed both his other two childhood friends were likewise lost to him.

If I hadn't been suicidal to begin with, I'd be stark-raving crazy by now, he thought, and then laughed. It felt good to laugh, but it didn't make him feel any less tired. Still, he had to get out of here. Had to find someone in authority and tell them what had happened. They might already know - based on the sounds, they sure as shit knew something, although their methods of dealing with it made Henry feel uneasy - but they might not know about the weasels. And the eggs. He, Henry Devlin, would tell them - who better? He was the eggman, after all.

The rawhide lacings of the snowshoes had been chewed by so many mice that the shoes were little more than empty frames. After some sorting, however, he found a stubby pair of cross-country skis that looked as if they might have been state-of-the-art around 1954 or so. The clamps were rusty, but when he pushed them with both thumbs, he was able to move them enough to take a reluctant grip on his boots.

There was a steady crackling sound coming from inside the cabin now. Henry laid one hand on the wood and felt the heat. There was a clutch of assorted ski-poles leaning under the eave, their handgrips buried in a dirty cobweb caul. Henry didn't like to touch that stuff - the memory of the eggs and the weasel-thing's wriggling spawn was still too fresh - but at least he had his gloves on. He brushed the cobwebs aside and sorted through the poles, moving quickly. He could now see sparks dancing inside the window beside his head.

He found a pair of poles that were only a little short for his lanky height and skied clumsily to the comer of the building. He felt like a Nazi snow-trooper in an Alistair MacLean film, with the old skis on his feet and Jonesy's rifle slung over his shoulder. As he turned around, the window beside which he had been standing blew out with a surprisingly loud report - as if someone had dropped a large glass bowl from a second-story window. Henry hunched his shoulders and felt pieces of glass spatter against his coat. A few landed in his hair. It occurred to him that if he had spent another twenty or thirty seconds sorting through the skis and poles, that exploding glass would have erased most of his face.

He looked up at the sky, spread his hands palms-out beside his cheeks like Al Jolson, and said, 'Somebody up there likes me! Hotcha!'

Flames were shooting through the window now, licking up under the eaves, and he could hear more stuff breaking inside as the heat-gradient zoomed. Lamar Clarendon's father's camp, originally built just after World War Two, now burning merry hell. It was a dream, surely.

Henry skied around the house, giving it a wide berth, watching as gouts of sparks rose from the chimney and swirled toward the low-bellied clouds. There was still a steady crackle of gunfire off to the east. Someone was bagging their limit, all right. Their limit and more. Then there was that explosion in the west - what in God's name had that been? No way of telling. If he got back to other people in one piece, perhaps they would tell him.

'If they don't just decide to bag me, too,' he said. His voice came out in a dry croak, and he realized he was all but dying of thirst. He bent down carefully (he hadn't been on skis of any type in ten years or more), scooped up a double handful of snow, and took a big mouthful. He let it melt and trickle down his throat. The feeling was heavenly. Henry Devlin, psychiatrist and onetime author of a paper about the Hemingway Solution, a man who had once been a virgin boy and who was now a tall and geeky fellow whose glasses always slid down to the tip of his nose, whose hair was going gray, whose friends were either dead, fled, or changed, this man stood in the open gate of a place to which he would never come again, stood on skis, stood eating snow like a kid eating a Sno-Cone at the Shrine Circus, stood and watched the last really good place in his life bum. The flames came through the cedar shingles. Melting snow turned to steaming water and ran hissing down the rusting gutters. Arms of fire popped in and out of the open door like enthusiastic hosts encouraging the newly arrived guests to hurry up, hurry up, dammit, get your asses in here before the whole place bums down. The mat of red-gold fuzz growing on the granite slab had crisped, lost its color, turned gray. 'Good,' Henry muttered under his breath. He was clenching his fists rhythmically on the grips of his ski-poles without being aware of it. 'Good, that's good.'

He stood that way for another fifteen minutes, and when he could bear it no more, he set his back to the flames and started back the way he had come.

7

There was no hustle left in him. He had twenty miles to go (22.2 to be exact, he told himself), and if he didn't pace himself he'd never make it. He stayed in the packed track of the snowmobile, and stopped to rest more frequently than he had going the other way.

Ah, but I was younger then, he thought with only slight irony.

Twice he checked his watch, forgetting that it was now Eastern Standard No Time At All in the Jefferson Tract. With the mat of clouds firmly in place overhead, all he knew for sure was that it was daytime. Afternoon, of course, but whether mid or late he couldn't tell. On another afternoon his appetite might have served as a gauge, but not today. Not after the thing on Jonesy's bed, and the eggs, and the hairs with their protuberant black eyes. Not after the foot sticking out of the bathtub. He felt that he would never eat again . . . and if he did, he would never eat anything with even a slight tinge of red. And mushrooms? No thanks.

Skiing, at least on cross-country stubs like these, was sort of like riding a bike, he discovered: you never forgot how to do it. He fell once going up the first hill, the skis slipping out from under him, but glided giddily down the other side with only a couple of wobbles and no spills. He guessed that the skis hadn't been waxed since the peanut-farmer was President, but if he stayed in the crimped and flattened track of the snowmobile, he should be all right. He marvelled at the stippling of animal tracks on the Deep Cut Road ?he had never seen a tenth as many. A few critters had gone walking along it, but most of the tracks only crossed it, west to east. The Deep Cut took a lazy northwest course, and west was clearly a point of the compass the local animal population wanted to avoid.

I'm on a journey, he told himself. Maybe someday someone will write an epic poem about it: 'Henry's journey'.

'Yeah,' he said. "'Time slowed and reality bent; on and on the eggman went."' He laughed at that, and in his dry throat the laughter turned to hacking coughs. He skied to the side of the snowmobile track, got another double handful of snow, and ate it down.

'Tasty and good for you!' he proclaimed. 'Snow! Not just for breakfast anymore!'

He looked up at the sky, and that was a mistake. For a moment he was overwhelmed with dizziness and thought he might go right over on his back. Then the vertigo retreated. The clouds overhead looked a little darker. Snow coming? Night coming? Both coming at the same time? His knees and ankles hurt from the steady shuffle - shuffle of the skis, and his arms hurt even worse from wielding the poles. The pads of muscle on his chest were the worst. He had already accepted as certainty that he wouldn't make it to Gosselin's before dark; now, standing here and eating more snow, it occurred to him that he might not make it at all.

He loosened the Red Sox tee-shirt he'd tied around his leg, and terror leaped in him when he saw a brilliant thread of scarlet against his bluejeans. His heart beat so hard that white dots appeared in his field of vision, flocking and pumping. He reached down to the red with shaking fingers.

What do you think you're going to do? he jeered at himself. Pick it off like it was a thread or a piece of lint?

Which was exactly what he did do, because it was a thread: a red one from the shirt's printed logo. He dropped it and watched it float down to the snow. Then he retied the shirt around the tear in his jeans. For a man who had been considering all sorts of final options not four hours ago - the rope and the noose, the tub and the plastic bag, the bridge abutment and the ever-popular Hemingway Solution, known in some quarters as The Policeman's Farewell - he had been pretty goddamned scared there for a second or two.

Because I don't want to go like that, he told himself. Not eaten alive by . . .

'By toadstools from Planet X,' he said.

The eggman got moving again.

8

The world shrank, as it always does when we approach exhaustion with our work not done, or even close to done. Henry's life was reduced to four simple, repetitive motions: the pump of his arms on the poles and the push of the skis in the snow. His aches and pains faded, at least for the time being, as he entered some other zone. He only remembered anything remotely like this happening once before, in high school, when he'd been the starting center on the Derry Tigers basketball team. During a crucial pre-playoff game, three of their four best players had somehow fouled out before three minutes of the third quarter were gone. Coach had left Henry in for the rest of the game - he didn't get a single blow except for time-outs and trips to the foul line. He made it, but by the time the final buzzer honked and put an end to the affair (the Tigers had lost gaudily), he had been floating in a kind of happy dream. Halfway down the corridor to the boys' locker room, his legs had given out and down he had gone, with a silly smile still on his face, while his teammates, clad in their red travelling unis, laughed and cheered and clapped and whistled.

No one to clap or whistle here; only the steady crackle-and?-stutter of gunfire off to the east. Slowing a little bit now, maybe, but still heavy.

More ominous were the occasional gunshots from up ahead. Maybe from Gosselin's? It was impossible to tell.

He heard himself singing his least favorite Polling Stones song, 'Sympathy for the Devil' (Made damn sure that Pilate washed his hands and sealed His fate, thank you very much, you've been a wonderful audience, good night), and made himself stop when lie realized the song had gotten all mixed up with memories of Jonesy in the hospital, Jonesy as he had looked last March, not just gaunt but somehow reduced, as if his essence had pulled itself in to form a protective shield around his surprised and outraged body. Jonesy had looked to Henry like someone who was probably going to die, and although he hadn't died, Henry realized now that it was around that time that his own thoughts of suicide had become really serious. To the rogues gallery of images that haunted him in the middle of the night blue-white milk running down his father's chin, Barry Newman's giant economy-sized buttocks jiggling as he flew from the office, Richie Grenadeau holding out a dog-turd to the weeping and nearly naked Duddits Cavell, telling him to eat it, he had to eat it - there was now the image of Jonesy's too-thin face and addled eyes, Jonesy who had been swopped into the street without a single rhyme or reason, Jonesy who looked all too ready to put on his boogie shoes and get out of town. They said he was in stable condition, but Henry had read critical in his old fi7iend's eyes. Sympathy for the devil? Please. There was no god, no devil, no sympathy. And once you realized that, you were in trouble. Your days as a viable, paying customer in the great funhouse that was Kulture Amerika were numbered.

He heard himself signing it again - But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game - and made himself stop it. What, then? Something really Undress. Mindless and pointless and tasty, something just oozing Kulture Amerika. How about that one by the Pointer Sisters? That was a good one.

Looking down at his shuffling skis and the horizontal crimps left by the snowmobile treads, he began to sing it. Soon he was droning it over and over in a whispery, tuneless monotone while the sweat soaked through his shirts and clear mucus ran from his nose to freeze on his upper lip: 'I know we can make it, I know we can, we can work it out, yes we can-can yes we can yes we can . . .'

Better. Much better. All those yes we can-cans were as Amerikan Kulture as a Ford pickup in a bowling alley parking lot, a lingerie sale at JC Penney, or a dead rock star in a bathtub.

9

And so he eventually returned to the shelter where he had left Pete and the woman. Pete was gone. No sign of him at all.

The rusty tin roof of the lean-to had fallen, and Henry lifted it, peeking under it like a metal bedsheet to make sure Pete wasn't there. He wasn't, but the woman was. She had crawled or been moved from where she'd been when Henry set out for Hole in the Wall, and somewhere along the line she'd come down with a bad case of dead. Her clothes and face were covered with the rust-colored mold that had choked the cabin, but Henry noticed an interesting thing: while the growth on her was doing pretty well (especially in her nostrils and her visible eye, which had sprouted a jungle), the stuff which had spread out from her, outlining her body in a ragged sunburst, was in trouble. The fungus behind her, on the side blocked from the fire, had turned gray and stopped spreading. The stuff in front of her was doing a little better - it had had warmth, and ground to grow on which had been melted clear of snow - but the tips of the tendrils were turning the powdery gray of volcanic ash.

Henry was pretty sure it was dying.

So was the daylight - no question of that now. Henry dropped the rusty piece of corrugated tin back on the body of Becky Shue and on the embery remains of the fire. Then he looked at the track of the Cat again, wishing as he had back at the cabin that he had Natty Bumppo with him to explain what he was seeing. Or maybe Jonesy's good friend Hercule Poirot, he of the little gray cells.

The track swerved in toward the collapsed roof of the lean - to before continuing on northwest toward Gosselin's. There was a pressed - down area in the snow that almost made the shape of a human body. To either side, there were round divots in the snow.

'What do you say, Hercule?' Henry asked. 'What means this, mon ami?' But Hercule said nothing.

Henry began to sing under his breath again and leaned closer to one of the round divots, unaware that he had left the Pointer Sisters behind and switched back to the Rolling Stones.

There was enough light for him to see a pattern in the three dimples to the left of the body shape, and he recalled the patch on the right elbow of Pete's duffel coat. Pete had told him with an odd sort of pride that his girlfriend had sewed that on there, declaring he had no business going off hunting with a ripped jacket. Henry remembered thinking it was sad and funny at the same time, how Pete had built up a wistful fantasy of a happy future from that single act of kindness . . . an act which probably had more to do, in the end, with how the lady in question had been raised than with any feelings she might have for her beer-soaked boyfriend.

Not that it mattered. What mattered was that Henry felt he could draw a bona fide deduction at last. Pete had crawled out from under the collapsed roof Jonesy - or whatever was now running Jonesy, the cloud - had come along, swerved over to the remains of the lean-to, and picked Pete up.

Why?

Henry didn't know.

Not all of the splotches in the flattened shape of his thrashing friend, who had crawled out from under the piece of tin by hooking himself along on his elbows, were that mold stuff. Some of it was dried blood. Pete had been hurt. Cut when the roof fell in? Was that all?

Henry spotted a wavering trail leading away from the depression which had held Pete's body. At the end of it was what he first took to be a fire-charred stick. Closer examination changed his mind. It was another of the weasel things, this one burned and dead, now turning gray where it wasn't seared. Henry flipped it aside with the toe of his boot. Beneath it was a small frozen mass. More eggs. It must have been laying them even as it died.

Henry kicked snow over both the eggs and the little monster's corpse, shuddering. He unwrapped the makeshift bandage for another look at the wound on his leg, and as he did it he realized what song was coming out of his mouth. He quit singing. New snow, just a scattering of light flakes, began to skirt down.

'Why do I keep singing that?' he asked. 'Why does that fucking song keep coming back?'

He expected no answer; these were questions uttered aloud mostly for the comfort of hearing his own voice (this was a death place, perhaps even a haunted place), but one came anyway.

'Because it's our song. It's the Squad Anthem, the one we play when we go in hot. We're Cruise's boys.' Cruise? Was that right? As in Tom Cruise? Maybe not quite.

The gunfire from the east was much lighter now. The slaughter of the animals was almost done. But there were men, a long skirmish line of hunters who were wearing green or black instead of orange, and they were listening to that song over and over again as they did their work, adding up the numbers of an incredible butcher's bill: I rode a tank, held a general's rank, when the blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank . . . Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name.

What exactly was going on here? Not in the wild, wonderful, wacky Outside World, but inside his own head? He'd had flashes of understanding his whole life - his life since Duddits, anyway - but nothing like this. What was this? Was it time to examine this new and powerful way of seeing the line?

No. No, no, no.

And, as if mocking him, the song in his head: general's rank, bodies stank.

'Duddits!' he exclaimed in the graying, dying afternoon; lazy flakes falling like feathers from a split pillow. Some thought struggled to be born but it was too big, too big.

'Duddits!' he cried again in his hortatory eggman's voice, and one thing he did understand: the luxury of suicide had been denied him. Which was the most horrible thing of all, because these weird thoughts - I shouted out who killed the Kennedys - were tearing him apart. He began to weep again, bewildered and afraid, alone in the woods. All his friends except Jonesy were dead, and Jonesy was in the hospital. A movie star in the hospital with Mr Gray.

'What does that mean?' Henry groaned. He clapped his hands to his temples (he felt as though his head were bulging, bulging) and his rusty old ski-poles flapped aimlessly at the ends of their wrist-loops like broken propeller blades. 'Oh Christ, what does that MEAN?'

Only the song came in answer: Pleased to meet you! Hope you guess my name!

Only the snow: red with the blood of slaughtered animals and they lay everywhere, a Dachau of deer and raccoon and rabbit and weasel and bear and groundhog and -

Henry screamed, held his head and screamed so loud and so hard that he felt sure for a moment that he was going to pass out. Then his lightheartedness passed and his rm'nd seemed to clear, at least for the time being. He was left with a brilliant image of Duddits as he had been when they first met him, Duddits not under the light of a blitzkrieg winter as in that Stones song but under the sane light of a cloudy October afternoon, Duddits looking up at them with his tilted, somehow wise Chinese eyes. Duddits was our finest hour, he had told Pete.

'Fit wha?' Henry said now. 'Fit neek?'

Yeah, fit neek. Turn it around, put it on the right way, fit neek.

Smiling a little now (although his cheeks were still wet with tears that were beginning to freeze), Henry began to ski along the crimped track of the snowmobile again.

10

Ten minutes later he came to the overturned wreck of the Scout. He suddenly realized two things: that he was ragingly hungry after all and that there was food in there. He had seen the tracks both going and coming and hadn't needed Natty Bumppo to know that Pete had left the woman and returned to the Scout. Nor did he need Hercule Poirot to tell him that the food they'd bought at the store - most of it, at least - would still be in there. He knew what Pete had come back for.

He skied around to the passenger side, following Pete's tracks, then froze in the act of loosening the ski bindings. This side was away from the wind, and what Pete had written in the snow as he sat drinking his two beers was mostly still here: DUDDITS, printed over and over again. As he looked at the name in the snow, Henry began to shiver. It was like coming to the grave of a loved one and hearing a voice speak out of the ground.

11

There was broken glass inside the Scout. Blood, as well. Because most of the blood was on the back seat, Henry felt sure it hadn't been spilled in the original accident; Pete had cut himself on his return trip. To Henry, the interesting thing was that there was none of the red-gold fuzz. It grew rapidly, and so the logical conclusion was that Pete hadn't been infected when he'd come for the beer. Later, maybe, but not then.

He grabbed the bread, the peanut butter, the milk, and the carton of orange juice. Then he backed out of the Scout and sat with his shoulders against the overturned rear end, watching the fresh snow sift down and gobbling bread and peanut butter as fast as he could, using his index finger as a knife and licking it clean between spreads. The peanut butter was good and the orange juice went down in two long drafts, but it wasn't enough.

'What you're thinking of,' he announced to the darkening afternoon, 'is grotesque. Not to mention red. Red food.'

Red or not, he was thinking of it, and surely it wasn't all that grotesque; he was, after all, a man who had spent long nights thinking about guns and ropes and plastic bags. All of that seemed a little childish just now, but it was him, all right. And so -

'And so let me close, ladies and gentlemen of the American Psy?chiatric Association, by quoting the late Joseph "Beaver" Clarendon: "Said fuck it and put a dime in the Salvation Army bucket. And if you don't like it, grab my cock and suck it." Thank you very much.'

Having thus discoursed to the American Psychiatric Association, Henry crawled back into the Scout, once more successfully avoiding the broken glass, and got the package wrapped in butcher's paper ($2.79 printed on it in Old Man Gosselin's shaky hand). He backed out again with the package in his pocket, then took it out and snapped the twine. Inside were nine plump hot dogs. The red kind.

For a moment his mind tried to show him the legless reptilian thing squirming on Jonesy's bed and looking at him with its empty black eyes, but he banished it with the speed and ease of one whose survival instincts have never wavered.

The hot dogs were fully cooked, but he warmed them up just the same, running the flame of his butane lighter back and forth beneath each one until it was at least warm, then wrapping it in Wonder Bread and gobbling it down. He smiled as he did it, knowing how ridiculous he would look to an observer. Well, didn't they say that psychiatrists eventually ended up as loony as their patients, if not more so?

The important thing was that he was finally full. Even more important, all the disconnected thoughts and fragmented images had drained out of his mind. Also the song. He hoped none of that crap would come back. Ever, please God.

He swallowed more milk, belched, then leaned his head against the side of the Scout and closed his eyes. No going to sleep, though; these woods were lovely, dark and deep, and he had twelve-point-seven miles to go before he could sleep.

He remembered Pete talking about the gossip in Gosselin's ?missing hunters, lights in the sky - and how blithely The Great American Psychiatrist had dismissed it, gassing about the Satanism hysteria in Washington State, the abuse hysteria in Delaware. Playing Mr Smartass Shrink - Boy with his mouth and the front of his mind while the back of his mind went on playing with suicide like a baby who's just discovered his toes in the bathtub. He had sounded entirely plausible, ready for any TV panel show that wanted to spend sixty minutes on the interface between the unconscious and the unknown, but things had changed. Now he had become one of the missing hunters. Also, he had seen things you couldn't find on the Internet no matter how big your search engine was.

He sat there, head back, eyes closed, belly full. Jonesy's Garand was propped against one of the Scout's tires. The snow lit on his cheeks and forehead like the light touch of a kitten's paws. 'This is it, what all the geeks have been waiting for,' he said. 'Close encounters of the third kind. Hell, maybe the fourth or fifth kind. Sorry I made fun of you, Pete. You were right and I was wrong. Hell, it's worse than that. Old Man Gosselin was right and I was wrong, So much for a Harvard education.'

And once he'd said that much out loud, things began to make sense. Something had either landed or crashed. There had been an armed response from the United States government. Were they telling the outside world what had happened? Probably not, that wasn't their style, but Henry had an idea they would have to before much longer. You couldn't put the entire Jefferson Tract in Hangar 57.

Did he know anything else? Maybe, and maybe it was a little more than the men in charge of the helicopters and the firing parties knew. They clearly believed they were dealing with a contagion, but Henry didn't think it was as dangerous as they seemed to. The stuff caught, bloomed . . . but then it died. Even the parasite that had been inside the woman had died. This was a bad time of year and a bad place to culture interstellar athlete's foot, if that was what it was. All that argued strongly for the possibility of a crash landing . . . but what about the lights in the sky? What about the implants? For years people who claimed they'd been abducted bv ETs had also claimed they had been stripped . . . examined . . . forced to undergo implants. All ideas so Freudian they were almost laughable . . .

Henry realized he was drifting and snapped awake so strongly that the unwrapped package of hot dogs tumbled off his lap and into the snow. No, not just drifting; dozing. A good deal more light had seeped out of the day, and the world had gone a dull slate color. His pants were speckled with the fresh snow. If he'd gone any deeper, he'd've been snoring.

He brushed himself off and stood up, wincing as his muscles screamed in protest. He regarded the hot dogs lying there in the snow with something like revulsion, then bent down, rewrapped them, and tucked them into one of his coat pockets. They might start looking good to him again later on. He sincerely hoped not, but you never knew.

'Jonesy's in the hospital,' he said abruptly. No idea what he meant. 'Jonesy's in the hospital with Mr Gray. Got to stay there. ICU.'

Madness. Prattling madness. He clamped the skis to his boots again, praying that his back wouldn't lock up while he was bent over, and then pushed off along the track once more, the snow starting to thicken around him now, the day darkening.

By the time he realized that he had remembered the hot dogs but forgotten Jonesy's rifle (not to mention his own), he'd gone too far to turn around.

12

He stopped what might have been three quarters of an hour later, peering stupidly down at the Arctic Cat's print. There was little more than a glimmer of light left in the day now, but enough to see that the track - what was left of it - veered abruptly to the right and went into the woods.

Into the fucking woods. Why had Jonesy (and Pete, if Pete was with him) gone into the woods? What sense did that make when the Deep Cut ran straight and clear, a white lane between the darkening trees?

'Deep Cut goes northwest,' he said, standing there with his skis toeing in toward each other and the loosely wrapped package of hot dogs poking out of his coat pocket. 'The road to Gosselin's - the blacktop - can't be more than three miles from here. Jonesy knows that. Pete knows that. Still . . . snowmobile goes . . .' He held up his arms like the hands of a clock, estimating. 'Snowmobile goes almost dead north. Why?'

Maybe he knew. The sky was brighter in the direction of Gosselin's, as if banks of lights had been set up there. He could hear the chatter of helicopters, waxing and waning but always tending in that same direction. As he drew closer, he expected to hear other heavy machinery as well: supply vehicles, maybe generators. To the east there was still the isolated crackle of gunfire, but the big action was clearly in the direction he was going.

'They've set up a base camp at Gosselin's,' Henry said. 'And Jonesy didn't want any part of it.'

That felt like a bingo to Henry. Only . . . there was no more Jonesy, was there? just the redblack cloud.

'Not true,' he said. 'Jonesy's still there. Jonesy's in the hospital with Mr Gray. That's what the cloud is - Mr Gray.' And then, apropos of nothing (at least that he could tell): 'Fit wha? Fit neek?' Henry looked up into the sifting snow (it was much less urgent than the earlier snowfall, at least so far, but it was starting to accumulate) as if he believed there was a God above it somewhere, studying him with all the genuine if detached interest of a scientist looking at a wriggling paramecium. 'What the fuck am I talking about? Any idea?'

No answer, but an odd memory came, He, Pete, Beaver, and Jonesy's wife had kept a secret among them last March. Carla had felt Jonesy could do without knowing that his heart had stopped twice, once just after the EMTs put him in the back of their ambulance, and again shortly after he had arrived at Mass General. Jonesy knew he'd come close to stepping out, but not (at least as far as Henry knew) just how close. And lf Jonesy had had any K��bler-Ross step-into-the-light experiences, he had either kept them to himself or forgotten thanks to repeated doses of anesthetic and lots of pain-killers.

A roar built out of the south with terrifying speed and Henry ducked, putting his hands to his ears as what sounded like a full squadron of 'et fighters passed in the clouds overhead. He saw nothing, but when the roar of the 'ets faded as fast as it had come, he straightened with his heart beating hard and fast. Yow! Christ! It occurred to him that this was what the airbases surrounding Iraq must have sounded like during the days leading up to Operation Desert Storm.

That big boom. Did it mean the United States of America had just gone to war against beings from another world? Was he now living in an H.G. Wells novel? Henry felt a hard, squeezing flutter under his breastbone. If so, this enemy might have more than a few hundred rusty Soviet Scuds to throw back at Uncle Sammy.

Let it go. You can't do anything about any of that. What's next for you, that's the question. What's next for you?

The rave of the jets had already faded to a mutter. He guessed that they would be back, though. Maybe with friends.

'Two paths diverged in a snowy wood, is that how it goes? Something like that, anyway.'

But following the snowmobile's track any farther was really not an option. He'd lose it in the dark half an hour from now, and this new snowfall would wipe it out in any case. He would end up wandering and lost . . . as Jonesy very likely was now.

Sighing, Henry turned away from the snowmobile track and continued along the road.

13

By the time he neared the place where the Deep Cut joined up with the two-lane blacktop known as the Swanny Pond Road, Henry was almost too tired to stand, let alone ski. The muscles in his thighs felt like old wet teabags. Not even the lights on the northwestern horizon, now much brighter, or the sound of the motors and helicopters could offer him much comfort. Ahead of him was a final long, steep hill. On the other side, Deep Cut ended and Swanny Pond began. There he might actually encounter traffic, especially if there were troops being moved in.

'Come on,' he said. 'Come on, come on, come on.' Yet he stood where he was awhile longer. He didn't want to go over that hill. 'Better Underhill than overhill,' he said. That seemed to mean something but it was probably just another idiotic non sequitur. Besides, there was nowhere else to go.

He bent, scooped up more snow - in the dark the double handful looked like a small pillowcase. He nibbled some, not because he wanted it but because he really didn't want to start moving again. The lights coming from Gosselin's were more understandable than the lights he and Pete had seen playing in the sky (They're back! Becky had screamed, like the little girl sitting in front of the TV in that old Steven Spielberg movie), but Henry liked them even less, somehow. All those motors and generators sounded somehow . . . hungry.

'That's right, rabbit,' he said. And then, because there really were no other options, he started up the last hill between him and a real road.

14

He paused at the top, gasping for breath and bent over his skipoles. The wind was stronger up here, and it seemed to go right through his clothing. His left leg throbbed where it had been gored by the turnsignal stalk, and he wondered again if he was incubating a little red-gold colony under the makeshift bandage. Too dark to see, and when the only possible good news would be no news, maybe that was just as well.

'Time slowed, reality bent, on and on the eggman went.' No yuks left in that one, so he started down the hill toward the T-junction where the Deep Cut Road ended.

This side of the hill was steeper and soon he was skiing rather than walking. He picked up speed, not knowing if what he felt was terror, exhilaration, or some unhealthy mix of the two. Certainly he was going too fast for the visibility, which was almost nil, and his abilities, which were as rusty as the clamps holding the skis to his boots. The trees blurred past on either side, and it suddenly occurred to him that all his problems might be solved at a stroke. Not the Hemingway Solution after all. Call this way out the Bono Solution.

His hat blew off his head. He reached for it automatically, one of his poles flailing out ahead of him, half-seen in the dark, and all at once his balance was gone. He was going to take a tumble. And maybe that was good, as long as he didn't break his goddam leg. Falling would stop him, at least. He would just pick himself up, and -

Lights blazed out, big truck-mounted spotlights, and before his vision disappeared into dazzle, Henry glimpsed what might have been a flatbed pulp-truck pulled across the end of the Deep Cut Road. The lights were undoubtedly motion-sensitive, and there was a line of men standing in front of them,

'HALT!' a terrifying, amplified voice commanded. It could have been the voice of God. 'HALT OR WE'LL FIRE!'

Henry went down hard and awkwardly. His skis shot off his feet. One ankle bent painfully enough to make him cry out. He lost one skipole; the other snapped off halfway up its shaft. The wind was knocked out of him in a large, frosty whoop of breath.

He slid, snowplowing with his wide-open crotch, then came to rest, bent limbs forming a shape something like a swastika.

His vision began to come back, and he heard feet crunching in the snow. He flailed and managed to sit up, not able to tell if anything was broken or not.

Six men were standing about ten feet down the hill from him, their shadows impossibly long and crisp on the diamond-dusted new snow. They were all wearing parkas. They all had clear plastic masks over their mouths and noses - these looked more efficient than the painters' masks Henry had found in the snowmobile shed, but Henry had an idea that the basic purpose was the same.

The men also had automatic weapons, all of them pointed at him. It now seemed rather lucky to Henry that he had left Jonesy's Garand and his own Winchester back at the Scout. If he'd had a gun, he might have a dozen or more holes in him by now.

'I don't think I've got it,' he croaked. 'Whatever it is you're worried about, I don't think - '

'ON YOUR, FEET!' God's voice again. Corning from the truck. The men standing in front of him blocked out at least some of the glare and Henry could see more men at the foot of the hill where the roads met. All of them had weapons, too, except for the one holding the bullhorn.

'I don't know if I can g - '

'ON YOUR FEET NOW!' God commanded, and one of the men in front of him made an expressive little erking motion with the barrel of his gun.

Henry got shakily to his feet. His legs were trembling and the ankle he'd bent was outraged, but everything was holding together, at least for the time being. Thus ends the eggman's journey, he thought, and began to laugh. The men in front of him looked at each other uneasily, and although they pointed their rifles at him again, he was comforted to see even that small demonstration of human emotion.

In the brilliant glow of the lights mounted on the pulper's flatbed, Henry saw something lying in the snow - it had fallen from his pocket when he wiped out. Slowly, knowing they might shoot him anyway, he bent down.

'DON'T TOUCH THAT!' God cried from His loudspeaker atop the cab of the pulp-truck, and now the men down there also raised their weapons, a little hello darkness my old friend peeping from the muzzle of each.

'Bite shit and die,' Henry said - one of the Beav's better efforts - and picked up the package. He held it out to the armed and masked men in front of him, smiling. 'I come in peace for all mankind,' he said. 'Who wants a hot dog?'