nd he did stop. They had come out of the residential area and were standing at the corner of Crouch Lane and Morris Road. A sign on the far side of Morris Road proclaimed that they were but one mile from Slaughter Towen.

Town? Vetter suggested.

No, Doris Freeman said. Slaughter Towen, with an "e."

Raymond crushed out the cigarette he had cadged from Farnham. "I"m off," he announced, and then looked more closely at Farnham. "My poppet should take better care of himself. He"s got big dark circles under his eyes. Any hair on your palms to go with it, my pet?" He laughed uproariously.

"Ever hear of a Crouch Lane?" Farnham asked.

"Crouch Hill Road, you mean."

"No, I mean Crouch Lane."

"Never heard of it."

"What about Norris Road?"

"There"s the one cuts off from the high street in Basing-stoke..." "No, here."

"No not here, poppet."

For some reason he couldn"t understand the woman was obviously buzzed Farnham persisted. "What about Slaughter Towen?"

"Towen, you said? Not Town?" "Yes, that"s right."

"Never heard of it, but if I do, I believe I"ll steer clear."

"Why"s that?"

"Because in the old Druid lingo, a touen or towen was a place of ritual sacrifice where they abstracted your liver and lights, in other words." And zipping up his windcheater, Raymond glided out.

Farnham looked after him uneasily. He made that last up, he told himself. What a hard copper like Sid Raymond knows about the Druids you could carve on the head of a pin and still have room for the Lord"s Prayer.

Right. And even if he had picked up a piece of information like that, it didn"t change the fact that the woman was...

"Must be going crazy," Lonnie said, and laughed shakily.

Doris had looked at her watch earlier and saw that somehow it had gotten to be quarter of eight. The light had changed; from a clear orange it had gone to a thick, murky red that glared off the windows of the shops in Norris Road and seemed to face a church steeple across the way in clotted blood. The sun was an oblate sphere on the horizon.

"What happened back there?" Doris asked. "What was it, Lonnie?"

"Lost my jacket, too. Hell of a note."

"You didn"t lose it, you took it off. It was covered with..."

"Don"t be a fool!" he snapped at her. But his eyes were not snappish; they were soft, shocked, wandering. "I lost it, that"s all."

"Lonnie, what happened when you went through the hedge?"

"Nothing. Let"s not talk about it. Where are we?"

"Lonnie..."

"I can"t remember," he said more softly. "It"s all a blank. We were there... we heard a sound... then I was running. That"s all I can remember." And then he added in a frighteningly childish voice: "Why would I throw my jacket away? I liked that one. It matched the pants." He threw back his head, gave voice to a frightening loonlike laugh, and Doris suddenly realized that whatever he had seen beyond the hedge had at least partially unhinged him. She was not sure the same wouldn"t have happened to her... if she had seen. It didn"t matter. They had to get out of here. Get back to the hotel where the kids were.

"Let"s get a cab. I want to go home."

"But John..." he began.