"Steve?"

"What?"

"Is that what I think it is?"

She was pointing out her window, pointing west.

"What do you think it is?"

"Sand," she said. "Sand and wind."

"Yep. I'd say that's what it is."

"Pull over a minute, would you?"

He looked at her, questioning.

"Just for a minute."

Steve Ames pulled the Ryder van over to the side of the road which led south from Highway 50 to the town of Desperation. They had found it with no trouble at all. Now he sat behind the wheel and looked at Cynthia Smith, who had tickled him even in his unease by calling him her nice new friend. She wasn't looking at her nice new friend now; she was looking down at the bottom of her funky Peter Tosh shirt and plucking at it nervously.

"I'm a hard-headed babe," she said without looking up. "A little psychic, but hard-headed just the same. Do you believe that?"

"I guess."

"And practical. Do you believe that?"

"Sure."

"That's why I made fun of your intuition, or whatever. But you thought we'd find something out there by the road, and we did."

"Yes. We did."

"So it was a good intuition."

"Would you get to the point? My boss - "

"Right. Your boss, your boss, your boss. I know that's what you're thinking about and practically all you're thinking about, and that's what's got me worried. Because I have a bad feeling about this, Steve. A bad intuition."

He looked at her. Slowly, reluctantly, she raised her head and looked back at him. What he saw in her eyes startled him badly - it was the flat shine of fear.

"What is it? What are you afraid of?"

"I don't know."

"Look, Cynthia. . . all we're going to do is find a cop - lacking that, a phone-booth - and report Johnny missing. Also a bunch of people named Carver."

"Just the same - "

"Don't worry, I'll be careful. Promise."

"Would you try 911 on your cellular again?" She asked this in a small, meek voice that was not much like her usual one.

He did, to please her, expecting nothing, and nothing was what he got. Not even a recording this time. He didn't know for sure, but he thought the oncoming windstorm, or dust-storm, or whatever they called them out here, might be screwing things up even worse.

"Sony, no go," he said. "Want to give it a try yourself? You might have better luck. The woman's touch, and all that."

She shook her head. "Do you feel anything? Anything at all?"

He sighed. Yes, he felt something. It reminded him of the way he had sometimes felt in early puberty, back in Texas. The summer he turned thirteen had been the longest, sweetest, strangest summer of his life. Toward the end of August, evening thunderstorms had often moved through the area - brief but hellacious convulsions the old cowboys called "benders." And in that year (a year when it seemed that every other pop song on the radio was by The Bee Gees), the hushed minutes before these storms - black sky, still air, sharpening thunder, lightning jabbing at the prairie like forks into tough meat - had somehow turned him on in a way he had never experienced since. His eyes felt like globes of electricity in chrome sockets, his stomach rolled, his penis filled with blood and stood up hard as a skillet-handle. A feeling of terrified ecstasy came in those hushes, a sense that the world was about to give up some great secret, to play it like a special card. In the end, of course, there had never been a revelation (unless his discovery of how to masturbate a year or so later had been it), only rain. That was how he felt now, only there was no hardon, no tingling arm hairs, no ecstasy, and no sense of terror, not really. What he had been feeling ever since she had uncovered the boss's motorcycle helmet was a sense of low foreboding, a sense that things had gone wrong and would soon go wronger. Until she had spoken up just now, he'd pretty much written that feeling off. As a kid he'd probably just been responding to changes in the air-pressure as the storm approached, or electricity in the air, or some other damned thing. And a storm was coming now, wasn't it? Yes. So it was probably the same thing, d��j�� vu all over again, as they said, perfectly understandable. Yet -

"Yeah, okay, I do feel something. But what in the hell can I do about it? You don't want me to turn back, do you?"

"No. We can't do that.. Just be careful. 'Kay?"

A gust of wind shook the Ryder truck. A cloud of tawny sand blew across the road, turning it into a momentary mirage.

"Okay, but you've got to help."

He got the truck moving again. The setting sun had touched the rising membrane of sand in the west now, and its bottom arc had gone as red as blood.

"Oh yeah," she said, grimacing as a fresh blast of wind hit the truck. "You can count on that."

2

The bloodsoaked cop locked the newcome rinto the cell next to David Carver and Tom Billingsley. That done, he turned slowly on his heels in a complete circle, his half-peeled, bleeding face solemn and contemplative. Then he reached into his pocket and brought out the keyring again. He selected the same one as before, David noticed - square, with a black mag-strip on it - so it was probably a master.

"Eeenie-meenie-miney-moe," he said. "Catch a tourist by the toe." He walked toward the cell which held David's mother and father. As he approached they drew back, arms around each other again.

"You leave them alone!" David cried, alarmed. Billingsley took his arm above the elbow, but David shook it off. "Do you hear me? Leave them alone!"

"In your dreams, brat," Collie Entragian said. He poked the key into the cell's lock and there was a little thump as the tumblers turned. He pulled the door open. "Good news. Ellie-your parole came through. Pop on out here."

Ellen shook her head. Shadows had begun to gather in the holding area now and her face swam in them, pale as paper. Ralph put his other arm around her waist and drew her back even farther. "Haven't you done enough to our family?" he asked.

"In a word, no." Entragian drew his cannon-sized gun, pointed it at Ralph, and cocked it. "You come out of here right now, little lady, or I'll shoot this no-chin pecker-checker spang between the eyes. You want his brains in his head or drying on the wall? It's all the same to me either way."

God, make him quit it, David prayed. Please make him quit it. If you could bring Brian back from wherever he was, you can do that. You can make him quit it. Dear God, please don't let him take my mother.

Ellen was pushing Ralph's hands down, pushing them off her.

"Ellie, no!"

"I have to. Don't you see that?"

Ralph let his hands fall to his sides. Entragian dropped the hammer on his gun and slid it back into his holster. He held one hand out to Ellen, as if inviting her to take a spin on the dance floor. And she went to him. When she spoke, her voice was very low. David knew she was saying something she didn't want him to hear, but his ears were good.

"If you want . . . that, take me where my son won't have to see."

"Don't worry," Entragian said in that same low, conspirator's "I don't want . . . that. Especially not from. ., you. Now come on.

He slammed the cell door shut, giving it a little shake to make sure it was locked, while he held onto David's mother with the other hand. Then he led her toward the door.

"Mom!" David screamed. He seized the bars and shook them. The cell door rattled a little, but that was all. 'Mom, no! Leave her alone, you bastard! LEAVE MY MOTHER ALONE!"

"Don't worry, David, I'll be back," she said, but the soft, almost uninflected quality of her voice scared him badly - it was as if she were already gone. Or as if the cop had hynotized her just by touching her. "Don't worry about me."

"No!" David screamed. "Daddy, make him stop! Make him stop!" In his heart was a growing certainty: if the huge, bloody cop took his mother out of this room, they would never see her again.

"David Ralph took two blundering steps backward, sat on the bunk, put his hands over his face, and began to cry.

"I'll take care of her, Dave, don't worry," Entragian said. He was standing by the door to the stairs and holding

Ellen Carver's arm above the elbow. He wore a grin that would have been resplendent if not for his blood-streaked teeth. "I'm sensitive-a real Bridges of Madison County kind of guy, only without the cameras."

"If you hurt her, you'll be sony," David said.

The cop's smile faded. He looked both angry and a little hurt. "Perhaps I will . . . but I doubt it. I really do. You're a little prayboy, aren't you?"

David looked at him steadily, saying nothing.

"Yes, yes you are. You've just got that prayboy look about you, great-gosh-a'mighty eyes and a real jeepers-creepers mouth. A little prayboy in a baseball shirt! Gosh!" He put his head close to Ellen's and looked slyly at the boy through the gauze of her hair. "Do all the praying you want, David, but don't expect it to do you any help. Your God isn't here, any more than he was with Jesus when Jesus hung dying on the cross with flies in his eyes. Tak!"

Ellen saw it coming up the stairs. She screamed and tried to pull back, but Entragian held her where she was. The coyote oiled through the doorway. It didn't even look at the screaming woman with her arm pinched in the cop's fist but crossed calmly to the center of the room. Then it stopped, turned its head over one shoulder, and fixed its yellow stuffed - animal stare on Entragian.

"Ah lah," he said, and let go of Ellen's arm long enough to spank his right hand across the back of his left hand in a quick gesture that reminded David of a flat stone skipping across the surface of a pond. "Him en tow."

The coyote sat down.

"This guy is fast," Entragian said. He was apparently speaking to all of them, but it was David he was looking at. "I mean the guy is fast. Faster than most dogs. You stick a hand or foot out of your cell, he'll have it off before you know it's gone. I guarantee that."

"You leave my mother alone," David said.

"Son," Entragian said regretfully, "I'll put a stick up your mother's twat and spin her until she catches fire, if I so decide, and you'll not stop me. And I'll be back for you.

He went Out the door, pulling David's mother with him.

3

There was silence in the room, broken only by Ralph Carver's choked sobs and the coyote, which sat panting and regarding David with its unpleasantly intelligent eyes. Little drops of spittle fell from the end of its tongue like drops from a leaky pipe.

"Take heart, son," the man with the shoulder-length gray hair said. He sounded like a guy more used to taking comfort than giving it. "You saw him - he's got internal bleeding, he's losing his teeth, one eye's ruptured right out of his head. He can't last much longer."

"It won't take him long to kill my mom, if he decides to," David said. "He already killed my little sister. He pushed her down the stairs and broke . . . broke her n-n-neck." His eyes abruptly blurred with tears and he willed them back. This was no time to get bawling.

"Yes, but The gray-haired man trailed off.

David found himself remembering an exchange with the cop when they had been on their way to this town- when they had still thought the cop was sane and normal and only helping them out. He had asked the cop how he knew their name, and the cop had said he'd read it on the plaque over the table. It was a good answer, there was a plaque with their name on it over the table . . . but Entragian never would have been able to see it from where he was standing at the foot of their RV's stairs. I've got eagle eyes, David, he'd said, and those are eyes that see the truth from afar.

Ralph Carver came slowly forward to the front of his cell again, almost shuffling. His eyes were bloodshot, the lids puffy, his face ravaged. For a moment David felt almost blinded with rage, shaken by a desire to scream:

This is all your fault! Your fault that Pie's dead! Your fault that he's taken Mom off to kill her or rape her! You and your gambling! You and your stupid vacation ideas! He should have taken you, Dad, he should have taken you!

Stop it, David. His thought, Gene Martin's voice. That's just the way it wants you to think.

It? The cop, Entragian, was that who the voice meant by it? And what way did he . . . or it . . . want him to think? For that matter, why would it care what way he thought at all?

"Look at that thing," Ralph said, staring at the coyote. "How could he call it in here like that? And why does it stay?"

The coyote turned toward Ralph's voice, then glanced at Mary, then looked back at David. It panted. More saliva fell to the hardwood floor, where a little puddle was forming.

"He's got them trained, somehow," the gray-haired man said. "Like the birds. He's got some trained buzzards out there. I killed one of the scraggy bastards. I stomped it - "

"No," Mary said.

"No," Billingsley echoed. "I'm sure that coyotes can be trained, but this is not training."

"Of course it is," the gray-haired man snapped. "That cop?" David said. "Mr. Billingsley says he's taller than he used to be. Three inches, at least."

"That's insane." The gray-haired man was wearing a motorcycle jacket. Now he unzipped one of the pockets, took out a battered roll of Life Savers, and put one in his mouth.

"Sir, what's your name?" Ralph asked the gray- haired man.

"Marinville. Johnny Marinville. I'm a - "

"What you are is blind if you can't see that something very terrible and very out of the ordinary is going on here."

"I didn't say it wasn't terrible, and I certainly didn't say it was ordinary," the gray-haired man replied. He went on, but then the voice came again, the outside voice, and David lost track of their conversation.

The soap. David, the soap.

He looked at it - a green bar of Irish Spring sitting beside the spigot - and thought of Entragian saying I'll be back for you.

The soap.

Suddenly he understood . . . or thought he did. Hoped he did.

I better be right. I better be right, or- He was wearing a Cleveland Indians tee-shirt. He pulled it off, dropped it by the cell door. He looked up and saw the coyote staring at him. Its ragged ears were all the way up again, and David thought he could hear it growling, low and far back in its throat.

"Son?" his father asked. "What do you think you're doing?"

Without answering, he sat down on the end of the bunk, took off his sneakers, and tossed them over to where his shirt lay. Now there was no question that the coyote was growling. As if it knew what he was planning to do. As if it meant to stop him if he actually tried it.

Don't be a dope, of course it means to stop you if you try it, why else did the cop leave it there? You just have to trust. Trust and have faith.

"Have faith that God will protect me," he murmured. He stood up, unbuckled his belt, then paused with his fingers on the snap of his jeans. "Ma'am?" he said.

"Ma'am?" She looked at him, and David felt himself blush. "I wonder if you'd mind turning around," he said, "I have to take off my pants, and I guess I better take off my underwear, too.,'

"What in God's name are you thinking about?" his father asked. There was panic in his voice now. "Whatever it is, I forbid it! Absolutely!"

David didn't reply, only looked at Mary. Looked at her as steadily as the coyote was looking at him. She returned his look for a moment, then, without saying a word, turned her back. The man in the motorcycle jacket sat on his bunk, crunching his Life Saver and watching him. David was as body-shy as most eleven-year-olds, and that steady gaze made him uncomfortable . . . but as he had already pointed out to himself, this was no time to be a dope. He took another glance at the bar of Irish Spring, then thumbed down his pants and undershorts.

4

"Nice," Cynthia said. "I mean, that's class."

"What?" Steve asked. He was sitting forward, watching the road carefully. More sand and tumbleweeds were blowing across it now, and the driving had gotten tricky.

"The sign. See it?"

He looked. The sign, which had originally read DESPERATION'S CHURCH & civic ORGANIZATIONS WELCOME You! had been changed by some wit with a spraycan; it now read DESPERATION'S DEAD DOGS WELCOME you! A rope, frayed at one end, flapped back and forth in the wind. Old Shep himself was gone, however. The buzzards had gotten their licks in first; then the coyotes had come Hungry and not a bit shy about eating a first cousin, they had snapped the rope and dragged the Shepherd's carcass away, pausing only to squabble and fight with one another. What remained (mostly bones and toenails) lay over the next rise. The blowing sand would cover it soon enough.

"Boy, folks around here must love a good laugh," Steve said.

"They must." She pointed. "Stop there."

It was a rusty Quonset hut. The sign in front read DESPERATION MINING CORP. There was a parking lot beside it with ten or twelve cars and trucks in it.

He pulled over but didn't turn in to the lot, at least not yet. The wind was blowing more steadily now, the gusts gradually merging into one steady blast. To the west, the sun was a surreal red-orange disc hanging over the Desatoya Mountains, as flat and bloated as a photo of the planet Jupiter. Steve could hear a fast and steady tink-tink-tink-tink coming from somewhere nearby, possibly the sound of a steel lanyard-clip banging against a flagpole.

"What's on your mind?" he asked her.

"Let's call the cops from here. There's people; see the lights?"

He glanced toward the Quonset and saw five or six golden squares of brightness toward the rear of the building. In the dusty gloom they looked like lighted windows in a train-car. He looked back at Cynthia and shrugged. "Why from here, when we could just drive to the local cop-shop? The middle of town-such as it is - can't be far."

She rubbed one hand across her forehead as if she were tired, or getting a headache. "You said you'd be careful. I said I'd help you be careful. That's what I'm trying to do now. I sort of want to see how things are hanging before someone in a uniform sits me down in a chair and starts shooting questions. And don't ask me why, because I don't really know. If we call the cops and they sound cool, that's fine. They're cool, we're cool. But. . . where the fuck were they? Never mind your boss, he disappeared almost clean, but an RV parked beside the road, the tires flat, door unlocked, valuables inside? I mean, gimme a break. Where were the cops?"

"It goes back to that, doesn't it?"

"Yeah, back to that." The cops could have been at the scene of a road-accident or a ranch-fire or a convenience - store stickup, even a murder, and she knew it - all of them, because there just weren't that many cops out in this part of the world. But still, yeah, it came back to that. Because it felt more than funny. It felt wrong.

"Okay," Steve said mildly, and turned in to the parking lot. "Might not be anybody at what passes for the Des-peration P.D., anyhow. It's getting late. I'm surprised there's anyone still here, tell you the truth. Must be money in minerals, huh?"

He parked next to a pickup, opened the door, and the wind snatched it out of his hand. It banged the side of the truck. Steve winced, half-expecting a Slim Pickens type to come running toward him, holding his hat on with one hand and yelling Hey thar, boy! No owner did. A tumble-weed zoomed by, apparently headed for Salt Lake City, but that was all. And the alkali dust was flying-plenty of it. He had a red bandanna in his back pocket. He took it out, knotted it around his neck, and pulled it up over his mouth.

"Hold it, hold it," he said, tugging her arm to keep her from opening her door just yet. He leaned over so he could open the glove compartment. He rummaged and found another bandanna, this one blue, and handed it to her. "Put that on first."

She held it up, examined it gravely, then turned her wide little-girl eyes on him again. "No cootiebugs?"

He snorted and grinned behind the red bandanna. "Airy a one, ma am, as we say back in Lubbock. Put it on."

She knotted it, then pulled it up. "Butch and Sundance," she said, her voice a little muffled.

"Yeah, Bonnie and Clyde."

"Omar and Sharif," she said, and giggled.

"Be careful getting out. The wind's really getting cranked up."

He stepped out and the wind slapped him in the face, making him stagger as he reached the front of the van. Flying grit stung his forehead. Cynthia was holding onto her doorhandle, head down, the Peter Tosh shirt flapping out behind her skinny midriff like a sail. There was still some daylight left, and the sky overhead was still blue, but the landscape had taken on a strange shadowless quality. It was stormlight if Steve had ever seen it.

"Come on!" he yelled, and put an arm around Cynthia's waist. "Let's get out of this!"

They hurried across the cracked asphalt to the long building. There was a door at one end of it. The sign bolted to the corrugated metal beside it read DESPERATION MINING CORP., like the one out front, but Steve saw that this one had been painted over something else, some other name that was starting to show through the white paint like a red ghost. He was pretty sure that one of the painted-over words was DIABLO, with the I modified into a devil's pitchfork.

Cynthia was tapping the door with one bitten fingernail. A sign had been hung on the inside from one of those little transparent suction cups. Steve thought there was something perfectly, irritatingly, showily Western about the message on the sign.

IF WE'RE OPEN, WE'RE OPEN

IF WE'RE CLOSED, Y'ALL COME BACK

"They forgot son," he said.

"Huh?"

"It should say 'Y'all come back, son.' Then it would be perfect." He glanced at his watch and saw that it was twenty past seven. Which meant they were closed, of course. Except if they were closed, what were those cars and trucks doing in the parking lot?

He tried the door. It pushed open. From inside came the sound of country music, broken by heavy static. "I built it one piece at a time," Johnny Cash sang, "And it didn't cost me a dime."

They stepped in. The door closed on a pneumatic arm. Outside, the wind played rattle and hum along the ridged metal sides of the building. They were in a reception area. To the right were four chairs with patched vinyl seats. They looked like they were mostly used by beefy men wearing dirty jeans and workboots. There was a long coffee-table in front of the chairs, piled with magazines you didn't find in the doctor's office: Guns and Ammo, Road and Track, MacLean's Mining Report, Metallurgy Newsletter, Arizona Highways. There was also a very old Penthouse with Tonya Harding on the cover.

Straight ahead of them was a field-gray receptionist's desk, so dented that it might have been kicked here all the way from Highway 50. It was loaded down with papers, a crazily stacked set of volumes marked MSHA Guidelines (an overloaded ashtray sat on top of these), and three wire baskets full of rocks. A manual typewriter perched on one end of the desk; no computer that Steve could see, and a chair in the kneehole, the kind that runs on casters, but nobody sitting in it. The air conditioner was running, and the room was uncomfortably cool.

Steve walked around the desk, saw a cushion sitting on the chair, and picked it up so Cynthia could see it. PARK YER ASS had been crocheted across the front in old-fashioned Western-style lettering.

"Oh, tasteful," she said. "Operators are standing by, use Tootie."

On the desk, flanked by a joke sign (LEAD ME NOT INTO TEMPTATION, FOR I SHALL FIND IT MYSELF) and a name-plaque (BRAD JOSEPHSON), was a stiff studio photo of an overweight but pretty black woman flanked by two cute kids. A male receptionist, then, and not exactly Mr. Neat. The radio, an old cracked Philco, sat on a nearby shelf along with the phone. "Right about then my wife walked out," Johnny Cash bawled through wild cannonades of static, "And I could see right away that she had her doubts, But she opened the door and said 'Honey, take me for a - '

Steve turned off the radio. The hardest gust of wind yet hit the building, making it creak like a submarine under pressure. Cynthia, still with the bandanna he'd given her pulled up over her nose, looked around uneasily. The radio was off, but - very faintly - Steve could still hear Johnny Cash singing about how he'd smuggled his car out of the GM plant in his lunchbucket, one piece at a time. Same station, different radio, way back. Where the lights were, he guessed.

Cynthia pointed to the phone. Steve picked it up, listened, dropped it back into its cradle again. "Dead. Must be a line down somewhere."

"Aren't they underground these days?" she asked, and Steve noticed an interesting thing: they were both talking in low tones, really not more than a step or two above a whisper.

"I think maybe they haven't gotten around to that in Desperation just yet."

There was a door behind the desk. He reached for the handle, and she grabbed his arm.

"What?" Steve asked.

"I don't know." She let go of him, reached up, pulled her bandanna down. Then she laughed nervously. "I don't know, man, this is just so. . . wacky."

"Got to be someone back there," he said. "The door's unlocked, lights on, cars in the parking lot."

"You're scared, too. Aren't you?"

He thought it over and nodded. Yes. It was like before the thunderstorms - the benders - when he'd been a kid, only with all the strange joy squeezed out of it. "But we still ought to . .

"Yeah, I know. Go on." She swallowed, and he heard something go click in her throat. "Hey, tell me we're gonna be laughin at each other and feelin stupid in a few seconds. Can you do that, Lubbock?"

"In a few seconds we're gonna be laughing at each other and feeling stupid."

"Thanks."

"No problem," he said, and opened the door. A narrow hallway ran down it, thirty feet or so. There was a double run of fluorescent bars overhead and all-weather carpet on the floor. There were two doors on one side, both open, and three on the other, two open and one shut. At the end of the corridor, bright yellow light filled up what looked to Steve like a work area of some kind - a shop, maybe, or a lab. That was where the lighted windows they'd seen from the outside were, and where the music was coming from. Johnny Cash had given way to The Tractors, who claimed that baby liked to rock it like a boogie-woogie choo-choo train. Sounded like typical brag and bluster to Steve.

This is fucked. You know that, don't you?

He knew. There was a radio. There was the wind, loaded with sour alkali grit, now hitting the building's metal sides hard enough to sound like a Montana blizzard. But where were the voices? Men talking, joking, shooting the shit? The men who went with the vehicles parked out front?

He started slowly down the corridor, thinking that he should call out something like Hey! Anybody home? and not quite daring to. The place felt simultaneously empty and somehow not empty, although how it could be both things at the same time was -

Cynthia yanked on the back of his shirt. The tug was so hard and so sudden that he almost screamed.

"What?" he asked - exasperated, heart pounding - and realized that now he was whispering.

"Do you hear that?" she asked. 'Sounds like. . . I dunno. . . a kid bubbling Kool-Aid through a straw."

At first he could only hear The Tractors -

"She said her name was Emergency and asked to see my gun, She said her telephone number was 911 "

- and then he did hear it, a fast liquid sound. Mechanical, not human. A sound he almost knew. "Yeah, I hear it."

"Steve, I want to get out of here."

"Go back to the truck, then."

'"'Jo.,'

"Cynthia, for Christ's sake - "

He looked at her, at. her big eyes looking back up at him, her pursed, anxious mouth, and quit it. No, she didn't want to go back to the Ryder van by herself, and he didn't blame her. She'd called herself a hard-headed babe, and maybe she was, but right now she was also an almost scared-to-death babe. He took her by her thin shoulders, pulled her toward him, and planted a loud smackeroo on her forehead, right between the eyes. "Do not worry, little Nell," he said in a very passable Dudley Do-Right imitation, "for I will protect you."

She grinned in spite of herself. "Fuckin dork."

"Come on. Stay close. And if we do have to run, run fast. Or else I might trample you."

"You don't need to worry about that," Cynthia said. "I'll be out the door and gone before you even get it in gear."

The first door on the right was an office. Empty. There was a cork-board on the wall covered with Polaroid shots of an open-pit mine. That was the big wall of earth they'd seen looming behind the town, Steve assumed.

The first door on the left, also an office. Also empty. The bubbling sound was louder now, and Steve knew what it was even before he looked into the next door on the right. He felt a measure of relief. "It's an aquarium," he said, "that's all it is."

This was a much nicer office than the first two they'd peeped into, with a real rug on the floor. The aquarium was on a stand to the left of the desk, under a photograph of two men in boots, hats, and Western-style business suits shaking hands by a flagpole-the one out back, most likely. It was a well-populated aquarium, he saw tigers, angelfish. goldfish, and a couple of black beauties. There was also some strange geegaw lying on the sand at the bottom, one of the things people put into their aquariums to decorate them, he assumed, except this one wasn't a sunken ship or a pirate chest or King Neptune's castle. This one was something else, something that looked like -

"Hey Steve," Cynthia whispered in a strengthless little voice. "That's a hand."

"What?" he asked, honestly not understanding, although later he would think he must have known what it was, lying there at the bottom of the aquarium, what else could it have been?

"A hand," she almost moaned. "A fuckin hand."

And, as one of the tigers swam between the second and third fingers (the third had a slim gold wedding ring on it), he saw that she was right. There were fingernails on it. There was a thin white thread of scar on the thumb. It was a hand.

He stepped forward, ignoring her grab at his shoulder, and bent down for a better look. His hope that the hand was fake despite the wedding ring and the realistic thread of scar glimmered away. There were shreds of flesh and sinew rising from the wrist. They wavered like plankton in the currents generated by the tank's regulator. And he could see the bones.

He straightened up and saw Cynthia standing at the desk. The top of this one was much neater. There was a PowerBook on it, closed. Next to it was a telephone. Next to the phone was an answering machine with the red message-light blinking. Cynthia picked up the telephone. listened, then put it back. He was startled by the whiteness of her face. With that little blood in her head, she should be lying on the floor dead-fainted away, he thought. Instead of fainting, she reached a finger toward the PLAY MESSAGES button on the answering machine.

"Don't do that!" he hissed. God knew why, and it was too late, anyway.

There was a beep. A click. Then a strange voice - it seemed to be neither male nor female, and it scared the hell out of Steve - began to speak. "Pneuma," it said in a contemplative voice. "Soma. Sarx. Pneuma. Soma. Sarx. Pneuma. Soma. Sarx." It went on slowly enunciating these words, seeming to grow louder as it spoke. Was that possible? He stared at the machine, fascinated, the words hitting into his brain

(soma sarx pneuma)

like tiny sharp carpet-tacks. He might have gone on staring at it for God knew how long if Cynthia hadn't reached past him and banged the STOP button hard enough to make the machine jump on the desk.

"Sorry, nope, too creepy." She sounded both apologetic and defiant.

They left the office. Farther down the corridor, in the workroom or lab or whatever it was, The Tractors were still singing about the boogie-woogie girl who had it stacked up to the ceiling and sticking in your face.

How long is that fucking song? Steve wondered. been playing fifteen minutes already, got to 'ye been.

"Can we go now?" Cynthia asked. "Please?"

He pointed down the hall toward the bright yellow lights.

"Oh Jesus, you're nuts," she said, but when he started in that direction, she followed him.

5

"Where are you taking me?" Ellen Carver asked for the third time. She leaned forward, hooking her fingers through the mesh between the cruiser's front and back seats. "Please, can't you tell me?"

At first she'd just been thankful not to be raped or killed, and relieved that, when they got to the foot of the lethal stairs, poor sweet little Kirstie's body was gone There had been a huge bloodstain on the steps outside the doors, however, still not entirely dry and only partially covered by the blowing sand which had stuck to it. She guessed it had belonged to Mary's husband. She tried to step over it, but the cop, Entragian, had her arm in a pincers grip and simply pulled her through it, so that her sneakers left three ugly red tracks behind as they went around the corner to the parking lot. Bad. All of it. Horrible. But she was still alive.

Yes, relief at first, but that had been replaced by a growing sense of dread. For one thing, whatever was happening to this awful man was now speeding up. She could hear little liquid pops as his skin let go in various places, and trickling noises as blood flowed and dripped. The back of his uniform shirt, formerly khaki, was now a muddy red.

And she didn't like the direction he had taken-south. There was nothing in that direction but the vast bulwark of the open-pit mine.

The cruiser rolled slowly along Main Street (she asswned it was Main Street, weren't they always?), passing a final pair of businesses: another bar and Harvey's Small Engine Repair. The last shop on the street was a somehow sinister little shack with ODEGA written above the door and a sign out front which the wind had blown off its stand. Ellen could read it anyway: MEXICAN FOODS.

The sun was a declining ball of dusty furnace-fire, and the landscape had a kind of clear daylight darkness about it that struck her as apocalyptic. It wasn't so much a ques-tion of where she was, she realized, as who she was. She couldn't believe she was the same Ellen Carver who was on the PTA and had been considering a run for school board this fall, the same Ellen Carver who sometimes went out to lunch with friends at China Happiness, where they would all get silly over inanities and talk about clothes and kids and marriages-whose was shaky and whose was not. Was she the. Ellen Carver who picked her nicest clothes out of the Boston Proper catalogue and wore Red perfume when she was feeling amorous and had a funny rhinestone tee-shirt that said QUEEN OF THE UNIVERSE? The Ellen Carver who had raised two lovely children and had kept her man when those all about her were losing theirs? The one who examined her breasts for lumps once every six weeks or so, the one who liked to curl up in the living room on weekend nights with a cup of hot tea and a few chocolates and paperbacks with titles like Misery in Paradise? Really? Oh really? Well, yes, probably; she was those Ellens and a thousand others:

Ellen in silk and Ellen in denim and Ellen sitting on the commode and peeing with a recipe for Brown Betty in one hand; she was, she supposed, both her parts and more than her parts, when summed, could account for . . . but could that possibly mean she was also the Ellen Carver whose well-loved daughter had been murdered and who now sat huddled in the hack of a police-car that was beginning to stink unspeakably, a woman being driven past a fallen sign reading MEXICAN FOOD'S, a woman who would never see her home or friends or husband again? Was she the Ellen Carver being driven into a dirty, windy darkness where no one read the Boston Proper catalogue or drank maintains with little paper umbrellas poking out of them and only death awaited'?

"Oh God, please don't kill me." she said in a boneless, trembly voice she could not recognize as her own. "Please, sir, don't kill me, I don't want to die. I'll do whatever you say, but don't kill me. Please don't."

He didn't answer. There was a thump from beneath them as the tar quit. The cop pulled the knob that turned on the headlights, but they didn't seem to help much; what she saw were two bright cones shining into a world of roiling dust.

Gravel rumbled beneath the tires and pinged against the undercarriage.

They passed a long, ramshackle building with rusty metal sides - a factory or some kind of mill, she thought - and then the road tilted up. They started to climb the embankment.

"Please," she whispered. "Please, just tell me what you want."

"Uck," he said, grimacing, and reached into his mouth like a man who's got a hair on his tongue. Instead of a hair he pulled out the tongue itself. He looked at it for a moment, lying limply in his fist like a piece of liver, and then tossed it aside.

They passed two pickup trucks, a dumptruck, and a yellow-ghost backhoe. all parked together inside the first Switchback the road made on its way to the top.

"If you're going to kill me, make it quick," she said in her trembly voice. "Please don't hurt me. Do that much, at least, promise you won't hurt me."

But the slumped, bleeding figure behind the wheel of the cruiser promised her nothing. It simply drove through the flying dust, guiding the car to the crest of the bulwark. The cop didn't hesitate at the top hut crossed the rim and started down, leaving the wind above them as he did. Ellen looked back, wanting to see some last light, but she was too late. The walls of the pit had already hidden what remained of the sunset. The cruiser was descending into a vast lake of darkness, an abyss that made a joke of the headlights.

Down here, night had already fallen.