Mary watched the old veterinarian take a bottle of whiskey out of the liquor cabinet, almost drop it, then pour himself a drink. She took a step toward Johnny and spoke to him in a low voice. "Make him stop. That's the one with the drunk in it."

He looked at her with raised eyebrows. "Who elected you Temperance Queen?"

"You shithead," she hissed. "Don't you think I know who got him started? Don't you think I saw?"

She started toward Tom, but Johnny pulled her back and went himself. He heard her little gasp of pain and supposed he might have squeezed her wrist a little harder than was exactly gentlemanly. Well, he wasn't used to being called a shithead. He had won a National Book Award, after all. He had been on the cover of Time. He had also fucked America's sweetheart (well, maybe that was sort of retroactive, or something, she hadn't really been America's sweetheart since 1965 or so, but he had still fucked her), and he wasn't used to being called a shit-head. Yet, Mary had a point. He, a man not unacquainted with the highways and byways of Alcoholics Anonymous, had nevertheless given that kiddy favorite, Mr. Drunken Doggy Doctor, his first shot of the evening. He'd thought it would pull Billingsley together, get him focused (and they had needed him focused, it was his town, after all) but hadn't he also been a teeny-tiny bit pissed off at the tosspot vet awarding himself a loaded gun while The National Book Award Kid had to be contented with an unloaded .22?

No. No, dammit, the gun wasn't the issue. Keeping the old man wired together enough to he of some help, that was the issue.

Well, maybe. Maybe. It felt a little bogus, hut you had to give yourself the benefit of the doubt in some situa-tions-especially the crazy ones, which this certainly was. Either way, it maybe hadn't been such a good idea. He had had a large number of not-such-good-ideas in his life, and if anyone was qualified to recognize one when he saw it, John Edward Marinville was probably that fellow.

"Why don't we save that for later, Tom?" he said, and smoothly plucked the glass of whiskey out of the vet's hand just as he was bringing it to his lips.

"Hey!" Billingsley cawed, making a swipe at it. His eyes were more watery than ever, and now threaded with bright red stitches that looked like tiny cuts. "Ginime that!"

Johnny held it away from him, up by his own mouth, and felt a sudden, appallingly strong urge to take care of the problem in the quickest, simplest way. Instead, he put the glass on top of the bar, where ole Tommy wouldn't be able to reach it unless he jumped around to one side or the other. Not that he didn't think Tommy was capable of jumping for a drink; ale Tommy had gotten to a point where he would probably try to fart "The Marine Hymn" if someone promised him a double. Meantime, the others were watching, Mary rubbing her wrist (which was red, he observed - but just a little, really no big deal).

"Gimme!" Billingsley bawled, and stretched out one hand toward the glass on top of the bar, opening and closing his fingers like an angry baby that wants its sucker back. Johnny suddenly remembered how the actress - the one with the emeralds, the one who had been America's number one honeybunny in days of yore, so sweet sugar wouldn't melt in her snatch-had once pushed him into the pool at the Bel-Air, how everyone had laughed, how he himself had laughed as he came out dripping, with his bottle of beer still in his hand, too drunk to know what was happening, that the flushing sound he heard was the remainder of his reputation going down the shitter. Yes sir and yes ma'am. there he had been on that hot day in Los Angeles, laughing like mad in his wet Pierre Cardin suit, bottle of Bud upraised in one hand like a trophy, everyone else laughing right along with him; they were all having a great old time, he had been pushed into the pool just like in a movie and they were having a great old time, hardy-har and hidey ho, welcome to the wonderful world of too drunk to know better, let's see you write your way out of this one, Marinville.

He felt a burst of shame that was more for himself than for Tom, although he knew it was Tom they were looking at (except for Mary, who was still making a big deal of her wrist), Tom who was still saying "Gimme that baack!" while he clenched and unclenched his hand like Baby Fucking Huey, Tom who was already shot on only three drinks. Johnny had seen this before, too; after a certain number of years spent swimming around in the bottle drinking everything in sight and yet seeming to remain almost stone-sober, your booze-gills had this weird ten-dency to suddenly seal themselves shut at almost the first taste. Crazy but true. See the amazing Late-Stage Alcoholic, folks, step right up, you won't believe your eyes.

He put an arm around Tom, leaned into the brown aroma of Dant that hung around the man's head like a fumey halo, and murmured, "Be a good boy now and you can have that shot later."

Tom looked at him with his red-laced eyes. His chapped, cracked lips were wet with spit. "Do you promise?" he whispered hack, a conspirator's whisper, breathing out more fumes and running it all together, so it became Dervapromiz?

"Yes," Johnny said. "I may have been wrong to get you started, but now that 1 have, I'm going to maintain you That's all I'll do, though. So have a little dignity, all right?"

Billingsley looked at him. Wide eyes full of water. Red lids. Lips shining. "1 can't," he whispered.

Johnny sighed and closed his eyes for a moment, When he opened them again, Billingsley was staring across the stage at Audrey Wyler.

"Why does she have to wear her damned skirt so short?" he muttered. The smell of his breath was strong enough for Johnny to decide that maybe this wasn't just a case of three drinks and you're out; Old Snoop Doggy Doc had chipped himself an extra two or three somewhere along the line.

"I don't know," he said, smiling what felt like a big false gameshow host's smile and leading Billingsley back toward the others, getting him turned away from the bar and the drink sitting on top of it. "Are you complaining?"

"No," Billingsley said. "No, I . . . I just . . ." He looked nakedly up at Johnny with his wet drunk's eyes. "What was I talking about?"

"It doesn't matter." A gameshow host's voice was now coming out of the gameshow host's grin: big, hearty, as sincere as a producer's promise to call you next week. "Tell me something-why do they call that hole in the ground China Pit? I've been wondering about that."

"I imagine Miss Wyler knows more about it than I do," Billingsley said, but Audrey was no longer on the stage; as David and his father joined them, looking concerned, Audrey had exited stage-right, perhaps looking for something else to eat.

"Oh, come on," Ralph said, unexpectedly conversational. Johnny looked at him and saw that, despite all his own problems, Ralph Carver understood exactly how the land lay with old Tommy. "I bet you've forgotten more local history than that young lady over there ever learned. And it is local history, isn't it?"

"Well. . . yes. History and geology."

"Come on, Tom," Mary said. "Tell us a story. Help pass the time."

"All right," he said. "But it ain't purty, as we say around here."

Steve and Cynthia wandered over. Steve had his arm around the girl's waist; she had hers around his, with her fingers curled in one of his belt-loops.

"Tell it, oldtimer," Cynthia said softly. "Go on." So he did.

2

"Long before anyone ever thought of mining for copper here, it was gold and silver," Billingsley said. He eased himself down into the wing-chair and shook his head when David offered him a glass of spring-water. "That was long before open-pit mining was thought of, either. In 1858, an outfit called Diablo Mining opened Rattlesnake Number One where the China Pit is now. There was gold, and a good bit of it.

"It was a shaft-mine-back then they all were-and they kept chasing the vein deeper and deeper, although the company had to know how dangerous it was. The sur-face up there on the south side of where the pit is now ain't bad - it's limestone, skarn, and a kind of Nevada marble. You find wollastonite in it lots of times. Not valu-able, but pretty to look at.

"Underneath, on the north side of where the pit is now, that's where they sank the Rattlesnake Shaft. The ground over there is bad. Bad for mining, bad for farming, bad for everything. Sour ground is what the Shoshone called it. They had a word for it, a good one, most Shoshone words are good ones, but I disremember it now. All of this is igneous leavings, you know, stuff that was injected into the crust of the earth by volcanic eruptions that never quite made it to the surface. There's a word for that kind of leavings, but I disremember that one, too."

"Porphyry," Audrey called over to him. She was standing on the right side of the stage, holding a bag of pretzels. "Anyone want some of these? They smell a little funny but they taste all right."

"No, thanks," Mary said. The others shook their heads. "Porphyry's the word," Billingsley agreed. "It's full of valuable stuff, everything from garnets to uranium, but a lot of it's unstable. The ground where they sank Rattle-snake Number One had a good vein of gold, but mostly it was hornfels - cooked shale. Shale's a sedimentary rock, not strong. You can snap a piece of it in your hands, and when that mine got down seventy feet and the men could hear the walls groaning and squeaking around them, they decided enough was enough. They just walked out. It wasn't a strike for better pay; they just didn't want to die. So what the owners did was hire Chinese. Had them shipped on flatback wagons from Frisco, chained together like convicts. Seventy men and twenty women, all dressed in quilted pajama coats and little round hats. I imagine the owners kicked themselves for not thinking of using them sooner, because they had all sorts of advantages over white men. They didn't get drunk and hooraw through town, they didn't trade liquor to the Shoshone or Paiute, they didn't want whores. They didn't even spit tobacco on the sidewalks. Those were just the bonuses, though. The main thing was they'd go as deep as they were told to go, and never mind the sound of the hornfels squeaking and rubbing in the ground all around them. And the shaft could go deeper faster, because it didn't have to be so big-they were a lot smaller than the white miners, and could be made to work on their knees. Also, any Chinese miner caught with gold-bearing rock on his person could be shot on the spot. And a few were."

"Christ," Johnny said.

"Not much like the old John Wayne movies," Bill-ingsley agreed. "Anyway, they were a hundred and fifty feet down-almost twice as deep as when the white miners threw down their picks-when the cave-in hap-pened. There are all kinds of stories about it. One is that they dug up a waisin, a kind of ancient earth-spirit, and it tore the mine down. Another is that they made the tommyknockers mad."

"What're tommyknockers?" David asked.

"Troublemakers," Johnny said. "The underground ver-sion of gremlins."

"Three things," Audrey said from her place at stage- right. She was nibbling a pretzel. "First, you call that sort of mine-work a drift, not a shaft. Second, you drive a driftway, you don't sink it. Third, it was a cave-in, pure and simple. No tommyknockers, no earth-spirits."

"Rationalism speaks," Johnny said. "The spirit of the century. Hurrah!"

"I wouldn't go ten feet into that kind of ground," Audrey said, "no sane person would, and there they were, a hundred and fifty feet deep, forty miners, a couple of bossmen, at least five ponies, all of them chipping and tromping and yelling, doing everything but setting off dynamite. What's amazing is how long the tommyknockers protected them from their own idiocy!"

"When the cave in finally did happen, it happened in what should have been a good place," Billingsley resumed. "The roof fell in about sixty feet from the adit." He glanced at David. "That's what you call the entrance to a mine, son. The miners got up that far from below, and there they were stopped by twenty feet of fallen hornfel's skarn, and Devonian shale. The whistle went off, and the folks from town came up the hill to see what had happened. Even the whores and the gamblers came up. They could hear the Chinamen inside screaming, begging to be dug out before the rest of it came down. Some said they sounded like they were fighting with each other. But no one wanted to go in and start digging. That squealing sound hornfels makes when the ground's uneasy was louder than ever, and the roof was bowed down in a couple of places between the adit and the first rockfall."

"Could those places have been shored up?" Steve asked.

"Sure, but nobody wanted to take the responsibility for doing it. Two days later, the president and vice president of Diablo Mines showed up with a couple of mining engineers from Reno. They had a picnic lunch outside the adit while they talked over what to do, my dad told me. Ate it spread Out off linen while inside that shaft-pardon me the drift-not ninety feet from where they were, forty human souls were screaming in the dark.

"There had been cave-ins deeper in, folks said they sounded like something was farting or burping deep down in the earth, but the Chinese were still okay - still alive, anyway - behind the first rockfall, begging to be dug out. They were eating the mine-ponies by then, I imagine, and they'd had no water or light for two days The mining engineers went in-poked their heads in, anyway-and said it was too dangerous for any sort of rescue operation."

"So what did they do?" Mary asked.

Billingsley shrugged. "Set dynamite charges at the front of the mine and brought that down, too. Shut her up."

"Are you saying they deliberately buried forty people alive?" Cynthia asked.

"Forty-two counting the line - boss and the foreman," Billingsley said. "The line-boss was white, but a drunk and a man known to speak foul language to decent women. No one spoke up for him. The foreman either, far as that goes."

"How could they do it?"

"Most were Chinese, ma'am," Billingsley said, "so it was easy.

The wind gusted. The building trembled beneath its rough caress like something alive. They could hear the faint sound of the window in the ladies' room banging back and forth. Johnny kept waiting for it to yawn wide enough to knock over Billingsley's bottle booby-trap.

"But that's not quite the end of the story," Billingsley said. "You know how stuff like this grows in folks' minds over the years." He put his hands together and wiggled the gnarled fingers. On the movie screen a gigantic bird, a legendary death-kite, seemed to soar. "It grows like shadows."

"Well, what's the end of it?" Johnny asked. Even after all these years he was a sucker for a good story when he heard one, and this one wasn't bad.

"Three days later, two young Chinese fellows showed up at the Lady Day, a saloon which stood about where The Broken Drum is now. Shot seven men before they were subdued. Killed two. One of the ones they killed was the mining engineer from Reno who recommended that the shaft be brought down."

"Drift," Audrey said.

"Quiet," Johnny said, and motioned for Billingsley to go on.

"One of the 'coolie-boys' - that's what they were called - was killed himself in the fracas. A knife in the back, most likely, although the story most people like is that a professional gambler named Harold Brophy flicked a playing-card from where he was sitting and cut the man's throat with it.

"The one still alive was shot in five or six places. That didn't stop em from taking him out and hanging him the next day, though, after a little sawhorse trial in front of a kangaroo court. I bet he was a disappointment to them; according to the story, he was too crazy to have any idea what was happening. They had chains on his legs and cuffs on his wrists and still he fought them like a catamount, raving in his own language all the while."

Billingsley leaned forward a little, seeming to stare at David in particular. The boy looked back at him, eyes wide and fascinated.

"All of what he said was in the heathen Chinee, but one idea everyone got was that he and his friend had gotten out of the mine and come to take revenge on those who first put them there and then left them there."

Billingsley shrugged.

"Most likely they were just two young men from the so- called Chinese Encampment south of Ely, men not quite so passive or resigned as the others. By then the story of the cave-in had travelled, and folks in the Encampment would have known about it. Some probably had relatives in Desperation. And you have to remember that the one who actually survived the shootout didn't have any English other than cusswords. Most of what they got from him must have come from his gestures. And you know how people love that last twist of the knife in a tall tale Why, it wasn't a year before folks were saying the Chinese miners were still alive in there, that they could hear em talking and laughing and pleading to be let out moaning and promising revenge."

"Would it have been possible for a couple of men to have gotten out?" Steve asked.

"No," Audrey said from the doorway.

Billingsley glanced her way, then turned his puffy, red rimmed eyes on Steve. "I reckon," he said. "The two of them might've started back down the shaft together, while the rest clustered behind the rockfall. One of em might have remembered a vent or a chimney-"

"Bullshit," Audrey said.

"It ain't," Billingsley said, "and you know it. This is an old volcano-field. There's even extrusive porphyry east of town-looks like black glass with chips of ruby in it: garnets, they are. And wherever there's volcanic rock there's shafts and chimneys."

"The chances of two men ever-"

"It's just a hypothetical case," Mary said soothingly "A way of passing the time, that's all."

"Hypothetical bullshit," Audrey grumbled, and ate another dubious pretzel.

"Anyway, that's the story," Billingsley said, "miners buried alive, two get out, both insane by then, and they try to take their revenge. Later on, ghosts in the ground. If that ain't a tale for a stormy night, I don't know what is." He looked across at Audrey, and on his face was a sly drunk's smile. "You been diggin up there, miss. You new folks. Haven't come across any short bones, have you?"

"You're drunk, Mr. Billingsley," she said coldly.

"No," he said. "I wish I was, but I ain't. Excuse me, ladies and gents. I get yarning and I get the whizzies. It never damn fails."

He crossed the stage, head down, shoulders slumped, weaving slightly. The shadow which followed him was ironic both in its size and its heroic aspect. His hootheels clumped. They watched him go.

There was a sudden flat smacking sound that made them all jump. Cynthia smiled guiltily and raised her sneaker. "Sorry," she said. "A spider. I think it was one of those fiddleheads."

"Fiddlebacks," Steve said.

Johnny bent down to look, hands planted on his legs just above the knees. "Nope."

"Nope, what?" Steve asked. "Not a fiddleback?"

"Not a singleton," Johnny said. "A pair." He looked up, not quite smiling. "Maybe," he said, "they're Chinese fiddlebacks."

3

Tak! Can ah wan me. Ah lah.

The cougar's eyes opened. She got up. Her tail began switching restlessly from side to side. It was almost time. Her ears cocked forward, twitching, at the sound of someone entering the room behind the white glass. She looked up at it, all rapt attention, a net of measurement and focus. Her leap would have to be perfect to carry her through, and perfection was exactly what the voice in her head demanded.

She waited, that small, squalling growl once more rising up from her throat . . . but now it came out of her mouth as well as from her nostrils, because her muzzle was wrinkled back to show her teeth. Little by little, she began to tense down on her haunches.

Almost time.

Almost time. Tak ah ten.

4

Billingsley poked his head into the ladies' first, and shone his light at the window. The bottles were still in place. He had been afraid that a strong gust of wind might open the window wide enough to knock some of them off the ledge, causing a false alarm, but that hadn't happened and now he thought it very unlikely that it would. The wind was dying. The storm, a summer freak the likes of which he had never seen, was winding down.

Meantime, he had this problem. This thirst to quench.

Except, in the last five years or so, it had come to seem less and less like a thirst than an itch, as if he had con-tracted some awful form of poison ivy-a kind that affected one's brain instead of one's skin. Well, it didn't matter, did it? He knew how to take care of his problem, and that was the important thing. And it kept his mind off the rest, as well. The madness of the rest. if it had just been danger, someone out of control waving a gun around, that he thought he could have faced, old or not, drunk or not. But this was nothing so cut and dried. The geologist woman kept insisting that it was, that it was all Entragian, but Billingsley knew better. Because Entragian was different now. He'd told the others that, and Ellen Carver had called him crazy. But.

But how was Entragian different? And why did he, Billingsley, somehow feel that the change in the deputy was important, perhaps vital, to them right now? He didn't know. He should know, it should be as clear as the nose on his face, but these days when he drank everything got swimmy, like he was going senile. He couldn't even remember the name of the geologist woman's horse, the mare with the strained leg -

"Yes I can," he murmured. "Yes I can, it was

Was what, you old rummy? You don't know, do you?

"Yes I do, it was Sally!" he cried triumphantly, then walked past the boarded-up firedoor and pushed his way into the men's room. He shone his flashlight briefly on the potty. "Sally, that's what it was!" He shifted his light to the wall and the smoke-breathing horse which galloped there. He couldn't remember drawing it - he'd been in a blackout, he supposed - but it was indubitably his work, and not bad of its kind. He liked the way the horse looked both mad and free, as if it had come from some other world where goddesses still rode bareback, sometimes leaping whole leagues as they went their wild courses.

His memories suddenly clarified a little, as if the picture on the wall had somehow opened his mind. Sally, yes. A year ago, give or take. The rumors that the mine was going to be reopened were just beginning to solidify into acknowledged fact. Cars and trucks had started to show up in the parking lot of the Quonset hut that served as mining headquarters, planes had started to fly into the airstrip south of town, and he had been told one night - right here in The American West, as a matter of fact, drinking with the boys-that there was a lady geologist living Out at the old Rieper place. Young. Single. Supposedly pretty.

Billingsley needed to pee, he hadn't lied, but that wasn't his strongest need right now. There was a filthy blue rag in one of the washbasins, the sort of thing you wouldn't handle without tongs unless you absolutely needed to. The old veterinarian now plucked it up, exposing a bottle of Satin Smooth, rotgut whiskey if ever rotgut whiskey had been bottled . ., but any port in a storm.

He unscrewed the cap and then, holding the bottle in both hands because of the way they were shaking, took a long, deep drink. Napalm slid down his throat and exploded in his gut. It burned, all right, but what was that Patty Loveless song that used to play all the time on the radio? Hurt me, baby, in a real good way.

He chased the first gulp with a smaller sip (holding the bottle easier, now; the shakes were gone), then replaced the cap and put the bottle back in the sink.

"She called me," he muttered. Outside the window, the cougar's ears flicked at the sound of his voice. She tensed down a little more on her haunches, waiting for him to move closer to where she was, closer to where her leap would bring her. "Woman called me on the phone. Said her horse was a three-year-old mare named Sally. Yes sir."

He put the rag back over the bottle, not thinking about it, hiding by habit, his mind on that day last summer. He had gone out to the Rieper place, a nice adobe up in the hills, and a fellow from the mine - the black guy who later became the office receptionist, in fact - had taken him to the horse. He said Audrey had just gotten an urgent call and was going to have to fly off to company head-quarters in Phoenix. Then, as they walked to the stable, the black fellow had looked over Billingsley's shoulder and had said. . .

"He said, 'There she goes now,'" Billingsley mur-mured. He had again focused the light on the horse gal-loping across the warped tiles and was staring at it with wide, remembering eyes, his bladder temporarily forgotten. "And he called to her."

Yes sir. Hi, Aud! he'd called, and waved. She had waved back. Billingsley had also waved, thinking the sto-ries were right: she was young, and she was goodlooking. Not moviestar-knockout goodlooking, but mighty fine for a part of the world where no single woman had to pay for her own drinks if she didn't want to. He had tended her horse, had given the black man a liniment sample to put on, and later she'd come in herself to buy more. Marsha had told him that; he'd been over near Washoe, looking after some sick sheep. He'd seen her around town plenty since, though. Not to talk to, no sir, not hardly, they ran with different crowds, but he'd seen her eating dinner in the Antlers Hotel or the Owl's, once at The Jailhouse in Ely; he'd seen her drinking in Bud's Suds or the Drum with some of the other mining folk, rolling dice out of a cup to see who'd pay; in Worrell's Market, buying groceries, at the Conoco, buying gas, in the hardware store one day, buying a can of paint and a brush, yes sir, he had seen her around, in a town this small and this isolated you saw everybody around, had to.

Why are you running all this through your dumb head? he asked himself, at last starting toward the potty. His boots gritted in dirt and dust, in grout that had crumbled out from between decaying tiles. He stopped still a little bit beyond aiming-and-shooting distance, flashlight beam shining on the scuffed tip of one boot while he pulled down his fly. What did Audrey Wyler have to do with Collie? What could she have to do with Collie? He didn't recall ever seeing them together, or hearing that they were an item, it wasn't that. So what was it? And why did his mind keep insisting it had something to do with the day he'd gone out to look at her mare? He hadn't even seen her that day. Well . . . for a minute. . . from a distance. . .

He lined himself up with the potty and pulled out the old hogleg. Boy, he had to go. Drink a pint and piss a quart, wasn't that what they said?

Her waving. . . hurrying for her car. . . headed for the airstrip. . . headed for Phoenix. Wearing a business-suity kind of rig, sure, because she wasn't going to any Quonset hut mining headquarters out in the desert, she was going someplace where there was a carpet on the floor and the view was from more than three stories up. Going to see the big boys. Nice legs she had m get-ting on but I am 't too old to appreciate a pretty knee. . . nice, yes sir, but -

And suddenly it all came together in his mind, not with a click but with a big loud kapow, and for a moment, before the cougar uttered her coughing, rising growl, he thought the sound of breaking glass was in his mind, that it was the sound of understanding.

Then the growl began, quickly rising to a howl that started him urinating in pure fear. For a moment it was impossible to associate that sound with anything which had ever walked on the earth. He wheeled, spraying a pin-wheel of piss, and saw a dark, green-eyed shape splayed out on the tiles. Bits of broken glass gleamed in the fur on its back. He knew what it was immediately, his mind quickly putting the shape together with the sound in spite of his startlement and terror.

The mountain lion-the flashlight showed it to be an extremely large female-raised her face to his and spat at him, revealing two rows of long white teeth. And the .30-.06 was back on the stage, leaned up against the movie screen.

"Oh my God no," Billingsley whispered, and threw the flashlight past the cougar's right shoulder, missing it intentionally. When the snarling animal snapped its head around to see what had been thrown at it, Billingsley broke for the door.

5

Cynthia was pouring herself a fresh glass of spring-water when the cougar let go its first cry. The sound of it unwound all her nerves and muscles. The plastic bottle slipped from her relaxing fingers, hit the floor between her sneakers, and exploded like a balloon water bomb. She knew the sound for what it was - the yowl of a wildcat - immediately, although she had never heard such a sound outside of a movie theater. And, of course - weird but true - that was still the case.

He ran with his head down, tucking himself back into his pants with the hand that had been holding the flash-light. The cougar loosed another of its screaming, distraught cries - the shriek of a woman being burned or stabbed, deafening in the closed bathroom - and then launched herself at Billingsley, front paws splayed, long claws out. These sank through his shirt and into his back as he groped for the doorhandle, slicing through scant muscle, flaying him in bloodlines that came together like a V. Her big paws snagged in the waistband of his pants and held for a moment, pulling the old man - who was screaming himself now - back into the room. Then his belt broke and he went tumbling backward, actually landing on top of the cougar. He rolled, hit the glass-littered floor on his side, got to one knee, and then the cougar was on him. She knocked him onto his back and went for his throat. Billingsley got his hand up and she bit off the side of it. Blood beaded on her whiskers like skarn-garnets. Billingsley screamed again and shoved his other hand under the shelf of her chin, trying to push her back, trying to make her let go. He felt her breath on his cheek, pushing like hot fingers. He looked past her shoulder and saw the horse on the wall, his horse, prancing wild and free. Then the cougar lunged forward again, shaking his hand .in her jaws, and there was only pain. It filled the world. Then it was a man screaming. Tom Billingsley screaming.

She turned, saw Steve stare at Marinville, saw Marinville look away, cheeks leaden, lips pressed together but trembling all the same. In that moment the writer looked weak and lost and oddly female with his long gray hair, like an old woman who's lost track not only of where she is but of who she is.

Still, what Cynthia felt most for Johnny Marinville in that moment was contempt.

Steve looked to Ralph, who nodded, grabbed his gun, and ran toward the stage-left opening. Steve caught up with him and they disappeared that way, running abreast. The old man screamed again, but this time the cry had a gruesome liquid quality, as if he were trying to gargle and scream at the same time, and it didn't last long. The cougar yowled again.

Mary went to Steve's boss and held out the shotgun she had up until then barely let go of. "Take it. Go help them."

He looked at her, biting his lip. "Listen," he said. "I have lousy night-vision. I know how that sounds, but-"

The wildcat screamed, the sound so loud it seemed to drill into Cynthia's ears. Gooseflesh danced up her back.

"Yeah, like a gutless blowhard, that's how it sounds," Mary said, and turned away. That got Marinville moving, but slowly, like someone who has been roused from a deep sleep. Cynthia saw Billingsley's rifle leaning against the movie screen and didn't wait for him. She grabbed the gun and sprinted across the stage, going with it held high over her head like a freedom fighter in a poster - not because she wanted to look romantic but because she didn't want to run into something and risk having the gun go off. She might shoot someone up ahead of her.

She ran past a couple of dusty chairs standing by what looked like a defunct lighting control-panel, then down the narrow hall they had taken to get to the stage in the first place. Brick on one side, wood on the other. A smell of old men with too much time on their hands. And too much jizz, judging from their video library.

There was another animal scream - much louder now - but no more noise from the old man. Not a good sign. A door banged open not far ahead, the sound slightly hollow, the sound only a public restroom door can make when it's banged against tile. So, she thought. The men s or the women's, and it must be the men's, 'cause that s where the toilet is.

"Look out!" Ralph's voice, raised in a near-scream "Jesus Christ, Steve-"

From the cat there came a kind of spitting roar. There was a thud. Steve yelled, although whether in pain or surprise she couldn't tell. Then there were two deafening explosions. The muzzle-flashes washed the wall outside the men's room, for a moment revealing a fire extinguisher on which someone had hung a ratty old sombrero She ducked instinctively, then turned the corner into the bathroom. Ralph Carver was holding the door propped open with his body. The bathroom was lit only by the old man's flashlight, which lay in the corner with the lens pointed at the wall, spraying light up the tiles and kicking back just enough to see by. That faint light and the rolling smoke from Ralph's discharged rifle gave what she was looking at a sultry hallucinatory quality that made her think of her half a dozen experiments with peyote and mescaline.

Billingsley was crawling, dazed, toward the urinals, his head down so far it was dragging on the tiles. His shirt and undershirt had been torn open down the middle. His back was pouring blood. He looked as if he had been flogged by a maniac.

In the middle of the floor, a bizarre waltz was going on The cougar was up on her hind legs, paws on Steve Ames's shoulders.. Blood was pouring down her flanks but she did not seem to be seriously hurt. One of Ralph s shots must have missed her entirely; Cynthia saw that half of the horse on the wall had been blown to smithereens Steve had his arms crossed in front of his chest; his elbows and forearms were against the cougar's chest.

"Shoot it!" he screamed. "For Christ's sake, shoot it again!"

Ralph, his face a drawn mask of shadows in the faint light, raised the rifle, aimed it, then lowered it again with an anguished expression, afraid of hitting Steve.

The cat shrieked and darted its triangular head forward. Steve snapped his own head back. They tangoed drunkenly that way, the cat's claws digging deeper into Steve's shoulders, and now Cynthia could see blood-blossoms spreading on the coverall he wore, around the places where the cat's claws were dug in. Its tail was lashing madly back and forth.

They did another half-turn, and Steve collided with the potty in the middle of the floor. It crashed over on its side and Steve tottered on the edge of balance, frantically holding off the lunging cougar with his crossed arms. Beyond them, Billingsley had reached the far corner of the men's room yet continued trying to crawl, as if the wildcat's attack had turned him into some sort of windup toy, doomed to go on until he finally ran down.

"Shoot this fucking thing!" Steve yelled. He managed to get one foot between the lower part of the potty's frame and its canvas catchbag without falling, but now he was out of backing room; in a moment or two the cougar would push him over. "Shoot it, Ralph, SHOOT IT!"

Ralph raised the rifle again, eyes wide, gnawing at his lower lip, and then Cynthia was slammed aside. She reeled across the room and caught the middle washbasin in a line of three just in time to keep herself from smashing face - first into the wall-length steel mirror. She turned and saw Marinville stride into the room with the stock of Mary's gun laid against the inside of his right forearm. His matted gray hair swung back and forth, brushing his shoulders. Cynthia thought she had never seen anyone in her life who looked so terrified, but now that he was in motion, Marinville didn't hesitate; he socked the shotgun's double muzzle against the side of the animal's head.

"Push!" he bellowed, and Steve pushed. The cat's head rocked up and away from him. Its luminous eyes seemed to be lit from within, as if it were not a living thing at all but some sort of jack-o'-lantern. The writer winced, turned his head slightly away, and pulled both triggers. There was a deafening roar that dwarfed the sound of Carver's rifle. Bright light leaped from the barrel, and then Cynthia smelled frying hair. The cougar fell side-ways, its head mostly gone, the fur on the back of its neck smouldering.

Steve waved his arms for balance. Marinville, dazed, made only a token effort to catch him, and Steve - her nice new friend - went sprawling.

"Oh Christ, I think I shit myself," Marinville said, almost conversationally, and then: "No, I guess it was just the wind in the willows. Steve, you okay?"

Cynthia was on her knees beside him. He sat up, looked around dazedly, and winced as she tentatively pressed a finger to one of the blood-blossoms on the shoulder of the coverall.

"I think so." He was trying to get up. Cynthia put an arm around his waist, braced, hauled. "Thanks, boss."

"I don't believe it," Marinville said. He sounded com-pletely natural to Cynthia for the first time since she'd met him, like a man living a life instead of playing a role. "I don't believe I did it. That woman shamed me into it. Steven, are you all right?"

"He's got punctures," Cynthia said, "but never mind that now. We have to help the old guy."

Mary came in with Marinville's gun - the one that was unloaded - held up by one shoulder. Her hands were wrapped around the end of the barrel. To Cynthia her face looked almost eerily composed. She surveyed the scene - even more dreamlike now, not just tinged with gunsmoke but hazed with it-and then hurried across the room toward Billingsley, who made two more tired efforts to crawl into the wall and then collapsed from the knees upward, his face going last, first tilting and then sliding down the tiles.

Ralph reached for Steve's shoulder, saw the blood there, and settled for gripping his arm high on the bicep. "I couldn't," he said. "I wanted to, but I couldn't. After the first two rounds I was afraid of hitting you instead of it. When you finally got turned around so I could make a side-shot, Marinville was there."

"It's okay," Steve said. "All's well that ends well."

"1 owed it to him," the writer said with a winning-quarterback expansiveness Cynthia found rather nauseating. "If it hadn't been for me, he wouldn't have been here in the-"

"Get over here!" Mary said, her voice cracking. "Jesus Christ, oh man, he's bleeding so bad!"

The four of them gathered around Mary and Billingsley. She had gotten him onto his back, and Cynthia winced at what she saw. One of the old geezer's hands was mostly gone - all the fingers but the pinky chewed to stubs - but that wasn't the worst. His lower neck and shoulder had been flayed open. Blood was spilling out in freshets. Yet he was awake, his eyes bright and aware.

"Skirt," he whispered hoarsely. "Skirt."

"Don't try to talk, oldtimer," Marinville said. He bent, scooped up the flashlight, and trained it on Billingsley. It made what had looked bad enough in the shadows even worse. There was a pond of blood beside the old guy's head; Cynthia didn't understand how he could still be alive.

"I need a compress," Mary said. "Don't just stand there, help me, he's going to die if we don't stop the bleeding right now!"

Too late, babe, Cynthia thought but didn't say.

Steve saw what looked like a rag in one of the sinks and grabbed it. It turned out to be a very old shirt with Joe Camel on it. He folded the shirt twice, then handed it to Mary. She nodded, folded it once more, then pressed it against the side of Billingsley's neck.

"Come on," Cynthia said, taking Steve's arm. "Back on stage. If there's nothing else, I can at least wash those out with water from the bar. There's plenty on the bottom.

"No," the old man whispered. "Stay! Got to . . . hear this."

"You can't talk," Mary said. She pushed harder on the side of his neck with the makeshift compress. The shirt was already darkening. "You'll never stop bleeding if you talk."

He rolled his eyes toward Mary. "Too late doctorin." His voice was hoarse. "Dyin."

"No you're not, that's ridiculous."

"Dyin," he repeated, and moved violently beneath her hands. His torn back squelched on the tiles, a sound that made Cynthia feel nauseated. "Get down here . . . all of you, close. . . and listen to me."

Steve glanced at Cynthia. She shrugged, then the two of them knelt beside the old man's leg, Cynthia shoulder to shoulder with Mary Jackson. Marinville and Carver leaned in from the sides.

"He shouldn't talk," Mary said, but she sounded doubtful.

"Let him say what he needs to," Marinville said. "What is it, Tom?"

"Too short for business," Billingsley whispered. He was looking up at them, begging them with his eyes to understand.

Steve shook his head. "I'm not getting you."

Billingsley wet his lips. 'Only seen her once before in a dress. That's why it took me too long to figure out . . . what was wrong."

A startled expression had come over Mary's face. "That's right, she said she had a meeting with the comptroller! He comes all the way from Phoenix to hear her report on something important, something that means big bucks, and she puts on a dress so short she'll be flashing her pants at him every time she crosses her legs? I don't think so."

Beads of sweat ran down Billingsley's pale, stubbly cheeks like tears. "Feel so stupid," he wheezed. "Not all my fault, though. Nope. Didn't know her to talk to. Wasn't there the one time she came into the office to pick up more liniment. Always saw her at a distance, and out here women mostly wear jeans. But I had it. I did. Had it and then got drinking and lost track of it again." He looked at Mary. "The dress would have been all right. . . when she put it on. Do you see? Do you understand?"

"What's he talking about?" Ralph asked. "How could it be all right when she put it on and too short for a business meeting later?"

"Taller," the old man whispered.

Marinville looked at Steve. "What was that? It sounded like he said - "

"Ta lleb" Billingsley said. He enunciated the word carefully, then began to cough. The folded shirt Mary held against his neck and shoulder was now soaked. His eyes rolled back and forth among them. He turned his head to one side, spat out a mouthful of blood, and the coughing fit eased.

"Dear God," Ralph said. "She's like Entragian? Is that what you're saying, that she's like the cop?"

"Yes . . . no," Billingsley whispered. "Don't know for sure. Would have. . . seen that right away. . . but. .

"Mr. Billingsley, do you think she might have caught a milder dose of whatever the cop has?" Mary asked.

He looked at her gratefully and squeezed her hand.

Marinville said, "She's sure not bleeding out like the cop.

"Or not where we can see it," Ralph said. "Not yet, anyway. Billingsley looked past Mary's shoulder. "Where. . . where..."

He began coughing again and wasn't able to finish, but he didn't need to. A startled look passed among them, and Cynthia turned around. Audrey wasn't there.

Neither was David Carver.