Johnny was ready to suggest that they just get going - Cynthia could hold the kid's head in her lap and cushion it from any bumps - when David raised his hands and pressed the heels of his palms to his temples. He took a deeper breath. A moment later his eyes opened and looked up at them: Johnny, Steve, Cynthia, his father. The faces of the two older men were as puffed and discolored as those of journeymen fighters after a bad night in a tank town; all of them looked tired and scared, jumping like spooked horses at the slightest sound. The ragtag remains of The Collie Entragian Survival Society.

"Hi. David," Johnny said. "Great to have you back. You're in - "

" - Steve's truck. Parked near the movie theater. You brought it down from the Conoco station." David struggled to a sitting position, swallowed, winced. "She must've shook me like dice."

"She did," Steve said. He was looking at David cautiously. "You remember Audrey doing that?"

"No," David said, "but I was told."

Johnny shot a glance at Ralph, who shrugged slightly - Don 't ask me.

"Is there any water? My throat's on fire."

"We got out of the theater in a hurry and didn't bring anything but the guns," Cynthia said. "But there's this." She pointed to a case of Jolt Cola from which several bottles had already been taken. "Steve keeps it on hand for Mr. Marinville."

"I'm a freak about it since I quit drinking," Johnny said. "Gotta be Jolt, God knows why. It's warm, but - "

David took one and drank deeply, wincing as the carbonation bit into his throat but not slowing down on that account. At last, with the bottle three-quarters empty, he put his head back against the side of the truck, closed his eyes, and burped ringingly.

Johnny grinned. "Sixty points!"

David opened his eyes and grinned back.

Johnny held out the bottle of aspirin he had liberated from the Owl's. "Want a couple? They're old, but they seem to work all right."

David thought it over, then took two and washed them down with the rest of the Jolt.

"We're getting out," Johnny said. "We'll try north first - there are some trailers in the road, but Steve says he thinks we can get around them on the trailer-park side. If we can't, we'll have to go south to the pit-mine and then take the equipment road that runs northwest from there back to Highway 50. You and I'll sit up front with - "

Johnny raised his eyebrows. "Pardon?"

"We have to go up to the mine, okay, but not to leave town." David's voice sounded hoarse, as if he'd been crying. "We have to go down inside the pit."

Johnny glanced at Steve, who only shrugged and then looked back at the boy. "What are you talking about, David?" Steve asked. "Your mother? Because it would probably be better for her, not to mention the rest of us, if we - "

"No, that's not why. . . Dad?" The boy reached out and took his father's hand. It was an oddly adult gesture of comfort. "Morn's dead."

Ralph bowed his head. "Well, we don't know that for sure, David, and we mustn't give up hope, but I guess it's likely."

"I do know for sure. I'm not just guessing." David's face was haggard in the light of the crisscrossing flash-light beams. His eyes settled on Johnny last. "There's stuff we have to do. You know it, don't you? That's why you waited for me to wake up."

"No, David. Not at all. We just didn't want to risk moving you until we were sure you were okay." Yet this felt like a lie to his heart. He found himself filling up with a vague, fluttery nervousness. It was the way he felt in the last few days before beginning a new book, when he understood that the inevitable could not be put off much longer, that he would soon be out on the wire again, clutching his balance-pole and riding his stupid little unicycle.

But this was worse. By far. He felt an urge to hop the kid over the head with the butt of the Rossi shotgun knock him out and shut him up before he could say any thing else. Don't you fuck us up, kid, he thought. Not when we're starting to see a tiny bit of light at the end of the tunnel.

David looked back at his father. He was still holding Ralph's hand. "She's dead but not at rest. She can't be as long as Tak inhabits her body."

"Who's Tak, David?" Cynthia asked.

"One of the Wintergreen Twins," Johnny said cheer- fully. "The other one is Tik."

David gave him a long, level look, and Johnny dropped his eyes. He hated himself for doing it but couldn't 7 help it.

"Tak is a god," David said. "Or a demon. Or maybe nothing at all, just a name, a nonsense syllable-but a dangerous nothing, like a voice in the wind. It doesn't matter. What does is that my mom should be put to rest Then she can be with my sister in . . well, in wherever there is for us after we die."

"Son, what matters is that we have to get out of here," Johnny said. He was still managing to keep his voice gentle, but now he could hear an undercurrent of impatience and fear in it. "Once we get to Ely, we'll contact the State Police-hell, the FBI. There'll be a hundred cops on the ground and a dozen helicopters in the air by noon tomorrow, that I promise you. But for now-"

"My mom's dead, but Mary's not," David said. "She s still alive. She's in the pit."

Cynthia gasped. "How did you know she was even gone?"

David smiled wanly. "Well, I don't see her, for one thing. The rest 1 know the same way I know it was Audrey who choked me. I was told."

"By who, David?" Ralph asked.

"I don't know," David said. '1 don't even know if it matters. What matters is that he told me stuff. True stuff. I know it was."

"Story-hour's over, pal," Johnny said. There was a raggedness in his voice. He heard it, but he couldn't help it. And was it surprising? This wasn't a panel-discussion on magical realism or concrete prose, after all. Story-hour was finished; bug-out time had arrived. He had absolutely no desire to listen to a bunch of shit from this spooky little Jesus Scout.

The Jesus Scout slid out of his cell somehow, killed the coyote Entragian set as a guard, and saved your miserable life, Terry spoke up inside his head. Maybe you should listen to him, Johnny.

And that, he thought, was why he had divorced Terry in the first place. In a fucking nutshell. She had been a divine lay, but she had never known when to shut up and listen to her intellectual betters.

But the damage was done; it was now too late to derail this train of thought. He found himself thinking of what Billingsley had said about David's escape from the jail cell. Not even Houdini, hadn't that been it? Because of the head. And then there was the phone. The way he'd sent the coyotes packing. And the matter of the sardines and crackers. The thought which had gone through his own head had been something about unobtrusive miracles, hadn't it?

He had to quit thinking that way. Because what Jesus Scouts did was get people killed. Look at John the Baptist, or those nuns in South America. Or - Not even Houdini.

Because of the head.

Johnny realized there was no point in gilding the lily, or doing little mental tap-dances, or - this was the oldest trick of all - using different voices to argue the question into incoherence. The simple fact was that he was no longer just afraid of the cop, or the other forces which might be loose in this town.

He was also afraid of David Carver.

"It wasn't really the cop who killed my mother and sister and Mary's husband," David said, and gave Johnny a look that reminded him eerily of Terry. That look used to drive him to the edge of insanity. You know what I'm talking about, it said. You know exactly, so don 't waste my time by being deliberately obtuse. "And whoever I talked to while I was unconscious, it was really God. Only God can't come to people as himself; he'd scare them to death and never get any business done at all. He comes as other stuff. Birds, pillars of fire, burning bushes, whirlwinds . .

"Or people," Cynthia said. "Sure, God's a master of disguise."

The last of Johnny's patience broke at the skinny girl's makes-sense-to-me tone. "This is totally insane!" he shouted. "We have to get gone, don't you see that? We're parked on goddam Main Street, shut up in here without a single window to look out of, he could be anywhere-up front behind the fucking wheel, for all we know! Or. . . I don't know. ., coyotes. . . buzzards. . .

"He's gone," David said in his quiet voice. He leaned forward and took another Jolt from the case.

"Who?" Johnny asked. "Entragian?"

"The can tak. It doesn't matter who it's in - Entragian or my mother or the one it started with - it's always the same. Always the can tak, the big god, the guardian. Gone. Can't you feel it?"

1don't feel anything."

Don't be a gonzo, Terry said in his mind.

"Don't be a gonzo," David said, looking intently up at him. The bottle of Jolt was clasped loosely in his hands. Johnny bent toward him. "Are you reading my mind?" he asked, almost pleasantly. "If you are, I'll thank you to get the hell out of my head, sonny."

"What I'm doing is trying to get you to listen," David said. "Everyone else will if you will! He doesn't need to send his can tahs or can tak against us if we're in disagreement with one another - if there's a broken window, he'll get in and tear us apart!"

"Come on," Johnny said, "don't go all guilt-trippy. None of this is my fault."

"I'm not saying it is. Just listen, okay?" David sounded almost pleading. "You can do that, there's time, because he's gone. The trailers he put in the road are gone, too. Don't you get it? He wants us to leave."

"Great! Let's give him what he wants!"

"Let's listen to what David has to say," Steve said.

Johnny wheeled on him. "I think you must have for-gotten who pays you, Steve." He loathed the sound of the words as soon as they were out of his mouth, but made no effort to take them back. The urge to get out of here, to jump behind the wheel of the Ryder truck and just roll some miles - in any direction but south - was now so strong it was nearly panic.

"You told me to stop calling you boss. I'm holding you to that."

"Besides, what about Mary?" Cynthia asked. "He says she's alive!"

Johnny turned toward her - turned on her. "You may want to pack your suitcases and travel Trans-God Airways with David, but I think I'll pass."

"We'll listen to him," Ralph said in a low voice.

Johnny stared at him, amazed. If he had expected help from anyone, it had been from the boy's father. He's all I got, Ralph had said in the lobby of The American West. All that's left of my family.

Johnny looked around at the others, and was dismally astounded to see they were in agreement; only he stood apart. And Steve had the keys to the truck in his pocket. Yet it was him the boy was mostly looking at. Him. As it was him, John Edward Marinville, that people had been mostly looking at ever since he had published his first novel at the impossibly precocious age of twenty-two. He thought he had gotten used to it, and maybe he had, but this time it was different. He had an idea that none of the others - the teachers, the readers, the critics, the editors, the drinking buddies, the women - had ever wanted what this boy seemed to want, which was not just for him to listen; listening, Johnny was afraid, was only where it would start.

The eyes were not just looking, though. The eyes were pleading.

Forget it, kid, he thought. When people like you drive, the bus always seems to crash if it wasn't for David, 1 think your personal bus would have crashed already, Terry said from Der Bitchen Bunker inside his head. 1 think you'd be dead and hung up on a hook somewhere. Listen to him, Johnny. For Christ's sake, listen!

In a much lower voice, Johnny said: "Entragian's gone. You're sure of that."

"Yes," David said. "The animals, too. The coyotes and wolves - hundreds of them, it must have taken, maybe thousands - moved the trailers off the road. Dumped them over the side and onto the hardpan. Now most of them have drawn away, into ml him, the watchman's circle." He drank from the bottle of Jolt. The hand holding it shook slightly. He looked at each of them in turn, but it was Johnny his eyes came back to. Always Johnny. "He wants what you want. For us to leave."

"Then why did he bring us here in the first place?" "He didn't."

"What?"

"He thinks he did, but he didn't."

"I don't have any idea what you're - "

"God brought us," David said. "To stop him."

2

In the silence which followed this, Steve discovered he was listening for the wind outside. There was none. He thought he could hear a plane far away-sane people on their way to some sane destination, sleeping or eating or reading U.S. News & World Report - but that was all.

It was Johnny who broke the silence, of course, and although he sounded as confident as ever, there was a look in his eyes (a slidey look) that Steve didn't like much. He thought he liked Johnny's crazed look better the wide eyes and terrified Clyde Barrow grin he'd had on when he put the shotgun up to the cougar's ear and blew its head of f. That there was a half-bright outlaw in Johnny was something Steve knew very well - he'd seen flickers of that guy from the start of the tour, and knew it was the outlaw Bill Harris had feared when he laid down the Five Commandments that day in Jack Appleton's office - but Clyde Barrow seemed to have stepped out and left the other Marinville, the one with the satiric eyebrow and the windbag William F. Buckley rhetoric, in his place.

"You speak as if we all had the same God, David," he said. "I don't mean to patronize you, but I hardly think that's the case."

"But it is the case," David replied calmly. "Compared to Tak, you and a cannibal king would have the same God. You've seen the can tahs, I know you have. And you've felt what they can do."

Johnny's mouth twitched-indicating, Steve thought, that he had taken a hit but didn't want to admit it. "Perhaps that's so," he said, "but the person who brought me here was a long way from God. He was a big blond policeman with skin problems. He planted a bag of dope in my saddlebag and then beat the shit out of me."

"Yes. I know. The dope came from Mary's car. He put something like nails in the road to get us. It's funny, when you think about it-funny-weird, not ha-ha. He went through Desperation like a whirlwind-shot people, stabbed them, beat them, pushed them out windows, ran them down with his car-but he still couldn't just come up to us, any of us, and take out his gun and say 'You're coming with me.' He had to have a . . . I don't know the word." He looked at Johnny.

"Pretext," Steve's erstwhile boss said.

"Yes, right, a pretext. It's like how, in the old horror movies, a vampire can't just come in on his own. You have to invite him in."

"Why?" Cynthia asked.

"Maybe because Entragian - the real Entragian - was still inside his head. Like a shadow. Or a person that's locked out of his house but can still look in the windows and pound on the doors. Now Tak's in my mother - what's left of her - and it would kill us if it could . . . but it could probably still make the best Key lime pie in the world, too. If it wanted to."

David looked down for a moment, his lips trembling, then looked back up at them.

"Him needing a pretext to take us doesn't really matter. Many times what he does or says doesn't matter - it's nonsense, or impulse. Although there are clues. Always clues. He gives himself away, shows his real self, like someone who says what he sees in inkblots."

Steve asked, "If that doesn't matter, what does?"

"That he took us and let other people go. He thinks he took us at random, like a little kid in a supermarket, just pulling any can that catches his eye off the shelf and drop.. ping it into his mom's cart, but that's not what happened."

"It's like the Angel of Death in Egypt, isn't it?" Cynthia said in a curiously flat voice. "Only in reverse. We had a mark on us that told our Angel of Death - this guy Entragian - to stop and grab instead of just going on by."

David nodded. "Yeah. He didn't know it then, but he does now-mi him en tow, he'd say-our God is strong, our God is with us."

"If this is an example of God being with us, I hope r I never attract his attention when he's in a snit," Johnny said.

"Now Tak wants us to go," David said, "and he knows that we can go. Because of the free-will covenant. That s what Reverend Martin always called it. He. . . he..

"David?" Ralph asked. "What is it? What's wrong?" David shrugged. "Nothing. It doesn't matter. What matters is that God never makes us do what he wants us to do. He tells us, that's all, then steps back to see how it turns out. Reverend Martin's wife came in and listened for awhile while he was talking about the free-will covenant. She said her mother had a motto: 'God says take what you want, and pay for it.' Tak's opened the door back to Highway 50 . . . but that isn't where we're supposed to go. If we do go, if we leave Desperation without doing what God sent us here to do, we'll pay the price.

He glanced at the circle of faces around him once again, and once again he finished by looking directly at Johnny Marinville.

"I'll stay no matter what, but to work, it really has to be all of us. We have to give our will over to God's will, and we have to be ready to die. Because that's what it might come to."

"You're insane, my boy," Johnny said. "Ordinarily I like that in a person, but this is going a little too far, even for me. I haven't survived this long in order to be shot or r pecked to death by buzzards in the desert. As for God, as far as I'm concerned, he died in the DMZ back in 1969.

Jimi Hendrix was playing 'Purple Haze' on Armed Services Radio at the time."

"Listen to the rest, okay? Will you do that much?"

"Why should I?"

"Because there's a story." David drank more Jolt, grimacing as he swallowed. "A good one. Will you listen?"

"Story-hour's over. I told you that."

David didn't reply.

There was silence in the back of the truck. Steve was watching Johnny closely. If he showed any sign of moving toward the Ryder's back door and trying to run it up, Steve meant to grab him. He didn't want to - he had spent a lot of years in the savagely hierarchical world of backstage rock, and knew that doing such a thing would make him feel like Fletcher Christian to Johnny's Captain Bligh - but he would if he had to.

So it was a relief when Johnny shrugged, smiled, hunkered down next to the kid, and selected his own bottle of Jolt. "Okay, so story-hour's extended. Just for tonight." He ruffled David's hair. The very self-consciousness of the gesture made it oddly charming. "Stories have been my Achilles' heel practically since I ditched the stroller. I have to tell you, though, this is one I'd like to hear end with 'And they lived happily ever after.'"

"Wouldn't we all," Cynthia said.

"I think the guy I met told me everything," David said, "but there are still some parts I don't know. Parts that are blurry, or just plain black. Maybe because I couldn't understand, or because I didn't want to."

"Do the best you can," Ralph said. "That'll be good enough."

David looked up into the shadows, thinking - summoning, Cynthia thought - and then began.

3

"Billingsley told the legend, and like most legends, I guess, most of it was wrong. It wasn't a cave - in that closed the China Shaft, that's the first thing. The mine was brought down on purpose. And it didn't happen in 1858, although that was when the first Chinese miners were brought in, but in September of 1859. Not forty Chinese down there when it happened but fifty-seven, not two white men but four. Sixty-one people in all. And the drift wasn't a hundred and fifty feet deep, like Billingsley said, but nearly two hundred. Can you imagine? Two hundred feet deep in hornfels that could have fallen in on them at any moment."

The boy closed his eyes. He looked incredibly fragile like a child who has just begun to recover from some terrible illness and may relapse at any moment. Some of that look might have been caused by the thin green sheen of soap still on his skin, but Cynthia didn't think that was all of it. Nor did she doubt David's power, or have a problem with the idea that he might have been touched by God She had been raised in a parsonage, and she had seen this look before. . . although never so strongly.

"At ten minutes past one on the afternoon of September twenty-first, the guys at the face broke through into what they at first thought was a cave. Inside the opening was a pile of those stone things. Thousands of them. Statues of certain animals, low animals, the timoh sen cah. Wolves, coyotes, snakes, spiders, rats, bats. The miners were amazed by these, and did the most natural thing in the world: bent over and picked them up."

"Bad idea," Cynthia murmured.

David nodded. "Some went crazy at once, turning on their friends - heck, turning on their relatives - and trying to rip their throats out. Others, not just the ones farther back in the shaft who didn't actually handle the can tahs, but some who were close and actually did handle them, seemed all right, at least for awhile. Two of these were brothers from Tsingtao-Ch'an Lushan and Shih Lushan Both saw through the break in the face and into the cave which was really a kind of underground chamber. It was round, like the bottom of a well. The walls were made of faces, these stone animal faces. The faces of can taks, I think, although I'm not sure about that. There was a small kind of building to one side, the pirin moh - I don't know what that means, I'm sorry - and in the middle, a round hole twelve feet across. Like a giant eye, or another well.

A well in a well. Like the carvings, which are mostly animals with other animals in their mouths for tongues. Can tak in can tah, can tah in can tak."

"Or camera in camera," Marinville said. He spoke with an eyebrow raised, his sign that he was making fun, but David took him seriously. He nodded and began to shiver.

"That's Tak's place," he said. "The mi, well of the worlds."

"I don't understand you," Steve said gently.

David ignored him; it was still Marinville he seemed to be mostly talking to. "The force of evil from the mi filled the can tahs the same way the minerals fill the ground itself - blown into every particle of it, like smoke. And it filled the chamber I'm talking about the same way. It's not smoke, but smoke is the best way to think about it, maybe. It affected the miners at different rates, like a disease germ. The ones who went nuts right away turned on the others. Some, their bodies started to change the way Audrey's did at the end. Those were the ones who had touched the can tahs, sometimes picked up whole handfuls at once and then put them down so they could. . . you know. . . go at the others.

"Some of them were widening the hole between the shaft and the chamber. Others were wriggling through. Some acted drunk. Others acted as if they were having convulsions. Some ran across to the pit and threw them - selves into it, laughing. The Lushan brothers saw a man and a woman fucking each other - I have to use that word, it was the furthest thing in the world from making love- with one of the statues held between them. In their teeth."

Cynthia exchanged a startled look with Steve.

"In the shaft itself, the miners were bashing each other with rocks or pulling each other out of the way, trying to get in through the hole first." He looked around at them somberly. "I saw that part. In a way it was funny, like a Three Stooges show. And that made it worse. That it was funny. Do you get it?"

"Yes," Marinville said. "I get it very well, David. Go on."

"The brothers felt it all around them, the stuff that was coming out of the chamber, but not as anything that was inside them, not then. One of the can tahs had fallen at Ch'an's feet. He bent to pick it up, and Shih pulled him away. By then they were about the only ones left who seemed sane. Most of the others who weren't affected right away had been killed, and there was a thing - like a z snake made of smoke - coming out of the hole. It made a squealing sound, and the brothers ran from it. One of the white men was coming down the crosscut about sixty feet up, and he had his gun out. 'What's all the commotion about, chinkies?' he asked."

Cynthia felt her skin chill. She reached out for Steve, and was relieved when his fingers folded over hers. The boy hadn't just imitated a gruff bossman's tone; he seemed actually to be speaking in the voice of someone else.

" 'Come on now, fellows, gettee-backee-workee, if you don't want a bullet in the guts.'

"But he was the one who got shot. Ch'an grabbed him around the neck and Shih took away his gun. He put the barrel here" - David poked his forefinger up under the shelf of his jaw - "and blew the guy's head off."

"David, do you know what they were thinking when they did that?" Marinville asked. "Was your dream-friend able to take you in that far?"

"Mostly I just saw."

"Those can tah things must've gotten to them after all Ralph said. "They wouldn't have shot a white man, other wise. No matter what was going on or how bad they wanted to get away."

"Maybe so," David said. "But God was in them too I think, the way he's in us now. God could move them to his work, no matter if they were mi en tak or not because - mi him en tow our God is strong. Do you understand?"

"I think I do," Cynthia said. "What happened then, David?"

"The brothers ran up the shaft, pointing the foreman s pistol at anyone who tried to hold them back or slow them down. There weren't many; even the other white guys hardly gave them a glance when they ran by. They all wanted to see what was going on, what the miners had found. It drew them, you see. You do see, don't you?"

The others nodded.

"About sixty feet in from the adit, the Lushan brothers stopped and went to work on the hanging wall. They didn't talk about it; they saw picks and shovels and just went to work."

"What's a hanging wall?" Steve asked.

"The roof of a mineshaft and the earth above it," Marinville said.

"They worked like madmen," David went on. "The stuff was so loose that it started falling out of the ceiling right away, but the ceiling didn't give way. The screams and howls and laughter coming up from below. . . I know the words for the sounds I heard, but I can't describe how horrible they were. Some of them were changing from human to something else. There was a movie I saw one time, about this doctor on a tropical island who was changing animals into men - "

Marinville nodded. "The Island of Dr. Moreau."

David said, "The sounds I heard from the bottom of the mine - the ones I heard with the Lushan brothers' ears - were like that movie, only in reverse. As if the men were turning into animals. I guess they were. I guess that's sort of what the can tahs do. What they're for.

"The brothers . . . I see them, two Chinese men who look almost enough alike to be twins, with pigtails hanging down their sweaty bare backs, standing there and looking up and chopping away at the hanging wall that should have come down after about six licks but didn't, looking back along the shaft every two or three strokes to see who was coming. To see what was coming. Pieces of the ceiling fell in front of them in big chunks. Sometimes pieces of it fell on them, too, and pretty soon their shoulders were bleeding, and their heads - blood was streaming down their faces and necks and chests, as well. By then there were other sounds from below. Things roaring. Things squelching. And still the roof wouldn't come down. Then they started seeing lights farther down - maybe candles, maybe the 'seners the crew-bosses wore.

"What - " Ralph began.

"Keroseners. They were like these little lighted boxes of oil you put on your forehead with a strip of rawhide. You'd fold a piece of cloth underneath to keep your skin from getting too hot. And then someone came running out of the darkness, someone they knew. It was Yuan Ti. He was a funny guy, I guess - he made animals out of pieces of cloth and then put on shows with them for the kids.

Yuan Ti had gone crazy, but that wasn't all. He was bigger, so big he had to bend almost double in order to run up the shaft. He was throwing rocks at them, calling them names in Mandarin, condemning their ancestors, commanding them to stop what they were doing. Shih shot him with the foreman's gun. He had to shoot him a lot before Yuan Ti would lie down and be dead. But the others were coming, screaming for their blood. Tak knew what they were doing, you see."

David looked at them, seemed to consider them. His eyes were dreamy, half in a trance, but Cynthia had no sense that the boy had ceased to see them. In a way, that was the most terrible part of what was happening here. David saw them very well . . . and so did the force inside him, the one she could sometimes hear stepping forward to clarify parts of the story David might not have fully understood.

"Shih and Ch'an went back to work on the hanging wall, digging into it with their picks like madmen-which they'd be before it was over for them. By then the part of the ceiling they were working on was like a dome over their heads" - Davjd made curving gestures with his hands, and Cynthia saw that his fingers were trembling "and they couldn't reach it very well with their picks any more. So Shih, the older, got on his younger brother s shoulders and dug into it that way. The stuff fell out in showers, there was a pile almost as high as Ch an Lushan's knees in front of them, and still the ceiling wouldn't come down."

"Were they possessed of God, David?" Marinville asked. There was no sarcasm in his voice now. "Possessed by God? What do you think?"

"I don't think so," David said. "I don't think God has to possess, that's what makes him God. I think they wanted what God wanted-to keep Tak in the earth. To bring the ceiling down between them and it, if they could.

"Anyway, they saw 'seners coming up from the mine. Heard people yelling. A whole mob of them. Shih left off on the hangwall and went to work on one of the crossbar supports instead, hitting it with the butt of his pick. The miners coming up from below threw rocks at them, and quite a few hit Ch'an, but he stood firm with his brother on his shoulders. When the crossbar finally came down, the ceiling came down with it. Ch'an was buried up to his knees, but Shih was thrown clear. He pulled his brother out. Ch'an was badly bruised, but nothing was broken. And they were on the right side of the rockfall - that must have seemed like the important thing. They could hear the miners - their friends, cousins, and in the case of Ch'an Lushan, his intended wife - screaming to be let out. Ch'an actually started to pull some of the rocks away before Shih yanked him back and reasoned with him.

"They still could reason then, you see.

"Then, as if the people trapped on Tak's side of the fall knew this had happened, the screams for help changed to yelling and howling. The sounds of . . . well, of people who weren't really people at all anymore. Ch'an and Shih ran. They met folks-some white, some Chinese - coming in as they ran out. No questions were asked except for the most obvious one, what happened, and since the answer was just as obvious, they had no trouble. There'd been a cave-in, men were trapped, and the last thing anyone cared about just then were a couple of scared China-boys who happened to get out in the nick of time."

David drank the last of his soda and set the empty bottle aside.

"Everything Mr. Billingsley told us is like that," he said. "Truth and mistakes and outright lies all mixed up."

"The technical term for it is 'legend-making,' " Mar-inville said with a thin, strained smile.

"The miners and the folks from town could hear the Chinese screaming behind the fallen hanging wall, but they didn't just stand around; they did try to dig them out, and they did try to shore up the first sixty feet or so. But then there was another fall, a smaller one, and another couple of crossbars snapped. So they pulled back and waited for the experts to show up from Reno. There was no picnic outside the adit that's a flat lie. Right around the time the mining engineers were getting of the stage in Desperation, there were two cave-ins-real cave-ins, big ones-at the mine. The first was on the adit side of the hanging wall the Lushan brothers had pulled down. It sealed of f the last sixty feet of the drift like a cork in a bottle. And the thump it made coming down-tons and tons of skarn and hornfels-set off another one, deeper in.

That ended the screams, at least the ones close enough to the surface for people to hear. It was all over before the mining engineers got up from town in an ore-wagon. They looked, they sank some core rods, they listened to the story, and when they heard about the second cave-in, which people said shook the ground like an earthquake and made the horses rear up, they shook their heads and said there was probably nobody left alive to rescue. And even if there was, they'd be risking more lives than they could hope to save if they tried to go back in."

"And they were only Chinese," Steve said.

"That's right, little chink-chink China-boys. Mr. Billingsley was right about that. And while all this was going on, the two China-boys who had escaped were out in the desert near Rose Rock, going mad. It got to them in the end, you see. It caught up with them. It was almost two weeks before they came back to Desperation, not three days. It was the Lady Day they walked into-you see how he got the truth all mixed up with the lies?- but they didn't kill anyone there. Shih flashed the fore-man's gun, which was empty, and that was all it took. They were brought down by a whole pack of miners and cowboys. They were naked except for loincloths. They were covered with blood. The men in the Lady Day felt like that blood must have been from all the folks they had murdered, but it wasn't. They'd been out in the desert, calling animals to them . . . just like Tak called the cougar that you shot, Mr. Marinville. Only the Lushan brothers didn't want them for anything like that. They only wanted to eat. They ate whatever came-bats, buzzards, spiders, rattlesnakes."

David raised an unsteady hand to his face and wiped first his left eye and then his right.

"I feel very sorry for the Lushan brothers. And I feel like I know them a little. How they must have felt. How they must have been grateful, in a way, when the madness finally took them over completely and they didn't have to think anymore.

"They could have stayed out there in the Desatoya foothills practically forever, I guess, but they were all Tak had, and Tak is always hungry. It sent them into town, because there was nothing else it could do. One of them, Shih, was killed right there in the Lady Day. Ch'an was hung two days later, right about where those three bikes were turned upside down in the street. . . remember those? He raved in Tak's language, the language of the unformed, right up until the end. He tore the hood right off his head, so they hung him barefaced."

"Boy, that God of yours, what a guy!" Marinville said cheerfully. "Really knows how to repay a favor, doesn't he, David?"

"God is cruel," David said in a voice almost too low to hear.

"What?" Marinville asked. "What did you say?"

"You know. But life is more than just steering a course around pain. That's something you used to know, Mr. Marinville. Didn't you?"

Marinville looked off into the corner of the truck and said nothing.

4

The first thing Mary was aware of was a smell - sweetish, rank, nauseating. Oh Peter, dammit to hell, she thought groggily. It's the freezer, everything's spoiled!

Except that wasn't right; the freezer had gone off during their trip to Majorca, and that had been a long time ago, before the miscarriage. A lot had happened since then. A lot had happened just recently, in fact. Most of it bad. But what?

Central Nevada's full of intense people.

Who said that? Marielle? In her head it certainly sounded like Marielle.

Doesn't matter, if it's true. And it is, isn't it?

She didn't know. Didn't want to know. What she mostly wanted was to go back into the darkness part of her was trying to come out of. Because there were voices

(they're a dastardly bunch)

and sounds

(reek-reek-reek)

that she didn't want to consider. Better to just lie here and -

Something scuttered across her face. It felt both light and hairy. She sat up, pawing her cheeks with both hands. An enormous bolt of pain went through her head, bright dots flashed across her vision in sync with her suddenly elevated heartrate, and she had a similarly bright flash of recall, one even Johnny Marinville would have admired.

I bumped my bad arm putting up another crate to stand on.

Hold on, you'll be inside in a jiffy.

And then she had been grabbed. By Ellen. No; by the thing

(Tak)

that had been wearing Ellen. That thing had slugged her and then boom, boom, out go the lights.

And in a very literal sense, they were still out. She had to flutter her lids several times simply to assure herself that her eyes were open.

Oh, they're open, all right. Maybe it's just dark in this place . . . but maybe you're blind. How about that for a lovely thought. Mare? Maybe she hit you hard enough to blind y -

Something was on the back of her hand. It ran halfway across and then paused, seeming to throb on her skin. Mary made a sound of revulsion with her tongue pressed to the roof of her mouth and flapped her hand madly in the air, like a woman waving off some annoying person. The throbbing disappeared; the thing on the back of her hand was gone. Mary got to her feet, provoking another cymbal-crash of pain in her head which she barely noticed. There were things in here, and she had no time for a mere headache.

She turned slowly around, breathing that sickish-sweet aroma that was so similar to the stench that had greeted her and Pete when they had returned home from their mini-vacation in the Balearic Islands. Pete's parents had given them the trip as a Christmas present the year after they had been married, and how great it had been. ., until they'd walked back in, bags in hand, and the stench had hit them like a fist. They had lost everything: two chickens, the chops and roasts she'd gotten at the good discount meat-cutter's she'd found in Brooklyn, the venison-steaks Peter's friend Don had given them, the pints of strawberries they'd picked at the Mohonk Mountain House the previous summer. This smell . . . so similar. . .

Something that felt the size of a walnut dropped into her hair.

She screamed, at first beating at it with the flat of her hand. That did no good, so she slid her fingers into her hair and got hold of whatever it was. It squirmed, then burst between her fingers. Thick fluid squirted into her palm. She raked the bristly, deflating body out of her hair and shook it of f her palm. She heard it hit something. . . splat. Her palm felt hot and itchy, as if she had reached into poison ivy. She rubbed it against her jeans.

Please God don 't let me be next, she thought. Whatever happens don't let me end up like the cop. Like Ellen.

She fought the urge to simply bolt into the black surrounding her. If she did that she might brain herself, disembowel herself, or impale herself, like an expendable character in a horror movie, on some grotesque piece of mining equipment. But even that wasn't the worst. The worst was that there might be something besides the scuttering things in here with her. Something that was just waiting for her to panic and run.

Waiting with its arms held out.

Now she had a sense - perhaps it was only her imagination, but she didn't think so - of stealthy movement all around her. A rustling sound from the left. A slithering from the right. There was a sudden low squalling from behind her, there and gone before she could scream.

That last one wasn't anything alive, she told herself. At least I don't think so. I think it was a tumbleweed hitting metal and scraping along it. I think I'm in a little building somewhere. She put me in a little building for safekeeping and the fridge is out, just like the lights, and the stuff inside has spoiled.

But if Ellen was Entragian in a new body, why hadn't he/she just put her back in the cell where he'd put her to start with? Because he/she was afraid the others would find her there and let her out again? It was as plausible a reason as any other she could think up, and there was a thread of hope in it, as well. Holding onto it, Mary began to shuffle slowly forward with her hands held out.

It seemed she walked that way for a very long time - years. She kept expecting something else to touch her, and at last something did. It ran across her shoe. Mary froze. Finally it went about its business. But what followed it was even worse: a low, dry rattle coming out of the darkness at roughly ten o'clock. So far as she knew, there was only one thing that rattled like that. The sound didn't really stop but seemed to die away, like the whine of a cicada on a hot August afternoon. The low squalling returned. This time she was positive it was a tumbleweed sliding along metal. She was in a mining building, maybe the Quonset where Steve and the girl with the wild hair, Cynthia, had seen the little stone statue that had frightened them so badly.

Get moving.

I can't. There 's a rattlesnake in here. Maybe more than one. Probably more than one.

That's not all that's in here, though. Better get moving, Mary.

Her palm throbbed angrily where the thing in her hair had burst open. Her heart thudded in her ears. As slowly as she could, she began inching forward again, hands out. Terrible ideas and images went with her. She saw a snake as thick as a powerline dangling from a rafter just ahead of her, fanged jaws hinged wide, forked tongue dancing. She would walk right into it and wouldn't know until it battened on her face, injecting its poison straight into her eyes. She saw the closet-demon of her childhood, a bogey she had for some reason called Apple Jack, slumped in the corner with his brown fruit-face all pulled in on itself, grinning, waiting for her to wander into his deadly embrace; the last thing she'd smell would be his cidery aroma, which was for the time being masked by the stench of spoilage, as he hugged her to death, all the time covering her face with wet avid uncle-kisses. She saw a cougar, like the one that had killed poor old Tom Billingsley, crouched in a corner with its tail switching. She saw Ellen, holding a baling hook in one hand and smiling a thin waiting smile which was like a hook itself, simply marking time until Mary got close enough to skewer.

But mostly what she saw was snakes.

Rattlers.

Her fingers touched something. She gasped and almost recoiled, but that was just nerves; the thing was hard, unliving. A straight-edge at the height of her torso. A table? Covered with an oilcloth? She thought so. She walked her fingers across it, and forced herself to freeze when one of the scuttery things touched her. It crawled over the back of her hand and down to her wrist, almost surely a spider of some sort, and then was gone. She walked her hand on, and here was something else investi-gating her, more of what Audrey had called "wildlife." Not a spider. This thing, whatever it was, had claws and a hard surface.

Mary forced herself to hold still, but couldn't keep entirely quiet; a low, desperate moan escaped her. Sweat ran down her forehead and cheeks like warm motor-oil, stung in her eyes. Then the thing on her hand gave her an obscene little squeeze and was gone. She could hear it click-dragging its way across the table. She moved her hand again, resisting the clamor of her mind to pull back. If she did, what then? Stand here trembling in the dark until the stealthy sounds around her drove her crazy, sent her running in panicked circles until she bashed herself unconscious again?

Here was a plate - no, a bowl - with something in it. Congealed soup? Her fingers fumbled beside it and felt a spoon. Yes, soup. She felt beyond it, touched what could have been a salt- or pepper-shaker, then something soft and flabby. She suddenly remembered a game they had played at slumber-parties when she was a girl in Mamaro-neck. A game made to be played in the dark. You'd pass around spaghetti and intone These are the dead man guts, pass around cold Jell-O and intone These are the dead man 's brains.

Her hand struck something hard and cylindrical. It fell over with a rattle she recognized at once. ., or hoped she did: batteries in the tube of a flashlight.

Please, God, she thought, groping for it. Please God let it be what it feels like.

The squalling from outside came again, but she barely heard it. Her hand touched a cold piece of meat

(this is the dead man 'sface)

but she barely felt it. Her heart was hammering in her chest, her throat, even in her sinuses.

There! There!

Cold, smooth metal, it tried to squitter out of her grip, but she squeezed it tight. Yes, a flashlight; she could feel the switch lying against the web of skin between her Y thumb and forefinger.

Now let it work, God. Please, okay?

She pressed the switch. Light sprang out in a widening cone, and her yammering heartbeat stopped dead in her ears for a moment. Everything stopped dead.

The table was long, covered with lab equipment and rock samples at one end, covered with a checked piece of tablecloth at the other. This end had been set, as for dinner, with a soup-bowl, a plate, silverware, and a water-glass. A large black spider had fallen into the waterglass and couldn't get out; it writhed and scratched fruitlessly. The red hourglass on its belly showed in occasional flickers. Other spiders, most also black widows, preened and strutted on the table. Among them were rock-scorpions, stalking back and forth like parliamentarians, their stingers furled on their backs. Sitting at the end of the table was a large bald man in a Diablo Mining Corporation tee-shirt. He had been shot in the throat at close range. The stuff in the soup-bowl, the stuff she had touched with her fingers, wasn't soup but this man s clotted blood.

Mary's heart re-started itself, sending her own blood crashing up into her head like a piston, and all at once the flashlight's yellow fan of light began to look red and shimmery. She heard a high, sweet singing in her ears.

Don't you faint, don't you dare -

The flashlight beam swung to the left. In the corner under a poster which read: GO AHEAD, BAN MINING, LET THE BASTARDS FREEZE IN THE DARK!, was a roiling nest of rattlesnakes. She slid the beam along the metal wall, past congregations of spiders (some of the black widows she saw were as big as her hand), and in the other corner were more snakes. Their daytime torpor was gone, and they wnthed together, flowing through sheetbends and clove hitches and double diamonds, occasionally shaking their tails.

Don't faint, don't faint, don't faint -

She turned around with the light, and when it happened upon the other three bodies that were in here with her, she understood several things at once. The fact that she had discovered the source of the bad smell was only the least of them.

The bodies at the foot of the wall were in an advanced state of decay, delirious with maggots, but they hadn't been simply dumped. They were lined up . . . perhaps even laid out. Their puffy, blackening hands had been laced together on their chests. The man in the middle really was black, she thought, although it was impossible to tell for sure. She didn't know him or the one on his right, but the one on the black guy's left she did know, in spite of the toiling maggots and the decomposition. In her mind she heard him mixing I'm going to kill you into the Miranda warning.

As she watched, a spider ran out of Collie Entragian's mouth.

The beam of the light shook as she ran it along the line of corpses again. Three men. Three big men, not a one of the three under six-feet-five.

I know why I'm here instead of in jail, she thought. And I know why I wasn't killed. I'm next. When it's through with Ellen - I'm next.

Mary began to scream.

5

The an tak chamber glowed with a faint red light that seemed to come from the air itself. Something which still looked a bit like Ellen Carver walked across it, accompanied by a retinue of scorpions and fiddlebacks. Above it, around it, the stone faces of the can taks peered down. Across from it was the pirin moh, a jutting facade that looked a bit like the front of a Mexican hacienda. In front of it was the pit-the mi, well of the worlds. The light could have been coming from here, but it was impossible to tell for sure. Sitting in a circle around the mouth of the mi were coyotes and buzzards. Every now and then one of the birds would rustle its feathers or one of the coyotes would flick an ear; if not for these moves, they might have been stones themselves.

Ellen's body walked slowly; Ellen's head sagged. Pain pulsed deep in her belly. Blood ran down her legs in thin, steady streams. It had stuffed a torn cotton tee-shirt into Ellen's panties and that had helped for awhile, but now the shirt was soaked through. Bad luck it had had, and not just once. The first one had had prostate cancer - undiagnosed - and the rot had started there, spreading through his body with such unexpected speed that it had been lucky to get to Josephson in time. Josephson had lasted a little longer, Entragian - a nearly perfect speci-men-longer still. And Ellen? Ellen had been suffering from a yeast infection. Just a yeast infection, nothing at all in the ordinary scheme of things, but it had been enough to start the dominoes falling, and now. . .

Well, there was Mary. It didn't quite dare take her yet, not until it knew what the others were going to do. If the writer won out and took them back to the highway, it would jump to Mary and take one of the ATVs (loaded down with as many can tahs as it could transport) up into the hills. It already knew where to go: Alphaville, a vegan commune in the Desatoyas.

They wouldn't be vegans for long after Tak arrived.

If the wretched little prayboy prevailed and they came south, Mary might serve as bait. Or as a hostage. She would serve as neither, however, if the prayboy sensed she was no longer human.

It sat down on the edge of the mi and stared into it. The mi was shaped like a funnel, its rough walls sliding in toward each other until, twenty-five or thirty feet down, nothing was left of the mouth's twelve-foot diameter but a hole less than an inch across. Baleful scarlet light, almost too bright to look at, stormed out of this hole in pulses. It was a hole like an eye.

One of the buzzards tried to lay its head in Ellen's bloodstinking lap; it pushed the bird away. Tak had hoped looking into the mi would be calming, would help it decide what to do next (for the mi was where it really lived; Ellen Carver was just an outpost), but it only seemed to increase its disquiet.

Things were on the verge of going badly wrong. Looking back, it. saw clearly that some other force had perhaps been working against it from the start.

It was afraid of the boy, especially in its current weakness. Most of all it was terrified of being completely shut up beyond the narrow throat of the mi again, like a genie in a bottle. But that didn't have to be. Even if the boy brought them, it didn't have to be. The others would be weakened by their doubts, the boy would be weakened by his human concerns - especially his concern for his mother - and if the boy died, it could close the door to the outside again, close it with a bang, and then take the others. The writer and the boy's father would have to die, but the two younger ones it would try to sedate and save. Later, it might very well want to use their bodies.

It rocked forward, oblivious to the blood squelching between Ellen's thighs, as it had been oblivious of the teeth falling out of Ellen's head or the three knuckles that had exploded like pine-knots in a fireplace when it had clipped Mary on the chin. It looked into the funnel of the well, and the constricted red eye at the bottom.

The eye of Tak.

The boy could die.

He was, after all, only a boy . . . not a demon, a god, or a savior.

Tak leaned farther over the funnel with its jagged crystal sides and murky reddish light. Now it could hear a sound, very faint - a kind of low, atonal humming. It was an idiot sound. . . but it was also wonderful, compelling. It closed its stolen eyes and breathed deeply, sucking at the force it felt, trying to get as much inside as it could, wanting to slow - at least temporarily - this body's degeneration. It would need Ellen awhile longer. And besides, now it felt the mi's peace. At last.

"Tak," it whispered into the darkness. "Tak en tow mi, tak ah lah, tak ah wan."

Then it was silent. From below, deep in the humming red silence of the mi, came the wet-tongue sound of something slithering.