HE CHASE ENDS

1

South and south and south.

By the time Mr Gray passed the Gardiner exit, the first one below Augusta, the snow-cover on the ground was considerably less and the turnpike was slushy but two lanes wide again. It was time to trade the plow for something less conspicuous, partly because he no longer needed it, but also because Jonesy's arms were aching with the unaccustomed strain of controlling the oversized vehicle. Mr Gray didn't care much for Jonesy's body (or so he told himself, in truth it was hard not to feel at least some affection for something capable of providing such unexpected pleasures as 'bacon' and 'murder'), but it did have to take him another couple of hundred miles. He suspected that Jonesy wasn't in very good shape for a man in the middle of his life. Part of that was the accident he'd been in, but it also had to do with his job, He was an 'academic'. As a result, he had pretty much ignored the more physical aspects of his life, which stunned Mr Gray. These creatures were sixty per cent emotion, thirty per cent sensation, ten per cent thought (and ten per cent, Mr Gray reflected, was probably on the generous side). To ignore the body the way Jonesy had seemed both willful and stupid to Mr Gray. But, of course, that was not his problem. Nor Jonesy's, either. Not anymore. Now Jonesy was what he had apparently always wanted to be: nothing but mind. Judging from the way he'd reacted, he didn't actually care for that state much once he had attained it.

On the floor of the plow, where Lad lay in a litter of cigarette butts, cardboard coffee cups, and balled-up snack-wrappers, the dog whined in pain. Its body was grotesquely bloated, the torso the size of a water-barrel. Soon the dog would pass gas and its midsection would deflate again.. Mr Gray had established contact with the byrum growing inside the dog, and would hence regulate its gestation.

The dog would be his version of what his host thought of as 'the Russian woman'. And once the dog had been placed, his job would be done.

He reached behind him with his mind, feeling for the others. Henry and his friend Owen were entirely gone, like a radio station that has ceased to broadcast, and that was troubling. Farther behind (they were just passing the Newport exits, sixty or so miles north of Mr Gray's current position), was a group of three with one clear contact: 'Pearly'. This Pearly, like the dog, was incubating a byrum, and Mr Gray could receive him clearly. He had also been receiving another of that group - 'Freddy' - but now 'Freddy' was gone. The byrus on him had died; 'Pearly' said so.

Here was one of the green turnpike signs: REST AREA. There was a Burger King here, which Jonesy's files identified as both a 'restaurant' and a 'fast-food joint'. There would be bacon there, and his stomach gurgled at the thought. Yes, it would be hard in many ways to give this body up. It had its pleasures, definitely had its pleasures. No time for bacon now, however; now it was time to change vehicles. And he had to be fairly unobtrusive about it.

This exit into the rest area split in two, with one road for PASSENGER VEHICLES and one for TRUCKS AND BUSES. Mr Gray drove the big orange plow into the parking lot for trucks (Jonesy's muscles trembling with the strain of turning the big steering wheel), and was delighted to see four other plows, practically identical to his own, all parked together. He nosed into a space at the end of the line and killed the engine.

He felt for Jonesy. Jonesy was there, hunkered in his perplexing safety zone. 'What you up to, partner?' Mr Gray murmured.

No answer . . . but he sensed Jonesy listening.

'What you doing?'

No answer still. And really, what could he be doing? He was locked in and blind. Still, it would behoove him not to forget Jonesy . . . Jonesy with his somehow exciting suggestion that Mr Gray forgo the imperative - the need to seed - and simply enjoy life on earth. Every now and then a thought would occur to Mr Gray, a letter pushed under the door from Jonesy's haven. This sort of thought, according to Jonesy's files, was a 'slogan'. Slogans were simple and to the point. The most recent said: BACON IS JUST THE BEGINNING. And Mr Gray was sure that was true. Even in his hospital room (what hospital room? what hospital? who is Marcy? who wants a shot?), he understood that life here was very delicious. But the imperative was deep and unbreakable: he would seed this world and then die. And if he got to eat a little bacon along the way, why, so much the better.

'Who was Richie? Was he a Tiger? Why did you kill him?'

No answer. But Jonesy was listening. Very carefully. Mr Gray hated having him in there. It was (the simile came from Jonesy's store) like having a tiny fishbone stuck in your throat. Not big enough to choke you, but plenty big enough to 'bug' you.

'You annoy the shit out of me, Jonesy.' Putting on his gloves now, the ones that had belonged to the owner of the Dodge Ram. The owner of Lad.

This time there was a reply. The feeling is mutual, partner. So why don't you go someplace where you're wanted? Take your act and put it on the road?

'Can't do that,' Mr Gray said. He extended a hand to the dog, and Lad sniffed gratefully at the scent of its master on the glove. Mr Gray sent it a be-calm thought, then got out of the plow and began to walk toward the side of the restaurant. Around back would be the 'employee's parking lot'.

Henry and the other guy are right on top of you, asshole. Sniffing up your tailpipe. So relax. Spend as much time here as you want. Have a triple order of bacon.

'They can't feel me,' Mr Gray said, his breath puffing out in front of him (the sensation of the cold air in his mouth and throat and lungs was exquisite, invigorating - even the smells of gasoline and diesel fuel were wonderful). 'If I can't feel them, they can't feel me.'

Jonesy laughed - actually laughed. It stopped Mr Gray in his tracks beside the Dumpster.

The rules have changed, my friend. They stopped for Duddits, and Duddits sees the line.

'I don't know what that means.'

Of course you do, asshole.

'Stop calling me that!' Mr Gray snapped.

If you stop insulting my intelligence, maybe I will.

Mr Gray started walking again, and yes, here, around the comer, was a little clutch of cars, most of them old and battered.

Duddits sees the line.

He knew what it meant, all right; the one named Pete had possessed the same thing, the same talent, although likely not as strongly as this puzzling other, this Duddits.

Mr Gray didn't like the idea of leaving a trail 'Duddits' could see, but he knew something Jonesy didn't. 'Pearly' believed that Henry, Owen, and Duddits were only fifteen miles south of Pearly's own position. If that was indeed the case, Henry and Owen were forty-five miles back, somewhere between Pittsfield and Waterville. Mr Gray didn't believe that actually qualified as 'sniffing up one's tailpipe'.

Still, it would not do to linger here.

The back door of the restaurant opened. A young man in a uniform the Jonesy-files identified as 'cook's whites' came out carrying two large bags of garbage, clearly bound for the Dumpsters. This young man s name was John, but his friends called him 'Butch'. Mr Gray thought it would be enjoyable to kill him, but 'Butch' looked a good deal stronger than Jonesy, not to mention younger and probably much quicker. Also, murder had annoying side effects, the worst being how quickly it rendered a stolen car useless.

Hey, Butch.

Butch stopped, looking at him alertly.

Which car is yours?

Actually, it wasn't his but his mother's, and that was good. Butch's own rustbucket was back home, victim of a dead battery. He had his Mom's unit, an all-wheel-drive Subaru. Mr Gray, Jonesy would have said, had just rolled another seven.

Butch handed over the keys willingly enough. He still looked alert ('bright-eyed and bushy-tailed' was how Jonesy put it, although the young cook had no tail Mr Gray could see), but his consciousness was gone. 'Out on his feet,' Jonesy thought.

You won't remember this, Mr Gray said.

'No,' Butch agreed.

Just back to work.

'You bet,' Butch agreed. He picked up his bags of garbage and headed for the Dumpsters again. By the time his shift was over and he realized his mother's car was gone, all this would likely be over.

Mr Gray unlocked the red Subaru and got in. There was half a bag of barbecue potato chips on the seat. Mr Gray gobbled them greedily as he drove back to the plow. He finished by licking Jonesy's fingers. Greasy. Good. Like the bacon. He got the dog. Five minutes later he was on the turnpike again.

South and south and south.

2

The night roars with music and laughter and loud voices; the air is big with the smell of grilled hotdogs, chocolate, roasted peanuts; the sky blooms with colored fire. Binding it all together, identifying it, signing it like summer's own autograph, is an amplified rock-and-roll song from the speakers that have been set up in Strawford Park:

Hey pretty baby take a ride with me

We're goin down to Alabama on the C&C.

And here comes the tallest cowboy in the world, a nine-foot Pecos Bill under the burning sky, towering over the crowd, little kids with their ice-cream-smeared mouths dropped open in wonder, their eyes wide; laughing parents hold them up or put them on their shoulders so they can see better. In one hand Pecos Bill waves his hat, in the other a banner which reads DERRY DAYS 1981.

We're gonna walk the tracks, stay up all night

we get a little bored, then we'll have a little fight.

'Ow eee-oh all?' Duddits asks. He has a cone of blue cotton candy in one hand, but it is forgotten; as he watches the stilt-walking cowboy pass under the burning fireworks sky, his eyes are as wide as any three-year-old's. Standing on one side of Duddits are Pete and Jonesy; on the other are Henry and the Beav. Behind the cowboy comes a retinue of vestal virgins (surely some of them are still virgins, even in this year of grace 1981) in spangly cowboy skirts and white cowboy boots, tossing the batons that won the West,

'Don't know how he can be so tall, Duds,' Pete says, laughing. He yanks a hank of blue floss from the cone in Duddits's hand and tucks it into Duddits's amazed mouth. 'Must be magic.'

They all laugh at how Duddits chews without even taking his eyes from the cowpoke on stilts. Duds is taller than all of them now, even taller than Henry. But he's still just a kid, and he makes them all happy. Magic is what he is; he won't find Josie Rinkenhauer for another year, but they know - he's fuckin magic. It was scary going up against Richie Grenadeau and his friends, but that was still the luckiest day of their lives - they all think so.

Don't say no, baby, come with me

We're gonna take a little ride on the C&C.

'Hey, Tex!' Beaver shouts, waving his own lid (a Derry Tigers baseball hat) up at the tall cowboy. 'Kiss my bender, big boy! I mean, sit on it and spin!'

And they're all killing themselves laughing (it is a memory for the ages, all right, the night Beaver ranked on the stilt-walking cowboy in the Derry Days Parade beneath that burning gunpowder sky), all but Duddits, who is staring with that expression of stoned wonder, and Owen Underhill (Owen! Henry thinks, how did you get here, buddy?), who looks worried.

Owen is shaking him, Owen is once more telling him to wake up, Henry, wake up, wake

3

up, for God's sake!'

It was the fright in Owen's voice that finally roused Henry from his dream. For a moment he could still smell peanuts and Duddits's cotton candy. Then the world came back in: white sky, snow-covered turnpike lanes, a green sign reading AUGUSTA NEXT TWO EXITS. Also Owen shaking him, and from behind them a barking sound, hoarse and desperate. Duddits coughing.

'Wake up, Henry, he's bleeding! Will you please wake the fuck - '

'I'm awake, I'm awake.'

He unbuckled his seatbelt, twisted around, got up on his knees. The overstrained muscles in his thighs shrieked in protest, but Henry paid no attention.

It was better than he expected. From the panic in Owen's voice, he had expected some sort of hemorrhage, but it was just a trickle from one nostril and a fine spray of blood from Duddits's mouth when he coughed. Owen had probably thought poor old Duds was coughing up his lungs, when in fact he'd probably strained something in his throat. Not that this wasn't potentially serious. In Duddits's increasingly fragile condition, anything was potentially serious; a random cold-germ could kill him. From the moment he'd seen him, Henry had known Duds was coming out of the last turn and heading for home.

'Duds!' he called sharply. Something different. Something dif?ferent in him, Henry. What? No time to think about it now. 'Duddits, breathe in through your nose! Your nose, Duds! Like this!'

Henry demonstrated, taking big breaths through flared nostrils . . . and when he exhaled, little threads of white flew from his nostrils. Like the fluff in milkweed pods, or dandelions gone to seed. Byrus, Henry thought. It was growing up my nose, but now it's dead. I'm sloughing it off, literally breath by breath. And then he understood the difference: the itching had stopped, in his leg and in his mouth and in the thatch of his groin. His mouth still tasted as if it had been lined with someone's old carpet, but it didn't itch.

Duddits began to imitate him, breathing deep through his nose, and his coughing began to ease as soon as it did. Henry took his paper bag, found a bottle of harmless no-alcohol cough medicine, and poured Duddits a capful. 'This'll take care of you,' Henry said. Confidence in the thought as well as the words; with Duddits, how you sounded was only part of it.

Duddits drank the capful of Robitussin, grimaced, then smiled at Henry. The coughing had stopped, but blood was still trickling from one nostril . . . and from the corner of one eye as well, Henry saw. Not good. Nor was Duddits's extreme pallor, much more noticeable than it had been at the house back in Derry. The cold . . . his lost night's sleep all this untoward excitement in someone who was an invalid . . . not good. He was getting sick, and in a late-stage ALL patient, even a nasal infection could be fatal.

'He all right?' Owen asked.

'Duds? Duds is iron. Right, Duddits?'

'I ion,' Duddits agreed, and flexed one woefully skinny arm. The sight of his face - thin and tired but still trying to smile - made Henry feel like screaming. Life was unfair; that was something he supposed he'd known for years. But this went far beyond unfair. This was monstrous.

'Let's see what she put in here for good boys to drink.' Henry took the yellow lunchbox.

'Oooby-Doo,' Duddits said. He was smiling, but his voice sounded thin and exhausted.

'Yep, got some work to do now,' Henry agreed, and opened the Thermos. He gave Duds his morning Prednisone tablet, although it hadn't yet gone eight, and then asked Duddits if he wanted a Percocet, as well. Duddits thought about it, then held up two fingers. Henry's heart sank.

'Pretty bad, huh?' he asked, passing Duddits a couple of Percocet tablets over the seat between them. He hardly needed an answer - people like Duddits didn't ask for the extra pill so they could get high.

Duddits made a seesawing gesture with his hand - comme ci, comme ?a. Henry remembered it well, that seesawing hand as much a part of Pete as the chewed pencils and toothpicks were of Beaver.

Roberta had filled Duddits's Thermos with chocolate milk, his favorite. Henry poured him a cup, held it a moment as the Humvee skidded on a slick patch, then handed it over. Duddits took his pills.

'Where does it hurt, Duds?'

'Here.' Hand to the throat. 'More here.' Hand to the chest. Hesitating, coloring a little, then a hand to his crotch. 'Here, ooo.'

A urinary-tract infection, Henry thought. Oh, goody.

'Ills ake ee etter?'

Henry nodded. 'Pills'll make you better. Just give em a chance to work. Are we still on the line, Duddits?'

Duddits nodded emphatically and pointed through the wind?shield. Henry wondered (not for the first time) just what he saw. Once he'd asked Pete, who told him it was something like a thread, often faint and hard to see. It's best when it's yellow, Pete had said. Yellow's always easier to pick up. I don't know why. And if Pete saw a yellow thread, perhaps Duddits saw something like a broad yellow stripe, perhaps even Dorothy's yellow brick road.

'If it goes off on another road, you tell us, okay?'

'I tell.'

'Not going to go to sleep, are you?'

Duddits shook his head. In fact he had never looked more alive and awake, his eyes glowing in his exhausted face. Henry thought of how lightbulbs would sometimes go mysteriously bright before burning out for good.

'If you do start to get sleepy, you tell me and we'll pull over. Get you some coffee. We need you awake.'

'O-ay.'

Henry started to turn around, moving his aching body with as much care as he could muster, when Duddits said something else.

'Isser Ay ont aykin.'

'Does he, now?' Henry said thoughtfully.

'What?' Owen asked. 'I didn't get that one.'

'He says Mr Gray wants bacon.'

'Is that important?'

'I don't know. Is there a regular radio in this heap, Owen? I'd like to get some news.'

The regular radio was hanging under the dash, and looked freshly installed. Not part of the original equipment. Owen reached for it, then hit the brakes as a Pontiac sedan - two-wheel drive and no snow-tires - cut in front of them, The Pontiac slued from side to side, finally decided to stay on the road a little longer, and squirted ahead. Soon it was doing at least sixty, Henry estimated, and was pulling away. Owen was frowning after it.

'You driver, me passenger,' Henry said, 'but if that guy can do it with no snows, why can't we? It might be a good idea to make up some ground.'

'Hummers are better in mud than snow. Take my word for it.

'Still - '

'Also, we're going to pass that guy in the next ten minutes. I'll bet you a quart of good Scotch. He'll either be through the guardrails and down the embankment or spun out on the median. If he's lucky, he'll be right-side-up. Plus - this is just a technicality - we're fugitives running from duly constituted authority, and we can't save the world if we're locked up in some County . . . Jesus!'

A Ford Explorer - four-wheel drive but moving far too fast for the conditions, maybe seventy miles an hour - roared past them, pulling a rooster-tail of snow. The roof-rack had been piled high and covered with a blue tarp. This had been indifferently lashed down, and Henry could see what was beneath: luggage. He guessed that much of it would soon be in the road.

With Duddits seen to, Henry took a clear-eyed look at the highway. What he saw did not exactly surprise him. Although the turnpike's northern barrel was still all but deserted, the southbound lanes were now filling up fast . . . and yes, there were cars off it everywhere.

Owen turned on the radio as a Mercedes hurried past him, throwing up fans of slush. He hit SEEK, found classical music, hit it again, found Kenny G tootling away, hit it a third time . . . and happened on a voice.

' . . . great big fucking bomber joint,' the voice said, and Henry exchanged a glance with Owen.

'He say uck onna rayo,' Duddits observed from the back seat.

'That's right,' Henry said, and, as the owner of the voice inhaled audibly into the mike: 'Also, I'd say he's smoking a fatty.'

'I doubt if the FCC'D be in favor,' the deejay said after a long and noisy exhale, 'but if half of what I'm hearin is true, the FCC is the least of my worries. Interstellar plague on the loose, brothers and sisters, that's the word. Call it the Hot Zone, the Dead Zone, or the Twilight Zone, you want to cancel your trip up north.'

Another long and noisy inhale.

'Marvin the Martian's on the march, brothers and sisters, that's the word from Somerset County and Castle County. Plague, deathrays, the living will envy the dead. I got a spot here for Century Tire, but fuck that shit.' Sound of something breaking. Plastic, from the sound. Henry listened, fascinated. Here it was once more, here was darkness his old friend, not in his head but on the goddam radio. 'Brethren and sistern, if you're north of Augusta right now, here's a little tip from your pal Lonesome Dave at E: relocate south. Like, immediately. And here's a little relocation music.'

Lonesome Dave at E spun The Doors, of course. Jim Morrison droning 'The End'. Owen switched to the AM band.

Eventually he found a newscast. The fellow giving it didn't sound wrecked, which was a step forward, and he said there was no need to panic, which was another step forward. He then played sound-bites from both the President and Maine's Governor, both saying essentially the same thing: take it easy, people, chill. It's all under control. Nice soothing stuff, Robitussin for the body politic. The President was scheduled to make a complete report to the American people at eleven A.M., EST.

'It'll be the speech Kurtz told me about,' Owen said. 'Just moved up a day or so.'

'What speech is - '

'Shhh.' Owen pointed to the radio.

Having soothed, the newscaster next proceeded to stir his listeners up again by repeating many of the rumors they had already heard from the stoned FM jock, only in politer language: plague, non-human invaders from space, deathrays. Then the weather: snow showers, followed by rain and gusty winds as a warm front (not to mention the killer Martians) moved in. There was a meee-eep, and then the newscast they'd just heard began playing again.

'Ook!' Duddits said. 'Ey ent eye us, ember?' He was pointing through the dirty window. The pointing finger, like Duddits's voice, wouldn't hold steady. He was shivering now, his teeth clattering together.

Owen glanced briefly at the Pontiac - it had indeed ended up on the snowy median strip between the northbound and southbound barrels, and although it hadn't rolled all the way over, it was on its side with its disconsolate passengers standing around it - and then looked back at Duddits. Paler than ever now, shivering, a blood-streaked fluff of cotton protruding from one nostril.

'Henry, is he all right?'

'I don't know.'

'Run out your tongue.'

'Don't you think you better keep your eyes on - '

- I'm fine, so don't sass me. Run out your tongue.'

Henry did. Owen looked at it and grimaced. 'Looks worse, but it's probably better. All that crap has turned white.'

'Same with the gash on my leg. Same with your face and eyebrows. We're just lucky we didn't get it in the lungs or the brain or the gut.' He paused. 'Perlmutter got it in the gut. He's growing one of those things.'

'How far back are they, Henry?'

'I'd say twenty miles. Maybe a little less. So if you could goose it . . . even if just a little . . .'

Owen did, knowing that Kurtz would, as soon as he realized he was now part of a general exodus and much less likely to become a target of either the civilian or the military police.

'You're still in touch with Pearly,' Owen said. 'Even though the byrus is dying on you, you're still hooked up. Is it . . .' He lifted a thumb to the back seat, where Duddits was leaning back. His shakes had eased, at least for the time being.

'Sure,' Henry said. 'I had stuff from Duddits long before all this happened. Jonesy, Pete, and Beaver did, too. We hardly noticed. It was just a part of our lives.' Sure, that's tight. Like all those thoughts about plastic bags and bridge abutments, and shotguns. just apart of my life. 'Now it's stronger. Maybe in time it'll drop back, but for now . . . He shrugged. 'For now I hear voices.'

'Pearly.'

'For one,' Henry agreed. 'Others with the byrus in its active stage, too. Mostly behind us.'

'Jonesy? Your friend Jonesy? Or Gray?'

Henry shook his head. 'But Pearly hears something.'

'Pearly? How can he - '

'He's got more mental range than I do right now, because of the byrum - '

'The what?'

'The thing that's up his ass,' Henry said. 'The shit-weasel.'

'Oh.' Owen felt momentarily sick to his stomach.

'What he hears doesn't seem to be human. I don't think it's Mr Gray, but I suppose it might be. Whatever it is, he's homing on it.'

They drove in silence for awhile. The traffic was moderately heavy and some of the drivers were wild (they passed the Explorer just south of Augusta, ditched and apparently abandoned with its load of luggage spread around it), but Owen counted himself lucky. The storm had kept plenty of folks off the road, he guessed. They might decide to flee now that the storm had stopped, but he and Owen had gotten ahead of the worst of the wave. In many ways, the storm had been their friend.

'I want you to know something,' Owen said finally.

'You don't need to say it. You're sitting right next to me ?short range - and I'm still getting some of your thoughts.'

What Owen was thinking was that he would pull the Humvee over and get out, if he thought the pursuit would end once Kurtz had him. Owen did not, in fact, believe that. Owen Underhill was Kurtz's prime objective, but he understood that Owen wouldn't have committed such a monstrous act of treason had he not been coerced into it. No, he'd put a bullet in Owen's head, and then continue on. With Owen, Henry had at least some chance. Without him, he'd likely be a dead duck. And Duddits too.

'We stay together,' Henry said. 'Friends to the end, as the saying goes.'

And, from the back seat: 'Otsum urk ooo do now.'

'That's right, Duds,' Henry reached back and briefly squeezed

Duddits's cold hand. 'Got some work to do now.'

4

Ten minutes later, Duddits came fully to life, pointing them into the first turnpike rest area below Augusta. They were almost to Lewiston now, in fact. 'Ine! Ine!' he shouted, then began to cough again.

'Take it easy, Duddits,' Henry said.

'They probably stopped for coffee and a Danish,' Owen said. 'Or maybe a bacon sandwich.'

But Duddits directed them around back, to the employees' parking lot. Here they stopped, and Duddits got out. He stood quiet and muttering for a moment or so, looking frail under the cloudy sky and seemingly buffeted by every gust of wind.

'Henry,' Owen said, 'I don't know what bee he's got in his bonnet, but if Kurtz is really close - '

But then Duddits nodded, got back in the Hummer, and pointed toward the exit sign. He looked more tired than ever, but he also looked satisfied.

'What in God's name was that all about?' Owen asked, mysti?fied.

'I think he switched cars,' Henry said. 'Is that what he did, Duddits? Did he switch cars?'

Duddits nodded emphatically. 'Tole! Tole a car!'

'He'll be moving faster now,' Henry said. 'You've got to step it up, Owen. Never mind Kurtz - we've got to catch Mr Gray.'

Owen looked over at Henry . . . then looked again. 'What's wrong with you? You've come over all pale.'

'I've been very stupid - I should have known what the bastard was up to from the first. My only excuses are being tired and scared, and none of that will matter if . . . Owen, you have to catch him. He's headed for western Massachusetts, and you have to catch him before he can get there.'

Now they were running in slush, and the going was messy but far less dangerous. Owen walked the Hummer up to sixty-five, all he dared for now.

'I'll try,' he said. 'But unless he has an accident or a breakdown . . . Owen shook his head slowly back and forth. 'I don't think so, pal. I really don't.'

5

This was a dream he'd had often as a child (when his name had been Coonts), but only once or twice since the squirts and sweats of adolescence. In it, he was running through a field under a harvest moon and afraid to look behind him because it was after him, it. He ran as hard as he could but of course that wasn't good enough, in dreams your best never is. Then it was close enough for him to hear its dry breathing, and to smell its peculiar dry smell.

He came to the shore of a great still lake, although there had never been any lakes in the dry and miserable Kansas town of his childhood, and although it was very beautiful (the moon burned in its depths like a lamp), it terrified him because it blocked his way and he could not swim.

He fell on his knees at the shore of the lake - in that way this dream was exactly like those childhood dreams - but instead of seeing the reflection of it in the still water, the terrible scarecrow man with his stuffed burlap head and pudgy blue-gloved hands, this time he saw Owen Underhill, his face covered with splotches. In the moonlight, the byrus looked like great black moles, spongy and shapeless.

As a child he had always wakened at this point (often with his stiff wang wagging, although why such an awful dream would give a kid a stilly God alone knew), but this time the it - Owen - actually touched him, the reflected eyes in the water reproachful. Maybe questioning.

Because you disobeyed orders, buck! Because you crossed the line!

He raised his hand to ward Owen off, to remove that hand . . . and saw his own hand in the moonglow. It was gray.

No, he told himself, that's just the moonlight.

Only three fingers, though - was that the moonlight?

Owen's hand on him, touching him, passing on his filthy disease . . . and still daring to call him

6

boss. Wake up, boss!'

Kurtz opened his eyes and sat up with a grunt, simultaneously pushing Freddy's hand away. On his knee instead of his shoulder, Freddy reaching back from his place behind the wheel and shaking his knee, but still intolerable.

'I'm awake, I'm awake.' He held his own hands up in front of his face to prove it. Not baby-pink, they were a long way from that, but they weren't gray and each had the requisite five fingers.

'What time is it, Freddy?'

'Don't know, boss - still morning's all I can say for sure.'

Of course. Clocks all tucked up. Even his pocket watch had run down. As much a victim of modem times as anyone else, he had forgotten to wind it. To Kurtz, whose time sense had always been at least fairly sharp, it felt like about nine, which would mean he'd gotten about two hours of shuteye. Not much, but he didn't need much. He felt better. Well enough, certainly, to hear the concern in Freddy's voice.

'What's up, bucko?'

'Pearly says he's lost contact with all of them now, He says Owen was the last, and now he's gone, too. He says Owen must have beat back the Ripley fungus, sir.'

Kurtz caught sight of Perlmutter's sunken, I-fooled-you grin in the wide rearview mirror.

'What's the deal, Archie?'

'No deal,' Pearly said, sounding considerably more lucid than before Kurtz's nap. 'I . . . boss, I could use a drink of water. I'm not hungry, but - '

'We could stop for water, I guess,' Kurtz allowed. 'If we had a contact, that is. But if we've lost all of them - this guy Jones as well as Owen and Devlin - well, you know how I am, buck. I'll bite when I die, and it'll take two surgeons and a shotgun to get me to let go even then. You're going to have a long and thirsty day sitting there while Freddy and I course the southbound roads, looking for a trace of them . . . unless you can help out. You do that, Archie, and I'll order Freddy to pull off at the next exit. I will personally trot into the Stop n Go or Seven-Eleven and buy you the biggest bottle of Poland Spring water in the cooler. How does that sound?'

It sounded good, Kurtz could tell that just by the way Perlmutter first smacked his lips and then ran his tongue out to wet them (on Perlmutter's lips and cheeks the Ripley was still full and rich, most patches the color of strawberries, some as dark as burgundy wine), but that sly look had come back. His eyes, rimmed with crusts of Ripley, darted from side to side. And all at once Kurtz understood the picture he was looking at. Pearly had gone crazy, God love him. Perhaps it took one to know one.

'I told him the God's truth. I'm out of touch with all of them now.' But then Archie laid his finger alongside his nose and looked slyly up into the mirror again.

'We catch them, I think there's a good chance we can get you cured up, laddie.' Kurtz said this in his driest just-making-my-report voice. 'Now which of them are you still in touch with? Jonesy? Or is it the new one? Duddits?' What Kurtz actually said was 'Dud-Duts'.

'Not him. None of them.' But still the finger by the nose, still the sly look.

'Tell me and you get water,' Kurtz said. 'Continue to yank my crank, soldier, and I will put a bullet in you and roll you out into the snow. Now you go on and read my mind and tell me that's not so.'

Pearly looked at him sulkily in the rearview a moment longer and then said, 'Jonesy and Mr Gray are still on the turnpike. They're down around Portland, now. Jonesy told Mr Gray how to go around the city on 295. Only it isn't like telling. Mr Gray is in his head, and when he wants something, I think he just takes it.'

Kurtz listened to this with mounting awe, all the time cal?culating.

'There's a dog,' Pearly said. 'They have a dog with them. His name is Lad. He's the one I'm in contact with. He's . . . like me.' His eyes met Kurtz's again in the mirror, only this time the slyness was gone. In its place was a miserable half-sanity. 'Do you think there's really a chance I could be . . . you know . . . myself again?'

Knowing that Perlmutter could see into his mind made Kurtz proceed cautiously. 'I think there's a chance you could be delivered of your burden, at least. With a doctor in attendance who understands the situation? Yes, I think that could be. A big whiff of cbloro, and when you wake up. . . poof.' Kurtz kissed the ends of his fingers, then turned to Freddy. 'If they're in Portland, what's their lead on us?'

'Maybe seventy miles, boss.'

'Then step it up a little, praise Jesus. Don't put us in the ditch, but step it up.' Seventy miles. And if Owen and Devlin and 'Dud-Duts' knew what Archie Perlmutter knew, they were still on track.

'Let me get this straight, Archie. Mr Gray is in Jonesy - '

'Yes - '

'And they have a dog with them that can read their minds?'

'The dog hears their thoughts, but he doesn't understand them. He's stiff only a dog. Boss, I'm thirsty.'

He's listening to the dog like it's a fucking radio, Kurtz mar?velled.

'Freddy, next exit. Drinks all around.' He resented having to make a pit-stop - resented losing even a couple of miles on Owen - but he needed Perlmutter. Happy, if possible.

Up ahead was the rest area where Mr Gray had traded his plow for the cook's Subaru, where Owen and Henry had also briefly pulled in because the line went in there. The parking lot was crammed, but among the three of them they had enough change for the vending machines out front.

Praise God.

7

Whatever the triumphs and failures of the so-called 'Florida' Presi?dency (that record is in large part still unwritten), there will always be this: he put an end to the Space Scare with his speech that November morning.

There were differing views on why the speech worked ('It wasn't leadership, it was timing,' one critic sniffed), but it did work. Hungry for hard information, people who were already on the run pulled off the highway to see the President speak. Appliance stores in malls filled up with crowds of silent, staring people. At the food-fuel stops along 1-95, the counters shut down. TVs were placed beside the quiet cash-registers. Bars filled up. In many places, people threw their homes open to others who wanted to watch the speech. They could have listened on their car radios (as Jonesy and Mr Gray did) and kept on trucking, but only a minority did. Most people wanted to see the leader's face. According to the President's detractors, the speech did nothing but break the momentum of the panic - 'Porky Pig could have given a speech at that particular time and gotten that particular result,' one of them opined. The other took a different view. 'It was a pivotal moment in the crisis,' this fellow said. 'There were maybe six thousand people on the road. If the President had said the wrong thing, there would have been sixty thousand by two in the afternoon and maybe six hundred thousand by the time the wave hit New York - the biggest wave of DPs since the Dust Bowl. The American people, especially those in New England, came to their narrowly - elected leader for help . . . for comfort and reassurance. He responded with what may have been the greatest my-fellow-Americans speech of all time. Simple as that.'

Simple or not, sociology or great leadership, the speech was about what Owen and Henry had expected . . . and Kurtz could have predicted every word and turn. At the center were two simple ideas, both presented as absolute facts and both calculated to soothe the terror which beat that morning in the ordinarily complacent American breast. The first idea was that, while they had not come waving olive branches and handing out free intro?ductory gifts, the newcomers had evinced absolutely no signs of aggressive or hostile behavior. The second was that, while they had brought some sort of virus with them, it had been contained within the Jefferson Tract (the President pointed it out on a Chroma?-Key green-screen as adeptly as any weatherman pointing out a low-pressure system). And even there it was dying, with absolutely no help from the scientists and military experts who were on the scene.

'While we cannot say for sure at this Juncture,' the Presi?dent told his breathless watchers (those who found themselves at the New England end of the Northeast Corridor were, perhaps understandably, the most breathless of all), 'we believe that our visitors brought this virus with them much as travellers from abroad may bring certain insects into their country of origin in their luggage or on the produce they've purchased. This is something customs officials look for, but of course' - big smile from Great White Father - 'our recent visitors did not pass through a customs checkpoint.'

Yes, a few people had succumbed to the virus. Most were military personnel. The great in majority of those who contracted it ('a fungal growth not unlike athlete's foot,' said the Great White Father) beat it quite easily on their own. A quarantine had been imposed around the area, but the people outside that zone were in no danger, repeat, no danger. 'If you are in Maine and have left your homes,' said the President, 'I suggest you return. In the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.' Nothing about the slaughter of the grayboys, the blown ship, the interred hunters, the fire at Gosselin's, or the breakout. Nothing about the last of Gallagher's Imperial Valleys being hunted down like dogs (they were dogs, in the view of many; worse than dogs). Nothing about Kurtz and not a whisper about Typhoid Jonesy. The President gave them just enough to break the back of the panic before it surged out of control.

Most people followed his advice and went home.

For some, of course, this was impossible.

For some, home had been cancelled.

8

The little parade moved south under dark skies, led by the rusty red Subaru that Marie Turgeon of Litchfield would never see again. Henry, Owen, and Duddits were fifty-five miles, or about fifty minutes, behind. Pulling out of the Mile 81 rest area (Pearly was greedily glugging down his second bottle of Naya water by the time they rejoined the traffic flow), Kurtz and his men were roughly seventy-five miles behind Jonesy and Mr Gray, twenty miles behind Kurtz's prime quarry.

If not for the cloud cover, a spotter in a low-flying plane might have been able to see all three at the same time, the Subaru and both Humvees, at 11:43 EST, when the President finished his speech by saying, 'God bless you, my fellow Americans, and God bless America.'

Jonesy and Mr Gray were crossing the Kittery-Portsmouth bridge into New Hampshire; Henry, Owen, and Duddits were passing Exit 9, which gives access to the communities of Falmouth, Cumberland, and Jerusalem's Lot; Kurtz, Freddy, and Perlmutter (Perlmutter's belly was swelling again; he lay back groaning and passing noxious gas, perhaps a kind of critical comment on the Great White Father's speech) were near the Bowdoinham exit of 295, not far north of Brunswick. All three vehicles would have been easy enough to pick out because so many people had pulled in somewhere to watch the President give his soothing, Chroma-Key-aided lecture.

Drawing on Jonesy's admirably organized memories, Mr Gray left 95 for 495 just after crossing over the New Hampshire? Massachusetts border . . . and directed by Duddits, who saw Jonesy's passage as a bright yellow line, the lead Humvee would follow. At the town of Marlborough, Mr Gray would leave 495 for 1-90, one of America's major east-west highways. In the Bay State this road is known as the Mass Pike. Exit 8, according to Jonesy, was marked Palmer, UMass, Amherst, and Ware. Six miles beyond Ware was the Quabbin.

Shaft 12 was what he wanted; Jonesy said so, and Jonesy couldn't lie, much as he might have liked to. There was a Massachusetts Water Authority office at the Winsor Dam, on the south end of the Quabbin Reservoir. Jonesy could get him that far, and then Mr Gray would do the rest.

9

Jonesy couldn't sit behind the desk anymore - if he did, he'd start to blubber. From blubbering he would no doubt progress to gibbering, from gibbering to yammering, and once he started to yammer, he'd probably be out and rushing into Mr Gray's arms, totally bonkers and ready to be extinguished.

Where are we now, anyway? he wondered. Marlborough yet? Leaving 495 for 90? 7hat sounds about right.

Not that there was any way to tell for sure, with his window shuttered. Jonesy looked at the window . . . and grinned in spite of himself. Had to. GIVE UP COME OUT had been replaced with what he'd been thinking of - SURRENDER DOROTHY.

I did that, he thought, and I bet I could make the goddam shutters vanish, if I wanted to.

And so what? Mr Gray would put up another set, or maybe just slop some black paint on the glass. If he didn't want Jonesy looking out, Jonesy would stay blind. The point was, Mr Gray controlled the outside part of him. Mr Gray's head had exploded, he'd sporulated right in front of Jonesy's eyes - Dr Jekyll turns into Mr Byrus - and Jonesy had inhaled him. Now Mr Gray was . . .

He's a pain, Jonesy thought. Mr Gray is the pain in my brain.

Something tried to protest this view, and he actually had a coherent dissenting thought - No, you've got it all backward, you were the one who got out, who escaped - but he pushed it away. That was pseudo-intuitive bullshit, a cognitive hallucination, not much different than a thirsty man seeing a nonexistent oasis in the desert. He was locked in here. Mr Gray was out there, eating bacon and ruling the roost. If Jonesy allowed himself to think differently, he'd be an April Fool in November.

Got to slow him down. If I can't stop him, is there a way I can at least throw a monkeywrench into the works?

He got up and began to walk around the edge of the office. It was thirty-four paces. Hell of a short round-trip. Still, he supposed, it was bigger than your average jail cell; guys in Walpole or Danvers or Shawshank would think this was the cat's ass. In the middle of the room, the dreamcatcher danced and turned. One part of Jonesy's mind counted paces; the other wondered how close they were getting to Exit 8 of the Mass Pike.

Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four. And here he was, back behind his chair again. Time for Round Two.

They'd be in Ware soon enough . . . not that they'd stop there. Unlike the Russian woman, Mr Gray knew exactly where he wanted to go.

Thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six. Behind his chair again and ready for another spin.

He and Carla had had three children by the time they turned thirty (number four had come less than a year ago), and neither of them had expected to own a summer cottage, not even a modest one like the place on Osborne Road in North Ware, any time soon. Then there had been a seismic shift in Jonesy's department. A good friend had assumed the chairmanship, and Jonesy had found himself an associate professor at least three years earlier than his most optimistic expectations. The salary bump had been considerable.

Thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, and behind his chair again. This was good. It was pacing the cell, no more than that, but it was calming him.

That same year, Carla's grandmother had passed away, and there had been a considerable estate, settled between Carla and her sister, as the close blood kin in the intervening generation had died. So they got the cottage, and that first summer they'd taken the kids up to the Winsor Dam. From there they'd gone on one of the regularly scheduled summer tours. Their guide, an MWA employee in a forest - green uniform, had told them the area around the Quabbin Reservoir was called 'the accidental wilderness', and had become the major nesting area for eagles in Massachusetts. (John and Misha, the older kids, had hoped to see an eagle or two, but they had been disappointed.) The Reservoir had been formed in the thirties by flooding three fanning communities, each with its own little market - town. At that time the land surrounding the new lake had been tame. In the sixty or so years since, it had returned to what all of New England must have been like before the tillage and industry began midway through the seventeenth century. A tangle of rutted, unpaved roads ran up the east side of the lake - one of the purest reservoirs in North America, their guide had told them - but that was it. If you wanted to go much beyond Shaft 12 on the East Branch, you'd need your hiking shoes. That was what the guide said. Lorrington, his name had been.

There had been maybe a dozen other people on the tour, and by then they had been about back to their starting place again. Standing on the edge of the road which ran across Winsor Dam, looking north at the Reservoir (the Quabbin bright blue in the sunlight, sparkling with a million points of light, Joey fast asleep in the Papoose carrier on Jonesy's back). Lorrington had been wrapping up his spiel, just about to wish them a nice day, when some guy in a Rutgers sweatshirt had raised his hand like a school kid and said: Shaft 12, Isn't that where the Russian woman . . . ?

Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty, forty-one, and back to the desk chair. Counting without really thinking about the numbers, something he did all the time. Carla said it was a sign of obsessive - compulsive disorder. Jonesy didn't know about that, but he knew that the counting was soothing him, and so he set off on another round.

Lorrington's mouth had tightened at the words 'Russian woman'. Not part of the lecture, apparently; not part of the good vibes the Water Authority wanted visitors to take with them. Depending upon which municipal pipes it flowed through during the last eight or ten miles of its journey, Boston tap water could be the purest, best tap water in the world: that was the gospel they wanted to spread.

I really don't know much about that, sir, Lorrington had said, and Jonesy had thought: My goodness, I think our guide just told a little fibby-wibby,

Forty-one, forty-two, forty-three, back behind the chair and ready to start around again. Walking a little faster now. Hands clasped behind his back like a ship's captain pacing the foredeck . . . or pacing the brig after a successful mutiny. He supposed that was really more like it.

Jonesy had been a history teacher most of his life, and curiosity came as second nature. He had gone to the library one day later that week, had looked for the story in the local paper, and had eventually found it. It had been brief and dry - there were stories about lawn-parties inside that had more detail and color - but their postman had known more and had been happy to share. Old Mr Beckwith. Jonesy still remembered his final words before he'd put his blue-and-white mail - truck back in gear and rolled on down Osborne Road to the next rural box; there was a lot of mail to be delivered on the south end of the lake in summertime. Jonesy had walked back to the cottage, their unexpected gift, thinking it was no wonder Lorrington hadn't wanted to talk about the Russian woman.

Not good public relations at all.

10

Her name is either Ilena or Elaina Timarova - no one seems sure which. She turns up in Ware in the early fall of 1995 in a Ford Escort with a discreet yellow Hertz sticker on the windshield. The car turns out to be stolen, and a story makes the rounds - unsubstantiated but juicy - that she obtained it at Logan Airport, swapping sex for a set of car keys. Who knows, it could have happened that way.

However it happens, she is clearly disoriented, not quite right in the head. Someone remembers the bruise on the side of her face, someone else the fact that her blouse is buttoned wrong. Her English is poor, but good enough for her to get across what she wants: directions to the Quabbin Reservoir. These she writes down (in Russian) on a slip of paper. That evening, when the road across the Winsor Dam is closed, the Escort is found, abandoned, in the picnic area at Goodnough Dike. When the car is still there the next morning, two Water Authority guys (who knows, perhaps Lorrington was one of them) and two Forest Service rangers start looking for her.

Two miles up East Street, they find her shoes. Two miles farther up, where East Street goes to dirt (it winds through the wilderness on the east shore of the Reservoir and is really not a street at all but a Massachusetts version of the Deep Cut Road) they find her shirt . . . oh-oh. Two miles beyond the abandoned shirt, East Street ends, and a rutty logging stripe - Fitzpatrick Road - leads away from the lake. The searchers are about to go this way when one of them sees something pink hangin from a tree-limb down by the water.

It proves to be the lady's bra.

The ground here is damp - not quite marshy - and they can follow both her tracks and the broken branches through which she has pushed, doing damage they don't like to think of to her bare skin. Yet the evidence of the damage is there, and they must see it, like it or not - the blood on the branches and then on the rocks is part of her trail.

A mile from where East Street ends, they come to a stone building which stands on an outcropping. It looks across the East Branch at Mount Pomery. This building houses Shaft 12, and is accessible by car only from the north. Why Ilena or Elaina did not just start from the north is a question that will never be answered.

The water-bearing aqueduct which begins at the Quabbin runs sixty-five miles dead east to Boston, picking up more water from the Wachusett and Sudbury Reservoirs as it goes (the latter two sources are smaller and not quite so pure). There are no pumps; the aqueduct-pipe, thirteen feet high and eleven feet wide, needs none to do its job. Boston's water supply is provided by simple gravity feed, a technique used by the Egyptians thirty-five centuries before. Twelve vertical shafts run between the ground and the aqueduct. These serve as vents and pressure-regulation points. They also serve as points of access, should the aqueduct become clogged. Shaft 12, the one closest to the Reservoir, is also known as the Intake Shaft. Water purity is tested there, and female virtue has often been tested there, as well (the stone building isn't locked, and is a frequent stopping place for lovers in canoes).

On the lowest of the eight steps leading up to the door, they find the woman's jeans, neatly folded. On the top step is a pair of plain white cotton underpants. The door is open. The men look at each other, but no one speaks. They have a good idea of what they're going to find inside: one dead Russian lady, hold the clothes.

But they don't. The circular iron cover over the top of Shaft 12 has been moved just enough to create a crescent moon of darkness on the Reservoir side. Beyond it is the crowbar the woman used to shift the lid - it would have been leaning behind the door, where there are a few other tools. And beyond the crowbar is the Russian woman's purse. On top of it is her billfold, open to show her identification card. On top of the billfold - the apex of the pyramid, so to speak - is her passport. Poking out of it is a slip of paper, covered with chicken-scratches that have to be Russian, or Cyrillic, or whatever they call it. The men believe it is a suicide note, but upon translation it proves to be nothing but the Russian woman's directions. At the very bottom she has written When road ends, walk along shore. And so she did, disrobing as she went, unmindful of the branches which poked and the bushes which scratched.

The men stand around the partially covered shaft-head, scratching their heads and listening to the babble of the water as it starts on its way to the taps and faucets and fountains and back-yard hoses of Boston. The sound is hollow, somehow dank, and there's good reason for that: Shaft 12 is a hundred and twenty-five feet deep. The men cannot understand why she chose to do it the way she did, but they can see what she did all too clearly, can see her sitting on the stone floor with her feet dangling; she looks like a nakedy version of the girl on the White Rock labels. She takes a final look over her shoulder, perhaps, to make sure her billfold and her passport are still where she put them. She wants someone to know who passed this way, and there is something hideously, unassuageably sad about that. One look back, and then she slips into the eclipse between the partially dislodged cover and the side of the shaft. Perhaps she held her nose, like a kid cannonballing into the community swimming pool. Perhaps not. Either way, she is gone in less than a second. Hello darkness my old friend.

11

Old Mr Beckwith's final words on the subject before driving on down the road in his mail-truck had been these: Way I heard it, the folks in Boston'll be drinking her in their morning coffee tight around Valentine's Day. Then he'd given Jonesy a grin. I don't drink the water myself, I stick to beer.

In Massachusetts, as in Australia, you say that beah.

12

Jonesy had paced around his office twelve or fourteen times now. He stopped for a moment behind his desk chair, absently rubbing his hip, then set off again, still counting, good old obsessive-?compulsive Jonesy.

One . . . two . . . three . . .

The story of the Russian woman was certainly a fine one, a superior example of the Small Town Creepy Yarn (haunted houses where multiple murders had taken place and the sites of terrible roadside accidents were also good), and it certainly cast a clear light on Mr Gray's plans for Lad, the unfortunate border collie, but what good did it do him to know where Mr Gray was going? After all . . .

Back to the chair again, forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty, and wait a minute, just wait a goddam minute. The first time he'd gone around the room, he'd done it in just thirty-four paces, hadn't he? So how could it be fifty this time? He wasn't shuffling, taking baby steps, anything like that, so how -

You've been making it bigger. Walking around it and making it bigger. Because you were restless. It's your room, after all. I bet you could make it as big as the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom, if you wanted to . . . and Mr Gray couldn't stop you.

'Is that possible?' Jonesy whispered. He stood by his desk chair, one hand on the back, like a man posing for a portrait. He didn't need an answer to his question; eyesight was enough. The room was bigger.

Henry was coming. If he had Duddits with him, following Mr Gray would be easy enough no matter how many times Mr Gray changed vehicles, because Duddits saw the line. He had led them to Richie Grenadeau in a dream, later he had led them to Josie Rinkenhauer in reality, and he could direct Henry now as easily as a keen-nosed hound leads a hunter to the fox's earth. The problem was the lead, the goddam lead that Mr Gray had. An hour at least. Maybe more. And once Mr Gray had chucked the dog down Shaft 12, there went your ballgame. There'd be time to shut off Boston's water supply - theoretically - but could Henry convince anyone to take such an enormous, disruptive step? Jonesy doubted it. And what about all the people along the way who would drink the water almost immediately? Sixty-five hundred in Ware, eleven thousand in Athol, over a hundred and fifty thousand in Worcester. Those people would have weeks instead of months. Only days in some cases.

Was there any way to slow the son of a bitch down? Give Henry a chance to catch up?

Jonesy looked up at the dreamcatcher, and as he did, something in the room changed - there was a sigh, almost, the sort of sound ghosts are reputed to make at s��ances. But this was no ghost, and Jonesy felt his arms prickle. At the same time his eyes filled with tears. A line from Thomas Wolfe occurred to him - o lost, a stone, a leaf, a unfound door. Thomas Wolfe, whose thesis had been that you can't go home again.

'Duddits?' he whispered. The hair on his neck had stiffened. 'Duddie, is that you?'

No answer . . . but when he looked at the desk where the useless phone had stood, he saw that something new had been added. Not a stone or a leaf, not an unfound door, but a cribbage board and a deck of cards.

Someone wanted to play the game.

13

Hurt pretty much all the time now. Mumma know, he tell Mumma. Jesus know, he tell Jesus. He don't tell Henry, Henry hurts too, Henry tired and make sad. Beaver and Pete are in heaven where they sitteth at the right hand of God the Father all mighty, maker of heaven and earth forever and ever, Jesus' sake, hey man. That makes him sad, they were good friends and played games but never made fun. Once they found Josie and once they saw a tall guy, he a cowboy, and once they play the game.

This a game too, only Pete used to say Duddits it doesn't matter if you win or booze it's how you play the game only this time it does matter, it does, Jonesy say it does, Jonesy hard of hearing but pretty soon it'll be better, pretty soon. If only he don't hurt. Even his Perco don't help. His throat make sore and his body shakes and his belly make hurry kind of like when he has to go poopoo, kind of like that, but he doesn't have to go poopoo, and when he cough sometimes make blood. He would like to sleep but there is Henry and his new friend Owen that was there the day they found Josie and they say If only we could slow him down and If only we could catch up and he has to stay awake and help them but he has to close his eyes to hear Jonesy and they think he's asleep, Owen says Shouldn't we wake him up, what if the son of a bitch turns off somewhere, and Henry says I tell you I know where he's going, but we'll wake him up at 1-90 just to be sure. For now let him sleep, my God, he looks so tired. And again, only this time thinking it: If only we could slow the son of a bitch down.

Eyes closed. Arms crossed over his aching chest. Breathing slow, Mumma say breathe slow when you cough. Jonesy's not dead, not in heaven with Beaver and Pete, but Mr Gray say Jonesy locked and Jonesy believes him. Jonesy's in the office, no phone and no facts, hard to talk to because Mr Gray is mean and Mr Gray is scared. Scared Jonesy will find out which one is really locked up.

When did they talk most?

When they played the game.

The game.

A shudder racks him. He has to make hard think and it hurts, he can feel it stealing away his strength, the last little bits of his strength, but this time it's more than just a game, this time it matters who wins and who boozes, so he gives his strength, he makes the board and he makes the cards, Jonesy is crying, Jonesy thinks o lost, but Duddits Cavell isn't lost, Duddits sees the line, the line goes to the office, and this time he will do more than peg the pegs.

Don't cry Jonesy, he says, and the words are clear, in his mind they always are, it is only his stupid mouth that mushes them up. Don't cry, I'm not lost.

Eyes closed. Arms crossed.

In Jonesy's office, beneath the dreamcatcher, Duddits plays the game.

14

'I've got the dog,' Henry said. He sounded exhausted. 'The one Perlmutter's homed in on. I've got it. We're a little bit closer. Christ, if there was just a way to slow them down!'

It was raining now, and Owen could only hope they'd be south of the freeze-line if it went over to sleet. The wind was gusting hard enough to sway the Hummer on the road. It was noon, and they were between Saco and Biddeford. Owen glanced into the rearview mirror and saw Duddits in the back seat, eyes closed, head back, skinny arms crossed on his chest. His complexion was an alarming yellow, but a thin line of bright blood trickled from the comer of his mouth.

'Is there any way your friend can help?' Owen asked.

'I think he's trying.'

'I thought you said he was asleep.'

Henry turned, looked at Duddits, then looked at Owen. 'I was wrong,' he said.

15

Jonesy dealt the cards, threw two into the crib from his hand, then picked up the other hand and added two more.

'Don't cry, Jonesy. Don't cry, I'm not lost.'

Jonesy glanced up at the dreamcatcher, quite sure the words had come from there. 'I'm not crying, Duds. Fuckin allergies, that's all. Now I think you want to play - '

'Two,' said the voice from the dreamcatcher.

Jonesy played the deuce from Duddits's hand - not a bad lead, actually - then played a seven from his own. That made nine. Duddits had a six in his hand; the question was whether or not -

'Six for fifteen,' said the voice from the dreamcatcher. 'Fifteen for two. Kiss my bender!'

Jonesy laughed in spite of himself It was Duddits, all right, but for a moment he had sounded just like the Beav. 'Go on and peg it, then.' And watched, fascinated, as one of the pegs on the board rose, floated, and settled back down in the second hole on First Street.

Suddenly he understood something.

'You could play all along, couldn't you, Duds? You used to peg all crazy just because it made us laugh.' The idea brought fresh tears to his eyes. All those years they'd thought they were playing with Duddits, he had been playing with them. And on that day behind Tracker Brothers, who had found whom? Who had saved whom?

'Twenty-one,' he said.

'Thirty-one for two.' From the dreamcatcher. And once again the unseen hand lifted the peg and played it two holes farther on. 'He's blocked to me, Jonesy.'

'I know.' Jonesy played a three. Duddits called thirteen, and Jonesy played it out of Duddits's hand.

'But you're not. You can talk to him.'

Jonesy played his own deuce and pegged two. Duddits played, pegged one for last card, and Jonesy thought: Outpegged by a retard - what do you know. Except this Duddits wasn't retarded. Exhausted and dying, but not retarded.

They pegged their hands, and Duddits was far ahead even though it had been Jonesy's crib. Jonesy swept the cards together and began to shuffle them.

'What does he want, Jonesy? What does he want besides water?'

Murder, Jonesy thought. He likes to kill people. But no more of that. Please God, no more of that.

'Bacon,' he said. 'He does like bacon.'

He began to shuffle the cards . . . then froze as Duddits filled his mind. The real Duddits, young and strong and ready to fight.

16

Behind them, in the back seat, Duddits groaned loudly. Henry turned and saw fresh blood, red as byrus, running from his nostrils. His face was twisted in a terrible cramp of concentration. Beneath their closed lids, his eyeballs rolled rapidly back and forth.

'What's the matter with him?' Owen asked. 'I don't know.'

Duddits began to cough: deep and racking bronchial sounds. Blood flew from between his lips in a fine spray.

'Wake him up, Henry! For Christ's sake, wake him up!'

Henry gave Owen Underhill a frightened look. They were approaching Kennebunkport now, no more than twenty miles from the New Hampshire border, a hundred and ten from the Quabbin Reservoir. Jonesy had a picture of the Quabbin on the wall of his office; Henry had seen it. And a cottage nearby, in Ware.

Duddits cried out: a single word repeated three times between bursts of coughing. The sprays of blood weren't heavy, not yet, the stuff was coming from his mouth and throat, but if his lungs began to rupture -

'Wake him up! He says he's aching! Can't you hear him - '

'He's not saying aykin.'

'What, then? What?'

'He's saying bacon.'

17

The entity which now thought of itself as Mr Gray - who thought of himself as Mr Gray - had a serious problem, but at least it (he) knew it.

Forewarned is forearmed was how Jonesy put it. There were hun?dreds of such sayings in Jonesy's storage cartons, perhaps thousands. Some of them Mr Gray found utterly incomprehensible - A nod's as good as a wink to a blind horse was one such, What goes around comes around was another - but forewarned is forearmed was a good one.

His problem could be best summed up with how he felt about Jonesy . . . and of course that he felt at all was bad enough. He could think Now Jonesy is cut off and I have solved my problem; I have quarantined him just as their military tried to quarantine us. I am being followed - chased, intact - but barring engine trouble or a flat tire, neither group of followers has much chance of catching me. I have too great a lead.

These things were facts - truth - but they had no savor. What had savor was the idea of going to the door behind which his reluctant host was imprisoned and yelling: 'I fixed you, didn't I? I fixed your little red wagon, didn't I?' What a wagon, red or otherwise, had to do with any of this Mr Gray didn't know, but it was an emotional bullet of fairly high caliber from Jonesy's armory - it had a deep and satisfying childhood resonance. And then he would stick Jonesy's tongue (my tongue now, Mr Gray thought with undeniable satisfaction) between Jonesy's lips and 'give him the old raspberry'.

As for the followers, he wanted to drop Jonesy's pants and show them Jonesy's buttocks. This was as senseless as What goes around comes around, as senseless as little red wagon, but he wanted to do it. It was called 'mooning the assholes' and he wanted to do it.

He was, Mr Gray realized, infected with this world's byrus. It began with emotion, progressed to sensory awareness (the taste of food, the undeniable savage pleasure of making the State Trooper beat his head in against the tiled bathroom wall - the hollow thud-thud of it), and then progressed to what Jonesy called higher thinking. This was a joke, in Mr Gray's view, not much different from calling shit reprocessed food or genocide ethnic cleansing. And yet thinking had its attractions for a being which had always existed as part of a vegetative mind, a sort of highly intelligent not-consciousness.

Before Mr Gray had shut him up, Jonesy had suggested that he give over his mission and simply enjoy being human. Now he discovered that desire in himself as his previously harmonious mind, his not-conscious mind, began to fragment, to turn into a crowd of opposing voices, some wanting A, some wanting B, some wanting Q squared and divided by Z. He would have thought such babble would be horrible, the stuff of madness. Instead he found himself enjoying the wrangle.

There was bacon. There was 'sex with Carla', which Jonesy's mind identified as a superlatively enjoyable act, involving both sensory and emotional input. There was fast driving and bumper pool in O'Leary's Bar near Fenway Park and beer and live bands that played loud and Patty Loveless singing 'Blame it on your lyin cheatin cold deadbeatin two-timin double-dealin mean mistreatin lovin heart' (whatever that meant). There was the look of the land rising from the fog on a summer morning. And murder, of course. There was that.

His problem was that if he didn't finish this business quickly, he might never finish it at all. He was no longer byrum but Mr Gray. How long before he left Mr Gray behind and became Jonesy?

It's not going to happen, he thought. He pressed the accelerator down, and although it didn't have much, the Subaru gave him a little more. In the back seat the dog yipped . . . then howled in pain. Mr Gray sent out his mind and touched the byrum growing inside the dog. It was growing fast. Almost too fast. And here was something else - there was no pleasure in meeting its mind, none of the warmth that comes when like encounters like. The mind of the byrum felt cold . . . rancid . . .

'Alien,' he muttered.

Nevertheless, he quieted it. When the dog went into the water supply, the byrum should still be inside. It would need time to adapt. The dog would drown, but the byrum would live yet awhile, feeding on the dog's dead body, until it was time. But first he had to get there.

It wouldn't be long now.

As he drove west on I-90, past little towns (shitsplats, Jonesy thought them, but not without affection) like Westborough, Grafton, and Dorothy Pond (getting closer now, maybe forty miles to go), he looked for a place to put his new and uneasy consciousness where it wouldn't get him in trouble. He tried Jonesy's kids, then backed away - far too emotional. Tried Duddits again, but that was still a blank; Jonesy had stolen the memories. Finally he settled on Jonesy's work, which was teaching history, and his specialty, which was gruesomely fascinating. Between 1860 and 1865, it seemed America had split in two, as byrus colonies did near the end of each growth cycle. There had been all sorts of causes, the chief of which had to do with 'slavery', but again, this was like calling shit or vomit reprocessed food. 'Slavery' meant nothing. 'Right of secession' meant nothing. 'Preserving the Union' meant nothing. Basically, they had just done what these creatures did best: they 'got mad,' which was really the same thing as 'going mad' but more socially acceptable. Oh, but on such a scale!

Mr Gray was investigating boxes and boxes of fascinating weaponry - grapeshot, chainshot, mini�� balls, cannonballs, bayonets, landmines - when a voice intruded.

bacon

He pushed the thought aside, although Jonesy's stomach gur?gled. He'd like some bacon, yes, bacon was fleshy and greasy and slippery and satisfying in a primitive, physical way, but this was not the time. Perhaps after he'd gotten rid of the dog. Then, if he had time before the others caught up, he could eat himself to death if he so chose. But this was not the time. As he passed Exit 10 - only two to go, now - he turned his mind back to the Civil War, to blue men and gray men running through the smoke, screaming and stabbing each other in the guts, fixing little red wagons without number, pounding the stocks of their rifles into the skulls of their enemies, producing those intoxicating thud-thud sounds, and -

bacon

His stomach gurgled again. Saliva squirted into Jonesy's mouth and he remembered Dysart's, the brown and crispy strips on the blue plate, you picked it up with your fingers, the texture was hard, the texture of dead and tasty flesh -

Can't think of this.

A horn honked irritably, making Mr Gray jump, making Lad whine. He had wandered into the wrong lane, what Jonesy's mind identified as 'the passing lane', and he pulled over to let one of the big trucks, going faster than the Subaru could go, sweep by. It splashed the small car's windshield with muddy water, momentarily blinding him, and Mr Gray thought Catch you kill you beat the brains out of your head you unsafe johnny reb of a driver you, thud-thud, fix your wagon your little red

bacon sandwich

That one was like a gunshot in his head. He fought it but the strength of it was something entirely new. Could that be Jonesy? Surely not, Jonesy wasn't that strong. But suddenly he seemed an stomach, and the stomach was hollow, hurting, craving. Surely he could stop long enough to assuage it. If he didn't he was apt to drive right off the

bacon sandwich!

with mayo!

Mr Gray let out an inarticulate cry, unaware that he'd begun to drool helplessly.

18

'I hear him,' Henry said suddenly. He put his fists to his temples, as if to contain a headache. 'Christ, it hurts. He's so hungry.'

'Who?' Owen asked. They had just crossed the state line into Massachusetts. In front of the car, the rain fell in silver, wind-slanted lines. 'The dog? Jonesy? Who?'

'Him,' Henry said. 'Mr Gray.' He looked at Owen, a sudden wild hope in his eye. 'I think he's pulling over. I think he's stopping.'

19

'Boss.'

Kurtz was on the verge of dozing again when Perlmutter turned - not without effort - and spoke to him. They had just gone through the New Hampshire tolls, Freddy Johnson being careful to use the automated exact-change lane (he was afraid a human toll-taker might notice the stench in the Humvee's cabin, the broken window in back, the weaponry . . . or all three).

Kurtz looked into Archie Perlmutter's sweat-streaked, haggard face with interest. With fascination, even. The colorless bean?-counting bureaucrat, he of the briefcase on station and clipboard in the field, hair always neatly combed and parted ruler-straight on the left? The man who could not for the life of him train himself out of using the word sir? That man was gone. Thin though it was, he thought Pearly's countenance had somehow richened. He's turning into Ma Joad, Kurtz thought, and almost giggled.

'Boss, I'm still thirsty.' Pearly cast longing eyes on Kurtz's Pepsi, then blew out another hideous fart. Ma Joad on trumpet in hell Kurtz thought and this time he did giggle. Freddy cursed, but not with his former shocked disgust; now he sounded resigned, almost bored.

'I'm afraid this is mine, buck,' Kurtz. 'And I'm a wee parched myself.'

Perlmutter began to speak, then winced as a fresh pain struck him. He fatted again, the sound thinner this time, not a trumpet but an untalented child blowing over a piccolo. His eyes narrowed, became crafty. 'Give me a drink and I'll tell you something you want to know.' A pause. 'Something you need to know.'

Kurtz considered. Pain slapped the side of the car and came in through the busted window. The goddamned window was a pain in the ass, praise Jesus, the arm of his jacket was soaked right through, but he would have to bear up. Who was responsible, after all?

'You are,' Pearly said, and Kurtz jumped. The mind-reading thing was just so spooky. You thought you were getting used to it and then realized that no negative, you were not. 'You're responsible. So give me a fucking drink. Boss.'

'Watch your mouth, cheeseboy,' Freddy rumbled.

'Tell me what you know and you can have the rest of this.' Kurtz raised the Pepsi bottle, waggling it in front of Pearly's tortured gaze. Kurtz was not without humorous self-loathing as he did this. Once he had commanded whole units and had used them to alter entire geopolitical landscapes. Now his command was two men and a soft drink. He had fallen low. Pride had brought him low, praise God. He had the pride of Satan, and if it was a fault, it was a hard one to give up. Pride was the belt you could use to hold up your pants even after your pants were gone.

'Do you promise?' Pearly's red-fizzed tongue came out and licked at his parched lips.

'If I'm lyin I'm dyin,' Kurtz said solemnly. 'Hell, buck, read my fucking mind!'

Pearly studied him for a moment and Kurtz could almost feel the man's creepy little fingers (mats of red stuff now growing under each nail) in his head. An awful sensation, but he bore it.

At last Perlmutter seemed satisfied. He nodded.

'I'm getting more now,' he said, and then his voice lowered to a confidential, horrified whisper. 'It's eating me, you know. It's eating my guts. I can feel it.'

Kurtz patted him on the arm. just now they were passing a sign which read WELCOME TO MASSACHUSETTS. 'I'm going to take care of you, laddie-buck; I promised, didn't I? Meantime, tell me what you're getting.'

'Mr Gray is stopping. He's hungry.'

Kurtz had left his hand on Perlmutter's arm. Now he tightened his grip, turning his fingernails into talons. 'Where?'

'Close to where he's going. It's a store.' In a chanting, childish voice that made Kurtz's skin crawl, Archie Perlmutter said: "'Best bait, why wait? Best bait, why wait?"' Then, resuming a more normal tone: 'Jonesy knows Henry and Owen and Duddits are coming. That's why he made Mr Gray stop.'

The idea of Owen's catching Jonesy/Mr Gray filled Kurtz with panic. 'Archie, listen to me carefully.'

'I'm thirsty,' Perlmutter whined. 'I'm thirsty, you son of a bitch.'

Kurtz held the Pepsi bottle up in front of Perlmutter's eyes, then slapped away Perlmutter's hand when Pearly reached for it.

'Do Henry, Owen, and Dud-Duts know Jonesy and Mr Gray have stopped?'

'Dud-dits, you old fool!' Perlmutter snarled, then groaned with pain and clutched at his stomach, which was on the rise again. 'Dits, dits, Dud-dits! Yes, they know! Duddits helped make Mr Gray hungry! He and Jonesy did it together!'

'I don't like this,' Freddy said.

Join the club, Kurtz thought.

'Please, boss,' Pearly said. 'I'm so thirsty.'

Kurtz gave him the bottle, watched with a jaundiced eye as Perlmutter drained it.

'495, boss,' Freddy announced. 'What do I do?'

'Take it,' Perlmutter said. 'Then 90 west.' He burped. It was loud but blessedly odorless. 'It wants another Pepsi. It likes the sugar. Also the caffeine.'

Kurtz pondered. Owen knew their quarry had stopped, at least temporarily. Now Owen and Henry would sprint, trying to make up as much of that ninety to a hundred-minute lag as they could. Consequently, they must sprint, as well.

Any cops who got in their way would have to die, God bless them. One way or the other, this was coming to a head.

'Freddy.'

'Boss.'

'Pedal to the metal. Make this bitch strut, God love you. Make her strut.'

Freddy Johnson did as ordered.

20

There was no barn, no corral, no paddock, and instead Of OUT-?OF-STATE LICS the sign in the window showed a photograph of the Quabbin Reservoir over the legend BEST BAIT, WHY WAIT?, but otherwise the little store could have been Gosselin's all over again: same ratty siding, same mud-brown shingles, same crooked chimney dribbling smoke into the rainy sky, same rusty gas-pump out front. Another sign leaned against the pump, this one reading NO GAS BLAME THE RAGHEADS.

On that early afternoon in November the store was empty save for the proprietor, a gentleman named Deke McCaskell. Like most other folks, he had spent the morning glued to the TV. All the coverage (repetitive stuff, for the most part, and with that part of the North Woods cordoned off, no good pictures of anything but Army, Navy, and Air Force hardware) had led up to the President's speech. Deke called the President Okeefenokee, on account of the fucked - up way he'd been elected - couldn't anybody down there fucking count? Although he had not exercised his own option to vote since the Gipper (now there had been a President), Deke hated President Okeefenokee, thought he was an oily, untrustworthy motherfucker with big teeth (good-looking wife, though), and he thought the President's eleven o'clock speech had been the usual blah-dee-blah. Deke didn't believe a word old Okeefenokee said. In his view, the whole thing was probably a hoax, scare tactics calculated to make the American taxpayer more willing to hike defense spending and thus taxes. There was nobody out there in space, science had proved it. The only aliens in America (except for President Okeefenokee himself, that was) were the beaners who swam across the border from Mexico. But people were scared, sitting home and watching TV. A few would be in later for beer or bottles of wine, but for now the place was as dead as a cat run over in the highway.

Deke had turned off the TV half an hour ago - enough was enough, by the Christ - and when the bell over his door jangled at quarter past one, he was studying a magazine from the rack at the back of the store, where a sign proclaimed B 21 OR B GONE. This particular periodical was titled Lasses in Glasses, a fair title since all the lasses within were wearing spectacles. Nothing else, but glasses, s��.

He looked up at the newcomer, started to say something like 'How ya doin' or 'Roads gettin slippery yet,' and then didn't. He felt a bolt of unease, followed by a sudden certainty that he was going to be robbed . . . and if robbery was all, he'd be off lucky. He never had been robbed, not in the twelve years he'd owned the place - if a fellow wanted to risk prison for a handful of cash, there were places in the area where bigger handfuls could be had. A guy would have to be . . .

Deke swallowed. A guy would have to be crazy, he'd been thinking, and maybe this guy was, maybe he was one of those maniacs who'd just offed his whole family and then decided to ramble around a bit, kill a few more folks before turning one of his guns on himself.

Deke wasn't paranoid by nature (he was lumpish by nature, his ex-wife would have told you), but that didn't change the fact that he felt suddenly menaced by the afternoon's first customer. He didn't care very much for the fellows who sometimes turned up and loafed around the store, talking about the patriots or the Red Sox or telling stories about the whoppers they'd caught up to the Reservoir, but he wished for a few of them now. A whole gang of them, actually.

The man just stood there inside the door at first, and yeah, there was something wrong with him. He was wearing an orange hunting coat and deer season hadn't started yet in Massachusetts, but that could have been nothing. What Deke didn't like were the scratches on the man's face, as if he had spent at least some of the last couple of days going cross-country through the woods, and the haunted, drawn quality of the features themselves. His mouth was moving, as though he was talking to himself. Something else, too. The gray afternoon light slanting in through the dusty front window glinted oddly on his lips and chin.

That sonofabitch is drooling, Deke thought. Be goddamned if he ain't.

The newcomer's head snapped around in quick little tics while his body remained perfectly still, reminding Deke of the way an owl remains perfectly still on its branch as it looks for prey. Deke thought briefly of sliding out of his chair and hiding under the counter, but before he could do more than begin to consider the pros and cons of such a move (not a particularly quick thinker, his ex-wife would have told you that, as well), the guy's head did another of those quick flicks and was pointing right at him.

The rational part of Deke's mind had been harboring the hope (it was not quite an articulated idea) that he was imagining the whole thing, just suffering the whimwhams from all the weird news and weirder rumors, each dutifully reported by the press, coming out of northern Maine. Maybe this was just a guy who wanted smokes or a six-pack or maybe a bottle of coffee brandy and a stroke-book, something to get him through a long, sleety night in a motel outside of Ware or Belchertown.

That hope died when the man's eyes met his.

It wasn't the gaze of a family-murdering maniac off on his own private cruise to nowhere; it almost would have been better if that had been the case. The newcomer's eyes, far from empty, were too full. A million thoughts and ideas seemed to be crossing them, like one of those big-city tickertapes being run at super speed. They seemed almost to be hopping in their sockets.

And they were the hungriest eyes Deke McCaskell had seen in his entire life.

'We're closed,' Deke said. The words came out in a croak that didn't sound like his voice at all. 'Me and my partner - he's in the back - we closed for the day. On account of the goings-on up north. I - we, I mean - just forgot to flip over the sign. We - '

He might have run on for hours - days, even - but the man in the hunting coat interrupted him. 'Bacon,' he said. 'Where is it?'

Deke knew, suddenly and absolutely, that if he didn't have bacon, this man would kill him. He might kill him anyway, but without bacon . . . yes, certainly. He did have bacon. Thank God, thank Christ, thank Okeefenokee and all the hopping ragheads, he did have bacon.

'Cooler in back,' he said in his new, strange voice. The hand lying on top of his magazine felt as cold as a block of ice. In his head, he heard whispering voices that didn't seem to be his own. Red thoughts and black thoughts. Hungry thoughts.

An inhuman voice asked, What's a cooler? A tired voice, very human, responded: Go on up the aisle, handsome. You'll see it.

Hearing voices, Deke thought. Aw, Jesus, no. That's what happens to people just before they flip out.

The man moved past Deke and up the center aisle. He walked with a heavy limp.

There was a phone by the cash-register. Deke looked at it, then looked away. It was within reach, and he had 911 on the speed-dialer, but it might as well have been on the moon. Even if he was able to summon enough strength to reach for the phone -

I'll know, the inhuman voice said, and Deke let out a breathless little moan. It was inside his head, as if someone had planted a radio in his brain.

There was a convex mirror mounted over the door, a gadget that came in especially handy in the summer, when the store was full of kids headed up to the Reservoir with their parents ?the Quabbin was only eighteen miles from here - for fishing or camping or just a picnic. Little bastards were always trying to kite stuff, particularly the candy and the girly magazines. Now Deke looked into it, watching with dread fascination as the man in the orange coat approached the cooler. He stood there a moment, gazing in, then grabbed not just one package of bacon but all four of them.

The man came back down the middle aisle with the bacon, limping along and scanning the shelves. He looked dangerous, he looked hungry, and he also looked dreadfully tired - like a marathon runner going into the last mile. Looking at him gave Deke the same sense of vertigo he felt when he looked down from a high place. It was like looking not at one person but at several, overlaid and shifting in and out of focus. Deke thought fleetingly of a movie he'd seen, some daffy cunt with about a hundred personalities.

The man stopped and got a jar of mayonnaise. At the foot of the aisle he stopped again and snagged a loaf of bread. Then he was at the counter again. Deke could almost smell the exhaustion coming out of his pores. And the craziness.

He set his purchases down and said, 'Bacon sandwiches on white, with mayo. Those are the best.' And smiled. It was a smile of such tired, heartbreaking sincerity that Deke forgot his fear for a moment.

Without thinking, he reached out. 'Mister, are you all r - '

Deke's hand stopped as if it had run into a wall. It trembled for a moment over the counter, then flew up and slapped his own face - crack! It drew slowly away and stopped, floating like a Hovercraft.

The third and fourth fingers folded slowly down against the palm.

Don't kill him!

Come out and stop me!

If you make me try, you might get a surprise.

These voices were in his head.

His Hovercraft hand floated forward and the first two fingers plunged into his nostrils, plugging them. For a moment they were still, and then oh dear Christ they began to dig. And while Deke McCaskell had many questionable habits, chewing his nails was not one of them. At first his fingers didn't want to move much up there ?close quarters - but then, as the lubricating blood began to flow, they became positively frisky. They squirmed like worms. The dirty nails dug like fangs. They shoved up further, burrowing brainward . . . he could feel cartilage tearing . . . could hear it . . .

Stop it, Mr Gray, stop it!

And suddenly Deke's fingers belonged to him again. He pulled them free with a wet plop. Blood pattered down on the counter, on the rubber change-pad with the Skoal logo on it, also on the unclad lass in glasses whose anatomy he had been studying when this creature had come in.

'How much do I owe you, Deke?'

'Take it!' Still that crow-croak, but now it was a nasal croak, because his nostrils were plugged with blood. 'Aw, man, just take it and go! The fuck outta here!'

'No, I insist. This is commerce, in which items of real worth are exchanged for currency plain.'

'Three dollars!' Deke cried. Shock was setting in. His heart was beating wildly, his muscles thrumming with adrenaline. He believed the creature might be going, and this made everything infinitely worse: to be so close to a continued life and still know it could be snatched away at this fucking loony's least whim.

The loony brought out a battered old wallet, opened it, and rummaged for what seemed an age. Saliva drizzled steadily from his mouth as he bent over the wallet. At last he came out with three dollars. He put them on the counter. The wallet went back into his pocket. He rummaged in his nasty-looking jeans (rode hard and put away wet, Deke thought), came out with a fistful of change, and laid three coins on the Skoal pad. Two quarters and a dime.

'I tip twenty per cent,' his customer said with unmistakable pride. 'Jonesy tips fifteen. This is better. This is more.'

'Sure,' Deke whispered. His nose was full of blood.

'Have a nice day.'

'You . . . you take it easy.'

The man in the orange coat stood with his head lowered. Deke could hear him sorting through possible responses. It made him feel like screaming. At last the man said, 'I will take it any way I can get it.' There was another pause. Then: 'I don't want you to call anyone, partner.'

'I won't.'

'Swear to God?'

'Yeah. Swear to God.'

'I'm like God,' his customer remarked.

'Yeah, okay. Whatever you - '

'If you call someone, I'll know. I'll come back and fix your wagon.'

'I won't!'

'Good idea.' He opened the door. The bell jangled. He went out.

For a moment Deke stood where he was, as if frozen to the floor. Then he rushed around the counter, bumping his upper leg hard on the comer. By nightfall there would be a huge black bruise there, but for the moment he felt nothing. He turned the thumb-lock, shot the bolt, then stood there, peering out. Parked in front of the store was a little red shitbox Subaru, mudsplattered, also looking rode hard and put away wet. The man juggled his purchases into the crook of one arm, opened the door, and got in behind the wheel.

Drive away, Deke thought. Please, mister, for the love of God just drive away.

But he didn't. He picked something up instead - the loaf of bread - and pulled the tie off the end. He took out roughly a dozen slices. Next he opened the jar of mayonnaise, and, using his finger as a knife, began to slather the slices of bread with mayo. After finishing each slice, he licked his finger clean. Each time he did, his eyes slipped closed, his head tipped back, and an expression of ecstasy filled his features, radiating out from the mouth. When he had finished with the bread, he picked up one of the packages of meat and tore off the paper covering. He opened the plastic inner envelope with his teeth and shook out the pound of sliced bacon. He folded it and put it on a piece of bread, then put another piece on top. He tore into the sandwich as ravenously as a wolf. That expression of divine enjoyment never left his face; it was the look of a man enjoying the greatest gourmet meal of his life. His throat knotted as each huge bite went down. Three such bites and the sandwich was gone. As the man in the car reached for two more pieces of bread, a thought filled Deke McCaskell's brain, flashing there like a neon sign. It's even better this way! Almost alive! Cold, but almost alive!

Deke backed away from the door, moving slowly, as if under?water. The grayness of the day seemed to invade the store, dimming the lights. He felt his legs come unhinged, and before the dirty board floor tilted up to meet him, gray had gone to black.

21

When Deke came to, it was later - just how much later he couldn't tell, because the Budweiser digital clock over the beer cooler was flashing 88:88. Three of his teeth lay on the floor, knocked out when he fell down, he assumed. The blood around his nose and on his chin had dried to a spongy cake. He tried to get up, but his legs wouldn't support him. He crawled to the door instead, with his hair hanging in his face, praying.

His prayer was answered. The little red shitbox car was gone. Where it had been were four bacon packages, all empty, the mayonnaise jar, three-quarters empty, and half a loaf of Holsum white bread. Several crows - there were some almighty big ones around the Reservoir - had found the bread and were pecking slices out of the torn wrapper. At a distance - almost back to Route 32 ?two or three more were at work on a congealed mess of bacon and matted chunks of bread. Monsieur's gourmet lunch had not agreed with him, it seemed.

God,Deke thought.I hope you puked so hard you tore your plumbing loose, you -

But then his own guts took a fantastical, skipping leap and he clapped his hand over his mouth, He had a hideously clear image of the man's teeth closing on the raw, fatty meat hanging out between the pieces of bread, gray flesh veined with brown like the severed tongue of a dead horse. Deke began to make muffled yurking sounds behind his hand.

A car turned in - just what he needed, a customer while he was on the verge of tossing his cookies. Not really a car at all, on second glance, nor a truck, either. Not even an SUV. It was one of those godawful Humvees, painted in smeary camouflage blobs of black and green. Two people in front and - Deke was almost sure of it - another in back.

He reached out, flipped the OPEN sign hanging in the door over to CLOSED, then backed away. He had gotten to his feet, had managed at least that much, but now he felt perilously close to collapsing again. They saw me in here, just as sure as shit, he thought. They'll come in and ask where the other one went, because they're after him. They want him, they want the bacon sandwich man. And I'll tell. They'll make me tell. And then I'll -

His hand rose in front of his eyes. The first two fingers, coated with dried blood up to the second knuckles, were poked out and hooked. They were trembling. To Deke, they almost looked like they were waving. Hello eyes, how you doing? Enjoy looking while you can, because we'll be coming for you soon.

The person in the back of the Humvee leaned forward, seemed to say something to the driver, and the vehicle leaped backward, one rear wheel splashing through the puddle of vomit left by the store's last customer. It wheeled around on the road, paused for just a moment, then set off in the direction of Ware and the Quabbin.

When they disappeared over the first hill, Deke McCaskell began to weep. As he walked back toward the counter (stagger?ing and weaving but still on his feet), his gaze fell on the teeth lying on the floor. Three teeth. His. A small price to pay. Oh yes, teeny dues. Then he stopped, gazing at the three dollar bills which still lay on the counter. They had grown a coating of pale red-orange fuzz.

22

'Oht ear! Eep owen!'

Owen, that's me, Owen thought wearily, but he understood Duddits well enough (it wasn't that hard, once your ear had become attuned): Not here! Keep going!

Owen reversed the Humvee to Route 32 as Duddits sat back - collapsed back - and began to cough again.

'Look,' Henry said, and pointed. 'See that?'

Owen saw. A bunch of wrappers soaking into the ground under the force of the pelting downpour. And a jar of mayonnaise. He threw the Hummer back into drive and headed north. The rain hitting the windshield had a particularly fat quality that he recognized: soon it would turn back to sleet, and then - very likely - to snow. Close to exhausted now, and queerly sad in the wake of the telepathy's withdrawing wave, Owen found that his chief regret was having to die on such a dirty day.

'How far ahead is he now?' Owen asked, not daring to ask the real question, the only one that mattered: Are we already too late? He assumed that Henry would tell him, were that the case.

'He's there,' Henry said absently. He had turned around in the seat and was wiping Duddits's face with a damp cloth. Duddits looked at him gratefully and tried to smile. His ashy cheeks were sweaty now, and the black patches under his eyes had spread, turning them into raccoon s eyes.

'If he's there, why did we have to come here?' Owen asked. He had the Hummer up to seventy, very dangerous on this slick stretch of two-lane blacktop, but now there was no choice.

'I didn't want to risk Duddits losing the line,' Henry said. 'If that happens . . .'

Duddits uttered a vast groan, wrapped his arms around his midsection, and doubled over them. Henry, still kneeling on the seat, stroked the slender column of his neck.

'Take it easy, Duds,' Henry said. 'You're all right.'

But he wasn't. Owen knew it and so did Henry. Feverish, crampy in spite of a second Prednisone pill and two more Percocets, now spraying blood every time he coughed, Duddits Cavell was several country miles from all right. The consolation prize was that the Jonesy-Gray combination was also a very long way from all right.

It was the bacon. All they'd hoped to do was to make Mr Gray stop for awhile; none of them had guessed how prodigious his gluttony would turn out to be. The effect on Jonesy's digestion had been fairly predictable. Mr Gray had vomited once in the parking lot of the little store, and had had to pull over twice more on the road to Ware, leaning out the window and offloading several pounds of raw bacon with almost convulsive force.

Diarrhea came next. He had stopped at the Mobil on Route 9, southeast of Ware, and had barely made it into the men's room. The sign outside the station read CHEAP GAS CLEAN TOILETS, but the CLEAN TOILETS part was certainly out of date by the time Mr Gray left. He didn't kill anyone at the Mobil, which Henry counted as a plus.

Before turning onto the Quabbin access road, Mr Gray had needed to stop twice more and dash into the sopping woods, where he tried to evacuate Jonesy's groaning bowels. By then the rain had changed over to huge flakes of wet snow. Jonesy's body had weakened considerably, and Henry was hoping for a faint. So far it hadn't happened.

Mr Gray was furious with Jonesy, railing at him continuously by the time he slipped back behind the wheel of the car after his second trip into the woods. This was all Jonesy's fault, Jonesy had trapped him. He chose to ignore his own hunger and the compulsive greed with which he had eaten, pausing between bites only to lick the grease from his fingers. Henry had seen such selective arrangements of the facts - emphasizing some, ignoring others completely - many times before, in his patients. In some ways, Mr Gray was Barry Newman all over again.

How human he's becoming, he thought. How curiously human.

'When you say he's there,' Owen asked, 'just how there do you mean?'

'I don't know. He's closed down again, at least pretty much. Duddits, do you hear Jonesy?'

Duddits looked at Henry wearily, then shook his head. 'Isser Ay ookar cards,' he said - Mr Gray took our cards - but that was like a literal translation of a slang phrase. Duddits hadn't the vocabulary to express what had actually happened, but Henry could read it in his mind. Mr Gray was unable to enter Jonesy's office stronghold and take the playing cards, but he had somehow turned them all blank.

'Duddits, how are you making out?' Owen said, looking into the rearview mirror.

'I o-ay,' Duddits said, and immediately began to shiver. On his lap was his yellow lunchbox and the brown bag with his medicines in it . . . his medicines and that odd little string thing. Surrounding him was the voluminous blue duffel coat, yet inside it, he still shivered.

He's going fast, Owen thought, as Henry began to swab his old friend's face again.

The Humvee skidded on a slick patch, danced on the edge of disaster - a crash at seventy miles an hour would probably kill them all, and even if it didn't, it would put paid to any final thin chance they might have of stopping Mr Gray - and then came back under control again.

Owen found his eyes drifting back to the paper bag, his mind going again to that string-thing. Beaver sent to me. For my Christmas last week.

Trying to communicate now by telepathy was, Owen thought, like putting a message into a bottle and then tossing the bottle into the ocean. But he did it anyway, sending out a thought in what he hoped was Duddits's direction: What do you call it, son?

Suddenly and unexpectedly, he saw a large space, combination living room, dining room, and kitchen. The mellow pine boards glowed with varnish. There was a Navajo rug on the floor and a tapestry on one wall - tiny Indian hunters surrounding a gray figure, the archetypal alien of a thousand supermarket tabloids. There was a fireplace, a stone chimney, an oak dining table. But what riveted Owen's attention (it had to; it was at the center of the picture Duddits had sent him, and glowed with its own special light) was the string creation which hung from the center rafter. It was the Cadillac version of the one in Duddits's medicine bag, woven in bright colors instead of drab white string, but otherwise the same. Owen's eyes filled with tears. It was the most beautiful room in the world. He felt that way because Duddits felt that way. And Duddits felt that way because it was where his friends went, and he loved them.

'Dreamcatcher,' said the dying man in the back seat, and he pronounced the word perfectly.

Owen nodded. Dreamcatcher, yes.

It's you, he sent, supposing that Henry was overhearing but not caring one way or the other. This message was for Duddits, strictly for Duddits. You're the dreamcatcher, aren't you? Their dreamcatcher. You always were.

In the mirror, Duddits smiled.

23

They passed a sign which read QUABBIN RESERVOIR 8 MILES NO FISHING NO SERVICES PICNIC AREA OPEN HIKING TRAILS OPEN PASS AT OWN RISK. There was more, but at eighty miles an hour, Henry had no time to read it.

'Any chance he'll park and walk in?' Owen asked.

'Don't even hope for it,' Henry said. 'He'll drive as far as he can. Maybe he'll get stuck. That's what you want to hope for. There's a good chance it might happen. And he's weak. He won't be able to move fast.'

'What about you, Henry? Will you be able to move fast?'

Considering how stiff he was and how badly his legs ached, that was a fair question. 'If there's a chance,' he said, 'I'll go as hard as I can. In any case, there's Duddits. I don't think he's going to be capable of a very strenuous hike.'

Any hike at all, he didn't add.

'Kurtz and Freddy and Perlmutter, Henry. How far back are they?'

Henry considered this. He could feel Perlmutter clearly enough . . . and he could touch the ravening cannibal inside him, as well. It was like Mr Gray, only the weasel was living in a world made of bacon. The bacon was Archibald Perlmutter, once a captain in the United States Army. Henry didn't like to go there. Too much pain. Too much hunger.

'Fifteen miles,' he said. 'Maybe only twelve. But it doesn't matter, Owen. We're going to beat them. The only question is whether or not we're going to catch Mr Gray. We'll need some luck. Or some help.'

'And if we catch him, Henry. Are we still going to be heroes?'

Henry gave him a tired smile. 'I guess we'll have to try.'